by Jack Dann
Barb floated, looking back at us without saying anything.
Kibbie put out a hand and pushed gently against the jumpsuit of the skeleton behind me. The body folded up and drifted backwards, the skull separating and floating free. Kibbie reached out. With one gloved finger into each of the eye sockets and his thumb in the mouth, he grabbed it out of the vacuum. “Gotcha.”
He held the skull at arm’s length, inspecting it with a show of reverence.
“Don’t,” I said. “That’s gross. Leave them be.”
“Fine with me.” Kibbie opened his fingers and released the skull, letting it hover in the Space before him, and touched it with one finger to steady it. “Bye-bye, dead guy.”
“Let’s move on,” Barb said.
The skull rotated with a slow wobble, as if it,were turning its head to look around at what had become of its little world, nodding at what it saw. When it had turned to face away from us, we moved out.
“Rest in peace,” Barb said.
After that, now that we knew what to look for, we flashed our illuminators more carefully into the shadows, and could see bones everywhere. Tidal forces had gathered the bodies into clusters of bones in the corners of rooms, or wedged behind equipment. For the first time, the magnitude of the destruction impressed itself on me. For a while, even Kibbie was silent.
* * *
We emerged into the sunlight of a vast open space. “How’s our time?”
“Five hundred seventy minutes.”
“Plenty of time to explore.”
“Right.” Barb turned around—
And suddenly we were surrounded by silent figures in purple-and-gray-striped suits. For a crazy second I thought it was more skeletons, a whole army of skeletons, but then I realized it was something rather more dangerous than that. It was Adders.
I had never run into them before, but I knew the Adders were a cluster from the Parsons habitat, and had a bad reputation. They carried bolos and whips, potent weapons for zero-gee fighting. I gulped.
“So, what have we here?” A figure slightly bigger than the rest drifted out. The voice was on the common channel, unencrypted. “A couple of little lost school boys. A bit far from home, aren’t we, children?” His skin-suit had an elaborate decoration across the front, an embroidery of a snake coiling around his chest and up his neck to his cheek.
I killed my background music and switched over to broadcast, keeping the encrypted link to Barb and Kibbie open as listen-only. “What do you want?” I said. I tried to keep my voice firm.
“Want? That’s a good question. I notice you’ve got a really spiffy suit there, all dolled up in yellow stripes like a tiger. Maybe I might decide to be wanting that, huh?”
“Well, I’m using it right now.”
“Now, isn’t that too bad. Too bad for you, that is.”
“Look, we’re not bothering you. We don’t want trouble. Why don’t you just let us go on with our business?”
I could see his face through the glass of his helmet. He was older than we were, perhaps nineteen or twenty years old. His head was shaven, and he had tattoos of snakes running around his face and eyes. Parsons habitat was known for having lax rules (and, the adults always told us, a high death rate). Tattoos like that would never have been permitted in Malina habitat. The Snake, I thought. The name seemed to fit.
“We’ve decided that this is our private place, see. We don’t like children coming here to play. When they do, we like to teach them a lesson they won’t forget real soon.”
Barb was suddenly a blur in the corner of my vision, kicking off a wall and launching herself ahead. She cartwheeled as she shot forward, and when she came past the leader, she was inverted. She reached down and opened the dump-valve on her suit’s urine-collection pouch.
The liquid sprayed out in the Snake’s face, freezing and boiling at the same time, a cotton-fog of glistening white crystals. She bounced off of him, kicking off his shoulder as she passed, timing her move so perfectly that she rebounded directly through a narrow rift in the wall without touching either side. Her voice in my earphones lingered behind her: “Run, you idiot!”
The Snake spun lazily around, the faceplate of his helmet momentarily covered with white frost. As the ice sublimated away into the vacuum of space, I took advantage of the distraction and headed through the same rent Barb had taken, hoping that Kibbie was smart enough to vanish as well. I caught a glimpse of her blue suit disappearing through an opening that looked too narrow to pass through, and I squeezed through after her. It was evidently once a ventilation duct, intact save for half a dozen holes, and she shot through it like an ore pellet down a railgun. I followed.
At the end of the tube, she dodged into a tiny cubicle, an ancient control room. I came up behind her. She was peering through a rip in the wall.
I started to giggle. She turned to look at me.
“Urine dump?” I managed to say. “Where’d you learn that trick?”
She started giggling as well. “You gotta use what you got.”
We looked out in all directions, but there was no sign of chase. “What now?” I asked.
“Back for Kibbie,” she said, and without a moment’s hesitation pushed off down a different corridor. How in the universe does she know where she’s going, I wondered, but there was no time to sit and ponder. I pushed off behind her.
The big main chamber was empty; the Adders all off chasing us. We found Kibbie hiding in a utility corridor, not more than five meters from where we’d been when the Adders confronted us.
“Yow!” I said. “How in the universe did you know where he was?”
“Oh, I saw him slide into the hiding spot when all the attention was focused on you,” Barb said. “It was you I was worried about. What’s wrong, were you frozen or something? Why didn’t you slide away the moment you saw them?”
“I don’t think they ever saw me,” Kibbie said. “I was behind, and in pretty dark shadow when I heard the voices. I figured it would be best to hide where I was, and not get further lost trying to find you.”
The big room was clearly the Adders’ assembly area, I saw. The walls had been covered with bold swatches of graffiti. Even more unnerving, near where the leader had been, dozens of skulls had been lined up, each one garishly spray-painted in gray and purple—Adder colors—and with names and crude slogans scrawled across the foreheads. KENNYS HO. KNUCKLE BOY. FIVE HOLES NO WAITING. AWESOME HEAD. SPINNER EATS FECAL WASTE. NO FEAR-DIE YOUNG.
If this was their gathering place, they would be back soon enough when they didn’t find us, I realized. “We shouldn’t stick around here.”
“We’re not lost,” Barb said.
“What?” I said, and then realized she’d been responding to Kibbie’s comment, not mine. “What do you mean?”
“It’s pretty twisted up and distorted by the impact,” she said, “but you can still see how it used to be laid out. This is the common room outside the D-level dormitories. That’s the intersection of C and D corridors there, see it? And over there is the air-filtration substation.”
I digested this. Had Barb memorized the whole plan of the habitat? I had the electronic version of the engineering diagram of the habitat, but once I’d seen how twisted up everything was, I’d assumed it was useless. “Which way?” I asked.
“Here, I think.” Barb pointed. “Around through the manufacturing levels. We’ll stay off the main corridors for the moment. And keep an eye out for more trouble.”
“Good idea,” I said.
“We shouldn’t maybe go home?” Kibbie asked. “We came, we saw.”
“And we didn’t conquer,” I said. “We have as much right to be here as they do. We’re not going to let them chase us off.”
And anyway, it was a huge colony, a city in the sky. As long as we got out of the territory the Adders knew, there was little chance they would find us again. “But still, we better get some movement on. Rockets, everybody. Go.”
Up to now we had been movi
ng by kick-and-coast, pushing off walls and girders with our legs and sometimes our arms, using the suit jets only for occasional fine control. Now, for speed, we used our rocket thrusters. That was dangerous in the cluttered chaos of the interior, since rocket thrusters let you build up speed scary fast, but it moved us out quickly. We moved in toward the center, rocketing along the twisted remains of what had once been a secondary corridor, zig-zagging at intersections to break the line of sight in case any Adders spotted us.
The corridor opened up into a huge area, a sphere a hundred meters in diameter, capped by shattered glass that let in cold blue Earthlight that bathed the area in a spectral glow. Barb moved toward a central fixture, some kind of electronics switching center. “Look!”
On all of the wires of the switching center, sending hair-thin spikes off in every direction, was a green fuzz.
“Weed,” I whispered. >
Barb approached, and brushed her hand against it. Thin green needles broke off, drifting and spinning slowly away. Barb looked at me. “That’s odd. I thought it was weed—what else could it be? But—”
She brushed her hand against it again, more gently this time, and broke off a single delicate long needle. She plucked it out of the vacuum and brought it to her helmet, examining it. Then she looked up and tossed it to me. “Look.”
I caught it and held it up to my faceplate, triggering one of my wrist illuminators to shine some light on it to look it over. Seen closer up, it branched away, intricate as a snowflake. “What is it?”
“Inorganic, that’s for sure,” Barb said. “I think I’ve got it. That green—that’s copper oxide. Some kind of electromigration, I’d say—it’s growing dendritic crystals, forming on the copper.”
“Oxide?” I passed the crystal to Kibbie, who examined it casually and then tossed it aside. “We’re in vacuum.”
“Atomic oxygen,” Barb said. “Must be. There’s not much oxygen here, but a little is leaking out, and what is there is very energetic. Weird.”
“Weird,” I agreed. What was really disturbing was that Barb had on her mind the same thing that I did: weed. I could feel the air in my lungs with each breath. I didn’t want to do it, but I had to ask.
“Barb?”
“Yeah?”
“Weed?”
“Yeah.” She stayed silent for a long heartbeat, and then said, “You think I couldn’t guess? Come on, Dylan, I’m not dumb; I can figure out what you’re looking for out here.”
“Look,” I said. “It’s not like—”
She waited silently, looking at me calmly, waiting for me to finish a sentence which I had no real idea of how to complete. I was able to look anywhere but toward her eyes.
“I do know what the stories about chinga weed are, Dylan,” she said softly.
“Well, yeah.”
“You know what?” she said. Kibbie had silently vanished somewhere else. Barb was floating in front of me. She pushed off with one hand, doing a slow backwards tumble while continuing to talk. “The stories are overrated. It’s a mild euphoric, that’s all. At least, that’s what my sister says.” She stopped her rotation with one hand on a bulkhead, and then tapped it with one finger, floating in a slow spin in front of me. Then she said, “It’s that girl Leeila you’re thinking about, I expect? The one you’re always slipping off to say hi to?”
“Leeila?” I protested. “No, no, you got it wrong. Look, she’s nothing to me, just—”
“She’s nice enough,” Barb said. “I approve. You’ll like her. Have you talked to her? Her little sister and my little sister are best friends.” She stopped her spin, bent her knees, and then shoved hard off of the electronics enclosure, arrowing across the center of the cavity, receding into the distance, dappled with blue light.
In my headphones, on a suit-to-suit private channel, Kibbie’s voice said, “Score one for Barb, Dylan. Looks like she nailed you good.” To my right, he jumped to follow her, tumbling as he flew.
I hung there, paralyzed for a moment, as they both drifted into the shadows on the other side. Then I jumped, too.
I was in free fall for thirty seconds. My own illuminators were off—no sense making a target of myself. Just before hitting the far side I flipped over and absorbed the impact with bent knees, steadying myself with a brief burst from my thruster and looking around as I hit.
A pair of small red eyes glowing out of the shadows. I stopped myself against an I-beam, fascinated. In an alcove that had been ripped open, two light-emitting diodes, ancient technology, glowed from an electronic read-out panel. That brought the age of the station out to me immediately; I’d never seen such things except in old videos of the history of space colonization. Nobody had used diodes for indicator lights for a century.
The old wrecked solar panels, still attached to the station only because they were too heavy and too ancient to salvage, were still generating power! Only a trickle of power, a tiny fraction of the megawatts that had once lit and powered the colony, but there was still a tiny bit of life left in it.
They were error indicator lights, I saw. Light-emitting diodes were a robust technology. These had been glowing for eighty years, a mute cry for help to reset one of the thousands of circuit failures that would never be fixed.
“Check this out!” I said. “Power!”
But Kibbie and Barb were otherwise engaged. I saw their illuminators suddenly go on, and I heard Kibbie on the radio: “Take a look at this.”
I pushed off, and coasted over, using a burst of my jet to stop and hover immediately over them. Kibbie had hooked one foot under a cable to keep himself from drifting. Barb was holding onto a beam. I triggered my illuminator to look down.
The first thing I saw was a dark-colored streak, like paint that had spurted out onto the aluminum. I swung my illuminators over the area. The streaks were a dark, dusty rust. I followed the streak backwards with my eyes to see what Kibbie and Barb were floating over.
We’d seen a lot of skeletons, but so far none of them had been in space suits. This was a body in an expensive late-model skin-suit, decorated with purple and gray stripes.
A dead Adder.
Kibbie pulled loose the arm that had tangled into a knot of electrical cord, and the body floated free to face us. Centered in his throat, protruding just above the suit environment controls, was a slender metal rod.
His eyes were wide and looked dull, almost dusty, bulging slightly from the lack of pressure in his helmet. Frothy bubbles of blood had come out of his nose and dried on the wisps of a beard and mustache around his mouth. He was only a year or two older than us. But old enough to be dead.
I didn’t want to touch him. Kibbie silently turned him around, and I saw where the rod protruded slightly from his back. The rod was hollow, I saw, a short length of conduit, scavenged from the station, the end cut at an angle to give it a wicked point. The surface of the rod was roughened with marks that spiraled around it.
“Gang war, maybe?” Kibbie asked.
“His suit’s been stripped,” Barb pointed out. “Look. Where’s his pack, his emergency kit, his propellant?”
She was right. Everything that could be snatched away quickly had been taken. “Whoever it is, they play rough,” I said. “Lights out, you guys. If there’s anybody here, we want to see them before they see us.”
Barb and Kibbie flicked their lights out at the same instant I did. My eyes took a moment to adjust to the dim. While they were adjusting, I scanned through the radio bands, but found nothing. “Barb? Best way out?”
“From here, it’s just as easy to continue on toward the center, and out the hub,” she said. “I don’t think we want to go back through Adder territory. ”
We crossed the empty area, and were in a corridor that was twenty meters or so wide. The Hercules habitat was much more cluttered than Malina. Malina colony was spacious, with enormous empty bubbles holding parks a kilometer or more in diameter. On Malina, the habitat levels were a ring around an empty hub, but Hercules was a mu
ch older habitat concept—what they called a “beer can design” in the old days. The solar illumination came upward through windows on the lowest levels, and there was no opening in the central axis. The designers had seemed afraid to let any bit of pressurized volume go to waste.
We followed the corridor past cryogenic tanks that must have once stored supplies of liquid oxygen and other gasses, toward what had once been the center of the colony.
All the way in, I had been looking at the holes, trying to understand what it could have been that hit the colony. Here the holes were all around us, and at last I found a spot where a chunk had happened to pass lengthwise through the vacuum-foam insulation of a cryotank. The tenuous vacuum foam, barely more dense than soap bubbles, had slowed the impacting object without vaporizing it. I followed the furrow through two meters of foam, and found the impacting object embedded into a shard of machinery, where it had welded itself into place.
“Look at this,” I whispered.
Barb and Kibbie clustered around to see what I had found. It was a steel ball the size of a marble, deformed by impact from a once-spherical shape.
I saw Kibbie raise his eyes, looking around him at the skin of the section. Dozens of holes. Extrapolating to the size of the colony, there must have been millions of balls, exactly placed in the orbital path of the colony.
“It wasn’t an accident,” I said. “That’s not a micrometeoroid, and it’s not a chunk of space debris, either. It was deliberate.” An involuntary shudder rippled across my body. Why?
You may ask why we lived up here, floating in orbit, instead of down below. What is the economic purpose? Well, why does anybody live anywhere? We live here, because this is where we live. To be sure, we had to build the very ground we stood on, and the bubbles that held our air. But that’s not so different from cities down below, if you think about it, where people also build the ground they live on—they call them “skyscrapers” and “highways” and “office buildings.” An orbital habitat is only a skyscraper, really, just a little bit higher up. And what do we do? Well, about the same thing as anybody in any city anywhere else, I’d say—a little of everything.