Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

by Catherine Asaro

  More ships came in, Web and Gineer alike, each carrying loads of injured people, so fast that Lizzie almost forgot to tend to the hydroponics. She diagnosed complications arising from welding burns, set broken legs from failed rig-drops, irrigated chemical lung-burns, treated vacuum explosions. When she rinsed off the cabbages, flecks of blood washed off her hands.

  She wanted to take pleasure in the Gineer soldiers’ agony, telling herself that it was just punishment for picking on the Web. But all soldiers screamed when they were hurt, and when they were dying they all wanted to talk to their Momma or their brother or their husband. They all wanted to see their families one last time.

  Lizzie cried so much, she felt like her whole body was drying up. But never in front of the soldiers.

  Momma combed her hair, told Lizzie how proud she was. “But you have to get the Doc to work faster, Lizzie,” she said. “They have to be out the next day.”

  Lizzie hated letting down Momma, but if she rushed Doc Ventrager then people died. When she was alone, she squeezed her fists tightly enough to leave half-moon cuts in the palms of her hands.

  After a few months of surgical assistance, the Doc handed off the minor operations to Lizzie. The Doc made it clear that even though she was doing doctor duties now, any profits from her surgeries went to him. That was better; surgery was like any other repair work. You took care, and measured twice before cutting once. The fact that she’d spent four hours a day in surgery for the past five months helped—and now she could go at her own speed.

  Still, the soldiers always panicked when the twelve-year-old girl hooked them up to the anesthetizer. She reassured them that this was nothing, just removing a slug buried next to a lung, she’d done it twenty times before. And if they struggled against the straps, their fellow soldiers laughed and said, hey, man, haven’t you heard about the Angel of Sauerkraut Station? Settle down, man, she makes miracles.

  But no matter how busy things got, every night Momma brushed Lizzie’s hair.

  “Those ships are deathtraps, Momma,” she complained, anguished. “There’s no supplies; they get cooped up in there, stew in their own disease. Why don’t they just build one big ship with a medlab?”

  “One atomic bomb would take it out,” she said. “Or heck, one kamikaze run. Spaceships are fragile, interconnected—like bodies, really. The more chambers you add, the more possibility that one hit ripples across all of them.”

  “But . . .”

  Momma pursed her lips in disapproval. “Little ships are easy to churn out, Lizzie. They let you land soldiers across a wider area. They’re built cheap and disposable, to carry cheap and disposable cargo.”

  A thought occurred to Lizzie. “We’ve had ships full of Web soldiers,” she said. “And ships full of Gineer.”

  Momma smiled in approval. “You noticed.”

  “But never at the same time.”

  “Interstellar ships are very slow,” she said. “The chances of two enemy fleets showing up on the same day are slim.”

  “But if they did?”

  Momma kissed Lizzie on the head. “Why do you think I’ve been riding you so hard to get everyone out of the station?”

  That thought kept Lizzie up at nights. But not for too long, because between the surgeries and the sauerkraut and the hydroponics, Lizzie was working eighteen-hour days. She slept deep.

  She couldn’t sleep long, though; the station was so packed with folks that their groans kept her awake. They slept fitfully in the hallways, with their heads on their backpacks, and when they woke it was always with a scream. And when she woke, startled, Lizzie smelt the fresh stench of infected wounds, body odor, and—yes, there it was—sauerkraut wafting through the vents. Its briny scent was stark against all the other recycled smells.

  The Doc was right. Sauerkraut Station did smell. She hated him for revealing that. And she hated the way he kept raising his prices.

  “I possess a mere two hands,” he said after sending another Web soldier back to her doom. “As such, my time’s at a premium.”

  “It’d take you one hand and three minutes,” Lizzie shot back. “All that girl needed was a proper implantation of bowel sealant.”

  Lizzie was surprised at how blunt she was with Doc—but she was doing half the work these days, and most of the trickier stuff.

  Doc just looked irritated. “Why shouldn’t I make it worth my while?” he asked. “I’m an old man. War’s the only time I can fill my coffers.”

  “I have to tend to the hydroponics,” Lizzie said, snapping off her surgical gloves. She made her way down to the lounge where the wounded Web soldiers keened. Their sergeants fed them watered-down painkillers—which wouldn’t stop their ruptured bowels from flooding their bodies with infection.

  They were all bald, dark-skinned. It was like seeing a row of Thembas, sweating in agony.

  “Hush,” she said, kneeling down, taking the stolen hypodermic of sealant out from under her shirt. “I’ll fix you.”

  The look in their eyes was so pathetically grateful that it would be worth Momma’s anger.

  * * *

  The Doc had dragged Lizzie to the comm tower by her ear.

  “The girl’s undercutting me!” he cried to Momma. “She’s working for free! The Web soldiers are waiting for her to treat them!”

  Lizzie stood tall, ready for the slap. Momma had only hit her twice in her life, both times for being careless around vacuum—but she’d never disobeyed anyone so flagrantly before.

  Instead, a curl of a smile edged around Momma’s mouth.

  “It’s free work,” she said. “She’s an apprentice, no?”

  Doc’s face flushed. “Yeah—but . . .”

  “She’s getting extra medical practice in. That’s why I brought you on board, you remember—to teach her?”

  “Not at my expense! I didn’t come here to get into competition, goddammit—I arrived with the intent of a monopoly!”

  “I never promised you’d be the only doctor here,” Momma said coolly. “I promised you free room and board as long as you served as a doctor. Check your contract.”

  “That’s letter of the law,” the Doc snapped. “That’s planetary talk. I deserve better than—”

  “I’ve been quite happy with your service here, Mister Ventrager,” Momma said, cutting him off. “But if you’re not satisfied, there’s no time frame to your contract.”

  Doc Ventrager’s hands twitched, as though he was thinking of taking a swing at Momma. Momma’s hand dropped to her taser.

  “Fine,” he said, biting down so hard on his cigar that it snapped in half. “I hereby proffer you my summary resignation.”

  “Best wishes, Mister Ventrager,” Momma said pleasantly to the Doc as he stormed out of the comm room.

  Lizzie stepped forward to wrap her arms around Momma, but Momma looked suddenly solemn. “Well, Lizzie,” she said. “You’re the ship’s doctor, now. Are you ready?”

  Lizzie wasn’t sure. But she realized she hadn’t left herself another choice.

  * * *

  The irony was that within weeks, Lizzie was charging prices as bad as Doc Ventrager’s. But that wasn’t her fault; there just wasn’t the medicine.

  The trade routes had dried up. The freighters told her that pirates and privateers were running rampant. Both Web and Gineer officials complained bitterly whenever the pirates struck—but everyone knew that the pirates were only allowed to operate if they gave a cut to their sponsoring government, and the privateers carried brands authorizing them to steal.

  Thankfully, after what Great-Gemma had done to them long ago, the pirates wouldn’t touch Sauerkraut Station. But Momma wondered how long that age-old story would keep the pirates at bay—especially now that things were getting desperate.

  Meanwhile, Lizzie bargained hard on the rare occasions she found a merchant with a case of Baxitrin or Rosleep. She got it for what passed for a good price these days. Lizzie hated sending poverty-stricken soldiers off with untreated w
ounds, but Lizzie found it was easier to set a price and refuse anyone who couldn’t pay. When Lizzie chose who to subsidize that week, it made her responsible for the dead.

  Food was scarce, too. The Web soldiers told rumors of other refill stations staffed by skeletal families, reduced to trading away fissionable materials in exchange for a case of protein bars. Lizzie tended to the vegetables in the hydroponics chambers with extra-special care, grateful for Momma’s planning.

  Occasionally, Lizzie stun-tagged hungry soldiers who pried at the food chamber locks—mostly Gineer scoundrels, as she’d expected. She lectured the Web troopers, though, sending them back thoroughly ashamed.

  Fortunately, there were fewer ships. The war seemed to be spreading out. But the soldiers were getting meaner.

  In the beginning, they’d all been fresh-faced and kind, talking about home with a wistful attitude; these new soldiers’ faces were hidden under grizzled beards and puckered scars. All they talked about was war.

  The Gineer soldiers shouted at her because this God-damned dry waste of a station had no alcohol to buy. The Web yelled because where had the Angel of Sauerkraut Station been when Ghalyela took a bullet to the head?

  Lizzie tried to be nice, but “nice” just seemed to slide right off of them. They’d lost something vital out there.

  Both sides threatened her when Lizzie tried to explain that they had to pay for the Baxitrin. The Web grumbled, but the veterans were quick to explain that this was the Angel of Sauerkraut Station; Lizzie had done work for free, back when she could. They pulled their friends away with an apology.

  The Gineer soldiers, however, had only known her as Doc’s assistant. And Doc Ventrager’s cruelty had become legendary.

  “I can give you a six percent discount,” she always explained, looking as wide-eyed and kid-startled as she could. “But there’s just not enough to go around. You understand, don’t you?”

  That worked until a soldier with a head wound took a swing at her.

  Fortunately, Momma taught her how to use a stun gun back when she was six. Lizzie pressed her back against the wall as the other eight wounded soldiers looked dully at the twitching man on the ground, then looked at Lizzie as she frantically tried to reload her stunner—

  Finally they laughed, a scornful mirthless cough of a thing.

  “Punked by a kid,” they chuckled, helping their friend up. “No wonder this asshole needs medical attention.”

  They joked about how maybe Freddie could get beaten up by a teddy bear for an encore. But not a one of them seemed to think there was anything wrong with trying to beat up Lizzie.

  Shaken, Lizzie worked on that whole troop for free, handing out precious supplies like they were sauerkraut.

  She’d apologized to Momma for using up so much medicine at a net loss. Momma just hugged her. Lizzie froze with the newness of it all; she couldn’t remember the last time she’d smelled Momma’s hair.

  “It’s getting bad,” Momma agreed. “If I could, I’d install a deadman’s switch to dump knockout gas into the chambers to keep you safe, but . . .”

  “Nobody has any,” Lizzie finished.

  “It could be worse,” Momma said, putting the best face on it. “Imagine what would have happened if Doc Ventrager had stayed.”

  Still, Lizzie alternately hated herself for being paranoid, then hated the station for requiring paranoia. Lizzie counted the people in the hallways now, moved quickly from room to room so she’d never be too outnumbered; she squeezed her taser’s rubberized grip until the bare metal poked through. She sighed with relief every time they got the latest batch of ships out beyond the Oort cloud.

  She was trying to catch up on sleep before the next patrol ship of soldiers arrived, when she woke to a sizzling pop. Her hair rippled; a soft current buzzed through her. The vent next to her bed puffed stale ozone and wheezed to a halt.

  When she opened her eyes, there was nothing to see. Did that current blind me?

  Then she heard the awful silence, a void so utterly complete it took a moment to put a name to it:

  The motors had stopped.

  There were no creaks from the gyros, no hiss of water through the pipes, no hum from the meteoroid shields. It was the sound of space, a horrid nothing, dead and empty in a place that should have a million parts moving to keep her alive.

  “Momma?” She tried to yell, but her mouth had gone dry.

  Lizzie fumbled at the latches of her emergency supply case to get a flashlight, banging her knees. This is a mechanical failure, she told herself; we’ll get this fixed, and everything will be fine. Except there was no light reflected down the hallways. The walls were shiny metal, each room normally ablaze with control panels and LEDs; she saw not a glimmer.

  She clicked the flashlight on. The LED stayed dark.

  “Momma!” This time, it was a shriek.

  “Circuit-friers!” came Gemma’s voice, echoing from down the hall. “Gotta be pirates—goddammit, nobody’s supposed to use those on civilian targets!”

  “Our systems are toast, Lizzie,” Momma yelled from the control tower. “Even the self-destruct’s dead. I’m going for the box.”

  “What box?” Gemma asked, her voice sharp. “Oh—no, love, too soon. Don’t show your hand before we hear what they have to say.”

  Lizzie swallowed back bile. She reached out and wandered forward, hoping to hug Gemma, but without light the echoes in the hallways went every which way.

  There was the dull clank of hull bashing hull. Lizzie was flung into the opposite wall. That wasn’t a gentle docking, when computers guided you in with micromovements; this was manual dock, a hard impact that crushed airlock collars and risked depressurization. The central gyros creaked in protest.

  Lizzie tried to make her way to the conn tower, but everything was jumping around in the dark. She followed the walls as best she could, but the distances seemed infinitely large. All the while Gemma yelled stay calm, we can talk . . .

  More clanking. A hiss. She wasn’t by the conn tower, she’d blundered to the airlock. She turned and ran, but a set of white-hot flashlight beams skittered along the walls, targeting her. Something exploded against the wall, sending slivers of shrapnel into her legs—

  “It’s a kid!” someone yelled. “No fire! No fire!”

  Someone grabbed her shoulders, wrenched her arms behind her back. Just before they pulled the hood over her head, she saw the camo-green uniform of a Web soldier.

  * * *

  The Web searched the halls with IR detectors, looking for other guests. Gemma, Momma, and Lizzie sat in the cafeteria with their hands crossed primly on their laps, pointedly not looking at the soldiers who aimed needle-jets at their hearts.

  When the soldiers smashed the locks off the kitchen cabinets, it hurt Lizzie like a blow; she’d installed those locks. Momma winced, too. Lizzie wanted to protest as the gaunt soldiers reached in with skeletal hands and chomped the raw cabbages with glee, but she didn’t dare. In the harsh glare of the portable spotlights, the soldiers assigned to guard them looked envious and angry; they couldn’t keep their eyes off of the dancing shadows in the next room, where food was being wolfed down. And when they looked at Lizzie and Gemma and Momma, who were skinny but not emaciated like they were, their dark brows narrowed.

  The commander, a leonine black woman with gray streaks in her hair, walked in. “Place is clear,” she said to the guards. “Get in there and get your bellies full. I’ll talk to our newest citizens.”

  The commander had the ketone-scented breath of a starving woman, yet she pulled up a chair as though she had all the time in the world.

  “Muh—maybe you should eat first,” Lizzie said.

  The commander smiled and stroked Lizzie’s hair. Her touch was light, delicate, comforting; a mother’s touch.

  “Bless you, child,” she said. “I’m afraid that yes, we will be eating your food. That’s a philosophy you’re going to have to learn.”

  Momma scowled. “I take it the
war’s not going well.”

  “We’re staging a tactical retreat. This way-station has been useful, but at this stage we can’t afford it to benefit our enemy. If we just leave you here, you’ll give our enemy fissionables, food—we can’t have that.”

  Behind her, her soldiers looted the kitchen. The new arrivals dug into the tubs of sauerkraut with both hands, shoving their mouths full of shredded cabbage with a fierce and frightening satisfaction. The ones with full bellies had begun toting the remaining food supplies back to the airlock, moving quickly.

  “We won’t give them anything,” Lizzie begged. “We’ve been rooting for you, we don’t want to help those awful Gineer . . .”

  The commander smiled wearily. “I know you mean that, child, but you can’t enforce it. Refuse to sell it, and they’ll take it. They’re as desperate as we are. We can’t afford to leave you here.”

  “So you’re going to kill us?” Momma asked, putting her arm around Lizzie.

  “Despite the Gineer propaganda, we’re not barbarians,” the commander snapped. “My troops will strip this outpost to bare metal—but we’ll take you with us. We’ll escort you to the nearest free Web holding where you’ll be safe.”

  “In between combat missions? That could take years,” Gemma said.

  “The Web’s more efficient than you give us credit for. The good news is that we’ll consider your ship’s materiel your entry fee to the Intraconnected Collective—you’re citizens now. It’ll be a better life, child; no more worrying about air, food, or clothing.” She ruffled Lizzie’s hair, as though to prove what a wonderful world it would be. “Just as you provided for us today, we will provide for you. I’ll personally recommend you for a surgeon’s career when you hit planetfall.”

  Lizzie felt like she’d been punched in the chest. She’d had dreams about leaving, yes—but that left Sauerkraut Station where she could come back to it. The commander was talking about forced relocation, putting her in a place full of strangers, and taking everything she’d loved as payment.