Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

by Catherine Asaro

  The soldiers smashed in the door to the fermentation chamber. Momma and Gemma blinked back tears. Lizzie knew why; Momma had installed that airlock when she was Lizzie’s age, the first time Gemma had trusted her with the welder.

  Everything in this station was her birthright, purchased by one Denahue and installed by another. The Web would take away this history to give her someone else’s hand-me-downs. And everything that five generations of Denahues had built would be so much floating debris.

  Choking back tears, Lizzie watched as the soldiers hauled the tubs of sauerkraut out—and then she saw it.

  A small container with a scrawled “T.”

  “NOT THAT ONE!” Lizzie yelled, leaping off the bench before anyone could stop her.

  She tackled the soldier, sending a stack of tubs clattering to the floor; she clutched Themba’s sauerkraut and to her chest.

  The commander bent her wrists back to make her let go; another soldier took it away. “THAT’S THEMBA’S!” she yelled. “YOU CAN’T HAVE THAT ONE! I HAVE TO SAVE IT FOR HIM FOR WHEN HE—HE COMES BACK—”

  Lizzie was already sobbing as the commander carried her back to the table, dropping her into Momma’s arms.

  “I understand the challenges of parenting,” the commander said stiffly to Momma. “And your daughter’s proven herself an ally. But you will settle her down, or it’s the cuffs.” She unholstered a pair of handcuffs, swung them lightly off the end of one finger.

  Momma stroked Lizzie’s hair, hugging her tight. Lizzie cried until Themba’s container was out of sight—and then a thought occurred to her.

  “Could you at least relocate us to Themba’s house?” she asked. “He’s my best friend.”

  The commander hesitated. “A Web citizen was your best friend? Is that why . . . why you were the Angel?”

  “Oh yes,” Lizzie gushed. “We played together for four whole days. He asked me to come with him—he’ll be glad to show me around his home, I just know it.”

  “It’s—an unusual request . . .”

  “Please,” she begged. She looked to Momma for support, but Momma and Gemma were studying the tops of their boots. “If I can be with Themba again, it’s . . . okay.”

  “I can’t promise. But . . . Themba’s a common name. Can you give me more details?”

  “He was a hostage.”

  The commander flinched. The handcuffs fell to the floor.

  Gemma let loose a choked cry. Momma reached over, and both Momma and Gemma were crying now, and that scared Lizzie worse than anything.

  “Sweetie . . .” The commander reached out to take Lizzie’s hands. “We gave our innocent sons to the Gineer as a token of our good will. We thought showing them our beautiful children would help them deal in good faith.

  “And . . . when the Gineer broke the treaties, they probably shot the hostages. That’s how hostages work.”

  Betrayed, Lizzie looked to Gemma and Momma. “You knew?”

  “She said ‘probably,’ love,” Gemma said, sniffling. “We did news-scans, but never found his name . . .”

  Lizzie felt the tears on her cheeks before she realized she was crying again, huge whoops of pain that seemed to erupt from her like air squirting into vacuum. She’d been holding everything in, all the anguish of the war, and now that everything was lost she was flying apart into nothing, nothing at all.

  “We’ll find someplace good for you,” the commander promised. Lizzie slapped her.

  “You killed everything!” she shrieked. “You made everything dead!”

  The commander touched her fingers to her swelling cheek in disbelief. Behind her, her soldiers froze; they cradled the sauerkraut containers awkwardly, not sure whether to keep moving or go for their guns.

  Momma, her arms protectively around Lizzie, glared them all down.

  “You’ve taken everything from her, now,” she said. “Every last illusion. Will you take her home from her, too? Is that who you are?”

  “You’d die!” the commander shot back, exasperated. “Your circuits are blown. And the Gineer are hot on our heels—so we can’t leave you with fissionables, or food, or medical supplies. We have to leave now, and all you’ll have left is a metal tube with a puff of air. Would you rather die in space than live in the Intraconnected Commonwealth?”

  Lizzie turned to Momma, wondering what she’d say—but was surprised to find Momma was waiting for her answer. And even though Momma’s face was patient and kind, Lizzie could see it in Momma’s eyes:

  Momma would rather die here.

  She had spent forty-three years in Sauerkraut Station. Here, she was a commander; in the collective, she’d be a quirky neighbor. Brought to dirt, Momma would become the stereotypical planetfaller that was the butt of every VDR comedy’s joke: terrified of the outdoors, obsessively closing every door behind her, frozen by the overwhelming choices at supermarkets. Laughed at by everyone.

  Yet Momma’s gaze told the truth: I would endure all of that. For you.

  Lizzie thought about that, then gripped her mother’s hand. Her Momma gripped Gemma’s hand. Three generations of Denahues turned to face the commander.

  “This is our home,” said Lizzie.

  * * *

  The Web troops left, burying them in black. In the darkness, Momma and Gemma hugged her tight.

  “You’re a true Denahue,” Momma said, wetting Lizzie’s neck with tears.

  “You did us proud, Lizzie,” Gemma assured her, enfolding them both inside her strong, stringy arms.

  “But I’m gonna die a Denahue,” Lizzie said. “We’re gonna suffocate inside a tin can . . .”

  Momma sighed, a warm stream of breath that rustled Lizzie’s hair. “We got hope, Lizzie. Not a lot, but some.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Gemma took Lizzie by the hand and they fumbled their way carefully to the mech-bay. She placed Lizzie’s palms at the back of the now-empty hidden storage crèche.

  “Tell me, Lizzie,” Gemma said, her voice wavering. “I know they found the hidden compartment. But did they find the double-blind?”

  The hidden hidden compartment! Lizzie had forgotten. And as she ran her hands along it, she whooped in happiness as she realized it was unopened.

  “I guess it’s still there,” Momma said. “Now we’ll see if the shielding held.”

  “It’s shielded,” Gemma said firmly. “My Momma made sure of that.”

  “She couldn’t test it, though,” Momma replied. “How could she, without frying the station? And we haven’t checked the integrity of the backup hardware—well, since Lizzie was born, at least.”

  Gemma was unconcerned. “Momma stored stuff to last.”

  Lizzie’s sweaty hands unbolted the last of the secret latches. She tossed the panel aside with a clatter. Come on, she thought, running fingertips around the edge of what felt like an emergency supply box. She grabbed at what felt like a flashlight.

  A blue flicker illuminated the mechbay.

  “Goddammit, yes!” Lizzie cried, and Momma didn’t even cluck her tongue at the swearing.

  The light was thin, barely enough to pierce the gloom, but Lizzie aimed it into the cramped cabinet. Fit neatly like a puzzle was a set of oxygen tanks, two backup servers, a case of shielded fissionables, a set of power tools, a month’s supply of food, and a full meteoroid shielding kit. Lizzie let out another whoop and turned to hug Momma.

  Momma pushed her away, looking grim.

  “Sweetie,” she whispered. “We’re still probably gonna die.”

  Lizzie shivered. It was the truth.

  * * *

  The worst part about Momma and Gemma leaving was that Lizzie couldn’t even wave goodbye. She stood on the other side of the welded door, doing the math one last time. Math was all she’d been doing for the last ninety-four hours, and the end results were merciless.

  As a rough guideline, Lizzie knew the average human exhausts the oxygen in about 500 cubic feet of air per day. There were three of them. The station h
ad 99,360 cubic feet of air, not counting airlock losses. Since the oxyscrubbers were fried along with everything else, that gave them two months before they suffocated on CO2.

  They did not have two months’ worth of food.

  Lizzie had begged hard, and the commander had left them with two weeks’ worth of rations. There had been a year’s supply of protein bars stored in the double-blind, but mold had crept in and gnawed most of it into a dry, inedible fuzz. Their water supplies were even worse: a mere thirty gallons.

  And even that didn’t matter unless they could get the meteoroid shield back up and running. Without that, as Gemma so colorfully put it, this place would be a tin shack on a firing range. Their first order of business was to get that running—which took twenty sleepless hours. (Thankfully, as Gemma pointed out, great-great-Gemma was wise indeed, spending the extra money for a shield that could be completely swapped out without ever leaving the ship’s confines.)

  When they were done, Momma and Gemma collapsed into a four-hour nap that had to keep them awake for thirty, but Lizzie had an idea. She felt her way out in darkness, conserving the power on her flashlight.

  As she stepped out of the bunk room, she bonked her head against the door frame.

  The station’s gravity was artificial, created by a near-frictionless rotating drum; judging from the new creaks the station had acquired and then lessening gravity, Lizzie judged the impact of the Web ship must have crushed something inside, creating drag. A few days, and there would be no gravity at all.

  Yet another deadline.

  Lizzie carefully bobbed like a balloon down to the hydroponics room, then dunked her hands in the growing chambers.

  Her wrists were engulfed in cold, moist sand.

  She sighed with relief. The Web had drained the water tanks, but they hadn’t removed the water in the diatomaceous earth. Lizzie didn’t know how much water was there precisely, but it was enough to feed the roots of seven hundred square feet of plants. All she had to do was filter the silt out with a bedsheet and a bucket before the gravity stopped.

  The next day, they looked at Gemma’s salvage ship, stuck so high in the rafters and looking so damaged that the Web had left it behind. Gemma ran a quick test; a lot of it was fried, but the junker’s older circuits weren’t as finicky as the newer installs.

  “Say it,” Gemma crowed.

  Momma lowered her head. “It was a good idea to keep the junker, Momma.”

  The junker had been designed for short hops out to the edge of the solar system, but in a pinch Gemma could rig it for cross-system travel . . . Assuming that there were enough supplies in the double-blind. Assuming that a jury-rigged drive wouldn’t conk out in mid-jump, leaving them drifting through empty space—Lizzie knew the junker was already a hot zone, leaking scandalous amounts of waste energy.

  Then Lizzie thought about how crowded it was in there when it was just her and Gemma cuddled inside the spaceship. She pictured all three of them there crammed in there, plus the food and water to feed them, the oxyscrubbers straining under a triple load—

  Even if, as Momma pointed out—if—they successfully made the jump to Swayback Station, there was no guarantee the Web hadn’t stripped Swayback as well. Lizzie pointed out it was a leap hubward, away from Web territories—but Momma retorted that fissionable material had already been scarce. There was no guarantee the Swaybacks, rumored to be a particularly mercenary family, would lend them fissionables for the week-long jump to Mekrong planetfall.

  And Mekrong? Did Mekrong have the supplies to refit Sauerkraut Station? If they did, could Momma afford to buy it?

  A single missed link meant either death or bankruptcy. Out here, the two were pretty much one and the same.

  “And even if we could all squeeze in there,” Momma agonized, putting her face into her hands, “We couldn’t. The Web were fleeing a pursuing force. That means the Gineer will probably be here soon—we already know they wanted our station. If we all stay here and wait for help, the Gineer aren’t any more likely to help us out than the Web was. But if all three of us leave, the Gineer can jump our claim and refurbish our station for their needs.”

  “That’s not a bad thing, staying behind,” Gemma mused. “The station’s not comfortable, but it’s stable. We got a working distress beacon in the closet. They’ll hear it.”

  “No guarantee they’ll stop, though,” Momma said. “Not in war. Not for a dead station.”

  “True,” Lizzie said. “But I bet they’d stop for a little girl.”

  The silence was punctuated only by the groans of the ship’s axis slowing.

  “Don’t say that, Lizzie.” Momma’s voice was hoarse.

  “I have to, Momma,” Lizzie replied, feeling light-headed but oddly sure. “You can take two weeks’ supplies on the ship with you—that gets you to Swayback. And two people have to go to Swayback—without our usual bankfeed to draw from, one of you might have to stay behind at the station as insurance. And someone has to stay here, or we might just as well have traded our station to the Web. The math says one person stays.”

  “That’s me,” she said, her voice only trembling a little bit. “I’m smaller than you. I eat less, I breathe less. Leave me with all the protein bars and the water in the sand, and I bet I could last for—for three, maybe four months. Someone’s sure to come before then.”

  Lizzie tried to sound more certain than she was. Her plan assumed that nothing further went wrong with the station. That Lizzie didn’t go crazy from being cooped up in a lightless ship. That the soldiers who answered her distress call weren’t soldiers who thought it was okay to beat up a little girl. But Lizzie’s future was a teetering stack of uncertainties; this plan was the best of a bad batch.

  Momma argued fiercely for a time—so furiously that Lizzie realized that Momma had already considered this plan. She just hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. And when Momma was forced to admit there was no other way, Momma squeezed her tight and wept. It was only the second time Lizzie had seen Momma weep since Daddy had died, and both times in the same day, and that scared her to the core.

  Momma took Lizzie in her lap and combed her hair one last time while Gemma finished soldering the junker into shape. “You know I love you, right?”

  Lizzie did, but it was good to hear it now. She buried her face in her mother’s chest, trying to inhale Momma’s scent so deeply it would carry her through blackness and terror. All her life, Momma had always been just a couple of rooms away; now, Momma was going to be systems away, crossing the void in a half-dead ship, and Lizzie would have no way of knowing what happened.

  “Maybe I should have gone to planetfall,” Momma muttered, rubbing her hands on her pants. “Maybe I should have—”

  That questioning was the most terrible thing of all. Momma never doubted.

  “It’s okay,” Lizzie said. “Daddy’s out there. He’ll protect me.”

  Momma looked sad, and then desperate, and then she floated with Lizzie to the observation window—the only native source of light in the whole station now—and spread her fingers across the scratched window.

  Momma said other things before she left, but that was what Lizzie remembered: the terrifying fear and love as Momma said a silent prayer to Daddy, the stars reflected her eyes.

  Without electricity, the airlocks didn’t work. So Lizzie said her goodbyes, and then pressed her ear to the wall as Momma and Gemma welded themselves behind a door, then started up the ship, then rammed through a weakened hatch and into space. The only confirmation she had of their leaving was the hollow metal thoom that resounded through the station walls.

  She prayed they’d make it. But whether they were alive or dead, for the first time in her life, Lizzie was alone.

  * * *

  Back when they’d had guests, Lizzie had bragged how even if all the servers crashed irrevocably, Sauerkraut Station would still remain a livable environment until rescue could arrive. The thermal hood that covered the axis like a great, trembling umbrell
a was the brilliant part of Great-Great Gemma’s design. It intercepted all the solar emanations that might otherwise cook the axis, transmitting both heat and electricity back into the station. It was an elegant design that required little monitoring, and no complicated circuitry; the core of the station’s axis served as a boiler room, keeping the station heated to human-habitable temperatures even in the deep cold of space.

  But, Lizzie thought after the first day, it made for lousy viewing.

  She pressed her nose against the observation deck window, looking for signs of Momma and Gemma. It was suffocatingly black; the thermal hood blocked all the sunlight, leaving Lizzie to strain her eyes to the faint illumination of reflected starlight. The only real light came from the sporadic purple bursts of the meteoroid shields zapping another microparticle.

  Yet that was the only place that had any light. The rest of the ship, quite sanely, had no weak points to expose to the sucking vacuum outside. Every corridor was a lightless prison.

  On the first day, Lizzie had to dare herself not to turn on her flashlight.

  She hugged the hard plastic to her chest, shivering. For the first time in her life, nobody would answer if she called out for help. The emptiness of the station seemed to have its own personality—a mocking smirk, hidden in darkness.

  By the time Lizzie half-skipped, half-floated up to the observation deck on the second day—at least she thought it was the second day, it was hard to tell without the usual lightcycles—the observation deck was tinged with a strange glow. It was her eyes adjusting, she knew that, but the deck felt like the ship’s lights during a brownout.

  Part of Lizzie wanted to stay at the observation deck all the time. A wiser part understood that if she stayed there in the light, eventually she’d be too terrified to venture back down into the chill void of Sauerkraut Station’s hallways—and so she forced herself, trembling, back to where the water supplies and her bed and the repair kits were.

  On the fifth maybe-day, Lizzie almost died.