Nebula Awards Showcase 2013

by Catherine Asaro

  The gravity had finally dropped to near-zero, and she’d let go of the doorway to push herself off the wall. But in the darkness, she’d misjudged her foot position, and instead of kicking off into space, she just stomped on empty air.

  Lizzie tried to whirl around, to get ahold of something—but flailed and touched nothing but air. She knew she must be drifting, slowly, down the middle of the main corridor, towards the observation deck. But she could see nothing; this deep into the station, there was no difference between having her eyes open and her eyes shut.

  From here, the observation deck was an eighth of a mile away.

  How fast had she been going when she let go? It couldn’t have been more than a couple of inches a minute. She was drifting, slowly, like a speck of dust, down the middle of a long and empty hallway.

  Lizzie shrieked. Her voice echoed back, colder and shriller, as if the station itself was throwing her words back at her. She punched, she clapped, she frog-kicked, hoping to feel the pain of her hands smashing against metal. Her hands only slapped the globs of water hanging in the air.

  There was nothing to push off of. There was no way to get free.

  “MOMMA!” she shrieked. “GEMMA!”

  Lizzie saw it all in her mind; she was drifting down the dead center of the hallway, slow as syrup. She’d eventually brush up against the gentle curve of the western wall—but that might take weeks.

  She might starve before her body bumped metal.

  She pictured her dead body ragdolling slackly against the wall and rebounding, just another dead thing floating in a dead ship. The doc had told her what happened to dead men when they rotted . . .

  She was still screaming, but now she was shrieking at the stupid Web. “I ROOTED FOR YOU!” she said. “I TRUSTED YOU! AND NOW YOU LEFT ME TO DIE, YOU STUPID . . . STUPID IDIOTS! I HOPE YOU ALL DIE LIKE ME IN YOUR HORRIBLE WAR!”

  Then she realized it was only five days maybe five days and Momma hadn’t thought the Gineer would show for weeks and she was going to die and bounce around this ship.

  Lizzie didn’t know how long she hung there, yelling like a madwoman; it felt like hours. But after too long a time it finally occurred to her: silly, just take off your clothes. And once she flung her shoes away, that gave her enough motion to thump against a doorway a minute or two later.

  It was a childish mistake, the kind of thing Daddy would have laughed at her for. But the panic of that moment never left her. From then on, she strapped herself to the bed when she slept, and she always carried a small canister of oxygen so she could jet herself to safety.

  Without gravity, going to the bathroom was an abominable chore, a filthy thing that contaminated the very air. The air stank of human waste and rotting sauerkraut. That made eating a precursor to horror, so she ate only when she grew faint from hunger. She stopped going to the observation deck because floating through the hallway’s splatters made her sick.

  All she wanted to do was stay in bed. But what would happen to her muscles?

  Things started to coalesce from the blackness.

  At first it was little sparkles here and there, but the sparkles turned into constellations, and then firespark-white lines connected the dots to turn them into great silver airlocks. The airlocks hissed open. And as Lizzie pushed her way past the glowing doorways, she glided into a vast hydroponics chambers, the skies ribbed with water-pipes hissing down clean cool rain.

  She looked down, and her fingertips brushed across waxy, familiar goodness; rows of cabbages floated below her. The cabbages danced joyfully, a strange and careful motion like two ships docking. Thousands of pale green heads bobbed beneath her fingers, like little men bowing.

  She saw a flash of braided brown hair.

  “Themba!” she cried.

  “Play,” said Themba, his voice just as full of joy and life as always, and as his cornrowed skull dipped under the dancing cabbages, she realized that Themba was playing hide and seek with her. She launched after him, laughing—and rammed into a cabinet.

  As she shook off the sting of it, the blackness swallowed her up.

  She tried to tether herself to the bed, but in the darkness she heard scuttling things coming for her. She felt fine hairs brushing against her skin, hoping to find an anchor on her flesh to drill deep.

  She shrieked, and the walls of the station fell away, and she was walking on the panels of the outside hull.

  Daddy walked with her.

  His desiccated hand was all rattly inside his punctured spacesuit, but he held her wrist like they were going for a walk around the corridors back in the good old days. Lizzie didn’t have a suit, but that didn’t matter; it was a beautiful day. She closed her eyes, felt warmth of the sun on her face.

  “You’re dying, Lizzie,” Dad said.

  “I know,” Lizzie shrugged.

  “It’s only been two weeks.” His face was smashed in like a crushed cabbage—but still kind. “You gotta be strong. Trust me, Lizziebutt, I know what you’re going through.” He gestured up to point at himself, a dot far out in space.

  “Aw, Daddy,” Lizzie said, hugging him tight. Her squeeze sent a puff of dry, dead air shooting out through his cracked faceplate.

  “It’s no good hugging you any more, Daddy,” she said.

  He nodded. “Only the living can give comfort,” he said. “That’s why you gotta stay alive, Lizziebutt.”

  “But you came for me,” she protested.

  “That’s cause I know how empty things are. You’ve been doing this for just fourteen days; I’ve been out here five years. But I wouldn’t be out here drifting if I hadn’t screwed up. I lost my footing, and drifted out, and wham—I was gone. You know how hard it is to get a glimpse of you only once every seven weeks?”

  “I miss you, Daddy,” she said, laying down on the panels and closing her eyes. “It’s nice here.”

  “You gotta do stuff, Lizzie. Or you’re gonna go crazier than you already have. So I’m gonna make things worse to give you something to do. It might kill you, too. But what wouldn’t, these days?”

  Daddy knelt down and swept her up in an embrace, then he leapt off like a ballet dancer to launch himself into space. He whirled around like a gyro and flung Lizzie back into the station.

  She busted through the hull with a horrible pong noise, and there was a hiss as all the air came whooshing out, and Lizzie realized that she was struggling against her bedstraps.

  There was new light in here. A sliver of stars, shimmering behind a fluttering stream of purple.

  Something had broken through the hull.

  A very real hissing came from a finger-sized hole on the wall. A meteoroid had punctured the alloyed metal like a bullet fired from space. If that meteor had gone three feet to the right, it would have punctured Lizzie’s stomach.

  She reached down for the emergency sealer-patch under her bed with the familiarity of practice of years of hull breach drills. She turned on the flashlight, and her head exploded; the light made her just as blind with white as she’d been blind with black.

  As she slapped the sealer on, she peered out the gap; the plasma hummed. The shields were holding.

  So why had a meteoroid made it through?

  When she was done, she floated back to the observation deck. It was almost too bright to see now, a strobing purple.

  How could she have ever thought it was dark? It was radiant in here.

  But looking out the window, she saw meteoroids sizzling against the shields. There was maybe one a minute—way more than usual. She pressed her face to the window, trying to see what looked different.

  Sure enough, Daddy’s bear-constellation had slipped off the side of the window, and she could only make out the top three stars of Great-Gemma’s turbine-constellation. If the stars were changing position, then the station was drifting off-course—through the fringe of the dust belt and into the nearby asteroid belt. The shields were designed to burn off small inbound particles . . . But large ones would still penetrate. W
ithout thrusters to prevent her from drifting into the denser part of the belt, the shields would fail.

  * * *

  Lizzie tried to get the thrusters back on-line, but it was no use; even if she’d had enough fissionables to start a reaction, the reactor itself was laced with yards of blown-out circuitry. She’d thought about controlled hull breaches, maybe jetting her way to safety with air, but some calculations scrawled on a filthy whiteboard showed her that the displaced air wouldn’t be enough to significantly affect the station’s mass. And even if she could have moved the station, she didn’t have a clear idea which way the ship was drifting. She might knock it deeper into the field.

  All her life, Momma had taught her that everything came down to guts and brains, but this put the lie to it: she was dice rattling around in a cup, her life determined by sheer randomness. Nothing she had could prevent the larger meteoroids from breaking through. Every punk! meant that a rock had blown through the hull, and by sheer dumb luck it hadn’t blown through her.

  It was like trying to drift off to sleep with a gun pressed against your stomach.

  Lizzie pulled herself around the station in an exhausted haze, her arms aching, trying to make herself a moving target. The station seemed to expand and contract at will, the sign of some malicious intelligence; at times it felt like a vast dock and she was a bat, fluttering madly around inside emptiness. Other times it was all walls, and the space outside compressed in. Sometimes she’d fall asleep in mid-pull and not even realize it until the next ponk woke her up.

  Ponk. She’d survived. Again.

  She had 99,000 cubic feet of lightless air to protect. Her universe was reduced to patching. Her universe had always been patching.

  There was no time for sleep; everything was a coma-fugue. She had nightmares about patching horrible, howling holes, then realized she was awake. Once, she fell asleep mid-weld and woke up with her hair on fire.

  The station hissed like a boiling kettle.

  All the while Daddy and Momma and Themba and Gemma and all the Web and Gineer commanders floated behind her like balloons on a string, babbling in languages that made no sense. They told her the war was over, and everyone went home. They told her to give up, the station was dying and so was she. They told her that all her memories were dreams—there was just her in these stripped-out hallways, blind and numb, forever and ever.

  Lizzie was dust. She was air. She was the taste of cabbages.

  A flare of light came from the observation deck, so bright it filled the station. She floated over to see, her eyes tearing up; Dad was there, pressing his collapsed face against the window, telling her that it was okay, a meteor was coming to end her misery . . .

  . . . And it was the catastrophic clang, the big one, a huge sound like a hammer smashing all the metal in the world. Lizzie was flung into the wall, bathed in light, enveloped in such pain and terror that she shrieked and shrieked and kept screaming until Daddy split in four and hauled her down to hell.

  * * *

  She opened her eyes. It took an effort.

  She was blinded by the soft glare of fluorescent lights. A repetitive beep changed pitches, keeping time with her heart.

  Turning her head to peer at the monitors raised a sweat underneath the stiff blue robe she was wearing. She tried to slide her hand up off the starched bedsheets, but only managed to make her heart monitor spike. Gravity held her tight to the bed.

  At least her vitals looked good.

  “It’s my ship,” Lizzie protested, using all her strength to lift her head off the pillow. “My home.”

  “We know that.”

  Lizzie jumped. A nurse was dressed in a close-fit Gineer uniform with a blood-red cross-and-sickle emblazoned on the front, his long hair slicked back under a nurse’s cap. He had a friendly smile.

  “'My ship, my ship,” he said, placing a cool hand on her forehead. “That’s all you’d said when we pulled you from the wreckage. And after everything you went through to secure that glorious lifestyle of yours, Elizabeth, our most profound generals decided that we couldn’t remove it from you. You are a hero.”

  Hero? Lizzie thought. She hadn’t done anything but survive.

  But the nurse called in a couple of Web commanders, older women with sad eyes, and they told her that she’d been in an induced coma for almost two months while they restimulated bone growth and removed excess radiation from her body. In that time, her story had been transmitted to all corners of the galaxy—the discovery of a small girl working diligently to keep her home alive for her family. Elizabeth “Lizzie” Denahue, they said, was now known as an example of the tenacity that only family loyalty could generate.

  “But I’m not Gineer,” Lizzie protested.

  “Doesn’t matter,” said the nurse. “It’s a nice story. After all the consternation, people ache for a comforting tale.”

  She thought about the word “nice,” and logically there was only one reason they could possibly think this was nice.

  “So where’s Momma?”

  “Smart girl,” one of the commanders said affectionately. “She’s back on the station, refitting it with donated equipment. We almost snuffed you out in towing it back, you know; we thought no one could be alive inside that, it had drifted so badly out of orbit. We were just looking to refurbish it . . . But you were in there, Elizabeth. There was barely any air left, but you were there.”

  Lizzie nodded weakly. “Can I see Momma?”

  “Of course, sweetie,” said the nurse. “We just have to fly her in from the station.”

  Momma came about an hour later, looking haggard and scared and more beautiful than Lizzie could have imagined. They hugged, though Momma had to help lift Lizzie’s arms around her waist.

  “They told me what happened, Lizzie,” Momma said. “We were on our way back, I swear—Gemma had to take a down-planet contract to pay for emergency supplies. But the folks at Swayback were real helpful once I explained what happened. We owe them a big one, Lizzie.”

  Lizzie flipped her wrist at the room around them. “So why are the Gineer . . . ?”

  “The war’s over, Lizzie. The Web was using some real unconventional weaponry, and the Gineer did something . . . Well, equally unconventional to end it. Something so big they’ve had to restructure the whole jumpweb around it. On the bright side, that means there’s lots of contracting work building stations. What you’re in right now is a rescue and refit ship designed to find stragglers like us.”

  “The war’s over?”

  Momma smiled and put a cool cloth on Lizzie’s head. “Yep.”

  “Who won?”

  Her Momma sighed. “Does it matter?”

  Lizzie thought about it. It didn’t. She squeezed Momma’s hand, happy to have what counted.

  * * *

  There was a lot of cleanup to be done.

  Lizzie was still weak from being weightless for almost two months, but the Gineer had muscle treatments—so as soon as Lizzie could walk within a day or two, Momma put her to work. Internal circuitry had to be replaced, the hull had to be reinforced, the hydroponics rebuilt, the air scrubbed. Thankfully, Momma and the charity mechanics had done the real work of getting the central gyros up and running; rebalancing a station was a job for ten people, not two.

  It was hard. The starvation and weightlessness had marked her permanently; her eyes now had deep hollows underneath them, and her arms sometimes went numb, especially when she was using a wrench. Her legs swelled up fierce for no reason.

  But now, when she went to bed, Momma combed her hair. That was the only luxury she needed.

  Gemma was stuck back on Mekrong for the time being. Until the station was fully functional again, they needed cash. Gemma was doing her part for the family by taking contract work and sending the money back home. Lizzie wrote emails every day, and the charity ship tightbeamed them back for free.

  But eventually the charity ship left and the ships started docking again. The folks travelling now were odd mi
xes that Lizzie had never seen before; gladhanding carpetbaggers looking for new opportunities, grieving families on their way back to homes they weren’t sure still existed, scarred soldiers-turned-adrenaline junkies.

  Gineer and Web folks mixed uneasily in the waiting rooms. Sometimes shouting matches broke out. And when voices were raised, Lizzie would limp in, and every person would go fall silent as the Angel of Sauerkraut Station glared at them.

  “Your war’s done enough to me,” she said.

  They stopped.

  Some folks wanted to meet the little girl who’d survived in vacuum for nine weeks, and seemed disappointed when she wasn’t more visibly scarred. Lizzie asked about that, and Momma got out the filthy gray coveralls they’d found Lizzie in.

  “If you wear these,” Momma said, her face unreadable, “People will hand you their money.”

  Lizzie looked at the rags. They stank of memories.

  “Not for all the money in the world,” she said.

  Momma hugged her proudly. “Good girl.” And she tossed the rags into the incinerator and pushed the “on” button.

  But Lizzie did notice that Sauerkraut Station was now being called Survivor Station. Momma left up a few of the sturdier hull-patches Lizzie had made, and put plaques over them that noted where Elizabeth Denahue had made these patches to survive during her nine-week ordeal in the asteroid belt. She also put donation boxes below them “To help rebuild the station.” They filled up nicely.

  A few weeks later, the prisoner exchanges started up, and station was once again filled with soldiers—this time miserable-looking wretches who barely spoke. The handful of survivors had been kept in POW camps, and now they were being shipped back like embarrassing refuse.

  They were suffering from scurvy, lice, malnutrition. Most were too weak to move. Lizzie wished she could have done more, but mostly what they needed was clean quarters and a steady supply of food. Neither looked likely in their futures, sadly enough.

  She was in one of the prisoner ships, wearing a newly-bought HAZMAT suit and using a viral scanner to double-check the POWs for communicable diseases, when she saw Themba.