Gravity of a Distant Sun

by R. E. Stearns

  They hadn’t even given her a window, like there’d been in the Ceres Station jail. Ceresians acted like people couldn’t survive with a blank ceiling over their heads all the time. Iridian missed the stars, but Sorenson ITAS was cleaner and calmer than the jail. Not meeting the other residents grated on her, though. In the Ceres Station jail, new prisoner introductions sometimes ended with the newbie beaten bloody. If a fight was coming, she wanted to get it over with.

  The comp in the desk had things to read, at least. She skimmed prison rules and her release criteria, the eighteen things she’d have to do before the ITA let her go. The official documents estimated that she’d meet all her release criteria in a couple of years, but almost everybody took longer. People who did it in less made the newsfeeds.

  Rehabilitation took as many years as the ITA wanted it to take, but blue boxes hovered beside the documents’ text describing statistical success: 91% of those released leave criminal behavior behind for good! 100% of released persons capable of work have a job within six months of meeting their release criteria! The exclamation points were absent, but implied.

  After the third morning’s blackout, Iridian climbed off her bed to find the cell door open. A projector stage in the ceiling presented a message beside it. Follow arrows to the dining room. Please do not deviate from the prescribed route.

  Iridian would’ve liked to finish the set of sit-ups she’d started before the blackout. She hadn’t broken a sweat and her joints were still stiff. But this was her chance to find out what the other prisoners were like. Footsteps and an approaching tense conversation drew her through the door.

  “. . . is gone. I didn’t do it. Wiley didn’t do it.” The husky feminine voice was familiar, as was the name Wiley, but the speaker was around a corner from Iridian’s cell.

  “Who did, then?” a second speaker, male by the sound of it, asked in the same quiet, tense tone.

  Iridian stepped around the corner in the direction of the voices, which also happened to be the opposite direction of the white arrows projected onto the walls. A dragging swish and a clack told her that the door had shut behind her. “Blame it on me,” she suggested. Since she’d just arrived, she had nothing to lose with disciplinary action, and solving their problem might head off a physical determination of how much respect Iridian was owed. “I’m new. I don’t know any better.”

  Both people stopped walking as Iridian turned a second corner to follow them. At least, she assumed it was two people, because the first person took up the entirety of the narrow hallway. She’d know that silhouette anywhere. The enormous woman turned around and her wide face confirmed it. “Hell’s holy whores. Nassir!”

  “Rio!” Iridian shambled forward as fast as the nannites would let her move. On Vesta, Pel had said that Rio had gotten locked up for something, but he’d never said what for or where. Captain Sloane’s ops had kept Iridian too busy to follow up.

  Whoever Rio had been talking to used spacefarer cant to compare Iridian’s arrival to a sewage system blowout. Seeing a friend in this place, even one she had befriended on Barbary Station while an AI was trying to kill her, was a powerful relief. She didn’t even get halfway into a bow before brown arms enveloped her in a rib-crushing hug. “What the hell brought you here?” Iridian croaked as her lungs compressed.

  Rio chuckled. “Long story. And go easy when you’re walking toward people. Anyway, we don’t have time. It’s important to be on time, as a courtesy to others.” That last sentence sounded memorized, and Rio’s smile fell away as they walked in the direction the arrows pointed. “Uzomo, this is Iridian Nassir,” she said.

  “Hey.” Uzomo raised a dark brown hand, tattooed with a black pattern of lines like a ladder from his wrist up as much of the arm as Iridian saw over Rio’s wide shoulders, which were about the height of Iridian’s head. “I’m going to say you lost it,” said Uzomo. “Who’d take one two-kilo dumbbell, anyway? And ‘we are empowered to work it out among ourselves,’ so the therapists aren’t telling us who.” The part about empowerment sounded like a sarcastic quote.

  Rio made a displeased grunt. “Speak only the truth.” Her broad shoulders hunched a little more with every platitude she uttered. Iridian frowned. Whatever process the ITA used to turn prisoners into good spacefaring citizens must’ve included catchphrases people felt compelled to repeat.

  You’ll never guess who I just met, Iridian subvocalized to Adda. On Barbary Station, Rio had been one of Pel’s staunchest allies, and she’d taken to Iridian and Adda as soon as Captain Sloane stopped aiming weapons at them. Knowing that Iridian had a reliable friend in this place might keep Adda from worrying about her too much. It certainly eased Iridian’s mind. And Adda might be interested to hear how Rio was doing. Like every other time Iridian had talked to Adda recently, there was no response. The silence tore her up inside.

  The hallway opened onto a small cafeteria. Over a dozen people sat at blue tables with ITA seals printed onto the tops. As usual, Rio was the most massive person in the room. Like Iridian, most prisoners wore plain clothes that came from default textile printer patterns. Despite the simple clothes, the hunched shoulders and tattoos would’ve looked more at home in the dark corners of Captain Sloane’s club on Vesta than in this well-lit, quiet place. The expressions as they sized her up were mixed. There was some cold disinterest and a couple of approving nods, a lot of suspicious glowering, and a few people who looked like just the sight of her was infuriating. Four of the ubiquitous ERTs stood in full armor around the walls, helmet faceplates showing featureless black.

  The tables and benches were bolted to the floor. Short straps hung from the benches, for low-grav seating. They also looked sturdy enough to allow people to sit with their full weight on their asses, and their plates resting on the tabletops, but the straps suggested that low grav was possible, if not common. Perhaps the station rose above the atmosphere in certain situations, like avoiding bad storms. As long as it was going up, not down, short periods of micrograv would be all right. Except for the lack of comp cradles in the tables’ centers, the place looked as civilized as the ERT people had told her to expect.

  Even though the tables were big enough for trays and plates, nobody had any. Everyone held yellow liter-size liquid packets, like the kind that’d been delivered to Iridian’s cell three times a day. Iridian gripped the dispensing machine’s handle while it scanned her vein pattern. A little cabinet door opened to reveal a yellow packet of her own. The contents, when she broke the straw’s seal and sipped, were thick and . . . “Banana flavored?”

  “That’s what they’re going for, yeah.” Rio raised hers in farewell to Uzomo, whose tattoos were much more visible in the cafeteria lights as he headed for one of the tables. He had Jovian and Saturnian secessionist iconography on his shoulders and back, peeking through carefully placed tears in his shirt, in addition to the lines Iridian had seen earlier.

  Rio was headed for a different table, so Iridian followed her. Once Uzomo was several meters away, Rio muttered, “Assassin. There are at least three in here. Recognition didn’t exactly end the market for violence.” Instead, the NEU recognizing colonial independence had turned a lot of soldiers into bitter freelancers. They hadn’t all joined a legal organization like Rio’s ZV Group. It made sense that some would end up here. “Stay with me and my group and you’ll be all right. Us four watch each other’s backs.” Rio returned to the topic of meal replacements at a normal volume. “Guaranteed allergen and contaminant free, with nutrients mixed up for each of us. No trading, nothing solid.”

  “Great,” said Iridian, in regard to both the “food” and the secessionist assassin. It wasn’t.

  Everybody kept watching Iridian, the prisoners out of the corners of their eyes and the ERT people through the blank faceplates turned toward her. The prisoners’ muted conversation was full of even more therapeutic-sounding phrases. It was almost like a new cant. Iridian had a lot of rules to learn, written and not, to avoid making any more enemies than
she had to. It paid not to piss off your new neighbors when you moved into a mod, especially when some of the neighbors used to kill for a living.

  The table Rio walked toward was occupied by a broad-shouldered black man and a shorter man with tawny skin that exposed dark circles under his eyes. They were playing black and white digital checkers on a board rising out of a thumbnail-size projector in the table’s center. Iridian did a double take back to the players.

  Rio thumped the table with one big hand, making the digital board game jump. The pieces moved together with the board and stayed in their squares. “Iridian Nassir, this is Noor Beck and—”

  “Zayd Wiley,” Iridian said. In her memory, the black man’s head was shaved as bald as she usually kept her own, but he’d grown his hair out a few centimeters. He was heavier than he’d been when they’d driven infantry shield vehicles during the war. Since he was the only person at the table wearing a comp glove, the checkers game had to be running on it. Like everything else, the fingerless glove was ITA blue. Iridian sat down hard on the open bench space next to him.

  Wiley looked as shocked as she was. It took a long moment for his face to split into a smile. “Nassir!” He wrapped his arm around her shoulders and dragged her into a sideways hug. People in this hab touched each other a lot more often than Iridian had expected. Everybody had gone through the same decon, so it wasn’t a big deal. One of the ERT people stepped away from the wall, heavy helmet lowered threateningly, and Wiley let her go.

  “I’d ask why you’re here, but everybody with newsfeed privileges already told everybody else.” Wiley laughed, probably at himself. That laughter was a comforting sound she could’ve heard anytime, if she’d just kept up with him after she left the service for school. “I didn’t believe you were coming,” he said. “Everything’s the same here, day after day. I didn’t believe even you could break the routine.”

  Iridian’s shoulders had been up around her ears in a defensive reflex that she only noticed as they relaxed. When she’d walked into the cafeteria, she’d been settling in to stay in this prison. Adda couldn’t think well enough to plan an escape, the ITA security measures seemed solid, and Iridian was just one woman in a cage designed to hold people exactly like her. She’d seen no way out. But now two soldiers she trusted were stuck in this place with her, and that changed everything. If she came up with something resembling a plan, these people could help her get back to Adda before they both got old and gray.

  Rio sat beside the man she’d introduced as Noor, looking pleased with herself. Noor moved a checker piece across the board and said, “Iridian Nassir is the Shieldrunner friend you were expecting to get sent here?” Noor’s spacefarer English, like Wiley’s, carried a hint of reassuring Martian twang.

  “Yeah,” said Wiley. “We ran together on Titan and Mars.” He shook his head, still looking at Iridian like if he turned away, she’d disappear. “Good times.”

  “Your exploits on Vesta catching up with you?” Noor asked Iridian while Wiley took his turn at the checkers board. His voice was lower than it looked like it ought to be for his size.

  “Look, Captain Sloane blew our involvement way out of proportion,” Iridian said. “Adda and I were foot soldiers.” Wiley snorted at that, and Iridian grinned. “Yeah, I know.” Aside from Iridian’s understatement regarding Adda’s involvement, the Shieldrunners mocked the exposed and vulnerable infantry who needed the ISVs’ protection. Maybe Wiley had let himself go a bit since the last time he’d driven an infantry shield vehicle, but he remembered those years.

  Noor ran a hand through black hair that fell almost to his shoulders. “But you did kidnap the scientist who discovered the interstellar bridge, didn’t you?”

  Her lawyer had no hope of getting her out of that charge on appeal. “We rescued ver from a disabled ship in the middle of Mangala stationspace first.” Iridian had questions of her own, starting with the ones about the station enviro. People who didn’t learn a hab’s quirks got hurt during “expected” enviro fluctuations. The comp in her cell hadn’t offered the usual public records about this hab. “While it’s question-and-answer time, what’s up with all the blackouts? None of the orientation crap they’ve been testing me on explains those. Is this station stable or what?”

  “Rumor is the hab has power problems, but they keep telling us it’s not getting any closer to the surface,” said Rio, which was a relief. Without a lot of specialized gear, Venus’s surface wasn’t survivable, even if you didn’t get there at terminal velocity. “And before you ask, everybody gets up feeling stiff, so that’s not just you either. The beds are shit.” Wiley and Noor nodded agreement. Iridian hadn’t even mentioned her stiff muscles. This was apparently a common complaint.

  A white woman wandered toward their table, making her nannite-slowed walk look slinky instead of sluggish, with hips rounded to entertainment-feed perfection. She had the ageless quality of women between thirty and fifty who’d spent most of their lives behind rad shielding. When she reached the table, she draped her arms over Wiley’s shoulders and the rest of herself over his back. Her shirt was tied in a knot to expose a line of small metal ring piercings up the side of her flat stomach, strung through with a pink ribbon. It looked like she had another set on the other side, and the ribbon laced up her front in a row of Xs. The woman cast a challenging look at Iridian while she cooed, “Hey, love,” in Wiley’s ear.

  “Hey, yourself.” Wiley patted her arm. “Tash, this is Iridian Nassir. Friend from—”

  “The Shieldrunners,” Tash drawled in uncolored spacefarer English like they spoke on Iridian’s home hab. “I know who she is.” She gave Iridian a long look.

  “Hey.” Iridian dipped her head for a duration that offered a high level of respect to a stranger. Tash broke off her challenging stare and nodded back.

  Iridian would definitely remember meeting this woman, so Tash must’ve heard about her on the newsfeeds. “Nice mods,” she said to Tash. “I’ve only got this.” Iridian raised one side of her shirt to display her tattoo, a triangle of skin peeled up from her side to reveal a realistic lung and liver under two crossed rib bones. A dark scar cut into the crossed-bone design. She hadn’t gotten around to having it repaired. A black skull grinned out from the middle of the peeled-back skin.

  Tash leaned closer in a glittering swell of breasts lit with small LED jewels that glowed through her shirt. She hummed in an approving sort of way. “Too bad about the blade that got you. It’s good work.”

  “I got him back.” Iridian grinned almost as widely as the tattooed skull. If she could convince these people to help her escape, she’d find her way back to Adda sooner rather than later.

  * * *

  After the meal, loudspeaker instructions directed the prisoners in the cafeteria to their beds for the duration of a brief blackout. From there, Iridian got sent to yet another therapist appointment. It was her second conversation with this skinny old white woman in the past couple of days. During the first, Iridian had halfheartedly completed a barrage of tests while Shera Marsten (“just Shera, I don’t have a doctorate”) observed from the stage built into the desk in Iridian’s cell.

  In person, Shera perched on a soft chair across from the equally soft couch on which Iridian sat. The therapists’ and doctors’ offices were the only comfortable places in the whole damned hab. Shera’s office was just warm enough to emphasize that the rest of Sorenson ITAS was slightly too cold.

  “Hi.” Shera wore a small, professional smile and earrings that were too big for her face. “How are you feeling about meeting with me today?”

  Iridian shrugged. “Not much else to do.”

  “That’s a good response.” Except for the ERT people, the staff constantly shared opinions on what Iridian said and did. They’d been doing it since she got onto the transport ship on Ceres. Even the virtual ones did it. “You’re going to be one of my clients,” said Shera.

  Iridian leaned back into the couch cushions and crossed her arms under her br
easts. “ ‘Client’ sounds like I’m supposed to pay you. Do you have any idea how much a lawyer costs?” The bill from the Ceresian lawyer she’d hired to replace the ITA’s silent one had been a nasty surprise.

  Captain Sloane had unexpectedly kicked in 40 percent of the fee, along with a note: “For your trouble on my behalf.” The captain wanted her free eventually but didn’t mind if she was low on funds when she got out. Besides, it would’ve been bad for Sloane’s crew morale to leave even a disgraced member in the ITA’s custody with no support at all.

  Shera laughed. “I’m sorry. ‘Client’ is just the lingo here. I’m sure you know that the language we use is important. Positive language has positive effects. Could you repeat that for me?”

  Iridian blinked at her. “Why?”

  “Repetition reinforces concepts that are important to your release criteria,” Shera said patiently. Demonstrating progress toward each prisoner’s individualized release criteria must’ve been what had the other prisoners repeating phrases that sounded more like psychobabble shit than real speech. No wonder repeating them aggravated Rio so much.

  “I understood what you said. What’s next?” Iridian wasn’t interested in progressing toward any of her eighteen release criteria. Not while she hadn’t even tried to find a faster way back to Adda. At the trial they’d talked about months of drug testing, developing a group of “prosocial” friends and advocates who the therapists thought would somehow make crime less profitable or debts less crushing, and psychological “milestones” that were arbitrary as hell. The repeated phrases must’ve counted as progress toward those milestones.