by Anna Gaffey
Bland food, Control duty, benumbed ass cheeks. These were minor annoyances by normal standards. But when Jake could have been on the planet’s surface? They were unbearable.
Meanwhile Santos was still talking. “—give you three resuscitation attempts, max. And then after you’re officially declared dead, or actually probably before, Dr. Murakami will take over as station head of Science—”
“Okay, okay, okay. Enough. Point taken.” Jake gave the mini Selas a last look and dissolved the image.
“Fuel in station ring quadrant four down to twenty percent,” Carmichael murmured. “Redirect all traffic to quadrant three.”
“Done.” Santos’ fingers danced over her console. “You should ease up, Jake. Just think. By tomorrow you’ll have thirty fresh, healthy victims for all the surface visits you want. Provided they’re game.”
“Well, there is that.”
“I’m not sure the term ‘victim’ is really appropriate for our new personnel, unless you want to alienate fresh crewmembers before they arrive,” Nat said, looking pleased to have finally got a word in. “But cheer up! There’s a party to look forward to.”
Still she was harping on the party. Nat was enough to turn anyone to the Dark Side of Science.
Jake tried to tune out her titters. There were only a few hours until the freighter arrived and the newts swarmed in, nine-tenths of them with chips on their shoulders. Or in their necks or brains, his mind added helpfully. He rubbed at the prickling on his own neck and tried to rub away the thought. The station would downgrade to minimal traffic control, and he could escape up to the labs. The bio samples he’d collected on his last visit to Selas waited frosty and secure behind a containment field and isolation of three centimeters of pre-Plague style glass storage. That is, if Kai hadn’t yet managed to break into them. Carmichael might not notice if Jake did some remote scans to the lab…
Accordingly, the comm node for the Science Labs vibrated. Jake tapped up one of the smaller, internal viewscreens on his central tablet. Kai’s face swam into view. Fucking Kai.
“Evening,” Jake said. “You seem awfully well recovered, Dr. Murakami. Change your mind about that Control shift?”
“What did you do to the containment field?” Kai demanded. “I can’t open the samples case without turning it on, and when I turn it on the screen says Opposable thumbs only. Why am I locked out, Jake? In case you’ve forgotten, I have full science privileges on this station, too.”
“I think what you really need to be asking, Kai, is why you’re sniffing around my samples in the first place.”
Kai sneered and retreated a few steps from the monitor, and Jake could see the mess of papers, rations trash, and food detritus piled next to the sample cases: Kai’s little calling cards. He gritted his teeth and sent a docking beacon to the next shuttle in the queue.
“Come on, now, Jake,” Kai said, and his voice took on the snidely reasonable cast he used when he thought he was being placating. “Someone’s got to get cracking on them. The rest of the team is on their way back to Earth. Under quarantine, the new recruits don’t exist yet, and you’re obviously overextended with the admin side of things.”
“Still my samples, Kai. I collected them with my own two hands.” Beside him, Santos sighed. What? he mouthed at her, and she scoffed back.
“I’ve collected samples, too,” Kai said, his face reddening.
Jake swerved back to the screen. “Really? When?”
“Plenty of times. Read the pod logs. And anyway, samples from Selas are public domain.”
“So is the containment field source code, buddy. Have fun with that.”
“Some of us didn’t grow up with it.”
“Excuses, excuses.” Jake cocked his head. “You could do something useful, like finish that database update backlog I assigned you, oh, last month.” He was pleased to see Kai’s pretentious little goatee quiver.
“I assigned it to Floros!”
“Who left this morning with the rest of them. That info’s been moldering in those gems since the place was recommissioned. Don’t you think that’s a priority?”
“For newts, maybe.” Kai made a rude sign at the screen, and Jake adopted a pious tone.
“I expected you to be laid up, Kai. Didn’t you say earlier you were feeling too ill to pull a quarter Control shift?”
“I—well—that doesn’t have any bearing on the larger issue.”
“You’re probably right.” Jake grinned. “I’ll just go on being overextended up here, then. Who knows when I’ll get back up to the lab?”
Kai glared. “I’m going to report you to the board, Doctor. Just wait till the next review period comes through.”
“Why wait? Comm’s always open. And it’s been, hmm, almost a week since your last complaint? I’m sure they’re just desolate.”
“Keep shoveling, you snide little shi—”
“Sorry, gotta sign off now. Freighters to refuel, samples to protect.” Jake clicked off the monitor and called up the next shuttle.
“Not your day for getting along with people?” Santos asked sweetly.
“Hey, if he’s gonna lie about being sick when Mei’s down and we’re busy as hell?”
“Jake, you of all people should know it’s very foolish to antagonize a scientist,” Nat observed. “Though I should probably be more concerned about staff mediations. Accusations of dishonesty will have to be investigated.” She settled herself more firmly on the edge of their console, returning her attention to Santos, and Jake smothered a groan. “Anyway, Rachel . . .”
Jake focused on the viewscreen. His own encryption was pretty advanced, but Kai was very good at hacking alternative routes, especially when it came to scientific recognition or ways to inveigle his name onto award-winning studies. Dr. Kai Murakami was best at picking up where others left off. Kai left vile self-conglomerating piles of rubbish in his wake but no helpful paperwork. Kai ate smelly, specially boiled organic food rations and left drippings all over the lab tables. Kai had a precious little ponytail to match his goatee. Kai consistently uploaded any important data to the comm network but just as consistently and conveniently forgot to decrypt them for communal viewing—not that Jake didn’t do that, too, but he was head of Science, he was allowed.
Nat laughed again, a high, happy trill, and Jake closed his eyes and thought space. Endless. Wide. No sound. No oxygen. No welcome galas or aggressive subordinates. Nothing but microwaves and gem spectrum and the occasional asteroid flyby. Very cold. Very black. Very peaceful. When the plaguing fuck was Carmichael going to kick her out?
A squawk in his commbud yanked Jake out of the calm coldness and back into Control. A freighter pilot for the General Grant had forgotten to update his cargo tonnage data.
“Furthermore, I know just where we’ll do it.” Nat’s voice reverberated around the deck. “The main gala is in general mess, but that second cooler’s still out of commission and exceedingly roomy, so—”
“—I don’t think so, Control,” the captain of the Grant interjected in Jake’s ear. “We took on more than a few tons of stellarcore at Sirius Four. Are you sure standard docking procedures still apply—”
“—I know! Won’t it be an absolute coup—”
Jake slapped the docking-cradle sequence, covered his mouthpiece, and swiveled around in his chair. “Ticonti, your shift is up. Why don’t you go decorate the mess?”
“I finished this morning.” Nat pouted at him across the console. She was picking restlessly at the uniform collar buttons under her scarlet scarf, her cheeks flushed. “But I’ve had the best idea. It’s really all quite serendipitous, isn’t it, Rachel? And just in time for All Hallows Eve and the transport. It will really do wonders for crew morale. Even yours, Jake.”
She pranced over and waved her computer tablet in Jake’s face. All he could make out was a dizzying spread of text on a field of pale aquamarine, the color of all textual comm traffic routed from Earth. He swatted it away. “Get out, damn
it, I’m right in the middle of bringing the Grant in, and it’s a beast.”
Undeterred, Nat cradled the tablet. “No worries. I can read it to you instead.”
“That’s okay. I’d rather be surprised.” Jake uncovered his mouthpiece. “Grant, as previously stated, you are clear to dock.” The freighters were starting to resemble a logjam in the shimmering curtain’s readout.
“‘Earth History Notes, year two-two, volume four. Courtesy of the United Worlds Library Association, as continued from our last volume on Old England fairy tales and folklore.’”
“I got those already, Nat.” Obviously. They were the only two official Historical Society members on board the station.
She gave him a pitying glance. “We all know you skim them for the corny science fiction bits.”
“I do not skim,” Jake snapped. “I like history. Patterns of technology? Hence the membership?” But so what if he did? What was the point of reading if you couldn’t read selectively? And there was such a wealth of material to read and watch and hear and taste, even under the Society’s conservative preservation dictates.
The birth of the Society had come some ten, fifteen years past the retreat into the Domes. After a prolonged and pissy skirmish between United Worlds Defense and Science over who would control the international networks, a group of radical librarians, archivists, and historians seized a bunch of servers and archived infinite old-time yottabytes of the old Internet’s material before it all went poof in the conversion and overlay to the new ’Net. The UWC Gov Board members and Science came out in grudging support of the action, and the World Historical Society was formed within the UWLA to perform further archival tasks. History, they claimed, had an importance equaling any new tech or scientific advancements. With enough study, they might discover further clues to the origin of Leech and thus use the knowledge to improve upon the human race’s little health problem.
Defense had accordingly blustered then that they, too, supported ’Net archival (which was bullshit) and that clearly they hadn’t understood the capacity requirements (definite bullshit). Jake still had never heard a reasonable argument for why Defense had wanted full control of the ’Net. Had they wanted the old material for some particular reason? Or more likely, were they being overbearing dicks solely for dickery’s sake? Maybe they’d wanted it for newt decompression. He’d always heard Defense training was comparable to slow death by suffocation.
But overall, thanks to research on both the reclaimed ’Net and primary sources, the Historical Society’s Earth History Notes were good: educational, full of equal parts treasure and junk, and almost always surprising. Though Jake wouldn’t know, since he’d skimmed them this week.
“‘Ghost stories and fairy tales,” Nat read, “are some of the oldest forms of moralistic cultural study available to our society,’ la di dah, la di dah.” She sketched above the tablet’s surface, sliding through layers of text. Jake turned up the volume on his commbud.
“—haints, fetches, more nonsense about evil and wolves and wicked stepmothers, you get the idea. Skipping ahead. ‘The incidence of séances in Earth culture is both varied and rich. Strongly linked with mesmerism, spiritualism, and later, hyperbolism—’”
“Control, say again?” The captain of The Grant sounded lost, and it was no wonder. “Come in, Control. Say again, all after ‘mesmerism?’”
Jake groaned. “Nothing, Captain. Proceed with docking to ring quadrant two, and we’ll have you reloaded and refueled before you know it.” He heard Nat take a huffy breath and overrode her. “Ticonti, take it outside, or I’ll put you outside. And by outside, I do mean outside.”
She tapped her tablet, considering. “If it’s too much pressure for you to handle an extended Control shift, Jake, you really should inform Carmichael instead of taking it out on me.”
“I am fine with the pressure. Pressure is easy. Give me another fleet of shuttles, another ten thousand carriers, a few emergencies—hells, take away my lab, too. As long as I don’t have to listen to you.”
Nat’s smiled hardened.
“Don’t mind him,” Santos said in confiding tones. “He’s just upset he might miss his meteoroids.”
“Perhaps you’ll be in a less foul mood tonight.” Nat regained her brightness. “In any case, you know who to thank when you’re enjoying yourself at the gala.”
“Not much chance of forgetting,” Jake muttered. And if one more person mentioned fucking pointless plaguing meteoroids to him, he’d chuck them out the airlock after Nat. Capricious mass murder in space! It sounded like an old serial.
Nat stood up and tucked her hair behind her ears. “Then don’t forget the quarterly psych evals are due next week—including yours.” She whispered something unintelligible to Santos and scurried off to the lifts.
“Is that supposed to be a threat?” Jake called after her. “No one reads those things, Nat.”
Santos sighed again. Jake ignored it, and also the pointed, silent rebuke radiating from Carmichael across the room. He took a deep breath and held it. Santos, Carmichael, Mei, Mick, Nat, Kai, and Lindy. Surely they could survive until the newts docked.
Apart from notifications, they worked in bad-tempered silence for the next few freighters and transports. Santos handled the console and her gems and tablets with a detachment to rival Carmichael’s, and the heavy traffic didn’t faze her at all. Jake had been worried about the Heart upgrade they’d installed before the main techs had skedaddled, but it was functioning well, almost too smooth and unbuggy.
The traffic jam bothered him, though. Selas Station had always been a science mission above all else. Science had insisted on it. In the eighteen months since Jake’s arrival, they’d never had this many freighters. He guided the Grant back out into open space, and with another hand, he sought out the traffic logs from the last two years, keeping the tablet display local and fixed to his console. The statistics compiled into a graph, and he tried not to snort in disbelief: for this day alone, they’d experienced a 99.5 percent increase in ship stops at Selas.
“What’re you looking at?” Santos asked.
“Oh? Nothing much. Station stats.”
“If you’ve got time, there’s still plenty of legacy data to trawl.” Santos extended a long leg and gently kicked a canvas sack in the direction of his console. The gem cases inside clinked.
“Give me a break already.”
Santos shrugged. “Suck it up. I already did my yottas for the month. Scanning frequencies. Again. More weird spectrums I’ve never heard of. I’m beginning to think Chubaryan adored scanning frequencies in a sad, sick way. So you need to step up, too.”
She pushed the sack more firmly against his feet, and Jake ignored it, concentrating on the giant traffic spike. It indicated something brewing, but what? Science was predictable in their interests and open about their takeovers. Defense usually briefed all space stations involved in a skirmish, unless they planned to commandeer a particular isolated station for tactical purposes. Which was funny, because there was no one to fight, at least not fairly. Any outright humans-versus-humans conflict had been technically illegal for fifty years. But Defense always managed to find a way to subdue humans in the name of human rights.
Something brewing, or paranoia. Jake shook his head. He would have to rein himself in during the psych eval if he didn’t want Nat to have a professional field day. Even allowing for a Defense coup, he couldn’t come up with viable players. Furbad Station was now a military outpost, the colonists on Dardanelle were too busy trying to regulate their farms to revolt, and the three or four other colonized worlds like Tau Ceti and Petel Eight weren’t really up and running yet. As for the scavengers, they’d never managed to get their hands on shuttles. Any skirmishes with them took place on good solid Earth.
There was a long break as the incoming ships jockeyed amongst themselves for lane position.
Was he really being paranoid, though? Furbad Station had been taken over by Defense as a political power
grab. The deciding factor in that sketchy mess, despite how tiny and podunk an observational operation Furbad had been, was its proximity to Earth, only a few light years from Jupiter. But a Furbad-type takeover could easily happen on Selas Station, if some higher-up in Defense decided they also needed a waystation security outpost.
Science wasn’t stupid like that. But they had already eaten the cost on Selas Station twice over. They’d be inclined to protect the investment, just as Defense would spare no expense in a takeover. In Jake’s opinion, both Science and Defense could avoid trouble, expense for a second reclamation, and bad publicity if they let station employees in on the decision. They weren’t unswayable. There was so much waiting for him—for them, them—to study biologically, geologically, and pathologically on Selas. It was the first untouched planet Jake had ever seen, let alone explored. He didn’t care who the hell was in charge, as long as he got to stay.
Even Defense? asked a snide little voice in the back of his mind. Yes, he thought. He hadn’t felt that way back in the Bends, but he hadn’t been pro-Science either. He hadn’t had opinions or loyalty for anything. Jail was numbing and boring. He was rather surprised to have opinions and loyalty now, after only two years out. How quickly the human brain adapted to mediocre comforts.
Anyway, extra traffic did not signify a station takeover. And Carmichael would be first to know if something coup-worthy was happening: Defense kept up a weird courtesy between the retired and the new guard, and Toby was decent to the Selas crew. He’d ready them if anything were set to happen. Strangely Santos fell under the same banner, though she was former Defense, which wasn’t the same as retired. Jake wasn’t sure what she’d done, just that she’d gotten a dishonorable discharge for disobeying some order a few years back. Fine minds needed fine distinctions. Santos certainly required them.
She was also a sucker for sweets. Jake dug in his pocket for his last piece of lemon candy and pushed it across the console to her. “What’s Nat jabbering about?”
Santos eyed it and him for a long uncomfortable moment. Then she laughed and took the candy. “She wants to have a séance tonight.”