by Anna Gaffey
“Huh.” That was a new one. In fact—no, no, Jake did know what it was. He’d read about Genialla Glory, and the Fox sisters, and Ouija boards. The History Notes were doing an old-time spooky series in honor of All Hallows Eve, in an attempt to raise awareness about cultural roots. Nat’s inspiration, clearly. This did not bode well.
“Yeah.” She arched her perfectly groomed eyebrows at him as she unwrapped the sweet. “Apparently she wants to see if any spirits have figured out how to travel with us through space. Or raise the ghost of Denys Chubaryan and the rest of them. I don’t really get it, but you know.”
“As long as it keeps her busy . . .”
Santos harrumphed. “She’s just a kid. Lonely, and all that. You were probably worse at her age, what with the ego and all.” Abruptly she sat up straight and tapped her console’s viewer. “And here comes our transport early. Check out sector three.”
Jake realigned his own screen. Sure enough, the giant personnel liner was there, insinuated narrowly and cockeyed between two tiny agriculture shuttlecrafts. There was almost an air of smugness to its angle. “How’d they sneak into the middle like that?”
The comm crackled. “Selas Station, this is the Leah Harmon approaching for dock, over.”
Jake grinned involuntarily at the lazy, familiar voice in his ear. Beside him, Santos coughed lightly, and Jake wiped the grin. “We read you, Harmon. We, ah, we weren’t expecting you until nineteen-hundred at the earliest.”
“Hey there, Jeong. Guess that makes me an overachiever, then. Been a while, huh? Good to hear your voice. How’re the bugs?”
He sounded exactly the same. How long had it been since Jake had seen him without the mishmash transmission quality of a vid? Two years, nine months, fourteen days. “Staying in their petri dishes. All expedition activities indefinitely suspended due to the flu. And low station personnel,” Jake added, when Santos leaned over and poked him.
“So this is a stellar time to visit.” The sarcasm sliced through the broadcast. “Is it just rumor that there’s some kind of festivity brewing?”
“Nah, that part’s true. When we get sick here, we just open the booze stores and invite everyone in the quadrant. You know how it is. Heaving-vomiting-sweating misery loves company.” Out of the corner of his eye, Jake saw Santos make some abortive gesture in Carmichael’s direction. Stop talking already, idiot. He hurried along. “Standard quarantine, obviously. You can dock, but we can’t break the seal till twenty hundred hours.”
“Right.” A pause. “See you later, genius.”
Jake broke the connection, and swiveled in his chair to see the personnel carrier pull in long and sleek past the main observation portal. On impulse, he gave it a sardonic salute.
“Hmm,” he heard Carmichael say behind the shimmer of the viewscreen curtains. “Was that the infamous—”
“My friend, yes. Ag shuttles are up next, and they’re coming in too hot,” Jake announced loudly. His ears were hot, and damn it, he could feel Santos gearing up to pounce. He directed all his attention to the viewscreen and fiddled with the comm frequencies. “Ready the refueling process, please.”
“Standing by and ready for drop.” Santos paused, and then added, “Genius.”
“Don’t make me throw you in the brig, Rachel.”
“As if you could. Even if we had one.”
“I’ll build a tiny one just for you out of Kai’s lab equipment.”
“That’s darling.” The cargo bay relay on Santos’ console beeped, and she entered a quick, complex succession of commands. “Fuel pods dropped. Confirmed receipt. So anyway . . .”
Jake could practically hear her shuffling the different questions in her mind before deciding on the one she thought might needle him the most.
“You are planning on coming to Nat’s party, then?”
Jake shrugged.
“Hmm. Fascinating, this change of tune.”
“You know, I liked it better when I was new and you were all still scared of me,” Jake mourned.
Rachel Santos hooted. “Who told you that bullshit? I’ll kill ’em.”
CHAPTER THREE
“Yeah, I’m still pissed about that. They told us about the migraines when we first got to the space station. What a joke, huh? Something like that should be in the contract. Required by law, man.
“Anyway, after thaw and decomp-decon we had a big welcome-to-this-side-of-the-galaxy meeting in the common room, you know, down at the bottom level, with Selas floating on a viewscreen all big and green and kinda cloudy-white, and nobody said anything until we were shunted off into our quarters, and there was this dinky welcome pamphlet with – oh. You wrote those? Well, pardon my saying so, but it was a hell of an info-dump, Doc.
“So, about six months later – I was busy, okay? Six months later I asked Jake, I mean, Dr. Jeong, when he got here, and he called another meeting and went into a long-ass scientist presentation about the headaches and what caused ‘em – probably – and why. No one really got it except the scientists, and there’s nothing like a bunch of whitecoats nodding in unison to make you feel like a moron, you know? But finally Jake took pity on us guys who didn’t spend years poking at microbes or whatever and made it simple. “Sort of like tides back on Earth,” he said. And he said some other stuff I forgot, but it was good. Made sense at the time.
“It pulls at your head. Selas does. Don’t you think? Earth tides sure as hell don’t do that. Some people have weird dreams, too. Not me. Probably because I usually work while everyone else is asleep, but Jake says that doesn’t matter. The headaches are enough. It’s pretty trippy at first, but as long as Dr. Lindy keeps a heavy supply of pain dope, it’s fine. And also? You just get used to it. No matter how many years we went past Leech, no matter how many setbacks we had with the Domes and spaceships and figuring out how to get from Earth to across the stars without it taking a damn century or making old men out of us, we all keep on getting better at getting used to things. We adapt.
“It’s still a good place to work, though. Newts have a hard time. But I love it here. Did I say that already? Sorry, dude, um, Doc. You’re making me nervous. Wow. This is really long, isn’t it?”
Excerpt: biannual psych interview
13 February 2241
Michael “Mick” Boxhill
Stellar Technician, grade 9
United Worlds DS 2075-5 [Selas Station]
Satellite 1H-24HM, 24HM System [updated: Eos]
[Archived: United Governance Board tri-system mission records, Earth]
31 October 2242 AEC
21:05
Thirty-five seconds before Jake could shut down the station’s beacon, the Earth rations freighter Smita Gunaji zipped in unscheduled out of the black and requested a full refueling. Carmichael and Santos had already gone down to Level 7 to unload the newts from the Harmon, so Jake made the call. They had plenty of station reserves; it couldn’t hurt to fill the guy up and send him on his way. Plus, he was curious. This had to be the mysterious Gunaji he’d been hearing about on the chatter all day. If he could figure out what they were up to, he’d have a nice newsy cache of goods to exchange.
He pressed the cargo bay and fueling commands at Santos’ empty console and loaded the freighter with enough fuel to reach their destination twice over—that is, if he’d known what it was. When he prodded, the Gunaji captain hemmed and hawed and finally flat-out refused to say.
Jake turned up the volume on his commbud. “Say again? I’m asking you a straightforward question, Captain—” Jake scrolled quickly through the transcript of comms from the ship’s manifest. “Fletcher. What’s your destination?” He’d never had a pilot block a destination before. Hells, there was never an opportunity: origin and destination were mandatory fields for the manifest. Leftover backlash? No, that was paranoid, even for Jake. He tried to inject some frivolity into his voice. “Obviously I can’t beat you out of it from here, but—”
“I’m sorry, sir. I’m unable to give out that info
rmation.”
The captain was hedging with him, the bastard. Jake sent a scanning query in through the fueling computer and pulled a quick image of the Gunaji’s cargo holds. The view curtains shimmered and displayed some exceedingly crammed quarters. Fuel pods, containment conduits, crates and containers and more crates, an easy dozen of scientific probes in their wall sockets; in short, nothing too provocative. So why the dodge? “Well, I’m afraid that’s outside procedure, Captain. We require at least a system heading for any ship that fills up here. Part of our statistical reporting to the Board. It’s regulation.”
The captain huffed into the comm. “Currently our destination is—uh—undisclosable due to security concerns. Science, I mean Defense priority two-delta. See the manifest. Gunaji out.”
“‘Undisclosable.’” Jake stared in disbelief at the console. Whatever kind of Regulation language they were teaching the space apes these days, he didn’t know it. Priority two-delta, that he did know. It was Defense code for avert your eyes and shut the fuck up, and if it was in the manifest, it was sanctioned. An illegitimate two-delt would set off alarm bells before a freighter underwent a greeting scan. Jake pushed back up to the top of the manifest.
Designation: S. Gunaji
Class: Brooks Freighter
Pilot: J.L. Fletcher
…
…
And in very big, dark print at the bottom of the preliminaries:
Mission: [Undisclosable]
****DP-02-D****
Well, shit. The new vocab was standardized.
Piqued, he scanned the latest commtext broadcast from Earth. It was sixteen hours old, their second of the standard three daily updates they received as one of the further-out stations. But there were no new bulletins regarding a hijacked freighter. No cryptic bursts on the Science channels, either, though most would be old by the time they reached Selas, and Jake probably wouldn’t recognize any new lingo. Muttering, he tracked the Gunaji’s signal on the console for half a parsec until it began to dwindle. It looked like they were headed on the main route to the Beda system, but there was no way to tell for sure. And Beda? As far as Jake knew, there was nothing habitable out there, not even a station setup. Rations for whom, then? The satellites and comm buoys?
Security concerns.
What was going on? Back on Earth there were plenty of sophisticated political games, misdirections, art-of-war advances and retreats and face-savings. This was certainly Earthish, but not like that. Civil conflict? Defense foul-up? Maybe someone was planting a flag on an asteroid.
He shook his head and felt his thoughts practically clunk back into place. All were options far-removed from Selas and none of his business. Jake pinged irritably at the winking, fading signal of the Gunaji on his tablet. Let it go, Jake.
So he cleared the signal. He broadcast a wideband Station Closed comm signal to the nearest buoys, set all the consoles to standby, and dimmed the viewscreen curtains until the shining pixelated tracking dots faded to barely visible gleams.
The newts were probably all aboard by now, and after a month frozen in cryostasis on the Harmon, more than eager to enjoy a party, festivities, whatever Nat had decided to call it. He wondered if Con had come aboard with them. Probably he had some piloting duties to attend to before he could relax.
Two years, nine months, fourteen days. That was when he’d last seen Con in person, in a transfer cell after his official release. They’d had time to shake hands and have a brief conversation, and Con had passed him a tablet packed with audios and e-texts, and Jake hadn’t been able to ask, Were you there? Do you remember? The time before that, he could recall reasonably well, probably because it was so repetitive: roughly seven years of the scheduled nightmare, of reading, of listening to someone bashing around the cell adjoining Jake’s in the Bends. Before that, he’d lost a year on trial, so about eight years total. Then his memory ran into the yawning gap and circled around it like a drain.
With an effort, he focused instead on the familiar, much-traversed memories from before the lab accident and the gap. There were scraps of dinners with his parents and Rebecca, and the clear, hectic day at the Courses when they learned about historical animal husbandry practices, and Santos showing him how to hold and fire a frygun.
Wait. Jake pressed on his temples. That was wrong, he hadn’t met Santos until Selas. Could the implant be affecting his long-term memories? Possible side effect number 23C: in closed initial studies, three percent of subjects displayed a phenomenon known colloquially as blurred lines—no, no, no, shut up, Jake.
He wanted to go back to his quarters, hide in his bunk, and let his mind empty of everything but the snuffing need for sleep.
No. Calm down. He breathed deeply. He would remember. He could do it. This was a good mental day. He cast about for a memory, anything, and focused on his arrival at Selas Station. The transport ship had smelled weirdly like grapes, but no one said anything, so Jake hadn’t mentioned it. He’d felt the chill slow jolt of cryostasis, the memory of endless, slow starry dreams they all had while frozen during vault cycle. He had noticed, as he walked through the pressure seal into the station’s receiving bay on Level 7, that the station’s air tasted metallic instead of grapey.
That was better, relaxing. Jake let more unrelated bits of memory slip in. Swirly green Selas floating outside the polymerine portholes. Trips to the little planet habitat. Climbing down the side of a rounded black shuttlepod and thumping with both feet into the solidity of Selas soil. The scent of trees, moss, and other green plant life, the breeze, the filtered grey-yellow sunlight, just different enough from Earth’s sun to be noticeable.
His mother, Angelica: straight-spined, tall and blonde and regal as she leaned forward, her lips plum red and perfectly outlined for the news cameras. Then his father, Min Jee, the dark embodiment of Old Korea, hunched and withering already from cancer as he crept in and out of the witness stand. The unintelligible chicken-scratches of the formula for Restore, the chains spiraling across a viewscreen. Rebecca’s face. The labs, the Dome, the hidden tunnels.
Jake shook himself. It was all right, if he could still recall things. That was the way the ERPIC worked. He had to remember, or else he wouldn’t be a successful repentant who contributed to society. He’d be a useless lunatic, haunted by bloody dreams of unfamiliar people. In any case, he had to have enough clear mind space to have passed the Selas placement psych exam, hadn’t he? Plague it all, he was confused.
Con. He’d been thinking about Con. Had Jake done anything wrong at their last meeting, back at the Bends? Said something inappropriate or unsolicited? The idea made him grin. If anything, the chip had enhanced his abrasive tendencies. But it was unlikely, if the friendliness in Con’s commtexts and vids since then and in his voice over the comm earlier was anything to judge by. Perhaps absence made jerkery seem charming. Jake could go down to the mess now and find out.
Or maybe he’d make a small cup of coffee and stay in Control a little longer, just to be sure everything was okay. Nervous? Jake? Nah. He leaned back against the console. Not nervous, just terrified for no reason, for fear that his one longstanding friendship would turn out to be a mistake, or a joke, or even simply not as genuine or close as he thought it was. The thought was preposterous and strangling.
Selas drifted silent and luminous before him. At this time of night, the planet suffused the Control windows with her marbly green-veined bulk. Black space crept in around the curve of her, and cold stars winked just within visibility.
Rebecca had found the super old-time paper map in Mother’s study, and they spread it out on her bed and huddled over it. She let Jake crumple the edges. She was nice about things like that.
“What do you think is outside…” He traced with his finger across the lines separating the Domes until it came to land on a wide spread of No Man’s Land woodsy wilderness. “There? Skin eaters? Lions run wild?”
“Stupid.” Rebecca laughed. “Hermits. That’s all. They like it out th
ere. Scavs do, too. Maybe you could go live with them!”
He smacked her arm, and she clutched it, her face aging instantly into adulthood. Her cheeks reddened and contorted with pain—the nightmare, his nightmare—
“Jake?”
At the voice in his ear, he jerked away from the console and crashed violently into Mick Boxhill, who was hovering beside him. He blinked, and Rebecca flicked out of sight.
“Sorry, doc.” Boxhill steadied him with both hands. “You okay there, twitchy?”
“Fine, fine.” For a moment Jake had dreamed, or thought of dreaming. It was sad not to be able to tell the difference. He should’ve hated the memory of Rebecca by now, still so clear and exact in her imperfections. But he didn’t. He looked more closely at Mick, grey and drawn under his wild shock of orange hair, his eyes shadowed by dusky circles. “You look awful. You’re not coming down with the flu?”
“Nah.” Boxhill sniffed. “I’m clean. Dr. Lindy stuck me this morning. Heh. I mean—”
“Don’t say it, I don’t need that image ever. You look dead on your feet.”
“That dickbag Niedermeier skipped out on his inventory shift before he left. I’ve been counting crates since oh-nine-hundred. But I did my boost before I came up here.”
“Ah. Right. Boost.” The day had been suitably abnormal to throw Jake out of his own routine, but not too terribly. He hadn’t felt the barest hit of withdrawal yet. Rolling up his sleeve, he went to Control’s immuno-boost box and stuck his arm inside. The jabber skittered over his elbow port. “Shit. What’s wrong with this thing?”
Boxhill shrugged. “Do the infirmary, man. Lindy’s machine never fritzes.”
“No thanks.” Lindy was sure to be there; she never attended station parties. Cursing, he twisted his arm and slapped the frame of the box. The jabber fluttered, pricking Jake’s skin, and then wove desultorily into his arm port. He felt the quick sting, and the hot push of boost flooded his veins.