From Ice to Ashes

by Rhett C. Bruno

  Captain Saunders waited directly inside, foot tapping. At first I was worried, but then I noticed that the Piccolo was still being loaded with supplies. Members of the crew rolled containers filled with food and other necessities into the cargo hold. Others carted cumbersome, cylindrical canisters meant for storing harvested gases.

  The Piccolo currently had a total crew of forty-one, with pretty much an even split between Ringers and Earthers. My last time aboard it was forty-three, but things changed shift to shift. I recognized most of the faces save for a few new members of the maintenance crew, like me. We did everything from cleaning harvester canisters to making minor repairs. Then there were a handful of overseeing mechanics, including the head one, security, a few engineers, a doctor, and a chef who seemed pretty unnecessary, considering the slop he served. I didn’t spot Cora, but the ship’s engines were rumbling, so she was probably already at her post. She was the only Ringer with a position above maintenance.

  “There you two are,” Captain Saunders remarked without averting his gaze from his busy crew.

  “Sorry we’re late, sir,” I said.

  “Not your fault,” the captain grumbled. “Pervenio Security has everything backed up more than usual. We had to wait for them to sweep the entire ship before we could start loading. Like anyone in Sol gives a damn about the Piccolo but us.” The captain turned to Desmond and me. “Get hauling—we’re only waiting on a few more. Cora’s had the engines ready for hours already. Waste of damn fuel.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  Desmond glared at me for a moment as we set off toward the Piccolo, and then sighed. “Yes, sir,” he mimicked.

  I ignored him.

  The Piccolo was exactly how I remembered. Its tapered hull was designed to slash through heavy winds and looked to have experienced far too many storms in its time. A patchwork of metal plates and fist-sized bolts coated the exterior, all with varying degrees of oxidation. It was impossible to tell what was original from when the ship was constructed, years before the Great Reunion had even happened. Its flanks were what inspired its name, as they had the appearance of an ancient woodwind instrument. A line of vertical ducts ran down either side, interspersed with the massive pumps used to siphon gas out of Saturn’s atmosphere. Tubes extended from them and ran across the hull, leading to the harvesting bay, where gas was refined and sorted for storage.

  At the front end, a glassy bulb popped out like the eye of an ancient insect. It housed the command deck, where I knew Cora was waiting anxiously to put her navigating skills to good use on the decades-old command console. The dual ion-engines she operated protruded from either side of the Piccolo’s stubby wings, and were the only things that appeared to be relatively new. Wings alone wouldn’t accomplish much if they failed while in the midst of Saturn’s impressive winds. It was a long plummet to the planet’s core, where the pressure would crush our bones into dust before the ship itself gave out. The captain often reminded us of the horrific story of the Sunfire, a gas harvester which nearly three years ago had inexplicably lost power to its engines and disappeared down there, never to be heard from again. It was his way of ensuring that nobody slacked off when it came to keeping the engines in optimal condition.

  “You two, let’s fuckin’ move it!” John shouted from his position at the base of the ship’s entry-ramp. Seeing him made my heart skip a beat, but the fact that he was just pointing in our direction and not charging me meant he didn’t know I was the one who stole his hand-terminal. He was in an exceedingly grumpy mood, however, and I figured it was because of the loss. “Ship ain’t gonna prep itself, and I don’t feel like hearing that bitch complaining that we had her keep the engines on too long.”

  “Why’re you standing around then?” Desmond asked.

  John grinned, a wad of synth-tobacco in his mouth making his lower lip bulge. He crossed his arms so that his biceps bulged out of his boiler-suit’s short sleeves. On either side of him, the two other burly Earther members of the Piccolo security team who’d been with him in the Sunken Credit did the same. They made sure that scuffles on the Piccolo didn’t last long.

  “I’m so glad to see you again, Desmond,” John said. “Should be a fun shift.” He spat at our feet.

  I noticed Desmond’s hands squeeze into fists, but I grabbed him by the arm and pulled him onto the ship. The XO was looking for any excuse to fight and get Ringers stuck on a shift keeping the boiling-hot engine room squeaky clean. He glared at us until we were all the way onto the ship.

  “Wait until we’re in Saturn at least,” I said.

  “I’m going to kill that man,” Desmond seethed.

  “Well, wait until I’m asleep then.”

  We dropped our bags off in the Ringer dormitory. Desmond was greeted in the hallway by his close friends Lester Cromwell and Yavik Vanos. They’d been in the Maw the night before too. The three of them liked to pretend they oversaw the Ringer members of the crew, with Desmond as their ringleader. Lester had an even sharper tongue than him, and the narrowest, most hawkish face I’d ever seen. Yavik wasn’t bad on his own, but was usually too high on foundry salts to do anything but go along with everything the other two did. His skin was a medium-gray hue because his ancestors came from a place on Pre-Meteorite Earth where people were brown-skinned.

  “What took you so long?” Lester asked. “Thought you were coming up with us. That mud stomper John is in rare form today.”

  “I had business,” Desmond answered succinctly. “Let’s go.”

  I listened to their footsteps fade down the hall before taking a second to change my gloves; they had the filth of Darien and Pervenio Station all over them. After I did, I glanced into my pocket at the hand-terminal, where the orange circle remained.

  After finding out about my mother, I never thought I’d be back on the Piccolo, yet there I was. The first step of M’s task was done. Now it was time to help get the ship moving.

  Chapter 9

  When the Piccolo entered Saturn’s upper atmosphere, I, and every other Ringer, popped a G-pill. They helped our muscles and organs endure the Earth-like G conditions, where even breathing could be straining. The captain was in charge of dispersing them every morning so that we wouldn’t deplete the ship’s Pervenio-issued supply before the shift was up.

  I was then immediately assigned to work in the harvesting bay. No time to check out the command deck or say hi to Cora. I wondered if she’d even heard I was back.

  The harvesting bay was the largest open space on the vessel, and while the floors, walls, and ceilings matched the ship’s worn exterior, all of the equipment inside was kept squeaky clean. The overall harvesting process seemed relatively simple, ignoring the myriad technical aspects I didn’t need to understand.

  Vacuum chambers lining the wall were switched on and off by the navigator, and Cora siphoned gas out of Saturn’s stormy skies when she located a pocket composed of the valuable ones. Pervenio had no interest in most of the elements that made up Saturn’s atmosphere, so the vacuums emptied their stores through a series of thick pipes into towering, noisy vats. Chemical reactions of some sort took place within them to filter the valuable gases into labeled tanks. The largest ones were for helium-3 and deuterium. Those two rare gases, among a few other lesser ones, were what drove fusion cores and interplanetary engine systems—the cornerstones of the emergent Sol-wide economy. They were what made the Ring so desirable, and in order to compete with Pervenio other USF Corporations were setting their sights on colonizing the moons of Jupiter. But even the largest of the gas giants didn’t have those gases in abundance like its ringed cousin. Saturn was a relative gold mine. Another one of Darien Trass’s brilliant foresights.

  Much of the harvesting procedure was automated up until storage, and apparently, the newer harvesters had that almost entirely mechanized as well. The engineering staff monitored the systems to make sure levels in every storage container remained at an acceptable level, so that we weren’t all blown to bits. Maintena
nce men like me were there only for conveyance and cleaning. Anything that interacted with the gases had to be kept as spotless as a Ringer’s body. Otherwise, like the captain always said, “We’d join the Sunfire in being eternally crushed by Saturn’s core.” Every once in a while the vats and vacuum chambers were emptied, and I had to climb in to rub them down too.

  It took only an hour of scrubbing the grime out of harvester canisters for me to fall back into my old routine. Prep a canister, wipe the sweat from my brow, and pass it over to a stronger Earther, who would have it inspected by the head mechanic before carting it down to the cargo bay all the way on the other side of the ship. Keeping a stockpile of flammable gases as far away as possible was the first rule of gas harvesting.

  The work was mind-numbing. As I scrubbed, I often found myself thinking about how I could’ve successfully robbed Larius Saunders. My duties rarely differed from what the Ringers cleaning the restaurants in Delora’s Upper Ward did. It was high-stakes cleaning—a lack of attention could taint an entire haul or potentially result in a fiery eruption—but it was cleaning nonetheless.

  John liked to remind us how scrubbing was a job fit for Ringers, that our long arms and slender fingers allowed us to reach impossible places. I couldn’t deny that might be true, but I welcomed every chance to switch things up. Earther maintenance staff got to do all of the lifting and carting, since Earth G conditions made things heavier and made us tire more quickly no matter how strong the G-pills were.

  Sometimes, however, equipment throughout the Piccolo would malfunction and I’d have an opportunity to actually repair something. As old as the Piccolo was, that was a common occurrence. But there were a dozen other workers to compete with, as well as the grumpy Earther head mechanic, Culver, who chose who got to do what. The captain tried to make sure the work was spread evenly to keep us all focused, but an Earther was likely to choose his own as often as he was permitted. That was simply the way of things.

  After a few hours of sweating in the harvesting bay, I’d have given almost anything for a chance to roam the ship’s halls, and perhaps catch a glance through a viewport at Saturn’s blustery, ruddy sky. Except for the Ringer dorms, the ship was kept at a balmy seventeen degrees Celsius, but all of the working machinery in the harvesting bay made it the second-hottest area outside of the engine room. The G-pill kept my heart from giving out, but it did nothing for the heat.

  “Hey, Kale, keep that hand moving!” Culver shouted from across the room. He leaned on a cane, his pebbly eyes glaring in my direction. The countless wrinkles striating his face seemed to have deepened every time I saw him. A scraggly white beard used to cover a lot of them, but it was no longer enough.

  I nodded, without the energy to raise my voice. Desmond snickered beside me. We were both on harvesting canister prep, right next to each other yet again.

  “Gotta love that man,” he said.

  “Do you have something to say about everything?” I groaned, and dipped my hand farther into the canister I was cleaning.

  “I’m not the one who got caught daydreaming. Must really make your heart ache when you get in trouble like that, Earther lover. Must make you want to give old Culver a hug and say sorry.”

  “Why the fuck are you even here?”

  “You two—enough!” Culver hollered. “Get working or I’ll have those masks replaced with muzzles.”

  Desmond mumbled something under his breath, so softly that I couldn’t hear him over the machinery. Then he whispered to me: “Same reason as anyone else. Credits. Trass, damn them. Didn’t exist on the Ring until the Earthers arrived, you know.”

  I hushed him. The rag in my hand ran across the bottom of the canister, scraping off a profuse layer of grunge. Even through my sanitary mask the smell was foul, like sulfur mixed into a cesspool.

  “That was when people like us were judged on skill alone,” Desmond continued all on his own. “You probably would’ve still been right where you are, but I could’ve been a king.”

  “Or a jester,” I muttered.

  “What was that?”

  “Whatever you say,” I said a little louder.

  I removed my hand from a freshly cleaned canister and handed it over to an Earther. It was marked DEUTERIUM, so he carted it over to the matching tank and hooked it up to a nozzle. A series of green bars on the side of the canister lit up, and the worker detached it once they were filled.

  “All right, navigation says this pocket’s been emptied out!” Culver announced a short time later. I heard his cane clicking as he shuffled into the center of the room so everyone could hear. “Chow time!”

  Everyone exhaled in relief and stopped what they were doing.

  “Finally,” Desmond said. He purposefully nudged me with his shoulder on his way by. “I’m starving.”

  At least that was something we could agree on. Not sure why, but cleaning up filth had my stomach rumbling. I just had to clean my gloves first. They were so filthy it looked like I’d been sloshing around in a sewer.

  —

  I stepped up to the chef’s counter in the galley and he slapped a pile of food down into my bowl. It was just lumpy, colorless goop, but it contained all the necessary daily nutrients. Or so we were told, and it didn’t look any worse than most of what I’d grown up eating in the Lowers. I filled a cup with murky water from a leaky nozzle at the end of the line and then turned to find a seat.

  The galley was small compared with the harvester bay. Its exposed ceiling was low enough for me to hear the constant buzzing emanating from a series of bundled circuits and ducts. The tiled floor was permanently stained.

  Two long tables were set on either side of the room, each flanked by rusty benches. Ringers wearing gloves and sanitary masks stretched down to their necks sat at one of them, and Earthers at the other. Even if some Earthers and Ringers were friends, it was like an invisible line split the galley in half. Nobody dared to even think about crossing it. That was the quickest way to incite a fight.

  I turned toward the Ringer table and spotted Cora. It was my first sight of her since I’d boarded the ship. The only times she ever got off navigation duty was to eat and sleep, but she was always kept on call. The Piccolo had an autopilot setting, and other crew members who knew the basics of flying, but if there was even the hint of a storm she was summoned no matter what she was doing.

  As usual, she sat at the very end of the table, with an extra-wide space between her and the nearest person and nobody across from her. Some of the Ringer crew felt she was a risk because her strengthened immune system meant she might be carrying something. This ensured, along with her rank, that there was never any real danger of unwanted advances when Ringers drank not far from her bed in our shared dorm. It also served to make her even more intimidating to me.

  The inherent risk involved in falling for her was real. In our dorms she was even required to wear a mask and gloves. I never thought about it much, but visiting the Q-Zone countless times has a way of making someone view even the tiniest details differently.

  But that wasn’t enough for me to let her eat alone. I headed to the seat across from her, knowing from years of observation that she was neat enough for me to be perfectly safe unless I shared her spoon. As I sat down, she didn’t even bother to glance up from her meal.

  “I told you he was back,” Desmond said. He sat on the same side as her, but with a solid meter of empty space between them.

  “Yep,” she answered, still not looking up. She was always fairly timid, but this seemed different. I guess I should’ve expected her to be angry that I’d planned to leave the Piccolo without telling her.

  “Couldn’t stay away,” I said, smiling at Cora. She continued to eat.

  “Of course you couldn’t,” Desmond replied. He raised a spoonful of the goop toward his mouth, then stopped and stared at it dejectedly as he allowed it to drip back into his bowl. “I should’ve jumped at one of those openings for work with Venta Co when they constructed Europa Colony a y
ear back. Open call to anyone with the credits to get there. I hear they serve fresh greens every day. Imagine that?”

  “You should go then. I’m sure they’re still building.” I pulled my mask down to my chin and shoveled a spoonful of the goop into my mouth. It was pretty much tasteless, and took less work to force down my throat than ration bars.

  “Can you afford passage that far?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Exactly,” he said. “So why did you really decide to come back, Kale?”

  “Like you said earlier: I needed the credits.”

  “No, no, that’s not it.” Desmond grinned in Cora’s direction. Luckily, she was too busy trying to ignore me to notice. “I bet that shit Saunders offered you something. Ringers dropping like sick flies and he gets a sure hand back.”

  “Nope.” I shrugged. “I just realized there wasn’t anything better.”

  “Oh c’mon.” Desmond reached over the table and prodded my arm. “I bet he promised you he’d make you head mechanic one day.” He snickered. “Told Lester that too, and Yavik.” His two pals were sitting on the other side of him, nodding in unison and holding in laughter. They were low-level maintenance men as well.

  My milky cheeks blushed as much as they could.

  “Trust me,” Desmond said, his voice purposefully elevated so that the whole room would hear him. “Nobody’s getting that job until the old man kicks the fucking bucket!”

  “Watch your mouth, skelly, before I shut it for you again!” John hollered over in response. “I’m sure our lovely Cora is dying to see a show.”

  Desmond slammed his fists on the table and jumped to his feet. Cora dropped her spoon and finally looked up, our gazes meeting for the first time. That was the only reason I didn’t say anything. Hearing that word again had my blood boiling.

  “What the fuck did you just call me, mud stomper?” Desmond growled.

  John rose to his feet beside the two members of his security team. I’d seen my share of fights growing up in the Lowers, so I knew when one was about to happen. I was usually smart enough to avoid exchanging blows with an Earther, though. They were physically much stronger than us, especially under the grueling Earth-like G conditions of Saturn’s upper atmosphere.