by S. A. Tholin
She forced it down as fast as she could. Nausea made her sweat and she clasped her hands over her mouth. The spider carcass fell from her lap and onto the floor and its legs waved up at her and...
...she got on her knees, pressed her forehead against the cool metal of the bench and fought the reflex to vomit. The sensation was so overwhelming it hurt, and when it finally died down, she had tears in her eyes.
Quickly, she wiped them away. She had six months worth of crying bottled up and if she let it out now, she wasn't sure she'd be able to stop.
"Look who it is." A woman's voice echoed between the station walls. "Little Red. We like Little Red, don't we?"
Joy stood, clutching her backpack close to her chest. Her other hand fumbled for the butt of her gun; not to draw it, but to reassure herself it was within reach. Because Rivka, no matter what she said, most certainly did not like 'Little Red'.
Rivka stood, flanked by two men, at the bottom of the station stairs. Their lanterns burned with warm firelight. The men were farmers, judging by their dusty coveralls, but Rivka made her living by other means. While the farm might belong to Natham, Rivka was its unchallenged queen.
"Scavenging life proving too hard on you?" Rivka, hands on her hips, sneered. Her black hair was braided in loops, and her eyelids were dark with dust, serving as eye shadow. "Good. It's about time you turned tail and ran back to Nexus. Don't need your kind out here."
"My kind?"
"Spider-fodder." Rivka smiled, and the two farmhands laughed.
"Nice. Just leave me alone, Rivka. I'm not in the mood."
"Not in the mood for what? We're all here waiting for the train, aren't we? And what's better than a little conversation to pass the time?" Rivka sat on the bench and kicked the remnants of the spider carcass into a dusty corner. It didn't seem to disgust her, but chances were Rivka had put far worse things in her mouth. "Come, sit. Don't be rude."
"I'll stand, thanks." Joy hesitated. Rivka wasn't wrong; a little human interaction would make the tunnel seem less of a tomb. But she was no fool, not anymore. Even her scant conversation with the faceless soldiers had been more human than anything Rivka could offer. Cato's inhabitants were as unpredictable and dangerous as its weather.
But if spider guts could substitute for granola, then perhaps razor-sharp Rivka could substitute for good company.
"You heading to Nexus?"
Rivka made a face. "Where the weak and the soft huddle below a force field and pretend to be civilised? No, no. The city is for those who have to be told, over and over, or else they forget. Out here, we remember. Out here, we have the wind and the plains, and the crackle of lightning on our skin."
"That's very poetic of you," Joy said, though the Nexus Rivka described had little in common with the one she knew and loathed.
"It's fact. We sprung like glass forests from this dust, and in this dust we belong." Rivka bent to pick up a discarded spider leg. Without so much as dusting it off, she stuck it in her mouth and began to chew. "Hmm. Not bad. Would've been better if you hadn't ruined it with heat. But come, sit. I'd like to smell you."
"What? No."
"I'd like you to sit." Rivka's voice rose to a command and the two farmhands approached.
Joy's hand closed around her gun, but Finn had told her never to aim a gun at someone unless she was ready to pull the trigger, and though the farmhands frightened her, she wasn't ready, not even close, because shooting a person was nothing like shooting a spider.
Before the farmhands could grab her, Joy sat.
"Much better." Rivka's hand crept around Joy's back to land on her shoulder. There was nothing friendly about her bony grip. "You still have that new smell. An off-worlder, fresh out of the box. Not for long, though. Cato will run in your veins soon enough."
Joy said nothing. She knew from experience that it was best to simply go along with Rivka - to a certain point anyway. The woman was every bit a predator, but she quickly bored of prey that didn't fight back.
"Speaking of off-worlders, you didn't happen to run into the Primaterre thugs, did you?"
"Nothing down here but me and the spiders."
"Good. Bad enough that they walk the surface like they own the place. The thought of them crawling around the tunnels is enough to make me sick. Don't be fooled by their shiny armour - on the inside, they are rotted. Nothing in their heads but fear and death." Rivka's grip tightened. "Impure, they call us, but they're the ones who spread corruption from world to world."
"You make them sound like some sort of death cult," Joy said. "I thought the Primaterre was just a federation of planets." That much she had gathered in Nexus. People didn't talk much about the Primaterre, and when they did, it was always with scorn. Apparently, there was Primaterre space (called "the Protectorate") and then there was the rest of the universe. Cato was very much outside of the Protectorate, and its natives seemed very keen on keeping it that way.
"Death cult?" Rivka laughed. "Yes, why not. All they deem impure they destroy. People. Planets. A death cult, yes, killing and burning in the name of purity."
"What makes something impure?"
"Well, that's the question, isn't it? I don't know. Perhaps they do, or perhaps they make it up as they go along. Perhaps one day they'll wake up and decide that red hair is impure, and then, Joy, you'll find out how deep their sickness runs. Cut you open from head to toe and drain your blood, they would."
Nonsense. Paranoid nonsense; the mad ramblings of inbred settlers. The soldiers possessed advanced technology. They wore a corporate logo on their armour. They might've been brusque, but they were civilised, and civilised people didn't go around killing each other for no good reason.
Each other, no - but you're not one of them, Joy. In their eyes, you're no different than Rivka.
She remembered the commander's black handgun; imagined its muzzle pressed to her head. Would she bring them their items only for them to kill her? It was easy to believe that of the titans in whose blank visors she'd seen nothing but her own reflection.
But he'd told her his name.
He told you a name.
No. Imaginary Finn might have reservations, but Joy was sure the commander hadn't lied. In the beat of silence before he'd replied, she'd sensed sincerity, perhaps even compassion.
Cassimer hadn't lied to her, and though Joy had never killed anything with less than eight legs, she felt certain it had to be harder to pull the trigger on someone who was no longer a stranger.
"You're shivering, Joy. Did I frighten you?" Rivka laughed softly. "No need to worry about the Primaterre. Cato is not for them. They'll soon learn that."
"What do you mean?"
Rivka pressed a finger to her lips and smiled.
"Whatever," Joy said. "It's got nothing to do with me."
It didn't. It shouldn't, but here she was, in the middle of a conflict she didn't even understand.
Something clattered to the floor, and she turned with a start. The two farmhands were rummaging through her backpack. A handful of batteries had fallen out, rolling towards the train tracks.
She stood, grabbing the straps of her backpack. One of the farmhands held it fast and wouldn't let go.
"If you want my stuff, you have to trade for it."
"But this is a trade, dear Joy. Didn't you know? Your things for your life. The fairest of trades." Rivka smiled blithely.
The farmhand was a tall and stringy man, whose calloused hands closed like hooks around Joy's bag. He yanked at it, and she stumbled forwards.
The other man shuffled around to flank her. The steely twang of a switch-knife made her throat close up. She wanted to surrender, to let them have what they wanted so that she could crawl away and hide. But nobody got on the train without paying their fare, and if she was to save Finn, every second counted.
"Get back!" She swept her gun in an arc between the two farmhands. The ground rumbled and her ears roared with rushing blood. The farmhand shoved the bag forwards with staggering force.
A spider leg crunched underneath her boot, her ankle twisted, and she fell hard on the floor.
Dazed, she pointed the gun towards the bench. "Call them off, Rivka. I need to get on that train."
Rivka laughed, and Joy knew that she would have to shoot, but her hand trembled and turned slick with sweat around the grip of the gun.
Then thunder rolled into the station and drowned out all other noise.
No violence on the platform. That was the first thing she'd been told at the station in Nexus. A vulture-necked janitor-slash-security guard had yelled it first, as she'd carefully crossed the newly-swept floor. Next, an old beggar woman had tugged at her jacket and whispered through rotting teeth: No fightin' in the station, or the Driver'll get you. Joy had heard the warning plenty since. Who the Driver was and what made him so fearsome, she neither knew nor wanted to find out - and neither did the farmhands. As the train pulled into the station, they withdrew into the shadows.
The train doors opened to let out a handful of dishevelled passengers. Eager eyes and sticky fingers turned towards the scattered batteries, but Joy was faster. Any other day she'd have been afraid to fight, but not today. Not when she could finally afford herself to hope.
The conductor watched her impassively. At his feet sat a ratty old cardboard box, into which Joy dropped a fistful of bullets. Their value was greater than what it had cost her to get to the farm in the first place, but the conductor shook his head and beckoned for more.
Bloody typical for public transport. Back on Mars, her train pass had eaten up a bigger chunk of her paycheck every month. KirkRail had claimed the price hikes were necessary to "provide our customers with the level of service they deserve" and yet the train delays only got worse. At least on Cato, they were honest about their highway robbery.
She opened her palm and let the batteries clatter into the box, and the conductor let her pass.
The passenger car was worm-eaten with corrosion. Brittle lichen drizzled in through fist-sized holes in the ceiling, and Joy had to step carefully around even bigger holes in the floor. In the windows, cloudy water sloshed between the panes. The seats were stained to such a degree that she couldn't even hazard a guess as to their original colour, but she hadn't the energy to search for the least horrible one. Instead, she slumped into the nearest seat, wincing as her spider bite lit up with pain.
At least on Cato, nobody cared if she put her feet up on the seat.
On the platform, Rivka had begun to ply her trade and had caught the interest of three potential customers. She took one by the hand to lead into the ticket office, but not before turning towards Joy and blowing her a kiss.
Next time, Rivka mouthed.
Joy closed her eyes and pretended she was anywhere else.
10. Joy
Like Kirkclair Spaceport, Nexus had a dome, but its glass was long gone. All that remained was a skeleton of rusted beams, distorted against the shimmering backdrop of the force field. If there were stars to see, they were obscured by tarpaulins and wind-whisked dust.
Still, for the first time, Joy was happy to be back in Nexus.
The spaceport was a nail driven into the surface of Cato. Landing pads surrounded the passenger boarding area, control towers reaching high enough to catch sparks from the force field above. Anything that hadn't decayed or been dismantled by scavengers, had been repurposed. Derelict ships served as housing, smaller shuttles stacked on top of one another to create dangerous-looking tenements. But the real Nexus lay underground, in the tapering subterranean part of the spaceport that had once housed hotels, restaurants and shops, all connected to a sprawling network of subway tunnels. It had been nice once, judging by the signs still plastering the walls of the spaceport. It wasn't anymore.
There were many ways to access the undercity. A nearby stairway leading to a business hotel was one, and Joy hurried by as quick as she could. If she went down there - or was pulled down there - she might never come back up again. The largest of the entrances was the pit at the centre of the spaceport - a shaft a hundred storeys deep cut through the structure itself. Fires burned there at night, but Joy knew better than to go near it no matter the time of day.
She pulled her hood down and hurried across an open square soft with lichen. Out on the plains, the lichen grew brittle and pale, but in Nexus it thrived, coating walls and floors a lush red. Colourful tiles of mosaic glimpsed through the growth here and there like vivid motes of a pleasant past.
Joy tried not to see the reminders anymore. The ticket machine that still printed tickets to faraway destinations. The two tickets to Mars that she'd kept in her jacket pocket until a mugger had taken both jacket and tickets at knife-point. The digital billboard, displaying travel adverts on fading diodes. Once-mundane things that now seemed like rare treasures.
For a time that's what she'd needed, but now they just reminded her that when she had said goodbye to Finn, this spaceport had been beautiful.
She didn't want to think about that. Didn't want to wonder about Mars. Didn't want to wonder if her old workplace was buried under dust like the buildings on Cato, or if her apartment was a mouldering ruin like Nexus. Her old life was gone, but the thought that it had gone without a trace, was too much to bear.
The way to Voirrey's clinic led through a maze of shacks and hovels. Many lay deserted, as though Cato's population had dwindled sharply and unexpectedly. The silence, nearly as thick as the lichen, was disturbed only by groaning metal and distant voices, barely more than whispers.
However, that didn't make the alleys safe. She slunk past shuttered shops and lichen-draped huts, resisting the urge to look down dark passageways because, in Nexus, so much as glancing at the wrong person could prove a fatal mistake.
These were the sorts of details the soldiers might have been interested in, she realised. The railway station, and where it entered the concourse; how the shacks were arranged in a rough spiral centred around the pit, overlooked by the mayor's estate - even the fact that there was a mayor. Now that she was in Nexus, it seemed obvious which details were pertinent, but like an idiot, she'd basically given the soldiers a tourist guide rundown of the place.
"There's no good part of town". As if the soldiers would be bothered. She might have to slink down alleys with her heart in her throat, expecting a shiv in her back at any moment, but she was a botanist, not built for this sort of thing at all.
Not like the soldiers. Must be nice to be a titan; nice to be encased in armour. She tried to picture herself as one of them, but her backpack weighed heavily on her shoulders and her breath wheezed, and the whole notion seemed ridiculous.
But what if they were here with her? She imagined Cassimer's seven-foot armoured frame ploughing a way through the squalor and misery, and knew that if he were there, he'd be the only thing she'd have to fear.
◆◆◆
"You're behaving like a child," said Voirrey.
Joy lay on the stainless steel table which served as the doctor's examination-cum-operation table and was possibly the only spotless surface on Cato.
Somewhere behind her, instruments rattled on a tray as Voirrey set down a scalpel. Hot liquid ran down Joy's leg where Voirrey had made an incision into the spider bite. The pain was -
- the pain was absolutely unbearable and Joy didn't care if she was whimpering like a child.
"You're making it very hard to concentrate. Bear in mind that a positive attitude will help you heal faster."
"Anaesthetics would help my positivity."
"And if we were on a civilised planet, I'd give you some. But here we cannot afford to waste luxuries on the trivial, so please, try to endure in silence." Brisk hands wiped Joy's calf.
"Maybe we'll be back to civilisation soon."
"Ah yes. This 'super secret' plan of yours." Though Joy couldn't see Voirrey's face, she was sure the doctor was rolling her eyes. "I can't wait to hear what is so important I had to send Sumner down into the undercity to find Duncan."
"Sumner's been g
one awhile," Joy said. Voirrey's assistant - usurped from his throne as Nexus's most qualified physician - had not looked happy when he left.
"If he isn't back soon, I fear you may owe me a new assistant."
"What's Duncan doing in the undercity anyway?"
"I have no idea. Perhaps he is working on a 'super secret' plan of his own." Voirrey began to wrap a bandage around Joy's calf, a little tighter than strictly necessary.
Voirrey had immediately found a place in Nexus's community. A doctor was always welcome and always in demand. Judging by the dark rings underneath Voirrey's eyes, and the generally frazzled look about her appearance, the woman was in dire need of a vacation that would never come.
"You can sit up now. It'll hurt for a few days, but you'll be fine. If you were one of the settlers I'd be worried about tetanus, but as a Hierochloe employee, you should be up to date on your shots. Well - in a manner of speaking."
"Do you think Hierochloe still exists?"
Voirrey shrugged. "Does it matter? There won't be a century's worth of back pay waiting for us, if that's what you think."
"They might be interested in finding out that we're alive. We are technically still employees, and the Ever Onward is Hierochloe property. It'd be good PR if nothing else." Joy put her environment suit back on. It was torn in places, and a dirty grey, but without it, there would've been many a night where she might have risked hypothermia.
"They could take our pictures; do interviews where we express how grateful we are to Hierochloe for rescuing us, and how incredible Hierochloe technology is for keeping us alive all this time. We could go on the morning news shows, maybe even write books. We'd be the feel-good story of the century!"
Voirrey arched an eyebrow. "I would blame it on starvation, but you always were peculiar. I've some stew on the stove in the back - help yourself. You look about ready to faint, though there's clearly nothing wrong with your mouth."
The stew consisted of pale brown gravy, bobbing with chunks of - well, whatever it was, it wasn't spider, which made it just about divine.