A Cosmic Christmas 2 You

by Hank Davis

  “George has asked me to marry him.”

  “And?”

  She looked at me. “I—” she began, and stopped. I said, “I love her.”

  He looked at me too, and then he sighed. “George,” he said after a moment, “I don’t know what’s right and what’s wrong, for the first time in my life. Maybe I’ve been seffish when I asked Lilymary to go back with me and the girls. I didn’t mean it that way, but I don’t deny I wanted it. I don’t know. But—” He smiled, and it was a big, warm smile. “But there’s something I do know. I know Lilymary; and I can trust her to make up her own mind.” He patted her lightly.

  “I’ll see you after the service,” he said to me, and left us. Back in the hall, through the door he opened, I could hear all the voices going at once.

  “Let’s go inside and pray, George,” said Lilymary, and her whole heart and soul was on her face as she looked at me, with love and anxiousness.

  I only hesitated a moment. Pray? But it meant Lilymary, and that meant—well, everything.

  So I went in. And we were all kneeling, and Lilymary coached me through the words; and I prayed. And, do you know?—I’ve never regretted it.

  INTRODUCTION

  SHEPHERDS AND WOLVES

  AT CHRISTMAS TIME, how are you supposed to feel if you’ve been declared not to be human? And what do you do when someone you never expected to see again shows up, reminding you of the sordid past you thought you had left behind—and endangering the safety and sanctuary you thought you had finally found?

  SARAH A. HOYT won the Prometheus Award for her novel Darkship Thieves, published by Baen, and has authored Darkship Renegades and A Few Good Men, two more novels set in the same universe, as was “Angel in Flight,” a story in the first installment of A Cosmic Christmas. Darkship Renegades also was a Prometheus Award nominee. She has written numerous short stories and novels in a number of genres, science fiction, fantasy, mystery, historical novels and historical mysteries, much under a number of pseudonyms, and has been published—among other places—in Analog, Asimov’s and Amazing. For Baen, she has also written three books in her popular shape-shifter fantasy series, Draw One in the Dark, Gentleman Takes a Chance, and Noah’s Boy. Her According to Hoyt is one of the most interesting blogs on the internet. Originally from Portugal, she lives in Colorado with her husband, two sons and the surfeit of cats necessary to a die-hard Heinlein fan.

  SHEPHERDS AND WOLVES

  by Sarah A. Hoyt

  IT STARTED WITH THE CALL ON CHRISTMAS EVE. I was at the distress console, a job that the Sisters of St. Lucia of the Spaceways always give to their oldest novice. “Old enough to be responsible, young enough to stay awake all night,” Mother Magdalene said, and I wouldn’t argue.

  I’d been living with the Lucias for five years, a welcome respite from my life before, and the doubts I had about professing had nothing to do with not liking the life, the house or the rule. They had to do with myself. And I’d been wrestling with them in the dark of the night when the call came.

  “Ship in distress,” it said. “Ship in distress.” There followed coordinates, so many degrees from Gilgamesh basin, to the north of Memphis City so many miles.

  I wrote down the numbers and the names, but didn’t think about them—couldn’t think about them—because the voice sounded familiar. I flicked the com signal on. “What ship, and what is your call sign? State the nature of your trouble.”

  I was working by rote. These were the questions I’d been told to ask.

  The answer came, faint, distant, scratchy, “We have crashed through a failure of the—” static. “Our call number is—” static. “We have ten people.” The last made me sit back hard on the chair. Ten people. So it couldn’t be the normal miner craft. It had to be another sort of transport.

  The static did not bother me so much. After all, on Ganymede, half the equipment worked badly, and the other half worked not at all. Mars might now be a semi-civilized planet in the dawning glory of the twenty-sixth century, but Ganymede, once a forsaken wasteland, for many years a forgotten colony, remained a backwater: terraformed, but not comfortable, populated but poor, striving but forsaken. Ganymede was the basis of operation of asteroid miners—mostly desperate men who had long given up on seeking redemption—and of the women who amused them, most of them also desperate and seeking only to live another hour, another day, another week.

  It is said—well, Mother Magdalene says it—that the order of St. Lucia was formed with the intent to go forth to the most desolate human colonies, to follow the ragged edges of the human diaspora out of Earth, burner in one hand and cross in the other.

  We comforted the afflicted, fed the hungry, gathered in the lost—usually ten minutes before they died—and, because Mother Magdalene insisted, ran an unofficial rescue for anyone who crash landed near enough we could find them and bring them in to safety. The atmosphere in Ganymede was still thin, even after centuries of terraforming, and the nights became cold very fast. A broken ship could mean death.

  Most of the people we helped were miners, in their two-men craft, often crashed through sheer mechanical failure. The ones I hated were the rescues in space. But we had to get to them before the scavengers did. Like all places at the edge of survival, Ganymede bred scavengers and pirates aplenty.

  I bit my lip, wondering if this crashed craft could be a pirate vessel. Ten people . . . yes, I could see the advantages of ten people when it came to boarding other ships, stealing the result of their mining labors. Or even, of course, scavenging stranded ships.

  At the same time, ten people seemed excessive. Most miner craft had two men, poorly armed. What overcame them was superior weaponry and better—pirate—craft. And four people would be plenty for that.

  I looked up at the wall, measuring the hours of Ganymede night. Three hours until early service, and until then all my sisters and Mother Magdalene would be tucked away in their beds. Of course, I had permission to rouse any or all of them, if I so chose, if I deemed the emergency was important enough.

  Did I? Ten people in a downed craft. I could take the bigger flyer, the one we used to transport all of us on the rare occasions we needed to make an appearance somewhere. When the Pope flew through Ganymede, we’d all of us gone to the Spaceport for a blessing, because it couldn’t be thought that His Holiness would travel into the countryside to our poor abode. I could transport ten people, if a little cramped. The twenty of us had been cramped enough.

  Why would I need help? If I woke up the house, or even one of the two novices more junior than I, just because I was afraid to go and collect the people in distress on my own, Mother Magdalene wouldn’t get half sarcastic.

  I sighed. It wasn’t so much that I feared her sarcasm, but I liked her too much to want to incur her displeasure. She would ask me if I didn’t have a burner. And yes, I had a burner, and I’d taken the training, though we were always cautioned not to shoot to kill, not before the sinner could get absolution.

  Nodding to myself, I clicked the com and asked again, just in case, “What is your call sign?” There was no answer but the steady beep, beep, beep of a distress beacon, and I sighed. Likely their com had given up the ghost, but even on Ganymede, ships made sure their distress signal was working.

  I got up, headed for the back door to our compound, passing the doors to the cells of my sisters—little rooms, provided only with a bed and pegs on the wall for our two extra habits—on my right, and the dormitories for our charity cases on the left. There were two large dormitories, one for males and one for females. I was mildly surprised that this one time I did not hear sounds to indicate that the inhabitants of one were visiting in the other. I was sure if I looked closely I would find a few couples snuggled in a single bed, but my job was rescue not policing, and besides, Mother Magdalene knew as well as I did what happened almost every night. She’d once muttered something on the subject of comfort and excusable sin, and that was that. She was more concerned with those who smuggled in intere
sting hallucinogenic substances, or those who tried to rob others.

  Down the hallway there were the baths and showers, and past that a sort of hallway that also served as a cloak room. I stopped and got a cloak with a hood. It wasn’t a matter of modesty. Yes, my novice’s habit, adapted to the sort of work we did in space, consisted of white pants and pale blue shirt, and it might be consider to reveal too much of my body. His holiness had talked to Mother Magdalene on the subject of allowed variations to the habit, or some such, during their ten minute conference. But the more important consideration was that it would be very cold outside, somewhere below freezing. The suit was indoor wear, and even my white wimple and veil wouldn’t keep out the chill. The heavy blue cloaks we wore outside kept us warm even in the worst weather.

  I strapped on two burners—after checking the charge on them—and made my way to the flyer.

  Attuning it to distress beacon took a bit of fiddling. I think we’d bought this thing used and fifth hand or so. But I managed it at last, set it on auto-pilot, standing by to rescue myself if the auto-pilot cut out. Flying over the mostly dark expanse of terrain, my mind returned to the fact that the voice on the com had sounded familiar. Awfully familiar. Something at the back of mind stirred, tried to wake up.

  That voice, my mind told me, in no uncertain terms, sounded like Joe.

  I ignored it. Joe was dead. Had to be after all these years, and given when and where we’d parted company.

  I told myself, as I looked out at the expanse where lights were as sparsely scattered as the stars on the cloak of St. Lucia, that this was just my fear of professing, my fear of polluting the order with my presence. I was calling Joe to mind, because Joe and what Joe had been and what I’d been, and what we’d done together were probably reason to disqualify me from professing ten times over. Or more.

  The flyer started heading downward before I could see anything resembling a ship. The site the beacon beamed from was inside a crater, dark in the shadow of night. It took landing next to it to see that it was a large ship—very large, doubtless equipped for interplanetary travel. And if it only had ten people in it, the travel it was fitted for had to be more than the jumps to Mars and back. For those little ships were used. This one clearly had supplies or cargo for much longer.

  My alarms were ringing, and I had my hand on my burner handle as I called over the speaker outside, “Come out with your hands in full view. I want to see how many of you there are. And state your call code.”

  There was a moment of silence, and then they started coming out of the ship. Two men, followed by eight . . . juveniles, male and female. Four male, four female, all looking very young and awkward, at that age when humans have stopped growing but haven’t yet gotten used to adult movements and poise. I counted them in the dim light, and looked them over. I couldn’t see weapons on any of them, and all of them were dressed in pants-and-tunic suits that looked more flimsy than my habit. The young ones appeared to be in sandals!

  Appalled, I opened the door at the rear of the flyer, and spoke again over the speaker, “Come in, one by one.”

  They did, first the adult males, slowly enough that I got the idea they were being very careful to display their lack of bad intentions, and then the boys and girls, half running, clearly anxious to be in out of the cold.

  I closed the door with a whoosh behind them, ordered them to sit and strapped down, set home on the beacon, and tried to figure out where we would house all these people. I could put the two adult men in the male dormitory. They were well-built enough and looked capable of defending themselves. But the young ones . . . It would be a crime akin to throwing kittens into a lion cage to put them in with the drug-and-madness addled refuse of Ganymede.

  I heard a seat belt unbuckle and turned to yell at my passenger to sit down, but before the words left my lips, I realized the man standing in the aisle, a few steps from me was Joe. My old friend Joe, whom I’d left on Mars. When I’d last seen him, five years ago, he’d been seized by interplanetary customs for the theft of valuable property: his body. I’d barely managed to escape the like fate, by leaving the landing area on the arm of a gentleman who’d sworn I was his wife. No one would think to test the wife of a rich man from Earth. Or at least, they’d not think of it twice.

  For five years I’d assumed Joe had been killed. It was the normal penalty for artifacts who hid what they were and their origins and, further, who were capable of escaping their tightly controlled existence and freeing themselves. But there he was, in the middle of the aisle, his green eyes wide open, his red hair mussed as if he’d been in a fight. A three-day red growth glinted on his face, and I had a feeling he had blanched under his reddish tan.

  I said, “Joe,” at that same time he said “Blossom,” and for a moment we stared at each other as the five years disappeared. We’d grown up together at the same crèche, Joe and I, destined to be Joy-bringers. But it wasn’t till we’d been sold to a brothel, in our teens, that we’d developed our friendship, or perhaps love. I’d thought it was love at the time, but it’s easy to convince someone like me of love. After all, born from a test tube and raised in a crèche, love was the human thing I had never hoped to experience.

  The brothel didn’t care what we did in our own time, and Joe and I had become friends; then we’d made mad plans for a future we’d known could never be. And then we’d put the plans into action, and escaped the brothel. A misbegotten adventure that had landed us in Mars Customs where our grand plans had come to an end.

  I’d made my way to Ganymede, partly because it was the only place I could think of where no one would follow me and test me. And after a week of hospitality by the Lucias, I’d decided to become a novice. I wasn’t even a Catholic at the time. I wasn’t anything. All major religions agreed my kind lacked souls.

  Over the last five years I’d come to wonder if that was true. More importantly, I’d come to believe there was something as souls—at least on my off hours, and when I squinted and wished really hard.

  But now there was Joe and all the years rolled back. “Joe!” I said again. And then, at the same time, we both said, “I didn’t know—”

  “An old friend is she?” the other adult man said. “I didn’t know you did nuns, Joe.” I turned, outraged, not because of the implication, but because the other man had got off his seat while I was talking to Joe, and had approached me on the other side, on my blind side, while I was looking at Joe, with no eyes for anyone else.

  “Please, get back to your seat,” I said, reaching in my belt for the burner. The man was tall and blond, with a face crisscrossed with scars, and I had a feeling he was bad news, though I might be judging a miner by his kit.

  “Listen, Avery,” Joe said. He sounded panicked. “It’s not like that. Listen, Blossom—”

  I’d turned to look at him as he spoke, and I never heard the end of the sentence. Something hit me a sharp blow above the ear, and I went down into darkness.

  I woke up, or rather I became aware of being awake while being pushed forward. I was on my feet. My hands were tied behind my back. I wasn’t so naïve that I couldn’t tell the pressure in the middle of my back was a burner muzzle. Likely my own burner. And there was a man behind me, pushing me just enough to keep me walking, while saying, “Steady, steady. Don’t even think of screaming. If you don’t scream, we won’t hurt anyone. We don’t want to have to hurt anyone.”

  My vision cleared. We were in the cloak room of the convent.

  I didn’t think of screaming. For one the voice was Avery’s. I might or might not be able to claim some special favor and protection from Joe, but Avery was likely to give me no quarter. For another, Mother Magdalene would just about have my hide if I got myself shot by engaging in what she called heroics.

  My only worry was Mother and my sisters, and the other people in the house. It was dawning on me slowly that I’d miscalculated. I should have taken another sister with me. I’d just brought two very bad men back with me. My heart clut
ched a little at the thought that Joe was a bad man, but I could hear him talking in an undertone to someone—the young people?—and I couldn’t lie to myself.

  The question was, what did they want in coming back to the convent? Supposing their vehicle, despite its fortuitous positioning in the crater, really had been wrecked, what did they expect to get in the convent? Couldn’t they as easily have stolen my flyer and gone to Memphis City or elsewhere where they might hide or transact their business?

  The certainty that their business was illegal and that they were in fact bad men made the presence of the eight young people something I didn’t want to think about. Unfortunately my mind wasn’t listening to my reluctance. I didn’t want to believe that after all this time, Joe—Joe, who knew what it was like—was selling young artifacts into slavery of that kind, but a glimpse of the juveniles, out the corner of my eye, told me that they had the beauty that few natural born humans possessed: their features were almost too regular and all too pleasing, their bodies were lithe and uniformly well-formed. Not a pudgy one in the bunch, nor a short one, nor one with spots. But more than that, they had the passive demeanor of crèche-raised children, beaten into submission one too many times.

  My heart sank somewhere to near my boots, and I thought it would have been better if he were dead.

  Avery was still holding the burner to the middle of my back, but now Joe was whispering at him, and he was whispering back.

  Then Joe approached, where I could see him. He pulled my hood back, with a quick gesture. “Listen, Blossom,” he said. “Listen. We don’t want to hurt you or your . . . sisters,” there was a slight smirk at that, as though he found my presence here even odder than I did myself. “Or anyone, but you have to help us. You don’t want me to die, do you?”