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I can do this. Indomitable, indomitable, in the Sloe Ghost’s image are we, indomitable. I can do this, this can I do, Fox repeated Pisque’s Litany in her head. From where she stood on the Furrow bank, the train car upended in the toxic sludge of a gurge-sink looked a long distance away.
Fox backed up several steps, ran, leapt.
She just missed the top end of the car and slammed into the tilted side, fingers flexing in her sticky gloves as she gripped a side rail. One of her booted feet slipped its purchase and she hung a moment until she found another bit of purchase on a window’s edge.
The train car had been wrecked several days ago as it traveled the Furrow line. A gurge, geo-spasm of this stressed and over-mined region of the rocky planet Fox’s people called Sloe, erupted under the train car without warning, taking it into the air, half-swallowing it down, and leaving a toxic sludge pit in the middle of the Furrow’s dry canal.
The Furrow line was shut down until such time as the council had the resources and give-a-shit to fix it, and too bad for the few mining techs left at the up-Furrow settlement who needed it for transport to Drumtown.
The Furrow ran through an expanse of folded rock like a giant shawl dropped by a passing cosmic grandmother. Currently it was hazed with low, clinging fog. Sloe’s brief early morning light curled through the thin, tech-assisted atmosphere.
Fox clung to the side of the train car, gripping the rail with both hands, one boot toe with precarious purchase, other foot searching for another bit of support.
Then her oxygen filament glitched. Her breath caught as the implant’s function stuttered. Fox dragged at suddenly too-thin air. No! Not now! There was one long, horrible moment of suffocation as her body tried to pull enough breath out of Sloe’s atmosphere, and then a gasp as the filament kicked back in. Fox closed her eyes and savored filling her lungs freely, muscles unclenching.
She inched herself up to the car’s rear door, wrenched open by the rescue drone that had lifted the few passengers—alive, dead, and in-between—out.
As her boot found another divot, Fox solidified her grip and pushed the last few inches to crouch atop the upended car. She peered through the hole where the door had been, then dropped into the car, the tough material of the mine suit she wore fending off the jagged metal edges of the opening.
The thin light of Sloe’s sun cast streamers through wreckage. Fox used the seats like rock outcroppings and came down to the opposite end of the train car. With one hand to a blood-streaked seat back, she slipped the scanner out of the suit’s hip pocket. Ryuu had cobbled it together specially for this salvage. Fox thumbed the seek switch on the finger-sized unit, not sure exactly what she was looking for; the scanner would supposedly identify it and Ryuu’s customer would pay a generous fee for it.
Debris littered the area around Fox’s feet in the corner of the car, a busted cool-pail with the rotting remains of someone’s lunch spilled from it, a mining tech’s helmet with basic data eye-screen, cracked, a crumple of kid’s blanket with holo-patterns of spin ships slipping through it. Other debris lodged above, between the seats and the curve of the train car’s side.
Ryuu’s scanner did nothing as she skimmed it over all the wreckage in her immediate vicinity. It wasn’t until she was halfway back up the car, using the seats to climb, that the scanner began to beep in her hand, speeding or slowing as she waved it this way and that. Fox climbed a little more, scanned a little more, and eventually found a small object wedged between a seat and the curved wall.
After trying to lever it out from above, she dropped down a seat and pushed from beneath. With a screech as it scratched the side, the object popped free and slid off the seat. Fox shot out a hand and caught it. At first glance it was just a rock, an oblong that fit in Fox’s gloved palm. There was a little bit of glint in the rough surface, but nothing to indicate it was more than a rock. Rolling it over, though, revealed an odd inset of fine, colorless crystal in the form of an organic-looking spiral—spiral amoeba was the thought that came to Fox.
She ran a gloved finger over the crystal facets; a pulse of sheen went through the spiral. Fox froze, but after a beat, nothing else happened. She tucked it into a secure inner suit pocket just beneath her breasts.
She was coming over the jagged edge of the opening at the top when a groan and a shift of the train car told her the gurge was still active. The car sank a hand span further as the sludge burped up a slow roil of bubbles. Fox’s lungs and eyes burned.
The car had shifted away from the bank. Fox eyed the new distance.
I can do this. Pisque and the Sloe Ghost, please.
From a low crouch at the very edge of the leaning car, Fox leapt. The upper half of her body hit the bank’s edge and she grabbed hold of rock and crusted sand. A moment of internal crowing, I can do this—
—and then pain burned a signal up her lower hanging leg as it dragged in the sludge.
She managed to drag herself up over the edge of the bank—no, I can’t—before the pain whited out her mind.
* * *
Fox had been four when she and her moms got their oxygen filament implants and came to Sloe. When she was ten, her moms quit the mines—they always said quit, but everyone knew most of the tech jobs petered out as mining operations pushed past the edge of safety and their area of Sloe became a geothermal lacework, creating the gurges. Fewer techs were needed as one mine after another tapped out. Her moms, Ohnee and Taf, moved themselves and Fox from the up-Furrow miner settlement to a burgeoning co-op in Drumtown. The co-op had taken over the unused silo at one edge of Drumtown to work on resource and support streams independent of the mining combine.
Sloe—Planet 3010SL08—was uninhabitable beyond the combine’s atmosphere mixers, sunk into the rocky surface marking out 250 square kilometers with Drumtown roughly center.
Humans had been on Sloe for twenty-two years standard, twelve longer than they were meant to. They were confined to the area within the combine’s ring of atmosphere assisters, sunk like sentry columns of tech in the planet’s rock. Once the area had been mined of its resource minerals to the point of instability, turning the local geologic layers into lace and giving rise to the gurges, the combine was to have lifted off the human techs, scientists, engineers, and administrative personnel overseeing operations at seven different mining stations within the ring. First there were technical delays; then in-combine political delays, and then more technical delays. Eventually, it became clear that the mining combine had all but abandoned them. They still got the automated drops of survival supplies, meds and food basics, but queries on disembarkation updates were lost in the bureaucratic cloud.
Children were born, jobs tending the mining bots ran thin, and the need for habitation str
uctures ran ahead of the process for approving it. The limited supply of oxygen filaments dwindled.
It was her moms who told her the story of Pisque and the Sloe Ghost, tag-teaming it at more than one bedtime.
“And so Pisque followed the voice of the Sloe Ghost, deep into its place, in the rock and ore and flow of Sloe,” Ohnee—the mom who’d borne her—would say.
“In the mines, where the lights ran out and the dark was all,” Taf took it up, using his long dark hair like a curtain about them as he leaned his face close to Fox’s, his dark eyes serious, brows raised, “down there the Sloe Ghost seeped back into the rock and said to Pisque, from all around her, ‘Everything must breathe, even rock.’” Taf’s voice always went woo-y and slippy on the Sloe Ghost’s words. Fox loved Taf’s hair, soft and shining dark, and his face like a beautiful story itself. Fox’d gotten Ohnee’s fuzzy hair, but Taf’s eyes.
“Pisque called back to the Ghost,” Ohnee picked it up, “‘Tell me what you mean, Ghost!’”
“Then the Sloe Ghost poured out its lament. And Pisque knew what she had to do.” Taf’s voice always sank here, to a sweet-rough whisper. “The thing that needed doing. Pisque gave the Ghost her breath.”
* * *
Metal taste of blood in her mouth. She’d bitten her tongue. Rocks dug into her cheek and palms.
Then a flash of pain from her left calf.
Fox rolled to her back, jaw clenched against escalation in the pain—
—which didn’t come.
Sitting up, Fox drew a deep breath and looked at her leg. It was ugly. The boot had protected her foot and ankle, but the suit had melted through in places on her shin, the leg burned dark red and puffy and bleeding sluggishly along cracked skin.
She should be screaming in pain. Instead there was just a low ache, an afterthought or memory of pain.
Judging by the level of light in Sloe’s layered haze of assisted atmosphere, it was late morning. She’d been out a little while. She got herself standing, every moment expecting the pain to kick in. It didn’t. Am I in shock?
She put a hand to her diaphragm, over the salvaged object; still secure.
The hike out here had taken her the entire previous night. No matter how little of the pain signal was reaching her, a return hike all the way back to Drumtown wasn’t a high-magnitude plan.
It was, however, the only plan she had.
* * *
By the time Fox reached the Pyres, a gathering of stone pillars rising into the thin air in cock-eyed cubic tumbles, it was night. The Pyres ran along one side of the Furrow for five kilometers. The light reflecting from Sloe’s three planetoid companions and the heavy spill of stars visible between drifts of cloud cover cast multiple shadows through the Pyres. A low fog obscured the ground.
The lack of pain from her leg was worrying. It wasn’t numb, or dead; something was between her and the sensory input.
A hard, human-made light flashed ahead, cutting a path by the Furrow. Some instinct nudged Fox back from the open space to hide among the Pyres as a transport came along, a heavy, roller-wheeled explorer. Not miners; only combine scientists, up-aboves, and their agents—flaks—had access to such a thing.
She watched the transport pass, nosing along the thin stretch between the Furrow and the Pyres. She couldn’t make out the occupants, only that there were two.
Fox limped on. In another hour she reached the number two mine and the station that had served it, both shut down. She came up behind the station, a deserted fab among the Pyres, from out of the rock forest, walking the path worn by mining techs between station and mine entrance. Equipment had been flown in by remote units, but humans had beaten this path.
Despite the muted pain signal, Fox felt ragged as the bed of a ripped out tooth. She crept through the empty station’s several rooms—meeting room, cantina, locker room. Graffiti scrawled over the degraded inset panels for notices on mine conditions, schedules, combine news; traces of the panels’ luminosity remained, leavening the dim.
Settling onto a bench that was part of one of the fab’s molded walls, Fox drifted, a tang of pain in her mouth, thoughts floating into patchwork corridors and dead-end alleys. Her moms appeared and wandered nearby, disappeared, reappeared. Ohnee said, “What’s that in your skin, Foxy girl?” Taf said, “She’s taken up molecular patterning, m’love.”
Molecular patterning was something speciationists did. It was also, indirectly, why Fox had left the co-op—before she could be kicked out. That and the fact that she and Jope, the co-op’s administrant, never had got along. Some people you just took against, they put your hackles up and you theirs, and that had been Fox and Jope since she was a headstrong ten-year-old.
By the time she was eighteen, she’d been salvaging for a few years. The co-op’s resident speciationist had asked her to find a sample of a particular mineral at one of the closed mine sites, and sent her son Attar, a little younger than Fox, along to test the samples on-site so Fox wouldn’t have to haul back any useless ones. Attar’s oxygen filament had glitched. It was one of the times a glitch was fatal; the filament died. She hadn’t been able to get him back to Drumtown quickly enough. She still woke up sometimes feeling Attar in her arms, wheezing for breath, and then—not.
That was when Fox started drinking the grain alcohol some co-op and other Drumtown residents made. It softened the hard edges, the ones inside, that hurt. It also made her sloppy, which led to the biggest fight she and Jope had yet had. He’d been right, and she’d known it, but he was so wrong in his rightness that she couldn’t, wouldn’t, back down.
Graceless, that’s what Jope had called her in the last argument they had before Fox left the co-op, graceless—a disappointment to him, the co-op, her moms, to Pisque and the Sloe Ghost.
Something woke her. After a moment she realized it had been a slant of light, moving over the station wall. Then she heard voices. The people in that transport, heading back to Drumtown.
Keeping to the shadows in the front room, Fox could see them standing outside their transport, its head beams cutting the night: a man and woman in the pale suits of combine flaks. The man was peeing against the platform side.
Their voices were clearer, but Fox couldn’t make out what they were saying.
Then, suddenly, she could.
“…back without it.”
“Who would have gone after it?”
“A hired scav, obviously; there’s only a few. We’ll start with them. You done yet?”
“Does it look like I’m done?”
“You pee a fuck ton. You should have that checked.”
“Slag off, Blanchard,” peeing man replied, but it was without sting. He was a tall guy with long features as laconic as his attitude, dark skinned as Fox. Folded in half he would still have been taller than Fox. Blanchard, the woman, was medium height, medium build, medium-pale skin, medium everything, the sort of flak you lost sight of even as she spoke to you. She stood there, stolid and unmoving, except for one hand, which fiddled restlessly with a slender cylinder device, flipping it in her fingers back and forth.
Fox recognized the device, oh-eight-sixers or wheezers, people called them. Triggered, it emitted a signal on a targeted beam that interrupted the functioning of oxygen filament implants. Fox rubbed her chest, above the left pulmonary artery, which was where the filaments were implanted. She’d had hers since she was four. Technically it was mining combine property. Like the mining colony itself, they’d never been meant to last so long. Drumtown had a limited supply, reserved now for any children born on Sloe; no replacements were available.
Peeing man shook off and tucked himself away. For a moment, Fox could smell his piss and the heavily spiced food he or Blanchard had recently eaten. She could hear the device flipping through Blanchard’s fingers, the sloughing tick of the transport, and the soft rolling of drops condensed from the fog dripping to the ground from the vehicle’s body.
Fox drew back against the wall, heart hammering as she freaked
out at the over-boosted sensory input. Then it faded. In that moment, the pain from her leg flared, sick dizziness washing up with it. Slowly, the pain receded again, behind the veil of … something.
The little oblong of rough rock with its spiral amoeba that nestled in her jacket, close to her skin—Fox very much suspected.
The flak’s voices barely carried now and she caught only a word here and there. Her heart slowed as she breathed through the panic.
Crap.
* * *
“A combine scientist put me onto it, geologist, yeah?” Ryuu had said. “One of the passengers was carrying something interesting and she wants it.”
“And ‘it’ is what, exactly?” Fox asked.
Ryuu shrugged. “Something small, dunno. She says she’ll pay big. We can help your moms and the co-op get the collectors replaced properly through Jope’s connections—you know the council isn’t going to do anything about it. Maybe even”—half a breath hesitation—“a supply of new filaments.” When Fox didn’t react to that, he continued the sales pitch. “This way it gets done. You can do it—you’re the best salvager I know, yeah?”
The taste of that hope—the hope of doing something right for her moms, for the co-op, was intoxicating. Better than the warm, calming rush of any alcohol.
“Ryuu, there’s only a handful of salvagers on Sloe.”
Ryuu grinned. “Yeah.”
* * *
Yeah.
Fox sank down to the floor. When she heard Blanchard and peeing man leave again, she slipped the rock out of her suit.
It was warm from proximity to her skin. The colors in the crystalline amoeba on one side had changed from when she’d first looked at it. Indigo was blushing into the colorless material, a slow, inky bleed.
She turned it in her fingers, examining it in the faint light from the degraded notices.
“What are you?” she asked.
A warm pulse washed through her senses, calling up all good things—a hug from Taf, a good swig of Ryuu’s best alcohol, a deep breath of pure air, Ohnee’s hands massaging her scalp as she retwisted her hair—all at once. Every endorphin associated with sense comfort showered like light through her brain.
Bourbon, Sugar, Grace Page 1