Sex and Violence in Zero-G

by Allen Steele

  This discovery prompted Yoshio to check both Old Bill’s and his own dosimeters. More bad news. Since Yoshio himself had never left the Marius, he had received barely five REMs during the mission, well within the safety limits—but Old Bill, even though he had been protected by his exoskeleton, had received almost twenty REMs. Under the same union codes, the maximum radiation exposure allowed within a thirty-day period is twenty-five REMs, with a career limit of four hundred REMs.

  In spacer parlance, William Smith-Tate had been singed. Had he been cooked, his career would have been automatically over and he would have spent the rest of his life grounded on Earth; if he had been fried, he would have already been suffering as slow, nasty death in the infirmary. Considering the circumstances, he was lucky to have been only singed—yet for the next month he could not leave the vessel under any circumstances save for the most dire emergency.

  At risk was not only his own health, but also his EVA certification. The rules are necessarily tough, because otherwise the major insurance companies—chief among them Lloyd’s of London, ConSpace’s principal guarantor—would refuse to underwrite industrial space efforts. Indeed, after a spacer receives more than four hundred REMs, Pax Astra automatically rescinds that person’s EVA certification, and a spacer who can’t step outside of an airlock might as well ship back to Earth. His career is over.

  By the time Yoshio broke the bad news to Old Bill, though, most of the crew had gone to bed. Exhausted both physically and emotionally, they were able to do little more than greet Old Bill and Yoshio at the airlock before they succumbed to fatigue. Leslie and Lynn hauled Bellafonte’s body, still encased in his spacesuit, out of the Marius and took it to the same storage compartment where I had found Young Bill playing handball only a short while earlier. Saul Montrose and Young Bill returned to the bridge where they assumed fourth watch by double-checking the systems to make certain the ship was secure and en route to Callisto and putting everything in control of the computers. Then, after relieving Betsy and Geoff from duty, the two men retired to the rest alcove, where they buckled themselves into armchairs and sacked out for the next six hours.

  By then, I was back in my seldom-visited quarters down on Deck 1-E, snuggled into my bunk and feeling the comfortable pull of gravity for the first time in many hours. The shields had been raised from my compartment window. As I had the ship-morning before, I spent my last waking moments gazing out the square portal. This time, though, I couldn’t see Jupiter at all; although the vessel was still close to the giant planet, it was now receding behind us as the Medici Explorer headed out-system toward Callisto, and all I could see was faint starlight and the tiny orbs of the Galilean moons.

  I fell asleep believing that hardest part of the voyage was over, never once thinking that the worst was yet to come.

  By 1800 hours ship-time the following day, the Medici Explorer was on final approach to Callisto, where it was scheduled to be reunited with its convoy. If the crew had thought their troubles to be over, however, they were in for a rude—although not entirely unanticipated—surprise: the drone freighters were being held hostage by Valhalla Station.

  More precisely, the consignment of helium-3 which was supposed to be loaded aboard the three vessels had been embargoed. The liquefied gas was still being held within the underground storage tanks at Valhalla, even though the convoy had arrived at Callisto more than twenty-four hours earlier while the rescue operation was still underway. The station’s dock crews had yet to pump it into the barges that would ferry the precious payload from the moon’s surface up to orbit.

  Given the fact that the Medici Explorer was already running two days behind schedule, the situation threatened to further narrow the launch window for the convoy’s return to the inner solar system. Yet when Saul Montrose—fully rested by now, and dressed in fresh clothes—inquired by comlink why the load-up had been delayed, he was told by Valhalla’s duty-officer that the matter would be discussed when the station’s general manager, B.F. LeRoy, arrived aboard the Medici Explorer. He was coming up on a shuttle with the local pilot—an astrogator who customarily helped guide deep-space vessels into parking orbit—and the issue would be discussed then. The duty-officer then signed off without so much as a word of apology.

  When I caught up with Saul, he was in the wardroom on Deck 1-F, finishing a late dinner. Swamp, the ’bot that resided in the mess deck, was happily scurrying away into the adjacent galley with the tray that Montrose had placed on the floor for it to retrieve, and Saul was relaxing with a mug of coffee before returning to the bridge. Through the wardroom window we could see the cratered and ice-covered surface of Callisto, the vast equatorial bulls-eye of Valhalla Basin prominent at the moon’s equator.

  “The company warned me there might be problems with station management on this trip,” Montrose said. He was more amused than irritated. “Last time out, the last captain was presented with a larger invoice than was stipulated in the contract. The freighters had already been loaded by then, of course, so there wasn’t much Butt Face…”

  “Who?”

  Montrose smiled. “LeRoy’s nickname, from back when he ran Arsia Station on Mars. B.F. stands for Brock Francis, but we used to call him Butt Face when I did the Mars run.” He shrugged. “He used to pull the same thing back then, trying to hold back delivery of goods until he and his crew got the perks they wanted. Didn’t always get him very far, but at least he’s consistent.”

  I shook my head. “I don’t understand. Since he’s also employed by ConSpace…”

  “He works for the company, yeah, but remember where he and his people are coming from. These people are a long way from the front office. Out here, guys tend to figure they can make their own rules and nobody’s going to say boo to them.” Montrose sipped his coffee. “Same spirit that got the Pax started in the first place. They’re just after a bigger slice of pie, that’s all.”

  “And the fact that you just rescued one of their crew doesn’t matter to them?”

  “Not really, no. Not when it comes to this.” The captain gazed out the window as Callisto swept past us once again. “I suppose they’re grateful, sure, but LeRoy probably had this little scheme cooked up months ago. If I know him, he’s not going to let a little gratitude get in his way.”

  “So what are you going to do about it?”

  Montrose sighed and placed the empty mug on the floor. As Swamp scampered in to get it—“Dirty cup! Swamp found a dirty cup to wash! Thank you, thank you!”—he stood up from the table, stretched, and hitched up his belt.

  “The way I figure it,” he said, “these guys want to play poker. Okay, then…let’s see who has the best hand.”

  A half-hour later, the shuttle Morabito from Valhalla Station rendezvoused with the Medici Explorer and docked in its auxiliary berth. After its two passengers cycled through the airlock, Young Bill escorted them to the bridge where Saul and Betsy were patiently waiting for them. The local pilot, a pale young woman named Jamie Van Sant, was no stranger to either the Explorer or its crew; she and Betsy retreated to the rest alcove to share coffee and conversation, leaving Saul to deal with B.F. LeRoy.

  To say that there was a confrontation between Montrose and LeRoy would be to imply hostility between the two men. LeRoy stood two meters in height; in Earth-normal gravity, he would have weighed in at almost a hundred and forty kilos. He had a sloppy, ill-trimmed mustache and a stubbled face looked as if he dry-razored his beard once every few days; there were large sweat-stains beneath the armpits of his shirt and vest, and his breath held the sweet-sour odor of liquor hastily chastened by mints. Everything about him suggested a lifelong bully, just civilized enough to get a decent job.

  Yet never once did the GM’s voice rise; he was savvy enough to know that posturing or making threats would get him nowhere. As Saul had told me in the mess deck, they had encountered each other before; the two men plainly didn’t like each other, but they could negotiate, at least for the time being. They shook hands with ea
sy familiarity, made some small talk, then got down to brass tacks.

  To summarize: LeRoy, speaking on behalf of his crew, did not believe that Valhalla Station was receiving adequate compensation for its hard work, and therefore the base personnel was collectively demanding a raise in the net percentage of gross profits received by ConSpace from the sale of helium-3 on Earth.

  Saul demurred to the argument, yet held firm against the demands; yes, he agreed that Valhalla Station probably deserved a bigger piece of the action, but his opinion didn’t really matter because this was an issue that had to be settled between Callisto and ConSpace’s board of directors. As a lowly deep-space captain, responsible for little more than shepherding a bunch of freighters from the Moon to Jupiter and back again, it was not his place to rewrite company policy.

  Perhaps not, replied LeRoy, but since ConSpace’s board of directors had ignored his petitions thus far, the time had come for him to demonstrate his disgust in a more direct fashion. Unless Montrose himself forged an agreement-in-principal for a larger share of the profits to be given to Valhalla’s personnel, the current consignment of helium-3 would not be loaded aboard the freighters, and the convoy could return to Earth with empty holds for all he cared.

  “Nothing personal, Saul,” he said, “but, after all, business is business.”

  Montrose played with his elegant mustache while he pretended to weigh the alternatives. Of course, he said after a few moments, if you don’t give us the helium-3, we’re under no obligation to reciprocate by unloading your own supplies. Saul then picked up a datapad and recited the cargo manifest: fresh produce, medical supplies, spare engine parts and various personal-request items including a new billiards-table cover and several boxes of current recreational VR chips, along with various packages from families and friends back home, including one crate of which was listed as “CTB Bibles”—“Claimed To Be Bibles,” and therefore unopened although the crate had rattled in a way more akin to bottles than copies of the Holy Scripture.

  LeRoy frowned while Montrose read the list, yet he remained stubborn. We can do without some of these things, he said, and if you refuse to surrender the vital necessities, then the Medici Explorer will be in direct violation of Pax Astra statutes regarding the withholding of aid to distressed colonists. Laws, he added smugly, which could result in the revocation of a ship’s charter and her captain’s license.

  “True enough,” Montrose said. “Then perhaps we should yield to higher authority.” He then touched his jaw and asked Yoshio Smith-Tanaka to bring one of the Explorer’s passenger, Marianne Tillis, to the bridge.

  “Who’s that?” LeRoy asked.

  “The new general manager,” Saul replied. “Why, you mean the company didn’t tell you? Sorry, B.F., but you’ve been terminated.”

  Butt Face’s mouth was still agape by the time his replacement arrived on the bridge. Marianne Tillis was a short, stocky woman in her late forties, with a quiet air of determination which stood out in contrast to LeRoy’s redneck sleaze. Since she had been revived from biostasis only a few hours earlier, she was still hungover and uncertain of her movements; Yoshio had to guide her to Montrose’s empty chair before she was able to relax.

  Despite her condition, though, Tillis’s mind and tongue were sharp. She presented the stunned LeRoy with a sheaf of documents officially designating her as the new general manager of Valhalla Station, signed by ConSpace’s CEO and directors. She then curtly informed LeRoy that, if he refused to relinquish his command or if the station’s personnel refused to carry out their duties, all previously acquired salaries and bonuses would be immediately annulled and no one on Callisto would receive zip for their work.

  And that, she said, was the end of the discussion.

  LeRoy’s jaw worked soundlessly for a few moments before he managed to speak again, and then the first thing he wanted to know was why he hadn’t been informed in advance.

  He hadn’t been told, Tillis replied, because he couldn’t be trusted to act in good faith.

  LeRoy persisted. What about his job? His career?

  Tillis shook her head. His job now belonged to her, she told him, and if he didn’t cooperate, his career would end with him operating a regolith combine at Descartes City. He was going home in a zombie tank aboard the Medici Explorer, period.

  She dismissed him with a wave of her hand. “You can take the shuttle back to the base to pack your bags and say goodbye to your crew,” she said. “Sorry, buddy, but you’re out of here.”

  Looking as if he had been socked in the jaw with a bag of pennies, B.F. LeRoy was led off the bridge by Young Bill, who was trying to hide his grin as he took the pirate down to the mess for a mug of coffee. As soon as he was gone, Tillis reopened the comlink to Valhalla Station. After she introduced herself to the duty officer, she ordered the immediate loading of helium-3 onto the barges.

  After she signed off, Jamie Van Sant—who had quietly observed the scene from the rest alcove—calmly unbuckled her seat belt, pushed herself across the bridge to the navigation console and, after politely introducing herself to Marianne Tillis, began laying in the coordinates for the Medici Explorer’s parking orbit near its freighters. She performed her duties as local pilot without question or argument.

  She knew the score. One boss was as good as another…and, after all, business was business.

  The fallout of the firing of B.F. LeRoy was that shore leave was shorter than usual. Even though LeRoy’s dismissal had been predestined the moment Tillis had boarded the vessel, the thirty men and women who lived and worked at Valhalla Station held Saul Montrose and the crew of the Medici Explorer personally responsible. This we discovered when the Marius landed on Callisto early the next day.

  Six of us rode the ship boat’s down from orbit to Valhalla Station: Captain Montrose, Yoshio and Leslie Smith-Tanaka, Lynn Smith-Tate, Young Bill and myself. We left almost half of the ship’s complement behind. Callisto’s one-seventh gravity would have meant that Geoff and Betsy Smith-Makepeace would have had to return to their wheelchairs. Rather than suffer that indignity, they elected, as usual, to stand watch on the Medici Explorer. For the first time they were joined, albeit reluctantly, by Old Bill; since Yoshio had restricted him from leaving the vessel for at least another month, he had stayed behind to babysit Wendy and Kaneko.

  The Marius was the not the first shuttle to leave the Explorer. When Van Sant had departed from the ship, flying the Morabito down to Valhalla Station almost ten hours earlier, she had taken along three passengers. Marianne Tillis and Karl Hess had already shuttled down; Hess was only too happy to leave the vessel aboard which he had made his unwelcome passage to Jupiter, and Tillis was ready to assume her new duties as general manager. Although LeRoy wanted to collect his few personal belongings before shipping out on the Medici Explorer, Casey Nimersheim wasn’t given that option: she was still recuperating from her ordeal in the infirmary and couldn’t risk more REM exposure by leaving the Explorer. She asked her former boss to pack her bags for her.

  The base on Callisto is located in the center of the Valhalla Basin, a vast crater formed millennia ago by the impact of a small asteroid upon the planetoid’s ice-crusted surface. Since Callisto is almost two million kilometers from Jupiter, the moon’s orbit lies beyond the most lethal zone of the planet’s radiation belts, the abundance of ice on its frozen surface assuring the small outpost a natural supply of oxygen, water, and liquid-fuel volatiles. In that respect, at least, Valhalla Station is more self-sufficient than even Descartes City, since the lunar colony depends on asteroid farming for its water supply.

  When the Marius touched down on the outskirts of the base, we suited up, decompressed in the airlock, and tramped down the boat ramp to the moon’s surface. The ground was like dirty snow, brownish-white and crunchy underfoot, eerily similar to a New England pasture during the mid-spring thaw between winter and the beginning of mud season, except that the ambient temperature hovers a couple of hundred degrees below zero Celsius. S
ave for the scores of meteorite craters all around us and the row ridges of the basin in the distance, the floor of the vast basin was nearly flat; Jupiter hovered above the horizon as a multicolored three-quarter sphere the size of a soccer ball held at arm’s length, and in the starry black sky I could see Ganymede and Europa as tiny spheroids, Callisto’s sisters in the eternal night.

  There was quiet majesty to Callisto which is absent from Amalthea. Here was simple wonder, the awesome beauty one commonly associates with the Jovian system. Yet amid the geodesic domes, nuclear generators, and parabolic antennas, there were mounds of trash that had been carelessly heaped outside airlocks: worn-out hardsuit segments, coils of frayed wiring, torn sheets of insulation, cannibalized robots, plastic this-and-that, unrecognizable garbage. Junk which might have been recycled or landfilled anywhere else, unable to biodegrade in the airless environment.

  This is depressing enough, and Young Bill had already hinted of an attitude that was manifest within the base, yet I was unprepared for the dismal squalor of its subsurface catacombs.

  Once we entered one of the domes and cycled through the airlock, we took turns in the tiny ready-room, shedding our hardsuits for the comfort of the fleece-lined jumpsuits Leslie carried in a duffel bag from the Marius. The air inside the EVA chamber was chilly; we could see our breaths when we exhaled, and it didn’t get much warmer as we climbed down the long ladder into the base’s underground warrens.

  The stench hit us as soon as Saul opened the hatch to let us into the main tunnel, a dozen odors trapped in the badly filtered air. Sweat and dust, unwashed laundry, overcooked food, raw alcohol, tobacco and marijuana smoke, urine and feces, something I couldn’t identify but which smelled like burnt paper—this and more. Compared to the scrupulously clean confines of the Medici Explorer, the tunnel we stepped into reeked like a sewage drain.

  The narrow, serpentine corridor was badly lit, its rock walls grimy with handprints and scrawled with obscene graffiti. The conduits running along the low ceiling were battered, their insulation ripped and leaking sickly yellow fiber. Open hatchways revealed quarters with unmade bunks, nude posters, clotheslines haphazardly suspended between lockers whose doors had been left ajar. Ceiling fixtures flickered inconstantly; discarded cans and food wrappers littered the hard floors. Here, behind the rec room hatch, four men with oily hair and unkempt beards played five card stud with a small pile of hand-rolled cigarettes as their stakes. There, in a disheveled laboratory where an empty centrifuge whirled as a creaky ornament, a bald man stared at the image of a complex molecule rotating on a computer screen; the back of his chair was turned toward us, but he seemed to be playing with himself. Loud music—industrial rock, old jazz, wheezy Italian opera—murmured or blasted from each carved-out room we passed, as if each was a different cell in which a seedy reflection of distant Earth was reflected.