by Allen Steele
Everything within Valhalla Station reflected desperation and loneliness, targetless anger and restrained sorrow, ugly mirth and—most of all—unrelenting boredom. At the edge of the human frontier, the farthest reach of humankind’s conquest of the solar system, lay a slum.
We found Marianne Tillis in the general manager’s office, located at the end of the main tunnel near the mess hall, where the worst of the boiled-cabbage stench seemed to congregate. Her new office was in shambles: stacks of dusty computer printout lay in collapsing piles across the floor, buried beneath crusty food trays and dog-eared service manuals. Empty liter bottles littered the desk and floor; one half-full bottle on a shelf contained what smelled like pure-grain alcohol. A defunct ’bot rested against the wall in one corner of the room, its eye-stalks smashed and its pinchers ripped away; “Stupid” had been scrawled in red ink across its carapace.
Tillis was seated at the desk, talking into a headset mike as her fingers played over a greasy keypad, bringing up file after file on the flatscreen behind the desk. “Look, I don’t care what he’s doing right now,” she was saying as we walked in, “but the duty roster says he’s the guy in charge of clean-up detail this week.”
Pause. “Then you wake him up.” She noticed our presence, nodded once and held up a finger. “He doesn’t know yet? Fine. Tell him the new boss wants him in here with a broom and a trash barrel…make it two barrels…or he’s docked a week’s pay, and if I don’t see him in fifteen minutes, then the same goes for you. This place is a sty and I didn’t make this mess. That’s all.”
She pulled the headset down around her neck, sighed deeply, then stood up and looked straight at us. “Was it as bad as this the last time you were here?” she asked no one in particular.
No one answered for a moment, then Yoshio cleared his throat. “A little worse, actually,” he said softly. “Last time we were here, they hadn’t taken out the garbage.”
Tillis stared at him, then slowly nodded her head. “Now it’s on the surface. Magnificent.” She stood up from behind the desk and stretched her back. “Looks like I’ve got my work cut out for me.”
The Smiths began to murmur vague, embarrassed apologies, but Marianne shook her head. “Not your fault,” she said flatly. “The company told me this place was a wreck when they offered me the job. That’s why I’m here.” She looked straight at Montrose. “Captain, I’m sure you and your people don’t want to be down here any longer than you have to, but I’ve found that the records are screwed.”
“How’s that?” Saul asked.
She shrugged as she bent over the desk and tapped commands into the keypad. A spreadsheet appeared on the screen behind her; she pointed at the upper right corner of the display, noting the date. “The last time anyone bothered to update the logbook was two weeks ago. Means we don’t have an accurate tally of how much helium-3 we’re supposed to be giving you…in fact, I suspect the last shipment we were given was probably off by a few hundred tonnes, since everything I’ve seen so far looks like guesstimates.”
“Uh-huh.” Montrose rubbed his chin between his fingers. “You think Tucker was cooking the books?”
Her eyelids fluttered briefly. “Maybe. Maybe not. I’ll let him take that up with the company when he gets back.” She walked over to the shelf and picked up the liter bottle; the clear liquid sloshed about as she shook it. “Anyone want a drink? I found the still this came from last night in the galley. Far as I can tell, everyone’s been on a bender for the last two months. This was Butt Face’s…’cuse me, Mr. LeRoy’s…personal stash.”
She unstopped the bottle and upended it over an overstuffed waste can, letting the evil-smelling liquor spill over the garbage until she dropped the bottle itself on top of the pile. The new boss smiled briefly. “The most fun I’ve had since I’ve been here was to take an axe to the damn thing. God, you should have heard ’em howl.”
Tillis folded her arms across her chest, looked again at Saul. “Since B.F. has declined to cooperate, it’s up to us to prepare a decent invoice to send to the company. Might take a few hours, but that’s the way it is.”
“I hear you.” Saul glanced at his watch as he turned toward us. “I’ll meet you guys at…ah, let’s call it 1500 ship-time…at the main airlock. All right?”
The Smiths nodded their heads, however reluctantly, then slowly filed out the GM’s office. As we edged out the door and out into the rank tunnel, I found Young Bill at my side. “What are we supposed to do for the next five hours?” I said quietly.
“Keep from getting beat up,” he whispered back.
This was easier said than done.
Yoshio was lucky. He found the base infirmary just down the corridor from the GM’s office and went inside to visit with his counterpart on Callisto, a thin young physician named Jesus Caliente. Dr. Caliente was one of the few people at Valhalla who had remained sober and reasonably responsible; when we discovered him, Jesus and one of the few AI’s that was still functional in the base were unpacking the crates of medical supplies that had been brought down by the Marius. Yoshio and I gave him a hand, but when the conversation shifted to bland medical shop-talk that was over my head, I excused myself and went in search of the rest of the Explorer’s crew.
I found Leslie, Lynn, and Young Bill in the wardroom. The compartment was crowded; at least half the base’s complement was in there, and some of their homemade ceramic mugs contained liquor from the still Tillis had destroyed earlier. The new GM might have destroyed the still, but she had yet to ferret out all the bottles in the base.
Lynn was leaning against the far wall, drinking coffee by herself and scowling at everyone who came near. On the other side of the room, Young Bill was in deep conversation with Van Sant, the young woman who had temporarily piloted the Medici Explorer. The two of them were talking in subdued tones, looking over their shoulders and sharing quiet laughter at private jokes. They had apparently met before during an earlier trip; this didn’t sit well with Lynn, who constantly watched her son, casting him hard looks which the teenager silently ignored.
Yet there were worse things to be worried about than Young Bill’s flirtations. Leslie had hunkered down at a poker table with the four men we had glimpsed earlier. Although she neither contributed nor took anything from the pile of cigarettes in the center of the table, she was slaughtering them hand after hand, displayed the cool verve of a master card sharp.
With each hand she won, the temperature at the table rose another degree. Here were four beefy, hard-core spacers who considered themselves the best card sharps in the outer system, being trounced by a woman who wouldn’t even accept the measly stakes on the table. “Sorry, don’t smoke,” Leslie would say, pushing away the hand-rolled cigarettes on the table. “Let’s just do this for fun, okay?”
The four men at the table grumbled and griped, reaching for the bottle on the table, apparently indifferent to the fact that they were ripped while Leslie was stone sober. While Lynn went to the rusting coffee urn to refill her mug, I caught a glimpse of Van Sant whispering in Young Bill’s ear. The young man’s face colored slightly; he glanced furtively in his first-mother’s direction, but the pilot already had him by the hand and was leading him out the door. When Lynn turned around again, her son was gone. She shot me a look; I shrugged, pretending innocence, and she reluctantly settled back against the wall, nervously glancing between the door and the card table.
The scenario might have remained tense but little more had B.F. LeRoy not walked in. The recently deposed general manager was accompanied by two cronies; all three were ripped to the gills. They slumped down at an adjacent table, each nursing a flask of liquor, and watched Leslie stomp the other poker players for awhile until Butt Face belched loudly.
“If she loses the next hand,” he said, “I wanna see her tits.”
The wardroom fell silent, the overlapping conversation falling away. Leslie’s face didn’t change. She stared at the four cards in her hand, trying to ignore the surly laughte
r around her. I glanced at Lynn; she had already put down her mug and was standing erect, her hands on her hips.
Leslie calmly pulled a ten-of-hearts out of her hand and placed it on the table. One of the men sitting across the table from her produced a queen from his hand and slapped it down on top of her card.
“Wanna see her tits,” LeRoy said more loudly. “Wanna see what they look like.”
Leslie swallowed hard, then looked up at her partners and managed a nervous grin. “C’mon, guys,” she said softly. “Let’s keep this friendly.”
They glared at her, unmoved by her appeal. One of them, the man sitting closest to her, barely nodded his head, but the other two were staring at her with dark, baleful eyes. “You ain’t put nothing into the poke,” one of them said, lecherously emphasizing the last word. “This game’s all about risk, y’know?”
The other one’s eyes were fastened on her chest. “Like to see you put a little something on the table,” he said. “Might make it more interesting.”
“I think it’s interesting enough as it is.” Leslie calmly studied her hand. At the back of the room, Lynn was touching her jaw with her left hand, murmuring under her breath.
“No, no,” LeRoy muttered, leering openly. “I wanna see how interesting you can make it.” He held his own hands, palms upward, near his chest. “Come down here, you gotta show us yer tits before you play with the boys.”
It wasn’t about poker or sex, however much it seemed that way. It was about a roomful of men who had lost control of their lives and wanted to take it out on someone who was easy to harass. Leslie’s gender wasn’t what had set them off; it was the fact that she had come into their wretched burrow and, by her calm presence alone, had shown them how horrible their lives had become…and how they hated her for it.
The prelude to rape was a moment frozen in time: a room gone absolutely quiet, everyone completely still. From somewhere far down the corridor could be heard the sound of running feet, boots pounding against the hard stone floor. A tall, skinny man near the wardroom entrance silently pushed the door shut and stood against it, arms folded across his chest.
Leslie didn’t see this, but she sensed the change in attitude. She carefully folded her hand, then, eyes downcast, she wordlessly scooted back her chair, stood up, and began walking away from the table.
LeRoy pushed back his own chair and stood up. Two of the men sitting at the table did the same.
“Oh no, you don’t,” LeRoy quickly stepped in front of Leslie. “I’ll be damned if I ain’t leaving without getting a going-away party.”
Leslie stopped in her tracks, her eyes glancing each way at the men who were beginning to encircle her. Lynn started to move toward her, but suddenly found herself surrounded as well. She tried to push through. Three men grabbed her from behind, two of them wrenching her arms behind her back while the third jammed a dirty cap against her face, cutting off her last shout.
Before I could do anything, I was grabbed from behind by two more men and was hauled back against the wall. I attempted to pull free, and in the next instant I felt the sharp tip of a jackknife against my throat. “Try it, buddy,” I heard someone say, “and I’ll carve you a new mouth.”
All around us, helium miners were chuckling, whispering to each other. I could hear someone pounding against the door, but the skinny guy who had put his back against it; like everyone else, he had a scornful, expectant grin on his face.
Leslie’s eyes were locked with LeRoy’s. “Don’t do this,” she said softly, trying one last time to reason with him. “If you do…”
“Fuck that,” LeRoy said. “What I do won’t matter shit in the long run. This base is mine, sweet thing, and nobody’s going to take it from me.” He glanced around at the other men in the rec room. “Will it, guys?”
Scattered murmurs of assent from those who had surrounded us. Everyone else was too scared to interfere; the innocent were in silent conspiracy with the guilty. Leering at the woman, LeRoy’s hands moved to the front of his baggy trousers; there was the slow, ugly sound of his fly being unzipped. “We can do this easy,” he said, “or we can do it the…”
Whatever he was going to say next was lost in the agonized whuff! of his breath leaving his lungs as Leslie kicked her right foot straight up into his groin.
He doubled over, his hands clutching at his crotch, but before she could hit him again, the men standing behind Leslie grabbed her and savagely flung her to the floor. Then they were on her, pinioning her limbs to the filthy carpet with their knees.
Leslie cried out as one of them ripped open the front of her jumpsuit, clawing her skin with his dirty nails. LeRoy painfully straightened up, his eyes seething with murder. “Fuckin’ bitch!” he gasped as he lurched toward her. His hands fumbled at his fly. “Gonna fuck you till you scream, you lesbo…!”
Then the door crashed open as a chair was hurled against it as a battering ram, and the man who had been standing against it was knocked aside as Saul, Young Bill, Yoshio, and Marianne Tillis charged into the room.
The skipper and Yoshio leaped upon the men who were holding Lynn; they were on the floor in a second, taken completely by surprise, with scarcely a couple of punches thrown. Yelling wildly, Young Bill attacked the two men who had pinned down Leslie. Before they were on their feet, he kicked one in the jaw and sent him reeling backward. The other one scuttled away, holding up his hands as if to protest his innocence.
The man restraining me relaxed his grip. I kicked backward blindly, felt the heel of my boot connect with his femur, heard him yell as his arms released me and the knife fell the floor. I shot my right elbow back; another lucky shot caught him straight in the center of his chest. He gasped and toppled to the floor.
His pal was already backing away. I didn’t know why until I heard Marianne Tillis shout: “Everyone freeze!”
I looked around, saw that she had a small-caliber revolver clutched in both hands. She was aiming at LeRoy.
“Move and you’re dead!” she yelled.
Still half-hunched over, LeRoy froze as everyone who had not been directly involved in the attempted rape moved back against the walls, as if trying to melt into the paint. Holding her ripped shirt against her scratched breasts, Leslie began crawling away as Young Bill stepped forward to help her off the floor.
As he did, Marianne’s line of fire was blocked for a moment. LeRoy saw his chance. Perhaps it was a desperate attempt to regain control, or frustration over a sundered career, or perhaps a last suicidal impulse. Whatever the reason, he howled and flung himself straight toward the new general manager.
“Down!” Tillis shouted. She didn’t wait for Young Bill or Leslie to react; still keeping the gun on LeRoy, she quickly stepped to the left and, in the next instant, squeezed the trigger.
There was a sudden bang! that reverberated off the walls as the .22 bullet hit LeRoy in the right shoulder. He staggered backward, and for a second it seemed as if he would drop, yet like a wounded bull in blood rage, he stubbornly lurched forward again, and didn’t stop until Tillis fired again.
Once more, the rec room was hammered by the sound of gunfire. The second bullet punched a hole in B.F. LeRoy’s chest. The third shot was unnecessary; all it did was splatter his brains across the floor.
Utter silence in the rec room, save for Leslie softly crying in Young Bill’s arms.
Everyone cleared a wide circle around the Explorer’s crew and B.F. LeRoy’s corpse. Tillis was still holding the revolver in firing position, heedless of the dark blood slowly flowing across the floor. The close air held two new odors: gunpowder and blood.
“Get your people out of here, Captain,” she murmured over her shoulder to Montrose, never taking her eyes off the men in the room.
Young Bill was already helping Leslie out the door. As I walked across the room, I noticed that the men around me seemed to have diminished in size. The knife that had been held at my throat lay abandoned on the floor; whoever owned it was too frightened to pick it u
p. Lynn seemed reluctant to leave; her face was hot with anger, but Yoshio whispered something in her ear that persuaded her to slowly walk out of the room.
Montrose was the last to leave. He paused next to Tillis. “Do you need any…?”
“No,” she said coldly. “You’ve done enough already, thank you.” She gave him one final glance. “Now get out of here.”
We were halfway down the corridor when Jamie Van Sant suddenly emerged from behind a half-open hatch. She went straight to Young Bill, and while the rest of the crew hovered nearby the two of them had a short, whispered conversation. He nodded his head; she hugged him tight and held on as the kid looked up at Montrose.
“She wants to leave, Captain,” he said quietly. “If she doesn’t…”
Montrose hesitated. His dark eyes flicked back and forth between them. Whatever was going on with these kids mattered, but not right now. “No time to pack,” he said to Jamie, and she nodded, still clinging to Bill. “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go.”
We were at the entrance hatch, beginning to climb up the ladder to the EVA dome, when a gunshot rang out from far down the corridor. We stopped and looked around as it echoed off the rock walls. Then we heard the crash of another gunshot, reverberating through the catacombs of Valhalla.