by Watson Davis
I growled, tightening my hands into fists, rolling my shoulders, cracking my neck. “OK. Fine. I’ll come to this damned group session.”
“Excellent.” His voice sounded genuinely happy.
I palmed the door control, opening it up.
He blinked, that confused expression back on his face, looking down at my slippers. “Wait, you’re not going to wear those are you?”
I looked down at the fuzzy, bear-claw slippers I’d gotten in a trade with a junker, a TR41 carburetor for bear-claw slippers and a trigger mechanism, and wriggled my toes. “Why not? They’re comfy.”
Waste Management
“You’re not sore?” My supervisor, Dianne Promer, Senior Waste Management Tech, waited for me at the bottom of the ladder, standing on the rickety catwalk, an oversized pack she’d never worn before in our three days together on her back, leaning against the thin railing. The lights inside her helmet bathed her face in a bluish-white light, draining all the color out of her already pale face, but leaving a look of incredulity. “Most of our rookies can barely move after the first couple of days.”
“Nah.” I watched my feet move from the rungs of the ladder, slimy synthsteel half-circles hanging precariously from a single, crud-encrusted ferrocrete spine, to the catwalk, a metal grate that seemed far too flimsy for even one of us to stand on. I eased myself down, legs stiff, hands outstretched to both sides of me, hovering over the rails. Once moderately steady, I looked up, smiling at her, our eyes meeting. “Acclimating to new movements can be rough, but I’m fine, not sore, been staying hydrated and getting lots of sack time. Don’t worry about me, I’ve been through worse.”
“Harumph.” She turned, striding down the catwalk, arms swinging freely, like it was the most natural thing in the world, like she wasn’t causing the whole world to tilt with every step.
I stomped along behind her, an awkward shambling wreck, hunched over, legs shaking, the catwalk swinging dangerously, my hands ready to latch on to the railing and hold on for dear life, expecting the whole thing to tumble over at any moment, dumping both of us in the overflow of toxic chemicals still streaming through the channels beneath us even with the normal waste products that flowed through this tube shunted aside. I sipped at the tube in my helmet, getting some water into my parched mouth.
“There we go.” Dianne pressed her hips against the rail, holding on to it with her hands right at her waist, leaning over the side swinging out into the darkness. The lighting element rose up from the back of her suit, rotating, whizzing as the light grew in intensity and narrowed in focus, piercing the darkness, concentrating on a collection of pipes down near the water’s edge.
I stumbled up beside her, peering down into the darkness beneath us, my gaze following her light along that grouping of pipes. Brown liquid rushed beneath it, white-tipped waves swirling, bits of debris and trash carried along with human excrement.
“See there?” She pointed. “A section of the pipe is missing.”
I squinted, following along, tracing the pipes until I found one with a section missing. “Yep. I see it. How did that happen? Did it get pulled off in the flow?”
“Nah,” she said. “Someone stripped it off. Freaking thieves and vandals sneak down here sometimes and hack off sections. They sell it to recyclers who probably sell it back to the people who we buy the pipe from in the first damned place.”
“People will do some stupid stuff for money.” I couldn’t imagine anything paying enough to induce me to put on a hazmat diving suit and immerse myself in industrial waste just to pull out random pipes. Didn’t make any sense.
“Well.” She turned toward me, her light shining into my eyes. “The point here is what stupid thing you’re about to do for money.”
Wincing, turning my head away, I held my arms up to block the light.
She said, “Chop, chop. We don’t have all night.”
“What do you want me to do?” I shrugged. “Pull some pipe out of my ass?”
Her light switched off, leaving me barely able to see. I blinked my eyes and shook my head. When my vision cleared, she had removed the pack from her back, set it down flat on the catwalk, and opened it, revealing several lengths of pipe. She patted one black tube. “This one should do.”
She stood up and backed away.
I stared at the pipe for a second and looked over the side of the catwalk into the darkness where the pipe had been. “You mean, climb all the way down there and attach this piece of pipe in there?”
“What? You thought you were going to walk around down here pulling levers, pushing buttons, clearing ducts all day? I trained you on how to cut and insert pipes. Consider this a test.”
“Ma’am, yes, ma’am.” I snatched the pipe she had indicated out of the case.
“Hold up.” She moved toward me, gesturing for me to come to her. “Let me check your suit.”
“Everything should be correct.” I lifted my arms, holding the pipe up. “My grandfather taught me to always read the manual of my gear and make sure I knew how to use it. He said take your time and do it right if you value your life.”
“Hmm.” She tugged at my suit, my belts, my oxygen tanks, my batteries. “Looks OK.”
“Great. Thank you for checking.” I didn’t tell her that I’d told her so even though I wanted to. Instead, I looked around until I found a ladder leading down to the small ferrocrete outcropping running along beside the pipes.
Dianne still stood where I had left her, her spotlight shining down onto the section I had to replace. I waved at her and she waved back. Her voice crackled in my ear, “I’ve seen rookies who said they were so sore they could barely move who made it down quicker than you did.”
“Maybe that’s why they were so sore.” But taking the hint, I stopped walking, readjusted my grip on the pipe, and started jogging, even if jogging on slimy, slick ferrocrete didn’t seem to me to be in my best interests.
“Maybe you should heed your grandfather’s advice a little less when it comes to taking your time.”
I kept my mouth shut, biting back retorts about how she maybe shouldn’t talk about my grandfather. Fuming, cursing to myself, thinking more about what I wanted to say than what I was doing, I knelt down by the missing section. Thick, greenish goo pumped out of the open pipe, gushing down into the water surging below. I patted the pipe, looking up toward Dianne, her light blinding me. “Should we get whoever owns this feed to shut it off before I start? Or is there a shut-off further down there?”
“We don’t have time for that, rook.” She sounded bored and irritated even though her voice was crackling and tinny through my speakers.
“Right. Yes, ma’am.” I pulled out my multi-tool, set it to cutter, and began the slow process of slicing away the ragged remains of the old pipe, hoping this goop wasn’t flammable, trying to fit the new one in there, on my hands and knees on the slippery ferrocrete, climbing over the pipes to reach the breach. The replacement was the right diameter thanks to Dianne’s keen eye, but a bit too long, so I had to shave it back using the cutter. Sweat ran down from my forehead, stinging my eyes, fogging my goggles. Done with cutting, I converted the multi-tool over to welding mode.
A red light suspended from the top of the tunnel began to flash; a buzzer sounded. I looked back toward Dianne, raising my hand to block her light, squinting to try to see her, but she was invisible in the glare. “That doesn’t sound good. That means the tunnel’s about to be reflooded, right?”
“Yeah. You’ve got time…” Crackle “…but you better hurry it up.”
“Right.” I jammed the length of pipe into place, fighting against the flow of goo, the weight it added to the pipe, my arms trembling holding it in place while I tried to get a good seal on the weld I was making, sparks flying up.
The ferrocrete beneath me began to shake. The deep rumbling vibrations pushed the air from my lungs. The pipe jumped and danced in my grip. “I’ve got a bad feeling about this. The operators upstairs know we’re down h
ere, right?”
Dianne didn’t answer. The shaking got worse; the rushing sound grew louder.
“Dianne?” I turned off my welder, let go of the section of the pipe I’d so carefully placed, the welding half done. “Did you check with the operators?”
Her light fell, tumbling down in a lazy spiral, the light flashing across the tunnel, far down the tunnel, enough to see a wall of dark fluid coming my way, enough to see that Dianne wasn’t up on the catwalk anymore. I turned and ran back to the ladder up to the next level, calling out, “Dianne? Are you OK? Where are you? Can you hear me? The tube’s getting flooded. You have to get out. Dianne?”
I reached toward the ladder, my fingers stretching out to it just as the fluid hit, driving me face first into the ladder, cracking the faceplate of my helmet, the rushing liquid pushing at me, tearing at me. I grabbed at the ladder but misjudged it and missed, the current propelling me down the tunnel, slamming me against the walls, against pipes, the catwalk.
I pawed at the emergency beacon on my tool belt, my fingers clumsy and bumbling, finally getting the pouch open but the beacon was gone. I know I’d loaded it. It was in the manual as part of the checklist. I know I’d followed the manual.
The lights in my helmet winked out. I checked my power reserves but instead of being full as they should have been, they were empty.
I called out with my onboard computer, knowing that the signal would be too weak without my suit’s systems’ amplification, trying anyway, frantically trying to grab hold of something, losing track of which way was up or down. The speakers by my ears hissed static, squealed, and went silent, leaving only the bubbling rumble of the thick liquid until I slammed into something and stopped moving.
I crawled out of the flooded tunnel, climbing up through one of the secondary access hatches, every bit of me aching, every joint wrenched, twisted, and torn, unable to breathe too deeply because of the protesting from my ribs, bone grinding on bone. A faint light came from somewhere beyond the door, giving me just enough to see.
Brackish goo dribbling off of my suit, pooling on the ferrocrete floor of the anonymous subchamber in which I found myself, I pulled my non-functional helmet off, gasping for breath through the pain. Even the noxious air in that place, poisoned by the gases and fluids circulating through the tunnels below, was better than the closed-in, sweat-drenched, carbon dioxide-rich air inside my suit with its tanks no longer circulating.
I collapsed into an exhausted heap, not even bothering to try one more time to send out a distress signal from my onboard.
I don’t know how long I lay there. I may have lost consciousness; I may have fallen asleep from the exhaustion. After some indeterminate time, I heard something, voices, people talking. I forced my eyes open and raised my hands, rubbing the caked-on gunk from them.
I would have called out for help; I intended to but I heard a man’s voice I recognized, Minh Tonder, one of the workers in my crew, saying, “The locator says her body is in here.”
My body?
“Too bad she didn’t listen to us and take care of her gear,” a woman’s voice, tinged with sarcasm, said: a woman’s voice I knew, Neida Bedney, another one of my co-workers. “Oh, no! I’m out of power and I misjudged the time! Glub, glub, glub.”
Someone else laughed.
I slid my multi-tool into my hand, fingertip on the on button, hiding it beneath me, tucked up against my hip.
Their footsteps came closer, their tread heavy, their suits creaking, their tools clanking together. I lay still, barely breathing, eyes shut, trying to get a feel for where everyone was.
“There she is,” Minh said. “Damn. She had enough strength to crawl out? I thought her body was just caught in one of the ladders down there.”
“Is she still breathing?” Neida whispered, a tinge of fear in her voice.
“She’s a tough little bitch.” A new voice, Luna Something-or-other, I’d only nodded to her when Dianne introduced the team on my first day, which seemed like an eternity ago now. “I’ll push her back in and let the flow finish her off.”
Her footsteps clomped toward me but I waited until she touched me, wedging her hands under my shoulder, beginning to push me toward the access. I spun, twisting out of her grip, bringing my multi-tool around to where I thought her face would be, triggering the multi-tool.
I hadn’t remembered the setting; I expected the cutting function to engage, but I’d been welding last. The multi-tool roared to life. The blue flame seared into her face, through her faceplate, her goggles, through her eye, burning through her cheek, turning her face into a blackened, bubbling, steaming mess. She shrieked, pulling away, hands rising, falling, collapsing onto her back.
I lunged to my feet, holding the multi-tool before me like a talisman. Minh and Neida froze, staring, not believing. I disengaged my multi-tool, removing my finger from the button, letting the fire die.
Neida gagged, bringing her hand to her mouth. “What did she do to Luna?”
I charged toward Minh, the bigger of the two of them. He yelled, drawing his right fist back, preparing for a mighty blow. I drove my elbow into his cheek, dropping him unconscious to the floor.
I turned to Neida, snarling, gasping to breathe, hoping she didn’t see my physical weakness. Instead of charging me and taking advantage, she stepped back, terror writ across her face.
I tapped my temple, bringing my onboard back online. I glared at Neida and I think she wet herself. Raising my fist and edging toward her, I said, “We need to talk.”
I teased the door open slowly, cursing at its creaking, stumbling into the control room with my multi-tool configured as the biggest wrench it could make, arm cocked, ready to strike.
“What took you guys so long? United’s game is going to start soon.” Dianne Promer sat with her heels on the control panel, leaning back with her left hand hanging down, a cold bottle of beer dangling from her fingertips, chunks of ice sliding down its sides, the monitors muted except for one that showed a holovid pre-game show talking about the teams in an upcoming match, her back toward me. “Hope you cut out an extra length of pipe for me.”
I tapped my multi-tool on the back of her chair, the edge knocking against her head.
“Hey!” Her feet slipped off the control panel. She raised her hands, ducking her head, bending forward in the chair to get away from the wrench rapping on her skull, emptying the beer on herself. “Nemesis damn it.”
She jumped to her feet, ready to say something. But whatever words she’d been about to say died on her lips.
“You were right.” I smiled, slapping the multi-tool into my palm. “I am feeling a bit sore.”
My Handler -- Part II
I relaxed in the nice comfy bed in my own private room in the emergency department. Manacles fit snuggly around each wrist, chains connecting them to the sides of the bed, an IV drip attached to my left arm, the tape pulling at my skin, the medi-comp beeping, air cast around my ribs. I concentrated on breathing in shallow sips of air, on not breathing too deeply, on not smelling the hospital scent of vinegar and lemons with an undercurrent of old age and death, on not moving in general because of all my aching joints and contusions. I wondered if the painkillers were ever going to kick in or if I was stuck with this, if this was as good as it would get for a while.
The door creaked open, the sounds of people talking slipping in along with a dour-faced Edward Craft. Glaring at me with a nasty look, he eased the door shut, shaking his head. He trudged over, picked up a chair, set it next to the bed, and groaned as he lowered himself into it. He smacked his lips and shook his head.
I said, “Nice to see you, too.”
“You told me you were getting along with your new co-workers. You told me you liked the job.” He gestured toward me, looking me up and down. “And now, this? What the hell?”
“Maybe I’m not so good at reading people.” I sighed, which hurt, so I winced.
“You think?” He leaned his forearms onto the railing.
“I’m not expecting everyone I meet to love me,” I said, his cheap aftershave, laced with alcohol-stink, threatening to gag me. I shrugged, pulling away from him, squinting at the stinging in my eyes from his malodorous air. “I just didn’t expect quite this much hate. I mean, they talked to me, smiled at me, shook my hand when they met me. They seemed friendly.”
“Yeah, well. Maybe you can get your old cell back at Calderone.”
“My old cell?” I grunted, shifting my position to something more upright, wishing I’d kept still. “What are you talking about?”
Edward tapped his head. “Did you have some head trauma the doctors didn’t tell me about? You killed a human being. Did you forget that part?”
“No, I just didn’t forget the part where it was self-defense.”
“I don’t know what to do with you.” He threw his hands up in the air melodramatically, bringing them down to smack against the railing in punctuation to his words. “I told you the first day we met that you needed to start acting like a civilized human being. We’ve had you go through session after session of counseling at the halfway house, and you still go and pull this stunt?”
“How did I pull the stunt? They stranded me in the lower reaches of the industrial waste tunnels and then tried to drown me and make it look like a rookie accident. How is that on me?”
“Civilized people don’t take a blowtorch to another person’s face.” Edward stood up, and kicked the chair, beginning to pace. “Once a civilized person has found a way to get away from her assailants, she calls the cops and lets them handle it. She doesn’t hunt down her final assailant and break seven of the woman’s bones.”
“Maybe you’re right.” I shook my head and lay back, at the white paneled ceiling with one panel discolored from a leaky pipe, looking up at the sedate and calming lights. “Maybe you all should send me back to my jail cell. I’m never going to run away from a fight.”