by Joe Vasicek
The pounding on the airlock had died down, but he knew it would be suicide to go out again. From the way her father had handed her over, he probably wouldn’t take her back even if they could get through.
Jeremiah sighed, pondering his options. He could drop her off at one of the many local mining ports, but all of those were so small and isolated, she’d probably end up as a slave. It was the same with the nearest stars, too; none of them had any settlements large enough to give her a chance at striking out on her own. The nearest suitable station was at Alpha Oriana, on the other side of the local star cluster, but that was nearly four and a half parsecs away—a three month journey.
“Here,” he said, “why don’t you come on board?” The airlock was starting to feel cramped anyways. He held up his wrist console and keyed open the main door. It hissed open slowly, revealing a short corridor leading to the narrow, windowless cabin that served as his home between stars.
The Ariadne was, for all intents and purposes, a one-man cargo hauler with just enough customizations to make her habitable for long-term interstellar voyages. Modular compartments lined the gray metal walls from floor to ceiling, while the periodic hand-holds served as a reminder not to take the artificial gravity for granted. The cabin itself was only a little wider than the corridor, so that when the cot was folded down from the wall, two people could only pass each other if one of them turned sideways. The helmet-like dream monitor sat in a half-closed ceiling compartment directly above the cot, with a control board and small display screen on the nearby wall.
The smell of old sweat and stale body odor made him blush; if he’d known he’d be bringing a girl on board, he would have cleaned up a bit first. He opened one of the larger wall compartments and hastily threw a pile of old clothes into the universal washer unit, then turned and unfolded the cot, trying not to think about the fact that there was only one bed between the two of them.
“Here,” he said, motioning for the girl to sit down. Her eyes widened with fear, and she hugged her chest a little tighter.
“No,” he said quickly, blood rising to his cheeks. “It’s not—no.” Stepping past her, he opened another compartment and pulled out a jumpsuit like the one he was wearing. “It might be a little large on you, but it’s all I’ve got.”
He held the jumpsuit out to her until she took it. While she tried to figure how to put it on, he ducked through the next doorway into the cockpit.
The wide forward window gave a magnificent view of the planet below: a blue ice giant with long, wind-carved cloud decks and a swirling dark spot at the equator, large enough to swallow a small world. Megiddo Station curved away overhead, its aging hull pocked from decades of micro-meteoroid impacts and exposure to cosmic radiation. A handful of small shuttles drifted past as the Ariadne spun with the station, but the scanners indicated that the local space was almost completely devoid of traffic.
Jeremiah relaxed as his body settled into the familiar contours of the pilot’s chair. He flipped a switch on the right armrest, and the three main screens at his station flickered on, displaying the Ariadne’s diagnostic and technical readouts. He keyed a series of other switches, and the various control boards and indicator panels hummed as they came to life.
The sound of soft footsteps made him turn. The girl stood behind him, his short-sleeved utility jumpsuit a little baggy on her thin body. Since there was no other place to sit in the cockpit besides the pilot’s chair, she stood in the doorway behind him, staring out the forward window.
“Uh, station control,” said Jeremiah, “this is the Ariadne, requesting permission to proceed to jump point alpha.”
He transmitted his flight plan data and began the warm up sequence for the main engine. The line buzzed with muffled static as the traffic controllers processed his request. For a gut-wrenching moment, he wondered what would happen if the controller ordered him to submit to boarding.
“Copy,” came a heavily accented voice on the other line, dispelling his doubts. “Proceed to alpha.”
Jeremiah breathed a sigh of relief and gripped the flight stick. The engines came alive with a soft, low purr that reverberated through the Ariadne’s bulkheads. The planet drifted lazily in the window as the station spun around, putting them into position for the maneuver. He nosed the flight stick forward as the coordinate map projected his flight path, then pulled down the lever to undock and separate from the station.
For a split second, a nauseous falling sensation gripped his stomach. Behind him, the girl gasped and staggered, hitting the wall with a loud thump.
“Oh stars—are you okay? Just—just hang on.”
He eased back on the stick to spin the Ariadne 180 degrees, trying to execute the maneuver as smoothly as possible. Despite his best efforts, however, the ship pulled some significant torque. Behind him, the girl collapsed to the hard metal floor, sliding to the base of the pilot’s chair.
“Sorry,” he muttered, cringing as she moaned. He wanted to get out and help her, but couldn’t do anything until the maneuver was complete.
The girl grabbed the armrest of his chair and pulled herself wearily to her knees as the arc of the station came back into view. Against the backdrop of the enormous planet, it looked so tiny—a double ring of human habitation in the midst of the foreboding blackness of space. She stopped moaning and froze, staring out the window as if entranced.
“Approaching jump point alpha,” Jeremiah announced over the radio. “Stand by.”
He checked the target coordinates and depressed the switch, holding his breath as he did so. The sounds of the engines and instruments around him faded, and the walls pressed in on him even as he felt his body shrink. His vision began to spin, and for an instant, it seemed as if the universe itself had turned inside out, leaving them stranded on the wrong side of reality. Then, as quickly as it had begun, everything returned to normal. The combined light of millions of stars replaced the station and planet, filling the cockpit with the soft, milky glow of deep space.
The girl responded by vomiting explosively across the floor.
“Here,” said Jeremiah, climbing quickly out of his chair. “Don’t worry—I’ve got it.” She gave him an embarrassed look as he helped her to her feet, then wiped her mouth and returned to the cabin, collapsing on the cot.
Jeremiah stepped past her to the bathroom unit and pulled out some disinfectant and a rag. The thick stench had already filled the ship, so he activated the odor scrubbers and began running the ventilation system at full power. The roar of the fans drowned out all other noise as the recycled air began to circulate.
“There,” he said, stepping back after cleaning the floor. “That wasn’t so bad.”
The girl sat on the cot with her back against the corner, hugging her knees against her chest. She stared off at the opposite wall, her expression blank. As the ventilators roared in the narrow cabin, the hard truth began to sink in. Jeremiah swallowed and glanced nervously around the room; he’d spent almost the last three years living in this confined space, but this was the first time he’d been here with a girl. It made the place feel more cramped than ever.
“Here,” he said, his gaze settling on the dream monitor overhead. “We’ve got some time—why don’t you hook up while I get things settled?”
The girl watched him with a mix of curiosity and apprehension as he pulled the device down from its compartment. It hung from a retractable stand, wires jutting out from a cluster of nodes in the back and feeding back into the control board overhead. She must have recognized its function, however, because she leaned forward and parted her hair to expose the neural socket in the back of her neck. He inclined the upper end of the cot to accommodate her before plugging her into the monitor and shutting the visor. She settled down with her hands in her lap, then relaxed and grew limp as the indicator lights on the monitor’s side began to flash green and red.
Jeremiah stood up and breathed a sigh of relief. With the dream monitor switched on, the girl might as well be
in her own private quarters. At the very least, it would keep her occupied until he could figure out what to do next.
Three months—it was going to be a long voyage.
Chapter 2
Delta Oriana, the Gaian Imperial catalog entry read. Class K dwarf; .68 standard solar masses; 3 planets, 8 major moons. Charted settlements:
Jeremiah’s mind drifted as he skimmed the article. Like most of the catalog entries, he suspected it was at least two or three decades out of date. The peer-to-peer database was even less reliable, however: communication lags between Outworld stars meant that updates were contradictory and frequently laced with political rhetoric and planetism.
Still, the official entry seemed pretty useful; it had a lot of good information on the founding of Megiddo Station and the people who had settled there. The most interesting part was that the original colonists hadn’t come from the Coreward Stars, but from a frontier system not far from his birth world at Edenia. Perhaps, at some point in the not too distant past, the two societies hadn’t been all that different.
“You’ll meet a lot of strange people on your journeys,” his father had told him. “Before I met your mother and settled here on Edenia, I saw my fair share of bizarre cultures. I once spent a year at a colony of third generation nudists, who thought I was indecent for wearing clothes.”
“You mean everyone was naked? No one wore any clothes at all?”
“No one. Though they had some mighty artistic tattoos.”
“What else is out there, Dad?”
Jeremiah still remembered how his father had smiled at his innocent question. “You’ll find out soon enough. When you’re of an age to wander the stars and make your fortune, the old Ariadne will be yours, and you’ll be free to explore all those worlds for yourself.”
At his father’s words, a lump had risen in Jeremiah’s throat. Free to explore, but never to see my home again.
“Is something the matter, son?”
“Nothing,” he had said, wiping his nose with the back of his hand. “I’m fine.”
“It’s the part about leaving home, is it?”
Afraid his voice would crack if he spoke, Jeremiah had only nodded.
“I know exactly how you feel. For the first month after I left my birth world behind, I felt as if I had died a hundred times over. But if I had never left, I never would have met your mother, and you never would have been born, would you?”
“I—I guess.”
“It’s a hard tradition to follow, but it keeps our people strong. In my travels, I came across a few colonies that wouldn’t send out their sons to wander the stars—or more importantly, wouldn’t allow outsiders to marry their daughters. None of those colonies have survived—not one. They’ve all perished, either from disease or infighting or some other evil brought about by their own weakness. And that is why the traditions of our fathers are so important, even if they are hard to live by. It’s only through our traditions that the Outworlds remain strong.”
Jeremiah had said nothing, but sniffled a little as he thought about how difficult it would be to leave his birth world forever. His father knelt down and put an arm around his shoulder.
“Jeremiah, let me tell you something. Someday out there, you’ll meet a girl whose beauty will make the gardens of Edenia pale in comparison. Her smile will warm you in a way the stars never could, and your feelings for her will fill a void in your heart you never knew was there. When that day comes, you’ll know you’ve found your home.”
The noise of someone stirring in the cabin brought him back to the present. I wonder what Dad would have thought of this girl, he thought to himself as he rose from his chair. He probably would have told me to keep looking.
“What’s up?” he asked aloud as he walked into the cabin. “Had enough of the dream monitor?”
The girl stood next to the cot, one hand on the wall for support. She patted her stomach and gave him an apologetic look. Blood rushed to Jeremiah’s cheeks. You idiot, he chided himself, she’s probably starving.
“Here,” he said, squeezing quickly past her. “Let me get you something.”
Her eyes lit up as he activated the food synthesizer in the wall and pulled out a pair of bowls from the retractable dish rack. The growling of her stomach was so loud, he wondered for a moment if something on the Ariadne had malfunctioned. Her cheeks blushed deep red, as if she’d committed some horrible faux pas by failing to hide her own hunger.
“It’s all right,” he muttered, for himself as much as for her. “I’m sorry, I forgot about—stars, I’m an idiot.” Even though he knew she couldn’t understand him, he felt compelled to apologize somehow.
While the synthesizer went to work, he pulled out a jar of dehydrated fruit slices from a side compartment. “Here,” he said, motioning for her to hold out her hands. She hesitated, looking confused, so he took her hands and formed them into a cupping shape. They were cold, but surprisingly soft.
He filled them with a generous helping of the fruit. “There you go; that should be good for starters.”
Her eyes met his, and the look of pure gratitude on her face took him aback. His cheeks grew warm, and his heart beat a little bit harder. As she nibbled on the dried fruit, her lips turned up in the barest hint of a smile, and his breath nearly caught in his throat. Stars, he thought to himself, there’s a real live girl with me on this ship.
Few thoughts had ever filled him with so much terror.
* * * * *
When the synthesizer had finished, they sat cross-legged on the floor with their bowls, knees touching for lack of space. Jeremiah showed the girl how to crumble the dried fruit and mix it in with the tasteless gray synthmeal, stirring the pieces in until they reconstituted enough to make the food more palatable. It wasn’t the best, but she ate it ravenously, making him kick himself for forgetting to feed her earlier.
“Do you have a name?” he asked as she started on her second bowl. She glanced up at him and smiled blankly, only confirming that she didn’t understand a word he said.
“Here,” he tried again, pointing at his chest. “Jeremiah. Can you say it? Jeremiah.”
“Jerem-ahra?”
“Yes,” he said, “I am Jeremiah. Jeremiah.”
“Jerem-ahra,” she repeated, struggling with the pronunciation.
He shrugged. “Close enough, I guess. And you?”
She stared at him blankly.
“Jeremiah,” he repeated, pointing at himself before pointing at her.
Her eyes lit up as she caught on. “Noemi,” she said, pointing to herself. “Jerem-ahra, Noemi.”
“No-em-ee?” he asked. She nodded vigorously and pointed to herself again.
“Noemi.”
Interesting name, Jeremiah thought to himself. It reminded him of a girl on his birth world by the name of Naomi. The similarity between the two names seemed like a confirmation that she wasn’t all that different from him after all.
I wonder what all this is like for her, he thought to himself as she scarfed down the last of her food. With the baggy short-sleeve jumpsuit and her hair all tousled and uncombed, she looked like a refugee—which in many ways, she was.
“How old are you?” he asked, carefully enunciating his words. She set down her bowl and stared at him with her deep green eyes, not comprehending.
“Here,” he said, pointing to himself and flashing all ten of his fingers twice. “Twenty standard years. You?”
She bit her lip and pantomimed his actions. When he shook his head and pointed again at her, she smiled nervously and held her hands palm up as if to apologize.
Jeremiah shrugged. “Eh, forget about it.” She didn’t look to be much younger than him anyway—maybe eighteen or nineteen.
But that raised a host of other questions. If she was only nineteen, what did she think about leaving her home? Jeremiah had left on his eighteenth birthday, but at least he’d had time to prepare himself for it, while Noemi hadn’t even been able to gather any personal belo
ngings or put on a decent change of clothes. Stuck on a deep space freighter barely larger than a simple hauler, subject to the whims of a man with whom she had no way to talk or communicate—-for all she knew, he was planning to take her to a slave market and sell her. He could get away with it, too.
“Don’t worry,” he muttered, “I would never do that.” She glanced at him for a few awkward moments, then stood up and returned to the cot. It wasn’t like there was anywhere else to go, after all.
“Here,” he said, rising to his feet to pull down the dream monitor. “Ready?”
She silently pulled back her hair to expose the socket in the back of her neck. He fit the monitor gently over her head and connected the neural jacks. The device hummed softly as it came to life, and her body grew limp.
Poor girl, Jeremiah thought to himself as he looked at her. After all she’d been through, the least he could do was help her escape into the solace of a virtual world.
He turned from her abruptly; it felt uncomfortably voyeuristic of him to stare at her when she was plugged in and unconscious. If he’d had a second monitor, he could jack in and interact with her through the virtual world, but the Ariadne was far too small for that. Better to leave her alone.
Still, before he left, he draped the blanket over her limp, unresponsive body.
* * * * *
As with virtually all Outworld societies in the north second quadrant, Jeremiah read, the communities at Delta Oriana have strict codes and social mores prohibiting extra-marital sexual relations. In particular, the older settlements place a high value on female virginity, considering it a major point of family honor. Several accounts document how visitors who violated this honor were hunted down and killed by jealous male relatives, in some cases as far away as the New Pleiades.
He stared at the words, trying to make sense of their meaning. The way Noemi’s father had handed her over, Jeremiah didn’t know whether she was supposed to be just another passenger or … something else. He remembered all too well how Master Korha had made them clasp hands, making the sign of the cross as if to marry them—but surely, if that had been his intent, he would have at least left his daughter with more than a skimpy chemise.