by Tammy Salyer
Disgusted, Brady turns his back and walks to the kitchen. Vitruzzi waits calmly, trying to will me to reconsider. She doesn’t know how stubborn I am. Or how dangerous Rajcik is.
Finally, she says, “Have it your way, Erikson.” She stands up, concluding the discussion. “Meet me at the hangar at 1600 and we’ll see if Rajcik has responded.”
“So what am I supposed to do until then?”
“Whatever you want. I’ll take you over to Venus’s and you can get that shower. Come on.”
As I pass in front of Brady, he reaches out and grabs me by the arm. I tense up and face him, ready for whatever might be coming, but the look on his face isn’t what I expect. I see weariness and resignation just under the surface of his weathered skin. His anger is still there, but subdued. We look at each other for a drawn out second and then he lets go. The message is clear: Don’t be a fool.
* * *
Venus’s dwelling is similar to Brady’s, just a bit smaller and wildly untidy. No one is home when Vitruzzi drops me off, but she assures me Venus will be around soon. Inside, electronic consoles, maps, unidentifiable parts, and machine schematics are strewn everywhere. An engine of some sort lays disassembled on part of the floor, pieces of it and other mechanical equipment dumped helter-skelter all around it like an asteroid field. It’s difficult to tell what’s supposed to be furniture and what’s just taking up space.
The room is dim, and after a short search, I’m able to locate the controls for a ceiling panel. Activating it rotates the panels toward the brightest part of the sky and catches the light, reflecting it back inside, but the room doesn’t look any better.
It probably wouldn’t be difficult to steal a land transport and run. But where would I go, and what good would it do me? As far as I know, the only communication link-up on this planet is here in this little settlement and I don’t think I could manage to steal an interstellar craft and fly it by myself. Could I get Vilbrandt to help me? I dismiss that thought immediately. Even if he knows anything about flying, I don’t trust him any farther than I can throw him and definitely don’t want to be in a situation where I’m forced to rely on him.
Forget it. The best thing for me to do right now is wait, no matter how difficult it is.
A narrow door leads into the bathroom. The shower is a round metal cylinder that requires an upward step of about half a meter to get inside, the lower portion a catchment and filtration system to either recycle the water or direct it to another use. Stripping down and leaving my clothes on the floor, I carefully balance the ’Bad on the top of the stall. Pushing the single round button on the wall dumps enough water on my head to get my hair and body wet. The temperature is lukewarm, probably regulated to stay exactly that. Finding a soapy gel in a tube on the floor, I lather up. It feels good to be in a shower with real water. Ships don’t carry much more than the essentials for the crew’s basic needs. Showering is done using a dry enzymatic powder that breaks down, rather than rinses off, all the dirt and grime on your skin, and is then scrubbed off with a microfiber towel or blasted off with an air blower. Washing in space is a little like being in a sandstorm.
When I’m finished, I push the button twice more and rinse off. I don’t have a towel, so I stand inside for a few more moments to drip dry.
I’d like to take a look at my bruises to see how much discoloration remains, but the mirror is nearly hidden by image captures. People, animals, landscapes, ships—everything imaginable is pinned to the wall, pictures on top of pictures until all I can see of some are the corners, the rest buried underneath layers. I stare at them, thinking that they’re a perfect representation of how I perceive Venus. Scattered, filled with bits of information that is so profuse and disconnected that even she can’t make it make sense. Or maybe it does make sense to her, but I’m at a loss.
A sliver of mirror remains, enough to see just my eyes. At thirteen, my first boyfriend had told me that they were the shape of elm leaves. He said it trying to sound smart and seductive, awkward coming from an adolescent boy, especially since neither of us had ever seen a real elm tree. Years later, I ran across a model of one in an Earth relics museum and discovered that the boy hadn’t been wrong. My eyes do slant to severe points at each corner. But they are blue instead of green.
“Sorry, I don’t have any towels. The air is so warm, usually you dry off right away anyway.”
I whirl, caught completely by surprise. “You shouldn’t sneak up on me like that!”
“Oh, okay.” Her focus is on a small video display unit in her hands, totally unaware that she’d startled me, or of the fact that I’m still half naked. I’ve been on ships long enough, where the only privacy is in your head, that it doesn’t really bother me. It’s the way she seems so detached that makes me nervous. Not in a distracted way, but as if she’s wired into a different frequency than most people altogether. Without a glance up, she motions toward my pistol, still on top of the shower stall. “Don’t forget that.” Then wanders back into the main room. I finish dressing and join her.
She’s cleared a small table of its clutter. On top lies the same tray of food that Brady had given me. At the time, I hadn’t been in the mood to eat, but now I feel hunger gnawing away at my stomach. I sit down on top of a crate and lift a square sandwich to my lips. Real bread! Venus sits opposite me and remains engrossed in watching the handheld VDU. Her feet tap a rhythm on the floor that would make a tap dancer tired in seconds. I have to take deep, calm breaths to cope with the incessant motion.
Suddenly, she looks up and levels her plutonium green eyes on me, disconcertingly like a cat’s in a dark room. “Did you know I lost my family because of the Admin? In a mining…accident.” She sneers the word, making it a curse. “My little sister and my parents. My brother died before that, from the chemicals that got into our food, our water, everything. The same chemicals that made me a freak killed him. Strange, isn’t it?” I don’t know if she wants me to answer, but I’m glad I ate so fast. I’m losing my appetite.
“I wasn’t there when it happened. I might have saved them if I had been. But it was already too late when I found out. I should have died too, but it happened at night and I don’t sleep much.”
I’m not sure I want to hear this story, but I have to ask, “What kind of accident?”
“I’m from one of the moons off of Spectra 5, Acculmi. The mine was an old one, almost nothing left in the ground. That’s why they started shipping us to the mine on Spectra 5. There hadn’t been any maintenance or reinforcement on Acculmi’s structure in years, except what we did ourselves. Requests for better equipment, parts, anything that could keep things running went without response. It was going dry and they knew it, so they weren’t going to be bothered with putting any money into keeping it in good order. We were all non-cits anyway. Cheaper labor.” She puts down the VDU and clasps her hands together tightly, almost as if she doesn’t trust what they might do.
“So we had to start finding other ways to get what we needed. We didn’t report all the ore we extracted, which was practically nothing anyway, and sold what we skimmed to whoever would buy it.”
After a pause, she continues, “It just collapsed one night with eighty people inside. We’d had to move inside because our sun shields were badly deteriorated. I was out flying when it happened, testing some of the modifications I’d been making to our shuttle. I heard the dispatch from the mine; they were begging for help. And then…I picked up a communication between the Admin flight control and one of their patrol ships close to our orbit. The patrol ship asked if they should send a medical team to the mine.”
My stomach cramps painfully as I wait for what she’s going to say next. I already know.
“The flight ship controller just asked him why he thought that was necessary.” A scary, half-crazed laugh bubbles out of her throat. “I got back to the mine as fast as I could, but there were only a few people who made it out. We couldn’t dig deep enough to get to the lower chambers and we didn’t h
ave the kind of equipment we needed. I don’t remember how many days we worked, trying to find anyone who was still alive. Their cries for help…there were less of them every hour. But eventually, we just had to give up. There was nothing we could do.
“Not long after that, a patrol ship finally landed to survey the situation, see if there was anything left to salvage. I stole it.”
She looks me fully in the face for the first time since she’d started the story, a wet sheen of tears highlighting her eyes. “I was going to get revenge, you know? I was going to fly straight into the first Admin ship I found and blow them all up. I was crazy. I lost my whole family, my friends. Everything I had. You understand that, right?
“I got as far as Spectra 6 without seeing a single Admin ship. I hadn’t eaten for days and had burns from a fire that broke out on the ship. There’s an outpost on the other side with a smaller settlement than this one. The fire took out part of the hydraulics and I crashed. Fortunately, Captain V and Karl found me. I was delirious. I don’t really remember it. When I got back to normal, they told me how sorry they were that they hadn’t been able to find any other survivors. I’d been raving the whole time, so they knew most of my story. But when I told them I’d flown the ship alone, they didn’t believe me for a while. They said that ship couldn’t be flown without a crew.” This time her laugh is genuinely amused. “They’d never met me before.”
“What kind of ship did you steal?”
“A DC Class gun ship.”
“What?” It’s my turn for disbelief. DCs are interstellar cruisers with the capacity for thirty crewmembers, four of which are essential to fly it. “How could you keep it flying, much less control it?”
“Took some rigging, and like I said, no time for eating or sleeping. But I got the flight trajectories loaded and made that baby do things it was never designed for. Kept on it for three days but I lost it anyway. Without a full crew I couldn’t look to the engine and once that fire started, I was done for.”
It’s a fascinating story, I’ll give her that. Fascinating, but impossible. Or is it? I’ve already seen how fluidly she handles the Sphynx, a ship design known for having quirks in atmosphere that makes being aboard one feel as if you’re riding a roller coaster through a blast zone. Something in her makeup has made her the kind of person who can read ships, understand and intuit the vagaries of flying and weather the way a master sculptor understands marble. And the modifications done to the ISPS, who better than the pilot to know what to do?
“The captain took care of me until I got back into my head again. Her and Karlie talked me out of killing myself. Even if I had managed to find an Admin ship and run into, it wouldn’t have brought my family back. She asked me to take the Sphynx up one day, to see if I really could fly it, and that’s why I’m here now, and not atomized space dust.”
It’s almost hard for me to match the image of a caring and concerned Strahan with the surly grunt I’ve dealt with, but it’s easier with Vitruzzi. It’s been a while since I’ve met people with a genuine sense of human decency. People who actually give a damn about others, not just percentages.
“Do you know why I’m telling you this?”
I honestly don’t, and shake my head.
She looks at me as if I might be a little slow. “Because Cap’n V, Karlie, and Pat are not stupid, Aly. If they were, they’d have been dead a long time ago. They don’t make decisions at random. They’ve been at this game a long time. They’re smart, and they always do what’s right for people who deserve it. Do you get it?”
“It seems to me as if they make a habit out of kidnapping unconscious people and making them part of the crew.” I know my words are unnecessarily frosty, but I can’t seem to help myself.
“Yeah, I guess you could look at it that way. But you could also look at it like they help those that need it. Even when there’s a risk.” She gives me a tranquil smile, her heart-shaped face and pale skin making her look like a marble angel. “The captain is a doctor, after all.” And then, with a rapid change of mood to which I’m becoming accustomed, she stands up and walks toward the door. “I have to help Bodie with some maintenance on the Sphynx. Help yourself to anything you can find, or wander around. Whatever you want. See you later.” And she leaves.
TEN
Restlessness and anxiety set my nerves on fire while my brain lists twenty different horrible things that might be happening to David while I sit uselessly on this rock. My watch has set itself to local time. It’s only 1130, so I have some time to kill before meeting Vitruzzi. I’ve been alone for half an hour and no one has shown up to keep tabs on me, but I know they can’t trust me that much. I probably have a shadow, most likely someone I haven’t met, someone I wouldn’t recognize if I saw them around. Probably waiting for me to leave and planning on following me. Or maybe they have video captures hidden in the maelstrom of Venus’s dwelling. Could be both. If I cared, it would be enough to make me paranoid.
Fuck it. Sitting here is going to make me crazy. I’ll just take a walk.
Being on foot allows me to soak up the warm air, refreshingly welcome after being aboard ship for almost a week. I walk aimlessly around the rambling settlement with no destination in mind. Basically, it’s just a small collection of dirt streets that divide the spaces between buildings. It’s hard to say how many people live in the area. Could be a couple hundred, could be no more than a sixty or seventy. People occasionally pass me either on foot or driving some version of a beat-up land transport. No one stops to talk, but their suspicious stares make it clear that they’re aware of who I am. They all proceed as if they have something important to do. Considering the work I saw taking place inside the mine, they probably do.
Despite my wandering, my mind stays busy thinking over the things I see. Here’s a group of people who have done more than fall into the deep end of space and given up. They’re really trying to make a life for themselves, make it work despite the Admin restrictions that work against them. Most of the non-cit outposts I’ve been to in my travels have been destitute sties filled with pirates, degenerates, and criminals—hiding places for the cutthroat and brutal. I had almost forgotten that there are still people in the universe, citizen or not, who want to do more than steal and hide.
By 1200 hours on my watch, Algol A is at its zenith, setting the sky fully ablaze. A crescent of Algol B can be seen on the distant horizon shadowed by the planets between us. The brilliant backdrop only serves to punctuate how alone and unguarded I am. As if to create a safe barrier between the unknown and myself, my interior navigator leads me back to the mine entrance.
As I walk through the opening toward the main cavern, darkness quickly absorbs the dazzling outside light like an inky sponge. The tunnel is semi-illuminated by deep holes penetrating to the surface along the roof, allowing enough sunlight to provide moderate visibility. The grainy gray glow filters through suspended dust and sweeps over a metal walkway along the left side of the tunnel. As speeding vehicles pass me in both directions, it becomes immediately clear that it’s the safest path for foot traffic.
The sound of a vehicle approaches, catching my attention as the hum of its engine slows. It pulls to a stop beside me. In the gloom, I recognize Desto sitting astride a large motorcycle with a gigantic faring and gun barrels pointing out of turrets on either side of the steering apparatus. I’ve never seen any kind of two-wheeled, terrain-limited vehicle equipped like it before. A bike made for combat?
He gives me his trademark lecherous grin.
“Nice bike.”
The grin widens even further at the compliment. “You like it, huh? My own design, with some help from my man, Bodie. He’s pretty decent with a wrench. But the guns were definitely my idea. Are you headed to the ship?”
“Just wandering around. Waiting for a chance to pick up communications with Vitruzzi a little later.”
He revs the engine loudly, showing off its power. “So you have some time then. Why don’t you come with me and I’ll
show you one of my favorite places on this rock.” Noticing my hesitation, he continues, “Don’t worry, I promise to get you back in time.”
“Are you trying to pick me up?”
“You damn right I am!” He leans closer and winks. “Come on, honey. Don’t be shy. We’re going somewhere I know you’ll love.”
“Which is?”
“The shooting range. Let’s see how good you are with that little carbine of yours.” His very white teeth gleam at me in a challenging smile. “If you want, you can try my gun too. Hop on.”
Why not? I’ll do about anything to take my mind off the fact that David’s been in the hands of the Admin for a week. Almost before I’m seated, Desto guns it and peels out, the sudden velocity whipping my head backward. Without time for a single breath, he slams the footbrakes, making the back wheel skid in an improbably canted arc at the mouth of the mine. Taking a moment to let his eyes adjust and make sure no one is entering, he warns, “Hang on.”
We drive fast for about fifteen klicks to a deserted stretch of land. The road we’re on narrows as we enter a sprawling cluster of wreckage, chunks of twisted metal, and other scattered debris that covers a range nearly the size of the mine’s main chamber. The path continues into the heart of the ruins, forming a twisted circuit.
Desto stops just outside of the perimeter and leans the bike on a reinforced kickstand the size of my arm. I nearly have to pry my clenched fists from his shirt with my teeth as we dismount. The transport is clearly as heavy as it looks, but he handles it as if it weighs no more than a bicycle. Next to us is a loudspeaker kiosk. He picks up the handset and clicks it on.