Interzone 251

by edited by Andy Cox

  “Do it,” she said, trying not to think about how she was going to feed herself for the next tenday. If only that damned new Rep hadn’t cut her pay.

  The shopkeeper typed a few more things, then turned around, put his hand against the palm-lock for the storage room. “Be right back,” he said, and disappeared through the door. He re-emerged a minute later with a small, dusty red box, the gold lettering on the top faded and scratched into illegibility. She stared at it, thinking how much smaller the box seemed, how hard it was to believe it was right there, within reach. The last time she’d held it she’d been eight years old.

  She took it with shaking hands, and lifted the lid for the briefest moment to see that the necklace was truly still there. The sight of it, and the memories it brought were overwhelming, and she closed it quickly again.

  “Thank you,” she said, the words barely audible, the gratitude she felt a bitter betrayal. The necklace was hers, had always been hers, a birthday gift from her mother before they’d been caught on the edge of Baselle space without a male escort. Her mother didn’t have the credit to pay the fine, so they’d confiscated the child instead, and all her belongings, leaving her to buy them back one by one, and herself too if she could. Few ever bought themselves free. She could still hear her mother screaming her name as they pulled her away, although memories of her face had become indistinct over the years. Her hand closed tightly around the box, feeling the soft, old cardboard give slightly in her grasp.

  Fari found herself hurrying away from the shop, before they could somehow raise the price, or take it back.

  The box fit snugly in the deep pockets of her worksuit. She wanted to be somewhere private, but didn’t dare be out on her own with Leor prowling around and angry, so she went to the Rockhard and found the small table where Mer and Huj were sitting. Borrn was standing there, talking to them, and Gin showed up a moment later with his wide calloused hands full of drinks, which he distributed around the table.

  She slipped into the empty seat between Mer and Huj. “Fari,” Borrn said. “I was just telling your team…”

  “The Rep. Core-val. I know.”

  “I don’t have any pull with him. Company still owns 17% of me, and until I work off the last of it, I have to watch my step. Insubordination fees would set me back years.”

  “I understand, Borrn,” she said, and she did.

  “Maybe this Rep won’t last long. The real core-val guys get to hate it out here fast, most of them.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Mer and I have been talking,” Huj said. “We figure we’ll cover things for you out of the part of your share that came to us, at least as much as we can.”

  “Just don’t get caught,” Borrn said. “They see you two giving her creds for no reason they can see, and they’re going to come to the wrong conclusion and decide she’s part-timing in a more traditionally female labor division, if you understand me.”

  Everyone did. Borrn nodded to them all, and left to seek his own solace, liquid or otherwise, somewhere else.

  “Just one drink for me tonight,” Fari said. She could feel the box against her side, nineteen years a stranger.

  “You should have something to eat,” Mer said. “You’ve been getting too thin, since… Since.”

  “I don’t really feel hungry.”

  “Too bad. I already ordered for you,” he said. “And look, here it comes now, so it’s too late to change our minds.”

  The waiter brought a large tray and began setting down dishes in front of them. The food smelled good, good enough that her stomach rumbled in rebellious anticipation. She gave in, shaking her head. “I love you guys,” she said, and she meant it.

  “We know,” Mer said. “Now eat.”

  ***

  Team Green was homed on Rock 17, hollowed-out and rendered worthless long before the Basellans had arrived. A century or more of space junk and mining debris littered the crack-covered surface, and the inside had little to distinguish it from the outside other than the presence of atmosphere, held in by a series of airlocks that were one of the few things that the Corp paid to fully maintain.

  A section of small rooms had been segregated off from the main living quarters when it was decided, against precedent, that a woman would be joining the team; the remote bunks, and the separate rooms, were to save them all from the temptations of sin.

  Fari slipped free from the webbing of Mer’s bed and retrieved her clothes from where they floated in the non-existent gravity of the rock. Mer was snoring, would not notice her gone until morning, would know she’d gone back to her rooms. It wouldn’t do for a surprise inspection to find them together.

  Once she was outside and had closed his door, she touched down on the floor and her mag boots stuck lightly, just enough to keep her upright as she walked back towards her rooms. She could hear Huj snoring too, off down the halls in the opposite direction; other than that, the only sounds were the faint hum and whine of the air handling systems and the click of the heaters working away. She could see her breath in the air, found pleasure in the way the cloud stayed put as she walked through it, imagining herself a ghost.

  Once in her rooms, she locked the door from the inside, then suited up. The relay from the mining rig went carefully into the suit’s large front pouch, next to the red box. She pulled her bottle and gear from her locker, and stood at her door for a long time listening for sounds of anyone stirring – there were none, and she expected none – before putting her helmet on and sealing up.

  Taking out her personal first aid kit, she opened the bandage pack and pulled out a small, square device, activated the magnet, and stuck it to the face of the door. She gave the door a single, good thump and saw the right light appear in her helmet’s heads-up display. Now she’d know if someone came knocking.

  Satisfied, she crossed through her small hygiene station down the long corridor beyond it to her emergency airlock, and cycled herself out. She’d disabled the alarms on it long ago.

  There was a long, steep ramp up out of the caverns towards the surface, the walls cut by cracks and fissures of increasing size as she got closer to the expanse of stars at its end. A black shadow blotted out the right edge of the view – Barracks 3, the collection of tin cans suspended between the rocks that housed Teams Blue and Red. Just knowing it was there, even if all the inhabitants were likely drunk asleep, made her anxious and angry, and before she reached the lip of the ramp she turned and climbed into a wide fissure that ran like a warfare trench in a zigzag across the gutted rock.

  In places, the discarded detritus of the original mining expedition lay across the rock above, or tumbled down into the fissure; she had shifted it just enough to be able to climb around it in the near dark without risking damage to her suit, but still left the way cluttered enough to be dangerous to anyone who didn’t know it blind.

  At last, the watchful stars disappeared as she climbed her way into shadow. An old colony skip lay across the top of the fissure where it had crashed, centuries ago, and been slowly picked apart by successive generations of scavengers. She’d first come here, over a year ago, hoping she could fix it up enough with stolen tools and scavenged parts to escape, either on her own or with Mer and Huj. It hadn’t taken her long to conclude there was too little left of it to ever fly again, and a fair bit longer to realize that didn’t make it useless.

  She climbed up in through a jagged hole in the ship’s underside, and from there up into the carcass of the ship itself.

  The electronics had been stripped long ago, entire sections of the metal hull cut away in irregular squares and hauled off to be melted down and made into something else. Even the first several steps of the spiral stairs from the lower decks up into the ship’s crew deck had been taken, but without gravity she needed only turn off her boots, grasp the rails, and shove off to ascend up into the cabins.

  The whole front of the bridge was gone, the tear jagged enough to believe that the initial affront, at least, hadn’t been th
e work of scavengers. The interior had also been gutted for reusable parts, a few scraps of which she’d taken herself, but most of which was long gone before she’d ever even heard of Baselle Mining Corp.

  The ship had come to rest at a sharp angle, and the narrow corridor back to the crew quarters and engine room was littered with debris, sharp enough to tear a suit. She grabbed hold of a safety bar above the navigator’s station, and swung herself sideways. As soon as her feet neared the wall, she turned the boots back on, and walked carefully along the wall towards the back of the ship. Out in space, down was any which way you wanted it to be.

  Planet-side cudders never really got that, which explained why the back half of the ship was less gutted than the rest; anything large that couldn’t be disassembled had been left behind. Aft, she reached the hauler’s airlock, with its bank of lifepod tubes, all deployed save one. She floated over to it, checked its display, ran her hand along its curved top that she had painted red with crude black dots. Then, hanging there in the air, spinning slowly, she pulled the old box out of her pouch and opened it.

  The necklace floated free. A gold chain, tiny and thin, made for the neck of a child and now and forever too small for her to wear again. At the end, among its loops and turns, the small oval pendant, also red, with its own black dots: a ladybug. She’d remembered the pattern almost right, even after so many years. Tears welled up on and around her face, before her helmet whisked the moisture away again.

  She could feel the low hum of the lifepod as she ran her hand over it. It had an independent power supply that ran its propulsion and cryo systems, not easily removed even with the right specialty tools, impossible to take out whole without; pods were deliberately made to deter casual vandalism for parts. The ejection mechanism, on the other hand, had not fared nearly as well. Popping the door open with practiced ease, she slipped in the relay she’d taken from the mining rig, clicked it snugly into place, watched another red light on the pod’s control panel wink over to green.

  There was only one more red light left.

  Fari closed the panel, floated back over the pod, and found the tiny personal effects drawer on the side. Putting the necklace back in the box, she put it into the drawer and sealed it back up. It was the safest place she knew of.

  Repairing the pod was desperation and defiance only. Even though the old skip, in one last mercy, had fallen with that side up and facing away from the rest of the rockpile, a perfect heading downspin and in towards civilized space, a pod would never make it up to speed in time to jump before being intercepted. There were armed guard bikes all along the circumference of the mining zone, keeping everything outside out and everything inside in, and an endless succession of Representative cruisers prowled along the edge of the rockpile like vultures hunched over their latest, meager carrion find.

  Even if she found a way to get around all of those things, the pod would only hold one.

  Her suit’s chrono beeped. Time to head back.

  She pushed off from the lifepod with both hands, spun, and with practiced ease brought both boots up against the far wall, where they stuck. She didn’t dare look back; she’d need her eyes clear for getting out safely.

  ***

  Three hours of restless sleep later, Huj was banging on her door. “Rep’s ordered a Worship,” he said. “All hands.”

  Fari groaned as she rolled out of bed. The last Rep was sporadic with Worships, and never invited the brothel women, so she was usually left in the woman’s chapel alone, where she typically sought salvation on the insides of her eyelids. All hands meant that the other women would be there, and a minder to keep an eye on them, and so the full pious show would go on.

  She pulled on her cleanest pair of pants and tunic, then grabbed her veil from where she’d tossed it in a corner. “When’s the first bell?”

  “We have forty-one minutes. If you’re not out in three, we go without you,” he said through the door.

  Cursing, she found her boots and slipped into them, throwing open the door. Mer and Huj were both there, looking at least as stressed as she felt; the minimum fine for being late to a Worship was more than any of them could afford, and this Rep didn’t seem like the forgiving type.

  “Suit up,” Mer said, holding out her helmet and bottle for her. “I have the feeling it’s going to be a long day.”

  The different rocks of the pile – an asteroid field, really – were connected by cables, with rickety, airless, and unshielded cars that rode them like tin cans sliding on string. The three of them climbed into the car and settled onto the hard bench inside, and started it up towards Station. Fari checked her chrono, and noticed Huj doing the same. It was a twenty-four minute trip, which was going to leave them with about eight minutes to spare on the far end. Close, but they’d make it.

  Fari didn’t feel like talking, and apparently neither did Huj or Mer. They rode the cable in silence, until Huj dozed off and began to snore. They let him sleep until they were within sight of Station, then Mer kicked his leg.

  Borrn was waiting not far from the cable terminus, looking nervous and unhappy. When he spotted them, he visibly took a deep breath, then intercepted Fari as her teammates split off to head towards the Men’s chapel.

  “Fari,” Borrn said. “After Worship, report to medical. The Rep wants a full checkup on you.”

  She barely kept from exploding. “What does this Rep have against me?” she snarled.

  “You’re a woman doing a man’s job, and doing it well,” Borrn said. “Figure it out. And when you do, keep it to yourself.” He turned and hurried after Mer and Huj without giving her a chance to form a response.

  She walked to the Women’s chapel, bowed her veiled head to the minder as she entered, and knelt on the cold tile floor in front of the golden icon hanging at the front of the room bathed in warm light. There were a dozen women already there, lined up in a unified front, finding some small safety in numbers. She could not, would not ever belong to their group; to a one, they all hated her for escaping their common fate.

  Beside her, one of the brothel women nudged her with an elbow, the faintest of contacts, deeply forbidden.

  “Mer comes to me, now.” The words were barely breathed, but each one was like a knife. “Now that you don’t meet his needs.”

  Fari gritted her teeth, her fists clenching against the floor. She could remember the feel of Mer’s arms around her the night before, the unspoken understanding that that was what they had now, since Leor, since… It had seemed enough. “Good for him,” she managed to hiss back. “And not my problem.”

  Whatever response the woman had hoped for, that must not have been it, because she did not speak again. In the silence they were each left to contemplate their failures and resentments at the feet of the tortured figure mounted brightly upon the wall.

  At last, the Caller came in and began the Women’s worship, exhorting them all to resist their sinful natures and find their way to God through hard work and submission, and if he saw the contradiction in giving that lecture to women held working in a brothel, it was lost in the fiery sermon. Fari kept her head low and let herself be carried away by the man’s words, exchanging unbearable hurt for familiar hatred instead.

  When it was finally over, she slunk out the door ahead of everyone else, half-way back to the cable terminus before she remembered Borrn’s instructions. Anger and anxiety mixed uncomfortably in the empty pit of her stomach. In the years the previous Rep had been here, he only did medical checks for the annual report.

  When she walked in the clinic door, the company doctor and the Rep were both there. Oh, hell no, she thought, barely managing not to say it out loud. “I have a right to privacy,” she said.

  “You have no such thing,” the Rep said, “unless you have the sixty-five thousand, two hundred and eleven credits needed to redeem yourself from your contract.”

  “I do have a right to have a woman present, to insure propriety,” she said, hoping she said the word right.
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br />   She must have, because the Rep shrugged. “Of course,” he said. He went to a side door and opened it, and the prostitute who had been beside her during Worship walked in.

  “You will be witness during the proceedings, such that you can lawfully attest that no improper behavior occurred during this routine exam?” the Rep asked her.

  “Yes, sir,” she said, bowing her head.

  “Then you will find fifty credits towards your account, to compensate you for any inconvenience,” he said. “Thank you.”

  She turned, walked back out of the clinic, and he shut the door again behind her. Fari stared. “She has to stay,” she said.

  “She will swear that she did,” the Rep said. “Now get undressed, and get up on the table. I want the full physical workup.”

  “I don’t—”

  “If you speak again, there will be a thousand credit debit to your balance,” the Rep said. “I expect you to remain entirely silent unless and until I ask you a question. Is that understood?”

  Tears burned at her eyes. “Yes, sir,” she said.

  He smiled. “Then we have an understanding,” he said, and took a seat down at the foot of the examination table.

  The doctor’s face was impassive and closed, no sympathy there at all. Numbly Fari took off her boots and then slipped out of her pants and tunic and stood there. The Rep pointed and shook his head, and with shaking fingers she took off her undergarments as well and, trying to compose herself, folded everything up and set them neatly on an empty chair, naked in the chilly room.

  The doctor led her to the table and gave her a hand up, and she lay back and tried to shut her mind down as he listened to her heart, ran a scanner over her body, checked her eyes and ears, and began working his way down.

  “As we discussed, sir, this employee had a miscarriage about four months ago, out on the rock,” the doctor said. “She was just at the start of the third trimester. Spent a tenday out on the rock – we all assumed we’d lost her – before she stumbled back in and got medical attention.”