by Rick Partlow
“You’re beginning to sound like Danabri,” Priscilla chided him, laying a hand on his shoulder fondly before she leaned over the long-obsolete two-dimensional viewscreens set in the control board, peering at the cargo shuttle about to dock at the station’s north polar hub. “Consensus Shuttle 032-Alpha, this is Gateway Station Control. You are cleared to dock at bay November-One-Six.”
“Hell, I wish the obnoxious little shit was here,” Sam said, realizing he was swearing a lot more than usual but writing it off to utter exhaustion. “I wish those damned traffic control crews the Belters promised they’d send over to help us out were here, or the automated AI control systems Aphrodite promised us two weeks ago were here. This,” he waved a hand at the station’s control center, empty except for the two of them, “is not what I pictured when they stationed us here.”
“We have to take our shift,” she pointed out, stretching her arm while she had a moment. It did interesting things to her figure and Sam smiled despite his weariness. “We only have three crews available right now, including us. If we didn’t work traffic control, each of the others would have to work twelve-hour shifts.”
“That’s very egalitarian of you, Pris,” he murmured, his grin taking the edge off the comment. He wasn’t sure when he’d taken to calling her “Pris,” but she hadn’t objected.
He nodded toward the status screen, where an external image of the station was displayed, broadcast from one of the monitor drones orbiting it. It looked for all the universe like a rusty tin can spinning in space, and only the swarm of freighters, shuttles and cargo barges surrounding it gave any hint to the sheer size of the place. It was a relic, definitely predating the Teller-Fox drive, and Sam wouldn’t have been shocked if the Belters had salvaged it from the original Consensus millennia ago.
“At least it’s in better shape now than when the bastards dropped it off here,” he allowed.
When the barges had dumped it at the fifth Sun-Mars Lagrangian point nearly two months ago, it had been uninhabitable, an airless hunk of metal with no working water or air recycling systems, a gaping hole where its reactor should have been and about thirty micrometeorite punctures. Getting it ready for humans habitation had taken the better part of six weeks, and the two of them had spent most of that time living in a tiny cabin on the unarmed Resolution transport they’d been assigned as a courier between Earth and Aphrodite.
Having gravity back---well, centripetal force if you wanted to get technical---and some space to move around was certainly an improvement, but Sam hadn’t slept more than four hours at a time in nearly two months.
Hell, when they were installing the fusion reactor, I don’t think I closed my eyes for forty-eight hours straight.
“I’d rather be here with you than following that prick Peterman around Ganymede like Danabri,” Pris muttered, her face darkening. She still resented the negotiator…and she’d become less reticent about expressing herself, and the language she used to do it, in the last few weeks. “Even if the food’s better.”
Sam made a face. That was another thing he could have complained about if he hadn’t been too tired to remember it. Soy paste and spirulina powder could be processed and shaped to resemble almost anything, but there was only so much you could do with the taste.
“Danabri will be back in a few weeks. Maybe we’ll have the computer systems installed before then.” And the energy shields. And the magnetic grapples. And the south polar docking umbilicals…
“Sam.” The voice came over the control room speakers instead of his neurolink---that was another thing not working yet, the ancient intercom. And there was so much damned metal in the construction, signals from portable datalinks wouldn’t even penetrate.
“Yeah, Telia,” he answered, touching the button to transmit, feeling as if he were back in the damned Dark Ages. “What’s up?”
He’d been a bit surprised when Guardian Proctor had been assigned as the station’s security chief by the Consensus, though he guessed he shouldn’t have been. It wasn’t as if she was wanted on Earth. Though at the moment, her “security force” consisted of her and a former maintenance technician she’d shanghaied once the toilets were repaired, and she didn’t trust the man with a weapon.
“Just got the word that Minister Gage is on board the Consensus cargo shuttle,” the cyborg informed him. Her tone seemed more casual now than it had even a few weeks before, and he hoped maybe she was warming up to them. She had certainly warmed up to Danabri, though God knew what she saw in the man.
“Surprise inspection?” Pris wondered, her voice sharpening, alertness replacing the tired haze over her eyes.
“Don’t know,” Telia admitted. “Just got a tip from one of the loading crew who owes me a favor. Figured you two’d want to meet him at the docking bay.”
“Thanks,” Sam told her, pushing himself to his feet. “We’ll be right there.” He leaned over and switched the intercom to the crew quarters. “Lieutenant Fukinaga, Technician Prole, report to primary control center immediately,” he called. “Sorry to wake you guys up early, but we have a VIP visitor.”
“Yeah, you’re so sorry,” Pris teased him, but the glint in her eyes told him she was just as grateful for an excuse to get out of standing watch for another three hours.
“Duty calls,” he said, spreading his hands with mock helplessness. “Come on, let’s go see what the Old Man wants this time.”
She snorted, offering a hand to help him up out of the chair.
“Unless he’s bringing a full crew with him,” she confided, “I don’t give a damn.”
***
Sometimes, when she was bored, when Mawae Danabri was off working for his Resolution taskmasters, Telia Proctor would allow herself the indulgence of wondering if she was better off now than she had been a few months ago. Most of the time, she still thought the answer was yes. Even though her…What? Boyfriend? Lover? Even though her lover was gone much of the time, even though she was stuck on this dilapidated junk-heap of a station floating halfway to nowhere and might be there for years, at least she was serving with people who didn’t try to hide looks of disgust whenever they saw her.
She didn’t know if she could call any of them friends yet, but Captain Avalon---No, he said to call him Sam, and I promised I would---Sam and Priscilla were at least friendly, civil, welcoming. And once the Resolution and Belter crew had grown used to her, they, too, had accepted her. There were still some among the Consensus workers who looked down on her, but they were easily avoided.
It had bothered her at first to skip the weekly ablution ceremony, but her nature was far too obvious when she was unclothed, and she didn’t need to see the uncomfortable stares again. She still bowed and said her prayers at waking and before sleep, mostly out of habit, but if she was being honest with herself, he probably hadn’t been much of a believer ever since the accident, anyway. What sort of God would allow her mother to die of cancer while she was exiled from Earth?
Still, she firmly believed being assigned to the Resolutionists was a good thing, a positive change. It was just harder to make herself remember that when the cargoes and crews streamed in through the locks endlessly and she had gone the last thirty-six hours with no sleep and every meal a protein bar shoved down her throat in the few minutes she had to spare.
She’d come to hate the cargo lock, every tarnished, sand-blasted centimeter of it, every stain and scrape and scratch. The lack of gravity was beginning to wear at her as well, though her cybernetics did have the advantage of built-in electromagnets to hold her in place.
If only my stomach came equipped with magnets, she mused, feeling a pang of indigestion. Maybe the Resolutionists had some drug to help with that. Her superiors in the Guard would have her called before a court-martial if they ever found out she’d taken Resolutionist medicine, but Mawae Danabri had taught her a saying: “What they don’t know won’t hurt them.”
Telia sighed and paused the cargo belt again, running a hand-scanner over a pl
astic tote at random. The security scanners in the cargo lock would theoretically pick up any threats or contraband, but they were nearly as old as the station itself and she had as little faith in them as she did in God lately. Once she got more help in Security, she’d see every single container entering the station hand-scanned until they had Resolution technology for their entry sensors, but until then, random checks were the best she could manage.
Sacred blood, this shipment is big, she thought, watching the line of crates and barrels and boxes trundling down the conveyer belt. It took them from the cargo lock as they automatically cycled through in bundles, through the loading bay where she stood statue-like, affixed to the deck, and then on down the hub of the station to the storage bays in the lower-gravity sections.
She could see the belt traveling down the hub, holding the crates to it via magnetic strips, an endless line of them all the way from the lock to where the belt disappeared into the sorting machinery programmed to deliver each to the correct storage section. It was hard to believe they’d been able to fit them all into the hold of one cargo shuttle and still have room for Minister Gage.
“What the hell does he want here anyway?” she mumbled aloud.
She’d never used to talk to herself, but spending hour after hour alone in the cargo processing compartment was driving her nuts.
But she wasn’t alone. She had been so wrapped up in the inspection, she hadn’t noticed the three crewmen who’d slipped in through the service entrance from the passenger bay one section over.
“This is a restricted section,” she said almost as if the warning were prerecorded, which it could have been after as many times as she’d had to give it. “Sorry, I know we don’t have any automated warnings, but…”
She trailed off, getting a good look at the trio for the first time. All men, all somewhere in late youth to early middle age, all fit and broad-shouldered, definitely born to a planet’s gravity. They wore matching blue coveralls, the standard uniform of the Consensus Space Service, but there was something about them, something that didn’t smell right to her after fifteen years serving alongside the Spacers.
It was their eyes, she realized abruptly. You couldn’t tell much about stance or body language in zero-g, even though they were wearing magnetic boots. They looked the part, had the appropriate uniforms, rank markings, equipment, haircuts…but the set of their eyes wasn’t surprise or consternation or shame at going through the wrong hatch, nor was it anger or resentment at being caught and chewed out. It wasn’t even the look of loathing she was used to from the Naturalists once they found out what she was.
Instead, their expressions were frustration, impatience, the look of interruption. They knew where they were going but they hadn’t expected to find anyone here. The realization took the space of a breath, and then all four of them were in motion.
They shouldn’t have had weapons; they were a Spacer cargo crew, not security and sure as hell not in the Guard. But they went for something, all three of them, digging for their cargo pockets, and she didn’t wait to take the chance they were trying diligently to produce their ID cards. She was definitely armed; she’d taken to it as part of her duties as Chief of Security, even though Danabri had mocked her mercilessly for carrying a gun on a “beat-up, piece of shit station with a skeleton crew.”
Her cybernetic hands were well made, but they weren’t exactly surgically precise, nor as fast as biological ones had the potential to be. She’d grown used to them over the last few years, but she’d never be a fast-draw. The grab for her sidearm was awkward, too slow, and she knew she wasn’t going to beat them, not all of them, so she moved.
“Movement is life.” That was what Guardian First Class Levinson, her first combat instructor in the Guard had told her, had yelled at her whole class over and over as they made their way through the tactical lanes. The lesson had stayed with her when all others fled and she used it now. It was a simple matter of cutting loose the magnets in her feet, a process of flexing a particular muscle she didn’t actually have, and sending the message from living nerves to superconductive wires.
She could see their guns now, snubby and ugly and compact, built for stealth and ease of concealment rather than accuracy, but they were only fifteen meters away and her own weapon was just clearing the holster. She pushed off the deck and shot upward as they fired.
***
“It’s a pleasure to see you again, Minister Gage,” Priscilla said, nodding respectfully to the man.
Gage, Sam thought, looked much different in practical civilian clothes rather than the robes of government. He was a trim, fit man whose demeanor gave Sam the distinct impression he’d been in the profession of violence at some point in his life. Gage was smiling cordially as he returned Priscilla’s nod and accepted Sam’s handshake, but there was a wry turn to the expression.
“I should have known better than to think I could catch you with your guard down,” he told Priscilla, stepping away from the docking umbilical to make room for the rest of the crew. His magnetic boots clicked softly on the deck-plates, their soles outsized and a bit ungainly looking to Sam’s eyes. Resolution ship boots were equipped with sticky plates, their surface adhering to the deck on a molecular level, in the same manner as a gecko’s feet.
“I just wanted to get a sense of how well you were managing with the current crew,” the Minister for Foreign Relations confessed, following their lead toward the lift banks. “But as the saying goes, three men can keep a secret if two of them are dead.”
“I don’t think I’ve heard that one before,” Sam admitted, pushing the control to summon a car.
“Benjamin Franklin,” Gage supplied. “A rather famous native of North America from the pre-war days. I’m something of a student of antebellum history, what little of it was preserved in the centuries after.” Another wry smile, this one with a hint of pain. “It’s a bit embarrassing, I have to admit, you Resolutionists having a more extensive pre-war history of our world than we do.”
“We had the benefit of the Gaia probes being able to carry terabytes of data in tiny chips,” Priscilla said with graceful humility. “It’s amazing as much survived as did on Earth with all electronics destroyed.”
“I wonder how complete it really is,” the old man mused as the doors opened and they stepped into the lift car.
Sam didn’t care for the elevators on the station; they were loud and moved with a jerky intermittence that didn’t inspire confidence. He would have rather just used the hub access tubes, but you didn’t haul a foreign dignitary through the tubes. At least Priscilla had insisted you didn’t. He pushed the button for the control center and tried to keep the paranoia out of his expression.
“What do you mean, Mr. Minister?” Pris asked, the expression on her face still carefully pleasant, but a crease showing around her eyes he knew was the sign of a suppressed frown…or possibly a snarl.
“Please, call me John,” the older man insisted, either missing the change in her mood or tactfully ignoring it. “It’s just that, your Charles Dauphin has become something of a spiritual figure to you, has he not? Almost a figure of worship. But when he sent the Gaia probes out, he couldn’t know that a faster-than-light drive would eventually be discovered. For all he knew, the colonies he was starting with his little genetic imperialism experiment would be forever cut off from each other and from Earth.”
Gage winced at the loud, metallic clunk and braced himself as the lift car changed direction, having traveled down through the center hub and now heading outward into the spinning drum. Sam gestured to the red-colored wall of the elevator car which was about to become the floor and Gage properly oriented himself as centripetal motion began to bring him under the simulated control of gravity once again.
“I’m afraid I still don’t understand, John,” Priscilla insisted, just the slightest chill in her tone as she used his first name.
“If you’re telling your children about your past,” the older man explained patien
tly, “and you know they’ll never be able to check the accuracy of your story, there might be the temptation to…” He shrugged. “…fudge the details. Leave out the embarrassing stories and the things you did you might not be so proud of. To color your past a certain way, you know?”
Sam’s first instinct was to reject the suggestion out of hand as just the colored, propaganda-fed narrative of the Consensus, but he forced himself to stop and consider it logically, from the other man’s point of view. It was what he’d been taught in the Academy as a method for defusing confrontations; put yourself in the other person’s shoes and figure out what they want.
“Wouldn’t that be robbing your children of the opportunity to learn from your mistakes?” he wondered.
Gage’s grey gaze speared him just like one of his old Academy instructors, with maybe a hint of respect.
“Yes, it would,” he agreed. “Another old saying I’ve come to appreciate is, the smart man learns from his mistakes. The wise man learns from the mistakes of others.”
“Yet perhaps children must mature before they’re ready to learn the complete truth about their parents,” Priscilla pointed out, arching an eyebrow. “Do we not idolize our parents when we’re younger, try to emulate their example?”
Gage seemed to consider the point for a moment before inclining his head toward her.
“Perhaps you’re right about that, Priscilla. Yet who is to say when the child is old enough for the truth?”
“All parents do the best they can,” she said, turning a hand up in an uncertain gesture. “It’s all they can do.”
Sam frowned. He was sure Priscilla hadn’t said anything about having children of her own, but this certainly sounded personal to her. He shook the thought away, promising himself he’d return to it once they had more time to talk alone…assuming they ever did.
“How is Guardian Proctor working out for you?” Gage wondered, changing the subject with the expert timing of a man who talked for a living and knew when a thread had been played out. “I know you’re undercrewed and overworked at the moment, but I was sure if anyone would be up to the challenge, it was her.”