by Rick Partlow
The pod’s solid-fuel rocket ignited, a small flare of white, shrinking rapidly as it accelerated away from the station at nine gravities, pushing the maximum of what a human passenger could take without passing out. She added her good wishes to the boost, and maybe a prayer as well, anything to get it moving away faster. She counted the seconds in her head, trying to do the math and figure out how far it had gone and what its velocity was.
She’d figured out she wasn’t good doing complex math in her head about the time the bomb exploded. It wasn’t a huge blast, given the amount of chemical hyper-explosives behind it, just a globe of white, expanding quickly but not that far. There was no atmosphere in space, nothing to conduct the shockwave. There was also nothing to stop the fragmentation from the destroyed lifeboat, nothing but the momentum the rocket had given it going away from them.
Fifteen seconds. It had travelled for fifteen seconds. She had no idea if it would be enough. She looked to Sam and he was shaking his head.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “But we’ll find out pretty damned soon.”
The station didn’t have Resolution energy shields, she knew that; it had been one of the many things they’d been fighting to get Peterman to release the funds for, and fighting to get the okay from the Consensus government to approve. They didn’t even have electromagnetic deflector screens up, because it would have interfered with the operations of the cargo shuttles. What they did have was several centimeters of nickel-iron armor, something not even the ravages of time had been able to strip away.
Telia had ridden out a bad hailstorm once in an old storage shed with an aluminum roof. The impact of the fragments from the escape pod on the armor of the station reminded her of the constant “bang-bang-bang” of the hailstones on that roof twenty years ago, the staccato drumbeat starting gently and building into a rattling, deafening vibration she’d been sure would rip right through that ancient roof. She’d huddled in her boyfriend’s arms and shivered as he’d made fun of her for being so frightened. If he’d thought either her fear or his teasing would get him laid, he’d been sorely disappointed.
Telia wasn’t shivering now, but if Mawae Danabri had been on the station instead of back on Ganymede, she would have shown him a much better time than she’d allowed Grant Foster, that self-absorbed prick she’d dated when she was fifteen.
Like the hailstorm, like her relationship with Grant, the chain of impacts ended quickly; but she stayed frozen in place, waiting for the alarm to signal they were losing atmosphere. There was nothing. She saw Sam Avalon let out a ragged breath and she felt herself relax at the evidence of his obvious relief.
“Are we okay?” she asked him, almost not wanting to let herself believe it.
She realized the alarms had been silenced, and she noticed the pandemonium calming down around them. The bay was nearly empty and the few workers who still remained were looking around, expectation on their faces, like they expected the walls to begin closing in on them.
Sam cycled through a few screens on the control panel before he answered.
“Yeah,” he finally said, “I think we are.” He hit the communications controls again and winced at the jabbering and shouting as the pilots and crews of a half-dozen different cargo vessels tried to talk over each other.
“Attention, all vessels!” he roared over their cross-talk. “This is Gateway Station Control! The situation is stable, there is no further threat.”
That we know of, she amended silently.
“If any of your vessels has been damaged, or any of your personnel need medical treatment, please contact us immediately. Otherwise, keep your crews on board and give us some time to sort this whole situation out.”
More gabbling and yelling and demands, and Sam cut them off again.
“Do you drink, Telia?” he asked her, wiping a hand over his brow to flick the sweat away. In the microgravity, it beaded off into tiny globules, scattering into the air currents.
“I do not,” she admitted. “But now seems like a very good time to start.”
Chapter Thirteen
The vodka burned its way down Sam Avalon’s throat and he savored the pain, savored the feeling of still being alive. The small dining room they’d designated as the officer’s lounge was still spare and undecorated, the walls bare, silvery metal, the plastic on the built-in tables aged and cracked and ugly. By contrast, the bottle of vodka thrown in as a celebratory gift for finalizing the deal on the station was a work of art, crafted by hand in one of the family workshops that dotted the Belt. The crystal caught the harsh, industrial light and shattered it into dazzling rainbows, shifting as he refilled his glass.
“More?” He held the bottle up for Telia Proctor, who was staring at her half-full cup as if it contained all the mysteries of life.
She made a face at the clear alcohol, then downed the rest of it in a gulp, holding her cup out for him to pour.
“This seems such a strange thing to do,” she mused, her voice harsh and rasping. “To intentionally ingest a poison in small doses just to alter your mood. And yet I am told by others who have studied the ancient texts it was one of the first things humans did when they evolved to tool-users. Honey, potatoes, mare’s milk, wheat, rye, agave root, whatever we put our hands to, we eventually ferment and use to dull our senses.”
“I don’t feel qualified to comment on evolutionary psychology,” Sam admitted, setting the bottle down on the battered plastic table, then resealing it with his free hand. “But maybe it’s got something to do with flight-or-fight and the psychological toll it takes on you, being yanked up and down by adrenalin. Or maybe it’s just a way for people to forget their troubles.”
He sat down on the bench seat behind the table; it creaked and moaned in protest and yielded slightly beneath his weight. Telia didn’t try to sit, which was probably wise given how much she massed with her bionics.
I wonder if she even needs to sit, he mused.
“I don’t,” she said and he blinked, convinced he’d blurted his thoughts out loud. “Everyone thinks it,” she explained, the corner of her mouth turning up. “I saw it in your eyes. I don’t need to sit down, though I do just to be polite sometimes.” She nodded at the flimsy booth arrangements in the lounge. “Not on this shit, though.”
Sam chuckled, saluting her with his glass.
“Sorry,” he offered, after taking another sip of the vodka. “Didn’t mean to be so obvious.”
“This is a paradise compared to what I have grown used to.” She shook her head. “At least you judge me for who I am, not what I lost.”
Maybe the vodka was getting to her, he thought; she hadn’t been this talkative since he’d met her.
“You know, if you want,” he ventured, feeling a bit daring with a couple drinks in him, “we could fix you up. It would take a few weeks, but I know Priscilla could pull the strings, get it done.”
She glanced at him sharply, as if he’d insulted her, and he nearly flinched back, sure he’d gone too far. But then she hissed out a breath and he could tell she’d been thinking of it herself.
“There was a time,” she told him, “when I would have been horrified at the idea. A time when I would have considered it unholy blasphemy. Now, I only think of where I would go if I accepted your offer. I still couldn’t return to Earth, and if not to return home, why would I bother?”
“You could make a home with us,” he offered. “I know the Patrol could find a spot for you.”
“And where is your home, Sam?” she wondered, eyeing him in a way that made him uncomfortable, as if he were being judged. “My home was Grayson City. It was where my mother was born, where her parents were born, where their parents were born, back until before the war. What is your home?”
Sam thought about the question a beat longer than he’d intended. When he answered, he tried to be honest.
“I was born on Aphrodite. Not in the capital, not in Dauphin City, in one of the smaller settlements where no one admits to being
from.” He leaned back into the booth seat, ignoring the groaning plastic. “Its official name is New Manilla, but all my friends called it Vanilla.” He snorted at the memory and took another sip. His lips felt a little numb. “My mom and dad worked for the Natural Resources Commission, cataloguing land mammals on the southern continent and we all thought I’d wind up taking a job alongside them when I graduated Primary Education.” He tilted his head to the side, a diffident shrug. “But I tested out for the Patrol instead, so I got sent to the Academy.”
“You could not have studied to work with your parents instead?” Telia was frowning, as if she found the concept offensive. “You were forced to be in the military?”
He chuckled at her indignant look.
“Forced? Everyone wants to be in the Patrol. It’s a privilege to serve. All my friends were so jealous…”
“But was it what you wanted?” she insisted.
“That’s just how we do things,” he tried to explain. “The tests we go through aren’t just to find out what we’d be good at, they’re to find out what we’d be most happy doing, too. They were designed by Mother Herself and everyone accepts them.”
“Not everyone.” The comment was sullen, her eyes focused downward at the deck.
“Yeah, I know Mawae complains about the way they force kids to train to be Sensitives,” he acknowledged, waving a hand. “But that’s a special case. Not one in a hundred thousand people have the qualities necessary to be a Sensitive, and it’s vital to the security of the Resolution.”
“And what is of use to the Resolution is all that matters?”
He was trying to make his brain work to come up with a reasoned response, trying not to get mad at the woman who’d just saved them all, when he was rescued by the poorly-fitted lounge door scraping open. Priscilla shuffled in, exhaustion dragging at her, and fell into the seat beside him, and John Gage followed behind her, slipping through and dragging the door shut. He stepped into the compartment with his hands clasped behind his back, his face impassive.
“We were very fortunate,” he said, picking up the bottle of vodka and eyeing it critically. “None of the cargo shuttles were badly damaged by the debris field, and no one was injured.”
Gage popped the lid and took a long draw straight from the bottle. Sam raised an eyebrow, but Gage just smiled as he set the crystalline container down on the table and sighed in satisfaction.
“We used to call this Rocket Rotgut,” he confided. “Those Belters really know how to make vodka.”
“Did we find out anything from the bodies?” Sam wondered.
“Their IDs were fake,” Priscilla told him. She rubbed her eyes with the heels of her hands. “No huge surprise. Their DNA signatures and what we can tell from their medical history points to them being from Earth, originally, but we have no idea if they migrated elsewhere.”
“You can’t check their DNA against your database?” Sam asked Gage, surprised.
“We do not keep records of our people’s DNA unless they are criminals or blasphemers, or known agitators. These three were none of those.”
That seemed a short-sighted policy to Sam, but he didn’t say so; it wouldn’t have been polite.
“We’ll keep investigating,” Gage promised, “but whoever sent these men undoubtedly covered their tracks well.”
“Who do you think sent them, Minister Gage?” Sam asked him, perhaps a bit too frank under the influence of the vodka.
The old man leaned on the table and Sam wondered perversely if it would collapse beneath his weight. He looked between Sam and Priscilla.
“This is strictly off the record,” he insisted, “and if you repeat it, I’ll deny it.” The corner of his mouth quirked. “I know you aren’t recording me because nothing in this station works well enough for that. This was likely the work of the Naturalists.” He shrugged expressively. “Perhaps not any of their public leadership, but some more covert wing of the party. It would suit their aims and interests if this project were to fail, and some of their lot are deep enough into denial that they might convince themselves the threat from the ramship isn’t real.”
“I managed to get ahold of Peterman,” Priscilla said. “Finally.”
She grabbed the bottle and poured another shot into the glass she’d taken from in front of Sam, then swallowed half of it in a gulp. She made a face, and Sam wasn’t sure if it was from the taste of the alcohol or the aftertaste of talking to Peterman.
“I had to get the message through Danabri to him, but I informed him of the attack. He assured me the security scanners and the energy shield generator will be on the next shipment from Aphrodite.”
“Well thank Gaia for small fucking favors,” Sam muttered. He caught Telia’s eye. “Are you okay? Have you ever had to…” He trailed off, gesturing at her sidearm.
She shrugged, a jerky, mechanical motion.
“I am a Guardian. This is my duty.” Her voice was firm and solid…but she took the bottle and refilled her glass.
“So what now?” Sam addressed Gage this time. “What is the Consensus going to do about this? Can you actually take any action against the Naturalists?”
“Not openly,” the man admitted. “They hold too much power in the government. But as Guardian Proctor can attest, I and my office are rather…” He grinned like a stalking wolf. “…old fashioned. We can arrange for lessons to be taught, informally.” He waved a hand expansively. “I can’t guarantee they won’t act again, but this attempt was a best-case scenario for us. It was unsuccessful and embarrassing enough to keep their heads down for a while, which should give us time to button this place down, with the help of your Patrol.”
“It doesn’t make sense to me,” Sam admitted, finally giving voice to the doubts eating at him since he’d had time to calm down. Three sets of eyes fixed on him and he shrugged, uncomfortable at the scrutiny. “I mean, suppose it had worked just like they’d planned it. Suppose they planted the explosives at, say, the reactor level, caused a catastrophic plasma leak and made the station so much uninhabitable slag. Do they think we were all just going to give up?”
“Maybe they heard Peterman’s dickering over money and assumed we wouldn’t pay for a replacement station,” Priscilla ventured, taking another drink. “I can’t honestly say we would…” She shrugged. “Though, if the two of us had been killed, it would likely have caused enough outrage to keep the decision-makers from pulling the plug on the project. It might still have delayed it.”
“All it would have done is made us look bad,” Gage said, his eyes fixed on something behind the bulkheads of the lounge. “You’re right, Captain Avalon,” he decided, focusing on Sam again. “It doesn’t seem to make much sense. Then again, men and women who resort to violence to make political points often don’t think about things the way you or I might.”
He checked the readout on the computer display built into the sleeve of his jacket.
“I must return to the cargo ship. There are meetings to be arranged, and I have to get back to Earth to arrange them.” He nodded to Sam and Priscilla. “Call me directly if you need anything.” Then he faced Telia Proctor and carefully, precisely saluted her. “You performed admirably, Guardian Prime Proctor.”
Sam could see Telia’s cheeks redden in surprise and embarrassment, but she returned the salute.
“Thank you, sir,” she said sharply.
Gage released the salute and headed out the door, but Telia was still staring after him, her hand halfway down from her shoulder, as if she didn’t want to let the moment go.
“Everything is clamped down for now,” Priscilla said gently, reaching out to touch Telia’s shoulder to get her attention. The Guardian glanced at the other woman’s hand curiously, as if unsure how to react to it. “Why don’t you go try to get some sleep? Gaia knows when we’ll get another chance.”
“Thank you,” Sam told her before she could step through the hatchway. At Telia’s questioning glance, he elaborated. “For saving us all.”
Then she was gone, leaving the two of them alone. Sam looked at his hands, realized they were shaking. He wondered if Telia’s hands would have been shaking if they’d been biological.
Priscilla covered his fingers with hers, holding them tight in the secure warmth of her grip. He met her eyes and tried to smile.
“That’s twice now we’ve almost gotten ourselves killed,” he pointed out, attempting humor but realizing even as he said it how tremulous the words sounded. “Third time’s the charm.”
“Under normal circumstances,” she replied, her own smile more confident than his, but still a bit wan, “I’d prescribe all three of us a regimen of counselling sessions with a qualified trauma therapist. But since we’re likely to be working another shift tomorrow, why don’t we just go back to our cabin and try to relax the old-fashioned way?”
She rose and tugged him up with her and he didn’t resist. He was a male, and still breathing, so he wasn’t about to turn down the offer, but if he were being honest with himself, he wanted her companionship at the moment even more than the intimacy. He’d spent his whole career in small ships light-years from home, surrounded by enemies, but at this moment he felt more alone than he ever had before.
***
Priscilla’s skin was as smooth as the porcelain dolls Sam had seen in the craft markets on Mars, as soft as the silk in the hand-made gowns he’d seen Consensus ambassadors wear at formal dinners, and he reveled in the feeling, in the warmth. She gasped and he covered her mouth with his to devour the emotion. There was an urgency to his movements, an imperative to go through the motions of procreation so soon after facing what might have been the end.
When he was finally spent, he collapsed as if the very life had gone out of him, breath rasping harshly as he tried to bring his respiration back under control. Priscilla snuggled into his arm, her head across his chest, warm against the constant chill of their cabin. He felt her fingers teasing at his chest hair and rolled his head around, staring into her eyes, so blue they nearly gleamed in the glow of the chemical lightstrips lining the deck. Her hair was loose and wild; but rather than seeming disheveled, it was a crown, the mane of a wild horse running free across the plains.