by M M Buckner
“Mistake?” Liam spoke as if he begrudged the very shape of the word. In the dimness, I could barely make out his bearded face.
“That hull breach wasn’t anywhere near where the gun-ship was firing,” I said.
“You think we stupid enough to blow our home?”
“You were stupid enough to start this war.”
He almost answered, then gritted his teeth and slung his braid behind his shoulder.
“Look where you are,” I went on. “You live on a freaking satellite. Totally dependent on artificial life support. Even your orbit has to be controlled from Earth. You have absolutely no chance in hell. What were you thinking?”
His eyes glittered in the uneasy light, and he scraped fungus off the bulkhead hinges with his glove. Dumb brute. I was just about convinced of his utter disability with language when his baritone resonated through the well. “Nasir, why you save my life?”
“I don’t know,” I said, thrown off balance.
He touched my arm. “Thank you.” The next instant, he unclipped my helmet and shut off its lights.
“Give that back!” I shouted.
“Save the batteries.” He shut off his own lights and sank us both into pitch-darkness.
I stood frozen with rage. Were batteries so scarce? If another hull breach occurred, I would need that helmet. I heard him clipping my helmet to his belt. Next he opened the door into Three, and I heard his boots leap over the sill and run down an unlighted corridor. I couldn’t see a thing.
“Come back here.”
I’d risked my life for that punk. My very toes curled with rage. I wanted to annihilate the stupid lout. Then I remembered Sheeba, so I hurried after him into Three.
“Dark is evil. It’s ignorance and depravity. Everything wicked.”
“Yes, that’s part of it,” Sheeba admitted.
She and I were lounging in my bed, with an old movie muted and forgotten on the screen. She was waxing ecstatic about her usual theme, the dark, and I was baiting her, for the fun of it.
“In the dark, we find rest and healing.” She hugged a cushion to her chest and rocked. Her eyes got that dreamy sparkle. “Life quickens in the dark. Stars are born mere. Dark laces the universe together.”
“It’s also the underworld where nasty things slither and rot,” I teased.
“Well, Nass, you’re as slithery as they come.” She tickled the back of my arm. “And don’t we tunnel in the Earth for shelter?”
“I see. You’re calling me a worm.”
“I’m saying the dark leads us home.”
“Gilty gods, you mean the grave. Do you want me to die?”
She laughed. “You’re the one who wants that.”
I kicked off the covers and sat up. “Just because my sport’s a little dangerous, don’t assume I have a death wish. I’m very cautious, darling. I love my life.”
“Liar. You hate it as much as I do. Everything’s too cozy. It’s not supposed to be like this.”
“You’d rather live in poverty, I suppose.”
She squeezed the cushion tighter. “Maybe.”
Scatterbrain. You don’t know what the hell you’re talking about, I almost yelled. Our discussion was getting edgy. Shee and I had never argued, and I didn’t want to begin, but her tomfool remarks upset me. Too cozy? My friends and I practically sacrificed our souls to give her this comfort. I tried to laugh it off.
“Be serious, Nass. You’re hurting all over. I feel your muscles every day.” To prove her point, she started kneading my tense shoulders. “It’s our nature to scream and fight and tear things. We need the dark.”
“But Shee—do you seriously want evil in your life?”
Her eyes sparkled. “I want some of everything.” Simple child. As I felt my way along Heaven’s pitch-black corridor, her words resonated. You might say, they haunted me. Sheeba had no idea how ugly and dangerous the dark could become. My shoulder brushed an unseen wall. The air tasted of long stale enclosure, and I couldn’t see three centimeters in front of my nose. Somewhere ahead, Liam twisted another creaking wheel. Despite the fact mat I loathed him, his nearness reassured me, so I hurried to catch up.
A flash of light showed a door opening, and his silhouette darted through. Then the door slammed, and darkness engulfed me again.
Punk. He could have left the door open. The very thought of the risks I’d taken for mat twentysomething thug made me want to bash his teeth in. I should have used the blowout to make my escape. With that extra length of hose, I should have sailed out and signaled the gunship. Instead, I helped that—that agitator.
At that very moment, he was racing ahead to meet Sheeba, with who knows what ulterior purposes. No way would I let him get there first. I slid my glove along the wall, grumbling under my breath and searching for the door. By feel alone, I located the wheel and fumbled to open it.
“Catch.”
Geraldine hurled a bulky object toward me the instant the door fell open, and I caught it by reflex. It was a heavy, ten-liter can of stew. I glanced around and recognized the same drying room I’d visited earlier, only now the rows of ovens stood open. Emergency fluorescent tubes buzzed from the ceiling, and Geraldine stuck her head in one of the oven doors. All the lids had been folded back, so I peeked inside. Each oven contained a hoard of food cans marked with Provendia’s logo. Standard employee provisions. They must have been stockpiling their rations for months.
Geraldine and Juani were transferring the ovens’ contents into a handcart. I read the label on the can Geraldine had tossed to me: chili diablo. It was some kind of spicy protein mixture, and the description on the label made me salivate.
“We’re taking everything up to Four, just in case.” Geraldine hurled another steel can in my direction. Behind her, Juani sang a song about moonlight.
Just in case. I didn’t like that phrase. As I ducked to let the next can fly over my shoulder, Juani gestured for me to help him push his cart. It was severely overloaded, and apparently, he wanted to move it to the ladder well.
I said, “Where’s Sheeba?”
“Nasir, I’m here.”
In the breathless moment that followed, I turned and saw her framed in a nearby doorway, lighted in the jittery halo of fluorescent green. She’d changed. Her appearance shocked me. Only after my eyes adjusted to the light did I understand. Her pale skin dye had faded even further, revealing more of her complexion’s true olive tone. She gleamed a deep burnished bronze. And those eyes, sparkling with all the shades of a northern lake stirred by rain. It made a jarring combination.
“We’re moving these supplies up to sick-ward,” she said.
I ran across the room and seized her in my arms, but at first I couldn’t speak.
Gently, she released herself from my grip. “We’re going to seal ourselves in and make a stand.”
“Make a stand? Sheeba, listen to yourself. You sound as if you’re siding with these protes.”
“Of course I am, Nass.” She checked out the EVA suit I still wore.
“Dearest.” I pressed my mouth to her ear and whispered, “We have to leave. This place might blow any second.”
“I know,” she whispered back, “but first, we have to help these people. Their situation’s heinous.” Then she hurried to help Juani push his cart.
By accident, the cart tipped over, and when Sheeba launched herself bodily to catch the spilling cans, I recognized what had happened. She was caught up in the thrill of war surfing. The ardor shining in her eyes told the story. The chemicals of fear, the need for fast action, the deep salty urge to fight, these instincts had overwhelmed her reason. Zone bliss had so completely captivated her that she’d forgotten which team she belonged to.
“Darling,” I pleaded.
“Help us, beau.” She dashed to an oven and started scooping up cans of food with both hands. Her chaste white longjohn had turned filthy gray, and there was a rip across her belly where something had snagged the smart-skin. Her lovely dimpled hands
were bleeding.
Geraldine squeezed past me toward the ladder, then paused to bump me with her hip. Her rank smell almost made me cough. “Lover, you haul the freight hoist. I show you what to do.”
“Go with her, Nass. We don’t have time to discuss things now. We’ll talk soon.” Sheeba’s gray-green-blue eyes shone out of her dark golden face like beacons.
It was useless to argue. Sheeba moved in hasty jerks, totally absorbed in her task. Geraldine handed me a water sack, and as I sucked it down, the wench patted my butt. “This way, sugar buns.”
A large pile of food cans had accumulated in Three’s ladder well, and my task, as Geraldine explained, was to convey them onto the freight hoist—the platform that moved up and down through the cargo door by a hand-operated pulley. Above, a flock of little toads was unloading and stacking the cans.
Imagine how my gut knotted with hunger pangs as I handled that Chili Diablo. After an hour of lifting and twisting, my broken leg throbbed, not to mention my shoulders. The designer additives in my blood gave me extra stamina though, and in Three’s reduced gravity, the cans weighed half what they usually would given their mass. Since the little toads bore up without complaint, I kept my grievances quiet.
After we moved the canned food, Juani and Sheeba started carting out glossy plastic sacks of water, but the sacks were slick and floppy, and they kept sliding off the hoist In a rush of impatience, Sheeba tore off her longjohn and improvised a cargo net to hold the slippery sacks on the platform. Juani and Geraldine both gawked when she stripped naked, but Sheeba didn’t seem to notice. She was plasmically focused on the moment
I tried not to see her nude body. Without the skin dye, her nakedness seemed more intimate and personal. When we met in the corridor, I edged past without touching her. Shee’s unwashed skin radiated a compelling pungency, yet for the first time, her nakedness embarrassed me. I wanted to cover her up. She seemed exposed, yes, but not vulnerable. Nothing about Sheeba seemed vulnerable.
Shee squeezed my arm and grinned. “Ordic emanations, can you feel them? I knew you’d want to help.” Then she hurried off on some new errand.
Far below, the hull rumbled as Provendia’s gunship resumed fire. Deck One was taking most of the hits, but occasionally a stray noisemaker would ricochet across the flank, and its impact would vibrate in the walls.
Juani shouted for me to come help him siphon the last of the water from their collector cistern, but I felt ravenous. I searched the gaping ovens for food—cracker crumbs, moldy powdered soup, anything to stuff in my mouth. Nothing. They’d moved it all. Juani had disappeared beyond the rows of ovens, so I marched along, irritably calling his name.
“Man, don’t yell so loud. I’m in here.”
He was kneeling in a nearby utility closet, shining a flashlight at a bank of old-fashioned analog dials and shaking his head. Some of the ornamental wire in his braid had come loose, and the sharp copper points stuck out like a frayed connection. “Cistern pressure too low to use the pumps anymore. We gotta suck out the rest by mouth.”
“You’re joking.”
He got up off the floor and wrinkled his nose. “How strong your lungs, blade?”
“Is this necessary? We’ve transported a megaton of water already. Why can’t you just turn on your recycler and make more water?”
As we wound through the drying room with his flashlight, he explained how they’d “rehabbed” a food vat to make their cistern. He was talking again as freely as ever.
“Through here” he said. “Watch the overhang.”
I ducked under some pipes, and Juani’s unraveling braid almost hit me in the eye. “Wait, wait, your hair’s a menace. Let me fix it” I caught hold of his braid, and he stopped and let me twist the sharp ends of the wires back into his plaits. “What caused that hull breach anyway?” I asked. “The gunship wasn’t targeting that area. I suspect sabotage.”
“Sabo-what?” Juani felt his braid to see what I’d done.
“Your treacherous chief did it to gain publicity. That’s what I think.”
“Blade, you so sharp you cut yourself.”
When he tried to take off, I caught his shoulder. “Provendia’s gunfire didn’t cause that breach. How do you explain it?”
“Plain old stress.” Juani grinned and thumped his fist softly against the steel wall. “This tank, he ancient. All mat gunfire, he tremble.”
Well, that gave me something to chew on.
Juani led me to their makeshift cistern, a spherical steel food vat anchored to the floor with bolts, patch-welds and also magnets. Quite a lot of redundancy, I thought. Still, the mounts had obviously bumped around a few times. I wondered what force could have moved this heavy cistern.
We had to crabwalk around the vat to locate the small pump valve, and the floor was wet where they’d been filling water sacks. When Juani twisted the valve full open, only a hollow whuffing sound came through. He insisted the tank held more water, though, and he jammed a short section of plastic tube inside the faucet to siphon it out. While I held the tube in place with both hands, he tried his manful best to suck the water out, but there was no result. He sank back on the floor, red-faced from the strain.
“We already have enough water,” I said.
“For how long?” His words struck me as ominous.
How long indeed? And how many people would have to share it? I envisioned the sick-ward crowded with thirsty, dying workers. All the adults must be there.
“Where’s the recycler?” I said. “Ye gods, was it damaged in the blowout?” From my decades of board meetings, I knew just enough about life-support recyclers to spout a little jargon. “If the main lagoons are intact, maybe we can repair the machinery. We still have power, right?”
Juani leaned back on his hands and gazed at the underside of the cistern, humming softly. “The recycler safe on Five, man, but it may as well be on the other side of the moon. The pumps down in Two, and I can’t get there to restart ‘em.”
I sat beside him, careful to avoid the puddles. My muscles were so fatigued that the steel deck actually felt comfortable. Silently, I worked out the ramifications of not having water pumps. “But we still have power, right? Those fluorescent lights were working.”
“We running off sick-ward’s emergency generator.”
Then another thought hit me. “What about air?”
Juani fingered his woven wire braid. “All the pumps down on Two.”
“Great golden gilders, we’re trapped with no air.” I thought fast. ‘Take my EVA suit. You can exit through the hull breach and get to the pumps through Two’s airlock.”
When Juani’s mouth shut in a flat line, I remembered the earlier discussion about his spacesickness. Fainting on a space walk was no joke. It could mean asphyxiation. But so could no air pumps.
“All right, if you can’t go, someone else can,” I said. “Surely you’re not the only one who knows the recycler machinery.”
“Not machinery. It’s the garden.” Juani ground his knuckles in his eye sockets. “The garden, she breathe and drink. She give us air and water and food.”
At first, I couldn’t take this in. “You don’t have recycling machinery? But every Provendia satellite comes equipped with a standard recycling plant.”
“We rehabbed it,” he said.
“What do you mean, rehabbed it? Did you have proper authorization?”
“We cut up the parts to build our garden.” Juani jammed the plastic tube back into the cistern faucet. “We fine, blade. The garden keep us alive. It’s the people on One and Two, they trapped.”
“Where’s Liam?”
“The chief down there trying to fix the cracks so we can repress’.’
I got up and started crabwalking toward the exit.
“Hey, man, we gotta get this water,” he said.
In my weariness, I didn’t notice the overhead strut till it banged my forehead and knocked me dizzy. I got back up, rubbed my head and staggered on. I had to find S
heeba. She and I were spinning through space in an ancient, decomposing fuel tank run by a covey of little hellions who had destroyed their recycling plant. And any second, the whole decrepit place might tremble to bits.
14
TIME AND SPACE
“No one is so old as to think he cannot live one more year.”
-CICERO
“This place is a freaking death chamber.” I charged along the corridor, ignoring hunger and fatigue, searching for Sheeba. Surf the moment. Ride the contingencies. We had to get out of this leaky spinning tank before it self-destructed.
But how? Liam had stolen my helmet. I had to find the wordless brute and get it back. Juani followed at my heels. Maybe he thought I had a plan to save everyone.
“Where did Liam put my helmet?”
“He gave it to Geraldine.” Juani patted my shoulder. “Be calm, man. You gonna bust a vein.”
I wheeled open a bulkhead door and collided head-on with Geraldine.
“Strip, lover. I need your trousseau,” she said.
Before I could react, she unzipped my EVA suit, and Juani slid past me, whispering under his breath, “I go check the generator, just in case.”
Ha. There lay my helmet at Geraldine’s feet. But when I bent to reach it, she jerked my EVA suit off my shoulders. I grabbed the folds of silky Kevlax and tried to fling her off, but the wench clung to me like Velcro.
“Nass, give her the suit,” Sheeba said. Out of nowhere, Shee was standing behind me, whispering in my ear and tracing tiny circles up and down my neck. Gently, she tugged the suit loose from my fingers. “Gee needs it. Her suit’s leaky. She has to help Liam restore our life support.”
Sheeba’s words sounded reasonable. Life support, yes. Restoring it had to be a positive step.
“Nass, let go of the suit,” she whispered, caressing me from behind.
As her breath warned my ear, my grip on the Kevlax loosened. Geraldine tugged the suit down around my ankles, and the two of them helped me step out of it like a docile old geezer. Then I just stood there in my longjohn.