Chewing Rocks

by Alan Black

  Jackson said, “It’s not that bad. We can always blend supplies from the Blinkin and the Winkin. We won’t lose that-”

  Sno interrupted and addressed both men. “Mister Lee and Mister Jackson, I understand your concerns. I am willing to offer the supplies aboard Sedona to share when the time comes. It won’t be easy to retrieve, but with our EVA suits we can get most of it off ship. I am also willing to pay double standard if that is what you want.”

  Lee said, “Double? You heard her, Jackson.”

  Sno said, “My suit is oxygen redlined. You name your price, do it now and let me onboard or I am going to blow a hole in the side of your ship and come in anyway. I have enough explosive putty to leave us all in vacuum. I am not planning to die out here because of your greed, but if I do, I am not going alone.”

  Lee said, “Okay, don’t get your knickers in a twist. Double fee is do-able.”

  Jackson said, “Redlined! I am sorry; I didn’t know it was that bad. Please, get into the airlock.”

  Once inside Sno watched Jackson hit the buttons to close and seal the doors. He slapped the lock mechanism as soon as the doors closed and simultaneously pushed the atmosphere exchanger. She wanted to push him out of the way and do it herself, but she refrained as he was working as fast as she would have on an unfamiliar ship. The controls were in the same place as every ship she had ever been on, but every ship seemed to have quirks and peculiarities. She did not want to bump into a quirk that shut down the air she would need; air she would need very soon.

  Sno watched the atmosphere indicator for the ambient air pressure in the airlock. The inner door would not open until the air pressure matched on both sides of the door. She glanced at her suit’s air gauge. It was not noticeably changing, but she could just imagine the air was going out of the suit faster than the air was filling the airlock.

  She glanced at the door pad. The gravity was set in the airlock and the whole ship at standard one gravity. She almost shuttered. No one but earthers would live and work in standard one gravity. She only used that high a setting on the gravimeter when she was working out. And truthfully, she did not work out as often as she should.

  As long as she stayed in the suit, she would not have any problems. The suit’s internal gravity was set at Ceres standard ten percent. That allowed her to settle into the suit and work in comfort but still give her muscles something to press against.

  She would not be able to pop open her visor; the gravity variation would be too great.

  “Mister Jackson, would it be possible to dial the gravimeter down a bit? I must admit I am not used to this much gravity.”

  The atmosphere indicator flashed green. Jackson’s suit visor slid back into the helmet and Sno looked on the face of her rescuer for the first time. It was a pleasant face. He smiled at her with a shy look. His eyes were dark, almost black, matching his skin. His white teeth stood out in contrast to his short black hair.

  “Hi,” he said.

  “Hello,” she responded. “I really need to get air into this suit, but I don’t think I can take one gravity right now.”

  She saw the door numbers spin down to fifty percent and hold as Jackson pushed buttons to get the inner door open. She punched buttons on her suit’s side control panel and raised her gravimeter to match the ship. It was higher than she liked, but it would have to do.

  Lee’s voice came over the comm booming in Sno’s ears. “I hate doing that. Changing gravity settings that fast always make my stomach do flip flops.”

  Sno popped open her visor and gasped in the cool air of the ship. Her suit had not quite reached empty, but it was close enough that any air still recycling through the system was not cooling down before she needed it to breathe again.

  The inner door opened. Sno followed Jackson into the personnel suit area. There were wall mounts for four suits, but only one mount held a suit. Jackson backed into a wall mount and with a hiss his suit connected and popped open. He gestured for Sno to take any empty mount across from him.

  She backed into an empty mount and felt her suit connect to the ship. She pushed her helmet up and off. Her hair was matted to her head, as it often was after a couple of EVA hours. She shook her head and felt the cool air, like gentle fingers, massaging her scalp. She breathed deeply. The Blinkin smelled different than the Sedona. She was used to her own ship, but when you are hitching a ride, you take what your can get. She could smell food odors wafting through the open corridor door. She smelled unfamiliar spices, soaps and disinfectant. She could also smell herself, as the odor leaked up through the collar gaskets to her nose.

  Lee’s voice came over the ship’s comms. He said, “You’re welcome.”

  Sno asked, “What?”

  Lee said again, “You’re welcome. I said, ‘you’re welcome’.”

  Jackson said, “Come on, Lee. Be nice.” His voice was muffled as he was busy unlatching his suit.

  Lee replied, “It isn’t my manners that need repair. Young lady, what’s your name again?”

  “Sno,” she answered.

  “Sno? That’s not a name. It’s a weather condition,” Lee said. “We save your life and take you onboard our ship. Shouldn’t you say thank you? Didn’t your mama teach you manners?”

  Sno replied, “I don’t have a mama. You are getting paid for taking me aboard. You are getting paid at double the standard rate, plus whatever consumables we pull off Sedona. You want me to thank you for raping me on the price too?”

  Lee stepped into the room. Sno saw he was a short man, or at least very short for what she was used to. He must not have stood above five foot-four, making him more than a foot shorter than her. He had a fringe of graying hair around a bald spot on his head. His pale hair almost blended into the color of his pale skin. His belly preceded him into the room. It was the biggest gut she had ever seen on a miner. That told her he had not been mining very long.

  Lee looked up at her, still enclosed in her suit with the helmet pulled off. “You don’t like it, you can get off. No skin off my nose.”

  Jackson said, “That is enough, Lee. Please?”

  Lee said, “Alright already. What is done is done! Finish getting unsuited. Jackson, it’s your turn in the galley. I’ve already got the course laid in and we are headed back to the old salt mines.”

  Sno looked across at Jackson. His suit had opened completely like a clam shell. He was wearing what most miners called a union suit. She watched him reach down between his legs, pull the plumbing hoses free and snap shut the trap door on his union suit. He climbed down from the suit and stretched. She could see that he was not even as tall as Lee.

  Earthers were often much shorter than space born. Her Dad was shorter than she was. He had been born on Earth and immigrated to Ceres before he had his final growth spurt, so he was taller than he might have been had he continued to live in a deep gravity well. Sno remembered her Grandfather as a huge man, but since she had not seen him since she was a small child she knew it was just perspective, because all records showed he was not more than five foot-nine.

  Lee looked up at her, “Well?”

  Sno said, “Well what?”

  He shook his head, “You were pretty anxious to get in here, but you’re dawdling getting out of your suit.”

  Sno said, “Okay by me, but just to let you know. I am naked in here. Not a stitch on.”

  Lee said, “Okay by me.”

  Jackson fled the room.

  Lee watched him go and looked back at Sno. “I got no where else to be for a while.”

  Sno hit the toggle to unsuit. The EVA suit slid open cleanly and she felt the cool air caress her skin. With a deep breath she could feel her nipples stiffen. She was not sure about the nudity taboos of her hosts. Taboos varied on Earth from drastic paranoia to blatantly open sexuality. She was not uncomfortable being naked, although Ceres mores tended to be middle of the road.

  Still, the man was a stranger. She felt a blush rise from her chest and encroach across her face. She re
ached down between her legs and unplugged from the suit’s plumbing. She caught another whiff of her body odor. She did not mind the nudity, but she hoped he did not want to watch her shower as well. She glanced up at him and caught him with an uncomfortable look on his face. She was a bit puzzled by his expression, but she was committed to getting out of the suit.

  She climbed out and stood before her suit. She stretched to her full height, reaching for the ceiling of the suit room. She twisted and bent at the waist, stretching kinked muscles that had been trapped in a suit for far too long. Her red hair flopped about in wet strands. Other than her red hair she was hairless, she used a dilapatory everywhere. It was not currently fashionable for women to remove all of the hair from their bodies, but she found that stray hair tended to cause problems for women in EVA suits. Pubic hair had a tendency to pull when attaching or unhooking plumbing systems. She did not know how men handled the problem.

  Sno reached up and patted her suit, “Thanks for the ride, big fella.”

  She turned to Lee, who was blushing deeply, and smiled to herself. He had been trying to make her uncomfortable and was trapped in his own embarrassment without any way to leave the room and still save face. She wanted to let him stew in his own dilemma, but he was going to be her host for a while.

  She reached into the thigh pocket of her suit, retrieving her panties and t-shirt. She did not really want to pull them on, because she smelled so bad she did not want to transfer her odor to the only clothes she had. She held them out modestly in front of her.

  She said, “Mister Lee, thank you for the rescue. Before I can get dressed I need to shower. I was in my suit way too long to be good company.”

  Lee shook his head, but he turned his back and waved her to follow him. “You smell fine by me. I mean, you beat the way Jackson smells after a meal of my chili. Our beds and showers are this way.” Without turning around to face her, he opened the door to the dorm room. “Our showers are at the end. Soap and clean towels are on the shelf. Feel free to use any of the shampoo or stuff there. Neither Jackson nor I use any feminine smelling stuff or hair conditioner or the like, but you are welcome to use whatever you find.”

  “I’ll keep track of what I use so we can add it to my charges,” she said, her voice coming out a bit snippier than she would have liked. The man had started to come off as a jerk, but she had the idea that it was all a front. His embarrassment gave lie to his attitude.

  “Nah, sorry about that, no charge,” he said. “Take all the time you need. I’ll be on the bridge if you need anything. Just give me a call.”

  With him embarrassed or not, she had no intention of calling either man while she was in the shower. Nudity was one thing, but there were some activities she wanted to keep to herself. Anything done in the bathroom was not for public viewing.

  There wasn’t anyway to lock the dorm room door so she tossed her dirty clothes onto an empty bunk and stepped into the shower. One thing about a mining ship’s shower is there was no lack of water. Water was almost all recycled with the exception of the minuscule amount evaporating into the air as additional humidity. Most of that was eventually recycled through the air recycling systems. Living in a completely closed ecology had its advantages.

  Sno tried to relax as she let the water soak her skin, but she could not quite loosen up. She was on a strange ship, crewed by two earthers. Either, or both men, could come busting in on her at any moment, demanding more from her than she was willing to give.

  Sno was washing her hair for the third time, luxuriating in the hot water, when she thought she heard the corridor door open. But when she looked out of the shower, the doom room was empty. Maybe she was being paranoid again, but she did not trust earthers; not even those who had just saved her life. She checked around her in the vents and corners looking for hidden cameras or peepholes in the shower stall, but she did not find anything. She was sure she was just being a bit paranoid, because with just the two of them on board, who would they have to spy on if they had not picked her up. Still, she thought, maybe there are more than two.

  Chapter 12.0

  Sno delayed getting out of the shower for so long she was sure she had recycled their water tanks twice through. She was almost ready to shut the water off when she heard the door to the corridor open again, or thought she did. She clenched her fist and poked her head around the shower wall, but the dorm room was still empty.

  With great reluctance she shut the shower off and grabbed a towel. The Sedona carried a good commercial grade of towel, designed to dry a person off, without taking up more space than necessary. The towels on the Blinkin were twice that size. And so soft! Sno’s eyes grew wide as she slid the material across her skin. She had felt such luxurious cloth before, but it had never occurred to her to use something so nice for an activity as ordinary as drying yourself off after a shower. She could not tell whether she was more amazed at the softness or because the towel smelled like flowers in the park after a good watering.

  A beeping behind her in the shower caused Sno to jerk around. A hissing noise followed the beeps. Her fists were clenched and she rose up on the balls of her feet. She glanced cautiously back into the shower not knowing what to expect. A small series of nozzles had popped out from behind a row of tiles. The nozzles where spraying a chemical on the walls of the shower. It smelled like ammonia or chlorine or a combination of the two. She could see soap scum and a few stray red hairs swirling away down the drain. A quick mist of water washed away any remaining chemicals leaving the shower sparkling and smelling like…lemonade or tang or something citricy. She could not quite identity the smell, but it was pleasant and dissipated almost as quickly as it had begun.

  “I’ll be,” Sno said to herself. Since she did not clean the showers on the Sedona, they often got pretty rank by the time she got back to the Ceres dock from a mining trip. “I need to get me one of those for myself. Then I can quit paying Larry at L&S to clean the head between trips.”

  Sno reached down to the bunk to grab what clothes she had, and her hand froze. Her underwear was there, but it wasn’t in the small wrinkled pile she had left it in. They were in the exact same spot, but they were a different shade of white and they were neatly folded. Underwear folding was something she did not do.

  “Those perverts have been messing with my panties,” Sno snarled. She was as embarrassed as she was angry. These were her granny panties and they had not been her cleanest underwear when she had put them on, however long ago that had been. These panties had seen better days. There were holes, not just around the seams, but there was a big hole in the right cheek where she had snagged them on the edge of a drawer in the Sedona’s galley. Plus, this pair had an embarrassing brown skid mark stain in the crotch. All in all, a pair of panties that would have made a pervert ecstatic, but the last pair she wanted anyone to see.

  Sno shook out the folds and was amazed to see the stains in the crotch were gone. The holes in the seams had been sewn shut; even the hole in the right cheek area was darned closed. The panties and the t-shirt smelled like new flowers. They did not smell like the same flowers as the ones in the central park in the middle of Arizona City, but they smelled like whatever you called the kind of flowers with the thorns. She slid them on. They felt better than if they were new; somehow softer and somehow fluffier.

  She shook her head and could not figure out how to make cloth fluffier. Next to her underwear was a small stack of other clothes. There was a blouse, a pair of shorts and pair of soft cloth booties for casual ship wear. She could tell nothing had been her size a short while ago, but somehow someone had remanufactured existing clothes to her size.

  The empty bunk had a fresh mattress laid out, with sheets as soft as the towels and blankets that smelled new, not flowery, just new. There was even a small pillow. Sno opened the sliding drawer under the bunk. Stacked inside were a couple of other shirts, folded so neat they looked new, as if they had just come from the box. But it was obvious they had been remanufacture
d from existing clothes of different sizes. There was also another pair of shorts and a second set of booties. It was all her size and each shirt smelled like a different kind of flower.

  “Holy cats!” she said. “If I am going to be kidnapped and raped by earthers, at least they are going to be civilized about it.”

  There was a knock at the corridor door. Lee’s voice called out, “Are you dressed, Sno?”

  “Yes, Mister Lee. I am covered,” Sno answered.

  The man came in the door and Sno was struck again by how short he seemed. She was surprised Lee and Jackson could have found anything they had ever worn that could be remade to fit her stretched frame.

  She said by way of thanks, “Nice clothes.”

  Lee said, “Don’t mention it. It was just old stuff we had laying about. We needed to throw it out anyway, so don’t sweat it. Jackson was worried you had drowned in the shower, so he sent me to check on you.”

  Sno nodded, “I guess I did spend a while in there. I hope your recycler is up to the task.”

  Lee groused, “That is not a problem on this old P.O.S., Jackson can’t spend an hour in an EVA suit without wanting to spend an equal amount of time in the shower. He is working up a tizzie even now, since he let you go first. If you and I go get something to eat, he can get in here and get cleaned up.”

  Sno’s mouth watered at the mention of food. “Food? That I could use. I haven’t had anything in quite a while. Last I had came in a prepacked box and was something called mandarin orange squid in fettuccini. It was filling but not quite satisfying, you know?”

  Lee stopped and looked at her, “Mandarin orange what? Squid?” He shoved a fat finger deep in his mouth and made a retching noise. “I hope it sounds worse than it tasted.”

  The two stepped into the galley. Jackson nodded and scooted past them.