Shattered Lamps (Osprey Chronicles Book 2)

by Ramy Vance

  “Ed department?” The young man glanced down, taking in the ensign badge on Petra’s uniform jacket. In a show of defiance more visible than her pilfered coffee, Petra had undone the top button. Technically, if she was in uniform in public, she was supposed to be in uniform. It had been a long, dreary day, and the new detergent they were using down in laundry made her skin itch. At least with it unbuttoned, it didn’t rub quite so hard against her throat.

  “You’re in Comms, aren’t you?”

  Petra turned, eying the young man standing beside her. People waiting for their next shuttle crowded the bay tunnel.

  He was a cute kid, she thought, but round-faced and too young to be wearing that lieutenant’s knot on his shoulder. She appreciated that he, too, had unbuttoned his top button. Casual Friday on the Reliant, it seemed.

  “That’s right.” The old hint of a low-class twang crept into her voice. “Except on Friday nights I run a group discussion with the teenagers. They like hearing about Old Earth.”

  Petra liked the casual, devil-may-care attitude of the youngsters. In her mind, she was still one of them. Anyway, someone had to keep an eye on the kids, especially the orphans. They were growing up hard and fast, ready to fall face-first and blind into the fleet’s seedy underbelly.

  The young lieutenant’s face brightened. “Volunteer work! Very civic-minded of you, Miss…” his eyes brushed over her jacket, looking for a name patch. “Potlova?”

  “That’s right,” Petra said. “You new to the command freighter, Lieutenant? I haven’t seen you on the bridge before.”

  “It’s my first week running bridge crews,” he agreed. “Although I’ve spent most of these last few days in meetings or coordinating a cleaning of the sensor arrays. I just got transferred up from the Endurance’s bridge.”

  The Tribe Six Support Fleet consisted of three heavy freighters and a few dozen smaller, semi-independent lab and habitation ships. The Reliant, which Petra and this lieutenant were on now, housed the command staff, most of the military, and a good number of the crew displaced from Tribe Six. If the scattered collection of ships was a body, the Reliant was the brain.

  The other two freighters—the Endurance and the Constitution—were more like the heart and stomach. They contained the Education and Youth departments, where fleet members sent their kids for basic learning and training. They also had the hydroponics and the manufacturing fabricators that churned out all the bits and baubles you needed to keep a fleet running smooth.

  “I haven’t visited the Endurance in seven or eight months,” Petra said vaguely. “Old Gretchen White, she still running the bridge food services there? She made some of the best pierogi.”

  The lieutenant’s smile flickered. “I’m afraid not. She was arrested and taken into custody about four weeks ago.”

  “Oh, gawd.” Petra pressed her fingers over her lips. Her effect suggested the simple shock of an innocent bystander—but on the inside, she went cold. “Old lady White, with the cane and everything? What mess did the old gal get into?”

  “Hoarding and theft of fleet supplies,” the Lieutenant admitted. “She was running an illegal distillery out of her family’s quarters. Almost a hundred pounds of fleet sugar, distilled into a few gallons of moonshine she was trading on the black markets.”

  “Oh no,” Petra murmured around her fingertips. The moonshine had been good—but not worth going into pressed service over. “What’d she get? Couple weeks in Ag, cleaning out the hydroponic tanks?”

  Such unpleasant labor was the standard punishment for most petty offenses on the fleet. It didn’t make sense to throw people in jail to do nothing when there was never a shortage of dirty, hard jobs to do.

  “Two years in waste disposal.”

  Petra, for the first time in a very long time, was speechless. She stared into the young lieutenant’s face, his sheepish, aw-shucks expression. As if he was describing a teenager assigned a week of community service for scrawling graffiti on a corridor wall—and not condemning an old, disabled woman to crawl through the recycling chutes and salvage reusable junk from the filth that people tossed without a second thought. Lately, Petra heard stories of people defecating into the tubes when the bathrooms were out of order and wait times ran long.

  “She’ll die down there,” Petra whispered.

  “Oh, I’m sure the crew managers will give her the easy jobs,” the lieutenant said easily. “Light sorting duty. Shifting through what others dredge up and the like. Our food cache stores are running low, Ensign Potlova. We must make examples so that others don’t steal from the community.”

  Petra could only nod dumbly.

  A babble rose from the end of the tunnel, and Petra turned to see a small figure shoving its way through the crowd.

  “My meal chip!” cried a woman from near the front of the line as she clawed through her fraying rations bag. A few sleeves of crackers spilled out of the bag and vanished into the crowd. “She stole my meal chip!”

  “She’s got a knife!” someone else barked, and like that, the crowd parted around the scrawny girl in a custodian’s uniform. No telling what a knife-wielding hooligan might do.

  The thief stumbled down the hall. She kept her cap pulled down over her head to obscure her face. Petra didn’t see a knife, but there was a palm-sized meal chip clutched tightly in the girl’s fingers. She leapt over a napping man stretched on the floor and plunged toward the nearest cross-corridor.

  Beside Petra, the Lieutenant stuck out one foot. The custodian girl tripped and sprawled forward with a cry, her cap flying off. A long, strawberry-blond braid spilled over her shoulders.

  Fast as a snake, the lieutenant was on her, with one knee pressed into the girl’s shoulder blades, pushing her face to the linoleum.

  The lieutenant slipped a pair of plasticuffs from beneath his jacket.

  “She dropped the knife!” A big man in a technician’s jumpsuit pushed through the crowd. As evidence, he held out a scrap of twisted metal about as long as Petra’s pinkie finger. “I saw her drop this!”

  “I don’t got no knife! I never seen that before in my life!” the girl yelled, then cried out as the lieutenant pressed her face into the filthy floor and closed the plasticuffs around her wrists.

  The lieutenant stood, hauling the girl to her feet.

  “Hold this for me please, Miss Potlova,” he said mildly, pushing the girl in Petra’s direction. Struck dumb with surprise, Petra could do nothing but grab the girl by the shoulder.

  The lieutenant brushed his hands clean on his slacks and lifted his gaze to the big man holding the twisted scrap of metal that was, allegedly, a knife. He withdrew something from his breast pocket.

  “Thank you for your assistance, Mister…”

  “Daniels,” the man said, suddenly mumbling as the lieutenant flashed a badge. Petra only saw it from an angle, but she thought she’d seen the double-sickle emblem before.

  “Mister Daniels. Lieutenant Bryce, MP.” Quick as he had drawn it, the lieutenant tucked the badge away. He turned to face the thief, who went rigid beneath Petra’s hand.

  “Is this the alleged stolen chip?” Bryce plucked the meal card out of the girl’s clutching fingers.

  The hapless victim had shuffled her way toward them through the crowd. She nodded like a bobblehead. “Yes, yes sir, it is.” Her eyes landed on the metal in Daniels’ hand and lit up. “She had that in her hand too,” she added, “when the brat stole from me. I saw it.”

  “I aint’ got no knife!” the girl cried. “You pulled that piece of junk out of your pocket, Daniels, you two-faced pig! You stealing scrap again, trying to pin it on me, too?” She lashed, but Petra’s grip was firm. The girl glanced over her shoulder, wide-eyed. Petra shook her head slightly. “Be good,” she whispered. “It’ll go easier if you be good.”

  The girl’s lips pressed together, bloodless.

  “May I have my chip back, Lieutenant?” the woman asked impatiently.

  Bryce shook his head, tuckin
g both the card and the scrap of metal into a pocket. “I’m afraid I need to take it for evidence. Don’t worry, ma’am. I’ll make sure the value is credited to the account holder as soon as the owner is confirmed. Nobody will be missing a rightfully-earned meal over this incident.”

  The woman pursed her lips, unhappy—but unwilling to protest.

  “Now.” Bryce turned back toward Petra. His faint boyish smile had faded, and he stared at the girl in Petra’s grip. “Thank you, Miss Potlova.” He reached out to take the girl’s shoulder. “I’ll take her down to the security office and hand her over to law enforcement. This really isn’t a matter for the MP.” He lifted his chin, noting the long-awaited motion at the front of the line as the shuttle finally began boarding passengers. He offered Petra a smile. “I won’t be more than a minute. Save me a seat?”

  Petra didn’t save him a seat, and not only because she forgot about the request the instant Bryce had slipped out of sight. There were no seats to save. By the time she reached the shuttle doors, people were already packed sardine-tight into the cargo hold. The only hope she had of making this trip instead of waiting who-knew-how-long for the next shuttle was to squeeze between two beefy mechanics in grease-stained coveralls. Normally she might have enjoyed the close company of men who smelled like an honest day’s work, but the panicked gaze of the thief-girl made her nervous.

  Bryce was here now…when did he arrive? Why was he following Petra across the thousand kilometers of cold space between the Reliant and the Endurance?

  The girl couldn’t have been more than sixteen and on her first work detail. She could easily have been one of the kids Petra mentored at the youth center before Petra went down to the gambling dens to relax after a long week.

  Petra was gonna have to be careful down in the black markets and dens for a while. Looked like Law Enforcement and the MP were stepping up security. Not that Petra had ever done anything unambiguously illegal, of course. Just some low-stakes poker, a couple of shots of bootleg booze fermented from leftover rations—but the dens were the sorts of places you would go if you did want to get into something dirty.

  Not that it was entirely a bad thing. A bit of a killjoy, sure, but times were tight, and you couldn’t have people getting robbed at knifepoint or stealing food supplies meant to go to the army.

  Still, though. Two years in waste reclamation for palming a bit of sugar?

  Petra stared out the sliver of shuttle window. She could see across the packed cargo hold. The endless stars slipped silently past.

  Sarah was out there, somewhere. With an entire big ole’ Tribal Prime ship—and all of its supply caches—to herself.

  Well, not quite. On second thought, Petra figured her lover, well ex-lover, Larry would be gorging himself every chance he got.

  We wouldn’t be all worked up over some sugar if you hadn’t gone and stole half the fleet, Petra thought, suddenly angry with her friends. How could you have done something so selfish?

  And yet. And yet. As she watched the stars slip past that thin sliver of eternity, she felt the thrill of adventure tickle at her ribs. She had known Sarah for a very long time. Petra was hard-pressed to think of anyone less selfish.

  What are you up to? She wondered. What are you planning?

  Why didn’t you tell me about it?

  The transport docked in the Constitution’s bay, and the people shuffled out, flashing their ID badges to the scanner on the catwalk.

  Each freighter was essentially a self-contained town with an economy and atmosphere, and the Constitution was Petra’s favorite.

  Colorful murals of picture-book forests and fantastic animals long extinct covered the corridor walls leading to the youth development center. Top brass had resisted giving permission for the youngsters to decorate the walls, but once the population had been reshuffled in the mutiny last year, in Jaeger’s mutiny, they had given up the fight.

  The pictures grew like wildflowers, popping up overnight and growing wildly with each passing day until, slowly, the colors began to run out. Petra passed a dozen life-size human figures painted in broad slashes of brown and tan and cream, beginning to fade beneath the touches of the hundreds of people that walked these halls every day.

  She turned down a side hallway and nearly walked into a group of four teenagers huddled around a mural section. They yelped and giggled, drawing back from the wall. The figure at the center, a girl with a square face and hair cut fringe-short, stuffed something into the front pocket of her coveralls. She whirled away from the wall, cheeks flushing pink.

  “Amy!” Petra said. “Gavin, Toya, Franny. What are you doing?”

  The kids, a gaggle of teenagers beginning to walk the line between childhood and adult responsibilities, covered their mouths, snickering.

  “Petie!” Amy clapped her hand on Petra’s shoulder with surprising force and turned her down the hall. The others fell in around them, frog-marching Petra toward the youth center. “So good to see you! Is that new lipstick?”

  “We were worried you wouldn’t make it this week,” Gavin added. “We heard some of the Reliant squads got slapped with double duties.”

  “Oh yeah,” Petra said, throwing an arm around Gavin’s shoulder companionably. “There was a mix-up in the leave scheduling. All those flyboys in Alpha and Zeta got into a fight over it. Not my squad. We know when to keep our heads down. Hey, Gavin!” She poked the boy’s cheek, teasing. “You’re growing a shadow!”

  Gavin’s face turned beet red. He mumbled something incoherent, trying to vanish between his shoulder blades.

  “How’s Dolores?” Francesca asked. “Mother said she caught the new bug going around.” The thoughtful young woman’s mother was the head nurse in the Constitution’s infirmary.

  “Dolly’s gonna be fine, Franny.” Petra patted her head, making the shy girl flush. “She took the morning off to nurse a cold, but she was heading off to duties when I last saw her. You tell your ma she works too hard. She could power a ship with all that worrying she does.”

  Franny considered this somberly, then nodded. “I’ll help out in the infirmary more. I can do the worrying for her.”

  Petra smiled, but it was a sad thing. “I think you do enough worrying of your own, don’t you?”

  She glanced over her shoulder to see the section of defaced mural as it disappeared around the corner.

  Amy was quite the artist. She had given one of the generic smiling humans a pair of oversized boots and a commander’s formal pointed cap.

  Old Boot’s eyes now crossed, his tongue sticking out in a comic depiction of disgust—or death.

  Petra’s last thought, before she stepped into the youth center complex and another dozen young teenagers swarmed her, was to wonder if the security cameras recorded that particular section of hallway.

  Petra sat in a circle of twenty teenagers. Before she could even sit, one of them said, “Tell us about cars, again, Petra.”

  “Or outdoor movies.”

  “Or slushies. Those sound amazing.”

  “I wish I could have one now…”

  All their excitement was broken by Gavin when he murmured. “My pop woke up screaming about the quakes again.”

  Petra put her elbows on her knees and leaned forward, staring intently at the boy. These talks always made her misty-eyed, but, dammit, Gavin needed to know that someone was paying attention to him.

  She knew how much of a difference that little gesture could make to a troubled kid. “Tell us what’s going on.”

  “He wouldn’t go to work this morning,” Gavin went on. “When his supervisor called, I lied and said Pops had the bug. He didn’t have the bug. He was drunk.”

  Silence fell across the meeting room, and Petra let it go on for a while. These kids didn’t get much thoughtful silence.

  Finally, she drank the last of her pilfered coffee and set her thermos on the floor beside her. “Your old man isn’t weak, you know.”

  Gavin’s gaze flicked up to her, then fell
away. He shifted his weight. “Yeah. He is.”

  “Naw.” Petra shook her head. “Your pops. He’s on the older side, isn’t he? Seventy? Eighty?”

  Gavin swallowed and nodded, flushing, as if this should embarrass him, too. “I’m…not sure. He was part of the first-generation genetic modification experiments, yeah. Old enough to be my granddad.”

  “The old boy’s tired!” Petra said. “Gavin, your old man lived through the collapse of Old Earth and all the Mars colonies. Your pops has lived through disaster after disaster that chewed up and spat out billions of lives. He’s not weak. He’s a survivor. He’s tired. He’s earned a day off work here and there.”

  “Yeah, well,” Gavin grumbled. “Tell that to his supervisor. He’s getting his pay docked.”

  Petra did some quick mental math and figured that meant that Gavin was probably running on half-rations that day to make sure his dad didn’t go hungry.

  “Well, duh,” said another boy a few chairs down. “He don’t work; then he don’t get paid. He don’t eat.”

  All eyes swiveled to the new speaker.

  “You think it’s that simple, Kurt?” Toya asked.

  Kurt shifted his weight, fussing with the cuffs of his fabricators-apprentice jumpsuit. It was several sizes too small for him. “Damn right,” he said gruffly. “You wanna sit back and rest, fine. You go ahead and do that. Don’t expect the rest of us to feed you. We got our own problems, and they ain’t getting any better.”

  “We’ve all got problems.” Petra sighed.

  Kurt pinned her beneath a heavy, stormy glare. “We got a system,” he countered. “You say it all the time, Petie. The Tribes got a system so it don’t all go to hell like it did before. We gotta stick to the system now. Now more than ever. My brother works in Resource Allocation. I’ve heard him talking. Protein caches are running low. We got—“

  Several of the other kids in the circle stirred uncomfortably. Petra shook her head. “Come on, Kurt. You’re not supposed to go around talking like that—”