Horizon

by Tom Dillon

Horizon

  by Tom Dillon

  A Horizon Station Story

  Copyright 2012 Tom Dillon

  “Hey Ava, check this out!” The curtain that muffled Remi’s voice did nothing to filter out the excitement.

  “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Yeah, it’s . . . 3:07 in the morning, why?” Remi had never quite gotten the whole morning/night thing, feeling that it was just a crutch for planetsiders who couldn’t hack it on a station.

  “You know how I feel about my sleep, this had better be good,” Ava said, getting out of bed and taking her blanket with her, wrapped around her shoulders.

  “I know, I know, you’d gladly sacrifice your own parents for an extra hour’s worth,” Remi muttered, then her voice picked up again. “But this is just too awesome to pass up.”

  Ava pushed her way past the curtain that separated her from her over-excitable roommate to see Remi sitting in front of her computer. In front of her was what looked like a live feed of a black chunk of metal, revolving lazily.

  “What am I looking at,” Ava asked.

  “That,” Remi said, tapping the screen, ” is an abandoned space station.”

  “Yeah, and?” There were thousands of stations just floating out in the void between planets. Most of them were abandoned for a good reason.

  “It looks like it’s in pretty good shape. We should go check it out.”

  Ava was thinking of a response when there was a knock at the door.

  “You called Vance, didn’t you.” Remi shrugged. She loved Remi like a sister, but sometimes she wondered if Remi wouldn’t make a better dead sister than a live one.

  Remi pushed a button. And the door slid open, stopping halfway where there was a dent in its track. Vance was waiting outside, looking excited, if sleepy. It hadn’t surprised Ava when they had gotten together, and it hadn’t surprised her when they broke up due to Remi’s manic sleep schedule.

  “So when do we leave?” Vance asked. Both he and Remi were looking at Ava, and despite herself she was excited.

  “As soon as possible, I guess,” she said. She was going to tell Remi to rent them a shuttle and some suits, but Remi was already completing the payment forms.

  Remi had booked them the smallest shuttle that would fit five people and their gear. It had been cramped to start with, and the bulky Extra-Atmospheric suits didn’t help. Although none of them had gone through Pilot training, Vance had been a simulator hobbyist for years and was perfectly comfortable at the helm.

  Two hours after they left the shuttle bay on Habitat, they reached the abandoned station. The shuttle sealed up against the hull of the station, and the light above the airlock cycled from red to green.

  “That’s a good sign, at least,” Vance said. “It would suck to get all the way out here and have the thing be locked down.”

  Remi finished doing whatever she was doing with her handheld and the door panel and the lights that still worked turned on. The floor vibrated as the fans that ran the atmo started up, coughing a little as they pumped out fresh air for the first time decades.

  “That’s as much as I’m going to be able to do from here,” Remi said, folding her handheld closed. “The atmo appears to be good, as does everything else, but I won’t be able to tell for sure until I can get direct access to the system.”

  “Then let’s go,” Ava said.

  “I really like these old stations,” Remi said. “It feels so open.” It did feel open, and Ava just stopped when she got out of the stairwell, staring up through the atrium, four decks above. She didn’t realize what she was doing until Vance tapped her on her shoulder.

  “Or at the bottom of a well,” Vance said, after Ava got out of the way. Remi shot him a dark look.

  The room that they were was huge, running up through the core of the station. When she was young, she had taken trips with her family to the gardens that covered the outside of Habitat Station, and the feeling had been similar.

  As they made their way through the station, Ava could see signs of deferred maintenance everywhere. Nothing that absolutely needed to be fixed, but very little that worked properly, either. Unlike newer designs, the entire station was built with practicality in mind, for every system that was automated, there appeared to be an auxiliary system that wasn’t.

  There was a lift that ran straight up one side of the room, but it was out of commission, so they took the stairs. The second deck was consumed by utility, nothing but mechanical rooms and vacant storage. On the third deck, they found the central operations room as well as a machine shop and an infirmary that had long since been stripped of anything of value. The fourth deck had all of the quarters, as well as a kitchen and some other rooms. Finally, the fifth deck was covered in dirt that had once been a garden. They found themselves standing in the middle of it, staring out through the ceiling at the stars.

  “Wow,” Vance said, and neither Remi nor Ava responded. On the station where they had grown up, almost the entire exterior layer was taken up by the estates and gardens of the wealthy. Despite living in space, they had rarely gotten the chance to see the stars.

  “Amazing. It looks like someone just couldn’t be bothered to keep this station running,” Ava said.

  “Yeah, it doesn’t look like anything is really wrong with it,” Remi said.

  “The owner probably just upgraded and abandoned it here,” Vance said.

  “We should go and check out Central Ops,” Remi said.

  Central Ops was a mess. Many of the panels and screens had been pulled out, as scavengers had picked out the most valuable electronics. Still, the backup systems were too inexpensive and difficult to remove for anyone to bother with, and had been left alone.

  There was a large round table in the middle of the room, lacking chairs, of course, and Ava unshouldered her bag and spread the contents out. There was bread, some dried meat, and a bottle of cider.

  “What is this, a picnic?” Vance asked, tearing off a piece of bread.

  “I figured that if we were going to be out here, we might as well have something nice to eat. You want something?” she asked Remi, who was digging through her pack to find a cable to attach her handheld to the panel on the wall.

  “Sure,” Remi replied without looking up, and Ava took her a piece of meat and a cup of cider. After that, they all ate in silence for a few minutes, Ava and Vance sitting on the table and Remi working at the panel. The wall that faced the center of the station was entirely transparent, and Ava found her gaze being drawn out and up towards the atrium.

  After another quarter hour, Remi finished what she was doing and joined them at the table. “So what do you guys think?” she asked.

  “This is fun, I’m glad we came,” Ava said.

  “Me too, wouldn’t have missed it for anything,” Vance said.

  Remi looked back and forth between them, and took a deep breath before she spoke. “I think that we should claim it.” If she hadn’t been so serious, Ava would have sworn that she was joking.

  Ava looked over at Vance. He was as surprised as she was, and looking to her for guidance. “Can we even do that?” she asked. “Doesn’t this station, you know, belong to someone?”

  “Nope,” Remi said, “It was registered as abandoned a decade ago. It’s just a matter of a small fee for the registration and it’s ours.”

  “So you really want to live here?” Vance asked. “Give up everything and move to an abandoned station?”

  After the initial shock wore off, Ava was starting to like the idea. “What do you mean everything we have? Do you think that we’ll ever be able to afford to live someplace with a view? Unless we win the lottery, that won’t happen.”

  “I get that part. My question is, how would it work out?” he asked. “What would we ea
t? What would we do when something goes wrong?”

  “With just three of us, we could probably get enough out of the garden to feed ourselves pretty easily,” Ava said. “The thing that bothers me is that we would be stuck here unless someone would lend us a half-million credits for a shuttle. If we could somehow get that, I would go along with it.”

  “When we got here, I saw two hulks in the bay, maybe we could get one of them working again,” Remi said.

  “If we could, and pooled our resources, we might be able to make this work, I think,” Ava said.

  “I . . . I don’t know,” he said. “I need to think about it.”

  Remi opened her mouth, but was silenced by a look from Ava. Pushing him wouldn’t do any good; he needed time to make up his own mind.

  An hour later, Vance found Ava and Remi in the atrium, laying on the dirt and staring at the stars. There was grease on his hands and smudged under his eyes. He was smiling so hard that it looked painful.

  “Good news?” Remi