“What the hell does it matter to them?” Toby Montoya asked. “They don’t care that we don’t have a working hospital. That half the equipment’s been cannibalized to keep the rest running. We’re just numbers, man. Qubit codes in some computer in Tokyo.”
Hofer snorted and looked around. “Hey! We had to wait our turn. You know, like after the stockholders got their vacations to Tahiti taken care of first.”
“What about our deeds and titles?” Betty Able demanded. “The Corporation’s going to honor them, right?”
“They sure as hell better, or there’s gonna be some heads beat in, I’ll tell ya!” Step Allenovich bellowed.
“That’s enough!” Talina slapped the scarred and stained bar. “They lost seven ships. Figure around a hundred crew and another four hundred transportees per ship. That’s three thousand five hundred people. Not to mention the cost of the ships and cargo. Just gone. Vanished. And no one knows where. Or even how.”
She stared around the now silent room. “Supervisor Aguila has made one thing clear: Turalon is the last chance The Corporation is going to give us. If it spaces off into inverted symmetry and disappears, there will be no more ships. No more attempts at contacting us.”
“So, what are they thinking? Shut the colony down? Pack us up and take us all home?” Stepan Allenovich asked. He stood at the side of the room, back to the wall, arms crossed, one foot propped on a bench. Hard use had polished his equipment belt, and four notches had been carved into his pistol’s duralon grip. A gleaming row of crest scales hung in a gaudy necklace over his worn homespun shirt. Step had been an exozoologist once upon a time. A series of articles waited on his desk to be shipped up to Turalon for transmission back to Earth.
“Nothing’s being shut down.” Talina glanced at Trish where the young woman taken up station in the rear of the room, hands clasping her upper arms, the rifle’s muzzle sticking up from behind her auburn hair. She looked more like a revolutionary than a suddenly insecure second-in-command of security.
“Now, here’s the thing,” Talina added. “When they finally land, they’re expecting to find a Corporate colony. Remember the old rule book?”
“Fuck that!” Thumbs Exman bellowed. “My contract expired one year, six months, and twenty-seven days ago. I just want to get home. I got family back there. I’ve got a wife.”
“Not so’s you’d notice, Thumbs,” Betty Able called from across the room. As the madam of Port Authority’s best-patronized—and only—brothel, the buxom blonde was one of the community’s less prosperous members. Especially given the ratio of women to men these days.
“Yeah, yeah, laugh it up,” Thumbs shot back when the guffaws subsided. “Going home? Is that too much to ask? What the hell does The Corporation think we’ve been doing out here? I busted my ass on their damn geothermal survey. I laid out in the bush for almost two weeks with a thorn in my back ’til Talina finally found me.”
“So, Thumbs, why don’t you think they’d take you home?” Talina asked. Then she looked around the room. “How many of you have fulfilled your contracts?”
Most the hands in the room went up.
“How many of you want to space back to Transluna and Earth?”
She figured the hand count at around three quarters. Another thirty or so where fidgeting, shifting from side to side in their seats, looking undecided.
“Don’t worry. Shig and Yvette will work it out.” Talina raised her hands. “The point I’m trying to make is that this Board Supervisor, her name is Kalico Aguila, is landing here tomorrow. When she does, she’s going to expect a Corporate colony.”
“I’m not cuddling up to kiss her Corporate ass,” Toby Montoya said with a snort.
“Hey, you never know,” Hofer shot back. “Might be a really nice ass. Me, I’ll wait, and then if it looks good, I’ll ask her to drop her drawers.”
This time Talina used her pistol butt to bang on the bar. “You want me to clear this place?”
“God, no!” Inga almost pleaded. “Tal, they ain’t hardly touched the booze I laid in for this.”
Talina fought a smile as she pistol-gaveled the crowd back into submission. “I know. We’ve been running our own show. And yes, I know The Corporation is run by a bunch of worm-gutted, coldhearted, money-grubbing bastards that we all hate. But we need to work together on this.”
“On what?” Step demanded.
Talina took a deep breath. “We’ve done some pretty amazing things, haven’t we? Made it for six years without resupply on a world that will kill us in an instant. Hell, there’s a couple hundred of us living out there in the bush. Surviving.”
“Yeah, so?”
“So, this is what I want you to consider: Donovan’s ours!”
The shrill whistles and cheers were deafening as they echoed off the dome overhead.
Talina had to hammer for most of a minute to get silence. “The Corporation doesn’t know that. They can’t know that! Now, do you want to tell me why that might be the case?”
Trish stepped forward, shouting, “Because now that they’ve figured out we’re alive, we need their ships. Need their supplies. Piss them off, and they can choose to just go away. Leave us out here to cope as we can. It sucks toilet water, but for the time being, we need them. We’ve got the clay, the metals and elements, the resources they need. And they’ve got the ships to carry them back to Solar System. The place that makes the medicines, technology, and materials we need to keep going.”
Step raised his hands, the gesture almost imploring. “Talina, what, specifically, are you asking us for?”
She took her time, met their eyes one by one as she looked around the room. Finally, she asked, “No jokes now. How many stupid people are in this room? Give me a count.”
She could see the occasional elbow and sidelong nod to friends, who just grinned in return.
“That’s what I thought.” Talina leaned forward on the bar. “Donovan’s killed the stupid ones. So let’s be smart, people. Turalon’s going to send a report back to The Corporation, along with the information that six years of product is stacked up on our landing field, ready for export.”
“Right,” Montoya called. “What of it?”
“It’s maybe a month that we have to play quetzal and camouflage who and what we are. Just long enough for Supervisor Aguila and her deputies to up-ship, fly out-system, and invert. As long as she sends a glowing report back, we’re in fat gravy.”
She pointed a finger at Exman. “Assuming you returnees keep your yaps shut about what really goes on here when there isn’t a ship up in orbit with a Supervisor on it.”
“And then what?” Betty Able asked. “If Turalon makes it back, we’re on our own for what? Four years?”
“The operative phrase is ‘On our own.’” Talina narrowed an eye at her audience. “Not all of us have something to go back to. Me? I can’t imagine living anywhere but here, and I want a future for the kids. So we’ve got to give The Corporation a reason to come back, but at the same time, not make it worth their while to take it over again.”
Step Allenovich slowly shook his head. “That’s a mighty tricky game to play, Talina.”
“Yeah, tell me about it.”
7
Beyond the sialon bulkhead an overstressed hydraulic system whined and thumped softly with a sound like boxing gloves hammering a steel post. The man who called himself Dan Wirth blinked awake and opened his gritty eyes to the dim light of the male quarters.
Wasn’t his real name. It had been the name of the cowherd. A man met in a Transluna bar, a chance encounter as security was closing in. A desperate last coincidence. Two men who happened to know something about cattle. Turned out that the cowherd—agricultural technician second class—had a Corporate contract that would take him off-world within forty-eight hours.
Three hours later, that Dan Wirth had stared up, eyes
glazed with pain. He’d reached out with fingers that shook so badly the blood dripped from them in jiggles. “Please. Don’t . . . Please?”
They always said please.
Didn’t matter who the mark was, rich or poor, the fact that they he or she was being murdered left them as bewildered as the pain and fear. They couldn’t grasp the impossibility of it. The desperation with which they clung to hope—that some miracle would save them—it lasted right up to the last instant when their vision faded to black.
“Sorry, pal. I had to get out of that floating tin can.”
Left in a blast vent. They’d never find the body.
Dan Wirth—it was such a simple name—lay on his back, enjoying the lax feeling left by sleep. Wonderful sleep. Escape from the ship’s suffocating monotony to a place where a person dreamed of blue skies, of fresh air, room to move, and freedom. The strangling existence he lived when awake vanished. Instead of scrubbing decks, cleaning filters, swamping out hydroponic tanks, and seeing the same faces, during his dreams he could walk perfect streets, give other people orders, and all the women he screwed were beautiful, submissive, and compliant.
I live like a rat in a damn small cage.
That hell, however, ended today.
The sounds hadn’t changed. The symphony remained the same: The rhythmic humming of pumps; the muted rush of water in the pressure pipes; the soft whisper of the atmosphere plant; or the shuffling passage of people in the corridors. The audience—consisting of his fellow transportees—was renewed. Joyous. Almost giddy with anticipation.
An excitement filled the low voices talking just beyond the duffel storage hatch. Inside the room, even the sounds of men breathing in their sleep seemed lighter, somehow charged.
In the cramped darkness of his bunk, Dan turned his head and glanced at the narrow room. The bunks were a uniform honeycomb of stacked coffin-like recesses molded into the sialon walls. Each was filled with a somnolent body—a man’s solitary domain for eight hours before he surrendered it to the second shift. Who in turn surrendered it to the third shift. Who then vacated the bunks for Dan and his companions. Space was at a premium aboard a starship. God, what a shit-sucking way to live.
The bunk-filled walls were like a sort of perverted mixture of universe, womb, and private hell.
Slave ships must have been like this. That’s how they treat us. Living cargo. Instead of chains, we have our wrist monitors that determine the extent of our ramblings and actions just as surely as links of iron would.
But then maybe they weren’t even human anymore. Maybe they were all a little crazy after the seemingly endless imprisonment within their sialon warren.
How many fistfights, screaming fits, and howling bouts of madness had he increasingly witnessed in the last months? Rico Simpatico had killed himself less than a week ago, his body found in the shower, facedown in a pool of blood. The guy had actually had the balls to slit his own throat. How did a man do that? Keep cutting as he felt the knife slice through his windpipe and esophagus? But he had. The ship’s surgeon had proved it by the blood spatter, the prints on the knife, and the way old Rico had sawed at his neck.
I followed my own damned madness.
Nandi would have a little more than two hours of duty before she clocked off. Should he try to see her one last time? Could he look into her eyes and not remember the humiliation she’d caused him? How she’d screamed? The pistol that she’d produced from under her pillow and shoved into his face. How—with fire in her eyes—she’d marched him out into the companionway? He’d stood there naked and trembling with rage as the realization soaked in that she’d really shoot him.
Bitch!
They’d taken his general-access wrist monitor. Replaced it with the restricted-access unit he now wore, allowing him to pass only certain bulkheads. Just like prison back on Earth. He’d hated that. The difference here was that no escape lay just beyond the walls—only empty cold vacuum, or whatever the other side of space really was. He didn’t understand asymmetry, or how it all worked.
Crazy. That’s what we are. Too many humans packed too tightly, for too long.
Hong Kong had had even less living space per person, but they were stacked up for a thousand stories. People could walk outside, see the sky, purchase a pass to Repulse Bay once a year. Breezes caressed the skin.
I lost control again. Nandi did that to me.
Her outraged eyes burned in the back of his mind.
Memories. Blurred, shattered, and angular pieces of a frantic flight down narrow tunnel-like corridors. People staring as he’d charged past them, naked, cursing. How he’d stormed into this room, dragged the man sleeping in his bunk out, and dropped him shrieking on the floor. How he’d crawled into this warm and comforting womb and burst into sobs of rage.
He never knew who had returned his clothes. He hadn’t cared. Had refused to raise his eyes in the mess. Willing his ears closed, he hadn’t heard the whispers, the snide comments, or outright mutterings of his fellows.
Only Stryski had made something of it. Stepping into his face and saying, “Been run out of any women’s quarters lately?”
They’d had one hell of fight until security gassed them. The next two months had been spent in “solitary.”
His father’s voice echoed inside his skull. “You gotta give a little. Learn the rules. Every place runs as a system, and the big guys control the action. You gotta figure what the little guys need and what they’ll pay for it. Control that, and you got the world by the balls.”
He’d tried it on the ship the first week out. Turned out the big guys controlled it all. So he’d clammed up. Kept his cards and dice to himself. But what would he find on Donovan?
Come 1200 hours, he’d be lined up to shuttle down.
Nandi would be a memory.
Donovan. The latest narcotic for those who dreamed of easy riches and freedom. Before he slept again, Dan Wirth would be on that world. The very thought was the solvent that washed sleep from his system.
Dan ducked his five-foot-ten frame as he sat up and swung his muscular legs over the edge of his berth. He leaned the back of his head against the cool ceramic that framed O’Leary’s bunk above. The place smelled of sweat and humanity—but then a person even got used to a rendering plant’s stench after a while. Human, hydroponics, machine, fungus, stale sweat, they’d grown so used to it he wondered if the olfactory senses might be forever blunted.
“Jesus,” came the disgusted cry from below. “Damn it, Cowboy, don’t you ever wash your damned feet?”
Cowboy. That was Dad’s work. Dear old Dad. A nameless, faceless, and frustrated programmer who worked in the Transluna office of personnel and records. Dad had changed the records at the last instant. His message had been succinct. “They’re onto you. Last chance, boy. Like you asked, I’ve put your new stats into the system. From here on out, you’re Dan Wirth. You work with cattle. Be on the shuttle for Turalon in five hours, or you’re going down for good.”
Dan grunted to himself and slipped from the bunk, landing with a catlike grace. He flexed his muscles, grinned, and poked his head into Pete Morgan’s space. “You want to make something of it?”
In the dark recess of Morgan’s bunk, he could see the man shake his head. “Donovan’s down there. I got no reason to screw my place in line with a disciplinary action. Especially with you.”
“Smart man, and I like smart men.”
“Hey,” Wan Xi Gow called. “We’re trying to sleep here.”
“Yeah, you little baby asses sleep.” Dan ran a hand over his face as he padded along the sialon deck, half enjoying the chill that ate into the soles of his feet.
He unclipped the flimsy door to his garment locker and reached for the steamed overalls on his shelf. The men’s room consisted of toilets, sinks, and showers, all efficiently placed to maximize the small space. The ceramic and plastic fixt
ures gleamed in malaria-yellow light. Aurobindo Ghosh, the Indian tech engineer, had cobbled up the weird yellow lights after the last of the laser-gas bulbs had died. Somehow The Corporation’s supply experts hadn’t thought to stock replacements on board.
“Candy-dicked bastards,” Dan muttered. “Wonder what else they forgot to stock?”
At the urinal he made his contribution to the hydroponics, then shifted a half step to the sink. He gave the mirror an evil grin. A film covered the glass. Film covered everything in Turalon’s sweaty and humid atmosphere. Fucking ceramic gopher hole.
Despite the disinfectants, stains clung to the toilets, urinals, and corners. A dent marred one of the coffin-shaped shower stalls; a gray smudge ran across the ceiling.
“One year, eleven months, and seventeen days,” he told his image in the mirror. “Seems like fucking forever.”
Nandi would be making final observations in the dome.
He closed his eyes, flexed his hands, and imagined her slim throat crushing under his fingers. Could feel the tensing of the neck muscles, the way the tendons would jerk as she tossed her head about. How the windpipe’s stiff cartilage crushed. The voice box always slid up as he squeezed, driving the tongue up into the back of the mouth. In his imagination, he savored that little snap as the hyoid bone broke. The eyes, that was the coolest part—that wide, popping panic as they started out from the sockets.
Paybacks are a bitch, Nandi.
Dan pressed a finger to the water tap, bending over the sink to wash the sleep from his hot face. Nice thing about Gosh’s yellow lights, they didn’t show the real color of the water. He blanked his mind at the number of times these same molecules had been cycled through human bodies.
He dried and dropped the towel into the steamer. Unrolling the coveralls with a flourish, he stepped into them and sealed the seams. The familiar orange uniform looked worn, the sleeves frayed, elbows shiny from wear. He clipped the collar and stared at the man in the mirror.
In the wake of Nandi’s betrayal, he’d taken the hard jobs—anything that punished the body—and spent his free time on the exercise machines. Others had gone soft, but he’d never been in better shape. Especially with the perfectly balanced nutrition they served in the mess. Tasted like shit, but each meal was calculated to provide all the proteins, fats, carbs, fiber, and vitamins the human body needed.