She blinked. "Of course. Sorry. Here, I'll show you."
She came forward, but he put up a hand, stopping her. "You know what? Never mind. I'll find it myself." He turned back to the monitor. As soon as he did so, he regretted it. He was being overly sensitive, rude even. Imala was trying to help, and he was snapping at her because he was ashamed of his own ignorance. He rubbed his eyes, waited for the hot flush of embarrassment to subside from his face, then turned around to apologize. Imala was on the other side of the shuttle with her back to him now, rereading the news feeds on the other monitor. Victor opened his mouth to speak, but then said nothing. She was probably angry with him. She had every right to be.
He turned back to his monitor and dug around until he found a map of Earth. It took him a few minutes to decipher it. The map had been designed for commercial ships moving between Luna and Earth, so it was loaded with superfluous information like trade routes and atmospheric entry and exit vectors. Victor made all that invisible and then found China quickly. It was a big country.
The map included several wiki entries, and Victor read through them, feeling more ignorant by the moment. He had known China was a country--there had been a few Chinese corporate miners in the Kuiper Belt. But China's nationhood had been the extent of his knowledge on the subject. He had not known that China was in a continent called Asia, or that it was the most populated country in the world, or that the Chinese language spoken by the corporates was actually one of many variations of Chinese, or that the language was written in ridiculously difficult to decipher characters instead of letters. In other words, he hadn't known what every schoolchild on Earth probably knew.
Again, he felt stupid and frustrated. How was he supposed to get into a university when he couldn't even name the continents? An admissions committee would laugh him to scorn. All their perceptions of free miners as dumb, bumbling grease heads was true. It wasn't a stereotype, it was him.
Oh sure, he could fix things. He could take a busted water pump and rebuild it with nothing but scrap metal and discarded circuits, but he couldn't tell you the capital of Japan. And now that he thought about it, he wasn't even certain Japan was a country. Was it a state somewhere? Or a province? He looked it up.
Country.
Yeah, you're a real brain, Victor. A genius.
He was sure Mother had taught him all of this at some point. He remembered lessons on geography when he was little. But he had been, what, seven years old at the time.
Then again, maybe he had missed that lesson. He had started apprenticing with Father at a young age, much younger than was the norm. So he had been absent for a lot of the classes. Mother and Father had argued about it. Mother had wanted Victor to stay with the other children and sit through the lessons, but Father had wanted Victor's help and had said that the survival of the family took precedence. Mother had been insistent however; Father would just have to find someone else.
Father had tried that, using a fifteen-year-old boy for a while named Gregor. But it hadn't worked out. Gregor had initially been assigned to the kitchen, and it soon became clear to Father why. "The boy doesn't think," Father had said. "He's slow. He can't work his way through a repair. The parts are all pieces to him. He can't see how they go together, how they intertwine and function as one."
"So teach him," Mother had said.
"I'm trying," Father had said. "That's the problem. I spend half my day trying to drill a simple principle into the kid's head, and the other half of the day I'm redoing what he did wrong. I'm losing time. And all the while, this ship is continuing to break down. I've got a backlog of work orders now, some of them critical. This kid isn't helping. He's dragging me down. I do more without him. I need Victor."
And so on special repairs--ones that needed a second person to hold a pipe while Father tightened it, or ones that needed a tiny child's hand to reach into a small space and remove something--Victor had tagged along. At first these had been exceptions, but slowly, over time, Father had become more and more dependent on Victor until Victor was going with Father more than he was going to class. And then eventually, without anyone acknowledging it aloud, Victor was going with Father every day.
So perhaps Mother had taught all the children about China, and Victor had simply been elsewhere on the ship at the time, crawling through an HVAC duct or squeezed into an engine room or packed tight beside a water heater, making some repair to keep the ship moving and the family alive.
"I didn't mean to offend you, Vico," said Imala. "I was just surprised you had never heard of China before."
She was behind him, hovering there, which of course only made him blush again. He should have apologized earlier. It should be him instigating this conversation. He turned around, not caring now if she saw how embarrassed he was. "I've heard of China, Imala. I just didn't know anything about it. I shouldn't have snapped at you. I was out of line. I'm sorry." He sighed. "I just can't help but feel like an idiot. I should know all of these things about Earth, but I don't."
"You're space born, Vico. Earth has never been your world. You grew up on a ship in the Kuiper Belt. You think I know anything about the Kuiper Belt? I couldn't tell you two facts about the Deep." She smiled. "Let's help each other. Isn't that how a free-miner family works? Everybody has their expertise, and you work together, sharing skills and information. Stronger together than alone, and all that?"
He smiled. It should be him making this argument. He should be the peacemaker. "That's the gist of it, yes. Although if we were a real miner family, we'd also be yelling at each other and threatening to kill each other. You'd be calling me a pig-faced rockhead, and I'd be crying and saying how I wished I'd never been born in this family."
She held her smile. "Something tells me your family isn't like that."
He shrugged. "Not usually, but we have our moments. It wasn't a very big ship. When you have that many people in that tight of a space, everyone's faults are glaringly obvious. Believe me, we had our disagreements."
In truth, El Cavador had never felt tight or close-quartered to Victor. It was simply the life he knew. People crammed in together to sleep. That's what you did. You stacked four or five or even six hammocks on top of each other--so close together that turning over in your sleep would likely brush your hammock up against someone else's. It wasn't always comfortable--there were smells and other annoyances occasionally--but that's how you lived.
Now that Victor had spent time on Luna, now that he understood Imala's world and all the space it afforded, he realized how confining this shuttle must seem to her. It made her sacrifice to accompany him all the more selfless and significant. She was doing this for him, suffering for him, and he was acting ungrateful.
"Let's dock at the depot," he said. "A few umbilicals have opened up. Let's go inside and stretch our legs. We'll take a holopad and read the feeds in there for a while."
"They're charging ridiculous docking prices," said Imala. "They bill you by the hour. We don't have that kind of money."
"I do," said Victor.
"Yeah, money for your education."
"Which I'm not likely to get. Please, Imala, let me buy you lunch. We could both use a breather."
They docked and floated down the umbilical to the cafe. There were few people inside. Victor launched toward a table near the back, away from everyone else, and strapped himself in. Imala followed, and soon a waitress floated over.
Victor looked at the menu, but then returned it to the waitress. "Would you do a specialty order?"
"Depends," said the waitress.
"White rice, black beans, shredded beef, fried platanos, and an arepa with butter."
The waitress looked up from her wrist pad. "I don't know what platanos and arepas are, so we probably don't have those."
Victor wasn't sure what the English word was, so he looked it up on the holo. "Platanos are plantains. You know, like giant bananas, only starchier?"
The waitress looked annoyed. "I know what a plantain is."
"Do you have any?"
"I'll have to check. What's an arepa?"
He had been looking it up. It wasn't in the dictionary, which meant it was unique to Venezuela and had no English equivalent. "It's a round corn patty, maybe four to five inches across. Really thick, not thin like a tortilla. They're not hard to make."
"They are if you've never made one before. I'll have to check." She turned to Imala. "Let's hope you're easier."
"I'll have the same as him," said Imala.
The waitress sighed. "Of course you will."
She floated back toward the kitchen.
"A family dish?" asked Imala.
"The unofficial plate of Venezuela, where my family's from. We ate it all the time on the ship, although truth be told, we usually ate it without the shredded beef and plantains. Both were practically nonexistent in the Kuiper Belt. Our diet was more about quantity than quality. We ate whatever was cheapest and would last the longest. Sometimes we'd eat nothing but rice and beans for weeks on end. Even your sweat starts smelling like beans after a while."
Imala scrunched up her nose.
"Sorry," said Victor. "Not good table conversation."
She smiled. "You miss your family."
Victor was folding his napkin into odd little shapes just to keep his hands busy. "Yes. I do. Very much."
"We'll find them, Vico. We'll get you back to them."
Victor sighed and looked up at her. "I'm not sure that we should now."
"That's why we came out here, isn't it?"
"I'm saying everything is different now, Imala. Everything we hoped and prayed wouldn't happen is happening. I never thought it would come this far. I thought I'd give the world the evidence, and they would respond, they would do something to prevent it from getting this bad."
"That's not your fault, Victor. You gave the evidence. The world didn't listen. You can't blame yourself for that."
"Well I do, Imala. If I had done more, if I had--"
"What else could you have done? You were hurt, barely alive. Your body had wasted away to nothing. You were under arrest. You couldn't go anywhere. All things considered, I'd say you did a bang-up job."
"If it had been someone else, the world would've listened. If my father had come--"
"Your father wouldn't have survived the trip. No one would have found the data cube. Or if they did, they would've thrown it away. The world would've been caught totally unawares."
"Their current situation isn't any better."
"Yes, it is," said Imala. "We don't know all the ways people have been preparing, Vico. We can't see everything. I can assure you. There are armies out there that have been training for this because of you."
"Yes, and I want to join them."
She looked surprised. "You want to join the military?"
He felt stung by her obvious disbelief again. "I'm eighteen, Imala. I'm old enough to enlist."
"Yes, but with what army? You're not a citizen of any country, Vico. You're space born. No one will take you."
"This is a fight against the human race, Imala. Last time I checked I was human."
She shook her head. "It's not that black and white, Vico. Earth doesn't work that way."
"Well why not? Why does everything have to be so constricted by regulations? It drives me insane. If there's a problem, you fix it. You don't set up fences around it and make rules about how it should be fixed. You fix it. Maybe that requires a little bit of ingenuity and doing it a way that's never been done before, but so what. If the problem's solved, why does it matter how it's done?"
"This isn't the Kuiper Belt, Vico. You can't do whatever you want and expect people to agree to your terms. There has to be an order to things."
"And look what that order has done for Earth, Imala. Look at the situation now. Stagnation. Infighting. Disagreements. Inaction. And thousands of people dead on the sidelines."
"So what, you think you can waltz in, join the military, and fix the problem?"
"I'm not useless, you know. I have skills I can offer."
"Of course you do. But that doesn't change the fact that the system is what it is. I doubt NATO would even take you."
"What's NATO?"
"An intergovernmental military alliance. A bunch of countries who agree on defense measures and military action as a combined force."
"Why aren't they doing anything already?"
"I'm guessing they will, eventually, though not in China. Not unless the Chinese change their mind and allow outside troops, which isn't likely to happen any time soon. NATO will be focused on space, taking out the mothership."
"That's perfect for me. I'm built for space. That's where I can help."
"If they'll take you," said Imala, "which I doubt they will. And even if they did take you, you're not likely to see action any time soon. They'll want to train you, specialize you, shape you into what they need you to be."
"Fine. As long as I'm helping."
She watched him for a moment. "Are you sure about this?"
"I wasn't five minutes ago, but I am now, yes."
"And what if we go back and NATO won't take you?"
"Then I'll do my own thing."
She laughed. "Your own thing? Meaning what? Take on the mothership by yourself?"
"If I have to."
Imala laughed again, and then her smile faded. "You can't be serious."
"Why not? Why should we sit back and accept someone else's inaction or failure? I have just as much right to protect the human race as they do."
"And how do you propose to take on the mothership by yourself, if you don't mind me asking?"
"I have no idea. I haven't thought that far ahead yet."
"And what about your family?"
"I'm doing this for my family, Imala. If we lose Earth, we lose everything. How long do you think miners would last without supplies? If Earth loses, my family loses."
"The landers are only in China, Vico. Earth is a big planet. It doesn't hang in the balance just yet. We don't even know what the aliens want."
"The report said the aliens were dropping bacteria into the sea, right?"
"Yeah. So?"
"Why would they do that?"
"Kill marine life? I don't know."
"Terraforming, Imala. They're seeding bacteria in the oceans for the same reason they're using defoliants to kill all plants and animals. They want the planet. They want Earth. But they can't have it in its current state. It has to be a planet that conforms to their biology, not ours. All existing life in the sea, all biology on land, evolved here without them. That makes it hazardous to them. They don't have natural defenses against our biota. Our strains of bacteria are different from theirs. So they're going to change Earth to be more like the world they do know. They're going to burn it down and start all over. If we were going to seize a planet, we would do the same thing. We'd drop stuff in the atmosphere, wipe out all existing biological life, seed Earth-born plants and animals, make the new planet as much like Earth as we could. It's the ecosystem we were engineered for. Why else would they have come, Imala? Why else would they be acting the way they are? They don't want to communicate with us. They don't want to negotiate. They're not going to ask us for Earth. They're already taking it. And I've seen these creatures, Imala. I've seen how they attack and how they think, how relentless they are. If they can land on Earth, if missiles and weapons can't hurt them, they won't quit until Earth is theirs."
The waitress floated back over. She wasn't carrying any food. She looked embarrassed. "I'm sorry, but I'm going to have to ask both of you to leave."
"Why?" said Imala.
"Someone is renting out the entire depot. They want everyone else off."
"We paid a docking fee," said Victor. "We just got here."
"I know. I'm sorry. We'll refund the fee."
"Why does someone need the entire depot?" asked Imala. "Do they have that many people in their party?"
"No," said the waitress. "There are jus
t the two of them. They docked a few minutes ago. They said they needed their privacy. I guess when you have that kind of money, you can do whatever you please."
"Who is it?" asked Imala.
"Lem Jukes," said the waitress.
CHAPTER 17
Transmissions
The supply depot was exactly what Lem had expected it to be: a dump. A sad excuse for an outpost that didn't appear to have been renovated since the first days of space commerce. The whole structure looked like it might break apart at any moment. There were metal plates crudely welded at random spots all along the inner walls, supposedly sealing off leaks or breaches that had occurred over the years. There were lines of grime where all the walls met, as if the mops they used to clean the place didn't reach the corners. There were several old neon signs for brands of alcohol or travel food that Lem had never heard of and that probably didn't exist anymore. None of the signs were turned on. Lem doubted any of them could.
All this gave the lobby a scarred, postapocalyptic vibe and made Lem more than a little uneasy. He was suddenly wishing he had come in a spacesuit just in case the whole thing split apart and dumped him and Chubs out into the black.
"Mr. Jukes. A pleasure to have you. Welcome. Welcome."
A thin, balding man was floating toward them from across the room. The proprietor. Lem disliked him immediately. He was the kind of person you could read in a blink. False expression, false demeanor, false cadence in his voice. Everything about him said dishonest.
The man's clothes weren't helping either. They had been fashionable at one point, years ago, but never together. The pants and shirt screamed at each other, fighting for attention, one fluffy and exploding outward with fabric, the other tight and form fitting. It was like he had won both in two different poker games and had convinced himself they were a matching set.
The man caught a handhold nearby and righted himself so that he had the same orientation as Lem and Chubs.
"Felix Montroose, Mr. Jukes. At your service. Welcome to Last Chance."
"The price we settled on over laserline will have to be renegotiated," said Lem.
Felix's face fell a little, though to his credit, he tried hard not to show it. "Oh? How do you mean, sir?"
"I mean I'm not paying you what I told you before. I was expecting a nicer establishment." He gestured to the room. "No offense, but I don't exactly feel safe here."