2015 Young Explorer's Adventure Guide Page 29

  “Hey! Put me down!”

  “Ain’t that interesting. Did you order us a newbie back at launch, Bongo?”

  “No sirree, Dodge. No newbies.” Bongo grinned. “I just pumped the fuel.”

  “Me neither. Any one of the rest of you lot offer a little girl a lift somewhere?” My gaze swept over our crew, who shook their heads as one.

  “Reckon she’s a stowaway, then.” I adjusted my cap firmly over my forehead, folded my arms, and stared as the girl dangled. “Put her down. You know what we do with stowaways, little girl?”

  Her voice was soft with an accent when she spoke. “You put them to work. I asked at station.”

  That rocked me back on my heels a little. There was a small rustle of nudges and whispers among the players arrayed behind me. “Heh. If they’re useful. You don’t look useful. You look like a dirt-licker. Ain’t got no useful bends at all.”

  Her eyes widened as she looked over the various deformities of the rest of us. Save for me, the crew was all space-born mutts, and I’d been out here since I was a tyke so my bones didn’t finish growing straight. Tiny and Mouse were both under four feet, Tiny because his legs were spindly, useless things and Mouse because his legs were missing below the knees. Paris doesn’t have a straight line in his body. Out here the food is crappy, the gravity is low, and accidents twist the body; not a lot of standard builds. That’s what dirt-lickers call themselves, standard. There is no standard here in space; you grow however you grow. Everyone adapts to their job and no one gets wasted.

  The girl lifted her chin. “Don’t matter. I’m here and willing to work. Word on the station was that if a kid works hard, then they can have a good enough life in one of the FAGNs.”

  “Station brats tell you that?” I spit to one side.

  She nodded stubbornly. “Yeah. Said it was safe enough, and if you work, you eat.” Her gaze skittered around the players again, pausing on Mattie who had settled in just at my other elbow. The girl stared, but Mattie is immune to it. Mattie’s fifteen, but station-born. She’ll never grow beyond her four feet, but her stunted, bowed legs and over-developed shoulders mark her as a solid worker in space salvage terms.

  See, you don’t need legs without gravity. You just need strong arms and a healthy respect for the laws of motion and mass. Mattie’s twisted body can move tons efficiently, for all that she’d be almost crippled in the full-gee on a planet. We can’t go ‘home’ to a planet, us FAGN kids. We’ve adapted. Me? I aim to be a captain one day.

  “Reckon so. You know anything at all about salvage ops?” I asked.

  She shook her head. “No. But I know ships. On my home world they build liners. Galaxy-class. My mom’s flat was close to the shipyards, and sometimes I helped bring tools and things.”

  Bongo whistled. “Galaxy-class liners. They’re spendy. What do they move, a thousand people?” Bongo had never seen a thousand people in one place before.

  “More’n that. Ten thousand,” the girl asserted before sighing. “Don’t matter. Just I know how ships go together, so I know how they ought to come apart for scraps. I shipped for a few months, too. I can work.”

  From overhead on the catwalk, Captain Bill’s voice boomed out. “What’s all this now? Who’s that?” We all looked up to see him leaning over the railing, pointing at the stranger.

  The girl’s shoulders flinched at his tone and volume, and I found myself swelling a little, protectively. “Uh, this here’s…what’s your name then?”

  “Olivia.”

  Typical dirt-licker name. I amended it. “This here’s Ollie, Cap. We signed her on at the last station to try a run with us.”

  Bill is a big man. His hair and eyes are black, his skin dusky and covered in scars from drinking and fighting. He made a point of clanging down the catwalk to make an entrance, the steel sounding with each tread. He’s a big man in any case, but when he’s angry he can fill the whole stair. “Oh we did, did we? Who authorized that without my permission?”

  In for a penny, I thought. I stole another deep breath and stood up as straight as I could. “That’d be me, Bill.”

  The blow was about what I’d expected. Bill’s fist slammed into my cheek and sent me back about five feet. It was sudden, impersonal, and emotionless. That’s why he’s a good captain. It’s not personal, and he’s always consistent. “I don’t have time to coddle a newbie. We have work to do. Contracts to fill. And there’s no extra rations.” He looked the girl up and down, from dirty feet to unbrushed hair that feathered down around her face. His voice lowered to something merely growly. “You’ll share your rations since she’s your problem, Dodge. Do the paperwork.” And with that he turned and headed back up the steps again toward the bridge.

  I let out a breath that I didn’t realize I’d been holding. The rest of the crew cheered weakly and went back to the game, stealing looks back. Ollie came over to help me up, but I shrugged off her hands. “I’m fine. It wasn’t as bad as it coulda been.”

  Her fingers lightly touched the red mark on my cheek then fell away. “I was worried he’d kill you. They say that the captain is life and death on these federal ships. They say it isn’t safe.”

  “Then you seem like an idiot for shipping out on one,” I pointed out. We call FAGN the Frustrating Agents of General Negligence but it’s really a federal program for managing orphans—poorly. As long as no one sees abused orphans on vid, the news streams don’t get a story. No one wants to see us. We are the embarrassing remnants behind the laws about space mining and exploration and leftover children. “Federal guidelines say we all get equal treatment, equal food, one room each, and access to online skim-training. So you’re throwing us off a little, but this run’s supposed to be short. Bill’s all about keeping clean on the books.”

  “I don’t want him to report I’m here!” Ollie said.

  “You do something illegal? Look, if you’re going to be here I gotta know.” It seemed unlikely the girl would be wanted for violent crime, but given the light fingers on our crew I didn’t equate youth with innocence.

  She hesitated. I gave her a look right back and she relented. “Momma was a cruise line entertainer on New Svenska.” We both knew being a lounge entertainer didn’t have a good reputation, but she didn’t say anything more and I’m not a jerk. “She was careful, but I came along anyway. My daddy was mad since I wasn’t “pure. Apparently he wanted to inherit things before he has kids so they have to give him the family money. Momma passed me off to a crèche for a few years, but people asked questions cause of my looks.” The girl tugged on her blond hair, a rarity among the muddled genetics of star travel. New Svenska was very famous for being big on racial purity. The ruling class might be inbred, but they were sure pretty on the skim-vids.

  “But you get kicked out of the crèche at twelve,” I pointed out.

  “Yeah. Mama got us a berth on a liner, and we shipped out with her as a singer doing the tourist run. I worked in housekeeping.”

  The ache in my face dulled to a mild throbbing as she talked, and I gestured her to follow me. “Keep talking.”

  I couldn’t see her shrug, but I felt it at my back. “Daddy found out we were on a New Svenska liner and put out a fire order. He could do that because his family owned the cruise line. When we hit the first nonautomated station, mama and I were turned off ship. She got sick and died there.”

  No one who ends up on this ship has a happy story. If you don’t blub about it you can do just fine. “Well, we do salvage here,” I informed her. “Decent profits. You got any hours logged in a v-suit?”

  “Just the usual drills.” She meant the monthly drills on any ship or space station. You have to make sure everyone knows how to get into a vacuum suit right quick in the event of a hull compromise. Space is deadly.

  I nodded. “That’s more than some dirt-lickers.” We reached my cabin, and I gestured inside. “You’ll sleep in here for now, since you’re my problem. But since you ain’t got any stuff to stow, let’s go on down
to find you a suit. We’re on our way to a job.”

  She peered inside. The walls were plain fiberglass with banded reinforcements and a single light panel overhead. A slab of a bed cantilevered from the wall holds my snarl of thermal blankets with some trinkets and bits around on the floor that I’ve salvaged for myself.

  I don’t think the notion of sharing a bed bothered her. I hear they all sleep together in a crèche, like puppies. We often did out here, too. Space is cold, and heating is expensive on long runs, so Bill kept the place chilly to cut costs.

  We continued to a storage room where we keep suits. There’s a lot of variety in a v-suit, and Mouse was a deft hand with a needle and sealant for making the varieties we needed to suit up the various crew that came our way. Ollie was small and still straight, so she fit a spare standard model that we hadn’t cannibalized for parts and fabric yet. We tested the oxygen, safety harnesses, and radio then fetched it back to my berth. Our berth, at least for this run.

  The overhead speaker crackled, and Bill’s voice came on. “Target acquired. Suit up, children. You know the drill. Dodge, take the newbie and keep her with you.”

  I kept an eye on Ollie as she suited up, but true to her claim she seemed to know her way around a v-suit okay. I traded my antique LA baseball cap for a helmet. We checked each other’s seals from the outside, and headed down to the main hatch together where the rest of the crew had abandoned the ball game to suit up. Our equipment was loaded up into the staging bay, and the iris to the main cargo hold telescoped shut. Through the speaker in my helmet, I heard the hiss of air being pumped out of the bay. “Everyone raise your hand if you can hear me,” Bill’s voice crackled through my ears. We all raised our hands.

  We waited a moment, feeling the shudder of small maneuvers as Bill lined us up with the salvage target. Then our feet came off the deck as he cut the rest of the gravity, and we floated in place as the outer hull door opened. Beyond was infinite black with distant stars. Just in front of all that nothing was our target: a smallish transport ship floating dead in space. It was a new model by the look of it, not like our usual long-outdated salvage runs. I wondered what had happened to make them abandon it. But it’s cheaper to make ships than fix them these days, with the materials they use and how quick things go obsolete. No one builds to last any more.

  One at a time we jumped over to the derelict, a slow and controlled push that took us over to the other ship’s hull. I jumped beside Ollie and watched to make sure she attached her magnetic tether to the ship’s hull properly.

  Long-armed Paris was already sticking the corrosive tape around the unlocking mechanism when Ollie leaned over and touched her helmet to mine. The inter-suit connection turned on. “Why doesn’t he use the external release trigger? It’s a T-94X.”

  “The what? Is that a new upgrade on this model?”

  “It’s got a new feature to improve the response times for search and rescue,” Ollie’s voice suggested pride in the knowledge. “Any ships manufactured since last year have them. This is a new model, fresh off the blocks.” Her gloved hand stroked the plated exterior. “Should I show you?”

  “Hell yes,” I said, then turned on my general radio for a moment. “Paris, we have another way in. Save the tape.” I nodded to Ollie.

  She released her magnet, and with great care went hand-over-hand toward a panel some three meters from the main door. She pressed and rocked the small panel there in some pattern too quick for me to catch. Then her small gloved hand snaked inside a hole that opened up, all the way up to the elbow. A moment later there was a silent wave of pressure as the main hatch popped out three inches.

  “What’s going on over there?” Bill demanded, testy at the silence.

  “We’re in, captain. Ollie found a short cut.”

  “Did she, now? Good. Carry on.”

  “Mattie, take Ollie here with you and do the bridge and I’ll meet you there,” I ordered. “Tiny, take Bongo and Mouse and sweep the bay for cargo. Paris, the usual.”

  Inside the derelict hold, the residual ambient light from the solar cells was dim. Our helmet lamps painted wide spots of light as we all looked around at the various boxes and wiring there. “I say, that was lucky,” Paris’s voice came over the headset. He’d paused just inside the door to lock it in the open position. “I think someone booby-trapped it.”

  I floated over to take a look. I couldn’t make heads or tails of the mechanism but there were definitely small lumps of something held around the lock by tape with wires. “That’s new,” I agreed. “Think that means they planned to come back for it?”

  “I reckon,” Paris started carefully undoing the wires. “I’ll take it with us. Never know when a little plastique will come in handy.”

  I broadcasted, “Watch your step, all. Someone clearly planned to come back here. There could be more traps.” The group scattered through the ship in search of anything not nailed down. And if they could get the screws off quickly, that didn’t count as nailed down.

  There’s not many places to hide things in a small transport ship, so it didn’t take us long to strip it pretty clean. The ship was comprised of one main crew cabin with bunks, two additional passenger cabins, engine room, mess, medical, bridge. I did medical, then passed Mattie just exiting the bridge and found Ollie still there. She was stripping data chips and spare sim-wave parts into a pillow case that came complete with the pillow still intact. Inside her helmet she lifted her narrow chin as if daring me to say something about the bit of luxury, but I didn’t. Clearly, the girls peeked in the cabins first.

  I pulled spare electronics as well for a bit, keeping an eye on Ollie although she knew her way around a screwdriver. “Keep on, then. Meet me back at the hold entrance when that’s full.”

  I headed next to the mess hall to grab up spare food packaging. Mattie was already there, pushing sacks of water twice as big as she was back toward the cargo bay. Even in nearly normal G, she can handle a lot of weight, but in zero-G she could push tons without effort. I felt a faint clanging of the hull as Bill attached the siphons outside on the refueling pipes. Waste not, want not, as he always says. With the rest of the fuel and power sucked out, the ship went dark save for the lights on our helmets.

  We all met back at the door. Due to sheer mass, Mattie jumped over first with the water supply. Bongo, Tiny and Mouse had large cartons and went next, once Mattie was on the other side and ready to catch. That’s how we transferred large objects between ships, a careful game of catch that we practice in the bay at home. It sure moved cargo faster than the way the manuals advised.

  I could see Ollie wanted to jump with her pillow by the way she held it protectively, but I stopped her. We didn’t do it that way. “Throw it.” Mattie stood on the other side, ready to catch. Ollie did a slow push of the pillow off between the ships just as Bill’s voice snapped out a little harsh on the general feed. “Ware the fuel line!” The long hose, still streaming stolen fuel that emerged frozen as bits of tiny rock and gasses, snaked around in between the ships and hit the pillowcase, sending it off toward the black.

  I don’t know if Ollie said anything in her suit, but she pushed off hard to go and intercept it. I swore – she jumped more enthusiastically than she should have, and caught the pillow just fine. Problem was, the two of them went tumbling off end over end toward nothing. It was a newbie move, and I was careless that I hadn’t seen it coming.

  I grabbed my own anchor, thumbed on the magnet, and slammed it on the hull of the salvage. Then I jumped hard after Ollie. I needed the momentum to overtake her before my line ran out. I heard Bongo over the loudspeaker. “We got drifters, cap! Ollie and Dodge!”

  Bill’s voice went hard over the speaker, but I wasn’t really listening. “Give me a spin directional?”

  I only had one real shot at this – most ships are not designed for tiny little adjustments to catch people floating in space. Bill’s good, but people are too small and space is mighty big. I saw Ollie up ahead, her whole
body wrapped fetal-style around the pillow case. I turned on the broadcast so she could hear me. “Ollie! Straighten your legs!” My heart was in my mouth as I spread my arms as wide as I could to try and catch her. Now it was all about distance.

  She heard me, and although stretching out her legs didn’t slow her spin in zero-G it gave me something bigger to aim for to try and catch. The distance closed as I felt the cable playing out from my waist in a long snake behind me. With every inch, my safety was assured while hers was in doubt. But I had jumped even harder than she had. My hand caught her foot just as there was a jerk at my belt. I held on for all I was worth, adding a two-handed grip.

  We hung there for just a moment in the black. Touching, I could hear her deep, gulping breaths and feel the shaking of her shoulders even through the suit. Hand over hand, I pulled her even with me. “Hey. Hey, I got you.”

  I could see her head nod behind the faceplate and the tears running down her face. We floated there with her ridiculous stuffed pillow between our bodies. “I’m so sorry. I panicked,” she whispered.

  “I know.” I freaked out once when I was a kid myself. Bill was the one who pulled me back safe. “It’s okay. It happens to everyone once.”

  She nodded, her panic easing. One of her hands let go of her death grip on the pillow and held my arm. “I won’t. I swear. Please don’t dump me at a station again.”

  “We’re alive. That’s all that counts. When you survive, you get to keep playing the game. You’re home.” I felt the tugging on my cable as the others reached it to start hauling us back in to safety.

  Olivia’s eyes met mine. “I’m gonna survive.”

  “You bet you are.”

  They pulled us back to the decompression bay, and we finished the op. Bill resealed our hull and engaged the grav. Everyone made a point of pointing and laughing at Ollie, who tripped into an undignified heap, but the laughter wasn’t mean. It was more relieved that no one died.