by Jack Dann
So Barb, Kibbie, and I were all watching the postings nervously.
Waiting for assignments was sort of a social ritual. All the kids hung around, waiting to hear what they drew, ready to swap jobs with their friends. You could trade off your assignments with another kid as long as the authorities were willing to believe that you were still getting a full education in all the jobs. If you found somebody else willing to take your assignment, that is. But there was always a lot of swapping, as kids tried to get jobs they liked better, or to switch to work alongside some other kids in whatever cluster they hovered around with.
I saw Leeila off in the distance, waiting with Sina and Darty for the assignments to be announced, and I resolved that I would go over and talk to her, just as soon as we found out what assignments the three of us were going to get. I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe she had smiled when she saw me looking in her direction. Had she really smiled at me? I convinced myself she did.
Barb got her assignment first.
“Crud!” she said. “I got put on slime patrol! I can’t believe it!
I did that last year! I can’t believe I got it again!”
A moment later, “No!” Kibbie said. “I got slime, too! I don’t get it! Is this punishment, you think?”
That was unlikely, I knew. The jobs were assigned at random, and if there was any hint that jobs went to certain people for any reason, there would be a general rebellion in the whole colony. When you got a crud job, the only thing that kept you at it was the thought that it was nothing personal, and you would be off the list for that particular job for a year. Next rotation you’d be at something else.
Slime patrol meant inspecting the niches and inside corners and pipe-bays of the colony, looking for the slime that accumulates in all of the cooler areas where atmospheric water might condense out. It was a never-ending task. Green slime, brown slime, biofilm—all sorts of nasty stuff would grow, if you didn’t keep everything inspected and cleaned regularly. The worst of the stuff looked like drips of half-congealed snot, and you had to wear a mask and take a sample of it to bio, so they could check it and verify that it wasn’t a biohazard.
“Water filtration duty, ” I said, a moment later, when I got my assignment. “That’s not so bad.” And then I thought for a moment, and said, “Wait a minute—you’re on slime patrol? That’s perfect!”
“What do you mean, perfect?” Kibbie said. “If you think it’s perfect, you’re welcome to swap with me. I’ll take water filtration over slime any day. ”
“No, I’m going to swap with somebody else,” I said. “Look. Here’s the way it is. With slime patrol, you have the whole twenty-day shift to cover the territory. As long as you inspect everything on the list, you’re fine. You don’t have a schedule, and they don’t care when you do it, just as long as it gets done.”
“So it’s perfect for us,” Barb said. “Of course. It gives us the free time to do the Hercules jaunt, just as long as we make up the inspection time sometime.” She paused for a moment. “So, you going to swap?”
“I’m not thrilled about it,” I said. Water filtration was a job that kept pretty strict hours. “But, unless you have another idea?” I was looking at the listings. I couldn’t believe I was about to swap a perfectly okay job for a crud job like slime patrol. “Jaime Ibarra,” I said. “Looks like he got slime, too. He’ll trade me, I’ll bet.”
***
And then the day came. We had all the stuff we’d gathered, our suits had full air packs and emergency packs, we had checked and double-checked and triple-checked everything.
Old Chris, the outside-safety warden for B-4 (the bubble in Malina I lived in—did I mention it?) walked in as I was checking my gear. “What are you up to, young man?”
“Just giving my suit a safety check. Looks like it might need refurb.”
“Guess I can’t fault you for good safety habits. Could save your life someday. Any particular reason?” He paused. “I couldn’t help but notice that your friend Kibbie logged his suit out for refurbishment just half an hour ago.”
“Yeah,” I said, “well, yeah, we both use them a lot, you know? I bet his needs it too.”
“You wouldn’t be, say, thinking about going over to the old Hercules colony, would you? No, don’t answer that—I’d hate to have you start lying. I guess every kid has to do it once. We tell ’em it’s dangerous, but they don’t care. Makes it seem more exciting, hah. Not much excitement to waiting for your air to bleed out, I can tell you. Had it happen once. Not quite fun, no sir, not at all.”
I had heard the warnings a dozen times already. “You wouldn’t, ah, tell Dad you saw me here, would you?”
“Talk to your father? Why should I? What do you think I’d have to say, that you were checking out and refurbishing your suit? Nothing wrong with that.”
“Thanks.”
“Nothing. Hah. Yes, Hercules may be out of bounds, but I know darn well the fool kids go over there anyway. Test of manhood or some such. I suppose kids have to get such idiocy out of their systems. Now, if you somehow were, jaunting over to old Hercules, be careful now, hear? Maybe so it’s not as dangerous as some of us adults make out like it is, but not all of us are old fools, and there are still things left in there that could get a kid who wasn’t alert. Hah.”
And, to my astonishment, he let me go?
Barb and Kibbie met me with their suits in the oat-boat, and there we did something that would get Old Chris to suspend our vac privileges immediately, if we got caught: we tampered with our finder beacons. They weren’t ever supposed to be turned off—if we were outside, and the suit’s finder beacon wasn’t sending its regular blip every thirty seconds, a search party would be sent out without a moment’s delay. But that would let everybody know where we were, and so we turned them off. We logged all three of our suits into the system as having been taken in for refurbishment and repair.
It was about time for that anyway, I realized; mine was getting filthy. I had over a hundred hours of vac since the last refurb; I resolved to clean it for real after we got back.
So we were out in vac without logging the exit, wearing suits that were tagged as under repair, and without working finder beacons. Any one of these would get our vac privilege yanked. All three together would certainly get us the big D.
We still had our emergency locator beacons, of course, and if we got in deep enough trouble we could yank the pull-tab and a high-power scream would go out across every emergency band with our exact locations. But they were to be activated only in emergencies, and if we needed that, we were in deep trouble already.
Once we exited the airlock, we were committed.
The oat-boat silently made its way on a standard run, ferrying supplies from Malina over to Parsons habitat, three degrees ahead. The orbit dropped down to nearly kiss the Hercules orbit, and we were hidden away inside.
Ready to eject. One by one, we exited the airlock, me in my tiger-striped yellow suit, Kibbie’s suit striped in orange, Barb’s suit an eye-popping shade of electric blue.
“Radio check,” I said,- speaking on the encrypted spread-spectrum channel. I found myself whispering, although that made no sense. The spread-spectrum signal should be undetectable to anybody who wasn’t tuned specifically into it, and if it wasn’t, whispering wouldn’t make any difference.
“Check two.”
“Check three,” Barb and Kibbie’s voices came back, also whispering.
I flicked the radio off, and switched to the backup radio on my belt. “Radio two check.”
“Radio two, got it,” and “Radio two, check,” Barb and Kibbie’s voices came back.
“Radios go,” I said. “Ready for suit check. Kibbie, I’m checking for you; Barb, you’re on me; and Kibbie, you’re checking Barb.”
I was nervous, but the familiar ritual of suit check-outs calmed me down. Kibbie had two quik-seals that were tight, but not tight enough; I cinched him down and gave him a quick scolding, the same one that I’d rece
ived myself a dozen times when I’d been lax suiting up, and then pronounced him safe. He must have been even more nervous than I’d been when we suited up, I realized. Barb found only a minor problem on me—one equipment pocket not fully zipped. Barb herself, of course, had done everything perfectly by the book. We each checked each other’s oxygen levels again, looked at our radiation monitors to verify that they were working, and checked the life-support telltales. Green, green, and green. We were go.
I’d been playing music on the trip over, but reluctantly decided not to play once we were over in Hercules. I wanted to be completely in the moment, so I selected only a mild percussion rhythm to accompany me.
Kibbie was bopping to his own music, clearly something pretty energetic. Barb was, as always, unnaturally calm.
I paused, floating next to the oat-boat, and looked across the void at the approach of Hercules, a twisted jungle of mirror-bright aluminum. The remains of Hercules colony no longer even slightly resembled the smoothly curved, squat cylinder of the active colony it had been. It looked like an old-style beer can somebody had tossed up and hit with a couple of shotgun blasts. Here and there, names and logos boldly spray-painted across the surface showed the record of various clandestine visitors who had journeyed there over the years since depressurization. I had my own spray can tucked away in the jack-pack of my yellow tiger-striped skin-suit. Kibbie would have brought one for himself as well; I wasn’t sure about Barb. I looked out across the structure, trying to make a mental note of a good place to leave my mark without getting caught off-limits and sent back in humiliation to my parents.
The wreckage had long since been stripped of anything valuable. Nobody ever talked about the decades-old disaster, and I wondered once again what had caused it. Strut failure? Collision?
Barb elbowed me in the ribs. “So, what are you guys waiting for? O’Neill’s birthday? Get to it.”
“We’re going, we’re going,” I said. “Give us a minute, willya? Lemme check my stuff.”
“You checked it three times,” Barb said. “So go already. You remember the evasion pattern? In fast when the wide-range radar’s over the horizon, hide in the radar-shadow of the big spike, then skim in through the dead spot in the proximity radar. Got it?”
“Got it.”
“Then go!” Barb gave me a shove. Well, now was as good a time as any. I killed the spin I’d picked up from Barb’s shove and took off. In the corner of my vision I could see Kibbie push off from the oat-boat and follow. In my earphones I heard Rip, sending us off.
“Remember, next conjunction with Malina is in six orbits; seven hundred minutes. Don’t miss it or you’ll be stranded, got it? And bring us back a chunk of weed for me, hear? A big chunk.”
I turned down my radio gain to squelch him. The wrecked colony loomed before us, rotating imperceptibly, almost glued to the sky. In a moment it ceased being an object and turned into a landscape of jagged metal girders and twisted aluminum skin. I felt a thrill compounded of both anticipation and fear. As the spike came around I turned my suit-jet sideways, curved around toward the spin-axis, and hovered in the radar shadow for a moment to catch my breath, waiting for Kibbie and Barb to catch up and for the pounding of my heart to slow back to normal. I floated over a vast blue plain, an old, rigid array of solar cells, too old and too badly damaged to be worth the delta-V to salvage. The glass of the solar cells was frosted and pitted by almost a century’s exposure to micrometeoroid dust.
It was a risk to be here, sure, but the element of risk was half the excitement. Parents all had the same horror stories, about some kid who jetted over to a derelict habitat on a dare, got trapped inside, and ran out of air. Or got lost in the maze inside. Or ran short of reaction mass, and ended up in an eternal orbit around the wreckage. The details varied (nobody seems to have personally known the kid it happened to) but the moral was always the same.
In a moment there was a bump as Kibbie arrived, and then Barb, twisting around to kill her relative momentum, landed without a bump, graceful in low-gravity as she always was. “Awesome, isn’t it?” she said.
I nodded silently.
“Can you imagine it?” Kibbie said. “Fifty thousand people used to live here.”
“Yeah, I know,” I said. “You told me already, like, a hundred times.”
We floated slowly across the outside of the structure, gawking. Neither of us had ever seen it close up. Its desolation held a peculiar form of beauty. Here was one place where aluminum skin had peeled up in a graceful spiral; there a girder bent into a pretzel-arc. Everywhere it was painted with splotches of color; mostly initials and dates. An enormous, purple and black sprayed mural of a coiled snake dominated one nearly intact panel. I got out my spray can and looked around.
“Hey! Get out of there! Out! Now!”
Yow, a watchman! I twisted and scooted, looking for an opening. I didn’t have the slightest notion that there would be a guard. Man, what would people think if we got caught and I hadn’t even been inside? What was I doing, getting caught up in a daze right out there in the open? I jetted across the blue plain of the solar arrays, twisted, rebounded off a girder, and dodged into the interior of the structure through a vast ragged-edged tear. The voice abruptly cut off as I was radio-shielded by the aluminum. I was in what had once been one of the agricultural tubes. I coasted across the chamber and passed through a ripped panel into the next.
I had lost the watchman, but where were Kibbie and Barb? Better not use the radio, not yet. Spread-spectrum was hard to detect, but this close to the watchman, I couldn’t risk it. I looked around.
This had apparently once been part of the outermost level of residential sections of the habitat, underneath the parks. I floated past doors, furniture, a broken toilet. I took a couple of turns at random. Maybe I was far enough from the watchman. I turned my transmission power down low and was about to transmit when I saw Kibbie’s bright orange suit floating down the corridor.
“Kibbie?”
Kibbie turned. “Dylan. I knew I saw you dodge off this way.”
“Where’s Barb?”
“Right behind. You take a look around this place yet? We’re talking, like, massive destruction here.”
“Yeah. What did all this?”
“Meteoroid strike?” Kibbie guessed. “Debris?”
“I dunno. Nobody ever says anything ’bout it. Look up there.” I pointed.
Something had pierced the structure, hard. Rather, many things had perforated it. Holes the size of my fist speckled the tattered shards of the aluminum skin. The colony had been a stressed-shell structure with internal wire bracing, and when enough of the tension members had been broken, it ripped apart of its own internal stress. In places, snapped tension lines had buzz-sawed across the structure, carving through aluminum beams like a knife blade. Other places, beams had twisted and broken, forming shapes like avant-garde sculpture. There was nothing loose; probably anything that could be easily carried off had been taken long ago for a souvenir.
I looked around to see if I could find a piece of what had hit the habitat. But there were only the fist-sized holes, hundreds of them. The colony must have rammed it at near orbital velocity, and whatever it was had been vaporized on impact.
Kibbie was far down the corridor already, putting the finishing touches to an elaborate signature on the wall.
“Hey, Kibbie,” I said.
He looked up. “I think we better get moving, or we’re likely to get caught.”
“Okay.” I pushed off a bulkhead and came up abreast of him, and then Barb came up to coast along next to us. I was still thinking. The colony had, quite literally, been hit by a shotgun blast. How? Why?
The spot we were seeking was inward, toward the center, where the low-gravity greenhouse had been. I’d been so caught up in thinking about why somebody would want to destroy a peaceful space colony, I’d almost forgotten about the ostensible object of our quest.
We moved inward, still looking around wide-eyed
. As we passed one sleep chamber, Kibbie nudged me. “Look.” Somebody had patched up the chamber to hold pressure. I looked inside. Padding and sex restraints. “Ooh-ooh. I know what somebody’s been doing in there.” Kibbie snickered.
I looked around to see if Barb was watching, but she was way ahead of us, gazing into another chamber.
We continued on. Through the gaping holes in the skin, we could see the blackness of space and occasionally flashes of the Earth below.
We passed the park levels, cavernous empty space. There was nothing of the park left, only blackened debris and the barren truss-work of the construction stripped bare.
We drifted across the levels. When we reached a stratum that must have been residential, we stopped momentarily to rest and get oriented. This level had originally been suspended by cables stretching directly from the hub, large rooms with the shattered remains of windows that allowed them to look out over the park levels below.
Something tapped on my suit from behind. “What?”
But Barb and Kibbie were both ahead of me.
“I didn’t say anything.” Kibbie twisted around to look at me. “Yow!”
I twisted around and found myself staring into the empty eye sockets of a skull. Floating up behind us were silent ghosts that had been dead for most of a century.
They had been in shadow; we would never have noticed them as we passed, but the exhaust blast from our cold-gas suit-thrusters had disturbed them. Eighty years of exposure to hard vacuum and radiation had desiccated the flesh away, leaving nothing but brown skulls, staring blankly out of jumpsuits from which the vacuum had leeched all traces of color. The skeletons drifted aimlessly. The one that had touched me was spinning slightly from the force of its own touch.
Kibbie pushed toward me, fascinated. “Let me see.” He raised all his suit illuminators up to full power, and in the sudden blaze of light, the skeletons were pale and dusty, no more scary than old sticks poking out of a bundle of rags.
