The Colonists (The Movement Trilogy)
Page 15
Mr. Ishiguro, the man said, here is your lottery authorization. Your period of eligibility begins today. Best wishes from the Onyx administration.
The man in the red uniform nodded smartly, then left, having changed their lives forever.
• • •
The lottery system had been instituted several hundred years earlier on Station Argus. It had been a dismal opportunity then, and had been extinguished when the Onyx program was overturned. Years later, when the Citadel reintroduced the Onyx program, it also unveiled a new lottery. Machine-class residents were not permitted to reproduce unless they were selected, by lottery, to do so.
On Argus, very few Machiners were authorized to reproduce each year. Those who did so without authorization were cruelly stripped of their children at birth, and the orphans were adopted by Onyx residents unable to produce children naturally.
It was a vile system at best.
Takao considered all of this while he waited in the physician's lobby for Setsuko, who was having her government-installed birth-control device deactivated. The devices were activated remotely, like bombs. He wondered why they couldn't be deactivated the same way.
Setsuko appeared in the doorway then, and he had smiled up at her. She looked nauseous. She opened her mouth to speak to him, and instead vomited.
Takao leaped up and went to her, and the physician peeked into the lobby.
Please use the hazard kit beneath the window to remove that mess, the physician said.
Takao said, What did you do to her?
Setsuko groaned.
It's expected, the physician said. The sudden shift in hormones affects nearly every woman this way.
And you want me to clean it up? Takao said. I'm taking my wife home.
Okay, the physician said. Suit yourself.
Takao and Setsuko had arrived home twenty minutes later to find a debt marker on their door. The marker was a fine for destruction of property, and was signed by the physician, and approved by Onyx administration. The amount of money required was greater than Takao earned in three days of work.
This was the world into which Megumi Ishiguro would be born eleven months later.
Maasi
They fumble around in the dark. Varien hears Oona trip over something, and she crashes to the ground.
Fuck's sake, she says with a grunt.
Are you okay? Tarae asks.
Oona makes a racket as she gets up. Yeah, she says. I'm alright.
Maybe when you can see you can treat yourself, Tarae says. Are ship's doctors allowed to treat themselves?
Oona doesn't laugh.
While her three crewmates knock around in the darkness, muttering and cursing, Ishy makes her way to the staircase. It takes a moment to find it. Days in the dark will mess with a person's internal compass. Varien has been thoughtful, telling the crew stories while they lingered in the secret hold. The stories helped, Ishy thought.
They helped keep your wits about you.
In the dark it's easy to invent things to worry about.
She discovers the bottom step of the staircase then, surprised to find it in a different place than she thought she remembered. Ishy closes her eyes and thinks. There isn't an inch of this ship she doesn't know intimately. It's been years since Tasneem showed her the holds, but the memory returns clearly.
Over here, Ishy says. Come to my voice.
You have something? Varien asks, from some distance away.
Just the way out, Ishy says.
• • •
The trigger panel was below the lip of the fourth step.
Close your eyes, Ishy tells the others, who have gathered around her.
She pushes the trigger plate, and a thin seam of dusky light appears on the western wall, accompanied by a metallic sigh.
Ishy feels Varien's hands come to rest on her shoulders and squeeze.
Nice work, Ish, he says, and she feels the slightest tremble of warmth at his touch.
Where does it go? Oona asks.
There's a ladder, Ishy says. It comes up inside the loading deck, in the corner.
Tricky, Tarae says. It's like an old smuggler's storeroom.
Maasi has its own peculiar history, Ishy says.
Let's not get into it now, Varien says. I want to make sure Tasneem and Serena are alright. Do we have any kind of weapons on board?
Tarae shakes her head in the pale light. Tasneem refused them, she says. If we had them, we'd be tempted to use them, she always said.
She wasn't the bullets-and-blood kind of woman, Oona says. It went against her nature.
Varien exhales, then seems to realize he's still gripping Ishy by the shoulders. He pulls his hands back, somewhat apologetically, and Ishy feels a small pang. She's curious about this feeling, but pushes it aside.
There are flare bars, she says. They're actually on the loading deck. They're really old, though. They were here when Tasneem started modifying the ship. They could work...
Or they could blow up in your hand, Tarae finishes. We can't risk that.
Varien opens his mouth to suggest something, then pauses, and cocks his head to the side, as if listening for a distant sound.
What? Oona asks.
Varien composes himself. Oh, he says. Just thinking. We've been down here too long to stand around arguing about weapons. If someone's on board, the only thing going for us is surprise. Weapons or not, we have that, at least. But I don't think we should all go stomping around the ship.
Ishy touches Varien's wrist. I'll go.
I can go, Tarae says.
Varien looks at both women, then at Oona, who ducks her head.
We'll both go, Ishy says.
Varien nods. If something happens --
I can scream really well, Tarae says. You'll hear it.
Be safe, Varien says.
Ishy takes Tarae's hand and they make their way through the dim light to the exit hatch. It's only slightly open, and is heavier than Ishy remembers. It takes both of them to swing it wide. On the other side is a shallow alcove, isolated rungs stapled to the depressed wall.
Ishy looks back before they begin climbing. Oona has settled down on the floor, legs crossed, but Varien has stepped forward into the wider play of light from the exit hatch. Funny that she had never noticed his eyes before, she thinks. They're wiser -- older -- than the rest of him.
She smiles cautiously, then begins to climb after Tarae.
• • •
The Maasi feels strangely foreign to Ishy. It is deathly quiet. The faint thrum of the engine is absent, she notices immediately. Over the years, the crew has become accustomed to its low murmur, attuned so well to it that any fluctuation in its whispers would raise conversations around the ship, and send one or another crewmember to Ishy's engine room to check in.
But her beautiful butterfly is silent now, and Ishy resists a sudden, desperate urge to dash to the engine room herself.
This is creepy, Tarae whispers.
Ishy nods. I'm a little scared.
Me, too.
The two women replace the grate over the chute they've just climbed out of, and scan the loading deck carefully. It appears as it should, with piles of cable and stacks of supply crates and the remains of a very old transport pod that Ishy has for years stripped of parts for various repairs. The deck is mostly dark, with only faint strip lighting activated.
What now? Tarae asks.
Ishy shrugs. We split up, look around, find Tasneem, find Serena.
And if someone's still on the ship?
I don't know.
Me neither, Tarae confesses.
Ishy's heart is thumping quite distractingly inside of her chest. She turns suddenly to Tarae and puts her arms around her. Tarae is surprised, then returns the embrace.
Just in case, Ishy says.
• • •
They agree to split the ship. Tarae will make her way to the upper command levels, as the bridge is usually her home. Ishy will crawl into the belly of the ship. They
decide not to confront any pirates they encounter, but to report back to the loading deck and regroup.
A sensible plan, Ishy thinks.
Sensible plans never seem to work out in the real world.
She squeezes Tarae's hand one last time, and watches her crewmate quietly ascend the ramp to the upper levels. Then she inhales deeply, slowly releases the breath, and starts moving sideways through the ship, inspecting each room and corridor along the way.
The first room is the galley.
Ishy flattens herself against the wall beside the galley's door.
She wishes for a moment that she knew of someone to pray to.
Then she presses her cheek to the wall and leans forward just a tiny bit, and peeks quickly into the dining hall.
It's empty.
She has a sudden urge to dash into the room and pull the heavy table aside, to flip back the rug and expose the secret hatch and bring Varien and Oona into her little nightmare.
But she swallows it back.
She steps into the room cautiously, and the other details begin to reveal themselves to her. The room is empty, but it's more than that: it's the scene of something awful. The big table is knocked askew, and the dishes that Tasneem and Serena must have quickly scattered on it for show are now overturned and lying on the floor. The prep counter is a terrible mess, with flour and rice and something sticky and dark angrily smeared on the surface.
Ishy steps around the counter and her stomach plummets.
The sticky substance is blood.
And there's an awful lot of it.
• • •
She hopes and hopes that Tarae hasn't encountered anything like this upstairs. Ishy bites her tongue to quench the burst of nausea she feels. Whose blood is it? Where are they? Her mind entertains only the most disturbing, awful possibilities.
There's spatter on the floor beyond the counter.
To her horror, it appears to lead somewhere.
She doesn't wish to follow, but she is compelled to.
She wishes that she hadn't volunteered for this.
Then she hears Tarae scream, piercing and loud despite the quarter-mile of ship's decks between them, and Ishy's heart stops dead at the sound. She breaks into a run, winded before she has even made it three feet, so palpable is her panic. Around the counter, across the storage compartment, past the cold lockers, past the --
Ishy had forgotten about the blood.
Her boots skid in it, and she goes down hard, without time to stop herself. Her overalls are stained rust-red, and she begins to cry as she tries to get up, her hands and knees betraying her and sending her back to the deck. The blood is everywhere, so thick that it hasn't had adequate time to dry, and Ishy struggles to get up again, and this time she falls the other way, and when she opens her eyes, she sees Serena's cold blue face, her sawed-open throat, and she is terrified, and then her heart seems to explode because if Serena is here, then that means Tarae can only have screamed for one other reason, and Ishy's brain tries to turn itself off rather than solve this puzzle, because it can only mean one thing, and Ishy would rather die than acknowledge it.
Tasneem is dead.
Crescent
Ishy was twenty when she met Tasneem Kyoh for the first time.
It had been an otherwise unremarkable day, as most of her days tended to be. She spent them in a workshop in the belly of Crescent Station, a minor port on the surface of Earth's moon. For Ishy, each day was an assembly line of broken engine parts. Quite literally -- she sat at a workbench at the termination end of a long, wide, flat assembly belt. Every few minutes, the belt chugged forward, and Ishy was expected to pluck a broken flywheel or a cracked depositor head from the belt, apply the bare minimum of repairs, and add the part to a second belt, which returned the pieces to -- well, she didn't know where.
Ishy only saw this end of the belt.
She shared the room with another technician, a portly, middle-aged man named Garson. Ishy didn't know if it was his first name or his last. She never asked. Garson didn't talk much. She intuited that he had been here, in this workshop, for a very long time. He worked slowly. The belt would advance while he was still working on the part he'd picked up an hour earlier. A small pile of broken parts would accumulate on the floor beside his workbench.
A missed part equaled a dock in pay. Two missed parts doubled the dock. Three quadrupled it. Garson didn't seem to know or care. He fixated on a single part, and performed magic, often restoring the piece to near-new condition. But Ishy wondered how he survived. He couldn't possibly actually earn any money. One day she counted the pay docks he accumulated, and realized that he actually owed their employer money.
So she helped. She couldn't catch every piece, but she caught a few, and the next day she caught a few more. Ishy worked fast, and though the parts she repaired would surely break again, they would certainly get a ship off-world and possibly to its next destination before crumbling.
That's all that was expected of her. She performed her job -- and Garson's -- well. She didn't complain. She didn't make waves. She sat at her bench for the full twelve-hour shift, and she returned the next morning to repeat the cycle. She did this for three years without missing a single day of work or petitioning for a day of leave.
So it surprised her when her employer fired her instead of Garson.
• • •
Don't think of it as being fired, Ishy was told. Think of it as a lateral transfer. Well, possibly a demotion. Certainly not a promotion. It's a reassignment. A recalibration of your skills.
Crescent Station offered little in the way of variation. Ishy took the reassignment, and discovered herself scouring moon dust from the docking platforms. The stuff found its way into every crevice and seam of the spaceport. She developed calluses on her knees from the work, but she worked hard and kept her complaints to herself. Machine-class workers -- particularly transfers from the Citadel -- earned no sympathy.
She actually liked the change of pace. The docking platforms were great metal tongues that protruded from the station. All day and all night, transport pods, microcrafts, repair drones and other small vehicles landed upon them, and were slowly drawn into the docking bays. The exposed platforms were dust magnets, but Ishy got used to the work. It was still a kind of repair, and that set her mechanical mind at ease.
Working in the bays meant she got to see new people all the time, too. Compared to her previous life on the repair belt, she was practically a social animal now. Most of the time the people were grunts -- pilots, fleet repair staff, and the like -- but now and again, a strange and exotic new ship would land at Crescent Station, and Ishy, still young, would try not to stare as unfamiliar and beautiful people emerged onto the deck.
She was covering another worker's shift -- her third such pickup in a week's time, which meant Ishy could afford to eat in the proper dining hall at least once that month -- when the crash happened.
• • •
Look -- look, she's okay. She's opening her eyes.
Ma'am, please. You can't see her until she's been properly evaluated.
She's okay. See? You have to let me see her. You have to let me.
Ma'am. Don't make me -- hey, Simon, Simon, can you come over here and help me with --
Fine, okay. Fine. I'm waiting. See? I'll wait.
Thank you. When she can have visitors, we'll notify you at your --
Oh, that won't be necessary. I'll wait. I'll wait right here.
You don't need to --
I'll wait.
• • •
Ishy felt as if she'd been stuffed into a bag and kicked down a flight of stairs. Her shoulders ached terribly. Her first instinct was to look down at herself, but she quickly stifled the impulse. Moving her head at all sent bolts of pain down her neck and into her upper back.
Her mouth felt cottony, warm. Primordial.
There were lights nearby, dim ones, but they felt like surface spots to her. They made her retinas ache.
Ishy started to turn to her left, but the pain was too much. She groaned and squeezed her eyes against the sudden flare-up.
I'm sorry -- look, don't move. Don't move, okay?
A woman appeared above Ishy's head, and this was enough to give Ishy some context for her surroundings. She was clearly lying down, nearly immobile. Above her, that was a treatment room ceiling. She'd stared up at one the last time she'd inhaled too much dust in the bay.
She was hospitalized.
Are you okay? the woman asked.
The woman was pretty, in a rather ordinary way. Even from this unusual angle, Ishy could tell that the stranger carried herself in a way that suggested wisdom, power. The woman's strong shoulders and jaw were almost regal.
And that shock of white in her dark hair was striking.
Are you okay? the stranger asked again. Can you hear me?
Ishy started to nod, then thought better of it.
I can hear you, she said, startled by the raspiness of her own voice.
Oh, good, the woman said. I was very worried.
Ishy blinked. Who are you?
Goodness, I'm sorry, the woman said. My name is Tasneem. They told me your name is Megumi.
Ishy, Ishy whispered. Nobody calls me Megumi.
Ishy, Tasneem said. Why Ishy?
Ishiguro, Ishy said. Ishy.
Tasneem put a hand to her own forehead. Of course. Silly me.
What happened? Ishy asked.
Tasneem smiled regretfully.
I'm afraid I'm a lousy pilot, she said.
• • •
I still can't believe you broke the bay door, Ishy said. I don't know how that's even possible.
With a transport pod, no less, Tasneem said. I know.
Those doors are seriously thick.
So is your head, Tasneem said. I can't believe you're not more seriously injured.
Well, my head hurts, Ishy said.
But still. They said you don't even have a concussion.
That's good, I guess. I need to get back to work.
Surely you can rest for a few days, Tasneem said.
If I rest for a few days, I won't have a job when I come back, Ishy said. There's a waitlist.