by Anna Gaffey
Monasteries. They weren’t a big draw on Earth these days, unless you counted the Historical Society’s interest in tracing the genesis of the ritual orgies. The Historical Society . . . hells, Jake had almost forgotten. Con. And Dr. Silverman.
How could he have forgotten? Supposedly he’d had an eidetic memory before the implant (so the prosecution had claimed at his trial), and what he had now . . . well, he had mostly good memory days and the occasional bad one, during which he usually stayed in his quarters. Bad days meant flashes of unmoored memory, things like complicated chemical formula strings or glittering glass. On the best occasions, the impediment of the chip seemed to lessen, and he saw the days of his life in a continual march backward, each moment bright and clear. But the bad days with their murky, interminable gaps always returned. And the biggest gap of all, the gap that never went away: Icebreaker Labs. The day of the serum test. Rebecca. A chunk excised, gone completely.
By all the tardy messiahs, it was a wonder his brain was still of use to anyone. On the plus side, he could serve as a handy warning to anyone tempted to wipe their own mind.
Jake stamped on that thought. It was all right to feel good, to remember the day still promised something decent. Con and Silverman. That was fine.
Another sharp stabbed his port. Lindy had given him something else.
“Can’t get enough?” Jake rubbed his arm.
“Your boost,” she said
“I said I’d do it down on Control.”
“That machine’s busted and I won’t have time to fix it today.”
“Still light years better than you.” He yanked free of her grip and stalked out of the infirmary, and heard her holler after him:
“Still not going.”
CHAPTER TWO
“I’ve just received word we are to report to the cryo bay for the remainder of the trip. We’re only a day out from Earth, but already I feel as though I’ve spent months aboard the Harmon. And still, it’s too soon. In the words of our dear Will, ‘Make haste, the hour of death is expiate!’ There’s so much to do. I’ve barely scratched the surface of the legacy notes we pieced together from memory. I’m very eager to begin my tenure on Selas Station...”
Excerpt: personal ship’s log
30 June 2242
Dr. Alice Silverman
Clinical pathologist
Personnel Carrier Leah Harmon
United Worlds DS 2150-1
Earth, Sol System
[Data recovered 02 Dec 2242, Gunaji rights per salvage]
31 October 2242 AEC
17:52
The rest of the day was, as expected, spectacular. Stuck in Control, ferrying in-and-out freighter traffic was to Jake the most mind-numbing task available. The station’s operations control center took up all of Level 3. It was simple and spare with no partitions, just the Heart core computers and the lift column running up through the middle of the circular grey room. Unfortunately, the design was difficult to work around. To update the tech to match Heart, the original reclamation crew had added new shimmering blue viewscreen curtains for displays. But the only place to hang them was around the lift column, which meant that the curved grey consoles for comm and docking and refueling now faced the wrong way. The best view of the system and Selas, through the clear polymerine glass of the walls, was served up to the crew’s backs.
Still, Jake hardly wanted to stare wistfully into Selas’ green bulk while he was stuck serving as a glorified automated signpost. And he didn’t have time to brood. The viewscreens were going nova with constantly winking stars, planets, solar flares, freighter signals, comm traffic blasting through the interstellar comm buoy network, all their primary station systems turned up and thrumming through Heart’s computer core. Freighters stopping at the remotely-controlled refueling satellites. Freighters swinging into Selas’ docking ring to refuel, to drop off supplies, to barter for news updates or entertainments. To have only four people on-console sifting through the cacophony of traffic communication was thoughtlessly overconfident and just plain masochistic.
A mess of talk flooded his comm, and Jake drifted along with it, brooding anyway. At least there was bound to be some excellent Earth and colony gossip tangled up in the chatter. Gossip was currency here on Selas Station—the freighter pilots and crews were desperate for any news as they went in and out of comm buoy range via their respective nowheres, and they brought in whatever tidbits they could garner to trade.
If he was honest, and really, dishonesty was not among his many failings, the ultimate issue wasn’t the shift or the increasingly insane levels of traffic and transmissions or even the postponed mission, it was that he was sharing his Control console with an effervescent Natalia Ticonti, who was no longer on duty. If Jake had to listen to her a minute longer, he’d be forced to pitch her out the airlock for the good of the station.
“But it’s perfect,” Nat crowed. Her voice was a barb in his ear. “Don’t you think? I admit I was skeptical, too. No rational person really believes in ghosts or goblins any longer, but this is something fresh, something very, oh, very Earth. And that, my dears, makes it comforting to the newly homesick. What do you think? Really, go on, tell me.”
At twenty-five years old, Natalia Ticonti was the Science division’s youngest resident space psychiatrist. On Selas Station, she served as both psych and self-appointed morale officer. She looked about twelve until she opened her mouth and unleashed a prattle of vocabulary worthy of an old-time Oxford English dictionary. Her favorite accessories were fluffy scarves and bright plastic hair combs. Insanely chipper, she hashed up strange, trendy aphorisms from Earth’s history so often (“it was what it was back in the good old boys club”) that Jake suspected she was doing side research for a Historical Society paper. She was a greedy stockpiler of gossip and chitteringly annoying from a distance. Up close, she was a horror story.
The United Worlds Commonwealth Gov Board’s early education was considered a rousing success by everyone living in Domes on Earth: doctors, scientists, technicians, and Defense soldiers took up the Courses training earlier every year. While in theory the idea was sound, in practice the kids were still too goddamn young for their posts. Jake might have wrecked his first lab at age nine, but he hadn’t blathered anyone’s brains to death while doing it. At least, not without merit. He himself had probably been too young.
But damn it anyway. Nat had been officially off now for—Jake checked his console’s chrono and ground his teeth—in excess of forty-five minutes, and still she loitered. Ostensibly her motive was to confer with Rachel Santos, their Quartermaster, but she’d stayed to bore them all stupid with the plans of her elaborate “welcome mixer” for the thirty new crew members arriving on the evening personnel transport. Jake widened his eyes pleadingly first at Santos, who sat on his other side, then across the starboard console to Carmichael. They both ignored him.
He hadn’t needed any welcome party; he hadn’t been homesick since his first month of exile. Selas Station was Earth’s furthest waystation, and that was fine. But then, he’d been used to isolation. Most of the newts wouldn’t be, and the ones that were wouldn’t be choice—Furbad Station and the colony planets snagged most of the best UW Science or Defense newts for crew. Selas was where you sent the obscure, the elderly, and the out-of-favor, not one of United Planetary Science’s freshest young psychs. Nat’s presence was a mystery, although she certainly could’ve unthinkingly blabbed her way onto a blacklist. And that line of thought brought Jake back to Silverman . . . what made one of the enduring stars of Science voluntarily seek assignment to their dark corner of the universe? There had been no whispers of scandal or disfavor regarding her, either.
He peeled his fingers from the console. Only a few more hours of traffic control, and he could sign off and escape into the lab. They were supposed to be on low-traffic status, for fuck’s sake. The never-ending stream of incoming freighter pilots had apparently skipped that comm buoy. Not much could stop their bitching, either.
He caught an intriguing few repeats in the transmission and noted them down: Marathon. Freighter. Uppity. There had been multiple mentions of “Marathon” today. Too bad he hadn’t the faintest idea what it referred to. And was that something about Smita Gunaji? It just showed that every bored pilot came to history in the end, when they needed something to read between space vault cycles.
The infirmary’s comm node buzzed and Jake pressed it live. “Is my trip back on?”
“Put it to bed, sweetheart.” Dr. Lindy smiled, her angular face crowding the tablet screen cradled between his hands. “Now transfer me to the main screen or I’ll postpone your little mission indefinitely.”
“Didn’t you already do that?” Jake muttered. But he was already tapping the node and pushing it to the large screen. Lindy flickered into view there, her sharp grey eyes dominating the wafting viewscreen curtain.
“How’s that meteor shower looking?”
“Fuck off, Doc.”
She cackled. “Toby? Mei’s back on her feet and looking good. I got everyone with the upgrade vaccine by oh-eight-hundred, so we’re smooth-sail again. Mick Boxhill’s here and we scanned the rest of the rations. They’re clean. He’s going back to inventory now.”
Hunkered over his console, Tobias Carmichael sat square and somber as a slab, and twice as imposing. “Affirmative. Shall we follow standard boost schedule?” He sounded half-asleep, but his huge hands flew too quickly to follow over the nodes, gems, screens and tablets in their connective wells atop the console.
Lindy wrinkled her nose and the screen display fuzzed out for a moment. “Better do an extra. I’m out, then.”
“Wait,” Jake interjected. “Mei could come down here for a few hours, and then I could still—”
With a muffled curse, Lindy’s image joggled and blipped out. The viewscreen faded to the crystalline blue of standby mode. Jake bit his tongue and winced.
“Ease up, there,” Santos murmured beside him. “You’re sending a shuttle across the lanes—”
“It’ll wake ’em up,” Jake snapped. But he corrected the coordinates. Blinking blue sensor blips flooded the screen curtains, a descending cloud of shuttles and ships, and he swallowed a groan. Half were headed to the various unmanned auto-fueling stations networked through Heart, but the other half were destined for Selas and her refueling ring, and then on to the colonies in Petel and Vega and Tau Ceti. Another section showed that comm messages from Earth had jumped again in the past hour, near doubling Heart’s memory usage, but he didn’t have time to access any of them. Carmichael was probably on it.
As their Stationmaster, de facto slave driver, and anal-retentive nitpicker, Tobias Carmichael had naturally settled at the busier starboard docking and refueling controls early that morning. He hadn’t stirred since, except to occasionally stretch and pass coordinates to the rest of them over the viewscreens. He wasn’t troubled by Jake or by anyone or anything else in the known universe. He inspired the same lockjaw and spine-ratcheting in them all as Lindy did, except for Rachel Santos, who ribbed him openly. She claimed he was part Unangan, part Hawaiian, and no nonsense, which combined took all the fun out of him. (It was at those times that Carmichael liked to remind them all that he possessed the only working weapons aboard the station: a dozen fryguns with modulating levels of current.) He was straight out of Defense division retirement, and he’d come to Selas with Lindy in 2235, five years before Jake arrived.
Like most people assigned to the place, he had some interest in historical artifacts and Earth space history, but Carmichael’s particular fondness ran to antique artillery. It was one he indulged whenever his credits allowed. The latest shipment: some kind of bazooka, an AL494 from the 2090s. No live ammo, obviously, but the seller had included an old archival scan of a soldier in old-time military fatigues firing a slim tube, an orange cloud of backfire blooming behind him. Carmichael had blown half a year’s pay on shipping alone, and he’d handled the packaging cylinder with such uncharacteristic reverence that Jake didn’t want to know what they got up to in private. The last time he’d seen it, it was mounted over Carmichael’s bed.
But all quirks aside, and despite the loose triumvirate he’d formed with Jake and Santos to keep the station’s daily operations in line, Carmichael was in charge.
Except in the case of so-called medically informed decisions.
“Meteoroids. Postponed indefinitely,” he muttered. What nerve.
“It’s not forever,” Santos murmured back, startling him. She looked every bit as starched and immaculate as she had since they’d begun the shift that morning, her dark hair still slicked back into a stiff bun at her nape. Infuriatingly neat, but typical for Defense, even former Defense like Santos. Despite her military history, though, she was all right. Sure, she joined in on the occasional recall trick, letting Jake parrot endless facts or memories of facts until he stopped himself, or until the chip let him stop. And she overrode his perfectly logical requests while citing overly inflexible station policy, and she continually made snarky comments at his expense. But she was fair, icy cold with logic, and sharply competent. During missions to the surface, Jake had witnessed his own satisfaction and pride mirrored in her, a sight that had relaxed an unnamable, painfully tight thing hidden deep in him. Sometimes he wondered if it had been as immediate for her as it had been for him, or if it had been a slower beguilement. But it didn’t matter. Santos loved both Selas and the station as much as (if not more than) he did. She was all right.
He buttoned his lips and tried to concentrate on the scanning control, because Nat was still perched on the console, still listening with that intent psych expression of hers, but—
“Postponed indefinitely,” he said again. “Indefinitely! As if she could.”
Santos shrugged. “Probably not.”
“With the look of those foundation rocks, the dereliction . . . it’s possible Selas wasn’t always an uninhabited planet.”
“If it’s inhabited,” Santos said, “shouldn’t we be able to pick some evidence of that up on weekly station scans? Little insectoid people waving white flags or little pistols?”
“I didn’t say it is inhabited, I said it was. Possibly. I mean, maybe. And no. You need to do in-depth field research to pick up that stuff. Do you ever bother to look at those scans?”
“Nope.” Santos smiled. “Probably not gonna start, either. Unless there are little insectoid people.”
Nat frowned. “Well, I think—”
Jake raised his voice over hers. “If I could just cut out for a few hours, before the newts get here.”
“And if the station blows up? Because we didn’t have the personnel to head off an emergency?”
“First of all, I’d be on Selas, not light years away,” Jake pointed out. “I’d come back to help. Probably. I’d make whoever flew me come back, even if they were seeing psychedelic rainbow chickens.”
“Oh, so someone’s flying you now. We’re out two people in this scenario. Excellent.”
“If you guys were stupid enough to get yourselves blown up out of hand, I could try to comm Earth from the habitat.”
“So grab a pod. Lindy might let you back in. Go down and check it out.” Santos shot him a sideways look. “Leave the labs to Kai.”
“Ha.” But her smirk was infectious, and the bilious angry heat that had been festering in Jake’s throat all day began to slowly dissolve. “But since everyone else is either half a parsec away or wallpapering the infirmary with projectile vomit—”
“Oh, thanks for that, Jake. Really. I’ll cherish that image. Call on it in times of need.”
“My pleasure. And the newts won’t be in any shape to help out even without the headaches. They’ll need to be trained. I should go alone. Complete scientific solitude, that’s what I need. No morons.”
“Until you trip over a rock and crack your skull.” Santos pulled up a tiny image of greenish-white Selas and pushed the virtual orb over to his side of the console, where it filled his tablet
screens. Jake snorted.
“Is this supposed to be coercion? They teach you this in Defense training? Or no, wait, wait, this is your idea of torture, right?”
Strange to see it so small when the real thing was so close out there, drifting slowly behind him and the station. Like most of the early 22nd century designers, the original engineers of Selas Station had been suckers for a space view. He’d never seen so much polymerine used in the more modern Earth stations, and for good reason, too: reclamation reported that, despite the shielding, Selas’ Control level in particular had been pocked to near bits by micrometeoroids and space drift. They were still fixing chinks here and there, while the newly installed containment field buzzed over the station’s length.
But then, who wanted to look at Earth? He never tired of looking at Selas. Jake drummed his fingers against the console, and the little globe jiggled under the assault. The carpet of bright star points, the vast green-white marble of Selas omnipresent in the background, lulled him into a state of wonder—regardless of how many hours his ass had been planted in the same chair with only cold sandwich rations and lukewarm coffee while they waited for fresh food and mess crew. He could disregard the million sequences his fingers had tapped while an endless line of bored pilots whined over the comm, pissy and stir-crazed in their cramped cockpits because Lindy’s flu quarantine denied all passing transits the refuge of the Common area at the base of the station.
