Against Impassable Barriers

by Kate MacLeod

  “In the meantime, I don’t need to see to dock this thing,” Emilie said. “The ship does all the work, really.”

  She put her hands on the controls but still made no moves, just waited with her whole body so tense she reminded Scout of Shadow when he had a mouse trapped in its hole and could hear it scratching around and he just knew it was about to dart out at any moment.

  Then Emilie reached forward and pressed a button, one quick jab, and the ship lurched forward and rolled partly on its side.

  Not that that meant much when they were once more at a steady velocity and Scout was still floating between the seats. There was no up or down, not yet.

  Emilie gave the positional rockets another nudge, changing their trajectory again, and then a third time.

  Something was looming over them, not reflecting enough light from distant Amatheon for any of its features to be illuminated. Scout only knew it was big—not as big as the last space station she had been on, not by a long shot, but far more immense than any ship.

  Then they were inside, drifting down a long tunnel to the heart of the station. And with the stars now left behind them, they were in complete darkness.

  5

  There was some amount of dim light inside the cabin, from the screens and controls strewn across the consoles in front of Emilie and Geeta, but it barely lit up their hands and the lower half of their faces. Everything outside the windscreen was darkness. It felt heavy, oppressive, like some thick black thing that had wrapped itself around their craft.

  Anything could be lurking in that darkness, waiting to pounce. Scout tried to swallow down the bitter taste of fear at the back of her throat, but her mouth had gone too dry.

  “You can see where you’re going, right?” she asked Emilie.

  “The ship sees,” Emilie said, her hands working the controls. “Hold on tight; I’m stopping our momentum and dropping our magnetic landers. There might be a jolt; this is my first time.”

  Scout clutched the seat backs and even Geeta, usually so calm, gripped the belts holding her in her seat as if she wasn’t sure they would be strong enough.

  There was another loud blast from the positional rockets that jerked them all forward. Before Scout had quite gotten back to her place between the seats, the floor dropped sharply away from her, and she heard herself squeal as she nearly lost her grip on the seat backs.

  Then she was sitting in a heap on the floor between the two seats, one ankle throbbing from where her foot had taken a wrong turn.

  She could scarcely feel that pain, though. It was nothing compared to the joy of being back in gravity, back in a world with an up and a down.

  The dogs started yipping, tangled together in the tiny space of the cabinet. Scout unhooked her tension band harness and stumbled to the back to release them as Emilie made some last adjustments on the console and Geeta unbuckled and got to her feet.

  “I never appreciated how good gravity feels,” Geeta said, interlacing her fingers to stretch her arms up and back, rising to her tiptoes at the apex. She didn’t quite smile, but she looked in better spirits than she had since they had boarded Liam’s ship.

  “What’s the plan now?” Scout asked. “Do we stay with the ship in case we need to beat a hasty departure?”

  “I don’t think that’s a bad idea, but it may be excessive,” Geeta said. “We should stay near the ship and make sure she’s ready to go at any time.”

  “We should explore the station first,” Emilie said. “Make sure we really are alone.”

  “Who else could be here?” Scout asked. It had looked dark and lifeless when they approached it.

  “Other squatters like us,” Emilie said.

  “Or maybe squatters not so nice as us,” Geeta added.

  “We should just be sure,” Emilie said. Geeta had already gone to the back of the cabin to retrieve her belt and grappler. Emilie pulled her oversized bag of tools from the cabinet next to Geeta’s. Scout was already wearing the marshal belt.

  She ran her hands over it, taking a quick inventory. Her fingers brushed over the gun loop at the back, empty now. She had been glad to leave the gun behind on Amatheon, but now she wondered if she might regret losing what protection it could offer her. But the few times she had drawn it, had aimed it at others and searched inside herself to find the will to shoot if necessary, she had hated it.

  No, she was sure she was better off without it. With no training as to its proper use, it was more danger than help.

  “Should the dogs come with us?” Geeta asked.

  “They’re likely to find trouble before we do,” Emilie said, but she looked up at Scout, one eyebrow raised in question.

  “They’re smart dogs,” Scout said. “They can flush out trouble we might miss until it’s too late, but they also evade capture pretty handily. We should let them run where their noses guide them.”

  “Send them out ahead then,” Emilie said.

  “I would rather it wasn’t so dark,” Scout said as Emilie reached for the door button.

  “It’s only dark on the exterior and in the dock,” Emilie said. “The ship and I activated the airlock and confirmed the emergency lights are still running within. Low-level light, but better than nothing. Plus, my glasses aren’t entirely useless. They do have a few apps that run without the network. Like enhanced night vision.”

  “I guess I have that too,” Scout said, putting her hand in her pocket to touch the single reflective lens that had also once been Gertrude Bauer’s. She needed it to use any of the equipment on the belt, but it also had functions all its own.

  The door slid open and the ramp extended, but the dogs hung close to Scout’s legs, not eager to be the first ones out in this strange new place.

  “Come on, guys. Perfectly safe,” Scout said, walking down the ramp. A squarish tent of clear plastic had extended out from the station wall to enclose the area around the ramp, sealing the vacuum out and the atmosphere in. Scout stepped lightly from the end of the ramp to the beginning of the hangar hallway.

  The dogs quickly found their bravery and came charging down after her, blowing past her to gallop down the long hallway. Red lights dotted the walls every few meters, spaced far enough apart that the dogs would just disappear into one shadow before appearing in the glow of the next light.

  “Do you have schematics for this place or anything?” Scout asked as Emilie came down to stand beside her.

  “Not specifically, not yet, but the layout is fixed by the model of station.”

  “What model is this?” Scout asked.

  “They call it a squat torus.”

  “What does that mean?” Scout asked.

  “Amatheon Orbiter 1 was a cylinder, right? Rotated around its axis to simulate gravity?” Emilie said, and Scout nodded. “A torus is like a wheel, but a thick one, and it rotates around its own axis too. Because all of the stations were originally segments of the Tajaki 47 hull, that axis is fixed. So this is a torus because it’s a much smaller section. Fully staffed, there would only be about a thousand people here, crew and families. Large enough for functioning spin for gravity though.”

  “Definitely a plus,” Scout said, although truth be told, the bottoms of her feet were already aching, unused as they were to supporting all of her weight. But that would fade away soon enough, Scout was sure, like aching muscles after a hard bike ride.

  “Which way to the lights, then?” Scout asked.

  “This way. Follow the dogs,” Emilie said.

  The dogs heard their footsteps and came tearing back, tongues lolling, ears perked with nearly overwhelming excitement. This was a place filled with a plethora of new smells for them to explore, but they wanted to keep their humans near.

  Scout glanced back to be sure Geeta was following them. She looked exhausted, but her grappler was in her hands, and she looked ready for anything despite the dark circles under her eyes.

  Emilie and the dogs had already started down the hallway. The hallway ended in a large open
space, and as they stepped out into the space, Scout saw other corridors running parallel to theirs all ending in the same room. They must run out to separate landing platforms, Scout guessed. Perhaps once they had the lights on she could go back out to the ship and see those landing platforms for herself. A thousand people on a station—how many docking stations would they need for travel and supplies? Scout had not a clue.

  Emilie paused in the middle of the space and looked around. “They’ve pulled out a lot of interior features,” she said, watching the dogs as they sniffed around the bare metallic floor.

  “Like what?”

  “Processing stations,” Geeta said. “Depending on the threat level, bags and belongings would be inspected on one end, cargo at the other. There should be detectors and partitions and ways to mark off the queues. But that’s all gone.”

  “I guess they took anything that could be reused back to the other stations when they pulled out from here,” Emilie said. “To be honest, I thought they’d leave everything in place. This was all supposed to be temporary, right? These stations would be repopulated when our numbers grew.”

  “That would take decades,” Geeta said. “And with the food shortages, the population expansion programs were put on hold.”

  “But that was supposed to be temporary too,” Emilie said. “I’ve found nothing that says otherwise.”

  Geeta sighed. “I’m sure everyone hoped it would be temporary, but they planned for the worst-case scenario.”

  “Does that make it less likely we’ll find squatters here?” Scout asked.

  “Maybe,” Emilie said.

  “It means we’re unlikely to find supplies left behind. Food and the like,” Geeta said.

  “We have food enough back at the ship,” Scout said.

  “And no running water,” Geeta said.

  They all fell silent at that. Scout suspected she hadn’t been the only one looking forward to a hot shower rather than a wipe-down with moist towelettes.

  And the dogs, after days in effective diapers, desperately needed baths.

  “Lights,” Emilie said, looking around once more before choosing a direction: the large opening directly across from all the other hallways leading back to the landing platform. She followed it a short way, then stopped at a door flush with the wall and painted to blend in. Scout wasn’t sure how Emilie had even noticed it. She had to pull hard to jerk it open. There was a flicker, then the same low-level red light turned on inside, dully illuminating a steep stairway down.

  “I don’t think the dogs can handle that,” Scout said, frowning at the open grillwork of the metal stairs. “It’s so steep it’s practically a ladder.”

  “No need,” Emilie said, adjusting her tool bag’s strap over her shoulder. “This will just take me a minute.”

  She clattered down the stairs. Scout looked back to where the dogs were still following scent trails in the receiving area. Geeta alternated between looking backward and forward down the hallway, finger gently tapping the guard over the grappler’s trigger.

  Then, in a blinding flash, all the lights came on at once. Dimly, from somewhere far deeper within the station, came the sound of music, something slow and melancholy.

  “Piece of cake,” Emilie said as she emerged at the top of the stairs. “Next step, command deck?”

  “Yes,” Geeta agreed and led the way further down the hall. Scout gave a whistle, and the dogs bounded to catch up.

  The hallway ended in a large open space that reminded Scout of market plazas in the dome cities back on Amatheon, albeit either very early or very late in the day when no one had set up their stalls yet.

  She felt a stab of homesickness, which surprised her. She had never liked being inside the cities, not since the day the asteroid had fallen from space and killed her whole family and destroyed her hometown while she was off on a delivery with Shadow. She had avoided cities after that as much as she could, preferring the open prairie.

  But the sight of all the white modular building material, the same versatile stuff everything was built with back home, was jarring. There hadn’t been a bit of it back on Amatheon Orbiter 1. But here it was everywhere, gleaming brightly in the indirect lighting that seemed to flood in from the corners where wall met ceiling.

  “Nice,” Emilie said. “Why don’t we have this back home?”

  “We have it on the surface,” Scout said.

  “I see repeating pieces,” Emilie said, trying to look in every direction at once.

  “It’s modular,” Scout said. “There are a certain number of designs but they all interlock. You can build anything with them. All kinds of shapes. Back home, different neighborhoods had very different design aesthetics, even though the building blocks were the same.”

  “I’d love to see that,” Emilie said.

  “For now, the command deck,” Geeta said.

  “Yes, it’s this way,” Emilie said and resumed walking.

  They were walking down what was effectively a wide road of bare metal like the station hull with a row of white buildings to either side built of the modular components. The buildings were all empty without a table, chair, counter or broken bottle to testify to having ever been occupied.

  But it had been. The white plastic was worn in places where many hands had touched it or feet had passed over it. It was marred with grease or scratches near the doorways, the corners not as sharp as when they had been new. Even without the elements of a planetary system wearing away at it, human activity was enough to take its toll.

  “Up here,” Emilie said, turning down an alley between two of the white buildings and up an open flight of stairs that led them out of the market area. A bulkhead divided the market area from the rest of the station, but if there was any sort of door to seal it off, Scout saw no sign of it.

  Emilie led them down another interior hallway and up another narrower flight of stairs.

  The door at the top of the stairs was locked. Geeta stepped forward and took a little device from her belt to place on the door. After a moment it beeped, and something inside the door clicked. Emilie put a hand on it, and it moved aside easily at her touch.

  Scout had expected the command deck to be bigger, but only half a dozen workstations lined the walls. That was all that was needed to manage a station housing a thousand people?

  Emilie started at the first of the three workstations on the left and Geeta moved to the right. Scout hovered uncertainly in the middle of the room, not sure what she could contribute.

  “It’s actually not all that cold in here,” she observed, and Emilie and Geeta both looked up at her. She felt her face flush. “You said the heaters would be off?”

  “That is odd,” Emilie said, exchanging a glance with Geeta.

  “No one is here now,” Geeta said after tapping through a few screens on the workstation. “I’ll run a quick scan, but the last station scan was an hour ago, so I’m sure the only thing it will turn up is us.”

  “I have the logs here,” Emilie said. “People have been squatting here, but all small groups for short periods of time. And no one has been here for days.”

  “Days?” Scout repeated. She would feel safer if that were a more significant unit of time.

  “Yep, just us,” Geeta said, turning away from her workstation. “What are we thinking?”

  Emilie looked at a few more things on her workstation, then stepped away to join Scout and Geeta in the middle of the room.

  “Original plan,” Emilie said. “Stay near the ship.”

  “How will we know if someone is approaching? We need to keep watching the moon too, right?” Scout said.

  “I’ll stay here,” Emilie said. “I can monitor both those things and communicate with the ship from here.”

  “I’ll stay in the ship,” Geeta said. She didn’t say why, but she didn’t have to. She wanted to stay near her sister.

  “What about me?” Scout asked.

  “Run your dogs around,” Emilie said. “Let them get
all the exercise they need. They deserve it, and we don’t know what’s going to happen next.”

  “Stick close to the ship though,” Geeta said. “Restrict your roaming to between Emilie’s position and mine.”

  “Got it,” Scout said.

  Emilie nodded and settled herself into her workstation, moving screens around to suit her fancy and settling in for a long watch.

  Scout hoped they wouldn’t have to wait much longer, but as far as waiting went, this was a much nicer way to do it.

  If only she could bathe the dogs.

  6

  Scout strolled down the road that was the center of the marketplace for over the hundredth time, hands buried deep in her pockets and eyes on the toes of her canvas high-tops. The dogs had found an interesting smell in one of the buildings. She could hear the sound of them sniffing hard, Gert occasionally whining in her frustration at never finding an actual critter no matter what scent trail she followed.

  They had probably found the remains of another squatter camp. About half of the storefronts near the hallway to the hangar showed signs of being camped in. Mostly it was just empty jolo bottles and the scorch marks left behind by ill-advised attempts at building an indoor campfire. Sometimes there were empty trays left behind from long-ago-eaten MREs. Those the dogs ripped to shreds, desperate for any remaining flavor clinging to the biodegradable trays.

  Once Scout had found a can of pineapple, completely intact. It had rolled away from the signs of the camp to disappear around a low wall. She had taken that to first Emilie and then Geeta, letting them each have a third of the sweet yellowy goodness.

  Liam had left them more food than they would need for months of waiting for his friends to arrive, but nothing sweet. Emilie and Geeta had been as pleased as Scout at her find.

  Scout had never tried pineapple before. It tasted like sunshine itself.

  The dogs snuffled louder, then got into an altercation over who got to be closer to whatever they were smelling. Scout stepped through the doorway to the building they had disappeared into, not daring to hope there might be another can of pineapple or some other treasure waiting for her.