by Joe Vasicek
“My wife’s an excellent cook,” Jakob told the young pilot as he took a seat by his side. “The food might be a bit more flavorful than you’re used to, but I think you’ll like it.”
“Certainly,” said Tom.
Giuli’s eight year-old daughter came out with a tray full of small glasses of white, syrupy juice. Jakob downed his in one gulp, while Tom gagged and coughed on the strong drink. The others watched him with a mixture of amusement and concern. His eyes watering, he recovered and forced himself to swallow.
“Good stuff, eh?” said Jakob, grinning as he remembered the first time he’d tried it.
“Yeah,” said Tom. When he saw the others watching him, he took another sip. This time, it went down without any problem.
“How goes the dockyard work?” Opa Jirgis asked, sitting cross-legged with his back perfectly straight.
“Very good,” said Jakob. “We haven’t fully offloaded Tom’s ship yet, but we got it all into the bay. We’ll finish the job first thing next dayshift.”
“What is his cargo?”
He waited for Tom to answer, realizing only after a few awkward moments that the young man didn’t speak Deltan. He leaned in and motioned to Opa Jirgis with his hand.
“My father-in-law wants to know what your cargo is.”
“Parts and electronics from Alpha Oriana,” said Tom. Jakob translated.
“Ah, parts—that’s good to hear. The station recyclers have been giving us trouble, backing up into the hydroponics modules and causing all sorts of problems. Good to know we’ll have them fixed soon.”
Salome came out of the kitchen carrying a tray with hot platters of rice, beans, and synthmeal. Steam rose up from all three, curling upward before dissipating in the air. The smell, as always, was absolutely delicious. Jakob licked his lips as she set the tray down and placed the trays on the center of the table.
“We’ve got another tray of steamed vegetables coming out soon,” she said. “I hope you don’t mind waiting for a minute or two.”
“See how Salome tortures us,” said Jakob, winking sidelong at her. She gave him a mischievous grin and returned to the kitchen. In his high chair in the corner, Isaac gurgled.
“How long have you lived here at Delta Oriana?” Tom asked. Since Jakob was the only one he could make conversation with, his question more or less cut the discussion of recyclers and station system repairs short. Thank goodness.
“Let’s see,” said Jakob, screwing his eyes up in thought. “Isaac is a little less than a standard year and a quarter old, and we had him pretty soon after I settled down. So, give or take a month, I’d say about two years.”
Tom’s eyes widened. “Only two standard years? From the way you get along, it seems like you’ve lived here half your life!”
“Maybe,” Jakob said as he chuckled. “I have to admit, it feels like that sometimes.”
“How long did it take you to learn the language?”
“I’m still learning.”
“Really? I find that hard to believe.”
Salome came out with the vegetables and placed them on the table before taking her seat at Jakob’s side. Opa Jirgis rose to his feet, and the room grew silent except for little Isaac banging his spoon against his tray.
“Lord of Earth,” Jirgis prayed, his head bowed and his hands clasped in front of him, “we thank thee for this bounty which thou hast generously provided for us, and for the hands that have prepared it. We ask thee to bless it for our health, that it may nourish and strengthen us in the midst of the starry deep. Amen.”
Almost the moment he finished, there was a clamor as everyone brought out their spoons and bowls, eager to begin the meal. Out of politeness, they waited for Jirgis to serve the guest. After Tom took his bowl, though, it became a noisy free-for-all, made all the more chaotic for the fact that they were all family.
“Pass the salt!”
“I’ll take the vegetables when you’re finished.”
“Could you serve me some of that rice, Giuli?”
Jakob sat up straight and took a deep breath, an unexpected feeling of warmth coming over him. Two years—had it really been that long? For all that it seemed like he’d always lived this way, it felt as if only a few short months had passed since he’d married Salome and settled down on Megiddo Station. His years as a star wanderer now seemed little more than a dream, brought back to memory only by the presence of their starfaring guest. He glanced at his wife, now pregnant with their second son, and realized that the life he led now was almost unrecognizable from the single starfaring life he’d led before.
“What’s the matter?” Salome asked, putting a hand on his thigh. He took her hand and caressed it tenderly.
“Nothing, dear,” he said. “I was just thinking …”
“Thinking about what?”
Is this really the life that I wanted? When he had first asked himself that question, it had seemed so urgent and troubling. Now, it seemed like almost a lifetime had passed, and with it all the fear and uncertainty from before. So long as Salome was happy, and their young family was healthy and well cared for, he was happy as well—happier than his younger self ever could have imagined.
He answered his wife with a smile and a kiss. Giuli’s children pointed and giggled, but that only made him smile even more. Was this the life he wanted? Perhaps not when he’d first started out, but now, it was all he could have ever asked for.
* * * * *
The alarm cut through the warm, inviting comfort of sleep, making Jakob moan. He fought it at first, drifting back into the darkness, until he remembered the baby. He reached out and slapped at the unrelenting sound, but he was too late. As he hit the alarm and shut it off, the baby’s cries began to rend the air. Salome turned on the mattress beside him, while Leah rose quickly to hush her child.
“Sorry,” Jakob muttered as he stood up on groggy legs. He didn’t usually cause so much trouble when he got up for work—it must the long days of overtime starting to get to him. Not much he could do to help, though. If he lingered any longer, he’d be late for work, and his family needed the money. Stars knew they needed it.
The lights were out, as they were throughout the apartment, so he had to stumble a bit before he reached the closet doorway. Leah cooed and patted her baby in the darkness, but it did little to calm the infant or quiet it down. From the other side of the room, someone swore—probably Svenson, though he wouldn’t be getting up much later.
Jakob dressed quickly in the darkness, even with Salome’s sister awake in the corner. His fingers fumbled with the zipper on his pants, but he soon got them on and stepped into the hall. The kids slept in the family room, so he took care not to disturb them as he put on his work boots.
Breakfast was a tube of synthmeal and a piece of fruit. He stuffed them in his pocket as he stumbled out the door, still groggy from waking up. His wrist console said that he’d only had three and a half hours of sleep, but that hardly mattered. Only one more week of this, and he’d pay off the extra expenses they’d incurred with the housewarming party. He was already halfway there. It felt grueling, but things would be better when it was over. Just another week.
He squinted and covered his eyes as he stepped into the windowless corridor. Upshift or downshift, the lights in this part of the station never dimmed. In the time it took to walk over to the elevator, though, his eyes more or less adjusted to the harsh, yellow light.
One of the few advantages to getting up this early was all the free space he had to himself on the tram. Oriana Station was so large, they always kept a regular schedule, posted prominently on the platform and at all stops along the way. Jakob waved his wrist console over the meter and stepped aboard, glad to see only five other people in the car. One of them was so scruffy, he could have been a homeless drifter. There weren’t many of them on the station, since security tended to crack down on that sort of thing, but every once in a while you’d see them, mostly on the lower levels where the security patrols neve
r came. He slept with his cheek pressed against the window, snoring loudly.
At least I’m not the only one working these days, he thought to himself as he took a window seat up near the front. Svenson still had his tacky restaurant job, but more importantly, Jeremiah had found something to pull in a little cash. He and his wife still kept their finances separate from the rest of the family, of course, but it was comforting to know that the rent would be paid on time. It wasn’t enough to make much of a difference, but at least it gave Jakob some small peace of mind.
As the tram pulled out from the platform and began to accelerate, his wrist console buzzed with an incoming message. He frowned and brought it up on the screen.
FROM: ORIANA STN PA (OSPA)
TO: VARVAVLI, JAKOB
SUB: TERMINATION OF EMPLOYMENT
Dear sir,
In accordance with clause 8(d) of your employment contract, your services with us have been terminated effective immediately. Your position as YARD WORKER has become redundant or your services were no longer required by us anymore. Please return any keychips or ID badges to the OSPA main office in Quadrant I.
A horrible sinking feeling grew in the pit of Jakob’s stomach. The tram shot out into the tube, but all he could stare at was the screen on his wrist. As the tram reached cruising speed in the low-gravity region between the rim and the hub, he felt as if he would throw up. The edges of his vision clouded over, and a cold sweat broke out behind his ears.
If his life was a prison, then this message was his death sentence.
Chapter 9
“Salome? We need to talk.”
Salome gave him a sharp look and rolled her eyes. “Is this about leaving Delta Oriana again? Because if it is—”
“Yes,” said Jakob. “Yes, it is.” He put a hand on her arm, and when she didn’t shrug it off, he continued. “Look, I know this place is your home. I know you don’t want to leave. But the recent events have got me seriously worried. We’re so close to famine conditions already, if the biowaste plant collapses, we haven’t got a prayer.”
“I know, I know,” said Salome. She sighed and lifted a hand to her forehead. “But we still have time. Master Korha said there’s enough food in storage to sustain us all for at least three months. Even if it takes longer to get relief, we can always run the food synthesizers.”
“That’s not true. Synthesized food is only a supplement, not a substitute. Too much for too long, and malnutrition is still going to be a problem.”
“Yeah, yeah. But that doesn’t mean that we have to leave now.”
Jakob looked her in the eye and paused. As always, she met his gaze square-on. Her face had changed a bit over the years, adding a few lines here and there with each of their three children. She’d put on a little weight, too, mostly on her hips. But there was still that touch of youthfulness that had initially drawn him to her, an echo of more carefree times. She was still the woman that he’d married all those years ago, the mother of his sons and daughter. Beautiful or not, he loved her all the more for that—and he’d be damned before he saw any harm come to her.
“Honey,” he said, putting an arm around her waist. She balled her hands into tiny fists, but offered no resistance.
“How can you just expect me to leave this all behind?” she said softly. “This is my home—the only home I’ve ever known. I’m not a starfarer, and never have been. Do you think it’s easy for me?”
“No, of course not. But you don’t have to be frightened. I know plenty of places we can go—Alpha Oriana, for example. They’ve got a bustling star port there, with plenty of room for us to settle down and start over.”
“I still don’t want to go if we don’t have to.”
He sighed. “Is it leaving Megiddo Station that bothers you, or leaving your family? Because if there’s another catastrophic system failure, we probably won’t be able to leave together. At least now, I’m reasonably sure I can arrange passage for all of us.”
She hesitated, biting her lip as she stared at the wall. Their cozy little bedroom had no windows, but a skylight mirror reflected the view of the stars from the courtyard. They drifted ever so slowly as the station turned, offering some freedom from the ever-present sense of confinement. It was all an illusion, though, and Jakob knew it would give no comfort if the famine that everyone feared became a reality.
“Listen,” he said, “it’s only until the situation here gets better. Once the biowaste plant is cleared and all the hydroponics modules are running at full capacity again, we can always come back. It’s not like this is forever.”
“Maybe,” she whispered. Without warning, she put her arms around him and squeezed. “Even if I stay, you’re not going to leave me—are you?”
“Of course not. I would never leave you.”
He kissed her forehead, and she began to softly cry. So many hard decisions—why did it have to be this way? At least they still had each other. He stroked her back, and she held on as if she’d never let him go.
* * * * *
“We have no choice,” said Jakob, reverting to Gaian in his frustration. “We can’t stay here with these Alphans any longer.”
He clenched his fists and glanced around the tightly packed family room. All of his wife’s relatives had come to the meeting, their faces betraying a mixture of shock, denial, grief, and exhaustion. Even Jeremiah and Noemi were present, standing with Mariya against the wall in the back. Opa Jirgis frowned, his brow furrowed in thought, while Jakob’s mother-in-law sat on the edge of her seat, ready to pounce on the first weakness in his argument.
“Look, I don’t like leaving any more than the rest of you,” he added quickly, switching back to Deltan. “But the truth is, if we stay any longer, we’ll be out on the concourse as beggars in just a few months. I practically scoured the station looking for work, and came up with nothing. If we stay, these racist Alphan bastards are going to keep twisting the screws until we all starve—or worse.”
“Has anyone else found work?” Opa Jirgis asked. A deafening silence answered him.
“None of us,” said Jakob. “The Alphans are taking advantage of the political situation with the Imperial takeover to drive us all out. If anyone does offer us work, they’ll be slapped with so many fines and regulations that they’ll soon be out of business.”
“You say we need to leave,” said Oma Salome, narrowing her eyes. “But where do you suggest we go?”
Jakob clenched and unclenched his hands. He glanced at his wife, but her arms were folded and the expression on her face was cold.
“Back to the Outworlds, of course. We need to start again at another—”
“And where are we going to find affordable passage for all of us?” his mother-in-law asked. “When you first brought us out here, it was all we could do to cram us onto six tiny freighters, without even a bathroom—and that cost us half the family fortune.”
“Aren’t you the one who brought us out to this wretched place?” said Leah as she burped her baby. “Why should we listen to you?”
Jakob glanced at Jeremiah and Noemi, who watched silently from the wall. Do you really want to air all your old grievances in front of our guests? he wanted to say. Of course, it was too late to stop them if they did.
“Because—look, I don’t have all the answers. I just know we can’t stay here.” And if you think I’m the one who got us into this mess, just remember: we’d all be dead if we’d stayed at Megiddo Station.
“I don’t like it,” Opa Jirgis muttered, his elderly eyes screwed shut in deep and ponderous thought. “I don’t like it one bit.”
“Well, it’s clear enough that something has to change,” said Oma Salome. “I just hope we have the good sense to be builders and not destroyers.” She glared at Jakob, as if that were supposed to be some sort of biting reprimand.
“We can always go Coreward,” Svenson suggested. “Passage is much cheaper, and there’s room for all of us. Now that Alpha Oriana is part of the Empire—”
“No,” Jakob snapped. “The Coreward Stars—do you have any idea how those people live?”
“Much better than us, I’m sure,” his mother-in-law shot back.
He drew in a sharp breath, his arms growing tense. “At the Coreward Stars, everyone lives under massive planetary domes, sometimes millions of people at a time. With all of that humanity packed into one place, lots of people fall through the cracks. If you think it’s hard for us out here, just wait.”
“Yeah, but how much of that is true, and how much of it is rumor?” Svenson asked. “When I was still a starfarer, I made a few runs less than a dozen parsecs out of Gaia Nova, and the systems out there seemed fine.”
“Were there any Deltans out there?”
He screwed up his eyes in thought. “Not that I remember, no. Though I wasn’t really looking.”
“If we go Coreward, I guarantee you I wouldn’t be able to find work,” said Jakob. “I’m forty-two standard years old, and my only useful skills have to do with piloting. Almost all of the starships in the Coreward Stars are superliners and bulk freighters—massive corporate-run ships with captains who started out in their careers back in their twenties. And the dockyard workers are all union, just like here.”
“Oh, come on,” said Salome, rolling her eyes. “Surely you’d be able to find something.”
Blood rushed to Jakob’s cheeks. “You don’t believe me?”
“No, I don’t. How often have I told you to find something better than that dockyard job, or at least ask for a raise? How often did you listen to me?”
