by A P Heath
Rig's Story (A Jupiter's Halo Novella)
Rig's Story (A Jupiter's Halo Novella)
Midpoint
For anyone who has read Unbroken and also wants to give Rig a big hug.
Author’s Note
My original idea for the Jupiter’s Halo series of books was to write novellas that told the stories of individual characters going through certain events. The aim was to have links and overlaps in the books to bring them all together in the same universal setting. Somewhere along the line that idea became a full length novel, Jupiter’s Halo: Unbroken and I realised I had a series of novels on my hands rather than novellas. Some short stories did survive the process though and this is one of them.
This is the back story to a character in Jupiter’s Halo: Unbroken that I have found myself becoming quite fond of. Although this book is linked to the Jupiter’s Halo series, this is a stand-alone work and it does not require reading Unbroken to follow the story.
In fact, the following story takes place before the events of Unbroken and the other books of the Jupiter’s Halo series.
I feel it is important to add that although this is written in the third person, the events and details are seen from the point of view of the main character and I have tried to write them in language that reflects the way he would think if he were real.
This is the first novella attached to the Jupiter’s Halo series, but now I’ve written it I sincerely doubt it will be the last. I truly hope you enjoy reading it.
Notices and Copyright
This is a work of fiction. Any similarities to real people, places, businesses or events are entirely coincidental.
First edition 13 June 2017
This entire work is copyright.
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the author.
AP HEATH
Rig’s Story
A Jupiter’s Halo Novella.
For information on the Jupiter’s Halo universe and details on upcoming books, visit:
www.jupitershalo.co.uk
ONE
She was sleeping again when he got home. She was always sleeping nowadays it seemed.
Rig let the little scrap of curtain that acted as her door fall again and walked away as quietly as he could to avoid waking her. He didn’t know why the Smoke made her so tired, but whenever she had some she’d sleep for hours and hours afterwards.
Rig didn’t like the Smoke. He’d tried it once, when he came back to their little cove and found her sleeping with the pipe still in her hand. She must have just drifted off because there were still wisps drifting from the wide bowl at its end.
Rig had picked it up, sniffed the bowl and screwed up his face as the sickly sweet smell burned in his nose. He glanced at her, looking so peaceful where she lay on the makeshift bed they shared.
He put the pipe to his lips and sucked hesitantly. His cheeks filled with the hot taste of the Smoke and he coughed it out, his throat scorched where it slipped down with his intake of breath.
He dropped the pipe, doubling over and retching as he struggled to breathe. He couldn’t see why she would do this. The taste was awful. He tried to catch his breath, his thin chest heaving and more coughs escaping his suddenly dry lips.
She never coughed or choked like that. When he had seen her sucking her pipe it seemed like something nice. She must like it because he’d seen her do it more and more often, but he couldn’t understand why.
Rig tried to clear his throat, feeling like something sticky had lodged there. He pushed his tongue out, his lips curling and his head straining forward. As he tried to clear his mouth he raised himself back to standing. His head felt funny; dizzy and unsteady as he lifted it. His eyes were blurry and he lifted his hands to wipe them but found he couldn’t get his fingers to work. They felt thick, hard to control.
Rig swayed where he stood, blinking and sticking his tongue out as his mouth ran dry and his vision swam. He didn’t feel bad as such, just odd. The usual chill of their home was gone and he wondered dully about why his tongue felt so fat, why his lips were numb and why he couldn’t feel his legs any more. A foolish smile plastered itself across his features and he thought again about why she liked it so much. It must be this feeling she wanted, this carelessness.
Rig felt his knees buckle and his body folded as he collapsed gently to the floor. He knew the floor would be dirty, the bare rock and sand of the tunnel floor left exposed by the shaky lean-to he called his home. As his face met softly with the ground his eyes were filled with the orangey-red of the dust his movement kicked up and he felt himself blinking uncontrollably.
His eyes ran with tears and he could see their redness as they crossed his nose and dripped to the floor. Was he bleeding? Had the Smoke done something horrible to him? Rig felt his happiness turn to panic as his mind began to wonder at the damage the Smoke was doing inside him.
If he lost his eyes he wouldn’t be able to work, he wouldn’t be able to bring in the small amount of hard credits they needed to live and then what would happen to them? He needed to move, he needed to get up and find someone to help him. Maybe she would wake if he shook her.
His arms and legs were dead to him. He couldn’t feel them and trying to crane his head round to look for them only made the dizziness worse. What if his limbs were gone? There was no way she could look after them, it was up to him and now he had done something like this and he would just be a burden to her. He knew he already was, she told him as much often, but now he would be even worse. Now he would be so useless she would have to leave him to die.
Rig didn’t want to die. His life was hard, but he didn’t want it to end. He wanted to see the surface, wanted to taste the air there and see the clouds and the stars through the domes of the city-states. He wanted to go to the other cities, the ones that shone like crystals where the air was clean. He wanted to see the seas, they sounded impossible to him; so much water when everywhere else on Mars was so dry. He didn’t believe they were there, but he wanted to find out for sure. His eyes ran with fresh tears and his stomach heaved.
Rig convulsed on the floor, his stomach turning and pushing its little contents up his throat to spill out onto the cold floor. Rig tasted the bile, felt the heaving again and spluttered as more liquid filled his mouth. The colours around him darkened, he could hardly see at all and he felt like the world was closing in on him. He wanted to shout and throw his arms out to stop it, but they still wouldn’t move. His voice wouldn’t come.
He thought he could hear her calling to him, calling his name softly. There was sadness in her voice. She was reaching out to him, to her boy, like she never had done before. Rig cried harder as he strained to reach back, to let her know he was there with her. Her voice faded and he wondered if it had been there at all.
He’d lay there, crying and retching for hours. No one came to help him, no one at all. After a while his legs had started to hurt and he realised he could move them. His face was smeared with dirt, his mouth full of the acidic taste of his own vomit. When he stood he saw he had pissed where he lay and the stink of it on his torn shorts was strong and unpleasant. All the time she had slept soundly behind her plastic curtain. She hadn’t known of his panic, his pain or his worry. As he kicked the dust and dirt over the caked markings of his shame he decided he would not touch the Smoke again. When she woke he might try to tell her how bad it was. He hated the idea that she might feel the way he did.
He never had told her though. He’d been gone again by the time she woke, back out onto shift in the tunnels, collecting all the scraps
and dregs that fed the incinerators.
That had been the one and only time Rig had tried the Smoke that his mother seemed to love so much. He looked back at the plastic sheet again now, listening for the sound of her gentle breathing. She was quiet, totally quiet and Rig felt the beginning of a familiar worry grow in his stomach as he took a hesitant step toward where she lay in that oddly still way.
TWO
Working on the garbage runs was hard, long and dirty, but for Rig is was about all that was available. He knew he wasn’t bright; so many things confused him or just didn’t make sense, but the garbage run was a job he could do. There were all sorts of ways to make credits in the tunnels, but Rig knew almost all of them were beyond him.
The garbage runs required two things of him, both of which he felt confident he could manage. On every other shift he would follow in the tracks of the tall loaders that carted the refuse of the surface above to the incinerators below. His job was simple enough; follow the loader, pick up anything that fell from its hopper and toss it back in. Another part that his foreman had seen fit to tell Rig especially was not to wander too close to the loader’s wide tracks as he’d get pulled under and crushed. Rig had felt that he didn’t need to be told that, but on more than one occasion he’d found himself pulled dangerously off balance when standing close to throw a particularly large or heavy item back into the high hopper, so maybe he had needed the advice after all.
The second part was to walk the tunnels around Henstown and pick up anything discarded or tipped by the residents there. He did this every other shift and although it lacked the danger of walking so close to the loaders, it held its own concerns.
Both parts of his job involved walking. Lots and lots of walking. The loaders would pick up from the chutes that dropped from Sabaea-Henry above, bringing industrial waste as well as the city’s general rubbish, and trundle their way to the incinerators ten kilometres away. They moved slowly and it usually took five or six hours to reach the incinerators. Rig would have to walk all the way and then back again if he didn’t have credits spare to board one of the trams. He usually didn’t.
His strolling around Henstown was no less work, although he did at least get to stop and rest on the brief occasions that he was by himself. They were sent out in teams of three, each patrolling the tunnels, byways or thoroughfares that made up the small town and its surrounding spread of shanties and lean-tos.
Rig often watched the people as he ambled his way about the township. It was where he and his mother lived, on the outskirts in their own flimsily home inside the west tunnel leading away from Henstown. Even the poorest residents managed to scratch a living within the boundaries of the township, but Rig and his mother couldn’t afford even that. His routes on the garbage runs never went as far out as his home, but he still saw plenty of people living in conditions that he recognised as similar to his own.
Henstown was built in a large natural cave two kilometres beneath the surface and the city-dome of Sabaea-Henry. The roof of the cavern was shored up in places with steel and iron where industrial work on the surface above had caused it to break away in parts and crash down onto the buildings below. The construction of Henstown was roughly circular, spreading out from the Mayoral Hall, the only sturdy structure in the entire place, to the edges of the massive cavern. The buildings at its centre clustered around the central square on all sides.
Rig didn’t know why it was called a square, after all it was closer to a circle and the six roads that led away from it at irregular intervals made it uneven. As well as the Mayoral Hall, built from red stone mined further along the tunnels in the northern mines, were the local Miners’ Guild, the Henstown Bank, a building his mother had once referred to as ‘the whores home’, back when she used to come out of her bed and the Lucky Red Rock.
Of all five the Lucky Red Rock was the only one Rig had ever entered. When he first started on the Garbage runs a couple of the other older guys had taken him in at the end of his first shift. They’d made him buy their drinks; said it was tradition for the new guy and then forced cup after cup of a thick brown drink into him until he had fallen to the floor and been horribly sick. They’d laughed at him until a big man from behind the bar had shouted about the mess and the stink and then they’d left Rig there on his own. They still went into the Lucky Red Rock most shifts, but they’d never asked Rig to go with them again.
Outside of the square, as the roads got thinner and headed into the tunnels that led to other towns the incinerators and up to the surface, the buildings were packed closer together and made of ever increasingly cheap materials. People built their homes out of whatever they could find, scavenge or steal and the houses he passed as he ambled along were mismatched and run-down. Some had sheets of corrugated iron for walls or roofs, others just wide pieces of plastic, dirtied enough to offer some privacy but still clear enough to make out the shapes within. There were buildings with red rock and steel in their construction, but not many. Mostly they were just made of rubbish like his own home. The difference between theirs and his was just that they had more rubbish to use.
Henstown was dark and poor and dirty for the most part and its citizens were largely no different. Rig was often stopped by locals as he walked around with his cart, who wanted to rummage through his findings for anything they thought they could use or eat or sell. The first time it had happened Rig tried to stop them; two women who seemed nice enough until he said he didn’t think he was allowed to let them look through his cart. They’d gotten mean after that, shouting and spitting at him. One had tried to push him to the ground and had seemed surprised when Rig didn’t let go. He was young, only eight and a half Martian years. In body he was almost a man, but in mind his childhood would last his lifetime. His thin frame held wiry muscles and he was stubborn when he thought someone else’s actions might get him into trouble. He stood his ground as she shoved at him, grimly holding the handle of his cart.
The woman had shoved him harder, hit his hands where he held onto the cart and kicked at his legs. She was older and taller than him; an adult where he was still just a child and it hadn’t taken long for the force of her blows to make him submit.
When he let go of his cart’s handle she’d pushed him again, this time knocking him off balance to fall on his rump on the ground. She and her friend had rifled through the few pickings he’d gathered and come up empty handed and disgusted at him.
The woman who had knocked him down shouted curses at him as she threw items from his cart and stormed away, leaving him to clear up the mess he had already picked once. After that he didn’t try to stop people from looking in his cart. He barely ever found anything of use or value anyway, the locals were good at spotting anything like that long before he got to it.
Today had been much like any other day. Rig was walking the outer paths of Henstown on his own. He’d been on shift with Jay and Champ, older men who teased him and threw things at him when his back was turned, for four hours.
The other two had been chatting idly as they walked behind him, pointing out things he should pick up and directing him to drop them into their own carts every now and again. He didn’t like them much, they said things about his mother that he didn’t really understand but he knew he didn’t like. They were lazy too. The carts had to be filled and an empty cart would see its owner getting few or no credits once a shift was done, but Jay and Champ almost never actually picked up anything. They just followed Rig and took what he found.
Today, as they often did, they’d quit pretending to work and left him to spend their time and their credits in one of the small bars that littered the outskirts of Henstown. Jay had even asked Rig to give over his credits before they went, claiming he needed the special kind of relaxation such places offered, but didn’t want to waste his own credits on the ugly girls when he could spend it on enough liquor to make them beautiful.
Rig didn’t really understand that. He knew there were rich people up on the surface who could chan
ge how they looked but no one had ever said it was done with drinking and even if it was he couldn’t imagine why someone like Jay would do that for somebody else. He hadn’t had any credits to give and Jay had left him with muttered curses and a light slap across the back of Rig’s head.
Rig continued his circuit after they’d gone. He walked the outskirt road of Henstown with his little cart, retrieving whatever he found to fill it. He knew they’d be back before he was done, picking from his cart to fill theirs so they could get enough credits to do the same thing again the next time they were shifted together. He’d thought about trying to stop them, but both were bigger than him. Most days it seemed to Rig that everyone was bigger than him. Bigger, stronger and smarter. Champ had hit him once too. Not hard, a slap across the his cheek, but as he’d done it he warned Rig he could hit a lot harder if the boy ever gave him reason to.
Rig didn’t like being hit. He didn’t like violence at all and he saw a fair deal of it walking the roads of Henstown. There was always some scuffle over a woman, a man, liquor, credits or space. Sometimes a fight would even break out over the contents of his cart when the locals found something more than one of them felt they could find a use for.
