by Gwynn White
“I dig that. How’d you get here?”
“Um, we walked.”
“Except I was carried,” Colden broke in, shrilly. Elfrida cringed. Colden might be incapacitated, but her attitude wasn’t. And now she had someone to get mad at, there’d be no stopping her. “I was mistaken for trash by a Garbage Hound. Which, I’m guessing, belongs to you. Are you also the person responsible for hacking it to hunt by infrared? That’s against the law, you know!”
The sandwich-maker pointed at Colden. “Sausage-inna-bun.” He pointed at Kristiansen. “Meat pie. Pretty good, weren’t they? You came back for seconds, I seem to recall. Fucking tourists. Where do you think the meat came from? You think we’ve got a herd of cattle hidden away somewhere on this moon?”
“I thought it was imported,” Kristiansen said.
“At those prices?”
“I thought it was just nutriblocks and flavoring,” Colden said faintly.
“Ha, ha, ha,” said the sandwich-maker. “What you don’t know can’t hurt you. But what you do know, might.”
Elfrida tensed. She shifted her weight, very slowly, hoping the movement didn’t catch the sandwich-maker’s eye. But he was focused on Colden and Kristiansen. Hadn’t spotted her peeking between the unused capsules.
“You, here, is a problem. What are we gonna do about it?” The sandwich-maker hiked an orange eyebrow. Both his hands were in the kangaroo pocket of his coat.
Kristiansen blurted, “We won’t say anything. Just show us the way out, and you’ll never hear from us again. We won’t cause any problems for you.”
“Sounds good. Sounds good. But there’s a hitch. I don’t believe you. Space Corps is a UN agency.”
Colden stared at Kristiansen in outrage. “FFS, Kristiansen! We can’t just let this go! The guy is breaking the law here!”
The sandwich-maker chuckled. “Someone’s got balls. Why’m I not surprised that it’s the girl? That’s how the UN rock-‘n’-rolls it. ”
“Yeah, you think you’re a hard-ass pioneer,” Colden sneered. “Got your little illegal slaughterhouse down here. I bet you get a kick out of disembowelling these poor, defenceless creatures and cutting them up. Selling them as sausages. But you’re at the bottom of the food chain, aren’t you? This is no one-man operation. If you give up your paymasters, I bet you could get off with a short sentence.” Colden grabbed Kristiansen’s hand. He helped her up onto her good leg. “Please, dude,” she gasped. “You can get out from under this. I know it hurts to be on the wrong side, to be c-c-carrying everyone else’s sins for them. I know. I’ve been there myself. But that hurt, that burden, you can put it down. Just put it down and walk away. We can make it right.”
A brief silence followed. Elfrida knew in that moment that Colden was going to be a very good Space Corps agent.
She also knew that Colden’s appeal to the sandwich-maker’s conscience wasn’t going to work. He just wasn’t that type of guy.
“Tell you what, hon,” he said. “Come back and tell me how much it huuuurrrts when you’ve tried to make a living in the Jovian system.”
The sandwich-maker drew his right hand out of his pocket. His glove swamped a laser pistol as small as it was plainly deadly.
“Out here, we do what we gotta do.”
Elfrida dropped onto her elbows. No more stealth, she was going for speed. She blinked the crosshairs up.
“If that includes fragging a couple of tourists,” said the sandwich-maker, “so fucking be it.”
Elfrida depressed the trigger button.
The plasma pulse caught the sandwich-maker as he was aiming his pistol at Colden’s head.
He dropped his pistol. Grabbed his leg, yelling in pain.
“Yeah!” Colden shouted. “Yeah, Goto!”
Elfrida threw down her now-useless rifle. She darted forward and grabbed the sandwich-maker’s pistol before he could reach it. Pivoting, she knocked over a barrel of blood. It spilled across the ice in a dark, gooey flood. She ran to support Colden.
Swinging between Elfrida and Kristiansen, Colden aimed a kick with her good leg at the sandwich-maker’s crotch. “That’s from a ball-busting Earthborn bitch,” she sang.
Elfrida and Kristiansen dragged Colden across the ice. Behind them, the sandwich-maker writhed in a pool of POCK blood, bawling that he would see them done for assault and battery.
“The capsule,” Kristiansen panted. “Not the one he came in! The other one.”
Too out-of-breath to ask why, Elfrida helped him boost Colden into the capsule that Kristiansen had explored earlier. It was full of crates and boxes, mostly open, mostly full of meat, some of it shrink-wrapped. The cheaper cuts and the byproducts were just jumbled in there, slimy and stinking.
Kristiansen must have delved into these crates, believing that Colden had been killed and dismembered, searching for her body. Elfrida’s stomach turned.
She had just shot a human being. She could have killed him. She hadn’t been trying to, but she hadn’t been trying not to, either. She stuffed the sandwich-maker’s pistol in her coat pocket.
The capsule’s doors slid closed. It started to move.
“Whoa!” Colden fell over.
“I didn’t do that,” Kristiansen said. “I hit door close, that’s all. It must be automatic.”
The capsule had no windows. It was, after all, a glorified elevator. Elfrida remembered the gimballed seats in the maglevator they’d come down in, which had swung to keep the passengers vertically oriented when the capsule stopped going down and began going sideways.
There were no seats in this one.
Before she finished having that thought, the capsule tipped up on end.
The crates of meat had originally been stacked against the rear wall, where they would have safely remained when that wall became the floor. But Kristiansen had taken the stack apart, scattered the crates, and opened them.
These crates, and their contents, avalanched down the car, pelting the trio with frozen POCK steaks and raw offal.
The maglevator rocketed upwards.
On the downwards journey, the 77’ers had felt themselves floating up against their straps. Now, the capsule’s acceleration pressed on them in an imitation of gravity, complicating their efforts to dig themselves out of the gruesome mess on the rear wall, which was now the floor.
They had time to do it. Plenty of time to feel sick, and in Colden’s case, to be sick.
After all, it was 70 kilometers to the surface.
The capsule slowed. They got lighter again. Elfrida continued to pick POCK innards out of her hair. (Her hat had come off during the meat avalanche, and was too disgusting to put on again.) Covered in gore and slime, she remembered that she had considered eating raw POCK meat, drinking POCK blood. The thought was now alien. Her mind had definitively reclassified this stuff as garbage.
“I think I’m going to turn vegetarian,” Colden muttered. She was sitting on a crate with her bad leg resting on another one.
“Your premises are flawed,” Kristiansen said. “Not to scare anyone, but there’s a chance that they just eject this stuff onto the surface, and someone comes to collect it later.”
“Nuh uh,” Colden shook her head. “This boat’s got no airlock. And Mr. C.M.O.T. Sandwiches wasn’t wearing an EVA suit.”
“He may have taken it off before he exited his capsule.”
“If that capsule had been full of vacuum, we’d have heard a boom.”
“Not from 70 kilometers away, and it would be a controlled process, anyway; no boom. Automatic, like everything else.”
Colden waved a dismissive hand. “This design is lifted from spacescrapers on Earth. Have you ever gone up to the top of the Grand Mosque of Astana? That thing is three hundred storeys tall. The upper floors are sealed like airplane cabins. If the maglevator wasn’t pressurized, you would get the bends somewhere around floor 150.”
“Jen, we know for a fact that Neith Spaceport is an EVA environment. What makes you think the top o
f this shaft is going to be any different?”
“Stop squabbling!” Elfrida begged, jamming her hands to her temples (and noticing that Kristiansen had called Colden by her first name, a breach of Space Corps protocol). “There has to be something we can do to improve our chances. Colden, I think Kristiansen’s probably right. There’s no reason to expect air up top. And if the doors open automatically, we’ll be screwed. So we should get into these crates. They’re big enough, and they look pretty airtight. What do you think, Kristiansen?”
“That’s a disgusting idea. Let’s do it.”
Elfrida packed the other two into crates, and then wondered how she was to seal herself in. She solved the problem by balancing a frozen haunch of POCK on top of her crate, letting its weight close the lid.
Once again, darkness cocooned her. The crate was basically a large refrigerator. Her knees bumped the inside of the lid, and her chin was jammed into her chest. She switched on her headlamp. On the bloodstained laminate, she read: STUCK? PRESS HERE TO ESCAPE. Thank God for UN health and safety regulations. All refrigerators were required to have emergency latches you could open from inside.
But that wouldn’t do her much good, if outside was a vacuum.
She pressed her gloves against the sides of the crate, trying to reconcile herself to the unknown.
The capsule stopped moving.
Moments passed.
When the capsule moved upwards again, Elfrida knew they’d just passed through the airlock at the top of the shaft. If Kristiansen was right, the atmosphere in the capsule was now equalizing with the surrounding environment. In other words, it was going away.
After a few seconds, they halted again.
And nothing happened.
Elfrida fought with the urge to PRESS HERE TO ESCAPE. She hoped the others were not succumbing to the same temptation.
She imagined that she felt short of breath.
Then she knew it.
Her eyes itched. She felt a dry cough coming on. When she opened her mouth to cough, a fizzy sensation danced over her tongue.
Her saliva was boiling.
Guess these crates aren’t so airtight, after all.
Suddenly her crate was picked up and hurled sideways. It was just as well she was so tightly wedged in, or she would have been rattling around like a shaken baby. Desperately short of breath, she was too weak to brace herself. Too woozy to panic.
The crate thumped down on a solid surface.
She imagined that she could breathe again.
Then she knew it.
The lid of her crate flipped open.
Drenched in industrial-white light, she blinked up at a blurry figure who shrieked, “Fuck! Here’s another!”
Hands dragged her out. She collapsed on her hands and knees.
“Open the rest of the crates, Nell,” bellowed a deeper voice. “Fuck knows how many stowaways we got.”
Kristiansen’s voice said weakly, “Only the three of us.”
Elfrida could not see properly. She had the worst case of dry eyes in history. She understood that they had travelled for several seconds through the vacuum. The crates had been somewhat airtight. That was why they weren’t dead. But she felt utterly rotten. When she tried to speak, only a cough came out.
“Cheese, Nell! Don’t just stand there! Give the poor girl some water!”
“Sorry, Brad,” said the voice of Nell. “I just thought … never mind.”
“I told you not to get a tail,” said a third person, a man with a sepulchrally deep voice. “It’s, like, against the laws of evolution. You look like a chimpanzee, and now you’re acting like a chimpanzee. Like, unintelligent.”
The next thing that happened was that water sluiced over Elfrida’s head. She stuck out her tongue to catch it, wiped her hands over her face, licked the palms of her gloves. Now she could see.
In front of her stood her one-night-stand from the Y-Zone.
“Did I tell you to pour the water over her fucking head, Nell? That was for swabbing the deck!”
Nell. Yes, thinking back, that had been her name.
Whippet-thin, a twenty-something spaceborn blonde.
Now sporting an unmarked EVA suit, open at the neck, and a very unbecoming expression of shock.
“It is you,” Nell said. “The Space Corps chick. Heh. Elvira. Elena. Elisabeta? Something Earthy …”
“Elfrida,” Elfrida said.
“Elfrida. That was it.”
They stood in a spaceship’s cargo hold. The crates from the capsule lay scattered throughout the hold, with their spilled contents. Colden was sitting on the gore-stained floor. Kristiansen leaned against a bulkhead, looking green. A beardy older man in an EVA suit shepherded a medibot through the mess. Elfrida couldn’t see the other man who had spoken.
Two women, also EVA-suited, stopped sorting through the POCK meat to stare at Nell and Elfrida.
“I kind of know her,” Nell explained to her shipmates. “Heh. I hooked up with her the night before my surgery. It was nothing.”
“That’s right. It was nothing,” Elfrida echoed.
“She was cute,” Nell said defensively. “I mean. You are cute. I’d totally do you again, after you take a shower. And maybe cut all your hair off, because I can’t see that crap ever coming out.”
“Did you get your tail?”
“Yeah. You can’t see it, it’s curled up inside my suit. I’m going to get a custom suit so I can use it on EVAs.”
The older man must have been Brad. He was bearded like a storybook wizard. He hoisted Colden onto the medibot’s stretcher. “Where the merry hell did you spring from?” he asked.
Kristiansen roused himself. “It’s very important that you take us to YM City as soon as possible. We’ve uncovered an egregious breach of UN health and safety regulations. And also tariff evasion, probably. And fraudulent merchandising.”
Flat on her back, Colden weakly clapped. “You can take your foot out of your mouth now,” she added.
Elfrida realized that Kristiansen had made his stuffy demand to prove himself to Colden. But Nell looked pissed-off. Understandably so. “We fucking rescued you,” she hissed. “Who’re you calling a fraudulous whatsit?”
Brad held out both hands and brought them together in a controlled gesture, as if reframing a scene. “That’s what they want, Nell,” he said with calm self-assurance. “They want outrage. Defensiveness. Self-incrimination. Don’t fall into their trap. When you react to their accusations, you’re accepting their right to frame the argument. Objectively, they have no such right.”
“Right, right,” Nell muttered.
Brad turned to Kristiansen.
“The laws and regulations you refer to are artifacts of UN hegemony, which we don’t choose to acknowledge. Did you kill Dibbs?”
“Who?”
“He means Mr. C.M.O.T. Sandwiches,” Colden said.
“Well? Did you?”
“We did not, and it’s quite telling that you would suspect us of murder. We do acknowledge the laws and regulations of the UN, which are based on a civilizationally mature understanding of the rights and duties of human beings.”
Elfrida wondered if she should interrupt. Kristiansen was being rather splendid. He was still plugged into his own version of reality, but he was making a good case for it. The trouble was, it seemed quite likely that he was going to get them all killed.
“We did shoot Mr.—Dibbs? in the leg,” Kristiansen admitted. “Someone should probably go check on him.”
“Aw fuck,” said one of the other women. “I actually like that orange-haired freak.” She snagged a helmet from the storage webbing on the wall of the hold.
“Take the medibot,” Brad said.
The chubby little bot had already cut the left leg of Colden’s trousers off and splinted her knee. It uncoupled itself from the stretcher and rolled after the woman into the airlock.
Brad watched the airlock close.
“Ye gods, what a mess,” he murmured
. “Nell, since you know these people, you can take care of them. Qiana, you’re in charge of cleaning up. I’ll be on the bridge.”
Nell sniffed. “I don’t know them,” she said to Brad’s back. “I slept with her once, that’s all … Oh, hell. Come on, you three. I’ll show you where you can clean up.”
They followed her up a ladder to the crew quarters. Elfrida had never been on a ship this small. It obviously would not have any spin gravity when underway. The furniture was all on the ceiling, to take advantage of the minimal gravity created by thrust. “The hold is in the nose,” Nell said. “Major pain in the ass when we have to to put down on rocks with significant gravity.”
“I wouldn’t call Ganymede a rock.” Kristiansen said. “It’s the largest moon in the solar system. It would be a planet if it orbited the sun, instead of Jupiter.”
“They’re all rocks.” Nell leapt, swung from a grab bar, and unlatched a storage hatch. Packets of wet wipes cascaded down on them. “Go to town.”
Carrying Colden’s stretcher, and armfuls of wipes, they squeezed into a cramped hygiene cubicle. There were no showers, of course. But there were mirrors.
“Holy crap,” Elfrida breathed. “I knew we probably looked bad, but …”
The meat avalanche had left all three of them looking like genocide survivors. Or perhaps, genocide perpetrators. No wonder Brad and his crew had greeted them with hostility. The wonder was that they hadn’t slung them straight back out of the airlock.
“Do the best you can, I guess,” Nell said. “If you can’t get it all off, there’s a decontamination device in the cargo hold lock, but the dousing fluid stings like a motherfucker. I’ll be back. You want some coffee? Soup? Anything?”
“Whatever you’ve got,” Colden said with a big bright smile.
Elfrida had already found a faucet high on one wall, a grudging concession to Earthlings’ ideas of cleanliness. She and Kristiansen were taking turns jumping up as high as they could and drinking from it. Stray drops of water fell, wobbling, like soap bubbles.
Colden darted her head to catch droplets in her mouth. “You have the worst taste in women, Goto,” she said.
“What?”
