A broad-shouldered spacer with a great, broad grin waved his thanks for the beer and tossed a twenty-cred disk his way. At the pub’s inflated prices that didn’t quite pay for the beer.
The spacer waved a hand indicating it was a tip while he told a story to the too perky blond across the table. A tip. He’d never gotten one at R4U and even in R2 it was exceptional. He dropped it into the till for Daver. Let him take the tip as a gift to get him off to a good start after his week-long break.
“C’mon, Turner. What happened then?” the blond chimed in.
Turner held his hands palm up indicating some imaginary person before him.
“There she was. First mate Devra Conrad. She’d spent twenty years working her way up from cargo handler. What did I know? I was a hot-shot pilot with officer’s school ten days behind me. The Loonie run was growing faster than they could train us, so they just gave me a ship. My first ever post and I was in command.”
He took a slug of wine and gargled it briefly for his audience’s amusement. He suddenly put on a very serious expression.
“Now I’m telling you. I know for damn sure that I was the best bloody pilot this side of Neil Armstrong.”
“Who’s that, Turner?”
He leaned forward and stared down the table. “Give me a break, Rolovsky. First dude on the moon. Ring any bells?”
“No, that was a Ukrainian. He…”
“Aww. Pipe down, Rol. I’m telling a story here.” He swung his gaze back and forth until he was sure of his audience.
Bryce stayed close enough to hear, which didn’t have to be too close with the expressive volume of the storyteller’s voice.
“Devra must have gotten sick of me by the end of that first run. She had the con on approach while I was doing my Captainly duties. We were way past the turn point before I realized that our nose was still pointing toward the moon. She was powering straight in until we were only three hundred meters off the Lunar dust. I nearly wet myself when she did a high-gee flip and set the old shuttle on her pads as sweet as could be, after a fourteen-gee burn. I’d have blacked out if I hadn’t been so scared. Fuel consumption was within a few hundred kilos of a standard approach. Never mess with Devra Conrad.”
There was a round of laughter, but Bryce could see he was leaning back holding onto the punch line. He wiped at the counter and waited. As the laughter died Turner leaned back in.
“Of course the high burn totally wrecked the landing pad. The first ever landing in my official record contains a major penalty for the damage as well as hazardous and unwarranted action…in my name. Never, ever mess with Devra Conrad.”
Everyone roared.
On his return to the bar, Bryce noticed a new arrival. Alone. Back in a dark corner, just inside the east entrance, half-hidden by a misplanted holly bush. Holly in the Desert Pub. Didn’t quite work.
He headed for the table when a hand shifted forward into the light and mimed drinking a beer. He pulled a draft of the porter, dark beer for a dark corner.
On his way to the table, a laugh rang out that ripped through his memory like a lightning bolt. Celia, his memories screamed. Emilia now, he reminded himself. He had wondered where she’d gotten to, she hadn’t come to R4U since he’d warned her off. He must be daydreaming to have missed when she had joined that party.
She leaned on the shoulder of the spacer with too many teeth, laughing as if he was the god of standup comedy. The red-tailed hawk flew up to the clear plas window and braked sharply with a great spread of wings. This time the predator latched onto his perch staring into the pub rather than out at the desert floor below.
Bryce restarted his feet, delivered the beer to the corner table, and gained his first clear view of its occupant. She was small in a day and age of progressive breeding and nutrition that had consistently added height and weight to the human race. Her straight, jet-black hair, hung down past her shoulders.
It was her eyes that stopped him.
The narrow slits, so dark that no hint of iris color peeked forth, regarded him steadily. She was everything that most of the women on board weren’t: petite, trim, and, he’d bet Daver’s twenty-cred piece, tough as nails.
She nodded her thanks and, after gazing at him longer than he was used to being noticed by a customer, her eyes drifted down and narrowed further as they aimed at the boisterous group.
“You are probably welcome to join them,” Bryce offered in his best bartender-host-R2 Desert Pub fashion. “They didn’t all come in together.”
“And why would I want to do that?” Her gaze had returned to study his face with no humor, no smile, no frown, just impassive regard. He was wrong, nails had just found their match in the toughness contest.
“Sorry. Didn’t mean to intrude. It’s just. You were watching. Them.” Smooth, Bryce. And where did you learn to build coherent sentences?
Emilia’s laugh ripped through him again leaving him breathless for a moment.
“Perhaps you should be the one who joins them?”
Somehow Emilia had worked her way into the spacer’s lap and was making a show of distorting his wide mouth into foolish expressions.
But the spacer wasn’t watching the squirming load of thinly clad flesh in his arms. Instead his gaze was watching their dark little corner.
Bryce turned for the lady’s reaction but the table was vacant. The foam atop her beer was unbroken. A five-cred piece rested beside it. He moved to check the corridor, but she was already out of sight.
He cleared the beer, wiped the immaculate table for form, and pocketed the five-creds.
# # #
“You’re a hard person to catch up with. I ask and no one sees you go by.”
Ri twisted and peered around the trunk of the cherry tree. The buds showing just a hint of the pink that would be bursting forth in the weeks to come. A few meters away, Captain Jackson Turner stood rooted to the ground. His feet planted firmly on the green grass, his fists rested on his hips with his elbows out. His torso tapered up toward the pale-blue sky. His smile was broad and inviting and she didn’t trust it anymore than she had before…no matter what warmth prickled across her chilled arms.
He moved about her like some sort of giant before levering his huge frame down to human-size by sprawling on the verdant green an arm’s-length away.
“Your Captain was right. You don’t talk much do you?”
“When there’s a need.” She didn’t like one bit that the Captain had said that, or that it was so true. That redhead squirming in his arms clearly had no problem with chatting away. It was the same one she’d seen on the balcony a few nights before. The woman had been at ease and in control then as well. Ri searched for those easy words, but they didn’t bubble forth in a way that hooked a man’s interest.
“That’s not why I came looking for you.” It wasn’t. It really wasn’t.
“What are you talking about?” He raised a single eyebrow in her direction.
No wonder she didn’t chat with men, her thought had been so clear, that she’d finished it aloud without noting that the first half had been inside her head.
“Where is Emilia, anyway?”
“Is that her name?”
Ri could feel her jaw drop.
His smile slid easily into a leer. “Hadn’t gotten around to finding that out yet.”
This was the man she was going to ask for help? The one she was going to help out? Why couldn’t he be more like his over-serious, battered brother? She’d been unable to find out anything from the databanks beyond the fact of their relationship. The data sorters at Hanoi Launch had clearly decided that the past of these two men was of no interest to Stellar One and her voyage to new worlds.
“Why can’t you…” she couldn’t ask the question.
“Be more like my brother?” His smile disappeared like a blossom on its final journey to th
e orchard floor.
She could only nod, disconcerted that her thoughts were so clear on her face.
“I saw that question coming the moment I spotted you.” He turned his gaze from her and faced out across the forest and lake biome. A small stream rushed cheerfully by their feet, slicing its narrow path across the orchard meadow.
More fruit trees were packed into the agricultural bays, but here the entire biological process had been captured. Robins hunted the bugs that hadn’t earlier fed the trout fingerlings. Rabbits cheerfully burrowed in the rolling hills, still trying to avoid, as they had for millennia, the marauding barn owls. The forest swept across one long side of the biome, oaks, beeches, maples all roaring skyward under the lesser gravity of the rings.
But his gaze was somewhere much farther away.
“Mother cancelled his dad’s contract when Olias was eight. About a year later, her new man had done his job and I was ready to come forth and wander the world. The flitter failed on the way to the birthing center. Mom was killed. She could have survived the crash or the birth, but not both. Olias never forgave my dad. Never forgave me. Wears his scars to this day refusing all cosmetic surgery, as a reminder to us of our mother.”
“But you called him ‘little brother’?”
His attention slowly returned from the far trees and he looked at her with those hazel eyes, sad with the past. Apparently he did have emotions deeper than leering smiles.
“Clearly you didn’t grow up with boys in the house.”
She shook her head. She grown up fearing and fighting boys for survival or a scrap of food, but her cadre had been all female.
“Another thing he never forgave me was growing taller than him by the time I was sixteen. My reaching command first would have hurt our relationship if we’d had one left to damage. That we both ended up in space was chance as far as I can tell. Perhaps both trying to give the other room to breathe. And now we’re sitting here on the same ship.” His gaze wandered away again and the tentative smile slid once more off his lips.
At rest he was a handsome man. There was normally no way to tell beyond his dazzling smile, but he was.
“I have a problem and was wondering if you might help me out.”
He turned his lost eyes upon her and for just a moment he looked like one of the lost ones her cadre had sometimes brought in off the streets. Young girls, starving, raped, wrapped in rags, separated from their own cadres, if their companions even still lived. Or the solos. The ones who appeared occasionally with no past and no power to speak of it. Jackson had lost mother, father, home, and brother. And now planet and career gone as well. Perhaps he did need what she had to offer.
“The ship’s security. I can’t keep up with it, and the few on the crew who might have time, have no skills, no training, no aptitude.” She’d practiced a dozen ways to dress it up, to cajole, to make her case, but the words had failed her as usual.
“You want me to work next to my brother, who can’t stand my existence, much less my presence? Thanks. Thanks a lot.” He rose to go but stopped when she rested her hand on his arm. His forearm muscles rippled beneath her fingers as he clenched his fist. He was spacer strong, workout strong.
“I’ve watched your crew.” It was like she’d kicked him in the balls. The life drained out of him, only the white of his knuckles gave away how deeply he felt.
“They need a task. They need a goal.” The words spilled forth. “I need a team. You can work from the Icarus. There’s no need for Olias to know. Perhaps better if he didn’t. No need for anyone to know. Reporting to me only. I need solutions, not people in the corridors. I need…” The words ran out.
“I need help.” Ri pulled back and hung her head exhausted by the effort. Problems were coming. She could feel it in the spring breezes that were teasing forth the new leaves. Feel it in the bite of cold that was coming off the stream which had been cooled to snowpack-fed temperatures. Trouble was ahead and there was no way she dared handle it alone. If she did, who knew where her death-curse might land.
“So do I.” Jackson’s voice was barely louder than the birdsong of a lone chickadee testing different branches of a huckleberry bush as a boundary for its territory.
# # #
Jackson had insisted that she make her full proposal to the whole crew at once rather than testing it out on him first. When they’d arrived aboard the Icarus to comm everybody, the entire crew was already there. It was hard to tell if the main lounge had been built for them or they were built for it.
Dan Wright sat at one end of the couch. Donnie was leaning back against him as they watched a vid on the wall screen. Her feet rested against Rolovsky who was browsing through an actual paperbound cookbook. Hank Christianson was in deep intense communion with a computer terminal, a complex three-dee model of some orbital mechanics puzzle twisting above as he studied it from various angles. Sicily Jacobs leaned over his shoulder offering comments that he grumbled about but incorporated even as he did so. Jill Emers and Jane Keller were playing a lazy game of chess that neither seemed to be winning.
A single armchair broke the tableau until Jackson collapsed into it and completed the scene. Icarus Crew at Home would be the title of this particular piece of performance art. The eight crewmembers fit together as neatly as her eight hunters ever had. An aching void opened in her heart, its name was Tancho Cadre.
She forced herself to turn and face them, these eight strangers’ faces all waiting patiently for whatever she had to say. She tried to shrug off the hollow feeling. She was just hungry. That was it. A skipped breakfast and a missed lunch chasing around after Captain Turner.
She glanced at Jackson, but he raised his eyebrows and waved a hand indicating she had the floor. Everyone turned their attention to her with no further signal, except Donnie who didn’t surface from her vid until Wright poked her sharply in the ribs. Ri was left to stand near a worktable covered with a large jumbled model nearly a meter across. An array of small tools and bits of plas were scattered over the surface. It took a moment to recognize that it was a nearly complete copy of “The Wanderer.” They had worked on a model of the Earth’s destroyer even as they were flying back to Stellar One. The hammer that had destroyed their world was now captured in miniature aboard the last ship of humankind.
She stayed on her feet, it was where she always did her best thinking. Ri pushed off from the wall she’d been leaning against and strode to the only place that she could see everyone easily at the same time. The Wanderer was thankfully behind her.
“I wish to make a proposal to you, the crew of the Icarus. Your Captain has let me speak to you without hearing it himself first.” However much she would have wished otherwise.
“The Captain, my Captain, our…” Most of them were grinning at her confusion. “Captain Conrad has placed me in the position of both Security Officer and Biologics Liaison. I am also her chief spy.”
It raised a few eyebrows where she’d been expecting a laugh.
“Okay. Not really. But Captain Conrad wants me to make an ongoing assessment of what is happening to our crew and what we need to do to fix the situations. I’m at a loss. When I initially accepted the added role of Biologics Liaison, my security tasks were very light. Of late, the latter has been escalating and frankly I can’t keep up. This is supposed to stay very low profile, per the Captain’s request.” She ran out of words and rather than continue, just shut her mouth. It had made sense when she’d first thought of approaching Jackson and his crew, but now it sounded so dumb she just wanted to leave.
Hank clapped his hands together with a loud smack. He learned forward in the settee. “Right to the point. I like that. No mincing words. Complete waste of time. Can’t stand the people who do. What’s the problem?”
“Mankind cannot survive being human.” It was not at all what she intended to say. She wished she’d chosen to sit.
“Yup. Li
fe will be the death of us all. But what can we do about that? Immortality seems to be out of our reach. At least to date.” Hank overflowed with bonhomie despite his dour look. His dark eyes studied Ri intently from beneath broad gray eyebrows and thinning hair.
“That is not what I meant.”
“Well, then,” the eyebrows pulled together, “get to the point.”
“Hank.” Sicily cut him off. “Give the girl a chance.” Ri could have kissed the elderly woman seated beside him.
Hank harrumphed and, leaning back, crossed his arms over his chest. Now his overeager face had shifted into a deep scowl. No one else paid him any attention so she did her best to copy their example. A deep breath did nothing to recall any of the neat phrases she’d rehearsed to use on Captain Turner.
“People are unhappy. Dangerously unhappy. The chief of fabrication won’t even speak to me. I hear rumors of fights all the time. The autodocs have patched more broken bones in the month since Captain Conrad declared the crisis over than during the entire construction phase combined with the six weeks of when we were struggling just to survive. There are suicides every day.
“Devra Conrad wants, needs answers about how we can stop these problems, or catch those responsible. These are answers I can’t give her.”
Rolovsky leaned forward and gestured broadly with his large hands. “You are saying…what? That we need to understand people’s minds and motivations and figure out how to fix that?”
“I guess so. No, I hadn’t thought of it that way. It’s more… Yet, if we could fix why people are doing things, then we’d be much better off. Wouldn’t we?” It had been such a simple request when she’d thought it up on her own. She shook her head.
“What I really meant to ask for was an elite security team. We need a shorter-term solution. Your other idea gets complicated far too fast.”
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