Gravlander

by Erik Wecks

  Katy heard Jones’s irritated voice respond. “Give us a minute, Control. We’re almost there.”

  Neela sounded ever so slightly pleased to have riled the first officer. “Fair enough, Container One. It looks to be around a twenty-two-minute flight to Salvador, give or take a minute. The launch window opens in thirty-six seconds.”

  Katy looked around. Behind her, huge boxes of ready-mix protein and food synthetics filled the container. She was strapped into a narrow gap between the stacks and the hatch. The mission was supposed to be relatively simple, a food and supplies drop to some twenty thousand people, abandoned in a defunct re-education camp on a barely habitable rock.

  Todd noticed Katy looking at the food shipment. He spoke up on their local comm. “Poor bastards.”

  Katy clicked on the comm on her heads-up. “Why don’t they just leave?”

  “Where do you come from again?” Todd’s tone made it sound like his answer should be obvious. “They’re re-eds.”

  Katy blushed. “Sorry, I’ve been pretty isolated for a while. I know about re-education camps, but when the Unity abandons them, why don’t the people just leave, you know, find a way off the rock? We could pretty easily pile a whole mess of them in the spindle, or even in some of the pressurized boxes we carry.”

  “Where would they go to work without ident papers?”

  “They don’t have papers?”

  Todd raised an eyebrow. “No, they don’t have papers. Unity Corporation scrubs their identity when they enter the camp, and unlike both of us, these Omitted don’t have Soren or her contacts to slip one in the back door—which by the way costs her a shit-ton of money. We both owe her a lot.”

  Katy smiled. “I only owe her half as much as you do.”

  Todd rolled his eyes. “All right, don’t you start, too. It wasn’t my fault.”

  “What happened?”

  Todd shrugged. “One of the guys I knew in the bad days before Soren took me on showed up as our contact for a good run of computer parts. Next thing I know, he’s trying to blackmail me, and Soren, too. There was no way for me to know that was gonna happen, so it wasn’t exactly my fault. As I was saying, re-eds are supposed to get a new one when they’re done with retraining, but let’s be honest, a brand-new identity that has no history is a dead giveaway for re-education. Even if you get out, almost no manager will take you with that kind of record. These poor bastards didn’t even make it out of the camp before the Unity pulled out about two years ago. Now they’re stuck on a barren rock with no identity.”

  For a moment, both of them were quiet. Neela broke the silence. “Containers, this is Control. We’re ready for launch. Estimating that you should start feeling atmo in about thirteen minutes. Good luck, and we’ll see you at pickup.”

  Jones answered first. Todd followed. “Acknowledged, Control.”

  A sharp bang announced that the container had been released. The familiar push of acceleration followed.

  Todd resumed the conversation as if nothing had happened. “Anyway, these folks aren’t as bad off as some. The ‘stroid mining operations have been going gangbusters in this system ever since CEO Randal announced that alien invasion bullshit. The mining operations are always desperate for labor, so they take on a lot of the able-bodied people from the surface. They get them comparatively cheap because they’re off-books, and the people on the surface get a means to get by. It’s certainly not ideal, but they stay alive.”

  The introvert in Katy was getting tired of listening to him talk, especially since he kept going when the container hit atmo, at which point it did its very best to shake itself apart. Katy idly wondered if the rough ride would shake her soul loose from her body, allowing her to look down on the whole scene from above.

  It took a few more minutes for Katy to recognize that Todd’s apparent solution to his nerves was to keep her engaged in a long stream of inane banter. Todd finally fell silent when the shaking subsided.

  Katy closed her eyes, savoring the relative stillness of normal atmospheric flight.

  Nearby, Jones spoke up in the other container. “There’s no way to tell how much time we’ll have on the ground. Rumor is the people on the surface have been getting the short end of things since a new manager took over. They’re likely to be hungry and desperate, so keep your eyes open. At the first sign of any trouble, we’re bugging out. I don’t want to see the containers get rushed. Everyone understand?”

  Todd answered for their container. “We read you, boss. Just give the word.”

  “I have the beacon from our contact in the old camp. We’re getting the all clear. Get ready, folks. Touchdown in ten … nine …”

  Todd unstrapped from his seat and stepped to the container door.

  The container landed with a relatively tame bump. As soon as it did, Todd had the ramp coming down.

  Katy released her HeFAR, allowing it to pop. As she took her first breath of acrid metallic air on Salvador, she wondered if the tang came from the red dust that drifted in the air from their landing. A couple of old light poles brightened the night enough so that Katy could see a long queue of people watching them from about thirty meters or so away. They were held back by a group of larger men who formed a ring around the landing zone. Armed with rifles of some sort, none of them wore a regular uniform.

  Todd leaned in to whisper to her, and Katy instinctively leaned away just a little. Todd was nice enough, but he had a habit of getting in her space, which she found a little disconcerting.

  “Those are the local guys, kept here by the ‘stroid companies. They keep a brutal kind of order and find bodies to plug into the mining operations. They’re people we want on our side.”

  As soon as the doors opened, a giant man with an orange beard and wavy receding hair left the circle and trotted toward the containers. As he approached, he spoke. “I’m Lars Neilson, the governor of St. Justina. Let us know how many you want at a time, and we’ll get started.”

  Katy soon found herself buried in the repetitive motion of handing out boxes of synthetic protein to hungry people. The contrast between the company men and the people behind the fence stood out to Katy almost immediately. While the guards looked relatively healthy, the people shuffling by barely made eye contact. Their eyes seemed sunken into bony skulls covered in almost translucent skin.

  One young mother caught Katy’s attention. She carried her four-year-old son on her hip. Something about the son pricked Katy’s doctor’s instincts. It didn’t take long before she realized what was bothering her. The boy was having small but nearly constant seizures. The mother barely appeared to notice.

  Just as Katy held out a package of protein to the mother, a particularly violent seizure shook the boy, and she was forced to hold him with both hands.

  The mother waited there while the boy shook.

  Katy tried to sound kind. “Does this happen often?”

  The young mother teared up almost instantly. “Fairly often. He’s worse than many but better than some.”

  “Worse than who?”

  “The other children.”

  “They all have seizures?”

  “Those whose families can’t afford clean food.”

  “What’s wrong with the food?”

  The woman looked at her, the barest hint of surprise in her face. “It’s brackish.”

  “Brackish? Like too much salt?”

  The mother nodded.

  The tang in the air suddenly made sense to Katy. If the soil were bad, it would explain a lot. “But you aren’t sick?”

  The woman shrugged. “The adults get by. Our bodies adjust. It’s the kids who suffer the most. If they make it to age eight, they seem to get past the worst of it.”

  Katy nodded. Instinctively, she reached into the pocket of her jumpsuit. “Can I listen to his heart?”

  With a nervous glance at the huge guard now standing near the container door, she gave just a single quick nod.

  The guard’s look darkened, but he didn�
��t intervene, instead focusing his efforts on shuffling those who had been waiting for Katy to hand them food to merge with those who were being served by Todd.

  Katy placed the scanner on the boy’s chest. For the moment, the seizures seemed to have stopped. Katy flipped down her heads-up, letting the scanner show her the boy’s condition. It wasn’t good. Both his brain development and function had been severely retarded by the constant seizures.

  Discreetly, Katy pulled a nanite injector from her pocket and programmed in the necessary information. “Where’s the boy’s father?”

  The mother looked at her, eyes narrowing. She seemed to stand a little straighter. “He died last spring in a mining accident.” As she spoke, she stepped closer, shielding the injector from the people behind her.

  Katy caught the mother’s eye, hoping she conveyed sympathy, and said, “I see.” Her heart started to pound, and she wondered if she was doing the right thing. She couldn’t treat every child in the queue, but without help, she was doubtful that this child would live long enough to see her return. The young boy who died on the station flashed through her head. She wasn’t willing to have that on her conscience again.

  As discreetly as she could, she injected the boy with a cocktail of nanites designed to help him excrete more salt and reduce his seizures.

  When done, she quickly slipped the monitor from the boy’s chest and put it and the injector back in her pocket.

  The mother stepped back and, picking up her food, ducked quickly away.

  Katy looked up and realized that their interaction had gained far more attention than she would have liked. She caught a man with a young girl at his feet glancing repeatedly her way. He looked strong and comparatively well fed. At first Katy wondered why he was in line. She guessed he was one of the miners, perhaps home on leave.

  When the large man finally reached the front of the queue, he spoke up loudly, with only the slightest glance at the clearly angry guard. “Would you help my daughter?”

  Katy looked down. The girl was clearly suffering. She looked a little older than the boy, but she walked like a toddler, and Katy doubted she could speak. Her face felt suddenly hot. She kept her voice quiet. “I … uh … I don’t have any more. I’ll bring more with me next time. I didn’t know …”

  The black look on the man’s face told Katy all she needed to know. “She won’t be here next time.”

  He ripped the package out of Katy’s hands and spoke loudly enough so that all could hear. “So you’d rather help the son of a whore than decent honest people?”

  “Sorry?”

  A sudden spasm ran over his red face, and he growled as he lunged forward, grabbing Katy by the throat. Katy was thrown to the ground, the man on top of her. Both his child and his food went sprawling.

  She couldn’t breathe. She swung wildly with her hands at the arm on her throat. She was vaguely aware of people screaming and rushing past her into the container.

  “You think you’re better than me and my child?” The man clenched his fist. The blow came, and Katy could do nothing to stop it. As the world receded to a red tunnel, she was surprised she didn’t feel any pain.

  The last thing she heard was the sound of a fletch gun, but it sounded like it came from somewhere far away.

  Katy could still barely see out of her right eye. Apparently, the nanites hadn’t yet deemed the swelling there a high enough priority to take care of it, but it had only been three hours since she arrived back on the Clarion. It was to be expected. The nanites had more important things to manage, like the broken eye socket under the bruised tissue.

  Holding up a shiny metal bottle of whisky in her right hand, she examined her face. The effort sent her spinning.

  In general, the Clarion was a difficult place to be alone. After Soren’s abrupt entrance into the med bay the last time she cut herself, she had stopped depending upon her office for solitude, but Katy was beginning to learn that there were spaces where one could hide. This particular room was a rarely used cargo room about half a kilometer down the spindle near the midsection. It made little sense to gravitize the whole spindle, so this room, while private, had been left to free fall.

  As her long brown hair drifted behind her, Katy gently touched her swollen cheek. She winced.

  Having had enough of the mess she’d made of her face, Katy pulled down hard on the whisky bottle and partially moved the thumb she used to keep the brown liquid inside. Droplets spilled out, stretching into sinuous pearls. Katy twisted her body around them, bringing each one to her mouth. As she drank them one by one, she savored the warmth and forgetfulness in each.

  She spun there, allowing herself to drift deeper into her melancholy. She didn’t want to be Katrina Paige. She couldn’t be Katrina any longer. She was just plain old failure Jo.

  All she could see in her life was a shamble from disaster to disaster, punctuated by failure. After this latest, she was ready to be done. She cut to feel alive, to know that she didn’t want to die, but this felt altogether different. She wasn’t really sure that she could find the will to try again, but perhaps she could find the will for one more final effort—if she drank enough. She still wasn’t sure she could find the courage. Jo’s hand wandered to her pocket, looking for comfort in cold plastic and a dose of sedative from which she would not wake.

  She hadn’t bothered to change when she arrived back on the ship. The blood of someone—she guessed it to be her attacker—spattered her front. He had died when the guard shot him with a fletch round.

  Jo left her hand in her pocket, squeezing the injector as she pulled down on the bottle again, allowing her false courage to spill into the room.

  Behind her, the door to the compartment slid open. Jo twisted. Todd—the last person she wanted to see—drifted into the chamber. Jo scowled, her voice flat. “I don’t want you here. I don’t want to talk about it.”

  Todd returned her steely gaze and matched her tone. “Who said I’m here to talk?” He removed a squirt bottle from the Velcro on his belt and took a long drag on the amber liquid inside.

  Jo felt her throat tighten. She really didn’t want company right now. She wanted to be alone with her darkness, but she was too tired to argue. Her breath felt so tight she thought she might choke if she swallowed. Under her breath, she mumbled, “I don’t want your sympathy.”

  Todd pushed off from a nearby wall, sending himself to the far end of the compartment. “Fine. Whatever you want. I don’t sympathize with you getting the shit beat out of you by some distraught father.”

  Jo’s shoulders slumped and tears welled in her eyes, but she fought them. Refusing to give them a voice, she pulled again on her bottle.

  The door on her broken sanctuary of darkness opened again, and of all people, the captain wandered in. She didn’t say anything to Jo. In fact, she didn’t say anything at all. She merely pulled out a bright green metallic flask and sucked on the liquid within.

  Jo looked between the two of them and, gathering her quickly fading coherence, spoke in her most diplomatic voice. “Look, I appreciate what you’re trying to do for me, but I really do want to be left alone right now.”

  Soren looked at her blankly. “Well, then you can be alone with us.” She took another pull on her flask.

  “Listen, I really don’t want to—”

  Jo was interrupted by the door. Six more of the crew, including her two roommates, floated into a room that had once felt spacious but was now feeling uncomfortably full.

  Soren sounded irritated. “Shut up, Paige. I’m not really in the mood to talk right now. I just want to drink.”

  Jo sighed and nodded. She felt torn in two. People—all people, even the crew, especially the crew—were dangerous. Down payments on future pain and disappointment. On the other hand, some small seed of her soul harbored a rebellious gratefulness for their attention.

  After several minutes of quiet consumption, she decided that what bothered her most was that people made her feel things, and right n
ow she didn’t really want to feel anything, not sadness or gratefulness, so she decided the best thing she could do was drink.

  In the last few weeks, Jo had been force-fed so many feelings that she had no more space on her shelves to put them. Overfull and with no way to process them, she felt fragile. The whole tottering tower of them could collapse at any time with only the slightest provocation, spilling them all over her and others.

  Pulling the bottle in an arc in front of her face, she forced another long series of bubbles to spill into the silence.

  Sometime later, Jo couldn’t say quite how long, she found herself gently drifting in a corner. “The thing is,” she began, “I was just trying to help. I just wanted to help the seizures because I kept thinking of the boy who died on Mt. Fuji station. I only ever want to help, but it doesn’t matter. Everything I do is fucked up.” It was only after she had started that she remembered that the room was full of people and that she had said that she didn’t want to talk. She looked up way too quickly, creating an unintended slow spin that her eyes didn’t seem able to follow. She closed them again and groped for the wall.

  When her mind seemed to have caught up to her now still body, she opened her eyes and blushed. Most everyone in the room faced her, and the room seemed even more full than she remembered.

  Soren, who was floating above her and to her right, said gently, “Tell us about the boy on the station.”

  Unbidden and unwanted, an image of the grayish, sweating boy flashed through her mind, and then his mother’s desperation as she held him.

  Jo choked up, and her vision became hot and blurry. “I couldn’t save him. He probably had a severe traumatic pneumothorax and internal bleeding. His BP was really low. I mean, I gave him nanites and got him on the first flight down to the surface, but he …” Jo swallowed. “… he was already a goner by the time I got to him.”

  Soren reached down toward her, but Jo floated a few inches beyond her grasp. “You can’t save them all, Katy.”

  Jo felt her shoulders start to heave. She squeezed her eyes shut. Her breath became ragged, irregular. “I … I … I know, but I have to.”