by M. J. Locke
Geoff groaned. “Another fight.”
Kam rolled his eyes. “Why don’t they break up and have done with it?”
Geoff said, “I don’t want to listen to them bickering. Why don’t you offer to partner with Ian this time, and I’ll go with Amaya?”
“Why do I have to go with Ian and you get to go with Amaya?”
“I took Ian last time.”
“Did not!”
“Did too!”
Kam held up his fist—rock-paper-scissors. Geoff sighed. “Oh, all right.” He chose scissors and Kam chose paper.
Kam dropped his fist. “Bastard.” Geoff just grinned.
After a few minutes, Geoff began to doubt that he had the better end of the deal. Amaya remained furious all the way up in the lift. When they reached the asteroid’s surface, she catapulted out of the lift so fast Geoff couldn’t keep up. He found her at their bikes in the hangar. She had changed out of the Downsider outfit, but she still had the makeup on, and he got glimpses of her tattoo, as it ran out onto her hands and up onto her neck.
“You want to talk?” he asked.
She threw her diagnostic tools into her kit. “I was the one who came up with the plan for getting the juice. I was the one who figured out how to get it primed. I’m a better mechanic than Ian is. And I can kick your ass in a race.” She glared at him. Geoff opened his mouth to argue. But maybe now wasn’t the time. “And all he gives a flying fuck about,” she said, “is how I look in a beaded bra.”
Geoff refrained from telling her that she really had looked pretty amazing, and merely nodded.
“It’s all about how big your tits are, whether you had your ass done, whether you put out,” she said. “That’s all anybody cares about. I could be Einstein, for fuck’s sake.” She glared at Geoff, daring him to argue. “I’m not saying I’m Einstein. It’s just that nobody would care if I was! The only thing that matters is how tight a slab of ass I am.”
“Oh, come on. Nobody thinks that.” A storm gathered in her gaze. He lifted his hands. “That’s not what I meant. What I mean is, we couldn’t have pulled the op without you. You had great ideas. You are the best mechanic we’ve got.”
She gave him an appreciative look, mollified. Then she tossed her tools into her kit and mounted her bike, waiting for him to finish his own checks.
As he tightened his fuel lines one last time, he added, “But … not to chafe you or anything … but wasn’t that the whole point? You were supposed to get that kind of reaction. It was your idea.”
He swung up onto his rocketbike and started the engine.
She leaned her chin on her forearms, braced against the handlebars. “I thought it’d just be a good joke. But it got me to thinking. I get way more attention dressing like a sex sapient than I do for anything I actually do that means anything. It just pisses me off. And then Ian…” she sighed. “He just doesn’t get it. I told him what I’m telling you now, and he says he wants me to dress like that all the time. Butt floss, pushup bra, and all. Like all I am is girl-meat.” She sighed again. “I wish he cared about more than how big my boobs are and whether he’ll ever get the booty prize.”
Geoff nodded with a rueful sigh. Ian’s brains did go out his ears sometimes. Especially when his chinpo was involved. Geoff gave it fifty-fifty odds that Amaya would get tired of waiting before he figured her out.
2
Geoff stepped out onto the commuter pad with his bike. One 25 Phocaea day lasted about ten hours, and the sun was below the horizon right now. (Not that anybody cared; Phocaeans used a twenty-four-hour day, like most stroiders.) But the lights blazing on the disassembler warehouses made it hard for his eyes to dark-adapt. He tweaked his light filter settings—if you wanted a good harvest, you needed your night vision—and fumbled his way toward Amaya and the others, who were pushing their bikes toward the launch ramps. Then his big brother, Carl, radioed him and waved. Geoff sent his buddies on, left his bike on the pad, and bounded over to Carl.
By the time he got there, he could see well enough to note that Carl wore a pony bottle and one of the cheap, bulky, standard-issue suits they provided at the disassembler and storage warehouses. Which meant he’d sneaked out to watch the delivery. Geoff was surprised. This was about the only misdemeanor Geoff had ever known him to commit.
“Hey. What are you doing off work?”
“Hey! You nearly missed it.” Carl gestured into the inky sky, at the vast ice mountain that loomed overhead.
“I was busy.”
Carl eyed him suspiciously, but Geoff knew his brother couldn’t see his expression very well through their visors, and didn’t elaborate. Carl hadn’t heard about the bug-turd skeletons yet. But he would, and would freak if he learned Geoff had been responsible.
“Hurry!” Carl said, and set off. Geoff bounded after him, to the rim of the crater—leaping high in the low gravity, for the sheer joy of it—over to where the last of 25 Phocaea’s remaining ice stores were.
It made Geoff’s neck hairs bristle, how much ice filled the sky. The ice was a deep blue green, with swirls of ruddy umber and streaks and lumps of dirt. Mostly methane. A rich take. Water ice was good—necessary, in fact, to replenish their air and water stores and provide raw hydrogen for the fusion plant—but methane ice was much more important. Kuiper objects always had plenty of water, and methane was needed for the bugs that made the air they breathed, the food they ate, the hydrogen feed for their power plant, and everything else.
The tugs’ rockets flamed at the ice mountain’s edges, slowing its approach, but it was still moving fast enough that he could not believe they would get it stopped in time to keep from knocking this asteroid right out of orbit. It didn’t take a lot of mass to shove 25 Phocaea around—it was only seventy-five kilometers across.
The mountain grew and grew, and grew—till the brothers scrambled back reflexively. But as always, by the time the pilots blew the nets off, the ice mountain was moving no faster than a snail crawl. The ice touched down right in the crater’s center. The cheers of his buddies and the other rocketbikers rang in Geoff’s headset as the inverted crags of the mountain’s belly touched the crater floor. The ground began to tremble and buck and the brothers flailed their arms, trying not to lose their balance.
Geoff whooped. “We’ll make a fortune! Best ice harvest ever!”
There was a rule: what came back down belonged to the cluster. What made it into orbit around the asteroid was yours—if you could catch it.
“I knew you were going to say that,” Carl said. “You always say that.”
“That’s because it’s always true. Anyway, I’ve got to go. Don’t want to spin wry and miss the first wave of ejecta.”
“I’ll never get why you’re so into ice slinging.”
“It beats trash slinging!”
“Hey,” Carl broadcast, as Geoff bounded back toward his waiting rocketbike, “this job is just to pay tuition. Someday I’ll be a ship captain. You need to take the long view.”
“Burn hot,” Geoff retorted. Burn hot—you might not be around tomorrow to enjoy whatever pleasure you’ve been putting off. Carl had always taken the long view and laid his plans carefully. Geoff had no patience for that. His bug-turd skeleton project was as long term as he was willing to go. He leapt onto his bike and raced to the far side of the crater.
Amaya, Kam, and Ian were already space-borne. He signaled to Amaya and she gave him her trajectory. Then he watched the spectacle of the ice mountain’s collapse into the crater, while waiting his turn at the base of the ramp.
Down it kept coming, all that ice, onto the remains of their prior shipment. It tumbled out over the crater bed in an avalanche, collapsing on itself, flinging ice shrapnel. Geoff, waiting in line with the other bikers, gripped his handlebars, raced his engine, impatient. Some of the ejecta were beginning to rain back down; more was propelled into orbit.
His turn—finally! He raced up the ramp, dodging flying ice shards, as the ice mountain finished settlin
g. He whooped again as he reached orbital velocity. The ramp arced upward and then fell away—he was space-borne. He fired his rockets and caught up with Amaya. They spread their nets and got started harvesting ice.
* * *
Carl headed back to his shift work once the mountain had finished settling. On the way back to the warehouses, he thought about Geoff. Something was definitely up. Carl could always tell when Geoff had done something that was going to get him into trouble with Dad. It looked like another storm was brewing. Geoff couldn’t seem to resist provoking their father. It didn’t help that Dad was always holding Carl up as an example Geoff should emulate: Carl, who made straight A’s, who had gotten a full scholarship to study celestine administration, who had been accepted to a top Downside university for graduate work next spring. Carl, studious and serious. Carl, the one all the teachers said would go far. Exactly the opposite of Geoff, who zigzagged through life in the same insane, impulsive way he rode his bike.
Geoff and Dad would never get along. They were too much alike.
You could smell the disassembly warehouses through a bulkhead. The tart, oily smell of the disassembler bugs mingled with the rotting trash to create a truly foul brew. They had told Carl he would get used to it, but after three months, he still hated the smell. It was also noisy, with the big vats churning, and fluid hissing and rumbling in the pipes under the floor.
His coworker, Ivan, sat on a bench along one wall, pulling on his boots. Carl sat down next to him. “I’m back.”
Ivan started and gave him a stare. Carl wondered if he was angry. “What are you doing here? I told you to take off.”
“The ice is already in. I’ve a lot of catching up to do. No big deal.” Then he noticed how pale Ivan was. His underarms and chest were stained with sweat. “Are you OK?”
Ivan shook his head. “You startled me, is all.” He had been out of sorts for the past few weeks. Carl had heard a rumor his partners and children had left him recently.
He had been looking at something in his wavespace. Ivan noted the direction of Carl’s gaze. “Ever seen my kids?”
Carl shook his head. Ivan pinged Carl’s waveface, and he touched the icon that appeared in front of his vision. An image of Ivan, his wife and husband, and three snarly-haired children unfolded before Carl’s gaze. The kids were playing microgee tag in a garden somewhere in Kukuyoshi while the adults watched. The image swooped down on the children’s faces, and then moved back to an overhead view. Their mouths were open in silent shrieks of laughter. Carl grinned despite himself.
“That’s Hersh and Alex,” Ivan told him, pointing. “They’re twins. Eight, now. And the little girl is Maia. She’s six.”
“Cute kids.”
He gestured; the image vanished. “I’d do anything for them.”
“Of course you would.” Carl eyed him, worried. Ivan stepped into his work boots and strapped on his safety glasses. “Let’s get this over with.”
“Um, get what over with, exactly?”
“Nothing. I just … miss them, you know?”
“Sure.” Carl eyed him, concerned.
Ivan glanced around. “Listen, will you do a favor for me? I left some of my tools back in the locker room. Could you go get them?”
“Mike will be pissed…”
“Nah, he won’t even notice.”
Ivan had a point. Mike rarely emerged from his office before lunchtime. “All right, sure.”
“It’s a small orange pouch with some fittings and clamps. It’s in my locker.”
Ivan leapt up to the crane operator cage mounted on the ceiling and climbed inside as Carl bounded back down the tube toward the offices. As luck would have it, though, Mike wasn’t in his office; he was at a tunnel junction just down the way. His gaze fell on Carl. “What are you doing wandering around the tunnels?”
“Ivan sent me for a tool kit.”
“I don’t pay you to run errands for the other workers. Kovak can get his own damn tools. Get back to work!”
Carl eyed him, fuming. He did have a way to strike back at Mike. The resource commissioner, Jane Navio, was a friend of his parents, and had pulled some strings to get Carl this job. She was Mike’s boss’s boss’s boss. All he had to do was drop a word in his mom’s ear, and before long, the hammer would come down on Mike.
But Mike’s petty tyrannies weren’t the commissioner’s problem. Someday soon, Carl thought, I’m going to be a ship’s captain, and you’ll still be slinging bug juice and smelling like garbage. “You’re the boss.”
“You got that right,” Mike said, and floated off.
Carl went back to the trash warehouse, slapped on bug neutralizer lotion, got his bug juice tester from the benches, and headed over toward the vats. Ivan was working over at Vat 3A. Carl shouted up at him, “Sorry! No tools! Mike’s on a tear!” but Ivan was doing something in the cab and did not see Carl, and the noise drowned him out. Oh, well. Later, then. Carl got to work.
Per safety rules, the tester never worked at the same vat that the crane operator did. The crane operator cages rode on rails that crisscrossed the open space below the geodesic ceiling. The cranes had long robotic arms that the operator used to lift the bunkers of trash and carry and tilt the debris into the funnels atop the disassembly vats.
There were two kinds of bugs. Assemblers built things: furniture, machine parts, food, walls, whatever. Disassemblers took matter down to its component atoms, and sorted it all into small, neat blocks or bubbles, to be collected, stored, and used the next time those compounds were needed.
Disassemblers were restricted in town. The specialty ones that only broke down matter of a particular kind—a specific metal, or a particular class of polymer, or whatever—those were the only ones they used down in Zekeston, and even then, only in small quantities. Trash bugs were much more useful—and much more dangerous. Not only did they break down all materials, but they were programmed to copy themselves out of whatever was handy when their numbers dropped too low. That’s what they used out at the warehouses.
Carl went over to the sample port on the side of the first vat, put on his goggles, and stuck the probe into the port. Then he heard a guttural scream overhead. Something small flew out of the crane cab and struck the floor not far from him. Something bloody.
He heard a loud crash. Debris scattered. It was Ivan’s dumpster—he had dropped it. Carl looked up. The crane’s grappling arm pointed at the third vat like a spear, and the crane plummeted straight down toward it. He caught a glimpse of Ivan’s pale, wide-eyed face as first the arm, then his cage, plunged into the vat. Disassembler fluid surged up and swallowed him and the crane. The vat walls buckled, and disassembler fluid spewed out.
Carl dove behind a stack of crates. Too late to help Ivan. The bugs were everywhere. Murky, grey-brown oil surged and splatted against the other vats, the trash, the walls, the floor. Gravity on 25 Phocaea was a bare one-thousandth of Earth’s; gobs of bug juice sloshed and wobbled about; the air filled with deadly mist.
The vats were coated on the inside with a special paint that the disassemblers were programmed not to touch, but on the outside they were vulnerable. One after another, the vats blew. As Carl made for the maintenance tunnel he was badly spattered. Burning, fizzing sores opened up on his arms and face. He changed course for the nearby safety showers and doused himself with neutralizer, and the burning stopped. But he felt a breeze, accompanied by a hiss that crescendoed to a shriek. The outer walls were being eaten away. The temperature dropped—sound died away—holes appeared in the warehouse wall.
He looked around. The bugs had destroyed the emergency life-support lockers. The bug neutralization shower was across the way from the tunnel doors, and frothing blobs and puddles of disassembler were everywhere. By some miracle, the emergency systems had not yet shut those doors—so air was rushing in even as it was escaping out the holes—but with every second it got harder to breathe.
Carl leapt and dodged for the doors, looking for a path to saf
ety. His ears popped. Sound was all but gone now. It made everything seem very far away. The floor was being eaten away, and bug juice poured into the steam and bug piping below. His lungs hurt and sparks danced before his eyes. With a desperate leap, he made it to within a meter of the door … as the emergency lights finally lit up and the door slammed shut. In that instant before it was sealed he saw his boss Mike, Mike’s boss’s boss Sean Moriarty, and others scrambling down the hall toward him. Then he bashed into the closed door.
He pounded on it, shrieking, “Help me!”—but could not hear his own words. Pain seared his lungs. He sank to the floor.
Half the ceiling came down around him. Stars blazed overhead. The air was gone. Outside the crumbling warehouse perimeter, next to the crater, the massive disassembler manifolds fell apart and a blast of superheated steam and bug juice shot out and spread across the near faces of the ice mounds. Wave after wave of membranous bubbles, color-coded balloons holding molecular nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen, tumbled upward into space as the bugs got to work on the ice.
Carl’s eyesight failed. He curled up in agony. In those last seconds, while others suited up to come out and get him—as the air effervesced in his veins and saliva boiled on his tongue—he used up his last breath on a soundless scream. Not of fear, but of rage, at being reduced to component atoms himself.
* * *
Geoff looked down from orbit and saw the geodesic collapse. He spotted a man go down amid the wreckage. An unsuited man. Then the lumpy horizon swallowed the scene. “Holy shit!”
Geoff checked his heads-up. Orbital time at this altitude was nearly forty minutes; far too long. The guy had ninety seconds, max. Geoff programmed a powered reversal that would get him to the landing pad in just over a minute.
It was a risk. If he miscalculated, he could make a new crater in the asteroid. But the time he bought might save the man’s life. The main rockets cut in and his bike shuddered. The stabilizers kept him from going into a tumble. And the ground sped beneath, dangerously close.
