Fighting Gravity

by Leah Petersen

  I agreed with him. So far, from what I’d seen, the place was at least clean, warm, and dry. It had to be significantly unpleasant somehow, but you probably also ate three times a day. For people like those I’d known in Abenez, life was always significantly unpleasant. That plus three squares and a warm place to sleep at night would be like a dream come true.

  For a moment I almost wished I’d been one of those Resets who spent a few months in a camp working, detoxing maybe, learning skills to support myself, or getting the treatment I needed for whatever physical or mental health ailments had put me in the position I was in. Then Resettled somewhere, nothing special, but a life. Good honest labor and a clean start. It wasn’t a bad thing. For most.

  Resettlement would have been the best I’d ever known, a step up for me and not a wicked fall after years of the best the Empire had to offer. All of which paled in comparison to having known Pete...

  “So, assuming I get out of here, where do I go after this?”

  He shrugged. “Not for me to decide. And frankly, I don’t care. They’ll work that out and tell you when it suits them.” He paused for a minute, considering me. “You’re quiet enough. You may do all right. But I’m afraid the general population isn’t going to cope so well with the idea that someone can come here and leave again. Not your fault, I suppose. And I can see why they’d put you out here. Still. A termer and a celebrity at that. Not a good situation.”

  I groaned to myself. Even the blessing of quiet anonymity was denied me. Not just a criminal and a traitor in a hard labor camp as far from Earth as practical, a famous criminal and traitor. My gut twisted with apprehension. Maybe the infamy would be a good thing, something to trade on or a point of pride the others would respect. Somehow I doubted it.

  “I don’t want to cause trouble, sir. I’ll do what I’m told to do and get out of here.”

  He nodded once. “Then you’ll do good to keep in mind what I’ve said.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  His eyebrow quirked. “So you can speak respectfully to an authority figure. You might have tried that with the emperor.”

  My face was hot. “Thank you, sir. I’ll try to remember that next time.”

  He chuckled. “Keep that sense of humor, son. You’ll need it.” He looked past me. “Chen! Jones!”

  The guards entered the room.

  “Take him in,” the captain said.

  With a hand on each arm they took me into a common area, filled with inmates. They all turned to watch me go by. With everyone in the brown prison-issue jumpers, the effect was like a field full of prairie dogs popping their heads above ground. Grizzled or clean-shaven, mountainous or petite, male or female, they all looked very scary and I began to reconsider my wish for someone to talk to. One woman in particular, standing very near, watched me with a frown that did little to hide the flash of something like hatred or contempt in her eyes. She unnerved me.

  The guards brought me to a cell and pushed me inside. It was one of a dozen on the left side of the hallway we’d entered. Every wall was a transparent force-field—even the back wall, where it connected to another cell. Through it I could see another hallway, beyond which was another cell. From where I stood, I could see dozens of cells spread out in all directions.

  The guard released my wrists from the cuffs. Then he stepped back and activated the force field that closed off the doorway.

  “Consider tonight a holiday, courtesy of the emperor.” He recited the line as if it were a stock speech. His lips twisted into a nasty grin as he paused and realized what he’d just said, and to whom. “Tomorrow, you join them,” he nodded toward the crowd in the common room, “and you work.”

  I said nothing, but he didn’t wait for a response. The two guards soon disappeared from sight.

  With my fingertips I tested the force-field. It was a passive barrier; nothing more than a transparent wall. I sank down onto the cot, noting how familiar such accommodations were becoming. The visually open space and total lack of privacy was new, and eerie.

  I heard the sound of footsteps and stood, looking around.

  The woman I’d noted in the common room strolled down the hallway, watching me as she approached. She stopped in front of my door and examined me, as if I were an unsatisfactory specimen.

  Up close she was very pretty. She had unusual coloring, with hazelnut skin and dirty-blonde hair washed with copper. Even wearing the same shapeless prison-issue as everyone else, her curves were nice. Young too. She looked barely old enough to be in an adult incarceration facility.

  “I’m Jake,” I offered, to break the silence.

  “I know who you are,” she said.

  “That makes one of us. I don’t know who you are.”

  “I’m K52. My friends call me Kafe. You can call me K52.”

  “K52?”

  “Names are a privilege around here. We don’t exist, you see. They took your citID and your name when you were processed. In here, they identify us by the first letter of the name and last two numbers of the citID we used to have.”

  “K52,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “Well I’m not here to stay,” I said. “So, no offense, but I’ll stick with Jake.”

  “Will you?” she smirked. The laughter in her voice was nothing like amusement. “The guards won’t care what you’re planning to ‘stick with.’ And they,” she jerked her head back toward the common room, “will call you what I tell them to call you. I know it didn’t work that way for you in your pretty little life at the palace, but welcome to the asshole of the solar system, Your Highness.”

  She favored me with one last look of contempt, and then turned and walked away.

  -

  As I lay in bed that night, staring up at the dark ceiling, I heard the muted beep and pop of my door opening. I sat up. I could barely make out the figure in the darkness but I heard the door close again and the figure approached. I didn’t move, straining into the dark to watch for his first move.

  When it came it wasn’t anything I’d expected. I saw a knee come up and I raised my arms to block it but instead of coming near my sensitive areas, it landed on the bed beside me. Before I had time to puzzle it out, I was pushed onto my back and the intruder swung over on top of me. Lips, too soft and small to be a man’s, pressed against mine. They tasted slightly sterile, like manufactured water.

  Suddenly a forearm lay across my windpipe, pressing down with all the weight of the body above me. I tried to cry out but I couldn’t get enough air. I grabbed her upper arms but she pushed harder. Her other hand grabbed my balls and squeezed, hard. I sucked in what breath I could draw in a startled gasp.

  “Now here’s what we’re going to do.” I recognized Kafe’s voice in the harsh whisper. “You’re going to lie here, quiet and still, and I’m going to fuck the emperor’s piece of ass.”

  “No, I don’t think so,” I rasped.

  “You don’t seem to understand,” she said. “Either we do this now, just you and me, or we do it tomorrow, in a quiet corner where the guards don’t go, with two of my men holding you down. If you make me do that, I’ll let them have you when I’m finished.”

  “Why are you doing this?”

  I heard the rustle of cloth as she shrugged. “Because I don’t like you. Because every pretty boy becomes someone’s bitch eventually. My reasons don’t matter. All you need to worry about is that I have you by the balls.” I could hear the smile in her voice as she squeezed harder.

  I bit my lips together against the pain. “What did I ever do to you?” I asked. But I didn’t fight when her hands went to my waistband.

  My head throbbed, filling with white noise and too much not-thinking and the stab of betrayal as my body responded to her.

  I turned my head and stared down a long line of dark forms, of inmates sleeping alone one by one in their cells. She moved against me and I closed my eyes.

  When it was over she put her mouth to my ear and bit the lobe, hard. “Was I as goo
d as your emperor?”

  My throat was tight. “Fuck off.”

  She chuckled and bit my ear again, this time drawing blood. She stood and put her pants back on and walked out. When she had reactivated the door she said, “Don’t forget this, deserter. You’re no one again. A nameless, powerless nobody. Get used to it.”

  I waited for the soft shuffle of her footsteps to recede. Then I buried my face in my pillow and tried to keep from vomiting.

  fg29

  I woke in the morning feeling scared and sick. It was the stress of all the changes, surely. I fought nausea and a crippling anger at myself as flashes of the previous night played through my brain and traveled my body in phantom caresses. Why should it have bothered me? Lucky me. I’d thought I was in for a dry spell.

  Then I did throw up. I sat back against the non-wall of my cell, fighting tears that I blamed on the retching and on everything that brought me here. Nothing else. There was nothing else.

  As my neighbors began to disgorge from the cells, I joined the line of people filing into the cafeteria. Everyone stared, but no one spoke to me. I took my tray from the dispenser and sat down alone. I ate with a nervous, twitchy feeling, constantly fighting the urge to look behind me.

  When a man slid into the seat beside me, I started.

  “Whoa, mate, you’re a jumpy one.”

  “Not usually,” I mumbled. The man was short and thick. He looked like solid muscle. He had a scruffy, few days growth of beard but was otherwise as almost-too-clean as everything else I’d seen here so far.

  “Don’t suppose you’re usually in places like this.”

  I smiled a little. “No, I guess I’m not.”

  “Well, welcome to Dead End. You’ll hate it here, but you’re just a termer, aren’t you? I didn’t think they ever sent termers out here.”

  “I seem to have a talent for being the exception to every rule,” I groused. I held out my hand. “I’m…I was going to say I’m Jake but I’ve been told I’m not anymore.”

  He grinned. “Had a run in with Kafe, did you?”

  “So it’s not just me?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. She’s nothin’ to mess with, and she makes sure everyone learns that lesson pretty fast. But she was waiting for you.”

  “Waiting for me?”

  “Sure. We heard you were comin’ a few days ago. She’s been stalkin’ around lookin’ scary ever since.”

  “Why?”

  He shrugged again. “I don’t know and I’m not askin’. My name’s Enten, by the way.”

  “Your real name?”

  “The only one I got anymore. N10. Enten.”

  “Ah. I’m J23, I guess.”

  He grinned around a mouthful of food. “’Fraid not, mate. She’s callin’ you ‘Highness.’ That sort of name sticks with a fella.”

  “Wonderful,” I grumbled.

  “There are worse things to be called, right?”

  “Sure. So, she says and everyone does? Who is she, anyway?”

  He shrugged. “Kafe. I don’t know any more than that. I do my best to stay away from her. She leads one of the gangs. There were only two, the whole five years I’ve been here, and then six months ago she strolls in and half the muscle in the place changes loyalties. From both sides too. It was an interesting few months. Things have settled down now. Not much real brawlin’ happens. Not worth it. Even the goons are scared of solitary.”

  “Solitary? That’s the punishment for fighting?”

  “For everything.”

  “You manage it,” I said with a shrug, but I couldn’t suppress a shiver.

  He shook his head. “Solitary work detail. One day is bad enough. Fightin’ gets you two, and it compounds with each incident.”

  “What’s so bad about it?”

  “You haven’t been out there yet, have you? At the end of the work detail today, come back and see if you don’t already know the answer to that.”

  A loud alert signaled the end of breakfast and I walked with Enten, joining the crowd to leave the residence facility. The couple-hundred or so inmates divided off into groups filing into smaller rooms where suits and equipment were stored. Enten took my elbow and stopped at a display panel.

  “Right. I thought you might be assigned to us,” he said, indicating my designation in a column with his. “Our team’s been short a man since Fen was spaced.”

  I didn’t ask why Fen was “spaced,” or even what “spaced” meant. I figured I had a good idea.

  Enten guided me through suiting up, along with the other ten members of his less-than-talkative team. “Here’s your air and your backup tank. Here’s the emergency sealer, for suit penetrations, though you’re probably only going to use it on someone else. If it happens to you, not likely you’ll be in a condition to do much about it. You’ve got isolators here and here, though what good this one would do you I don’t know. Hardly seems worth messin’ about with survivin’ if your balls get frozen off.”

  He grinned. “Your boots keep you on the surface, but this here will throw out a line that will connect you to the nearest person in a suit. Don’t panic and throw one ‘cause you think you’re flyin’ away as soon as you walk out of here. Lots of people do that, mind you, but we’ll laugh at you at dinner tonight if you do. Best if you don’t.”

  He pulled my wrist around to show it to me. “Here’s your com controls. You’re online with your team automatically. It’s weird out there, so we keep up a conversation. Don’t chatter and drive us all crazy, but if you got something to say, say it. You can talk to someone else by pressin’ here and sayin’ their designation. Everyone’s got it on their helmet. See?”

  He held mine up so I could see the “J23” already painted on the side.

  “Now, that’ll cut off your line to your team, so just use it when you need it. No long lovers’ chats.”

  “Lovers’ chats?” A cold sweat washed over me.

  “You ain’t been here long enough, but you might think of it before you get shipped off again. The rest of us have to make do. It’s not a bad selection, all things considerin’. And after a while, even the ugly ones start lookin’ nice when you just want someone to scratch the itch.”

  He chuckled and went back to donning his suit. I stood motionless for long enough that he turned back to me.

  “It’s not that hard, mate. There’s pictures there on the wall.” I didn’t tell him I hadn’t even thought of the suit in my hand, or noticed the diagrams. I was looking around for Kafe and her men.

  He resumed suiting up, and I started putting my gear on, as well.

  “It’s not as bad as it sounds,” he said. “In all the time I’ve been here, only four have died out there. And one of them could have gotten himself killed inside a padded box.”

  We waited, a suited-and-sealed group, as they cycled us through the airlock and onto the surface. I saw what Enten meant about solitary. It was overwhelming, the feeling of being out there with only millimeters of poly between me and the vacuum. I wanted to grab something, hold on to something. There was a definite appeal in the idea of throwing out a line and being connected to someone.

  We entered a sloping tunnel leading down into the asteroid’s crust, where we worked at glorified rock-moving without a break until the end of the workday was called. Then we shuffled as a tired group back into the facility.

  “There are more efficient ways to do that stuff,” I said to Enten as we unsuited.

  “Of course there are. You think we’re out here because they need anythin’ off this rock? The work’s to keep us busy,” he said. “Something to do till we die.” He shrugged. “There are worse things.”

  As I watched him put his gear away, I realized that I agreed.

  -

  A week passed in which Kafe did no more than watch me. But after what she’d done to me the first night, and the way one of her lumps of muscle seemed to always be at my elbow, her silence was little comfort.

  One evening, as I was walking
through the common room, she stepped into my path.

  “Have you figured it out yet?” she asked.

  I swallowed on nausea and the twist of anger in my gut. “What’s that?”

  “What you are?”

  “What I am? I’m a physicist, or hadn’t you heard?”

  She leaned close, her breath hot against my cheek. “Not anymore.”

  I was holding my breath, my fingernails digging into my palms.

  “Do you really not remember? You used to know what you were. Before that fancy man came and convinced you they’d let you be one of them. Have you whored yourself out for their approval so long you don’t even remember?”

  I sucked in a breath. “Fancy man? What do you…what do you mean? What do you know about that?”

  She made a sound of disgust and walked away.

  “What are you talking about!” I yelled after her.

  She stopped, and turned slowly. “Tell me,” she said, “did you even bother to find out where Carrie was buried?”

  I launched forward and grabbed her shirt, shoving her back against the wall.

  “How do you know about Carrie?”

  One of her well-muscled shadows grabbed my collar from behind and dragged me off her. I threw an elbow back into his gut and he umphed but didn’t let go. One of the guards, who never seemed to be nearby otherwise, shoved between us, and the next thing I knew, the goon was gone and my arm was twisted up my back.

  “Shoulda known you’d be trouble,” the guard said before he hauled me back to my cell and threw me inside, locking the door behind me.

  -

  I spent two days on solitary work detail.