Up and Coming: Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

by Anthology

  It had been her mother’s idea of Margo “traveling alone.” Most of the swarm even had the U.N. Sky logo painted on them, just in case anyone was not aware they were handling a diplomat’s daughter. Every corridor she went down, every room she entered, her mother’s re-appropriated machines followed, causing nearly everybody to give her and the chair an artificially wide berth.

  It was exactly like she was nine years old again, the only kid in her UN-run classroom flanked by droids that were programmed to answer her questions, and pick up things she let fall, and keep her schedule, and re-purify her water, and silently alert the teacher if she, Margo, wet herself.

  And so, fifteen-year-old Margo had regressed a bit, sending the servitors to run baths or make sandwiches or compile obscure information she didn’t want. Luring them into closets and cupboards and password-protecting the doors. She’d even managed to send a servitor sailing into a wall of its own accord, which she hadn’t done in years.

  And hiding. Lots of hiding. The nice thing about servitors is that if you tell them you want to spend all remaining 10 hours of the journey harassing allosauruses in the Jurassic United States, or deliberately trying to freeze to death in early 20th century Antarctica, they don’t ask you if you’d rather be doing something more constructive with your time.

  It was probably being all strapped in to the VR system that saved her life. She didn’t feel the crash. She didn’t hear or see the crash. Her only thought as everything around her went blinding white, was that something interesting was finally happening in her game.

  And when she opened her eyes next, what she saw was the factory-made steel ceiling of the dirtiest, dankest little room she’d ever been in.

  ***

  She wouldn’t stop talking about the chair, even after Rumer told her they hadn’t picked anything like that up. “Are you sure? Are you sure? It has a call function, it’ll come right to me.” Like she thought they’d find it tucked away in the corner of the cargo bay if they just looked hard enough.

  When, after about a half hour, the girl was convinced they were not hiding the damn thing from her, she seemed to think they were going back for it. Even Kell’s outright laugh did not cure her of that delusion. “How long was I out?” she asked. “It didn’t feel like that long. It couldn’t possibly be that big a jump from here to there.”

  “You were out for more than a day,” said Rumer. “And we don’t jump, much as that might surprise you.”

  “What do you mean?” Such confusion in that voice, and a little bit of rancor, too. Rumer supposed that’s how it was with first-colony girls. Kell saved him from having to answer.

  “This ship don’t jump, coochie, she’s just an old dustpan ramjet. She’s got no drive.”

  “What do you use a ship without a drive for?” the girl asked, genuinely curious.

  “Oh, you’re shittin’ me,” muttered Kell.

  “Nothing has drive out here, young lady. Nobody can afford it,” said Rumer Pilgrim, and then off her open stare, “around here, we just stay close to home, and make sure that our most valued possessions don’t end up somewhere where we can’t get to ‘em in a hurry.”

  The girl squirmed on the bunk, looked around for Diallo. Not finding him, she looked to the floor, gauging the distance. “I have spina bifida,” she said, tightly. “That means I’m missing spine.”

  “Missing spine,” repeated Rumer. Kell caught his eye.

  “So, you can probably guess I don’t really get around too well without that chair,” Then, after a pause, “There are people in my life who would kind of freak out if they knew I was without it.”

  Kell laughed again, baldly. Jesus, the little bitch was actually making threats, or at least toying with the idea. She wasn’t practiced enough at it to know to be specific.

  “I am sorry about that,” said Rumer. “You’ll all just have to work that out, won’t you, amongst yourselves. Listen, now. What did you say your name was?”

  She hadn’t. “Margo,” she said, now.

  “Just Margo?”

  The girl’s lips pinched together. She looked warily at Kell. “For now,” she said.

  Rumer couldn’t help smiling a little. “Okay. Margo. Listen now, Margo. Even were I to feel such an inclination, and I don’t, to track a free-floating ship through space would take days we don’t have and don’t want. Now, we’ve got our own rather time-sensitive business to see to, which you have interrupted…” Rumer put up a finger to stop her speaking, “So you’ll want to keep your head down and let us finish with that, and then we’ll see about dropping you at a port when we can get to one. And as I said before, you’re welcome.”

  The brittle green eyes blinked.

  “Now, where is it you’d like to be just now? Floor? I’m afraid it’s the floor or the infirmary bunk, until we can find you a free hammock.”

  She nodded. He picked her up and sat her on the floor. She sat there with her legs oddly tucked under her, and watched the men (his sweaty, scarred and hardened crew) file out and go back to work. All except Kell, who stood there alternately scratching ass and eye. “How far out are we?” she asked suddenly.

  “Far out?”

  “Of major colonized space. Of UN space.”

  Kell barked. “Coochie, you are right smack in the middle of UN space. There’s Peacekeeping Officers all over this vacuum…” Rumer passed him a look, and he shut his mouth.

  Margo’s brow furrowed uncertainly, and she looked at the deeply rusted gray of the ship around her, at Kell’s cloudy piece of scrap glass, as though prepared to contradict. “You can just drop me at a station, then,” she said, finally.

  “Can I, now?”

  “The officers will know who I am,” she said.

  Rumer watched Kell watch her drag herself from the room, legs out, across the factory steel floor. With effort, she turned herself around in the doorway. “Do I have a room?” she asked.

  “Anywhere where there’s no one to kick you out.”

  Margo nodded, the flick of a smile reappearing. “Anyone going to literally kick me?”

  “If they do, you lay yourself out flat. Mess is in an hour if you want it.”

  The girl drew herself up, recoiling a little. “I can wait. I’ll wait until a station.” And she dragged herself away.

  “Fuckin’ hell,” Kell said, “fuckin’ shit.”

  ***

  Margo did manage to find a long, rusted metal cupboard in a large utility closet that none of the crew was yet sleeping in. With two of the synthetic wool blankets and three very fibrous pillows, it was almost a bedroom. There was even a steel door that slid noisily open and closed, and made a locking sound when you hit the right button.

  Not that the door did her much good. The men (the ones who weren’t afraid of her) still went in and out like the closet was wide open. For the first couple of days, they bothered with pretext, coming in to fish around amongst the jumbles of cord, and replacement switches, and lengths of as-yet un-rusted wire. But that didn’t last long.

  There came a period of relative privacy after Captain Pilgrim Pilgrim picked a man to guard the door, and told the worst offenders to stop being quite so pervy, or expect double-shifts. That didn’t last long either.

  Now almost every one of them, including the man supposedly assigned to the door, came in at least twice a day to have a good, grinning gape at whatever she was doing. When that got boring, they’d try to get her to talk.

  “You ever get freaky in that chair you miss so much? Is it good for that?”

  “There’s buttons on it I’ve never pushed.”

  “So it could be good for that.”

  “We’ll never know.”

  “You feel anything down there?”

  “I feel enough.”

  “You ever been with a man who’s sewed back on his own arm?”

  “No.”

  “Would you like to?”

  “Not especially. Can you sew other things, or just your arm?”

 
Margo wasn’t bothered, she decided, since being bothered never seemed to do very much. Nobody else on this ship went behind a door to strip their rank clothes off, or smell their own belches, or scratch their ass-cracks. Why should she?

  At any rate, she’d learned pretty quickly to stop asking for things. The one time she’d asked about the number of servitors on board, they had laughed for what seemed like an hour. “People who use those servitors get to love them a little too much,” Pilgrim Pilgrim had said, “embrace your liberation.”

  “I’ve never loved them,” said Margo, “I grew up with swarms of them, it drove me fucking nuts. I used to send them smashing into walls just to see if I could do it.”

  “I believe you,” he said, in a way that told her that wasn’t the right thing to say to someone like him.

  And when she’d asked where the toilets were, he’d gone into another dark narrow, metal closet where he lifted up the false floor to reveal the dark, deep, seatless hole.

  “How do I use that?” she’d asked, a little pale.

  “How did you sit the toilet in that big, fancy cruiser before it broke?” he asked.

  “It had a seat-back, and armrests, and a fall-guard. And…I usually have droids.”

  “Same general principle,” he’d said in an absolutely unbearable voice, “squat, let loose, and get well out the way before you flush.”

  (She did end up doing it, a full hour and ten minutes later, squatted on all fours with her dress up over her head, one leg on either side of the hole. She felt marvelously defiant, even as she emerged to a round of sarcastic applause from the crew.)

  Margo had fully intended to keep to her closet-room as much as possible until they’d come to a UN Sky station. But whenever she asked Diallo, the grinning pilot, how close he thought the nearest one was, he would call her a little dictator and offer her some of his reconstituted soup (the sort of lumped up stuff that poor people ate before there were food labs). Also, Pilgrim Pilgrim and his one-eyed first mate seemed to be much more comfortable when she stayed put, and Margo didn’t see any reason to make them comfortable.

  So, she dragged herself all around that filthy, rusted-out ramjet, seeing what she could see.

  They were hiding something. Margo had figured out that much. They were carrying something—in the cargo bay, maybe elsewhere too—that they didn’t want found. There were a few too many halted conversations to ignore. A few too many badly suppressed glances in her direction.

  Not that they were afraid of her finding it, necessarily. Even if they’d known who she was, she doubted it would mean anything to most of them. Most stepped right around her and carried on with their work when she crawled by, looking down to grin at her only when she called out cheerfully to keep from being stepped on.

  But Kell and Captain Pilgrim had guessed something about her. The captain would straighten when he saw her, and ask her if there were any particular reason she needed to be there, wherever there happened to be. And Kell, whenever he came on her by accident, usually turned directly around and walked in the opposite direction.

  “You don’t let it bother you,” Diallo had tried to tell her. “You must excuse a degenerate like Kell. Raised on a prison colony, the American kind. No hope of learning good manners, no experience with women. His mother was not a very successful prostitute.”

  Margo smirked. “How can you be raised in a prison colony?”

  Diallo shrugged. “Perhaps his mother was also a less than successful terrorist. I can’t claim to know.”

  Margo studied his smile a moment. “But there are no prison colonies anymore.”

  “No?”

  “Not in UN space,” she said, sounding like a teacher even to herself. “The Security Council ruled a long time ago that abandoning prisoners on far-world correctional colonies constitutes inhumane punishment. The ruling was just upheld again the year I was born. It’s illegal.”

  Diallo smiled, or at least showed his teeth. “That is comforting to know. Thank you.”

  “It’s true.”

  “I’m sure you’re right.”

  “That’s the whole point of UN Sky. To make sure stuff like that doesn’t happen.”

  Diallo was silent for a moment, and then said, with irritating slowness. “As you say. It does seem to me that people will always discover a place to put away the things they do not want, so that they don’t come back again. But I’ve never been very clever with names.”

  Later, while she lay in her bunk trying to think of all the things criminals would not want UN Peacekeepers to find in their cargo bay (nukes, sonics, VX gas, high-power low-precision lasers?), Margo could not help thinking about Kell’s glass eye.

  People without eye donors had biomechanical eyes. They had microchipped acrylic ones. At the very least, Margo had always thought, they had those plastic boxy pieces that you had to keep a cap on at night to block out images while you slept.

  When you were Kell, on a faraway colony, and you knocked your eye out, what had to go wrong, what had to break down, before you fashioned your own out of whatever you could find, and carried on?

  “Someone’s taken an interest in us,” was the first thing Diallo said when Rumer came on to the bridge.

  “Peacekeepers, or the Kang family fun squad? Or both?”

  “It’s difficult to say. She’s not marked. And she is keeping her distance.”

  “Blueberries,” said Kell, “gotta be. You’ve heard that bitch talk. She knows somebody.”

  Rumer ignored him. “Can you signal-cloak us?”

  “I have done, of course,” said Diallo, “but I cannot do it long, and eventually she finds us. Very quietly persistent.”

  “Keep on it ‘til you shake her. She don't want us that bad, or she’d be on us already. We make our drop, even if we gotta pour it down there like manna.”

  Diallo nodded, and bent over his joysticks.

  “About that,” said Kell, rubbing his eye.

  “About that,” said Rumer.

  “What’re you thinking you’re gonna do with her? Our hitchhiker, I mean?”

  Rumer shrugged. “I don’t know as I have a whole lot of options. We take her with us far as we can, drop her at the first opportunity, and hope she has the good sense not to talk to anybody.”

  “You don’t mean you’re still gonna take her on the drop?” Kell looked entertainingly uncomfortable. “Jesus, Rumer, she’s not…she can’t even…plus, you heard her, she’s dyin’ to talk to the police. She thinks police are like…service dogs, or somethin’.”

  “Don’t shit yourself, soldier. We drop her at Black Oven before anything else happens. It’s backworld enough no one’s going to care why we’re there, and she can go about her business, and we about ours.”

  “Pretty outta our way, isn’t it, Black Oven?”

  “Everything’s out of our way. What do you suggest?”

  Kell shifted a little. “Hey, I’d just like to remind you, but we got about two tons a’ very perishable cargo down there, and there’s some very angry Koreans want it back. This was your idea, this thing. I wanted to do something small, something normal that’d make us a little fuckin’ money. You’re the one who wanted to go all Wyatt Earp Robin Hood…”

  “What do suggest, Kell?”

  “Well,” Kell hesitated. “Well, have you thought maybe we just…maybe we just get rid a’ her?”

  “How the hell you want to do that?”

  “I don’t know, man…”

  “Yeah, you do, asshole.”

  “Look, she woulda’ been dead anyway if we hadn’t picked her up, that’s all I’m tryin’ to say. Just, in the interest of the cargo. I’m not saying exactly we should, you know…”

  “What are you saying, exactly, you fuckin’ moron?”

  “I’m saying, you know, maybe, we put her in one of the shuttles, with some food, if you want, and we just…” Kell mimed the dustpan’s tiny shuttle drifting harmlessly away into space.

  Rumer smirked, despite him
self. “I thought you wanted to fuck her.”

  Kell recoiled like he was standing too close to a serial kiddie-diddler. “She’s in a chair, man, don’t even joke. That’s some sick shit.”

  Rumer rolled his eyes. “Turn the temp down in cargo and head for Black Oven,” he said to Diallo, “she’s clever enough to catch her own ride from there, I expect.”

  ***

  Margo wasn’t going to let them continue to have their muttering, panicked, poorly-buried talks around her as though she didn’t understand what they meant. From now on, she would be where they were. If they wanted to continue having conversations about their secret black hole machine, or whatever, they’d have to do it while she was in the room.

  That was Margo’s reasoning for finally joining them at dinner.

  They had boiled the turtles, neatly diced, in four tins of reconstituted cream of tomato soup. Chin-Hae, the ship’s cook, who was alternately sipping beer out of his prosthetic leg and adding it to the pot, looked up grinning when she appeared. Margo hadn’t known that anyone still ate turtles. But then, until this voyage, she hadn’t known there were spaceships that couldn’t leave immediate space, or people who replaced their vital members with removable plastic and bottle-glass.

  The mess turned out to be two long metal tables bolted to the floor. The men crowded around them on one-footed metal benches and passed stories and sloshing carafes of beer. Every one of them had scars they bragged about, and for the first time, Margo wondered whether this was because they really took any pride in them, or because they lacked the technology to remove and forget them.

  Pilgrim Pilgrim looked up at her. “Come to eat, or just watch?” he asked.

  “Eat.”

  “Waitin’ on the servitors?”

  “No,” though Margo realized as she said it, that she had been.

  The captain tossed her down a thick wooden bowl. “Queue up and get yourself some turtle surprise, before this mess of rapists and degenerates eats it all.”

  Margo paused, then dragged herself to the back of the line forming in front of Chin-Hae’s pot. When it was her turn, Chin-Hae winked at her, a little drunkenly, and filled her bowl to the brim, tilting in a little extra beer from the bottom of his leg.