In the Company of Others

by Julie E. Czerneda

  Had he been the one in charge, she told herself firmly. Which he wasn’t.

  Nor was Reinsez immune to the aftereffects of his own favorite sherry, something Tobo ensured was in plentiful supply in the ship’s galley, hence rare moments of peace such as this in which to contemplate what might happen next. After he slept it off, the university’s watchdog would doubtless skim through all the vid recordings he could find. Gail was reasonably sure her office and bedroom were clear of the devices—she’d had Grant’s people sweep both very quietly, five times now—but, as at home, she undressed with the lights off to be sure. There was something, she thought, about never knowing who might be watching.

  “Deployment Specialist Peitsch is very capable. Here.” Grant tossed her the viewer, a disk already set to play. His face turned inexplicably grim. “It’s—well, it’s not what I expected.”

  Tobo gave a short, humorless bark. “Who would?” he said, then waved impatiently at Gail, urging her to see for herself.

  She cued the viewer with one hand, raising her teacup with the other as she started watching the dizzying perspective provided by the ’bot as it spun away from the underbelly of the Seeker and headed out along the seemingly limitless arc of Thromberg’s white flanks. The image quality was as exceptional as the subject was dull.

  Gail took an idle sip then froze, the cup barely touching her lips, as the ’bot began passing over what was not in the least dull or ordinary.

  “Good gods,” she whispered involuntarily. “What—? They have a fleet out here?”

  “Once, maybe,” Grant corrected, his voice rough and low. “Watch. The ’bot’s going in closer. See?”

  She did, indeed. Plainly, the ships were derelicts, attached to the station’s hull by a bewildering variety of wires and conduits, grapples and beams. “What a mess ...” Gail muttered to herself, finding herself offended at the sight, as if some parasitic fungus grew on the station’s side. “What are they doing? Storing scrap?”

  “Surviving,” was Tobo’s low growl. Gail spared a moment to put down her cup and look at him. For the first time since they’d met on Titan, Tobo’s face was completely serious; if she didn’t know him better, she’d say he looked as though he’d love to strangle someone.

  Gail gazed back into the viewer. The ’bot had moved on, but the blight of dead ships continued—it must coat the entire aft ring of the station, she realized with sick wonder. No questions now why Forester was so anxious about external surveillance—or why the Seeker had to choose between such a limited selection of approved docking approaches. They kept this part of their artificial world well out of sight of visitors.

  The question was why?

  Then, Gail saw it. “What?” she exclaimed before she could stop herself, her fingers hurrying to pause the display and back it up a few heartbeats.

  She watched a second time as the ’bot slowed to follow a space-suited figure careening along one of the cables slung between the ships. Just as Gail was sure the figure was out of control, one of its arms swung outward, somehow latching onto another cable and so coming to an abrupt halt. The ’bot went up close, so close, it reflected itself in the blackened curve of a helmet.

  A helmet that belonged in some museum. Gail felt as though she’d stepped back in time. Who would use such antiques these days? And the rest of the suit was a mess, crisscrossed with tape and mends until the original silver blue was almost obscured.

  The figure moved in an odd fashion that nonetheless effectively propelled it away. Gail almost protested when the ’bot swung in another direction, forgetting this wasn’t live feed. Then she subsided, seeing that the space suit wasn’t alone out here. Once she knew what to look for, the barnacle crust of ships swarmed with life, sliding down cables, moving in and out of air locks, working in small groups.

  “Survival,” she echoed Tobo’s judgment, and shuddered. “They’re—living?—outside the station?” The visual turned black and shut down. It must have been when the station discovered the ’bot. Which meant that Forester and the rest knew perfectly well what was out there.

  “I’d heard talk from freighter captains,” Tobo said. “I hadn’t believed it—you hear all sorts of junk—”

  “This is real,” Grant objected.

  Tobo took the viewer and ejected the disk, turning it over in his hand thoughtfully. “Yes.”

  Gail was pleased her hands didn’t shake as she picked up her teacup and refilled it. “What did these captains say?”

  “That Thromberg was damaged when so many immigrants tried to run for Earth at once—to go home,” Tobo said in a slow, careful voice, as if listening to his own words. “The stationers were just as afraid of the Quill, but they had nowhere to run, no ships of their own. When the immigrants were—turned back—at Sol, those that survived tried to return here. But the stationers believed their ships had been contaminated by Quill.”

  “That’s ridiculous—” Gail began.

  “By what we know now. Then, it was believed Earth fired on the ships and drove them back to prevent the spread of the Quill.”

  Grant’s voice slid into the following pause: “A station can’t defend itself. The rings were designed to expedite the movement of large numbers of ships. All they could do was refuse to help—they must have sealed up the docking rings, locked the ports and air locks. The station left them outside to die,” He spoke as though making a tactical observation, until the last, when the words dropped a startling, menacing octave.

  “Life finds a way,” Gail observed, watching the disk harbored in Tobo’s hands. “Life survives however it can, wherever it can. Like these people—by staying on their ships all these years.”

  Tobo pocketed the disk and leaned forward, his elbows on his knees. “According to what I was told, that’s not quite true. The Outsiders, as they’re called, are supposed to have secret ways on and off the station. The stationers look the other way, too busy dealing with the immigrants who didn’t leave.”

  Gail and Grant traded glances—his was decidedly gloomy. “Why don’t I like where this is going?” he asked neither of them in particular.

  “Because,” Gail answered, “it may mean we’ve been looking in the wrong place for Aaron Pardell.”

  Chapter 5

  LIKE her young owner, the Merry Mate II was skin over bones, more patchwork than whole, and worth little more than her mass in materials by most standards.

  Pardell felt uncommonly aware of the similarity after the day’s events. “As if I care what any of them think,” he muttered under his breath as he hung his suit over the line in the gap between his second- and third-best socks. There weren’t fourths, but he’d never needed them anyway. He pinched the fabric of the nearest. Still damp. It took forever to dry things anywhere except in the warmth of the galley, but Raner had brought him up to know food and laundry shouldn’t mix.

  The suit was sweat-damp inside and, to be honest, gave off an aroma that didn’t belong in a galley either. His boots were worse; he’d had to pour liquid out of both and the linings shed irreplaceable bits of themselves in the process. Encountering the Earther’s spy ’bot hadn’t helped the old gear’s function, nor had his unusually long, circumspect route home afterward. At least the station’s clean-up barge had come hunting—a forgivable intrusion, since it scooped up the ’bot—but by then Pardell hadn’t felt like taking any more chances.

  Smith had been hunting him. He knew it as surely as he knew the entry codes for the ’Mate.

  Pardell gave his empty suit an unnecessary whack as he ducked under it. “Why? Why me?” he asked the universe in an aggrieved tone, despite knowing he’d get no answer, despite a mouth-drying suspicion he knew the answer already.

  Other years, earlier years, there would have been a chorus of responding voices, ranging from cheery to profane. The ’Mate’s three cabins, galley, and private washroom might technically be his legacy from his foster father, but her space was a luxury not to be wasted. Aaron Raner had left their port open
to anyone willing to put up with what he vaguely termed his son’s allergy. Some stayed only until witnessing young Pardell’s convulsions, especially those who inadvertently touched him and caused one. Others had stayed for years, becoming family until accident, old age, or station temptations took them.

  Raner had never explained what debt or obligation turned him from stationer to Outsider, even when Pardell was old enough to understand the difference and young enough to ask. He did know it had something to do with him, that for some reason Raner couldn’t keep him on the station and had chosen to stay here with him. As a child, he’d suffered confused pangs of guilt; as he matured, he grew to understand how very lucky he’d been to have the stationer care for him. Raner, a quiet, peaceful man, had been killed before Pardell could express either feeling, cut down with so many others in an aisle slippery with wasted blood.

  Since then, Pardell had hoped for company, having been raised to share his living space and unhappy alone. But there were no longer enough ’siders to fill the ships and most stationers were unwilling to venture outside even if they’d been welcome.

  Immies were welcome. A handful had ventured outside in the early years, seeking missing family or friends, trying to comprehend the finality of the new distinction between in and outside. Most had reentered Thromberg, afraid to trust their lives to aging equipment for the sake of a little more room and privacy; very few, in fact, risked any of what little security station registration, address, and work ident granted them. They’d lost enough already.

  Unspoken was the burden of choices made by either side, and consequences to be borne, however unfair.

  Pardell busied himself in the galley. He brought out the bags he’d carried on his suit, opening a couple to dump his share of the daily ration on the table: an odd assortment of bars, jellies, and some quasi-mauve globules Yves McTavish, the immie working the dispenser this shift, had proudly announced looked just like grapes—a fruit grown on Earth. Give them credit, Pardell grinned to himself, for putting the same thing in our hands every day and making it look like something new. As for the grapes—Pardell held them up to the light and shook his head. Familiar with the station’s idea of how best to keep everyone fed, he knew food could come in different shapes and textures, some warm, some cold. It made life more interesting. But mimicking Earth plant material? It seemed pointless and a little obscene. Perhaps it comforted the older ones.

  Doubtless the Earthers had brought their own supplies.

  For a moment, as Pardell nibbled a “grape,” curiosity consumed him. What would a real grape be like? Were there any on her ship? What else might be different?

  Pardell’s thoughts unfolded, freezing the moment, expanding the galley of the ’Mate outward until he lost every sense of himself and saw only events, consequences, possibilities. He saw forward to a time when, unless checked, the differences between humanity’s sundered parts would become so pronounced there could be no commonalities, to a potential future when Earther would name a distinct species as well as culture. They would meet the alien, no longer knowing themselves.

  “Assuming,” Pardell told the grapes, forcing himself free of abstraction, “they ever let us breed.” That was the crux of it; the fertility inhibiters were in the “grapes”—in all the rations so no one could escape them, even if anyone was crazy enough to want to disrupt Thromberg’s precarious balance. Of course, he knew better than to express any opinion on that subject near the hard-eyed immie women. It took little these days to launch the calmest, most rational female into an uncomfortably detailed and direct commentary on the passing of time and its effects on a woman’s body—especially since the latest Earther stupidity.

  Not that anyone blamed them, he thought. Some charitable group or other in Sol System had raised funds to send a transport to Thromberg, a transport loaded with embryo storage equipment and cases. Noticeably lacking was the equipment to thaw the embryos, the explanation being that the group would care for the unborn, making sure the immigrants had a lasting legacy, a living posterity which would live safety on Earth.

  The ship had been sent back empty, except for a short, somewhat unlikely suggestion on where to send it next. What good’s a legacy I’ll never hold in my arms, Pardell could hear Amy Denery now . . . We came out here to make families and a new world, not to be harvested.

  Filled with these and other restless thoughts, Pardell toyed with his rations. Usually he’d pull out a reader if he had to eat alone. Today, he knew he couldn’t concentrate and tried for a novel arrangement of food on his plate instead. He created one, but it required the annoying grapes be squashed between two fingers and lined up in a spiral from the middle. Their interiors were a very ordinary and disappointing pink.

  Abruptly, the result reminded Pardell of the way Malley’s mother’s insides had spilled over the floor as she pushed both him and her son ahead to the safety of the air lock, strange whorls and cloudy, translucent sheets steaming as their warmth spent itself on the icy, dark surface.

  He grabbed the plate and flung it, and its contents, against the wall.

  “Wasteful, young Aaron.”

  Pardell started violently, fearing that the Earthers had followed him home and somehow knew the precious codes to his ship, even as he recognized the voice and relaxed again with a shudder. “Damn it, Rosalind,” he said unsteadily. “It’s not polite to sneak up on people.”

  Rosalind Fournier, forty years his senior and once senior systems engineer on a freighter which had failed to hold its crew or air, tsked-tsked at something. His lack of respect or the fake grapes? Pardell wondered nonsensically, his heart still pounding as he watched her enter the galley. Rosalind was naturally elegant, though dressed in bits and pieces of other people’s clothing, a tall, willowy woman whose age showed only in the salt and pepper of her hair and the fine lines edging her mouth and eyes. She even moved the clumsy artificial hands her crewmates had fashioned for her with a terrible grace, her own hands having refused to release the white-hot handle keeping the emergency lock open until everyone else had escaped the inferno behind her.

  It was said she shot her own captain for trying to push his way out before the wounded.

  All Pardell knew for sure was Rosalind and Aaron Raner had been close—close enough that she had the ’Mate’s codes, and lived here with them more often than not. Until Raner died. Then again, he reminded himself, nothing had been the same after that.

  “How have you been, Rosalind?” Pardell asked, having recaptured something of his breath. He intercepted her attempt to salvage the food he’d thrown at the wall. “I’ll do that.” It wasn’t the wasted grapes—he was all too familiar with her spacer’s fastidious horror of loose objects, despite the ’Mate’s current condition.

  “I heard what happened in Sammie’s,” she said, taking a seat at the galley’s long table and spreading the contents of her ration bag alongside his. Exactly the same, save her pseudo-grapes were intact, but that was to be expected. The point was to show one wasn’t planning to freeload. As a visitor, you chipped in everything you had, if you wanted a real welcome and not directions to the nearest air lock. Of course, Rosalind was family—there was no question of her right to sit here any time she chose. But she always observed the courtesies, particularly those she and Raner had established for the Outside in the first place.

  Pardell eyed his guest, well aware there was also no question of Rosalind Fournier’s ability to take what she felt she was owed—from anyone. “The Earthers,” he returned shortly. “News travels fast.”

  “Hardly news,” she said offhandedly. “Nothing calls in for docking rights without my hearing about it first. You know that.” He did. There were those ’siders, Rosalind prime among them, who had never ended their vigilance where it concerned either ship movements or new regs from the station. For some, Pardell thought half-resentfully, the old habits would rule until they died.

  “Then what brings you here?”

  Rosalind’s eyes narrowed. Disappro
val. “I heard about your little accident.”

  The blush heated his cheeks again. “It was nothing—”

  Rosalind gestured to the water container in the middle of the table, producing a metal cup from her pocket. Pardell filled it, then poured one for himself. They sipped in unison, once, then again.

  The small ritual soothed him, as she’d doubtless intended it should. “It really was nothing, Rosalind,” he repeated more calmly. “You needn’t worry. Hugh Malley was right there and got me out of it—a bit uncomfortably, mind you. I was fine.”

  Her lips twitched. “The man thinks fast. A good friend, young Aaron.”

  “The best,” Pardell concurred, then fell silent.

  Neither spoke for a long moment: Pardell no longer interested in conversation, given the uncomfortable nature of the likeliest topic, and Rosalind apparently deep in her own thoughts.

  In the quiet, the Merry Mate II hummed, her machine voice at the edge of detection, her systems purifying and warming the air, recycling waste, lighting the darkness. As a child and, to be honest, even now when alone or escaping uneasy dreams, Pardell imagined the ship herself was aware and able to think; silent not by choice but because her machine thoughts were simply too different from his own to share. Knowing himself already too different, he kept such fancies to himself.

  Still, Pardell viewed the past, not as Raner or others had told it to him, but as if he could see it through the ’Mate’s sensors, for this ship had borne mute witness to the events that brought Rosalind to sit in silence across from him at this table and led to so much blood and fear.

  Pardell could see it all now, as though reflected in the water of his cup ...

  ... Adrift, derelict, abandoned. The approaching freighter looming out of the utter dark, her grapples slipping forward to gather in the lost one. The code to open her ports delivered by the only one who now could, stationer Aaron Raner, his face streaming with tears as he races through empty corridors calling the names of the missing, reigniting ship systems with his voice, since all but the emergency beacon have fallen to standby levels to conserve power.