Interzone 251

by edited by Andy Cox

  “Any indication that the miscarriage wasn’t accidental?”

  “No, sir.”

  The Rep got up, came over, put one hand against her knee. “Does there appear to be lasting damage, such as would imperil future child-bearing?”

  “None that I can see,” the doctor said.

  “Good.” The word hung in the air.

  The Rep turned, grabbed his chair, slid it up beside the table. “Fari, right?” he asked, and she could only nod an affirmative. “My understanding is that you had physical relations with Leor, which is what resulted in your pregnancy. Is that correct?”

  “He beat and raped me,” she said.

  The Rep shrugged. “Men have needs, and here you are working and living among them? I think we both know you wanted this sort of attention. This is not my concern,” he said. “However, your supervisor, Borrn, asked me to take a second look at your records, said that you were the most skilled of all his workers. I suspect he was trying to sway me to restore to you a man’s share of work credit. Despite that, Borrn seems to be a sensible man, so I checked your records. And what do you know? Your aptitude scores are top of the charts. The Representative delegated to this shit-hole back when you were a kid spotted you playing some sort of ball game in the tunnels and recommended you for aptitude testing, and you scored higher than anyone else. An affinity for machines and an excellent rock-instinct – he put you on the maintenance crew until you hit your majority, and from there you managed to get placed on a mining team. Both are unprecedented assignments, but from what I can tell, ones you entirely earned.”

  He reached out, ran one finger lightly down her abdomen. The One has gifted you with very talented genes,” he said. “We intend to expand that resource. Leor, for all his bluster and crass attitude, is not entirely unskilled, and since you’ve already paired, it would mitigate the stain of sin on you to do so formally. We will credit you both for any living children produced.”

  “No,” she said.

  “I didn’t ask a question. One thousand credit demerit.”

  “No,” she said again. “He nearly killed me.”

  “Two thousand credits. He has been made to understand that the company considers you a valuable asset, and has agreed that he will not commit any further harm to you, except in matters of routine marital discipline, if you submit yourself fully to him as wife. So we’re pairing you.”

  “No,” she said.

  “Four thousand credits demerit,” he said, and stood up, scowling at her. “I think you’re now in negative numbers, yes? And you would still choose to keep this stain on yourself, rather than be wedded to Leor?”

  “I would rather die,” she said.

  “Well.” He stood there contemplating her for a long moment, as she lay on the bench, shivering. “Most men are nothing more than livestock,” he told her, his gaze wandering her body. “You breed them to try to enhance specific talents or desirable qualities – strength, endurance, compliance, not too bright – to make them better workers. Give them the minimal education they need to do their jobs and nothing more, put them to work, provide prostitutes for them to spend their frustration on, and it’s a stable, profitable system. Women aren’t even that much. Women are vessels, with no purpose other than to make the next generation of workers. I am no more concerned about your opinion on how we make use of your body than I would care what a jar thought about whatever I wished to fill it with. Nod if you understand that.”

  She nodded.

  “The only true joy for women is in submission. Now, remember who’s in charge, and how much you have to lose, and do not speak again.”

  ***

  Borrn was waiting for her as the doctor led her out of the clinic, and whatever he saw in her face, he said nothing as he helped her to the cable terminus, got her in a car, and sent her alone back towards Rock 17.

  Mer and Huj were both at the far end, holding onto a terminus post and joking together about something she couldn’t quite hear. When the cable car door opened and they looked her way, whatever it was died on their lips, and they both pushed off and tumbled forward.

  “What happened?” Mer asked, reaching her first.

  She opened her mouth, the pressure of the words to come almost unbearable, and then she remembered the feel of the prostitute’s elbows in her side, the sharp cut of her words. Wordlessly, she propelled herself out of the cable car and past them. Huj reached out, caught her hand. “Fari,” he said. “You can trust us.”

  “Can I?” she asked. “And you, Mer?” She met his eyes, not for long, but long enough for his face to redden and for him to turn away.

  “I don’t…” Huj started to say, looking between the two of them, and Fari pulled her arm free and kicked off for the tunnel to her room.

  Behind her, Huj made to follow, but Mer put a hand on his shoulder. “I’m sorry,” he said, the words just reaching her as she turned, half-blinded by tears, away from them, as if she could run away from everything.

  Once she was behind a locked door, she turned on the shower, but the water wouldn’t turn warm. Insufficient credit, the cracked display informed her, so she took it cold. Once she’d dried off, she wrapped herself in the warm cocoon of her hammock and stared at the ceiling, shaking, for a very, very long time.

  ***

  In the morning, it was Huj who tapped at her door. “Fari?” he called, sounding unsure of himself. “I’ve brought you food. I… Mer and I talked for a long time last night. We… He guessed that one of the brothel women spoke to you? He’s sorry, he didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Then why isn’t he here apologizing?” she called out, still buried deep within her hammock. It was Green Team’s day off, and she didn’t intend to leave her room, or her bed, for anything or anyone.

  “I guess Leor bought a sick day, because the Rep sent Mer over to sub for him,” Huj said.

  Sick days were costly. Too costly – Huj had once worked with two broken ribs because he didn’t want to take the hit to his balance, and Leor didn’t have nearly the same cred. She felt her stomach drop another notch. “Huj,” she said. “Leor might be coming here. He’s going to remember yesterday.”

  “Why would he come here?”

  “The Rep wants to marry me to him, to remove my sin.”

  There was a long pause. “Fari?”

  “I said no,” she said, then with more bitterness than she imagined she could still have left in her, “the Rep doesn’t like ‘no’.”

  “You stay in there, okay? I’m going to go check the cable line for incoming traffic, just in case. We aren’t going to let anything happen to you again.”

  “Huj…”

  “Yes?”

  “Check in when you’re done, okay?”

  “Will do.”

  She listened to Huj’s boots trudging away down the corridor, almost drowned out by the loud thumping of her heart in her ears. It took several minutes before she became aware of a vibration coming through the walls, growing in pitch and intensity. Someone’s landed a rocket bike, she realized; Rock 17 was dense enough to conduct sound from the exterior well down into the tunnels.

  Pulling herself out of her hammock, she suited up as quickly as she could. There wasn’t anyone she could think of that would come here that way, unannounced, that wouldn’t be trouble. She had no intention of waiting helplessly in her bunk.

  She activated her boots long enough to walk over to her door, set the intercom to two-way open, and then she opened the door a crack, slipped through it out into the hallway. Reaching in and around the door, she placed her motion device on the floor just behind it, then shut and locked the door. It wouldn’t go off unless someone forced the door open and hit it; if that happened, she’d know a lot more about the intentions of whoever was here. Done, she grabbed a wall bar in the corridor, deactivated her boots, and, pushing off lightly, floated silently down the corridor, alert for any sounds above the hum of the air handler systems.

  The terminus was at the far en
d of Rock 17 from her rooms, with a veritable maze of old mining tunnels surrounding the habitat. She pulled her helmet on and sealed it, turned on her suit heater, and took one of the airlocks down into the old tunnels.

  Her thinking had been to hunker down in the tunnels until she heard Huj, over the intercom, tell her everything was okay. Once in the tunnels, though, she found herself drifting towards the old safety retreat, a century abandoned, at the far end of the maze.

  She could feel the creak of the old airlock as she opened the first door, slipped inside, and pressured up the lock. The inner door groaned and strained, but just as she was about to panic it began to grind its way open, spilling her out into the small quarters.

  It was a small space: a medical bay, a comms office, and a toilet room, meant to be a retreat and central response point in case of a mine disaster. Lights flickered slowly alive as the long-disused systems responded to her presence. She watched her suit readout until the oxygen mix hit breathable levels, then popped off her helmet and stared around the retreat. She saw no signs of the tenday she’d spent here four months ago, which was good. She didn’t want anyone else stumbling on this place and retracing her steps.

  Folded neatly and pressed into a holding cubby was a plastic life-envelope, as if it had never been used.

  She hadn’t ever wanted to leave this place, but someone would have come looking for her, eventually. If she’d been male, it would have been sooner. If I’d been male, I wouldn’t have had to hide here in the first place, she thought ruefully.

  The knock startled her so badly she tried to jerk herself around and lost her equilibrium, began a slow spin across the room. It came again, and she realized she was hearing it over her link to her room intercom – someone was at her door there, not here. Oh please, she thought. She patched her mic into the open relay. “Huj?”

  “Sorry,” a familiar, hated voice came through. “Open up for your brand new husband, like a good wife.”

  Leor. She’d known it would be him, really.

  “Where’s Huj, Leor?” she asked.

  “He wasn’t very hospitable to me,” Leor said. “And here I was coming for my honeymoon day, too. The Rep even lent me a bike so we could have the whole day together.”

  “I’m not your wife, Leor. Go home.”

  “Rep said you’d say that, but you know what? He don’t care, and I sure don’t. So let me in, or I’m breaking this door down, and then I’m going to be mad.”

  Even though she wasn’t there waiting on the other side of that door, she felt frozen where she was, the memory of terror still palpably real. “Rep said you can’t hurt me.”

  “Rep said I can’t make it so you can’t procreate,” he said. “I plan on procreating with you till you cry my name so loud the whole damned rockpile can hear it, and knows I own you.”

  And here’s the anger, she thought with relief, as it raged through her mind like a solar flare had gone off there. “I don’t know, Leor. From what I remember, I’m not sure you can manage to stay in a woman long enough for her to say two whole syllables. Maybe you should shorten your name and then come back.”

  She wished she’d turned down the volume on her earpiece before she said that, because the crash that followed left her wincing. He’s throwing himself at the door, she realized. The door would hold for a while, though his temper would hold longer. If she knew anything about him, it was that he beat things until he got what he wanted.

  It would buy her a little time, if she was willing to take some risk.

  She put her helmet back on, checked that her bottles had recharged automatically while in the oxygen-rich environment, then cycled herself back out of the mining retreat with a first aid kit and the life-envelope. She could feel each step ahead unfolding in her mind, like some terrible winged thing, and it filled her with a giddy rage.

  If Leor’d run into Huj, he must have come in at the terminus; he wouldn’t know Rock 17 well enough to find any of the other external airlocks. She could still hear him pounding on the door, expending himself, though she’d turned down the volume enough to blur the words of whatever threats he was shouting.

  Huj was floating, motionless, above the terminus floor, blood caking his face around one ear, a metal bar slowly spinning nearby. Fari floated up, put one shaking hand against his chest, felt him breathe, and took a breath herself she didn’t know she’d been holding. “Huj,” she said, shaking him gently.

  He opened one swollen eye, blinked at her. “Fari,” he said. “Get out of here. Go, hide. Leor—”

  “Shut up,” she said. She set her boots down on the floor, unclipped the first aid kit, took out a dermal, and peeled it off onto his arm. She watched him sink into sleep, fighting it the whole way down, then she shook out the life-envelope and slipped it around him, zipping it up around his face last. His eyes were scrunched up into a frown.

  Grabbing one leg, she towed the limp and weightless man behind her back towards the tunnels.

  She had just pulled Huj into the old retreat when there was a particularly loud crash through her earpiece and her alarm went off. Leor was in her rooms. Even with the volume turned down, she could still make out his dreadful voice as he began ransacking her room, looking for her, already describing in detail the “honeymoon” he had planned for her. Her rooms weren’t large; it wouldn’t take him long to realize she wasn’t in there.

  Unwrapping Huj from the envelope, she pulled him over to an old autodoc in the medical bay. The lid was stuck, and she had to kick it hard to get it to open. The motion sent her tipping over backwards, anchored by her remaining boot on the floor, and she winced as the ankle twisted just slightly in the boot as she managed to push herself back upright. Huj was still floating, serenely spinning, where she’d let go of him above the autodoc. Wrapping her arms around him, she pulled him down and into the bed liner.

  The sudden string of curses over the earpiece was extraordinary. “Where the hell are you, you goddamned whore?” Leor screamed.

  “I just went out for a breath of fresh air,” she answered. “Make yourself at home, why don’t you?”

  There was a crash, garbled, and then a squeal of feedback as the intercom unit in her rooms went dead. He’d be coming for her now, if he could find her.

  She was stuck, she realized, between Leor and the Rep, and her own absolute conviction that she would not give either of them the opportunity to have her alone again. Not alive, anyway. She wished she could leave Huj a note, but she could barely write, and she knew Huj – who had been sold from one place to another for most of his childhood, before he reached the nadir of the rockpile, couldn’t read. Instead she leaned in and kissed his forehead, then shut and sealed the lid.

  She didn’t expect she’d see him again.

  Outside the old retreat, in one of the many pits and crevasses that ran through wall and floor alike, she had been carefully stashing stolen tools. The men were subject to regular pat-downs, but no one had ever checked her; if it was because they thought, as a woman, she wasn’t smart enough to escape, or brave enough to try, she didn’t know and didn’t care. It had allowed her to repair the lifepod to the extent she had, and engineer a few other surprises into Rock 17 during endless insomniac nights over the years.

  Fari gathered up the toolbag, strapped it across her front so it wouldn’t interfere with her air bottle, and made as quickly as she could towards one of the other abandoned airlocks, this one leading out onto the rock near the terminus. If she’d gauged the sound right, there was a rocket bike waiting there.

  It was tethered right where she expected it to be, just above the cable terminus entrance, only barely out of sight. She caught the tether with ease, swung herself up beside the bike, and began looking it over.

  The fuel cell was hovering at around 15%; the bike could barely make it out of the rockpile on that, much less get as far as the nearest freehold outside Basellan territory. She had just pulled a wrench off her frontpack when she noticed the small relay attached to the
cell, nearly hidden behind the bike’s heat transfer stack. The relay had a small receiver built into it, and was wired to send the cell into overload. If Leor had gone off-course, or tried to take advantage of the bike in some way the Rep didn’t want, bye-bye Leor. She clicked open her link to the base intercoms.

  “In case you don’t know, Leor, the Rep doesn’t give a flat black rock about your genes,” she said. “It’s mine he values.”

  “Where the hell are you?” came the immediate response. From the sounds in the background, he was tearing something apart.

  “Not where you are,” she said, and closed the link again so she could concentrate on removing the cell and relay intact. She had a use for them, could feel all the parts clicking together in her mind. Leor and the Rep had given her exactly what she needed. Now all that was in short supply was time.

  ***

  “Leor, where are you?” she asked over the link as soon as she’d reactivated it.

  “Found your little tunnels,” came the immediate response, over silence. “How long do you think you can hide in there before your air runs out? Didn’t think I could figure out you’re in a suit?”

  “You’re right, I am,” she said. “I’ve got a couple of hours left on my tank, though.”

  “I can wait a couple of hours. Why don’t you just come out now, and I’ll take it easy on you, make it nice. I won’t offer again.”

  “I’m sure you won’t,” she said. “But I wonder – how much damage can I do to this fancy bike of yours in a couple of hours? I imagine the Rep made it clear what he’d take out of you if you let anything happen to it.”

  “You’re bluffing.”

  “Let’s see…it’s a Basellan model, of course. A G-449, older model, and you left an empty can of skunk on the seat. You aren’t high, are you, Leor? There’s fines for that.”