Severance

by Chris Bucholz

  As everyone got up to leave, Stein lingered behind, pretending to work on something on her terminal. Finally alone, she crossed the big meeting room and entered the supervisor’s office, where Curts normally presided, and sat down in the big chair. Another little ritual of hers. They all liked their jobs, but she liked hers more, and definitely more than she let on. Not the ability to order people around so much, though she knew that’s what most of them probably thought. No, she just liked being in charge of stuff. Every morning she allowed herself the momentary self–delusion that she hadn’t sent them off to fix the ship. They were fixing her ship. And this battered maintenance office was the drafty and damp seat of her power.

  Her moment over, she levered herself out of her chair and walked out of the office. The heating complaint from the floatarium — a simple task that she could have easily assigned to someone else — had caught her eye. There was someone up there she wanted to talk to.

  Outside, Stein turned north and began walking down the street, picking her way past the thicker slicks of grime and puke and a hundred years of neglect. Fifty thousand people on this god damned ship, and no one wants to swing around a mop. She caught the escalator upstairs. “What the hell happened to you people?” she wondered aloud, not for the first time.

  §

  From the outside, the Argos looked like an imperfectly rolled cigar, three kilometers long and three hundred meters wide, its outer surface lumpy, bulging in a variety of places. In cross section, the ship looked like an onion, the majority of livable space concentrated in the four outermost layers, where the pseudo–gravity caused by the ship’s slow rotation was most comfortable. Aside from some low–rise apartment complexes within the garden well, few people ever had cause to go higher than the fourth level, other than the handful of maintenance and naval personnel who worked in those areas. This was the domain of ship systems, and storage space, and bare rock. In the aft, the ship’s main engines and control systems occupied this central space, partially jutting out behind the ship.

  In the bow, the lone civilian use of the vast, floaty space was the floatarium, a multipurpose area near the central axis, where Argosians could amuse themselves in the micro–G environment. Stein tugged her way down the access corridor using the hand holds mounted on the walls, beads of sweat quickly forming on her brow. It was always warm up here, though Stein conceded it was probably a little warmer than normal. Not that Griese was the sort to complain unnecessarily. As she neared the end of the access corridor, she palmed herself to a stop and looked down into the floatarium.

  Griese Otomo stood on one of the twenty different surfaces in the room that laid claim to the designation “floor.” Above him floated a half–dozen other people, scripts clasped in sweaty hands, rehearsing a scene from what appeared to be Taming of the Shrew. Stein watched quietly as Petruchio, gesticulating wildly in the course of a monologue, accidentally struck his assistant, sending the boy backwards and into the gathered crowd of players, scattering the group like billiard balls. Everyone broke down laughing.

  “Having some problems with your blocking?” Stein asked from the entrance.

  Griese looked up, recognizing his old friend. “That was intentional.” Which was entirely possible. No one attended a low–G play to see it go right. “So, you finally got around to us?” he asked, though Stein could tell the annoyance in his voice wasn’t genuine.

  “It’s nine thirty!” Stein replied. “You’re my first call of the day.” She kicked off the floor of the entrance and sailed across the room to Griese. “I’m amazed you’re even awake. I thought you arty types didn’t roll out of bed until noon.”

  Griese watched her approach, offering up an arm for her to catch. She caught him by the wrist and planted another hand on the back of a chair, spinning her body around to land roughly on this new floor. “That’s my wife you’re thinking of,” he said. “As for us, would you believe we were trying to beat the heat?” He poked a finger at a bead of sweat on Stein’s brow. “You see our problem then?”

  “Yeah, it’s pretty steamy. Are you guys growing drugs up here?” Stein looked at the gaggle of actors, which had retreated to the far side of the space, still giggling. “Or just consuming?” Griese laughed, though not with his eyes. Stein decided not to prod him anymore. “Let me see if I can do something about that.”

  She pulled her terminal out of her webbing, and called up a display of the bow’s ventilation systems. She immediately spotted the error, two thermostats reading the temperature in the room at 15 degrees Celsius. The system had thus concluded it should stop supplying cold air to the room. It was even trying to supply hot air in its place, though she knew that that wasn’t going to work, thanks to a damper that had been deliberately bent shut eighty years previous. She tapped a couple of commands on the terminal to enable an override, pumping chilled air into the room temporarily while she replaced the sensors.

  Looking up from the terminal, she scanned the many floors of the room, trying to figure out where the thermostat was hiding. Spotting it, she bounced across the room, landing neatly on the wall where it was hidden, and with a practiced twist, disconnected it. The designers of the ship had been acutely aware that every element of it would be replaced at least a dozen times over the length of the journey. Every system on board the ship was based on nearly antique designs, all with decades–long track records of reliability. And they were all designed to use parts that could be easily recycled and re–fabricated onboard the ship. Almost everything was made of soft metal or thermoplastics, capable of being scavenged, melted down and recycled. A routine piece of trivia delivered to school field trips in the vessel’s fab shops was that these shops were just as critical a part of the ship’s life support systems as the hydroponics or carbon dioxide scrubbers. As with most pieces of trivia delivered during field trips, it failed to impress.

  Stein turned the old thermostat over, quickly diagnosed it as a worthless piece of junk, and reached into her tool webbing for a new sensor. With it popped in place, she checked her terminal to see if it was registering on the ship’s internal systems. Satisfied that it was, she pushed off back to the entrance of the floatarium.

  For all the efforts made to make the ship maintainable during the design phase, some mistakes were inevitable. And these thermostats, at least amongst those who had the task of replacing them, were considered the biggest of those mistakes. Every decade or so someone attempted to redesign them, invariably someone who had to work with the fucking things every day. None had succeeded, and replacing wonky thermostats remained the most common chore for the maintenance team. At any given moment, Stein had two or three replacements on her person, more during working hours.

  Stein backtracked a short distance down the entrance corridor. An air duct ran under one of the surfaces, supplying cooled air to the observatory. Her terminal had indicated that the second broken thermostat was within this air duct, so she pried open a panel, earning a blast of cold air in the face. Inside, she quickly found and replaced the sensor. That done, she looked down the duct towards the floatarium, blinking in surprise at a lumpy obstruction. Opening another panel in the corridor revealed a dead robot wedged into the ducting.

  “Hey, little guy,” she said, reaching inside and yanking it out.

  A huge gash had nearly ripped the maintenance robot in half. Somewhere upstream the thing had lost a fight with a supply fan. She frowned. If left to their own devices the robots were normally smart enough to avoid that kind of damage. Stein guessed that if she downloaded its memory, she’d see a custom program another technician had entered, sending the robot to go un–jam a fan. The proper way to do that — shutting off the fan, isolating the area, physically securing the blades — was time consuming. Reprogramming a robot wasn’t. And if the fan started up again and sliced the fucker in half, well, they were replaceable. A technician’s free time wasn’t. Stein didn’t have a problem with that reasoning; she liked free time. But she didn’t approve of the stupidity of leav
ing the shattered robot in the ducting. They were lucky it hadn’t jammed another fan. She tucked the husk of the robot into her webbing and closed up both hatches.

  Returning to the floatarium, she launched herself back down to where Griese sat. Stein examined her terminal again, and disabled the override to check that the system would continue cooling the room on its own initiative.

  “All done,” she announced, satisfied.

  “Thanks,” Griese replied. “Sorry I was pissy with you. Just frustrated with the sweat running down my ass for two days.”

  Stein smiled. “No worries. That’s why I thought I’d deal with you myself. Don’t need you ripping the head off any of my doofuses.” She flicked her eyes at the actors floating above them. “Can we talk for a second?”

  Griese raised an eyebrow. “Sure.” He waved away his troupe. “Go towel off, guys. We’ll meet back here in ten.” After they had dispersed he turned back to Stein. “What’s up?”

  “This is going to sound kind of weird.”

  “Only kind of weird? That’s a big improvement for you.”

  Stein snorted. “Thanks. Okay. I’ll just ask. What does a blinder look like?”

  Griese narrowed his eyes. “A blinder? As in a stun grenade?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you think I’d know because…”

  “I know we don’t talk about it.”

  Griese cocked his head. “Fair enough. I guess I could know.” He held up his hands. “But I don’t. Never had that misfortune.” He looked at Stein. “Ellen will have.” Griese studied her face for a moment. “Do I want to know why you’re asking?”

  Stein smiled. “It’s nothing bad. Not too bad at least. Not yet. I just thought I might have stumbled upon one.”

  “I guess we all need our hobbies.” Stein hadn’t told him everything about her nocturnal activities, but he was smart enough to guess, if Bruce hadn’t drunkenly told him everything. Griese waved his arm at the room. “For me, it’s low–gravity prose. More classy.”

  “Oh, highly classy. I like the way Kate’s skirt keeps billowing up. You know, I think they did have undergarments back in Shakespeare’s time.”

  “We can’t completely defy the audience’s expectations, Laura. This is still the Argos.”

  Stein smiled. “All right.” She looked at the door, then the time on her terminal. “I think Ellen and I are meeting at the Prairie tonight. You coming?”

  “To chaperone you two? Sounds dangerous. I’ll see.”

  “It won’t be any fun without you.”

  “I’ve been told by several reliable sources that Ellen is much more fun without me around,” Griese said, smiling. “But your kind words are appreciated.”

  §

  Sergeant Sinclair Hogg walked down the street at a measured pace, scanning back and forth. Tall, wide, and solid, Hogg looked like a cop; even in plain clothes, his size and bearing marked his profession as clearly as if he had a little rotating blue light on his head. He had exited the trolley a block earlier than necessary so he could arrive on foot. Good for seeing what he was walking into, but more importantly, it allowed people to see him coming. He could tell a lot about someone by how they reacted to a security officer approaching. That was something his partner, Steve Ganty, had told him on his first rotation. That Ganty had been stabbed in the stomach by someone who saw him coming, did temper the value of the advice a bit, but in situations where stomach stabbings were unlikely, Hogg still regularly followed it.

  Hogg was currently on his fifth rotation in the corps, not an uncommonly high figure. Unofficially, the rotation policy had been intended to reduce the risk of corruption and complacency amongst the security corps by repeatedly introducing new blood into their mix. Whether this was effective or not was open to debate; it took a certain type of person to want to be a cop in the first place, and given the variety of perverts and recreational substance abusers on board the ship there was a limited pool of suitable volunteers. Consequently, security officer jobs tended to rotate amongst a fairly small group of regulars, and in practice, the only difference between a security officer and an off–rotation officer was that one got to wear kind of a neat hat.

  Hogg rounded the corner and set off down the side street, moving away from the main shopping traffic along Asia. Ahead he could see the rest of his team along with Sergeant Koller, clustered outside the door of a modest apartment. Standing in front of the door was a balding middle–aged man, wearing stained, fraying clothes. He was yelling obscenities at the gathered security men. Not very original ones, Hogg was disappointed to hear.

  As he approached, the distressed man noticed Hogg and immediately shifted the focus of his anger, having correctly pegged Hogg as someone in charge. “You can’t do this! You bastards can’t do this!”

  Hogg waited until he was close enough to the man to not have to shout. “Sir, you were informed months ago that you’d have to relocate. You have no one to blame for this but yourself.”

  “You don’t have the right to make me move, you fascist fucker!”

  Hogg arched an eyebrow. “Sir, the ship’s government has the right to reallocate space and personnel as it sees fit, if it’s in the interest of ship–wide operations. I’d suggest you look it up; it might make you feel better.”

  “You can’t just take away our home! My family has lived here for a hundred and fifty years!”

  Hogg inhaled deeply. “And you were given multiple opportunities to sell it at a fair price. Now you’ll sell it at an unfair price.” Hogg wagged his finger at the man. “Not too bright, was that?”

  He extended his big paw to push the man out of the way, the poor dummy nearly falling over at his touch. With a flick of his head, Hogg directed one of his officers to open the door of the apartment. The young officer slapped the back of his hand against the door controls, overriding the lock, then stepped aside, making room for Hogg.

  The apartment was woefully decorated, the walls covered in amateur art that Hogg immediately despised, the type sold by idiots to other idiots in parks every weekend. The back of the suite was dominated by a pair of paper walls dividing the space into separate rooms. In the main living room stood a woman, arms clasped around a young boy in front of her.

  “You can’t do this,” the woman whimpered. Behind him, Hogg could hear the father pushing to get past Sergeant Koller, who had moved to block the door.

  “Yes, I can,” Hogg said. “It’s really quite easy.” With three big steps he covered the distance between them and plucked the boy from his mother’s surprised grasp. Holding the shocked child out in front of him like a bomb, he spun around and walked out the front door of the apartment. The mother’s tiny little fists played percussion on his back, not slowing his movements in the slightest.

  Outside, he set the child down abruptly. Hogg estimated that the boy was about four years old, and either too scared or stupid to cry. The mother darted past him and threw her arms around the child, before hurling some language at Hogg of the type generally not recommended for use around children. Hogg observed the boy’s father staring at him, his hands balled into fists; a couple seconds of eye contact was enough to prompt them to unclench. The father cautiously circled Hogg and came up behind his wife and child.

  The man whispered something to his wife and child, who withdrew a few steps away. Turning around to face Hogg, the man approached within a couple of steps and stopped. Teeth clenched, he said, “I didn’t know I was working for them. They didn’t tell me. How could I know? How could I have known?”

  “What?” Hogg asked, genuinely baffled.

  The man’s eyes watered. “The Breeders. I didn’t know it was them. They didn’t tell me. They didn’t tell me.”

  Oh. He had worked for the Breeders? Hogg hadn’t known that. He didn’t actually know why they were removing the man from his home, hadn’t even considered that he should care. It seemed a little late to be beating on Breeders; that had been settled years earlier. But orders were orders. He to
ok one step towards the man, digging something out of his pocket. He thrust a terminal onto the man’s chest.

  “A map to your new home. Your possessions will be delivered shortly.”

  The man clutched at the terminal as Hogg released it, bobbling it slightly. Hogg pivoted and walked back towards the apartment, knowing he would have to keep an eye on the security men lest too much of the family’s possessions go missing in transit. But before he reached the door, he stopped, an amusing idea having revealed itself to him.

  “Stop!” he said, turning around to face the family again. They hadn’t actually moved anywhere, but upon hearing his command, somehow moved even less. Hogg walked slowly towards them, eyeing the young boy standing at his mother’s side. Hogg opened one of the cargo pockets on his trouser leg, fishing around for something. Finding it, he bent down in front of the boy and offered him what he had withdrawn. A plastic security badge.

  “Here you go, son. Maybe you’d like to be a security officer some day?” He waggled it gently in front of the boy, who hesitated a second before snatching it from him. Hogg nodded curtly at the parents, before turning away from their gaping faces. He returned to the apartment, a grin spreading across his face.

  §

  The rest of Stein’s day had not gone smoothly. After dropping off the robot at the recyclers, her terminal informed her of an urgent request in a hydroponics pond, and she’d spent the rest of her shift ankle deep in water and cucumbers.

  After changing, she left the maintenance office and walked down Asia to the nearest escalator, her feet squishing as she went. The streets on the Argos were laid out in a grid, those running the length of the ship named after continents, historical leaders, and interesting plants, with the cross–avenues assigned more mundane numbers. All four of the inhabited levels of the ship had identical layouts, with escalators running up and down at major intersections. Stein caught one of these escalators up to the third level.