Aeon Nine

by Aeon Authors

  Shit.

  A minute later the level lock clicked shut behind me. I went up the lift, tugged my cleaning cart out of its locker, and clipped its cord to my suit so that it floated along beside me on little repellers like some kind of permanently-attached colon bag. I had a mini-version of the repellers on my own boots so I could move soundlessly. Some kind of smart-reversing-polymer-pad-somethings. My mask had low-light pick up. Even my clean-green sprayer was silenced to a hiss so we could clean the halls right outside sleep cabins and nobody would wake up.

  Great snagger get-up, right? Except cleaners are tagged a hundred different ways coming up and electronically monitored the whole time they’re updeck. Suits are bugged. Every non-private room is watched. Cleaners are scanned and searched coming and going. A cleaner tries to destroy something or take a souvenir of the uppies and she’s off for a mine tour so fast…

  How Paula managed to smuggle something down… Well, shit.

  I checked the time on my cart. 0305. Fifteen minutes to rendezvous with Spartacus, one deck up.

  If I went.

  Blanking my mind, I rush-cleaned the Princess deck, mostly doing a quick pass of the halls with my clean-green hose. I slammed shut an entire row of EVA suit lockers. Weird they were open, right? Because every spacer brings their own suits onto Station, their own weapons, and all these suits were extras. Must have used these to take some sexkids outside.

  Everything smelled cold and rank to me suddenly. Someone had been sloppy with the air locks!

  I was just freaking, of course. I knew nothing about air locks because none of the downdecks have them; only updecks and engineering. Found that out on my little spy missions. The only way out of a sexkid downdeck is the shitter.

  When I finished the sweep, I went up a level to the Prince deck where the main partying was supposed to happen. Sure enough, the movable furniture there was whacked about, the walls hangings ripped, food smeared around, light brackets smashed, sour puke everywhere, clothes, papers, blood.

  Real fun, I guess.

  0318.

  I coded open the big vents around the edges of the room but had to get my tools from the cart to manually open one that had become stuck. Used a laser-saw to cut through the crud build up that had jammed it.

  Then I put back my tools and swung out my clean-green hose for a full foam. It roared out in great, high-power blasts, slorping the clothing and other garbage in big foamy waves to the vents. Laser-sawed a shredded couch into pieces so it could follow the rest. Until finally the antiseptic smell of clean-green coming through my mask overpowered the vomit.

  And still I kept on, trying to zone out but thinking how the ghouls on damaged would be stopping all this at their shitter sieve and using remote arms or wading suits to pick through for hard scrip or drugs or—

  A hand clapped onto my shoulder and I spun with my sprayer, but Spartacus batted it aside and reached to my cart to turn off the foam. With his eyes, he gestured to the surveillance cams, then ripped off my cleaner hood to drag me in close and kiss me hard on the mouth. No tongue.

  “Come to my room,” he said raggedly.

  I nodded. I could hardly breathe, my heart was doing a terror high-step.

  He pulled the plug to separate me from my cart and dragged me, floppy suit and all, out of the party room and down the corridor. He fingered open a room door that lay separate from all the others, different from the one he was in the last time, and dragged me inside.

  Private quarters. No monitoring.

  And freakin huge. A viewer desk showed a rotating field of space with two blazing suns. There were table and chairs, a food dispenser, a room with a personal shitter (okay, all the uppie rooms had those), a massage soaker, a huge double bed. Squirrel told me he’d been in one like this when he was five, when the Station Commander had requisitioned him. I didn’t believe him. Maybe you don’t believe me. But here it was.

  Spartacus saw my wide eyes and laughed. Scary, because his eyes were so intense. His black hair was longer and messier than any other spacer’s I’d ever seen. His pasty white body had a hungry, wasted look. Which made his clean smell and raspy smooth accent that much more surprising.

  “Station brass found out I am a reporter,” he said. “They are scared I will record something bad—these are Live-On filaments in my eyes—and they will be shut down. But nothing bad happens here, yes?”

  I didn’t say anything. I rarely did when facing a new grown-up. I just listened, watched, ready to run. Of course it was better usually to just give in, since where could you go on Station anyway? Once you were in a private room, I’d heard you couldn’t even get out without the owner’s fingerprints.

  “Take the cleaner suit off, Maggie. Make yourself comfortable. Have a drink.” He waved to the little dispenser unit in the wall. “They assume we fuck now. It gives us at least one hour, perhaps more if we look exhausted later.”

  I hesitated, then slowly peeled off my outer suit and stood in just my singlet and bare feet. I knew he could see my hard nipples and fear pimples through the slick material, but I made myself not think of that.

  “Good. Good.” He looked away from me. “Have a drink. Anything. Then we can talk for awhile. Finally you will tell me what you found. I will tell you what I am planning. You will decide to help me…or not.”

  I hesitated again but I was finally drawn to the novelty of a dispenser that could do more than water and slop A or slop B. I stood in front of its little outlet, staring. Couldn’t figure it out. Started blushing from my heels on up.

  “Take a cup from the cupboard on the right,” Spartacus said from behind me. “Hold it under the spout, and say what you would like. Try…ginger ale.”

  I bit my lips, nodded, and did as he said. The resulting splash of liquid looked so bad that I wondered if maybe this was a kind of loyalty test. Or maybe he wanted to punish me because I hadn’t come directly to him?

  “Sip,” he said, right behind me.

  I did, coughed as the liquid tried to shoot up my nose, and dropped the cup so the “ginger ale” splashed all over the soft floor, wetting both his and my legs.

  Spartacus laughed. “Don’t worry.” Then more gently, almost purring, “Sit down on the bed, Maggie. I will tell you a story.”

  This was it, then. I was to be a sexkid, after all. And if I screamed here, he’d report me for going to the other downdecks. Make up some story.

  I walked to the bed and sat. My whole body was vibrating. If I could just make myself vomit…

  But he didn’t follow me to the bed. Instead he pulled out a chair from his viewer/sender and straddled it backwards, crossing his wiry arms on its back. His chin rested on the arms. His eyes burned into mine.

  “Do you know how long Station’s been out here?” he said. “Eight years, your time. More than twelve by Earth world clocks. And you know that in all that time, no government has ever protested it?”

  He waited for an answer and I all I could think about was how I’d first met him. It was like this:

  I was cleaning the Prince deck. I came across this ring of boys and girls, sixes and sevens from the look of them, who’d been drugged and tied, arm to arm, around a donut seat. From the blood and muck, I guessed they’d been sexed repeatedly, hit and slagged, by a whole gang of spacers. Out in a public place too, not a private room. I scowled at the surveillance cameras, then jumped when a spacer, still popped and apparently not done, came stumbling back into the room wearing an EVA suit with the helmet hanging off his neck and the front middle of his suit unseamed and wide open, heading for the kid circle.

  Without thinking, I raised my clean-green hose and sprayed him in the face, full force. He went screaming backwards and suddenly another long-haired skinny spacer jumped out of nowhere, grabbed my hose, and aimed it at the screaming man. “Thank you!” Spartacus had giggled at me like he’d asked me to do this. “I have him! Spray! Spray!”

  Saved me. Dragged me back to his room. Told me he was here to change things and d
id I want to make a difference?

  “Well?” he demanded now.

  “No one’s protested what goes on here,” I said.

  “What? What goes on here?”

  “The…hitting?”

  “Yes, the hitting. Also the rape. The imprisonment of minors. The sexual slavery. These things have been universally outlawed on Earth and its worlds for over fifty years. Yet out here, they persist unchecked. Do you think that no one back on Earth’s planets cares what happens this far out?”

  I blinked back at him. Wasn’t that obvious?

  As if he read my mind, he sprang from his chair so that it crashed to the floor in front of me. “It is not apathy, but blindness!” he shouted. “The elected officials, the human rights groups—they do not know what this station is! If we could get just one person…” He whirled back towards me and bore forwards so I shrank back on the bed.

  “Or eighteen,” he said and pointed at me. “Two children from each level. Five years old to fifteen. This is why I sent you down there. I need someone they will all trust to make it work. Will they trust you?”

  Please be my mommy!

  “Some will.”

  “Tell me.”

  So I did, telling him how I’d used the memorized codes at each level door, surprised at how basic the security was compared to the lock between the updecks and the lowers. “It’s just repeating numbers shifted once for each lock going down.”

  “Very good. You see? They think you are too stupid to figure it out. Unschooled and illiterate.”

  “Well, yuh-uh.”

  “Do not say that. Do not speak their lies with your mouth.”

  I blinked at him again. It wasn’t a lie to say we were unschooled. Who among the sexkids could read or write? Other than Squirrel, of course, who said he learned it from you before you both lost your folks and got sent here. So what did Spartacus—

  “Tell me about their social structure. Their leaders.”

  I did. And this time he let me talk until my mouth was dry and he brought me some liquid that tasted suspiciously like the vitamin juice they put in our slop. He said it was the juice of an orange.

  When I was done, Spartacus took over, pacing the room and describing his plan. It was full of overblown sidetracks but boiled down to this:

  There were only two ways out of the downdecks. One was to get updeck, past all the security guards and locks—essentially impossible, even if the entire downdecks revolted.

  The second way was out through the shitters. And once out, it was easy enough to get back in via an updeck airlock because each was fitted with lots of safeties for fool spacers who got themselves trapped outside. (Say, after a popper party like last night?)

  The trick, of course, was to get out through the shitter choppers and grinders alive. But according to Spartacus, he’d seen the plans of Station and confirmed that it was like every other station he’d ever visited. Failsafes were built into every egress for people intelligent enough to use them. In this case, if a spacer somehow found himself going down the shitter with the muck, there was a stop button at sieve level that would shut down the grinders and either let the trapped human go out the bottom or take the much more embarrassing option of calling for retrieval help.

  “Out the bottom?” I said. “Into space?”

  Spartacus wrinkled back pale lips. “Some spacers are most comfortable there, especially if they are only stopping at a station for a short visit. They may remove their space suits to bathe, but some give up bathing altogether. Their suits are their second skins, their oxygen, their defense, their strength. It is not uncommon for a spacer to be crazy within his suit.”

  “An EVA suit you’re talking about,” I said. “Like the ones in the lockers.” I’d touched them before, hung them up and been amazed at their light, filmy texture, impossibly thin for something that was supposed to guard against the frozen vacuum of space. To try to steal or wear one, Squirrel had told me, got you sent to damaged.

  Spartacus studied me. “You have never tried one?”

  I shook my head. He went to a panel in the wall, pressed something and had a compartment snap out with an EVA suit suspended from it, a pale, iridescent red. Spartacus scooped it off its rack and threw it to me. “Put it on.”

  I found the front seam and slid my right foot into the oversized boot. I gasped as the boot shrank to fit my foot. The material thickened slightly to absorb the extra mass.

  Spartacus laughed and urged me to try on the rest. I did and moments later looked like the skinniest, smallest spacer ever to walk free on Station. But the suit fit perfectly. I even pulled on the helmet and it blew to a perfectly clear sphere around my head.

  “Press your fingers hard to the wall,” Spartacus said.

  I did and found they stuck and I couldn’t release them until I’d given up and let my hand go slack.

  “The entire suit is an intelligent multi-shift polymer,” Spartacus said. “The parent of your cleaner boots. It will adapt to the largest man or smallest child, self-sealing, automatic compensation for pressure. Various things trigger its attachment power. The ribs on its back synthesize enough heat and oxygen for up to thirty minutes. This will be enough time.”

  “For what?” I said through my helmet.

  He seemed not to hear as he answered a viewer call on audio only, turned away so I couldn’t hear. When he turned back, I repeated the question. “What is thirty minutes enough time for?”

  He smiled. “For your eighteen children to exit the station and climb to my ship.”

  Twenty minutes later I was checking back through the lock to the downdecks, ignoring the guard’s abuse because my head was spinning. Spartacus swore he could personally deliver eighteen space suits down the main shitter and wait with them at the sieve. If I could bundle or otherwise protect my eighteen sexkids to survive the drop to the sieve, he’d help them don the suits there, hit the failsafe on the grinders, and crawl out of Station and up to Spartacus’s ship.

  Tomorrow night. Ship time zero hour. Nineteen hours away.

  It wasn’t a lot of time, but I already knew how to get the kids down, like some part of me had been working this forever. It involved ropes all the way down the garbage chutes and you don’t even want to know the inspiration for that. I also planned to steal the few oxygen masks we had on each level cause I wasn’t sure how breathable the air was down the main shitter. It went out the center of the station, where Squirrel said the gravity was to be next to nil, so my illiterate and unschooled head told me that if all that gunk wasn’t getting pushed down by gravity, it had to be sucked by the air going out, right? Like the vacuum that pulled stuff down when I clean-greened them.

  It bugged me that Spartacus hadn’t mentioned any of that.

  It bugged me that I couldn’t get my head straight on how we’d manage to get past the damaged without alarms.

  Or negotiate the suit change in a near-vacuum.

  Until I finally admitted to myself that I was brain-buzzed from too little sleep. Might as well have been popped. So I stole off to the tailpipe to sleep with Squirrel in his box. Only he wasn’t there.

  I crawled in anyway.

  I woke up to Nervy shaking my scrawny body and shouting so that sweat and spit flew off him like a sprinkler.

  “Wha—? What? What?”

  I sprang out of the box, knocking him over backwards. Saw that Blow was there with Nervy. Blow was a big, blocky boy who probably would have been the 13 bully except that he had the heart of a mouse. He also worshiped Squirrel and, by extension, me. Both he and Nervy were honking like they’d just come off really bad poppers. Their eyes were red. Their hands and legs shook.

  “Squirrel’s gone!” Nervy said. Blow nodded.

  “What time is it?” I demanded and fumbled out my timer. 0800. I’d slept almost three hours. Shit. The countdown was on now. I had to get moving. I rubbed my face and slapped my cheeks. I could smell myself. “He’ll turn up,” I said.

  “Uh-unh,” Nervy said
.

  “They came and told us,” Blow said.

  “What?” This was just bad enough to jitter me fully awake.

  “He came outta here awhile back, swearing and kicking stuff.”

  “Kids,” Blow said. “Kicking kids and stuff.”

  “Looking for you. Really scared looking. Then he took off for the updeck lock.”

  “Hour goes by.”

  “And they tell us he’s been sent to damaged.”

  It hit me like a kick in the chest. A Station uppie did that to me once—kicked me in the chest when he caught me cleaning some of his personal stuff down the party vents. It felt like this. My wind left me in a rush, my stomach flipped over and sent bad stuff up my throat, and the pain spread up to clap around my head like a nutcracker, squeezing.

  I slid back down in the box. “No.”

  “Yeah!” said Nervy like he thought I didn’t get it.

  Time. There was no time. No time to grieve. No time to back down. Still—

  “Did they say why?” I whispered.

  Both Nervy and Blow shook their heads in the top opening of my box and looking up at that made me want to be sick again. Instead I reached up my hands and grabbed the top edges of the box. Made myself climb out. “Oh, Unified Mother,” I prayed under my breath when my feet hit the deck.

  “There was one thing,” said Nervy.

  “Yeah,” said Blow. “Before he left.”

  “He said he had to save you.”

  I turned to face them. “Who from?”

  They shrugged together. “Spartacus?”

  I knew the moment Nervy and Blow had said the name Spartacus that I’d somehow been had. And maybe I should’ve just tried to back away. Hide? Go to the Station managers? Stay ignorant.

  But all I could think was Why? Why did Squirrel even know the name? I mean, maybe I’d said it to him when he was popped, but it was just a name. Why’d he gone chasing after me updeck? And what had he done to get sent down to damaged?

  That’s why I was keying my way down a level at a time, avoiding the elevator and its security, using the progressive number codes on the deck locks and tempted to jam them all open. Cause what did it matter if the big and little kids mixed, really? We were all screwed, literally, figuratively, every which way.