TableofContents

by Low Bo

  * * *

  Two by two, the readouts went dead, and Spinacre went from disbelief to anger to full-blown, eye-bulging, capillary-popping rage. As he alternated between incoherent sputtering and equally incoherent screamed invectives, the remainder of his strike force went from amusement to concern to glancing toward one another and coming to the unspoken understanding that where they were was the last place they wanted to be. In fact, several of the assembled troops took the opportunity provided by Spinacre's tantrum to absent themselves from the immediate vicinity altogether.

  And none too soon. Spinacre suddenly went deathly pale and frighteningly quiet, except for the quiver that vibrated his entire body.

  "Fall in and prepare to engage the enemy." So focused was he on his anger and his mission that he took his place at the front of the column and marched them out the gate without taking time to don armor.

  His focus continued to propel him up Gate Street, totally oblivious to the fact that the ranks of the strike force behind him were melting away, one or two soldiers at a time. Some merely stopped in the middle of the alley, shook their heads, turned around and walked back toward the station. Others had their attention caught by people peeking out of doorways, friends and acquaintances who beckoned them into safety. And the few who tried to draw a bead on the residents of BackGate found themselves silently and efficiently taken out of action.

  By the time Spinacre reached the town square, he was in supreme command of a force of five. Needless to say, the force that stepped and rolled and crutched to surround his was much, much bigger.

  "Commander Spinacre, I presume?"

  The man whirled toward the sound of his name, coming face to face with Flossa and Billem. His look of surprise gave way to one of disdain as he raked his eyes across Flossa. "What do you want, whore?"

  In the next second, he was lying on his back several feet from where he'd been standing, his body having followed his chin in an elegant arch translated from the tip of one of Billem's crutches. Flossa raised one eyebrow and the corner of her mouth in Billem's direction. "Now how do you expect him to learn any manners when you don't explain his mistake? Besides, I am a whore... or was."

  Billem shrugged and grinned down at the woman. "Sure, but he made it sound like there was something wrong with that. And besides, I didn't like his attitude."

  "There's a whole lot I don't like about him. Right now, however, we have more important things to deal with." She shifted her attention to the five SpaceMil soldiers standing unarmed and uncertain in the square. "I'm Flossa Manderos, Mayor of BackGate. This is Sergeant Billem Simmons, Space Military Forces, Medical Discharge. As you can see, he is very much alive, as are the other thirty-five 'resettled' war casualties you were told we'd murdered. The mission you're on is based on a lie, which is not your fault. You are also severely outnumbered and seriously outgunned. So here's the deal. Surrender right now and you'll be released unharmed."

  There was a scant moment of silence before the "deal" was unanimously approved. Two of the soldiers headed back toward the spaceport; the other three asked for sanctuary. No one asked what would happen to Spinacre.

  * * *

  "Milhouser dropped by this morning on his way to his office."

  Flossa input a last number into her datapad, chuckling even as she did so. "Checking on plans for the wedding again?"

  "Not this time," Billem replied as he double-checked the tally and signed off on the bar receipts. "He thought we'd be interested in the latest communication from Central."

  "And..."

  "The formal charges he filed against Spinacre have been tabled."

  Flossa looked up, cocking her head to one side. "Do we need to start making arrangements to disappear the kid?"

  Billem grinned. "Not unless he can't handle the promotion they handed him. Captain Milhouser has been named permanent second-in-command of Ysbet Tertiary, until such time as he chooses to request reassignment and independent of whoever gets assigned command. His second piece of news was that the new Commander is due any day now and has sent word ahead that she'd like to meet with Backwater's leadership at your earliest convenience. He said she stressed that it was a request and only at your convenience."

  "Interesting. What's his take on her?"

  "He thinks you'll like her. He does."

  Flossa nodded and made a note to herself. "I still don't understand why Spinacre did what he did or why he seemed to hate BackGate so much."

  "It might have something to do with the fact that he was a bit less than forthright with SpaceMil regarding his background. Such as the fact that he was born Mickey Spinner, father unknown, and grew up outside the spaceport on Keslinger. In a house very much like this one run by his mother."

  "Fancy that. Here I was thinking the bastard was just your basic nutcase bugger, and it turns out he had issues."

  "Which doesn't keep him from being a nutcase," Billem chuckled. "But that's not why the charges were tabled. No need to court-martial someone who's been permanently consigned to the Violent Patients Installation on Lector 2."

  "I do love it when things work out," commented Flossa before returning to the datapad.

  "Flossa, there's something I've been wanting to ask you."

  The woman looked up, her lips together in contained amusement "Yes?"

  "Why?"

  "Why what?"

  "Why did you take us in... you and the town... the way you did?"

  Flossa leaned back in her chair and smiled. "A guy walks into a whorehouse." She paused, and when the only reaction from Billem was a raised eyebrow, she continued. "He's a shiny new private, headed out for his first war, and it's the last planetfall before the fun and games start. So he and his buddies all have twelve-hour passes and the predictable desire to make the most of those twelve hours.

  "Saint Magdaline alone knows why he picks the girl he does; she's young-a couple of years younger than he is-and not doing much in the way of trying to sell herself. But he puts his money on the counter, takes her by the hand and they go to her room. A little while later, he comes out-alone-and asks how much for the night, much to the amusement of his buddies, who've finished their business and gotten down to serious drinking. Between what he has in his pockets and what he borrows from his buddies, he pays the fee and disappears into the back. The next time his buddies see him is right before lift-off."

  "And probably ragged him for months thereafter."

  Flossa nodded. "Probably. And would have ragged him even more if they'd known what actually happened in the girl's room. It was her second night in the business. The first night-well, let's just say that the customer who won the auction had been none too gentle. The boy may have been green, but he wasn't dumb, and once he found out about it, he bought up her time to give her a night to recover. They talked most of the night, and that was all. Except for him holding her as she went to sleep."

  There was a long moment of silence, until Flossa, speaking very softly, added, "I never forgot that kindness, Billem. I've owed you for that for over twenty-five years. I'm just glad that things came around so I could pay the debt."

  "I'll... be... damned." He reached out and took one of Flossa's hands, raising it to his lips and laying a gentle kiss on her fingertips. Whatever he started to say was interrupted by the cheerful din of arriving employees. As he levered himself up and reached for his crutches, he leaned over and whispered, "Let's work on balancing the books after closing time."

  Flossa's answering chuckle held anticipation that made the one-legged man grin.

  BOTTOM OF THE FOOD CHAIN

  Jody Lynn Nye

  Hap stared up at the big screen of the vidscreen with his mouth hanging open. A smiling, elegant lady was enjoying a dainty bite of Orange-O's from a glistening crystal dish. She looked about his own age, twenty-two, but her blond hair was shining and golden, not dusty taupe like his, and her blue eyes gleamed clear and bright. He followed the silver spoon full of gleaming red circles all the way up to her pink li
ps, which rounded pleasantly around the bowl of the spoon, then imagined the tangy goodness of the smooth-textured O's as they burst upon the tongue. He'd never tasted any Orange-O's, but that was what the announcer said eating them was like. His own tongue traced its way around his mouth, wishing he had some Orange-O's. They must taste better than anything: Sugar Star Bursts, YogoLinks, Zanzibars, even chocolate. He'd never had any of those, either, but he wished with all his heart he could.

  "Come on, youngster!" Merg ordered him. The stocky sixty-something tilted his shaved and scarred head toward the corridor. "We've got to fix that damned conduit, or the whole place is going to be hip deep in sludge by second shift."

  Reluctantly, Hap pulled himself away from the screen, just as the woman took another taste of Orange-O's. His watering mouth dried up in a hurry when he got a whiff of the leaky pipe waiting for him around the corner. Reality bit, if gingerly and with fingers pinching the nose shut against the smell.

  Not much of the elegant food he saw advertised on any of the Station's vidscreen channels ever got down to Belowstairs. Certainly not in its original form, and not to the likes of Hap. He hungered for it. Oh, he wasn't hungry in the literal sense. He had plenty to eat; the powers that be wouldn't let anyone starve, however inconvenient they might be. The Earth-Gov Convention of 2265 dictated that every human being was entitled to basic elements of survival: shelter, air, water, food, clothing and education. At the very lowest levels of society, those were basic, indeed, amounting to just better than exposure, suffocation, starvation and ignorance. Delta Station, orbiting Proxima Centauri along a major shipping route, was far enough from Earth that few inspectors ever came to see how well their program was working. They took the word of those Upstairs that everybody was being cared for. Vids showed the clean dormitories the dispossessed lived in, the well stocked cafeterias where they ate, the classrooms where their minds were fed. Those were just as much fantasies as any of the soaps Hap watched, nothing like the garbage-filled corridors and storage chambers where everyone staked out a piece of floor they sometimes had to defend with their lives.

  Hap could sleep on anything. At the moment he had a piece of shock insulation that had been removed from a damaged airlock Upstairs. It lay in a plastic shipping case that had been used to bring a couch for some rich person to the station. He wore a shipsuit that mostly fit, and had good boots that had come off a corpse that had been strangled and dumped into a disposer unit on a higher deck. It was the food that griped him.

  Nothing was wasted Belowstairs. He and all the other misfits and rejects lived on what was essentially treated and reclaimed sewage. Everything dumped by the folks who lived Upstairs went through the recycler. It was broken down into its elemental particles, reformed into 'recognizable' food, and available at the push of a button by the folks Belowstairs. Comestibles, anything without heavy metal or toxic components, could be recycled nearly infinitely. The common joke was "First they eat it, then we eat it. Then we eat it again." Newcomers, the recent down-and-out, got sick when they heard that, but the ones born down there, like Hap, didn't like it, but were used to it. The only vestige of the welfare state that supposedly existed was that when someone got sent Below, the daily rations available in the food machines were increased by one. Whether the person to whom they were assigned got to eat them was left open to chance or muscle.

  In an effort to keep the underclass out of the way of the privileged, only one lift on each side stretched between the decks that kept the station functioning and those facilities enjoyed by the upper class. The crew who maintained the engines and power and sanitation plants came down infrequently, either under an agreed truce or accompanied by a troop of armed guards. Traffic only came from one way; you couldn't get on the lifts without an identification chip, and you couldn't get an identification chip without a job, and you couldn't get a job without an identification chip, and you couldn't apply for a job unless you could get Upstairs to the employment offices.

  Connecting Belowstairs's decks were staircases, slides, poles, ladders and the occasional lift. No stairs led Up. Hap assumed that Upstairs was structured in much the same way, though their lifts worked all of the time. And they didn't smell of urine and dead things. (Officially, neither did the lifts Belowstairs. Anyone caught defecating in a lift got spaced or recycled, no appeal, but everyone took a leak in them once in a while; it was a long walk to the loos, and the shafts ran gravity-wise down toward the Core. God only knew what the base of the lifts smelled like, but as long as Hap didn't have to clean it, it wasn't his problem.)

  Mutants, the mentally-ill, science experiments gone wrong, you name it, they lived Belowstairs. If no one wanted to look at them, they ended up there with the rest of the trash. If they lost their jobs and their companies refused to pay for their repatriation to their planet of origin, they were 'relocated' Belowstairs. Even a few so-called rebels against society decided to make their home where they were no longer a number. Down below, they weren't much of anything. No one cared, except officially. They were an embarrassment to a government that wanted desperately to pretend the underclass didn't exist, that poverty and ignorance had been legislated compassionately away. Well, Hap, thought, following Merg's grunted commands to heft the cracked and stinking pipe while he patched it with plascrete, he was there to tell them they were wrong. He'd never had a school lesson in his life. He'd learned reading and history from the kidvids. Being a cipher meant he had no one to ask why so many of the history programs contradicted one another.

  "You about finished?" asked Amlin. The burly, one-eyed woman had been a guard Upstairs until she was dismissed for brutality. Now she worked for the Chief. "Himself wants to see you."

  "That's not proper grammar," Hap said, and was rewarded with a backhanded slap.

  "Who are you, being uppity about talking? Trying to prove you're better than someone?" Amlin asked, with a growl. "The Chief wants you, if you're so fussy. The dispenser plate on his synthesizer is wobbling. It dumped his morning coffee down the drain, so I wouldn't correct anything he says if you can't breathe vacuum."

  * * *

  As in any untenable situation, someone managed to take advantage of a void in order to rise to the uppermost stratum of power. In the case of Belowstairs it was more like floating like scum to the top of a sewage vat, but Gormley Parker preferred to think of himself as the chief bottom feeder. To give him credit, he wasn't acting purely out of self-interest. He did care about the other forlorn souls around him, and he always saw that they were provided for-as long as he got his share first.

  All unwanted, broken, outdated and frankly obsolete technology ended up passing under Chief Gormley's eye. The exception to castoffs from Upstairs was a food synthesizer, his bribe for releasing a shipment of the precious devices that had been delivered accidentally two years ago to the service dock instead of the goods ports above. Synthesizers broke down frequently and had to be replaced at great expense from the manufacturing colonies on Europa-Jupiter. A standoff had ensued between Gormley and Upstairs, until the powers that be threatened to invade with the full security force, gas every living being unconscious or worse, and take back the machines, but the Chief countered that before a single guard stepped out of the lift every machine would be destroyed and broken down to its component elements, and by the way, the threat was being digitally recorded for playback to every news agency in the galaxy. Would they care to reconsider their approach? How much better it would be, the Chief had said, leaning back in his reclaimed executive leather-covered armchair with his hands clasped comfortably above his round belly and his face serene, to make a deal in a peaceful manner.

  The round face wasn't serene that morning.

  "What took your pathetic asses so long to get here?" the Chief bellowed, as Merg and Hap came into his office, a former storage hangar. The fifteen-meter, bare metal ceilings amplified his voice, making Merg cringe. "If you don't answer me smarter the next time you'll find yourself ground up and served over ice cream!" Ha
p admired the Chief with all his heart, so he didn't mind the threats. Under Merg's nervous eye Hap examined the synthesizer. It was a modest-size machine, just over two meters in height and a meter wide with a hatch that opened two meters to reveal a hinged grille. It was hanging in down position, as if it had just dumped unacceptable food into the mini-disposer tank in the base. "The damned thing comes up when you order food, then plops down and stays there," Gormley said.

  "Nothing to it," Hap assured the Chief. The two workmen unrolled their tool bags.

  "It'll be the activator chip," Merg said, as they searched for a replacement. Hap nodded. They had plenty of those. Whenever a machine was dumped Below, scavengers descended on it for usable parts. Hap and Merg were part of a good-sized force employed by the Chief to keep the technology running. Anyone else caught hoarding parts was subject to a gang beating, all the while the Chief gave his speech about deploring violence. Hap understood that a certain amount of force was necessary to keep order Belowstairs. When subtlety failed.

  "Hah!" the Chief said. "You see that!" He pointed at the vid on the wall opposite his desk. "We're on the news!"

  Hap glanced up from his work. Some well-dressed woman was ranting. "We've got to do something about the disgusting situation! The scum inhabiting our lower levels..."

  The scene changed to a view of Belowstairs. Hap recognized it as stock footage. That's all Upstairs had. They might control the government, the media and the supply line, but their influence stopped at the dividing deck. The last time that they'd tried to send a cameraman down to get some fresh footage, he'd been swarmed the second his lift hit bottom. Hap and his mates had stolen everything he had brought with him, leaving him naked in the elevator except for his ID. Yeah, same old vid, he reflected, seeing a mutant shuffle from one side of the screen to the other. Poor Domble, with no more brain than a drinks dispenser, looked fearsome and disgusting with his shrunken skin and gigantic teeth. He'd been dead about five years now.