The Year’s Best Military SF & Space Opera (34 page)

As I watched them go down the hall I thought about inviting them to eat dinner with me, then reconsidered. I didn’t need to form any new attachments. I’d either be gone or dead within a few weeks.

The next day in my hub-based control center, I kicked off from the interface station and floated to the wall hiding my salvation. I resisted the urge to run my hand along the section where the door would appear. On the other side, exposed to the bitter cold asteroid belt, was a four-by-three-meter external equipment blister I’d quietly and secretly converted into an escape pod.

I moved on to the robot launch tube, cycled it and opened the hatch. Burnt smelling air poofed into the cabin as I pulled out the basketball-sized mining drone called a Mining Operations Manager, or MOM. Once I locked it into the fixture on my test bench, I changed its status to inactive then opened the main access cover. I slipped my hand inside and removed the mostly empty nano replicator bladder. The “mostly empty” designation could get me killed if station security found out. Nano-device manufacture was strictly controlled and each tiny robot made for a MOM had to be loaded into the MOM. But nothing could count the replicators that left the MOM out on an ice ball, the number of times they reproduced or the number that returned with it. This bladder was still a quarter full.

With a series of coded taps against the MOM’s inner shell, I directed the remaining replicators into a hidden conduit that allowed them to flow into the empty spaces in the station’s hull structure, where they would hide until I needed them.

A loud beep announced the door opening and when I turned the breath caught in my throat. Bernard Eisenhower drifted into the room. He wore his trademark half smile that never reached his eyes. He could be beating a suspect or chatting up a pretty girl and the smile was always the same. I tried to force myself to relax. He probably wore augmentations that helped him read and record fluctuations in body heat, heart rate and eye movements.

“Hello, Clarke. How goes the dowsing? Your magic water stick still working?”

I smiled and pushed my feet into the cleats at my workbench. “Business is slow. But given time, I’m able to find enough ice to keep us going.”

He worked his way around the room, looking into every open device, picking up and examining each scroll screen. He nodded repeatedly to himself.

“My boys told me about your little threat yesterday.”

“They should leave me alone. I’m just trying to do my job.”

“No, you aren’t doing your job, Clarke. Instead, you’re playing a dangerous game with 
Arturo Station
’s water supply. That makes it a Security issue, which is why I sent my men to talk with you in the first place.”

Eisenhower might be a bully and abusive with his power, but he wasn’t totally stupid. After my first week on 
Arturo Station
, when I realized the highly addictive productivity enhancement drug called Canker had been put into my food—and that of nearly every worker on board—I started planning how to get out of the situation. That had been nearly a year ago, and much of the ice I collected had been stored in secret tanks I’d hidden inside the hull, but the official ice I “found” for the station had dropped at a steady rate ever since. Making management and security think we had a limited supply was my only insurance if my escape plot were ever discovered.

“My predecessor used up all the close ice balls. I have to send my bots further and further out. It takes time. Maybe management should move the station to richer hunting grounds or better yet, tighten up their water reclamation system.”

“Bullshit, Clarke. There’s ice out there close. Our scanners see it.”

“In small amounts. It would take twice as long if I tried to mine every little grapefruit-sized nugget out there.”

Eisenhower glared at me. “Your replacement is on the way. I’m sure he’ll have better luck.”

I snorted and shrugged.

“You don’t believe that?”

“Hell no. If my replacement were on the way you wouldn’t be wasting your time talking to me. My corpsicle would already be tumbling out toward Jupiter.”

His smile almost broadened and he started toward the hatch. “Don’t push it, Clarke. We have backups you don’t know about and we 
will
 send you spinning to Jupiter if that ice tonnage doesn’t come up a lot and very quickly.”

I exited at my level and Nora was waiting again, this time just outside the lift. Her face lit up and she started chattering.

“You’re really from Earth?”

“Yep.”

“I was born here,” she said. “Momma too. She was in the first generation born on the station.”

“So she’s never been off of 
Arturo
?”

Nora shook her head as we approached my door. “No. Momma said they’ll never let us leave.”

Many of the workers would be afraid to leave. Canker was an ugly thing. It was named for the sores that formed around a user’s mouth during the long and nasty withdrawal period. It left scars on most and even killed some. 
Arturo Station
 was just one of dozens that operated outside the Earth and Mars protective zones, so unless those governments had overwhelming evidence these atrocities were going on—something that would get a lot of press attention—then they would ignore the rumors. They had too many of their own problems to go looking for more.

Nora and her mother would likely spend their entire lives as slaves in this illicit bioware factory.

“So why aren’t you in school?” I said as I opened my door.

She shrugged. “I’ve learned everything they have to teach me.”

I snorted. “Sure you have. So you’re an expert on Mars history, European literature and calculus?”

“They don’t teach us that stuff. But I know how to clean bio-vats and assemble crystal matrices.”

I just stared at her as she slipped past me and into my cabin. She looked around, then turned back to me.

“I’ll clean your cabin for five credits!”

“Huh?”

“Or I can mend clothes? Anything like that. I need to earn some money. Seth has been coming a lot more since I lost my duct cleaning job. I hate Seth.”

I scratched my beard. “Sure.”

I locked the door open again and started giving her instructions on what to clean. She worked fast, folding clothes, shelving books, separating my trash into the proper recycling bags.

I hated this station and its criminal overlords since I first realized I’d been tricked, but had always kind of blamed myself for my own stupidity in coming. That wasn’t the case for these people. They had no choice. They were born on the station and probably didn’t even exist in any citizen records outside this place, but were still made to pay for food and a sleeping berth. It wasn’t mean or even greedy, it was evil.

“Well?” she said. “What now?”

“That’s enough cleaning for now. Calvin? Please transfer fifty credits to Nora’s account.”

Her eyes widened a bit and she shook her head. “That amount of work wasn’t even worth five.”

“It was to me.”

She bit her lip and stared at me for a second before darting down the hall.

“This is fantastic,” Nora said in a whisper.

I could barely see her mouth below the interface goggles, but it was stretched into a wide smile. I glanced down at the scroll screen echoing what she saw. The MOM’s work lights swept along one of 
Arturo Station
’s four rotation rings, revealing a complex field of conduits, access hatches, antennae and stenciled identification labels.

“Could you really find that jerk’s cabin from the outside?” she said, as she tapped and spun the thumb controls on the tele-operation yoke like an expert.

“If I knew his cabin address,” I said, then briefly took the controls to zoom the MOM’s camera down to read some of the hull identifier text. It read R1S4-43. “These station habitat rings are assembled from hundreds of identical wedge-shaped sections. One for each cabin. So it’s just easier to keep the construction identification tags as a cabin address.”

“Cool!” she said and took the controls yoke away from me again. “How did you use that camera zoom?”

I showed her and suddenly the view slaved to my scroll screen started zooming all over the station.

“I bet you spy on people all the time!”

“I do not,” I said and took the yoke from her again. “And I think this lesson is over.”

“Noooo!”

“We can do it again later.”

I helped her remove the interface goggles. Her hair floated nearly straight up and she wore a wicked grin.

“You have a great job.”

“You didn’t think so until I let you drive a robot.”

Nora’s mother refused to let her come with me at first. After nearly an hour of Nora’s begging, her mother finally allowed her to accompany me to my hub control center for the day instead of staying in her cabin alone. I thought she might like to watch me launch and retrieve some robots. She’d been fascinated for a while by the video feeds coming back from some of the MOMs as they shepherded their flock of nano-disassemblers through the process of stripping the rock and minerals away, leaving the remaining ice in strange, twisted, lacy sculptures that were returned to the station by the MOM.

But she eventually got bored with the video feed, and started playing in the microgravity. My control center was really too small of a space for her to be flailing and bumping around, so I had to do something.

“I like having you for a friend,” she said and then glanced away as if embarrassed that she said it aloud.

“I like you too,” I said and then felt suddenly and horribly guilty again. My makeshift escape pod was finished. Using nothing but nano-scale robots, I’d bypassed critical systems without sounding alarms and had slowly separated the equipment blister from the station hub. The little ship contained a minimalist acceleration sling and enough air and water for the two-week trip to Mars.

So why did I feel so damned guilty? She wasn’t my kid, but when my hands started shaking I knew I couldn’t leave her here. I started rearranging the computer model of my escape pod, adding a second acceleration sling, trying to find places to attach more tanks. I’d need near twice as much water and air. I’d also need more fuel to get that extra mass to Mars. Food? Should I take more food or let her suffer the same excruciating withdrawal I would?

Felicia’s voice echoed in my head, telling me no, that I couldn’t take Nora. I looked up at her canister locked in its special mount, but ignored her and kept working.

“What are you doing now?” Nora said from right beside me.

I flinched and closed the scroll screen. “Just some work.”

She reached out and touched Felicia’s canister. “What was she like?”

I tensed up. I hadn’t talked to anyone about Felicia since her death and sure never expected to start with a nine-year-old kid, but as I stared at Nora’s open and curious face, I realized I actually did want to talk about her.

“She was very brave and smart. She laughed a lot and loved jokes. And singing. I think she would have liked you.”

“You loved her a lot?”

I nodded, the lump in my throat preventing me from saying more.

“And you still talk to her?”

“Yeah,” I croaked.

Then she looked at me and squinted. “Does she ever talk back?”

“Sort of,” I said. “I can still hear her in my mind sometimes.”

“How did she die?”

I swallowed hard. I’d never had to say the truth out loud, in my own words. The helmet-cam video of the incident had told the story back on Phobos, so the was never an investigation. I was reprimanded and reassigned, but never once had to talk about it.

My stomach clenched tight and my pulse raced. I’d always hated the cold vacuum, but after Felicia’s death, I went to great extremes to avoid it. Herding robots from a warm, safe workstation had been as close to cold space as I intended to get. Until I formed my escape plan.

I blinked at Nora and took a deep breath.

“We lived on Phobos station. We were both surface equipment technicians. One day while we were outside I started goofing around. I jumped up on a big rock that gave way and rolled out from under me. I knew better. I knew to not step on boulders and still . . . Anyway, the big rock rolled down a slope and on top of Felicia. The gravity was low, but the rock had mass and momentum. It tore her suit and pinned her down. By the time I got the rock off of her and fixed her suit, it was too late.”

She touched the canister again.

“It was an accident,” she whispered. “But that didn’t stop you from feeling it was your fault?”

I nodded. How could a freaking nine-year-old kid understand those kinds of feelings?

Felicia was right. I couldn’t take Nora with me. It would be wrong to separate her from her mother, even for her own good. And of course I’d be instantly arrested at Mars for being a child abductor. I’d have to find a way to take them both.

“I think my mom would like you,” she said with an impish grin. “I asked her to invite you to our cabin for dinner, but she said that probably wasn’t a good idea. It might make Seth mad.”

“Is he your dad?”

“I think so, but my mom won’t admit it. He spends the night with mom sometimes and she says I have to be nice to him since he’s her boss.”

I swallowed and felt the panic rising in me again. I had to do something.

When her shift ended, Wendy came to collect Nora.

She hesitated, looking uncomfortable at first, then her gaze hardened. “You sent two payments of fifty credits each to Nora’s account. She cleaned for you?”

“Yeah, my cabin and then she cleaned up in here,” I said and motioned around my still cluttered work bay.

Nora looked momentarily surprised, then immediately hid it.

“If she wants to come back, I can teach her how to scrub down the robots. They have to be cleaned after every trip out and I hate doing it.”

Wendy stared at me, as if trying to read my mind, read my true motivations for being with her daughter.

“There are video recordings of each time she’s come to see me. I’ll give you access to them.”

Then her hard expression collapsed and she looked twice as tired as before. “Sorry, I just . . .”