ASIM_issue_54 (12 page)

My cargo. Two things make this run a killer: the cargo and the destination. The Ketzal is a star graveyard, full of supernova remnants and mean little neutron stars. My cargo hold is full—by mass, not volume—of the most exotic materials in the universe. Condensate. Degenerate matter. Starstuff flung into the void by the death throes of supergiants that burned hot and died young. It’s unsafe, expensive, and essential to modern industry. My bread and butter, or so I hope.

Nothing you’d want to share a bunk with, though. I check the containment field holding my deadly cargo in check. One of the readouts is orange, indicating a 90% integrity failure. A hair further, and I wouldn’t have a ship anymore.

* * *

The Glass Cat
was mine, every wire and bolt of her, earned while I was working journeyman’s runs out to long-period comets on a converted junk scour. A
rented
junk scour. Merciful God, that was hell, but I was too young to know it. Back then, I thought anything was better than the life my parents had made. They were scientists, first generation spacers. Achingly poor. I became a miner because miners sometimes get paid.

The Glass Cat
waited for me, her nose snugged up against Siberia Station’s docking ring. I punched my code into the dockside doors and let the machine swallow my card, wincing mentally as it deducted its fees. The station’s great doors undogged, and I heaved them open.
The Glass Cat
accepted my code and opened its doors for me in turn.

I caught a rung of the ladder up to
The Cat
’s cockpit. With a practised lunge I grabbed hold of the G-railing and pulled myself up.
The Cat
’s cockpit was pristine: soft peach-colored foam flooring thoughtfully glued down everywhere I might need a floor, black-and-silver access panels with their standardized labels in bright colors, and my beautiful chair. I ran my hand across the back of the headrest, then settled in. The chair sensed my weight and molded itself to my body. The console took a cue from the chair and lit up, raising the preflight buttons and offering them to my hands.

“Hey, you,” I said to my ship. I began my prelaunch checklist. An icon flashed, indicating a query from Station Control. I touched it, expecting a standard automated request. Instead, I heard a man’s voice.

“
Glass Cat
Primary, this is Control. We have a request for your presence at Control Primary.”

“Control, this is the
The Glass Cat
. I thought I already had clearance.”

“Ah, no,
Glass Cat
. Have your primary present himself at Control Primary within the hour.”

“I will,” I said. “
The Glass Cat
out.” Then I switched off the comm. “Screw you too, Control.”

* * *

I set the radiation scrubbers throughout the ship as high as they will go. Better safe than irradiated, and there is a good chance I’ll be going aft to check on my cargo. Best to give the little machines time to work their magic. I grit my teeth, and call up the telltales on my stardrive. If that’s down, I’m doomed.

The computer answers me as fast as breathing. (With all the mining robots stowed and inactive, it has cycles to spare.) It brings up the readings from my ship’s Hawking generator, and I let out the breath I’ve been holding. The generator is ticking away quietly, all systems green.

The Glass Cat
’s heart is still beating. Aside from the radiation—and I have to laugh at that, aside from the radiation, indeed—environmentals all check out. The telescope and communications array are intact, and my computer’s self-diagnostics show no faults, for whatever that’s worth. The red lights in cargo containment glare at me.

I query the propulsion subsystems. Everything looks fine. There are no lights, no fault warnings, and I begin to close the screen. Then I stop. I had left the Hawking generator’s telltales open for my own peace of mind. I can hear it ticking steadily in time to the surging energies it contains. Those generators never quite go cold. There is always a stream of particles bubbling up through the folds of crenelated reality inside them. Mass and energy. It has to go somewhere.

The exhaust ports show zero throughput. None. I shiver, my hand hovering over the trigger for the diagnostics. There are things I can fix, even out here in the void, and things I can’t. I wonder for a moment if I really want to know. I could take my chances, throttle up the engines, and see what happens.

I still can’t remember the explosion that put me here.

I let my hands fall back onto the controls. I query the computer for a diagnostic scan of the exhaust ports, and turn back to the radiation monitors. The corridor shows green, the cargo hold yellow. That won’t last long. I unstrap myself from the chair and kick off lightly. My head swims. There is one diagnostic I’ve forgotten: Mine. Never mind. I don’t need the computer to tell me that I feel like I’ve been stepped on. My hands don’t look like aliens welded to the ends of my arms anymore, which I take as a good sign.

I glide over to the pod that holds my EVA suit and hit the release. The door slides halfway open, then sticks. I swear, and smack it with the palm of my hand until it opens. Goddamn sliding doors came with the ship. They are unreliable, unsafe, and expensive to replace. A mere repair won’t hold past two landings at best. I shrug on my suit and cycle the door to the corridor before I have time to get scared.

Radiation makes me itch. It’s purely psychosomatic, but it bothers me anyway. I do a visual check of the scrubbers. They’re fresh, which means that they can soak plenty of grays before I’ll need to replace them. Their readouts are all green, so far. I start the timer on my suit and step into the cargo hold.

The hold is the biggest open space on my ship. My deadly, expensive cargo hangs in the middle of that space: a ball of shining coralline starstuff, hideous blue light pulsing from its constantly-shifting poles. Tethers reach out to hold the anvil-shaped containment pads just close enough to keep the exotic matter at bay. I push off and check each mooring in turn, trying to stay as far away from the shimmering mass of frozen starstuff as I can. Not that it makes any difference. If the scrubbers fail me, I’m already dead. Inside the suit, my skin crawls.

I make my way around to the back of the cargo hold, and now I see what generated the warning lights. A section of the hold’s wall is marred by rainbow arcs of corroded metal. A containment pad floats loose inside a tangle of tether cables. I put a hand against the wall to kill my forward momentum, and just float for a moment, doing a gut-level assessment of the damage. It’s bad, very bad. A quick count tells me that one of the pads is completely gone, probably annihilated when it fell into the starstuff. Not good, but … I run the numbers in my head.

No. Short two pads, I won’t make it home. It’s a miracle I’ve made it here. In theory, I could rig the remaining pads to hold it, but in reality the least bit of shimmy in the lines would throw the load off-balance and probably blow up my ship. I consider the tangled mess of cable and conduit in front of me, then I thumb open the control pad on my wrist and tell the computer to send me a robot.

* * *

I couldn’t think of a reason why Control Primary would want to see me.

It was damned rude to pull a miner off her ship so close to launch. I started to get nervous. Was there some reg I’d overlooked in my excitement? I was always meticulous—I always
wanted
to be meticulous, I corrected myself. Everyone slips. With me, though, there was always someone like Arens looking over my shoulder, saying “Did you check that? Are you sure? Why don’t you let me.” And if I slip up? Then it’s “Look, she doesn’t know what she’s doing, she’s incompetent, she’s dangerous.”

I worked my way down out of the docking ring to where Siberia Station spins up gravity for the homes and offices of its crew. The halls were crowded with men. I did see the occasional woman, somebody’s wife walking calmly ahead of her minder. They lifted the official ban years ago, but slogans like “You’ll fry your eggs!” take a while to leach out of the imagination.

My mother went to space despite the scaremongering about cosmic rays, and I don’t dare show less nerve. Other spacers think that makes me stupid. A second-generation spacer woman must be damaged, chromosomally or mentally or both, right? I caught myself glaring at the people in the halls, and forced myself to stop. Don’t pick fights. I’ll be damned if I’m giving up the Ketzal now.

I’m as good as anyone in the void, and if Control Primary has forgotten that, I’ll just have to remind him.

* * *

I glance at the clever machine hanging beside me in the cargo hold. Its gross manipulators blur, splicing the ragged ends of cables together. Points of white light glitter as it makes pinprick welds in the control tether. It keeps its fine manipulators folded away within the silver lozenge of its body. Those are strictly for particle work.

My robots are my livelihood, as much as
The Glass Cat
itself. They are the best semiautonomous matter-handlers money can buy, hardened against the worst deep space can throw at them, and more versatile than some lovers I’ve had. They resemble insystem asteroid-mining drones the way my ship resembles a solid rocket lifter.

I turn back to the containment pad, looking for another way around the fried logic pathways. I don’t trust these repairs to a machine that lacks an oh-shit reflex. I want to rub my nose, run my hand through my hair. I want out of the damned hold, out of this damned suit.

I disengage my suit’s multitool and power up the containment pad. This time the circuits hold, and I feel the pad tugging me away from the wall. The robot plays a chime over the comm and folds its manipulators away. Finished. I release the pad, and let its internal logic guide it back up to the starstuff.

I kick off as hard as I can and sail to the door. Solo mining work has its benefits: no one’s watching, so I don’t even try to hide my haste to get out of the hold and away from my cargo’s hideous light. It takes forever to cycle, and then I’m out.

Once in the control room, I send a few more robots down to clean up the wall in the cargo hold. Then I bring up the exhaust system’s diagnostics. It still shows zero activity, and an unspecified fault. I’m going to have to make another visual check. The radiation readouts for the generator and its room are green, but I’ve kept my suit on just in case.

My Hawking generator cannot be serviced while the ship is underway. I don’t even have the equipment to open it safely out here. It’s my understanding that doing so would be a Bad Idea anyway. Better to rip the whole thing out and slot in a new one. It has built-in diagnostics, and either they function properly or I’m dead.

I check the places where the generator connects to my ship, easing my way past its nest of conduits and leads. Everything checks out until I get to the generator’s interface with the
The Cat
’s exhaust system. That’s when I find the “unspecified fault.” The bottom of my stomach drops out. I stop, and stare.

The exhaust shunt is missing. There are tool marks around where it had been. It has been
removed
.

* * *

I walked up to the man in the reception alcove. He ignored me. I waited. I tapped my toes, and folded my hands behind my back. After maybe a minute, I serenaded him with the loudest, phlegmiest throat-clearing I could manage. He looked up.

“Yes?”

“I’m from
The Glass Cat
, here to see Control Primary?”

The man looked down at his console, his angelic face marred by an ugly frown. He said, “You were supposed to send your Primary.” I opened my mouth to insist that I
am
my ship’s Primary, but he cut me off. “Never mind. He’ll see you now.” I stared. The receptionist looked up at me like I was an idiot. “In there,” he said, jerking his head toward the hatch.

Control Primary looked up when I walked in, and smiled. “Ah, Mira!” he said.

“Osman,” I said. A huge man, but squat, Osman looked like he had been installed behind the desk and the rest of the station built around him. He was an ex-miner, a lifelong spacer, and I should have called him “sir” but I hated how informal he was with me. Everyone else was “Captain.” I was just Mira. So far, neither of us deigned to officially notice the other’s bad behavior.

“I have good news for you,” he said.

“You know I’m supposed to be shipping out in—” I checked my watch. “—fifty minutes?”

“Exactly right,” he said, smiling hard enough to give me radiation burns. “I’ve found you a job. Osmiridium mining on Tethys 2 for Godfrey Consolidated. They want you to leave today, and …”

“Since when do you rent out me and my ship!” I said before I could think. This was not the conversation I’d nerved myself for.

“Don’t interrupt me,” Osman said. “As I was saying, they want you to leave today. It’s not the most lucrative job, but it’s well-suited to your skill sets.” He paused, probably waiting for me to fall over myself thanking him.

“I know that run. I’ve done it. It’s shit. The only reason they haven’t automated it is because the CEO is mech-phobic.”

“I promised them a miner, Mira.”

“Then have one of the newbies do it.” Taking a job like that at this point in my career? And as a handout? I’d never be able to show my face in Feng’s again. “I already have a contract,” I said. “With ASIE, out at Ketzal. And if I don’t get moving, I’m going to miss my launch window.”

He slammed his open hand down on the desk, hard. A light went off on one of his consoles. I didn’t flinch. “It is an excellent job, and I went out of my way to help you get it. You don’t want it? I will find someone else.” He jabbed a finger at me. “Just remember, I tried to do you a favor.”

I turned, as calmly as I could, and walked out of his office.

* * *

Anger erupts in my gut, making me queasy. I am going to make whoever did this pay for it in teeth. Later. First, I have to get home.

I close the hatch to the generator room, then strip out of my suit in one practised backward somersault. I call up my parts manifest, even though I know what it will say. Nothing on the manifest looks remotely like an exhaust shunt. Why would I carry a spare? The damn things don’t break.