Summer's End, page 6
“Really?” Pam asked, giving me a strange look.
“Well, unless you’re an elie,” I said with a snort. “Then nothing happens at all and everybody says that they had it coming.”
“What happens if you kill an elie?” Chaz asked.
“They kill your family if you’re a prole.”
“What if you’re a dole?”
“They kill everyone on your block,” Hank said with a snort of his own.
Chaz shook his head. “How can anyone live like that?”
I shrugged. “Beats me. I hated every minute of it, and now that I’m gone, the only time I’ll ever go back is when we land to pick up cargo. Where are the rest of you all from, anyway?” I asked, not only wanting to talk about something else, but wanting to be able to eat my dinner before it got cold as well. “They really don’t teach us much about the rest of the solar system on Earth, being as it’s the ‘center of the universe’ and all that kinda crud.”
Everyone at the table snickered at that. I guess the Earther attitude was fairly well known.
“I’m from the colony on Ceres,” Chaz said. “Not a lot to say about it really. It’s a nice place, but everything there is either about mining, or about building habitats and space stations. My family’s been doing it for generations, but me? I wanted to travel, I wanted to see things and go places. I always wanted to become a spacer and just travel and . . . well . . . ” He smiled and looked at Hank, who smiled back at him.
“I grew up on Mars,” Hank said next, looking over at me. “When I turned seventeen I decided to join the Martian Space Navy and see a bit more of the solar system than I’d ever see working in the steel mills down there like my old man.
“Honestly, I enjoyed it, but after a while hunting pirates and rescuing people or chasing down smugglers gets old. So when the time came I took all those skills they taught me and struck out on my own.”
I glanced up at Pam, seeing as I already knew where Dot was from.
“I’m from Adonis,” Pam said with a slight smile.
“Adonis?” I asked. “Where’s that?”
“It’s a small cluster of artificial habitats linked to the Adonis asteroid that used to be in the Apollo group. I trained with one of the groups there, but advancement was hard in my last job, so when I saw that Damascus had openings and had a faster track for promotion, I came here.”
I nodded; I wasn’t surprised that I’d never heard of where she was from. There were tens of thousands of asteriods that people lived in, on, or around, and most of them had been moved into better and more stable orbits over the last two hundred years. Many of which weren’t even on any map, and some of which changed their orbits from time to time.
“I have to admit, I’m really curious as to what it’s like growing up in a habitat or on an asteroid as big as Ceres,” I said, pausing a minute between bites. “When I was a kid, my father would tell me stories he’d heard from some of the captains when he’d been working on their ships. The places you all get to go, the things you’ve seen. I grew up in a run-down apartment complex, never went anywhere until I went to college to become an engineer.”
“It’s not all fun and games, you know,” Pam said, surprising me. I would have thought with looks like hers, every door would always have been open and life always would be fun and games. Then again, she was here, and Dot had warned me more than once about everyone onboard. A warning that even extended to me, I realized.
“Well . . . truth is my younger brother was a child prodigy and I had to watch out for him in the public school system for years, until he graduated —before me, I might add. Trust me, I haven’t had any ‘fun and games’ since I was like twelve,” I said with a short laugh. “But I take your point. The housing always looks sweeter on the other side of the quad, as they used to say where I grew up.”
I looked down at my plate; I was done and I really wasn’t interested in dessert. I still ate rather quickly, a holdover from school and work, where there was never enough time to enjoy yourself.
“I guess I’ll go relieve Chief Parks,” I said, getting up and carrying my stuff over to the counter. I actually enjoyed sitting the occasional watch on the bridge when somebody needed a break. It was the only part of the ship with windows, and while most of the times you only saw stars, it was still fascinating to look out at them.
“I got the watch, Chief, you can go eat,” I said, coming onto the bridge.
“Ah, thanks, Dave! I saw earlier that Dot’s teaching you how to shoot?”
I nodded. “I think she was a little offended to find out I’d never touched a gun before.”
Parks laughed at that. “Yeah, I can see where she would be. Your predecessor not only wouldn’t learn, I think he ran screaming from the room the first time he saw one!”
“And yet you still hired me?” I said, shaking my head. “Kinda surprised you’d be willing to take on another kid from Earth.”
“Eh, I think the powers that be were pissed at us for letting that idiot get in trouble. That and finding entry-level engineers isn’t easy. Most of the ones out in the system with actual certs and licenses are all threes and up, and they don’t work cheap.”
“So once I get my level three I’ll be able to write my own ticket, then?” I asked, a bit curious.
Parks gave a snort as he headed for the exit. “Not at first you won’t. You’re gonna find that most Earthers aren’t popular with the regular system types. Earth companies usually only hire Earthers and most Earthers don’t want to work for anybody that isn’t.”
“Isn’t Damascus Freight an Earth company?”
“Yup. But other than you and the captain, there isn’t anybody else from Earth on the ship. Damascus isn’t exactly picky about who works for them,” Parks said with a grin as he left the bridge.
Shrugging, I got into the command chair and, sitting down, fastened the lap belt, but left the rest of the harness off. Regulations required the watch to be wearing at least one restraint when on duty, but I’d noticed that I was the only one who did it.
A few minutes later, Chaz surprised me by joining me on the bridge.
“We didn’t say anything wrong down there, did we?” he asked, looking a little concerned.
“Huh? Why would you think that?”
“Well, you did leave kinda quick.”
“Haven’t you noticed I’m a fast eater?” I said. “It’s a bad habit I picked up from school and work, where we only had, like, fifteen minutes to eat. Plus,” I added with a grin, “I wanted to beat you up here for a change. I don’t often get a chance to look out the windows.”
“You don’t have to be on duty to come up and look out the windows, Dave,” Chaz said with a smile. “I think Dot’s the only one who doesn’t come up here at least once a day to take a look.”
“Really?”
He nodded. “A lot of people who grow up out here aren’t that fond of open spaces.”
“What? But you live out here, in this!” I said, waving at the infinity on the other side of the windows.
Chaz laughed. “I know, right? But most of us don’t go outside of our habitats, and most of them are inside an asteroid and not on the outside. So you can go months, or longer, without ever seeing a large open space. Because of all the mining and construction work, people back on Ceres go out into space all the time. They even have domes on the surface that they take you up in when you’re a child, so you don’t become afraid of it.”
“Huh, I didn’t know that.”
“Well, for you planet-raised types, everyone worries if you’ll flip from the lack of open spaces.”
“Yeah, I can see that. But Engineering is pretty big and so’s the cargo hold,” I replied with a shrug. “Actually, I grew up spending a lot of my time inside. The complex we lived in was really just one big megalopolis. You didn’t have to go outside if you didn’t want to, and when the weather sucked, you really didn’t want to.”
“Yeah, that whole ‘weather’ thing was surprising when we were on Earth.”
“Was that your first trip there?”
Chaz nodded.
“How long have you been onboard here?”
“On the Iowa?”
I nodded.
“About a year. I need another few months before I can file for my ‘Able Spacer’ certificate.”
“And then?”
Chaz shrugged. “Won’t know until then, I guess.”
“What about Hank? I thought you two were a couple?”
“If we’re still together a few years from now, then I guess we’ll be a couple,” Chaz said with a chuckle. “Hank might be all grown up, but I’m anything but.”
I laughed, “Yeah, I know that feeling.”
“So, is your brother really a prodigy?”
I nodded. “Yup. He had it rough at first too. Until my dad sat me down and gave me this long talk about family and him being my brother now and how I had an obligation to take care of him.”
“What, was he adopted?” Chaz asked confused.
I shook my head. “My father remarried when I was like ten. Up until then he’d been raising me by himself. Ben’s mom —my mom now really —would babysit for my father while he was working. As a single mother, she had it a lot worse than my dad did, and eventually they just decided to get married.”
“What about your real mom?” Chaz asked.
“She is my real mom,” I all but growled out.
“Oh, sorry . . . didn’t mean to . . . ”
I sighed. “It’s a sore spot; my bio-mom ran off when I was, like, three; I can’t remember anything about her. It was pure hell on my dad, though, having to raise a son and work a full-time job to pay the bills.”
“Oh, I can imagine. Again, I didn’t mean to pry.”
“Eh, you didn’t know,” I said with a shrug. I still remembered when Dad had brought Jenny and Ben home; I was six going on seven. They’d been tossed out on the street after Jenny’s husband had died; she was a doler who had been trying to move up into the proles, wanting a better life. When Dad had found her on the street, she was willing to do anything to protect her child, so I got a baby brother and dad got a live-in girlfriend and babysitter.
That he eventually married her and they had a daughter together had made me and Ben happy. Looking back on it, I could see now that she’d made my dad very happy. Because I didn’t have a single memory of him ever being happy about anything until after she’d moved in. He’d always been either angry or sad.
“So, what’s it like having a genius for a younger brother?” Chaz asked, snapping me out of my revery.
“At first it was a pain in the ass!” I said with a shake of my head. “A young smart kid who didn’t know when to shut his mouth, always telling all the other kids in my school why they were wrong? Oh yeah, I got into a lot of fights teaching the other kids to keep their hands off my brother, or else.”
“That must have sucked.”
“Yeah, I got beat up or detention way too many times. But eventually he learned to keep his mouth shut and figured out how to help all the jocks. Once he got them on his side, I never had to beat anyone up again.”
“How’d he win ’em over?”
“He’d watch their opponents’ games before they played us, figure out their weak points, and then teach the team how to beat ’em. But it gets even better than that.”
“Oh?”
I grinned. “He figured out how to make routines for the girls’ cheerleading squads that would take them to the big national competitions. So at the age of thirteen he had one of the hottest eighteen-year-old girls in school as his girlfriend!”
Chaz laughed, “Damn! Now that’s funny! He didn’t leave you hanging, I hope?”
I shook my head. “No, from that point on, Ben always watched out for me, just as I watched out for him. There were a lot of girls who wanted to get to know me better, so they’d get a co-starring role on the team.” I shook my head. “Honestly, I’m gonna miss him more than my parents.
“What about your family?” I asked.
Chaz spent the next twenty minutes, until Chief Parks came back, regaling me with stories about his own childhood and family. He had two brothers and a sister, and apparently one of his brothers had a reputation for practical jokes that was second to none, to hear him tell it. He’d actually been going to a trade school to be a deckhand on an ore hauler when he’d met Hank and decided to sign on with the Iowa Hill.
As I went back to my cabin, it felt nice to have finally connected with somebody on the crew on a friendly basis.
SIX
Saturn
By the time the captain had called in to our destination, which was another transshipment point in orbit around Titan, I’d become friendly with Chaz, Hank, and Chief Parks, who preferred to just be called “Chief.” Pam was always quiet around me, but considering the body I suspected that loose shipsuit was hiding, I really couldn’t blame her. She probably didn’t want me hitting on her.
Shelly, the cook, was even starting to warm up to me a bit, but I was still too afraid to try and make friends with the captain as I’d barely been here a month. Maybe once I’d been here a while longer and made a few more trips I’d be a bit more comfortable with talking to them.
Docking went off without a hitch and once cargo started unloading, Dot and I were both given leave of the ship.
“Here, put this on,” Dot told me when I met her at the docking exit, as she handed me one of those athletic caps, the type with a bill on it.
Looking at her, I took the cap and put it on my head.
“What this for?”
“It’s a disguise,” she said, smiling.
“A hat? That’s it?”
“There’s a button on the underside of the bill, by the hatband. Press it.”
I felt under the hat with my hand until I found a small bubble button. I pressed it and suddenly I noticed there was a slight glow along the underside of the bill.
“Look at me a moment.”
I turned to face her and she smiled. “Perfect.”
“What’s it do?”
“Simple physics, it shines filtered light down over your face to change the color of your skin. Add a few simple variations and it alters the lines of your face faintly as well. Here, look.”
She held up her tablet with it set for “mirror” mode and sure enough, my skin looked darker, somewhat swarthy, and I looked older.
“That’s pretty cool!” I said as she put her tablet away.
“It’s got enough battery power for about eight hours, then it has to be recharged. Now, let’s go hit the station and get some supplies. Got your pistol?”
“Right here.” I patted the vest I was wearing for extra warmth.
“Good. We’ll see if we can find you a better holster while we’re out.”
I nodded and, checking the hat and making sure I had my own tablet, I followed her out onto the station. Coeus Station was one of the older stations and had started out as one of the original six colony habs around Titan, but over the last century the population had shrunk as a lot of people emigrated to either one of the many ultra-modern arcologies now down on the surface, or one of the much more numerous —and again, more luxurious —orbital habs that had been built on one of the many “captured” asteroids from the belt, or even some of the lesser moons of Saturn and Jupiter.
Given enough power, people had learned that if you weren’t in a rush, you could use a gravity drive to move anything. Oh, a couple had crashed into Jupiter due to some magnificent engineering cock-ups, but after the disaster at Uranus where they’d accidentally dropped Miranda into the planet and killed a half million people, all the major governments got together and decreed that if you tried to move anything larger than ten kilometers in size and hadn’t been licensed to do so by at least three of them, they’d kill everyone involved and seize whatever assets were left after that’d been done.
As Earth, Mars, Titan, Ganymede, Ceres, and Venus —all of whom maintained some large ships with some serious firepower —were a part of this agreement, nobody ever tried to move anything that big again. Though there was still talk about moving Oberon one of these days, not that I could understand why anyone would want to.
Leaving the ship, I noticed that the hallway we were berthed off of was a lot busier than the last one. There was a ship berthed to the other side of the arm we’d attached to, and there were people coming and going from that one, as well as several more spots we passed along the way as we headed for the commerce section of the station.
“See anybody following us?” Dot asked.
I shook my head. “No, but I don’t know if I’d be able to tell. There’s a lot more people here than I expected.”
“Coeus is a major transfer station, unlike Gany-Two. There’s still a large population of people living here as well.”
“What’s large?”
“More than twenty thousand, less than fifty, if I had to guess.”
“Doesn’t anybody know?” I asked, surprised.
“Oh, the people down in Environmental probably have a good idea, but that’s not the kind of information that a lot of people want known. People out here tend to be a little paranoid when it comes to others wanting to know anything about them.”
I thought about that a moment. On Earth, there was little to no privacy. The government knew everything about you that there was to know, and as was probably the case in governments everywhere going back to the beginning, what the government knew, way too many people who wanted something from you seemed to know as well.
“So what are we here to buy today?” I asked, changing the subject.
“Well, we need more materials to make more bullets; I also need to replace our stocks on materials for rebuilding panels. Then I need to order some general items for the ship’s engineering stores. I also thought a few nice snacks from someplace other than the ship’s freezers would be nice.”
“How long are we going to be docked?”
“It’ll take about forty-eight hours to unload the ship. They don’t work around the clock here and as there’s other ships on the same arm, they can only move so much out at a time. Captain says they already have a load assigned for us. So maybe another forty-eight to load. Count on three days, but it’ll probably be more like four.”
