Chapter 1

Part 1

I remember watching my lover die. If my plan fails, I may get to join him. I’m not sure what I’m hoping for more – success or failure.

I remember watching Raj stepping up onto the metal staircase leading into the vacuum chamber. At the top, he turned to look at me. “My place after the lab?” he asked, knowing the answer. “Study for the test?”

I felt my face flush. Trainees were discouraged from dating each other. “Sure thing, study buddy,” I replied. We’d done many things at his place, but studying wasn’t one of them.

We were partners for this exercise, and responsible for each other’s safety. Even though we were still on Earth, vacuum could kill. It was only the second time we’d worn a spacesuit in a real vacuum.

The vacuum chamber was a windowless concrete room, lit with industrial fluorescent light and studded with video cameras. As soon as we were inside, one of the instructors pulled the heavy steel door shut. With the alarms sounding and the yellow warning light flashing, the huge vacuum pumps quickly sucked the damp Florida air out of the space.

“Commence exercise, commence exercise,” one of the instructors said, his voice harsh and crackling in our earpieces.

This was supposed to be a simple exercise, designed more to build our confidence in our spacesuits then anything else. Still, training time was valuable, so somebody had incorporated some basic Damage Control drills into the mix, involved finding and patching a simulated hull leak.

The biggest problem with a small leak in space was finding the damn thing, or so our instructors said. Even now, ships were lost due to their crew’s inability to find and fix small holes. So, a crude mockup of a ship’s hull had been set up in the middle of the chamber. When the instructor hit a button, smoke, simulating somebody using a smoke candle, would be let out of tiny pinholes for us to find and patch.

“Found the hole,” I said. “Pass me the sealsprayer, Raj.”

He didn’t respond, and I repeated myself. He’d been acting dumb since the exercise started, and I was getting a little bit tired of it. “Damnit Raj,” I said, “let’s get with the program here.” There was no response, and so I turned sideways. Where the hell was he, I thought. This was no time to goof off.

Space suits are clumsy and awkward at best, and not designed for a one G environment, so just turning around took a bit of doing. I finally located him, all the way behind me, and as I watched he sat down in the middle of the floor. I ran to him as quickly as I could, and looked at Raj’s face in the helmet. Blood was streaming down from his nose, and he was moaning, patting his helmet with his hands.

Feeling suddenly sick with fear, I hit my suit control panel on my forearm and toggled to the emergency frequency. “Man down! Man down! Loss of suit pressure!” I screamed into the mike.

All of the safety instructors converged on me. One of them pulled me clear, and two more bent down to work on Raj.

“We need emergency pressure now!” I shouted over the radio, nearly hysteric. “Why don’t we have pressure?”

“Emergency pressurization system failure,” said a mechanical voice. One of the safety instructors barked, “Use the secondary evac door!”

I struggled free of the instructor holding me, and helped lift Raj up. Three of us carried his limp body to a side door in the compartment, and shoved him into a small airlock. Two instructors got in with him, and I slammed the metal door on them. As I did, one of the instructors, Ribilisi I think, pulled me aside.

“Didn’t you monitor him?” He said, his voice harsh over the radio link. “That was your responsibility!”

I don’t think I responded. By the time they got Raj up to a safe pressure, he was dead.

**********

“There will be an investigation, of course,” the Safety Director said.

We were sitting in the Safety Director’s office. I was in coveralls, my hair still matted and sweaty from the suit helmet. The carved wood nameplate on her desk, out of place in the plain, almost generic office, said read Alison Hill. “Florida law requires a coroner’s inquest in these cases, and NASA safety regulations require an investigation after every major training mishap. I’m sure you’ll have to testify.”

Raj was dead, and she called it a “mishap?” “Should I get a lawyer?” I heard myself ask. It seemed like I was dreaming.

“I would for the inquest,” the Director said. “NASA’s mishap investigation is confidential and can’t be legally used against you.”

“Thank you for you advice,” I said. “Can I go home now?”

“Unfortunately not, Ms. Pilgrim. You should meet with the mishap team. It’s best if these interviews are conducted as soon after the incident as possible.”

I have only a vague recollection of the next few hours. It seems I spoke to three or four different people, all asking the same questions. Did I notice that Raj was not responding normally? Did I check the hose connections from his backpack to his helmet? The training exercise had started at 1830, and it was nearly midnight before the lead investigator, a kindly, gray-haired old man, finally told me to go home. “You should eat something,” he said as I left. The thought of food sickened me, and I involuntarily made a face. “Report to me here at 0930 tomorrow.”

I was staying on Academy grounds, but my studio apartment was miles from the training center. To get back and forth we had to ride a rickety old monorail system. I lucked out, and got a car nearly to myself. The Academy sprawled over miles of Florida swampland, but it was still like a small town, and word got around. I don’t think I could have taken the sympathetic looks of my classmates right about then.

“Home” in this case meant the “Carlos X. Montoya Memorial Housing Unit”, on the south end of campus. Whoever Carlos was, I don’t think he would have been impressed. The unit consisted of a number of two story cinder block buildings arranged around a couple of hot and dusty squares of grass and mud. My unit was a tiny one-bedroom apartment on the second floor of Building 30. The main door opened onto a sagging concrete walkway, open to the air, which was the common access for all the other units. My unit was closest to the east stairway, so people were always walking by my windows at all hours of the day and night.

The apartment, number 3022, had a small living room combined with an eat-in kitchen barely big enough for a small, cheap dinette set. The bedroom was barely big enough for the built-in bed, and the tiny, moldy bathroom had a shower only. Everything was manual. Manual doors, manual stove in the kitchen (apparently nobody ever heard of an auto-cook before) and one phone display, in the living room.

I rattled around the place in a daze for a bit, and finally found myself sitting at the dinette, staring at a plate of beans and rice. To this day I don’t remember heating it up, but steam was coming off of the plate, so I guess I had. I ate mechanically, surprised to find out that I really was hungry. I left the plate on the table and went back to take a shower.

I got as far as the bed when the tears came. I think it was Raj’s shirt, crumpled up in a ball on the floor next to my bed, which set me off. We’d been together last night, and after we’d finished lovemaking, we’d talked for hours.

**********

We’d met the first week of school, right after the “Ship Security and You” seminar. I smile as I write this. My current situation makes me an expert on the subject, unlike the old windbag of an instructor.

“Hey, Blondie,” he’d said as I walked out of the auditorium, “Wait up.”

I’d turned and shot him an exasperated look. “What did you call me?”

“Blondie. Worked, didn’t it?” My smart-alecky classmate was a tall, dark and handsome young man. He had a warm smile, and held out his hands disarmingly. Definitely a hottie. My irritation faded under his gaze.

“My name’s Janet. And yours?”

“Raj.” He fell in next to me as we started to walk down the hall. “What didja think of Doctor Doom in there?”

I suppressed a snicker. “Every time he said the word ‘pirates’ I kept picturing somebody with a peg leg singing ‘Yo Ho Ho’.”

“Now here, young Miss, that was serious stuff,” he said, a stern look on his face.

“I suppose so,” I said mildly. Doctor Doom had told several stories of actual and attempted shipjackings.

“Good, then,” he continued. “Glad to see some of this valuable information is sinking in then.”

I busted out laughing at his parody. Doctor Doom had said the exact same words at least a dozen times in his short presentation. Raj was jerking my chain.

Raj mock-glared at me for a second, then lost it, and roared with laughter.

“You hungry, Janet?” He’d asked when he’d gotten his breath back.

“I could eat.”

“Great. I know this great little place that serves the best Indian food. You like Indian?”

Raj’s “great little place” turned out to be his off-campus apartment. Unlike my Academy-provided dump, his had a pool and air conditioning that really worked. He was a surprisingly good cook, and went easy on the spices out of respect for my palate. I ended up spending the night at his place, where he became my first lover.

I know what you’re thinking – I’m some kind of loose woman. I mean, it’s not like in great-grandpa’s day, when people had sex all the time. To hear some of the stories from that time, you wonder how they had time to do anything else but have sex. Grandpa Pilgrim had a half brother, who was born when great Grandma Pilgrim was only 15, and nobody even said much about it.

Things were different at school. It wasn’t just that everybody was away from their parents, although that helped. We were, after all, learning a “dangerous trade” and, more to the point, one that would keep us away from friends and loved ones for months if not years at a time. There was a “get it now while you can” mentality.

Although Raj was certainly easy on the eyes, our mutual attraction wasn’t just physical. We were both people with a plan, and the United States Merchant Astronaut Academy was just a way station. We were both looking to be “one hop and out” astronauts. Raj’s plan had ended on a cold concrete floor that February night.

Chapter 2 contents

I called my parents early the next morning and told them what had happened. When they appeared on the phone’s tiny screen they were still in their housecoats.

“I’m just glad it wasn’t you,” Dad finally said. He ran a hand through his thinning hair, unruly from sleep. “Do you have money to get home?”

It wasn’t like he had any to spare. If it wasn’t for Mr. Afeef, I’d be working construction already.

“I still have to testify at the inquest,” I said.

“Tiger is hiring,” Mom said.

“Mom, Dad, I need to go,” I said. I was too tired to argue. Besides, depending on the investigation, I might have had to go home and work for Tiger. At the time, I’d rather have died then done that, or so I thought.

**********

My Dad is a dreamer, and always has a sure-fire get-rich-quick scheme going. His latest grand plan had involved him becoming a sales rep for a liquor wholesaler. After all, he liked bars and knew well the products he was selling. But there was a problem. With my dad, there is always a problem. Dad wasn't selling, or at least not selling enough to make any money. He'd had the sales job for about a year, and his boss had been making noises about "shaping up or shipping out" for months.

It was a tough time for us. Dad got a small allowance from the company, but the bulk of his money was supposed to come from commissions. Few sales meant few commissions. Most months he didn’t even break the “floor” or minimum sales requirements, and so didn’t even get the commissions for what little he had sold. Mom had been carrying the full cost of living for months, but her wages just covered the necessities of life.

We had a nice townhouse in the Printer’s Row area of Chicago, and everything was expensive. I was a high school senior at an expensive private school, and doing my part to add to the overhead. Christmas 2070 was not a very merry one at the Pilgrim house.

One day in early January, I came back from school to see Dad in the living room, staring blankly out the front window. It was a typical winter day in Chicago – the wind was blowing off of the lake, kicking up little swirls of old snow and de-icing compound from the streets. I had ran in the front door, and tossed by coat on the couch.

There was a drink on the table, and I remember the soft clinking of the ice as he held it. The coffee table was covered in ominous-looking legal papers. The room lights were low, and the orange light from the sim-fireplace, flickering from its recess, colored Dad’s face. Dad sat down on the couch, and held his drink in front of him, his hand resting on his belly.

“Janet,” he said, “I’ve got bad news for you.”

I sat down. “You’ve been fired,” I said. He was always surprised when he got fired, or one of his schemes collapsed, but I had figured it out long ago.

He nodded, then launched into his usual explanation of why it wasn’t his fault. He was winding down when Mom came in, shedding her coat with one hand and holding her lunch bucket in the other. Her jeans were gray with drywall dust, and flecks of it were in her hair, blonde like mine. She was wearing a tan shirt under her coat, with a gray patch proclaiming “Tiger Electric” and “Linda” all in red embroidery. She leaned over the couch, pecked Dad on the cheek, and set her lunch bucket on the table.

“How was work, honey?” Dad asked.

“Sucked. That damn idiot Sylvia’s got us in pulling the wiring, Juan’s crew is in finishing up some drywall and Nick is putting down tile. We were literally stepping on each other!” She turned and revealed a dusty footprint from somebody’s work boot on her butt.

Dad chuckled, then got up and gave her a hug. “Looks like you had a rough day, dear. Let me get you a drink.” He walked into the kitchen, where I could hear the glass tinkling.

Mom looked at my face, and said in a low voice, “he’s been fired.” It wasn’t a question.

“Like it’s a surprise?” I said in the same volume. I love Mom, but I don’t understand what she sees in Dad. I had asked her once, and she had been unable to explain it to me. It’s not like living with him had been easy. Dad had gone through dozens of schemes and jobs, and even when Mom got really cranked at him, she always came back. Maybe Raj and I would have had the same thing.

Dad returned, and handed Mom a drink. “I hear your day was worse then mine,” she said, in a tone reserved for misbehaving children.

“I was fired,” Dad said. He opened his mouth as if to explain, but Mom’s harsh expression silenced him. There was a long and uncomfortable silence, which Mom broke.

“Anything else I should know?” she said, gesturing at the pile of papers on the coffee table.

He stared into the fire, embarrassed. “We’re being forced into bankruptcy.”

“Bankruptcy?” Mom took a sip of her drink, her face flushed. “Well, at least we’ll keep the house.”

Dad looked like he’d swallowed sour milk. “I’m not so sure about that, Linda.”

She glared at him suddenly. “You did file those homestead exception papers like I told you to.”

“Not really,” Dad said.

It took some time to extract any details at all, but apparently Dad had committed all our savings (not that we had much) and pledged the house as collateral in some investment opportunity with Grandpa Szymanski. The scheme had gone south, and taken our savings with it. It didn’t dawn on me for a while as to exactly how bad things were.

**********

I walked out of the apartment at my usual time, and headed down to the monorail station. The conversation there was muted, and I felt like I was being avoided, like I had some contagious disease, and if they got too close, it would rub off on them. The seats in the monorail were benches, two people wide, and I got an entire bench to myself. I called up a newsfeed on my PDA, and I pretended to read during the ride. I got out at the main campus, and walked to the Administration building. I ended up outside the Admin building way early, just before 0900, and sat down on a concrete bench overlooking a grassy quad.

“At least you’re early,” a gruff voice growled behind me, startling me. I stood up and turned.

“Mr. Afeef? What are you doing here?”

“Trying to protect my investment, of course.” He handed me a cup of coffee and gestured at the bench. “So, sit down and tell me what happened.”

Junaid Afeef was my sponsor at the Academy. If I graduated, I would be a paid crewmember on one of his company’s ships. He was, in short, my ticket to college.

He already knew most of what had happened, of course, so he was primarily interested in my version. After I finished, he sat silently for a minute. “Did any of the instructors notice his problems?” He finally said.

“Not as far as I could tell.”

“Reilly’s doing the investigation?” Junaid asked. I nodded affirmatively.

“Are they going to kick me out?” I asked. Raj and I were “safety buddies” and that meant that I was supposed to be looking out for him. If I couldn’t handle a simple B-level simulation, who would trust me on a spaceship?

“Depends on the exact cause of the accident,” Junaid said. “But Doc Reilly’s a good man, so you’ll get a fair shake.”

I wasn’t entirely sure that I wanted to stay. While I was waiting, I found myself thinking about home again. It had only been a few weeks since I’d been a typical high school senior. Sitting on that hard concrete bench, it felt like a lifetime.

**********

The evening after Dad had been served with the legal papers (only lawyers still sent people physical paper anymore) we went to visit “Grandpa Nearby” – my Mom’s family, the Szymanskis, who lived out in the suburbs – Oak Brook to be exact.

I remembered pulling up into the driveway at Grandpa’s house. It gets dark early in Chicago in winter, and by the time we got out to Grandpa’s it was full night. His house was a two-story brick affair, on a quiet and dark cul-de-sac. Although you couldn’t see in the dark, it was tan, with a green copper roof. The back of the house opened on to a golf course, now buried under a foot of snow. More snow was coming down, or rather blowing in, on a sharp and biting wind. “Ah, the joys of Chicago – sideways snow,” my Dad muttered as we climbed out of the car and briskly walked up to the front door. The door was opening as we arrived, and the yellow light spilling out was very inviting.

Grandma was just inside the door, standing on the marble-slabbed foyer, hands out to take our coats. She was dressed in a smart blue dress, with brass buttons down the front. Her hair, blonde like Moms’, was up in a bun. Her blue eyes twinkled, and she was smiling. It looked like she had gotten another skin treatment, because there were less wrinkles then when I had last seen her.

“I got rid of Jeeves, dears, so you’ll have to help me with your coats,” she said. When I was a little girl, they had had a real butler – a man named Alberto – who lived with them all the time. He had left – I don’t know why – and they had gotten a mechanical butler they called Jeeves. He wasn’t much smarter then a dog, and required a lot of training. He was constantly in the shop for repairs, and I guess they had gotten tired of having him fixed.

We went inside the house, and into the main living room, a two-story affair with cathedral ceilings. It was a study in beige – beige carpet, walls, and furniture. Grandpa was standing beside the sim-fireplace, a drink in one hand and the control unit for the fireplace in the other. He was fiddling with the controls, and the simulated orange flames kept changing from a low flicker up to a roar. I could tell he was also adjusting the heat output, because the temperature display – a bar of colored lights, from blue to red - was up on the glass front of the sim-fireplace. As we entered, he sat his drink down and came over to hug and kiss us.

Dinner was a simple affair. The Szymanski’s auto-cook was an older model, and not able to handle complicated dishes. Dinner was winding down when Mom said “You know Janet is graduating in May. She’s been accepted to Brown. We were going to look at the dorms next month.”

“Yes, well perhaps you should consider, postponing, that trip,” Grandpa said.

“How so?” Mom asked.

“Well, considering our financial situation...” Grandpa said.

“I thought you set up a trust fund for Janet’s college?” Mom asked.

“Yes, Linda of course we did. However, trust funds are normally invested, and in this case...”

Mom glared at her father. “I hope you’re not going to say what I think you are.”

Grandpa looked down at his plate. “I am the trustee for the fund, and as trustee I make the investment decisions. Based on the information available to me, I put some of the money into Mr. Simpson’s deal. It seemed wise at the time.”

Mom continued to glare at him. “Dammit, Dad, couldn’t you just once not screw things up?”

This was my money they were talking about! Valerie and I were to be roommates and we were picking out classes, for Pete’s sake.

“Just how much money do I have?” I asked.

“Well, technically it’s still in the trust,” Grandpa said.

“Just answer the damn question,” Mom said. “She deserves an answer.”

“Certainly not enough to go to a 4-year college,” Grandpa said nervously. “Perhaps a junior college, maybe College of Cook, for a few years. After all, many teachers started out there.”

Not any good ones – certainly none of my teachers! College of Cook County was no better then going to public high school. I couldn’t possibly accept that. As the discussion continued, I became convinced that even junior college would be a stretch. Dad was talking about moving us in with my grandparents! I couldn’t imagine a more embarrassing fate.

The ride home from Grandpa Szymanski’s after we found out about my disappearing college trust fund was deathly quiet. Mom’s temper had gotten the better of her, and harsh words were said all around. I decided that I would just have to find another way to go to college.

Chapter 3 contents

Doctor Chris Reilly’s office was a small, windowless cube deep inside the Admin building. Doctor Reilly, the lead investigator for the Academy, was an old man, gray and round, with a kindly glint to his eye. As we walked in, he stood up and shook our hands. He and Junaid made small talk for a moment. The office was scrupulously neat, and except for a wall-mounted photo display, empty of decoration.

“Well, Ms. Pilgrim, I guess we should get to the point,” Doctor Reilly said. “We are still conducting our evaluation of the incident; however I plan on making a formal report to the Accident Review Board this Friday.” That was only three days away. “The county coroner usually waits for his inquests until after the Review Board has met. Have you obtained legal counsel?”

“I’ll arrange that,” Junaid said.

“Good. Well, pending the findings of the Review Board, you are cleared to continue training on a restricted status. No B- or C- level simulators until after the review. Any questions?”

I had a ton, but none that he could answer, so I said no. We shook hands and left. The whole meeting had taken five minutes. Junaid dashed off, promising to be in touch and come back for the Review Board. I was back on my own.

My class was in a “B” simulator until 1030, so I had some time to myself. There were three levels of simulators, A, B and C. The C-level simulators were the most realistic, and many of them were done during our training visits to the Liberty Spaceport orbital station. The level “A” simulators were the least realistic, and many were just computer games played on a desk. Obviously Reilly figured even I couldn’t get somebody killed on an A-level trainer.

**********

I returned to class, uncomfortable under the stares of my fellow students. The looks they sneaked at me were a mixture of pity and curiosity. Nobody said much to me until we came to an “A” simulator – practicing radio communications procedures. Everybody would sit in a soundproof booth, and look at their partner through a window. We would then talk like we were using a radio. I settled down at my usual terminal, then felt the stares of my classmates on my back. Raj wasn’t coming to be my partner.

“Janet,” the instructor said, “why don’t you work with Mindy?”

I nodded curtly, and ignoring the stares, sat down in the booth across from her. Although we were facing each other, the partition was opaque. I was getting good at talking to people without seeing their faces. As soon as I had the earphones on, the “COMMEX” (commence exercise) command came over the earpieces. We eventually came to the “free talk” portion of the exercise. In this part of the drill, the computers monitoring us didn’t care what we said as long as we used proper radio procedures.

“Lima Six (Mindy’s call sign) this is Alpha Mike,” I said over the mouthpiece. Where’s Kevin, over?”

“Alpha Mike, this is Lima Six,” Mindy replied. “He quit. Raj’s – accident - really shook him up. I guess it’s bothering us all, over.”

Like it wasn’t bothering me? “Copy that Lima Six, over.” The “FINEX” (end or finish of exercise) command saved me from having to think of anything else to say. The rest of the class was heading to a “B” simulator. Since I couldn’t go, I slipped out of class quietly.

**********

When my class was over, I checked my voicemail. Junaid wanted to meet – he had found a lawyer. We met for lunch in the Captain’s Lounge, the formal lunch spot on campus.

To this day, I can’t remember my lawyer’s name. I do remember thinking she looked terribly young.

“What will happen to me?” I asked her.

“You’ve got a good case,” Junaid replied.

The woman pursed her lips. “I don’t know about that,” she said. “You were Raj’s training partner.”

“Manslaughter has to be out of the question,” Junaid said, a concerned look on his face.

“Manslaughter? Doesn’t that mean jail?” I asked.

“They’d have to convince a jury that a raw trainee was responsible,” the lawyer said. “That’s a tough sell.”

“But not impossible,” I pressed.

“No,” the lawyer said.

“Enough of this gloom and doom,” Junaid said. “What’s a realistic outcome?”

“She gets kicked out of the training program. Maybe a lawsuit.”

I looked at Junaid. “Then I owe you a bunch of money.” He had fronted all of my training costs.

He looked away uncomfortably. “Technically, yes,” he finally said. “It won’t come to that.” He looked at the lawyer. “Right?”

“I believe you are correct,” she said.

Junaid shook his head forcefully. “I believe I should be a billionaire.” It wasn’t the first time he’d used that phrase, but she’d clearly never heard it before. It took the edge off of the confidence she’d been exuding. “Say shit like that at the Review Board and they’ll have your guts for garters. Wanna try again?”

“I’ll do my best,” she said.

**********

“You’ll have to leave school,” Mom said. It was the day after our dinner at Grandpa’s. “To save money.”

“I know,” I said. “At least I’ve got enough credits to graduate.”

“Tiger might need some help around the office,” Mom said. I doubted it, since construction was typically slower in the winter. “I’ll check into apprenticeships at the shop Monday. Maybe you can work under me.”

“Good,” I lied. I had helped Mom with more then a few electrical projects before. Past experience told me that we’d be at each other’s throats within a week. We’d re-wired some old solar panels at a house in Kansas when I was a kid, and I nearly ran away from home over it.

Damn I wish I’d listened to her. Instead, after breakfast I took the El into the Loop. It let me off a block from the Armed Forces Recruiting Station.

It was a dreary place, and packed full of people. I spent a good twenty minutes in line just to meet a receptionist. “I’m here to see somebody about money for college,” I mumbled to the elderly man behind the counter.

“What service?” He asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “What would you recommend?”

He glanced at his desktop monitor. “Sergeant Czerneda has an opening at 10:30,” he said in a monotone.

“That sounds fine.” The selection of hard plastic chairs was full, so I ended up leaning against a dirty wall.

At the appointed time, I was ushered down a cramped hallway to a tiny office, its old-fashioned window overlooking an alley and a blank brick wall. Sergeant Julie Czerneda wasn’t what I expected. She was short, for one, a good two inches below me, and she wore her brown hair straight. She smiled warmly at me, and offered her hand, her eyes sparkling behind a pair of silver wire-rimmed glasses. The overall effect was more like a schoolteacher in a costume then somebody in the military.

“So you’re interested in the Army?” She said.

“Not really, Ma’am,” I replied. “I’m broke and want to go to college.”

I’m sure I didn’t make a good impression on the Sergeant, coming across as selfish and clueless. We talked for a few minutes, and I left with a collection of pamphlets and her email address. The Army had two strikes against it. First, I had to commit to four years.

Second, and a deal-killer for me, was that I couldn’t ship out until July at the earliest. That left almost seven months of enduring the ridicule of my friends. As far as I was concerned, the sooner I was gone, the better.

When I left the recruiting station, the wind had picked up, blowing flecks of ice which burnt when they hit my skin. I decided to cut through the lobby of an office building on my way back to the El station.

The lobby, a long and ornate affair of marble and chrome, was nearly empty on a Saturday. I came to a bank of elevators halfway down the block-long hallway and a video display caught my eye. “Help wanted – no experience needed – start immediately.”

I stopped and waited for the screen to refresh so I could catch some contact information. It was probably some kind of come-on, but I was grasping at straws.

“He’s in today,” somebody said. I turned around. There was a little coffee and candy store, nothing more then a counter facing the hallway. The counterman, a kid not much older then me, gestured at the display. “He bought his coffee.”

“Thanks,” I said. The kid was clearly mentally handicapped, but that was no reason to be rude. “What does he do?”

“Something about space,” he replied. “He’s on twenty.”

I looked around. This was a nice building, not some fleabag place. What did I have to loose? That’s when I met Junaid Afeef.

Chapter 4 contents

“The Incident Review Board will come to order,” Safety Director Hill said. We were meeting in a large classroom in the basement of the Admin building. A series of plain Formica tables had been arranged in a U shape, and Director Hill was sitting at the bottom of the U, just right of center. Her boss, the Academy’s Commandant, a shriveled old woman with a vaguely oriental appearance, was in the middle. Doctor Reilly sat on the Commandant’s left. The rest of the Review Board filled out that side of the U.

My lawyer, Afeef and I sat on one end of the U, facing the instructors from the simulator.

After some brief preliminary remarks, Director Hill turned the meeting over to Doctor Reilly, who promptly started to call witnesses. Reilly started with me first, asking me to “tell the Board what happened in your own words.”

I managed to get out a short and coherent story without breaking down, somewhat to my surprise. Then Reilly turned to the lead instructor, Don Marsh. First he asked if Marsh agreed with my version of events, which he did. The whole exercise was recorded on video, so there was little dispute about what had happened or when.

“Mr. Marsh,” Reilly then asked, “did you see anything unusual about the trainee, Raj Vajpayee, in performance or attitude, prior to the alarm sounded by Trainee Pilgrim?”

“No sir, I did not,” Marsh replied.

“When were you first aware of the trainee’s distress?”

“When Trainee Pilgrim sounded the alarm,” he replied.

“And when was that in relation to COMMEX?”

“Approximately 20 minutes after COMMEX.”

“During those twenty minutes, did you have occasion to communicate directly with either trainee Pilgrim or Vajpayee?”

I noticed a bead of sweat appear on his brow. Reilly knew the answers to these questions, and the only reason to ask them was to get it on the record.

“No, Doctor Reilly, I did not communicate directly with either trainee.”

Reilly made a show of stroking his chin. “What sim-level were these trainees at?” Sim-level was basically an indicator of how experienced we were. The lower the number, the less knowledge we had. There were ten levels, and since we could (presumably) walk and chew gum at the same time, we were assumed to be at Level Two when we started the program.

“I’m not sure, Doctor.”

Reilly continued to stroke his chin. “You’re not sure? Isn’t ascertaining that information required as part of NASA SafeTrain Pub Twenty stroke Four?”

“Yes.”

“Let me help you out,” the Commandant interjected in a broad Jersey accent. “These kids were at sim-level Three.”

“Thank you, Ma’am,” Marsh croaked.

“That’s green enough to hear them photosynthesizing. Would you agree?” She continued. Marsh nodded wordlessly.

Reilly next asked him what the requirements were for safety checks in this trainer. Marsh “wasn’t sure” and the Commandant “helped” him out again, telling him, “The requirement is a personal check by a qualified instructor at least every ten minutes.”

Reilly grilled the other two instructors, Reed and Riblisi, on much the same vein. Neither of them had checked on Raj either. Riblisi at least had an excuse – he had been on the other side of the hull mockup.

After working on the instructors, Doctor Reilly then called one of his investigators into the room. She was a young woman, and appeared to be little older then me.

“Ms. Tanner,” Reilly began, “did you examine the deceased’s space suit? If so, could you summarize the pertinent findings for the Board?”

“Gladly, Doctor Reilly,” she said. She referred to her notepad and began to talk. “I examined the suit carefully, with especial attention to any potential leaks. On reviewing the helmet hose assembly, I discovered a faulty seal on the O2 feed hose, specifically on the H seal, going into the helmet. This seal was missing an O-ring, and so the hose was attached metal-to-metal.”

I stared at her in shock. Missing O-ring? Raj had died because somebody hadn’t installed a damn O-ring?

“What is the impact of this O-ring being missing?” Reilly asked.

“Immediately, nothing. The suit would appear to hold pressure until exposed to vacuum, at which time the pressure would slowly leak off.”

“Would there be an immediate alarm?” the Commandant asked.

“No, but you would notice an unusually high O2 consumption rate. Based on my calculations, Trainee Vajpayee’s O2 consumption alarm would have been on for at least five minutes prior to Trainee Pilgrim’s alert.”

“Mr. Marsh,” Reilly said, “had the trainees been instructed to report any O2 alarms?”

“Its standard practice to report any suit alarms,” he replied.

“Yes, well, but the question was did you or anybody address this issue during the pre-exercise briefing?”

I remembered that briefing. Riblisi had given it. He’d fumbled through it, struggling to read his notes. Reed and Marsh hadn’t even been in the room.

“It was included in the standard briefing form,” Marsh said.

“So you recall it being addressed?”

Marsh stared at Riblisi. “I believe so, Doctor Reilly.”

“Well, I believe I should be a billionaire,” Reilly said. The kindly old man had disappeared. I wondered if it had been an act. “Was it mentioned or not, sir?”

I sneaked a glance at Junaid, who was studying the table in front of him. He gave my hand a quick squeeze.

“Well, sir, I’m not sure,” Marsh finally said.

“Not sure?” Reilly asked, an eyebrow arched.

“I wasn’t actually in the briefing,” he said. “But it was on the sheet, I know that.”

The hearing went downhill from there. By the time Reilly had finished asking his pointed questions, all three of the instructors were blaming each other. After an hour or so, the witnesses were asked to leave, and the board went into executive session. The instructors fled to somebody’s office, leaving Junaid and I sitting on a bench outside the door.

“Something you want to tell me?” I asked Junaid. That “billionaire” phrase wasn’t exactly common slang.

“Let’s just say Doc Reilly wasn’t always just a safety weenie,” he replied. “And I wasn’t always just a ground-bound pencil-pusher, either.”

We were called back in after maybe fifteen minutes. Director Hill called us to order, and started to speak.

“It is the opinion of this Board that the proximate cause of Trainee Vajpayee’s death is the loss of an O-ring in the O2-H seal of his suit life support system. This problem was aggravated by the failure of the emergency re-pressurization system.”

“We are especially concerned, however, with the breakdown in discipline and safety procedures of Instructors Marsh, Reed and Riblisi. Had any of them performed their duties in a professional manner, this death might have been avoided. Specifically, the Board finds failures in the pre-brief, the ongoing monitoring, and the emergency reaction. This is not the first time an O-ring has gone missing or an emergency valve has failed.”

“It is further the opinion that Trainee Pilgrim, as safety partner to Trainee Vajpayee, failed in her initial duty to report potentially suspect conditions. This is mitigated by her inexperience and quick reaction once a problem became apparent. The Board makes the following recommendations.”

“First, we recommend that the training certificates of Instructors Marsh, Reed and Riblisi be revoked immediately pending complete recertification. Second, we recommend that all instructors be retrained on operations in the vacuum chamber, especially with regards to safety. Finally, we recommend that Trainee Pilgrim be required to complete twenty hours of remedial training in safety. This meeting is adjourned.”

My emotions were definitely mixed. On one hand, I was relieved that I wasn’t being held to blame. But a part of me said that if I had been on the ball, Raj would still be alive.

“That’s survivor’s guilt you’re feeling,” Junaid said. “Don’t wallow in it. The planets wait for no man.”

**********

The planets wait for no man. That’s what Junaid had said when I found my way to his office, and I asked why he was working on a Saturday.

The twentieth floor was given over to small office suites, of which Midwest Ship Operators Limited was the only one open. It seemed as if everybody was in that day. One of the harried junior employees took me into Mr. Afeef’s office, a small wood-paneled space with plush carpeting.

“So you want to be an astronaut,” Junaid had said. He was a stocky man, with thinning gray hair and a salt-and-pepper beard, neatly trimmed. He wrapped my hand in one of his bear paw-like hands and ushered me to a couch.

“Not really, Sir,” I replied. “I’m broke and want to go to college.”

“I might be able to help you,” he said with a smile.

We talked, and the deal he laid out seemed, if not more reasonable then Sergeant Czerneda’s, much quicker. I would go to astronaut training at the Merchant Academy in Florida, starting immediately. He’d loan me the money for training. Then, I’d ship out as crew on a ship to Mars.

“You own spaceships?” I remember asking.

“Actually, no,” he said. “I operate ships for their owners. And I should warn you, young lady. ‘Astronaut’ is not a glamorous job. It’s the lowest form of spacefaring life. You do all the work, and the ship’s officers take the credit.”

“How long would I have to work for you to pay off the note?”

“One voyage, to Mars and back,” he said. “Just over a Terran year.”

“How much do you pay?”

He named a figure. “But except for a thirty-day turnaround on Mars, you’ll have no place to spend it,” he said.

My salary for the trip would be less then half what was supposed to be in my college fund, but if I worked during school, it would be enough. “I’m still interested,” I said.

Chapter 5 contents

To my surprise I actually graduated. There was a subdued late afternoon ceremony held on the main Quad, and the Commandant, resplendent in her old-style NASA dress whites, handed out diplomas. We had a moment of silence for Raj, and I didn’t even try not to cry. A couple of my friends arranged to sit next to me, and they helped me keep it together – help which included a hip flash of whiskey.

More surprisingly, Mom and Dad came, as did the Szymanskis. The school put on a reception and dinner for the graduates and guests, and we went there after the ceremony.

“Why do they call them ‘monkey lids?” Mom asked. Our (rarely worn) official training uniform came with a cheesy-looking black beret, which, on the command of “Monkey Lids – Remove” we had thrown in the air.

“It has something to do with the fact that the first astronauts were monkeys,” I said. I really didn’t understand it myself, and was just glad to get rid of a really ugly hat. The white and black cap that was part of the official “passed astronaut” uniform was still cheesy, but a big improvement.

“You look sharp in that uniform,” Grandpa Szymanski said, a fake smile plastered on his face. “We’re all proud of you.” He looked at my dad. “Right, John?”

“Oh, sure,” Dad said, looking at the buffet line. “I’m going to get some dessert.” He got up and left.

“I don’t understand your husband,” Grandma said. “This is a big day for Janet.”

“Not that big, Grandma,” I said. “College graduation will be the big one.”

“Mike was in the merchant space service,” Mom said. “He wanted his son to join too.”

“I think I understand now,” Grandma said.

Mike Pilgrim, my other grandfather, and my dad did not get along. Dad had moved to Chicago just to get away from him, and things were still tense. That was probably why Grandpa Pilgrim wasn’t there. Dad returned, a couple of dessert plates in his hands, which he offered to the group.

“I’m just glad my daughter’s in one piece,” he said. “And I hope she stays that way.”

Junaid walked up, making his rounds. “We’ll do our best, Mr. Pilgrim,” he said.

“I’m serious, Junaid,” Dad said. He gestured at me. “Have you talked to her?”

“About what?” I asked.

Junaid looked uncomfortable. “Your father asked about groundside support positions.”

“It would be great for you,” Dad said. “You could work and go to school nights.”

I had mixed emotions. My training was entirely geared towards space work. There wasn’t a lot I could do dirtside, especially without experience. Besides, most of those positions were reserved for people who’d paid their dues.

“If you had anything,” I asked, “what would it pay?”

“Well, not nearly what you’ll be making on a deep space run,” Junaid said. “And of course you’d need to have flexible hours.”

Midwest ran a 24/7 operation, so I knew what that meant. I’d be working nights, weekends and holidays and getting paid peanuts. Working like that, it would take forever to graduate from some second-rate diploma mill.

“I don’t think so, Mr. Afeef,” I said. “I want to get in and out.”

“Janet,” Dad said, “Don’t be stupid. This is for your own good.”

“You should listen to your father,” Grandpa said. “He knows best.”

“That’s rich,” I said. I felt thick-tongued, from booze or anger I don’t know. “I’m sitting here instead of at my senior prom because you two threw away all my money. No, I’m going to earn my own way, thank you very much.”

Grandpa opened his mouth to say something, but Grandma’s hand on his made him think better of it.

“You’re a true Pilgrim,” Dad finally said, “stubborn as a mule.”

**********

I met up with Junaid at the Orlando Spaceport the next morning. “I thought I’d show you to your new home,” he said, as if yesterday’s argument hadn’t happened. Once we got to orbit, we transferred to the Liberty Station and proceeded to one of the space taxi docks. It was only my fourth trip to orbit. To save on docking fees the ship was in a trailing anchoring orbit a few clicks away from Liberty Station.

The ship was just coming into sunlight as we approached her from “above”, and was framed against a giant white storm marching ceremoniously over the blue Earth. “There she is,” Junaid said, pointing out the window.

The Windy City was a GR-30B Hercules, and had first flown in 2039. It was a “fore and aft” ship, which meant that it traveled in the direction of its long axis. She was generally the shape of a long tin can with a pair of rectangular “fins” or solar power panels running lengthwise down the sides. She was just over 100 meters long, and her smooth surface was punctuated by bumps, ridges and spars wherever needed. Not designed to operate in any atmosphere, she had a wide, flat bow, and measured almost 20 meters across at her beam.

“The original owners went bankrupt when she was halfway through SLEP,” Junaid said. “Our clients bought her from the Alabama Docks for little over what the overhaul cost.”

‘SLEP’ stands for ‘Service Life Extension Program,’ which is a major overhaul of the ship, and supposedly it adds twenty years to the ship’s service life. General Rockets had sold the first Hercules-class ship in 2031. When it came out, the ship was revolutionary. Fully loaded, a Hercules-class ship weighed just over 1000 metric tons loaded, of which half was the weight of cargo. It was the largest spaceship ever built up to that time, and the first commercial ship able to go to Mars and return.

Like almost all deep-space ships, ionic engines propelled her. They didn’t have much thrust – a few dozen newtons on cruise setting – but in the vacuum of space it meant we were continually accelerating. Even so, it would take us six months to get to Mars. We carried only about 50 tons of rocket fuel, enough to maneuver in orbit or rendezvous with an asteroid.

“Pilot,” Juniad said, “do a flyby for us. It’s her first ship.”

The pilot, an elderly lady, smiled and nodded. “My first ship was a GR-30. It was a B-mod, just like this one.”

She gave us a slow fly-by along the port side of the ship at a close range of maybe 40 meters. As we approached the bow, I could see the bowsprit – all GR-30s had one. Mounted on the flat bow was a larger-then-life aluminum statue of a woman, her robes blown back by some impossible wind. The robes had slipped, and her right breast peaked out. She held a torch in her outstretched right hand, as if to illuminate the way.

“You ever crew one of these?” I asked Junaid.

“Yeah – the Condoleezza Hill, back in ’54.” He took a deep breath. “She was – is – a damn fine ship. Reilly was my captain.”

“Are you carrying passengers on this run?” the pilot asked.

“No – she’s going to Mars,” Junaid said. The small passenger capacity and cargo space of the GR-30 was ideal for crew rotation on an asteroid mine. In fact, asteroid miners referred to their bases as “one Hercs” or “two Hercs” depending on the number of people assigned. However, since the Hercules had come out, there had been developed a number of ships that could carry more people and in more comfort. These bigger ships dominated passenger traffic to Mars now.

“It’s a pity they’ve stopped making these,” the pilot said, as we came by the box-like pilothouse projecting out of the cylindrical hull.

“All good things must end,” I said. General Rockets had announced that they would stop building the latest Hercules, the H series, back in February. Some at the Academy had considered it overdue – General Rockets had been selling the GR-40 Super Hercules, its replacement ship, for over a decade now.

We swung back from our flyby to dock. As we were riding in the space taxi (now approaching a docking on the Windy City’s starboard side), we were wearing space suits. Since we were in zero gee, it wasn’t that hard to move around, but still suits were uncomfortable. But on this ride, they were mandatory, because of the risk of space junk impacts.

Man had been traveling in space since the 1960s. Every tool, nut, bolt, or piece of junk dropped, abandoned or lost since then was still in space, and waiting to collide with something else. With closing speeds of several kilometers a second, a tiny nut or washer or even a fleck of paint could be more lethal then a bullet. Liberty Station’s junkcatcher had been hit the day before we arrived, and a piece of the object had lodged in the wall of a docking bay. This was noteworthy not because it was infrequent, but because a piece of the object survived the impact and was identifiable. It was a pair of needle-nosed pliers, which were stamped with a hammer and sickle and the letters CCCP – insignia of a nation that had not survived the 20^th century. So, space stations were fitted with junkcatchers, and space ships had double hulls, and steel covers to protect windows.

I can still hear the thump of the space taxi when we made hard seal.

“So, what’s your cargo?” The pilot asked.

Junaid chuckled. “The summary manifest runs to ten pages. How much time do you have?”

“Not that much. Well, here you are.”

Junaid drifted out first, and I followed. There were three people, the rest of the crew, waiting for us on the quarterdeck.

“Welcome to your new home, Janet,” the woman said. “I’m Kate Yergan, the Captain. This is my husband and ship’s first mate, Alex Yergan.”

Alex was a tall and thin man, with dark, curly hair close-cropped and a chocolate complexion. His wife Kate was slightly lighter in complexion, and wore her auburn hair in a tight ponytail, very practical in zero-gee. Both of them were wearing blue coveralls, each with their name embroidered in cursive with gold thread above their breast pockets. They had a patch sown on their sleeves, embroidered with a picture of the ship. They were a young couple, in their early thirties I guessed.

The third person was a white man, who I had a hard time guessing his age. His face was unwrinkled, but there were flecks of gray in his short black hair, parted on one side. He had a small, dark and neatly trimmed moustache. He was short for a guy, barely two inches taller then me at 5’ 6”. He was wearing a pair of green cloth pants and a gray short sleeve knit shirt, which bore the name of a ship chandlery firm above his breast.

“This is Ken Bell,” she said. “You’ll be working for him.” It was standard practice – all the astronauts reported to the Chief Astronaut.

“Glad to be aboard, Ma’am,” I said. Everybody shook hands. When I got to Ken I said, “Glad to be aboard, Chief.”

He smiled. “I’m just an honorary ‘Chief’” he replied. My rating is AA. Here, let me help you stow your stuff, and I can show you around.” He seemed very stiff, and spoke briskly, with a soft drawl.

I went to change out of my spacesuit, not liking what I had just heard. The US Merchant Space Fleet had standardized ranks. I was an Ordinary Astronaut (OA), or the lowest “non-licensed” (enlisted) rank. With six months experience and a simple test, I could be an Able Astronaut (AA). There were two grades of specialists above that, with the top grade being a Chief Astronaut. Then came the officer ranks. For Ken to be only an AA meant that he lacked either ambition or skill.

When I came out from the changeroom, Ken was waiting for me. We were in the quarterdeck area, so called because it was about a quarter of the way from the bow. This was where the main passenger airlocks were, as well as our two small orbital launches and a zero gee workshop.

With Ken leading, we proceeded forward down “Broadway” or the ship’s central corridor, drifting in zero gee. The interior of the ship, or at least the inhabited area, was divided into two rings, and inner and an outer.

All of the crewmembers had cabins in the “Crew Core”, a part of the inner ring that was spun to provide centrifugal force. Except for this small area, 90% of the ship was in zero gee.

As he took me to my cabin, he somehow ended up floating behind me, pushing one of my bags along with a finger. At the “jump”, or the space where we transitioned from the zero gee to the quarter-gee of the crew’s quarters, he helped by hauling one of my bags. When we arrived at my cabin, he hovered outside the door as I stowed my stuff.

“You move well in zero gee,” he said. There was a sly grin on his face, and a slight vibration in his voice.

“Thanks. I guess it comes easily to me.” Like I didn’t notice he had been staring at my ass the whole way up here. I wondered when he had last been laid. “So, where are you from?” I asked.

“Port Lowell.” This was Mars’s largest city, and our official destination.

“I didn’t know you were a Martian.” I almost said “greener”, Academy slang for a native Martian. Something to do about “little green men” or so I was told. “So, this trip will be a homecoming for you?”

“I guess so.” Not exactly a dazzling conversationalist.

“Where’d you train out of?”

Ken smiled. “OJT,” he said.

Great, I thought, another Melvin From Mars who thought on the job training substituted for the classroom. Yes, living on Mars taught you about wearing a suit and life support, but it didn’t cover a damn thing about space ship operations. No wonder he was just an AA.

“What were you doing before signing up?”

“I had gotten out of the space business for a while, and ran a welding shop back in Port Lowell. Didn’t work out, so here I am, back where I belong.” With that, he headed over to his cabin, which was next to mine.

**********

I didn’t have must time to worry about it, as the next few weeks were a very hectic time. It was May 20^th, and our window for Mars opened up on June 14^th. Between then and the 14^th we needed to get cargo loaded and hold all-crew training.

We ended up loading cargo first. Two days after getting onboard, we fired up the orbital rocket engine and cruised into Liberty Station for cargo loading. In one hectic day, we would take on 500 metric tons of cargo.

After we finished loading, we conducted “all-crew training.” It was a requirement of the insurance companies, which I was beginning to see were stricter than the government with regards to safety. Besides requiring the crew to have formal training, they wanted the entire crew to train together as a team before leaving.

It was a great idea poorly implemented. The requirement was to “train” together. There were no tests, merely a signoff by the ship’s captain that we had done the required drills. I had heard from my fellow trainees at the Academy that most ships just “gundecked” this requirement rather then actually do anything. It was Kate’s first command, so she made us run the drills. However, since we knew what was going to happen and when, I’m not sure that it did us much good.

I really liked Kate. She proved to be a very good ship driver, and did the bulk of navigational work. She had gone through the University of Illinois’s 4-year space management program, and so was as qualified as many of my instructors at the Academy had been. She also took me under her wing, and taught me a lot about navigation, ship handling, and operations.

When I wasn’t on watch, Alex and Kate had me completing any number of training tasks. For instance, Alex had me manually shift the ship’s electrical load from the #1 array (on the “top” of the ship) to the #2. This could be and normally was done automatically, but Alex wanted me to know how to do it by hand “just in case”.

It was less then a week before we were to depart when we got a call. I think that call is why I decided to stay alive. I was in the charthouse, helping Kate update our navigation computer when the comm-call came in. I went to the pilothouse and answered up.

“Liberty Station, this is spaceship Windy City, Whisky November November Delta, go ahead.”

“Windy City, this is Liberty Station, shift and answer vidcomm channel 226 alpha, over.”

I acknowledged, and brought up the vidcomm channel. This was the same video circuit conventional phones used on Earth, but due to antenna and power constraints, we usually left off.

As the picture was coming up, I started talking to the blurry image. “Station calling, this is Windy City, Astronaut Pilgrim, go ahead.”

As the picture cleared, I heard a familiar voice saying, “What? My Sport is only an astronaut! I figured you’d be at least a Specialist Two by now!” The picture cleared into the familiar face of Grandpa Pilgrim.

“Glad to see you!”

“I’m glad to see you too, Sport. How’s it going?”

“Hectic. A lot of checklists to punch and stuff to inventory.”

Grandpa frowned. “Well, if you forget to bring something it’s not like you can run out to the store and get it. Do you have time to squeeze in a visit from your Grandpa before you ship out?”

“You want to come up?”

“Don’t look so shocked. I was hauling ice to Armstrong City on Luna before your daddy was even a gleam in my eye,” he said. “I’ve got some gifts to bring aboard as well.”

“Well, I can meet you on the station.”

“Ask your captain if I can visit the ship,” he said, smiling. “I’d like to inspect it and see if it’s fit to clear the dock.”

Kate had joined me by then. “I’d be glad to meet him,” she said to me.

**********

The next evening found us waiting by the quarterdeck for Grandpa’s space taxi to dock. We had been using the same taxi pilot for most of our runs, and she had him give Grandpa the same flyby I’d gotten on my last trip. Also on the taxi was Ken Bell, coming back from the last visit to Liberty City. Two workmen were standing on the quarterdeck with us, waiting to ride back after PM’ing our cooling unit.

After the taxi made a hard seal, the lock started cycling. Grandpa came out first, dressed in a pair of pressed jeans and a short sleeve gray knit top. He was wearing deck shoes with no socks, and he drifted into the quarterdeck as gracefully as a bird. “Permission to come aboard, Captain?” he boomed as he entered.

“Of course, Mr. Pilgrim,” Kate said.

“Call me Mike, Captain,” Grandpa said.

Kate smiled. “Only if you call me Kate,” she replied.

Ken drifted in behind him, pulling a large green canvas bag, gray with age. “I’m going to take this to the freezer,” he said.

Alex looked quizzically. “What’s in that?”

Grandpa answered. “As many good steaks as I could carry. I heard about your meal plans, and I thought you might appreciate some variety.” He waved some money at the taxi pilot, who was entering behind him with another somewhat smaller bag. “When I was on the Julie N we had a steak every Friday night. It’s a good tradition.”

“That’s very generous of you,” Kate said.

I gave him a tour of the ship, and then we had dinner with the crew in the wardroom. Grandpa was in fine spirits, regaling all with stories (most of which new to me) about his spacing days, forty years ago. He had been in on the beginning of commercial space travel, and had served under Alan Lane, who went on to be the commissioning captain of the Hercules.

“I’d have liked to seen Mars up close,” Grandpa had said as dinner was winding down. “I hear it’s a big place.”

“Too big to see much of,” Kate said. “We’re only staying for 35 days, including cargo unload and reload.”

“Talk about an in-and-out,” Grandpa said.

Ironically, that’s the only thing about my situation that hasn’t changed. Generally speaking, about thirty days after you arrived at Mars, there was a window opening to return to Earth. So our plan was to “work the gap” between these windows, unloading and loading cargo, make urgent repairs, and head on back. I wasn’t on this trip for sightseeing, so it was fine by me.

After dinner, Grandpa and I retired to the port observation room. We anchored ourselves in the zero-gee space as the Earth filled the domed window. Grandpa opened up the small bag he had carried. We had finished one bottle of wine during dinner, and the first thing out of the bag was a bottle of port with a zero gee siphon - very sweet going down and warm in the belly.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come to your graduation,” Grandpa said. “I didn’t want to be an uninvited guest.”

“You were invited.”

“I know - formally. I also know your dad. How’d he take seeing you in your dress whites?”

I grimaced at the thought. “Not well. He and Grandpa Close By tried to get me to take a dirtside job.”

“I wish your father would stop listening to that idiot Szymanski. That man’s pissed away more money on dumb ideas then either of us will ever see.”

Grandpa took my squeezeglass of wine and refilled it. “Your father,” he said, “has been a great disappointment to me.”

“I know, and so does he.”

Grandpa looked up at that. “Point taken. But just because somebody’s a disappointment doesn’t mean you don’t love them.” He handed me back my squeezeglass. “Here, I’ve got some stuff for you.”

Grandpa had bought me a number of gifts, mostly of a practical nature. To save weight, he hadn’t wrapped anything, and several gifts were stuffed into each other to save space. For instance, he gave me a pair of deck shoes like his, and inside one of the shoes was a flashlight, while inside the other shoe was a new multi-tool in a leather case. Everything was nice, of good quality, and practical. The deck shoes, for instance, were from L. L. Bean, and were also magnetic gripshoes. It was clear that a lot of thought had gone into the selection.

“Since your grandma died, I’ve had a lot of time to think,” he told me by way of explanation.

“I just realized there’s a lot I don’t know about you,” I said.

The smile faded from his face. “I was damn lucky, kid,” he said. “There were three or four times that some dumb thing I did or didn’t do shoulda killed me.”

“Things are different now,” I said. “We’ve got all sorts of redundant systems...”

“Yeah, that’s what we used to say too, Sport.” He took a long suck on his wine. “Murphy and his clan are alive and well. Besides, I had a lot more training then you did.” He tapped me on my chest, putting us both in a slight spin. “Don’t forget, a week from now you’ll be farther from civilization then I ever was.”

We passed through to Earth’s night side. The cabin, which had been flooded with blue light reflected from Earth, grew dim, lit only by a light over the door.

“Sport, I need you to promise something,” Grandpa said.

“Sure. What?

“Promise me you’ll come back alive.”

I did, and I intend to keep that promise.

Chapter 6 contents

Almost as soon as Grandpa’s taxi cleared the ship, we lit off the ionic engines and started to accelerate out of orbit. The continuous thrust of our engine meant that our windows were days or weeks in length, and that ships of varying speed could leave at different times.

Unfortunately, ionic drives did not generate much acceleration. It took us over a week to work up enough speed to break free of Earth’s gravity, during which we made a number of orbits of increasingly elliptical shape.

This meant that we were continually cutting in and out of both orbital and translunar traffic, and so a continuous high traffic or “condition two” watch had to be maintained. To make matters worse, there were a number of other ships also leaving for Mars at the same time, so we were continually stepping on each other’s toes. With four crewmembers, we were in two watch sections, or “port and starboard,” standing watches six hours on and six hours off. Kate and Ken were in one section, Alex and I were in the other. While the officers stayed in the pilothouse and tried not to get run over by shipping, the enlisted watchstander acted as their runners.

After about two weeks of this, we finally cleared the Earth – Moon system, and got into deep space. Then the traffic consisted of a bunch of ships all heading in the same general direction, to Mars. We were able to stand down to “duty watches.” This meant I was only on watch for six hours out of every 24, instead of 12. Basically, I had to look after ship’s operations, answer the radio (rarely) and any alarms (even rarer). As the junior member of the crew, I had the least desirable watch, from 0000-0600, and so my periodic sweeps of the ship were very lonely.

A typical day for me started around 2300, with me microwaving a plate of leftovers for a lonely dinner. I’d get up to the pilothouse, all the way forward, around 2330, and get a turnover from Ken, then call Kate and let her know I was on watch. Then the boredom set in.

Every hour, I had 15 minutes of required log entries, and another 15 minutes of night rounds. That left 30 minutes of staring at the stars and the console lights. Doctor “Headshrinker” Heidegger had called it “sensory deprivation”, old-timers called it the “timewarp” and my shipmates and I called it “the stares.” Basically, the brain would shut down. Time would go by, and suddenly you’d come too. According to Headshrinker, this was caused by a lack of new things in your environment, and it was a serious problem, because you could miss alarms or indicators or trouble, or end up skipping maintenance tasks. It also tended to screw with your sleep cycle, either requiring more sleep or less. For instance, I would go several days without sleeping at all, while Ken needed more.

So, to fight the stares, Kate and I took to studying the ship’s systems minutely. We would trace out pipes and wires hand over hand, and manually stopped and started practically every piece of gear on the ship. It was boring as hell, but it was something different.

Kate reminded me of Mom – a capable, confident woman. As far back as I could remember I had been Mom’s little helper in all sorts of household repairs. When we’d lived in Kansas, the two of us had spent the summer completely rewiring the house we’d bought, including replacing the old (2004) solar array on the roof with a modern unit. I told Kate that story and she laughed – her Mom and Grandma had ran companies that installed those solar panels.

It was a typical slow watch, about 30 days out from Earth. The nearest contact, the freighter Jade Forest, had just moved out of radar range, some 10,000 kilometers ahead of us. I had just gotten off of the radio, recording messages to my parents, when an audible alarm went off. The pilothouse of a spaceship is literally wall-to-wall with controls, and to aid a watchstander in determining where to look, each group of systems had a different tone for its alarms. This alarm was the warbling note of an Engineering alarm.

The ship’s computer wasn’t shouting out an alert or sounding a general alarm, so I figured that whatever was wrong was a minor thing. I drifted over to the Engineering panel and looked for the indicator. It was a low coolant level for the main cooling unit. “Probably a bad filter gasket,” I said aloud. There was nothing else indicating as a problem, and besides it was time for 0045 rounds, so I grabbed a remote headset and display / control unit and went below to look at the problem. With this, I could communicate and monitor key systems from wherever I was.

The main cooling unit is housed in the engineering deck, just off of the Engineering Control, and in the outer ring. This means it is aft of the quarterdeck, and as far aft in the ship as we normally went. We had access to the cargo bays of course but no reason to go in there. In fact we kept life support off. The cargo bays had air and pressure, and with nothing breathing, no oxygen was being expended.

As I approached the hatch to the cooling room, another alarm sounded. My control unit displayed “general cooling failure.”

“That’s not supposed to happen – the unit should run for hours on low coolant” I said to myself.

My next indication of a problem was when I got to the door. Like almost all doors and hatches on the ship, this was a pressure-tight door. Because the space was usually unmanned, the door was kept closed and dogged. When I got there, I noticed a dent in the door – a big one. The gray paint was flecked off around the dent, and paint particles were floating in the air.

When I touched the door, it was cold. Even though the passageway was cool and well ventilated, a bead of sweat popped up on my brow. That door was normally warm, from the heat given off from the cooling unit. Hot doors were a sign of fire, and cold doors, well, they didn’t mean it was the freezer.

There was one other way to test my theory. There was an audible alarm in the room. I looked at my control panel and verified it was operating, then put my ear to the bulkhead. I couldn’t hear the alarm. I stepped back and took a deep breath. Then I hit the general announcement button on my remote unit and said, “Possible hull breach main cooling room, possible hull breach main cooling room, this is not a drill.” My voice cracked.

I was looking at my remote display / control unit which I had clipped to my belt to sound the general alarm when the ship sounded it for me. I heard the ship’s Voice announce, “pressure failure in compartment” and give a compartment number a deck forward of me, which was the quarterdeck proper.

I quickly backpedaled out and went to the compartment in question, manually closing doors and sealing vents as I went. I arrived on the quarterdeck at the same time as Ken, the alarm blaring in our ears.

“What’s going on?” he asked.

“I think the cooling room is completely depressurized. Did you see anything wrong when you were in there?” As I was talking, I grabbed a smoke flare from the repair kit on the bulkhead. My hands were shaking – this was the real deal – and I took a deep breath and tried to calm down. It didn’t help that the last time I’d been involved in a scenario like this Raj had died.

“What does the cooling room have to do with the quarterdeck?”

“They share a bulkhead, don’t they?” I noticed that he hadn’t answered my question. “Kill the ventilation please.”

Ken did so, and I lit the flare. As I did, the general alarm stopped.

“Why didn’t the pressure alarm in the cooling unit room go off?” Ken asked. I turned and glared at him. That was a really dumb question.

“What pressure alarm? It’s an unmanned space.” It was a tiny as well, and the hatch opened out, so you couldn’t accidentally open the door if there was even a small pressure difference.

It was also supposed to be checked each watch, so Ken, who had the previous watch, should have been in the space at least once. “Hey, Chief,” I said. “Let’s worry about this leak – the door’s holding.” He nodded his assent.

The smoke flare worked as advertised. Ken and I were able to follow the smoke aft to the bulkhead between the quarterdeck and the cooling room. There was no visible hole, not even a pinhead, on the bulkhead. Ken had a bottle of quickpatch in his hand, which he sprayed at the area anyway. After covering an area the size of a dinner plate the smoke stopped flowing, so we figured we’d got it.

By this time Kate was calling me from the pilothouse over the announcing circuit. “What’s the status of the leak?” she asked.

The ear bud for the remote unit had fallen out of my ear. Rather then look for it, I drifted over to the wall phone – a voice only unit – and dialed the pilothouse. “The leak is under control, captain,” I said, trying to sound calm. “The quarterdeck leak is patched, and the hatch to the cooling room is holding. We probably need to kill some systems, though.”

“Understand. Head down to Engineering Control – I can’t get the auxiliary cooling unit to start remotely.”

I headed to Engineering Control to troubleshoot. For some reason, Ken followed me, as I told him what Kate had said. The small room was buzzing with alarms and flashing red lights. Ken tried to remotely start the auxiliary cooling unit, but it wouldn’t go. He kept hitting the remote start button, and glared at it as if getting angry would make it work.

I keyed the wall-mounted speaker box. “Captain, I’m going to load shed from here. Request you power down the high-gain antenna and the radar before they overheat.”

“Acknowledged,” Kate said.

“Loose something?” Alex asked from behind me. I turned and saw him, wearing a spacesuit, drift into the compartment, the remote unit ear bud in his hand. He pulled a laminated checklist out of a bin. “I’ll run the ECC checklist for loss of coolant,” he said. “Ken, go start the aux unit manually.” Ken nodded and left. Without coolant, most of the critical systems, like life support and long-range communications would quickly fail.

“Somebody should go out to inspect for damage,” I said. “Since you’re suited up...”

“You’re not engineer rated,” he said, cutting me off. “Go suit up for a damage assessment EVA. By the time you’re in the lock, I’ll be done here and can be your safety.”

I didn’t reply for a second. Alex pivoted weightlessly and put his hand on my shoulder. “You’re doing fine, Janet.”

“I can’t believe how calm everybody is,” I blurted out.

“Who said I’m calm?” He turned back to the console. “Go get suited up.”

“Aye, aye sir,” I said.

“Be careful, Janet. Now is not the time for a suit malfunction. And don’t go EVA until I get there.”

He didn’t need to remind me of that – Raj’s death was still fresh in my mind. I suited up quickly, and by the time I was done, Alex was just floating on the quarterdeck. We gave each other a quick once-over, then stepped into the lock together.

The coolant unit was in the shadow of the ship, so I turned on my helmet light as I stepped out. I had come out of the ship facing aft, and only a few feet from the cooling room. Earth was visible in the distance, a small ball not much bigger then a pea. This was only my sixth spacewalk, and like the previous ones I had no time to stand and admire the view.

The problem was immediately obvious, as my lights caught the glimmer of frozen particles just aft of me. The cooling unit was on the outer ring because it needed to have a large, finlike radiator to act as a heat sink.

“Whatever hit us must have been huge,” I said, whistling under my breath. “Maybe like a rice grain or something.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if this wasn’t a double or triple strike,” Alex said. “Still, we got lucky.”

Alex was right. Besides the fact that the space was unmanned, the main impact had occurred on the base of the radiator, where it flared out to meet the hull. This was the strongest part of the whole thing. If we’d been hit in a weaker area, the meteor would have gone right on through the whole ship. I reported my findings over the commlink.

Lucky or not, repairs would be difficult. The impact had produced lots of shrapnel, and these had poked dozens of holes in the radiator and the hull. GR-30s were double-hulled ships, and debris had gone through both of them. The inner layer of Kevlar between the hulls was also ruptured. When we finally got into the cooling room, we found that a major feed pipe had ruptured, and shrapnel from that had dented the door and sprung the leak into the quarterdeck.

Ken’s voice came over the link – apparently he was using the remote console ear bud. “As soon as we get cooling stable, I’ll come out and look at the damage. We’ll probably need to weld it up. Sounds like a one-day job.”

“I’m not a welder, Ken,” Alex said, “but I think one day is a tad optimistic for the amount of work.”

**********

“Nice bead, Janet,” Ken said, his voice crackling in my headset.

“Thanks,” I said.

Alex had been right – this was no one day job. After a day acting as Ken’s second during the EVAs, I asked to help out. This wasn’t entirely an unselfish thing to do. Without the primary coolant system, the secondary system was devoted to keeping the engines operating. Radar and radio were ran on a limited basis, and the crew, well we sweated. Kate decided to reduce the cooling load further by killing excess lights, so we sweated in the dark. The sooner we finished, the sooner we were back to normal.

Ken and I ended up pulling eight-hour shifts, with Alex as our safety for both. We then had other work to do inside the ship. Everybody was pulling a sixteen hour day, except Kate. She was literally living in the pilothouse, leaving only to eat and pee. We ran that way for over a week.

I got good at welding, especially in vacuum. That skill saved my life.

Chapter 7 contents

Once we got the main cooling system back on line, we had a little celebration in the galley.

“Nice job, people,” Kate said, as she placed a bottle of whiskey on the wardroom dining table. “Here’s a little extra reward.”

“We are getting overtime pay for all our work, right?” Ken asked suspiciously.

Under union rules, we were only required to work eight hours a day. Considering we stood watch for six, almost any non-watch-related task was overtime. I had already accumulated quite a stash of overtime pay before our little crisis with the meteor.

“Of course we are,” Alex said. “And we’re getting hazard pay for our EVAs.”

“Sweet,” I said. Any EVA was an automatic 25% bonus on base pay. “Well, let’s hope this is the worst Mother Nature throws at us,” I said.

“Amen,” Alex said. He drained his glass, and planted a sloppy kiss on Kate. “Captain, I think a little debriefing is in order.”

We all laughed. It was clear what kind of “debriefing” Alex had in mind.

“Now Mister,” Kate said, laying a finger on Alex’s nose, “we have to set an example to the crew.”

“Yes Ma’am,” Alex said. “We’ll take copious notes for them.”

Kate and Alex headed off to the bridge, ostensibly going on watch. Ken and I finished off the bottle.

“Wanna help me look for home?” Ken asked.

“Can you see Mars yet?” I replied.

“I don’t know,” he replied. “Come on, it’ll be fun.”

“If you say so, boss,” I said. I suspected his intentions were other then honorable, but I had had enough to drink not to care.

We ended up in one of the observation rooms on the outer ring. Ken made a bit of a show of trying to pick out Mars in the window. Somehow he maneuvered around me, and his hand ended up resting on my ass. I thought about pushing him away, then decided against it and kissed him.

“Why’d you do that?” He asked.

“I’m not stupid,” I said. “I’ve caught you checking me out.”

“Now, I’ve been a perfect gentleman,”

I kissed him again. “I know,” I said after I came up for air. “I’m trying to say that you don’t have to be – not tonight, anyway.”

“Well, if you put it that way,” he said, his hand sliding down the back of my pants.

Maneuvering in zero gee is not as easy as it looks, and being drunk didn’t help. Of course, when you’re drunk, you don’t care if you get where you’re going or not. I was having a real problem getting my shirt off – the movement of my arms kept putting me in a slow spin. Ken solved the problem by pinning me to the bulkhead. I finally got my shirt off over my head as he was overcoming my pants in a manly struggle.

It would have been a weird scene on Earth. Ken had one leg splayed out at a very awkward angle, and was holding on to a cabinet latch with his big toe. He was using the force of the leg to pin me against the wall – not very hard, just enough to stop my actual spin – as opposed to the alcohol-induced spin. As soon as my face was clear, he planted a big kiss on my lips, and tried to stick his tongue back to my tonsils.

We had sex right there in the observation lounge, banging about in zero-gee, a few meters from the pilothouse. If Kate and Alex heard us, they didn’t say anything, although I suspected they doing the same thing.

Sex in zero-gee is harder then it looks and somewhat overrated. Still, even bad sex is good, and he was a considerate and experienced lover. What he lacked in emotional attachment he made up for in skill and effort.

Sometime in the early morning, after our passion had subsided, we had a little conversation.

“You really are a lovely young lady,” he said, as he ran a finger down the cleft between my nose and mouth. “Thanks for putting up with my fumbling around.”

I suddenly realized that I had a bad case of “rookie’s desease.” It was a common problem – newbies straight from the Academy tended to act like they had received the wisdom of the world. I had also been down on him because he wasn’t formally trained.

“You’re welcome. Besides, don’t sell yourself short.”

“I know you don’t really like me. I’m not a very likable guy.”

“You’re alright,” I lied. Besides, I had been acting like a bitch, so I guessed we were even.

“There’s certainly no future between us. I’m way too old for you anyway.”

This was where I was supposed to disagree with him. “I suppose you’re right.”

He shifted around next to me. The nice thing about zero-gee sex is you could get into just about any position and hold it indefinitely. Right now, I was using his forearm as a pillow. “I know I’m right.” Well, that was a surprise. His next statement was not. “But that doesn’t mean that we can’t enjoy each other’s company on the way back.”

“Isn’t sleeping with the boss a bad idea?”

“You don’t have to. Besides, I’m not really your boss – this ship is too small for that shit.”

“Now may not be the best time to ask this, is there a Mrs. Bell?”

I had been in his cabin before, and had never seen a picture of a wife or girlfriend. The only pictures in the place were of his two boys, at various ages. “Yes. Her name is Patty,” he said, grimacing and turned away to stare at the far bulkhead. “Let’s just say our relationship is, well, complicated.”

“When I married her, I was young and stupid, and madly in love. She was beautiful, but...well, brittle. I thought she’d change. I was right. She’s 30 kilos heavier and twice as brittle.” He sighed heavily. “We’ve been married 15 years now.”

“What, you get married at age 10?”

He smiled and turned to look at me. “How old do you think I am?”

“Mid 20s?”

“Lighter gravity does that for you. Also, we get less exposure to UV radiation. Today is my 40^th birthday – in standard years.”

“Happy birthday. I’m glad we could celebrate it with a bang.” He nodded. “I’d figure you’d get more radiation – less atmosphere.”

He chuckled. “Yeah, if you stood out naked on the surface. Of course, if you did that, radiation would be the least of your worries.”

“Were you born on Mars?”

“No, I was like 5 or 6 when we emigrated.”

“How long have you been a spacer?”

“Fifteen standard years, off and on. I’d work at something dirtside for a while, then when I got fed up with the wife, I’d ship out on whatever was sailing.”

She must have something going for him to stick around. “So, why’d you stay with her?”

“The kids, I guess. I love my boys, and wanted somebody to take care of them. I suppose, now that they’re old enough, I might ditch the bitch. Still, it’s kinda nice to have somebody waiting for you when you make port. I’ve seen a lot of old farts in this business who’ve got nobody.” He shuddered a little. “Man, that kinda life sucks.”

I was getting cold, so I rounded up my clothes and, still naked, headed back to my cabin. I tossed the bundle of clothes into a corner and crawled into my bed.

Chapter 8 contents

On the surface, we settled back into the usual routine after the meteor strike. I mean, we stood the same watches and did the same work as before. Underneath, there were a lot of changes.

The first change was between Ken and me. I had had my required shots of course, so getting pregnant wasn’t a problem. Sleeping with the boss could be.

The second change was between the crew. I realized that during the first part of our trip that we had been feeling each other out. Obviously, the Yergans knew each other, but Ken and I were both unknown quantities. There had been some distance, and we had both been under evaluation. Now that was over.

**********

“Morning, Ken,” I said. He was unshaven, and dressed in paint-stained khaki pants and a faded pullover. The pilothouse was quiet.

“It’s night to me,” Ken replied, stifling a yawn. He gestured at the radar repeater. “Let’s start with traffic, shall we?” In a few minutes, it would be Friday, September 11, 2071, and I was taking the watch.

“We have traffic?” I said. We were 89 days out of Earth, nearing our halfway point, and there hadn’t been a blip on the scope for days.

“Just popped up maybe twenty minutes ago,” Ken said. He grinned wolfishly. “You’re looking sexy this morning,” he said. I had on a pair of oversized coveralls and my hair pulled back into a loose ponytail. In short, about as unsexy as I could get. “How about we slip into the charthouse for a quickee?”

“No thanks, Ken,” I said. I was definitely regretting ever sleeping with him. “Let’s focus on the contact,” I said.

“All work and no play makes Janet a dull girl,” He said, trying to grab my boob. I dodged his hand.

“Focus, Ken.”

He mock-pouted. “If you insist.”

There was only so much information to turn over with him, and eventually we finished and he headed down below. I called into Kate and reported in, ending up with the contact.

“Give her a call on the radio when we get closer,” she told me.

We slowly overtook the ship during my watch. “Slow” was of course a relative term. We were both traveling at over 40 kilometers a second, but because we were both going to the same place that really didn’t matter. What mattered was our relative speed, which in this case was only a couple of hundred meters per second. Not even supersonic.

The ship didn’t answer my radio calls, which really wasn’t that unusual. If they were a small ship like us, the watchstander might be some lowly astronaut like me. Although the ship’s officers were all supposed to speak English (and I’d heard some really mangled stuff passing for English on the radio) the watch astronaut might not. Unless they heard a ‘Mayday’ they’d probably ignore me until an English-speaking crewmember was available.

When I took the watch from Ken, the ship was just over fifteen hundred kilometers away. When Alex relieved me at 0600, she was at five hundred kilometers.

**********

A very solid clunk on the outer bulkhead awoke me from my after-watch nap. This was immediately followed by the general alarm. The ship’s Voice was reporting all sorts of problems, and as rolled out of my rack the lights flickered off, and a second later about half of them came on again. As I listened to the Voice, I heard three alarms, any one of which was serious. First I heard a “loss of communication” alarm, then a “power failure #2 solar array” and finally a loss of pressure alarm for the #3 greenhouse.

I jumped into a pair of coveralls and raced to the greenhouse. Everything seemed to be in slow motion, but it was really only a few seconds before I was at the pressure door to the greenhouse. As I looked in through the observation port, still struggling though sleep and shock, I couldn’t understand at first what I was seeing. Maybe I didn’t want to understand.

Practically all the plants had been sucked out of the compartment, and what few remained had been sucked clean of leaves. A couple of the water sprays were running, and the water coming out was boiling and freezing at the same time. I looked shipdown towards the outer hull. Something had cut a gouge almost the entire length of the compartment, slicing through the twin hulls like a hot knife through butter. There were scorch marks along the edges of the gash, which must have immediately vented the compartment to space.

A flash of red caught my eye. I blinked and saw Kate, drifting lifelessly against the far bulkhead. I stared at her in disbelief. There was a red streak of blood down her face from her nose, and her hair was matted with blood, whether from her ears or a skull wound I couldn’t tell. There was nothing I could do. I only hoped that she had passed out quickly from the loss of pressure. I pounded on the hatch for a minute, out of frustration more then anything else.

“Kate, where are you?” Alex said, his voice booming out of the announcing system.

I picked up the nearest ship’s phone and dialed the pilothouse. Ken answered. “Kate was trapped in #3 greenhouse. Aft bulkhead holding.” It took me a minute to notice that there was no answer. “Ken, what’s up?”

“You’d better get up to the pilothouse fast, Janet.”

I hustled up Broadway as fast as I could, running into Ken on the way. The ship was yawling and rolling, which didn’t help movement. Alarms were blaring, and the ship’s Voice seemed stuck in a loop of bad news. I entered the pilothouse, and asked what hit us.

Alex gestured at a magnified image on the main console. “They did, I guess.”

“They” was a Mitsubishi Type-17 freighter, which, according to the display, was about 100 clicks on our port shipdown bow. I stared at the freighter, usually nicknamed a “Flying Beachball” for its spherical shape.

Alex grabbed me. “Where’s my wife?”

“I’m sorry,” I said. “She didn’t get out.” He released me, stunned. He stared blankly at the far bulkhead.

“Alex,” I said, trying to keep the tension from my voice, “what’s going on? What should we do?”

“Fuck if I know,” Alex said.

The ship bucked again, and the image in the main console swam out of view.

“Does anybody know why we’re pitching around like this?” I asked.

Alex answered. “They fired on us – musta been a laser ‘cause I didn’t see nothing –and hit the high-gain array.”

“We must be off-gassing from somewhere,” Ken added.

Yeah, #3 greenhouse. We didn’t have time for that now. I knew that some ships on the Mars run were arming themselves with mining lasers for self defense. Apparently these guys decided to go on offense. “Somebody turn off the goddamn alarm!” I said. Things were happening way too fast. I felt dizzy and sick to my stomach.

Ken hit the switch, and the ship fell silent. He glanced at the radar display, and announced that we had a small blip inbound. “Well, that’ll be the boarding party,” Alex said.

The bridge to bridge radio crackled, and a male voice with an Australian accent said, “Windy City, prepare to be boarded. Leave one watchstander on the bridge, and assemble all other personnel in the quarterdeck.”

“OK,” Ken said, and left the pilothouse.

“OK what?” I said. “Alex, sir, your orders?”

“What?” Alex turned, a blank look on his face. “Where’d Ken go?”

“Who gives a shit!” I said. “What should I do?”

He didn’t answer me. After another minute or two, the bridge-to-bridge set crackled again. “Windy City, did you copy my last, over?”

The ship jerked again, so I sat down at the helm controls and tried to stabilize it.

“I’m going to find that idiot Ken,” Alex said. “You’ve got the bridge.”

Great – what the hell was I supposed to do? I picked up the bridge-to-bridge radio handset. “Station calling, this is Windy City. We copied your last, over.”

“Captain, is your crew mustered, over?”

“I don’t know. Things are a bit confused over here, over.”

“I suggest, captain, that you get unconfused right quick if you want to keep breathing, over.”

“The captain’s dead. You killed her, you son of a bitch,” I barked into the radio.

The reply was a long time coming. “Understand, Windy City. I suggest you cooperate if you want to save the rest of your crew. How are you doing on the muster, over?”

By then I had gotten the ship more or less level. I picked up the mike for the announcing circuit and paged Alex. The phone rang a second later. It was Alex, telling me he was with Ken on the quarterdeck. I picked up the radio.

“Everybody’s on the quarterdeck, over.”

“Roger, how many people should we see, over?”

“Two, over.”

I saw a brief glint of light outside the pilothouse window, which must have been the boarding craft. I tried to remember what I was supposed to do according to that stupid Ship Security seminar we’d had back in Florida. I was pretty sure “sit there like a bump on a log” was not recommended, but I didn’t have any other ideas. Kate and Alex were supposed to do this kind of stuff. They were officers, after all.

A few minutes later, I heard a solid thump aft, and the ship’s computer informed me that a vessel had just made a hard seal on the port docking hatch. As I sat there I heard the main port airlock door cycle.

I went to the command console, and called up the quarterdeck cameras. There were two, both motion sensitive and wired for sound that had been installed as a “security upgrade” during the SELP. As far as I was concerned, they were useless. Alex was standing there in the middle of the deck, his hands at his sides. As I watched, four space-suited figures entered, all of them holding guns. I heard one of the suited figures say “where’s the other crewman?”

“Damned if I know,” Alex said.

Just then, one of the cameras jerked, and caught a dark blur. Apparently it was Ken. As I watched, he launched himself at one of the suited figures like a torpedo. The guy’s gun went off, apparently hitting one of the cameras. The shot echoed throughout the ship.

As I tried to see what was going on, more gunfire broke out. I saw Alex get shot in the chest, and one of the other intruders shot Ken as he wrestled with the guy he’d tackled.

It was all over in an instant. Red globules of blood drifted across the field of view. A few seconds later, another body, dressed in Ken’s plaid shirt and with a red stain on his back, drifted across the room. I saw the attackers talk among themselves briefly, but too low for the mike to pickup.

The radio crackled. “Windy City, is your watchstander still on the bridge, over?”

“I am, over.”

“Stay put – our boarding party is coming to you, over.”

“Wilco.”

A few minutes later a spacesuited man with a sawed-off shotgun floated onto the pilothouse. He had his faceplate open, and I could see his grizzled and weary face.

“What’s your name?” He asked, in a weird European accent.

“Janet Pilgrim. I’m the only one left.”

“We’ll see about that, Janet,” he said. He waved his shotgun at me. “Let’s go.”

“Where?”

“To the quarterdeck. You go in front, and no sudden moves.”

We floated down the central passageway to the quarterdeck, me in front. As we got close, my guard shouted, “don’t shoot – it’s Boris.”

“Come on,” a woman’s voice said. We entered the quarterdeck, and a woman, her faceplate up, said, “John, tie her up.”

Another figure grabbed me, and quickly tied my hands behind my back and then tied my ankles together. He finished this by running a rope from wrist to ankles. Lastly, he took a loop of rope and attached me to the bulkhead by my waist. “Boris, go help J. R. search the boat,” the woman said. “John and I’ll stay here.”

We sat there like that for quite some time. I couldn’t see where they had put Ken and Alex’s bodies. After a few minutes, the woman who was their leader took off her helmet. She wore a red bandanna over her brown hair, and she scratched it with one gloved hand, casually holding the shotgun with the other. Her face was angular and thin, with pinched, pale lips. She was quite tall for a woman, almost 6-ft, I guessed. Her eyes were green, and there were quite a few “smile lines” around the corner of her eyes. Somehow I didn’t think she got them from smiling.

The other figure, John I assumed, stood next to me, holding a shotgun. I realized the he was the one Ken had tackled.

I watched as he removed his helmet. He looked like he was barely sixteen. He was tall and thin, almost gangly, like he’d just had a growth spurt. His hair was long and black, and he wore it pulled back in a ponytail. His face was also angular, and his lips were fuller then the woman’s but also pale. I noticed a gold chain glinting around his neck. He was staring at me with hungry eyes.

Periodically the woman put her hand to her ear, and listened on her headset. She briefly acknowledged the report each time, but otherwise said nothing. Eventually she smiled, took her hand out of the trigger guard of the shotgun, and held it by the barrel. She changed channels on her forearm suit controls, and said, “Ship’s all secured. Three dead crew, one survivor secured.” She listened to the reply, and then looked at John. He came close and she whispered something in his ear.

“But Mom...” he said.

“Goddamnit, do what I fucking tell you, boy!” He whined. Again he whispered something in her ear. They had a brief conversation, too low for me to hear. Boris returned, and grinned at me leeringly as he went by. Finally John stepped away from his mother. He grabbed me like a sack of potatoes, and we headed into the change room.

Chapter 9 contents

He pushed me into the room. Bound as I was, I was helpless to stop my drift into the far bulkhead. I watched wordlessly as he franticly peeled off his suit.

“Are you going to fight?” He asked. “Not that it makes much difference to me.” He was down to a skintight suit liner, and he ran a finger down my face.

“Cat got your tongue?” He asked.

“I can talk, you son of a bitch punk kid,” I said.

He slapped me. He was holding on to a grab bar, but I wasn’t, couldn’t, and his slap put me into a flat spin. I collided painfully with the nearest bulkhead.

“Girl like you shouldn’t use bad words.”

“Fuck you.”

“No, I think you got that backwards.”

He approached, and pulled out a knife. “Like I said, easy or hard.”

“Go to hell,” I said.

He wedged me in between two pipes, and pinned me there with his body. Then he wrapped some rope around my head and in my mouth, and tied this off to a pipe. Then he took another loop of rope around my arm and took it to the other pipe. I was stuck.

He ignored my curses, garbled from the rope gag, as he cut off my coveralls. Every time he touched me I felt slimy, like I was being touched by a snake. When he cut the rope around my ankles I kicked out, but missed hitting anything important. He punched me in the stomach for that, and knocked the wind out of me. I nearly passed out as I struggled to get my breath through the rope gag.

My next clear recollection was of John’s mother’s voice over the intercom ordering everybody to lay to the galley. John pulled his suit liner back on. I remember him quickly glancing in the mirror at himself, adjusting his necklaces, his nipple ring (I had never seen one before) and the gold loops in his ears. He cut me loose from the pipes, then looped a piece of rope around my neck, using it as a leash. My hands were still tied behind my back as he took me with him.

When we arrived, the other pirates were filing in. I was naked except for my bra. He had ripped off the right cup, exposing my breast, but the left one was completely covered. Strangely, I think I would have been more comfortable completely naked instead of like that. It was tangible proof of my helplessness. Boris leered at me as he came in, and as I was pushed into a seat beside John, he reached over and squeezed my exposed breast with a rough and callused hand. John batted his hand away.

“Why did you bring her?” Their leader asked.

“You said ‘all hands’ Mom,” John replied.

“Well, Kelly, are you going to make him share?” Boris asked. Their leader replied, ”Keep it in your pants, Boris.”

Boris made a hurt face. “I thought we were splitting things up evenly?”

She shook her head, clearly unhappy. “I got more important things to worry about then your sex life.”

Kelly took a sip of coffee, and handed her son a cup. “I hope you enjoyed your little fling, boy.” He gave her an embarrassed grin, to which Boris laughed uproariously.

“OK, OK, enough of the shits-n-giggles. What’s the status of my ship?”

The woman called J. R. spoke first. She was a tall redhead, with a tattoo, some kind of geometric design, wrapped around her upper arm. First time I had seen a woman with a tattoo, at least in the flesh. “High-gain array is gone. Pieces of it are probably a couple of miles astern by now. Looks like the comm gear inside the ship’s OK, but without an antenna it’s useless. Navigation, radar and ship’s controls are OK.”

“Good. Do you think they got off a Mayday?” Kelly said.

“Can’t tell,” J. R. said. “I doubt it.”

“That was the good news,” Boris said.

“And the bad news is?”

Boris jumped in. “#2 solar array must have been hit by the high gain. 10 or 15 meters of it is dangling by a wire off of the ship. Most of the rest of it is hanging on by a thread, I guess the mounting brackets gave way. The whole unit is shorted out. I can cut off the damaged section and fix the short, but until we re-attach the unit to the hull it won’t be real stable.

“Worse yet is we lost one of the greenhouses,” J. R. said, “#3 - and the switchboard room.”

“Define ‘lost’,” Kelly said.

“There’s a gash almost the entire length of the greenhouse, and the whole thing’s vented to space. The switchboard is aft of that, and the main electrical conduit for the array has pulled out of the hull. Both compartments are open to space.”

Kelly waved her hand in the air. “Bottom line it for me.”

“The ship’s lost,” J. R. said. “We should strip it for valuables and clear out.”

“Lost?” Kelly said. “Why?”

“We’ve got no safety margin,” Boris said. “We’re under 50% life support and right at it for power.”

“You damn greeners and your safety margins,” Kelly said.

“And you damn blue-heads running around on a wing and a prayer,” J. R. shot back. “Get yourself killed if you want to, but I’m bagging it back.”

John asked, “Why don’t we fix the damage?”

Boris and J. R. both laughed, and Kelly answered. “Anybody here know how to weld in vacuum and zero gee? Let me tell you, it’s a real skill. I don’t have it, and nobody here or over on the Sarah Sands has it.” The pirates started to argue among themselves as to potential jury-rigs they could try.

As this argument was going on, I was staring at the far bulkhead. Kate had allowed each of us to hang a picture in the wardroom. Mine was of Grandpa Pilgrim. I had a promise to him, and I might as well try and keep it.

“I can weld,” I said. It was the first thing I had said in hours, and it brought the room to a dead silence.

“Yeah, right, and I can shit $100 bills out my ass!” Boris said.

“I welded up our heat radiator. Look in the ship’s log. Besides, what do you have to loose?”

Kelly nodded. “She’s got a point. But why would you be so all-fired willing to help?”

It’s kind of hard to shrug with your hands tied behind your back, but I tried. “I don’t want to die.”

John was nodding vigorously at this. “See, Mom, I told you she’d be useful!”

Kelly glared at him. “Yeah, useful for polishing your dick.” John looked hurt and embarrassed, but said nothing. “Who said you we’re going to die?”

“You already killed three people – last thing you need is a witness,” I said.

“We might let you work and then kill you,” Boris said.

“You might.” I really didn’t care at that point. “But it’s not like this is my ship. And the Captain was a real bitch,” I lied.

“OK, little miss welder chick,” Kelly said, “We’ll give you a try. You fuck up, you die. You try anything dumb, you die. You are no longer useful to us, you die. Get the picture?”

I nodded. Kelly pointed at John. “Untie her hands.” She looked at me. “Get in there and fix us some food. I’m hungry.”

**********

I had thought, after the meteor strike, that I’d worked hard. The next few weeks proved me wrong.

We started on the hull repairs. Boris would cannibalize and cut metal for the hull patch, and wrestle it to the airlock. John and I then got it in position for me to weld. J. R. tackled the electrical work, occasionally pulling me to weld parts of the solar array back together.

At least that was how it was supposed to work. John seemed to think I was his personal property, and spent most of his time on ‘security’ which he defined as keeping an eye on me.

John moved into my cabin as well. Thankfully, in those first few weeks, he was too tired for much sex. He did insist, however that I sleep naked, and he always made sure to tie my hands together, either behind my back or to the bunk, before he went to sleep.

My only plan, if you could call it that, was to stay alive, whatever it took. In a way, the hard work was good – I didn’t have time to feel sorry for myself. That would come later.

**********

“She’s your captain,” J. R. said, wiping the sweat off of her face with a bandana. She pointed at the hatch to the greenhouse. “You bury her.”

We’d finished the exterior weld last night, and had repressurized the greenhouse. The pressure had held for six hours, proving the welds were good.

“Don’t suppose you could help?” I asked, feeling stupid for asking.

“I still gotta re-pull the line to the greenhouse,” she said. She kicked off the wall and headed starboard.

I steeled myself and opened the hatch. Kate’s body had drifted to the forward bulkhead, where he clothes had caught on a spray nozzle. She was unrecognizable. The lack of pressure and cold of the compartment had combined to freeze-dry her, and she looked like a wizened old woman. Her skin was leathery and wrinkled, and turning brown in spots, like freezer burn. I untangled her from the spray nozzle, and wrapped her in a green blanket I had pulled from the cargo bay, and tied it to her in some yellow twine.

I took off her wedding band, and put it on my finger. “No point in letting these shits get it,” I said to myself. She hadn’t taken that band off since we left on the trip, because her finger had swollen in the zero gee. Yet, it slipped off of her brown and wrinkled hand into mine very easily.

I started to push her aft. My plan was to go through the switchboard and battery rooms to the quarterdeck airlocks. It was a straight shot, which I figured was easier. She was limp – either rigor mortis didn’t set happen in space or it wore off – so moving her was difficult. This was especially so as I was trying not to bang her body around. Maneuvering in the cramped spaces was difficult, and I had worked up a sweat by the time we got to the quarterdeck. But I hadn’t banged her body into anything, and that was important to me.

That is, I didn’t bang into anything until we got into the wide-open quarterdeck area. Then she developed a little too much momentum, and smacked hard into the outer door of the airlock. I guess that was the last straw. I saw this, and I started to cry like a baby. Uncontrollable sobs racked me, and I ended up getting out of breath.

I finally got myself under control. Kate’s body had drifted out of the airlock and into the quarterdeck proper. I grabbed it and carefully put her in the airlock, then stepped out, closing the inner door. Boris had rigged the airlock so that you could remotely open the outer door without depressurizing it. That was how they got rid of Alex and Ken’s bodies. Once I got the inner door sealed, I called up to the pilothouse (they would get an alarm) and told them what I was doing.

I looked through the small window set in the door and activated the jury-rigged switch. As soon as the doors started to open, the air rushed out, pulling Kate’s body with it. To my surprise, her body didn’t tumble at all – just flew out straight.

I stared out the window until Kelly called from the pilothouse, asking me if there was a problem. “No,” I said, remotely closing the outer door.

Chapter 10 contents

“So this is our little welder chick,” Captain Gus said, examining me as if I were a piece of meat. He turned to John. “I can see your interest in her, boy.”

“She was, helpful, in getting the repairs done,” Kelly said, looking at John, who was turning red.

“So I understand,” Captain Gus said. “Well, show me what she’s done.”

After I had finished moving Kate’s body out of the greenhouse, I had gone to find John and find out what I was supposed to do. I ran into Kelly first, coming down the central corridor from the pilothouse.

“Get cleaned up,” she told me, “Captain Gus is coming over from the Sarah Sands. He’s going to want to see you.” She continued down the corridor. “And get my lazy-ass son moving, too,”

I didn’t know who Captain Gus was, but apparently he was somebody important. I did as instructed, and an hour later found myself being inspected on the quarterdeck.

Captain Gus was an older man, dark-skinned, with thinning gray hair, and a weathered face. He was dressed in a short sleeve white uniform shirt, with blue epaulets with three gold stripes on each shoulder. As soon as I spoke, I recognized his thick Australian accent as the one on the radio from the day of the attack.

Somewhat to my surprise and amusement, Kelly had assembled everybody on the quarterdeck except Boris, who had the bridge watch. John and I were both wearing shirts, something of a rare occasion for us. J. R. wore a white blouse of Kate’s with an embroidered crest instead of her usual tank top. Even Kelly had cleaned up, and had put on lipstick.

“Well, Kelly, let’s have a look about, shall we?” He pointed at me. “Bring her too.”

We toured the ship, Kelly and John pointing out the repairs made. We finally ended up in the wardroom, where I helped J. R. serve a late lunch. After everybody had eaten, Gus pushed back from his chair. “Kelly,” he said, “time for a meeting. J. R., would you find a place for Ms. Pilgrim here?”

“Gladly,” she said, smiling. We went to an unused cabin. As soon as I opened the door, she pushed me from behind and slammed me into a bulkhead. I was a little dazed, and made no resistance as she tied my hands together behind my back. Then she wrestled me facedown onto her bunk, and tied my ankles together. I somehow squirmed onto my back in time for her to loop a piece of rope around my neck, which she tied off to a grab bar.

“Comfy?” She asked.

“Fuck you,” I said.

She put her fingers on my lips. “Talk nice or that’ll be your last words, bitch,” she said. She stepped back, admiring her handiwork for a minute. “That ought to hold you. Still, there’s something missing.”

She looked around the tiny room for a second, then produced a small black cloth bag, which she pulled over my face as a blindfold.

“Don’t squirm around,” she said. “If you fall off the bed, that rope’ll choke you, eventually.”

I have no idea how long I spent tied up on that bed. Despite my situation, there was some hope. If they had decided to kill me, they would have done so already, so I concluded that they were discussing what to do about me. It was actually the first time since the attack that I was alone and not busy for more then a few minutes.

I reflected on my decision to help repair the ship after the attack. It had kept me alive this long, but I didn’t know if that was a good thing or not. If they had been in my shoes, what would they have done? More to the point, who else would die because I had decided to live? It seemed like I had developed a habit of having people die around me.

It wasn’t fair that this was happening to me. All I wanted to do was go to college.

Eventually, I realized that, fair or not, it was happening to me. My best, my only, option was to try and stay alive. An opportunity like tomorrow was sure to come.

**********

“Take the hood off,” Captain Gus said. “I want to see her face.”

Somebody jerked the hood off. I blinked in the glare for a second. When I could focus again, I saw Kelly, Captain Gus and J. R. crowded into the little room. Gus had straddled the only chair.

“Frankly, my dear,” Captain Gus said, “I wanted to quietly shove you out the nearest airlock and be done with you. However, the crew felt that you might be, amenable to a different offer.”

“I’m listening, sir,” I said. It took all my self-control to talk nicely to that murdering son-of-a-bitch.

“How much were you getting paid for this cruise?” Kelly asked.

I told him, finishing with, “plus overtime.”

“Any equity?” J. R. asked.

“What’s equity?” I replied.

J. R. smiled. “That’s a ‘no’.”

“We’ll give you the same offer we gave J. R. and Max when we took the Sarah Sands,” Gus said. “You get three options. Ready?”

I nodded as best I could without choking myself.

“Option one is you sign on as one of us. Since you didn’t help us take the ship, you only get half a share of what this ship brings. We take any more ships, you get a full share. You get one vote in the meetings, same as everybody else. We pay off on Earth. Oh, no liberty on Mars – I wouldn’t want you to have a sudden change of heart. Understand?”

“Yes.”

“Option one also means that,” J. R. said, “If we get caught, you get hung same as us.”

“Option two,” Gus continued, “is you do what we tell you, and you keep serving as a crewman on this ship. You don’t get a share or a vote, but you’re not expected to fight.”

“When do I get released?” I asked.

“If you get released. That’s up to John,” Gus said. “It was his idea. I think you know what option 3 is.”

“Option three is you kill me now,” I said. “How long do I get to think about it?”

“I need to take a leak,” Gus said, standing up. “When I get back I’ll want your answer.”

“Wait, please,” I said. “You’d really let me be a full partner? My own cabin and everything?”

Kelly and J. R. smiled at each other. “Yes, we would,” Gus said. “Any other questions?”

“I’ve made my mind up, sir,” I said. “Option one.”

Gus smiled. “John’s not going to like that,” he said. “I see that glint in your eye, so before I have J. R. cut you loose, I want you to understand something. If we have any problems with you, any problems at all, your fault, my fault, nobody’s fault - I will kill you myself. No matter what else happens, no matter who else dies, I will kill you. Do you understand?”

“I understand completely, sir,” I said.

“Cut her loose,” Gus said, as he walked out of the room.

Chapter 11 contents

I have no intention of helping these pirates any more then I have to, and I also have no doubt that they were more equal then me. But, thanks to my playing along, I have an opportunity to leave.

After our discussion in the cabin, we all re-assembled in the wardroom. Even Boris came down from the pilothouse, remote unit in hand. Gus announced my decision, and the group all applauded – except John, who looked like he’d eaten a rotten egg. Gus produced a crowbar, and pried open the liquor cabinet. Everybody had a stiff shot in celebration. A camera was produced, and I was made to swear an oath to my new “family”. I was told to write out the oath twice longhand on a pad of paper and sign both copies. Kelly kept one and Gus kept the other.

More drinks were had, and Kelly and J. R. both hugged me. Eventually, John, prompted by his mother, came up to me and said, “No hard feelings, right?”

I smiled and punched him in the nose as hard as I could. As he staggered back, I kicked him in the crotch. He crumpled, falling slowly in the light gravity. He lay down on the floor, rolling about, holding his nose with one hand and his crotch with the other. I backed away carefully and poured myself another drink. “Now we’re even,” I said.

John glared at me, but Gus just laughed and said “you had that coming, son.” He looked at me. “Nice shot, dear.”

Gus made me go over and help him up. He took my hand in poor grace and stood up. I had drawn blood, so he left in a sulk to take care of it.

John had just returned when Gus announced that he was going back to the Sarah Sands. He was taking Boris with him. Kelly, as ‘quartermaster’, was put in charge of the ship. The pair shared a passionate embrace, to the delight of the crew, and Kelly walked Gus out. The pair were clearly an item.

“Any booze left?” John asked.

“I saved some for you,” I said, handing him a glass. “Stop by later and pick up your stuff,” I said.

I went to my cabin and started to pack up John’s stuff. I left the door open, and when I heard him walk in I turned.

“I should wring your neck,” he said.

I took my top off, and, bare-chested, pressed my body against him. “I said we were even, Mr. Krasny,” I whispered into his ear, followed by my tongue. “I didn’t say it was over.”

I truly didn’t want to fuck him. At the moment, he couldn’t, so it was an empty gesture. Still, I couldn’t have him running around mad at me. There were too many ways for me to have an ‘accident.’ Besides, my freedom depended on convincing people that I was a willing convert.

He left, if not happy, convinced that he had a shot with me, and life aboard the Windy City settled into a routine. We were back at full power again, so the ship was much more comfortable. With #3 Greenhouse fixed, and the emergency plantings in #1 greenhouse, we could stop drawing down on the reserve air. I still had several days of work in the greenhouse, but I could now focus on them, and working in pressure was much quicker. I was still the junior member of the crew, so most of my time was spent doing whatever shitty little job the rest of the crew didn’t want.

Kelly put me on the watch bill with her, as her assistant. I’m sure she wanted to keep an eye on me.

There was not much I could do, even if the high-gain radio had been working. My best and only chance was to get to Mars and disappear.

In the meantime, I decided that I needed some allies. Kelly was only concerned about her son, and I knew exactly what John wanted. That left Boris and J. R. As it happened, she made the first move.

It was a little more then a week after my “getting made,” which is what they called my taking their little oath. I had just gotten off of watch and was in the shower when I heard the door open. This wasn’t unusual. The only private head was in the captain’s cabin. What was unusual was when the door to my stall popped open to reveal J. R. standing there naked.

I jumped and shrieked, to her evident amusement.

“What, never seen a naked girl before?” She asked.

“No, I mean yes, I have. You startled me.”

“Mind if I join you?”

“What, the other shower busted?”

She laughed at this, a deep and throaty sound. “You can’t be that innocent, girlfriend.” She squeezed in uninvited anyway. To save water, you only ran the shower to get wet and rinse, not constantly. She hit the button and started to get wet, rubbing herself suggestively against me as she did.

“I’ve, well,”

“You’ve never been with a girl, I could tell.” The water stopped, and she turned to face me, her hair and body soaked. “Don’t worry, I have. Just relax and let me show you what you’ve been missing.”

I was confused, to say the least. I needed allies, and here was somebody offering just that. On the other hand, she was a murderess who’d have gladly strangled me just a few days ago. As I was trying to decide what to do, I felt her hand between my legs. An involuntary moan escaped my lips.

“Good, huh?” She said, a smile on her lips. “Just relax and go with the flow.”

God help me, I decided to take her advice.

**********

We arrived in Mars orbit December 11, 2071. Instead of docking at the Port of Deimos, we went into direct orbit over the planet. Boris had arranged to offload all the cargo via some orbital lighters. To facilitate our unloading (After all, we couldn’t bring up a crew of stevedores from the planet) Gus docked our two ships together. Then, we could unload everything into the lighters for shipment dirtside and sale.

And I mean everything. Not only were we selling the two ship’s cargoes, but we held a “pick party” and went through the dead crewmember’s stuff. Anything not claimed we would sell. Boris had arranged for a “Cheap John”, as auctioneers on Mars were known, to sell everything. The auctioneer took a third as his cut, and the rest of the cash ‘we’ kept.

I have been spending a lot of time planning this escape. My first problem is getting off of the ship. In all the old videos I’d watched back on Earth, the heroine would have just snuck onboard the “automatic lifepods” and blasted down, safely landing close to a helpful hero. There’s a problem with this – deep space ships don’t have lifeboats.

The conventional wisdom is “good was a lifeboat if you are millions of miles from any help?” You’d run out of O2 way before any rescuer showed up, if one were even attempted. I remembered one of my instructor’s comments on the subject. “Lifeboats are just for show. If anything goes wrong on your ship, you’d better fix it, or be able to hold your breath for six months.”

Assuming I can get to the surface, I still have a big problem. There are less then a million people on Mars, spread out over an area roughly equal to all the landmass of Earth.

Cops apparently are even thinner on the ground then people. Boxtown station, home of our auctioneer, is a good example. Apparently it costs a ton of money to keep somebody in prison for even a year, let alone for life. So, many long-term prisoners were shipped to Mars, and literally dumped on a landing spot on Mars’ southern highlands. They had used their boxlike one-way transports to build the initial town, hence the name. Since the only concern was that the prisoners not return to Earth, there were no guards or officials of any kind in the station.

The next nearby town, Boba Fett, is even worse in that all of it’s inhabitants are exiles from Boxtown. And that is almost 200 KM away. There was a little place called St. Mary’s Station about 500 KM to the northwest, but I don’t know if they would be of any help. As near as I can tell, the closest place I can rely on to protect me is Heinlein, a city of 10,000 or so – only 800 KM to the west!

Getting on the radio and screaming for help is a problem as well. Mars has no planet-wide law enforcement. Assuming anybody came to look things over (a big assumption) by the time they got there I could be dead and gone. Or, my would-be rescuers could get killed. Besides, since I’d signed papers and all, I might just get charged as a pirate myself.

I thought about and discarded the idea of stealing one of our small ship-to-ship launches. They would burn up well before they got to the ground, even in Mars’ thin atmosphere. Of course, I have no idea how to fly one, so that is generally a non-starter.

But I do have a plan. Hopefully, if you’re reading this file, the plan worked.

Part 2

Mars

Chapter 12 contents

My plan failed. As I write this, we are nineteen days out of Mars orbit, and I am still onboard the ship. My only hope now is to make a break for it when we get to Earth, six months from now. Let me tell you what happened.

I had decided to wait until we were just ready to leave orbit, on the logic that Captain Gus wouldn’t want to delay getting back to Earth to look for me. I also figured that whatever lingering doubts they had about me would quiet down after a while. Finally, based on my experiences of leaving Earth, the last few days were the most hectic. Many spacers hated leaving port – any port – and so spent as much time dirtside as possible.

One evening, all three of these factors lined up in my favor. Kelly and John were dirtside, keeping an eye on Boris and the auctioneer, and Captain Gus was topside, supervising loading of supplies. Our new crewmembers were still dirtside as well, partying before shipping out.

“We’re having dinner on the Sarah Sands,” J. R. had told me after we finished our work in the cargo bay. “Take a shower before you go up.”

“Like I wouldn’t anyway?”

J. R. smiled. “This is a special occasion.”

**********

“I hope this Marina can cook as good as Max,” Gus said, pushing back from the table. Marina was one of the new crewmembers, coming up the next morning. He was wearing his usual uniform. J. R. was sitting next to me and had changed from her usual work clothes into a see-through black tanktop (no bra) and a skimpy pair of shorts. I was wearing one of Kate’s blouses, mostly unbuttoned, no bra, and my only skirt, a faded denim number.

“You want desert, skipper?” J. R. asked.

“After the floor show,” he said. At that, J. R. turned and tried to tickle my tonsils with her tongue. I felt her hand slide down the front of my shirt and wrap itself around my boob. I leaned into her and lifted up her shirt.

As J. R. and I were struggling with her shirt, Gus had stood up, presumably for a better view. I managed to get her shirt up over her head and tossed it at Gus. He wasn’t expecting that, and it hit him in the face.

J. R. pulled my shirt down off my shoulders, pinning my arms behind me. She was quite expert at restraining people.

“Well, if you want to lead,” I said, to Gus’s laughter, “just say so.”

We managed to get out of our clothes, and put on quite a little show for Gus on the floor of the wardroom. When he could stand it no longer, Gus had reached in and picked me up, tossing me over his shoulder like a sack of potatoes, and the three of us headed off to his stateroom.

**********

“So which do you prefer,” Gus asked, “girls or guys?”

The three of us had satisfied our passions, and were lying in his surprisingly large bed. J. R. was sound asleep on her stomach, her red hair scattered over her back.

I was glad he’d turned down the lights so he couldn’t see me blushing. “It’s like asking if I prefer steak or lobster,” I said, borrowing a line from J. R. “They’re different things.”

Until I met J. R., I had never considered being with a woman before, and I hadn’t understood the way she’d been looking at me. In my quieter moments, I was concerned that the “whatever goes” mentality of the pirates was rubbing off on me. Here I was, entertaining my ‘captain’ and myself by having sex with a bunch of crooks and murderers. The nuns at Mother McReady High School would not have approved.

As far as my sexual orientation, that was even more difficult for me to understand. I had enjoyed sex with Raj and Ken, and never even considered a woman as a sexual object. I told myself that I was just going along with J. R. for political reasons, but I knew that wasn’t entirely true. I decided to change the subject. At any rate, I hoped to be rid of them in the morning.

“How’d you get, well, I mean...”

“Did I want to be a pirate when I grew up?” Gus asked. J. R. stirred, and Gus ran his hand down her back.

“I spent twenty years working for the Black Star Line, out of Melbourne,” he said, “all of it on the Lunar run. Worked my way up to captain, had me own ship, the Saba Bank. Well, one day, one of the owners, guy named O’Malley, he comes to me with a big bundle.” Gus held his arms out at full length. “Wanted me to hide it onboard, and deliver it to some bloke in New Moscow.”

“What was it?”

“I didn’t ask. I’d lost my shirt in a divorce, and the girl I was with was high maintenance,” he said with a wink, “so I needed the cash. And there was a fuckload of cash.”

“This became a regular thing, every other run same drill.” Gus said, yawning. “About a year later, and everything’s going along usual like. Then one day O’Malley he asked where I was hiding the stuff, and could I show him.

“I thought that was a bit off, but he had some good story about new Customs searches, so I took him to the stash. I shipped out the very next day and just as soon as we hit Russian customs at Luna they march right there and popped the cover. I was most thoroughly fucked, mate. Five years freezin’ me arse off in a Russian jail over that.

“Why’d he turn you in?”

“Interpol and the Russian cops were on to him, so he copped a deal and set me up as fall guy. Made it sound like my idea, too, the fat fuck. He got shitcanned from the line of course, but no jail time.”

“How’d you get this boat, then?”

He was silent for so long that I thought he’d gone to sleep. Finally, he said, “Well, I gotta eat. All I’d ever done was spaceman shit. When I got out, nobody would hire me. Except O’Malley. He figured that he could trust me. In fact, he got me sprang from jail early – I was supposed to serve 10 to 15.” He smiled, his teeth gleaming in the dim light. “Boy was he wrong. I guess he figured I’d be loyal out of gratitude.”

I yawned myself then.

“Not boring you, am I?” I assured him he wasn’t.

“At any rate, he needed a qualified captain to make this big score work, and he knew that I was desperate. So, he hired me to fly him and this ship to Mars.”

“And you took over the ship?”

“Yeah, me and the Krasnys. We made J. R. and Max the same offer we did to you.” I felt his hand reach down between my legs. “Think we can have a go without waking Red?”

“Sure,” I said, sliding on top of him. “So, what was the big score?”

“Ever hear of cocaine?” he asked.

“I thought that had been wiped out? Some plant disease?”

Gus chuckled. “By a plant disease created in a US bio-weapons lab. Somewhere on Mars somebody started growing it again. We were going to pick up a shitload of it and smuggle it back in.”

“Where?”

“I don’t know - somewhere up in Utopia - I frankly don’t care. I’ve seen enough of Earth Customs pricks to last me a lifetime. No, this is easier. Sell the ships, and retire with Kelly to a beach with my name on it.”

“She OK with what just happened?” I asked. I started to run my finger in a circle around his nipple.

Gus chuckled deep in his throat. “She is most definitely not OK with this,” he said. “It’s our little secret.” He put a finger on my mouth.

I felt him slide inside me, and suppressed a moan. “How are you going to get back to Earth without getting caught?”

“You’ll see, matey.”

He came quickly and immediately went to sleep. The next morning came sooner then I wanted, and I was dog-tired. The Martian day lasts 24 ½ hours, but we were running normal, 24-hour days. That was Gus’s idea. “No sense changing every clock on the bloomin’ boat for a 30 day layover,” he’d said. Everybody was paying for that decision.

The problem was simple. Assume you synchronize your 24-hour watch with a Martian watch at 12 noon. Every day, your watch will lose 30-some minutes (the exact time difference is like 39 minutes every day) against the Martian’s. So, a week goes by, and the Martian is getting up at his normal time. But according to your watch, he’s getting up – and knocking on your door – four, almost five, hours earlier then he did just last week. It’s like slow motion jetlag, only worse, because you never really catch up.

The phone rang, and J. R. fumbled over me to get it. She listened for a second then grunted an acknowledgement. “Wakey wakey,” she said, slapping me playfully in the rump. “Work to do.”

“Can’t these bloomin’ wankers hold off until daylight?” Gus said, fixing us with bleary eyes.

“Look out the window, skipper. It’s daylight somewhere,” J. R. said. She was entirely too perky in the mornings for my tastes. Still, I found that I liked waking up next to her.

“After I get the lighter clear,” I said, “I’m going over to the Windy City and clean out the waste water plant’s holding tank. It looks like an all-day job.”

Gus wrinkled his face. “Make sure you take a thorough shower and wash off that stink before you come near me!”

Chapter 13 contents

I had no intention of going anywhere near him again, nor the wastewater plant, which was operating perfectly. But the fact that it was a smelly job in an out-of-the way space meant that nobody would be in a hurry to check up on me. Instead, I slipped through the docking collar and entered the quarterdeck of the Windy City. There I quickly changed into my spacesuit. The night before I had stowed it in “emergency ready” – zippers open, boots and gloves attached, backpack recharged – just for this occasion.

The lighter that was coming alongside was an elderly Boeing T-111 model. The day before, they had left a battered and rusted container mated to the starboard hatch of the Windy City’s #1 cargo bay, which J. R. and I had spent the rest of the day filling with junk, dunnage and scrap. The lighter’s pilot was going to put this “cleanout container” in his cargo hold, detach it from us, and head down to Boxtown. I was going to sneak aboard, and ride down in a little nest I had built of scrap paper and dunnage from the cargo hold. Although the container was pressurized, Mars was not, and it was going to be a warm ride through the atmosphere.

When we had first started this unloading process, somebody from the crew was always in the cargo hold with me, both for safety and to keep an eye on me. Considering that we were short handed, I figured that if anybody was watching, they would do so via the security camera from the pilothouse. What everybody forgot was that I was doing most of the maintenance, and so it had been easy for me to disable the camera in the cargo hold.

I had done something that I had seen in some old video. I had rigged a switch in the cargo hold, and when I turned on the switch, the video system, instead of playing live action, played a loop from a previous day – a day where I had closed the inner doors on the cargo bay and watched the ship pull clear, then cut back to a live feed. I had pulled the plans from a CD-ROM in the ship’s library, and, after burning my fingers on the soldering iron, I had rigged up the bypass. I had even changed the timestamp, which all the characters in the videos seemed to forget. I had also hidden a remote pad for the Windy City’s controls in my suit, and I would use this to close the cargo doors.

The plan worked like a charm. If it had been one of my old videos, there would have been some tense moment in the cargo bay where I had to get rid of J. R., or the door would have stuck, or something would have given me away. Instead, everything went smooth, and it was really anticlimactic.

The ride down to the surface, though was a gut-buster. Almost as soon as we cleared the Windy City, the bouncing started as the ship hit Mars’s atmosphere, and built to the point that I felt like I was riding on the inside of a washing machine. Besides the turbulence, the noise was deafening. It started as a quiet, high-pitched whine, and built to a loud bass roar that reached into by stomach and twisted it into a pretzel.

The g-forces were higher than anything I’d felt for six months. My crude cushions provided no real support, and I was plastered against a wall for most of the ride, struggling to breathe. All this was happening in near darkness, illuminated in a pale green glow from a chemlight I had activated when I got inside.

After an eternity of this, the ride smoothed out for a bit, and then I heard a faint thump and screech, which I took to be the lighter’s wheels hitting the landing strip. The bird rolled to a stop, and I heard metallic clanks on the sides of the container. There was a little bit of jostling, and then the movement thankfully stopped.

My head was spinning, partly from the ride and partly from the return of real gravity. All I had felt for six months was centrifugal force. In our small ships, that meant that when you stood up, your head was moving slower then your feet. Getting “spinsick” was a common event, and when you got into real gravity, “dirtsickness” while adjusting to the real thing was also common.

I puked my guts out into a trash bag, which I had brought for just that purpose. I waited for a bit, to ensure that the nausea wouldn’t return, (vomiting in a spacesuit could be a real problem, even fatal) and then started to extract myself.

My plan was to take advantage of the fact that this was a beat up old box, and beat my way out. When the container had been brought up, I had noticed a small area on one side was badly rusted, and had been patched by fiberglass and epoxy. Also important, the weak area would be on the side when the container was on the ground. In space, nobody cared about up or down, but it made a difference in gravity, and so any container was always marked as to up or down. As part of my pre-escape preparations, I had marked that area on the inside with some white chalk. My glowstick and gone out, and I wanted to conserve my suit batteries, so I started to fish around for another one.

Then I saw the weakened area, which was translucent enough to let in some of Mars’ weak sunlight. Apparently my eyes had adjusted enough to the dark to find it. The hole was originally only about a foot or 2 in diameter, and it had been patched well enough to hold against 500 millibars of pressure, but it was much weaker then steel. Besides, I had snuck a hammer onboard as well.

With the container’s air pressure working for me, it only took a few solid whacks to get a small hole opened. The air rushed out, equalizing the pressure and kicking up a small red sandstorm. I used the force of the air to help me expand the hole to a size I could get through. Containers had relief valves (I had blocked up this one) which were supposed to equalize pressure, so I figured anybody who saw this would assume the valve had stuck and then became unstuck.

Expanding the hole to fit me only took a few more minutes, so within an hour of touchdown I was free on the surface of Mars. Sooner or later the crew would notice I was gone, and I needed to be as far away from Boxtown as possible by then. I had squirreled away all the cash I had in my suit. Back on Earth, that would be barely enough to buy lunch at McDonald’s. So I had also hidden a few small pieces of jewelry, including Kate’s wedding band and some stuff from one of the cabins on the Sarah Sands. I planned to pawn these for a gun and some cash, and get a ride to Heinlein or St. Mary’s.

When I got out, I spent a minute or two to look around at Mars, the only other planet I had set foot on. It was not that impressive. The “spaceport” (really a glorified airstrip) was set on a flat, rock-strewn plain, ringed by a few small and rounded hills in the distance. Everything, the dirt, the rocks and even the sky, was tinged orange. My container had been placed in a dirt area cleared of rocks on the edge of a runway or taxiway (orange-tinged concrete, of course), in a haphazard cluster of similar containers and assorted junk. On the other end of the airstrip was a cluster of brick, stone, concrete and glass structures, which I assumed to be the dome or station of Boxtown. Any vestiges of the original boxes were long gone. As that was the only “civilization” that I could walk to before running out of air, I started towards the station.

There wasn’t a whole lot of activity going on outside of the station, and I stayed well clear of the two or three people I saw outside. I had my suit radio set to the main hailing frequency and I heard very little chatter. I went straight up to the first set of airlock doors I came to. I wasn’t sure of the protocol, I mean, do you knock or what – so I decided to just go in.

I pressed the airlock cycle button, which was half dangling out of the wall, with several wires exposed, when I heard in my suit radio “Hey, at airlock Three – hold up for me please.”

The battered and dusty metal door in front of me had a faded spot that had once been a painted numeral three, so I decided I was being hailed. Trying to be calm, I answered, “OK”, and turned around to look.

I saw a fat man stuffed like a sausage into a dirty and well-worn spacesuit awkwardly lumbering out of a tractor of the type used to move spaceplanes. He walked up to me, and gestured at the door with his hand.

“Go ahead, my friend,” he said. I stepped in the open door, and he got in behind me. He hit the cycle button, and pulled the door closed behind him. As pressure returned, he took off his helmet, revealing a wild mat of dark brown hair. He badly needed a shave, and wore eyeglasses.

“No rest for the wicked, is there?” he said as he stuck a dark brown tube into his mouth. He lit it, and handed its mate to me. I didn’t know what it was, so I put it in my pocket. I had taken of my helmet, and we together stepped out of the small room into a larger locker room.

“I don’t recognize your suit, there, young lady. Where are you from?” He asked.

I had noticed a number of faded geometrical designs on his suit, while mine was the same vanilla white it had been when I bought it. Well, there were a few soot marks from my welding work, and a small fleck of green puke on one sleeve, but it was clearly not customized.

“I came down from the Sarah Sands this morning.” Might as well stick as close to the truth as possible, and say as little as possible. I didn’t know if another lighter had come down or not, so I figured I had to account for the time from the first lighter to now. “I wanted to check on a few of our cargo containers.”

“Welcome to Mars, then,” he said. We headed off to our respective changing rooms. I lingered in mine a bit longer, hoping he’d go on about his business. I had no such luck.

I came out of my room in a pair of coveralls, my suit in a pack over my shoulders, to find him leaning against the door. A cloud of blue smoke surrounded him. I somewhat abstractly realized that the black tubes were cigars. Tobacco was illegal back home.

“You staying down for long?” he asked.

“Actually, no – just stretching my legs. Maybe see the sights and pick up some supplies.”

“Know where you’re going?”

“Not really – but this is a small town. How hard can it be?”

“That might not be a good idea,” he said, a frown on his face. “Parts of this town are really rough. One of your crewmates found that out last night.”

“Oh, sorry to hear that,” I lied.

“I could take you to the main shopping district,” he said.

“I wouldn’t want to impose,” I said. I really didn’t want to trust anybody.

“No problem,” he said, “I’m going there anyway.”

“OK, if you insist,” I said. Trusting the first man I ran into didn’t seem like a good idea, but he’d be even more suspicious if I didn’t. Besides, I really had no idea where I was going. “Lead on, Mister.”

“Call me Mike,” he said, as we started walking.

We walked out of the airlock area into a wide and high-roofed hallway, with brick floors and walls. I was expecting the inside to be dark, but the ceiling was lined with electrical lights and painted white. The floor meandered randomly, tilting up and down like a snake’s back. The walls of the hallway were actually the front walls of various houses, and the windows and doors opened in the hallway. The whole effect reminded me of when we’d visited the old city of Jerusalem when I was a kid.

There were a few people out and about, from kids to old women. They were dressed casually, in shorts and T-shirts, although I noticed several people who were close to naked. The picture painted of these prison towns was of poverty and desperation. Everybody seemed surprisingly happy and healthy, and there were no outward signs of poverty, although I’d never seen so many tattoos before – even some children had them!

My guide seemed to know everybody we saw, and waved or nodded to them all. I had expected to be an object of curiosity in a burg this small, but that didn’t seem to be the case, except for the children. The children we saw mostly stared at me, and by the time we reached the little store we had developed a comma of five or six small and half-naked children.

We entered a large grassy area with weird shadings on the ground. I looked up and realized I was in a huge glass dome, bigger then any stadium on Earth. The ceiling was made of glass in geodesic shapes, supported by a steel framework. I looked down to see my guide waiting for me. “Fallgater Park – we just opened it last year,” he said, gesturing around. “Biggest dome BAF makes.”

More out of an attempt to make small talk, I asked why there were sheep, out grazing in the grassy park.

“To cut the grass,” Mike said.

“Haven’t you people heard of lawnmowers?” I asked.

“Nearest lawnmower factory is a hundred million kilometers away,” Mike said. “Besides, sheep make other sheep.”

I dodged around to avoid a small pile of sheep dung. “Lawnmowers don’t leave droppings,” I said.

“But they’re good eating. Never ate a lawnmower, myself,” Mike said, a wise-ass smile on his face. “Don’t rightly know how I’d cook one.”

“OK, OK, I get the point,” I said.

We walked through the dome, then entered an airlock on the other side. Just inside the brick airlock, we approached a small door on the side of what I kept thinking of as a hallway, although the locals clearly considered it a street. It looked like all the other doors I had seen. The only difference I could see was a small metal sign over the door, hanging by hooks from a pole. The sign was painted white, and in light blue letters proclaimed “Nice Guys Sales” and under a picture of a gavel, in smaller letters said “Buy Sell Trade”. I thanked my guide – I would have never found it without him – and stepped inside. As I opened the door, a little bell chimed.

My guide opened the door for me, and shoed away the kids with his hand. I walked into a dark room with a low roof, and I heard the door close behind me.

As my eyes adjusted to the dim light, saw Kelly and John sitting at a small table inside the space. I noticed that John was sporting a fresh bruise on his face.

“Brought a friend of yours,” my guide said.

“What the hell – you’re not supposed to be here!” Kelly said.

“Gus said it was OK,” I lied. “I just came down for the day.”

“Like hell,” Kelly said.

“Well, let’s call him up,” John said, uninterestedly.

I took off my backpack. I hated to leave my spacesuit, but if was going to have to run it would slow me down.

“We can’t, dummy,” Kelly said, “they’re below our horizon.”

“You said you needed to pick up supplies,” Mike said. “Well, here’s a store – start shopping.” I heard a click and turned to look. Mike was locking the door – a heavy steel one. It was fitted with an old but serviceable mechanical lock, the key to which Mike put in his pocket. I wasn’t going out that way unless he approved.

“How long until we can check with Gus?” I asked.

Mike consulted his PDA. “Fifteen minutes.”

“OK,” I said, feigning indifference, “I might as well shop here. Can you charge my stuff against my share?”

“Sure,” he said. “All the stuff you’re looking for is in the back.”

As I browsed through his limited selection, I alternated between mentally kicking myself and looking for a back way out. I should have figured that anybody out on that tiny airstrip was in on the deal. The shop was fairly roomy, but the only other doors led to a back office, where Mike had planted himself, and upstairs to his living area. I filled up a box with some supplies (ever buy six months worth of toothpaste?) and was sizing up a metal cane as a weapon when Mike yelled out from the back office.

We all crowded around a surprisingly new radio set in the office. I held back, casually gripping my cane. It wasn’t much of a weapon, but I was damned if I wouldn’t go down without a fight.

“Sands, this is Gerulitias, over,” Mike said into the radio.

“Go ahead Mike,” the radio crackled. Gus was talking.

“One of your crewmembers came down for shore leave, and we wanted to know if it was authorized, over,” Mike said. I brought the cane around in front of me, ready to strike.

The pause that followed felt like an eternity. “Let me guess, Janet, right?”

“Correct, over.”

“Damn it, I told her to stay on the boat,” Gus said. “Well, since she’s down there, she can stay. But she just bought herself a week of extra duty, over.”

I relaxed my grip on the cane, and tried to look appropriately chastised. “I just wanted to say I’d been to Mars, that’s all.”

“Well, you have, dear,” Mike said. He keyed up the mike. “Copy all. She’ll be on tomorrow’s rocket. Any other traffic, over?”

“J. R. says for her to pick up a couple of pairs of jeans. Says Janet knows the size, over.”

“She copied, out.”

I set the cane down as casually as possible. “Yeah, no problem,” I said. “What time to I need to be at the airstrip for the shuttle?”

“We’re real informal here,” Mike said. “0600 is plenty of time.”

“Good. So, got any jeans?”

“Afraid not,” he said, as a siren started to whine outside. “They test the emergency alarm every day at noon local,” he said, smiling as I jumped. I did note that he went to unlock the door, and hung the key on a hook next to it.

After a brief discussion, Mike advanced me some cash from my “share” of the pirate’s money, and gave me some directions. The only bad thing was that John, at Mike’s insistence, was accompanying me on my shopping trip. As I walked out, I decided that things could be a lot worse. John Krasny wasn’t the brightest bulb in the marquee, and if decided that if I couldn’t give him the slip, I deserved whatever I got.

Chapter 14 contents

John and I walked out the door, and turned left down the street. I wasn’t too happy about running into our Cheap John, but still, things could be worse.

We walked maybe a hundred meters down the little street until we hit the shopping district Mike had mentioned. It reminded me of a large athletic gym or stadium. The main floor had been partitioned off into various stands, some just folding tables, other more permanent, selling everything from vegetables to jewelry. There were a ring of more permanent shops around the outer walls of the square, and the place Mike had recommended, Nelson and Sons, was on the far side of the market.

I was struggling not to just take off running, and forced myself to act casually. We stopped to look at a couple of the stands, and John tossed a dollar coin into some street musician’s cup as we passed.

“You hungry?” John asked as we came up to a nice-looking “outdoor” café. “I’ll buy.”

I was hungry, and I needed to save my cash. Besides, the place looked busy, so maybe I could get some information. “Sure, I could eat,” I said.

We grabbed a small table, and John ordered “two house drafts” from the waiter. “Most places on Mars brew their own beer,” he told me.

I soon realized the real reason we were eating there. To John’s evident delight, a young woman climbed up on a stand in the jewelry store across the way. All she had on was a smile, shoes and some gold necklaces. Beer and boobs – what more did John need?

“Just off the boat?” A woman at the next table asked. She appeared to be in her early forties, and was sitting with a pair of young men. All three were wearing jackets with discreet bulges from concealed weapons.

“How did you know?” I asked.

The lady smiled. “I saw the way you walked.”

“Oh,” I said. “My name’s Janet, and this is John.”

“Ann Doolittle, and my sons Fred and Mark.”

They had sat down just before us, and as we waited for our food I was able to pump them for information. They were from New Freedom Station, some five hundred clicks away. Ann’s husbands (she had two) raised cotton, some of which they weaved into fabric. She came into town once a month or so (Martian month, or every sixty days) to trade.

“I thought all Mars did was raise food for the asteroid mines?” I said.

“We do some mining of our own,” she replied.

“All that jewelry is made with locally-mined gold,” one of her sons said, gesturing at one of the models.

“But with shipping costs from Earth so high,” she continued, “we can make a lot of money selling to the local market. Just have to come in under what Earth-made stuff costs.”

“Do you get paid in cash or trade?” I asked.

“Both. The asteroid mines pump a surprising amount of cash into the economy.”

John was on his third beer, so I steered the conversation into a more immediate issue. “I was thinking about doing a little sightseeing, like maybe out to that big crater east of here. Do they have buses or anything?”

“Not to Argyre,” Ann said with a chuckle. “People here scare their children by threatening to send them to Boba Fett. We have our own carryall, of course, but there’s a public carryall service to Heinlein.”

They didn’t know where the station was or its schedule, but they were sure it existed. Well, I could get that information elsewhere.

**********

After lunch we walked into Nelson’s, which was your basic department store, and would not have looked out of place on Earth. Well, except for the pair of armed guards outside the door. They patted us both down, then let us in. We headed up to the women’s section on the second floor. The jewelry show was still going on, so John found a seat by a window. I didn’t even have to suggest it.

I spent a few minutes pretending to shop, then went up to one of the clerks and asked about the bus station. He didn’t prove to be very helpful.

“Don’t know, Ma’am,” he said. “I suppose you could call them.”

“Thanks,” I said, flashing him my best smile. “You wouldn’t happen to have a cell I could borrow?”

“Cell?” He said, flashing me a confused look. Then he started to chuckle, a wry look on his face. “I’ve been on Mars too long. Sorry, Ma’am, we don’t have cell phones here.”

They did, however have something called a phone booth. Inside the booth, I found an old voice telephone, which was coin-operated and audio only, but sufficient for my needs. Even more convenient, the phone booths were near the restroom, so I could finesse John if I had to. A quick call told me everything I needed to know. Yes, they had a bus, or ‘public carryall,’ but it didn’t leave until 0530 tomorrow. The fare was steep.

“I don’t have that much cash,” I told the booking clerk.

“Charge it,” he replied. “But be here early – card authorizations can take up to forty minutes.”

I booked a seat, surprised that credit cards even worked on Mars. Not only that, but I did get one other important thing accomplished. I had had to ask the operator (a real live person, no less) for the number. He’d given me the number, and asked if he could do anything else. Sarcastically, I asked if he could connect me to Earth.

“No, but I can send a voicemail,” he replied. “Ten dollars for thirty seconds.”

So, I plugged all my coins into the machine, and recorded a message to Grandpa Pilgrim, care of his bank phone number. When I got to civilization, I could send all the messages I wanted.

**********

“Don’t suppose you bought anything decent to wear?” Mike said when I walked back into the shop.

“Just this and some clean underwear,” I replied, gesturing at my coveralls. “Why?”

“I was going to take you out to my club for dinner,” Mike said.

“Sounds expensive,” Kelly said, looking up from a PDA.

“My treat,” Mike replied.

Boris, looking over Kelly’s shoulder, clutched his chest, pantomiming a heart attack. “Now I can die – I’ve heard everything.”

The chimes over the door jingled, and John walked, or rather staggered, in. He’d had several more beers, and could barely stand. As I watched, he burped, then clutched his mouth, and dashed for the bathroom. This was followed by the sounds of him vomiting.

“I guess it’s four for dinner,” Mike said, a sly grin on his face.

Mike had a small selection of women’s clothing, and I found a cotton print mini-dress to wear. After we’d all showered and dressed (except John, who was left to lay in a bathtub) the four of us headed out of the shop.

We crossed back through the park dome, and entered another brick chamber, smaller then the market area, with an arched brick ceiling, bathed in a harsh florescent light. “Welcome to Old Main Street, folks,” Mike said. Several men in casual attire, armed with shotguns, stood on stone pedestals looking over the crowd. “Night riders,” Mike said by way of explanation.

I had seen a similar setup in the market. I was coming to understand that, unless you saw armed guards or were behind a checkpoint, you weren’t safe – at least in Boxtown. Mike was stopped by a man who called him “Commissioner Gerulitias” and the two talked local politics for a few minutes. Apparently Mike was the equivalent of the local Building Commissioner, and the man wanted to build something.

We were standing by a sidewalk café, and I noticed a family with two small children ordering dinner. One of the kids, a girl no more then five, picked out a live chicken from a side cage, and as they watched it was immediately beheaded and cleaned. I had had a chicken sandwich for lunch, and I very nearly lost same on my shoes.

“That’s real common in the lower-priced places,” Boris said.

I didn’t understand, so Boris explained. “Lot of people don’t trust that the cooks are giving them what they ask for, or that it’s fresh, so places have glassed-in kitchens and you pick your own food. Kind of quality assurance.”

I was glad we hadn’t seen that earlier. Mike ended his conversation and we continued on, and passed under a brick archway into a small room. Three large and mean-looking men were standing there, one armed with a shotgun. The largest of the three, a one-eyed black man with a shaved head, shook Mike’s hand. In front of us was a chain link gate, and beyond that was a metal doorway that looked like it had come off of a spaceship. One of the other guards ran a hand-held metal detector over everybody, and motioned us forward past the chain link gate. When all of our party had been searched, the gate was closed behind us. Only then did the one-eyed guard open the metal hatch.

I was not expecting what was beyond that door. We walked into a quiet, carpeted room, a waiting area of some kind. The room was softly lit, and the walls had paintings and knickknacks hung on them. Mike said something to Kelly, and then went ahead. The rest of us sat down on some benches, upholstered in red cloth, built into the walls. A minute later, a young woman in a severely cut red gown came up to us.

“Mr. Gerulitas is upstairs meeting with the day manager. Let me show you to your table – he’ll be joining you in a few minutes.”

We followed the hostess past a massive and ornate copper bar into what appeared to be the main dining room. It would not have looked at all out of place in any upscale restaurant on Earth. The plaster walls were intricately painted in white and blue, with gold-colored medallions and details. The ceiling was painted like a blue sky, and there was a huge crystal chandelier in the middle of the ceiling. The tables were set with china, and there was quiet classical music playing over the low conversations.

The inhabitants of the room were stunningly at odds with the décor. Most of the men had beards, earrings and prison tattoos peeking out of their shirts. A few men were in suits, mostly garish and loud. The few women were very scantily clad, and several were topless.

We walked through this room seemingly unnoticed. At the end of this main room, we went through a set of tall double doors and immediately turned right and went up a staircase. We came out and were seated on a balcony overlooking the room we had just walked through. It was a surreal experience.

“You like the chandelier?” Boris asked the group.

“It’s nice,” Kelly said.

“It’s not crystal – those are diamonds in there,” Boris said.

“Can’t be,” Kelly said. “It would be too expensive.”

“Diamonds are actually very common in nature,” Boris said. “These were found in the bottom of Argyre crater. There are tons there, just sitting around waiting for somebody to pick up.”

I believed him. Mars was, after all, a planet, with lots of unexploited resources. A young man, casually dressed in a knit shirt and khaki pants, came up to take our orders. Based on his prompting, we ordered some appetizers and a local wine. These had just arrived when Mike returned.

“Sorry about that – had to see how business was doing,” he said as he joined us.

“I take it you own this,” I said.

“Part owner. Doc Fallgater is a partner, of course.”

“Who’s he?” Kelly asked. “I keep hearing about him.”

“Alvin ‘Doc’ Fallgater. He’s the reason there’s a town here at all, instead of a pile of bodies in the sand.”

The waiter interrupted us, and Mike helped us to order. I ended up getting the catfish, which was raised in the restaurant. I had cleaned fish before, so the mental imagery wasn’t a problem.

We had just finished our main course when Mike pushed back from the table. “The show doesn’t start for bit, so sit back and relax.” Mike lit a cigar.

“How’d this place come to be?” Kelly asked.

“Well,” Mike said, “since I’m one of the long-time Charlies, I’ll tell you my story. I used to rob banks back on Earth – got caught in ’40 and sentenced to 20 to life in the Federal pen. About then some government bean counter had figured out that it was cheaper to ship long-term prisoners to Mars then feed them on Earth.

“So, with some ‘encouragement’ by the guards, about a thousand of us ‘volunteered’ to come here. It was a real international group – only about half even spoke English. We shipped out in spring of ‘41.”

“And what happened to the guards?” Kelly asked.

Mike laughed. “What guards? They shipped us out in rigged up GR-30s. We rode 24 to a ship in the cargo bay in zero gee. Only way out was via the hull and we didn’t have pressure suits. They’d send a dumbwaiter down twice a day with food, and let us fend for ourselves.

“Three guys died on the way to Mars – one suicide, one murder and one execution.” Mike must have seen the quizzical looks on our faces, so he explained. “The inmates formed two gangs – my gang won and killed the other gang’s leader.”

“Once we got to orbit here, they married up a one-way lander to the outside cargo door. You either got on or died when they depressurized the cargo bay. There were space suits for us in the lander – first time I’d ever really seen one.”

“How’d you even know how to wear them?” I asked.

“We’d been shown training videos on the flight over – only thing on the TV. Of course, two more guys fucked it up, so they died as soon as we landed. Then the fun really started.”

“We were fighting amongst ourselves from the moment we landed. A couple of the later ships got overran before the dust had even settled – maybe half the original cons were left when Doc showed up.”

“That was in ’43, wasn’t it?” Boris said.

“January ’44, actually.” Mike took a sip of wine. “Boris there was still shoplifting candy back then, right?” Boris grinned bashfully. “Doc did what I thought wasn’t possible – he got all those factions to work together. Well, most of them. At any rate, once Doc showed up, we went from animals to men.”

“Why do they call him Doc?” Kelly asked.

“Guy has a Ph.D. – taught Poli Sci at some Podunk school in Nebraska. Then he caught the wife diddling a student, and so he killed them both. Judge gave him a choice – Mars or the needle.”

“I still don’t know how you keep things so peaceful,” Kelly asked.

Mike and Boris chuckled. “Not everyplace is nice like this, Mrs. Krasny,” Boris said. “Some places here is downright dangerous.”

Mike jumped in. “We’ve got the Night Riders to keep the peace, and a lot of the real crazies either die before they get here or we let them take a long walk outside.” Mike smiled, humorlessly. “Sometimes we even let them wear a spacesuit.”

Kelly shuddered. “Without a suit, you’d die in an instant.”

“Not really,” Mike said. “I think the current record is 92 seconds. It was that big dude from Africa – what’s his face?” Mike pointed at Boris.

“Mfume. Dude cost me $20. Who’d have figured he’d last that long?”

The mental picture of these people betting on how long it took to die in near-vacuum did not sit well with me. Apparently, there was even a special airlock with glass booths for spectators that was used for such events.

A man walking through the main room playing a set of chimes interrupted us. “Time for the show,” Mike said.

We got up and followed Mike into another room, much more simply constructed of plain red brick and steel. “This is the original dining room,” Mike said. We sat at a pair of tiny tables on some plain metal seats. Mike ordered drinks for everybody.

The show was a mixed bag of singing, dancing, skits and comedy routines. All the actors were clearly locals, and judging by the banter from the audience many were familiar fixtures. Some of the acts were OK, but most of it was pretty amateurish stuff. One act in particular featured a guy with a huge teakettle taped to his gut. He was the building commissioner, and was playing his role for all the laughs he could get. Mike was fascinated by the show, and applauded vigorously, even at the act making fun of him.

After the show, we went back to Mike’s place to crash. That’s where I planned to leave.

CHRIS GERRIB