In the Company of Others (10 page)

Unspoken was the burden of choices made by either side, and consequences to be borne, however unfair.

Pardell busied himself in the galley. He brought out the bags he'd carried on his suit, opening a couple to dump his share of the daily ration on the table: an odd assortment of bars, jellies, and some quasi-mauve globules Yves McTavish, the immie working the dispenser this shift, had proudly announced looked just like grapes—a fruit grown on Earth.
Give them credit
, Pardell grinned to himself,
for putting the same thing in our hands every day and making it look like something new.
As for the grapes—Pardell held them up to the light and shook his head. Familiar with the station's idea of how best to keep everyone fed, he knew food could come in different shapes and textures, some warm, some cold. It made life more interesting. But mimicking Earth plant material? It seemed pointless and a little obscene. Perhaps it comforted the older ones.

For a moment, as Pardell nibbled a “grape,” curiosity consumed him. What would a real grape be like? Were there any on her ship? What else might be different?

Pardell's thoughts unfolded, freezing the moment, expanding the galley of the
'Mate
outward until he lost every sense of himself and saw only events, consequences, possibilities. He saw
forward
to a time when, unless checked, the differences between humanity's sundered parts would become so pronounced there could be no commonalities, to a potential future when Earther would name a distinct species as well as culture.
They would meet the alien, no longer knowing themselves.

“Assuming,” Pardell told the grapes, forcing himself free of abstraction, “they ever let us breed.” That was the crux of it; the fertility inhibiters were in the “grapes”—in all the rations so no one could escape them, even if anyone was crazy enough to want to disrupt Thromberg's precarious balance. Of course, he knew better than to express any opinion on that subject near the hard-eyed immie women. It took little these days to launch the calmest, most rational female into an uncomfortably detailed and direct commentary on the passing of time and its effects on a woman's body—especially since the latest Earther stupidity.

Not that anyone blamed them
, he thought. Some charitable group or other in Sol System had raised funds to send a transport to Thromberg, a transport loaded with embryo storage equipment and cases. Noticeably lacking was the equipment to thaw the embryos, the explanation being that the group would care for the unborn, making sure the immigrants had a lasting legacy, a living posterity which would live safety on Earth.

The ship had been sent back empty, except for a short, somewhat unlikely suggestion on where to send it next.
What good's a legacy I'll never hold in my arms
, Pardell could hear Amy Denery now . . .
We came out here to make families and a new world, not to be harvested.

Filled with these and other restless thoughts, Pardell toyed with his rations. Usually he'd pull out a reader if he had to eat alone. Today, he knew he couldn't concentrate and tried for a novel arrangement of food on his plate instead. He created one, but it required the annoying grapes be squashed between two fingers and lined up in a spiral from the middle. Their interiors were a very ordinary and disappointing pink.

Abruptly, the result reminded Pardell of the way Malley's mother's insides had spilled over the floor as she pushed both him and her son ahead to the safety of the air lock, strange whorls and cloudy, translucent sheets steaming as their warmth spent itself on the icy, dark surface.

He grabbed the plate and flung it, and its contents, against the wall.

“Wasteful, young Aaron.”

Pardell started violently, fearing that the Earthers had followed him home and somehow knew the precious codes to his ship, even as he recognized the voice and relaxed again with a shudder. “Damn it, Rosalind,” he said unsteadily. “It's not polite to sneak up on people.”

Rosalind Fournier, forty years his senior and once senior systems engineer on a freighter which had failed to hold its crew or air, tsked-tsked at something.
His lack of respect or the fake grapes?
Pardell wondered nonsensically, his heart still pounding as he watched her enter the galley. Rosalind was naturally elegant, though dressed in bits and pieces of other people's clothing, a tall, willowy woman whose age showed only in the salt and pepper of her hair and the fine lines edging her mouth and eyes. She even moved the clumsy artificial hands her crewmates had fashioned for her with a terrible grace, her own hands having refused to release the white-hot handle keeping the emergency lock open until everyone else had escaped the inferno behind her.

It was said she shot her own captain for trying to push his way out before the wounded.

All Pardell knew for sure was Rosalind and Aaron Raner had been close—close enough that she had the
'Mate
's codes, and lived here with them more often than not. Until Raner died.
Then again
, he reminded himself,
nothing had been the same after that.

“How have you been, Rosalind?” Pardell asked, having recaptured something of his breath. He intercepted her attempt to salvage the food he'd thrown at the wall. “I'll do that.” It wasn't the wasted grapes—he was all too familiar with her spacer's fastidious horror of loose objects, despite the
'Mate
's current condition.

“I heard what happened in Sammie's,” she said, taking a seat at the galley's long table and spreading the contents of her ration bag alongside his. Exactly the same, save her pseudo-grapes were intact, but that was to be expected. The point was to show one wasn't planning to freeload. As a visitor, you chipped in everything you had, if you wanted a real welcome and not directions to the nearest air lock. Of course, Rosalind was family—there was no question of her right to sit here any time she chose. But she always observed the courtesies, particularly those she and Raner had established for the Outside in the first place.

Pardell eyed his guest, well aware there was also no question of Rosalind Fournier's ability to take what she felt she was owed—from anyone. “The Earthers,” he returned shortly. “News travels fast.”

“Hardly news,” she said offhandedly. “Nothing calls in for docking rights without my hearing about it first. You know that.” He did. There were those 'siders, Rosalind prime among them, who had never ended their vigilance where it concerned either ship movements or new regs from the station.
For some
, Pardell thought half-resentfully,
the old habits would rule until they died.

“Then what brings you here?”

Rosalind's eyes narrowed.
Disapproval.
“I heard about your little accident.”

The blush heated his cheeks again. “It was nothing—”

Rosalind gestured to the water container in the middle of the table, producing a metal cup from her pocket. Pardell filled it, then poured one for himself. They sipped in unison, once, then again.

The small ritual soothed him, as she'd doubtless intended it should. “It really was nothing, Rosalind,” he repeated more calmly. “You needn't worry. Hugh Malley was right there and got me out of it—a bit uncomfortably, mind you. I was fine.”

Her lips twitched. “The man thinks fast. A good friend, young Aaron.”

“The best,” Pardell concurred, then fell silent.

Neither spoke for a long moment: Pardell no longer interested in conversation, given the uncomfortable nature of the likeliest topic, and Rosalind apparently deep in her own thoughts.

In the quiet, the
Merry Mate II
hummed, her machine voice at the edge of detection, her systems purifying and warming the air, recycling waste, lighting the darkness. As a child and, to be honest, even now when alone or escaping uneasy dreams, Pardell imagined the ship herself was aware and able to think; silent not by choice but because her machine thoughts were simply too different from his own to share. Knowing himself already too different, he kept such fancies to himself.

Still, Pardell viewed the past, not as Raner or others had told it to him, but as if he could see it through the
'Mate
's sensors, for this ship had borne mute witness to the events that brought Rosalind to sit in silence across from him at this table and led to so much blood and fear.

Pardell could see it all now, as though reflected in the water of his cup ...

... Adrift, derelict, abandoned. The approaching freighter looming out of the utter dark, her grapples slipping forward to gather in the lost one. The code to open her ports delivered by the only one who now could, stationer Aaron Raner, his face streaming with tears as he races through empty corridors calling the names of the missing, reigniting ship systems with his voice, since all but the emergency beacon have fallen to standby levels to conserve power.

In the last place he looks, the man finds a cold speck of life, life that whimpers and shrieks at his touch.

Crewed again, strangers fumbling, then sure at her controls, retracing a familiar taped course, the approach to Thromberg locked in and accepted. All systems nominal.

Docked time, drive systems dormant, a pause like peace. Communication links to the station activated; traffic along the link is steady, unremarkable.

Suddenly, proximity alarms shrill through every plate and joint.
Danger! Damage! Thieves!
The stationer, Aaron Raner, is back, keying in codes to mute the ship's response to what is happening at her locks. Burning, voices, power fluctuations, the scream of evacuating air. Agreeable, sensible orders to seal up tight. Then all fail safes are turned off and the
Merry Mate II
finds herself ripping away from the station.
Danger! Damage! Thieves!
Her machine cries are silenced again, this time with a lock, this time for good.

A tape grants stability and purpose. She accepts it, switching system drives to translight, aiming for the origin of her living cargo, if not her own. Origin for the
'Mate
was the Callisto shipyards, in orbit around Jupiter. Perhaps, if machines had longings, she feels one for the safety of home.

There is no safety here. This isn't a convoy; she's one of a crowd, a torrent, a streaming irregular mass of translight drives corrupting the very space she rides until some tumble off course, losing themselves in nothing. Their final signals pass through what's still real and travel ever away, becoming ghosts for the future.

Meanwhile, voices argue throughout her corridors, unfamiliar voices debating topics of no concern to a ship; Raner's voice urges caution, reason. The stationer does not touch her controls but holds the codes for their use. When not calming others, he stays with the tiny speck of life, speaking words repetitive in their softness, adapting tools to touch without pain.

A restful time for a machine, given direction and asked only for speed. Does she dream then or hum in chords of power?

Plummet from translight. Sol System.

Raner has muffled her alarms; she can't shout
Danger! Damage! Thieves!
But warn offs streak red across all her boards. The strange crew and Raner curse and shout to no avail. They use her sensors to see for themselves.

Vast distances are made conquerable by convention; so the patrol ships knew to wait here for incomers. This is the lane swept clear of hazards for those bound to Earth. Now it is filled with them.

How absurd to simply stop, hanging Solward of Neptune. How much more absurd to stop as one of this company of vagabonds, this fleet come together for no more organized rationale than fear has its time and any movement can seem to safety.

Incoming transmission:
Turn back. Sol System is under quarantine to protect humanity from the Quill contagion. No one from the stations will be permitted to enter until this ban is lifted.

The
'Mate
's chronometers keep track of time passing; her crew are frozen in place.

A broadcast from one of their companions: garbled, incoherent pleading. It ends abruptly.

Danger! Damage! Thieves!
The
'Mate
's alarms are mute, but her views show for those waiting how the leading ships are being targeted two at a time, five, now ten.

Raner shouts a command; the tape is ejected, reversed, reinserted. The ship hits translight breaking all the rules; space shatters around her as others do the same, space that splinters into light as those who hesitate become small suns instead.

Do ships mourn? Humans do.

Do ships comprehend governments and laws? Humans must. The Patrol who killed the ships enforce the laws set by Earth for all of Sol System. Earth is the heart and mind of humanity, an overburdened heart and overcrowded mind perhaps, but nonetheless the seat of all policy. What Earth fears, everyone fears.

Oh, there are other voices. The great system universities—Titan, Luna, Phobos, and, the oldest, Antarctica—come closest to independence and pride themselves on being opinionated. Their mandate is to look outward, to pave the way for humanity to expand beyond Sol, to seed a future beyond Earth. But the Quill had struck them first and hardest, stealing away the terraforming projects they'd designed, at the same time crippling the huge corporations who'd invested everything in humanity's next stage of growth. The universities and corporations had learned the lesson of fear well.

Danger! Damage! Thieves!
Not quick enough. A blast catches up as translight engages; the
'Mate
screams without sound. Autorepairs initiate, cut speed, necessitate deviation, alter the panicked flight.