Interzone 251 (11 page)

Folded neatly and pressed into a holding cubby was a plastic life-envelope, as if it had never been used.

She hadn’t ever wanted to leave this place, but someone would have come looking for her, eventually. If she’d been male, it would have been sooner.
If I’d been male, I wouldn’t have had to hide here in the first place
, she thought ruefully.

The knock startled her so badly she tried to jerk herself around and lost her equilibrium, began a slow spin across the room. It came again, and she realized she was hearing it over her link to her room intercom – someone was at her door there, not here.
Oh please
, she thought. She patched her mic into the open relay. “Huj?”

“Sorry,” a familiar, hated voice came through. “Open up for your brand new husband, like a good wife.”

Leor
. She’d known it would be him, really.

“Where’s Huj, Leor?” she asked.

“He wasn’t very hospitable to me,” Leor said. “And here I was coming for my honeymoon day, too. The Rep even lent me a bike so we could have the whole day together.”

“I’m not your wife, Leor. Go home.”

“Rep said you’d say that, but you know what? He don’t care, and I sure don’t. So let me in, or I’m breaking this door down, and then I’m going to be mad.”

Even though she wasn’t there waiting on the other side of that door, she felt frozen where she was, the memory of terror still palpably real. “Rep said you can’t hurt me.”

“Rep said I can’t make it so you can’t procreate,” he said. “I plan on
procreating
with you till you cry my name so loud the whole damned rockpile can hear it, and knows I
own
you.”

And here’s the anger
, she thought with relief, as it raged through her mind like a solar flare had gone off there. “I don’t know, Leor. From what I remember, I’m not sure you can manage to stay in a woman long enough for her to say
two
whole syllables. Maybe you should shorten your name and then come back.”

She wished she’d turned down the volume on her earpiece before she said that, because the crash that followed left her wincing.
He’s throwing himself at the door
, she realized. The door would hold for a while, though his temper would hold longer. If she knew anything about him, it was that he beat things until he got what he wanted.

It would buy her a little time, if she was willing to take some risk.

She put her helmet back on, checked that her bottles had recharged automatically while in the oxygen-rich environment, then cycled herself back out of the mining retreat with a first aid kit and the life-envelope. She could feel each step ahead unfolding in her mind, like some terrible winged thing, and it filled her with a giddy rage.

If Leor’d run into Huj, he must have come in at the terminus; he wouldn’t know Rock 17 well enough to find any of the other external airlocks. She could still hear him pounding on the door, expending himself, though she’d turned down the volume enough to blur the words of whatever threats he was shouting.

Huj was floating, motionless, above the terminus floor, blood caking his face around one ear, a metal bar slowly spinning nearby. Fari floated up, put one shaking hand against his chest, felt him breathe, and took a breath herself she didn’t know she’d been holding. “Huj,” she said, shaking him gently.

He opened one swollen eye, blinked at her. “Fari,” he said. “Get out of here. Go, hide. Leor—”

“Shut up,” she said. She set her boots down on the floor, unclipped the first aid kit, took out a dermal, and peeled it off onto his arm. She watched him sink into sleep, fighting it the whole way down, then she shook out the life-envelope and slipped it around him, zipping it up around his face last. His eyes were scrunched up into a frown.

Grabbing one leg, she towed the limp and weightless man behind her back towards the tunnels.

She had just pulled Huj into the old retreat when there was a particularly loud crash through her earpiece and her alarm went off. Leor was in her rooms. Even with the volume turned down, she could still make out his dreadful voice as he began ransacking her room, looking for her, already describing in detail the “honeymoon” he had planned for her. Her rooms weren’t large; it wouldn’t take him long to realize she wasn’t in there.

Unwrapping Huj from the envelope, she pulled him over to an old autodoc in the medical bay. The lid was stuck, and she had to kick it hard to get it to open. The motion sent her tipping over backwards, anchored by her remaining boot on the floor, and she winced as the ankle twisted just slightly in the boot as she managed to push herself back upright. Huj was still floating, serenely spinning, where she’d let go of him above the autodoc. Wrapping her arms around him, she pulled him down and into the bed liner.

The sudden string of curses over the earpiece was extraordinary. “Where the hell are you, you goddamned whore?” Leor screamed.

“I just went out for a breath of fresh air,” she answered. “Make yourself at home, why don’t you?”

There was a crash, garbled, and then a squeal of feedback as the intercom unit in her rooms went dead. He’d be coming for her now, if he could find her.

She was stuck, she realized, between Leor and the Rep, and her own absolute conviction that she would not give either of them the opportunity to have her alone again. Not alive, anyway. She wished she could leave Huj a note, but she could barely write, and she knew Huj – who had been sold from one place to another for most of his childhood, before he reached the nadir of the rockpile, couldn’t read. Instead she leaned in and kissed his forehead, then shut and sealed the lid.

She didn’t expect she’d see him again.

Outside the old retreat, in one of the many pits and crevasses that ran through wall and floor alike, she had been carefully stashing stolen tools. The men were subject to regular pat-downs, but no one had ever checked her; if it was because they thought, as a woman, she wasn’t smart enough to escape, or brave enough to try, she didn’t know and didn’t care. It had allowed her to repair the lifepod to the extent she had, and engineer a few other surprises into Rock 17 during endless insomniac nights over the years.

Fari gathered up the toolbag, strapped it across her front so it wouldn’t interfere with her air bottle, and made as quickly as she could towards one of the other abandoned airlocks, this one leading out onto the rock near the terminus. If she’d gauged the sound right, there was a rocket bike waiting there.

It was tethered right where she expected it to be, just above the cable terminus entrance, only barely out of sight. She caught the tether with ease, swung herself up beside the bike, and began looking it over.

The fuel cell was hovering at around 15%; the bike could barely make it out of the rockpile on that, much less get as far as the nearest freehold outside Basellan territory. She had just pulled a wrench off her frontpack when she noticed the small relay attached to the cell, nearly hidden behind the bike’s heat transfer stack. The relay had a small receiver built into it, and was wired to send the cell into overload. If Leor had gone off-course, or tried to take advantage of the bike in some way the Rep didn’t want, bye-bye Leor. She clicked open her link to the base intercoms.

“In case you don’t know, Leor, the Rep doesn’t give a flat black rock about your genes,” she said. “It’s mine he values.”

“Where the hell are you?” came the immediate response. From the sounds in the background, he was tearing something apart.

“Not where you are,” she said, and closed the link again so she could concentrate on removing the cell and relay intact. She had a use for them, could feel all the parts clicking together in her mind. Leor and the Rep had given her exactly what she needed. Now all that was in short supply was time.

***

“Leor, where are
you?” she asked over the link as soon as she’d reactivated it.

“Found your little tunnels,” came the immediate response, over silence. “How long do you think you can hide in there before your air runs out? Didn’t think I could figure out you’re in a suit?”

“You’re right, I am,” she said. “I’ve got a couple of hours left on my tank, though.”

“I can wait a couple of hours. Why don’t you just come out now, and I’ll take it easy on you, make it
nice
. I won’t offer again.”

“I’m sure you won’t,” she said. “But I wonder – how much damage can I do to this fancy bike of yours in a couple of hours? I imagine the Rep made it clear what he’d take out of you if you let anything happen to it.”

“You’re bluffing.”

“Let’s see…it’s a Basellan model, of course. A G-449, older model, and you left an empty can of skunk on the seat. You aren’t high, are you, Leor? There’s fines for that.”

“Don’t
touch
the bike.”

“Come stop me. Oh, and Leor? Hurry.”

She waited for him in the cable terminus, her suit still on but her faceplate open. Her boots were clamped down to the deck and she had one arm looped around one of the ubiquitous wall-bars, beside the airlock out to the surface and his bike. She could hear him as he careened off walls, any grace of movement lost in haste, and she could remember him breathing heavy on top of her, and this time, for once, it didn’t make her cry.

He came sailing around the corner, still wearing his work overalls from the day before, his face red from exertion and anger. When he saw her he smiled, and she smiled back at him, and both smiles were predatory.

Leor grabbed a bar, pulled himself around, got his boots down on the floor. “Fari,” he said, almost snarling her name.

“Leor,” she said. “Are you sorry for what you did to me?”

“Sorry?” He tripped over the word, staring at her. “I’m not the one who’s going to be sorry,” he said. “I’m not the one who’s going to be begging—”

“This is your last chance,” she said, and put one hand on the control panel for the airlock. “Ask for forgiveness.”

“Stupid bitch, there’s a whole safety system that won’t let you open that,” he said.

“I rewired it,” she said.

“You expect me to believe a woman—”

“I expect you to die, Leor,” she said. “Believe
that
.”

He rushed her. She pulled the lever.

The entire air volume of Rock 17 tried to crowd past her, and she clung to the bar as long as she could, long enough to see Leor go flying past her, eyes wide with fear, out into the vacuum of space.

“I lied,” she said over the comms, though he was beyond hearing the moment she’d opened the door. She was torn from the bar and out after him, the safety tether she’d coiled up behind her snapping taut and leaving her flailing at the end of it. “This place makes us all monsters, and I had no forgiveness to offer you anyway.”

She’d decompressed all of Rock 17. Huj was safe enough in the autodoc, as long as someone came along to let him out.

Alarms would be going off now, all over Station.

As soon as the pressure of the escaping air had let up, she pulled herself back along the tether until she reached the surface again. She’d pinned her toolbag against the rock, and pulled it free, taking out a hand-spider for the cable line.

The spider powered up the moment she clamped it around the cable she wanted. Grabbing hold with both hands, she squeezed and the spider zoomed down the line.

She hit Rock 44 hard. Forty-four was Team Green’s mine-in-progress, so there was no airlock, no safety zone, just a few bars and a lot of need for care. She almost missed the nearest bar on first grasp, but then caught it with the tip of her fingers on a second swipe and just managed to pull herself in close enough for a better grasp.

Her mining rig was where she’d left it, at the entrance to the gigantic hole they’d eaten into the rock like some sort of virus. She checked her chrono as she climbed into the cab; she had to time things just right.

Sealing herself in, she checked that the cabin was airtight and then pressured it up. Once the inner atmosphere greenlit, she took off her helmet and bottle, most of her frontpack, and climbed into the driver’s seat. Pulling the safety harness tight, she reached up and tore the camera eye from its mounting and ground it beneath her boot heel.

Then she checked her chrono again.

It’s time
, she told herself, as if the words could make her more brave. She could see the pinprick of light that was the Rep’s ship, already moving towards Rock 17, no doubt responding to the depressurization alarm. She couldn’t pick out the rocket bike until its engines, wired with an old timer out of the retreat kitchen, fired up right on schedule. Then it was a bright streak in the sky, already half-way towards the edge of the rockpile, and the Rep’s ship turned in pursuit.

She’d pointed the bike in a cut-through between Rocks 3 and 9, and set it in motion with a leaking airtank strapped to the underside. Those rocks made it hard for the Rep’s ship to follow, made it look like it was trying to evade.

“Come on,
come on
,” she said out loud, pounding the rig console with her fist. “Do it, you self-righteous bastard!”

She saw the explosion bloom and dissipate, not Leor’s bike, but back on the surface of Rock 17. The ancient hulk of the colony skip lit up briefly in the glare as the long-dead ejection mechanism of one last lifepod, wired up to the Rep’s detonator, was triggered remotely into overload. Her last, fleeting glimpse of the lifepod was as a shadow crossing in front of Rock 4, headed out into space.

The Rep’s ship slowed; they would have detected the detonation on the rock, know now that the bike was a decoy. It turned, banking, and passed directly in front of the mine entrance on Rock 44.

Fari fired up the rig’s engines on full, hitting the lower edge of the ramp at the enormous machine’s top speed, and exited the rock itself at only slightly less than that. The rig’s momentum carried it out across the intervening space.

The ship banked again, trying to swing down below it, but not quickly enough. Fari threw her hands up over her face as the rig slammed into the side of the ship.

Against all expectation, the cabin held. She scrambled for the rock claws and managed to lock the rig tightly onto the Basellan cruiser. Pulling down her goggles, she began powering up the impact head and injection systems.