About Back Then

By Rod Slatter

 

“Scared, Cookie?” your Mum said. “What for?”

Everyone was scared. Me, I’d been scared ever since Genoxi. But your Mum got me. In a softer voice, she said, “Genoxi was a one-off, Yan. Let it go. Let her go. Better days ahead.”

I tried to smile back, but the Genoxi raid wasn’t a one-off. I looked along the two rows of seats in the assault pod, counting the empty ones. The pod swerved, throwing everyone on your Mum’s side back against the pressure hull and throwing everyone on my side forwards against our bars.

Edina Wessington's ship made sixteen contacts on that tour: sixteen raids on human resource hubs. Raid four -- way back -- was Darkstar, where they rescued me and Lily. Our first experience of indebtedness; to repay, we signed on as crew.

As the motion of the pod stabilised, your Mum winked at me. For once it got under your Dad’s radar, saving me a beating later.

After Darkstar, the first six raids went book-style: in and out, rescued freeworkers packed off downside and traffickers banged up in cold store. Then we started losing hands. Last time out, Genoxi, we lost Lily. I lost Lily.

Which was why now, on descent to Kaligayahan, everyone was scared. End of tour. Eight hours and we’d be on ballistic back to the Beacon 90 Orbiter, back to civilisation. Civilisation I’d never seen, but wanted to, more than you can imagine. With Lily gone, the only future I’d ever dreamed of was gone, but I still wanted out of slavery, out of soldiery, out of deep space.

The pod engine cut and all eyes turned to Chief Petty Officer Brewer. “Sixty,” he said. The bars unlocked and hinged back.

Everyone sealed up and went stealth. The payload door opened. We kicked aft in skirmish order and out into space. The pod had got us down low, maybe a hundred metres from the asteroid surface. Orientate. Suit jets. Reorientate. Reverse. Coast to contact. Roll don’t bounce. Stop. Assemble.

Brewer counted everyone down and signed the way to the dayside port of the stock market, where we found the cover hatch battened down: the stock guards were ready for a fight. Brewer told Deck -- your Dad -- to cyclotol the hatch. As soon as your Dad was back with us, Brewer signed, we braced, and Singh set it off. The hatch spun off into space: probably twenty tonnes of steel, flipping like a blini, and not coming back, way over escape velocity.

We jetted through the gritwave to the crater rim, but Morton, Gains’s partner, took a hit. She panicked, whacked a seal over spraying nanogel. It was the wrong shape for the tear. Gains and I slapped more seals over the top but it was never going to work.

By now the pod was halfway back to the ship on the dark side: ten minutes before it could medevac. Louise Morton didn’t have ten minutes. She had four. She never spoke a word. She just stared at me over Gains’s shoulder. I watched as her air leaked out and she died, spasming.

We fragged the remains of the airlock and killed the guards inside. Someone told me afterwards they were trying to surrender. The truth: I don’t remember. Debris and grit clouded the cavity. Rutherford, the WO (Tech), got the combination and opened the inner hatch. He lost his grip and we had to grab his legs and scrum down to stop him blowing away. A lot of air escaped. Brewer did another headcount and signed us through with your Dad on point.

We entered a tunnel made of shipping containers sealed together end-to-end, same as stock hubs everywhere. Same as the Darkstar Hilton, where they liberated me and Lily, where I’d been Yan the cook, rationeer, and where Lily was head chef by default; where we’d been happy, as freeworkers went.

The tunnel was dark. We went through two open bulkhead hatches before we got to the first cross-junction. Ahead, the hatch was locked. Right and left: unlocked.

Brewer signalled your Dad to take the first section left, and Flynn the second section right. I was in the second section. One look through the hatch and I gagged. It was a freeworker hotel: a rockslab tube containing twenty or thirty decompressed corpses in ordinary denim work clothes, chained to the walls. I mean their ankles were chained to the walls. Quite a bit of body debris was floating around the tube, sparkling in our lights.

Flynn signed us back out sharp. To judge from your Dad’s face, the chamber on the other side was the same.

Maybe the dealers had been using their stock as a human shield, just forgot to tell us. Maybe they thought we were rival traffickers and went scorched earth. Then again, when they scoped a ship the size of Edina Wessington’s cruiser, and its friend-or-foe exclusion sphere casting around their rock, slavers were apt to panic. We’ll probably never know the truth.

In any case, surprise was off the menu, so Brewer abandoned comm stealth. “Flynn, hold this position. If we’re not back in twenty, RTB and tell Edina to tool the rock, fission-style, received?”

“Received, Chief.”

“The rest of you, on me by sections. All hands transponder audit. Any blue-on-blue this gig, I’m handing you to Edina on a stick. Where’s Rutherford? Rutherford, get this hatch open.”

Rutherford got the hatch open, and the rest of the unit filed through to negligible air loss, meaning sealed bulkheads forward.

Flynn detailed Wells and Lacey to check the bodies for ID clues. Wells looked as if she was going to pass out from pure horror. She was an Oxford law graduate, up here trying to make a difference. Edina had put her in charge of mine and Lily’s education.

I guess everyone, even your age, knows who Edina Wessington was, what she did, and how she did it. People nowadays, safe in the Reg worlds, they can talk and examine and pronounce, but back then the law was whatever you made it, and if you didn’t make it anything else, it was the market, tooth and claw. The asteroids were tough on high minds and clear consciences.

I signed I’d do the search.

Wells signed back ‘owe you one’ and went back with the others to take up firing positions at the hatch. Two minutes later they were all dead.

The remaining stock guards melted through the corridor wall after our main force had passed, meaning to attack our guys from behind, and not thinking to have our second section at their own rear. In their panic at being out-pincered by their own pincer, the guards bombed the junction, which killed all our hands there, plus probably most of theirs, ruptured the corridor, and went seismic.

The first I knew about it was a flash outside and a shockwave which reached me through the chain on the dead freeworker whose pockets I was searching. Lacey was closer to the hatch than me, and the surviving stock guards shot him dead. All I saw was three-plus contacts inbound: frag out.

I came to, wedged into a cavity with no exits. I started digging in the direction I thought was up, towards the surface of the asteroid. The regolith was loose and fractured and easy to shift, but it was hard to get any traction. The 100kg armoured pressure suit didn’t help. After a while my gloves were gripping vacuum. But I was lucky. Someone with strength and micro-g poise got hold of my arm and hauled me through. It was Brewer. The space was lighted by suit beams only -- not by the sun: it was just a bigger cavity. Your Dad and Tassiter were there too.

“Where’s Flynn?”

“Trafficker frag bomb, Chief. They’re gone.”

Brewer stiffened.

I changed the subject. “Where’s this? Where are we, right here?”

“Trapped, Cook. Cut off. Kaligayahan is a conglomerate. Pockets of space everywhere. Those blasts kicked it all off. We got out of the tunnel any way we could. Current objective: re-group, soon as, before the traffickers do.”

The walls of the cavern quaked and everyone cowered.

“I don’t get it, Chief.” Tassiter was from Earth.

Brewer said, “Gravity is zip. There isn’t enough weight to press the rocks together. They just touch and stop there, balancing.” He looked around. “Leaving gaps like this.”

“I thought I’d made it to the surface.”

“Up is that way, Cook.”

The walls shifted again. Dust and grit belched from a crack that opened up right next to me. It widened as we watched. I scoped. I could see a jagged strip of light through the cloud. “That’s the outside,” I pointed. “We can crawl through, look.”

“No way,” your Dad said. “Anything that opens that easy can close that easy too.”

“Yeah but -- ”

“I said no way, Cook. Don’t make me ….”

Brewer got between us as I backed off. He took a look. “That’s thirty metres. It’s a duck’s arse, but doable. Better than sitting here waiting to get outmanoeuvred. Go, Cook.”

I squeezed into the fissure. It widened another ten, twenty centimetres, but your Dad was right: it could close just as easily. The lumps that made up the asteroid were rocking backwards and forwards in slo-mo as the shockwaves from the explosions propagated around and back. Although the lumps didn’t weigh much, they were massive, and if they moved, there was nothing anyone could do to stop them. I parked images of italo josh and got to work.

Brewer sent Tassiter after me, then your Dad. The Chief himself was last up.

I got out, and your Mum grabbed me in a war-suit hug. Others slapped me on the shoulders. They didn’t want me to die in some nameless hole in the ground like Lily. For some, we were the whole reason they did what they did; for others, at least a part.

Tassiter kicked himself out of the fissure and we dragged him clear. The ground shook and shifted. A haze of dust kicked up.

“I don’t believe this,” your Dad growled. The crack had narrowed with his lower legs still in it, making his suit nanogel set solid.

We started digging at the regolith with our hands, and after a few seconds we got him free. A couple of metres below, I caught sight of Brewer’s glove.

“Chief!”

There was no reply. I started digging, again and others joined in, scooping out dust and pulling lumps off the rock surfaces, but your Dad said,  “We’ll never reach him in time. We’ll need power jacks from the ship to open the rocks and keep them apart. Bingo air in thirty, tops. And besides, what if more of us get stuck in there?”

Nobody spoke, but I knew we were all thinking the same: maybe Brewer was already dead, but maybe his nanogel had saved him with just his comms box crushed u/s. Maybe Deck was abandoning the Chief.

Everyone was looking at your Dad as he flexed his knees back to order. “I’m calling the pod. End of gig. No freeworkers left here. We’ve lost seven hands.” He paused. “We’ve lost the Chief. We pay what’s due. We get shipside.”

Hard to tell how much your Dad believed in the cause. Fighting came natural to him and he was at home in space; but whether he cared about the freeworker issue -- whether he cared if he killed good people or bad -- I never knew. Deck wasn’t the kind of man you asked questions like that.

I looked at your Mum, and she looked at the hole in the ground. The human resources we had come to liberate were dead. There was no liberating to be done, only bagging and tagging. She made eye contact with me, seemed also to sign something to Doc Singh, the acting WO (Med) and demo cadre. Then she jetted after your Dad, and I followed her with the rest.

Even back then most bases had an antipodean escape port. Edina had it cross-haired from orbit. We jetted through the dust meta-atmosphere around the asteroid, from the day side into the night. Your Dad charged the hatch and dived back to us, but the timing cocked up and your Dad took some debris. It looked pretty minor, but the pod was on station by then and medevacced him as a precaution.

That left Tassiter in command, with air time ticking down. Rutherford was still on the ball and got us through into the pressurised core, which read high mountain eco by the time we slammed the hatch shut behind us.

Inside, they were just service types, gasping for breath. The traffickers were offbase. I never took Tassiter for a killing fiend, and assumed he was just making them strip and line up to humiliate them and prep them for the transfer bubble to the pod; for cryo storage on the ship; take them back for trial on Beacon 90 or in The Hague. But he wasn’t. He shot all eight of them in the backs of their heads, one after the other, while the rest of us watched and said nothing.

You know what? I’ve never told anyone about that. Twenty years at stealth. But now it looks as if it’s going to be your turn soon. You’ve got to know the truth about back then; why all this matters today.

Seven hands lost plus Brewer. Your Dad in the freezer. We crawled back into the ship, nothing to show, just cam-vid of corpses and people turning into corpses.

Edina was silent, but I was too tired and miserable to care. I got to my bunk, stripped the war-suit off one last time and went to sleep. No need for tabs: freeworkers can sleep anywhere, trust me. I wanted to sleep all the way back to Beacon 90, a hundred days best estimate.

###

Next thing I knew: your Mum’s big, soft eyes staring into mine.

“Angela?”

“He’s dead, Cookie.”

“Who’s dead?”

“It’s the burial.”

As I came to, I realised I didn’t need to ask. She meant Deck, your Dad.

Your Mum looked sick.

“But he was only de-com for a few minutes. He was only ….” I sat up as best I could with Gains’s empty bunk a metre above. “Wait, who found him? He was in cryo, good for the Beacon. Who found him?” I frowned. “Who else was up there?”

“Me,” she said, looking at the deck. “And Singh. Found him dead.”

“Doc Singh and you, you found him dead, just like that?”

Now she looked at me, challenging. “That’s right. Like that. That's the truth now.”

Believing, doubting, like rocks that can't resolve their positions under micro-g, I got to zero, no resolution, only the fact of what had happened. I looked up. “When?”

“When what?”

“The burial.”

“Twenty-thirty. All nine together.”

I nodded. “We should uni up.” It was the drill: you dressed up smart to show respect. You had nightmares about this, so in real life, when it was them not you, you went book-style.

She nodded back, and now the tears fell off her face in showers. She tried to grab them but just made it worse. I got out of the bunk and held her in my arms for the first time. I tasted her salt as she sobbed on my bare shoulder. In the gangway outside, Tassiter saw, nodded, turned away.

###

You've got to remember, Edina did her tours back in the twenties and thirties. There was no Regulation Committee, no Peacekeepers, no Fair Deal. You had to fight for everything.

“Nobody knows if Leading Rating Deck had a first name. If he did, nobody in this company knows it. So let me speak in these few moments of what we do know.

“Deck found his calling and pursued it without quarter to the end. This is what we fight for, my sisters and brothers, why we make these sacrifices, so that one day everyone will be free to explore their own dignity and honour, to find their calling and pursue it.” Edina paused. She seemed to look straight at me, or your Mum, who was leaning against me. “Deck was a tough fighting man, and we were proud to stand at his shoulder. At one time or another, we've all said to ourselves, ‘I’m glad Deck is on my side’.”

Edina was right -- as always. At one time or another.

So, Edina’s place in history is safe. But the rest of us? The things we did, or should have done but didn’t? The things we let happen but shouldn’t have?

###

We were in ballistic now, day minus ninety-seven. There was me, Tassiter, Rutherford, Metals and Jack Twenty playing holdem with totopo minis for chips. Out of nowhere they folded and left the mess. I looked around, puzzled, clawing in the pot.

I heard your Mum at the hatch on my six. “Hey, Cookie.”

“Hey, Angela.”

She entered the mess. “You know when we get back to the Beac?”

I shrugged.

“I mean you and Lily, you were going to jump ship, right?”

I said, “We were going to relocate our labour. Our right under natural law.” Wells had drilled us good.

Your Mum looked sad. “Yeah, of course. That. I’m not … a big one for words and stuff.”

I suppose I knew that so I said, “We were going to open a ration outlet on the subconcourse. We would have pooled our pay from the tour. We would have had enough for the down-payment on the franchise. It would have been a start.”

“Yeah.” Eventually she said, “But you know the Beac’s a big city.”

Lily and I had spent our whole lives -- or all we could remember -- in Darkstar. Darkstar was a major trade hub even back then but it wasn’t a big city. We’d read that the Beacon 90 Orbiter had a population of maybe ten thousand, averaged over its elongated orbit. I looked back up at your Mum, wondering why she was torturing me with this, because none of it mattered any more without Lily.

“I could help you, Yan. I’m from the Beac. There’s stuff you need to know about the place. People. Firms and stuff. Attitudes. I could help …. I could …. I could really ….”

“Really what, Angela? What are you talking about? That was back then. This is now. Lily’s gone. I don’t know what I’m going to do.” I looked around the empty mess again, frowned at the cards floating up, showing themselves, the deal becoming clear.

She laid her hand on mine. “Do you think you could teach me to rationeer, Yan?”

“Angela, why would you want to be a cook? You’re a soldier -- you’re making history up here with Edina and -- ”

“Because.” She cleared her throat and looked me in the eye. “My baby needs a proper start in life.”

I stared.

She nodded, too choked up to speak.

I could not say no to her. “We’ve got ninety-seven days.” I put my other hand on top of hers, hoping Deck was still on our side. “Let’s start with the basics. Tell me what you know about salt dal mash.”

 

THE END