CHAPTER THREE
Maung was falling. He screamed and reached out until his hands found one of the cage bars and he dragged the rest of him over to grip the metal tightly but still he fell. The cage, he thought; the cage itself must have been falling with the entire elevator because there’d been an accident, and Maung screamed again.
“Shut up, for Christ’s sake!” someone hissed. A woman. Her voice sounded muffled as if coming from another room. “We’ll get caught!”
“We are falling!”
“We’re not falling. We’re at the orbital spaceport and our containers are in customs awaiting inspection. What you’re feeling is weightlessness because you are now in orbit around the Earth. God you’re dumb.”
Maung relaxed a little but the sensation still disturbed him. He maintained his grip on the bar.
“Won’t we get caught during inspection?” he asked.
She laughed. “They only inspect about one container in a hundred; there are too many these days. And if they inspect yours, I hope your skin is made of lead.”
“Why?”
“Because,” the woman said, “it’s done automatically, by bots, using powerful x-rays and you’re sure to be cooked alive.”
The words terrified Maung. This time, instead of screaming, he vomited.
To Maung it seemed as though days had passed and the tight space smelled so awful that he was sure someone would come to inspect. Had he known what would happen upon throwing up he would have tried harder not to; his last meal coated much of his body.
“So where are you from?” the woman in the next container asked.
“Myanmar. You?”
“You’re Burmese.” She said it in a way that made Maung glad he couldn’t see her, glad there were walls between them. “That makes sense. A backward country filled with stupid jungle people. No wonder you threw up.”
“Myanmar is as modern as any other country.”
For a few seconds she went quiet. Then the woman said, “Without the Chinese, Myanmar’s greatest export would still be carved statues and Buddha trinkets. You smear mud on your faces. Jesus. What’s that even about?”
“Where are you from?” Maung asked.
“Laos. I’m Laotian, but born in America. I fought in the war.”
Maung sneered. “Yes. This backward jungle man killed thousands of Laotians and without the Americans your kind would still be massacring hill people with machetes.” He was not sorry about saying it and ignored the regrets that usually haunted him; it was war.
“Asshole,” she said.
Finally there was light. Maung tried to open his eyes but the brightness hurt and rough hands seized him by the ankles; the Americans found me, he thought. He swung at one of the figures snatching at his legs and it connected, but the impact sent Maung spinning in weightlessness so that his head banged against the bars; he took hold of one, gripping it as hard as he could.
“Goddammit!” a voice said. “I’m not customs, we’re here to get you out. Give us a break so we can get you onto the ship.”
Someone else sounded angry, punching at Maung’s arms in an effort to coax him loose. “This idiot puked his guts out. We should make him clean up the whole friggin’ container.”
“What ship?” asked Maung. “Who are you?”
“We’re here to get you on the transport to Karin, you little bastard!” Maung was too weak and too tired to hang on much longer. He let go. Before he knew it, someone had wrapped him in their arms, but Maung could tell from the man’s cursing that something was wrong.
“Watch out for the bulkhead!” someone shouted.
Maung’s head struck something and he winced, shutting his eyes from the pain but also because he was too scared to look at where they took him.
Fingers forced his eyes open and Maung’s vision adjusted to a dimly lit room, tight and cramped, and everything looked as though it’d been strapped or bolted down. He’d never seen anything so modern. Someone shone a brilliant light into his left eye. Then the light hit his right eye and he said, “Stop,” trying to wave his hand at it.
“How many fingers?” a man asked.
“Two.”
“Good. You’ll make it. Those idiot cargo handlers gave you a bit of a bruise, but not a concussion. I’d say you’ll have a headache for a while but nothing major. Nothing we need to use the Medsys for.” The man took Maung’s hand and shook it, introducing himself as the ship’s doctor but Maung was too tired to hear the name. “Anything to do with Karin is on a budget so we have to trust on X-rays and finger tests when we can. Now you’re going to feel a sting on your right arm.” Maung did, and the man continued. “That’s just a little cocktail to help maintain your DNA structure and bone density. You’ll need one of those each week on Karin to stay healthy.”
“I want to sleep,” he said.
“No problem.” The doctor floated away toward the door. “We’ll wake you up for the trip briefing. Three hours. And I suggest you clean up.” He tossed a damp towel, which floated across and wrapped around Maung’s face. “You’re covered in puke.”
Someone grabbed Maung, shaking him by the shoulders, and he cursed in Burmese, jerking his eyes open and instinctively reacting by trying to throw a punch. But he was strapped in. Maung forgot where he was until his eyes adjusted and a boy—no more than nineteen—held a flexi-pad as if it were a shield, floating at the hatchway in case he needed to exit quickly.
“Maung Mi Tun?” the boy asked.
“What? No,” said Maung, before he remembered. “I mean yes, that’s me.”
“Captain said that the company wants the new Karin guards in the wardroom in ten minutes. Come with me?”
It took Maung a minute to disentangle from what looked like a vertical bed, narrow and gray. When he was free, he reached for the nearest handhold. “I’ve never been in space,” he said.
“That’s OK. A lot of the new hires are like that. All you need to do is follow me and try to do what I do; I’ll move slow. Oh, and here.” The boy handed Maung a plastic bag. “If you get sick, throw up into this. There’s a plastic seal to tie it off, and since you have a head injury the doc insisted. Just shove it in your pocket for now. Once your head is good, he can give you some pills to take care of any motion sickness you might have from weightlessness.”
Maung looked down to find that someone had dressed him in the same blue-gray jumpsuit the boy wore, and he shoved the bag into one of the pockets. He felt his ID there and a pair of plastic cards, which he drew out.
“What are these?”
“Company chow card,” the boy said. “You get three meals a day, no more, and the other is company coms card. You stick that into coms terminals if you want to talk with anyone off Karin; coms are free but the card helps keep track of who uses what, I guess in case they have a jailbreak. Don’t lose any of that stuff. Ready?”
Maung figured he wasn’t, but he nodded anyway.
Moving became easier. Maung sweated at first and did his best to keep from looking stupid but soon he got the hang of it and kept up while the boy explained how the layout of the ship made movement simple: Each corridor had a handrail bolted to the wall. The rail for pulling yourself toward the bow was blue striped and the aft red striped. At first, gripping his rail was the only thing on which Maung concentrated. But once he got the hang of it he had time to look around and appreciated that as easy as it was to move, it was also easy to get lost; each intersection gave Maung a glance down side passages that extended into darkness and all around him humming pumps, electronics, and engines filled the cramped spaces. Not a single cubic centimeter was wasted. And, when after ten minutes they still hadn’t seen another person, Maung wondered if they were the only two people on the ship.
“What kind of ship is this?” Maung asked.
“Aframax tanker. We carry almost all hydrogen so whatever you do, don’t smoke.” When Maung frowned, he said, “That was a joke.”
“Hydrogen? A prison needs this much?”
The boy nodded. “Yeah, well it’s not just for the prison. We all work for Carson Corp, a system-wide multinational conglomerate with its headquarters in Singapore. So this vessel services all of Carson’s holdings when she’s needed. Right now we have two guards headed for Karin 2 along with 300,000 liters of hydrogen, and then we’ll deliver the rest to about a dozen other installations throughout the solar system.”
“How many of us are onboard?” he asked.
“Including you and the other prison guard, thirteen. We have two crews of five so we can take turns on duty and one company physician. The crews and the doc are all located forward, near the bridge, and you guys are in the guest quarters, all the way aft. The rest of this ship is hydrogen storage, engines, and bots; she’s mostly automated.”
“That’s it? Eleven humans for a craft this big?” When the boy nodded, Maung got a chill and thought that the ship could hide a lot of things. Like ghosts. He prayed to his ancestors and hoped he wasn’t too far from them, still close enough that they heard.
Maung almost ran into a pair of tennis shoes when the boy stopped at a hatch. The door chugged upward. Once his escort was through, Maung followed into a small space about ten meters square and three meters high, with desks bolted to what must have been the floor. Only fifteen desks fit into the tight space. All of them were empty except one, and from her glare, Maung figured that this was the girl from Laos—the one who told him to shut up from the next container over.
He was sure of it when she flipped him off.
Once the boy left, Maung pulled himself into one of the desks and slipped his feet into floor straps to help him stay put.
The girl chuckled. “You won’t make it at Karin, Tatmaw. Look at you: You’re already bandaged and can barely function in zero g.”
“Zero what?”
“My God, you are stupid.” The girl slipped a cigarette from a pocket and Maung was startled when she inhaled without lighting it, then blew a white cloud of vapor.
“What is that?” he asked.
“Electronic cigarette. They’ve only had them for centuries, jungle boy.”
“Not in Myanmar,” Maung said.
The girl laughed and Maung couldn’t help but notice that she was beautiful. A red band kept her black hair in a ponytail and he guessed it was about shoulder length, and her nose was thin, pointed, reminding him of his wife’s so that he stared for longer than he intended to, marveling at skin that was smooth and light brown.
“Quit looking at me,” she snapped. When he did, she continued. “Alternative nicotine delivery systems. In space some people use electronic cigarettes because they like to keep it as close to the original thing as possible. Others chew tobacco. But you can’t spit; so unless you’ve done it long enough to swallow all that nicotine—without getting sick—forget it. Then there are microbot systems in a transdermal patch that respond to stress levels, and which give you random jolts of extra nicotine. Those are fantastic, but expensive. Of course there are people who decide to move on to other drugs altogether but I’m old-fashioned.” She paused to take another drag. “You’ve never heard of these?”
Maung tried to answer but couldn’t. He knew that what she said was true and it sounded familiar but the memories refused to surface, and his face went hot first with embarrassment then anger.
“I am not stupid,” he said and pounded his fist on the desk, but the movement forced him upward and he almost floated away.
“Where we’re going, Tatmaw, we’ll be prisoners just like the convicts, so you better learn zero g; you’ll have to fight in this shit if you want to survive.”
“How do you know about Karin?”
“This is my second tour; I ran out of money after getting back from my first stint on Karin, and got into a bit of legal trouble. So unless I want to work in a brothel, it’s the only job I know. Don’t kid yourself, Tatmaw. One out of ten guards never come back and the ones who volunteer, the ones who aren’t forced here like you? They usually quit in one month—hop the next hydrogen transport out on credit and work it off on some mining station in deep, deep space. I don’t want to mine.”
Maung shivered. He was about to ask her more questions when the door opened again and a short man, fat and bald, barely fitting into his jumpsuit and sweaty with the effort of having gotten himself there, burst into the room.
The man looked them both over and then wiped his head. “I’m Captain Jacobsen. You two are guests on the Singapore Sun and just so we’re clear, I have a few simple rules you’ll follow or I’ll blow you out the airlock. The fact that they sent you to me in boxes means one of three things: you’re wanted, you’re idiots, or you’re both.”
The captain’s voice irritated Maung and his mind wandered; he was stupid. Part of him wanted to break down, right there, because he feared the girl was right and that he wouldn’t make it if he had to survive at Karin as half a person. The captain described where the entertainment and fitness centers were and Maung laughed internally, thinking that if they were like the rest of this ship they were probably in the same kind of space, a tiny box into which you could barely cram one person. Finally the captain finished and before leaving said, “Carson Corp has a training video for Karin guards. You’re to watch it here, and then you can pull it up in the ship’s library at any time. I suggest you watch it a few more times to memorize the rules; that’s all the help I can offer except for one more thing: pray. Pray all the way to Karin that you don’t die on that frozen rock.”
He floated to the door. Just as it closed behind him, a holo-vid began, the blue and green fields intersecting in patterns that formed a person, but which reminded Maung of the soak—the instant in which he bonded with the semi-aware and merged into the safety of power. He wanted to activate so badly that he almost switched on, imagining the supremacy if he once more let his organic mind join with an electronic buzz. The semi-aware would have jacked into each of Maung’s neurons, almost making decisions for him and suspending his consciousness in a kind of hammock of semi-aware logic, giving his brain a chance to rest.
“Watch and learn,” the girl said, ripping Maung from his daydream. “This is your first taste of company life, Tatmaw. Your killing days are about to start again.”
After the holo ended Maung pulled himself back to his cubicle. He prayed. A clock stuck to the wall but Maung ignored it because time was another enemy, a kind of threat where even the thought of minutes and seconds might have prevented him from concentrating on the words that already formed in his mind; praying had never been this difficult. Several years had passed since he prayed this much, but Maung shouldn’t have forgotten the words this quickly and recalling them should have been easy. Eventually he relaxed. With a long sigh, the words rolled off his tongue and he said them aloud in a whisper, carefully traversing the lines and the verses to get them right because the pattern mattered just as much as the words. His pulse slowed.
Maung ignored it when engine tests made the lights flicker on and off, and he was deep enough into thought that the meaning of the flickering was lost on him anyway; Maung cycled back to the beginning of the prayer. Before long he saw them and grinned. His dead comrades watched over everything and his wife stood next to him so he kept his eyes closed for fear of sending her away but when he finished he realized that she was crying.
Maung sensed something behind him and spun around, forgetting about the lack of gravity and sending himself into a corkscrew. But he caught a glimpse. A mass of black hair was at his hatch, which he had left open, and the Laotian girl breathed too loudly as she retreated back into the corridor.
The prayer still rotated in his mind. It was not a prayer from Myanmar but from India, and Maung didn’t mind because there were two lines that resonated: Examine your speech when with many people; examine your mind when alone.
The Laotian later returned, half dressed, and she zipped her jumpsuit the rest of the way while his hatchway framed her. She was like a picture. For a moment, Maung thought she was the only woman who ever existed and when he opened his mouth to speak nothing came out.
“I came to see what you’re up to,” she said. “I’m super bored.”
Maung coughed and an idea came to him. “We’ll be in transit for a while and you are right; I will not survive if I can’t fight. Will you teach me how to fight in zero g?”
“Do you have a brain, Tatmaw?” she asked. “I’m not here to serve you; I’m not one of the Old Man’s toys.”
His face went red from embarrassment. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean . . .”
The girl laughed and shut his hatch, nearly catching Maung’s fingers in the sliding mechanism.
Maung floated in the mess hall. He slid his card into the reader, which pinged, and then he placed his bowl under a nozzle that exuded a brown paste reminiscent of ngapi, which made him miss the Yangon streets. Maung reminded himself most of the smells were horrible. But for now all he remembered were the good ones, the spices in the marketplace and the smoke from cooking chicken and fish, and how his mother served ngapi with everything.
The machine pinged off.
He snatched his bowl of paste and floated over to a table where he slid in, hooking his knees underneath the way he’d learned from watching others. There was no taste. The paste had the right nutrient mix and the correct amount of fiber, but was so flavorless that Maung had trouble swallowing, having to force it down with exaggerated gulps. He was almost finished when something slammed the back of his head and forced his face into the plastic bowl.
Maung jerked his head up to see a white man in an orange jumpsuit—one of the crew. He had seen the man before, one who worked with robots in the engine room, and was about to say something when someone grabbed him from behind, pinning his arms so the first could close in. The one in the orange jumpsuit clutched him by the hair and punched him with his free hand, over and over, and Maung couldn’t believe how large the man’s fist looked. While pounding, the man called him a damn gook.
There was a flash of bluish gray and the men shouted. One screamed and blood floated in the air, some of it mixing with the paste in his bowl.
“Well,” the doctor said, “this didn’t help your head injury and now you have a black eye, but you’ll be OK. I injected a bolus of microbots to handle everything so that in a day or two, it’ll be as good as new.”
Maung blinked. He was in his quarters again and had no idea how he got there; he remembered the fight and that he’d been knocked unconscious.
“What happened?”
“Word’s out that you’re Burmese, Maung. A few of the guys on this ship fought in the war and aren’t too happy about having you here.”
Maung’s face went red. “I lost friends. My wife. Americans took everything from me and this is why I’m on my way to Karin. To hell with all of you.”
The doctor patted him on the shoulder and sighed. Maung felt the pain in his face, but even more intense was his need for a cigarette and his skin crawled with nervous energy and nicotine withdrawal.
“Look,” the doctor said. “I’m not the kind who still lives in the war. But I can understand how they and you must feel. Think about altering your eating schedule so you don’t run into those fellas? It’s a big ship.”
“How can you understand?” Maung asked. “You’re a doctor. Not a soldier.”
The doctor put away his gear. “I was there, Maung. Navy surgeon stationed at the main hospital in Bangkok when it was overrun by Chinese genetics. In less than a month they killed most of us for experiments—the women and the wounded too—and if the peace agreement hadn’t been signed when it was, I would have been next.”
Maung closed his eyes. The pain in his head throbbed to the point where he lifted his hand to press it against his temple, but now there was an uneasiness in his chest from not having realized the doctor was a veteran.
“I didn’t know.”
The doctor pushed himself to the open hatch but then stopped before leaving. “Don’t sweat it, Maung. And you owe Nang a big thank you.”
“Who?”
“Nang. Nang Vongchanh, the girl headed with you to Karin. She nearly killed those two guys and we’d all love to know where she learned to fight.”
Maung closed his eyes again and tried to remember but couldn’t, only calling to mind the flash of blue-gray, which he assumed was Nang, maybe her jumpsuit. Nang Vongchanh. Maung hated the twangy sound of spoken Laotian—and their names—but this one slipped through his thoughts in a gentle way and the when the doctor pronounced it the word made a soft noise, barely disturbing the air. He opened his eyes to ask the doctor if he had any electronic cigarettes, but the room was empty.
Someone knocked on his hatch. Maung opened it and shoved back, preparing himself for a fight by grabbing the handhold on the far wall and getting ready to kick. When he recognized Nang’s hair he relaxed; she shut the hatch and braced herself against the walls.
“You’re alive,” she said.
“Thank you, Nang.”
“So now you know my name, Maung. That doctor talks too much. Don’t get too grateful; I would have helped if those animals had been kicking a rabid dog.”
“Well, I still thank you.”
Nang looked at her feet and Maung stared. A feeling of guilt grew in his gut. Somewhere his wife rested, watching, and Maung said a quick prayer to beg for her forgiveness, but the words were confused and he started over. There was something about this girl, and it hit Maung quickly so that for the first time in years his heart raced.
“There,” Nang said, “that!”
“What?”
Nang opened the hatch. “What you were just muttering, what is it?”
“It’s a prayer.”
She nodded and then said “My father used to pray like you do. He was first generation and came from a small village in the mountains near China; spent his whole life fighting Chinese border incursions and eventually lost a leg. The Americans took him and my mom from the jungle. Regrew his leg. My first memory was of him saying prayers like that at bedtime. I was always embarrassed by him—always thought he was dim witted, a mountain villager who would never fit in with the families of my white friends.” She stopped talking and her face hardened again.
“Get ready,” she said, pulling herself out into the passageway. “We’ll start tomorrow.”
Maung shrugged and the motion sent him down to bounce off the floor. “Start what?” he asked. “Where can I get one of those cigarettes?”
“Get some rest,” she called out. “Tomorrow is a big day.”
“You have to learn this,” Nang said. “Otherwise, you’re dead already.”
It was the next “day,” although Maung had no sense of time and had not been able to sleep in zero g, so his eyes squinted and haze filled his head. They floated in the corridor outside Maung’s cube. Somewhere in his mind was a memory of zero-g combat training; he had already learned it. But no matter how hard he tried to recall the details, it remained locked away in the structure of the semi-aware along with all the things that transformed him from a village idiot into a humanlike thing.
“I’m still hurt,” he said. “My head.”
“It doesn’t matter if you’re hurt; every soldier knows this, what’s wrong with you? It won’t matter to your enemies on Karin, and you need to get used to the likelihood that you will always have some kind of injury. The first thing about zero g: have a good grip on something or brace yourself in a doorway, or between walls, before you strike.”
“Look,” said Maung. “I’m tired. I—”
He didn’t get to finish. Nang launched herself by yanking on the railing and twisted so that her feet rocketed forward, impacting against his stomach. All of her momentum transferred. While he tried to catch his breath, Maung sailed down the corridor, finally stopping himself by grabbing a rail.
“What the hell are you doing?” he asked.
She laughed but then got serious. “Those two men were going to kill you Maung. One of them had a knife. I barely stopped him from slitting your throat and we’re not even to the prison yet!”
Maung shook his head clear and asked, “What did you do to them? Someone was hurt worse than me?”
“I took the knife from one of them and liberated him of a finger. He can grow a new one back on Earth.”
The joke made him laugh. He felt warmth in his stomach and decided that this was the path; for a split second Maung thought he’d heard his ancestors’ agreement: Nang was good and there was a smiling nod of approval from his wife which made him smile. Nang means well.
“Thank you,” he said again.
She launched herself before he was ready and this time her fists slammed into his solar plexus, one after another, knocking the wind from him, and then Nang hooked her feet under the wall railings, bracing herself before grabbing his shoulders and yanking downward. Maung spun in the air, somersaulting.
“Stop being so nice; this is combat!”
Maung sat across from her and gagged on his paste. Nang had a squeeze bottle of spicy fish sauce and she loaned it to him, watching as he squirt some on. It helped. At least now the paste had more flavor and Maung waved his hand across his mouth, smiling at her while his tongue burned.
“Hot,” he said.
Nang looked away. “Did the Tatmawdaw soldiers train the same way we did in America—direct cortex loading?”
Maung stopped smiling. Unconsciously he reached up and traced the thick scars, four of them on the back of his head, and he nodded slowly, scared of where she might take the conversation. He had never been good at lying. And now, without the ability to merge, he was certain that he’d forget how to describe things in a believable way.
“Yes,” he said.
“Isn’t zero-g combat part of the training package? I know it was for the Chinese and assume you used the same or similar package.”
Maung thought as quickly as he could. Nang must suspect something, he figured, and she stared at him so intently that Maung looked down at the table.
“Well?” she asked.
Maung picked up his bowl and stuck it into the recycling chute, and then kicked toward the hatch. He waited for it to open. “You’re right, Nang. I am too stupid to be a soldier. If I were to sign up today, the best I could hope for is assistant ass-wiper, and you’re much more intelligent than me—a better soldier. But in war people make decisions and then things happen and some people wind up defective. Subnormal. That’s all I’m going to say; I can’t remember my training.”
Maung guided himself into the corridor and almost collided with two crewmen, who knocked him out of the way, sending him out of control and into an overhead pipe gallery; he noticed that one of them was missing a finger. Maung hooked a foot under a railing, seized on the closest one and wrenched the man’s head straight down, jerking a knee upward at the same time so that the crewman’s nose cracked on contact. Maung let go; the man spun backward and an arc of blood spread outward from his face.
The other looked about to throw himself forward but Maung said, “I’ll kill you. Now it’s just you against me. You’re all alone.”
Maung heard someone move in the hatchway behind him; he thought it must be Nang. She had come to see what was going on but Maung wanted nothing to do with her right now; he was ashamed of how stupid he looked to all of them.
The other man grabbed his shipmate, who was holding his face; he nodded toward Maung and said, “I think you broke his nose and he needs the doc; can I get by?”
“Sure.”
The man pushed his friend down the hall. Blood had already splashed against Maung’s jumpsuit and he felt sick, so he waited until the crewmen disappeared before heading back to his cube, ignoring a call from Nang to wait for her.