Earth-Saturn Transit
by W.A. Hoffman
Introduction to “Earth-Saturn Transit”
In addition to editing and writing science fiction, I’m an astronomer who has operated telescopes at Kitt Peak National Observatory for most of the past decade. My love of science makes me something of a sucker for a good, hard science fiction story and “Earth-Saturn Transit” delivers just that. W.A. Hoffman imagines a plausible way for one ship to attack and raid another in space while giving us a good look at Saturn that almost makes us believe she’s visited herself.
Hard science fiction isn’t just physics, though. It’s understanding how people will evolve and change in the environments humans will find themselves in. This story shows us a complex human society and doesn’t forget that even today, love is not a clear-cut emotion defined by the sexes of the people involved. In a society where humans take new forms to adapt to new environments, love is likely to take new forms as well.
* * *
I floated on the rec deck, one foot hooked in the netting and my eyes on a wide-view projector I had linked to an external camera. Saturn filled the room: bands of blue and peach from floor to ceiling, glistening rings spreading from the exercise equipment to the pantry. Wheeling specks and clots of debris from an exploded gas tanker passed by and messed with my view of the great planet. They made it real and not some orbital camera ad image I could have seen on Earth.
I would have preferred a better view. Our ship, the Mantis, drifted in that tanker’s debris field, though; lying in wait for a passing outbound Martian ship that would use Saturn to slingshot it away to really distant wonders. We weren’t here to provide me with pretty scenery. My wants and needs weren’t very important in the big picture: they never were.
We had drifted here, in freefall and the illusion of freedom, all wrapped up in the laws of gravity and physics, for thirty-two standard days; and we would keep drifting here until the Nav’s calculations said the door, or window, for this outbound route had closed, or shifted, or whatever they did. I would continue to drift in the rec deck netting, just another lump of the Mantis’s mass, put in motion by my ambition and trapped by my contract, until we caught one of those ships and they needed me to board it and subdue its crew; because that was what I did: that was my job for the last two years and the next eight.
I didn’t know a lot about Saturn. I was pretty sure I knew more of my mother’s Neo-Pagan crap than I did real science. My mother had called Saturn the great taskmaster, the planet of karma. It caused delay and taught discipline in whatever sign of the zodiac it rested in when you were born—on Earth—or that it passed through—relative to Earth. I wondered what the astrologers tried to say about its meaning if you were in orbit around it. My mother hadn’t gotten into that part of her faith: the part that dealt with the human race going into space. She had been a devout Gaia worshipper. Mankind wasn’t supposed to go into space. That was just a way poor misguided souls attempted to escape our karmic duty to our Mother.
Though my mother and her people were full of crap, I was beginning to think they were right about Saturn being the great bringer of delay. Since I came near it, my life had crawled to a halt and I had too much time to think thoughts I didn’t care for. In the past standard month, the boredom had only been broken by the occasional piece of debris moving at a different relative velocity to the rest of the cloud—or more importantly, us. I had had to suit up and join Dozi in making repairs twice. I was starting to think Saturn was going to hit us with a big one somehow, and teach me why man should leave space to the Gods.
A tone sounded, signaling the coming hour and a shift change. A moment later, Quinn and Faun flowed out of the companionway from the upper decks. Quinn hovered at the doorway, one finger on a hold, and looked at me as if I were something the recycler had spit out.
I flicked off the projector and pushed my way to the edge of the netting. “I’m leaving, Princess,” I said with my best I’m-a-stupid-ape smile.
Her cupid lips twitched in a grimace, and she pushed off to the galley, leaving Faun hovering in the doorway behind her.
I didn’t watch him; I watched her. She was the only woman onboard, and the view was worth making her mad again and getting another lecture from the captain. Quinn’s legs were sheathed by a thin pair of ship’s tights. They were long and sleek and seemed to take forever to reach her nicely rounded rump. Her hairless scalp was covered by a complex pattern of metallic ink that glowed softly in the lights. The tat work framed her face and flowed down her neck, giving the illusion of her having hair, just like the billowing shirt it disappeared into gave the illusion of her having a bust. I felt an urge to run my fingers through real hair and cup real breasts—not that Quinn’s breasts weren’t real, just that there wasn’t enough of them for me to think she might be a legal adult. All the Collie women are that way: petite and thin, as if the giant space colonies they come from lack the room to house full-sized women.
She knew I was looking at her, just as I knew Faun was looking at me. She hated the Eart ape looking at her. The Eart ape hated the Loonie boy looking at him. I figured the Loonie boy hated knowing the Collie princess was seeing him looking and not getting looked at: connecting us all in one big anti-social circle jerk of lust and unhappiness. But that was how things went on the Mantis. Space ships are full of people who hate other people, but who’ve let their ambition drive them into being locked up in little boxes with other people who hate people for months or years at a time.
I had tried, sincerely even, to make friends when I had been brought on board. I had thought it would be like the army; but in the army, we had all been soldiers together. Here, I was a dirty Eart contractor and they were all officers. I was barely human in their eyes, or maybe it was that I was human and they now thought they were something more: the next step in evolution. I would have thought that funny, if it didn’t piss me off so much.
The one time I had tried to flirt with Quinn the Colony princess, she had looked at me as if I were a dog trying to hump her leg. It still stung. I wondered if she treated me like a dog because she didn’t know how to separate pets from people in her mind. Maybe she hadn’t been around animals. I doubted it, though. From what she said, her family had money, and I had seen lots of pictures of the happy Colonists in their space stations playing with dogs in their parks.
So I watched her prep a soup pouch—one long leg hooked over a hold, and her body twisted at an interesting angle—and asked. “Quinn, did you ever have a dog?”
She turned her head to give me a quizzical grimace. I thought the look was more for my asking the question than what I asked.
“You know,” I said with a grin. “A dog. Small hairy thing. Four legs. Barks. It’s a pet.”
“Yes,” she said, and pushed back to the companionway with her soup and coffee pouches, as if talking to me about her pet would dirty her memory of the animal.
I shook my head and gave her my ape smile again.
Faun the Loonie still watched me from the doorway. He only moved enough to let her pass.
The Colonists are stuck up rich bastards: the ones who escaped Earth before the big melt and the holy wars. They live in beautiful stations designed to mimic Earth at Her best. I didn’t like them, but I could understand them. The Loonies I wasn’t too sure about. They had settled Luna before the Earth-orbit colonies were even constructed. They had taken to living in space as if they could force their own evolution. They are second only to the Mercs in body-alteration, bio-net implanting, and abandoning Earth-grav living conditions. I doubted Faun could walk in a full G, but he flowed through Zero-G like water.
The Collies are distant because they’re snobs, the Loonies are distant because they’re weird. Androgynous little bastards: male or female, age ten or a hundred and twenty-five, they all look like they’re maybe sixteen. They live in their Loonie Suits: smart-cloth, self-contained EV units that fit them like a second skin and can protect them from just about anything except a heavy projectile weapon or more than a week in hard vacuum. If the Mantis suddenly blew up, Faun would live and the rest of us would die. I understood what a good idea that was, especially when we were floating in a little metal can in a debris cloud at thousands of miles per hour; but I couldn’t see how anyone could stand being covered from head to toe in skin-tight mesh—and that was just the parts I could see. I didn’t even want to think about the waste-management systems the suit had: they had to be inserted.
Faun’s suit was gray and silver and he always kept the mask on, so being around him was like being around a robot or a real space alien. I couldn’t see his eyes, read his expression, or even his body language; and he didn’t talk unless he needed to, and when he did it was in this distant monotone. I only knew he saw something about me that he liked because there are certain things that a man can just feel, and I felt them whenever he turned his silver-masked face my way.
“Did you have a dog?” I asked him, and tried in vain to meet his gaze. Sometimes if the light was just right, I could actually see his eyes through the mesh. The light wasn’t right.
“I had rats,” he said. “My brother had a monkey. Dogs don’t do well in space. Cats do better.”
“Hairless cats, I bet,” I sighed, and wondered if I should get something to eat before retreating to my quarters.
“No,” he said. “Cats should have fur.”
I frowned at him, and wondered if he was serious.
Our engineer, Dozi, dropped down the companionway and shouldered his thick Venetian body past Faun. He paused—one massive, long arm easily stopping and reversing his mass with a twist of his wrist—and turned to glare at me from beneath a heavy brow that just looked wrong without a thick black caterpillar of hair. But like all good spacers, he was depilated. I was the only ape with hair onboard.
“Quit talking to the girl, ape,” Dozi growled.
I saluted him with my middle finger in a gesture even the high and mighty spacemen still understand—especially ones like Dozi, who spent a lot of his time with a custom-made Merc love doll.
Faun gave a little noise. I thought it might have been a snort of laughter, but the idea was so odd I wasn’t sure if I should believe it.
Dozi grumbled and moved on to the galley. He talked a lot, but he would never actually come after me; despite his looking like a gorilla, he didn’t have any combat training; and despite my only learning to maneuver in Zero-G two years ago, I did.
Captain Jacobs pushed out of the companionway. He had come down head first, and quickly righted himself relative to Faun and me once he found us near the doorway.
I nodded respectfully. “Captain.”
He put a look of fatherly disapproval on his blandly handsome Collie face. “Quinn says you were bothering her again. Now we’ve had this discussion before, Rowan.”
I gave him the pleasantly bland look I had always given officers. “I’m sorry, sir. I forgot myself.”
“If it happens again, there will need to be consequences,” he said, and moved off to the galley.
I kept my mouth shut and my thoughts off my face and nodded politely before pushing up the companionway.
I was surprised to feel a hand on my arm, and I looked over as I reached the sleep deck. Faun was hovering beside me in the narrow space.
“Do you hate him?” he whispered.
“The captain?” I mouthed.
He nodded.
“Hate’s a strong word. I don’t like to think I care that much,” I said carefully, and glanced up and down. It looked as if we were alone, and the doors around us to the cabins were heavily soundproofed. “And it’s not like it matters. He can make me the sorriest man alive with a thought.”
“What if he could not use the control chip?” Faun asked.
I wished I could see his eyes. “What do you mean?”
There was movement below, and suddenly Dozi was filling the companionway beneath our feet. He smirked up at us in a way that said he thought Faun saw something in me too.
Faun shot up the companionway and out of sight onto the bridge. I pushed sideways to the door to my cabin and slipped into its privacy with a sigh of relief. The little space wasn’t wide enough for me to stretch out if I strung my sleep-netting horizontally, and if I put my feet on the floor I could touch the ceiling with the flat of my hands; but it was all I had and I was lucky to have it.
What the hell had Faun been talking about? I had been told when it was implanted that the contractor chip in the base of my skull would kill me if it was tampered with. Of course, it makes sense to tell a man who has just found out he will be a slave for the next ten years—and maybe longer—something like that. Otherwise, all of us stupid Earthers who signed labor contracts, came up the well, and then found out just how bad our lives were going to be, would rebel—and then who would they have to man the mines, do station construction, and the rest of their dirty, dangerous jobs?
I was dozing when the alert claxon went off. It was the one for an approaching ship. I made sure the rush of bodies going up had passed before I followed them to the bridge. The other five members of the Mantis’s crew were rushing around, happy they finally had something to do. I went to drift in the corner, out of the way so that no one would tell me to leave.
Dozi and Quinn crammed his bulky Ven body and her dainty Col one into the same station, strapped and jacked themselves in, and combined their knowledge of Martian ship engineering and Venetian drone technology to confirm we did have a transport in our trap. They gauged her make, model, cargo-tonnage, drives, and maneuvering capacity; and compared that info with our drones floating along the edges of the ten thousand cubic kilometers of wreckage to determine which of the drones were in the best position to be activated and used during our attack. The Martian would only pass through the thin upper section of the debris—luckily most of our drones were there.
Our Mercan navigator, Akira, twitched in his couch, as if all the feeds entering his neck and head were shocking his atrophied body. He displayed projections of all the scenarios that could develop based on the data Dozi and Quinn were feeding him. The screens filled again and again with different trajectory paths of the drones, the Martian, and us. Faun perched at his console, monitoring the prey’s transmissions and glancing at the screens. The captain floated in the middle of the domed room, upright with his arms crossed, like a statue, using his wireless connection to the ship to constantly adjust the images as he sorted and analyzed them.
Decisions were made, and the drones readied to do their jobs. When the Martian reached the proper point—in about ten hours—two of the robotic units would accelerate from their hiding places and explode cones of projectiles into the current trajectory of the Martian ship. Our prey wouldn’t encounter the tiny steel pellets for thirty-nine hours after the release at their current velocity; but if the Martians were too stupid to change course—toward our planned trajectory—the pellets would tear them to pieces. Of course, they could just turn away; heading up above the plane of Saturn’s orbit, but that would throw them off their slingshot and make it impossible for them to reach their destination. It could even kill them if their margins for life support were too narrow.
The rest of the drones would be spread out to form a transceiver net to attempt to block the Martian’s transmissions. Nothing moved now, though. We had to wait in silence until our prey came closer. I slipped off the bridge and retreated to my cabin, a calmer pill, and another Twentieth-century espionage novel.
I returned to the bridge when I heard the alarms sound again. The Martian had reached the point of no return in the trap, and the drones were activated. Now we would wait to see how they changed course, before we left our position in the cloaking flak cloud that we had spread to hide us in the debris and fell into Saturn’s gravity well behind our prey. I went below and exercised.
Hours later, there was another alarm, this one signaling that we would soon begin to move. I hurried to the bridge. The Martian had changed course in the desired direction. Akira gave a whoop of happiness and sputtered an unintelligible stream of Mercan as he fired the maneuvering thrusters and the Mantis began to accelerate. I shook my head at his enthusiasm; the ship’s movement was enough to make me slowly drift toward the floor. Back on Earth, no amount of telling me about space travel had prepared me for how very slow everything seems to happen in space. I had thought it would all be like the multi-G-force rush of escaping Earth’s gravity. My heart had been crushed in my chest and I had felt free as the clouds receded behind us and we rocketed into space. I was an idiot: just a dumb Eart ape like they all thought.
Now that the Martian could see us, we began to wait for their hail. I brought my reading pad up from my cabin and drifted in the corner. I liked to listen to the transmissions: it let me know how difficult my job was going to be. Sometimes the Martians were pretty calm about the whole thing—the other nations had been preying on their shipping for over two decades—but sometimes they were really angry and took it personally. I had had to kill a couple of those.
The transceiver chimed less than an hour later. Faun opened the channel, and the bridge was filled with angry Martian ranting. The speaker was so mad the usual sing-song quality of their language was lost. He just spit it out in little bursts. The translator slowly parsed the message into Collie. The gist of it was that we were insane and in violation of a treaty.
“What treaty?” Dozi roared.
The captain shook his head and looked to Faun, who was paging through a news site and sending a message to the Venetian Admiralty. We were out here preying on the Martians under their license.
“There is a treaty,” Faun said with a shrug, and posted it up on a floating screen.
“Not for me!” Dozi ranted. “Not after all those bastards have done. They bombed Novo Kiev. They burned out the Chelnov Colony. They collected everyone on Odessa and took them to the mines on Triton. We Venetians would never sign a treaty. There’s no peace beyond the Belt!”
He sounded odd, as if he had rehearsed his little speech.
“Everybody signed it,” Faun said emotionlessly. “The Republic of Venus, the Federation of Luna, the United Colonies, Mercury, and even the United Nations of Earth.”
I read the screen. Mars had finally agreed to a treaty that could maybe end the decades of warfare beyond the asteroid belt. They agreed to cease hostilities within the Belt; and grant Venus, Mercury, Luna, and the Colonies the right to maintain any cities or stations they had already established on or around the moons of the outer planets; and allow for the peaceful expansion and exploration of what remained of the solar system. There had been peace talks about this since before I was born, and now it had happened, nineteen standard days ago, while we were maintaining transceiver silence.
A text transmission came in and Faun posted it to a screen. The Venetian Admiralty wanted to know what the hell we were still doing out here. They had issued a recall of the privateers weeks ago. The crew of the Mantis was out of a job, and I wasn’t sure what it meant for me.
“We have to break off,” Quinn said.
“Why?” Dozi yelled. “You believe this farce?”
I looked around. Akira’s round little face was contorted in a grin, but it was hard to tell if that was from the news or the constant stroke all of the hardware in his head seemed to cause him. Quinn looked as shocked as she sounded, but Dozi still seemed a little too blustery, even for him. The captain appeared truly surprised. Faun was unreadable as always, but he seemed very still and I could see his gaze was roaming around the room like mine. There was a moment when our eyes might have met, and he turned his head quickly.
“Akira, change course,” the captain said with a sigh.
“But Captain,” Dozi said. “What are we going to do?”
“Find new jobs,” the captain said, and drifted to the companionway.
Behind his back, Dozi glanced toward Faun and Akira as if he were looking for support. “But Captain, this isn’t going to last. The damn Martians will break the treaty, they always do. They don’t want anyone else out here.”
The captain stopped and turned. “So what are you suggesting, Dozi? That we become pirates? Are you insane?”
Dozi bit his thick lip and shrugged. “I’m just saying.… It won’t last. And if we walk away now, then it’ll be harder to get back in.”
“Change is hard,” the captain said in the patronizing voice he usually only used on me. “You’ll adapt. We all have lives to return to.” He turned away and lowered himself down the companionway.
I didn’t think our Ven engineer agreed with him, and maybe Dozi wasn’t the only one. He was looking at Faun and Akira again. Faun tensed and I thought he might say something.
“You’re crazy,” Quinn said with a smirk. “Piracy is impossible. Where will you dock? Where will you buy thruster fuel? Drones? Air? Food? Once they find out who you are—and they will—your accounts would be frozen. And if you get caught—and you will—you’ll get your brain altered and spend the rest of your life making processors … and liking it. You’ll be so happy. You won’t even know you’re a mindless drone.”
“That’s an outbound ship,” Dozi said, drifting over to get in her face, his voice lowering in volume as he closed. “The Consortium stations will buy cargo off anyone, no questions asked. The drones will keep the Martians from calling for help, the ape can kill them, and we’ll wipe their systems. They won’t know we did it.”
I shook my head, but no one was watching. He was crazy.
“The drones aren’t foolproof,” Quinn scoffed. “And Ven Ad already knows we’re out here!”
“It doesn’t matter!” Dozi yelled, but I could see he knew she was right. “What are we supposed to do now?”
“Go be a pirate. Run for the rest of your life,” Quinn said.
“Lots people run now,” Akira said. He didn’t speak often, not intelligibly, and definitely not Collie. “More run now after this.” He pointed a stubby arm at the floating screen with the treaty information. “New colonies way out. I hear trans.”
“Shut up, you retarded dwarf!” Quinn said. “You would be happy flying around for the rest of your life. Some of us just do this for the money.” She gave one last scowl at the others and darted down the companionway.
I moved, and three sets of eyes were immediately on me. The two that I could read were speculative and a little fearful.
“You should ask the captain what happens to you,” Faun said. I couldn’t read anything in his tone.
I wanted to ask Faun what the hell he was up to, not the captain. I could feel something in the air: it was the tingle I got before a battle. But like a good soldier, I did as he suggested and slipped down the companionway to the captain’s door and pressed the buzzer.
The captain looked surprised to see me, and distracted. He let me stand in the doorway and returned to sitting at his desk—he had the only cabin large enough for a desk. There was enough acceleration that my bare feet felt natural resting on the floor. I thought his butt probably felt pretty natural on its stool. It reminded me of the army and I found myself standing at attention.
“What can I do for you, Rowan?” he asked.
“What happens to me, sir?” I asked. “When you quit privateering?”
He frowned, and there was as much annoyance in it as confusion. He probably thought I was the least of his problems. “What are you worried about?”
“Whether I’ll be sold,” I answered quickly, because I had finally figured that out. Either he would sell me, or I would be forced to go and live in the colonies as his pet ape and do chores or Gods-only-knew-what.
He frowned again, this time with what I read as sincere thought. “Well, Rowan, I’ll be returning to Asimov Colony. I can’t see where I’ll have need of your services there.” He looked a little guilty. “But don’t worry, I’ll find you a good home.”
“I would appreciate that, sir,” I said. “I don’t want to end up in a mine.”
He nodded, but his eyes dodged away. I smiled pleasantly and left him. The door closed quickly behind me.
I had to wait a couple hours before Faun got off duty and returned to his cabin. He grabbed my shirt and pulled me inside as soon as he opened the door and found me standing there. His cabin was the same size as mine, and full of personal storage cartons on one side, so we were forced to stand almost chest-to-chest with the sleep netting crowding us. With his feet on the floor, he barely stood as high as my shoulder. The angle was good though: I could see his eyes—at least enough to know where to focus.
“He will sell you to the highest bidder,” he said quietly.
“Yeah, I got that,” I said. “What are you doing?”
“You are his insurance policy against us,” he said.
I could see that, too. I nodded. “So you’ll disable my control chip so he can’t make my head explode, and I’ll help you out. Then what?”
“Not disable,” he sighed. “The chip will self-destruct if tampered with. I can relieve him of the control codes, though; and transfer them to me.”
That made me mad. I couldn’t say exactly why.
“So why tell me at all?” I growled, and backed him to the wall. “Just flip the damn switch and give the orders.”
“Non, non,” he said quickly, and rattled off something in Lunite. He shook his head. He was breathing heavily and his fists were clenched, and even with such unusually strong signs from him, I couldn’t tell why. Was he excited because I had him backed to the wall, or scared?
“What do I get out of the new regime?” I asked.
“You will be part of the crew and not a contractor,” he said earnestly. “The contract will be voided.”
“I’ll still be your slave,” I snapped. “And what duties will you expect?”
“Non,” he said with a lot of head shaking. “I would never …”
I stood back. “No, no, not with the dirty Eart ape. You just dream about it, but you would never stoop that low.”
He slumped dejectedly. I had hit home. It just fueled my rage.
I leaned in to brace my hands on either side of his shoulders. I could see his scared eyes. “Tell you what, if you want me to work for you, you’re going to have to prove you can work for me. You want me to help with your little mutiny, when it’s over, you strip that suit off and I do what I please.”
He gasped, the intake of air sucking his mask into a little O of surprise over his mouth. “Non,” he breathed it back out softly and peered up at me. “Your profile.… You identify as hetero.”
I snorted. “Back where I come from, you don’t exactly qualify as male.”
“Get out!” His hands hit my chest and slammed me back into the boxes. “Never! Maybe you are as stupid as Dozi says!”
He slammed the door open, and I let him shove me out into the companionway.
I hovered there until the acceleration made me start to sink, and then I grabbed the ladder. The rage was gone. It was always like that. Somebody said something that pinched some nerve and off I went and I spent the rest of my life regretting it. And now I was going to do it in a mine: being expendable and sharing bunks, toilets, hard labor, unsafe conditions, chemical castration, and beatings, with hundreds of other stupid Earts who couldn’t make a good decision to save their lives.
Faun didn’t respond when I buzzed his door. I ate and worked out, trying to avoid the rest of the crew, who luckily seemed to be trying to avoid one another too. Then I sat in my doorway and read, with my feet dangling in the companionway, and waited for Faun to emerge.
It took four hours, and even though I had spent more of that time rehearsing than reading, the words still stuck in my throat when he looked at me.
“Wait,” I managed as he darted down the companionway.
He reversed at the bottom, and came back up to hover with a hand on the ladder so that our heads were even. “What?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, and hoped that even though he spent his life hiding his face, his whole race didn’t, and he could at least interpret other people’s expressions. I wasn’t trying to hide anything. I was a sorry idiot.
“Where I was raised …” I said. I didn’t want to get into discussing my mother’s commune, but I couldn’t exactly avoid it: it was the only excuse I had. “Men were men and women, women, and … men were supposed to worship the Goddess in all her forms, including women, and, um … men just didn’t … It was sacrilege. And … I know … that’s not how things are out here, and I should not be …”
“You don’t have to explain,” he said, and looked away. “All the religions on Earth have prohibitions against it.”
“Yeah,” I sighed. “Well, I don’t like to think I’m a member of any religion, I’ve been fighting that my whole life, but … it’s stuck in my head, I guess. So … it just … that and being owned by anyone, anymore. That’s what really … bothered me, and the other, I was just … being an ass to mention it, and …”
He looked at me again. “It won’t be like that,” he whispered. “I swear.”
“I want to believe you, but … it’s hard for me to trust a person when I can’t look them in the eye.”
He took a deep breath.
A shadow fell over us and we looked up. Quinn was dropping so fast she nearly collided with him.
“Get out of the way!” she snapped. “What are you idiots doing?”
“I’m reading,” I said.
Faun was already gone, going up the ladder instead of down.
I retreated to my room, leaving the door cracked so I could see when Quinn came back up. When she did, and disappeared into her cabin, I slipped out and went to the bridge. Faun was perched on the edge of a console, talking quietly with Akira. The rest of the bridge was empty.
“Akira is in on it,” Faun said quietly. “The captain is in his cabin, asleep. Quinn is …”
“In her cabin,” I said. “You have the whole ship bugged?”
He shrugged.
“Dozi?” I asked.
“With us,” he said.
“Can we really find a safe port if we do this?” I asked. I looked to Akira: he never bothered to hide whatever he was thinking.
Faun did something with his wrist controls and pulled off his mask and hood with a swift motion.
I blinked in surprise. He was pretty. There was still something masculine about him, but if he wore a dress and a wig it would have been hard to tell. His bald scalp was covered in subtle tat work. His big gray eyes were almost as pale as his blue-tinged skin, but they met mine solidly and I found that reassuring.
“Thanks,” I muttered.
“There are safe ports for outlaws and refuges,” Faun said. “There are people out here who want something different and do not like being owned and controlled, either. We will never be able to go back inside the Belt. And if we are caught, we will be rehabilitated.”
I nodded. “I’m in. Can you make the code changes for the chip whenever?”
He shook his head. “There will be an alarm on his private circuit when I make the change.”
I sighed. “How fast can you do it? And you’re sure, right? You don’t know how damn bad that thing hurts, and more than a few seconds and I start losing motor functions and IQ … permanently.”
“I have been thinking that my switching the codes will be the signal,” he said solemnly, his eyes steady on mine. “I can do it, and I do know. I had my bio-net disrupted by feedback once. I was in the hospital for a month.”
I believed him, and relief flowed through me. “So when?”
He pointed at a small set of screens showing our trajectory. They didn’t match the ones floating overhead. According to this information we were still in pursuit of the Martian. We were less than eight hours out.
“We need whatever she is carrying,” Faun said. “We will need money. Akira needs to decelerate soon. The captain will figure it out then.”
I was amazed at how much they were hiding. “Did you know about the treaty?” I asked. “And … how long have you been working on …”
He smiled grimly. “Yes, and we were planning this before then.”
“Damn,” I said sincerely. “So, when it happens … You want him dead? And what about Quinn?”
Akira chortled, but Faun didn’t seem pleased with the question.
“It would be easier if they died,” Faun said reluctantly.
I thought about it and didn’t find any reluctance. I shrugged. “I don’t have a problem with that. So, Akira needs to flip the ship, and you need to change the codes, and … we have a party. You have a plan?”
Faun looked to Akira and I could tell they were considering it: telepathy through their computer feeds: no words, just data.
“We need to act soon,” Faun told me. “I have summoned Dozi.” He replaced his hood and mask.
I realized I had forgotten an important bit of information. “You’re going to be captain, right?” I asked Faun.
He nodded. “Dozi was not happy, but Akira sides with me, and …” He looked at me.
“I side with you,” I assured him. “It’ll probably take all three of us to keep that Ven bastard in line.”
Faun sighed. “Oui.”
The captain emerged from the companionway, holding a flechette gun. “I’m not stupid, Faun, but Dozi is,” he said smugly. “Did you really think this would work?”
I expected the pain of the control chip firing. Every muscle in my body tensed for it. It didn’t come.
The captain’s eyes widened as he looked from me to Faun. “I am impressed you managed to hack the codes. I was told that was impossible. But it doesn’t …”
I was moving.
Out of the corner of my eye I saw Faun throw himself on top of Akira. His suit shined silver, as if he were suddenly encased in chrome.
The captain had been aiming at Faun. He took precious seconds—for him—to adjust the angle of the barrel toward me. It was a stupid thing. The cone of razors the flechette pistol fired would have torn me to shreds without his re-aiming, but he had probably never fired one. He was thinking all the wrong thoughts: trying to act on logic and not instinct. The army had beaten the logic out of me when it came to a fight. If you had to think about it, you were dead.
I hit him hard and he fired wide. I heard the little blades pinging off exposed metal on the far side of the room as I drove us into a wall. I got a handhold on a beam with my left and began to pound with my right. He was already stunned from hitting the ceiling.
“Stop!” Faun yelled from below. “We need his head!”
I didn’t need to continue anyway: the captain was unconscious.
I whirled and snatched the pistol that had drifted from his grasp. I pumped another capsule into the chamber as I reversed to kick straight down toward the companionway. I found Dozi and Quinn fighting on the rec deck. The woman had been holding back on everyone: she had had some combat training, and she had scored twice on the big Ven with a little blade. Blood followed him in slow trails as he threw himself around the room trying to avoid her. I stood in the doorway, guessed my angle, and fired at a point where I thought she wouldn’t be able to avoid the cone of death even if she saw it coming. I didn’t really care if I hit Dozi or not: it made things easier.
They both dodged: Dozi just enough; Quinn, not quite. The blades shredded the flesh of her legs, and she screamed and writhed in the middle of the room. I dove at her and got a good handful of shirt. I hooked my other hand in the netting to swing her around, aiming her head into a wall. She went limp on impact.
I turned and found Dozi swearing at me and Faun standing in the doorway.
“You okay? Akira?” I asked Faun.
The silver head nodded.
I floated there, still holding Quinn’s limp body, and watched the blood drift around as I tried to calm my breathing.
“We did it,” Faun said. “We’re free.”
I didn’t know what he thought he needed to be free of, or Dozi, or Akira. I didn’t feel free. I felt as chained to the physics of my life as I had ever been, just like the drifting blood was at the mercy of the actions that released it.
“I suppose I have to clean this mess up,” I sighed.
“No,” Faun said. “We need things from their bio-nets, and … their eyes for the biometrics, and … I will see to it.”
“Good,” I said. I didn’t want any part of that, or anything for that matter. “I’ll be in my cabin for a while. Wake me when we catch the Martian.”
His hand fell on my arm as I began to pass him. “Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” I said. Beyond him, I saw Dozi trying to look at one of his wounds. He was still cursing. “If you need any other help …”
“I will signal you,” Faun said quietly.
I felt a tone in my head. It was like I heard something my ears didn’t. I thought I had felt it before when they tested the chips, but I hadn’t felt it since.
I jerked away from him and squawked, “What was that?”
“I am sorry,” he said, and I could hear the alarm in his voice. “It is just a chip feature. The captain never …”
“No, he never,” I snapped.
“All right, all right,” Faun said soothingly. “I will not use it. I am sorry. We all have … It is part of our bio-nets. We signal one another all the time …”
“Okay, okay, I get that,” I said, and I did. I knew he meant it. I just didn’t like it. “Just … I need to be alone.”
I retreated to my cabin and closed and locked the door. I often felt exhausted after the excitement of a fight, but this was different. This was the way I used to feel on Yule morning when I didn’t get the present I wanted. I didn’t feel cheated, just disappointed. I took a sleeper pill. Thinking about it wasn’t going to help. It never did.
Faun came to get me sometime later, no chime in my head, just the one at my door.
“We are close,” he said quietly.
“How are things?” I asked as I shoved the sleep out of my head.
“We got what we needed. The bodies are gone. Dozi is … behaving,” he sighed quietly.
“You go ahead and do that thing in my head if it’s an emergency,” I said.
He nodded and led me up to the bridge.
We were a couple hours from intercept, and the Martian was trying to defend herself. Our scoop was in, and Akira would be using maneuvering thrusters to bring us into grapple range. Dozi was suited and at the drone station and Faun was at his usual communications console. I suited up in my armored EV, pulled a temp couch from the wall, and strapped myself in.
For the next two hours, Akira engaged in a game of cat and mouse with velocity, Saturn’s gravity, and fuel conservation, as he brought us ever closer to the evading ship. She was trying every trick we had seen the Martians use: from ejecting debris to burning her fuel in an attempt to decelerate enough that we would be forced to pass her. Akira almost rammed her instead. Dozi swore a lot at this, but managed to grapple the Martian with lines. We swung out and around relative to our prey, and dragged her with us until both ships ended up ninety degrees off their original orientations. Even though the lines were anchored at reinforced frame points, and the Mantis was designed for it, she groaned and complained at the sudden strain; and my heart tried to crawl up my throat as I thought about the sheer stupidity of what we were doing when nothing but vacuum waited outside our thin hull.
Dozi finished grappling with our arm while Akira finished matching our trajectory. Then it was my turn. I dropped to the maintenance deck, feeling three sets of eyes on me as I went. I checked my gear and pulled up a wire-frame schematic of the Martian to float in the corner of my faceplate as I waited for the airlock to cycle. Then there was just the suit between me and nothing, and Saturn filled the universe. His rings were almost too bright to look at, and they seemed so close that I could just thrust to the end of my tether and walk on them.
I floated there in awe. Not because what I saw was pretty, but because it reached inside my chest and head and gripped me and shook until I remembered why I had wanted to come to space: until I remembered all my boyhood dreams: until I remembered just how amazing life was—all of it. Every step I had ever taken was worthwhile if it had brought me to this. I wasn’t a victim of fate and bad choices. I had wanted this, and now I had it. I howled with joy and no one heard me and I didn’t care. Saturn heard me.
“Rowan?” Faun’s voice came through the speaker. “You’re not moving, and …”
I wasn’t sure what the suit sensors had told him of my heart rate and breathing. I stifled a laugh and toggled the mike. “I’m fine. Just … had to look. It’s amazing.”
“There’s damage?” Dozi yelled. “I can’t see it with the drones.”
“No, Saturn,” I said.
“What the …” Dozi’s voice suddenly cut out.
“Are you okay?” Faun asked calmly.
“Yeah,” I said. “It doesn’t look the same as it does on the screens. Don’t worry your pretty head. I’m moving now.”
“No hurry,” he said.
“You’re lying.” I chuckled as I turned away from Saturn’s splendor and toward the Martian.
Our prey was named the Quonyang, and she was three times the mass of our Mantis. Even with cargo ballutes, I wasn’t sure how we were going to empty her, but the logistics were Faun’s problem, not mine. The ships nestled side by side like a mother whale and her baby, haloed by the sun. My facemask was nearly black trying to compensate for the direct solar light, and I began to maneuver down to get the ships completely between me and the rays before I approached an entry.
Her crew blew her outer airlock doors with explosives. I watched one door wheel up and over the Mantis. It would have broken every bone in my body if it had struck me. It was pretty to watch as it eclipsed the sun and tumbled into the void. I silently thanked Saturn for holding my attention and Dozi for destroying the external Martian cameras with one of our drones. Not being able to see my approach, the desperate crew had timed their sabotage to correspond with when I should have arrived at their airlocks if I hadn’t been floating there staring like an idiot at the wonders of the universe.
In the ten ships I had boarded, I had only seen them prepare to destroy their ship to stop me twice. Most of the Martian crews realized we just wanted the cargo: they fought, but not so that they committed suicide. These guys either had enough to fear back home that they thought this cargo was worth dying for, or they thought we were going to kill them. Which made sense, since we weren’t privateers of one government preying on another’s shipping anymore, but pirates. Who knew what we would do? Desperate men do crazy things.
I thought of all the crazy things desperate Martians might try as I considered the schematic. After blowing their airlocks, they had to be expecting a decompression somewhere, so I assumed they were suited up. It also meant they had explosives and were insane enough to use them. The whole ship was probably booby-trapped.
Faun’s voice was like my conscience again. “Rowan?”
I knew my crewmates had seen the airlock doors go. “I’m trying to figure out how to avoid booby-traps,” I said.
“Dozi says to cut into the hold,” Faun said.
“All right.” It sounded good to me. The bastards couldn’t rig their entire hull and we didn’t need them, just the cargo.
I maneuvered over, clamped myself down, and began to carefully cut a hole with a vacuum torch into their hull. No air escaped as I broke through. Once again I was reminded of how slowly things seemed to move in space as I cut a hole large enough to look through. I moved around and kept one eye on my progress and another on Saturn. I might as well enjoy the view while I was out here. I might as well do a lot of things.
I sent my crew a picture with the suit camera of the cartons I saw inside.
“Pharmaceuticals,” Faun said after they had deciphered the Martian characters.
I could hear Dozi and Akira whooping in the background. We had hit the mother lode.
“I told the Martians we just want the cargo, and they have said they will do nothing to stop us,” Faun said.
I didn’t fully believe that, and I doubted he did either. I stayed wary as I began to cut a much larger hole in the hull.
There was a tone in my head. I shoved off from their hull and reeled myself back up my tether to our airlock in silence.
I felt more vulnerable standing in the lock in the bulky suit boarding my own ship than I had ever felt boarding one of the Martians. I wasn’t afraid for myself, though. I was worried about Faun.
I readied a crowbar and a flechette pistol as the lock cycled. I couldn’t see anyone through the interior window but it wasn’t as if I had a field of view, between my faceplate and the little port. No one was in the inner bay. I shoved off up the companionway, thankful Akira had us at Zero-G again.
They were all on the bridge, and I understood why Faun had signaled: Dozi was armed with a Taser and standing between him and Akira. Dozi couldn’t hurt Faun due to the Loonie suit, but without Akira I doubted we were going to fly anywhere, at least not well. They were all arguing.
Dozi seemed really surprised at my sudden entry: enough that he aimed the useless Taser at a fully-suited man and gave Akira the opportunity to spray him with a canister of gas. Then I was on the Ven engineer. We didn’t wrestle long; whatever Akira had hit him with was potent.
I rotated around Dozi’s choking and writhing body until I could see the others. Faun’s suit was opaque and Akira’s couch was encapsulated in an emergency dome. One of them had triggered the bridge hatch so the gas wouldn’t get into the rest of the ship.
I toggled my suit mike. “He going to die?”
Akira and Faun nodded.
“We need his head?” I asked.
Another set of nods.
I cursed to myself. I really wanted to hit Dozi with the crowbar a few times.
It took an hour for Dozi to finally stop twitching and Faun to force-cycle the bridge’s air through the cleaner. Faun and Akira were communicating through their bio-nets during that time, but I was out of the loop. It gave me time to think: about Saturn, and how much the Martian’s cargo might be worth, about how I could use my share of that to get my chip removed and make some changes I hadn’t considered even wanting before, like getting a bio-net, and adapting to … space, my way.
Now that all the people who had problems with our new course had been accounted for, Faun was free to leave Akira with the ship and help me tackle unloading the Martian. Even if we had thought the little Mercan wanted to betray us, he needed us as much as we needed him.
“You will need to learn the drones,” Faun said as he donned a normal EV suit on top of his skin-tight one.
“I was thinking there’s a lot of stuff I need to do,” I said.
“Such as?” he asked through the suit channel as we stepped into the airlock.
“Get laid,” I said with a grin he couldn’t see. Even though we were right next to one another in the lock, with the suits on we were just voices.
“There might be women where we end up,” he said quietly.
“I don’t think I need to wait that long,” I said, and realized that hadn’t sounded quite right. “Maybe I don’t need a woman,” I added. “Maybe I need to just see what’s in front of me, and appreciate it.”
The outer door opened and I stepped out to the vista of Saturn once again. I pulled him with me.
W.A. Hoffman believes a geek is someone who can tell you everything about the propulsion system of the space ship in their favorite TV series, a nerd is someone who knows how and why the same propulsion system violates the laws of physics, and a dork is someone able and willing to explain the difference. Hoffman prides herself on being all three. She’s spent her life daydreaming and absorbing movies, art, and the written word on any conceivable subject. Every few years she reaches critical mass and weaves the voices in her head with the endless supply of useless facts to create fiction. Dedicated to independent publishing and artistic freedom, she established her own publishing company, Alien Perspective, in 2001. Her published works include numerous short stories and the novels Love & Benjamins, Blood is Thicker than Water, and the Raised by Wolves buccaneer series: Brethren, Matelots, Treasure, and Wolves. For more information about her or her other works, please visit alienperspective.com.