Chapter Four
The rubberized boot covers of the two electromagnets clunked with reverberating shame on either side of Ladybug’s hull. Docking under station control involved only minimal action by me. So I decided I’d listen to my recorded messages.
It was a thing that you did: recording messages for people to listen to during their docking after a time off station. The time to dock and to get yourself cycled down from the port to station interior took just as long going in as going out. But for in transit time going home, there weren’t last minute things to study and focus on. My older brother, Jules, would play mashups of my younger self lisping out messages of encouragement to him for his various trips out station. I was missing my top two front teeth for a lot of those trips because I fell down and got banged up when I was really little and cracked them. Since they were just baby teeth, the dentist took them out rather than doing any time-consuming dental work on them.
When Xavier had had a similar tooth problem, he’d been sent over to Daphnis Station and their dentist had given up his first vacation in a year to take care of it. But a Sadou kid can’t ask for exceptions like that. There are never enough specialists for all the work that needs doing. A Sadou can’t ask because there’s too much chance a specialist will think they can’t say no.
Anyway, I checked the incoming ship’s messages queue eager to see what each of my parents, my brothers, and Susu and Babu had recorded for me. (There are other Sadou relatives too, but they don’t live on Chawla, so of course there’d be no messages from them.) These would be videos that they’d made much earlier, so there’d be assumptions that all had gone better than it had, but I looked forward to some encouragement anyway. It’d be mercifully free of recriminations, I was sure. And maybe they’d have some silly comments that I could mash together to tease them with later, for once.
But there was nothing in the Ladybug file.
I mean, there was the usual docking procedure with updates. But there weren’t any personal messages for me at all.
Suddenly intensely aware that docking was recorded, I pasted a smile I didn’t feel onto my face and tried not to run through all the reasons why not a single one of them thought to do the welcome home videos. I mean, I always reminded people, and, oh.
I would not cry. I would not. I flipped through the plasticized sheets of the docking procedures and grease-marker checked each step. The scratch of small, clawed hands put a real smile back on my face. At least one of my brothers had remembered to prank me, after all. I reached under my desk and pressed the tab to drop another treat into the cage. When I leaned back in my chair to take a peek, everything seemed well enough.
Chameleon had curled up for a nap in his little cage with a Velcro loop attaching it securely to the wall just under my console desk. None of the monitoring cameras would have a view of it there to get either me or my brothers into trouble.
We reached the end of the first part of docking and started the transition into matching velocity with the station proper. Dockside arms clamped hard against Ladybug’s sides.
That shuddering slow motion stop that means you just broke something that isn’t going to snap back into place takes on new and even more unpleasant meaning when it’s on the vehicle that’s responsible for keeping you alive.
The squealing, of course, was the alarm system letting me know that this time the scuffs on my pod’s hull weren’t going to buff out. Since I was already suited up, I just put my helmet on, but I didn’t dare turn off the audio system for the built-in headset.
And, of course, I had an audience. My external-to-ship comms started working just as soon as some poor contractee swanned out in a suit and jabbed physical cables into the connector port. The worker had that almost-too-fast-for-safety way of moving that made it obvious he was a contractee, someone always aware of the possible chance observation by someone who might or might not approve a job extension. Regular voting-share owners weren’t slow exactly, but you could always tell the difference.
I thought at first it was Mr. Aanderson, who’d given me helpful tips when I was first developing my own zero-gee skills, but this time it was Mr. Mulvane. Oh, and his backup, suited up with his helmeted face pressed to the fisheye there on the port, was Omaara’s dad, Mr. Ulbadine.
I hoped nobody needed backup, because Mr. Ulbadine, jack-of-all-trades rating or not, was really best as a gardener.
That should have been the port master, Mr. Petrie-Xi, doing the backup job. But maybe Mr. Ulbadine was suited up anyway in case his daughter needed help? Or maybe Mr. Petrie-Xi hated taking the time out of his life for depressurization and repressurization.
Maybe contractor-residents could be counted on to take icky jobs for cash. Maybe citizen-residents were getting too wimpy, and we all ought to do more zero-gee time and more pod driving time and spend more time with headsets on bending metal.
The embarrassment of bringing Ladybug back as a battered wreck would’ve been bad enough with just Mr. Petrie-Xi and old Mr. Aanderson. Mr. A would’ve been supportive and reminded me again that suit time was more fun than driving around giant air bubbles (meaning a pod). Mr. Petrie-Xi was Dad’s Deputy President of the Station Council. He and Dad didn’t get along much with all the Good Old Alpha refueling cost versus speed arguments, but his gossip about me would stay mostly among the Station Council staff and bleed out to all the regular mechanics through Mrs. Pixie.
But with Omaara’s dad around too, the telling and retelling of my humiliation would reach all the kids via Omaara.
A beep on my comm line alerted me of a message and for a brief moment, I thought I might have a welcome message that I’d somehow missed.
Nope, it was a live call: my dad. He’d made the time, himself, to be there. My warm elation came from knowing how busy his days were with so much prep to do for the real trip, but I’d forgotten my situation.
Dad didn’t start with questions like: “Hey, are you okay? We were so worried about you. How’s it going?”
No, no, no, none of that for me from my family.
“Calypso, what did you do?”
And I had nothing to say.
“Mr. Sadou, sir,” Omaara’s dad said, “there’s the atmosphere readings for her pod. As you can see, she still has some margin. I’m running out a backup air supply to her now.”
“I’m sure she’s fine,” Mr. Petrie-Xi said. “Complete waste of resources for a Sadou, again.”
“You can go home, Deputy,” Dad growled. “I’ve got this.”
“Oh, no, I’m going to see everything your little disaster did wrong. Not going to let you order anyone to hide one single thing.”
I was fine. Really, I was. I was fine because I’d been working hard at being fine. And now I was just exhausted.
A few syllables of what sounded like an argument began on the comm line and then crackled to silence. Ladybug’s external camera’s showed Mr. Mulvane hand signaling to me to double check all the connectors. I used the remotes to signal back message received and got to work on that.
The system popped up a query that had to have come from Mr. Petrie-Xi announcing that an external program with hardware connection was trying to take control of Ladybug. I was really tired, and besides Dad was in the control room so he would be monitoring it all.
So, I pressed the agree option and let the station remotes take over full control. I didn’t fight it. I did know the key words to type into the console to stop that from happening, but it’d be all right, right? Just let somebody else do it this time.
I loaded myself into the transfer module Omaara’s dad locked to Ladybug’s tiny airlock, waited morosely until the arms lined it up with one of Control’s personnel locks, and came out.
Straight into an earful from my dad about how you never let the station take control of your ship and you monitor the whole time and yeah, all that stuff.
Mr. Petrie-Xi looked me up and down like I was a piece of growth medium from the Gardens he somehow found on the bottom of his shoe and left without bothering to do any of the traditional welcome back to station protocol I’d memorized.
“Sadou Calypso reporting back to Chawla Station, sir,” I said through the airlock speakers to Mr. Ulbadine, hoping I’d get to do at least one thing right.
He looked wide-eyed over at my dad and mumbled, “I don’t know the lines.”
“It’s fine, Caly,” Dad said. “I’ve got to get back to work. Just finish up here and I’ll see you at home later.”
In the giant clear window, I waved a thank you to Mr. Mulvane (who ignored me, busy with some zero-gee maintenance item while out in a suit) and Mr. Ulbadine (who flashed back “you’re welcome” with the lights of the backup unit). I do appreciate how Mr. Ulbadine says hi every single time. He’s a nice guy even if he is Omaara’s dad. But I didn’t keep waving at him.
I got into one of the big elevators to transfer from Control down into the station proper. My heart felt even heavier than my body as spin gravity started taking effect.
The elevator came to a stop in full station gravity. I gathered up Chameleon and all my stuff. Since my family hadn’t had time to send me silly welcome home messages, I didn’t really expect to have anyone waiting to walk home with me, but I still half hoped to see at least Julian…
The display screen inside the elevator didn’t show anyone, but it doesn’t show the whole of the bench used by people waiting on arrivals. And the secondary screen that only turns on for wide area motion detection was blank.
When I got out, there was someone there, but it wasn’t anyone I wanted to see.