Part 1 — Joey and the Rat
Location: Drake Space, Casa Verde Station, Level 2, near Corridor 23
Standard Date: 12 02 629
The rat was hungry. It sniffed the air and smelled mostly other rats. It recognized most of them, and they were bigger than it was. Now it was afraid as well as hungry, so it moved away from the smell.
It looked like a rat, furry, long pointed nose, beady red eyes, and four paws. But if you looked really closely, you would note that the beady red eyes were a little glassy and the front paws had what appeared to be thumbs.
A hundred years earlier, the geneticists on Cybrant had modified a strain of rats to be more vacuum survivable. It was done to test the utility of certain changes they were considering for humans. There were a number of changes they introduced. The eyes had a harder surface and the liquid secreted by the rats’ tear ducts was not water, but an oil that didn’t evaporate in low pressures. The nose and mouth could be closed to a good seal. The skin had muscles that held it tight in place, in case of a pressure drop. And a student attempting an advanced placement also modified the rat strains, changing the paws so that they might double as hands to help the rat avoid being sucked out into total vacuum.
One other odd feature was even less apparent. The rats’ feces was liquid, viscous, and dried into an airtight plug. That last was a bit of scientific curiosity to see if the rats would learn to use it to make their own habitats.
They did.
The rats, as rats tend to do, spread. And by now they were fairly common on stations in Drake Space, if less so in Cordoba Space and on the free stations.
The rat knew nothing of its ancestry and cared even less. What it cared about was finding food and avoiding getting eaten by its fellows, hungry rats not being known for fellowship. It wasn’t small by Old Earth standards, being 23 centimeters long, not counting the tail, and weighing in at 326 grams. Its fur was scraggly and it was thin compared to its fellows. It couldn’t see at the moment, but that wasn’t because of its sight. It was just pitch-black back this far in the rock.
It jumped across a gap in the rock and ran down a passage until it saw light, then it followed the light to a crack in a very old plastic patch. It nibbled the plastic, then slipped through.
✽✽✽
Joey was eight years old and asleep. He was a skinny kid with reddish-brown, not quite straight hair. He didn’t have a nightlight, but there was a gap near the top of the wall panel, and this let in some of the corridor light.
Joey’s home wasn’t a great deal better than the rat’s. It was asteroid stone on one side, and corridor panel on the other. His dad slept two meters up the corridor from him and his sister two meters down. Had to do it that way, since the “rooms” were barely more than a meter wide. The floor was the wall of a packing crate laid over the corridor support bars.
It made getting up to go to the toilet a challenge, and he knew better than to disturb either his dad or his sister’s sleep. So when the rat walked over his foot, he didn’t jerk or scream. He opened his eyes and saw it, a black blob sitting on the space blanket that covered his feet and lower body. The blob sat up, sniffed the air, and headed right for Joey’s stash. He had soy chips and a giant grape that he scrounged from hydro yesterday.
That was to be his breakfast, and the blob wasn’t getting it. He sat up, careful not to wake Dad or his sister.
The rat froze, then looked at Joey, who carefully reached over and retrieved the fist-sized grape. He set the grape in his lap and reached for the chips, all while the rat watched. Then Joey looked at the rat. It was looking back at him.
No.
It was looking at the soy chips.
Joey considered, then tossed a chip at the rat. It reached up with its little hands and caught the chip. Then, quick as a flash, it was gone.
Holding his grape to his chest, Joey went back to sleep.
Over the next weeks, Joey came to know the rat, and the rat came to almost trust Joey.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Cargo Section
Standard Date: 12 18 629
“I got it,” Danny Gold sent over the shipnet. Charleen Dreesen watched as he snagged the farm-bot with the mag grapple, swung it over and adjusted the angle, then sent it on to Charleen. All in vacuum, wearing nothing but his helmet, gloves, and a ship suit. Charleen was wearing a hardsuit, something closer to a mini-spaceship than the flexsuit a wealthier spacer would have. She’d seen this before when they worked outship on the trip, but it always creeped her out when the skipper went into vacuum naked.
The farm-bots weighed three tons in their crates. They weren’t tractors, but hydroponics robots that ran on rails, picked lettuce, trimmed sage, or did thousands of other gardening chores, depending on how they were programmed. These had expert systems, programmable but not trainable like artificial brains.
Charleen shook her head as Danny snagged the next crate, bent his knees to take the force, then sprang back and sent it on to her. They were working in zero-g but mass still applied, and Danny’s ability to take that sort of mass was another indication of his genetic mods.
Charleen, in the hardsuit and riding a station tug, grabbed the farm-bot with the tug’s arms, shifted it onto the pallet, and clamped it into place. Hardsuits were considerably less expensive than flexsuits, but they were more restrictive, harder to get into and out of, and much less comfortable. They were also adjustable, so that you could rent one at a reasonable cost. The ship paid the rent on this one.
“That was the last of them,” the Pandora reported via radio.
Charleen acknowledged and turned the tug back to the hanger station.
✽✽✽
“I’m not so sure,” Pan said to Danny, as Charleen exited the airlock still in the hard suit. “As you pointed out, the fix is in.”
“What’s going on?” Charleen asked as she opened the faceplate on the hard suit using her internals.
Pan told her. There was a lien placed on the fee the Pandora received for delivering the farm-bots.
“That’s my pay you’re talking about!” Charleen said.
“Like I said, we can get the ruling reversed.”
“Pan?” Charleen asked the ship. Danny was a good guy, charming and fun in the sack, but he was convinced that he could fix anything.
“I’ve been checking the records and Herr Furger is less adept at records security than he should be. Yes, if there was time, we could get the lien reversed, but it will take too much time because they have a series of delaying tactics ready.”
Charleen shook her head. “Sorry, Cap,” she said. “You’re pretty as hell and a good lay, but I don’t work for free.” She would get another berth easily enough. She was an able spacer with a clean ticket.
Danny looked at her. “You sure, Charleen? You might find it hard to get a new berth. And once we get out of here, I’ll find more jobs and be able to pay you.”
“I’m an able spacer, Skipper. I’ll find something. And you ain’t getting out of here if the fix is in.”
✽✽✽
Danny started to argue more, but Charleen held up a hand and he dropped it. She’d been overworked on the trip in. He’d be lucky if she didn’t put a lien on the Pan herself. Charleen Dreesen was a tall, rawboned woman who’d been in her fair share of bar fights. She kept her dark brown hair short so that it wouldn’t interfere with the connections between her internals and the hard suit helmet. Most spacers did, even though it wasn’t really necessary. She worked hard and played hard. Both her body and mind were more flexible than the hard-bitten spacer persona she sported would suggest. And Danny knew that he owed her for this last trip. “Pan,” Danny sent to the ship. “Give her what you can,” certain that the Pandora was already doing so.
✽✽✽
Still in the hard suit, but with the gloves flipped back, Charleen collected up her duffle and left. She was a temporary hire in the first place and had no real connection to Pan, Danny, or really anyone.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Cargo Section
It took Charleen the better part of an hour to get the hard suit turned in. Then she headed for the hiring hall.
As she floated through the hatch into the hiring hall, she looked around and saw five consoles located on one wall. She grabbed a handhold, swung, and launched herself feet first at an unoccupied console. She flipped in the air and grabbed a handhold at the console station while letting her momentum swing her into place. She pulled her ticket from the inside pocket of her shipsuit. It was a ruby crystal memcore with her account balances and records recorded in protected files. She put the crystal in the slot and the screen lit up.
She tapped the screen to get a look at the station. Casa Verde had started out as a half-klick across gravel pile in orbit around the Casa System star at the right distance to give it solar energy of about the same intensity as Old Earth got. In other words, the station was a perfectly ordinary asteroid. First the bits on the surface were tied together with heavy cables and rods, then it was cut into two parts and the larger part was spun up to provide gravity.
After that, the real construction began, and that part of the construction of Casa Verde Station was still going on. The asteroid was mined for materials to extend the station. When it was “finished,” in another twenty years or so, it would hold a population of fifteen million. At least that was what was planned. For right now it held five hundred thousand people and about the same number of livestock. It was mostly a farming station with massive greenhouses growing everything from asparagus to zagut. Zagut was a fungus that had a great deal of protein and could be formed into shapes. It was almost entirely tasteless, but it was nutritious and the base for survival bars.
The newer sections of Casa Verde were downright luxurious, with lawns and even artificial streams, small trees, and artificial sunlight. The working portions of the station, which were carved out of the rock, were less so. Not a place where Charleen wanted to stay.
She went back to the main screen and found the entry to apply for a ship berth, and tapped the icon. The screen started flashing in red with the words:
Incomplete documentation
Report to Desk 3
“What the f—?” Charleen pulled her ticket from the slot and went to Desk 3.
The guy at Desk 3 was fat, greasy, and in need of a shave. He looked her up and down. Shook his head. “Dumbass spacer. Should have looked before you jumped. Casa System has additional licensing requirements, so we don’t get stuck with a bunch of outsiders taking our jobs. License fee is two hundred marks, and you got to pay in Casa marks, not Drake money. And especially not Cordoba money.”
“What? I’m fully qualified with a clean ticket.” Two hundred marks. That was a fortune. “Surely the interstellar traffic don’t follow that rule.”
“You do if you change ships here. It’s illegal to hire a spacer without full Casa Verde papers.”
✽✽✽
Charleen muttered curses as she bounced along the corridor using her duffle as a counterweight. She knew Danny Gold wasn’t the sort to settle down and raise a family, but she hadn’t thought he would stiff her like this. Now she was stuck on this rock with no job, very little money—which money might or might not be good here—and the Casa System wasn’t famous for the kind and gentle way they treated indigent spacers. She considered filing a lien against the Pan, but from what the ship brain told her, that would do no good. The ship was probably already owned by the people running this scam, and she might meet Danny Gold again here on the station. Besides, deep down she knew it wasn’t Danny’s fault. She’d just got caught in the gears again. The story of her life.
Charleen took her time bouncing through the warehouse section of Casa Verde, but eventually reached the big shiftable lock that linked the cargo section and the habitat.
There she waited. The airlock was the choke point. Unless you wanted to live in the cargo section and let your bones rot from lack of grav, you had to use it. It was also expensive to use. It was a large round hallway that was eight meters long and about the same across. There was a set fee every time it was used, plus a cost per kilogram. She didn’t have the flat fee. So she waited with the other spacers and stevedores until someone with a big cargo showed up. Then everyone chipped in, based on their weight.
A cargo arrived and it turned out they were some of the ag-bots Pandora carried here. She paid her fee to the crew chief and went to the door on the cargo side. She had to let the station personnel scan her hand, so they would have her hand print in their files. Starting now, they would tax every breath she took until she left the station.
Then she floated through the lock with her duffle and it closed. The room detached from the warehouse section, then the magnetic grapples grabbed it and it started to rotate slowly. This far in, you couldn’t hardly call it gravity, but she grabbed a handhold so she matched the spin. She waited as the lock made the half meter trip to the rotating habitat and locked into place. The far hatch opened and they waited till the ag-bots were removed. Then, along with the others, she launched herself across the distance to the other hatch. Once through it she was in the habitat section. It took her another hour—avoiding the cameras—to get to the outer levels and get some gravity to hold her down.
Now she needed a job.
Charleen didn’t know Casa Verde Station, so she didn’t know who to talk to to get on the unofficial job rolls. The official job rolls had a waiting list of years. Ten years of hard work and study to become an able spacer and here she was—a station rat again.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Industrial 3, Level 4, Corridor 12
Standard Date: 12 19 629
“Hey, Dreesen! You just stay right there, spacer. You won’t like it if I have to taze you, and you’ll like what happens next even less.”
Charleen froze. She’d been tazed before and knew from grim experience that station cops beat the crap out of you after they tazed you. Slowly, she turned her head until she saw the station cop in her distinctive yellow and red disposable, tazer out and smart vest blinking red and blue. After a night spent dozing in a side corridor, Charleen was tired and grumpy, but not stupid.
“No trouble, Officer.” Slowly, Charleen lowered her duffle to the station floor.
✽✽✽
Five minutes later Charleen was sitting in an “interview room” in the local precinct, being questioned about Danny Gold. The questions told the story. Danny and the Pan got away, and the local muckety-mucks were pissed and scared.
A new guy came into the interview room. He was wearing station formal, a belted robe of smart cloth that flickered through images, including his name and his position as manager on station for Sterling Management and Organizational Governance (SMOG) Savings and Loan.
It was him, Horace G. Lee, who told her she had to file a lien against the Pandora for nonpayment of wages.
“Sure, boss. But I don’t have the filing fee. I’m skint.”
“We can take care of that. And you’ll even get a mark out of the deal,” he told her with a greasy smile. He made her sign some forms, which she didn’t read, then added one mark and ten credits in Casa Verde station credits to her data chip. After that she was allowed to leave.
Walking away from the precinct station with her duffle on her back and enough credits to pay for one night’s lodging at a spacer’s rest, she thought, I should have stayed on the Pan, salary or not. It was three hots and a warm cot.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Industrial 3, Level 4, Corridor 22
Two Hours Later
This agro section was part hydroponics and part soil farming. The soil was ground asteroid with human and animal waste mixed in and fermented, seeded with earthworms and used to grow fruit trees. In one section there was a group of coffee trees that weren’t doing well. The manager was laying off the people who worked there because now he had the ag-bots. He suggested two other agro sections on the station, but not like he really meant it.
It was on her way out of the agro section that she saw the kid. He was half hidden behind one of the reflective wall panels and well out of sight of the cameras. Charleen was curious and, considering the interview, wasn’t all that interested in ratting the kid out to the manager. So she wandered down the hall a little and set herself to watching.
Using a mirror apparently made of broken wall panel, the kid watched a camera and timed its cycle, then slipped out as it was looking the other way, and went to a midget banana tree. The bananas were blue and still almost out of the kid’s reach, but he managed to get two of them and scamper back to the crack in the wall panel. Charleen looked at the reflective wall and tried to figure out where the kid would come out.
The reflective panels were used to increase the amount of light available to grow the plants, and so save on costs. These were in poor repair, cracked and broken in several places, showing the ragged rock walls of the asteroid behind them. Charleen watched the holes and saw a flicker of motion. That gave her the kid’s direction of travel. She walked down the hall, away from the agro section, and saw the kid emerge from a poorly attached white panel into the hall proper. He was wearing disposables at least a week old and frayed, and there were suspicious bulges under his shirt.
✽✽✽
It took Joey almost fifteen minutes to get back to their place, and all the way there, the hairs on the back of his neck were standing on end. He knew there was something wrong, but not what. He opened the panel and slipped into home.
His sister Debby grabbed him by the collar and grabbed for his bananas. “Hey, let go.”
The panel opened and there was a woman standing there. She was wearing spacer clothing, the sort of clothing that you didn’t dump in the recycler, and a heavy bag on her back. “Let the kid go!” said the tall, raw boned woman with a bump on her nose where it had been broken at some point, probably in a bar fight. Her hair was close cut, like most spacers wore it, dark brown with eyes that almost matched it.
Debby let Joey go and jumped back, then caught herself and sneered. “He’s my brother and it’s none of your business. I’ll call the securities, I will.”
“Brother or not,” the woman said, “he stole those bananas fair and square. And you won’t be calling station security on a spacer. So, back up, kid. Where are your folks, your parents?”
“They’ll be right back,” Debby said.
Joey knew that wasn’t true. Dad was on his rounds. He would be looking for work or handouts down around the spacer bars for hours yet. Mom . . . Joey didn’t remember Mom.
“Good, then,” the lady said. “We’ll wait right here for them.” She pulled the bag off her shoulders and set it on the floor, then she sat on it and leaned back against a stanchion.
Joey was scared. Spacers were dangerous. They could get drunk or crazy and they had status. If a spacer got mugged, the securities would be all over the place, rousting people and sending them to the cells.
Debby was scared too. Joey could tell.
✽✽✽
Charleen looked at the kids. They were in hand me down disposables, and the fact that they were arguing over a couple of bananas suggested they were hungry. She had a half full box of energy bars in her duffle, but she was hoarding them like credits, because she didn’t have nearly enough credits. They were good energy bars too, made by the Pandora’s cooking unit and vac sealed to last. She considered, then stood up and opened her duffle. She dug around and found the bars, pulled two, then a third, out of the box and sat back down. “Is there any water around here? Drinking water, I mean?” She held up the bars. “These are vac sealed. They go better with water.”
The girl’s already large eyes got bigger when she saw the energy bars, then she turned away, saying, “I’ll get some.” She found a plastic bottle and started for the loose panel, then stopped. To get to the panel, she would have to pass Charleen and Charleen could tell the girl didn’t want to get into arm’s reach.
“Don’t worry, kid,” Charleen said. She didn’t scrunch over, but she did lean back and wave at the panel.
Hesitantly, the girl, almost as skinny as her brother and maybe thirteen years old, slipped by. Once she was gone, Charleen looked at the boy. She held up an energy bar. “I’ll trade you, kid. Energy bar for a banana?”
The boy considered and nodded, then pulled a banana from under his shirt. But he didn’t toss it, not until Charleen tossed him the energy bar.
Charleen started to peel the banana and asked, “So, when will your parents really get back?” The banana was a paler blue inside.
The kid cocked his head, then opened the plastic wrap on the energy bar, and took a bite. He chewed, then—mouth still full—said, “Hours. Dad’s looking for work.”
“And your mom?”
The kid shrugged, which Charleen took to mean Mom was out of the picture. “So, I figure you know your way around the station?”
“Some.”
“Some’s better than none. What’s your name, kid? I’m Charleen.”
“Joey.”
“Well, Joey, I’m looking for work too. You know where I can find some?”
Joey shook his head. It was the answer that Charleen was expecting, but not what she was hoping for. There was a quiet squeak from the corner, and Charleen looked over to see a rat hiding in a corner behind some rocks. She used her implants and called up the light-intensifying function. It was an odd rat. The sucker had opposable thumbs. Again she used her implants to snap a still of the creature.
It was watching them both. It squeaked again. Joey broke off a small chunk of energy bar and tossed it to the rodent just before the sister opened the panel. As the girl entered, the rat—piece of energy bar held in one hand—spun and ducked into a crevice.
“Joey, I told you, stop feeding that damn rat.”
“It’s Joey’s food,” Charleen told the girl. “And what’s your name, Miss Bossy Pants?”
The girl didn’t answer, but Joey giggled and said, “She’s Debby.”
“Well, Debby, if you can find cups or glasses to share out the water, I have an energy bar here for you.” Charleen held up the bar.
Debby went to fetch glasses. They were red, translucent, and had lids. She filled them up and got her bar.
Charleen looked around. The rock of the station was held together with rods and cables, and the gaps and cracks in the rock showed how the station was built. In this case, they were in a deep crack traveling down, outward, about two meters before it turned out of sight, and up a good three meters. There were five-centimeter-thick rods tying the two sides of the crack together and acting as supports for the corridor. She could see splotches where sealant kept the atmosphere of the station from leaking out. But the sealant was old. Often enough there were several layers of the sealant and, at a guess, Casa Verde was leaking atmo pretty good.
She questioned Joey and Debby about work and jobs, and who ran the neighborhood. There was always someone who ran things. Acted as an interface between the off the books people and the real citizens of a station like this.
Charleen was—in one sense—in a good situation. She was, by station regs, a real person. Her credit account was almost empty, but she had one. Joey and Debby—and probably their father—didn’t have station accounts. They couldn’t buy or sell in the official economy of the station, so operated on the margins, living out of recycle bins and by barter.
✽✽✽
Dad arrived back four hours later, and pulled a knife the moment he saw her. Dad was shorter than the woman, a good five centimeters shorter. His auburn hair was flowing, and he was wearing the little plastic glow jewels in it.
Charleen held her hands out and open. “No threat. At least not unless you push me. And you don’t want to push me.”
“What do you want?”
“Mostly an intro to whoever runs this neighborhood in the station.”
“Why?”
“I have a credit account. I can do money transfers. Also, I need a flop. A place to stay, and a secure place to lock up my duffle while I figure a way to get a berth on a ship out of here.”
Location: Casa Verde, Industrial 3, Level 1, Off Corridor 23
Standard Date: 12 21 629
Charleen lay in the hammock two meters below Joey’s “house.” She was a spacer and had a spacer’s comfort with heights, so she strung her hammock between a couple of the beams. She heard Joey arguing with his sister about the rat.
“Mr. Rodent is okay. He knows how to act.”
Charleen looked around and saw “Mr. Rodent” clinging to a stanchion next to the rock wall of the crack, watching the conversation avidly. He stuck his head over the packing crate that formed the floor of Joey’s house and squeaked.
Debby squeaked and Charleen laughed. The laughter was apparently too much for Mr. Rodent and he jumped to the stone wall, ran up it, and ducked through what appeared to be an old and worn patch that Charleen hadn’t seen until he disappeared into it. Those patches were supposed to prevent atmo from getting through, much less rats.
Curious, Charleen climbed out of her hammock and put herself together for the day. Then she knocked on the floor of Joey’s house and said, “Coming up.”
She climbed up to Joey’s house to see Joey and his sister arguing and his father, Mike, sitting up, with one hand under the space blanket. Charleen was pretty sure that Mike didn’t trust her yet. That hand probably held the knife from yesterday. Charleen had a flechette pistol tucked in the small of her back, so she wasn’t overly worried.
“Just relax, Mike. I’m not going to kill and eat you. You’re all way too scrawny for that. I just need an intro to the local Perra Jefa.” The Perra Jefa was the boss bitch or top dog and it was a standard criminal designator across the Pamplona sector. Charleen pointed at the place where Mr. Rodent had ducked out of sight. “Well, I also want to take a look at that crack that Mr. Rodent uses for a door.”
“Why?” Joey asked suspiciously.
“Because it’s a seal and it’s ripped to shreds, but we aren’t breathing vacuum.”
That got Mike’s attention. He stood up, leaving the knife under the space blanket. He walked over to the spot and looked.
Charleen went over to join him. It was a small crack even when they pulled back the plastic seal, six or seven centimeters wide and maybe ten tall. It twisted to the left maybe three decimeters in, and that was all they could see.
“Back in a sec,” Charleen said, then swung back down to her pack and pulled the snake-cam out. A snake-cam is a standard piece of spacer gear, needed to look for flaws in the shieldgold plating and for about a hundred other jobs that spacers have to do on a regular basis. She pulled it out of her pack and took it back up, along with her spacer cap, a cloth cap that had electronics all through it. It would let her control the snake better.
She fed the snake in and it went around the corner, then another. It was the better part of two meters in when the crack widened out into almost a chamber.
“Well, well,” Charleen muttered. “We may just have an apartment if we can figure a way to get to it.”
“No!” said Joey. “That’s Mr. Rodent’s house.”
“Good. Maybe we’ll scare the horrible little monster off.” Debby sneered.
“You can’t,” Joey wailed.
“Quiet,” Mike said, quietly but intensely, looking at the panel which hid them from the station corridor. Joey got quiet, but Charleen could tell that the kid was barely keeping it together.
She realized that, for Joey, Mr. Rodent was more than a rat. He was a pet, a friend. “Joey, I’ll do what I can to keep from disturbing Mr. Rodent any more than we have to. And we’ll see about providing him with regular food and water.”
“What?” Debby whisper-screeched.
“Quiet,” Mike said again. Then, “Just what did you find?”
“About two meters in, the gap opens out to a space at least three meters wide and four or five long. And from what I can see, probably two full levels high.” That was, Charleen knew, luxury for these people.
Mike nodded, then looked at Debby. “Without Mr. Rodent, we wouldn’t know about the chamber. And especially we wouldn’t know that it held air. That’s valuable information.” He looked over at Charleen. “That goes for you too, Spacer.”
“Great.” Charleen laughed. “I’m almost as welcome as the rat.”
Mike had the grace to look embarrassed. He was kinda cute when he was embarrassed. In fact, he was pretty darn cute most of the time.
“Not that it will do us any good,” Charleen continued, “unless we can get hold of some rock cutters.”
“And they need to be quiet ones, or we need some sort of sound damping,” Mike added. “If we get discovered, the station authority will take it for themselves.”
“I guess that brings us back to the Perra Jefa,” Charleen said.
Mike didn’t look happy at that.
“So, what’s the problem with the Perra Jefa?”
Mike looked at the floor, then at the kids. “It’s Perro Jefe, but come on. We’ll talk on the way.”
✽✽✽
Out in the corridor, Mike looked at Charleen and said, “I work the spacer sections, as I’m sure you can guess.”
Charleen looked at his outfit. It was a disposable, but it was the next best thing to transparent and very tight, to show off his shoulders, hips, and package. Mike was at least a part-time joy boy and, from the outfit, one who took clients of both genders as need required. She got it. It was what he had to do to keep his kids fed and clothed, and pay the unofficial rent on that hidden habitat of theirs.
“Benny the Mook, really Benny Ramirez, is the Perro Jefe for this part of the station. And don’t call him mook if you want to keep breathing. The thing is . . . Sometimes I have to short Benny on his cut of the pay and Benny doesn’t take that. So, I’ve been avoiding him.”
“How much do you owe?”
“Forty credits.”
If Charleen was still a working spacer, that wouldn’t be much less than she would spend on a night on station. But she wasn’t. Now forty credits was almost half of her cash. Then she had a thought. “Does that include the vig?”
Mike’s grimace made it clear that it didn’t.
“How much, including the vig?”
Mike swallowed and said, “Maybe twice that.”
“Maybe more?”
Mike nodded, but didn’t speak.
They were walking through a food court. Stations are all inside, not like planets. Weather is when the sprinklers are turned on to water plants or wash corridors, and that happens on a set schedule. Light is LEDs or augmented reality, or both. Windows are rare, especially because most of the station isn’t next to an outside wall. So the interior of a station is much more like the inside of a building than like the surface of a planet. In the case of Casa Verde Station, that was complicated by the fact that this part of the habitat section was essentially a big rock in space. A rock that spun to produce gravity. That meant it was constantly trying to pull itself apart. To prevent that, they used cables and rods to tie it together like a suspension bridge. That meant that the corridors twisted and turned around big chunks of rock, iron, nickel, and other stuff.
The section they were in now was three stories tall and almost thirty meters across, surrounded by shops that sold everything from food to spacesuits, from deep space mining equipment to top of the line interface systems. It was occupied by a cross section of station population, and a sprinkling of spacers. There was a fountain in the center and actual grass around it with grow lights above. Charleen guided Mike to a bench, sat down, and for the next half hour or so they talked while Mike ate one of her dwindling supply of energy bars.
She learned that Benny the Mook had a “job” at Morrigan Clothery, a job that paid him a monthly salary of three marks and which he never attended. But most of Benny’s money came from running girls and boys like Mike, from “insurance” on Morrigan Clothery and almost twenty other businesses, and from an illegal gambling hall on Level 18.
Benny had seven in his personal crew and reported in turn to someone that Mike didn’t know. Benny also had fifteen ghosts—that is, official residents that didn’t actually exist—as a way of receiving and transferring credits. At least some of those ghosts were actual ghosts. People who had offended Benny and while still officially on the station had, in fact, gone into a recycler years ago.
“Just how likely is it that Benny will decide that my ID is more valuable without me attached to it?”
“Not too likely. To do that would mean some big bribes to Station Security.”
“But if I cooperate, my ID can be a useful tool for transferring funds?”
“Should be.”
“Okay. Wait here a minute.”
✽✽✽
Charleen went into a fresher, then went into the stall and lifted up her shirt. She pulled the flechette pistol out of the top of her pants and set it on a sink, then she reached into a pocket and pulled two straps out. She wrapped them around her leg at crotch and five inches below that. Each strap had a powerful magnet that she placed carefully on the outside of her leg to moor the small straps that went around the flechette pistol. The magnets were lined up. Then she placed the pistol against her leg and heard the soft snaps as the magnets attached.
It was not a safe way to carry a pistol. A bump in a crowded room and the pistol would be on the floor. But it was the way to go if you were ready to go for your gun at the least provocation and wanted everyone to know it.
When she came out of the fresher, the flechette pistol was riding her thigh and she saw Mike swallow as he saw it.
Location: Casa Verde, Industrial 3, Level 7, Corridor 14, The Grill
The augmented reality was excellent here. There was a roaring fire with a full ox rotating on a spit over it. Just to check, Charleen turned off the augmentation, and the ox, the fire, the spit, and even the man with barbecue sauce on a sponge coating the ox disappeared, leaving a black alcove with a standard heating unit in it. The smell of roasting meat was still here, through scent generators, Charleen guessed. She adjusted her internals so that the ox and so forth was there, but a little translucent.
Mike grabbed her arm and pointed.
Near the ox was an ordinary man. He was broad, a bit overweight, with hair dyed blond, but with black roots, short cropped on the sides and long and curled on top. Dark squinty eyes, and a large bulbous nose filled out the look that said “tough, but not too bright.” He was wearing disposables, but bright, new disposables in a red and black paisley print and was seated in a booth, with a beer and a sandwich in front of him and his hands were dancing along a virtual keyboard that Charleen couldn’t see, while he watched a screen that was also invisible to anyone but himself.
He looked up and frowned at them. No. At Mike. Then he looked at Charleen and his eyes fastened for a moment on her thigh, or at least on the flechette gun riding there. His frown got a little darker and he flicked his eyes at a big man standing by the bar a few feet away. The big man was also carrying.
Charleen showed open hands, but didn’t move them away from her pistol. She waited. Another gesture and the big man leaned against the bar, but kept an eye on them, and Benny waved them over to his booth. They sat when he gestured toward the bench across the table.
✽✽✽
“This is Charleen, Benny,” Mike offered obsequiously. “She has a proposal for you.”
“And you have some money for me, don’t you, Mike?”
“If we can come to an arrangement, I’ll cover Mike’s debt,” Charleen said. “Again, that’s assuming we can come to an agreement.”
“You would be Charleen Dreesen?”
“Now, how did you know that?” Charleen asked.
“It’s my job, Spacer.” Benny smiled and Charleen felt a little chill crawl up her spine. This guy creeped her out. “Besides, your Captain Gold is the talk of the station. Did he really jump out of a lock and survive?”
“He’s a Cybrant Gold Line. And an experimental one, at that. He has this weird mod that keeps his skin tight in vacuum. And the Pandora is an artificial brain ship. So, yeah, it’s likely he could jump in his birthday suit and survive vacuum for a while, then get picked up by the Pan and be on his merry way.”
“What about you?”
“Nope. Just a station rat who worked my way up to spacer. And jumped the wrong way when it looked like the front office pukes were going to land on Danny. I shoulda stayed on the Pan.”
He nodded, and they got down to business. Yes, he could use her card. He would arrange for a no-show job for her and she would be transferring her whole pay to him until Mike was paid off. Then, seventy-five percent of her pay would go to him.
“And just how much does Mike owe you?”
“Well, right now, a mark. One hundred credits. But by the time your first pay hits, it’s going to be more, unless Mikey-boy starts shaking his money maker a lot more than he has been.”
She pulled the ruby memcore from her pocket and said, “Take the mark out of this. I like to keep current.”
“So, are you Mike’s client, or are you trying to be his manager?” He didn’t pick up the memcore. “Managers pay me a cut if their boys work my section.”
“Neither one,” Charleen said. “Just renting a space from him. I’m looking for other work and I have a couple of projects you might be interested in.”
Benny leaned back in the booth and considered her. Then he picked up the memcore and slotted it into the table. He worked with his virtual keyboard and Charleen used her interface to follow what he was doing. The first thing he tried to do was empty her account. She used her interface to block that, and pulled the flechette gun from her leg. She tapped the barrel on the bottom of the table, making two soft taps.
Benny stopped smiling. “You showing me disrespect, spacer?” As he said that, the big guy stood away from the bar and his hand fell to his pistol.
“No disrespect. None given and none taken. Even if it means we both go out the lock, and this section gets a new Perro Jefe.”
Again there was a pause while Benny the Mook considered.
That tingling up her spine was really starting to bother Charleen, but she was almost sure that Benny would back down for now.
He did. He nodded slowly and said, “We can deal.” Then he went back to her memcore. He made the transfer and registered her employment at, oddly enough, exactly the same agro section that refused to hire her yesterday. That was good news, because, aside from the pay, it would cover her air tax for as long as she was on the rolls.
Charleen decided that she didn’t want to involve Benny the Mook in the expansion project. She needed legitimate fronts.
Location: Joey’s House
The rat that Joey knew as Mr. Rodent crawled down the wall and sniffed around the bag tied to a stanchion and he smelled food. He crawled all over the bag and couldn’t find the food. He tried to bite the bag, but the material wouldn’t give. He even tried to open the latch, but it wouldn’t budge. Finally, he gave up and crawled back up to where the boy was lying on his belly, playing with a broken something. Mr. Rodent squeaked, hoping that food would be forthcoming, but though the boy looked at him, he didn’t toss him any food. Instead he made the sounds that signaled “no food.”
“Sorry,” Joey said. “I’m hungry too.”
It was then that Debby arrived with a bag of groceries. Not a large bag. “Don’t you give that rat any of this.” She opened the bag and pulled out a soy wrap, and tossed it to Joey.
Joey took it, took a big bite, then pulled off a piece of it and tossed it to Mr. Rodent, who grabbed it out of the air and ran back to his house.
They heard voices, then the panel opened. Charleen came in. Without saying anything, Debby tossed another wrap to the spacer.
“Thanks, kid. I’ll get the water.”
Charleen took the plastic jar and slipped back out through the loose panel. She walked down the corridor to the intersection, where there was a public restroom, went into it and got water from a spigot marked “not for drinking.”
✽✽✽
A few minutes later, they were all sitting on the floor, eating and talking very quietly. Charleen was asking about who they knew and who they could work with. Debby explained that sometimes she got work off the books at a food shop down the corridor, and they paid her in food. Charleen asked about education and learned that since they were off the grid, they didn’t have access to the educational programs.
That, Charleen thought, is going to have to change.
Location: Joey’s House
Standard Date: 02 27 630
Charleen woke up to see two beady red eyes staring at her. He was sitting on one of the beams that her hammock was strung between. “Morning, Mr. Rodent. What can I do for you?” she asked quietly.
The rat squeaked. The rat had several distinct squeaks that Charleen had learned over the last two weeks. One was “food,” another was “stay away,” and a third seemed to be a warning. This one was none of those, but it was almost like “food.”
“You want something?” Charleen asked.
“Squeak.”
“I wonder what that means,” Charleen muttered. But she climbed out of her hammock and stood on a beam. Mr. Rodent ran along the beam and out onto her hammock, all the way to the middle, and curled up in a ball.
“Why aren’t you in your house?” Charleen asked. The gap in the wall was still unmodified. They were looking for sources of cutters and noise cancellation gear, but so far, no luck. Two weeks of twenty-five percent of a non-job left little in her balance, especially after contributing to everyone’s meals.
She did have the kids sharing her slate and running education programs that dated back to when she was a girl. But Casa Verde Station wasn’t designed for opportunity. She checked the time using her implants and realized that Mike would still be asleep in the main part—if you could call it that—of Joey’s house. Joey and Debby would be out scrounging and, hopefully, Mike had earned enough to give Benny his cut.
She quietly climbed up the stanchion to the main level and saw Mike sitting up.
“What’s up?”
“Benny wants to see you.”
“Why?” Charleen had visions of Benny hitting her up for his cut of Mike’s income. “Did you short?”
“No, nothing like that,” Mike said. “I’m good.”
“So what?”
“I think he has work for you.”
Location: Casa Verde, Industrial 3, Level 7, Corridor 14, The Grill
Benny was in his usual spot and by now Charleen no longer felt the need to display her flechette gun. It was holstered at the small of her back. A little harder to get to, but less likely to bring trouble from station security.
Benny waved her over, and as she sat, he asked, “What’ll you have? My treat.”
That put Charleen on her guard. Benny didn’t buy anyone anything. “Coffee will be fine. Thanks.”
“Sal, bring Dreesen here a cup of the shiva blend. We have our own coffee trees here on the station. The shiva blend is a mix of Old Earth arabica and a special bean developed here in the station.”
Charleen nodded thanks, though the truth was she couldn’t really tell the difference in flavor in any coffee she ever drank. Coffee was just coffee. Then she waited while Benny watched her until the coffee arrived on a white ceramic tray with cream, sugar, and station honey. She ignored the condiments, poured herself a cup of black, and sipped. It was coffee. She set it on the table and asked, “What did you want to see me about?”
“Your records say you can handle a hard suit?”
“I can. I was using one to unload the ag bots just before I got dumped here.”
“Yeah, I know. But that was all in the cargo section. Can you use the jets?”
“Yes. I’ve worked suits on ships under spin and while underway.” She was starting to guess what this was about. “You want me to take stuff from the cargo section to the habitat section, don’t you?”
“See, Sal? I told you she was sharp,” Benny said jovially, but there was something false in his tone. Charleen was pretty sure that he wasn’t happy she’d figured it out.
Well, he could just be unhappy. “What about the sensors?” Both the habitat section and the cargo section had cameras all over the place. They were there to let people see dangers, but also to keep people from bypassing the cargo dock. And the fees that went with using it.
“That’s all taken care of,” Benny said. “You just have to move kind of quick.”
Kind of quick was right. The station rotated 2.8 times per minute and was just over a kilometer across, so the outer edge had a standard gravity, but near the center the gravity was a great deal less. If there was even one camera on, she would be limited to one minute to make the transfer. If there were several, she might have as little as a few seconds from exiting the habitat to entering the cargo section and back.
“How many of the cameras are out?”
Location: Casa Verde, Industrial 3, Maintenance Level D, Airlock 3
Standard Date: 03 03 630
Charleen stood in the lock and looked out as she watched the camera on the cargo section go by. Thirty seconds now.
She opened the lock, which took five seconds, took two quick steps, closed the lock, and leaped, starting her rockets. She accelerated spinward and up, and flipped, then decelerated to the lock on the other end. She slapped the plate and the lock opened, then stepped in and closed the lock behind her.
She waited while the lock filled with air, then undogged her face plate as the inner hatch opened. There was a man waiting for her, floating in the corridor.
“You Dreesen?”
“You were expecting the station manager?”
“Nope. If I was expecting Lord Throbuckel, I’d have asked if you were Lord Throbuckel. Come on. We don’t have a lot of time. The sensors won’t stay down for long.”
“How long do we have? The way I got it, all I had to do was make the leap in time.”
“No. The down sensors are on a loop, and we have to have everything back in place before the self-check, in—” He checked the time. “—four minutes, thirty-two seconds.”
A hard suit is heavy metal with actuators and powered arms and legs. It’s rather like wearing a bulldozer. In it, Charleen stood 2.5 meters tall and weighed over two tons. It was not well suited for dancing over tulips. At his direction, Charleen moved five meters down the corridor, picked up a crate that weighed a bit over a ton and moved back to the lock.
The hatch opened and Charleen used her internals to close her face plate as she stepped into the lock, then it was wait again as the dead cameras went by, then leap and adjust her velocity by eye to land on the habitat section. She was barely into the lock in time.
As she was unsuiting, she considered. The hard suit wasn’t really the right piece of equipment for what they wanted. It was big and flexible, but not fast. And the calculation wasn’t difficult, so you didn’t need a pilot. You needed an expert system and . . . Her thoughts trailed off. She didn’t have the tools to make what they needed. And she didn’t have a place to work, either.
Wait. . . . Maybe she did. It would be hell getting something that frigging big back up here, but she might just have a way to convince Benny the Mook that he should provide the cutting tools and sound dampening gear.
Location: Casa Verde, Industrial 3, Level 7, Corridor 14, The Grill
“So you’re here for your money, right?” Benny nodded, holding out his hand. “We’re gonna want to do this again.”
Charleen passed over her ruby memcore. “Yes. And to talk to you.”
“About what? I ain’t going to pay you more.”
“About paying me less. At least long term. You don’t need a hard suit for this. You need a loadable mini-shuttle.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s something I can make if I have the room and equipment. That crate you had me move, it was pressurized. I could tell. What you need is something you can load on one end of the leg, put in the lock, then have it run on auto to the other end.”
“Why would you put yourself out of a job?”
“Because you’re going to buy the mini-shuttle from me. And you’re going to help me set up the shop where I’m going to build it.”
They talked business for a while then. And Charleen endeavored to tell Benny as little as she could about what she wanted and why she wanted it. But she ended up, unavoidably, telling him too much.
Benny, it turned out, wasn’t stupid. He had a good guess about what she found and even where it was.
“Sal, go with her. Have a look at the hole she’s found.”
Location: Joey’s House
Joey looked up at the noise and saw Charleen come in, followed by Benny’s hand, Sal. Joey would have run then, but it was too late. Sal was a scary guy, big and broad, with a scar down the left side of his face, and scars on his knuckles.
“It’s okay, Joey,” Charleen said. “Sal is just here to see Mr. Rodent’s house. Benny and I have a deal.”
Joey didn’t like it, but he wasn’t going to argue with Sal or Charleen. So he scrunched over out of the way while Charleen got her snake thingy and showed Sal the chamber.
✽✽✽
Charleen moved the snake around the chamber and spotted Mr. Rodent’s relatives. There was a whole nest of the suckers back down in there.
Location: Casa Verde, Industrial 3, Level 7, Corridor 14, The Grill
Standard Date: 03 04 630
“It’s a big chamber, Boss, and there may be others behind it. Airtight too. I checked, and that seal is shredded.”
“What seal?”
Sal explained about the shredded seal leading to the chamber. He didn’t mention that it was maybe shredded by rats.
“Why didn’t we know about the chamber?”
“Because you don’t look for holes if there isn’t a pressure drop,” Juanita Davis said. Juanita was blond with a wide nose and thin lips in a round face. She had a computer interface on her left temple. Interfaces weren’t usually visible, but Juanita also had a virtual comp and a truly massive data storage capacity. Even that could have been done invisibly, but Juanita’s interface was also a statement of her position. Something like an implanted pocket protector. It said, in no uncertain terms, “I am nerd; hear me calculate.” She was also Benny’s legal eagle and top advisor, a paralegal at Shuster and Cartwright, one of five law firms on Casa Verde Station. She knew the law better than her bosses and, in general, was one of the smartest people Benny knew. She was even smart enough to know that getting ambitious would be a bad idea.
“That needs to change,” Benny said.
“Yes, I think it does. I was just checking, and over the last five years leaks and atmo losses have decreased. And that’s wrong. As seals get old, they fail, and you get atmo loss. Then you have to go find the leak and replace the worn-out seal. You also have to have new ice for atmosphere shipped in, and that costs credits.
“Herman Mozingo has been taking credit for proactively preventing leaks, but . . . Why, that sneaky son of a bitch! He’s running at least half a dozen ghosts and pocketing their pay.”
“What is it then? Why aren’t we having the amount of atmosphere loss that we are supposed to?”
“I don’t know, Boss.” Suddenly Juanita smiled a big, happy smile. “Something for me to figure out.”
Benny considered. He considered dumping Mike and his kids in the recycler. He considered having Sal take out Charleen Dreesen. This seemed big, and it offended Benny’s sense of proportion for a bunch of station rats to be in on something big. But there were problems if he took them out. There would be questions, and not just from Station Security. Mr. Horace G. Lee would have questions, and Mr. Lee was the director of Casa Verde Station for La Causa, which pretty much controlled organized crime in the Casa System. Mr. Lee controlled crime on Casa Verde Station. Benny, as the Perro Jefe for Industrial 3, worked for La Causa.
Benny was anxious to move up in the world. He knew that losing the Pandora was a major public embarrassment to Mr. Lee and that bosses on the other stations were not happy with either the loss or the publicity.
“Okay. Sal, you get the spacer whatever she wants.” He gave Sal a hard look. “But keep it tight. Keep it tight. I don’t want anyone to know what it’s for or who’s getting it.”
“If anyone asks, you have a deal to sell some of the cutting gear to the rock miners,” Juanita said. “I’ll put it on the books that way.” She looked at Benny and said, “That will mean we’ll have to pay the baksheesh up the line.”
Benny nodded. It would be worth it to keep this private. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more a set of rooms no one knew existed seemed like a really good idea. That brought his thoughts back to getting rid of the station rats. He sent Sal on his way and got up. He motioned for Juanita to follow him. This bore thinking about.
Location: Joey’s House
Standard Date: 03 08 630
Joey sat in a corner with Mr. Rodent on his lap. That was a new development. When Sal showed up with the cutting tools and the sound mufflers, Mr. Rodent decided that Joey was the safest place to be. So they sat and watched together as Charleen attached the cutting rig to the stone wall and sealed it. The cutting rig used a stream of dirty water to cut, and it collected up the water to reuse. That’s what the seal around it was for. From where Joey was sitting, it looked like a half balloon glued to the stone wall, with wires coming out.
Charleen turned the machine on, and then the cutter, and there was a high screeching noise. Mr. Rodent put his little hands in his ears, and Joey did the same. It didn’t help much, but a few minutes later Charleen shut it down. She sucked up the water, and pulled off the cutter. There was a forty-centimeter-tall chunk of rock cut loose.
Charleen and Dad worked together to pull it out and set it aside. The hole was wider and deeper now, but not wide enough to use. So Charleen moved the cutter and they did it again. For most of the day, Charleen and Dad worked while Joey fed Mr. Rodent. After an hour or so, Joey needed to go. He invited Mr. Rodent to hide in his shirt and went out to use the toilet down the corridor.
Location: Casa Verde Station, Industrial 3, Level 1, Corridor 23, Fresher 16
Mr. Rodent watched while Joey did his business, which made Joey nervous, but he really had to go. Then Mr. Rodent went scurrying around the fresher and pooped into a crack between two of the tiles. It came out liquid, and Joey wondered if Mr. Rodent was sick. But he decided not to mention it, because, sure as anything, Debby would make him clean it up.
Location: Joey’s House
Standard Date: 03 09 630
Charleen took the hydro-cut sheet of station rock and laid it over two beams. She used bonding compound between the beams and the rock to make a stable floor that wouldn’t move. The space created by this and several other sheets of rock wasn’t big enough to make a room, not even one of the tiny spaces like the one she and Joey’s family shared. It was more like a pantry, and a small pantry at that. But it used up some of the rock. Charleen figured another two days of cutting to get a comfortable passage into the big chamber.
Location: Joey’s House
Standard Date: 03 12 630
Charleen stepped aside and gestured at the woman with the geek-chic implant on her left temple. Juanita was forced on them by Benny.
The chamber was not the sort of place you might expect to find in a planetside cave. It was all rough edges and jagged rocks. It had nothing even resembling a floor, because this room had only had gravity for the last seventy years or so. After the initial falling rocks, nothing much had moved until the last few days.
It was a big room and now that Charleen was in it she could use her snake cam to see farther, and she found two more rooms. It wasn’t livable yet, but it could be made quite nice if she could keep the cutter for a while.
“We need another entrance,” Juanita said, standing carefully on the meter-wide chunk of flat that was left from Charleen’s cutting.
“Why?”
“Because we can’t have the people that we are going to put up here being seen in that corridor.”
“What people? This is our place.”
Juanita turned and looked Charleen in the eye. Juanita was a small woman, and thin. Charleen probably had ten kilos on her, maybe more. But the little woman didn’t seem the least bit intimidated. “It’s yours as long as you can hold it, and you can’t. At least, not without Benny’s acquiescence. I am telling you how to get and keep that acquiescence.”
“We had a deal,” Charleen insisted.
“No. You thought you had a deal. Benny doesn’t make deals with station rats. He uses station rats. Benny makes deals with people of power, and that is not you.” She shrugged and continued. “It’s not me, either, if you’re interested. I am still alive because I am more useful than threatening. I suggest you adopt the same tactic.”
Charleen didn’t like it, but—for now—she took it. She didn’t have any choice. “So how do we do that?”
“You make and run a safe house for Benny. For that you need an entrance that will let people come and go with privacy. I have maps.” She reached up and pulled an actual electrical wire out of her implant. Charleen looked. It was a standard data port. She went and got her tablet. And a three-dimensional holo map of this part of the station appeared, showing several corridors, and not showing anything near them except the corridor.
“Where?” Charleen asked.
Juanita pointed at a section of the far wall, up perhaps three meters from where they were standing. As she looked, Charleen saw a small crack, perhaps a meter long and five or six centimeters wide.
They scouted. Juanita had a sonar sounder and interpreter. Banging on the walls of the cave let them see probable gaps.
Location: Joey’s House
Standard Date: 03 21 630
Joey watched Mr. Rodent squirt into a crack between two of the rock panels in the newly installed floor of their new rooms. That was the thing that was starting to bug Joey. Mr. Rodent always seemed to find a crack to squirt in and he never squirted in the same place twice. He would cover part of a crack, and then the next bit until the whole crack was filled in. By now Mr. Rodent had a thick, glossy coat and was gaining weight. And Joey was wondering if he should maybe tell someone. He used the slate Charleen loaned him to look up rats, and according to the books, they didn’t look like Mr. Rodent, not quite. And they pooped little pellets, not a liquid. And they pooped it all over the place. They didn’t look for cracks to fill. Also, Joey had noticed that Mr. Rodent’s poo got hard after a day or so, and it expanded to fill the gap where he pooped.
After serious consideration, Joey decided that he had to tell someone. He considered Debby in the hopes that maybe it would make her like Mr. Rodent more. But Debby wouldn’t know. She didn’t know as much about rats as Joey did. He considered telling Dad. He took care of them and loved them, but Dad was a station rat too. He could barely read. Joey didn’t consider telling Juanita or Sal. They were scary, and Mr. Benny was even scarier.
That just left Charleen. He liked Charleen. She used the rock cutter to make Mr. Rodent a house of his own. It was a little square hole with a water bowl and a food bowl cut into the rock and a flat plastic panel that could be taken off so Joey could refill the bowls.
✽✽✽
“What do you need, Joey?” Charleen asked. She was sitting on the newly finished floor of the main room, resting.
“It’s about Mr. Rodent,” Joey whispered.
“What about Mr. Rodent?” Charleen whispered back, even though there was no one to hear.
“I don’t think he’s a rat. Well, he’s a rat, but he’s a special rat.”
Charleen figured that Joey was just being a kid, making his pet out to be special, but she nodded anyway. “So, how is Mr. Rodent special?”
“It’s how he poos.”
“Is he sick?” Charleen asked, suddenly worried. Rats carried diseases. Always had.
Joey shook his head and his curly reddish-brown hair flopped back and forth. “No, he’s not sick. He always has liquid poo. And he always uses a crack somewhere. And the poo plugs up the crack.”
Charleen didn’t believe that. At least, for the first few moments, she didn’t believe that. Then she remembered something that Juanita told her last week. Something was preventing the station from leaking as much atmo as it should. Juanita was trying to figure out what.
Then Charleen remembered the first time she saw Mr. Rodent. She called up the image. Opposable thumbs. She called up the specs on a standard rat, Old Earth type, and compared them to Mr. Rodent. He was within the acceptable range, but on the edge of it. She looked at the differences. Opposable thumbs. Something over the eyes. Something different about the nose and mouth, and a slightly larger cranium compared to a standard rat.
Charleen asked Joey to show her the rat poo and he did. She collected her testing kit and found out that the rat shit was almost a foam rubber. It had strands of actual latex in it and a tiny amount of a nitrogen-based acid that decayed into nitrogen and solids in a few hours. The nitrogen caused the shit to foam up, filling gaps.
It was just barely possible—like winning the lotto twice in the same day possible—that a rat might have evolved that sort of a waste product naturally. But that and opposable thumbs, and the other differences? No way. Someone modded these rats.
“Joey, don’t tell anyone else about this. It could be important. And I think we need to get some of Mr. Rodent’s relatives to come visit.”
This was intriguing, Charleen thought. If the other rats were like Mr. Rodent, then there might be hundreds of chambers on the station that were holding atmosphere and were unoccupied. She wondered how the rats survived in the vacuum long enough to shit enough patches to hold air. Then she remembered Danny Gold tossing crates around in vacuum with just a helmet, shipsuit and gloves, and the story that he got off the station by jumping out an airlock, and falling into space to be picked up by the Pandora.
“I wonder if the Cybrants made Mr. Rodent,” Charleen muttered. “Well, his ancestors, anyway.”
Location: Casa Verde Station, Safe House
Standard Date: 04 15 630
Charleen waved Juanita over, and the little woman sat primly at the table. “Did you get it?”
“Of course. However, I want to know why you are so interested in unsealed chambers in the rock. They hold nothing but vacuum and even if you could seal all the small holes to space, filling them with air would be noticed by the station authorities.”
“Not if it was done slowly enough. It would be thought of as standard leakage.”
Juanita shook her head. “I don’t believe you, Charleen, and I will not help you unless you tell me what’s going on.”
Charleen considered. Juanita, unlike Benny, had a version of personal integrity. She would usually keep her word. Besides, Charleen needed those site maps. They would tell her where the other holes were. Living space was at a premium, especially for the people on the edge in the station. She told Juanita about Joey and his pet rat and the other rats that she had trapped, and about their ability to survive for a while in low pressure environments and their ability to seal those environments.
“So we can have extra rooms, spare rooms? Safe places that Station Security doesn’t know about? Even hydro farms for oxy and food. We can live better now. Not just you and not just me, but all the station rats? All because of Joey and the rat?”
Charleen grinned. “Yep. All because of Joey and the rat.”
Location: Casa Verde, Residential Section, Level 1, Lee Estate
Standard Date: 04 15 630
Horace G. Lee sat on the patio of his hacienda, reading through the files as his wife and kids went about their business. Danny Gold showed up at Concordia Station on the 15th of Enero. That means he has to have a short jump route from Casa to Concordia. And that was bad news for Horace. SMOG’s La Junta Directiva weren’t happy with his try for the Pandora in the first place, and his failure to get it made him look weak. Horace hated the Cybrants. They were an offence against nature and God. But letting his hatred push him into the attempt to steal Gold’s ship, that was a mistake.
“DADDY, COME PLAY WITH US!” shouted his six-year-old. “We’re having a tea party.”
And so they were. Sitting at the stone table was his daughter and the family of animatronic garden gnomes. The gnomes were actually operated by the house computer’s AI programs, but they did a good imitation of living creatures. They were made of hard semi-flexible plastics and servos, but they looked very much as stone garden gnomes from Old Earth had looked except, of course, for the fact that they moved around. They also did the lawn care and pruned the decorative shrubs.
Horace looked back at the report. There was nothing he could do about it.
For now.