Part 3 (1/2)
Soje glanced up at the tone of her voice. ”What do you mean?”
Awandi crouched down beside him, holding his wrist to keep him from closing the bag. ”She's getting even paler. Look!”
Slate blue faded to a light cyan, lavender about the lips, deathly color draining away beneath the pale skin. Black lashes marked the curve of eyelid, black brows like brushes of ash over the violet shadowed orbits. Awandi stared. She had never seen anyone so pale outside a history text. She had never seen anyone dead change color, either.
”What are you doing?” Chouss demanded from the com panel.
Black eyelashes fluttered, thin white nostrils flared. Awandi fell back onto her a.s.s. Soje froze. Chouss came crossly over.
”Ever heard of a schedule? We got six repairs lined up after this one for the bottom of the watch, you want to find out what the bosses think if we don't-” She broke off. ”Mother suck me dry!”
For the rider was breathing. The rider was alive.
Soje looked from her face up to Chouss. ”You call authority?”
She shook her head, numb.
”Don't,” he told her with all his old, pre strike command.
Chouss frowned down at him, crewboss even in the presence of a miracle.
”Chouss, please,” he said, and command fell like a mask from his guilt. ”Please. I can't let them take anyone else.” His eyes fell away from her look, back down to the rider. ”Please,” he whispered.
The rider stirred. Opened brown eyes and gazed into Soje's hard, dark, sorrowful face.
”h.e.l.lo,” she whispered. ”Why can't I move?”
”You're in a body bag.”
She blinked, looked past him to Awandi. Laughed.
They still had a schedule to keep. Soje helped the rider down to the cubby where the crew took its breaks and left her curled on a bench asleep, wrapped in the body bag for warmth while the rest of them went back to work. They had lost almost an hour and had to scramble, but that didn't stop them from talking.
”Some miracle, yeah?” Wen said to Awandi. ”What'd the bosses give to find out how she survived, you think, cousin?”
”How about what will they do to us if they find out she did?” she hissed back. ”We've got to turn her in!”
Wen paused with the pod's airlock telltale half disa.s.sembled to give her a sober look. ”We give nothing to the bosses.”
”But-”
”Nothing.” He turned back to the telltale, forcing her to return to prying at the compromised seal. ”Listen, my cousin. You're afraid that if the bosses, who already think your big brother is a unionizer, find him with unauthorized personnel they maybe won't bother with a shuttle when they send him dirtside, yeah?”
”Yeah,” she miserably replied.
”With the rest of us along to keep him company. So. What d'you think they'd do if we called them to come get her? What do we say when they ask how come she's not dead, how come she's in this pod, in this pit, on our watch?”
”Well, how come she isn't dead?” Awandi glanced around, making sure Soje wasn't near. ”Wen, what if she's a denanos?”
”So, well, she hasn't bitten anybody yet.” He glanced up with a grin. ”Cousin, denanos never leave Glory. I thought everyone knew that. Why should they? Better to rule in h.e.l.l than be a leper anywhere else, yeah?”
”It's not just a disease, Wen. A disease cripples you, okay, kills you maybe. It's not a disease that turns you into an alien d.a.m.n monster that can't die-”
”Awandi. Save the ghost stories till after work, yeah?”
”But how else did she survive?”
He shrugged, broad scarred hands never pausing in their work. ”Broken seal, bad pump, good skin suit and a quick ride up from dock ring. Plain dumb luck.”
”But-”
”Hey,” Chouss called from the catwalk. ”Wandi, aren't you finished with that seal yet? We got another pod on the way.”
Glue weld, new seal, voltmeter to check the weld was true: ”Green,” Awandi yelled, Just as Wen ran the final test on the new telltale unit. ”Green,” he said, and the pod was moving even before they'd skipped back onto the walk. Then there was no time for anything but work.
Soje took the rider home with him, trusting her fake ID to fool residential section's monitors. Foolish trust, Awandi thought, and refused to ride with them in the lift. Even if the security monitors didn't catch the interloper, some snitch among the workers would spot her startling white skin and report her. Report Soje who thought he should anyway be dead.
Awandi remembered her brother the way he had been before the strike: smart, confident, full of fire against the company's contempt for the workers that kept it alive. ”Workers control the means of production,” he used to say, his face alight as he quoted some ancient text.
”But we don't, do we?” their mother had said, not long before she died. ”Denanos and the poor convicts under them produce the goods. And the workers in AuFen and s.h.i.+rrea who make the s.h.i.+ps and pods. What's left for us to control? How dirty or clean the pods are?” A long speech for a woman whose lungs had been seared by a chemical leak.
But Soje had glowed all the brighter, living for the argument. ”If Glory's Gate Company can't meet Commonwealth s.h.i.+pping regulations on cargo pod maintenance and repair, they lose their trading license. It wouldn't even take a CW inspector to shut them down, no stars.h.i.+p is going to risk unlicensed pods. Not even the independents, not when the cargo is biochemicals from Glory. All it would take is twenty watches of refusing to work and the company would be eating out of our hands!”
Their mother hadn't been impressed, even dying from a treatable injury the company would not cover in the medical plan. (Striker joke: ”What's the worker's medical plan?” ”Plan your funeral now and avoid the rush.”) No, their mother hadn't been impressed, but others had. He wasn't alone in his union ideals. But he was the first to contact maintenance crews in other spokes, the first to risk exposure by company spies to spread the word. It had sounded so simple-not easy, maybe, no one was that naive-but simple, yes. Refusal to work. Strike.
The bosses' response was simple too, and easy as pressing a switch. Emergency venting, they called it. A shame those fool rebels were mad enough to trigger the decompression sequence and too incompetent to stop it in time. Empty lies. Empty spoke. Two hundred fifty three workers dead.
Should have known, people said. Maybe they should have. A company too cheap to provide its workers with emergency decompression equipment obviously didn't much care one way or the other. But they hadn't known: none of the strikes in Soje's illicit history texts had taken place in s.p.a.ce.
”Now we know why,” he had bitterly said, before descending into his silence.
Silence the rider had broken. When Soje turned up for work their next watch, Awandi thought she caught a glimpse of the old spark in his eyes and grew cold with fear.
”Her name's Izu. She's a convict,” Soje told the crew. He was running a diagnostic with one hand and eating a ration bar with the other: two AuFen farfreighters had arrived last watch and the growing backlog of pods didn't allow for meal breaks. ”She got sent to Glory because her family was part of a squatters' colony and she resisted when the landlord's hired goons tried to remove them. Can you believe it? Sent to Glory because she didn't want to leave the only home she'd known.”
Awandi shrugged. Sure she believed it. Why shouldn't she?
”She's been there four local years.” Soje shook his head. Awandi was amazed at how quickly he seemed to have taken up another cause. But the light in his eyes couldn't hide the wider darkness behind them.
”She say what it's like?” Wen asked.
”h.e.l.l.” Soje's grin twisted like he had a bad taste in his mouth. ”You know what they call the station down there? Hope Gate. Some joke, huh?”
Chouss snorted, nine tenths occupied with a valve repair. ”But wait till you hear why she came up.” She had gone with them to Soje's quarters in the off watch. When Awandi had asked her why she took such a risk, she had said, ”Same risk either way, girl. Your big brother goes down, we're all going with him whatever we do. Anyway, it's my d.a.m.n crew.”
Now Wen asked her, ”What d'you mean, why she came? She's escaping from Glory, what more reason does she need?”