Osprey chronicles comple.., p.128
Osprey Chronicles Complete Series Boxed Set, page 128
Petra glanced over her shoulder at the six people in sturdy exo-suits and the two dozen mining droids filling the cargo hold of the shuttle. She nodded, and the leader of the human crew gave her a thumbs-up. “You guys be careful out there,” she said. “Gawd knows we can’t afford any more injuries.”
She activated the interior doors, sealing the shuttle cockpit from the cargo hold and closing her up in a little metal box. She waited a moment for the pressure to equalize and punched the sequence of buttons that activated the exterior doors.
“Doors are open,” the mining chief reported over the comm channel. “Crew and droids unloaded. We’re off and away, Secretary. Thanks for the lift.”
Petra let out a nervous little sigh. She wrung her hands, counting to one hundred in her head before turning back to the shuttle control board and activating the liftoff sequence. “Okay,” she said, uncertain. “Next shuttle’s gonna be here in two hours. Have fun mining an alien asteroid, boys.”
On her display screen, said alien asteroid stretched ahead, a rocky moonscape of blasted craters and powdery white dust that briefly clouded over the cameras as she piloted the shuttle up and into the great sea of space. A squad of six Seeker jets swirled around the edges of her radar screen, patrolling the area in case any of those nasty bugs decided to wake up and make trouble for the miners.
All reports said that the mining operations were taking place far from the populated, hollow sections of the asteroids. As far as anyone could tell the aliens were in really deep hibernation, but you could never be too careful.
The fleet needed the raw minerals crusted over the asteroid’s surface. They’d had to suspend repair operations of the Vigilance since there wasn’t enough steel to repair the hull. An entire six sectors of living space closed off, forcing everyone to get all the cozier.
Still, Petra felt much better as the asteroid shrank in her rear viewscreen. She didn’t like piloting such a little ship, but she was one of the few people in the logistics department who knew how. As soon as she had a free minute, she was gonna sit down and try real hard to remember how she knew how to fly a military cargo shuttle.
There was a logjam in the Defiance’s docking bay when Petra arrived. A good dozen ships drifted near the docks, waiting for their turn to offload people or cargo.
Petra scowled at the landing queue. A two-hour wait for the next available docking arm. She flipped to a private comms channel and hailed the docking manager. “This is Secretary Potlova,” she said. “What’s the holdup down there?”
The man who answered sounded like he’d been awake for seventy-two hours and had an IV of epinephrine dripping constant mania into his blood.
Not that she knew anything about that.
“It’s the goddamned Separatists,” he growled. “They think they’re doing us a huge fucking favor sending up these supplies, but they came in the middle of a shift change, and nobody knows where to send a thousand kilos of raw potatoes and kidney beans.”
“Send them to kitchen storage,” Petra suggested.
“What a great fuckin’ idea, except that all of our kitchen storage units are currently refugee storage units. Who did you say you were? This channel is secure. How did you get on it?”
“Coms Secretary Potlova of the new civilian administration.”
“Well, I didn’t vote for you, Secretary. Unless you’re offering to store all these potatoes up your twat, you can stay the fuck off my lines. I’m busy.”
There was a blurt of static, and the line went dead. Petra blinked.
Then she entered her override code into the docking bay computer, skipping her shuttle to the head of the line. She’d only be occupying the docking arm for a minute, and she still had a lot of work to do before her shift was over.
She stepped out of her lonely shuttle and into a surge of commuters looking for a quick lift to the other freighter. Now that she had no more use for the ship, Transport was free to send it back to standard shuttling duty.
Petra ducked her head and elbowed her way through the ever-present docking tunnel crowd. The heat and smell were particularly bad after having the shuttle all to herself. A fresh layer of graffiti slathered long sections of the bulkhead.
Read the writing on the walls!
Land the Fleet Now! Build a New Home!
Silver and brass don’t care about you!
That last one made Petra wince. They still hadn’t found the human resources to send someone down here to clean off the graffiti, but she made a mental note to move it to a higher priority.
Most people barely remembered what happened in life before the wormhole. Instead of angsting about the past, it was time to move forward. As a secretary of silver—the new civilian government that ran the fleet arm-in-arm with the military—Petra worked day and night to make life better for everyone.
She only wished everyone would get with the program instead of wasting time rabble-rousing in the overcrowded corridors.
She reached the line of lifts at the end of the tunnel in time to see a familiar, black-coated man stepping onto a restricted-access platform.
“Bryce!” she waved her ID at the turnstile and hopped onto the lift beside him. “Thanks,” she breathed as the platform slid into motion, pulling them out of the docking tunnel and down a long, blissfully quiet transport tube. “A two-hour delay over some potatoes,” she marveled. “We gotta get someone down here to help the docking manager. Poor guy’s gonna give himself a heart attack.”
“I’m sure the problems will clear up quickly with your help.”
Petra flashed the major a smile. She was comfortable doing so now that she had shiny new teeth slotted into her gums. Besides, Bryce was good-looking. Young but cute. “You’re a charmer, Major. Hey, you wanna grab lunch some time? There’s this new potato dish I wanna try.”
Bryce snorted into his computer, a sound she took for a suppressed chuckle. The lift platform stopped.
“I’m awfully busy, Miss Potlova,” he said as they stepped onto the bridge level. “I’ll have my people call your people.” With a nod, he split down the left corridor toward the Seeker C&C. Petra went straight past a few small offices, which were bustling, but not nearly as crammed as the rest of the fleet. Her comm line beeped, and she flipped it open.
“Sypher! How ya doin’, honey? I was beginnin’ ta think ya forgot all about me.”
The surly pilot on the other end of her line grunted. “More like you forgot about us, Miz Petie. You was supposed ta come help clean out the Bitch this morning like we planned.”
Petra stopped in front of the doors to Ops. “Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I meant to send you a message but I got so wrapped up in work. I needed to run a shuttle of miners off to an asteroid. There was no one else who could do it and—”
“I know ya busy, girl,” Sypher grumbled. “We jus’ can’t keep puttin’ this off forever. Suits from silver crawling up my ass about housin’ more people on the Bitch and…”
Petra’s stomach did a little somersault. There was a dirty little secret in the Bitch. Well, more like hundreds of them—written all over the darned bulkhead, and Petra and her friends hadn’t yet pieced together what even half of them meant. Petra’s common sense told her that they weren’t worth worrying over—like the graffiti in the tunnels, they were stuck in the past—but still.
She wanted to know everything they’d written, before silver scrubbed it away.
Petra’s voice dropped. “I’ll meet you at the lower docks this evening,” she whispered to Sypher. “After Sim and I get supper. In the meantime, I’ll see what I can do to get silver off your butt.”
“Don’ blow me off again,” Sypher grunted before hanging up.
Petra drew in a few steadying breaths before putting on her best work smile and stepping into Ops. She was surprised to see all the workstations with their urgent blinking lights and beeps were empty. Instead, the entire Ops staff of nearly two dozen people huddled on the platform in front of the grand display screen. On the screen, the bright blue and green planet called Locaur floated against a backdrop of stars, like it had been for days, so that nobody would forget what they were working for.
She heard murmuring from the crowd, which split as she approached.
There, standing at the center of the platform, surrounded by keen listeners, was a little man in a clean, knee-length lab coat over a black and silver uniform. His face split into a smile when he saw Petra.
“Petie! Glad you could make it,” said Professor Grayson, interim prime minister of the silver government. “We were about to do a little team-building exercise. Care to join us?”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Sim doubled over, laughing until soup came out of her nose. The laughter turned to coughs. Petra reached across the tiny table and thumped the girl between the shoulder blades.
“Oh my God.” Sim straightened, wiping her mouth with the back of her wrist. “Team-building? Victor’s such a dork.”
Petra’s concern broke. She grinned. Probably it wasn’t okay for Sim, a droid technician’s apprentice, to call the prime minister by his first name, but Petra liked that about the girl. At a scant eighteen years old, Sim could look the leader of the entire fleet in the eye, smile, and call him by his name—and nobody would object. Not even Minister Grayson, who always asked after Sim like they were old friends, too.
After Petra’s shift ended, she’d swung down to the tertiary droid bay to wait for Sim to clean up, and they’d wandered up to the concourse for dinner. They’d been lucky enough to hit this little canteen before the worst of the dinner rush and had crammed into a tiny side booth originally designed to let a single person squeeze in a cup of coffee on her morning break.
But, well, it seemed like lots of things weren’t being used for their original purpose. A line had already formed at the food counter, at least sixty people long. All of them looked tired and guarded their ration cards closely, waiting for their chance at tonight’s fare of watery potato soup and a dinner roll fabricated from low-quality carbohydrates.
“It wasn’t so bad,” Petra allowed, taking another spoonful of her soup. She pulled her elbows tight to her sides to keep them from sticking out and clipping the dull-eyed people who walked past. She grimaced. “Gawd, what I’d do for a bit of pepper.”
“So what did you do?” Sim’s eyes glittered golden in the dim light. “In your team-building exercise?”
Petra shrugged. “Okay, so…first we did this thing where we all got in a circle and took turns telling the person to our left one thing we appreciated about ‘em. I got Janice. Have you met Janice? Minister Grayson’s personal assistant? She’s that older gal with the blue veins?
“Anyway the lady has a marvelous singin’ voice, is what I told her. Coulda been famous.” Petra paused, chewing a lump of potato thoughtfully as she recalled the distant look that had flickered over Janice’s face. “For a moment, it seemed like it touched on somethin’,” she murmured.
“A memory?” Sim ventured.
Petra shrugged and offered the girl her dinner roll. One of the perks of working in the heart of the silver government was that Ops provided a nice lunch for all the public officials. Most days, Petra could eat her fill of fabricated rice and beans. Sim took the roll without a word. She was a growing girl, always hungry.
“The game ended and I didn’t get a chance to ask her.” Petra sighed. “People from the health department arrived and gave us some immune-boosting shots. Oh, make sure you get one too,” she added absently. “As soon as they’re available to your department. Real worried about disease spreading when we’re all crammed together like this. Then the minister wanted to get on to our meeting. We got the first part of the Wormhole Report all polished up. You’ll see it on TNN tonight if you’re around a screen.”
Sim shook her head, swallowing a dry lump of bread. She reached for the shared water glass between them. “No, I gotta go back on duty at 1900.”
“You’re working another shift?” Petra frowned as Sim’s cheeks flushed a darker shade of copper. “Girl, you gotta sleep sometime.”
“We’ve got a backlog of repair orders a kilometer long.” Sim shifted her weight, her glance skittering off to the side.
Petra frowned. “You were already outta the room by the time I woke up this morning. Are you getting enough sleep?”
“I don’t need much sleep.”
Petra studied her young ward curiously. “Bad dreams?” She pitched her voice low. Lots of people were having bad dreams lately. No shame in that. Between the wormhole memory mess and the battle with the aliens and the awful soup, anyone with a pulse should be having nightmares.
Sim hesitated. “No,” she said finally. “No. I don’t, um…” she looked down, fidgeting. “I haven’t had any dreams at all, Petie.”
Petra blinked. She didn’t know what to say.
“I’m sure I just don’t remember them,” Sim added quickly. “Anyway, it doesn’t matter. I’m doing fine, and I can help. I want to help. Lots of people don’t remember anything about before, so I’m not special. The fleet needs me, and I need to feel useful.”
She drew in a breath, lifted her cup to her mouth, and drained the last of her soup. Then she squared her shoulders. “Since I’m going to be elbow-deep in droid guts tonight, why don’t you give me the skinny on that report right now?”
“Oh, sure.” Petra forced her thoughts away from Sim’s curious sleep problem. “There’s a whole team of computer scientists up in Ops who’ve been doing nothin’ but combin’ the records since the moment we came out of that wormhole, trying to piece together what happened. Looks like there were food riots in the fleet not so long ago. People real unhappy with the way the military was running the place, so we cooked up this idea of a civilian government to share power.”
“The silver,” Sim supplied.
“Right. After some negotiation, brass agreed to let us all have elections for the ministers.” She pressed her lips together and blew a raspberry. “We were tallying up the last votes when we fell through the wormhole. That ain’t no way to start a new government, is it?” She shivered, wrapping her hands around her elbows. “Gawd, it’s a miracle we’ve managed to hold everything together peacefully these last few days.”
“I’m glad,” Sim said quietly. “Things are bad enough without a civil war.”
“From your lips.” Petra checked the time on her computer. “To gawd’s ears—oh!” She hopped to her feet. “Oh no.” Hastily, she wiped her face and straightened her hair pins. “I’m late. I’m late to meet Sypher again. He’s gonna have my head…”
Sim pushed out of the tiny booth with a smile. Petra was always dimly surprised to see how tall the girl had gotten. Then she was surprised by her surprise. There must be some memories trying to bubble to the surface, but hand to gawd, she would say she’d never seen this girl before in her life before the minister had reunited them in the Defiance’s atrium.
No memory, but the skinny dark arms that enveloped Petra were undeniably the arms of a lifelong friend. The unique scent of Sim’s sweet musk and the grease beneath her fingernails were familiar. The goodbye kiss they shared, cheek-to-cheek, was as comfortable as an old and well-worn pair of boots.
“You make sure you get a nap before your shift,” Petra insisted, as another pair of diners shuffled them aside to take their booth. “I wanna see you back in the apartment when I wake up tomorrow, okay?”
Sim stuck out her tongue, gently mocking as they drifted apart in the crowd. “Whatever you say, mom.”
Whatever you say, mom.
The words echoed between Petra’s ears as she made her way down the grand terminal toward the outer docking rings.
Sharp as a bee sting and sweet as honey, those words were.
I ain’t your ma, am I? As badly as Petra wanted it to be true, she only had to look into a mirror to know she wasn’t the girl’s blood relative. That someone else, some other woman with Sim’s shining dark skin and lovely golden eyes could claim her for kin. Some somber-faced stranger, who spoke pretty words about regret and love, but couldn’t bother to hug her child.
Petra was being uncharitable, she knew. If Petra were worried about spreading some alien fungus, she’d be careful about who she hugged, too. Especially if you might accidentally spread a spore to your long-lost daughter.
Still, Petra thought. It was her shoulder Sim had cried on the night after that awkward meeting when this stranger claiming to be her mother refused to hug her. Whoever this Captain Jaeger was, she hadn’t taken Sim in from off the streets and slept beside her in a tiny single-room apartment every night. She didn’t huddle with the girl in the early hours of the morning, offering sage advice on how to handle handsy boys or nasty supervisors.
Neither have you, an ugly voice whispered in the back of Petra’s mind.
She shoved it aside. That was silly. Just because Petra couldn’t remember life before the wormhole didn’t mean it wasn’t real. Down in the pit of her stomach, it felt real. The minister had records showing that Petra had been Sim’s legal guardian for over a year since the girl had turned up in the lower decks.
Still, the doubts made her sick, and she was still biting back a swirl of nausea by the time she reached the outer ring. A gaggle of people, some in official silver uniforms, some well-dressed civilians, crowded around Harlan as he guarded the Bitch’s airlock portal.
“Every other ship docked in this ring has taken on additional occupants,” growled a man in a sash that marked him as an undersecretary of public health. He lurched toward Harlan, who folded his corded arms, set his jaw, and remained silent as flecks of spittle decorated the front of his shirt. “It is your duty as a member of this Tribe to aid—”
“What’s this ruckus all about now?” Petra sniffed in a deep breath of stale air and pushed—politely but firmly—through the gaggle. Harlan and the undersecretary turned. She waved her ID for the undersecretary before putting it back into her pocket. “Potlova, logistical secretary.”
