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The magnetic cradle rings of Dock D sent a tremor through the Hand as they clanged down on the cylinder of our outer hull.
"Dahphuu!" Saura spat a curse and scrambled to reposition black and white stones on her Go boards.
"Wouldn't it be easier to play on virtual gameboards?" I asked as I scooped a stray white piece off the deck and set it in a free space, bracketed on three sides by black markers.
Pinned in, like us, with options closing, I thought.
"Not same." She plucked up the piece and moved it to another position. "Is physical connection to opponent."
There would be many connections to opponents. I'd never figured out how it worked. Non-Earth Alliance species, outside of military roles, were not allowed inside the EA inner systems, so her presence on Mandragala was breaking the law. Yet, every time we hit the farthest-out stations, a rumor spread through the Go community that Saurubi Cerros Syrhas was back and the calls came flooding in. Everyone wanted to challenge the reigning Interplanetary Agon Cup Champion.
For International Go Federation records, Saura was a retired EA Space Marine; therefore, by reason, she must be Human, right? Her adoring fellow competitors knew better and they guarded their little, not-so-secret secret with zealous enthusiasm.
As long as she kept her furry blue mug off our ship screens and her self inside the ship, the EA ignored her presence, even though they had to know she was Tabisee from her five-year stint in the EA Space Marines. Maybe it was gratitude for our continuing service when they called us up for action on the Outer Rim.
Gratitude? Was I an idiot? There is no gratitude in space.
But they weren't asking questions for whatever reason, so it worked for me.
"I'll check in, so don't get too wrapped up in your games," I warned her.
"You will fix, Vivi." Go boards were rapidly covering every open surface in the control room.
I wished I had the same confidence in me that she had. When those dock rings clamped down on us, the dock fees—thank the gods, stations couldn't charge a breathable air tax anymore—had begun sucking away the last of our limited resources. It gave me a mental image of creds draining from our account the way ice slewed off a comet's tail.
"Shutting down ship grav system." My fingers glided over a console, disabling systems we could do without while docked. My stomach fluttered as our gravity ring began to slow its rotation. The station spin would transfer enough force to keep the Go boards in place and let us move about the ship. We would simply have to exercise caution to prevent bumps and bruises.
Unfortunately, shutting down our grav ring also meant losing our primary source of heat. But we would manage that, too.
"Will have good reason to use workout equipment," Saura said, referring to the chamber full of resistance-based exercise equipment along the inner side of the grav ring. Earth Alliance regulations required spacers to log a certain number of hours to space-time ratio to keep physically fit, and they would ground anyone who didn't log the time. I ranked one percent above the minimum allowable. She used the damn things every day—and she didn't even have to report it!
"That's why we wear shipskins," I sang out defensively. Along with the other functions the fabric in our suits performed, it worked our muscles and circulatory system with our body movements to keep us healthy.
"Not enough." Her ears came forward in exasperation as she looked up at me. "Six weeks watching vids is bad!"
"Ugh." I gave a grunt of disagreement as I finished the last of my java and set the cup on the galley counter before she could cover every surface in there, too. "Old adventure movies are not bad for me." She simply refused to appreciate the Human artform of video entertainment. "You should watch them with me."
Her golden eyes narrowed to slits and her upper lip curled to flash sharp incisors. "Gives you bad ideas."
Was the queen of attitude actually criticizing me? "What? You mean the violence and drama?" I threw my arms out as wide as the passageway allowed and grinned.
She gave me a dark look.
Okay. Being locked up on our ship, freezing our asses off while a station full of activity boomed outside our hatch, inaccessible to her and unaffordable to both of us, was going to be hard on us.
"I know, not a hero." I dropped my arms and sighed. I was Vivi Zant, the whack job space marine who obsessed over weird things. I knew what other corps members had whispered. The sooner I could resolve this and get away from here, the sooner I could exhale the anger and resentment—and fear—twisting up inside of me.
Why the hell was the station taking so long to attach the debark tube to our hatch?
I took a deep breath. "Let's head for the Outer Rim when we're done here. We can pick up a security job or something. Forget about this inner system shit for a while." In the inner systems Saura couldn't step a foot off the ship, but on the frontier she was just another species in the mix.
She didn't look up at me, but I saw her ears perk in silent approval.
The soft chime I was waiting for finally sounded. Our physical connection to the station was up and running, ready to clean away all those dreaded, nonexistent parasites when I opened our hatch.
"Disconnecting from ship system." I pressed a node on the flexible, bio-mechanical circuitry board buried beneath the skin of my left forearm. Felt a flicker of loss as the perivision in my left eye cleared. The implant, known as wetware, was the thing that set a spacer apart from surface-bound population. Coupled with hardware in our heads, it linked us to critical systems inside our ship, enabling us to respond in fractions of a second, and, out on the docks, allowed us to link with equipment and things like bay doors, while most "bounders" had to do their thing with key codes and slide cards. The augmentation was a precious gift, courtesy of the EA Space Marines—a lure to make people enlist. Most spacers, including me, could never have afforded the enhancements on our own.
With most of the console lights on the bridge darkened, and the nerve-vibrating rumble of the grav-ring gone quiet, the Hand was snoozing in Saura's capable control.
I moved on to the next step, enabling my station feeds. Hardware in my brain searched out and made a connection with the station systems. Ship feeds always ran in the peripheral vision of the left eye. Now, as they disappeared, I gained another stream of information in the outer corner of my right eye. Station time, maps, FAQ lines. Adverts. All available and eager to respond to the twitch of eye muscle or a querying thought.
I concentrated on the lift location that would carry me up to the main ring, pulling the information out of the Mandragala feed.
I could have made the necessary calls to our lien holder and cargo broker from our ship, but I refused to risk a rejected call. The conversations with Big H and Scriver had to take place face to face as soon as possible.
Saura was watching me now, her golden eyes dark with concern. "Don't have to stay on station ring overnight, Vivi," she said gently.
"It's okay." I swallowed against the tightness in my throat. "It's been two days since I talked to Hu. Scriver should have this mess straightened out by now." Optimism. The stuff dreams—and failure—are made of. We were both familiar with the slow speed of Human bureaucracy. "I'll rack on the ring for the night."
Sleeping in one of the cheap, horizontal pod stacks in a secure area on the dock would be noisy and cold, but, for me, it would be preferable to any flophouse in Spacertown. Just the thought of that place drove a rush of sound and smell through my brain that made me want to retreat to the darkness of my cabin and never come out. "I'll get this fixed before I come back."
Okay. I had twelve hours and a plan of execution. Heading down the passageway past our cabins, I pulled a light jacket from the rack beside the airlock and slipped it over my cobalt blue shipskins so I would meet station 'decency' codes.
They don't call the tight, multi-functional suits spacers wear 'skins' for no reason. Designed to protect from extreme temperature changes, and to control cell-shed while stimulating muscle-tone and blood flow, they fit our bodies like a second skin. Most ringers, or dockworkers, don't give a second thought to them, though there are always a few weirdoes who work dockside for prurient interest. Entering areas where the stationers work and live, however, is a different matter. If we want access to places beyond the docks, rules require a thigh-length loose garment worn over our skins.
All I can say is, if the sight of my skinny, bald, fifty kilogram, hundred seventy-seven millimeter tall body, with the breast bulge of a prepubescent girl, stirs their interest, hooray for them. As long as it keeps their creepy attention focused on me as an adult, and off any kids, I don't care.
"Keep a feed open in case I need to talk to you," I called back to Saura before I hit the hatch release and stepped out into a small, white-walled vestibule. A yellow light blinked insistently above a box stuck on the surface to my right.
'Caution! Entering decontamination chamber', flashed in my perivision. 'Please put on supplied eye protection before activating.'
"Yeah, yeah," I muttered. I pulled the eye coverings out of the box and put them in place while the Hand's hatch slid closed behind me. When I touched a red bar that flashed 'activate' on the surface of the enclosure in front of me, blasts of air and light slid over my body. Then the white surface in front of me parted. I returned the eye protection and I stepped out into a long white tunnel on the other side. At the bottom I could see a red glow from the letters of a virtual sign floating outside the sealed opening. It read "Quarantine."
I had another word for Mandragala Station management: discretion. Apparently, it was missing from their vocabulary. Letting a rumor of potential plague spread inside a closed environment like a station could be nearly as deadly as an actual threat. People could panic and panicked people were known to react stupidly. Of course, there was also a certain level of clearance required to access Dock D, so they must have some faith in their workers discretion.
"This is all a crap mistake," I repeated under my breath as I walked the fifteen meters down the debarkation tube.
A station technician dressed in white, accompanied by a dour-faced, blackclad security officer, waited at the bottom. The tech straightened her posture as I came into view. Bracing herself for whatever would happen next?
I understood her reaction. I could even sympathize with it. We spacers are a crazy lot. We come in to civilization trying to lose the phantoms of the lonely deep dark, only to end up frustrated when we can't make the Human connection. Most resort to becoming drunk and angry, which only fires more hostility around us. Fear that some mad hatter might damage the station doesn't help attitudes on either side. It's a self-perpetuating cycle: stationers mistrust spacers and spacers mistrust stationers.
Quarantine could make for an even worse situation. The thought of losing a ship could drive someone to an extreme action—like making a run for it and taking a piece of the station along with them.
Instantaneous vacuum does bad things to the air bubbles that are Human structures in space.
I didn't believe I would ever be crazy enough to rip the maglocks off a station and vac it, but you couldn't let the people in charge know you had limits on what you were willing to do to protect yourself or they'd walk on your back and try to stand on your head.
I took my own deep breath. Easy, Zant, there's no reason to go to war here.
At least, not yet.
"Vivi Zant, owner and captain, Thief's Hand." I forced a smile.
The tech didn't look overwhelmed by the warm and fuzzies, either. "Idents." She held a hand-scanner up to the seal.
I lifted my left arm and she passed it over my wetware.
"You have my ship under quarantine. Who else do you think would bring it in to port under in those conditions?" I growled at her.
Okay, maybe there was a little pent up frustration.
"Can't be too careful, ser," she said in practiced, non-confrontational response. "Please breathe into the respiration tube in front of you."
I pulled the sanitary cover off the little nipple sticking out of the seal and breathed into it.
She studied the small data screen in her hand and I counted off the seconds while the whole interaction transpired. Mother Universe, it was eating precious time!
"Captain Zant is clear," the tech announced to someone at a remote location. I noticed the guard beside her still kept his hand on his weapon as she passed the scanner over a section of the seal. They stepped back as it split apart and I walked through onto Station Dock D.
The tang of metal and oil hit me hard. Gods, I hated that smell! I might have lived out my whole life never knowing it existed, breathing fresh planetary air and feeling the sun on my skin, if the raiders hadn't hit my home on New Bounty.
But they had, and because of it, I knew the stink of station docks far too well. It was the way of the universe.
"Have a good day, ser." The tech and her escort descended the ramp ahead of me and were gone.
I strode for the lifts, to take the long ride up to the main station.