The Materials At Hand
by Jessica McAdams
MINNIC LOOKED UP and down the service corridor before he stuck his finger into the joint between the doorframe and the wall. He was allowed to be here, and as far as he knew, taste-testing the algae the cleaning servos were supposed to eliminate wasn’t illegal, but he had just finally earned enough to pay for his wife to join him, and he didn’t want to mess that up. Plexis was about to enter the Powti System, and that made tickets from the Powti’s refugee center cheap enough that Raphic could make the flight, and Minnic could pay the entrance fees when she arrived.
Risking any kind of trouble just wasn’t worth it, and you never knew what one sapient or another would find offensive.
Maybe this algae creeping around the doorframe was sacred to the people who were rich enough to own the establishment on the other side of the wall. They certainly spent enough money on keeping their rooms dripping with water vapor and oxygen: their doorframes grew enough algae and mold to have the servos overwhelmed and breaking down in the corridor practically every week. Minnic didn’t know if they used the service doors often enough that the stuff got out that way, or if the delicious-looking algae had actually defeated the structural integrity of the supposedly air-tight seals around the doors. If it was the latter, it was a safety hazard, but safety was not his assignment. Cleanliness was, and fixing the cleaning servos was all he ever wanted anyone to catch him doing.
But no one was there to catch him right now. The only thing moving was the servo he’d come to fix, and it only buzzed in its patient holding pattern, so Minnic ran his first finger down the joint and scooped up a lovely pile of the green goo. He popped it into his mouth and rolled it over his tongue. Mmm. Good enough to serve at the chief’s table, back when the Dineaps had a chief.
Looking around once more to make sure he was unobserved, Minnic scooped up a bit more of the algae, wiped it on the kerchief he kept in his uniform pocket, and folded the kerchief neatly around it. Popping it back into his pocket, he turned to the servo. Now that he had a sample he could cultivate in the little table-greenhouse back in his small rented room down in the sublevels, he was happy to repair the servo that would eliminate the rest of the algae from all the joints and corners and crevices in the corridor.
Well, eliminate it for another few days, anyway.
Minnic linked his fingers together, and gave himself a good, joint-crackling stretch, looping his joined hands over his head, all the way behind his back, and then bringing them to the front again. Ah, that felt good. He missed having trees to swing through. He bent over the servo, and began to pry out the excessive algae that had gummed up the works and mixed with the servo’s lubricant to make a kind of stiff paste. He’d probably also have to replace the filter or recalibrate the sensors, but even though he was on the pay scale as a janitorial technician, Minnic had found that most of his work was a matter of muscle, and not of mind.
“Here now, what’s this?” Minnic sat back on his heels, and stroked the fur on his cheek thoughtfully. There was more than algae and lubricant stuck in the servo. Something stiff was wedged in there, too, and that shouldn’t be, given that the cleaning servo was programmed to follow close on the heels of the waste canister. Someone had to have dropped it fairly recently.
Minnic tried pulling at it with his fingers, but it wouldn’t budge, so he took a pair of pliers out of his belt. The other members of the cleaning crew had laughed at him the first day he’d walked onto the job with his dad’s old hand tools clanking around his waist, but Minnic didn’t mind. Sometimes the best tools were the simplest ones. Back in the bad days on Dineaps, electric pulse attacks had knocked out all the power tools and motors, leaving many families stranded up in their eyries. But Minnic’s dad had been able to jury-rig a block and tackle system with the stuff on his tool belt—got their whole family out before the troops who’d been following the pulse attack had reached their part of the forest.
Got Raphic’s family out, too. Now, if only Minnic could do his dad one better, and get their families out of the refugee center. This job was a start.
Minnic grasped the stiff edge of whatever-it-was with the tips of the pliers and pulled, hard. It came out without ripping, which surprised him. Awfully tough stuff, this . . . well, whatever-it-was was still the best name Minnic had for it.
It was a small rectangle, dark blue and so matte that it seemed to swallow the light. Minnic turned it one way and then another, but could make nothing more of it, so he slipped it into one of his many pockets and went back to cleaning the algae out of the servo.
He was so intent on his work that he jumped when a voice behind him said, “All right, scum-sucker, give me that brick back, or you’ll regret it.”
Minnic swiveled on his knees and found himself looking down the wrong end of a blaster. He skittered back onto his heels and stood up, pressing himself against the wall.
The blaster was being held by a short female humanoid of a species Minnic didn’t recognize. She was also holding some kind of scanner, and it was beeping insistently at his right inside jacket pocket.
The humanoid scowled, hooked the scanner onto her belt, and stepped closer. “C’mon now, I haven’t got all day. Give it back, and I’ll let you go.”
Minnic could hear his heartbeat in his ears and feel it in his neck. Oddly, he could also feel it in the set of molars he’d been slowly filing down, in hopes that when Raphic rejoined him, he could soon have them decoratively capped to show that he had become a father. The current racing of his pulse made those teeth ache.
Minnic pulled out the dark blue rectangle—the “brick”?—and handed it to his attacker, who pocketed it herself.
“Okay,” said Minnic. “Didn’t know it was yours. Sorry about that.”
But the blaster stayed leveled at his head. “Sorry about this, too,” she said.
“Wait!” shrieked Minnic. “I did what you wanted. I’m not going to say anything to Security. I’m just a janitor. I don’t care what you’re smuggling.”
“‘Smuggling’?”
“Sure.” Minnic shrugged, and tried to make himself look nonthreatening. It was hard, given how he towered over the little humanoid. “I go everywhere on this station. I know stuff happens. I don’t care. I just want to do my job. You don’t need to worry about me.”
His attacker squinted up at him, her finger slightly relaxing away from the trigger. “Huh,” she said. “I’d never thought about that.” Her free hand rubbed the blue airtag on her cheek. “I guess that’s true, though . . . you can go anywhere on this station.”
The last time Minnic had worked the service corridors in the upper levels of Plexis, he had enjoyed it. The smells coming from the restaurants here were better, the things patrons discarded were more interesting, and there were so many decorative plants that no one noticed if someone like him occasionally snuck a leaf or two for a midday snack. In fact, last time he’d worked in the upper service corridors, not only had he found a new and helpful tool for his belt, he’d also found a bottle of Omacron wine that was only half drunk. After his shift, he’d traded the bottle to a coworker in exchange for a beautifully-made and barely-used dress he knew Raphic would love.
On Plexis, the barter economy among the janitors who worked the corridors was second only to the barter economy among the grunts who worked at the recycling plant.
But now he walked the upper service corridors with a feeling of dread in his belly. Not only was his gut heavy with guilt, but his trousers were hanging heavy on his hips, weighed down as they were with more than a dozen of the smuggler’s “bricks.”
She’d explained that this was the actual price of his life: not merely giving her back her property after he’d found it stuck in the servo, no. No, that wasn’t enough. She insisted that he had to go to a trade mission on the upper level, pretend to work on the cleaning servo there, and at the same time drop a small mechanical bug behind a certain desk.
“I’ll get in trouble,” said Minnic. He could almost smell the musk of his wife’s neck fur. If he were arrested, who would be there to welcome her at the air lock? Who would help her and the rest of his family find jobs?
Plexis had seemed like such a safe haven, so full of possibilities, so full of nooks to hide in and vantage points to look out of.
Now it felt like just as much of a trap as the eyries back home under the eyes of the invading army. He was not going to do that again. He was not going to be trapped again. Not again . . .
“You won’t get in trouble. My friend just left us a message on the comp there, and I have to access it directly. No one’s going to care.”
“Then why don’t you do it?”
She shoved the blaster into his belly, all pretense at being reasonable gone. “Do it, or I shoot you.”
And then, as if afraid that threat wasn’t enough, she had loaded him down with both the brick he’d been carrying, and more like it. She zapped them all with her scanner, and sweetly informed him that he was now programmed to explode if he didn’t do exactly as she said.
That had been too much. Minnic told her she was welcome to kill him, but he wasn’t helping any saboteurs.
“I’m not a saboteur,” she said. “I’m a smuggler. You said so yourself. Those bricks are what I’m smuggling, but they’re not going to do me any good here on the station. I need the info my friend left me, and I need it now, so I can get out of here.” She paused. “You do want me to get out of here, don’t you?”
Minnic had agreed that he did, and so he went. He took the service corridors as far as he could, not eager to walk through the crowds out in the public part of the station—especially not in the upper levels, where his coveralls would stand in stark contrast to the elegant clothing of the wealthy customers who frequented that part of the massive mobile supermarket.
In fact, he was noticed when he exited the service corridors—by a security officer who was standing, hands folded and yet alert, near one of the ramps. One of the officer’s five eyes flicked first to Minnic’s airtag—blue and the wrong color for this level—but then blinked away once it also took in his maintenance uniform.
I can go anywhere on this station, Minnic thought miserably. She’s right. So could the security guard, he supposed.
But the security guard had training and a weapon. His freedom was real, and not an illusion. All Minnic’s freedom of movement was buying him right now was guilt—that, and a growing fear that somehow this would all go wrong, and he’d never get to see his wife again.
Everyone noticed him at the trade mission, too, but again, no one stopped him. Minnic knelt beside the servo the trade mission had contracted out from the station to clean its floors, and changed its filter, even though it clearly didn’t need it. With a gulp, he also brushed against the comp console in question, opening his hand to release the tiny mechanical bug as he did. It skittered away into a crack, and was lost to his view.
He trudged back down the service corridors, feeling both hot and staticky. The fur under his coveralls seemed to twitch and writhe against the bricks strapped next to his legs. He went down to the air lock where he’d been instructed to go.
He paused a moment before pressing his palm to the lock. This was so close to the transfer point where Raphic’s ship was scheduled to arrive in just a few hours. It was the same side of the station, and only two levels up. He leaned his forehead against the cool metal wall of the corridor, just for a moment. What kind of place was he bringing his family into? What kind of father-to-be was he to think of nesting a litter of babies in such a hive of crime?
He’d thought he was bringing his family to freedom—to the chance at a better life, the kind of life they’d thought had died back in the fires on Dineaps.
Instead, he was just bringing them back into another conflagration, into a different kind of war zone, and one where he had no weapons, no training . . . and no route of escape.
He was not a father like his father. He never would be.
Minnic pressed his palm to the lock. It did not open automatically, but the vid above it glowed briefly red, and Minnic wearily turned his face toward it so that his tormenter could see that he had obediently come as he had been told.
The door slid open, and Minnic was greeted with the now-familiar sight of the wrong end of the smuggler’s blaster barrel. He stepped in through the door, and found himself in a giant shipping container that was attached, limpet-like, to the side of the station.
The smuggler was not alone this time. A male of her species stood just behind her. His blaster was also drawn, but he was staring at a handheld screen. “He did it,” the male confirmed. “I’m getting the itinerary now.”
Itinerary of what? Minnic wondered. The ship that was going to pick up their stolen goods?
“Can I go now?” Minnic asked. He shook one leg irritably. “Would you take these things off? I just want to go and get some dinner.” He thought longingly of his little tabletop greenhouse, and the beautiful plate of colorful algae appetizers he’d planned for Raphic’s arrival.
“I don’t think so,” said the female. “We can’t let you run off and tell on us.”
“He’s coming in two levels up,” said the male. “Less than an hour from now.”
“I’m not going to tell on you,” insisted Minnic. How could he get these people to understand that all he wanted was to never think of any of them ever again?
The female looked at her companion. “We can’t risk it,” she said.
The male flicked his gaze toward her, then gave a short nod.
“Sorry about this,” said the female. “Your bad luck, I guess. We’ve been looking for a way to take out the Curian commissioner for months, and this is the closest we’ve been able to get.”
“You’re not smugglers,” Minnic said, the realization coming all too late.
The female shook her head. “I’m sorry. But you have to understand: he’s a war criminal. He deserves it.”
I don’t! thought Minnic, but he couldn’t bring himself to say the words aloud. What difference would it make?
The male raised his blaster at him.
Now Minnic did shout. “Wait!” he cried.
“Why?”
Minnic licked his lips, then pressed the tip of his tongue against one of his shaved molars. Just a chance, just give me a chance . . . “I haven’t had time to make peace with the goddess,” he said.
Would they even know what that meant? The two smugglers looked at each other. Then the female said, “We can’t afford the time to wait for you to make your prayers. We have to get out of here.”
Minnic looked at the pile of “bricks”—the pile of explosives. “I can’t die unshriven,” he pleaded. “I can die—I don’t want to, but I can. But you can’t let me die damned. You have to give me time.”
“Just leave him,” said the male. “This place is going to be gone in an hour.”
Please, please, please . . . thought Minnic. Please . . .
Minnic was elated that they’d listened. He was even more elated when they tied his hands behind his back, securing him to one of the container’s giant shelves. They pulled off his tool belt and threw it on the other side of the bricks, but that was all they did before they left out the air lock door, securing it behind them.
As he rolled his shoulders in a preparatory stretch, Minnic chuckled in disbelief. Some sapients! Thinking everyone was just like them! He squatted down and easily looped his tied hands to the front of his body, where he could easily reach the hard plastic tie with his teeth. Just because your species doesn’t have level-three brachiating ability . . .
His smugness lasted long enough for him to chew through the ties around his wrists, and for him to reclaim his tool belt, cinching it back tight around his waist, but it disappeared as he reached the door.
Then he stopped, standing stock still and staring. No. And he thought he’d been so clever! But they’d not just secured the lock, they’d destroyed it—and the com panel above it.
I can’t get out. And he couldn’t call for help, either. Minnic’s hand reached automatically for the tools at his belt, but not with much hope. Plexis might allow algae to grow around internal doors, but the air locks that ships and shipping containers latched onto were serious hardware. He’d have to hack at the door frame for days to make any headway.
Minnic glanced back at the pile of explosive bricks, which the terrorist pair had activated before they left.
He was pretty sure he didn’t have days.
No com, no way out. Minnic tapped his fingers in a frantic rhythm against his belt. No com, no way out, no time. What did he have? He ran his hands up and down his coveralls, patting all of his many pockets.
He stopped over the pocket that held his kerchief.
He had part of the mess he’d cleaned up earlier in the day.
He had algae.
Minnic glanced away from the air lock door and down to the—much smaller—service port beside it. Too small to crawl through, even with his flexible shoulders. Just big enough for a cleaning servo to get through.
Had the bombers, in their haste, signed the boilerplate contract for full service from Plexis?
Minnic knew there was only one way to find out.
He had to make a mess.
The first servo came in quick response when Minnic wiped his collection of algae across one of the sensor points at the corner of the nearest floor plate. Usually the sensors called for the servos when a large enough layer of dust and grime built up over them, but they weren’t foolproof, and a big enough spill at the right point would trigger a servo call.
Minnic temporarily disabled the servo’s locomotive ability and levered it open. He filled the inside fluid reservoir with almost half of the explosive bricks and was about to send it on its way when he realized that if he did that, he’d be dooming all the workers in or near the recycling center to the same fate he himself was trying to escape. He quickly pulled the bricks all out again, and then smoothed down the fur on his face, which was standing up in horror at the fact that he’d almost become a mass murderer.
Mass murder . . . that was still what was going to happen, if he couldn’t come up with a better solution. It was just that he would be the one dying—along with everyone on this level, and on the next couple of levels above and below him.
Raphic. She was supposed to arrive within the hour, and only two levels up. The person the criminals were trying to kill must be coming through the same transfer point where she was scheduled to arrive. She would die if he couldn’t figure out a way to stop this explosion . . . Minnic almost put all the bricks back. Let the recycling workers die—they weren’t Raphic!
But no, no. He couldn’t. He just couldn’t. He’d be as bad as the couple who’d set this all up, as bad as the soldiers who’d burned his people in their nests back on Dineaps.
Minnic tapped the servo, the frantic rhythm of his fingers slower now.
These were tough little machines, these cleaning servos.
Tough little machines. Little machines. Small machines. Small . . .
How small could he make his problem?
Minnic began to hum as he sealed up just one brick in the little servo, and left it tipped over on its side at the far end of the container, locomotion still disabled. He knew more about the servos than he knew about the explosives, but . . . but if they needed this many bricks to make a big enough explosion to blow up the concourse two levels above . . . Minnic calculated. Maybe. Just maybe. The servos really were tough little machines: well-built, and made to stand up to a lot of abuse, and even built to handle the fairly serious chemical reactions that could happen when they were sent to clean up the kind of messes that a station swarming with every kind of life saw with some regularity.
Minnic carefully wiped up his algae from the first sensor, walked to the next one, and covered it up, too. How many servos could he prompt to come to him . . . how many were even on the station?
He counted the bricks, and compared it to the number of levels on Plexis. Enough, he thought. There were probably enough servos.
He just wasn’t sure if there was enough time.
The last brick was in the last servo. His algae hadn’t held up to being wiped and rewiped over and over, and he didn’t like to think about the various bodily fluids he’d had to produce to trigger sensor after sensor in the floor plates. Undignified. Dirty.
But it had worked. He looked at the collection of disabled servos now lining the far end of the container, piled like firewood, ridiculously spinning their cleaning pads in vain.
Minnic sank down next to the ruined air lock, chewing absently on the edge of his lip. Would it be enough? Would a hundred tiny explosions, each contained in its own little case of fluid, plastics, and tough metal, be better than the giant uncontained one the terrorists had planned? Or was he wrong? Maybe he had just added more shrapnel to an already unstoppable disaster.
As he eyed his work with misgiving from the far side of the container, another thought occurred, less horrible than imminent death, but still daunting: They’re never going to let us stay.
That pile of repurposed servos, levered open and resealed: they weren’t just a desperate solution to danger, they were property damage.
In trying to survive, he had been forced to become a vandal. Anger flooded Minnic. He hadn’t asked for this, he hadn’t asked to make this choice!
All he had wanted was a home for his family. All he had wanted was the freedom to live in a good place and make a nest that would see his beautiful Raphic a pleased and preening mistress over a brood of promising littermates.
He’d thought he’d found that. And now—one way or another—he was going to lose it all.
Minnic closed his eyes. He’d been bluffing when he’d talked about needing to make confession before he died, but now that it was coming to it . . .
He startled at a banging noise beside him, and clambered to his feet as a line started to glow in the air lock door, next to the ruined lock. Less than a minute later, the lock popped out on his side, as if pushed, and the door was jimmied open.
Minnic’s boss, a Whirtle, humped through, and waved its tentacles in dismay at the sight of him. Behind, a uniformed security guard peered past them both and frowned at the ruined pile of servos at the far end of the container.
“So this is where they were all going!” his boss said. “Minnic, what did you do to them?”
Apology, fear, and accusation all poised themselves at the end of Minnic’s tongue, but what came out was a truncated, “Get out! They’re going to—”
Behind them, in unison, all of the servos blew up.
Training for his new job had taken almost a year. But the Curian Trade Pact Commissioner, in gratitude for saving nis life, sponsored Minnic through the schooling.
Minnic’s old boss, in janitorial, had had some things to say about the property damage. When the servos blew up, tough little machines that they were, it looked more like a series of giant water bottles burping than a hundred little bombs wreaking havoc.
But the servos were still completely ruined.
However, the security officer who’d arrived with Minnic’s boss, and who’d examined the wreckage, and raised his eyebrows at the estimated weight and makeup of the explosives, had taken down Minnic’s account of the event with an increasing attitude of respect, and assured Minnic that he would put in a good word for him.
“Trust me,” he’d said, “we’d rather clean up this mess than the one we would have had if you hadn’t been so quick on your feet.”
Plexis Security caught the two responsible before they could leave the station.
Then Plexis Security offered Minnic a new job.
Minnic stood every day at his new post: a lovely little level just up past where the underbelly of Plexis ended and the expensive shops began.
Minnic wasn’t trapped and he wasn’t hunted. He looked at the shoppers passing him with genial good will. Some of them had blue airtags on their cheeks and some had gold. It didn’t matter: this was Plexis, and there was always a chance to move up.
He settled his hands more firmly around his belt, which still, with permission, hung heavy with a few of his father’s old hand tools—as well as his newly-issued service blaster.
This was a good place, and people like him were going to keep it good.
He ran his teeth over his newly-capped molars. Raphic was settled and happy in her nest, and their babies were thriving. Plexis was no trap, as he’d feared. No, it was a forest of metal and plas, fit for tourists and families, smugglers and shop owners, but not terror, not wars. Not while he lived here and kept it safe.
I am free, he thought. I’m going to stay that way.
He smoothed down the front of his new uniform in satisfaction.
And I can still go anywhere on the station.