After working her budget this way and that, and getting increasingly impatient with the assay, the Miner decided that she had the time and money for an overdue visit to the sawbones. There was a doctor’s office right off the galleria, she’d passed it when she returned along the eastern spur, but the bartender Takata told her to skip him. “He’s for the gangs,” he’d said, “and these days he’s usually drunk or stoned out of his gourd.” He’d given her directions down into the back bowels of the station and promised to message ahead. There were stairs at the end of the southern spur; she took those instead of the elevator on principle.
As she navigated the corridors she thought back to the same spaces on other stations long ago. She’d worn a uniform then, and fewer scars. Carved into the rock of the asteroid it clung to, Station 35 was divided into hundreds of little squared-off reconfigurable spaces. Not exactly a maze, but not easy to find one’s way through without directions. She could tell it had been designed for floor-to-floor fighting, meaning they expected their enemy wouldn’t want to seriously damage the infrastructure.
The usual plan for taking a space station was simple: make a couple nice big punctures to evacuate atmo, and then be patient while all the little pockets ran out of food, water, heat, and air. Accept the surrender or clear out the corpses, then spend weeks bringing it up to working condition again without the benefit of schematics or working knowledge of the systems. Station 35 had been valuable once; the designers had known that an attacker couldn’t afford to be patient, couldn’t afford downtime. The Miner stopped and rested a hand on an access panel: thin plastic, as cheap as it looked, intended to deter invaders from throwing a lot of lead. Make some greedy commander order hand-to-hand fighting, an ugly, bloody rush against defenders who knew they could fix these systems ten times as fast.
Yeah, the place had been something special once, some critical hub. She felt strangely sad at how irrelevant it was now, discarded and loaned out to scum like Anaconda so someone could else pay to keep the air on. Maybe it had drifted out of a useful location, or probably the political universe had just moved on without it. It had seen fighting recently, but pathetic street brawls, nothing serious. In a way, that made it sadder. She stopped once on her tortuous route to stare at a brownish-red handprint that someone had failed to scrub off the wall, barely bothered trying. Charming.
The place was spooky empty. A couple times she caught a glimpse of someone, always just stepping around a corner. Once or twice a head poked out of a hatchway that closed again. But that was maybe six or seven people on a long walk. Maybe just one or two keeping tabs on the stranger in their midst.
She found her destination down in what must have been the old command structure space, embedded deep in the rock in the belly of a poorly-oiled machine, part of a block that had been divvied up into offices and apartments. The seismic rumble of the air movers was palpable down there, thrumming the decking under her feet, only interrupted by the periodic rush of gurgling fluids. The doctor’s door just said “A. Mills, MD” and “NO CREDIT”, which she found oddly endearing.
Mills answered the door by intercom, and only when told “Takata sent me,” did he open it. He was like every other doctor on every other station, if heavier and hairier than average. He was brusque and businesslike, which was fine by her, and didn’t ask her name. She paid in advance to be stripped, poked, measured, and prodded, told she had high blood pressure for her age, that her false eye needed to be recalibrated, and reminded that her facial scars could be removed for a fee – same as every other doctor on every other station. When she gave him the list of compounds she’d been exposed to over the years, he drew blood and ran the usual tests for the interesting diseases they caused, and thankfully got the same results as always. He also told her that she ought to get her augmentation implants taken out before they screwed up her joints, but unlike most of the other sawbones he didn’t offer to sell them for her, so she figured Takata had the guy right.
She lingered after dressing slowly, and finally admitted, “I’d like a supply of sleeping pills, too.”
He frowned so hard his mouth disappeared into his curly black beard. “Aren’t you flying solo?”
He was shaking his head already before she finished saying “Yup.”
“I really shouldn’t sell you any kind of sedative. It’s not safe for solo spacecraft operation. You know as well as I do how often emergencies crop up.”
“Oh, that’s no problem. It’s not for me, it’s for my ship.”
“Your… ship.”
“Yeah. See, it gets anxiety real bad.”
“Your ship gets anxiety.” He had a pretty good level stare, she had to admit.
“Sure,” she said, grinning. “It gets this crazy idea that I’m going to pilot into a rock or something while I’m strung out on lack of sleep. Nuts, right?”
Mills stared at her a long time, maybe wondering if he should prescribe an anti-psychotic. “You having trouble getting to sleep, or trouble staying asleep?”
“Both. And yes, I’ve tried cutting out bright light and blue light, and taking melatonin, and I’ve got a white noise generator, and a pink noise generator, and a brown noise generator. Think of something and I’ve tried it. Drugs work.”
He pursed his lips and studied her face for a while. His mouth moved like he was chewing his lower lip. “You were in the service, and you’ve obviously seen action.”
“Not relevant.”
If he was skeptical, he didn’t show it.
“Don’t pry, doc. We’ve been getting along.” She gave him a wry smile and raised an eyebrow.
“Mmm.” He didn’t return the smile. “I’d rather give you a sleep replacement.”
The Miner considered mentioning that she’d spent the better part of two years on the damn things. She owed a couple scars to the hallucinations they gave her. “They don’t work for me.”
He chewed a corner of his mustache for a while, then sighed and ran her bank chip again. He gave her a curious look for a moment, but if he was going to ask anything he was interrupted when the auto-pharm started chugging. It spat pills into the tin like a slot machine paying out. “One, and only one, right before bed. It acts fast, but nothing’s instant. Don’t take it with alcohol, and please, please take them sparingly.” She reached for the tin. “Not yet, I’m not done.”
He punched a second order in and the auto-pharm started vomiting again. “This is the antagonist. It’s not safe to rely on, but it’s better than nothing, and it works quick. Keep it by your bed. Get some sugar pills or something to train yourself to take one when an emergency alarm wakes you up. Don’t start taking the other ones until you’re confident you’re drilled enough to take the antagonist in an emergency. Got it?”
The Miner bit back the urge to snark. The guy was trying to do her a favor. At least, he was trying to keep her alive, and figured that was doing her a favor. Still. “Got it. It’s starting to get a little expensive…”
“The antagonist’s on me, then. I’ll feel better if I think you’re not sleeping your way through a collision or raid.”
“Asleep” seemed like the best way to experience those catastrophic events, the Miner thought, but said, “Thanks, doc.”
“You want to thank me, stay alive. Repeat business, that’s the actual sincerest form of flattery.”
She grinned and thanked him again, and then noticed that she had a message waiting: the assay was done, and the buyer was ready to meet with her.