ELEVEN

“Victory to Unfunky UFO, coming in with salvage and citizenry.”

“Hey, Victory.” The radio crackled. “Whatcha got for us?”

Towing the trawler had added several days to the trip, plus an additional spacewalk when Brooklyn went back to make sure the thing would slow down when it needed to. Steve had come along to see how it was done, and together they’d jockeyed the boat into temporary orbit nearby.

“Refugee ship,” Brooklyn radioed back. “Make someone a decent work truck.”

“You need docking space?”

“Just for Vicky, right now. Couple o’ things to take care of before we’re ready for an open house.”

The voice on the radio relayed docking instructions. “Happy landings, Victory. Good to have you back.”

“Unfunky UFO?” Cindy said from the doorway. She’d spent a lot of time there since they found the trawler. She and Gooch weren’t talking much.

“Parliament song.” He’d won station-naming rights in the lottery Demarco held. “I was high as hell on mushroom tea when I picked it. The UN has a station up here too, but this one’s better.”

He moved the Victory into docking range. Unfunky wasn’t much more than salvage itself – shipping containers and assorted scrap hulls welded and braced together. First Tech played a role in keeping it that way, but Colony Director Yuri Kasperov had taken pains to make sure she could do without. The former Soviet space officer didn’t have much faith in the kindness of strange visitors from other planets, and his attitude was contagious. And correct. What the First gave, they could easily retake.

The old ship rocked as it made contact with the station, and the docking telltales flashed from red to yellow to green. A couple of them flickered uncertainly back to yellow, warmed up green again, and vacillated between. Brooklyn put the reactor on standby and headed to the galley for a tea refill and a sandwich.

“We’ll be here a couple of days,” he said. “You can sleep on the ship or get a room on the station. Give you a chance to get your legs under you and make some decisions.”

“You hear anything new about work?” Steve said.

“Channel 53 is all jobs all the time. Right now, there’s a captured asteroid in low orbit. Tidal forces are ripping it into little pieces, and they’re putting together a crew to catch the good parts before they de-orbit.” Brooklyn blew across the surface of his tea. “Not much work on the station itself, but you might get lucky.”

“Or we take our chances in the caves,” Carmen said.

“Free heat, light, air, and plenty o’ space. Food’s cheap if you’re not picky. Lots of new construction going on.” Brooklyn hefted the milk crate of records he’d grabbed from the cargo section. “Get yourself some of these and open a dance club.”

“What about our cut of the salvage?” Gooch said.

“I’ll have the cash for you before I head down.” He considered. “There’s a bulletin board in the hub outside. Look it over and pick a couple of chores. Write your name next to them. It’s how you pay to use the station. If you got the know-how, you could do station maintenance. If you don’t, there’s always a bathroom to clean. No one’ll bug you if you don’t pitch in, but you might get a cold shoulder the next time you’re here.

“There’s something similar down below. Four outta five days a week you can work for yourself, but the fifth day you gotta do community chores.”

The Victory’s low ceilings and re-re-recycled atmosphere were weighing heavy, but Brooklyn ate lunch and washed the dishes before grabbing his jacket and heading out. Even at a looky-loo’s pace, the quartet from Earth should have had enough time to get out ahead of him.

Be nice not to see them for a while. Never thought I’d say that about Carmen, but she’s gotten… something… in her middle age. Old? Settled. She’s a different person around Steve.

Brooklyn and Float stopped at the bulletin board and claimed a couple of jobs each. The station’s full-time crew had all it could handle with daily operations and taking care of the odd emergency, so the extra help mattered.

“I’ll meet you at Turk’s.” Float made a beeline for the currency exchange.

Brooklyn fixed his collar and went on ahead.

Turk’s was the station’s original bar, built out of an Airstream trailer the proprietor flew into orbit in ’83. More rooms followed, and now the venerable establishment was a maze of corridors and abandoned ideas. Interesting in concept, but hell to find the bathroom in. The proprietor was a former London punk, missing a leg, with a record collection that had its own room. He’d given up his shop in De Milo and moved into orbit because the lower gravity of the station was easier on his remaining limbs.

“Oy, ya foocker!” Turk reached without looking for a bottle of Brooklyn’s favorite.

Brooklyn put the milk crate of records he’d carried from the Victory on the bar top. “Former owner was a deejay. Might be something in there you like.”

Turk made a sucking-lemons face. “Probably all Top-of-the-Pops shite.” He poked the crate with one finger. “Whadaya want for them?”

“A hangover and the use of your tug for a few hours tomorrow.”

The barkeep pulled at his lip. “I’ve seen how much you can drink. How ’bout the tug and a good buzz?”

Brooklyn leaned his elbows onto the bar. “Booze me.”

Turk pawed skeptically through the box of records. “Who the ’ell is Matthew Wilder?” He broke off to give a hairy eyeball to Float who’d just come in. The jelly put a stack of glass coins, about two thousand nola if Brooklyn was counting right, on the bar.

“That should square us,” she said.

The barkeep made a show of counting them and nodded. “Drink?” He busied himself with Jelly mixers behind the bar. The brief cold war between the bartender and Float, which had started because of a jovial fistfight between a couple of rival Jelly blooms, was over.

“Turk says I can use his tug tomorrow. Go over to the wreck. Care to join me?”

“I have plans.”

Turk put Float’s drink, mostly liquefied brine shrimp and neurotoxins, in front of her. “Jelly boat parked on the other side of the station. The lady’s probably sick of your mug and wants to see some prettier faces.”

“Agemates?” he asked her.

“Yes. A well-established bloom.”

“That mean I gotta worry about finding a new partner?”

Float twisted the wrist of her exosuit. A noncommittal gesture. Jellies were naturally social and tactile, and it wasn’t easy for her to spend all her time with someone she couldn’t touch without killing. “We’ll see.”

Turk’s tug was open to vacuum, a space tractor, but Brooklyn was happy working in a vacsuit. Almost preferred it. It was quiet, for one thing, and safe, as long as he didn’t make a stupid mistake or karma came ’round with a raging hard-on. Shit could go wrong, but there were steps to take in response. Maintain the gear, follow the checklist. Find the hole, patch the hole. Good to go.

Brooklyn strapped into the tug’s seat and tuned into his salvage beacon. The signal led him right to the trawler. He brought the tug in close and set the grapplers.

The first job was that of an undertaker, moving all the bodies out of the ship and tying them together. The family that was roped together, stayed together – assuming the knots were good. He finished the bundle off with a cheap chemical rocket he’d picked up at the station, aimed the whole thing at the planet, and fired. The rocket had just enough fuel to put the corpses into a re-entry orbit. Gravity and friction would sink their claws in, and the bodies would be gone in no time. Shooting stars, ashes to ashes and all that shit. More victims of the First and opportunity’s knock.

A moment to drift and breathe. The locals had done a good job cleaning up the wreckage left behind by the Jellies’ blockade two decades before. A lot of the bigger pieces had gone into the construction of the space station. Small technical stuff went downstairs to the Boneyard or to people like Brooklyn who tried to sell it at a profit elsewhere.

He towed the trawler to a docking collar on Unfunky UFO and hooked the derelict up to shore power for an overnight warm up and recharge. A few interested parties had come knocking already. Selling the boat off in pieces might have been more profitable, but it would take longer, and he was all ready tired of the whole thing.

He rubbed his eyes, and the brief darkness filled with flashes of faces. Knew better than to look too closely. Seven girls, five boys. The oldest barely a teenager, the youngest still in diapers, bare to vacuum. No suits for them.

Brooklyn brought the keys to the tug back to Turk’s, accepted his buzz and paid extra for a hangover.

Waking up was the opposite of tubular or whatever it was the kids were saying these days. Whatever Carruthers had injected him with all those years ago didn’t do shit for dehydration or pain, and he’d consumed enough booze and other recreational chemicals to leave him with a good headache. Brooklyn stumbled from the Victory’s cockpit in search of water and aspirin.

Steve met him in the corridor and kept him from both. “Got a minute?”

The smell of cheap alcohol oozed from Brooklyn’s skin and clothing. There was blood, origin unknown, on the front of his coveralls. He raised his hand to probe his mouth and nose. Bar fights were nearly recreational at Turk’s. He studied the hand he’d lifted to his face. Fading bruises or dirt on the knuckles, it was hard to tell in the dim light of the hallway.

He blinked. He’d forgotten something. Steve. Do I have what?

The slick handed him a cup of tea and gestured to the table visible through the narrow galley door. Carmen was already seated there. “We have a proposition for you.”

“You guys are sweet, but I feel like shit and I’m not really into threesomes.” Usually.

“A financial proposition, Brook.” Carmen rolled her eyes. “M.O.N.E.Y.”

“Better.” Brooklyn struggled with the catch on the wall-mounted first-aid box and tore open a paper packet of aspirin. He washed the pills down with a swallow of hot, bitter tea and grimaced. “Thrill me.”

“We want to buy the trawler.”

“Who’s we?”

Steve leaned against the counter. “Met a guy last night says we can make money running supplies back and forth to the new asteroid and elsewhere. He’ll put up a quarter of the cost.”

“Leaving you on the hook for seventy-five percent,” Brooklyn said. “You got that?”

Carmen glanced at her husband. “We figure you owe us a cut already, plus what we brought with us. Cindy and her husband will pitch in too.”

“Husband?”

“She broomed Gooch. Hubby’s coming out with the boys in a few weeks to join her.”

Brooklyn put his hands on the table. “Sure you want to go in with her?”

Steve folded his arms. “We don’t know anyone else.”

“She’s a nurse,” Carmen said. “He’s a heavy-equipment operator. Good things to bring to the table.”

“Who’s your silent partner?”

“Guy named Grisha. Russian. Says he knows you.”

“Last I knew, he had his own boat to worry about. Calls it SuperFreak.”

“It passed through a micrometeor swarm a couple of weeks ago. He sold it for scrap,” Carmen said. “He’ll boss the refit for us, and we’ll be dumb labor. He figures there’s enough room on the trawler for us all to live and work.”

An’ you’ll have somethin’ to get back to Earth in when the news about the First hits, and an off-world investment to offer your friends at the golf course. Brooklyn rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. Money always does OK. “Alright. Let me get a shower and make some calls. Got some people to disappoint.”

He scrawled his name on the third sheaf of documents, this time above the word “witness”. On paper, he was $57,000 ahead, and the newly incorporated Space Dog, LLC was the proud owner of a ninety-foot fishing trawler rechristened the Foundling. Steve had found some champagne somewhere, and he flourish-popped the cork.

Gonna wish they’d celebrated with something cheaper ’fore too long.

Grisha had grown his hair out since last Brooklyn saw him, and his empty shirt sleeve had filled up with a prosthetic more tentacle than arm. He’d lost the meat fighting the Jellies a few hours before Brooklyn died the second time.

“Nice flipper,” Brooklyn said.

“Got it in the Belt.” Grisha grinned through his thick beard. He was sticking to the local mushroom vodka, a bottle of the clear liquid clutched in the coils of his prosthetic. “But the doctor has moved on and said I need to keep better track of the rest.”

“How are things?” Brooklyn said.

Grisha see-sawed his remaining hand. His left. “Too many people below, and work is only slowly coming to balance. The local vodka is good and cheap. Kasperov needs vacation. The Trolls are gone again.”

The Trolls were Designed, engineered and bred by the First as technicians, builders, and grunt labor. They’d spent most of the last century readying the Venus caves for human occupancy. “Whaddaya mean ‘gone’?”

“Four or five weeks ago, they just,” he made a flying motion with the bottle, “gone.”

“Where’d they go?”

“They didn’t say.” Grisha waggled his bushy eyebrows. The Trolls’ silent hand-language wasn’t widely known. Brooklyn only knew a few dozen words of it. “No one knows.”

“Somebody does,” Brooklyn said. “Last time they left, they built the Cathedral. Bet the Angels know where they are.”

Grisha lifted the bottle to his lips. “They are not talking either.”

Brooklyn flipped the socket wrench in his hand and passed it back to the chipper preteen who was serving as his helper. Her parents were station keepers, and she had the long, lean look of a childhood in low gravity. If she’d been born on Earth, she might-a had a future on the basketball court. As it was, she tagged along as Brooklyn did his station chores and learned a little about the HVAC systems.

“Different from the ones we did yesterday.” She ran greasy fingers through her knuckle-length shock of bright blue hair, standing it on end. From the looks of things, machine oil and smudges were her favorite accessories.

“Station came together at different times, pieces of scrap refitted and bolted on,” Brooklyn said. “Lucky if you find two filter housings alike in the whole thing, much less on this side o’ things.” He shook the plastic bin they’d been dragging around the station for the past six hours. “Filter material comes from De Milo. It’s cut and fitted into recycled housings up here.”

She hummed. “You’re from Earth, right? Is it true, what they say?”

“’Swhat true?”

“My dad says you can go outside and stand right under the sky without a vacsuit.”

“Don’t need Earth for that,” Brooklyn said. “You can do that in De Milo.”

The girl scoffed. “’Snot a real sky. The sun’s a fake, and there’s a roof over all of it.”

The shittiest end of the many shitty-ended stick humanity had been handed. Earth was the only place where they could walk out their front door, dig their dirty toes in the grass, look up at the stars, and take a deep breath of fresh air without being under a dome or something. “If you were on Earth, you’d be in school now instead of learning something useful. And there’s snow. Comes right out of the sky and gets all over the damned place. Freeze your ass off.”

“I’ll be in school soon,” she said. “Mama’s rotation is over at the end of the season, and we’re going down to De Milo.”

“Nervous?”

She shrugged. “I know it will take me a while to get used to the gravity. Mama said I might have some agoraphobia, too. But I want to go. It’s time.”

“Just don’t get so wrapped up in school and sh– stuff like that you forget to–” he faked a cough to cover that he’d been about to say ‘see the world’ “–that you forget to live a little.”

“What does that mean?” she said.

“Ya know, raise a little hell, maybe steal a car, kiss boys, punch cops…”

She looked at him blankly.

“Or maybe just do your homework and eat all your mushrooms like a good kid.” He flipped the top of the bin closed and held it under his arm. “Job’s done. We’ll report to your mom and call it good. Okay?”

She nodded. “I like kissing girls better.”

“Don’t blame you a bit.”

Brooklyn and Float spent their last day on station in the market, filling up space left by their passengers’ luggage. Never fly empty. Necessities and luxuries were easier to get in De Milo than they used to be, but it was still a pain in the ass to dash into orbit every time the sugar ran out or someone wanted a drink of something that didn’t taste like mushrooms. They cleaned the Victory’s ’fresher, the bunk area, and galley, and returned to the airlock where their next job was waiting. Six people looking for a ride down the well to De Milo. Float showed them to their places and collected their fares.

Brooklyn returned to the cockpit and took the reactors off standby. The various telltales flickered to yellows and greens, and Bugs rasped its infuriatingly unsexy greeting before freezing and requiring a reboot. Being a spaceman always seemed cool on the shows. Brooklyn Lamontagne, bus driver. Ma would be so proud. Actually, she probably would.

He clicked the intercom. “If you need to piss, do it now. Upper atmosphere gets kind of choppy this time of year, and I don’t need you smearing blood and broken noses all over my boat. Launch in five.”