IF WISHES
WERE SPACE CUTTERS
Planet Grayson,
1922 PD.
Noah Bedlam slid into an empty office in the Burdette Steading church offices. The nameplate over the door read “Deacon Roundhouse,” but on the piece of tape crossed over the name someone had scrawled “vacant.” A single desk held a console, and when Noah powered it on, he found it accepted a guest login. Good. He got up, shut the door, and turned the lock. The Church of Humanity Unchained was the most reliable place for him to get a secure network connection that he didn’t have to spend austins to use. But the cost of accessing the free service came in interruptions, veiled criticism of his irregular prayer meeting attendance, and inquiries into how long it had been since his last confession.
The bank screen he needed opened immediately to his palmprint. He considered the line of numbers, automatically converting everything from austins and cents to the more important units of Monthly Rent (m) and Cups Instant Noodle (n). As any social services regular could tell you, a thousand cups of noodles equaled one month rent at a dirty unfurnished efficiency apartment where the landlord would look the other way about housing two or three people in a place zoned for single occupancy. Of course he’d rather be housed for only the price of his dignity through one of the charity programs, but if you lost your eligibility for those, you couldn’t sleep on the street in any city within Burdette Steading—not even the ones with one of the new Skydomes of Grayson Downs—without getting locked up.
Bank of Burdette
Accounts with Head of Household *Bedlam, N* access
B. Jezzy: 35(n)
B. Mary: 0(n) – Account closed
B. Grace: 0(n) – Account closed.
L. Lillian: 2(m) 308(n)
[GSN Credit Union] B-L. Cecelie: 4(m) 32(n) – Transfers blocked.
B-L. Lucy: 0(n) – Account closed.
B-L. Evelyn: 12(n)
Primary: B. Noah: 0(n) – Overdrafts for B. Jezzy in last six months: three. Overdrafts for L. Lillian in last six months: one. Overdrafts for B. Grace: four.
“Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit.” Noah sent an urgent message off to Aunt Lillian. “Aunty L, please go buy something fast! We are about to lose benefit status if anyone notices!!!”
He hurried to check the official records, ready to send another message to Aunt Lillian if they’d already been dumped from the program. He found the household of “Bedlam, N” listed on the Burdette Social Support Services site, and, he breathed relief, the green letters “assistance eligibility approved” still floated next to his official photo.
The system used the picture of him from three T-years ago at a too-thin fourteen with a busted lip and two black eyes. He looked away from it, and the screen auto-scrolled to the legal dependents section to show Lucy Bedlam-Lecroix heavily makeup caked and smirking at the police cameraman. Mary Bedlam was just as thickly made-up but her mascara was running, and Noah could tell the processing officer must have given her a handkerchief and chance to clean up a little before snapping the photo in front of the black height lines on the wall. “Presumed Deceased—Blackbird Residency” was bolded beneath both their names. “Suspected of prostitution, no convictions.” was on there too, but at least it wasn’t highlighted anymore. Jezzy Bedlam, Lillian Lecroix, and Grace Bedlam all appeared in respectable dresses with their official photos clearly taken from the local parish registry of members. Ensign Claire Bedlam-Lecroix, Grayson Space Navy, had two photos: one in her Sunday-go-to-meeting demure best, giving the camera a dead-eyed glare, and a second in her full-skirted dress uniform with a trace of a smile curving her mouth as if she’d had to be reminded a few times that one wasn’t supposed to be grinning while posing for a Grayson Space Navy official photo.
“Damn, Claire, I’m so glad you got out,” he said to the screen. “Just please don’t die out there.”
“Language!” A soprano voice snapped from the hallway, and she slapped an open palm on the door of the office. “I told you before, Deacon! We don’t tolerate your profanity down here in Burdette Steading. I talked to Elder Larson’s fourth wife myself about your foul dock-worker mouth, and I’ll tell her again, I will!” The woman’s hand hit the door three more times in emphasis, and Noah gave a silent prayer of thanks to the Tester that he’d locked the door. A shame some deacon was getting the blame for his words, but he didn’t want to be lectured like a little boy.
He checked the room’s one window. This ground floor office in the large parish support building across the street from the temple proper faced into a small garden populated, at the moment, only with statues of the martyrs of First Landing. He could get the window open if he had to, but the bushes just beneath looked sharply thorned for all that they were blooming with brilliant tiny red flowers.
The hammering on the door started up again, and Noah started working on the window. “I’m back, Deacon Roundhouse,” the woman’s voice took on a hiss of growing anger. “The Elder wasn’t in, but if you don’t answer me this instant, I’m going directly over the Steadholder’s Ladies Tea to have a chat with the First Wife about whether or not you should be allowed to keep your lay ministry position. The Tester alone knows why you’ve . . .” Fuck it. He couldn’t let some man lose his job.
Noah swung the door open. A shocked woman perhaps two decades older than his mother stood in the hallway with her hand still lifted to bang on the door. He ducked his head and tried to give his heavily muscled shoulders an apologetic hunch. “Ma’am,” he told her neatly polished leather shoes, “I’m very sorry. I should have realized the doors were thin and . . .”
“Well, you most certainly should have realized,” the woman said, only partially mollified. “But, my, you are, hmmm.” Her knobby hand reached out and lifted his right hand to check for rings. Her tone changed. “I know some ladies you should meet, young man.”
“I don’t think so.” Noah looked at her.
She batted her eyelashes. Old enough to be his grandmother but she still fluttered them. “Nonsense,” she said. “All the young men think they want to try being single for a while, but every youngster should start to seriously court his first wife while he’s just starting out. We might not have quite the night life of the dome cities in Mayhew Steading, but we’ve got better church socials right here in Burdette City than anywhere on the whole of planet Grayson or in orbit either.” She gave him an up and down look that wasn’t as discreet as Noah’d expected in a church office hallway, and added, “I should think you’d have quite the pick of the young girls too.”
“Ma’am,” Noah said, blushing, “that’s really not the best idea.”
The soft breeze of an airlock door cycling around the bend of the hall and the click of heels warned that other parishioners were coming. His own mother, Jezzy Bedlam, walked around the corner of the church hallway escorted by another older woman in a somber gray dress. Mom Jezzy’s eyes widened at the sight of him and she gave a very quick headshake.
“Oh, Mrs. Wilson, there you are!” the other older woman said. “This is Miss Jezzy, the example who is coming to talk to our prayer circle tomorrow to thank us for the parish’s generous contributions to the Social Support Services baskets.”
Mom Jezzy looked at Noah and looked away. She was signaling something, but he wasn’t quite sure what. “Mom?” he said.
Mrs. Wilson narrowed her eyes and looked back and forth between Noah and Mom Jezzy. Disgust filled her face and she stiffened her spine, turning to the other woman. “I think not, Mrs. Carlson. We agreed we’d be showing the prayer circle an example of the deserving poor.”
Mrs. Carlson blinked. “I still say that’s not the best term to use in front of the recipients. But did he say, ‘Mom’?”
Mom Jezzy said, “I told Mrs. Carlson already that I had a young son.”
“And she has two daughters and a niece who died on Blackbird. They were, what did you say, working in one of the Uriel orbit sewing factories customizing skinsuits for our Navy men?”
Noah blinked. Skinsuit fabric couldn’t be sewn. Claire hadn’t told a ton of stories about life in the Grayson Space Navy, but he was sure of that much. What had Mom Jezzy been saying?
“Not hardly.” Mrs. Wilson looked down her nose at Mom Jezzy. She looped her arm through Mrs. Carlson’s. “The Elder can deal with these two when he returns. We’re going to be late to the Steadholder’s Ladies Tea.”
“Oh, I’d love to go to that. I’ve never had an invitation, you know. But I was going to buy Miss Jezzy a lunch, something with vegetables but not too extravagant,” Mrs. Carlson said. She allowed herself to be walked further down the hall, no longer even looking at Mom Jezzy whose hand she’d let go of when Mrs. Wilson took her arm.
“Let me save you from that,” Mrs. Wilson said, not bothering to lower her voice as she walked away towing the other woman. “That woman’s son is hardly better than a whoremonger. I’m sure you’ve heard about the Bedlam-Lecroix family?”
“No, she’s not that one, there are lots of Jezzies . . .” Mrs. Carlson’s voice trailed back. “Miss Jezzy isn’t Jezzy Bedlam, the mother of Noah Bedlam . . .” Her voice hitched. “Oh dear. What will I tell the prayer circle?”
“We’ll just do a Blackbird remembrance planning session,” Mrs. Wilson said. “We need some special flowers for the narthex what with Protector Benjamin’s upcoming visit to honor our dead . . .” Their voices finally trailed out of hearing range as one of the airlocks cycled the women into another section of the building.
At least they hadn’t said anything about trying to get the family blocked from receiving charity support. Maybe they’d forget about them in the excitement of seeing Steadholder Burdette, Lord Nathan Fitzclarence, and however many of his wives were in good enough health to attend. The high aristocrat’s second wife was rumored to be an inpatient at the Dr. Allison Harrington Clinic. Lord Nathan already had two boys, but perhaps he wanted three.
“I’m sorry,” Noah said. “I should have called you ‘Mom Jezzy,’ not just ‘Mom.’ It just slipped out. I know you don’t like people to be reminded that I’ve only got one mom. I’d not mean to be rude.”
Her face was crinkling up in a mixture of distress and an attempt to pretend nothing was wrong, so Noah knew he had definitely not apologized for the right thing, but he wasn’t quite sure how he’d messed it up. Mom Jezzy crushed him into a hug. He couldn’t see her eyes, which he was sure would be filling up with tears. She’d hate to be seen crying in public, and other people could walk through at any moment. He could, at least, help distract her. Tell her about the money problems? No. He wanted her to laugh, not to be further stressed out. If it came to it, they could fit all their belongings in a couple of trash bags again and find another temporary place. The Barbara Bancroft Society had some hostels for the “down on their luck” to stay in for two weeks at a time. The hostels didn’t compare resident lists, so he and Mom Jezzy might be able to go from one to another hopping around Burdette’s cities if they could manage the travel costs and the places weren’t full. But first he needed a thing to say to his mom. His mouth jumped on that last thing Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Carlson had been talking about.
“Yeah, uh, Mom Jezzy, what’s this about the Lord Protector visiting Burdette? Are all the high and mighty steadholders pretending to like each other now that we’re at war? Didn’t Lord Fitzclarence give a speech comparing the Mayhew Fleet Expansion Bill to giving cosmetics to a supermodel and insist there were initiatives on the surface of the planet that’d see more benefit from the funds?”
She gave a muffled laugh in his shoulder. “Of course my boy knows all about the Steadholder’s speeches! Did our Steadholder, Lord Nathan, really say all that?” She pulled back and looked at him without a trace of tears.
“Well, it was before Blackbird,” Noah admitted. Everyone knew about this stuff, he was pretty sure. Did Mom Jezzy really not know it? Or was she pretending for his benefit? “The full confidence vote immediately afterwards all but begged the Lord Protector to go annihilate someone.” Tester’s mercy, this wasn’t a humorous topic. He’d not found the best thing to talk about, but at least Mom Jezzy wasn’t crying.
“Burdette had the third highest number of space workers lost of all the steadings, Mrs. Carlson said.” Mom Jezzy shook her head. “I had no idea of the numbers of our steaders working up there. All the way out in Uriel’s orbit and a lot of them were men! So many families with their father only visiting home on weekends. She was quite appalled and wants the rebuild to only employ unmarried men, as if there are anywhere near enough of those.” Mom Jezzy’s mouth twitched. “Mrs. Carlson opposes women’s employment most fervently, but in the same breath, she said she’s going to pay me to clean her house next week to get ready for a visit from her two mothers-in-law. They’re the sister wives of her husband’s deceased mother, and quite particular about the dusting. Mrs. Carlson was worried, and I assured her that I can scrub very well. It might turn into a regular thing monthly, maybe. Oh. Well, I had the job, I suppose.” She rolled her eyes. “I’ll get something else lined up.”
“We’ll be fine,” Noah assured her with a façade of confidence that he doubted she believed.
“Of course we will,” she said. “We’re a good family.” She tilted her head at the empty office. “Was there a console in there? I wanted to check the times for the ladies’ prayer meetings at Chapel Yanakov. There might be a lunch one.”
“Yep.” Noah held the door for his mom. He was pretty sure nobody in the Grayson system besides his mom would characterize the Bedlam-Lecroixs as a good family.
She whistled a little tune and gathered the needed details quickly. She rambled a bit about how Aunt Lillian had been doing lately and a few guesses about Claire’s doings.
“Wait,” Noah said. “Is Claire actually answering your messages? I haven’t heard from her since that mess with Deacon Randall trying to get her to resign her commission.”
Mom Jezzy waved a dismissive hand. “You know how our Claire-Claire is. She’ll get over her mad eventually, and she could just be too busy to answer. I get the news from the GNS Ephraim’s Wardroom Wives’ Club, you know. Since Claire’s not married, Commander Greentree’s second wife Elsabeta put your Aunt Lillian on the distribution list. The ships are doing a bunch of extra patrols and a lot of the ships, not just the Ephraim, are really busy, Mrs. Greentree says. And speaking of bad families, you remember that Rustin nonsense?”
“Those letters from Claire’s roommate that her little sister put on the Tester’s Blessings on the GSN message board for everybody to laugh at?” Of course he remembered. It had been a rare time that a Bedlam relation got a little bit of positive fame.
“I doubt that little Rustin girl Suleia meant to have it all go the way it did,” Mom Jezzy said with more compassion than Noah was entirely sure was deserved. He did remember those letters and how they’d clearly been intended to be private before the little sister had retyped them to share them with the planet in exchange for a bit of reflective fame. “But it seems Commander Greentree was pretty offended on Ensign Rustin’s behalf. And that Suleia is writing letters again, this time about her own doings. Elsabeta got them from her husband and shared them with the wives’ club. Elsabeta said Ensign Rustin had to be talked into the sharing, but the ships are pretty bored doing non-stop patrol duties so a bit of entirely unclassified gossip to chatter about during the off hours seems to be good for morale.” She showed him.
Posted to the shared GNS Ephraim Wardroom Board
Tagged Subject #SiblingPayback
Captain, XO, Bosses, & the Rest of You Guys:
It’s payback time. Remember how my little sister posted all my letters home on a public forum a while back? Well, she’s been accepted to a prestigious cross-steading internship program and has been sending me her journal entries about it. She doesn’t seem to realize what she’s done yet, but Oh Glory Be is she going to regret sending me these. Just wait until you see what she’s written on day three.
I present—for your amusement, the amusement of your friends on other ships, the amusement of complete strangers you meet on shore leave, and for the entertainment pleasure of the known universe—my sister Suleia Rustin’s private journals.
Vengeance belongs to the Tester alone, but who are mere siblings to stand in the way of righteous payback?
Very Respectfully,
ENS Cecelie Rustin
GSN Officer By the Grace of God & Tool of the
Tester’s Vengeance against Younger Sister Suleia Rustin
Addendum 1: Please stop asking ENS Lecroix to tell on Suleia to the Lady Steadholder. I know Suleia. Let my sister dig herself a proper hole. There will be plenty of time for us to make it worse for her later. Trust me.
Addendum 2: These are all the entries I have from Suleia. I’ll update you when I know something. And I still don’t think it’s time to “help” further. I blacked out the names she used in her letters. Suleia is not the most unbiased of observers, and I prefer to let others out themselves if they so choose.
“Mom Jezzy,” Noah said. “Just how bad is this going to get?”
“Don’t worry,” she said. “Our family isn’t mentioned after that.”
Noah read on, not sure if he should be relieved or not.
Posted to the shared GNS Ephraim Wardroom Board
Tagged Subject #SiblingPayback
Wardroom—
This is the final draft of Suleia’s thank you letter for her internship admission. Yes, I have a copy. Who do you think Suleia begged editing and revision help from as she crafted it? I’m including it in the file primarily for context. You can see that I set her up for success. This first letter sounds totally fine without even a hint of her natural snot-nosed self. I warned her that she’d have to pretend to be a much, much more polite version of herself. I give all credit to Suleia herself for the rest of this; she did it entirely on her own.
Though, of course, I have assisted in promulgating her mistakes. What else are sisters for?
V/R,
ENS Rustin
P.S. Sis, when one day you see this, you’re welcome.
#Suleia’sLetters1 #SiblingPayback
June 3rd, 1922 PD
Madame Lady Steadholder, Mrs. Theresa Burdette:
I would just like to take this opportunity to thank you so very much for selecting me as one of your interns for this summer steading exchange program. I look forward to learning more about Burdette Steading and especially learning from your poverty outreach initiatives. As I’m sure you know from my application, I had never been out of my own steading before this opportunity. My sister, Ensign Cecelie Rustin, has been loads of places, and she inspires me every day. I assure you, I will work tirelessly for you this summer and will absolutely help make a difference.
Gratefully Yours,
Suleia Rustin
#Suleia’sLetters2 #SiblingPayback
June 4th, 1922 PD
Dear Diary,
Today was the first day of my internship. I met L⸺ and M⸺ my fellow interns. Very nice young ladies. I’m sure they’ll say the same about me. I can’t wait to begin working with the Lady Steadholder.
[Entry ends. Zero views.]
#Suleia’sLetters3 #SiblingPayback
June 5th, 1922 PD
Dear Diary,
I metadata tagged paperwork all day today. Have not yet met with Lady Steadholder. I can’t wait to get started on the internship.
[Entry ends. Zero views.]
#Suleia’sLetters4 #SiblingPayback
June 6th, 1922 PD
Dear Diary,
Mrs. R⸺ continues to assign busy work while the Lady Steadholder is otherwise occupied. I’ve taken the initiative to identify more useful work.
[Entry ends. Zero views.]
#Suleia’sLetters5 #SiblingPayback
June 7th, 1922 PD
Dear Diary,
I’m sure the Lady Steadholder understands that while Mrs. R⸺ means well, it is not a good use of three very knowledgeable interns’ time to spend all day sorting tax records and correlating with levels of food bank use. I’m sure Mrs. R⸺ has many other things she does quite well and this is merely a case of her not having a task aligned with her natural abilities.
[Entry ends. Zero views.]
#Suleia’sLetters6 #SiblingPayback
June 8th, 1922 PD
Is anyone even reading this?
[Entry ends. Zero views.] <–See that Cecelie?
Nobody is reading these. —Suleia
#Suleia’sLetters7 #SiblingPayback
June 9th, 1922 PD
Mrs. R⸺ insists on an entry. Here is an entry.
[Entry ends. Zero views.]
#Suleia’sLetters8 #SiblingPayback
June 10th, 1922 PD
Dear Diary,
Now Mrs. R⸺ commented that the character count on our diaries seemed shorter than usual. She mentioned that she doesn’t have the access code to read them. But she encouraged us to write more. Fine. I’ll draft my letter here. I didn’t want to have to do this, but Mrs. R⸺ is not getting better. If anything, she’s become downright snippy.
Dear Madam Lady Steadholder, Mrs. Theresa Burdette:
I do, of course, absolutely understand you must have a very busy schedule. But I am here. I can do all kinds of things. If you need your office dusted while you brainstorm solutions for social problems in the steading, I’m here. Just for example, of course, but I could do that. I’m a great brainstormer, and I could take care of whatever little office things you need done while you think. I’d sit in the background while you work things out and take down the notes with, of course, additional ideas and corrections for anything that might have been inadvertently forgotten.
Oh, but you do need to know: Mrs. R⸺ is completely incompetent. She is utterly inept at managing interns. I’m quite sure she misunderstood her tasking and there’s just been an administrative oversight. Please don’t feel bad. It’s only a week lost. In a large household these things can happen. I’m great at fixing these sorts of things.
Once I’m in your office, I’ll make sure to do some reassignments, so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again.
With Greatest Respect,
<thumbprint signed>
Suleia Rustin,
Intern to Madame the Lady Steadholder
Theresa Burdette
[Entry ends. Zero views.]
#Suleia’sLetters9 #SiblingPayback
June 11th, 1922 PD
Dear Diary,
Mrs. R⸺ is pleased with the increased diary use. I almost feel sorry for her. Except that she made me redo the *entire* steading’s food bank data verification process by myself. L⸺ and M⸺ were sent off to coordinate the flower deliveries for the Steadholder’s Lady Wives’ Economic Growth Gala. [Cecelie: This is the thing everyone calls the Steadholder’s Ladies Tea. Apparently it has an official title related to its yearly theme.]
I did not talk back. I merely pointed out that she was wasting our time and should focus on what she was good at instead. Some people should never be given management roles.
[Entry ends. Zero views.]
#Suleia’sLetters10 #SiblingPayback
June 12th, 1922 PD
Dear Diary,
I cracked the authorized readers list on this Inter-Steading Diary file today. It wasn’t set up. Not surprising. Mrs. R⸺ probably doesn’t know how. Anyway, no one’s ever going to see this but me.
So: hi, me.
This is now my personal log. I’ve got to write something to keep Mrs. R⸺ happy. I might as well make it useful to me instead of just pasting in gibberish, which believe me, I’ve seriously considered doing.
Someday when I’m running a family of my own, I’ll need to have records like this to know what *not* to do.
[Entry ends. Zero views.]
#Suleia’sLetters11 #SiblingPayback
June 12th, 1922 PD
Dear Diary,
Yes, I’m making a second entry in one day. Good things have happened and I want to make a record while everything is fresh.
Finally! Something useful. Burdette Steading is underwriting one of the station rebuilds. They bought the orbit rights and are going to set up a whole space-based manufactory. The underprivileged have the option of accepting some of their sustenance assistance in the form of ownership shares. L⸺’s idea, unfortunately. Not mine. But Mrs. R⸺ did repeat it to the Lady Steadholder, and she brought it to the Steadholder Himself who asked for a full proposal! He modified it somewhat and, I think, made it entirely useless. But arrgh, no one is listening to me here.
Mrs. R⸺ and the other girls didn’t notice my work because the Steadholder undid it all. His sharp note about “not starving the children for the sins of the grandparents” rather stung, but they didn’t understand it at all. Not having seen the original submission, they just took it for an adamant agreement. Idiots.
Useful idiots, apparently, but still idiots. I miss my sisters. They would never have let a file go through without a copy back and reading it themselves just before sending. But then, they did grow up with me, so perhaps they’ve got that “experience” everyone keeps ranting on about.
L⸺ and M⸺ are going door to door visiting eligible households and talking them into signing up for the program. Of course they are getting lots of takers. Something like 80%. Mrs. R⸺ is all excited for them. It’s disgusting. Of course people are signing up. The Steadholder took all the teeth out. (He had this lengthy thing about there being an urgent need for training up more space workers after so many skilled technicians were killed in the attack . . . the future of the steading’s economic prowess in its people, etcetera, etcetera.) They don’t have to give up *any* of their assistance provisions they just have to opt-in and send a family member to apply to do some of the work. Paid work which they are probably not even remotely qualified for, so they probably won’t even get selected to do anything.
Losers annoy me. But at least the research stuff is getting slightly more interesting. And Mrs. R⸺ is threatening to ship me off to the station. As if that would be a bad thing.
[Entry ends. Zero views.]
#Suleia’sLetters12 #SiblingPayback
June 13th, 1922 PD
Dear Diary,
Ha! Going to the station in a couple days. Advance party no less! And Madame Lady Steadholder Theresa *HERSELF* is going to be coming up later. I’ll finally get to meet her, and she’ll see all my work setting up for the visit. No more Mrs. R⸺ for an entire week, and possibly no more Mrs. R⸺ for the rest of the internship!
[Entry ends. Zero views.]
#Suleia’sLetters13 #SiblingPayback
June 14th, 1922 PD
Dear Diary,
My first letter has been unanswered for a solid seven days now. I went ahead and checked the internal mail system. I used Mrs. R⸺’s login. I didn’t crack it. I’m not stupid. And it was sent. It just wasn’t read.
Mrs. R⸺ leaves herself logged in all the time and doesn’t think to lock access screens or thumbprint protect any of the household files. Sloppy, sloppy. But it lets me know what is going on.
Drafting my next letter here:
Lady Steadholder—
I know you’ll probably never read this, but Mrs. R⸺ is flat crazy. That long talk followed by that letter she wanted me to sign about “improving” my performance is completely absurd. You know that. Or you would know that if you’d had the time to run these internships yourself or attend to reading these “internship experience documentation diaries for young ladies’ self-improvement.”
But you aren’t reading this and needs must.
I am *not* going to complete this internship without a letter of recommendation to take with me. There’s no point in wasting a summer like that. I could have gone to Manticore B. I turned down a slot there with another internship.
Okay, truth be told, I couldn’t go to Manticore B. That one was an unpaid internship without any travel expenses. This one isn’t paid either, but at least room, board, and travel are covered. I don’t know who can afford to both forgo a summer job and pay out of pocket for fancy hotels and such. Rich people, I guess.
That’s what I really don’t get about your poverty study programs. You intentionally set this thing up to attract the middle people. L⸺ pretends like she comes from money, but she doesn’t. No one with much money pays anywhere near the attention to brands she does. The logos are all too big on her luggage and clothes. M⸺, I might believe. But she outed herself in the first week when she admitted to having never been out of her own steading and working in her uncle’s shop most of her life. M⸺’s solidly middle. There’s no other possibility.
Signed . . . Ug.
Okay, not sending that. There’s no point. She isn’t opening messages from people not on her screened contact list. I might be able to get myself added to her contact list using Mrs. R⸺’s login, but that would be noticed immediately and not in a good way. If I’d seen R⸺ stealing the silver it might be worth it. As is, she’s wasting something with more value than silver, but they are unlikely to immediately see that. Simply not worth it. Quite a shame. But that’s the nature of being young. No one recognizes your expertise when it doesn’t come with years of experience to back it.
Remember that, Future Me.
Now drafting the next letter here. Might as well get a fat character count reported to Mrs. R⸺.
Cecelie,
I need your help campaigning with the Moms to fund an internship to Manticore next year. Look at my diary files for this one. You simply must help me make sure this doesn’t happen again.
—Suleia
P.S. You aren’t still mad about that letters thing,
are you?
[Entry ends. Zero views.]
Grayson Navy Mail System
Personal Message for Suleia Rustin
June 15th, 1922 PD
Dear Suleia,
You will never again have a Burdette Steading Internship, I promise.
Yours,
Cecelie
“No kidding she’s not getting another internship,” Noah said. “Mom! This kid is going to get lynched!”
Mom Jezzy giggled. “You are such a sweet boy. Remember: she’s a little girl. Probably only about seventeen. They’ll all forgive her.”
I’m seventeen, Noah thought. He wasn’t sure that Suleia would actually be okay.
“Look, look!” Mom Jezzy said. She opened another set of letters. “There’s another update.”
Sent via Grayson Navy Mail
Personal Message for ENS Rustin
June 15th, 1922 PD
Cecelie—
I’m so glad you are over your little tiff. Here’s the next batch of my journal entries.
—Suleia
Posted to GNS Ephraim Wardroom Board
#Suleia’sLetters13 #SiblingPayback
With regards, another excerpt from my dear sister Suleia’s latest. I do believe it speaks for itself. V/R ENS Rustin
#Suleia’sLetters14 #SiblingPayback
Dear Diary
Working on my remediation already. Mrs. R⸺ said my efforts were showing a “positive trend.” I apologized even. That was a tough bit of acting, but I think I pulled it off. Said I was sorry. Very carefully did not say for what. Said I’d do my best to improve our relationship and that I hoped she’d give me another chance. The woman got all choked up and hugged me.
M⸺ and L⸺ didn’t buy it, but they’ll keep their lips shut if they know what’s good for them. ***
*** I cut the listing of mild indiscretions my dear Suleia intends to hold over her fellow interns’ heads. She plans to wait until after the station trip to send the next update. V/R, ENS Rustin
“Well?” Mom Jezzy said.
“Tester bless their hearts,” Noah said.
“Ain’t that the truth,” Mom Jezzy agreed. “It’s like I always say: ‘More money, more problems.’”
I wouldn’t mind having a few more problems, Noah thought, at least not if they came with more money.
A great many people who had more money and thought they had more problems were assembled for the Steadholder’s Ladies Tea. En masse, they looked like someone had animated a florist’s shop full of exotic blooms and thrown them together with no regard for clashing colors or aesthetic sensibilities. The only unifying theme of the party was expense.
Off to one corner in an alcove, a tired middle-aged man was realizing that the full regalia of a lay minister of the Church of Humanity Unchained itched a lot. But Deacon Roundhouse didn’t pull on the too-tight collar, or pick at the overdone embroidery, or complain about any of it. His beloved first and only wife, Nadia Roundhouse, was having a hell of a day, because her boss was having an even worse one.
“Thirty thousand austins is what this dress cost,” Lady Theresa Burdette whispered at her assistant Nadia, “and it doesn’t even have sleeves. I just wanted an extra ten thousand in the budget to add to the salary of the construction crew chief, but Nathan said, ‘no.’ Now the man I needed has gone off and accepted a position working for the Manties. I can’t get my project a decent shot without more capable people to run it, Nadia.”
“Yes, Lady Burdette.” Nadia said, “I could arrange to sell some of last season’s dresses, if you’d like.”
“Nathan forbade me to increase the senior supervisor’s salary range. It has to do with an agreement he and Mueller have been pushing with the other steadholders to combat rising wages in the face of the skilled labor shortages. I told him that my project would make more skilled labor. And then he said he was done arguing with me and walked out.”
“Yes, Lady Burdette,” Nadia said again. “Couple in the red and fuchsia headed this way. Mr. Ron Wilson of Aquaculture Delish and first wife Mindy, donated a half million. You’ve not met the second woman in gray. She is not one of his other wives.”
Deacon Roundhouse had met both of the women before, but not the man. He wasn’t sure if he’d be recognized in his finery.
A bright, if false, smile lit Lady Theresa’s face as she turned. A picture of elegant femininity, the youthful aristocrat could have made a garbage bag look good. In the tasteful silver gown and elegantly tailored, gorgeously embroidered indigo over-tunic, she radiated wealth and sophistication. “Ron and Mindy!” she said. “So pleased you could make it.”
“Lady Theresa, always a delight,” the gentleman in red said. “Please give my best to your husband.”
“Of course,” the third wife of Lord Nathan Fitzclarence, Steadholder Burdette, said. “He was right over there in the central pavilion last I saw.” She waved her hand towards a knot of men in the center of the gala.
“Oh, of course. I think, yes, I do see him.” Mr. Wilson nodded to himself. “If you’ll excuse me, ladies,” he said, and he left without waiting for another word from Lady Theresa or either of his female companions.
Lady Theresa’s smile didn’t flicker.
“Lady Theresa,” Mrs. Wilson in the fuchsia dress said, “Ronnie and I were so pleased to get your invitation to this tea, so very pleased. And I love what you’re doing to get the poor of this steading off their behinds and doing some good for a change. We just love it, don’t we, Mrs. Carlson?”
The other woman in the gray dress flushed. “Um, not how I’d say that, your, um, ladyship.” She’d been loaded down with a lot of pearls, but unless Deacon Roundhouse missed his guess, the jewelry was borrowed. He also suspected Mrs. Carlson’s gown had not cost thirty thousand austins or even much over three thousand austins, and it mattered to her.
“Oh!” Mindy Wilson said, “I forgot, you’ve not met before.” Deacon Roundhouse was pretty sure Mrs. Wilson had forgotten nothing and was enjoying extending her opportunity to chatter with the Steadholder’s wife while other members of the crowd cast covert looks in their direction and waited for an opportunity to approach the third lady wife of Steadholder Burdette. “Lady Theresa, please allow me to introduce my dear friend and co-chair for the Burdette Cathedral’s Parish Poor Initiative, Mrs. Lily Carlson.”
“A pleasure to meet any of your friends, Mindy,” Lady Theresa said. “What does your husband do, Lily?”
“She’s a widow,” Mrs. Wilson interrupted.
“He ran an engineering consulting firm supporting the client businesses operating around Uriel and had offices near Blackbird. He hasn’t been recovered,” Mrs. Carlson corrected. “They found his business partner, or well, a piece of him. My fellow wives are waiting until, well, until.”
Lady Theresa abandoned all normal proprieties and hugged Lily Carlson tightly. “I’m so sorry for your loss, so sorry,” she murmured in the woman’s ear.
“Oh, well,” Mrs. Carlson blinked back tears. “It’s not like I lost a child. I met a woman today who lost three: two daughters and a niece. She was poor and they’re tougher, you know, don’t feel things like we do, but still. I can’t imagine.”
Lady Theresa’s mouth returned to a fixed brittle smile. “I’m sure I don’t know what anyone else feels, not precisely, anyway. But the Tester calls on all of us to soften our hearts and return to follow more closely in His ways, isn’t that right, Deacon?” she said.
Deacon Roundhouse made a small bow and stepped out of Nadia’s shadow to support Lady Theresa. He’d been wrong. Both Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Carlson recognized him from the stiffening of their postures.
“Sounds about right to me, Lady Theresa,” he said. “But I’m new to ministry, as Mrs. Wilson and Mrs. Carlson know, and I haven’t studied the Holy Writ enough to speak with authority off the cuff like this.”
“At least you have cuffs,” Lady Theresa said.
Mrs. Wilson’s lips pinched, but she kept her tongue between her teeth. It was Mrs. Carlson who spoke up. “I’ve been grieving, and I don’t have the right words to say a lot of the time. I wrote a letter a few days ago to the Elder . . .”
“Signed my letter you mean,” said Mrs. Wilson under her breath.
“And well, now I’m thinking I was too harsh, and it wasn’t my place. If you wish it, Lady Theresa, I’ll be writing another to retract my words.”
Mrs. Wilson rocked back in place, and Roundhouse thought he saw Mrs. Carlson’s elbow jab the other woman.
“I, also, of course, would sign that,” Mrs. Wilson said through gritted teeth. “I’m understanding a lot more now.”
Lady Theresa inclined her head. “I hope you enjoy the party,” she said in dismissal. The women dipped into deeper curtsies than Roundhouse had expected their aged knees to manage, and they turned away with a murmur of similar good wishes for Lady Theresa.
The lady lifted her eyebrows at Nadia slightly in inquiry.
“My husband was asked to step away from his position at the Cathedral following a letter of complaint from the ladies’ auxiliary,” Nadia explained.
The eyebrows went all the way up.
Nadia surveyed the crowd. “We’re being given a little space,” she said. “No one approaching just yet. Mindy Wilson and Lily Carlson are telling everyone about their chat with you. Lily turned away, can’t read her lips. Mindy Wilson is saying you’re a lovely person and you’re a bit naïve but have a true heart for the people.”
“Fine, fine. Just warn me if you can make out if either of them says something about stopping their donations or tells someone else not to contribute.” She directed her quiet attention at Deacon Roundhouse and asked barely audibly, “What did you do? Tell them they’re all dogs?”
He managed not to snort. “No, Lady. I was, um, overheard to use foul language, and I think they might not have minded that, but I’m told my demeanor is unfriendly.”
“What does that even mean? Joseph Larson comes for coffee with Nathan twice a week, and I don’t think I’ve seen him smile in a year. And the Sacristy made him the Steading’s Elder,” she whispered back.
“My husband’s first and only homily was on the assigned text about the rich man and the poor man trying to reach the kingdom of heaven.” Nadia said, “It wasn’t his fault.”
“That would do it,” Lady Theresa said dryly.
“It doesn’t matter,” Deacon Roundhouse said. “The Sacristy will find someplace else to put me. Maybe in the Chaplain Service or something.”
Nadia pressed her lips together. He could tell she didn’t like the idea. They’d worked apart for most of their marriage and made it work. But the chaplain corps deployed with the Grayson Space Navy. In a time of war, deployments were long, and some ships never came back.
“In truth, Lady,” Roundhouse said, “I think Elder Larson is hoping I’ll quit the ministry and go back to space work as a construction supervisor again.”
“Incoming,” Nadia said. “Your three project interns. I’ll redirect them.”
“Please do,” Lady Theresa said. While Nadia stepped away, she turned urgently to him. “Deacon, I desperately need a skilled construction supervisor. Do you think you can go back up there? I know it isn’t fair to ask it . . .”
Roundhouse felt all the saliva in his mouth dry up.
Lady Theresa looked down. “Please forget I said anything. For Nadia’s sake, I’ll see to it that you’re given another position. Something right here in the city.”
He looked from the lady to his wife a dozen steps away speaking with three bright faced young girls and back at the lady. He thought her ladyship’s project was daft. But it meant a lot to the lady, and his wife adored the young aristocrat. And he’d been in charge of not fully planned out projects before. He’d always made them into something that worked.
“I’ll do it,” he said. “But tell Elder Larson you want me assigned as your project chaplain. That way you don’t have to pay me.” He glanced over at the men surrounding Lord Nathan. “But perhaps don’t advertise that detail. You can redistribute the supervisor’s salary to plus up some of the other key positions you still need to fill.”
A genuine smile quirked at the edges of Lady Theresa’s lips. “I do believe I will abide by your guidance, Deacon Roundhouse.”
Nadia hurried back to her position at the lady’s side as another group of attendees approached to pay their respects.
Noah made it home without trouble. The long walk from the center of the city to their assigned apartment wasn’t something he should do regularly if he wanted the soles of his shoes to last through to St. Austin’s Mass when the well-off usually made more donations and Mom Jezzy could probably find him a replacement pair.
But Aunt Lillian had completely emptied her account without answering his message, so he wasn’t sure if she’d bought something that could be turned back into austins later or not. She wasn’t legally in the steading where she was working right now, and if she ran into hard times, available support services would be limited to a lift back to the closest Burdette city. Noah wanted to reserve a little bit to get her reunited with them if she needed it.
Mom Jezzy had boarded a tram at the university stop, where rides were free, and headed over to Chapel Yanakov, where she’d be getting a lunch. His stomach grumbled, but he resolved not to open any of their food. Not when Mom Jezzy would be bringing home a plate of something in a few hours.
A figure stood at the entrance of their apartment, and Noah’s heart rose into his mouth. Had some authority come to evict them in person? He quickened his steps and tried to think of a believable argument if an official had noticed the account totals and seen Aunt Lillian’s speedy emptying of her balance.
He got closer and slowed. The figure was female. Burdette Steading had no female police officers, so that was not an official with eviction orders. And he could tell she was young, from the way she stood in a somewhat uncertain pose, fingers tugging on a long blonde braid and then tucking it behind her back to lean on the door buzzer, and then fidgeting again with the braid while she waited. The door buzzer had never worked. In fact, Noah couldn’t remember living in any charity housing where noncritical engineer devices like doorbells reliably worked.
She turned around at his approach and made a tiny startled jump. “Oh!” she said.
Shit. She was gorgeous too: curvy, with a lot of boob, and a very cute face. Her mouth opened in the beginning of a gasp and then transitioned into an eager smile as she looked him up and down and then, yep, her eyelashes fluttered. Not good.
She was looking at him with a lingering appreciation. He’d learned to read those signs.
She gave a breathless little sound that she had to repeat before he realized it was, “Hi?” Oh no, she’d not spent enough time around younger men. She didn’t know how to pretend disinterest, and she was about to let herself get infatuated with a very ineligible young man. He had to start a fight or something.
She had some sort of large nametag pinned to the lapel of the walking jacket she wore over her blouse. It read, “Hi! I’m Suleia Rustin. Ask me about the new Burdette Steading Assistance Programs.”
“Are there a lot of Rustins? Do you run into other Suleia’s from time to time?” Noah asked.
“What?” She blinked at him. “Um, no sir. Or, I wouldn’t know. I’m not from Burdette Steading originally.” She straightened. “I’m an intern to Madame Lady Theresa Burdette for the season.”
He was supposed to answer with his name and his occupation. Noah kept his mouth shut, trying to figure out what she was doing at the exterior airlock entry to the apartment he shared with Mom Jezzy.
In this last year, he’d shot up four inches, packed on muscle at the community gym, and gotten a few day labor jobs. The muscle gain had been intentional. It was the only way he could think of to make other non-rich folks treat his mom right. It had worked to let him avoid fistfights here in the not always safe charity housing. The female interest had not been something he’d planned for. He still had indifferent brown hair, poor man’s skin, and a nose that overfilled his face, but women seemed to forgive boring faces when they came attached to strong bodies.
He found his own complete lack of prospects less forgivable.
Miss Suleia Rustin tossed her head in irritation at his failure to reply. Some tendrils of hair escaped her braid. That riot of blonde hair was destined by the Tester to clog air filters and entrance men. She’d also been given a full mouth that she now pinched as if that might let her look aloof or at least surly. She achieved endearing instead.
Oh well, at least she wasn’t acting on the edge of infatuation anymore.
“Why are you here?” Noah said.
“I’m signing up all the indigents for a work program,” Miss Rustin said. “I’m sure that those with records and so forth will get bumped off the rolls properly enough, but for now, we’ve got to get the forms out to everyone.”
Those with criminal records would include him, of course. He’d become Head of Household at twelve to let the family stop being in the system as Wards of the Steading, as they’d been since his uncle had died when he was seven. But he’d become fully adult under Grayson law at fourteen T-years. Mom Jezzy, Aunt Lillian, Mary, Lucy, and Grace had all worked extra hours cleaning homes and selling sandwiches on street corners for half a year to buy him a hover bike he hadn’t understood how to fly.
He still remembered the bleak horror of the accident that followed. There had been fish swimming all around and more water than he’d ever imagined. The expensive bike was a total ruin, not that he’d cared about that at first. His entire focus had been on coughing up that unbreathable water. If the aquafarm supervisor hadn’t hauled him out of the tank, he’d have died.
The particular tank he’d crashed in was only four feet deep, but in the shock of the moment, with bruises everywhere and water over his head, it hadn’t occurred to him to stand up.
There had been a Steadholder’s boy he’d heard about in school. It wasn’t the heir, just a younger cousin. The aristocrat kid had done some elaborate prank involving the fish. Everyone had been laughing and talking about it between classes. Noah had wanted—something—he couldn’t quite remember now, but it had involved respect. He had hoped to earn a fraction of the admiration they’d showered on that wealthy scion.
He’d gotten a beating from the fish farm supervisor who’d saved his life, lectures from everyone else, and a court record to further constrict his already limited life options. It had been one hell of a fourteenth birthday.
“Miss Rustin,” he said, “no one here needs your forms.”
He could already see how it would go. If he filled that thing out, he’d get far enough through in-processing to get all the current benefits suspended, then someone—maybe even Miss Suleia Rustin—would pull up his record, and he’d be dropped from the program without even a trash bag to hold his belongings.
“They absolutely do!” Rustin said. “I’ll just step inside and leave it in the airlock for them. The other two girls are not going back to Mrs. Roundhouse with more signups than me,” she added cryptically.
She got the door open and stepped inside. Noah sighed and followed.
The young woman backed into the wall of the airlock interior. Burdette Steading had strict civil engineering codes, so the space was several feet across to allow all the occupants of the connected housing unit plus a few guests the ability to shelter-in-place inside in the event of an environmental breach. Ideally the attached housing would maintain atmospheric integrity during such a disaster, but making the airlock larger let the builder meet code without providing each apartment with its own emergency shelter. “This is wastefully spacious,” Miss Rustin said. “I need to tell the Lady Steadholder the poor housing is too big. Why are you following me?”
“I live here,” Noah said. He entered just enough to let the door close behind him and picked the opposite side of the airlock space to wait for the interior door to open. He did his best not to loom. Poor or not, he was a properly brought up Grayson. And men who were real men did not do or say things that might scare a young woman out and about on her own.
“You do not!” Miss Rustin said. “This domicile is assigned to the Bedlam-Lecroix household. It’s a condensed family way smaller than steading average. Two senior sisters: Lillian and Jezzy, one widowed and the second with no spouse on record, probably a case of benefits fraud from a generation or so ago. But both had several children. Poor people for you.” She paused in her recitation to bat the interior door open button. “A single—obviously spoiled—male offspring and three of the female offspring d—” Something in his expression warned her. “Are you Noah Bedlam?”
“Yes,” he said. Benefits fraud. That was a new one. Usually he had people assume his mom had engaged in prostitution. That was an easier assumption for people to make about what life in Burdette Steading might be like for an underclass worker than to ask themselves whether it was always safe for a young woman to clean a stranger’s home. Benefits fraud. Yes! He could imagine a young Mom Jezzy as a rakish female Robin Hood sneakily collecting assistance checks to feed her children while his father was, what, in another steading arranging the setup for an interplanetary jewel heist that would allow him to retire from crime and raise his family to a level of wealth that they’d never even know what instant noodles were? Yeah.
“Um, fine,” Miss Rustin said. The interior door still didn’t open. “We’ll just step inside so you can sign these on a table or built-in counter or whatever you have.” She bashed the open button harder and the cover fell off.
“Air quality alert. Particulates inside above recommended levels,” a soft machine voice announced. “Interior door sealed.”
Miss Rustin gave him a look of complete disgust. “You don’t change your air filters, do you?”
He had, in fact, never changed an air filter. Usually they lived in transition housing and had to move on to the next place every two weeks. Somebody changed the filters between occupants, maybe. This new place was a Lady Theresa initiative: a five-year residency arrangement that was supposed to let people take on longer term apprenticing positions instead of only daywork. A social services support box arrived every month. Mom Jezzy had said there was no food in it, so he hadn’t opened one himself.
“You think it’s women’s work, I suppose.” Miss Rustin put her nose in the air. “Men,” she intoned with disgust. “I bet that GSN cousin of yours the files referenced used to do all the home engineering maintenance or one of your sis— Never mind.” She closed her mouth over what she was about to say and pulled off a wall panel to get at a diagnostic console for the interior apartment’s ventilation system. Noah hadn’t known that was there, but it wouldn’t have mattered if he had. Tiny little screws held a cover over the controls.
Miss Rustin produced a tool kit from her purse and accessed it in moments. “Yup,” she said. “No maintenance done during any of the two and a half months this place has been assigned to the Bedlam-Lecroix household. Before that, when the Reeds had it, they were a little spotty about it, but they at least never missed more than one month in a row on any filter. And! They always changed that critical filter right next to the airlock entrance where most of the surface contaminants collect.” Rustin gave him a pointed glare. “You do know that if you ever get infants or a pregnant woman in here, you immediately put in a request to double your filter deliveries, right? Those companies that say their filters are baby-grade are all scams. The thicker filters don’t work any better than the usual ones because contaminants will slip around the edges of the filter at a higher rate once they’re even a little bit dirt-coated. For infants in the house, you need to double your change rate. There’s no other way around it without a complete tear-out and replace of the installed resident air filtration system.”
Noah blinked. He wasn’t going to have infants growing up in poverty assistance housing if he could help it.
“I might as well be talking to a wall,” Miss Rustin grumbled. She reaffixed the cover over the buttons and put her kit back in her purse. “Here, I can just hold the forms against this spot where the airlock door juts out a bit, and you sign where I point, got it?”
“No,” Noah said.
Miss Rustin huffed in irritation. “You can always quit later. Please?”
“Get out,” Noah said. He pressed the exterior airlock door, gently in the upper left corner to avoid breaking off its button cover, and that side opened for him.
“But, I—” Rustin blushed furiously, clutched her purse to her belly and stepped through the airlock door. Outside, she turned back to face him and hissed, “Wastrel lay-about men like you are everything that’s wrong with Grayson!”
Noah rocked back as the airlock door closed. He didn’t think he’d ever been called a man by a pretty unmarried Grayson woman before.
Noah tried to hate Miss Rustin for the rude and thoughtless comments. But he was tired, so very tired. She was gone. It was time to stop indulging in maybes and might-have-beens. He tried to enter the apartment. The door didn’t open.
“Air quality alert. Particulates inside above recommended levels,” a soft machine voice announced again. This time it added: “Diagnostic review of air filter system in progress.”
Miss Rustin had done something to the air quality settings, and he didn’t have a tool of his own to change it back.
Noah popped off the wall panel next to the open button and crossed the wires needed to get the door open. He got into the apartment. The interior panel blinked and stopped the diagnostic.
I got what I wanted. Noah found himself laughing.
Noah could really have used a job, if his record wouldn’t exclude him from even trying. Especially now that his sisters and cousins were gone, he didn’t need to stay here. There were really nice support programs that predated Lady Theresa’s for older women without any younger family. His mom would be better off without him. Aunt Lillian still, technically, had Claire, which made her ineligible for those programs, but Aunt Lillian’s little illegal restaurant cart business might be enough for her to get by for a while.
He pushed those bleak thoughts out of his mind and tried to focus on the present. There were air filters somewhere in this place that were supposed to be changed at least monthly. And Miss Rustin thought girl kids had been doing it for him his whole life. How hard could it be?
The panel at the front of the apartment proved to have a new resident “Welcome to Your New Home” instructional video.
He struggled through the machinery checks for the home airlock and air filtration systems. Before his uncle died, he thought, his cousins and sisters used to do the housing maintenance. He still wasn’t sure he understood it right.
Mom Jezzy had said she was doing it here, but he suspected Miss Rustin was right. These filters were filthy. He knew Mom Jezzy would get flustered if he asked her when she’d changed them last. She’d grown up in transitional housing with no dad around ever. She talked a lot about how wonderful it was when Lillian had married Joe and the little while when Joe was making enough that he let her and the kids move in with them. Noah bet she’d never changed any home filters. She might not know how. So he did it himself.
He found the social services box from last month in the kitchen cupboard under the food pantry bag of boxed meals only recently expired. The standard package of household filters was there—unopened. That meant the filter change for the air handling in the main entry airlock wasn’t the only routine maintenance chore that hadn’t been done.
He worked fast, changing all the household filters before Mom Jezzy got home from the prayer meeting. Mom Jezzy liked to pretend their lives were more rich-people-normal than they really could be. He knew she hated to see him doing anything close to women’s work. But if she couldn’t be counted on to do it herself, it had to be okay for him to do it. But Noah could at least give her the gift of doing it on the sly, so she wouldn’t have to admit to herself that he was doing it.
He was washing the grit off his hands in the sink when the airlock door whooshed open to admit Mom Jezzy. She gave him a big hug and proudly produced a mouthwatering carton of barbeque complete with a slab of cornbread and a mess of mixed greens and bacon. As he ate, she proudly produced her other finds.
One of the ladies at Chapel Yanakov had allowed her free access to their charity thrift closet. Mom Jezzy had made herself into a masterful supplicant. She had a knack for finding every support service in Benedict City, and—when he wasn’t present—she had no trouble convincing people that she was a member of the deserving poor who should be given the best of whatever handout was available this month.
Noah was never as successful. Not a surprise, when he hadn’t wanted to grovel and be as appreciative as people like Miss Rustin always seemed to think people like him were supposed to be.
The good poor—the deserving poor—those were the titles Mom Jezzy had worked her rear end off to get affixed to their family for her entire life. Everything he did always seemed to make it harder for her.
Noah wanted to throw open both sides of the airlock, never mind the risk of letting in contaminants from Burdette City proper and yell back at the long gone Miss Rustin: “I am not everything wrong with Grayson! People like you are the ones who embody everything that’s wrong with Grayson! I’m just a guy trying to . . .” But that last bit was the problem. Trying to what? He’d turned seventeen. He’d been legally a man by Grayson law for a while now, and he still didn’t know what he was trying to do. Sure, he had a list as long as his arm of what he wanted, but he had no way of getting any of it.
Mom Jezzy noticed his distraction enough to break his train of thought with a forced cheerfully running commentary on the best of her finds.
“Look at this jacket I got for you! Almost the right size even. I’ll fix it right up with a little tailoring and won’t the girls be all over you!”
“That’ll be great, Mom Jezzy.” That was a lie. He would rather drown himself than get another dependent right now, but Mom Jezzy would get all teary-eyed and go buy him something they couldn’t afford if he said so. She should be allowed to live in false hope. Noah could give his mom that much.
The parents of all the potential brides who might consider him knew he had no prospects, and a like-new jacket expertly tailored by Mom Jezzy wasn’t going to change that. “Thanks, Mom Jezzy.” He gave her a hug, and she squeezed him right back. These lies were important to her.
Then she pulled out the flimsy, and Noah’s mouth fell open.
Mom Jezzy had met Miss Rustin on the street and obtained the form. Miss Rustin had filled out an application in his name. Mom Jezzy had signed it for him, since she was sure he wouldn’t mind. “And that sweet girl didn’t mind either,” Mom Jezzy said. Miss Rustin had submitted it right there in the street.
“Mom,” he said forgetting the “Jezzy” again in his distress, “you’ll lose this apartment.”
“What? Why?” she said.
“They’ll suspend our benefits if I have a job. Then they’ll run the background check which I’ll fail. I’ll be fired.”
Mom Jezzy went very still.
“It’s okay. It’s okay,” Noah assured her. “I’ll go right down there as soon as the offices are open tomorrow morning and tell them Miss Rustin lied to you and the forms were submitted in error. We’ll get through this. And if we have to, there are some spots available over in the Barbara Bancroft hostel on the east side.”
“But I read the whole paper,” Mom Jezzy said. “It says benefits status won’t be changed by participation during the first year of the program.”
“What?” Noah stared at the paper as Mom Jezzy turned the flimsy to point out each of the sections that repeated that. Mom Jezzy produced another chit bearing the address near the shuttle port and a range of times when new applicants could check in.
He was going to have to see Rustin again, and she was going to think she’d outmaneuvered him. There were some details about an initial training event. Lunch to be included. Breakfast available for those who could arrive early . . . Noah’s eyes widened at the description of the program itself.
“You don’t have to do it, Noah,” Mom Jezzy said. “It’s fine. You don’t have to.”
They wanted to use him as an orbital worker.
Mom Jezzy was looking at him with that quiver at the corners of her mouth, and he knew she was worried about him. He’d go. “Mom, it’s fine.” He gave her an easy smile as if he weren’t at all worried about going to the wreckage of Blackbird Station.
“Just promise me you’ll stay on top of the filters while I’m away,” he said.
She wrinkled her nose at him as if that were a ridiculous thing for him to say. “I always do. Such a thoughtful young man.” She patted him on the arm. She hummed all afternoon while she packed his bags.
There were shuttles going up all the time and pay would start as soon as he got on one. He could call Chapel Yanakov from the shuttle port and get someone to come visit Mom Jezzy and check on the filters while he was away. She’d be furious, but it’d keep her from getting sick.
It wasn’t every day you could infuriate a pretty girl and your own mother by trying to do the right thing.
“Learn their names, goddamnit, learn their names!” Deacon Roundhouse pulled on his already sparse hair and glared at the photos of the three young men he’d confused with each other during his self-inflicted memory drill.
He was alone in one of the many small offices in the shuttle port that Burdette Steading authorities made available. The lay minister of the Church of Humanity Unchained hadn’t noticed his own blasphemy. The rough habits learned in his first career came back to the surface whenever he was under stress.
Deacon Roundhouse flicked again through screen after screen of orbital workers murmuring names as he went. Three hours ago, his mutterings had been much less blasphemous. Impure language wasn’t a sin he’d ever been particularly adept at avoiding. Frustrated, and in the privacy of this borrowed space, he plowed through the work again. A new dozen faces had been added to the list in the last hour and someone named Suleia had taken a group photo “for efficiency” instead of individual pictures. That might’ve been fine, but someone else had made up the identity badges assigning the names wrong. So now he had to unlearn seven names and wonder how many others crammed into his mind were actually wrong.
Elder Larson expected him to be praying before starting up to orbit.
His mental health counselor expected him to be meditating and perhaps composing a resignation letter. The counselor thought it was too soon for someone like him to go back to working around the remains of Blackbird.
Elder Larson’s latest missive had actually suggested he could go ahead and resign with a whole lot of extra words circling around the idea that the Church wasn’t meant to be a rebound career. This despite the fact that the same man had publicly and loudly welcomed Roundhouse into lay ministry within a week of the Blackbird attack and mentioned him by name in several homilies as an example to all steaders of how they should respond to adversity by holding more tightly to the faith. Roundhouse agreed. He just didn’t see that ministry politics within the Church of Humanity Unchained was necessarily in line with true faithfulness.
Neither the elder nor the therapist really understood Deacon Roundhouse, but his wife Nadia did. He was going to leave the familiar and safe habitats on Grayson’s planetary surface and move to the new station being built in orbit of the gas giant Uriel right in the midst of the Blackbird wreckage, because it was the right thing to do. There were kids who needed him. He and Nadia hadn’t been blessed with their own progeny, but the Tester had provided them with hundreds of young people in need. Few would ever rise as high as Lady Theresa, but few would want to if they truly understood her life. In Burdette, a steadholder’s wife almost never left her elegantly padded cage.
The fear knotting Roundhouse’s gut came from self-doubt. What if he’d lost his touch? What if he couldn’t teach safety and engineering principles fast enough for the hodgepodge group being thrown out to him? His therapist kept poking at his feelings around the horrific attack and all the people in his old crews and their support techs who’d died. He didn’t blame himself for those. No crew chief controlled whether or not a foreign military would execute a sneak attack on his build site. He blamed himself for that one found dead with his skinsuit helmet not sealed on properly or those three dead in the life pod with the pinhole leak and the patch kit floating inside unopened.
Roundhouse closed his stinging eyes. He needed a break. He opened his packed lunch. Sweet Nadia had had one of her interns drop it by earlier with apologies about the mix-up on the photos. He removed a note from under the container of chopped vegetables which he didn’t intend to eat and above the container with pie that he would be eating. It read very simply, “Thank you for helping me support Lady Theresa. I know this is hard. I know you aren’t going to stop now no matter how nervous I get about it. Thank you again. All my love, Nadia.”
“Oh fuck, Nadie-girl, it’ll work out. Don’t sweat about me.” Roundhouse shook his head at the note, and reaching for the pie, he finally realized he’d been using language inappropriate for a lay minister again. He gave an irritated grunt and ate sweet cherry goodness.
He browsed some files about the new Burdette Station. Ron Wilson and several other men Roundhouse recognized were on the board of directors. The initial construction had been successfully pressurized out in Uriel orbit by a picked build crew who were leaving immediately for another urgent (Roundhouse interpreted that as more lucrative) project. Gravitics was online. No creaky spin gravity with all that Coriolis effect to deal with, then. Life support, backup life support, and tertiary life support were online, along with about quadruple the usual number of built-in life pod chambers. The amount of filter maintenance they’d need for all those vent systems would be enormous. But it was an easy task to hand out to newbie spacers. That amount of life support was overkill right now, with all the GSN ships running patrols around the whole star system and paying particular attention to the rebuilding efforts Burdette and many other steadholders were working on around Uriel. But, Roundhouse supposed, Lady Theresa had needed to include so much in order to solicit large donations from the wealthier steaders and large participation from the poorer steaders.
The materials needed to build out the rest of the station were in short supply, but the new station’s setup involved a plan to do some reclamation of space debris. It was partially to clear their orbit around Uriel and partially as natural Grayson frugalness. Why buy and move building materials to the new station when they could reuse some of what was already there?
He finished his pie and returned to studying the prospective crew roster. These were poor steaders, most not only with no space work experience, but also with no travel outside of their own steading, let alone into orbit or out to another planet in the system.
All he had to do right now was finish learning their names. Never again was he going to be asked to identify a body and not be able to say which name went with that half face.
Outer space was even bigger than Noah had thought it was.
It had been sobering enough to look out the viewport and see Grayson, shining in Yeltsin’s Star’s reflected light, with his own eyes. Like every child of Grayson he’d seen enough orbital imagery of his home world to be bored to tears, but it was very different, somehow, to see it with his own two eyes. To know that he was up among the planetary orbital traffic, not stuck down in one of those sealed habitats so far below him.
Then there’d been the trip to Uriel orbit. At closest approach, they were almost forty light-minutes apart. Given the current geometry, the actual range was almost a full light-hour, so the flight had taken close to eleven hours, even at three hundred gravities of acceleration. It was a good thing the seats were so comfortable, and the food service had been an eye-opener. He’d heard some of the supervisor types complaining about its quality, but it had been hot and there’d been almost enough of it!
And now, as they decelerated at last, the brilliant red gas giant of Uriel, streaked in bright yellows and blues, loomed in the same viewport, and Noah’s mouth tightened as the shattered rubble of ruined station bits glimmered against that bloody planetary backdrop. Even Yeltsin’s sunlight was dim so far from the system primary, but the wreckage glimmered like lonely tears under its distant kiss.
And then, the rubble dimmed. Not all at once. It was as if a moving wall had blocked the sunlight, sweeping in across his field of view. The line of darkness embraced the wreckage, sweeping smoothly across the lonely fragments.
“That shadow,” the pilot said, “was courtesy of our boys in blue, the Grayson Space Navy. That’s from the CLAC Covington. She’s part of the security patrols. She’s headed back out for the Uriel Hyper limit, and she’s passing outside us at the moment, where her impeller wedge can cut the light. She’s a light attack craft carrier and shares the name with the old Austin Grayson-class cruiser Covington museum ship which orbits Grayson. You really ought to visit when you next get home.”
As Noah watched, the edge of the ship’s impeller shadow moved on, clearing the shuttle to once again reveal more and more debris, scattered like a child’s abandoned rock collection and festooned with the cobwebs of even smaller bits caught up in the mass attraction of the larger pieces.
He closed his eyes against the painful beauty of it, not wanting to catch sight of any more twisted metal that might hold the remains of his cousin Lucy or sisters Mary and Grace.
The pilot’s voice came over the speakers again. “Check those itty-bitty cutters out, boys. Genuine old-time Grayson technology right there.”
“What’s he even talking about?” Noah couldn’t see any vehicles at all in the midst of the debris.
A blonde-haired fellow traveler turned from her prime viewing position right next to the viewport to stare directly at Noah. “Oh, hi,” Miss Rustin said. “Ha! I knew you’d show up if someone pushed you properly.”
“Not now, miss,” a middle-aged man said. He wore a clerical collar underneath his skinsuit. “The pilot can see things with his sensors that the mere human eyes the Tester gave us can’t make out. In answer to your question, Lady Theresa received a donation of several dozen durable old commercial cutters to support our new Burdette Station. My name’s Deacon Roundhouse, but don’t let the church title fool you. I’ve been a space work supervisor for over twenty years and a journeyman technician before that. At this time in the shift cycle, there’d be only a couple of ’em out and about, but we might be using ’em for a lot more later. They might be old, but they’re still in service because they work. And you’ll see plenty more of them once we get Burdette Station going.”
He made it off the transport shuttle without catching Miss Rustin’s notice again.
Thank the Tester, Noah and the other volunteers were put to work immediately after docking. Mom Jezzy would have been appalled at all the women’s work he was doing. To start, he did nothing but filter changes. The expert-space-worker-turned-deacon taught classes every afternoon between lunch and second shift. With no more senior clergy about, everyone tried to call him “elder,” but he insisted on “Deacon” Roundhouse.
Morning devotions with Roundhouse included a loss of atmosphere emergency response litany: suit, visor, gloves, assist. It was weird, but not that weird. The jailhouse chaplain who’d presided over prayer services before each community service shift at the Burdette recycling plant had been drunk most of the time. The not-so-standard clergy and lay ministers in the Church of Humanity Unchained had to be given positions somewhere.
If you paid attention and passed his practical exams, Roundhouse promised there would be more interesting work assignments like spacesuit maintenance, salvage, cutter piloting, and station construction.
They had a supply hangar full of older style bulky suits of the kind a non-spacer might use. They were in a range of sizes, not individually fitted like proper skinsuits, but at least they were better than the one-size-fits-all kind of emergency suits Roundhouse called “gumbies.” Cutters and other little space vessels flitting about carrying passengers usually carried those. Of course a skinsuit was more comfortable, but they were also a lot more expensive. And Noah laughed when he learned part of spacesuit maintenance involved changing filters in the air regulator system.
Some of the supervisors talked about expanding this Burdette public works space station into a cutter taxi depot after the Lady Steadholder got bored with it. A standard cutter could shuttle people or gear around from one side of a large station to another or between stations. They were nowhere near as fast as one of the more modern, impeller-drive shuttles, but that kind of speed was more than anyone needed for short-haul, local work. If the projected restorations of the hulks around Uriel and her moon were funded to replace Blackbird Station, they’d need the services of a lot of cutters, and that meant there’d be a need for a good cutter depot. Noah kept his ears open and listened in on the supervisors as often as he could.
For now, Mom Jezzy was living well. On his third call to the women at Chapel Yanakov, he’d managed to convince a kind widow to drive his mom home from prayer circle, personally check the filters, and call him back after. He’d installed about half of the filters backwards, but she’d fixed them, and was deeply amused that a son had tried to put in filters at all. Mom Jezzy had been patted on the back for having raised a compassionate young man who even did filters. His stipend was generous, and no one had stopped the social services delivery even though his total balances were too high now.
Noah had been able to transfer some extra cash back to Aunt Lillian. She and her youngest daughter, Evelyn, ran an unlicensed side business, not a restaurant exactly, but a food cart to sell hot lunches in an industrial area of Mueller. Aunt Lillian had wondered if maybe Mom Jezzy might sew some insulated carry pouches for those who wanted to buy evening meals to take home? Noah sent Evelyn a note and asked her to figure out what it’d take to get the food cart to pass an inspection by the Mueller health code, and he promised to send more money to pay for fees.
He’d tried to send a few austins to his cousin Claire as a repayment of sorts, but it hadn’t been accepted.
The station supervisors complained about missing amenities and talked among themselves of positions elsewhere. But it wasn’t missing anything. The life support system had multiple backups, and there were life pods all over! The air smelled fresh in a way Noah hadn’t realized was possible for filtered air. Airlocks between sections cycled open and shut without even one overridden alarm. No wonder Mary and Lucy had liked station life.
“We should at least have a club here,” a supervisor handing out the day’s assignments said to the man next to him, who was checking off which workers had shown up for the shift.
Noah looked at his work list: filters and . . . more filters.
“Some place to relax, yeah,” the man with the list said. “Didn’t old Blackbird used to have one with, ah, dancers?” He lifted his eyebrows to indicate that he meant more than dance had gone on.
“The Lady Steadholder made arrangements for beer to be available in the dining hall for those who want it while off shift,” Miss Rustin said.
Both supervisors started at her young female voice.
“I suppose I could ask her about having a dance troupe visit.” She tilted her head to the side. “Did they really have a ballet hall on Blackbird before? I know it was big, and there were more businesses in the greater distributed space infrastructure than just the shipbuilding ones, but I’d not heard about dancers.”
“Um, no, miss,” the second supervisor said.
“I should ask Deacon Roundhouse,” Rustin said. “He worked on Blackbird before.”
“Don’t bother the deacon with that. He’s much too busy.” The first supervisor tried to hand her a list of filter cleaning assignments.
Rustin didn’t take it. She folded her arms. “But the Lady Steadholder only hired supervisors who agreed to support the project for a full year. Do I need to tell her you are planning to quit early?”
“Just keeping ourselves aware of the options, miss,” the first supervisor said. “There are other people in line behind you.”
Miss Rustin gave both older men a regal nod.
Noah left to go change his first filter, and she followed him like an unwelcome shadow.
“Lady Theresa should fire them both,” she told him. “There’s not going to be any strip clubs on one of her stations. And they really ought to know better than to be talking like that in front of the unmarried poor ladies. It could give them ideas.”
Give who ideas? Noah chose not to tell her that the female workers around her already knew all about strip clubs. Those sorts of establishments were relatively uncommon on the planet, but where they did exist, it was the poorer people who were recruited to work in them.
Noah had managed to avoid seeing Miss Rustin at the check-in desk at the shuttle port but that didn’t mean he’d escaped her “I told you so” or any other comments since. Rustin was everywhere underfoot at the station. The deacon made her scrub floors and change filters whenever he saw her, and she was annoyingly good at both. But she wasn’t used to dirt. She flinched at the small bits of muck the filters managed to collect between cleanings.
“What are you doing this shift?” Rustin peered at his list and made a tsking noise at seeing nothing but filter changes. “The station was supposed to have more crew by now,” she said. “Some more people should come in a few weeks, but the Lady Steadholder insists they be volunteers.”
“Will she pay us more?” Noah asked.
Rustin sniffed. “It’s not the pay. People want to commute back home each night. If she’d just decided to establish the station in Grayson orbit, they could do that.”
Noah unscrewed a wall panel and switched a filter out. “If she’d done that we’d have no work to do that other more experienced people aren’t already doing. With the station in Uriel orbit, it can provide services to whatever gets rebuilt out here where Blackbird used to be.”
Rustin made a harrumph noise that Noah was pretty sure wouldn’t be considered ladylike by her moms.
Eventually servo mechs would do a lot of the work the volunteers were currently learning, the deacon had explained during one morning devotional session. The topic of loving your neighbor had somehow segued into airlock safety during a loss of station atmosphere and the goals for the project as a whole. By the time programmed remotes were doing the basic station maintenance, the work crew would be trained up for more advanced tasks, he’d said. Rustin had demanded to know why the machines weren’t already doing it, and the deacon had laughed at her.
Noah had expected the answer to be that it was made-up work left undone to give charity cases something to do. But Deacon Roundhouse said not. In a new build or a newly overhauled station, humans had to doublecheck that the machines were really doing everything that needed doing. Machines only followed their programming. It depended on people noticing the points where the programming fell short.
Miss Rustin continued to trail after Noah. Deacon Roundhouse had promised him a spacesuit fitting after he completed this shift’s worth of filter change-and-inspect procedures. And then he’d get more training in the careful out-hull maintenance work that required one.
Noah crawled halfway into a ventilation shaft to replace a filter his long arms could barely reach. He pulled himself back out, panting from the effort of squeezing into a long narrow space not sized for nonrobotic maintenance.
“I’m not available, just so you know,” Rustin said.
“What?” Noah examined the thickly dirt-crusted filter. He brushed the muck off the bottom corner where the date of install was supposed to be printed by a maintenance bot. It was blank. That made it an original preconstruction phase filter. Noah made a note to let the deacon know that this one had been missed in the cleaning bots’ schedule.
“Just the way you’ve been looking at me,” Miss Rustin explained. “Seemed like maybe you thought I was going to be super interested and stuff.”
“Okay,” he said. Noah considered explaining how he was absolutely not interested in gaining a dependent. Quite the opposite since the dependents he’d had from birth seemed to flee. Or die.
He hunched down to repeat the process for another hard to reach filter.
Even if he’d had to marry someone, Rustin looked like she had expensive tastes. He couldn’t afford moderate tastes, let alone expensive ones.
“Good. Glad we got that out of the way. Some guys get all fussy and angry about it.” She paused and gave him that slow inspection he’d come to hate. Other women were more discreet. And it felt more annoying when it was side to side instead of up and down. He slid the rest of the way back into the hall with the old filter in his outstretched hand.
This filter was nearly clean with a bot-install date of just a week ago. Good. He wouldn’t have to come back and contort himself again next week. It was already in the programmed servicing schedule.
“I think I like you after all,” Miss Rustin continued, while not, he noticed, actually doing any of her filter checks. He supposed she didn’t care about skinsuits. Perhaps she had three of them at home and knew all about them. “We’ll have to be friends,” she said. “It might be nice to have some guy friends. I hear the Manticorans do that all the time. Girls friends with guys and not even because they’re considering dating when the guy’s ready to add another wife.”
“They do?” He kicked himself. Questions were not the right way to handle this. Consistent disinterest was key. Anything else and the girl’s reports to her father and mothers would include angry tears and a claim that he’d been leading her on.
“Yes. They do. You wouldn’t believe the things my sister’s told me about how people do things in other star systems. Or maybe you would. You talk much with that GSN cousin?”
Noah considered lying. “Some,” he said reluctantly. How much had they put in his file? Maybe she’d take the hint from his monosyllabic response and not pursue the subject?
She didn’t. Women so very rarely did.
“Oh, good. Then you understand. Well, at least to some extent. Your cousin is enlisted, I’d guess. My sister, Cecelie, is a GSN officer. She writes me all the time. The moms were worried at first that she’d be bringing all these officers home, and that all of us Rustins would end up GSN widows, but that was just the moms being silly. Cecelie hardly gets any leave time at all, what with the war and all. So she doesn’t bring anybody by to visit.”
The GSN had a very nice pension benefit. Mom Jezzy had been very excited about it for a while. He’d been especially terrified after Blackbird that something would happen to his cousin. He’d had confused half dreams, half nightmares where they suddenly had a lot of money, but it was because the GNS Ephraim had been destroyed. And Ensign Claire Bedlam-Lecroix was dead. Since the money he’d get as next of kin would be so nice, Mom Jezzy had talked about it way too much. He’d gone to the church about his fears. And instead of praying for Noah and Mom Jezzy, Deacon Randall had tried to get Claire’s officer commission revoked.
Noah tried a grunt. Sometimes grunts worked to get Mom Jezzy to change subjects or find a different audience. Unfortunately Miss Rustin took it as active listening.
“Officer suitors.” Rustin waved a hand at the bulkhead as though farewelling a dream. “It never happened. Turns out almost every officer in the GSN is married already. Except the girls of course.” She stopped to give him a glare as if she expected a mean reply and she was giving him the chance to blurt it out before she hit him with one of the used filters.
Noah wasn’t stupid. He didn’t say a thing. A silent nod was all she was getting out of him.
She nodded right back. What they’d just agreed on, he had no idea.
“You see then. A Rustin girl might be second wife, but not a third or fourth. So of course those men are right out. If a guy were tragically widowed, I suppose I could imagine it, but even so, there’d be all that extra emotional baggage, and it’d be so hard to retrain the household properly.”
Noah nodded again, even though he had no clue what might make a household improperly trained. He rather suspected that everything about his own family would be untrained to Miss Rustin’s eye and resolved not to share a single bit of his own background.
“You two.” Noah jerked at the sharp call. “Stop lollygagging and get over here.” A new black-shirted supervisor snapped his fingers. “Miss Rustin, you and Mr. Bedlam join that line over there.”
Noah hurried to the appropriate group on one side of the large cargo bay. Suleia Rustin trailed along behind him.
He had to skirt the side of the bay. The half dozen cutters normally parked docked to its transfer tubes were absent, and a mound higher than his head filled the center of the space.
The large bulkhead display screen showed a video feed of the other cutter bay. Its cutters were headed out, as well. A few of the skin-suited crew members moved with the easy confidence of long experience as they swung themselves across the station’s gravity interface to swim the boarding tubes, but a lot of them had the clumsiness of trainees.
A supervisor pointed out a collection of bins and called out salvage sorting directions in a carrying voice. Rustin sniffed. “Looks like the worst organized craft room I’ve ever seen.”
It reminded Noah of Burdette Steading’s trash and recycling central holding room from past community service experience. “Not really,” he said.
“Noah and Suleia. Stop the chatter,” the supervisor bellowed. “Get at least two bins filled with properly sorted materials by lunch bell, if you please. The rest of you, head to hangar bay two for suit fittings. Those who paid attention to me will be able to sort in the cutters, so we won’t end up with piles in both bays.”
Rustin looked at the pile and the few workers pulling out bits to place into floating bins. “You aren’t going to finish by lunch,” she said.
Noah selected a bin at random and pulled it with him to the edge of the mound. An assessor tool hung by a cord from the side of the bin. His bin said, “nickel-based alloys.” He’d been able to hear enough of the instructions that he figured out how to turn the assessor tool on and held lumps of salvage up to it until he got a green light. That lump went into the bin.
“This is such a waste of time,” Rustin said.
Noah sifted through the top layer until he couldn’t find anything else that had enough nickel in it to get a green light. A couple lumps seemed likely but the tool only flickered when he held them up to it. He left them for someone with more metals knowledge and went back for the molycirc bin.
Deacon Roundhouse made his way into their bay and wandered the room, going from worker to worker. When he reached the two of them, Rustin raised her eyebrows at him and smiled. “Good afternoon, Deacon.”
“Afternoon, Mr. Bedlam, Miss Rustin. You see our project received authorization to spend more time on reclamation. Good progress there, Mr. Bedlam,” Deacon Roundhouse said.
“The Protector did sign off on the Sacristy’s petition!” Rustin said. She grinned from ear-to-ear and danced on her toes in self-congratulation. “I told Mrs. R. that we’d get the most money out of this project if we could get the Church to fund it. Oh, yeah! I was right. Again.”
A scowl flickered across the deacon’s face and for a moment Noah thought the man was considering punching her.
Right after Blackbird was attacked, people had donated a lot of austins to survivors’ funds and funeral relief drives. He’d made a contribution himself with a few spare austins.
“We will not be taking Sacristy funding,” Deacon Roundhouse said. “We do not profiteer off the dead.”
Rustin opened her mouth again, and Noah stepped on her foot, hard. Thank the Tester, she shut up.
“But . . .” Noah scrambled for some words to distract the man from Rustin. “You will bless them, right? Just in case?” The half-formed idea left him scanning the pile in front of them for limb fragments and bones. It had been more than three months since the attack and search crews had been over every bit of debris twice at a least. There’d be no more miracle rescues. No one could have survived this long since the attacks, but remains could still be intermixed and crushed in the debris.
The deacon allowed himself to be diverted. “I’ve been on most of the cutter rides headed to new claims, and I’ll continue that. I’ve prayed over all of them. Funerals have already been held by most families, but some of our reclamations have turned up remains. The Church has the list of the missing. They do the contacts. Sometimes the families have bodies shipped home. Other times they want a space burial.
“So, yes, I’m praying for them. I ask that you do too. These aren’t . . . Well, you know how all this debris got out there. It does all need to be cleared out and either placed in a controlled orbit or shifted into Uriel’s gravity well. It’s for the protection of our new builds up here, that we need to move it. But it’s all a graveyard in a sense. Treat it with dignity, but make the place useful again. Any spacer would want that.”
The deacon nodded to himself and moved on to talking about more commonplace things. He talked about the cutter assignments, and the process by which they would be determining who was ready to do reclamation work, and suit fittings, and the classes for those working towards various space work certifications. Several others came by and needed specific instruction on how to assess certain system repairs they were working on.
Miss Rustin looked bored and didn’t pay attention.
Finally, the deacon got back around to them.
Noah was patted on the back for his completed filter checks. Rustin was sent away to complete a few filter changes herself. Her comments about being here as an observer and not an employee were ignored, as usual.
“Does the Tester send us just to watch or to also act?” seemed to be a usefully sharp line from the deacon, which seemed to get through to her. Though her interest in a recommendation letter from the deacon on Sacristy letterhead might have been more inspirational. She did go.
After several hours of his working with the pile, Rustin returned and started talking again.
“I’ve been thinking about what you said, Mr. Bedlam.”
Noah just kept working. He hadn’t said a thing.
“You’ve got a point.” Miss Rustin fished out a particularly well-preserved bit of molycirc and, after verifying its quality, placed it in the high grade stack. She had an eye for finding the very best stuff. “I can’t just go up and propose to a Manticoran. They’re odd like that and wouldn’t mind, but it sets the wrong precedent. I don’t want to always have to make all the decisions, you know? I need a guy who’ll take a few good hints and run with it. Somebody smart.”
He held his head very still as he worked. He wanted to avoid an accidental nod or headshake that she might take as an answer.
Deacon Roundhouse rescued him, sending Rustin off to go pick up a pallet of assessor kits just shipped in. The better tools should help them shift the pile more quickly.
“You doing okay, Mr. Bedlam?” Deacon Roundhouse asked.
“Yes, sir.” It was nice of the minister to care, but Noah had learned the hard way that advice was worth exactly what he paid for it. He did not want another Deacon Randall experience. Rustin was an easy trouble, so he didn’t complain.
They both watched Rustin’s progress across the floor, and the deacon snorted to cover a laugh when she stopped halfway to the pickup point to engage in some kind of argument with one of the other workers.
“She’ll be gone in a few weeks, and I appreciate your willingness to work with her. She’s offended most of the others.”
“Miss Rustin does report to the Lady Steadholder,” Noah said. It felt strange to caution an older man, but the deacon did need to know the dangers. The tone of irritation the supervisors took with her made perfect sense considering her practice of assuming authority she didn’t have, but still. Now that he took a moment to think about the bigger picture, he thought Miss Rustin might cause the whole project significant damage if she made a negative report. Losing a few key people without timely replacements could scuttle even a standard project. This effort, well, they needed every one of the few experienced spacers they had.
“She’s an intern. She’s got no authority and no access to Lady Theresa. Quite the opposite.” Deacon Roundhouse shook his head. “The Lady Steadholder had some initial concern that Miss Suleia Rustin might get herself killed through overconfident ineptitude.” Roundhouse tilted his head and shared a grin with Noah. “She actually said that, ‘overconfident ineptitude.’ I had to look it up after. Means ‘being a dumbshit.’ The young woman’s troublesome, I’ll give ’em that. Miss Rustin’s not a dumbshit though. Helps that I got the Lady Steadholder to give out an annoyance bonus to all my supervisors if we could get her to do any real work. Miss Rustin put grit in the wrong gears at the steadholder’s office, that’s for sure. At first hearing about the girl, I felt sorry for her, but having met her . . .” The deacon shrugged. “I think she earned it.”
“But she is starting to do some work.” Noah pointed out.
“Yep.” The deacon acknowledged. “And she’s not always wrong.” The woman Miss Rustin had been arguing with set down her bundle and stomped off. Rustin leaned over the load and removed a few large pieces of salvage from the top. She put her shoulder against the side of the largest mass and rolled it over. It was a battered grav lifter. Rustin turned it on. She piled the other pieces on top. The machine lifted off the floor and drove itself the rest of the way with Rustin walking behind it.
“Huh,” Noah said.
The new mass assessors made the sorting go faster. They’d have finished by lunch if the cutters hadn’t continued bringing in new finds.
Lunch was steak and as many roasted root vegetables as a man could eat. Noah was in heaven.
Miss Rustin took the smallest possible portion of beef and used the ladle to pick out only the best-looking vegetable bits in the medley. The woman with the grav lift problem sat across from them and nagged until Rustin cleaned her plate.
“It’s not Montana beef,” was all she had to say when asked what she had against the meat. And, after a pause, she added, “I suppose the mess hall only has a soup kitchen budget and is doing the best they can.
“Oh!” She brightened. “Of course, it isn’t like a soup kitchen. It is a soup kitchen! They have to skip the salads and skimp on food quality or you lot would think this was an okay way to live and stay with this program indefinitely. They are encouraging everyone to move on.”
Noah suppressed his groan. “It doesn’t work that way,” he said. The woman across the table rolled her eyes and left. Her tray was empty anyway. She seemed to have enjoyed the food, if not the company.
“Why not?” Miss Rustin looked genuinely puzzled.
“Because it doesn’t, that’s why.” He took his own empty tray to the washer and went back to work. Tomorrow he had been promised a cutter run.
Miss Rustin, after a few hours doing who knew what, joined him to help sort salvage again. The lunchtime argument and the deacon’s news of Rustin’s powerlessness broke some dam of silence inside him. When she made a comment about poor families simply lacking proper household management, he let her have it.
“Miss Rustin.” He glared at her. “You have a stupid life-is-easy perspective. That’s not how my Test has been. I can’t just run away and make the rest of the family figure out their way without me. That’s what my cousin did. Sure, she doesn’t see it that way, but it’s reality as far as I’m concerned. She got out, but it sure didn’t help the rest of us.”
“Oh, you’ve got brothers then?” Miss Rustin persisted in taking the wrong information from his rant. “You’re lucky. My family has just sisters so far. The youngest of the moms has been going to this great clinic though. She’s expecting twin boys. It’s going to be a miracle for the whole family if she can actually bring them to term. Dr. Allison Harrington has changed everything, you know?”
Of course he knew of Dr. Allison’s miracles. That wasn’t the point. “No. I don’t know.” His fingers were leaving dents in the softer salvage pieces. He reached for something tougher. “Fine, yeah, Dr. Allison is a saint. There’s going to be a lot of boys born who would never have survived before. Kids twenty years younger than us will have just as many boys as girls in their classes and in a couple generations maybe most people will have just one mom instead of three. But that doesn’t fix anything now! It used to be that I had my mom, an aunt, three cousins, and two sisters. And every one of them is a girl. A lot fewer now, but that’s not the point. The last other male relative we had was my uncle who died when I was seven. You know what that means? Huh? Do you?”
This time Miss Rustin was the soft-spoken one. “No.”
“It means I’ve never been in charge of a darn thing and I probably never will be. Sure, they used to bring me stuff to sign and I could ruin things for any of them with a word to the wrong authority, but nobody has a big plan figuring out what’s best for each of them and how the whole family should work together. I used to have the cousins and sisters all coming to me for loans and food and clothes and, and everything. And I could only give it to one as long as I took it from another. We always ran out too soon.
“All those accounts, technically/officially/legally/whatever, they belong to me. My own account is primary and has to be the overdraft protection for everyone else’s. Pretty soon everyone figured out that if they want something, they should buy it immediately on a payday and pull whatever there was in my account down to zero.”
“You let them do that to you?” Miss Rustin stared at him. “My dad would take my access card away if I ever overspent my allowance.”
“It’s never an ice cream cone.” Noah glared at her. “It’s a birthday cake. Or it’s a taxi ride when the cleaning job took too long and the last tram is gone. Or it’s getting grandma’s pendant back from the pawnbroker, because this time he’s really going to sell it to someone if we don’t redeem it right now.” He chunked a piece of low-grade platinum into the appropriate bin. It made a satisfyingly loud clunk as it hit.
“But at least you don’t have to pay any taxes,” Rustin said.
“I’m a Burdette steader.” Noah scoffed. “Everyone pays taxes, and they’re due quarterly. To manage that, I had to buy things. Big things. Things someone would pay money for at a pawnshop. I used to go buy things as soon as Mary and Lucy’s pay came in since they made the most after Claire, and I was never quite sure what Claire might need to get. Official uniforms are really costly sometimes. But whatever. So each quarter when the taxes were due, I could go pawn the things so we could pay our share. Now, of course, I wish I hadn’t. All I had to do was miss a tax payment, and the steading would have taken head of household away from me and made us Wards of the Steading again. Mary and Lucy wouldn’t have been professional dancers anymore. And. They’d. Be. Alive.”
“They performed at one of those clubs then?” Rustin said.
“Yes.”
“So impressive,” Rustin said.
Noah snorted. “You’re going to have to work harder than that to make it hurt. I got my family killed and the best anyone can do is call me a pimp.”
“I meant they were impressive, not you. Though I suppose your insistence on facing their Tests for them instead of your own Test is kind of impressively idiotic. No training. Almost no money. But they find a way to get themselves out of their home steading and off the planet. The work was probably bad, but they might’ve saved enough to do something else in just a few years.” Rustin rolled her eyes. “Who could possibly be so dumb as to think you were a pimp? Everyone could see you couldn’t even make them stick to a budget, but people somehow think you can control their employment choices from the other side of the Yeltsin System? People are idiots.”
Noah swallowed hard.
The next morning Noah wore a fitted size 10 spacesuit. Not quite a skinsuit—which were individually made and fitted—it was still a very good suit, and the sizing was almost right if a tad bit too tight in the arms and shoulders. It moved smoothly and easily. His fingers had only the lightest skimming material over them. He felt great and didn’t even mind the appreciative hoots the older female workers made on his way to the cutter.
“Why does he get one that actually looks comfortable?” Miss Rustin was there, outfitted in one of the one-size-fits-nobody gumbies.
Noah shot the deacon a silent appeal. Please don’t let her come with us.
“He did all his filter checks. You were at least twenty short.” The deacon waved them both into the cutter. “Since you’re only here to observe, you could stay behind. But then I wouldn’t be able to tell you about those engineering student exchange programs in the Manticore System you wanted to know about.”
Noah wondered just how large that annoyance bonus was. He certainly wasn’t going to be seeing any of it. Though if he were really lucky, the project would succeed and there might be a permanent place for him here.
Miss Rustin claimed the copilot’s seat next to Deacon Roundhouse, and Noah was forced to strap into one of the jump seats affixed to the side of the cutter’s main bay. It folded out but faced forward to support against the g-forces when the little reaction-thrust craft accelerated. They seldom exceeded a single gravity—cutters were designed for strictly short-haul work—but in theory, they could go as high as six. There was nothing much to see from the bay, of course, but he’d get other chances to watch cutter piloting after Rustin was gone. With a few minutes free, he logged into his accounts from the wall terminal and checked on how Mom Jezzy was doing. He had to pull off his gloves to get the ID palm print to read right.
A note from the woman at Chapel Yanakov confirmed that she’d brought over some tea and helped Mom Jezzy get building maintenance to fix a problem with an air handler. The monthly support services box had arrived with four #2 sized filters instead of the two #4 sized filters needed for the kitchen.
A second note from the parish prayer circle leader at Burdette Cathedral let him know that Mom Jezzy had been regular in her attendance and seemed well. He sent a response asking as politely as he could about helping Mom Jezzy exchange the apartment’s air filters for the right ones. Dear Tester, he wished he could hire someone to just buy the right things and put them in for Mom Jezzy.
A check on the bank accounts showed a small total, but positive balances in each. As the employee himself, this time he’d been able to have taxes withheld from his stipend. He felt a rare moment of appreciation for Miss Rustin. She’d been the one to mention that withholding was possible. Given the lack of pawnshops in orbit, it was pleasant to be able to manage money like a rich person for once.
He looked up as the deacon cycled through the internal airlock between the main bay and the cockpit.
“We’re at the site,” he said. “I’m going to visually inspect the claim. Cutter Control messaged about some debris field collisions making a mess of things farther around Uriel, but they’ve got no warnings near us. And I did a scan with . . . ah, never mind, it’ll be easier to just show you after I get back in. I’m going to pray over the site and do some hands-on inspecting.”
He pushed off from the bulkhead, hands automatically checking that his tool attachments were secured, as he sailed across the bay toward the port side airlock with the easy grace of the experienced spacer he was. He braked to a stop and lowered his helmet visor.
“Comms check,” his voice said in Noah’s earphones.
Noah nodded, then blushed as he realized the deacon couldn’t possibly see that with his own helmet in the way.
“Comms check,” he repeated belatedly, and heard something like a chuckle.
“Good,” was all the deacon actually said, though. “Don’t know how good reception’s going to be with all the junk outside, so we’re patched through the cutter’s comms. That should keep us linked no matter what. Wait in here for a minute, though. I parked us a little close since you’re both new to space walks, but I’ll still probably need to realign us.”
“Of course, Deacon,” Noah said.
Roundhouse entered the lock. It closed behind him, and another note popped into Noah’s queue as he was about to log back out. It was a Grayson Navy Mail System message from Ensign Claire Bedlam-Lecroix, his cousin. He hadn’t expected ever to hear from her again. He read through the lengthy file and whistled. Suleia Rustin had written her sister about a boy she’d met.
He tried to hide the blush.
Claire said that Cecelie said that Suleia said that she liked him, but he didn’t like her, so it was all hopeless. Unless Cecelie had some recommendations? And Cecelie Rustin, definitely still mad, had asked Claire Bedlam-Lecroix what to suggest to her little sister, since Cecelie liked Claire and didn’t want to inflict Suleia on one of her friend’s relatives without first giving him an out.
“Please make Ensign Cecelie Rustin stop posting,” he wrote back immediately. He should probably say more, but he couldn’t think right now.
In her message Claire had already promised not to let Cecelie post anything that named him. Noah smiled. His cousin would never let Miss Rustin’s sister do anything to hurt the Bedlam-Lecroix family’s chances. Claire hadn’t abandoned him after all. He lifted his helmet visor to rub at his eyes.
Noah logged off and changed the display preferences to show the debris field they were salvaging. The heat view showed space trash reflecting distant sunlight and the cutter’s own emissions. They fluoresced like bright pearls on midnight silk. A nice big lump of mixed metals reflected back a clear sensor return. Deacon Roundhouse in his skinsuit shot a tether out to it, tugged on it, and drifted out to the find with more tethers trailing behind him.
Deacon Roundhouse sang a hymn to himself at full volume as he spacewalked out to the very nice-looking two-hundred-plus-cubic-meter find. There was no requirement to perform a spacewalk prior to opening up the back of the cutter and dragging in the salvage finds, but he’d wanted to pray over them. He used to use drinking songs to keep a mental count of how long a spacewalk was lasting and to keep from gibbering in terror at the sheer vastness of empty space swallowing him up, but hymns seemed more appropriate just now. They worked just as well for timing things, too. And the Church of Humanity Unchained had a lot of really good ones.
His feet reached the solid center of the find and latched on just as he reached, “Our sword and shield victorious!” He unhooked assessor tools from his skinsuit belt with each hand and started the close scan.
The piece was very dense. It was looking very good. They could probably use the cutter in its pickup truck mode. He’d open both sides of the rear external airlock into the main space and shove the whole find inside. Noah could help him, and he could leave Rustin in the pilot compartment on the far side of the interior airlock to keep her more fragile gumby suit safe until they closed back up and repressurized everything.
Most thousand-year-old space debris in the Grayson System consisted of particulates and dust and semi-solid lumps held together by physics. But the recent Blackbird’s debris included purified metals, reinforced station structural members, and bits and pieces of all the things people who love to tinker bring to a space station. This one was mostly high-grade battlesteel.
Roundhouse imagined that it might be a warehoused piece of ship’s hull plating that had escaped a direct hit only to be battered by other debris. He poked a finger into a long gouge dug into the side. Something even tougher—or traveling at a very high velocity—had hit this.
He forgot to start the next line of his hymn as he got to thinking about the velocity necessary to inflict that gouge . . . and the hull plating that had been in warehouses on this side of the Blackbird construction yard before the strike. Those particular warehouses had been mostly empty and in preps for a shipment coming in. All he could remember was that one load of hull plating that had failed inspection. It had been cut to commercial-grade thickness instead of military-grade thickness, but it had had a stealth coating already applied. And the stealth coating had passed testing just fine, which meant . . .
Oh, shit.
He had to get back to Cutter 19!
Deacon Roundhouse turned and reached quickly for a tether. He’d detected no dense particulate debris on a collision course for the small vessel during the scans he’d performed before shutting down his radar to avoid microwaving himself when he went EVA. But if his gut was right—
Now Deacon Roundhouse was praying not over the debris, but over Cutter 19. If he didn’t get back aboard in time—
He didn’t see the thirty-eight separate, stealth-coated hull plate slivers that hit the other side of his find and stopped. He did see the eleven bits, none of them thicker than a seventeen-year-old’s little finger, that missed the mass of near impregnable battlesteel, hit the cutter, and kept right on going.
“Noah!” he shouted over his com. “Suleia!”
Only silence answered, and his jaw clenched.
His tripled tether lines led back to the cutter. One of the three had been sheared off. Roundhouse left it trailing and yanked hard on the other two to send himself sailing back towards his two kids, terrified that he hadn’t trained them anywhere near enough for this.
Noah heard a sound like a dozen pistols. The lights flicked off. Emergency lanterns flicked on. An alarm screamed. But a sudden ache stabbed his ears with distracting urgency. A rushing wind through the cutter bay muffled all other sound, but he thought Miss Rustin might be screaming over the intercom.
“Deacon! Deacon Roundhouse!” he shouted into his suit com, but there was no response, and when he turned to the screen to see what Deacon Roundhouse might be signaling him to do, it was blank. A scattering of fingernail-sized holes on the far side of the console matched the hole pattern on the opposite wall of the cutter.
“Low pressure alarm! That’s the low-pressure alarm! I don’t remember this one!” he heard over the internal com. “There was a memory trick. But I don’t—I can’t—Deacon . . .” Rustin’s fading yells snapped Noah into motion.
He didn’t remember low pressure either, but he knew that if it got low enough, it turned into decompression. And that one every soul on Burdette Station knew: Suit, Visor, Gloves, Assist. He remembered.
Spacesuit—already on. He had, well, he didn’t remember exactly, but there were seconds, and a not very huge number of them before he had to get to the Assist part. In a space this small, he might have wasted half of that time already. He knew that because the deacon had taught him and was always talking about how fast the air would leave and how . . .
Suit, Visor, Gloves, Assist. Suit, Visor, Gloves, Assist.
He slammed down his visor, felt it seal and at once everything was better. The cacophony was muffled, the circulators in the suit kicked on, and his ears felt better. His gloves trailed from their tethers at his wrists. He pulled them on, and the smart fabric of the spacesuit wrists connected.
Assist.
The cockpit airlock cycled open. Thank the Tester! That meant she must be—
No wait, she wasn’t okay. Rustin spilled out helmetless. She drifted untethered, with both hands clasped tight against her left leg.
He was out of memorized responses. He didn’t know why the power was down. He didn’t know if the deacon was alive or dead. He didn’t know what to do about the spheres of rich dark red dribbling out from between Miss Rustin’s clenched fingers and drifting away on the now persistent breeze as she stared in wide-eyed pale-faced fascination. Her helmet wasn’t on. The tether to hold it to her suit trailed empty behind her.
He unbuckled from the cutter wall, looped the belt end around one hand, and grabbed her trailing ankle.
They hung together in the middle of the cutter bay for a moment while he tried to yell, “Helmet!” at her with no response.
He keyed his suit’s external speaker and meaning to say something clear and helpful, instead gibbered, “Head, helmet, air, air, breathe now?”
One of her hands flew up and touched her face and blood globules trailing the hand caught in her haloed hair. Her eyes widened as if she’d only just realized that the reason she was suffocating was because she’d lost her helmet.
She turned a panicked head back and forth with enough confusion that Noah was certain she had no idea where her helmet had been even before the cutter was hit.
He pulled them both down to the cutter wall with his belt and clipped her into the chair by the now useless console. The emergency kit built into the wall opened easily under his gloved fingers, and praying, he uncoiled the wall-mounted oxygen hood and pulled it over her head.
“Deep breaths,” he said through his suit speakers.
She batted at his hands, and Noah couldn’t see her eyes through the mass of hair. The ambient pressure telltale inside his own helmet visor blinked from amber to solid red. Cabin pressure was near vacuum. She couldn’t hear him. He took Rustin’s free hand and cupped it around the mouthpiece inside the hood. Her hand squeezed tight on it and the other hand flew up from her wounded leg to push back hair and get the mask fitted over her mouth and the ends of the hood sealed with the top of her spacesuit.
Noah grabbed a suit patch from the emergency kit and slapped it over the puncture in her suit. Blood stopped dribbling into the cabin, but the wound underneath was untreated. A skinsuit would’ve known she was injured and adjusted compression. But a gumby had none of that smart tech. Noah grabbed a longer length of suit repair tape and wrapped it tightly around her whole calf squeezing the bulky suit fabric. He hoped it would be enough.
But he needed to see how badly the cutter was damaged and figure out if Deacon Roundhouse was hurt, and he couldn’t stay here to do any of it.
Rustin, holding her oxygen hose firmly to her face, gave him a determined nod. Noah smiled back. She understood. She’d be okay with just the hood and the cutter’s emergency oxygen for a while, even if that meant she couldn’t move around until help arrived. In the meantime—
He kicked off the wall and glided to the front bulkhead and the cockpit airlock. He looked though it and winced. He counted four through-and-through punctures he could see, and there might well be more he couldn’t. One had hit the main multi-function display almost dead center, another punched straight through the communications section, and Rustin’s helmet floated against the cockpit canopy, holed through on both sides. He left it.
The solid salvage mass remained in matched orbit in the center of the clear armorplast viewing screen. But the deacon was missing and the next nearest cutter on a salvage run was over a quarter rotation around Uriel, and Burdette Station was still farther off. The Yeltsin System suddenly felt bigger than it ever had before.
A tether line still hung, attached to the salvage, but Deacon Roundhouse wasn’t on it, and Noah’s imagination supplied him a too vivid picture of what the debris that had sliced holes through Cutter 19 could have done to the deacon’s skinsuited body. If he could get sensors up, maybe he could trace where the corpse was.
Noah crawled into the pilot’s chair and looked over the cutter’s status boards. The main multifunction display was shot, but the smaller one in front of the copilot’s chair looked like it might be functional. He punched the button to toggle between displays, grateful he’d seen the deacon do that, and the secondary display came alive with alphanumeric codes.
He didn’t have a clue what all too many of them meant, but he started puzzling out the ones he could. They were running on stored energy only, he discovered. The cutter’s fusion reactor had auto-shutdown. The solar converters woven into the cutter’s hull remained functional, but out this far from Yeltsin’s Star, those dribbles of energy wouldn’t be enough to even sustain life support after the stored power ran empty. He pushed away his fears and kept looking.
He checked the radiation screens: they were still up. He let out a relieved breath. The salvage onload had had a planned work break in two hours because the find was on course to pass through one of Uriel’s radiation belts not long after that. Deacon Roundhouse had been going to use the break to give them both a cutter systems overview and then they’d get back to salvaging after the radiation levels dropped back down.
Indicators for the cutter’s thrusters were dead. The debris field might have cut through too much of their machinery or maybe it had severed the wrong indicator line. He remembered from newscasts about the Manticore-Haven war that if a strike on a warship got past sidewalls and shielding and reached the powerplants, that were basically gravitically contained fusion explosions already, they detonated.
But these old-style cutters didn’t have those kind of powerplants. Roundhouse had said they needed less power and were designed with the understanding that their operators might be, ah, less expert than the crew of a full-sized starship. When an old reliable electromagnetic fusor of the type Cutter 19 mounted got unstable, it just quenched itself and waited to be told to restart.
Noah looked longingly at the restart button, but he didn’t actually know how to pilot a cutter or know if they had the energy for more than one restart. A lot of angry red errors, cautions and warnings filled the powerplant’s part of his readouts. He reached for the communications headset instead.
The comms display had a lot of buttons he didn’t understand. He was pretty sure that didn’t really matter, though, given the hole punched clear through it and the fact that every one of its LEDs was blank. He tried anyway, though, and pressed the button for something titled “suit comms.” He called the deacon, but there was no response. He tried “standard channel” in an attempt to reach Burdette Station. Same. He tried “emergency channel” and called out by name a few of the other recovery boats he knew were out.
No sounds came back over the headset, but he couldn’t be sure that meant his signals were—or weren’t—actually going out. He hadn’t had classes in any communication systems yet.
Of all the solid red and amber lights glowing on the console, one light blinked yellow on the secondary multi-function display: restart autopilot.
That might clear some of the errors. Or maybe all the systems would go offline and never start up again.
Noah closed his eyes, held his breath, and tapped the touchscreen icon.
Nothing blew up, so he opened his eyes again and exhaled explosively. The light was still blinking, but now it was green and the words “systems check in progress. autopilot restart in 3 minutes” glowed below it.
There was nothing else he could do while he waited, so he went back to check on Rustin.
“We’re okay?” she asked as soon as he appeared in the cutter bay. She’d found the internal circuit radio in the emergency kit and the speakers inside his suit transmitted her voice without even a crackle of interference. She’d tied her hair back with suit tape and resealed her hood. That hair was going to be very short if they lived through this. “I didn’t want to bother you while you were checking things out in the cockpit, but tell me, really, are we okay?”
“We’re okay,” he said automatically, and realizing it was a lie, he added something true: “There’s a lot of damage up there, but the autopilot is rebooting.”
“Oh, thank the Tester, and they’ll come looking for us?”
“Should.” Except the deacon told them we’d be out of communications while dragging the salvage in and expected it to take at least a few hours.
“Didn’t Deacon Roundhouse tell Cutter Control that it’d be tough to fit hourly comms checks in while dragging in salvage and besides that Uriel would block direct transmissions and the replacement commsat relays aren’t working real well for cutter-grade whisker net comms? And then the Cutter Control guy just said, ‘Okay, but yell if you need anything,’ and the deacon said, ‘Yup, sure will’?”
Damn it. Rustin never seemed to forget anything. “Well, yeah. But they should notice when we don’t come back. I mean of course they’ll look for us.”
“Noah,” Rustin said, “where is Deacon Roundhouse?”
The deck was very interesting.
The console next to Rustin restarted. The system reset hadn’t killed them both. Noah breathed out a sigh of relief.
Rustin spun around and typed furiously on the console to see the cockpit displays. You couldn’t fly the cutter from here without codes neither of them had, but you could see all the consoles and read the alarms. Rustin tried to patch through to the comm system anyway.
“Deacon, Deacon Roundhouse?” she called into her headset.
“Um, I’m sorry. I think, the debris, I think he’s dead,” Noah said. “And I couldn’t get any of the cutter’s comm equipment to work.”
Rustin paled, but she kept trying. It didn’t work for her either. Then she looked at the wall and turned a switch.
“Bedlam! Noah Bedlam!” The deacon’s voice roared in Noah’s earphones with a rasp that sounded like he’d been bellowing the entire time since the debris strike, and Noah’s eyes went huge. He looked at Rustin, and she pointed at the bulkhead mounted speaker. For a moment, he felt only fresh confusion, but then he understood. The deacon must have jacked physically into the airlock communications panel. He probably had been shouting at them over the cutters intercom all along, but with no air, they hadn’t been able to hear him until Rustin switched the intercom to their suit channels!
“Yes, sir?” Rustin said. “Are you okay?”
A long, relieved breath whispered over the channel. “Oh, thank the Tester. Yes, I’m fine. The lights went out on the cutter, and after I found the entry and exit holes on the outer hull I thought I’d lost you two. The exterior access airlock won’t cycle me in. It’s got a false no-pressure alarm for the cutter bay.”
“Um, it’s not a false alarm, Deacon,” Noah said.
“Oh,” Deacon Roundhouse’s voice lost some of its cheer. “Okay, I’ll just pry a cover off over here and see if I can figure out how to manually override this thing.”
Noah swallowed and told the deacon which wires needed to be crossed if it was the same as a planet-side household airlock.
The deacon grunted acknowledgement and cycled in. He launched straight across the cutter with practiced ease and scanned through the cutter’s system errors on Suleia’s console before heading just as quickly to the cockpit. Noah followed him and was surprised when the old space worker paused on his way through to the cockpit to drag him in and wave Rustin a cheery parting salute.
“Holding up all right, Mr. Bedlam?” Deacon Roundhouse said as they entered the cockpit.
“Uh, yes, Deacon,” he said. “But Miss Rustin’s injured and the cutter is broken.” Noah gulped and delivered the bad news. “The comm system is down and we can’t move. I’m glad you aren’t already dead, but I think we’re all going to die.”
The deacon shook his head and smiled. “We all die, but not today.”
At least some of the LEDS which had been crimson before were only yellow now, Noah noticed as the deacon floated to the copilot’s chair. He swung into it with practiced ease, settled himself in front of the multifunction display, and called up each of the cutter’s system analysis reports in turn. At the drive system screen, he started chuckling.
“Look at this.” He pointed at the detailed readout for the fusion drive. “That’s not inoperable. It’s just broken.”
“You can fix it?” Noah asked.
The deacon shook his head. “I can’t fix it without a bunch of spare parts we don’t have, and I’d much rather have a proper engineer do that work. I’m a tech. But!” He held up a triumphant finger. “I can use it. The lights might dim a bit,” he added as a caution and began typing commands into the screen.
“We’re in a busy star system less than a million miles away from a half dozen stations, including our home base. And we have almost an entire T-day of life support, if you count our suits, which I do. If we were all unconscious or you hadn’t pushed the reset button to override the error that had the cutter trying to repressurize, then we could easily have died. But we won’t now.”
“The cutter was trying to repressurize?” Noah said.
The deacon gave him a sideways look. “Ah. Well. Next time I’ll include more on cutter casualty responses in the early training sessions. But what matters right now is that you got the fusion drive back up. We can wait things out for a bit while I think of something. Hmm, maybe thrusters . . .”
He jabbed a few buttons and made an unhappy growl at the controls. He changed the screen over to the comms system and it filled up with red and yellow casualty lights. Deacon Roundhouse grunted displeasure.
“Deacon?” Rustin called over the internal speaker. “May I ask a question?”
Besides that one? Noah didn’t say it.
“At least she’s asking,” Deacon said softly, and then: “Go ahead, Miss Rustin.”
“Can we restore power to the thrusters? The control screen says they aren’t damaged.” Her voice went up with suppressed anxiety. “I thought maybe I should ask before pushing the button. It’s got a big flashing thing that says, ‘Restore thruster power? Y/N’ here on the cutter systems control panel.”
“You’d need a control override code to have systems control access from a remote console,” Noah said, baffled.
“Oh, did you need that?” Miss Rustin asked. “It’s Mrs. R’s birthday. That’s the default for all of the codes on Burdette Station.”
“Tester save us,” Deacon Roundhouse muttered.
“Oh, um, sorry,” Rustin said. “Sorry to bother you. Of course, you knew the code.”
“Touch nothing,” Roundhouse said. “Noah: main bay. We’ll be right there.” Roundhouse hurried him through to the cargo section and shifted Rustin out of the seat.
With a shaking finger, Deacon Roundhouse pressed the button to restore power to the cutter’s thrusters. A flurry of reports scrolled down the screen, and they were all green.
Noah and Rustin exchanged hopeful glances.
“Not always wrong,” Deacon Roundhouse said, grinning. “The control lines from the cockpit console must’ve been one of the parts of this old rig that got shredded by the collision. Thank the Tester for the engineers who build rigs like this with backups to the backups. Strap in kids, I’m driving us home.”
A few hours later back at Burdette Station, Suleia Rustin listened without speaking while Noah told her about how many people had been reading her letters. Noah waited for an outburst or maybe some angry tears, but Rustin didn’t even blush.
“I’ll write her another letter,” she said and then she leaned in and whispered conspiratorially, “Deacon Roundhouse agreed to give me a recommendation on Sacristy letterhead. A good one that he’ll let me read before he sends. And he said it’ll say good things about being calm under pressure. He says he’s going to tell them that I have a tendency towards being a dumbshit too but he intends to phrase it as ‘willingness to speak uncomfortable truths.’” She shook her head. “That almost sounds like a good attribute. Makes me think that as long as I keep my eyes open to sometimes being wrong about stuff, then maybe, at least some of the time, I could figure out fixes for stuff that nobody else seems willing to admit is a problem.”
Noah laughed. It was good to be alive, but his problems weren’t over. “Think he’d write me a recommendation letter? Think that’d make any difference for a guy with a criminal record?”
Rustin rolled her eyes. “That thing on the very day that you turned fourteen? You weren’t born until almost midnight. I checked the records. It should’ve been a juvie offense. I got Mrs. R. to write a letter to a judge friend of the Lady Steadholder’s weeks ago. It’ll probably be expunged from your record in a month or two whenever the system gets it processed. And it’s not like it matters anyway. Deacon Roundhouse has you on the list for cutter pilot training.”
“Suleia,” Noah said, “you are everything that’s right with Grayson.”
She laughed. “No one thinks that, not even me anymore.”
Grayson Navy Mail System
Personal Message for Ensign Cecelie Rustin
June 25th, 1922 PD
Hey Sis,
You know that guy I met? The pretty impressive one you’d love? I think he’s not into me. But you aren’t getting an introduction either. I’m onto you.
—Suleia
June 25th, 1922 PD
Dear Madam Lady Steadholder, Mrs. Theresa Burdette:
I want to thank you again for this internship. It’s been significantly more exciting than I’d expected. Mrs. Nadia Roundhouse has taught me quite a bit, and I am fortunate to have been granted the opportunity to learn from her and from her husband, Deacon Roundhouse.
Oh, and I did want to make a few last suggestions. About the rent assisted apartments in Benedict City, are you aware of the filter issues? Perhaps we could talk when I get back.
With Greatest Respect,
<thumbprint signed>
Suleia Rustin,
Burdette Assistance Program Intern
[Entry ends. Three views: NRoundhouse, LadyTBurdette,
SteadholderBurdette.]
Noah entered Deacon Roundhouse’s office later. “You wanted to see me, Deacon?”
“Yeah, Mr. Bedlam. I’ve got a cutter pilot training program and a space station engineering maintenance program starting up. I’m thinking you should do the cutter pilot one. Just sign at the bottom of these forms here.”
“Um, thank you, Deacon, but before I sign, I need to study up on the details of the two programs,” Noah said.
“Taking control of your own future,” Deacon Roundhouse said, and he smiled. “Good man.”