David Weber - Worlds of Honor

"What?" he asked. "It's just more mountains, Susan."

She turned her head to show him an expression of exasperation dusted with reproach, and he gave himself a mental shake, for his comment had come out in an older brother's deflating tone, and he hadn't meant it to. At seventeen, he was five years older than Susan, and as his mother had just finished pointing out to him a few weeks ago (in a rather painful conference), he'd gotten into the habit of ditching his kid sister whenever he and his friends had something "interesting" to do.

It had been an accurate accusation, and that had hurt, because he loved Susan and he knew he truly had been brushing her off and shooing her away as if she'd become some sort of inconvenience. And she could be an inconvenience, he admitted. But so could he, and so could anyone else, under the right—or wrong—circumstances. And the fact that Manticore Mineralogy and Mining, Ltd., which employed both their parents, had assigned them to the job of evaluating exploratory asteroid cores for the Hauptman Cartel in Manticore-B's Unicorn Belt for the past two years had only made it worse.

For all its massive resource wealth, the Unicorn could be a decidedly boring place to grow up. At least the Hibsons were assigned to Unicorn Eleven, one of the newer of the widely scattered orbital habitats Hauptman's had built to provide housing for its employees, and Unicorn Eleven had the most up to date living and recreational facilities imaginable. But most of its permanent work force tended to be very young—brand new geologists passing through for evaluation and final training before they were assigned to their own field teams, or equally young processing and R&D personnel just starting their way up those career ladders—with only a small, hard core of senior station training and management personnel. Kalindi and Liesell Hibson were two of the rare exceptions to that rule: the sort of specialist analysts who were too valuable to use in the field but who were most useful close to the actual exploration sites, where turnaround time could be minimized. For the last few years, Hauptman's teams had been working what had turned out to be an exceptionally rich portion of the Unicorn, and the need for extra hands was one reason Hauptman's had picked them up from Three-M on retainer to augment Unicorn Eleven's normal work force. As consultants from outside Hauptman's normal career tracks, they fell right in the middle of the gap in the age spread aboard the station: younger than the permanent senior personnel, but older than the transient newbies. As a result, they felt just a bit awkward whenever they tried to socialize with either, and the fact that they weren't officially part of the "Hauptman team" tended to exacerbate that problem.

What was true for them was twice as true for their kids, however. There simply weren't many children on Unicorn Eleven, and that was one area in which the invention of the prolong anti-aging treatments didn't help a lot, either. Prolong was tending to erase a lot of the age-based divisions which had always been humankind's lot, which would probably be a good thing once civilization fully adjusted to the consequences. Of course, first they'd have to have prolong long enough to figure out what all those consequences were , Ranjit supposed. It had been available in the Star Kingdom for only sixty-four years. To someone his age, that seemed like forever, but it was less than an eye-blink in terms of a culture's adjustment to so monumental a change. One immediate effect was readily apparent, however: people were waiting considerably longer, on average, to have children. His own parents had rushed things more than many of their contemporaries in that regard, because both of them loved children and they'd wanted to get started early, but that was increasingly rare. Which meant that, despite a total population on the order of eight thousand, there were less than three hundred kids on Unicorn Eleven, and those who were present tended to be the children of the senior personnel and so, on average, older themselves. At seventeen, Ranjit himself was below the median age of the children aboard the station, whereas Susan, at twelve, was actually the youngest one of all.

Worse, the station was far enough out from Gryphon, the inhabited planet of the Manticore Binary System's G2 secondary component, that the light-speed transmission lag between them was very noticeable. At the moment, it ran to just over twelve minutes each way, and it was growing steadily longer as the relative motions of Unicorn Eleven and Gryphon took them further and further apart, which made it impractical for station personnel to tie into the Gryphon planetary education net as they would normally have done. The Hauptman Cartel had set up an excellent school system within the habitat, and Ranjit rather enjoyed the novel experience of having direct, physical access to his human instructors. But the lack of any real-time link to the planetary net meant Susan had been denied even the electronic friendships with classmates she might have enjoyed under other circumstances. She'd made a couple of long-distance friends aboard Unicorn Nine and Unicorn Ten, the closest pair of Hauptman habitats to their own, but that was it, and Ranjit knew his sister had grown increasingly lonely. She hadn't needed her own big brother making it worse, but that was exactly what he'd done. Which was the reason he had assured his parents that if they allowed Susan to come along on the field trip Mr. Gastelaars, Unicorn Eleven's chief administrator, had arranged, he would keep an eye on her.

His father, especially, had been hesitant to let her go, for several reasons. For one, she would be the youngest student on the trip, and it would be the first time she had ever been allowed to make such a lengthy trip unaccompanied by at least one of her parents. For another, the Hibsons were natives of Manticore itself, and the capital planet was a warm world where skiing opportunities were rare. Susan had been only a beginner-level skier (on snow, anyway) when her parents were assigned to Unicorn Eleven, and she'd had precious little opportunity for practice since, but Kalindi Hibson had a pretty shrewd notion that his headstrong daughter would insist she was more experienced than she actually was unless someone sat on her firmly. And for yet a third, he knew that all of Ranjit's friends would also be along—including Monica Gastelaars, the chief administrator's strikingly attractive daughter, who also happened to be seventeen years old—and questioned just how much time Ranjit would truly devote to keeping an eye on Susan.

Their mother had come down on Ranjit and Susan's side, however. Liesell had insisted that Susan was old enough for the trip and pointed out that the group would be accompanied by six adults, most of whom were child care professionals and all of whom were experienced skiers. Moreover, the Athinai Resort, the largest and best known on Gryphon (which meant in the Manticore Binary System) was accustomed to this sort of field trip. That was one of the main reasons it had been chosen when the outing was planned, and the Hauptman Cartel had arranged for the resort to provide full-time instructors, all experienced with young people, to ride herd on their youthful charges on the actual slopes. It was unlikely that even their inventive daughter would be able to put much over on that many veteran kid-watchers, she'd suggested. And if Susan could , then her parents needed to find out about it now so that they could take proper precautions—like locking her in her room until she was twenty. Besides, it was past time Susan got a chance to meet some other youngsters her own age. Then Liesell had sealed the deal by unscrupulously extracting an explicit promise from Ranjit that he would not allow his own interests to distract him from maintaining a close watch on Susan. He'd given her his word, but not without a certain sinking feeling which suggested to him that he had, in fact, been planning on spending just a little less time with his sister than he'd originally tried to allow his parents (and himself) to believe he had in mind.