SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Margo did manage to find a long, rusted metal cupboard in a large utility closet that none of the crew was yet sleeping in. With two of the synthetic wool blankets and three very fibrous pillows, it was almost a bedroom. There was even a steel door that slid noisily open and closed, and made a locking sound when you hit the right button.

Not that the door did her much good. The men (the ones who weren’t afraid of her) still went in and out like the closet was wide open. For the first couple of days, they bothered with pretext, coming in to fish around amongst the jumbles of cord, and replacement switches, and lengths of as-yet un-rusted wire. But that didn’t last long.

There came a period of relative privacy after Captain Pilgrim Pilgrim picked a man to guard the door, and told the worst offenders to stop being quite so pervy, or expect double-shifts. That didn’t last long either.

Now almost every one of them, including the man supposedly assigned to the door, came in at least twice a day to have a good, grinning gape at whatever she was doing. When that got boring, they’d try to get her to talk.

“You ever get freaky in that chair you miss so much? Is it good for that?”

“There’s buttons on it I’ve never pushed.”

“So it could be good for that.”

“We’ll never know.”

“You feel anything down there?”

“I feel enough.”

“You ever been with a man who’s sewed back on his own arm?”

“No.”

“Would you like to?”

“Not especially. Can you sew other things, or just your arm?”

Margo wasn’t bothered, she decided, since being bothered never seemed to do very much. Nobody else on this ship went behind a door to strip their rank clothes off, or smell their own belches, or scratch their ass-cracks. Why should she?

At any rate, she’d learned pretty quickly to stop asking for things. The one time she’d asked about the number of servitors on board, they had laughed for what seemed like an hour. “People who use those servitors get to love them a little too much,” Pilgrim Pilgrim had said, “embrace your liberation.”

“ I’ve never loved them,” said Margo, “I grew up with swarms of them, it drove me fucking nuts. I used to send them smashing into walls just to see if I could do it.”

“I believe you,” he said, in a way that told her that wasn’t the right thing to say to someone like him.

And when she’d asked where the toilets were, he’d gone into another dark narrow, metal closet where he lifted up the false floor to reveal the dark, deep, seatless hole.

“How do I use that?” she’d asked, a little pale.

“How did you sit the toilet in that big, fancy cruiser before it broke?” he asked.

“It had a seat-back, and armrests, and a fall-guard. And…I usually have droids.”

“Same general principle,” he’d said in an absolutely unbearable voice, “squat, let loose, and get well out the way before you flush.”

(She did end up doing it, a full hour and ten minutes later, squatted on all fours with her dress up over her head, one leg on either side of the hole. She felt marvelously defiant, even as she emerged to a round of sarcastic applause from the crew.)

Margo had fully intended to keep to her closet-room as much as possible until they’d come to a UN Sky station. But whenever she asked Diallo, the grinning pilot, how close he thought the nearest one was, he would call her a little dictator and offer her some of his reconstituted soup (the sort of lumped up stuff that poor people ate before there were food labs). Also, Pilgrim Pilgrim and his one-eyed first mate seemed to be much more comfortable when she stayed put, and Margo didn’t see any reason to make them comfortable.

So, she dragged herself all around that filthy, rusted-out ramjet, seeing what she could see.

They were hiding something. Margo had figured out that much. They were carrying something—in the cargo bay, maybe elsewhere too—that they didn’t want found. There were a few too many halted conversations to ignore. A few too many badly suppressed glances in her direction.

Not that they were afraid of her finding it, necessarily. Even if they’d known who she was, she doubted it would mean anything to most of them. Most stepped right around her and carried on with their work when she crawled by, looking down to grin at her only when she called out cheerfully to keep from being stepped on.

But Kell and Captain Pilgrim had guessed something about her. The captain would straighten when he saw her, and ask her if there were any particular reason she needed to be there, wherever there happened to be. And Kell, whenever he came on her by accident, usually turned directly around and walked in the opposite direction.

“You don’t let it bother you,” Diallo had tried to tell her. “You must excuse a degenerate like Kell. Raised on a prison colony, the American kind. No hope of learning good manners, no experience with women. His mother was not a very successful prostitute.”

Margo smirked. “How can you be raised in a prison colony?”

Diallo shrugged. “Perhaps his mother was also a less than successful terrorist. I can’t claim to know.”

Margo studied his smile a moment. “But there are no prison colonies anymore.”

“No?”

“Not in UN space,” she said, sounding like a teacher even to herself. “The Security Council ruled a long time ago that abandoning prisoners on far-world correctional colonies constitutes inhumane punishment. The ruling was just upheld again the year I was born. It’s illegal.”

Diallo smiled, or at least showed his teeth. “That is comforting to know. Thank you.”

“It’s true.”

“I’m sure you’re right.”

“That’s the whole point of UN Sky. To make sure stuff like that doesn’t happen.”

Diallo was silent for a moment, and then said, with irritating slowness. “As you say. It does seem to me that people will always discover a place to put away the things they do not want, so that they don’t come back again. But I’ve never been very clever with names.”

Later, while she lay in her bunk trying to think of all the things criminals would not want UN Peacekeepers to find in their cargo bay (nukes, sonics, VX gas, high-power low-precision lasers?), Margo could not help thinking about Kell’s glass eye.

People without eye donors had biomechanical eyes. They had microchipped acrylic ones. At the very least, Margo had always thought, they had those plastic boxy pieces that you had to keep a cap on at night to block out images while you slept.

When you were Kell, on a faraway colony, and you knocked your eye out, what had to go wrong, what had to break down, before you fashioned your own out of whatever you could find, and carried on?

“Someone’s taken an interest in us,” was the first thing Diallo said when Rumer came on to the bridge.

“Peacekeepers, or the Kang family fun squad? Or both?”

“It’s difficult to say. She’s not marked. And she is keeping her distance.”

“Blueberries,” said Kell, “gotta be. You’ve heard that bitch talk. She knows somebody.”

Rumer ignored him. “Can you signal-cloak us?”

“I have done, of course,” said Diallo, “but I cannot do it long, and eventually she finds us. Very quietly persistent.”

“Keep on it ‘til you shake her. She don’t want us that bad, or she’d be on us already. We make our drop, even if we gotta pour it down there like manna.”

Diallo nodded, and bent over his joysticks.

“About that,” said Kell, rubbing his eye.

“About that,” said Rumer.

“What’re you thinking you’re gonna do with her? Our hitchhiker, I mean?”