John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

He rubbed his chest. It was bruised. It stung. Was the attack a practical joke? Or had someone really tried to kill him?

On the Colony’s rear launch level, A-Deck, the deck foreman looked at his watch. Russ had said ten minutes. It was now fifteen.

His screen pulsed, and Praeger’s image appeared there.

“Bucher!”

“Yes, sir?”

“What’s the delay?”

“Chief Parker said…”

“He’s out of line. Launch it now!”

“Yes, sir.”

Bucher turned and looked out the foot-thick tinted glass window into the Launch Deck area. The seventy-foot graymetal bulk of Repair Module 17, roughly beetle-shaped, was sitting in its deck collars, its pilot windows lit up, its launch lights glowing red.

Bucher hit a button, and the launch lights went green. He hit another button and spoke into a mike extending from the wall. “Clearance, 17.”

“Copy,” crackled from the speaker.

The enormous air-lock doors slid aside. There was no whoosh of air: the launch area was already pumped airless. The collars unlatched from the beetle’s legs, and it drifted up. Small jets on its aft sent it sliding neatly into space.

It became a black insect-shape snipped out of the field of stars, and then slipped like a shadow to Bucher’s left, out of sight, as it followed the curve of the hull back to where the temporarily sealed punctures were.

As the doors were closing behind it, Bucher saw something odd.

There was a two-man EVA module, just a bucket shape with clawlike arms extended in front of it, drifting by the doorway, from Bucher’s right. It looked as if it were following the RM17. That was odd, because it didn’t appear on his duty charts.

He switched on his extra Launch Deck cameras and saw a flattened image of the RM17 drift by. And then, thirty seconds later, the EVA module, coming close on the RM17’s heels.

Russ stormed into Praeger’s office, pushed past the secretary—and stopped short when he saw Praeger looking up at him. He felt his courage draining away, leaking through the holes Praeger’s glare made in him.

“You have a reason to come barging in, Russ, you’d better give it to me fast. ”

Russ’s mouth was dry. He could talk about the door’s attempt to crush him—but what really bothered him was the RM17. It was hard to put into words, though.

Sitting next to Praeger was Van Kips. Her normally immaculate flaxen hair looked a little mussed. Something odd about the way Praeger was sitting behind that desk too. And the room was dialed to dim illumination. It was almost dark in there. Could they have been…?

No, ridiculous. Not in here, not now.

“Well,” Russ began. “My com was down and I wanted to talk about that personnel list of the…” He stopped, his attention caught by the screen across from Praeger’s desk. It showed a TV image of the outer hull of the Colony, curving away like a metal plain. Four things crawling over it. No, two things, and their shadows. Repair Module 17—he could see the big numbers painted on the side—closely followed by a two-man EVA bucket.

“It’s already been launched?” Russ asked, his voice sounding hollow in his ears.

“Yes.” Smugness in Praeger’s voice. “Yes, why shouldn’t it? I was just monitoring it because…” Parker could feel Praeger pause to make up a lie. Praeger went on: “…ah, as you had expressed some concern about it. It seems to be just fine.”

“Isn’t it unusual for an EVA bucket to work so closely around the RM series?”

“Yes,” Van Kips said hastily. “We just put in a call to it. We couldn’t get through. That crazy interference again.”

“Well, we’d better try again…”

Van Kips and Praeger exchanged glances. “Oh, leave it alone, Russ,” she said.

Russ started to tell them about the “glitch” that had trapped him in the doorway… but nothing came out of his mouth. He was staring at the image on the screen. The EVA module was moving in closer—moving in on the cylindrical fuel tanks on the underside of the RM17.

The arms on the EVA bucket extended, and punched through the metal of the fuel tanks.

A crackle of electricity along the arms, a billow of gas from somewhere on the front of the bucket…

The RM17 exploded.

It was eleven o’clock and Kitty’s supervisor had sent her home early. She was riding in one of twelve small, rubber-wheeled cars pulled by something resembling an oversize golf cart. It made her remember being a little girl riding in a “train” not so different than this one at the Bronx Zoo, past a lot of tired, dull-eyed patchy-furred animals.

She sat across from a boy who held a smartfone on his lap. He was watching rock cartoons.

The people in the street-wide corridor—“Hollywood Boulevard”—were of all kinds. Unsmiling and dull-eyed, most of them, but there were people laughing here too. There was a group of boys wearing real-cloth jackets, covered with technicki patches, using markers to leave their gang tags on the walls. She couldn’t read the stylized graffiti writing. The train swept past them, rocking as it turned a corner, and she winced as the inertia chased a snake of nausea up through her. She’d almost collapsed at work today. The supervisor had said, “You’re past the time you can do this kind of work.”

It seemed her super could no longer pretend she didn’t know Kitty was pregnant. Kitty wondered if she’d reported it. They were supposed to report it in case the parents didn’t.

She sighed. She closed her eyes. She hoped Lester was behaving himself.

Her eyes snapped open when the device on the boy’s lap broke from its mindless minimono yammering to announce: “Special news report from Colony Central. A repair module working outside the Colony has exploded, with all hands lost. However, no major damage to the Colony’s hull was done. Although not yet Admin-confirmed, RM17 was reportedly destroyed by an accidental collision with a drone EVA module. A list of casualties will be…”

“Jeez,” the kid said.

Russ sat on his bunk, in the darkness, listening to an audio called “Night Noises in the Desert.” Smelling the fragrance disk he’d put in the scent player: sage, wood smoke, mesquite. He was sitting on his hands. When he didn’t sit on them, he tended to pound them against his temples, and that hurt, so he had to sit on them.

This is stupid, he told himself. So he took his sweaty hands from under his haunches and tucked them into his armpits for a while.

Goddammit. Goddammit son of a bitch.

They did it, all right. They had all the answers way too soon. Too pat. “Guidance mechanism on the drone EVA bucket poorly insulated, misdirected by RM17’s computer navigation signals.” They had it twenty minutes after the thing exploded.

He squeezed his eyes shut but still saw, against the darkness of his unlit chamber, the white flash, the fireball quickly snuffed out in the vacuum, the expanding ring of debris—

And twenty minutes after the RM17 exploded, Praeger was printing out a statement for release at 1800. The statement talked blandly of a poorly insulated guidance mechanism; the EVA bucket sent out to assist the RM17 was simply the wrong one, was the one that should have been in repair dock.

Some equipment dispatcher would get the blame. Maybe someone the SA wanted to get rid of. Just to put the cherry on the sundae. Get rid of one more, after killing all those men and women on RM17. All those troublemakers.

No, Russ told himself. No one’s going to take the fall for Praeger. Not that he could accuse Praeger. Yet. Too risky. Praeger would have him removed from his job before the accusation could become public. Praeger’s people—under Judith Van Kips’ supervision—censored all the Colony’s media now. Nothing went on the air or into printout without Van Kips’ approval.