Elizabeth Bonesteel - Breach of Containment

Jamyung will buy the box, Dallas thought determinedly. We can go off and have dinner and tomorrow everything will be the same.

But as it turned out, Dallas’s first instinct had been right. “What the fuck is that?” Jamyung asked dismissively, and only Dallas saw the curiosity in the trader’s eyes.

“Don’t know,” Martine said. Dallas had tried to teach her, but she was fucking awful at playing it cool.

“Fifty,” Jamyung said.

Even Martine was outraged at that. “Come on! The thing’s hot . It’s got a power source, at least.”

Jamyung picked up the box and turned it over in his hand. Dallas could see it better, here inside the dome: it was still that nondescript gray, but it had slightly rounded corners and edges, as if it were designed to be held. Something about the proportions gave it a strange sort of grace. Uncharmed, Jamyung tossed it back to Martine. “If it’s a power source, it’s a fucking weak one.” He paused. “Fifty-five.”

“Sixty,” Martine said, just as Dallas said “Eighty.”

Jamyung pinned Dallas with a look. “You guys unionizing on me?”

One for one. All the scavengers were taught that. You started teaming up, you lost all your business fast. But Dallas had to say something. “You know it’s different.”

“Different is useless.” But then Jamyung sighed, and Dallas thought something in the trader might have softened a little. “All right. Seventy. But that’s it, Martine. No more arguing, or you get shit.”

Martine kept her hand outstretched as Jamyung counted out seventy in hard currency into her palm. She set the box back down on the trader’s desk and waved at Dallas. “See you at the pub,” she said, and ran off.

Jamyung had picked up the box again and was turning it over in his hands. He noticed Dallas almost as an afterthought. “You need to stop doing that,” Jamyung said. “She’s good enough without your help.”

“You were ripping her off,” Dallas pointed out.

Jamyung tossed the box on his desk and opened a drawer, pulling out Dallas’s payment. “Sixty was a decent price.”

“Eighty was better.”

Jamyung snorted. “You’re too smart to be a scavenger, Dallas. You should be on my end.”

Dallas wouldn’t have Jamyung’s job for all the currency in that desk. “I like it out there.”

Jamyung shook his head and handed over the money. “Uninhabitable and freezing, except when we’re facing the sun, and then your env suit will melt right into your skin unless you’ve got one of the fancy ones the military are hoarding.”

“Maybe they’ll get the terraformers working again.”

Jamyung shot him a jaundiced look. “You think anybody’s going through all that again, you’re a damn fool. The surface is done. You should come in here and work for me.”

It wasn’t the first time Jamyung had offered, and it wouldn’t be the last time Dallas would refuse. “Bird in the hand,” Dallas said, and took the money.

“Suit yourself,” Jamyung said. “Go beat Martine at whatever bullshit game she’s hauled off the stream this week. And fuck, Dallas, stop telling her what her shit is worth. She learns on her own or she’s no good to me.”

“Okay.” Dallas turned to the door, then stopped. “What are you going to do with it?”

Jamyung’s eyebrows shot up. “What do you care?” And then his expression grew cunning. “You got a buyer?”

“Nope. Just curious.” Dallas lifted a hand. “See you tomorrow.”

But all the way to the pub, currency clanking and waiting to be spent, Dallas thought about that box lying on Jamyung’s desk, and couldn’t shake the feeling that, defunct terraformers or not, the days on Yakutsk were never going to be familiar again.

Elena ran in patient circles around the perimeter of Budapest ’s largest storage bay, the space around her filled with stacked crates towering like massive city blocks. The bay would be clear in a few hours, after they dropped off the seed stock and dried roots on Yakutsk, but even then there would be little room for exercise beyond running. A freighter, she had learned over the last year, wasn’t like a starship. Starships were designed for sustaining large crews over long-term missions, and generally sported a fair number of human-centric spaces. Freighters were rarely out longer than six weeks, their crews rarely larger than ten people. Living space was not prioritized. All of Budapest ’s crew quarters were small—if Bear Savosky, Budapest ’s captain, operated with ten crew instead of six, she would have had to share—and there was no separate gym space.

Early on in Budapest ’s venerable life, Bear had started packing cargo to leave a two-meter gap around the edges of the storage bay. Back when she had first met the freighter captain, when she was just sixteen and awed by any interstellar vehicle, even this inelegant, utilitarian cargo ship, she had remarked on it. “It was either make space for running,” he had told her, “or set the gravity to one-point-two so people can get some exercise walking across the kitchen. The last thing you want after a long shipping run is to get home and find out none of your clothes fit you anymore.”

Elena had been young, her metabolism still half child, and the statement had confused her. Now, at nearly thirty-five, she was grateful for his practicality.

Arin lapped her for the third time, and she smiled. Bear and Yuri’s adopted son was nineteen. He was also taller than she was, and so much more energetic; but he had no patience for a marathon. She watched him disappear around the corner, his heavy footfalls echoing around the cargo and off the tall ceiling, and resisted the urge to catch up with him. Controlling her natural competitiveness had been one of her hardest lessons at the Academy, but she had learned to pick a pace and stick with it, even if it was slow. The sprints she always lost, but she had done well over long distances. She had even won a few endurance runs.

But when it came down to it, she preferred dance to running. Here on Budapest, where there was no room, she missed it. With dance, time went more quickly; when there was music, it was so much easier to let her mind drift. She would be twelve weeks without dancing, out to Yakutsk and back. Running was an efficient method of exercise, but it left her restless and bored. She needed more than the mundane rhythm of her feet against the floor, and her heartbeat in her ears. She needed more than monotony .

On top of that … running reminded her of Galileo, and of Greg. Always Greg. For so many years he had been the anchor of her routine, from breakfast to duty to the gym. She used to watch him run, kilometer after kilometer, sometimes more than twenty in a day. For years she had wondered what he was running from. She had eventually concluded that he wasn’t trying to escape anything specific; he just felt the need to run. Movement. Forward. Anywhere but here.

A broken man. She had no good reason for missing him.

Arin came around again. “Slow old woman,” he said to her as he passed, and she laughed, taking off after him. She caught up, and he ran faster; his long legs brought him past her again, but not as far as he might have wanted. When they reached the inner door, he dropped to a walk, breathing heavily. In sympathy, she stopped as well.

“‘Slow’?” she objected.

“I beat you, didn’t I?” He bent down to scratch the head of the sturdy orange tabby cat seated by the door. Mehitabel, Budapest ’s standoffish and ubiquitous mascot, twitched her ears irritably and continued washing her face.