“I haven’t seen enough of the layout to come up with an informed estimate.” Abel remains within half a meter of Riko, partly because she is his guide, but also because the other members of Remedy are far less sure of him than she is. They’ve hung back approximately three and a half meters, following at a careful distance, muttering among themselves. He doesn’t object. On a crashed ship, on an isolated world, it would be tactically unwise to needlessly antagonize terrorists.
Riko Watanabe is such a terrorist. He has known that since her connection to the Orchid Festival bombing. Yet this information refuses to fully process when she gives him a small, uncertain smile; the expression makes it clear how young she really is, no more than twenty-one or -two.
“We’ve got to introduce you to Captain Fouda,” she says. “Explain to him exactly what you can do. With your abilities, you might be able to help us get some of this ship back in operating order. I mean, I know it’s never going to fly again, but at least we could get it running as some kind of shelter.”
Given the extremity of the crash, Abel doubts this. “While landing, I observed a large structure some kilometers distant. The most rational conclusion is that this was the shelter built to house the first settlers here. Your group should send a team there to investigate. It would undoubtedly provide better long-term shelter than the wreckage of this ship.”
“Of course they had homes waiting for them already. These bastards would never come here to settle the land through hard work like any other colonists.” Riko clutches the blaster rifle she holds a little closer. Abel’s very glad not to be standing in its crosshairs. “The Columbian Corporation’s fancy-pants passengers are too good to dig ditches, or winter in ready-huts. No, they have to be surrounded by luxury at all times, taking a luxury ship to keep them comfortable until everything’s set up to their satisfaction. It’s ridiculous!” She nods toward an ornate mural on one wall, an upside-down portrait of the falcon god Horus.
Her irascible mood seems likely to cause complications. Abel keeps his tone even. “You’re entirely correct that the use of resources for this ship was wasteful. But the Osiris has been destroyed. We should move on.”
Riko stops midstep. The orange emergency lighting catches the spikes in her short black hair and the thoughtful expression on her face. “I know you’re right, but it’s hard,” she finally says. “I’ve been fighting this kind of evil since I turned ten. Moving on—that’s never been an option before now. It’s always been about tearing something down. Never about building something up.”
“New worlds offer new possibilities.” Abel continues making his way through the Osiris corridors, and as he’d anticipated, Riko stays with him.
By this point on his visit to a new vessel, he’s usually mentally constructed a rudimentary layout of his surroundings. Form follows function, and the fundamental structures within any station or ship usually conform to basic templates. The Osiris, however, is different. Its corridors wind and bend in illogical ways, more like the tangled streets of an ancient city than anything designed. Even though maps of the ship are posted at every stairwell and lift, they won’t illuminate without main power, which means they’re as useless as the nonfunctioning lifts and the stairs that seem to dangle from the ceilings. They walk through a spa with saunas and hot tubs hanging down uselessly, a ballroom with ridged acoustic tile that would’ve caught sound from beneath efficiently but is tricky to walk on, and finally a banquet hall with long opalescent tables dangling from the ceiling.
This extravagance seems likely to set Riko off on another tirade against waste. Abel decides the best means of distracting her would be to obtain more information for his own purposes. “Since you were ten?”
Riko, still gazing at the shimmering tables above, doesn’t quite catch it. “What?”
“You said you’d been fighting since you were ten. I wouldn’t have thought Remedy accepted recruits that young.”
“Oh. They don’t. That was a—turn of phrase, I guess.”
Abel considers what he knows of the human subconscious. “Even turns of phrase mean something.”
Taking another couple of steps, her boots crunching against broken glass from the tables, Riko shakes her head. “I was ten the first time I saw a food riot on Kismet. You wouldn’t think people would be starving a couple miles from a beach party, would you? But we were. You could hear people laughing while you lay in your bed hungry.”
“Kismet hides that fact very well.” Even Abel, who is hardly naïve about humanity’s unkindness to its own, hadn’t realized hunger would be one of that planet’s problems.
“There’s plenty of fish in the ocean, and humans can eat most of them, but you have to serve the resort guests first.” She stares into an unseen distance, focused only on the past. “Tons of edible fruit grows, both on Kismet-native trees and the ones we imported—the palms with their coconuts, or the bananas, or the pineapples—but the resort guests love those. They eat it all. Every alcohol distiller in the galaxy ships to Kismet, plus we were able to ferment the local bellfruit into a wine so sweet you could hardly believe it. And the guests drank all the wine. Every glass. Nearly every drop. You could spend every day harvesting food, every night serving it to the guests, and then at the end of it go to bed ravenous.”
“That sounds difficult.” Hunger is one human experience Abel can’t share. He doesn’t think he’s missed much.
“We have it pretty good on Kismet, at least better than the Vagabonds or laborers on Stronghold. But compared to the people who visited our world to eat and drink the best we had, and who lay around on our beaches all day while we slaved to make them comfortable? We were desperate,
