“Don’t sir me. This ain’t Fleet. You’re just an idiot on the wrong end of a shovel, and I’m the guy handing out shovels. That makes me smarter than you, but it don’t make me a sir.”
“Fair enough,” Kyle said with a grin.
“Yeah, yeah, yuck it up. They all do, the first day. We’ll see how much you’re laughing at the end of the shift, when just raising your nose to sneer at me feels like lifting a two-ton hopper. No, you idiot, the other way.” The foreman reached out to twist Kyle’s helmet into the locking ring.
“Sorry … I’m not used to space suits.” On Kassa they had only worn them for warmth.
“I can see that, man. And I can see you ain’t Fleet, either. I don’t care. You ain’t from here, you ain’t staying here, and you got a sob story an hour long. And I don’t care. All I care about is that you’re clocking out in six hours with all your parts attached.” He raised his voice, shouting so the rest of the workers could not fail to hear him even through their suits. “That goes for all of you. Stop thinking you can do this. You’ve been in sims—I hope, and if not, it’s too late to tell me now—but real heavy G ain’t like a sim. It don’t go away after half an hour. It tugs at you all the time, drags at every fiber of your being, sucks you down like the dying pull of Earth herself. It is your enemy. Forget that for one microsecond and you’ll be a debit in my paycheck. So stop thinking you can do this job. And start focusing on
It was only seventeen percent over Terran standard. Kyle had tried the sim, doing deep knee bends in a gravity-enhanced chamber, and while it felt ridiculously uncomfortable, he had passed the medical exams.
“Every step you take is a fifth harder. Every drop you fall is a fifth longer. Everything you pick up is a fifth heavier. All them fifths add up fast, in ways your idiot brains didn’t evolve to handle. You can’t operate by instinct out there. Every single action has to be consciously evaluated before you do it. You will burn calories you didn’t know you had. You will strain muscles they ain’t even named in the medical vids. If you try to act like you’re in normal G, your suit’s air-cracker will not be able to keep up oxygen production, and you will pass out. This is for your own good. An unconscious idiot is cheaper than a dead one. We can fix your air, but we can’t fix your heart if it bursts a chamber.”
The idea that he could die of heartbreak struck Kyle as unlikely. If that were possible, then walking off the
“Now get your arses into the air lock. We’re gonna shut the door and flood it with kelamine. If you start throwing up in your suit, that’s ’cause you didn’t seal it properly. You can thank us for saving your life after you clean out your suit.”
The suits were different from Prudence’s. Heavy opaque rubber instead of the clear thin plastic he had expected. He didn’t know if that was because they needed to be stronger, or if the rubber was just cheaper. The suit was impregnated with heavy salts to block radiation, but so was the glass faceplate of the helmet, and it was transparent. On the other hand, there wasn’t much value in being able to see through these suits. They didn’t contain slender dark-haired girls with intense black eyes.
The air lock cycled, lights going from green to yellow. Nobody threw up, which Kyle took as a good beginning. Then the lights went red, and the outer door creaked open.
Climbing down a short set of stairs, he took each step carefully. The foreman was standing to the side, watching the new recruits critically. Kyle stepped out of line to join him.
“Why kelamine?” he asked.
“We used to just use a stinker, but one day we got a jackass with anosomia. Couldn’t smell a thing, and didn’t think to mention it until it was too late. The kelamine means we don’t gotta rely on you idiots to tell us something’s wrong. Plus, it washes off the suits easier.”
Kyle debated asking if it was cheaper, too, but decided not to.
“See that one?” The foreman pointed to a young man who had taken the last two steps in one go. “That jackass is gonna get somebody killed. Go ride his arse and keep him in line. Can you do that?”
“Sure,” Kyle agreed. The foreman had an impressive sense of judgment. He seemed to already know what every member of his team was capable of.
Kyle shuffled over to join up with the young stallion. “Hey, slow down a second. Give an old man a break.”
The kid turned and stared at him through his glass bubble, trying to see if Kyle was ribbing him.
“The foreman teamed us up,” Kyle explained. “This is my first time out here. How about you?”
“Yeah,” the kid agreed. “But I did a lot of time in the sims. I’ll be okay.”
Kyle hadn’t asked. The kid must be pretty nervous to volunteer so much information. People always led with what they were trying to hide.
They climbed onto an open-bed truck with the rest of the squad. The foreman came by to make sure everyone was hanging on to a safety strap. Then he shouted to the driver, and the truck rolled forward, jiggling heavily over every bump. Kyle watched the alien landscape bouncing by for as long as he could stand it. The rocks were almost all the same dull gray, with only the occasional streak of brown or black. Wind had shaped the landscape, carving out pillars and valleys, smoothing craters and building drifts, but after the first five minutes it was just a bunch of rocks.
The truck descended into a valley, rock walls rising up and spreading away.
“Why don’t they use grav-cars?” he asked his young companion.
“Cost. The extra Gs makes them burn too much fuel.” The kid had done his homework.
“Where are you from?” Kyle regretted asking it immediately. On Baharain, people didn’t like to talk about their past, and Kyle had no particular desire to discuss his own. But he liked this kid.
The kid hesitated, but talked anyway. He would learn some expensive lessons about trust, if he stayed in this cesspit long enough. Hopefully the lessons wouldn’t be fatal.
“Kassa. We got attacked. I used to cut trees, but my dad said we’d need hard currency to make it through winter.”
The effluent of war. Refugees.
“I heard about that,” Kyle said, feeling like a heel for lying. “But you’ll pull through.”
“If they don’t come back. Dad says why would they, but nobody knows why they came in the first place.”
“Is anybody sending help?” His news was a few weeks out of date.
“Altair Fleet is there, but they don’t do much. Just hang around in deep space, looking for secret nodes. Other planets have sent food and stuff, but we don’t need that. We need a fleet of our own.”
That surely couldn’t be what the League wanted to hear. They wanted the worlds cowering under their thumb, not arming themselves for resistance.
“Fleets are expensive,” Kyle said. It was a perennial political football on Altair. Fleet never seemed to provide anything except prestige. Not everyone felt that was worth paying for. Kyle’s experience as a cop had convinced him that the reason Fleet had nothing to do was because it existed. Just like detectives had a lot less to do when there were regular patrols by beat cops. If Fleet didn’t exist, then Altair would pretty quickly find out why they needed it.
He imagined there was a lot of crowing and finger-pointing going on right now, back on Altair. The people who voted for Fleet would be bragging about their prescience. He wasn’t ready to join them, though. Not until he was sure Fleet could actually help.
Not until he was sure whose side Fleet was really on.
The truck rattled around a corner, exposing a vast but shallow crater. The road crept along a lip of the crater. Men and machines labored below. Kyle goggled at them, stunned by the improbable sight.
“What are
His knowledgeable young guide answered. “Crawlers. The company’s secret weapon.”
The crawlers were large, compared to men, but small on the scale of starships and earth-moving equipment. The other companies used massive bulldozers and ore transports the size of houses, or sometimes the size of entire apartment buildings. These machines seemed almost delicate in comparison. Only five meters high and ten wide, they looked like animated bowls carrying ore from place to place. What shocked Kyle was how they moved.
On eight legs. Like insects, stepping gingerly from place to place, moving in unnatural gaits with their own sense of purpose.
The wheel was as old as Earth, tried and tested by the ages. Improved by tracks and rails, it could go
