Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 (37 page)

Lizzie tried to sound more certain than she was. Her plan assumed that nothing further went wrong with the station. That Lizzie didn't go crazy from being cooped up in a lightless ship. That the soldiers who answered her distress call weren't soldiers who thought it was okay to beat up a little girl. But Lizzie's future was a teetering stack of uncertainties; this plan was the best of a bad batch.

Momma argued fiercely for a time—so furiously that Lizzie realized that Momma had already considered this plan. She just hadn't wanted to acknowledge it. And when Momma was forced to admit there was no other way, Momma squeezed her tight and wept. It was only the second time Lizzie had seen Momma weep since Daddy had died, and both times in the same day, and that scared her to the core.

Momma took Lizzie in her lap and combed her hair one last time while Gemma finished soldering the junker into shape. “You know I love you, right?”

Lizzie did, but it was good to hear it now. She buried her face in her mother's chest, trying to inhale Momma's scent so deeply it would carry her through blackness and terror. All her life, Momma had always been just a couple of rooms away; now, Momma was going to be systems away, crossing the void in a half-dead ship, and Lizzie would have no way of knowing what happened.

“Maybe I should have gone to planetfall,” Momma muttered, rubbing her hands on her pants. “Maybe I should have—”

That questioning was the most terrible thing of all. Momma
never
doubted.

“It's okay,” Lizzie said. “Daddy's out there. He'll protect me.”

Momma looked sad, and then desperate, and then she floated with Lizzie to the observation window—the only native source of light in the whole station now—and spread her fingers across the scratched window.

Momma said other things before she left, but that was what Lizzie remembered: the terrifying fear and love as Momma said a silent prayer to Daddy, the stars reflected her eyes.

Without electricity, the airlocks didn't work. So Lizzie said her goodbyes, and then pressed her ear to the wall as Momma and Gemma welded themselves behind a door, then started up the ship, then rammed through a weakened hatch and into space. The only confirmation she had of their leaving was the hollow metal
thoom
that resounded through the station walls.

She prayed they'd make it. But whether they were alive or dead, for the first time in her life, Lizzie was alone.

 

* * *

 

Back when they'd had guests, Lizzie had bragged how even if all the servers crashed irrevocably, Sauerkraut Station would still remain a livable environment until rescue could arrive. The thermal hood that covered the axis like a great, trembling umbrella was the brilliant part of Great-Great Gemma's design. It intercepted all the solar emanations that might otherwise cook the axis, transmitting both heat and electricity back into the station. It was an elegant design that required little monitoring, and no complicated circuitry; the core of the station's axis served as a boiler room, keeping the station heated to human-habitable temperatures even in the deep cold of space.

But, Lizzie thought after the first day, it made for lousy viewing.

She pressed her nose against the observation deck window, looking for signs of Momma and Gemma. It was suffocatingly black; the thermal hood blocked all the sunlight, leaving Lizzie to strain her eyes to the faint illumination of reflected starlight. The only real light came from the sporadic purple bursts of the meteoroid shields zapping another microparticle.

Yet that was the only place that had any light. The rest of the ship, quite sanely, had no weak points to expose to the sucking vacuum outside. Every corridor was a lightless prison.

On the first day, Lizzie had to dare herself not to turn on her flashlight.

She hugged the hard plastic to her chest, shivering. For the first time in her life, nobody would answer if she called out for help. The emptiness of the station seemed to have its own personality—a mocking smirk, hidden in darkness.

By the time Lizzie half-skipped, half-floated up to the observation deck on the second day—at least she thought it was the second day, it was hard to tell without the usual lightcycles—the observation deck was tinged with a strange glow. It was her eyes adjusting, she knew that, but the deck felt like the ship's lights during a brownout.

Part of Lizzie wanted to stay at the observation deck all the time. A wiser part understood that if she stayed there in the light, eventually she'd be too terrified to venture back down into the chill void of Sauerkraut Station's hallways—and so she forced herself, trembling, back to where the water supplies and her bed and the repair kits were.

On the fifth maybe-day, Lizzie almost died.

The gravity had finally dropped to near-zero, and she'd let go of the doorway to push herself off the wall. But in the darkness, she'd misjudged her foot position, and instead of kicking off into space, she just stomped on empty air.

Lizzie tried to whirl around, to get ahold of something—but flailed and touched nothing but air. She knew she must be drifting, slowly, down the middle of the main corridor, towards the observation deck. But she could see nothing; this deep into the station, there was no difference between having her eyes open and her eyes shut.

From here, the observation deck was an eighth of a mile away.

How fast had she been going when she let go? It couldn't have been more than a couple of inches a minute. She was drifting, slowly, like a speck of dust, down the middle of a long and empty hallway.

Lizzie shrieked. Her voice echoed back, colder and shriller, as if the station itself was throwing her words back at her. She punched, she clapped, she frog-kicked, hoping to feel the pain of her hands smashing against metal. Her hands only slapped the globs of water hanging in the air.

There was nothing to push off of. There was no way to get free.

“MOMMA!” she shrieked. “GEMMA!”

Lizzie saw it all in her mind; she was drifting down the dead center of the hallway, slow as syrup. She'd eventually brush up against the gentle curve of the western wall—but that might take weeks.

She might starve before her body bumped metal.

She pictured her dead body ragdolling slackly against the wall and rebounding, just another dead thing floating in a dead ship. The doc had told her what happened to dead men when they rotted . . .

She was still screaming, but now she was shrieking at the stupid Web. “I ROOTED FOR YOU!” she said. “I TRUSTED YOU! AND NOW YOU LEFT ME TO DIE, YOU STUPID . . . STUPID IDIOTS! I HOPE YOU ALL DIE LIKE ME IN YOUR HORRIBLE WAR!”

Then she realized it was only five days maybe five days and Momma hadn't thought the Gineer would show for weeks and she was going to die and bounce around this ship.

Lizzie didn't know how long she hung there, yelling like a madwoman; it felt like hours. But after too long a time it finally occurred to her:
silly, just take off your clothes
. And once she flung her shoes away, that gave her enough motion to thump against a doorway a minute or two later.

It was a childish mistake, the kind of thing Daddy would have laughed at her for. But the panic of that moment never left her. From then on, she strapped herself to the bed when she slept, and she always carried a small canister of oxygen so she could jet herself to safety.

Without gravity, going to the bathroom was an abominable chore, a filthy thing that contaminated the very air. The air stank of human waste and rotting sauerkraut. That made eating a precursor to horror, so she ate only when she grew faint from hunger. She stopped going to the observation deck because floating through the hallway's splatters made her sick.

All she wanted to do was stay in bed. But what would happen to her muscles?

Things started to coalesce from the blackness.

At first it was little sparkles here and there, but the sparkles turned into constellations, and then firespark-white lines connected the dots to turn them into great silver airlocks. The airlocks hissed open. And as Lizzie pushed her way past the glowing doorways, she glided into a vast hydroponics chambers, the skies ribbed with water-pipes hissing down clean cool rain.

She looked down, and her fingertips brushed across waxy, familiar goodness; rows of cabbages floated below her. The cabbages danced joyfully, a strange and careful motion like two ships docking. Thousands of pale green heads bobbed beneath her fingers, like little men bowing.

She saw a flash of braided brown hair.

“
Themba!
” she cried.

“Play,” said Themba, his voice just as full of joy and life as always, and as his cornrowed skull dipped under the dancing cabbages, she realized that Themba was playing hide and seek with her. She launched after him, laughing—and rammed into a cabinet.

As she shook off the sting of it, the blackness swallowed her up.

She tried to tether herself to the bed, but in the darkness she heard scuttling 
things
coming for her. She felt fine hairs brushing against her skin, hoping to find an anchor on her flesh to drill deep.

She shrieked, and the walls of the station fell away, and she was walking on the panels of the outside hull.

Daddy walked with her.

His desiccated hand was all rattly inside his punctured spacesuit, but he held her wrist like they were going for a walk around the corridors back in the good old days. Lizzie didn't have a suit, but that didn't matter; it was a beautiful day. She closed her eyes, felt warmth of the sun on her face.

“You're dying, Lizzie,” Dad said.

“I know,” Lizzie shrugged.

“It's only been two weeks.” His face was smashed in like a crushed cabbage—but still kind. “You gotta be strong. Trust me, Lizziebutt, I know what you're going through.” He gestured up to point at himself, a dot far out in space.

“Aw, Daddy,” Lizzie said, hugging him tight. Her squeeze sent a puff of dry, dead air shooting out through his cracked faceplate.

“It's no good hugging you any more, Daddy,” she said.

He nodded. “Only the living can give comfort,” he said. “That's why you gotta stay alive, Lizziebutt.”

“But you came for me,” she protested.

“That's cause I know how empty things are. You've been doing this for just fourteen days; I've been out here five years. But I wouldn't be out here drifting if I hadn't screwed up. I lost my footing, and drifted out, and wham—I was gone. You know how hard it is to get a glimpse of you only once every seven weeks?”

“I miss you, Daddy,” she said, laying down on the panels and closing her eyes. “It's nice here.”

“You gotta do stuff, Lizzie. Or you're gonna go crazier than you already have. So I'm gonna make things worse to give you something to do. It might kill you, too. But what wouldn't, these days?”

Daddy knelt down and swept her up in an embrace, then he leapt off like a ballet dancer to launch himself into space. He whirled around like a gyro and flung Lizzie back into the station.

She busted through the hull with a horrible
pong
noise, and there was a hiss as all the air came whooshing out, and Lizzie realized that she was struggling against her bedstraps.

There was new light in here. A sliver of stars, shimmering behind a fluttering stream of purple.

Something had broken through the hull.

A very real hissing came from a finger-sized hole on the wall. A meteoroid had punctured the alloyed metal like a bullet fired from space. If that meteor had gone three feet to the right, it would have punctured Lizzie's stomach.

She reached down for the emergency sealer-patch under her bed with the familiarity of practice of years of hull breach drills. She turned on the flashlight, and her head exploded; the light made her just as blind with white as she'd been blind with black.

As she slapped the sealer on, she peered out the gap; the plasma hummed. The shields were holding.

So why had a meteoroid made it through?

When she was done, she floated back to the observation deck. It was almost too bright to see now, a strobing purple.

How could she have ever thought it was dark? It was
radiant
in here.

But looking out the window, she saw meteoroids sizzling against the shields. There was maybe one a minute—
way
more than usual. She pressed her face to the window, trying to see what looked different.

Sure enough, Daddy's bear-constellation had slipped off the side of the window, and she could only make out the top three stars of Great-Gemma's turbine-constellation. If the stars were changing position, then the station was drifting off-course—through the fringe of the dust belt and into the nearby asteroid belt. The shields were designed to burn off small inbound particles . . . But large ones would still penetrate. Without thrusters to prevent her from drifting into the denser part of the belt, the shields would fail.

 

* * *

 

Lizzie tried to get the thrusters back on-line, but it was no use; even if she'd had enough fissionables to start a reaction, the reactor itself was laced with yards of blown-out circuitry. She'd thought about controlled hull breaches, maybe jetting her way to safety with air, but some calculations scrawled on a filthy whiteboard showed her that the displaced air wouldn't be enough to significantly affect the station's mass. And even if she could have moved the station, she didn't have a clear idea which way the ship was drifting. She might knock it deeper into the field.

All her life, Momma had taught her that everything came down to guts and brains, but this put the lie to it: she was dice rattling around in a cup, her life determined by sheer randomness. Nothing she had could prevent the larger meteoroids from breaking through. Every
punk!
meant that a rock had blown through the hull, and by sheer dumb luck it hadn't blown through her.

It was like trying to drift off to sleep with a gun pressed against your stomach.