Orphans In the Black: A Space Opera Anthology Read online

  Emily listed as her skills: explosives specialist, rocket operations, and computer skills. That was exactly what she needed and she was the only female candidate.

  Emlee reached up to the screen and touched the ID, which highlighted it.

  In the room behind her, a comm unit beeped.

  A woman got up from between the rows of seats.

  Emily Hasegawa. Natural born, with no cohort tag on her chest.

  She was pretty, with long dark hair tied in a bun and sharp dark eyes. Her skin was pale and soft without blemishes. She was slim and tall, nothing like Emlee's functional broad shape.

  Emlee's first thought was that she did not look like a rocket specialist at all.

  She smiled. "Hi."

  Emlee said, "Hi. You're Emily Hasegawa?"

  The question was stupid, but the woman said that she was.

  "I'm Emlee ... Grimshaw," she added after a pause, because natural-born people always used their last names. Never mind that Grimshaw was the workhorse of constructs, and there were hundreds and thousands of Grimshaws, and everyone—natural-born or construct—knew the name was such.

  Emily pursed her lips but said nothing. At least she didn't ask for a cohort number. What did one say to a natural-born person? She already felt doubt about her choice.

  She blundered on, "Isn't it funny? We have the same name."

  "Do we?" said the cultured, willowy creature.

  "Yes. Emlee, Emily."

  "No." She shook her head. "There is no 'i' in Emlee."

  And that said it all. Emily was a "natural" name, reserved for those born from a mother. Those like Emlee, the Grimshaws, the Kesslers, the Browns, all of them with a number attached to indicate their cohort, did not have the right to use those natural names.

  Stay in your rightful place, worm.

  "All right," Emlee said. "Let's go then. The ship is on a tube in the D corridor. Do you have everything?"

  Emily lifted her bag by way of reply.

  "Let's hunt some asteroids."

  Emily followed the construct woman out of the room, where all the contractors were still waiting, to the main hall, where the chaos showed no sign of letting up and neither did the smell of all those unwashed bodies or the stares of all those desperate people.

  The majority of them had come from Goldline on Europa, where the rioting in the mines had reached such epic scale that sections of habitat were now unserved by base operations and were in danger of atmosphere collapse.

  The mining base was in rebel hands; her uncle, who owned the settlement, had fled to Ganymede and the people who had stayed behind were now prisoners of the rebels.

  Those rebels were nothing but vandals. Did they even know how much a mining settlement cost to set up? Her uncle had paid for that. He had made it safe, given that everything on Europa stood on ice sheets that were always moving. He looked after the workers. They thought all those things came for free?

  Well, the rebels would find out that they didn't, and Emily would love to see their self-righteous faces when the new management faced habitat collapse and people were fighting for the last scraps of food and killing each other for the last shuttles out.

  They would find out that, in the matter of base operations, there was no point in having everything decided by discussion by a council. Sometimes you needed to make decisions and needed to make them quickly.

  The operation of a company and habitat where the lives of thousands of people depended on the competence of management was not and could never be a democracy. You could give a toddler a go for five minutes at the controls of a surface buggy on a family outing. You could not let a toddler at the controls of a giant ship with thousands of passengers.

  The Families had managed these bases for many years. They were best at it. Why even want to oust them in the first place?

  And with the thought of the Families came a painful memory.

  Her mother sitting in her study, quietly working on one of her speaking essays. Her mother looking up. Her soft voice says, "Hello, dear. You're back late."

  Emily had never felt the guilt of leaving her mother to have dinner by herself at the big table in that big and empty house when her father was out on a trip, as he so often was. Friends and fun were so much more important. Parents could wait. They had fun themselves when they were that age, right?

  Until it turned out they weren't around forever.

  Until there was no longer someone waiting at home, until there were strangers living in what used to be her house.

  Her eyes misted over.

  She was tired and getting far too emotional.

  "You act and think with your heart," David would say.

  She became aware that the construct pilot was talking to her. "Sorry?" She turned to her.

  The woman was of typical construct stock: solidly built with a square frame, not much of a waistline, a typically flat face and empty, grey eyes. She had a couple of freckles on her nose, which was sort of cute, in a way that constructs could be cute. Her tag said Grimshaw275.

  "I asked how long have you been here? I've never seen you before."

  "That's because I haven't been here before."

  "It says you're an explosives specialist. Where did you learn about explosives?"

  "In different places." Emily had taken the course on David's advice and had only just finished it.

  "Oh." The construct woman looked taken aback. "Well, I'm sorry, if I asked something I shouldn't have."

  Emily forced a smile. "I'm sorry. I'm just tired."

  Exhausted, as she had been since that fateful day, unable to sleep, her head echoing with her parents' voices, her mind buzzing with anger.

  "Why Iovis-X?"

  "Why not? It was the closest place. It seemed a good place to start."

  A small frown.

  What did the construct woman think about that? Good place to start might not have been the best thing to say. What did people say in situations like this?

  See, David, I told you I'd get into trouble. Emily knew why David had chosen her to do this job—because of her personal involvement after her parents were killed—but she had frequently wondered if there were no better people to do it.

  Despite watching the vids and talking to some constructs, she had no idea of how these people talked to each other.

  They arrived at the access tube to the craft. Because this ship was much smaller than the huge mining ships, it used the tube at the far end, where the more agile craft could dock out of the way of the behemoths. Emily had studied the plans of the station in great detail before coming here.

  There was no guard at the tube entrance, only a sign-in with an ID pass required.

  It would be so easy to steal a ship here. Or just "borrow" it. Emily would have done that, except she was no pilot. But learning to fly might have been worth not having this cumbersome construct woman to deal with.

  The ship was a small industrial cruiser. Sturdy and functional. Quite square and clunky to look at, but more agile than the blocky shape suggested.

  The important part about it was that it came armed with a number of rockets, which sat at the front of the craft, away from the engine. Each had an explosives chamber that would be filled with explosive pellets by a robot from inside, according to the strength of the explosion needed.

  The inside of the craft was well-worn. There was only one cabin, seating about ten in cheap-looking seats with just the basic necessities: seat belt, breathing mask, and a connection for communication. A row of vacuum suits stood against the back wall, the tanks filled up.

  "Find a seat," the construct woman said.

  Emily did, strapping herself into the safety harness. She pulled out her comm unit and for the umpteenth time checked the huge list of impact windows, potential targets, number and strength of charges needed to hit each. When they found a suitable asteroid, she only needed to enter the coordinates and the program would calculate potential targets. Then she could decide which one to go for
with the click of a button. It was almost too easy. Yet, no one had ever done what she was about to do, and she doubted anyone would do it afterwards.

  Meanwhile, the outside view screens came on, showing their little ship next to the mining behemoths. While they were in shadow of the sun, this side of the station received a soft grey glow of the glare of Jupiter, which loomed huge and fat, with swirling clouds below.

  The construct woman put on her earpiece and spoke to station control.

  A bit later, the door shut and the tube disconnected.

  They were off.

  A message flickered over Emily's comm.

  It said, The hope of the Families is with you.

  David. Of course.

  That woman was such a strange one.

  Emlee could see her sitting in the seat directly behind her in the reflection in the shiny surface of the forward view screen.

  She had barely said anything since they left, and had not taken Emlee's invitation to sit next to her. In her experience, most people were delighted when she invited them. They found sitting next to a pilot and seeing the controls exciting enough to put aside any reservations they might have about constructs, even those people who preferred not to speak to constructs.

  Silly people.

  Emlee never had much to do with natural-born people, but the ones she had met were all like that initially—thinking, just because constructs were made in labs and woken up as six-year-old children, had their brains infused with knowledge they would need in their assigned jobs, and were put through two years of accelerated growth, that they were any less human, or that they had no feelings or need to talk to other people. Or worse even, that they had no opinions and were not entitled to any.

  Seriously stupid people.

  Emlee also knew that discussions about this subject went nowhere, and speaking out could even be punished, so she said nothing.

  Natural-born people thought differently. They valued tradition and connections. They would trust someone from the same standing without even seeing any proof that the person was trustworthy. They made decisions based on very dubious grounds.

  They had left Iovis-X's obit behind, and Emlee steered the craft with ease, pointing the nose towards the blackness of space, while the glare from Jupiter lit them from behind. The sun hung off to the side, not visible in the forward view screen.

  She flew this particular craft quite often and liked it. The controls felt familiar, the engine responded well, and it handled like wearing a comfortable if slightly worn station suit.

  She had turned on the spectrometer. The screen produced the familiar half-arc of little bumps and blips. Each was logged, checked against the locations of known objects—one didn't want to accidentally shoot down a satellite—and the machine then produced a list of candidates.

  Finding ice asteroids was not so easy around here. The inner system was devoid of water ice. Jupiter's radiation saw to that.

  Io was particularly devoid of water, and the only water on the moon and its secretive military bases came delivered through redirected asteroids and was then religiously recycled.

  Emlee had been responsible for most of those asteroids.

  The mining station Iovis-X described an orbit around Jupiter in between Ganymede and Europa. Ganymede was just coming into view in the distance but Europa was close. Lit from the side, it showed up as a bright half-disk. You could even see the lights of the human settlements on the shadow side, patches of light on the cracked ice plains. Huge mining operations that crunched ice, filtered it and sorted the residue into rare metals. That industry was the backbone of this area.

  "I presume you have been there?" Emlee said.

  "Been where?" The frosty tone continued.

  "Europa. Don't the Hasegawa family own most of it?"

  "Old wives' tales. Maybe once they did, but it's the companies that own things, not the families."

  As far as Emlee knew, the families owned the companies, so that was pretty much the same thing. And she didn't understand the reason for the hostile tone.

  "But you visited there?" She should probably shut up, but this woman was such a strange one.

  "Of course I have. That's not so special."

  "It is. I've never set foot on any natural world."

  This was followed by a suspicious silence.

  In the reflection on the viewscreen Emlee could see the suited figure detach from her seat and float across the cabin.

  "You have to be kidding," Emily said. "You've never set foot on a world?"

  "Why should I kid? I want to go, but we have to earn the right." We constructs, that was. "I'm trying to be the best pilot with the best safety record so they will let me study at Ganymede University."

  Another double take. "You? Study at the university?"

  "Yes, why not?"

  She met Emily's eyes. One letter, one syllable, made all the difference. Emlee had woken up at the base, biological age six. She had grown up with her cohort sisters, whom she relied on for support, and she still lived within the dorm in the residential section. Mara, Tima, Lishee and the others. She had spent her entire life on Iovis-X. She had learned to fly at the base, with a number of other constructs designated to become pilots. She had been taught by a construct and had little to do with natural-borns.

  Emily probably grew up with parents and brothers and sisters. She would be able to form her own family. She could choose her own work, and her own study. She could travel. She could even go to Earth.

  Why would someone like this come to the station and choose to do the job normally done by constructs?

  Emlee said. "You make it sound like it's really terrible at the university."

  "Oh no, that's not what I mean." Much too fast. "Then what do you mean?"

  "I mean—it seems strange that you would want that... as a construct, I mean."

  "Why not?"

  "Well..." She spread her hands. "People might not be nice to you."

  "I wouldn't go there for people to be nice to me. I would go to get the best marks. I want to learn so that I can take one of the freehold jobs."

  "As a construct?"

  "Why not? As long as I've had the education."

  Emily actually looked a bit disturbed at the thought.

  "Why are you looking at me like that? I am allowed to study, aren't I? There is nothing that says I can't."

  "Well, yes, but..."

  "But what? Going to university is reserved for people from the rich families who already live at Ganymede?"

  "No, not that."

  "Then what?"

  "Well..." She spread her hands. "The political situation isn't real great at the moment. It's not safe."

  "Isn't it?"

  "What do you think all those people were doing in the hall back at the station?"

  "I heard that it was about people demanding better conditions."

  "No, they want to take the settlements from the Families. But the Families came here first. They built the colonies and the domes and the stations and all the infrastructure you can see today. What right do these people have to demand that we just give them a share in what we built and paid for?"

  "I was told that it was about the workers against the bosses. They're mistreated. I heard that a lot of people got angry about a worker being made to swim in a water reservoir for hours."

  "Who told you that?"

  "Someone at the station." She felt kind of protective about Piro.

  "You can't understand what's going on."

  "Why not? Didn't it happen?"

  "It did, but you're..."

  "What do you think I am?"

  She didn't reply to that.

  Emlee had enough of this stupid woman. It was always the same with those people who lived on Ganymede. "Am I machine? A robot? Do you think I have no feelings? Do you think I don't have opinions for myself? Do you think I am dumb?"

  "Of course not."

  "Then what do you think I am? What, in all that privileged lif
e of yours, have you been told about us?"

  "Well..." And then she didn't say anything for a long time.

  This was turning into a horribly awkward trip. What was that woman even doing here?

  The silence lingered in the cabin for a long time. Emily kept hearing the repeat of those words in her mind.

  What do you think I am?

  She couldn't believe how shortsighted this woman was. Didn't she even understand that without the original colonists, she would not exist? Didn't she care that their houses had been destroyed, their families murdered? They were honest workers who had looked after everyone in the system for many years, for generations.

  No, those demanding better conditions were just lazy and entitled troublemakers.

  I understand that it was about the workers against the bosses.

  No, it wasn't. It was about the influence of people from Earth barging in, coming to dictate their politics to the colonists who had worked out how to live here for more than a generation.

  Restriction of freedom was only a problem if there was freedom to be had. They were welcome to have the "freedom" of the immense void of space. As long as they also produced their own air to breathe.

  That was why they had constructs in the stations out here: because they didn't go crazy being locked up in a tin can for all their lives.

  Construct minds were too regimented for freedom.

  Study at Ganymede University. As if.

  Emily's parents had been lecturers at the university. Her father taught geology and her mother was an expert in human relations. Emily remembered like yesterday the day her mother had received that fateful call from her brother—Emily's uncle—that trouble was brewing up in the mining company he owned. Her mother had offered to help him broker an agreement. Her father had decided that he wanted to come.

  And what had those rebels done?

  They had murdered a peaceful delegation on their way to the site, before any negotiations could even start.

  Emily didn't talk nice to people like that. People like that didn't deserve anybody to be nice to them. There was no cause that justified an attack on a number of peaceful negotiators.

  Nothing at all.

  Emily pulled her comm unit in front of her.