27: Rodge

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I wasn’t sure what to say about Hali’s story, but luckily I didn’t have to say anything because right then came the warning that we were about to start moving toward the Arborea Celestia. We stowed our bags safely in a locker and Plia helped me figure out the straps on my bed, which could be used to keep someone in bed when sleeping in zero pull as well as to safely tether someone during the inertial pull of a velocity change.

We were going to visit five big ships on our journey – Arborea, the Stalwart, Hexacorralia, Starlight, and the Dish. Two of them (Hexacorralia and the Dish) were zero pull ships, and transportation between the ships would also be in zero pull, so I was going to have to get used to zero pull facilities. (I was most excited about the Dish. Its main job was to collect and preserve information about existing colonies, so if I wanted to find out what the big threat to the colonies and the fleet was, I’d probably find out there. Or if I didn’t, I’d at least get an idea of what kind of information to look for, so I could message them from the Courageous to get it later – right now, I didn’t know enough about the problem to even know what to ask. But actually being there would have to give me the perspective that I needed.)

Once we stopped accelerating, I decided to go exploring. It was still a couple of hours before dinner and I wanted to see what the passenger area had to offer. (Someone probably could have told me, but if I was going to be exploring new ships and getting new perspectives on life, I should get some practice now.)

“Stay in the blue marked areas if you don’t have an escort,” Plia reminded me as I left, but she didn’t try to stop me.

What did the passenger area have? Not much. A few more bedrooms, none of them locked. A small projector room. The mess hall had some little packets of water and I took the time to teach myself to drink in zero pull while I was alone so I wouldn’t make an idiot of myself in front of others. (I’d already studied how to use zero pull toilets and showers before we even left, because that would be a very embarrassing thing to need help with.) I put the empty water packets in the disposal like we’d been instructed (high-resilience waterproof canvas with a disposable molded drinking spout; would probably go through Rubbish & Recycling by having the spout removed, having the pouch washed and sterilised, and having the spout melted down and remolded and then replaced before refilling with more drinking water).

There was a broken panel in one wall that looked like it might have some kind of cool secret behind it, like in a story, but when I pulled it open as far as I could without causing more damage, there were just pipes. It was in an out-of-the-way corner so it was probably just a broken bit of the ship that needed replacing and nobody had noticed yet. A lot of the stuff on the Vanguard was way more worn down than the Courageous. The most interesting thing about it was that when I leaned my head against it I could hear stuff happening on other parts of the ship; unfortunately, everything I heard was boring talk about mechanics and haulage and timetables that I didn’t understand or care about.

Eventually, I found a tunnel (marked blue, I was allowed to be there) that lead towards the outside of the ship, and at the end of it, a little viewport. It wasn’t like the big ports on the Courageous, the rooms with the comfortable benches and plants and a whole wall as a big window to see space; it was just a foggy little circle of clear plastic barely bigger than my head. Some sort of space dust or something had burned onto the outside of it, making the view fuzzy, but I could see stars and, if I pressed my head right against the very edge of the window and looked behind us, about a quarter of the Courageous.

It was the first time I’d ever seen the outside of the Courageous for real. A big ring of metal with spikes going inward to a treegrave that I couldn’t see. The outside wasn’t smooth or shiny; it looked all rough from the viewport, but I knew that what I was seeing was lots of sensors and satellites and tiny engines that kept the ship spinning evenly and, if it had been speeding up, would be speeding it up. (The ones currently slowing it down were, of course, on the other side of the ship.) I wished I could see more of it, but that was a silly wish, because if I could see more of it then I’d also be able to see the Dragonseye and the Dragonseye would make it hard to be able to see anything at all.

There were a couple of other ships in view too, and I had a look at them, but they weren’t nearly as interesting. What mattered was my home, over there, for real, behind me. I could see it because I wasn’t on it.

I wasn’t on the Courageous. Between me and everyone and everything I’d ever known (except Plia) was the yawning void of space that would kill me if I tried to move across it outside a ship.

“Hey.”

I turned around quickly, then grabbed at a takehold bar in the wall to stop myself from spinning all the way around in a circle. The boy behind me snickered. I recognised him; he was the one who’d delivered our bags.

“I’m Rodge,” he said.

“Taya,” I said.

“You want to see the ship better, Taya? I know where you can get a better view. There’s a big viewport down the other end of the ship.”

I glanced at the blue stripe on the wall. “I’m not supposed to leave – ”

“Without an escort, right? I’ll escort you. Come on.”

Fair enough. It was probably the best chance I was going to get to see more of the ship. I followed Rodge down the narrow hall and out of the guest area.

“All that stuff down there is dangerous,” he said, gesturing to a random hall, and I could see why I needed an escort. On the Courageous, I could recognise what areas were restricted and dangerous, but here nothing was locked or marked or anything. How many passengers had accidentally blundered into something and gotten hurt?

“That’s all storage, it’s boring,” he continued, gesturing down another hallway. “Not dangerous, but they don’t like passengers going in there ’cause if something gets stolen it gets really awkward. But through here…”

It was another big room like the docking bay, one that seemed to take up the whole width of the ship. This one didn’t have so many narrow bars all close together though, where anyone could grab them; the bars were thicker, and much wider apart.

“What’s this even for?” I asked.

“Large materials storage,” he said, pointing to the far end of the room where there were some huge crates tied between the bars. The bars, I noticed, had little metal loops welded on them every few metres, and the crates were held in place with heavy straps through some of these loops. “It’s mostly empty right now, but when we’re loaded up you can only move through the very middle. Come up here.” He leapt lightly for the middle of the room, and I did my best to follow him, leaping from bar to bar.

“Aren’t we going to a viewport?” I asked.

“Yep. But the way in is actually a secret. I’m allowed to show it to you but I can’t show you how to get in. Close your eyes, okay?”

That sounded pretty strange, but it wasn’t my ship. Rodge would know the rules better than I did. I closed my eyes.

“I’m going to lead you for a bit,” he said, gently taking hold of my elbows. I let him pull me around. Without sight, I lost track of which way we were going straight away, but it didn’t matter because he barely moved me at all before letting go.

“Enjoy the view!” he said with a laugh, and I opened my eyes in time to see him floating away, giggling to himself.

We hadn’t gone anywhere. He’d just taken me high up in the big storage room, almost to the middle. I wasn’t moving; he’d set me there so that I was floating perfectly in place. And now he was speeding away towards the exit.

I reached for a support bar, but of course there was none in reach. I looked for something to help me reach, but of course, there was nothing around me. All I had was the jumpsuit and bandanna I was wearing; I took off the bandanna and tried to hook it around a bar, but it was just a light strip of cloth; there was nothing to hook onto anything.

I was stuck. Stranded. Helpless until the ship moved around me and slammed me into a wall or pole and killed me. My heart raced; it was hard to breathe. There was so much space around me, too much space. And space was dangerous.

I was going to die here.

Then I got a hold of myself, because I was being stupid. “Treegrave?” I called.

“Hello there! It’s Taya, right? Oh dear, are you in trouble?”

“I’m stuck.”

“Oh dear. Don’t worry, I’ll send someone along to help you right away.”

I was pretty embarrassed when Smyles came to rescue me and lead me back to my room. Ke didn’t lecture me, and did it with a sort of weary resignation, so I guessed that ke knew what had happened and that it wasn’t my fault. Ke didn’t even tell the historians about it, which was nice.

I resolved to stay int the passenger area from then on, and not follow any random kids around the ship.

After dinner in the mess hall (which was all food in solid bar form, easy to eat in zero pull) I didn’t feel like going to sleep right away, and the historians were all talking about some boring history thing that I didn’t understand, so I went wandering again, inside the passenger area. I thought about going to the little viewport but it reminded me of Rodge, and I was still mad at him. Instead, I found myself leaning up against the broken wall panel, listening to sounds from some other part of the ship.

Then I heard Rodge’s voice, so plan ‘don’t think about Rodge’ failed straight away.

“It was just a joke, Mum!”

“You know not to joke about like that with passengers,” Decker said angrily.

“She was fine! Nobody was going to get hurt! So what if some stupid Jessie gets all scared over something as simple as – ”

There was a sound like Decker was clapping her hands together, and Rodge, for some reason, cried out in pain.

“You are getting too old for this nonsense! This ship is going to be your responsibility someday, you know. Yours and your sister’s and all of your cousins’. You cannot keep antagonising passengers. Those ‘stupid Jessies’ are our air and water, and you will learn to grin and tolerate them if you want to survive.”

“It’s not even a jaunt group! It’s just a couple of wordies; why does it matter – ”

“And you don’t think it says anything that we were chartered for a trip like this for such a small group? Somebody went out of their way to waste this much fuel on carrying four people on a trip that seems to me to be little more than a joyride. At least one of those passengers is someone important somehow; they’re some admin’s child or important speaker’s niece or something.”

“Which one?”

“How should I know? I don’t ask meaningless questions, and neither should you. Probably the expedition leader, though I’m not sure which one that is. But what I do know is that that girl probably went crying to them about the mean Vanguard boy and that it’s probably going to get back to whoever’s administrating them that they had a bad time on the trip because a brat like you can’t keep his own manners. And that when enough complaints like that build up, big ships like the Courageous start chartering other ships, and we lose our biggest clients and get pushed to the outskirts. You want to live on the outskirts, Rodge?”

“No,” he said sullenly.

“You want to be competing with scrap ships for low paying contracts that barely pay the fuel? You want to be rationing your ship mass?”

“No.”

“Then get a smile on your face and learn to do your job.”

“They don’t even have a real job!” he whined. “Those stupid Jessie kids are always just going on trips to other ships and messing about and don’t have to work a day in their – ”

“And growing up, Rodge, means learning that that doesn’t matter. What matters is that we’re going to hit orbit soon, and when it does, this ship needs to be in good standing with the Courageous and the Arborea and the other big thinkers, because it’ll be them making high and mighty decisions about things they can’t do since they can’t get into the asteroid belt and we can. Our reputation is what protects your future career, you understand? And when we all leave the asteroid belt, whenever that is, this ship’ll be in the hands of your generation and if you’re remotely competent then it’ll be where it is right now in good standing between the big ships. But if you fuck this up, either here or in orbit, then some other ship’ll have our position and you’ll be handing your kids a scrap ship fighting for scraps among other scrap ships, and won’t that be embarrassing for you. If you’re that jealous of the Jessies, put in your immigration requests and see if you can get them to pity you enough to let you in. Otherwise? Grow up.”

Rodge must have left, because I heard Decker mutter to herself “Kid’s barely worth his air and water, I swear,” and then say nothing else. After a while, I went back to my room.

I had no idea what was going on, but it seemed like the grown ups on the Courageous weren’t the only ones who were tense about reaching orbit.

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