76: Fuel Up

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“We should fuel up together, rookie,” Javi suggested at the end of our shift, slapping me on the shoulder.

“We should what?”

“Come eat with me. Keep me company. Saba! Lina! Fuel up?”

Two people from further down the line, another middle-aged lenti and and older santi, cheered. “Fuel up!” they called back.

Before I realised what was happening, I was crammed into a little bench with three adult factory workers with a plate of some kind of protein-heavy bread and flavoured oil.

“Let me see those fingers, rookie,” Javi said. Lina (who turned out to be the kelti) wordlessly handed Javi a small fabric bundle, which Javi unwrapped to reveal an odd collection of bandages and tiny jars of clear liquid. “This will sting,” Javi warned me, before pouring the liquid on some of my deeper nicks. (It did.)

“How long are you here, rookie?” Saba asked. “I assume you’re not staying.”

“Maybe I immigrated here,” I said defensively. Which made everyone laugh.

“How long?”

“A week and a half. We’re going to the Courageous.”

Saba gave a low whistle. “You work well for a Jessie.”

“People work on our ship, too,” I pointed out.

“Not that come here.”

“They’re too busy working on their own ship,” Lina told them. “Do you have time to go jumping about to other ships?”

“Do you get many visitors from the Courageous?” I asked.

“Kids a bit older than you, and self-important fancy people here to negotiate materials purification deals with the higher-ups, neither of which can tell their arse from their toes,” Javi said, sticking little bandages over my cuts. “You’ll want to slow down on the line tomorrow, your arms are going to be sore.”

“The chips aren’t very heavy,” I said.

“No, but we do move a lot of them,” Lina said, picking at their food. “It adds up. You’ve got to take care of your body if you want to be able to keep up long-term.”

“Or even just a week and a half,” Javi said. “Is this your job back at home, rookie?”

“I don’t have a job yet,” I confessed. “I’m too young.”

Saba snorted. “Jessie pandering. You’re good enough to work, kid, and don’t let anybody tell you any different.”

“It’s not about being good enough,” I said, “its about making sure you know what you want to do. You don’t want to pick too early and make a mistake. I mean, you can just retrain into something else, but isn’t it better to avoid making a mistake in the first place?”

“And you’re not sure what you want to do yet?”

“Well, I am,” I admitted. “I like Rubbish and Recycling.”

“Ah, see?” Javi, finished with my cuts, clapped my shoulder again. “That’s what this whole ship is about! Maybe you should immigrate here!”

I was definitely not going to do that.

“I’m probably going to have to do other work,” I said. “What with the Dragonseye and everything.”

“The what?” Saba asked.

“The colony,” Lina said, still not looking up from their food.

“Oh, yeah. I forgot about that.”

I stared. “What do you mean you forgot?”

Saba shrugged. “It’s not going to make much difference to us, is it?”

“Of course it will,” Lina said.

I nodded.

“It’ll dramatically change our recovery and manufacturing input. There’ll be a whole bunch of new metal available, and every day we’re getting closer to a sun and dealing with heavier radiation. The whole focus of multiple factory lines will be revamped. They might pull us off chips completely and throw us on smelting.”

“Uuuugh, I don’t want to be on smelting!” Javi groaned.

Lina shrugged.

“Why are you so calm about it? You hate the big machines! Doesn’t the sound give you headaches?”

“I can tolerate your voice, can’t I?” Lina replied. “Besides, I plan to be dead by then.”

“Aww, don’t say that!” Saba said. “You’re going to break the age record for kelti survival!”

“If I even get close to having to put up with you lot that long, I’ll walk out the airlock unprotected and attempt to break the vacuum survival record instead,” Lina said drily.

“Aren’t you guys excited about the colony?” I asked. “About which bid will win? Or whether you want to move there?”

The three looked at each other.

“Rookie,” Javi said, “it doesn’t matter what the colony is like. It’s all going to be about the same amount of manufacturing and decontamination. What matters is what materials are present in the asteroid belt, and that was decided by physics long before we existed. It’s gonna be the same sort of work no matter who wins.”

“It’ll affect the history and culture of the entire fleet, though,” I said, trying not to think about how untrue my time on the Dish made that seem. “And however it’s built will affect what we can learn from it to make even better future colonies…” they did not look any more interested than politeness demanded. “You might want to move there.” I looked to Lina. “They might have places without noisy machines.”

“Nobody without noisy machines wants old factory workers,” Lina said.

“You were a decent pilot back in the day,” Saba said.

“Nobody wants a pilot whose eyes have given out, either. And I’m not all that interested, kiddo, in leaving behind my friends and family and life just to avoid noisy machines. When I die, it’ll be around these rustbuckets.”

“You seem interested in the colony,” Javi said. “Are you going to move there?”

“No!” I snapped, as surprised as them at the anger in my voice. But it was different for me. I already had a place on the Courageous. If I’d been born on the Ironstock and couldn’t find a way to a better ship, I’d want to know what the colony was like so that I could try for a better life there.

But Lina was right; we were still more than sixteen years away from orbit, and we had no idea how long building the colony would take. Maybe these people were all too old for it to matter.

“You should eat up,” Saba said, pointing to my barely touched food. “You’ll need your strength for the line tomorrow.”

They were probably right.

There weren’t a lot of computers on the Ironstock. I mean, there probably were; there’d be computers in all the machinery and stuff, and the “data people” (as Javi called them) had terminals in their offices to do whatever ship management they needed to do. But there were no easily found public terminals, and definitely no portable computers and nothing in our bedroom except a large clock on one wall that didn’t to anything but display the time. Asking around, I found out that you could book space in a couple of small projector rooms or book time on terminals in a public office up the other end of the ship to send messages to other ships or whatever, but after spending so much time on the Stalwart, it was strange not to see them everywhere.

Home was like this, I remembered, though we had more projector rooms. It had seemed so normal before, but now it felt strange to not just be able to find a computer whenever I wanted it.

Anyway, it left me without much to do. It felt wrong to hog limited projector time when I was just a guest, I was way too tired after work to go to a crowded, sweaty gymnasium or sports area, and I didn’t really have any friends to hang out with. I suspected that the historians were probably working longer hours than me, because I barely saw them except at bedtime, and when I did see them they mostly wanted to make sure that I was okay and nothing bad was happening. The others in our room were all lenti and about the historians’ age, and didn’t seem to want to hang out with any of us.

I hung out with Javi and their friends at dinner, and understood hardly any of their jokes. Sometimes I’d say something that I thought sounded normal and they’d laugh or clap me on the shoulder. Sometimes, it was obvious that this was about their mantle system I didn’t understand; that I’d said something amusingly inappropriate about someone else, or inappropriate for whatever mantle they thought I was (they said to my face that they understood that I didn’t have one, but I didn’t believe them). Sometimes, it obviously wasn’t that, but I had no idea what it was that made whatever I said or did funny. They seemed to think I was hilarious, anyway.

A couple of times, they invited me to “poker night” to play a game with paper cards called “Texas hold them.” They said this was an ancient Earth game, which made sense; most of the original colonists had come from a part of Earth called Texas. It seemed fun enough, but I always got confused about the scoring system, especially during the building and the tower defence phases. I figured that I could probably learn to master it better than I had Tikka’s little computer game, though.

I didn’t. By the time we got close enough to the Courageous to board a tiny little docking vessel, I was relieved to go.

Our pilot, a young kelti who didn’t bother to introduce themself, was in a little cockpit, leaving the three of us alone in the passenger area. As soon as we secured our cargo and buckled ourselves in for zero pull, Plia sank back into her chair and groaned. “Uuuugh, that ship was the worst of the lot.”

“You’re just saying that because you couldn’t obsessively check your search results from the Dish the whole time.”

“No, I’m not! That’s only one reason why it was the worst. There were plenty of other reasons.”

“There were some nice people,” I said. “But yeah, it wasn’t the most fun ship.”

“There’s fun people on every ship,” Plia said. “Including our own. I think I’m all travelled out. I wonder if Hali regrets his decision yet.”

“He’s probably on a lovely ship and having a great time and pitying us poor unfortunates who have to go home,” Tima said. “Which is what makes him a weirdo. I can’t wait to get home, either.”

“You’ve gotta get back before all your friends forget what favours they owe you.”

“You’ve gotta get back before your drum circle boy pulls in someone else.”

Plia snorted. “I feel sorry for whoever he’s turned to, because they’re gonna get dropped the second I get back. He’s such a tunnel vision play partner, it’s really weird. He hasn’t looked at anyone else since we properly got close. Freaks me out a little, to be honest. Makes me wonder if he’s secretly angling for marriage, even though we’ve both been pretty clear that we don’t want kids.”

“Well, the Courageous has great access to red houses; I guess one girl – ”

“Nope, he won’t go near those. I’ve invited him. No one else, not even on a service basis. It’s weird.”

“That sounds pretty unstable. I’d never survive a relationship like that, I’d be paranoid that I might get replaced by whoever else my partner fell in love with.”

“Oh, I’m not worried about that. I’m way too good a catch for competition to be an issue.”

“And so humble, too,” Tima grinned.

I was looking forward to getting home. I could see Arai and Hitan, and my parents… oh, some of my younger siblings must be so big by now! And I was behind on my jaunt, of course; I would have to work hard to see all the possible jobs. (I wasn’t worried about that. I already knew what my two options were.)

“Disengaging,” our pilot’s voice warned from a speaker, and we all braced for the slight jolt of pulling away from the Ironstock.

We were going home.

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