Unidentified Funny Objects 7, page 15
I grimaced. “Sorry, Vi.”
“I know.” For a moment, she softened. “Once we get to a station, we can have a talk about how you don’t need to do repairs. You have Doc and you have me.”
But how long was I going to have her? That was the real question, and it didn’t have a good answer. Doc and I were carnies, possibly the last of a dying breed. There was nothing for us beyond the silver spangle of the sky and the rush of bringing our carefully-acquired attractions to a new audience. We were happy living a vagabond existence, bouncing star to star and planet to planet, forever and ever, step right up and see the lady dance. Doc had been born to it, son of a grifter and a lion tamer who’d managed to keep his glorious beasts alive long after Earth had fallen into the deep distance behind them.
Me, I was the clone of a late 2200s starlet named Nona Raquel Nanson, who had liked the money she got from licensing her genome way more than she’d liked to think about the fact that she was essentially setting up puppy mills for her own duplicates. Maybe she’d assumed that people would lose interest, not realizing that most stars would look at the way little Nonas had flooded the market and think better of licensing their own DNA. I’d been decanted slightly imperfect, thanks to a few misplaced freckles, and dumped on the secondary market, where my parents had picked me up for a song and a fistful of tokens. There was no place for me outside the traveling funfair.
Maybe not even that if some of my gene sisters had their way. Rona especially was prone to acts of senseless larceny, and thought the fact that I had my own ship and a clean record made me a perfect target when she needed an alibi. It was one of her schemes that had landed us with Violet.
Professor Whitman, daughter of the Dyson Spheres, heir to the Whitman Engineering fortune, smart and beautiful and too innocent by half to be out here with the rogues and raiders. A pioneer of zero-gravity design, capable of taking a handful of wires and weights and gyros and spinning them in place until they fell into perfect harmony, becoming something infinitely more than the sum of their parts. Smart and beautiful and out of my league basically everywhere except for Duck Hunt. I may look like a total fool in front of Violet every time I open my mouth, but at least my top score in Duck Hunt remains unchallenged.
“I promised my parents that I’d never forget how to do my own maintenance,” I mumbled, turning my face away. The vehemence of the gesture set me to tumbling again, Violet becoming a piece of the constantly moving background.
“Nora. Come on.” She grabbed my arm with one hand, the other clutching one of the rungs on the floor. I was jerked to a sudden stop and spun by momentum to face her again, our noses only a few inches apart.
Moon have mercy, she was beautiful. I swallowed.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“Nowhere, if I don’t get the engine working,” she replied easily. “So how about you promise not to hit anything else with a spanner, and I’ll go see what I can do about getting us to the station on time?”
“Sure,” I said.
She flashed a smile before letting go of the rung and me at the same time, pushing herself up, away from the floor, and into the nearest tube. I watched her go. Then I reached down and grabbed the rung myself, hanging there in the gravity-free cargo bay, waiting to feel a little less stupid.
Stupid, it turns out, is a hard habit to break. I was still hanging, wondering what had possessed me to try fixing the gravity generator with a hard knock while we were actually in flight, when the whole ship gave a convulsive shudder. I had time to turn and blink before there was a pulse of golden light and I hit the deck, literally, landing flat on my face in the suddenly restored gravity.
It hurt. Falling usually does. I still punched the air triumphantly, thrusting one arm up behind myself for the amusement of whoever happened to be manning the cameras. Probably Doc. He was in the generator room, and he liked to see me fall down.
Under the circumstances, I could reward him for his little pecadilloes. Anything to keep him happy and fixing the things I sometimes broke.
Doc’s voice, familiar and oddly uncertain, crackled over the intercom. “Uh, Nora? We seem to have a problem.”
“Problem?” I rolled onto my back, gazing up at the ceiling, which was finally, stably up again. “You fixed the gravity. I don’t care if you did it with chewing gum and ribbons. As long as we can get the engine up and running, we’re golden.” The engine had shorted out when the power surge from the gravity generator had raced through the ship’s systems, causing more problems than even I was usually capable of creating with a single smack.
“No, I didn’t.”
I stilled.
“The gravity is coming from an external source.”
I sat up.
“Probably the ship that has us in a tractor beam.”
I resisted the urge to cover my face with my hand. “I think you should have led with that. Is it the authorities?” Please, I thought. Please be the authorities. All our paperwork was in order. Unlike many of my genesisters, I’ve never considered actual crime to be a worthwhile hobby. Sure, I’ll occasionally rig the funfair games to make them easier on newbies, or more challenging for the kind of cocky professional gamers who come sauntering in, convinced that nothing built more than a hundred years ago can have even the slimmest of recreational values, but that’s not illegal. As long as no one’s gambling on my machines, I can tweak their values any way I want to.
“No.”
I waited. He didn’t expound. I pushed myself away from the floor and scowled at the nearest camera lens.
“Gonna need a little more than that if you want me to know what to do,” I said. “Am I coming to you or are you coming to me?”
Silence.
“Doc?”
There was a click before Violet’s voice came through the intercom, shaking with sudden nerves. “Nora, uh. The control room just locked me out. I can’t get a message through to Doc at all.”
“Can you see the ship that has us? He didn’t have time to tell me before—”
“No ID beacon, no running lights. I think . . . I think it’s pirates.”
My mouth went dry.
The phrase “space pirates” sounds like something out of a kiddy holo, something swashbuckling and scripted and fun. The reality is a little bleaker. See, humans are basically jerks. We can swallow or channel our baser instincts when we have other things to do, like fixing gravity generators or playing Skee-Ball, but when push comes to shove, we have a really hard time suppressing the urge to knock everyone else over and take their toys away. Add the word “pirate,” with all its storybook cinematic connotations, and you get a pseudo-profession that gives assholes a license to ass freely, all the way across the cosmos.
Of course, there are laws about the sort of things space pirates get up to, which is why most of them have adopted a policy of “get in, smash or steal everything you can, get out.” They don’t take shortcuts, and they don’t leave survivors, and we were just a funfair, no guns, no great defenses, no functional internal gravity.
“Stay right where you are, I’m coming,” I said, and broke into a run.
Gravity sucks. When it’s gone, nothing gets done, but when it’s working, everything has to follow a pre-set floor plan, like playing a video game with none of the cheat codes enabled. I put my head down and ran as hard as I could, hoping to reach Violet before—
The sound of guns being cocked met me as I spun around the corner. I slid to a stop, hands already raised, and watched with growing fury as my own mirror image sauntered down the corridor toward me, backed by a line of unfamiliar men in too-familiar piratical black and red.
“Hello, Nora,” my sister purred. “You’re looking well.”
“And you’re looking like a rotten, stinking pirate,” I said. “When the hell did pirates start wearing uniforms? Second thought, don’t care. Get off my ship.”
“What, not even a please?” She widened her eyes, giving me her best wounded look. “This is why I worry about you. You don’t seem to understand how important family is.”
“I do understand how important family is, and that’s why I want you to get the hell off my ship and away from mine.” I glared at her. “Sharing a genetic code doesn’t make us family. It makes us merchandise. You’re not welcome here.”
“Such prejudice. I blame the people you’ve been spending time with. I bet your parents would be so disappointed.”
“My parents left me the funfair and told me to keep it flying for as long as I could. I think they’d be pretty impressed by what I’ve been able to do, considering the circumstances.” Sure, our equipment was ancient and inclined to break down, and sure, we had to fly farther and farther to find an audience that wouldn’t view our assortment of antique games and attractions as too quaint to be worth their time or credit, but we were flying. We had the stars all around us, and when we docked, we always knew it was only for a little while.
Rona’s eyes hardened. The time for making nice was over. I was almost relieved. She was much easier to deal with when she wasn’t pretending to give a damn about me.
“Where’s the professor, Nora? ”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
The blow caught me squarely on the side of my head, sending me staggering back. One of the pirates snickered. Somehow, that was the loudest sound in the world.
“Professor Whitman has something that belongs to me,” said Rona, in a calm, level voice. “I was willing to wait for her to come to her senses, but unfortunately, the people to whom I had promised my property are a little less thrilled by the delay. They want me to deliver, and they want me to deliver now. So I’m afraid that means the loan’s over. I need her back now. Return her and you can go on your way.”
“There was no loan. Her information isn’t yours, and neither is she. Violet isn’t going to help you crack the Dyson spheres.”
Behind her, the pirates exchanged a glance. Rona didn’t see it. She was too busy watching me, waiting for the moment when—she was sure—I would inevitably yield to her superior firepower and strategy and turn over a member of my crew.
“You know,” I said slowly, “I always wondered why the people who adopted you dumped you on us. I mean, Nona-Rs are still considered a prestigious clone line. People who manage to pay the surrogacy fee don’t normally let us go. But we also have a reputation for being smarter than a broken arcade console, and then there’s you.”
Rona’s eyes widened briefly before her expression turned mulish and hard. “What the hell are you talking about? They wanted me to have a sibling my own age. We had the same decanting day. Leaving me with your family unit was the reasonable thing to do.”
“Uh-huh. This client of yours—did they suggest you hire a pirate crew to come and harass mine?”
She didn’t answer.
“Thought so. Rona, did they promise you, in writing, witnessed by a legally binding judicial algorithm, that you’d be allowed to walk away when this was over? Because pirate crews are famous for three things: terrible plans and not leaving any survivors.”
“That’s two, missy,” sneered one of the pirates. “Or can’t clones count?”
I leaned around my sister to smile broadly at him. “We can count. I was getting to the third thing pirates are famous for: having terrible network security.”
The pirate blinked. “What are you—”
The gravity cut out again.
On a planet, you expect gravity. You get used to doing things according to gravity’s rules, whether or not you like them. Humans evolved in places where gravity was normal, plentiful, and free.
In space, you have to make your own artisanal gravity. Usually with a Whitman generator, since they’re the most stable option on the market—but they’re not the cheapest, and because they have to be sized to their vessel, they’re not the best for salvaging from one ship to another. Pirates, however . . . they don’t want anyone to know the exact specs of their ships, and they don’t like to pay for repairs. Most of them, consequentially, have generators of the wrong size or specs maintaining their gravity.
Badly-sized gennies aren’t necessarily a problem under normal running conditions, but if you’re trying to do something weird—like, say, extending your grav field to an entirely separate vessel—you’re going to be straining the system something awful. And if, say, a trained engineer happens to be locked in a room with a lot of wireless equipment and a great desire not to get shot in the head by pirates, it’s possible to log into those gravity systems remotely and shut them down.
The pirates spun in the air, baffled by their sudden weightlessness. Rona did a little better, grabbing hold of one of the rungs on the wall. I had a decision to make, and I didn’t have a lot of time to make it.
In the end, I did the only thing I could do: I grabbed her hand and slammed my feet into the wall, kicking off, sending myself rocketing away down the hall and dragging her in my wake. Rona shouted a stream of colorful invective, accusing my parents of having relations with farm animals and me of being way too fond of the ship’s robotic autocleaner. I decided not to point out that technically my parents were also her parents, and she’d probably have known if either of them had been fond of petting zoo pornography. It’s a big galaxy, and a lot of things have become socially acceptable since humanity decided being planetbound was a bad idea, but there are still fetishes we don’t discuss in polite company.
Clones are a pretty mainstream fetish. Everybody wants to get with the face from the vids, even if it doesn’t belong to the woman who actually spoke the lines they love. Sometimes I think so many Nora-Rs resort to petty crime because it’s that or the tickle-films, and while there’s nothing wrong with deciding your calling is sex for credits, it’s a little awkward to have people assuming that’s what you’re going to do when you grow up from the time that you’re decanted.
Rona hit my arm with her free hand, trying and failing to break away. I guess a life of casual crime isn’t as good for the physique as the physical labor of maintaining a traveling funfair.
“Let go!” she demanded.
“You may be in a dying mood, but I’m not, and I’m not in the mood to get yelled at for letting you get shot by your own hired goons,” I snapped back, pushing off another wall and sending us shooting up, up, up into a ceiling-level access tunnel. We were traveling like paired pinballs, ricocheting deeper into the ship with every thrust. Part of that was intentional: I wanted more distance between me and the pirates. Part of it was just physics.
“They weren’t going to shoot me! They work for me!”
“Keep telling yourself that!”
Violet had figured out the situation and killed the gravity. Great. Without gravity, the pirates couldn’t pursue us effectively, since they didn’t know the layout of my ship. The Mercury Midway has been rebuilt so many times over the years that she’s half maze, half ode to creative engineering. It’s necessary if we want to store the games and attractions and still have room for silly things like “living quarters” and “hydroponics.” The things no one in their right mind will pay to see, and some of the many reasons we need a gravity generator rated for a passenger liner.
Without the gravity, we couldn’t slow ourselves down, and I could only hope that Doc had been as busy as Violet had. I kicked off another corner, and we hurtled up the last tube, speeding up until—
—we smacked, face-first, into a wall of colorful plastic that bent inward under us, absorbing our momentum like it was nothing. I let go of Rona, rolling away and grabbing hold of the handholds set into the plastic wall. She squawked, indignant and confused, and flailed around, unable to get her balance on the slick surface. I sat up, using the handholds to steady myself, and watched her.
It was nice not to be the one off-balance for a change. It was even nicer when the one who didn’t know her ass from the air was my so-precise sister, who never met a con she didn’t think was a great thing to test on her family.
“Nora? You all right?”
“Fine, Doc,” I said. “How’d you know we were coming?”
“They cut the main cameras, but they didn’t know about the tunnels.” My engineer’s broad, welcome face appeared around the curve of the inflatable kinetic-absorbent bounce house. Guaranteed not to let your little tyke break an arm, five credits for fifteen minutes. Fifty credits for two adults and the same time period after hours when no one was watching you. “Violet has control of the gravity.”
“Do you have her on comms?”
“Yes.”
“Tell her to turn the gravity back on, then cycle it a few times. Maybe if we concuss them before we return them to their ship, they’ll forget how much they want to kill my stupid sister.”
The stupid sister in question shoved her hair out of her face and glared at me. “They weren’t going to kill me!”
“They’re pirates.” I looked at her pityingly. “Killing people is what they do.”
She was opening her mouth to object again when the sound of lasers firing in an enclosed space echoed up the tunnel network. Doc swore and ducked out of sight. The sound of switches flipping and hatches slamming shut followed.
“They’re firing at the ceiling where you disappeared,” he reported. “They’re not really aiming so much as, ah, doing property damage. I’m going to let Violet know what she needs to do with the gravity. Can I help you with anything else?”
“Call the authorities,” I said, while Rona sputtered and glared, looking like she couldn’t decide whether to be angry with her so-called crew for shooting at her or furious with me for saving her neck. Ah, the joys of sisterhood.
“On it.”
I turned a serene smile on Rona. “I’d grab hold of the bounce house if I were you.”
