Asimov's SF, October-November 2011 Read online

“They are,” Squishy said, “but you're not.”

  She pushed at the woman, and the woman stumbled, then started to run, letting her panic take over. They'd had drills here: Squishy made sure of that when she arrived, but apparently no one thought about what the drills actually implied.

  And this was no drill.

  Her ears ached from the sirens. Then the stupid automated voice started up again.

  Emergency evacuation underway. Proceed to your designated evac area . . . .

  She tuned it out, counting the scientists as they passed. There was no way she could count a thousand people, not that all of them would run past her anyway. But she was keeping track. Numbers always helped her keep track.

  Her heart raced, as if it was running along with everyone else.

  Quint stumbled out of the side corridor, his face bloody, his shirt torn. He reached her and she flinched.

  “We have to evacuate,” he said, grabbing her.

  “I'm going to go,” she said. “I want to make sure everyone's out.”

  “They're out,” he said. “Let's go.”

  She shook her head. “You go. I'll catch up.”

  “Rosealma, we're not doing this again,” he said.

  “Yes, we are,” she said. “Get out now."

  “I'm not leaving you,” he said.

  This was not the moment for him to develop balls. “Get out, Quint. I can take care of myself.”

  I always have, she thought, but bit back the words.

  “Rosealma,” he said. “I'm sorry—”

  “Oh, for God's sake,” she said. “Get out."

  And she shoved him. He lost his balance, his feet hitting the jar. It skittered across the floor, and she looked at it, wondering what would happen if the damn thing shattered.

  He saw her. “Do we need that?”

  “Aren't you listening?” she said. “You're supposed to leave everything behind.”

  “You didn't make the rules,” he snapped.

  She pointed up, even though she wasn't sure if the automated voice came from “up” or if it came from some other direction. It did rather feel like the Voice of God.

  “Those aren't my rules,” she said. “They're the station's. Now hurry. I'll be right behind you.”

  “Promise me you won't do anything stupid, Rosealma,” he said.

  “When have I done anything stupid?” she asked, sounding calmer than she felt. Sometimes she thought that everything she had done was stupid. Hell, she knew that everything she had ever done was stupid. That was why she was here, to make up for the stupid, and it wasn't coming out so well.

  “Rosealma—”

  "Go," she said.

  He gave her an odd look and then hurried, half-running, half-walking down the corridor. Twice he glanced over his shoulder, as if he expected her to follow.

  She didn't.

  The corridor was emptying out. No one had run past in at least a minute. The damn sirens sounded even louder in the emptiness.

  Emergency evacuation underway. Proceed to your designated evac area . . . .

  “Shut up,” she whispered, wishing she could shut the stupid voice down. But she didn't dare. She needed everyone off this station.

  She needed everyone to live.

  * * * *

  Nineteen Years Earlier

  The mood on the skip was tense. The light was terrible. The tourist was lying next to the door, unconscious, blood covering his face. The three women running the dive stood near the control panel, looking down at him.

  None of them wanted to help him. Rosealma knew that without consulting with the other two.

  “He hasn't even gotten off the skip yet,” Turtle said. She was thin and looked strange in her environmental suit. She hadn't put on the helmet, and without it, she really did look like a turtle.

  She had gotten the nickname long before Rosealma met her, but Rosealma understood why the first time she'd seen Turtle in her environmental suit with her tiny head sticking out of it.

  “Just because they have money doesn't mean they have brains,” said the spacer-thin woman leading this little dive. She wouldn't tell anyone her name, insisting on being called Boss.

  Rosealma didn't call anyone Boss, particularly a thirty-something woman whose only claim to the job title was the fact that she owned the skip that was taking them to the celebrated space wreck.

  Still, this Boss promised good money for the practice dive, as she called it, and if the dive worked out, then both Turtle and Rosealma could join her team of divers. Boss wanted to take divers to real wrecks, unexplored wrecks, not the historic wrecks that tourists wanted to see. But she couldn't do that without government funding, and Boss never took money from the Enterran Empire—or so she said.

  “Look,” Rosealma said, squatting beside the stupid tourist. “I have some equipment. Let me see what I can do.”

  “We need to get him back.” Boss ran a hand through her short cap of chestnut hair. “He needs a medic.”

  “I am a medic,” Rosealma snapped.

  Turtle looked at her in surprise. The two of them had been sleeping together for six months, and Rosealma hadn't told Turtle about her background. Or, rather, Rosealma hadn't told Turtle much about her background, including her medical training and her various scientific degrees.

  “Then get to it,” Boss said. “I don't think he'll appreciate getting an infection on top of losing the eye.”

  “He's not going to lose the eye.” Rosealma grabbed the skip's medical kit from beside the control panel. Then she took her own tools from the bag she carried on every single trip.

  “He's going to lose the eye,” Boss said stubbornly, and she didn't sound sympathetic.

  Rosealma wasn't sympathetic either. The guy really was an idiot. He had a tiny knife and he had been gesturing with it, explaining to Boss how he would cut just a small bit of the historic wreck as a souvenir, and how it wouldn't hurt the wreck at all.

  Boss had gotten angry and told him that if he was going to cut up the wreck, then she wouldn't take him to it. He had leaned toward her, shaking that little knife, blade up, and said, I'm paying you, honey, to take me to that wreck, and if you don't put me on it, then I'm not paying for anything.

  You already paid a deposit, Boss had said.

  I'll take it back.

  Just try, she had said, and smiled.

  He had leaned toward her, waving that blade, and the skip had lurched just enough so that he had lost his footing. He had let out a little squeak, and had fallen forward, the knife skittering out of his hand, leaving a tiny blood trail on the skip's floor.

  Rosealma had glanced over her shoulder at the crucial moment. Turtle had been standing near the control panel, but she hadn't been touching it.

  Or at least, she hadn't been touching it a second after the skip lurched. What she'd been doing a second or two before the lurch no one would ever know.

  “The idiot sliced through his own eyeball,” Boss said.

  “I don't know why you let him come on board with a weapon,” Turtle said.

  “I didn't,” Boss said. “The thing was small enough for him to conceal.”

  “Doesn't matter,” Rosealma said. “If you move away, I can help him.”

  “I almost wish you wouldn't,” Boss said.

  “Then you'll get sued,” Rosealma said, although she didn't know if that was true.

  She crouched over the stupid tourist, tilted his head back, and cleaned the blood away from the eye. Then she used her handheld to magnify the eyeball.

  Just like she thought. He had nicked it, making it bleed. Most of the blood came from the socket, not the eye itself.

  She had an entire stash of lenses. Too many cases of laser blindness had made her cautious. The lenses would graft onto the eyeball, and serve as a protection until the victim could get to a real medical facility.

  Boss was watching. Turtle leaned over.

  “Squishy,” Turtle said.

  “What?” Rosealma asked.
<
br />   “It looks squishy. Is it?”

  Boss uttered a shaky laugh, and looked at Turtle. “For a minute, I thought you were calling her Squishy.”

  “Why not?” Rosealma muttered. “One name is the same as another.”

  She worked on the eye—and noted that it was a little squishy—but she didn't tell them that. Then she patched him up, but she didn't give him anything that would wake him. He needed to heal and they didn't need to listen to his bluster. He wasn't going to get to dive his precious little historic wreck, and Rosealma doubted he would get his deposit back, no matter how hard he protested.

  Boss turned the skip around and headed back to her larger ship, Nobody's Business. For the rest of the trip, Turtle called Rosealma Squishy, and giggled.

  The name stuck.

  * * * *

  Now

  The corridor was empty. The sirens continued to wail, and the androgynous voice repeatedly informed Squishy that she had only five minutes to evacuate.

  She reached down and grabbed that jar. It was warm. She wondered what the hell it actually was. She knew what it wasn't. It wasn't a functioning anacapa drive.

  But it might have been a malfunctioning version of it, missing the various pieces that actually made the anacapa function.

  She carried the jar to one of the side rooms and set it inside.

  Then she took one last look around. It hadn't been a bad research station. The station had been well designed and well equipped, although all of the state-of-the-art protections, all of the one-of-a-kind technology couldn't help it now.

  She tapped into the control panel on the wall, looking for heat signatures and individual life tags. Everyone who was supposed to be here was tagged, and should show up on the panel. Everyone who wasn't supposed to be here should show up as a heat signature.

  She was the only heat signature and had the only tag. In a place that normally housed a thousand scientists, she was the only one who remained.

  She let out a small sigh of relief.

  The sirens sounded even louder than they had before, probably because the station was empty. All of the spaceships had left as well, except for her designated evacuation vessel. She opened its systems, checked to make sure it was empty, then shut it down.

  Finally, she punched in an access code, opening previously sealed corridors, then sprinted out the door.

  The androgynous voice accompanied her.

  Emergency evacuation underway. Proceed to your designated evac area . . . .

  She wanted to tell it to shut up, but of course it would shut up involuntarily, and not too long from now.

  She ran as fast as she could down the escape route she had set up more than a month before. She wasn't in the best shape any longer, even though she had made certain to exercise every day. It didn't matter. She couldn't run as fast as she used to.

  She wondered if that would make a difference. Maybe she should have gone to her designated evac area.

  As if to mock her, the androgynous voice was telling her to get to that evac area.

  Do not double back. Go directly to your designated evac area. The station will shut down entirely in . . . five . . . minutes.

  “Shut up,” she whispered, using precious breath. She was breathing harder than she expected.

  She skidded around the last corner, putting out a hand to catch herself, then headed to the last remaining ship.

  It wasn't quite a single ship and it wasn't quite a skip. It was a modified cruiser, one she had designed herself and parked on the station when she first arrived months ago.

  She reached into her pocket, clicked the ship's remote, and ordered it to start, hoping the station's systems did not prevent the remote access. She had set them up so that they wouldn't, but everything changed in an emergency.

  Do not finish your work. Do not bring your work. Once life tags move out of an area, that area will seal off . . . .

  If she survived this, she would be hearing that stupid voice in her sleep. Small price, she supposed. Maybe she could try some lucid dreaming and shoot out the voice.

  The doors were open to the docking area. The stupid voice was lying about everything being sealed off.

  Well, not lying exactly. Unable to cope with directions Squishy had programmed long ago. She wanted her ship, not some designated evac vessel that she couldn't control. She hadn't even checked her dedicated evac vessel for supplies and provisions, although she made sure her cruiser was well stocked.

  The station will shut down entirely in . . . three . . . minutes.

  She ran up the ramp. The door to the ship, which she had rechristened The Dane in a fit of whimsy, stood open. She hurried inside, slammed the lock, shot through the airlock and into the ship itself.

  Only two meters to the command chair, and she crossed those faster than she had run through the corridors. She slammed her open palm on the controls, recited the Old Earth Standard nonsense poem she had learned in the last year, and the controls came on.

  Then she hit the preprogrammed escape plan and the ship roared into life. It rose and headed toward the docking doors faster than they were opening.

  She cursed and hoped there was some kind of failsafe for those doors, because she didn't want to slow down and she didn't want to hit them and she certainly didn't want to be here with the station about to blow.

  At the last second the doors seemed to slam open—shaking the wall as they hit, which had to sound like slamming, although she couldn't hear anything—and then she was free of the place.

  The Dane zoomed away from the station as fast as the ship could safely go without hitting FTL. She turned the screens onto the station itself, imagined that snarky automated voice continuing its countdown to the now empty station:

  The station will shut down entirely in . . . five . . . four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . . .

  She raised her head, expecting to see the station blow into a million pieces. Instead it remained intact and she wondered if she had gotten her count wrong. She hadn't really been paying attention to the clock. She'd been running, not counting minutes.

  Her heart was pounding and she was breathing hard. Her palm had left a damp print on the controls.

  She stared at the screens and wondered, for the very first time, if she had gotten it all wrong.

  * * * *

  Nineteen Years Earlier

  The woman sitting at the edge of the bar wasn't pretty. She was too thin, her head too small, her features not clearly defined. She wasn't even a woman—not quite, anyway. She was probably eighteen if she was a day, but she pretended to be older, and that had caught Rosealma's attention.

  That, and the woman's cap of brownish-blond hair. The hair was choppy, clearly cut by the woman herself. Her long fingers were wrapped around a mug of some kind of ale, and she looked lonely.

  Maybe it was the loneliness that caught Rosealma. Or maybe it was the woman's sideways glances. Rosealma tried not to watch her, but there was something, something interesting, the first interesting thing Rosealma had seen since she'd left Vallevu.

  The bar was old and seedy, the space station not much better. Rosealma had used the last of her hazard pay to get here, and really didn't want to leave. She had placed six months’ rent on a berth that wasn't much more than a bed, an entertainment wall, and an unlimited supply of reading material from the station's rather eclectic (and ancient) library.

  At the moment, she was staying off the grid. Not because anyone was looking for her, but because she didn't want to be bothered. And so far no one had. One old spacer had told her she had the “look.”

  It's your eyes, he said, leaving off the endearment she had heard him use with other women on the station. You got that long stare. You seen stuff, stuff I'm not sure I want to hear about.

  He was right: he didn't want to hear it. She didn't want to tell him. She didn't want to tell anyone. She didn't want to talk, not about her past. She wanted to pretend that her life had started here, on this stupid station, way
out at the ass-end of nowhere.

  The young woman glanced at her again, and Rosealma lifted her own mug of ale in a kind of toast. The woman smiled. She tilted her head sideways as she did so, as if she couldn't quite believe she had caught another person's attention. She might even have been blushing.

  The bar owner, who was also the bartender, shouted at someone near the entrance, something about non-payment of a bill. Rosealma didn't listen. Out here, everyone was short of money, and everyone wanted something for nothing.

  She found it was easier to remain quiet about everything, to be ignored rather than draw attention to herself. She had come as close to disappearing as a human being could without actually losing her identity and starting all over.

  The woman at the end of the bar glanced at Rosealma again, then looked at the seat next to her.

  Rosealma's breath caught. She wasn't sure if she should walk over. If she had a flirtation with the woman, then she would be noticed, and everything would change.

  Still, she hadn't had a real conversation in six months, and surprisingly, she missed talking. Not about trivial things like the quality of the ale or the best place to eat for the fewest credits, but about ideas and politics and science and the things that people talked about when they were laughing and relaxing with each other.

  She missed interaction, and she'd never thought she would.

  She sighed, stood, and grabbed her mug of ale.

  Then the lights flickered out, and her stomach floated. She recognized the moment as it happened: the gravity had changed. The lights came back on just as she floated upwards, her ale floating with her, the glass emptying and beads of liquid dotting everything around her.

  No one screamed like they would have had this been planetside, although a few people cursed as their beverages took on a life of their own. The chairs and tables were bolted down, but the mugs weren't, and neither was the ice or the bar snacks or the lemons, olives, and cherries.

  She and everyone else in the bar were in the middle of a choreographed mess, which would only get worse when the gravity returned to normal.

  Behind her, the bar owner shouted, “You son of a bitch!” and that was when she realized that the gravity change wasn't some kind of malfunction; it had been planned, probably to get money out of the bar owner.