Reckoning
By
Floyd Largent
Nothing good ever happened to Janey on a Freytag.
She'd failed second form on a Freytag. Her beloved
drishter,
Kit, had died on a Freytag, run over by a skimmer that Dah swore wasn't his... except
she'd seen the streak of orange on the skids. Her mother had caused the
accident on a Freytag, and a few weeks later, she'd died on a Freytag. When Dah
fell off the wagon, it was always on a Freytag, and he always fell hard, and he
always took it out on Janey.
Now it was Freytag again, and Janey was in trouble
again,
and she was done with school for the week.
She dreaded the weekend to come, and it began
badly. When
she finally completed the long walk home and circled around to enter the main house,
she found that her father had ripped apart the emergency lockout override,
scattering its components across half the back snowfield. The hatch to the
supply shed stood open, propped open — against colony regs and all sanity — with
a chunk of blue ice. Inside, she could see that the skimmer was partially
dismantled.
Electricity sputtered, and a burst of sparks sprayed
across
her father's chest. He stepped back, cursing. She could smell the sharp stench of
burnt cable insulation.
She wrinkled her nose in disgust. "Hey, Dah."
Her father turned toward her, bleary-eyed and
haggard-faced.
His parka hood was pushed back, revealing greasy, tangled hair, and he clenched
something shiny in his teeth. She watched numbly as he transferred the shiny
something to his left hand so he could talk. "What in hell're you doing
home so early?" he rasped.
"Hector Suunto called me a dronespawn, so I smacked
him. They sent me home."
He grunted. "And you walked home, ten kays in
the
snow."
"Yeh."
"Hector Suunto was right."
Janey ground her teeth. Bastard. Four years ago,
Mum had
made an error in judgment that had cost 17 miner’s their lives. A month later,
she'd been convicted of mass manslaughter and mindwiped, mercy and family be
damned. Now she was a drone in the Commonwealth bordello in Tailspin. Janey'd
had nothing to do with it, she was just eight then, but her Dah never passed up
an opportunity to make her feel small.
She took a deep breath and said, "Do you really
think
it's a good idea to take apart the lockout override? The alarm's been broke for
months." She avoided pointing out that the alarm was broken because he'd
dismantled it and never bothered to replace the parts he'd scavenged. "What
if something happens?"
"Ain't nothin'll happen," he muttered, and spat.
"I need these components for the skimmer. Now get your ass inside and fix
dinner before I smack ya." He went back to his task.
She pushed past him into the lock, shaking
her head. He
should know better. They taught everyone from infancy to never, ever compromise
your failsafes. Make sure your emergency equipment is functional at all times,
because it might save your life someday. The Founders hadn't been futzing
around when they'd named Gliese 876-f "Icebox": the world was located
on the extreme outer edge of its star's Goldilocks zone, and as a result was
only marginally habitable. Daytime temps fluctuated around a bearable -10° C, but plummeted to as low as -80° at night. Humans could
acclimate to the daytime cold, given sufficient clothing, but the nighttime
chill would freeze you solid.
Scowling, Janey went straight to her room to change.
As she
slipped out of her school uniform and reached for her sweats, she caught a
glimpse of herself in the mirror over the bureau. She straightened, turned, and
took a good look.
She wouldn't be winning any beauty contests anytime
soon. The
semicircular bite mark above her left breast from last time was fading, but it
was still a sufficiently bright purple to notice. The bruises on her thighs
were nearly gone, but still they ached. Not as bad as her gut, though; she was
afraid he’d damaged something in there. For a long moment, she rubbed her
stomach and stared thoughtfully at her reflection. Then she turned away from
the image and yanked a sheet off her bed. Very deliberately, she draped it over
the mirror, and finished changing.
Dah...
When Mum was around, he'd never hurt Janey. She'd
loved him
then. But when Mum had been wiped, he'd disintegrated morally and psychologically.
A year later he'd been fired from the mines for striking a foreman who'd
questioned his sobriety. Popped him a good one, according to Dah.
Popped himself right out of a job in the mines,
the colony's
solitary reason for being. He'd passed up his chance to make it right by
popping the foreman's boss a good one several days later. Now he was no longer
welcome even in the fissionables pits where the cons worked off their debts to
society. Icebox was a Company world, Commonwealth supervision notwithstanding. If
the Company didn't want you to work, you didn't work, and they didn't hand out
tickets back to the Core Worlds either, not to second-gen Icies and their
dronespawn brats.
Like an idiot, he'd used the last of their savings
to
purchase the freehold and a stake on a heavy-water glacier ten kays from
nowhere. Yeah, he made sporadic attempts to mine deuterium, but that made
barely enough cred to keep the house running. Otherwise they survived on
Children's Welfare, church charity, and by selling off possessions they'd taken
a lifetime to accumulate. There wasn't much left.
God, how she missed her Mum. Mum hadn't been perfect,
but
she'd treated her girl right. Wasn't much left of her now.
Biting her lip, Janey opened the bottom drawer
of her
bureau and withdrew the battered tin box within. She took the lid off
carefully, so as not to jostle what was inside. It was priceless.
The Doll had been Mum's prize possession. It had
been
manufactured on Earth more than two centuries ago, before anyone had so much as
set foot beyond the mother system. The Doll had been passed from mother to
daughter every generation since, and had been lovingly reconditioned a
half-dozen times. It still had its original nylon-strand hair, and the tiny
swimsuit it wore had been stitched by her grandmother's hands. There wasn't
another like it on the entire planet.
Janey reached in and gently stroked Barbie's shiny
blonde
hair with a fingertip. Beautiful, so beautiful. She turned it over, and looked
at the word stamped on the bottom of its left foot in old-style script: MALIBU.
She'd looked up Malibu in school; it was the name of a city in a province
called California, on the western edge of the North American Alliance on Earth,
and the cyclopedia said it was warm there all the time. It never snowed, or
sleeted, or even hailed. It boggled her mind to think that places existed where
it was so warm that there was no snow, and all you needed to wear was a tiny
two-piece swimsuit. Imagine that.
She put the Doll away and rubbed the moisture
from her
eyes.
She was skinning a bizzle when Dah finally clattered
into
the house. He ignored her, as usual, and she focused studiously on defurring
the rodent. It was a small one she'd plumbed out of its ironbush lair this
morning before school, mostly fur and gristle, but it was meat and Dah liked
meat. Not much nutrition in it for humans, but it filled the belly and tasted
OK. It and its buddies would do until the CW check came next Zeestag. The furs
might fetch a little cred, too.
She was dicing the bizzle into a stewpot, idly
wondering
what sand was like (she thought that it must be something like grainy yellow
snow; they both came in drifts) when he came out of his bedroom. He was dressed
in town clothes and snow boots and looked halfway presentable. He must have
gotten the skimmer fixed; God forbid he should have to walk the ten kays into
town. She didn't say anything.
"Goin' to town," he volunteered. "We need
cash. Can't get the skimmer runnin'."
He waved something in her general direction. What it was didn't register
at first, but when it did, bizzle and knife splatted and clattered onto the
duraplast at her feet.
He was holding Mum's Doll.
Before she realized what she was doing, she'd
stepped in
front of him, face flushed. "No. We don't need money that bad. Put it back.
Right now."
He didn't say a word; he just lifted his free
hand and
swatted her aside, as easy as she'd bat away a snow-gnat. She would've been OK,
it wasn't like it was the first time or anything, but she stumbled over a
muck-encrusted pair of work boots he'd left in the middle of the floor, and
pitched headfirst into the wall. Her head hit with a dull thock, and that was
the last thing she remembered for quite a while.
She didn't know who or where she was when she
came to hours
later. By the time she'd recovered her senses and remembered, the statwall
indicated that there was less than an hour before dark.
Dah wasn't home yet. A kind of panic seized her,
and she
stood suddenly. A wave of dizziness washed over her. Moving carefully, she
stumbled to the sink, kicked aside the remains of the bizzle, and vomited into
the drain. When she was feeling better, she gently explored her forehead with
her fingers. No blood, no broken skin; just a lump. Thank heaven for small
favors. She had a hell of headache, but a couple of codeine tabs from the
medkit would take care of that.
Dah would be fine. After all, he'd grown up in
this, and he
was an ice prospector. He knew the dangers of the environment better than most.
After she'd medicated herself, Janey tottered
to the lock
and activated the forward viewscreen. She panned the camera around the yard; Dah
wasn't there, but she noted that he had, at least, buttoned up the supply shed.
She'd been half afraid she'd have to stumble out into the snow and do it
herself, and she wasn't sure she was up to it. She switched to the supply-shed
cam and aimed it at the front door. The emergency lockout override was still
ripped apart, its guts laid out on the snow like a bright metal sacrifice to
the gods of technology.
Stupid git. Sighing, she hugged herself and
rubbed her
forearms. It was always too cold in here for her. Dah kept it at 15°, supposedly to save energy,
which didn't make sense because energy was dirt cheap. All you needed was a few
chips of heavy ice for the converter, and you had a day's power. And he could
get it for free if he'd shift his lazy ass. Grumbling, she plopped down onto
the stool in front of the climate control comp near the lock, and turned it on.
It started eeping at her insistently. Rolling her eyes, she glanced at the
readout.
Emergency lockout override system offline.
Emergency lockout alarm system
offline.
Backup power supply offline.
Long-range comm offline.
Short-range comm marginal.
"No foolin'," she muttered. A swift keystroke
silenced the alarm. She navigated to the proper screen, and touched the icon
that activated the heaters. After a second of thought, she scaled the temp up
to 28°. Dah would be pissed, but for a
little while, she'd be deliciously warm. As she began to initiate the CC system's
shutdown, something crackled loudly from the direction of the kitchen nook.
She jerked her head in that direction, and the
motion made
her vision waver and dim. She shut her eyes tightly as a sick pounding started
in her forebrain. The shortcomm. But who could it be?
"Hey! Janey! Wake up in there. I'll be home in
a
minnid and dinner'd better damn well be ready."
She swallowed. Crap. Crap crap crap. For a long
moment she
stared at the CC monitor, wondering what to do. Maybe she could have something
edible ready, something she could nuke in the mike. She continued the system
shutdown, hurry hurry hurry, couldn't leave it on 'cause it might piss off Dah,
and on the last screen before she hit Escape her hand brushed an icon in the
lower right corner of the screen, accidental-like, and a quadruple thump
vibrated through the house as the arm-thick collapsteel stormwards slid into
place on the airlock doors, two to each door, one at the top and one at the
bottom, and the system started eeping again and the screen blinked red like
blood, and then the eeping doubled its pace as the stormwards snapped shut on
the supply shed door too, but she didn't pay attention, 'cause she was in a
hurry. Hurry hurry hurry.
She was sliding the last of the leftover veggies
into the
mike when the proximity alert bleeped. She reached over and thumbed it off.
She heard someone's heavy breathing over the shortcomm
as they
tugged at the outer door. "Whathehell..." A dull whang sounded, as if
the visitor had kicked the door. Probably had. Fat lot of good that'd do; it
was 20 cents thick, per code. "Fuggit, somethin's wrong with the door. Janey,
somethin's wrong with the goddamned door! Lemme in, goddammit, it's gettin'
friggin' cold!"
So it was. On the monitor above the sink, she
could see the
tiny bright point that was Gliese 876 sinking below the horizon, and the night winds
had already started howling around the corners of the house.
Her head hurt like sin. Her vision began doubling,
then
smearing into uselessness. "Janey, open the goddamn door, you stupid little
slut! I'm gonna strangle you with your own guts when I get inside if you don't
get this friggin' door open right now, ya hear me? You better open this door now,
or you're gonna regret it!"
The voice shouting at her over the shortcomm was
making her
headache worse. She reached out and snapped it off.
From the freehold, it was more than an hour's
walk back to
town — if you really hurried. In less than an hour, the temp would hit -80°. Maybe colder. Whoever was out
there would be wearing a heated drysuit, natch; that was an elementary
precaution. Though it was amazing how much damage a screwdriver could do to a
drysuit's powerpod.
Or so she'd heard.
When someone started pounding against the outer
door, first
angrily and then desperately, Janey sat down on the cold duraplast, wrapped her
thin arms around her aching head, squeezed her eyes shut, and began rocking.
Eventually, the pounding stopped.
When Janey uncurled and got up off the floor,
the statwall
said it was Soontag. Huh. Hadn't yesterday been Freytag? Must be broke again.
She groaned. Christ, why was her head hurting
so much? Why
was the comm off? Where the mufti was Dah?
She checked every room in the house and couldn't
find him.
Then she scanned the property with the cameras, so she wouldn't have to leave
the warmth, if he was even out there. Nothing outside but a blanket of even
white, a good meter deeper than before. She noted that he'd deployed the
stormwards before he wandered off; good thing, that.
She couldn't figure it. Was he out on the glacier,
actually
working? Nah. She'd better just call around town, ask if anyone had seen him.
But then she remembered the longcomm was still out. Skimmer was gone, too.
Cryke. Well, she'd just have to walk into town
and find him
her damn self. If Dah still wasn't around, she figured she'd check in with the
Child Welfare billies, see if they had any use for one slightly used
twelve-year-old who could cook and clean and do all kinds of helpful things.
But first she needed to make breakfast. For some
reason,
she was really, really hungry.
END
