Chương 36: Interlude One - The Twenty and Six

She was born in a desolate little station, stuck in the rings of Saturn. Stuck and desolate were not pulling nearly enough weight in that statement. She'd been born on a station whose name was a string of letters and numbers, and whose owners lived way back on Earth. Or maybe Mars? It was hard to tell. It wasn't like they really mattered. Twenty-Six was born to a cozy little family, and that was, maybe, enough. Her name was given to her in the station's hospital.

She was the twenty-sixth baby born there, and was, technically, company property from the moment of her birth. That, like many other things, was a polite fiction. If she was company property, then she was also the company's responsibility. It meant that the number's corporation that owned her had to write off her 'maintenance' as a normal expense. Diapers and her first shots, the medication that all babies born in zero-g needed, the special little pace-maker for her infantile heart to be able to beat.

Her first clothes, then her education. It was all a calculated game of putting the responsibility on someone's shoulder. That was a good analogy for life around Saturn, actually. Everything was teetering on the edge of being a disaster, and it all had to be someone's fault. It wasn't all bad. She was one of some eighty thousand people living in and around the rings of Saturn. That was a small city's worth of people, so many that it was impossible to know everyone. But it was possible to know each other's families.

They formed a strange sort of society that had felt completely natural to her at the time. Clans and sects and tightly knit family groups, each one with their own speciality. Her family were mechanics. Her grandparents, all four of them, were engineers, and her parents both mechanics. They devoted themselves to keeping the stations running. Others had clans of security officers, or clans of mining operators, drone controllers, life support specialists, dock workers, officers... there was a sense of...

place, in the rings. You were born into your slot. You'd live and work in it, responsible for keeping that cog turning until you inevitably died at the median age of twenty-nine. When her parents passed--the blame had fallen on a young man called Forty-Seven, from the Life Support Subsystems Clan, she had decided that maybe... maybe life around Saturn wasn't the best. There was nothing actually keeping her back. She was company property, but that was a polite fiction and everyone knew it.

So she made some calls, took the small amount of time allotted to her to grieve and got herself a berth on the Held Together. She was happy to admit that she fell in love with the ship. There was so much room, so much life, so much motion. Sure, it was even older than some of the stations she'd lived on and repaired, but old wasn't always bad. It had a weight of history to it, and the captain treated her right. Missy was there too. Stern and gruff and... kind of hot.

Twenty-Six had developed a crush on the older woman almost as grand as her love for the ship. Both loves had lasted for a while, and both seemed to be going nowhere fast. Missy didn't return the feelings. Twenty-Six wasn't sure she was able to. The woman had history of her own, and she'd leave at many of the ports they found themselves in and find a man, or a woman, to spend the night with. The Held Together... didn't always live up to her name. She was a ship in rough shape, and it often showed.

The romance faded a little. There were other ships out there, some that weren't death-traps. She'd seen stations, even moons, that she never expected to see before, and discovered first-hand that her experiences in the rings weren't... normal. Sure, life was shit all across the solar system, but there were big pockets where things maybe weren't so bad. She'd never live on a planet, or on one of the moons with a heavier gravity well. Her bones and heart couldn't take it. But one of the smaller moons?

One of the newer, nicer stations? Maybe... maybe one day. Twenty-Six could say a lot about Saturn, but she couldn't say that the place had stomped out her ability to dream. The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there. None of those dreams had ever included someone like Evelyn Ville. The woman had come aboard the Held Together and acted in a way that didn't fit the little boxes that Twenty-Six usually put people in.

They'd had guests and passengers before, but never any who were that interested in their homely rust bucket. She'd never had someone interested in her before. Twenty-Six might have been... a little innocent, but she wasn't stupid. Evelyn was hiding a whole heap of stuff. She was powerful, way stronger than was normal, she was probably rich, she was well-educated, and she was... kinda hot, but in a very domineering, overpowering kind of way. Even if she acted very maternally towards Twenty-Six herself.

She was uncertain about her emotions regarding everything that had happened, and the act of storming a pirate station, eliminating hundreds, and then presenting Twenty-Six with a core did nothing to clarify her feelings on the matter. Cores were expensive. Cores were worth a fortune. The one she had was probably even useful, which meant that if she figured out how to split it and sell that split, she might be set for life. Well, life as long as she lived humbly.

In under a standard week, Evelyn had swept into her life, flirted with her (she was pretty sure), flirted with all the other pretty girls on the ship (she was more certain of that), then murdered a heap of pirates, gave Twenty-Six an entire core for no reason, and now they were waltzing into a ship that looked like it couldn't be any more than two years old. Twenty-Six knew that if it wasn't for the adrenaline pumping through her right now, she'd be a hyperventilating mess in a corner.

"Can you open the door, Twenty Six?" She jumped, then looked over to Evelyn. The woman was standing, as if there was gravity, next to the final airlock door leading into the Sappho.

"Oh, uh, yeah," she said while cursing herself for not being more articulate. The door was new, sure, but it wasn't operating on anything too sophisticated. The hardware was nice, but the software was dated, and whoever had put it together had never patched out the exploits that could get the door open. She tapped into the commands, checked in the maintenance log, took note of the last name on the registry, then tapped out.

Then it was as easy as opening the maintenance menu again, typing in that name as a pass, and running a physical diagnostics test. That same test included the door opening and closing, which... made it all terribly easy.

"Well done," Evelyn said. Twenty-Six tried to suppress the happy thrill that those words sent down her spine. She wasn't a dog to go all happy just because she got a little praise! She... she'd need a lot of praise for that. Pouting to herself, Twenty-Six allowed the others to get past her into the ship before she followed them. Evelyn was still floating the corpse of that pirate captain with her, for whatever reason, though she did open up a locker just on the inside and tossed it in without a care.

She floated around it as she followed the others deeper in. The airlock shut behind them, and they were all inside what might have been their brand-new ship. It was gorgeous. Sleek panels with evenly placed handholds. Brushed aluminium grating over maintenance access points. The air exchange quickly syphoned the air from the lock out of the room, with barely a rattle and no signs that there was an active fan. The ship was only partially active at the moment.

Life support was on, but everything else seemed to be on standby. Still, it was quiet, far more so than the Held Together ever was.

"I'm not sensing any life onboard," Evelyn said.

"You can do that?" Twenty-Six asked. Evelyn looked back to her, amber eyes, almost the same colour as a warning light, meeting her own. She gulped.

"I can," Evelyn said simply.

"I suspect the bridge is above. That's usually where those things are. Will you be able to give us control?"

"I'll try," Twenty-Six said. She didn't want to complain. Right now, there was an opportunity the likes of which she never had before, one to turn her life around, to make it so much better... but why did it have to come from the scary hot lady?