Ark

83

May 2068

Steel Antionadi waited for Max Baker by the wet farm in the base of Halivah, as far down-pole as she could get from Wilson and his thugs. Nobody was around. Nothing stirred except the green things growing in their glop tanks.

She looked up along the length of the hull. She could see up-pole all the way to Wilson’s nest in the dome. In the middle of the day it was bright, the arcs glowing warmly, and people came and went, old folk and kids, and babies gurgling in the air. A work party had taken out the equipment racks from Deck Six and was scrubbing the walls in a spiral pattern.

All this was background to Steel. What she looked for was other shippers like her, shipborn, where they clustered in their little territories, marked by scratchy graffiti signatures on the walls. To her they stood out against the hull’s drab background like stars against the black sky. Every so often you would see one of them glare down at you, making eye contact like a zap from a laser beam. There was information in the way they clustered, information in the way they looked and laughed. Nobody much older than Steel even saw any of this going on.

Max Baker came swimming down. Slim and supple, he was good in the air, and he showed off for her, staying away from the guide ropes and handholds, letting the friction of the air slow him down. He was fifteen, she twenty-three. He somersaulted and landed neatly on a T-stool beside her. “Got ’em,” he said without preamble.

She glanced around. Wilson said he had taken out the cameras, but everybody knew there were cameras and spies. But Wilson didn’t watch the wet farm because shippers didn’t work here mostly, and what he liked to watch was shippers, especially the younger ones. Still, she whispered. “The caps. You got enough?”

“Yeah. Exterior store.”

He was talking about explosive charges intended for such uses as blowing hatches in emergency evacuations, or separating the shuttles from the hull’s main body.

“Hid?”

“Yeah.” He glanced up at Wilson’s nest in the dome. “ He won’t see them.”

“You sure you want to do this?”

He looked back at her, thoughtful, conflicting feelings visible in his face. She could see he was trying to big up in front of her. Well, they had had a relationship. There were so few of them on the hull that everybody had done some kind of fooling with everybody else, on a spectrum of warmth all the way from best buddies to moms ’n’ pops. Every gradation of love and friendship had a name. There were even more names for kinds of enemies. With Max she had got as far as feelie-friends before they backed off. He was too young, or she was too old. Being with him reminded her of her time with Wilson, but sort of upside down, for with Max she had been the old one. Anyhow she liked Max, and respected him. She didn’t want him to get himself killed, which was a strong possibility if they went ahead with their plan.

But he shrugged. “He’s got Terese. Wilson. Cold-fucking her. That’s not right.”

She knew that even the shipborn word, cold-fucking, wasn’t appropriate for what Wilson was doing to Max’s twin. He was using Terese just as he had used Steel, before she grew too old for his taste, her bones too long, her breasts too big. It was a word Max was using for comfort, a lie he told to himself. That was Max’s motive. Hers was deeper.

She grabbed his arm. “We’ll do this, end the lies.”

He nodded, anger and fear warring in his expression. “When?” “You’ll know.”