Penumbra

1

Bennett’s last shift began with the late arrival of his copilot and ended with a near-fatal collision between his Viper tug and a colony liner. In between, he learned a little about Bhao Khet Buddhism.

He crawled through the umbilical and strapped himself into the pilot’s couch. The cabin was a cramped, darkened wedge that stank with the sweat of a thousand previous pilots. The narrow, mock-leather couches were so low-slung that he operated almost horizontally, staring down the length of his body through the acutely angled view-screen.

After ten days aboard Redwood Station, piloting his tug two shifts a day, Bennett was looking forward to his leave period on Earth. Lately he had come to hate his job. What years ago had seemed to him a life of excitement and glamour had turned into nothing more than mind-numbing routine.

He jacked the leads into his helmet and got through to Control. “Bennett here. Any sign of my co-pilot?” They should have been sealing up and splitting five minutes ago.

“Ah… check, Bennett. She’s on her way.”

He settled back and magnified the viewscreen. There were times, even after fifteen years, when he was struck anew by the visual majesty of so many colossal orbital structures. His tug adhered to the skin of the station like some minuscule parasite to the flank of a basking cetacean. Beyond the station, strung out in a vast parabolic archipelago, industrial orbitals and habitats, labs and factories scintillated in the raw light of the sun. Tiny vessels, reduced to the size of gnats by comparison, shuttled between the orbitals. Occasionally, bigger tugs set off at right angles from the shimmering necklace, heading for the mining depots out on the asteroid belt.

As Bennett watched, a colony ship detached itself from an orbital transit terminal, turned with the colossal languor of all vessels its size, and moved to a phase point well away from the orbitals.

The sight of these interstellar colony ships embarking for the stars never failed to stir in Bennett a sense of venture quashed, of opportunities missed. For how many years had he promised himself that, one day, he would leave Earth and relocate to one of the colony worlds? He had dozens of downloads and holo-cubes back at his dome advertising holidays and resettlement on a hundred exotic planets.

He wondered whether it was the coward in him that shied away from the challenge of new experiences, contenting himself with the mind-numbing routine of work in the high orbitals.

The systems analyst appeared in the hatch and swam through. “Sorry I’m late,” she said as she floated past, elbowing him in the chest. He noticed that she was barefoot, an increasing trend aboard the station.

She was a tiny woman in a bright scarlet flight-suit, black-skinned and shaven-skulled. There was something severely Oriental about her features, the slanting eyes set flush in the sheer fall of her cheeks, at once childlike yet knowing.

He tried to guess at her age. She might have been anything from fifteen to thirty.

She pulled on her helmet. The bulbous headgear on so slight a figure appeared ridiculously top-heavy and antlike. She was having difficulty with the chin strap, frowning as she tried to snap the catch.

Bennett thought of Ella, his dead sister, and the face she had made when trying to buckle her cycling helmet, and he had to stop himself from reaching out to give assistance.

She strapped herself in and analysed the computer systems, going through the checks with a swift professionalism, small hands darting around the console housing, lips moving as she talked to herself.

The name-tag stitched on to her upper arm said: TEN LEE THENEKA.

“Josh Bennett,” he said. “Where you from, Ten?”

She closed her eyes briefly with a mixture of impatience and disdain. “Bhao Khet, Rigel VII. Was Rocastle’s World five years ago, before the War of Independence.”

“I know it.” From the brochures. “Vietnamese?”

“Principally Viet-Zambian.”

He nodded. That explained her jet skin.

“Now, Joshua, if the geography lesson’s over for the day, do you think you might get this ship up and running? It’s over to the ICI Industrial for routine ferry work, then up to phase point with supplies for the liners. She’s all yours.”

Bennett gave the command to disengage and through the sidescreen the excoriated skin of the station seemed to drift away. At the required distance from the dock, the engines cut in and they banked and followed the long curving line of the orbitals.

“Been on the station long?” Bennett asked.

Ten Lee sighed, staring at him. “As a matter of fact, one week.”

“Settling in okay?”

She flashed him a glance. “Why all the questions?”

“Hey—I’m sorry.” He looked at her, surprised at the tone of her voice.

He hesitated. Outside, hulking orbitals flashed by.

“It’s just that you’re new here. I was curious, that’s all. We don’t get many colonial spacers through this way. They’re all from the academy on Mars.”

He realised he was shooting off, trying to win her over.

“I don’t like much personal contact, okay?” she said. “Where I come from, we realise the danger of emotion. We try to distance ourselves from the illusions of sentiment, to avoid the suffering that is a consequence of living too much in this world. It is all maya—things that are impermanent and therefore illusory.”

Bennett nodded. She sounded like one of the many religious fanatics he came across these days. “Isn’t that some kind of Buddhism?”

She regarded him, nodded minimally. “The Bhao Khet code of the philosophy. We’ve taken it further even than the Avatamsaka school. One of the tenets of my belief is the attainment of sunyata, of nothingness. I do not need the petty distractions of your society.”

He shrugged. “Sorry if I offended you.”

Ten Lee smiled and flipped down the visor screen of her helmet.

They came to the sunlit vastness of the ICI Industrial and approached a cantilevered shelf marked with the stark black numeral 65. Bennett took control of the tug, turned it about and backed on to the shelf stacked with containers.

Ten Lee ran a hand across a touch-pad, instructing the tug’s grabs to engage with the containers. Contact and engagement rang through the tug as if it were a struck bell. Bennett lowered the visor on his helmet and monitored the pick-up on the integral screen, less out of necessity than for something to watch during the hour it took to load up.

He had often wondered why this class of tug had been named Viper; Squid would have been more appropriate. With its tapering nose-cone and multiple trailing grabs, it resembled nothing so much as that many-tentacled creature of the deep.

“Ease forward, Joshua,” Ten Lee said.

Bennett touched the tug forward ten metres and the vessel shook as more grabs snaked from its stern and contacted with the containers. This procedure was repeated for the next fifty minutes until Ten Lee gave the thumbs up. On his helmet screen, the nose-cone of the tug was dwarfed by the bulk of the two dozen containers looming aft.

Bennett eased the tug from the shelf and set course for a slow traverse of the inner curve of the serried orbitals. With the computer running things, he flipped up his visor, lay back and watched Ten Lee.

She lifted her visor, frowned down at the monitor and shook her encephalic, helmeted head.

“Something wrong?” he asked.

“I… don’t know. Yes, but not so serious, I think. We’re scheduled to pick up a load from the Burgess manufactory bound for the phase point, but the pre-programmed route takes us past the interstellar terminal.”

“Shouldn’t we go via station?”

“Of course. But there’s a hitch in the pre-programming.”

“Think you’d better check it with Control?”

“I’ll put a query in, but it could take hours to locate the operator. I could rewrite the sub-routine…” She regarded Bennett, her expression blank as she considered her options. “Hokay, I’ll contact Control, explain the situation and request clearance to do the rewrite.”

She tapped her visor down and linked with Control.

“Systems analyst Theneka here. Viper-class code 45/7a. We have a problem, Control…” She outlined the situation while Bennett watched the orbital archipelago drift by.

Minutes later Ten Lee lifted her visor. “Control’s okayed the rewrite.”

She pulled the com-screen down from a padded recess above her and ran quick fingers over the touch controls, rewriting the program.

Bennett considered the potential disaster the systems glitch might have caused. In years of working in high orbit, the closest he’d come to a possible life-threatening situation himself was when a micro-meteorite impacted with an air tank and cut off the supply. For an hour it had been touch and go as to whether he could get back to station before his existing air gave out. He’d made it, but only just.

He’d considered himself lucky. Every year saw the loss of at least one tug crew. More often than not the fatalities were the result of human error—both on the part of pilots and engineers—sloppy workmanship caused by apathy and complacency, the it’ll-never-happen-to-me ethos that was bound to affect crews who had worked in space for years without mishap.

Ten Lee pushed the com-screen back into the ceiling. “Control have vetted and passed the rewrite, Joshua.”

They slowed on the approach to Terminal 2, a great silver-ringed construction the periphery of which consisted of a hundred docking bays. Ground-to-orbit ships drifted across the hole in the middle of the doughnut, collecting goods manufactured in orbit to deliver to the cities of Earth. It was the most spectacular sight in space, Bennett thought. Twenty-four hours a day, cargo ships came and went like so many bees at a hive, a constant sunlit flux of arrival and departure. Way below the station, dwindling into the vortex, the ships were no more than tiny specks of scintillating dust; up close, the cargo ships manoeuvring and docking inside the ring-station could be seen for what they really were, vast streamlined shuttles the size of towerblocks. For the first five years of his tenure with the Redwood Corporation, Bennett had piloted these leviathans on their journeys to and from Earth, before the repetition had become monotonous and he’d requested a transfer to inter-orbital work.

He turned the tug and backed towards the delivery bay. Ten Lee directed the operation of unloading the containers, each one disappearing into the terminal to be loaded on to a cargo vessel. One hour later she gave the thumbs up and Bennett eased the tug from the terminal.

As they moved away, he asked Ten Lee about her name.

A brief sigh was the extent of her protest. “It doesn’t mean anything, Joshua. My mother wasn’t very imaginative—she ran out of names for her children after the first five, so the rest were called Six, Seven, Eight, Nine… I was her tenth.”

Josh peered at Ten Lee in the gloom of the cabin, but her expression was serious as she stared at the passing station.

“My mother was religious, so I got Joshua,” he offered. “Christian fundamentalist.” She had died when Bennett was seventeen, three years after the death of her daughter. She had never recovered from the shock of losing Ella.

“My mother,” Ten Lee responded, surprising him, “worked all her life to overthrow the government of Rocastle’s World. She was a writer. She wrote political pamphlets exhorting revolution. When the change came, she taught Buddhism. I trained at the Bhao Khet Space Academy and piloted sub-orbital freighters for ten years before coming to Earth.”

“Ten years?” He shook his head. “How old are you now?”

“Thirty-two.”

“Hell, I had you down as twenty.”

“If that’s meant as a compliment, save it for the girls on the station.”

Bennett lifted his hands in a gesture of helpless innocence.

“Age is an irrelevance,” Ten Lee went on matter-of-factly. “What is important is experience, and how one interprets and uses that experience in this incarnation.”

“In this incarnation?” Bennett said.

She stretched out her stick-thin arms and yawned. “This is my final incarnation in the physical. Upon my death I attain the void. This life is merely a means to prepare myself for that state.”

Bennett fell silent for a time. To change the subject he said: “Why did you come to Earth?”

“I needed new experience. My Rimpoche—my teacher—suggested that my fate was elsewhere. I should follow an outward path. Outward even beyond Earth.”

Bennett nodded. He had met many colonists in his years on the station, most conforming to character types and belief systems prevalent on Earth. Occasionally he came across humans so strange that they seemed almost alien in their idiosyncrasies.

The Viper banked around the curve of the orbitals on automatic. Bennett closed his eyes and contemplated the end of the shift and his three-day leave.

He would visit his father in hospital in Mojave Town, more a courtesy call to salve his conscience than a genuine display of sympathy or concern. Every leave he made the short journey to the private clinic that had been his father’s home now for the past year. He was not so much ill as merely old. He was over a hundred, and it seemed that everything was failing at once. Expensive and expert medical care kept his vital organs ticking over, but the quality of his life was diminishing fast. He spent most of his time hooked up to some mindless virtual reality entertainment, and seemed to resent his son’s intrusion. Bennett never looked forward to their futile, stilted dialogue. They had nothing in common other than a mutual experience of resentment.

His father had waited until his retirement before starting a family—an afterthought to his major concern of amassing wealth. Even then, he had spent much of his time immersed in business matters, regarding his son and daughter as a distraction from the more serious matter of accumulating saleable assets. The laughable irony was that his father had lost most of his savings with the collapse of a string of dubious financial investments months before his final hospitalisation. Now the old bastard was fading fast after a life of futility, and the hell of it was that Bennett could not help but feel guilty for his lack of concern.

After visiting his father he would call on Julia, and try to assess the current state of their relationship.

He opened his eyes as the Viper altered course. They dropped from the plane of the orbitals, the radiant white light of the Earth, spinning hugely to starboard, filling the tug with unaccustomed illumination. The Burgess manufactory was situated below the orbital chain, an ugly silver rectangle producing the catering supplies for the interstellar liners. Five minutes later they docked and began the loading process.

Bennett watched Ten Lee as she stared at the read-outs on her helmet screen. She was washed in the stark light of Earth, and he was made aware again of her diminutive size and frailty. Involuntarily, he recalled the image of his sister, her thin body wasted by the lymphatic cancer that finally killed her.

The pick-up was through in twenty minutes. They collected ten containers and moved slowly away from the manufactory. They climbed past the orbitals and Redwood Station, and headed “up” towards the phase point. Bennett stretched, savouring the thought that soon he would be in his berth on the station, showering before taking the ferry to Earth.

“Joshua…” Ten Lee said.

At the same time, Control spoke in his headset. “Bennett. What the hell’s happening out there?”

“Joshua,” Ten said again. She was sitting up on her couch, frantically running fingers across a touch-pad on her lap, staring intently into the screen of her visor.

“What is it?” Bennett said, a sick feeling in his stomach.

“I don’t understand this,” Ten Lee said. “The Viper has reverted to the original program.”

Control’s shout almost deafened Bennett. “Jesus Christ, man! Watch out for that bastard liner!”

He stared through the viewscreen, the improbability of what was happening slowing his reaction time. He felt a stab of disbelief—this was surely impossible.

A starship was moving slowly through space towards phase point, and the tug’s flight-path was taking it on a collision course. Bennett grabbed the controls and yelled at Ten Lee to abort the pre-program. She was already cutting the link. Thanks to her quick work, no sooner had Bennett gained manual override than he felt the tug respond.

The liner swelled before them. Bennett watched a knot of passengers gathered by a viewscreen, gaping out like fish in an aquarium. Their collective reaction mirrored his own sense of panic: they fell to the floor or fled as the tug hurtled towards them.

Bennett cried out and pushed on the controls, sending the Viper into a steep dive. The liner seemed to bob up and out of view, and for a split second Bennett almost allowed himself a sigh of relief. Then he saw before him, and impossible to avoid, a forest of antennae and guidance probes bristling from the underbelly of the starship.

They scythed through them, a series of sickening thumps conducted through the cabin. The tug yawed wildly, spinning out of control and hurtling towards the swollen cargo blister on the rear underbelly of the liner. For all their speed, the silver blister seemed to approach in slow motion, expanding before the Viper like a blown bubble. Bennett dragged on the controls, less from intent than sheer blind hope, and miraculously the liner vanished.

He was about to congratulate himself when something hit the Viper. One second they were drifting in the welcome void of space, and the next they were swatted by a terrifying and powerful force.

Bennett swore and stared through the viewscreen above his head, hardly able to believe what he was seeing.

The starship had phased out, washing the Viper in the molten backblast of its ion-engines. The temperature in the cabin was climbing alarmingly and Bennett felt his skin beginning to burn. The tug swirled out of control like a leaf in a hurricane, the jets incinerating the vessel’s paintwork and melting the viewscreen.

“Get the suits, Ten!” Bennett screamed, expecting the viewscreen to crack and the tug to depressurise at any second—and then the alarm sounded, an ugly, pulsing double note that almost deafened Bennett. The tug was floating, becalmed. The viewscreen held, a blurred mess of scorched plasti-glass.

The alarm dinned in his head and Bennett fought to control his breathing. He fumbled at the controls, trying to kill the noise.

Ten was scrambling around in the confines of the tug, attempting to find the suits.

Control was yelling: “What the hell were you doing, both of you?”

“The Viper rejected the rewritten flight-path!” Bennett yelled back.

The alarm cut off, to be replaced by the Viper’s calm, synthesised voice: “Cabin depressurisation. Advise immediate evacuation.”

Bennett felt his pulse quicken. “Ten! Those suits!”

“You were slow, Bennett!” Control went on. “You should have seen the liner long before you did, taken evasive action.”

“We were on an original flight-path, okayed by you! I wasn’t exactly expecting company!”

“That’s not the point—”

“And fuck you!” Bennett shouted. He turned to Ten Lee. “Where the hell are those suits?”

She was floating, twisted, behind the seats. She stared at him with a calm expression which, in the circumstances, he found maddening. She indicated the empty suit storage unit. “They aren’t here.”

“Jesus Christ…” Bennett said.

“Repeat: cabin depressurisation. Advise immediate evacuation.”

Ten Lee resumed her seat and regarded the monitor. “We have seven minutes before the tug breaks up, Bennett.”

His visor screen flared. He blinked and made out the hunched head and shoulders of Matheson, the flight manager.

“Hope you both enjoyed that little roller-coaster ride. I want a full report and systems analysis in my terminal in six hours, got that?”

“It was a program error,” Bennett began. “And what the hell are you doing to get us out?”

“I’m not bothered what the hell you think it was, Bennett. I need to find out what went wrong out there.”

“Hey—and who equipped this fucking pile of junk?” he began, but Matheson had cut the connection.

Ten, professional to the last, was reporting a list of damages back to Control. Bennett stared at her. She seemed calm, composed. Her voice was even, her expression neutral.

He closed his eyes and concentrated on not spilling the contents of his stomach.

“Major functions damage,” Ten Lee said. “The tug is inoperable. Control’s sending out a salvage ship.”

Bennett stared at her. “Christ, Ten, we’ve got five minutes to live and you don’t even bat an eyelid.”

She shrugged, regarding the screen of her visor.

“Okay, I know. You don’t fear death, right? You’re past all such fear… Well, just between you and me, I’ve yet to learn that lesson and I’m shit scared.”

He was aware of the tremor in his voice and shut up.

“Repeat: advise immediate evacuation.”

“How long before that damned tug gets here?” he said.

Ten Lee glanced at him and smiled, something mocking in the regard of her slanting eyes. “Calm down, Joshua. Panic can benefit no one.” She raised a small hand and pointed. “Look, the salvage ship is here.”

Bennett stared through the damaged viewscreen and made out the hulking silver blur of the salvage vessel as it slowly approached.

His visor flared and Matheson stared out at him. “Bennett, Theneka,” he said, something ominous in his tone. “This is just to tell you that you’re both suspended for ten days until we get to the bottom of this. Out.”

Ten Lee raised a hand, forestalling Bennett’s protest. “We have nothing to worry about. It was a systems error, after all. Calm down.”

Bennett lay back in his couch, closed his eyes and awaited the pick-up.