Cosmonaut Keep (v2.0) by Ken Macleod

Author:Ken Macleod
Format: mobi
Published: 2010-05-15T18:25:09.679000+00:00

12

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Orbital Commie Hell

The station gleefully informed us as he led us through its crowded, cluttered spaces, was no longer called the Marshall Titov. It was called (deep breath) The Darker the Night the Brighter the Star; after a volume of some obscure biography of Trotsky, I gathered. I wanted to suggest that The Prophet Stoned would have been snappier as well as more apt -- the people we passed were certainly high on something, maybe the pervasive acetone and alcohol vapors of degrading wet-tech -- but I forbore.

I began to get the hang of moving in microgravity, with the occasional shove from Camila to correct my mistakes. Beyond the heavy rubber-sealed door of the receiving area the smells of the place were stronger and more various. The air-circulation system made a lot of white noise but didn't seem to make the air any fresher. Hardly a light source was without its huddle of hydroponics. Rabbits and chickens -- the mammals better pre-adapted to free fall than the birds, oddly -- floated or dived in airy spaces fenced off with fine plastic netting that contained their droppings but not their odor. People in grubby fatigues or quirky, scant selections of clothing and tools worked at all angles in every available cranny. As they glanced up -- or down, or across -- at us, they looked pleased enough to see us but returned without reluctance to their work.

At a corner of two corridors Camila took advantage of a momentary collision and entanglement to ask me, sharply under her breath, "Why aren't they saying anything to us?"

Lemieux glanced back. "Because they don't know who's listening."

"That's us told," Camila muttered, as she pushed me on.

I didn't believe Lemieux's explanation for a moment. These people didn't look as though they were worried about saying something that might be held against them by whoever came out on top of the power struggle. They looked like people who had something better to think about than that.

Driver looked much as I'd seen him in his announcement, but thinner, with a few days' growth of stubble; eyes bloodshot and sleepless. Patches of his cheeks had been scratched almost raw from the itch of overused wet-tech. He'd angled himself in between a work surface and a wall as though sitting at a desk. A net bag tethered to the surface bulged with crushed smokeless filters and crumpled sets of waste goggles and phones. Shelves of transparent containers, tool-racks, computing equipment, and surveillance gear covered the walls behind him and the ceiling. Postcards of landscapes and seascapes -- almost pornographic in the circumstances -- decorated them.

Lemieux crouched in an upper corner of the inadequate space, watching us at a disconcerting angle. Camila and I looped our arms through some webbing opposite Driver's desk and relaxed in the air.

"Well," Driver said, "I got a warning from Area 51 that a flying saucer was on the way. Kind of amusing. Didn't say why you were coming, though, or who you were." He grimaced.

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