Space Stations

Her mother was bound to a chair. A console with a screen sat in front of her. “I didn't say anything,” Alonza cried out, trying to free herself from the man holding her arm, but Amparo did not seem to hear her. Then one of the men in the room stepped toward Amparo and held out a circular silver headband.

Amparo screamed. Her scream was so sharp and piercing that Alonza froze.

“Tell them!” her mother shrieked. “Tell them anything they want to know!”

Alonza told the Guardians about the woman and how Amparo had struck her and where she had ditched the bracelet they had stolen from her. The men asked her more questions about other marks they had taken things from, and Amparo, who was sobbing by then, told Alonza to answer those questions, too. When Alonza had finished telling the Guardians about what they had stolen over the past months and how they had obtained the goods, the pale-haired Guardian told her that her mother would be doing useful labor for the Nomarchies of Earth while serving out her sentence. They did not say anything about a hearing, how long a sentence Amparo would get, or how unpleasant the useful labor would be.

“What about my daughter?” Amparo asked hoarsely.

“That's none of your business, woman. We'll take care of her. She'll be a lot better off than she was with you. She'll be a better citizen of her Nomarchy when she grows up, and by then she'll forget about you.”

The Guardian had been right. Alonza had been cared for afterward, and supposed that she had grown up to be a better citizen than she would have been otherwise.

Her memory of her mother grew fainter over time. In the first years after her mother's arrest, while she was still living in the children's dormitory, Alonza had occasionally tried to find out where Amparo was being held, but the cyberminds always blocked those channels so that she could not get an answer, and then the teaching image on her screen would order her to get back to her lessons. After a while, she stopped asking about Amparo. When she was older, after the officers in charge of the dormitory had decided that she and a few of her friends showed enough promise to be sent to a school for more lessons in academic subjects instead of being trained for satellite repair, she rarely thought of her mother.

The pale-haired Guardian had been right when he told her that she would be better off in the dormitory than with Amparo. There had been the opportunity for schooling, and since the Guardians often recruited from the children housed in the dorms while their parents served time, she had eventually been trained at an officers' academy for the important work of being one of the protectors of Earth's biosphere and its peace. Had she remained with her mother, she would have grown up to be another one like her, a mosquito as they were called in their crowded neighborhood near the port, one of those who lived by stinging any unwary travelers passing through San Antonio. Had she stayed with Amparo, she would never have made it to the Wheel, certainly not as an officer and as an aide to Colonel Jonas Sansom, the commander of the Guardian detachment at the Wheel, and also the pale-haired Guardian officer who had detained her at the San Antonio port so many years ago.

Alonza Lemaris stood in the small waiting area just beyond the shuttle dock's bay.

Another group had just arrived, passengers from Earth bound for Venus. Most of the people coming to the Wheel could be left to find their own way to the lounges and bays in the hub where they would wait to board their freighters or passenger vessels, but this group of travelers, who came from a camp outside Tashkent, were an exception.

Guardians were stationed at that camp to keep order, and Guardians traveled with any settlers who left the camp on the shuttle flights to the Wheel. Usually Alonza or one of the other officers met the new arrivals and ushered them to a bay near the dock holding the Habber ship that was to take them on the next leg of their journey to Anwara, the vast space station that circled Earth's sister planet, but that was not why she had come here this time.