The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

James Lo Barrett, the smug bastard, giving her a synthetic look of soapy sympathy. He had a fleshy, pouched face, a shaven head (even his eyebrows were shaved), and a pussy little beard that was no more than a single long braid hung off his chin and wrapped in black silk thread. He looked, Maris thought, like a fetus blimped up by some kind of accelerated growth program. He was sitting at his desk, at ease in the centrifugal gravity of his ship in a clean, brightly lit room, with real plants growing on a shelf behind him and a mug of something smothered in his podgy hands. Coffee, probably-Maris thought she could see steam rising from it. She hadn’t had a proper hot drink or meal in twenty days; the hab-module’s atmosphere was a nitrox mix at less than half an atmosphere, and water boiled at seventy degrees centigrade. It stank too, because its air scrubbers didn’t work properly; its joints needed careful monitoring because they were prone to spring leaks; its underpowered electrical system was liable to unpredictable brownouts and cut-offs; it had a low grade but intractable black mold infection; the motors and fans of its air conditioning thrummed and clanked and groaned in a continual dismal chorus. But it was infinitely better than sitting rockside, subsiding on the meager charity of the Three Powers Occupation Force and enduring the random sweeps of its police. It was work, and work was what Maris lived for, even if she had to deal with people like Barrett.

She’d met him just once, at the start of her contract. He’d made a big deal about coming out to the hab-module to meet the new wrecking gang, had a clammy handshake, grabby eyes, and smelled of eucalyptus oil. He’d tried to convince her then that he was on her side, that he thought outers were getting a tough break. “The war is over,” he’d told her. “We should draw a line under it and move on. There are tremendous possibilities out here, vast resources. Everyone can benefit. So don’t think of me as the enemy, that’s all in the past. Deal with me like you would anyone else, and we’ll get along just fine.”

Maris decided then that although she had to work for him, he couldn’t make her pretend to like him. She said now, direct and matter-of-fact, “We’ll get back on schedule. No problem.”

“Work with me, Delgado. Don’t let me down.”

“Absolutely,” Maris said. Her job would have been so much easier if Barrett had been a tough son of a bitch. Maris could deal with sons of bitches-you always knew where you were with them. But Barrett pretended that he was not responsible for the authority he wielded, pretended that punishing his crews hurt him as much as it hurt them, demanding their sympathy even as he sequestered money that was needed to feed starving children. His spineless mendacity made him a worse tyrant than any bully.

“If there’s a problem,” he said, “you know I’m always here to help.”

Yeah, right. Maris knew that if there really was a problem, he’d get rid of her without a qualm. She gave her best smile, and said, “The refinery threw a glitch, but it’s fixed now. We’ll get on top of the schedule first thing.”

“That’s the spirit. And Delgado? No more games with my drones.”

Wrecking Gang #3’s hab-module was nothing more than two stubby, double-skinned cargo pods welded either side of a central airlock, like two tin cans kissing a fat ball bearing. Maris sculled from the workspace cylinder, with its lockers and racks and benches, through the spherical airlock, into the living quarters. Ty glanced up from his TV; he was an addict of the spew of reworked ancient programs pumped out by autonomous self-replicating satellites in Saturn’s ring system. Half hidden by the flexing silvery tube of the air ducting, Bruno Peterfreund, his long blond hair coiled under a knitted cap, was painstakingly scraping mold from a viewport.

Maris told the two men the bad news. She gave it to them straight. She didn’t mention their sudden obsession with missing fuel cells and the rest; she let the inference hang in the air. “You guys will start dismounting the fusion plant,” she said, “and once Somerset and I have finished up metal reclamation, we’ll come and give you a hand. We’ll start early, finish late. Okay?”

“Whatever,” Ty said, affecting indifference but not quite daring to meet Maris’s fierce gaze.

“That won’t interfere with your social plans, Bruno?”