Severance (2 page)

“You smell like a bar toilet.”

Stein blinked, recent blinding events having overshadowed her
earlier work. “Thanks.” Feeling sluggish, she parried with, “Hey, maybe next
time you get to handle the urine while I stand around hurling insults and
disparaging your mother.”

“Oh, you couldn’t possibly disparage her. Such a poor
reputation, that girl,” he said. “All those sailors,” he added after a moment’s
thought. She chuckled, forcing it slightly, then pretended not to notice his
eyes narrow. They continued for another block, the silence between them growing
in import. Eventually, he asked, “You okay?”

“Yeah,” she said. She blinked again, still seeing traces of
VLAD. “Saw something weird is all.”

“How weird?”

“Dunno. All the way weird. Will tell you later.”

Bruce looked at her curiously, but she held her ground,
knowing he wouldn’t dig too much. “Okay,” he said, relenting. “Want to do
something then?” He cocked his hand up to his mouth and tilted it backwards,
inhaling an imaginary beer.

“Smelling like this?” Stein said, smiling genuinely this
time. She checked the time on her terminal. “Was supposed to meet Sergei in the
bow for the countdown. But I’m not really feeling it.”

“You’ll be in trouble.”

“Ehh. I’m always a little in trouble. This will be no worse
than the background levels of trouble.”

Bruce snorted. They reached an intersection. “See you
tomorrow then, piss–girl?”

“Yeah.”

With a nod, Bruce turned and headed off towards the rest of
his evening. Stein silently thanked him for not badgering her more. For a
burglar, the big man had an excellent sense of when not to pry.

She turned the opposite direction and began walking home, passing
a crew working on one of the ladders mounted to the ceiling. Up and down the
length of the ladder, scorch marks dotted rungs that had recently been repaired
or replaced. She stopped at America Street; her eyes followed the ladder north
towards the bow. She’d brushed Sergei off the last time he’d tried making plans
with her. And the time before that, actually. The static pressure of guilt was
building up to the point where it could no longer safely be ignored. She
smelled her hands. “Clean enough,” she declared. She set out towards the front
of the ship.

§

Stopping on the lower tier, Stein saw she had made a
mistake. The observation lounge was packed, every bench and table occupied with
families, couples, and friends. People had started stretching out on the floor
itself, daring their shipmates to tread on them, perhaps unwisely given the
number of alcoholic beverages being consumed. A steady series of minor
catastrophes unfolded in every direction she could see.

Turning her back to the huge curving expanse of the lounge
window, she looked back at the entry of the lounge. Still filling up. She
scanned the crowd. There. Sergei in his uniform, waving her over. Stein started
picking her way through the crowd, moving parallel to the great window. The
stars slowly spun past as she walked.

The great window was built up in square panels, three meters
a side. The inner surface, the one with thousands of handprints, was a thin,
transparent plastic sheet, put there exclusively to collect thousands of
handprints. Next lay the pressure panels, twin layers of a thick polymer, there
to support the pressure of the ship’s atmosphere. Beyond that, the exterior shielding
was a two–meter–thick chunk of some exotic polycarbonate. The curvature of the
intervening pressure layers kept this shield out of focus, but a careful eye
could detect its presence from the pockmarks it wore, marking the graves of
objects small and fast.

In the next few seconds, Stein stepped on a woman’s hand,
hopped away, apologized, nearly crushed a small child, hopped away, and stepped
on the woman’s other hand. Several more apologies and hurried escapes later,
she arrived at Sergei’s bench. He slid over to make room for her, casting a
meaningful look at the man on the other side of him, whom he had probably been arguing
with about the space he was saving for his errant lady–friend. Stein offered a
weak smile to the man, earning a sneer for her troubles.

Sergei leaned over and kissed her on the cheek. “Hey. I didn’t
know if you’d come.”

“I’d hate to miss absolutely nothing,” she said, somewhat
cruelly. “Sorry,” she said, squeezing his hand.

He smiled, always so frustratingly pleasant. “Seeing nothing
happen seems to be a popular choice tonight.” Which was a rarity — people on
the Argos were rarely interested in the same thing at the same time. Nor were
they normally this sedate; even the alcohol–fueled collisions seemed somehow
subdued.

Like she did every time she came to the bow lounge — like
most of the people were already doing — Stein looked up to the single
stationary star in the sky. Not quite stationary anymore, but it was hard to
see it moving. Where every other star in their field of vision was in motion, a
single star stood almost in the center of it all, rotating imperceptibly.

“Maybe they’re hoping that nothing won’t happen?” she
offered.

“If nothing didn’t happen that would mean…” Sergei trailed
off. “What would that mean?

“Something.”

“Oh.”

Slowly, the individual conversations died off. “What’s that
smell?” Sergei asked, looking at his feet. Stein simply stared out the window. She
wondered if anyone would count down.

“I wonder if anyone’s going to count down?” Sergei said. The
man on his other side shushed him. No one did count down, though almost
everyone had their eye on their terminals as the seconds slowly ticked down.
Three. Two. One. Midnight.

A consummate showman, nothing happened right on schedule.
The stars continued to rotate slowly by, oblivious to the gathered crowd and the
sound of hundreds of people all drawing breath at the exact same time.
Collectively a hundred different conversations started again, punctuated by
clinking glasses and laughter.

“I’m surprised. I thought people would be more excited,”
Sergei said. “Though I guess it was just a practice run.”

Stein wasn’t surprised at all. “You don’t seem excited.”

Sergei licked his lips. “Doesn’t feel real I guess. What?
Only seven months away. Don’t know how to feel about it.”

“Kind of scared?”

“Me?” His cheekbones rose, halfway through a smile before he
reconsidered. “Not scared exactly.”

“If you say so.” She turned back towards the window, people–watching
as the crowd started to thin out. Someone at the front of the lounge caught her
eye, a man right up against the window, his hand on the glass. He had something
on his head, some kind of homemade helmet. She tilted her head and squinted. It
looked like a pair of glass bowls taped together to form a transparent sphere.

Beside her, she felt Sergei tense. Stein looked at her
sometime–lover’s face, saw his eyes fix on something. She followed his gaze to
see the helmeted man, who had produced a hatchet from somewhere. He screamed
something, the words muffled by his helmet, and raised the hatchet above his
head.

“Oh, shit,” Stein said. Beside her, Sergei sprang forward.

The hatchet came down, cracking the inner plastic surface of
the window. The blade twisted and jammed itself into the plastic, and as the
man struggled to free it, Sergei plowed into the side of him, smashing him into
the window, shattering the plastic barrier. Chunks of plastic rained down on
the pair.

Pandemonium, bodies upon bodies pushing for the exits,
desperate to escape. Another security officer arrived, helping Sergei free the
hatchet from the man’s grasp and subdue him as gently as they knew how. Stein got
to her feet but otherwise stayed put, out of the crush of people pushing for
the exits. She relaxed a bit, seeing Sergei and the other officer get the
maniac under control. More security officers arrived to help subdue the man
more thoroughly.

As they dragged the fellow away, Sergei left his colleagues
and returned to Stein, his face flushed, a single scratch along his forehead. He
smiled, and she hesitated a moment before hugging him, sensing it was the
appropriate reaction. She couldn’t have been completely wrong; he hugged back.
Chin resting on his shoulder, she watched the stars, suddenly clearer with the
plastic safety barrier gone. Instinctively, she looked up again to the nearly–fixed
north star, getting her first clear look at the sun their ancestors had left
behind.

Two hundred and forty years had passed since then, as the
ISMV Argos slowly plowed its way to the star called Tau Prius and its third
planet. The bulk of that long voyage had been spent coasting, the engines
sitting idle as generations of passengers lived and died within the confines of
the vast ship. Six months of acceleration had gotten the Argos up to its
cruising speed, and once set in rotation to provide a semblance of gravity for
its inhabitants, the Argos was again little different than the inert rock it
had been carved from. Though it now moved at five percent the speed of light —
an admittedly glamorous life for a rock.

Thanks to the hard work of Isaac Newton, the end of the trip
would look much like the beginning, with the ship, now flipped around,
decelerating for six months. According to the original itinerary, April 3
^rd
,
239 A.L. — the date currently displayed on the front of every terminal — was
the day that the brakes were to be hit. But plans had changed.

The Argos was running late.

§

Stein let the door to her apartment close behind her and
leaned back on it, exhaling. After leaving the observation lounge, the arch in
Sergei’s eyebrow gave away his hope for what the rest of the evening had in
store. But the near suicide and lingering smell of urine had left Stein feeling
distinctly unsexy, and when she’d firmly told him she was going home, he hadn’t
forced the issue.

“Smart guy,” she said to herself as she lurched across the
apartment to the bathroom. Sergei was sweet. She performed some mental
gymnastics, imagining more weeks and months, maybe even years, in his company.
She probably would be pretty happy with him, based on what she understood the
word ‘happy’ to mean. But for a variety of reasons — none of them very clear,
even to her — she still didn’t seem terribly interested in letting that happen.

After a quick shower, she returned to the living room and
slumped on the couch. Her eyes drifted up to the lamp embedded in the ceiling.
She blinked. No secret messages.
What the hell was that all about?
It
was definitely something. Unless it wasn’t. The shapes were muddled, but
definitely looked like letters. VLAD. Probably Vlad.
Who the hell is Vlad?

She had been to doctors before. They had never said a thing
about anything unusual in her eyes. Not that they had been looking for VLAD.
But those guys had no problem telling her about her other faults; if they had
known her eyes belonged to someone called Vlad, they would have said so.

They hadn’t exposed her to a blinding blue light though. She
hadn’t seen anything like that before either, during any of her aboveground or
subterranean wanderings. She was confident none of the regular electrical or
mechanical systems could make that kind of light, having seen most of those
systems violently malfunction at one point or another in her life. Besides
which, there was nothing terribly exotic in or around that room, equipment–wise.
She tried to piece together the sequence of events that had led up to the
light. She had bumped something in the corner. Some kind of booby trap? What
kind of self–important maniac thought art that crappy was worth booby trapping?
And what kind of booby trap blinded someone with strange messages about eastern
Europeans?

Bruce would know. She decided she would tell him the next
morning. It had been smart not to tell him immediately — he would probably have
gone back there that night with welding goggles and a sledgehammer to plunder
the room like some kind of contemporary Viking. No, she would let him get his
beauty sleep.

Stein got up from the couch and crossed the room to Mr.
Beefy, the potted meat plant in the corner of the room, and the sole other
living creature in the apartment. Mr. Beefy was a steak plant, a smaller
version of the monsters in the meat farms downstairs. A metal armature of
braces and feeding tubes supported several dangling ‘fruits’ swaying slightly
under her touch. She poked thoughtfully at a couple of them, then adjusted the
nutrient settings on the panel mounted into the plant base. “You’re all right,
Mr. Beefy. Steady, not too lippy. And you never want to know where ‘this’ is
going.” She patted the tree gently, then went to bed.

Harold approached the first level of the hospital, coming to
a stop just outside, dismayed by what he saw. The front doors were obstructed
by a cleaning crew, a man and woman haphazardly swabbing the ground. The man
was resting a large portion of his body weight on his mop, pushing it forward
in straight lines before stopping and turning around, moving back and forth in
a grid. The woman was using more of a slapping motion, bringing the mop head a
short distance off the ground before slamming it back down, spraying water
around. None of this appeared to be having any effect on the street, which didn’t
even look that dirty in the first place. It never looked dirty, being made from
that grey composite purposely designed to have that effect. A stack of plastic ‘Wet
Floor’ signs lay to one side of them, unused.

“Hey, come on, guys. You should put those up when you’re
doing that,” Harold complained as he approached them. He gestured at the signs.
“There are people coming in and out of here on crutches.”

The slapper looked Harold up and down slowly, eyes lingering
on the hem of his lab coat. “Fuck you, doc,” she said finally.