Crudrat Page 4

  Not fast enough.

  Running would do it no good come ticking time. A spaceport couldn’t hide anything that size for long. No tunnel big enough to hold it within reach of the belt, though Maura could think of few further away. Though that supposed this alien could escape the beltway. That didn’t look to be an option. Why bother to run? Surely it knows? Unless, it’s as animal in smarts as it is in looks.

  On her next vault over one of the beltway support beams, Maura saw a waiting crowd of armigers. The original captors hadn’t even bothered to chase. They’d just called reinforcements while they sorted themselves out.

  Poor old alien.

  The creature below paused in flight.

  Maura paused as well.

  The alien glanced up at her, as though it had known all long she followed. A reverse shadow, cast above.

  Ah, he’s a he. Maura met shiny solid-black eyes through the sheen of crud scum and knew without a doubt that the alien was male. Didn’t know how or why, just knew. And intelligent, there was no doubt of that.

  Something in his gaze acknowledged her presence, a tiny nod. Like reject to reject, greetings between the chipless, no Spoke customs to dictate speech or social interaction. Then he sped onwards, apparently intending to break through the waiting military with sheer force.

  He didn’t.

  They brought him down with shock batons. His thick fur protected him at first, but it wasn’t enough against the number of shockers the armigers prodded into him. The smell of singing fur and the horrible hissing sound from the electric bolts reached even Maura, high above.

  Maura leaned over the edge of the beltway gate and settled into watching. Sparks floated upwards in yellow twists. There seemed to be blood on everyone. The alien came fully stocked with claw and teeth as well as fur and didn’t seem afraid to apply them with vigor. The shockers sizzled and hissed. The armigers yelled and swore. The creature stayed silent, even under that kind of pain. Impressive. Maura had been shocker-prod once. Once was more than enough.

  Then, with a roar of rage, the alien reared away from the painful weapons. It was an animal sound, the howl of some planetside beast that Maura’s instinct remembered to fear even though she herself had never been to ground. He threw himself sideways, crashing into the arch supporting the beltway gate and then to the floor. The whole front of the beltway shook violently, and Maura, perched precariously on the edge, tumbled off.

  Free fall twice in one spin. Just brilliant. Perhaps foreman was right, I am losing it.

  There was no time to compensate this time. Maura plummeted straight down into the crowd of armigers. They were bent over a massive crumpled heap of fallen alien so they didn’t see her coming. She tried to twist mid air but hit the red and gold uniforms hard enough to throw off her landing. Almost graceless, she stumbled into a half roll coming up against someone’s spit-shined boot.

  I’m gonna garner bruises for that one. I’ll just add to the day’s collection, shall I? Fantastic.

  The armigers looked at her long enough to register her blue hair – crudrat – and unimportance – reject – and then went back to the alien. The foot she rested against kicked her hard. The boots were ceramic tipped, military issue and tailored for cruelty. Maura rolled with the kick but still felt her ribs give ominously. She ended up crouched so close to the alien she almost touched him.

  Ignoring her, the guards wrestled the creature upright.

  Black eyes slitted open.

  Eight shockers at once and he wakes three ticks later? Maura stared in amazement.

  She hardly dared breathe, crouched so close to such a being. He was different than anything she’d ever known — all fur, and height, and emanating anger she could feel like air through a duct, fierce and constant. When she finally did inhale she caught smell with the anger, so fresh and clean it made her nose all tingly.

  Maura sneezed.

  The alien lurched in her direction, a jerky, bumbling move. The armigers responded with a surge of frantic activity. In the same instant, Maura felt a large hand grope down her arm. Her skin shivered away. Alien touch, sure as I live and breathe. He had a warm dry palm with the feel of felted cloth about it. He pressed something small and hard into her hand. Maura grasped it reflexively. She glanced up, all shock and confusion, into the alien’s white face. Sharp black eyes looked down, and then, to her amazement, he winked at her, one white lid down and then up over one black eye.

  4

  It’s not the vast reaches of nothingness that drive the spaceborn mad. It’s the vast loneliness therein.

  ~ Proverb

  Aliens wink.

  Maura was momentarily grounded by shock. It seemed like such a human action – winking.

  One of the guards struck out at her, in the manner of a man eliminating an inconvenient clump of crud. Maura dodged the strike and spun out of the way into the crowd. She cowered down, trying to make herself as small and uninteresting as possible. It worked. From that vantage point she watched unhindered as the armigers dragged the giant alien away. Only when they were fully out of sight did she look at the object the alien had given her.

  It was nothing more than a small card, yellowed metal, thin as fabric, and punctured with a random pattern of swirls. It had a hole at one end and looked as though it was meant to go on a cord. Jewelry, perhaps? Why so important? But then, who hands importance off to blue-haired strangers at beltway ends? I wonder what it’s worth in ration cubes? Instead of chasing after that line of thought, Maura tucked the card away in a secret fold of her ragged shirt.

  She glanced around, furtively. The beltway started up again, as though nothing had happened to bring it down. As though it had never paused at all. People were getting on and off the end platform all around her. No one paid her any mind – rejects are nothing if not invisible. Wait, that ain’t right. Rejects are just nothing. Maura never thought she’d be grateful for her lack of implant, but saddled with an alien artifact and an uneasy feeling? She took a moment to be thankful that no one thought to see her or take notice of her movements. She climbed over a side barricade, up the far side of the gulley wall, and into the mouth of a small garbage tunnel.

  “Where,” Maura wondered that evening, “would armigers be stashing a hostile alien critter, do ya think?”

  “Aren’t all aliens hostile?” Rees looked worn 'round the edges. He had engaged in a bit of a disagreement with the blades last shift. While Maura was running beltways, the blades won. The blades always won. So Rees sported a deep gash in one shoulder. The blood had slowed to a trickle but was still leaking down his arm and staining his shirt and vest. Rees was a bit over-concerned about the state of his vest, torn though it now was. Bleeding irked him something fierce.

  Maura shrugged. “I rather think it tends to the other way 'round. Let me see that.” She tore off an end bit of one of her own shirtsleeves with her teeth. She was never one to worry much about appearances. She spat on the rag and patted at her friend’s gash.

  “Purely for my own edification, why would you be needing to know such a thing?” Rees winced under her inept ministrations.

  “Ran into one this spin, a few ticks ago. Well,” Maura corrected herself, “fell into one, more’s like.”

  “An armiger alien stash?”

  “Nope, just the alien himself. Hold still, would you?” Maura wrapped the scrap of fabric around Rees’s cut. It was the best she could do.

  “Not the alien that came attached to that weird spaceskiff we were looking at earlier, when you chose to take up flying?” Rees tugged at the makeshift bandage.

  “Probably. Know of any other alien ships? Stop playing with it. It’ll never cure-up if you fuss.”

  “Brilliant! What’d the alien look like?” Rees left off fiddling with the bandage to stare at Maura intently.

  “Large. White.” She paused and then added, “Fuzzy.”

  Rees sighed. “I be all amazement. Your skills at description…unparalleled. I shudder to think how you’d verbal
ize me.”

  Maura shrugged.

  “So what happened?”

  “You mean after the beltway went and stopped?”

  “Yes. I mean, no. I mean... the beltway stopped?”

  Maura nodded and relayed, sparingly, what had occurred last shift. Her recitation left much to be desired. Maura was not the type of person to use two words where one would suffice. This tended to frustrate listeners.

  Rees prodded her into as many specifics as possible until both of them were exhausted by his efforts.

  Maura felt like she’d told him everything. Except the bit where she ended up holding the alien’s metal card thingy. It was a small secret flatness tucked into her chest band.

  She ended her story with, “You’re the intrepid explorer, where do you think the guns would go stashing an alien?”

  “Section eight-oh-five. No thinking on it needed. That’d be high risk lockup,” Rees answered, without blinking.

  “Sure?”

  Rees nodded. “Certain sure. ’Tis the only section I haven’t been able to crack into yet.”

  Maura smiled. “Perfect.”

  Rees escorted her ‘round to section eight-oh-five the very next morning.

  “Sure you’re wanting to be doing this?”

  They were crouched at a massive duct hub. Tunnels, like rays of sunlight in space, beamed off before them in every direction.

  Maura looked at him. She felt gloomy. For the first time in five cycles she wasn’t heading with him to scyther level. For the first sleep shift in five turns she hadn’t dreamt of blades. The universe felt all akilter, as though the spaceport wasn’t spinning straight.

  “What else would I be doing?”

  Rees shrugged. “Trying for survival instead of risking it? This ain’t no time to develop a curiosity.”

  Maura gave him a funny look. He was one to talk.

  “Did you not hear the part about the alien? You know, here? On our spaceport.” Without pausing for answer, Maura climbed down and swung herself through the hub into a tunnel across the way. Its mouth was black-tinted where the others were silvery blue.

  She turned back, waved at Rees, part farewell, part dismissal.

  Rees shook his tufted head and then turned to crawl back down the tunnel away from the military Spoke and toward blades and licensed work. He looked small and forlorn without her.

  Maura crawled though the darkness. Usually, on a spaceport, all the ducts went blue tinged from ambient crud in the air. Crud liked metal and loved plastic static so tended to stick where it could. But military ducts were black, so there was no way to note its presence. The black also made the tunnel more than normally difficult to navigate. Part of its purpose, Maura supposed.

  Eventually, she came up short against a thick grate, barring her way. The tunnel was so much darker than her regulars that she ran straight into it and spent a long moment rubbing at the top of her head and swearing all her most colorful swears into the indifferent blackness.

  She pushed up against the grating, working her fingers through and lifting. Nothing. She pushed it downwards, pulled it toward herself, and then tried shifting it from side to side. Still nothing. With a sigh, she felt about the edges where it connected to the tunnel wall.

  Then she grinned.

  The steel Spoke was so predictable. When were they going to suss the fact that tunnels weren’t walkways?

  They’d put the barrier in as though it were a door — bolted on one side and locked, but hinged on the other. Hinges were all well and good when fastened into a nice solid bulkhead, but became something of a security risk when fastened into the thin curving metal of an air duct. And these hinges weren’t even welded.

  She scrabbled a bit, twisting at the hinge fasteners and banging against the tunnel wall around them to weaken the metal. Eventually, she worked the hinge base loose enough to rip right out. She pushed hard against side of the grate, buckling it on the bolted side. It bent enough for her to squeeze through.

  She wondered if that was the best security they had. True, no one worried overmuch about rejects in tunnels. What could we possibly want or do to the all-powerful of the Wheel’s finest? In a strange way, Maura and her fellow non-citizens had more freedom portside than any real person ever did — no implant checkers, no gateways, no debit points, no credit counts. Still, technically, it was supposed to be armiger business to worry about security of everyone, even rejects. Of course, once every cycle or so, they noticed a plague of non-citizens slouching about sucking down air. Sometimes they swept the station for vagrancy, tossed everyone they could into lock-up, spaced the useless rejects, and let the licensed crudrats go. Crudrats, at least, served a purpose. Sometimes they went in for a kind of mass extermination program — tunnel-wide toxic gassing. The rest of the time, they forgot rejects existed.

  Maura crept on, into the black. She felt the metal beneath her knees change texture from smooth to beveled. Gratings appeared in the floor. Around a sharp bend in the duct, Maura paused at a larger than normal grate. Dim light came up through the rectangular slats. She peeked through.

  Below her was a tidy dispatch office. Gold and red clad armigers, all stiff-necked formality, mingled amongst subgenetor workers manning scanpads and screens. Maura cocked her head to listen through the rush of duct air, ciphering out words and conversation.

  “Alien... maximum security…” A neatly clad clerk of some kind, in a three-piece suit and bowler hat, tapping at a board covered in numerical notations.

  “What are they thinking…?” Another clerk, less well dressed, sucking down a protein drink.

  “Six-sev-oh-two... status?” A buzz through one of the audio dispatches, followed by a flicker on a screen. The image of some high-up mucky-muck armiger. There was a massive fringe of gold at the shoulders of her uniform and gold braid about her collar.

  “Did what…? On my shift…?” A guard, to another guard, looking annoyed.

  “Sequensors... full report.” A dispatch operator, to the fringe-riddled woman on the screen.

  “Tell them... clearance codes... skiff... full custody.”

  “What do we do with it? Won’t talk…” Maura perked up at that.

  “… even intelligent?”

  Maura pulled the alien’s small square of perforated metal out from her chest band and twirled it between her fingertips. Intelligent? She wondered on that point herself. Had the alien really winked back beltside? Or did I imagine it? She shifted around to try and spot the people talking about the alien. In one corner of the room, a group of guards crowded together looking down at a scanpad. On the pad’s screen Maura could make out the image of the alien... a faint white blob pacing a small cell.

  Wherever he is, one thing never fails in its portside truth — there has to be air flowing to him.

  There came a loud roar and the dull thud of flesh against bulkhead. The guards with the scanpad took off down a side corridor. There was a lot of yelling and few more thuds. One of the armigers returned with a colleague draped over her shoulder, both looking a little the worse for some serious encounters with a large unyielding surface. The draped guard was lowered onto a bench while a subgenetor clerk scampered off after a med kit. She slumped to one side and had to be propped up against a large monitor screen.

  “Doesn’t respond any differently to females then?” said one of the high rank administrative staff.

  The injured guard gave him an evil glare. “Apparently not.”

  “It was worth a try. Some alien cultures have gender dysmorphic treatment attitudes. Or so I’ve read.” The progenetor, who seemed to be in nominal charge of the dispatch office, looked unrepentant.

  “Well, not this one. It doesn’t seem to care what sex it hits, so long as it hits.” The female guard spat out blood onto a wiping cloth.

  Maura noted the direction of the corridor down which they’d all run. She swung herself over the grating and crawled on through the black air duct. Behind her the dispatch maintained a high-pitched buzz
of annoyed voices.

  One of the side effects of being a reject was pretty good spatial orientation skills – what the crudrats called sussing the ducts. The tunnel Maura crawled through turned and twisted and backtracked on itself for a while before emerging into a small hub. Without qualms, Maura select a duct, one to her far right and squeezed inside. It was a tight fit. Truth be told, she really was getting too big for reject life, let alone crudratting. What will I do when I’m too tall to handle tunnels? Join the bums gutterside scrounging in beltway muck? Fantastic future. Blast my trigger traits. As if in response to that thought, Maura cracked one boney knee on the tunnel lip.

  She inched through the smaller duct, squirming on her belly now. It was slow going, plus she had to pause every few lengths to press her ear to the floor. For a long time she heard nothing but the screaming rush of air. Then she began to hear the intermittent sounds of roaring and yelling. Eventually, both became so loud she could hear it easy all around her and didn’t need to pause.

  Like all air ducts, this one was fitted with multiple vents at various points. None were as large as the floor grating she’d looked through onto the dispatch room. These were no bigger than her hand — round, with small dropped caps. There was no way to look through them. But she still found the right one.

  There was a pattern to imprisonment portside. Maura knew it well. Armigers weren’t above pulling crudrats in for vagrancy, especially if things were slow and they wanted the sport. Maura was usually nimble enough to evade capture, even from a steel Spoke with implant-adapted reflexes. But three times she hadn’t. Twice she’d been nabbed off shift, just having run the blades, all tired-tissue and sleepy-brain.