When Camila O'Flynn was sure she wouldn't start screaming, she took her knuckles out of her mouth. The movement jostled the horrible, filthy negro squeezed next to her, and he bumped the Asian on his left. The disturbance ran down the whole bulkhead, eliciting a multilingual stream of invective that made Camila want to clap her palms over her ears.
But she'd learned in his endless interval of transit that one didn't move any more than was absolutely necessary. There were 300 people packed into the hold of this ship and none of them was any more comfortable, or any happier, than she. The food was bad, the heat and stink intolerable, and the toilets a nightmare. Washing was out of the question.
And there was nobody to complain to: no one, at least no one she could find, was in charge. The dark, cavernous hold was a Tower of Babel; Third Worlders from every impoverished nation Camila had ever heard of, and some she hadn't, made up her traveling companions, every one of them headed for a better---or different---life in the Fourth Worldl, the outsystem colonies.
Almost no one spoke Portuguese, and those who did spoke it so badly or with such heavy accents and hostile attitudes that Camila had given up trying to make conversation. Early on, she'd attempted to slide her way through the crowd, to the big conveyor belt that wound through the center of the hold, a rubber, ever-moving strip on which bad food came and went.
But she'd been nearly raped; she'd been shoved and brutalized because places nearest the food were the most prized. She'd crawled back to her bulkhead and wept.
How long ago was that? She didn't know. She didn't have her Timex watch anymore. She didn't have her purse. She didn't have her ID, her credit cards, her company cards. She had a paper bag with a comb, toothbrush, and a punch card in it. On the punch card was plenty of information in binary, but only one notation in Portuguese, the printed information: Ryder, f 28, w; "as."
After days of wondering, she'd decided that "as" meant "atestado de saude" (clean bill of health).
She kept telling herself that eventually someone in authority would come within shouting distance and she could start rectifying this titanic error. She kept waiting for a well-groomed face to appear and solicitously peer down at her with profuse apologies and an outstretched hand. She was still waiting for that moment.
She'd run out of tears, she'd run out of energy. She'd lost weight and she knew her night-vision was going from lack of vitamin A, because the terrible tableau before her was getting dimmer every time they turned on the lights to simulate "day."
She wondered who "they" were, and fantasized about her revenge, once she found out.
A tremor ran through the horde---that was the only way she could think of these animals around her, living in each other's filth and jabbering in their polyglot tongues. The strongest men surged forward as bread started appearing on the conveyor belt.
Camila didn't try to join them. Usually the negro beside her grabbed enough, eventually, for them both. She didn't thank him when he handed her a share---he just had no wish to spend the rest of this interval next to a rotting corpse.
Three people had died that she knew of, but she'd never been awake to see the bodies taken away. The lights would go out; you'd fall asleep---a heavy, sweet-smelling sleep---and when you awoke, the corpse would be gone. An efficient system, but one that always ran late. By the time the corpse was removed, everyone was gagging on the smell. So they tried to keep each other alive, most of the time. Or the smart ones died.
The negro came back with bread, and handed her some. She'd given up trying to teach him Portuguese, too. She'd given up everything, in fact, except fantasies of what would happen to the culprits when she got out of here.
And thinking about Cardoso----she still thought about Cardoso: if he was involved, if he'd set her up for this intentionally. She thought about that night repeatedly, the last night she remembered clearly until she'd awakened here, soiled and worse.
She thought about Cardoso and she thought about Wooten and she thought about Gisele Brondum and she wanted to kill them all.
She wolfed her appallingly dry bread and picked the crumbs from her smock. Not until she was finished with every one did she realize that the timbre of the sound in the hold had changed. There were vibrations coming up through the floor, shaking her very bones. There was a slow wave of stifled hysteria running through the mass of passengers.
And then, with a shudder that shook the bulkhead against which she leaned, the whole hull began reverberating with noise. It was so loud and painful that Camila elbowed for room to clap her hands over her ears. People screamed. The noise got louder, the vibration more pronounced, more frightening.
People were starting to panic, to lunge back and fort, to try to find somewhere to run n. But there was nowhere to run. The negro beside her knew that. He put out a hand protectively, making a barrier between her and the people milling, now, before them.
She pressed herself back, away from his touch, away from theirs, into her filthy corner. She knew what was happening, and she knew that the most frightening part of it was that no one else here seemed to understand.
The cargo ship she was in was either making dock somewhere, or breaking up. The former would be a relief of one kind; the latter, of another. She'd rather die quickly in space than be trampled to death by the crazies around her, who couldn't adapt to anything or understand anything, or they wouldn't be here, failures from the Third World hoping to make a last-ditch stand in the Fourth.
She closed her eyes, praying it would end quickly. End either way: dead was better than this, and space was indubitably cleaner than this metal coffin in which she'd been buried alive so long her hair had grown out. If she lived, there'd be colonial officials who spoke Portuguese.
There had to be....Espaco Intermediario Corporacao S.A. was the largest single employer of manual laborers off-planet, in-system or out, she reminded herself.
Abruptly, where the conveyor usually emerged from the wall bearing food, a blinding light began to shine. An ear-splitting screech accompanied the expanding light as the huge bulkhead doors drew back. A hull-to-hull dock!
An automated voice began telling the workers in the hold to "Proceed double-file through the door. Take the first empty cubicle you see and lie down flat. Don't worry. You are guaranteed robot-assistance," in first Portuguese, then English, then Spanish, and then another language Camila didn't recognize.
But she recognized what she was seeing and her heart sank: there wouldn't be anyone to complain to, no human in charge---at least not for a long time; not where Camila was going. She'd been present at the meetings that EICSA had held concerning "bulk lentocongelar of workforces" and she remembered how the new system worked.
She remembered, because one of the executives had remarked, "So what if we lose one out of ten of 'em? It's quicker, cheaper, more efficient to ship 'em fully automated---we can even charge them less, which means they owe us less. They never work any of it off, anyway. And what kind of casualties are we talking about, anyway? Gringos, niggers, wetbacks, chinks and wogs."
She'd lowered her eyes that day demurely, feeling uncomfortable at having heard something she'd have to forget having heard. The automated lentocongelar system saved millions; allowed the transfer of workers more quickly and efficiently, and even with the robot-assist systems, there was a risk of lost life, of people dying, unrevived or unrevivable, due to mechanical failure. Or human error.
At least there'd be no human error, she thought, trying to stand and finding her knees wouldn't hold her. On a cargo ship like the one to which her group was transferring, the only human life, besides cargo, stayed on the flight deck or in the few scientific mission suites. She wouldn't have to worry about someone purposely trying to monkey with her lentocongelar---to kill her.
There was no need for anyone to do that. Automated lentocongelar in bulk was available only in the new superforce jump ships that EICSA was experimenting with. And you didn't haul workforces by jump to close-in terraforming projects.
Again, Camila tried to rise to her feet. This time, the big black man's hand closed around her elbow. She shot him a grateful look, having borrowed his strength. For the first time he smiled at her, showing small, yellowing teeth. He wouldn't be smiling if he knew where they were going. Or maybe he didn't give a shit. But she did.
Superforce jumps were only needed for distant, exploratory destinations---for outsystem hellholes like Z-42B. The pilots of the ships she was staggering into line to board were being paid quadruple their normal rate for flying jumpships because three out of the ten EICSA had launched had been lost in space.
And because, once you got a strong human contingent in a quadrant, you didn't have to boost from Earth's solar system: you got what you needed from neighboring mining or scientific or cultural colonies.
Stumbling into line with the negro's hand still on her arm and the computer's voice droning unintelligibly in her ears, Camila O'Flynn made her way towards the lentocongelar tank and the frontier beyond.
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