Camila O'Flynn dreamed about the landing at Estação Vanguard long before she'd got there. In the dream she knew she'd died and gone to hell but that didn't make the fear any easier to bear or the shocks any duller.
She'd dream she'd waked, as she had in reality, from lentocongelar, stumbling and numb, to be herded into one of the drops trucks with just a respirator and an extra pair of coveralls to her name. She'd lost her paper bag with the comb and toothbrush and she kept trying to go back for it but nobody would let her. She'd lost the big negro too---in fact, in the dream she was positive she'd never see him again.
She was herded into the truck's cargo hold and she found a seat on a slatted bench, cinched her harness, and strapped her respirator over her nose, just the way she'd done during the real drop.
But there all reality vanished from the dream. In the dream, there were things under the slats of her seat---crawly things, clawed things, gooey things, all living among the filth collected there over the years. In the dream she lay down full-length on the slat and peered through them and she saw a horrid little creature like a wizened macaco wrestler with a horny snout rather than a mouth trying to burrow into the filth and mulch and the writhing life there beneath her seat. Then it turned and looked up at her and opened its jaws malevolently. She began cursing, in the dream, as loudly and as fast as she could because, in the manner of dreams, she knew that if you cursed it horridly enough it couldn't get you. She cursed and yelled and screamed and then she chanted "Go a-way; go a-way," because that was what you did, to save yourself from the creature.
The creature was going to attack her otherwise, come right up through the slats and bite her on the ass and that would be the end of her, so she chanted for her life. And the creature, trying to get away from her chant, burrowed deeper until it burrowed into the steel beneath the mass of organic horror---through the spiders, worms, and mulch.
Even though, when she woke, shivering, she was safe in a workforce tent on the frontier planet's surface, it always took her a long time to recover after the dream. Her heart would be beating fast and her throat as raw as it'd been when she'd emerged from the bulk slow-freeze. And then she'd sit up, groping for her flashlight, to make sure there wasn't any creature under her cot.
The true drop hadn't happened that way---the horror had been more subdued. She'd had the breath squeezed out of her; she'd been subjected to intense cold and barely survivable depressurization. Her ears had felt as if someone was forcing liters of water into them and her eyes as if they were about to pop from her skull. Some had died, in the cold darkness of the drop truck---hemorrhaged because they weren't strong enough to take it, or maybe they panicked and failed to use their respirators.
She thought, sitting crosslegged on her bunk a week after she'd arrived, that maybe the negro had died like that. She missed him, him and the transit hold, too. The only thing she didn't miss was the bulk lentocongelar tanks, because she'd been so frightened.
She was frightened now, but it was a different kind of fear. She was Ryder, no first name, work number YC451359. Ryder had made too many waves when she'd been in the processing line at Estação Vanguard. Ryder was a Portuguese speaker, where only the staff spoke Portuguese. Ryder had thrown her extra coveralls at a foul-mouthed workboss with a neural-truncheon and demanded to be taken to the highest official in charge before she'd realized what that could mean.
Ryder had looked around her, gasping in the thin air, up at the cobalt sky that never lightened, and then down at the thin soil and sparse brown grass that anchored the purple mud at her feet and raged. She'd looked up at the naked, jagged mountains that made Estação Vanguard cost-effective, at the sprinkled lights of oxygen-making stations and mining facilities and terraforming platforms and, closer to hand, at the squalor of the workforce tent city or favela, and rejected all of it.
She'd caused so much trouble that three grown men had been needed to frog-march her off to the commandante's office, a permanent facility of prefab composite. In it, under a naked fluorescent, she'd told her story to an impassive, pasty-faced man with a rolling gut who'd tapped a stylus against his lips an d told the ruffians who'd dragged her into his presence to "wait outside. She's not going anywhere."
When she'd finished, the workforce commandante's aide rose ponderously from his plastic desk and strolled to the window, scratching the crack between his ass without regard to a lady's presence.
Then he'd turned and said, "Listen here, Ryder, or whatever your name is, let's get some thing's clear. I don't know, or care, if you're telling the truth. It doesn't make any difference how or why you signed your contract. You signed it. You're here. Unless you can dig into your pocket and pull out enough spare change to pay for your round trip, plus whatever prep charges are against your account, you're here for the whole tour. We could send a query back---if I believed you, sorry, I don't----but it'd take anywhere from 6 to 8 months to get to Earth, and I'd have to pay good money for it. Which I will not, without a good reason---better than you've given me. Plus, there's the elapsed groundsider time since you left: if you had a job, like you say, you don't have it anymore. Now if you speak anything besides Portuguese, I could get you into liaison, if you make it worth my while."
The sexual innuendo was unmistakable. "No!" Camila said emphatically.
He said. "I suspected as much. Listen up, then, mulher; you're just more workforce slime, as far as we're concerned. The reason these projects aren't fully robotized except for tech crews is real simple: you eat, you shit, the shit's great fertilizer. You carry bacteria of all kinds, the interactions of which are too complicated to bother reproducing through technology. So you're here to tote that bale and, if you're lucky, push some paper while your human-body factory does its little bit to aid the terraformers. You die here, what the hell: we'll just bury you. It's good for the soil, human mulch. You should know all this if you're what you claim to be---some hotshot from EICSA H.Q." Now the sneer he must have been suppressing for the whole interview broke out as he leaned his elbows on the windowsill and said, "So if you want me to go to all the trouble of checking out your story, you come back when you've learned the facts of life. Maybe you can convince me to send that query for you. Until then, we'll put you up in Turvolandia, where it won't matter that you're a Portuguese speaker."
She hadn't understood how bad a mistake she'd made until much later, as the ground trucks came and went, carrying workers to their billets. When numbers began to be called for the Turvolandia trucks, hers was among them. And someone came up to her and gave his condolences in broken Portuguese, a tall, thin man who handed her a card that said, Trabalhador David Imhoff.
The card was a smudged Xerox. On it were some numbers. She said, "What's this, senhor?"
He had graying temples and a hawk nose and as he leaned closer, she could smell the rankness that bad diet had given his flesh and breath. "If I can help u there, senhorita, gimme a call."
Then she realized what he was: workers' union. She almost threw the card in his face but that an old impulse prompted by the part of her that was still a loyal EICSA employee.
She got out the card now, in the dark, and read it again in the light of her flashlight. Then she shook her head and put it away. He'd want the same kind of incentive that the commandante's aide had. She wasn't going to let this place turn her into a zombie like the people around her. She was going to get out of here. She already had a plan. Turvolandia was a high-risk area because its physical location: on a sheer cliffside, the workers tended heavy equipment. The noise and the dust kicked up by the drilling was horrendous. The dust, she knew, was needed for greenhousing, as much a product as a by-product. But she coughed all the time now.
There was a chance, though, up here that she wouldn't have had below: the terraformers' headquarters was up here. The tech barracks, hermetically sealed, were here as well. There were people in them who were Portuguese speakers, perhaps even some Brazilians; surely someone among the host of them in the bureaucracy, whom she could convince to help her. She had sufficient insider knowledge to convince another insider it would not only be prudent, but an opportunity for advancement worth taking, to notify Brooks Wooten that his lost administrative assistant was alive and (un)well at Estação Vanguard.
She kept going over the plan in her mind until her chest stopped heaving, but she couldn't go back to sleep. Not and have the dream again. She slipped off her cot and padded through the rows of fitfully sleeping workers. There were so many that their body heat had warmed the tent, and when she slipped through the outer seal into the night air, the cold hit her like a wet towel.
She gasped and hugged herself. And realized she wasn't alone out here. On the rock shelf that extended from the plateau was a knot of people talking in low voices, crouched against the livid dark, silhouetted in the dust-diffused light of the tech center across the chasm.
There were no guards patrolling this part of the work camp because there was no exit but a sharp, killing drop to the reservoir under construction hundreds of feet below. The fences and the guards were all over to the east, where a road had been cut out of the mountainside.
She stood listening to the rumble of voices, unable to make out the words. She told herself she was shivering because of the cold, that she should have put on the respirator and her other coveralls, that her agitation had nothing to do with a surreptitious meeting on the promontory by night.
Overhead, a triangle of lights left the tech center---a police VTOL or a tech bird---flying in her direction. It was hard to tell how high it was, but she could hear its roar already, and it was getting louder.
Impulsively, she headed towards the gathering on the shelf, not knowing whether she would be welcome or not. There were 200 workers up here, only a few of them new. They had a society of their own and they didn't exactly welcome you into it open-armed. Your mistakes could kill them, if, say, you were at the right machine and pushed the wrong button. Still, she had nothing to lose and somehow she didn't want to be alone in the open when that bird came over.
There'd been rumors about surveillance; there were gardas who came ripping through the tents on unscheduled head-and-bed checks: two kinds of gardas: EICSA lifers, and rougher men, men Camila was sure were paramilitary---professionals looking for trouble to stop before it started.
Yeah, she'd read the proposals; she knew more about those young toughs with the weapons were looking f or than most of the frightened men and women they threw out of bed on surprise inspections. Knowing what she did about unionization and EICSA's bias against it, she was out of her mind for that group on the shelf.
But she did. She was too angry, too frustrated, too bored not to. She skulked through the jumbled rocks, glancing up repeatedly skyward to make sure the bird wasn't going to sweep down on them before she reached them.
When she was less than ten feet away, the bird came directly over and nobody dove for cover. They just stopped talking and sat very still. Smart.
When the bird had gone, they started talking again in the polyglot she was beginning to pick up, but hadn't yet mastered.
".....holy mother of...praise...every soul....holy father of....praise....every soul..." she heard them say together.
And since it was some kind of repeated chant, and among the voices was one that she was sure she recognized, she kept inching towards them, curious, lonely, and somehow unafraid.
When she was almost upon them, the chanting stopped and one voice said in English simple enough for her to follow: "To business now, Dadeesh. We have fifty..."
Her foot hit a stone and every head there turned. She was close enough to make out five men, two women, and a blanket covering a flashtorch. She froze, thinking they'd listen, hear no more, and return to their discussion. She couldn't just pop out of the rocks, she knew now, and say ola, not after sneaking up on them like this. She'd be very still, and they'd forget about her.
They didn't: there was a staccato of monosyllables, and all five men moved at once, faster than she would have thought possible, towards her, spreading out as they came.
She turned and ran, scrambling among the rocks, suddenly horrified. Obviously they were not EICSA, and just as obviously they were ready to deal with anyone caught spying on them. She was acutely aware of how far the shelf protruded over the construction project below, and how far the drop.
Struggling for breath in the thin air, Camila could barely hear over the pulse pounding in her ears. So she ran right into the chest of a man who grabbed her with practiced skill. Before she knew it, he had her in a bear hug and then had whirled her around. A hand came down over her mouth before she could scream, another across her chest, pinioning her arms, and then other men were around her.
Voices whispered together, unintelligibly except for the urgency in them. Someone shined a flashlight on her face. Someone said something more.
She couldn't see anything besides the blinding glare of the flashtorch, although she could hear the men moving around. And then she heard rapid-fire English, and the voice she'd thought she recognized in Portuguese. "If your lips are free to speak, you must promise not to scream, yes? Nod if you agree."
She nodded as best she could. The same voice gave her an order. The hand came off her mouth. She could now feel the heat of the man against whom her backside was pressed, the way his muscles were tensed.
The voice behind the glare said again. "So, Ryder, you decided to take me up on my offer, yes?"
"I...yes," said Camila O'Flynn, barely recognize the pseudonym as her own. "I'm sorry, it was an impulse. I'll just go away now..."
"We cannot release you before we have talked to you. Do you agree? Come back and sit with us. You have nothing to fear." The hands holding her let go completely and the man behind her stepped back, out of contact with her body.
Not until then did she realize what kind of bargain she'd made, and who the man with the familiar voice must be. David Imhoff, the one who'd given her his card.
"Imhoff?" she quavered. "Yes, all right."199Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡXPrvtuqm1i
The flashtorch went off, leaving her temporarily stone blind. And shaking uncontrollably. Men crowded around her and one touched her arm....Imhoff, because he'd said. "Yes, it's me."
She was escorted back to the place where their blanket was, and Imhoff told her to sit. She could see more than a green-black cloud now; she could see darker silhouettes against the night, sitting crosslegged. From the one parallel to her, Imhoff's voice came, talking now in rapid-fire English.
When the words stopped, she said miserably. "I cannot understand you. You will have to slow down or speak to me in Portuguese."
He laughed and said something in English at which the whole group laughed, and spoke to her again, this time in slow Portuguese. "I asked you how much you'd heard. I ask it again."
"I.....some sort of chant or prayer, then just something about business. That's all, I swear."
"Would you like to know more?"
"Am I supposed to know more?" she said honestly, trying to keep her teeth from chattering.
Again the voice from the silhouette had humor in it. "We could make things simpler for you, senhorita---now. But what we do is not without it's dangers. I think you know this."
"I do."
"If we got you into the tech center, will you do certain things for us?"
"I---What are you offering besides that? What do you want from me in exchange?"
"A new life. Redemption. Resurrection. The holy road."199Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡNngYiKG9fe
"What?"
"You'll understand later. Say now if you wish to join us---we are the workers' sole hope. Or go back to your hopeless life. You do not know enough yet to hurt us."
Someone else interjected harshly, "She knows your name, David."
"And we know hers; it's got a balance."
"I want to know more," she said defiantly, cold and shivering and thinking about the tech center across the chasm, where there'd be employees of EICSA to reason with, not just sadistic work bosses and peasants, one thing she was sure of was that she didn't want to go back to her "hopeless life." Even engaging in unionizing beat that. And what could the workforce bosses do to her...send her someplace worse than Turvolandia? To her knowledge, there was no place worse.199Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡwHbmJhPXS1
But looking at the silhouettes of Imhoff and the others, she suddenly remembered her dream, and the chanting in it was the only way to keep the creature at bay.
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