Chapter 3: Chapter 3
Pearl hit him at a run.
She got both arms around his ribs and lifted. His boots came off the lobby tile for half a second. The whole terminal swung sideways past his ear, and he kept the case clamped under his left elbow through all of it.
“You’re taller,” she accused into his shoulder.
“You’re stronger. What have they been feeding you?”
“Put me down, then.”
“You’re holding me.”
“Oh.” She put him down.
Then she turned her face and brushed her muzzle along his, whiskers catching against his whiskers, and her tail came around and hooked the back of his knee the way it had since they were nine and she had knocked out one of his teeth with a bucket.
It was the oldest greeting he knew. The tips of his ears went hot.
She pressed into him and held on. She was warm through the travel sweater and her chin sat on his shoulder where it had always sat. The smell of her was salt and boat rope and the summer she gave him the fish.
And she was coming with him.
She was going up High Perch with him, and to Mars, and to Ares Vallis. Every documentary he had ever watched put a crawler camera down a shaft and a lamp across a corridor six meters high, and every single time, he had put himself down there alone against the dark. Now Pearl was in it. He had no idea what to do with that, and what he did was laugh out loud into her hair.
“What,” she said.
She had pulled back far enough to look at him, and Arthur lost a second to it. White fur, pink inside the ears, and the same pink on the pads of the paw she still had on his arm. On a projection the size of his paw her eyes had only ever been a color. In front of him the blue went deep and had a black ring around the outside of it, and he had to make himself look at her mouth instead.
“Nothing. You’re here.” He was fighting an urge to pat her head, or her shoulder, or her tail. “I’m going to need a minute with that.”
“Take thirty seconds,” Pearl said, pulling at his collar. “Let me see it.”
He turned his head and let her look.
“Ay. They cut you crooked.”
“Sable says it’ll scar into a raya.”
“Sable is right for once.” Her finger came to a stop a half inch short of the seam. Then she tipped her head to his right and swept her left ear forward to show him hers, the white fur growing back over a line cut at the same angle. “So will mine.”
Arthur looked at it longer than he meant to.
“Who paid for that?” he said.
“Artie.”
“I’m asking as a fellow customer.”
“You’re asking as a nosy tigre.”
“That too. Where’d you have it done?”
“A clinic.” Pearl let her ear go and her fur settled over the seam and covered it. “You got in.”
“You got in.”
“I know. You told me first.”
“Pearl. You never told me you applied.”
“You’d have talked me out of it.”
“I would not have talked you out of it. I have been talking myself into it since I was twelve. I have a whole speech.”
“I’ve heard your whole speech.” She was grinning at him, and it was her real grin, the one with the crooked tooth in it, and it worked on him exactly as well as it always had. “That’s why I didn’t tell you. You’d have made it about you.”
“It is about me. It’s my speech.”
A clinic, Arthur thought. He had asked her where, and she had handed him a noun and taken her paw off her ear. He let it go. He had never once in eleven years pushed Pearl on anything she had decided not to say.
His mother reached them with the duffle over her shoulder and a travel case in each paw and one look on her face that Arthur had learned to read before he learned to read.
“Pearl,” she said.
“Señora Ashpelt.” Pearl went and hugged her too, careful of the cases, cheek to cheek, formal. “You look well.”
“I look like a woman who has been awake for thirty hours.” She set one case down. “Your parents?”
“Clearing the apartment. Ma’s coming, Pa can’t. He put me in the crawler and told me not to cry in front of the company.”
“Good advice.”
“It was terrible advice,” Pearl said. “I cried in the crawler.”
The screening room was across the hall behind a door marked BASELINE, and there was no line, because Arthur was the last one.
There was a counter with a stool behind it. The wall panel above showed the Red Horizon crest, a sun cresting a ridgeline, printed in the same red it had been printed in on every recruitment feed Arthur had ever asked his QUIP to read him. The woman behind the counter was somewhere past fifty, tabby, wearing a gray company blazer with the sleeves pushed to her elbows. Her name tag said MAVA LONGWHISKER, INTAKE.
Arthur had rehearsed this. He had lain in the cradle two nights ago running it: the chair, the halo, the technicians, the readings climbing a display while somebody in a coat frowned at them. He had decided in advance not to look at the display, so that whatever it said, his face would not have already said it first.
“Ashpelt,” she said, without looking up. “Left ear toward me.”
He turned his head.
She lifted a gray wand off the counter, held it eight inches from his skull, and swept it down once. It clicked. She set it back in its cradle.
“You’re all set.”
Arthur did not move.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it.”
“You didn’t take a reading.”
“I took four.” She turned her panel a quarter inch so he could see it, then turned it back before he had made sense of any of it. “Grade I. Two units. Nothing seated. Calibration closed out at oh-four-twenty this morning.”
“Is that good?”
“It’s the only thing it can be.” She had said it eleven hundred times and it came out at that speed. “Every lattice comes out of surgery at Grade I with two units. Yours, hers, the boy behind her. There is no such thing as a strong one. I am not measuring you, Ashpelt. I am confirming that a licensed clinic put it in, that it took, and that it is yours, so that when you die under Mars the company can prove it did not sell you a defective head.”
“Right.”
“You were expecting a chair with straps.”
“A little bit.”
“That’s the surgery. This is a receipt.” She was already flicking through something else. “The company doesn’t care what your lattice can do. It cares that it exists and that it’s yours and that you’re not going to stroke out in a pressure suit forty meters under Mars and cost us a body recovery.”
“That’s a lot warmer than the brochure.”
“The brochure is written by people in orbit.” She looked up at him for the first time. Her eyes went over his face, then down over the jacket, the boots, the black case clamped under his arm, and back up, and whatever she decided about him she kept behind her teeth. “Fifteen minutes.”
“Fifteen minutes for what?”
“For the shuttle. Last one lifting out of this district, ever. Company has no reason to send another one, and the municipal field closes with the flats.” She swept two fingers across her panel and Arthur’s QUIP chimed against his forearm. “Assignment’s on you. The Prowl first, then a climber car out of the yard.”
“Tonight,” Arthur said.
“Tonight.”
A jolt went through him, half joy and half something with teeth in it. He had known every step of this for six years and it had never once had a time attached. He looked at his QUIP. A line of assignment text sat waiting above the band, cohort designation, intake team, berth. He closed his hand on it without reading it. His heart was going too fast to be trusted with numbers.
“One more thing and then you go,” Longwhisker said. “Transport is in your contract. Out and back, fronted, on your account, accruing since you scanned in.”
“I read the contract.”
“Everybody says that.” She held up a finger. “Then you know you are in debt and have not left the province. Personal effects are a separate line. Anything you carry up gets weighed at the yard and charged by the gram, every month, both directions. Uniform and kit are issued at the top and stay company property.”
Arthur turned his head.
His ma stood in the doorway with the duffle over her shoulder. Everything he owned was in it. Four shirts, two pairs of trousers, a jacket he had outgrown and kept anyway, a stack of family disks, his pa’s old deployment patch, and a lopsided stone fish with too many teeth.
“By the gram,” he said.
“By the gram.”
He walked over and took the duffle off her shoulder and set it on the floor between them and knelt down and opened the zipper.
“Artie.”
“It’s fine.” It was not fine. Shame came up in him the second his knee hit the floor, hot and stupid, at eighteen years old handing his mother a bag because he could not afford to lift it. The fish was where he had put it, on top, where it would not get buried. He closed his fist around it and it was gritty and cold and one fin was thicker than the other. He put it in his jacket pocket, next to the brass gear, and pulled the zipper shut, and stood up, and held the bag out to her by the strap. “Take it. Take all of it. It’s four shirts.”
“I have room.”
“Ma.”
“I said I have room.” She took the strap. Her paw closed over his on the way past and did not let go immediately. “You have the case.”
“I have the case.”
“Then you have everything that matters and four fewer shirts than you should.” She put the duffle back on her own shoulder. Her voice stayed exactly level, and she did not look once at the woman behind the counter, and her paw went to the strap and stayed there. “Go on. She said fifteen minutes.”
“Fourteen,” Longwhisker said, without looking up.
The orientation was six chairs in a room built for twenty, and they had brought the chairs in a circle, which fooled nobody.
Pearl took the seat beside him. There were four others. A heavy-shouldered tom with a chipped ear who introduced himself as Bastien and then said nothing else for the entire session. Two girls who had clearly met on the crawler ride and were already finishing each other’s sentences. A skinny kid in a coat too good for him who sat with his knees together and kept checking his QUIP as though it might reverse his decision.
The man who came in wore the gray blazer over a work shirt and had the build of somebody who had spent twenty years carrying other people’s equipment. His tag said REDTAIL, QUARTERMASTER. He carried a packed canvas grip in with him and set it down in the open doorway, inside the swing of the door, at paw height on his way back out.
“Thirteen minutes,” he said. “So I’m going to talk fast and you’re going to make one decision. Everybody breathing?”
“Yes, sir,” said the skinny kid.
“Don’t call me sir, I work for a living.” Redtail dropped a case on the table and thumbed it open. Inside, laid in foam, was a carbine. It was gray and stubby and looked like a length of pipe with a grip on it, and Arthur’s whole body leaned toward it before he told it not to. “Standard package. All of you get the same. Suit, medium plate, this, lamp, tether, med pack, beacon. Loaned, logged, on your account. Questions about the kit go to the armory at basecamp and not to me.”
“What is it?” one of the girls asked.
“Vantage carbine.”
Nine hundred credits, kinetic, and the cheapest weapon a licensed company was permitted to issue. Arthur had known which one it would be. He had also spent a year of his life wanting a beam rifle instead, back when he wanted a boat too, and he had eventually read enough settlement filings to understand that a fifty-thousand-credit weapon does not get handed to a boy who has not yet proved he can walk down a corridor without touching anything. That was what Standing was for. Everyone in the room knew it. Nobody looked happy about it.
“Weapons experience,” Redtail said. “Show of paws. Anybody hunt, shoot competition, militia, family in the trade?”
Bastien raised a paw. So did one of the girls.
“Anything seated? Paws up if you’re running a module already.”
Bastien’s paw stayed up. One of the girls put hers up too, a tortoiseshell with three gold rings up one ear, and Arthur turned in his chair to look at her.
Pearl kneed him in the leg.
“Two of you. Good.” Redtail did not ask what, and nobody offered. “The rest of you will get sold one within the month, at the outfitters, at whatever the board says that week. Do not buy the first thing you can afford. Prices in there move like weather, and a module that runs you a year’s work in the spring goes for half that when a hauler comes in heavy.”
Arthur put his paw over the black case in his lap without deciding to.
“Right. The decision.” He turned, and the wall behind him lit.
CORE sat at the top, four lines nobody was being asked about.
Suit Systems and Pressure Discipline. Zero and Variable Gravity Movement. Combat Simulation. Ruin Conduct and Team Procedure.
“Thirty-one days on the Farstep, hull four four seven one. Core is every day of it, everybody, no swaps. Combat sim is four hours in the tank, and the tank is rendered off company recordings, so the first machine you meet will be the ninetieth machine you’ve seen.”
The skinny kid raised his paw. “How accurate is it?”
“Accurate enough that people cry in it. Next.”
Below CORE the wall said ELECTIVE, ONE, and Arthur did not have to read that list either. It was printed in the brochure, and he had read the brochure the way other boys read box scores.
Precursor Assay and Valuation. Machine Recognition and Avoidance. Survey and Cartography. Vacuum, Pressure, and Field Medicine. Breach, Shoring, and Structure. Marksmanship and Weapon Handling.
“One each. Taught in transit, charged to your account.” Redtail put a knuckle under the last line. “Free advice you didn’t ask for. Everybody picks marksmanship. Nobody shoots the machines. Rounds come off them like gravel off a hull, and the recruits who come home are the ones who read a patrol route before it read them.”
Arthur’s paw went up before he had decided anything.
“Assay.”
Redtail looked at him properly for the first time. “Not marksmanship. You’ve never held a weapon in your life.”
“Nobody’s paying me to shoot anything,” Arthur said. “They pay me if I find something. I’d like to be able to tell a find from a floor.”
Somebody snorted. Redtail flicked something into his panel and held his eyes a second longer than he had held anybody else’s.
“Ashpelt. Logged.”
Pearl said, “Field medicine.”
“Not with your friend?”
“He’ll be the one bleeding,” Pearl said. “Somebody has to be useful.”
Everybody laughed. Arthur laughed hardest. It went around the circle after that. Bastien said “Breach” and nothing else. One of the girls took survey and the other took marksmanship and got a look for it. The skinny kid changed his mind three times and landed on assay ten seconds after Arthur did. The wall panel logged all of it, and Arthur sat there with his ears forward feeling like a boy on the first morning of a very good school.
“Last thing, and then we all go get rained on.” Redtail cleared the wall. “There’s more school at basecamp. Advanced assay, breach two, deep survey, machine behavior, nine or ten others, running continuously. Anybody can enroll any time.”
“How much?” one of the girls asked.
“Course fee, plus the days.” He shrugged and let it sit. “A day in a classroom is a day you’re not underground, and you still eat and you still occupy a bunk. It bills against lodging. Nobody’s stopping you.”
The skinny kid looked at his QUIP, then at the wall, then at his QUIP again. One of the girls said “oh” under her breath. They had all walked in believing basecamp training was something the company gave you.
Arthur wrote none of it down, because he already had it.
He had been reading the boards since he was twelve. Not the recruitment feeds, which his QUIP would happily narrate at him for free in a voice like a warm bath, but the other places: veterans’ threads, discharge complaints, the public lines of a bounty settlement, the annual filings a licensed company has to publish whether it wants to or not. Six years of it. He could not have told anyone what he was preparing for back then. He knew the shape of the thing now, and the shape was this.
He would take every course that came with the passage, because the passage was charged either way. The air in that hull was billed whether he slept through it or came out the far end knowing what a find looked like. The boards were full of men who called that kind of thing free. It was already paid for, which was a different thing entirely.
He would draw his kit at the armory the hour he arrived, and the kit was loaned and logged and accruing from that same hour. That was why he would sign up for a delve rotation the same day, before the first course and before he had a bunk he liked.
Then he would go down and come back up with something. It did not have to be a housing the size of a bread box that ran a gravity field. A pocket of wall fragment assayed out at ten thousand credits a piece, and there were men on the boards who had paid off a full year on gravel. The assay office would price it, he would take his participation slice, and the number on his account would move the correct direction for the first time since he had scanned in.
With the first real payment he would buy a module for the empty unit, outright, off the basecamp outfitters and never on loan.
Then he would keep going, because the account did not clear itself. That was the part the veterans’ threads all arrived at eventually, in the same tired sentence phrased forty different ways. The passage home was in the contract and the contract was on the account, and a recruit in the red got handed a rotation instead of a berth. He would stay until the number was zero.
Four years to get his ma onto ground. A delve inside the first week, and four years was a long time.
Arthur sat there with the case on his knees and his chest went smooth and level for the first time since he had woken up in the cradle.
“Eight minutes.” Redtail was already at the door with the grip in his paw. “Pad’s through the double doors. Say your goodbyes on the walk.”
“Are you coming up with us?” Pearl asked.
“I’m coming as far as the Prowl and then I’m going east.” He held the door with his shoulder and waited for them, and for one second he looked past the six of them at the empty chairs. “Twenty-two years I’ve processed intakes in this building. You’re the last of you and I’m the last of me. My wife’s had the crawler loaded since Tuesday.”
“Where east?” Arthur asked.
“Uphill,” Redtail said. “Go on. Move.”
They said them on the walk.
The rain had not let up. It came off the roof of the covered walkway in a sheet and hammered the pad apron where the shuttle sat with its ramp down and its running lights turning the water orange. It was a fat, ugly, blunt-nosed thing with soot streaked back from the lifters, and it was the most beautiful object Arthur had ever seen in his life.
His ma stopped where the roof ended.
“I hate the rain,” Arthur said.
“You always have.”
“There’s no rain on Mars.”
“There’s no air on Mars either. Don’t get clever.” She reached up and straightened his collar, which did not need straightening, and then she did not take her paw back. “Look at me.”
He looked at her. Forty years old and gray at the temples, standing in a company terminal in a district with a published end date, holding a duffle with four shirts in it.
“Your father will write when it reaches him,” she said. “Write him first anyway. He likes to lose that argument.”
“Ma.”
“And eat. Whatever they give you, eat all of it, they are charging you for it either way.”
“Ma.”
“What.”
He had a whole speech. He had rehearsed pieces of it in the shower, on the ferry, lying in the dark with his QUIP reading him bounty boards. I’ll get the ground back. Four years, and you’ll have a deed with your name on it, and Pa can come home to a house that isn’t underwater. It was all sitting right there behind his teeth, and it was too big to say in a doorway with eight minutes on the clock, and if he started he would not be able to stop.
“I won’t let you down,” he said.
His ma put her forehead against his and held it there.
“You have never been in a position to,” she said. “Go.”
He went. He got four steps into the rain and turned around, and she was already lifting her paw, and he had known she would be. Something went through his chest that he had no name for and no time to look at.
Thunder rolled over the pad. Arthur ran for the ramp with the case held against his chest and both ears flat to his skull. Pearl was ahead of him, laughing at the sky. The last thing he saw of the coastal city was his mother under the edge of a roof with his duffle bag on her shoulder, getting smaller, refusing to go inside first.
The shuttle went up through the storm like a stone thrown the wrong way.
Arthur had never flown. He had been told about the weight, and the weight was worse than the telling, four minutes of it pressing him back into the seat while the hull shuddered and lightning went off somewhere below them in flashes that came up through the floor instead of down through the windows. The skinny kid was sick into a bag. Bastien slept.
Then it stopped. All of it, at once. His arms floated up off the armrests. His tail lifted off the seat, and a bright spike of terror went through him and turned into laughing before it reached his mouth. His stomach informed him that the entire world had made a serious error, and out the port the storm was a white shelf of cloud lit from inside, going on to the curve of the horizon, and beyond the curve there was black, and in the black there were lights that were not stars. Tether traffic. Yard lamps. A hauler under way with its drive lit, sliding across the dark on a line as straight as a ruler.
Somebody four rows back was breathing through their mouth. Nobody talked.
“Artie,” Pearl said eventually.
“Yeah.”
“You’re gripping that case like it owes you money.”
He looked down. His knuckles had gone pale under the fur.
“They said not to open it until baseline.” He turned it over in his paws. The courier tag was still zip-tied to the handle. Rufo had signed for it. Two hours of his one life. “Baseline’s done.”
“So open it.”
“They didn’t say anything about after.”
“Artie. There’s ninety minutes to the Prowl and you’re going to spend all of them talking yourself into it.”
Arthur opened the case.
The module rested in black foam, no larger than the tip of his thumb: a slim dark wafer with a narrow silver connector along one edge. There was no branding on it anywhere, and a serial line etched down the side too fine to read in cabin light.
He turned his head and pointed behind his ear.
“The lower port,” he said. “I think.”
Pearl unbuckled and leaned across, one paw settling lightly against his shoulder while the other traced the edge of his raya.
“Hold still.”
“I am holding still.”
“Your ears are moving.”
He forced them flat. “Better?”
“Much.”
She found the lower port beneath the short new fur and guided the module into place. The connector caught with a faint magnetic pull. Her breath was warm on the side of his neck and he decided, with great discipline, to think about that later.
“Ready?”
She had turned her head to line the wafer up, and her face was four inches from his, and the blue took up most of what he could see. He shut his eyes.
“No.”
Pearl pushed.
The module clicked once. A thin ring around the port contracted, drawing the wafer inward until it sat flush beneath his skin. Then the lattice cover slid closed over it, sealing without a seam and leaving only the shaved raya to show where anything had happened.
>>> Initializing Implant
>>> Reading module...
>>> Seating...
[Adaptive Recursive Cognitive Scaffold (A.R.C.S)]
Neural Integration Grade: I
Stable capacity: 2 units
Utilized capacity: 1 unit
Available capacity: 1 unit
Installed Implant Module
Sensory Coordination Implant, Civilian Grade
Integration Level: 0
Synchronization: 7%
Available functions:
Sensory filtering
Balance assistance
Low-light compensation
The cabin sharpened.
The hum of the air handler pulled apart into three separate sounds, one of which was a fan bearing that needed replacing. The skinny kid’s breathing came in from four rows back, clean and separate from everything else, as though he were sitting in Arthur’s lap. The cabin light stopped being a glare and became a fixture with a lamp in it. And the sick lurch under his ribs, the one that had been telling him for ten minutes that he was falling, simply set itself down and went quiet.
“Well?” Pearl said.
“It’s a sensory coordination implant.” He was grinning so hard his face hurt. “Civilian grade. Seven percent.”
“That’s what she bought you?”
“That’s what she bought me.”
He did not say the rest of it, which was that civilian grade was the cheapest module anybody sold, and that she had bought it after the account was already empty, and had done it sealed, before he was awake to argue. There was exactly one thing on him that nobody could take away.
Two, counting the fish.
“Hey,” he said. “Let’s see what team they put us on.”
He turned his wrist. Pearl turned hers. Their QUIPs came up together, two blue panels hanging in the cabin air.
INTAKE ASSIGNMENT · ASHPELT, ARTHUR G.
COHORT 214 · FIRETEAM 214-C
Duskfang, Tigran
Nemeris, Cara
Quickstep, Bastien
Ashpelt, Arthur
Arthur read it once. He read it again, slower, and the names did not change, and there were four of them and one of them was his.
He tilted his head toward Pearl, already grinning, already halfway into the joke about Bastien saying one word per day for thirty-one days.
She was still looking at her own panel. She had not moved. Her ears had gone all the way flat against her skull.
“Pearl.”
“Two forty-one,” she said.
He felt the floor drop beneath him.