Record of a Spaceborn Few (Wayfarers, #3)(8)
Tessa stretched back against her desk chair, cracking the tight points between ribs and spine. She turned her head toward the wall vox. ‘224-246,’ she said. The vox chirped in acknowledgement of a home address. ‘Pop, is your scrib on?’
‘No,’ her father shouted back. He’d never grasped the concept that even though the vox was on the other side of the room, he didn’t have to yell like he did with the old models. ‘Why?’
Tessa rolled her eyes. Why, asked the man who’d been looping feeds all morning. ‘Ashby wrote to us. He’s okay.’
The vox relayed a long sigh, followed by a softly spoken ‘shit.’ He started shouting again. ‘How’s his ship?’
‘He said stable. He didn’t have time to write much, just that he’s okay.’
‘Is he still on board? Stable can change fast.’
‘I’m sure Ashby knows whether or not his ship’s safe.’
‘These Toremi weapons they’re talking about on the feeds, those things can really—’
‘Pop, stop watching the feeds. Okay? They don’t know what’s going on either, they’re just filling time.’
‘I’m just saying—’
‘Pop.’ Tessa pinched the bridge of her nose. ‘I have to get back to work. Go to the gardens or something, yeah? Go to Jojo’s, get some lunch.’
‘When are you coming home?’
‘I don’t know. Depends on how the day goes.’
‘Okay.’ He paused. ‘I love you.’
Pop wasn’t withholding or anything, but he didn’t throw those three words around lightly. Tessa softened. ‘I love you, too.’
The vox switched off, and she took another opportunity to clear her lungs. She stared out the workroom window, out into the cargo bay. Rows of towering shelves stretched on and on, full to the brim with wires and junk, attended by the herd of heavy-duty liftbots following assignments Tessa had punched into her terminal. There were stacks of metal, too, the pieces too big for the shelves, the pieces nobody’d had time to cut down. This was her domain, her project. It was her job to track comings and goings, to make sure everything got logged and weighed and described, to keep track of stuff the merchants and foundries weren’t ready for yet, to wrangle the unintelligent machines who shuffled goods from where they had been to where they were needed. A complicated job, but not a taxing one, and one where you could count on most days going exactly the way you’d thought they’d go when you woke up. Compared to the constant familial chaos of home, she valued that.
When she’d first started working in cargo, way back in her twenties, Bay Eight had been a tidy place. She remembered the neatly packed bins of raw materials, the imported crates with exciting labels printed in multiple alien alphabets. Twenty years down the road, and you couldn’t find a one of those in her bay anymore. Imports and processed stock were elsewhere. Bay Eight was one of three on the Asteria dedicated to the remains of the Oxomoco. Every homestead ship was made the same: a massive central cylinder full of vital systems, a flat ring of thousands of homes anchored around it, a cluster of chunky engines at the back. The Oxomoco didn’t look like that anymore. Half of it was a ragged husk, dragged far from the Fleet’s orbit but still out there, still scaring the boots off anyone who saw it grimacing through a shuttle window. The other half was in pieces, gathered and shoved away in cargo bays like hers. So now, instead of alien crates, she dealt with a never-ending backlog of support trusses, floor panels, empty oxygen tanks. Things that had been vital. Things that had been viewed as permanent. All it had taken was one malfunctioning shuttle, one unlucky trajectory, one stretch of fatigued bulkhead. Just one combination of small things that led to the deaths of tens of thousands, and to cargo bays packed with what was left of the place that had carried them.
Pop’s words stuck in her head. Stable can change fast.
‘M Santoso, you okay?’
Tessa looked over. Kip was peeking around the doorway, his pockmarked face scrunched in concern. She sighed and gave her head a light shake. ‘Yeah,’ she said. ‘Yeah, I’m fine.’ The scrunch persisted. Explanations that worked for a nine-year-old had no chance against a sixteen-year-old. Tessa gave an acknowledging smirk and waved him in. ‘Just family stuff. Would you pour me some mek?’ She paused. ‘You can have one, too, if you want.’
The boy raised his eyebrows. ‘My shift’s not over.’
Tessa gave him a wry smile. ‘You’ve got two days left with me, and we both know you’re not going to apprentice here.’
Kip smiled sheepishly as he poured two mugs of mek from the brewer in the corner. ‘Come on, M, I’m not that bad.’
‘You’re not,’ Tessa said. ‘You could be decent at managing inventory if you put in the practice. You’ve got the kind of logicky brain you need for sorting stuff. But we both know this isn’t for you.’ She accepted the mug with a nod, trying to brush away the lingering mental image of kicking Ashby in the shins. ‘But that’s the point of job trials, yeah? You’ve gotta find a good fit, and you won’t know what you like and what you don’t until you give everything a try. You worked hard for me, and you didn’t slack off.’ Much, she thought.
Kip sat down, a lanky assemblage of too-long limbs and patchy stubble. The kid would be handsome in a year or two, but puberty wasn’t going to let him get there without a fight. ‘What was your first trial?’ he asked.