Flight of the Outcast (4 page)

   So she was to be the only passenger. Only when the shuttle rattled, roared, tilted steeply, and surged into space did Asteria allow herself to relax. Her palms hurt from where her fingernails had clenched into them.

   "So we made it out okay," the captain's voice said. "We'll dock in about fifteen minutes. Remain in your seat until I give clearance. We're in free fall, so don't try to move around."

   She took a deep breath. She didn't know what would happen on the space station, the High Docks. She didn't know whether or not she could bluff her way to Corona. She'd have to work on that. Concentrate on being a boy. Being boyish, anyway. She didn't even know if she could.

   But she did know, with deep certainty, that she would rather die than marry a sour, obsessive member of the Bourse. Whatever else she was, an orphan and an outcast, Asteria was free.

T
he High Docks hung in a stable orbit over Theron, so far

     away from the planet that it could be seen whole through the viewports. The orbit was not quite synchronous—you could see the slow turning of Theron if you were patient. Asteria had never been so far offworld before.

   The station was a warren of tubes and gratings. The metal walls might once have been painted white, but now they were shades of dingy ranging from nearly black to a gruesome tan. Seen from outside, the Docks looked like an enormous wheel, rotating on its axis. From inside, it was grubby and claustrophobic. The shuttle captain had sent her to an arrival room, where a Cybot had scanned her in.

   Immediately, it told her to report to the transportation officer on Level Three, Radiant Two, Office Nine. She had no idea where that was. The Cybot placed a finger to her head and in a short pulse sent her the station map.

   So she knew to climb a ladder up three levels and go to a tubeway so narrow that it had recesses in the walls every ten steps—if you met someone heading your way, you could squeeze in and let the other person pass. This was one of the spokes of the wheel. It was under microgravity, so you did not walk but hauled yourself along by rungs set into the walls. It widened out again, and Asteria swung down into near-1.0 gravity, hanging by her hands for a second before dropping to the deck. Office Nine was just ahead.

   The transportation officer was a woman, gray-haired and sharp-featured. "I've seen your documentation," she said in an impatient tone. "A. F. Locke, bound for Corona. Why are you wasting time here?"

   "I want to wait for a ship," Asteria said.

   "It'll be a week before a ship bound that way docks here. You could have checked the schedule. Where do you propose to stay?"

   Asteria shrugged. "I thought I'd make do somehow. I can stay in the passenger boarding area if it comes to that."

   The woman snorted. "For a week? And how are you going to eat?"

   "You have rations, don't you?"

   The woman sat back in her chair and brushed a stray tendril of hair from her cheek. "Do you have money to pay for your keep?"

   "I have an account on the surface. In the town of Sanctal."

   "In care of the Bourse?"

   Asteria nodded.

   Making a wry face, the woman said, "I suppose you know how easy they'll make it to collect what's due. Girl, don't you know anything?"

   Asteria cringed at the word
girl.
So much for her brilliant plan.

   "You're a legacy appointment to the RMA, according to your documentation," the woman continued. "Didn't your father provide you with a travel allowance account?"

   "My father is dead." In a flat voice, Asteria told her of the raid, the wreck of the farm, and her decision to leave the planet as soon as she could—including her decision to disguise herself as a boy to escape the Bourse. She figured that it was best to tell the whole truth. They'd find out anyway.

   "We've had no report of Raiders," the woman said, scowling.

   "You wouldn't. The Bourse want to keep it quiet, and the Empyrion administrators don't seem to care—as long as they're not personally attacked."

   "Let me see what I can do." The woman rose from behind her desk, told Asteria to stay put, and left her alone. Asteria slumped in her chair, glumly realizing how difficult things were going to be. She had not really thought ahead, not beyond leaving the planet. Corona was seventy light-years and many weeks away. She had assumed that her appointment orders meant that any Empyrion ship that picked her up would provide for her food and accommodations. Travel allowance? She'd never even heard of such a thing. If they tried to send her back—

   She heard a sound and looked over her shoulder. The woman was back, accompanied by a muscular, middle-aged man. "A. F. Locke?"

   She stood. "Yes."

   "Come with me." She followed the man into the corridor. They were walking with their heads toward the center of the rotating station, the rotation itself providing the illusion of gravity. The man led her to a doorway, paused beside it, and looked at her with an uncomfortably hard stare. "Carlson Locke is dead?"

   She nodded, her throat tight. "Cybots brought in what was left of his body. Particle bomb."

   "One was stolen in a raid on the Fedder System a month ago," the man said. "Raiders."

   "They just seemed to want food. They stole our crops."

   "They may have been starving," the man said with no hint of sympathy. "Or they may want to sell it. Plenty of struggling colonies that would give top money. There seems to be a lot of this sort of theft going on lately. Earl Vodros and his allies have tightened restrictions—" He sighed and broke off, touching the wall. A door shimmered open. "I imagine you're too young to care about politics. Lucky you. You can have these quarters. I'm issuing you standard rations and giving you a limited clothing allowance. If I were you, I'd put together a basic wardrobe for your trip."

   "Why are you helping me?" she asked him, surprised.

   "Because I knew your father," the man said shortly, and he turned on his heel and walked away.

Life on the High Docks was dull but not difficult. There were pulsebooks to read, a gym for exercise, and people to talk to on the rare occasions when they were not working. There was even a commissary, a kind of small restaurant, where you could eat while watching the planet on the viewscreen, as if you were looking out a real window. Asteria practiced her boy act there.

   The woman who had first interviewed her was named Celicia, Asteria learned, and she was a career administrator for the High Docks. "I haven't gone far in life," she said with a rueful smile one day as she and Asteria sat at a commissary table drinking jalava juice. "I was born right there on the planet. You see that little cluster of lights on the equator, just inside the edge of the night?"

   The planet far below was half in light, half in dark, and just inside the dark edge, near the equator, pinpricks of light marked out a city. "Central," Asteria said. "We visited it once."

   "Big city," said Celicia mockingly. "Nearly a hundred thousand people."

   "Were you born there?"

   Celicia nodded. "My mother was an entertainment girl in the baron's court. I mean the old baron, not his son. Rumor had it that my father was one of his deputies. I never knew for sure. But I didn't want that kind of life, so I made sure to concentrate on studies that would lead me to a civil appointment. I didn't know it meant I'd wind up here." She looked musingly at Theron hanging in space.

   Asteria asked, "Do you go back often?"

   "Not since my mother died," Celicia replied. She thought for a minute. "I haven't left this station in six Standard years now. I don't intend to leave it. There's nothing for me down there."

   "Me either," Asteria said.

   "I'm off-duty now," Celicia said. "What are you doing?"

   "I should be shopping," Asteria said. "Only I don't know what a cadet needs."

   "They didn't send you a list?"

   Asteria shook her head.

   Celicia shrugged. "Well, the Academy will issue you a set of uniforms. You'll need clothes for travel and for downtime, though. I'd get three outfits if I were you. Tunics, pants, underwear, socks. You need space shoes, too, the soft-soled ones. You're wearing dirt boots. You need those only on the surface."

   Asteria thanked her and did her shopping later that day, buying the three outfits and a synthetic tote bag to carry them in. Some toiletries completed her preparation. But she felt as if she were moving in a fog; nothing seemed real. Would the Academy buy her boy act? Should she even try to keep it up?

The High Docks could be a busy place when ships paused. And one seemed to dock about three or four times every Standard day. For a couple of hours, the commissary bustled, communicators twittered, and men and women hurried along the corridors. Then all became quiet until the next ship arrived.

   Asteria made no attempt to speak to anyone, and she always remained in her tiny room—two and a half meters long, one and a half meters wide, with barely room for a bunk—when the daily shuttle from Sanctal arrived.

   But the Bourse never came looking for her. On the fifth day of her stay aboard the station, while she was waiting out the daily shuttle visit, someone pinged her door. She dissolved it and saw the officer who had first given her the room. "Yes?"

   He said gruffly, "Your ship for Corona's due tomorrow. The
Stinger,
an old-fashioned Defender-class destroyer. Don't expect much. Space Fleeters call her the
Stinker.
But she's heading for Corona, so I've booked you onto her."

   "Thanks," Asteria said.

   "Do you think you can get away with that disguise?" the man asked. "It's none of my business, but a candidate cadet shouldn't fool around like that."

   "What do you mean?" Asteria asked, apprehensively.

   "I mean I checked your orders," the officer said. "You're Andre F. Locke. Why are you pretending to be a girl?"

   For a moment Asteria didn't know what to say. "W-well—you see, my—uncle was Carlson Locke—"

   "I know who he was."

   "He had a daughter," she said. "I sort of took her place. Because she had an appointment to the Academy."

   "Really? Let me see your ID chip."

   She unstrapped the transceiver and handed it over. The officer scanned it. "It says you're a boy, all right," he muttered. "But you think the Academy appointment's for your dead cousin? Is that it?"

   Asteria nodded.

   The officer handed her the transceiver again. He was staring hard at her. "Or is it the other way around?" he asked softly. "Are you really a girl?"

   "My ID says—"

   "I know about Carlson Locke," the man said. "I don't want to hear anything about you or your situation. But if you want this transceiver to identify you as a girl, I can arrange that."

   "It's fine," she said.

   "It's a simple thing to do. I'd do it for a nephew of Carlson Locke—or for his daughter."

   Asteria's shoulders slumped. "Is it that obvious?"

   The officer smiled. "My name's Altmon. Kris Altmon. I was a major in the Space Fleet until I retired. I came up the hard way, from the underclasses. Like Carlson Locke. You'll learn that most of the cadets at the Academy are Aristos. They look down on people like us. So we Commoners—we help each other out when we can. You'll have to learn to find people you can trust."

   Asteria found herself heaving a sigh of relief. "Could you change the setting?"

   "Give me the transceiver again." Altmon beckoned her, and she followed him to a maintenance bay. Half a dozen Cybots rested against the wall there, dormant. He tapped one of them, and its eyes lit up. "Unit S-939," Altmon said, "This ID chip has a faulty bit of data on it. Change the designation of gender from M to F."

   "Yes, sir." The Cybot's delicate fingers dissected the transceiver, a hair-thin cable connected to the almost microscopic chip, and in a moment, everything had been reassembled. The Cybot returned the bracelet to Altmon, and he handed it over to Asteria.

   "Don't depend on this too much," he warned her. "As I'm sure you know, the Academy admits both males and females, so there's no problem there. And the student body is so large that you just might hide in the throng. But there are other records that could be checked. Don't put your head up above the crowd at the Academy—don't make them eager to check out your background. You might just get by with it."

   "Believe me, I'm not ungrateful or anything," Asteria said, strapping the wristlet back on. "But why are you helping me?"

   "I told you. Because your uncle—or your father—was Carlson Locke," Altmon said. "Will you trust me enough to tell me which he was?"

   "My father," she said. "I'm Asteria, his daughter."

   "I think you can pretend to be a girl better if you really are one," Altmon said. "All right, your father, then. He's told you about the
Adastra,
hasn't he?"

   "Just that he was on it."

   Altmon snorted. "On it. Yes, he would say that. Come on, let's have a cup of cava."

   They went to the commissary, where a few off-duty people sat at scattered tables. A couple of them rose hastily and left. "They're supposed to be on the job," Altmon said with a wink. "But High Docks isn't exactly a tight ship."

   He brought the hot cups of cava to the table, and they sat sipping them. Then he said, "The
Adastra dropped into normal space no
t expecting any trouble. There'd been no Tetra activity anywhere in the sector for nearly fifty years. It must have been a Tetra probe ship they encountered, though no one got a good look at it. The
Adastra's mission was to seed the second planet of the system wit
h basic plant forms—algae, seaweeds, some bioengineered ferns that could stand the atmosphere and begin producing oxygen. In six thousand years, the planet might be made tolerable for lower forms of animal life, if the seeding took."