Rebel (Rebel Stars Book 0) (15 page)

She kept her eyes and ears open. She neither saw nor heard any hints of the alien ship. While she moved rocky rubble away from the site, others raised new buildings, clean plastic edifices that were quickly stained by the yellow dust.

Every morning at breakfast and night before sleep, the PA blasted the IRP's national anthem, a bombastic fusillade of horns and strings. Other than their uniformed superiors, that was the only overt sign of IRP authority. The employees were expected to work, not to worship.

Each day, Rada rose with the alarms, dressed, went for a breakfast of soy, prot, and a white mulch that could have been potatoes or rice or neither. She suited up and drove the cart until lunch, ate a meal identical to breakfast, and returned to the fields until dinner. After, they had a free hour in the bunk. Some passed the time watching videos on their cut-off devices, but many chewed the fat, telling stories, asking each other about their previous gigs. They were all lifers, born to do the dirty and dangerous work that was necessary to expand the fringes of the system. Nothing more and nothing less.

Sollivan checked in with her every day or two. She smiled politely, asking him the occasional question about what they were up to with the site, but he towed the company line, answering with vague nothings.

Five days in, with nothing to show for herself but sore muscles and a rash around her neck from spending so much time suited up, she began to despair. The plan now struck her as insane. Even if she had seen anything, she had no way to communicate that to the Hive. She had no way off Io. She was stuck until the job was over—months, as much as a year.

Most meals, she did her best to mingle with the others to absorb any gossip. This flew fast and furious, but none of it seemed relevant: guesses that the IRP was looking to plant a new colony, or that they had discovered a new isotope and were racing to monopolize it and begin to repay their debts. Rada soon tired of these hopeless guesses, taking whatever seat was available. More and more frequently, she ate alone at the edges of the mess.

One breakfast, a dark-haired woman plunked down beside her, tray slapping the table. The woman forked up a mouthful of pan-fried prot.

"Ready for another day?" she said, muffled by her unswallowed food.

Rada set her spoon into her white mush. "At least we're well fed."

"Don't lose hope." She stuck her finger in her mouth and sucked away the gravy. "And don't worry, we can talk freely."

"I never feared the IRP would restrict our natural-born rights."

The woman smirked. "You're cautious. I like that. Sorry it took me so long to get here. Was a real bitch finagling a second hire."

Rada forced herself not to look over. "You're with..?"

"A loyal drone of the king bee. Here's the score. I can jam their transmitters. As long as we're close, all they'll hear is us jabbering about nothing. Our relationship is simple. You see something, you bring it to me, I send it home."

"I haven't seen a damn thing. Are we sure we're in the right place?"

"If we were sure, we wouldn't be here." The woman shoveled another forkload of prot strips into her mouth. "My name's Ferri."

"Holly," Rada said.

"Well, don't get too chummy. Nothing to draw the eye. Meanwhile, keep yours open, yeah?"

Ferri stood, ate a final giant bite, and wandered off with her tray. Rada stayed to finish her meal. Relief washed through her veins. She had a way to reach the Hive after all. Now all she needed was anything to tell them.

The first week drew to a close. She drove the cart back to the garage, swabbed off the dust and grit from its tires and undercarriage, and passed through the airlock into the habitation. Her device pinged. It was from Sollivan. He wanted to see her at once.

She froze, rereading the message. Had Ferri been wrong about the jamming? Had IRP heard their conversation? For that matter, did Ferri truly work for the Hive, or was she an IRP agent looking to ferret Rada out? Rada tried to remember the exact details of their conversation, but couldn't conjure up the woman's words.

She trudged down the hallway. The floor was a dull gray streaked with vivid yellow dust. Sollivan rated highly enough to warrant his own quarters: office in front, living area behind it. She knocked on the door. From the other side, he said something she assumed was permission to come in.

She stepped into a tight foyer. The door to his office was open. He sat behind his workstation, a tidy desk with two devices, a nameplate, and an analog notepad.

"You wanted to see me?" Rada said.

Sollivan rose from his seat and smiled. "Good to see you, Holly. How's the job treating you? Everything smooth?"

"Buttery." She glanced at a chair but didn't sit. "No complaints."

"Where did you work prior to this, Holly?"

"A mining rig. Independent operation. Bounced around a lot. Why?"

He grinned. "Because they're fools for letting you go. You're doing a hell of a job out there."

The corners of her mouth twitched up. "It's just driving a cart around. Making sure it doesn't get into any trouble."

"They often do, though. And your metrics are off the charts. If everyone we had was as efficient as you, we'd be done in half the time."

"Thank you, sir."

"Call me Sollivan."

Four more days endured with no visits from Ferri or revelations in the field. Rada hauled out debris, cleaned the carts, gossiped. But even the wildest speculations didn't suggest they were prepping the basin to house an alien spaceship. Whenever Sollivan saw her at mess, he waved. She smiled and waved back.

Another morning came. She drove the cart to one of the excavations and got out to help oversee the workers load it with brown rock and yellow dirt. The drive to the dump was uneventful, but when she got back to the site, a man with red stripes on his suit was striding out from the airlock waving his hands at the dig.

"What are you
doing
?" His voice crackled over their comms. "Stop everything. You're going too deep!"

One of the workers climbed a few steps up the rampart toward the officer. She said, "That's not what it says on the schema. Does it?"

"Have you even
looked
at it?" He stalked up in front of her, displaying orders on his device. "You see? You're already past specifications."

"Okay, so we'll fill it back in. Tamp it down real tight."

"If it were that simple, do you think I'd be screaming at you? Look around, numbnuts. See those volcanos? Io is one big hotspot. So long as you stick to the specs, we're fine. But we can't give the magma the slightest temptation to bubble up." He turned in a circle, gazing across the masked faces of the workers. "You hear me? Before you dig, check the schema, check it again, then check it
again
. One more screwup like this, and the responsible parties will be fired."

He stared across the crowd, turned, and headed back to the airlock.

"You heard him," the woman muttered. "Let's get this back up to specs."

With no more debris to be hauled for the next few hours, Rada was allowed inside. She changed out of her suit and headed to the cafeteria. Between shifts, it was all but dead. She sipped artificial coffee that didn't even pretend to be the real thing and wondered if she should put in for a transfer. Try to grab a promotion. Driving carts wasn't showing her anything. It made no sense to stick with it.

Shoes whispered up behind her. She turned, smiled up at Sollivan.

"Are you guys trying to get us burned alive?" he said.

Rada laughed. "You heard that?"

"Loria came in here so hot I thought he
had
stepped in a flow." Sollivan sat at the end of the bench, straddling it. "Glad to see you made it out alive."

"Plausible deniability. I was out running carts."

"Do you enjoy that? Driving rubble?"

"Pays the bills. Something wrong with it?"

He pushed up his lower lip, shaking his head. "Not at all. Seems like you could handle more, though. If you want, once the job wraps up, you come see me."

"Hell," Rada said. "Why not now?"

"Let's not rock the boat. Okay? Build your track record and we'll go from there."

He got up. Rada sipped her "coffee." Frustrating to have an opportunity to shake things up get waved under her nose and then snatched away an instant later. Yet a part of her was flattered to hear he thought she should be doing more.

She got back to work. That evening, Rada returned to the mess for dinner. She'd barely dug in when Ferri sat down beside her.

"How's it going?" Ferri said. "Fruitless, I trust?"

"If I had anything, you'd have it, too."

"No need to snap at me. I'm just doing my job." She reached over Rada's tray and speared a strip of spicy prot. "Why don't you get with him?"

"Who?"

"The bossman. Sollivan. He's like a little dog around you."

Rada frowned at her tray. "Are you ordering me to sleep with him?"

"I'm not
ordering
you to do anything," Ferri said. "I'm asking you to decide how much you're willing to do to get justice for your friends."

~

Rada spent hours that night thinking up ways to ask Sollivan out. In the end, all her plotting was for nothing: he asked her the next day at lunch.

Their first "date" consisted of him coming with her for a ride-along to get a better idea of conditions in the field. The gravity on Io was low and whenever the cart bounced free of the ground he grabbed tight to the straps. After each landing, he chuckled and shook out his gloved hands.

"That was more…exciting than I envisioned," he said as she brought the cart home for the day. "Want to come by my office for dinner? Talk shop? I'd like to pick your brain about a few things."

In the garage, she hurriedly washed up and joined him in his office. While they talked about the pros and cons of human involvement in tasks that could be handled by automated systems, they were served dinner. After the server left, Sollivan got a bottle from the drawer in his desk and raised his eyebrows. Rada smiled sadly and shook her head.

"Really?" he said. "I thought all miners drank like fish. Which makes sense, because if there's one thing that would stress out a fish, it's hanging out on rocks all day." He poured himself a glass. "Anyway, they thought about going full automation here. There was a lot of debate."

"Why didn't they?"

"They were in a hurry. This project, it all came together very fast. It was quicker to hire people than to customize and order the necessary machinery."

She gave him a sly look. "Why the rush? Did they find something here?"

Sollivan chuckled. "I'm not that easy, Holly."

"Then we're a match. Because neither am I."

Not wanting to spook him, she danced back from the subject. An hour later, the PA chimed to indicate it was a half hour until lights out. Rada smiled and said goodnight.

He invited her back for dinner two nights later. Again, they chatted; as coworkers, talk often turned to work. Rada did her best to pry out more info about the project, but fettered by the facts that a) she didn't want to look
too
interested and b) Sollivan got cagey whenever they neared specifics, she garnered little.

Outside in the works, they finished one dig, then a second. Another team came to pour foundations of plascrete. The day after, they put up the walls; the day after that, the roofs. The buildings were on the small side. Sealable, but lacking proper airlocks. Sheds, probably. Either that or single housing. Rada considered that unlikely, though.

Unless they were planning to ship in scientists too prestigious to be crammed into the group housing so common to new colonies.

"I think they're going to dome the place over," she told Ferri at breakfast.

Ferri slurped her coffee. "You say that like it's a tragedy."

"You don't build domes to hold ships. There's no way to get a vehicle that big inside without building an airlock a quarter of a mile long."

The woman grew suddenly pensive. "Well, you don't spend tens of millions of dollars just to rush a colony, either. Maybe they're building the settlement and will add the landing pad later. You snuck any peeks at Sollivan's device? Bet that would clear up the mystery."

Ferri set her palm on the table and withdrew it. A small white button rested on the surface.

"If you get some time alone with it, stick this to the device. Make sure you've got at least an hour. No interruptions."

Rada moved her hand over the button. "That's kind of slow, isn't it?"

"Getting in without being noticed takes time. Choose your spot and choose it well—if we screw up, we won't get a second chance."

That night, after dinner, Sollivan had his customary drink. During a pause, he smiled and excused himself to the bathroom. Rada waited for the click of the door and moved around his desk for a look at his device. It was unlocked. The screen showed the day's pictures from the dig. She flicked around its files. The interface was the same as the IRP-provided device she'd been given. The bathroom whooshed. She returned the device to the pictures and sat down.

Sollivan came back to the office, smoothing his shirt. "Hey, who's your friend?"

"My friend?"

"Black hair, about yay long." He held his hand flat against the side of his chin. "Always looks like she's just thrown her quitting papers in the boss' face."

"Ferri," Rada laughed. "She came up to me at breakfast one day, asked me what I thought of the food. Total stranger. She's like that. Enjoys complaining, acting like she knows how to run the entire moon."

"What
is
her job?"

"Know what? I don't even know." She changed the subject.

As she left, he kissed her goodbye. It wasn't the first time. But this time he moved into it with the determination of a boxer. For a moment, Rada let herself get lost in it, arms wrapped around him.

She withdrew and touched her lip. "Night, Sollivan."

As she left, he watched her go, a smile painted on his mouth. His eyes were hungry. Rada was tempted—it would make it that much easier to get him to talk, to learn what she wanted. Maybe to find a chance to drop the button on his device. It wouldn't be flat-out exploiting herself—she knew she would enjoy it, too. She liked him.