Interlude (Part Two)
Leah meets the sole inhabitant of an asteroid
Above the planet Izra, between two stars that always seem to be setting, sits an old ship, a fresh start, and a new home.
Previously: Six months before Leah arrived on Aspiration, she bought a derelict ship from Sōzō corporation, getting to the station where she inspected the ship by catching a ride with a pilot for the corporation named Erin. But something went wrong on the shuttle and Erin needed to make an emergency landing on a nearby asteroid. Luckily, she said she knew the person who lived there…
“How’d you say you knew this guy?” Leah said, unbuckling herself.
“I didn’t,” came Erin’s muffled reply. As soon as they landed on the asteroid, she’d made a beeline for the toilet at the rear of the shuttle and from the noises that filtered through the cabin, Leah didn’t have to guess why. They were...disturbing to say the least. “And they’re not a guy. Wait for me before you head out there. They don’t like-”
“You said you were going to be a while,” Leah said, headed towards the airlock. Luckily, the gravity on the asteroid was below 1G so she didn’t have to use her chair. She did grab the pair of crutches she’d brought, though, just in case. “I’m not just going to sit around in my seat until you’re done throwing up.”
She didn’t mention that she also barely even wanted to look at the inside of this shuttle again, never mind hanging out for a couple of hours, waiting for Erin to be done.
“Leah,” the pilot said, but her voice was lost as she began to vomit once more.
Leah ignored the sound and shut herself into the airlock, slowly pulling herself into the suit that hung from the wall. She remembered how difficult that had been the handful of times she’d pulled herself into a suit while in 1G and was grateful that she was near zero now; it was much easier to move through the air when she didn’t have to fight the normal weight of her body.
She was unfamiliar with the mechanism of the airlock, but it only took her a couple careful minutes to figure out how to depressurize it safely. She made sure all the lights on the suit were green and she couldn’t hear any hissing before she opened the shuttle doors. She blinked rapidly at the starlight from the star that the asteroid (and everything in this system) orbited and raised the hand not holding her crutches to shield her eyes from the light. Fit her luck perfectly that she just happened to step out onto the asteroid when it was star-ward.
There was a thin crackle that came through the speakers in her helmet, from the transmitter that she didn’t even realize was on.
Then a voice, static-y, but certain: “Don’t move.”
Her eyes adjusted to the light. There was someone standing in front of her, holding a rifle in both hands, but there was something strange about one of them.
Wait. Not holding. Pointing.
Leah held up her hands, her heartbeat jumping up into her throat. Her crutches hung in the air for a moment after she’d let them go, before succumbing to the less than 1G and falling to the ground silently. “I-”
“This is Erin’s shuttle, but you ain’t Erin,” they said, still not lowering the gun. “Who are you?”
Leah blinked a couple of times and swallowed dryly as the gun, and its owner, began to waver into view. The rifle was covered in sheer plastic, about as thin as a condom, with a couple bright red patches of tape here or there along the barrel. She might have laughed at the idea of trying to fix a gun with duct tape, if it wasn’t being pointed at her and if her heart hadn’t begun to beat so loud that it pushed out all other thoughts. The person holding the gun was wearing a spacesuit, one of the homemade ones made out of recycled plastic, and she noted a similar type of tape as the one on the gun in a handful of places here and there along the arms and legs. She couldn’t tell much beyond that because of the star on the horizon behind them.
“Erin is inside,” Leah said, careful to speak the words as calmly and slowly as possible. Even though this situation was far more statistically likely to result in an injury than in a shuttle malfunction caused by Erin’s piloting, she still felt more comfortable here than there. Half of her wondered what that said about her. The other half thought it was completely reasonable. “My name is Leah. We landed because something went wrong with Erin’s shuttle, and she thought-”
“Again?” they said, and lowered the gun. In response, Leah began lowering her hands too. “And I’m guessing she swallowed her chew too? That’s why she’s still inside?”
Leah nodded.
“God damnit,” they said and swung the gun around easily in the low gravity, sliding it into a sling across their back. As they moved, the starlight shifted and Leah took the moment to get a real look at them. They were only a couple of inches taller than Leah and even though their hair had been shaved down to a peach fuzz, she could tell from the shadow of it that it was dark. They had a hoop on their nose, a stud in each ear, and two hoops jutting off the top of their right ear, along with some kind of tentacle tattoo stretching up onto the side of their neck from underneath the suit. They were Yamato, just like Ita-san but their eyes were also a startlingly bright blue, the blue of a cloudless, summer day.
Now that she could look directly at their arms, she could see what had struck her as strange: on their left arm, the suit ended just a bit past the elbow and the rest of their arm was taken up by a metal prosthetic. She’d seen the kind before, in doctor’s offices when she’d first woken up and been brought around to all of the different specialists to see if they could replace her legs. It was the type that could be easily interchanged with different attachments for cross-purposes. Right now, it was a skeletal impression of a hand, connecting to the metal in their arm, the suit ending just after metal hit skin.
The suit itself was a piece of art. She’d seen the tape on it before, but now that they’d moved, she could see it wasn’t just for little scratches and cracks here or there; no, it was structurally integral to the whole suit, holding the thing together. She could even see some cauterized rubber around the bionic arm, where it had needed to be burned back into submission after fraying. Every patch was expert, perfectly placed. Even the gun looked recycled, the trigger made of that shiny, other-worldly plastic that could be nothing else but 3D printed.
They went to rub their hand across their head with their gloved hand, but stopped as they hit the glass of their helmet. They smiled, showing a missing incisor.
“Well, you might as well come in,” they said, turning a little as if they were holding open a door and making a wide, welcome gesture behind them that seemed to encompass all of the asteroid. Leah glanced behind them and saw nothing but rock, pockmarked by its constant wandering: craters and scars against the turf.
“I-where?” Leah said.
“Oh, sorry.” They took a couple of steps forward and then pushed off the ground, a flying leap towards her.
She flinched back, away, worried they were going to run into her, unable to control their speed. But they had done this before, landing less than a meter from her, and extending their bionic hand out. “Name’s Echo.”
“Leah,” Leah said as she pressed her hand, encased in the thick padding of the suit, to their metal one. She vaguely remembered Erin calling on the transmitter down to the asteroid, while she’d been scrunching her eyes shut and trying to pretend like she was anywhere else. She’d assumed when she’d said Echo, she was referring to the phonetic alphabet, not a person’s name.
They made a funny face as Leah said her name and she realized that they were raising their eyebrow...except their face was completely shaven clean. They didn’t have any hair there to symbolize it, just a muscle moving.
“You already said that,” they said.
“Yeah, well,” Leah said, feeling her face flush a bit. She bent to grab her crutches, just for a thing to do. In the low gravity, and the adrenaline from the landing, she didn’t need them yet. “You introduced yourself. It seemed the thing to do.”
They snorted. “Sorry about the gun. Can’t be too careful, you know?”
“Oh, yeah, sure,” Leah said and Echo nodded approvingly before showing her their back. Leah shook her head in disbelief at the thought of pointing a gun at anyone, no matter how unsafe they appeared to be. But, then again, she didn’t live this close to Sōzō; who knew how different she’d feel if she did?
“They keep coming back, landing every couple months and knocking on my door. All monkey suits and politics,” they said, walking star-ward in that leaping sort of way that really only worked in low G.
“Who keeps coming?” Leah said, still standing where she’d been when she first opened the airlock, not sure if she should follow or go back inside. She wasn’t sure what the protocol was when someone pointed a gun at you and then seemed to be offering you shelter.
“Sōzō of course.”
“Oh,” Leah said. “Of course.”
She hadn’t realized it at first, but whenever you meet someone when you were in a suit, there were a couple of awkward minutes while you negotiate your transmitters, trying to make sure you can connect. But that hadn’t happened this time. She’d been able to connect with Echo first thing. Erin had been here before, though. Maybe her suit had already been set to Echo’s channel before she even stepped out of the shuttle. She shook her head. That had to be it. Nothing else made any sense.
“We’d tried to contact you as we were coming in,” Leah said, trying to make conversation as they made their leaping shuffle.
“Yeah?” they said, stopping about thirty meters away and dropping awkwardly to their knees on the asteroid’s dusty surface. “I think I was in the john. I didn’t hear anything about it until I got a notification someone touched down.”
Some noise from their movements came through the transmission bleed-over: a big exhale of breath, a scrape of metal against metal, followed by the whine of rusted hinges and a crash, their body leaning star-ward as they heaved something out of the ground and into the dirt on the far side from Leah.
From what Leah could see, it was hatch made out of recycled metal, reforged to form an air tight seal. She guessed that it led into a below ground habitat. She’d never been on an asteroid before, never mind an underground asteroid habitat. Based on the suit and the gun and everything else about Echo, she guessed they made it themselves.
Echo looked around at her. “You coming?”
There was only one correct answer to that question.
Credits:
ZK Hardy as principal writer, editor, and audio editor.
Emily Westland as editor and producer.
Jamie Philips as design consultant.
Original art provided by Sabina Lewis.
Original music for audio recording and podcast by Ryan A. Mahoney.