The Slums of the Solar System Books 1-3

Chapter 1-1

Chapter One

Omesh

He was a hundred thousand kilometers from home when he decided what his name would be. He had managed to put off thinking about it in the last few weeks, but now that all the bureaucracy was done and he had left Earth, never to see home again, there didn’t seem to be anything else to occupy his mind. Omesh had always been the special name only his mother and her family used; the rest of the world called him Rashid. But now he would be living with his uncle and aunt, two of the few who had always called him Omesh. They would call him Rashid if he asked, but he suddenly wanted the change.

His old life was dead and gone; perhaps a new life needed a new name.

The loud boom that echoed through the shuttle felt like it was punctuating his decision, and Omesh almost smiled at the coincidence. But then he noticed that unlike all of the other loud bangs and roars that had occurred randomly but continuously throughout the trip, this one seemed to agitate the other passengers.

“Is that not normal?” he asked the woman sitting next to him. She had pulled a small computer tablet out of her pocket and her thumbs were flying over the keys.

“Normal? Definitely not. Sounds like something blew.”

“Blew?” Omesh repeated.

“First time in space?” she asked, her fingers never slowing as she threw a curious glance his way.

“Yes. Does this happen a lot?”

“Too much lately. But no one is going to retire these shuttles until one catastrophically fails, all hands lost. Probably not even then, unless someone really important is on board.”

“So what’s happening to us?”

“They’ll limp to the nearest station if possible. Call for a pickup if not.”

“But how can they? The fuel and life support were calculated for this specific trip, weren’t they?”

“Well, kid, we either use less or we die.”

Omesh sensed that he was gaping at her and deliberately closed his mouth. She didn’t sound panicked in the least, as if this sort of thing were a nuisance and nothing more. Strangely, that attitude gave him hope.

The woman glared at her pocket computer, shook it forcefully, then put it away with a sigh of disgust. “Too far from the comm satellites, dammit. I don’t know what this pilot is up to, but we’re way off course.”

“My uncle is waiting for me on the Dauntless,” Omesh said.

“They’ll make an announcement there, I’m sure,” she said. She looked him over very carefully, taking in his old but sturdy shoes, stiffly new jeans, and the brightly colored kurta his mother had made for him especially for this trip. He doubted he looked his best. It had been baking hot inside when he’d boarded the Avatar RLV at the Mumbai spaceport and he had sweated profusely waiting for takeoff. When they’d reached orbit the sticky heat had become a moist cold, and he could feel the itchy fabric sticking to him, curls of his hair plastered to his forehead. But her eyes gave all of that a cursory once-over before settling on his hands, of all things. She grabbed one, turned it over, and began to examine it closely. “Farmer?” she guessed.

“Student,” Omesh answered, but he knew that was a shade dishonest, so he added, “but my father is a farmer.”

“You’re too young to be heading out because of lack of marital prospects,” she said, releasing his hand.

“I’m seventeen,” Omesh said.

“Just bailing on the Collective, then? I can’t find fault with that impulse.”

Omesh caught the tip of his tongue between his teeth. That wasn’t why he was leaving, but he was scarcely going to discuss the real reason with a total stranger.

“It’s a shame this is your first introduction to humanity in space. Most of the time it’s not this bad.”

If that had sounded ominous, the “good luck” she gave him after they’d docked was even more unsettling. He had never been on a train when it broke down, but everyone knew that if it happened, you just waited until the next train came down the tracks. How could this be any different?

All of the other passengers were gathering their belongings and floating out of the compartment. Omesh waited for them all to leave before unbuckling his own restraints. He had never been in free fall before, not even in simulation, since this trip into space had been sprung on him so quickly. It seemed easy enough at first, like swimming in a pool: you could push off a wall and just let momentum take you.

He caught the handle of his trunk easily enough and quickly found how different from swimming free fall could be. He had watched all the others pull their briefcases and backpacks out of the bins with ridiculous ease, but when he tugged on his own handle, rather than pulling the trunk out of the bin, he nearly pulled himself into it. Once he got his motion under control he braced himself to pull again, but still the trunk wouldn’t budge. It should be weightless, the same as he was. So why did it feel like he was trying to pull a ten-ton weight?

“It’s caught.”

Omesh stopped what he belatedly realized was some pretty spastic wrestling with his luggage and looked around for the source of that sleepy voice. He had thought he was alone in the compartment, but now he saw a glint of silver. Not real silver, just a very whitish-blond fan of hair that was spreading itself out like a peacock’s tail but quickly pulled back into one long stream as the boy to whom it was attached pushed himself out of his seat to reach the back of Omesh’s trunk.

“You’ve got a loose corner plate,” he said, fingers moving around the wire mesh to snap something back in place. “Pull it now.”

Omesh tugged—too hard, he realized as the trunk met his face with a dull smack. He rubbed at his forehead, blinking hard.

“At least you missed your nose,” the boy said, sounding half asleep.

“Thanks,” Omesh said. “For the help.”

The boy was nodding when something seemed to distract him. He looked at it again more intently, and Omesh turned but couldn’t figure out what he was staring at. “It’s not nearly time for us to be at the Dauntless.”

“No, apparently there was some trouble. I don’t know where we are.”

“That’s unacceptable.”

For a moment Omesh thought the boy was annoyed with him and his lack of knowledge, but then the boy propelled himself out of the container and down the aisle and Omesh, still struggling with the awkward mass of his trunk, followed.

The turn at the end of the last pair of shipping containers was tricky, the narrower opening of the airlock even more so. Omesh had been imaging some sort of hangar beyond, a large open space filled with ships and cargo, but he was startled to find himself in a very ordinary hallway. A few cargo nets full of boxes and sacks floated on short tethers near the airlock doorway, bottlenecking the traffic. Omesh clung to them gratefully, pulling himself and his trunk along at a crawl, trying to stay out of the way of the people zooming past, all completely at ease being weightless. By the time Omesh caught up with the silver-haired boy, he was frowning as a man in a pilot’s uniform floated away from him.

“What’s going on?” Omesh asked.

“We’re in Haven, of all places.”

“What’s Haven?” Omesh asked.

The boy shot him a surprised look. Then his eyes swept over Omesh in an appraisal much like the woman had previously given him, minus the hand grab. “Where were you heading?” he asked at last. Somehow, Omesh could just tell that the boy considered “First time in space?” a question with too obvious an answer to even ask.

“Chandi V. My uncle works there.”

“Really.”

“Yes. Do you know it?”

“I’ve never been, but as your luck would have it, that was my destination as well.”

“That is lucky,” Omesh said. “My name’s Omesh.”

“Hjalmar. And to answer your original query, Haven is a squatter community. No, perhaps community is too small a word. Haven is a corporate city in space that’s been entirely taken over by riffraff. Although riffraff might be too small a word.”

“You’ve been here before?”

“Hell no. No one in their right mind goes to Haven. The good news is my grandfather has a contact here who owes him a very hefty favor. The bad news is he’s on the other side of the station. So you and I are going to have to slum it for a while, so to speak. But at least you’re dressed for it.”

Omesh’s mind was reeling. There was a lot of information packed into those few short sentences, and he was pretty sure an insult as well.

“How do you know that? Two minutes ago you didn’t even know where we were.”

“Trust me.”

Then Omesh remembered the way Hjalmar’s eyes had rolled up and to the left, just at the moment he realized what time it was. He looked over the boy before him, doing an appraisal of his own. Hjalmar’s clothing had seemed nondescript at first glance, but on more careful examination Omesh could see that the shoes were real leather, the jeans new but supple—not stiff like Omesh’s A&MC ration jeans—and the shirt that had appeared solid black was covered with a fine embroidered tracery: black on black, but he could discern the outlines of dragons and Chinese characters.

A rich boy. Probably a corporate prince, although he wasn’t one Omesh recognized. And with that silver-blond tail that would hang past his waist if it wasn’t floating free in a swirl around his head, he would be hard to forget.

So Hjalmar had a chip in his head. Every second he was sending and receiving information. By now his grandfather’s contact probably already knew they were on their way.

“Lead on,” Omesh said, pulling his trunk into his arms.

“Allow me.” Hjalmar caught one of the straps and pushed off from one of the larger boxes caught up in the cargo net Omesh had been clinging to.

As they moved down the hall, Omesh realized it was shaped like a corkscrew, always turning. There was no up or down, no floor or ceiling. Smudges from countless hands covered every surface; whatever color the paint had originally been was anybody’s guess. Omesh clung to his trunk, reluctant to touch anything. Hjalmar propelled them forward in long bounds that became shorter as the pull of the station’s centripetal force increased.

Omesh hopped off the trunk, but moving was nowhere near as easy as Hjalmar made it look. He was constantly bumping into the curving walls, putting out a hand to avoid ramming his head on the ceiling, stumbling rather than bounding off the floor.

“You’ll get used to it,” Hjalmar said. “Quicker than you think.”

“Chandi V has spin, though, right?”

“Sure, but free fall is fun.”

Omesh couldn’t see beyond the next curving turn of the hallway, but he heard a low roar of sound that was growing steadily louder.

“How big is this place?” he asked Hjalmar.

“Compared to what?” Hjalmar asked. “For a corporate city satellite, it’s smallish. There’s no simulated weather here; you’ll feel indoors everywhere.”

That wasn’t the most reassuring of answers. Anxiety weighed heavily in Omesh’s stomach as the hallway came to an end, turning out into the station proper. The noise had been a warning, but it hadn’t prepared him for the sight of it all. The hallway ended at a balcony, wide staircases to either side leading down, to where he could not see. Omesh stepped up to the railing. The space station was a wheel type. He had just traveled down one of the spokes and now looked down into the wheel itself: one long open space, filled with people. Millions of people all talking at once, to companions near at hand or more loudly to those getting swept away by the crowd. Little booths were set up everywhere, some sensibly against the walls but others right in the middle of traffic, and vendors were crying their wares to every passerby.

And the smell. Greasy food and overripe garbage receptacles were bad enough, but over that was the smell of millions of people, anxious people, people in a hurry.