Nebula Awards Showcase 2013 (34 page)

Predictably, the Gineer started shouting when Momma said she could only spare enough fissionable material to get them to Swayback Station, a mere five systems over. And when they stopped shouting they started begging, thrusting handfuls of cash at Momma, certain that everything was for sale. But Momma couldn't afford to stock up too heavily on any one currency.

The Web folks were disappointed, but took the news with a grim resignation. They were used to shortages.

Web or Gineer, though, every guest was desperate for food—especially when Lizzie explained that sauerkraut didn't go bad. They bought huge jars, so Lizzie had to stay up late at night chopping more cabbage.

But the Web folks seemed disheartened at having to spend money for food; they'd sigh, their pockmarked faces faded to a pale, overmilked coffee color thanks to weeks locked inside darkened ships.

“The Intraconnected used to provide for its citizens,” they said, gesturing to their families huddled miserably behind them. “I'm a stamp-press mechanic, not a soldier! They tried to make me switch tasks. They said my children would be provided for in the unlikely event of my sacrifice—but I couldn't. I couldn't risk it . . .”

They were so polite, so peaceful, so like Themba, that Lizzie gave them extra dollops of sauerkraut.

The Gineer were pushier. Their smooth faces were plastered with makeup, men and women alike, pancaking their cheeks to hide the blemishes that had cropped up once they couldn't get their weekly gene-treatments. Lizzie didn't see anything wrong with a pimple, but tell that to the Gineer. They held up suitcases packed with useless stuff—gameboxes and electric hair-curlers—and lamented that
this
was all they could carry.

Yet in their suitcases they carried photos of their families. They were eager to tell Lizzie stories about the beautiful house they'd saved for, the beloved husband they'd negotiated so cleverly for to get their marriage authorization. They stroked the pictures with their fingers when they talked about the past, as if they were rubbing a genie's lamp for a wish—and then told Lizzie how the house had been bombed to splinters, the husband crunched under rubble.

Lizzie tried to tell herself that the Gineer had it coming. But then she imagined losing
her
home, seeing
her
Momma dead, and her anger dissolved into pity.

“You can't listen to their stories, Lizzie,” said Momma. “It takes too much time. We need to get them out of the station as soon as possible.”

Then there were the soldiers. Whether they were Web or Gineer, they were all lean-limbed, clean-cut, eager; they each told Lizzie how the other side had started it, and they pumped their fists at the idea of dispensing proper justice.

Lizzie bit her lip when the Gineer soldiers trash-talked the Web. Smart-mouthing was bad for business.

After a few months, a sour-looking Gineer with a bushy white mustache limped out of the airlock. His patched white suit hung in unflattering rags off his stick-thin frame. He chomped at a ganja cigar with malice, his wrinkled cheeks pulling in and out like a pump.

He sniffed the air and scowled.

“Smells like ass in here,” he said.

“I've lived here all my life,” Lizzie shot back, forgetting to be polite. “And if there was a smell, I would have noticed.”

The man chuckled, bemused; it set Lizzie's hackles on edge. “You vacuum rats are so superbly
cute
,” he said, ruffling her hair. “I'm Doc Ventrager. You must be my apprentice, Elizabeth. Inform your Momma of my presence, and update her that I shan't physic anyone in this sauerkraut fart of a place until I get a fresh deodorizer in my quarters.”

Momma was slumped over her comm unit, half asleep. “That's right,” she said, gulping a cup of tea. “I forgot he was arriving. It's time you learned medicine, Lizzie; in these times, it's good to have a sawbones handy. From now on, your spare time will be spent with Doc Ventrager.”

Lizzie nearly suffocated from the unfairness of it all. “But I was supposed to learn how to
fly
!”

“Circumstances have changed, and so must you, Elizabeth. Instead of paying us rent, the doc is earning his keep teaching you to set bones—and you'll both do good business here, sadly enough. Now show him to the medbay.”

Though Lizzie had dutifully run their syscheck routines once a month, she had no idea what all of the headsets and plastic wands in the medbay actually did—but judging from the harrumphing noises Doc Ventrager made as he picked them up and slapped them back down, he wasn't impressed. Momma stood behind him anxiously, chewing her lip. The Doc had Lizzie unlock the doors to the medicine cabinet, then peered in at the neat rows of antibiotics, opiates, and sutures.

“Well, at least
that's
well-stocked,” he said.

“My great-grandma installed all this herself, after the pirates came,” Lizzie protested. “It all works.”

He flicked ash on the floor. “Thank the stars that despite their predilection for genegineering, the Gineer haven't altered the core organs of the human body in the past century.” He turned to Momma. “Install that deodorizer and give me a free hand over pricing, and I'll educate your offspring with these antiques.”

“Sold,” said Momma. Lizzie said nothing. She wasn't sure she wanted to be under Doc Ventrager's tutelage.

As it turned out, Doc Ventrager had brought his own equipment, and he expected Lizzie to carry it all for him. He pointed out where the leather satchels and tanks should go as Lizzie struggled under their weight. As she ferried them out from the ship, Doc Ventrager seemed to sum up everything that was wrong about Gineer folks—even if Ventrager's pockmarked face meant he wasn't exactly a normal Gineer.

The next morning, she checked the hydroponics and then went to the medlab. “Right,” the Doc said. He pointed to a tank, where child-sized things with gray, wrinkled flesh floated in a stinking green fluid. “Let's see what you're made of. Fish one out, deposit it 'pon the table.”

They were so small that at first Lizzie thought they
were
children—and then she realized their ears and noses were funny. Lizzie ran her palm across the stiffened flesh, feeling its hard, horned hands, its antenna-like ears, the little snippet of flesh on its butt that looked like a leftover from a bad vacuu-forming job.

“What are these?” she asked.

“Pigs,” said the Doc. “A lot cheaper than anatomy clones, that's for damn sure.”

She frowned. “I thought you were supposed to teach me about humans.”

“Pig bones and organs are close enough to hum-spec for the rudiments of injury repair,” the Doc said, absent-mindedly cleaning a sharp knife on his gown. “You know how to stitch a wound? To set a bone?”

“No.”

He handed her the knife. “Time you learned. Now cut.”

 

* * *

 

Doc Ventrager was a hard but efficient taskmaster; Lizzie learned that he'd spent years training girls and boys at stations all around the 'verse.

“You're damn lucky,” he said, after a long day treating simulated decompression injuries. “Most kids have to learn this all in theory. They can't call me when someone's EVA suit rips; it'd take three weeks to get there. So their first major field operation is on their dying Momma—holding her down while she's thrashing, shrieking, soaked crimson in blood . . .”

Lizzie sensed the test buried in the Doc's words; he was trying to frighten her with thoughts of her Momma. She said nothing.

The Doc nodded and took a long drag off of his reefer cigarette, blowing the sweet smoke into the room to overwhelm the “gangrenous reek” he smelled.

“But you, missy,” he said, tipping his cigar at her, “Will acquire a chance to watch the
real
show. By the time this conflict's ebbed its course, you shall be qualified to teach.”

She found out what he meant when the first Gineer warship arrived, one engine nearly shot to splinters.

Gemma immediately started working up an repair estimate, but the sergeant was more interested in cornering Doc. “We received some specially withering fire in a rear-guard action,” he explained. “We had to escape before resupplying, and so several soldiers have severe infections. What's the charge to cleanse gangrene?”

“Allow me a gander,” the Doc said, looking satisfied for the first time since Lizzie had known him. Doc walked, preening, into the ship, but Lizzie almost threw up from the smell.

Twenty soldiers rested on pallets against the wall, most with broken limbs that had healed in horrid ways. They bit down on pieces of plastic, trying not to shriek; the last of the painkillers had been used up weeks ago.

“Oh, that's a
fine
mess,” the Doc said, rubbing his hands together. “The quote is one-ninety per head.”

“
One-ninety
?” the sergeant said. “That's three times normal rate.”

“You possess superior alternatives?” the Doc said. “No. You do not. You can sew 'em up now and have 'em heal en route to the next battle . . . or you can keep your funds walleted and remove them from your roster. Either way's acceptable to me.”

“One-ninety's blackmail.”

“Excuse me,” Lizzie said politely, ostensibly to Doc Ventrager but speaking loud enough that the sergeant could overhear her, “Don't forget that Momma said the Gineer get eight percent off at Sauerkraut Station.”

“I never heard of that. Even if I had, it wouldn't apply to me.”

“You're on the station, aren't you?”

“Goddammit,” he said. “I will speak with your Momma.” But didn't; instead, he went down to one-seventy. Lizzie felt a malicious price at seeing the Doc's greed quashed.

And she felt pride when she cleaned her first batch of wounds. Though she'd drained pus on the dead pigs, Lizzie hadn't been sure how she'd take to it once she was working on live men. Judging from the sergeant's pleased reactions, she did a fine job.

The Doc grumbled at having to work for such low rates, snarling at everyone like their injuries were their own damn fault. “You went to war,” he snapped. Lizzie, on the other hand, tried to be nicer, even if they were stupid, Themba-hating soldiers.

More ships came in, Web and Gineer alike, each carrying loads of injured people, so fast that Lizzie almost forgot to tend to the hydroponics. She diagnosed complications arising from welding burns, set broken legs from failed rig-drops, irrigated chemical lung-burns, treated vacuum explosions. When she rinsed off the cabbages, flecks of blood washed off her hands.

She wanted to take pleasure in the Gineer soldiers' agony, telling herself that it was just punishment for picking on the Web. But all soldiers screamed when they were hurt, and when they were dying they all wanted to talk to their Momma or their brother or their husband. They all wanted to see their families one last time.

Lizzie cried so much, she felt like her whole body was drying up. But never in front of the soldiers.

Momma combed her hair, told Lizzie how proud she was. “But you have to get the Doc to work faster, Lizzie,” she said. “They have to be out the next day.”

Lizzie hated letting down Momma, but if she rushed Doc Ventrager then people died. When she was alone, she squeezed her fists tightly enough to leave half-moon cuts in the palms of her hands.

After a few months of surgical assistance, the Doc handed off the minor operations to Lizzie. The Doc made it clear that even though she was doing doctor duties now, any profits from her surgeries went to him. That was better; surgery was like any other repair work. You took care, and measured twice before cutting once. The fact that she'd spent four hours a day in surgery for the past five months helped—and now she could go at her own speed.

Still, the soldiers always panicked when the twelve-year-old girl hooked them up to the anesthetizer. She reassured them that this was nothing, just removing a slug buried next to a lung, she'd done it twenty times before. And if they struggled against the straps, their fellow soldiers laughed and said,
hey, man, haven't you heard about the Angel of Sauerkraut Station? Settle down, man, she makes miracles
.

But no matter how busy things got, every night Momma brushed Lizzie's hair.

“Those ships are deathtraps, Momma,” she complained, anguished. “There's no supplies; they get cooped up in there, stew in their own disease. Why don't they just build one big ship with a medlab?”

“One atomic bomb would take it out,” she said. “Or heck, one kamikaze run. Spaceships are fragile, interconnected—like bodies, really. The more chambers you add, the more possibility that one hit ripples across all of them.”

“But . . .”

Momma pursed her lips in disapproval. “Little ships are easy to churn out, Lizzie. They let you land soldiers across a wider area. They're built cheap and disposable, to carry cheap and disposable cargo.”

A thought occurred to Lizzie. “We've had ships full of Web soldiers,” she said. “And ships full of Gineer.”

Momma smiled in approval. “You noticed.”

“But never at the same time.”

“Interstellar ships are very slow,” she said. “The chances of two enemy fleets showing up on the same day are slim.”

“But if they did?”

Momma kissed Lizzie on the head. “Why do you think I've been riding you so hard to get everyone out of the station?”

That thought kept Lizzie up at nights. But not for too long, because between the surgeries and the sauerkraut and the hydroponics, Lizzie was working eighteen-hour days. She slept deep.

She couldn't sleep long, though; the station was so packed with folks that their groans kept her awake. They slept fitfully in the hallways, with their heads on their backpacks, and when they woke it was always with a scream. And when she woke, startled, Lizzie smelt the fresh stench of infected wounds, body odor, and—yes, there it was—sauerkraut wafting through the vents. Its briny scent was stark against all the other recycled smells.