Rich Man's Sky Read online

  “It’s a lot of responsibility,” he said.

  “Yeah, I get it.”

  “You know, this is the first deep-space vessel built entirely in outer space, from something like ninety percent lunar- and asteroid-mined materials. Most efficient human transport ever built, with a way better mass fraction than a chemical rocket. I named it myself.”

  “That’s nice.”

  “You know when you blow on a dandelion, and scatter the seeds all to hell, contaminating an entire neighborhood? That’s us. Colonizing space.”

  “Charming.”

  He frowned, then let it go. “You’re a sweet one, aren’t you? All right, then, I’ll stop trying to converse with you. Let’s do this high-bo thing.” High-bo was apparently slang for hibernation. He started unzipping his coverall, revealing space underwear that for some reason was bright orange.

  “Hey, why do you get nicer underwear than the women?” she complained.

  “Quit looking at my dick,” he told her, in a tone that might or might not be joking.

  “Our underwear is gray,” she said.

  “Yeah, I know,” he answered, because derp, there were six examples of it just a couple of meters away. “Printer pigment costs money, and y’all haven’t earned any.”

  “Wow. Seriously, you spend yours on underwear?”

  “Some of it. Seriously, fuck off with that and get me some biotrackers.”

  “Okay, okay.” Leaving him, she swam back to the equipment lockers and, after a brief search, pulled out a pack of radio patches and handed them to him to stick on various parts of his body.

  Soon Derek was packing his things in a locker, and getting strapped to the wall, and developing a half erection that the space underwear couldn’t hide. Alice did her best to ignore it as the hibernation cuff slid up and around his arm and then tightened at the elbow.

  “Ouch,” he said as the pressurized IV needle penetrated his skin and wormed its way into a blood vessel.

  “Good vein,” she reported.

  “Quit looking at my dick!” he said again.

  “I’m really not,” she assured him.

  “It’s these cuffs.”

  Alice was attaching Velcro straps to hold his wrists down at his sides, to hold his ankles together against the wall of the hibernation berth. For a moment, the operation put her face uncomfortably close to his groin.

  “Woman cuffing me to the bed, oh Jesus. I can’t help it. It’d be bigger if it weren’t so fucking cold in here.”

  She secured the head strap around his forehead and said, “I have patients machine-gunned in a jungle who whine less than you.”

  “It’s normal sized. At least normal.” He was starting to slur his words now. His skin was turning pale and sweaty.

  “Dude, I’m a medic. I don’t care how big your dick is.”

  “You will,” he murmured, and just like that he was gone. His body tried to curl up into a fetal position, but was stopped by the straps and cuffs, so he just hung there, barely breathing. Alice had watched this process six times now, and it still creeped her out. She’d doped her share of patients up with Pillows, but she hadn’t left them like that for sixty-six days, and anyway those patients were going to die without the drug. These were healthy people, put to sleep for mere convenience, and that was different.

  “Night night,” she said to Derek, knowing he couldn’t hear her. He wasn’t as pale as the women around him. He didn’t need anything over his eyes and ears. He was more than asleep, but bear hibernation was a long way from death, and so actually not as creepy. She could wake him up if he needed to, and it would only take a few minutes. Not unlike Pillows, which could be counteracted with a different shot called Risers.

  And then, with a sigh, she looked around her at the cold ship interior, already feeling the days and weeks stretching out ahead of her. Already realizing yet another reason she’d been chosen as a copilot: because Captain Hakkens of the Normal-Sized Dick preferred to sleep through as much of the boredom as he could, not dreaming, barely ageing, while still earning a full paycheck. Damn it.

  For lack of anything better to do, she checked the vital signs on all the sleeping beauties, and then checked their exposed skin for signs of abrasion or infection or anything else out of the ordinary. Checked over the three empty beds—one for her, one for Dona Obata, and one for Rachael Lee, to make sure the equipment was in good shape. And then checked her watch, and saw that six whole minutes had gone by.

  Sighing again, she started, very unprofessionally, checking out the bodies of her fellow space colonists. She was under recorded video surveillance, so she couldn’t be too obvious about it, but of course it didn’t really look like much, to be looking.

  And yes, she had to admit they were a fine collection, good enough for any trillionaire’s harem. If you overlooked the sickly gray-blue skin tones, and the goggles and headphones hiding their faces, these were symmetrical, smooth-skinned, well-proportioned humans of many different sizes and shapes. Jeanette was voluptuous and soft. Malagrite—Maag—was tall and slim. Nonna Rostov was even thinner—almost bony, really—but proportioned like a 2030’s swimsuit model. Saira Batra was petite in almost every dimension, and Pelu Figueroa was also voluptuous, but in that almost-middle-aged way that said she had put on two pounds a year for twenty years, and her athletic body had found artful ways to distribute it. Bethy was short and compact and rather muscular, with unaccountably large breasts. Dona, though absent, was tall and thin and muscular. And all of them, now that she thought about it, had wider than average hips and narrower than average waists for their respective body types.

  Alice herself . . . Alice had never thought of herself as particularly good looking, except in that generic chubby-Asian way she’d inherited from her mother. But she’d always known her hips were her best feature. “Good birthing hips,” Soon-ja Kyeong had called them, in a rare moment of quasi-praise. Airmen and soldiers and civilian boyfriends had made less polite comments of their own, but for basically the same reason.

  It certainly appeared that the prospective colonists had been selected not only for useful skills and “genetic fitness” (which of course was code for physical beauty), but also for genetic diversity and yes, good birthing hips. Because there was genetically diverse birthing to be done, out here in the Great Beyond. Yes indeedy.

  And then, ashamed at how long her gaze had lingered, she turned away and launched herself back into the cockpit, closing the hatch behind her so the place could warm the hell up.

  4.4

  29 March

  ✧

  Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot

  Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1

  Cislunar Space

  Over the next several days, Dona did her best to stay out of the trillionaire’s sight, and to poke around the Clementine station, learning its places and rhythms. It resembled both the Marriott Stars and Transit Point Station in certain particulars—the general sizes of modules, the spacing of grab bars, etc.—but a lot of things here seemed to be made of plastic. Also, where the Marriott Stars was basically round in its overall design, its modules huddled around the gymnasium bubble that was its main attraction, and where Transit Point Station was long and spindly to accommodate docking spaceships, Clementine was arranged in a large, rectangular block of trusses and modules, huddled (she supposed) around the pressurized hangar and the outgassing oven that were its central features. The layout seemed, in a way, to have been inspired by offshore oil drilling platforms, and for all she knew that might also be the basis for the station’s schedules and routines, which did include a false “night” of reduced lighting, but not really much of a pause in activity at that time. But finding her way around, while the crew ebbed and flowed around her, helped her develop a routine of her own, which in turn helped her stay mostly quiet and mostly invisible.

  Of course, she was still a new face in a crew of only fifty people, and also the only black person on board, and only the fourth woman, so a certain amount
of notice was inevitable. When people introduced themselves to her, she told them her name was Dona and she’d come here from Transit Point Station. If they pressed for details, she turned it around by asking them questions. If they asked, for example, what her job here was, she’d reply, “Oh, are you with payroll?” If they asked about her nationality, she’d say, “I’m guessing you’re good with accents.” If they asked whether (as a person freshly arrived from Earth) she had any information about the embargo or the blockade, she’d ask if they followed politics closely, and whether they thought the Cartels were going to survive through the end of the year. She was at once friendly and distant, eager and yet curt, sexy but unavailable, and so she became a familiar enough face and voice to stop drawing much attention, without anyone actually learning anything about her.

  She learned the station’s systems, too; not only how to eat and shower and find the bathrooms, how to use the gym to keep her body strong, but also the way the gatherbot crews would swarm into the pressurized hangar every time one of their charges came back with a rock. Through portholes in the station’s hull she might see a bot, dwarfed by its shrink-wrapped cargo like an ant carrying a chocolate kiss, inching its way toward the Hopper, where the rock would be snatched from it and closed within the gigantic outgassing oven, its volatiles blasted away with beams of focused sunlight, blinding even through the polarized coatings of the observation porthole. And once the easy volatiles were cooked off, the beams got even hotter, vaporizing the rock itself, square millimeter by square millimeter, so that chemical extractor wands could take it apart into component atoms, like a drug printer operating in reverse. Then the bot itself went into the pressurized hangar, and was swarmed by a pit crew of human beings doing stuff she wasn’t yet sure about, but involved checking the status of the bot and getting it ready for its next outing. From what she knew of life out at ESL1, their systems were substantially more autonomous than this, so it surprised her to see so many people working, it seemed, for robot masters.

  She also watched a crab-shaped robotic lander arrive from the surface of the Moon, and a robotic landing body, like a miniature space shuttle, arrive from ESL1. She watched that same crew take a little pressure bottle out of the lander and put it inside the landing body, which they then launched on a trajectory toward Earth. The landing body was the size of a delivery van and mostly hollow inside, and it looked to her like there was a lot of room left over in its cargo hold, which told her that bottle must be very valuable indeed.

  On the fourth day, the outlines of a plan began to take shape, and that “night” she dared to climb into bed with Grigory Orlov while he slept. She did nothing more than put an arm around him, not trying for anything more physical than that. He stirred and mumbled a bit, but didn’t resist or wake up. She liked the warmth of his body, and let it lull her to sleep. In the morning, when he began to stir, she awoke immediately into alertness, but pretended to be asleep as he roused and dressed, not lingering very long between sleep and wakefulness. She was still “asleep” when he left on his morning’s business, whatever that was.

  The next night she did it again, and then the morning after that it was time, finally, for her to show her worth around here.

  “I’ve been working on a project,” she said to him, after he was awake but before he’d gotten out of bed.

  “Hmm?”

  “I can show it to you in about two hours, if you like.”

  “If I like?” he answered gruffly. “I insist on it. I was not joking about your need to be useful here.”

  “I know. I’d expect nothing less. The fact is, I can be very useful in station security, and I think you know that. But if that’s all I was good for, I wouldn’t expect a lot of patience from you.”

  “Mmm. That is wise. Meet me in two hours, then. In the mess hall.”

  “Let’s make it the infirmary,” she said.

  That seemed to surprise and intrigue him a bit, though he hid it well. “Hmm? Yes, very well. But do not expect to take much of my time. I have several large enterprises to run.”

  “I appreciate that,” she said, then shut up and watched him dress. She could see he spent time in the gym, and of course took weightlessness drugs to retain bone and muscle mass, and it showed. His body did have some fat on it, but not as much as she’d’ve expected for a man in his mid-fifties. He was in better shape than most manual laborers his age, and much better than most desk drivers.

  “You’re handsome,” she dared to tell him.

  “You’re a flatterer,” he said, unimpressed, then combed his hair and left.

  Two hours later, she was in the infirmary with Sergei Golubev, the station’s doctor.

  “You ready?” she asked him in bad Russian.

  “For what?” he answered in bad French. “I am bystander here.”

  “No. I could not done without you.”

  He shook his head emphatically. “No. Is no blame here. You blame. I help because of nice, because of bored, because of beautiful. Only. Understand? I no blame.”

  “No credit, then,” she said in English, since she didn’t know the Russian word for that. It didn’t get a lot of use around here.

  “Fine,” he said, also in English. “No credit. I am physician. What do I need with credit?”

  “Credit for what?” asked the trillionaire, also in English. He’d materialized in the hatchway, looking stern and impatient.

  “Your new product line,” Dona told him. She held up a plastic squeeze bottle, one of several popular types used for drinking liquids in zero gee.

  “Raketnoye Goryuchiye,” he said, reading the freshly printed, red and yellow and black Cyrillic label, which depicted a winged wine-bottle shape with a tongue of flame extending from its neck. “‘Rocket Fuel’? What is this?”

  “Vodka,” she answered. “Here, try some.”

  She attempted to hand him the bottle, but he wouldn’t take it. He looked cross and . . . disappointed?

  “Drug-printed vodka? My dear, a liter of this ties up the printer for over an hour.”

  “Try three minutes,” she told him. “This came out of the chemical synthesizer. Like soap.”

  “Then it isn’t fit to drink. It’s polluted with toxins from side reactions. It probably has soap in it. Listen, if this is what you have for me—”

  “One million euros,” she said quickly, before he could look away.

  He raised an eyebrow. “What?”

  “One million euros. That’s how much money this will make you next week, when the next landing body goes out.”

  He looked at her for a long moment, and then said, “Firstly, a million euros isn’t that much money. We’ll make a billion on the tralphium in that shipment.”

  One can’t really lean forward in zero gee (not without rotating and translating one’s whole body in the process) but Dona made other gestures of engagement. “I understand, sir. But if it isn’t much, can I keep it for myself?”

  He snorted. “You’re a bold one, aren’t you?”

  “It’s the reason I’m here,” she confirmed.

  He glared at her for another long moment, and then said, “You’ll make salary if you’re lucky. And by lucky, I mean you’ll impress me with what you say next. Explain this million euros to me. Explain it zhato, please. Succinctly.”

  She nodded. “Yes, well, the activated carbon wafers produced by the drug synthesizer for accidental poisonings”—she pointed at the aforementioned equipment—“are basically identical to the carbon ultracapacitors they print down in the machine shop, and structurally similar to the six-micron pump filters we use on liquefied volatiles.”

  Orlov cocked his eyebrow again. “‘We’?”

  “You, then. The six-micron filters you use on liquefied volatiles.”

  All this she had learned in the last forty-eight hours, and she stated it with confidence. She was wearing her red heels and her blue-and-yellow scarf and her glasses and her lipstick, looking just as intelligent and productive and sexy and
eager to please as she could manage under the circumstances.

  He checked his watch, looking bored. “I said succinctly, woman. What do you have for me?”

  “You’re correct, the liquor that comes out of the chemical synthesizer is poylo. Rotgut. Dechets, as we say in France. Possibly even lethal. But we force it through an activated carbon wafer, and it becomes premium liquor, or passable at any rate. This man”—she pointed at Doctor Sergei—“confirms it’s safe to drink, and you yourself can confirm the taste. We throw the wafer away when it’s filtered ten bottles; it simply joins the sewage stream, and helps feed our, or rather your, hydroponics.”

  “How is this one million euros?” he demanded. His face remained impatient and skeptical, seemingly unimpressed by anything she’d said so far. But he hadn’t actually left yet. He was actually listening for her explanation.

  She gave it to him: “I found a luxury liquor distributor in Spain who’ll buy these bottles—these 3D-printed, extraterrestrial plastic bottles full of exotic extraterrestrial liquor—for ten thousand euros apiece. I can fit a hundred into the landing body, packed around your little pony bottle of helium.”

  Orlov looked thoughtful for a moment, then frowned and shook his head. “This can be counterfeited. It will be counterfeited; if it’s that simple to make, even the bottle can be faked, and the profit will go all to Spanish gangsters. Assuming the man you’re speaking with isn’t gangster himself.”

  “No,” Sergei piped in, in Russian. “It will not be easy to fake. The isotopes don’t match. Asteroidal hydrogen has actually about the same percentage of deuterium as Earth’s hydrogen, but our oxygen and carbon are a little bit lighter, and our nitrogen is a little bit heavier. Earth-printed fakes could be caught by any chemistry lab with a mass spectrometer. We are in negotiations with several right now that are local to this distributor.”

  To that, Dona added: “And we’ve warned him, we’ll cut him off at the first sign of tampering, anywhere in our value chain. It actually is possible to counterfeit every part of this, including the isotopes, but doing that would cost a lot more than what we’re charging. Now will you please have a taste of this?”