SPACE HORSES--sci-fi short story Installment Four of Five

(This short story first appeared in the 12/12/16 edition of Perihelion Sci-Fi Online Magazine)

Previous intallments can be found on my blog.

“Fifteen percent of the crew is female,” said the APV pilot she knew only as Hub as they walked up a short flight of steps to the uppermost level of the freighter. “Ten percent is transgender.”

Hub had been one of the six hairy beasts she saw on the tarmac that day at the airport. White-blond hair, expressive dark eyes—a Haflinger pony, short in stature but long on good nature and strength. He’d been assigned by Rader to help acclimate her to life on board a freighter.

“What positions do women typically fill?” Nilah asked, keeping pace beside him. “Domestic or professional?”

“They fill the positions they applied for.” He nodded at another crew member as they passed him on the mezzanine. “We have women in the galley and in laundry, but we also have a female nuclear engineer, two women in electrical, and four on the bridge.” He gave her a sideways look. “Why so interested in what our women do?”

Nilah knew to proceed with caution. Honesty was called for here, but not opinion. “I’ll spend the next ten months interacting with the people on this airship. I need to understand the social hierarchy, so I don’t get eaten alive.”

He stopped walking and leaned against the mezzanine railing. Below them, off-duty crew members lounged in the common room, basking in a very authentic-looking sunlight beaming down from retrofitted day panels. “Any chance you’re overthinking this?”

She smiled. “Possibly. But probably not.”

He hadn’t been present in the commissary when she and the clerk had their exchange, so she gave him a brief rundown of the encounter. When she got to the part about Rader, he winced.

“I wish I could tell you that kind of shit never happens out here, that we’re an enlightened and evolved people. About the best I can do is wage a bet that Johnny thought that guy was just as big an asshole as you did.”

“Johnny?”

He blinked hard, like he was trying to beam common sense to her through his eyeballs. “Johnny. Rader.” He twirled a finger in the air. “Flies this thing.”

“Ah.”

So not just first name basis, then. First name familiar basis. Interesting.

Hub squinted at her, as if his next words pained him. “Can I give you some advice?”

Nilah nodded. “That’s actually what I’m angling for.”

“Eh, you probably don’t want this advice,” he said. “But I hope you listen. Whatever hang-ups you have about women and boohoo life isn’t fair and penis envy and whatever—this isn’t the place for it. There’s no social unrest on this freighter. You acting like there should be is going to make for a long, miserable ten months, and not for the crew.”

Was that a threat? Nilah studied him carefully, thought about his words—thought about their context—and pegged them ninety percent sincere good intentions, ten percent don’t-fuck-with-us. It was a ratio she could live with.

The fact that the Longemeire had no windows except on the bridge took a little getting used to. It wasn’t a lack of brightness—the day panels were almost more effective than actual sunlight. It wasn’t lack of view, although that was certainly the case. Her second day on the freighter, she’d mentioned this to Hub and he just shrugged: “There’s nothing to see out there.” And Nilah supposed there wasn’t.

Her almost subconscious objection, like an instinctive, primal aversion to snakes, was not something that couldn’t be overcome, but was definitely something that required understanding to do so. She felt sure it had to do with motion. The speeds achieved by the Longemeire weren’t exactly bone-crushing in regard to G-force, but still were fast enough to require on-board gravitational stabilizers. She felt certain she was sensitive to their effects. Her body knew she was hurtling through space at speeds that should kill her, even though all environmental clues said otherwise. The inability to look out a window and gauge the rate at which they passed other objects in space confused her internal sensors even more. The only thing that seemed to help was total immersion in water, which could be accomplished at the freighter’s fitness center by floating around in the deep end of the swimming pool.

They’d been under way for forty days, were thirty-six hours from docking at the Space Station, and she hadn’t seen John Rader once during all that time. So his appearance in the fitness center startled her into a near-drowning incident that involved a quiet capsize off her inflatable lounger and more water in her sinuses than she preferred. Fortunately, her two seconds of actual distress went unnoticed by safety scouts, so she was able to paddle calmly alongside the lounger, nose barely above the surface, and watch the freighter captain tackle a running mile of simulated Appalachian Trail before he even broke a sweat.

People in the fitness center were off-duty, relaxed. Informal. It proved interesting to watch how they interacted with their captain, which was essentially no interaction at all. Everyone ignored him. Certainly not hostility—maybe deference? It made her think about that first impression back at the airport, when the APV crew walked past her without so much as a glance. If it hadn’t been rudeness, then what? Some frontier social code neither acknowledged nor discussed? She felt sure it was significant that Rader had been the only one out of that group to make eye contact. But how that translated into a meaningful clue about how to interact with these people was anybody’s guess.

Nilah had just finished dressing and was bent forward squeezing water out of her hair when his shoes appeared on the rubberized floor inches from the puddle she’d made. She recognized them from earlier—she’d watched Rader’s entire workout, amazed at how long it took him to get winded. Slowly, she straightened and braced herself for impact with his unyielding stare.

“Will you disembark once we dock tomorrow?” No greeting, no preamble. Then, “You should.”

She grabbed a towel from her bag and draped it over her shoulders, sparing her shirt from the water she hadn’t wrung from her hair. “Why?”

“Because it’s the Space Station. Everybody needs to see it at least once.”

Now he was serving as her personal tour guide?

“I don’t know,” she said, cautious in her response. “I can’t leave my dogs alone that long. Eight hours, max. Hub said in order to really see any of it, you have to go to the interior. And that takes a couple hours, right? Just to get there? So it’s best to find lodging, stay overnight. Except animals can’t be cleared for entry. I can’t take them.”

The Space Station had its share of four legged or feathered residents. All domestic, all serving some sort of purpose. Pets. Service animals. Beef cows. Chickens. Emu. She’d studied the list in second year at vet school, since students were tested on the reasoning behind each species sent from the surface. Animal populations had been established on the Space Station for more than a century. Contagious veterinary disease was one hundred percent controlled in that environment. Now, the only way a new animal could be introduced to the Space Station was by arrival in sterile embryonic stasis.

Rader draped a towel around the back of his neck and held an end with each hand, tendons in his wrists prominent as he gripped the cloth. “I can get somebody to watch the dogs for you. That is, if they’re good with other people.”

She stared at him, maybe a beat or two longer than would be considered polite. “You’d do that?”

“Sure.” He shrugged. “Why not?”

Her dogs were good with other people. Definitely. Not even fearful of strangers. “That would be wonderful. Thank you.”

“I grew up in a province outside Panama,” he said. “We had sheep, cows, goats—and we kept working dogs. Border Collies. Sometimes it’s odd, not having animals around.”

Nilah didn’t know what to say. How to react. Whether or not it was advisable even to smile. She’d certainly never seen him do it. “My three—are they allowed outside quarters? I mean, can I walk them around the upper deck? On leash?”

He nodded. It was a slight gesture, but noticeable. “I don’t have a problem with that. Can’t imagine the crew would, either.”

“Okay. Sounds good. Thank you,” she said. “They’re friendly. Well mannered. The biggest problem I can foresee is that everybody on the Longemeire is going to want a dog after they’re gone.”

For the first time since she’d known him, the ice cracked. Just a little, at the corner of each eye. Almost a smile, but not quite. “They know better,” he said.

And walked away.