I know where you sleep

[Sarah McFarlen]

Sarah ‘Sparks’ McFarlen

---

Sarah’s room was bare - unfinished plasterboard hung from the walls in rough sheets. Panel seams clustered around welds, cracks branching out along the wall like the forks of some great plaster river. Some long-departed activist had made a half-hearted effort at covering the plain steel floor. Scuffed and dusty coils of linoleum still lurked in the corners, each a little monument to procrastination. A half-made bunk bed squatted against the far wall like a cornered animal, discarded clothes scattered about its base like wayward young.

Balanced at the centre of the upper bunk, a datapad charger rested alongside a fist-sized sphere of rock. Veins ran through the stone, colours shifting and bending in the light; but the glassy surface was smooth, throwing up twisted reflections. Maintenance binders sat in a loose stack against the base of the bed in mute defiance of the electronic age. Faded registry numbers and dates stamped across yellowing covers that must have been old when Sirius was young. One had slid off the top and slumped between the rest of the pile and the floor like a homeless man seeking shelter from the storm. A wardrobe that must once have been green but had now faded to an uncertain iron-grey completed the room’s meagre fittings.

Sarah was nowhere in view. Outside, footsteps reverberated against the narrow halls of the station like caged thunder.

*

“Oxygen’s showing 80%. You still alive out there?” Cameron’s voice cut into her helmet, as clear as if he had been standing behind her. Really, physically, breathing down her neck, instead of just metaphorically.

“Yeah, still alive last time I checked.” Sparks released the transmit button on her suit, extended a gloved hand to steady herself against the rocky bulk of Bruchsal base. Bruchsal was a dwarf by station standards. Less than a speck held against the real giants like Montezuma, or the nameless Blood Dragon base she and Erich had once run supplies to. Yet; the asteroid installation was still large enough to make her feel like an ant crawling up a battlement. A twist of her hand, and a circuit board came away from the sensor beneath her fingers. She fished around and replaced it with a passably new one from her bandolier. "Alright. Number three should be good. How many of these things do we have left?"

"Looks okay on my end. Another four sunward, and one over on the dark side." Cameron, again, his voice carried to her via the long cable snaking from the back of her suit to the relay. A dozen such relays bulged from the asteroid, no more than another crater rim to most who cared to look. Anywhere else in the sector wouldn't have bothered hard-wiring a personal communicator. Out here, with a military bunker-buster only ever one incautious burst away, security and reliability won out over convenience.

"Dark side. Very spooky." She patted down the bandolier, the motion muted through the suit. "How many boards does Rutgen have to go?"

"This isn't a competition, Sparks." But the hint of trepidation in his voice said that he knew it was - and that he didn't approve. But this was Cameron. The man was so risk adverse he'd call up three traffic reports and a soil test before crossing the street. He'd come to Rheinland to write a commerce thesis for Cambridge. How he'd ended up a systems tech for the Widerstand instead was something she'd never got around to asking. On the upside, he hadn't asked about Sparks' past either, which suited her just fine.

"I know. Just wondering. Healthy concern." Ficker had banned races among his repair crews, of course. Jumping around the surface of a rock where escape velocity meant a gentle sneeze was far from safe at the best of times. Which was exactly why races were so popular. They raced for credits, they raced for prestige, but mostly they raced to relieve the dull, mind-numbing boredom of station life. Sparks was the station favourite. She had her own betting pool going.

"For the sake of healthy concern then, Rutgen's got four replacements to go."

"Only? Wasn't he on six a minute ago?" Sparks swore under her breath, and resisted the urge to punch the surface of the asteroid. Four. Her hard-won lead kicked down to less than nothing.

"We had a transport come in five minutes back. The docking bay sensor has been scrubbed until the bay is clear."

"What? Why didn't you say something?" Damn it. Damn it. Damn-

"I didn't think it worth worrying you. Look, you know Rutgen is hardly in the pool anyway. Besides, we've-"

"But I am!" And that was what mattered, wasn't it? Not the money - though the money did have a certain, mercantile, appeal - but the competition. Holding back, letting Rutgen win just because a transport happened to arrive was somehow worse than losing in the first place. Treasonous, that's what it was. A betrayal of the effort she'd put in - and the money, of course. There was always that. Sparks grinned, pushed away from the asteroid, and the universe spun into view above her.

Cameron's voice was in her ear, steady and measured, marking the next sensor to replace. Sparks barely heard him. Above her, there was nothing but the black sky. Asteroids of the Westerwald drifted across her vision, as slow and stately as ballroom dancers. Eternity swam below her feet, lit by the steady glow of a hundred distant stars, as she floated from the cratered surface of Bruchsal. For a moment, she felt an insane urge to push on, to spin away into the void and just keep flying.

She twisted, and the galaxy spun beneath her, the rattle of her regulator the only sound. The phrase free as a bird came to mind; but what poor earthbound bird had ever experienced freedom like this? Gravity was a prison, the atmosphere a cage, and she had slipped the bonds of both those ancient tormentors. Her heart drummed in her chest, and, for a stolen moment, she shared a smile with the stars.

Then, the competition was on again. Sparks thumbed the controls and her pack purred to life with a hum that raced up the back of her skull like the hunting cry of a living thing. She jetted retrograde, addressed the ascent before it could tug the comms cable from its housing. From here, she could see other crews, jumping about Bruchsal's surface like worker bees in a hive. Long comms cables trailed behind them like tails, clouds of compressed gas puffing from their packs like the last gasps of a giant.

Somewhere below her, Rutgen was widening his lead. Sparks' called the pack to life, and the sensation of weightlessness left her. She puffed back toward the station, starlight fading in the glow of Bruchsal's docking lights. To her left, she caught a flash of movement as another worker leapt skyward, faded green suit a dark silhouette in the vacuum. Sparks didn't bother waving. Beautiful as the view was, few people wanted to spend longer in a vac-suit than was necessary.

"Cameron?"

"Oh, are you talking to me again now? I've been trying to get that next sensor on your HUD for three minutes." The voice on the other end of the line was more exasperated then annoyed. Sparks tended to have that effect - the annoyed ones didn't stick around. She could almost hear the disapproving shake of Cameron's head as the tech continued. "It'd be a lot easier if you gave me access, you know."

"Sorry." Sparks tapped her wrist terminal, accepted the data transfer. A moment later, a yellow diamond flashed into being on her visor, cupping another sensor on the asteroid's surface. A steady stream of numbers informed her of the sensor's distance and heading. They also alerted her, more often than she felt was strictly necessary, that it was not operational. She couldn't see it, of course, but she didn't need to. That was what Cameron was for. Besides, if her suit couldn't pick up almost standing on the surface, it was a fair bet the station would give the Rheinlander's planetside arrays trouble too. She nudged her suit's trajectory up a few degrees, towards the crippled sensor, felt the gentle stretch of acceleration tugging at her toes. "Got it now. Did I just sail past Rutgen?"

"Hang on." A moment's pause. Sparks could hear the insect like hum of machinery on the other end of the line. "Yes, that was him. Just finished up his number three. Why, did he wave?"

"Nope. Just an inkling." Waving would been unprofessional. Rutgen tended to save his gloating for after his victory. At least he had, last time Sparks had been slow enough to hand him her money. Three months ago, and the experience had cost her what would have been a week's pay on Manhattan. Out here it was closer to a month's wages. Then again, she had learned to expect that. Her pay packet had seen a swift decline alongside her employer's chances to manipulate her father through her. That was just dandy with Sparks. It meant they were forgetting who she'd been. They had known, she was certain of that much. You didn't shake hands with the Order unless you had a formidable intelligence network of your own at your back. With more than a century eking out an existence in the gutters and dusty university backrooms, the Widerstand's network of informers was about all the fractured revolutionary band still had going for it. "Alright, I'm heading down."

"I know. I'm in your head, remember?" Cameron dumped just enough faux-mysticism into the phrase to tug a laugh from Sparks.

"Uh-huh. Let's not make a habit of it." Sparks slid her suit to a halt next to the ailing sensor with a gentle sequence of puffs that hugged the straps to her shoulders. As a child, she had been to the snow, but always artificial environments. She imagined that the pressure of the suit on her shoulders was something like falling snow would have felt like. "What's up with this one again?"

"Camera still works okay. The image is a little scrappy, but that's alright. A micrometeorite strike took out the servos back before the... incident at Zwickau."

"One day we really, really, need to have a talk about your use of the work 'incident.' But, yeah, busted servo, on it." Sparks tugged a small electric drill from her belt and slid the magnetic clamps on her boots on, felt them bite onto the metal plate hidden beneath the dirt of the asteroid. Quickly, deliberately, she set to work unfastening the lead-lined plate shielding the camera's internals. Not that it had been shielding much of anything lately. A neat round hole drilled its way through the small assembly of electric motors responsible for manoeuvring the camera, and punched straight out the other side. Under the camera, a matching scratch gouged its way across the rock. "Huh. When did meteorites start using AP rounds?"

"Probably some nutcase shooting into the field. You know this place, happens every other Thursday, right?" There was a trace of doubt in the system tech's voice.

"Yeah, probably." And if not, she had better places and times to worry about it than here and now. Sparks secured the new servo in place and patched the hole. Then she disabled the locks on her boots, and kicked off the station and into deep black nothing. "Where's our next-"

Another yellow waypoint flashed onto her visor. A moment later, a green circle joined it. The circle darted across her HUD before resolving into an arrow pointing off to her left. RUTGEN was stencilled alongside it, next to a heading and distance. "Hey, thanks."

"You're welcome. I thought you may wish to know." Cameron said. Rutgen was stationary, relative to the rock - presumably working on his repairs. A chance to catch up.

Sparks pushed the suit hard. Let the cloud of compressed nitrogen swat her forward like a giant's hand. Not too fast. Beyond a certain speed, the defensive guns made no distinction between a space suit and a hypervelocity round. Rationally, she knew that there wasn't enough fuel in her suit to get her anywhere near the velocity that would prompt the guns to dust her. Nonetheless, she kept a light finger on the throttle as she skated past the gun.

Two more sensors; a radiation-saturated infrared camera and one of the station's few LADAR arrays - passed in a steady blur of motion. Damaged parts slowly replaced their functional counterparts hanging off her suit. None of the parts she was using were new, exactly, and some of them had passed through enough hands to make a Junker blush but, they all had one redeeming feature. By and large, they worked. Perhaps not for long, and perhaps not as well as they might have, but they worked. When you lived at the bottom of the local food chain, you had to be content with that.

Zwickau had meant something different to everyone who saw it. To the Rheinland Military, the attack on the station had been a resounding victory. The destruction of a Widerstand fighter wing and the extensive damage to the station had revived the military campaign against the revolutionaries. The chance give the upstart Natio Octavium a bloody nose had been a pleasant bonus. To the die-hards in the Widerstand, it had been irrevocable proof of the regime’s brutality. Renewed justification that any force the Widerstand could bring against them, no matter how cruel, was ultimately right. To the universe at large, it hadn't been much more than another skirmish in a guerrilla campaign that had dragged on over century. Another scattering of dead starships in a sector already polluted with wrecked hulls. To Sparks, it had meant more work.

The Widerstand wasn't so wealthy that it could write off a station, and Zwickau had been the closest thing the movement had to a research base. Ficker's crew, Sparks included, had spent most of the past few months hanging off Zwickau aboard inflatable habitation blisters. Raided from ships bound for the Augsburg relief effort, the blisters had provided rough housing while the engineers raced to save the station. They'd managed to pull Zwickau back together. Looking back, she still wasn't quite sure how. The race to bring the station's ECM back online and hide it from sensors before the Rheinlanders sent something heavier than a cruiser group had taken its toll.

The rest of the Bundschuh's bases had languished for lack of maintenance. It was like trying to dam a river with putty. Every time you turned away, there was another hole. If you left it, the problem worsened until your dam was nothing but flotsam on the water. A space station was the ultimate violation of nature. Life where, by rights, there should have been nothing but hard vacuum and solar wind. Sometimes it didn't feel as much like maintenance as it did a marathon. Hold back the cascade, or the station dies. It was like living your life dangling off a cliff.

She loved every moment of it.

Sparks velcroed a torque wrench back onto her suit, and braced her legs to push off again. Then, without a flicker, the waypoints vanished from her HUD. Rutgen's marker disappeared a moment late. A red and white EMERGENCY banner had usurped it, stamped across the top of her visor. She chinned the comms switch in her suit. "Cameron, I've just lost markers here. What's going on?"

"We just got pinged." Cameron's voice was low and urgent. Sparks felt her heart drop and settle somewhere in her toes. She froze, braced herself against the station's surface like a barnacle clinging to a wharf. As though the stillness would hide her from electronic eyes. "Don't move, we're tracing it now."

Sparks didn't. Her suit seemed far colder than it had been a few minutes ago. The stars that had promised freedom, she now found herself searching. She raked her eyes across the suns, waiting for the distinctive silhouette of a warship. They've found us. God, they've finally found us. It would be Zwickau all over again, and this time she didn't have a ship to carry her clear of the devastation. Sparks rolled her hands into fists to stop them shaking, switched her suit camera to watch for the distinctive glimmer of a targeting laser dancing across Bruchsal's surface. A plasma cannon could punch through the armoured hull of a fighter like so much damp paper. She tried not to think about what a hit would do to her.

After what felt like hours, Cameron's voice cut across her comm.

"Head for the airlock, Ficker's calling everyone back in. We're powering down the active sensors."

Gas poured from her pack as Sparks jetted off the surface. She didn't need to be told twice. "Is it the military?"

"Could be. Whoever they are, they're not actively targeting us. We picked the signal up on one of the ventral sensors though, so it's probably on the wrong heading for a military ship."

"Well. That's nice." Sparks released a breath that was more tension than air. "Any luck on that location?"

"Beyond that the ventrals picked it up first? No. I could give you a location if the outriggers were up and running, but..." But with only one sensor pointed in the right direction, the signal could have come from anywhere above the station. Sparks nodded, realised that Cameron couldn't see her face and hit the comms instead.

"No idea. I get it." It probably wasn't the military, though. They could have come in from above, but why bother? A dreadnought could shrug off anything the Widerstand could throw at it without bothering with subterfuge. All it would need to do was come in on an orbit counter wise to Bruchsal's and drop a few kinetic rounds, let the cruel laws of Newton guide them to the station. It wouldn't take more than the press of a button, and all they'd need to do would be to wait for the boom. But it probably wasn't them. Probably.

"I can't see anything on the passives, so, yes, unless Jana decides to start shooting off LADAR, we're essentially blind." Cameron paused. "On the upside, they haven't hit us again."

"You think it was random?" Sparks settled to a halt next to the airlock, locked her boots to the surface with a clang that reverberated up her legs. A familiar green-suited figure was already in the lock. Rutgen signed a spacers 'okay?' with one hand. She returned it and he returned his attentions to his own comms line.

"It would hardly be the first time a free trader decided to check the lay of the land for himself." Cameron's tone carried the faint uncertainty of a man trying to convince himself.

"Yeah. That's probably it." Never mind that a merchant would show up on the passives. Sparks nodded, began to nurse her own suspicions. "Just unplugging comms. I'll see you when I get in."

"I shouldn't bother if I were you." Cameron jumped in. "Ficker’s got that tone again. I suspect I'll be here late."

"All right. See you whenever, then." Sparks tugged the cable free of her suit, and the world went quiet, save for the rhythmic click of her regulator. Save for a few, critical life-signs, the information on her HUD faded with the noise. Without the station's computers lending her processing power, the suit had its hands full running her own trajectory calculations without keeping track of everyone else’s.

She locked her cable into the clamps just outside the airlock door, alongside Rutgen's. There were still three empty clamps, but that wasn't unusual. Other repair crews tended to run at a pace that was closer to sedate, or sane, depending on who you were asking. As she watched, another mechanic barrelled toward the airlock. As one, she and Rutgen reached out gloved hands to steady him before he careened into the interior door, magnetic boots tugging at her knees. The mechanic gave a wave that managed to look flustered, even with his visor down, and stowed his cable alongside theirs.

Rutgen gave his 'Okay?' sign again and, when the shaky mechanic returned it, cycled the airlock. Sparks fidgeted with her gloves as the light above the door slowly cycled from red, to yellow, to green. Sound returned in a trickle as the atmosphere filtered in. Gravity returned next, the generator buried under the airlock floor coughing its way up to the 0.3G of the rest of the station. After nearly ten years in space, even that felt almost heavy to her now. She hadn't kept up with the fitness regime meant to keep her in-shape for one G, but who did? If I ever want to go back dirtside, I'm going to regret that. She wasn't concerned. A future in which she went back down a gravity well seemed as fantastical as a future in which she grew wings.

"Do you need help?" Rutgen and the other mechanic - a broad-shouldered man, with the scraggly beginnings of a beard clawing their way out of his chin - had their suits off, down to the creased bodysuits underneath, and were watching her, still fully suited. Sparks had the distinct impression that it wasn't the first time he'd asked. Rutgen's sirian was the slow, hesitant drawl of a student speaker. Still better than when they'd first met. Before she'd learned more than a few words of the bastardised union of modern german and a dozen, older, languages that spoken in Rheinland. She still wasn't sure if she hadn't preferred him before they started talking. She hit the speaker on the suit.

"I'm fine. Sorry. Just thinking." She waved them away. "I'll catch up later."

Rutgen nodded his assent and vanished down the corridor with the mechanic, swaying like sailors too long at sea. Sparks undid the clasps on her helmet, took a long breath of the recycled air, tainted with the small of heated plastic, and set to work undoing the rest of the suit. Unpeeling would have been more accurate. The temperature control unit on her suit was just one more thing on her ever-expanding list of things to fix and, right now, it was falling well below a shower. She stowed the suit in an airlock locker, and began the long walk to the other side of the station, and her bunk.

*

Someone was in her room.

Sparks had seen movement, a flash of black against the grey station walls as she rounded the corner. That, and she'd caught the hiss of the sealing door as she rounded the corner. She'd pressed herself back around the bend as rapidly as surprise had allowed. No-one outside of the station administration should have had access to her quarters. Right now, that meant Erich, Freya, and a middle-aged fire warden whose name she should have known but never remembered. She worked through the list, mentally checking off names. Erich was still missing, and Freya had considered her beneath notice since she'd turned down her offer to run station engineering. As far as she could see, nothing was on fire, and the wall terminals reported the station's life support was functioning, if not perfectly, than well enough that there was no immediate emergency. So it wasn't the fire warden.

She revised her assessment. Someone unauthorised was in her room. She'd locked it on the way out, she was certain. She pulled up another mental list; what sort of person had a reason to want in to her room? More importantly, who had the means to override station security? Sparks pointedly ignored the whisper at the back of her skull, the whisper that had nestled there since Cameron called her in, suggesting she knew exactly that sort of person.

Sparks retreated down the passageway until she found a wall terminal. The red and white warning banner at the top was a perfect copy of the one on her suit HUD, albeit this one warned against unshielded communications. She paused, considered calling up the internal cameras before she remembered that she had quietly removed them from their mountings the day she moved in, and swore under her breath instead. Instead, she unhooked the terminal from the wall and navigated through until she hit a screen titled SECURITY. The station branch was already on screen. All she had to do was hit the pulsing SEND REPORT, and Freya's soldiers would march right in. Then all that was left was to do was to explain herself to Freya.

Again.

On second thought, perhaps the intruder wasn't so bad.

She slid the terminal into her hand, thumb hovering over the button, and slipped into her room.

The back of a black trench coat greeted her. The coat was a strange affection. Except for the real backwaters, the primitive worlds that had withered and not-quite-died when the jump network sprung into existence, mankind hadn't dug trenches in a millennium. Sparks held a deep-seated belief that the coats should have died out with them. There was only one person she knew backward enough to wear one. Only one person that broke into her rooms, as reliable and inevitable as winter. Only one person with the means and reason to ping Bruchsal and avoid the retaliatory probes. She let her thumb drop away from terminal.

"One of these days, Vaelin, I'm going to have to teach you to knock." Sparks pushed past him, all elbows and knees, auburn hair a fuzzy halo in the low gravity. "It’s been at least a month. I'd started to think you might've learned manners or something stupid like that while you were away.

“It’s good to see you again.” She laid a hand on his chest, shepherded him back towards the door. "Now, get out. I need to change into something that doesn't smell like a donation bin, please and thank you. We can talk after."

---

"This is really sort of a personal project of mine."

- James Arland, on single-handedly engaging an enemy regiment.

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