Uncle Daran lived in the corner of the third level, Bhutan. Like the station’s other high-end levels, its design reflected the aesthetics of its namesake—or at least what the architects assigned to this level interpreted as its aesthetics. They’d had money for that, back then. Still did, she supposed. It was hard for her to remember that other people had money when she’d spent so long scraping by without. But up here, instead of straight metal panels or painted pre-fab, real wood had been transported in, along with real stones and real trees. So, when she stepped off the lift and entered the throngs of worried, scared-looking people hanging around the level’s central commons, it was prayer flags and not advertisements that moved in the ventilation currents overhead. Real dirt, likely a mix produced from the top-level biosphere forest and not the bottom-level sewage disposal units, gave the air a kind of clean, earthy scent that mingled with the pines that dotted the plaza in intervals. Beyond, lit with subdued spotlighting, a seven storied reproduction of Punakha Dzong, rose with the straight eighty-degree walls and embedded wooden windows of its origins, capped together with a design on top that looked like a more exotic version of the traditional Chinese and Japanese building design she saw mirrored on the second level.
She doubted any actual Bhutanese people had been involved in the planning process, just as she doubted any actual Bhutanese people lived on the level. Most here were mixed, anyway. Her and her uncle’s name might be Chinese, but that only reflected the domination Chinese descendants had on the Fallon population. Her particular blend of DNA was something like seventy-three percent East Asian, with much of the rest coming from the Middle East.
Gods. She swallowed hard as her thoughts turned to her parents. They were on Chamak Udyaan, more than a twelve hour lag between here on Tianjin, through the comms relay, and to the planet’s current orbital position—and that’s if any of their messages made it through the current comms traffic.
I hope they’re all right.
As the cool smell of moving water, coming from a faux-natural creek by the side of the yard, she swayed. A wave of dizziness rolled over her, making the entire seen blot out for a few seconds. Tuomin caught her before she stumbled, his hand firm on her shoulder. It remained there even after she’d straightened, guiding her through the crowd and toward the closest exit.
“Thanks,” she said, giving herself a little shake. “I need more coffee.”
“You don’t need coffee, you need sleep.” His voice had a firmness to it, and a kind of tone she remembered some of her friends using when she’d overdone it in high school—Sol, are they okay?—but it faltered with concern when he continued, “Are you sure you’re going to be okay? These things are quite viscious.”
“Yeah. I kind of got that impression.” She winced, remembering the sublevel and the undulating, rippling mass of the oncoming Shadow People—and the way that first one had looked at her, unerringly, as if it had known precisely where she’d been and precisely who she was. She gave herself another little shake to dispel the shiver that threatened. “But yes, I will be fine with my uncle.”
Tuomin hesitated. “Can he… can he fight?”
That sparked a grin out of her. She flashed it his way, an unexpected laugh chuckling out of her as she met his uncertain gaze.
“Oh, you’re in for a treat.”
Thoughts of the Shadow People, and the very vivid imagery in her head that followed those thoughts, must have jumped some wakefulness back into her because she found herself straightening and looking around as she re-took the lead from Tuomin—he happened to have led them to the correct exit for her uncle’s apartment. The Bhutanese theme continued in whitewashed walls, wooden windows, and the subtle sway of prayer flags coloring the lights above, but here and there she caught signs of modification. Obviously, the decorating council of this level had more cash on hand, because most of the renovations and post-build modifications had been smoothed over to blend in with the rest of it, but they couldn’t hide everything, especially from the eyes of an engineer. Panels, even hidden ones, caught her attention like fish in a pond—visible because she knew where and how to look. Bhutan may trace its station structure over with decorated wood and other ornamentation, but it still needed to be repaired and serviced. Though the circuits varied across the station, they all varied in similar ways. An engineer like her could work in Sumatra and Bhutan just as easily as she could work at the very bottom in the Unnamed Four levels.
As they walked, the hallways and corridors straightened and leveled out, moving into a similar squarish, warren-like feel of her own level, albeit with more organization. According to her uncle, the renovations committee was quite strict, and the look of these halls reflected that—very few changes had been made beyond minor rewiring and upgrades, as far as she could tell, which gave the place a peculiar kind of vintage feel. Double-layered, with both the old underlying station architecture visible in its bones and the maintained Bhutanese-styled facade. A ceiling dragon, decorated in an angular, stylized manner on one of the wooden ceiling running pieces, followed them overhead and, as they turned down the last corridor to her uncle’s combined workshop and apartment, a silent hush fell over their ears, noticeable enough to make her pause.
In fact, she did more than pause. Her rising heartbeat made her stop entirely, frozen to the spot as her eyes widened. Tuomin tensed beside her, the blaster in his hands rising as his eyes swept the empty corridor, looking for the threat.
It took her a few seconds to catch her breath and wrestle it back into control.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s nothing. I’m just… rattled.”
His blaster went back down, along with his shoulders as he relaxed. The breath he blew out was audible. As she glanced to the side, she realized he’d done something similar to her—reacted without thinking. The more she looked, the more she realized that he’d been going through the same panic and fear as she had, even stemming from the same, terrifying experience they had shared on the Harbin sublevel. He’d just been doing a better job at keeping a professional face.
“So,” he said. “You’re dating a gang member?”
Her teeth grit together, but she restrained herself from the heavy, hissing breath she’d been about to let out.
“No. Well, I guess. I mean—” Clio, what have I got myself into? “I guess I knew, or suspected at least. He never really talked about them. They were always ‘the boys.’” She gave the dragon on the ceiling a narrow-eyed look as she pieced the words and her thoughts together. “Gods, I was going to marry him today.”
“Ah.” Tuomin hesitated again. His eyes also darted around, finding a place to settle on that was not her. “I, ah, well… I think you mentioned that your boyfriend was taken?”
“Yes,” she said. “He was.”
And if he really is one of those… things… he’ll definitely need that marriage protection. If there were as many of those as she suspected, she was willing to bet that Tianjin’s government would attempt to dump as many of them out of its care and jurisdiction as it legally could. She’d heard they recognized non-traditional unions, thanks to the civil rights challenges from a couple decades ago, so maybe she could swing it.
“I’m sorry to hear that,” he said.
He sounded like he meant it, too, which surprised her. She turned her gaze back to him. Though Bhutan’s specific design put atypical lighting around most of its passages, this part had reverted to a more normalized appearance. Not quite tube-lights, but with similar filaments that cast a pale, milky glow along the old, carefully maintained wall and touched Tuomin’s already pale skin with a weird, anemic glow. A mix of shadows crossed his features, further adding to the sunken look of his features, but his eyes caught the light, appearing to glitter as he avoided looking at her. After a few moments, his attention away from the doorpiece he’d been staring at and slipped back up. As his eyes met hers, a small shock slid through her, like the touch of a small, grounded electric current through her neck and back and chest. They both held the stare, neither of them moving. Seconds ticked by.
Then, at once, they both seemed to realize what they were doing. She ducked her head, and he seemed to flinch, both glancing away and down the hall.
“So,” he said after a few seconds. He made a gesture to the empty hall and its closed doorways. “Which one does your uncle live in?”
She lifted her hand as if to point, but lowered it when her legs decided to move instead, eager to get ahead. She nodded instead, ignoring the flush of color that she hoped didn’t show against her pale, sleep deprived face.
“Over here.” She cleared her throat. “He, ah, has two conjoined units, but he only uses the second door. He’s talked about boarding up the other one.”
Tuomin hesitated, his eyes pinching. “Isn’t that… not allowed?”
She shrugged. “Hence why he hasn’t done it. Yet. His name is Daran Hou, by the way. Have you heard of him?”
“No. Should I have?”
“I dunno. Maybe. He used to have a contract with C-STAT.” She shrugged again. C-STAT was a joint organization between Tianjin Station and Chamak Udyaan that, among other things, oversaw weapons maintenance, replacement, and development. “You’ll see.”
She forced herself to move again, to shake off her earlier feeling and put one foot in front of the other. Her netlink buzzed again in her pocket, but she ignored it. Tuomin’s footsteps followed a few seconds later. As she came to a stop in front of a rust-colored wooden door, the painted decorations worn away on its sides and handles, a panel sequence flashed to life on the wall next to it. She ignored it, instead lifting her hand to give the door three sharp raps with her knuckles.
A thump sounded from the inside, making her heart leap—Is Uncle Daran all right?—but a stream of grumbles and curses crossed her ears before her panic could settle back in. A second, and another thump, later, a beep sounded from the panel next to her and the decorative wooden panel rolled back into the wall. A second door, a heavier, more conventional security panel, retracted on a two second delay behind it. The slight click and groan of its motor caught her ears with its usual faulty familiarity.
As she stepped across the threshold, the level’s Bhutanese facade vanished in a brief, unlit corridor of piled and stacked storage boxes and half-opened parts orders. Beyond the small closet, which housed three old workbelts, his old work lanyards, at least a dozen grab rags, and was wedged permanently open by the end of a wooden table that he’d jammed in, the strong yellow glow of his worklamp illuminated the transition from the entrance’s wooden floor—an attempt to link to the tradition outside—to the stamped and scored metal that he had installed thirty years ago. More boxes stacked on the far side, sprawling into a second hallway, this one leading to his second unit which acted as his living space, but in her experience he tended to sprawl in his work. More than once she’d seen evidence of him bunking on the floor of his workshop when working on some project or other, and his supposedly-domestic sink tended to have more oil smears and metal dust than was typical. He’d been married once, a long time ago, but he never talked about them.
“I, uh.” Still outside the door, Tuomin cleared his throat. “I need to make sure it’s safe in there.”
“Well, yes, of course you’re coming in.” She gave him a head-to-toe glance. “When’s the last time you ate?”
“I don’t eat,” he said.
She stared at him, eyebrows rising. “I didn’t think the station hired androids.”
“Er, I don’t need to eat,” he said. “I’m fine. I don’t need anything.”
“Well, come in anyway. Uncle Daran’s probably got the place safe but you can do your soldierly duty. He’ll be tickled pink, I’m sure.” She turned back around. “Uncle Daran? Where are you?”
No one answered her, which should have spiked some sort of warning in her brain, except someone had let them in and she’d definitely recognized the tone of swearing she’d heard before. She assumed she’d caught him at an odd time—and, sure enough, as she stepped passed the entry hallway and into the workshop proper, there came the distinct sound of a flushing toilet from somewhere else in the apartment. Behind her, the light shifted as Tuomin followed her in. She heard him hesitate just passed the threshold, then continue on. Ducking past a few bedraggled prayer flags hanging from the ceiling, these ones with cartoon characters and Japanese lettering, probably in response to the culture committee’s iron control of the level’s corridors, she glanced past the two display cases on the inside wall and did a quick scan of the bench and counter. “Uncle?”
“Coming, coming. Give me a minute.” Movement sounded to her right, where two a short, dim corridor led to the second apartment. She caught sight of the kitchen just beyond, and a mess of bags, bottles, and cans stacked precariously on the counter, table, and the top of the fridge, but a sharp intake of breath made her turn.
Tuomin had spotted the guns.
Like her, Daran Hou had a talent for circuitry, but where she had a passion for rooting in the station’s sublevels and working through different amalgamations of its multi-generational circuits, he had turned his attention to energy weapon design. He’d designed and modified more than five hundred circuits across a variety of weaponry, ranging from the handheld type blaster that Tuomin carried around to at least three major cannon systems on the empire’s ships, and for both ICP laser technology and the plasma models they’d been experimenting with for the past twenty years. The blueprint for one such cannon hung across the wall above his workspace in a two-meter spread, along with a medal of commendation at its base for his design work. Tuomin had stopped dead in front of it, his jaw dropping open as he looked from that, to the display racks of guns and blasters on the front wall, to the large rifle Uncle Daran was currently working on which lay in pieces across his workcounter, parts held into place with a combination of wire and the electro-magnetic levitation hubs that she’d used during her coursework.
((Due to word count restrictions, I have to put it in two parts. Keep reading for Part Two!))
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