This is a character exploration piece, the focus is on a sixteen year old girl adapting to higher gravity and life without her mother. It may evolve into a fully fledged novel in time. This short is a "Part Two" of another short piece involving the same characters. I can't put up the first part as it's been published (Yay!) but I've written this such that you shouldn't need too much foreknowledge to be able to get into it.
Special thanks to those that posted in This Thread, with apologies in advance if I've butchered or misread the advice given.
Anyway, enough of my blathering. On with the story.
***
Rihoko Yasana held her breath and flattened herself against the inside of the wall she was hiding in. Footsteps thudded closer on the deck, stopping a few feet from the access panel Rihoko had shut just seconds before.
“Fucking gravity,” complained the voice of a person she couldn’t see in the dark confines, “Central! Can you track her?”
Rihoko drew shallow breaths. Interminable seconds passed punctuated by the whirs and pumps of the air cycling system as the unseen person listened to a voice that chirruped over the comm lines.
“Well can’t you get that bloody computer to track her? I thought you had that damn thing fixed,” the voice paused, listening, “Fine, I thought you got her fixed. Jesus what is it with people, computers and pronouns anyway?”
A loud thud made Rihoko jump out of her skin and, painfully, into the bulkhead. It took all her self discipline not to yelp in surprise or groan in pain.
After a few seconds she realised that the person outside the wall panel had merely kicked the wall in frustration and hadn’t been trying to root her out.
“Yeah, look, she’s definitely not down here, the extra weight alone is enough to make her steer clear of this area. I’m heading back up to help searching section fourteen…” the voice paused briefly, “Listen, if you want to search this section more thoroughly, come on down and do it yourself sweetheart, I’m outta here.”
Rihoko listened carefully as she heard the receding footsteps. Recalling a tactic used in holovids she’d seen, she pressed her ear against the metal, both feeling and hearing the vibrations of her would-be captor getting fainter with each passing step until she could no longer distinguish it from the blood pumping into her ears and the rapid beat of her heart.
With care she clawed at the access panel’s internal release and flopped face first out of the panel, panting for air in the relatively spacious corridor. She pulled herself completely free and replaced the panel, breathing and grunting with every effort.
At 16 years of age, Rihoko was in the prime of her health, but she was struggling against the force of gravity trying to crush her down into the floor. She had been born on Mars and though she had adapted well to ‘Earthnorm’ gravity she still found it preferable to remain in areas of the Starship Mariner that had less than one G.
She lay there on the floor just panting, trying to regain her strength to walk again. Once upon a time she’d been on a theme park ride that had spun her round and round, pressing her into the walls until the walls had become the floors.
The same could be said of the entire Starship Mariner. The whole ship rotated, and everyone was pressed down as a result. The further you got from the core of the ship, the harder you’d be pressed down.
That’s what made this area such a good hiding place. The crew knew she hated high gravity. Even they hated the high gravity. But if she was going to get to crew stasis without getting caught this was the way to go.
Come see me.
The words echoed in her mind just as she’d read them. Three words had compelled her into this game of cat and mouse. Three words had pitted her against the crew that had effectively fostered her ever since she had come out of cryostasis and her mother hadn’t.
Come see me.
Those words, in an email, from her Mother… It wasn’t possible. It was unthinkable. Keiko Yasana was frozen along with thousands of others in Crew Stasis. Frozen people didn’t talk. Frozen people didn’t think. Frozen people didn’t even dream.
And yet a frozen person had sent her an email with just three words.
Come see me.
Her first instinct had been to delete it as spam. But who the hell would be sending her spam in the vast swathes of empty space that permeated the distances between the stars? Little green men?
Was one of the crew playing a practical joke on her? Possibly but it was far too cruel to be credible as a joke. Were they screwing with her head? Also possible but Rihoko couldn’t believe that any of the crew could be that deliberately malicious or callous.
The email had come from her mother’s ship-board email account. It had been a reply to Rihoko’s latest email. It had to be her mother sending the message. Logically she knew it couldn’t be her mother sending the message. Her heart said otherwise.
Rihoko had come to a decision. If her heart said one thing and logic another, then screw logic. She was doing what she felt was right. She was doing what she knew was right. Everything about it felt right.
Rihoko had gone to them and asked that she be allowed to see her Mother. They’d said no, of course, dismissed her pleas as wishful thinking and had even gone so far as to blame the message she’d received as a bug in ships AI.
Rihoko knew better, though. Nara was her friend. Nara never lied to her. Nara had told her stories before bedtime ever since she’d been six years old and had kept her company through the long interminable months when she had been bedridden and weak trying to adapt to the increased weight of gravity. Even if the ships AI had lost its mind and a good chunk of its circuits to a gamma ray burst ten years ago the computer was still her friend.
“Still misleading them Nara?” asked Rihoko.
A nearby speaker chirped into life, “Pink daisies taste like triangle” stated Nara, the ships AI.
“You’re doing well, thank you Nara,” said Rihoko.
“Triangles are pink,” responded Nara absently before the speaker chirped back into lifelessness.
Rihoko and Nara had built up an unlikely friendship over the years. The computer had adopted a crazy kind of gobbledygook in place of its once eloquent speech and concise answers since its deterioration. It was easy to dismiss if one thought of Nara merely as a machine that had to do its job.
Rihoko had long since built past that kind of hollow relationship. The computer had become a friend, a sibling… perhaps even a surrogate parent to her. The sentences, even the words themselves may have been nonsensical blather but the meaning behind them was clear. Positive statements were for positive outcomes. Negative statements were for negative outcomes. Complete gibberish stood in for uncertainty. Even crippled and insane the computer could still talk to the crew… if they would only listen.
Rihoko picked herself up and dragged her leaden limbs through the high gravity corridor. She had to be careful. A misstep would be easy even if she had already adjusted her walk to the increased weight. Running was out of the question. A single fall, given her low gravity upbringing, would easily mean broken bones. Eventually she came to a crossway and stopped. A speaker chirped into life.
“It sails upon the leftward wind, palms open to meet with the maiden of sorrowful slumber, sleeping the sleep of the dead yet not, yet not, yet not, yet not, yet not…”
Rihoko sighed and ran a hand over the speaker, a brief pat followed by a gentle stroke, the closest intimacy she could share with Nara at the moment. The computer had told her, if cryptically, to go left to find Crew Stasis before entering a psychotic loop.
She’d barely walked one hundred meters and she was already panting and exhausted. Even so, relief was at the end of the corridor in the form of a lift. It led straight to Crew Stasis on the inner decks, an area where the crushing force of gravity was lighter, more tolerable to her wiry body.
Rihoko made a misstep as she climbed into the lift, falling onto her knee. She yelped in pain and tried to bring herself to the floor as gently as she could. The sharp pain in her legs however told her that she had likely bruised herself severely. With a final effort, she managed to hit the button for Crew Stasis.
She panted as the lift rose, pressing her harder to the floor, trying to regain her breath and her heart thundered in her ears as her vision swam. If she exerted herself too much more in this gravity she knew she would faint. It had happened to her hundreds of times as she’d been adjusting and most often when she’d only just started out.
The blackouts had terrified her as a child. One moment she’d be playing, then she would feel woozy, and the next thing she knew she’d wake up hours later, often in bed with bruises and sometimes even a broken bone.
The idea that she could so very easily lose control like that had made her timid of exerting herself too hard. Strenuous exercise, marathons, swimming and especially contact sports had been things she’d avoided like the plague. The only thing she’d felt remotely safe doing would be time on the Exercycle or the occasional bout of weightlifting, things that she could easily stop doing if she started to feel too woozy.
With every passing floor she felt the weight literally lifting from her shoulders. Her heart beat finally slowed to something approaching normal and her panting was finally paying off by delivering much needed oxygen to her overtaxed muscles. She picked herself up from the floor feeling both relieved and remarkably light albeit still tired.
Her first step out of the lift overshot and she stumbled.
“Ah shit!” she yelped as she grabbed onto a handrail built into the wall expressly for such a saving move.
Wiry and tall, Rihoko had always been somewhat uncoordinated. The crew had a word for it: ‘Unco’. It was a consequence of her Martian birthright; she had grown tall and thin, far too wiry to get around properly in normal gravity.
Steadying herself, she dispelled the thoughts of her past from her mind. She might once have had that excuse, but she had adapted since then. Special drugs had been administered, at one point even an operation, to help her body adapt. Her stumble wasn’t because of her body, but her mind. Her brain had been expecting more weight and had overcompensated. That’s what had made her overshoot her first step.
Hand on the rail, she quickly adapted with every successive step. Each one led her closer to her goal. When she was half way there she didn’t even have to think about her steps anymore.
She paused at the Captains cryo pod. Mike Osmund… she remembered him vaguely. He’d been kind to Rihoko and her Mother, she’d never quite found out why. His pod meant that her Mother couldn’t be too far off.
She passed more pods. Some were empty, their occupants long since awoken to deal with the crippled AI and now walking the decks of the Mariner. Many still held frozen, sleeping occupants, unaware of the passage of years while their colleagues aged naturally.
Something had driven Nara insane and damaged her circuits. It wasn’t clear which had come first, the insanity or the damage. The result however had been the same. Nara had been hardcoded to bring some of the crew out of stasis should she encounter any emergency she couldn’t deal with herself.
For some arcane reason Nara brought Rihoko out of stasis and had left her mother, Keiko, frozen. When she was old enough to ask why, Nara could only ever answer with a stream of gibberish that even Rihoko couldn’t understand.
Finally, Rihoko had found her. She was inside a cryo pod with a light covering of frost. A neon blue light illuminated her indolent form giving her a ghostly wraith-like look. She was just as Rihoko remembered her, though she was now taller… shoulder length black hair that curved slightly towards the ends, a look of wistful sadness, as though she knew that her daughter was growing up alone and something that she held in a clenched fist that Rihoko only half remembered… something small but important.
“Hi mum,” she said timidly, “I… I got your email.”
Her frozen mother simply lay there in the pod. Rihoko could see herself in her still young mother. They shared the same hair and face, though she recalled being told she had her father’s nose. By the time they reached Alpha Centauri and could revive her, Keiko and Rihoko would be, physically, both in their twenties.
“Mum,” she said, gathering her courage and her heart, “Mum I just want you to know… I love you mum. I miss you. I miss you… so much…”
Her throat hurt and her eyes stung. She slumped to the deck, sobbing…. ten years without her mother, so close and yet so far.
“I love you mum!” she wailed as her tears echoed down the empty halls.
