That Which Pulls

I stood in the bottom of my ship as the bottom docking clamp, just above my head, let out a hiss as the station's interlock made a vacuum-proof seal. Thanks to how Dusty Star's gravity was set, I was inverted to the ship with my feet firmly planted on what really should have been the ceiling. A hiss echoed above me as the docking clamp unfurled and chilled humid air washed over me. Luckily, the ladder was lined up properly so that when I moved from Dusty's gravity well to the station's I would just be kneeling on the ladder and could walk the rest of the way. Station maintenance misaligned docking ports sometimes; turning a ladder into monkey bars after 72 hours in a ship was a poor surprise.

The lights in the interlock linkage swapped from red to white, so I climbed up the ladder. As I passed through the open port of Dusty's docking clamp, gravity fell away and I switched on the magnets in my boots. Marke might have decided to leave, but at least he left behind some good ideas; having to hook my feet around every rung I climbed was an annoyance I was glad to do without.

I pulled my way along the ladder, rung after rung. The station workers like me always got sent to dock at the unimproved docking linkages, so nothing mechanized was installed within the linkage; no rotating walkways, no movements aides - just a fucking ladder. TR-13 wasn't where I usually attached to the station, so I didn't know where along the ladder it would be that station gravity would kick in. At rung 647 (helpfully labeled, but I counted them anyways to pass the time) the helmet of my pressure suit went from weightless to pulling my head down suddenly enough that I bonked my forehead against the ladder that was suddenly beneath me instead of in front of me.

Three rungs later, and I was walking toward the station along the worst walk way ever made, used filter banging against my knees with every step I took. It hung off a tether from my belt to keep it from floating somewhere inconvenient, since I had changed it for a new spare I had forgotten about. Doing my best to ignore the filter, it just took walking to rung 1429 to reach the airlock on the station side of the linkage. As I waited for the airlock to cycle, I looked back at the almost 1500 meters I had crossed. There was a fucking cloud floating through the linkage. Whoever was on atmosphere control needed to get their shit together and bring down the humidity.

I stepped into the air lock and popped my helmet as soon as the pressurization light swapped to green. Stepping out onto the rickety catwalk, I paused to take in the view. I was greeted by the massive interior of the stations repair shop, an open hangar meant to provide a pressurized environment meant for the maintenance and assembly of system class ships. The berths were almost empty of spacecraft at the moment, but there was still plenty of noise coming from mechs and techs working on fixing their equipment. The lone ship being worked on had taken a pretty substantial blow; almost half of the ship was missing, and the pieces suspended next to it that had been stripped off so far were nothing more than twisted scrap. I had been the one to pull the wreck in after it collided with an asteroid; listening to what few crew that were left break down over comms when they described the rest of their crew slowly dying from blood loss and sepsis were tough to listen to to say the least.

Normally I would pause to enjoy the sounds of ship repair echoing through the massive bay; the sound of welding, drills, hammering, booster carts, and distant swearing were what I had grown up with. Knowing what ship was being torn apart for usuable parts and scrap had me moving faster than normal.

“ATTENTION STATION PERSONNEL, ATTENTION STATION PERSONNEL. BE ADVISED, THIS STATION WILL BE REPOSITIONING IN 300 STANDARD HOURS. BEGIN PRE-MOVEMENT CHECKLISTS. THIS STATION WILL BE REPOSITIONING IN 300 STANDARD HOURS. BEGIN PRE-MOVEMENT CHECKLISTS. STANDBY TO ASSIST MINING BERTH CONVERSIONS. BEGIN LINKAGE STORAGE. ALL QUALIFIED PERSONNEL, REPORT AVAILABILITY TO THE DOCKMASTER FOR COLLISION REPAIR SCHEDULING.”

I stopped walking and took a deep breath, then scrubbed at my face with my free hand. A mining crew I had docked a week ago had mentioned that the scanners weren’t picking up much more ore at the quality RMC demanded, but there hadn’t been any warning about a system move before now that I knew about. I shook my head and got moving again. It wasn’t my problem yet.

“Tugger!” As I pushed open the door to Tug Base, the controller shouted my name and waved me over as he disappeared into a side office.

“Huh.” 72 was the space traffic controller that has been assigned to the station. I wasn’t sure how it was done, but RMC had given him an implant or something that removed his need to sleep to let him always be on duty. If I had known better, I’d have said the lack of sleep is what made him an ass, but I knew him before he’d become truly full-time, and he was an ass then too.

I eyed the office that STC, the official name for what I called Tug Base, worked out of. It used to be neat and well organized, but with the sheer amount of traffic lately, myself and my fellow tug operators hadn’t had a chance to properly file any of our paperwork. 72 had decided that on top of the digital system that RMC put in place hundreds of years ago, tug operators like myself needed to do physical flight logs by hand at the end of each shift. Even with our ship computers automatically writing them and submitting them through docking datalinks, 72 still insisted.

I made my way to the side door 72 had disappeared through, trying to turn a blind eye to the state of the office. The stacks of paper, most shoulder high on me with the rest even higher, took up most of the floor space that wasn’t occupied by computers or the filter recycling that I quickly tossed my used filter into. I opened the door to 72’s office half way, not wanting to knock over a stack of digital data storage in the way, but I didn’t even have time to close the door after slipping in before 72 started monologuing.

“Your next shift was supposed to be in 18 hours, but as soon as you had that nuclear meltdown handled, I was sent a folder to give to you. No, I don’t know what it has inside. No, I don’t know who delivered it. No, you don’t have the option to refuse. The only thing they told me was refusal would extend your contract indefinitely. This will also excuse you from conversion work. Get out.”

I turned on my heel and walked out of Tug Base, too in shock to be righteously indignant about the state of the office. This was bad. A mandatory contract extension could be the death of a company if the right people heard about it. The fact that, one, I had been tapped for whatever this was either meant I was too important to let go or all to expendable. I knew my employer; whatever this folder contained was probably going to get me killed.

Getting out of conversion work was nice, but helping the station stack ships for mass transit really wasn't that bad of a job, just tedious. Standing on the walkway just outside the Tug Base office, I opened the folder, ignored the massive block of warning text on the first page threatening every possible bad thing if I were not allowed to read the contents of the folder, and read the next page.

TOP SECRET

MEMORANDUM FOR AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL

ATTN: OPERATION BLACKLIGHT

BLACK HOLE HAS LOCATED SUSPECT █████████. BLACKLIGHT TEAM █████████ HAS BEEN TASKED WITH REMOVAL OF █████████ AND THE REACQUISITION OF ███████████████████████ IN THE POSSESION OF █████████.

BLACKLIGHT TEAM █████████ HAS ███████████████ AUTHORIZATION, CODE █████████████████.

BLACKLIGHT TEAM █████████ WILL UTILIZE SPYGLASS CONTRACTOR ███████████, CODE NAME THERIDION, FOR ███████████████████████, AND ██████. TEAM ZZZZZZZZZ WILL UTILIZE THERIDION'S ████████ IN FULL PER █████████████████████████████████ TO ASSURE COOPERATION.

TOP SECRET

What was the point in labeling things as 'Top Secret' if you were going to redact half of the page anyways? It didn't make sense. It seemed to me that it was a safe bet to assume I was Theridion. None of the rest of the memo made sense to me. Who were Black Hole and Spyglass? What is Spyglass supposed to 'utilize' to assure my cooperation? I had read the page over five times before I decided to flip to the next page.

There were 26 more pieces of paper in the folder, but only the first two had anything legible on them; the rest contained what looked like some kind of report, but with so much blackout that I would need to sit down and study them to get any kind of meaning. I snapped the folder closed, tucked it under my arm, and started walking again. This folder was a mystery, sure, but my direct supervisor had told me I was excused from not just my job the next day, but from the massive amount of work I would need to juggle soon, with all the traffic headed to the station that would need towing. I had plenty of time to deal with this redaction-filled mystery later, but what couldn't wait any longer was my stomach.

I passed through 3 bulkhead airlocks before I saw another person. Or, really, he saw me first.

“Tugger! Man, am I glad I caught you. I saw you got removed from the rotation for the move! Did you break something? Did you break someone? I hope you aren't in trouble. Getting in trouble sucks. Enjoy your time off. They told me I would get a week bumped off of my contract for every day I had to cover for you, so you must have really done something bad. What do you think it was? I heard about that reactor meltdown you towed in. Were they all okay? I hope they were. Free radicals aren't radical at all. Hah, get it? Radical? Its some old slang I read about the other day. Its supposed to mean popu-”. A bulkhead closed and cut him off mid-prattle.

Jemes meant well, he did. He just didn't shut up. Getting stuck in an airlock with him was almost as bad as having to listen to 72, but at least Jemes wasn’t actively an asshole. I would deal with Jemes prattling for hours before I had to get a lecture from 72; fuck him, that extraneous paperwork was such a waste of resources. My stomach reminded me that I didn’t need to deal with my coworkers nearly as badly as I needed to feed myself. I wound my way through the stations hallways, too distracted by my thought about the folder I was still holding to acknowledge the people I walked past.

It only made sense that I was Theridion, right? I mean, if I was the suspect there would be no reason to give me warning. Then again, I had no idea who was involved. I didn’t know of any groups called Black Hole, and I had never heard of an Operation Blacklight. I was fairly confident Rumors didn’t have a black ops department, but my contract had kept me busy with all things spacecraft; if it didn’t relate to something with a flight deck and a pressure seal, I didn’t know about it.

My ruminating wasn’t anywhere close to finished by the time I got to my assigned living space. Rumors had seen fit to give me a full service suite when I was running tug ops while 72 was getting his implant(s?) and they had let me keep it when I started flying. What was even better was that I didn’t have a roommate after Marke had left, so it was the one place I was nearly guaranteed privacy.

I held my palm on the pad on the face of the door. A second passed, and then the door pushed in slightly, then split as it whooshed into the wall pockets. I grinned; I would never get tired of that door. I left the lights off in the main room as I walked into the kitchen, dropping the folder that threatened to entirely upend my future plans on the counter. I’d deal with it after I had eaten.

I tapped the light control above my kitchen counter, illuminating the floodlights mounted in the upper cabinets. The shine off the steel made me blink, being that I had already adapted to the darkness of my quarters. I had opened my cooler and was debating frying some mushrooms or just throwing a sandwich together when I heard a cough in the living room.

“Really? A cough? You fucking idiot.”

“Well, fuck. I’m not allowed to ominously cough now? This is bullshit. Can we just bag him now?”

This wasn’t good. I didn’t recognize that voice, but the door I had used was the only way in and out. Whoever else was in here with me must have been waiting for me.