“So she plays little White Mother for us, we put her down wherever she wants, she goes on home having gratefully agreed to tell nobody, and everybody’s happy and still alive, is that it?”
Diallo grinned wide and white. “She won’t even have a ship’s name to tell her mother.”
“It might work,” said Rumer. “If we don’t run into any transit police or any Peacekeeping Officers she feels like chatting to.”
“Why would she talk to any Blueberries?” asked Diallo, “why leave the ship at all? We are just some nice men of varying degrees of handsomeness taking her to port.”
Kell laughed at that, his loud bulldog bark. “I’ll agree with that! Why leave the ship at all? Hell, I’ll teach her to have fun sittin’ in one spot.”
“You’ll wait ‘til she’s awake, you ugly fuck,” said Rumer. “If she don’t immediately bite your balls off and run screaming from your very presence.”
Kell laughed again, louder and longer. Rumer turned to Diallo.
“She’ll get her ride, but she’ll have to work. You think you can get her to work?”
Diallo paused. The girl’s green eyes flickered open. And she sat up.
Or rather, she tried to sit up, squirming strangely for several minutes before going limp, and saying, in a slightly strained voice: “Could one of you please help me up?”
Nobody moved for a second. Diallo took her by the arm, and when that proved insufficient, grabbed her by the armpits, and propped her against the corner. Her feet were bare, and her legs dangled off the edge of the bunk, limp and pale. “Thank you,” she said.
Diallo answered with a nod.
The girl looked around her, not exactly frightened. Not exactly. But looking a little like she’d been thrown into an icy gray lake, and was just now bringing her head up out of the water to discover which of them had done it to her. “Who…What…happened? Where is this?”
Rumer thought it best to let her have it all at once. “I am the more-or-less captain, Rumer Pilgrim, and you are currently a passenger aboard my ship, this streamlined and classically engineered cargo vessel you see before you.”
“Why…?”
“Well, young lady, because your own is presently floating through deep space like a chunk of particularly metal-rich frozen shit. Now, I don’t know who you are, and I don’t really care to. But you’ve got to know that we’ve gone pretty well out of our way to pick you up. Now, I didn’t mind doing it, and you’re welcome. We’ll drop you off soon as we’re able, anyplace you want to be, so long as it’s not a place where people are likely to get up in our business. But before that happens…what?”
The girl was shaking her head, green eyes dry. “The ship, I was just…how did…?” She blinked, touched her head bandage, and suddenly settled on a question. “Your name’s Rumer Pilgrim?”
“That’s right.”
“That’s your real name?”
Rumer frowned. “Never had another.”
There was the smallest flick of a smile on that pink mouth. “So your name is actually ‘Pilgrim, Pilgrim’.”
“No.” Rumer Pilgrim looked at her with narrower eyes than he intended. “No, and I can’t say I know what you’re playing at.”
The girl’s smile widened the littlest bit. “Nothing. Never mind.”
“Young lady, if you’d rather not ride with us…”
“No, no. It’s fine. Thank you…Thank you.”
Rumer nodded.
She let out a somewhat shuddering breath of air. She looked around. “Sorry…can I have my chair, please? Where did you put my chair?”
Rumer blinked. Blinked again. “What chair?”
Margo had been busy hiding when the crash occurred.
She was trying to find a way to get lost and freeze to death inside the “Antarctic Exploration” levels of the ship’s educational Ages of Earth VR. You never could get really lost, of course. Margo knew that. Even the game’s wrong turns and avalanches and blinding snowstorms were all part of a network of programmed paths with beginnings, middles and ends.
But on the outgoing flight, a kid who’d been angling to get a ride in her chair had tried to convince her that if you wandered far away enough from all the computer-generated explorers and the Prince Charles Mountains and the penguins, ignoring the game’s copious temperature warnings and the automatic chattering of your teeth, the VR would give you a slow and dramatic “death” on the spectacularly shimmering ice.
She’d read everything interesting on the ship’s library terminal, and at least half-watched all the films available in the tiny holo-theater, and the VR terminals were the only other place the servitors couldn’t follow her.
It had been a full two weeks of dodging the servitors. Everywhere, the servitors.
Margo had brought one droid for the return journey from Polis. Her mother had supplied the ship with the other ten. One to three of them were always hovering nearby, chirpy little orbs of plastic and metal that went into fits of attentiveness every time their sensors detected movement: “Hello. Do you need assistance? What would you like to do? Please repeat what you would like to do. If you don’t know what you would like to do, I can make suggestions. The time is now 12:30. Are you hungry? If you’d like, I can access the network to tell you what is currently available in the kitchen…”
It had been her mother’s idea of Margo “traveling alone.” Most of the swarm even had the U.N. Sky logo painted on them, just in case anyone was not aware they were handling a diplomat’s daughter. Every corridor she went down, every room she entered, her mother’s re-appropriated machines followed, causing nearly everybody to give her and the chair an artificially wide berth.
It was exactly like she was nine years old again, the only kid in her UN-run classroom flanked by droids that were programmed to answer her questions, and pick up things she let fall, and keep her schedule, and re-purify her water, and silently alert the teacher if she, Margo, wet herself.
And so, fifteen-year-old Margo had regressed a bit, sending the servitors to run baths or make sandwiches or compile obscure information she didn’t want. Luring them into closets and cupboards and password-protecting the doors. She’d even managed to send a servitor sailing into a wall of its own accord, which she hadn’t done in years.
And hiding. Lots of hiding. The nice thing about servitors is that if you tell them you want to spend all remaining 10 hours of the journey harassing allosauruses in the Jurassic United States, or deliberately trying to freeze to death in early 20th century Antarctica, they don’t ask you if you’d rather be doing something more constructive with your time.
It was probably being all strapped in to the VR system that saved her life. She didn’t feel the crash. She didn’t hear or see the crash. Her only thought as everything around her went blinding white, was that something interesting was finally happening in her game.
And when she opened her eyes next, what she saw was the factory-made steel ceiling of the dirtiest, dankest little room she’d ever been in.
She wouldn’t stop talking about the chair, even after Rumer told her they hadn’t picked anything like that up. “Are you sure? Are you sure? It has a call function, it’ll come right to me.” Like she thought they’d find it tucked away in the corner of the cargo bay if they just looked hard enough.
When, after about a half hour, the girl was convinced they were not hiding the damn thing from her, she seemed to think they were going back for it. Even Kell’s outright laugh did not cure her of that delusion. “How long was I out?” she asked. “It didn’t feel like that long. It couldn’t possibly be that big a jump from here to there.”