“228,” said Lizzie.
“Only 228 walls in Sauerkraut Station,” Gemma nodded, clucking her tongue in sympathy. “All the walls you’ve ever seen. And each of those walls feels like it’s squeezing you. There’s gotta be someplace bigger out there, and you’re gonna die if you don’t step into it. That it?”
Lizzie nodded eagerly, feeling like Gemma had just opened an airlock inside her.
“Perfectly normal at your age,” Gemma concluded. “Is it that kid you liked?”
“Themba.”
Gemma waved her hand in the air, like she was trying to clear away smoke. “Themba, whatever. He’s not important in the specific—for me, it was a merchant marine. Sea-green hair, storm-gray eyes, all adventure and spitfire. The important thing is that he made me think of someplace else. And then I had to go.”
“Daddy said you made your Momma furious,” Lizzie said.
“Oh, how I did!” Gemma’s titanium-gray eyes twinkled. “Left her with just my brother—a two-man crew for a three-man station. It was years before they forgave me.”
“I guess it would be mean to leave you with all that work,” Lizzie said. But Gemma planted her finger right in the center of Lizzie’s chest.
“My happiness shouldn’t enter into it, Lizzie,” she said firmly. “Only you know what’s gonna make you happy. That’s why you should go if you need to, Lizzie—you have to follow your own dreams.”
Lizzie felt absurdly grateful.
“But planets are big and careless,” Gemma continued. “I’ll tell you what I told your Momma: You get swallowed up there. There’s so much room to spare that people just wander away. They don’t need you like station folk do.
“And us spacers are fools down there, Lizzie; you’ve seen how they make us look in the VDRs. They laughed at me for recycling waste urine, for refusing to bathe more’n once a month, for jumping when the wind whistled. Eventually the loneliness ate me up inside, and I crept back home to take my licks. My family forgave me—that’s what families do—but I never forgave myself.”
Lizzie thought how easy Themba had made it seem. Gemma pursed her lips thoughtfully, then added:
“I hate to say it, Lizzie, but Themba’s probably forgotten you by now.”
“Themba would never forget me!”
Lizzie hadn’t meant to yell. Gemma just nodded wearily.
“That’s exactly what I thought about my merchant marine, ’Lizabeth.”
Lizzie knew Gemma didn’t really mean that. Whenever Gemma talked about the nameless merchant marine who was her Momma’s pa, it was always with such a regretful fondness. It was a hurt, Lizzie could tell, but a useful hurt, like the way your muscles ached after a long day of wiping off solar panels.
But Momma must have noticed her loneliness, because within a few days the chores started racking up. Shipments of wiring and water tanks arrived, and Lizzie spent whole days in her EVA-suit tethering vacuum-safe cargo packs to the surface storage hooks.
Then one day she saw a gigantic construct-tug blotting out the stars, a ship big enough to hold whole stations inside its belly, and soon after that a ferry-trawler dragged two huge shiny new rooms towards them, gleaming in the sun. Momma explained that the new hydroponics modules were here, two new rooms and twelve new walls for Lizzie to check.
It was exciting and dangerous work, since adding any new chambers to the station’s architecture could cause any number of dangers; hull breaches, orbit eccentricity, brownouts. The last time they’d added a room was well before Lizzie was born.
“Why do we need more hydroponics, Momma?”
“We’re gonna need more independence,” Momma said. “This’ll give us extra oxygen and more food once the shortages start coming.”
“What shortages?” But Momma refused to talk about it. Gemma nodded grimly in agreement.
Prepping for the addition was a lot of work: Lizzie and Momma had to go over the hull with electrostatic rags to clear it of grit, and then pushed a layer of fresh sealant over everything so the surface was smooth and ready. Then, all three of them maneuvered the bulky units to the hull carefully so the new units almost touched—one bump might cause it to fuse in the wrong place—then clamped and vacuum-welded the metal.
Then the real welding started, which Momma wouldn’t let Lizzie do because the torches could burn through the sleeve of an EVAC suit.
Next, they filled the chambers with cheap test helium to see whether there was any leakage, which of course there was, leading to tedious sealant application. And then there was the big danger when they closed down the station for a day; they air-locked off the rest of the station, broke the vacuum-seal on the new rooms, then carefully opened up the old rooms one by one until they were sure the bond would hold and they wouldn’t lose any expensive oxygen. Lizzie’s ears popped until they pumped in enough fresh O2 to regain equilibrium.
Lizzie was exhausted, because it wasn’t like her other chores had stopped. She still had to greet the incoming guests and fill the sauerkraut vats and serve meals. At one point Lizzie fell asleep on the counter, right in the middle of serving dinner. She woke to find Momma, smiling as if she hadn’t just put in a twenty-hour day, handing plates of thawed bratwurst to grateful travelers… And Lizzie felt shamed for being so weak, even though Momma never mentioned it, that she worked triple-shifts.
When that was done, they had to prime the hydroponics—filling the circulation system with nutrient water, lining the trays with diahydro grit, planting the seedlets. They even installed locks, which was weird; the old chamber never had locks.
On the day of the new hydroponics opening, Lizzie was thrilled to find that Momma had splurged for a sugar-cake. Everyone wore the celebration hats from storage, and Momma gave Lizzie some wonderful news: Lizzie was in charge of all the hydroponics.
“You grew those cabbages better than I could,” Momma said proudly. “You got your Daddy’s native thumb.” That made Lizzie beam with pride, and she stayed up after shutdown cycle tending to the tender shoots of soybeans and oxyvines.
When she harvested her first ear of corn, she went to the observation deck and duct-taped it to the window so Daddy would see it on his next orbit.
Yet every day, she wondered what Themba was doing. She asked Momma about sending him a text, but Momma said intra-planet textbursts were expensive. All their money was tied up in the new hydroponics, anyway.
That was when the Gineer arrived.
Lizzie went to greet the incoming customers, but when the airlocks cycled, it didn’t smell of BO and pot; it stank of ozone and WD-40. She started to say, “Welcome to Sauerkraut Station, the homiest place in the stars,” like always, but as she did there was a “HUP!” from the inside and ten soldiers came tramping out in a neat line.
It was almost like a dance, the way they came out; each soldier had the same bulging foreheads of Themba’s escorts, a sure sign of vat-grown folks. And like Themba’s escorts, they wore reflective jet-blue uniforms with plastic gold piping on the shoulders, though these uniforms had a dullness to them; some of them had tiny, ragged holes.
Unlike Themba’s escorts, they clasped black needlers. They fanned out before the airlock in a triangle pattern, and when their eyes moved the tip of their rifles followed their gaze, ready to spray death at whatever they saw. Lizzie trembled as those rifle-barrels swept across her, but she locked her knees, determined not to show disrespect to a paying guest.
When they were done, they yelled “CLEAR!” The commander came striding out of the back, as calm as her troops were nervous. She was flat-foreheaded, tight-skinned as a drum, with a long rope of braided red hair tied neatly around her waist. Her suit was spotless, which could have meant she’d never seen combat, but to Lizzie that seemed unthinkable; she was thin, sharp, attendant.