Chapter One, Part Four
Consciousness trickled in slowly, buoying Julie upward from a deep, nearly dreamless sleep toward the waking world. Along the way, snippets of dream and memory fluttered around her like cleaning drones agitated by someone flipping on a light off-cycle. Voices, some deeply familiar, some all but new, murmuring in a cascade. Familiar scents, underlaid by the sharp smell of a ship with heavily refurbished air cleaners (she could fix that pretty easily) seeping in from the waking world.
A memory: Julie, no more than six years old, gawking at a display of a mining mech, her soft little hand holding tight to her mother's fingers as she pointed with the other. "Lookit Mami! Big 'bot! And issa got a person innit!" The entire thing was scaled down, making it seem as if a child could pilot one of the machines. "I wanna ride the 'bot too! Can I ride 'bot?"
On her other side, her mom chuckled quietly, her voice deep - she was one of the station's entertainers, her deep contralto voice and solid pitch affording her a position of being able to make music as her role in society. "Well, if you test well for aptitude, sweetie. So be sure to study and train yourself and maybe you can." Her mother didn't sing anymore; an accident with an environmental system had robbed her of that powerful singing voice, and in the waking world, even with cybernetic replacement of her voicebox, she was relegated to delivering supplies that the robots couldn't be trusted with.
"Now, Julie. We're in public and you're old enough to study for the first aptitudes. Proper speech, sweetie." Her mother was gentle with the chiding, but Julie still shrank a little; her mom thought the baby talk was endearing, and had let her keep using it long after her mother had started trying to correct her speech patterns to standard, for fear of it interfering with her aptitude tests.
"Sorry, mother. I got..." She focused, searching her young mind for the word, before perking up. "Excited! It's big and it looks fun to be in there." She had no idea why you might sit inside a giant robot that looked like it could smash through walls and stomp down the enforcement officers, but she knew with all her young heart that she wanted to do it.
"Well, dear, if you test well they might assign you to it, but it's not a very fun job that they do and they work very long shifts. That's a miner's mech. They're stuck down on Ventra, digging up the ores and minerals to be shipped up for all of us to make things with." Ventra, second planet in the system, a supra-class terrestrial. Julie had tested for ability to tolerate gravity and, not aware that you could train to handle it, had collapsed in moments, breaking her left leg in the process. The memory faded with the low pulse of misery that she'd felt at eight, convinced that she had failed at ever piloting a mech.
Another memory: Fifteen, getting suited into an EVA mech for testing. She'd learned how to train for a variety of gravity environments since that failure, and that had led her to the aptitudes for microgravity mechanical-assist engineering. As the system powered on, she felt a small thrill of glee bubble up from her carefully forgotten childhood - an EVA mech might not be a big robot, but she was still being trusted to pilot one.
"All right, students. Spin is coming to a stop in sixty seconds. Breathing exercises now. Anyone who vomits inside their suit will be the one cleaning it out afterwards." The assessor's voice indicated that she felt certain at least one of them would be tasked with cleanup, and Julie resolved to not be the one doing it.
The loss of gravity was gentle, more a weird sense that the world was moving for a few moments as the spin slowed and stopped; she felt briefly dizzy, but her effort to train paid off as a simple breathing and focus exercise steadied her until her inner ear caught up and her brain recognized the situation. "All right, then, none of you have failed yet, so testing can begin. Engage maglocks, form up in your assigned positions."
Most of the test was routine - show that you could control the machine while maglocked, then disengage the locks and perform a slow, careful circuit. A few of the hopefuls failed at that one and were retrieved after they started to panic, microgravity flight overwhelming them. It was the unexpected part, two-thirds of the way through the drill, that proved the challenge - a small chunk of debris puncturing a hole in the testing bay, causing an abrupt and violent draft, blaring alarms, and causing everyone to panic.
Nearly everyone, anyway. Julie and two others in the EVA suits were quick enough to identify what was going on, even as the assessor was shouting into the microphone for everyone to evacuate; seeing them moving toward the breach, she signaled them and they dropped into a side band. "We need something we can brace over the hole, these suits don't have a full kit."
Suit 3C just blipped a green affirmative and tagged a heavy row of lockers on the positioning system. 6D also blipped a green affirmative, but the channel popped open briefly. "It needs more than one of us to move it. 2F, 3C, can you two carry it? My suit's leg was struck by the others, the right actuator and positioning jet is damaged. I can move to trim inward damage for a better fit."
Julie thumbed her own affirmative, and joined 3C in wrestling the bulky lockers toward the hole - in microgravity, with the air rushing out, it was more a matter of keeping it oriented and not pushing it too much - as 6D activated the EVA suit's cutting laser and began to trim pieces loose, carefully collecting each cut portion and stowing it to a magnetic clamp.
The three of them managed to get the lockers in place and jointly performed a patch weld, sealing it off and double-checking each others' work; they'd just switched back to the main channel and notified the assessor that the bay was safe to reopen when 6D simply stopped moving. "Mm. Apologies, I think more than just the suit leg was damaged."
The recruit, Julie learned afterwards, had been slowly bleeding out inside the suit for the entire period of work, adrenaline leaving her unaware of the injury. She might have been saved, if the assessor had promptly signaled for medical, but the EVA suits couldn't patch through to the main system and she had decided to inspect the patch in the nearly airless environment, ignoring the frantic motions of the two still-active EVA mechs to try to signal what was happening.
The funeral was when Julie decided to try to leave when she got a chance; the pale and pretty person who had helped handle a crisis, eyes closed and expression serene, for their family and friends - and two fellow students who had only known them for that one crisis - to mourn over before their entire existence was recycled for the good of society. Julie hadn't even gotten to learn their name before they were gone, and had been shipped off for training as a neutrino telescope technician before she could ask those who had known them.
Three and a half years later, she opened her eyes to look up at an unfamiliar room, a bubbling mix of childlike glee, fresh sorrow for her unknown fellow student, and abject relief to be escaping.
