Ghosts of Earth, Chapter 1

Lana thought it had been a long time since she was here last, watching the dawn light splash out to sea and break over the Spar. It really hadn’t, only a year or two since her last research visit. Still, the spar and the enormous space elevator at its end featured so heavily in her dissertation that it haunted her nightly. It had been a year since she defended her thesis and moved on to greater things. 

Greater things like escorting a Spider postdoc to the university, apparently.

Lana could see the exoatmospheric bud whistling towards the landing platform from kilometers away. It stood out against the morning sky like a speck of dust on her glasses, smudging its way through the ragged clouds as they faded from orange to grey with the first stabs of sunlight brightening to flat morning light. She blew a curl of deep brown hair out of her face. 

The air in the open terminal already shimmered with heat from the vast conical pots of the street vendors, their seafood smells mixing nauseously with pollution from the city. This terminal, the long carbon spar connected to the old city by way of preserved brick and stone. And out to sea, far enough that it wasn’t visible with the low clouds, was the space lift. She was thankful at least to not be taking the tram out to the lift base this time, speeding over the dark morning waves and waiting on the subtly shifting platform. 

It was then that the bud jittered into place over one of the landing pads above her, the last of its sonic booms timed with the firing of the stopping jets. Lana braced for the bang, watching as the bud stopped with enough force to liquify any reasonable person, its many jets, laid out unsettlingly over the darkly webbed surface, pulsing in strange staccato sequences to steady itself to the ground. The street vendor’s little tents and flags whipped in the sudden wind, their pots of oil ripple at the force of the bud’s arrival, the beggar’s mouth cathedrals’, their cobbled together instruments, let loose a discordant hum. 

Lana stepped from the terminal waiting area and up towards the landing pad, watching it settle with her hands behind her back. She fiddled, picking at a ring on a finger, and stopped several steps from the top as the bud hissed with decompression. It made a sickening moist slop of a sound as the petals opened. The living impact slime, all greasy gray metallic stringiness, stuck to the lips of the bud’s bladed opening and sluiced aside as a figure clad in tight grey plastic pulled herself forward cheerily. 

“Hi! Lana right, Lana Soo-”, the figure teetered unsteady in the snug entryway for a moment, passerine, cradled as if in a nest by the unfolding petals of the craft, her voice unsteady and interrupted by a grinding metallic sound that seemed to accompany each word, before she was cut off. 

“-Xochitl,” Lana corrected, awkwardly helping the little starling of a person out of the bud and shaking her hand with the same movement, shaking a little too much to be properly helpful but not enough to pass off the movement as a real handshake. 

“And you’re Bay…”, stepping back a moment, Lana tucked her arm to her side with the forearm outstretched and seemed to suddenly relax. The motion was accompanied with a similar droning metallic sound, with a startling series of clicks and booms. The twittering data language of the Spiders always unsettled Lana. Hearing the port full of it was more grating than the shocks of the slowing bud. But here it was required of her, to speak the language of the Thread, to grind out data into a shared metaphysical space. Without the abstraction layer provided by a Thread implant, it would have sounded of metallic birdcall and the garish jangling of a broken radio. But between them, in abstraction, the data acted on the air, becoming lush with emotion: a half glimpsed sunlit afternoon, time spent well and wholly during a summer at the park. The syncopation hid the immense data of a Webwork name, pouring out into an abstraction overlay surrounding the two women. It hung there between them like smoke, hazy and wafting, for a half breath or less, then spilled away with the rest of the thick air sloshing in from the sea. Sometimes Lana even wished she could see it too.

“Oh wonderful! Lovely inflection!” Beamed Bay, slow to extract her gloved hand from Lana’s, and then brushing herself down, knocking the remaining flecks of grey living material off her suit. She launched into the formal greeting of the Webwork, “Shall we spin together?” 

Lana almost bit her tongue, but the response was already out, ingrained from years of university dinners, “May our thread be strong.” They both bowed gently, in a courteously small way, and the last dregs of stray data around them sparkled in the morning light.  

“Oh I can already tell I’m going to like you. You’re the girl who wrote that paper about the… the layers of ruins under the Spar foundation right?” Bay’s own speech was stilted, slightly hoarse from lack of use, and cut through with the metallic buzz that crept into the pauses between words. Threaded individuals often went long times without speaking with their tongues, using the Thread itself to stream data between each other in a cacophony of riotous noise: or, when subtlety called, through light and smells produced in the abstraction overlay by the surgically embedded living machines. In Cotanique it was more common to speak naturally. The port was filled both with the clanging of data and the burblingly soft vowels of the Nique language. 

“Ah, yeah, it was back and forth for a long while under there. We’ll see all the plaques and memorials the Webwork’s put in over the years when we walk by. But there’s a whole layer or two of Nique buildings down there too, unlabeled.”

“Just fascinating…” stepping forward off the pad and down to Lana’s level on the steps, Bay buckled almost immediately. Lana caught her by the elbow and helped her back up as Bay clutched at her head, evidently in intense pain, “what the fuck is that? That sound!?”

“Oof, kill your public abstraction overlay, we don’t use that here.” 

Lana glanced around as she helped Bay straighten again, more helpfully this time. Bay seemed to relax artificially for a moment as she disabled her connection with the public overlay, something unthinkable in her home city of Aba. .

“Nooo? But, wait, you’re Threaded, right?” 

Bay had reluctantly touched the side of her head while Lana grasped her elbow, she was full of pins and needles after the aural assault and began shaking herself out, bouncing on her toes and flapping her wrists about. She removed her flight gloves and started preening.

“Oh no… Yes, I mean, you know it’s mandatory. But we don’t have the bandwidth here. I think it was 30 something years back, when I was a kid. There was a push from the north to provide overlay services to the whole Cotanique region as a philanthropy kind of thing.” 

Lana continued, helping Bay down from the pad and into the surrounding open terminal, now starting to fill with the usual traffic, Webwork workers, traders, serious people speaking rapidly aloud, and in some cases muted and only subvocalizing, seeming to stare off into the distance as they narrowly avoided the vendors and droning beggars nearby on their narrow way to the Spar’s tramline and the space lift itself. This terminal was embedded into a cliff to the southern side of the old city. With landing pads stretching along the great construction of the Spar as it jutted out to sea. Clear walls in some places pointed to features of geological and anthropological importance as they walked into the cliffs. Beyond were the stairs down to street level, and the light rail, and the steep cove of the old city with the gently rising hills of the larger sprawl to the north.

“They kept having trouble, protestors putting up unauthorized hallucinations, graffitos marking up official webwork stations. And anyway, that was 20 years ago. The Fine Webwork got as far as putting up the test tone.” 

“No way! They wouldn’t just leave that up?! That would be tremendously unethical” Bay dismissively finished wringing out her hands as she moved onto reading another plaque in the wall, as much gawking as following Lana. 

“Like I said we just don’t use it much, the uni has a centralized abstraction overlay though so it’s useful there. Lots of businesses and buildings do too in the newer districts.”

“Good! Because I have my whole room photomapped, I would be dreadfully distraught if I couldn’t download it here too.” 

There was a pause for a moment as they pushed their way out from the cliffs and into the maze of stairways and levels of the old city itself. It took more concentration to wind through the masses and down into the tight alleys below. While Lana kept her eyes ahead, focused on dodging the more vacant passerby, Bay was craning her neck to look around. 

Before the streets swallowed the morning light, she saw out over the slopes of the city, spread out on all sides of the bay. An array of stark white brush strokes where old and open palaces lay, each one filled with makeshift bright flashes of color where tarps and canvas walls were hung. The jumbled gray and silver buildings where the Webwork spun curved organic lines into nests of uneven honeycomb. And blocky apartamentos, covered in murals and memorials, and then covered again. They all abut each other, caught in the act of tumbling, the organic shapes and sharp linework worming through each other amongst the tent cities on their roofs and side streets. There were signs in many scripts; physical billboards, not just hallucinations in the overlay; advertisements on shops and shanty hostels blaring to life with real color, and squiggly painted codes on almost every surface of the city, just begging to be opened in the Thread. Some, she could see, squirreled words into their design so that she could see the author, or the meaning, or the group. 

BlackQatBar, with a number of broken bottles fading into the script. 

“Stop Killing Us,”  and the Webwork symbol crossed out many times 

And what looked to be an ominously tall rendering of the space lift on the side of a building, jittering every moment in and out of view. 

It made Bay feel as if she was putting on an well fitted pair of pants: reading again, as she did for exams at the university, without the Thread’s help. Deciphering old carvings and illuminations, and arguing in paper-after-paper about the context of a specific symbological reference, or the right way up for a complicated piece of abstract art. She gulped the thick air of the old city, heavy and uncomfortable, but filled with a tingling nervous energy.

As she and Lana stepped into the busy streets outside the port, Bay’s enthusiasm bubbled over and she recalled her company, “Lana! We must be passing some of those unlabeled layers you were writing about?” 

“Oh, yeah… no,” Lana looked up absently and twisted back a little, her linen jacket swaying open briefly, showing how the pale undershirt was tucked into her relaxed pants, “you saw them back up towards the terminal, and there’s more at other terminals higher up. We’re at the oldest level now already, even though it’s still a ways down to the sea.” She stamped sandled feet onto the rough brick, “see the cobblestones, all original down here. There’s a foundations here and all down below us as we head North.” She chuckled, “And besides, that paper is a year or two out of date now, some other grad student will be rewriting what I did next year for certain.” 

“I doubt it, I was almost the only one in the Nique program back at Aba, and the others mostly sat in for the elective. Not that your paper wasn’t widely read of course.”

 It was one of those moments where Lana didn’t know what to think. Was that meant as a compliment? A jibe at her people’s expense? It couldn’t be good that there was waning interest in her people’s history in the Webwork, but perhaps if the Nique were left alone they could do more to reclaim their own history, their own place in the world. She decided not to say anything. A wave of sporadic honking spread through the scooter traffic on the street below. The narrow staircase was trashed with cigarette butts, and smelled piney and acrid. They walked into the muddy light of the street.

Bay was suddenly embarrassed, pausing to kick at the smoothly worn stones, “About where we first landed then.” she looked out to sea for a moment, along the trailing shadow of the spar’s boardwalk. Even here on the rim of the cove there were ropes connecting overhead to anchors in the cliffs, and a tangle of electrical wires, plants, walkways, and tents strung haphazardly along. It all fell towards the sea, obscuring any view of the coast itself. And farther, out in the bay, ships and docks and networks of rope bridges swayed in the distant waves. 

She turned back towards the street. “The hotels around here are newer though?” she pointed at the concrete blocks they were coming up on as they led into the old city astride the port. The buildings were almost ten stories tall, with another story at least of overhanging tents and ropework. 

Lana was already tired, “Yeah, you can tell by the bullet holes. Or, I mean, them not being there.” 

Bay gasped lightly, Lana reconsidering the sarcastic laugh that had almost escaped. An especially loud rickshaw driver sliced through them, and Bay balanced on the curb to avoid the driver. 

Lana needed to change the subject. This is going to be a miserable summer, she moaned, internally. She watched Bay dance in and out of the road in her silver slicksuit, between the parked and moving scooters.  

“Wait a sec! We should probably stop at one of these shops for some clothes. You can’t have outfit abstraction overlays on all the time anymore, and I don’t think you’d want to meet Mikil–Professor Amandou in that.” Adding, “not that he’d mind, of course,” under her breath. 

“Oh fuck, I didn’t even realize! I have a cute dress on right now and everything, here let me…” Bay reached out to touch Lana’s hand again, this time without her gloves, the air around her vibrating slightly as the data sought a connection, but the other girl stepped back just enough to miss the attempt. She brushed a strand of curly hair out of her face. It could have been accidental, and it left Bay precariously balanced on the curb for a second, dropping her hand as the moment passed, and raising her eyebrows a little. Around them, colorful traffic spun past, one rickshaw or ycle after another pulling up to let off a passenger or honking as they darted back out into the crush of people. 

“Here, this place is pretty good, I knew the owner’s cousin,” Lana lifted a canvas flap on a food stall, pushing through a few stacks of onions to a shop street level in one of the hotel buildings. 

Bay trailed behind, shouting, “pardon, pardon” to the people she bumped into trying to follow Lana close enough to keep up.

They were streets deep now, the last of the cloudy morning light tangled up in the nets of the city. Steam rose; from the drying laundry, the canvas tarps and walkways, the muggy streets. To the north, up the hill from the harbor, through the palatial open spaces webbed with tents and aerial paths, rocked Cotanique’s light rail. At the upper edge of the city the train slowed: the sunbaked stucco houses and concrete high rises began to mix more and more with foamlike honeycombs of the Webwork replacements. Glassy buildings oozed over the cracked streets. Soon, the wide lawns of the university wheeled into view. 

It was afternoon by the time the girls made it to campus, and by then, Lana was thoroughly tired of talking about the building methods of her people, and more tired still that this spider girl from the north seemed to both know, and care, as much as she.

***

With a casual look over his shoulder the man in the white turtleneck and cargo shorts opened his hand to show the door his palm, waving it slightly when nothing happened at first. It took him bending the first digit on his pointer finger briefly for the glass door to slide open, as he huffed at himself for the forgetfulness. He checked again through the glass as he stepped inside the dorm, but the campus was quiet with most students back home for the summer. His Thread sparkled at the corners of his vision, letting him know there were overlay objects nearby, and some of the lamps and small tables on the side of the hallway were ornately formed out of silver-gray material, no doubt vibrantly colored if he were to pay enough attention. Ignoring them he made his way down the hall to an emergency access door, rendered artistically interesting with layers of careful mural work, and hasty grey coverups from the janitors. It swung open into a dusty flight of stairs, metal railings and concrete flooring, none of the living material of the rest of the dorm. The stairs went up into the few upper floors and the roof garden, but below awash with a dim red light emanating from the subfloor maintenance door. 

He stepped down briskly, grabbing onto the railing to spin around beneath the landing and straightening himself before the maintenance door. This one was metal too, though less covered in the undergrad’s drawings and tags. He breathed out through his nose and motioned again with his hand, with the same open palm. This time it opened without hesitation, no trick of the knuckles. The crisp smell of ozone and old cigarettes poured from the doorway.

It was cramped inside, just a folding chair and table with the ashtray and two stubby cigarette butts on top. A dented but still slim disposable notepad was left on the chair, and at the back of the room a similar door led deeper into the subfloor. A grated cupboard stood on the side wall, filled with various tools, anachronistically made up of wooden handled brooms, screwdriver handles with living material heads, various chemicals, toolbelts, and a lighter or two. But the source of the red light took up most of the room. 

On the far side was the nano-generator. Oozing achingly red, like a naked Thread when pulled from the skin. The circular containment unit was alight with warning signs, and shimmered with overlay suggestions that the man pushed through on his way to the access pad. He blinked them away and glanced down at pulsing electromagnetic jets that stabilized the living material. It was like he could see the back of his own head, the light was bruised and twisted around itself, desperately reaching to hold back the roiling mass. The living material itself looked like a school of fishes off the coast, shimmering in the fractal sunlight below the waves as they darted too rapidly to track. It swarmed over itself, making a mess of things in his visual cortex. 

Blinking back to the access pad he tapped out a school staff emergency code, and signed off with a touch of his thumb to his pinky finger as he waved his hand. The frantic movement of the nano-generator slowed a little. The warning lights dimmed. 

At the maintenance door he hesitated. He doubled back to root around in the ashtray for one of the cigarette butts. Careful not to get any half smoked tobacco on his turtleneck he stooped and left the cigarette in the door frame. He shut the maintenance door gingerly and headed off up the stairs. 

***

As the day passed, the clouds that slewed off the sea and bunched up against the mountains above the city were blasted away by the heat of the sun. It was humid from the morning mist. The lower levels they had traveled through were thrown into blackness. So deep in the city as they had been, Lana and Bay were cast in shadow through most of their trip. But by the time they trotted into the quad ahead of the Archaeology department and Dr. Mikilay Amandou’s office, the sunlight punching through tall buildings was warm enough to have had them panting on their way from the tram. Every edge of the buildings had been etched, arced, and bent into a delicate weave of patterns. Their sharp architectural lines, drawn more from the architectural lineage of the Nique than the bubble-like efficiency of the Webwork, fanned into softness: with each surface stretching into a nest of spires. 

Out of the corner of her eye Bay noticed a flash of color, seeing a bird flit between two of the larger towers of the archival building. It seemed to stop abruptly, falling as swiftly as a piece of space junk. She pulled the moment from recording into her main view, concerned for a moment. It was easy to see after adjusting some of the levels that the bird had simply vanished into the shadows after passing through the halo of sunlight pooling between the towers. Still, she played the video on repeat for a moment, watching the bird fall. 

Lana had taken off the linen jacket, and had tied up her undershirt and sweated through that too. Her warm, dark skin was blushed red, but in a way that looked as if she was just going to get even more tan in the end. Bay had gotten a pair of loose cropped cloth pants, and black tank top, but was still wearing the silvery booties of the slicksuit whose remains were in the shop’s paper bag. Without the slicksuit Lana could see how pale she was, short tousled chestnut hair and yet blond about the eyelashes and brows. Bay was short, though most everyone was to Lana, and her close cut hair and compact upper body smoothly curved down to wide hips and broad legs. Lana knew the Webwork took in all types, but she didn't expect someone so normal looking. Most Spiders from the big cities were all artificial colors and body augmentations. She looked painfully childish scrunching up her face and subvocalizing into the Thread. About halfway from the train to the Archaeology department, Bay had gotten bored of the university’s meager overlay features. 

“Seriously, all you have here are interactive murals?!” Bay picked at the fabric of the top, “you know in Aba there are whole districts transformed by habhackers right? Like they design the whole experience, plants, animals, day/night cycle. People spend weeks places, when they need the break.” 

“You mean to tell me you came here to uncover history with us and you didn’t like all the historical murals.” Lana waited just long enough for Bay to begin forming a hurried retort before continuing, “I mean it’s not like we have the bandwidth anyway. Or the sheer volume of living stuff to build it out of.” 

“Everything is living material in Aba. There’s no default or anything, we just see it as we like.” Bay caught back up with her, “but that's what I was saying, like, that’s why I’m here Lana. I’m interested in the history of your people, this state, and how it’s connected to mine.” She lowered her voice a little, “I know it’s not something many of us have come to look into, and most of the time when we come here it’s strictly on business.” 

Lana couldn’t stop herself from scoffing, “Business,” as a response. After years of postgraduate study in the university it had been a while since someone spouted unadulterated Webwork propaganda at her. It caught her by surprise. 

“Not all bad business these days,” Bay continued untroubled, but couldn’t help to think back to concessions made by the Webwork, decommissioning the Jute military base across the bay from Cotanique, and the tense last days of resistance she remembered the teachers speaking on from time to time when she was younger. She didn’t read faces well, but even she could tell that something had closed off in Lana’s eyes at the discussion of the recent politics. Bay moved back to her interest, “as far as I can tell, a few centuries ago the people of the coordinated remaining states of the Webwork met the people of this coastline. Yes I know there were hostilities but we coexist now. Our peoples are catalysts of growth! You know the story: the more we share the Thread, the more data, the more learning, acceleration on acceleration, singularities and all that. And I think there might be more to it. I think the story of the Nique is important.” 

Lana almost choked on the ridiculous blase tone, important? No fucking shit. She ground her teeth and spat out a terse reply. “Since the colonization of the Cotanique itself happened alongside the hostilities you mention, our research has focused more on the mountains than the coast these days, and we have reason to believe that’s the true concentration of the Cotanique civilization. Not that’s any consolation to those still dying now and then from un-exploded ordnance here in the city,” Lana felt her ears turn pink, as always with the spiders it was one lie after another. Too fluid to be undone by any one stray thread being picked apart, and too solid to break down with a barrage of fact-checking. It made her tired. “Anything relevant to our research in the city area was bombed out long ago, or taken back to museums anyway. I’m sure you got plenty of hands on time with my ancestor’s art, artifacts… the filigree…” She trailed off and waved her hand. The building anger and sadness mixed to choke her from continuing. 

Bay seemed oblivious to the discomfort, at the mention of museums she began to gush over her own research back in Aba. Lana would have paid more attention, or at least pretended to, but couldn’t stop viciously repeating “business” in her head, turning the word around, digesting the different ways it seemed to poison her history in the city. Her family's history and her people, the lack of her people. All business to the spiders. Just the busy work of connecting threads, growing the network. She had almost worked up enough discomfort to tell Bay off again when they reached the door of the Professor’s office. 

Lana left them there to get caught up. It’s not like she hadn’t heard Mikilay’s spiel enough already, and besides, tomorrow, at the proper start of the summer excavation season, she would have plenty of time to be stuck with them both, for hours, as they lugged equipment to the mountain temple in the utility cart. 

No matter, she had a job to do anyway. Outside of hours spent brushing a wall panel, the scanning and pouring over similar artistic motifs, and starting again the next day and the next, outside of the spider graduate student coming into her city and arguing with her about the importance of the Nique, Lana had something else to focus on. She hurried across the hall, down the steps, and across the hall again. Pushing open the graffitied entryway, she carefully turned down the flight of stairs to the subfloor maintenance door, checked it was propped open, and stepped inside. 

***

With a startling radiance, an impossibly bright line of light began to unfold itself across the jagged surface of Le Calliou. The asteroid’s previously dark, rocky texture suddenly cast into silverine brilliance. It was a rough textile, lit so starkly that each pill and bit of loose thread stood out at attention, and the velvet smooth backdrop of space washed out into fuzzy white. The nobbly gravel and metal protrusions of the asteroid's composure all blew into frazzled sparkles of light as the penteconter used the barest of thrust to maneuver into acceleration posture. A light war vessel, pin-like and tapering aggressively towards the rear as the tail guided antimatter along with its trailing guideline, bulbous at the spherical front and bristling with weapons, the penteconter Orizuru became the brightest object in the sky. Its pinprick of exhaust energy grew and grew, throwing everything into black and white for a moment more. And then it was gone, whisking away into the background of stars with shocking speed. Leaving after images shimmering. 

Three hundred million kilometers from earth, Hecate sighed. This was the two-hundred and seventy first time they had seen a penteconter class warship blast off from the safe harbor of Le Calliou. Thirty fifth for the Orizuru. Yet another out for another fruitless trip around the Fine Shell, where the Webwork ran constant observance across their controlled space, and what could be argued as under their control. Hecate absentmindedly chewed on the end of their pencil and scratched another mark on the rough paper of the logbook. 

Hecate had their feet up on the control board. They hung in a bubble, glass all around with a similar trailing tail to the penteconter, in a small observational craft in loose orbit around the port. Their coracle steadied itself from time to time, lazily staying mostly aligned with the docking port. It wasn’t particularly accurate. For the first month or so of this, Hecate had gotten the coracle re-tuned multiple times until Jeth, the poor dockhand they had bullied into most of these systems checks, had become sick of their constant complaining. After, Hecate just frustratedly poked at the manual controls every few hours to account for the overzealous autonomous “corrections”. 

But these days, they just let it drift. 

An amber light on the control panel caught Hecate blinking, and they rushed to slam their chunky magnetized boots back onto the deck. They answered the call with a slap of the button, the mechanical grind of Hecate’s prosthetic arm overzealously crunching against the dash, and not without a few frenzied posture corrections and losing control of the pencil. “Port Authority, Hecate speaking.” 

“Hecate!” the voice popped and buzzed through the coracle’s speakers, but not without sickening enthusiasm remaining insultingly clear, “what a brilliant launch again! Hope you got a great view.” 

The pencil, spinning, caught Hecate in the ear as they pawed at it, the great cuff of their unwieldy suit glancing against its side before they could grab the out of control tool, and sending it ricocheting around the bubble, “Just as good as the last 34 times they refueled here, Authority Gower.”  

“Fuck,” They leaned away from the control panel to reach for the pencil again, as it danced about the grated floor.

“What was that? Everything alright with the Tinswallow there, Hecate? Couldn't quite hear you.”

Hecate had just about strained out of the seat straps before finally grabbing the wayward writing implement, and tucking it again behind their ear, nestled into the short shaved sides of their hair as the rest of their wispy mouse brown waves floated about, “Absolutely, Authority Gower, just taking notes about the exit trajectory, all nominal.” 

“Good, good,” the voice on the speaker paused for a moment, then boomed about the Tinswallow again with a sharp crackle, “anyway just in case we’re cut off again Hecate, let’s do this by the book.” 

Authority Gower seemed to clear his throat, seeming to revel in the pause as Hecate’s blood pressure increased. Rarely had the Le Calliou Port Authority officer been one to enjoy rigid communicative standards, preferring his jaunty gossip, and getting to know each one of the docked craft through regularly enforced “maintenance test drives” which Hecate was certain weren’t mandatory on any of their other deployments. 

After a moment, Authority Gower continued, “Hecate, Observer Class Operative 104-A9, upon conclusion of your current shift on the Tinswallow, report immediately to Calliou’s hardened briefing room C-92. A representative of Wildcat, and myself, Le Calliou Port Acting Authority Gower, will be in attendance. Copy?” 

Hecate’s heart dropped, they were fired for sure, after months of burn out, months of drifting, a year of corkscrewing around the desolate little rock of Le Calliou, Gower had finally found out they weren’t cut out for this. They’d be heading to an even more tedious post next, somewhere back out in the Jupiter Research Priories, or even worse, an orbital cycler, whiling away the decades as the only living inhabitant of an empty cargo carrier, staying frozen until shot with frighteningly rapid recovery drugs at the first sign of some imagined danger hallucinated by the cycler’s drone intelligence. They shuddered at the thought of those cold years, blood pumping in their ears. 

“Copy,” their voice shook, “0500 in C-92.” 

“I mean,” Gower must have heard the tremor in Hecate’s voice, “Jeez, at least take 15 minutes for a caf on the way over, let's make it 0515.”

“Wait, did you say Wildcat?” Their hands twitched, impulsively tapping. Hecate didn’t know whether to be less, or more, terrified of the meeting’s prospects after registering the name, “Gower, what is this meeting about?” 

“Port Authority to you,” his voice bounced again around the compact bubble of the craft, “something personnel related I presume.” 

Hecate’s slumped back against the straps: there it was, some sort of investigation, some sort of exposé, finally disqualifying them from active duty and uncovering the truth about their last job. Unless… “But Authority Gower, ‘you presume?’ Haven’t you met with them yet? Just tell me what I’m in for, might have to pick up something stronger than caf on the way over.”

“I know every damn ship that comes in and out of this rock, Operative.” 

But his tone gave him away, they must not have even told them they were coming. Wildcat, besides emergency rescues, were the only force that could bypass the staggering bureaucracy of the port. Hecate mulled over what that meant, Wildcat showing up out of nowhere without involving their acting superiors. Couldn’t be good, they thought, and leaned back again, putting their boots back up on the panel. 

“Hecate?” It took a moment for them to realize they had been silent for too long to assuage Gower’s bruised ego. 

“Yes Sir, see you and Wildcat at 0515, C-92.”

Little changed in the next 4 hours of Hecate’s shift, besides their boredom being replaced with heart pounding anxiety and cold sweats. By the end, they almost collided with another coracle as they docked, and had to awkwardly salute the angry figure in the next watch. Despite the other figure wearing the same chunky red space suit, and even actually using their helmet during undocking, Hecate could tell it was Arni. It was just their luck that Hecate would run into the only Observer who would file a ‘close call’ report for this. 

They landed and ditched their own space suit into the bubble of the coracle. Dressed in a woolen sweater and ochre padded flight overalls, Hecate debated whether to head straight to the meeting room, or to stop off along the way in a bathroom somewhere to try and calm their building panic attack. It always took a moment to re-adjust to spin gravity after the weightlessness. They took a deep breath, or at least tried too, and mostly felt deflated. 

Hecate tapped their forefinger and thumb together on their fleshed hand, and began to slow their breathing. They touched their thumb to each segment of their other fingers in turn, counting up to 15. They repeated the action on their prosthetic, little metallic taps echoing through the hanger as the haptic pads registered feedback. Calibration, prayer, a mix of both. They felt it in almost the same way, their brain hardly noticing the difference between the hands. With each tap they muttered under their breath and paced farther in from the vast, echoic spaces of the entry dock.

Their hanger fed into a series of catwalks, squeezed into the slim spaces carved out of the asteroid. Even so, with the ever economical use of living space, looking up or down from the wire gantry strung between the bays revealed row upon row of levels. Hundreds of spaces for other small craft, each nestling in snugly. The hallway beyond opened up, though never quite enough to evade the feeling of being underground. Hecate felt claustrophobic. 

There was an airy false sky and fountain. A garden, surrounded by public multi-use areas. Each day, these alcoves would become spaces for anyone who wished to set up shop. They were storefronts, offices, restaurants, whatever a Sibling Worker needed them to be at the time. Today, they were busy. A number of other workers were angling about the courtyard visiting these temporary shops, or meeting after shifts at one of the hobby cafes, or cutting through everyone for work of some kind. Several were busking, playing gaspy music or reciting hymns or poetry. There were people laid out on the lawn itself, basking in the artificial sun. 

Drones almost outnumbered them all; small flying ones or flat and bulky carriers. Some followed mechanics around, assisting with their many tooltipped arms. Others acted as couriers, whizzing about with packages and darting between the people.

Hecate had almost made it through the crowd when they heard someone call out. She had passed a chapel, a group performing some kind of detailed maintenance work and arguing loudly, and the cafe she usually stopped at before shifts. And it was Tam, the sibling worker at the coffee bar, that had yelled. He was waving, his dishwashing gloves splattering water everywhere, a tall man with a pink face and short greying hair despite being only a touch older than Hecate’s 31 standard years. 

It was decided for them then, no time for a cry in the bathroom. It was probably better this way, didn’t want to show off ruddy cheeks and swollen eyes to Wildcat before the meeting. That was for after. Subconsciously they were still tapping their fingers together. They slouched into the stool in front of him, while Tam was struggling slightly to take off gloves. 

“Where you going all dour like that, Sibling Hecate?” 

“I’m cooked, Tam.” Hecate couldn’t stop the first thing that came to mind, they were too busy also stopping their hyperventilation. And besides, it was just Tam. “I think I’m getting discharged.”

“Don’t you hate this job anyway? Coffee?” 

“No, please, I think I might have a heart attack.”  Hecate had stopped pressing into their fingers, and stretched both hands out on the counter anxiously, willing stillness.

“Oh you’re serious.” Tam stopped doing the busy work and leaned over the counter. 

“Gower called me in for a meeting after shift today.”

“Well it can’t be that bad. You’ve been like, fine, here right? Besides complaining to me about not wanting to go to work every time you stop by. 

Hecate tried to say a few different things, but mashed them together at the wrong moment so that their mouth just made a few “um” sounds, maybe a groan. They couldn’t express the real danger and felt knotted up, especially around the still raw area where they had lost their left arm. No matter how hard they shoved the memories back down, they were there, written in Hecate’s flesh. There was always worry. 

“Gower’s a loveable prick anyway, I don’t think he has it in him to discharge anyone. And besides,” Tam quieted, and leaned in further, “at least you aren’t that poor ass that’s got Wildcat here.”

Hecate’s stomach, which had already dropped, was now sinking somewhere below the floor and the next level of Le Calliou. Their hands started again, pressing out the rhythmic syllables, but Hecate’s breath wasn’t with it. Of course everyone already knew there was a Wildcat here. They wondered how long it would be until everyone learned what they had done, or would Wildcat want to keep the investigation private? 

“Ha,” their dry lips cracking, “couldn’t be me.” 

“Oh do tell me if you’re doing crimes that big.” Tam slapped them on the shoulder. “Either way I know that right now it seems grim, but you’ll be fine. Think of the Tenants, the S’s. And this.” 

Tam sat a cup of water down. Hecate was feeling overloaded, and numb, but they took the soft cup and drained it. It was too hot under the sweater, and the fake sunlight. 

“I’d better get going. If I get vac-tubed out of this place can you name a special after me?” 

“Not gonna happen pal: the special, that is.” Tam winked, “Remember, you’ll survive: Pro Omnibus, Pro Deus.” 

Hecate wanted to ask him about his day. To sit and forget and drink together for a moment. Join one of the groups debating in the atrium, sitting around a table with tea and talking about something so lofty as to be unintelligible. They could dissociate then, live in the curves of space and the flow of politics, the shifting lines of control against the Webwork, and forget themself in a poem. They had even gotten quite invested in the drama that Tam got to participate in every day, who gets what space and when and sourcing all the ingredients and consumables of the cafe. The bureaucracy of the port seeped into every aspect of running a service, even something as seemingly simple as making coffee and gossiping. 

But Hecate felt trapped in their body instead, and trapped against the metal of what would be their arm. If they left much later they would only be on time, not attractively early like a good Union worker. They set down the cup of water, a little crushed, said goodbye, and headed for the tubes. 

As Hecate stepped into the small pod to be shot along the tube system, all fast accelerations and dizzying moments of vertigo, they began again to tap and pray. The mechanical prosthetic felt heavy on their shoulder, the scars on their chest almost stung. Their pulse was still quick but Tam’s familiarity had helped a little, or maybe the water. 

Tam’s goodbye turned over in their head. Hecate always wanted it to be helpful; wanted to at least have some touchstone. The motto, the tenants, or the great Manifold Function like the scientists of the priories. They spent almost every day staring into the “great cathedral” of space but no special motive or divine mandate had come to them. And after what happened before their station at the dead end Le Calliou… They shook to fling the feelings off. The tapping moved across their body and seemed to reverberate down the grey halls. It was all drawn too vividly like a dream or half remembered moment. Too close for Hecate to calm. 

They shot through the network of lifts and exits, hardly noticing the rapid changes in speed and weight, and repeated the words in their head anyway: Pro Omnibus, Pro Deus. 

For All. For God.