A Planet For Emily

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Suzanne’s eager recruiters turned out to be Sam, the fat one, and Woody whose only redeeming feature was that he was less assertive than Sam. Their immediate boss, a dour man they called Nod because he was always nodding his head when he spoke to anyone, looked her up and down in an appraising way that Suzanne did not like at all and nodded at the other two. But then he treated her like the crew member she was supposed to be, assigning her to the top row of a three-deck bunk squeezed into a corridor, in defiance of safety regulations, and set her to work as a kitchen hand. That was what was meant by the title assistant flight director on board the Paris, it seemed – kitchen hand.

Suzanne did not mind the hard work which could easily have been done by machines, or that there was no ladder to the bunk – she had to haul herself up the rickety structure, stepping on the edge of the bunks below – because she had been used to far worse on Earth Station. At least she had the narrow bunk to herself, and it had advantages.

On the first night, as she settled in, having exchanged messages with her mother before their ships got out of range of normal comms traffic, Sam appeared in the corridor beside the bunks. She had not had a chance to put up screens as the girls in the lower bunks had.

“Hello darling,” he leered, looking up at her. “You want company?”

“No!”

Rods had once told her that the Zards preferred to authorise shipping companies with poor reputations for the Earth Station trading routes, but of course there had been no choice in the matter. She was lucky to make it out and she knew it.

“I c’n keep you warm.”

“I’m warm enough, thank you,” said Suzanne, grasping her knife under the pillow. “There are others you could visit.”

“None as fine as you, darling.”

“Will you two sort it out,” said the girl on the bottom bunk, crossly. “I’m trying to sleep.”

“Yer, right, we should sort it out,” said Sam and he started to climb up the bunks. Being heavier than Suzanne and nowhere near as graceful, the bunks creaked alarmingly.

“Hey watch it,” said the girl on the lower bunk.

“Whadda you doing?” said the girl on the second tier.

“Keep away or we start screaming,” said Suzanne raising her voice.

“Not so loud!” snarled Sam.

He tried to hoist himself into Suzanne’s bunk. As it was only just big enough for her, with barely room to turn over, he wasn’t going to get very far, but as it was he stopped with Suzanne’s knife pressing hard into his testicles. She was on her side with the hand holding the knife underneath her, where Sam could not get at it, and with a blanket over her for good measure. Sam could not see the weapon, but he could feel it.

“Is that a knife?” said Sam. He didn’t look any better close up, and his breath stank.

“It’s not you,” said Suzanne. “It’s me. You’re not welcome.” She prodded with all her might and kicked at the foot Sam had on the edge of her bunk. His foot slid off but he kept hold with one hand and tried to grab Suzanne’s knife hand, through the blankets, with the other, with Suzanne trying to push his bulk off the bunk.

“Sam! What are you doing?” said Nod, who had arrived wearing a thin, tattered dressing gown. “You’re making enough noise to wake half the ship.”

Sam dropped down in front of him, with a distinct thud.

“Bitch has a knife, Nod.”

“He tried to come up here,” said Suzanne.

“I’ll handle it,” said Nod, glancing at her. He led Sam away, whispering. Suzanne heard “captain” and “doesn’t”, but the rest was a murmur.

One of the other girls tossed her up a spare sheet and she made a screen by hanging it over the duct that passed just by her bunk. With the sheet in place, she managed some sleep but the words “captain” and “doesn’t” echoed in her dreams and, when awake, she recalled the way she had been forced aboard, as part of some sort of deal between the two groups in the departure lounge, helped by the fact that there had simply been no time to call for mediation. Perhaps, she thought, the captain had no idea there was an extra person aboard. It was a big ship.

As the days went by, her suspicions were confirmed. Nod rebuffed any attempt at questioning him and kept her hard at work. However, he insisted that she not stray from the kitchen and the crowded living area at the back of it. On no account was she to serve food. The most worrying part was that she also didn’t have a card like all the others had to draw food or even gain bathroom access. Sam told her with an annoying smile that her card was being processed and that she would have to make do with meals drawn by others or borrow a card when she wanted to use the bathroom. The one bright spot was that after the incident at the bunk, Sam restricted himself to occasional grope and leer.

When Suzanne realised that she wasn’t on any passenger or crew list, she decided not to draw attention to herself. If the captain did find out, well, she was not sure what they did with stowaways in space but being put in an airlock and spaced, as Rods had occasionally threatened to do, was a possibility. Instead, she kept busy, kept her distance from Sam and made friends with the two girls on the bunks beneath her. Henrietta, just beneath her, and Annette on the bottom tier were both about her age but were trapped in the catering section of a “fifth rate cruise ship ripping people off” as they put it, because they simply had nowhere else to go. They were separated from their families, but fortunate in that their parents and siblings were in settlements here and there, where at least they would live, for the moment. There were plenty of people on the ship, they told Suzanne, who had been forced to leave or had been unable to reach mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, boyfriends, girlfriends, lovers, cousins, second cousins and best friends forever.

In the meantime, Earth Station had turned into a squalid dictatorship that refused to accept any more people forced on them by the Zards. No one knew what happened to the humans that the new government turned away, and no one really wanted to know. The Zards issued bulletins that certain regrettable but necessary decisions had been made, due to the “limits to available resources”. There was nothing any human could do.

Suzanne was strongly tempted to tell her colleagues about Emily and Fermat, but she knew that the moment she opened her mouth it would be all over the ship, then everyone would message everyone they knew in the settlements and the Zards would quickly find at about it and organise an expedition to take it over. So she kept quiet and comforted herself with the thought that when she was back with The Max, assuming Rods had not fired her and Eve, she would ensure they were enticed to Fermat II by one means or another. For the time being, she told them tales about being a cruise director for Rods.

“I think I’ve heard of him,” said Annette, a short girl with dark hair who also had to fend off Sam’s occasional attentions. “He’s an identity up where we’re going. He did well at boxing, got thrown out of the navy, tried drug smuggling and ended up way out there.”

“I never saw any drugs,” said Suzanne, remembering that Rods had been taunted by being called ‘druggie’ on the day they met, and rumours of the deals her predecessor as cruise director had been making, “but the boxing and the navy part is right, and he doesn’t cheat people. They respect him up that way.”

“Heard he was pretty tough,” said Henrietta, stout and easy going.

“I saw him throw someone through a doorway once,” said Suzanne.

“Was the door open or closed at the time?” asked Annette.

“It was closed,” she said, after a moment’s thought.

Rods did not like his picture taken with or without others, but he had grumpily agreed to a couple during his travels with Suzanne, and these were shown around.

“Seems alright,” said Annette. “What’s he like personally? Nice?”

“He can be grumpy, but if you’re bad tempered right back he doesn’t mind. And he is a gentleman, in many ways. He has his moments.”

“Sounds like you like him, even when he’s grumpy.”

“I want my job back,” said Suzanne, quickly. “I left my sister in it but she’s no good at things like that and he’s had a bad habit of picking blondes from anywhere to be cruise director before I took it on.”

“Did you get the job because you were blonde?”

“I wasn’t blonde when I got it. I was around when the last one got thrown off the ship because she tried to jack it, and his friends told him to take someone .. better.”

“Helps if you’re around at the right time, but what were you doing up there, and why did you go back to Earth Station?” asked Annette.

Suzanne stuck as close to the truth as possible by saying that she had swapped identities to visit her sister and had a fiancé back at Earth Station.

“You should have paid for the other girl, your mother and fiancé all to come out. Maybe you could have owed Rods, you know, convinced him to pay.” Henrietta said this with a sly smile.

“To pay for my fiancé to come out too?”

“Hmmm! Well, the plan isn’t perfect, but then what plan is?”

“I wish I had done something like that, believe me, but we didn’t part on very good terms.” That led to another explanation which required Suzanne to leave out just where the chance remark to her sister had occurred.

Annette, the sharper of Suzanne’s two new friends, got the sense that the newcomer was leaving out parts of the story but thought that if Suzanne did not want to tell them everything she must have a reason.

“Three weeks of this, and you’ll be in that zone,” she said, “If this Rods has got any more openings you’ll keep us in mind?”

“Of course,” said Suzanne, “if I still have the job.”

The days passed slowly. The work in the kitchen became easier as Suzanne understood more about what she was doing, even preparing some of the meals. The whole job should have been mechanised as it almost was on The Maxwell, so that a single cruise director could handle deck loads of passengers, provided they were not very fussy, but labor had become cheap. Why bother with expensive mechanical devices when people could be forced to work their passage? Suzanne concentrated on one day at a time, avoiding Sam, trying to get the work done, chatting to Annette and Henrietta, and watching films on the entertainment systems, although she was mostly too tired when she stopped work. There were no days off.

Brusque and business-like, Nod never responded to Suzanne’s efforts to break the ice. He occasionally bustled her out of the way, and even once insisted that she lie on her bunk while someone visited the galley, which was fine by her. Woody eyed her but kept away. It was Sam’s knowing smiles that worried Suzanne most of all, even more than his occasional gropes. She got the feeling that the Sam, Nod and Woody trio had something in store for her, but what? She had Annette and Henrietta talk about Rods in Sam’s hearing, as a very good friend of hers, status indeterminate, who threw men through doors, had close connections with organised crime bosses and law enforcement officials, and tortured men in his spaceship. Sam just smiled slyly, as if he knew it was all a trick and moved away.

After too many days to count, as far as Suzanne was concerned, Annette told her that the stop after next would be Janice IV. She knew the port! It was on the edge of Rods’ area. In fact, she knew the resident law enforcement officer and his wife, and that they owed money to Rods, or at least did when she had kept the books. This point had been the subject of a business-like discussion between herself and Mrs Law Enforcement. What was her name? Suzanne had in fact kept records of her dealings in the area on her own PA – no one had told her not to – and had the name in a flash. Anne Levinson; husband’s name John. She would dash through the airlock and drop the Levinson name. With any luck the port officials would remember her, and she wouldn’t even need to do that. The galley of The Paris would then be a not very fond memory. She could survive on the money owed by the Levinsons, until Rods arrived, assuming, of course, that he had not already picked up an interesting blonde from Stacey’s to be the next cruise director. Men! He had paid for the passage back, but that was weeks ago now and Stacey’s was still there.

Suzanne worked out just how to get to the main airlock, from a plan Annette downloaded from the ship’s system, and briefed both colleagues to tell her when the way was clear. Fortunately, ship security was not concerned about people leaving the vessel. The problem was keeping unauthorised people out of it. Her escape should be a piece of cake.

Two days before they reached Janice IV, with Suzanne trying not to count the hours, Nod complained about some missing salad containers.

“But I checked them off this morning,” said Suzanne.

“Well, they’re not there now. They’re gone missing. You ladies haven’t been eating the salads now have you?”

“When do we get time to eat?” asked Annette.

“They just walked off by themselves, I suppose,” said Nod.

Suzanne looked around. Neither Sam nor Woody were around and she had not seen them all shift.

“I’ll go and check on them,” she said “They’ve probably just been shifted.”

The cramped food locker, just off the equally cramped kitchen was used to store food taken out of the ship’s processors and deep freeze, so it held only two day’s supply of food, but that was for 200 hundred people and it took Suzanne a few minutes of rummaging around to locate the missing containers. They had been moved, just picked up and stuck on another shelf. Puzzled by this, Suzanne picked them up and, just as puzzlement was turning into a vague suspicion, there was a step behind her. One arm clamped her in a bear hug, pinning both arms to her side, and another clamped a thick, foul-smelling cloth to her mouth. One breath and she felt woozy. Remembering what Rods had taught her she kicked back hard against her attacker’s shin and was rewarded with a yelp. It was Sam. She tried to kick again but forgot to stop breathing. By the time she kicked again she was too drugged to do anything but make Sam grunt. She dropped the containers, hoping the noise might bring someone.

“Is it chloroform?” she thought, woozily. “No one uses chloroform outside old detective novels.” She went limp.

No one except Nod heard the containers fall. He had already ushered all the kitchen staff out to hear the captain tell them the latest news from Earth Station. Many of the crew and passengers still had relatives there and the news was not good.

“But what about Suzanne?” protested Annette.

“I’ll tell her,” said Nod. “Just go out now and be quick about it.”

“You fool,” he said to Sam when he stepped into the locker. “Just as well the others were all out, listening to our esteemed leader” The last words were said with a sneer.

“Bitch kicked me,” said Sam, who had let Suzanne fall to the floor in favour of grabbing his leg and hopping. He stopped for a moment, grabbed hold of one of the storage units to balance himself and kicked at the helpless Suzanne.

“Don’t damage the merchandise!” snapped Nod. “We’ve got to move fast, while everyone’s at this announcement.”

They picked Suzanne up between them, Sam limping, and carried her to the main airlock, coincidentally by the route Suzanne had planned to take herself. They taped her mouth, ankles and hands and put her at the back of an equipment locker near the main airlock – a locker they knew was rarely checked.

“Stuff should last a few hours,” said Nod as they hurried to catch the captain’s address, which had wandered onto the lawlessness and dangers of The Rim. The chemical they had used wasn’t chloroform, despite Suzanne’s suspicions. “But we’ll have to top her up during the night.”

“Then when we’re docked we heave her out, and serve the bitch right,” said Sam.

“Was there anything to this business with the trader the two girls were talking about?”

“Nah, I don’t reckon, anyway people go missing round here all the time – that’s what the captain’s going to tell us. Dangers of the Rim ’n all that.”