Plan Goeth Before the Fall

Fifteen minutes before she burst into Nekkau’s room, Taru had it all under control. She left the rowdy corridors of station core and strolled the amber-flecked gray halls of Branch C, where warm lights soaked her and the passersby ignored her to stare into their phones, as nature intended. Shadows had to find somewhere else to lurk. Quiet too: management gave Branch C over to housing permanent station staff, so surface agents had no reason to come here. Taru could hear her own footsteps leading her to a knot of privacy booths. In the station core, these small pods were always beer-stained and occupied by people busy arranging shady black market deals, or by couples making out, or by persons arranging shady black market deals while making out. But here in Branch C the patient pods waited, smelling softly of lemon disinfectant.

Taru stepped into the nearest booth and clipped her phone into the holder, but not to charge it. The station’s internal comm net was a net in the classic sense—calls and communications couldn’t reach outside the station except on certain approved lines. Settling onto the foam stool, Taru fished in her pockets and found the crisp paper she had secured within. Hidden in the folds, a long chain of letters and numbers that Taru tapped into the network proxy field in her phone’s settings. Then she dialed a number she knew by heart.

Rang once. Ringing twice. Then, the clack of an old style pearl white slimliner telephone with backlit touchtone keys being lifted off its base. Taru knew without being told that the person who had just picked up the phone would be lying on her stomach on a sprawling old bed on guaranteed time off from school.

“Hello?”

“Hey, Rin, it’s Taru.”

Uranishi Rin’s voice sounded like a worn out cassette tape of her bright, loud self. “You just cal—right, hi, Taru, what’s up?”

“I just wanted to check in. How are you holding up?”

“Fine, really. Throat stopped hurting yesterday.”

“Good.”

Starting when she went off to college, Taru had made a habit of calling her younger sister every day. The pattern had been disrupted when she came to work on the station. Calls to home and hospital alike rang up as busy signals every time, unless one used a proxy new enough that station-management hadn’t discovered it yet. Thanks to this anonymous chain of characters, Taru got to hear the fwoomf of the pillow catching Rin’s idle kicks and the telltale snap of a wrapper.

“Did the doctor say you could have pretzels yet?”

A guilty crunch, a pause, then: “… no.”

Taru stifled a laugh. Meanwhile she tapped the privacy booth’s display to wake it and navigated two tabs. One to her bank account, one to a loan statement with Algorojo Medical Finance. The new loan stared 262,379.84 credits back at her. Taru puzzled at it. Lower than it should be, than it had been, but still a lot. Maybe she would earn more now that she was on a team? She shook her head. Wouldn’t do to think too wishful. That would just make the fall harder if Jack and Nekkau flaked out on her. But still, the loan should have been sitting at 280 thousand. Maybe grandma had helped out?

They kept their chats short and breezy. Today in particular, Taru had to hurry back and make Jack return all the useless crap he had bought.

“Alright, try to take it easy, Rin.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

“Bye, twerp.”

“See ya, worrywort.”

Retrieving her phone, Taru stepped out of the booth. She decided to take the long way back, and would soon regret it. Not even Branch C could escape the rolling station renovations. A unit of robots—eyeless, inhuman in stature and motion as machines had ever been—set bricks and dirt, then grabbed and rotated fully grown trees off a shipping palette into the waiting soil. An artificial island of green in the middle of the walkway. A few other people walked by, ignoring the plants’ takeover.

“Oi! What’s this?” Taru demanded.

A claw-and-boom robot played back a clip of corporate gobbledygook about ‘spiffing up the place’ and creating a ‘healthy work environment’. Just a recording of some suit spitting a self-aggrandizing soundbite, pumped through a tiny speaker on the robot’s carapace.

“Yeah, ‘healthy work environment’. That’s why we leave flower lying around, so everyone gets to enjoy having seasonal allergies year round.”

The robots didn’t answer this time. Probably hadn’t been programmed to comprehend snark.

Footsteps meandered up behind Taru while she disapproved at the robots.

Yeah, it looks okay, for now. Are the robots going to water and prune it? And this part of the station was already appealing to look at. Aloud, she added: “What’s the point?”

“A library to soothe the mind, a garden for the soul, that is the poi … wait … is that …?”

Taru turned around and found herself staring down at Selene Nieuport. Long straight hair like fresh copper, Selene carried herself like a Batavian aristocrat out for an evening stroll, but the imperious green eyes perched above a crafty smile. If Taru were asked to produce a short list of people she would rather not meet without advance warning they were coming, Selene Nieuport would be top 5 … not in the top 5, mind you: it would be her name, 5 times.

Up on tiptoe and up in Taru’s face, Selene examined Taru. “I know you.”

“Uh, no, I think you have me mistaken with—”

“Taruuuuu-chan~”

Fuuuuck.

“How have you been? Why did you never return my calls? Did you lose your phone? You lost your phone, that has to be it. Do you need a team? Would you like to join mine? We’re at the top of the leaderboard right now and—”

Taru pulled away and aligned outbound.

“Just remembered something do have to. Bye!”

Uranishi Taru bravely ran away. Charging down the halls started out with her face red, those pesky suppressed high-school memories all jumped out of their shallow graves and held a parade. At first they she hated seeing them again. She didn’t need to relive the baseball game—not a date, mind, Taru had made it very clear that she was just giving Selene a chance—where they received a guided missile zoom-in from the kiss cam. Selene had arranged that, of course she had. And ditching the script to declare affection in the middle of the play, in the middle of the school culture festival, with their parents and teachers and half the city watching. And now here she was, out of all the space stations, in all the systems. Selene would definitely be back to pester her. As she processed these thoughts, Taru broke out of Branch C and back into the noisy halls of the station’s core. Here it was too crowded to run without bowling people over, so Taru had to slow down, had to move with intent rather than impulse. Taru made her way past the commissary and back toward the team apartment, the gears in her head starting to grip each other again. It had been a long time. 8 years, or was it 9? Maybe Selene had a girlfriend now.

Still she should have a plan ready if Selene got up to her old antics. Taru strolled into the apartment and straight to Nekkau’s room with brows set to determined.

✧✧✧

“I don’t understand.” Nekkau stayed seated with her legs splayed next to the incompatible power socket, watching her power reserves dip into the red. Her tail slipped behind her back before Taru was any the wiser. “You say you don’t want to date this person.”

Taru nodded. “That’s right.”

“But they ask you out incessantly.”

“Yes.”

“And we’re not talking about Jack?”

“Correct, he’ll be part of the solution.”

Nekkau let her head thud back against the wall. Here was an interloper, sitting on her bed, asking for Nekkau’s help while grinning like a cat that got the mouse. It wasn’t that no one had ever asked Nekkau for assistance, but the situation had always been down planetside among the mossy ruins, and the askers always been caught in a pincer maneuver by a pair of Curator Drones or pinned down by a Blanched Omen. ‘Be a doll and switch it off for us?’ or ‘You go first.’ Words like those dissolved into screams shortlived, soon replaced by the green and amber of the patient forest.

Sitting on Nekkau’s cot, Taru kicked her legs back and forth—tried to anyways, the cot didn’t stand high enough off the floor for her long legs to swing in any proper sense.

“The solution? Jack’s part of it … then you already have a plan?”

“I do.” Taru beamed. “It’s foolproof, I just need you to help out a teensy.”

Taru started to explain the how of her seemingly bombproof plan. “So, it’s been a long time since the two of us saw each other. Almost a decade. A lot can happen in 9 years. She might have found herself a girlfriend. Or ….”

After a full minute of waiting for Taru to continue, Nekkau realized she was expected to participate.

Fine. I’ll play along. “Or you got a girlfriend.”

“Boyfriend,” Taru said. “If I’m in a committed relationship, Selene will back off.”

“Sure about that? She might not care.”

“Positive.” Taru’s voice wobbled a bit, but it came from the mental image Nekkau’s words produced, not from doubt. “She’s from a very distinguished family. Capital-p Posh. They’re all about dignified behavior.” Except when it comes to theatrics.

“So, Nakko.”

“Nekkau.”

“That’s an unusual name, where’s it from?”

“It’s Antarctican.”

“Oh. Cool. Anyways, the plan. You pop over to Nieuport’s place and casually inquire if she’s seeing anyone. If she’s involved with someone, great, we’ll go back to being acquaintances. But if she’s still angling to marry me, well, then I just need to find someone who will say he’s my boyfriend. Nekkau, I’m still talking. Are you listening? Why are you looking at the door?”

“Ten minutes,” Nekkau said.

The door hissed open, and Jack was behind it, with the power adapter in hand.

“Hey, you’re both here.”

With a sigh of resolve, Taru looked him in the eye and said, “We need to talk.”