Lindsey watched the huge, peach colored mining machine as it dredged deeply into the dry soil. The machine wasn't really peach colored; it was reflective silver, like almost everything else on this god-forsaken world. But the sulfurous clouds turned the light reaching the surface to a washed out peach tone. She reached out slowly, placing her gloved hand on the super heated metal. It was hard, unyielding, but it didn't satisfy her. Lindsey longed to touch something. Someone. Anything. Anyone. She could barely fight the impulse now to remove her gloves.
"Venusian" she told herself.
She returned her hands and attention to the control panel and spent the rest of her shift fighting the insane desire to feel something on her skin. When Harks showed up to take over, she trudged heavily back towards the shelter, the nano-servos in her environmental suit protesting against the massive atmospheric pressure and gravity.
She paused, fighting down the urge to just remove her helmet and feel the heat on her skin.
"Venusian" she said again, shaking her head.
She wasn't actually on Venus, but Flavian IV was close enough. The atmosphere was composed of carbon dioxide and sulfuric acid, the temperature somewhere around 490 degrees Celsius. The atmospheric pressure was insane, and the gravity made her frail body weigh nearly ninety times more than the 100 pounds she weighed. If her enviro-suit failed, she would be dead in an instant, either crushed by the weight or burned to a cinder by the heat. She knew that, but the desire to remove it was still strong, and growing stronger every cycle.
Her affliction was a little understood, but heavily studied and documented psychosis. It was first reported in the penal colony on Venus, and thus the name. Depending on a person's makeup, it could manifest itself in weeks, months, years, or not at all. Life in an enviro-suit wasn't that bad, but for some people, the need to feel, to touch, simply became irrepressible.
The usual victims were lifers. Those poor souls condemned to life on the planet, their sentences of hard labor far crueler than death. They wore the black suits, fibrous carbon exoskeletons without seals. Encased in them, they would never be removed; a lifer would go to his grave, already ensconced in his coffin. Living in your own coffin was one of the more macabre aspects of Terran Authority justice.
Lindsey wasn't a lifer; her silver suit was no different from those worn by the contract miners and officials. It could be removed and that was a particularly hellish punishment for someone going Venusian. A lifer could lose it, but couldn't do anything about it. She could, and a lot of prisoners who weren't lifers never left Flavian, simply because they could get out. The authorities took that into account as well, often giving the worst criminals silver suits and just waiting. Political prisoners, those with longstanding but unproven ties to organized crime, the odd soldier or administrator who had seen too much, these were the ones given long sentences and silver suits. More often than not, they would help the Authority out by making embarrassments just go away.
The shelter was a large ceramite blockhouse, with no partitions, no furniture and no windows. Its only real shelter was from the wan peachy light of the surface. Fifty souls inhabited this one, most were even more over crowded. Floor space was at a premium and the lowest of the low usually ended up sleeping standing up. Fights were frequent. Improvised weapons, usually spanners or machine parts with sharpened ends were the weapons of choice. It only took a tiny breech in a suit to mark the end of an opponent.
Lindsey found some floor space against one wall and sat down. The wall was hard against her back, but she couldn't really feel it. She again fought the desire to remove her suit, arguing with herself that she wouldn't feel it even if she did; she'd be dead before she could lean back.
Even then, her hand was fumbling with the catch on her glove when a grip like steel clamped onto her wrist and jerked it away. She looked up into a blast shield. Another of the dehumanizing features of penal servitude. Everyone's face was shielded. You could see out, of course, to repay your debt to society by mining on this hell world, but you never saw another face, or even your own reflection, just a blank, peachy faceplate.
The figure that held her wrist in a vice-like grip wore a silver suit as well. Lindsey noticed the catches on the wrists had been broken off. It was against the rules, but those who really wanted to live through their time often jammed the small catches into moving machinery, mangling them so badly they couldn't be opened without a torch.
At the end of their sentence, they would be heavily fined for it, and considering the pittance they were "paid' for their labor, that usually meant being turned back out into society with nothing. The tall figure opened the com box on its shoulder and extended a cord and plugged it into Lindsey's box.
"Don't do it," a mechanical voice flatly admonished.
"I didn't mean to," Lindsey whined.
"Break 'em, kid. On your next shift."
"I've only got five more cycles."
"You won't make it. Not if you are doing it unconsciously now. Break 'em."
"If I do that, I'll be right back in here inside of a month."
"If you don't, you'll be here a lot longer."
"I can hack it," she said without conviction.
A sound then, something she hadn't heard in so long it took a moment to register. Laughter? The voice boxes were designed to give and receive orders. They were calibrated to simply convey an electronic voice, no emotion, nothing human.
"What's your name, kid?"
"Lindsey, yours?"
"Simmons. Five cycles huh?"
"Four, after this one."
"All right, kid, tell you what. I'll watch over you. Find me before you knock off and I'll keep an eye on you till you're sprung."
"How can I find you? Everyone looks the same."
"Just come here. This is my corner; no one will fuck with me over it. The last one who did had an accident."
Lindsey shivered. Like any prison colony there was a hierarchy, and those who could arrange accidents for their enemies were usually near the top. It was usually the lifers who ran things - they had nothing to loose. If this person was powerful enough to stake out a corner in the blockhouse, he was dangerous. Definitely not to be trusted, but then again, what did she have to lose?
"All right. Thank you."
"Think nothing of it, kid, just doing my part to stick it to the man. Everyone who walks away from here is a victory for us."
"You're a political prisoner then?"
Again that sound. How anyone could laugh here was beyond her.
"Free Worlder, you?" the voice replied.
"Unregistered, soliciting, which I wasn't, and resisting a Terran Authority officer."
"No shit? You're a girl? Some petty party official trying to get in your pants?"
"Not mine. My sister's. I was just leverage."
"Sorry to hear it. Can't believe your own flesh and blood let you get sent to hell rather than give up the pussy."
"She gave it up. I got sent anyway. No witnesses."
"Sons a bitches."
"Yeah."
For the next three hours, Lindsey answered questions about herself. She was tired and scared, and talking seemed to lessen the hopelessness and give her some strange kind of release. Simmons said almost nothing about himself, not even where he was from. It didn't really matter. Eventually, Lindsey began to stumble over words as sheer exhaustion started to over take her.
"Go to sleep, kid."
Lindsey did, falling asleep almost instantly. It was the first time in seven hundred cycles she slept deeply, unafraid.
***
