It was windy outside, and the artificial sunshine generated by the colony’s power supply was glaring off the pages of my book, making it almost impossible to make out the words. There was a dome over the colony, holding in our artificial atmosphere and providing some semblance of normal weather, including artificial sunshine that was supposed to give us the vitamin D and all that other stuff humans have to get to stay healthy. But that didn’t make it very conducive to reading.
I knew I’d catch hell if I got caught skipping school, but I didn’t care. My grades were good, and it wasn’t like I thought the staff at the children’s home really gave a shit if I got a real education. As far as they were concerned, as soon as I got old enough to graduate, I was going to move out and get some dead end job, either as a miner (it was a mining colony, after all) or as the “entertainment” staff in town that kept the miners happy and drudging away in the mines every day. It was only another six months before I turned sixteen, and then I was going to have to get a job either way, because at sixteen I’d have to start paying back the home for all the food and shelter they’d provided me with over the course of my life. Nice, huh? About half the sophomore girls that the home had in every class ended up turning tricks to make their payments every month. It was quick, it was easy (once you got over the whole disgusting aspect of letting some strange guy maul you, I guess), and usually even the not so pretty ones made damn good money at it. Most of them never stopped, though, and they ended up strung out on some kind of drugs and looking like they were fifty when they were about thirty.
I had no intentions on taking that road. That was why I kept my grades decent; there was no way some dusty, smelly miner was going to stick his hands or anything else up my skirt. The only problem was, I couldn’t bring myself to sit through class on most days. Unpleasant wasn’t the word for it; the boys had it kind of rough, sure. They got made fun of because their school uniforms were usually secondhand, or cheap, and their computers were refurbished and usually at least five years behind everybody else’s. Most of them ended up stealing or selling illegal drugs to make their payments to the home every month. They were singled out for being poor, having to pack their lunches because they couldn’t afford the catered ones everybody else got, they got called trash, and stupid, and dirty, and every other adjective the teenaged mind can think of.
The girls got all that and more. Everybody knew what they did to make their money. As far as our classmates were concerned, we might as well all have been prostitutes.
Well, I wasn’t a thief, there was no way I could bring myself to sell someone something that might kill them, and like I mentioned, I’d live in a crate in an alley before I’d do what most of the other girls did. The problem was, I wasn’t too crazy about people assuming I did do those things. So I skipped school as often as I could get away with it, I took my library books and my textbooks to the park, and I just read. All the public schools really wanted to do was educate me on how to be of service to the colony. I was going to be of service to myself; I didn’t care what I had to do, but I was getting the hell out of there, well before my sixteenth birthday.
It was starting to get late, though, and my eyes were burning from sitting outside to read for so long. I’d had all my classwork done since morning, and it was late afternoon now. Some of my classmates had already passed me by on their way home, and that was usually my signal to take off. I’d go home, finish the chores that were beside my name on the house list (usually washing the dinner dishes…God, how I hated washing dishes, and I was pretty sure the administrators all knew it), clean my side of the room that I shared with two other girls, Amber and Leigh (both older than me…I was pretty sure Amber was already turning tricks to make ends meet, even if she denied it), and maybe pick up my reading again. I’d have to find a hiding place, though, because Amber always made fun of me for being a bookworm, and Leigh seemed to have made it her mission in life to drag me out for her idea of “fun”, which usually included coming home around three in the morning and feeling like shit at school the next day. Neither idea was really appealing to me. The book I was currently immersed in was a manual of tips and tricks that would help me get into pilot school; pilots made a decent salary by any planet or colony standard, they worked by contracts so they had plenty of job security, and besides….there was something about the freedom associated with being a pilot, with flying off for parts unknown just about every day, that really appealed to me. Even if I turned out to hate it…I couldn’t possibly hate it as much as I hated life on the colony.
Voltaire colony wasn’t so much a colony as it was a dirty, smelly, overcrowded town stuck on the side of an asteroid, with an atmospheric bubble keeping it from floating away into space. Because the ore coming out of the mines was in high demand on the black market for spacecraft fuel, it was prone to pirate attacks. Because we were a privately owned colony, out on the outskirts of civilization, nobody really did a damn thing about it. The buildings were old, the people were poor, and it had the highest crime rate this side of the known universe.
That was why I hated walking home. Especially when I was wearing my school uniform, and everybody knew what I was. Or what they thought I was, anyway. I was stuck walking through the bar and restaurant district (hell, most of town was a bar and restaurant district, but the Mirror district, named for the main road that ran through it, was worse than most). The miners saw my uniform and automatically catcalled me, thinking I was out looking for business (with my schoolbooks under my arm. I never claimed miners were smart.). Sometimes they even came out and tried to proposition me, which really made me want to gouge their eyes out with a rusty nail. And of course, since the Mirror district was always the most crowded, when there was a pirate attack, guess where they hit first?
But it was the only way for me to take home without taking a ton of alleys and side streets, and experience had taught me that I didn’t want to be too far out of the public view. So I sighed, tugged the too-short skirt on my uniform down to an almost decent level…I’d outgrown this one last year, but I couldn’t afford a new one just yet…and started off through town at a quick walk. I’d have to move my ass a little faster than usual and stick to my usual M.O. of ignoring anyone who spoke to me; there hadn’t been a raid in over two weeks now, and it would be just my luck to get caught in one.
******************************************************************************
If Puck had had his choice of layovers, this colony would not have been anywhere in his top ten. Colony 550266-F, as it showed on his navigation console, or Voltaire Colony as it was known under the common trend of naming colonies after famous authors, was a dusty, dirty, grimy rock, with the only habitable area at the pole of the asteroid it was situated on. He’d had a devil of a time getting clearance to land, but he had run low on fuel without realizing it, thanks to a glitch in his fuel reader, and this was the closest landing area he could make it to. With his luck, if he’d tried to make it any farther to one of the fueling stations orbiting the nearest planet, he’d have wound up dead in space, waiting for someone to come along and find him.
Puck, at the moment, didn’t want to be found.
He’d lived among humans for fifteen years now, and he found it easy to blend in among them. Long red hair covered up slender, delicately pointed ears, a thick coat gave bulk to a small frame. Humans tended not to notice what they couldn’t see, and he used these devices to keep their thoughts from wandering to his origins. He was a little too fine-boned, a little too ethereal, to blend in completely, but humans were so used to seeing non-human races these days that if he kept his differences minimized, they tended not to ask too many questions. That was good for him. Puck could remember when the differences in his looks would have had him hanging from a stake over a raging inferno, and when he’d returned to human society, he’d found all the changes quite pleasant. He could move around with relative freedom now, even work among them, without too much questioning; it had been some work, getting himself an identification and all the trappings he’d needed to move in this current society, but anything could still be accomplished with the right words and a few well placed bits of currency.
Right now, though, he wanted to move unnoticed. That was a little more complicated. Backwater colonies like these tended to be a little more suspicious of non-humans; there were rumors of lynchings, and burnings, and they had little to no law enforcement. The colonists tended to enforce their own laws, at least the ones they chose to follow.
Pulling a thick cloak over his light jacket, he tugged the cowl-like hood up over his head and stepped out of his craft. He gave the service attendant at the fueling station his identification, which would automatically bill his funding account for the minor repairs and fuel, passing it to him quickly so the man wouldn’t linger too long on his features. It was a delicate art; don’t look away so long that you look suspicious, but long enough that the man’s vision didn’t get a clear picture of your features. Turn your back and pretend to inspect one of the propulsion nacelles on the ship, giving a bit of a frustrated sigh. Nod your head and mumble a thanks when the attendant reassures you they’ll have everything taken care of within four hours, just enough time to get a bite to eat and maybe browse some of the city shops. Puck grinned as he headed out the fueling station’s exit; humans were still so easy.
