The cargo game was going on in the hold when we found her, a waifish blonde with blue eyes that took up half her face. Bongo dragged her out from behind the cartons that marked one side out for our playing field. He held her up dangling in the air by the wrist as he yelled for me. “Hey! Lookie here, Dodge!”
We all stared, players of a now-abandoned game gathered around. I could tell right off she was a stowaway and clearly not born in space. We don’t often see anyone our age that’s planet-born like she was with her upright skeleton grown straight and true with a decent daily protein ration, not to mention the unusual hair and eyes. I’d have guessed her at six years old due to her size, but the way her temper flashed at being found and gaped at I doubled the guess to nearer my own age.
“Hey! Put me down!”
“Ain’t that interesting. Did you order us a newbie back at launch, Bongo?”
“No sirree, Dodge. No newbies.” Bongo grinned. “I just pumped the fuel.”
“Me neither. Any one of the rest of you lot offer a little girl a lift somewhere?” My gaze swept over our crew, who shook their heads as one.
“Reckon she’s a stowaway, then.” I adjusted my cap firmly over my forehead, folded my arms, and stared as the girl dangled. “Put her down. You know what we do with stowaways, little girl?”
Her voice was soft with an accent when she spoke. “You put them to work. I asked at station.”
That rocked me back on my heels a little. There was a small rustle of nudges and whispers among the players arrayed behind me. “Heh. If they’re useful. You don’t look useful. You look like a dirt-licker. Ain’t got no useful bends at all.”
Her eyes widened as she looked over the various deformities of the rest of us. Save for me, the crew was all space-born mutts, and I’d been out here since I was a tyke so my bones didn’t finish growing straight. Tiny and Mouse were both under four feet, Tiny because his legs were spindly, useless things and Mouse because they were missing below the knees. Blink doesn’t have a straight line in his body. Out here the food is crappy, the gravity is low, and accidents twist the body; not a lot of standard builds. That’s what dirt-lickers call themselves, standard. There is no standard here in space; you grow however you grow. Everyone adapts to their job and no one gets wasted.
The girl lifted her chin. “Don’t matter. I’m here and willing to work. Word on the station was that if a kid works hard, then they can have a good enough life in one of the FAGNs.”
“Station brats tell you that?” I spit to one side.
She nodded stubbornly. “Yeah. Said it was safe enough, and if you work, you eat.” Her gaze skittered around the players again, pausing on Mattie who had settled in just at my other elbow. The girl stared, but Mattie is immune to it. Mattie’s fifteen, but station-born. She’ll never grow beyond her four feet, but her stunted, bowed legs and over-developed shoulders mark her as a solid worker in space salvage terms.
See, you don’t need legs without gravity. You just need strong arms and a healthy respect for the laws of motion and mass. Mattie’s twisted body can move tons efficiently, for all that she’d be almost crippled in the full-gee on a planet. We can’t go ‘home’ to a planet, us FAGN kids. We’ve adapted. Me? I aim to be a captain one day.
“Reckon so. You know anything at all about salvage ops?” I asked.
She shook her head. “No. But I know ships. On my home world they build liners. Galaxy-class. My mom’s flat was close to the shipyards, and sometimes I helped bring tools and things.”
Bongo whistled. “Galaxy-class liners. They’re spendy. What do they move, a thousand people?” Bongo had never seen a thousand people in one place before.
“More’n that. Ten thousand,” the girl asserted before sighing. “Don’t matter. Just I know how ships go together, so I know how they ought to come apart for scraps. I shipped for a few months, too. I can work.”
From overhead on the catwalk, Captain Bill’s voice boomed out. “What’s all this now? Who’s that?” We all looked up to see him leaning over the railing, pointing at the stranger.
The girl’s shoulders flinched at his tone and volume, and I found myself swelling a little, protectively. “Uh, this here’s…what’s your name then?”
“Olivia.”
Typical dirt-licker name. I amended it. “This here’s Ollie, Cap. We signed her on at the last station to try a run with us.”
Bill is a big man. His hair and eyes are black, his skin dusky and covered in scars from drinking and fighting. He made a point of clanging down the catwalk to make an entrance, the steel sounding with each tread. He’s a big man in any case, but when he’s angry he can fill the whole stair. “Oh we did, did we? Who authorized that without my permission?”
....to be continued in the Young Explorer's Adventure Guide!
*********
Where You Belong is a story from the Young Explorer's Adventure Guide, an anthology of science fiction stories for middle graders. We've got a great collection of 20 stories from amazing authors, ranging from Nebula and Hugo winners to relative newcomers to the field. 90% of the stories in the anthology are brand new, and 80% have central female characters. We don't have girls who are prizes to be won or waiting to be rescued. All of our heroines and heroes are on their own adventure, not a side note in someone else's. Our characters are white, black, asian, latino. Human and robot. Everyone belongs here.
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