By that point, thousands of days would have passed inside the construct, and Taven considered the real chance that Cat wouldn’t exit the ship. She could let it all end, burn up as their ship enters Jupiter’s atmosphere.

  Regardless, he doubted anyone would ever find the Hudson again. Even if Cat exited the construct and got the ship back on course, she wouldn’t hide it in the same place twice. They’d disappear in another isolated part of the Belt, a sector in the solar system so dense with debris you couldn’t throw a stick two yards without hitting rock.

  Taven walked the halls of the St. George, seeing everything anew, the way all travelers do the first time they return home from a long voyage. Except he’d been gone minutes or hours, not days or weeks. And the crew that interacted with him treated him the same as always. They had no idea what he’d seen, what he’d been through. And they never would.

  Taven reached what Meyer Corp called the captain’s room. It was a cruel joke as far as he was concerned. The one and only time they referred to a mining foreman as captain was behind closed doors where no one but Taven could appreciate it. Still, it was the nicest room on the ship, bare bones as it was.

  He collapsed into the plush glorified beanbag beside his bed. Before him was the black vid-screen, and he felt the impulse to turn it on. He resisted. After being inside the Hudson, he wasn’t sure he wanted any more virtual life. Not right now, anyway.

  But then he remembered that he had unfinished business. He touched his wrist console and activated the larger vid-screen in front of him. After toggling through a few menus, he pulled up Amy’s last message, the one he needed to respond to.

  He hesitated to hit record. He knew what he needed to do, what he should say, but he also knew there’d be no turning back, that even if he relented after he got back to Earth there’d be a price to pay.

  “There’s always a price to pay. No matter what,” he told himself.

  He pressed the record icon and took a deep breath.

  “Amy. I got your message, Sweetie. I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is that we finished three weeks early, hit our payload capacity, and are heading home. That means a pretty substantial early-completion bonus.”

  “The bad news—and I don’t really think it is bad news, not ultimately. Honey, we can’t go on that trip you’ve planned. Call Jamie and cancel. And don’t send Evelynn to your mom’s. If you want more time away, I’ll keep her. I’ve been missing her real bad. Both of you.”

  “I can guess your reaction right now, so go ahead and calm down and breath. It’s going to be alright, and no, I’m not going to change my mind when I get there. The reason we’re not going on the trip—one of the reasons is I don’t want to spend my break with Jamie, and you know that. But the real reason is that we’re going to need every credit we’ve got.”

  He took another deep breath.

  “Because I’m done mining. I don’t know what I’ll do instead, but I’ll find something. I know you won’t understand, so we’ll talk about it more when I get home. Just know I’m serious about this. Things are going to be different from now on. Love you, dear. See you in about three weeks.”

  And with that, Taven touched his wrist console and ended the recording. The screen prompted him to either save or transmit the message. Again, he hesitated, then hit the transmit icon.

  “There,” he said, “it’s done.” Except he knew it was anything but done. It was just beginning, and he could hear Amy’s voice now. It wasn’t pleasant. And it wouldn’t be pleasant when he made it home, not the kind of arrival he had hoped for, anyway.

  He told himself that he had to remember the way things used to be, how life was once different back when he and Amy were first married and before he signed up to mine the Belt. If things were good once, they could be good again.

  He thought about Evelynn and how big she probably was getting, how she always seemed heavier each time he picked her up. He smiled, knowing he was making the right choice.

  Then a thought popped into his mind, and he snapped his fingers. “Blast it.”

  He quickly touched his wrist console and started recording again.

  “Hey, Sweetie. I forgot something. You don’t have to join me if you’re still mad. But I wanted to invite you to dinner, my first meal back home. Let’s go to Gus’s, that sandwich shop in Montreux where we used to eat. They have an Italian sub and an IPA that have been calling my name for days.”

  CHAPTER 28

  “READY, BOSS?” MACK asked, standing in the doorway.

  Taven grabbed the last item from his room and joined Mack. “First one in, last one out,” Taven said as they began walking the halls of the St. George together for the last time.

  “You sure you’re done?” Mack asked with unusual concern in his voice.

  Taven didn’t answer for a second and just kept walking. The rest of the crew had already left their posts, and Mack could have done the same. Mack was impulsive, but he was loyal. And Taven felt the need to make it seem like this was a hard decision even though his mind was firmly made up and had been ever since he’d come out of the Hudson construct.

  “You’ll see it differently in a few years,” Taven finally replied as they came nearer to the airlock.

  “Hey, I’m not far behind you, you know?” Mack responded.

  That was true, technically. Taven was only five years older than Mack. “Trust me,” Taven said. “Things change.”

  Taven turned around to glance at the St. George’s interior one last time. It was surreal; the usually bustling, sardines-in-a-tin-can experience was gone, and the inside of the ship, minus crew, looked downright roomy. It was as if this flying dragon was trying to tempt Taven to change his mind, to stay for one more tour. He shook his head and smiled, then turned and walked through the airlock.

  Immediately after entering the white-walled, brightly lit Scrub Bucket—Meyer Corp preferred to call it a quarantine orbiter—they were prompted by the ship’s computer: “Dispense all personal effects into trays and place on the receiving belt,” the female voice said.

  “She sounds nice,” Mack said. “Wonder what she’s doing later?”

  Mack’s predictable juvenile joke was now only half-funny to Taven, because it made him think of Amy. He really did miss her and for more reasons than Mack would guess.

  Mack emptied his pockets into one of the small trays and sent it down the conveyor belt. Quickly, his effects, a tiny iridium nugget and his data stick, disappeared into the cave-like mouth of the machine, on its way to being spic and span clean.

  “They better not ‘lose,’”—Mack raised his fingers making air quotes—“that rock like they did two tours ago.”

  Taven remembered the incident. Somehow, the supposedly unstaffed and completely computer and bot driven disinfecting sequence had lost Mack’s nugget. In the end, there wasn’t anything Mack could do; technically, Meyer Corp had them dead to rights. All rock carried back on the St. George was Meyer Corp property, even the nuggets stowed away in pockets.

  Now it was Taven’s turn to place his personal effects on the belt. His arms were full, and he struggled to set them down. Clumsily, he released the artwork Evelynn had drawn for him onto a tray; he couldn’t decide if it was supposed to be a landscape or what. But it didn’t matter; it was from his baby girl. Then he placed a framed portrait of Amy and his Freidman Institute sweatshirt on top of the drawing.

  It now seemed strange for him to have the shirt from his alma mater. He had never really thought of himself as a scholar, and his two years at the Institute hadn’t been spent studying. Still, the shirt had been a link to his former life before mining and had been a reminder that this job was supposed to be temporary, that he had other things he’d started to do and could go back and finish when the credits were right.

  “That’s all?” Mack asked. “If I had to clean out my room…I’m just—I don’t know. You pack light, I guess.”

  Taven grinned as his effects disappeared down the belt. “I kept telling myself that this wasn’t my career and that if I didn’t set up camp in my room that I wouldn’t get too comfortable here.”

  “I guess it worked,” Mack said.

  “Yeah, but only if you think six years counts as temporary employment.”

  “Hey,” Mack said excitedly. “Maybe they’ll promote me, give me your old job.”

  Taven doubted it, but he didn’t want to burst Mack’s bubble. “I’ll put a good word in for you,” he said.

  Mack slapped him on the back and stepped forward to the next decontamination station. As they passed through the gate, a soft bing sounded. An electronic voice barked: “Place all personal effects into trays on the receiving belt.”

  Mack froze, then began searching his pockets. Finally, he found the offending item in his shirt pocket and removed it.

  “Ah, I guess we gotta do this now,” Mack said as he handed Taven an old-fashioned pocket watch. “I didn’t have time to go shopping, you know. So, this is your retirement gift. It used to be my great-grandfather’s.”

  Taven was stunned by the gesture. “This is too much,” he said. “You should hang on to family heirlooms.”

  “Nah. I figured you needed it more than me,” Mack teased. “All those days inside the construct and all.”

  Taven gave an obligatory chuckle before Mack snatched up the watch and ran it back to the conveyor system. Over the last three weeks, this had become a new running joke between them. At first, Taven had insisted that it really had been three days that had passed inside the Hudson construct and that time was relative, just like Cat had told him. But soon, after all the scoffing and jokes, he realized they would never believe him, and he’d decided to agree with them and say that the computer had just played tricks with his mind. He dreaded debriefing the higher-ups at Meyer Corp about the incident. He hoped Amy and Evelynn were waiting for him on the other side of the quarantine orbiter, but he knew the bureaucrats from Meyer would be.

  Mack came back, and they proceeded to the next station, turning a corner and appearing to move into a different section.

  “Dispose of all clothing here,” said the voice again. What looked like the swinging door of a trash incinerator blinked its lights on the wall near them.

  “She’s getting kinky,” Mack said as they disrobed. “You know computers these days: no time for foreplay.”

  “Don’t you think this is overkill?” Taven complained as he shoved his clothes into the chute. They whooshed away as the door closed. “I mean, when was the last time you heard about miners bringing home a new disease?”

  “Yeah, it’s more likely we’ll take something out there with us and all succumb to it,” Mack agreed. “If the Union would actually stand up to them, we’d do all this before we left Earth, not after.”

  Taven’s mind flashed through all the implications and remembered that Ferah and med-school graduates like her represented a compromise to that old debate. In the end, it was cheaper for Meyer Corp to hire a doctor than to waste more time on health and safety. This part of the process, the quarantine orbiter was a formality, Taven knew, a means to remove liability in case there was a disease outbreak on Earth. The corporation didn’t really care about the miners in space. If they got sick, they had already signed away their rights to sue. But if non-miners contracted a disease later on . . . well, that could be expensive, and this orbiter was Meyer Corp’s get-out-of-jail-free card. Or so Taven believed.

  They moved on to the next module, and the door shut behind their naked bodies. Taven couldn’t help but feel like he’d walked into a trap, like he had entered a gas chamber and was to be exterminated.

  No longer was everything antiseptic white. The walls all glimmered stainless steel, and Taven abraded his foot against the rough drain grate in the center of the room.

  “Raise arms above your heads,” came the voice.

  They complied, and Taven heard a momentary hiss before ice-cold liquid sprayed them from all sides.

  “Do not inhale disinfecting spray,” came the voice again.

  “Now, she tells us,” Mack coughed.

  The spray stopped, and Taven felt his goosebumps covered body turn strangely warm as if the chemicals were reacting with his skin.

  “Spread apart your legs and touch your toes,” said the voice.

  “Now this is where I draw the line,” Mack said, though they both obeyed. “These new computers think they can jump from first base all the way to—”

  The spray returned and interrupted Mack’s foolishness. He let out a big whoop, and after a couple seconds, the spray stopped. Then a new whirling sound came before hot, dry air rushed over them like they were part of a wind tunnel experiment.

  “Please stand and raise your hands above your heads,” instructed the computer.

  “Now she says please,” Taven said, robbing Mack’s chance at making the joke.

  After they were dry, they were instructed to continue standing still, and Taven saw the lights flicker before a new buzzing sound came on. This was his least favorite part, the radiation treatment that they were told would be harmless after taking the subsequently prescribed pills for the next two weeks. Meyer Corp told them the pills ameliorated its effects —that was the word they used repeatedly—but Taven didn’t buy it. The more they said it, the more he knew they were lying.

  Finally, the buzzing stopped, and the voice said, “Proceed to final station. The bio-scanner is a single-occupant unit.”

  “Not it!” Mack shouted as he lunged forward and entered the scanning chamber.

  After about a minute, Taven heard a celebratory “Yahoo!” come from the other side of the chamber, Mack apparently gaining his freedom and a fresh set of new clothes.

  The door opened, and Taven entered. “Stand by for bio-scanning,” said the voice.

  Taven waited. After a couple seconds, he saw through the translucent walls of the spherical room two glowing orbs which began chasing each other like motorcycle daredevils inside a circus cage. The orbs raced faster and faster until turning into a blur.

  Then there was a loud kerplunk that made Taven bolt, and the two orbs came to a sudden halt.

  “Bio-scanner is a single-occupant unit,” the computer seemed to say angrily.

  The door he had entered the chamber through opened again as if it was waiting for him to exit. After a moment of not knowing what to do, Taven stuck his arm through the door and pulled it back inside. The door shut, and the computer told him again to stand by for bio-scanning.

  The sequence started over. This time, the whirling orbs stopped before getting to full speed, and the voice gave him yet another “single-occupant” message.

  Frustrated, Taven said, “Computer, re-scan.”

  Surprisingly, the bossy computer obeyed Taven and began another sequence. Taven held his breath, waiting to see if it would yet again stop prematurely.

  After a few tense moments, the whirling orbs peaked in speed, ostensibly sustaining their scanning power for about thirty seconds.

  Taven began to breath easily. This seemed like it was going to work. Whatever had gone haywire with the scanners was about to become somebody else’s problem. And soon Taven would be off Meyer Corp property for good.

  Gradually, the orbs came to a smooth stop, their glow fading away. Then a soft binging alarm began to sound, like the one that had gone off when Mack had forgotten to remove the watch from his pocket.

  “Oh, great,” Taven said, knowing something was off. “Computer, what’s wrong. What’s happened?”

  “Subject’s bio-scan complete,” it answered. “Subject’s DNA has been altered. Contamination source . . . unknown origin. Remain calm.”

  Then he heard the doors lock and the unmistakable sound of airlocks engaging before the computer added, “Help is on the way.”

  The story continues in Rebel’s Gambit (Sim-Verse: Book 2).

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  You made it to the end! I hope you had as much fun reading Rebel’s Construct as I had writing it.

  You know, creating stories can be a strange experience. Ideas for the story don’t come linearly, and often—as is the case with me—you can’t remember how some ideas came together at all. Before I forget, and in case you were wondering, here’s what is still with me about the genesis for this story.

  It all started with a car ride with a good friend of mine from Tennessee to Virginia. We’re both musicians and were on our way to perform a concert that weekend. Both of us consider ourselves to have above average manners, which consequently means we commonly find people saying incredibly rude and insensitive comments.

  Are we extra nice or just snooty?

  Additionally—and this is the real germ of the idea—we share a sensitivity to sound. Now, that may seem like an obvious statement; we’re musicians after all. But what I’m describing is more than just being able to identify a chord progression by ear or tell which bassist is playing on a Miles Davis recording without checking the album’s liner notes. I’m talking about the inability to tolerate loud, chaotic, or obnoxious sounds. For me—and this depends very much on whether I’m stressed out, well rested or not, etc.—multiple sound sources are the worst, e.g. people talking over the radio or my kids simultaneously watching two different videos on their tablets in the car. And the louder the sound, the more intolerant I become.

  Already, I’m worried about what you are thinking: he’s cookoo, or wow, he thinks he’s special. I don’t want to sound like a weirdo or a self-absorbed jerk, but I’m telling you the honest truth. These things drive me and my friend crazy with a capital C.

  So, along this six-hour car ride, we were both on our best behavior, trying not to get on each other’s nerves. Idiosyncratic as we are, it was inevitable that we’d still get under each other’s skin, and the thing that surfaced this trip was interruptions: