The Vital Abyss

We planned our theft quietly. When Brown sat bent over the terminal, he could not watch us talk, but Quintana and I were discreet all the same. I squatted at the side of a crash couch while he lay in it, facing away from me. The metal and ceramic made too hard a backrest, my spine aching where it pressed. I tried not to move my lips while we spoke. Fong, I felt sure, noticed us, but did nothing. Or perhaps she didn’t see us. Fear kept me from looking around to find out.

“He has to sleep,” Quintana said.

“He also has to wake up,” I said, recalling Alberto’s advice.

Quintana shifted on the couch, the gimbals hissing as the cup of the couch readjusted. Across the room, Brown sat near the hotel. The hand terminal flickered, throwing subtle shadows onto his cheeks and the hollows around his eyes. With the right equipment, I could have modeled his face, its reflectivity, and rebuilt the image he was looking at. I realized that Quintana had been speaking, and I didn’t know that he’d said. When I asked him to repeat himself, he sighed with a sound very much like the gimbals.

“Once I get it, you hide it,” he said. “They’ll question me. Search where I went. Then they’ll have to give him another copy. Once that happens, we’ll be safe. They won’t care anymore. You can get it back out and give it to me. You won’t even have to get in trouble.”

“Won’t they punish us?”

“He’ll have the copy. Why would anyone care about the original?”

I suspected that analysis had some holes in it, but I didn’t object, out of concern that Quintana would grow impatient and scrap the plan. I resolved instead to ask Alberto if he thought the stolen hand terminal would be trivial once a copy was delivered, but as things fell out, I didn’t have the chance. Navarro, one of Fong’s leadership from security, walked toward us. I coughed, alerting Quintana, and he changed to talking about the nutritional value of Belter food compared to the fare we’d had before the room, and the probable health effects that we could expect from our systematic malnutrition. Navarro sat at the next couch over, watching the guards at the window watch us. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t need to. The message—you’re being watched—was clear.

That afternoon, the guards came early and took Brown away. They offered no explanation, simply found him there among us, nodded to the doors they’d entered through, and escorted him away. I watched him leave.  My heart was in my throat, and I was certain it was already too late. If they were taking him to the Martian, he might never come back. When Brown returned to the room just before nightfall, confusion and worry pressed on his brow, but he carried the hand terminal with him.

That night as we curled up to sleep, I told Alberto of my fear that Brown and the hand terminal might vanish before I could see what was on it.

“Better if it did,” Alberto said, holding my hand. I didn’t know if he meant that with the irritant of hope gone, the room could return to something like its resting state, or something more personal between the two of us. I intended then to sound him out about Quintana’s plan, but he had other intentions that were more urgent and immediate, and when we were spent, I curled in his arms, warm and content in the way that being a masculine animal allows.

Either Brown’s temporary absence spurred Quintana to action sooner than planned, or he had told me his timetable when my attention was elsewhere. The first I knew that action had been taken was the screaming, then pelting footfalls going one way and the next. I tried to stand, but Alberto impeded me, and then, from the darkness, a dim glow. The plate of a hand terminal, moving toward me. Quintana loomed up out of the darkness, pressing hard ceramic into my hand. He didn’t speak, but ran on past me. I curled back with Alberto and waited. Brown was shrieking now, his voice bansheeing up until it threatened to rise above the wavelengths of human perception. And then Fong. And then Quintana proudly announcing that Brown didn’t deserve the data, couldn’t understand the data, and was going to doom us all to living and dying in the room out of his own misplaced pride.

I lay with my head against my lover’s shoulder, the hand terminal tucked beneath our bodies, while the other prisoners screamed and fought in the darkness, the first open combat in the war Alberto had foreseen. The Belter guards did not come. I felt sure their absence meant something, but I couldn’t say what.