The Last Hour of Gann

And then she’d heard Eric, jogging back from a brief midnight trip to the bushes, pause beside Maria’s blanket. “You sure you don’t want to get cozy?” he’d asked. He’d had to shout it, really. So much rain. “Two people can fit if they’re cozy.”

Amber raised her head to watch, expecting a tirade that might actually end in some kind of fair tent rotation since it wasn’t coming from Amber herself. Instead, Maria threw back her blanket almost at once, snarling, “I am so ready to get cozy. Let’s go.”

If Eric was surprised by the speed and ease of this capitulation, he hid it well. He helped her up, grabbed her pack, and the two of them splashed through the soggy grass to his bivy. It bucked and rolled for a few minutes as they worked their way in and then the flap zipped shut.

Amber put her head back down and listened to their two voices, unintelligible beneath the rain. In the dark, she could make out only the faintest outline of the bivy. When it started moving, she closed her eyes. She pulled her emergency blanket over her ears so the rain could hammer out the identity of the women who went to the other bivies. She just put her arm around Nicci to make sure she couldn’t be one of them. She pretended not to know why when Nicci started crying.

And she slept, eventually, because she was just so damned tired.

She woke up before dawn, soaked to the pruny skin, and hobbled into the bushes to pee. She thought the low ache in her belly was hunger right up until she got her pants down and saw the blood.

Terror woke her all the way up before she realized what she was looking at. Of course. Her implant was gone and the stupid umbilicus in the Sleeper had been giving her works a tune-up and oil all the way here, wherever here was. She wasn’t dying; she’d gotten her period. Her very first period. Wearing a pair of white pants.

Motherfuck.

“Suck it up, little girl,” she hissed at herself, absolutely disgusted. “Grow a goddamn sense of proportion. This shouldn’t even make your list of problems.”

So she went back for her duffel bag and took it a little deeper into the trees. She pulled some grass and wadded it into a pad of sorts and stuffed that in her panties. Off came the white pants with the red badge of womanhood stamped across the crotch and on went her only pair of jeans. As for the evidence, she stuffed it under the exposed roots of one of the trees, scraping up handfuls of wet earth to push into the hole until it was good and buried. She felt guilty doing it since they were perfectly good pants, but she was never going to get that blood out and if she had to listen to just one joke, she was going to have to kill someone. After washing the (blood) mud off her hands at the stream, she’d gone back to camp, walking right past Scott and his loyal lieutenants at their morning debriefing so she could curl up in her blanket and pretend nothing had happened.

She lay there while the sun crawled higher behind the clouds, wondering if it was supposed to feel like this. She’d had the implant since she was ten—God bless Measure 34 and Zero Tolerance—and at the moment, she felt like she could cheerfully give up anything, even her place on a lifeboat back to Earth, to get the stupid thing back. Second-grade sex-ed was a long time ago; she couldn’t remember how long this was supposed to last, only that it would happen again about once a month for the rest of her miserable fucking life. Was it normal to hurt like this? How much blood was she going to lose? Was there something she should be doing besides just packing her panties with grass and waiting for it to be over? She’d gone to so many stupid seminars preparing her for life in a colony that were about as useful now as that solar generator they were lugging around, and she’d never even thought about reading up on what was going to happen to her own damn body!

Naturally, it had been later that morning, when she could not have cared less, that Scott gave the speech Amber had been waiting for—the ration bars were almost gone and it was time to learn how to catch di

She made the spears. It wasn’t as easy as she’d thought it would be. The first set of sticks she was able to break off the trees were way too small once they’d had their points cut. The next set—deadfall branches she’d picked off the ground—seemed okay as she did the carving and heating, but every one of them broke when Scott sauntered over to give them a practice throw, and as much as she’d wanted to sock him for doing that, even she had to admit he was right when he pointed out that if they’d break that easy, they’d be no good as a weapon. But three seemed to be the charm and the day was only half-over. The deer drifted back and forth across the plains as they had for days now, but never went far. It was almost like they were waiting for them.

“How are we doing on those spears, Miss Bierce?”

“I’m doing fine, Everly,” said Amber, testing the point of a hot spear before setting it aside in the Finished pile with the other six. “How many have you made?”

It didn’t seem to embarrass him. If anything, his officious little smirk widened. “You asked for this job, remember? You practically begged for it.”

“I remember. That was the day you called me a pig.”

“I did not.” But he looked to see if anyone else was close enough to hear. When he saw a few frowns pointed their way, he blushed. “Miss Bierce, if you can’t do what you promised to do, that’s all right. I’ll understand if your physical limitations—”

“Godammit, I am not too fat to make spears!”

“I never said that either, Miss Bierce, but you are clearly having difficulty. Instead of getting angry with me, why don’t you tell me what the problem is?”

‘At the moment, it’s the jackass breathing down my neck,’ Amber thought. Aloud, she said, “I’m just trying to finish this. What are you trying to do?”

“Have a civil conversation with someone who is determined to cause trouble in this colony.” Scott heaved a sigh. “There is absolutely no reason for this, you know.”

“For what?”

“This.” Scott waved irritably at the sky, as if her question were a distracting fly. “I get it, okay? I understand.”

Amber felt her eyes narrowing. “You understand what?”

“Why you’re like this.”

Had he found her pants? Amber made herself pick up another spear, even as she told herself that this was probably not a good time to fill her hands with weapons. Fat jokes she could handle, if not entirely with good grace. If he pulled out a period joke, she was clubbing him.

“I understand that you feel like you have to be a bitch because you think that people will take you more seriously if they think you’re strong.”

She let out a laugh before she could help herself. He hadn’t found her pants. He was just being his usual dicky self. “I think we’re done with this conversation.”

“No, we’re not. This is something we should have said a long time ago. Amber.” He came and put his hand on her shoulder, did it like he was knighting her. His expression was that of a bold and rugged space adventurer comforting his distressed damsel—noble and determined, with just the right degree of pity. “We’re going to take care of you, Amber. You and all the other girls. You’re our most precious resource.”

“What?” she said flatly.

“This is still a colony,” said Scott. His hand was still on her shoulder. “Only we’re not in it for the five-year contract anymore and you are one of only eleven wombs. We’ve been talking about this.”

“Wombs.”

“And we’ve made some difficult decisions regarding our duty here.” Scott ran his commanding eyes across his gallant colonists. “It may be our immediate goal to persevere, but our ultimate goal hasn’t changed from the day we boarded the Pioneer. It’s not just about living, surviving. It’s about preserving our lives, yes, and our way of life, our very future. Yes, Miss Bierce, we have a duty…and we’re going to have to be mature about this.”

“Says the man about to order people to fuck,” said Amber, and quite a few people flinched, just like that wasn’t where that little speech was going. “Were you pla

Maria looked at Eric. He did not look back at her.

“You’re right, Scott,” Amber said, removing his hand from her shoulder. “This is a conversation we should have had before now. Because it seems that someone actually has to point out to you that eleven wombs plus one or two hundred years equals so much inbreeding that it ain’t even fu

“And what is it, then? What is it you expect all these people—” A sweep of his arm included the whole camp, quite a few of whom stood quietly up and moved a little closer to him. Taking sides. “—to do, Miss Bierce? Just stand around waiting to die?”

“No, Everly, I expect us to stop standing around and start finding a way to live! Picking out who to screw ought to be dead last on our list of priorities, right after building a goddamn musical theater and casting for The King and I! Clean water! Food! Shelter from this constant cold, windy piss we’re stuck in! That ought to be where your head is at, not in my pants!”

“Oh believe me, nobody here is looking forward to getting in your pants.” Scott gave that a dramatic pause, then added, “Although God knows there’s room for two or three in there once you’re out of them.”

“Another fat joke,” said Amber, rolling her eyes. “If you can’t quit the name-calling, can you at least pick a new name?”

Several female voices called agreement and a few of the men standing behind Scott slunk off and sat down again.

Scott noticed. He glanced around, flustered and trying not to show it.

“You’re losing your crew, Commander,” said Amber.

“No one ever taught you when to shut up, did they?” He looked at her again, almost but not quite sneering, and dropped his voice until it was just for the two of them. “You want to call this a win, you go right ahead. But there is no future in all your self-righteous talk about what we eat and where we sleep. There’s a future in fucking. So you give it a week. Give it two. And then you get ready to spread that butter because things are going to change.”

He waited, just in case she wanted to get the punches started, but she turned her back on him instead, since that had always been the best way to chap Nicci’s ass when they fought. They both walked away, but it sure didn’t feel over.

“All right, people.” Commander Everly Scott, in charge once more, clapped his hands to get people’s attention just like the argument itself hadn’t done that. “Volunteer hunters, front and center. Miss Bierce will be in charge—”

So it could be all her fault when it failed.