Free The Baba Yaga by Una McCormack Page A

cutting-edge; where scientists who couldn’t quite get permission for their research within the Expansion had come, finding it a place where nobody really bothered to ask questions, as long as the results were good. And since even research scientists need food and entertainment, and sometimes even want to enjoy the finer things in life, and since there seemed to be a good deal of money sloshing around, the traders moved in to offer whatever was wanted. Soon the place acquired its own momentum, and the great market of Shuloma Station was born. The place now had the feel of a bazaar; it had been running for more than thirty years, and had no intention of packing up soon. There was little original scientific work conducted on Shuloma these days, but business was still booming.
    Maria, clutching Jenny’s hand, stood at the intersection between two busy walkways and stared around at the booths, and the traders, and the people... and the aliens ... Maria had never left the Expansion before. She’d seen a few pictures of non-humans—the Vetch, of course, were the staple villain of popular war vids—but nothing had prepared her for the great diversity of the universe beyond her former little world, in all its messy, stinking, oozing glory, with its tentacles and multiple eyes and excess legs and hands and fingers. She stared round until suddenly a little head came to rest exhaustedly against her. Turning to Kit, she murmured, “Jenny’s getting tired.”
    “I know.” Kit frowned into his handheld, and then looked down at his daughter. “Can you manage a little longer, sweetheart?”
    The little girl clung to her mother’s leg and stared at the ground. Kit sighed, and lowered himself down to her height. “Hey, Jenny,” he said. “Think you can manage a while longer? For me?”
    The little girl, bless her, smiled gamely and held out her small arms. “Carry, Daddy?”
    Kit glanced down at the handheld.
    “I can take that,” said Maria, softly.
    He hesitated.
    “Pick her up, love.”
    Kit handed over the device and lifted his daughter into his arms, kissing her soft hair. “I’m following the directions I was given,” he told Maria.
    “You don’t know where we’re heading?” Maria said. “We don’t have an address?”
    He shook his head. Maria wondered, for a moment, whether it had crossed his mind that whoever was helping may well have decided that they were a liability, and was sending all three of them to an unpleasant fate. Then she decided that if it had occurred to someone as inexperienced as her, it had probably occurred to Kit too, and that it was a mark of their desperate situation that he was prepared to take the risk.
    “Then I guess we’d better do what this thing tells us. Everything will be fine,” she said firmly. She nodded towards a passageway on the right, where a huge birdcage hung on the wall, with a great scarlet bird inside. Its eyes, bright and sharp, glittered like gold, or fire. “Down there, I think.”
     
     
    A HEAVY GLOOM lay over Shard’s World: a thick industrial smog that settled on the lungs and made every breath laborious. Walker had only been planetside for a matter of hours, and was already eager to leave. She could not imagine living out her life in this murk.
    They had landed mid-morning, local time, at the spaceport outside Roby, the main city on Shard’s World. They had had no trouble passing through customs and boarding a city-bound shuttle. Nobody checked documents; nobody asked for permits. The worlds that made up Satan’s Reach did not trouble themselves with the baroque bureaucracy and tight controls that typified the Expansion; indeed, they prided themselves on their freedoms. Walker rubbed her hand against the window of the shuttle and looked out across a grim, depleted landscape: grey sky, oily river, heavy machinery, cheap housing. The freedoms enjoyed by the inhabitants of the Reach included, it seemed, the freedom to smother themselves in thick smog and