She came to stand before him, palms pressed together as if in prayer. “Can I tell you a story? I don’t want to lie to you or hide things from you. You’re right. We need to be friends to survive this Godforsaken place. I appreciate you’re honesty.”
“Tell me.” He settled back into his seat, folding his arms across his chest. Her demeanour worried him. She’d lost her confidence and struggled to hide her nerves.
She took a deep breath. “I want to tell you about a couple who loved each other deeply. They married young and hoped for a great future together. He was a miner, she a schoolteacher. They had a child, a girl, unplanned but welcomed. However, the miner had already accepted a job on a colony and as you know, children are forbidden on the Outer Rim. They left their daughter behind with a loving grandmother. She was two years old. They went to Europa.”
“There aren’t mines on Europa,” interrupted Blake. Where was this tale going?
“I know, but there were twenty years ago. Europa was not as stable as this one. A year after they arrived, there was a massive explosion, destroying the colony and all its… inhabitants.” Her voice broke and she covered her mouth with a hand. “Sorry, this is so hard.”
“Go on, Lysa.” The tale started to make sense. Before him stood the grown up daughter.
“The little girl never knew her parents and she was grateful for her doting grandmother, who brought her up. She desperately wanted to know why her mother and father died, but nobody could explain the circumstances. The Corporation abandoned Europa and Callisto was chosen to be the main source of minerals. She read everything about mines and grew fascinated by them. She studied what she could and it kindled a dream in her heart.”
“What is that dream, Lysa?” he asked, leaning forward.
“To be a mining engineer.”
He shook his head. A doomed ambition. “Women can’t be engineers. It is prohibited. Punishable by imprisonment for inciting dissent. So why are you here if you can’t work as an engineer?”
She crept forward. “I reached so far with my studies and took some exams—”
“How?” he queried.
“You can do it all remotely, online studying. I set up a bogus male identity and took the exams… I passed with distinction.”
Blake stood up. “Lysa. You’ve committed fraud.”
She cringed. “That isn’t the end of it.”
Blake stared up at the ceiling, hands on his hips. “Go on,” he muttered before sitting back down.
“I couldn’t complete the course. The Corporation doesn’t give the general public access to their systems. I got stuck, unable to learn any more. But up here.” She walked over to the Comms system, where the colony computer could be accessed and touched the screen. “Here I can complete my studies. You have access—”
Blake leapt up again, anger bubbling over and it was his turn to pace the room, fuming at her deceit. “You’ve no interest in being my wife. You just used me to complete your studies.”
“No.” She ran a hand through her hair. “I mean, yes that was the plan. All the way here, on the shuttle, I’d convinced myself I just had to be a wife and gain access to the system, see all the schematics, the protocols, all things I couldn’t access on Earth and then I’d return home and take the final exams. I can see how it might appear to you—mercenary, calculating, manipulative, all those things—but Blake,” she sniffed, wiping away a tear from the corner of her eye. “I do want to be your wife because you’re right, I need a friend. I can’t lie to you any longer, pretend I’m something I’m not. I don’t want to do this on my own, but I won’t… won’t give up. I owe my parents a promise.”
“Promise?” He growled, appalled at her duplicity.
“To make mines a safer place. You should know, the Corporation cuts corners, covers up mistakes. They might have pulled out of Europa, but are things any safer here?”
Blake knew things were tough below ground and there were plenty of near misses. However, he couldn’t condone her behaviour. “I can’t marry you if you begrudge being my wife. I knew you were different when I saw you for the first time, uncomfortable with your nudity. So different from the others. I chose you because I believed we could be more than bedfellows. As much as I need the sex, I want a companion.”
She clasped her hands back into a prayer shape, tears streaming down her face. “So do I. Please believe me. This one day together has changed me. I promise I will keep you happy. I will cook, keep house, kiss you when you come home from work, massage your tired body, make love to you. All I ask is you say nothing of my ambition to be an engineer. If I can pass the exams back on Earth, I can come out and demand to be taken seriously. All women should have this chance to prove themselves. I despise how authorities treat women as second-class citizens with no prospects of being anything but schoolteachers or nurses. We’ve so much more to offer society. Centuries ago women had equal rights.”
He frowned, unconvinced by her lecture on women’s rights. Instead, he refocused his thoughts and recalled her reaction to a comment Dr Lamont made during her examination. “When the doc mentioned women bribing their way on to the marriage list, you went white. Why?”
He could guess, but he had to hear her say it. Her lower lip trembled uncontrollably. Lying to gain access to a computer system was one thing, but bribery was a serious crime. “I had to get in the catalogue. I found out a few officials could be bribed.”
“But not with money?”
Tears gathered a pace again, dripping off her chin. “I slept with two executives and they got me on the list.”
“How many times did they fuck you?” he snarled.
“Many. I hated it. It was nothing like us, I took no pleasure from it. I sold my virginity.”
“Dear God,” Blake buried his face in his hands. “For how long?”