Please Return Your Borrowed Gravity

How it begins

Petra's first instruction was to secure all loose objects. Her second was to secure all loose people. The company had added the second after an expensive misunderstanding.

She broadcast both in a pleasant voice.

Below her service platform, the colony's market square continued its morning business. A woman anchored a crate of oranges. A barber tied his chair to a drainpipe. Nobody looked surprised, which was usually worse than panic.

“Repossession begins in ninety seconds.”

A man climbed the platform carrying a child's shoe.

“Someone will need that,” Petra said.

“Several thousand people will need the thing you're taking.”

“The field remains at emergency minimum. Nobody falls upward.”

He set the shoe on her console. It drifted sideways.

Petra checked her instruments.

The colony's gravity grid was operating within tolerance. Something beyond it was not. A narrow thread of force ran from the central generator into the uncharted space behind the moon. Along it moved hundreds of tiny signatures.

Ships. Old ones, with engines too weak to hold a normal transit lane.

“Your field has an unauthorized extension,” she said.

“Yes.”

“That voids the lease.”

“It was void before we signed it.”

Petra stopped the countdown at eleven seconds. Her supervisor's warning light appeared immediately.

The man introduced himself as Amir Vale. On the display, one of the distant ships began to slip away from the others.

“What happens if I complete the order?”

Amir watched the little signature moving.

“We lose the route. Then we lose the ships.”

The supervisor sent a second warning. Petra had exceeded her discretion allowance by thirty-four seconds.

She took the child's shoe off the console and fitted a safety tether through its buckle.

“Who calculated your original loan?”

Amir gave a short, tired laugh.

“The same people who calculated what a refugee should weigh.”