Dawn of Procyon by Mark R. Healy Read Free Book Online

snatched up a rag and wiped at her hands as she headed toward the workshop exit. Even though it was late in the day, the workshop was still abuzz with noise and the shuffle of Optechs moving about. It was always this way, she thought, when the troops were due to ship out. All hands on deck in order to get the war machines ready to go.
    “Little girl, huh?” she smirked. “So that’s how it is?”
    Pasternak suppressed a smile. “Uh-huh.”
    “You mean the same little girl who ground you into the dust down at the hoop yesterday?”
    “Hey, that’s not fair—”
    “What was the score again? Fifty-seven to thirteen?”
    “Fourteen,” Pasternak said, raising a finger in objection. “That last shot I made was a three-pointer.”
    “Right.” Cait flicked the rag into Pasternak’s face as she breezed past, causing him to stumble backward. “Hold onto that for me, will you?”
    Pasternak grabbed the rag from his face and grinned, then stood watching her go. She was peripherally aware that other men in the workshop had also turned to watch her leave. Being called in to see Dodge was generally not a good thing, she knew. He wasn’t the type to give pep talks, or even engage in idle chat, so this was most likely a reprimand of some kind.
    Cait made it out into the corridor, and the clamor of the workshop began to diminish as she left it in her wake.
    Some days I can’t wait to get out of there , she thought.
    Although there were parts of the job she enjoyed—the physicality of the work, the problem solving aspect of fixing a circuit array or making an engine purr smoothly again—there were also aspects that made her dread coming into work at all.
    More often than not, she felt as though no one in there respected her, that they didn’t believe she could do the job as well as a man. She was still stewed over the “little girl” comment, even though she knew she was projecting her father’s values onto Pasternak, and that her vision had been skewed by her obsessive feud with the old man, but she couldn’t help it. She felt as though they regarded her as some kind of ornament, an amusing and pretty-to-look-at diversion, but not an integral, functioning part of the team.
    The truth was that Cait had loved to get her hands dirty as a kid, spending hours pulling the family lawnmower apart, or trying to fix the busted television set, instead of sitting around putting clothes on dolls. That was all she’d ever wanted to do.
    And that had gotten under her father’s skin, big time.
    Her old man had always tried to steer her into a “woman’s” vocation, a career that was more befitting of a “lady.”
    “Wear a dress to work,” he’d said one day as she was nearing the end of school.
    “Wear a dress?” she’d shot back. “What is this, the 1950s?”
    “You’re not cut out for hard labor is all I’m saying. Look at you, you’d blow away on a puff of wind.”
    “That’s ridiculous.”
    “Cait, I don’t want you to go out there and do something that’s too tough. You’re going to look stupid.”
    Cait hadn’t bothered to argue further with him. Over the years that followed, their fights had escalated, and the eventual heartbreak had driven her to take the toughest job she could find, on an outpost in the middle of nowhere, eleven light-years from Earth.
    Eleven light-years from both him and his backward advice. That would shut him up.
    More than that. One day she was going to run this place. She was only twenty-eight now, but within the next few years she was going to be the most accomplished Optech that Proc-One had ever seen.
    She couldn’t wait to see the old man’s face when that happened.
    She reached Dodge’s office quickly, rapping on the frosted glass door before proceeding through. The office was relatively small and cramped, and stuffed full of crap—boxes of parts that were awaiting inventory processing, for the most part. On the wall hung several certificates from the dim dark past, one