1.3
21 March
✧
Paramaribo, Suriname
Earth Surface
The RzVz launch vehicle, Exultation, was a good old-fashioned vertical rocket ship with a little shuttle perched on top, with seating for a pilot and copilot who apparently were not actually needed, or at least not going to show up for this particular trip. The empty seats were far more unnerving than if the ship were simply automated and pilotless. Their vacancy contributed to the rushed, half-baked vibe of this whole endeavor.
Separated from the cockpit by a little doorway was the passenger compartment, with two rows of three seats. It looked like maybe two additional rows could be bolted in, but those spaces were vacant as well. The seats had probably been removed to save weight. The seats that remained were pleather in RzVz blue, bright against the cabin bulkhead of gray composite material, much like that of the Space Force’s own shuttles. There were video monitors built into nearly every surface, serving as virtual windows looking up at the sky, down at the ground, across at the launch tower and the complex of roads and fuel tanks and support buildings that surrounded it, and out over the sea and the swamp and the rocky beaches and the bricky, tin-roofed sprawl of Paramaribo off in the distance. A ladder led down the left-hand side of the cabin, but it seemed weirdly out of place, because the overall effect in here was like someone had taken a section from the right half of an airliner, and tipped it on its back.
Apparently thinking the same thing, Jeanette said, “Sorry you got the middle seat, Hon. I’ll save you the armrest.”
That was a joke, because they were all in bulky spacesuits, strapped into their seats, with their heavy arms lying on rather generous blocks of cushioning separated by a good three centimeters from their neighbors. Alice had Jeanette on her left and Bethy Powell on her right, and Dona Obata in front of her, and on either side of Dona were two women she’d met only very briefly, in the gowning area where they’d all been ordered by a chipper young functionary to exchange their street clothes for blue space coveralls covered in patches announcing their status as RENZ VENTURES SPACE COLONIST and MISSION SPECIALIST posted to ESL1 STATION CREW 3.
One of the women was surprisingly muscled, and had short brown curls and a name tag that said R. Lee. The other was tall and thin and vaguely floppy-looking somehow, with shoulder-length aquamarine hair. Her tag said M. Aag.
“Malagrite Aagesen,” she’d said with a very slight European accent, catching Alice’s eyes on her name tag as she zipped up her coverall. “But I guess I’m ‘Maag’ now. That’s kind of silk, eh?”
As they dressed and made introductory small talk, Jeanette let it slip that Alice (A. Kyeong) had room left over in her flight bag, and so after some negotiation Alice found herself in possession of the street clothes (and in at least one case, used underwear) of five other women. They’d taken the duffel away from her in the gowning area, and she had no idea what had happened to it after that, or where it was now. She hoped to hell it did not get misplaced in all this amateur-hour shuffling, because she needed some of the stuff in there.
Surprisingly, despite all that was in it, the space inside the shuttle did not feel cramped. However, it did seem a bit flimsy; not counting the reentry shield, the whole crew cabin probably weighed less than the women inside it, and although it was mostly carbon fiber and foamed titanium, Alice almost felt she could kick the whole thing to pieces in a few minutes if she needed to.
“Are you ready?” Bethy asked everyone, not over the suit comms (which hadn’t yet been switched on), but just calling out loudly through the acrylic of her helmet visor, in a voice like some kind of sports announcer. Then dropped back into her own Kiwi voice and said, “I know I’m not! Ha!”
Two male technicians had led them into the launch vehicle one by one: in through the hatch, down the ladder, across the empty seats and into their own, and then helped them buckle in. “Thanks to carbon bond stripping technology, you’ve got three hours of breathing from a tank the size of a wine bottle,” one of them kept saying, over and over. “That will get you to Transit Point Station, so do not open your helmet visors unless instructed. Thanks to carbon bond stripping technology . . .”
Bethy had gone in first, and then Alice a few minutes after her, and so the two of them had had almost half an hour sitting next to each other, pretending to get acquainted.
Bethy had said things like, “I’m from Middle Earth. You know, where they filmed those Hobbit movies. My pastimes include gardening, bicycling, and beefing exotic billionaires.” And, “God loves a fast car. How many kph do you reckon this baby clocks?” And, “Botanist, yeah, but I don’t honestly think that’s why. I hear they’re going to start raising some animals, and I know a little about that.” And, “Box of fluffy ducks, we’re about to head! Journey of a lifetime and all that.”
She was laying it on awfully thick—too cheerful, too Kiwi, too lacking in the kind of nervous tension the occasion actually called for. It looked like an act. It was an act. Of course, Bethy always seemed to be acting; Alice wasn’t sure she’d ever met her as an actual person. Still, it made her feel exposed, so she responded as noncommittally as possible, with brilliant improvisations like “Uh-huh,” and “I moved around a lot as a kid,” and “Air Force medic, eight years,” and then “Uh-huh” again. Bethy knew all of that already, and while it was a good idea to go through the motions, Alice felt pretty nervous about the whole thing. Bethy wasn’t a good liar, and Alice suspected she wasn’t, either. The less she actually said, the better. But she also realized that wasn’t the only thing she was nervous about. In point of fact, she actually felt rather keyed up.
Jeanette, for her part, reached across Alice to touch fingers with Bethy just as soon as the techs buckled her in and climbed back up for their next human parcel. “We’re going to be crewmates, so I’m pleased no matter what. Jeanette Schmidt, space resources utilization.”
“Bethy Powell, botanist and cattle rancher.”
As far as Alice knew, Bethy didn’t have any formal credentials in botany—not real ones, anyway—but her family had grown vegetables and battled weeds and participated in some kind of Open Source Seed movement, and in her final week at the Marriott Stars the bosses had had her tending a zero-gee hydroponic system made of white plastic tanks and tubes, with help from a consultant they’d flown up under pain-of-death secrecy. So yeah, she probably knew enough to fake her way through.
“Shoulda put some crayfish in there,” she’d commented at one point. “They eat anything, and their poop is good fertilizer, because anything’s poop is good fertilizer.”
Anyway, now they were all strapped in and ready for flight, looking out the “windows” at the scene around them. Their last glimpse of Earth through anything but fire and shockwaves.
Alice’s attention was directed inside the ship, however; the Air Force sergeant in her felt a flutter of nervousness when she looked at how lopsided the load was here. All the people on one side! The ship was a sort of stubby winged shuttlecraft, with the ladder and cargo holder down one side, and it just didn’t look balanced. But that couldn’t be right, right? They’d’ve worked it all out to the third decimal place. It was Alice’s keyed-up perceptions that were skewed. Right? When it came to being a Maroon Beret, Alice was very, very good at her job. When it came to most other things, she was a bit of a wreck, and often didn’t trust her own judgment. This was one of those times.
Presently, the suit coms switched on, and after a moment of static and feedback she heard one of the technicians saying, “Check, check. Can you ladies hear me? Cargo loading is about to commence, so I’d like to do a roll call and make sure you’re all on the network. Elizabeth Powell?”
“Here.”
“Alice Kyeong?”
“Uh, here.”
“Jeanette Schmidt?”
“Present! God, I’m nervous.”
“Just breathe deeply. We can adjust your oxygen mix if necessary. Malagrite Aagesen?”
“Roger.”
To which someone said, “I have a brother named Roger.”
To which someone else said, “Is he married?”
But the technician was having none of that. “Cut the chatter, please. You’re on an open channel with ground control, and we’re on the clock here. Dona Obata?”
“Here.”
“Rachel Lee?”
“That’s Rock-kale Lee. Here.”
“All right, we’re going to start loading the cargo containers.”
“Won’t that block the aisle in an escape situation?” Jeanette asked.
To which the technician replied, “In an escape situation, this whole structure blows apart and you all come down on parachutes.”
“Huh,” said someone.
“Yeah, right,” said someone else.
“Cut the chatter, please. Pod one is on the rails. Keep hands and feet out of the aisle.”
And then a blue barrel came trundling down the ladder on two pairs of motorized gripping wheels.
“Pod two coming.”
A second barrel followed, this one covered in cryptic red and white labels.
“Pod three.”
This one was white, and square, and looked like an oversized milk crate full of neatly bagged charity donations. Was her duffel in there? Together, the three cargo pods were enough to fill the aisle next to the seats, and Alice’s loading questions were answered. Now the weight looked balanced. With any luck, these jokers knew the mass of every colonist down to the gram, and had loaded enough ballast, in just the right places in each container, to compensate. With any luck. As much as she distrusted herself, she wasn’t too keen on Renz Ventures, either. At least on this particular day, they did not seem to have their shit entirely together.
“Capcom here,” a voice said over the network. “Please clear the channel. Thank you. Colonists, I’m going to be talking you through this mission from here on, so please listen closely.”
Capcom stood for “Capsule Communications,” a job title that dated back to the earliest days of space travel, now almost seventy years ago. The term was one of the first things drilled into RzVz candidates, which Alice found ironic, because as far as Launch Ops was concerned, RzVz colonists were cargo—not much different than the barrels currently sitting to their left. But perhaps RzVz felt it was psychologically important for passengers to feel that sense of connection to someone who knew what was going on. Especially with no pilot on board! A ship full of people who’d never been to space before . . . did they need a strong human voice piped into their helmets? Probably. Probably most of them did, yes.
Of course, Alice was no stranger to pilotless aircraft; these days about half the USAF fleet was on full autopilot all the time. But not the fighter jets. Not the ground support jets or the combat helicopters, not when anything, you know, hairy was going on. These days a robot could probably fly combat missions better than most humans, but “most humans” weren’t who the Air Force recruited to fly their planes, and when you were risking your neck there was something reassuring about a human being (an officer, no less) issuing calm instructions and status updates.
Was it different if that voice was on the ground, controlling nothing and sharing nothing of the danger? She supposed it was. But probably still better than nothing. Capcom certainly had a nice, deep voice.
“I’d like you to sound off by seat numbers again,” he said, and then when they’d gone through that, he remarked, almost casually, “All right, the hatches are sealed and if you look out your viewscreens, you’ll see the tower beginning to roll away. We’re live, and the main engines will ignite in thirty seconds.”
“Woooh!” somebody said.
Someone else started breathing really hard and fast into her microphone.
“Cut the sounds and voice chatter, please,” Capcom instructed calmly. “Colonist Lee, I’m putting some CO2 into your air mix to adjust your breathing rate. Breathe nice and deep. That’s right.”
And then, with remarkably little fanfare, he started counting backward from ten! “Ignition in ten . . . nine . . . eight . . .”
Like a rapid-fire eternity, the numbers came too quickly for Alice to think or to feel or to really grasp what was about to happen, and yet somehow too slowly to release the tension. She was on another rocket ride, just another rocket ride, just another little rocket ride to space, except she was lousy at fighting and she had told the President she would take over Esley Shade Station by force . . .
And then the engines lit up. This ignition was a louder, jerkier business than on a government launch vehicle, and wasn’t that a strange thing, that private citizens carrying private citizens would be less gentle than the Space Force tossing some hardened Maroon Beret up into the sky.
And through the many video screens she watched the ground fall away and the clouds ease closer. Not quickly at first, but once the launch stack was clear of the tower it felt like a whole ’nother set of engines kicked on, like kicked on, and then they were really moving.
Somewhere on the voice network, one of the women was whimpering and hyperventilating (Alice thought it was one of the newbies she’d met in the gowning area), and another one was whooping loudly, but only for a second or two, before their voices cut out abruptly, and the soothing voice of Capcom was saying something Alice couldn’t quite make out over the rumble and screech of the engines and the air rushing by them faster and faster.
After that, she began to settle in. Her breathing slowed, because riding out noise and vibration was how she’d spent most of her second decade of life. This was her fourth trip into space, basically routine at this point, and easily her five hundredth time leaving the ground in some dangerous contraption or other. No big deal at all, no big deal at all.
Interestingly, once the first layer of clouds had shot past them, the view screens all suddenly had a gee-force indicator plastered across them in big white figures. Presently 2.3g, and climbing. 2.4, 2.5 . . . At 3.0, the numbers turned yellow, which worried Alice vaguely, since it implied that at some point they would turn orange or red, and oh my God the centrifuge drill at RzVz training went all the way to seven gravities. Just for a second or two, but it hurt, and Alice had found it nearly impossible to breathe. Was that about to happen here? And if so, why was she just figuring it out right this second? Another briefing she’d skipped, or played on her tablet in the background instead of paying full attention?
Jesus.
And then the word STAGING was flashing across the screens in bright red letters, and without warning Alice felt herself thrown forward hard against her seat harness, and then oddly weightless for a fraction of a moment, and then thrown backward or downward really hard against her seat cushions.
“You ready to get heavy?” someone asked. Jeanette Schmidt? Hard to tell; the voice was hoarse and deep and shuddering, barely a woman’s voice at all.
Alice, who ate fear for breakfast and had hurled her body out into cloudless stratosphere more times than she could count, found she was maybe not quite ready to get heavy. And yet, the gee counter climbed, faster now. 5.0. 5.25. 5.75! At 6.0, the numbers went red, and at 6.5 they began flashing, and it was too late, already too late to take a breath, and then it was 7.0, and in some weird phase change, Alice’s helmet visor suddenly went foggy with condensation for some reason. She remembered to squeeze her lower body, keeping the blood from pooling there like the Air Force had taught her to do, but of course that was for when you were seated upright and the gee force was toward your feet. She was on her back so that wouldn’t do any good, and why wasn’t she better at this?
It occurred to Alice that these people were fucking crazy. There were engineers willing to build rocket ships this close to the limits of human endurance. There were owners willing to operate those ships without insurance or really even any government oversight. There were women who, with a few days’ training, were prepared to climb aboard those ships and never come back to Earth again as long as they lived.
The gee counter hit 7.4 and then, with a chunking noise somewhere behind and below, began declining sharply. 7. 6. 5. The voice network was briefly dominated by the sound of women gasping for breath, and then Capcom was on again, saying, “We have main engine cutoff. Prepare for zero gravity, just like in your training, and if you vomit inside your helmet remember to press the purge valve on your chin.”
There was some whooping after that, which Alice understood completely: The ordeal had only lasted a few minutes (maybe eight? maybe ten?), but it was as terrifying as anything she’d ever done, and she was quite glad it was over. Too, for women like Jeanette, the arrival in outer space was the culmination of a dream, perhaps lifelong, and the start of an exciting new chapter in their lives. Reaching for the stars and all that crazy bullshit.
For Alice it was simply the next leg of a journey that would definitely end in tears. Maybe not for her, but for somebody. And maybe for her, yes, or her poor worried mother back in Burning Man.
“Attitude control jets activated,” Capcom told them. “We’re going to reorient the capsule and then do a slight burn to raise our apogee to the orbit of Transit Point Station.”
“Capsule?” Jeanette said cheerfully. “More of a shuttle, really.”
“Our?” said Bethy Powell at the same time. “I don’t see you up here with us, Capcom. Have you been?”
“Many times, yes,” Capcom replied, “now please cut the chatter.”
But someone else piped up with, “Something’s wrong with Lee! I think something’s wrong with Lee! She’s choking or something.”
That was Maag speaking—the girl with the aquamarine hair. Alice recognized the voice. And indeed, through the hiss of air valves and the huffing of her own breath, Alice could hear the faint sounds of coughing and retching in the seats above her. Or in front, or whatever.
“We’re talking Colonist Lee through a situation,” Capcom confirmed.
“It sounds like she’s choking,” Maag said, fumbling with her harness and finally releasing the buckle. “You can’t talk somebody through choking.”
Capcom reacted with immediate and stern disapproval. “Colonist Aagesen, I show your seat restraint detached, repeat, detached. Please check your buckles and reattach.”
“I’m aware of the problem,” Maag replied, floating up out of her seat and catching herself by grabbing one of the seat straps awkwardly with her left hand.
“Whoa,” she said, clearly a bit surprised and disoriented by the lack of gravity. Alice felt smug about that for about half a millisecond, and had to remind herself that her own first minutes in freefall hadn’t gone so well.
“Colonist Aagesen, you’re in a vehicle undergoing orbital maneuvers. You’re risking injury to yourself and others, as well as damage to equipment.”
“Understood,” Maag answered.
Capcom persisted: “When the reaction thrusters activate, the ship is going to rotate around you, and when the main jet fires, you’ll experience thirty seconds of about point five gee. Your fall could break someone’s neck.”
“Then delay the burn,” said Dona.
“It doesn’t work that way, Colonist Obata. I don’t want to be rude, but you folks are cargo.”
“Hands and feet inside the ride,” Maag said. “I do get it, yes.”
Presently, Maag crawled her way across Dona’s space-suited form, to where R. LEE sat flailing and coughing. Lee was still cut out of the main voice network, so the sound was muffled and distant, but unmistakable.
And then another noise: a series of rumbling tones, like low blasts of tuba music. RROO! RROO!
“Attitude jets are firing,” Capcom warned.
Alice wasn’t sure she would have felt anything, if the images of Earth in the view screens hadn’t begun a slow spin around them. As it was, she felt a hint of dizziness.
Ignoring Capcom, Maag reached Lee and poked at something under her helmet visor. The suits had a big orange button there marked PURGE, supposedly for situations like this. But a panicked Lee was batting at Maag, trying to push her away. Maag responded by grabbing a fistful of Lee’s harness strap and leaning into the button with the plastic armor of her spacesuit elbow.
That did the trick; there was a kind of farting sound, and Lee’s helmet barfed out a cloud of, well, barf.
“Orbital burn in fifteen,” Capcom warned.
Then Maag was fumbling one-handed with the visor latch on Lee’s helmet, saying “Hold still, you fucker, hold still.”
And then the latch was open, and the visor was rotating up and away from Lee’s face, and Lee was coughing and spitting and screaming into the passenger cabin.
“Fucking fuck! Fucking . . .” And then she vomited again, launching an arcing stream of it over Maag’s shoulder, across her faceplate, and up toward the empty cockpit.
“Son of a . . .” Maag said.
“Get the fuck off of me,” Lee spluttered. “Let me up. Let me up!”
Without gravity to hold Maag down, Lee did manage to throw her off fairly easily. Of course, Maag was holding onto Lee’s straps with her left hand, so she just sort of pivoted up into the space above the seats, but that was the moment when Capcom said, “Two, one, initiating orbital burn NOW.”
Maag became heavy again, falling toward the back of the passenger cabin. She caught herself with her left hand, pivoted some more, then cried out in pain and fell squarely on top of Alice.
As it happened, Alice was no stranger to situations of this type. When you jumped out of planes for a living, it sometimes happened that somebody’s chute didn’t open. Twice in her career, Alice had arrested somebody’s fall—once by flying down to a dude who had hit his head on the way out of the plane. At three thousand meters she’d tucked in her arms and shot downward face-first, and at two thousand she’d flared and slid a hundred meters laterally, and grabbed the dude and octopused every limb around him and pulled the cord on her primary. BAM! It was too much weight too quickly, and she had nearly dropped him right then, and nearly again several times during the descent, until she’d finally groped her way to one of his dangling carabiners and clipped him to her harness, taking some of the weight out of her arms. And then the fucker had woken up!
His name was Bill Gonzales, and he was strong. He wrestled her for a moment, yelping and squawking in alarm, but she had him from behind, and she was saying “Calm down, Gonzales, calm down, I’ve got you. Calm down. I think you hit your head. Can you look at the horizon for me? Find a spot to orient. I’ve got you. Can you, yeah, can you grab onto my waist? Brother, you are heavy.”
The second time this happened, things were nowhere near as calm. A guy called Florida, coming down on a streamer, had landed squarely on her canopy and collapsed it, and before she knew what was happening the two of them were tangled up together in a mess of unbreakable parachute cords.
Almost without thinking she pulled her boot knife and started slicing, with the ground rushing up at two hundred kph. And suddenly everything was in slow motion, and she had plenty of time to see where the problems were, and she tied Florida to her left leg and then cut everything else, and while he screamed and thrashed she pounded her reserve chute from the sides, took what felt like a very long breath, and pulled the cord. Then the world went back to normal speed, and the chute opened with a sickening jerk that felt like it had popped every joint in her body, and then the two of them were coming down into a canopy of trees—in cartel country, Panama!—with the hum of bullets in the air all around them.
Alice got a medal and a promotion to Senior Master Sergeant for that one, and she never figured out if it was for saving Florida’s life, and her own, or because she broke three bones in her right hand, or because she pulled out her service pistol with that same hand, and started returning fire, and happened to hit somebody who happened to be in view of her jump camera.
(There had been some talk about her meeting the President in the wake of that incident—Yano, not Tompkins—along with a handful of other decorated Spec Ops. But it was election season, and Yano was trying to appease his base by distancing himself from the not-so-secret war against the Cartels, and then he lost the election, so the thing had never quite come together. But apparently Alice had been on some sort of presidential short list after that, which was one of the reasons the new President, Tompkins, had thought to interview her for the RzVz job. So in a way, that incident had been her ticket to outer space.)
Anyway, when Maag landed on her, the situation was familiar enough that she knew exactly what to do, and mild enough that she almost laughed while doing it. But her medic voice kicked in instead.
“I’ve got you. I’ve got you. Just hold still.”
To Lee, Maag said, “You’re welcome, asshole.”
But Lee was still mostly just coughing, so Alice said, “Easy now. We don’t know what’s going on there. We’ll give her a proper evaluation in a minute. Just hang tight.”
It was a hallmark of the Maroon Berets, that they could speak soothingly to a patient while simultaneously firing a weapon or barking orders at a subordinate. Because patients had to be kept calm, for both medical and tactical reasons. Until this moment, Alice had never really considered how creepy that was, or what it said about her that she’d taken to it without any specific instruction. But of course Maag didn’t know any of that. All she heard—all anyone heard—was Alice’s soothing voice. They would form their opinions around that—everyone except Dona and Bethy—and think she was a nice person, and it would work out to her advantage. And this thought brought with it the slightest flicker of shame, passing over her and then gone, at least for now. No time for shame right now.
The burn lasted thirty seconds, with Capcom counting up the numbers, now that he could get a word in.
“Twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty. Burn complete. Colonist Aagesen, please return to your seat and buckle in. We’ve got another hour before station rendezvous.”
Ignoring him, Alice said, “Hang tight, Lee. We’re going to examine you and see what’s going on.”
“Fuck off,” Lee said, gasping, struggling blindly with her seat buckles. Panic attack? Without waiting to be asked, Maag floated up off of Alice and took a position between the cargo canisters and Lee. Alice unbuckled herself and flipped up over the seat, locking eyes with Dona for a moment before gripping Lee’s heaviest strap and settling down to clamp her knees against Lee’s arms.
Alice said, “Hold still, soldier. I’m a medic, and I’m going to check you out. Can you take a few deep breaths for me?”
But Lee was panicking, not really responding in any meaningful way, and it occurred to Alice that she might, among other things, be feeling claustrophobic.
“We’re monitoring Lee’s vital signs from here,” Capcom warned. “If you don’t stay put, you could be liable for any injury you cause.”
“Is there a way to shut that guy off?” Alice asked no one in particular. Then, to Maag: “Can you get her helmet off? That’s a, yeah, that’s a latch. Good. Now rotate and . . . lift, I think? Right. Good.”
Maag lifted the barf-stained helmet away, handing it off to Dona. Alice held Lee by the cheeks and looked at her pupils, which were maximally dilated, so that it was impossible to tell what color her eyes were.
“Breathe for me,” Alice instructed. “That’s right, your job right now is just to breathe. I know you’re a doctor, but right now you listen to me. Breathe. That’s right. Maag, can you get these gauntlets off her hands?”
At this point, Jeanette piped up, saying, “I think you can relax, Capcom. We’ve got things well in hand up here.”
To which Capcom replied, “Ah, shit. I’m going to get some coffee. Please don’t break anything while I’m gone.”