1.4
22 March
✧
Transit Point Station
Low Earth Orbit
Cislunar Space
“I’m Derek,” the pilot said, reaching out to shake her hand.
“Of course you are,” Alice said, a bit more snidely than she’d intended. She backpedaled slightly, with, “Sorry. I’m Alice.”
She felt embarrassed by her reaction, but not that embarrassed, because goddamn it, the male pilots she knew (and she knew a lot) were never “Chris” or “Dana” or “Timmy.” Did men with names like that simply never go to flight school, or never get taken seriously there? Or did they all change their names to “Mitch” and “Hank” and “Thor”? Seriously, she knew two guys named Captain Thor! Of course, the female pilots were nearly as bad. She knew a female “Mike” and a female “Brandon,” for God’s sake.
“Whoa,” said Derek, smiling but confused by her tone. “Hostile. What’s that about?”
The name tag on his jumpsuit said D. Hakkens.
“Oh, you pilots and your names,” Alice said, unhelpfully.
Derek snorted, then nodded, then tongued his cheek from the inside, seeming unsure what to make of her. “Pilots, huh? Okay. I heard you were pararescue. Is that right? Special Forces medic? I’ve found . . . excuse me, I need you to sign this.” He thrust a tablet computer at her. “I’ve found Special Forces people sometimes have an issue with pilots. Not tough enough, something like that.”
“It’s not a toughness issue,” she said, glancing at the form on the screen (some kind of safety waiver) and scribbling her finger on the signature block. “I’m sorry, it’s not you. Well, maybe it’s you; I mean, we haven’t met. I’ve had a lot of soccer dads ferry me around and expect me to swoon for it. Can I help you with that, sweetheart?”
Derek laughed out loud at that, cheerfully refusing to take the bait. And why was Alice baiting him, anyway? Was she attracted to him? Was she pushing him away so she didn’t accidentally sleep with him? Damn it. That had certainly happened with a soccer dad or two, but she couldn’t tell right now if that’s what was going on. Was he anything more than just all right? Did she want him to be? Did it matter? Unfortunately, Alice never seemed to be in good contact with her own brain about stuff like this. Like a lot of adrenaline junkies, she was never in touch with much of anything when the world around her was too calm. She did have a job to do, so she decided to focus on that.
“My call sign is ‘Beaker,’ if that helps,” he offered. “Probably not the most macho you’ve heard.”
Alice opted not to smile at that. “Muppets fan?”
“My father was.”
Was. Past tense. Okay, now that was bait Alice wasn’t going to take. No, she wasn’t going to ask some flyboy about his dear dead father, and listen to all the stories about him sitting in Daddy’s lap, landing the goddamn plane at the age of three. Jesus Christ already.
“What did you want to see me about?” she asked curtly. “What’s this form I just signed?”
They were floating in a too-busy service hab on this too-empty station, their voices elevated over the surprisingly loud hiss of the station’s ventilation system.
Like the spaceport at Paramaribo, Transit Point Station was some kind of joint venture between RzVz and the three other private space companies: Orlov Petrochemical, Harvest Moon Industries, and Enterprise City LLG. And like Paramaribo, TPS had a seat-of-the-pants vibe to it. As the shuttle had approached, Alice and her fellow passengers had seen the structure of it—much larger and spindlier than you saw it online, from angles carefully selected to be photogenic and dramatic. The station orbited at a higher altitude than the Marriott Stars, so the Earth was smaller and rounder below it, and revolving more slowly underneath, than Alice was used to seeing it. TPS had ten cylindrical habitat modules arranged in two rows of five, with connecting modules in between, and the “pier” structure extending upward from that, with berthing slips for, it looked like, ten spaceships at once, although only three were occupied. One was filled by a little shuttle like the one they were in, and one by a deep-space craft Alice actually recognized from one of her briefings, as the L.S.F. Dandelion, the “low speed ion ferry” that would carry them out to ESL1. Or a vehicle of the same type, at any rate.
The third ship was so big she’d thought at first that it was part of the space station. It had taken her a minute to recognize it as H.S.F. Concordia, the famous ship that was allegedly going to carry one hundred lucky contestants to Mars in a couple of years. “My God, will you look at that,” Maag had said. Alice hadn’t known what to say. Mars? For real? But there was Dan Beseman’s ship, larger than life.
Now, onboard the station, a small Asian man in red coveralls brushed past her and Derek, looking like he was in a hurry, with a larger, ginger-haired man trailing after him. These same two people had swarmed past in the other direction not two minutes ago. TPS had been built to accommodate transient populations of up to a hundred people—literally, a hundred!—but its permanent crew was only ten, and they always seemed to be in motion, on their way from somewhere to somewhere else. Cheerful but harried, clearly overworked in their shitty astronaut jobs and just as clearly loving it.
Transit Point Station was on the same clock schedule as Suriname, an hour ahead of Eastern Standard Time. As Alice and her crewmates discovered shortly after arriving, during the evening and night shifts, these modules unfolded into galleys and bathing areas, exercise rooms and sleeping quarters. It wasn’t as nice as the Marriott Stars, but it was a lot nicer than Alice had been expecting. A bit like RV camping, and in the absence of gravity the modules felt pretty roomy inside. With the exception of Rachael Lee, they’d all slept together in the same dormitory module, in sleeping bags like oversized pillowcases hung from the walls. Lee, who had barfed in her helmet, was recovering in sickbay, which was a module unto itself, and capable of serving up to six patients at once. That seemed like overkill to Alice, but it said something about the ambitions of the people who’d built this place. Lots of traffic expected in their future, lots more than today.
But during the “day,” most of these same modules packed up into corridors and workstations, plus gowning and de-gowning rooms for people in spacesuits. This particular module—2C—wasn’t exactly out of the way, but it didn’t seem to be serving any specific function at the moment. It was a good enough place to meet and talk.
Of course, Alice was only here because she was bored and Derek had paged her. She got the sense Derek was here for something more specific than to get a form signed.
“According to your dossier, you’re a qualified pilot yourself,” he told her.
“Gliders only,” Alice answered. “I had some basic single-engine training but not enough to get certified.” She paused and looked at him. “Why?”
“They’re pushing us out of here ahead of schedule, and my copilot isn’t going to make it off Earth in time. I need someone to fill the chair.”
Alice couldn’t quite help rolling her eyes. “We need two pilots for a slow ferry? Really? I took a big rocket here, and we got all the way through boost phase, orbital rendezvous, and docking with zero pilots.”
“True, although that’s frowned on. They wanted you out of there, and up here, in a hurry.”
She frowned at that. “Yeah, we noticed. Why is that? What’s going on?”
Derek demonstrated the art of the zero-gravity shrug. “Not sure. Something about government interference. You heard about the blockade of Suriname?”
“People have been talking about it, yes.”
“Well, that’s part of it, but there seems to be something more going on. Igbal’s worried about, quote, ‘more invasive government assistance,’ close quote.”
“Even up here?”
Derek shrugged again, and for the first time, it occurred to Alice that it might be her own operation that RzVz had caught wind of. The thought gave her instant goose bumps, though whether of fear or excitement she couldn’t tell. Like most Maroon Berets, she had those two emotions pretty well twisted together when she had them at all.
Changing the subject, she said, “How does it help you, to have a glider pilot on a spaceship?”
“In terms of flying, it doesn’t. You’d be redundant and actually kind of in the way. In terms of my pay, it’s the difference between tending a semi-robotic flight and commanding a fully manual training mission. That’s six thousand dollars in my pocket.”
“Ah.” Six thousand dollars didn’t buy as much as it used to before the currency collapse, but for most people it was still a month’s rent or two years of decent haircuts—nothing to sneeze at. That made enough sense to calm Alice down a bit. As a motivator, simple human greed was easy to relate to. RzVz wasn’t a drug cartel; they weren’t going to put a bullet in the back of anyone’s head or anything like that. But they did want their precious profits, same as Derek, same as everyone else in the world.
They also wanted power, she supposed. Not just the power to buy and sell what they wanted, and place their space assets wherever they wanted, but to sidestep government influence in every big and small way they could. To operate out of third-world countries that did their bidding. But even that wasn’t so sinister, because what was the point of power, if not to satisfy greed? Cartels were not motivated purely by money. They were quick to anger, quick to take offense, quick to solve problems with insane levels of highly targeted violence. Corporations—even shady ones like Orlov Petrochemical—were calmer and more predictable. Still, if it were up to her, she would have liked to see them under better control. Bridle the Horsemen, so to speak.
Alice realized, suddenly and with some surprise, that she was a bit of a socialist. Huh. If she really thought about it, most Air Force people were! Praise Jesus, all their actual needs were met by shared facilities and a government salary, and few of them traded it for the private sector until their pensions kicked in and it was safe. Funny, that people like her would rather parachute into a hot landing zone than risk their pride and treasure in the job market.
And it did sound kind of silk, learning to fly a spaceship. Also, and more darkly, she might learn something that would help her escape from Esley Shade Station if her betrayals somehow failed to deliver the station into government hands.
Playing along, she asked, “What do I get out of it?”
Derek seemed to ponder that for a while, before answering, “I guess I could sleep with you.”
It was such a flyboy thing to say, it almost didn’t surprise her, but she pushed him for it, lightly on the chest, with her other arm braced, so he tumbled away from her.
“Try again.”
Snorting as he caught himself, Derek said, “You’d be surprised how often that works. But okay, you’re a cut above the schoolgirls. Duly noted. You want a third of the bonus money?”
“Half,” she said, not meaning it, just wondering what he’d say.
He looked at her sideways. “Fuck are you going to spend it on, Colonist?”
“Don’t care. Oxygen, maybe.”
He snorted again, but with a bit less amusement.
“One third. Final offer. And you get a flight approval on your personnel file, and a pile of hours toward your certification, so I don’t want any shit from you.”
“Deal,” she said, after pretending to think it over. Then, just to be an asshole, she added, “I’d’ve done it for free.”
He nodded. “Yeah, me too. Fucking spaceship, am I wrong?”
And then the two of them were laughing, and that was that.
Changing subjects, she asked him, “If we’re shipping out later today, what’s going to happen to Rachael Lee?”
“Colonist Lee is staying here. I’m told she’s on some kind of probation, might get shipped back home.”
“For barfing in zero gee?”
“For losing her shit about it, yes.”
“Mmm.” That seemed fair. RzVz was no military operation, but it did seem to have a bit of the same flavor, including a low tolerance for bullshit. For a moment, Alice caught herself thinking that was good and would make her happy in her new life.
Derek handed her a little Velcro-backed rectangular patch that said PILOT TRAINEE in gold letters. It was fresh off the fabric printer, still warm.
“Once you put this on,” he told her, “you outrank the other colonists, at least until we reach Esley. So I need you to go round them up, get ’em ready for the flight.”
He looked her over for a moment, and then added, “I was an Air Force captain, you know. Fighter pilot. I flew top cover on fifteen Coffee Patch missions, making sure you people had clear skies above.”
Alice considered that. “Am I supposed to be impressed?”
“Just saying, you’re not the only one who’s been shot at.” Then, to her unspoken question, he answered, “The June Massacre? Yes, I was there.”
Hmm.
Once the bankrupt U.S. government had finally given up its drug war and Big Pharma had taken over the job of getting people high, the Cartels had not taken it well. They’d started straight-up taxing the people and businesses in their territory, like legitimate governments high on blood and cocaine. And the actual legitimate governments had taken that badly, and soon everybody was shooting everybody. And yeah, the second time an American judge was murdered right there on the bench of his own courtroom, the U.S. was officially back at war with the Cartels again, and it was personal.
Things had gone well for Uncle Sam, and then really well, because it was finally just a matter of identifying what needed to be blown up, and then blowing it up. Hard times or no, these things were still very much in the American wheelhouse, and the Air Force started racking up impressive numbers, until it was time for the Marines and Army to start actually capturing back territory. Boots on the ground, as they liked to say. Even that had gone well for a while, until the Medellín Cartel had somehow gotten their hands on a shipment of Chinese jet drones, packing enough EMP wattage to microwave a human brain from two kilometers away.
That day—known to the media as the June Massacre and to the Maroon Berets as Zero Extract—was the war’s highest Coalition body count by a factor of ten, and it had been largely responsible for pushing the U.S. back into covert ops, where it was easier to literally hit the Cartels where they lived, with deniability for any atrocities that might occur. Not deliberate atrocities, of course, but there were plenty of fuckups in the heat and confusion of battles taking place on remote, mansion-covered hills poking up out of dense jungle. The Medellín and Chocadores used their own children as human shields, and other people’s children as torture porn to bait ambushes.
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Alice said to Derek. What else could she say?
He nodded. “Yeah. Thanks. We undock in three hours.”
He turned to go, on some inscrutable pilot business of his own, before turning and adding, “That trainee patch puts you in my chain of command, by the way.”
“Well, duh,” she answered. But his meaning was clear: Until they got to ESL1 and she reported to whomever, he in fact couldn’t sleep with her, even if he wanted to. Sleeping with direct subordinates was universally forbidden, both in and out of the military.
“Understood,” she added, just to make sure he knew she knew what he was getting at. But it did cross her mind that military and corporate ethics rules probably didn’t apply out here. Maybe not even maritime law, because who was going to enforce it?
When Alice got back to the sleeping quarters, she found Dona Obata engaged in a fierce argument with two men wearing the red jumpsuits of Transit Point Station crew.
“I’m sorry,” one of them was saying, “but your file is red-flagged. Some of the answers on your application don’t line up with your background check, and the AI kicked it back.”
“My background check was finished months ago,” she snapped at him, “and I passed.”
“Data sniffers,” the guy said, shrugging. “They never sleep, they just keep searching.”
“Fucking AI,” Dona spat. “You let me talk to a person about this.”
“I’m a person,” he said. He was black, though not as black as Dona herself. The name tag on his coverall said Cmdr. C. Oliver. “I reviewed the discrepancies myself.”
“What’s going on?” Alice demanded.
“Big Brother, here,” Jeanette mumbled.
Moderating her tone, Alice tried, “Commander, I’ve known this woman for”—for what, a few days?—“a few days, now. I’ve seen nothing suspicious.”
“Reeeally,” Commander C. Oliver said, glaring sideways at her. Not impressed.
It did sound kind of thin. Why had she said that?
“What exactly is the problem?” she tried. Oliver looked at her name tag, saw the trainee patch. Looked back up into her eyes.
“Anomalies,” he repeated. “I mean, people lie on their résumés, it happens, but not everyone has École Polytechnique lying on their résumés for them.”
Improvising, Alice asked, “Meaning what, she hacked her records?”
“I don’t know,” Oliver replied. “I don’t know what it means, but it’s not my job to know. Our instructions are to put her back on the shuttle that brought her here. And so far she’s noncompliant. Are you military?”
“Formerly, yes.”
“You want to give us a hand with her?”
Physically, he meant. Because even out here in low Earth orbit, he didn’t want to assault a woman, or be accused of touching one inappropriately.
Alice looked him over. It was hard to say what separated civilian types from military and first responder types, because civilians could be tough and disciplined people. Football players and street brawlers, CEOs and Cartel jackboys all had their strengths. And yet, she could spot at a glance who was and wasn’t currently in the military. Former military took only a moment longer to sniff out. There was something disciplined and tough about Commander C. Oliver, but he was definitely a civilian. This amused Alice, who had spent her adult life around Spec Ops men who’d think nothing of grabbing Dona by the tits and slamming her head against the ceiling, if the tactical situation appeared to call for it.
However, Alice’s special relationship in this situation offered a whole ’nother approach: throwing Dona under the bus. Dona was burned, as the intel people liked to say, and if Alice tried to defend her, she could end up burned as well. No, thank you.
“What’s your strategy here, Dona?” she asked in a loud voice. “Whatever you were trying to get away with, it didn’t work, and now these gentlemen want you gone. Your new employer wants to stop employing you. And you’re arguing with them? Do you think that’s going to work?”
“What are you doing?” Dona demanded, glaring icily. She was far off script now, and Alice could see that made her dangerous. She would turn to violence if she thought there was an advantage in it. But there wasn’t. What could she do, beat up everyone in this room, and then just board the ferry to ESL1 like nothing had happened?
“Helping, Dona. Are you listening? I’m helping. I don’t know what’s going on here, but if you’re some kind of a spy, I’d say your cover is blown. If you’re not a spy, if you’re some plain old liar, your cover is still blown. Apparently Igbal doesn’t want liars on his station, and I can’t say I blame him. Would you? You’re fired, girl. They’re not letting you on that ferry. So what are you trying to do?”
“Steady now,” Bethy said from across the room. “Nobody wants trouble.”
Dona turned her glare of cold fury in Bethy’s direction, and right there, from the look in Dona’s eyes, Alice could see she’d made the right move. If Alice and Dona and Bethy were all in this together, Dona would know that her own exposure could, ironically and indirectly, make Alice and Bethy more secure. Problem solved, everyone! Government interference found and neutralized! But no, Dona didn’t appear to see it that way. Dona was not in this together with Alice and Bethy, but had some other sort of plan in mind. To cut Alice and Bethy out? To seize the station and all its assets for France, or for the Congo, or for the highest bidder, or whatever? Maybe even for the fucking Cartels. Oh, Dona.
“Maybe you’re a spy,” Dona said to Bethy, then turned to Alice to include her in the statement as well. It was a naked threat—I can expose you right here and now—but Dona’s heart did not appear to be in it. She was compromised, all right, but she and her backers still had a good deal of deniability. If she went and compromised the whole operation, there’d be nothing but ass fuckings all around, and the ESL1 Shade still in the hands of a nutjob.
Dona sighed, and then the tension went out of her, and she did a remarkable job of starting to actually cry. “I just wanted to be here. The future, outer space. Didn’t you? Oh, damn, I knew it was too good to last. I went to college, okay? Free online college is still college. I know what I know! Give me an aptitude test!”
Commander Oliver now looked embarrassed. “That’s not my department, Ms. Obata; I don’t even work for Renz Ventures. When you get to Earth, I’m sure you can petition your case with the admissions board. Right now, I’m afraid Pilot Trainee Kyeong is correct: you’ve been fired. If you don’t get on that earthbound shuttle ASAP, you can be charged with trespassing, and billed for the air you’re breathing. Which isn’t cheap. That is my department, so I’d encourage you not to test my patience.”
“So what am I supposed to do?”
“Put your spacesuit on. Now. I’ll have someone stow your belongings on the shuttle for you. I don’t have any pilots to spare, but the shuttle can take you back to Suriname on its own. It’ll be a few hours before the orbits line up, but you can spend that in the shuttle, floating free. Not here.”
“Damn it. Damn it. Really? Are you serious right now?”
Oliver’s silence said it all.
Bethy, wisely, looked away rather than involving herself any further in the dispute. And so it was Maag and Alice who wound up escorting Dona to the gowning module, and watching while she stripped to her 3D-printed “space underwear” and sullenly donned her spacesuit. Distinctly unfashionable, the space underwear consisted of a dark gray, stretchy, remarkably slippery T-shirt with a kind of shelf bra built in, and a pair of tight-fitting shorts in the same color that reached almost to the knee, like bicycle shorts. They were basically just to keep spacesuits and coveralls from chafing or sticking or stinking in the wrong places. Loaded with antimicrobials and “odor-neutralizing and odor-sequestering molecules,” they were designed to go a whole week between washings, and to permit the aforementioned spacesuits and coveralls to be used for months, because apparently laundry was hard to do in outer space. It used up a lot of water or something. This had been invisible to her at the Marriott Stars, but people made a big deal about it here.
“You’re going to be going through atmospheric reentry by yourself,” Maag told Dona. “I don’t care who you are, that’s going to be scary.”
“I’ll be fine,” Dona snapped, because of course she’d been through several reentries already.
But it just looked like bravado to Maag, who offered Dona an awkward hug. Dona accepted it, but shot Alice a look that said, I might very well murder you for this.
Once they had her in the spacesuit, they escorted her onto the shuttle and helped her buckle in like it was their job. Perhaps it was? They chose an aisle seat for her, closest to the vehicle’s center of mass, presuming that was better somehow. Then one of the red-jumpsuited station technicians came around with a box containing Dona’s flight bag, and secured it to the rail across from her seat.
Maag offered her another awkward hug, and said good luck.
“And to you,” Dona said sourly, and with a bit of acerbic irony. Like, Good luck, blue hair, when Pilot Trainee Alice Kyeong turns on you, too. Her voice was muffled by the bubble of her spacesuit helmet, but that tone came through loud and clear. Well, good. At least she was playing the part—hurt and confused, a little panicked at how fast this was happening and how little control she had over it. The nastier truth was something Alice wasn’t sure she wanted to know, but meanwhile she had her own part to play: ashamed. If she simply pretended in her mind that Dona wasn’t a dangerous government operative, then this was a shitty thing they were doing to her. Shitty and scary.
“I’m sorry,” Alice told her, not meaning it in the slightest.
There wasn’t much else to say, so the three of them—Alice and Maag and the red-suited technician—retreated back into the station under a cloud of shame.
“Not exactly teamwork,” the technician said, putting voice to it as he dogged the double hatches closed. “Not exactly professional.”
“Right?” Maag said. “We’re just kicking her out in a lifeboat. For what, exactly?”
“For being a security threat,” Alice said. And this time she did mean it.
The technician leaned on an intercom button and said, “She’s ready to fly, Cap’n.” His name was D. Nguyen, and he looked about as far from a classic astronaut as you could get. Lacking the chiseled flyboy jaw or the smug PhD certitude, he had that harried Transit Point Station thing going on, and he looked, if anything, like the janitor from Alice’s high school. Was it possible to “stoop” in zero gravity? If so, this man was doing it.
And yet, he must have passed through some kind of selection process to be here. With nothing to explore or build, and no research to perform, the TPS joint venture had more in common with the Marriott Stars than it did with anything out at ESL1, or on the surface of the Moon, or whatever. But the staff of the Marriott Stars were fit and friendly and extremely good at their hospitality jobs. Alice had imagined them being recruited from resorts all over the world—every one of them a multilingual kite-surfing instructor and tennis pro and five-star chef with somehow no ego about it. She’d been discouraged from fraternizing with them, and with one sweaty exception she had in fact kept her distance, though she’d liked them well enough. But D. Nguyen was not like those people, either.
“What’s your story?” Alice asked him. She liked to think of herself as the sort of person who could get away with questions like that.
He was actually upside down from her at the moment, so his expression was difficult to read, but he’d understood the question, and his answer was clear enough: “I worked twenty years on deep-sea natural gas rigs. Maintenance division.” He made a swimming motion with his hands. “Spent years of my life underwater, and years more in decompression chambers, gassing out the nitrogen bubbles. But I had a window that looked up at the stars. Every night, they kept me sane! Dreaming of the sky. Dreaming to live in the sky.”
“Ah.”
“Nobody more qualified than me,” he said with a little laugh.
Intrigued, she asked, “You work outside much? In a spacesuit?”
“EVA? Yeah, we go out in teams of two to swap out components and such. I’m usually one of the two. But I also keep the 3D printers running, and the toilets, and every other thing. These boys would die in half an hour if not for me.”
Turning right side up, he gave Alice and Maag a sidelong look and observed, “Mostly women where you’re going. Trust me, I seen them all when they come through here. The only men out there are pilots. You tried zero-gee sex yet?”
Maag looked annoyed at that, but Alice just laughed. It was the sort of pass an Army Ranger might make—direct and to the point, and without much riding on it.
“You’re at the top of my list,” she assured him.
“Got more experience at that, too,” he assured her right back.
Then, suddenly, there was a banging noise from the double hatch, and through the little round window Alice could see the shuttle falling away. She couldn’t help crowding forward to look out the porthole, and apparently neither could Maag. The two of them crowded in together, as much as the lack of gravity allowed, and watched as the shuttle—their shuttle—drifted away into empty space.
“Damn,” Maag said.
She smelled of Paramaribo and wet wipes and some sort of fruit-scented shampoo, and the new-car aroma of 3D-printed clothing.
“Yeah,” Alice agreed. If she thought about it, she actually did have some complex feelings about what had just happened; she and Dona had spent a lot of time together at the Marriott Stars, in training and conversations and the curiously intimate business of wrestling each other into submission. Well, Dona wrestling Alice into submission. They weren’t friends, exactly, but they had headed off into danger (and probable combat) together, which made them a lot closer than office colleagues.
On the other hand, it really did seem like Dona had been planning all along to betray Alice and Bethy, and their respective countries, which was awful, of course, and made Alice very glad to see her leaving in disgrace. But it somehow didn’t erase the other stuff, not completely. And then, yes, there was also the slipshod way the thing was being handled. Kicking someone—anyone—out into outer space by herself was a cold move. She wasn’t sure what anyone could have done differently, with no security personnel on the station, and presumably no weapons, and no spare pilots, and everyone in a huge hurry to pry these colonist women away from the grasping hands of Earth.
But it did leave a bad taste. Unprofessional, yes, on multiple levels, because everyone was off script. How could there be a script for something like this?
The shuttle simply drifted for a minute, and then little plumes of gas started jetting out of little recesses in its hull, and it began to rotate, and then more jets fired, and the rotation stopped. Then, with eerie silence, the main thruster fired; a blue-white umbrella of flame and gas, blasting from a cone-shaped nozzle mostly hidden from view.
For a moment, the ship barely moved, and for another moment it moved sluggishly, like a motorboat churning at the dock. But then, with alarming swiftness, it pulled out of view. Both Alice and Maag craned at the window, trying to angle for a better view, but the shuttle was gone. Reluctantly, they turned away.
“She’ll be okay,” Nguyen assured them, although it was hard to say what, if anything, he was basing that on. “That shuttle was supposed to leave empty tomorrow. It knows its way back home.”
“I feel unclean,” Maag said, half jokingly and half . . . what, despairingly?
“Space is grungy,” Nguyen said to her, nodding vaguely. “You have to do everything. Fix the climate controls or you broil and freeze. Clean the toilets or you shit yourself. You have to deal with problem people, and with good people on problem days, and I’m saying really deal with them. Or what happens? It’s not pretty. That’s the thing, eh? Not pretty. Guys like me, we know that.”
Unhappily, Alice said, “She was a problem person. Bad enough her story didn’t line up, but her reactions didn’t, either. Did you buy any of that?”
Maag shrugged.
Alice thought: Do you buy any of this? From me? Shit.
“Do you have access to any medicinal comforts?” Maag asked Nguyen.
Somehow, his answering smirk was simultaneously filthy and guileless. “Alcohol? Could be. If I take you on a date, show you the sights . . .”
Maag appeared to be considering that for a moment—like a woman contemplating a tray of greasy gas station hot dogs before a long desert drive, and wondering if she dares to eat one, so to speak.
But it was Nguyen himself who saved her the trouble. “The drug printer’s idle time program is a never-ending experiment to create drinkable booze. Some of it’s pretty good stuff, and if you throw some orange drink in it, it makes a decent cocktail. You want some, I can set you up, no strings attached. This was an ugly business; I can see you’re upset.”
And it was Alice who stepped in humorlessly with, “We have to go, Maag. Our ship leaves in about two and a half hours. We’ve all got to pack up our shit and get our spacesuits back on.”
“Why?” Maag wanted to know.
“Still running from government interference, it sounds like.”
“I mean, why the spacesuits?”
“Any launch, docking, and undocking maneuvers,” Alice said, for once remembering a line from the RzVz training. “In case we rupture a seal.”
“We’re not wearing them now,” Maag said, sniffing and flourishing a hand at the now-vacant airlock. Wasn’t that an undocking procedure?
“We’re not civilians here,” Nguyen told her. “All veteran astronauts here. Also, we got a lot bigger volume than a spaceship. We spring an air leak, we might not even notice right away. And even then, we just close a door, seal the module until we find the hole. It’s happened more than once—no big deal. And heck, if we suited up for every docking and undocking here, we’d never do anything else.”
“Hmm.”
“She’ll be okay, we’ll be okay,” Nguyen said. “Everybody be okay. Come on, I’ll send you away with a little something.”
Maag shook her head. “Nah. Thank you, no, I changed my mind.”
Maag was clearly not going to be made happy about any of this. Well, fine. Cheering her up wasn’t in Nguyen’s job description anyway, or Alice’s. But getting her on the ship was Alice’s job, so she beckoned, and Maag followed.
They made their way back to the gowning area, where the women had already received word of their impending departure, and were already shrugging and twisting their way into spacesuits. This was a tricky business, like fitting yourself into a very heavy, very stiff, pullover winter coat and snow pants. And once you had them on, you had to rotate the seals and lock them together, and then you had to pull your helmet down over your head and lock it into place, and turn on your air, and then put the gloves on and lock their seals as well. Then check for leaks. It was serious business, but also harried and rushed. They were, once again, being moved along like UPS packages. Ah, life in space.
There were originally supposed to be nine colonists in this shipment, but with Lee and Dona out of the picture, they were down to just a lucky seven. There was Alice, of course, and Bethy Powell, and Malagrite Aagesen, and Jeanette Schmidt, and the three new faces who’d been waiting here at Transit Point Station for a couple of days.
The women had dined and washed and spent the night all in a single hab module, hung in thin sleeping bags from every available surface. When the “night” shift started, the windows slowly frosted themselves white with some sort of liquid crystal thing, and the blue light reflected up from the Earth on one side of the module came through as a sort of midnight purple, while the sunlight on the other side came through as a smoldering campfire orange—first through one set of portholes, and then another, and then dark for a while as the sun slipped behind the Earth, and then rising again, never brighter than a don’t walk sign. The hatches at either end of the module remained open, and a constant breeze flowed through from one end to the other, making the place feel almost outdoors, like a mountain cabin with all the windows open.
The seven of them had slept (maybe five or six hours?), and these were mostly quite serious women, no less than Alice herself, though in different ways. And yet, the night shift had passed with the dreamy excitement of a grade-school slumber party, or the first night of summer camp, full of whispered biographies and bursts of giggling. And Alice, who’d shared a room with her hissing goose of a mother for a while, and who’d spent much of the last eight years sleeping in ditches full of rough-talking men, was unable to resist being drawn in to this girl talk. She’d told the new women more about herself than was probably wise, and had listened raptly to their own stories.
There was Nonna Rostov, a materials scientist from the Russian Far East, with Asian-looking features and wavy chocolate hair, who carried herself with a nervous determination that reminded Alice of kids about to go through Navy Dive School. (That was one of the harder, scarier courses the military offered, where drowning was a very real possibility, and the reward for passing was even more chances to drown.) Every time Nonna drifted away from a secure hand- or foothold, she seemed to panic a little, flailing wide-eyed for a few moments until she remembered she wasn’t falling, wasn’t in any sort of immediate danger. After three days in zero gee it seemed she should be wearing it better, but Alice had seen people acclimate at different rates, so okay. It was poor but not terrible. Nonna had brought a little guitar with her to outer space, sized like a ukulele but shaped like a battle axe, with a surprisingly deep tone, and she’d spent a few minutes strumming it as the lights were turned down. She wasn’t bad.
And there was Saira Batra, a walnut-skinned little thing with a halo of zero-gee frizz bursting out of her head. Her blue RzVz coveralls looked official enough, but stripped down to her gray space underwear she’d looked vaguely like one of those dolls you could win at carnivals by knocking things over with a baseball. She had a PhD in something Alice couldn’t quite grasp. Topo-histo-smorbologicalism? Something like that. As near as she could figure it meant finding practical applications for geometry involving more than four dimensions, and why that was needed at ESL1 was anyone’s guess. Saira herself seemed a bit confused by her selection, though in an upbeat sort of way.
“Of course I’ll get pregnant for this,” she said at one point. “I was planning on getting pregnant in the next few years anyway, and now my child will be part of something really big. Esley is supposed to get a spin-gee extension at some point, and that should be fine for physical development of a growing body. All the animal experiments have turned out fine. There’ve even been some healthy animals that were born and raised entirely in zero gee. With the right drugs and exercise, the body can be fooled into not knowing the difference.”
Dona Obata, obliged to share a biography when her own turn came, had seemed cagey about relying too much on her cover story, so she hadn’t said much. But she did tell a story—probably true—about fishing in some African river when she was a little girl. Bethy Powell, similarly, had told a couple of funny stories about growing up on a New Zealand cattle ranch.
And finally there was Pelu Figueroa, the oldest of the group at the age of exactly forty years, which Alice for some reason guessed correctly on the first try. Pelu had PhDs in both mechanical engineering and astronomy, and she’d run four ultramarathons and could swim a mile in just under twenty minutes. That wasn’t going to win any records, but it was really, really good. Pelu was also a certified yoga instructor and weightlifting coach, and Alice pretty much hated her on sight. Not a strong hatred, not any sort of loathing, but that super-duper can-do attitude really rubbed her the wrong way for some reason. Pelu did seem to feel she was locked in competition, and was winning fiercely, and deserved a nod of recognition for it. Well done, madam. Well done indeed. Pelu also seemed to think she was tough, although Alice could definitely kick her ass. Hell, Alice could probably kick the asses of everyone here, all at the same time, if only Bethy would sit out. So whatever.
Last night these were just idle thoughts, but here and now, they took on a more sinister edge. Alice had just kicked Dona out into space, and it occurred to her that in completing her mission, she might very well have to hurt some of these women at some point, and by the light of day it just wasn’t all that cute.
“Let’s pick up the pace,” Alice told them all. “I want everyone suited and cross-checked in thirty minutes.”
“Who put you in charge?” Jeanette asked, not sharply but, like, actually asking.
“Our pilot.”
“We have a pilot?” Jeanette said, with exaggerated glee. “Ooh, swanky. We’re moving up in the world. Now if only we were leaving on a normal schedule, I might feel almost like a respected human being.”
Maag said, “Good luck with that. Bunch of men running things up here. Cave men. Bloody competitive assholes. I’m the first! Yeah? Well I’m the best! Yeah, well I’ve got the biggest dink! Yaaaargh!”
Alice paused, looking at Maag. This was interesting, because last night Maag had been gung ho about her upcoming job, as a chemical engineer and manufacturing process specialist, and excited about the chance to “be part of something so much bigger, so much bigger than any of us have ever dreamed.” If she had a problem with Igbal Renz, she certainly hadn’t mentioned it then. But Alice had a professional interest in people who had a problem with Igbal Renz.
Jeanette, however, did not. She said, “Jesus, girl, what crawled up your ass? It’s a bit late for that kind of talk, don’t you think?”
“No,” Maag said. “I don’t. Obviously, I wanted to be here. I want to be here. But why is it, if you want to get to space, you have to pick a Horseman? You have to be exactly what some rich man is looking for. It’s a rich man’s sky, isn’t it? And why is that? So all right, I’ve picked my Horseman, all right. Igbal is my guy. But I don’t have to love doing that. Do I? I don’t have to love every aspect of everything. My God, we just pushed a fellow traveler out into space, alone, because she lied on her résumé. Because she’s not exactly what the rich man wants.”
“That’s crap,” said Nonna Rostov, in a heavily accented voice. “She seemed nice enough person.”
“She shared a candy bar with me,” said Saira Batra.
“She was up to no good,” Alice said, in a tone she hoped would end it. “Can’t you smell it? She wasn’t just lying on her résumé, and she wasn’t alone. Wasn’t acting alone, I mean. There’s a lot going on up here. Probably more than we know.”
“Definitely something wrong with her,” Bethy Powell agreed. “Good riddance, I say. Now let’s get to Esley Shade Station and let that pervert knock us up!”