“Yeah,” James says, “I don’t have the answer to that one. Being twenty-five again sounds pretty good, though.”
Will shrugs. “That it does.”
After a long moment, Sarah breaks and rummages in her rucksack to retrieve a sky-blue disk. “Okay, we’ve got a kick-ass sunrise fading behind us and the three of us together, right here, right now. Let’s not miss it.” She sets the delay on the camera and tosses it into the air. The disk buzzes to life and hovers, its lens focusing on the group.
James takes his cue and drapes one arm over each of his friends, smiling and holding them tight. He knows this picture is for him to pin to his cabin board and remember this moment when he’s light-years away. He has trouble holding the smile as the camera etches their memory.
11
Ghosts
James brings the Pintail out of Earth’s shadow into the glaring white sunlight of the June 2093 morning. Through the cockpit windows, the U.N. Antares Shipyard is like Shanghai’s skyline suspended in space, endless neon lines and geometries stretching for kilometers. Just like a city, lanes connect it to hubs of industrial structures, food storage, power, service, and habitation modules. Hundreds of strobes blink from cargo ships coasting along to and from the shipyard, and several U.N. warships patrol the area. The sleek behemoth of the U.N. Damysus glides by, nearly occulting the sun, flying in a parallel arc with the U.N. Aristaeus. Behind the two, the Perseus is back in service. Six Goshawk fighters circle Earthwise around the shipyard. The U.N. is clearly making a statement. There will be no Subversive attacks here.
Willow sits beside James, both of them wearing their brick red and navy blue Hayden-Pratt flight suits. Behind them, Sarah, Hitoshi, Lin, and Beckman watch the flight through their windows. Willow keys the mic. “Antares Approach, Hotel Papa X-Ray Niner Niner Four, request Romeo Seven One clearance for docking at Bernard’s Promise. Special Envoy Willow Parker speaking. Confirm voice ident.”
“Cleared to enter restricted space, Niner Niner Four. Identity confirmed, Miss Parker.”
She smiles. “We’d like the scenic approach if you can fit us in.”
“Acknowledged. Fly heading two four three mark ten.”
“Thank you,” Willow says.
To their right, the habitation decks of the shipyard are a Jenga-like tower of softly-lit windows showing the shadows of people moving within. Ahead, the north spaceside arm of Antares is a daisy chain of ten identical space docks, a meshwork of structural beams and scaffolding peppered with spotlights. Nestled within each is the embryo of a half-dozen starships. The scenic approach places the Pintail in an arcing pass right in front of them. The first to come into view is a sleek, tapered arrow like a giant metal bird with its wings swept back for speed. It’s still mostly a skeleton.
“The Peregrine,” Willow says. “Japanese crew. Hana Ichikawa commanding. Ross 248 and 61 Cygni. Going to search for the 2017 Wow! Signal.”
“Glad to see my home team represent,” Hitoshi says from the back.
The second ship is an elongated tee shape with panels attached to the wings. The inner decks are just starting to take shape.
“The Xuanzang,” Willow continues. Chinese crew. Chen Wu is in command. Very highly-decorated. The destination is Kapteyn’s Star.”
As the third ship bay glides into view, the ship’s configuration is entirely different than the others. A white ring encircles an aerodynamic spear.
James smiles. “I like their style.”
“Oh, yeah,” Hitoshi says, “I think I have an old book cover like that.”
“Totally Larry Niven,” Lin adds.
Hitoshi widens his eyes. “I know. The Angel’s Pencil. Right on.” He offers his fist, and Lin fist bumps it, making a pow sound as she opens her hand at the conclusion.
“The Aletheia,” Willow says. “European Union. Diverse crew with Maja Erikkson leading. Going back to Astris to study the Mimic.”
“Hope they’re planning on filling that ring with lots and lots of lasers,” Beckman says.
Hitoshi balls his fist and makes it like he’s going to punch Beckman in the arm. “Now that’s the Beckster I know.” Beckman glowers at him, and Hitoshi stops his punch short, retracting his first.
“Good choice,” Beckman says.
The fourth ship is a blocky design in the shape of a flying tee. “The Dayspring,” Willow says. “Canadian crew led by Noah Bouchard. Barnard’s Star and Lacaille 9352.”
“Boss,” Hitoshi says. “You built us a star fleet.”
James quirks his head. “Not me. I just yelled road trip and everyone piled along.”
As they clear the Dayspring’s dock, the final bay’s scaffolding swings ahead. Unlike the other starships, this one is fully assembled and has a few trillion kilometers on its odometer. Bernard’s Promise looms large, several access plates open on its upper hull, exposing modules within. The ship looks different. Bernard’s is chunkier with a new hue to her exterior. Where she previously had matte black nacelles and a snow-white hull, she’s now a metallic gunmetal blue with a nearly iridescent sheen. Microencapsulated self-healing armor. After their Subversive attack, they realized how vulnerable they were to damage when they couldn’t get the nacelles configured for armor. Stitched patterns run along both sides of its hull. Kinetic slug point-defense weaponry. Bernard’s laser emitters have also increased to two per side for a total of eight with two new gun ports on the nose housing rail guns. She’s ready to fight, if needed.
James slows the Pintail, and it slides up against the docking ring. As he finishes the power down sequence, he looks over his shoulder. “Okay, game on, partial systems test number three.” He taps open coms. “We’re heading in, Sarah.”
“Got you five-by-five,” Sarah responds over speakers.
James unclicks and leads the way into the airlock’s transit tube. As they glide through the concentric lights, Hitoshi says from behind him, “So, there’s one other tweak I made that’s a bit of a surprise. You’ll see what I mean as soon as you get inside.”
“All right,” James says, curious. He stops at the inner airlock door and presses the button. It’s a good thing that Hitoshi gave him a heads up because he almost jumps when he sees the silhouette of a person standing there in the airlock. Not floating in zero-gee, like him, but standing. She’s young, in her twenties, with chestnut brown hair tied back in a ponytail, and she wears the same Hayden-Pratt flight suit that he does.
“Hello, James,” Ananke says. “I’m sorry if I startled you.”
James laughs nervously. “I admit, you did, just a little. It’s good to see you, my friend.” He glances up at the ceiling. A small nub shimmers with shifting light. “Holo emitter. This is Hitoshi’s surprise?”
Hitoshi drifts up to James. “Lin gets half the credit, but yeah, there’s an emitter in every room. Ananke can appear anywhere we can.”
James grins at Ananke. “How do you like it?”
She tilts her head. “I’m not sure, yet. I feel a little bit like a ghost who’s haunting the ship, but I’ll try it out and see if I get my space legs.” She motions over her shoulder. “Ready to start?”
James grabs onto a tether and pulls himself inside. “Lead the way.”
Hitoshi sits on his couch, an open pizza box, a can of cola, and a small black box resting on his coffee table. The entire wall across from him is a media screen streaming gaming stats and friends lists worldwide. Behind him, the Santa Monica skyline gleams through the plate glass windows of his tenth-floor apartment. The adjacent wall is dominated by a bookshelf filled with hundreds of paperbacks and hardcovers spanning that last century. Heinlein, Asimov, Clarke, Dick, Adams, Gibson, Weir, Herbert, Bradbury, Banks, Card, Stephenson, Robinsons, Simmons, Cline, Scalzi, Niven — so many great names — a collection worth more than all the hardware he’s accumulated in his apartment. On the opposite wall, a red lava lamp shifts, spilling warm light on framed movie posters. 2001: A Space Odyssey, Dune, Forbidden Planet, The Empire Strikes Back, Bla
de Runner. A display table houses a few models, including the 1960s Enterprise, the Millennium Falcon, The Last Starfighter’s Gunstar, and the Battleship Yamato from Star Blazers. A few action figures stand guard around the collection. One of them is the miniature Hitoshi from the Bernard’s Promise playset.
“Play mode,” Hitoshi says to his room, snagging a bite of pizza. The lights dim to a low red, with the lava lamp’s glow dominating the shadows. Music fades in as colorful visualizations stream behind his chat windows, I Ran (So Far Away) by Flock of Seagulls playing. Hitoshi washes down his pizza with a swig of soda, wipes his hands, opens the black box, and removes a coin-sized silver disk. He warms it with his breath before placing it on the back of his neck. A dialogue box reads, Syncing. Complete. Enter? Hitoshi taps and accepts, a sparkling light washing over his vision as his living room fades away. He can still hear the music of the media screen, but it is quieter, distant, and the strong pepperoni scent of the pizza has dulled to a subtle spiciness. His room is still the same dimensions, but the walls are transparent portals to other places. Dozens of game feeds stream, and he watches a few with interest, wondering which to join. As he’s watching one of his guilds take down a classic boss, a notification dings from his arm. Hey, Tosh! Can’t sleep?
It’s Lin. Hitoshi is still on Narita time from his commute, but she’s always up at this time. He switches to vocal for his response. “Hey! Just seeing what the guildies are up to. How about you?”
“Trying to figure out what I want to do tonight.” She’s switched to vocal also, and it’s nice to hear her voice.
Hitoshi glances at the west portal. Half-a-dozen space marines take down a monstrous mech. “Looks like Gamma Squad is wrapping up the room. We could hop in for the next boss.”
A slight pause on Lin’s end. “I was thinking you and I could do something together.”
Hitoshi raises his eyebrows. “Uh…yeah, sure. What’d you have in mind?”
“It’s, uh, someplace I wanted to see, but I thought I’d wait to see it with you. I think it’ll be really cool with you.”
He squints, curious. “Okay.”
“Give me a sec. I’ll invite you when I’m in.”
Hitoshi waits, the muted music of his media screen playing in the background. He squeezes his fingers together and relaxes his hands. After a moment, a prompt floats in front of his vision. Lin Song has invited you to join her in Everything. Accept? Hitoshi’s lips part. Where is she taking him? He touches the icon, and reality swirls into a vortex as he teleports. A nighttime landscape rushes up to him in an instant, and he rematerializes standing with his feet on rocky terrain. When he looks down, he’s wearing his Hayden-Pratt flight suit with dirt and pebbles strewn around his feet. Directly ahead of him is a kilometers-wide basin framed by rocky mountains reaching up to a turquoise sky. The crescent of one silvery moon and the tiny disk of the second moon hang low in the sky. It’s well past sunset, and the primary sun, Rigel Kentaurus, has set, with the glare of the smaller, distant sun, Tolliman, rising on the left. The sky around it glows a daytime blue, although the apex of the sky’s dome is still a deep navy revealing a canopy of stars with Earth’s Sun a yellow speck at the tail end of Cassiopeia. He takes a deep breath, and the air is warm and smells of minerals. When Hitoshi turns around, Lin is standing there, smiling, also wearing a Hayden-Pratt flight suit. Behind her, Bernard’s Promise is a massive ship awash in running lights, its own oasis parked in the night.
The sleeve of Lin’s flight suit has three mission patches on it. The topmost has the three suns of Centauri, and the middle and bottom have Janus and Janus 2 illustrations. She follows Hitoshi’s eyes, then she reaches over to his shoulder and touches his arm. Butterflies flutter in Hitoshi’s stomach as her fingers trace his mission patches. When he looks at them, the stitching is luminous amber, emitting its own light.
“Badges,” Lin says. “Awarded by the software. You’ve been here in real life. You’re one of eight people in the universe to have them.”
Hitoshi examines his glowing badges and points a thumb back over his shoulder towards the basin. “Well, the Mimic probably has one, too.”
Lin leans around him, peering. “Can we see it from here?”
He shakes his head. “Oh, God, I hope not.” He motions at the landscape. “This is…unreal.”
“Yeah,” she says, checking out the sky. “It’s all the data from your mission. There’s been a project to get it integrated into Everything, and it’s live now. People can go to Alpha Centauri like you did.” She smiles with wonder. “It’s so pretty.”
He bobs his head. “Yeah, it had its moments when aliens weren’t trying to digest us.”
“It’s amazing that you were really here. It’s like the type of stories that people make up, but for real.” She touches his Centauri patch again, admiring it.
“You know,” Hitoshi says, “you can go with us when we go back out. Are you thinking of asking for a mission seat?”
She looks back up at him. “I’m not sure. I was kicking it around, and it seems like there’s this sweet spot. Either you’re young, like us, and you’ve got the time, or you’re old, and you don’t have the constraints. You ever read Old Man’s War?”
“Is that Halderman?”
“Scalzi. Guys get new young bodies to go off to space. They should, like, totally do that with the age treatments to pick the crews. Be young again. Go off and explore the universe.”
“Nah,” Hitoshi says. “Then we wouldn’t get to go.”
“I really want to go,” Lin says. “I want to see the things you’ve seen.” She wags her fingers. “A little hung up on the twenty-eight year jump, so still trying to figure that one out.”
Hitoshi nods. “Time jump’s a bit rough, although it is kind of cool to come back to the future.”
She looks him in the eye and slides her hand down his sleeve, slipping past his wrist and curling her hand and his palm. Her skin is soft and warm, and his pulse ticks up a few beats at the contact. “Hitoshi,” she says, looking down at his hand and then back up at his eyes. “However this plays out, it’s six months, maybe a year until Bernard’s launches again.”
He curls his fingers around hers. His breathing rate is up now, and he’s thought about this moment for a while now. He rubs his thumb cautiously over the back of her hand. The moment has arrived, now, standing in the twilight sky of Astris.
“I’d always regret not having a chance to do this,” Lin says. She slides her other hand around his waist.
Hitoshi slides his right hand behind her neck as she leans into him. He sets his lips upon hers, tasting her wet, soft kiss, Earth’s sun shining down upon them from the starry midnight sky of another world.
It’s September 2093, and Beckman is in the fields on his father’s soybean farm in Iowa. His father’s name is Leith, but of course, he’s never called him that. Now that he’s older, he’s just Pop. Pop has a few drones and robots to help with harvesting, but he still prefers to be out in the fields himself. Machines just can’t do what a man does or know the ins and outs of what makes a good harvest as Pop can. Beckman’s father wears a flannel shirt with a navy blue baseball cap embroidered with the U.S. Navy logo. He’s holding a handful of soybean pods in his palms.
“Pop,” Beckman says.
His father sifts through the pods, evaluating them. “Say what you got to say. You’ve been dancing on it all morning.”
“Pop,” he continues. “I’m going to go.”
“I know,” his pop says, glancing over at him. “It’s your duty.”
Beckman approaches, searching for words. “The way the trip works, it’ll be twenty-eight years.”
His father nods. “You got to do what you got to do. Duty, honor, country. Make me proud.”
“Pop, you’ll be a hundred and three when I get back.”
His father squints, his sun-aged skin a tapestry of wrinkles and shadow in the morning light. “Damn, that’s pretty goddamn old.”
“Y
eah,” Beckman says, “but for guys that go, they’re giving a deal. Their families can get the age treatment. You could be twenty-five again.”
His father pauses. “No shit.”
Beckman nods. “No shit.”
Leith holds the pause a moment and then shakes his head. “You think I want to be twenty-five again? Twenty-five was crap. No money, nothing built, still getting my head out of my ass.”
“Yeah, pop, but you already got that. You got the money. You got your head screwed on straight. Now you can have all that and be young again.”
His father peers at him in the sun. “Got one life granted to me. Sometimes I screwed it up but always found my way and got back on the path. Lived ’till now and looking forward to working until I can’t, then settling in and becoming a cranky old fart who wakes up when he wants to, drinks a cup of coffee and looks out over his land with no damn idea what he’s going to do with his day.”
“You could still do that. Just be young again. I got this thing to give, and it’s yours.”
“How’s that going to work? I don’t have enough saved to live another life. You really want to work another hundred years?”
“I got my job. I can take care of it,” Beckman says.
“Not how it works. I get you on your feet. You go your way. I take care of me. You take care of you.”
Beckman takes a deep breath and sighs. “Pop, you don’t take this, you might not be here when I get back.”
“Might not be here tomorrow. None of us knows when our day is. What’s important is how you spend them.” He looks him directly in the eye. “You got a duty. You’re doing something great, and I’m proud of you, son. You did more than I could ever have done. Now you have to get your ass on that ship and do something that’s going to make things better for all of us.” He sets his soy pods into the basket, dusting his hands. “Besides, don’t count your pop out of it. I’m a tough old bastard and don’t plan on quitting just because I roll up another digit on the meter.”
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