Trace the Stars

by Nancy Fulda

  A tiny prickling sensation went up Caddy’s spine.

  “Now,” Chief continued. “You’ve all been spending a lot of time in the simulators, and I know it’s not much fun. But really, you’re going to have to get used to it. You need to be prepared for every possibility, including sudden instrumentation or mechanical error, during your approach. You get one chance to snag a comet the right way. Screw it up, and wreck your web, and it’s a long trip back home to get your ship fixed—and we might decide to let somebody else go out in your place. We’re too young—as a colony—to be able to afford careless mistakes. The number of comets that need to be harvested for the transformation of New Olympia is immense. But every single one counts. Which means you count. Understand?”

  A chorus of yessirs echoed around the schoolhouse.

  “Good,” Chief said. “Now, let’s break for fifteen, and then we can start talking about how to work your fuel replenishment electrolyzers. Your comet is not just your target object, it’s also your source of working mass for getting yourself back home.”

  The various candidates split off or split up, veering around Caddy as she remained and stared at the scale model. When the room had emptied, leaving just herself and Okatsu, he stepped closer to her—staring at the little empty pilot’s globe.

  “I knew Peter,” he said quietly. “He had a gift for this work. One of our most productive pilots. Seventeen lifetime catches without a single accident. I am sure he’d have tried for hundreds more.”

  Caddy wrapped her arms around herself, and rubbed her palms along her triceps.

  “It’s going to be lonely out there,” she said.

  “It is,” Chief said. “But then, that’s part of how we pick you all for this job. Each pairing works in twelve-hour shifts. One of you is resting in the living module, while the other is in the pilot’s globe. You will have as much or as little contact with each other as you want. Your file says you like to spend a lot of solo time looking at the stars. And down at New Olympia. Your brother’s file said the same.”

  “I hope I can fill his shoes,” Caddy said. “I’m just a little scared, is all.”

  “You should be,” Chief said. “These missions are going to be long, and a lot can go wrong on the way out and on the way back. You won’t follow your comets in—your job is to nudge them in the right direction, then let gravity do the rest—but between the time you leave here and the time you return for refurbishment and resupply, it might be a year or more.”

  Caddy nodded her head, absorbing the older, more experienced man’s wisdom.

  “Sir,” she said, “can I ask a question—not related to class?”

  “Okay,” Okatsu said, fishing a water bottle out of a pocket and taking a drink.

  “Was Earth really bad?” she asked. “When we left, I mean?”

  The man’s eyes lost focus for a second, and he slowly swallowed several mouthfuls of water, before putting the bottle back in its pocket.

  “Yup,” he said.

  “I just can’t remember that well,” Caddy admitted.

  “You wouldn’t. You were . . . six years old? When your parents signed you over to us? I was twenty-five. Spent my whole life in Japan. If you think things are cramped now—the way we live on this asteroid—try living in a country where people hot-bunked in shoe-box style dormitory structures that make our present living quarters look palatial by comparison. Once the geriatric medicine boom of the late twenty-first century took hold, suddenly people were living far healthier lives for far longer. Global population tripled inside of a generation. They eventually locked the clamps on with mandatory birth control, but by then all the old, chronic problems had come roaring back to bite us. Trust me, Earth is not somewhere you’d choose to live. They’re banking on us making these colonies work, so that maybe in another five hundred or a thousand years—however long it takes to crack the bulk transit barrier, or the light-speed barrier; whichever falls first—we can be a safety valve.”

  Okatsu suddenly began to chuckle. It was a harsh sound.

  “Of course, by that time, the colonies might have ideas of their own,” he said.

  “What do you mean?” Caddy asked.

  “Just because Earth wants to send more people, doesn’t mean we necessarily want more people. Hell, for all we know, a string of sister ships—to the Mainfront—was launched in our wake. We won’t know about it until those ships suddenly begin arriving. Do we have room for all the new people? Will we have room? If New Olympia has oceans and breathable air—and land aplenty to fertilize and cultivate with Earth life—that’s one thing. But if we’re still living on this asteroid and tinkering with New Olympia’s air—the sudden arrival of an additional thousand mouths to feed . . . anyway, this is all kind of political. I’m getting ahead of myself. Us oldsters talk about this crap. You kids don’t need to worry about it. Just focus on learning to operate the comet-catchers, then get out there and do us proud. Do Peter proud.”

  “Target body is in the green, plus or minus ten,” Caddy said. She was cradled in the simulator’s pilot’s chair, surrounded on all sides by what was—for all intents and purposes—a working version of a comet-catcher’s pilot’s globe. The globe itself was a solid piece of transparent, micrometeroid-proof plastic that gave her virtually unlimited visibility in every direction. The chair proper was mounted on a single pole that projected out into the globe, and allowed the chair to pivot or swivel according to the pilot’s preference. Presently, the globe was surrounded by a very realistic three-dimensional projected of deep space. A shadow—representing a soon-to-be-captured comet—loomed in the “far” distance. Caddy had her comet-catcher’s web fully charged and extended. She couldn’t see it, except for the false-color imagery that showed the web superimposed over a different false-color image of the comet proper.

  Sweat slowly formed across Caddy’s skin as she used the finesse controls to gently dial up her ship’s thrust. She was approaching the comet at mere meters per minute now. Any faster and she risked impacting too hard. Any slower . . . and her nerves would break. Things were taking too long as it was. She resisted the urge to rush the job.

  This was the final phase of simulator testing. Once they passed this, they’d graduate to live ship exercises. Beyond which lay graduation, and promotion to live flight status.

  But being able to prove she could stick the catch was the biggest test to date.

  Peter, if you’re out there, help me do this, Caddy thought silently as she watched the proximity sensors. The space between herself and the simulated comet shrank, and shrank, and shrank.

  Just a bit more . . .

  Suddenly a bwooping alarm hit her ears.

  The comet-catcher began to accelerate, and drift down.

  “What the—” she began to swear, but her hands were already in motion. The heads-up hologram indicated that a thrust unit on the rear of the ship had gone active, and was refusing orders to switch itself off. Caddy’s mind went white for an instant, as she realized she was moments from wrecking her web, and even burying the snout of her ship in the foamy, filthy ice on the comet’s surface.

  Counterthrust, she thought defiantly, and instantly pulled up a tactical display showing the numbers from the malfunctioning unit. She dialed the unit on the exact opposite side of the axes to an identical level of thrust, and watched as the ship’s dangerously increasing velocity held steady . . . but did not decrease.

  “Shit,” Caddy said, and realize she didn’t just have to combat the effects of the broken unit, she had to correct for the mistake which had already happened. She opened up her forward thruster array and dialed responses by feel. The bwoop from the computer continued, as the comet was now dangerously close to the web, and she was still moving forward and down at the wrong angle.

  When the bwoop was joined by a second, angry pang sound, Caddy knew she was in the red zone. She opened all of the forward thrusters up to one hundred percent in a desperate attempt to reverse course. If she could back off i
n time, maybe she could get the broken thruster taken care of, and take another crack at it.

  But then the pilot’s globe lit up with warnings about stress failures along the breadth of the web. She was slamming to stern, but with such sudden force that it was not only causing her to pull into the straps of the pilot’s chair, it was collapsing the web as well. She tried to dial back the action, but it was too late. The web was in pieces now, and the comet was receding. Unharmed, but also untouchable, now that she’d ruined her chance.

  Caddy spat a blue streak of profanity, and slammed her arms onto the rests on either side of the chair.

  “Easy,” said a voice over the simulator speakers. It was Chief. “Learning how to keep cool in the face of a defeat is as important as learning how to keep cool on the brink of victory. The chances of that actual malfunction happening during a live catch are extraordinarily low. The computer is set up so that a stuck thruster unit has its fuel supply automatically cut off after five seconds. For both the thruster to fail and the computer cutoff to fail . . . well, it’s not impossible, but it’s unlikely.”

  “Then why’d you throw that one at me, boss?” Caddy said, slowly peeling herself out of the chair—soaked with perspiration, and very much in need of a shower.

  “I’ve got a mean streak,” was all the voice said. “Chalk it up to lesson learned, Candidate. Now get out of my simulator, and don’t take it personally. Everybody’s getting roasted during Finals Week. Or did you think I’d just let you cakewalk your way to the live exercises?”

  Caddy was tempted to make an obscene gesture at the several cameras she knew were monitoring her as she floated toward the neck of the pilot’s globe—and the door back to the rest of civilization—but decided she was too tired to make the effort.

  Live piloting involved repeats of everything they’d practiced in the simulators, except they weren’t using actual comets. They were using scaled-down, inflated balloons which represented comets, with webs scaled accordingly. Captures and other maneuvers were noticeably free of mysterious mechanical glitches—Caddy found it a much more relaxing experience than anything she’d gone through in the sim—and everybody was proceeding through class more or less according to the book.

  Outside class, Caddy kept to herself much of the time. But then, so did the others. The Chief had said it: they were each chosen for their comfort in solitude, as much as for the potential aptitude with the ships. And though they all bunked dormitory style, Caddy avoided the eventual pairing off that began to occur, as people realized graduation was approaching, and it would soon be time to go out on a real mission. Nobody had been told how the crews would be selected. Everybody seemed to be assuming that whoever was their buddy now would be their buddy when they launched in their actual comet-catchers.

  But Chief had never made any such promise, and Caddy suspected there might be some rude surprises when the time came for them to leave orbit.

  One of their final exercises was not an exercise at all, but rather the passive observation of an in-system capture. For years, comet-catchers had been working in the cometary halo at the very edge of New Olympia’s system, diverting comets onto short-period trajectories that would bring them within reach of New Olympia’s expanding in-system space infrastructure. So, to complement the comet-catchers working on the edge, an almost identical team of comet catchers worked closer to home: flying out to meet comets as they came in: each of them streaming huge, bright tails of sublimated gas and dust, blown off by the solar wind from New Olympia’s home star. Those comets were then slowly herded toward New Olympia itself, and prepared for an eventual de-orbit—their precious water being added to New Olympia’s gradually moistening atmosphere.

  Nobody knew how many comets in total it would take, before New Olympia had enough water for the atmosphere and climate to change dramatically. At present, it was much, much too hot, and composed of all the wrong gasses. With time, and the relentless addition of water, nitrogen, and whatever else the comets brought with them, New Olympia might eventually resemble a world worth growing things on.

  During the observation, Caddy and each of the other students were strung out in a line—each of them commanding one of the many pint-sized trainer ships that the academy used for training hops close to home. Being able to see an actual comet—gloriously dazzling, surrounded by its coma of gas and dust—was as exhilarating as it was sobering. The comet was literally huge. A monster. A megaton ball of packed ice and snow, left over from the formation of the system at least a billion or more years in the past. The comet-catcher—the actual one assigned to make the snag—was like a tiny insect compared to the object it was attempting to corral. The web proper was not even visible, having been deployed in full.

  “Watch how gently she does this,” Chief said over the instructor net, as they waited and watched. The comet-catcher seemed to be barely moving at all as it slowly closed on the comet. Relatively speaking, they were all hurtling toward the home star at several tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. Just matching velocity had taken them over a day’s worth of careful maneuvering.

  Caddy’s pilot’s globe display showed the core of the comet, hidden behind the bright gas and dust. The comet-catcher maneuvered toward it like a tiny dust mite wielding a salad bowl on its head. Second by second, the distance shrank. Occasionally, the comet-catcher pilot muttered something into her mic: numbers, or a comment about what she was seeing on her readout. Deadpan tone of voice. Cool as cucumber, one might say.

  Caddy wondered if she’d ultimately be that steady when clutch time came.

  Eventually the comet-catcher disappeared into the comet’s coma, but there was still a ways to go before the web made contact. Once that happened, the web itself would begin to partially conform to the unique crevices, bumps, valleys, rifts, and other features on the comet’s surface. That would allow the web to get a good “grip” prior to the comet-catcher sinking in its fuel reclamation hoses, and beginning the process of tanking up on fresh working mass for the push toward home.

  The most deceptive part, was the perception of the comet as a solid. Chief had drilled this fact into them over and over again. It might seem solid. It might look like one big blob of stuff on the displays. But if a comet got nudged too hard in any particular direction, the comet’s constituent pieces could go flying apart. That would waste the opportunity to bring the comet back to New Olympia orbit, but also create lots of dangerous trash that would eventually need to be policed up—otherwise it could pose a threat to comet-catching and other ships in the future. Even a small, muddy clump of sand, going at the speeds comets tended to achieve, would put a lethal hole in the best craft New Olympia could build.

  So, making the snag on the first try—and doing it right—was of utmost importance. Somebody had managed it out on the edge of the system. Now somebody had to manage it close to home.

  Caddy was almost unable to breathe as the final few meters were closed. And then happy chimes sounded across her pilot’s globe, as the comet-catcher’s sensors reported good contact across the web, and the bow of the craft gently came to rest against the comet’s surface proper.

  Cheers rang out across the instructor net, including those of Chief, who was among the loudest.

  “That’s how it’s done,” he said proudly into their ears. “I can’t emphasize it enough, Candidates. Slowness and patience win, every time. If you feel like it’s not right on the approach, don’t be afraid to gently back off, get your attitude and your trajectory right, and try it again. There’s no shame in making a second, third, fourth, or fifth try. But you only get one time to screw it up. Then your ship is fouled, and you have to come home. Or, worse, you’re too fouled to effect your own extraction, and you’re signaling for rescue. And out there in the cometary halo, the distances are often too big for help to arrive in anything less than a few weeks. You don’t want to be stuck with your thumbs sticking up your you-know-whats, waiting for others to come clean up your messes for you. Roger?”
>
  Caddy and the rest sounded an immediate roger through the net.

  “Now the long, gentle push to get this thing to New Olympia,” Chief said. “Which we won’t stick around for. Hey, Sarah—” Chief momentarily keyed over to the live net, to talk to the pilot who’d made the successful snag “—thanks for showing the new kids how it’s done. Nice work out there. You made it look almost too easy.”

  “Happy to influence the new generation,” said an older woman’s voice, followed by the sound of her yawning and stretching. “Right now I am going to let my partner in crime take over, while I go get some sleep. One thing you newbies need to remember: even though this is not physically strenuous work, once you’re dialed in and focused on making a snag, everything goes into time warp. Hours will pass in what seem like moments. Muscles will cramp. You will complete the snag, only to discover that you haven’t eaten in a whole day, and suddenly you want to eat until your sides split. Don’t overdo it. Just disengage, let your partner come up after you—fresh and ready—and let yourself decompress. Good luck after graduation, okay? I will see you all out here.”

  Caddy and the other Candidates voiced their understanding and appreciation for the comet-catcher’s words of wisdom, then they busied themselves for the return voyage home. It had certainly been a day to remember.

  “But . . . I graduate tomorrow,” Caddy said hotly.

  “Graduation doesn’t always mean being put on the job right away,” Chief Okatsu said. “Not everyone has a ship waiting for them at the end of school. Since we lost one of your classmates to a medical problem at the last minute, you’re now the odd woman out. I am sorry. Look, it’s not the end of the world. We’ll just mate you up with one of the students from the next class.”

  “Which will be months away,” Caddy said, still fuming.

  “It can’t be helped,” Okatsu said. “Nobody flies alone. Not anymore.”

  Unsaid: not since your brother disappeared.