Whiskey Romeo

by James Welsh

  Where her pilots found a chore in their flights, Joyce felt freedom. Where they felt the chill of space, she found her blanket. Where they saw responsibility, she saw her rights. Where they choked on the vacuum, she breathed in the air. And where they saw a confusion of stars before them, she saw the North Star in every one of those little candles, lighting her way home.

  ***

  2185 AD

  “Mystery! Now where are you off to at such an hour?”

  “I thought I told you – I have to see Instructor Halen.”

  “Didn’t you say you had to meet him at 1500 hours?”

  “Avis?”

  “Yes?”

  “It is 1500 hours.”

  A shallow pause. “Oh.”

  Mystery laughed at her friend and classmate, Avis Thaden. She wagged her finger, mocking one of their flight instructors and his quirk. “We’ve been living here for a year now. How is it that you’re still getting used to lunar time?”

  “I’ll get used to it when you get used to docking a ship,” Avis said like a reflex, her curly rose hair bouncing as she turned back to the tablet she had been reading.

  Mystery stuck out her tongue as she stepped out of the dormitory and into the sleek hallway. From behind her, Mystery heard Avis call out, “Good luck!”

  As she walked down the hallway, she grazed her hand against the mirrors. The entire network of corridors at the lunar base was crafted out of mirrors. The architects justified this by saying that, since the base was built underground, the mirrors helped with opening up the cramped space and letting the pilots exhale some of their claustrophobia. And, as one of their instructors pointed out before, the mirrors could disorient a careless soul, and if you could walk through a hall of mirrors, you could maneuver an asteroid field. Avis sarcastically pointed out to her classmates that the mirrored halls served a more lurking purpose: for the men to be able to look up women’s skirts as they walked past. When Akilina heard this theory, she responded by hemming the skirts for her uniforms so they could be even shorter.

  Before she turned the corner in the hallway, Mystery spotted Instructor Halen in the mirrors, walking from the other direction. His image was distorted in the mirror’s reflection, but she could see that he was flipping through papers in his hands with a troubled look. Mystery stopped, expecting Halen to bump into her in the hallway. But, as Halen approached, the flight instructor said – without looking up – “Walk with me, Pilot Joyce.”

  And so Mystery did, shortening her pace, held back by Halen’s short stature. Handing her a packet, Halen said, “We have some problems.”

  “It’s about time,” Mystery said, misunderstanding. “I’ve been waiting for the committee to put together a final exam.”

  “Well, that’s not quite what I meant,” Halen said. “Read the packet. We’re taking a left here.”

  “Okay,” Mystery said, with hesitation slipping into her voice. As they turned left at the intersection of hallways, the push through the tide of students caused Mystery to drop most of her papers on the floor. She tried to stop and pick them up, but they were already washed away in the swirl of boots.

  “Keep up,” Halen said, still not looking up from his own packet of papers. “We received word this morning of a bacterial outbreak at the charter’s colony on Jupiter’s moon Callisto. Of course, it wouldn’t be the first time they had an epidemic of this scale – I don’t think they’ve ever cleaned their air infiltration system. Anyway, one of the charter’s supply trains just arrived here from Earth, complete with a few crates of medicine. We’re supposed to assign two of our pilots to complete the rest of the relay, taking the cure from here on the Moon to Callisto.”

  “I see the problem there,” Mystery said.

  “What? That a whole squadron of our pilots just left on a training run, and they won’t be back for the next two days?”

  “Yes, that,” Mystery offered helpfully.

  “That’s where you come in, Pilot Joyce,” Halen continued, as the hallway suddenly emptied into the vast hangar. When the hangar had been hollowed out years before, the boring drill had carved out the room with curves – the structure reminded Mystery of a rubber ball being squeezed in someone’s hand, to the point of breaking. The only hint of straight lines was buried in the far wall of the hangar, which was where the air locks separated the inside from the outside. The locks were closed, and yet Mystery could feel the vacuum of space pulling her.

  “For lack of a better term, you’ve been bugging us for a test, to prove your worth to this base and the charter back home. This, Pilot Joyce, will be your test: deliver the medicine to the colonists on Callisto. Succeed, and you’ll graduate from this academy as a pilot. Fail, and you’ll be grounded to Earth for the rest of your days. You’ll be leaving in no more than five minutes.”

  A part of Mystery regretted being so persistent – or what Halen called “bugging” – about taking the final test. She didn’t want to take the test to prove herself to anyone – there was no one worth that much to her. Rather, she had grown exhausted of ground school, of sitting through the lectures on spaceflight, of flying the simulators that were always breaking down. She burned to fly, to inflate the sails of her lungs with that freedom.

  But she just learned that freedom was not free. A few years before that moment, a stray comet had crashed into one of Jupiter’s moons. This chance collision knocked the moon off-orbit and sparked a chain reaction with her sister moons. Within just a few months, most of Jupiter’s seventy moons had grounded themselves into debris, the result of their bouncing into one another like billiard balls. A few of the moons, including Callisto, survived the catastrophe, but were now hidden behind a shroud of dust and rock. But the research on Callisto was too important to abandon, and so the scientists stayed. The trip there was suicide to the careless pilot – they had to run a minefield where one wrong turn meant a meteoroid impact in their hull. Halen wasn’t just trying to test Mystery – he was trying to enlist someone else for the task, to save his self the trouble of dying.

  But Mystery’s cynicism melted away when she stopped in front of the launch that she would be flying. The ships flown by the trained pilots were fresh and casted in deep night colors. The launch that Mystery would be assigned to was an older model, painted in a slate gray. But the moment she laid eyes on that launch, Mystery had already written all of her hopes and dreams on that ream of slate. Through the arrow of time, mankind had always looked up to the stars as gods. Now, Mystery was at the tip of the arrow, and the unseen archer was going to launch her at those same gods.

  Mystery was so lost in the moment of finding true love, she didn’t even hear what Halen was saying. It took him shaking her shoulder for her to wake up from her daydream. “Did you catch what I said, Pilot Joyce?”

  “Absolutely, sir,” Mystery said, snapping to attention.

  “Good. Hopefully, at least one of you will reach the colony with time to spare.”

  “One of us…?” Mystery began, before remembering that she was supposed to understand what was going on. She looked past Halen, at another of her classmates, Ysabel Winter, who was boarding the launch parked next to hers. Both Mystery and Ysabel were at the top of their class, and they had been at a stalemate for months as to who was the better pilot in the simulator. Now, though, it was no longer practice but the game itself. Not only were they going to provide insurance for each other – if one were to fail the run, at least the other could still deliver the medicine on time – but she knew that the instructors would be timing them. The first of the students to finish would receive the best contracts in the solar system. The friendly rivals nodded to one another, and there was barely just enough time for that.

  As Mystery walked up the ramp into the launch, she looked back, hoping that Halen would be there to offer some last word of advice. But the instructor was already walking away and not bothering to look back. She closed the ramp and waited until the locks hissed into place. She was now alone, about to fly her
first solo mission. And perhaps it was her nerves, but a primordial part of Mystery’s brain swore that when she breathed in and out with rapid-fire excitement, the ship’s ribcage seemed to pulse to the same rhythm. It was then she realized that she was not alone after all.

  ***

  2196 AD

  As Captain Joyce washed her hands in the control pads, her Ship Nu accelerated even more into the throat of space. Although the vacuum all around her was stillbirth, she found a tailwind in the stars around her. She was not sure if she was pushing her ship or if the canvas of stars was pulling her – but if she was supposed to be afraid of dissolving into the darkness, she didn’t feel it.

  Instead, she reached over and picked up a pair of glasses off the dashboard. As she slipped the glasses on, the world around her changed as if in revolution. The space outside of the window looked the same, except for the overlay of faint grids draped over it. With that pair of glasses, she was able to wirelessly access a map of the entire star system through the sonar buoys. Altogether, it was a map of a square light-mile, itself made up of hundreds of millions of square miles. She had the entirety of the star system trapped in a net of grid.

  “Computer, show me Sonar Buoy 44,” Joyce ordered casually. She could feel the cartographer’s glasses warm up as its processor searched for the location of that buoy. Joyce waited a few moments, but a stretch of space did not blink red as it was supposed to be. This was expected – if the space blinked red, it would mean that the buoy in that sector was in working order. A buoy dead in the water would be unable to transmit, just like Sonar Buoy 44.

  Joyce sighed. “Computer, show me the tracker for that buoy.”

  This, the computer could do. A green bullseye appeared deep in space, the little symbol radiating circles to indicate that it was active. Joyce was relieved – at least she knew where to start first. It was ironic that the buoys – deployed solely to track asteroids and other dangerous objects – were routinely knocked out-of-place by those same chunks of rock. Joyce had half-jokingly posed a solution to the charter back home that they should have smaller buoys for the buoys themselves, to prevent this from happening. Joyce didn’t know what to make of the response she received, that the charter was intrigued and actually looking into it.

  And to make matters worse, there was a minefield of rock between her ship and the downed buoy, casted down like dice on the table. There were graphite meteoroids scattered around the star system, and they were most prominent in that region. How the graphite meteoroids – or “blackberries” as the miners called them – came to be, and why they were so plentiful there, no one knew yet. What they did know, though, was that the blackberries were small and dark, making them impossible to spot and even more difficult to navigate around. A few years before, Thaden attempted to fly through the same field of blackberries and one of the meteoroids pierced her ship’s hull. Due to the total loss of cabin pressure, Thaden and her passengers had to don their pressurized suits until the launch could limp to the safety of Harbor. Since then, Joyce was the only one of the pilots qualified enough – and brave enough – to run those fields.

  With a lazy flick of the wrist, Joyce twirled the launch around a blackberry that suddenly jumped into sight. Its jaguar colors camouflaged it against the night of space, and Joyce should have flown right into it. Fortunately for her and the other pilots, Dr. Chroma lived up to his reputation as an engineer once more, inventing a lightning prow that was fitted to the front of the launch. The prow fired fleeting arcs of lightning into outer space ahead. When the lightning bolts connected with the electrically conducive graphite, the whole meteoroid lit up in a reader onboard the launch. The meteoroid that Joyce just dodged took up the reader’s entire screen – it would have been her end if she had hit it.

  And still she felt no fear – she was as steady as she ever was. It was because, like a sculptor, she could create art with her hands. Joyce pushed her hands through the control pads in front of her, and the ship accelerated even more, darting into the unknown that stretched before her.

  ***

  2185 AD

  As Mystery’s ship settled down in the hanger at Callisto, the moon’s colonists could not wait a second more. A number of the hangar crewmen rushed up and rapped their fists against the ship’s ramp, even before Mystery had a chance to kill the engine. But Mystery took her time, squeezing into a spacesuit that was a size too small and fitting a helmet onto her head. The hangar was pressurized, but Mystery wasn’t going to play the odds with the colony’s contagious outbreak.

  It was only when she was completely insulated – like a lily in a bell jar – did she dare open the ramp. The colonists rushed in, excited to have their hands on the cure. Mystery recoiled at the sight of the sick crew – they were covered in sores and suffered from patchy hair loss on their heads. They carried out the boxes of medicine, and one of the crewmembers almost dropped his box after being overwhelmed by a hard coughing fit. He spat on the floor and continued walking – Mystery looked down at the floor and saw a little puddle of blood on the floor. She reminded herself not to remove her spacesuit until she could reach a space station an hour’s flight away for decontamination.

  And yet somehow, through the inferno of sickness, Mystery somehow remained clean with excitement. She had not been in contact with Ysabel since they left the lunar base, but it looked like Mystery had won the race for delivering the medicine. She patted the ship’s dashboard as one would pat a dog’s head. Her world would be better now – she knew this much and she knew it down to her veins.

  But, as Mystery took off once more into the cold of space, she began to realize that her earlier excitement was actually fear. Where was Ysabel, exactly? The two pilots had raced each other so many times in the simulator, and Mystery knew Ysabel’s race time down to the decimal. Her rival was out there somewhere, lost in the vacuum. And Mystery knew that she had to find her – she owed Ysabel that much. Mystery wouldn’t be the pilot she was that hour if not for that good fight.

  While Mystery didn’t know what happened to her, she had a good idea of where to start first. She throttled her ship towards the clouds of asteroids and meteoroids that orbited Jupiter. In just a few minutes, all she could see were rocks, spinning and twirling as they collided with one another. The kaleidoscope of debris was so entrancing, Mystery almost flew headfirst into a particularly large chunk of stone. She managed to dodge it somewhat – she winced as a dull thud reverberated throughout the ship. The meteoroid had glanced off the ship’s hull, denting it but thankfully not cracking the seal. She had given herself enough room for just one error, and she had already made it. She couldn’t let it happen again.

  More cautious now, she danced between the pillars, looking for her partner. As she flew, she continued radioing the spacescape around her. Never before had she cried out in the dark and hoped that someone cried back. But her radio calls were met with an audience of silence, and that audience was heavy on her soul. After an hour of searching the fields, a part of her wondered how much longer she should look. Should she look for another hour – another day – to the cliffs of her life? This cynical part of her was a small voice, but every time it repeated the question, it grew a little louder.

  And it was only when all hope seemed lost that Mystery noticed the rock ahead seemed odd. After seeing nothing but rocks for the past few hours, she knew what to expect: jagged, rounded, sheared, impacted, natural. But the rock that grew larger in her window as she approached it was different. It was built out of straight lines, and Mystery knew that straight lines didn’t exist in nature – only in captivity.

  But it wasn’t until she got thirty seconds closer that she could confirm the truth. It was Ysabel’s launch, rotating gently, scarred with the pockets of impacts. Frantically, Mystery fumbled for her radio once more and called out, “Ysabel? Ysabel!”

  At first there was no answer. But then, through the sea of static, a voice responded. “Mystery…that you?”

  “Yes! Thank goodness
I found you. I thought you were lost for sure. Are you hurt?”

  “No…” Ysabel said, her words punctuated. “I…pressure when…was punctured…I put on…suit…in time…don’t have much air left…hurry.”

  Mystery understood just enough to feel the gravity of the situation. As quickly and carefully as possible, she twisted her launch around until she was upside-down. Then, she forced her ship sideways until it was hovering under Ysabel’s ship, like a reflection on the water. She activated the clasps that were used to fuse together launches, in the event that they needed to haul heavy cargo. Three of the four clasps caught, the fourth one failing since the clasp on Ysabel’s ship was damaged – but three was a good number, a lucky number.

  Mystery got up from her chair and floated to the back of her launch as quickly as she could. Ysabel was fortunate enough to break down in a cavity in the asteroid fields, where she was mercifully spared any more impacts for the time being. But rocks are an unpredictable breed, and any moment could bring death with it. A rock hurtling out of nowhere could destroy one or even both of the ships. The time left was rare and about to go extinct.

  In a few moments, Mystery clambered out of the launch and into outer space. She was hyperventilating as this was her first spacewalk. But Mystery had thought ahead and tied herself to the inside of her ship with a long stretch of cable, and the knots were strong. And so she climbed from her ship to Ysabel’s using as a ladder the clasps that fused the ships together.