by Wil McCarthy
“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 s
hrugged.
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.
&n
bsp; 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.
