by Wil McCarthy
Once the pressure has equalized, one opens the inner hatch and steps through into the shower, where first jets of ionized air and then jets of water and surfactant seek to clean off the dust that clings to us despite best efforts and antistatic spray. And then jets of air again to dry the suits, and then finally we may doff them with difficulty even greater than that with which we donned. The suits are finally crucified on their hanging racks, and we strip off the space underwear that has come in contact with them, for it too is contaminated with dust and must needs be fed through the laundry lock before permitted in the dormitory.
Nude as newborns, we then slip back into the shower to clean off the dust of Lune and the sweat of long exertion, paying careful attention to the head hair and body hair, for grit does love to accumulate there. Finally, still nude, we slip indoors, to find ourselves some fresh clothing—inevitably now the traditional monk’s habit. And then finally, with much gratitude, we blow our damned noses.
On this day at shift’s end we were starving, and no one had thought to pre-program the CHON printer or wanted to wait for it to churn out three meals’ worth of slop, so we raided the hydroponics and gorged on sewer-grown carrots and tomatoes and cabbage (all carefully washed and irradiated, of course), then cleaned and stacked the dishes. Then came vespers, for praying in the evening helps one make sense of the day, followed by an hour of personal time which I spent reading academic papers on the art and science of growing edibles in nutrient-poor soil. “Add fertilizer” seems to be the consensus, by the way, which defeats my purpose, and thus it’s between the written lines that I must read, to glean the information I require.
Afterward, more tooth brushing and hair combing, and thence to bed. And there you have it: a day in the life.
I hasten to remind my beloved that this is but one of the eighty-two Vatican days I’ve dwelt here upon the South Arse of Lune, and that the days and times are as varied as those of any nomadic hunter-gatherer or colonist farmer who ever trod the hills of Earth. I shall, for the moment, leave it to your imagination to describe the other eighty-one behind me, and the hopefully much larger number stretching out ahead. I remain:
Very yours and very truly,
Brother Michael Jablonski de la Lune
4.3
23 March
✧
Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot
Earth-Moon Lagrange Point 1
Cislunar Space
A staffer came into the mess hall to issue Dona Obata a freshly printed uniform (with, unusually, no name tag on it), and to show her to the trillionaire’s quarters, which seemed to have been designed by the same people who did the guest rooms at the Marriott Stars. There, alone, she spent little time contemplating her fate. Things had gone wrong, indeed, and she was not in control of this situation at all, but she had spent much of her life in survival mode, and some in outright fight-or-flight, and she knew very well how to stay loose in a crisis. Instead of fretting, she took a shower, and then slid herself into the soft envelope of a queen-sized zero-gee bed. Sleep found her quickly; she’d been running on coffee and adrenaline for almost three days. She slept hard for a couple of hours, her body actually quite enjoying the reduction in stress that came from no longer being undercover.
Then she awoke, poked around in the trillionaire’s dresser drawers and medicine cabinet, and found a stout metal safe hidden behind one of the padded vinyl wall panels. It was an older type, purely mechanical, and by the looks of it, it had no way of tracking or logging attempts to open it. That was good, because she meant to find out, sooner or later, what was in there. However, it could potentially take her hundreds of hours to crack it, spread out over a couple of weeks, and she needed to know her efforts would remain undetected. In any event, today was not the day to begin; she doubted there were surveillance sensors of any kind in the trillionaire’s private quarters (except, perhaps, aimed at the bed to collect a record of his sexual conquests) but the chance of his coming in randomly to check up on her was significant, and until she knew his habits better, she would not trust to luck.
She would, of course, have to seduce him. Her very survival could depend on it, and she was quite good at looking after her survival. In her six years of professional spycraft, she had certainly seduced her share of men. It was easier and tidier than killing them, which she also sometimes did. There were three that she had definitely killed and confirmed, and another three that were . . . probable. So there you had it. But the task in front of her now was to secure a position for herself here at Clementine and, as the trillionaire had said, ensure that the future still included her. To do this, she had to get him not only into bed with her, but actually on her side. And she knew how to do that.
Of course, expecting to win his trust would be stupid. At his behest she’d already betrayed her former employer, which was also her country, and she’d been fully prepared to shoot her colleagues, Bethy and Alice, in the backs of their heads and turn control of ESL1 over to Grigory Orlov in perhaps the boldest act of piracy the modern world had ever seen. Naturally, the trillionaire was plenty smart enough to know that if she’d do it for him, she’d just as readily do it to him if a better offer came along. And she would, yes, obviously. But what he also needed to see, and probably didn’t, was that nobody was ever going to have a better offer than he did. Nobody else, in all the universe, could offer her the universe. Occupying ESL1 Shade Station would never have been anything more than a temporary assignment for her, and then back to Earth for more skullduggery in all the places France liked to meddle. Ironically, she’d’ve made a better future for herself by simply signing up for ESL1 as an actual colonist! But that RzVz contract, that mandatory pregnancy clause, was a nonstarter, and anyway by the time she’d realized going there was even a possibility, she already knew that place was in the Coalition’s crosshairs, and its days of normal operation were sharply numbered.
So, what did that leave her? Find a way onto Concordia, Dan Beseman’s Mars ship? That would take tens of millions of euros, maybe even hundreds of millions, to bid successfully for one of the hundred slots, assuming she could even persuade the backers that her skill set matched the basic admission profile. Or somehow get herself hired by Harvest Moon, and somehow persuade them she was one of the very few who actually got to live at Shackleton Lunar Industrial Station? Or maybe she should just suck it, give up on the universe, and move her ass to Burning Man in the U.S., or Ciudad de Esperanza in Antarctica, or even Mustaemara in southern Libya, in the crook of the Sahara’s Ramlat Rebiana dune sea. Somewhere essentially uninhabitable, without the aid of space colonization technology. Someplace she could start something and build something and be someone, in a way she never could in France or even the Congo. People like her—females of modest means and great determination—were in the First World seen fit to be excellent whores and hotel maids, and in the Third World as wives for gangsters and warlords, petty politicians and businessmen. Government service within the E.U. had offered her a slightly better alternative, but Orlov had opened up the possibility of something more. Something real.
In France’s opérations secrètes community, RzVz’s ESL1 Shade was seen as both a major geopolitical threat and an easy target for wet-ops intervention. Hence her mission there. But Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot scared them in a totally different way; it was often discussed by Dona’s superiors that Grigory Orlov—a “known bad actor”—could “drop a rock” any time he wanted to, and level any square kilometer on Earth with perhaps twelve hours’ notice at the very most, and perhaps a lot less if the rock were first painted black and swaddled in radar-absorbing material, so that only quantum radar could pick it up as it passed through low Earth orbit. But in this case, it seemed the best defense was not a strong offense, but simply the constellation of American orbital lasers. Those were nominally to protect against Earthly missile launches, but there was also talk about using them to enforce the no-fly zones in Central and South America, and apparently they had been secretly used to
shoot down natural meteorites. And so, Dona had heard those lasers referred to more than once as “rock block” weapons, that could divert the course of an incoming asteroid small enough to be flung by Clementine’s gatherbots, breaking it into smaller pieces that would burn up better on reentry, or at least steering it toward unpopulated areas. Because yes, even if Orlov Petrochemical were somehow taken out of the picture, there were enough people in space these days, with little enough supervision, that in paranoid government circles it was understood that a dropped rock from somewhere, against someone, was only a matter of time.
But that left no need for the Coalition to take Clementine Cislunar Fuel Depot away from Orlov, and he seemed somehow to know it. Perhaps he knew more about it than she did. So yes, Clementine was the one place she could think of that made a real future possible for her. And to access that future, she needed to get Orlov’s hormones working on her behalf. And really, she felt the work of seduction was half-done already; by asking her to stay in his own quarters, she sensed he was in effect reserving her, basically sequestering her away from the eyes and deeds of other males who might catch her eye. She supposed it was a piggish move. She supposed many women in her position would be offended or afraid, but truthfully she felt neither thing. If parking her in his own quarters was crude in method, well, it was also quite precise in effect, and exactly the sort of thing she would have expected from a man with his very particular kind of power. She’d be in trouble if he weren’t interested. That would be worth fretting about.
It was not like this seduction would be a particularly odious chore, either; she was attracted to powerful men in general, and she tended to fall for dangerous, unrepentant men in particular. Call it a weakness. Of course, some such men were also fat or sweaty or pointlessly cruel, or precocious in youth, or else they were old men pining for the precocity of youth, and these were not attractive qualities. The trillionaire, though, seemed in fine control of both his body and mind, and his chiseled tough-guy frame suggested he could possibly beat her in a physical fight as well. Call it another weakness, but this engaged her own hormones like nothing else. So yes, as far as she could tell, Orlov was very much her type, and this was her kind of place, and she had done the right thing by coming here.
Next, she did a quick inventory of what she’d managed to bring with her in her flight bag: an extra set of dark gray space underwear, some colorful scarves, a pair of bright red, wedge-heeled, magnetic-soled shoes, a maximally equipped Swiss Army knife, a tube of red lipstick, and a pair of inert, flip-lens magnifying eyeglasses that had no electronic features, save a pair of small, forward-facing lamps on the sides of the lenses. And finally, the now-useless radio: an entangled ultrawideband disguised as an old smartphone handset (the kind people still watched movies on when they were too fashion-conscious for augmented reality glasses). It had one more trick hidden up its electronic sleeve, but today wasn’t the day for that, either.
Dressing in her Clementine uniform of dark gray spandex, she tried on the high heels and found they looked pretty good with it. She then tried each of the scarves, first loosely around her neck and then tightly along her hairline, until she found a look that hit the right combination of “accidental” sex appeal. She even tried the glasses with it and found, to her surprise, that they somehow made her look more like she belonged in a mining outpost, like some saucy records clerk accustomed to “hanging with the boys.” She decided the lipstick would push that too far, though, so she put it away for now.
Then she stripped back down to space underwear and slipped back into bed for a few more hours of sleep. Her mind—itself a disciplined instrument, and a relieved one—did not prevent her from performing the two-minute progressive relaxation ritual that put her body at rest and sank her into what she called, without irony, le sommeil du juste—“the sleep of the just.”
1.5
22 March
✧
L.S.F. Dandelion
En Route to Earth-Sun
Lagrange Point 1
Cislunar Space
“You monitor the thrust and engine temperatures over here,” Derek was saying, pointing to indicators on the Flight Management screen of the ship’s virtual control panel. “That’s acceleration there, and calculated mass over here. That always fluctuates a bit in the third decimal place, but if it changes more than that, or you see a consistent downward trend, it means we’ve got trouble. You can set a trigger alarm if you want to, but it’s boring enough up here without automating yourself out of existence.”
“Plus we need the benefit of human judgment?” Alice asked.
“Only when something unexpected occurs, but then yeah, definitely. And it happens more often than you might think. Machines are fine at anomaly detection and fair to middlin’ at diagnosing a root cause, but they know fuck all about how to improvise. That’s why human pilots still exist, maybe for a good long while. Okay, propellant mass has its own separate calculation, right here, based on acoustic and optical readings inside the tank. And no, the fuel tank is not going to blow up, so get that look off your face.”
“What look?”
“It’s xenon. It’s an inert gas.”
“I didn’t say anything.”
“Okay, fine. But you do have to watch it closely. An anomaly in fuel mass is not as bad as a leak in the air or water supply, but it’s still very bad, so it’s something you want to keep an eye on.”
They were orbiting the Earth and thrusting lightly along the direction of their orbit, slowly spiraling outward on a trajectory that would take them out past geosynchronous orbit, past lunar orbit, and eventually all the way out to Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1. This meant that for the majority of the trip, the Earth would be invisible through both the windshield and the rearview mirrors. The Sun and Moon would occasionally pass into view as the weeks unfolded, but right now the Sun was at their side, casting glints off the edges of the rear-view mirror frames and mostly drowning out the starry night in front of them.
Derek selected a different tab at the top of the screen, and brought up the Engine Management screen. He pointed: “Temperature. Efficiency. Specific impulse. Flowrate. Voltage. Wattage input. Wattage output. Problems here are even less urgent, but still, you know, extremely urgent. We’ll be two months on this tub if everything goes perfectly, and forever if it doesn’t.”
“Yep. Got it.”
Alice tried to keep the sarcasm out of her tone, but this was the third time he’d gone over the exact same material, after making her memorize the positions and functions of every physical control in the cockpit. In the unlikely occurrence that Derek died and the computer shut down and someone needed to guide the ship manually into a docking port, Alice had a one hundred percent theoretical knowledge of what to do. Emphasis on the theoretical.
Derek continued: “Point is, if you find any kind of problem, anything, no matter how small, you wake me up. If I find a problem, I’ll wake you up on the theory you can help me deal with it, or at least learn from watching me.”
“And how long does it take to wake someone up?”
Alice looked back. Behind them, the cockpit door (a two-piece sliding hatch about twice the thickness of a highway sign) sat open, looking back on six women in their space underwear, hanging from the walls like sides of beef. Goggles over their eyes, headphones over their ears, IV catheters in their arms, and various wireless monitoring patches stuck to their necks and hands and feet, and hidden beneath their T-shirts.
It was cold as fuck back there, only eight degrees above freezing, and with the door open that meant it was cold here in the cockpit, too, because the climate controller was too smart to waste very much energy trying to heat one space while it was open to one that was being cooled.
Passengers on these low-speed ferries spent the whole trip in what was called “squirrel hibernation,” which was a much colder, much deeper sleep than “bear hibernation,” which is what Derek was preparing to go into. Derek looked back. “For them, about two hour
s. It’s no joke; you’ll kill them if you try to rush it. Bear hibernation is a lot more flexible, so you can wake me up in about fifteen minutes under normal circumstances, or five minutes in a real emergency. But try not to have one of those, okay? It wouldn’t be fatal to wake up that fast, but I’d be sick for days.” He paused, then said, “Seriously, are you going to be okay? This is your first space mission. If it’s too much, I can just put you under and take the whole flight myself.”
“I’m fine,” she assured him, although there was something unnerving about the whole situation, even to Alice, who’d dealt with quite a lot of scary things in her life.
But the two of them had been awake together for almost twenty-four hours, which was enough of a strain on the ship’s resources that they pretty much had to put a stop to it now. One of them had to go back in the hibernation bay for a few days, and if Derek did it, then Alice would build up flight hours toward a certification. It wasn’t hard to pretend to care about that, as part of her imaginary future in space, but it did mean spending a lot of long hours alone with her thoughts, and with seven cold coma patients on the very very brink of death.
By now she’d figured out the other reason Derek wanted her for a copilot: because she had field experience with hibernation drugs. Maroon Berets used a mix called “The Pillows” on wounded soldiers, mainly just to drop the blood pressure and slow hemorrhaging, but with rapid unconsciousness as a convenient side effect. And yes, the core temperature of those patients did drop, along with heart rate and respiration, until the drug wore off, usually in about four hours. But “bear hibernation” was a whole level beyond that, and “squirrel hibernation” was even more extreme.
