Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  Another swish-thrum-clank. The door irises. Derlock walks in like a general inspecting his troops, and his eyes wander up and down me. That is so zoomed.

  We drop our bags into lockers. Nets reach out, cover them, tighten. We strap into our barely needed acceleration hammocks like good little obedient students—max acceleration upbound is 1.5 g, which just means instead of weighing 50 kilos, I’ll feel like I weigh 75. Lots of people weigh more than that, all the time. But we all do it anyway—no troublemakers here, no sir.

  With a hum and a swing, the crane lifts us to the top of the launcher, which is a thirty-storey tower of ice in an aluminum tube. The robots clamp us into place and back away.

  Notes for the Interested, #6

  CAP: short for capsule. An spacecraft shaped like a rounded cone. The easiest structure for going up or coming down in the atmosphere.

  A cap is highly stable; when going up, the pointed nose keeps it faced into the wind, and when coming down, without the rocket under it, it naturally rolls into a position where the heat-shielded rounded bottom faces into the wind, and provides plenty of drag to slow it down.

  A cap requires much less guidance and is much more stable than a winged spacecraft like the twentieth-century space shuttle; if it is aimed correctly, it can land just as precisely, if not more so. By 2050, design engineers gave up on winged spacecraft, just as earlier generations of designers gave up on sailing ships, dirigibles, steam-powered cars, and ornithopters.

  A cap is launched from Earth on top of an ice rocket, which is simply an aluminum tube, about as tall as a really big office building, filled with ice. (In our real world NASA began looking at this idea before 1980; we just don’t have powerful enough lasers to make it work—yet). A laser from the ground is focused into the beam port, turning the ice to superheated plasma; the plasma ejects from ports on the side, creating a rocket exhaust that pushes the rocket at very high speeds. By shaping the beam port, body, and exhaust ports correctly, it is possible to build a rocket that naturally stays on the beam, so that the lasers can guide it to orbit as well as propel it. The laser can deliver much more energy than could be generated from fuel carried on board, allowing more boost for the same sized rocket, and removing any need for carrying volatile, possibly explosive fuel on the flight itself.

  When I was little, and we’d go to the tourist hotels in orbit, or to the moon for skiing or surfing, Pop always let me put the audio on so I could listen to the countdown. I want to now, but I’m sure Glisters has a camera running and I don’t want to style this moment all childish. Luckily Fleeta says, “Countdown, please.”

  “—three, two, one, laser on.” The cap starts moving upward, smooth as an elevator but gaining speed steadily. Under us, the laser from the ground flows into the beam port at the bottom of that ice-filled aluminum skyscraper. Ice vaporizes, molecules tear apart, electrons strip off the atoms.

  Fourteen thousand tonnes of ice go out the exhaust ports as oxygen-hydrogen plasma in the next half hour. Since it’s a beam rider, the rocket always stays centered with its beam port right on the beam—we studied how that works in math class—and the plasma jets fan out around the beam without blocking it, leaving a 500-meter doughnut of flame about a kilometer behind the ship (where the hydrogen cools down enough to burn back into water). As you go up they switch your rocket from beam to beam so you’re finally on exactly the right trajectory.

  Sheeyeffinit. I am not thinking celeb-eenie thoughts, even at a career-defining moment. Gah. Crazy Science Girl is always inside me, waiting to pop out.

  The last beam switches off. There’re just a few tonnes of ice rattling around inside the rocket.

  Before I can think about my dignity, Fleeta and I release our tie-downs and airswim to the tail-end window; we nearly collide with Glisters coming from the other side. The metal wall facing us through the window backs away from us on its positioning jets.

  In minutes, the rocket is far away, a glinting cylinder against the curve of shining ocean wrapped in a thin band of deep blue air. As the remaining ice inside boils from the frictional heat of the thin remaining atmosphere, the nose jet flares in a soundless glowing white wisp. For a moment the empty rocket flashes in the sun, rushing ass-first away before we lose its brilliant glare against the vast Earth.

  “What are you all looking at?” Emerald demands.

  “You always watch the rocket fall away,” Fleeta says, firmly. “It’s great.”

  “The rocket falls away? Where does it go?” Marioschke asks.

  “They drop it off at the end of boosting. Then its nose jet shoves it down into the atmosphere so it will fall into one of the catching ranges to be recycled,” Glisters says. “When I was little, Mom and I used to sit outside in Hawaii just after sunset and watch the boosters come down over the Pacific. They make these big white trails that aren’t like anything else, because they tumble as they come down, and get hot, and the steam from the leftover ice pours out through the ports and kind of makes them pinwheel.”

  “I used to watch that with my parents,” I say.

  “It’s what you do,” Fleeta says. “It’s so beautiful. Big white scribbles across the sky like angels doing graffiti.”

  I notice Stack and Derlock smirking. Fury rises in me; Fleeta is right, it’s what you do. Glisters catches my eye and his eyebrows twitch, as if saying, What idiots. They don’t know, do they? I can’t help myself. I smile. He’s still a creepy pornographer, but he’s my favorite creepy pornographer. I’d watch rockets come in with him, anytime.

  “We’re already out of gravity,” Wychee says, tumbling awkwardly.

  Here we are halfway through the second century of space travel, and idiots still talk about the cap “leaving Earth’s gravity” because they mix up weight with gravity. We’re just going into a very high, lopsided orbit around the Earth, and by definition, if you’re orbiting, you’re in the gravity.

  At the high end of the cap’s orbit—seven times farther from Earth than the moon—when Virgo grabs us, we will still be in the gravity; we just won’t have any weight.

  Definitely, Crazy Science Girl has returned. Maybe I’m regressing because I’m going to see Aunt Destiny again.

  April 7–23, 2129. In a highly elliptical Earth orbit, rising from the top of Earth’s atmosphere (160 kilometers up) to intercept with Virgo (about 2 million kilometers from Earth, around five times as far as the moon).

  Sixteen days in a cap is a long time, but at least that’s all it is, going up; because the cap needs to be going more slowly and less steeply when it re-enters the atmosphere, and it’s starting from moving away instead of a standing start, the return trip will be more than a month. I’m glad I’m not going to be on it; it might have been so dull that we really would have started studying for PotEvals, like we promised.

  The moes are all good at hanging around pointlessly—it’s about all we’ve ever done. We gossip a lot about people back at Excellence Shop, who aren’t here to defend themselves. We plug into meeds—we’re featured in a quick little pop-up meed on Ed Teach about “celebubrats go to space.” Admittedly it’s pretty much straight botflog.

  Excellence Shop, already milking the fame, is the sponsor. At least we all look good in it, though Pop and Sir Penn Slabilis and all the other celeb-eenie parents actually get more screen space than we do. I doubt it even budges anyone’s recognition score.

  Derlock and I have weightless sex often. I relish the envy for Satan’s girlfriend in the other girls’ eyes, but I go back to my own sleepsack for the night. Derlock likes morning sex, he likes to get himself going by talking about awful things he did to people, and the combination means waking up every morning to the guy whispering about someone he cheated, betrayed, beat up, or reduced to helpless tears. I’m thinking that the moment enough meeds are out there, I’ll be de-declaring, and trying for the biggest closursation “since Nora slammed the door.” (Get out of my head, Pop!)

  UP-LEG

  EARTHPASS

  TO />
  MARSPASS

  APRIL 23, 2129–AUGUST 27, 2129

  POSITIONS OF THE EARTH, MARS, AND VIRGO—APRIL 23, 2129—AUGUST 27, 2129

  Again, the whole year of 2129 is shown for reference. The dark solid lines show the movement of Earth, Mars, and Virgo. The most interesting thing here is the gap, as represented by the small gray circle; because of what happens in this section, they are not able to get close enough to cross the gap, which is 14.4 million kilometers, 37.5 times as far as the Earth is from the moon.

  Notes for the Interested, #7

  The ride they’re planning to take

  Susan, Derlock, and the rest are planning to go up to Mars on Virgo and come back down on Leo; this will give them about three weeks on Mars. It’s very different from travel on Earth, where locations at least stay in one place, and only the travelers move, and where the vehicle doesn’t just keep going of its own accord after the traveler gets on and off. So the table below is a short guide to refer to if you start to get lost in the orbital process.

  Of course, their plan is going to encounter the two absolute rules of travel, from the Stone Age to the Space Age, which are:

  Your Mileage May Vary

  Subject To Change

  But for the moment, the chart on the following page will tell you what everybody thinks is going to happen.

  You might notice that if everything goes well, they will be on Virgo for only four months (and Mars for a few weeks, and Leo for four months). But if they don’t get off Virgo, the next time there’s anywhere to get off is almost two years away. But, after all, what could go wrong?

  3

  RENDEZVOUS WITH DESTINY

  April 23, 2129. On Virgo, upbound from Earth to Mars. 149 million kilometers from the sun, 171 million kilometers from Mars, 2.5 million kilometers from Earth.

  AUNT DESTINY’S ARMS grip me; we’re laughing and babbling. The shape of her face is so much like mine, but she wasn’t geneered for rich-cocoa skin, so she has a space crew tan: the goggle-and-resp triangle from her eyebrows to her upper lip is coffee-with-fresh-cream, about like Pop’s color; her cheeks, chin, and lower forehead are deeper brown than mine, and freckled black, where the light comes in through her faceplate; and her neck, ears, and forehead are another band of warm light brown beneath her glistening black crew cut. Her face looks like a sepia-and-chocolate bull’s-eye.

  “Hey.” She holds me at arm’s length to look at me. We tumble like a slow-motion dumbbell, bouncing off the soft walls of the receiving area, laughing. “Hey. It’s so good to see you again, kiddo.” She thumps my back like she’s afraid I’m choking. “I won’t exclaim about how you’ve grown, but you do look older. And if you say ‘so do you,’ you’re dead.”

  Derlock glares; the attention café is closed due to a private party.

  The rest airswim away after Rojdeff, the crewman that Emerald has already started calling “Mr. Junior Spaceman.” Emerald may not be exactly splycterbait, but she can turn on the cute, and I suspect Rojdeff is in for an ultra distracting day.

  “So,” Aunt Destiny says, “would the biowaste recycler, the star spotter array, or the medical bay interest you?”

  “Um, not very much, but if you like them—”

  She snorts. “Kiddo, I just wanted to make sure we don’t skip anything you really want to see. Just trust me that most of the standard tour is boring. Now, shall we see the cockpit before the regular tour gets there, so we don’t have to hang around respectfully at the back?”

  Her enthusiasm is like a dance beat you can’t resist. “Sure.”

  In the cockpit, the watch is just five people strapped into chairs, three of them reading and two playing Go on a screen, all “waiting for an alarm to tell them it’s time to watch the machines take care of something automatically,” Destiny explains cheerfully. Everyone nods solemnly, so I guess she’s not exaggerating much. “Commander Kanegawa, permission to move between the cockpit crew and the screens?”

  A small, heavyset woman looks away from the game of Go. “Sure, Destiny, but keep it short. If you’re going over to the pod, maybe you can take a longer look in the auxiliary cockpit?”

  “That’s a great idea, thanks!” Destiny says. “Let’s just look at the things that the main cockpit has but the auxiliary doesn’t, then.” She guides me to an all-wavelength hologram tank; inside it, what looks like a tiny model of Virgo floats at the center. The illusionary object is only the length of my index finger; almost all of it is a stumpy window-dotted cylinder, the pod, where all the cargo is stored. At the front end of the pod there’s a small pointed structure, rings and slopes leading up to a little needle; that’s the nose spire. At the back of the pod, like a blister or a wart, is a little cone half as wide as the pod, attached to it by the wide end: the crew bubble, where the crew live and everything is controlled and planned. The main cockpit, where we are now, is almost at the rear of the crew bubble.

  “The ship is steered from the tail,” I say. “I didn’t think of that before now.”

  Commander Kanegawa nods. “Form follows function,” she says. “Airplanes are steered from the front because they’re mostly steered visually and the biggest concern is that you might run into something. Ships are steered from a high platform so you can see farther and in more directions. Down here at the bottom of our orbit, relative to the solar system as a whole, we’re moving at about 35 kilometers per second, and we steer entirely by radar and instruments, so the best place to put the controls is in the best-protected place, which is back here, with the whole pod and crew bubble between us and trouble, nestled snug between four big iceballs so that radiation and cosmic micrometeoroids can’t nail us from the side.”

  She points to the three big spheres around the crew bubble; they are about the same diameter as the pod but attached at its edges, so that they meet in a central spandrel. Those are the iceballs; when all of them are in place, they will supply not just reaction mass, but also radiation shielding. Half of each iceball extends beyond the edge of the pod, so the four iceballs together, when everything is assembled a couple of days from now, will form by far the widest part of the ship, surrounding and guarding the crew bubble that huddles between them at the back of the pod.

  Sticking up like a brush of long shiny bristles between the iceballs, Virgo’s eleven engines wait to be summoned to action.

  “It’s so pretty,” I say. “Like the best dollhouse you ever saw, if a dollhouse was an interplanetary ship.”

  “I shall take that as a compliment,” Commander Kanegawa says.

  There’s a sound like distant thunder and a vibration in the air; I look back into the tank to see a tiny cap crawling away from the crew bubble.

  Virgo is always at the center of the hologram tank, for quick reference. Now that I am looking for them, I see a small scattering of mostly cargo caps, coming in and going out. Iceball-4, still on its way, is a fingernail-sized white sphere far down in one corner of the tank.

  “So even though you’re only doing course corrections,” I say, “you need almost, what, half the volume of the ship in water to do that?”

  “It’s not all reaction mass. A little bit of it also goes to the farm sections and life support, because we always lose some to leaks here and there.”

  “How long before the moon runs out of ice?”

  Commander Kanegawa hesitates, and Destiny quickly jumps in. “At the rate we’re using it, the conservative guess is we have 200 years of proven reserves, but most people who study it think it will be 1,000. It’ll be a while before we’re thirsty, and by that time there’ll be plenty of other sources from comets or the gas giants.” It sounds sort of memorized.

  She flips the holotank display over to solar particle density scan, which shows the nanocurrents of ions surrounding the ship as a weave of yellow and blue flames ten times as long as the ship itself.

  It’s gorgeous, but I can’t help noticing that I asked a bad question. Maybe the Moon of Our Ancestors League has been getting a lot
of media coverage or something. (Pop always calls them “Save the Rocks.”) “So let’s go see the pod,” I say. “Thanks for answering my questions, Commander!”

  A little politeness will get you a smile and a wave, and I seem to have de-embarrassed Destiny.

  We make our way noseward through the crew bubble. The corridors zig and zag to ensure that if they fire the engines when you’re in midair you won’t have far to fall. Doors open on all surfaces into all kinds of spaces. Destiny and I poke our heads in to visit an off-duty crew chief, who is also a sculptor, making ultra elaborate floating-string structures. In another workroom, we find the astrogator of the watch and chief economist discussing course corrections. They threaten to explain it; we flee onward, up one of the several entry corridors into the pod.

  “You can always tell when you’re crossing over into the pod,” Destiny says, “because every corridor that goes into the pod’s tail disk is interrupted by a double fast-close airlock, even though they have all four hatches open 99% of the time. If they ever have to, the pod and the bubble can be sealed off from each other in less than a tenth of a second. Of course if anyone’s in the doorway at the time, one nasty job for the survivors might be matching up the pieces floating on each side of the door.”

  I shudder. “It seems like things are dull here, but you’re always a meter away from something awful.”

  “Yeah. That’s life: dullness that’s a second, or a meter, from horror. In space, you’re more aware of it. This way—I want to show you the Forest.” I can hear the capital in Destiny’s voice.