PART FOUR
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
ESCAPE VELOCITY
CAM WAS IN COMPLETE AND total darkness. He had a plasma lantern that he could turn up to as high as a thousand lumens, but at this point, the tedium and familiarity of his compact surroundings were worse than the pure blackness. According to the chronometer strapped to the outside of his pressure suit that auto-illuminated when he looked down at it, he’d been inside the crate for a little over three days now, though to him, it felt more like three months.
At last check, about a third of his consumables were gone (air, water, tubes of protein paste, supplements, and the antinausea pills he took in preparation for a launch he was beginning to think might never happen). Other biological necessities had been addressed through indiscreet germicidal receptacles that were accumulating in the bulging refuse pouch behind him.
His seat was mounted on a triple-axis gimbal that kept him in an optimal launch position regardless of which way the crate was stacked. Cam was thankful for the arrangement since he had indeed been rotated several times during transport, though the contraption left him little room to stretch. And despite regularly kneading freshly oxygenated blood into his hamstrings, quadriceps, and calves, they’d begun seizing and spasming with increasing regularity.
When at last Cam was awakened by the sound and feel of multiple colossal engines igniting somewhere beneath him, there was an instantaneous upwelling of emotional dissonance. This was the point of no return—the moment beyond which it was impossible for him to change his mind. Even though the reality was that it had probably been too late from the moment his crate had been loaded into the cargo bay, he knew now that no amount of screaming or banging could possibly alert anyone to the fact that he was inside, and that cracking the hatch or blowing the explosive bolts and trying to get out would, at this point, almost certainly be suicide. What only moments ago had been by far the most dangerous thing Cam had ever done was now the only hope he had for survival.
There was another reason why the sensation of immensely powerful rocket fuel combustion was a relief. When they were working out the details of how to get Cam up to Equinox, Omicron had explained that there were three widely used methods for launching objects into orbit: Single-Stage-to-Orbit spaceplanes (SSTOs), hypervelocity mechanical mass acceleration rings (or “hammers” as they were usually called), and traditional rocket technology. Since nobody knew which spaceport was assigned to ultimately receive the ice auger components, it was impossible to know for sure which method would be used. Cam’s capsule was designed for either an SSTO (which was unlikely since spaceplanes were far better at quickly inserting small objects into orbit than delivering heavy payloads to a space station), or just about any kind of expendable, multistage, vertical-launch system. But had the brokers built a hammer big enough to launch industrial-scale equipment—and somehow found a way to counter the effects of massive amounts of centripetal acceleration on mechanical cargo—anything organic inside would be reduced to protoplasmic gelatin long before it ever got off the ground.
Cam began to sense movement, and then shortly thereafter, the gradual accumulation of g-forces. That was the moment when he knew, absolutely, that despite all the brave optimism, and all the contingency plans he was forced to memorize consisting of coordinates and radio frequencies and survival techniques, he would never see Cadie or Zaire ever again. Even if he survived the launch and somehow managed to make it to Equinox, the chances of him getting back down to Earth without being discovered, or before he ran out of consumables, or before he perished in any number of other ways, were laughably minuscule. And even if he did manage to complete his mission and get himself on a homeward trajectory, the chances of him surviving reentry and being picked up by someone more interested in rescuing him alive than waiting for him to die and then salvaging his capsule were probably even lower.
Cam knew as well as anyone that this had always been a one-way trip.
But rather than fear or desolation, what Cam felt more acutely than anything else was a sense of relief. As soon as someone suggested attempting to infiltrate Equinox as a way of sabotaging the Coronians’ mining operations, Cam knew that this was his best way out—perhaps the only way left for him to fulfill his obligations to the people he loved, and then, one way or another, to finally move on. Living with Cadie inside Aquarius had gotten to be unbearable. He hated that he watched her sleep, and that he looked for opportunities to brush up against her so that he could feel and smell her, and that he even enjoyed holding her hair back out of her face as she vomited from seasickness their first few nights aboard the research vessel. Yet never once did she respond to him in the way he wanted her to. As hard as he tried, he could not stop thinking about the request she’d made of him back in V1—her plan to try to preserve something of her dying husband—and how badly he had wanted it to be something physical between them rather than just a dispassionate procedure that occurred in isolation inside a laboratory. He could not forget how he had tried to turn the whole thing into something that it was not; tried to use his best friend’s accident to his advantage; how much he hoped that comforting Cadie would eventually grow into something much more.
But now he could see how impossible it had always been. Everyone had his or her place in V1, and his place was with Zaire. Somehow—he couldn’t even remember exactly how anymore—the two of them had been matched up and expected to marry in the communal ceremony that had been celebrated as the biggest wedding in the galaxy, and then both had been assigned to work in the Wrench Pod. Cam knew that being with Cadie had always been unrealistic—that he was not good enough for her, not smart enough, and that he would never be or have the things that she valued in a partner. Even when they had nothing left in the entire world but each other—when their home was gone, and Arik and Zaire were both gone, and even the baby was gone—even then Cadie had not responded to him, not even in one single helpless and desperate attempt to cling to something familiar, something of their past that nobody else on the entire planet shared with her but him. When Cam watched Cadie, he could see that the source of her passion would always be her past, and never the potential for a future with him.
Yet somehow it had been possible for Cam to love Zaire. Somehow he both loved her and hated her for not being Cadie, and loved his best friend, but also hated him for having the only thing in the world he’d ever wanted. And now the only way he knew to reconcile all the contradictions of his past was to give the only thing he had left—his life—in service of something that he hoped was bigger than himself, big enough to shift his perspective and make everything in his past feel so small and so insignificant that, if even for a few hours or minutes or seconds before he died, he could finally put it all behind him.
The velocity a spacecraft must achieve in order to escape Earth’s gravity was enormous. Cam was told that a typical cargo rocket burning highly refined kerosene and liquid oxygen would likely take between eight and nine minutes to reach orbit, and along the way, accelerate to between three and four times Earth’s gravity. By no means was such strain trivial, but it was easily survivable. He was also told that those who had not been conditioned, or prescreened for tolerance, or who weren’t wearing a g-suit designed to squeeze the blood from their legs and abdomen back up into their brains, might very well lose consciousness along the way.
Cam had spent most of his life believing that he had already left Earth behind forever. The last thought he had as he closed his eyes and surrendered to the forces of escape velocity was that now he actually had, and even though he was terrified of what lay ahead, he hoped more than anything else to never have to go back.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
JETSAM
OVER THE LAST SEVERAL MONTHS, Cadie had learned all kinds of new things about herself, but the one that probably surprised her most was that she was terrified of insects. She’d never seen one in person before being brought aboard the San Francisco (nor, for that matter, any other form of complex multi
cellular organism other than her fellow humans), but as a competent and even accomplished biologist, it never occurred to her that she might find other living things so repulsive and somehow menacing.
It was Cadie’s second encounter with an insect that was the most traumatic. After she met Luka in the Turkish hookah lunge, she’d decided to postpone returning to the confines of Aquarius so that she could see a little more of the San Francisco. As she turned from Market onto Mission, she came upon something long and sleek and iridescent that turned out to be a set of wings cloaking what seemed to her an impossibly large cicada with enormous, beady, bulbous red eyes. It had somehow escaped from the broods raised by the growers in the center column of the Yerba Buena structure, and had attached itself right at eye level to the outside of the electrolysis station. In an attempt to acknowledge and emphasize her curiosity over her fear and rising disgust, Cadie leaned toward the unfamiliar creature to get a better look, and when it suddenly buzzed with the intensity of a fire klaxon, she shrieked, spun, and immediately returned to Aquarius, where she did not complain about cabin fever or claustrophobia again for almost a month.
However, Aquarius was not entirely impervious to entomological infiltration, either, and in fact the tiny research habitat had been the setting of Cadie’s very first—though thankfully much less dramatic—insect encounter. Charlie had brought Cadie one of her own favorite boxed meals, which happened to be quinoa and ant stir-fry, and it wasn’t until Cadie was about to put the first bite into her mouth that she realized what the little bristly black curls actually were. Charlie apologized profusely at having forgotten that there were cultures out there who found the consumption of insects offensive, including the one from which her own sister originally came. The meal did not go to waste, though, since curiously, Cam had none of the same culinary misgivings as Cadie, and in fact, benefited more than once when boxed meals meant for his roommate were mislabeled, or when Luka or Charlie simply forgot about Cadie’s self-imposed dietary restrictions. Ever since those little articulated legs and pointy abdomens and crooked antennae and pincer mouthparts had come so close to her lips, Cadie had been subsisting primarily on nutrients derived from almonds, black beans, and soy—along with capsules of probiotics to help her digest them, and lots of vitamin supplements.
That was what led Cadie to a second discovery about herself. She’d never given much thought to food before she’d come to live aboard the San Francisco, and in fact, had always found eating to be more of an inconvenience and a distraction than a form of pleasure. But now that she’d probably lost close to five kilograms since leaving the medical center, she found she was thinking about food almost constantly, and specifically, nice big hot boxes of stemstock. There was a long-standing debate in V1 about whether consuming meat synthesized from the stem cells of long-dead bovine or fowl (and sometimes both simultaneously) qualified one as a true carnivore, or whether the intersection of food production and modern genetics merited entirely new dietary categories. Cadie had never cared to argue semantics and paid little attention to how those around her chose to label themselves, though she now knew unequivocally that whatever she was, she was no vegetarian, and that she desperately wanted some meat.
According to Luka, there was sometimes an item called black pepper chicken available in the Union Square food court for up to a week after the San Francisco left a broker post. He didn’t much care for stemstock himself, but apparently those who did were constantly raving about the dish to anyone they could get to listen. Cadie would have probably asked Luka or Charlie to bring her an order or two rather than risk leaving Aquarius, but the food court held another draw: it was on the top floor of Union Square, and apparently the higher up on the rig you were, the more you could feel the flushing of the waterlock.
Cadie and her team had explored several methods for launching the UNVs. Their initial plan was to fill them with ballast, drop them through the moon pool, then after some interval of time, have them jettison their weights so that they would bob up to the surface, deploy their sails, and begin their long journeys around the globe. The main problem, according to Luka and Charlie, was that someone on the bridge might notice a trail of sixty-four solid-sail hydrofoils wandering off in different directions in the San Francisco’s wake. The next idea was to transport them all over to the Accipiter Hawk, where Ayla and Omicron could launch them in safety a few hundred kilometers away, but for reasons Ayla still hadn’t explained, Omicron did not come back from their trip up to the Global Seed Vault, and although Cadie knew that Ayla was perfectly capable of launching the UNVs on her own, without Omicron, she seemed to lack the confidence.
That was when Charlie—just before being put on saturation rotation—had the brilliant idea of simply throwing them all away. There were records of everything that came aboard the San Francisco, and records of everything that was assembled and distributed throughout the rig, but nobody ever paid any attention to what got dumped. Additionally, though the UNVs’ hulls were assembled from self-healing polymers, the team really had no idea how much punishment they could withstand, and launching them through the refuse chamber would probably result in less structural stress since the rig slowed down significantly before releasing its waste. And finally, as long as the UNVs did not deploy their sails too soon, they would easily blend in with the other jetsam and just float away with the rest of the garbage.
Cadie was sitting in a secluded corner of the food court, absently watching a cricket match on a massive overhead panel—presumably a classic rivalry from the archives. She’d never really been a fan of any sport, and in fact only knew enough about cricket to be able to follow the matches that were sometimes held in the Play Pod pitches in V1, but it was a convenient distraction from the skewers and pans and platters of insects for sale all around her. On her way in, she’d seen a stall with a Japanese theme offering compressed rice-substitute pillows garnished with grubs, beetles, and roaches, and now she was actively trying to unsee them.
Since Tycho had made her an official citizen of the San Francisco, Cadie’s cap repository was automatically credited at regular intervals. Although she didn’t really have a good sense of the economics aboard the rig, her impression was that the allocation was a paltry and primarily political sum, but lacking any other financial responsibilities, she found that it was more than enough to get her not just one plate of black pepper chicken, but a second one, as well. It was just as she was gathering her first bite of seconds with her chopsticks—and reflecting on how this was probably one of the very best meals she’d ever sat down to—that she finally felt it.
Cadie considered the gyroscopic stabilizers that Luka and Charlie claimed made the rig feel as solid as dry land to be closer to motion dampeners rather then eliminators. The closest Cadie had ever come to floating on anything before being brought aboard the San Francisco was the maglev that connected all of V1’s pods, and she suspected that her inner ears had a far more solid baseline for sensing movement than those who’d spent most or all of their lives at sea. In fact, even though Aquarius inherited most of the motion compensation from the hull to which it was lashed, she’d spent her first few nights aboard vomiting into the stainless steel receptacle in the entry lock with Cam standing behind her, holding her then-long hair back out of her face. Therefore, the sensation that Luka had said she might be able to detect from the top floor of Union Square (the tallest building she had access to, and where she would remain relatively anonymous and inconspicuous) was, to her, unmistakable. She looked around at the other patrons who continued carrying trays from stalls to tables, or animatedly conversing over elaborate presentations of exotic invertebrates, or interacting with their workspaces in solitude without the slightest acknowledgment of what just occurred.
Cadie figured that continuing to eat would help her to blend in better, so she wrapped her mouth around the bite of black pepper chicken and looked back up at the cricket match while she chewed. A few moments later, she felt the same sensation again, but this tim
e in the opposite direction, and she knew that it was done.
It was strange, and perhaps even a little unfair, how anticlimactic the world could sometimes feel. Sixty-four solid-sail unmanned hydrofoils—each one christened with a unique species of extinct flying fish, and known collectively among the team as “gliders”—had just started the gradual process of entirely changing the course of humanity. Using decrypted signals from Coronian navigation satellites, they would eventually disband and dynamically plot courses toward multiple coasts of every continent on the planet, propagating not only genetically engineered and fully automated terraforming technologies, but just as important to Cadie, also finally realizing and actualizing her husband’s legacy. Yet the only indication was a subtle sway in the level of the tea in her cup; a delicate, seemingly magnetic inclination to lean slightly forward toward the table, and then a few minutes later, slightly back; a sensation so deeply ingrained into the psyches and equilibria of everyone around her that not a single person even paused to take notice.
Cadie wondered how many other scientists had experienced disappointment at the incongruent coexistence of profound paradigm shifts and insipid normalcy. She wondered if Gregor Mendel, having just discovered the entire field of genetics by recognizing the pattern of inheritance in pea plants, was soon thereafter called inside from his garden to eat his lunch before it got cold. She thought about how newspapers were far more interested in the gossip of the day than in printing a single factual account of the Wright brothers having just invented controlled, powered, and sustained heavier-than-air human flight. And how Buzz Aldrin, having participated in one of the most daring adventures in the history of humankind, returned to Earth to face the suicide of his mother, multiple failed marriages, depression, and alcoholism. Finally, she thought about her own husband, and how solving artificial photosynthesis and figuring out how to terraform an irradiated and sterile planet were simply means to an end, and that they might never have the opportunity to be widely celebrated as scientific revolutions in their own rights.
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