Edge of Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  I slip my hand into my pocket and pull out my info screen. One tap and I see the form Connie’s filled out for this one. Yep, at least ten years older than I thought, with a weird history. Perpetual student, then school teacher, then resigned to go to law school, which she quit after a few months.

  I don’t like this history of quitting. It shows a character defect that isn’t readily apparent. If I’d looked before coming out here, I would’ve had Connie take her off the flight list for some damn reason.

  Now I’ll have to think of one.

  LaDonna takes out a little analysis device, synched to mine (because no one brings any device in here without it being certified, synched, and government-approved), and she examines some of the dings and dirt patches. Good girl. She realises that those things could threaten hull integrity, and a hull without integrity is worse than a lawyer with ethics.

  Yeah, yeah, old joke. I have to amuse myself somehow.

  Still, I’m impressed by her, and not sure I want to be. Scrub that: I don’t want to be. I want to disqualify her because of her dilettante nature.

  “This thing barely passes safety regs,” she says to me as she comes around. “I’m amazed it flies.”

  She wouldn’t be if she knew about its guts, which she doesn’t. None of the students know what’s really inside these ships. That way, no nutball student can disable anything before we get on board.

  We have the occasional really awful accident, like the one that happened to my predecessor, but we also have a mountain of precautions to prevent those accidents from happening every day. And believe me, they could. If I’d allowed Buff Guy into this ship, his forearms alone could’ve caused an accident just by brushing one of the ancient controls. You think I’m kidding: I’m not.

  I make her lead me inside. This is just sadistic of me; it’s hard to get into any ship, particularly a ship you’re not familiar with.

  But she does a credible job. She only fumbles twice at the door, manages to get through the airlock without mishap, and finds her way to the cockpit easily.

  That bugs me. It really does. The specs of the tester ships are supposed to be impossible to find. Plus she shouldn’t have known which ship she was going to be in. We rotate them, for one thing. For another, we generally don’t discuss which ships go with what test – although I suppose if you interview enough test-takers, you could figure that out.

  I sigh and follow the perfume trail into the cockpit. It’s not as large as it should be, given the size of the ship. Yet another sign of age. Older ships were designed for only a few people in the cockpit, figuring that only a handful of people even knew what the controls were for, so those people should be the only ones allowed inside.

  Newer models allow anyone to sit in the cockpit and watch. Of course, newer models are tied to the operators’ (and their pilots’) DNA. Harder to steal.

  Impossible to use in this kind of situation.

  She sits at the controls, hands on her lap, just like some instructor probably told her to do. It’s good advice, considering how much could go wrong with the brush of a fingertip.

  I sit beside her and strap in. Then I use the voice command to release the ship to her. Kinda. I retain shadow control that no student knows about.

  “Get us out of here,” I say.

  She doesn’t lift her hands. “Where are we going?”

  Correct question, if this were some other kind of flight besides a test flight. But right now, I want her to take everything one step at a time. I’ve learned from painful experience that if I tell her too much, she’ll jump ahead and screw up.

  I’m not protecting her; I’m protecting me. I don’t want to end up a bloated corpse with burst eyeballs. I want to return to my bed tonight and come in fifteen minutes late tomorrow, while I’m working hard to save up for my Please-God-Make-It-Soon retirement.

  “I’ll tell you when we get out of here,” I say.

  She looks at me, and for a moment, I think she’s going to refuse until I give her our destination. Then she puts her hand on the docking controls. She taps them off as if she’s done it her entire life, and the ship rises slightly. She gives me a sideways glance, as if she expects me to tell her now, but I wait silently.

  I suppose she thinks I should be impressed. I’m not impressed. I’m confused. The docking commands on this ship are complicated. They should have taken her a few minutes of study before she figured out how to access them, and I know she didn’t have time before I arrived in the cockpit.

  I want to ask her if she took this test before, with this very ship, but I don’t. Instead, I not-so-surreptitiously remove my little info screen, turn the screen away from her, and tap it like I’m recording her movements. Instead, I’ve sent a request to Connie:

  How many times has this LaDonna woman taken this test?

  LaDonna leans forward and clicks on the automated request for departure. We leave departure and entry requests automated so that Control doesn’t have to ask for voice rec from every single student. Or so that I don’t have to verify the voice/entry. Because in emergency situations, every second counts, and a verification might be the difference between saving our lives and losing them.

  The bay doors seal, and the environmental controls shut off.

  The info screen vibrates in my hand, giving me Connie’s response.

  This is the first time she has taken the test.

  The top of the dock opens. We use top exits because they’re harder to manoeuvre than in-front-of-the-ship exits. Not that we can actually see this in real time. It’s all visible on the monitors. This tiny cockpit has no exterior windows.

  Really? I send back. Because she knows this ship too well for it to be the first time. Check her records. See if someone snuck her in here for unauthorised practice.

  I put the info screen face down on my knees. LaDonna’s hands hover over the controls as the ship slowly rises. This is a key moment, because if she messes with it too much, the ship will bang into things and she’ll be done.

  Most first-timers bang into the wall at least once. They get one bang. Two puts them on probation. Three requires a second test. The thing is, you hit once, you’ll shove over to the other side and it’ll take some amazing skill to prevent the second bang. If there’s a second bang, it’ll take a miracle to avoid the third. That’s how this ship gets dinged up and that’s why we don’t fix the dings. More will happen the following day anyway.

  LaDonna doesn’t hit anything. I can count on my left thumb the number of times that’s happened with a first-timer.

  No record of unauthorised practice, Connie sends, like that’s going to show us anything. I mean, unauthorised generally does mean off the books.

  Her instructor get any demerits for cheating on behalf of the students? I send.

  Not that I can find, she sends so fast that I know she was anticipating the question. But as I said above...

  I look away. I have to pay attention to LaDonna anyway. She’s got this gigantic ship hovering over the dock exit. The top of the dock closes. For the first time, she seems nervous. This isn’t part of the standard test.

  Usually no one stops once they start moving. I really don’t care. I suspect this girl cheated somehow, so I’m going to have to give this test a little thought.

  No part of the standard test seems to throw her. If she did cheat, then she knows everything I’m going to make her do. I tap a standard save instruction on my info screen without looking at it so that Connie makes our conversation part of the record.

  Then I toss out the standard test. I can do that when I suspect the subject has taken the standard test too many times, or when I have reason to believe the standard test won’t provide the right information.

  This, my friends, is why the system isn’t automated. There’s no beating the system when the system is subject to human whim.

  “We’re going to Mars,” I say.

  LaDonna glances at me, and unless I’m imagining things, that perfume smell has gott
en really strong. She’s sweating. Soon I’ll actually smell the sweat, not the overlying protection some chemical has given her.

  Good. I want her to sweat.

  “This is a cargo test, not a speed test,” she says.

  Suspicion confirmed. The racers go to Mars, even though they never arrive there. Too far to travel for the duration of a test. But racers can really cut loose on these routes.

  The cargo ships all go to the Moon, or at least head toward the Moon. They usually don’t get to the Moon either, because none of us have the patience for the ten-hour trip.

  “We can stop the test right now, if you want,” I say.

  She opens her mouth, closes it, and then shakes her head. She glances at the controls for the first time, and finally she looks like a beginner. She’s not sure what to do.

  I frown. She should know how to move to a different route with less thought than she put into the release from her docking bay.

  If, of course, she’s not cheating.

  “Problem?” I ask.

  “N-No,” she says, but she still hesitates.

  “We can go back.” I try to keep the hope out of my voice.

  “N-No,” she says. “I just – you don’t want me to go fast, do you?”

  “I want you to take this test the way you planned to take this test,” I say.

  “Do you have family, Mr. Devlin?” she asks. I had forgotten about her nervous conversation tic. She had stopped when we got to the ship.

  “Are you unable to take us to Mars, LaDonna?” I ask, using her name to bring her out of the nervous funk, just like I’m supposed to do.

  “N-No,” she says.

  “Well, then,” I say. “Time’s wasting.”

  She nods and bursts into tears. I sigh to hide a smile, and then click on the shadow controls.

  “I think you’ll have to finish the test another time,” I say as I bring us back to dock.

  “Nooo.” She actually wails. I hate it when they wail.

  “Sorry, LaDonna,” I say. “Those are the rules.”

  She bows her head. “One more chance?”

  They all ask that. As if I’d risk my job for them. As if I really want someone who freezes when something out of the ordinary happens to pilot ships in the tight traffic routes that spider out of Earth’s orbit.

  “Sorry,” I say. “You can try again in thirty days.”

  It only takes a few seconds to get back into the confines of the dock. She has to reverse the actions she took just a moment ago, but I don’t let her. I take control of the ship.

  “Thirty days.” She chokes out the words. “I don’t know if I can make it for thirty days.”

  I hit the docking controls, and the ship slides into place as if it’s never left.

  “Sorry,” I say, not sorry at all. “But I don’t make the rules.”

  I used to say, See you then, but I no longer believe I can make it another thirty days. Sometimes I doubt I can make it another hour. Today, though, I can make it.

  One more test and I’m done. For a whole twelve hours. (And fifteen minutes.)

  I GO BACK in and immediately glance at the waiting area. Only the sleeping woman remains, head tilted back, mouth open, small snores emerging at regular intervals.

  Real pilots can sleep anywhere. I’m impressed, even though I don’t want to be.

  I’m also impressed that Connie has taken pity on me and hasn’t added four more candidates to my pile. She could have, given the four she dismissed this morning.

  I don’t thank her, though. Instead, I pick up the last candidate’s info screen and actually peruse it. I should do that with every candidate, but I don’t, and then I pay for it, like I did with LaDingdong.

  This woman’s name is Iva, and she’s here for recertification. What a surprise. She’s flown cargo for decades, preceded by some classified military stuff. She went private for five years, and then a spectacular personal implosion – involving name-calling, food-throwing, and a refusal to take her client wherever he wanted to go. (The report states [probably because the report writer can’t resist] that she would take her client anywhere he wanted provided it was hell. Because he belonged in hell, and nowhere else, and she wasn’t about to inflict him on the good people of the universe.) That made me smile. It also made me like her.

  I didn’t want to like her.

  Such behaviour would have gotten her disqualified from any public and/or corporate job, but she worked for herself. She did lose her license for a while – that food-throwing thing led to a near-accident with a really expensive ship – and that lost license led her here.

  She had to retest for everything and of course, she was passing with stellar grades. An easy test for the end of the day.

  “Iva,” I say, and she sits up, the kind of awake soldiers have when aroused on the battlefield – hair mussed, eyes sleep-covered but alert, body ready for anything. “You still want this test?”

  “No,” she says. Her voice is deep and sarcastic. “Who wants these tests? I’m told I need it.”

  Oh, God, I like her. I don’t want to like her. I want her to be as impersonal a candidate as Buff Guy or LaDingdong. I want to be able to flunk her for picking her nose at the wrong moment, for farting indiscriminately and pissing me off, or for putting her hand on my knee and trying to flirt with me. I want to feel nothing for her, like I feel nothing for all the others, not even a sense of duty.

  “If you don’t want to take the test, that’s fine with me,” I say in my most dispassionate voice.

  “That’s not what I meant – ah, hell.” She shakes her head, runs her hand through her badly cut hair, and stands up. “Yes, sir, I am ready for the test, sir.”

  “All right then,” I say. “Let’s go.”

  SHE’S GOING FOR a cargo license too, and technically I should take her to the same ship I used for LaDingdong. But that ship’s old, and Iva’s experienced, and chances are that she actually flew that type of ship before.

  So I take her to our newest baby, a repossess with every bell, whistle, and gadget known to man. There’s not one, not two, not three, but four shadow controls on this thing, and it took me nearly a week to figure out how each part of the ship worked.

  It’s gold and sleek and moves like an eel in water. If larceny actually lived in my soul, I’d steal this son of a bitch and use it to get me out of here.

  Only if I do that, I’d have to leave my very comfortable bed behind, and I’d be on the run for the rest of my life, neither of which really appeal to me.

  We stop in front of the dock and Iva tilts her head back, looking up at my beautiful baby.

  “You’re shitting me, right? Do you know how much this thing is worth?”

  It unnerves me that she does. Maybe I should’ve taken her to the older vessel.

  “You want the test or not?” I ask.

  “Stop asking me if I want it,” she snaps, then sighs. “I’m sorry.”

  I want to tell her never mind, that attitude isn’t an issue, but it is. That’s one mark against her because no one likes working with a mouthy pilot, particularly one who went off the deep end and lost her previous job due to some creative insubordination. Except me, of course.

  “Yes,” she says somewhat meekly into my silence. “I want the test.”

  Then she walks around the ship like she’s done it all her life, which, I suppose, she has. Hands clasped behind her, inspecting not the dings (there are a few) or the small scrapes, but the actual equipment, from the life pod releases to the outside engine access to the docking clamps.

  A true professional.

  When she reaches me, I sweep a hand toward the ship, indicating that she should board ahead of me. She nods, and does. It takes her the required minute or so to figure out the entry mechanism for this thing, and then she strides inside like it’s her ship.

  If, of course, she meant to go to the sleeping quarters instead of the cockpit. Her cheeks are just a little red as she turns around and heads in the co
rrect direction.

  I follow closely, watching her absorb the ship. She’s never been inside it, nor has she seen a ship like this, but she’s acting like it’s not new to her. Her head moves slightly as she takes in the panelling, the extra monitors on the walls, the closed doors.

  Then she turns left into the cockpit as if she’s done it a million times before.

  By the time I get in there, she’s in the pilot’s seat, strapped in, and examining the controls, hands on her lap, just like she’s supposed to.

  I expected her to be hands-on already. I’m a little surprised she hasn’t touched anything.

  Either she’s taken some refresher courses or she flunked a previous test way back for moving too quickly. I’ll vote on the previous test. Pilots like her don’t take refresher courses.

  I sit in the co-pilot’s chair, noting as I do every time, how very soft and plush it is. Would that I could always run tests out of this ship. I almost – almost – shut off all four shadow controls, but I don’t. I don’t trust anyone that much.

  “I’m going to release the controls to you,” I say, of course, not mentioning the shadow controls.

  She nods and listens as I speak to the folks on the Traffic Desk. Then I tell her to take the ship gently out of here.

  I’m not sure which route to take – the fast ones to Mars or the standard cargo test routes to the Moon. It’s a shame to make this beautiful ship do something standard, but she hasn’t signed up for a racer license. She signed up for cargo, and a renewal at that.

  “Here’s your route,” I say and punch Route Three on the control panel, just like a co-pilot/navigator would.

  She nods, eases this ship out of the docking area with an ease I haven’t experienced in years. Not even this morning’s other retest, that male pilot I complimented so highly, had such a nice touch.

  The ship unclamps and floats out as if no one controls it at all. Only real pilots know how hard that is to do.

  We have an actual cockpit window on this ship, and she raises the metal curtain. Suddenly the cockpit fills with ship butts, running lights, glare, and three-dimensional nightmares. The Moon looms in the distance as if it were really our destination.