Edge of Infinity

by Jonathan Strahan

  I can see the routes as clearly as if they’re marked. They’re not, of course. They change as the station’s orbit around the Earth changes, but I’ve done this so long it’s like there’s a map of the trajectories in my head.

  There probably is, too. I can see which ships are a little off-course, which ones are travelling too fast for their route, which ones are not certified for the station itself.

  She doesn’t seem distracted by the ships at all. She waits until she’s the required distance from the station before engaging the engines. Her hands on the controls are firm and delicate at the same time. She’s clearly used to hands-on flying. I wonder if she ever uses the automated system.

  We ease forward, out of the first protected zone around the station. Speeds here are regulated just like everything else, from engine burn to communications chatter. The tiny robot deflector ships hover near the bays, ready to knock some ship aside if it gets too close to anything.

  Farther ahead, through the second and third protected zones, ships move faster, some of them actually speeding their way to Mars.

  But no one speeds here. Six ships surround us, all heading on different routes for different things. L&R learned long ago that we should have only one test course running per day, because any more and the stupid candidates might bump into each other (literally).

  Add in the private pilots (some of whom are real doofuses), the folks who should have Sectioned out long ago, and the pilots from countries with regulations less stringent than ours (and who aren’t allowed to use our space station), and the first protected zone is the Wild West – ships moving every which way on trajectories not assigned by any standardised route.

  I count at least three inexperienced or just plain inept pilots out of the six. One ship keeps turning on half of its running lights, then turning on the other half, never both at the same time. Another ship slides from one standard route entry to another as if the pilot can’t decide where he’s going, and a third seems to be on yet another attempt at docking with the station.

  Iva manages to avoid all of them with an ease that would lead any passenger to think there’s no trouble at all. She seems to be able to do complicated equations in her head, adjusting for this, adjusting for that, working the three-dimensional space in a way that most pilots never learn.

  Then she translates all of that math, all those spatial relations, into her fingers with a gentleness that I’m not even sure I can attempt.

  We head toward the Moon at a pace that feels unnaturally slow.

  I run Iva through the paces – a turn here, a pretend crisis there – and she does even better than I expect.

  Then we begin our return. I’m going to ignore her attitude mistake, and pass her with the highest possible grade.

  At least, that’s what I’m thinking until I realise we’re heading too fast into the high traffic around the station.

  “You’re coming in hot,” I say.

  She ignores me. Or maybe she didn’t hear me.

  “Iva,” I say with a sharp twist on her name, “you’re going too fast.”

  “You desk jockeys,” she says and that pisses me off. I am not a desk jockey. If I were, I wouldn’t be sitting here, feeling my heart rate increase.

  “Iva,” I say, keeping my tone level, “slow down.”

  “Yeah, yeah,” she says. “I can handle it.”

  She narrowly avoids the ship with the running lights problem.

  “You know that handling it isn’t an issue. You’re not allowed to come in too fast. It’s too dangerous.”

  “I have the skills,” she says.

  “Skills aren’t a problem.” I try not to raise my voice. I want to sound calm, even though I’m not calm. “There are rules.”

  “Of course there are rules,” she says.

  Warning: Your speed violates the safety protocols for the nearby space station.

  We triggered the station’s automated warning system. I glance at the controls. That means there have to be robot deflector ships nearby.

  “I hate rules,” Iva says.

  “They keep us safe,” I say as I try to contact the station. I can’t. She has taken control of communications.

  The robot deflector ships line up outside our ship. If I can see them, she can too.

  “One of those things hits us,” I say, “and you automatically fail.”

  “I won’t fail,” she says, deliberately ignoring me.

  “I’ll have to flunk you,” I say.

  “Of course you will,” she snaps. “All those stupid rules. You people and your stupid rules. This station and its stupid rules. The licensing board and its stupid rules.”

  She’s supposed to be slowing down. She’s supposed to be easing toward the station. Or to be accurate, easing toward the docking ring. But she’s heading directly toward the station. That’s why the robot ships are crowding us. They assume we’re an out-of-control ship. They’ll nudge us off the path to the station, and then everything’ll be fine.

  I don’t want to get hit. That happened on one of the first tests I ran, and it wasn’t pleasant. I orbited the Earth with that idiot driver for five rotations before the station would let us near it again.

  I touch my console – and get a shock so strong that I pull my hand away.

  She rigged it somehow. In those few seconds before I arrived, she strapped in, then rigged the console, and did it so beautifully I didn’t see it until now.

  I shake my hand, but say nothing. Then I brace myself and reach in again.

  No shock this time. But the first shadow control is off.

  “It’s stupid, really,” she says. “You people don’t value talent or experience. All you want is someone who can follow the damn rules. Have I told you I hate the damn rules?”

  I click over to the second shadow control. It’s off too.

  Warning: We will move you off your course if you do not comply with regulations.

  “Go for it, asshole,” she says to the automated system.

  And as if it heard her, one of the robot ships brushes against us. We will now drift off course for the station.

  Except that Iva eases the ship back on its collision trajectory. And now she slows down. Waaay down. She’s actually aiming at the station.

  I try the third shadow control. I can’t use it.

  Warning: We will take control of your ship if you persist on this course.

  Another robot ship brushes us. She corrects.

  I can’t do anything. My hands ache from the continual shocks she’s sending through the system. I pull them off the controls for just a second. I try to unlatch my safety strap and it won’t come off. I can’t even shove her away from the console.

  “If you hit the station,” I say, “we’ll all die.”

  “Wow,” she says. “Did you just figure that out? And here I thought you were smarter than that.”

  A signal flashes through the console. Technically, it should have shut the ship down, but she’s managed to lock out the station, too. Dammit. I was so dazzled by her skill that I didn’t even see her resetting the controls.

  She’s good. She’s better than good. She’s better than me.

  “Everyone on the station will die,” I say. “You’ll be a mass murderer.”

  “I’ll be dead,” she says. “Who will care?”

  “Then who will care how talented you are? They’re not going to say you were ignored or passed over or a great pilot. They’re going to call you crazy.”

  She glances at me sideways. Then she shrugs. She takes the ship into a perfect line with the station itself.

  I manage to activate the final shadow control. I’ve never used it before, but it works. I hit the automatic sensors through the shadow control – that’s the fastest way to regain control of a ship – and then I select the last navigation instruction sending us back to the Moon.

  The ship veers, scraping a robot ship. Iva tries to regain control. She will, too. She’s that good.

  W
e’re not heading toward the station any more. I have no idea where we’re going and I don’t care.

  I need to stop her.

  I slam one fist on my side of the console, disconnecting all of the safety protocols. Our straps slide off.

  She grabs the controls and I push myself sideways, grabbing her. I knock her into the wall, then grab her shoulders and slam her head against the console.

  The station warnings are coming in, plus warnings from other ships, and because I’ve shut off the safety protocols the ship is officially considered out of control. That means the robots ships are going to nudge us, and some fighter ships are supposed to blow us up (but they never do, or they would have saved the life of my predecessor way back when) and someone else has to warn the nearby ships about us, because my ship – our ship – this stupid out-of-control ship – is running silent.

  I can’t care about that yet. I have to care about her. She’s reaching for me and I slam her head against the console again. She’s dazed. There isn’t a lot of room to manoeuvre in this cockpit, but I have to get her out of it.

  I use her chin to pull her backwards. She grabs at the pilot’s chair, wraps her foot around the base, and holds on.

  I’m half down myself, but still on my feet. I stomp on her elbow, then kick her in the stomach, dislodging her grip just briefly. She clutches my knee, ruining my balance. I hold onto my chair, and shake her off.

  Then I grab her chin again and slam her head against the floor. The smacking sound sickens me. I slam again and again until I’m certain she’s unconscious.

  I have to drag her out of here. I have to lock off the cockpit and all of the controls. This ship doesn’t have a brig. It doesn’t have anything except passenger straps for emergencies, and different environmental controls for different parts of the ship.

  The passenger sections have no cockpit access. I drag her down the hall, into the passenger section. She’s heavy, and she’s starting to moan. At least I haven’t killed her. I pull her into one of the seats, and strap her down. As I leave, I shut off the gravity.

  If she manages to free herself – which I don’t think she can do – she’ll have to deal with zero-gravity. She probably had military zero-g training, but that training happened more than a decade ago, and zero-g skills aren’t intuitive.

  I had to work in zero-g for three years – that’s part of being a Level One Military Pilot – but most military pilots never do that. And I can tell just from her attitude issues that she never had the patience or the respect for authority to go that far.

  I scurry back to the cockpit, and sit in her seat. We’re half an hour into the Moon flight, directly on the centre of the route, but the messages I’m getting from other pilots are rude to say the least. Fighter ships still flank me.

  I don’t want to wear a strap at this point – I want the freedom of movement – so I turn the safety protocols on one by one. Then I let out a small sigh and send a message with my identification back to the station.

  I’m fine. Ship in my control again. Need security when we arrive.

  I get an automated response, which is just fine by me.

  Then I send a message to Connie: This last student went seriously bonko nutball. Nearly killed us all. We need more than station security to deal with her. Plus, check her medical data, see what we missed.

  By medical data, I mean the illegal stuff that we downloaded, just to see. I don’t expect to find anything, but in case we do, I want to prevent this from happening the next time.

  I let the ship head toward the Moon for a few more minutes. I need to collect myself. My heart is racing, and I have blood on my hands. Literally. And it’s on the console and on the chair and in the cockpit itself.

  I grin like a nutball myself. I haven’t felt this alive in years. Which is probably good, considering my future is filled with lawyers and police interviews and psychologists and more tests than I want to think about.

  Not that I mind. What this means is that I’m done, and I will still get my pay raises. I get to serve out my five years without Sectioning. I’ll probably end up teaching emergency procedures or how to tell one nutcase from another (I’ll lie) or maybe I’ll become a consultant on improving regulations so that no one like Iva can slip through again.

  Then I slide down in my chair. Who am I kidding? I’m not going to do any of that stuff. I’m not a consulting kinda guy, because it means I’ll have to leave the station.

  After the required post-incident time off, I’ll be right back here, fifteen minutes late every single day, steering ships and dealing with dingdongs like LaDonna.

  And I’ll be grateful for it.

  Because I don’t mind the regulations. I rather like them. They keep us safe.

  And I’m all about safety – especially my own.

  BRICKS, STICKS, STRAW

  Gwyneth Jones

  1

  THE MEDICI REMOTE Presence Team came into the lab, Sophie and Josh side by side, Laxmi tigerish and alert close behind; Cha, wandering in at the rear, dignified and dreamy as befitted the senior citizen. They took their places, logged on, and each was immediately faced with an unfamiliar legal document. The cool, windowless room, with its stunning, high-definition wall screens displaying vistas of the four outermost moons of Jupiter – the playground where the remote devices were gambolling and gathering data – remained silent, until the doors bounced open again, admitting Bob Irons, their none-too-beloved Project Line Manager, and a sleekly-suited woman they didn’t know.

  “You’re probably wondering what that thing on your screens is all about,” said Bob, sunnily. “Okay, as you know, we’re expecting a solar storm today –”

  “But why does that mean I have to sign a massive waiver document?” demanded Sophie. “Am I supposed to read all this? What’s the Agency think is going to happen?”

  “Look, don’t worry, don’t worry at all! A Coronal Mass Ejection is not going to leap across the system, climb into our wiring and fry your brains!”

  “I wasn’t worrying,” said Laxmi. “I’m not stupid. I just think e-signatures are so stupid and crap, so open to abuse. If you ever want something as archaic as a handwritten signature, then I want something as archaic as a piece of paper –”

  The sleek-suited stranger beamed all over her face, as if the purpose of her life had just been glorified, swept across the room and deposited a paper version of the document on Laxmi’s desk, duly docketed, and bristling with tabs to mark the places where signature or initialling was required –

  “This is Mavra, by the way,” said Bob, airily. “She’s from Legal, she knows her stuff, she’s here to answer any questions. Now the point is, that though your brains are not going to get fried, there’s a chance, even a likelihood, that some rover hardware brain-frying will occur today, a long, long way from here, and the software agents involved in running the guidance systems housed therein could be argued, in some unlikely dispute, as remaining, despite the standard inclusive term of employment creative rights waivers you’ve all signed, er, as remaining, inextricably, your, er, property.”

  “Like a cell line,” mused Laxmi, leafing pages, and looking to be the only Remote Presence who was going to make any attempt to review the Terms and Conditions.

  “And they might get, hypothetically, irreversibly destroyed this morning!” added Bob.

  Cha nodded to himself, sighed, and embarked on the e-signing.

  “And we could say it was the Agency’s fault,” Lax pursued her train of thought, “for not protecting them. And take you to court, separately or collectively, for –”

  “Nothing is going to get destroyed!” exclaimed Bob. “I mean literally nothing, because it’s not going to happen, but even if it were, even if it did, that would be nonsense!”

  “I’m messing with you,” said Lax, kindly, and looked for a pen.

  Their Mission was in grave peril, and there was nothing, not a single solitary thing, that the Combined Global Space Agency back on Earth could
do about it. The Medici itself, and the four Remote Presence devices, should be able to shut down safely, go into hibernation mode and survive. That’s what everybody hoped would happen. But the ominous predictions, unlike most solar-storm panics, had been growing strongly instead of fading away, and it would be far worse, away out there where there was no mitigation. The stars, so to speak, were aligned in the most depressing way possible.

  “That man is such a fool,” remarked Laxmi, when Bob and Marva had departed.

  Sophie nodded. Laxmi could be abrasive, but the four of them were always allies against the idiocies of management. Josh and Cha had already gone to work. The women followed, in their separate ways; with the familiar hesitation, the tingling thrill of uncertainty and excitement. A significant time lag being insurmountable, you never knew quite what you would find when you caught up with the other ‘you.’

  The loss of signal came at 11.31am, UTC/GMT +1. The Remote Presence team had been joined by that time by a silent crowd – about as many anxious Space Agency workers as could fit into the lab, in fact. They could afford to rubberneck, they didn’t have anything else to do. Everything that could be shut down, had been shut town. Planet Earth was escaping lightly, despite the way things had looked. The lights had not gone out all over Europe, or even all over Canada. For the Medici, it seemed death had been instantaneous. As had been expected.

  Josh pulled off his gloves and helmet. “Now my charms are all o’erthrown,” he said. “And what strength I have’s mine own. Which is most faint...”

  Laxmi shook her head. “It’s a shame and a pity. I hope they didn’t suffer.”

  2

  BRICKS WAS A memory palace.

  Sophie was an array, spread over a two square kilometre area on the outward hemisphere of Callisto. The array collected data, recording the stretching and squeezing of Jupiter’s hollow-hearted outermost moon, and tracing the interaction between gravity waves and seismology in the Jovian system; this gigantic, natural laboratory of cosmic forces.