Walking on the Sea of Clouds

by Gray Rinehart

  * * *

  Thursday, 26 April 2035

  Lunar Colonist Group 3, Training Day 81

  Barbara was numb for the first thirty hours after watching the launch vehicle explode.

  She realized how bad she had gotten when she had to look on her datapad to find out what day it was, besides training day 81. She tried and failed to remember what tasks she had performed the previous day; the notations on her schedule seemed written in an unfamiliar language. She hoped she hadn’t made any major errors while going through the motions of training.

  As soon as she thought it, she retreated from the implications and tried unsuccessfully to immerse herself in her next training task: tearing down, cleaning, and rebuilding pressure suits. She failed to occupy her mind enough, though, because she had already gone through the pressure suit rotation three times before: her hands remembered the pieces and procedure well enough that her brain was free to think about other things she’d rather not. Several times she found her hands shaking so hard she could barely fit couplings together; other times she worked so frantically that she couldn’t remember afterward if she’d put everything back in the right place. And when she allowed herself to articulate her thoughts, which she only dared in the privacy of her mind, the words might change but the meaning was always the same.

  I’m not going up in that thing.

  She chided herself; that made no sense. She knew the launch business better than most, and deep down was impressed by how well the system worked. The inertial navigation system detected the rocket tracking off course at +00:00:26 and tried to bring it back, but thirty seconds into the mission the condition was uncorrectable. The egress system took over, and the dropsule was a safe distance from the launch vehicle when the abort system activated. What ate at Barbara was that they hadn’t released exactly how the Fiester woman broke her arm and the power engineer, Chu Liquan, ended up drowned.

  Over the next several days there was too much speculation about whether the Fiester couple would continue in the program and who would replace the Chus, and not enough straight reporting about what happened and why and what they were doing to fix it. And in Barbara’s mind, despite all her efforts to shut the fear off and replace it with analysis, there was too much role-playing with her in Chu Liquan’s position. Worse, her mind extrapolated from the few facts she knew, especially when she slept. She dreamed of fire—which was silly, since the crew had been ejected before the vehicle blew up—and falling, which made sense except she seemed to fall without a parachute or anything in her dreams—and drowning, which only intensified the smothering sensation she still experienced knowing she was so far underground.

  She slept less. She started awake whenever she began to drift off, afraid to let herself slip down into dreaming. She closed herself off like an airlock, afraid to voice her fears with the AC trainers listening everywhere, afraid to join in any casual conversation lest it turn to the obvious topic that affected everyone, afraid most of all of how badly the fear was affecting her. She cut herself some slack at first, then berated herself when her attitude didn’t improve, then downloaded a copy of Frank Herbert’s “Litany Against Fear” onto her datapad and repeated it to herself almost hourly. “Fear is the mind-killer”—God, how right he was.

  She tried to act normally, and shifted her schedule a little to keep herself isolated at meals and working mostly alone, but Van eventually realized something was wrong. Even he couldn’t ignore the signs for days on end. He tried to talk to her several times, but she brushed him off and he let her be. By Sunday the 29th, she was starting to nod off during routine activities. She had just completed a solar flare drill when a chime from her datapad woke her from an unplanned nap. The message was brusque and chilled her: “Report to Central Control immediately.”

  Damn.

  Now they were going to call her out, expose the fear she was trying to control. She just needed a few more days to sort through things, and then their training would be over: she and Van would graduate and be promoted out of the Cave and back onto the surface of the world along with the seven other couples who still remained. But more than time she needed to get the launch failure investigation report and read exactly what happened. The high-level executive summary was out: all the systems worked as designed, and human error was implicated in the casualties. But Barbara wanted the technical details so she could evaluate her own risk and understand if it was acceptable. It would be; it had to be.

  Wanda Lorentz, a petite woman with a beautiful complexion that reminded Barbara of the Caribbean, was on duty in the tiny control center. “Hello, Barbara,” she said, shattering again the island mystique: her accent was as thoroughly British as her husband, Roy Chesterfield’s. They were part of training Group Four, newly arrived and settling in. “Roy and Van out gallivanting again?”

  Barbara forced her lips into a wry smile. Roy’s arrival had been a mixed blessing for Van at first; on the plus side, he had someone he could talk to who had really “been there” with him, but on the minus side, Roy’s good-natured ribbing about Van’s problems in the “done that” category were a sore point. Now they spent as much time as they could together, which was just fine by Barbara.

  “I suppose so,” Barbara said. “Whether they’re getting into trouble or staying out of it, I’m not sure.”

  “Oh, I’m sure,” Wanda said. “The former, almost certainly. But that’s not why you’re here.”

  Barbara held up her datapad. “No. I was summoned.”

  “Indeed you were, because I summoned you. You have a call.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Really? Oh, very well then. You can take it across the way there.” Wanda pointed to the cabin on the other side of the habitat. “It’s audio only, half-duplex, and don’t forget the time lag.”

  “I won’t. I know the drill by now.” She turned, and then remembered her manners. “Thanks, Wanda.”

  Barbara settled herself on the stool in the tiny terminal room. By the notation on the screen, the far end was standing by. She keyed the microphone, said, “Barbara Richards here, as requested, over,” and waited.

  “Well, you could act a little more enthusiastic, as much as this call is costing your husband. Quit moping around, Barmaid, and get your butt up here to keep me company, over.”

  Beverly Needham’s voice slowly seeped into Barbara’s consciousness, along with the realization that the time delay wasn’t a Consortium-induced artificiality. BD was calling from the colony.

  And Barbara was keeping her waiting extra long by not responding. But what to say?

  “Oh, BD, it’s good to hear your voice. Even though the sound quality sucks.” Nothing else came to mind, so after a second she added, “Over.”

  BD laughed, and her laughter was a tonic to Barbara’s spirit. “Get used to it, dear, it’s the way things go. But it’s worth it so far. I’ve never been so tired, and I’m getting sick of the stored food—we’re still weeks away from having more than a handful of fresh vegetables to eat—but this is nothing short of amazing. Except that my husband is livid with the AC right now. They’re not telling him who they’re going to select to replace the Chu couple, or how they’re going to make up the lost time. He heard they were going to delay the next launch, but he thinks they should go ahead and launch that group anyway. He says the rocket’s already been checked out and approved, there’s no reason to wait. Over.”

  Barbara fell into the conversation so easily she barely registered the radio protocol—though the time lag irritated her so that she wished she were talking to BD face to face.

  “Come on, BD, he’s done those investigations before. He knows how they run.”

  “Yeah, and he used to say the same thing when we were at Patrick, long before we met you.”

  “At least he’s consistent.”

  “No, at most he’s consistent.”

  It was an old joke, but Barbara enjoyed it because her friend offered it. So much so that she almost missed BD�
��s next words.

  “You’re not letting this get to you, are you?”

  Lying would be no use. If Van had arranged for this call, it was because he was worried and thought BD could help pull her out of her funk. And he was concerned enough to pay for the call and not to worry about anything the AC would overhear. Barbara processed that for a moment and realized it meant that Van was more worried about her state of mind than about the possibility of getting scrubbed from the program.

  “I’m trying not to,” she told BD. “I guess I’m not handling it too well. I think I’ll be okay once I can see the full report—and maybe after the next launch goes well.”

  “There you go,” BD said. “Shoot, you could probably write the report.”

  “No, not me. I’m just a cowgirl, you know that.”

  BD snorted; the sound was much more grotesque with the added distortion of distance and amplification. “Yeah, you keep telling people that. They’re no more likely to believe you than I am.”

  “So, you still think I should come up there?”

  “You’d better. I’m getting tired of talking to my husband.”

  Barbara laughed a little. “Okay, then. We can have a girls’ night … in, I guess. It should make Van happy, since he won’t be paying for antenna time.”

  “Oh, I don’t think he minds. In the e-mail he sent Gary, he said he thought this would be cheaper than sending you to therapy.”

  “He did not.”

  “And more effective, too, I might add.”

  Barbara tried to work up a retort, but instead a genuine smile grew on her face. She might have choice words for her husband later, but for now she was content to chat with her long-distance friend. Cheaper than therapy, indeed.

  Chapter Twenty

  Trespassing the Sanctity

  Tuesday, 8 May 2035

  In the usual way that the media ignores routine events and examines aberrations with unabashed fervor, the failed Consortium launch brought more attention to Kourou than had been seen since the first manned launch from Guiana back in the early 2020s. Air traffic to Guiana surged from every direction: not only was every direct flight from Paris full, but even the little planes that hopped their way down through the Caribbean were packed with reporters, producers, camera and sound technicians.

  The AC kept Stormie, Frank, and the rest of their crew sequestered from the press, except for carefully-scripted events. Stormie preferred to think that was for the crew’s sanity more than saving face; it was hard enough dealing with anxious family members, let alone droves of reporters, when they were supposed to be completing their final preparations.

  Slipping the launch date only freed up time for crewmembers like Stormie who had no extended family. In contrast, Frank spent hours e-mailing, web-chatting, and talking with his parents and siblings, enough that he began losing his good humor as well as sleep. They tried to convince him to withdraw from the program, or ask for further delays, or to let them appeal to Congress or the United Nations for his protection, and probably other wacky ideas that he didn’t bother to share with her. Frank held firm.

  Rex and Maggie Stewart planned a memorial service for Chu Liquan; Frank persuaded Stormie to attend, if only to show solidarity in front of all the cameras. Their entire contingent sat in the first two rows of uncomfortable folding chairs in the high bay of the building where the dropsules were received and inspected. The building was packed with Consortium and Arianespace workers, with reporters lining the walls and even situated on elevated work platforms. A group of local workers played the music and Rex delivered a mercifully brief eulogy.

  Almost daily they sat for press conferences, where they were peppered with questions from reporters whose only knowledge of rockets seemed to be that the pointy end went up and fire came out the bottom. It surprised Stormie that so few of the reporters seemed to know any of the technical details, but it made their questions easier to answer. After all, she didn’t know many details about the launch equipment herself, and didn’t need to; all she had to do was ride the thing, not fly it or fix it. The AC put on a good show and a good face, explaining that they trusted Arianespace’s analysis and that the next vehicle was being thoroughly checked; no, they had not negotiated a new date for the next launch; no, they had not negotiated a new price for the next launch; yes, they had recovered the “black boxes” from the dropsule and were examining the recordings; no, they had no intention of requiring future rockets to carry more instrumentation; no, they would not discuss the details of any of the insurance settlements.

  The online reporters seemed more in tune with the events and technology than did the television talking heads; one of them, Jacqueline Argos, finagled a Consortium pass into the crew cafeteria and posed as a technician working on the accident investigation. Stormie learned more than she ever hoped to know about components that had been made self-healing to improve their reliability, and about analytics software—developed to mine huge data caches—that turned out to be useful in many other rapid-comparison applications, including monitoring vehicles in flight from the ground. Details of vehicle performance that used to only be available from instruments radioing signals to the ground now were reconstructed by software using feeds from transceivers that painted the ascending vehicle with radar and lidar and that took in multispectral imagery from UV to IR. The rocket still carried critical instrumentation for parameters that couldn’t be read remotely, but less instrumentation meant less expensive launch vehicles and more payload capacity.

  The security people weren’t fooled for long; they tracked down Ms. Argos and escorted her from the cafeteria while she was eating a piece of baklava. The next day Stormie learned that analysis of the sensor net recordings had projected with something over ninety-five percent confidence that the launch vehicle tracked off course because of a small burn-through on one of the outboard rocket engine nozzles. The day after that—a week after her and Frank’s original launch date—Arianespace announced they had checked the pedigree of their rocket and certified it safe for flight. The Consortium briefed the passengers on the investigation and gave them a few minutes to talk it over before they signed onto the mission roster.

  Stormie looked at Frank and raised her eyebrows at him. She didn’t need to talk anything over; she had no intention of backing away from the mission. They had invested too much time and money and pain to give up now. But he had been fending off his family and may have some reservations, and she was prepared to listen to them. She might not be happy about them, but she would listen and address them as best she could.

  Frank’s dark eyes were inscrutable in the briefing room light. He looked at her a long time without speaking, his face relaxed and betraying nothing. His silence, in the low cacophony of conversations all around them, worried her. He reached out and put his hand over hers.

  “Are you ready, my dear?” he asked, and squeezed her hand.

  A thin film of moisture formed along the bottom of Stormie’s eyes—not enough that she was in danger of shedding tears, but enough that she noticed the feeling and the warmth of gratitude and pride and love that came with it. She smiled, slowly, and asked, “Are you?”

  Frank stood and pulled her up with him, and led her to the table where Aliette Mittengard, the AC launch controller, had set the mission book. Frank picked up one of the pens, held it out to Stormie, and smiled his brilliant smile.

  “I’ll let you sign first,” Stormie said.

  “No,” Frank said. “You first.”

  Her hand shook a little as she took the pen, her nervousness a summation of the residue of months of planning and preparation, the memory of pain and fear, and the anticipation of realizing the biggest dream she’d ever had. She took a deep breath and signed her name in the book with a slight tremble she hoped didn’t show.

  Frank’s hand didn’t shake at all.

  * * *

  Friday, 11 May 2035

  Lunar Colonist Group 2-B Launch Day

  Stormie and Frank suite
d up and were strapped to acceleration cushions at the top of the massive Ariane launch vehicle. Stormie had accepted a shot of Jägermeister just before they boarded the van that took them to the launch tower—a tradition started by Gary Needham before he launched on the first setup mission—but once she had been lying in place in the rocket for an hour she alternated between regret based on slow waves of shallow nausea and euphoria from the liquor taking the edge off her nerves.

  The low chatter of controllers’ voices as they checked subsystems and verified power and fuel levels nearly lulled her to sleep—largely because most of the calls were in French and repeated in English; plus, she could do nothing about any of the systems they mentioned—but each time she was yanked back to consciousness by the creaks and groans of the spacecraft around her as pressures built up or released, or as thermal expansion put stress on a structural member, or simply as one of her fellow passengers shifted position. Part of the display inside her helmet scrolled through views fed from the vehicle’s cameras but she paid more attention to the chronometer. It silently counted down, and she found herself gripping the arms of her seat each time the clock scrolled through a multiple of ten or paused for a planned hold. Each time she forced herself to breathe and relax her grip, but when the final hold came and the controller polled the launch team she held on until her hands cramped.

  She wasn’t sure if she first felt or heard the vibration as the engines ignited and ramped up to full power, but soon her entire world was full of noise and every cell of her body started to shake—and then the pain began.

  No, please not now.

  At her preflight checkout, she had confirmed for Dr. Nguyen that she still had occasional twinges of pain. He had mentioned some instances of pre-arthritis in picophage patients, which he thought Frank might have, and also the possibility of a form of post-traumatic stress. What might trigger her nervous system to re-create the pain, he could not tell.