Orbital Burn

by K. A. Bedford

  Lou leaned back in her couch, tired again. She folded the restraints back over herself and Dog, and settled back for the long ride up to geosynch.

  She had a display panel on the wall in front of her, showing a view from outside, fed in from an external monitor. The Bloody Bastard was an ugly black hunk of rock; only a thin curved blade of sunlight glanced off its limb, a sword of execution. Kestrel, still a great arc of planetary surface in the foreground, was the bigger world. Lou had heard that in the endless discussion shows she’d seen on the feed. But it wasn’t about size. It was about kinetic energy and mass multiplied by the square of velocity.

  It was as if God was about to punch Lou’s world in the face.

  Chapter 14

  At geosynch, tired from the trip, legs still shaky from the long stretch of coasting in microgravity between acceleration and braking, Lou leashed Dog and pulled her way along the guide cable into the Transit Lounge. The place was empty except for two Customs officers at the Planetary Customs station set up next to the sole remaining gate. Beyond that gate, she knew a private Otaru orbital transfer shuttle awaited them.

  They were the only travelers in this part of the station. Lou remembered when she first came here, how the place had been jammed with tourists and people on business, and all the docking facilities had ships coming and going every fifteen minutes ‘round the clock. The sheer roominess she now felt, as she looked around the Transit Lounge, was starting to edge into agoraphobia. She had no idea that it would look so big without the bustling crowds. One of the Planetary Customs officers — they were disposables, she noticed without much surprise — told Lou, “You only just got here in time, Ms. Meagher. Two more hours and this whole station unplugs and bugs the hell outta here.”

  Lou stared, trying to think about this station leaving the Stalk. It had always been here, a bright fixed star in the night sky. She knew the station had once been the often-upgraded colony ship Kestrel, part of one of the first privately funded self-contained colonization projects. It had brought the first wave of settlers to this world eighty years ago. Now that the imminent departure of the station was at hand, it helped bring home, to her, the urgency of things in a way even seeing the image of the Bastard had not. She asked, “Where are you headed?”

  While the first Customs officer processed her belongings and scanned Dog for parasites — commenting that he felt almost foolish going to this trouble at this late hour — the second, a female, said, “We used to be a colony ship, so we’re going to go and start another colony. Ship’s got hypertube grapples and we make a pretty good piece of lightspeed going flat out, so we could be out of this system about an hour before impact.”

  Lou took Dog’s leash back and picked up her valise. She smiled and wished them luck, though felt silly doing so. They’re disposables, she told herself. If they get blown to bits, they can be replaced. Yet as she walked away, heading for the ramp and the door leading into the orbital transfer vehicle, Lou felt … unsettled. She turned and looked back at the Customs officers. They were dismantling their workstation and moving to stow the components in a wall locker. They seemed comfortable with each other. Was that a programmed behavior to put humans at ease, or was it spontaneous? Were they really worried about getting caught here and killed when the Bastard hit, or were they just programmed to behave as if worried? Lou frowned a moment, then pulled herself by the guideline up the ramp and through the door into the cool fresh air of the transfer vehicle. Dog, tumbling helplessly by her side, muttered about microgravity and nausea as he tried to stabilize his motion.

  Built for longer trips than the Stalk shuttle, this vehicle was plush, more like a yacht than a ferry. Among other things, this shuttle had a pilot who stood in magboots in the passenger cabin and greeted Lou and Dog.

  “So pleased you could join us. I’m the pilot, Gia Reynolds. Please let me know, during the trip out to the Orbital, if there’s anything you need.” Like the Otaru guy she’d met, Gia Reynolds stood like a dancer, tall, straight and seemingly coiled for action. The only difference, as far as Lou could tell, was that, unlike the Otaru guy, she could properly see Captain Reynolds. An employee of Otaru rather than a part of Otaru? she wondered.

  Lou liked her. A real human person at last. A disappearing breed, it sometimes seemed. She had hair, too: a ginger buzzcut, much like Lou’s. The pilot’s uniform was a stark white jumpsuit with black trim. Somehow the presence of an actual person in the pilot mesh helped Lou feel more secure about the safety of the coming flight. She said, “Thank you. Nice ship. When do we leave?”

  Reynolds smiled in a soothing manner. “As soon as you sing out that you and your dog are strapped in.”

  “Great. Listen, before you go, how long will it take us…?”

  The pilot said, “To reach the Orbital? Normally it would take a week or so, but with the present situation, we have to clear the impact zone in a big hurry. Also, the Orbital itself will be maneuvering while we’re in transit—”

  Lou stared, surprised. “The Orbital? I thought it was anchored at the LaGrange point.”

  Reynolds smiled, and it looked natural, not a reptilian PR thing. “That does present a few tricky problems. They’ve had engineers rigging the structure for travel since shortly after the Object’s discovery. The current protocol calls for preparing the structure for hypertube transit, which is…” Her voice trailed off; she rolled her eyes.

  Lou nodded, feeling boggled. “A bit of a big job. Something so huge, making waveshift intact…” It was hard to think about. Hypertube entry and exit points came in a variety of sizes, but the largest ones, also among the rarest ever found, were approximately half a kilometer in diameter.

  “The engineers say the literature’s unclear on whether something this big can enter a tube, but they reckon they want to have a go anyway. Find a more populated system for the residents and more biz opportunities.”

  “Good thing,” Lou said, still agog, “it’s not one of those whacking great Yggdrasil-class habitats. Now that’d be a hell of a job.”

  The captain nodded, smiling. “Yup.”

  “God, I had no idea this kind of thing was going on.” Lou ran her free hand through her hair, trying to think about all this. Huge events were unfolding around her.

  Dog made an anxious noise, flailing at the air. Lou smiled at him. She asked Reynolds, “What about the debris from the collision?”

  Reynolds seemed prepared for Lou’s questions. “The principal danger is from ejected matter arcing away from the impact at extreme velocities. The Orbital hull and super-structures are designed to withstand sizeable impacts, so they’re not expecting serious problems with that.”

  “Uh-huh…” Lou commented. “Well, thank you for that. Drive carefully!” She managed a small laugh. Reynolds smiled back, looking every inch the seasoned pilot. Lou pursed her lips, still not completely relaxed about what she’d just heard, and pushed off for the nearest acceleration couch.

  One thing’s for sure, she thought, I’ll be damn grateful for some gravity. Dog wasn’t the only one feeling queasy.

  Sixty-four minutes into the flight, with Lou and Dog pressed hard into the couch, Dog started spasming. Alarmed, Lou asked, “What’s the matter? Dog?”

  Dog kept writhing. After a few agonizing moments, he fell unconscious. Lou remembered only too well the night in her penthouse when Dog had an attack like this.

  Trying to control her panic, the sucking feeling in her gut, and her shaking hands, Lou struggled against the three-g acceleration to help him. Yelling Dog’s name wasn’t helping. Trying to wake him up was equally useless. He was still breathing, but his breaths were fast and shallow. His heartrate felt bloody fast, too; not that she knew anything about dog cardiology.

  She yelled for the pilot. Reynolds’ head and face appeared in a crisp hologram floating over the conversation table in front of the couch. Lou could see t
he pilot was, like herself, squashed into her own couch, skin pulled tight against her bones. Lou saw that the pilot wore no helmet or other equipment, like she had expected. She assumed Reynolds had a skull full of photonic enhancements and neuroid restructurings. People were having all kinds of things done to their bodies in the name of their careers. And she knew that some scientists had plans to rewrite the human genome to include wetware iterations of equipment, so babies could be customized in utero.

  Reynolds asked, voice tight, “Ms. Meagher? Something wrong?”

  She felt stupid, embarrassed. “It’s, well, it’s my dog. He’s unconscious, or something. I…” She was fidgeting, and hated feeling so helpless.

  Reynolds squinted at something. “I’ve got your dog’s telemetry feed here. I’ll forward it to our people at the Orbital.”

  “It looks, kinda anyway, like an epileptic seizure.”

  The pilot was staring out of capture range, but Lou saw Reynolds quirk an eyebrow at the mention of this antique condition. She turned to look into the imager. “Prelim analysis agrees. There might be an unexpected problem with the upgrade your dog received while in our care.”

  “Oh God…” she whispered.

  Reynolds scowled. “Make sure he doesn’t choke on his tongue. The guys on the Orbital are doing deep-tissue studies now…”

  Lou fought renewed feelings of panic, about the idea of veterinarians out at the Orbital remotely monitoring Dog’s neurological systems. There was something creepy about it.

  Reynolds said, “Our docs say your dog’s brain is phenomenally active at the moment. There’s a huge brainstorm passing through, centered around his limbic system. So far it looks like his new equipment is taking the extra load okay. They’re sending patches to coordinate containment of the stress … should take effect … now.”

  Dog’s body, moments before quivering in tight spasm, relaxed. He now felt like a beagle-shaped bag of hot water pressed against her side. She noticed his feet still twitched and his eyes darted back and forth under his eyelids. Whatever had happened, it was an improvement. Lou said, her voice breaking she felt so relieved, “He seems more relaxed now. What did they do?”

  “Spread the load around more. Used the datafeed line to sink some of it, I think. They’re just now trying to interpret some of the dream-imagery they picked up, but they’re having trouble finding an interpreter for canine thinking paradigms.”

  Lou looked at Dog’s small head. It was hard to think about what was going on. She said, despite her qualms, “I think he’ll be okay for the time being.” She smiled so hard her cheeks hurt.

  “That’s great,” the pilot said, forcing a grin that, under the acceleration, looked distorted.

  Lou hugged Dog close.

  “Louise — you need to prepare.”

  Lou jumped, startled; she had been resting, eyes shut, listening to a little music. Dog was still out, but seemed like he was sleeping. He wasn’t twitching so much.

  Looking around, she saw the crazy woman in the blue dress pressed into the seat next to her, looking extremely uncomfortable. Unlike Lou, she was not strapped in, but Lou could see that the three-g acceleration was squeezing the woman into her seat, and that she wasn’t used to it. The woman clutched her hat with tense hands. Lou also saw that the woman’s head was as bald as she remembered, which made her think that maybe the woman was some weird kind of disposable, only that didn’t make sense, either. She had an antique-looking gold watch on her left wrist. Lou knew about those from old vids. There was also a simple gold wedding band on her left ring finger. She had moist, sad green eyes, Lou saw, taking all this in.

  For a long moment Lou was speechless. She stared at the woman. The woman smelled of some kind of scented soap. The skin on her arms was mottled and dry.

  The woman said, looking distressed, “Oh, I’ve caught you at a bad time. Sorry. I keep doing this to you. But this time I really must prepare you. Louise?” The woman strained against the g to reach out with one of her long, fine hands and touched Lou’s forearm.

  Lou squeezed her eyes shut, held for a moment, then opened them again. The woman was still there, looking confused and anxious, even more so than the time Lou had seen her on Kestrel.

  Lou managed to say, “Who the hell are you?” There was something about the woman, as strange as she seemed, that suggested great power at work. Previously, she’d thought that the Otaru representative had seemed to reek of enormous power, but this woman was something beyond even that. For a moment, Lou wondered if there could be someone, or something else, involved in this business.

  The woman glanced at her watch, frowned, and tapped the crystal face. “They should have used the other one.”

  Lou yelled for the pilot, wondering what the woman meant by that last remark, but knowing better by now than to ask her to explain. Gia Reynolds’ holo-image appeared over the table again, and she saw the woman in the blue dress. “Ma’am? May I ask you who you are and what you are doing stowed away on this vessel?”

  Lou interrupted, “She’s not a stowaway, Captain. She just … she just appeared here. She’s been bugging me for days.” The woman was busy winding a tiny knob on the side of her watch, bringing the watch to her ear, listening, frowning and muttering something about cheap equipment. Lou had never seen anything like it.

  Reynolds scowled. “My instruments register three humans and a canine aboard this ship. Total mass has increased by forty-eight kilos. Ms. Meagher, would you mind explaining this?”

  “If I could, believe me, I would. She won’t give me a straight answer, but keeps trying to warn me about things and generally drive me nuts.”

  The woman said, “I’m terribly sorry if I have upset you. I don’t mean to do that. I’m just trying to help you. It was important to help you get here. It’s just that there are things you mustn’t do at the Orb—” She stopped herself. “Sorry. I’m not good at this. The other chap, he…” She trailed off, having trouble talking under the acceleration.

  Lou and the pilot exchanged frustrated looks. Speaking slowly and loudly, “Is this about Kestrel? Is it the Bastard’s collision with Kestrel?”

  The woman first brightened and smiled, as if Lou had asked exactly the right question, but then she frowned, and touched a finger to her lip. “Yes, and no. The collision. It’s… No. But there’s the boy to consider, too.”

  Lou forced herself to take a couple of difficult breaths and said, “If I could move, I think I would punch your lights out, lady.”

  “I do hope it won’t come to that, Louise.”

  “Anyway,” Lou said, trying to maintain some kind of calm, “the kid’s dead. These two guys—”

  The woman brightened, and smiled. “Oh no!” she said, looking at Lou and then at Dog, sleeping next to her. “Oh no, he’s not dead. He’s…”

  She touched a hand to her mouth, looking anxious.

  “The kid’s still alive? How do you know?”

  “It’s hard to explain.” She looked distressed. “I do wish they’d sent the other chap.”

  “But the kid’s alive?” Lou was yelling now, or trying to. “But we’ve lost contact. We assumed—”

  Shocked, she tried to control her breathing. If the lady was telling the truth, then Lou was back in the game. It meant there was some hope. If only she could believe the word of … whatever this woman was.

  Still, the spark of hope was back. She looked at Dog, and stroked his head.

  The woman looked at her. “It’s so hard to think straight.”

  “Listen,” Lou said, feeling renewed and impatient, “I just want some straight answers. There were these two guys named Tourignon. Did they or didn’t they steal the kid? Were the Stalktown cops involved?”

  The woman fidgeted with her hands, pulled on her earlobe, scratched her nose and said, as if trying to remember a tricky phr
ase, “The police? No, not them. I just…” Her eyes began to tear up. She pulled an embroidered lace handkerchief from somewhere Lou did not see, and dabbed at her eyes. “I’m sorry. It’s just that it’s so important!”

  Lou barked at her, “Where’s the kid now? Who’s got him? Is it one of the brothers or what?”

  The woman wept. She managed to say, with enormous difficulty, “He’s … with … his … own kind.”

  “What? Is he on the Orbital? Is that it?”

  “I … think…” she said, mopping her eyes, looking ashamed.

  Lou felt embarrassed for the weird lady, and wondered what she should do or say, what would be appropriate when you didn’t even know what the hell you’re dealing with.

  To Reynolds, she said, “The Otaru guy I first met said this woman is a ‘known variable’, that she’s part of whatever the hell is going on here. Do you know anything about that?”

  Reynolds managed a shrug of her eyebrows. “You’ve got me. I just fly these cans. I’d appreciate it if you could find out how she got on my ship, though.”

  “Will do,” Lou said, and turned to—

  The woman was gone. She left a faint waft of scented soap in the air.

  Lou swore. “Might’ve bloody known.” She sat there and seethed for a while, then bellowed, “For God’s sake, send someone a bit helpful next time!”

  The captain looked at Lou, troubled. “Ship’s mass is back where it should be. I’ll need to have a word with Head Office about this.”

  Lou covered her face. She swore in sheer frustration.

  “Nobody can just come and go from a ship like that. It’s not possible,” the captain said, thinking it over.

  “I’ve heard rumors of recent advances in teleportation,” Lou said, rubbing her eyes. They felt gritty and sore. Seen too much, she thought, and stroked Dog’s smooth back. When he woke up, he’d be damn hungry, she realized. “And I can tell you we might have the kid back. Maybe. Sort of. Who the hell knows…?” She flashed a bitter smile at a puzzling universe.