The Sol Majestic

by Ferrett Steinmetz

  “Sure.” Kenna is glad of any excuse to back away. Her empty skinsuit is disturbingly flesh-warm; concealed within are bewildering assortments of unguents and nostrums and crushed-up pills. But he ferrets out a small banana-scented packet.

  “Just a sprinkle,” she instructs him.

  “Montgomery,” Rakesh warns her. “We need to adjust your thrusters.”

  “This may be our last moment together, your schedule can wait. That’s right, Princey, dust a thin coat across her.” The weight in his arms shifts as the Bitch deliquesces, spreading across the cask’s bottom. “Good. She’s preparing to bud. Could you…?”

  The words make no sense, but without the goggles, all her desires are made manifest. He inches closer to that vastness beyond, holds the cask next to her face. She rubs her cheek against the knotted wood.

  Then she glares at him. Webbed and bound, eye contact is the best she can manage, but her gaze is hot as a ship’s thrusters. “You need to go?”

  It’s not a kind choice to offer. He’d much rather she had bullied him into it; he could blame her, then. He can imagine that window shattering with the first thump as she’s flung toward the stars, all of them sucked out of the room, their lungs bursting, his eyes crystallizing with frost …

  But he feels the liquid weight of the Bitch relaxing into jelly, realizing she would not survive without Montgomery. He imagines ferrying her away, then Montgomery dying in this explosive decompression, then him seated in The Sol Majestic, offering bits of bread to a Bitch turning black with death.

  It is a strange bond they share, but she has pledged never to abandon the Bitch—and if Montgomery dies then she and the Bitch should perish in the same violent vortex, and he realizes that yes, he’s staying.

  His head is a balloon when he nods, light and empty.

  Her expression softens into happiness when she looks at him: all the others get hard hurry up glances, but she shares her enthusiasm with Kenna. Yes, it’s a lunatic’s dream she’s enacting, one that sets Kenna’s bladder shivering with the need to void, but he realizes she vibrates with excitement, she’s eager to face the universe’s cold hollowness and welcome it into the scrap of pulsating meat that is her body.

  Though he does not understand, he accepts.

  Doesn’t he have to make a decision about The Sol Majestic?

  If distracting him is her intent, she has surely succeeded.

  They double-check the automated winches that will haul her back in, fuss over her positioning in the coffin. Kenna wonders how far the cords extend; if he cranes his neck, he can make out the edge of Savor Station’s solar panels, glinting in the sun’s light, the station endlessly pinwheeling. Watching the vast outline of Savor Station, he realizes what holds his feet to the floor is not gravity, but rather him being spun rapidly enough that he’s being centripedally shoved against the station’s walls, and if that wall gave way he’d drop into space, and the fine meals of this evening burble in his stomach at the thought of his body turning into a frozen pork chop orbiting the sun …

  “Shit,” Rakesh mutters. “Security’s on their way.”

  “How the fuck?”

  “Couple of idiots got caught by the maintenance bots. Captain Lizzie’s coming down to investigate.”

  That was the problem with Savor Station; even though it was gigantic by station standards, it was only a mile across. Kenna could flee to its furthest reaches and security would still be a twelve-minute jog away.

  Kenna remembered Lizzie’s stern kindness when she’d overseen Paulius’s surgery, and his guts squirm at the thought of her confronting him. This was her station, and Kenna knew from experience how hard it was eking out a living in the void: she’d made savvy deals, pinched and saved to purchase each of these waste processing plants and oxygen reprocessors and solar panels, worked to shield this outpost from politics and wars and economic fluctuations. She’d provided a home for Paulius and his madman’s orchard and this restaurant.

  Wasn’t that why his belly was stuffed full of thirteen chefs’ food, anyway? To save Savor Station?

  No wonder Mother and Father would have berated Kenna for coming here. This party isn’t saving the starving millions. He looks at the tents and the sprayed-over consoles and the twinkling lights. Now all he sees is selfish vandalism, and who’ll clean this up when they’re done?

  “Goddammit. Abort.” Montgomery’s fists clench inside the webbing, the only frustrated gesture she can make. “Scatter. By the time Captain Lizzie arrives, she’ll find a gift of a new porthole and no people.”

  “No.”

  Rakesh’s denial is a judge’s gavel, hammering a close to arguments. His grave certainty thumbs the pause button on Kenna’s concerns; there’s another side to this story, and judging from the way the partygoers nod their heads solemnly in agreement, Kenna’s misunderstood what’s driving this party.

  “We worked for months to pull this off, Montgomery. Scouting the territory between shifts. Scanning accurate plans. Planning how to mod the hatch safely. Christ, do you know how many people worked to inset this porthole in less than two hours?”

  Montgomery squeezes her eyes shut; it looks like she’s wincing, but she doesn’t want Rakesh to see into her. “She’s gonna catch you, suckbrain. She’s gonna jail you, maybe even space you if you don’t have the cash…”

  Rakesh grabs the netting on her chest, not quite yanking her out of the coffin, but tugging the webbing upward as if he hopes to haul her around to his way of thinking. “Let her. Everyone’s devoted their spare time to this, dropping by after work to tool up the proper parts, running kerbalsims to dial in your trajectories, researching ways to suborn the security cameras—a battalion’s effort poured into this once-in-a-lifetime hack. We got the cannon in place, Montgomery. You’re telling us we don’t even get to fire it?”

  Montgomery’s upper lip curls upward, snagged halfway between a smile and a sneer, squinting up at the concerned people leaning in to beg her approval. Her golden eyes dart around in confusion.

  “This is insane.” She seals her eyes behind her eyelids, but a dab of moisture wells up in the corner. “I’m a Sensate. I’m crazy enough to risk my life on this shit, but—but I was gonna go alone. I can’t let you get caught for this, I don’t even know why you’d—you’d want to…”

  Kenna understands.

  He understands everything.

  He leans over into the coffin, placing a gentle palm over Rakesh’s angry fist; Rakesh’s face flushes dark at the interruption, then melts into a quiet hope as he remembers this weird, cask-toting kid came here with Montgomery. He releases his grip, and Kenna instead leans down to slide Montgomery’s fingers between his.

  “You’re not entrapping them in your own needs.” He squeezes her hand, indicating this is kindness he is conveying. “They’re satisfying their own. Witness them, Montgomery. They—they’re sweating hours at menial jobs, too poor to afford a flight off-station, trapped in a tin can and wondering why their lives are spent on such small dreams. And you gave them such a ridiculous challenge—who in dark blazes would punch a hole in a working spaceship for merriment?”

  Montgomery’s muscles slacken in gratitude, her sinking back into the coffin. “All to shoot a bitch into space.”

  She shakes her head, or tries to; they’ve put her in a neck brace to minimize motion.

  Kenna exhales a ragged laugh. “It’s not wise. Yet nobody else has done it but them. That is, in fact, why they’re doing it.” He squeezes her hand again, then lets go. “You’re not being selfish.”

  Her tears overflow, trickling in rivulets across Montgomery’s sharp cheeks.

  Kenna is certain that if he were to check the insides of her brass goggles, he would find a salt-crusted rim: the residue of too many hidden tears.

  Then her hips heave upward, her laughter seizing her whole body, thrashing with amusement like a fish in a net. “All right. Let’s do it. Let’s shoot me into fucking space!”

  The twenty or so
remaining party members don’t laugh—they choke out one disbelieving sigh, resigning themselves to failure one more time, sallowed eyes glistening with an uncertain hope. But Rakesh thumps them in the chest with a datapad, driving them back:

  “Get the fuck out.” He swats them toward the door; they cover their chests protectively before retreating with the frail disappointment of people used to being given orders. “Check those mounted cameras above: I’ve just shot you their addresses. I can do this solo, and the rest of you can watch from your bunks.”

  Kenna thinks of the sad rows of hot-beds that merchants and travelers rent to sleep in at Savor Station—he’d seen merchants crammed in narrow tubes with a ratty pillow and a marker-scribbled vidscreen mounted four inches above their noses.

  Those hot-beds are smaller than the coffin Montgomery’s stuffed into.

  No wonder these people were so eager to do something amazing.

  “Go.”

  Kenna thinks Rakesh is exhorting them to leave—then realizes he’s the one who’s spoken. How in the stars has he become this cabal’s co-leader? Yet Rakesh has batted the crowds toward the exit with limited success. When Kenna speaks, the room turns to look at him, giving him silence to hear what he might say next—

  And he realizes that he is no longer Kenna. He is the Inevitable Prince. If he says they should go then he must know—he’s wise, he swayed Paulius into a once-in-a-lifetime meal with the power of his Philosophy. They offer him tentative smiles before they exit, hoping to impress, then bolt out at full speed.

  Rakesh slams the door shut. “Comfort her while I dial in the last-minute adjustments. If she pukes, the weight difference will throw off my calculations.”

  The duct-tape-covered porthole hisses as the air bleeds into the void, rattling in its frame. Kenna picks his way among the spare parts rolling across the floor. The room feels evacuated, and Kenna is robbed of protection; the crowds had made death seem less likely. A room full of people dying seemed like an impossible Grand Guignol tragedy.

  Three people, however, could die easily.

  That hatch will cause a pressure differential. If anything sucks that window out, Montgomery’s launch will do it.

  Montgomery’s frazzled hair is damp with fear-sweat. Her body is stiff from her fingers to her toes, seized with the paralytic surrender of a woman freezing as wasps crawl across her skin. Even as Kenna leans in, she keeps a wide-eyed gaze fixed on the hatch—the hatch that, in under a minute, will tilt down to eject her into space.

  “You look as terrified as I feel,” Kenna says.

  “Scared is good.” She hyperventilates, staying as still as possible. “You have to be a little scared all the time.”

  It doesn’t feel right, condemning a woman to death by decompression without understanding her. “Why do this?”

  “Have you figured out what meal you’ll choose?”

  The question skids off him like fingernails off plastic sheeting. It doesn’t even make sense. Then he recontextualizes her query, and somehow tomorrow’s problems fail to evoke terror when his blood could boil away into vacuum.

  She sees his perplexed recollection of stale fears, then grins. “Life-threatening risks pare your anxiety back to the essentials.”

  He tries to evoke his fears of faking his Philosophy, of rusting eggs, of condemning The Sol Majestic to a slow death; they shrink to a pinpoint when actual death rattles in a loose porthole inches from your face.

  If he can get through this, The Sol Majestic will be trivial.

  “You find out who you are at my kind of parties,” she murmurs, a slow grin spreading across her face. Kenna feels her Philosophy mingling with his—she’s shared something essential by bringing him here.

  Rakesh adjusts a thruster strapped to her left shoulder. “Okay. You have to breathe out, and keep your mouth open. Any air in your lungs, you risk fatal aneurysms. You ready?”

  Montgomery sucks in a wad of air to push back a bolus of vomit. “As I can be.”

  “It’s easy for her,” Rakesh mutters to Kenna. “She’ll be unconscious in fifteen seconds.”

  “Goodbye, Bitch!” Montgomery howls, tensing her muscles. “Kenna, you take good care of her until—”

  Someone bangs on the door, commanding them to stop this now.

  Rakesh slams a big red button.

  The hatch drops open.

  18

  There Is Only Now

  For the rest of his life, whenever Kenna feels terror, he remembers the hollow boom as Montgomery was shot into space.

  That boom was every noise Kenna feared: heavy metals slamming into each other at ship-crumpling speeds, the roar of wind pouring through the hatch, the thump of the porthole window flexing inward as the pressure differential hit.

  Kenna screamed, his ears popping, the tornado sucking his fluttering robe downward into the breach …

  Then he looked out the undulating porthole—which was, against all odds, holding—and saw Montgomery sailing toward the stars.

  Her smooth arc outward was like watching mathematical formulae and aesthetic theory fuck. The long bungee cords unspooled behind her like ripples in a pond, the sun spinning into view just in time to illuminate her bronze skin, this dot of humanity rocketing through the cold void like a middle finger thrust against the universe’s emptiness.

  Her expression was rhapsodic, her fears melting away into the galactic wonder spinning around her.

  Whenever Kenna fears the worst is going to come, he remembers Montgomery, how everything bad turned out okay, and holds fast to a faith that things will be all right.

  19

  Thirty Seconds Until Captain Lizzie

  The soles of Kenna’s feet vibrate from the automated winches on the other side of the hatch pulling Montgomery back in. He presses his hand against the porthole, his palm sending hoarfrost blossoms curling across its surface—but he feels a connection to Montgomery, now unconscious, as her body sails back under the shadow of the station’s great solar panels, air-jets hissing crystallized plumes as they slow her return.

  Then the meaty thump of Montgomery impacting the coffin as solidly as a baseball in a glove. Kenna rubs his ribs, imagining her bruises.

  “One minute, sixteen seconds.” Rakesh’s voice taut as a mooring cable; he jams the handlebar down so hard his muscle-strained laboratory coat rips.

  The trip took sixteen seconds longer than anticipated, and Montgomery could well have had an embolism in space—but Kenna’s skin tingles with a post-orgasmic bliss. When that coffin flips back inside, she will be all right.

  She flops back into oxygenated space, her cheeks bulging like swollen tires, her dark-peach skin now a mottled violet and puffing up through the space between the straps. Her bloated tongue is rimed with ice; it obstructs her airway, makes hideous sucking noises as Montgomery’s lungs whoop in deep breaths.

  He can smell space on her, a chill Freon odor, like old refrigerators.

  Rakesh hip-checks Kenna aside, palpates her bruising body. Her skin makes squishing noises. His explorations come to a stop; he peels a hand away from her to clap it over his mouth, making high keening noises at the back of his throat.

  Kenna grabs his arm. “Is she…”

  Rakesh seizes him, pulls him into an encompassing hug, thumping Kenna’s back in an exultant drum solo. “We did it! We did it!”

  Yet Montgomery looks like she’s gained twenty pounds in the void, her lumpy skin mottled, bruises veining open underneath the straps. “Is she…?”

  “Yes, yes.” Rakesh fumbles at the latches, knuckling aside Montgomery’s puffy flesh to set the cables free. “We anticipated this could happen. If there’s rapid decompression, sometimes—”

  “This isn’t unusual.”

  Kenna barely has time to recognize the voice before Captain Lizzie leans between them, pops the remaining latches with nimble fingers.

  His calm bliss-armor sublimates away, replaced with a numb floating dissociation.

  Captain Lizzi
e examines Montgomery’s naked body like a mechanic troubleshooting a blown engine. Though Captain Lizzie is practically naked herself. She’s wearing a white camisole with thin straps and mismatched red jogging shorts, tugged-on sneakers with no socks, a holster strapped across her shoulder.

  We must have roused her from bed, Kenna thinks. He imagines Captain Lizzie tumbling awake to a terrorist alert blaring across her datafeeds, sees the three officers standing with drawn Tasers pointed toward the floor, waiting for their captain’s command.

  Yet Captain Lizzie has no embarrassment about being half-naked in front of her crew. She stands before the hatch like she owns it. She does own it. If she wanted to walk naked through Savor Station’s food mall, then she would do it with the unashamed nature of someone walking into her shower.

  She owns the air here. If she ejected Kenna into the sun, not Paulius could countermand her, not Mother, not Father, not anyone.

  She finishes inspecting Montgomery, purses her lips in a frown.

  “Seen enough decompression injuries to know that some swell.” Her flat tone suggests joining in on this conversation could be fatal. “Passes in thirty-six hours, usually. Most don’t even get stretch marks.” She clucks her tongue. “She’s fine.”

  That curt she’s fine gives Kenna the feeling of sliding out from underneath a warship’s shadow.

  She clasps her hands behind her back, standing at attention, directing their gaze out the duct-taped window. “You boys take my station’s defense systems into your planning?”

  Rakesh opens his mouth, as if to ask Captain Lizzie for clarification, then recognition blooms. He makes a strangled noise.

  “I thought maybe that’s why those six new broadcast nexi opened up as you started these shenanigans; I thought, Well, these folks are surely asking me to turn off my automated meteoroid defenses. Or maybe they’re just very trusting that our systems are set to let fast-moving debris stay intact within station range.”