“What?”
She tightbeams the ship, opens comms. “Unidentified ship, this is the CNMA Prosperity. You are illegally docked and appear to be attempting a stratolaunch. Discontinue all activities immediately, identify yourselves, and turn your damn strobes on before you cause a collision.”
Ping says, “Cloud Nine just kicked me out. I’m coming up there.”
“No, stay at aerocon, buckle in. I don’t know what the hell they think they’re doing.” She switches back to tightbeam. “Okay, whoever you are, it looks like you’ve managed to hack both platforms, but you’re not getting any of those tanks.”
She wasn’t expecting a response, and the man’s voice startles her. British English. The ship translates it to Chinese. “That’s an interesting perspective, Prosperity.”
“Really? Because I’m betting you need that Crane to get the He3 to you, unless you’ve got a really, really long rope.”
Ping sits in his station’s chair, clicks in the harness. “What are you doing?”
Jia switches over to Ping’s channel. “The Crane’s independent of the platform software. I’ve got it up now and I’m putting it in remote flight mode. I just locked it out from platform requests.”
A few seconds go by before the voice comes back on. “Clever, but I think you’re going to release it.”
Alert: Rangefinding Laser banners across Jia’s screen.
They’re bluffing. Everyone has rangefinding lasers. She doesn’t recognize their ship’s configuration, but it looks like a heavy hauler. “Listen, don’t try and pull that intimidation crap—”
The orbital platform strobes with electric blue as a staccato line of burning streaks erupts from the other ship’s nose. At first all of the streaks are clustered together, barely moving, but they stretch out and accelerate towards the Prosperity.
Red characters read Collision Warning as the navcon attempts to tag each projectile.
“Ping, brace! They’re firing on us!”
She pushes the Prosperity’s engines to full. Her harness strap digs hard into her left ribcage and she fights to straighten her head. The vectors on her screen bend into parabolas, reaching for her ship. Seekers. Railgun-launched slugs with chemical rockets to track targets. Twenty seconds until impact.
“Hang on,” she says, tapping new commands. Gravity changes as the ship accelerates down, and every unsecured thing on the bridge floats up and pins itself to the ceiling. Jia’s long, black hair dangles straight up.
Ping grunts over comms.
The first volley of slugs streaks above the Prosperity. More scintillating flashes sail overhead and there is a loud bang like an auto crash ringing from the comms room. The Prosperity lurches. Jia steers hard and her hair tilts left in tangles, suspended as if an invisible hand pulls it to the side. The tightbeam icon flickers red and stabilizes yellow.
“No, no. You’re not getting it,” she says through clenched teeth. Through the remote connection she pushes the Crane’s engine to full. Cloud Nine’s safeties sense the danger, try to override her commands, but she’s locked out all communication. Finally the safeties relent and disengage the dock clamps, retracting the umbilical, then the Crane blasts off the pad. It’s a hundred-ton heavy lift vehicle carrying an empty tank and it accelerates off Cloud Nine’s runway like a jet fighter doing a vertical takeoff. In seconds it’s supersonic. Critical warnings bubble up as Jia alters the Crane’s trajectory. It lists to the right, top-heavy, tail raising up over its nose, and catastrophic alarms flicker throughout the telemetry. Aerodynamic forces tumble off pieces and the Crane blossoms into a spray of shrapnel and vapor in the murk of the green sky. Its connection turns black.
The man’s voice crackles back on comms with a mixture of surprise and anger. “I can’t believe you just did that.”
More streaks curl to the starboard and the Prosperity shudders as if a great fist punches its side.
Jia grunts. “Hang tight! We’re almost out of their firing arc.”
Ping says, “I’m hearing impacts in the battery room and—”
A percussion hits Jia like a slap as a blast rocks the ship. She is senseless a moment with her ears ringing. Everything to her left floats up and hits the ceiling, while everything on her right falls to the floor. Red icons pulse along her display.
Jia reaches for the comm panel to send the general distress signal. She doesn’t have time to process the next explosion. There is just a kick in the chest and a sharp crack on the head as all of the airborne objects in the bridge launch themselves at her.
4
Sunset
Jia’s face fills the video. Her eyes are heavy and red HUD graphics scroll across her faceplate. She settles against Aero One’s core. “Okay, the mission has changed, but we’re still on the job, so we’re doing a daily log. Today is mission day twelve and six hours ago the Prosperity broke apart in Uranus’s atmosphere. Ping deserves a promotion for getting us inside this aerostat, and, crazy as it sounds, we’ve deployed the balloon and we’re flying along in the stratosphere.” She smirks, bobs her head. “I know, right?”
She spends a minute recounting the foreign ship attack, then glances down, bites her lip. “Also, I sort of, uh, blew up the Crane. Uh, yeah, I know, but it was a lot less expensive than losing the tanks. So, things looked bad, but now we have a plan to get to Cloud Nine. We’re way out of the loop and we’re pushing the stat’s limits to make it work.” She pans the camera off her face to Ping. He’s curled on his side, sleeping. “I’m worried about Ping. He inhaled a lot of volatiles from the battery fire. He really needs to be in a hospital. I’m hoping Cloud Nine has some medical supplies in the emergency area. Jia out.”
In the next video, Jia looks fatigued but alert. “Mission day thirteen. We have not dropped from the sky like a stone, so this is promising. Our aero has descended into the troposphere and moved towards the equator. Winds are two-fifty kph, but it’s not windy, it’s a gradient, more like being swept away in quickening water. There’s a definite flow which snakes and turns, and it catches you off guard, like white water rafting. Being in the troposphere is like swimming underwater in a swamp. It’s this haze of hydrocarbons and I can’t see a thing. This reminds me of my IFR pilot training. I never thought I’d use it on a blimp.” She tilts the camera to Ping, who has a rainbow tangle of wires wrapped around his suit’s charging port. “Ping’s working on trying to pull power from the stat to charge our suit’s batteries.”
Ping waves both of his hands and bahs. “Drawing from the core reactor would be like plugging into a lightning bolt. Drawing from the instrumentation, like this,” he motions at the spaghetti mess, “is like peeing in the water to raise the ocean temperature.”
Next video. Ping’s face is pale, but his eyes are bright. He says, “Jia was hogging the slate, so it’s my turn. We are flying at three hundred and fifty kph. Covered eighteen thousand kilometers so far. Not too bad!” There is a rattle when he coughs. “Only sugar water to eat. I could really go for a steak. Hope they have something good at Cloud Nine.”
Jia’s back. “Mission day fifteen. We passed over a lightning storm last night. You could see the sub-structure of clouds beneath the haze layers with each flash, monstrous green and yellow cumulonimbus clouds stacked together.” She raises her eyebrows. “Ping’s running a low fever and has some fluid in is lungs.”
From offscreen Ping says, “I’m fine.” His voice is hoarse.
Jia continues. “We’ve given up on trying to charge the suits, which leads us to our new problem. We’ve been running the heaters to keep from freezing and the suits will be dead in twenty-six hours. At max speed we will arrive at Cloud Nine in thirty-six hours. So, ten hours with no heat at minus one sixty-eight and no CO2 scrubbing other than the filters. We’re working on it.”
Last video. Jia’s faceplate has a light fog. “Hey! We’re still alive. Mission day sixteen. We’ve traveled nearly thirty-eight thousand clicks. That’s almost enough to circumnavigate the Earth.”
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She breathes and her breath condenses. “So, we came up with cycling the heaters to stretch the power an extra sixteen hours. One hour on, two hours off. The good news is that we’ve been ascending for the past few hours, and we’re about to leave the troposphere and return to the stratosphere. It’s sunset here. Even though we’ve been through four sunsets, we haven’t seen one yet due to the murk, so I’m looking forward to it. After that, it’s only an hour to Cloud Nine, and none too soon, because Ping’s burning up. He really sounds pretty bad.”
Jia ends the video and lies down on the floor next to Ping. He spoons up against her, and she can feel the warmth of his suit’s heater filtering into her back. They’d realized earlier that if they offset their heating cycles, one of them could have his heater on when the other was off, sharing heat through body contact. This created one hour out of three where both suits were off. They still maintained body contact during that time to maximize heat retention. At first it was a bit awkward, but now having Ping’s arm curled around her is comforting, like she can just close her eyes and feel secure.
The slate chirps a notification and she reaches a finger to acknowledge it. Ping stirs behind her to look over her shoulder.
On the screen the sun is a distant spotlight amidst a burgundy sky banded by amethyst and moss. Cerulean clouds float like icebergs shrouded in rubies. Far above, the sky is a panorama of stars with the crescents of Ariel and Miranda visible. One of the stars blinks red.
“Oh,” Ping says, “I’m so happy to see that little red star.”
“Yeah, I can’t wait to get out of this capsule. Time to connect.”
Jia sends the approach request. One of Cloud Nine’s primary functions is air traffic controller, talking with all of the aerostats and ensuring the clockwork dance of their flight paths never intersects. When stats require periodic maintenance, Cloud Nine pauses approaching traffic while directing the repair stat to the maintenance platform. They’d avoided all communication up to this point out of concern that Cloud Nine would immediately slow their speed to design specifications and put them on a leisurely but catastrophic sixteen-day transit to the repair dock.
She can feel her aerostat changing direction. “Cloud Nine’s got us.”
They watch together, lying front to back, as the sun progresses below the cloud banks. The sky washes out to deep red. More stars appear, the same constellations as Earth’s, even though it feels like an alien world in another solar system.
Ahead of them, Cloud Nine grows from a star to a cluster of ruby lights blinking like radio towers on Earth. Against the dark red horizon the platform’s lights evoke ancient incandescent bulbs. Cloud Nine itself looks like the offspring of an aircraft carrier and an oil rig, with runways, docking areas for aeros to empty day tanks, and maintenance ports. The entire fantastic structure rests upon a honeycomb matrix of balloons.
As they fly over the dock there is the slightest sensation of descent. Outside they can hear—not through the slate speakers but through the actual walls—servos whine as the dock clamps engage. The floor feels solid beneath them for the first time.
When the aero’s maintenance panels bloom, open sky is everywhere. They’ve seen it on the slate, but with their own eyes it’s completely different. Such intense dark blue. Behind them the platform’s edge just rolls off into the infinity of the stratosphere.
Jia clips her carabiner to Ping’s suit and leads. She shimmies out along the panel to the dock clamp scaffolding and climbs down it like a ladder. Her teeth chatter as she runs across the deck. On the way to the control tower she glances at the empty launch platform where the Crane should sit.
It’s dark at first when they enter the control room, but lights flick on after they take their first step. The right corner houses an airlock door encircled in silver and red. Jia hurries, enters it with Ping and closes the door.
A palm-sized glossy red button rests at waist height on the wall. She hits it with the bottom of her fist. Pumps cycle the hydrogen atmosphere out of the room and it feels like the cold has been replaced with a thick blanket. She’s in vacuum. A low hiss escalates as nitrogen-oxygen fills the chamber. It’s warm. The red light over the door changes to green.
Inset along the wall to the left are two blue and silver suits, considerably bulkier than the red EV suits they currently wear.
“Oh, PLEX suits,” Jia says. “We so could have used these four days ago.” She unlatches her helmet, lifts it free of her head, then closes her eyes and takes a deep breath in through her nose. Ping does the same.
A soft smile. They’ve made it. She can’t believe they’ve actually made it. Ping seems to read her thoughts and nods in reply.
In the center of the room stands a three-meter wall screen. Jia walks up to it and waves her hand in an arc. The display illuminates rich blue with a radial menu following the sweep of her fingers. Emergency, Communications, Flight Control, Reactor Control, Production Management, Help. She taps the air in front of Emergency.
Jia’s employee identification bubbles up and the computer’s voice is male, pleasant. “Jia Xu, identity confirmed. Do you wish to declare an emergency?”
“You betcha.”
“Emergency protocols activated. Do you wish to send a distress signal on the priority channel?”
Ping walks beside her and places his hand on her left shoulder. She reaches up with her right hand and touches his, squeezing it. “Yes I do.”
5
Cloud Nine
Jia zips up her red flight suit. It’s a little long in the sleeves and legs, but it’s a close enough fit that she can just roll up the cuffs. It has the two-tone stitching that was popular last decade and feels a bit retro. Patches on it display the CNMA logo and Cloud Nine graphic. She wishes it had a patch for Prosperity.
Her hair’s wet and she towels it dry. She’s just taken a shower on Uranus, which was weirdly normal. When she examines herself in the mirror, the goose egg on the left side of her head is dark purple and her eye has a crescent of a bruise beneath it. Otherwise, she looks much better. She finishes up and exits the bathroom.
Ping sits in a matching flight suit at a glossy white dining room table. He’s pale and weak but looks much better after getting cleaned up. Steam rises from a bowl of broth nestled in his hands. It was tempting to open some of the solid rations, but the med program recommended a gradual return after days of sugar water. It’s in the process of fabbing up some antibiotics and an inhaled nano-cellular treatment. She’ll feel better once Ping’s received medicine.
Ping coughs. “You’re a new woman.”
“I feel human again. How are you doing?”
He shrugs at the spoonful of broth. “I’m imagining this is steak.”
“You should lie down. Bed’s all yours.”
“In a bit.”
She sits down. Ping has a bowl waiting for her. When she wraps her hands around it, it’s hot against her palms. It’s salty and has a mild beef flavor. They both sit there, eating in silence a moment, but Jia can read his thoughts. “You’ve wanted to ask for the past four days, so go ahead.”
Ping arches an eyebrow. “Don’t take this the wrong way, but why didn’t you just let the pirates have the tanks?”
A pit forms in her stomach at the question. “You know, growing up, my family didn’t have much. Where I lived there were people that would take everything you had just because they could. No one would ever stand up to them. Everyone just kept their heads down and hoped someone else was the victim. It just makes me so angry. I’d rather fight and lose than just lose.”
Jia watches Ping’s expression, and it’s a bit of a mystery for a moment. “Sometimes I wish I had that same fire,” he says.
Across the room the media screen chirps. Ping and Jia stiffen. At first she’s excited. One hour since they sent the distress signal, so that’s thirty light-minutes each way. Whoever’s responding has to be at least within the neighborhood. “Display message.”
The man on the scre
en looks military, buzzed gray hair, with a scar on his chin. He wears a gray flight jacket and the media screen provides subtitles as he speaks. “Jia, Ping. Call me Ward.”
British English. Jia recognizes his voice.
“Just the two of you based on that distress call, huh?” He claps. “Hats off, mates. I watched your ship burn up, yet here you are. I admit, I am baffled. It’s like a magic act.” He glances over at something off camera. “The good news is the orbital’s just swung around to your side of the planet and in about an hour it’ll be in launch position, so I’ll be down there soon and you can tell me all about it.” He points a finger. “You know, you really buggered everything up when you crashed the Crane, and I’ve been stuck here the past few days trying to sort it out. We’ve got a little puddle jumper up here, though. Sort of a Plan B. Can’t carry as much as the Crane, but we can do as many trips as it takes.”
Jia’s eyes widen. “Oh, no.”
Ward continues, “And we’ve been busy. After this call you’ll check your inventory and see I’ve already got half of it. But here’s the problem.” His hand curls into a fist and there’s a harsh edge to his voice. “Cloud Nine says it’s now shut down due to an emergency and it refuses to fill the launch tanks. That’s a billion of my He3 that you’ve locked down.” He leans forward so his face fills the camera. “And, you know, I’m on a bit of a schedule here so I really don’t want to waste my time playing hide-and-seek with you two. So, here’s the deal. I don’t care about you. I just want what’s mine. You’re going to release it, I’m going to come down there and get it, and I’ll let you go. Otherwise, I’m going to tear apart that platform until I find you, then take one of you apart piece by piece until the other cooperates.” He smiles. “See you in sixty minutes.”
The communication closes. Both of them just stare at the blank screen.
Jia snaps out of it, gestures up a radial menu and displays inventories. Sure enough, the He3 numbers are down fifty percent.
Hayden's World Shorts, Stories 1-3: 43 Seconds, Signal Loss, Aero One Page 10
