by Glenn Damato
Paige and I are more interested in the crescent Earth. It’s in the downward direction but not directly under the TMI, so I can still see it from the window near my seat—a sliver of majesty floating in a black void. I can cover the whole world with two fingers. She squeezes my shoulder, pulls me to the opposite side of the control center, and points upward toward a pinkish star—Mars.
I have to state the obvious. “That’s a really small target.”
Shuko beckons us to the nav panel. Our velocity is fourteen kilometers per second and increasing. And there’s something new:
ESTIMATED ARRIVAL
PROTONILUS MENSAE PM1
09:22:00 PCT 3 GEMINI 54
Exact and to the minute!
The lure of rest overcomes all else. The sleeper is quieter than the control center, just the soft purr of air flowing from a ventilation duct blended with Alison’s snores. There’s a mesh hamper for the absorbency pants. I transfer the rosies to a clean flight suit and edge into the other bunk. My tiny body weight is just enough to hold me against the cushion. A gentle current of air sweeps my face.
Lights out.
I need to sleep, but my mouth fills with thin fluid.
Try to sleep.
But the fireballs come back, more and more fireballs. Thunder. The world is shaking to pieces.
Orange and black churning together. Hideous.
Death.
Wipe it out. Relax. All is well. The vibration from the thrusters is a guarantee. The system works.
David. Dr. Ordin. Zach. The people standing in the corridor looking at us as we rushed to the rocket. What happened to them? So much going on since then. Forget it, nothing I can do. Hide it for now.
The Lord is my shepherd.
Why did someone write those words inside the airlock? It hurts to think of it. I’ll wash or scrape it away as soon as possible.
Paco, the hospital, a piece of paper in his fingers.
The Lord is my shepherd.
Paco, dead.
Everyone, dead.
Bile gushes up my throat. I flick the light and fumble for the sickness bag. I left it in the old flight suit! I pop out of the bunk, grab the bag and retch into it. Nothing but gruel, and it burns my throat. I gag again and a bit more comes out.
How many explosions and fireballs today?
Should be just one, when Enterprise blew up.
I get back into the bunk and shiver. The fireballs come back the instant I close my eyes. Booster firing. A tremendous detonation directly below, seconds after launch . . .
Of course. Tons of methane and oxygen remained in the ship.
The whole ship exploded.
David never worried about Harmony capturing them.
I see it all again; six fireballs below us, one for each ship.
More puking. It hurts, and this time nothing comes up but bitter spit.
I slam my palm against the side of the bunk. Can’t hold it back any longer.
“Dead!”
I bash my fist into the side panel. “They’re dead. They’re all dead!”
Paco.
Zach the orderly.
Dr. Ordin.
David.
Kim.
Dr. Mike. Thumbs up. Now he’s dead.
I scream one last effort to keep the tears inside, but I lose the battle. I sputter and sob and I can’t help yelling, “Dead, dead, dead, dead!” My fist punches the bunk with each word.
Nathan, Isabel, Dottie.
Sorrows old and new explode from me, unrestrained.
Someone’s here, and close to me—two people. Shuko, with something in his hand. Impossible to see through the tears.
Mikki takes my shoulders. “I’ve got you! You’re okay. Grab on to me.”
I wrap my arms around her and cry. There’s only pure release, and the soft vibration of the thrusters. I tell Mikki, “They’re all dead. Every one of them. And they knew they would die.”
Everything’s out of me. I barely feel the pinch from Shuko’s needle.
EIGHTEEN
An artificial voice sings, “Thruster shutdown in three, two, one.”
My forehead smacks against the cool bunk wall. It punches me back into full awareness without hurting much. I float in the middle of the sleeper, feet dangling in midair. The vibration is gone; the thrusters have stopped. Ten hours already?
The hum from the life support appliances in the equipment bay leaks into the control center. Somebody nested the seats together so there’s more room. Paige sits at the fold-out table, her butt held down with a lap belt. She floats food in the air and chomps it into her mouth like a goldfish.
Alison tosses me a protein bar. “Feeling better?”
I nod despite a minor headache. The hatch to the hygiene compartment is closed and the OCCUPIED light glows orange. I might need another diaper.
The Earth and moon are two slender crescents, arcs of delicate color too perfect to exist. We’ve flown 764,300-something kilometers, the last two digits changing too fast to read. The hundred-kilometer digit increases to four and goes up again every three seconds. Our velocity is just over thirty kilometers per second, three times faster than Apollo. What do you think of that, Buzz Aldrin?
A sleeper door slides open and Shuko blinks against the light. He tucks his legs against his chest and uses his arms to launch himself directly to the table.
“Smooth move!” remarks Paige. “Been practicing?”
The three of them eat with their heads pointed in three different directions. An eggy scent comes through my nose clog—yes, they have the printer going. The menu shows hash browns, toast, scrambled eggs, roti canai, and more, all of it counterfeit-style food created from powders, pastes, and oils. Fake, but widely considered tasty.
Alison tells me while chewing, “Try the oatmeal with cinnamon.”
I ask Shuko, “How’s Ryder?”
His eyes dart to the hygiene compartment. Ryder’s in there. I lower my voice. “What do you think happened? I mean, when we opened the breakers.”
Shuko sips from a juice pouch. “Simple anxiety attack. Understandable, don’t you think?”
“If you say so. How can we stop it from happening again?”
Paige giggles. “Sing a song!”
We girls laugh, and I’m not even in a laughing mood. Alison says, “I thought it was a perfect song.” We hug, an inept, unsymmetrical space hug.
Shuko clears his throat, then whispers, “I don’t know how to prevent another panic attack unless I shoot him up with benzo on a daily basis.”
“What if we have another emergency? He’s bigger and stronger than any of us. He needs to be calm until we land.”
“Sedated but awake for the next six weeks? I can’t recommend it. There could be issues of drug tolerance, dependence, withdrawal. Probably some degree of cognitive impairment such as degraded memory and concentration. I don’t think one anxiety episode justifies that treatment.”
“I didn’t intend it as a punishment.”
“I didn’t intend to imply you did.”
“Scratch the idea. We’ll find another way.”
“Tie him up,” Alison suggests. We laugh again, tres niñas sharing a giggling fit.
The hygiene hatch swings open. Ryder. No bandage on his head. Our eyes meet. He mumbles, “Don’t go in there.”
I try to think of something to say but Shuko tugs at my sleeve. “While you were asleep I researched the reason one of our oxygen generators keeps shutting down.”
Paige jerks her head. “What?”
I don’t care about Ryder anymore. On the warning panel—red text!
ERROR 415: OXYGEN GENERATOR UNIT 2
HIGH ELECTROLYTE TEMPERATURE SHUTDOWN
UNIT 1 IN BACKUP MODE
11:37:41 PCT 17 Taurus 53
Shuko grabs my sleeve again, which I hate. “Eric says the same problem is happening on all five spacecraft. Possibly just a sensor issue. Every trans-Mars stage has three independent oxygen generators. When the
primary unit shuts down, a standby comes on automatically.”
“Does the standby get the alarm too?”
“After about an hour. Then the primary takes over again. There’s a third unit as a spare.”
My stomach’s rumbling and my bladder’s ready to burst, so this oxygen thing has to wait. I tuck legs and try to fly to the hygiene compartment hatch à la Shuko, but I miss and Ryder grabs my ankle to redirect me.
Using the space shitter isn’t as complicated as I feared. Waste gets sucked into a tank, and two jets of warm water clean you-know-where. What makes everything difficult is the fact my body refuses to stay in place. I’m constantly drifting, rotating, or both, so any sort of activity requires anchoring with one hand or using both feet hooked around a solid object. The hygiene compartment does have two foot straps, but I don’t notice them until I’m done.
Dealing with Ryder will be even tougher. I won’t ignore what happened. I won’t blame him, either. I’ll occupy him. And I’m going to get it over with now.
The three other girls fuss over Ryder, feed him samples of what they consider luscious food, and Alison even massages the back of his neck. I twist into position with my face centimeters from his. “Come talk with me.”
“This exact minute?”
I nod my head toward my sleeper. He delivers a dramatic sigh, but he follows. I slide the door shut.
Ryder swallows his food. “First of all, I apologize for going ape-shit yesterday.”
We’re up against each other, wedged between the bunks and the lockers. But where else can we get privacy? The equipment bay is too noisy for conversation.
“Let’s put that behind us. It was a crazy day. What do you know about the oxygen generator shutdowns?”
“I’m aware of the problem.” He’s close. No question, peanut butter and coffee with his breakfast.
“At the hospital you said you were an applied engineer. I want you to find out everything you can about the shutdowns. Talk to Eric—”
“Shuko’s already done that.”
“Talk to him again, one engineer to another. This is your priority today.”
He bows at the waist just like the Harmony jefes do to each other. A dig at me?
“On top of that, I’m putting you in charge of training. We have forty-one days. Every minute is precious. We have to be ready for any emergency that can happen.”
“Well, there’s David’s eight-day syllabus. It’s in the knowledge base.”
“That’s a start. We need more.”
“His work is fairly comprehensive. I don’t think we need to add anything.”
“Are you an engineer or not?”
“Bachelor in Applied Synthesis Technology, Jiao Tong, fourth in my class.”
“Then you should agree we need to adapt David’s plan for the fact we’re in flight, and we don’t have the benefit of his experience. Can you put together some kind of training plan for everybody?”
“It would take time. There’s something like seven hundred training vids.”
“You’ll have help. We need to get everyone organized.”
He averts his eyes. “Maybe we should ask what the others have to say.”
My throat closes. Keep it rational, don’t make it personal. “This isn’t up for a vote. Our lives depend on a thousand pieces of equipment working when we need them to, and we already know they screwed up at least twice. And they didn’t have time for testing.”
“What do you expect from me, exactly?”
“First, we need to understand why the oxygen generators shut down. Then we need to prioritize topics and procedures we should learn first. For example, the syllabus covers BioSuits. We can start there.”
“Why worry about BioSuits now?”
“Not worry, preparation.”
“They’re useless until we land.”
“We don’t know that. There’s always the unexpected.”
“I think David and the rest of the senior engineers anticipated what we need to know better than we can. So relax.”
Let him save face. “Don’t you agree we need to at least catch up before we relax? I want everyone’s suit fitted and vacuum tested over the next three days. And starting tonight we’ll adjust our sleep schedules to correspond with nighttime at the landing site.”
“Cristina, I didn’t want to say this, but you put me in this spot. You’re an academy kid.”
I get a rush of nausea, plus a weird sensation of being upside-down. “I’m not a kid,” I stutter. I sound stupid but I can’t stop. “I completed eighty-eight units—”
“All of it academy. You have no professional-level education. You can be flight director, Cristina, that’s okay by me. Keep in mind that Mikki, Paige, and myself, we’re certified engineers.”
I search for words. “But no experience with anything real . . .”
Ryder shakes his head slowly. “Sure. No experience. Unlike you. I’ll plan a new syllabus because you’re probably right about keeping us busy. We don’t want people to have enough idle time to think about what they got themselves into.”
NINETEEN
Ryder breaks his promise, but that’s not the worst crisis, not even close.
Something has gone wrong with Paige. She was fine that first morning; she laughed with us, made jokes, flirted with Ryder, had fun floating food into her mouth. Maybe the oxygen generator errors got to her. Plus, as Ryder said, she didn’t keep busy so instead thought too much about what she had gotten herself into.
Paige was at the window when we couldn’t reset the breaker, just gazing out at the beautiful Earth growing smaller and smaller.
Now she does nothing but sleep and cry, occasionally whimpering, “What have I done? Oh, no. Oh, no. What have I done?”
Nobody can comfort her. We feel less and less like trying.
We’re all drowsy. My nose is congested. Without gravity we nod off all the time, even after getting several hours’ sleep. Genuine rest is difficult; imagine trying to sleep with sparks flashing inside your eyelids. Just cosmic rays, Shuko assures us. High-energy atomic nuclei from the supernova of massive stars. They stimulate our optic nerves and generate the illusion of streaking white embers. Maybe that first night I was too tired to notice.
Night? We’re back in the Ninth Circle; nothing distinguishes day from night. Without sunrise and sunset, the GNC clock is meaningless.
People are awake, so it might be our biological morning. No one else in the control center except Mikki. I ask, “Is Ryder up?”
“In more ways than one.” She jerks her thumb toward Ryder’s sleeper. Muffled giggles come from behind the door. Alison’s giggles.
All I can say is, “Yeah,” followed by a useless, “Sure, okay.” He’s exactly the type. The control center is suddenly more cramped. How long do we all have to live together in this tiny place? Barely four days and it feels like four weeks. Six weeks will feel like, what?
Ryder hasn’t even tried to talk to Eric about the oxygen generators. At least he studies the problem once in a while, or maybe he’s just a good faker. I’m going to have to do it myself.
Shuko and I take turns monitoring the oxygen tanks. They’re always at upper ninety-percent charged, so maybe Eric was right. Triple redundancy, extreme low probability of systemic failure. After weeks of this I’ll at least know how to talk like an engineer.
Every spacecraft can see a vid of the control deck of any other spacecraft, or every spacecraft, any time we want. For a while I hallucinated we could do vid training sessions for all thirty of us at once. But no, that’s not going to happen.
People don’t have the Stream to tell them what to do. So they do whatever they want. What they don’t want to do is train and learn.
What do they want to do? Everything else.
Sleep, especially, and of course plenty of echar un polvo, as Dottie called it. The boys have quite a selection, and people pair up and even squeeze three into cramped sleepers with two small bunks.
Not on
Liberty, not yet.
We can watch or read millions of vids and books, and that’s what everyone pretty much does when they’re not sleeping or screwing. Most of the material was hidden away by Harmony years ago, and now we can see any of it any time we want. The vids go back over a century, so I can find out how people lived when Paco and Victor were small. Alison and I watch a few minutes here and there of extremely old vids from the 1950s and 1990s. It’s incredible how people lived their lives, bold and confident, without agonizing over Scores or the Stream.
We’ll get there.
I still can’t believe it. No one watching, no one listening.
No one with any power over us cares what we say and do.
If we want to know something or see something, we just find a flatscreen and get what we need. We’re back in ancient times in that regard, but that’s how Liberty and the other spacecraft are set up. It worked fine for all those people in the old vids.
No spotters, no autosystems. I could read anything, see anything, and no one would know it.
It’s chaos. It’s strange.
If we had infinite time there’d be no reason for concern, but we don’t have infinite time. Or food. We have seven hundred days’ worth of calories, not counting emergency rations, which we shouldn’t be eating—but we’re eating them anyhow. We get three menus a day, and the printer makes whatever we pick, but no seconds. I found out it lets me, and only me, reduce the portions and even cancel meals. The instructions say that future selections will vary depending on past selections. The number of food choices will probably become fewer as the printer uses up stock.
I try to set an example by studying the tech manuals and procedures and asking the engineers questions, but no one cares. They don’t know the answers anyhow.
Ryder says he’s working on our training syllabus, but I seriously doubt it. Shuko? He’s an inexperienced physician. I could do a better job of it myself. But the real issue isn’t lack of a formal program, it’s lack of motivation.
Where’s that motivation supposed to come from? From me? I tell people to complete specific training modules, and they don’t bother. What am I supposed to do? Come up with some Autoridad-style punishments? Print my own little swarm of spotters and hit people?
