Frontier

by Patrick Chiles

  Marshall looked perplexed. “I don’t understand, sir.”

  The commander drummed his fingers as he considered his words. “We don’t pay you to understand yet, Ensign. There are machinations behind the scenes that would curl your hair, only because most of it is unintentional and it rarely makes sense. The only advice I can offer is to treat every assignment like it’s the best deal you could imagine. It’s like the grunts say: ‘embrace the suck.’”

  The ride to orbit had indeed been a good deal more exciting—and noisier—than the trip up that clunky gantry elevator. Stardust rattled and roared for nine straight minutes and seemed on the verge of shaking itself to pieces, when suddenly all became still. The spacecraft which had at first felt so crowded sitting atop its booster suddenly seemed to triple in size as they experienced the first liberating sensations of zero g. The floor was no longer the floor—it could be the ceiling or a sidewall if someone wanted it to be. Impossibly bright, unfiltered sunlight exploded through the windows along one side while the blue glow of Earth filled the other, turning their little spacecraft from a ride in a barrel over Niagara Falls into a kaleidoscope of novel sensations.

  Of the group, only Giselle and Whitman had been here before. Experience had apparently done nothing to blunt her enthusiasm, as Nick noticed her turning to the nearest window every chance she had while stowing her pressure suit. It didn’t seem to slow her down as she worked her way through checking out their spacewalk gear, a top priority before Whitman began the series of burns that would raise them into a geosynchronous transfer orbit. And for his part, the pilot’s focus had not wavered since their rocket first roared to life. If the view outside threatened to distract him he’d yet to show it. Other than stowing his gloves and helmet beneath his seat after engine cutoff, the pilot had barely moved. Nick watched as his eyes darted around the control panel, scanning critical instruments as his hands barely touched the controls. An occasional tap on a control stick set thrusters to banging outside, otherwise the spacecraft was remarkably quiet.

  It was therefore no surprise that Billy/Xenos would be the one to interrupt it. “Oh my God it’s stuffy,” he complained, and reflexively honked his nose against his hand.

  “It’s the fluids in your body stabilizing,” Giselle said as she pushed away from the EVA locker. “Just like we are in this spacecraft, your insides float along with you.”

  That they’d all been warned about this in training didn’t seem to matter. He tried blowing his nose again.

  “That won’t really work like you think it should,” Giselle said. “Give it time, you’ll get used to it.”

  The kid looked at her disdainfully. “Doubtful,” he said. “Not if the conditions don’t change until we’re back in gravity. How can you enjoy this?”

  That prompted a reaction from the stoic Whitman. He turned his head slowly—either for effect or for avoiding sudden movements that might upset his vestibular system—and stared. “You’re kidding, right?” he finally said, and motioned to the nearest window. “You’re in space, kid. Millionaires still spend big money for trips to orbit. Businesses invest all kinds of dough into training schlubs like us to work up here. You’re in an exclusive club.”

  Billy/Xenos appeared uninterested and proceeded to begin checking over his own equipment stash. “I was in an exclusive club before this,” he sniffed.

  Whitman exchanged an amused look with Nick. “Very well, then. A reminder, people: we have one orbit to check out the spacecraft and our equipment before we start our first transfer burn. If you have any concerns or no-go calls, you have exactly”—he checked his watch—“eighty-nine minutes to tell me. Otherwise, enjoy the ride.”

  Nick Lesko’s smile was less for the experience than for the satisfaction of seeing that the pilot they’d selected seemed more than willing to keep this gaggle of oddballs on task. After they reached GEO in another day, it would become life or death. And that was information he preferred to keep to himself.

  3

  Vandenberg Space Force Base

  California

  Despite advances in biometric security and artificial intelligence, the check-in process for a freshly minted officer in the newest and highest-tech service branch remained confoundingly byzantine and hopelessly bound to paperwork (in triplicate, of course). First the gate security police checked his ID, then waited for the base provost to confirm that he was, in fact, supposed to be there before being allowed to report to Wing headquarters in order to wait on some disinterested admin clerk who misplaced his orders before eventually uncovering them in last week’s pile of onboarding paperwork—a good thing, because otherwise they’d have considered him AWOL—before finally arriving at the subordinate command to which he was assigned, where a slightly more interested admin clerk repeated the process until he was directed to report to the group commander’s office in order to wait some more until, at last, a door opened.

  “Hunter.”

  Startled, Marshall managed not to show it only because it was now getting on into midafternoon and he’d really been craving a cup of coffee. He was greeted by a stocky man with buzz-cut red hair that contrasted sharply with the blue-gray uniform of the Force’s new Orbit Guard. The silver stripes on his epaulets signified he was indeed the group CO, Commodore Harlan Haynes. The old-style silver pilot wings on his chest signified he’d once been Air Force and had jumped ship for the newer service along with the other space cadets.

  Marshall snapped to attention. “Yes sir, Ensign Hunter, reporting as ordered.”

  The CO took Marshall’s records and studied him for a moment. “Come in.” He gestured to a chair by his desk. “Have a seat.”

  He made sure to sit up straight and not get too comfortable, becoming more awkward as the senior officer flipped through his training file and cross-referenced certain pages while scrolling through something on his desktop monitor. “Funny thing about the Pentagon never letting go of paper records—we out in the field have ways around that.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t follow, sir.”

  The CO waved the folder. “There’s a lot that paper just can’t capture. For instance, this doesn’t tell me squat about a man’s attitude or work ethic unless you just plain failed. Which you mostly didn’t.”

  Here it comes, Marshall thought.

  “Anything you’d like to share with me about that busted check ride? Because I’m guessing you’d much rather be in a cockpit than down here pounding a keyboard.”

  “No sir. I have to accept the instructor’s assessment. I failed to meet the test criteria.” There. It felt like complete horseshit to him, but nothing about it was technically false.

  The commodore’s quizzical look indicated he wasn’t buying it. “No contributing factors, then?”

  Marshall swallowed hard and hoped it wasn’t too noticeable. “Sir, I allowed myself to be pushed into a corner. That was my fault. It doesn’t matter what the IP might have been trying to achieve, in the end I could’ve said no.”

  “You kind of did,” the commodore said. “Albeit too late to salvage that hop. Startling your IP into not punching out let you keep the spaceplane intact and land safely.”

  “We lost the bird for three days, sir, between trucking out a tanker full of RP-1 and getting a temporary launch-site permit.”

  Haynes waved it off. “Bah. The more common these kind of hops become, the more that’s going to happen to smaller airports. They’ll get used to it. They’re just going through the same growing pains the big air carrier hubs went through with your old man’s company.”

  And here we go again. Marshall wondered if he’d ever grow out of his dad’s shadow.

  His reaction must have shown on his face. “So here’s your first piece of your CO’s Advice for Life: don’t run away from your past, Ensign. Embrace it. Use it. I don’t know your old man, but I know the type,” he said, poking at his own chest. “He wasn’t looking for notoriety when he took the job. He was just looking to challenge himself and fly somet
hing badass. The rest came after he got backed into a couple of bad corners and had to miracle his way out of them. That sound about right?”

  Marshall had to chuckle at that. “Yes sir. That sounds about right.”

  “That’s all any of us are doing. Anybody who’s looking for fame in this business needs to stay out of the cockpit because he’s just going to be dangerous. Now’s the time to be honest: Is that what you’re looking for?”

  He didn’t hesitate. “No sir. I just want to fly something badass.”

  A smile from the CO. “Then you’ll do all right. Might even get you enough admin hops with the training squadron to keep your flight pay.”

  “That would be great, sir.”

  “You’d better believe it’s great!” Haynes handed back his training records. “Take these to the S-1, he’ll be your reporting officer while you wait for your permanent assignment.”

  If hope were a balloon slowly filling his soul, this was the pinprick that deflated it: S-1 was administration. He’d be flying a desk until they decided what to do with him.

  After a day of steadily raising their orbit to geosynchronous altitude, Nick’s crew hovered in space above South America. Stardust’s velocity at this distance now matched that of Earth’s rotation, keeping it locked in place over the same point on the globe.

  Their target appeared as a bright blip in the crosshairs of a monitor on Whitman’s control panel; over the past few hours it had grown from a point of light nearly indistinguishable from the background stars into a jagged white smudge.

  Nick pushed away from behind the pilot and floated over to the other forward-facing window. Without the video, their nominally dead comsat was simply a luminous speck in the distance. He was surprised there weren’t more; if this was the geosynchronous plane, he’d expected to see a long trail of communication and weather satellites. “Are you certain we’re clear of interference?”

  “We’re in the graveyard orbit,” Whitman confirmed, “three hundred klicks above GEO. Even down there we’d have plenty of separation. It’s a big sky, we’re not going to hit anything.”

  Nick was more concerned about their being seen but kept that to himself. He looked back toward Giselle and Billy. She didn’t seem to be bothered by spending so much time in a cramped spacecraft with three men and their smelly bodily functions; if anything it was a testament to her experience and professionalism. Billy, on the other hand, had seemed mortified by the lack of privacy. Nick wondered at that—after their training with the zero-g toilet and all the other privations of spaceflight, how could anyone be surprised? Maybe it was being faced with the reality of not being able to open a window for some fresh air, maybe it was just the kid’s prickly nature. In the end, Nick didn’t care so long as everyone did their jobs.

  Which they appeared to be doing. After struggling with setting up their private network in zero g, Billy had found something of a groove for himself. He floated among a nest of laptops and network cables, wearing a distant countenance though his eyes were intensely focused on the information before him.

  “Billy?” Nick prodded. He was ignored. He sighed as he remembered, then finally: “Xenos.”

  “Yup.”

  “Are you satisfied with your level of control?”

  “Test environment hasn’t given me problems, but then it’s my setup. Can’t know until we get closer. If I boosted the signal enough to link from here, somebody on Earth would notice our EM emissions.”

  Nick understood but played along anyway. “You’re right. We don’t want to arouse suspicion.”

  He turned to Giselle, who was buried down to the waist in her pressure suit. He rapped on the helmet to get her attention, and her head popped up through the opening. “One moment,” she chirped, at ease in her element. He wondered if she’d be this chipper once they were outside. “Yes?”

  He gave her an intentionally disarming smile. “Just seeing if you’re ready. Anticipating any problems?”

  “If I did, rest assured we wouldn’t go,” she said flatly. “Both suits are pressure checked. Right now I’m checking the coolant and hydration lines. Trust me, you wouldn’t want a pinched drinking tube on an eight-hour spacewalk.”

  “Then I defer to your judgment,” he said solemnly, and checked his watch. “Twelve hours from now we’ll open the hatch, correct? An hour to suit up, another two hours to pre-breathe”—he looked back toward Whitman, who held up two fingers in anticipation of his question—“and two hours until we’re on station with our first job. That leaves us just enough time to rest before getting to work. If anyone thinks they’re going to have trouble meeting those timelines, let me know now.”

  The hacker and the spacewalker silently shook their heads no, and Whitman’s two fingers turned into a thumbs up. Without another word, they each turned back to their work, the cabin silent but for the hum of circulation fans and the occasional thump of a thruster.

  Schriever Space Force Base

  Colorado

  Roberta McCall had navigated a nearly identical administrative labyrinth as her old classmate and now stood in front of the 9th Space Delta’s S-3, or Operations officer, an Air Force light colonel on loan to the Space Force. His pilot wings and missileer’s badge suggested someone who’d lost his flight rating at some point and moved on to manning ICBM silos. He pointed Roberta to a nondescript government-issue synthetic wood desk. “You’ll work here when you’re not on shift in the SOC.”

  She looked around for any clues as to what her actual role might be. A foot-high stack of folders sitting by the desktop monitor hinted at it. “Are those training files, sir?”

  “They said you were bright,” he said, clapping her on the shoulder. “You’re our new training officer. Haven’t had one for about a month now and the turds are starting to pile up accordingly. Got a lot of junior enlisteds who need to finish NCO school before we can promote them, they’ll be waiting on you to get their quals back up to speed. And we’ve got to put on a physical fitness test next month, that’ll be up to you.”

  Sounds fascinating, she thought, keeping a straight face. “Understood, sir. And when will I be on shift?”

  “Had lunch yet?” The lieutenant colonel looked at his watch for effect. “Never mind, doesn’t matter. How about right now?” He walked away, turning down the hall and not waiting for her to follow.

  “Yes sir,” Roberta mumbled, and hurried after him while trying to not look like she was in too much of a hurry.

  The Space Operations Center was decidedly less high tech than she’d expected. The setup was familiar enough: a dimly lit amphitheater room filled with rows of multiscreen computer consoles, each occupied by clean-cut young people in charcoal Space Force jumpsuits. A couple of serious-looking senior officers stalked the back of the room, occasionally looking over someone’s shoulder and giving commands. At the front of the room were the kind of floor-to-ceiling monitors that had become signature features of control centers since the early days of the space program: a “god’s-eye view” of whatever they were tasked with controlling.

  What surprised her was the age of the equipment: some newer curved screens, but very few of the holographic projections that made managing objects in 3-D space so much easier to visualize. Half of the telephones looked to be older stand-alone units, not integrated into the network comms. She’d seen the same in the training squadron and had assumed it was intended to not make things too easy for the students. But now, seeing her country’s Space Force still mired in tech that had been old when she was a kid was startling. It must get the job done, but she wondered how much more they could do if they could just upgrade their systems.

  She forgot to notice the Ops officer was still talking to her while pointing to the various rows of consoles.

  “. . . and over there is Space Weather. These guys,” he said, pointing to the row behind them, “coordinate with FAA’s launch-and-entry traffic control. You’ll notice they’re on the phone a lot. It’s old school, but it gets the job don
e. Kind of like that stack of training records,” the lieutenant colonel said, apparently reading her mind. He walked down another row and stopped behind a young man. “This is Lieutenant Ivey. He’s our intel liaison and your section lead,” he said, and walked away.

  Roberta wasn’t even sure which section they were in; she was looking for a sign atop the consoles when a gangly young man with a brush of sandy blond hair unfolded himself from his seat and seemed to tower over her. “Jacob Ivey,” he said, and extended his hand.

  “Roberta McCall,” she said, taking his hand.

  “I’m Poison.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s my call sign. Kind of obvious, I know.”

  “Oh,” she said, slightly embarrassed. “Sorry, Lieutenant. I should’ve caught that. I’m still used to the IPs keeping it formal with students. Rank, last name, you know.”

  He eyed her up and down but not in an obviously leering way. She decided this was probably how he sized up every newbie, gender be damned. “No call sign yet,” he muttered around what looked like a wad of chewing tobacco. Interesting, as that was supposed to be prohibited on duty. “Well, you’ll do something to earn one soon enough. Roberta, eh? For now we’ll just call you Roboto.”

  Didn’t see that one coming. She smiled to herself and looked around the control room. “Didn’t realize we needed call signs in here, sir.”

  “Does anybody really need them?” he said. “Pilots just like it because it’s one more way to indulge their arrested development.”

  She noticed the spacecraft operator wings on his name patch. “Doesn’t look like it stopped you.”

  “I only act mature when I have to,” he said, at which the enlisted technicians on his console row smirked. “And that’ll be enough out of the peanut gallery,” he added over his shoulder.