by James Welsh
“Bel, I need you to open up the ramp. I’m coming in,” Mystery ordered over her helmet’s radio as she climbed.
There was no response, but Mystery did see the ramp on Ysabel’s launch begin to open up. The ramp was severely damaged as well, opening up in halts and stutters until stopping altogether. But it was ajar enough for someone to get in or out. Mystery reached the crack in the door and peered in. The inside of the ship was the morning after a riot. The interior lights, which were operating on the failing backup battery, were flickering on and off. And pieces of metal and equipment and other debris were floating around soundlessly. In the corner, Mystery saw Ysabel – she was dressed up in her spacesuit. While the sputtering lights glared off her helmet, it was apparent that Ysabel was injured, a deep cut on her forehead shining blood.
Mystery extended her hand. “Let’s go – I don’t know how much more time we’ve got left.”
Ysabel didn’t move. Instead, she stared blankly at Mystery, as if afraid that any movement would shatter the ship to pieces. Mystery repeated, this time more demanding. “You’re coming with me now, or not at all.”
With hesitation, Ysabel silently crept through the cabin and took Mystery’s hand. With a heave, Mystery pulled Ysabel out through the partially opened door and into outer space with her. With Ysabel wrapping her arms around her waist, Mystery tugged on the cable and pulled the both of them back into her ship. Once she closed the airlock, Mystery guided Ysabel to an empty seat in the cabin and sat her down and buckled her tight. Ysabel was about to take her helmet off when Mystery stopped her.
“I wouldn’t do that right now,” Mystery said. “I’ll explain why later.”
Ysabel nodded silently, immediately understanding. Even through her trauma, she had enough sense to realize that Mystery had already come into contact with the diseased colonists. A few moments later, Mystery was back at the comfort of her controls. She warmed up the engine, disconnected the clasps that held them to Ysabel’s ship, and they blasted off into the rock harvest. The whole process, from the second she turned on the engine to the second they flew off, was no more than fifteen seconds long. Less than a minute after that, the asteroid field yawned and a massive rock appeared and ripped the limping launch in half, but there was no one there to watch the show. Mystery and Ysabel were already heading for the edge of the fields and into the safety of open space.
“We have to stop at Space Station Odysseus. We need to get the ship fixed up and that cut on your head looked at,” Mystery said, her eyes busy on the space ahead.
“...need air,” Ysabel said hoarsely over her radio.
“Course, sorry about that. There’s a spare tank strapped under your chair. You can use that until we get to the station.”
There were a few moments as Ysabel fumbled for the tank under her chair before finally unstrapping it. She then switched her air hose to the new tank, taking care not to inhale any of the infected air in the cabin. It was only when she was certain that the air was flowing freely once more that she said, “Lucky for me you knew where to find me.”
“That’s all it took,” Mystery said evenly. “Luck and a couple hours of my time.”
“You were in the fields for hours, and you didn’t get hit?”
“No,” Mystery lied – she was too embarrassed to mention a dent on the side of her ship. But her answer became a question. “How did you get hit so badly?”
This, Mystery wanted to know. Ysabel was known among the pilots for being agile at the controls. It confused her profoundly how she could let herself get hit by so many meteoroids, let alone one. Ysabel seemed to agree, too. Shaking her head, she said, “It was going well – at first. I dodged a few of the larger asteroids, one of them almost as big as the hangar back on the Moon. It wasn’t hard to miss – I didn’t even need to ping my sonar to see them. But as I dove deeper into the field, I activated my sonar, just to be on the safe side. Just a few seconds after I turned it on, I got a warning: a patch of small meteoroids was flying up at me from below. And so what did I do?”
“You climbed up?” Mystery offered.
“I climbed up – right into that same patch of meteoroids.”
“What? How?”
“I don’t know. Why don’t you tell me?”
“How could I know?” Mystery asked, confused. She wasn’t sure what Ysabel was getting at. “I wasn’t there. You were.”
“The software that picks up the sonar readings was miscalibrated, so badly that it was flipping the picture. So what was up became down, and what was down became up,” Ysabel said, her voice rising. “And funny, we just learned just the other week how to calibrate the sonar system too.”
“So you think I sabotaged your ship?” Mystery asked, finally turning around in her chair to confront Ysabel. “Why would I try to kill you, and then save you?”
“Maybe you weren’t trying to kill me – maybe you were just trying to shame me,” Ysabel shot back, already convinced of her theory. “If you could deliver the medicine on time and rescue me in the field, the instructors would have to pass you. So how did you know where to find me? Or did you fit a tracker onto my launch so that you could locate it?”
“Ysabel, listen!” Mystery snarled, not caring that she was using up her precious oxygen. “I found out about this mission five minutes before we left the lunar base. How could that have been enough time to sabotage you?”
“I’m just trying to make sense of it,” Ysabel said, spitting as much venom as Mystery was. “I want to know how a sonar system that was perfect yesterday when I tested it could have failed when I needed it most. Can you give me an answer to that?”
“It sounds like you already have the answer you want. Why do you want another one?”
The pilots fell silent as Space Station Odysseus began to grow into view. It would be another fifteen minutes of heavy silence until they landed. Mystery knew that no matter what she said, Ysabel would not believe her. Their game of rivals had gone on for too long and had gotten out-of-control. Now, Ysabel was writing a narrative that was entirely fictional, and her wild-eyed paranoia was only making her write the story faster. As Mystery thought that, she suddenly felt very alone again, even though there was another soul just a few feet away.
***
2196 AD
As she sailed through outer space, Captain Joyce found her joy where others found only sorrow. She remembered, as a child, living on the new beaches, after the rising seawaters overwhelmed what was once Oregon. While many had fled the jaws of the waters, Joyce and what remained of her family stayed behind. It only made sense: Joyce’s father was a fisherman, and he found life in the ocean where everyone else found death. But Joyce was too young to boat the rough seas with her father, and so she was left behind with her mother and little sister, Fleur. They lived in the ruins of a gas station, and it didn’t take long for Joyce to grow bored. And so she would sneak out and walk on the new beaches, although mother forbade her from doing so. It was where a young Mystery Joyce found her first body, a rotting woman washed up on the shore like a fish. The gulls had found her before Joyce did, and they had pecked out the soft parts. Joyce would never again see something that sad.
But there were bright moments, though, buried deep inside the tragedies. She developed a habit of taking a fallen branch and using it to write out stories in the sand and mud. At first, the stories were written in crude pictures, but Joyce begged her mother to teach her writing, and so she did. And while the overnight tides washed away the pages she had written, she just wrote a new story the next day when someone else would have been discouraged and gave up.
And Joyce felt that same way now, as she darted through outer space aboard her launch. The emptiness ahead of her was nothing more than mud, patiently waiting for her to write her story. The stretch of space that the downed buoy had occupied had never been visited before by man – the buoy had been deposited there years before by a robotic scout. She would be the first of mankind to fly through that inky space.
Joyce thought of her lost home on Earth, a planet that had been crisscrossed by human feet to the point where no grain of dirt had gone untouched. It was only in outer space where someone could burn a different path through the forest and be unique.
As Joyce flew, she found herself mesmerized by the illustration of stars all around her, like fireflies painted into a ceiling. For a brief moment, she forgot her duty and felt the urge to fly towards the stars. To do so would have surely been her end, as she would become lost in the open labyrinth of the galaxy. To her, becoming lost was the only rescue from her jail of a routine back home. But in just a moment, she remembered her duty and she continued flying towards the buoy, which continued to radiate green circles in her glasses.
***
2185 AD
After Mystery’s successful delivery of the medicine and her rescue of Ysabel, it did not take long for the committee of instructors to surrender a diploma. The ceremony was unceremonious – a courier delivered the certificate to Mystery while she was in the library, and he left without saying a word of congratulations.
But whatever indignation Mystery felt soon dissolved when she received a job offer that same day. Most fresh pilots received assignments for one of the forgotten colonies, usually to run foodstuffs to the hungry scientists. But this job offer came straight from the head of the Phoenix Charter himself – the executive of a corporation that owned every inch of soil from Alaska to Argentina. The message could not convey enough times how important the job was. But simply put, the charter needed new pilots for the Volans colony. Mystery had heard rumors of how incompetent the colonial pilots were out there, and the letter seemed to confirm it. She was needed to shuttle around the miners, who were themselves responsible for the delivery of limitless energy back to Earth. Civilization would crumble again if the miners did not have the best of the best at their disposal – and Mystery was more than qualified.
She radioed Earth and accepted the job, but with one condition: that her friends Akilina and Avis were given work as well. Since they were excellent pilots in their own right, it did not take much convincing for the charter to give in to the demand. Mystery also figured that the charter was desperate for competent pilots for a change. And so, within just a few hours, Mystery went from being a fresh cadet to being crowned captain of the fleet of ships at Volans.
The next starling frigate for Volans was leaving in just a few days, and so Mystery and her two companions took a ship to the launch pad back on Earth. As they settled down into their seats, Avis looked out the window at the hangar they had come to know all too well during their training. “I’m going to miss this,” she said.
“Oh, don’t say that,” Mystery said.
“Yes, please don’t say that,” Akilina laughed, “because that would be a lie.”
“We’ll be back one day,” Mystery reassured her, not realizing how wrong she was.
As Avis buckled her harness, she leaned over once more and asked, “Oh, did you hear what happened to Branca?”
“What is she up to this time,” Akilina groaned. Branca was one of their classmates in the academy and a strange creature. Most memorably, she had a tendency of flying her ship sideways in the simulator – she claimed that this was the most efficient way to pilot a launch. Her constant crashing in the simulator could not persuade her otherwise. And the fact that she refused to cut her hair wasn’t odd, but her reasoning was: that hair blocked radiation in space, and so the more hair she had the better. Mystery once gave Akilina grief because she was mocking Branca behind her back – Akilina insisted that she wasn’t laughing at Branca but “for her.” After all, someone had to laugh about the ridiculous Branca, and it wasn’t going to be her.
“Well, the committee was preparing to drop her from the program, but I guess she caught on and she left with some dignity,” Avis continued.
“Yeah, some dignity,” Akilina scoffed.
“What is she going to do now?” Mystery wondered.
“I heard that she was going back to Earth to become a medium,” Avis replied, referencing another of Branca’s eccentricities, of thinking she could speak to the dead.
“A medium, eh?” Akilina said, her eyes mischievous. “If anything, she’s a large, if you catch my drift.”
“Lina!” Mystery said, chiding, but she and Avis couldn’t help but laugh.
With just a few minutes left before launch, Mystery heard the door slide open once again and a pair of boots stepped in, thudding against the metal floor. Mystery and her friends turned as best as they could in their harnesses and saw Ysabel Winter standing before them, dressed in her pilot’s uniform and carrying a duffel bag of her belongings.
“Bel, you’re heading back to Earth too?” Akilina asked.
Ysabel nodded. “I got a job with the Volans colony. The next frigate to the colony is leaving Earth on Sunday.”
“You got a job with Volans?” Avis yelped, surprised. “We did too! What are the odds of us all finding work there?”
“We’re all going to be working together? What are the odds indeed?” Ysabel replied, with no surprise in her voice. She shot a quick glare at Mystery as she took a nearby seat. A horrified Mystery looked out the window, frantic thoughts raging through her mind. How did Ysabel get the job too? Did she know that they would be working together? What was going to happen now? Ysabel had been cold to Mystery ever since the rescue, still thinking that Mystery was somehow responsible for her ship’s sonar malfunctioning. All Mystery knew for sure was that Ysabel had revenge in her heart, but she didn’t know what shape the revenge would take until after it happened.
She thought that whenever she took the Volans assignment, that she would be putting the Earth and its history of war light-years behind her. But now, as she looked at her rival just a few seats away, she realized that she could never escape Earth and what it meant to her.
***
2196 AD
As Joyce continued maneuvering between the blackberries, the green pulse on her cartographer’s glasses began to shine more urgently. But she didn’t need her glasses to know that she was getting closer to the downed buoy – she could feel the approach pull on her veins like a bell’s rope. In the back of her mind, she recited her instructions for when she reached the buoy. It was a process she had successfully completed three times before, each time taking no more than twenty minutes to manually reboot the buoy’s system and to make sure the orbital thrusters were in working order.
What seemed dangerous to others was routine to her. It was a routine born from trust – she had flown in the same launch for years, and she knew her ship down to the stray rivet that shook as she docked at Harbor. It was her soul-mate – to tear the two apart was unthinkable, because that would be the last atrocity of humanity. One simply could not think of one without thinking of the other – they would be as useless apart as a bow and arrow. If she had only known her mythology, she would have thought about Apollo, the Greek god who tugged sunshine behind him with his chariot. Of course, it was work – work, like an ox dragging its plow through the fields – but it was work that grew the future. And to Joyce, that was love. It was just a little sadness that there was no audience with whom to share that art.
As Joyce wormed deeper between the blackberries, she noticed that they were becoming smaller in diameter. This spelled out trouble in dozens of languages, since Joyce wouldn’t be able to spot a shower of meteoroids until they came hurtling through the hull of her ship. It was a nightmare that played itself out in the average pilot’s mind. But Joyce was dry with calm, her faith in the lightning prow unshaken. If there was a blackberry heading towards her ship, the prow would see it.
And then, just as if someone’s god had heard that thought, the lightning prow briefly sputtered. Joyce sharply turned her head towards the monitor that displayed the incoming blackberries, and she found the screen blank. She froze, not quite sure how to handle the situation. She pressed a few of the buttons underneath the monitor, hoping one of them would restart
the program. When that didn’t work, she resorted to the time-honored tradition of slamming her fist against the monitor, hoping to snap it awake.
It was on the fourth slam that the monitor flickered back on, and just in time too. Joyce noticed on the screen the silhouette of a particularly large blackberry, and it was spinning towards her. She flipped her hands in the water of the control pads, and the launch immediately rolled out of the blackberry’s path.
It took exactly five seconds for Joyce to realize that she was hyperventilating, the first time she had done so in years. She took a series of deep breaths, hoping to calm herself down. But while her breathing slowed, her mind was quivering with nervous electricity.
“What the hell was that all about?” Joyce sputtered out loud, knowing that no one but herself could hear it. She would have to wait until she got back to the colony and found Dr. Chroma before she could ask that question again. Chroma had promised that his invention would never fail her, and it was a promise that held for almost a year before that moment.
But Joyce had too much faith in Chroma’s genius, and she could not accept that he would have made a mistake. And that was when she thought of Ysabel Winter, whom she spotted being near her docked launch earlier at Harbor. Was it possible that this was Winter’s revenge at last? Or was it just a simple mechanical failure?
Whatever the cause, Captain Joyce continued once more towards the buoy, although this time much less confident than before in her ship.