The Fated Sky

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  Two hours later, we’d finished our checklist, and the passengers were all strapped into their seats. Grissom looked over at me and nodded. “Let’s light this candle.”

  The engines whispered to life, nearly silent on the airless surface of the moon. We lifted off and in that acceleration I felt weight again, as if the moon wanted to pull me back down to it. Below us, the gray-and-brown craters fell away, washed in the flames of our exhaust.

  I said you can get used to anything. I might have lied.

  * * *

  Arriving in low Earth orbit and docking with the orbital station, I was a pilot astronaut: even sitting in the copilot seat and mostly handling navigation calculations, I was intimately involved in the procedure. Grissom and I handed off our ship to the replacement pilots, who were heading out for their three-month stint on the moon, and drifted inside.

  Leaving Lunetta, I was just another Earthbound passenger dropping out of orbit. So far, the International Aerospace Coalition had yet to staff any women as pilots on the big orbital rockets. It wasn’t official policy that we weren’t allowed to pilot them, but when I inquired, I always got something along the lines of how they wanted to use my expertise “where it’s most valuable.” Since the lady astronauts had gotten into the corps on the strength of our computing skills, it was hard to get them to let us sit in a different seat.

  I floated into the passenger compartment with the rest of the Earthbound folks. While Lunetta had artificial gravity in the spinning outer ring, the center remained stationary for docking purposes. It made handling luggage easier and harder at the same time. It weighed nothing, but also had a tendency to wander off if you didn’t strap it down. I wedged my bag into the small compartment beneath my seat and tightened the tie-down straps before shutting the compartment door.

  “Elma!” In the aisle floated Helen Carmouche, née Liu. She wore her dark hair pulled back in a ponytail and the ends floated above her head.

  “I didn’t know you would be on this rocket.” Grinning, I pushed myself up to hug her, almost overshooting the mark—I’d gotten used to having at least the moon’s microgravity—but Helen hooked a foot under a rail like a zero-g pro and caught me.

  Remember what I said about how you can get used to anything? This did not feel much different than running into her on a streetcar or train.

  “We need to do some Earthside training.” She eyed the couch next to me. “May I?”

  “Absolutely!” I swung up to let her pass beneath me. “How’s Reynard?”

  She laughed as she tucked her bag into the compartment. “He says he has repainted the living room. I dread to see it.”

  I pulled myself closer to the “ceiling” to let other passengers through. “Color choice or skill?”

  “Two words: Martian. Red. But how would he know?” She shook her head, yanking on the tie straps with practiced ease. “We don’t have pictures from the surface yet.”

  “It could be worse. It could be regolith gray.”

  “Neutral may be better.” She closed the hatch of the luggage compartment with a click. “How’s Nathaniel?”

  I sighed, without meaning to. It just slipped out. “Good?”

  She straightened, catching herself on the seat. “That not sound good.”

  “No, no. He’s fine. Everything is fine.” I pulled myself down to my seat and began strapping in. As I worked the shoulder straps into place, I could feel Helen staring at me. “It’s just hard being gone so much. You know how it is.”

  She settled into the seat next to me and patted my hand. “At least we are going home.”

  “I’m sorry—I shouldn’t complain, not about a three-month separation.” Helen was on the Mars mission team, so she had been training for fourteen months, and when the expedition left next year, she and Reynard would be separated for another three years. “I honestly don’t know how you’re going to do it.”

  “It would be harder, I think, if we had been married longer.” She winked. “Keeps honeymoon going. You know? When I come home…”

  “You have ignition?”

  “All thrusters firing.”

  Overhead the speakers crackled into life. “Ladies and gentlemen, this is Captain Cleary. We will push back from the station in a moment, and should have you back on Earth at the Kansas Astrofield in about an hour.”

  Routine. I’d made the trip between Earth and the moon about a dozen times. On each trip things became a little more polished. A little more … normal. It really wasn’t any different now than a cross-country train trip. Except, of course, for everything.

  A slight clunk reverberated through the ship as the locking mechanism released from the station. Outside the tiny porthole, fireflies seemed to eddy as the frozen condensation on the spacecraft’s skin came out of the station’s shadow and into the light of the sun. The frost flurried around us, luminescent against the ink of space.

  I keep trying to say that this is nothing more than a routine, but the truth is that it is magic. Around us the great arc of the station swept in dizzying circles. If I hadn’t been strapped in, I would have leaned forward and pressed my face against the window.

  “There!” Helen pointed to something just out of sight ahead of us. “The Mars fleet.”

  The ship vibrated and began a slow rotation, coming around into position for dropping out of orbit. As it did, the three-ship fleet designed for the First Mars Expedition panned into view. Against the ink-black sky, the two passenger ships and the supply ship stood out as irregular cylinders, the passenger ships long and slender, girdled with a centrifugal ring like the space station. Someone had likened the ring to an … adult toy, which told me two things: one, that I was more of a prude than I thought I was, and two, what that particular item must look like and how it might function. I had yet to ask Nathaniel about it, because I wasn’t sure if I wanted to know if he knew what it was.

  In any case, if you did not have experience with such things, the ships were an innocently beautiful sight. “You know … there are times when I’m a little jealous of y’all.”

  “Eh.” Helen shrugged. “I’ll be doing math all the way there and back.”

  “Why do you think I’m jealous?” I rolled my eyes. “I’m basically a bus driver.”

  “On the moon.”

  “True. And I love it, but … it’s not very challenging.” I could have gotten on the Mars mission if I’d wanted to, but the truth is that Nathaniel and I had been talking about children. “I’m thinking about retiring as a pilot and maybe going back to the computer department.”

  Helen is the queen of the disdainful snort. “And go back to flying a Cessna?”

  “Or doing training for incoming astronauts. I’m just…” Bored. “I want to focus on my marriage.”

  Helen gave me one of her patented sniffs. She really is a master of those little noises of disbelief. I was saved from the full brunt of her scorn when the rocket shuddered as the captain fired the deorbit burn.

  Behind us, someone whimpered a little. Helen glanced over her shoulder and leaned closer to me. “Just wait until we hit the entry interface.”

  “Must be their first return to Earth.” I did not glance back. Grandma had always said that when someone was embarrassed, the cruelest thing you could do was stare at them, and I understood what they were feeling. Even with training, there was nothing like the real thing, and it was going to get a lot worse before we got down.

  Helen and I chatted through the first half hour, catching up on life in space. Then a piece of popcorn began a slow fall from someone’s bag. That first sign of gravity was our indication that we’d fallen far enough toward Earth for the atmosphere to be slowing us down.

  Outside, we began the slow process of heating up to 1,649 degrees Celsius. Outside the windows, the air began to glow orange with streamers of superheated atmosphere whipping past us in a wake of plasma. What’s funny is how quiet it gets during this part of the descent. We aren’t in enough atmosphere to cause vibrations, an
d are basically a big glider, so there’s no engine noise. But even quieter are the astronauts inside, watching the spectacle of reentry. It never gets old.

  The captain banked the ship in the first of a series of long S curves to kill some of our speed. The g-forces grabbed at us, pulling me down into my couch. It was only two G, but after months at one-sixteenth, it felt as though I were buried in mud.

  The g-forces continued to rise, pressing me into the side of my couch. I waited for the captain to pull us out of the turn into the next part of the S curve, but the rotation continued. This was not routine.

  And being stuck in the passenger compartment, there was not a darn thing I could do.

  TWO

  CYGNUS 14 LANDS OFF COURSE AFTER ERROR OR A GLITCH

  By STEVEN LEE MYERS

  KANSAS CITY, KS, Aug. 20, 1961—One of the Cygnus class spaceships that ferry astronauts from the International Aerospace Coalition’s Lunetta space station back to Earth landed about 260 miles past its intended target today, officials said, after a technical malfunction or piloting error during its fiery descent. The spaceship is a variant of the ones used almost since the program’s inception, but the ship that landed today was a new version, making its first trip with modified rockets and control systems that had been intended to ease its descent and landing.

  My arms weighed five thousand pounds, and a Clydesdale sat on my chest, drumming the walls with its hooves. I dragged my eyes open to see why no one had chased it off, and was rewarded with a regolith gray field. Not the moon. No … the chair in front of me. Groaning, I turned my head but stopped as nausea grabbed my stomach and squeezed it.

  At some point, the g-forces must have gotten high enough to make me pass out. I don’t know how the captain had managed to set the rocket down—or for that matter, what had gone wrong—but we appeared to be miraculously alive.

  The pounding continued, though the Clydesdale was simply the weight of my body under Earth gravity for the first time in three months. The air stank of vomit and urine. Slowly, I turned my head to check the life-support telemetry panel. All signs were earth-normal, but until they opened the door, we were still in an airtight can, and protocols had to be observed.

  Next I turned to check on Helen. She was still out, which wasn’t surprising, but otherwise appeared unharmed.

  I closed my eyes, taking slow controlled breaths through my mouth while we waited for the recovery team to come aboard. They were taking an extraordinarily long time. On the other hand, I didn’t know how long we’d been down or what else they had to deal with. Maybe one of the landing wheels had caught fire, or who knows what.

  Finally—and it’s a little embarrassing that it took this long—I realized that the pounding was coming from the hatch. It must be jammed. As much as my Southern training made me want to stand up and try to help, years of astronaut training brought the protocol checklist to the front of my mind.

  Smell of smoke? None. Oxygen? Confirmed. Injury? I was fine, Helen was fine … I opened my eyes and very carefully turned in my seat to look around the cabin. The other passengers were whey-faced or green, but no one seemed to be in unexpected distress. A Black man across the aisle with a crooked nose—one of the geologists from the Mars team, what was his name…?—anyway, he caught my eye. “Should we help with the door?”

  I did not shake my head. “They’ve got the tools. We’re safe, so we’ll let them do their job.”

  He nodded and immediately went gray-green, swallowing hard. I winced in sympathy. Anytime you changed gravity environments, sudden head movements were nauseating.

  Leonard Flannery—that’s right. We’d had a nice conversation about the Loire Valley at Helen and Reynard’s wedding. He’d been appalled that I hadn’t gotten to taste any wine there back when I was ferrying planes during the war.

  Vindicating my choice to stay put, the hatch opened with a hiss of changing pressure. The distant roar of our T-38 chase planes rumbled through the cabin. Sunlight and fresh air tumbled in, along with the scent of burnt rubber, raw earth, and, underneath all of that, freshly mowed grass. I closed my eyes again, because goddamn it, I was not going to weep over greenery.

  “Nobody move!” A gun cocked, metal on metal.

  My eyes snapped open of their own accord. Crowding through the hatch, six men in hunting camouflage held rifles trained on us. They were a mix of Black and white and tones in between, wearing various forms of masks over their faces. One had a balaclava, which masked everything but the fact that he was Black. Another with a sunburnt tan had a bandana tied over his face like a comic book bandit. A third had a gas mask. The rest wore dust masks from a construction site.

  How had they gotten past security at the IAC with—Oh. Wait. The chase planes were still circling. No telling where the captain had needed to set down, but my guess was that we weren’t in Kansas. I had no protocol or routine for this.

  Beside me, Helen groaned.

  “Hey! Shut up!” One man wearing a balaclava and armed with a gun and a heavy Brooklyn accent charged down the aisle to point his weapon at Helen.

  She snapped her head up and immediately vomited. Like the pro that she was, she managed to turn her head so that it didn’t hit me, though bile spattered her own thigh. It set off a wave of retching from other parts of the cabin.

  I swallowed hard, keeping my jaw clenched. Who knew that years of dealing with anxiety-fueled vomit would come in handy? Still, my heart labored against the stress and the gravity load as the Brooklyn man turned his gun toward each new sound. Behind the mask, his brown eyes were pinched and angry. “What the … What are they sick with?”

  Behind me, someone gagged. Another of the men said, “Don’t lift your mask! You don’t want to catch it.”

  “Space germs.”

  It was probably not the best choice to laugh, but a single “Ha!” escaped. It bounced around the cabin and drew all eyes to me. But, honestly … space germs? It sounded like something out of a radio serial.

  “You think that’s funny?” Brooklyn pushed closer to me, pressing the gun against my temple. The metal made a cold indention in my skin, grinding against the bone. “You think poisoning the Earth is funny?”

  “No, man. Don’t do this.” Leonard leaned against his straps. “You know how this will look. Don’t—”

  “Shut it.” Brooklyn pointed his rifle at Leonard. “I don’t have time for an Uncle Tom. You’re part of the problem, and we aim to stop it.”

  “Hey!” The man with the gas mask strode forward with proper military bearing, his gun held down at an angle. Even muffled behind a filter, his voice resonated like a drill sergeant. “Sick or not, the clock’s ticking. We aren’t going to get another chance like this, so—holy shit. You’re the Lady Astronaut.”

  Of all the times to encounter a fan, I had not anticipated it happening at gunpoint. Still, it gave me a script of sorts. I knew how to talk to fans. Even with the gun held to my temple, I smiled at the new man. Behind the lenses of the gas mask, he had muddy hazel eyes with a dark mote in one. “You must be a fan of Mr. Wizard.”

  “My daughter loves the show.” His eyes softened for a moment, but then he shook his head, shoulders tightening. “Doesn’t matter. Except…” He thumped Brooklyn on the upper arm. “She’ll do. They’ll pay attention to her.”

  “I thought we wanted the pilots.”

  “Well, we can’t fucking get to them, now, can we? Cockpit is sealed solid. But she’s a genuine celebrity. A national treasure. They’ll—”

  In the distance, sirens wailed, growing louder by the second. Brooklyn straightened, staring back at the door. “Shit. That was fast.”

  “What did you expect, doofus?” My fan reached out and grabbed my arm, trying to haul me out of my seat without undoing the shoulder straps.

  “Let me help?” I held my hands carefully where they could see. “There are a lot of buckles.”

  He grunted, stepping back to give me space. With leaden fingers, I fumbled with the shoulder str
aps. The weight of the Earth pulled me down, and even the straps weighed a thousand pounds. It didn’t matter how much time I spent in the gym on the moon, the first week on Earth was always Hell. All the while, the sirens dopplered closer to us.

  From his seat, Leonard said, “Please. Don’t use a white woman as your hostage. You know how this is going to go down.”

  For a moment my fan hesitated, then he shook his head. “They won’t care if we use a Negro as a hostage. The Lady Astronaut, though? That’ll get their attention.”

  When I shrugged off the second shoulder strap, my fan grabbed my arm again and hauled me to my feet. I leaned my weight on him and grabbed the seat back in front of me, while my brain tried to figure out what to do with all this extra weight. I struggled to support myself as the cabin spun wildly around me. Vomiting seemed like a plan.

  “She—” Helen’s voice cut off behind me. But, bless, her, she started again. “She will be dizzy. Go slow if you do not want her to vomit on you.”

  My stomach was already empty, because I avoid eating before a flight. Still. I stalled, trying to get my bearings. “What do you want me to do?”

  “You’re going to stand in the door and give our demands.” Brooklyn shoved me down the aisle, and I staggered as my feet dragged through the gravity.

  My fan caught me before I went down. “Just do as we say, and no one has to get hurt.”

  “Sure. Of course.” Catching my breath got harder. From exertion or fear, I’m not sure. Maybe both. I leaned on my fan as we made our way to the rocket hatch.

  The passengers all seemed to be awake now. Once upon a time, I’d known everyone in the astronaut corps, but now I only knew half of them on sight, and some of them seemed only vaguely familiar. Still. I knew Helen, Leonard, and Malouf would all be good in a pinch. Over by the door, Cecil Marlowe from engineering fiddled with his shoulder straps like he was thinking about getting up. Ruby Donaldson, with her blond pigtails, looked like a child, but had been a doctor on the front lines during the war.

  What must the pilots be doing up front? Presumably, they were conscious and aware of what was happening, or at least knew that someone other than the rescue team was aboard. There was an intercom to the back, but not a camera. If I were them, I’d be listening in right now, trying to get more information. I’d be piping it to Mission Control, too.