The Fated Sky

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  I cleared my throat. “What did the six of you want me to say?”

  Brooklyn stopped me at the end of the aisle. “Tell them there’s problems here on Earth. Leave space alone until you get the Earth fixed.”

  I nodded slowly. They were Earth Firsters, which I should have guessed sooner. Most of them tended to be refugees from regions that had been hit hardest in the aftermath of the Meteor. The fellow from Brooklyn had probably lost everything, and, being Black, had been left to rot in the ruins of Brooklyn. “Okay, but you don’t need everyone here in order for me to give a message…”

  “You’d like that, wouldn’t you.”

  “It would be kind.” Beyond the door, rescue vehicles pulled to a stop, lights flashing. It was a local ambulance and three fire trucks, not the IAC. One of them stopped sideways so I could read “Madison County” on its side. “Where are we?”

  “Alabama.”

  “Okay … well, it will take a while for someone from the IAC to get here.” Even with chase planes and radar trackers letting them know where we’d set down, they would still have to travel. “Since some people aren’t well, why don’t you let them off to go with the ambulance? It would … it would isolate any space germs.”

  One of the men peeked out, then pulled his head back in. “EMTs are heading this way.”

  “Stop them.” My fan jerked his chin, gas mask canisters wobbling with the movement.

  Taking a breath, the man at the door poked his rifle out and fired it into the air. The sound ricocheted in the cabin, filling it with violent echoes. He shouted out the door. “That’s close enough!”

  Brooklyn shoved me forward. His thumb dug into the flesh above my elbow, but his grip was the only thing keeping me upright.

  My fan glanced at me. “You’re going to tell them that we want a news crew here. And the president. And Dr. Martin Luther King.”

  “And the head of the UN,” one of the bandanaed men said. He had the darkest skin of the bunch and an unexpected British accent. I knew other black Brits, but had thought the Earth Firsters were all Americans.

  “You know … you know that’s not going to—” Not going to happen, but I caught myself before being too blunt. “That’s not going to be fast.”

  The Brit raised an eyebrow. “The ambulance got here fast.”

  “The ambulance is local.” I wasn’t sure what to do here. My training was in mathematics and piloting spaceships. What I knew about hostage situations was formed entirely from films, and I was fairly certain Suddenly wasn’t a good model. None of these men were going to mistake a cap gun for a revolver. I had no way to electrocute them. Heck, I could barely stand. Keeping them calm and cooperating seemed like the only way forward. “I’ll tell them, but I just want to make sure you’re prepared to wait.”

  “You aren’t in a position to tell us what to do,” the Brit said.

  “I understand. I’m only trying to make sure you have the information you need. It’s a five-hour flight from Kansas to here. Okay? That’s all I’m saying.” Actually, it was more like two hours, but I figured having extra time wouldn’t hurt … I mean, they could load the president into a T-38 and get him here in twenty minutes, but that seemed crushingly unlikely. I turned toward the door, squinting at the unfiltered sunlight. “They’ll ask why you want to talk to them.”

  “That can wait until they’re here. Right?” My fan gestured to the door. “News crew, the president, Dr. King, and the head of the UN. You say nothing else. Got it?”

  Brooklyn charged back down the aisle and aimed his rifle at Helen. “For insurance.”

  The only thing keeping me upright was adrenaline and the fact that I had spent decades learning to mask anxiety. Inside my suit, my skin felt too tight and my knees shook with each racing beat of my heart. Somehow, I was able to nod and step to the door.

  I braced my hand against the door frame. My fingers trembled, which undercut my attempt to display confidence. The firemen were standing near their truck, clearly consulting about what to do, while the ambulance driver had his radio out, talking to someone. One of the firemen saw me and nudged another.

  I inhaled to shout our captors’ instructions. That deep breath of unfiltered air, laden with dust and pollen and burned fuel, set off a coughing fit. Clutching the doorframe, I bent double. Not from the force of the coughs, but just to keep from passing out. Someone rested a hand on my back, and another on my arm, bracing me.

  “You okay?” My fan crouched down, using the doorframe as a shield.

  I nodded, and regretted it. Clamping my jaw shut, I swallowed hard and waited for the spinning to stop. “Help me stand? Slowly.”

  He nodded, gas mask bobbing with the movement, and helped me straighten. Leaving a hand on my arm, he stared at me with those muddy hazel eyes until I drew a more cautious breath. The EMT had come closer while I was coughing, as if he couldn’t help himself.

  I focused on him, a young white man in his early twenties, with frizzy blond hair that had writhed out of its pomade. “These men would like a news crew, and to speak to the president, the head of the UN, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.”

  “Who?” A fireman with shoulders like a bear, freckles spattering his pale cheeks, stepped away from the group. “What do they want?”

  I glanced to the side, and my fan shook his head. “Tell them they’ll find out when the president gets here.”

  Which, if I knew the government, meant never.

  Down the aisle, Brooklyn still had the rifle trained on Helen, so I repeated the message before stepping back out of the sunlight. “May I sit down, please?”

  I’d half expected them to say no out of spite, but my fan led me back to my seat. Brooklyn lowered his gun as we walked toward him and Helen slumped, as if the gun had been a gantry holding her up.

  Much as I wanted to drop into my seat, I lowered myself carefully. My fan helped me, as if I were an old lady and not a hostage. I cleared my throat, and would have given a lot for water. “I thought we could talk through what you want me to say when the president gets here. You mentioned problems on Earth…?”

  My fan exchanged a look with Brooklyn and then behind me as well, presumably checking in with our other captors. Across the aisle, Leonard leaned a little toward us, listening. At some point while I was in the front, he’d undone his shoulder harness.

  Narrowing his eyes, my fan studied me. I don’t know what he saw, but he eventually nodded. “People on Earth are getting left behind. All the money is going into the space program instead of cleaning up the mess that the Meteor left. People crowded into apartments. Refugees that still, after ten years, can’t go back to their homes because the insurance companies just say ‘Act of God!’ and that the governments are ‘allocating resources’ as needed.” His brows lowered with a scowl. “As if we can’t see where the resources are being allocated. As if we don’t know whose neighborhoods are being left out.”

  I spent so much time in the space industry and working with people who understood, intimately, what was happening to the Earth’s climate that it was easy to forget that many people had much more immediate needs. “If the climate keeps warming the way the meteorologists think it will, we’ll all be in trouble, unless we’ve established homes on other planets. It’s … The space program is for the people of Earth.”

  “Please. We’ve seen this before. Space will be for the elite and everyone else will be left behind.”

  I shook my head. “No. That’s not how it’s going to work.”

  “Look. Around.”

  I did, turning my head with care so I didn’t add to my malaise. Our captors had spread out so that two stood at the back of the cabin. Three were at the door, leaving my fan with me. All of the passengers had a greenish-grey tinge, though whether that was from gravity or the situation, I couldn’t say. Probably both. Helen had her hands folded in her lap and was wearing the set expression that consumed her when she played chess or did computations. Leonard had his hands tucked into his armpits
, sucking on his lower lip while he watched us. Ruby Donaldson’s right knee jiggled, and Vanderbilt DeBeer was chewing on the cuticle of his thumb.

  “Okay. Everyone looks miserable.”

  “Look again. How many people look like me?”

  I glanced at Leonard, across the aisle, and he winced. I swear, someday I will not be so slow to figure these things out. On a rocket full of astronauts, we had one Black man, a Taiwanese woman, and thirty white people. Or twenty-nine and a Jew, depending on how you counted me. “I can’t say that you’re wrong…”

  “But you’re going to try to anyway.” He shifted the gun in his grip.

  “It’s the early stages of the program.” People had this glamorous view of the space program created by shows like Buck Rogers, and it just wasn’t like that. “Look … I live on the moon six months out of the year. We have no running water. My bed is a sleeping bag. No alcohol—” Mostly. Nothing palatable, at any rate. “All the food is tinned. And an error could kill everyone in the colony. Currently you need to have a very specific set of skills to go into space. I think everyone here has a master’s or a doctorate.”

  My fan leaned down, eyes tight behind his gas mask. “And you’re making the assumption that Black people don’t.”

  Across the aisle, Leonard cleared his throat. “Some of us clearly do—” He stopped as my fan spun on him.

  With a jerk of his gas mask, my fan grunted. “Let’s hear what you have to say, Uncle Tom.”

  Leonard rolled his eyes. “The kinds of degrees they are looking for take more than hard work. They take money and connections. Mind you, this is a bone-headed stunt you’re pulling, but I agree with the why of it.”

  * * *

  Here’s the thing about spaceships: They are airtight. Even with the hatch open to the muggy air of Earth, we did not get a lot of circulation. It was August. In the South. And remember that thing about people vomiting everywhere thanks to the descent?

  Four hours into our wait, the heat and the smell just kept getting worse. Normally by this point we would have been floating on waterbeds at the IAC’s acclimation center. Instead, we were forced to sit upright, under full Earth gravity, in a sweltering room filled with the miasma of human ejecta.

  Helen reached over and put her hand on my leg, then she began tapping her forefinger. Brilliant woman that she is, it was Morse code. I rested my hand on hers as if we were comforting each other and tapped back an affirmative.

  In a string of long and short taps, she spelled out: USE GERM FEAR

  Tapping the back of her hand, I asked: HOW

  I PLAY DEATH. She paused and looked at me out of the corner of her eye. YOU TALK

  Oddly, I knew that she could “play death” well. There’s this thing in astronaut training called a “death sim” where we simulate what happens when an astronaut dies. Usually, the astronaut whose sim card comes up “death” just sits out the rest of the sim, but Helen had acted out her death scene, complete with an alarming rattle, and then just hung around, limp in the creepiest way possible.

  Goodness knows if it would work, but there was no way that the president would come … and no telling what these men would do if he didn’t. I sat up, looking around for my fan. His name was Roy, which I only knew because Brooklyn had asked him where the bathroom was.

  Roy was probably the only person who was remotely comfortable on the ship, because of his gas mask. I lifted my hand to get his attention and, wonder of wonders, he came right over. “I have been thinking about your goals, and I have a suggestion.”

  “I can’t wait to hear this.”

  In one of the most heroic acts I’ve ever seen, Helen leaned forward, whipping her head sharply, and vomited onto Roy’s shoes. All of the actions we avoid to keep from vomiting when we first come back to Earth, and she’d done them in rapid sequence with brilliant precision.

  Roy stumbled back, knocking into Leonard’s seat. Even behind the gas mask, his face was twisted with revulsion.

  The other captors went onto high alert instantly, rifles rising to point toward us, even while they tried to figure out what was going on. Helen raised her hand, shaking, and croaked, “Space…” She coughed. “Germs.”

  And then she collapsed, limp across my lap. Even knowing it was coming, I still recoiled in genuine shock. Then I put my hand at her throat, where her pulse was fast and hard. Looking up to Roy, I tried to will him to believe me. “She’s pretty bad.”

  Behind Roy, Leonard leaned forward in his seat. “Do you think anyone is going to listen to you if you let a rocket full of astronauts die? You think Dr. King is going to support that?”

  With my hand still on Helen’s neck, I begged, “Please. As a show of good faith, let the people who are the sickest off the rocket.”

  “Giving up our leverage, you mean?”

  “An act of compassion like letting people who aren’t well get the medical attention they need can only help your case.” It didn’t look like he was folding. Not even a little. “I’ll stay here as your go-between.”

  Dawn Sabados from comms dry-heaved then, and it broke the composure of one of the lightskinned men wearing a bandanna. He shook his head at Roy. “Come on … Before we all catch it.”

  Safely behind his gas mask, Roy turned to look at each of his compatriots. Brooklyn had a hand clapped over his nose, even with the balaclava. He pulled his hand away long enough to say, “Do it.”

  “Okay.” He reached down to grab my arms. “You need to tell them what’s happening.”

  I eased Helen off my lap. She stayed as “dead” as she had in the sim, letting one arm droop to the floor. Roy helped me to my feet and the room swayed, graying around me. I clenched something—the seat back, I think—until I was steady enough to stumble down the aisle.

  Before we got to the door, I paused and turned to Roy. “The EMTs will need to meet them as they come out. Most will be too weak to stand.”

  The Brit looked up from where he leaned against the doorframe, rifle at ready. “Two by two?”

  Roy nodded. “No heroics.”

  “Understood.” I walked to the door. The Brit had to reach out a hand to steady me. The sun had dipped in the sky, painting everything a beautiful golden color, punctuated by the red and blue swirling lights of emergency responders. The ambulances had multiplied, and there were police cars as well. The protestors had their news crews now. It looked like all three networks, plus multiple radio stations, had come out to set up shop.

  Not too close, though, because they were all behind the military cordon that had formed around the rocket. When I stepped into the doorframe, all the guns raised to point at me. I had to swallow before I could speak. “They want to let some of the astronauts out, as a show of good faith. Two at a time. EMTs can come forward to meet the astronauts.”

  And then they hauled me back from the door. My knees went out from beneath me and I fell to the floor of the rocket. The Brit grabbed me, hauling me to my feet, and the sudden change … Well. I passed out.

  When I woke up, it was just me and the protesters on a ship reeking of vomit and fear.

  THREE

  EARTH FIRST PROTESTERS ABOARD SPACESHIP FREE 31 OF 32 HOSTAGES “AS A GESTURE”

  By DAVID BIRD

  MONTGOMERY, AL, Aug. 21, 1961—Earth First protesters seized an opportunity when the spaceship Cygnus 14 landed off-course, and stormed the craft, taking 32 astronauts hostage. Earlier today they released, “as a gesture of good faith,” all but one of those astronauts. The remaining hostage, Dr. Elma York, known as the Lady Astronaut, is still being held until the protesters’ demands are met, and has been serving as their means of communication with officials.

  Hour ten. The ship was dark, lit only by the observation lights the rescue team had set up outside. My vestibular system hated being back on Earth in full gravity. I was ill, and even weaker than I had been when we’d first landed. Despite my best efforts, I’d fainted two more times after they had me walk to the door to make another demand f
or the president, the head of the UN, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

  They weren’t going to come. I knew that. It was only a matter of time before the Earth Firsters understood it too. President Denley had a reputation for ordering his troops to fire on civilians in the Korean War. I didn’t think he would bend for these men.

  In between trips to the door, I sat in one of the vacant seats near the front of the rocket with my head against the neck restraints, and tried to nap. Even at 2 a.m., sitting in the dark, I was too tense to sleep, but while my eyes were closed, the protesters were freer about their conversation.

  “Bloody hell. I’m hungry.” That was the Brit, whose name was Lysander. He was married to Brooklyn’s sister, who was Roy’s cousin. It had become clear that this whole thing wasn’t really planned. The men had been hunting, seen the rocket come down, and all their anger from the past ten years boiled over into action.

  “You think you can get them to bring us some food?” Brooklyn shook my shoulder.

  I waited until he shook me a second time before opening my eyes. Again, I was using film tactics, figuring it might help to pretend to be weaker than I was. Not that I could really be much weaker. “Hm?”

  Pointing to the door, Brooklyn repeated himself. “Tell them to bring us some food.”

  Roy shook his head. “Don’t be an idiot. They could poison anything they send us.”

  “So we ask for cans.” Brooklyn shrugged. “Can of SPAM and a loaf of bread. We can make sandwiches.”

  At the word “SPAM,” my stomach made a desperate leap for my throat. I tried to swallow it back into place. “May I go to the restroom? I think I’m going to—” I pressed a hand over my mouth. “Please?”

  Roy got a hand under my arm and hauled me to the restroom. It was optimized for space travel, with a vacuum toilet and a bar to hold you in place. On Earth, the gravity feed worked just fine.