The Fated Sky

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  “I brought you some pie.” I sent the baggie spinning across the mod to her.

  Florence snatched it out of the air with a grin. “You are my favorite person.”

  I snorted.

  “Right now.” She winked. “Keep plying me with your pie…”

  “Ply pie.”

  “I sigh…” She opened the baggie and inhaled deeply. “Seriously, though. Consider me bribed. What do you need?”

  “Nothing.” I stopped as she gave me The Look. “Caught me. Did you run my burn plan through the mechanical computer?”

  “Every time, as per protocol. You know it’s never caught you out even once.” She narrowed her gaze at me. “Why?”

  “I just … Reassurance? I’m working without all the numbers that I’d have if Earth were…”

  “It’s fine, Elma. No errors.”

  I swallowed. “Thanks. Anything I can do for you? I mean, you’re sort of trapped in here.”

  She shrugged, as if the schedule adjustment to keep the ComMods on both ships staffed at all times were no big deal. “Eh. At least it means I don’t have to do laundry anymore. And Parker has me rotating with Rafael and Leonard.”

  “All the same … need anything?”

  Florence patted the intercom next to her. “I’ll call if I do. And I’ll call the moment we hear from them.”

  The longer the silence went, the more worried we all got. But while the undercurrent of fear grew, so did our kindness, in much the same way people rallied together after the Meteor.

  Please, God. Please let it not be another meteor.

  “Well. I’d better get up to the bridge. Just wanted to drop that off on my way.”

  “Much appreciated.” She clipped the baggie to the wall. “It’ll be my treat after I finish this bit.”

  With a wave, I kicked out of the ComMod and grabbed a handrail to propel myself up to the bridge. I wanted to be there before Parker, so he couldn’t complain about me being late.

  As I passed through the hatch of the CM I hesitated, gnawing on the inside of my lip. Sitting in the copilot’s chair on the bridge shouldn’t be a big deal—it was only one seat over from the NavComp station—and yet it made me keenly aware of Terrazas’s absence. I gripped the back of his chair. What would he say about all this? “In this installment, our intrepid adventurers…”

  Behind me, Parker sighed. I froze, blushing because he’d caught me being silly. He cleared his throat. “Our intrepid adventurers begin their approach to Mars … He was a good man.”

  “Yeah.”

  Parker put a hand on my shoulder. “You’ll do fine, York.”

  Goddamn it if my eyes didn’t fill with tears. I wiped them off on the back of my sleeve before they could blind me. “Well, I don’t have his radio voice.” Pulling myself around the seat, I settled into it. One meter to the left of where I usually sat, and it was an entirely different world. “You look over the burn plan?”

  Of course he had. It was insulting to ask, but I had to fill the silence with something. Parker slid into his own chair, buckling in. “Looks good. It’s just a little off the original flight plan.”

  Which was to be expected, and yet … I wasn’t used to being worried about my math.

  Rafael had reconfigured the CM a little to put my NavComp tools within reach of the copilot chair, including plugging a gimbal arm for my sextant into a WIF socket so I could keep it out, but not have to hold it. It was more for comfort than anything else, because Heidi and I had calculated the burn already, and Florence and Dawn had fed that information into the mechanical computers on the Santa Maria, which would do an automatic burn.

  But what if I was starting from an erroneous data point? It could be like the time that I’d misidentified Alkaid in the sim and sent us all to our deaths. Yes. Yes, I know that there were safeguards, but I hate computing without the benefit of all the information I’m used to. “Okay … Set to roll 198.6, pitch 130.7, and yaw 340.”

  Parker began flipping switches on the control panel, calling out his settings as he did. “198.6, 130.7, 340.”

  As copilot, my job was simply to make certain that everything was set correctly. Nothing more, right now, but I watched him set up for the burn like a hawk.

  The timer ticked us closer to the mark for the burn. Wetting my lips, I pulled the mic to me. “Prepare for burn. Ten, nine, eight…” Everyone would already be in lockdown. “Seven, six, five…” Next to me, Parker held the ship’s joystick lightly in his hand. “… four, three, two, one—”

  He fired the engines. The seat slammed forward to meet us, and outside the viewport, flame blossomed from the back of the Pinta as they started their burn.

  I dragged in air past the weight sitting on my chest. If I needed reminding that the spinning section of the Niña only had Mars gravity, this was it. Ten seconds. An eternity. They are much the same thing sometimes.

  Ten seconds and everything had changed. We had begun the slowdown for Mars.

  THIRTY

  First Mars Expedition Mission Log, Cmdr. Stetson Parker:

  July 19, 1963, 1:05 a.m.—Niña and Pinta teams have completed preparations for insertion into Mars orbit. Day 53 of communication blackout with IAC.

  I thought it was a dream, at first. I was floating in the dark of crew quarters when Florence very calmly said, “Parker, come to the ComMod. Repeat. Parker to ComMod.”

  She was so calm that I almost drifted back to sleep. There were no alarm bells. No Klaxons. It wasn’t an emergency, and she had sounded so gentle. Kam whispered, “Is it Mission Control?”

  That ratcheted me to full alertness. I twisted in my sleeping bag to peer out of my cubby.

  Parker floated in the middle of crew quarters, pulling a flight suit on over his underwear. “Don’t know yet. Stay here.”

  I had been undoing the straps that kept my sleeping bag closed, but stopped as I woke up a little more. Right. They didn’t need everyone crowding in there. Not that I’d be able to sleep, wondering what was going on. It could simply be a call from the Pinta, though few calls in the middle of the night were innocuous.

  Still zipping up, Parker kicked off and drifted over to me. “York,” he whispered. “With me.”

  And that woke me the rest of the way up. As his copilot, he’d need me, in case whatever this was required moving the ship or God knows what.

  I pushed the neck of the bag the rest of the way open and slipped out. Grabbing my flight suit, I nodded. “Right behind you.”

  He didn’t wait, and spun in the air to aim toward the hatch into the spindle. As I wriggled into my suit, the rest of the crew poked their heads out of their cubbies like gophers.

  Leonard’s teeth flashed in the dim light. “Do you know what’s going on?”

  “I know as much as you.” I zipped my suit shut, twisting to head to the hatch. “Parker will give a SitRep as soon as he has it.”

  SitRep—situation report. So much tension packed into those syllables. I flew down the spindle to the ComMod as Parker hooked around the corner and vanished into its hatch. As I got closer, the constant hum of the Niña’s fans seemed to part and let the clatter of the teletype through like angels singing hosannas.

  “Baruch ata Adonai, Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam, hagomel lahayavim tovot, sheg’molani kol tov.” The prayer of thanks slipped out, even though I still had a list of worries as long as my arm.

  As I caught the edge of the hatch and swung into the ComMod, Florence’s face gave me a lot of the answers I needed. Or raised more questions. Or both. She was smiling, but her eyes were red, as if she’d been crying. “Yes, it’s Mission Control. Yes, Nathaniel is on the team sending the message.”

  “Thank God.” I clutched my chest as if I were a damsel in a melodrama. But, honestly, I felt as if someone had just untied me from the railroad tracks. I still didn’t know why the Earth had been out of contact for almost two months, but my husband was alive and well. I swallowed the tears of relief and tried to focus on my job. “What happene
d?”

  “Protesters.” Parker hunched over the teletype, reading the pages as they fed out of it. “The Earth Firsters knocked out the satellites.”

  “My God.”

  Florence pushed off the desk to get closer to the teletype. “How the hell?”

  “Apparently that conspiracy theory about someone in the IAC being a member of Earth First … not so crackpot. Someone in the computer department sent up bad code that deorbited both satellites. Jesus.” He ran a hand over his hair, resting it on the bald spot. “They took out the power grid in Kansas, too.”

  “Wait—who was it?” I also pulled myself closer to the teletype, which continued to rattle as if it were a small child that had been waiting all day for Daddy to get home.

  “Um…” He scrolled down the page. “Curtis Frye, Jennifer Lynn, and Tyler Richter.”

  “I don’t know them.”

  “New hires, apparently—” Parker stopped moving. The pages scrolled up through his limp fingers. He took a breath and turned an utterly impersonal mask to Florence. “Let the crew know that we’ve reestablished contact with Earth. I doubt any of them went back to sleep. York, help facilitate the distribution of personal mail and prepare updated duty rosters. I’ll review those before we hand them out. Now, if you’ll excuse me.”

  Parker turned a somersault and kicked off to swim smoothly out the hatch of the ComMod.

  Here’s the thing: I know what it looks like when Parker gets bad news. I remember, from the days when he had trouble with his leg going numb, how he goes cold and concentrates on business. I know the faint green tinge that colors his cheeks.

  As Florence grabbed the edge of the desk and pulled herself closer to the teletype, my mind unfolded the facts into a rigid equation. Personal mail was coming through. The Kansas power grid went down. His wife was in an iron lung.

  I was halfway to the hatch before I’d thought about it. It would kill him to have anyone offer sympathy. So why did I follow him? I don’t know. Or, no … I do. There are some things you don’t let anyone, not even your worst enemy, go through alone. And I was his copilot.

  The spindle was empty. He had tucked into some nook while I was still sorting things out.

  Some nook—I stopped outside the hatch to the BusyBee. Soundproof.

  Through the porthole, the interior was lit only by sunlight reflected from the Pinta. Parker floated in the middle in a silent ball.

  I tried to undog the hatch as noisily as possible, so he’d have plenty of warning. But when I pulled it open, the sound came out. He couldn’t have heard anything.

  I said that I knew what it looked like when Parker received bad news. No. I knew what his public face looked like. This … Each sob shook his entire body and bounced off the walls of the BusyBee in ragged waves. He floated in the middle of the aisle, wrapped into a tiny ball, as if he could contain his own grief.

  For a moment I hesitated, because he didn’t know I was there and would not thank me. But who else was I supposed to get? Kam, maybe. Benkoski, if we were still on the Pinta. It didn’t matter. I was here, and I had made the choice to follow.

  “Parker?”

  He jerked, lifting his head. Even with his back to me, I could see his effort to pull the mask into place. His breath tore into coughs and ragged pants. Parker swiped his arm across his eyes, spinning globules of water across the cabin. “Does Mission Control need me?”

  I shook my head, then realized he still couldn’t see. “No.” Biting my lip, I pushed closer until I floated just behind him. I almost asked him directly, but I still didn’t have permission to talk about his wife. “The power grid … I’m so sorry.”

  He broke.

  That thin hull of control shattered on reentry and he disintegrated into racking sobs. I wrapped my arms around him, as if I could help him stay together, or maybe just find the pieces afterward. Parker hung in my embrace. One hand latched onto my forearm and dug in as if he were trying to pull himself back.

  We rotated in that dark space as his grief spun out around us.

  * * *

  “I’m sorry.” Parker’s voice was rough and thick. He rubbed his sleeve across his eyes. “Jesus Christ, I’m—” His voice broke again, and, for a moment, his chest jerked with silent weeping.

  He coughed and cleared his throat. “Shit. Sorry.”

  “What can I do?”

  “Cover for me?” He stretched out a little from the tight ball he’d been in, and I let him go. “I’m going to be a mess for a while.”

  “Sure.” I let momentum create some space between us. “Do you want me to get anyone else?”

  “Fuck, no. Don’t tell a goddamned soul.”

  “Okay.” I bit my lip, aware that I’d left Florence with all the papers pouring out of the teletype. “Florence might have told people.”

  Parker drifted slowly through the BusyBee, his face as red and swollen as if he’d been stung by wasps. He shook his head. “There’s no way she could know. There’s a message ‘from’ Mimi with all the other personal messages. But … heh … you weren’t the only one with a private cipher. Just the one who got caught.”

  “Oh.”

  “Bet you got a lot to say about that.”

  “Teach me how to not get caught?”

  He laughed until it turned into weeping again. He wiped his face. “I knew they’d pull something like this, that they wouldn’t want me to be upset if she died, and they’d fake letters from her. So there was a code. It went into everything. Even the shortest of messages. Wasn’t there.”

  “Maybe they edited—”

  “Don’t.” He straightened and jabbed a finger at me. “Don’t you fucking dare give me false hope, York. She couldn’t survive outside the iron lung for more than an hour. Two, at the most. Our backup generator would last for twenty-four hours. A week and a half without power? She would have made damn sure her code was in the message after that. Mimi is—”

  His face crumpled as his mouth snapped shut to keep back a moan.

  I pulled closer, but he shook his head, so I stopped. “I’ll … I’ll go cover.”

  He nodded. “Be there as soon as I can.”

  “Take your time.”

  He gave a half laugh and waved me away. It felt wrong to leave him alone, which was a new sensation—usually I wanted to get away from him as fast as I could. Putting a hand on one of the chairs in the BusyBee, I reoriented myself to face the hatch. With a push of my fingertips, I floated up to that end of the cabin.

  “York?” The humming fans almost masked his voice.

  “Yeah?” I used the hatch edge to turn and face him.

  “Tonight, will you … will you help me recite the Kaddish for her? I don’t … I don’t know it, and—” Parker pressed the heels of both hands against his eyes and ground his teeth together.

  “Yes. Of course.”

  He nodded, jaw still tight. I slipped out and let the door of the BusyBee mask the rest.

  THIRTY-ONE

  TWO SATELLITES REVIVE IN SPACE

  KANSAS CITY, KS, July 19, 1963—Two United Nations communication satellites which had been presumed dead following terrorist acts by Earth First in May were restored through a herculean effort by the International Aerospace Coalition. These satellites, which have provided easy telephonic communication on Earth, were also part of the network that allowed communication with the First Mars Expedition. The astronauts and astronettes have been isolated from the rest of humankind as their ships hurtled through fathomless space. The entire world is thrilled to learn that their mission has continued and that they were preparing to enter Mars orbit. In a teletype interview, Mission Commander Stetson Parker said, “We were entrusted by the people of Earth to carry out this mission and I look forward to showing them the grand sight of our sister planet.”

  The letter from Nathaniel burned a hole in the pocket of my flight suit, but I was resolutely not reading it. Parker hadn’t emerged yet from the BusyBee, and we had work to do.

  I s
tood at the front of the kitchen next to the whiteboard. Where Parker should be. Thank God for his clipboard, which hid how badly my hands were shaking. I have to say, my anxiety is incredibly stupid. It chose now, when I was faced with a room of four whole people—people I knew—to decide that my throat should close.

  1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 …

  I cleared my throat. Or tried to. Good thing I had experience talking around a lump. “This is the duty roster that Mission Control sent up, but Parker is reviewing it before we lock anything in.” Not that I really thought his “review” time would set him to rights. “Until we’re ready to send the lander down, there are no changes from what we rehearsed back on Lunetta, so our plans this week will start with reviewing material.”

  Parker slid down the ladder into the kitchen. “Thanks for getting us started, York.” He had bathed, and carried the scent of aftershave into the room. “Just got off the line with Benkoski, and I have some updates.”

  I held out his clipboard. He took it with a nod, but didn’t meet my gaze. He held the board in one hand, letting it hang at his side in a seemingly casual pose, but his knuckles stood out white against his skin.

  I took a step to retreat to the safety of the kitchen table, but Parker stopped me. “Stay put.” Then he did that thing, where he rolls his neck to crack it before starting work. “All right, people. You have a lot of questions, and I told Grey and York to hold off until I could talk to Mission Control directly. There’s information they couldn’t say in the clear, and, truly, they would probably rather that I not tell you either, but fuck ’em. Here’s the SitRep.”

  My teammates came to full attention. Leonard had his elbows on the table with his hands steepled in front of his face. Rafael lifted his head. Florence cocked hers to the side, eyes narrowing. And Kam sat forward, uncrossing her legs.

  “The Earth Firsters weren’t working alone. They had a collaborator inside the IAC computer department. They also made a strike at the Kansas spaceport, and knocked out the power grid, using arms from the former Soviet Union—we’re still not sure if Russia was an active participant, but it seems possible.”