The planet had been just out of view earlier, when the pod-rocket was braking directly opposite its own orbital velocity. My helmet was still pressed against the pod, so to get back on course, all I had to do was get Earth down out of my view. I didn’t need to know the numbers; I could use the giant visual reference below me.
Positive pitch. Upward rotation along lateral transverse axis. I remembered my flight school terminology. You always wanted to be a pilot, right? Now’s your chance. FLY.
I switched my wrist controls over to the forward-facing suit thrusters, vectored them forty-five degrees down, and pulsed them once. The Earth began setting, barely fast enough to see, then stopped as the pod-rocket continued pushing. I pulsed my jets again and again, watching each time to make sure I didn’t overcompensate.
“Nice and easy, Kenna,” I muttered. What was it Travis always said, when he was running circles around me in one of his video games? Small moves, Mom.
It wasn’t easy. The rocket was still firing unevenly, so I had to nudge myself backward a little bit at a time, hoping the fuel in my forward RCS wouldn’t run out.
More alerts popped up in my HUD. The pod exterior temperature had reached one hundred twenty-five percent of my suit’s rated tolerance. My pulse was pushing one eighty. I took a moment to silence all the alarms so I could concentrate on maneuvering. My fingertips felt wet inside my gloves; I was sweating faster than the material could wick away the moisture.
I watched the curve of the Earth slide up, down, and just enough from side to side to make me nervous. I could deal with one axis of rotation and a little wobble, but too much more and I wouldn’t be able to eyeball it.
And so I passed the longest twenty-three seconds of my life, tapping my thruster controls while a plasma fire roared behind me and the Earth bobbed up and down in front of me. The view might have been beautiful. I didn’t notice.
All I could think was, I will never again tell my son he plays too many video games.
When the burn stopped, it was so abrupt—from noise to silence, without any sputtering or fading—and I was so focused that it took me a second to realize what had happened. Then the radio came back, and I nearly wept.
“—are you there?” Roger’s voice was tight and flat, as if he’d been repeating himself over and over. “Kenna, this is Gladstone, please respond—”
“I’m here!” I said, blinking away tears. “I’m still here.”
I heard him exhale. “We lost you for a minute,” he said. “What happened?”
I told him about the plasma fire, the EM interference, and my seat-of-the-pants maneuvering against the misfiring rocket. “Am I still on course?” I asked.
“Affirmative,” Roger said after a long pause.
“Would you tell me if I wasn’t?”
“Absolutely,” he said, too quickly this time.
I decided I didn’t really want to know. “Okay. I’m moving to the other end of the pod now.”
“Copy that.”
I stood up on the cargo pod, walked across its length, and leaned over the door to inspect my rocket nozzle. Amazingly, despite a large crack down one side and charring all around, the bell was still intact. I took a picture and resolved to only buy space equipment from that manufacturer for as long as I lived.
I pulled myself upright again and bent my knees. Then I de-magnetized my boots and kicked off as hard as I could, jettisoning my used pod-rocket stage.
I had one final maneuver left. Only one more thing that could possibly go wrong—or so I thought.
“You’re sure the train’s holding position?” I asked Roger.
“We issued the remote command as soon as your pod separated,” he said. “It took some distance for the emergency brakes to decelerate the vehicle to a complete stop, but it shouldn’t be more than a few kilometers above where you’re going to hit the ribbon. Within range of your suit jets, in any case. Your Ops must still be unconscious; he hasn’t responded to any radio hails.”
“And what happens if he wakes up and decides he needs to continue the ascent?”
“We overrode the drive controls and added a password lock. The vehicle’s not going anywhere until you get back aboard.”
“How’d you clear that with Legal?”
There was a pause. “We . . . haven’t exactly told them what we’re doing. It’ll take them a couple of hours to figure it out, and longer than that to get a security team out here.”
I felt a lump in my throat. “Thank you, Roger.”
“Don’t thank me yet,” he said. “Let’s see if this crazy stunt works first. Two hundred seconds.”
I cleared my throat. “Thank you for trying.”
“Hey,” Roger said, “I’ve been on this control desk for four years. You’re the first ostech who’s ever asked me what my name is. That’s something.”
“My husband’s a lawyer,” I said. “Whatever the company does to you and your team after this, he’ll represent you.”
“Aw, hell, you’re married?” Roger said. “Now you tell me.”
I smiled. “Yeah, I’m a wrinkled old lady. Did I not mention that?”
Roger chuckled. “You got kids?”
“We have a son.” I saw Travis’ face in my mind: smiling, crying, sleeping.
“Well, you’ll have one heck of a bedtime story to tell him in a couple weeks,” Roger said.
“Yeah.” I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Listen, if I don’t make it, I want you to tell my family something.”
“Your signal’s breaking up, Kenna,” Roger said.
“I said, if I don’t make it, I want you to give a message to my family.”
“Do not copy, Kenna,” Roger said, “and if you keep talking that way, I’m not going to listen.”
I laughed in spite of myself. “Don’t be a dick, Gladstone.”
“No, ma’am, I’m not feeling sick at all,” he said. “One hundred seconds to target. Are you ready?”
I checked, double-checked, and triple-checked my equipment. My right glove held a coiled work cable with my multitool tied to one end and the other end secured around my waist. My left glove rested on my suit’s rescue paddle. “Good to go.”
“Target in thirty seconds,” Roger said, his voice cool and calm again. “Prepare for capture on your starboard, repeat, starboard side.”
“Copy that,” I said. “Thirty seconds, starboard side.” Timing was going to be everything here. I could barely see the silver line that was the EL ribbon, twinkling ahead of me like a single strand of a spider’s web.
Roger counted me down from fifteen.
When he reached “zero,” I swung my right arm as hard as I could and threw out the cable. At the same time, I squeezed the rescue paddle to deploy my suit’s crash gear. A series of airbags inflated all around me, and tiny reservoirs at the edges of my backpack burst open and sprayed quick-setting polyfoam to fill the gaps between the airbags.
Everything after that was, as they say, in Sir Isaac Newton’s hands.
The EL was a momentary grey blur as I flew past. But I had flung my cable across to the far side of the ribbon, and when those perpendicular lines collided, the weights on either side of the work cable—my spacesuited self and my heavy multi-tool—swung out of their forward trajectories and into rapidly decaying orbits around the ribbon.
I had played out the entire length of my work cable, but my relative speed was so great that the whole cable wrapped around the ribbon in a matter of seconds. I didn’t even have time to become nauseated. I felt three things in rapid succession: a gentle tug when the cable first hit the ribbon; a sharp lurch when the multi-tool ballast smacked into the ribbon, anchoring that end; and a skull-jarring crash when I collided with the ribbon, transferring all my velocity into it.
My ears were still ringing when I regained my senses, and it took me a moment to orient myself. All but two of my airbags had burst, and most of the polyfoam had been smashed into a white haze all around me. I waved away the debris unti
l I could look up and down the EL.
It’s mind-boggling to witness something that big actually moving. I saw waves traveling along the ribbon, moving downward and making the carbon nanotube shimmer in the lower atmosphere, then racing upward to shake the stopped train. I wondered if that would finally wake up Nick. I also wondered how many alarms were going off in all the various EL control centers right now.
Yeah, I thought, watching the ripples propagate and interfere with each other, that’s definitely coming out of your paycheck.
I popped my ears and realized the buzzing noise I’d been hearing was actually Roger talking to me.
“Sierra, Gladstone, please respond, over.” He sounded more than a little frantic. “Sierra, this is Gladstone, come in, over. Dammit!”
“I’m here!” I said, hardly believing it. “Gladstone, Sierra, I am going to get you an ancient bottle of single malt and the best legal defense in the Solar System!”
“That’s great,” Roger said. I heard shuffling noises in the background. “Listen, we’ve got some visitors here, but you are go for ascent. If you need help, ask your favorite aunt. I repeat, if you need help—”
The line went dead. I checked to make sure my suit radio was working, but I suspected I knew what had happened.
It hadn’t taken Legal quite as long as Roger had hoped to get wise to his shenanigans, and they’d sent a team to shut down Gladstone Control. Security wasn’t going to listen to a bunch of flight engineers explain why they needed to crash a human being into the EL. They were going to lock down that tiny tracking station in the wilds of Oregon and make sure they didn’t have some kind of terrorist cell going on there.
Six different disasters in one day. I briefly wondered if that was some kind of record, then got back to work.
As my un-safed RCS thrusters pushed me upward, rattling my teeth, I wondered what Roger had meant by asking my favorite aunt for help.
It took me the better part of an hour to fly back up the ribbon to the train. My retro burn had cost me a lot of altitude. Then it took another fifteen minutes to climb around the power receiver panels to the crew compartment.
Miraculously, Nick was awake by then, and he opened the airlock for me. Stale recycled air had never smelled so sweet.
A moaning sound greeted me when I pulled off my helmet inside the cabin. Nick was slumped over the control station, head against his arms. I tapped him on the shoulder. He jerked upright, sending drops of sweat flying backward off his pale skin. His eyes were bloodshot but alert.
“Where the hell you been?” he slurred. “Shit. You get sick, too?”
“What? No.” I glanced at a nearby mirror and saw that perspiration had plastered my hair to my head in an unflattering mess. “Oh, that. Funny story.”
“Could use a laugh,” he grumbled. An alert sounded, and he smacked the console to silence it. “Shut up.”
“You know that was the radio, right?” I prepared to wrestle him down if he became delirious.
“Yeah, yeah, it’s Ground Control again.” Nick waved at the sea of blinking red lights on the neighboring drive station. “Computer called emergency stop while we were both out. Oh, we also lost pod two. You know anything about that?”
“Later,” I said. “What’s the problem with drive control?”
“Locked out!” Nick said. “Ground says they’re locked out too, and we need to do a local override. But stupid computer won’t accept my password.”
Thank you, Roger. “Let me take a look.”
“Whatever.” Nick put his head down and resumed moaning.
I pulled myself over to the drive station. Our instruments still showed some sway in the ribbon, but within normal tolerances. GEO was thrusting upward and had already dampened most of the vibration from my impact. Status reports showed only minor equipment damage at both ends. Of course, someone would need to go EVA to remove the mess of cable I’d left behind, and probably rebond that section of the ribbon. Later.
I brought up the drive controls and smiled. The computer wanted the password to login a user named NEEDHELP.
I typed in SIERRA. That didn’t work. AUNTSIERRA did.
The console indicators changed from red to green, and our drive controls came back online with a flurry of electronic chimes.
Thank you, Roger.
“What?” Nick raised his head and squinted at the console. “The fuck? How’d you do that?”
I set the controls to resume our ascent. The cabin shuddered as we began moving again. “It’s a long story.”
Nick wheezed. “We’ve got a few days to kill.”
He pointed at the clock above his head, which showed our remaining mission time: five days, eleven hours, and forty-two minutes.
Five days up, then ten days down. Another two weeks of routine maintenance duty.
That wasn’t long at all, compared to the rest of my life.
“Sure,” I said, grinning like an idiot. “Just let me get out of this stinking spacesuit first.”
* * *
Curtis C. Chen writes speculative fiction, puzzle games, and freelance non-fiction near Portland, Oregon. His short fiction has appeared in Daily Science Fiction, Leading Edge magazine, and SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror. He is a graduate of the Clarion West and Viable Paradise writers’ workshops. Curtis is not an aardvark.
For a complete bibliography, visit his web site: www.curtiscchen.com/stories.
In the following story, Grand Master James Gunn takes us on a journey where no one has gone before, at least in reality, as a team of travelers pass through a wormhole, going down . . .
THE RABIT HOLE
by James Gunn
“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice.
—Lewis Carroll
They existed inside an explosion of light. It filled their waking moments and their dreams. They heard it as a background of white noise; they smelled it underlying a stench of human and machine effluvia; they felt it like the warp of their world; they ate it with their breakfast cereal.
The external viewscreens were blank. They had been turned off; nobody remembered who had done it or when. But they knew the glare was out there just beyond the walls of the ship. It was the only thing they knew for certain since they had entered the wormhole.
“No one knows what happens inside a wormhole,” Adrian Mast said, turning in the swivel chair that faced the useless controls.
“Except us,” Frances Farmstead replied.
They were inside the control room of the spaceship they had helped build. Although there was nothing to control, they found themselves meeting there as if by prearrangement. But that was impossible.
“If we really knew what was happening,” Adrian said. “Or remembered from one encounter to the next.”
“We should make notes.”
“I’ve tried that,” Adrian said. He wrote a note to himself on a pad of paper. He showed it to Frances. It read: make notes. “But I’ve never come across any record of anything I’ve written, on the computer or by hand.”
“That’s strange,” Frances said, leaning back. “I’ll have to try it.”
“It’s as if there is no before and after,” Adrian said.
“It’s a mystery,” Frances said. She was seated in the swivel chair next to him. She was wearing loose-fitting khaki coveralls. Moments earlier, he thought, she had been wearing a kind of body stocking. No, that had been Jessica, and it wasn’t moments earlier. It had been before they entered the wormhole.
“We’ve got to solve it like a mystery,” Frances said. “Like Ellery Queen or Nero Wolfe. Putting together clues.”
“There’s something wrong with that,” Adrian said, “but I can’t remember what. Maybe that’s the trouble. We can’t remember.”
“We should make notes,” Frances said.
“I’ll try that,” Adrian said. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“We had been accelerating for a long time, and then—and then—”
The
crew had built the ship from alien plans. That was strange enough, but what was stranger was that the plans had been decoded from a message communicated in energetic cosmic rays picked up by SETI, decoded by a computer genius, and then smuggled to an incurious world disguised as a UFO cult book titled Gift from the Stars. Adrian had discovered it on a remainder table and recognized that the designs might work, and Frances had helped him track down the author, Peter Cavendish, only to find that he was in a mental institution. Just because he was psychotic, however, didn’t mean that all his ideas were crazy. The ultimate bureaucrat, William Makepeace, took Cavendish’s notions seriously, and, even though Makepeace tried to stop them, Adrian and Frances released the information to the world.
It didn’t work out the way Makepeace feared, but it didn’t work out the way Adrian and Frances had hoped, either. Rather than building a spaceship, the world used the aliens’ antimatter collection process and engine designs to solve the energy problems of Earth, and once those were taken care of, most other human problems seemed to melt away. With Earth becoming utopia, nobody wanted to go into space any more, except for a few troublemakers. The Energy Board took ten years to see the wisdom of letting the malcontents depart, and the malcontents took five years more to build the ship. Then, when they started the engines, the ship began a headlong plunge into space controlled by a Trojan-horse program within the computer, inserted perhaps by aliens, certainly by Peter Cavendish. But Cavendish wasn’t with them. He had been torn between his need for answers to the questions that once had driven him over the edge and the fear that the test flight would fail—or that it might succeed. In that paralysis of choice, he had stayed behind.
The immediate question was whether they should try to reprogram the computer to take back control of the ship. But where else would they go? If they continued toward an alien-chosen destination they might find the answers to the other questions that had plagued them from the beginning: Why had the aliens sent the spaceship designs? What did they want from humans? What would humans find at the end of their journey, and what would happen when they arrived? If they arrived.
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