An eternity passed as she reached for the helmet again, and the clock hit six seconds. Seven, as she moved it over her head. Eight, as she twisted it to lock it in place. Nine and ten before she managed to hit the automatic environment control on her wrist, eleven, twelve and thirteen before the suit was pressurized and she could feel the temperature starting to rise. She could feel her skin swelling in tandem with the increasing temperature and she knew she would look like a bloated fish for weeks, not to mention that she probably had contracted decompression sickness and would need weeks in a pressurized globe to survive. She would welcome it all: bloated skin, contusions, aching joints, and pain as she had never suffered before in her entire life. If only she could live. She was spinning lazily around her lateral axis, and for every revolution she could see the Wayfinder becoming smaller and darker against the backdrop of stars.
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The captain grabbed the jagged edges of the hole, one hand on each side, pushed himself as far back as possible and then pulled with all the strength he could muster. He shot out of the hole as a bullet from a rifle, exiting straight and true from his beautiful ship. He could not see Nadia anymore, but she would be out there, hopefully not too far out. He could feel the sweat stinging his eyes and tried in vain to blink it away. The drops were gathering mass, and it was becoming harder and harder to see anything. He blinked hard a couple of times and tried to shake his head to rid himself of the nuisance. No use.
He strained his eyes and tried to pick out something, anything, from the black.
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Nadia was having a hard time moving her fingers as she tried to disengage her utility belt. There was nothing on it that she could use to get back to the ship, but if she concentrated she might be able to throw things away and stop her spinning. The screwdriver came loose from her belt, and with the tip of her tongue sticking out from the corner of her mouth she threw it perpendicular to her spin. She slowed, but she did not stop. Her hand brushed something larger strapped to her thigh. The bolt gun. The suit carried the mandatory utility gas gun, used to shoot bolts into the hull to both repair and secure equipment. She gripped it fiercely, and with the renewed hope she could feel the panic starting to rise. It was easy not to panic when you had no hope, harder when there was a glimmer.
The strappings were hard to work with her deadened fingers, but she managed to get the gun off the belt. Holding it with both hands she aimed it over her head and waited for the ship to come into view again. A speck in the darkness was all that remained of her home as she squeezed the trigger, sending a bolt off into space and nearly stopping her spinning. A few more shots, and she was almost still, feet first towards the Wayfinder. She could barely see it. Her breath came in shallow gulps and she could not, would not, fire the gun again. Panic was gripping her, and she could feel herself hyperventilating, trying to force a dwindling source of oxygen into her lungs. As blackness started to narrow her vision, she could make out something moving between her and the ship.
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Reinholts could not see. His universe was a mix of starlight seen through a haze of sweat and tears that he could do nothing about, and the occasional redness as he squeezed his eyes shut trying to dislodge the stubborn droplets. There was something wrong with his environment settings, and he could not see enough of his wrist pad to do something about it. He kept on pressing buttons at random, knowing that he could not do something to deteriorate the situation. It was bad enough as it was. What the hell had he been thinking? Launching himself out of the ship like some second-rate circus clown being shot out of a cannon. As he had been so fond of repeating before they set out: “If you do not think up there, you will die.” He had not been thinking. Or rather, he had been thinking clearly, just not about the present day. He had been thinking about the fifteen passengers he had left to die on his last flight back on Earth, and the look his co-pilot had given him as he reached down to eject, knowing that none of the others had that option.
Never again.
That the promise originally meant that he would never fly again meant little, since those two words were the ones that had reverberated through his skull as he watched Nadia being flung from the ship. After that he had no conscious memory before he found himself outdoors, and not in a good way. He kept on punching buttons at random, trying to find the right combination that would get the air circulating at a higher rate. Sooner or later he would find it, preferably sooner rather than later.
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A light in the dark. Occasionally Nadia could see a flash of light against the nothingness where her ship had once been. She was no longer hyperventilating, but it had been touch-and-go there for a few seconds. There it was again, and it was definitely coming closer. Her breath quickened, but this time more as a reaction to the unexpected rather than the onset of panic. Again! Moving faster than her, and a bit up relative to the position she was in. She had five shots left in the gas gun, and she had been pondering how to best use four of them for a little while now. The recoil would never be enough to get her back to the ship, she would need a lot more shots to accurately navigate, but it would be enough to get her to change direction. Four shots might get her over to the source of light before it disappeared, but not much else.
Using the fifth shot was not up for debate, that one was for her, and her alone. She would choose her death rather than let it be forced upon her, slow and cold. She crouched into a ball with the top of her head pointing toward where she thought the light would be in a few moments, put her hand with the gun down between her legs and took care to aim it straight down. She said a silent prayer and fired the gun.
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He had finally found the right combination to get some more air flowing into his helmet, and he could feel the sweat drying on his forehead and his eyes easing up enough so that he could see again. Not that it improved his visibility much; the stars and the black were still all there was around him. He would murder the bastard that had designed the wrist pads if he ever got hold of the man, nothing was intuitive about them. He crouched down and squinted along the path he had flown. The Wayfinder was gone. He straightened again and scanned the skies for the bright point that he had stared at for hundreds of hours already this trip. There. Mars: a discolored dot amidst the field of stars. He crouched down again and found the bright point that was the Earth. At least he had an approximate direction for the ship now, given that he had launched straight out from the side. Hopefully he would catch a glint of the ship as he got closer, and he might extrapolate the direction better if he encountered some of the debris that had escaped after the explosion. He had not travelled that far after all.
The fire extinguisher was still clasped to his belt, and although the sucking mechanism was useless since there was no air to suck, it still sprayed the fire suppressing lubricant well enough. It was designed to work after being exposed to vacuum and was, as many things were on this mission, gas driven. He could use it as a makeshift thruster and make his way back the ship, given that he could find it. Time to find out if the thing actually worked in a vacuum, and not only after it had been exposed to it. The captain crouched into a ball, put the nozzle down between his legs and was momentarily stunned as something large crashed into him, knocking the extinguisher from his hands.
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Nadia had time to note that it was an emergency flashlight lazily spinning from a utility belt that was the source of the light, before realizing that she was going to hit the other floater way too fast. Just as she was about to hit, the other person crouched and she slammed into the legs, knocking them both in opposite directions and starting a new spin. Frantically she flailed about, and just as she floated out of reach, the chord of the flashlight twisted around her wrist and brought her to an abrupt halt. She gripped the lifeline with all her strength and pulled herself close to the other person. After a few bumps they ended up face to face, holding tight. Captain Reinholts stared back at her through his faceplate and she co
uld feel a wave of relief washing over her. He mouthed something unintelligible and for a moment her stupidity overwhelmed her.
The radio! All the suits were equipped with short-range radio, but she had heard nothing since the explosion. Had she given more than a cursory thought to that fact, she could’ve tried other frequencies and maybe established contact with either the ship or Reinholts himself. She quickly thumbed through the available channels and on the fourth try his voice broke through, loud and clear: “—your radio on! Channel five, can you hear me?”
“Yes, yes, I can hear you! It was all silent, I heard nothing, I had to fire my gun to stop spinning and reach you, but I saved the last bolt for myself, I think I could’ve done it and it would have been better than freezing to death or choking, and the ship is gone and the explosion sucked me out, and I—” She realized she was babbling and clamped her mouth shut with a loud click.
The captain smiled and nodded. “You did good. Now let’s get back to the ship.”
She could feel her shoulders relax, and for the first time in years she trusted somebody else to take control.
10. The Billionaire
The Killer, that’s what they called me. I had earned the nickname the second time I had put my critics to shame and increased my steadily growing fortune by a hundredfold. I knew the second the markets opened that first day: this was it. This was me making it big time. The Icarus stock opened fifteen percent higher than predicted, and it just took to the skies from there. The oil market had been in a turmoil for several years, although not as bad as the ’23 crack. Ups and downs, regulations loosened, let loose and finally stopped altogether. The Russians. The Saudis. The Norwegians and their bloody Barents Sea regulations. The computers tried their best to model the fluctuations, and succeeded only in making things worse. The high-frequency trading computers that had plagued the market in the early 21st century were, thankfully, no longer present. They had their own playground now, calculating the optimal way to relay solar power to an increasingly hungry world of consumers. Turns out turning stock trading over to computers that frequently bought in excess of a hundred million shares a second was a sure way to turn previously sane conditions into chaos and war. Give a semi-intelligent supercomputer the open-ended task of making money from trading oil stocks, and it pretty soon discovers that “Hey, tanks use a lot of oil, planes use a lot of gas, the military is my best customer,” and concludes, “Let’s make sure the military has enough to do.” It did not end well for those involved.
So the computers had been banned. 11 Wall Street again opened its doors to traders and their like, and the markets turned from violent hurricanes back to the unpredictable human waves that barely rocked the shores. It was mostly for show, anyway. All the companies were driven by supercomputers, everything was closely monitored and hardly anyone did anything that wasn’t predicted by some two-by-two computer sitting in a blast resistant cellar beneath a company’s headquarters. Nothing untoward happened, unless you counted buying stocks that obviously were going to fall, unless you took into account human stupidity, greed, and tolerance for financial failure. Unless you took humanity into the equation. The supercomputers never stood a chance. The markets were again, firmly, in human hands. Or rather, they were in my hands.
And they were like wet clay in my fingers.
In my humble opinion it was dead simple. The only question that lingered on my mind as I sold my house, my car, my furniture, and my dog, took out loans with every institution I could find that would give me two cents on the dollar, was: Why isn’t everybody doing what I’m doing? Why didn’t people line the streets outside the stock markets, eager to be a part of the surest thing since bottled milk? The only answer I could figure was that they didn’t see it. People are idiots.
I spent everything I had that first day when they announced that they were building the array. I bought stocks for every penny I owned or had begged, borrowed, or stolen. And the stocks soared like an eagle. And I sold them again. They still couldn’t see it, so they still kept on buying while the oil stocks plummeted like a rock. Free energy! The oil companies are done! Broken! Sell, sell, sell! And again, I spent everything I had. Exxon Mobil, British Petroleum, Royal Dutch Shell, Chinese National Petroleum, Statoil, EUrOil. I wasn’t really hedging my bets as much as buying everything that had “oil” in its name and was big in the field. Then the sanctions hit, and I made my first billion. In less than a year I had turned a meagre 2 million dollars, ninety percent of it borrowed, some of it from people who would take their interest finger by finger if I didn’t pay up, into $1.04 billion.
And then I sold everything. And bought Icarus stock for it all since it was lower than my sense of ethics. Financial Daily first called me a financial genius unprecedented in modern times, then the biggest idiot since Adam ate the apple. Finally, the GEDS (Global Energy Distribution System) was ironed out and Icarus was the golden goose again. My percentage in the Icarus stock was now close to twenty-five percent, and that was easily enough to hold sway over general policy. The various factions were so opposed in everything but the actual construction of the array that it was an easy task to manipulate their interests so that they coincided with my own.
In reality, I now owned the Icarus Solar Relay.
By now my obsession with money was really kicking into high gear. Money can buy everything. Seriously, don’t let those we’re-happy-as-we-are-we-don’t-need-that-much-money hippies tell you differently. Try living in a dumpster for a couple of years, scrounging for food others have deemed unfit for consumption. Try slaving on an opium farm high in the Afghan mountains, being beaten and raped after fifteen hours in the fields before making dinner out of nothing to serve yourself and your seven children of dubious heritage. Try living in a suburban home after your wife left you, claiming, “you don’t fulfill my life (read: my wallet),” all the while trying to juggle two kids, a mortgage, and a gambling debt best left forgotten. All right, that last one might’ve been me projecting, but you get the point. The bottom line is that I was happier with a lot of money than I was without it.
Icarus was back on track, the world held its collective breath, and I wondered what I should do with my new life. The jet set life didn’t hold much sway over me. Sure, it was fun for a while. The fastest cars (crashed three of ’em), the biggest apartments (trashed three of ’em), and the sexiest girls (don’t ask). I was searching for something. The thrill of the game, the eagerness of the hunt, the scent of something wicked in the air. I just knew something would show up and catch my attention the way the oil drops and the array had. And lo and behold, SpaceX finally made good on their promise to put civilians into space.
SpaceX had been a dream of mine since their very conception. A private company, selling trips to space! All for the meagre price of $250,000. Small change. Pocket money. The tip I left in the MGM casino in Vegas after I hit black four times in a row. Money I had never had, until now. I could buy the company if I wanted to, these days! But no, that one was holy. You do not mess with the people who manufacture dreams, they might turn into nightmares. So, I called them up, asked nicely for a tour of the facilities, and bought a shuttle for my private use. I paid double.
The first trip up was exhilarating, the beauty of it took my breath away. The shuttle was, in short, a stripped-down rocket with a cargo hold. I was strapped in next to the pilot up front, and thanks to the power of the dollar, there were no other passengers in the shuttle. The shuttle dropped from the belly of the carrier plane, and after a few seconds of freefall the rockets hit, and my stomach did its best to crawl out my spine. Fifteen seconds later we were vertical, and a couple of shaky minutes after that the sky started to fade. From azure blue, shifting to light blue with a hint of gold dust and finally pitch black. With a million stars in the sky and the earth at my back, I slowly unbuckled my safety harness and set my body adrift. I was finally home.
But I wanted more. For me, space was like the elixir of life. But I didn’t just want a sip of it
, I wanted to bathe in it. I wanted to wallow and frolic in it, drink down gallons and gallons of it. And I wanted to bottle and sell it. It occurred to me that I might have been shortsighted when I only reached for the sun; I could have reached for the stars. The biggest real estate market in history was up for grabs, and again it astounded me that I seemed to be the only one to see it. Energy would soon be the cheapest commodity on earth. Wars would end, no children would have to die of starvation, droughts would be an inconvenience instead of a killer. The Earth would turn into a garden of plenty, a place where humanity could finally reach its true potential. And the people would multiply in their Garden of Eden, and they would fill it to bursting with happy, fat little babies. Toddlers who would grow up to find that all the land had been explored before they were even conceived. Babies who would grow up to be restless young men and women, wanting to claim a piece of land for their own. A whole generation that would find that all the land had already been taken.
I decided to provide a new land. I decided I wanted to own Mars.
11. The Fix
Finding a hiding place to smoke a joint in space was surprisingly easy, even on a spaceship halfway to Mars. Roger floated in the cramped space in the midst of a cloud of swirling smoke, blissfully gazing at the stars and trailing patterns in the smoke with both hands. Smuggling the narcotics aboard the ship had been a piece of cake, he just put it in one of the crates labelled “Biohazard, Do Not Open” and shipped it off to be stored with the rest of the greenhouse equipment. Nobody would touch those crates once they were packed, and as chief of the greenhouse project he was the one who authorized which crates could be opened and at which time. He now had a six-by-six crate stashed to the brim with marijuana, as well as ten small saplings happily growing in his makeshift laboratory in one of the smaller storage globes.
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