Losers in Space

by John Barnes

  “Well, the Space Patrol maintains seven emergency channels, which unfortunately look just like any other submillimeter-wave channels before you decrypt them. They carry 80 faces each, so we need to find any one of 560 emergency faces. Within the solar system there’s about 6,000,000,000 faces. We just have to find the sending and the receiving side of the same face out of all that.”

  “Well, how do we find them?”

  “We’re doing it right now. My antenna can only work about one-ten thousandth as fast as the one we lost, but at least it’s working. We spray the Earth, the moon, and Mars with submillimeter wave signal that says ‘Hey, hit me with a face.’ Any open transmitters that happen to get a fix on us—that takes a little time and luck, so not every antenna we light up will be able to get a fix—will send an encrypted signal back, which takes a few minutes because of the radio lag. Since we’ve been off-line so long, we don’t have the keys, and we have to break the code to see what it is, which adds another 3 seconds per face.”

  My heart practically stops, and I say, “So if we have to try out 10 million faces to find one emergency face, and if it takes 5 minutes in radio lag to try it out, then that’s 50 million minutes, which is—”

  He looks a bit disgusted with me. “Commander, chill. Swallow the panic. Yes, if we were calling them all up one at a time and waiting for an answer, and if the emergency face was going to be the ten millionth one we tried, it would take 50 million minutes, and”—he punches his wrist comp—“that’s about 95 years. But we don’t have to wait for signal to come back; the real problem is just that it takes about one second for one of my homemade dimples to lock on a target and ping it, then it has to receive about two seconds when a signal comes back a few minutes later, and then it has to stay locked on a few more seconds till we decrypt and the computer decides whether it’s an emergency face or not. Figure we can average a ping every 10 seconds from each of the 200 dimples on the antenna. At that rate we’ll have a fifty-fifty chance of finding an emergency face inside two weeks, and it’ll be almost certain within a month.”

  “So we can call for help in two weeks, or a month at most?”

  “Well, we’ll be able to hear an emergency channel within that time. Then we have to handshake with it, which means hacking an access code for our outgoing message. That requires a lot of trial and error over a few minutes’ time lag, though fortunately they were designed to be hacked, so it won’t take impossibly long.”

  “You’re kidding. Why would they design it to be hacked?”

  “It’s like a bicycle lock. It won’t stop someone who really wants your bicycle but it makes anyone trying to steal it have to stay beside it, obviously doing something bad, for a long time. So hackers and crackers don’t try to break in because they might get detected. Whereas, say, a spaceship that has been out of touch so long that it doesn’t have any useful codes might even want to be detected.”

  “I get it. Okay, Glisters, one more try. What are the odds we’ll contact them while they still have a chance to come out and get us?”

  “Maybe 10% at best that we’ll have it in time for them to come and get us during Marspass, but nearly certain that we’ll have it for the next Earthpass.”

  “Two years away.”

  “Yeah.”

  “And it’s been an hour since you got the antenna up and started cracking with it. How many incoming and outgoing faces have you cracked so far?”

  “About thirty incoming and one outgoing,” Glisters says. “Since F.B. put the antenna up—”

  “F.B.!” Fleeta yells, raising her squeezebulb as if in a toast, and hugging the poor guy like she’s going to hump his leg. Marioschke looks like she’s been punched.

  “So far the incoming faces,” Glisters says, ignoring all that messy human stuff happenning around him, “are all botflog. Music, fashion, and celeb accumulators and reposters, all of them.”

  “Can you get meeds?” Fleeta said.

  “Yes, most of the faces carry meeds—”

  “It would be so fun to see meeds again, I miss them.”

  “I can set up a viewing lounge, so people could do that if they want. Next off-watch awake time I have, I’ll put that together—it shouldn’t take long.”

  I’m about to raise the question of whether we want people to have a distraction to make them goof off. Then I see that everyone is nodding and looking eager; this is the most popular idea anyone has had in a long time. I decide I’d rather not trigger a mutiny just now. “So we have an outgoing face—”

  “Yeah. It’s a drop face.”

  Wychee asks, “What’s a drop face?”

  “A face that archives research material or bureaucratic reports. It’s like if we were lost in the desert and we found an animal-research camera—we would wave at it and hold up signs, but chances would be it was just recording stuff that some scientist would look at in a few years. Almost all outgoing faces are drop faces.”

  “So you’ve sent a message to it—”

  “I’m flooding it with messages. Maybe it will overflow its storage and attract attention that way. Maybe it actually logs distress calls and it’s already notified the Space Patrol, but they haven’t hacked in to our system to tell us yet. Lots of things are possible. But Emerald and Derlock, much as I hate to admit it, are still our best hope. They should be in hailing distance of Mars in a few days, and then it’ll be all over the broadcast news faces, plus some smart guy in the Space Patrol or some news face will think to look in the drop face archives. Till then, well, we’re pretty good at living shipboard, which is good, because even if they hear our call tomorrow, we’ll still have to live here for at least two more months.”

  20

  BEING DEAD IMPROVES OUR SOCIAL STANDING

  July 23, 2129. On Virgo, upbound from Earth to Mars. 195 million kilometers from the sun, 40 million kilometers from Mars, 49 million kilometers from Earth.

  WYCHEE CATCHES ME coming out of the shower. “Glisters says there’s news from Mars.”

  I pull my coverall on quickly and use the smartcomb and coswand. The person floating in mid-air in the mirror looks professional, prepared—like a commander.

  Seeing Glisters in the cockpit practically drops me out of the steely-eyed commander act right there. His expression is somewhere between “in shock” and “poisoned.”

  “Want to tell me now or shall we wait for the others?”

  He glances at the screen. “Short summary: we’re screwed, because—” He raises a finger in a discreet shush! at the noise coming from the corridor; in a moment the rest of the crew swims in, Wychee last, like they’re her sheep and she’s a border collie.

  Glisters says, “I’ll put it up on the front screen. We’ve got one minor news face open—”

  “I still can’t get You Know You Wanna!, even though—” Fleeta begins, but Wychee gently rests a hand on her shoulder, and she’s instantly quiet; apparently those brain cells are not gone yet.

  Glisters nods to Wychee, just a slight thanks, and resumes. “So here it is.”

  A standard animated announcer says, “And again, on the incredible story that there is apparently a single survivor from Virgo, who was in the cargo pod at the time of the mysterious accident that destroyed the crew bubble—”

  An image on the screen shows two big pieces of the crew bubble joined by a spaghetti of pipes and cables, with the caption Missilecam, 148 hours post accident.

  “How come they can get that picture but they can’t send a rescue ship for us?” F.B. asks.

  Glisters hits pause. “One, they don’t know we’re here. Two, the camera that took that picture, from probably 50 kilometers away from the wreckage, weighed a couple of kilograms and was fired off on a one-shot missile; after it passed the wreckage it kept going and it’s never coming back. A ship to rescue us would weigh at least a few hundred tonnes and have to carry enough reaction mass to rendezvous, match course, re-accelerate, and fly somewhere else. They have missilecams ready to go all the time,
because something interesting might happen in space, but a real rescue mission will take them at least a couple months to assemble.”

  “They said sole survivor,” Wychee says, “but we sent two people—”

  “Two people went.” Glisters’s face is flat. “Here’s the rest.”

  The image on the screen resolves again and starts to move; the sound slides out of a squeal. “—now on his way to Mars in a lifeboat cap. Contact was lost within twenty minutes of its being established three days ago, and we don’t know what condition the survivor is in; authorities refused to speculate as to whether he’s unable to answer because of equipment failure, or an injury situation, or something worse.

  “Since his family has been contacted, we now can disclose that the survivor is Derlock Slabilis, formerly a student at Excellence Shop, an Earth-based prep school with an excellent reputation both for training students for PotEvals and for attracting high-level children of celeb-eenies to grace its social side. He is also the son of Sir Penn Slabilis, the noted trial lawyer and one of the best known celebrities on the law, crime, and politics circuit.

  “Derlock Slabilis had been presumed dead after the mysterious loss of a cap returning his classmates from an Excellence Shop field trip to Virgo during Earthpass. The cap, inbound to Earth on a thirty-three day trajectory, failed to answer routine hails within a day of departing Virgo, did not deploy its main rocket to steer into a safe approach to aerobrake, and plunged into the atmosphere at an extremely steep angle over the South Pacific without jettisoning its rocket. Fuel tanks on the rocket exploded at an altitude of about 140 kilometers. Almost all debris vaporized during re-entry.”

  The screen shows a little cartoon of where the cap’s engine should have fired and didn’t. In the cartoon, the cap, with rocket still attached, plunges almost straight down into the atmosphere. The dashed blue line the cap was supposed to follow fades; the red solid line ends in an explosion image.

  “During the full day between the departure of the cap and the accident that destroyed Virgo there were no communications from Virgo mentioning Derlock Stabilis, let alone why he might have stayed on board. Excellence Shop and his father expected him to return and take his PotEvals.

  “What he was doing in Virgo’s pod, and how he survived for a period of several weeks before launching his cap toward Mars, is a question that can only be answered if he again answers a radio hail, or perhaps if, more than a month from now, the automated systems bring the cap safely through aerobrake, capture orbit, second aerobrake, re-entry, and descent—each operation fraught with deadly danger.” Glisters rolls his eyes at me—typical media-speak. All those operations are fraught with deadly danger the same way that crossing a busy street or taking a shower are, i.e., people do die now and then.

  The animated figure intones, “Perhaps not even then will we fully understand the remarkable events surrounding this remarkable young man.

  “After the break we’ll have a profile of the mysterious sole survivor, a young man of remarkable talent and charisma who now boasts one of the highest recognition scores of anyone of his generation—”

  Glisters pauses it. “Everything after is PR and botflog. You may be surprised to hear that us moes were the beloved social leaders of Excellence Shop, and that Derlock was the leader of us beloved moes. Being dead apparently really improved our social standing all the way to beloved. If anyone would rather watch by yourselves, they do have our families on there—”

  “That’s why I want my friends with me,” Marioschke says.

  “I’m so sowwy, you must awe be so sad,” Fwuffy says, from where he’s been watching at the back of the cockpit.

  By common consent we pack into a ball of people all leaning against Fwuffy; it occurs to me that it’s a good thing he’s big enough to comfort all of us at once.

  It’s what Glisters said it would be. Excellence Shop’s PR company has changed and edited everything about who we really are except our parents, and that’s the worst of it. Marioschke’s father is training for the circumlunar suit race and can’t be bothered to say anything; her mother, who’s been bounced back to miney after the divorce, tries to make her interview an audition. The principal of Excellence Shop lies his ass off about how wonderful and popular we all were. F.B.’s father threatens legal action when they ask him why he named his son Fucking Bastard; his mother’s barred from ever appearing in media by the paternity agreement.

  They move on to our math and science teacher, who is too honest and too socially clueless to say that any of the moes were any good at anything, except me and Glisters, who didn’t apply ourselves but could have been pretty good if we’d wanted to, apparently. She finishes with a sad little, “I always thought if they just took on a challenge they might make me proud of them.”

  “If we get back I’m hugging her,” Glisters says.

  Fleeta’s mother just can’t stop crying; her beautiful genius with every advantage money could buy turned herself into a vegetable long before her purported death. She keeps repeating, Oh, the waste.

  “She says that all the time,” Fleeta says. “It makes me laugh she says it so much.”

  Stack’s and Emerald’s parents style Classic Meed, using Simple Grief. If you’re not much of an actor it’s at least a correct choice, the equivalent of a plain suit or black dress at a funeral. It works for Stack’s dad, who is not very articulate, just a guy who can really ride a board, and it keeps Emerald’s kindergarten teacher mom from breaking down and turning her grieving into some silly circus. It feels weird to see them doing that because they think their kids are dead—and their kids are dead.

  Wychee’s parents, who were one of those golden athlete-and-musician couples that splyctered into n-nillion hooks twenty years ago, and are now ultra retro, issue a quietly correct statement. Derlock’s father tells us about how he’s going to sue the whole universe and make sure his son gets everything he’s entitled to.

  Glisters glances at me and I know we’re thinking the same thing: we’re next—and they always put good hooks last. Then his mom, who is a famous talking-head explainer, comes on, and starts telling stories about things he did before he was eight. Then she says, “His last few years have been a disappointment, you know, we just haven’t had the same closeness or enjoyed the same things together.” Right then I know Glisters’s whole story, because it’s such a common one. He was a typical eenie-brat who turned an age his parents didn’t like anymore, the way some people are always getting kittens and dumping cats.

  Wychee floats over to bump a shoulder against him.

  I’m so worried about Glisters that Pop surprises me when he appears on-screen. “Susan was always one of the best people I knew. Whether or not I liked what she was doing, I always knew a good person was doing it. I’m sure that if there was a spare fraction of a second before she died, she spent it trying to help someone else. I wish she could know how proud of her I always was.”

  I think I’m not going to cry, but then Fwuffy strokes my cheek with his trunk; he’s been petting all of us as if we were upset puppies.

  The announcers recap everything about heroic Derlock and mysterious cap journey and conclude the meed in a burst of “only time will tell” excitement.

  It takes three hours of hot chocolate and hanging out to soothe Fleeta, Marioschke, and F.B. enough to send them back to bed or off to their duties. After they’ve gone, Glisters cocks his head toward Fwuffy, and raises an eyebrow.

  “Fwuff,” I say, “I think we’re going to talk about things that require discretion.”

  He stretches, an impressive sight in a horton, and says, “If you need me to, I have bwoccowi I can tend. But you should know I nevah tell Mawioschke anything which I think might upset huh.”

  “Well, that’s the discretion it requires,” I say. “Stay if you want.”

  Wychee has wrapped herself up in her arms, and says, “That cap blowing up on its return to Earth… that was no accident.”

  Glisters nods. “It ha
s to have been part of his Plan B. Maybe because if any of us had chickened out at the last minute, we’d have known about the stowaways. But we were planning to come out long before the cap would reach Earth—”

  Wychee looks pale and sick. “If one of us had gotten down to Earth we’d have told them there might still be people alive in the pod. They’d have had time to send a cruiser to investigate. And we don’t have to guess that there was something Derlock didn’t want them to find: we know he didn’t want them to find us alive.”

  I’ve listened enough. “We’ll never know,” I say. “No matter how deep you go into Derlock’s convoluted evil mind and all you will find are more convolutions and deeper evil. Period. It’s not worth digging into and it can’t change anything we do. The point is, we’re alive, and we’re going to stay alive.”

  “And because we’re going to stay alive,” Glisters says, “we will ultra mess up Derlock’s plan, whatever it is.”

  “That’s just a side benefit,” I say, “delightful as it might be. Glisters, the conn’s all yours. I need a nap, and Wychee, you’d just gotten to bed when Glisters called us in, and you owe it to yourself to get some sleep.”

  She says, “I’ll stick around a little while, if you need company to keep you awake, Glisters.”

  He looks a little baffled, but says, “Sure, if you want.”

  When I leave, she’s sitting very close to him, and he’s telling her about his mother.

  August 27, 2129. On Virgo, at periareon (closest approach to Mars), 226 million kilometers from the sun, 14.4 million kilometers from Mars, 80 million kilometers from Earth.

  I don’t know why everyone wants to be in the Forest. But since they want to be, I have to. That said, it’s pretty nice these days; months of work and re-growth have undone the damage from the mud and water. The tree trunks are clean again, and the grass is thick and soft. We lie around one window, averting our eyes for ten out of every ninety seconds as the sun flashes through in a fierce blaze, then peering again, watching the bright red star.