by James Wilks
“She could stay on the ship,” he replied, finally looking at his wife. “I think she’s ready for that now. Eight is old enough to spend the night without us.”
“You’re probably right. Maybe it’s me that’s just not ready.”
The man, John, suspected that she disagreed with him about their daughter being ready to stay alone in her cabin on the ship, but appreciated his wife’s willingness to hide her disagreement behind a mask of her own attachment to their child. Understandings and small compromises like this, he thought, made marriages work.
“Maybe next time we come back, we can get away for a few nights, just the two of us,” he offered.
She favored him with a grin of understanding. “Yeah, that sounds great.” As she finished speaking, they heard the ring of footsteps on the ladder, and the dorsal maintenance hatch they had used to access the top of the ship opened. Their first mate, Donovan Templeton, appeared and blinked in the bright sun. He was breathing a bit heavily from the climb up the ladder. As he emerged from the portal and lowered the door back, he regarded the two of them.
“Hey, you two. How’s it going up here?”
John Park, the vice engineer and Dinah’s right hand man, turned his Asiatic features to him, a pleasant look on his face. His dark hair was cut short to make it more manageable in zero G, and he possessed a wide thin mouth and a small nose. His slim frame was wrapped in a towel from the waist down, and his bare, hairless chest and shoulders were shaded by the parasol attached to his beach chair. Despite the near eighty degree weather, the shade and constant breeze at this height regularly brought out gooseflesh on his arms and chest. Charis, John’s wife, sat to his left on her own chair, also wrapped in a towel and sporting a faded white tee shirt. Her dyed blonde hair was put up in a bun, strands blowing about her rounded face, and her fair features found protection under her own umbrella.
“Going great, Don,” John replied.
“Nice and private,” Charis added.
Templeton offered an apologetic wince. “Sorry.” He looked around. “Where’s Gwen?”
John opened his mouth to reply, but Charis spoke first. “Jabir took her on a hike in the gorge outside Portland. Said he could use the exercise. Nice of him to give us the afternoon off, especially if we’re casting off tomorrow.” She tilted her head inquisitively. “Are we casting off tomorrow?”
Templeton put his hands on his hips and looked southward down the coast at the tide and the other spaceships moored at docking ramps along the beach, each about a hundred yards apart from one another. He could see three, but knew there were more out of sight behind a large bluff. His grey jacket, left unzipped, flapped in the breeze. “Don’t know. Captain’s not back yet. Should be soon, though.” A bit of his unease at being the senior officer on the ship crept into his voice. “Should have brought my sunglasses,” he added, raising a hand to shade his eyes. “Beautiful up here though.”
A moment passed while the couple regarded him. The breeze swelled and waned, never stopping altogether, and the gulls continued their conversations round the rocks.
“Was there something you wanted, Don?” Charis ventured as kindly as she could.
Templeton, seeming reluctant, took several seconds to answer. Finally he dropped his hand and turned to her. “Yeah, I wanted to see if you had completed the synch with local servers to update our astrogation charts. You know that can take hours to do, and I want to make sure we’re ready to go if we gotta go quick.”
Charis stifled her sigh in the back of her throat. “Not yet,” she admitted. “You know we can do that from space, right? I mean, we don’t start losing netlink strength until we’re over a thousand clicks from the atmosphere.”
Templeton’s we’ve had this conversation before expression took up residence on his features, his smile fading and his expression turning business-like. “Yeah, I know, but you know that can get unreliable, and if the update is a big one… well, the last thing you want to be telling the captain is to slow down so you can finish synching the astrogation charts because netlink picked this day to turn turtle.” Templeton’s watch beeped faintly as if to emphasize his point.
Charis hoped her sunglasses hid her eye roll, but she did not object.
“Tell you what. Take another hour up here if you like, but I want that synch completed by sundown. Alright?”
Charis nodded. “Yes, sir,” she said without ire.
The first mate looked down at his watch. “Well, looks like the captain’s back. I’ve gotta go. You kids enjoy.” As he turned back towards the hatch, he cast his eyes down the hundred feet or so to the water below. He could just make out a small dark shape swimming a few dozen feet out in the water sans wetsuit. He laughed and shook his head as he reached down for the dorsal maintenance hatch.
From the scrubby hillock that overlooked the beach and berths, Captain Staples admired her ship. Her ship. She spent far more time on board looking out than she did regarding it from the outside, and it still gave her a thrill to see it parked, hovering four meters above the swelling tides. She let her eyes trace the smooth contours of the craft carved in gunmetal grey, the roughly conical shape that tapered to a broad cockpit in front. From her perspective, the craft swelled out and back, the large engines at the aft barely discernible. She could just make out the name Gringolet in green paint on the side. The electromagnets submerged in the surf beneath her ship kept it aloft and in place, allowing the reactor to be taken offline for maintenance. The atmospheric wings were currently retracted, and the VTOL engines were pointed at the sea.
“Hey there, boy. It’s good to see you again,” she said aloud. As she spoke, her eyes drifted down and spied her friend and first mate walking down the loading ramp and onto the sand. Rather than moving to meet him, she waited for him, looking back up at her ship. Her chin-length blonde hair whipped about, unsecured in the wind, and brown eyes squinted from a broad pale face at the sun’s reflection gleaming on her vessel. After a few minutes, Templeton reached her. He was, she thought not for the first time, looking a little tired. Though he was only a few years past fifty, his sandy hair was greyer, he walked a bit more slowly than he did when she first met him a few years ago, and he breathed somewhat harder. He was breathing a bit hard now.
“Welcome back, Captain.” He turned and looked up at the ship with her. “Never get tired of looking at it, do you?” he asked rhetorically, knowing well his captain’s love of her ship. This was not the first nor third time they had stood like this and gazed up at the instrument of their livelihood.
“Indeed.” The captain’s high clear voice carried over the wind. “It seems she hangs upon the cheek of night.”
Templeton raised an eyebrow. “It’s still daytime.” She didn’t reply. “Lemme guess. Hamlet?”
His captain turned to him, shaking her head. “Romeo and Juliet.”
“Would’ve been my next guess. Seriously,” he replied, turning back to her from the ship. “So don’t keep me in suspense. I’m dyin’ here.”
She allowed some satisfaction to creep into her voice. “We got the job.”
“Great!” he almost shouted, and for a minute she thought he was going to take her by the shoulders or hug her, but instead he simply rocked up on his toes and back down again. “Am I going to like it?”
“Probably not, but it pays a ton, and it should be easy enough. Shall we?” She gestured towards the ship, and together they began walking back over his footprints in the sand, heads bowed a bit against the wind which had been picking up as the day progressed. “It’s a delivery job. Our first port of call is Mars for a pickup. We’ll be there for a few days, and then we head all the way out to Cronos Station at Saturn for a drop off.”
Templeton grunted. “Something told me it would be a Jovian run. You know Mars is on the other side of the sun right now. That will turn what should be a two day journey into a week.”
“If we thrust all the way, yes.”
“And,” he continued, “I could be w
rong, but I think that Saturn is pretty much the complete opposite direction right now.”
“I’ll need to check with Charis, assuming she updated the astrogation charts, but I believe you’re right.”
“It doesn’t make a whole lotta sense. Why not wait until the planets are closer? Why not hire a ship already on Mars to bring whatever they want transported here, and then we could take it on to Saturn? Did they say?” They reached the ramp and began ascending into the cargo bay of the ship. Templeton’s breathing became a bit more labored.
“Maybe there are no ships available on Mars, or no appropriate ships, or no good ships with our record. As for waiting, they seem to be in a rush, which will make sense once you hear the full details. They’re paying well for a chartered flight.” She shrugged. “They didn’t say why, and I didn’t try to talk them out of it.”
“What’s the cargo?” he asked as the shadow of the vessel fell over them.
“Two passengers, their effects, and a few cargo crates. That’s all. For that we get six hundred and eighteen thousand.”
“They’re paying us all that to run just two people and some crates all the way to Saturn? It seems like a waste to me.” He held up his hands, adding, “Not complaining.” They reached the shuttle bay and headed across, past the shuttles and jump ships, to the elevator at the back of the cavernous space.
“Well, it’s a relocation move.” She paused to organize her thoughts, and then began. “The meeting was with a couple of executives from Libom Pangalactic. You know how paranoid those types are about corporate espionage and the like. That, I assume, is why they wanted me to come alone. I had to sign a waiver saying that I wouldn’t tell anyone about the job if I decided to turn it down before they would even tell me what the job was.” She pressed the button in the elevator for deck two.
“It seems,” and the way she stressed the word made it clear that her faith in the stories of corporate energy executives was somewhat lacking, “that the key computer engineer on Cronos Station died in an EVA accident.” Templeton displayed the frown of those who hear of a tragic death that holds no personal meaning for them. “They need to replace the man who died, and since this accident has slowed production, they want some redundancy. So they’ve hired two new computer techs, a scientist and an engineer. Both are top dogs in their field, and Libom is paying through the nose to relocate them. First class all the way.” The elevator came to a smooth stop and the doors slid open quietly. Staples led them, a half a step ahead, towards the mess hall.
“By first class, do you mean…” Her first mate let his question drift.
“Yes. They’re not to lose any time, so that means stasis tubes.”
Templeton shook his head. “You know we don’t have any stasis tubes on board.” Staples stopped and turned to him, looking up at the taller man with a nearly expressionless face that communicated quite effectively. “Okay, that was stupid. Of course you know that.”
“It’s true we don’t have any tubes on board at present,” she said, continuing, “but we have the reception bays for them in CB4. Libom is paying for the tubes, and we will get to keep them when we’re done. I made it part of the deal.” Again, self-satisfaction edged into her voice. “I’m a bit peckish,” she added as they entered the mess hall. Templeton eased himself down at one of the benches while his captain rooted through one of the refrigeration units. “So we head for Mars and spend two days there. We’ll meet the engineers and give them a tour of the ship. Not much point, I suppose, as they’ll be unconscious the whole trip, but I don’t like to let anyone aboard my ship I haven’t met. Plus, it need hardly be said that the ethics of transporting people who begin and end a journey in stasis are sticky at best.” She emerged with a raspberry yogurt, plucked a spoon from a nearby magnetic tray, and settled down across from her friend.
The man shrugged slightly. “Naturally. Gotta be sure that the people want to go where they’re goin’.”
“Indeed. After the tour, the technicians in Tranquility freeze them, we bring them aboard, and we’re off to Cronos Station.”
“Mm.” He grunted.
“After we deliver the stasis tubes and they’re revived, we’re done. And because I know you’re wondering, we will be paid forty percent before we depart Mars and the rest upon delivery. I trust that you’ll handle informing the crew and dispensing pay?”
He nodded his graying head. “Sounds easy enough.”
She smiled wryly and said, “It always does.”
Chapter 2
The next day, Clea Staples sat in her seat in the ship’s cockpit, the seatbelt snug around her waist and shoulders. Her hair was held back from her face by two small colorless metal barrettes, one on each side. The chair itself was scuffed metal and partially covered in well-worn and comfortable black leather. From it she had a slightly raised view of the room and the sleepy Oregon coastline towns beyond the windows. Bethany, the pilot, sat directly in front of her, her small frame nearly swallowed by the chair. Only her coffee colored hands were visible as they flew over the controls, running final system checks.
“Yegor, do we have final clearance from berth control?”
“We do, Captain,” the Russian replied with little trace of an accent. He sat to Bethany’s right and somewhat back along the curve of the front of the cockpit. “Are you set, Bethany? You have EM control?”
The pilot’s high thin voice was barely detectable over the sounds of the ship as it throttled up. “Yes, Captain.”
Staples turned to her left and addressed Templeton, who was seated next to her. “Final check. Is everything in order?”
He scanned down his surface, verifying the check list. “All cargo secured, double checked. All crew on board. Go from control. Mmmm… yep. All set.” He looked up and nodded, then turned to the console on his left side and depressed a coms button. “Gringolet ready to depart. Everybody check your belt.” His loud voice rang out through the cockpit and the rest of the ship as he spoke. He shifted his finger to a side console and typed in a three-digit code. “John? Is Gwen belted?” Charis, sitting to Bethany’s left, shot him a look of gratitude.
“Yes, all set.” John Park’s voice came through the speaker over the first mate’s console scratchy but loudly. “Thanks.”
“Yah hum,” Templeton intoned, and then turned back to his captain. “Set.”
“Bethany, the ship is yours,” Staples said. Her voice carried the air of a task that has been completed often enough to become routine, but whose potential for disaster should never be forgotten.
There was no response from the small young woman, but as she manipulated the controls in front of her, the ship began to rise steadily. The electromagnets increased their power output, pushing the vessel upwards. As they did so, Bethany gently allowed thrust to creep out from the VTOL engines. The thrust provided by the magnets waned, and the pilot increased the thrust proportionately, keeping the upward velocity almost perfectly constant. The goal of any good pilot was to transfer the thrust from the magnets to the engines without too many jolts, and preferably without the downward facing engines disrupting the tides below. Particularly bad pilots could earn fines for their ships by bringing up the thrust too early. Staples thought that she had rarely seen a pilot, especially one only twenty-one years old, able to strike that balance as well as Bethany Miller. Eventually the ship began to tilt skyward. There was a hum as the atmospheric wings extended. The crew felt the ground move from beneath them to behind them, and the moon came into view in the early morning blue sky. Bethany continued her manual ballet, and the ship slowly picked up speed, accelerating towards escape velocity with barely a shudder.
Ten minutes later, Bethany’s long black hair began to drift away from her head and shoulders. She brushed it lightly out of her face, her heavily shadowed eyes intent on the gauges in front of her. It rippled back like an eel and rallied for its return. Her hands continued to push it away, the actions seemingly part of her work. Eventually, her manipulations slowed
as she restricted herself to the odd attitude correction. “Wings retracted, low orbit established. We are atmosphere free, Captain,” she said, her voice just audible against the quiet hum of the computers and the deeper rumble of the engines.
“Excellent work as always, Bethany.” Staples found herself hoping that her young pilot would become more emboldened as a result of the confidence she placed in her, but it had yet to happen.
Bethany took the compliment in silence, tilting her head down as she smiled a bit and allowing her hair to drift in front of her face for a moment.
“Captain, berth control reports no problems and, naturally, no fines. Total bill for docking is four hundred, thirty-two fifty,” Yegor said, reading off his communications console. “Okay to pay?”
“Please do.” Now that they were in space again, the takeoff having been among the smoothest she had experienced, Clea Staples sighed and relaxed. She missed Earth when she was away, but not as much as she missed her ship when she was anywhere else. She undid her safety harness and pushed off lightly from the base of her chair, stopping herself easily with a hand when she reached the forward observation window. “Mind giving me a roll, Bethany?” She looked down at the girl next to her, dressed head to toe in black. Not for the first time, she wondered what strange events had landed this quiet but amazingly talented girl on her ship.
As Bethany reached for the control sticks, Templeton turned to his control console and depressed the shipwide coms button again. “Prep for a roll,” he stated out of consideration for the vertigo-prone crew members like himself, and then fastened his eyes on the floor.
Gringolet rotated along its Z axis to the left, spinning the blue and white world in front of them. It moved from below to above, and as it did so, Staples pushed up and back from the front console. She grabbed the grip bars on either side of the skylight and surveyed the planet of her birth. The clouds and storms swirled over the surface, and as she watched and the ship gained some distance, the islands of Nippon crept into view off to her left. She smiled, and her breath fogged the window, obscuring the view. As Bethany continued the roll, Staples allowed herself to drift away from the glass, pushing off at the last second to send herself back to her chair.