He rolls his eyes at first, but considers for a moment, then nods his head and shrugs. “Ya know Yuuta, you might be on to something there. I ain’t never written a poem. Not sure I got a sensitive side.”
“You do. I see it every time you look at her. You just gotta put it in words that sound right. Look, there are a lot of great poets out there that you could read to get ideas. Frost, Sandburg, Browning; dozens of them, all great. You could ask for some volumes from Luna; the forward link ain’t fully used.” Louis nods. He’s thinking about it serious. Maybe it’ll help.
In the silence, I look up. The display films show the reconn drone releasing from its docking bay at the stern of the ship, floating free. The ungainly craft is about two thirds fuel tank and main thruster, the rest peppered with lenses and other sensors, all wrapped around a set of trusses and beams. Plus, a long arm to reach out and take samples from the stroid. It reminds me of beetles I’ve seen in the Shacktown greenhouse: fat in places, gangly in others, and moving with single-minded purpose. Not near as ugly as a stinkroach; a beetle is an honest, working insect.
Nastez is running diagnostics on the drone’s internal chemical lab while Katya performs tests on the drone’s other systems: verifying the avionics, firing the tiny maneuvering thrusters, turning the craft this way and that to expose its top side and then its belly to the ship’s cameras for visual inspection. It has been sitting unused all this time, parked back aft in the hanger with all the other drones. Before sending it off, Katya wants to be sure it hasn’t been struck by any rogue rocks. “Captain, the reconn drone is ready to deploy,” she finally says, in her impeccably professional tone.
“Roger that. You may launch when ready, Katya,” says the captain.
“Aye Captain. Drone away,” says Katya, as she presses a soft button on her console. The films on the bulkheads show the drone come to sudden life, puffing the small thrusters of its attitude control system as it rotates towards its programmed course, then firing its large main engine. The drone is soon obscured by the plume of plasma between it and the ship’s cameras. It’s on its way.
“Drone is running straight and normal,” Katya announces.
“Very good,” says the captain. “Carry on.” The captain unbuckles her strap and floats out of the room. Nastez follows soon after. Within seconds, the drone recedes from view, last seen as a fluttering white dot against the black nothingness, appearing as any other star might appear, and then it is gone. Katya continues to look on, enchanted, like a mother watching her child’s first piano recital.
* * * * *
“Buongiorno Straker! Good morning!” squawks the wristy on my bed-side shelf.
The room lights have begun to brighten, much to my disappointment, so it’s time to get up anyways. I sit up and run my fingers through my hair. “Good morning Sophia. How are you today?”
“Sto bene grazie, e tu? I am well, and you? Did you sleep well Straker? Tell me everything you are doing.”
I punch the button on the wall to dispense some black coffee into my sippy, which is dyed brown with the coffee stains of previous mornings. In my sleepy stupor I wonder how nasty this cup can get before it becomes a health hazard. Guess I’ll have to wash it at some point, or at least wipe it out. I pull the sippy from the dispenser and choke down a swallow of the bitter brew. I need a little bracing before dealing with this perky space ghost. “Nothing special,” I say. “Cleaning stuff, fixing stuff. Had to rebuild a regulator from Katya’s evasuit yesterday, so that was pretty fun.”
“Oh yes and your ship launched a drone towards Hrothgar, yes? Did you do that Straker?”
Man, she’s really been watching us. I guess it would have been hard to miss if she’s anywhere in the vicinity. How does she know about Hrothgar? Obviously we’re headed for a stroid, but how does she know what we call it? “Oh no, that was Katya. I’m just a lowly crewman; they don’t trust me with the important stuff.”
“Well, your day will come. And you are not lowly, amico mio. Never think that!”
“Thanks for saying that, but I’m the lowest ranking person on the ship.”
“Does that bother you? To be low in rank?
Here she goes with the head games again. “Maybe a little,” I say. “But I can handle it.”
“Yes you can. You are young, much will happen. Is the drone running well?”
“I thought we agreed not to talk about our mission.”
“Yes, we did agree. My apologies. When the drone arrives, it will tell you that Hrothgar is every bit as valuable as you thought.”
“Really?” I ask. “How do you know? Have you already been there?”
“We agreed not to talk about my mission too.”
She’s being as evasive as ever. Now I’m thinking she’s on a mining ship like ours. But it still don’t add up. Maybe I can get some information from her for a change.
“Yes,” she continues, “Hrothgar is rich with iron and platinum and other metals.”
“Um, OK, what else can you tell me about it?”
“I will tell you that in addition to its riches, Hrothgar has dangerous areas as well. Your drone will show you what I mean. One side of the asteroid is flat: this is the side you should mine. You should not land on the other side.”
“Why not?”
“It is unstable and rocky. There is no place flat enough for you to land. Also, the weight of your ship could cause the surface to collapse inward and swallow you.”
“How do you know all this?”
“Avoid the rocky side, amico mio,” she says, in a singsong tone. “Until next time, arrivederci!” The wristy goes silent; the little blue light is dark. She’s gone.
Damn. I think for a minute about what I’ve just heard. How much does this woman know? Where does she get her information? From what she says, she knows more about Hrothgar than we do, but we have the Big Scope, the best sensor humanity has ever had. For a minute I cogitate on the possibility that she’s on board our ship somewhere, stowed away, watching and listening to everything going on. But I toss that idea; the Allgood’s habitable spaces ain’t that big—we would’ve found her by now. Once again, I have to conclude that she is scamming us somehow. But I don’t know how and I don’t know why. I reckon I best tell someone what she said.
I look in the mirror on the wall next to my bunk. My hair has taken on a strange, random shape with a big hump on the left that sticks out like the horn of a unicorn. I get my hoohouse kit together to take my shower down the hall. Once I’m dressed, I ride up to the pivot room and see Nastez going the other way. I tell him about talking to Sophia. I try to phrase it so it doesn’t sound so weird. Like that she calls herself Sophia. “And what did your little phantom have to say, Yuuta?” he asks, his eyebrows peaked, his mouth in a scowl.
“She already knows where we’re going. She told me about Hrothgar and where we should land. She described a wide, flat area where we should set up the rovers and beneficiation. Said we need to stay away from the rocky area on the other side. Said it is unstable.”
His eyebrows knit together in consternation. “So much for operational security. A wide flat area, eh? Hmmm. I find it hard to believe that this odd woman, on this ship or whatever it is, has more knowledge of the target than we do.”
“Yes sir. I wonder that myself sir.”
“Nonetheless, keep her talking. And report to me whenever she reveals anything about herself. Did you record the conversation?”
“No sir, not this time. She caught me by surprise and the episode was very brief.”
“That was not very smart, Yuuta. You will record and report every conversation from now on. Do I make myself clear?”
“Yes sir, record the conversations, aye.”
“Very well. Carry on.” And with that, Nastez whips around expertly in his weightlessness and pushes himself into the spoke going to Carousel A.
I’m not real crazy about reporting my every conversation with Sophia to Nastez. Like I said, she has a way of popping
up when I’m least prepared for her. Plus, she gets too personal much of the time. Maybe I’ll ‘forget’ to record sometimes. Dr. Kapoor will want to keep up with her, though. I trust him with the personal stuff, and maybe he can make sense of all this. But, to me, the real question is: with all the radio gear on the Allgood, how come I’m the only one who can hear her?
We’ve been aboard Allgood for over 2 months now. Weeks have gone by since we sent the reconnaissance drone. With each passing day, we get closer to Hrothgar but farther from Luna and Shacktown and only home I can remember, crappy as it was. Sometimes I look out the portholes in the galley and gaze at the star-sprinkled black that surrounds us. When I’m alone I turn the lights down low so I can see better. But Luna is a ways behind us now—a mere speck of light—so the only way to see her is to zoom in with one of the aft cameras. Sometimes Louis, Katya and I do that together, just to see Luna, and remind ourselves that we have a home and that we’ll be going back someday. It helps.
There’s no feeling of speed. It feels like the ship is holding still while the twinkling diorama of stars and galaxies in the portholes slowly change perspective, as if driven by some kind of massive clockwork mechanism. That’s when I get this feeling in the pit of my stomach, a ball of dark and nasty that festers in my insides: Is it fear? Loneliness? Or is it that I got no idea what’s going to happen to me?
On the one hand, I’ve developed a sort of easy friendship with my crewmates—except Nastez of course, who’s a jerk at all times. They’re good people, but knowing that I’m spying on them for the government makes me keep my distance. I don’t want to get real attached. I’m on the edge of a new life and I gotta discard these people like a snake sheds his old skin. I’m committed. So that’s how I feel, day to day—as I do my chores, keep my watch, study the learning materials, sleep, eat, and do whatever they ask me to. Here, but not completely here. Never really at ease. At least nobody is beating me up. That’s a nice change from Shacktown.
But after all the monotony, finally there is a buzz on the Allgood. Today’s the day the reconnaissance drone sends back close-up telemetry. I’m on the flight deck, my sticky boots planted behind Katya’s station, with Louis taking the console’s other saddle. Katya is making softly spoken progress updates into her headset, keeping the captain and Nastez up to date. Mostly critical telemetry items from the drone such as distance and speed. It’s been a waiting game, but today the drone will park itself beside the asteroid and tell us what it’s made of.
We watch the video streaming back from the drone as Hrothgar looms large in the screen. Nastez is in control of the multiple camera views from his console, switching back and forth between visual, infrared, and radar-mapping views. Katya has got maneuvering, although at this distance the bird is pretty much on its own. We watch as the drone decelerates to the speed of Hrothgar and begins skipping around it, like a hummingbird over a juicy flower, using its thrusters, photographing and analyzing and mapping the surface. This part goes on for hours. Finally, the drone moves in close enough for the its robotic arm to reach out and touch the stroid, taking itty bitty samples and chucking them into its internal lab for a chemical breakdown.
It’s fun to watch at first but it takes a long time and frankly I get pretty bored. I’m about to make some excuse to go back to my bunk when Katya announces that the analysis is complete. Then, without a word to the rest of the crew, the captain and Officer Nastez retire below to the captain’s ready room. “Why are they going below?” I ask Louis. This is the first time I’ve been through this. I don’t know the routine.
“Probably a planning session,” he says. “We’ll see in a little while I reckon. They have to make a bunch of executive decisions at this point.”
Makes sense. I nod.
“Hey, you wanna grab some joe?” asks Louis. “I’m having a hard time keeping my eyes open. My watch was over hours ago.”
“Sure,” I say, and I pull my boots off the floor and push off towards the galley. Louis follows me there and we gather up around the coffee maker.
“This is all new to me,” I say. “I’ve read all about it but whoever wrote up the training stuff left out a lot of details.”
“Yea, I thought so too on my first mission,” he replies between sips from his cup. “But I’ll tell ya, this Hrothgar is nothing like our previous target. It’s huge!”
“Looks to me like a smaller version of Luna,” I say.
“There’s enough there to fill up our cargo boxes and then some. Last mission we had to hit three asteroids before our cargo holds were full. But for this monster, we could have used a bigger ship. I mean, compared to what my daddy drove, Allgood is huge. But she’s only designed for the average sized asteroid, not this baby.”
“Your dad was a spaceman?” I ask.
“Yea…funny story. He drove some of the early commercial ships; tourists, mostly. But he was also a part time rodeo clown; grew up in New Mexico. He was just a cowboy riding a new kind of horse.”
“How about your mom?”
“She grew up in Australia on a big cattle station. Worked as a government sharpshooter for a while. She could shoot the nuts off a dingo at 1000 meters.” He smirks; I get tickled and nearly spurt coffee out my nose.
“So did you start the Corps training right after high school?” I ask.
“Yea, right after high school. Got busy doing extra stuff—medical stuff like I said before, so it took me longer to get through than most.”
“What kind of medical stuff?” I ask, thinking that maybe he’ll open up about it.
But it’s pretty obvious he don’t want to answer that. “Just a medical thing,” he says. “I sat out a couple of years.” Louis is such an open book. It surprises me that he just don’t come out and say ‘I had a drug addiction’ or ‘I had clinical depression’, or whatever it was. It must be pretty embarrassing, but I can’t help but wonder.
“Hey,” he says, suddenly changing the subject and speaking in a low voice, “Will you listen to my poem? I want to read it to Katya but I wanna get your opinion first.” Without waiting for my reply, he pulls a folded piece of paper from his arm pocket.
“Paper?” I say.
“Yea. Seems to me that a poem ought to be written on paper, proper like. See, look.” He unfolds it and holds it for me to see. It’s all printed, longhand. Most people don’t know how to do that; some ain’t never even seen a pencil or pen. But this is very readable. The big jock is full of surprises. He’s got culture. “OK, here it goes,” he says, holding the sheet down under a spotlight. “I took your advice and read some old poetry. Ya know, I actually kinda liked it. People had a lot of heart back then. This one is a rip-off from a Robert Browning poem. Anyhow, this is it.”
He stretches the paper out flat and reads in a conspiratorial whisper.
Ancient craters, watching stars
A blue planet hangs in the sky
And the thousand boulders in my way
A million subtle shades of gray
Step by step through fields so dry
As must be on a far-off Mars
Through your airlock chamber doors
Spacesuit doffed, hatch is cleared
Tap at your room, that welcome sight
Of you there, clicking on your light
And a voice less loud, through joy and fears,
Than two hearts beating, mine and yours.
He looks at me, expectantly, a lock of his hair dangling over one eye. At this moment he looks like an excited little boy. A large little boy. “Wow, Louis…that’s really…it’s really good,” I say. “You got something there. If that don’t get to her, nothing will.”
“Yea, that’s what I’m afraid of. It’s kind of an all-or-nothing thing.” As if on cue, Katya enters the room from the flight deck. She looks tired, her eyes sunken and red, her high black ponytail floating above her head like a mesmerized cobra. Somehow she makes it look good.
“What are you guys doing?” she asks with a weary smile,
filling her sippy with coffee and injecting sugar creamer.
Louis look at me with a nervous smile. He eyebrows arch up one time, saying it’s now or never. I nod my encouragement. “Can I show you something, Katya?” he asks.
“Um,” she sips and shrugs, “sure, OK, what?”
Louis tilts his head towards the corner of the galley. “Can you come over here?”
I can take a hint. “Actually I’ve got some stuff to do,” I say, as the two of them meander towards the far corner of the room. But as I push off to leave, I bump the coffee maker with my elbow and accidently pop open the filter compartment. Liberated coffee grounds go bounding throughout the galley in happy little globs. Mortified, I grab a cotton bar rag from a cabinet and swoop around trying to catch the coffee grounds before they make an even bigger mess and distribute themselves throughout the ship.
I see Louis reading to Katya, his voice drowned out at this distance by the hum of the ventilators. I grab a wobbling black ball of gritty fluid in my rag and move to the next one meandering over towards the microwave. Now Louis is looking up from his paper and over at Katya; I guess he’s finished. I close in on the soggy ball, trying not to disturb its path by coming in to fast and creating air currents that might change its trajectory. I surround it with my cloth. Katya kisses Louis. On the cheek. Ouch.
“What in the world are you doing, Yuuta?” demands Nastez, who has just come up from below decks and caught me in my guilty clean up act.
“I had a mishap sir. Sorry sir. I’ll have it cleaned up in a few seconds.”
Nastez scowls. “You’re sorry all right Yuuta. You are a one-man hazard area. Come with me, I’ve got a job for you.”
Love and Other Metals Page 16