by Niko Perren
“We mute the microphone when that happens,” Sharon replied through the helmet speakers. “Have to preserve our reputation for bravery.”
“Five minutes. Wind is four knots west. Shield One, you are go for launch.”
Don’t stop now. I don’t know if I could do this again.
“Two minutes.”
“One minute.”
Is that me shaking? Or a motor?
“Fifty seconds. The launch stack is on internal power. All systems nominal.”
“Thirty seconds. Everything looks good, Shield One.”
Adrenaline raced through Jie’s arteries, a fight or flight response, useless to somebody strapped atop a 100-meter cylinder of rocket fuel. Each second ticked slower than the last. Isabel breathed in ragged gasps. Sally lay next to him, jaw clenched. They’re as scared as I am.
“Twelve, eleven, ten, nine, eight, we have main engine ignition.”
The five massive primary-stage engines exploded to life. The rocket shook like a wet dog as the engines built to full strength, straining against the hold-down arms on the tower. No turning back now.
“Three, two, one.”
Time stopped for a beat. The solid fuel boosters ignited, their fiery chemical stew leaping to the aid of the first stage engines. Bang! Explosive bolts fired down the length of the vehicle, hurling aside the hold-down arms before the straining giant tore itself apart.
“We have liftoff. Main engines at 109%.”
Jie clutched his seat in a death-grip as the rocket howled upwards, pressing him into the couch. 109%? Is that good?
Fuel poured out at 15,000 kilograms per second, balancing the rocket on a tower of flame. In the surrounding slums, millions prayed for their future. Billions more watched on their televisions as the spacecraft vanished into a fiery cloud of steam and smoke.
“Six seconds. You have cleared the launch tower. Commencing roll program.” The noise fell off as they exited the steamy backsplash from the millions of liters of cooling water pouring off the launch tower. A scrap of ceiling insulation dropped onto the floor.
“Twenty seconds. Altitude 800 meters. Velocity 300 kilometers per hour.”
The rocket plowed through the dense layers of warm air, sluggish, bloated with fuel. Do the engineers know the vibration is this bad? Could Sharon and Rajit even reach the controls in an emergency? Will my equipment survive? The engines hurled out fuel as fast as a hundred years of research could pump it. Every shred of acceleration cut the gravity losses – the fuel burned just to keep them falling back to Earth.
“Thirty seconds. Roll is complete. Your trajectory looks good.”
Through the fish-bowl bubble of Isabel’s helmet Jie caught a manic grin of gleeful terror.
“One minute. Altitude 6000 meters. Down range 2000 meters.”
Acceleration nailed them to their seats, the vibration lessening as the air thinned. A million kilograms of fuel. Gone. The vehicle was becoming more responsive as they shed mass.
“Coming up on solid booster separation.” For a moment they held collective breaths. A lurch. The empty booster rockets detached, traveling so fast that they wouldn’t reach the top of their arc for several minutes.
“Solid boosters have separated at two minutes. Altitude 30 kilometers.”
The ascent’s most dangerous phase had passed. Sharon lifted her hands in a double-thumbs up. For the next eight minutes the five first stage engines powered their ascent; their tanks were still full from crossfueling with the boosters. The ride smoothed out. The vehicle wobbled as the engines gimbaled to keep them on course.
“Tell the engineers she’s riding beautifully,” Sharon said.
Acceleration crept to 3.5 Gs as the vehicle continued to lose mass and the last drag of atmosphere vanished. Invisible fingers tugged at the flesh on Jie’s face. His heart and lungs labored to pump his heavy blood.
“Coming up on ten minutes. Shield One, you are go for staging. Prepare for main engine cutoff.”
“Aaahhhh!” Jie felt like he was being hurled towards the ceiling. An illusion, he knew. A moment of pure, raw terror caused by the sudden switch from nearly 4G to total weightlessness. His arms flailed, and his vision blackened as the pooled blood in his feet rushed back into his head.
No wonder I had to exercise. Calorie blockers might help with weight loss, but no pill could prepare me for this.
A loud bang cracked through the capsule like a thunder clap.
“First stage explosive bolts,” said Sharon. “We have to make sure we detach.” She was enjoying herself. Jie could hear it in her voice.
“Shield One, you have a clean first stage separation. You are go for shroud separation and orbit.”
Orbit. The word sent a tingle down Jie’s spine. A moment of thrust from the single remaining engine pushed the Earth departure stage and its attached crew capsule clear of the spent first stage. Another jerk, smaller this time. The payload shroud, which had sheltered their passage through the atmosphere, split into four, like a silver flower, its petals opening to the sky before fluttering to a fiery end below. A shaft of sunlight stabbed through the window, casting a moving circle of light in the cabin as they climbed ever higher.
***
Zero Gravity! Jie started rotating as soon as he unbuckled, spinning from his chair as if pulled by some invisible force. Out of instinct, he reached to the wall for support, which sent him wheeling about, flapping his feet to try and steady himself. He kicked Sharon in the head.
“Don’t flail or I’m strapping you back in,” she snapped. She grabbed one of Jie's legs – none too gently – and stopped his spin. “Let your legs drift behind you.”
Jie maneuvered to the window to join Rajit and Sally, the barest push with his fingertips enough to get him moving. Move slowly. Don’t spin again. Now that the falling sensation had passed it felt like he was floating in invisible water, but without drag or wetness. Rajit flipped himself upside down, hanging expertly above the window to make more space.
“Showoff.”
“Like a bicycle. You don’t forget microgravity,” said Rajit. His curly hair tried to escape in all directions. Maybe that was why the women had cut theirs short.
“Rajit, the XPOS is matching our telemetry data perfectly,” said Capcom.
“Great,” grunted Rajit.
“What is XPOS?” Jie asked.
“X-Ray Pulsar Positioning System,” said Rajit. “I was one of the designers before I volunteered for this mission. Works like a GPS, but uses X-ray pulsars as timing signals. Five-centimeter accuracy anywhere in the solar system. As we get further from Earth it can be hard to get an accurate position using conventional means, because any earthbound signal we triangulate on is essentially collinear. So we’re trying something new.”
Jie crowded between Rajit and Sally, a tangle of legs and arms around the porthole. Their launch trajectory had taken them over the Bay of Bengal and the Himalayas. Now China rolled 400 kilometers below, Earth’s curvature just visible if they pressed close to the glass. The land was brown with thirst; white snow still frosted the wrinkled mountaintops.
“We’ve resurfaced the whole planet,” said Sally, pointing through the window. “That green rectangle is the Wulong Panda Preserve. Everything around it is farmed. The browns and reds are exposed soil.”
They reached the East China Sea, a hundred shades of dazzling blue under rows of fluffy spring storm clouds. The telltale boundaries between man and nature checkerboarded the rugged islands of Japan. Then came the Pacific Ocean. It faded into darkness as they glided to Earth’s shadowed side. The sea flickered with the moon’s pale reflection, occasional patches of clouds like ghosts over the black waters. They met the sun again over the Andes, a blaze of light that cleared the horizon in seconds.
They left Earth behind at the horn of Africa, a sickly brown expanse of blistered dirt. For six minutes, the Earth departure stage engine pushed them higher. And then, it was only physics. “This is max v,” Rajit said. “Earth
's gravity is already slowing us, but we’ve now got enough momentum to get in front of the moon” – he motioned above his couch – “which pulls us out of Earth’s influence. The math is beautiful.”
“Are we clear to stow suits?” asked Sharon.
“Yes,” replied Earth. “And we’ve arranged a surprise for you. There will be a blacktie dinner in the lower cargo bay, followed by a formal reception.”
“Copy that,” said Sharon, unbuckling. “Do I wear heels?”
“Speaking of shoes,” said Sally. “Wiggle your toes, Jie.”
“What?” He hadn’t even noticed his feet cramping. “How did you know?”
“We clench our toes when we’re falling. Probably some old monkey instinct to keep us in the tree.”
They changed into light blue coveralls, struggling in the limited space like college students in an old-fashioned phone booth. Sally pulled a plastic squeeze tube out of stowage. “Vanilla goo?” she asked, reading the label. “It’s good and sticky so it doesn’t make crumbs. There wasn’t time to put in proper air filters.”
“Do I have a choice?” asked Jie.
She dug in the compartment. “There’s also chocolate goo. Or green goo.”
“Green? Really? They called it that?”
“That’s what it says. I guess nobody could pin down the flavor.”
“I take the vanilla,” said Jie.
Sally floated it over, and Jie squeezed the bland, scentless paste into his mouth. He washed it down with a gulp of lukewarm water. Yum, yum.
Earth’s surface sped away at thousands of kilometers an hour, its curvature increasing as if they were watching a fisheye lens imperceptibly gaining strength. At four hours the planet was visible in its entirety for the first time, an immense shadowed sphere with an arc of blue and green along one edge. The whole crew gathered at the portals, awed to silence. Cheng and Zhenzhen are down there. Maybe already on the flight home to China.
It all snapped into perspective. At any moment, millions were having breakfast, while millions more were going to bed, or going to work, or making love. All on the same wet ball of rock. Breathing the same thin haze of atmosphere, that fuzzy line on the horizon marking the edge of life’s fragile hold. The borders on the map that so many had died to defend lacked any meaning from here. As arbitrary as the names of the plants and animals.
***
Gradually, it turned from an adventure into a trip on the world’s worst budget airline: cramped seats, tasteless squeeze tube meals, and a suction hose urinal, all set against a mindscape of low-grade worry. On the plus side, they lacked the leg shackles that had briefly been the rage in the United States after the hijackings in ‘42. And nobody had needed a bowel movement so far. It was possible, in an emergency, but filling a plastic with feces was hard to manage in zero gravity, even without the obvious effects on the poorly recycled cabin air.
They watched a movie to pass the time, a story of a New York cop who realized that his illegally cloned brother was working for the mob. Sally, the token extrovert, pried everyone for personal information. Rajit had a math degree and hoped to teach at a university in India on his return. Sharon played bass guitar in a rock band. Little snippets of color that Jie would never have thought to ask for.
Isabel was curled up to conserve space, one hand on the window’s edge for stability.
“So Isabel?” asked Sally. “Who are you going to miss?”
“My husband,” she said, a wistful expression passing over her. “And my parents. The four of us spent last week at their place in Amazonas. How about you, Sally?”
“My friends at Xinjiang Space Center,” said Sally without hesitation. “Being so isolated creates a unique community. Every year we drive into the mountains for Yuri’s night and throw a huge party. DJs. Dancing. It’s beautiful.”
“Yuri’s night?” asked Jie.
“Yuri Gagarin,” said Sally. “First man in space, on April 12, 1961. This’ll be the first Yuri’s night I’ve missed in ten years.”
“Yuri would understand,” said Sharon.
***
“Commencing lunar capture burn.”
The EDS engine engaged one final time. After three days of bored weightlessness the return of gravity felt out of place, an outside force pulling Jie into the padded seat. The spacecraft slowed, shedding the excess velocity it had been steadily gaining on its fall towards the moon. And then, with one more bang of explosive bolts, the lunar descent capsule separated. The EDS drifted slowly away, on a ballistic trajectory that would see it slam against the lunar surface shortly before their own arrival. Of the 3 million kilogram monster that had left India, only a tinfoiled pocket of air remained: five astronauts and 70,000 kilograms of equipment.
“OK, Shield One, that was the final course correction before we set you down. You’ve got a few minutes to look at your new home. Enjoy the view.”
A pockmarked wasteland hung outside the window, immense in the spangled blackness. Bleak. Lifeless. They swung low over the lunar North Pole, within 50 kilometers of the surface. The shadows grew long, giving everything a sinister, foreboding look. It was as if the moon were alive somehow, hostile. Jie shivered.
Yet the four-day-old memories of Cheng on the beach were so fresh he could still smell salt.
They passed into the moon’s shadow, a vast blackness lit only by stars, a hole in the sky. They strapped in, but it almost seemed unnecessary. The half-G descent had none of the violence of the ride into low Earth orbit. No wonder the engineers had been able to cobble together a lander so quickly.
“Five kilometers, four kilometers.”
The details of Malapert Mountain started to resolve, a long, low-angled ridge that towered above its cratered surroundings. Unlike Earth, whose poles moved in and out of sunshine with the seasons, the moon had no rotational tilt. From an unobstructed vantage point on the lunar poles, the sun perpetually circled the horizon. Malapert Mountain, a “peak of perpetual light” at the South Pole, was the best such point. Its summit was high enough that the surrounding terrain blocked the sun just two days a month, giving ample solar power. And since the same phenomenon kept the lowlands around the mountain in eternal shadow, large amounts of valuable water ice had been preserved there, which the first astronauts had mined out of the impenetrable darkness.
“One kilometer,” said Capcom. “We’ve got a good lock on the landing beacons.”
“XPOS. Landing beacons. It’s taken all the adventure away,” complained Sharon. “Apollo 11 had no idea what they were heading for. They had to dodge a boulder field. Neil Armstrong landed with 30 seconds of fuel remaining.” Was that a hint of envy? This is scary enough already, thank you. Sally drummed her fingers, the sound just audible in the silent capsule.
The monitors showed the landing field now, a flat section of ridge close to Malapert summit. Abandoned equipment lay scattered across it. Tire tracks marked the rubbly ground. It was hard to get a sense of scale in the unfamiliar terrain. Not one bit of color was visible on the surface: just grays and whites and blacks. Jie jiggled his leg in nervous anticipation.
“One hundred meters. Fifty meters. Twenty meters.” Jie let out a breath. We’re as good as down.
“Ten meters, eight, five meters.” The engine cut off to protect the capsule from backsplash. A moment of freefall, followed by a gentle jolt.
“Whooooo!” Sharon’s cheer shattered the silence so abruptly that for one panicked moment Jie thought there’d been a malfunction.
He added his voice to the hoots and cheers. I’m on the moon. Jie felt insubstantial, though it was hard to tell if it was the feeble gravity or the adrenaline coursing through his system. Harsh light from the empty world outside flooded into their cramped cocoon, making it seem colder, somehow, than Jie had ever imagined possible.
Chapter 18
NO MATTER WHICH country, no matter how different the language or the culture, international airports existed inside a bubble of Western civilization. Tania sat in a f
ake Irish pub in the Halliburton Airport in South Sudan, drinking coffee from Guatemala that cost a week’s local wages. The pub had been crowded for the lunar launch, but now the passengers had drifted off and the screens showed a baseball game from Beijing.
What if Steve doesn’t show up? Even finding a hotel would be a challenge here. She’d done some belated reading on the plane, and Al Qadarif wasn’t a place where a single Western woman could move around safely. In fact, a convoy of armored vehicles couldn’t move around safely. Like most countries in this lawless region, power existed locally, bound to the central government by only the thinnest of threads. Medieval city-states had returned, with crime syndicates and multinationals as the new royalty.
A tall man with stubbly blonde hair stepped out of the flow of passengers. “Tania Black? Steve DeBeers.” His short-sleeved, button-up shirt, tucked into khaki pants, made him look like a missionary. Is he a missionary? Tania knew little about Steve, other than that he worked at one of the refugee camps and had some nebulous connection to Ruth. And I’m trusting him with my life.
“Sorry about the delay,” he said in a strong South African accent. He took her backpack before she had a chance to stop him. “Gun battle on the highway. Burned out vehicles all over the place.” He saw Tania’s expression. “No worries. Happens all the time. We’ll take a side road.”
Steve led the way past the row of chain stores, past the armed guards, and into the chaos outside. The airport loading area looked like the mutated offspring of a street market and a parking lot. Dark, long-limbed taxi drivers swarmed around them, shouting, “Where you go? Where you go? I take you!” For once in her life, Tania didn’t feel tall.
Steve grabbed Tania’s arm, plowing a path through the crowd like a human icebreaker, dragging her in his wake.