Martians Abroad

by Carrie Vaughn

  “Can’t say I am, particularly,” he said.

  I looked at him like he was crazy. “We’ll finally be back in low g. We’ll finally be in our element and we’ll get to watch the others flail around like newbies. Tell me you’re not looking forward to that at least a little.”

  He set aside his handheld and looked at me. “It’s my hypothesis that on each field trip, Stanton has rigged some kind of event to test our responses to emergencies, and that in both cases we’ve exceeded her expectations with our proactive responses. So what do you think she has planned for us on this trip? Think about worst-case scenarios possible on a lunar field trip for a minute, then ask me again if I’m looking forward to it.”

  Charles really had an interesting way of looking at the world.

  “We’ll just have to keep a lookout, that’s all,” I said, trying to be blasé.

  “Yes, we will.”

  And we would. We’d be in our element, in sealed space stations and colonies. We’d be able to spot it the minute something went wrong.

  Stanton wouldn’t dare rig anything truly dangerous, would she?

  21

  Boarding the shuttle to get to Cochrane Station, I couldn’t stop grinning. I might have been vibrating, I was so excited. I might have annoyed some of the others.

  “I think I’m gonna be sick,” Angelyn muttered.

  Turned out about half the Earth kids in our group had been off-planet before, at least to one of the orbiting stations on a vacation or whatnot, and didn’t have any trouble. Some of the other half, though, weren’t thrilled. Angelyn had gone pale, like the blood had drained out of her face.

  “Zero g’s nothing to be scared of,” Ladhi said, trying to sound reassuring.

  “I’m not scared of zero g, I’m scared of making an idiot of myself!” Angelyn said.

  She wasn’t wrong—making an idiot of yourself in zero g was way too easy if you didn’t pay attention.

  “Don’t flail,” I said. “Relax. No sudden moves. It’ll be fine.”

  She closed her eyes. “Oh, my God.”

  We filed down the aisle of the shuttle and into our seats.

  We had a cluster of familiar faces in our section of the shuttle. The usual offworld clique—me, Charles, Ladhi, Ethan, Boris, Marie—plus some of the Earthers: Angelyn, Elzabeth, George, a couple of George’s friends. And this time, they weren’t teasing us, smirking at us, or acting superior.

  A member of the shuttle crew gave us the safety briefing. Stanton ordered us to pay attention, but I had a hard time. I knew all this, about emergency oxygen and crash positions and inflatable escape bubbles and harnesses stored at the exits. The odds of anything going wrong were so vanishingly small—

  Except for Stanton, standing in the front of the shuttle gazing over us during the briefing with her usual superior, calculating expression. With her in charge, I could throw the odds out the window. Anything could happen.

  I started paying closer attention and checking to make sure the safety and escape devices actually were in place and labeled. I looked across the aisle to see Charles doing the same. He caught my gaze and pressed his lips in a grim line.

  The engines whined, and the shuttle rattled as the launch module prepared to ignite and take us out of the gravity well. A hand closed over mine. Angelyn, sitting next me, had grabbed my hand and squeezed.

  “I’m sticking with you this whole trip,” she said, her voice tight with anxiety. She glanced back to include George and Elzabeth sitting in the row behind us. “We all are. If something awful happens, we’re counting on you guys to get us out of it.”

  “We’ll all get ourselves out of it.”

  So what should have been a really nice trip and the highlight of my time so far at Galileo ended up being anxious and stress ridden. We knew something was going to happen, we just didn’t know what, or when. I hoped it didn’t involve air locks.

  * * *

  As far as we could tell, everything went smoothly. We docked at Cochran Station, and the seal between the ship and station didn’t blow and send us all tumbling into an explosive vacuum.

  Being on the station, stepping on the rubber matting in the steel corridor, felt like coming home after a long and difficult journey. I took a deep breath of filtered air and relaxed as the walls safely closed around me.

  “Why do I feel like my heart’s in my throat?” Elzabeth muttered.

  Funny, my internal organs finally felt normal, sitting lightly in my body cavity like they were supposed to, instead of sinking like rocks.

  We could tell who’d never been off-planet before by how they acted once we got on the station. The station had simulated gravity, but it was less than Earth’s, and you had to move carefully. Even the students who were excited about this took slow steps and reached out to grab on to things.

  A couple of people got sick right off. We’d been given bags for that, fortunately. It was apparently pretty common. Secretly, I thought it was hilarious, because at least one of the sick kids was Franklin, who’d given us offworlders a hard time from the get-go.

  “It’s called payback,” Charles said. “Part of the natural order of the universe. I think it’s a corollary of Newton’s Third Law of Motion.”

  “What are you talking about?” one of the other kids said.

  “He’s making a physics joke,” I said. “He does that.”

  The entire list of activities on Cochrane Station:

  Microgravity gym class. Charles’s payback in spades, because here the offworld kids were the ones able to jump and zoom and spin and bounce without effort, reaching out to grab handholds or bounce off walls like it was second nature. We might have spent the last six months on Earth in too much gravity, but the instincts came back in moments. We had been like carp out of water, gasping for breath, now tossed back into our watery homes, and we celebrated. On the other hand, the Earth kids flailed like mindless blobs set loose in space. I couldn’t really laugh, since the idea of the low-g practice wasn’t to make anybody an expert—it was to make sure people didn’t hurt themselves and everybody around them. Microgravity gym was like remedial PE for them. A tiny revenge.

  Station-operations tour: Everything you needed to know to operate a space station, which was pretty much exactly what you needed to operate a Martian colony, so once again we were ahead. Life support, maneuvering thrusters to maintain spin and orbit, communications systems, daily operations. The kind of thing Mom did every day. It was like being home again.

  Planetary-charting workshop. We used the telescopes in one of the station’s observation lounges to photograph and then map various features of Earth’s surface. I found Manhattan, a built-up gray splotch jutting into a twisting corner of water. It looked so innocuous from 160 kilometers up.

  Introductory hydroponics and low-gravity health and nutrition. Which was, again, mainly for the Earth kids because it was second nature to those of us who grew up with it all. I still had to pay attention and take the tests. Another hoop to jump through.

  Through just about all of it, us station and colony kids finally, finally took the lead. I was too happy to be functional again to gloat. If they’d just move Galileo Academy to a space station instead of insisting that it had be on Earth, I might actually enjoy it.

  Except, weirdly, the pang of homesickness hit even harder than it had on Earth, because the station felt so much like home. But however much a station might have been like a colony, it wasn’t, and I realized that what I really wanted to see was a rocky brown landscape stretching away outside a view port. Wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Moving on.

  After three days of activities came the second leg of the trip, to Collins City. I was anxious to bursting. Not about the trip, but about making that all-important request.

  We were eating breakfast in the student bunk area we’d been staying in. Stanton and several other instructors were supervising—probably because it would be especially embarrassing if I decided to go exploring on my own here. I hurrie
d to finish eating, cleaned up my things, and approached her. Carefully, deferentially, hands clasped behind my back, gaze downcast. It was just me, harmless little student type. She watched me like she might an approaching missile. I only got as close as I needed for her to hear me talk, slightly softer than normal.

  “Ms. Stanton,” I said as carefully and politely as I could. “May I make a request? A small request.” I winced. I had to strike a balance between making sure I was serious, but that it wasn’t a big deal. Who was I kidding? She’d know exactly how important this was to me. She knew everything.

  “Yes, Newton?”

  “I’m deeply, very interested in the piloting and operations of M-drive interplanetary craft, and so I would like to observe the M-drive jump in the flight operations cabin, if I might be able to do so without being in the way, if at all possible. Please.” Calm and quiet, that was me.

  She raised a brow, studied me. This was possibly the most polite I’d ever been in my entire life, please let her not slam me for it. I had a sudden, terrible thought: she could leave me on the station. She could keep me off the lunar half of the trip just out of spite. Had I made a horrible mistake? I wanted to scream, but I just stood there wringing my hands behind my back and clenching my teeth so I wouldn’t say anything stupid.

  Finally, Stanton said, “I’ll ask the captain. It will be her decision.”

  “Thank you, Ms. Stanton. Thank you for asking.” At least I’d tried. I couldn’t get down on myself for not trying.

  She didn’t say anything. Just frowned.

  “You shouldn’t even engage with her,” Charles said, sidling up to me as we walked to the docks.

  “Why, because it’s not playing the game right? I don’t care about the game, I want what I want and if I have to ask for it myself, that’s fine, because no one else will. I’m not going to go around second-guessing myself all the time.”

  He didn’t have a zinger for that.

  * * *

  The M-drive jump was short, seeing as how we only had some half a million kilometers to go, instead of hundreds of millions. Just a hop, really. Less exciting than a truly interplanetary leap, but I’d take what I could get. Especially since Stanton said yes. I got to sit in the flight cabin for the entire jump maneuver.

  We were boarding when she pulled me aside, calling me to the front of the passenger aisle. “Ms. Newton, will you come up here please?”

  Nearby students gave me that look, wondering what I’d done wrong and hanging back to see how much trouble I was in. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, I just knew it. At least, I hadn’t in the last fifty hours or so. “Yes, ma’am?”

  She looked down her nose, and I couldn’t tell from her expression whether she was praising me or dressing me down. “You’ll be allowed to observe flight operations on the bridge, but you must remain still and quiet, and I want a thorough written report of the experience as part of your classwork. Understood?”

  The breath went out of me, but I managed to squeak, “Yes, ma’am.”

  Captain Arroz was obviously from Earth, short and stout, with olive skin and dark hair. And she was kind, showing me a little jump seat in the back where I could sit out of the way. She introduced me to her navigator, Lieutenant Nguyen, and asked if I had any questions. I had too many. I just wanted to see it all work. This was a smaller ship, so the bridge really was just a cabin, with two seats for the pilot and navigator, who doubled as engineer for the trip. The controls and displays were all scaled down, but I still recognized a lot of it. I stayed very quiet and didn’t bother them with questions.

  Powering under the M-drive felt much smoother and quieter than the conventional engine. There weren’t vibrations through the hull, there wasn’t the distant roar of thrust. It all seemed perfectly calm. Perfectly perfect. The ship was hurtling through folded space—speed was irrelevant, but I imagined zipping across tens of thousands of kilometers in seconds. The crew managed the ship without any fuss. Lights beeped, status reports scrolled across screens. Captain Arroz would ask for an update using some verbal shorthand of just a couple of words, and Nguyen replied, again with just a couple of words. They had been doing this a long time and were comfortable here. I wondered if I’d ever get that comfortable in a flight cabin and not too excited for words. About halfway through the M-drive jump, Captain Arroz leaned over the navigator’s station and they had a quiet conversation that involved pointing at the screen, like something was wrong, but they didn’t speak loudly enough for me to find out what. They were very calm about it. As if something going wrong was just part of the routine. I wondered if that came from training, or if that was just their nature—if you had to be super calm to be on a ship’s crew. That was something I could probably work on.

  Nothing was wrong, it turned out. This had all been routine.

  I sat quietly, hardly moved at all, and tried to take it all in. I was desperate to remember everything so I could replicate it when I finally got into training. Be calm, be prepared, be focused. How wonderful to feel like I was part of it, even if just for an hour or two.

  And then, too quickly, we were in lunar orbit and docking with a shuttle that would take us to Collins City. I let out a happy sigh.

  “Thank you very much, Captain. I really appreciate it,” I said when Stanton arrived to steer me back to the others.

  “Still want to command a ship of your own? It’s pretty boring.”

  “No,” I said. “It’s wonderful.”

  She got this glint in her eye, like she understood.

  22

  Collins City was even more like home than Cochran Station. It was partially underground, with all the expected support systems and rubber-matted corridors and hissing vents. But the gravity was scant. We had no trouble standing upright, anchored to the floor, but take a step too quickly or too hard, and you’d fling your body forward into a wall or the floor or someone else.

  I could look out a view port here to an expanse of ground reaching to a horizon. But the landscape was gray, harshly lit by unfiltered sunlight, and the sky was black. Fiercely black. My homesickness got even worse. I wanted to see Mars so badly I almost cried. But I couldn’t. Like Charles said, just put your head down and get through it.

  I couldn’t tell if he was feeling the same deep longing, the frustration that things were familiar but just off enough to be flat-out wrong. He kept his serious expression to the world, and I was sure that if I asked, he’d say he wasn’t feeling anything at all. You didn’t win the game by feeling.

  We had to sit through another orientation and safety video, a lot like the one we had to sit through on Cochran. I imagined Mars had a video new arrivals were made to watch, about what doors you were allowed to go through and what buttons you really shouldn’t push, and about how the dust was so bad that if you went on EVA you had to be very sure you got thoroughly vacuumed in the air lock. I’d never seen that video, because why would I? We had a different set of videos we’d watched since we were babies, for people who lived there. I’d never thought about it before. This was all second nature. It would be easy to blow it off, not pay attention. But it was the little tiny differences between Collins and Colony One that would get me in trouble, so I paid attention.

  Weirdly, everybody was paying close attention. Well, almost everybody. Me, Charles, Ethan, Ladhi, Angelyn, Elzabeth, George—the group of us who thought Stanton was up to something. Would she sabotage the life-support system? Cause an air lock to fail? Hard to believe she’d do something that life-or-death, something that had a good chance of getting someone killed. But that was the trouble with not being on Earth—if something went wrong here, there was a good chance someone would get killed.

  Out here, so much could go wrong. Stanton had many opportunities to rig something, to test how we’d react in an emergency. The more attention we paid, the more we knew about the colony and its systems, the more likely we were to figure out what disaster she was going to throw at us. Ethan leaned forward, chin in his hand,
staring at the screen like he was memorizing every image. Charles sat back in his chair, scowling.

  After that, we were sent to the dorm area we’d been assigned. We shared rooms, which were clustered around a common area where we’d eat meals and hang out between coursework and tours.

  We had this first day to rest and acclimate, but I was so mixed up about what time it was supposed to be, I didn’t really care about resting. We were all wired, wandering around the dorm area, complaining, staring out observation windows at the fascinating bleakness. The only one who was really happy with the gravity and the constant sensation that our bellies were crawling up our rib cages was Boris, who’d grown up here. A couple of the Earth kids had to be medicated so they could keep food down.

  I had to write that essay about observing flight operations for Stanton, so I barricaded myself in the dorm room while the others burned off energy and excitement. Pretty soon, though, I heard shouting. Two voices, male, muffled through the door. One of them was Ethan’s. Ethan never yelled at anybody. I slid open the door a crack and peered out to the sofas and chairs where people had gathered. Angelyn, George, and Ladhi were sitting, cringing and watching with wide eyes. Ethan stood off to the side, arms crossed, staring down at Tenzig, who was pointing at him.

  “That’s messed up. You’re messed up. I’m not spying on Stanton for you.”

  “We’re just asking for everyone to keep an eye out, to watch out for each other—”

  “I’m looking out for myself! You all should be looking out for yourselves. You’re just too stupid to realize it, too stupid to not go begging everyone else for help.”

  Ethan sighed. “Looking out for yourself—that’s you all over.”

  “You know what? I’m telling Stanton that you all think she’s out to kill you.” He took in the whole room, and his eyes were lit up, like he was on the hunt.

  Ethan just smiled. “You’re so into being her little stooge, you go right ahead.”