“I’ve never gone orbital before.”
She placed a gentle hand against his back. “It’s less scary than a flyer. Come on.”
He stepped over the threshold. The flight deck contained plush sudahyde acceleration couches arranged in a circle, feet toward the central structural column, heads under windows in the tapering nose cone. I have no memory of this, yet I know that the pilots sit in that pie-wedge section to the left and that the safest place to sit is the seat next to the hatch. Baker—ghost in my head—are you watching?
A portly man in gray and umber reclined in the first couch. Kinney stood at his feet and gazed at him.
“What’re you staring at?” the man asked.
“You’re in my seat,” Kinney said in an odd voice.
“Says who?”
Kinney’s eyes widened into a mad stare. “Says God.”
“Virgil”—Delia tried to direct him away—“any seat will do.”
“Not on a doomed flight,” he said, gazing with unblinking intensity at the man.
Behind him, Trine made dismissing motions for the passenger to see. What he saw and noted was her white piping. Muttering about “cush-pampered test-pilot blowheads,” he rolled off the couch and made his way to the far side of the ship where the pilots’ cabin and central column blocked the view.
Kinney reclined on the couch, the upholstery still warm from the other man’s body.
Why did you want this seat, Baker? Are you waking up?
Delia strapped into the seat beside him. She stared at him, hoping not to appear as if she was staring.
Five more people boarded shortly before blastoff. Virgil eyed each one with severe scrutiny, as if he were in judgment of their lives.
Candycane walks in hunched over from the low ceiling, his red-white jumpsuit rumpled and twisted, his eyes goggling at me. He sits like a crumpled bag next to Gooseflesh, who’s allprickle-hair nervous at the prospect of rocket flight. Or maybe at sitting near me. Why are they watching me while trying to avoid watching?
Virgil grinned strangely during the shaking at engine ignition and the sudden pressure of blastoff. His grin became a wolfish grimace at the period of maximum dynamic pressure.
Crush me, giants, he thought while the world thundered around him. Try to squeeze me into nothing. I shall break free.
Suddenly, he did.
The engines cut off and he gazed out of the viewing port at star-riddled blackness.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” the pilot announced over the intercom, “we’ve broken the law of gravity again and are in orbit.”
Trine smiled at the pilot’s superstitious phrase, a saying that went back more than a century to a time when launching a spaceship without Fetter permission was an actual crime. She glanced over at Kinney. He stared with wide eyes at the planet’s surface rotating into view. The reds, browns, and deep greens of AfricaLand marched past with silent grace. The verdant checkerboard and circles that marked the Sahara Cooperative drifted next into view.
Virgil drank in the broad vista through the tiny polycarbonate window for long moments until a buzzer announced their arrival at the Texas Spaceways terminal.
“What the hell is this?”
Virgil floated in the staging area dressed in a skintight pressure suit. The outer radiation/meteor armor of loose-fitting, overlapping lead and Kevlar plates made him look like an ancient knight—from the neck down, at least. His head craned around the interior of a tough plastic sphere coated with gold mined from the Belt asteroid lodes.
Delia, identically attired, pulled along the hand rails to float at his side. Neither could actually see the other’s face behind the reflective golden globes. Inside their helmets, though, tiny fiberoptic vids sent a view of their faces to each other, which were then superimposed on their head-up displays to look as if their faces were visible. The HUDs projected all manner of information, most of which did not concern Virgil, who only alternated between observing Delia and the Earth.
“The trip to the experimental ship has to be made by taxi,” she explained.
The term “taxi” implied a level of luxury not offered by the minuscule
spacecraft at which Kinney stared. A taxi, at least, had such amenities as doors and windows. The vehicle they faced in the docking bay was not much more than tanks of hydrogen and oxygen with seats in tandem down the center of mass.
Virgil strapped in between the pilot and Delia. He noted that the pilot’s armor was twice the thickness of theirs.
The pilot’s voice rumbled gruffly in their headphones. “Sit back, strap down, shut up, and hang on.”
The docking bay doors slid aside. With a roar that was felt rather than heard, the taxi kicked powerfully forward out of the Texas Spaceways terminal into the blinding glare of a sunny low-Earth-orbit noon.
Kinney squinted. The pilot rotated the taxi so that the dazzling sun was beneath their feet, blocked by the spacecraft. The Earth overhead, though, bathed them with a reflected glow that lit up the taxi with a diffuse illumination; it belied the harsh division between light and darkness in space. He could see every detail of his space suit, every scratch on the back of the pilot’s seat, every inspection note chalked on the tanks and engine.
The Earth hung five hundred kilometers over their heads for long minutes, then shifted suddenly to their side as the pilot rolled to align them with the attitude of the test ship.
It was unbelievably small. Virgil knew that it was only ten meters long and five wide, but it seemed like a toy, only slightly larger than a family flyer.
They want me to go to Saturn in that! Kinney suppressed a shudder. Death Angel serves Nightsheet well. This will kill me for sure. But I’ve got a secret. He fingered the crumpled piece of paper jammed in the third finger of his right glove and smiled. The blues and whites of Earth glittered and reflected off the polished body of the stubby, wedge-shaped device.
“Not much to it, is there?” Virgil’s voice had a raspy, breathy sound over the ’comm.
Delia reached forward to pat him on the shoulder. “It’s not actually a spaceship; it’s a dimension ship. It has vernier rockets and emergency thrusters, but no main engines. It’s really just a needle that finds where two pieces of universe fabric touch and pushes itself through.”
The pilot tapped at the braking rockets, shoving them forward against their harnesses. They stopped, motionless relative to the test ship. Texas Spaceways’ terminal shone unevenly about a hundred kilometers away.
“Where are the camera crews?” Virgil asked. “The dignitaries?”
Trine shrugged and fumbled with the restraint harness. “Nobody knows except us three and the monitor team at Brennen Orbital.” She reached forward to undo Kinney’s.
“How can you keep a spaceship secret?” he asked.
The taxi pilot laughed in the newcomer’s ear. “It’s both crowded and empty out here. Lots of people coming and going tend to make individuals anonymous. Lots of open space to lose yourself in. With every piece of orbital junk down to the size of a pea being tracked, no one has the time to query the comings and goings of every ship. Act innocent, play dumb, and everybody else is working too hard to notice you. Up here, you stay busy watching your step with Nature. It’s a long drop back to the ground.”
Kinney looked to his left, toward Earth, and suddenly felt extremely dizzy.
With the aid of Delia and the taxi pilot, Virgil climbed inside the tight, cramped compartment and strapped into position. Delia clamped down the hatch, sealing it from the outside. Circuits completed by the lockdown, the ship came to life. A small scrim before him glowed. The image of Trine appeared in a corner of the screen. Earthlight washed out her left side while reflected light illuminated her right. The vid’s computer balanced the image quickly.