“It’s fine. You’re right, anyway.”
Old puppy dog Jack already feeling sorry for himself.
Still. She can’t help feeling sympathetic. He’s got problems.
Back in the cargo bay airlock, they check that the shovers are secured and find three loose tie down straps. They either came off during landing or someone forgot to secure them after unloading the shipment. Justin has been shirking his duties, Jack says. Half-assing things. Little chores, mostly. Changing the garbage, sweeping the bay, cleaning the toilet. But a loose shover careening around an airlock could cause a hell of a lot of damage. He’ll talk to him.
They walk the new room, the addition by the observation deck. There are square seals arranged in a pattern on the tile floor. Jack says these are the hideaway seats. Against the far wall, a holo monitor. She counts seven EVA helmets plugged firmly on their holders, several lockers that must contain the rest of the suits. Straight ahead of the main doors, a narrow hallway leads farther in. Halfway down, a door on the left opens into a storage room. Looks like food and water, mostly. At the end of the hall on the right, a cramped lavatory.
All at once, she knows what this is. “An escape pod,” she says.
Jack nods. “We call it the panic pod. Anything goes wrong, you get here fast and shut the doors. There’s no other way inside. She’s sealed off from Belinda completely. O2 and water filtration can last up to two years. There’s enough food for about half that right now, but space for more. Six suits for the crew, plus one spare.”
There are no grav tanks, she notes.
Jack says, “It’s just a life boat, not a getaway vehicle. Has basic propulsion but there’s no grav drive. Say you’re a few miles from the nearest lunar outpost and Bel has critical damage. Take this baby out to a safe distance and wait for rescue.”
“There’s no airlock either. Opening the doors would depressurize the whole thing. That doesn’t seem like much of a rescue.”
“That’s what the suits are for.”
This all makes logical sense, but it’s not like Jack to think so far ahead. He’s more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants kind of guy. At least he used to be. “Why?” she says.
“Why what?”
“Why’d you get it?”
He shows her the pink circle in the center of his right palm. Scar tissue about the diameter of a grape.
“Laser rifle?”
“Yep. Some jumpy cop. I went to shake his hand. He thought I was pulling a gun. After that I thought, you know, in this line of business, a safe room might not be a bad idea. I didn’t like paying for it, but it makes the rest of the crew feel better.”
“You’re lucky you didn’t lose the hand.”
When they’re finished with their rounds and the others report clean diagnostics, they head to the bridge. The third-level ceiling transitions to transparent materials. She sees dark gray sky through a light dusting of snow. This is the observation deck. It gives her vertigo. A knot of nerves has been building in her stomach since she got here. She’s managed to ignore it until now.
The doors to the bridge open automatically. A set of steps leads them down to the deck. Storage compartments and straps cover the walls. The ceiling, half transparent, is peppered with handholds in case the gravity goes out. Grooves in the floor serve the same purpose.
There are two command monitors in the nose. Hunter and Stetson have already taken their places at them. Jack stomps a black switch on the floor and six shutters slide back. Chairs rise and unfold. Behind them stands the interactive mapping module, the same size and shape as a billiards table. And beside it, there’s an emergency hatch in the floor, a slight depression that opens to a vertical shaft leading to the forward airlock prep chamber.
She straps into a seat and focuses on these familiar features, reminds herself how routine all of this is. Because the thing is, no matter how many times she takes off and lands and pretends she is safe, and though she was born and raised on a space station orbiting a gas giant, she has never been comfortable in space. The first time her father took her to the observation park looking out on Saturn with its soupy bands of cloud and those mystifying rings, Lana burst into tears and wouldn’t stop crying until she was back in their apartment and her parents told her it was a holograph. That was the other reason she left Jack’s ship. The one she tended not to acknowledge. She’d been afraid. She always would be. Like a sailor with a fear of drowning. And Jack keeps glancing in her direction, a half-concerned look on his face. In another time, he might have reached out and grabbed her hand, told her everything would be alright. More likely he would have made fun of her. Not now. He leaves her alone with her deep inhalations, her silent refrain of, It’s safer than taking the tram. Takeoffs bother her most. Even docking isn’t so bad. Something about the transition from solid ground—or any ground—to the great void. And even though she knows space is not really empty, its size gets to her. Its foreverness. Unquantifiable. Every run around the sun flirts with our vague understanding of physics. Faith alone tells us gravity will not fling us into the darkness.
As the gravity engines kick on, the ship begins its humming shake. She feels it in her teeth. She grips the arms of her chair.
“We’re golden,” Hunter says. “UAFA has cleared us for takeoff.”
Jack says, “Hit the gas.”
The shaking stops as the ship lifts. She makes the mistake of looking up. The clouds shift and seem to boil downward. Gravity fields cause distortions in spacetime, bending light. She glances to Jack, expecting his cocky half-smirk or a reassuring smile, but sees instead that his own head is thrust back and his eyes are closed and his hands are white-knuckled on the arms of his seat. There’s nothing she can do or say. She leans back and shuts her eyes and gives herself over to what might come, hoping she made the right decision.
Chapter 11
Once they’re out of the upper atmosphere, Hunter sets course for safe jumping distance and Jack retreats to his room. He lies on his bunk and swallows more pills. His thoughts race.
There is nothing good about this run. Dandy’s mystery coordinates are way off the standard axis, in a realm where FROST fleets used to hide before an attack, an area so vast that trying to spot and armada was like searching for a needle in an ocean. Jack is wary of such places. Twelve years may have passed since the war’s end, and he has traveled the solar system countless times, but anything beyond Mars still feels like enemy territory. Sure, FROST was disbanded, but that doesn’t make up for their atrocities. Reminders still litter the systems. Five years after the Alliance’s victory, a crew of freelancers in the asteroid belt approached what they thought was a small, slow-moving comet. Upon closer inspection, they found a mass of bodies compressed into some kind of meteoroid from Hell. Hundreds of thousands of dead, their bones snapped, contorted, faces staring frozen and irradiated. Civilians, probably. Unclaimed.
The war had been a brutal conflict from the start, though you wouldn’t have known it from the way people talked. Like it was some romantic adventure. The Great Solar War. They signed up by the millions, wanting to be heroes—whatever that means—men and women both, buying into the myth of honorable warfare. Maybe they imagined stringed instruments playing in the background as they marched to their ships. Probably saw themselves returning as hardened veterans with stories to tell of patriotism and valor, weeping softly when speaking of fallen comrades. It would be a respectable pain. Somehow modest. Cause for reverence in the hearts of their children and grandchildren.
Horseshit.
Even at 18, Jack knew better. He signed up to escape his life on Earth, but volunteered for mess duty to keep out of the fighting, and for a long time, it worked. COs valued talented cooks. They laughed with him, made special requests which he obliged, assured him he deserved a promotion. Then one day he found himself face-down in the barracks, FROST fighters kicking his ribs and laughing. He was marched with the other survivors into the cargo holds of ancient freighters, rickety grav tanks lined up in rows. They crawled inside at gunpoint.