As mission control counted down the final seconds, Juno was sure that something had gone wrong, because she felt as if the orbiter was about to roll right off the launch pad. Perhaps some bolt had ruptured too early and the shuttle had ceded to gravity at this first hurdle.
But, by the time the flight director said ‘One’, they were upright again and then they were flying.
‘Lift-off!’ came the exultant voice from mission control, the same way men shout, ‘Goooooooal!’ during a football match, ‘We have lift-off!’ and over the headset, Juno could hear laughter and applause.
It was a brutal ride. The vibration rattled her bones and her muscles seized against the shockwaves. It felt as if the rocket was strapped right onto her back. As they shuddered up into the sky, she clenched her jaw to stop her teeth from smashing like china. Her arteries flooded with adrenaline and her heart thrashed against her sternum.
Outside the window, the ground disappeared. And then, as they cleared the cobalt stratosphere, the solid rocket boosters burned the last of their fuel. Juno sensed the instant they detached because, for a second, the shaking stopped. She pictured the two cylinders falling back on themselves through the sky and into a foreign sea. Then the next stage fired and her spine was slammed back into her seat.
It was a little like being on a rollercoaster, that quick point when the carriage swings up and the passengers are pushed down, momentarily heavier.
The crew were speeding to twenty-six times the speed of sound, and for Juno, the acceleration was terrifying. She felt it first in her arms; when she tried to lift them up they crashed back onto the armrest like felled trees. Then the force intensified. They accelerated at 3g and her eyes were pinned open. Juno felt the pull of the force in the sides of her face and around her mouth as the soft tissue peeled away from her bones.
Six minutes into the flight, she weighed almost four and a half times as much as she did on Earth, and it felt like being buried alive. Her chest was trapped in a tightening vice and drawing every breath was a struggle.
All the senior crew – the veteran astronauts – had snapped their fingers and told her that the moment of suffering would fly by, but, for Juno, it felt like hours. She couldn’t think past the pressure on her lungs. How long until a bone snapped? What if her heart tore loose from the sinews holding it in her chest and collapsed like a punctured balloon? It felt possible.
She had seen a video of a pilot sitting up at 3.5g. It took only a few seconds for the blood to drain from his brain into his feet, and for his eyes to roll back as he convulsed into unconsciousness.
Juno was saved from this because she was lying on her back and because her suit was designed to grip her body and stop her blood pressure from dropping too low.
When she was finally thrust into orbit, she instantly went from weighing four times as much as she did on Earth to weighing nothing at all. Her brain tried to process the sudden change and for a while – although she was still strapped in her seat – she could not shake the dizzying sensation of tumbling forwards again and again into the control panel by her feet. She had to close her eyes to fight the tide of nausea whirling in her gut.
When she opened them again, everyone was laughing with nervous relief. The checklist in Dr Golinsky’s hand had begun to float and the mad-eyed statue of St Joseph of Cupertino that Igor had affixed to the dashboard for luck had come unstuck and was hovering in the air.
Out the window, it had gone from a sunny day to complete blackness. Over her headset, mission control said, ‘Good luck and Godspeed.’
SHE WOULD PROBABLY NEVER be weightless again, Juno realized with an odd disappointment as she looked for the Damocles through the window. Their little shuttle was due to dock with the imposing ship in thirty minutes and as they approached Juno could start to feel the heaviness of its artificial gravity.
Like other members of the Beta, she had trained for 200 hours in the Weightless environment Training Facility – a fifteen-metre-deep pool in which scaled-down mock-ups of the Damocles and the Congreve were sunk. Those exhausting days meant that, now, the Beta were expected to take to weightlessness as instinctively as creatures designed for the sky.
But true weightlessness was different from swimming. Although Juno’s clothes clung and floated around her chest in the same way, there was no real sense of up or down. No pool floor beneath or light refracting above. After a while in the orbiter, her sense of balance disappeared. There was no need for it. She unstrapped from her seat and found that she already knew how to move around the cramped space, the exact right angles to push off surfaces, the amount of force to apply to her weightless limbs. Poppy clapped as Astrid and Jesse turned gleeful somersaults in the air.
‘There she is,’ Commander Sheppard said, as Juno turned to see the Damocles rising like a shard of glass out of the shadow of the Earth. It was a strange shape, a long shining central truss banded by three torus decks – which looked like aluminium doughnuts – with no wings or rudders, nothing to suggest flight. It was not streamlined like their shuttle, because it did not need to drill against friction to escape Earth’s atmosphere. It had been assembled in orbit over the past five years – a gradual process that all astronaut candidates for the Beta had followed with hopeful interest, dreaming of making it their home, of walking the round decks or harvesting crops in the glassy greenhouse that ran through its spine.
Perhaps that was why, as she spotted the glinting vessel, Juno shivered with recognition. She herself had been excited every time a new module had been built, launched into orbit and locked by skilled engineers onto the central truss. She had bought a kit and built her own model of the Damocles to mount on the desk in her bedroom at Dalton, a model with real decks that spun around tiny crawl-spokes, with hollow little bridges running between them all. She had even coloured her own Union Jack with red and blue gel pens and tacked it onto the round control module that protruded from the upper deck.
However, she suspected her recognition ran a lot deeper than a scale model or simulation mock-ups. She wanted to believe that the reason she felt a twinge of closure as they locked on to the giant vessel was because it was her home.
As they edged closer to it, gravity tugged at the crew. Juno’s limbs grew heavier and the fluids drained from her face. The congested flu-like feeling that being weightless induced in her sinuses began to clear. The Damocles was equipped with two gravity-dromes that emitted 1g of fictitious force to stop their bones from crumbling and their muscles from atrophying during the long-haul journey.
When they finally docked, Juno was one of the last to climb out and when she did she felt like a swimmer surfacing, crawling back onto land. Her bones were made of iron, her head a millstone. As she stepped out of the airlock and onto the craft the muscles in her thighs began to tremble. Her first view of the ship was glittering with stars, and then her vision blackened and the floor smacked the side of her body.
JUNO AWOKE FEELING SPACESICK, shaken to her core by an unfamiliar dread. Had she made a mistake? She had made a mistake. In the window, Earth was bright as a marble and tumbling from view.
‘Do you know where you are?’
Juno looked up to see a pair of steely blue eyes. ‘Dr Golinsky?’ she heard herself say.
‘You must have blacked out,’ the doctor said. ‘No, don’t try to get up just yet.’ It took a second for the room to come into focus. Juno lifted her head and felt the bed sway beneath her, so she lay back down.