Emma Stoney:
The curving flank of the booster, just a couple of feet away from her, swept to the ground, diminishing with perspective like a piece of some metal cathedral. On the concrete pad at the booster’s base she could see technicians running, vehicles scattering away like insects. Farther out she could see the buildings of the compound, the fence, and the people swarming beyond: a great sea of them, cars and tents and faces, under the lightening dawn sky.
In one place the fence was dark, as if broken. She saw guards running. The distant crackle of gunfire drifted through the air. She saw a truck, a man dangling out of it, some kind of mist drifting, guards closing in.
She turned to the hatch. There was Malenfant, his thin face framed by his helmet, staring out at her.
“GB,” he said. “It was GB. That’s what the military call it”
“Sarin. Nerve gas. My God. You used nerve gas.”
“It was brought here to be incinerated in the waste plant. Emma, I have always been prepared to do whatever I have to do to make this mission work.”
I know, she thought. I know more than I want to know.
I shouldn’t be here. This is unreal, wrong.
He held out his hand to her. Through the thick gloves, she could barely feel the pressure of his flesh.
Without looking back, she entered the humming, glowing, womblike interior of the spacecraft.
George Hench:
Pale fire burst from the base of the stack. Smoke gushed down the flame trenches and burst into the air like great white wings, hundreds of feet wide. And now the solid boosters lit, and the light was extraordinarily bright, yellow and dazzling as the sun.
The stack started to rise. But the noise hadn’t reached him yet, and so the booster would climb in light and utter silence, as if swimming into the sky.
George had worked on rockets all his life. And yet he never got over this moment, this instant when the great blocky machine, for the first and only time, burst into life and lifted off the ground.
And now the sound came: crackling and popping, like wet wood on a fire, like oil overheated in a pan, like a million thunderclaps bursting over his head. The rocket rose out of the great cauldron of burning air, trailing fire, rising smooth and graceful. At the moment it lifted off the booster was burning as much oxygen as half a billion people taking a breath.
George, exhilarated, terrified, roared into the noise.
PART THREE
Cruithne
Emma Stoney:
Rockets, it turned out, were unsubtle.
The launch was a roaring vibration. She’d been expecting acceleration. But when each booster stage cut out, the engine thrust just died — suddenly, with no tail-off — so that the reluctant astronauts were thrown forward against their restraints and given a couple of seconds of tense breathing and anticipation; then the next stage cut in and they were jammed back once more. After a couple of minutes of this Emma felt bruises on her back, neck, and thighs.
But the thrust of the last booster stage was gentle, just a push at her chest and legs. Then, finally, the thrust died for good.
And she was drifting up, slowly, out of her seat, as far as her restraints would let her. She felt sweat that had pooled in the small of her back, spreading out over her skin.
The rocket noise was gone. There was silence in the cabin, save for the whirr of fans and pumps, the soft ticking of instruments, Malenfant’s quiet voice as he worked through his shutdown checklist.
And she heard a gentle whimpering, oddly high-pitched, like a cat. It must be Michael. But he was too far away for her to reach.
Now there was a series of clattering bangs, hard and metallic, right under her back, as if someone were slamming on the hull with great steel fists.
“There goes the last stage,” Malenfant called. “Now we coast all the way to Cruithne.” He grinned through his open faceplate. “Welcome to the Gerard K O ‘Neill. Don’t move yet; we aren’t quite done.”
This cabin was called the Earth-return capsule. The four of them sat side by side, their orange pressure suits crumpled in their metal-frame couches. Emma was at the left-hand end of the row, jammed between Malenfant and the wall, which was just a bulkhead, metallic and unfinished. She was looking up into a tight cone, like a metal tepee. She was facing an instrument panel, a dashboard that spanned the capsule, crusted with switches, dials, and softscreen readouts. On the other side of the panel she could see clusters of wires and optical fibers and cables, crudely taped together and looped through brackets. This was not the space shuttle, rebuilt and quality-certified after every flight; there was a home-workshop, improvised feel to the whole shebang.
Obscurely, however, she found that comforting.
The light, greenish gray, came from a series of small fluorescent floods set around the walls of the capsule; the shadows were long and sharp, making this little box of a spaceship seem much bigger than it was. But there were no windows. She felt deprived, disoriented; she no longer knew which way up she was, how fast she was traveling.
Malenfant reached up and took off his helmet. He shook his head, and little spherical balls of sweat drifted away from his forehead, swimming in straight lines through the air. “All my life I dreamed of this.” The helmet, released, floated above his belly, drifting in some random air current. He knocked it with a finger, and it started to spin.
Emma found her gaze following the languid rotation of the helmet. Suddenly it felt as if the helmet was stationary and it was the rest of the ship that was rotating, and her head was a balloon full of water through which waves were passing. She closed her eyes and pressed her head back against the headrest of her couch until the spinning sensation stopped.
There was a sound like a cough, a sharp stink of bile.
Emma opened her eyes and tried to lift her head, but her vision swam again. “Michael?”
“No,” Cornelius said, his voice tight. And now she saw a big ball of vomit, green laced with orange, shimmering up into the air above them. Complex waves crossed its surface, and it seemed to have ten or a dozen smaller companions traveling with it.
“Oh, Christ, Cornelius,” Malenfant said. He reached under his couch and pulled out a plastic bag that he swept around the vomit ball. When the vomit touched the surface of the bag, it started to behave “normally”; it spread out all over the interior of the bag in a sticky, lumpy mess.
It was like nothing Emma had seen before; she lay there and watched the little drama unfold, mindless of the stink.
There was a new series of low bangs, like guns firing, from beyond the wall beside Emma. With each bang she felt a wrench as her couch dragged her sideways.
“Take it easy,” Malenfant said to them all. “That’s just the hy-drazine attitude thrusters firing, spinning us up. We’re feeling transients. They’ll dampen out.”
There were metallic groans from the hull, pops and snaps from the latches that docked the Earth-entry module to the rest of the spacecraft cluster. It was like being in a huge, clumsy fairground ride.
But at length, as the spin built up, she felt a return of weight, a gentle push that made her sink back into her seat once more.
The attitude thrusters cut out.
“Right on the button,” Malenfant said. “We is pinwheeling to the stars, people. Let’s go open up the shop.”