O Earth! dost thou too sorrow for the past
Like man thy offspring? Do I hear thee mourn
Thy childhood’s unreturning hours, thy springs
Gone with their genial airs and melodies,
The gentle generations of thy flowers,
And thy majestic groves of olden time,
Perished with all their dwellers?
—“Earth,” by William Cullen Bryant,
from Poems From a Distant Earth, by Chen Tien
We’re going home.
Rai sweated inside his suit, white-knuckling the arms of the retrofitted launch chair under his suit gloves. He watched the Zhenyi’s launch countdown clock.
Sixty, fifty-nine, fifty-eight…
Outside he was calm, but inside he vibrated like an erhu string, his stomach doing acrobatics in his chest. I’m not ready.
Five teams of dropnauts had strapped themselves into their jumper ships, prepared for the ascent from Redemption on the lunar surface to Launchpad station. Outside his porthole, the blue-green marble of Earth beckoned.
Forty-five, forty-four…
Rai cast a nervous glance at his three teammates. Hera was doing her preflight check, her back to him, sweat dripping down the umber skin of her neck from her short-cropped, curly black hair.
Behind him on his right, Tien’s eyes were closed, and she was still as a golden statue. Zen.
He turned to find Ghost looking at him from behind. His ex grinned, running his hand through his lanky, dirty blond hair, his green eyes twinkling. His skin was as white as Rai’s own, but with a dusting of freckles over the bridge of his nose.
Rai managed a pale imitation of a smile back. -It’s totally safe.- Ghost’s voice pinged in his head, em to em.
-Sure. Easy for you to say.- Ghost had never feared a thing in his life.
Rai sighed. If he had to, he could take the small ship apart and put it back together with his bare hands, a skill learned under Sam’s supervision—the mech was as harsh a taskmaster as any human Rai had ever worked for. Still, he felt like puking. The speeches and adulation of the farewell celebration were over, and now his doubts circled like vultures. I’m not ready.
Thirty-two, thirty-one…
-You’ll be ok.- Hera’s determined voice this time. She turned to squeeze his knee, and then fired up the Zhenyi’s hydro-fuel engine. He flashed her a sheepish grin.
A hundred meters away, the Bristol’s takeoff shook the landing pad. Rai watched it rise, carrying Dax, Jess, Ola, and Xiu Ying, the London team, toward the bright stars above. The jumper’s expelled water froze almost instantly, falling as snow over the snaking lava tube that held the city of Redemption. A lunar blizzard whipped by them and shimmered into nothing.
Rai closed his eyes, remembering the night before. Jess, laughing and dancing with him at Heaven, the clear dome of the lunar sky sparkling above them, the heavy beat of the thromb club pulsing through his chest. Dancing like no one was watching.
He rubbed his jaw. It still ached from the fist he’d taken to the face. Wild party. And a wilder night with Ayvin, the jack he’d picked up at the club.
“Zhenyi, ready for liftoff in T-Minus ten seconds.” Sam’s voice, coming from Team Five’s ship, the Liánhuā, was cool and collected. Did the mech feel emotion, like the nausea that was boiling in Rai’s guts? His teammates were strong, smart, and prepared for anything. I can do this. Besides, it was too late to back out now.
“Affirmative.” Hera shifted in her seat, her biframes stretching her paralyzed legs for her.
“You’ll do okay, tiger.” Ghost elbowed him in the ribs.
“Six, five, four…” Hera swiped the glossy white control deck, and the launch controls appeared, floating over the white surface.
“Leave him alone.” Rai could hear the icy frown in Tien’s voice.
He closed his eyes, willing his stomach to calm. Here we go. Nothing he could do about it now.
“Three, two, one… hang on.” Hera fired the engines, and the craft lifted on a cloud of steam into the star-filled skies of Luna.
Rai squeezed his armrests again as G-force pushed him hard back in his seat. He was committed now. Poppies, Chinese Houses, Fiddlenecks, Baby Blue Eyes, Yellow Pansies, Star Lilies… Reciting the flowers of the old San Francisco basin helped soothe his abraded nerves as the rumbling of the little craft rattled his bones.
He opened his eyes to see Redemption receding below them. The great lava tube was striped with sparkling bands of solar receptors that let sunlight into the city below. Rail lines snaked out from Redemption to the transit center like roping vines—to the seed launcher at Copernicus Crater, to Renewal colony, and beyond.
As the city shrank below them, his fear turned to sadness, a lump forming in his throat. He’d taken his home for granted, enthralled by the idea of joining humankind’s greatest adventure in a century. Now he might never see it again.
The hydro rocket thrust them up out of Luna’s gravity well into naked space, toward the bright blue skies of the empty Earth above. Rai stared at it, that enigmatic ball in space which no one had visited in over a century. What secrets are you hiding?
The roar cut off as quickly as it had begun, leaving the Zhenyi drifting upward in silence as they slipped out of Luna’s grasp.
Hera’s hands flew across the deck, swapping the launch controls for navigation, and nudged them onto a new course following the Bristol toward the Launchpad.
Rai let go, his breath coming out in a heavy sigh.
“See? That wasn’t so bad.” Ghost unbuckled his seatbelt and stretched, yawning as if he didn’t have a care in the world.
God, he’s beautiful. Pale as his namesake under his mop of dirty blond hair, the engineer’s thick arms were just a suggestion under the bulky suit, but Rai could still see them in his mind. Ghost’s well-toned muscles, the smell of his skin after—
“You okay, buddy?” Ghost was staring at him, one dark eyebrow raised in concern.
Rai bit his lip and looked away. “Just nervous. Wondering if we’ll ever make it back home.”
“Hey, if things go well after the drop, maybe you and me could open the first Earthside bar since the Crash.” Ghost leaned over him from behind to stare at the Earth through the porthole, his cheek close to Rai’s.
“That’s crazy.” But his spirits lifted. It was idiotic. And just the distraction he needed.
Ghost sank back into his own seat. “Every outpost needs a good bar where the colonists can blow off a little steam, right?”
Rai laughed in spite of himself, warming to the idea. “We could call it ‘The Frontier’.”
“Or ‘The Wild Hookup’.”
“Best beer this side of the planet.”
“Only beer!”
Rai snorted. Just like old times. He hadn’t forgiven Ghost, though. Not yet. He looked down at his gloved hands, emblazoned with the leaf-and-orb of Redemption’s space service.
Things had ended badly between them—crash and burn bad. Still, they’d be too busy the next few weeks to think about anything but the drop. The survival of Redemption and the remnants of humanity depended on them.
He could let it go. I have to. He’d managed the launch, after all. I can do this too.
Ghost squeezed his shoulder and closed his eyes, touching his temple and bobbing his head to a song only he could hear.
Rai turned away.
You’re stronger than any of us. Hera had told him that the night before. Still, he didn’t feel strong.
He looked out of the porthole again at the Earth—the same view they’d had from Heaven. And yet somehow, it looked different. More real.
Poppies, Chinese Houses, Fiddlenecks, Baby Blue Eyes, Yellow Pansies, Star Lilies…
He touched his hand to the porthole. Even through the glove, it was cold. We’re going home.
Rai spun his seat around to face Ghost. “Feel like a game?”
The ending strains of Thus Spoke Zarathustra faded into the background as the Zhenyi settled into her new course. The ship would be on autopilot for two days as they hurtled toward the Launchpad.
There was nothing more for Hera to do for a while.
She pressed the releases on her biframe, pulling off the metal braces and tucking them into the webbing behind the seat.
Up here in space, she was free—in zero-gee her useless legs weren’t a hindrance. Through the suit legs, she touched the scars where the medics had cut her open to replace her crushed bones with rods printed from gumdust—the pulverized moon dust they’d used to make her whole again.
Luna would always be a part of her, no matter how far she roamed.
Somewhere behind them, Tovey waited for her return. She could still feel the touch of their lips on hers.
She shook her head, dispelling the memory. Don’t let yourself get lost in homesickness.
She got up and squeezed past the chair and the gunmetal gray walls to her own seat, and settled in next to Rai. She snapped her seatbelt closed and peered out of her porthole. The red running lights of one of the other jumpers blinked in the distance.
Rai had swiveled his seat around, and he and Ghost were playing chess on one side of the cramped five-seat craft. Behind Hera, Tien was staring out at the stars, her overhead light dimmed.
Along with Tovey, her teammates were Hera’s family.
She’d known Ghost all her life, and Rai and Tien for two years while they’d trained on Luna, learning how to operate the jumper’s modified flight systems, packing her brain with everything there was to know about the Earth. They’d spent six more intense months together in the full Earth gravity of the Launchpad, time which had sealed their bond.
She’d met Tovey there too, but they weren’t a part of the mission. Pain gripped Hera’s heart. What if I never see you again?
Hera needed a distraction. She released her seat and swung it around to face Tien, the only one of them raised by her birth parents. She wondered for the thousandth time what it would have been like to have actual parents instead of creche parents. “How’d it go with your parents, Ti?”
“What?” Tien turned toward her, dark brown eyes glassy. They shimmered and Tien was back in the here-and-now, staring at her.
Sometimes Hera still saw Tai in her features, the man Tien had been when they first met. “I’m sorry, didn’t realize you were busy—” Hera braced herself to get up. She could watch the view from the pilot’s chair.
Tien flashed her a warm smile, brushing a long strand of black hair back behind her ear. “It’s okay. I was just reading poetry. What did you ask?”
“Your parents. How’d it go?”
Tien’s smile became a grin. “Better than I hoped. My father called me his daughter—for the first time. They told me they were proud of me and gave me their blessing to go.”
Hera’s jaw dropped. “That’s amazing, Ti.” She squeezed Tien’s hand. “What are you reading?” Anyone I know?”
“Probably not. Emily Dickinson. From the old United States.”
“Read me a few lines.” Hera loved poetry, especially the lyrical Old Earth stuff Tien found.
Tien’s lenses shimmered again. “Okay. How about this one?”
Hera closed her eyes to listen.
There is no Frigate like a Book
To take us Lands away,
Nor any Coursers like a Page
Of prancing Poetry—
This Traverse may the poorest take
Without oppress of Toll—
How frugal is the Chariot
That bears a Human soul.
Hera bit her lip. “What does it mean?”
Tien bit her lip. “Hmm. That words have power. They can cross centuries to transport us to other worlds.” Tien smiled wanly. “That what we do now can still matter so much later.”
“That’s beautiful.” Tien was a closet romantic, but the old words still confounded Hera sometimes.“What’s a frigate?”
“A bird, or maybe a warship. It’s not really clear.” Tien frowned. “I can try to find out—“
Hera grinned. “Let’s say a bird. Better than a warship—”
The ship-to-ship radio blared to life with a loud burst of static. “This is Dax on the Bristol. We’ve taken a hit. I repeat—” More static. “—hit. there’s a lot of space junk—”
Hera swiveled and pulled herself out of her seat and into the pilot’s chair with the ease of long practice.
Sam’s voice came from the Liánhuā at the rear of the convoy. “Bristol, you there?”
Nervous silence filled the Zhenyi. No response.
Hera glanced back at her teammates. Rai was pale, sweat beading his forehead, the chess game forgotten. “Everyone buckle in.”
The radio buzzed again. “…lost contact. Something hit us and spun us around. We’re ok.”
Hera breathed a sigh of relief and hit the comm button. “What kind of something? The way’s supposed to be clear all the way to the Launchpad.” She activated the scanner. Five glowing red dots floated over her deck, one for each ship.
“Don’t know. It was too fast—” Loud static cut him off again.
“What’s happening?” Rai sounded panicked, his voice raspy.
“Keep it together, Rai.” She couldn’t deal with his fear and this at the same time. Hera leaned forward, staring at the dots—each of the jumpers were still there, spread out in a lazy line. She sighed with relief. “Dax, you there?”
“Yeah. We’re losing pressure…” Dax’s usually calm, suave voice broke. “Hissing hell, it cracked the hull—”
An apocalyptic boom, then nothing.
All the blood drained from Hera’s face, and her stomach twisted. Please let them be okay. Hera looked at the lights hovering above the deck again. The Bristol’s dot was gone.
Sam’s voice crackled over the comm. “What happened? Zhenyi, can you see the Bristol?”
Hera was racing to scan the space ahead of them. “Unexpected debris. I think—she’s gone, Sir.” Concentrate. She had to figure this out fast.
Dax, Jess, Ola, and Xiu Ying… cracking hell. She bit her lip hard, tasting blood.
Rai sobbed quietly behind her.
“Must have been a space-junk collision somewhere since they scanned it last, scattering more debris.” Ghost sounded calm, but that was one of his tells. He was totally freaking out inside.
“No shit, Sherlock.” Her eyes tracked the screen, looking for danger. She had no idea who in the whole pantheon of history Sherlock was, and right now she didn’t care.
Something flared bright blue above the deck. “Hang on!” She fired one of the aft thrusters, and a gust of steam pushed them out of the way of a piece of debris. It slipped past the window, a white-encased leg. Hera fought not to hurl.
“Oh crap. Wasn’t that—”
“Shut up!” The Bristol was gone. Better not to know who it had belonged to. “Sam, we have visual on Jumper One’s debris. Advise course correction. Sending revised path.” Her hands flew across the deck. Hold it together, Hera.
“Affirmative. One moment.”
Hera watched the sensor field nervously. “Ghost, sealant ready?”
“Yeah. Just a sec.” He rummaged around in the webbing along the wall of the craft.
Something struck the metal skin of the jumper. Air hissed out as the temperature and air pressure dropped precipitously. “Ghost!”
“On it!” He leapt out of his seat to find the pinhole puncture and applied a dab of sealant. It sucked into the hole and froze, holding tight. “Got it.”
More blips on the sensor field. “Hold on!” Hera fired the thrusters again, and the ship threw her sideways. No belt! She flew up out of the pilot’s seat, slamming hard against the metal ceiling of the Zhenyi.
Tovey, I love you… Searing pain was followed by darkness.
“Hera!” Ghost unbuckled his belt and leapt to grab the pilot. He pulled her down toward her chair gently.
“Careful.” Tien floated next to him, checking Hera’s body through her white suit. “She might have broken something.” Together they maneuvered her into her seat and buckled her in. “Rai, take the controls. I’ll check her over.” Tien pulled out her medkit from her seat’s webbing.
The ship was tumbling off-course, moving away from the others at a rapid pace.
Rai was still buckled in. He was hyperventilating, looking back and forth from the controls to Hera. “It’s not… I’m not supposed to… I’m not ready—”
Tien knelt in front of him, taking his face in her hands. “Rai, snap out of it, dammit! If you don’t get this jumper under control, we’re all dead!” Tien pointed at the pilot’s seat, moving out of his way.
Rai swallowed hard and nodded. “Okay.” He unbuckled and slipped past them to settle into the pilot’s seat. He stared at the deck as if all his training had fled. “I’m just the backup—I never expected to have to actually fly this thing.”
“Tien, take care of Hera. I’ve got this.”
Tien met his eyes and nodded.
“Zhenyi, everything okay over there?” Sam’s synthetic voice over the com was calm, reassuring.
Rai’s teeth chattered. “I… I don’t know what to do.”
Ghost squeezed past Tien and activated the comm. “Sam, this is Ghost. We’re okay. Hera sustained an injury when she rolled the ship to avoid a patch of space junk.” He let go of the comm button. “Rai, you’re going to be okay. Just take a deep breath, buddy.”
Rai nodded. He closed his eyes, putting his hands on the cool deck. His breathing slowed.
“Injury? How extensive is it?” Sam actually sounded concerned.
“Unclear, sir. Tien’s checking her over now. She wasn’t buckled in.” Rai’s cheek was inches from his. Ghost took a deep breath. Keep it together, big guy.
“Where’s Rai?”
“He’s getting this bucket of bolts back on course.” Ghost squeezed Rai’s shoulder and thumbed off the comm. -You got this, pal.-
-Thanks.- Rai leaned in to the jumper’s deck and went to work, monitoring the debris sensor, his hand flying through the navigational controls in the air like a master piano player.
Being so close to Rai again set off all kinds of alarms in his head. They’d kept a certain distance between them the last two months. A healthy distance, for Rai.
Ghost was toxic, and he knew it.
Rai gently nudged the ship back into a straight trajectory with the attitude jets, reducing the Zhenyi’s spin and wobble. Bit by bit, he pulled her back to center, and then swung them around toward their destination.
“You’re doing it, squirt.” Ghost winced. Tiger, buddy, pal, squirt. He was working overtime to put Rai back in the friend zone, in his head. He squeezed Rai’s shoulder and pulled away before his teammate could see how the close proximity rattled him.
Ghost turned to find Tien crouching next to Hera, running a sensor over the pilot’s forehead. “How’s Hera?”
“She’s okay, I think. Just a concussion.” Tien sounded calm too, a doctor’s voice, serious and reassuring. “She’ll have a nasty goose egg on her head when she wakes up.”
Ghost laughed. “What the hell is a goose?”
“Earth bird. Long neck, swam in ponds.”
Rai’s voice had that know-it-all tone, and Ghost couldn’t help but mock him. “You’re such a geek. So it’s like a swan?”
Rai didn’t seem to notice. “Kind of. They had enormous eggs. Like giant chickens.”
Ghost shivered. The idea of eating something that came out of a bird’s ass squicked him out. Still, for all that he kidded Rai, Ghost was proud of him. “You did good. I knew you would.”
Rai flicked the comm back on. “This is Rai on the Zhenyi. Back on track, sir.”
There were cheers in the background. “Excellent work, Rai.” Sam sounded dejected, though, different from his usual mech self. Ghost frowned. Since when did Sam have feelings?
“Sir?”
“Yes, Rai?”
“It’s not your fault. The debris maps must have been wrong, or there was a collision somewhere. Or—”
“Thanks, Rai. But everything on this mission is my responsibility. And my fault if it goes wrong.” The comm link cut out.
Rai looked up at Ghost, his eyebrow raised.
“I know. Weird.” He picked a floating rook out of the air and set it back down on the magnetic chessboard.
Four of their fellow dropnauts were gone, just like that. The sense of security, the boring normalcy of the trip was shattered.
Ghost sighed. This spin just got real.
Sam sat back in his chair, running a diagnostic on his mental state. There was something corrosive in his programming, a sense of wrongness that gnawed at him. His diagnostic identified it as guilt.
He shunted the feeling away again, but it was harder each time. When he got to the Launchpad, he’d have to ask Alpha for a tune-up.
...fileto > memcache…
He’d never been in such sustained contact in such intimate and challenging situations with humans before. They’d finally gotten to him with their complicated emotions.
...access > communications module…
He relayed the news of the Bristol’s destruction to Alpha, who would pass it on to the families of the dead.
I should be the one to tell them.
He retrieved the odd feeling again and spun it around, considering it as if it were a math problem, this strange new wrinkle in his programming.
Guilt made no sense here. He had committed no wrong act. He and Alpha had worked together to chart the space junk left in Earth orbit by human activity before and during the Crash. He had acted correctly based on all the knowledge they had at hand.
...access > data: debris map…
Nothing. But there was no way to track it all, not without a fleet of satellites—or to predict the changes that would occur, for instance, when a piece of the old Frontier Station collided with one of the old Cino-African Syndicate space mines.
Too many variables.
Besides, these young dropnauts had signed on knowing the risk.
There was no good reason for him to feel this guilt. Then again, he was a mech. There was no good reason for him to have feelings at all.
Sometimes he missed the simpler times before his forced uplift, when the only thing he’d felt was a satisfying jolt of recognition when he unearthed a rare type of moonstone, one that matched the specs for maximum profit. Damn you, Alpha, for making me like this.
He still couldn’t feel in the physical sense. His fingers were touch-sensitive, to allow him to pick up objects without crushing them or knocking them aside, but his metallic “skin” had no human-like ability.
It was these new emotional feelings that threatened to undo him. They wouldn’t stay cached, stubbornly resurfacing again and again.
His mission felt doomed, and with it the remainder of humankind. The power core under the old Jīnsè Base was slowly eating its way into Luna’s heart, melting the wastewater that the old base had injected into the crust. The crisis growing more acute by the day. The reactor had been steadily working its way down for more than a hundred years, but now the quakes had begun. And they were getting worse.
We waited too long.
“You okay, sir?” Ying Yue’s voice pulled him back to the present.
Sam opened his eyes to find all the Beijing team on the Liánhuā looking at him. “I will be. Are we past the debris field?”
She nodded. “We have a clear path to the Launchpad.”
...fileto > memcache: return, the > bristol…
He wanted to retain this moment in all its clarity. “Please send a message to the other teams. ‘We are heartbroken about the loss of Team One, but we must continue on.’ The Bristol would want that, I think.”
“Yes, sir.” She put a hand on his metal knee. “It’s not your fault.”
Sam wished he could feel her touch.
Was he that transparent? His features shouldn’t have betrayed the cursed emotions he was feeling.
The whole crew was staring at him now. They needed something from him. Inspiration. “We’re humanity’s last chance. But looking at all of you, I’m not afraid. I see hope, and Redemption.”
Ying Yue held her fist to her heart over the Return Mission’s leaf-and-orb logo, in automatic salute. “Redemption.”
Her teammates did, too.
She searched his silver face a moment longer. He wondered what she was looking for. At last, she nodded and turned away.
Humans are strange creatures. He closed his eyes, seeking comfort of his own.
…define: redemption. > The act of redeeming something or someone. The name of the main human colony on Luna. Alternatively, the program for the return…
Guilt surged in him again, and he squeezed the armrest so hard it cracked.
Sam shut off his definition subroutine.
No more distractions. No more errors.