April 25, 2129. On Virgo, upbound Earth to Mars. 149 million kilometers from the sun, 166 million kilometers from Mars, 3.8 million kilometers from Earth.
THE WORLD WHIRLS wildly, spins differently, arrests and restarts, in a flurry of thruster shots. With only a little difficulty, I hang on to the wall and my breakfast. In the next round, Derlock and I, working our way down, meet Emerald and Stack, working their way up, halfway through Cargo Wall 2.
They’re contemplating a blue-gray suspended-animation container the size of a vacation cabin. Even with the wrong-way gravity now down to 7% of Earth’s, we can only budge the monstrous box slightly once Wychee’s crew finishes and joins us.
“According to the manifest,” Glisters says over a local speaker station, “this is Category Y, Type 4. If they have to abandon ship, Category Y is the next thing they save after the passengers, crew, and ship’s pets. According to the steward’s notes, this is ‘Pets in Suspended Animation.’ With one footnote: ‘Fwuffy.’”
“Fluffy?” Emerald asks.
“Fwuffy. With a w. And that’s all I have. So it’s someone’s pet or pets—”
“Pets?” Emerald says. “Even if half the space in there is suspended animation machinery, that box still has room for a four-horse team, half a dozen bears, or a whole pack of Great Danes. A fwuffy must be some geneered pet species. Anyway, on the side I’m looking at, it says, upside down, THIS END UP, NO TOLERANCE, DO NOT SHAKE OR TEMPORARILY OR PARTLY INVERT right next to an arrow that is pointing straight down. N-nillion red lights are flashing, on two different panels on different sides; there’s a few green, but it’s mostly flashing red, and most what’s not flashing red is yellow. One corner is smashed in.”
“Okay,” Glisters says. “I can’t get very much info at this end, either. It looks like it fell from the cargo wall overhead and slid around; it’s a miracle it didn’t smash on the nose bulkhead. Too many required fields overwritten with blanks and N/A; a pro hacked this one into the system, I’d say, so for sure it’s semi-contraband—not an atom bomb or a load of happistuf, but not quite in bounds legally.”
“Great,” Emerald says. “So it’s criminal, undocumented, upside down, heavy, broken, showing flashing red lights,… can anything else be wrong with it?”
“Well, if it dies,” Glisters points out, “with suspended animation failing, we will have tonnes of rotting fwuffies in the part of the ship where we mainly live.”
“My next engineer is going to be an incurable optimist.”
“And your ship is going to stink, Commander. I don’t make the news, I just report it.”
Emerald looks around at the group. “Well,” she says, “sooner or later, as Glisters gets the ship stabilized—”
“The ship is doing that automatically,” Derlock points out.
“Sooner or later, as Glisters does the things that make the ship stabilize itself, which most of us couldn’t do in n-nillion years and some of us insist on sniping at,” Emerald says, “the gravity will be along the cargo wall and out toward the hull again, and a few tonnes of dying fwuffies will smash into the window. Anyone care to bet that that will make things better? So at the least we need to stabilize it, somehow, before we’re back to regular milligrav.”
No one argues with her. I’m beginning to think that Glisters and I have great taste in commanders.
“All right, then.” She looks around at all of us, then back at the speaker. “Glisters, before we go any further, can we just dog it down in place?”
“That will keep it from smashing anything else but otherwise it won’t solve the problem. It’s already had ultra too much acceleration in ultra too many bad directions. Besides, the control panel you need to fix the thing—if it can be fixed—is on the top, right where that arrow is pointing, so you need to turn it over. I think you’ll have to turn it at least enough to access the top, unblock the front, and aim the bottom at the windows. Sorry, I realize that sucks.”
“I hate not wringing your neck just because you’re right.” Emerald turns to me. “Okay, you took all that high-end math and topology and stuff. What’s the minimum number of turns to get it upright?”
I’ve been standing here thinking about just that. “Two. First we rotate it about 90 degrees to get FRONT pointed that way”—I point—“so there’s empty space to tip it into. That won’t be so bad. Then we do the real bastard, tip it 90 toward the hull. That will get TOP pointed toward the coretube and the bottom toward the windows.”
With all of us pushing on corners, we just manage the first move.
Tipping requires much more effort. Glisters finds us a tool locker along the outside of the coretube where there are crowbars, pulleys, hooks, cable, and lengths of pipe. With Stack, Fleeta, and me on one corner pushing down on a crowbar, and Emerald, F.B., and Derlock at the other, we lift one side of the crate enough for Wychee to roll the pipe lengthwise under the gap. We sink hooks into the raised edge and run lines to them through two triple-advantage block and tackle rigs, attached to a bracket on the handling floor. Stack has a couple of scary moments getting that rigged, and then has to go down to the nose and climb back around to rejoin us.
With all of us pulling like two crazed tug-of-war teams next to each other, the crate slowly tips up, up, and over, crashing down on its side. TOP and FRONT are pointed the right way. Two cargo hooks are close enough to reach, and then we run cable from two of its attachment rings to two more cargo hooks. Nobody wants to have to do this job over.
Another two red lights are flashing when we’re done.
On the now-exposed control screen, I touch AUTOCHECK.
A clear, pleasant female voice says, “Severe damage to nine support systems. Specimen harmed on four fatal and eighteen non-fatal identifiables. Death delay system will prevent permanent death for two to six hours. Press AUTOCHECK for options.”
I push AUTOCHECK again.
“Currently workable options are, option 1, painless euthanasia”—a red button labeled PAINLESS EUTHANASIA NOT REVERSIBLE appears on the touch screen—“with three days of follow-on refrigeration to allow time for disposing of remains. Option 2, release specimen from suspended animation without restoration.” The next button that appears is also red, and is more prosaic than the voice; it says IMMEDIATE DUMP. “Unrestored specimen cannot survive if released,” the voice goes on to explain. “Option 3, commence restoration with full repair.” The third button to appear on the screen is blue, not red, and it says RESTORE & REPAIR.
Em reaches past me and pushes it. Her even gaze meets my startled reaction. “Susan, that’s the only one that doesn’t kill it, and I won’t kill someone’s pet.” I must still look dubious, because she says, “Just thinking about how I felt when I lost my cat named Dog. You told me last night you had a dog, too. I don’t know about you, but…” She shrugs in a mute plea for understanding.
I do understand; I understand so well I’m having trouble putting the words together to tell her. Back when Pop started dragging me out on all the Revive the Family! tours, we started putting poor old Stanley into suspended animation all the time. He was afraid of it—I don’t know why, it doesn’t hurt—but every time, as soon as he saw that tank, he whined and yelped and tried to hide behind me. And then he always came out of it pathetically begging for attention, and just wasn’t the same dog for weeks; sometimes he’d have to go back in before he was recovered from the last time.
He was so crazy and miserable, and besides they told me he was really old anyway, so I agreed to let them turn the suspended animation off and let him just die in his sleep in the tank. They did that while I was on the moon getting felt up on camera, and Fleeta was destroying her brain.
Emerald is looking at me expectantly, and repeats, “I just don’t want to be the kind of people who kill other people’s pets.”
I think, Yeah, we don’t kill people’s pets, and that just feels right, down in my bones. I can feel my smile escaping onto my face. “Well, I sure hope it doesn’t turn out that a fwuffy is a shark with wings.”
The female voice from the container says, “Anticipated complete restoration in about thirty-five hours.” The screen displays a countdown that starts down from 35:00:00, and a single button that says REVIEW SPECIMEN STATUS. When I push it, it puts up a screenful of tiny graphs, not one of which means anything to me.
Glisters’s voice breaks in, “If you all are ready, I think I’ve been able to plan out rehooking the loose stuff in the tail end to go a lot faster,” he says. “And it’s still about forty minutes till the next thruster lurch. Emerald and Stack are ahead with twenty-eight hookups, then the other two teams are tied at twenty. Derlock and Susan are ahead for fixing yellows, with forty-four; then Wychee’s team with thirty-eight, and Emerald and Stack at twenty-four. Shall we continue the race?”
It’s unanimous, and soon we’re all scrambling down to our start points on the tail side of the pod. He’s given Derlock and me the tail bulkhead, sent Emerald and Stack to Cargo Wall 58, and put the others at Cargo Wall 88. Derlock and I drop swiftly down the coretube, slowing ourselves on the grips as we go, because at 7% of a g, falling 500 meters in one plunge still means you’re going almost 100 kilometers an hour when you hit the floor.
“We’re going to win this thing, Susan. No sense playing if you don’t play to win.”
We’re done by the next thruster lurch, partly because Glisters has done a better job of planning and mostly because we’ve now all had enough practice to do things quickly. Even poor, awkward F.B. seems to have the hang of it, and the routine repositioning and rehooking that took me or Derlock a couple minutes is now something we do literally one-handed in seconds before bounding to the next container. Derlock and I come out the winners—we rehooked forty-one reds and reset fifty-two yellows. “All the glory we can eat,” I say, smugly, as the group stands around waiting for Glisters to figure out what’s next.
Fleeta says, “Uh, not to be all complainy or anything, but could we eat sometime?”
I’m hungry the moment she says it. Looking around, it looks like so is everyone else. Emerald says, “Okay, let’s eat somewhere near the cockpit so we can make sure Glisters does, too, because I’m betting he’ll be just as obsessed by running the ship as he was with splyctering porn, and we can’t afford to have him forget to take care of himself. Do we have a volunteer for figuring out lunch or do we just all go looting?”
“I cook,” Wychee says.
“Actually you’re really good at it,” Emerald says, “but I was hoping I wouldn’t be forced to use my inside information to get you to do it.”
“Well, I’d rather eat my own cooking than most other people’s. I need two helpers—”
“I don’t know anything,” F.B. says, “but I’d like to learn, so I’ll help, Wychee.”
“Me, too,” Fleeta says. “Besides you’re nice to work for.”
I make the note to myself that Wychee obviously has a gift for getting work out of the awkward squad, and raise her a couple more points on my usefulness scale.
Emerald nods with satisfaction. “All right, kitchen crew created and I didn’t have to do anything. Everybody be sure to remember my brilliant leadership when Ed Teach is putting together the meed about us.” Then a thought wipes the smile off her face. “Before I forget again, did anyone find Marioschke while we were rehooking?”
“About an hour ago she was sitting on the end of Cargo Wall 28, looking out at the stars and om-ing like a hive of hornets,” Wychee says. “I got her to say about five sentences. She intoned like she was trying out for First Chair Oracle. She’s trying to peacefully accept her oneness with the universe so she can actuate her potential and do whatever it is that a person with an actuated potential does on a wrecked spaceship.”
I ask, “Has she… uh, cracked up?”
“I don’t know. After the intoning she went back to om-ing. Maybe I should have stuck around, but it was getting pretty om-y and I had work to do.”
Stack grunts. “She’s not crazy.”
Something about how sure he is, and how embarrassed he looks, makes me ask, “How do you know?”
“We had a secret sex thing going for a while,” he admits.
A freezing silence descends.
Stack adds, defensively, “I gave it up. She liked it, it was fun, and she’s smarter than she acts, and nice to talk to, too, except I just couldn’t cope with all the be-doo-be-doo philospho-pillow talk; she’d go on forever about how everything is spirit and how in touch she felt with all those plants, and I’d get so bored.”
He can see that Wychee, me, and Emerald are too angry to speak; if F.B. and Derlock have any common sense, they’re afraid to. His eyes not meeting any of ours, he explains, “So, like, I know her pretty well, I know how she thinks and what she dreams about and all that sheeyeffinit. She’d like to crack up, because it would mean everyone would worry about her feelings and what was going on inside her. That’s all she ever wants, really, to be the most time-consuming mental patient on the ward. But she’s . . well, really going all the way insane would take more effort than she ever makes. She just wants a lot of attention.” He’s looking at the stares with shame in his eyes, and then suddenly he squares his shoulders. “You’re right. That was a rotten way to treat her, because she’s just like all of us. She wants to be a genius and important and a star without having to know anything or be anything special.” More silence. “Can I stop now?”
I finally think of something to say. “Stack, I might not be thrilled with you, but I’m glad someone understands what’s going on with her, and yeah, you’re right, it’s not that different from the way the rest of us are. So thanks, it helps to know it’s really just interpersonal botflog.” I guess I’m coming down with a bad case of pilot or something, because I ask Wychee, “Cargo Wall 28, right?”
“Right. I don’t think she’ll have moved.”
Stack adds, “Just keep reminding her that she’s hungry.”
I consider baring my teeth at him, then realize my mouth is twitching trying not to laugh; bless her, Emerald does laugh, and then we all do. Finally Emerald says, “All right, bring her along, Susan. Try to be quick, because whether she needs to eat or not, you do.”
“Right.” I just shoot up the coretube; I’d rather not be late for lunch and this might be difficult.
Marioschke’s face is red, her eyes are swollen, and there’s a damp spot under her nose. She is still sitting on the edge of Cargo Wall 28, letting her feet dangle, and watching the much-slower rotation of the stars past the window. The wreckage of the crew bubble and the intact iceball are now lost in the stars; the two lost and shattered iceballs barely form disks, not much bigger, though a lot brighter, than the Andromeda Nebula. In a few hours they’ll be entirely invisible.
She wipes her face. “The stars are all crazy. That has to be screwing up everything astrologically—”
This doesn’t seem like the time to do any science educating, so I just say, “Come down to the cockpit area and eat. You must be hungry.”
She drags one of her big flowy sleeves across her face and sighs; it must have been pretty tiring to play crazy to an empty cargo space for all this time. “How do we get there with the ship all wrecked, anyway?”
“We bounce along the cargo wall, then climb the coretube. The gravity changes a lot along the way, but it’s all very low, you won’t weigh more than 2 kilos the whole way.” (Actually, I think, I won’t weigh more than two, you won’t weigh more than three. I add to myself, Meow.) “You’ll see. It takes practically no muscle, and your balance will get better if you try.” I stand up, and when she follows me, she almost falls over the edge. I pull her back. “This way.”
If it were just me I’d take the cargo wall in three big bounces, but I try not to run ahead of her, so I sort of patter along, using my ankles to rock from heel to toe. She trails after me in slow, chaotic bounces, like a balloon being dragged behind a little kid.
At the coretube, I open the hatch and say, “All right, just kneel on the edge, facing out like this, lean back a little bit, grab a handhold, pull up, and grab the next one after.” I demonstrate, pulling myself about 5 meters up inside.
She isn’t following, so I go back. She’s sniffling; rather than kicking her, I try gentleness again. “Come on,” I say, climbing to be at the side of the hatch. “Sit down on the sill. You can do that.”
She sits, gripping the doorframe like she’s hanging her ass out of an airplane on Earth.
“Give me your hand. Turn it so your palm faces you.” I reach down with my left and take a firm grip with my right.
She does, and I say, “Now let me just lift you up, and your body will come around to face the right way.”
Marioschke shuts her eyes, and gasps when I pull her off her perch, so that she’s just hanging by my grip on her wrist. Her elbow untwists the half turn, facing her the right way. “Reach out with your other hand,” I say, “The handhold is right in front of you.”
She grabs it and hangs on for dear life.
“Now just let go of my hand and feel how easy it is to hold yourself up.” That takes a few seconds. “Now reach for the handhold above you and grab that.” Awkwardly, slowly, making F.B. look like an Olympic gymnast, she begins to climb. By the time we’re at the center of mass, she looks no worse than terrified.
She can’t make herself try to turn over with a handstand and has to do it like a little kid, walking her feet through her hands and turning around hand over hand. She’s almost there when she realizes that she can see half a kilometer in either direction, and could fall that far either way. She just freezes.
Talking her through climbing down is worse than talking her through climbing up, until there’s enough gravity to keep her pulled against the wall; then it’s easier. When we’re at the level of the aux cockpit, I drag her in through the hatch; works, but t’ain’t elegant, like Pop says in Mighty Hard Row.
By the time we’re there, Wychee is making that food sing and dance, and it all smells way too good. The little kitchen, off the same corridor as the cockpit, has its own independent stabilizer setup, “Which is good, because I’d rather not face the challenge of cooking on a sideways stove,” she explains.
Among the many crates, with Glisters’s help, she located uncooked fresh fettuccine packed in helium, trout fillets pickled in white wine, a cubic-meter temptrol box embossed with Laiterie de la Provence, what appeared to be the stock of an entire spice store, and some self-heating mixed veg. Fleeta and F.B. are filling up the fridge and freezer with all the other food that was in the same crates; “We’ll get more systematic later, right now I just want to get some food into people.” She has just put the noodles into a boiling sphere, which is whirling up to speed in the stove’s receptacle.
“Is it going to bother the sphere that there’s so much gravity?” F.B. asks—a surprisingly intelligent question. Everyone is surprising me lately.
“I don’t think so,” Wychee says. “I used one on the moon where the gravity was five times this.” She puts cream, butter, and cheese into a stirring sphere to warm; after a while she has something going on in four of the eight receptacles. Somehow, it all comes out done at the same time, and we each get a squeezer, one of those heavy insulated plastic bags that you squeeze to put a bite-sized bit into a split bubble; when you bite down on the bubble, the slit opens, and the food pops into your mouth. It beats having it float all over.
We all enjoy a real meal; I hadn’t thought about it, but the cargo rehooking was probably like four trips to the gym. A few more days of this and all of us will be begging Glisters to make some recordings of our butts in something tight, I think. Splycterable for sure. I might yet end up as one of those loser celeb-chickies whose buttocks have a higher recognition index than her face.
Strangely, I feel nothing about that thought. I’m already beginning to not care how I look. And to not care that I don’t care. Wonder if there’s anything in the infirmary’s database about recursive apathy?
At the end of lunch, Emerald says, “Glisters, am I right that we have two hours till the next thruster fire, and then just two more after that, also about two hours apart?”
“That’s right.”
“Eight huge things to rehook in the vacuum cargo sections, and whatever shoveling we have to do in the one open farm section, right?”
“Also right. I have a feeling this is going somewhere.”
“Are we all likely to die if something happens and you’re away from the cockpit for a couple hours?”
“Probably not. I haven’t actually done anything to operate the ship since I started the automated programs. Everything I’ve been doing is trying to get up on tutorials, and guiding you guys through rehooking the cargo.”
“Perfect,” she says. “You’re coming with us.”
“All right, where are we going?”
“The Forest,” she says firmly. “This is mandatory. It gives us a chance to see how bad things are in Farm Section 1, but the main reason is I want everyone to unwind and take a nap. So far we’ve done a lot of hard work that could have caused some serious accidents, and nobody—knock on alclad—has been injured. Everyone is stressed and tired, even after this break, and probably a little sleepy with food coma as well. So let’s go give everyone nap time.”
Wychee grins. “Commander Em, would you like milk and cookies with that?”
“Some other time. I want you to rest and do nothing, too. Just like Glisters and Susan and everyone else. We’re going for a nap in the Forest, people. You are all going to get de-stressed and rested. That’s an order. Anyone that doesn’t come along and chill is going to be flogged around the fleet.”
“‘Flogged around the fleet’?” I ask. “Have you been watching old meeds?”
“All my life. I’d’ve threatened keelhauling but we don’t have the eva skills for that. Now, if all the squeezers have gone into the Phreshor for cleaning, let’s get going. No goofing off when your commander orders you to rest.”
Grumbling, but kind of liking her for it nonetheless, we clean the eating area and form up, making sure F.B. and Marioschke are in the middle in case they need help. Yesterday, when we learned Bari and King were dead, there wasn’t one hand reached out to anyone; for better or worse, now we’re a team.