M. Planck - The Kassa Gambit

The job involved leaving the domes, which meant stepping off the grav-plating while wearing a chem suit. He would be exposed to the native environment of Baharain, protected by only a few millimeters of expensive plastic. It didn’t sound fun and it was certainly dangerous, but the company would provide training and equipment. Those were both necessary to fulfill his sudden desire to go sightseeing outdoors.

This desire sprung from a casual fact he had gleaned while interviewing for jobs. The management of RDC maintained a series of private domes for executives and their families.

Dejae’s twin would live in one of those. Kyle would never get past security to access them normally, but all he needed was a single photograph. The public domes were transparent on most optical wavelengths, filtering out only the dangerous rays. Letting the local sunshine in was cheaper and more naturally satisfying than purely artificial light. No doubt the executive domes were the same. They would, at the very least, be transparent during the night. Everyone liked to look at the stars. Everyone stared up into the great void from time to time, wondering which insignificant sparkle was the light of ancient Earth. A still-living Earth: humanity had left only centuries ago, and they had traveled thousands of light-years through the nodes. The light from that ancient Earth, if it could be resolved into pictures, would show a shining blue ball painted with strokes of green and white. Oceans teeming with schools of fish. Forests whose branches were alive with troops of monkeys and flocks of birds. Plains where herds of animals thundered in glorious freedom.

The visions of Heaven were out there, if only a man could stare hard enough to see it. No one could, of course. It was optically, mathematically impossible. But that didn’t stop people from trying.

The domes would be transparent at night, and Kyle would get his picture. Then he could go home again.

The foreman was scarred, ugly, and one-eyed, but that eye was keen. He barked out corrections and derisions with uncanny accuracy. Kyle wondered why boot camp always felt the same, no matter what boot you were learning to wear.

“Nobody dies on my watch.” The foreman was adjusting Kyle’s suit. “It detracts from my bonus. Your helmet’s too small, man. Get another one.”

“Yes, sir.” Kyle shuffled over to the equipment table and found a helmet with a larger number printed on the collar ring. When he got back to his place in line, the foreman was waiting for him.

“Don’t sir me. This ain’t Fleet. You’re just an idiot on the wrong end of a shovel, and I’m the guy handing out shovels. That makes me smarter than you, but it don’t make me a sir.”

“Fair enough,” Kyle said with a grin.

“Yeah, yeah, yuck it up. They all do, the first day. We’ll see how much you’re laughing at the end of the shift, when just raising your nose to sneer at me feels like lifting a two-ton hopper. No, you idiot, the other way.” The foreman reached out to twist Kyle’s helmet into the locking ring.

“Sorry … I’m not used to space suits.” On Kassa they had only worn them for warmth.

“I can see that, man. And I can see you ain’t Fleet, either. I don’t care. You ain’t from here, you ain’t staying here, and you got a sob story an hour long. And I don’t care. All I care about is that you’re clocking out in six hours with all your parts attached.” He raised his voice, shouting so the rest of the workers could not fail to hear him even through their suits. “That goes for all of you. Stop thinking you can do this. You’ve been in sims—I hope, and if not, it’s too late to tell me now—but real heavy G ain’t like a sim. It don’t go away after half an hour. It tugs at you all the time, drags at every fiber of your being, sucks you down like the dying pull of Earth herself. It is your enemy. Forget that for one microsecond and you’ll be a debit in my paycheck. So stop thinking you can do this job. And start focusing on surviving it.”

It was only seventeen percent over Terran standard. Kyle had tried the sim, doing deep knee bends in a gravity-enhanced chamber, and while it felt ridiculously uncomfortable, he had passed the medical exams.

“Every step you take is a fifth harder. Every drop you fall is a fifth longer. Everything you pick up is a fifth heavier. All them fifths add up fast, in ways your idiot brains didn’t evolve to handle. You can’t operate by instinct out there. Every single action has to be consciously evaluated before you do it. You will burn calories you didn’t know you had. You will strain muscles they ain’t even named in the medical vids. If you try to act like you’re in normal G, your suit’s air-cracker will not be able to keep up oxygen production, and you will pass out. This is for your own good. An unconscious idiot is cheaper than a dead one. We can fix your air, but we can’t fix your heart if it bursts a chamber.”

The idea that he could die of heartbreak struck Kyle as unlikely. If that were possible, then walking off the Ulysses for the last time should have killed him.

“Now get your arses into the air lock. We’re gonna shut the door and flood it with kelamine. If you start throwing up in your suit, that’s ’cause you didn’t seal it properly. You can thank us for saving your life after you clean out your suit.”

The suits were different from Prudence’s. Heavy opaque rubber instead of the clear thin plastic he had expected. He didn’t know if that was because they needed to be stronger, or if the rubber was just cheaper. The suit was impregnated with heavy salts to block radiation, but so was the glass faceplate of the helmet, and it was transparent. On the other hand, there wasn’t much value in being able to see through these suits. They didn’t contain slender dark-haired girls with intense black eyes.

The air lock cycled, lights going from green to yellow. Nobody threw up, which Kyle took as a good beginning. Then the lights went red, and the outer door creaked open.

Climbing down a short set of stairs, he took each step carefully. The foreman was standing to the side, watching the new recruits critically. Kyle stepped out of line to join him.

“Why kelamine?” he asked.

“We used to just use a stinker, but one day we got a jackass with anosomia. Couldn’t smell a thing, and didn’t think to mention it until it was too late. The kelamine means we don’t gotta rely on you idiots to tell us something’s wrong. Plus, it washes off the suits easier.”

Kyle debated asking if it was cheaper, too, but decided not to.

“See that one?” The foreman pointed to a young man who had taken the last two steps in one go. “That jackass is gonna get somebody killed. Go ride his arse and keep him in line. Can you do that?”

“Sure,” Kyle agreed. The foreman had an impressive sense of judgment. He seemed to already know what every member of his team was capable of.

Kyle shuffled over to join up with the young stallion. “Hey, slow down a second. Give an old man a break.”

The kid turned and stared at him through his glass bubble, trying to see if Kyle was ribbing him.

“The foreman teamed us up,” Kyle explained. “This is my first time out here. How about you?”

“Yeah,” the kid agreed. “But I did a lot of time in the sims. I’ll be okay.”

Kyle hadn’t asked. The kid must be pretty nervous to volunteer so much information. People always led with what they were trying to hide.

They climbed onto an open-bed truck with the rest of the squad. The foreman came by to make sure everyone was hanging on to a safety strap. Then he shouted to the driver, and the truck rolled forward, jiggling heavily over every bump. Kyle watched the alien landscape bouncing by for as long as he could stand it. The rocks were almost all the same dull gray, with only the occasional streak of brown or black. Wind had shaped the landscape, carving out pillars and valleys, smoothing craters and building drifts, but after the first five minutes it was just a bunch of rocks.