Roger Allen - The Ring of Charon

“We copy you, Pack Rat . Departure plan received, recorded and approved. Slide on in to HNY easy. Milk the fatcats until they moo or meow. See you next time.” Chelated Noisemaker Extreme, also know as Frank Barlow, was a decent sort, even if he drifted into the stilted Naked Purple lingo now and again.

“Thanks, Frank,” Dianne replied. “I’m looking forward to it.” Not exactly true, of course, but what the hell. On her job description, Dianne Steiger was called a pilot-astronaut. But she knew better. Dianne was a backup system. The robots, the automatics, the artificial intelligence routines—they were the astronauts. They did all the work. She was here because this freight run flew close to inhabited areas in the crowded regions of Earth orbit, and because the astronaut union was still fairly strong, if in decline.

Union rules and safety regs required a pilot aboard in case the incredibly unlikely occurred and the automatics packed up while leaving the manual controls functional. Nice theory, except that virtually every mishap that could incapacitate the autos would wreck the Rat past all possibility of controlling her ever again, by any means. But regulations were regulations.

Even the few tasks left to Dianne could just as easily have been done by machines. But it was deemed wise to give the pilots at least something to do, even if the computer could have controlled that circuit, and a servo could have sealed that hatch. A pilot left completely inactive, her reflexes completely dulled by boredom, was not likely to be of much use in an emergency. Or so went the theory. Dianne felt pretty dulled down, even so.

Flying spaceships was supposed to be romantic, exciting, dangerous and challenging. Dianne had gone through eight years of training and ended up running a glorified delivery service.

She was thirty-three years old, but looked older. Her hair was long and brown, half-gone to gray. At the moment she had it bound up in a tight braid coiled on top of her head. When she let it down, it was as wiry as a bottle brush. Her face was lined and lean, and her eyes were wide and bright. People who didn’t know her assumed at first sight that she hadn’t eaten in a week, Her face took expressions to their extremes. Her slightest smile lit up a room, her least frown was frightening.

She sorely missed her cigarettes aboard ship. Someday they’d build a ship with an air system rated to handle tobacco smoke. She made up for it on the ground, though. She was a chain-smoker between flights, her fingers stained yellow with nicotine. She was small and slight of build, but surprisingly strong, with a bone-crushing handshake and a hard, muscular body built over her slender frame. Her appearance, her body, had helped her get a job. The shipping companies like their pilots small and quick.

She had, quite literally, set her sights a lot higher than flying an orbital shuttle. She had been a candidate for the starship project, before they scrapped it. She’d been one test away from acceptance as a cold-sleep reserve pilot aboard the Terra Nova . She was to have been the third-wave pilot, thawed out when the first-wave pilot retired and the second-wave pilot took command. When the second-wave pilot died or retired—then she would have been the commander of a starship.

Then the whole starship project had been canceled, victim of the Knowledge Crash recession that had hit Earth and the rest of the Solar System. It was an era of retreat, surrender, drawing back from the frontiers to safety. So now the nearly completed Terra Nova rode in low Earth orbit, mothballed.

The recession hadn’t offered much to ex-starship pilots. There weren’t any openings on the passenger lines, or even on the cargo ships moving between the major planets. And so Dianne was reduced to humping freight back and forth between NaPurHab, the low-Earth-orbit stations, and the dirtside spaceports. And she was lucky to get even this job. All the other Terra Nova pilots had out-emigrated long ago, looking for work in the Settlement worlds. But pilot jobs were lean out there, too.

She almost didn’t care about that. She was thinking of quitting astronautics altogether, picking one of the Settlement worlds or a habitat and getting the hell out. It wouldn’t be exploring new star systems, true, but at least it would be a frontier, of sorts.

She didn’t understand the people on the Earth or the Moon anymore. The crazies were taking over. The evidence was right in front of her. She looked intently at the huge habitat floating in the darkness. The Purps had come off Earth, taken over this place and the old Tycho Penal Colony—and the United Nations actually recognized the Purps as a legitimate government.

Dianne had her mind made up. If she could not have the stars, she wanted to get out to somewhere , to a place, a world, that would at least be new to her. But could she live in a habitat, a tin can in the middle of space? To one of the Settlement worlds, then. Mars, or Titan, maybe. Perhaps the Asteroid Belt. If she could even get that far in the middle of a recession.

Dianne Steiger checked the Pack Rat’s main panel again and sighed. All was well. Far too well. Nothing for her to do. Transorbital burn in ten minutes. The Rat knew that with far greater accuracy than she did.

The ship lit engines and made the transorbital burn with perfect precision, shut down, and left Dianne to continue stewing in her juices. Not much longer , she told herself. Not much longer at all .

Chelated Noisemaker Extreme glanced up at his external monitor. Good-bye to the Pack Rat . There she was, a small dot of light ten degrees across the sky from the gleaming bulk of a nearly full Moon, a skyful of familiar old stars glowing warm and bright between them. He glanced down and checked his Moonside comm board. All green. All comm channels to the Moon operational. He’d have to do something about that, or catch hell from his boss.

But not just yet. The view was too pretty. The Pack Rat’s acquisition strobes blinked on and off, giving Frank an easy visual sighting. Good for Dianne. A lot of the astros didn’t bother with ac-lights anymore, especially the ones who flew into Purple space. He sighed and shook his head. There was something wrong with a world where so many people worked so hard to do the absolute minimum. Not as if the Purps were much help.

Chelated did a lot of the traffic control duty, but he was mainly a radio tech, responsible for keeping the Naked Purple Habitat more or less in contact with the outside universe. That “more or less” was a key part of his job description. If things got too bad, he had to struggle to bring them up to spec. If, on the other hand, communications got too good , it was his job to degrade them. And he was, of course, expected to randomize the situation at times. Keeping things off an even keel was an important part of the Purple philosophy.

Even if the duties of the job were a bit strange, Chelated—known as Frank Barlow in his pre-Purple life—was skilled in his profession. That was what made him a Noisemaker Extreme —and earned him a bit of suspicion from the more purist Purples, who disapproved of any ability.

But that didn’t matter. Chelated (or Frank, as he still secretly thought of himself) loved radio, electronics, and communications gear for themselves. In the post-K-Crash world, there were few positions for a man of his skill. He had come to the Naked Purple Habitat simply because there was no other place he could get a chance to practice his craft. He saw it as a bonus that he was allowed—even required—to try all the crazy things the other comm centers never permitted.