Патрик Томлинсон - Children of the Divide

Jian had been a young boy when the Ark made planetfall, just after his mother had been killed onboard the grand old ship. Jian still remembered how her hair smelled of apple blossoms. He’d been only five when she’d died. Asphyxiated, along with twenty thousand other people when a lunatic blew a hole in Shangri-La module’s hull and let all the air out. A terrorist attack that might have been discovered in time to save her had it not been for his father trying to save face. He’d spent a few years living on the surface in Shambhala until in a most unlikely turn of events, his disgraced dad had somehow weaseled his way into the captain’s chair of the Ark, a precarious position that he’d managed to hold onto for fifteen years and counting.

But it was that moment as a boy, when he’d seen his mother and many of his childhood friends swept away by a single act of unfathomable malice that he’d decided to do whatever he could to protect people. Which had led him to be sitting in this chair today. Most people mistook his ambition as an attempt to follow in his father’s footsteps. It was an insulting thought. Nothing could be further from the truth. But, it was a useful illusion to maintain. Being the son of the captain had afforded him certain opportunities over the years, and in the end, pride had taken the copilot seat next to pragmatism.

The slight vibration of the thrusters spiked as they froze the shuttle in space, then ceased entirely as the Atlantis lined up with its destination. Or, more precisely, with where its destination would be in thirty-one hours.

The moon, Varr, hung in the sky to Jian’s left, just beyond the thin blue haze of Gaia’s atmosphere. The tiny satellite was nothing like Luna, Earth’s companion to the last. Varr was scarcely large enough for its meager gravity to collapse it into a rough spheroid. At only three and a half percent Earth standard gravity, escape velocity was only a kilometer per second, which made lifting huge loads of the precious Helium-3 fuel trapped in its surface dust a ridiculously easy prospect. There were plans to install a solar-powered railgun system on the surface to take pressure off the cargo drone fleet, but it kept getting pushed down the manufacturing priority queue.

Varr’s orbit was wildly elliptical. At its perigee, Varr was scarcely further from Gaia as the Ark was, while at apogee, it was almost a million kilometers away and growing by a few centimeters with each passing year. The huge swing meant shuttle operations had to take place inside a relatively narrow, eleven-day window before the moon traveled too far away from Gaia and the Ark for the shuttle to make the return trip. Anyone caught out after this curfew would just have to settle in and wait for Varr to swing back around again on the return leg of its orbit.

The shuttle Atlantis , named after an old NASA shuttle which had itself been named after a fictional continent, was now ironically the namesake of a very real continent some tens of thousands of kilometers below. The Atlantians were the native sapient species of Gaia. It was from their language and legends that their destination of Varr had been named. Varr was one of their triumvirate of Gods, their own version of the Holy Trinity. It was said that Varr was a cosmic protector, clashing every month with Cuut and zer explosive tantrums and harsh, asteroid-based justice.

It was fitting, then, that the second half of their mission was meant to protect everyone in the system, whether they lived on the ground, in the sky above, or in the caves beneath.

“ Atlantis , we’re ready to transfer local control,” said Flight’s cool, practiced voice.

“Copy, Flight. Atlantis is ready for the handoff.”

“Transferring now.”

A small red light flashed on his console as Jian took control of his boat for the first time. “Thank you, Flight. I have the ball. Main engine start.” The shuttle shuddered as the half-dozen shockwave spike engines at its tail rumbled to life. The shuttle lurched forward in response to the trickle of thrust coming from the motors. But they were merely pilot lights compared to the torrent that was about to hit.

“Five seconds to throttle up. Everyone tighten your straps and hold onto your asses,” Jian announced to the crew. His crew. “Three. Two. One. Go!”

On “Go,” Jian slid the holographic controls to one hundred percent. At the back of the shuttle, butterfly valves and turbo pumps opened wide, dumping thousands of liters of liquid hydrogen and oxygen per second into the hellish maws of the rockets, converting the energy of the reaction into fire, steam, and punishing acceleration.

The skin on Jian’s face pulled back and tried to settle into a new home somewhere behind his ears. He couldn’t help but smile.

“The injectors on the number four motor are redlining,” Kirkland shouted, not out of fear, but merely to be heard over the roar of the engines. Jian tore his gaze away from the window and brought the diagnostic displays up on the augmented reality interface in his plant. Kirkland was right, the number four rocket motor was faltering. It had already dropped to eighty-seven percent thrust and falling. The turbo pump feeding it fuel was bad, probably the “frictionless” magnetic bearings throwing in the towel. At this point, they could probably still be rebuilt, but push them much further and they might not only burn out permanently, but disintegrate with enough force to crack the engine bell and maybe even damage one or both of the adjoining motors. The monkeys back in the maintenance hangar wouldn’t thank him for that.

Jian cut the number four motor entirely to prevent catastrophic failure, then adjusted the flow to engines one through three to compensate for the uneven thrust and keep them from drifting off course. The weight pressing down on Jian’s chest eased fractionally as the shuttle lost one-sixth of its acceleration. Some quick calculations from the navigational computer determined that they’d need another thirty-seven seconds of burn at their reduced five gees to stay inside their flight profile, but they’d be well inside their fuel reserves on both the outbound and return legs of the trip.

Just another one of the charms of commanding a two-hundred-and-fifty year-old boat through space.

Jian keyed on his com back to the Ark. “Flight Control, Atlantis . Be advised. We’ve had to cut number four motor,” he paused to take a strained breath, “but we’ve adjusted our burn and are still well within our safety envelope. Mission remains a go.”

“Roger that, Atlantis . Keep us apprised.”

“Acknowledged.”

Jian relaxed and let the gees push him back into the contours of his chair. Now that he wasn’t trying to move his arms, the pressure wasn’t as exhausting, even though it was still a task to breathe. A few of the older members of the team weren’t having as easy a time of it, he knew. Three of them were original Ark crew members and had spent the majority of their lives in the micro grav of either the Command module, labs, or Engineering. Even with anti-atrophy drugs artificially bulking up their bone and muscle density, nothing beat the pull of gravity on body development, whether that gravity was real or spin. They wouldn’t be happy campers for the next few minutes.

Jian let his breathing settle into the same rhythm he used to meditate, not that he was at any risk of slipping into that fuzzy, dreamlike state while his body was being pressed like a panini.

The great weight pressing down on his chest vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Jian’s attentions snapped back to the present and checked the shuttle’s flight profile.

“Flight, Atlantis . We’ve completed our burn. Profile is five-by-five. We’re on our way to Varr.”