Майкл Бишоп - The Final Frontier - Stories of Exploring Space, Colonizing the Universe, and First Contact

(This is the second; it is nearly the eclipse.)

Marika doesn’t remember anything until they play the recording.

Then she listens as Zeke orders her more and more sharply to let go of the handhold and strap in for re-entry, where are you going, the decision’s been made, this is an order, don’t touch the hatch, have you lost your mind, that’s an order, answer me goddammit, move back now or I’ll make you move.

“Why didn’t you answer?” they ask her.

She says, “I did.”

(Not then—when Zeke blocked the hatch and broke her fingers, it was Konstantinova who yelped.

But on the recorder, as soon as the Director said “It’s possible to make it,” she said “Go.”)

They put Marika back at the computer bank, and she gauges wind resistance and plots angles and tells the telescope where it should be pointing.

(She’s still good at it; she just doesn’t look behind her any more where the map is, where the ghosts of the stars flicker and shine.)

It’s a week before anyone talks to her.

The first person who does is Konstantinova.

“Can you move your fingers?”

Marika says, “Yes.”

A week later, Konstantinova hands her a screwdriver, says, “Prove it.”

Konstantinova makes her do mechanic drills at night, after the others are asleep.

So Marika drills: into her suit in two minutes, alone; flicking switches to a full-speed metronome; screwing and unscrewing panels until the pads of her fingers have no skin left.

She doesn’t understand why, until she hears rumors that the techs are making modifications and repairs; that it will be going back up as Alkonost II, with three chairs up for grabs.

“They’ll never crew me again,” she says.

Konstantinova says, “You have fifteen seconds. Go.”

It takes a year for Alkonost II to take off.

Zeke gets water-fever and dies. No one offers to replace him.

Walters gets drafted out of the pilot pool. He’s surly to the techs; he can suit up in two minutes; he cries in his bunk.

Konstantinova wishes for one, just one, to be the sort of person you want beside you when you stand on a new planet.

But no one else comes, and that morning on the launch pad, it’s Marika standing on her other side.

(This is the third; it’s almost over.)

The launch succeeds. The pods register nominal. The life-support system holds.

They make it through the asteroid belt with only one bump (a fragment of meteorite, so small that when it strikes the hull it makes a soprano ping they can hear inside).

Decision point comes after that, with the inner planets behind them and Jupiter filling the viewscreen. Along the top edge, a shadow is passing; a moon in transit.

“We are go,” says Konstantinova; her feet go numb just saying it.

“Godspeed,” says Mission Control.

On the ground, they’ve already started to leave notes, to write things down and lock them up safely in case the war gets worse while they’re gone. They’re making a covenant of things for their children to do when they’re grown and staring at the dusty computer banks, greeting three far-away strangers.

“When we wake up,” says Konstantinova, “we won’t know a soul. Imagine that.”

She glances behind her, but Marika’s looking out at Jupiter with a crestfallen face; a moment later, Marika closes her pod like she’s glad to go.

(Walters went into his right after launch, even before the asteroid field. He’d better be as good at landings as they swear he is. She doesn’t put much faith in people who are surly to techs.)

Konstantinova stays up long enough to watch the ship accelerate to full speed, just in case.

Jupiter drops away, and Uranus and Neptune roll past in the distance like blue marbles, and there’s a brief bright string of stones along the Kuiper belt (Haumea whirling by), and then they’re in deep space and it’s nothing but her star map, as far as she can see.

It’s so familiar, suddenly, that she has to calculate the luminosity of Vega from memory before she can breathe again.

(Some thirsts you never get over.)

They wake up three days shy of Gliese 581.

Konstantinova wakes a day before the others to check out the comm. The Captain should be first, she feels. Zeke would have agreed.

When Dee comes into sight, cloudy and blue and welcome, Konstantinova holds her breath, runs some numbers.

(It’s an afterthought. By now the numbers are practically shapes, and she knows what home looks like.)

Walters wakes next. He looks out at the planet, sighs, and starts to dress.

Marika wakes last. As her pod cracks open she knocks it away with outstretched arms, leans out the edge and takes a few gasping breaths.

“I dreamed we hit the water,” she says.

Konstantinova doesn’t answer. People’s dreams are their own business.

The navigation system is working and the life support is as expected (enough air to get home, and Konstantinova tries not to shout with relief).

There’s a message from Mission Control, only twenty years old, which catches up to them on the second day. A few of the old voices from Mission Control send good wishes, and introduce some new voices.

“We’ve been monitoring your trip, Alkonost,” says one of the strangers. “Everything looks good; watch fuel usage on your way in, so you can make it back up all right if the gravity’s stronger than estimated. Let us know when you wake up. Good morning, and Godspeed.”

Konstantinova sends a message back. Beside her, Marika looks grimly through the viewscreen, where Gliese 581-d is spinning in the glow of their new home star.

They suit up and take positions for landing; it’s so instinctive now that Konstantinova smiles.

(She spent forty years dreaming of setting down on Dee, and after all that practice the comm switches feel like her own fingertips.

She never got to the part where they step out on a new world; not enough imagination left over.)

The checklist goes well until the very last moment, until Dee’s gravity has already caught them and they’ve begun the slow, inevitable fall.

“The third shock absorber isn’t running,” says Konstantinova. The words sound distant; disbelieving.

“We can land with two,” Marika says.

Walters says, “Not on water; if we’re off by more than a few degrees the surface tension will knock us over before we even touch down. We’ll slam into the water and be pulverized by impact.” He’s not disbelieving; he sounds like that’s just what he’s expected all along.

“Then you’d better do your job, I guess,” Konstantinova snaps.

“What’s wrong with it?” asks Marika. “It froze?”

Konstantinova frowns at the diagnostic. “Doesn’t look like it. The mechanism still registers. Something must have broken loose while we were sleeping. Maybe we can open the nav panel in the back and—”

“In the asteroid belt,” says Marika. “Something hit the hull.”

“After last time, there better not be a fucking thing wrong with that hull,” says Konstantinova.

“But it sang,” Marika says quietly.

All at once Konstantinova has a vision like a reel of film, as a sliver of rock careens into the hull, as a few grains slice through the hull and nick the fuel line, as forty years of a microscopic accident converge on them at once when there’s not enough pressure in a valve.

She tries for words, and for a moment fails.

“We can’t access that now,” Walters says. “We’re heading into the atmosphere, we’ll burn up if we go out there. Let’s pull out, we’ll look at it from a steady orbit.”

“If we pull out now,” says Konstantinova, “we’ll burn the fuel we need to launch from the surface of Dee and go home. So we take our chances in the water, or we take our chances on the ground.”