Gary Gibson - Final Days

‘So if you’re one half of the flight crew,’ asked Saul, ‘who’s the other half?’

‘That’d be my wife, Amy,’ Lester replied. ‘She’s an engineer and pilot, and a good one, too, knows every ship we own inside and out.’ He turned to the hopper pilot. ‘Sam, you should get over to Bay Fifteen, give Arkady a hand. There’s something fishy going on with the fuel-gauge readings on bird number five.’

‘Sure thing.’ Sam headed over to the truck and began talking to one of the men standing nearby.

‘In case I don’t get the chance later,’ Mitchell said to Lester, ‘I want to thank you for holding the launch back for us. It means a lot to me.’

Lester shook his head. ‘Way I see it, we might all owe Jeff our lives. So if he wants us to give you a ride up, we’ll give you a ride up.’ His expression became uncertain. ‘It’s really going to be as bad as he says?’

‘Yes,’ said Saul, ‘it’s really going to be that bad.’

‘Right.’ Lester sniffed, staring out towards the horizon for a moment. ‘You know, a couple of generations back, a girl in my family went off to live on a mountain for a year with some people who all reckoned the end of the world was coming. Shaved her head, got herself pregnant, then a solar eclipse came and went, and she returned back down the mountain and found the world was still there. Everyone pretended it never happened, so she went on and got a regular job and never did anything crazy ever again. I can’t imagine how foolish she must have felt, but there’s a tiny part of me thinks maybe this is all the same kind of situation, and we’re all going to fly up there and find the world isn’t going away, and we’re all going to come home again feeling foolish. Do you know what I mean?’

‘If I thought shaving my head and going to live on a mountain might help things to come out any other way,’ said Saul, ‘I’d be reaching for the razor right now.’

Lester nodded with a look of inexpressible sadness. ‘Come on,’ he said, and led them through the hangar towards a side-office. ‘I’ll introduce you to Amy.’

Amy Rose proved to be an equally leather-skinned old person in her eighties, who had once worked on the early construction of Kepler’s biomes, and even helped carry out course adjustments on board one of the CTC-gate-carrying starships. When she wasn’t reminding Saul and Mitchell that she was too busy to retire, she was airing her political convictions.

‘We fucked ’em over every which way for no good reason,’ she said, when Saul described the invasion of Sophia he’d witnessed. ‘The colonies, that is. Should’a shared the technology with the Sphere nations a long time ago.’

‘Amy,’ intervened Lester, a note of warning in his voice, but this only earned him a scowl from his wife.

‘No, Lester ,’ she continued, scowling, ‘long as they could control all the gate traffic, they reckoned they could keep the colonies under their thumb. The human race could have expanded a lot further out into the galaxy by now, if it weren’t for that kind of shortsighted thinking. That’s how they’ve maintained the same historical imbalance between rich and poor, even over light-years. Enough to make you sick.’ She shook her head with evident disgust.

‘When are we going up?’ asked Saul.

‘First thing tomorrow morning,’ replied Amy.

Ice trickled through Saul’s veins. ‘That soon?’

‘That soon,’ Amy echoed. ‘In the meantime, you look like you could use a night’s sleep.’

They put Saul up in a hotel next to the runway, where he woke early the next morning, still feeling bruised and sore and tired. Mitchell had already departed the room he’d taken next door to Saul’s own, and so Saul ate alone in the hotel’s tiny restaurant, staring out across the desert landscape towards the Saturn rocket a few kilometres distant.

Lester picked him up just before eight, driving him to another building nearby that turned out to contain a suite of changing rooms, the walls lined with sportswear-model spacesuits. He found Mitchell there, following Amy’s detailed instructions and by that time already halfway into donning his own suit.

Amy waved Saul over to join them, ordering him to strip down before showing him how to put on a pair of rubber-lined long johns studded with flexible microscopic monitors. Following that, he clambered inside one of the racked spacesuits, which proved to be a one-piece garment entered through a diagonal zip running from the crotch all the way up to one shoulder. A how-to, uploaded to his contacts, described the function of each piece of equipment his suit contained in interminable detail, before guiding him through a full systems check that required him to put on a helmet and pressurize the suit to check for potential leaks or any other problems. Once he had the helmet on, icons appeared along the bottom of its curved interior surface, each bearing a name: Saul, Amy, Mitchell and Lester.

‘Jesus,’ exclaimed Amy, when she noticed Saul struggling to remove his helmet a few minutes later. ‘Trust an amateur.’ With a sorrowful look, she helped him unlock it from his suit’s neck ring.

‘How does the suit feel?’ she asked.

‘Itchy,’ Saul replied. ‘Not very easy to move.’

‘Believe me, it’ll be harder once we get to the lunar surface, but we’ll be there to guide you along the way.’ She turned and snapped her fingers at Mitchell, until she had his attention, too. ‘Didn’t you say Saul’s been up in space before?’

‘Just a sub-orb jump,’ Mitchell replied, still adjusting the fabric hood he had pulled over his head.

‘Right,’ Amy turned back to Saul, ‘well, this time it’s going to be a little different. We’re launching way ahead of schedule as it is, which means you need to be ready for anything.’

‘Like what?’

She patted his shoulder. ‘I wouldn’t want to worry your pretty little head with the grisly details. You’ve got your rubber underwear on, that’s the main thing.’

Mitchell glanced across at him. ‘Like when we jumped,’ he explained. ‘You have to pee inside your suit, remember?’

‘Somehow I’d managed to wipe that detail from my mind,’ Saul grumbled. ‘What about, uh, everything else?’

‘There’s a hose attachment for that,’ said Lester, helpfully.

‘Just remind me,’ said Saul, now flexing his arms and knees. ‘There are people who actually pay for this experience?’

Lester started to reply just as a mild tremor rolled through the ground under their feet, lasting several seconds in all.

‘I’d better go check on things,’ Amy said quickly.

Saul watched her hurry away. ‘How much trouble could a tremor like that cause?’ he asked Lester.

‘Hard to say.’ Lester shrugged, as he finished climbing into his own suit. ‘Doesn’t take much more than a cracked exhaust pipe or fuel line to cause more trouble than you’d believe. We’ve been very lucky we weren’t forced to postpone the launch a few days more, but the faster we can get up now, safety permitting, the better chance we have of avoiding any trouble.’ He waved a beckoning hand to the both of them. ‘All right, we’re about done here. Keep your suits on and come with me.’

Saul picked up his helmet and trailed after Mitchell and Lester, down a narrow passageway decorated with images of vintage spacecraft from centuries past. Every step he took in the heavy boots felt as exaggerated and forced as if he were fleeing some nameless dread in a nightmare.

The flight control room adjoined to the rear of the hangar, and consisted of little more than a low-lit booth with several wall-mounted screens, each showing a different view of the Saturn, either from close up or some considerable distance. Several personnel were crammed into this small space, all of whom greeted Lester by his first name before returning to their tasks. Saul listened to them quietly mutter to each other about liquid fuel ratios and payloads, their eyes fixed on one display or another.