Cosmonaut Keep (20 page)

She stood up and strolled to the window, as though watching out for the camo dudes or the black helicopters. "Y'know," she said, "your credibility as an E.U. citizen who's an oppositionist has just gone off the scale. You could really talk to the mutineers out there. And you are in deep shit here on Earth."

She turned to with me a speculative grin. "Still think going into space is a crazy idea?"

"Yes," I said. I had given them a lengthy piece of my mind on this subject as soon as the suggestion had come up. "But -- "

"Good man!" said Alan. "I knew you'd come around."

"That's a
spaceship!"

I was used to seeing launch pictures from Baikonur, from Kourou, and for that matter from Canaveral. Even with single-stage-to-orbit, flea-on-a-griddle liftoff they resembled everything back to the V2 in their vertical ascent. This black object, out in the glare of the sun on the bitter flat ground, resembled nothing. It looked more alien than any real or imagined flying saucer. It was like a sculpture of some animal native to the vacuum. Just trying to get a perspective on the thing, to form an image of it as a whole, was making my eyes water and my head hurt.

"Nevada Orbital Dynamics SSTA," said Alan Armstrong. (That was his name, he'd finally admitted. He was only the chief engineer -- notoriously modest, according to the info my spex were pulling down.) "Single Stage to Anywhere. It's a refinement of the old USAF Electro-Dynamic Stealth Fighter. Our famous flying saucer that the Russkis chewed up so many of in the war. This one can ionize the surrounding air and electromagnetically pulse it to reach escape velocity
in the atmosphere,
then generate its plasma sail and accelerate further. You could go to Pluto with it. I mean, you'd starve first, but your body could get there."

Plasma sail -- I checked the ref, found screeds about the system, a vast electromagnetic field enclosing a spheroid of ionized gas that interacted with the solar photon flux like a lightsail. It could take us to the
Marshall Titov
in days, more than half of which time would be spent tacking and decelerating. Final course-corrections by fusion rocket.

"Fusion?
So why don't you -- "

"Use it for everything? It's expensive, that's why. That ship is worth billions of dollars."

I stared at him. "How do you expect to make that kind of money back?"

He shrugged. "The U.S. military is a bit burned-off with flying saucers," he admitted, "and the commercial space operators don't need anything like this -- yet. We might flog it to NASA someday, if they ever get their act together, but for now this is blue-sky, foundation-funded stuff for the space exploration which we are certain will revive. More certain now than ever, come to think of it."

"Makes me wonder why we need to bother with alien tech," I said.

"Anti-gravity would be worth having," Armstrong said mildly. "Anyway, you're soon going to find out."

"Jeez." I felt cold inside. Already, trucks were rolling up, in a haze of dust and leaks of pressurized gases, to prep the thing for launch in a few hours.

"Bear in mind that it can get you back just as fast," Alan said. "It's not like you're leaving Earth for months, or anything."

I should have known what to expect when the medical included a few minutes of squirming through a long, narrow, dark pipe, with sensors checking my signs to make very sure I didn't suffer from claustrophobia. It was never something I'd thought about before. The mission psychologist said I would have made a very good cave-diver. I told him I'd bear it in mind if I ever wanted to take up safer hobbies.

The gel-packed g-suit was state-of-the-art. What one wore underneath was a sort of skintight, soft combination garment, and what one wore under that --

"Why the diaper?" I asked indignantly.

"In case this pill doesn't work."

"Can I take two?"

I was told to keep my spex on, and provided with a new, American-made palm computer onto which all my AIs and systems-management programs had been downloaded. It, along with the wet-tech reader and the datadisk, went into pockets on my thigh.

The pilot was called Camila Hernandez. She was several inches shorter and years younger than myself, and I hesitate to estimate how many kilos lighter. Her face might have been pretty if it hadn't been so thin, almost anorexic, and if her hair hadn't been buzz-cut to a five-millimeter fuzz. She shook my hand as we sat facing each other on the back of a trailer that trundled us out to the ship. Beyond that she didn't have much to say. She had a look of fierce concentration and I guessed she was fingering some rosary of flight-checks in her mind, so I kept quiet.

The ship,
Blasphemous Geometries,
was about two meters deep in the center. The entrance hatch was at the center. The cockpit wasn't. Camila climbed in and I followed, to find myself squirming along a long, dark, narrow tube. I emerged in a space less than a meter deep and two meters long and a little under two meters wide. Camila was already lying prone on the couch on the right. I pulled myself up on the one beside her, and at the far end stuck my head into a bubble helmet, which sealed itself around my neck. Behind me, I could hear hoses and nozzles snake out and snick onto my suit.

In front of the bubble helmet, curving around in front of and above and below the two of us, was what looked like a bubble window. There definitely hadn't been a window visible from the outside, so this had to be some scaled-up version of spex, but the illusion of having my head up at the leading edge of the craft was perfect. Above, the blue sky; below, the dusty ground, the technicians going about their final tasks; ahead, the shimmering heat haze and mirage of Groom Lake, the craft's shadow stretching ahead of us in the late-afternoon sun.

Camila's hands rested in front of her head on a control panel. The control panel in front of me was covered with a plastic lid, sealed down; I rested my forearms on it and looked ahead. I absurdly thought of Superman's flying pose, and stifled a nervous chuckle.

"You all right?"

"Yeah, I'm fine."

"Good. Shock-gel deploying."

Camila slid back a bolt. With a loud hiss the space around our legs and torsos filled with some kind of foam which set instantly to a rubbery texture that yielded just enough to make it possible to breathe. It pressed hard against my feet and legs and around my midriff.

"Deployed," she said. Then, in a different tone:
"Blasphemous Geometries,
ready to roll!"

The sound of something disengaging, and a siren outside that brayed for a good two minutes. The air in front of us began to crackle and warp; a deep hum came through the soles of my feet and up through my legs, setting each bone and then each tooth resonating at a separate frequency. With it rose a feeling of tension and oppression and the uncanny sensation that my arms and legs were being tugged and stretched.

The ship began to move, slowly at first, dust and glowing flecks streaming around the curved viewplate, the ground flicking past beneath us, faster and faster until it was a blur of straight lines. I looked up. The mountains surrounding the salt-pan approached in a terrible rush, and then --

-- dropped away.

The view around us reddened, then cleared -- I guessed the view-plate was correcting innumerable wild distortions and refractions. Despite the gel-suit and the shock-gel, I felt as though my weight were increasing so fast that my bones would crack. Every joint ached. Below, the landscape passed like a panning shot, then it became as blurred as the runway had been, only slowing a little as we climbed. In a shockingly short time we were above the Atlantic; and shortly thereafter, above the atmosphere.

I didn't have much time to appreciate the blue view of Earth. The acceleration dropped, ended, and then, just as my bones were creeping back to their full length, returned, milder but more insistent. Around the craft something bloomed like neon, then faded from view as the correction software reacted like an iris adjustment. Earth's horizon, too, rushed upon us and dropped away.

I stared at space and stars in a sky that went all around.

"That's it for now," said Camila, in a more relaxed voice than I'd heard from her before. "Want to see how we looked from the ground?"

"Sure," I said, reluctant to disengage my view of the stars.

She tabbed a few keys and part of the viewplate right in front of us opaqued and showed, somewhat disorientingly, a band of blue sky. Along that band hurtled an accelerating red fireball; and then, in jerky succession, the view cut to ever-briefer glimpses of our ever-tinier bolide streak across increasingly dark skies.

"Twenty-seven missile station alert-status upgrades," she read off from somewhere, "and two hundred and eighty UFO incident reports logged to date. Not bad."

"What do we look like now?" I asked.

She gave me a sideways glance, doubly distorted by our two goldfish bowls. "Um," she said, "didn't want to worry you, you know? But since you ask, because we have thousands of cubic kilometers of ionized gas around us we're, uh, naked-eye-visible ... "

A nighttime view, looking up. According to the Cyrillics scrolling along the bottom it was a patch from a local station in Minsk doing an outside broadcast follow-up of a UFO report or war scare. Above a ragged horizon of new-tech housing-pylons we shone plainly, a bright star.

I never heard the proximity alarm, which was for the pilot's ear. The first I knew was when Camila turned to me and asked urgently: "Matt -- are you religious?"

"No," I said, baffled by the question.

"Okay," she said. "Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death. Amen." Then, in a different tone: "Right, this is where it gets tedious."

Her fingers played over the control board faster than touch-typing. I immediately, with a mercifully apt reflex, clasped my hands across the back of the helmet and pressed it down as hard as I could into the yielding surface of the gel-couch. The viewplate went black. A moment later we were slammed sideways. It was the first of many such bufferings, giddy moments of free fall followed by brutal bursts of acceleration in unpredictable directions. It actually did get tedious, like a roller-coaster ride that goes on far too long, repeating its thrills to the point where they merge into a continuous dull fear and a wish that you could get
off.

After what seemed like a long time but, according to my clock in the spex, was only about an hour, the violent motions stopped. All the time the forward acceleration had built up -- still nowhere near one gravity, but very noticeable.

"We've outrun them," Camila said. "Every nearby burst gives us more gas and more flux, and lets us run faster. Real neat." She grinned across at me, sweat drying on her face. "Really
soaks up
laser strikes too," she added, worryingly.

I felt absurdly apologetic.

"I had no idea the EPAF would try to shoot us down."

She laughed. "That was friendly fire, bro. Our side. USAF Orbital Defense."

"What?"

"Not surprising. Unauthorized launch, overflying E.U. territory -- they had to do
something
to convince the commies we weren't about to nuke 'em. Other politics as well, I guess. The Feds are really worried about freelancers taking advantage of the shake-ups in the E.U. defense and security apparats to start something." Her grin became feral. "Bring down the whole stinking commie edifice."

"God, you sound like Jadey," I said. The thought of her returned like an injury that hadn't hurt as long as the fight continued.

"Jadey Ericson? You mean you
know
her? Wow! Tell me all about it!"

"Shouldn't you be flying this thing?"

"For the next couple of days it flies itself, until I have to start tacking." She frowned. "Now,
that
gets tedious. In the meantime there's nothing to do. We can take our helmets off now, by the way. Twist it
so
-- right, then left."

We both breathed deeply, in air that was indistinguishable from what we'd had in the helmets, except perhaps for the faint reassurance of each other's human smell.

"Well, here we are. We can suck glop out of these tubes, water out of that. We can piss, but we can't shit. We can sleep." She jerked a thumb. "That stuff stays around us until we dock. Might as well be in a fucking plaster cast. Best not think about it, huh?" She brightened. "But we can talk. And we can follow the news -- we're getting a laser feed, if you want to check your spex you'll see it all." She sucked water. "Talk to me or I'll go bugfuck crazy."

"Or I will." I wanted to see the breaking news, but I knew what she meant.

I told her my adventures, leaving out only the nature of the information I was carrying.

"What I don't get," she said when I'd finished, staring out at the unchanging view of the stars -- no speed of ours could change them visibly -- "is how you guys
live
with it. All that corruption and controls and shit."

"It's not so bad," I said. "The state's a bit heavier than in America, sure, but let's face it, it does get more things done. More education, less pollution, no beggars ... " I laughed. "And space exploration -- let's not forget space exploration!"

"But the
Party!"
she said. "How can you stand that? I mean, nobody believes in Communism anymore, not even the commies."

"Oh yes they do," I said. "They just don't call it that. They call it 'the sustainable society.' What economists used to call the stationary state. And they think they're getting us there, and that everybody will get there in the end, even the Americans."

"Never!" Camila said. "Maybe the East Coast liberals might go for that, but not the rest of us."

I sighed. "It's got nothing to do with what anybody
believes
in. The falling rate of profit will get you in the end. You can evade it for a while by exporting capital, and follow that falling rate like a star sinking on the horizon, which by following fast enough you can raise for a while, but all that gets you is a fully capitalist -- and fully capitalized -- world, with low profit rates everywhere, and then there's nowhere else to go but the steady state, an economy just quietly ticking over rather than expanding. In the steady state it's easy for workers to end up employing capital -- socialism, near as makes no difference."