Here Be Dragons (10 page)

Yasmin Tehrani, Arnaud’s immediate superior, was the last to speak. Shee had stopped by the oxygen garden and taken a single green frond, almost as green as her eyes, which she now slid into the seam between the sheets. It was no rose, but it would do just as well. Then she stepped back into the rank with the other department heads.

Elena looked around her, at all the lives that had been entrusted to her care. She had not expected to see Rivkah there, and wondered at her own surprise. The doctor was easy to miss, at attention in the middle of the rank to Elena’s right, instead of at the front with the other senior officers. But why shouldn’t Rivkah see him off? He had been her patient too, despite what little comfort she could give him.

She suddenly remembered the duty roster that Ikenna had shown her hours before, so long ago, and the religious holiday that the had requested. She regretted not going to the doctor for advice. Surely Rivkah could have recommended something, a passage from the Old Testament, the books that Elena had never read.

All eyes on her. Most of them had never beheld the death of a colleague. The proud officers of the Space Agency were more technicians than soldiers. Their parents and grandparents had lived with death every day, but that time was over. The men and women gathered around her had spent their entire careers building and maintaining robots, and sent them to kill other robots. It had been the perfect war—battles were won and lost, but nobody had to die. They had grown up in the shadow of the outsiders, but they had convinced themselves that shadows couldn’t hurt them. Now they knew better, as she did.

The doctor was the only person aboard the ship who had already been born when the outsiders had destroyed the
Solstice
. Elena knew that there had been men and women who had lived through the dark days from beginning to end, from the coming of the Storm to the founding of the Union. She could only hope that those like Rivkah, within living memory of the time before fear, would one day know it again. This too would pass.

Elena opened the Bible to the right chapter, and found her verses easily. She read.

“‘Now it came to pass that on a certain day he went into a ship with his disciples. And he said unto them, let us go over unto the other side of the lake. They launched forth, and as they sailed he fell asleep. And there came down a storm of wind on the lake and the waves threatened to sink them. And his disciples came to him and awoke him, saying, master, master, we will perish. Then he arose, and rebuked the howling of the wind and the raging of the water. And they ceased, and there was a calm. And he said unto them, where is your faith? And they were afraid and wondered, saying one to another, what manner of man is this? For even the winds and water obey his command.’”

She closed the Bible, and looked up. They stared back at her, Christians and Muslims, Buddhists and Hindus, atheists and agnostics, and a Sikh and a Jew. There was no pattern to what she saw in their eyes now. They had all expected something about ashes to ashes, dust to dust. And while some of them had understood, some had not.

Elena didn’t care, and she didn’t think that Pascal Arnaud would care either. Where he was, nothing could help or hurt him further. Funerals were for the living. She had her own disciples to watch over, and whether they put their faith in God was none of her concern. But she wanted them to know that they could put their faith in her.

Vijay tapped his bracelet, and the long, doleful notes of le sonnerie aux morts began to play over their helmet intercoms. As one, Arnaud’s comrades raised their hands in salute.

This fell to Elena also. She had already pressurized the airlock and opened the hatch. She took her fallen warrior gently by the arms and steered him inside, careful not to bump him against edges. Alone in the airlock, Arnaud seemed much smaller than Elena remembered. She retreated, and closed and sealed the inner door just as the piece ended. Arnaud had met her at this very airlock on the day of her last spacewalk, and Elena had wondered when any of them would know the sun again. He would be the first.

Elena vented the airlock, and laid Pascal Arnaud to rest.

Dusk and Dawn

Six months earlier

E
lena tried to do nothing, and found that she didn’t know how.

She had departed Port Avramovich the day before, and the spaceline, well aware of how unbearable twenty four straight hours on a plane would be, had done its best to make sure that she never wanted to leave her seat. Even when she did get up, there wasn’t much to do or see. The craft’s windowed fuselage was big enough to hold two heads, a tiny galley, and a cubicle for each of its forty eight passengers. Even if she wanted to float about the cabin, there wasn’t enough room to properly enjoy herself.

Elena checked her bracelet for the latest of several hundred times that trip, but there were no new messages waiting for her. Her cubicle, a meter and a half to a side, was fully stocked with entertainment. It was mostly contemporary media that she had failed utterly to recognize, as well as three news organizations—
Lunar Times
,
The Nile,
and
Transnational
—which had paid a large sum to have their electronic broadsheets placed next to every seat and guaranteed bandwidth on the ship’s antennae. Elena idly ran her fingers over the newspapers in their slots. They were plastic, as thick as a sheet of heavy bonded paper and about as flexible. Electronic broadsheets were transparent when powered down, and the tracery of wires which coursed under their surfaces were completely invisible to the human eye. The technology was almost as sophisticated as the touchscreens aboard
Gabriel.
She tapped the
Times
lightly, and it sprang to life with animated text and video that crawled over the sheet.

Election coverage dominated the front page, and Elena watched a few highlights from the previous night’s debate. It had been an awkward affair, as the Socialists and Conservatives, currently shackled together in an unhappy marriage at Tahrir Square in Cairo, seemed to have resigned themselves to another four years in coalition. The administration’s approval numbers had dropped quite a bit from their peak during the Nuclear Crisis, five years earlier, and neither Prime Minister Helena Dixon nor her deputy Nguyen Van Thanh had dared to attack the other, or the leader of Liberal International, their preferred partner. Instead they had ganged up on the Alliance for Sovereignty, whose candidate seemed to bask in their scorn. The Sovereigntists had never won an election in the Global Union—and as they denied that it should even exist, they probably never would.

Elena hadn’t voted since she had been twenty years old, when she had lost all interest in politics. She powered the paper down and leaned forward to put it back in its slot. The videos and games held no appeal for her either, and reading for pleasure and not the job produced a scrabbling feeling of guilt in the back of her mind, even though she couldn’t possibly have concentrated on paperwork right now anyway. Elena had absolutely nothing to occupy her mind but the secret that she had carried with her from Glenn Station.

“Snack?”

She jumped. There had been no footsteps, but Elena was so used to zero gee that she could usually perceive her neighbors by nothing more than changes in the air.

“Perhaps some Pisco?”

The attendant at her shoulder smiled sweetly, and Elena found it hard to be annoyed with someone who was trying so hard to be nice. The spaceline checked the nationality of every passenger, and arranged to have familiar food and drink for the trip. They had no way of knowing that Elena had subsisted on rehydrated Agency rations for most of the past eighteen years, and she hadn’t bothered to tell them. She’d even left her uniforms stowed in her luggage, and boarded the plane in civilian attire.

“No, thank you,” she said to the attendant. The woman had red hair and blue eyes, and she’d practiced her smile often enough to look as if she actually meant it. “I’m not thirsty.”

“Very well, mademoiselle.”

The attendant took hold of the handrail fixed to the ceiling above them and propelled herself to the next seat with one hand, trailing her cart behind her. Elena watched her work. The attendant’s movements were smooth and effortless, nothing hurried or wasted. Experience with weightlessness was not as common among civilian fliers as one might expect, as the dangers of prolonged exposure to radiation discouraged repeated flights. According to the actuarial tables, a single week in outer space cost a single day at the end of one’s life—a small price to pay for a calling, but too much to ask for just a paycheck. For the civilian flight crews, assignment to outer space was like rotating over to the graveyard shift. They even got hazard pay for leaving the atmosphere. Elena had once thought of hiring on as a civilian herself, two years before.

“This is your captain speaking.” The voice on the intercom was cool and smooth. “Our estimated time of arrival is now thirty minutes. Food and beverage service will be suspended in ten minutes, and the attendants will be around to collect your dishes shortly after that. Please prepare your personal belongings for disembarking, and we would appreciate it if you could begin gathering any loose items and stow them away in advance of the returning gravity. It might not be much, but it’s more than enough to make a mess.”

The captain went on to remind them of the emergency kits stowed throughout the fuselage, and that there were exits at the front and rear of the cabin. She had performed this speech many times, and her voice had an easy command to it which Elena envied.

The redhead returned to check on her, and she had to prove to the woman’s satisfaction that, yes, she was indeed capable of fastening her own safety straps. The attendant’s hair brushed Elena’s cheek when she leaned over to test the locks. Her nametag said “Coralie,” and her perfume was rose scented.

“Do I pass inspection?” Elena asked.

“Oui, mademoiselle. Head of the class.”

Coralie put one hand on Elena’s shoulder to turn herself, then pushed off with her other. She hadn’t bothered with the handrail this time. Elena supposed she should not have felt too flattered. Coralie probably appreciated the one passenger who actually made her job easier. This hop had drawn a particularly green set of tourists, in more than one sense. Every single one of her fellow passengers had promised themselves before takeoff that they absolutely, positively would not vomit when gravity disappeared. Every single one of them had broken that promise, and the attendants had spent the first few hours of the flight bouncing from one queasy novice to another. Elena had prayed that they would arrive in time. Otherwise, it could go everywhere.

She ran a mental checklist. They were now on the final approach. In the cockpit the pilot and co-pilot would have checked in with the tower for clearance, and the flight engineer would run a final diagnostic check on all the vital systems: Attitude thrusters, radar altimeter, quantum gyroscopes, landing gear, and avram. The captain’s voice returned to the intercom.

“The seatbelt light is now on, and we ask that you remain within your cubicle for the duration of the flight. We will be on the ground shortly.”

Elena was seated in the middle row, but she could see through the portholes if she craned her head. The ground was rushing to meet them, and soon the black sky disappeared from view. The pilot hit the avram. It was subtle, like pulling the ripcord on a tiny parachute. The plane seemed to briefly stall, but the moment passed so quickly that most of the passengers probably thought they had imagined it. Their velocity began to rapidly and invisibly decrease.

“Beginning descent now,” the captain said.

The avram switched off at the exact moment that the plane’s speed hit zero. For an instant so miniscule that it could barely said to have occurred at all, they hung in the air, completely motionless.

Then gravity caught the plane and began to gather it in. They had shot right through low orbit and into the descent, and Elena could perceive her weight returning bit by bit. The plane gained another few tonnes every second, and she felt her feet fall to the floor and stay there. The spacelines didn’t build ships inside out like the Agency—civilians wanted something they could point to and call the ground.

The landing thrusters fired, and this time everybody onboard knew it. The plane jerked up and around and pulled perpendicular to the surface. They began to glide flat to the ground, and a feather could not have fallen more lightly than they landed. Elena’s stomach dropped once more as the massive elevator dropped and took the landing pad with it, and the hangar doors slid shut above her head. The captain spoke once more.

“Ladies and gentlemen, it is 9:30 am local time, and the seatbelt light is now off. Welcome to the Moon, and thank you for choosing Starway.”

The attendants fanned out to check on the passengers, none of whom had yet to make a move. Perhaps they were still stunned by their own weight, though it was only one sixth of what it had been on Earth.

“Do you think you can handle those yourself?”

Elena was beginning to think that Coralie’s smile wasn’t just for show.

“I don’t want to monopolize your time,” she said.

“That is considerate, but soon enough, my time will be my own,” Coralie said. “And I will have quite much of it. I do not fly back to Earth for three days.”

“Well, you’ve been very hospitable. I think you’ve earned a vacation.”

Elena twirled her head, taking in the cabin around them, and tourists who were clumsily rediscovering their sense of down. Coralie laughed.

“Yes, I believe so. And in the spirit of hospitality, I would be pleased to show you around, if you wish. I stay on the Moon quite often.”

Elena remembered the soft touch of Coralie’s hand on her shoulder, and wondered what the rest of her felt like. Then she remembered why she come all this way. Her face must have shown it, because the attendant quickly backtracked.

“Of course, you must have plans.”

“I do,” Elena said. “Unfortunately.”

“Business?”

“Of a sort.” She wondered what the attendant would think if she knew she’d been fussing over a Chief Officer of the Global Space Agency. “Yes, business. I would have loved to have lunch with you, but I have an appointment in a few hours.”

“A client?” Coralie stood and smoothed her uniform pants. She did not seem to want to look Elena in the eye.

Elena laughed shortly.

“More like the boss.”

“Bonne chance, madame.”

Coralie smiled one last time, but the moment had passed. Neither offered their contact information to the other. Both knew that they would soon be worlds apart. Today was their only chance, and today they would not have.

Elena gathered her things, and watched surreptitiously as Coralie checked on the other passengers. The attendant’s sense of balance had already returned, and she leaned over quickly and easily to take one man by the hand and help him out of his seat. Her long red hair hung in the air behind her and fell slowly over her bent back. Elena loved red hair.

She stood without help, and turned to queue up at the opposite exit. Her only consolation was that she was leaving behind one beautiful woman for another.

The bag held ten kilograms of Colombian arabica coffee beans, but Elena hefted it easily with one hand and had to grip it tightly to keep it from flying into the air. The Moon’s gravity was light, just enough to tease her with the memory of how the weight had been briefly lifted from her shoulders.

“Mama, you shouldn’t have.”

Alejandra Estrella shook her head and demurred, leaving her thick black hair to trail languorously behind her, as if she were underwater. Elena’s smile fell briefly under her envy—her civilian mother, who had required prescription sedatives just to survive the only spaceflight she had ever taken, had never endured the particular hell of stuffing long, unruly hair into a spacesuit helmet. Elena’s own hair had not touched her shoulders since she was eighteen years old.

Elena set the bag back on the table, next to her plate. Alejandra really shouldn’t have. Coffee beans were a luxury item, and with arable land at a premium, they were heavily taxed. Ten kilos had probably cost her a week’s pay—and biochemists like her mother, who could make algae taste like nearly anything other than algae, were paid quite well.

“One day the company will put serious effort into coffee flavors,” Alejandra said. “Until then, you’ll have to settle for the real thing.”

“I’ll try to hide my disappointment.”

“Be good to your mother,” Alejandra said. She raised her wine glass to her lips—slowly, so as not to splash herself in the face. Their clothes, and shoes especially, were heavily weighted to compensate for the weak lunar gravity. But it was still far too easy to forget one’s strength on the Moon. Waiters in every restaurant kept washcloths on hand at all times, and tourists were advised against hot dishes.

“Sorry, mama. Y gracias,” Elena said, and picked up her fork. Her plate held a tangled morass of flat, broad noodles that looked like a pile of red linguine. Kelp salad with thick oarweed dressing, Alejandra’s first professional concoction. Elena never failed to order it in her presence. She lazily twisted her fork in the salad. “But it is a bit much, no? We’re only going to the Belt and back.”

“You say that now, but I’ll bet you drink it all before you get to Mars.”

“If you’re so concerned about that you could have bought twice as much Brazilian below water for the same price.”

They spoke in English, but Elena used the Spanish idiom for “under the table” without thinking. Her mother rarely used their first language these days.

“If I get caught with embargoed goods, I pay a fine. God only knows what they would do to you.”

Alejandra lifted her own fork, laden with a heavy algae compound engineered to resemble lobster meat. Elena turned her head to the balcony while her mother chewed. The Selentine Cafe was the only starred restaurant in Maginus City, and required reservations even for a weekday lunch. Alejandra had chosen it primarily because it was the only establishment in town which did business with the algacultural corporation where she worked. But for Elena, it was all about the view.