Something Coming Through

56. Unlikely Astronaut

Mangala | 13 September

When he returned to Petra, Vic told Chloe that he’d brought back Henry Harris’s body and had made arrangements for it to be transported to Earth. And then he told her about his trip into space.

The young woman listened with rapt attention, the shine of a true believer in her gaze. She’d had her hair cut while he’d been away, a boyish bob that made her look younger, vivacious. But although she’d lost the drawn look of the truly ill and had exchanged her hospital gown for a tracksuit, she was still sitting in a wheelchair, and crutches leaned against the wall of her room.

Vic told her that he’d travelled in a small convoy of UN vehicles out along the new road, really just a bulldozed track still mostly unpaved, that linked Winnetou and the ferry crossing to Site 326. Which was a bustling village of tents and prefabs now — labs and workshops, dormitories and mess tents, even a tent that doubled as a church and a mosque. A small frontier town dominated by the two ships that hung like strange fruit above adjacent mounds.

Fahad had made a connection with one of the ships through his patch, and there had been several secret tests, with Fahad taking the ship into the sky to different heights, straight up and straight down like a tethered balloon. But this time he was going to take it on a real flight: out of Mangala’s atmosphere and into orbit.

Vic went aboard as Fahad’s guest. He and the other passengers — technicians, scientists and a former astronaut — sat in a horseshoe of padded chairs on a plywood platform suspended in the middle of the ship’s vault, watching as the ship recognised Fahad and gave him access to its systems. A weirdly solemn moment, like being in a cathedral or temple at some ceremony of investiture, although everyone was dressed in shorts and T-shirts because of the tropical heat, wearing sunglasses to filter the UV in the blue light that glared on webs of black struts, and now and then taking sips of oxygen from face masks connected to portable tanks.

There was an air of jocular tension, and not just because they were all about to take a huge fucking step into the unknown. There was the possibility that the Jackaroo might intervene; jokes about being shot down by alien starfighters now seemed suddenly real. A photographer was videoing Fahad as he engaged in an internal dialogue with the ship. A surgeon was measuring his vital signs; a neurologist was measuring his brain activity. Technicians studied arrays of readouts on their tablets, exchanged cryptic jargon.

At last the astronaut, a petite French woman with a cap of silvery hair, reached over and lightly gripped Vic’s wrist and said, ‘The entrance has closed. It begins.’

She was grinning hugely.

It was gentle at first. Like riding a very fast elevator. Vic’s weight slowly increased, pressing him into the aerogel padding of his chair. He was too excited to be scared. Everyone was excited, even the scientists and technicians pretending to be monitoring changes on their tablets.

The force of acceleration peaked at 2.2 times Earth’s pull. And then it abruptly went away and they were in free fall. One of the technicians switched on cameras stuck to the ship’s hull; everyone cheered and applauded as images of Mangala’s ochre crescent appeared on the big TV screens hung here and there from spars. Pouches of wine were passed around to toast the historic moment. Fahad refused to make a speech; the kid seemed dazed, but maybe that was because he was still plugged into the ship, one arm engulfed in a mass of jostling black bubbles that hung from a spiny many-jointed limb.

The astronaut shoved off from her chair, turned neatly in mid-air, caught a spar with one hand and held the other out to Vic, as if asking him to dance. He unsnapped his harness, kicked towards her, and shot past, tumbling head over heels. He snatched at a thin spar as it went past; momentum swung him around it and he clung there, dizzy, foolish and exhilarated, as the astronaut swam neatly towards him.

‘Don’t use too much force,’ she said. ‘Look at where you want to go and push. Like this.’

She glided across the width of the ship and Vic followed, and soon they were flitting amongst the spars like birds in an aviary, swimming and somersaulting through the air, while the ship swung around the planet and the scientists tried to work out whether various readings meant that the ship was functioning normally. Mostly, they seemed to be arguing about what ‘normal’ meant. Fahad sat alone in his big chair, arm cased in stiff black foam to the elbow, eyes closed. He seemed happy and calm. Serene. As if he had reached the place where he had always wanted to be.

‘And after two orbits he brought the ship back down,’ Vic told Chloe, ‘and that was that.’

‘It’s just the beginning,’ Chloe said.

‘Are you going to go up? Try to fly one of those ships, I mean, not just as a passenger.’

‘I don’t know. It’s a big thing. Enormous. How was Fahad, afterwards?’

‘We talked for about ten seconds after he brought us down. He seemed pleased. And then the scientists hustled him away for tests.’

‘Maybe I’ve had enough of tests,’ Chloe said, with a quietness that touched Vic. She was a tough young woman, no doubt, but she’d been through the fire and it had definitely left its mark on her. He felt a pang, a tender protectiveness. You save someone’s life, you’re responsible.

‘Well,’ she said brightly. ‘What about you? When Fahad decides to dive through a wormhole, will you go with him?’

‘Oh, I’m an unlikely kind of astronaut, don’t you think? Besides, I’ve already been through a wormhole. And I have work here. Making sure that McBride goes down for what he did, to begin with. I was police before I came up and out, and I’m still police. I like to think I’m good at it. Or I try to be. My partner, Skip, now he definitely knew the job. He wanted to do the right thing by his dead, even if it was the hard thing. I’m going to dedicate myself to that, I guess.’

Vic didn’t tell Chloe that he had a date with Astrid Pelissier. The French astronaut. He wanted to see how it worked out first. They’d had a moment, on the ship, and afterwards, back on the ground in a corner of one of the tent cafeterias, they’d fallen to talking about themselves. He’d told Astrid about tracking Drury and McBride to Site 326; she’d told him about her tour on the International Space Station, six months orbiting Earth — one of the last tours before the Jackaroo came and that was the end of the space programme. But now, she’d said, who knows?

‘We have no idea what the ship can do yet, but it’s clear that it is powered by some kind of reactionless drive. Possibly a bias drive that alters the gravitational constant to create a local propulsive gradient, the scientists say. If so, we could go anywhere we wanted to go. I could be the first woman to step on Mars.’

Astrid was a few years older than Vic, scary-smart, capable, cosmopolitan, certain about who she was and what she wanted. He wasn’t sure what she saw in him, but believed it might be fun, finding out what they had in common. Maybe one day they would walk the sands of Mars together. Meanwhile, he could most definitely use some certainty in his life.