Starbound Read online

  Tamara sat down in an armchair across from the sofa. She rested her elbows on her knees and her chin in her hands as she gazed at the couple. “You two are so cute.” She sighed. “Come on. Eat up. The main course is almost ready.” She returned to the kitchen.

  Jas passed Sergei a plate. “I’m leaving early tomorrow for the spaceport.”

  “Huh? Oh, I forgot. Your Mars trip. That’s tomorrow, is it? How long will you be gone for?”

  “Only two days.”

  “Two days to Mars and back. How long did the first mission take? Two years?”

  “Something like that.” Jas wondered how long it had taken to get to Mars when her parents emigrated there. Had they been among the original settlers, or had they been part of the global warming rush? She’d been born on Valles Mariniers Five, scene of the worst colony disaster in the history of humankind’s expansion into space. A massive explosion—possibly originating in the oxygen storage tanks—had devastated the base. Only those at the periphery had survived the initial blast, and then only for the few seconds it took the fireball to reach them.

  Jas had never researched the disaster. A care worker at the children’s home on Mars had once offered to show her the records of the couples of fertile age who had died, but she hadn’t wanted to speculate about which of the twenty or so might have been her parents. She’d never been able to see the point.

  “Are you sure you’ll be okay doing this starjump, Jas?” Sergei asked. “Is your instructor’s friend legit? Is her ship safe?”

  She put down her fork and touched the side of his face. His concern was heart-warming, though she knew it was also borne out of his distrust of space travel. “I’ll be fine. In fact, though I’ll miss you, I’m looking forward to it. Don’t worry. I’ll be back before you know it.”

  THE Alexandria IV was a mid-range, multi-purpose utility vessel of the type often purchased by space entrepreneurs who were just starting out. The ship’s design didn’t define a specific business strategy, allowing the flexibility to alter direction if the first venture didn’t work out. It had a hold generous enough for a substantial shipment, the crew’s quarters, and twenty modest passenger berths.

  It was also a ship for spacefarers who never settled on one thing. They spent their lives roaming the stars, picking up a group of colonists here, a shipment there, taking whatever work they could find wherever they could find it, eking out a living.

  Jas could see the appeal of such a life, she thought as she arrived by shuttle from the McMurdo Sound Spaceport. The white-streaked, brilliant blue globe that was Earth slowly rotated to one side, and through the shuttle windows on the other side of the passenger cabin, she could see the Alexandria IV, its long snout taking up the view. The snout was mostly engine, that much Jas knew. The technology that enabled starjumps was bulky. Aside from that, she wasn’t sure what they would find inside.

  After docking with the other vessel, the students filed through the opening that linked the shuttle and the starship, Elba bringing up the rear. A small, wiry woman met them in the narrow, bare-metal corridor. She greeted them and Elba when she appeared, and directed the students to follow her, explaining the layout of the ship as they went.

  Jas was immediately taken back to the first and only starjump she’d ever experienced, when traveling to Earth at the age of twelve. She’d been alone and lonely. Her Martian friends had either already left for Earth a year or two before her, or they’d still been too young to make the trip. Aside from that, she couldn't remember much of what had happened.

  “Here are your cabins,” the ship’s owner announced they drew close to a set of ten doors, five on each side of the corridor. “You can figure out which ones you’re taking later—they’re all doubles, so you’ll have to share. Before you enter your cabins, I’m going to take you to the jump suite. You need to know where you’ll have to be in around four hours, when we’ve maneuvered far enough away from Earth and built up energy for the jump. Please make sure you aren’t tardy. Time’s money.”

  “Don’t worry,” said Elba. “They won’t be late.” He was in the lead now, walking alongside his friend, and he shot a look over his shoulder to impress the instruction on his students.

  The jump suite was only just large enough for the twenty-five jumpseats it held. The smell of the foam and plastic reclined seats made Jas a little nauseous. Open safety harnesses hung down from them. Memories of her first jump returned to Jas at the sight. She recalled the crew members finding her a spare adult seat as the child-sized one had been too small.

  “Isn’t there a window?” one of Jas’ male classmates asked. “I wanted to look outside as we jumped.”

  “No windows on starships, son, and you wouldn’t see anything if there were,” replied the owner. “You’d only notice the stars had changed position.”

  “So it really is like falling asleep and waking up?” another student asked.

  “Hmm...” said the woman, “it’s more like falling down a well, then being suddenly thrust to the surface again. You’ll float for thirty seconds or so as the gravity comes back online. There are sick bags in the slots on your seats. If anyone feels like they’re going to throw up, hold the bag around your mouth, okay? I’m sure you can all imagine what it’s like when someone upchucks in zero-g. If you can’t, I don’t want you finding out aboard my ship. I take it you can all remember the way here from the cabins? We jump at eleven hundred sharp. Meanwhile, you can make use of the passenger lounge and the cafeteria, but you’re not to enter any crew areas. They’re clearly signed.”

  “Are we doing the training when we arrive?” the male classmate asked Elba.

  “No. We’ll be training in the cargo bay, so we’ll have to wait for the Mars shuttle to collect the shipment. Then we’ll move out of orbit and turn off the gravity for a few hours.”

  At eleven hundred, Jas was strapped into a jumpseat, listening to the countdown. The ship’s owner had explained that the seats weren’t to protect them from violent movements of the ship, but from any accidents that might occur.

  Jas briefly wondered what kind of accidents were possible, but there was no time to ask. Maybe Sergei was right about space travel. The trip seemed like a lot of work for just a few hours’ training, and she wouldn’t even be able to go to Mars.

  The owner, Elba and three crew members with the coloring and build of Martians were also strapped into jumpseats. A vibration began building all around them. It was in Jas’ seat and in the air. The jump suite walls also seemed to subtly shaking. The movement penetrated her skin, her teeth, and her bones. Over the speaker came the sound of the pilot’s voice, counting four, three, two, one, zero.

  Then Jas fell.

  Chapter Ten

  IT WAS HARD TO BELIEVE that, after several hours of building energy, the engines released it all in a split second and catapulted the Alexandria IV tens of millions of kilometers across the solar system. Was catapulted the right word? It was more like the ship and everyone and everything in it had disappeared out of existence for a millisecond, only to reappear in an entirely different place. Jas had a sense of climbing or clawing her way back to the physical universe—to life.

  The experience had left her more shaken than she’d thought it would. She didn’t recall feeling so disoriented the first time around. She wasn’t the only one affected. A couple of students had made use of the sick bags. After the artificial gravity had started up, everyone but the owner and crew crowded into the cafeteria for a warm drink to settle their stomachs.

  Jas was squashed between the petite classmate that she was sharing a cabin with and the male student who had been asking the questions about starjumps. No one was saying much. As Jas recovered a little, she decided that starjumping wasn’t too bad, and she wouldn’t mind doing it more regularly.

  A woman in a flightsuit came in. Her eyes searched the students crowded at the tables, and when she saw Jas, she beckoned her with a finger. The others watched as Jas got up and made her way over to the
woman. She had to be the pilot as she hadn’t been in the jump suite during the jump. She lacked the Martian coloring of the other crew members, so Jas assumed she was from Earth. She followed the woman out of the cafeteria and into the corridor.

  “They said we had a Martian student aboard,” the pilot remarked when they were out of earshot of the other students.

  “I guess I’m not difficult to spot.”

  “Do you get back to Mars often?”

  “No, I haven’t been since I was twelve.”

  The pilot nodded, though Jas had a suspicion that the woman was asking questions she already knew the answers to, out of politeness. Jas’ scholarship student background was hardly a secret.

  “We don’t often have passengers, you know,” the pilot went on as Jas accompanied her, wondering where they were going. “Owens usually runs shipments. The regular transports get most of the passenger traffic. She can’t compete on price.”

  “Oh,” Jas said.

  “And when we do have passengers, it’s usually a bad idea to invite them to the flight deck. You never know when someone’s going to accidentally flip a switch or touch a screen.”

  “You’re taking me to the flight deck?” Jas asked.

  “Of course, where did you think we were going?”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Here we are,” the pilot said. She put the flat of her hand to a panel, and a door slid open.

  Jas could see another good reason for not inviting passengers to that part of the ship: the place was tiny. Two seats took up nearly all the available floor space. In front of and above the seats were interface screens, switches, and buttons. That was it. That was all there was room for. Jas wasn’t even sure how the pilot got into her seat.

  She still didn’t know why she was there.

  “Can you squeeze in okay?” the pilot asked her as she made a deft maneuver that somehow landed her in her seat. Jas’ movements were far less graceful as she clambered and twisted her way into a sitting position, almost elbowing the pilot in the head. Apparently, she was about to get a lesson in flying a starship, though she had no idea why.

  The pilot reached forward, but stopped midway to a screen and turned to Jas. “You do know why I’ve brought you here, don’t you?”

  “Umm...not exactly.”

  The pilot laughed. “Sorry for not explaining. I thought it was obvious. You’d like to see Mars, right? It’s okay if you’d rather not.”

  “No, I’d love to,” Jas replied, realizing the truth of the words as they left her mouth. She did want to see her home planet, desperately. “But I thought there were no windows on starships?”

  “There aren’t, but pilots can get a visual if we need one.” She held a finger over the largest interface, directly in front of both seats. “Ready?”

  Jas gripped her arm rests. She nodded.

  The pilot swiped the screen, and an image of a red planet appeared. The Alexandria IV was in orbit. The curved, deep red Martian surface spread from horizon to horizon below them. The pilot explained how they’d arrived from their starjump some distance away, then navigated into orbit to await the cargo shuttle’s arrival, but Jas only barely took in her words. The image of Mars was sinking into her mind.

  “Where’s Valles Marineris? Can we see it from here?” she blurted.

  “Is that where you grew up? It’s on the other side of the planet at the moment. It should be coming around in half an hour or so, if you want to wait.”

  “Yes, yes, I do.” Jas rested her elbows just below the screen, taking care to avoid touching anything else. She scanned the rust-red image, and as she looked more closely, she began to notice patches of dark red and gray that had to be the settlements. They were set in squares, rectangles, and spreading starbursts.

  She remembered the blue-green, cloud-swirled surface of Earth she’d seen from the shuttle windows. Mars was dry and barren, and it didn’t resemble anything like her memory of it. She recalled the camaraderie and warmth of the children’s home among her friends. Though they were all orphaned or abandoned or removed from their parents due to abuse, they’d found a kind of family with each other. Dysfunctional and sometimes unpredictable to be sure, but a family nonetheless. The image she saw before her seemed hardly capable of supporting the pulsing life and energy of humanity.

  After a little while, the pilot pointed out that Valles Marineris was coming into view. To Jas’ eye, it looked the same as the rest of the surface. She could hardly believe those lines that ran out from the valley bottom and up the sides of the surrounding mountains were once the scene of the disaster that had claimed her parents’ lives, or that she had once been a tiny baby there. Had it been her mother or her father who had put her in the safety capsule? Why hadn’t they gotten in with her? She wished she could tell meet them and tell them she’d made it.

  A keen yearning grew in her heart. She wanted to travel to new planets. For years, she’d entertained the idea of a career in deep space as a possibility—something interesting and challenging to do with her life. But seeing that dusty expanse of alien soil slowly revolving beneath the ship had turned her idea into much more than that. Space travel wasn’t something she was choosing to do, it was something she had to do.

  Her heart sank. Space travel also meant a life without Sergei. He would never come with her.

  “What do you think of Mars?” asked the pilot.

  Jas sighed. “I think I’ve seen enough. Thanks.”

  She awkwardly climbed out of her seat and left to go to her cabin.

  The room was empty. Her classmate was probably in the cafeteria with the others. Jas lay down on the bottom bunk, curled on her side. She wondered what she was going to say to Sergei when she got back to campus.

  Chapter Eleven

  THE CLOUD OF HER DECISION hung over Jas throughout the Mars trip, and when she got back to McMurdo Sound, Sergei could tell immediately that something was wrong. She didn’t waste any time in telling him. It wasn’t fair to allow things to continue as they were when the relationship had no future.

  Jas didn’t cry easily, but the tears were soon pouring down her face as she explained what she’d realized when she’d seen Mars. She felt like she was being torn in two. She didn’t think she’d ever love someone again like she loved this man, but neither could she be happy Earth-bound.

  As Jas went on, Sergei looked down and swallowed. Her explanation drew to a close, and he looked up with a forced smile. “It’s okay. I’ll just learn to like space travel.”

  She put a hand to his face. “No, you won’t.”

  He shrugged. “People change. Maybe you won’t feel the same way in a couple of years. Maybe I’ll get over my fear. I could try hypnosis. Or drugs.”

  They laughed, sadly.

  “No drugs,” Jas said.

  “But we’ll stay together for now?”

  Jas nodded and wiped her eyes. “For now.”

  JAS’ STUDIES CONTINUED, and soon it was time for her weekly hand-to-hand combat session with Trankle. Jas had avoided confrontation with him as much as she could, especially since the bar incident. Whenever he criticized her for a mistake she hadn’t made, or when he passed over her when picking students for sparring, she gritted her teeth and let it go.

  The session had started out like the rest. She’d stayed at the back and avoided the man’s gaze. But it wasn’t enough. Maybe her depression over a future without Sergei was showing on her face, or maybe Trankle took her morose expression personally. During his explanation that the class was to be about techniques for defeating a larger opponent, he stopped twice to stare at her. The other students also looked at her curiously, as if to figure out what was bothering the instructor.

  “Don’t be intimidated by size,” Trankle said after his second pause. He addressed all the students but then fixed Jas with a glare. “It doesn’t matter how big the other guy or girl is, you’ve got advantages. Speed, agility, and—if you’ve learned anything in this class—technique. If you
have time, play the long game. Wear your opponent out. Some heavier types slack off on their cardio-vascular. Got no stamina. It goes without saying, but avoid grappling. Duck in, and hit the vulnerable spots, hard. Throat, diaphragm, solar plexus, groin, kidneys. If your opponent doesn’t go down on your first attack, back up and wait for the next opening.”

  He paused again and threw Jas another look.

  “Harrington,” he barked. “What’s your problem?”

  Jas was startled. “What?” She’d been following what he was saying. Not closely, but she’d been listening.

  “Think you know better, huh? Get over here.”

  The students shuffled aside as Jas made her way to the front. Tension rose in the room. All the students knew Trankle’s antipathy toward Jas. The atmosphere became tense.

  “There.” The instructor pointed at the mat. Jas went over and stood where he’d pointed, her muscles tensing. An uncomfortable prickling began running up and down her spine.

  “These techniques are useful for women fighting men,” Trankle went on. “Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, the guy’s gonna be bigger and stronger. But with the right moves, a woman can incapacitate a man. Harrington here’s the biggest woman among you. By far,” he added. A few of the students snickered, though many looked grave and embarrassed. “If any girl among you stands a chance of taking me out, it’s her. Wanna try it, Harrington? I’m guessing you do.”

  He joined her on the mat and got ready to fight, bending and spreading his arms and legs. He fixed his narrow eyes on her, as if to say, Now’s your chance, bitch.

  Jas’ arms hung limply at her sides. The whole situation was ridiculous. The teaching method Trankle had used up until then was to first demonstrate a technique, then ask the students to practice it. Now, he was expecting her to practice techniques that he hadn’t taught.