The Fated Sky Read online

  I staggered in and shut the door, leaning against it for a moment, before sinking to my knees and being wretchedly sick. I hate vomiting. It left me panting, and weak on the floor of the tiny room.

  Roy pounded on the door. “You done?”

  “Almost!” The thought of having to stand again and walk all the way back to my seat tied my limbs to the floor and—

  Gunfire.

  I’ll admit it, I shrieked. Outside the bathroom, all I could hear was the harsh blast of shotguns peppered with the bright percussion of assault rifles. And men shouting.

  Yes, I cowered. Yes. I was terrified. I’d been in World War II, and while I was never supposed to see combat, the fact is that some days … some days my ferry missions had me flying into besieged locations. I knew what was happening out there, and I would be an idiot not to be afraid when all I had between me and death were the walls and the plastic door of the restroom.

  I crouched down, wrapped my arms around my head, and tried to make myself as small a target as I could. That’s it. That is the sum total of my heroics—just trying not to get shot.

  The guns stopped.

  “Clear!” echoed from one male voice to another, until one stopped outside the restroom door. He tried the handle. “Dr. York? Sergeant Mitchell Ohnemus with the UN.”

  “Yes. Just a moment.” I wiped my eyes and used the wall to lever myself up to standing. I might cower on the floor, but I was not going to be rescued there. It took a couple of tries for me to get enough coordination to work the lock.

  Outside, the scent of cordite lay over vomit and urine. I hadn’t thought the rocket could smell worse, and yet it did. The young UN soldier had freckled white skin and lashes so pale that he must have been a natural blond under his helmet. “Ma’am. Are you all right?”

  “Thank you. Yes.” I held out a hand. “But I’ll need some help walking.”

  Roy writhed on the floor, bleeding from the upper chest. From between the seats, another arm stretched across the carpet as if in supplication. Someone groaned, thank God—not that he was in pain, but that he was alive.

  It shouldn’t have come to this. Strange as it might seem, I think if the president had come, they really would have just let me go. If he’d come. But that was never going to happen.

  * * *

  It took another four hours for them to clear me through medical and a debriefing. And then … Let me describe to you the wonders of a shower after three months of linen towels and dry shampoo. People who have never been in space do not understand what a luxury water is. I sat on a stool under the falling water in the shower attached to my room at the acclimation center. The droplets pelted my head, finding their way through my hair to trickle down my face, my neck. Liquid warmth wrapped around me, sliding with sensuous glory down the length of my limbs.

  I would have to go through another, longer debriefing, but for the moment, I could just sit in the shower. Leaning forward, I rested my elbows on my knees and let the water cascade against my back in a many-fingered massage. Outside the bathroom, an attendant waited to help me to the waterbed that would support my aching limbs tonight. Much as I wanted to stay under the shower forever, there would be more showers later. And baths. Oh … to submerge myself in the tub and let the warm water take the weight and support me.

  Meanwhile, I was being rude to the attendant. Sighing, I turned off the water and pushed the call button. The door opened as if she had been waiting with a hand on the knob and—

  Nathaniel stood in the door. He smiled, and it was like meeting the sun. “You needed some assistance, Madam Astronaut?”

  I stretched my seventy-pound arm out for him. “Someone might need to help me towel off.”

  “I can do that.” Already barefoot, Nathaniel walked into the shower room and took my hand, leaning down to kiss me. Sure, they’d let us talk on the phone after they’d pulled me out of the rocket, but until this moment he had still seemed like a hypothetical ideal.

  My husband’s hand was warm and familiar, from the permanent pencil callous at the first knuckle of his index finger, to the dry tickle of the blond hair on its back. His lips against mine were warm and a little chapped, but with such familiar contours that I melted against him. When you haven’t seen your beloved in three months, that first moment back together—the touch. The smell. Just the orbital influence of his presence made me feel as if I was no longer lost to sidereal motion.

  Oh, I was still too tired to stand on my own, but the world was right again. “I’ve missed you so much.”

  “This is the first time I’ve literally worried I would never see you again.” He leaned forward to grab the towel off the stand.

  “I was never in any real danger.” I grimaced with the weight of memories. “Aside from the reentry.”

  His jaw went slack with surprise. “Elma. You were held hostage by six armed men.”

  “Well … yes. But they weren’t going to shoot me.” Maybe I was delusional, but their anger had never really been directed at me. “They were a bunch of guys out hunting and they saw an opportunity to act and took it.”

  “So they were impulsive.”

  “Determined.” I squeezed my eyes shut, remembering Roy’s eyes above his mask when he spoke about his daughter. “They had families. They just wanted a better world for their kids.”

  I know the silence of my husband’s disagreement. He inhales as if he is going to speak, then stops breathing for a moment. Nathaniel let that held breath out, running the towel down my back. “Well, I can’t wait to get you home again.”

  If we were at home, I would have asked him what he disagreed with, but I was exhausted, so I let Nathaniel change the subject. “Tell me what’s new?”

  “I bought a new rug.” The towel followed the path down past my hip to my thigh. “Actually, Nicole Wargin picked it out, but I used my hard-earned cash.”

  “Is it possible to have soft-earned cash?”

  “Yes? If you lie down all the time?” The towels followed the contours of my body as he talked, like he was trying to reassure himself that I was real.

  “They won’t let me lie down long.” I’d have today to rest, then tomorrow my physical therapist would start whipping my vestibular system into shape to reacclimatize me to Earth’s gravity. Thank God, it didn’t take as long as it did my first couple of times. The process wasn’t pleasant, but they’d have me out in a week. “What color is it?”

  “What? Oh. The rug. It’s, um … reddish? With a pattern.” He chewed his lower lip for a moment. “It goes with the pillows on the couch.”

  I narrowed my eyes at him. “Hm … Well, Nicole has excellent taste. What prompted the purchase?”

  He folded the towel. “Last time, you had trouble with the smooth floors. I thought traction might help.”

  Such a sweet man, my husband. “I could wear shoes in the apartment.”

  “I know, but you like being barefoot.” Nathaniel hung up the towel, with a line of concern between his brows. “It’s a nice rug. Honest.”

  I laughed, which felt alarmingly good. I’d just survived two different potential deaths, to say nothing of living in space, and we were discussing rugs. “I believe you.” I took his hand and looked to the door. “Help me to bed?”

  Ever so carefully, Nathaniel eased me up. I stopped him with my arms around his neck and leaned in. His arms came around me, pressing gently at the aching spots on my spine. He felt so good. Just the warmth of him, pressed against the full length of my body.

  My eyes burned, and I had to close them to keep the longing inside. His hand traced the curve of my spine, down to my buttocks, and back around to my waist. He squeezed gently and stepped back, still supporting me. With a sigh, I let him help me into my hospital gown and then across the short distance to the waterbed.

  My feet burned where my calluses had dropped away, so it felt like I was the Little Mermaid walking on knives. Funny thing was that I had calluses on the tops of my feet, from anchor rungs, and my toe t
ips from pushing off in the skip hop. But my heels? Soft and delicate as a baby’s.

  I settled on the bed slowly and let him help me swing my legs up onto it. With a sigh that sounded like I was deflating, I leaned back into its support. God, I was tired. The waterbed helped, but nothing on Earth is comfortable after living in microgravity.

  Patting the area next to me, I slid over to make room for Nathaniel on the edge of my narrow waterbed. He settled next to me carefully, so that the bed didn’t slosh me around too much, and curled up against me. Nathaniel ran a path back and forth along my collar bone, raising heat down to my core.

  “Myrtle is talking about making dandelion wine.” It was just noise to fill in the space between us. Being gone so long … there are so many words and thoughts bottled up that it’s hard to know where to start, or what I hadn’t told him. “And after the raisin experiment, I’m pretty sure that everyone—”

  “Wait. Raisin experiment?”

  “Oh. Right. Sorry, I couldn’t tell you about that without Ground Control catching on. That giant store of raisins that got sent up? She rehydrated them, and managed to get a fermentation going.”

  “She made wine?” The waterbed quaked with his laughter. “On the moon?”

  “Alcohol is an important part of a viable community.”

  Nathaniel kissed my cheek. “I’m sure it is. How was it?”

  “Cough syrup and turpentine.”

  That got a whistle. “Wow. And you know moon wine would sell for thousands here on Earth.”

  “Well, Henri Lemonte distilled it and made a respectable brandy out of it.” I wrinkled my nose. “And by respectable, I mean that it mixed well with juice. And by well, I mean you could barely taste it.”

  “I’m surprised she didn’t try fermenting the apple juice.”

  “People wanted that. The raisin shipment was at the request of Olga Baumgartner, but she got pregnant and had to go back to Earth early.” I shrugged as best I could lying down.

  “Yeah … I heard about that.” He sighed. “Someone’s going to have to be the first to stay up there, if we’re going to have a self-sustaining colony.”

  “Who wants their kids to be test subjects? There was enough of a foofaraw when we started breeding rabbits on the moon.” The animal rights activists had been furious, but, to quote my grandma, there’s good eating on a rabbit. “The bunnies we’ve brought back down have been miserable. Who would want to doom their kid to never coming back to Earth?”

  “The way things are going, they might not want to.”

  I sighed, nestling deeper against him. That was exactly what Roy and his friends had been scared of, that there would be an exodus from Earth that wouldn’t include them. And they were right: someone would wind up getting left behind, either because of resources, or politics, or just sheer stubbornness.

  There didn’t seem to be a good answer.

  * * *

  Of all the things I miss while in space, you would not expect the Monday morning staff meeting to be one of them. I suppose it’s not strictly true that I miss the meeting, but it’s a chance to catch up with friends and colleagues. Also, coffee and donuts.

  A week after returning to Earth, I walked into the meeting feeling much steadier on my feet. The din of forty or so people chatting over the aforementioned coffee and donuts gave a lift to my step. The astronaut corps had gotten huge, so this was just one department: the pilot astronauts. We’re “elite,” which really just means that we do more training and—let’s focus on the important thing—get better donuts.

  Benkoski saw me first and hooted, “The Lady Astronaut has landed!”

  Elite does not equal dignified. My face must have gone as red as a signal flare. I was not the only woman in the room, and yet somehow that moniker had stuck. People crowded around me, grinning and clapping me on the back.

  Malouf handed me a steaming cup of coffee. “You. Were. Amazing. Space germs … Ha!”

  “Helen was amazing. Space germs were her idea.”

  “True.” He toasted me with his own cup of coffee. “But I already complimented her, and you’re the one who stayed on the rocket.”

  Clemons strode into the room, which freed me from being the center of attention, as everyone scurried to grab chairs. Leonard and Helen must be getting similar attention over in their Monday meeting with the rest of the Mars group. On the other hand, a lot of them had been on the rocket, so maybe they’d already talked it all through. I was just happy to get back to the business of space.

  Before I sat, I snagged a donut. I wound up sitting between Sabiha and Imogene. Whatever Clemons started saying never made it past my first bite of donut. Let me tell you … deep-fat frying is not a thing you can do in space. A donut is such a humble food until you really contemplate it. The glaze had begun to crystallize as the donut drew the moisture out of the sugar, leaving a sweet shell that separated as I bit into it, to reveal a delicate interior. Sugar and yeast and butter and God … God was in the donut.

  Imogene leaned over and murmured, “Does Nathaniel know you make that face outside the bedroom?”

  I snorted and then choked. The meeting ground to a halt as Clemons stared at me, while I cleared my throat. Face flaming, I took a sip of coffee and cleared it again. “Sorry. Gravity.”

  As if that were reasonable, Clemons nodded and carried on. Funny thing: The director of the IAC has never been in space. He has a bad heart valve and probably wouldn’t survive liftoff. Which really got back to the point that Roy and his friends were making, that space was only for a certain percentage of the population. Many people would, of necessity, get left behind. It would be like a self-selecting eugenics program which … honestly, the horror of that hadn’t occurred to me until now.

  But what choice did we have? I mean, yes, people were trying to ameliorate the runaway greenhouse effect, but by the time we knew if those efforts had failed, it would be too late to establish colonies. Sighing again, I put the donut down and pulled my binder forward, flipping through the handout to see what my assignment was.

  Clemons continued at the front, going through the agenda and talking to each group about their tasks. As I turned the pages, my brow started to furrow, and by the time I got to the last page, it seemed set to split my head. My name wasn’t on any of the pages.

  One of my responsibilities when I’m on Earth is to help train colonists for the moon. All the astronauts have to take turns doing this. Each “class” of colonists is assigned a pair of astronauts who accustom them to what they need to understand to survive on the moon. I’d been expecting to be assigned a new class, but—

  “York. Good job with the protesters. We’re giving you and the other astronauts who were on that flight an extra week off to deal with the press.” That was not the reward that he seemed to think it was. With a puff on his cigar, Clemons closed his agenda. “That’s it, everyone. Get to work. York—stay put for a moment.”

  Smiling, I nodded, but a groan pressed against my throat. I hated press junkets. Sabiha patted my shoulder in commiseration. “Tell him that you need to help me refresh on the moon bus sim.”

  “Thanks.” I pushed my chair back and stood to meet Clemons. “I don’t think he’ll let me off so easily.”

  “Worth a try. And it’s true, too.”

  I laughed, doubting that. Sabiha had more flight hours than I did, but I appreciated her effort to give me something less in the public eye to do. After gathering my binder, I walked up to the front table. “You wanted to see me, sir?”

  “Yes.” He puffed on one of his ubiquitous cigars, letting clouds of smoke surround his face like water in zero-g. “Malouf! Close the door on your way out.”

  Shit. That … that sounded like I was in trouble. 2, 3, 5, 7, 11 … I’m sure it was nothing.

  “York … You impressed a lot of people during the hostage situation.” Clemons lowered his cigar. “A lot of people. The public relations blokes are clamoring to get their hands on you for interviews. Are you up for
that? I don’t want to send you out if you still need time to acclimate.”

  “Thank you, sir.” There’s no astronaut or pilot who will admit to infirmity if they can help it. As much as I hated the press junket, I knew its value to the space program. “Whatever I can do, I’m happy to.”

  “Good … good…” He tapped the ash from his cigar into the glass ashtray on the table. “Here’s the thing. The space program has been facing some difficulties, and the men who took you hostage represent that. People who don’t understand the importance of the program are pressuring the government to pull our funding.”

  “I’m aware of some of the concerns.”

  He nodded. “So we need some good publicity. Someone that the people look up to. You…” He sighed. “You remember how you told me, years ago, that we needed women in the space program early to make it seem safe?”

  Where the heck was this going? Clemons looked as worried as I’d seen him in years. “Yes, sir.”

  “You were right. I was dead wrong.”

  Words blew away from my head like an airlock voiding into space. “Um. Thank you?”

  He snorted, a smile softening his broad face. “People like you. They trust you. So … for the sake of the space program, I want to ask you to be the face of the IAC, and, specifically, to join the First Mars Expedition.”

  FOUR

  HURRICANE CARLA DEVASTATES TEXAS

  GALVESTON, TX, Aug. 28, 1961—Hurricane Carla, with wind velocities reaching 173 miles an hour, ranks as one of the eight worst reported on the Texas coast since 1875. Men, women, and children fled before the storm in a mass evacuation, one of the greatest such exoduses since the Meteor struck in 1952.

  All this serves as a reminder that though man may reach for Mars, there are still natural forces on this Earth that he neither understands nor is able to prevent or control. Every second, a hurricane releases at least ten times as much energy as the Meteor released over Washington, D.C. Or, to put it another way, during its lifetime, a hurricane unleashes as much energy as 10 million atomic bombs. This awesome fact should serve to stimulate a certain sense of humility in the face of nature.