Edge of Infinity (20 page)

One older woman, arms crossed, head back, eyes closed. She’s been through this before and she doesn’t want to seem too eager.

“Any wash-outs?” I ask Connie as quietly as I can.

“Already gone,” she says.

I grab one of the tablets behind the counter, then raise my eyebrows, asking without asking if someone has washed out because of the chemical components of his sweat or because of a genetic propensity to nervous disorders.

“Nothing that’s not on the reports,” Connie says.

The reports. We can’t wash candidates out if they have a doctor’s release or if they self-report the hypertension, the family history of mental illness, the time that they went off the deep end and threatened passengers with a gun. Okay, that would get them disqualified no matter what, but I’m always thinking these people are going to do something screwy like that.

“All right,” I say tiredly, already dreading the day. “Let’s get to it.”

I
TAKE THE
big guy first. I take him to our smallest cockpit, and he can’t fit into the chair. He asks for another ship, which I give him. His arms brush against the controls. He asks for his own ship, which I deny. We don’t give private ship licenses here. Those cost more money than anyone can contemplate and have a gold standard all their own. You think my job is high-burnout, you should see the folks who do the private license tests. The ships don’t work right half the time, the ships’ safety regs are usually out-of-date, and the controls are often screwy, sometimes not even set up for a co-pilot, let alone a flight instructor.

My job is crazy; theirs is insane.

I send Buff Guy to them, and pray he can’t afford the fees.

The other two guys are by-the-book. Standard mistakes – forgetting the visual check before entering the ship, not reviewing the safety equipment before starting – the stuff that everyone does, and no one gets penalised for, no matter how much I bitch.

As for the older guy, I was right: alcohol. Three years clean and sober. Hands don’t shake. Doesn’t use anything to keep the alcohol at bay. Has had genetic modification to get rid of the alcoholic tendencies, several schools to get rid of the behaviour, but wouldn’t do anything that touches the brain because he wants to get back piloting.

He was the only one so far whose visible nerves have no effect on his actual flying skills. I’d fly with him any day, and I tell him that.

He looks grateful. I think he actually is grateful, not something I get very often.

Then, the youngish woman.

She wears too much perfume. It’s some kind of floral fragrance, which would get her kicked out of her commercial flight test. That stuff sometimes interacts with the controls, particularly if it’s on a hand crème or something.

But I don’t tell her, not even when she gives me a pretty little smile as she introduces herself. Not many people smile when they see me, and usually the pretty ones never do.

She’s LaDonna something. It’s not my job to remember the names. They’re on the forms and in the registry. Connie has to keep track and make sure the right information gets to the right place.

I just have to hold the name in my head until the test is over. People respond to having their first name shouted authoritatively better than almost any other command. “LaDonna!” for example works twenty times faster than “Stop!”

She’s getting her student license so she can pilot cargo ships. I’d’ve figured her for a speed racer, but she’s not that kinda girl, apparently. She wants to work her way up in commercial flights, but not passengers, never passengers.

She’s one of those hyper types that never shuts up when she’s nervous, which means that for the next hour I will get to hear about her boyfriend, her parents, her pets, and maybe even her sex life. Not that I want to. Most people aren’t as interesting as they think they are.

I’m careful not to ask questions. Questions only make things worse. Questions give the talkers permission to continue. Questions make them believe I actually care.

Cargo plus student license plus first-time tester equals our oldest, biggest ship. It’s bulky to get out of the dock, which makes my job really easy. Because if she fails that, then the test is over and I can move to the last victim – um, candidate – of the day.

The ship we use is eighteen years old, and shaped like a gigantic rectangular box. It’s grey and dingy. It was donated by one of the cargo companies and modified not just for me to take over quickly, but with a special engine that only I can access that’ll get us out of an emergency faster than almost anything else can. These big ships aren’t made to go that fast, but the kind of emergency that killed my predecessor requires fast-thinking and fast-manoeuvring to avoid, and this ship has the manoeuvring power.

I’m supposed to supply the brain power.

The ship looks awful. Purposely. Covered with dings and dents. Ancient portholes with sealed metal covers. Flaps no longer in use because these things are no longer approved for Earth landings. All kinds of extras that don’t function any more.

We want to scare these candidates before they get on board. In fact, we want to discourage everyone from ever taking the test. Only the courageous or the truly prepared need apply.

This ship has its own dock, because it’s so hard to manoeuvre. The tester bay juts out of the station as far as it can be from everything else, and this dock just out of the tester bay. We have to walk through a bubbled passageway that takes us to the ship. The dock itself is tiny (comparatively speaking) and I’m always worried that the environmental controls won’t hold out here.

I brace myself for stupidity from the moment we arrive. But, remarkably, she knows what to do. She walks around the ship, inspecting itquietly. The ‘quietly’ part surprises me. I thought she’d talk through it all, and she doesn’t. She gets very serious, her thin face suddenly not so youngish and not so attractive.

I slip my hand into my pocket and pull out my info screen. One tap and I see the form Connie’s filled out for this one. Yep, at least ten years older than I thought, with a weird history. Perpetual student, then school teacher, then resigned to go to law school, which she quit after a few months.

I don’t like this history of quitting. It shows a character defect that isn’t readily apparent. If I’d looked before coming out here, I would’ve had Connie take her off the flight list for some damn reason.

Now I’ll have to think of one.

LaDonna takes out a little analysis device, synched to mine (because no one brings any device in here without it being certified, synched, and government-approved), and she examines some of the dings and dirt patches. Good girl. She realises that those things could threaten hull integrity, and a hull without integrity is worse than a lawyer with ethics.

Yeah, yeah, old joke. I have to amuse myself somehow.

Still, I’m impressed by her, and not sure I want to be. Scrub that: I
don’t
want to be. I want to disqualify her because of her dilettante nature.

“This thing barely passes safety regs,” she says to me as she comes around. “I’m amazed it flies.”

She wouldn’t be if she knew about its guts, which she doesn’t. None of the students know what’s really inside these ships. That way, no nutball student can disable anything before we get on board.

We have the occasional really awful accident, like the one that happened to my predecessor, but we also have a mountain of precautions to prevent those accidents from happening every day. And believe me, they could. If I’d allowed Buff Guy into this ship, his forearms alone could’ve caused an accident just by brushing one of the ancient controls. You think I’m kidding: I’m not.

I make her lead me inside. This is just sadistic of me; it’s hard to get into any ship, particularly a ship you’re not familiar with.

But she does a credible job. She only fumbles twice at the door, manages to get through the airlock without mishap, and finds her way to the cockpit easily.

That bugs me. It really does. The specs of the tester ships are supposed to be impossible to find. Plus she shouldn’t have known which ship she was going to be in. We rotate them, for one thing. For another, we generally don’t discuss which ships go with what test – although I suppose if you interview enough test-takers, you could figure that out.

I sigh and follow the perfume trail into the cockpit. It’s not as large as it should be, given the size of the ship. Yet another sign of age. Older ships were designed for only a few people in the cockpit, figuring that only a handful of people even knew what the controls were for, so those people should be the only ones allowed inside.

Newer models allow anyone to sit in the cockpit and watch. Of course, newer models are tied to the operators’ (and their pilots’) DNA. Harder to steal.

Impossible to use in this kind of situation.

She sits at the controls, hands on her lap, just like some instructor probably told her to do. It’s good advice, considering how much could go wrong with the brush of a fingertip.

I sit beside her and strap in. Then I use the voice command to release the ship to her. Kinda. I retain shadow control that no student knows about.

“Get us out of here,” I say.

She doesn’t lift her hands. “Where are we going?”

Correct question, if this were some other kind of flight besides a test flight. But right now, I want her to take everything one step at a time. I’ve learned from painful experience that if I tell her too much, she’ll jump ahead and screw up.

I’m not protecting her; I’m protecting me. I don’t want to end up a bloated corpse with burst eyeballs. I want to return to my bed tonight and come in fifteen minutes late tomorrow, while I’m working hard to save up for my Please-God-Make-It-Soon retirement.

“I’ll tell you when we get out of here,” I say.

She looks at me, and for a moment, I think she’s going to refuse until I give her our destination. Then she puts her hand on the docking controls. She taps them off as if she’s done it her entire life, and the ship rises slightly. She gives me a sideways glance, as if she expects me to tell her now, but I wait silently.

I suppose she thinks I should be impressed. I’m not impressed. I’m confused. The docking commands on this ship are complicated. They should have taken her a few minutes of study before she figured out how to access them, and I know she didn’t have time before I arrived in the cockpit.

I want to ask her if she took this test before, with this very ship, but I don’t. Instead, I not-so-surreptitiously remove my little info screen, turn the screen away from her, and tap it like I’m recording her movements. Instead, I’ve sent a request to Connie:

How many times has this LaDonna woman taken this test?

LaDonna leans forward and clicks on the automated request for departure. We leave departure and entry requests automated so that Control doesn’t have to ask for voice rec from every single student. Or so that I don’t have to verify the voice/entry. Because in emergency situations, every second counts, and a verification might be the difference between saving our lives and losing them.

The bay doors seal, and the environmental controls shut off.

The info screen vibrates in my hand, giving me Connie’s response.

This is the first time she has taken the test.

The top of the dock opens. We use top exits because they’re harder to manoeuvre than in-front-of-the-ship exits. Not that we can actually see this in real time. It’s all visible on the monitors. This tiny cockpit has no exterior windows.

Really?
I send back.
Because she knows this ship too well for it to be the first time. Check her records. See if someone snuck her in here for unauthorised practice
.

I put the info screen face down on my knees. LaDonna’s hands hover over the controls as the ship slowly rises. This is a key moment, because if she messes with it too much, the ship will bang into things and she’ll be done.

Most first-timers bang into the wall at least once. They get one bang. Two puts them on probation. Three requires a second test. The thing is, you hit once, you’ll shove over to the other side and it’ll take some amazing skill to prevent the second bang. If there’s a second bang, it’ll take a miracle to avoid the third. That’s how this ship gets dinged up and that’s why we don’t fix the dings. More will happen the following day anyway.

LaDonna doesn’t hit anything. I can count on my left thumb the number of times that’s happened with a first-timer.

No record of unauthorised practice
, Connie sends,
like that’s going to show us anything. I mean, unauthorised generally does mean off the books.

Her instructor get any demerits for cheating on behalf of the students?
I send.

Not that I can find
, she sends so fast that I know she was anticipating the question.
But as I said above...

I look away. I have to pay attention to LaDonna anyway. She’s got this gigantic ship hovering over the dock exit. The top of the dock closes. For the first time, she seems nervous. This isn’t part of the standard test.

Usually no one stops once they start moving. I really don’t care. I suspect this girl cheated somehow, so I’m going to have to give this test a little thought.

No part of the standard test seems to throw her. If she did cheat, then she knows everything I’m going to make her do. I tap a standard
save
instruction on my info screen without looking at it so that Connie makes our conversation part of the record.

Then I toss out the standard test. I can do that when I suspect the subject has taken the standard test too many times, or when I have reason to believe the standard test won’t provide the right information.

This, my friends, is why the system isn’t automated. There’s no beating the system when the system is subject to human whim.

“We’re going to Mars,” I say.

LaDonna glances at me, and unless I’m imagining things, that perfume smell has gotten really strong. She’s sweating. Soon I’ll actually smell the sweat, not the overlying protection some chemical has given her.