No Place Like Home (2 page)

· · ·

“What are you going to do?” I said that night.

“I don't know.” Grady shifted next to me in the dark. “Why the hell did he have to look?”

I said nothing. I’d seen grief on Esme’s face today, but no guilt, and no regret. He was convinced absolutely of the righteousness of his act, and he was no less certain of the course of our future action. We would cease operations, even if we died of it.

Evangelists do it with Him watching.

“How many of the crew do you think are with him?” Grady said.

“How many of the rest of them support Esme, do you mean? God, Grady, I don’t know. None of them seem all that hot to become martyrs. Nobody except Esme talked much religion on the way out. Hiroshi’s a Buddhist, and they have tremendous respect for life. Boris is his partner, but that doesn’t mean anything. Aya, well, she’s a healer. Franz says ve dee zuperior live vorms are, our need bevore dee bugs come. Roberto and Kirsten have gone into their cabin and I don’t think they’re coming out until it’s over, whatever
it
is.”

“Thanks.”

“Always glad to be of service.”

He rolled over on top of me. “Works for me.”

Later, he repeated, “Works for me.”

I understood.

· · ·

The second ship put down next to us right on schedule. Every available cubic meter of space was crammed with supplies, including material for an expansion to the existing shelter that housed a small water reclamation plant and a shower facility. The followers of the Universal Church of Being could have chanted a celebration to that with my right good will.

We invited the incoming crew to dinner. The news from home hadn’t changed, although everyone had messages from family. Joanna had been accepted into the marine biology program at the University of Hawaii, David was driving his fourth-grade teacher insane, and Annie was talking in complete sentences.

In return, we caught up the second team on our progress to date—we'd already found deposits of iron ore and nickel. They asked about the two graves located nearby, and the next day in a small ceremony they added rocks to the cairns surmounting each one.

Their commiseration was sincere over Betty’s freak accident—“Good cooks are hard to come by,” their captain said with genuine sympathy—and they shook their heads over the faulty seal on Esme’s goonsuit. It had resulted in the oxygen boiling out of his lungs while he was drilling a series of core samples on that promising ridge we had spotted from orbit. He’d had the Tortoise out that day, and he was only fifty-two kilometers away, but one of the tires had flattened before he had been able to make it back to base.

Mechanics do it with their tools.

If you enjoyed “No Place Like Home,” we think you’ll like
Second Star
. It’s a novel in the popular Star Svensdotter series by Dana Stabenow, and it’s now available as an e-book at
stabenow.com
.

MY FULL NAME IS
Esther Natasha Svensdotter but if you want to live you’ll call me Star. Star is what Esther means, it was the first word I ever said, and when I’m feeling romantic I like to say that among the stars is where I live.

It was the first day of the new year and ten minutes out of LEO Base the gee forces on the
Ted Taylor
Express were discouraging to both my stomach and my disposition. I moaned a little. No one in the cockpit paid me any attention. I moaned a little more. Crip, the lean, graying captain of this happy ship, turned from his console to give me an unfeeling grin. “Happy New Year, Star.”

I opened my eyes with an effort and gave him what I hoped was a damning glare. “Yeah, right, you asshole. Welcome to the twenty-first century.”

“Hang in there. It’s time to give us another boot.” I swore at him feebly. He gave a fiendish laugh in reply. His right hand gripped the lever rising up between his seat and the copilot’s. “Ready to boost?”

“Ready, Captain,” she replied crisply.

“Okay, kick it!”

I held on to my liver and followed the propulsion process in my mind. When Crip hit the glory button one of the bombs–pardon me, Colony Control prefers that we refer to them as ECFCPCs, or Express Class Freight Carrier Propellant Charges—anyway, at boost one of the bombs in the fuel bay was expelled by compressed nitrogen and ignited about a hundred feet below our ship’s pressure plate. The controlled-velocity distribution of hydrogen pushed against the plate and we bounced farther away from Terra. I moaned again. The piston shock absorbers between the payload and the fuel bay took most of the blow, but it was still a bouncy ride.

I was riding the bare duralumin jumpseat against the cockpit aft bulkhead. Crip and his copilot and navigator were between me and the only port on the
Taylor
. There wasn’t much of a view, black and more black. I didn’t care. After two interminable weeks of kissing babies on Terra I didn’t care what kind of infernal machine got me there, all I wanted was home. I closed my eyes and tried to forget how cold, how hard, and how small the jumpseat was.

My hair woke me up. I had forgotten to bind it that morning like I always do first time up and out after a spell downstairs. In the zerogee it was floating around my face in a tangled mass, and the ends were getting in my ears and up my nose and in my eyes. I sneezed, like I always did, and, silently cursing my own vanity in refusing to get it cut, fumbled in my pockets for a hair ribbon or a piece of string. When I finally had the blond mess braided back and the end secured with a length of the gray tape found on any self-respecting spaceship’s flight deck, the view through the port had improved immeasurably. I gave a sigh of pure joy and I could the hear the smile in Crip’s voice when he spoke without looking around. “Not bad, huh, Star?”

Not bad? Home had never looked so good. At first it was only a smooth, slender twinkle in the far distance, to the right of Luna and dimmed by her radiance. As we approached it filled the port, no longer a smooth column but a hexagonal cylinder. Against the blackness of space the rotating sides reflected the sun’s light in sharp, glittering bursts. The solar mirrors flared out from one end like the skirts of a girl at her first dance. Stabilizers, antennae dishes, handgrips, tool racks, and airlocks protruded from a surface already lumpy with an uneven layer of porous moon rock—LIMSH, courtesy of Colony Control, or Lunar Insulating Material for Space Habitats. Acronyms are Colony Control’s life.

Home again, home again, jiggety jig. Home was Ellfive, and Ellfive was the first of two planned space colonies circling Lagrange Point Five, maintaining a stable orbit between the conflicting gravitational pulls of Terra, Luna, and Sol, traveling sixty degrees ahead of Luna as the third point of an equilateral triangle of which the other two points are Terra and Luna. I had to swallow hard. The sheer immensity of the mere idea of Ellfive, when I had time to think about it, made me feel the size of a gnat and about as significant. But home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in, gnats and all. I shifted in my seat, straining at the harness with my feet braced as if I could help push the ship in quicker.

Crip warped in closer to the North Cap, its six-and-a-half-kilometer diameter dwarfing the
Taylor
, and the transmitter erupted with the traffic-alert whistle that sounded like the combined efforts of a stall signal on a Super Cub, air squeaking out of a balloon, fingernails scraping a blackboard, and teeth biting down on aluminum foil. Cockpit crews hate the whistle and curse me en masse for requiring its installation on every ship doing business with Ellfive, but it is a clamor impossible to ignore and so admirably serves its purpose. “Ahoy the
Taylor
, ahoy the
Taylor
, this is Ellfive Traffic Control.”

“Go ahead, Control,” Ariadne responded from the navigator’s console.

“Be advised, there is a hold on your docking,
Taylor
, I repeat, a hold on your docking. Proceed immediately to Transient Parking Area Number Three. You are cleared for approach and orbit.”

Ariadne swore roundly and fluently, the harsh words sounding worse in her musical contralto, and looked around at Crip. “Ellfive Control, this is Captain Young, commanding the
Taylor
. What’s the problem, Bolly?” he said. Over his shoulder I watched him bring up the approach vectors for the Warehouse Ring on his screen and punch in the coordinates. The maneuvering thrusters kicked in, sounding like incoming mortar fire outside the hull. The old girl shuddered once in protest and began changing direction slowly. “I say again, Bolly,” Crip repeated, “what’s the problem? Are we early?”

“No, you’re not early, Crip, the
Thunderbird
is late and the hangarlock won’t be free for at least another hour.”

I could see Crip’s shoulders stiffen, but his voice remained calm. “Ellfive Control, are you aware that we have the boss on board?”

The traffic controller’s voice was no less grim than his own. “We know, Crip. The
Thunderbird
’s captain insists she is unable to pull back from the lock for another hour.”

In moments we were stationary, floating free in Park Three, still sixteen klicks from home. Crip hushed his mike and swiveled his seat to speak to me. His voice was polite and furious. “This is the third time in a month the Patrol has put me behind schedule, Star. Just what the hell is going on?”

“It’s not your fault, Crip,” I said, fighting back my own annoyance. Annoyance does not sit comfortably on top of a hangover in zero gravity. “It doesn’t have anything to do with you.”

He looked at me, frowning, but his crew was there so he said merely, “We could rustle up a solarscooter for you.”

I shook my head and immediately regretted it. “I’ll ride in with you.” I sat back in that Iron Maiden of a jumpseat and tried to get comfortable.

Unfortunately, the
Taylor
had not been built with my comfort in mind. The entire vehicle was 125 meters long and looked like the bishop piece from a chess game, with an aft pusher plate that was 57 meters across. We rode up front, with the freight modules between us and the fuel storage, and the freight modules and fuel storage and the pressure plate between us and ignition. It never felt like nearly enough of a safety margin. After Hiroshima and Pyongyang there wasn’t enough room in the universe to put between me and fission. Once they work the kinks out of the Martin-Bond deuterium-helium fusion nuclear pulse rocket, or figure out a way to make solar propulsion push a spaceship along at speeds comparable to that of an Express, I’m jumping the fission ship.

Still, we were lucky to have the Express ships, and no one knew it better than I. When the War of the Worlds nonsense broke out in 1992 after Odysseus II intercepted the message from Betelgeuse, the absolute necessity of fielding some kind of force into space to act as a Terran reception committee became obvious to those of the most limited intelligence, and even to a few congressmen. Some bright soul remembered a plan by General Atomic in the late 1950s to build a ship powered by nuclear bombs that would put payloads larger by a factor of two or even three on Luna than would a chemical rocket of the same mass at launch. Congressional leaders in their infinite wisdom fell on Project Orion with loud hosannas and began to hurl funding at it in that odd but seemingly innate American conviction that enough money can cure anything. In the resulting rush to construction plans for padding crew seats were inexplicably lost.

Two interminable hours and seventeen minutes later the
Taylor
docked, its nose nuzzling comfortably into the North Cap hangarlock. The little man inside my head had set aside his piledriver in favor of a meat tenderizer but was still thumping away with unflagging energy. I couldn’t unstrap fast enough. “Very nice trip, Crip, as always,” I said, turning to pull myself through the hatch.

“Liar,” he said, his usual good humor restored with our safe arrival. “You didn’t think so.”

“My stomach didn’t think so,” I protested. “Stop by for dinner next trip.” I could see a polite refusal forming and added, “I’ll get Charlie to whip up something.”

He brightened perceptibly. “In that case I accept.”

I slapped a bicep with one hand and jerked my forearm in his direction. He saluted smartly in return. I waved good-bye and pulled myself down into the payload bay, an immense cavern stripped to the essential shell, stark and bare and filled with freight strapped into nets, most of it mining equipment bound for the Trojans on the next SeaLandSpace freight tender. I didn’t mind the lack of passenger amenities; the
Taylor
was an Express-class cargo ship, not some posh TAVliner where flight attendants served saki nonstop from Tanegashima Spaceport to Tranquility Base, discounts available for frequent flyers. And the truth was that if necessary I would have ridden a mass capsule home today.

The polysteel diaphragm of the North Cap’s transitional hatch enclosed the
Taylor
’s bow, the atmosphere pressured up, and the cargo door dropped down slowly to become a ramp. I could see the arm of a Clark hoist floating outside, surrounded by a dozen waiting longshoremen in heavily padded overalls. I pulled myself down via the handholds and the three other passengers followed me out. One of them was a big dark man in a scruffy gray flightsuit too short for his arms and legs and too tight in the butt. He had yet to learn that you don’t use your legs in zerogee and he kept getting tangled up with himself and anything else that got in his way. It’s always a surprise to me how much one human being can fill up an entire cargo bay, if the cargo bay is on Ellfive and the human being is an Ellfive cheechako. He looked like he was headed for Neptune when one of the longshoremen finally took pity on him and took him in tow with a boathook.

“Where the hell do they get these guys?” Jerry Green grumbled behind me. “I’ll bet that jerk’s never had on a p-suit in his life.” He sighed a deep, sad sigh. “It’s not like the old days, Star.”