Spin the Sky

AN ORBITAL ODYSSEY

KATY STAUBER

NIGHT SHADE BOOKS

SAN FRANCISCO

Spin the Sky
© 2012 by Katy Stauber

This edition of
Spin the Sky
© 2012 by Night Shade Books

Cover art by Richard Anderson

Cover design by Claudia Noble

Interior layout and design by Amy Popovich

Edited by Ross E. Lockhart

All rights reserved

First Edition

ISBN: 978-1-59780-340-3

eISBN: 978-1-59780-341-0

Night Shade Books

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PROLOGUE:

TINKER SHIP CAPTAIN

Excerpt from Trevor Vaquero’s “Tales of my Father” Archive

I don’t remember my dad as anything more than a giant shadow with a rough beard, a ready smile, and a warm hug. He left before I turned two. My mom doesn’t like talking about him so I collect these stories, mostly recordings from travelers and war veterans. Everyone seems to have a story about my dad even if they never met him. They all have a theory about how he died and why he did what he did. This story I got from Nomie, the colony engineer for New Siberia, over a big plate of enchiladas when she came to visit my mom.

—Trevor Vaquero

S
o Captain turns to us and he says, “Do we die slow or just take a walk out the airlock? My money’s on the airlock.”

Seriously.

That’s what he says and he’s totally calm about it. He fixes us with that steely look and drinks his coffee. Because Captain is just that cool and that’s how life was on the tinker ships after the Spacer War, right?

In the history archives, they optimistically call them merchant ships and say we carried trade goods between the orbital colonies above Earth. But it’s a tiny bucket of bolts held together by duct tape and prayer, so everybody calls them tinker ships. We were a bit like tinkers, sailing around swapping this and that for this and that, but really the name was a rip-off Tinker Toys.

You know those old wooden toys? The ones that were so popular with kids growing up in orbital colonies? I guess because they were one of the few default toys, the ones all the manuvats had plans for.

This time I’m thinking about was almost two years after the Spacer War. Our ship was cobbled together from war wrecks and crewed mostly by soldiers too broke to go home. Most didn’t have homes to go to anymore.

Damn dirt-loving Earthers. The Spacer War was just so devastating. Not that the Earthers got out of it looking so pretty. It was a long time before they recovered too. But we got our independence so now we can enjoy all the poverty and anarchy that entails.

So we’re all freaking out, of course, but trying to play it cool because the Captain just doesn’t do freak-outs and we were all desperate to not disappoint the guy. Especially me, since we’re in these dire straights because I totally jacked up the day before. Sleeping at the console when pirates attacked, if you can believe it.

Me! The best, brightest and, if I do say so myself, cutest pilot this side of the stars. Nomie the Tinker Treasure, they called me. Sometimes. When I saved them from certain death and got them into port two days early on half a working thruster. When we were sucking on carbon dioxide and praying for a miracle, they called me all sorts of names not fit to repeat.

Of course that was years ago. Nowadays I’m just slightly less cute and instead of piloting tinkers, I spend my days running the logistics of this orbital and raising my little ankle-biters. Sure never would have guessed things would turn out this way.

So anyway, pirates attack. Life was like that back then. Only two years after the Spacer War, there were plenty of not-so-funny ways to die. Don’t get any ideas, kid. There is nothing romantic about these pirate guys. They were just a little more hungry and desperate than us and more willing to be jerks about it.

They blindsided us in a ship only slightly faster and less shoddy than our own. They’d never have gotten close to us except the portside sensors only worked some of the time and not at all that day. Also, I was taking a nap.

We escaped, mostly intact, but limping and slow. The ship was losing pressure and it was a long way to the main shipping lanes. Decompression is a nasty way to go.

So the Captain gives us a second to gulp like goldfish and then he says, “Or maybe you bright boys could come up with some other options?”

I forgave him for the two or three hundred times he called me a boy. It was his way of saying that even though I was the hottest girl pilot in the system, he wasn’t gonna try gnawing on my bra strap any time soon. You appreciate that, after a while.

How to get out of this mess? It’s not like we could call anybody for help. The Spacer Army was in shambles and a police force was just a dream to argue about over dinner, if you had any. These things hadn’t been thought about in the heady days of revolution. Earth just hung in our faces like a big ball of suck, ignoring our last gasp for life.

Finally Mike pipes up, his voice cracking a little, “There’s a Russian tether close enough.”

Mike was our lone Earther but we didn’t hold it against him. He said he’d been a Spacer soldier, but no one believed the kid. He looked about twelve years old and even the Spacer Army had standards.

The Captain winces, but the rest of us openly groan. Me, I flick on my comm and start plowing through the data like a salmon heading up river, looking for any solution that didn’t involve us flinging ourselves across the sky with a Russian tether.

“The idea is to find a way to live, not a more interesting way to die,” the tall Asian woman pointed out.

No one could pronounce her name and she never talked about her past. If we had to call her anything, we called her “Asia.” Her specialty was electronics and information. Over rounds of beer, we speculated that she’d been a spy in at least one of the Worlder Wars, but we never could agree which side. I could never keep track of who was fighting who in all those wars the Earthers fought amongst themselves before they started in on killing us.

Mike flushes.

“Tethers can work,” he insists. “They just don’t like to. I’ve used ’em before. If you got a better idea, I’d love to hear it. Only no one seems interested in our distress beacon.”

“Please? What is Russian tether?” asks Alex.

Alex had a thick Spanish accent but moved like a Spacer. I wondered where he came from, but the past just wasn’t something you ask about on a tinker ship. Sure, if you were drunk and a guy started talking, that’s one thing. But to just ask? Never.

Oh man, did I have a thing for Alex. Spanish accents are like catnip for this girl’s ears. He was very easy on the eyes too. Think dark wavy locks and full sensual lips. I loved to watch him talk just as much as I loved listening to that accent.

So Captain clears his throat and starts lecturing. “A Russian tether is like a slingshot for ships. One end is attached to a weighted motor with solar panels to charge it. The other end is attached to us. It spins us around like a dead cat before pitching us. It’s cheap energy, but if you don’t let go at the right moment, it will pitch you into Earth or out into void space so far you can’t get back. There’s a bunch of them out here. They never break, but…”

Nobody says a word. Finally Captain sighs and says, “We can last maybe another twenty hours without docking for repairs. The repairs are easy, but we need new air. No one’s answered our signal for three days. Tether’s not a good choice, but it’s our best one.”

Captain pauses, rubbing his thumb thoughtfully. No one offers any criticism so he slaps his palm against a table and says resolutely, “We do it.”

He doesn’t wait for agreement. He just flips on his comm while we throw ourselves into action. I start the docking procedures for this little suicide run, while praying to whatever gods might listen to a bunch of tinkers.

The comms were your basic ear-bud computers with retinal projector screens that operated using your finger movements. The whole thing looked like a pair of glasses with matching earplugs and bracelets. These days everybody’s got to have those cochlear implants jacked right their skulls, but I miss my old comm. It was nice to be able to unplug once in a while.

We only had three working comms on the tinker because even black market ships from Earth came practically never. So the others only get a turn when Captain, Asia and I aren’t busy keeping us all alive.

“I always did like roller coasters,” mutters Mike with a crazed gleam in his gray eyes. He straps in, rubbing the stubble on his shaved head.

We find the tether and lock in without incident. It takes a long time for the torque to spin up. We get a kick out of the brief feeling of gravity, even if it had us standing on the walls. We were cooped up for close to two weeks without grav on that run.

Ships all travel slow in the orbitals. Everything is a lot farther away than you would think. Especially after the War, fuel for speed was too expensive for Spacers. Even on Earth, everyone moved slower than they had in the past. We gave them as good as we got in the War.

Asia and me, we check and recheck the flight figures frantically. As if our lives depend on it. Because they do.

Tinkers tend to know a bit about almost everything. Knowing a million ways to jury-rig every system in the ship with a pair of boots and an old ration box will greatly extend your life span. And if you dock at a colony that doesn’t need the goods you have to sell, knowing your way around a water filtration system or a solar generator is always good for a meal and a beer. We’d been doing pretty good before the attack, all things considered.

“Here we go!” announces Captain.

Of course, he sounds dead calm, but I catch the slight tremor in his hands. His face always remained blank, no matter how insane his curly red hair got or what kind of crap we were knee-deep in. We break loose from the tether and go hurtling through the void, powerless to stop.

I would vomit, but I’m too scared. Alex closes his eyes and begins a prayer under his breath in Spanish. Captain starts telling a very unlikely story about a distant wild night with a dazzling senorita. It is momentarily distracting and that’s a blessing.

The minute the spinning stops and we are all able to gulp down a few relieved breaths, Mike practically crawls into my lap, trying to see my retinal screen. I push him away.

“Well? Nomie, where are we? Where?” they all start yelling.

“We are not exactly where we would like to be,” I say, trying to break it to them easy.

Mike weeps.

Alex starts praying more loudly and more rapidly. I think I can make out a few very strong curses concerning God and his orifices mixed in with the litany, but my Spanish is not great.

I keep working the comm, trying to get us safe or at least safer, while Asia calms them down. She doesn’t stop working her comm though, because Asia can multitask her way to hell and back.

“We are very high up, very far out of the spheres,” she tells them. There’s some sort of long official name for the part of space around Earth that the orbitals colonized, but who can remember that? We always just call them the spheres.

Sounding surprised, Asia says, “There is an orbital up here we can reach. Perhaps there are others, but we are on a course outwards into void space. If we do not stop now, we may not be able to get back.”

There is a collective sigh of relief. Just shows you how dismal our lives are. An unknown orbital, floating like a life buoy before certain death, and we actually think our luck is looking up. Alex crosses himself quickly and stops his prayer, if that’s what it was. Asia begins hurriedly pulling her long glossy curtain of black hair back into a tight bun and that’s how I know we are in trouble.