Pleiades dipped its nose, and Teresa Tikhana welcomed back the stars. Hello, Orion. Hello, Seven Sisters, she silently greeted her friends. Did you miss me?
As yet, few constellations graced the shuttle's forward windows, and those glittered wanly next to the dazzling Earth, with its white, pinwheel storms and brilliant vistas of brown and blue. Sinuous rivers and fractal, corrugated mountain ranges -- even the smokestack trails of freighters crossing sunburned seas -- all added up to an ever-changing panorama as Pleiades rotated out of launch orientation.
Of course it was beautiful -- only down there could humans live without utter dependence on temperamental machinery. Earth was home, the Oasis; that went without saying.
Still, Teresa found the planet's nearby glare irksome. Here in low orbit its dayside brilliance covered half the sky, drowning all but the brightest stars.
Vernier rockets throbbed, adjusting the ship's rotation. Valves and circuits closed with twitters and low chuckles, a music of smooth operation. Still, she scanned -- checking, always checking.
One plasma screen showed their ground track, a few hundred kilometers from Labrador, heading east by southeast. NASA press flacks loved ground path indicators, but the things were next to useless for serious navigation. Instead, Teresa watched the horizon's tapered scimitar move aside to show more stars.
And hello, Mama Bear, she thought. Good to see your tail pointing where I expected.
"There's ol' Polaris," Mark Randall drawled to her right. "Calculating P and Q fix now." Teresa's co-pilot compared two sets of figures. "Star tracker fix matches Global Positioning System to five digits, in all nine degrees of freedom. Satisfied, Terry?"
"Sarcasm suits you, Mark." She scanned the figures for herself. "Just don't get into the habit of calling me Terry. Ask Simon Bailie, sometime, why he came home from that peeper-run wearing a sling."
Mark smiled thoughtfully. "He claims it was 'cause he got fresh with you on the Carter Station elevator."
"Wishful thinking," she laughed. "Simon's got delusions of adequacy."
For good measure, Teresa compared satellite and star tracker data against the ship's inertial guidance system. Three independent means of verifying location, momentum, and orientation. Of course they all agreed. Her compulsive checking had become notorious, a sort of trademark among her peers. But even as a little girl she had felt this need -- one more reason to become a pilot, then astronaut -- to learn more ways to know exactly where she was.
"Boys can tell where north is," other children used to tell her with the assurance of passed-down wisdom. "What girls understand is people!"
To most sexist traditions, Teresa had been impervious. But that one seemed to promise explanations -- for instance for her persistent creepy feeling that all maps were somehow wrong. Then, in training, they surprised her with the news that her orientation sense was far above average. "Hyperkinesthetic acuity," the doctors diagnosed, which translated into measurable grace in everything she did.
Only that wasn't how it felt. If this was superiority, Teresa wondered how other people made it from bedroom to bath without getting lost! In dreams she still sometimes felt as if the world was on the verge of shifting capriciously, without warning. There had been times when those feelings made her wonder about her sanity.
But then everyone has quirks, even -- especially -- astronauts. Hers must be harmless, or else would the NASA psych people have ever let her fly left seat on an American spacecraft?
Thinking of childhood lessons, Teresa wished at least the other part of the old myth were true. If only being female automatically lent you insight into people. But if it were so, how could things ever have gone so sour in her marriage?
The event sequencer beeped. "Okay," she sighed. "We're on schedule, oriented for rendezvous burn. Prime the OMS."
"Aye aye, Mem Bwana." Mark Randall flicked switches. "Orbital maneuvering system primed. Pressures nominal. Burn in one hundred ninety seconds. I'll tell the passengers."
A year ago the drivers' union had won a concession. Non-members would henceforth ride below, on middeck. Since this trip carried no NASA mission specialists, only military intelligence officers, she and Mark were alone up here on Flight Deck, undistracted by nursemaid chores.
Still, there were minimal courtesies. Over the intercom, Mark's low drawl conveyed the blithe confidence of a stereotypical airline pilot.
"Gentlemen, by the fact that your eyeballs have stopped shiftin' in their sockets, you'll realize we've finished rotating. Now we're preparin' for rendezvous burn, which will occur in just under two and a half minutes...."
While Mark rambled, Teresa scanned overhead, checking that fuel cell number two wasn't about to act up again. Station rendezvous always made her nervous. All the more so when she was flying a Model One shuttle. The noises Pleiades made -- its creaking aluminum bones, the swish of coolant in old-style heat-transfer lines, the squidgy sound of hydraulic fluid swiveling pitted thrusters -- these were like the sighs of a one-time champion who still competed, but only because the powers that-be found that less expensive than replacing her.
Newer shuttles were simpler, designed for narrower purposes. Teresa figured Pleiades was perhaps the most complex machine ever made. And the way things were going, nothing like it would ever be built again.
A glitter over near Sagittarius caught her eye. Teresa identified it without having to check. The old International Mars Mission -- scavenged for components, and the remnants parked in high orbit when that last bold venture had been canceled, back when she was still in grade school. The new rule for harder times was simple -- space had to pay for itself with near-term rewards. No pie in the sky. No investment in maybes. Not when starvation remained an all too likely prospect for such a large portion of humanity.
"... checked our trajectory three different ways, folks, and Captain Tikhana has declared that all's well. Physics has not broken down..."
Overlaid across the constellations were multicolored graphics displaying the vessel's orbital parameters. Also in the forward window, Teresa saw her own reflection. A smudge had taken residence on her cheek, near where a curl of dark brown hair escaped her launch cap... probably a grease speck from adjusting a passenger's seat before launch. Rubbing just smeared it out, however, overaccentuating her strong cheekbones.
Great. Just the thing to make Jason think I'm losing sleep over him. Teresa didn't need any more aggravation, not when she was about to see her husband for the first time in two months.
In contrast, Mark Randall's reflection looked boyish, carefree. His pale face -- demarcated from the white of his spacesuit by the anodized helmet ring -- showed none of the radiation stigmata that scarred Jason's cheeks... the so-called "Rio tan," acquired working outside through the sleeting hell of the South Atlantic magnetic anomaly. That escapade, a year ago, had won Jason both a promotion and a month's hospitalization for anti-cancer treatments. It was also about when troubles in their marriage surfaced.
Teresa resented Mark's smooth complexion. It should have been a confirmed bachelor like him who volunteered to go out and save the peepers' beloved spy-eye, instead of Jason I'm-married-but-what-the-heck Stempell.
It also should have been some bachelor who signed up to work cheek by jowl with that blonde temptress June Morgan. But once again, guess who raised his hand?
Easy, girl. Don't get your blood up. The objective is reconciliation, not confrontation.
Mark was still regaling the Air Force men below. "... remind me to tell you how one time she an' her old man smuggled a homemade sextant on a mission. Now any other married couple might've chosen something more useful, such as..."
With her right hand, Teresa made a gesture whose meaning had changed little since the days of Crazy Horse. Spacer sign-talk for cut the crap.
"Um, but I guess we'll save that story for another day. Please remain strapped in as we make our last burn before station rendezvous." Randall switched off the intercom. "Sorry, boss. Got a little carried away there."
Teresa knew he was unrepentant. Anyway, that episode with the sextant wasn't much compared to the tall tales told about some astronauts. None of that mattered. What was important was that you lived, the ship lived, the mission got done, and you were asked to fly again.
"Burn in five seconds..." she said, counting down. "... three, two, one..."
A deep-throated growl filled the cabin as hypergolic motors ignited, adding to their forward velocity. Since they were at orbital apogee, this meant Pleiades' perigee would rise. Ironically, that in turn would slow them down, allowing their destination, the space station, to catch up from behind them.
The station's beacons showed on radar as a neat row of blips strung along a slender string, pointing Earthward. The lowermost dot was their target, Nearpoint, where they'd offload cargo and passengers.
Next came the cluster of pinpoints standing for the Central Complex, twenty kilometers farther out, where scientific and development work took place in free-fall conditions. The final, topmost blip represented a cluster of facilities tethered even higher -- the Farpoint research lab where Jason worked. They had agreed to meet at the halfway lounge, if offloading went well at her end, and if his experiments let him get away.
They had a lot to talk about.
All motors shut off as a sequencer by her knee shone zero. The faint pressure on her backrest departed again. What replaced it wasn't "zero-g." After all, there was plenty of gravity, pervading space all around them. Teresa preferred the classic term, "free fall." An orbit, after all, is just a plummet that keeps missing....
Unfortunately, even benign falling isn't always fun. Teresa had never suffered spacesickness, but by now half the passengers were probably feeling queasy. Hell, even peepers were people.
"Commence yaw and roll maneuver," she said, as a formality. The computers were managing fine so far. Thrusters in the shuttle's nose and tail -- smaller than the OMS brutes -- gave pulsing kicks to set the horizon turning in a complex, two axis rotation. They fired again to stabilize on a new direction.
"That's my baby," Mark said softly to the ship. "You may be gettin' on in years, but you're still my favorite."
Many astronauts romanticized the last Columbia-Class shuttle. Before boarding they would pat the seven stars painted by the shuttle's entry hatch. And, while it went unspoken, some clearly thought beneficent ghosts rode Pleiades, protecting her every flight.
Maybe they were right. Pleiades had so far escaped the scrapyard fate of Discovery and Endeavor, or the embarrassing end that befell old Atlantis.
Privately though, Teresa thought it a pity the old crate hadn't been replaced long ago -- not by another prissy Model III job, either, but by something newer, better. Pleiades wasn't a true spaceship, after all. Only a bus. A local, at that.
And, despite all the so-called romance of her profession, Teresa knew she was little more than a bus driver.
Continue reading sample 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10, or purchase Earth.
The Real Culture War
