Under Strange Suns (11 page)

* * *

Doctor Roberts’ voice pulled him back to the present. “I was hoping to see you tomorrow for your physical, but perhaps we can get it over with now. We both appear to be supernumeraries at the moment.”

“My appointment book is open, Doctor.” He sniffed, wrinkled his nose at the acrid musk of his sweat. “If you don’t mind the smell, that is.”

“Please, I’m a doctor. Also, I’m pretty sure I smell just about like you. Now, walk across the street with me.”

The infirmary was in keeping with the rest of the ship: compact. It was well stocked given its space limitations. Aidan noted that the drug supply was securely locked.

“Up here, please, Mr. Carson,” Doctor Roberts said, indicating the examination bed. She was giving him an appraising once over. “I think we can dispense with any fitness tests. What were you, some sort of athlete? Policeman by day, cage fighter by night?” She placed a thermometer inside his eardrum, took a reading.

“No ma’am, nothing like that,” Aidan said with a chuckle. “Military, freshly discharged. You? Marathon runner? I’m detecting a trace of an accent. East African?”

“Yes. Eritrea. Very good,” she said. She shone a light into each of his eyes.

“What brings you all the way out here?”

“Prying are we, Mr. Carson?”

“It is your duty to examine the crew’s fitness, Doctor Roberts. It is my duty to examine the crew.” He flashed her what he hoped was an engaging smile.

“Cute will only get you so far, Mr. Carson. But it is far enough this time. Very well. I was a general practitioner in Eritrea for many years. But about two years ago when our new, duly elected leaders declared that it was inappropriate for women to be doctors–or any other sort of professional, or drive, or show their faces outside the confines of the home–I emigrated to Holland. Then parliament enacted the Parallel Judiciary Act. Now I was not a practicing Muslim, nor in a household headed by a practicing Muslim. So in theory, the law should have no bearing on my existence. But in practice, given the demography of the city I lived in and how I look, I was subject
de facto
to Sharia law. Meaning I could not practice medicine. Again. I did not belong. Again.”

“Did you think about moving to the States?” Aidan asked, then fell quiet as she stuck a tongue depressor in his mouth and flattened his tongue.

“I had a cousin in Detroit. I considered moving there. Then she was murdered by her brother, an ‘honor-killing.’ No, I don’t think I would have belonged there either. Instead, I decided to see if I belonged out here, among the stars.”

“Why this ship? Why not one of the big liners, a proper pair?” He winced as she took a blood sample. He didn’t like needles, which had made certain aspects of his military career unpleasant.

“Captain Vance explained what she was after. She is looking for her family. I want to help her.” Doctor Roberts took some notes on a datapad. “Now go on. I need to test the blood sample, but on first read: you’re disgustingly healthy. Go paw through the rest of the crew’s dirty laundry.”

Aidan left. He wedged himself into a shower cubicle and washed away the workout. It was a cramped and brief shower, but the water was hot.

Thorson was trotting down the corridor as Aidan emerged, toweling his hair. “Hard at work, I see,” the First Officer said. “Glad to see you’re earning your keep, Carson.”

“Someone needed to test the plumbing, Thorson,” Aidan said. “I’m off to take a crap next. I’d ask you to do it, but I doubt your sphincter could squeeze out a turd large enough to challenge the pipes.”

“Watch your tone, Carson. This may be a civilian ship, but there’s still a pecking order, and I’m the big pecker, got it?”

Aidan grinned. “Right you are.” Thorson’s bluster was empty. He wasn’t sure Thorson knew that, but it didn’t matter. Aidan took his orders from the Captain. Other than that, he was largely a free agent. He watched Thorson stalk away, no longer at a trot. “Big pecker,” he muttered under his breath, and chuckled.

* * *

“I believe this ship previously conducted assemblies in the theater,” Captain Vance said. “But given the–efficient–size of her current crew I think a certain informality is justified.” She was addressing the crew in the galley. All, that is, but Thorson who was listening in from the command center. “So let’s not consider it so much a briefing as a–family dinner.”

The entire ship’s complement occupied only two tables. Quentin Burge had put in an hour in the galley. Aidan judged his efforts surprisingly good given the constraints of time, space, and ingredients.

“Go ahead, eat,” Captain Vance said. She provided the example, digging into the main course–a polenta dish ladled into the largest compartment of her dinner tray. “Nice work, Burge. Did you leave cooking school off your CV?”

“No, Captain,” he said, reddening. “Addicted to cooking shows. Didn’t much care for school, not for, y’know, actual in-person, not on-line school.”

“Okay. Well done, anyway. So here’s the update. Park and Matamoros give the
Yuschenkov
a clean bill of health. Lunar traffic control provided us a departure window starting in about thirty minutes and lasting two hours. No ships expected within a thousand kilometers of our position or calculated to intersect our trajectory.

“Our initial destination is Upsilon Andromedae d. We’ll need to drop to subliminal about twenty-seven light-years out to make a course correction; there’s a pulsar too near our direct line, need to go around. We’ll lose our accumulated speed, and that’ll delay us some. So I estimate arrival in just under four months, about one hundred fourteen days.”

Four months! Aidan was glad he’d maxed out his datapad. He’d been on a sufficient number of lengthy deployments to appreciate the value of a well-stocked library of books and films.

“Everyone, enjoy your meal. You’ll have about an hour to digest. Then we’ll shut down hab module spin and engage the Y-Drive.”

“A toast,” said Sam McAvoy. “I wish we were raising flutes of champagne rather than juice glasses of iced-tea, but that’s no matter. To the maiden voyage of the
Yuschenkov
.”

An hour later, Aidan wished he’d had a bit longer to digest. The habitation module had wound down like a slowing top, the pull of simulated gravity weakening with the decreasing speed, until at last he was bobbing about in zero-gravity. He’d liked to have watched the departure through a porthole, but the habitation module was nearly devoid of windows; viewing the stars in constant rotation had been deemed too likely to lead to a perpetually nauseated crew. The command center possessed a single porthole to supplement the monitors, but it was usually shuttered. So he joined McAvoy and Roberts in the auditorium to watch the feeds piped in from the pilot’s station in the bridge. Vance, Thorson, and Matamoros were in the command center, Park and Foster in the hub. Burge was in his quarters.

Aidan and the other two spectators “sat” to enjoy the best sight lines to the auditorium’s large screen, hands curled about armrests to maintain their positions relative to the seat cushions. The screen was subdivided, displaying views from several exterior cameras. The shunt of power from the fusion reactors to the engine provided the first spectacle, a camera catching a brilliant aurora rippling past the engine cowlings. Another camera that displayed a section of the lunar regolith in the ship’s background allowed Aidan to note that the
Yuschenkov
was in motion, vectoring toward the coordinates plotted for commencement of the first leg of the faster than light journey.

The moon receded, the few lights winking on the surface diminishing to points, then disappearing.

The dancing plasma display of the engines flickered out.

“Here we go,” said McAvoy. “Wish I had some popcorn. And a scotch.”

If there was any visible display of energy emanating from the bulbous housing of the Y-Drive Aidan didn’t see it. One moment he had multiple views of stars, a couple including the moon, and one with a thumbnail slice of the Earth. Then–the inside of a blizzard? No, more a fog bank. All the screens displayed was an enshrouding gray, almost a mist, though without any hint of moisture. The ship appeared englobed in featureless, colorless nothing, with the exception of a single circular patch showing the images captured by forward mounted cameras. There was the sole break in homogeneous limbo, a spot of constantly shifting, kaleidoscopic red hues. He knew, of course, that cameras captured light, so all the exterior cameras were seeing was within the bubble of distorted space-time generated by the Y-Drive. Except for that forward view. No one had any idea what exactly the camera lenses were picking up. It was hypnotic, though.

“Quite a show, huh, Aidan?” said McAvoy.

“Do not get too caught up in the Y-Drive horizon,” Doctor Roberts said, her voice professionally admonishing. “There are known cases of spacers becoming obsessed with it, gradually becoming unresponsive to any other stimuli.”

“Hey, it’s just a pretty red dot, Doc,” Aidan said. “If that’s the whole show, I think I’m going to call it a night.”

T
HE CREW ENDURED A DAY IN
null gravity while Park and Foster completed another inspection tour. With the
Yuschenkov
given the green light, the habitation module spun up again and with it commenced shipboard routine. Aidan came to the grudging conclusion that Thorson was right–a security officer was superfluous. But so were Grace Roberts and Sam McAvoy. And when not offering to show off his cooking talents, so was Quentin Burge. And the
Yuschenkov
was purring along smoothly, gradually pushing to ever greater superluminal speeds, so the engineers’ continual inspection tour was also superfluous. And the electronics functioned without glitches, and the computer maintained the assigned course without deviation. So Matamoros, Vance, and Thorson were all superfluous. Everyone aboard was so much human cargo.

Unless something went wrong.

That’s how Aidan rationalized his berth. Something might go wrong, and it might go wrong with a crew member just as easily as with any of the ship’s systems. Not something physically wrong; he wouldn’t and couldn’t intrude upon Doctor Roberts’ bailiwick. But something mentally, morally, might snap. And he was there just in case. Like the rest of the crew.

He knew it was a crock of shit but he nurtured that shit whenever he felt the sense of futility grow beyond acceptable limits.

Aidan kept himself busy. He re-read the Army Survival Manual. He badgered Burge into guiding him to the storage crate that contained the dirt-side expeditionary gear he’d purchased and he shanghaied the Cargo Master into assisting him in a piece-by-piece inventory. He followed the engineers on their perpetual rounds, trying to grasp the complexities of a starship. He exercised. He found he probably hadn’t brought along enough entertainment and struck up conversations to plumb the literary and film tastes of his crew mates, laying the groundwork for swaps or borrowing. He increased his exercise regimen. He got up a game of D&D, though only McAvoy, Burge, and Roberts signed up.

Doctor Roberts refused to play a cleric.

After supper, about three weeks into the voyage, Aidan was assisting Foster with cleaning the dishes. It wasn’t Aidan’s rotation, but he was still trying to acquaint himself with the crew. Foster wasn’t much of a conversationalist. He was much more comfortable with machines than people, so the tidying up was a rather quiet affair.

Aidan saw Vance enter the galley and pour herself a cup of coffee. Seemed to Aidan like better company than the assistant engineer.

“May I join you, Captain?” he asked.

“Sure, Carson. Get yourself a cup.”

He opted for tea. His day was nearing an end. Captain Vance’s schedule was a bit more haphazard than his. She was likely getting ready for a stint in the command center.

“So what do we know about Upsilon Andromedae d, Captain?” he began, sitting down across the table from her.

“Not a damn thing,” she said. “As far as I’ve been able to ascertain, only my uncle had any interest in exploring the system. Other than the number of large planets and some spectrographs and educated guesses, we’ve got bupkis on Upsilon Andromeda and less than bupkis on Upsilon Andromedae d. We’re going to be explorers.”

“The Lewis and Clark of Upsilon Andromedae d.”

Vance produced that smile he liked. “Louise and Carson, more like,” she said. “Kind of exciting. I always wanted to pilot one of the pioneer ships. The mining ships could be hazardous, give a bit of that danger rush sometimes, but they weren’t, you know, glamorous. No sense of adventure.”

Aidan sipped his tea, trying to keep his mind on business. “So,
terra incognita
. Or, whatever the expression would be for a moon. You said Brennan Yuschenkov was obsessed with investigating a moon, not a planet, right?”

“Yes, that’s what we’ll be looking for first. Find a good sized moon, look for atmosphere, then–well, I guess we’d look for wreckage, either orbiting or on the surface.”

“But you’re hoping to find–what? A cabin built out of palm trees? S.O.S. spelled out with coconut husks and the crew of the
Eureka II
busy working on rescue plan number 4,022?”

“That would be an adventure,” she said, and he could tell she was deliberately blunting his sarcasm. She appeared to be in a reflective mood. “Why not? I’ve always kept my mind open to possibilities. It’s partly why I became a pilot, went to the stars. Why I learned to sail and navigate. Why I studied saber in college. Opening myself to the new, allowing room for the possible.”