At last she’d piloted a spacecraft way beyond the Earth. The exhilaration pushed away the doubts. In between checking the near-fully-automatic ship controls, Kallandra stared through the viewscreen at steady stars. It buzzed her so much and yet the only word she could drag up to describe it was inexpressible. She laughed but checked herself before accusations of hysteria could be hurled at her.
A long inhale brought whiffs of new plastic and fresh rubber seals. Something, Kallandra appreciated, most people only experienced when they bought a new car.
She twisted in her pilot’s seat to find Claude triple-checking navigation and engineering modules in the spacecraft’s cramped forward cabin. She knew he felt guilty, and so did she. She tried to forget the arguments and so concentrate on the mission, but emotional fragments snagged her.
“I’m the chief designer of this craft, and the modifications aren’t fully tested.”
Derek’s pleas to Disraeli should have worked, but the General had thought it through.
“If this was the Mars mission, we might have kicked off a biologist to make way for an engineer—after all, Mars is a machine-hostile environment. But this is flight only.
Instead of a crew of six, we’ve booted off flesh to make way for fuel and resources so two can follow them fuckers for as long as possible. Maybe a one-way trip.”
Kallandra didn’t need reminding that the mission was more important than the crew.
“Even so, General,” Derek said, “The Apoidea’s modification in the switch from Mars to pursuing the spheres has been hastily, too hastily done.”
“Are you saying it’s too dangerous to fly?”
“Well, not really, although all space-vehicles can be improved on—”
“Yeah, forever. If it was up to you guys, the first space rocket would still be sitting on the launch pad.” He chuckled at his own joke in spite of the seriousness of the situation, or perhaps because of it. He pointed at Claude, who was fingering his moustache; like his hair, close cut for the flight. “Lapointe there, like Major Harvey, is a top NASA pilot, and it’s those skills we need more than yours. He’s an engineer, so is the Major, and both can follow any emergency directions. You’ve only flown sub-orbital,
Derek.”
Refusing to go away, Derek tried one last time. “The ion drive has only been tried on much lighter unmanned vehicles, and the auto-drive-interface is revolutionary— my design.”
“And we’re damned grateful, Derek. Who better to be manning the duplicate and simulator at mission control in case it needs tweaking?”
“But once they leave the Solar System there might not be time for radio messages to bat to and fro in an emergency.”
“The decision’s been made, Derek. Excuse me, we’ve both a heck of a schedule.”
* * *
Kallandra ran a hand over her brown hair, trimmed to within an inch of her scalp.
She could just make out the sun-reflected white spot of the spheres eighty thousand kilometres in front. They’d caught up after five days and kept their distance at the amazingly slow speed of just over sixteen hundred kilometres per hour, expecting a speed surge or time displacement disappearance any second. NASA programmers told them the sensor software would track the spheres even with slight temporal displacements and large acceleration.
“Claude, do you think they’ll speed up any moment? Surely they can’t be thinking of spending another billion years to reach their home system?”
“You don’t have to make small talk, Kal. The General was right to only let two come on this mission.”
She turned to see if he was smiling. “I know the General had a dossier on me and Derek.”
“Don’t look at me, I had no hand in it.”
“Allegedly it said me and Derek could be unstable.”
“And how dare they? God knows how these shrinks operate.” He wasn’t smiling but she guessed he might be on the inside. He pointed at the spheres on the zoom field screen. “Whoa there they go.”
Kallandra waved her finger at the sensor to turn off the alarm, triggered by the sudden change in the spheres’ velocity to nearly sixteen thousand kilometres per hour.
Their own ship had engaged its ion drive days before, but now it needed rocket engines to catch their quarry.
After the computer’s feminine voice nagged them with safety checks and re-checks, Kallandra tried to focus on readouts as their engines blasted. It was easier to close her eyes as her face distorted, but the boost didn’t last long.
“If they go ten times faster again,” Claude said, “we might as well turn around and head for drinks at La Carotti’s Bar.”
“Don’t wish for it. Look at that news bulletin.” Kallandra pointed at a CNN programme live feed.
Claude rubbed his neck after the acceleration had pulled his muscles. “What’s happened to the Golden Gate Bridge?”
The screen showed that only the north side remained.
“Probably timequaked into the Pacific,” Kallandra said, “along with the hapless people driving along it. Apparently a mini tsunami hit Frisco shortly after, so a mass of sea must have been displaced, too.”
“If the displaced mass of ocean was thrown into the Pacific, then more displacements would have happened there, too. I’m contacting NASA to see if more tsunamis hit Japan.”
“We haven’t time, Claude. Let’s make sure the Apoidea has its nose pointing after the spheres.” Something nagged at her.
“Ma soeur is studying at the Tokyo Language Institute.”
Kallandra nodded. Now she knew it was his sister, Marie, that tugged her memory. “Sorry, Claude.” She left him to dig around the news channels while she interrogated the nav computer for an update on the spheres.
Ten minutes later she smelt coffee. It only took a pressed button but she smiled knowing Claude had forgiven her.
“Maybe I should’ve asked earlier, Claude, but how do you feel about being Derek’s replacement?”
“Excusez-moi, I have replaced Derek in your heart? Ah, don’t worry. I jest. I don’t consider I have replaced Derek up here. I am needed and there is no room for him. C’est la vie.”
“Yes but...oh well.”
“Kal, I stopped worrying about my promotions affecting friends’ career prospects from day one—I had to.”
She nodded, and then turned to find their nav systems had fixed on the new position of the spheres. She checked the auto systems.
She glanced at their Apoidea badge emblem: a bee whizzing off from Earth into space. “Do you think the spheres will actually notice this little bee chasing them?”
“I wouldn’t be here if I didn’t.”
“Trouble is—”
“Oui, they’ll either ignore us or blast us into another universe.”
“Hopefully, they’ll realise we’re not non-sentient insects and damn well want to do something about having left us with a rapidly uninhabitable home.” She sniffed at a liquorice stick after sucking at it, while thinking others would have sworn at the spheres.
“Claude, why can I call people bastards, but not badmouth the spheres? It’s as if they did something to me with that first Glastonbury encounter. Not many folk have actually touched a sphere.”
“They sprinkled magic-dust on you.”
She threw him a glance and caught his smirk. His moustache looked so ridiculously like Errol Flynn in They Died With Their Boots On. “You might as well shave off that cookie-duster.” She couldn’t help laughing as he twitched it into a dance, while he mocked looking hurt.
“I will if you will,” he said.
“What?” She threw an iPod earpiece, which he batted back. As she turned to place it in a drawer she felt his warm arms around her, and his moustache nuzzling her neck.
“Claude, you’re freaking me out.” But she didn’t fight him off. A sensible synapse urged caution; remember Derek. Wasn’t she betrothed to him? Yes, but that scent…. “Are you wearing perfume?”
His voice deepened as the words slowed. “You are aware of regulation one-five-nine-twelve forbidding the introduction of extraneous contaminants such as deodorants and aromatic aerosols? This is all me, madam.”
“Yeah right, and a roll-on pheromone boost with added musk.”
“Are you enamoured with me or my alleged fragrance?”
“Don’t push it, buster.”
“But you want me to push it, ma cherie, don’t you?”
“Not right now, Claude, we have stage one of this mission to see through.” My God, she thought, she’d not said no, but sidestepped into the job. He unwrapped his arms but his smirk left its ghost. She looked away to the console, looking for work, which wasn’t difficult: they were always behind schedule on double and triple routine checks.
Kallandra needed thinking time along with a rest. “Claude, I’m taking my sleep time now. Wake me if there’s any change?”
* * *
Damn, she couldn’t get off to sleep. The ship sang to her through its aluminium alloys, struts vibrating their concertos and syncopating with gurgling fluids, and the symphony conducted by occasional engine thrusts. But it wasn’t those noises that kept sleep at arm’s length.
She’d known of Claude’s bad-boy reputation over the previous two years. He’d nearly cooked his future flight chances with an opportunist fumble with Disraeli’s teenage daughter at a launch party. He’d kept quiet but the excitable Fiona’s face had glowed on return to the bar and couldn’t help blurting to her friends how they’d had their own take-off in the deserted upper observation room.
Kallandra sat bolt upright at another revelation. She’d dismissed a suggestion from Tabitha Wish that she’d dug up dirt on Claude about an affair with Gibbon’s wife, a former pageant queen. If he’d hit on married women, why had he treated herself as a mere flying colleague up till now? She’d assumed they would always be no more than buddies. Surely he wasn’t afraid of Derek? Maybe he wasn’t a sufficiently aggressive challenge compared to the boss’s wife and a general’s daughter. She knew there was little point in such a bedtime analysis with insufficient data, and so tried to sleep.
Unconsciousness resisted her appeals. Although she’d successfully driven thoughts of Claude away for another day, issues about the mission prevented sleep.
She’d pressed for the mission on the grounds that the spheres would notice, after their exit, their bee in pursuit, and so maybe they‘d want to rectify the time mess they’d left.
Actually, that maybe had crept in after her impassioned speech to Disraeli where she’d asserted undue positivism to that hope. Her other argument, agreed by everyone, was that they’d nothing to lose, and possibly something to gain if the spheres returned and, somehow, rectified the increasing time chaos.
Gibbon said that it was possible the spheres would notice their Bee following them, and rather than be stung or having their lair discovered, would swat the Apoidea, and then the Earth; as an exterminator would do to a barn wasp nest. While this possibility remained, the environmental scientists and physicists agreed that normal life couldn’t be sustained with the time decoherences.
She turned over, the tucked-in single sheet preventing her drifting in the near zero gravity. Sleep usually galloped up on her once her head hit the pillow. It’d better arrive soon or her six-hour sleep-slot would be over….
* * *
Moments later she smacked the back of her neck, but then opened her eyes when she realised there shouldn’t be a mosquito within a hundred thousand kilometres.
“Claude, what are you doing? Get back to monitoring the console.” He’d removed his hand from stroking her neck after her hand caught his finger. She shivered from the sensation, although it was not unpleasant. Thankful—maybe—the bunks weren’t wide enough for two, she glanced at her watch as she turned and realised she’d had a welcome four hours sleep.
“There’s a news bulletin you should see.”
“Can’t you just tell me?” she asked, but to his retreating back as he loped-drifted back up front.
Still in NASA underwear, Kallandra grabbed an instant coffee and sleepily collapsed in the swivel chair next to Claude. He waited for her first sip and then clicked to replay the web news item. The headline said it all: Spheres leave from Mars, and Venus.