Earth unaware

CHAPTER 20

Solitude

At first Victor thought little of the pain in his back. After five months of traveling in the quickship, unexplained aches and pains had become second nature. His muscles were atrophying, his bones were weakening; dull aches were to be expected. But then the backache worsened and became so excruciating at times that it felt like a knife stabbing and twisting inside him. It came in waves, and no matter how Victor positioned his body in the quickship, the pain continued. Then the pain spread to his side and groin. Then blood appeared in his urine, and he knew he was in trouble.

All symptoms pointed to kidney stones. His bones were becoming osteoporotic and the released calcium was coalescing in the kidneys. Sleep was difficult. He felt anxious and nauseated and worried about being sick in his helmet. He drank lots of water, but it didn’t help. He had brought a few mild pain meds, but he had taken those months ago to get through a few days of migraines. Now he cursed himself. The migraines were a gentle kiss on the cheek compared to this.

After three days, he worried that the stone might be too big to pass, and he wondered what would happen if that were the case. Would he get an infection? Could it kill him? Would Earth never receive warning because of a stupid clump of crystallized calcium?

He passed it on the fourth day, and the pain was so unexpectedly searing and intense that for a moment he thought he was dying. When it was over, he fell instantly asleep, exhausted.

He continued to drink a lot of water over the next few weeks, but it didn’t stop him from having stones. He passed four in all. None of them were as painful as the first, but they all left him anxious and restless. He was now keenly aware of the fact that his body was deteriorating, and he constantly worried about a dozen other ailments that might afflict him at any moment. His bone density was his primary concern. Would the weight of his own body break his legs when he stood on Luna? Gravity on Luna was only a fraction of what it was on Earth, but perhaps it would be enough to overstress his weakening bones. Then there was the issue of his appetite. It had greatly diminished recently. Was he malnourished? And what about his heart? It was weakening, too. Would it give out before he reached the Moon? And what about radiation? Was the shield holding? He needed to strengthen it, he realized. He needed to add another plate to the exterior. He was sure he’d get cancer if he didn’t.

Victor entered the commands in his handheld to initiate deceleration. The ship had been moving at a constant, high velocity for months, and if he maintained that speed and went outside, the ship would appear to him as if it wasn’t moving at all since he would be moving at the same velocity. But going outside at a high velocity was risky. He’d expose himself to gamma radiation and the threat of micrometeoroids. Getting hit by a tiny rock particle would likely be fatal. Victor couldn’t take that risk. Not with so much at stake. It would be safer to decelerate and repair the shields at a full stop. He’d add a lot of time to his trip, yes, and he wouldn’t reach Luna as quickly as he had hoped, but he felt the extra shielding and precautions were worth the delay.

It took the ship almost two full days to decelerate. Victor didn’t want to rush the process and put any undue burden on his body, weak as it was, so he had slowed the ship gradually. When it had reached a full stop, he detached his air hose and screwed a canister of oxygen into the back of his suit. Next came his tool belt, which he fastened around his waist. Then he opened the hatch and crawled outside. Using the handholds recessed into the hull, Victor pulled himself toward the back of the ship to check how the rear plates were holding up. His hand slipped from one of the handholds, and Victor instinctively reached for the safety cable fastened to his chest harness to steady himself.

Only the safety cable wasn’t there.

In his haste to come outside he had forgotten to anchor himself to the ship.

Victor clawed at the hull, trying to get purchase, desperate to stop himself, but his body was in motion now, moving toward the rear of the ship, and he had already passed the last handhold. His bulky gloves slipped along the metal surface, stopping on nothing. He was screaming now, his voice hoarse and cracked from lack of use. He was slipping down the side of the ship. There was nothing to grab. He was going to die.

Then he saw it ahead of him. A tube of some sort, a small metal pipe at the back corner of the ship. Beyond it was space. If he missed it, he was gone. He would drift until he ran out of air. He approached the pipe, and just before he reached it he knew he wouldn’t be able to grab it. It was too far away, just beyond the reach of his fingers.

In a single swift movement, his hand whipped to his tool belt and came back with a long wrench that he reached out and hooked around the pipe at the last possible moment, stopping himself. His heart was pounding. His breathing was labored. The wrench’s hold on the pipe was slight and precarious. It could easily slip off. He gently pulled and drew himself back to the ship.

The wrench slipped from the pipe, but he was moving in the right direction now. He slowly drifted toward the cockpit, climbed inside, and fastened the safety cable onto his harness. He cursed himself for being so stupid. He had come all this way, risked his life, with intelligence that the whole world needed to see, and he nearly ruined it all by failing to fasten a single metal ring to his harness. Brilliant, Victor. Real genius.

With the cable secured, he returned outside, checked the plates, found them in order, but then decided to install the spare plates anyway on top of the existing ones. Might as well. The spares weren’t doing any good inside the ship. Besides, he needed the labor. He needed to occupy his mind with work for a little while. He had built and engineered every day of his life since becoming Father’s apprentice, and the past five months had been nothing but mind-numbing idleness.

When he finished the installation, he resealed the seams twice to be sure they would hold. He knew he was stalling. The seals were fine. He simply didn’t want to get back in the ship.

Eventually, he returned to the cockpit. His hand lingered on the hatch for a moment before he closed it, his eyes scanning the expanse of space above him. He was only a few months away from Luna. He could endure this a little longer. He sealed the hatch and began to accelerate. The computer reconfigured his flight path to account for the delay and revised the time of arrival, putting him at Luna three weeks later than originally expected. Victor felt like hitting something. Three weeks. That was much longer than he had anticipated. But it was too late now. What’s done is done, he thought. Sighing, he sat motionless in the flight seat as the quickship picked up speed.

A month later a feeling of hopelessness overcame Victor. He felt certain he was off course. Or the computer had a glitch in it. Or he was running short of air. He kept catching himself staring at nothing. Food lost all appeal. His sense of taste was gone. Or maybe the proteins in the food had broken down so much from radiation that the food no longer had any taste to deliver. Either way, he had no appetite. He lost weight. His wrists and ankles felt thin and flimsy. He had brought rubber strips for resistance exercises, which he had been doing religiously every day since setting out. Now he ignored all exercise. Why bother? Little good it was doing. His bones were probably twigs at this point. He had struggled for months with insomnia. Now he seemed to sleep all the time. He hadn’t touched his handheld in days. There were books he had started and hadn’t finished, puzzles he had left unsolved. He didn’t care.

A hand was gently shaking his shoulder, rousing him from sleep. Alejandra was beside him, wearing the pristine and pressed white gown. She smiled at him and folded her arms across her chest. “You’re losing your mind, Vico. You’re psychologically frito. You’ve been cooped up in this thing so long and your sleep is so unregulated that you’re only sane when you’re dreaming.”

Victor’s voice was dry and frail, and the sound of it surprised him. “Am I dreaming?” He looked around him. Everything seemed normal. The instruments. The equipment. The air tanks.

“You won’t find any pink elephants, if that’s what you’re looking for,” said Alejandra. “ I’m here. That should be evidence enough for you.” She sat down in front of him, with her legs bent demurely to the side. “You’ve stopped exercising and eating. Have you looked at yourself? You’re wasting away to nothing.”

“I don’t have a mirror.”

“Probably best. You’d break it. Also, you need a haircut.”

“I’m going crazy, aren’t I?”

She ticked off his problems on her fingers. “Severe anxiety. Depression. You’re ignoring life-sustaining food and exercise. Your sleep patterns are completely out of whack. You can’t think straight, and you’re talking to a dead person.”

“It’s a very good choice of dead person. That should win me some points.”

She rolled her eyes. “Isabella gave you pills to help regulate your sleep. Why did you stop taking them?”

“I don’t like taking pills. I like being in control.”

“You’re not in control. That’s the problem, Vico Loco. You’re not yourself. If you’re not careful they’ll throw you in a padded room when you reach Luna. It won’t take much to convince them. They’ll already think you’re crazy for flying from the Kuiper Belt in a quickship. As soon as you start yapping about aliens, their suspicions will be confirmed. You need to be a model of sanity, Vico. Looking like you do now isn’t going to help.”

“You, on the other hand, look quite the opposite. I never told you how beautiful you are. I never even thought to say it, but it’s true.”

“We’re talking about you at the moment.”

“I wish we wouldn’t. You’re much more interesting.”

She smiled and said nothing.

“They sent you away because of me, Janda. If I had known that’s what they would do, I would have changed things.”

“How? By pretending not to be my friend? By avoiding me? By being formal around me and treating me like a mere acquaintance? That would have been worse.”

“These aren’t your thoughts,” he told her. “They’re mine, projected on to you. You’re only saying what my mind is telling you to say.”

“But you knew my thoughts, Vico. You always did. The only reason why you didn’t know that I loved you was because I didn’t know it myself. But I did.”

“Don’t use the past tense,” he said. “That means it’s over.”

He awoke. Alone. Everything was where it always was. The instruments. The equipment. The air tanks. He forced himself to eat. He drank water and took vitamins. He did the resistance exercises and was shocked to learn how weak he was. He checked the instruments. He had seven weeks to get back to health. He drank more water and did another rep of leg exercises.

There was traffic all around Luna, but the LUG system in Victor’s quickship took over the flight controls long before he reached the mass of ships. Freighters, courier ships, passenger vessels moving back and forth to Earth, newer corporate mining ships heading out toward the Asteroid Belt, many of which were emblazoned with the Juke Limited corporate logo.

The quickship had decelerated hours ago, and now that he was here and close, he found the LUG system’s docking speed maddeningly slow. Soon other quickships were gathering around him, coming in from all quarters, all being lugged toward the same destination; where exactly, Victor had no idea.

He could see Earth but he was greatly disappointed since he had expected it to be much closer. It was night on the planet’s surface, and there were millions of lights twinkling below the atmosphere. All of those people, he thought, and none of them know what’s coming. Or maybe they did know. Maybe word had gotten through. Victor hoped that was true. That would mean his work was done.

The settlements and industries of Luna constituted the tiniest part of the moon’s surface. Victor had seen pictures, but they had been taken from space, so he expected a small outpost. When the moon rotated as the quickships approached, and the city of Imbrium came into view, Victor gaped in wonder. Factories, smelting plants, huge industrial complexes with so many lights and pipes and buildings that they seemed to be their very own cities. Then Imbrium proper came into view to his right. Buildings and lights and glass-topped walkways. It was more human-built structure than he had ever seen.

He could feel his body getting heavier. Gravity was seizing him. The quickships around him organized themselves into a line, all of them loaded with huge cargos of cylinders. Victor’s eyes followed the line in front of him, and he saw that the LUG system was taking the quickships to a massive complex beyond the city.

Then suddenly his quickship deviated from the others and changed course, flying down toward a hangar with a ceiling at least a hundred meters high. The quickship’s engines died. It drifted into the hangar. There were damaged quickships everywhere in various stages of repair, but there were no workers that he could see. Robot arms extended and grabbed the quickship. His forward motion stopped, and Victor was thrown against his restraining harness. The pain took his breath away, and he was certain he had cracked a few ribs. He coughed, trying to get his wind back. The ship rotated ninety degrees, with the nose pointed upward. Victor was on his back. The robot arms lifted him quickly and hooked the ship onto a long rack of quickships hanging by their noses ten meters off the ground. The robot arms released him and went elsewhere.

All was quiet. The ship swung lightly on the rack, an odd sensation caused by gravity that Victor had never experienced. He waited, but no one came for him. He unharnessed himself, still wincing from the pain in his chest. His body felt heavy. He climbed out of the seat and looked out the window. He was too high off the ground. He didn’t trust the strength of his legs in partial gravity with a drop like that. He scanned the warehouse floor, looking for people. There were none. Everything was automated. A quickship suddenly slid onto the rack in front of him, pushing him farther into the rack, partially blocking his view. The robot arms were packing him in here. He needed to get out.

He tried the hatch. He couldn’t open it. The other quickship was packed in too tightly. He went to the radio and tried a frequency. “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”

Again, the sound of his own voice frightened him. It was hoarse and crackly and barely above a whisper. No one responded. He heard only static. He tried another frequency. Still nothing. Then he tried another and got chatter. Men talking, giving numbers and data; Victor didn’t understand it. He interrupted them. “Hello? Can anyone hear me?”

The chatter stopped. There was a pause. “Who is this?”

“My name is Victor Delgado. I’m a free miner from the Kuiper Belt. I’m stuck in a warehouse of some kind.”

“Get off this frequency.”

“Please. I need help. I have information that needs to get to Earth.”

“Sanjay, I got someone on the frequency who won’t get off.”

A different voice-deeper, commanding, with an accent Victor didn’t recognize. “I don’t know who you are, mate, but this is a restricted frequency. Now get the hell off before I have you tossed.”

“Please. I need to speak to someone in charge. All of Earth is in danger.” The words sounded trite, even to him.

“You’re the one in danger, mate. Marcus, triangulate that signal and find this prankster. I want this ash trash off my frequency.”

Victor stayed on the frequency, but didn’t say more. Let them triangulate it. Let them find him.

An hour later a police rover arrived. A single police officer in a suit and helmet got out with a light and began scanning the interior of the warehouse with bored disinterest.

Victor banged on the side of the ship with a tool to get the man’s attention, but the man couldn’t hear him. Victor lowered himself to the back of the ship, which was now the bottom. He turned on his cutting tool and began slicing through the ship’s wall, showering the inside of the ship with small burning metal embers. He pressed harder, being careful not to damage his suit. The cutter broke through. Hot embers rained down from the ship into the warehouse. The officer saw him.

It was another hour before someone who could operate the machinery arrived to lower the ship from the rack. When the men lifted him out of the quickship and set him on the ground, Victor’s legs gave out completely. He buckled and crumpled to the ground. He tried pushing himself up with his arms but couldn’t. He lay there not moving while the officer attached an audio cable to his suit.

“I need to see some identification,” said the officer.

“I don’t have any. I’m a free miner.”

“Space born, eh? Let me guess, you don’t have any docking authorization, either.”

“I came here from the Kuiper Belt.”

The officer looked amused. “On a quickship? Sure you did.”

“You don’t believe me? Check the flight computer.”

The officer ignored this, typing notes onto his pad. “So no permits, no papers, no entry codes, nothing.”

“I need to speak with someone in charge.”

“You need to speak with a lawyer, space born.”

They carried him out to the rover and lifted him into the cargo trunk. Victor felt completely helpless-and to think this was only one-sixth of Earth gravity.

The officer drove him to a medical facility, where nurses put him on a stretcher and gave him IV fluids and ten different vaccinations. When they finished, an officer in a different colored uniform entered and wire-strapped Victor’s wrists to the stretcher. It wasn’t until the man started reciting a litany of legal rights that Victor realized he had been arrested.