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4.5

31 October

ESL1 Shade Station

Earth-Sun Lagrange Point 1

Extracislunar Space


“It is both beautiful and stultifying,” Maag said, to no one in particular.

Alice wasn’t entirely sure what “stultifying” even meant, but decided to grunt an agreement anyway.

In the womblike, red-lit weightlessness of the radar room, Alice and Maag floated with their arms loosely around each other’s shoulders, looking out the porthole at an approaching ion ferry, with the little Earth and Moon hanging silently in the background. Maag was lightly holding a grab bar on the wall, letting Alice float free.

“I like the purple,” said Jeanette Schmidt, clearly referring to the color of the ion engines’ exhaust.

“Actually a bit more of a mauve, I think,” said Isaiah Pembroke. “Like feptaual.”

After studying the color for a few moments, Alice decided he was right. Feptaual was an alloy Jeanette had recently invented: a funny gray-purple mix of gold and platinum and iron and aluminum. “Good wear resistance for sliding parts,” she’d said. “I wish we had it when we were building the spin decoupler.”

Isaiah had lately been wearing a bracelet made of the stuff, and Alice thought there must be a story behind that.

Jeanette and Isaiah were also arm in arm, and also looking out the porthole. And yes, Alice had a hand on Jeanette (though not in “that” way), and Isaiah had one on Maag. The four of them were arranged head-to-head, their eight-total legs spreading out radially like the spokes of a wheel, though contacting the wall of the radar room on one side. It was one of those geometries that made perfect sense in zero-gee, allowing four people to look out the same small window.

“Mauve,” Jeanette said. “Yes, that’s exactly right.”

The ferry was fifty meters out, and moving slowly, and slowing down even more slowly. If the pilot, Charisse Ulmer, had any sense, she’d shut down the ion engines and guide the ship in with her attitude control thrusters, which burned hydrazine chemical propellant and thus had a lot more kick. Also cheaper than wasting xenon like this. But like a lot of pilots (first and foremost, the departed Derek Haakens), Charisse liked to show off.

“Thank you, love,” Isaiah said to Jeanette.

Love? Okay, wow, that was new. Romantically speaking, Alice had always seen Jeanette as a bit of a runner—she’d run all the way to ESL1, after all, leaving behind a string of ex-boyfriends. Similarly, when Isaiah first got here, Alice had seen him as a play-the-field type, and also a bit immature for someone like Jeanette. However, to her surprise, the two of them had lasted not only past the first month, but also through the summer solstice and Jeanette’s birthday, and now they’d been together for six months. Amazing.

“It looks like the sign outside a whorehouse I know in Amsterdam,” Maag opined, and presently she gave Alice’s shoulders an intimate little squeeze. Alice returned it.

Alice and Maag were not in love, exactly. It was more like, having shared men in the past, and having agreed there were no decent men available on the station at the moment, they’d decided one day to cut out the (literal) middleman and simply share each other for a while. It wasn’t even a gay thing, exactly, or at least not often. And Alice was confident they’d stick a man back between them again at some point, but for now they had each other, and it was fine.

“We’d better get to the docking module,” Maag said.

“Soon,” Alice said. For some reason, she was really enjoying this particular moment in time, and was reluctant to let it go any sooner than necessary. And, thinking about it now, she was also enjoying the thought of six new colonists—some with no prior space experience—floating into the zero-gee part of the station with no one there to greet them, and wondering what the fuck was going on. But that would be bad leadership indeed, so she disengaged her arms from Maag and Jeanette, and prepared to head down there ahead of the ferry.

“There’s going to be a lot of barf,” Jeanette observed. The new colonists—three women and three men—would have adapted to weightlessness back on Transit Point Station, back in low Earth orbit, and to some extent on the ferry itself, although they’d’ve spent the majority of the trip in squirrel hibernation, strapped to the walls. But in one of the great ironies of life at ESL1, it was actually a lot harder to adapt to spin-gee than to zero-gee. Alice herself had taken almost two months, and while she was (annoyingly) an outlier, Jeanette was definitely right. There was going to be a lot of barf.

But Alice had been a medic before she was an astronaut, and both professions involved a lot of management of loose bodily fluids, so she said, “It’s going to be fine, and these people are going to make us a lot of money.”

Alice shuddered to hear herself say this. She was Special Forces, not some hack in a business suit! But Igbal and Sandy had been gone for a year, and nobody they’d left behind knew quite how to get the new flutter drive working. Built, yes. Operational . . . no, not quite. And since the consequences of failure would be a hundred times worse than a backpack nuke, Alice had erred on the side of caution, and hired in six expensive experts who, at least in combination, were likely able to seal the deal.

And, you know, it was exciting. The new flutter-drive ship, the H.S.F. Comet, would be able to push a hundred tons of cargo—or people—to Jupiter in just twenty days. It was what people like Bob Rojas called a “game changer,” and it would put ESL1 back on the evening news, as something other than a target for nukes.

As the four of them disentangled and started drifting toward the hatch, Isaiah said to Alice, “Hey, did you ask corporate about my energy proposal?”

“I did,” Alice said, not bothering to point out that, as Vice President of Space Operations, she herself was part of “corporate.”

“And?” His eyes glittered brown as the red lights of the radar room gave way to the white ones of the Cross. His bracelet, yes, glittered almost the exact color of xenon ion exhaust. Though it bordered on a “girly” pink, it had enough blue and gray in it to land on something that looked surprisingly rugged against his brown skin.

“Still waiting,” Alice said. “It would help if you put some dollar signs in your proposal, instead of just gigajoules.”

Isaiah had gotten a squirrel up his rectum about using his EMP weapon to tight-beam microwave power down into cislunar space on a contract basis. It wasn’t clear to Alice who needed that, or how much they might be willing to pay, but since the equipment was already in place and (literally) battle tested, she didn’t see any harm in trying.

“Hey, how are they doing up on Intercession?” Jeanette asked, as the four of them swarmed through the Cross and the spin decoupler.

“Fine, last I heard. By now they’ve arrived, and they’re . . .”

She couldn’t complete the sentence. At their nonexistent destination? About to commune with the Beings? She frankly had no idea what was going to happen up there, and after a year of dealing with hard problems in the real world, she had trouble mentally connecting to even the idea of the Beings. Were they real? Would they speak? Would it matter if they did? It was just like Igbal to focus his energies—and those of the whole company—on something so . . . speculative.

“They’re fine,” she said, finally.

While they coasted through the decommissioned hab module and the gamma corridor of the old station, Jeanette said, “We should build Igbal a spacesuit out of gold and platinum, to surprise him when he gets back. Or feptaual. Or blue iron.”

“Or all of the above,” Isaiah said. “Big gaudy fucking thing.”

Alice couldn’t tell if Isaiah was being ironic or not. Igbal was not big on flashy clothes, or flashiness in general, but he was a huge fucking nerd, and would probably love it from a metallurgy standpoint alone.

Jeanette had been going kind of crazy lately with the metallurgy, after working out a new process to extract noble metals from the station’s mining slag. Not because they were valuable per se; antimatter was worth a billion times more, and anyway the costs of moving precious metals around vastly exceeded their market price. Also not because they resisted oxidation; there was no oxygen in space. But gold was ductile, and a good reflector of infrared, and it alloyed surprisingly well with other metals. And platinum was tough, and silver was a great conductor. Or so Jeanette had said. Every part of the buffalo.

So her “blue iron” was iron with gold and platinum in it, and it really was shockingly blue, more like the paint job on a car than any actual metal Alice had ever seen. She’d also come up with platinum steel (white), aluminum bronze (pale red), and a bunch of other stuff that was easy to make in a zero-gee foundry. The thought of making a spacesuit out of all that was . . . well, Alice wanted to hate the idea, but not nearly as much as she wanted (God help her) to see that spacesuit.

“Igbal would love that,” she admitted, as they drifted from gamma corridor to alpha corridor.

And then they were at the docking module.

Pelu Figueroa was already there. At Alice’s quizzical look, Pelu shrugged and said, “Fresh coffee on that boat. Not enough to go around.”

“Ah,” Alice said.

“And hot sauce from Bolivia,” Pelu said, now somewhat conspiratorially.

“Bolivia? Really?” Alice said, thinking more about the shipping cost than the taste.

“Oh, stop it,” Pelu chided. “We’re not exactly destitute up here.”

The docking hatch thumped lightly, then banged and clattered open, revealing the interior of the ion ferry, crowded with people in bright, new jumpsuits of RzVz blue.

And then, as though they’d rehearsed it, everyone around Alice said, at the same time: “Welcome to ESL1!”


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