Under Strange Suns (7 page)

The offices of Vance Aerospace certainly didn’t appear any larger on the inside than the outside. Whatever money was backing the enterprise wasn’t tied up in leasing or furnishing elaborate headquarters. The prefab metal structure was walled off into maybe five rooms, including the bathroom and supply closet.

Captain Vance slid by Aidan, letting the door swing shut behind her. Aidan followed her into the first room on the right, apparently her office though without any nameplate on the door. A flat screen display desk dominated the windowless room. A few framed photographs hung on the wall: a young girl and a woman; the
Eureka
separating from the first rocket stage; the
Eureka II
on the launch pad; the same young girl and a man bearing a familial resemblance to the woman. Some of the photos transposed to similar shots, mostly family pictures, Aidan judged, seeing the young girl at various stages of life up through images that were clearly of Captain Vance at near her current age. Some were looped video. Others were actual old-fashioned still photographs.

Aidan took the guest chair when Captain Vance gestured to it as she sat behind the desk. “Right,” she said, “let’s get this interview underway. We’re at least three minutes behind schedule.” She tapped and swiped icons on the desktop. Bringing up his resume, Aidan figured.

“You are, I assume, Aidan Carson. Picture looks like you. You letting your hair grow out? Okay, formerly a sergeant in the United States Army. Honorable discharge. Pretty high incentives to stay in, aren’t there? Why’d you–what’s the phrase–muster out?”

“I’ve done my bit, Captain,” Aidan said, his tone flat.

“Hmmm, let me see. Thirty-one. Six feet tall?” Here she stopped and looked at him, head cocked to one side and an eyebrow raised. “Honesty is important at a job interview.”

“Honestly,” Aidan said.

She tilted her head to the other side, mouth twisted in a moue of disbelief.

“In my socks. I’m six foot in my socks. Thick socks.”

“Okay, we’ll let that go. Height isn’t a job requirement. Says here you spent only nine months in the military police. MP is a pretty good reference for a security position. Why so little time?”

“Well, about three years back I was beginning to consider life after enlistment. The career options for a guy with about a decade on SF teams didn’t exactly blow my skirt up. So I dual-classed–switched my MOS to MP. Finished my training. I was nine months in when DC was scooped up and tossed into space to follow the planet around like a puppy.”

“A Trojan puppy,” said Vance.

“Excuse me, ma’am?”

“Never mind, just an astrophysics joke. You know I saw it once? About twenty months ago I was bringing in a pair of asteroid mining barges, and we passed close enough to see it. Eerie–that big hemisphere in space topped with all those iconic structures just drifting in the blackness with the Earth as a backdrop. Couldn’t get too close. The military was warning off traffic. They had troops suited up, going through the buildings to collect papers and data and bodies and such.”

“Yeah. When I went through OIT last year–what the Army calls Orbital Insertion Training–one of my instructors told me he did a tour on one of the recovery teams. Used the same word you did, ‘eerie.’ Said it was like being in a horror movie, all those empty, silent marble halls. Said he goes around a corner and a body bumps against him, its face all distorted, one of thousands of corpses bobbing along, colliding, spinning off through dead corridors.”

They were both silent. Then Vance cleared her throat and expanded a notation on her desktop. “Yes, it does say here your last deployment was with a rapid reaction force. So you have been off-planet and do have at least minimal zero-g training, correct?”

“Over the last two years, my life has consisted of two things–training and practical application. I’ve been thrown into damn near every retributive action we’ve undertaken since DC.”

“Retributive action? That’s what they call it?”

“‘Payback’ is considered an unprofessional term. Revenge. Panicked flailing. Going off half-cocked. Exterminating vermin. I’ve heard every description, probably used most of them myself.”

“Which do you use now?”

“I don’t know anymore. It’s hard to stay killing mad for so long.” Aidan was looking just past her shoulder but his eyes weren’t seeing the photo on the wall. “At some point, I guess I started wondering if our intel was one-hundred percent–if we were lighting up the bad guys, or just some poor bastards unlucky enough to be born in whatever shit-hole country we were currently rampaging through.”

“Feeling a bit of compassion, Carson?”

His eyes refocused on her. “Compassion? I don’t know. A lot of these places–Mali, Yemen, Eastern Turkey–the same people smiling and trying to sell you hammered copper bracelets in the daytime would dig up their AK’s at night and plant IEDs along your patrol route. Hard to feel compassion when you’re pretty sure most people outside the wire want to kill you. It was more wondering what the point was. What were we accomplishing?”

Brooklynn nodded, and Aidan thought he saw comprehension in the gesture. Encouraged, he said, “Say we somehow managed to kill every last goat-buggering son-of-a-bitch responsible for launching DC into space. What then? What have we defended? What’s left of the world I was born into?” His eyes had shifted out of focus again. “Only thing holding the US together is anger, and that won’t last forever.”

“Like a beast, brought down by jackals, thrashing in its death throes,” Captain Vance said. “It’s damn well going to kill a few jackals, but the pack ultimately will eat. My mother sent me a message to that effect after we carpet-bombed Ankara.”

Aidan nodded, but refused to let himself be sidetracked. He’d uncorked the bottle and he wasn’t going to stop until it was emptied. “We’ve been going the way of the EU most of my life. And no matter how bad things get for Europe, we refuse to believe it could happen here. It’s like, we read about the California food riots and shrug it off. Just an aberration; what’s a few thousand dead in such a populous state? New York City general strike going on seven months? Eh, I don’t live there. So no big deal, let ‘em torch a skyscraper or two. Hell, I heard Florida is talking secession. Figured it would be Texas first. Every day things get a little worse but that just seems normal. Like a frog in a pot, never noticing the increasing temperature.” He stopped, a sheepish smile briefly curling back his lips. These thoughts had been tumbling around his mind for so long. Now that he’d let them out, he felt a trifle foolish. “So, yeah, I didn’t take the re-enlistment bonus. Hope that answers the question.”

“May I ask why you enlisted in the first place?”

“You sound like my father. Or like my father did.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean that to sound...what? Dismissive? Insulting? I’ve nothing but respect for choosing a term or even a career in the military. I take it your old man didn’t approve?”

“Thought I was wasting my life. He was a DC lobbyist. Wanted me to go to college, then on to law school. My mother, now, she made my dad seem supportive. You’d have thought I’d announced I was joining the Ku Klux Klan. Enlisting was not the sort of thing sons of Georgetown social studies teachers did, not in her circle.”

“Both your parents were...?”

“In DC? Yeah. I may not have seen eye-to-eye with my folks, but DC was real personal. Now, I just don’t know.”

“Still haven’t answered the question. You’re evading.”

“What? Why enlist? I don’t think I’m evading. Maybe I just don’t know. Wasn’t rebellion, if that’s what you think. I never bought into my mom’s world view, and I never quite saw the value of my dad’s. But I didn’t despise them. Maybe my mom was right: all those boys’ own novels my dad let me read when I was a kid. Y’know, Robert Louis Stevenson, Walter Scott. Like that. Got a taste for adventure. Maybe. Shit, I really don’t have a clear answer for you.”

Captain Vance leaned back in her chair, interlacing her fingers beneath her ponytail. “Not a whole lot keeping you on-planet then, is there?”

Aidan liked that. No false sympathy for his loss. Everybody lost someone — even if just symbolically — in DC. She worked up to the point in her own time, but wasn’t maddeningly circuitous about it. And she was far from bad looking, no question. Maybe not what he should be thinking about his potential boss right now, but still...

“No, can’t say I’d be sorry to leave it in the rear view mirror,” Aidan said. “Are you offering me the job?”

“Thinking about it, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. A spaceship is a rather confining environment, without much privacy. If you find you don’t get along with the rest of the crew, you can’t simply give your notice and catch the bus home. I need to be pretty damn certain before I sign up the only other crewman besides myself to carry a gun on board.”

“Fair enough. But on that topic, what exactly
is
the job?”

“Security officer. On the books, anyway. The
Yuschenkov
will be on a geological survey run, scouting for prime mining opportunities within reasonable range of colonies. The crew is minimal...I know, don’t interrupt the Captain. Security isn’t a vital berthing with a skeleton crew, I know. But I fully expect to go dirt-side. It’s the Big Unknown out there, and I’d like to have an excursion leader with actual experience coping with stressful conditions. This is a shoestring operation, and I can’t afford someone requiring on the job training.”

“Like the old wildcat oilmen, is that what you’ve got here? Hoping to find a rich strike?”

“More or less.”

“More or less?” Aidan frowned. “You said the
Yuschenkov
. Named your ship after Doctor Yuschenkov? Not exactly a popular name for spacecraft.” He gestured with his chin at the pictures on the wall behind Captain Vance. “That’s the
Eureka
launch, right? And the
Eureka II
?”

“MPs trained you as a detective, huh Carson? Yes. It’s no secret, though I’ve done my damndest to bury the fact; Brennan Yuschenkov was my uncle. And a major influence on my life. Because of him I spent my entire life preparing for work in space. I got my commercial pilot license, signed on with one of the early cruise-to-the-moon agencies and became a lunar shuttle pilot. I even had a berth as assistant navigator with the
Asimovs
, aboard
Asimov B
, making the regular run to Brigham. Finally I got my rating piloting for one of the major asteroid mining concerns. Just in-system, but it was my own pair to command.”

“And now you want to work for yourself.”

Captain Vance seemed to reach a decision. She stood. “Come on, Carson. Let’s take a walk.”

He followed her back out into the broiling spaceport, squinting until his eyes adjusted to the glare.

“This way,” she said, leading on through the maze. “Amazing, this place. The country is falling to ruins, but this spaceport keeps functioning smoothly. As if everyone realizes deep down that our only real hope is out there and spaceports like these are our only exit. So we’re searching for every habitable planet we can reach, and even trying to terraform those that
might
become habitable. Long term thinkers, those folks, living in underground habitats or in orbit, knowing they won’t live to see the culmination of their efforts.”

“Wanting to be part of something new, I can understand that. Especially when we’re watching the old die around us. Makes you wonder how long this place will last. Makes me wonder how many mining corporations will be around to pay you for your big strike, if–when–you find it.”

“Am I sensing some mistrust, Carson?” They were passing through the last band of aluminum-sided prefabs. Ahead lay ranks of cavernous hangars. “Over this way. Keep walking.”

They passed through the ranks of hangars with their variety of rocket stages, atmosphere capable shuttles, low orbit insertion airplanes, and experimental vehicles. Aidan hadn’t grown up a space buff, but he could have spent hours gawking if Captain Vance hadn’t hustled him on. She was telling him about the mining colony of New Cymru, where the colonists had burrowed living quarters up to a mile underground, safe from the sulfur dioxide storms that occasionally scoured the planet’s surface, knowing it would take generations for atmosphere scrubbers to achieve a breathable mixture. “All the while they’re busily digging, extracting iron, gold, uranium. You name it. Whatever they can sell. And that’s the point: they can sell a lot. We’ve reached the point where most resource-extraction product does not end up on Earth. The balance is off-world.” Then, “Okay, here we are.”

They were at the edge of the kilometers of paved emptiness, an expanse of launch sites and landing runways. A gantry, rusting, empty of activity or any signs of recent activity was the closest object of any interest.

“Right where we’re standing were the bleachers where I sat with my mother,” Captain Vance said. “Over there was the launch site of the
Eureka
. There’s a plaque commemorating it, but I never see anyone paying a visit. Actually a nice bit of panegyric, calls him a pioneer. That, due to his sacrifice and that of his crew, space vessels now know to travel in pairs. Public reaction the first few years after his disappearance was...hard on me. Fraud. Mad-scientist. Megalomaniac. Some family of the
Eureka II
crew even called him a murderer. So it is nice to think he was appreciated at least by some for not only inventing the Y-Drive, but also for providing the needed lesson in how to use it safely.”