Out
A series about Mars
by Daniel
E. Machado
Chapter
7
(to continued)
"Fred?" Blade's question holds a hint
of suspicion. "Where's Roselene?"
"She’s..." Fred’s head snaps back
and forth, searching around his feet and then up Edwards Interorbital's
vast crowded departure complex. "Shit! She was just..." His handtablet
back up in front of his face Fred thumbs his preset panic button.
"She’s..."
On his display four separate public
inputs frame out to show Fred four different views of Blade and himself
standing next to a handcart loaded down with their recently expanded carry-on
allotment. Every sensor in the cavernous room tells Fred that Roselene’s
personal locator positions her right there next to him. A soft rustle comes
from their handcart. Fred kneels down to look beneath a wardrobe bag draped
over a gap between two of their molded cerametal lockers. The girl lay
curled up and sleeping, a slobbery thumb drooping from her slack jaw. Fred’s
shiny black and yellow AeroDynamic jacket lay wadded up under her head.
"She’s... not use to getting up at
03:30." Fred smiles up hopefully at the child's mother.
"And, you’re still not
use to thinking for two! I watched her construct that." Blade points down
at the makeshift shelter. "Talk you out of your jacket, and then crawl
up into it and go to sleep without you even taking your eyes off that display."
"Hey, sorry!" Fred stands. "I’m sorry;
okay? But, I’ve got her locked onto a two meter alarm. She can’t go far.
And, I was just following the loading so we can..."
"So we can get on board faster?" Blade
interrupts.
"Well, no." Fred admits.
"Well, then pay attention."
This time it’s Fred who quietily chants along with Blade's last two words.
"Yes, ma’am." Fred nods his face away
in complete frustration. It’s been a hard few days for Fred. He likes kids
well enough, and Roselene isn’t particularly a brat, but occasionally entertaining
or enlightening a child, and living with one, are two completely
different things. And, sometimes Fred sees Blade get a bit too overindulgent.
She does that career mother thing.
After their visit with TransOrbital’s
Quartering Office, Edwards Transit Housing moved Fred into family quarters
with Blade and Roselene, probably to satisfy anyone in TransOrbital’s psych
office who still may have concerns about their group. So, in the spirit
of proving himself a proper family man, Fred had spent his last few afternoons
on Earth taking care of little Roselene. Picking her up at school. Watching
her until her mother got off from work.
The experience had been tiring, to
say the least. The little girl’s mind multi-tracks somewhere in the gigahertz
range. You have to keep your eye on her every second. The
little stinker regularly beats him in VR and then publicly gloats about
it with a chirping cheerfulness that leaves poor Fred with dark thoughts
of corporal punishment. And, it nearly killed him the first
time Fred had to let Roselene use a public toilet. Standing outside the
doors watching the little girl's locator icon move across the rest room’s
map on his display made him feel like a complete pervert. He wanted to
have himself arrested.
Yes, it’s been a hard few days
for Fredy. Blade sighs over at her cousin with long sufferance.
She's not really looking forward to traveling all day with an pissed-off
man.
"So, how is the loading
coming?" Blade smiles up at him with her head cocked playfully to one side.
Fred’s eyes flash up angry, his mouth ready to bark a reproach, but he’s
stopped short by the seemingly apologetic grin plastered across her annoyingly
beautiful face.
You little brat. Fred
returns the smile. That woman at the Quartering Office was right;
you are trouble.
Fred nods back, acknowledging Blade's
jest then pulls his smile down into a more sober expression in protest
of her blatantly successful manipulation.
"Well." Fred gazes down his nose at
his handtablet's display. "Seeing as you’ve asked, we should be in freefall
by noon. That is, if none of the field maintenance crew stops to take a
pee."
"How’s the check-in going?"
"Four stations are ready. Our shift
should be called up in about ten minuets."
"Then, we’d better get going."
Nodding back at her Fred glances down
at the loaded handcart. Three gray cerametal lockers rest tilted at angles,
each identically one meter by three-quarters by a meter-and-a-half, and
each loaded to within a few grams of their thirty kilo limit. The molded
boxes themselves are but a few ounces of bonded ceramic-metal superalloy
no thicker than an eggshell, but a strong man would have trouble breaking
into one with a sledgehammer. Three long flat wardrobe bags lay sprawled
across them, also massing to within grams of their five-kilo limit.
"Things should be pretty easy once
we get up out of Earth’s gravity well, but are you sure you’ll
be okay with a locker and two bags?" Fred has run the math. Blade’s share
of the load masses forty kilos. She weighs less than sixty.
Frowning up at him with growing contempt
Blade flips her hand up and slams her elbow on top of a locker.
"Put you money where your foot is,
buddy." Blade wiggles her fingers up at him in challenge as Fred’s eyes
flash wide. In the past week he's has had several opportunities to see
Blade in various stages of dress. Her biceps and shoulders probably look
better than his. The gestalt of engaging in, and very possibly losing,
an arm wrestling match to a woman in the middle of Edwards Interorbital's
slaps Fred hard. Shrugging he smiles, hoping to beg her pardon.
"Hey, I, ahh..." Fred laughs waving
his hands out in front of him. "No insult intended. But, even with the
transfer rollers you’ll still be pulling two-thirds your own weight. That’s
not bias, just math."
"You do the math own
your load, stretch?"
"I put fresh wheel batteries in this
morning. They should hold up until we get onboard."
"And, I take it you also put fresh
batteries into mine?"
Fred nods back in reply.
"Good. Then we don’t have to worry
about it; do we?"
A stubborn chauvinistic streak, a
bit of culturally antiquated genetic hardwiring, leaves Fred feeling highly
uncomfortable but without much choice in the matter. Immigration passengers
are contractually obligated to carry on their own carry-on baggage. Otherwise
it can legally be considered stowage, and TransOrbital has the right to
leave to behind as excess. TransOrbital already been paid. The less they
have to haul out into orbit, the more money they make per ton. They also
do their math.
Kneeling down next to their luggage
Blade pulls her sleeping daughter from the her cozy den. Once up in Blade's
arms the sleepy child rubs her knuckles angrily at her eyes, a pouty lower
lip stuck out out as she slowly butts her sweaty little head into the crook
of her mother’s neck.
"Come on, Sweety, it’s time to go."
"Don’t want to go."
The girl whines.
"You don't want to go? You don’t want
to go out into space with us? Well, cousin Fred and I have been training
a long long time so we can go on this trip. It'd be a shame to make us
miss it just ‘cause of one sleepy little girl. Besides, you can sleep all
you want when we get up to the Terminal Station."
At this Fred almost snickers. Blade
and he have both been trained out in micro-g, they know what to expect.
But, little Rosie has never been out before. And, while children generally
acclimate quicker than adults, there’s still no way of telling how, or
for how long, the little girl will react. Fred's hand pats down at his
jumper's thigh pocket for the extra barf bags.
"Okay, Mommy." Roselene yawns as she
stretches. Then Fred sees the tiny wheels begin to spin behind the little
girl's widening blue eyes. "Can we go up to the spaceships now?"
"Almost, Sweety. First we have to
go through the final check-in gates and then carry our stuff out onto the
bus."
"Mom-mee!" Roselene says in a two-tone
sing-song. "You can’t go to outer space on a bus!" The child's
seriousness almost sends Fred off into a snort of laughter. Both girls
look up at him hard.
"Sorry." Fred fans his fingers at
her in apology. Blade turns back to her daughter.
"We’re going to take a bus out to
the Orbital Transport, Sweety." Blade sets Roselene down to straighten
the child's hair and bright blue Atlantis Corp jumper.
"The spaceship?" Her delight more
obvious as the girl continues to wake.
"Yes, the spaceship. Now." Blade pinches
Roselene’s chubby cheek. "You ready, Sweety?"
The child nods.
"Good." Her mother nods back.
Thumbing the assist button on the
baggage cart’s pivot handle Fred steers their collective belongings toward
the first immigration check-in gate.
The Edwards' Departure Complex sets
in a perfectly cylindrical robot-quarried cavern just below the Mojave's
scorched sands. Transfer buses make their way out onto the tarmac by a
long spiral road cut all the way around the chamber's outer wall. Each
bus climbs nearly one full circuit around the kilometer wide cavern before
driving out the long straight ramp leading out to the desert above.
Up till now Roselene hasn’t really
paid much attention to the boxy little busses, but now that she’s in front
of the departure gates she suddenly finds their circular progression completely
fascinating. The bright squarish blue shuttle buses trundle up and around
the great outer wall, each growing smaller and smaller as they arch up
and around the ramped roadway until disappearing one by one through a tiny
rectangular opening high in the wall above.
At a wide guarded gate declaring in
bold white letters "No Handcarts Beyond This Point" Fred stops to pull
their three lockers off the cart. Roselene’s he latches to the top of his
own before strapping his wardrobe bag to the top of the stack. Roselene’s
wardrobe Fred snaps down onto the lid of Blade’s locker while Blade folds
her own in half and straps it up across her shoulders back-pack style.
Swivel roller motion batteries built into the personal-effects lockers
-- some sort of superconducting battery/motor hybrid that Fred only vaguely
understands -- take much of the actual labor out of hauling nearly your
own weight; but moving their collective belongings through the maze of
gates and counters leading up to the loading area presents a most formidable
challenge. The passageways have all ben ramped, but humanity seems historic
blind whenever it comes to designing interfaces. Every loading ramp and
platform must be negotiated with great effort. Every crack in the floor
and ramp seam apparently designed to easily accommodate locker wheels.
Fully awake and refreshed, Roselene
scurries along ahead, Blade constantly having to call the child back to
keep her from straying. After four bureaucratic examinations of their possessions
Roselene finally rushes up to the final checkpoint counter at the shuttle
bus gate. Having observed the process several times in the past two hours
the young girl feels more than qualified to handle the proceedings.
"Extended Family Davis/DeSilva." The
small girl thrusts her mother’s secured tablet up at the young woman sitting
behind the counter. "Cabin sixteen-B-twelve-A-six. We’ve passed Identification,
Mass, Bio-Chem, and Contraband."
"So, you think your ready to board;
do you?" The pretty twentyish girl smiles down at Roselene, her eyelids
sparkled with pearl green, her hair a halo of bright red ringlets that
seem to hang softly suspended in zero-g. The young woman holds out her
hand. "Let’s see."
Roselene hands over the tablet as
Fred and her mother lug their lockers through the last set of detection
sniffers and up onto the loading ramp.
"That’s the downside of kids, isn’t
it." The girl with the bright red zero-g hair smiles as Blade yanks her
luggage to a stop. "You get to use their carry-on allotment, but they make
you haul it on yourself."
"It’s worth it." Blade draws in a
deep breath. "We’re almost there."
"You are there." The
young woman hands the secured tablet back to Blade. "Palm print at the
door then straight up and into the bus. There should still be some racks
in the back for your lockers and hooks for the wardrobes. You’re the last
ones on this shuttle so the bus leaves as soon as you secure your belongings
and buckle in. Have a good flight."
Rushing up to the closed door Roselene
slaps her palm down on the small glass plate, then dashes through as the
door hushes sideways.