The entire list of activities on Cochrane Station:
Microgravity gym class. Charles’s payback in spades, because here the offworld kids were the ones able to jump and zoom and spin and bounce without effort, reaching out to grab handholds or bounce off walls like it was second nature. We might have spent the last six months on Earth in too much gravity, but the instincts came back in moments. We had been like carp out of water, gasping for breath, now tossed back into our watery homes, and we celebrated. On the other hand, the Earth kids flailed like mindless blobs set loose in space. I couldn’t really laugh, since the idea of the low-g practice wasn’t to make anybody an expert—it was to make sure people didn’t hurt themselves and everybody around them. Microgravity gym was like remedial PE for them. A tiny revenge.
Station-operations tour: Everything you needed to know to operate a space station, which was pretty much exactly what you needed to operate a Martian colony, so once again we were ahead. Life support, maneuvering thrusters to maintain spin and orbit, communications systems, daily operations. The kind of thing Mom did every day. It was like being home again.
Planetary-charting workshop. We used the telescopes in one of the station’s observation lounges to photograph and then map various features of Earth’s surface. I found Manhattan, a built-up gray splotch jutting into a twisting corner of water. It looked so innocuous from 160 kilometers up.
Introductory hydroponics and low-gravity health and nutrition. Which was, again, mainly for the Earth kids because it was second nature to those of us who grew up with it all. I still had to pay attention and take the tests. Another hoop to jump through.
Through just about all of it, us station and colony kids finally, finally took the lead. I was too happy to be functional again to gloat. If they’d just move Galileo Academy to a space station instead of insisting that it had be on Earth, I might actually enjoy it.
Except, weirdly, the pang of homesickness hit even harder than it had on Earth, because the station felt so much like home. But however much a station might have been like a colony, it wasn’t, and I realized that what I really wanted to see was a rocky brown landscape stretching away outside a view port. Wasn’t going to happen anytime soon. Moving on.
After three days of activities came the second leg of the trip, to Collins City. I was anxious to bursting. Not about the trip, but about making that all-important request.
We were eating breakfast in the student bunk area we’d been staying in. Stanton and several other instructors were supervising—probably because it would be especially embarrassing if I decided to go exploring on my own here. I hurrie
d to finish eating, cleaned up my things, and approached her. Carefully, deferentially, hands clasped behind my back, gaze downcast. It was just me, harmless little student type. She watched me like she might an approaching missile. I only got as close as I needed for her to hear me talk, slightly softer than normal.
“Ms. Stanton,” I said as carefully and politely as I could. “May I make a request? A small request.” I winced. I had to strike a balance between making sure I was serious, but that it wasn’t a big deal. Who was I kidding? She’d know exactly how important this was to me. She knew everything.
“Yes, Newton?”
“I’m deeply, very interested in the piloting and operations of M-drive interplanetary craft, and so I would like to observe the M-drive jump in the flight operations cabin, if I might be able to do so without being in the way, if at all possible. Please.” Calm and quiet, that was me.
She raised a brow, studied me. This was possibly the most polite I’d ever been in my entire life, please let her not slam me for it. I had a sudden, terrible thought: she could leave me on the station. She could keep me off the lunar half of the trip just out of spite. Had I made a horrible mistake? I wanted to scream, but I just stood there wringing my hands behind my back and clenching my teeth so I wouldn’t say anything stupid.
Finally, Stanton said, “I’ll ask the captain. It will be her decision.”
“Thank you, Ms. Stanton. Thank you for asking.” At least I’d tried. I couldn’t get down on myself for not trying.
She didn’t say anything. Just frowned.
“You shouldn’t even engage with her,” Charles said, sidling up to me as we walked to the docks.
“Why, because it’s not playing the game right? I don’t care about the game, I want what I want and if I have to ask for it myself, that’s fine, because no one else will. I’m not going to go around second-guessing myself all the time.”
He didn’t have a zinger for that.
* * *
The M-drive jump was short, seeing as how we only had some half a million kilometers to go, instead of hundreds of millions. Just a hop, really. Less exciting than a truly interplanetary leap, but I’d take what I could get. Especially since Stanton said yes. I got to sit in the flight cabin for the entire jump maneuver.
We were boarding when she pulled me aside, calling me to the front of the passenger aisle. “Ms. Newton, will you come up here please?”
Nearby students gave me that look, wondering what I’d done wrong and hanging back to see how much trouble I was in. I knew I hadn’t done anything wrong, I just knew it. At least, I hadn’t in the last fifty hours or so. “Yes, ma’am?”
She looked down her nose, and I couldn’t tell from her expression whether she was praising me or dressing me down. “You’ll be allowed to observe flight operations on the bridge, but you must remain still and quiet, and I want a thorough written report of the experience as part of your classwork. Understood?”
The breath went out of me, but I managed to squeak, “Yes, ma’am.”
Captain Arroz was obviously from Earth, short and stout, with olive skin and dark hair. And she was kind, showing me a little jump seat in the back where I could sit out of the way. She introduced me to her navigator, Lieutenant Nguyen, and asked if I had any questions. I had too many. I just wanted to see it all work. This was a smaller ship, so the bridge really was just a cabin, with two seats for the pilot and navigator, who doubled as engineer for the trip. The controls and displays were all scaled down, but I still recognized a lot of it. I stayed very quiet and didn’t bother them with questions.
Powering under the M-drive felt much smoother and quieter than the conventional engine. There weren’t vibrations through the hull, there wasn’t the distant roar of thrust. It all seemed perfectly calm. Perfectly perfect. The ship was hurtling through folded space—speed was irrelevant, but I imagined zipping across tens of thousands of kilometers in seconds. The crew managed the ship without any fuss. Lights beeped, status reports scrolled across screens. Captain Arroz would ask for an update using some verbal shorthand of just a couple of words, and Nguyen replied, again with just a couple of words. They had been doing this a long time and were comfortable here. I wondered if I’d ever get that comfortable in a flight cabin and not too excited for words. About halfway through the M-drive jump, Captain Arroz leaned over the navigator’s station and they had a quiet conversation that involved pointing at the screen, like something was wrong, but they didn’t speak loudly enough for me to find out what. They were very calm about it. As if something going wrong was just part of the routine. I wondered if that came from training, or if that was just their nature—if you had to be super calm to be on a ship’s crew. That was something I could probably work on.
Nothing was wrong, it turned out. This had all been routine.
I sat quietly, hardly moved at all, and tried to take it all in. I was desperate to remember everything so I could replicate it when I finally got into training. Be calm, be prepared, be focused. How wonderful to feel like I was part of it, even if just for an hour or two.