Chapter 14 #2
“Confirmed,” Rowan said smoothly, and Kelli blinked at him.
She wasn’t sure what paperwork people needed for this.
Probably not much, since Inspiration owned all the Jovian moons anyway.
Couldn’t people tell she was here? She was right behind a big transparent window.
But apparently not, because the automated voice didn’t argue with Rowan.
Okay, so he was a smuggler, and he was smuggling her. That was fine. Probably.
Wait, did that mean Kelli was leaving Callisto illegally? She hadn’t told Baz for sure yet that she’d seen any crimes, but she’d told him she was leaving Callisto. Did he know it was illegal?
Had he even read her message yet?
“Automated checks confirmed complete and payment validated,” said ground control. “Vessel Wildfire, you may proceed to Launch Pad B-3.”
“Here we go,” said Rowan under his breath, and an engine thrummed to life.
Kelli tensed, but the taxiing was gentle—not much worse than riding the hyperloop.
The Wildfire rolled slowly through the hangar, into some tunnels, before emerging into a narrower and higher-ceilinged space that must have been the launch pad.
There were various clunks, rumbles, and whirs.
To the side, Kelli could see some ladders and scaffolding.
Above them, the ceiling was the same gray metal as the other parts of the hangar, but with a big, heavy hatch on top, like the blast door of a missile silo.
“Vessel Wildfire,” said ground control, “you are in position for launch and on schedule for your launch window to Io. Confirm: all safety indicators green?”
Rowan cast a last glance across the ship’s incomprehensible controls. “Confirmed.”
“Commencing air cycling. Stand by.”
There was a sort of whooshing sound from outside the ship, and then a bigger, lower clank from above them. The ceiling split and retracted, opening them up to the clear untwinkling black of the sky, with Jupiter’s wide bulk hovering above them, red and gibbous.
“You are ready for launch, Vessel Wildfire. We will count you down. T minus two minutes, twenty seconds.”
Rowan cracked his knuckles, then started to flip switches in time with the count.
Numbers flashed by on the display screens too fast for Kelli to interpret.
The rumble of the taxiing engine was joined by other sounds, bigger and deeper, rising in pitch, and a haze of smoke wisped up around them.
As Kelli clenched her jaw to keep from making a sound, Rowan glanced over with a quick, reassuring smile.
At least, he probably meant it to be reassuring.
Kelli tried not to think too hard about what was happening, how many tons of high explosives they were currently sitting on top of, and how many ways it could go wrong.
She tried not to think about fires.
“T minus ten,” said ground control. “Nine. Eight.”
Deep breaths.
There would be jostling, Kelli reminded herself sternly. There would be G-forces. There would be smoke. That was just normal. No reason to panic. But for a moment, guilty and frightened, she wanted to change her mind. She bit the inside of her cheek.
“One.”
And then the whole world exploded.
That was the only way Kelli could make sense of what she saw.
There was an awful, enormous sound and a blinding flash of light.
A huge outpouring of even more smoke. In the same instant she was thrown backward against her seat as if some enormous person had tackled her with intolerable weight.
She couldn’t make sense of the ship’s movement: there was that weight, and an awful rattling, a shaking that threw her every which way against the restraints.
Her stomach flipped over and over and over again.
The smoke cleared after a second but then everything out the window was stars, which shook as the weight and the rattling continued.
For all Kelli knew, they might be spiraling out of control.
Surely a ship that was spiraling out of control, falling back down again, wouldn’t have felt any worse than this.
She didn’t scream, but only because she remembered Rowan’s warning.
That automated system was still listening to them over the radio, and it would probably alert a human supervisor if it heard anything really weird.
She bit her tongue, harder than she meant to.
She screwed her eyes shut, but that only made her even less sure of which way was up.
She tried to take deep, slow breaths, but the air was so heavy that she could hardly breathe at all.
It would have been easier if she could have just screamed. She wished she could scream.
Jupiter swung in and out of view amid those stars, and so did a dark gray, sparkling crescent that must be Callisto itself.
Then, abruptly, the engines clanked off. Everything was suddenly quiet—except for the static of the radio and the small buzzing thrum of the life support.
Kelli was so startled that she didn’t feel any relief. The pressure and jostling had given way to a horrible swooping feeling. An emptiness in her stomach, a dizzy vertigo, like the ship was falling and falling and falling—even as the broad crescent of Callisto grew steadily smaller at their side.
She took deep breaths now, even though every breath made her think about barfing.
“Vessel Wildfire,” said ground control, “you are leaving Callisto’s orbit on your planned trajectory as scheduled. Have a pleasant journey. Disconnecting now.”
“Confirmed and disconnecting,” said Rowan, and he switched off the radio. He turned and grinned at Kelli like he’d just done the best trick, like he wanted her to tell him how cool it was. Rowan had always grinned like that when he wanted to impress her.
Kelli took a very, very deep breath.
“The radio’s off?” she whispered. It took effort to make her mouth behave properly, and her jaw shook. “I can make noise?”
“Yeah,” said Rowan.
Kelli screamed.
It went on and on. She’d imagined just doing it for a second to make her point but there was so much screaming inside her and it all came out at once.
She put her hands to the side of her head—feeling where the strands of her hair moved strangely now against her fingertips—and wordlessly screamed like a woman being eaten by a monster, gulped a deep breath only to scream it out again.
“Okay,” said Rowan, a lot more nonchalant than anyone ought to have been in the face of one of Kelli’s meltdowns. He looked only partway surprised. “Okay, fair enough. I deserved that. It can definitely be a lot your first time. Do you want your restraints off or on?”
“THERE WAS SMOKE AND FIRE AND SHAKING AND I THOUGHT WE WERE GOING TO CRASH AND DIE!” Kelly screamed. “I HATE YOU!”
Then she slumped forward in her restraints and the screams subsided into awful, racking sobs.
She’d already recovered her wits enough to feel shame.
He’d warned her about the smoke and the fire and the shaking.
She’d agreed to sit up in the cockpit. What was she complaining about?
Professionals shouldn’t act this way; she was being a baby.
Orlando wouldn’t act this way. But the tears wouldn’t stop, wrenching up through her body and out through her face as uncontrollably and painfully as the screams.
Rowan wasn’t saying I told you so, though. He wasn’t telling her to smarten up and pull herself together. Rowan had never said things like that.
“Yeah, I know,” he said. “You can let it out. It’s okay.”
Kelli wiped at her wet eyes and growled in frustration. Her vision had blurred. Something was wrong with how the tears gathered on her face, but she was crying too hard to make sense of it.
“I’d offer a hug,” said Rowan, “but I promised I wouldn’t touch you.”
“Good,” said Kelli icily.
Then she drew her hands away from her eyes, sniffling, and realized what was wrong with her face.
Her tears weren’t falling. Of course they weren’t falling; she was in zero-grav. Instead of falling they’d collected on her face through surface tension and stuck there, a big blob of salt water, wobbling around. That was why her vision had gone blurry.
This was so absurd that it shocked Kelli out of her crying jag. She pawed at her face, but the blob of water stayed there.
“Here, I’ve got something for that,” Rowan said.
With a clink, both sets of restraints retracted.
He kicked out and sailed gently away in a way that didn’t make sense to Kelli’s blurred vision.
For a second she thought he’d abandoned her; then she heard him rummaging and realized he’d just gone to his sleeping nook and opened a bag of supplies. The next second he handed her a towel.
Kelli scrubbed at her face, wondering if towels worked differently up here, but once it touched the water, it soaked the water up in the usual way. She wiped her nose, too, and then met Rowan’s eyes, amused and embarrassed.
Rowan was floating.
They’d both floated up out of their chairs, weightless.
He was upside down now relative to her, but he took hold of the back of the chair and easily righted himself.
His hair, shortish but tousled, had risen up like a black halo.
The stars outside the window shone steadily now.
Jupiter and Callisto, two great orbs reflecting each other’s shadows, hung in front of them.
Kelli hadn’t had time to think about it when they were taking off, but most of the time, like most people on Callisto, she stayed in a small space with a ceiling over her head.
Even the nice big arbor ceiling above her apartment was an opaque, white-painted dome.
She only saw the sky twice a day, while she rode the hyperloop to and from work, and she treasured that sight, the endless dark and frosted horizon with the stars shining above it.
In Basic Housing, most people saw it even less.
But the view out the Wildfire’s front window now was better than that.
The sky was so big, out here, a glittering endlessness, and they were all of a sudden so small.
Even Callisto looked small all of a sudden, and somehow precious, one little gray bead that held all the home and all the humans she’d ever known.
Kelli stared at it all.
“Oh,” she said.
His mouth quirked in triumph. “Like it?”
“I don’t know yet,” said Kelli, but she couldn’t stop staring.
“It’ll never be this bad again,” said Rowan.
“The first launch is the worst. After that, you know what to expect. Anyway, we’re on course to Io, ETA about eighteen hours.
Should be just momentum doing the work until a few hours before landing; the autopilot’ll alert me if anything weird happens before that. ”
Kelli kept staring out the window. “Do you do this all the time?”
“Yeah. I kind of enjoy the launches. You know me.”
She did. She remembered Rowan in their school days, running around restless, always seeking more sensation; she remembered herself, hiding in the leaves, always seeking less.
In retrospect she barely understood what they’d seen in each other.
Why she’d used to feel that, deep down, they were the same.
Kelli forced herself to look away from the window.
She wanted to call it looking down, but there was no down anymore; to her vertigo-addled brain, every direction felt the same.
The padded chairs seemed to sit upright now, not because they’d moved, or because any gravity pulled in that direction, but because that was how chairs were supposed to be.
The chairs were upright; the window was forward; the sleeping nook was a closet-sized space with plenty of room to stand.
The hatch leading back into the rest of the ship was forward—an alternate forward, when she looked there instead of at anything else.
Or maybe it was sideways, or an alternate down. Maybe everything was down.
“What do you think you want now?” said Rowan. “Some quiet time? Some food?”
Orlando would—
Orlando would do something clever, something charming, but Kelli was only Kelli, and she’d had enough.
“Quiet time.” She pushed forward, weightless, and clumsily pulled herself through the hatch.