Date Point 10y8m1w5d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Xiù Chang
“Scared?”
“Hell yeah.”
“Same.”
“We’ve got this.” Allison put her arms around Xiù’s and Julian’s shoulders and pulled them in. “The Group sent up ten ships before us, and we’ve trained way longer and harder than they did.”
“Easy for you to say,” Julian joked. “You’re not the passenger.”
He wasn’t being entirely fair on himself. Julian actually wore several hats during flight, foremost of which were keeping up a running commentary for the BGEV program’s control room and subtly support the pilot and the engineer by reading through their checklists and checking that everything was being done properly. They’d already finished battening down while the ship was towed out onto the asphalt in front of a semicircle of busy news crews.
“We’ve got this,” Xiù echoed, nodding. “We know our jobs.”
Allison nodded. “Let’s give ‘em a show!”
They touched foreheads, then broke and put on their helmets. Drew Cavendish’s warning about heat aside, their planetary excursion suits were still an appropriate backup for the trip to orbit—if anything did go wrong, wearing a pressure suit would at least buy them time to get to the escape pods.
Xiù’s modified helmet had room in the back for her hair to fit neatly, if she wore it in a high bun. She didn’t mind at all—that little concession to personal vanity was very much appreciated, and they checked each other’s pressure seals with careful dilligence, exchanged one last three-way fist bump and retreated into their respective workstations.
The journalists and spectators became much more animated when Xiù’s chair slid and rotated into position behind the flight controls, leaving her quite visible in the pilot’s blister. She raised a hand to acknowledge them, then went to work.
”Okay,” Julian called from the lab. ”Pre-startup sequence, engineering diagnostic.”
”Green across the board,” Allison replied.
”Flight diagnostic”
“Also green,” Xiù agreed, running a practiced eye across the instruments. She’d run this sequence a hundred times in the simulator, and three times with the actual ship in the past week. The double-safe diagnostic accounted for ninety-nine percent of the actual business of booting the ship up and preparing it to fly. Her panels lit up and everything quickly settled into nominal territory. Misfit was young, healthy, and raring to go.
”Okay, manual engineering checks…“ Julian continued. She listened as he and Allison worked through the ten items that definitively confirmed that the fusion reactor, the WiTChES array, the two capacitor banks, the power control systems, life support, gravity, the engines, the forcefield emitters and the ship’s computers were all functioning properly.
Then it was her turn.
”Okay, Xiù…Ping NEO-tracking.”
The navigational database provided by NASA informed her that nothing dangerous was lurking in their planned orbit. “Green.”
“EACS power to idle.”
Exo-Atmospheric Control System. Dozens of small kinetic thrusters dotted all over the hull. There was a whine as their internal capacitors drew from the main bank in engineering. “Check.”
“SUBLIME DED power to idle.”
Xiù grinned as she stroked that particular control. Misfit purred in the deep, deep contrabass as the four main kinetic engines spun up. A feeling of power thrummed around her and danced under her fingers. “Check!”
“Power to ISDE.”
“…Check.” Inertial Stabilization wasn’t strictly necessary today, as they weren’t going to be doing anything in a remotely dangerous G-force range, but it would still make for a smoother and more comfortable ride.
”Power to ESFS”
“Check…” To either side of her, she knew, wings of invisible force had just solidified out of what was otherwise nothing, giving the lumpen ship a sleek aerodynamic lift profile.
”Limited Alcubierre Distortion generator to standby.”
Not that they needed the warp drive today, but Xiù powered it up anyway. “…Check.”
”ESFALS to equilibrium…”
“…Check.” The feeling of power waiting to spring into the sky intensified as the Electro-Static Field Assisted Landing System took up the strain of Misfit’s weight, preparing to lift her aloft in preparation for atmospheric flight.
”Charge ERB-2 generator.”
The jump drive. Useless without power and the encrypted algorithms to let it connect to a waiting beacon. Power, however, was easy. They had plenty of power.
“Check.”
”ESARB to full power.”
Yeah, didn’t want to forget that one. If there was a leak somewhere in the hull, ESARB was supposed to keep the air in.
“Check.”
“EARS field test fire.”
A yellow halo crackled around Misfit’s nose and belly as Xiù briefly turned on the Exo-Atmospheric Reentry Shield. “Working!”
”That’s all check for me,” Julian said.
“And for me,” Xiù agreed. She clapped her gloved hands together and took a deep breath. This was the bit that had given her so many nerves during training.
She tuned into ATIS and listened, grateful for the scratchpad tablet they’d found room for above her to her right and the stylus that she had, on Rylee Jackson’s kind advice, duct-taped to her glove. As predicted, it was a beautiful clear morning.
She switched to departure clearance and waited for a lull in the chatter of civilian airliners and light aircraft in her volume, biding her time and letting her nerves fade.
“Good morning Omaha clearance, Byron Echo-Victor-One-One Heavy.”
There was a seemingly interminable wait before a calm, almost bored-sounding voice got back to her.
”Byron, say again please.”
“Yes sir, that’s Byron Echo-Victor-One-One Heavy on the ground at private facility Bravo Triple-Alpha Foxtrot to Low Earth Orbit.” She’d rehearsed those words uncountable dozens of times.
“And you’re a, uh… a spaceship?”
Xiù grinned to herself. After months of training with people whose voices had betrayed not the faintest hint of surprise or emotion, it was good to hear the slight stumble in a real air traffic controller’s voice as he realized just what he was handling. “Spaceship heavy,” she confirmed.
”Your clearance is on request, I’ll be right back.”
She tapped the send twice to acknowledge his message then sat and drummed her fingers on her knees as she waited, reflecting that Earth and Cimbrean were literally the only planets on their itinerary where she would have to go through all this. Or so she hoped.
”Byron Echo-Victor-One-One Heavy, Omaha Clearance. You are cleared out of the class Charlie airspace on a heading of zero-six-zero…”
She listened and recorded everything she was told, read them back, got her confirmation and was one step closer to getting off the ground. Over the next five minutes she spoke to two other controllers and it was only once she was sitting there ready to put in the final call that she realized how easy she’d found it. All the hard training and education, all the tricky scenarios she’d stressed through and stressed over and in the end…
In the end they practically cleared the board for her. She listened with mounting amusement as ATC explained to dozens of bemused pilots in the vicinity that they were making room for a ’spaceship heavy en route to LEO’ and put them all in a holding pattern that gave her a wide berth.
Hopefully that was a commentary on the unusual nature of her vehicle, rather than on her inexperience as a pilot.
“Okay. We’re ready to rock,” she called internally.
”Let’s do it.” Allison had a fierce grin in her voice.
Julian, as ever, was quieter: ”Take it away.”
Xiù nodded to herself and made the call. “And Eppley tower, Byron Echo-Victor-One-One Heavy ready to go.”
”Byron Echo-Victor-One-One Heavy, clear for takeoff.”
“EV-One-One clear for takeoff, thank you tower.”
Congratulating herself on a job well done, she diverted power to ESFALS and the kinetics, and Misfit picked herself up off the deck with balletic grace. She yawed round to the heading given her, climbed up to five hundred feet, and decided that she couldn’t resist a little showing off within the rules she’d been given.
She punched to full forward power in one smooth movement and quietly saluted the ESFS and ISDE as they sprang forward at a violent ten Gs without feeling so much as a jolt.
She heard Allison whoop somewhere behind her.
Once off the ground, Misfit did a fairly fine job of flying herself. All Xiù had to do really was tell her where to go and how quickly. They were out of the airspace in minutes and from that point, as they banked over a wide arc of North America until they were aimed toward their final orbit, it was a delicately controlled balancing act as the kinetics pushed them ever faster and higher while the field flight surfaces shrank and streamlined ever narrower but further and further out behind them to generate the huge lift they needed from ever more tenuous atmosphere. Their ground speed ceased to be a comprehensible number, but when she looked down between her feet, she found that she could already see the west coast.
She followed its contours with her eye, leaning forward to get the right angle, looking for the familiar crenellations of… there.
“…Hey, guys?” she called.
”Yeah?” Julian replied.
“I can see my house.”
There was a snorting noise and a feminine chuckle on the line. “Well, you know what I can see from here?” Allison asked.
“Do tell.”
“Green, green and more green. She’s running like a dream, guys.”
”They’re cheering like crazy back at mission control,” Julian added. ”You should hear it.”
Misfit beeped for Xiù’s attention and requested her permission to make the final boost into orbit. Unadulterated solar energy was sleeting into her forcefields, which charged the capacitors even as they protected the three of them from the radiation. They were now so high that the odd stray nitrogen molecule was offering no lift at all, and without that boost the Earth’s gravity would pull them steadily back down on a ballistic trajectory that would drop them… somewhere in Africa, according to a quick glance at the map.
She authorized the boost. Misfit angled herself upwards and poured on the power to her engines, adding Delta-V until she was happy that the ship was successfully hauling itself up the gravity well.
At this point, Xiù’s presence on the flight deck was the next best thing to unnecessary. Misfit largely navigated herself using proprietary technology reverse-engineered from alien systems. The mission called for her to stay where she was until they were safely in their orbit just in case, but now that they were up her job quickly became a case of watching out for sudden alarms.
There were none.
She sat and meditated with nothing but the stars for company for nearly an hour before Julian finally called from the lab. ”Okay, that’s it. Clara just gave us the go-ahead to relax.”
“About damn time.” Allison commented, as Xiù entered a few simple commands to make the ship roll and yaw by about eighty degrees each, so that the cupola in the hab would be looking down on Earth’s surface. She reached down to her side and pulled the release that deposited her into the prep room. Allison was just coming out of the door in front of her.
Allison gave her a wry look. “I have the worst itch,” she complained.
Julian emerged from the Lab. “So that’s it! We’re in space again.”
“Feels like progress alright,” Allison agreed. She popped the door to the hab and glanced inside. “Yup. Pressurized.”
“Helmets off?”
“Helmets off.”
Xiù sighed happily, shook her head and then scratched at the back of her neck as soon as the helmet was off. They helped each other out of their excursion suits and racked them up properly in their lockers. None of them bothered with putting on their sweats and t-shirt, seeing as they’d be back in those suits in twenty hours’ time preparing for the descent.
Besides: there was the view to consider.
Xiù’s maneuver had positioned the Earth perfectly. It filled a little less than half the cupola window when standing in the hab doorway, and when they got closer the full majesty of Mother Gaia really got her chance to smack them all in the face.
It was funny to reflect that, despite that all three of them had had their most defining life experiences in space, not one of them had ever seen the Earth from orbit before. They gathered round and, reverently, they drank it in.
Xiù was the first to say anything.
”…Wow…”
Allison wiped away an unexpected tear. “Yeah. I…God, it’s beautiful.”
”…I hope everybody gets to see this, someday.” Julian mused. He put a hand on the window, and smiled.
“Only a few people have…” Xiù agreed.
They stood there and watched the Earth turn below them for several long minutes, watched the sun drop low on the pronounced curve of the horizon, marvelled at the ruddy twilight band of the terminator, and gazed down at the dim stains of human light that bedazzled every continent.
It was Allison who finally broke the religious silence with a very… a very Allison comment. “Hmm. I wonder if any of them had sex?” she asked. “Y’know… joined the hundred-mile-high club?”
Julian cleared his throat. “Uh…hmm. None of them, probably.”
She aimed a sly grin at him. “None?”
He matched it. “Probably not…”
“So…” Xiù licked her lips nervously. “What you’re saying is…We could be the first.”
Allison laughed and pantomimed scandal. “But Xiù! The whole world’s watching!”
Julian chuckled thoughtfully and stared out the window for a moment longer before backing away from it. He took their hands and drew them both gently in the direction of their new fold-out bed.
“Let them watch,” he said.
Date Point 10y8m1w5d AV
Byron Group Exploration Program mission control, Omaha, Nebraska, USA, Earth
Doctor Clara Brown
If Clara had a vice, it was shipping her friends. When they came pre-shipped… well, so much the better.
When three pre-shipped friends had a large bed, in orbit, high above the Earth with an opportunity to boldly come where no-one had come before…
She was monitoring Misfit’s flight telemetry. Right now, one hundred percent of the life support load was in the hab module, which was reporting O2 consumption levels well above baseline. Given the need to record anomalous results in the log during the test flight, she had inserted a preliminary systems log entry of “PT session” for Allison to rubber-stamp when she got the chance.
She was her chewing on her pen and idly fantasizing about what she suspected—or at least hoped—was going on up there when Mr. Jenkins stopped by her work station.
“No contact yet?” he asked.
“It’s been about fifteen minutes,” she replied. “So… could be soon, maybe?”
“I’d give it another twenty. I’m sure it’s a, uh… big occasion for them.”
Clara stifled a giggle. “True. They must be feeling very, ah… emotional right now.”
“Well, they’re young.” Jenkins nodded sagely.
“Mm. And fit.”
“Lucky fuckers.”
Clara giggled outright this time. “…My thoughts exactly,” she agreed.
Date Point 10y8m1w5d AV
BGEV-11 Misfit, Low Earth Orbit, Sol
Xiù Chang
It was all over but for the heavy breathing, the laughter, and the cuddling. Nobody neglected, no losers. Just three lovers’ worth of warm sweat-slick limbs, disheveled hair and a deep cleansing breath that sent one last ghostly tremor of pleasure through Xiù’s entire body which she swallowed down and closed her eyes to regain herself as Julian, his fingers still interlaced with hers, rolled off her to lie on his back beside her with his chest heaving.
He’d earned a rest.
Allison cuddled up to her, ran an erotic eye up and down the length of her and swirled a finger lazily across Xiù’s chest from one breast to the other. “So?” she asked, grinning like a ten-canary cat.
Xiù tried to force her eyelids not to flutter from the stimulation. She was so sensitive right now that even the gentle brush of that fingertip was enough to send jolts of pleasure dancing through her. “Uh…Wuh?”
“So…how was your first time?”
Xiù levered herself up on her elbows and looked down the length of her own nude body, aware of some stinging sensations and fatigue that she hadn’t anticipated but which felt totally natural and even satisfying in their way.
Through the cupola window, the Earth’s daylight side gave her a stunning view over the Mediterranean, and her face split into a broad grin as the perfect reply presented itself.
“It was out of this world,” she said.
Julian groaned and found the renewed energy to swat at her with a pillow. Allison joined in, which led to tickling, giggling, shrieking, wrestling, and from there to kisses and heavy breathing, and from there…
The second time was even better.