Numina code, p.14
Numina Code, page 14
“Everybody strap in,” Skoro said. “First-stage acceleration is the worst. It’ll even out after we get to cruising speed.
“How long to Numina?” Argo asked, pulling himself into a seat harness.
“Three hours. And that’s if I don’t have to dodge any patrols along the way.”
As they left Aethera, Skoro was characteristically chatty.
“Aethera’s a private island, essentially,” he was telling them, for no obvious reason at all. “No real government. Things are managed mostly through the terms and conditions in our docking contracts. You lose that, you can’t operate up here. I’ve heard the Saudis are working on another hub, trying to have that online within the decade, so maybe that’ll change things. I kind of hope not.”
“Why?”
“It’s a good system. Keeps everybody honest. Keeps everybody healthy. Living up here for extended periods of time can kill you, or at least, that’s what the space agencies think. Aethera enforces surface rotations. Gotta go back down every six months for at least three more months.”
“Do you do that?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“How do you pay the bills on this thing?”
Skoro checked something on one of his screens, then adjusted their flight path. “I’ve got a co-owner in this little venture. Lewis Kim. Did you know him, Argo? No? Well, he’s another Class of ’24 guy. He owns forty-five percent and flies half the year, I own forty-five percent and fly the other half. We’ve got a condo down in Florida that we share. Works out well, having a roommate you never have to see.”
“Who owns the last ten percent?”
“Mags,” he said, looking over at the rack. “You deserve something for all your hard work, eh, girl?”
Argo got a string of contentment emojis, but nothing more. Maybe Daelia knew what was going on with this Mags. Argo had never dealt with an elephas-class before.
“See?”
“So nothing back home?” Daelia asked.
“I don’t know about that. The condo’s pretty nice.”
Argo leaned in. “Weren’t you dating, oh, what was her name, Cadet Taylor?”
“Sarah?” A ghost of a smile crept across Skoro’s face. “Yeah, yeah. Yeah, she was…”
“Didn’t work out?”
“What?” Skoro’s smile fell. “Oh, right. We tried to work a joint spouse assignment, you know how that goes. Couldn’t get us at the same base. I got Misawa in Japan, she got Osan.”
“Oh,” Argo said.
“What do you mean?” Daelia asked.
“Osan, South Korea,” Argo said. “In 2026.”
The abiota-brokered ceasefire had stopped the war before things got insane, but for a few places, even five days had been too late. South Korea was one of those. Osan Air Base had been wiped out entirely. Day one.
Daelia clearly realized she’d stepped in it. “I, shit, I didn’t mean…”
“It’s okay,” Skoro said lightly. That was something Argo remembered about him. Even when screaming, he’d never really been serious. But there was bitterness in what he was saying now. Anger. “It was almost a decade ago. Everyone back home’s moved on, forgotten about it. Like it never happened, right? Everything’s fine.”
Abiota, Magellan offered. Partnership now.
“That’s right. Or it was worth it, for this glorious future we all have now together.” Skoro snorted. “I like it up here. No bullshit. And the money’s damn good. Thank you, Emily,” he added, nodding to the kugu in the back. The puppet body was strapped into a wall cradle as padded as the seats Daelia and Argo were in.
The kugu made a grumbling noise. A scene of knights, fleeing on horseback, popped up in Daelia’s monocle.
“There is not going to be anything to kill over there,” she said.
“You sure?” Emily asked and bared her projected teeth.
“Okay, almost clear of the main shipping lanes,” Skoro said. “Hold on to your butts. We’re going to pull a few gees for a little while.”
“Skoro,” Argo asked, “refresh my memory. What AFSC did you get?”
He grinned at them. “Civil Engineering,” he said, and shoved the throttle forward.
A little while was an understatement.
For ten minutes, the spacecraft accelerated.
Here, Argo could tell, was where Magellan earned her ten percent. Abiota reaction time was usually far faster than human, and it was she who made all the subtle, necessary corrections to their flight path or velocity. In one, she decelerated and twisted so hard that all of them were thrown forward into their harnesses. Daelia groaned. Argo gritted his teeth and tried to remember his breathing patterns. It had been a long time since he’d had to do any in-aircraft piloting, and even with that, they hadn’t spent much time in the single-engine jet trainer.
“Whoopsie,” Skoro wheezed, amusement under the strain. His hand was shaking on the controls. “Okay, flight vector looks good. Mags?”
Confirm.
“Cutting thrust now.” He pulled back on the throttle. The gee force faded; weightlessness resumed. Argo’s chest no longer felt like it was going to collapse in on itself. Skoro took a deep breath. “Okay, relative velocity holding at, oh, just under 370 miles per hour.” He flipped a few more switches on his control panel. “Switching to course-correction thrusters only. Mags, you got it?”
I have the stick, came the confirmation.
“Seems slow.”
“Yeah, we’re actually going about 17,520 miles per hour right now. But that hurts the brain. What really matters is our speed in relation to the speed of our target. We’ll have to do this same thing again, just decelerate, once we get closer. But you have to remember, the Archipelago is huge. Like, fifty to seventy miles high, about a thousand miles long. And Numina’s about as isolated as it gets.”
“Oh,” Argo said, considering that. “That’s bigger than I would have guessed.”
“Yeah, everything’s very spread out. Has to be, for safety reasons. Takes a little getting used to,” Skoro agreed, and looked behind him. “What did you think about that, MQ-9 lady?”
Emily was still trying to disentangle the kugu from the harness. “Interesting.”
“‘Interesting’ certainly is a word for it,” Daelia grumbled, holding her stomach. “Is there a, uhh…”
Skoro pulled a bag out from behind his seat. “Toilet’s just outside the cockpit, to the left. Don’t puke in my ship, please.”
“Right,” she said, and tried to get out of her seat. She didn’t make it.
“I love those bags,” Skoro observed as Daelia buried her face in the bag, heaving. “Saved me with passengers lots of times.”
Daelia shot Skoro a nasty look. It reminded Argo of the time when his mom had picked their cat up from the vet after a tooth extraction. The old girl had been dopey from the anesthesia, unable to walk straight, and spent the rest of the afternoon glaring at them all from under the coffee table.
She managed to get herself out of her seat though, heading for the door.
“Doesn’t look all that different,” Argo said, trying to break the moment.
“Sure. Everything up here is based off terrestrial flight controls. It’s kind of a debate right now, when we’re going to start designing systems that are optimized for this environment, but especially with Mags here, this gets the job done. Important thing to remember is—”
Argo let Skoro talk, not really paying attention. It had all seemed so simple back on the ground. Find Aiden, figure out what the hell was going on, get the kid home. Simple. But this, this was big. Complicated. Too many moving parts.
Magellan’s Bird was flying across the underside of the Archipelago, belly oriented out toward space. Earth, therefore, hung overhead, filling the cockpit’s small windows and most of the monitors, feeding imagery from external cameras. Argo watched the planet for a while, just looking at it. And then a thought hit him.
“Have you seen the Unity fleet, Skoro?”
“What? No. Personally? No. Just the imagery that’s been disseminated.”
“Nothing? How have they been getting all that expo stuff over?”
“There’s a dedicated bay for that, and it’s a no-fly order when one of their shuttles is coming in.”
“But you can see the thing from Aethera.”
“The tourist areas? Yeah. That’s a magnified image that Eos is disseminating. For the tourists specifically. The actual fleet’s got a hundred-mile cordon around it, enforced by drone.”
“Space Force?”
“No, Aethera’s got their own fleet.” Skoro shrugged. “Like I said, they’re kind of the law up here.”
“So nobody’s seen it, except through a computer screen?”
Skoro rested an elbow on the back on his seat, glancing over at Magellan’s rack. “What are you getting at?”
Argo wasn’t sure. He was saved, however, by a klaxon that went off. Skoro’s HUD lit up.
“Shit,” he said, and turned back around in his seat, throwing switches.
“What’s up?” Argo asked.
“Proximity alarm. Security drones.”
“They abiota?”
“Unfortunately,” Skoro replied, his levity fading now. “Wake up, Mags. Time to spin some bullshit.”
“What do we do?” Argo asked.
“Go to the head, get Daelia in there with you, and shut the door. Don’t talk, don’t transmit. Monocles off,” Skoro said. “I’ll come get you when it’s safe to come out.”
The space was tight, cramped, awkward. There was barely enough room for one person in here, let alone two. But after a few seconds of twisting around—which resulted in Argo having to hold himself up over the waste cup’s sanitization cradle—they managed to fit. It wouldn’t have ever worked in gravity, but the weightlessness added to the room’s exploitable space.
Argo pulled a small notepad out of a back pocket. Comfortable? he wrote.
She rolled her eyes and gestured for it. She scribbled something quickly, then held it up. At least I’m not sitting on the toilet.
He smiled and took his pad back. On a whim, he flipped the page, drawing a little tic-tac-toe board, and handed it back to her.
She gave him a bemused look, but drew a circle, dead center.
A classic mistake, he wanted to tell her, but took it back and placed his own X.
Time stretched out. They filled a dozen pages with boards.
But finally, Skoro came to get them.
“You’re damn lucky there was a human on the other end of those drones,” he said as Daelia and Argo tumbled back out into the small corridor. “I was able to have a nice chat.”
“What’d you tell them?”
“That I was doing a run out to one of the unmanned Russian stations and wouldn’t they cut me some slack?” Skoro, holding on to a bulkhead to steady himself, looked tired. Argo suspected the conversation had been more intense.
“Can’t they verify that?”
“Probably, but the Russians are cagey as fuck and typically don’t tell Aethera anything. It’s a known problem.” He shrugged. “It’s the excuse we all use, and the excuse Aethera Void Control tends to accept.” Skoro turned to Argo. “I’ll need an extra thousand when we get back.”
“For what?”
“Bribe,” he said flatly. “The Russians are typically cool with us piggybacking on their silence, but it helps to pay them off.”
“Why the bathroom?” Daelia asked.
“Not all the patrol drones have sophisticated sensors, but the ones that do mostly read thermal energy. The position of that room, along with the waste-holding tank, tends to confuse those scans, for whatever reason. Big hot space in the ship. An additional two people above my normal crew complement would have been suspicious.” He let go of the bulkhead, pulling himself back toward the cockpit now. “Come on. We’re going to have to start decelerating in a few minutes. Sucks less than the acceleration but you’re still going to want to strap in.”
“You don’t dump the waste?” Daelia asked, following.
“No, no. Aethera pays for it.”
“Water reclamation?” Argo asked.
“No, they pull enough of that out of the asteroids up here. Water’s as expensive as iron to extract but easier to refine.” He swung around the corner and into the cockpit. One easy push and he was grinding back into his chair. “Real issue’s fertilizer. They process it down, sanitize it, and use it for the plants.”
Daelia looked a little sick again.
“Did she shut down or disconnect or something?” Argo asked her pointedly, gesturing to Emily’s borrowed kugu as he took his own seat.
She paused, checking an indicator panel on the kugu’s chest. “No,” she said. “Signal’s still holding strong. I think she stepped off for a moment. Probably talking to somebody back at base.”
“Hey, Argo,” Skoro asked, thumbing through a checklist binder he had Velcroed to the panel in front of him, “speaking of bases, you hear about that shit with the Storm Gryphons at an air show a few weeks back?”
Argo ignored Daelia’s look. Tightened his straps. “Rings a bell.”
17
Daelia’s first thought was that Numina was tiny. A speck of reflected light, barely bigger than the stars beyond.
“It only looks that way because we’re so far away still,” Skoro said when she asked him about it. “You know how fast we’re going, right?” And he pointed to one of the gauges on his dash. Everything was mechanical, little cylinders printed with numbers that fretted and whined in their housings as they marked the spaceship’s deceleration.
“I wouldn’t have guessed that,” she admitted.
“It’s a terminology thing. You hear the word ‘archipelago’ and you assume it’s some tightly bunched network of asteroids and stations or whatever. But everything’s really spread out. Smaller than you think, too.” Skoro shrugged. “Technically, nothing up here is supposed to be bigger than a quarter-mile in diameter.”
“There’s a treaty about that, right?”
“Yup. Honestly though, even something a quarter-mile wide could probably wipe out all life on Earth if it deorbited. Guess you have to have some kind of limit on things, though. The damn Chinese would probably try to haul one of the big boys in if they could. It would fuck with the moon, probably.”
“I hear Numina’s a lot bigger than that.”
“Yeah, almost three miles long. The excuse I’ve heard is that it looked smaller when Gravipause went out to capture it, but who knows? Something like eighty billion sunk into getting out there, they weren’t exactly going to leave it over a technicality like size.”
Daelia leaned forward. “This is the first one they dragged in, right?”
“Aethera was first, but that was more proof of concept than anything else. That’s C-type, not much useable metal in it. Good for water and fuel production, not much else.”
“Lower density, right?” Argo asked.
“Yeah, less of a perceived risk, I suppose. But I don’t think it would really matter if somebody decided to throw it into the atmosphere.” Daelia’s unease at the idea must have shown on her face, because Skoro laughed. “Yeah, never thought about it, have you?”
“No,” she admitted, looking at the approaching rock with whole new eyes. “Never.”
“Well, I wouldn’t worry about it too much,” he told her. “There’s too much money to be made up here, and nobody wins if the planet gets glassed. Besides, you think the Domain Array would allow it?”
“No.”
Daelia jumped a little. It was Emily’s kugu, powering back up. “Shit, where have you been?” she asked.
“Is boring, go fly home kugu,” Emily said, and in the AR, extended one dragon head up next to Skoro’s shoulder, looking out the cockpit window. “Tiny night island, eh?”
“Not so tiny,” Argo told her.
“How we find blood-kin?”
“My brother? I’m not sure yet. We’ll need to see what conditions are like in there.”
“Yes, we will,” Skoro muttered.
Within radio range.
“Lovely, thank you, Mags,” Skoro replied, and twisted a dial on the radio panel. “Numina Control, Numina Control, this is the cargo freighter Magellan’s Bird. ETA fifteen minutes. Requesting dock assignment and gangway deployment, over.”
He waited for a moment, but there was no answer.
“What does that mean?” Argo said.
“I don’t know yet,” Skoro said. “Mags, let’s rotate radio frequencies and try again.”
Agreed.
For the next ten minutes, Skoro cycled through every radio frequency he could, changing up the message slightly, hoping for a response. But now, slowing to what he referred to as docking velocity and with the asteroid’s craggy surface looming large in the cockpit windows, there was still no answer.
The approach had revealed an asteroid station with far less finesse than Aethera. Unlike Aethera, Numina was apparently metal-heavy; its regolith was darker, and big splits in its surface revealed plains of what looked like lava. There, Skoro explained, was where the iron-rich interior had boiled up to meet the cold vacuum, back in the days when everything was forming, hot from the kinetic force of its creation.
The livable region of the station itself was a tin can embedded in a dusty plain. Roughly cylindrical, albeit more oblong than round, the facility was unmistakably man-made. Judging by the line of windows set into the blunt end, facing out into space, it was organized inside in even floors, maybe six or seven stories tall at the widest point.
Below that was a bay, identical to the ones at Aethera that they’d left that morning. These were dark though, unlit.
“The start of every horror movie ever,” Skoro muttered, and tapped the rack. “Mags, hold up. Let’s look.”
One last set of thrusters fired, and they seemed to stop, hovering right there, facing the station’s blunt end.
“What is it?” Argo asked.
“I can’t see any damage,” Skoro said. “The windows look intact, there’s none of the big hull bursts I’d associate with explosive decompression, nothing.”
