Escape velocity, p.1
Escape Velocity, page 1
Contents
Also by Victor Manibo
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
The Height of Luxury
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
The Martian Emigration and Resettlement Index of Traits (MERIT) System
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Terraforming Success Promises to Bring More to Mars Sooner
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Escape Velocity
Also by Victor Manibo
The Sleepless
Copyright
Content notice: Escape Velocity contains depictions of/allusions to: ableism, alcohol use, classism, death, drug use, eugenics, genetic discrimination, gun use, murder, physical violence, queerphobia, racism, sexism, transmisogyny.
EREWHON BOOKS are published by:
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Copyright © 2024 by Victor Manibo
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This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
ISBN 978-1-64566-084-2 (hardcover)
First Erewhon hardcover printing: June 2024
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Control Number: 2023944509
Electronic edition: ISBN 978-1-64566-085-9 (ebook)
Edited by Sarah T. Guan
Cover design by Samira Iravani
Interior design by Kelsy Thompson
Author photograph by Sean Collishaw
Dedication
To my mother, Ramona
Epigraph
But outer Space,
At least this far,
For all the fuss
Of the populace
Stays more popular
Than populous
—“But Outer Space,” Robert Frost
Chapter 1
Schrödinger’s Spaceman
The stars blurred into curved lines of silver, crisscrossing the spaceman’s field of vision as he tumbled and spun. He flailed his arms and legs, his grasp searching for something, anything to arrest his motion. Which way is up, Henry Gallagher asked himself. There was no “up” in space, but when one is in a free fall, rationality takes a dive as well.
He awoke in that state, shaken by a floating piece of debris. A rock, or more possibly a torn-off hunk of satellite. The loud thud to the back of his helmet roused him from unconsciousness just as much as the spinning that immediately followed. Soon enough, his movement had slowed to what felt like stillness, his body having found its own orbit.
“Comms,” Henry called out weakly. The inner screen of his helmet came to life with icons and graphs.
“Find Altaire,” he stated. Even as his screen zoomed in on the station, he could barely see it. Space Habitat Altaire floated far beyond him, at the edge of the Earth’s horizon where much of Asia slowly disappeared from view.
The screen flashed a directional arrow and a number too big for him to comprehend.
“Holy fuck,” he muttered under his breath. “How did I get here?”
He got no response; apparently, the smart suits weren’t as smart as he’d been promised. All it told him was that it was Saturday, October 10, 2089. 5:53 p.m. station time.
He pulled up his vitals, which showed his oxygen saturation, his pulse and breathing rate, his blood pressure. All stable, all things considered. Most importantly, his tank had enough O2 for another three hours and change.
Henry knew that the Altaire orbited the globe about eighteen times in the span of a day, and he assured himself with this fact. The station would circle back around to where he was well before he ran out of air. He checked that his signal beacon was still transmitting, then pulled up his coordinates to see when this flyby would occur.
The display told him that he was 1,400 kilometers above sea level, on an orbit well below the Altaire’s. The station could float directly above him and he would still be too far to establish comm range.
Blind panic began to set in, but all was not lost. Henry reached for the control arms of his jetpack. All he needed to do was propel himself toward the Altaire’s orbit, close enough for its scanners to pick up his signal beacon. Cheered by the prospect of rescue, he held on and pressed the buttons on the jetpack controls, only to be deflated by the display on his screen.
“Fuck!” Henry screamed. As he did, a crick in his jaw radiated pain.
Instinctively, he raised a hand to feel his head. He’d been knocked around, and not by the slight piece of space junk that shook him awake. He’d sustained some sort of blunt force injury, and if he weren’t marooned in space, Henry might have been more afraid. As it was, the only emotion he could muster was confusion.
He checked his reflection in the glass and saw a reddish bruise on his left jaw. He saw, too, that instead of the standard base layer for an EVA suit, he wore a spread-collar button-down shirt and a black bow tie. Even his spacesuit was wrong. He was wearing a standard-issue silver-gray EVA suit with the Altaire logo. One of the station’s loaners. Why would he have this on? He had a custom designer suit—bright red, with racing stripes running down the sides.
Henry attributed the memory loss to a head injury, but he at least remembered his civilian aerospace training and all the math that it required. Having a computer helped too. Judging by his straight-line distance from the Altaire and his distance from the station’s orbit above him, Henry estimated that he’d been off the station for about an hour. The Altaire’s orbital speed was constant, and so was his; he may have gotten knocked around by debris, but the impact wasn’t too fast or too forceful to have changed his position by much. Looking back now, Henry thanked that piece of junk for having just the right size and velocity to wake him up without throwing him farther off course.
His angle was the bigger conundrum. To end up in an orbit well below the Altaire would have required sustained thrust—and someone intending to steer him into a trajectory that diverged from the station’s.
That explained the empty jetpack.
He was shunted off the station. He had to have been.
Henry drew some satisfaction in answering at least one of his questions. He’d get his answers soon enough, but for now he needed to focus on one: how to get back to the Altaire.
The station had light shuttles for this exact scenario. Regardless of how the brochures touted the safety of space tourism, there’d always be a risk that guests or crew might go overboard. Altaire Security would have been alerted the minute he left the station’s range, since his EVA suit would have been relaying his last known location until it lost contact. Once someone realized he was missing, a shuttle should have no trouble locating him. Untethered with no propellant and no means of communication, his best bet was to wait.
Yet Henry also knew that the Altaire wasn’t his only bet. He asked his suit to run a scan for nearby bodies: a probe, or a satellite, maybe another luxury orbital. If he came close enough, he might be able to communicate with it. If it were crewed, it could send rescue.
His own field of vision gave him nothing, and the screen indicated two weather probes below him, both farther than Altaire, and a satellite overhead. That last one had enough modules to be crewed. Henry asked the suit to identify the craft, but it had no information aside from its orbit, location, and speed. No information meant defense sat. In any case, it, too, was too far above him.
He patiently watched his screen as it scanned for other crafts. Sp
In the lull of waiting for a flyby, Henry’s consciousness reassembled the moments that led to his stranding. They came to him mostly as whispers of sense-memories, slowly cresting above the louder thoughts in his mind: calculations of elevation and distance, comm range, etc.; projections and readouts from his helmet. Underneath the data and the noise, the murmurings of his recent experiences made their presence known.
Like the spacewalk he’d taken that morning. The view of the sunrise, the feel of his husband’s gloved hand in his. They returned to him in flashes. The black bow tie too, the one he still wore now, and the feel of Nick’s hand as he adjusted it, made it straighter. Henry had never been able to tie one right the first time, and Nick always knew to check. He made sure the butterfly ends were level yet askew enough to evince an air of sprezzatura. He made sure it was tight. Henry felt that constriction now. The sense-memory suffocated him even as he stared at the loosened tie reflected on the glass of his helmet.
The world turned beneath him, and Henry found himself straddling the line that bisected the Earth between day and night. Half the planet basked in the glow of the sun and the other slumbered in shadow. The line was narrower than he remembered from prior spacewalks. Starker, with little gradation on either side. One moment an island was there, and the next it wasn’t, swallowed by the dark. As he hovered over that twilight meridian, Henry felt himself bisected too. Schrödinger’s spaceman: in the same moment both alive and dead.
His orbital path soon passed over to where the sunlight never reached, over an ocean that had been sapphire blue, but now was black as jet. Plunged into the darkness, Henry was overwhelmed by more sense-memories. He smelled the hickory of their suite’s fireplace. He felt the thrill of a hand under the warm waters of the Moon Pools, the rumble of the shuttle engine as they rocketed off the launchpad. He tasted champagne on his tongue, as when he toasted the Altaire’s captain over dinner. Then, above all these sensations, a melody. Cymbals and trumpets and strings.
Henry heard the sound so crisply he thought he was hallucinating. His consciousness chased after it, clutching at it, and once caught, Henry found it to be more than just a disordered cacophony in his jumbled mind. It was the opening notes to an overture. The sound began to swell into a song. He remembered now.
Summertime. The theater box.
His final moments aboard the Altaire.
Henry gasped as he realized what had happened. He gasped like someone who had just been brought back to life.
Then, from beneath his multilayered gloves, his fingertips tingled with a burning sensation. First on his left hand, then his right. This felt different from the blunt impact on his head. This felt like fire.
Henry knew it wasn’t external, not a tear in the suit. He didn’t need to see his hands to know what they looked like now. This was a sensation all too familiar. His palms throbbed violently, and he gritted his teeth as the heat flowed in his veins, like his own blood had transformed to acid, searing him from within. The pain moved up his arms, his shoulders, his neck. He caught his reflection in the glass and saw, through welling tears of agony, that his entire face had turned an alarming shade of red.
Chapter 2
Arrivals
Tom Lazaro III was having a fitful flight. He couldn’t tell why, but he figured it was the disorientation from his view windows. The HLV Excelsior kept its portholes shielded, obstructing an outside view from the shuttle during its upward journey. As a substitute, the cabin system projected onto each window a “hyperrealistic” real-time view of space as seen from the shuttle’s exterior.
Laz groaned. He’d actually seen space. This filtered, panoramic projection was too sharp, too lifelike; it came back around to looking fake.
That was probably what made him feel queasy. It wasn’t zero-g; that had never been a problem for him before. He had the best drill times back in high school, and he’d maintained his training certifications since then. He had also racked up a handful of trips to other orbitals, though only for a day, and nowhere as grand as his current destination.
He didn’t want to admit it, but deep down he knew the cause of his unease: It was the reunion itself. The thought of reliving his days of youth pained him, knowing that things would never be as they were. That they would never be as good as they were.
His helmet’s comm announced their final approach toward the station. Instantly, his port screens opened. Muffled cheers came from passengers in the neighboring pods. Laz gaped in awe, his eyes wide at the sight of a space orbital larger and more majestic than he’d expected.
Space Habitat Altaire was shaped like an eight-point star ringed by a massive, glimmering torus. Some called it a ship’s wheel, but the comparison was a crude approximation of the orbital’s design. The central hub was also a torus, smaller but no less impressive, and it housed the station’s helm, staff and crew quarters, the medical bay, and all parts that made the Altaire function, including the shuttle ports that the Excelsior now approached. Along the docking bays, across a flat surface uninterrupted by windows or walls, two thick diagonals of brushed crimson steel converged at an angle. The painted lines spun with the rest of the station, like a compass head aimed at an ever-changing direction.
Each of the spokes that radiated from the hub were lined with solar arrays and acted as conduit between the hub and the shining halo of the upper torus. This outer ring contained the Altaire’s amenities, including a full-size theater, a shopping pavilion, bars, lounges, and restaurants. A tree-lined promenade ran alongside the entire length of this ring, which also contained all of the Altaire’s suites. Each had floor-to-ceiling windows with either a full view of the Earth beneath it or the starscape beyond.
Laz held his breath as the Excelsior approached its docking port in the hollow of the station’s central hub. The shuttle slowed, keeling to align itself as the Altaire rotated. Once it docked completely, the shuttle’s commander addressed the cabin with an inauthentic tone reminiscent of a weary tour guide.
“Rochford Institute Class of 2064, it’s my distinct pleasure to announce that we have arrived. Welcome to Prestige-Class Space Habitat Altaire.”
The cabin erupted in cheers and applause. Laz joined in, unable to help himself. As the other passengers did so, he unbuckled himself from his pod, rose from his seat, and took his helmet off. He craned his neck over the crowd in search of a familiar face and caught sight of an old friend, Henry Gallagher, beaming in breathless excitement. Henry waved at him, giving a winsome smile that hadn’t changed in decades. He weaved his way through the crowd and upon reaching Laz, he leaned in for a hug.
“Are you ready for an unforgettable weekend, Ambassador?”
“As ready as I’ll ever be,” Laz answered, returning the gesture effusively.
“Twenty-five years, man. I’m feeling my age; are you?”
“You don’t look a day over fifty,” Laz quipped, earning him a playful swat on the arm. In truth, Henry looked as vital and refreshed as he always had. Unlike some of their class who’d let their hair thin and their midsections thicken, Henry’s flaxen hair remained lush, and he cut a trim figure beneath his custom EVA suit.
“And you . . . you’re looking good too,” Henry said. “Chile agrees with you.”
“If only that were true,” Laz replied. He began to extol the cool climate of his current diplomatic posting, but quickly veered into a monologue about American interventionism and the political quagmires he often found himself in. Though his friend appeared rapt by his stories, Laz worried that he was boring Henry. A pang of fear returned to him like an echo from their boyhood days when he’d always been anxious for his friends’ approval. In due course, Laz wound down his tale, promising himself that the rest of the weekend wouldn’t see him quite so desperate.
“No plus-one?” Henry then asked. “What happened to that publicist I met at that wildlife benefit . . . Syll, was it? I thought she was lovely.”
“It didn’t last too long after that,” Laz replied, impressed at his friend’s memory. That had been almost three years ago.
