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= NEBULA EXPRESS =

a DarkSF novel

by John Argo

Page 5.

Within an hour, Ridge stood by the portal and the others were beginning to form up in a casual line facing the video screen in the bulkhead beside the exit. On the other side of that dark, riveted metal door was a steel grid platform, and beyond that the vast belly of the cargo ship Neptune Express.

Ridge had an uneasy sense in remembering the meteorite impact. No surprise--the wounds and the shock were still fresh, and six plain white coffins sat in a special holding room far away in the stern of the ship, with Federal Earth flags draped over them--mute testimony to the frantic and chaotic days spent saving Neptune Express just recently. Once you lived through something like that, it took a long time to sleep well again and not to jump at the slightest tremor or noise. Then again, people were resilient. They joked. They fought. They talked. They started healing immediately. In space, you had to. There was no choice.

Since Brenna had made his day by relieving him of his report writing agony, Ridge spent some leisure time, first in his personal cube, then at the main crew table eating breakfast.

First he shaved and showered. The showers were in a common area, but each person had a reserved and private bath cubicle. (The potty facilities were also individual and private, located in another area of the workpod, and each crewmember had a virtual library in theirs.) For a good ten minutes in the shower, Ridge stood in the steamy atmosphere while needles of hot water exercised his skin. He changed the showerheads several times, settling finally on a nice steady stream. He used the special milled lavender soap he and Dorothy had picked up on a tour through Provençe, along with sunflower kitchen towels. He'd shaved using a new gold-plated four-blade razor and some very foamy cream, which worked fine as long as no stray suds escaped from the steamy confines of the shower. He changed from hot water to hot air and let the stimulating breeze dry him off. Grabbing a fluffy robe from a dispenser, he wrapped himself up and strode back, through his moon door (named after those round moon gates built into classical Chinese gardens and palaces) into the comfort of his personal cube. He felt much better.

He turned on the wall screen and dialed up San Diego. Familiar scenes of beaches, palm trees, botanical gardens, workaday streets, shopping centers, and freeways flashed by. Dorothy's face appeared on the screen, looking a bit formal since she'd had a makeover just to create this video reply. "Hello. I can't answer my personal comdeck just now, maybe because I'm in the garden or busy with the kids or out shopping, but if you will leave a message I will return your com as soon as possible. Thanks, and have a lovely day."

"Honey," Ridge said, "sorry I missed you today. Give the kids each a big hug for me, and a kiss, and maybe I'll have a chance to catch you after we get back from our work detail if I'm not too tired. You know how it is. Long hours, no sleep, and I'm too beat to even fall into the shower. Love you. Bye." These messages were always awkward, though he could tolerate them a lot better than writing reports.

With an hour to kill, and knowing the long exhausting shift ahead outside the workpod, Ridge crept into bed--a fancy sort of sleeping bag on a large upper bunk. He snuggled in to get comfortable, thinking it ironic that the living quarters were called the workpod, while the work was done anywhere but in here; although, one might allow, the entire lower floor consisted of specialty workshops for welding, brazing, chemical analysis-almost a mobile factory, so to speak. Closer to home though: in the cube, below the bunk where he now lay, was his desk, his thinking area, his place to speak recordings for home, read poems sent by his two small children, watch holovids directly on the desktop of Dorothy relating neighborhood gossip. Sometimes she would shoot him an hour or so of just plain day to day, moment to moment footage, like the mailman ringing, the children tramping through on a rainy day and getting yelled at, the golden retriever romping from couch to love seat and around all the living room furniture in one big circle while Dorothy, predictably, doubled over in a mix of laughter and yelling. These were the truly relaxing and wonderful moments of his day. What a miracle, that the tiny moments of life in a San Diego suburb could be beamed across such vast distances to such a tiny dot in space. Ridge had not slept well last night for some reason, and now his body hungrily sopped up the extra hour of sleep, like a plant soaking up a good watering.

As he drifted off, he looked forward to spending a little time, maybe a half hour, talking with Dorothy and watching the kids, all with a delay of several hours, of course. He and Dorothy couldn't directly talk because of the delay, but sent each other loving little messages. The pix of the kids were usually a few hours old. The time of day on board Neptune Express was synchronized with that in San Diego, but this time delay threw it all off. Dorothy liked to transmit early, so he tended to be watching early morning footage. He could just put it all together in his head, from the senses and from memory. He could imagine that the dew was still wet on the grass, and maybe the street lights were still lit against a dark blue sky, and the morning breeze smelled fresh with the faint distant undertones of ocean and desert, not to mention eucalyptus and jasmine wafting up from the canyons, and maybe a touch of anise, a scent of citrus blossoms, and of course always that noxious hint of hydrocarbons not burned well from a passing mail truck.

Daydreaming of Dorothy and his little son and daughter, he dozed off. Distantly, he thought he heard laughter from a card game in the galley. He felt regular little tremors as the workpod moved on its axis, as it crept along on greased mirror-like steel surfaces. What luck, he thought again, to be alive, when they could all have died if a slightly larger object had struck the ship.

As he dozed off, he could imagine what sorts of dreams the others might have. Lantz might dream of running along the deep, mysterious green rainforest trails around the Olympic Peninsula, her home. Mughali might dream of shopping for clothing in the fashionable Marais in Paris, where her parents had moved, in this cosmopolitan and global world. Yu probably thought of his family, who lived in a planned development on Chongde Lu near Huaihai Park. Tomson, on the other hand, most likely had stormy thoughts of a crowded neighborhood in Sand City in old Philadelphia, a blues joint, a good pizza, and a brisk whiskey before bed. What did Jerez think of...sleepily, he lost track and thought of Brenna strolling arm in arm with Ricardo on the Plaza Dorrego in Colegiales, Buenos Aires, or perhaps sharing a half-pint of Italian-style cerveza tirada while watching tango dancers and listening to sensuous but melancholy bandonéon music. Why did he somehow feel he belonged there with her? He almost sobbed with frustration at the impossibility of it. Why have these dark thoughts? Why have these forbidden fantasies? In his dreams, as he lay on his back savoring the quiet and comfort of his cubicle, Ridge forced his thoughts in another direction. He made himself think about how he would take Dorothy and the children up onto the breezy bluffs of Cabrillo Point, high above San Diego bay and North Island, with the sandy and sparkling Coronado far below, and the red conical roofs of the Victorian-era Hotel Del, and beyond that the high-rise condo hives of wealthy Mexican economic refugees along the Silver Strand.

Feeling rested and refreshed, Ridge woke about an hour later. He could still feel occasional gentle rocking motions as WorkPod01 traversed forward under pressure of its inner worm gears all packed with grease and silicon. He put that off--work would begin in the dimness, far from the sun, inside the vast hangar-like structures of the ship, and that was what they got paid to do, and do well. He washed his face at the sink, dried himself with a towel, donned fresh underwear, and changed from his robe back into his jump suit.

Out in the lounge area, a loud card game was in progress as the staff sat in their jumpsuits ready to go. They looked stiff and bulky in web gear with back and front packs containing water, oxygen, and tools. The place was cheery with laughter, the aromas of brewing coffee and tea, the sweetness of pastries, and the occasional exhilarating whiff of stimtube. The conversation was a customary desultory mix of cross-talk, some of it revolving around salaries. They were all paid well, on standard sliding scales, and everyone pretty much knew what everyone made, base, but of course the company strung them all along with various bonuses and nobody actually revealed what he or she really had waiting in their bank account back on Earth. Whatever it was, it had to be comfortable and the envy of Earthside labor, or these people wouldn't risk life and sanity out here in the eternal silence, so Ridge thought as he wandered through.

Ridge fixed himself a little breakfast in the galley and sat at the table. Someone had cleaned away last night's Asian detritus and the empty containers sat in an autowash incubator ready to get cleaned and processed for reuse as Greek or Tejano or Hawaiian or Belgian or whatever was the next culinary adventure. Ridge blocked out the general noise as he sat reading Homer's The Odyssey and slurping milk and cereal from a bowl. In artificial gravity, one could slurp from a bowl, albeit cautiously. A loose loop of sugared, cinnamoned, toasted wheat could float away in the low gravity ten feet above the baseline floor, get into a vent, and seriously hog up the whole show if it found its way into just the right--or wrong, Ridge supposed--tube or hole or whatever. As he read, he idly plashed a finger in the liquid that pooled around his cereal bowl. A milk container stood like a little tower nearby, still beaded with condensation from the fridge. Like much else on board the markings on the cereal box and milk carton were cheery, subdued, and functional without the excessive clamor of commercial advertising. There was, however, a small caricature of a smiling cow on the milk carton, and pictures of happy children with red cheeks on the cereal box.

A red light began to silently wink on and off, high up in the dark struts that resembled faux ceiling beams. The ship was loaded with psychological tricks to put walls of comfort between the interplanetary travelers and their natural fears, their loneliness, the constant nearness of disaster and death. For one thing, the ship maintained a natural cycle of days and nights in exact concordance with that at the travelers' most recent stay on Earth--the northern temperate zone space center near San Diego, where Colfirio had its global headquarters. Next, although the ship was a cylinder ten U.S. football fields long and one football field in diameter, with huge amounts of empty air space inside, one normally never saw any long vistas. There were tight spaces for coziness, wider spaces for communal but still cozy activity, and of course the huge warehouses for cargo. Most of the time, by day, you were surrounded by glassy and light-reflective surfaces reminiscent of the semi-arid mesas and canyons inland from San Diego. Dry, fresh breezes maintained the illusion further. By night, one tended not to see ceilings and far spaces, which stayed in shadows and countered any feelings of claustrophobia. In short, the ship was state of the art, first lulling the body with unspoken cues that it was in a familiar and safe place on earth. In so doing, the ship cued the subconscious into believing this information. Finally, this lulled the conscious mind into forgetting where its owner really was--on a fragile dust mote floating far from home.

Two images seemed to creep out at one from nowhere, at odd moments, unexpectedly, on a wall monitor here or there. One was the white and blue wispy globe of Earth with its cratered olivine Moon. The other image was that of another disconcertingly blue planet with wispy clouds, albeit four times the diameter of the home world, and choked with liquid methane: Neptune, named after the ancient Roman sea god. In that second picture, one tended to be looking over a greenish-glassy landscape pimpled like a melon's skin: Triton, Neptune's largest moon. That image came from Triton Base, the orbiting space station from which workers could rise or fall above Triton. As the image of Earth got smaller, the image of Neptune got larger.

As always, the ship performed miracles in managing its artificial gravity, spinning on its axis, and it was sometimes hard to remember one was deep in the solar system like a grain of sand in the ocean.

There was a definite shudder now. The workpod was moving slowly on its axis, heading through the vastness inside the ship toward the next trouble spot the crew must fix, resulting from the recent meteorite impact. The images of Earth and Neptune had not appreciably changed in size, but that was an illusion of the human eye and the ship's technology, for the ship was rushing along faster than a bullet shot from a rifle. All banter stopped for a moment, and the crew of WorkPod01 looked up.

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