1.
The pre-flight checks are well underway by the time Della takes her seat. This will be her first chartered flight. She usually opts for value above comfort on the countless trips she’s taken around the globe and the handful of Moon circuits she’s done. But cost savings are the least of her concerns. Quite the opposite. Every gallon of fuel burned is a metaphorical stack of notes up in smoke, decadent wastefulness, and the feelings stirred by that image provide an unfamiliar sense of ease, reassurance that this is undoubtedly the right thing to do.
How strange to be sitting so near to the pilot, to be able to step over and touch him or tap him on the shoulder should she wish, or just watch and listen as he goes through his safety itinerary in that systematic way they have. Della doesn’t want to hear the endless list of things that could fail before they even reach orbit so she stands to put her brother in the overhead locker, then retakes her seat and places her earphones in to muffle the noise.
The pilot looks back over his shoulder and raises a hand, his seat a car’s length in front and slightly askew from Della’s. She can’t be sure he didn’t say something. She doesn’t think so, though, so she simply waves back, not bothering to take the earphones out. She’s in no mood for conversation.
The diazepam must be kicking in because neither this nor the wider prospect of launch is troubling her to a great extent. Ordinarily, she would be fidgeting about now, her foot tapping or her fingers picking at each other. Instead, she stares with a lack of intention at a rivet on the floor as her head bobs to the rhythm of the tune playing in her ears. This song was one of her sister’s favourites and over time it’s become a favourite of Della’s, too. Strange how a person comes to love something after the fact, growing into the memory of it. A soundtrack of days gone by.
She imagines Ruthie sitting in front of her on the empty jump seat wearing teen fashions that went out of style thirty years ago. How much more fun this trip would be with her here.
Pull yourself together, woman. Too soon for that kind of talk. Five months there; five back. Plenty of time to be morose.
The pilot swivels around in his seat, makes full eye contact, points to his ear.
‘Sorry,’ Della says, pulling the earphones out.
‘No worries.’ He’s casual and not very old for a pilot. Mid-thirties, perhaps, or the kind of early forties that takes care of himself. ‘Barclay.’ He holds out a hand for Della to shake, which she leans forward in an uncomfortable over-stretch, and does. ‘I guess we’ll be getting to know each other pretty well in the coming months. Route looks clear. Just catching the tail end of the Perseids, but they shouldn’t cause us any problems. You okay with the Gs?’
The truth of it is that she usually throws up, but she doesn’t want to share that little gem. Besides, she’s been training herself at the gravity centre ahead of this trip. She feels sure this’ll be the first launch she’s attempted without needing to clean herself up once the five point harness unclicks. Well, almost sure.
‘I’ll be fine,’ Della says.
‘Okay, great. There’ll be an eight minute initial burn, then-’ The pilot looks like he’s doing the sums in his head, which alarms Della somewhat. ‘-In the region of twenty minutes additional before we go into coast. And of course you’ll know when that happens.’
Della smiles and nods as if coasting velocity isn’t the point at which her stomach evacuates its contents.
‘Any questions?’ the pilot says.
‘Nope.’
‘Alright, then. Strap in before they crank us up. We’ll be ready to go just as soon as we get confirmation from the tower.’ He turns back to face the bank of screens and the small rectangular windows that serve no purpose but to indicate that it’s dark outside.
They wait.
Della’s glad she booked a night launch. There’s something terribly sad about the slow shift from bright blue to the darkest black that occurs when approaching orbit during daylight hours. At least at night you don’t have to witness the change from being in the atmosphere to not. She doesn’t get homesick, not in the truest sense, but this is something else: an undefinable draw. A sense of leaving everything she knows behind. Gravity playing tricks, as Father would say.
The pilot lets out an easy laugh at something Della can’t hear, a joke told by a flight controller or member of ground crew, perhaps. It’s a bizarre sound when juxtaposed with the sorrow of her own thoughts.
‘Ten-four, good buddy,’ the pilot says. A throwback Della hasn’t heard in years. ‘Commence stage one.’
He turns his head to speak over his shoulder. ‘Off we go.’
There’s whirring and movement and a shift in Della’s weight distribution that indicates the ship is tilting up into launch position. After a minute, she could no longer stand up if she wanted to. The seat is beneath her now as opposed to behind and it hugs her contours, built to fit, like she’s cradled in a giant hand. There’s a hefty clunk followed by a few minutes of stillness as they await further instructions.
Then, the pilot speaks in more serious tones into his headset: final preparations. He flips a handful of switches and the ship’s engines thrum into life.
Della wonders when co-pilots stopped being a thing? She’s used to commercial flights with hundreds of passengers and multiple members of crew. Suddenly, this lone charter, which had seemed like the most sensible idea when she booked it, feels incredibly vulnerable. One passenger; one pilot. That’s a lot of faith to put in the abilities of a single person and their tech.
Before she can take the thought to its worst case conclusion, the pilot pulls back on the throttle. ‘Hold tight,’ he says.
The ship and everything aboard it tremors for a few seconds, building energy and force, reaching for that climactic point that will ultimately see them thrust skyward.
Della clenches her jaw and digs her nails into the soft leatherette arm rests.
As the ship surges up off the launch pad, the pilot whoops like a cowboy.
All Della can think is: Shit. Fuck. Piss.
2.
The Mighty Meridian rattles and shudders through the darkness. It’s one of the earlier models, manufactured a year or so after they lost Ruthie. Della measures time that way: one year post-Ruthie, five years post-Ruthie, and so on. What came before is prehistory, a different world, different Della, barely worth mentioning. She researched the ship to make sure all its modifications were reputable, the service history up to scratch. If there’s one thing she learned from Father it’s the importance of due diligence, and it wouldn’t do to ride a total heap of junk to Red, regardless of her purpose for doing so.
That’s what they call it now: Red. Its formal name comes with connotations, Gen Z vibes. Nobody under fifty buys a ticket to Mars nowadays. Not unless you want to sound so fucking dated you oughtn’t to be doing Gs anyhow.
A counter ticks up on one of the monitors: 00.01.00 since launch. Is that all? Feels longer. Della’s brother clanks against the inside of the baggage locker. She wonders if the fierce vibrations of the ship might shake his lid loose, tease open his plastic bag and shimmy his contents everywhere. What a mess that would make when everything onboard goes weightless. She’s inhaled some shit in her time, but a dead sibling’s ashes is a step too far even for her.
‘Alright back there?’
Della manages an, ‘Mm-hmm,’ and she can tell the pilot is enjoying himself. A little too much, truth be told. She counts her breaths in time with the ticking seconds on the monitor (in for five; out for five) and tries to imagine the moment when she can unclip and float across the cabin and grab herself a complimentary pouch of whiskey and dry, then another.
00.02.00 since launch.
The pilot talks numbers with someone through his headset. It sounds to Della as if he’s discussing trajectory or distance from orbit or some other such technobabble, but then he mentions the three-thirty at Aintree and she realises he is in fact talking about horse racing, and is getting the guy on the ground to place a bet.
‘Don’t you have something more important to be doing right now?’ she shouts above the roar.
A million quid, for this? Maybe she should’ve gone budget or hitched a ride on a scientific vessel. The De Lacie name still carries some weight in certain circles, after all. At least they tuck those pilots away in a proper cockpit where you can pretend they’re concentrating on the business of flying, and not gambling (literally) with the lives of everyone onboard.
‘Sorry about that. Dead cert. Can’t blame a guy for feeling lucky.’
Lucky? she thinks. Don’t get me started on that.
‘Please just get us out of here in one piece.’
‘Aye, captain,’ the pilot says with a flourish.
Fuckssake.
00.03.00 since launch.
The cabin jerks from side to side and Della can’t stop her head from bouncing between the panels on the head rest. Undignified, if mercifully brief, it puts her in mind of being grabbed about the shoulders and shaken, told to pull yourself together, girl, and when the shaking eases off, she feels a tear streak backwards along her temple, pulled away from her face by the sheer force of their ascent. She takes note not to worry about a stray droplet as the vents will suck that in, use it for something, feed it back to her later, no doubt. Nothing is wasted on these long haul flights, not even tears.
00.04.00 since launch.
If she had a window through which to look, Della would see the horizon curve as the wet lump of rock below them bends back into a sphere. Hard to imagine there was a time when anyone thought otherwise. If by this point you haven’t tried space flight, you know someone who has. No denying the science now.
The pilot performs some minor adjustment with his thumb on a toggle set into his armrest. It’s about the most his body can move while the rocket’s thrusters hurtle them toward the outer atmosphere. He’s pinned in place, as are they both, for a while yet.
The changes he makes are miniscule, nothing Della can see or feel, but she knows enough to know a fractional shift early on makes a vast difference over the distance they have to travel. The difference between skirting Red’s orbital perimeter as planned or missing it altogether, flying by it and off into the farthest reaches with nothing to slingshot back home on.
Get it right, she thinks, watching the pilot’s thumb, willing him to do his damn job. To attempt to recover from an early fuck up, to be forced to error correct, is so much harder than not fucking up in the first place. This she knows.
00.05.00 since launch.
She’s settling into it now. There comes a time in any launch when Della’s brain assesses the greatest threat of death to be over even though she knows the stats, knows that there are plenty more opportunities for a tiny malfunction to lead to a catastrophic failure. But existing in a constant state of hypervigilance is exhausting, so she tells herself to calm down, conserve adrenaline for some other point along the route.
The pilot whistles the theme tune of a show she hates and Della wishes she’d kept her earphones in. How tedious this will be if he does that the whole ten months. He quietens a moment to scroll the wheel in the armrest a couple of clicks and the monitor in front of him changes ever so slightly to reflect whatever it is he’s done, then he purses his lips and whistles again.
Jesus fucking Christ.
00.06.00 since launch.
The ride is smoother now. Della searches her memory for details learned and forgotten from science classes, and from Father, a lifetime ago: the layers of the atmosphere – troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere. She tries to remember at which point they’d be at the greatest risk of a satellite strike. Not that it’s likely since they cleared and amalgamated most orbital debris following the Clear Skies Review. Still, shit happens. And sod’s law says it’ll happen on her first and last ever flight to Red. A parting gesture from Will. (‘This is what you get for trying to dump me overboard, you ungrateful cow.’)
00.07.00 since launch.
‘Tank switch in ninety seconds,’ the pilot says. Whether it’s to her or the ground crew, Della can’t tell. ‘You good back there?’ That last bit is definitely for her.
‘Still here,’ is all she can think of to say.
‘Going for second burn shortly so you’ll feel the pull. When we hit coasting, just hang fire until I give the word. Then you’ll be free to roam. A while yet.’
‘Okey dokey.’
Okey frigging dokey? She never says that. The Gs are dragging the sense out of her. Making her stupid. But to correct it would make her sound nervous, indecisive, unsure of herself, which would be worse. Besides, these pilots are glorified bus drivers, so who cares what he thinks? More importantly, the person on the ship most likely to criticise sits desiccated in the overhead locker and is in no position to feel superior. To hell with them both, she thinks.
00.08.00 since launch.
Despite her best efforts, Della’s anxiety intensifies with the approaching threat of vomit. Her bones jangle with it. No amount of breath work can compensate for the combo of adrenaline and bile.
The pilot whistles again (same tune, higher pitch, twice as annoying).
‘Could you not?’ Della says.
‘Huh?’
‘The whistling. Could you please not?’
‘Oh sorry,’ the pilot says, the hint of a smile in his voice. ‘Helps me concentrate. Going for burn in three, two, one-’
The additional thrust kicks in and Della feels like a bug on a windscreen going ninety. She squeezes her eyes shut and swallows hard.
The pilot releases a sound into the air somewhere between a laugh and a howl. Must he enjoy his job quite so much? It’s unseemly given the dangers involved, the cost, the fact he holds both their lives in the palm of his oil-streaked hand. And to think, there’s another twenty minutes of this to go. Twenty minutes burn, pinned to this chair. Kill me now, she thinks.
With a rapid fire TING-THRUP-TING, something invades the cabin, in through one side and out the other, too fast for Della to grasp what just happened.
The pilot is quiet now. No whistling. No whooping. His thumb rests against the toggle on the armrest, so Della tells herself it must be alright. That these things are to be expected. He’d be doing something if not, surely?
‘Is that normal?’ she says after a moment.
He didn’t hear her.
‘Hello? Pilot? Was that normal?’ She says it louder this time.
The flight time ticks up and she notices something coming out from the rear of the pilot’s headrest in front of her – a thread? A piece of cotton unravelling itself from the stitching around the leather, being teased out toward the back of the cabin by the forces of pull? She watches as it trails by her, only just missing her face. A fine red thread dancing in the Gs.