The Ides of Matt 2017

Chapter 6

Chapter SixKarina forgot to breathe while the hatches were opened.

How could Brody not remember that night? It had shaped so much of her flying ever since. He’d shown her a new way of conceptualizing orbits that had rocked her mental world. With a simple screen of calcs, he had revealed a level of mastery behind his easy-going exterior that had humbled her. He had made her a different pilot, a better one.

She stole a glance over at him, but he wasn’t watching the hatch, he was watching her. He looked aside quickly.

Felice had said that Brody was mooning over Queen b***h Rostov. What possible reason…

Then she remembered something else about that long-ago night. She’d kissed him in thanks. It had been an unthinking gesture that she’d felt mostly embarrassed about. A senior pilot had been waiting for her that night and yet she’d kissed another man. Now, she couldn’t even remember the pilot’s name.

She’d also forgotten that kiss. Apparently Brody Jones hadn’t.

What sort of a woman was she that she’d blocked all that out? Easy answer: Queen b***h Rostov. Yet somehow Brody always saw past that. She now knew that was part of why she kept being drawn back to him. Because only Brody Jones saw her differently than everyone else did—even herself.

“I—” she turned to him, but his attention was now riveted on the first of the Lifters emerging awkwardly from the hatch that joined the two ships—unused to the zero-gee of space. A man, a woman, two teenage girls, a small boy. They were emaciated and weeping. They kept touching Brody’s crewmates as if to make sure they were real. They arrived in a cloud of smells she couldn’t separate. Salt tears, body odors, and something she didn’t recognize that reminded her of the hydroponic farms but was a hundred times more powerful. It made her wonder what humanity had lost in leaving Earth.

More people followed and the ritual was the same. A broken arm was routed over to Vetch’s med station. There were any number of black-and-blue marks that they’d feel later. Soon there were forty people crowded in the Mod18’s bay. No more followed.

“Stay here,” Brody told her before leveraging himself down into the Lifter’s hatch.

She ignored him and pulled herself through the hatch too.

The odors were different in here. The sharp tang of fear and human waste—released in fear or…

A woman stared at her from a mattress on a steel deck floor. Her eyes were wide and her jaw slack. She looked as if she’d died while screaming.

Brody was checking each body. Occasionally, he’d nudge one free and float it toward her. In the zero gravity, it didn’t take much for her to push them up toward Warwick waiting on the Mod18. Some were merely unconscious, others conscious but immobile with shock.

She looked around. The Ariane’s equipment bay was barely three meters across and five tall. In that space they’d built mattressed tiers that had impossibly held fifty people. She counted seven of them who would never leave.

Brody was grim as he double-checked each one left behind.

“I had no idea,” her whisper sounded overloud in the cramped space.

He nodded. “Out of choices, they take the only chance they can get.”

She waited for him in the ill-lit stinking confines of the pod while he arranged a young boy’s body so that he almost looked natural.

“He could have been my brother. Was almost me,” Brody’s voice was a whisper as he brushed the boy’s hair gently into place. “An ICBM was never meant to carry people. We didn’t know how hard the Minuteman missiles boosted. Three families totaling twenty people. I begged to ride at the top of the cone—I so wanted to be the first one into space—it was the only thing that saved my life. Dad built a small platform at the nose, just big enough for me. Everyone else packed in below, with only room to stand during the launch. They crushed one another under that awful acceleration. The only other survivors were an aunt, who ended up raising me, and the technician’s wife who killed herself just a month after losing her whole family—that was all out of twenty people. This is how I pay back.”

His voice was even, calm, steady, though she could feel the pain surging from him into the close air.

Karina wondered if she’d ever really known Brody Jones.

She had always thought of him as a slacker. He’d been a top flyer at school. Not as good as she was on the actual piloting, but truly exceptional in the mechanics, and an outstanding leader. Then, when she’d suggested that they go military together—with some lame image of the two of them blazing paths of glory throughout the system—he’d just shaken his head.

“Lift Rescue,” was all he’d said. That was a flyer level below Patrol, Cargo, or even Salvage.

It hadn’t made any sense. But she’d been so hyped on the chance of a highly prestigious future that she’d been afraid to ask. His blue eyes had been so sad that she’d backed away rather than stepping forward. Was that what had kept drawing her back to him all these years?

Hope that she would change his mind?

Or the unanswered question of why he never would?

Now she knew the answer. And as she slowly eased from the small pod, which was now just a coffin, she knew why she’d been afraid to ask. Her own life suddenly looked trivial and privileged compared to this.