25: Vanguard

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My friends were, of course, not happy that I would be going away for so long.

“I’m going to miss you so much!” Arai wailed, throwing her arms around me.

Hitan gave me a stiffer, tighter hug. “I’m so jealous,” he said. “You’re gonna have to message us all the time to tell us about all the cool stuff you see out there. Promise!”

I did promise, and Arai chewed her lip. “That’s a good point,” she said. “Messaging. Your education is going to suffer. You don’t want to come back and be behind everyone else in your math and spelling and stuff.”

I hadn’t thought about that. When I was away, there probably wouldn’t be any Education shifts. Also, jaunts were usually designed to be at the same math and reading level as the class, so they could practice those skills all the time. I didn’t think that Plia would organise stuff like that, meaning that I was going to have to figure out how to practice on my own.

I started pestering my family, asking Mum to teach me reading and Auntie Lia to teach me math and Dad to teach me science. I thought it would annoy them but they all seemed really happy that I wanted to spend time with them and learn from them. Mum was especially pleased; she liked that I understood what I was getting into on my journey and was taking it seriously.

And then, way sooner than I was ready for, it was time to go.

There are two types of docking for the little transport ships that bring things to and from the Courageous, called above docking and below docking. Above docking is at the highest point on the ship, up at the treegrave; there are docks on either end of it where ships can dock. Below docking is on the lowest deck of the ship, down in storage below the farms and factories and things. Above docking is a lot easier for the little transports, because you don’t have to worry about inertial pull and can load and unload stuff easily, but it does mean having to get everything up and down the elevators, making it harder for the Courageous. So different docks are better for different situations.

Usually, big or heavy stuff that’s for stuff in the ring is docked below. Whereas people and stuff for the treegrave is docked above. So to switch ships, we had to go up to the treegrave.

There were four of us on the trip – Plia, me, and two other historians around Plia’s age. All of us were in jumpsuits and Plia and I were in hair-securing bandanas for the long zero-pull journey on the Vanguard, which would take us to the Arborea. I didn’t know much about historians, but I found it interesting that all the ones coming with us were pretty young. Maybe it was just because we were going to be changing air pressure and inertial pull and stuff a lot, and young bodies are much better at doing that. Or maybe – and, knowing Plia, I thought it was probably this – it was because their project was actually kind of silly, and older, more experienced historians had better things to do with their time.

Plia’s man walked her all the way to the elevator and hugged her goodbye. Her necklace caught the light as she stepped back from him. It’s a necklace she wears a lot, just a chain with a solid metal ring on it. The ring is about as wide as a circle made by a grown man’s thumb and forefinger, and there’s what looks like a little metal bead on it, but if you look closely you can see that the bead is made from the same metal at the same thickness as the circle, so it’s not one circle with a bead on it but two interconnected circles and one of the circles is so small that it can barely interconnect with the other one. I’ve never paid that much attention to her necklace, lots of people have favourite jewellery, but that day I saw that her boy wore the same necklace, and so did one of the other historians. So maybe it meant something.

Plia introduced us all in the elevator. “Guys, this is my sister Taya. Taya, this is Hali and Tima.”

Hali, who was a heavy, shy-looking man who wore a necklace like Plia’s, gave me a grin and a little wave. Tima, who was a very tall, bony girl with complicated braids that ran all the way past her hips that were all tied together and tucked in her belt for the zero pull journey, put her hands on her hips and leaned forward to talk to me in that loud, slow voice that people who don’t talk to kids very much sometimes use with kids.

“Hello, Taya! Aww, you’re very cute. Do you like history? Do you want to be like your big sister?”

I shrugged vaguely and sort of stood half behind Plia.

“Aww, she’s shy. Don’t worry, we’re all friendly! We’re going to be great friends, Taya.”

Maybe I would get lucky on this trip and not have to talk to the historians very much.

We got off the elevator at the administration tunnels, where a security guard (not one of the two I knew) met us and took Plia’s keycard. He lead us all the way right to the end of the ship, through a few big doors and past a couple of ramps leading upward.

He lead us into a big room right at the very end, full or random boxes tied firmly down and a handful of desks with jumpsuited workers. (Everyone else was much better at moving around in the almost zero-pull environment than me and the historians were.) In the far wall were some clearly labelled airlocks, spaced very far apart. All of them were closed except for one, and the open one wasn’t being an airlock, because both doors were open.

One of the workers in the room looked different to everyone else. Her head was shaved, and her eyes looked tired. She was wearing a jumpsuit, but it wasn’t the light, soft sort of jumpsuit that everyone else wore; it was thick and stiff and made of lots of patches sewn together, some of which looked like stiffer material than others so that places like her shoulders and knees had special protection. It was a faded red colour, with lots of pockets and ties on it, some of which held tools.

“You the passengers?” she asked us, and her voice was harsh and rough. There was something strange about the way she talked, too; she said some things too flat, or too fast. I remembered this from some of the kids I’d met on jaunts from their own spaceships – an accent, it was called. She had an accent.

“Yes,” Plia said. “I’m Plia. Thanks for transporting us.” She handed over some papers, which the woman flipped through too fast to be reading them. She had some kind of electronic thing strapped to her head, and I thought it might be a camera, recording the papers, maybe. She handed them back. “They count towards your mass restrictions,” she warned Plia. “Come one, your cargo’s already packed.” She pulled herself through the open airlock, and through a second airlock attached to the transport ship (which was also fully open and not being an airlock), and we followed. “And no loose jewellery,” she called over he shoulder as we went, and Plia and Hali had to shove their necklaces into their pockets. I checked the bandana holding my braids down – it was secure.

Our stuff was indeed already packed. Being in the little transport was like being in a very small trolley; there were a couple of rows of seats with our luggage already stowed beneath them. The woman left us in there and went through a door in the far wall (the back wall, I supposed, since the seats faced the airlock), where I supposed the pilot controls must be. I sat down on the seat with my case stowed under it and let Plia help me put on the safety harnesses. “It’s perfectly safe,” she told me quietly, like she thought I was going to get scared. Which made sense because we were about to do something very scary. Once all those doors closed, the transport would let go of the Courageous and we’d just be in open space, with nothing but what the transport could carry to keep us alive until we reached the Vanguard. Which would be pretty soon, but what if something went wrong? We wouldn’t be attached to anything. We’d have nothing but our rockets to move us. We could die all alone in empty space.

It should be scary. But it wasn’t. Maybe because I couldn’t actually see any of that, and being inside was just like being in a trolley, except for there being no inertial pull.

A little bell sound chimed and we pulled away from the Courageous, and I was right; it wasn’t scary. It was even better than a trolley, because there was no noisy rattling. The only sound was the historians nervously talking about the trip, and the only inertial pull was occasional tugs this way and that as we turned and (I assumed) headed for the Vanguard. I just stayed quiet, and waited.

The trip wasn’t very long. Soon there was another chime, and we docked with the Vanguard. The pilot came back out to tell us not to get up until environmental checks were done, so we had to wait in our seats for a few more minutes before the airlock doors opened again and we were let out. The Vanguard had no inertial pull at all, so we floated out into my first ever fleet ship outside the Courageous.

The Vanguard is, I already knew, a small ship. It’s barely larger than just the treegrave of the Courageous, and it’s population is tiny. That’s why it can be a transport ship; its mass is very low, so it doesn’t take that much to move it between the bigger ships, and it’s a lot safer than trying to get two big ships close to each other. But walking out of the docking bay, the Vanguard felt enormous, because I didn’t walk into a tiny corridor like I would have on the Courageous; I walked into the biggest room I’d ever been in except for the tour sectors of the treegrave.

In fact, it was a big cylinder, like a sector in the treegrave; the main difference was that it didn’t have a ceiling. If I looked ‘up’, I could see the ‘floor’ on the other side, but words like up and down and floor didn’t mean very much without inertial pull. There were rows of bars stretched across the room from one side to the other, placed so that wherever you were in the room, a grown-up would be able to reach at least one of them. I was short enough that there were some spots in the room where I might not be able to reach one, so I would have to be careful not to accidentally get stranded in the air.

“No unattended loose objects at any time,” the pilot was telling us. “Any object you pick up, even just drink pouch, you secure in or to a surface before you leave it. Anything you take out and use, you stow back in its proper place before leaving. Zero pull living is no joke. No loose liquids anywhere; you spill a liquid, you tell someone immediately. No leaving the guest areas without a qualified escort to keep both you and the ship safe. Safety straps on when the motion alarm sounds and they don’t come off until the motion has ceased and you receive the all-clear. The all-clear is important; don’t assume the motion is over just because it stops, we might be pausing mid-manoeuvre. Keep at least one support bar, handle or surface within arm’s reach at all times, keep at least one hand free at all times; you hear a takehold alarm, you secure any loose objects and grab a bar immediately. You do not let go of whatever loose thing you’re holding to grab it; you secure the loose thing first. A floating fork can and will kill you during a takehold event. Do you understand?”

“Yes,” Plia answered for the group.

“Good. Your bags will be taken to your room. Try not to get yourselves killed.”

“Don’t worry,” Plia whispered to me as we floated over to where the pilot pointed us; a door on one side of the large room. “It sounds scary but that’s all for emergencies. I’ve been on transport ships lots of times and I’ve never been through a takehold event.”

I nodded. I’d been through zero-pull emergency drills. They’d made us learn them in Education, even though we lived under normal inertial pull, because we’d take jaunt to other ships and might end up working in the treegrave and stuff like that. It was expected that we’d need to know zero-pull stuff eventually.

I hadn’t expected to need to know it this quickly.

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