"First Flight"
12th Buri, 6 (2183)
Rivkah Of Unity
I'm sat in the co-pilot seat as Mum preps the shuttle. Just us two, and the cargo of asteroid mining robots that are connected to a simulator back on the colony; miners will operate the drones with virtual reality equipment while safely still on Unity. They won't work quite as well as they do on the surface because the lightspeed time delay meaning the responses are a few seconds delayed, but they've been working on robotic miner input coding to compensate for it. Now we are flying the prototypes up to the ring system to do some testing.
If it all goes right, these prototypes will set up a teleoperating station up here, and we can use it as an orbital base by using the ring's material for supplies. Apparently it should be a lot easier than how they did it on Old Earth; they had to use the Moon, so it was a three day trip and needed a lot more fuel.
It's funny how quickly things are changing now that my Mum is effectively in charge of decision making; it was only a few years ago miners meant people with pickaxes. Now it's remotely operated drills and stuff.
Mum sits next to me, but she contacts traffic control. They talk, and soon the siren sounds to tell the flying members of the colony to land. She turns to me. "Set our ascent at fifteen degrees above horizontal, we'll use only a little throttle until we are ten kilometres up and far from the colony."
I look back at her. "Why not just light the afterburners and go up?"
She smiles. "Firstly, that would give us lots of altitude, but not much distance traveled. It's the prograde velocity which balances out the planet's gravity and means that we reach orbit, and not crash back down. Think of it as trying to fall around the planet, not back to the ground. Secondly, it would waste fuel by pushing so hard and fast against the lower atmosphere, when being a bit more patient saves a lot of a resource that's very difficult for us to replace."
"I thought you said we can make fuel for rockets?"
"There's lots of types of rocket fuel. And the kind that these shuttles use is a little bit beyond our technology right now, so, we have to make the most of it."
"Ok Mum."
She smiles again, and starts pressing buttons. "Mum, how do you know how to run one of these?"
She stays silent. Thinking face on. "I... Picked up a few hints and tips, and MSI are cheapskates who reuse the same interface over and over again to reduce costs."
"Where from?"
She looks at me. "How much has Dad told you about Mum's past life?"
"Nothing. Why? What did you do?"
She looks very uncomfortable. Very sad, until anger burns in her eyes. "When we were slaves, I was a Companionship Asset. Spent ten years doing it at a shipyard. That's how I know."
Part of me thinks I shouldn't ask. But I am curious... I ask. "What's a Companionship Asset?"
She closes her eyes. "Their euphemism for prostitute."
She hasn't taught me that word. She looks at me. She looks very conflicted.
Eventually she closes her eyes. "It means people paid my slavers money so that they could have sex with me. And not only a few, but thousands and thousands of them."
She focuses on the task at hand, and we take off, blazing gently into the sky. Mum puts the shuttle into a stable ascent path, and starts to cry. I reach out and hug her.
"Rivkah, you guys... Your generation, hopefully you will never truly understand what your parents generation went through. They did unspeakable things to us. And that's why we are pushing ourselves so fast to try to rebuild here, because somewhere out there are enemies who will work you to death, and then use your skin as their rug."
I'm fairly sure she isn't joking. It isn't her way. But I feel a sense of dread...
Dad, Aunt Vaki, they don't really have any stories of MSI. They were only on the slave ship. But the others... I suppose like Mum they keep it buried inside. They don't want to scare us.
What kind of enemies will I face, that they can make my Mum afraid?
The sky outside is starting to get less blue. We're high above the clouds.
Mum smiles. "Now, we can light the afterburners."
She presses another button, the shuttle shakes, I'm pinned to my seat, it hurts. Mum is looking at the instruments and a calculator, doing numbers. I'm starting to see stars. She glances at me, before throttling back a bit. I feel better. "We're now on a suborbital trajectory. Once we're in space, we'll burn prograde a little bit more to circularise. Then we pick a suitable test object in the ring, and get to work."
A while later - Mum lets me go for a nap - I wake up.
I'm floating. She's undone the buckles for us, she's right up against the windscreen, I join her. Well, I try to, but swimming doesn't seem to work... I pull on the console. Too much, ouch, I hit the screen...
I'm a little dazed, Mum slows me down and holds me still. I look out the window, and...
Wow. The view...
She's rolled the ship. I can see my homeworld in a way I never dreamed of. It's so round, and so white and so blue, and it fills half the view. "Where are we?"
"We're above the uncharted far side continents right now, but we'll soon be coming up on the western side of our home region. Few more minutes at this altitude."
"How fast are we going?"
"Just under eight thousand kilometres per hour."
"How fast is the buggy?"
"About a hundred and twenty kilometres per hour, top speed. Although you've only seen it do about thirty kilometres per hour, your Dad is a gentle driver."
I look for the colony. I can't find it yet.
"It would stand out a lot more at night, but I don't think the settlement is big enough to be clearly visible from here." She - so much more gently than me - pushes off the window, catches the chair. She's looking at the scanners. "Coming up now."
I search frantically, but we're just too far up.
"Come back to the seat Rivkah, time to switch the artificial gravity back on, we have work to do remember."
I very lightly push off the window, and sail back over the console. Mum puts the gravity on at a low level to help me, and back to normal once I'm landed. She shows me the astrometrics. She's running through the detected objects to find one big enough for us to use; eventually, she finds one. She starts to plot the navigation, adjusting the display until she finds whatever it is she is looking for.
"Why don't we just point ourselves at one?"
"Then we'd miss. Think of traveling in space as a dance. You have to relate to where your partner will be and how they will be moving when you get to them, and if you just fire the engines up, you could easily miss them completely." She pulls me close. "So, what we do is we adjust the inclination of our orbit to match the target, and use our higher velocity, lower altitude orbit to catch up to a slower moving but higher object, then match velocities once at the intercept point."
A small burn in the anti-normal direction matches the inclination, but it's a two hour wait until Mum's low fuel burn transfer window. We spend the time looking out the window, and practicing moving in microgravity. It's a lot of fun, especially when we turn the lights off and practice hunting exercises.
A little while longer, and we are at the intercept. Mum finishes the matching velocity burn, and points the ship parallel to the rock. It's roughly two hundred metres long. She engages the maneuvering thrusters, and slowly moves us in until to docking clamps grip.
"Ok Rivkah, I need you to stay inside and handle things in here; I don't want you to accidentally jump into space. I'll deploy the miners, we will keep an open channel." She turns back to the comms system, presses more buttons. "Naomi to mission control, we have docked with a suitable asteroid. Deploying the mining robots now."
"Positive Naomi, standing by for your next communication."
Mum makes her way to the airlock.
"Mum, what do I do if something happens to you?"
She comes back over, and points at one of the other displays. She presses more buttons. "this is the tractor beam. I've set it to scan for RFID tags, as there will be one in the envirosuit. Pan the camera, find the only RFID tag outside the ship, then press this blue button here. That will pull me into the cargo bay." She nuzzles me, then heads for the airlock again.
I start reading the technical manual; I know Mum or mission control will talk me through anything I have to do, but it would be useful to at least know how things work. Occasionally move the scanner to keep an eye on Mum.
It's boring.
Several hours pass of Mum unloading the robots and getting them in position, then setting up the comms relay. Thankfully other missions have already put communications relays up, so it's easier.
Eventually, she comes back in, sits down, stretches her legs. Back on the comms. "Naomi to mission control, we are live, over."
"Positive Naomi, we are reading visuals. Beginning a mining test now."
I don't hear anything. Just a very slight rumble through the floor. "Mission control to Naomi, we have contact and are drilling, mission accomplished."
"Positive mission control, shuttle one is returning home."
Mum unclamps us from the robotic miners. Soon they'll have a shelter dug out the rock, and the next team will come up with people to make our first orbital station a home. Mum burns normal to get back to the orbital plane that takes us home, and then lights the thrusters retrograde.
I'm glad to be going home. Mum points the shuttle at Unity while we coast back to the atmosphere. I'll never forget this sight, it's breathtaking.
