The Pioneer Read online

  “Fine,” I say, trying not to sound as surly about the idea as I feel. It’s not like she’s wrong. I never fully recovered from the accident. Ironically, it wasn’t being tossed into space without a suit that caused permanent damage. It was getting saved. I felt my heart burst when my tether retracted and yanked me back into the ship. At the time I thought it was, I don’t know, emotional or something. It made sense to me that losing Teddy would feel like being torn apart on the inside. But it turns out that’s just what being torn apart on the inside feels like.

  ISA medical spent almost six months trying to find a way to fix me well enough to return to active duty. They failed. So, for the rest of my life, my blood pressure will be monitored and maintained by little machines about the same size as my blood cells, called pacers. They work just fine under normal circumstances, but they can’t handle really high speeds, or big altitude changes, or basically anything else that happens on a regular basis when you’re a pilot. Blacking out every time the ship turns too fast is no big deal if you’re a passenger, but it could be fatal for everyone if you’re in the pilot seat. That’s why I’m a civilian now.

  “Do you want me to come with you to medical?” Mom asks.

  Yes. I want Mom to hold my hand and tell me I have beautiful bones, like she used to do when I was little and I was scared of the body scanner. But I say:

  “Not particularly.”

  “Fine,” she says. Her voice is chilly and still, like deep water has drowned the irritation and concern that were there a few seconds ago.

  She leaves. I feel like an asshole. I should just talk to her. But I can’t. I’ve tried before. Putting these feelings into words is like picking up shards of broken glass with my bare hands. It accomplishes nothing and leaves me shredded. Besides, it’s not like she’s been exactly forthcoming with her own emotional damage.

  After the accident, everyone else drove me nuts, talking about how I was a hero. Mom couldn’t even look at me. The day after Teddy’s memorial service, she signed on to test the ISA’s newest superluminal engine and disappeared into space for ten months.

  Dad pretty much disappeared too. He came home at night sometimes. But sometimes he slept in his lab for weeks on end.

  It took fourteen months to rebuild the Pioneer and confirm a new launch window. I spent most of that time in rehab and physical therapy. Alone. Except when I was in the hospital cafeteria bullying Beth into eating. She got scary thin for a while, because she was living on coffee. Mom and Dad were too busy burying their grief in work to notice.

  Screw this.

  I’m taking a shower before my physical. If my heart fails in the shower after surviving eight months of deep sleep, then I won’t have to bother figuring out what I’m supposed to do with my life now that I can’t fly.

  The wall screens in the locker room are usually switched to mirror mode, but when I walk in, the walls and part of the floor are covered in chemical equations, DNA sequences, and strategic genomic algorithms.

  Oh goodie.

  “Beth?” I call.

  “What?”

  The word swats at me like an irate house cat. I find my sister working a tangle of equations on the wall screen at the end of the first row of lockers. She is dripping wet, bald, and naked.

  “Beth. Towel.”

  “Why?” she asks without looking up.

  “You’re naked.” I grab a towel and toss it at her. She ducks and keeps working.

  “I’m also in a locker room,” she says. “Nudity is perfectly acceptable.”

  I don’t bother to argue. There’s no point. Beth doesn’t give a crap what other people think of her. I open the supply cupboards and collect a uniform, boots, and utility harness in her size. I pile them on the bench next to her. “Just get dressed, okay? Mom’ll blame me if you’re late for launch.”

  “That would be irrational,” Beth says, “and unlikely, since you have forfeited your place in the command structure on this ship.”

  “Gee, thanks for reminding me,” I say as I shuck off my swimsuit and try not to stomp on my way to the shower room.

  I swear, we used to be able to talk to each other. I guess our relationship is just another thing that doesn’t make sense without Teddy.

  I choose a shower stall at random. The last person in here set it to a three-sixty that makes it look like I’m taking a shower in a rainforest. This was shot somewhere in the New Amazon, I think. The trees are big, but nothing like the stuff in the old documentaries that Beth was obsessed with when we were kids. I’m supposed to be doing an ecological survey of a forest just like this one with Grandpa right now. That was the plan. Dad wasn’t a big fan of the idea of me staying behind on Earth, but at least he understood why I didn’t want to be a part of the GFP anymore. Mom didn’t. She came back from her superluminal test flight and informed me I was back in the Project, and we were leaving Earth in four months. And I’m still seventeen, so what I want doesn’t matter.

  Actually, “want” is the wrong word. I want to be a part of the Project. I want to be there the first time the Wagon touches down on our new planet. But I don’t want to be a passenger. I want to be Joanna Watson, cadet pilot. And I’m not her anymore.

  I seem to be the only one who realizes this. The academy would have let me finish my degree and officially be a member of the Pioneer’s crew, but only because I’m a “hero.” I didn’t want that. The only crew position I’m even close to qualified for would be in the Pioneer’s dedicated marine squadron, but I don’t want to be a marine.

  I have no idea what I do want to be and there was no time for me to train in a new field before we left anyway. That means I’m listed as “Accompanying Family: Minor” on the manifest. The next oldest AFM is seven years old. It’s embarrassing.

  My scalp tingles as I scrub in the follicle stimulator. You have to shave your head for insulated sleep because it’s impossible to get inso-gel out of hair. We learned that the hard way after our first test run of the system, when I was nine. Thankfully, we have stims. They’re great, as long as you don’t spill any on your feet. I learned that the hard way too. Teddy called me “hobbit” for a year.

  I let my hair grow to the middle of my back. It isn’t practical, but I grew my hair out after I left the Academy. This is what I look like now. That’s just the way it is.

  I turn off the water and step out of the shower.

  I can hear someone moving around in the rows of lockers, but it isn’t Beth. She’s gone, and so are her clothes. She cleared the wall screens and left them in standby mode, so the rows of black lockers stand in stark relief against the pale gray of the screens.

  I wrap myself in the towel and go looking for my locker. They’re assigned in alphabetical order by last name, so I find mine in the last row, next to the shower room. A gray ISA flight suit is hanging next to the duffel bag full of personal effects I stowed when I went into insulated sleep.

  “Subtle, Mom,” I mutter to myself as I pull on the jeans and T-shirt I wore to the sleep center on Earth the day I went into inso. The jeans will go into the recyclers eventually. We don’t do laundry. It’s way more energy efficient to 3D-print clothes, then recycle them when they’re dirty. But I’m not recycling this shirt. Not ever. Teddy gave it to me on my fifteenth birthday. It has the early-twenty-first-century NASA logo screen printed across the chest. I distinctly remember opening the package, rolling my eyes, and saying, Gee, thanks, bro. You sure this isn’t for you? I don’t think I wore it once before he died. I’ve been wearing it a lot since then.

  I jam my feet into my elderly high-top sneakers and then I strip the utility harness from the flight suit and strap it on over Teddy’s shirt. Civilians don’t usually wear harnesses, but civilians aren’t usually out of their crates in orbit, either. There’s a flex stowed in the harness pockets. I wrap it around my wrist. The ISA gets faster processors and cooler apps than civvy flexible tablets. Waste not, want not.

  I switch the wall screens back to mirror mode and brai
d my hair. The slippery brown strands slide through my fingers, and when I finally capture them all, the braid comes out lopsided and lumpy. I give up and bend over to finger comb it out so I can start over.

  “Bold fashion statement,” Leela says behind me. If I’d known she was the other person in here, I wouldn’t have bothered to mess with my hair. I would have just left.

  Leela is another thing I lost in the accident. Theoretically, we’re still friends. But in practice we can barely manage small talk without one of us pissing the other one off.

  It’s sort of my fault. Leela took my place as Mom’s cadet pilot after I was medically discharged from the ISA a year ago. You’d think the fact that Leela is my best friend would make it easier to watch her take over the job I trained for my whole life, but I think it makes it worse. Being jealous of Leela seems to be like breathing these days. It just happens, whether I want it to or not.

  I try not to be a jerk about it, but I’ve never been great at hiding my feelings. Especially since the general level of jerkitude is mutual. Leela’s never actually said that she’s mad at me. It just wafts off her, like a perfume that I can’t smell but is giving me a headache anyway. I think she blames me for Teddy’s death. Which isn’t fair, but I blame me too, so I get it.

  I can’t decide if her wordless aura of accusation is better or worse than all the people who smile extra brightly and ask me how I’m doing just a little too loudly, like they think my heart condition also makes me kind of deaf.

  Leela has already trimmed her wavy black hair into a pixie cut with thick fringe that somehow manages to be both practical and stylish. Compared to her, I look like a little kid playing dress-up with my utility harness strapped on over my jeans and T-shirt.

  “Mom was kind enough to passive-aggressively leave a uniform in my locker,” I say, trying to act like I’m not feeling outclassed and intimidated, which I totally am. “I figure, waste not, want not.”

  “You could just put the uniform on,” Leela says, tousling her hair and examining the effect in the mirror. “Not like there are a plethora of career options out here.”

  “Not like wearing the uniform is gonna change that,” I say. “Considering.”

  I swear, I didn’t mean that to sound bitter. It just came out that way.

  “Considering what?” Leela says before I get the chance to course correct. “That anything less than cadet pilot is beneath you?”

  Heat flushes up the back of my neck and prickles under my new hair. I don’t know if the flare of emotion that follows is anger or embarrassment, and I don’t stop to figure it out.

  “That’s not what I meant!” I protest. “You always—”

  “What? What do I always?”

  I open my mouth. Then I close it again. I don’t know what to say. If I knew the words to make things better between us, I would have said them already.

  A countdown clock fades up on the mirrored wall screen in front of us: DEPARTURE IN T – 00:23:00.

  I’m late for preflight.

  The thought is a reflex, whispering from a universe that doesn’t exist anymore. I’m not late for preflight. Leela is late for preflight. It’s her job now.

  “You should go,” I say, quietly.

  “Whatever,” Leela says, but her voice is still jagged with hurt feelings. She turns and marches off. I don’t stop her.

  I need to get to the medical center and get Leela’s dad, our chief medical officer, to check me out, if I want to be on the Wagon when it leaves. I give up on braiding my slippery new hair and scrape it back into a ponytail. Then I grab the duffel from my locker and leave.

  Most of the crew must already be on the Wagon. The corridors are empty, and the wall screens are all in standby mode. It makes the ship feel like a maze of white punctuated by the occasional matte black rectangle of a sliding door. I don’t even realize that I’m almost to the engine room until I come around a corner and see the memorial wall.

  A picture of Teddy and me when we were kids has been blown up to almost life size and displayed on the wall screen across from the engine room doors. The words IN GRATEFUL MEMORY run under the image in a plain black font.

  I was eight when this picture was taken. Teddy was ten. It was our first trip into space. We’re wearing little ISA flight suits that Mom had made special for us. Beth refused to wear hers. She didn’t think it was appropriate for a civilian twelve-year-old to be in uniform. Teddy loved it. He loved everything about space. He was going to design spaceships when he grew up. But instead of growing up, he became a hero.

  I’m sure this memorial makes the other survivors feel better. It makes me feel empty. Sometimes I think both of the kids in that picture died here, and I’m just a ghost lingering where I shouldn’t be.

  Melodramatic much, Jo? I scold myself. But that doesn’t make the feeling go away.

  “Dear lord, woman.” Miguel’s bright voice bounces up the corridor ahead of him. “You have a taste for danger.”

  “Huh?”

  He closes the distance between us in a few bounds, his med kit and the waterproof neoprene dry bag he uses for his surf gear bouncing on his shoulders. “You know how pissed the commander was when she turned up in medical and Doc told her you hadn’t been there yet?”

  I wince. “I can guess.” I didn’t think Mom would actually check on me, not with everything going on today.

  “Thankfully,” Miguel says, pulling a test tube with a hot-pink membrane stretched over one end from a pocket on his utility harness, “I am a smooth mofo, and I convinced our fearless leader that I could track you down and test your little pacer dudes on the fly.”

  “You can do that?” I say, relieved.

  “Yup,” he says. He wiggles the test tube and raises both eyebrows, like he’s already laughing at his own bad joke. “But first, I need to do as the vampires do.”

  I hold out my arm. He presses the membrane-covered end of the tube to the inside of my elbow and says, “Brace yourself.”

  Pain licks me with an icy tongue as a needle dips through the membrane and my skin, and into the vein. Blood rushes into the tube. “Righteous,” Miguel says, tapping the vial twice. There’s a quick bloom of warmth as the needle retracts, leaving a tiny patch of adhesive behind it to seal the skin. He shakes the vial, bopping his head to the beat.

  “Why are you hanging around this morbid junk?” he says, tossing a nod to the memorial wall.

  Guess I’m not the only one who has mixed feelings about this thing.

  “I didn’t mean to,” I say. “I was on my way to medical. Then I saw this and . . .”

  Miguel rolls his eyes sympathetically. “People aren’t trying to be weird,” he says, pressing the membrane side of the vial to the flex on his wrist. It bonds, sticking in place. “They just don’t get it. It was a different sort of day for them than it was for us.”

  “Understatement,” I say.

  “Nah,” Miguel says as he taps into his flex to start the analysis of my blood. “Just the truth minus all the drama.”

  Miguel has a way of taking complicated stuff and making it simple. Kind of the opposite of what my brain does.

  “What am I doing out here, Miguel?”

  He raises a dubious eyebrow. “Exploring? Pioneering? Building a new home for humanity? Unless I seriously missed a memo.”

  “You guys are pioneers,” I say. The words pour out faster with each passing sentence. I couldn’t stop them if I tried. “I can’t fly and I’m not trained in anything else that’s useful. I’m just . . . baggage. Dead weight.”

  Miguel’s face twists into an expression that manages to be confused, sympathetic, and mildly offended at the same time. “No, you’re not. You’re Jo.” He looks up at the memorial wall again and shakes his head. “Ted would be super bummed to miss this. But he’d be psyched that we made it. Especially you. You survived throwing yourself out of a spaceship, dude. Badass.” His flex vibrates. He looks down at it, then grins big as he pops the test tube free. “And thanks to
these little guys, you’ll survive to do more stupidly awesome stuff on our new home.”

  “I’m cleared?”

  “Yup!” He tucks the vial of my blood into his medical kit. “Now we better haul ass or they’re gonna leave without us.”

  The airlock to the Wagon is open when we get to the loading bay. Leela is standing next to it, looking annoyed.

  “Finally,” she snaps. “You realize you two are the last in, right?”

  “Gotta make an entrance,” Miguel says, cheerfully ignoring her irritation.

  “Come on,” she mutters, waving us through the airlock.

  The Wagon’s passenger cabin is full of pioneers, laughing and talking. Happy, excited conversations weave through each other like a school of fish darting through the chilly, dry air. Mom has the wall screens set to a three-sixty of the shuttle’s exterior cameras, so it feels like we’re floating over the vivid green globe of our new planet.

  “Okay, people,” Mom calls out as Leela seals the airlock. “Settle.”

  The swirling current of voices rises as everyone hustles to tether into a seat.

  “Come on, guys,” Chris says, popping out of the crowd. He grabs my hand and tows me toward the last row of chairs. Beth is already there, scribbling on the flex that’s spread out on her lap. “The faster we strap in, the faster we get there!”

  Chris has only stimmed his hair a couple of centimeters, so his tight curls hug his scalp. He’s thirteen now, and taller than me, though he hasn’t gained any weight to go with the new heights. He still looks like a little kid, just one who’s been stretched like taffy.

  “The commander is letting Leela be lead pilot for descent,” Chris says. “Isn’t that cool?”

  It is. And I want it to be me so badly, I’m afraid I’m going to scream. Or burst into tears, right here in the middle of everyone. I manage a half smile for Chris. I’m sure it isn’t convincing, but he’s so busy watching Leela do last-minute checks with Mom that he doesn’t notice.