The Dispossession of Dylan Knox

3

3

The braking rockets of the spacecraft Venture had completed eighty-six percent of their burn before they sputtered and died.

Lieutenant Colonel Maxim Bury felt the loss of thrust and was calling up systems data even before the klaxon assaulted his ears. Then he swore extravagantly. The braking rockets had suffered complete failure, though that looked to be the only breakdown. The holographic display in front of him showed six graphs that represented the failed rockets—that graphic pulsing bright red—plus the four directional thrusters and the main engines, which all showed green. To his left was a three-dimensional representation of the planet below with Venture’s programmed trajectory overlaid in blue and a new course suddenly superimposed in red dashes that refreshed every second as information changed.

It only confirmed what he’d known instantly: without the rest of the braking burn, Venture would not lose enough velocity to make orbit, but skip through the outer atmosphere of Centauri B’s fourth planet and continue through the star system back into interstellar space, never to return.

There would be no way to return to Earth, either.

Had he missed warning signs because he hadn’t been paying attention? That would be the cruelest of ironies—this mission had filled his every waking moment and every daydream for longer than he could remember.

Max spat questions at the ship’s digital intelligence, but manually fired topside thrusters even before getting answers. He had to drop Venture’s nose immediately, get a few seconds of thrust from the main engines, and then worry about correcting the new flight path. Centauri B-d was only about seven-tenths the mass of Earth and its upper atmosphere at Venture’s current altitude was less than half as dense. Using it for aerobraking was impractical in the extreme, and odds of success were dropping by the second.

Except there was no other choice.

A swollen delta wing hiding behind the fat umbrella that was its radiation shield—and potential heat shield if the craft had to enter atmosphere—Venture was never intended to harness the friction of air to slow down from such a speed. Max had no idea if it would work, or if Venture would just catch enough air to lose all control. That scenario ended in a ball of flame that would spread debris across the sky, giving the virgin planet one hell of a fireworks show.

No response yet from the ship’s DI. Max clenched his teeth, his hand hovering over the main engine controls. If he triggered another downward boost, it would just mean a new round of calculations for the DI to make, requiring still more time he couldn’t afford to lose. Meanwhile, Venture might pass the point of being able to climb back up to orbit and would be committed to going down. All the way down, in one piece or many.

Finally, the display flashed gold, indicating a plotting solution. Max fired two more seconds of main engine burn, then feathered the directional thrusters to keep the slim craft at the critical angle. Too shallow, and it would get lift instead of braking; too steep, and it would flounder. Vibration had built without him noticing, and now he felt his command couch shake.

The wait was excruciating. He held his breath—couldn’t help it.

At last, a tone like an antique door chime told him that Venture had slowed enough for the planet’s gravity to capture it. He emptied his lungs through tight lips. At least he wouldn’t be careening helplessly off into the endless night between stars. But should he continue to slow and try a landing? The mission plan called for months of investigation from orbit before making that decision, but he was almost a third of the way down already.

No. The remaining two thirds was by far the most dangerous, and Venture’s digital intelligence still didn’t have enough data about the vagaries of the planet’s atmosphere, let alone where to find a suitable landing spot.

He followed the navigation system’s instructions, carefully adjusted Venture’s attitude, and gradually increased its delta-v with the main engines to regain enough speed to achieve orbit.

There was a nervous moment when the ship felt too sluggish to make it, but many minutes and muttered curses later, the wing-shaped craft climbed above the ocean of air, and her DI informed its commander that it had reached a stable elliptical orbit around the planet Centauri B-d. Another round of minimal aerobraking could regularize the orbit later.

The center display flashed white and gold.

Max’s performance in the simulation scenario was judged to be ninety-two percent successful.

He slumped in his chair and wiped sweat from his forehead with a sleeve. He’d wondered if Mission Control would throw something nasty at him with the launch of the real mission less than three days away, but apparently they believed there was no such thing as over-preparation. He could probably blame Arseny Blazhenov for that, revenge for some chess game he felt Max shouldn’t have won. Maybe Blazhenov would laugh about it over drinks later. But maybe not—he took his duties as head of Mission Control seriously.

The lights in the crew cabin brightened and the holo-displays returned to default settings; but before Max left his chair, he asked the computer to calculate the likelihood of success if he had attempted a landing. Its answer was a sobering seventeen percent.

He looked over at the pilot’s couch and imagined Clay Deverell there. Clay would certainly have piloted through the emergency with greater skill than Max, but he probably would have gone for the landing. And that was why Max was the mission commander.

There was no rush to leave the simulator. Max had nowhere else to be right then, and although he’d be spending a lot of time in the real ship within a few days, it would not be the same. Android senses were vastly different from human ones. He stood up to stretch and felt his short-cropped hair brush the ceiling. That wouldn’t happen in an android body either.

Not for the first time, he mused that he would probably not have been accepted for the Centauri mission if he’d been going in his own body—building spacecraft for tall people was a needless expense. That fact often made him worry that when the mission was over his career in space might be too.

A video call the day before had shocked him—the director of Roscosmos himself calling to thank Max for his efforts to promote the space program. The director had mentioned that several of the space organization’s top staff would be ready to retire by the time Max returned home in a dozen years and hinted that such an outstanding service record should be rewarded. Max had thanked him sincerely, a little embarrassed. The truth was that he hoped to spend ten or twenty years experiencing real space travel before pursuing a desk job.

Unless something happened on the Centauri mission to change his mind.

The simulator was a full-sized reproduction of Venture, and he sent his gaze over every surface, willing his brain to preserve each detail.

Ivory-colored paint was dulled in places where he and his crewmates had leaned on hands and left skin oils behind. His fingers traced a small crack in a plastic panel cover where Clay had slammed his fist after a particularly sneaky series of systems failures. A spot of color on the wall caught his eye—the lip print Ming-Mei had planted there after her first successful simulator landing. Even the team’s science specialist had to learn to fly the bird in case of emergency. Ming-Mei wasn’t the lipstick wearing kind, but she’d virtually been ordered to use it to impress some visiting dignitaries earlier that day. When the vivid lip print on the wall reminded her that she still had it on, she wiped her mouth with the palm of her hand in disgust and smeared it on the side of a conduit box, but you had to bend over to see that.

The interior of Venture held about as much living space as a bus with most of the seats taken out, except a little wider. Three bunks along the back, a common worktable in the middle, and workstations that covered most of the walls. Android bodies didn’t need furniture, didn’t need to move around at all—they could spend the entire mission in couches without any concern about loss of muscle and bone mass in zero-g, fluid circulation problems, or difficulty digesting their source of fuel. But the human minds that inhabited those bodies would go stir crazy.

Humans needed at least some space to move around, and although there was no room for exercise equipment, they would spend a few hours every day in virtual reality mode, playing games, exploring Earth’s tourist attractions, or just going for walks in pixel-perfect forests.

Max had tried out those VR systems, but he’d never been in an android shell. Experiments had shown that the transfer of human consciousness was nearly always successful the first time, and very often the second; but attempts beyond two had a frighteningly high failure rate. No one tried that anymore. Venture’s human crew would arrive at the ship a week before the encounter with Centauri B-d to let them get accustomed to their artificial bodies.

Two centuries after humans had first landed on the Moon, a crew was now ready to be the first children of Earth to go beyond the solar system to another star. The fact that their physical bodies would not actually make the journey didn’t lessen the achievement as far as Max was concerned.

It was strange to think that the real Venture had hurtled soundlessly through space toward its target for nearly seventeen years already. It would be another four years and more, in early 2181, before the minds of its human crew caught up with it aboard a powerful laser beam. The uninhabited ship had to chase the Centauri system for two decades then use the complex gravitational fields of the three-star system to slow and detour around the star called Centauri B, braking even more before proceeding to its fourth planet.

The laser could take a much more direct route, with no need to decelerate. And since it carried only massless data, that data could move at the speed of light. While Venture’s voyage would be twenty-one years, the consciousnesses of the crew would arrive in just over four.

Two years after their arrival, the consciousnesses of the humans, and all recorded data, would be returned to Earth by a laser aboard Venture. Venture itself would never return, left behind in the Lagrange point of the target planet and its sun.

What about that fourth planet? Would it be the desperately needed second home for humanity?

Scientific instruments showed a world a lot like Earth, that shouldn’t need the centuries of terraforming that Mars would require for large scale colonization, but those instruments still left many unanswered questions. That was what the Venture mission was for. The situation was too complex and much too important to entrust to robot probes.

Max had immersed himself in the whole scenario for five years. Why did he feel ... unsettled now? It wasn’t fear—he’d experienced fear often and was very good at pushing it aside. Apprehension? Whether from intuition or imagination, there was no way to tell, but it felt like weakness, and he hated that.

He looked again at the pilot’s couch and pictured Syuzanna Kanadova there instead of Clay. Like Max, she would have made the sensible decision to return to orbit in the simulation he’d just completed.

Was that why the selection committee hadn’t chosen her for the mission—because she and Max were too close in temperament? Or simply too close?

They had never been lovers—that would have meant an immediate washout from the program. But Max remembered the time they had huddled together all night for warmth during survival training, each knowing that the other was all that stood between them and death. An experience more intimate than s*x.

Her elimination from the Centauri program could have opened the door for their love. Instead, her pain from the loss of her dream became a wall between them. He should have reached out; but he never had, and now, though he was only thirty-eight, an inner voice told him he’d missed a chance for love that would never come again.

Maybe that association was why he gave the Venture replica an extra-long look as he left it.

“Don’t worry, you’ll be seeing it again in just a few days.”

Arseny Blazhenov came to a stop a meter away from him, a big smile on his face.

“Four years and four months,” the man continued, “but to you it will seem like only days. How did you like our final simulation?”

“Not a very friendly send-off. You couldn’t have taken it easy on me?”

“Tcha, where’s the fun in that? Besides, any kind of failure is possible with a craft that’s been travelling through four light years of space dust and cold near absolute zero. It’s important for you to be ready.” He gave Max an exuberant slap on the shoulder. “Scaring people into wetting their pants always makes me thirsty. Want to join me at the Depot?”

The Fuel Depot was the nickname for the bar at the Vostochny Cosmodrome, for those who couldn’t wait until they got to their homes in Uglegorsk to start their drinking. Max had planned to go there tonight, but now he didn’t feel like it. He shook his head.

“Why not? You still have your will to write or some poignant farewells to say? Proschai! Bog znayet uvizhul’ya tebya!”

Max laughed. Making light of the risks in their business was the best way to deal with them.

“Not really. I said goodbye to my parents a few weeks ago—they’re in Congo now. In fact, there isn’t even reliable vidphone coverage where they are.”

“Your mother ... what is it she does there again? Delivers babies?”

Max nodded. “Her yearly pilgrimage. She believes the donation of her skill is more valuable than money in those villages. My father says he has to go along to keep her safe, but I know he gets a kick out of any minor engineering project he can help with. He missed that kind of thing in the Air Force.”

Blazhenov smiled again. “Not much call for training fighter pilots in Congo anymore, I imagine. What about Alexander?”

“We caught up with each other a couple of weeks ago in Moscow, and I called him yesterday. Maybe you know that he’s Moscow’s second striker. They’re playing a high-profile tournament in Paris, so I want to check the feeds when I get home ... see if any of his matches are being ‘cast.” Max rarely watched vidcasts of his younger brother’s football matches, but he wouldn’t get another opportunity for a long time.

“A footballer as tall as you?”

“Not as tall, but a lot faster!” Max chuckled.

“Tomorrow then.” Blazhenov nodded and started to walk away. Over his shoulder he said, “You know you owe your body one last good drunk before you leave it behind.”

A spider of ice crawled up Max’s spine.

That was it, he thought—the disquiet he’d been feeling.

Other cosmonauts had left their home planet behind. He was leaving everything behind. His very body—every single cell that the world knew as Max Bury.

Was it possible to ever get that back?