Rocket Girls: The Last Planet (14 page)

There was a long pause before the captain responded.

“Fine, we’ll just have to trust that you know what you’re doing.”

Yukari nodded and Akane turned to crank up the oxygen levels on her life support. She began taking rapid breaths.

“Don’t take too much, you’ll get high.”

“I know.”

Akane deftly removed her backpack and attached a light to her wrist.

Yukari touched her helmet to Akane’s and spoke. “What day is it?”

“Thursday, on the Solomon Islands.”

“Great. Be careful in there.”

“Will do.”

With a twist like a mermaid breaking through the water, Akane disappeared back into the truss. Yukari started the chronograph on her wrist. She looked up to find Norman staring at her. He said nothing. They both waited, breathlessly.

When the needle on her chronograph had gone around twice, she saw something moving inside the truss.

A white glove emerged—holding the valve assembly.

“She made it!”

Yukari reached out and grabbed the assembly. Handing it to Norman, she quickly reached back and grabbed Akane’s hand. Akane slid smoothly out and hurriedly reattached her backpack. Yukari could hear her rapid breaths once she had the electrical cable reattached.

“Are you okay?”

“It was a lot—” she took a heaving breath, “—it was a lot easier than the first time.”

“Ha ha!” Yukari cheered and gave Akane a big hug. “A complete success! That’s my grade-A student!”

Akane laughed. “I’m just glad I’m not getting in the way.”

“We can’t even bring a change of clothes on the orbiter. Why would we waste all that space on something that just got in the way?”

“Good point!”

The girls were rattling on in Japanese when Captain Berkheimer cut in.

“
Arigato
—sorry, that’s all the Japanese I know.”

“Oh, sorry.”

“No, not at all. You’ve really helped us out. It’s not much, but would you like to join us on the middeck for a welcoming party? I’ve already gotten permission from Solomon.”

They weren’t initially scheduled to visit the shuttle at all, to avoid interfering with their mission.

“We’d love to join you,” Yukari said without a moment’s hesitation.

THEY PASSED THROUGH
a circular air lock and arrived on the middeck. There was a line of white lockers in front of them, three sleeping berths on the right with a small galley on the side. On the left was a toilet and access hatch for the decks above and below.

In the remaining space, three men waited in T-shirts and shorts.

Yukari and Akane took off their helmets and held them at their sides.

A cheer went up. They always got this reaction when they took off their helmets in front of men—something about it was particularly enchanting, apparently, though Yukari had never figured out exactly what.

“Welcome to shuttle
Atlantis
,” the captain said, extending his hand. He was in his early fifties, with a long face and rough whiskers on his chin. Yukari would have taken him for a British gentleman on his day off, but seeing as how he was a shuttle captain, he was most likely a former U.S. military test pilot or of similar stock.

“Excellent work out there,” he said. “You did in five minutes what we couldn’t do in five days. My hat’s off to you.”

“Not at all,” Yukari said pleasantly, “but I will say I was impressed by my mission specialist’s work. Allow me to introduce our new rookie at SSA, Akane Miura.”

“No, really, it was nothing,” Akane blurted as she shook each of the men’s hands in turn.

Next it was the shuttle crew’s turn to introduce themselves.

The pilot, Luis, was thirty-seven years old, ex-Air Force. Something about his eyebrows made him look a bit like the actor Koji Ishizaka, and one of the first things he asked them was which anime was the most popular right now in Japan.

Akane had no idea, and when Yukari suggested
Chimaera Ball Z
off-the-cuff, he informed her that it had already been canceled.

Gordon, the shuttle MS, was thirty-one years old, an aerospace engineer for an airline company who’d switched over to NASA. He was a handsome fellow with blond hair and an anxious look in his eye, despite his relief that the valve assembly had been retrieved. It was his mishap with the RMA that had lost it in the first place.

The two girls were offered juice in tubes, biscuits, and freeze-dried ice cream. A couple of the men offered them gum and chocolate out of their personal lockers. Nothing up here was particularly tasty, but the variety was welcome.

Norman emerged from the air lock. He was a big man with a crew cut. Had they been standing on the ground, Yukari would have only come up to his chest.

Though he had taken off his helmet and backpack, he was still in his bulky space suit. The five spread out to the floor and the ceiling to make room in the suddenly crowded middeck.

“Sorry we started without you. Good work out there,” the captain said to him.

“I didn’t do anything. They’re the ones you should thank,” Norman said gruffly.

Seen from this close, his space suit looked incredibly unwieldy. The chest was like a barrel wrapped in cloth. His arms and legs were tubes, completely obliterating the human form beneath.

“You look like a sumo wrestler,” Yukari said, earning a smoldering look from Norman.

“If I had a suit like yours, I’d be able to keep up with you up there.”

“Maybe, though you’re so big as it is I doubt you would have been able to get inside that truss.”

There was silence in the middeck.

The captain cleared his throat. “So, you two, want to check out the cockpit?”

“Oh yes, that’d be great!” Akane said eagerly.

“Why not,” Yukari said with obvious disinterest. “Just the thing—technology older than I am. It’ll be like being in a museum.”

Akane glared at her, but Yukari pretended not to notice.

The captain led them through a hole in the ceiling onto the upper deck. Though photographs and video made it look larger, in reality, the cockpit was small—roughly the size of a truck cabin with a sleeper behind the seats.

“As you can see, everything but the floors and ceilings are covered with instrumentation. Everything up front is the flight controls—it’s pretty much the same as a commercial airliner. The right side is for mission operations and the left is for payload operations. In the back we’ve got the RMA control and the docking controls.”

“It’s a two-seater,” Akane noted.

“That’s right. The only people that actually have to sit up here are the pilots when the shuttle is in flight mode. See the footrests? You can adjust the height on those, so even someone your size could fit snugly.”

“That was a smart design.”

“We have to consider the range of people that come up on the space shuttle. Different sizes, different races, different religions. We’re set up to take them all.”

“Unlike the SSA, you mean,” Yukari said.

“Yukari!” Akane was visibly angry now. She spoke Japanese. “Why are you saying things like that? What did these guys ever do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“So why the attitude?”

“It’s just in my nature to rebel in front of an authority like NASA.”

Akane blinked. “Okay, but aren’t we supposed to be emphasizing goodwill and international relations up here in space?”

“Man, you really are a grade-A student! You talk like a textbook sometimes, Akane. We’re leaving here in just a little bit anyway. Who cares if you get along with these people?”

The captain watched them, a look of concern on his face. Akane didn’t think he understood Japanese, but their tone of voice was probably information enough for him to make some assumptions about what they were saying.

“Well, I think it’s important to be nice to other people. It’s an opportunity to make friends—you never know how the people you meet might help you in the future,” Akane said quietly.

“You don’t say.”

“Opportunity only knocks once, Yukari.”

“It’s only opportunity if they’re worthwhile people. Meeting some bum probably isn’t going to get you very far.”

“Just think, I met you, and now I’m up here.”

“Oh, so that’s where you’re going with this?”

Akane nodded. “Remember when you told me to get on the helicopter? I was terrified. But I just did it. I had the feeling like that was the start of something.” She smiled a little. “I think I’ve gotten better at meeting people since then. And being
nice
to them. Especially when I think of what possibilities might lie in store for me.”

“Well, I call that being a goody-two-shoes.”

“I’m fine with being a goody-two-shoes,” Akane said with a guileless smile.

Yukari looked off into space and sighed.
Why do I always get the insanely optimistic ones for partners?

“Fine. So I should go apologize to Norman, is that what you want?”

Akane nodded cheerfully.

Yukari excused herself and went back down to the middeck. There she found Luis and Gordon eating Snickers bars.

“Did Norman go somewhere?”

“He’s pre-breathing in the air lock,” Luis told her.

“He’s going out again?”

“Yep. He has to put on the new valve that you brought with you.”

“Pre-breathing takes about two hours, right?”

“That’s right.”

Wait, he didn’t come back in here just for our welcoming party, did he?

“Did you have something to talk to him about? You can get him on the intercom.”

“No…no, that’s all right.”

I’m sure he came back to replenish the oxygen and his backup. That has to be it.

“So, Yukari,” Luis said, “want to exchange souvenirs? We do with the Russians whenever they dock. Here, here’s mine.”

Luis pulled a cloth emblem out of his pocket. It was a special badge for the Orpheus Mission.

“Wow, that’s nice. But I don’t have anything like that to give you.”

“Oh, doesn’t have to be anything special. A notebook or a pen, anything.”

“I might have a pen.” Yukari rummaged in her waist pouch and found a Fischer ballpoint pen. “Here. It even has the Solomon Space Association logo on it. How’s this?”

“Ooh! That’s great!” The pilot seemed genuinely happy.

Just then, the captain called down. “Think you can come up here, Yukari? Dr. O’Reilly wants to talk to you.”

“O’Reilly?” Yukari asked as she made her way to the upper deck.

“Chief designer on the Orpheus Project. He wants to thank you personally.”

Now this is a person worth meeting
, Yukari thought. Yukari and Akane held on to the backrest of the pilot seats in the cockpit and positioned themselves facing the intercom.

“You did all the work. I’ll leave this one up to you,” Yukari said to Akane.

“Are you sure?”

“Aren’t you the goody-two-shoes who likes meeting people? Especially scientists?”

Akane nodded and pressed the talk button. “This is Akane Miura on
Atlantis
. Hello, Dr. O’Reilly.”

“Ah, you’re the one who took off her backpack and retrieved that valve?”

“That’s right.”

“Thank you! Thank you so much!” His voice wavered, making the end of his words a mess of static. “I’m afraid I can’t express just how grateful I am to you.”

Akane cleared her throat. “I think I understand, Doctor. I heard that the Orpheus probe had been put in storage for a whole decade. Is that true?”

“Yes, the project officially started over twenty-two years ago now.”

Akane swallowed. “That’s an awfully long time.”

“Pluto isn’t as exciting as the other planets, you see. I don’t know how many times our budget got cut. And then, after the
Challenger
explosion—”

“I see.”

“We needed a powerful liquid fuel engine for the Orpheus’s prolusion system—Pluto is a long way off, as you know. After the
Challenger
accident, it became more difficult to carry that kind of fuel up in the shuttle. Safety regulations and all. Of course I understand but… I’m sorry, I don’t mean to bore you.”

“Not at all, Doctor. I find it fascinating,” Akane said.

“Well, it’s only been recently that Pluto has garnered more attention. Being small and frozen, it’s not as exciting as the other planets, you see. In fact, there are some who consider it a Kuiper belt object and not a planet at all. Yet if it is this, then surely it is a representative of the belt, and therefore worthy of study.”

“The Kuiper belt… That’s where comets come from, right?” Yukari asked.

“One of the places, yes!”

The Kuiper belt formed a great ring of innumerable celestial objects just outside of Pluto’s orbit, all too distant and small to see from Earth, even with a decent telescope. Most of them just sat out there frozen in space for an eternity, but when something happened to kick one out of orbit, it would plummet toward the sun, becoming a beautiful streaming-tailed comet.

Though some comets came from even farther afield, those with a relatively frequent orbit were usually thought to have originated in the Kuiper belt, where Pluto stood as lord of the gates.

“So Pluto’s like the big boss of the comets.”

“That’s what I want to find out. Even Voyager missed Pluto on its survey of the outer planets. It’s the last large object in the solar system that hasn’t been studied from relatively up close. If Orpheus makes it there, it will be the first probe to observe Pluto from space local to it. I’m sure we’ll see some astronomy textbooks rewritten.”

“When is it scheduled to arrive?”

“Oh, the trip will take twelve years. It takes even light a good four hours to cover the distance, after all. How old will you be then?” the professor asked.

“Twenty-eight.”

“Splendid. I’m jealous. Until recently, I had given up hope that I would ever see a close-up image of Pluto in my lifetime. But now I’ve made up my mind,” he said with rising cheer. “As of today, I’m giving up doughnuts and cigarettes! This is all thanks to you, you know,” he added. “Thank you ever so much.”

“You’re welcome, and I hope I can see those pictures with you someday.”

The transmission was over, but Akane remained facing the speaker, tears welling weightlessly in the corners of her eyes.