city blues 02 - angel city blues (25 page)

The tug nudged forward until our upended module slid into its form fitting recess in the shuttle’s cargo bay. The module seated itself with a metallic thump that I felt through my spine.

The image in the data-shades flipped to the view seen by one of the shuttle’s nose cameras, staring up past the runway lights into the blackened sky.

A channel selector was right next to the volume control. I started cycling through channels. Five more were reserved for external cameras: dorsal view, ventral, left-looking, right-looking, and tail camera—virtual views that made every seat a window-seat. I continued to surf through canned video, and local vid stations, until I came to a news broadcast.

Thirty seconds into a late-breaking story about rebel rocket attacks in Singapore, Icon-man reappeared, temporary overriding my dialed-down volume control. He smiled his best computer-generated smile. “It’s time for lift-off,” he said. “Captain Suryama extends her greetings, and hopes that you enjoy flying Japan Aerospace.” He winked and made the A-Okay sign with his thumb and forefinger.

The roar of the shuttle’s hydrogen-fed engines exploded into my ears, and three gravities of acceleration reached down like the hand of God and squeezed the breath from my lungs.

CHAPTER 19

The pneumatic cushions softened the shock considerably, but acceleration made every breath an effort.

The carefully-padded data-shades pushed against my face with nearly painful force. News stories continued to flicker in front of my eyes, ignored. I flexed my fingers, cycling through channels until the shuttle’s tail camera appeared. I found myself staring down a silver-white pillar of fire, the runway lights of LAX falling away into darkness. The domes of Los Angeles lay like a scattering of fat gumdrops, unevenly illuminated from within. I watched them recede until they dwindled out of sight.

I switched to the ventral cameras. The world was not the pretty beach-ball sized sphere that they show on orbital vacation commercials. From this altitude, it was a dark and dominating presence. The curvature of the surface was easily visible now, but the Earth was still quite clearly the
ground
. It looked like it could reach up and swat us anytime it wanted.

A couple of more clicks of the channel selector brought the dorsal camera up in my data-shades. We must have climbed above most of the atmosphere, because the stars were no longer pinpricks in the curtain of night. They were blue-white diamonds, burning with a fierce internal brilliance that nearly dazzled my eyes.

Something about them struck a chord inside me. Their clarity whispered to me of a universe that transcended the petty squabblings of Man. Of aspirations higher than greed, and lust, and anger.

For a few minutes, I dreamed the dreams of a child. I was not a hairless primate, but some higher being, with a purpose beyond the comprehension of so-called humanity. I could continue my journey toward the stars forever. Soaring into infinity. Away from evil. Away from Nine-fingers and his murderous cronies. Away from a civilization that could not seem to stop eating itself alive.

After some unknown number of minutes, the engines cut out, their column of flame shortening as though sucked back into the rectangular exhaust ports. Deafening thunder fading to silence.

We continued to climb, riding the hand of inertia into the eternal night of space. The pressure of acceleration dropped off, trading places with the plunging-elevator sensation of zero-g.

My stomach rebelled, tumbling violently like a compass suddenly deprived of its magnetic reference. Saliva flooded my mouth, salty and metallic under my tongue.

I had forgotten my SAS patch. Icon-man’s unheard pre-launch spiel had undoubtedly warned me about Space Adaptation Syndrome, and reminded me to wear a patch.

I fumbled through one of the egg’s side pockets until I found a small stash of foil packets. I tore one of the packets open, peeled the backing off the patch, and pressed the adhesive surface against the right side of my neck.

The drug hit my brain almost instantly, clamping down on the nausea, and making me drowsy. That was probably an intentional side effect, to minimize the opportunities for mischief during the freefall leg of the flight. Sleepy passengers can’t get into much trouble.

That was fine by me. I’d had a long day, and my men’s room tango with Arm-twister had burned up most of my energy reserves.

“Hey,” Dancer said. “You losing steam on me?”

I yawned. “Yep.”

“What am I supposed to do while you’re snoring?”

“Plug your ears,” I said in a bleary voice.

I was still zonked out when the engines fired again. The roar and sudden onset of acceleration jolted me back to consciousness.

Inside the data-shades, the view from the nose camera showed only stars. I fumbled the selector until the tail camera came around, and found myself staring past the white-hot glare of the exhaust trail toward a circle of light in the dark fabric of space. The circle grew slowly larger, gradually resolving itself into the donut shape of the orbital colony.

“You’re awake,” Dancer said in my ear. “I was beginning to wonder if you were dead.”

I did the best job of stretching that the safety harness would allow. “Not yet.”

My attention was still on the looming shape of the colony. Like most of the major space habitats, Chiisai Teien was a Stanford Torus. The main body of the station was a fat tubular ring joined to a central hub by six cylindrical arms like the spokes of a wheel. The entire structure rotated slowly around its central axis.

The structure continued to expand as we approached. The size of a coin. The size of a dinner plate. The size of a cocktail table. The size of my living room. The size of a house. Swelling until it became a turning wall of metal that nearly filled the viewing area of the data-shades.

I knew from the digital brochures that the outer curve of the ring was 1.8 kilometers in diameter, and the rotational speed was one revolution per minute. Centrifugal force created about nine-tenths of a gravity for the people living inside the ring at that level. Not quite Earth normal, but more than enough to make dirt-huggers like me comfortable.

The docking ports were at the center of the hub, on the axis of rotation. To mate up with one of them, the shuttle would have to precisely match the spin rate of the station. I watched as the main engines stopped firing and the shuttle initiated its spin maneuver. The stars were just beginning to show circular movement when the camera feed abruptly terminated, and the view inside the data-shades filled with a menu of entertainment options. Probably another wise decision on the part of Japan Aerospace. The sight of the stars wheeling past in dizzy circles would undoubtedly provoke the nausea reflex in many of the passengers, including me.

So I didn’t get to see the docking sequence, or the mechanical handoff when our passenger module was detached from the shuttle airframe and fed into the cargo elevator that lowered it through one of the tubular spokes toward the primary habitation ring. I felt a series of bumps and vibrations, and then a sense of returning weight as the passenger module moved farther from the axis of rotation and deeper into the well of centrifugally simulated gravity.

Dancer passed the time by humming some annoyingly tuneless pop song in my ear. I ignored her.

Several minutes later, a final jolt announced that we had reached the bottom of the elevator. There was a chuff of equalizing air pressure, and the lenses of the data-shades went transparent. A translucent image of Icon-man went through the motions of returning the shades to their assigned pocket. I followed his directions.

A minute or so later, the latches of the safety harness released themselves, and the entire rig retracted into the overhead of my passenger egg. A perky feminine voice came over the intercom, announcing something in Japanese, and then repeating the message in English and four other languages. The usual stuff—thank you for choosing Japan Aerospace; watch your step while disembarking; etcetera, etcetera…

I followed a shuffling line of travelers out of the passenger module and down a narrow concourse to the baggage claim. Most of us walked cautiously, our bodies not accustomed to the lower subjective gravity of this new environment.

For me, the sensation was an oddly-euphoric mix of increased muscle energy, offset by a low grade uneasiness that my feet weren’t getting proper traction. The combination was disquieting to my body’s neuromuscular feedback circuits. My brain couldn’t decide whether I was about to soar like a bird, or fall flat on my ass.

I could see from the expressions of my fellow passengers that I wasn’t the only one feeling it. One woman leaned close to her traveling companion and whispered something about walking with someone else’s feet.

That was a better description than anything I could come up with.

My borrowed feet took me to the baggage area, where I walked past the milling travelers waiting for their luggage to appear.

I wondered if Jackal’s shit-bird tracker software would work here. Probably not. It was tapped into Earth-side video surveillance aggregators. The colony’s camera systems wouldn’t be on the same data feed. As long as I was up here, I couldn’t count on handy little pings to tell me where the bad guys were.

Dancer spoke in my ear. “You expecting the welcoming committee?”

I looked up quickly, scanning the scrum of passengers for Nine-fingers or Messenger-boy. I hadn’t expected them to come after me in such a public setting. I didn’t see either of them. Only a few of the passengers looked Asian, so at least I wasn’t going to be the only gaijin walking around. “Why? What do you see?”

“Sushi-girl over there is carrying a sign with your name on it.”

I stopped searching the crowd for thugs, and spotted a young Asian woman holding an unfurled rice paper scroll. ‘D. Stalin’ was printed in letters that were clearly intended to suggest brush-stroked kanji.

Dressed in a red silk kimono decorated with white and gold embroidered flower petals, she could have been a character in an old samurai vid.

I could tell from her expression that she had recognized me, but she made no move in my direction. In LA, that might have signaled attitude, or even plain old apathy. Here, the cultural subtext was different. Probably, it was a gesture of respect. She was making it my decision to either acknowledge her, or ignore her.

She bowed deeply as I approached. Her voice was soft, and almost musical. “Welcome to Chiisai Teien, Stalin-san. Your luggage will be delivered directly to the hotel.”

I didn’t know enough about bowing etiquette to return the gesture. I don’t have any luggage, other than my carryon bag, but I decided not to mention that. “Uh… I think there’s been some mistake. I haven’t booked a hotel yet.”

She bowed again. “My apologies. You have a suite at the Shogun.”

I nodded, and motioned for her to lead the way. Someone was either lying in wait for me, or rolling out the red carpet. Either way, we might as well get it over with.

I followed the unnamed woman out of the concourse and into the station proper. The transition was profound and immediate. We went from bright artificial lighting into the pleasant gloom of a fairly convincing twilight.

The louvered shutters in the overhead curve of the torus were closed, blocking out the rays of the sun. The arch of the ceiling was only a few hundred meters above our heads, but the entire surface was a photoactive matrix. It was currently showing a realistic simulation of an evening sky—complete with fading pink-tinged clouds and a handful of emerging stars.

The change in architectural style was just as profound and immediate. When we left behind the steel and molded plastic of the passenger area, we stepped into a world of sloping tiled roofs, greenery-lined flagstone walks, and buildings of black-lacquered wood, bamboo, and rice paper.

This was the Edo district, modeled loosely on the feudal Japan of the nineteenth-century. Or more accurately, a corporate marketing team’s romanticized idea of that period and place.

It was picturesque, but a tad overdone. The grass and fir trees too artfully groomed. The carp-filled reflecting pools a shade too serene, and too quaint. As though visitors couldn’t quite be trusted to recognize beauty without the decibel level cranked up.