Michael Bickford
Lost Coast Writers, Redwood Coast
A Distant Blue Light (a novel)
Part One0 Launch
{Opening four pages previously posted.}
0.1 Acceleration
Naz and Del have just been boosted into a solar orbit that will bring them to a contracted six years at an asteroid mining station.
They were already a couple. For this extended mission they have entered into a marriage contract.
Chapters 0.11 and 0.12 recount their dream-like acceleration experiences—first Naz's, then Del's—which include their backstories.
1.2 Del will be posted next.}
0.11 Naz
This is really starting to bug me. Moments into the burn, and sweat has swamped her gloves. Now more spreads out from her solar plexus, below her breasts, and between her legs. Most of it pushed by the burn to the small of her back where it waits to be absorbed, some pooling in her navel. Naz imagines it pressed into her bellybutton under the force of the Gs they’re pulling, a dark pool, vibrating. She grits her teeth, trying not to act on her inclination to swear at Maira.
“OI Command, check my LESS. It’s a ****ing greenhouse in here.”
“Roger, T5. You are putting out more Joules than usual, Naz. Understandable. This is an especially big burn.”
“OK, Mom.” She slings the epithet, but only raises the slightest pause in Maira’s efficient communication style. Maira has heard it all from Naz before and doesn’t have an opinion on maternal feelings.
“Liquids Evac will catch up with your prodigious perspiration in approximately forty-five seconds. Sooner if you relax. Let the suit do the work, Naz.”
“Easy for you to say, Maira, but thanks.” Maira is actually nothing like Naz’s bi-polar mother. Naz is grateful for Maira’s boring stability, but seldom expresses it in more than the occasional conciliatory tone. She relies on Maira more than she likes to admit. Maira, for her part, notices and notes all Naz’s emotional responses, but reacts to them only when they impinge on Naz’s performance. This seldom happens.
Naz loves takeoffs, launches, and accelerations. She isn’t about to let a minor discomfort interfere with her adrenaline enjoyment. But the excess moisture in her suit is bothering her. Counterintuitively, and against all training, she pushes back on the rising Gs and strains against here belts, intending to fire herself up so she can feel the sense of release that follows as she relaxes. This has worked for her before, and it does now.
Settling deeper into the e-foam, she starts in on a song. “Blackjack n palm sweat on a Saturday night...” The lyrical connection and vocal fry on the tune of an old song brings a smile and eases her further. Eyes shut and relaxing into the burn, she opens up. “I’m leavin’ Las Veg–a–a–as...”
A sudden, unfamiliar self-consciousness invades Naz’s vocal reverie. She shifts her head slightly, stiffening to keep the Gs from twisting her neck, and shoots a challenging look at Del, expecting him to be giving her raised eyebrows for the inappropriateness of her outburst. They both know it’s being relayed throughout the system, but singing—or even howling—during a burn aren’t things Naz has ever worried about, both being proud parts of her legend. Now, though, she has a real partner—something new to her. Del, she sees, has dived immediately into sleep. Too keyed-up to ever fall asleep without chemical assistance, Naz is somewhat jealous of Del’s ability to knock himself out at will, even though she doesn’t really like to sleep.
“That’s gonna take some getting used to.” Her whispered self-narration, something she’s done since she was a girl, is also being broadcast to Maira, OI Command, L2 Control, and anyone else in orbit or on the surface tuned to their frequency. She knows these inter-orbital accelerations are so routine people outside the Orbital Industries system seldom monitor them, but the thought of an audience is part of the excitement, so Naz always imagines a throng of listeners—especially on the surface.
A lot of space monkeys let pharmaceuticals ease their burns. Naz takes hers straight, pumping adrenalin and singing. Even during sleep shifts she takes the meds only when she has to get her required six-hour minimum, preferring controlled daydreams to the helplessness of sleep-dreaming. Captain Nazareth Colton likes to be in control.
She reaches her right hand out to Del. Her glove, now mostly evacuated of excess sweat, touches Del’s encased left hand for a lingering moment, but knowing how deep he goes when he wants to, she pulls it back and her hands resume their usual rhythmic tapping to her soundtrack. “Used to go up to Barstow for the night... da-duh-da—da—da... Find some mm-mm trucker...” Each word of the song becomes harder to sing than the last, dropping in pitch and tempo, lyrics mumbled as the acceleration increases. Like always, she is losing her fight against physics. “Demonstrate his...dah-dah-dum... Now... mmm-mmm... far enough away... so... I’m...’’ Exhausted, she can’t even whimper the chorus, let alone belt it out as usual. As the Gs approach their max, she finally lets herself be still. Her roiling mind seeks old familiar paths to wander.
“It really is Saturday night back in Palmdale,” she whisper-thinks, only the vocal fry remaining of the singer she’d been impersonating. A spray of neon signs flashes across her memory on the verge of unconsciousness. “Palmdale... ****ing Palmcaster. Just what I needed.” She smiles the pulled-tight lip-line of the gravitationally challenged, enjoying the full-body vibration generated by the engines. At the edge of a memory-dream, she tries to nod her head in agreement with herself, satisfied with the visions of her life that are flooding in, but the G-forces have immobilized her. Sounding drunk, she laterally lisps, “A g-plaish to ge-the hell out-uh. Tha-wsha a good wa-out.”
~ ~
The ranch house, trailers, and outbuildings that comprised the Colter compound were the only buildings remaining in miles of city blocks at the southern edge of the what had been Edwards Air Force base—now known as the Mojave Interplanetary Spaceport. As the spaceport grew with the explosion of space industries, Palmdale-Lancaster—Palmcaster, as locals came to call it—had thrived along with it. Long before Naz was born, the twin cities had become one of the largest urban centers in California. But out in the Redman area, where Wayne Colter and his extended Christian clan took their refuge, it was still empty desert—huge squares of sand, sage, and saltpan blocked out by cracked and crumbling streets on which little had ever been built.
From her brothers’ stick-fort on the southwest side of the Colter compound, little Nazareth Colter liked to watch the glass high-rises of Palmcaster; sparkling and flaring in the desert morning, sheltering in the afternoon shadows of the desiccated mountains, and glowing blue as the lights came on below the red western sky. At night she saw the city as a cluster of craggy diamonds in the distance, competing mightily with the cascade of the Milky Way across the clear desert blackness to the northeast. Naz remembers many nights too hot or too tumultuous with family trauma for her to try to sleep anywhere but the fort, shifting her gaze over and over from the city to the sky, weighting their magnificence in her wondering mind.
Naz’s great-grandfather, Henry Colter, the first Old Man, had bought the place at just the right time, and at the worst time possible. Caught in a catch-22 of federal laws, the land around the spaceport was zoned for agriculture, but federal security laws prohibited certain activities within two miles of the old Edwards boundaries—activities required for farming in the high desert: no heavy machinery or new buildings, no new road construction, and no pumping water from the Antelope Valley aquifer. The land had been subdivided into half-mile squares for the development the city had anticipated outside the growing aerospace hub, but they became ghost blocks when the new federal laws came into effect.
The last in a long line of hot-potato buyers and sellers of the rapidly devaluating blocks, the Old Man, took the burn. The price was rock bottom because the feds were just about to make the land legally unsalable in perpetuity, except to the government—at a loss. The feds, as it turned out, didn’t have any interest in owning the buffer zone just outside the space port. They controlled and patrolled their own tract of insulating desert, full of old runways, hangers, and Quonset huts. For security reasons they didn’t want the industrial agriculture that enclosed the twin cities on their northeast to grow right up to their razor wire. A buffer of fallow, privately-held land was the least expensive solution. They crafted the laws to ensure that their additional security zone was maintained by the cities of Palmdale and Lancaster and by Los Angeles County. Owners, like the Coltons, sparsely spread around the port’s perimeter, paid no property taxes, and the feds leased the easement to their water at a rate designed to keep them satisfied with zero rights to develop their property and no viable sale options.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
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