Theia

Three hours to departure, 83% loaded and 100% fuelled. Through the cafeteria window I can see some kids scrawling REMEMBER B on the wall opposite. The aircon substation next to them has all sorts of other crap painted over it. I keep my own gag reflex down with a gulp of coffee, swallowing my anger along with the bitterest bean. No one who wants to remember B was actually there. Kids will be kids. We were all young once. Young, angry, and stupid.

The feed in the corner is showing highlights from the last race. Two teams out of Ceres had been battling for the lead until the last checkpoint, at which, within minutes, both their engines went down and PallasGuard sailed by to win it. Suspicious, yeah, but not unexpected. It's a race and the point, obviously, is to win. No one around me seemed to care much. If they had then they would have watched in real time, and this was already old news. The current drama was fresh trouble on Mars. Well, fresh-ish. About 20 million people now called Mars home, twice as many as when I left. For all the talk about a "stable second home for humanity” that they were peddling way back it turns out that, in hindsight for obvious magnetic and vital biological resource reasons, only a few spots on the surface were suitable for permanent habitation. The Magnetosheath would solve a lot of that problem, and ease the terraform decay that's a large reason behind the rest of it, if only it had worked. The broadcasts kept using the same clip of a crowded forum in Hellas, some girl leading the crowd chanting “THIS IS JUST THE BEGINNING.” Like fuck it is. Sorry my pretty little Martian, but what it is is just another episode in that series nobody says they watch anymore but clearly someone does or they wouldn't keep making the fucking thing.

Mars was once space. Not anymore. Martians who think they're spacers don't know space, and if they decide to put it to the test most of them find out pretty quick. Then they die. That's what's separates Spacers from Terrans and Martians. Spacers survive, planetsiders don't. That's all there is to it. As a result you get all kinds of people in space except morons. Those rampant fucking egotists that do far too well in any other environment where just saying what people want to hear will actually get you pretty far. They don't survive out here. They kill themselves by doing something stupid or we kill them to stop them doing something stupid. Stupid gets people killed. Stupid doesn't fly.

Still, Mars was nice enough for the years I was there. It was safe, and comfortable, and I did at least meet more people than most spacers meet in childhood. Lacking both gravity and people hardens and softens you in strange and interesting ways. Full life spacers are, almost universally, mad cunts. Beautiful chancers inhabiting an airtight world unto themselves. As long as you keep that in mind you can navigate the often stormy seas of stunted personalities that will flow your way. I'm lucky in that sense, and a touch of gravity is good when you're still growing. It keeps you within average height for most habs and suits.

I worked the terraform rigs, and I loved it. I grew up with these photos of heavy industry back on earth. These beautiful machines digging the wealth of Eden from deeper and deeper below. I liked the oil rigs best. Small cities built far out in the ocean wilderness, prototypes of the ice mining stations that keep everything in the belt running. The terraform rigs crawling across that rusty regolith were a genuine childhood fantasy come true. Smaller crews than I think the Earthside oil rigs had but for most Martians it was a Goldilocks zone of social contact. Not too many, not too few. Only one fatality in the years I worked em too, which by Martian standards was pretty good. First time I saw someone die, and almost as bad as seeing someone spaced. Hit rough ground during routine maintenance training up a newbie. Thierry, or Terry? Fucknows, it all kinda blended on Mars. Could have easily been spelled Tewi and we still would have said it the same. Anyway rig rocked hard, they slipped, first phase grinders, big teeth, caught a leg and pulled him in. I worked another year before deciding that sooner or later something like that was bound to happen to me, and on reflection I'd rather it didn't. I took the Callisto Settler loan and set out with others from Mars and a couple of belt stations to boldly go where only a few of us had already been before.

Calli was rough, like I imagine Mars was at first only colder, darker, and smaller. It was also beautiful. I mean Mars was beautiful in a way only someone who had never been to Earth could appreciate but Calli was something else. I'm biased of course. I met Alyna there. It would have still been beautiful without her, but that sky had layers of light to it that I often felt were only visible through the prism of her. I also met myself, as I later learned people generally do when far enough from home. There's some invisible barrier that you just need to break through sooner or later, and the longer you stay homebound the later and harder it inevitably gets. I loved Alyna and by direct extension Calli, and eventually Calli loved us back and gave us Theia. One of the first children born to the new colony and everyone in our hab wing was over the moons. We planned to spend the rest of our lives there, put the work in, and grow fat on the returns as the moon was settled.

It was an opportunity, but fuck me was it hard. We shared a 4x4. Standard single person hab, divided by 3. The guys on the rigs back on Earth didn't know how easy they had it. We both worked, hard. We both cared for Theia, hard. If you've never raised a baby in a first gen colony, do it only with the measured expectation of death. Beyond the unpredictable biological issues that vary from kid to kid, there's a lot of ways to die in space. Remember what I said about the mad-cuntishness of spacers? Multiply and add the uncontrollable curiosity of children. I remember hearing once that long ago on earth, talking back when the sky was still an impassable barrier between land and the heavens, most children died real early on. If all the old diseases didn't get them then it was just as likely some random act of cruel curiosity would. The village well gave you water, and ate the occasional small child in return. Theia was strong. We knew she could make it if only we could see her through the first few years.

That beautiful sky hid the fact that Calli was just as greedy and envious as anywhere else, and the farther you are from core the farther too from oversight and justice. We both worked tunnels. Colonies are built on tunnels, discovered or dug. There's inherent mortality in it. Machinery designed to destroy the rockiest regolith combined with old suits that would never have passed inspection had there ever been one. We always repaired our own suits but they can only be patched so many times, and you can't build a suit fab without the tunnels and domes to build it in. So we patch, we rig, we adapt, as best we can until we die. I got word about thirty minutes after it happened. Suit puncture at the waist joint. Near instant depress. Alyna was gone, and Callisto instantly became less beautiful.

I still knew, logically, that it would one day be brilliant, and to Theia it was the only home she had ever known. I tried to hold it together and keep working to make it somewhere she could one day be truly comfortable, and then came B.

Dome B was intended to triple population capacity. There was no way the colony would ever support a second wave without it. With Dome B came a new dock, again much bigger than A dock, which by that point we had taken to calling The Shaker. Too many ships, not enough space. When hulls make contact, even a gentle nudge, the vibrations shake through the whole thing. It shakes right down your spinal cord and people generally keep shaking for a fair while afterwards. We had needed another dock, let alone another dome, for most of the time I had been there. The Callisto Consortium had simply held back the funding until Dome A and the surrounding tunnels were so overcrowded, and enough water ice had been accessed, to supply the surplus labour and resources.

By that point Callisto was almost impossible, and the near crushing pressure of people pushing for Dome B led to too many opportunities for shortcuts. I mean we built the fucking thing and we knew we were going to live in it but give people a chance to get rich quick and I don't care what otherwise binds you. If you aren't on the case, if you aren't constantly checking each other with worst case scenarios in mind then sooner or later some self-serving little shit gets greedy. If that shit is greedy enough and becomes valuable enough to other bigger shits then they'll also get away with it. We lost a lot of good people when the primary lock to B dock blew and pulled half of B with it, thousands of our best swallowed by the vacuum that had carried them there.

I was in B at the time, working construction at the far end from the dock, which gave me the necessary seconds to helmet up and tie down. I spent about 30 minutes in the tender care of a 5mm cable, and the open ended girder I had looped it to. Had the wind been pulling just a bit more to my right then I would have counted my last moments in decreasing millimetres from the end of that lifesaving beam. After Alyna I found it hard to love Callisto, but after B I actively hated it.

Dome A was safe, and Theia with it. Thank all the fucks we built that one right because, ignoring the obvious fact that I had very nearly just died, losing her would have been the end of me. I had already paid off the loan, and with the company compensation for Alyna, and after spacing a few reps the payout we eventually forced from the consortium for B, I had enough for passage elsewhere.

I also had nightmares, panic attacks, and about two years of throwing my own shit at Theia that she neither asked for nor deserved. Everything about Callisto had a bad air to it now, for both of us. The next settler ship that docked I signed us both up as crew for the return journey. Theia was eight by then, but Spacers like having kids around and a kid who can prep a suit and deliver ration packs can more than earn their place on any ship. I became one of the two engineers aboard. One of the very few labour laws anyone actually follows out here is having a backup for critical crew. It's simple logic really, if you've only got one engineer and something happens to them then you're all fucked, and nobody wants that.

She loved it. Seeing her that happy worked wonders for me as well. It didn't even occur to me that she had never seen Calli from the outside, and seeing it reflected in her eyes as we left orbit was enough to make me fall in love with it all over again. The whole thing had turned out to be a false promise of course, but those do tend to be the pretty ones. Across the other colonies thousands more were still choking on those promises and all they have for relief are further and farther promises. I'd been too far, and seen too much, and I couldn't be fucked with any of it. Callisto had taken Alyna, and a large part of the man I once was, and all I had left of both of them was Theia. The best I could do for her now was show her the system, let it nurture her and hope that one day she could find some part of it to call home.

The return went smoothly. I was barely needed for engineering duties so we had more time together than we had ever had before. Crossing the belt we spent hours just looking at those countless distant specks passing us by. When you let the mind wander gazing on those puffy little dots of rock and ice they start to look like things. One that looked like my old terraforming rig on Mars looked like an aircon substation to her. I tried to explain what the rig was, and how it worked. I left out what it could to a person but I think she got the idea. “Like a big munchy machine?” she asked.

We didn't stay long on Mars. When I left I had decided to never come back and that feeling was still very real. The gravity was a touch hard on her compared to Callisto, and we both liked the journey more than the destination. I agreed to another settler run on the same ship. The captain had taken a liking to having us around and we were more like mascots than actual crew. Theia was meeting new people, and learning a little something from each of them. She started meeting Earthlings too. They're a strange bunch, Earthers, which wasn't lost on her. “They talk like the air's free,” she had said, and I laughed like it was. It was good for her though, to hear about the place we all once called home. One day, with enough weight training, she might even see it.

On the way out we saw an asteroid that looked like the captain's face in profile and she insisted he come and see it. “hmm close, but with a nose like that I'd never get my helmet on,” he said after a few seconds consideration.

“Well, with a belly like yours I'd think the helmet would be the easy part,” she responded, with much less consideration.

“Touché little spacer,” he chuckled back, and for the first time in a long time I felt at home.

It hit me every time we broke sky diving back into the brilliant black. There was no reason we needed to settle for anything less than zero-G, asteroid faces, and the endless expanse. For both of us life planetside had become unbearably heavy. Everywhere between everywhere everyone else wanted to go, that was our home.

We spent about seven years on that ship. By then Theia was as good a crew as any captain could hope to have, and I'd been saving almost everything I earned the whole time. Very few Spacers spend so much of their childhood unshackled from even a weak gravity well. We're taller than the average Earthling of course, but height and a lack of gravity aren't entirely proportional and after a certain point other issues start showing up. Theia hit the Spacer grail of 2 metres when she was 14, and by the time I put in the deposit on our BluNova 4 she was possibly the lankiest extant mammal in the system.

The BluNova 4 wasn't exactly top of the line, even then, and Theia would have preferred to transport people, but I'm several lifetimes away from affording that. We called her the Alyna, of course, and she could carry about 4 Million litres in up to 40 standard containers. We were among the smallest fish in our particular pond, but parts were easy to come by, and a crew of two was enough to rotate shifts in the pilot's seat. The Alyna could hab four, and we sometimes took charter passengers from one station to another. The new faces were good for both of us but I always preferred the journeys with just me and her, floating effortlessly past increasingly familiar asteroids.

The closest we've come to harm in the years since was a blowout in one of the containers that threw us off course and ejected fucknows what into the outer belt. In our manifest we had “tunnelling equipment” logged for that container. Most tunnelling gear I ever used was fully electric and nothing pneumatic is ever transported assembled and pressurised. Based on how angry the clients at the other end were I'm guessing it was more expensive and probably a lot more dangerous than the manifest made out. I like to think a scavenger later came across it and had either the luckiest or unluckiest day of their life, depending on which bit of it they touched first. These guys nearly killed me over it. In fact it was Theia who saved me. She's becoming a bit of a celebrity in the belt, and one of these guys felt, I like to think accurately, that killing me would necessarily lead to killing her, which would, also accurately, lead to any of a thousand people killing them at the earliest possible opportunity. She was a real lucky charm that day. One more reason why I owe her my life.

I turn to her as the screen in the corner switches back to Mars and even with those tired slogans polluting the atmosphere everything somehow feels right. She's a better daughter than any Spacer could ask for, and half the belt knows it. The day is soon coming when she needs to go her own way and with her reputation she could probably be a contract pilot for any of the major carriers. I'll miss her, and I'll probably need to hire at least two more crew to replace her, but it's safer money than freelancing and a necessary step to pilot a passenger ship. I know that deep down that's what she's after, and she'll never get there under my ageing wings.

“fully loaded” blips up on my watch. Theia is on her feet before I've even looked up. I smile to my reflection in the black mirror of my cup, and lose myself in it for just a second.

“What's up?” she asks, looking quite significantly down at me.

I smile to my reflection in the dark mirror of my cup before looking quite significantly up to say “You are...”

I let her eyes begin to roll before deciding that's probably the best way I could have said it. Anything else would have ruined the moment.