“Will you shut up?” Charles moaned from the bunk under mine.
I wiggled to the edge of the bunk so I could look down at Charles. His eyes were clamped shut and he was gripping the strap across his chest so hard I thought his knuckles were going to pop. Was he actually getting motion sickness?
“You going to be okay?” I called down. “Want me to get you a barf bag or something?”
“Shut. Up.” I could barely hear him around his rigid jaw.
It really would suck if he got sick. I’d still mock him for it until the end of our days.
The topsy-turvy bouncing lasted ten minutes or so, until the Lilia Litviak settled into orbit. We’d arrived. It took another day to match orbit and spin with Ride Station, where we’d be meeting the shuttle that would take us to Earth. Once again, I had to follow along with the tourist commentary on the monitor in the cabin. They wouldn’t even let us watch from the observation lounge. They didn’t want untrained passengers bouncing around the corridors for some reason.
Before the maneuvering started, I complained about it to Charle
s, who suggested, “It’s because if something goes horribly wrong they don’t want us to see it coming.” He was probably right.
Ride Station was a kind of giant cylinder made of connected corridors, rings, pods, and docking sections held together by a steel framework. The whole thing spun to create simulated gravity in the outer levels. It was mainly a transfer station—ships coming in from Mars and the outer system could dock here; short-range shuttles from Earth delivered supplies and passengers. The place was busy, ships coming and going, passengers arriving and leaving. The space around it was filled with blinking lights and silver hulls reflecting sunlight and then falling into shadow. The closer we got, the more the hull and framework of the station filled the monitors until I couldn’t see anything else.
Then we docked. I expected to feel something, a big clanging ringing through the hull, a hum as the ship powered down, a vibration as thrusting engines guided us to the docking ring. But I didn’t feeling anything—until the ship’s gravity was taken up by the station’s spin, and then what I felt was tired. Heavy. My steps moved slowly, and my breath dragged out of my lungs. The gravity was spun up higher here. Two-thirds of Earth gravity, double what it was on Mars. I was going to feel this heavy for the foreseeable future. No, I was going to feel worse—this wasn’t even full Earth gravity. How did people on Earth live like this?
We got ready to leave the ship. My bag felt massive, and I hadn’t even packed much. But that five kilos on Mars would be fifteen kilos on Earth. I wanted to go home. I never thought I would miss the ship, its cramped quarters, its mind-numbing routine. But at least I could breathe there. Bags over our shoulders, Ethan, Charles, and I gathered at the mouth of the boarding tube, the passageway that linked the ship to the station. Charles didn’t look like he was having too much trouble, but he was probably just hiding it really well—don’t show weakness, after all. Ethan walked with his shoulders slumped and didn’t seem to be doing any better than I was.
I didn’t bother hiding anything. I huffed my way through the tube and dropped my bag as soon as we reached the docking bay on the station.
“That bad?” Ethan said. He was smiling, gazing around with his eyes lit up.
“You’re just going to have to pick it back up,” Charles observed, and I sneered at him.
The ship had docked on the station’s outer hull. Inside, a broad corridor curved in both directions. At the next docking bay, fifty meters along, crates were being loaded on a ship, some kind of cargo from Earth bound for the outer system. Pipes and cables made up the ceiling, and across from us a door led to a passageway and the station’s inner corridors. It was all painted a pale, inoffensive beige, same as the ship, same as half the rooms at Colony One. The least aggravating color imaginable, which made it weirdly maddening.
This could have been the garage by the air lock back home—most wide metal rooms looked the same at some level. But this one was crowded, busy, worn. The rubber matting on the floor had a scuffed trail where hundreds of footsteps had passed. Noise echoed, and a regular current of people passed along the corridor in front of us, some of them carrying satchels, pushing carts, wearing hard hats, or talking with companions. I’d seen this many people on Mars in meeting rooms or in the atrium for concerts or plays. But these were all just living and working here. I wondered if we’d have time to explore.
“There.” Charles nodded.
A slim woman in a steel gray uniform, trousers, and a jacket with a pale shirt underneath, stood to the side of the bay. Her hair was short, slicked against her head, giving her a severe military look. She was staring at us like she knew us.
“Is she from Galileo?” I said. “Are we all going to have to dress like that?”
“It’s not so bad,” Ethan said, a little breathlessly—from the higher gravity or because he had a thing for uniforms?
She approached us, her stride predictably clipped and official. Stopping, she looked each of us up and down, slowly and appraisingly, and didn’t seem particularly happy with what she saw. I felt like a diagnostic monitor and squirmed.
She donned a perfunctory, official smile. “Charles and Polly Newton? Ethan Achebe? I’m Elinor Ann Stanton, dean of students at Galileo Academy. Welcome to Ride Station. You’re the last group to arrive, and we’re on a tight schedule, so I hope you’ll understand my hurry. If you’ll come with me?”
What would happen if I said no? What if I wanted to see more of the station first? The others were already following her, and it was easier to just do what she said than to argue. Although if I ran in the other direction, how long would it take her to find me again …
Who was I kidding? Run? I could hardly walk in this gravity. I thought we’d get at least a day to acclimate. But no. We were headed straight to Earth. I wished I’d spent more time on the treadmill.
I hauled my twice-as-heavy bag over my shoulder and set off behind her and the others.
We followed her along the corridor, past other docking bays. The floor gently curved up ahead of us around the cylinder of the station. It almost looked like we were walking uphill, but it didn’t feel like it. The station’s spin was pressing us into the floor. The optical illusion was kind of fun.
Stanton wasn’t much for conversation. Ethan asked her a couple of questions about how many ships were docked at the station and how many other students were waiting to go to Galileo, and her answers were clipped and vague.
We passed five more docking bays. A couple seemed empty, the doors sealed shut, docking tubes stowed, carts empty, and monitors shut down. A couple more were busy, lit up, doorways open, people moving back and forth. I tried to sneak looks down the tubes or at the monitors to see what kind of ships were there, whether they carried passengers or cargo or both. Stanton walked too quickly for me to get a good look of any of them.
She stopped at the sixth bay.
Five kids in the loose, functional jumpsuits typically worn by people who lived on ships or stations were sitting on a steel bench against the wall across from the docking-tube doorway. They stood when Stanton stopped in front of them.