Martians Abroad

And we would. We’d be in our element, in sealed space stations and colonies. We’d be able to spot it the minute something went wrong.

Stanton wouldn’t dare rig anything truly dangerous, would she?

21

Boarding the shuttle to get to Cochrane Station, I couldn’t stop grinning. I might have been vibrating, I was so excited. I might have annoyed some of the others.

“I think I’m gonna be sick,” Angelyn muttered.

Turned out about half the Earth kids in our group had been off-planet before, at least to one of the orbiting stations on a vacation or whatnot, and didn’t have any trouble. Some of the other half, though, weren’t thrilled. Angelyn had gone pale, like the blood had drained out of her face.

“Zero g’s nothing to be scared of,” Ladhi said, trying to sound reassuring.

“I’m not scared of zero g, I’m scared of making an idiot of myself!” Angelyn said.

She wasn’t wrong—making an idiot of yourself in zero g was way too easy if you didn’t pay attention.

“Don’t flail,” I said. “Relax. No sudden moves. It’ll be fine.”

She closed her eyes. “Oh, my God.”

We filed down the aisle of the shuttle and into our seats.

We had a cluster of familiar faces in our section of the shuttle. The usual offworld clique—me, Charles, Ladhi, Ethan, Boris, Marie—plus some of the Earthers: Angelyn, Elzabeth, George, a couple of George’s friends. And this time, they weren’t teasing us, smirking at us, or acting superior.

A member of the shuttle crew gave us the safety briefing. Stanton ordered us to pay attention, but I had a hard time. I knew all this, about emergency oxygen and crash positions and inflatable escape bubbles and harnesses stored at the exits. The odds of anything going wrong were so vanishingly small—

Except for Stanton, standing in the front of the shuttle gazing over us during the briefing with her usual superior, calculating expression. With her in charge, I could throw the odds out the window. Anything could happen.

I started paying closer attention and checking to make sure the safety and escape devices actually were in place and labeled. I looked across the aisle to see Charles doing the same. He caught my gaze and pressed his lips in a grim line.

The engines whined, and the shuttle rattled as the launch module prepared to ignite and take us out of the gravity well. A hand closed over mine. Angelyn, sitting next me, had grabbed my hand and squeezed.

“I’m sticking with you this whole trip,” she said, her voice tight with anxiety. She glanced back to include George and Elzabeth sitting in the row behind us. “We all are. If something awful happens, we’re counting on you guys to get us out of it.”

“We’ll all get ourselves out of it.”

So what should have been a really nice trip and the highlight of my time so far at Galileo ended up being anxious and stress ridden. We knew something was going to happen, we just didn’t know what, or when. I hoped it didn’t involve air locks.

* * *

As far as we could tell, everything went smoothly. We docked at Cochran Station, and the seal between the ship and station didn’t blow and send us all tumbling into an explosive vacuum.

Being on the station, stepping on the rubber matting in the steel corridor, felt like coming home after a long and difficult journey. I took a deep breath of filtered air and relaxed as the walls safely closed around me.

“Why do I feel like my heart’s in my throat?” Elzabeth muttered.

Funny, my internal organs finally felt normal, sitting lightly in my body cavity like they were supposed to, instead of sinking like rocks.

We could tell who’d never been off-planet before by how they acted once we got on the station. The station had simulated gravity, but it was less than Earth’s, and you had to move carefully. Even the students who were excited about this took slow steps and reached out to grab on to things.

A couple of people got sick right off. We’d been given bags for that, fortunately. It was apparently pretty common. Secretly, I thought it was hilarious, because at least one of the sick kids was Franklin, who’d given us offworlders a hard time from the get-go.

“It’s called payback,” Charles said. “Part of the natural order of the universe. I think it’s a corollary of Newton’s Third Law of Motion.”

“What are you talking about?” one of the other kids said.

“He’s making a physics joke,” I said. “He does that.”