Zero-G Adventures

In wartime, the difference between a soldier and a worker is that the soldier had the good sense to ask for a gun.

But that’s not entirely fair. There are far more people on Earth than Amalgamated Command could ever throw away senselessly. You have to go where the work is, even if you know it puts a bull’s-eye on your head. Nobody eats for free.

That was most of the problem. Put a different way, Mars was sick of our begging. They had a whole planet and six hundred times fewer people to feed, but apparently it doesn’t make economic sense to ship rice. Starvation is better for the economy, I guess.

Earth managed to get some AC troops over there and organize a command economy for about ten years, and my parents told me those were good years, calorie-wise. But when it broke down and we withdrew, they were even less accommodating than before. Then there were those years of flooding in Europe, and I guess it was obvious that we were scrounging up more parts in orbit to send a second wave of troops. I mean, there really wasn’t anything else we could do.

So, they threw the Ring at us to keep us occupied.

Then, it was known as Deimos, Mars’ smaller moon. At the time, it didn’t make much sense that they would move it at all. Martians are all about efficiency. For what it would cost, they could have built hundreds of perfectly horrible bombs.

They were explicit about it being a warning shot. They had rigged it with explosives, with the idea that it was going to do a tight parabola around Earth, blowing off fragments at intervals. Those chunks were supposed to rain down and cause “sub-critically catastrophic” tsunami and fires. Then we’d have to rebuild, and we’d leave them alone for a while as we tried to recover. And starved. Typically callous. Who attacks with a weapon of mass destruction, as a warning?

The official story is that our brave, suicidal (and probably totally inadequate) scavenged orbital group got moving and set off those explosives early, before being wiped out by a Mars interceptor fleet. I think it’s more likely that they screwed up and triggered a failsafe. Anyway, for the past two years Earth has had the Ring, roughly where our geosynchronous satellites used to be.

We mostly escaped harm, and there was a bonus. We started picking at the fragments for metals. There is olivine in Deimos that you can break down with focused sunlight, which is way easier than digging under topsoil. Earth started building some decent tech again, for the first time in a long time.

That’s what my team was doing — pulling metals out of a gift from Mars — when we heard that Deimos’ bigger brother Phobos was breaking orbit. I mean, we’re all thankful for Martian generosity, but that was just too much.

Within a day of that news, we were press-ganged. Congratulations and welcome to AC, ensign. Here’s your knife. We actually didn’t get guns. Too much risk that we might shoot at something today and hit a friendly next week.

We were critical to the survival of Earth, we were told by our new commanding officer, while she dragged us and our equipment off to the Moon. We were privileged to be the agents of the biggest counter-attack in the history of war.

I had my doubts.

Part II will follow tomorrow.

There is a certain hilarious bravado in making stuff up.

Our species would be comedy gold if we weren’t such a danger to ourselves and others. What are our super powers? We have good legs for running, good hands for making things and a big brain for getting ourselves out of situations we don’t remember how we got into. After that, we just started making things up, like milking animals, intellectual property and spaceflight.

Why didn’t a raccoon develop the internal combustion engine; why did we? Well, it’s a long story, and it started with somebody looking at a horse across a field somewhere, and saying, “you know what would be awesome?”

Space. Space fiction is usually science fiction, and science fiction has a lot of heroes and everymen. The heroes press on with resolve and a plan, and the everymen are lost misfits who need things explained to them and generally get swept along.

In reality, we’re all heroes to our everymen. We don’t know where we are or how we got here, and we resolve to keep going. When we switch roles, if we have a light heart, we can realize the absurdity of our situation.

The value in making stuff up is getting in way, way over your head.

It is my greatest desire to bring to you a game in which you can make stuff up and get lost and resolve to keep going. There’s a definite story as to how you got into your situation. There will be big things to do if you want to do them. There will also be getting lost and finding stuff and having no idea what you’re doing.

Is this fun? I don’t know, but let’s not worry about it too much. If it’s not, we’ll figure something out.

Stay with me. We’ll make it up as we go along.

What Gloria missed most was the food.

Her work was rewarding. She had several colony landings to her credit, and her voting bloc made her commutes to and from her major trade points reasonable. Gloria was doing well for herself, in a way that was enough for some people.

But before the diaspora, she had been a pretty good cook. In fact, her pod wing had agreed to switch off secondary duties to make sure that Gloria cooked more (and Jensen less. Oh, Jensen, she thought, if I ever have boiled cod again, it will be too soon).

Pod life wasn’t bad. There was socializing; too much of it sometimes. There was meaningful work and control over your own destiny. There was romance, in its normal form at Home and in improvised forms elsewhere.

There was also a slow transfusion of nutrients through the pod hookups, and a variety of tasty tablets with zero nutritional value that eventually everybody got sick of and just ordered mint flavour, or cinnamon if you were a freak. There was no Grana Padano cheese. There were no spring greens. There was certainly not ever a single damn omelette ever ever ever.

That was the lot of every podder. Gloria just felt it more. It was the oatmeal that did it.

One of her pickups was from a small agricultural colony. Poor sods were clamoring for the latest copper-coated gadget, and they only had oats. Lots of oats. What manufacturing they had revolved around oat processing (nutrient bars, breads, cereals, oat protein isolate, soluble oat fibre for regularity, oat milk, little rustic figurines made of strung-together oat hulls), and apparently everything smelled of oats. People assigned to the station complained that it smelled weird. Like not oats.

Gloria had thought that was funny. And then she had a run-in.

Some other pod wing had let one of their better colonies go to seed, and its government was presently in a state of malignant decay. This had been a good waypoint for Gloria when she was establishing her colonies, but it had recently become just a nervous moment for her as she lined up for the next star, with the local defence forces broadcasting an isolationist anthem, if you cared to listen, as their wing lined up in a futile attempt to intercept her short jump run.

Sociological zero points aside, Gloria thought they were a bunch of idiots. However, a bunch of idiots wouldn’t have the logistical capacity to keep a fuel barge and a small wing of scavenged spacecraft at her jump beacon.

Gloria herself wasn’t an idiot, so it wasn’t really a close thing. There should never have been a chance of total-loss. Her jump trajectory went out of the plane of the system. But they were ready for her arrival, and they hit her with a microwave beam, from about 30 degrees up and right of her heading; reasonably accurately and very, very quickly.

She considered evasive action. If she’d been heading the other direction and loaded down with decent tech, she would have taken it. But she had just the oats (and oat cheese, and oatmeal, and oat-based non-abrasive cleaners, and oat liquors, and twelve hundred copies of an erotic film that would have been very pedestrian if not for the unexpected appearance of oat flour at a critical moment), and water ballast. So she cancelled her jump, just for a moment, hit the dampers and set up a fast barrel roll, just to distribute the heat from the beam. Then she restarted the jump and waited.

And there it was, all through the ventilation system. Oatmeal.

At first it was just the smell of it, but in another second it was actually oatmeal, semiliquid and flowing. How was it getting in? Some sort of breach on the equipment rail? The water tank was heating and venting, two of the four oatmeal canisters were breached, and she was in warm oatmeal up to her ankles.

This was especially remarkable because her pod was spinning at about 30 RPM. There was an equally thick layer of it on the ceiling.

The local militia slowly fell behind as she picked up speed. But the metal canisters were still hot, and the pod continued to fill. She could see it flowing in between the padded panels. This was going to become an emergency if it got any worse. Well, technically, she thought, it’s a hull breach. How much worse could it be?

A lot worse. Without the pressurized oatmeal coming in, the air would be going out.  A lot worse.

Discontinuity.

Arriving at a new star system is always a little disorienting. You were last conscious as a human in a canister travelling out of system at a high rate of speed. Then suddenly, you’re there and you’re not moving. There actually is a sequence of events in between, but your brain doesn’t process them because when you’re superluminal, they’re not really causally connected in your world-line. There’s no change over time that your poor brain can use to understand anything.  It just happens.

Oatmeal, like every other thing not specifically engineered to deal with Einstein’s inconvenient notions, also experiences no transition between the pre-jump state and the post jump state.  In this case, it departed a star system in a pod rotating once every two seconds, and had formed a thick, even layer around the interior of the capsule. It arrived at the next system in a stopped pod that was about 1AU above of the plane of the system, with a huge gas giant planet directly underneath.

It fell, as hard as you’ve ever seen oatmeal fall. Every outward surface that was now an upward surface let go of its payload. Gloria was covered. The displays were covered. Gloria couldn’t find her next beacon because she couldn’t see the screens, which was dangerously funny. And tasty. Damned if it wasn’t the first non-minty thing she’d tasted in months, and it was really, really good. Is that blueberry? I didn’t know they grew blueberries. Brown sugar? What is this? How could oatmeal be this good?

Surprise, she thought. The oat people aren’t rubes, either. They really know their oats.

She made it Home with two sealed canisters and a mission. Her pod had been breached, which might have been enough to get anyone out of the business. But for Gloria, really, the oats had sealed the deal. Within a few weeks, she was in back in orbit, but usually podless, running a simple 2-node station that served three decent meals a day, and always smelled like oats.