Ballistic (The Palladium Wars), стр. 42
“And best of luck with the safe part,” Tess said in a low voice.
They spent the next eight hours doglegging a course in preparation for their stealth run into Rhodian space. The biggest giveaway of a ship outside the regular transfer lanes was always the drive signature, followed by the heat output. Every time Maya burned after a course change to hurl Zephyr down a new trajectory, Tess altered the power curve of the drive. Finally, Maya and Decker were happy with the amount of navigational subterfuge and did a final course correction and acceleration burn that would take them into the general neighborhood of their drop-off coordinates. When they crossed over into Rhodian space a little while later, they were coasting ballistic, with the main drive shut down and the heat sinks retracted. It was the interplanetary equivalent of leaving one’s ID pass at home before walking the streets at night while wearing a mask. Anyone who spotted them would have no illusions about their intentions. But Zephyr was small and fast, difficult to see and harder still to chase down, and designed to be good at sneaking.
Coasting in stealth mode sounded exciting, but it was a major pain in the ass, Aden found. With their main drive off, they had momentum but no acceleration. Without acceleration, they had no gravity. The rest of the crew handled zero g like the experienced professionals they were. But Aden wasn’t a spacer, and he found that easy everyday tasks turned into difficult physics puzzles in zero g. He had to use the toilet with vacuum attachments to avoid floating around in the head with a big bubble of his own urine, and every time he sat or lay down anywhere, he had to strap in to stay in place.
“You know, they used to have tourist flights for zero g,” Tristan said when Aden muttered a curse after banging his shin on the edge of the mess deck table while trying to stick a graceful landing.
“They did?” Aden gave Tristan a skeptical look and strapped the seat’s lap belt around his waist.
“Back when spaceflight was new again, right before the colonization wave. People would pay good money to go up into orbit around Gretia and experience an hour or two of floating around.”
“That idea sounds dumb enough to be plausible,” Aden said.
“I’m not even kidding. People shelling out tens of thousands for a little bit of constant free fall. And now you have to have money to avoid zero g. Cheaper to get passage on a freighter without a gravmag array.”
“I guess everyone figured out that being weightless is only fun for those first two hours. Until they have to eat and drink. Or empty their bladders.”
“Gravmag changed everything,” Tristan said. “Cut the transit times between the planets by fifty, seventy, ninety percent. Before, they all had to chug along at one g almost all the time. And then, boom. Want to make a three-day run at seven g? Crank up that fusion drive. Talk about supercharging system commerce.”
Tristan held out a squeeze bottle.
“Here, give this a try.”
Aden eyed the bottle for a moment before taking it from Tristan.
“Is that going to have me bouncing off the walls in here?”
“No, it’s pepper sauce. I mixed it before we went to stealth. Used some of the stuff I bought on Pallas One. Don’t worry. It’s a lot tamer than Spacers’ Sunrise.”
Aden took the cap off the spout and squeezed a very small quantity of the sauce into his mouth. In zero g, even eating and drinking felt unnatural. Without the assist from gravity, food and liquids didn’t stay on the tongue or go down the esophagus easily.
“It’s good,” he said. “Really good. Bit of a kick, but just a small one.” Something about the taste reminded him of the vegetable fields at his family’s estate, the way they smelled in the autumn sun when the produce was ripe. “Tastes like liquid sunshine.”
“That’s what I’ll call it,” Tristan said with a smile. “Liquid Sunshine. I think it’ll go well with the soy base in the galley meals.”
“That better not be alcohol,” Tess said from the doorway as she floated through it. “You know we’re not supposed to drink on stealth runs.”
“It’s hot sauce,” Aden said. “Tristan mixed it. To improve the freeze-dried dinners.”
“Some of those are beyond salvation, I fear.” Tess reached the table and grabbed the zero-g handle that was protruding from the surface on one end. She flipped herself around and took a seat, far more gracefully than Aden had managed.
“That awful oversalted veggie layer thing in particular,” she continued. “The number-eleven meal. I could swear it’s fifty percent sodium. I don’t think anyone likes that one. I don’t know why we keep buying it.”
“It’s a package deal from the distributor. Major price break if you buy unbroken variety boxes,” Tristan said.
Tess was wearing the sleeves of her flight suit tied around her waist again. Her orange undershirt had a faded Tanaka Spaceworks logo on it. Aden had noticed that most spacers either wore their hair short, or long enough to be tied back in a zero-g environment. Tess had gone the second route. Her black hair was mostly gathered in a tail, but a few unruly strands had come loose. She blew one out of her face, and it drifted away from her eyes in slow motion. The Aden from ten years ago wouldn’t have thought of her as his type. Now he didn’t even know if he still had a type, but he found himself attracted to her low-key competence. Tess was quietly good at many things. She knew the ship inside and out, and she was the best nuts-and-bolts engineer he had ever worked with, both in her understanding of systems and her hands-on skills with wrench and welder. She played a string instrument Aden didn’t recognize—their berthing compartments were