Rattle

The cockpit began to shake. Little short shudders began rocking the passengers. Emily glanced left at Conrad. Conrad looked forward to Kareem, who was curling and un-curling his fingers around the throttle. The shaking stopped. The Fang settled. The crane pulled away slowly with a wrenching sound. Kareem let out a long breath. 

“That wasn’t so bad.” Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker said. 

“That wasn’t the flight.” Reyes replied. 

“I was afraid you’d say that.” 

The countdown started down from twenty. The seconds inched by until they reached ten. After that it seemed almost as though time was still. Cypris started counting her heartrate. It was already abnormally fast, and it was growing faster. Kareem disabled the brakes and eased the throttle forward a centimeter. He let out another deep breath. He wasn’t nearly as enamored of the Fang as he had been when they were outside and not about to go rocketing off the runway at almost an entire mach. Cypris would have made a smug remark if she wasn’t concentrating on the number of times her heart could beat between countdown numbers. She realized with a shock that control had reached three. Then two…one…

Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker almost blacked out. She was pressed into her seat by a hurtling, tearing acceleration. Her head pounded and her eyes bulged. Then Kareem threw the throttle to the 50% mark, and Cypris stopped thinking about her limbs as though they were attached. She felt like a painting; stretched over a space. She still had her limbs. Her legs were in agony because she hadn’t set them on the floor like she’d been told to. But her legs felt like they belonged to someone else. The throttle went to full, the sound barrier broke with a sound like Emily’s parents' favorite porcelain bowl shattering against the countertop, and the control tower flashed across the window. Then the Fang was up in the air, and leapt across the sky, and Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker started to almost feel her legs again, but the engine got over its head cold, and spurred the slim aircraft to greater speed. Cypris realized that they were moving faster than a rifle bullet at this point. She spent a very long time after that trying not to think about moving faster than a rifle bullet. It was very difficult, because thinking about moving faster than a rifle bullet is much easier than not thinking about it, especially when it feels as though your organs are being rearranged by an overzealous jet engine. 

The engine cut out. Cypris jerked forward, and swore. Her stomach had just done two tours of her mouth. She grabbed a bag from the seat in front of her and vomited extensively while Kareem brought the throttle back and nosed the Fang up and out of the atmosphere. The transition was surprisingly graceful. One moment they were bumping and shaking and being shoved around, the next they were whipping silently across the skin of the sky, like a skipped stone. Space was empty and milky black above them, with the stars set out in surprising brightness, and below them, the land was slipping away, and there was nothing but ocean after a few seconds. The water was gorgeous and bright, and looked still and calm from where Cypris was sitting. Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker began to breathe more easily. The Fang continued to coast, unimpeded by air resistance, affected only by the slight but insistent tug of the Earth’s gravity. 

Kareem fired off the OMS for a few seconds, and they circularized. The remainder of the flight was fairly routine, but it never occurred to Cypris that flying in space was something that lots of people had done. It was still very magical. 

They rendezvoused with Mortimer Station, and after a very frustrating minute of docking where Kareem flatly refused to stop swearing, they climbed up through the Fang’s upper hatch and into the airlock. A face pressed itself against the interior glass. A new face; a friendly face with a bright expression. The second airlock door slid open, and Cypris’s crew drifted into the equipment room. They were slightly clumsy about zero-gravity still, and it must have shown, because the perky Astronaut behind the airlock grimaced a bit. It didn’t escape Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker’s notice. 

“Evie Kingston.” The Astronaut said. “I’m the biologist though, so everyone calls me Sprout.” They didn’t actually, but she wished they would.

Shaking hands in zero-gravity is very difficult, but Cypris Maricela Alta Cranford-Tracker tried anyway. 

“Good to meet you Evie.” Cypris said. “Have you been here long?”

“Last six months, so have Henry and Tyler. They’re in the canteen. There’s gravity and actual food here, you know.” 

Evie led them out to the edge of the station and its gravity ring, where there was gravity and actual food. Henry Lane and Tyler Batt, the station’s technician and astronomer respectively, were sitting and eating potatoes out of a red bowl in the center of a very white table. They introduced themselves when prompted by Evie, who seemed to be lonely, but it didn’t seem as though they would otherwise have acknowledged the new crew. Cypris got the sense of being at a new school.   She felt like a rookie again, and she felt in awe of the Astronauts sitting at a table and eating potatoes. They were real Astronauts with names and ranks and opinions about very arbitrary things like black holes and space time.  

The “real Astronauts” resumed a discussion about space time, and continued eating potatoes. They left Evie to lead the thoroughly bashful Cypris, and her stilted, jaded crew around and across the station to their cabins. Cypris could remember the last time she had gone to sleep in space, but the memory had been implanted during simulation. She could remember the sense of lightness. The cramped room and cold light, everything was as before, but this time, it was real and actual, and Cypris was very, very tired. She went to sleep quickly, and didn’t wake up until their orbital period was done.