ΔV Pt. 01

Emerging from the forward blister on the Sparrowhawk and into the spinal section of the ship took the two of them from the civilian Science Division to the domain of the Republic's astroforce. Like each of the Earth bound powers that had sought to win the space race, India had needed to either create a new service or cede space to an old one. Where the Americans and the Russians had made new branches – though neither would admit the other had managed it first – the Chinese and the Indians had both simply folded their astroforce into their air force. After all: They were all off the ground, weren't they?

It was just a matter of magnitudes.

The crew of the Sparrowhawk were in their skintight khaki uniforms, with their badges sewn directly into the fabric. The uniform of the IAF had whittled away things that could snag in micro-gravity over the decades, becoming more sheer and less ostentatious with every nearly fatal accident until, at last, the crew were left in clothing that looked as if it had been dragged from a 20^th century spec-fic program. Vidya had heard Dr. Chakwas remark, several times, that he was glad for the form fitted uniforms: Anyone who let their workout regime slip or messed up their caloric intake would show it.

Shame, he had said. Is a powerful motivator.

Which, Vidya thought, has me weeping tears for his victims. Ah, patients.

The crew they passed gave the two civilian scientists curt nods or a happy wave or two. Most of them were clearly pleased to be posted so far from the burbling hotspots of the SOL system. Venus had long been relegated to third tier real estate. First tier acquisitions like Ganymede, Europa, Vesta, Ceres, and Mars all shared the same sorry distinction of having some measure of human blood shed over whose flag flew over which chunk of uninhabitable rock. Second tier acquisitions, mostly the broad swath of asteroids that had lacked names till some civilian surveyor had stopped and checked and found water, ore, radioactives or all of the above, usually had the dubious pleasure of only having ships fighting to the first punctured reaction mass tank or sheered off radiator.

Venus?

No one had fired a shot in anger for Venus since the second space race began.

The Sparrowhawk's spine was always shorter than Vidya imagined. On the schematics, it looked quite expansive – it had to be, to allow technicians to reach and service the spinal railgun that made up the ship's main armament. But at the end of the day, the Sparrowhawk was merely a frigate. It only shipped with thirty people aboard, and there was an upper limit to how long it could get. The very base of the ship was where the multi-ton water tanks were located, each one hooked to the nuclear thermal rockets that were situated on armored gimbals beyond the skin of the ship. The water served triple duty: The crew drank it, the engines heated it into steam and spat it out to move the ship, and the water itself provided a secondary shield against radiation – from both the engines themselves and from the hostile universe that surrounded the ship like the world's least comforting blanket.

Because the tanks soaked up the radiation, most of the living quarters were nestled here. That included the multipurpose room that, for three hours of every day, was formatted to be a kitchen. As Mohammad and Vidya pulled themselves in, Vidya checked to make sure Raj wasn't in the room and breathed a heavy sigh of relief when she didn't see him.

Where Mohammad was handsome and chaste, in a dignified way, Raj was handsome and entirely disinterested in the words 'I'm married.' Vidya had rebuffed him politely. Then rudely. And now, she was seriously beginning to consider dashing his brains out against a bulkhead. Doing so would be the hard part, though: Vidya wasn't a trained astro. Raj, meanwhile, was the ship's gunnery sergeant, a position that made him (as if by some kind of magic) take on muscle mass that should have been impossible to maintain in the ship's perpetual microgravity.

Seeing her look, Mohammad asked: "Everything all right?"

"Fine," Vidya said. "I just wish we could build probes that last more than a few hours."

"If God is kind, we will not," Mohammad said, his voice serious as he tugged himself to the autodoc. He started to tap at the controls, then frowned. Vidya, looking past his shoulder, saw that he had brought up his preset meal. Someone had portioned in a sliver of the ship's artificial pork for his meal. Mohammad, with great dignity, began to reprogram in his meal to his standard settings. Vidya looked aside, feeling shame burning on her face. India's vast plurality of religions and languages hadn't led to a peaceful history – and traveling several AU from Earth had only meant that they had brought the old hatreds with them.

"Why do you say that?" she asked, trying to act as if she hadn't noticed the reprogramming.

Mohammad sighed as he punched in the last command and the autocook began to create the meal with a clatter and click and whirr. "Armor that could stand up to the acid rain and the temperature would be incredibly strong. Strong enough to hold up to railguns, lasers, missiles?" He arched an eyebrow, his hand stroking his mustache solemnly. "Maybe. And belief that one might survive a battle would mean more battles would begin."

Vidya shrugged one shoulder. "A railgun is a hell of a kinetic package..."

"True," Mohammad admitted, then took his meal package from the cook. Despite months of experience telling her otherwise, Vidya still expected to smell something. But the package was nearly perfect – scent that escaped would have brought food particulates with it. She started to punch in her favorite meal. Well.

'Favorite.'

Once she had her food package, she pulled herself into one of the many nooks that had been set up in the room. Bracing herself against the wall, her feet hooked into some straps, she tugged open the food package feeder tube and began to slurp the thick, chewy paste into her mouth. The autocook claimed it was curry. It wasn't spicy. It was, in fact, completely bland. Vidya chewed and tried to not make a face.

"Still, the question comes," Mohammad said, licking his lips. "Where do we launch the next probe?"

"Well!" Vidya said, quickly folding the tube back flat against the food package. "I..." She trailed off, her eyes darting to the doorway. Raj and three of his compatriots were moving into the cafeteria – and somehow, they were swaggering in microgravity. Raj was clean shaven and short haired (as was common in the IAF) and was wearing his uniform with a panache that would have put an ancient warrior-king to shame. He saw her and shot her a dazzling grin – and yet it transmuted into a skin-crawling expression the instant it reached Vidya's eyes. She looked back at her food, unfolding the tube and slurping some more into her mouth. She chewed, then swallowed. "I think that, uh, we should try to land near the highlands. The givens on the seismic scans show some heavy materials under the rock formations there. And that means we may find how the lithosphere reacts to this kind of temperature."

"Landing it will be tricky," Mohammad said.

"Hey Vidya," Raj said. He was floating, compared to Vidya, upside down.

"Good afternoon, Gunnery Sergeant," Vidya said, her voice prim.

"Oh, you wound me," he said, clasping his hand to his chest. "I am off duty. You are a civilian."

"I'm merely delivering the respect due to your position," Vidya said, her voice going from prim to dry. She felt her temper beginning to fray – like a thread being dragged back and forth over a knife.

Raj chuckled. "You can call me Raj," he said.

"I could," Vidya said.

"Gunnery Sergeant, if you would be so kind," Mohammad broke into the conversation. "We're discussing where to land the next probe."

Raj's eyes went, with remarkable speed, from warm and kind to flinty and hard. He looked at Mohammad as if he was a bug. Vidya spoke up: "It's true." She nodded. "So, maybe, you can give us some time?"

Raj pursed his lips, then spread his hands, pushing away from the wall with one foot. He moved with the fluid grace of a veteran astro, and as he rejoined his friends near the autocooks, Vidya turned her face back to the food package, her fingers tightening on the plastic. The plastic started to squeak and it felt like it was about to tear. Mohammad coughed. "Do you want me to..."

"It's fine," Vidya snapped. She smiled. "Unless you can get me posted to Janus?"

Mohammad shook his head. "I fear that is beyond the power of a lowly exoclimatologist."

Vidya chuckled.

Mohammad and her managed to talk about work until Raj and his crew had needed to return to duty. Once they were gone, Vidya extricated herself from the conversation with a yawn and a wave and started to clamber towards her quarters. As one of the civilians on the ship, she had nominally private quarters – essentially nothing more than a narrow tube of metal that had a few screens built into it. She had found it screamingly claustrophobic for the first few nights, but then, through sheer, stubborn willpower, she had managed to get over it. Now, she drew herself into the tube and shut the door by her feet and marveled in not being around other people.

Then she checked her message log.

She clapped her hands together and said a quick prayer to every god she could think of – her fingers started to punch in the commands to bring the message up. It was relatively inexpensive to send a message through space if one was located at any base with a powerful enough communication system. But Sukhdeep was kept just as buy as she was in his research position. Meeting in after three years in college meant both had already been well into their doctorates before they had fallen in love – which had meant when Sukhdeep had made it into the deep space high energy physics program being run by the IAF, he had had a choice: Take it and be shipped to the far edge of the solar system, or stay with Vidya.

Vidya had, of course, pushed him to go – she only needed to prove herself in the IAF's science arm until she could get a transfer to the same research base. The separation had, by turns, hurt terribly and been rather pleasant. She loved Sukhdeep quite a lot – but she had also...she shook her head, focusing instead on the message. Bringing it up, she saw her husband's goofy smile. His quarters looked utterly decadent. She could see a free-standing bed beyond him, and a large screen that was currently set to a view of the Punjab countryside that he had grown up in. Just seeing him and that brilliant sun set off a cascade of sense memories – of their first time together, in grass that was still rich with the rains, the scent of fertilizer heavy in the air, the delicious ache of his mouth on her nipples.

Vidya dug her fingers into her shoulders, her cheeks heating.

Gods, she thought, shaking her head. I'm nearly dizzy.

She actually had to hit rewind on the player to catch the first part of his sentence: "Now, before I begin, my darling, know that I cannot tell you nearly as much as I wish. The research we're doing here is fascinating – being able to observe Saturn's rings up close and personal?" He shook his head. "There are interactions that we'd never have noticed without being near enough to get constant, up close observation. There are so many moons, so many moonlettes, and the rings!" He sighed. "Sometimes, I get distracted from the sensor data by their beauty – though, of course, they are but a fraction compared to yours."

Vidya pursed her lips.

Knowingly, Sukhdeep nodded, as if he could see her – despite this being a recorded message. "You are even now, of course, telling many lies about being pain and ugly. I shall, of course, refuse to hear such lies."

Vidya crossed her arms over her chest and resolutely refused to feel flattered.

"Now," he said. "The actual work remains utterly backbreaking. The American that is here, Dr. Rian..." He pronounced the name with exaggerated care. "He is quite an efficient manager and very clever."

Vidya arched an eyebrow: Overbearing and full of himself, hmm?

"But fortunately, Dr. Azad is able to ensure that he does not work himself into an early grave," Sukhdeep said. "Now! Tell me of your time with the Sparrowhawk. Still leaving your litter in our sister planet? And tell me more of this mysterious Dr. Amar – this mysteriously unspecified and poorly described Amar. If you do not tell me more, I may have to begin to assume things about him!" He waggled his finger at the camera.

Vidya sighed, then set the camera to record. She looked into the camera. "You are utterly absurd, my husband..." She smiled. "I do not litter. Venus is glad to have many probes fired at it, surely." She started to tell him about her day, about Mohammad – though she did leave any reference to astounding biceps, glorious mustaches, and kindness out of the description – and even threw in some complaints about the food. Raj, she left where he should be, in an airlock, tumbling towards the Venusian surface. At least, in her head. Though, she did kindly imagine him in a spacesuit.

So he would have more time to picture the end, of course.

She hit send on the message.

And an error message sprang up on the screen.

Vidya frowned. The message said that the ship's communication array was currently entirely in use. The only thing that might take up the entire array was if they were engaged in military level telescopic and LIDAR observations. She frowned even harder. A few fanciful worries shot through her head: Was someone actually coming to contest their orbit? There were a few American ships – all civilian – around Venus, doing some preliminary work on areostat research. But...then her eyes widened as she felt the almost subliminal groaning of the engine gimbals shifting. Then the Captain's voice, stern and focused, came over the PA: "All hands to burn positions."

"Burn positions?" Vidya asked. Then, hurriedly, she tucked her legs up against her belly, then spun herself around, so her feet were facing the engine. She managed it with time to spare – and spent several minutes wondering. Goggling, even. No. There was no way that...

The Sparrowhawk shuddered. A very gentle simulacrum of gravity pressed her feet to what was, for a short time, the floor. Except it was not a short time. Her head started to guesstimate – and she realized with a lurch that the Sparrowhawk wasn't just correcting their orbit or changing it. They were actually leaving orbit. This burn would be using up a dangerous amount of reaction mass: Boiling off tons of water and spraying it out of nozzles like great big geysers. And she had no idea where to.

Or why.

And she was terrified, absolutely terrified, to find out.

***

Spacer First Class Jianhong Qasim was on duty when Janus blew itself up.

And to think.

It had been such a boring day.

Signing up to the People's Liberation Army Astroforce had seemed like an excellent adventure for Jianhong. Growing up in the backwater of a backwater of a backwater, within a stone's throw of the same shitty river that some officious bureaucrat had dumped his great grandparents into after the coastal evacuations, everything about the PLAA struck a chord in him. For a world constrained by putting things in dirt and smearing them with shit and water until they stubbornly sequestered carbon – which you then cut out and buried in the designated community sequestration mine – the idea of being in the depths of space, millions if not billions of kilometers away from even a bit of dirt...oh, it had sounded like heaven.

The recruiter had made it seem even nicer after he had hitchhiked from his family village to a city large enough to actually have a recruiter.

Oh yes, the recruiter had said. It pays quite well. And if you enlist, you will be posted within the year.

Training had been brutal. When the Ganymede Campaign had been lost due to a string of computer viruses unleashed by the USAF during the opening stages of the battle, the PLAA had shifted away from automation in a big way. This meant that tasks that were normally handled by computers and machines on other ships had to be handled by deck monkeys like himself. This meant that PLAA ships weren't simply crowded. They were utterly stuffed. For most of them, this was only a minor change from their life in the cities. But for Qasim, it had been a shock deeper and more profound than his first exposure to microgravity.

Like with microgravity, he had adjusted.

Duty had, also, been a bit of a shock. He had left his home, wanting to get away from the endless, seemingly pointless task of planting, chopping, burying. But then it had transpired: Maintaining and running a ship required an endless, seemingly pointless array of tasks that were never over. Screw in that panel one day, unscrew that panel, adjust those wires, tug out the wires, put in different wires, scrub away that corrosion, empty that tank, replace that tank, drill on the guns, drill on the simulators, speak to the political officer. Rinse repeat. Rinse repeat. Rinse repeat.

Like with the crowding, Qasim had adjusted.

This adjustment was why, when Qasim woke up every morning in the bunk room, he said to himself in Arabic: "Today, Allah shall kill me and it will be great."

After all, Allah knew everything that someone was going to do, from the day they were born. Which meant Allah had known about this. If Qasim was closer to an Imam, he would ask them about why Allah would create so much space and put so little into it. He supposed he could send a letter home, and to the Imam living quietly in his village. But while Imams were no longer reported to the police and thrown in camps, it would still go down on a mark in his file. He had crawled from Spacer Third Class to Spacer First Class through sheer, dogged hard work. Not talking back, not complaining, never showing up late, never missing a regulation, and generally doing exactly what he was told paid off.

Sort of.

On the day Janus exploded, Qasim was on exterior work. The People's Shield was a heavy laser cruiser. It had about fifteen high power laser weapons mounted on spherical turrets that thrust from the nose and spine of the ship like ugly blisters – and those parts of the ship needed the most tending. For him and his work crew, it had involved donning spacesuits (worrying about their state of repair) and then clambering on the hull and doing spotchecks of every turret. Then tests on their swivel rate. At the end of the day, in the fight between a missile and a turret, it all came down to who could move faster. If the turret was faster, the missile would explode. If the missile was faster, then the missile would blow great big holes in the radiators.

Qasim had taken a moment to look back at the radiators: Four huge, fin-like extensions of the ship, each one glowing a brilliant cherry red against the vastness of space. He had never thought that space would be so garish. Tracers fired by railguns were searing yellow. Saturn was bilious yellow. Even the vaunted, so called beautiful rings, were starkly bright against the darkness of space. Qasim was unimpressed.

He and his work crew had checked every last turret and had turned back to walk to the airlocks...

And then Janus blew up.

He hadn't known it was Janus that blew up at the time. He just knew that, in the sky overhead, one of the many tiny stars above him had become as bright and as brilliant as the sun. He swore he felt the heat, and then he went blind – his suit helmet polarized and plunged him into blackness. Cries of alarm and shock came from the rest of his crew and Qasim gave the order: "Latch!"