Chapter 4

July 19th, 2069

Richmond, Virginia

9:02 PM

Bliss in a strip mall.

Trisha Barnes curled back against the grassy rise behind her and stared unfocusedly at the purpling sky, nostrils filled with the strong, crisp smell of freshly mown grass. Hollow, sun-dried crabgrass stalks poked sharply into her back and bared arms as she settled in. Trisha didn't mind. She'd forgotten how delightfully raw and intimate – how real – grass actually felt; she usually saw its level plains from five and a half feet up, insulated and isolated from its texture by her shoes. Relaxing, brain shifting in the neutral, she realized she couldn't recall the last time she'd simply flopped out on the lawn, and wondered if any of her friends could. She doubted it.

Drinking in her senses, she closed her eyes.

It's a night to be alive.

The urban heat island was cooling slowly, and as it did, the region's infamously wicked humidity ebbed. At present, the balance of temperature and humidity hovered close to tangible perfection. Thick, warm air caressed her shoulders like a boyfriend's hug, and night settled like a comfortable blanket. Trisha felt an inexplicable joy to be human and alive. This was a simple Americana she thought she was too cool for. This was a summer's summer night.

She craned her neck up as an electronic chime distantly ding-a-linged. Her boyfriend was edging his way out the restaurant's push door, nudging it open with his back and shuffling through to keep the milkshake in each hand stable. As he crossed the drive-through lane and walked across the parking lot, humidity-misted light from the curly red sign above lit up his side.

She pushed herself upright, resting her hands behind her on the grass; the tang of the night changed from turf to tar as she swung forward toward the restaurant's freshly-resurfaced parking lot. She wondered vaguely just how much it had cost them; oil had reached a new record two weeks ago and was gunning to break it again this week.

"Here ya go..."

"Thanks, Darrell..." She took the proffered cup and poked in a wide-bore straw as her boyfriend sat down beside her on their favorite curb. For the three years they'd been dating, this spot had been their point of relaxation and stability on warm nights. "The Green," they called it, a small slice of grassy median strip in the corner of the Chick-fil-A parking lot, sandwiched between the lot, one of the mall's entrance roads, and the four-lane road it linked to. The small patch was one of the very few "natural" spots they knew of in the entire area; the fifty acres of forest that had existed across the road from the restaurant vanished long before Trisha was born.

"Damn. Hot out here."

She giggled. "You were inside that nice A/C too long." She finally pulled a shot of the thick sludge up the straw, and her eyes widened. "...Vanilla?"

"Hey, you said 'surprise me.'"

Trisha leaned against his shoulder. "Vanilla's my favorite. Thanks... What'd you get?"

"Peach."

"Mmm…"

They turned their attention to their shakes. The dip in conversation brought the sound of the road next to them to the fore. Cars slurped past, tires humming as they skimmed the asphalt. An older-model electric car slowed and turned into the entrance road behind them, its regen brakes, then its accelerating engine, whining noticeably.

Darrell glanced up as his own car gurgled softly nearby. Oh. Right. Just coolant through the fuel cell...

Over the rim of his bio-Styrofoam cup, he eyed a large milkshake advertisement spread over the facing wall of the restaurant, and its exhortations of the products' taste, texture, and low cost. What the ad certainly didn't contain was the enticement of "made with real dairy." He remembered that pitch fading away sometime as a young child, around the time the government restricted meat and dairy production in an effort to slow global warming. If today's heat was any indication, he thought idly, it hadn't really worked. He pulled another sip of his shake. And whatever's in here, it sure as hell isn't milk. But I haven't had any of the real stuff in so long I probably couldn't tell the difference. Tastes good enough, anyway...

Above them, the sky slowly leached of color, heading toward a uniform navy blue. In the fifteen minutes before full darkness, deep red traces of the sun lingered faintly over crisscrossing contrails of jet and rocket exhaust. Darrell's gaze followed them east. The straight, orderly ones were produced by the ubiquitous, manta-like blended wing bodies that took off from airports the world over. Thin, heavily dispersed, cone-shaped streaks were the signatures of the Wallops Island spaceport; its supply rockets launched on a rigid six-hour schedule, four a day, day after day.

Trisha's shoulder-pillow was disrupted as his head moved, and she looked up too. Peeking between the contrails, burning through the thin veil of smog that hung across the planet, were stars. She gasped. "Oh... Wow... It's really clear tonight." She raised an arm and pointed toward one of the brightest ones. "What one's that?"

"Um."

"Oh, come on, you're the smart spacey spaceman."

He squinted. "I... think... that's Vega. Or Betelgeuse. Erm... Maybe Venus." He pulled out his pocket comp – only his grandparents called them "cell phones" – booted up the star app, and pointed it at the sky. "Ah... Deneb."

"You remember the first time I reallysaw stars?"

He nodded. Trisha chuckled. She'd been twenty-three, and it had been one of their first dates. Darrell, something of an "outdoors freak" by the standards of his peers, drove them out to Shenandoah National Park, which was one of the few places left where it was possible to see an entire star field, not just the few brightest stars. Trisha freaked when her mobile dropped signal; it was the first time it had ever happened. She couldn't understand why the jammers laid out around the park's boundaries were one of its draws. But then the stars had come out. Trish shuddered in the warmth of the suburban parking lot, her awe still tangible.

She'd had a revelation.

Everybody knew what stars were. WiFi contact lenses ensured that. Everybody could spit out, on the spot, a stream of stellar coordinates, hydrogen ratios, Kelvin temperatures.

Nobody knew what stars were. In that instant, under a dome of ancient light, she understood her boyfriend's "outside craziness," his devotion to his job, the primal starlight connection that linked humanity across millennia.

She'd cried.

Trish dissolved into the present as she took another sip of her rapidly-melting shake. She spent a moment vacuuming up the dregs with her straw, then looked up again. Forcing her lips into a smile, she pointed toward a very bright star sitting low on the horizon. "Huh. I wonder what that one is."

Her boyfriend snorted. "Nice try. Like you don't know. That, hon, is your new set of car tires."

Trisha carefully placed her cup on the pavement and slowly wrapped her arms around his midsection, resting her head against his chest. "Don't joke."

"I'm not. I know you're nearly on the rims of those things."

"Damn it, I've told you don't care about that damn piece of junk!" Her outburst echoed across the blacktop. Nobody looked up, thoroughly ensconced in their cars as they were. Between the two on the curb, a deep, empty silence hung as she pulled herself back together. "... I care about you."

He put a slow arm around her waist and sighed heavily. "Baby, you know it's safe. They've done hundreds of flights, they've got procedures and safety gear for everything. Don't worry."

"I worry every time you go up there! There's always the launch risk, and then there's space debris, and cosmic rays, and... and..."

"Shhhhhh... Shhhhhhh... Shhhhh..." He gave her a little shake. "I'm just a bolt-turner, remember? Not some scientist or hot-rod astro way out on the end of the platform."

"Yeah, which means the Company doesn't give a damn about what happens to you."

"You know that's not true. Do you remember that whole thing with Ricky and that blown ammonia tank? You remember? Remember how they nearly shut down the whole platform to save him? You know – I know – they'd never leave us behind."

Trisha was silent for a long time. Then she said, flatly, "You boost tomorrow, right?"

"Yeah. Oh-six-hundred. I'll probably have to get up around two to be on the road by 2:30." He sighed. "God, early start. I'll take 64 out to the 'cat ferry in Deltaville... That'll run me up to this side of the Seaboard at Saxis, and I'll drive over the Neck to Wallops." They both knew the sequence a hundred times over, but breaking down the trip yet again piece-by-piece eased the jitters. "Then an hour of intake, then launch, then..." He waved his fingers toward the low star. "...A week at Delta Station to get acclimated. And then a week after that, we finally wrestle that giant chunk of God-Knows-What to a dead stop."

He snorted angrily. "Three years over the first estimates. I know they had no clue just how dense that thing was at the time – which is good in the long run, I guess, 'cause it means more stuff - but, damn... Did they botch it. First they said six months over, then it was a year, then two, then three. The Company kept saying I was in for the biggest paycheck I'd ever seen, but three extra years is a long time for a man... and his girl…" He gave her a squeeze, "To wait..."

"What're we going to do with the money, Darr?"

"Get a house, fix your car, maybe even rustle up a patch of yard..." He caught himself and smiled wistfully. "But... gotta remember we don't have it yet."

"They pay you a percentage of its total worth, right? The news goes on and on around in circles about it, but they've never even said what might be in it for us at the bottom."

He nodded. "Yeah. But, shoot, they don't have any idea what it is, hon. None of them do – not the news, not the company scientists. I stopped trustin' anything they said when they blew the ETA estimate for, like, the twelfth time." Darrell shrugged. "I just hope it's worth a few more pennies a pound than helium three."

The two lovers gazed up at the shining dot of humanity's fourth space station and the hive of space vehicles swarming around it, and the sun went all the way down.

To be continued...