Starchild
I do not own Fire Emblem or any of its characters.
Chapter Four: A Hole in the Sky
The Gemstone mission was scheduled to launch at precisely 7:52 in the morning. Eirika and Ephraim were strapped into their seats and sealed off from the rest of the world a good two hours in advance. Sitting there atop the mighty Ashera rocket with nothing to do gave Eirika the time to reflect and worry on what would happen when the fires inside the rocket's engines were finally lit. Everyone who'd ridden one of the Pegasus 1B rockets said it was an unsettling experience; the rocket leapt off the pad with a force that caused the pilots inside to feel eight times the force of normal gravity during flight. The engineers promised the Ashera rocket was more advanced and wouldn't be nearly as bad, but up to this point, no one could really say for certain...
"Ignition."
Eirika sensed no noise, no vibration, just a sense of power issuing from somewhere far below her. When she did hear the rumble of the engines, it seemed distant, like peals of thunder coming from somewhere beyond the horizon. Yet the thunder moved closer, and closer still, and finally the roar was in Eirika's ears and she felt a definite jolt as the rocket rose from its launchpad.
The voice coming across her headset confirmed what her body already knew.
"Liftoff."
"We're up and running," Ephraim said as he glanced at the mission clock embedded in their control panel. As first words on a mission went, it didn't have the joy and exhilaration of "Let's go!" from the Starlight mission, but Eirika heard the undercurrent of glee in her brother's voice regardless.
Eirika said nothing. She felt like a bird in the mouth of a frenzied dog as she was jerked from side to side in her harness by the motions of the rocket. The sound, the violence, were almost overwhelming. She looked down at the handle on the control panel that served as their escape if the Ashera went "angry" and decided to kill its human passengers. Would Ephraim even hear the command to eject if ground control ordered it? Would he want to hear it?
Ten seconds, twenty, thirty, forty... and then there was quiet again, as the Ashera sailed past the sound barrier.
"Gemstone, all looks good," came the voice through the headset.
"Roger that, it's a smooth ride now," said Ephraim, and even through the bubble of his helmet he was obviously smiling.
"Many thanks to the designers," Eirika called out.
It wasn't pleasant- first Eirika felt her limbs turn to dead weight as the force of three and then four Gs pressed upon them. Then, when the spent bottom stage of the rocket dropped away they had another jolt, one that made Eirika think she was about to be catapulted through the control panel. But the harnesses held fast, and their spacecraft withstood all the shocks.
And then, as the protective cover over the Falcon II capsule fell away, Eirika saw sunlight and a glimpse of blue out the cabin window- not the blue skies of a sunny day on Terra, but the luminous blue of Terra itself.
-x-
They spent the first three hours of the flight circling Terra while the engineers back on the ground made sure that everything in the spacecraft was functioning. Only then were they given the go-ahead to proceed where no human- no living being, as far as anyone knew- had ever been. Yet the ride didn't feel much different from the flight simulators now, and it was only when the Falcon II turned and Eirika saw the sphere of Terra framed perfectly in her window that she realized how truly distant she and Ephraim now were from everything familiar.
The great deserts of the world- Jehanna, Yied, the Missur Peninsula- showed as orange and brown through the streaming tops of the clouds. But the habitable regions of Terra, the forests and plains, were strangely colored, more of a blue-gray than a refreshing green. Eirika could not find her homeland of Renais; it didn't help that real countries weren't colored like a map!
By this time the pilots already dispensed with their bubble helmets and the other protective gear from the liftoff, and Eirika now decided it was time to get out of her bulky spacesuit. Once that was off and stowed away, and she was just in the pajama-like flightsuit, every weightless movement was a joy and a revelation. The few minutes of "weightlessness" she experienced in training jets were nothing compared to the freedom of having "up" and "down" being whatever Eirika wanted them to be at a given moment. She could poke around under the seats without discomfort, she could "stand" upside down in the cabin, she could tuck her body into a ball and tumble freely...
"Ooh."
And she could make herself sick. Her stomach lurched and her head spun. Eirika felt instantly guilty for her silly actions, and she automatically turned to her brother, now also free of his spacesuit, for support.
He wasn't having such an easy time, either.
"Okay, not good," Ephraim said as the color in his face altered. "Focus your eyes on one spot and move very slowly. It's like having the spins when you're drunk."
Eirika never had been, but she took her brother's word for it, and that did seem to help. She tied back her hair so it wasn't floating around as a distraction and decided to focus on being a pilot and not a zero-G gymnast.
Their bodies had a lot of adjusting to do. Sleeping wasn't easy, either; the sleeping bag was designed for someone the size of Ephraim, or Hector, and Eirika felt lost in it. Since everything floated, there was no sensation of having her head against a pillow, no security of having a blanket wrapped tightly around her. Her mind didn't know what to make of it all, and when she did sleep, she had dreams of falling, falling into nothing.
-x-
As it was Ephraim's job to guide the spacecraft- to the extent the automated controls would allow- it fell to Eirika to relay the descriptions of their experiences back to Terra. She provided updates on how the planet appeared as it grew smaller and smaller through the window. What were the colors, the textures? She took photographs, but each moment she gazed at the world through the camera was a moment she wasn't seeing Terra with her own eyes, and that gave her a small sense of loss.
Meanwhile, the moon was out there in front of them, and it seemed to Eirika and Ephraim both that they could sense it hanging there in the darkness before either of them saw it. They could only see a narrow view of space at a time thanks to the small cabin windows, and that meant that they weren't able to see Luna getting larger in front of them while Terra receded behind them.
Ephraim grew edgy; Eirika noticed a familiar steely gleam in his eyes, and she knew it was because they were coming up to a critical moment in their spaceflight. They were going to lose radio contact with Terra as they slipped around the moon, and the mission engineers had calculated the moment of lost contact right to the second. If everything was right, if they were truly on course, their headsets would turn to static at precisely that moment.
If not...
They were sixty-nine hours, two minutes, and seven seconds into the flight when Eirika's headset began to crackle in her ears.
"It worked," she said, and felt a wave of relief and surprise.
"Maybe they turned off the signal," Ephraim said. He was joking, of course, but then Eirika knew she really wouldn't feel right until they had the signal back again.
As the Falcon II passed into the shadow of the moon, they were plunged into a darkness that was almost tangible. Out one window, Eirika saw so many stars she couldn't recognize any of them. Out the other window, there was a strange starless void, a dark presence... a hole.
It was another moment training hadn't prepared her for. Eirika felt the hair stand up on the back of her neck and wondered how anyone back on Terra would possibly believe them.
To Be Continued...
Author's Notes: While the Soviet space program is, as I've said, a major inspiration for this, specific mission details for Gemstone are drawn from the U.S. Apollo VIII mission (the Soviets never had a manned lunar flight of any kind). The books Lost Moon by Jim Lovell and Jeffrey Kluger and A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaikin were my primary sources for this.
FYI, "Let's go!" (also translated as "Let's ride!" or "Off we go!") is what Yuri Gagarin said during the launch of Vostok 1- the first human spaceflight on our planet Earth for those of you playing along at home. This just so happens to be the catchphrase of the appropriate Fire Emblem character. History is a funny thing. )