Curse the Darkness

The pilot was in the half-empty cafeteria, shoveling down her breakfast. She paused to take a long drag on her cigarette, and saw an intern leading a nervous-looking young man in. The intern caught her eye, and she waved him over. The two men threaded their way through the tables. She quickly downed a swig of orange juice, and stood just as they reached her.

"Major Pari Bhatnagar," the intern said while bowing slightly, "May I present Jal Khambatta; Mister Khambatta, may I present Major Bhatnagar." She shook the young man's hand.

"Pleased to meet you," she said, somewhat indifferently.

"Likewise," he said, with genuine, if jittery, enthusiasm.

"Will that be all?" The intern asked.

"Yes," Pari said, "No, wait, would you please have the waiter bring over an SAB for mister Khambatta?"

"Of course, ma'am," he said, and scampered away backwards, never taking his eyes off them, never bumping into a thing. The two of them sat down. She took another drag on her cigarette, then noticed it had gone out. She issued a mild Hindi profanity, and fished out another cigarette.

"You smoke?" Jal asked.

"Do I smoke?" she laughed, "Child, not only do I smoke, I am the best smoker in the world!" She rattled this off almost like it was a standard verbal riposte. "Check this out," she said. She exhaled, lit the new cigarette, brought it to her lips, and sucked the entire thing down to the filter in one incredibly long drag. Her eyes glazed over slightly as she breathed mentholated plumes out through her nose. "Lungs like a zeppelin!" she said.

"What's a zeppelin?" Jal asked. She didn't answer, merely looked annoyed. The waiter appeared and put a plate down in front of the young man, who didn't really look at it.

"May I have some coffee, please?" he asked. The waiter quickly snapped a look at Pari, who just as quickly said, "No coffee before a flight." The waiter smiled; relieved he didn't have to explain the regulations, and backed away. "No coffee for twenty-four hours before a flight. Standard rules," she said, "You've got plenty of orange juice there, though; it's good for you, drink up. Free refills."

He looked at his breakfast tray. "That might pose a problem. I had a lot of coffee yesterday afternoon. Will I still be able to fly?"

"It's more of a tradition than a rule," she said, "Don't sweat it."

"What's an SAB?" he asked, poking at his food with a fork.

" 'Standard Astronaut Breakfast,' she explained. Steak and eggs. Eat up, it's good. The eggs are a little bland this morning, though. Throw a little hot sauce on 'em."

He whispered a prayer, then tentatively sampled the food.

"How is it?" Pari asked. A middle aged man moved up behind her carrying a tray, but Jal wasn't really paying attention.

"Much heavier than I'm used to for breakfast. It's more like dinner. Is this a rule, too, or a tradition?"

"In the Major's case, it's more like a superstition," the newcomer said, patting her on the shoulder. She startled slightly and jumped to her feet. After a moment, Jal realized he was supposed to get up, also.

"Jal Khambatta, may I present Doctor Arav Tamil Nadu," Pari said, "Doctor Tamil Nadu, mister Khambatta." The doctor put down his tray, and they shook. He, too, had the steak and eggs, and an extra glass in his left hand. "I brought you some more juice," he said.

"Bless you," she said, and started a third cigarette. They all sat down, and the doctor meticulously set into dissecting his meat.

"It's very nice to finally meet you in person," Jal said.

"Likewise," Arav said, "You presented us with a very interesting problem."

Pari sopped up the last of her egg-goo with some toast, and snapped for the waiter. "Seconds, please," she said as he took her plate.

"I take it you're not Hindu," Jal said.

"Despite sounding like a question, that's the first thing you've said to me that wasn't a question," Pari said, "And you're wrong. I'm just sort of an 'Istara Ravivara' Hindu," she joked.

" 'Easter Sunday Hindu?' I don't get it…"

"It's an old American term," Arav explained. "Loosely translated, it meant a Christian - usually a Baptist for some reason - who only went to church for Easter, Christmas, funerals, and weddings."

"I'm not especially devout," Pari volunteered.

" 'Lord, help my unbelief,' " Arav said, but Jal didn't get it.

"What exactly are we doing, anyway, guys? I've been instructed to shepherd you two all the way to Strongarm, and provide whatever services you need, but beyond that my orders are rather vague."

Arav explained…

In the twenty-second century, the Earth's Moon was a boomtown, with a dozen different countries and corporations running mining operations that ranged in scope from 'merely huge' to 'terrifyingly bowel-wateringly godlike.' Though all these outposts were more-or-less self-sufficient in terms of life support and food production and water supply, they weren't colonies in the strictest sense of the word. Though the largest operations might employ as many as ten thousand workers on site, they were more like crew on an oil drilling platform at sea: They signed on to do a dangerous, grueling job for one to five years, they earned the big rupees, and if they survived, they went back to Earth to their families. The ratio between the sexes was roughly ten-to-one, and if prostitutes were factored out of the equation, the ratio was more like twenty-to-one. Few people lived on the Moon permanently, and such as did were mostly eccentrics, or osteoporotic retirees who preferred low-gravity agility to being bedridden on Earth, or such workers as had sustained injuries that prevented their return to the motherworld.

Regardless of who owned which Moonbase, regardless of what language they spoke, regardless of what religion or nationality or race or level of education they had, almost all of the workers had one thing in common: they were poor enough that a one-in-five chance of dying on the Moon seemed preferable to abject indigence on Earth. As such, lunar workers tended to be extremely blue-collar and recruited from the lowest echelons of society. It was seen as a way out, an escape from pauperism. If one survived, and if one hadn't blown everything on booze, drugs, and hookers at the company store by then, the pay was fairly awesome.

Among these hopeless poor were Parsis - Indian Zoroastrians. By the twenty-second century, they were but a tiny minority of only a fewscore thousand souls. Their relationship with larger Indian society was like a somewhat milder version of the discrimination Jews had once faced in Europe: They worked hard, they valued education, a few had managed to make some very significant careers in Hindu society, but for the most part, they were somewhat isolated, somewhat mistrusted, and above all else, desperately poor.

Per capita, more Parsis signed up for lunar factory work than any other group. There were now several thousand on site, a large enough number that the absence of any means of religious observance for them was becoming awkward.

Pari, Arav, and Jal walked through the terminal as she finished up her fifth cigarette and absently checked out some of the girls milling about. They crossed a line of "Free Sri Lanka" protesters.

"I don't get it," she said, "So there's a lot of you guys in Strongarm, so what? There's lots of temples and shrines and mosques and synagogues up there, even some churches, so just build one of your own, and then send up a priest."

"That's our plan," Jal said, "I'm the priest."

"Huh," Pari said, contemplating obvious youthfulness for a beat before continuing, "So what do you need me for? You just file a construction request and get cracking. Not that it's not nice to work with you again, Arav, but why did ISRO pull me off my regular detail to hold your hand?"

"Well, it's not that simple; you see, there's an artifact they need to ship up in order to properly consecrate their house of worship," Arav said.

"So pack it in foam, and ship it up."

"I guess you could say it's pretty fragile," Arav said.

"So use extra foam."

"It's not that kind of fragile," Arav said.

"So insure it, and have someone on the other side ready with a glue gun."

"That won't work. This is a really complicated thing to ship, arguably the most complicated thing ever shipped across space," Arav said.

"Ok, so use a really, really lot of foam."

"It would burn the foam," Arav said.

This got Pari's attention. Specialty cargos were one thing, dangerous specialty cargos were another entirely. She stopped cold in the hallway, and said, "Why would it do that? What the naraka kind of religious relic is this?"

"It's fire," Jal said, "Our religious relic is fire."

As with most monotheistic faiths, Zoroastrianism strictly forbids the worship of idols. It takes this limitation a bit further than most, and eschews the use of iconography of any sort, fearing such visual touchstones would, themselves, become a kind of idol. The only valid symbol recognized in Zoroastrianism is fire.

Fire is not a physical thing in the same way as rocks or pieces of wood are, and therefore can not be an idol. Beyond this, fire is a very good allegory for God: it obviously exists, though it is not a solid, a liquid, or a gas, and hence is ephemeral in an obvious sense. Much like God, it is beneficent: it casts out the darkness and the fear that comes with darkness. It can be used to purify things. Its warmth sustains people in winter. It can be used to cook meals and boil water. Its smoke reaches up to heaven, but the flame itself stays firmly on the Earth. It reacts - after a fashion - to outside stimuli, and it can likewise reproduce after a fashion. Though not life in the conventional sense, fire is very much alive in its own way. This can be taken as an allegory for God, who lives, though not in the same way as anything in His creation.

With fire, as with God, should you handle it carelessly and without respect, you will get hurt.

"So you guys worship fire," Pari said as some stevedores wrestled the bulky sacred flame machine off the dolly and into the passenger seat. It was particularly stupid looking, like an armless, headless robot from a 1950s Science Fiction Film.

"No, we do not," Jal said, "We worship the only God, Ahura Mazda. Fire is not God, but it is the supreme poem in praise of God." He said it with such fervor that she was taken aback momentarily.

"Catchy slogan," she said.

"It's not a slogan, I just made it up right now."

"Really?"

"Really."

"You are one idealistic young priest, Jal," Pari said.

"I am one idealistic young priest, Pari," Jal agreed, copying her tone exactly. They smiled at each other.

The stevedores fussed with the device a bit more, strapped it into the seat, and headed out. The passenger cabin looked much like the inside of a mid-sized commuter airliner. There were twelve rows of seats, two to a side, with a walkway down the middle. The only difference was that there were no windows, and the seats were actually just padded vertical platforms with lots of straps.

"Speaking as a smoker, I see some inherent problems with this plan of yours," Pari said.

"Which are?" Arav asked.

"Well, obviously, weightlessness inherently smothers flame," she said.

"I never really understood that," Jal said. She looked at him quizzically.

"What?" he said defensively. "I'm a priest, not an engineer. I wasn't involved in the technical phase, that's what we hired him for," he jerked his head towards Arav.

"Fair enough," Pari said, "Ok, on Earth I decide I want to smoke a glorious, wonderful, tasty, life-affirming cancer stick. Normally I smoke Gold Flake, but it's a special occasion, let's say, so I'm splurging on a Gold Navy Cut. I light my match, and it burns for several seconds as I ignite my cig and take a drag, filling my lungs with squeaky-clean smoke. Because they're filtered, you see…"

"I don't think the filters actually…"

"She's being sarcastic, son," Arav said.

"Now, I try the same thing on a space station, and the match doesn't work. Why?" He thought about it for a moment, then admitted he didn't know. "Think about it," she urged. "What direction does smoke go? Up? Down? Sideways? Backwards and to the left? What?"

"Up, obviously," Jal said.

"Why?"

"I don't know. I guess the smoke is lighter than the air?"

"Exactly," Pari said, "Well, not exactly exactly, but close: The fire is hot, therefore its waste - smoke and carbon dioxide - are hot, too. Heat rises, which carries that crap away from the flame. In weightlessness, however, there is no 'up' nor 'down' nor weight as such, so 'lighter than' is a useless concept for our purposes."

"Therefore the carbon dioxide and smoke don't go anywhere, they just build up around the match and smother the flame?" Jal asked.

"Bright boy," Arav said.

"Of course there's ways around this. If you keep the flame in a steady but gentle airflow, it's not really a problem. That's what they do in smoker's rooms on the space stations and on the Moon: blowers on one side, suckers on the other. Can't do that on a shuttle, though, or a ferry. Smoking is strictly forbidden. Too dangerous."

"Yup," Arav agreed, "Hence my clever little toy here," he patted the headless robot-looking thing on the armless shoulder. There was a coincidental beep, then a voice over the PA announced they were going to start loading the other passengers. Pari excused herself and headed up to the flight deck.

Space travel was common enough and safe enough now that no one bothered to wear pressure suits anymore. Strapped to what was essentially a board, stuck between a windowless wall on one side, and a large metal parody of a human form on the right blocking his view of the aisle, he had a brief bout of claustrophobia, which eventually gave way to boredom. He struggled to get comfortable against the straps, which were doing nothing to support his weight, then finally just gave up.

After an hour or so, the entire vehicle lurched, and started tilting up on end, amidst much disquieting creaking and wobbling. He squelched his nervousness, until a woman in the very front of the cabin shrieked, and then he himself grunted in fear.

Across the aisle, eclipsed by the fire-robot-thing's bulk, Arav took pity on the boy. "Talk to me Jal. Keep your mind off of it."

"I can't think of much to say."

"Ask me anything."

"Uhm….ok….how does this thing work?"

"The shuttle or the Sacred Fire Device?"

"Device…uhm….fire, sacred, yeah."

"Oh, it was an interesting project you guys presented us with. How do we keep an ember glowing through four or five days of weightlessness? We had a very limited budget, and some very strict limitations from the ISRO. Do you remember what they were?"

"…uhm…" Jal said through a dry mouth.

"Think, boy. Concentrate. Distract yourself from the fact that you're sitting atop a six-million-ton firework."

"Calling it that is not helping. Uhm….ok, the device could be no larger or heavier than a man, it had to be self-contained, it had to be internally powered, and it could use up no more life support than a man."

"Correct. Which is why, in the end, we decided to shape it like a man. More or less. Just easier to get it around that way." The creaking and wobbling stopped. The shuttle was now perfectly vertical, standing tall in the Sri Lankan sun. It looked much like an ancient NASA space shuttle perched atop an even-more-ancient Saturn V rocket. The nose of the vehicle was more than four hundred feet in the air. The irritating backboards were now rather comfortable bunk beds stacked twelve high. Jal calmed down.

A voice came over the PA, "This is the Colonel. We have received flight clearance and will be lifting off in ten seconds."

"So how does it work," he asked.

"…Nine…" the Colonel said.

"Basically we've got a hamster wheel in there, a little centrifuge. It spins to provide up and down for your embers, and we filter a trickle of air over them to keep them from going out. The centrifuge gives a little sense of up and down in there, though 'up' is towards the hub, and 'down' is outward. So the CO2 and the smoke - such as there is - heads away from the heat source and is sucked up by a tiny exit-vent. The right leg of this monstrosity is the oxygen tank, the left leg is where the waste CO2 is stored."

"…Seven…" Arav had been talking so loudly, Jal had missed part of the countdown.

"Oh."

"…Six…"

"I foresee only two potential areas of trouble."

"…Five…"

"Which are?"

"…Four…ignition sequence start…"

"Well, we're going to get jostled like crazy on liftoff, which could easily snuff the flame or break the device."

"…Three…"

"It could?"

"…Two…"

"Sure. Then there's the long haul to the Moon, during which this half-assed thing could simply break."

"…One…"

"Uhm…"

"…LIFTOFF!"

The padded bunk slammed into Jal's back as though he'd been dropped off a two story building, and the pressure rapidly increased. Dimly, through his fog of fear and discomfort, he could hear Arav saying something, but he couldn't make it out. His chest constricted as though a fat man were sitting on it, then two fat men, then three, then it steadied off at around three-and-a-half fat men. The indicator on the back of the bunk/seat above/in front of him said they were holding 3.5 Gs acceleration. He'd never reacted well to roller coasters, and to keep himself from screaming, he tried to do some math in his head. He normally weighed 150 pounds; under this acceleration he weight was around 525 pounds. He wished he hadn't worked that out. Knowing just made things worse. The entire vehicle was shaking like a paint-mixer. The seatback in front of him was a blur. He could see a large digital display counting down something, but he couldn't read it well enough to tell what it was counting down to. Someone screamed, but he was pretty sure it wasn't him. Several other people screamed, and he knew that couldn't be him. He couldn't scream in three-part harmony. Someone in the seat in front of him made a gurgling sound which, Jal realized, must have been ridiculously loud to be heard over the roar of the engines.

Then he realized the roar had died down a bit, but the imaginary fat men sitting on his chest hadn't moved. Were they traveling fast enough to outrun their own sound? Were they simply above most of the atmosphere, so there wasn't much sound to be heard? He didn't know, but pretty clearly the only noise (Apart from random screaming, crying, and disconcerting gurgling) was coming from aft, and not from all sides as before.

Suddenly the sound stopped entirely, there was a huge Bang, and he was falling! No, not falling, weightless. He instantly realized there was no real difference between the two. The vibration was gone, too. He could make out the display in front of him. 'Flight Time: 2:01,' it said, '2:02, 2:03,' and it kept crawling upward. Had it only been two minutes? It felt like an hour! Another light said 'First Stage Separation.' Another clock said 'Countdown to Second Stage Ignition: 04, 03, 02 ...'

"What did you say, Arav?," Jal shouted, louder than he'd intended.

"I said, 'But it'll be fine, nothing to worry about. Now relax.' " Another indicator flashed 'Second Stage Ignition,' and Jal was slammed in the back again, as hard as if he'd been rear-ended in a car accident. The imaginary fat men returned to sit on his chest, though not as many as before. Perhaps only two or two and a half. Although the thought of himself weighing a mere 375 pounds as opposed to a quarter ton was less disturbing, it was only barely less.

After another three minutes they reached orbit, the second stage fell away, and about a third of the people in the cabin started puking. In the old days, they'd had barf bags for this, but space travel was so common and space sickness was so ubiquitous that suction vents were simply built into the seat backs. These gradually slurped up all the disquieting fluids and semisolids drifting about the cabin, though they didn't do much for the smell. It was obvious several passengers had soiled or wet themselves.

"Space travel is not a glamorous business," Arav volunteered. "How do you like weightlessness, kid?"

"Not. At. All," he choked out.

An hour passed, and Pari re-entered the cabin, and made eye contact with a pretty graduate student type in the front row. She smiled, and the girl smiled back. 'Work comes first,' Pari reminded herself, and floated back to her charges: "How's our tin man?" she asked.

Arav checked the old-fashioned needle-gauges on the side, "Seems fine. Spinning is good, temperature is good, CO2 outflow is good."

"Good thoughts, good words, good deeds," Jal breathed in relief. It was the credo of the Zoroastrian religion.

"We're still an hour or two away from being able to dock with Kaksaganva, but the colonel has given me permission to bring you two up to the flight deck. You want to see Earth?"

"Gave you permission?" Jal asked.

"Yeah, I'm just deadheading on this flight, I've got no authority here. But he said it's ok."

By the time they got into the flight deck, they were passing over the Pacific Ocean.

"The California coast is coming up," Colonel Balasubramanium said, then helpfully pointed to it as it came over the edge of the world. They were only two hundred and fifty miles up, and could make out a lot of detail, including several forest fires and the perpetual smog cover of Los Angeles.

"You know, I spent a summer in Portland, Oregon, when I was sixteen," Arav said. Pari looked at him inquisitively. "Mission trip from my church."

"Really? I didn't know you were a Christian," she said. He shrugged. "What was it like?" she asked.

"Oregon is just like anywhere else in Mexico, I guess: abject poverty, ignorance, violence, religious oppression."

"Religious oppression?" Jal asked. His voice was a foul-smelling wheeze. He had nothing left in him to throw up, but was still looking rather green. The stewardess had given him a breath mint and a space-sickness patch to stick behind his ear, but their respective effects hadn't really kicked in yet. "I thought Mexico was a Christian country?"

"Catholic country. I'm a Protestant. They don't really consider us Christian. Still, we were bringing humanitarian aid, building little plywood houses for the homeless, so they begrudgingly allowed us in."

California passed beneath them, and they swept over the Midwest. "I had a layover in New York City once," Pari volunteered.

"What was that like?" Jal asked.

"Canada is Canada, you know? They don't really like non-Caucasians like us. They don't care about religion, though."

"I hear Dixie is nice," Balasubramanium said. "My wife's got a thing for Gone With the Wind. She keeps bugging me to go there for vacation sometime."

"True, I've never been, but I'm told it's the least-awful country in that neighborhood," Pari said, "But that doesn't get us around the fact that North America is the poorest continent on Earth."

"Hard to believe the United States used to pretty much rule the world in the twentieth century, isn't it?" Balasubramanium said. This was quite literally ancient history, as well-known and irrelevant as the Roman Empire. And like the Roman Empire, not a single bit of it remained as a political entity.

"Yeah, well, they stupided themselves out of existence," Arav said.

"Yes they did," Balasubramanium agreed. "You folks should be getting back to your seats now."

As they made their way back, Pari excused herself and started chatting up the pretty female passenger. "So how far up are you going?" she asked.

"The Moon," the girl said excitedly.

"Really? Me too," said Pari.

"There's not that many ferries to the Moon. Maybe we'll be on the same one?"

"I hope so," the girl said. "My name's Priyanka, by the way, Priyanka Soni." They shook hands.

Meanwhile, drifting back to their seats, Jal said, "So what's the difference between a Protestant and a Catholic?"

"Too much to go into, but basically they believe the Pope has the supreme authority over all Christians, and we Protestants disagree."

"What's a 'Pope?' "

"The leader of the Catholics. Lives in the Potala Palace in Tibet. The Chinese gave it to their church after the…unpleasantness."

Jal was too embarrassed to ask what this meant. The way Arav said it, it felt like something everyone should know about, but he wasn't much of a student of history.

Whereas the more genteel Chinese and Russians had built very large, wheel-shaped space stations that rotated to simulate gravity, and the Japanese were endlessly tinkering with a massive O'Neill sunflower in low Earth orbit that would probably never be finished, every other space agency in the world had opted for pragmatism over comfort. Most space stations were random hodge-podges of huge tin cans, solar panels, spheres of random sizes, and massive inflatable sections. Kaksagarva, the ISRO space station, was far and away the largest of the bunch, and was considered the gateway to the Solar system. Someday, if there was ever to be a manned mission to Mars, it would doubtless leave from here. There were several hundred people in it at any given time, and spacecraft coming and going every few hours. Docking was briefly delayed owing to an argument with a North Korean food transport, but they got in to port no more than a half hour late. Since their connecting flight to Luna wouldn't leave until tomorrow, there was no real inconvenience.

As soon as they docked, Pari made a bee-line for the nearest smokers' room. Arav fussed with the Sacred Fire Device, and pronounced it 'ok.' They checked in to their hotel rooms, and Jal tried to sleep. He couldn't get over the terrifying feeling he was falling, and somehow being in the coffin-like room made it worse, so after several hours he just gave up and made his way to the cafeteria-lounge. It was a house-sized inflatable ball made up of transparent Kevlar. It offered a stunning view of Earth.

Pari and Priyanka were there, drinking coffee out of insulated squeeze-bulbs. They saw him, and Pari waved him over. He laboriously made his way through the crowd, banging into several people, and cartwheeling ass-over-teakettle, until a waitress grabbed him, and just hurled him at his friend.

When everyone (excepting Jal) was done laughing, Priyanka said, "the major here was telling me some fascinating stuff."

"Ah, it's nothing," she said. India was passing below them, gorgeous and sprawling and green and blue, with huge white clouds. Beautiful, except for an unsightly brown circle. Pari pointed it out. "That's where New Delhi used to be," she said, "I always think it looks like Shiva stubbed out a cigarette there." Priyanka, evidently a bit more religious than Pari, expressed discomfort. "Sorry," Pari said, though she wasn't, really.

"It's nothing," Priyanka said in a tone that indicated just the opposite. She looked at her watch, and excused herself. She drifted away into the crowd.

"Are you and her…?" Jal asked.

"Just a fling. It's a long drive to the Moon. Nice to have company."

"Ah," Jal said, politely trying to keep disapproval out of his voice. Homosexuality was an unforgivable sin in Zoroastrianism. "She said you were being interesting? What were you talking about?"

"The Moon. Back in the twenty-first century, and even the late twentieth centuries, everyone assumed we'd mine the Moon for helium three, then we'd use that in nuclear fusion reactors to power the whole world, and end our reliance on fossil fuels. I read a lot of old science fiction, and this was a pretty common trope."

"Yeah?" Jal said, mostly because he felt he was expected to say something.

"Yeah. That didn't work out so good. The simple fact that everyone chose to ignore was that no one knew how to build a fusion reactor of any sort, much less a HE-3 one. We've been tinkering with it for a hundred and fifty years now, and still the only artificial fusion reactions we've ever been able to make are thermonuclear explosions." She paused and took a sip of her coffee. "Mind you," she said, "Helium-3 does make jim-dandy bombs." She waved her hand theatrically to indicate the huge charred-black swath of land that had been Pakistan, once upon a time. "That was about twenty-two years before I was born," she said.

"You and Arav are about the same age, right?" Jal asked. He laughed, then wished he hadn't. It was too late. Pari took the bait.

"What's so funny, kid?"

"I'd just assumed you and he were…uhm…together until just…well I guess ..."

She laughed, "That is funny. But even if I wasn't into chicks, I didn't even know the guy was a Christian, kid. How close could the two of us be if I didn't know that? No, we used to work together groundside, years back." She took a sip of her drink. "So have you availed yourself of the local specialty entertainment?"

"I saw a theater, but I don't…"

"No, I meant hookers."

"What's a …"

"Prostitutes."

He winced, "That would be immoral. We strive for good thoughts, good words, and good deeds. I don't expect you to understand, but that would most definitely not be a good deed."

"Just checking," she said.

"Checking what?"

"Whether or not you really are a very idealistic young priest."

"Why?"

"Because everyone's got their character flaws, and priests tend to have more than most. As a class, I don't really like them very much, but I kind of like you. I'm not sure why. I guess I'm just hoping you won't disappoint me."

"I'm not a priest of your religion; would it matter?"

"I'm not a huge fan of priests of any religion, and, yeah, it would matter."

The origin of the earliest fire temples is a subject of much debate, both on historical and theological lines. The earliest Zoroastrian scripture makes no mention of sacred flame whatsoever, so it clearly wasn't there from the outset. Even so, the earliest fire temples are very ancient indeed, so it's difficult to know exactly when the practice originated. Most Zoroastrians believe the first of these sacred fires were set by the great God Ahura Mazda Himself, and all other sacred fires are derived, either directly or indirectly or spiritually from these.

The embers in the hamster wheel of the Sacred Fire Device came from the ancient and holy fire at Udvada, the oldest one burning on the subcontinent, and the only one that existed prior to the seventeenth century. The Udvada fire was said to be carried by refugees - after many adventures - to India from an original temple in Persia in the eleventh century. How much of this was truth and how much of it was legend, no one knew. Jal was fully aware of the potential difference between facts and faith in this matter. There were several times when the Udvada fire had been moved over the last twelve hundred years, generally during crisis, war, disaster; sometimes hidden in caves for extended periods of time; sometimes its whereabouts and status were disturbingly unaccounted for. The most recent of these periods was sixty-eight years earlier, during the seventh-and final-war with Pakistan, when it was rumored that…

Well, no matter. Jal was, after all, an idealistic young priest. Part of that was knowing the importance of symbols and continuity. Another part of that was not casting doubt on such things. He squelched the thought in his mind and tried, without success, to sleep.

Pari and Priyanka broke their embrace, naked and sweaty, in a small room about the size of a closet. Both were breathing hard. Pari reached for a towel and a bottle of water. "Well?" she said.

Priyanka looked flushed by a post-coital glow, but distant and brooding. "Good," she said noncommittally.

"Just 'good'? Not a worlds-shattering deluge of passion to rock you to your very core?"

"No. Just 'good.' "

"Bavva," Pari said, and chucked a wadded up towel at her.

Priyanka smiled, "I mean, obviously I liked being with you, but…"

"But it wasn't all you'd fantasized about?"

"Not really, no. Not to be rude."

"Yeah. Zero-G sex is one of those things old-timey science fiction writers used to spend all their time fantasizing about. It comes up a lot in the genre, but the fact is it's not all that good. Be glad you're not straight - hetero sex is terrible in weightlessness. Or so I'm told." Priyanka arched an eyebrow. "Well, think about it: What's Newton's Third Law of Motion?"

Priyanka pondered it for a moment. "Ohhhh…" she said, "I get it."

"But you know what genuinely is amazing? Low-G sex. When we get to the Moon, I promise you you'll totally lose yourself when we…"

At the mention of the Moon, Priyanka's mood instantly went from distracted and brooding to flat-out depressed. "I need to be alone," she said. Unexpectedly chastely she looked away while Pari got dressed, and didn't say a word.

Ten minutes later, in a smoking room, Pari was sucking down cigarette after cigarette in one or two drags and wondering what the naraka had just happened.

The ISRO Uttarkhand was one of a dozen Indian ferries that took people back and forth between Kaksagarva and Strongarm city. Like the space station it called home half the time, it was more pragmatic than aesthetic, merely a double-hulled inflatable Kevlar bubble about the size of a house, with water in between the hulls, acting as a passive radiation shield. Below this living area were some cargo racks, and below that were large fuel tanks and landing gear. It was as ugly as it was distinct, and as the ferries had all been built at different times, and repeatedly modified over the years, no two of them looked particularly alike. Inside of the bubble itself were several grated circular decks affording no privacy, and a central shaft that connected all the levels with the control room. The outer walls of each deck were dotted with what passed for cabins - sleeping closets, they were called - and a few bathrooms. Food came from dispensers around the central shaft.

This was Pari's normal assignment, her normal ship, and she was happy to get back to it, even if it meant three days without cigarettes. It was nice to be busy with something apart from handholding the priggish young Parsi cleric. A full load would have been thirty passengers, but this trip was underbooked at about half that for some reason. Added to which there was Priyanka, who had remained distant both emotionally and sexually. Plenty to keep her occupied. Seriously, what had happened with that girl? she ruminated. When they'd met she'd been so giddy and over-the-top excited about everything, and pretty much the moment they'd made love, she slipped into an ever-blackening mood. Could she be manic depressive? Who was manic depressive anymore? It was like the easiest mental disorder to fix…

Two days out from Kaksagarva, she bumped - literally - into Arav, who was coming out of his sleep-closet.

"Don't tell the kid, but there was a problem with the tin man," he said.

"Did the fire go out?" she asked, legitimately concerned.

"No, but the wheel did stop spinning for an hour or so. The embers are still going, though, I checked the temperature. The air feed alone was enough to keep it going. For a bit anyway."

"You designed it to be redundant?"

"Not intentionally. I'm just that good, I guess."

"Show me," she insisted, so he took her to another sleeping closet that the device had been stashed in, and they laboriously lugged it out. She looked at the swinging needles. All of them showed acceptable tolerances, as far as she could tell. The temperature gauge was pegged exactly where it should be. "Why did you use these old piece-of-crap indicators?" she asked.

"They don't use much power," he said, "And the ISRO agreement says it has to be completely self-contained, no recharge."

"Mmm," she grunted. "How did you fix it? You can't open the thing out here, can you?"

"No, that'd be a breach of the contract, and the colonel of this tub -"

"Hey! Watch it! He's my colonel and this is our tub, and we like it!"

" - sorry. Anyway, he'd probably chuck it overboard."

"So how did you fix it?"

"I just kicked it really hard a bunch of times. I figured the hamster wheel must've come slightly off balance, and wasn't spinning free. It was making noises. I figured kicking it might knock it back into place, and it worked. Not like I had any other options."

Pari put her ear to the machines 'chest.' "I don't hear anything."

"Right. That's because it's spinning well. If you could hear it, that'd mean it was spinning badly. Check the RPMs if you don't believe me." She did. They were fine.

"Ok, your secret's safe. Question?"

"Answer."

"Why are you helping the kid? I mean, you seem to have a genuine interest in this. Generally you just sort of slap stuff together and barely pay attention."

"True. I'm lazy. You ever read the Bible?"

"Obviously not. I barely read my own scriptures."

"Ok, are you familiar with the Christmas story?"

"Not very. Jesus was born. That's all I know."

He rolled his eyes. "Are you aware of the relationship between Christianity and Judaism?"

"Yeah, that I know. Christianity grew out of Judaism sort of like Buddhism grew out of Hinduism."

"It's a little more complicated than that, but close enough. We believe Judaism was a valid religion started by God to set up Christianity. Kind of a first stage to the rocket, if you will."

"Ok, so?"

"Well, in the Gospel of Matthew - " he saw her eyes glaze over in theatrically feigned boredom " - the birth of Christ is attended by Zoroastrian priests. Magi, they're called."

That caught her interest, "Huh. That's odd, isn't it?"

"It is, indeed. Why would the Bible include emissaries from another religion? I mean, they're presented in a positive fashion, they're looking for Jesus specifically, they're warned by God about a trap at one point. These are not Christians, and they're not Jews, but they're not portrayed as bad or evil or pagan or whatever. That's fascinated me for a long time."

"What does it mean?"

"Lots of theories, but nobody really knows. My own not-uncommon take on it is that Zoroastrianism might have been legitimately founded by God, too."

"So you think the Judeo-Christian-Islamic God is the same as this 'Ahura Mazda?' "

"Well, let's just say I strongly suspect He could be. So I jumped at the chance to help. In fac -"

"THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE SRI LANKAN LIBERATION ARMY," a voice screamed from the PA system, "WE HAVE TAKEN CONTROL OF THIS VESSEL. YOUR COLONEL AND CREW ARE DEAD, AND WE WILL BEGIN KILLING PASSENGERS ONCE EVERY HOUR IF THE INDIAN GOVERNMENT DOES NOT ACCEDE TO OUR DEMANDS."

"Pavitra bakavasa!" Pari exclaimed.

"Isn't that Priyanka's voice?" Arav asked.

"Pavitra bakavasa!" Pari exclaimed again, by way of saying 'yes.' "Get suited up!" she shouted at Arav. With a booming stage-voice that made full use of her zeppelin-sized lungs, Pari shouted, "Everyone get suited up! Lifeboat drill! Everyone get suited up NOW!" Given the relatively small quarters, and the grated floors, all the passengers and attendants could hear her. Most turned to look, some looking confused, others with the panic setting in. "Omkar," she yelled at the nearest steward she could see, "Get these people suited up and tethered." Then she turned to Arav, who was already fumbling his way into his clear plastic emergency suit. "Good boy," she said. "You get done, you make sure the kid gets suited, then you help the others ok? And make sure you're tethered."

"Yes ma'am," Arav said. All of this had taken less than a minute.

"THIS IS THE VOICE OF THE SRI LANKAN LIBERATION ARMY," Priyanka's voice repeated.

Lanata, lanata, lanata, lanata, Pari cursed to herself, First time I get a little garabara in a year, so of course the girl's a homicidal maniac. All the doors to the central shaft were now locked from the cockpit, so there was no easy way to get up there.

Jal came out of his sleeping closet rubbing his eyes. "Isn't that Priyanka's voice?" he asked.

"Get in your emergency suit," she barked without looking at him, and lit up a blowtorch. The flame looked weird to him, and evidently to Pari too, as she squinted at it confused for a moment, then adjusted some valves. He pulled the emergency suit from a sealed envelope taped to the wall of his closet, and began to unfold it. It was a loose-fitting human-shaped thing, seemingly about as substantial as a sandwich bag, but actually strong enough to stop a bullet, should the need arise. He pulled it on over his clothes. There was a small oxygen tank and a small oxygen purifier in the envelope, too. He stuck them through the neck of the suit, then pulled the hood up over his head. Once he did that, the entire thing sealed itself up without so much as an apparent seam.

"Is this safe?" he asked.

"Kinda busy," she said, and started cutting away at the central shaft. Priyanka was going through her announcement a fourth time as Omkar floated up alongside Pari.

"Everyone is suited up and accounted for, excepting Aishwarya," he said, referring to the other flight attendant.

"Assume she's dead," Pari said.

"Is that…"

"If you can't find her, then she's either in the cockpit dead with the rest of the crew, or she's with Priyanka, and she's a terrorist. Either way…" her concentration drifted to the torch flame. "What the naraka is going on with this thing?" She busied herself cutting again. Arav floated up.

"This is Arav Tamil Nadu, Ma'am" Omkar said. "He was helping me with the passing - "

"I know who he is," Pari said.

"Everyone's tethered in, excepting us. If there's a breach, no one's going to go flying out the hole."

"That only happens in the movies," Omkar said.

Arav ignored him. "She sealed up the central shaft? You want me to cut that for you while you talk her down?"

"I can do both at the same time. We need a weapon. Can you access any of the RCT lines from in here?"

"I don't know. Maybe from the bottom deck."

"Go find out. If you can, I need a bottle of nitrogen tetroxide and another bottle of…"

"Let me guess: UDMH? I see where you're going with this, but it's not at all safe."

"You know what else isn't safe? Getting killed by a sapita crazy girl in the cockpit. Now get me the stuff! Go! Both bottles need to be breakable."

"Right. How much do you need?"

"How the naraka should I know? As much as you can put in a Coke bottle, I guess." Arav nodded and kicked himself away. Priyanka, meanwhile, was reading off a lengthy ideological diatribe very loudly over the PA system. Presumably it was also being transmitted back to Earth. Pari's suit wasn't a mere emergency life support device like the passengers were wearing. It was an actual working space suit, with built in communications and other functions. She pulled her helmet on, and tapped one of the buttons on the wrist.

"Priyanka, honey," she said, "It's me, Pari."

"Don't try to stop me, Pari," the terrorist said over the PA, not over the suit radio. She probably didn't know how to work it.

"Ok, I won't. But could you turn the PA down? It's so loud out here it's distorting your words. We can't make out what you're saying, and if it's important enough for us to die over, you probably want us to understand, right?"

"Oh…" Priyanka said. She was silent for a moment, then her diatribe started again, but at a less deafening level. Pari adjusted the torch a third time - what is wrong with the flame? - and kept cutting.

As there didn't seem to be anything else to do, and as Omkar was just standing around, Jal said, "Excuse me, is this suit safe?" He felt naked with it there clinging tightly to his body and clothing.

"Oh, certainly, sir," the steward said, though he was wearing the same kind of emergency suit, and his face betrayed no real confidence in it. "They were made to maintain air pressure and breathability for a full day. Nothing to worry about."

"What about heat? Cold? Radiation? Sunlight?"

"Certainly, sir," Omkar lied, and handed Jal a "Frequently Asked Safety Questions" card.

Arav reappeared. "That was surprisingly easy," he had two actual Coke bottles with him, each full of a sloshing liquid that clearly wasn't Coke.

"Tether them to me," Pari said. He and Omkar did while she continued to cut her way into the central shaft. The flame spluttered erratically. "Isa Lanata," she exclaimed, "What the khuni naraka is the matter with this torch?"

At exactly that moment, Jal said, "I think there's something wrong with my suit. According to this card, it's supposed to balloon out some, right? But mine's stuck to my body all tight. That's not right, right?"

Omkar and Arav looked at their own suits simultaneously and realized their emergency suits were way too snug as well. At the same instant, it suddenly clicked in Pari's mind what the problem with the torch was. She looked at the cabin pressure gauge for confirmation, but she knew the truth before her eyes even made it there.

"Oh, bakavasa," she said.

The passenger hull popped like a water balloon.

Priyanka, following a written set of instructions her cell leader had given her, had cranked up the cabin pressure way beyond the safe levels. Had they not been wearing pressure suits, everyone below would have succumbed to this, but as Pari and Onkar had wasted no time in getting everyone dressed for the emergency, they simply hadn't noticed. The over-abundance of air built up and built up, messing with the torch flame, and pressing their suits uncharacteristically against their bodies, but as none of them had ever been in this situation before, no one really noticed how unusual it was.

The inner and outer Kevlar bubbles tore themselves into a million fragments. The ten thousand or so gallons of water that had been between them exploded to vapor before it even had time to freeze, and spread slowly outwards, a ghostly shroud of momentary fog. What was left of the ferry was in the center of a small, but rapidly expanding nebula.

Omkar was swept away instantly, drifting off with the rest of the debris. His suit would, indeed, provide him with air for a full day, but the direct sunlight would have cooked him to death long before then. Pari and Jal and the rest of the passengers were all yanked out eight feet or so, but as Omkar and Arav had made sure everyone was tethered to the decks, no one else got thrown clear of the ship. The explosion had been strong and startling, but it had also been very brief, and its force was expended almost before they realized what was happening.

Catching on to what was going on just an instant before it actually happened, Arav quickly jammed his arm through the dispenser slot in one of the snack machines lining the outside of the central shaft, and managed to hold on.

His vision blurred. His sandwich-bag suit had withstood the pressure change, and was now bulbous and fully inflated. He started to feel a burning in his knees, and gasped for air, realizing the pressure change was going to bring about the bends in fairly short order.

The emergency pressure suits had no radios in them. He saw - but did not hear - Pari, dazed and presumably screaming profanity, through the faceplate of her helmet. He saw Jal's panic-stricken face, and realized the disaster was just beginning if he didn't do something about it. He spied a tablet floating by in the general clutter of junk that hadn't quite been blown free, and grabbed it. He poked away at the keys and showed it to Jal, who didn't seem to quite comprehend what was going on.

Arav slapped Jal. It didn't hurt him at all, since both of them were effectively inside balloons, but the violence of it startled the priest to the point where he could concentrate again. Arav pointed at the tablet. Turn up the pressure in your suit to avoid the bends, it read. Jal nodded, and started poking ineffectively at the oxygen tank. He got nowhere, and was about to panic when he realized the suit was now so loose he could simply pull one arm out of the sleeve entirely. He did, and adjusted the tank. The pain in his knees and ears and eyes and chest eased some.

Pari, meanwhile, continued cutting her way through the central shaft. Now that it was operating in a vacuum, the torch worked great, and she was making rapid progress. She realized eventually that her radio was still on.

"Priyanka," she said, "You can hear me?" She waited for the reply, then realized the girl probably didn't know how to work the radio. "Third control panel to the colonel's left. Hit the button marked 'Suit Intercom' and we'll be able to talk."

She made her way through the shaft hull, and started clambering up the ladder inside, towards the cockpit.

"Everyone's dead but me," she lied, "It's cold and lonely out here. Talk to me, please?" She willed herself to sound vulnerable, willed the seething hatred out of her voice. "Just please hit the intercom button? Please?"

Arav scrambled around the several decks, showing the passengers the message on the tablet screen, and helping them adjust their air. This took a while. Some of them were already bleeding out the ears, eyes, nose, and mouth by the time he got to them. Some were fetal with pain. He did what he could, then he noticed the Tin Man, the sacred fire containment vessel.

It hadn't been tied down. It was drifting away from the ship.

"Oh no," he said, though no one could hear it but God.

He sized up the situation. The thing had been in the hallway, on the deck when the hull blew, so it hadn't picked up anywhere near the velocity of things in the sleeping closets had. It was drifting slowly, but it might be retrievable. He could cinch some tethers together, make a rope, kick off, drift out, tie the rope to the thing and…no, there was obviously not time for that. It was moving slowly, but not that slowly. Pari's torch had some recoil to it. Maybe he could use that as a rocket? No, nowhere near enough force for that to work. He ran through several other options, ran some math in his head, and realized there was only one that could possibly work. He grabbed several small pieces of junk floating about, guessing as to their mass, and shoved them into a bag from the duty free market at the space station. He tapped two of the other survivors. He showed them a message on the tablet screen:

I am going to go out there and get that thing. When it comes back in here, grab it and hold it down. OK?

They nodded.

He calculated, then re-calculated his trajectory, and leapt towards the tin man, saying a prayer as he flew. He was now moving away from the ship slightly faster than the device was. He'd intercept it in a couple minutes. He'd miscalculated his course slightly, so he pulled a coffee mug out of the bag, figured the angular momentum he'd need, and threw it as hard as he could. This worked, and his course changed slightly.

As he got closer, he threw another coffee mug and a snowglobe to fine tune his course. Finally, as he came within reaching distance, he threw what appeared to be a lunchbox ahead of him, outward from the wrecked ferry, with all his might, though hampered by the ill-fitting suit. This slowed him some. He hurled a briefcase, which slowed him some more. Finally he hurled the tablet itself, which brought him almost, but not quite, to a stop relative to the tin man. He was still drifting outwards, and so was it, but he was slightly farther out now, and moving only barely faster.

There was only one object left with any mass he could use to adjust the tin man's course, and that was his own body. He lined up his shot as best he could by eyeballing it, debated giving up, then realized he was dead anyway, regardless of what he did from here on out. There was no getting back to the ship. "Lord, please guide my aim," he prayed, and then he kicked the thing as hard and as square as he could with both his feet at once. "With any luck…" he said to no one in particular.

He and the tin man were now moving away from each other at roughly equal speeds. He was tumbling slightly, but he tried to keep his eye on both the ferry and the sacred fire vessel when he could. Eventually he got bored and started to sing hymns. He had a very nice voice, though nobody heard it.

Jal eventually realized he wasn't in any particular danger of drifting away from the ship, as long as he was careful, and kept a death grip on the deck grating. He untethered himself and began pulling his way around by his hands, trying to find a way to be useful. Presently, through the grating, on the lowest deck, he saw some people manhandling the tin man around. 'Oh, thank Ahura Mazda,' he thought. He'd been afraid it might have drifted away, but hadn't wanted to voice his fears even to himself.

He clambered his way over the spidery remains of the passenger compartment, down to the men with his sacred fire, and tried to indicate by hand gestures that it was his. They didn't understand him, but pointed past him, out into space. Finally he realized they wanted him to turn and look. He saw a man tumbling slowly out there, about a mile off. Instinctively he knew who it was.

He panicked. He shouted. He cried, but the tears just built up in his eyes and lashes making it hard to see. He pulled his arm out of the sleeve and wiped his eyes and his running nose.

An idea struck him. He scrambled back over the wreckage to where he'd seen what appeared to be a shaving kit, grabbed it, then clawed his way back to the tin man and the two strangers. He rifled through the bag until he found a shaving mirror. He used the shadows to figure out where the sun was - never look at the sun in space, even he knew that - and angled the mirror to reflect light at Arav.

He flashed a message in the New International Signaling Code. It was a fairly long message. He had plenty of time, and was too overcome by guilt to even think about doing anything else. The message read, "I have the Tin Man. You have saved sacred flame. Thank you. May Ahura Mazda bless you and speed you to The Best Existence." This was the Zoroastrian name for heaven.

He flashed the message three times, unsure whether or not Arav could see it, or even read it. On the third repetition, the man clearly waved.

Unsure what to do, Jal repeated the message one more time, and added, "I will meet you again in The Best Existence, my friend." After a pause, he flashed the lyrics of a funeral hymn. Then, feeling a bit awkward, he stopped signaling, and simply prayed for the man until he was finally lost from sight in the distance.

Arav laughed when he realized what Jal was doing with the mirror. 'That's a pretty clever trick,' he thought, 'I wish I'd had time to think that up.' Content that he'd done the right thing, even if the cost was terrible, he spent the short remainder of his life alternately singing and praying, and, as he was fortunate enough to have his air run out before the sun cooked him, the songs and the prayers more or less became the same thing by the end.

It was a good death. He was content.

"Priyanka, honey, please let me in," Pari said, as she tapped on the door. The girl had long since stopped reading her political screed, and could be heard sobbing on the other end of the radio. "It'll be ok," Pari lied, "No one else needs to die." What she actually thought was more along the lines of 'I'll choke the life out of you, you crazy kutiya.'

After what seemed like hours of cajoling, the girl said, "I can't let you in. There's no air out there."

"There's an airlock at the top of the shaft. I'm in it already. All you need to do is open it."

"Ok," the girl sniffled. The inner hatch opened, but only a foot or so. "That's as far as I go," she said. "I don't trust you." Priyanka could see Colonel Singh's turban unraveled and floating about the cockpit, his topknot come undone, and his long Sikh hair and beard now formed an unruly cloud around his head. There was a lot of blood up there, too. She was disgusted. Singh had been her friend for a lot of years. He'd always been so meticulous. To see him so disheveled in death…

"How can you not trust me? I love you," Pari said, and instantly regretted it. The lie seemed to revive something inside Priyanka, and she hurled something at Pari's head. It caromed off her helmet with an alarming clang.

"Don't try to play me," she screamed.

"Ok, ok, I'm sorry," Pari said, "I'm just really, really scared." That much at least was true, and this, too, seemed to connect with the terrorist in some way.

"Me too," she whispered.

Awkward silence.

"Take off your helmet," Priyanka said.

"Why?"

"I've got a gun. I don't know if the bullets can get through that thing - your helmet - I'd feel safer if you took it off." Pari reluctantly did. As she set it on the lower hatch of the airlock, she noticed the object Priyanka had whipped at her had been a sextant. All spacecraft kept them on board for emergency navigational purposes. It was a tradition from the earliest days of spaceflight, and an occasionally useful one.

She didn't really have a plan, but an idiot hope struck Pari. "I brought you a Coke," she said, and showed the darker of the two bottles cinched to her belt. "I thought you might be thirsty."

"Hand it up slowly," Priyanka said, and Pari did. Priyanka stuck the bottle to an adhesive board by one of the windows. "I'll drink it later," she said. "Thanks," then floated directly between it and Pari. There was another awkward silence. Pari decided to just keep her talking.

"What's this all about, anyway? Why are you doing this?"

"What, no 'honey'?" Priyanka said.

"No, Ma'am."

"I already told you that, told everyone that: I'm with the Sri Lankan Liberation Army."

"Yeah, but it doesn't make any sense," Pari said as she eased the other bottle into her throwing hand. "I mean, firstly, Sri Lanka begged - begged - to join the Republic fifty years ago. Secondly, you're not even a Tamil, are you? I mean, you don't look at all like one."

"YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND! YOU DON'T UNDERSTAND AT ALL!" The girl stormed closer, then realized what she was doing, and stopped short of the airlock hatch. She was still partially blocking a clear shot at the coke bottle.

"Ok, so make me understand," Pari said, mentally willing her to move just a few inches in any direction.

Priyanka took a deep breath, and sighed, which rotated her ever so slightly. "It's just so wrong what we did to them…" Pari took the shot, whipping the second Coke bottle at the first. Her aim was off, however, and it struck Priyanka hard on the shoulder, deflecting off and shattering on another control console. A noxious smell filled the cabin.

"Oh, naraka mem yaha saba lanata!" Pari exclaimed.

"THAT'S IT?" Priyanka yelled. "That's it? That's your big plan? Throw a bottle at me? And what's that smell? Is that acid? Were you trying to poison m…you stupid kutiya vesya!" She kicked over to the far wall and hit a button that started the airlock hatch closing again. There were little globules of a sizzling liquid drifting all through the cabin. Now Pari had a clean shot at the first bottle stuck by the window, but nothing to throw!

The powered hatch closed more, more. Pari tried in vain to push it open, but she knew it wouldn't work. When it was about to pinch her arms, she gave up and pulled them back in. The opening grew smaller, smaller if only -

She remembered the sextant!

In one uncharacteristically fluid motion, she swept up the thing, and hurled it boomerang-style through the shrinking gap in the hatch, directly at the other Coke bottle.

"Oh, and what's that supposed to…"

Priyanka was incinerated instantly.

There are two kinds of chemical rockets. The more common type uses a fuel and an oxidizer, and some external force to actually start the ignition. This is generally an electrical impulse - a spark - but really anything will work, even a fuse lit by a match.

The less common type uses chemicals that automatically explode on contact, without the need for any kind of ignition. The advantage to these "Hypergolic Rockets," as they're called, is that they're very simple, require little maintenance, and tend to be very difficult to break. The disadvantage is that they're either on or off, with no real throttleability. As such, hypergolics tend not to be used for brute propulsion, but mostly in rough-and-ready systems like the tiny thrusters used to orient a spacecraft on it's X, Y, and Z axes in space. Arav was easily able to siphon some of this stuff out of the ship's reaction control system. The first Coke bottle had been full of unsymmetrical dimethylhydrazine. The second bottle had been full of nitrogen tetroxide, a combination that had been commonly used in RCS systems since the 1960s.

It hadn't even been necessary for the fluids to actually touch. The moment their mere vapors connected in the cabin atmosphere, they burst into invisible flame, and everything combustible inside was engulfed.

The first thing she did was have a smoke. Skru the rules, she'd earned it! It was difficult to light one, but by keeping cigarette and lighter moving, she was able to spark one up just long enough to get it to her lips, where she sucked the whole thing down in one drag. Then she had another. Then she noticed her hair was singed - apparently a little flame had gotten in before the hatch was fully closed - and decided that was enough smoking for the day.

The upper hatch wouldn't open, so she went through the lower. A passenger was there with a tablet that read How do we go to the bathroom in these things without soiling ourselves? Pari laughed. She snatched the tablet, and typed, You don't. They're disposable. Enjoy yourself. She showed it to the passenger, but didn't give the tablet back.

She made her way hand-over-hand outside to the cockpit. The windows had been blown out by the blast, so she clambered in, and unlocked the inner door to the airlock. She then sent a distress call to the ISRO, and explained the situation. They explained that regardless of whatever she'd told the passengers, Priyanka had made it clear she'd intended to crash the ferry into Strongarm City, killing as many people and destroying as much of the place as she could in the process. Two ISRO cutters and a Russian one had been holding station about a thousand miles away, waiting for the situation to resolve itself one way or another. Had nothing else happened, they were going to blow it out of the sky in another six hours.

Instead, they sent one of the ISRO ships to rescue the passengers and get them to a hospital on the Moon ASAP.

Most of the controls in the cockpit were trashed, but the damage was superficial. The systems were working, and in fact the Uttarkhand was in pretty good shape, apart from the hull being blown out. By the time the cutter arrived, she'd managed to appropriate six tablets from shell-shocked passengers, and jerry-rig them into the ferry's mangled systems, bypassing the control panels almost entirely. The ferry was flyable, though not exactly safe. She had a mission, and was determined to see it through after all the death and destruction and betrayal. Someone still had to get this thing to the Moon. Stopping it out here was almost as difficult as landing would be, and anyway, leaving it drifting out here would be a hazard to navigation. After a brief confab with the colonel of the cutter, he agreed with her. Jal elected to stay behind - with a decent space suit on loan from the cutter, and they were joined by an engineer/co-pilot, just in case anything else went wrong.

They were less than a half-day out from Strongarm when Jal came into the cockpit. Their new engineer was tinkering with something aft. Evidently Arav had re-sealed the hypergolic fuel lines with duct tape, which wasn't exactly the safest fix.

"How's the tin man?" she asked.

"Fine," he said, "All the needles are still pegged."

"All of them? That's a little odd. I'd have thought…" Jal had gone bleary-eyed, literally Moonstruck by the view. She waved her begloved hand in front of his helmeted face. "Earth to Jal. Earth to Jal, come in Jal, do you read?" He blinked, and came back to reality.

"Sorry," he said. "I'm still blown away by it, there's so much traffic." Pari nodded, which was impossible to see in her suit.

"Yup. Hundreds of freighters and ore-carriers and factories and you-name-it. All mass-producing solar panel satellites and hauling them to the La Grange points. It's where ninety percent of Earth's energy comes from. So obviously it's a pretty huge industry."

"They convert the sunlight to microwaves, beam it to Earth, and then it's converted to electricity?" he asked.

"Close. They beam it to satellites in geosynch, and those beam it to the ground. It's safer that way, but, hey, you're learning." He smiled. He took a spare tablet and typed Can we speak privately? She nodded reflexively, and switched the settings on her suit radio. Then she reached over and adjusted the settings on Jal's suit as well, since he had no idea how to do it.

"What's up?" she said.

"Can the engineer guy - "

"Kumar."

" - Right. Can Kumar hear us?"

"No. What's up?"

He explained that this was a big deal, and there were bound to be security issues, an inquest, the surviving luggage would be undoubtedly checked for contraband, explosives, and other things. There'd be armies of security. Added to which, there'd be a huge to-do with reporters, since Pari was now a big bo-honkin' heroine. The flurry of activity could last for days.

"So?"

"So we don't have days. Tin Man is running out of air. If we go through proper channels, I imagine he'll be seized and examined by people who don't know or care what the sacred embers are, and even if they survive that…"

"Right. I get it."

"So is there something we could do to avoid it all? I'd hate all this to have been for nothing. I'd hate to have to do it again."

"So would I, but there…ah, naraka." She thought it over for a second, then switched the suit radio over to the general channel. "Kumar?" she said.

"Yeah, boss?"

"I'm thinking the Uttarkhand is probably a little too rickety to land at the primary or secondary sites. If we wreck, it'll mess up traffic for days. Just to be safe, I'm gonna' land in the wilderness, say twenty-five miles northwest of Strongarm."

"If you say so, boss."

Eleven hours later, while emergency vehicles, the Indian army, a legion of reporters, and scores of others waited in in a remote hunk of airless countryside, Pari reported an 'accidental' problem with the guidance system, and that she'd have to land the thing by hand. She ordered Kumar to stay by the engines while she 'attempted' to fix it, but it looked pretty bad, and she'd probably have to go in by hand.

"Once they get a chance to poke around this thing, aren't they going to know you were lying about that?" Jal asked.

"Let 'em try to prove it." She yanked the tablet that was functioning as a jerry-rigged guidance control panel free of its moorings and chucked it out the window. "Now, where's this temple of yours?" He pulled up a schematic of the southeast quadrant of the station, then zoomed in on a smoker's lounge only a few hundred feet from an airlock. "Yeah, we can do that."

Apart from the unnerving aspect of landing a ship while literally sticking her head out the window to eyeball the distance to the ground, it was an unremarkable landing. They touched down with no one around, though it tripped every warning sensor in the base. "Kumar, you stay with the Uttarkhand. Jal and I are going to go inside and call for help."

"Sure thing, boss," Kumar said.

The two of them wrestled Tin Man to the ground, and bounded gracelessly over the lunar soil. There wasn't much dust in the area, owing to years of civilization. Still, it was slow going.

"I need a second priest for the ceremony. There's one working as a miner over in Chalpana town. I talked to him before we left Earth. He's got an arrangement with his boss, and he can be here in forty-five minutes once he gets the call. Once he's here, I can start the ceremony, and invoke clerical privilege. That'll prevent security from hassling us until everything is done. Unfortunately, I can't have you in the temple for that part of it."

"That's fine, I understand. As soon as we get in, use the public com lines. I'd prefer to use the radio from out here, but that'd expose our whole tissue of lies."

"Agreed," Jal sighed.

Five minutes later, they were still a quarter mile from the airlock. It was very slow going.

" 'Strongarm City' is a really strange name, now that I think about it."

"You want to play tourist trivia now?" Pari asked.

"Well, this is taking forever…"

"Fine. It's named after the first person on the Moon, like almost two centuries ago. An American. Neil Strongarm. Or maybe Nigel. Or Ned. I can't remember."

"American, huh?"

"I know; crazy, right? Who'd believe it?"

Once through the lock, Jal excused himself to find a public phone booth while Pari manhandled the tin man to the smokers' lounge-cum-fire temple. When Jal met her there, she was half-out of her suit, sucking down a cigarette. He scowled.

"What? I've earned it!"

"Whatever. Let's get this guy open. We don't have a lot of time before security gets here and makes things awkward."

They cracked open the tin man, pulled away the inner cover for the hamster wheel, and found it still spinning. Both of them sighed relief. Carefully, Jal removed the wheel, and dumped the sacred embers into a specially consecrated vessel that had been waiting for them in the room.

"Oh, no," he said.

Pari had noticed it, too. "Jal, aren't embers supposed to glow?"

"How the naraka could it have gone out?" he cried. Pari was startled. It was the first time she'd heard the young man use any profanity.

"I don't know," she said, "The needles are all pegged, still. Everything looks fine. In fact if anything the O2 looks a little high…" she tapped the gauge. The needle immediately fell away to the opposite end of the scale. "Oh," she said. "It looks like the readout got jammed. I told Arav these old fashioned gauges were unreliable. It probably went out, I don't know, it could have been days ago."

Jal was soundlessly crying. He'd taken his glove off and buried his fingers in the fistful of ash, desperately looking for any sign of heat. There wasn't any.

"What do we do?" she asked.

"There's nothing to do," he said.

"So we've failed."

The young priest was silent for a long moment. He took a deep breath. With his clean other hand, he wiped away his tears. He stood up straight, his face took on a resolve she'd never seen there before, and said, "We have not failed, so far as anyone else knows."

His next words confirmed her opinion of the boy, and cemented their life-long friendship: "Give me your lighter, and don't tell anyone."

THE END

Bio: Randall Schanze is an amateur Science Fiction author and blogger from Florida. He's the child of a NASA engineer and an immigrant, and has had a life-long fascination with space and exotic cultures. He's wild-eyed, engaging, chatty, smart, interested in nearly everything, and hence almost instantly annoying in person.

He also sings.

*********

Randy has his own website, and his own Amazon page:

http://www.mahatmarandy.net/

http://www.amazon.com/Randall-Schanze/e/B0193Z7H30/ref=sr_ntt_srch_lnk_2?qid=1459825561&sr=8-2

E-mail: Randall Schanze

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