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tsaomengde · 2 years ago

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“The Mission”

A short story about love, time travel, healing, spaceplanes, and making the world a better place, even when no one will ever know.

---

After the TAG forces shot me out of my cockpit in low orbit, I floated there for about six hours. Something – probably debris from my fighter – had hit me in the back, hard, and I couldn’t feel anything below my waist. My suit’s maneuvering jets let me correct the initial nauseating spin I was thrown into, but they didn’t have sufficient thrust to get me out of my unstable, highly eccentric orbit.

My suit told me I had about eight or nine trips around Titan before my periapsis wobbled low enough into the atmosphere that drag would bring me down below escape velocity. At that point, gravity would catch up with me, I would fall, and I would crash into the surface and die. The suit had an emergency beacon, but no built-in communications beyond that. I was alone in the silent dark.

I sped around the moon at a little less than ten thousand kilometers per hour. The view of Saturn, for the parts of the orbit where it wasn’t eclipsed by Titan, was gorgeous. That was a small comfort, as my brain endlessly analyzed the ways I could go. A bit of debris from the battle could kill me outright at these speeds, or it could puncture the suit on a glancing hit and it would be a toss-up whether I would die of suffocation or extreme cold. My oxygen meter also claimed I had about three hours of air left, which meant I would probably be unconscious or dead by the time I actually hit the ground. And, of course, there was the matter of my probably-broken spine. I suspected I was bleeding internally from that.

Later, when I woke up in a hospital bed on the Agamemnon, they told me that the TAG brass had transmitted a formal surrender eighty-seven seconds after my fighter had exploded. I was officially the last casualty of the Earth-Titan war.

They fitted me with prosthetics so I could still walk, but as the physical therapist with the cute dimples explained to me, there was some kind of incompatibility with my chromosomal something-or-other that meant I couldn’t use them at a hundred percent, which meant I didn’t qualify for combat. My spine, which had indeed been broken, was too damaged to repair with conventional methods. That left experimental regenerative genetic surgery, which was more expensive than the navy was willing to shell out for.

So, at thirty-one, after thirteen years in the navy, I got out with an honorable discharge, a pension that was decent enough but far from what it would take to fix my spine, a chromium heart for my injury, and enough PTSD to fuck me over for the rest of my life.

---

“I don’t care about my legs,�� I said to Kate, the first time we ever met. We picked a bar about halfway between us for our first meeting. She had a gin gimlet with cucumber simple syrup. I had an old fashioned. “They get me from point A to point B just fine. I just miss flying.”

“Were you good at it?” she asked, blue eyes very wide.

“I certainly thought so. But then some TAG dipshit blew me out of my fighter above Titan and ended my career, so maybe I was less good than I thought.”

“You can’t fly for one of the intrasolar shipping companies?” she asked. “Or transport?”

I gave her a patient smile. “Do you know what a pilot actually does aboard one of those big fusion torchships?”

“No, actually.”

“They point the nose where the destination is going to be, fire the engine for half the trip, then flip the ship around and fire the engine for the other half. There’s nothing to that. I miss flying.”

She nodded sympathetically. “I understand.” I could tell she didn’t, not really, but that she wanted to.

I moved in with her a few months later. Part of me wondered if it was a good idea, moving so fast, but I was two years from Titan and still waking up screaming in the middle of the night, convinced I was back in my suit, in the dark above the moon. The greater part of me, the selfish part, was happy that someone was there to touch me, to talk to me, to root me back in myself and pull me back to earth from up there in the black.

In that sense, Kate could have been anyone. I never thought of her as replaceable, but there was always a vague sense of guilt, of knowing that I was definitely getting more from the relationship than she was. I voiced this to her once, and she told me I was being silly, and that she loved me, and that was all she needed.

So when she first approached me with her idea for the Mission, I like to think it was that part of me, the part that wanted to be more for her, that moved me to say yes to what was honestly an idiotic idea. Not the part that missed flying. Just selfless altruism and desire to help the woman I loved.

I like to think that a lot.

---

We cracked time travel about a decade after I was born. Much to our collective disappointment as a species, it was not the fun kind of time travel that lets you go back in time and kill Hitler.

Kate, as she told me once we were living together, was part of a DOD think tank tasked with finding some kind of use for the technology. After a lot of experimentation, they came up with what Kate called the Four Rules.

1. It’s time travel, not space travel. If you want to meet Julius Caesar, you had best make sure you’re in Europe when you travel back.

2. It only works by going back. There is no forward travel because the future hasn’t happened yet. The only exception is returning to your point of origin.

3. If you actually do meet Julius Caesar, it’s because your meeting him will not change history in any measurable way. If you try to go back in time to change something significant, it simply doesn’t work. The little box makes the noise, it uses up a lot of energy, and then nothing happens.

4. The corollary rule to number three, then, is that when you travel back in time, whatever you do end up doing has already happened.

I asked Kate what this meant about determinism versus free will, and she primly replied that she was a theoretical physicist, not a philosopher. The DOD was not known for employing philosophers and paying them the kind of money they were paying her.

---

The Mission’s personnel consisted of four people. Myself, the heroic pilot. Kate, the brains behind the time travel stuff and the one who came up with the Mission to begin with. Leon, the aerospace engineer slash DOD contractor. And Ash, the director of the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. We would go over to Ash’s place, have dinner, and conspire.

Over one such dinner – mac and cheese with broccoli, I remember it vividly for no adequate reason – we discussed the logistical difficulties involved.

“We can’t use anything from the last century,” Leon was saying around a mouthful of mac. “All the guidance systems on those ships are keyed into the orbital satellite network. There’s nothing like that at the target time. We need a craft that can achieve orbit, rendezvous, and de-orbit in a single stage, without remote guidance.”

I nodded. “That means we need a spaceplane. Not just a fighter, but an actual spaceplane.”

Ash chewed over the problem as well as their food. “There might be an SR-75 in decent enough shape we could appropriate from the displays at the museum. The hardest part will be bribing the transport operators to take it to home base instead of, you know, a navy cache where highly dangerous military surplus equipment is supposed to go.”

I raised an eyebrow at them. “That’s going to be the hardest part? What about getting the parts to get it into decent working condition, or the fuel?”

Leon waved a hand dismissively. “Do you know how many spare parts I have lying around at work? How many millions of tons of liquid hydrogen and oxygen are stored in poorly-guarded places that I have access to?”

“No. I’m guessing the answer to both is ‘more than the general public would be comfortable knowing about.’”

“Exactly.”

I looked at Kate. “Is the magic box going to be able to send a whole spaceplane back, kitty?”

She wrinkled her nose at me for using her pet name in front of our friends, but let it go for the moment. “The magic box can send anything back given enough juice.”

“Okay, but is the shitty little battery at home base going to be able to give it enough?”

“Probably. If we strip everything nonessential out of the spaceplane, get the mass down as much as possible. I need to know the exact mass of the plane, plus us, when it’s ready for travel.” Kate shrugged. “If it won’t be enough, we can always add to our list of capital offenses and steal a torchship, then use its fusion reactor for the power.”

I pinched the bridge of my nose and sighed. “Last resort.”

---

“I don’t really understand why we’re doing this,” I told her one night, in the silence following her helping me out of another flashback.

She shifted a little in bed so she could look me in the eye. “You said you were on board.”

“I am. I’d do anything you asked, kitty, you know that. And obviously I’m excited to get to fly again. But nothing we’re going to do is actually going to matter. That’s one of the four rules, right?”

With a little shrug, she began running her fingers through my hair, which I’d stopped bothering to keep short after I was discharged years ago. It was pretty long by now. “It’ll matter to us, won’t it? And to her?”

“I mean, sure, but the risk-reward ratio is way off. You and Leon and Ash could all lose your jobs, we could get prosecuted by the Justice Department –”

“Vee, why did you sign up to be a pilot?”

I stopped. “I mean, I always wanted to fly.”

“Yes, but what was the reason you put on your application? And the reason you told me on our first date when we were still trying to look really good and put together for one another?”

That took me back, and I snorted gently. “To make the world a better place.”

“Exactly. Does there have to be a minimum threshold of goodness increase in order for an altruistic act to be worthwhile?”

I weighed that particular bit of moral utilitarianism in my mind before I committed to an answer. “No.”

“So, that’s why we’re doing this. To make the world a better place, even by the tiniest, slimmest margin.”

I gently snaked a hand out from under the comforter to lightly boop her on the nose. “And the real reason, since we’re not on our first date and this isn’t an application you’re filling out?”

She stuck her tongue out at me. “I know how much you want to fly again. And I want to see my magic box used for something other than letting rich assholes reenact Bradbury’s ‘A Sound of Thunder’ without any of the nuance or lessons learned.”

“Dinosaur leather shoes is not the outcome you probably had in mind,” I agreed. The time-travel hunting industry generated billions for the government every year now.

We fell asleep that night, and the next morning, we took a magtrain to Vegas, and from there we went to home base.

---

Home base was an abandoned aircraft hangar in the middle of the Nevada desert. Leon had said something about centuries-old top-secret aircraft testing, when we first conceived of the Mission, and lo and behold, there was a facility with room for a spaceplane. We spent far too much money on the highest-capacity quantum battery civilians could buy, hooked it into the Vegas grid, and watched it take eight weeks to charge.

It had also cost far too much money to bribe the transport operators to bring the SR-75 here, but the deed was done and they hadn’t sold us out so far. They probably assumed we were aviation junkies. What domestic terrorists would bother stealing a hundred-year-old spaceplane when there were far cheaper and more effective ways to kill people, these days?

Kate, Leon, Ash, and I sat at a small table in a corner of the hangar, drinking coffee and going over the ascent profile. Ash’s part was done, having delivered the goods, but they wanted to be here for everything, and I certainly respected that. The spaceplane took up the majority of the hangar space, a sleek black dagger with barely a suggestion of wings to either side. The underside was dominated by a pair of huge jet intakes, and the rear of the plane sported three engine nozzles, the center much larger than either of the ones flanking it. A gracefully curved tail fin slightly forward of the engines completed the vessel’s profile.

“The plane looks like it’s in good condition,” Leon was saying. “I’ve sourced the fuels we need. The main problem is going to be the timing, not the equipment.”

“How so?” Kate asked.

I spoke up. “The SR-75 should theoretically be able to hit escape velocity just on the air-breathing engine mode, but the target has an extremely elliptical orbit, and we’re launching much closer to the equator, so we’ll have to adjust our inclination, too. That means either a lot of burns with the rocket fuel mode once we’re in vacuum, or a very steep climb to orbit. That pronounced an angle of attack might affect the engines’ ability to get enough air to achieve escape velocity.”

Kate blinked. “Still not seeing how that affects the timing.”

I pulled out my personal comm, laid it on the table, and put it in draw mode, so I could trace pictures on its screen with the tip of my finger. I drew a little ball, the Earth, and traced a messy, elliptical orbit around it. I indicated the very top of the orbit, where the line peaked like a mountain summit. “We have about a thirty-minute window to achieve rendezvous with the target. We need to rendezvous at or near its apoapsis, here, where its orbital speed is lowest and matching relative velocity will be easiest.”

I loved Kate, but it was endlessly amusing to me how she could understand quantum and temporal physics and articulate mathematical concepts I could never grasp in a million years, yet still not understand basic orbital mechanics. She gave me a blank look, then just said, “And that’s hard?”

“Yes. It is very hard, kitty. We are trying to hit a target the size of, roughly, a bullet train car, except the target is going twenty-eight thousand kilometers per hour. We need to come alongside it, match velocity with it, perform our docking maneuver, and then decouple. And the parameters of the Mission mean that there is exactly one half-hour window we can do this in if we’re going to avoid violating rule three.”

“I think the best solution is going to be adding some external rocket fuel tanks,” Leon said. “Not much, since we have to think about flight performance and transit mass for the magic box, but even a few hundred extra meters per second of delta-vee might make the difference in your ability to match orbits with the target.”

“Agreed. Just make sure the Goddamn things aren’t going to come loose at Mach fuck-you.”

Leon grinned at me. “I love your optimism, Vee.”

---

Unlike with most modern fighters, and indeed with even-older jet aircraft, the SR-75 did not have a fully enclosed cockpit. The pilot sat in a big swiveling chair in front of the instrument panel, and the main cabin of the craft was accessible from there. It was a spaceplane, and therefore supposed to be able to perform orbital docking maneuvers exactly like the one we were about to attempt, which necessitated the crew being able to actually get up and access the docking port without going fully extravehicular.

Kate sat behind me in a second chair that Leon bolted in there for her. She had the magic box in her lap, hooked up by a pair of very fat and long yellow wires to the bulk of the quantum battery, which squatted heavily just slightly off-center in the SR-75’s main cabin. (“Gotta keep that center of mass where it’s supposed to be,” Leon had said.) She was doing something with the box’s controls, squinting at the small readout which displayed some kind of complicated waveform.

“I’ll initiate the breach when we get to fifteen thousand meters,” she told me. “It wouldn’t do for anyone to actually see us at the target time, because then it just wouldn’t work, but I would rather not get shot down by our modern-day autonomous airspace defenses.”

“Sounds good,” I told her. “Hey. Kate.”

“Yes, Vee?”

I craned my neck around as best I could while strapped into the pilot’s seat. “I love you, kitty.”

Her cheeks darkened a little and she smiled. “I love you too.”

I keyed in the ignition sequence and the SR-75 roared to life. Leon and Ash, both standing a safe distance away outside the hangar so their eardrums didn’t rupture, started waving and giving us thumbs-ups. I gave them a thumbs-up in return, projecting more confidence than I actually felt, and brought the throttle up just a little.

The spaceplane practically leapt out of the hangar. Ruggedized, smart landing gear wheels hit the Nevada desert ground like it was perfectly maintained asphalt. Within twenty seconds I pulled back on the yoke and the SR-75 was in the air, starting a steep climb. I opened the throttle up the entire way and was slammed into my seat with the gee-force.

“JESUS CHRIST WE ARE GOING TO FUCKING DIE!” Kate screamed.

I glanced over my shoulder at her. “You okay, kitty?”

She was clutching at her chest, magic box forgotten, and for a long, terrible moment I thought she was having some kind of heart attack. But then she nodded, looking pasty. “I just got taken by surprise,” she shouted over the roar of the engines. “Sorry!”

“Okay!” I returned my attention to the instrument panel. We were already moving at a good clip, and the altimeter was increasing fast enough that even the digital display was having trouble keeping up. For a long, pure moment, I just relaxed into my seat, hands on the yoke, feeling the currents of air spiraling around the ship. Now, more than ever before my prosthetics, it felt like an extension of myself. I was flying again.

“We’re at fifteen thousand meters!” I told her.

Kate pressed a button on the magic box. Everything blurred like someone just messed with the focus on a camera, except the camera was my brain. When it re-focused, we were still in the plane, climbing toward space at an impressive clip, but all of the global positioning systems were dead. There were no satellites to receive data from, not in this era. However, we had accounted for this; the SR-75 had its own onboard suite of computers dedicated specifically to calculating orbital information.

It was at this point that things began to go wrong. I felt a sharp tug on the yoke. Swearing to myself, I corrected, keeping the plane on course, and keyed a status readout. The SR-75’s onboard systems insisted that nothing was wrong, but that the plane was experiencing significant and unexpected drag.

It hit me. “Fuck me!” I snarled. “Leon’s fucking external fuel tanks! I told him they needed to be secure!”

“What’s going on?” Kate asked.

“One of the external fuel tanks Leon spit-soldered onto this Goddamn thing has come loose, and the drag is killing our velocity,” I told her. “I need to get it off of us, now.”

My gaze was fixed on my instruments, so I couldn’t see the horror in her big blue eyes, but I could hear it loud and clear in her voice. “How?”

“Shearing force. Hold on, this is going to fucking suck.”

I stomped down on one of the SR-75’s rudder pedals with my right foot, the motion almost as smooth as it used to be even with the prosthetic, and spun the plane in a sharp, hard three-hundred-sixty-degree roll. I nearly blacked out, and I know Kate did for a few seconds, since she didn’t go through flight training. But there was a sudden, violent wrenching feeling that went through the yoke into my arms, and afterward the drag was gone.

“Did it work?” Kate asked blearily.

“Yup. And apparently an external fuel canister from several hundred years in the future crashing in the Nevada desert doesn’t fuck up the timeline, since we’re here at all.”

“Are we still going to be able to make it?”

I eyeballed the delta-vee readouts on the navigation display. The lost fuel tank didn’t exactly have a ton in it, and of course, the reduced mass of the ship now that it was gone meant the net loss was slightly ameliorated. But even so, the situation was grim.

“Well, yes and no,” I told her.

“That is never the answer anybody wants to hear, Vee.”

“I should, should, still be able to match velocity with the target and achieve rendezvous. But our margins are basically nil now. If I don’t do this perfectly, we’re going to miss completely.”

I felt her reach out and place a hand on my shoulder, give it a squeeze. “You can do this, Vee. I know you can.”

“Thank you for the vote of confidence,” I told her, and was surprised to hear that it didn’t come out sarcastic.

The ascent became a delicate balance. I was trying to hit escape velocity while still using the air-breathing mode of the engines, which was incredibly efficient compared to the rocket fuel. But as I got higher, the engines needed to work harder to ram enough air in to function, which meant my thrust decreased. Without the global positioning system to feed me flight info, I needed to do it all by feel and eyeballing the orbital information given to me by the onboard computers.

I trimmed a couple degrees off my angle of attack, trying to find the sweet spot between still gaining altitude and not starving the engines of air in the increasingly-barren stratosphere. The SR-75 shuddered, engines straining, and began to threaten me with a stall. I swept my gaze across my instruments. “Fuck,” I muttered, and switched the engines to rocket mode.

Instantly, we were slammed back into our seats again as our thrust suddenly increased dramatically. I glanced at our projected apoapsis, counted to three, then shut the engines down.

In the sudden silence in the absence of the engines’ roar, Kate asked, “Did we do it?”

“Yes and no.”

“Goddammit, Vee!”

I looked over my shoulder at her and gave her my most reassuring grin. “Sorry, couldn’t help it. The drag from the fuel tank breaking loose meant that we lost velocity, which meant we took longer to get to the speed we were needing, and the spin I had to put the plane through shifted our course a little bit. Our inclination is about five degrees off of where it should be.”

“Okay. What does all that mean?”

“We are going as fast as we need to be, but we’re not in the place we need to be going that fast. I’m going to need to do correction burns at certain points in our ascent. We can still make our rendezvous, but we won’t have the fuel to do a proper deceleration burn. I’m going to have to perform emergency aerobraking.”

“In English, Vee!”

“On our way back down I am going to use the atmosphere to slow us down the old-fashioned way.”

“Jesus, Mary, and Joseph. Is this plane designed for that?”

“Probably.” I shrugged. “Assuming we don’t burn up, I’ll be able to switch the engines back to air-breathing at a certain altitude and land without the need for lithobraking.”

I could see her trace the Latin roots of litho and arrive at the gallows-humor definition of the word. She went even paler than before. “Certainly hope so.”

I let my grin fade as we continued to coast on our momentum, rising inexorably up through the mesosphere into the thermosphere, our speed gradually slowing as we crested toward the very top of our parabolic arc. At key points, I reoriented the SR-75’s nose, now using chemical thrusters to maneuver the craft in the absence of air for the control surfaces to manipulate, and fired the engines in rocket mode, tweaking our orbital inclination until it matched that of the target.

The computers suggested to me, at that point, that we would be able to achieve equal relative velocity, and it would leave us with enough delta-vee to then de-orbit ourselves. We would not be stuck in orbit forever until we died. I blinked hard, banishing the memory of Titan as it suddenly threatened to overwhelm me, and repeated the affirmations Kate taught me. I am not there anymore. I am here, now. I am safe.

Safe was, of course, a relative term in the vacuum of space, going tens of thousands of kilometers per hour. But Kate took my hand from behind and gave it a squeeze, and I was good again.

“We’re going to do a long burn once we’re within ten kilometers,” I told Kate. “That’ll bring our relative velocity to zero. From there we just point our nose at the target, fire the engines for half a second, get as close as we can until we’re either about to hit or miss, fire them again to bring ourselves back to zero relative velocity, and then we do that over and over until we’re close enough to dock.”

“I don’t need to know all the mechanics,” Kate replied, and I could see she was fighting to keep her teeth from chattering. The environmental controls were working just fine, so it was fear she was dealing with, not cold. “I just trust you, Vee. Make it happen.”

I suited action to words. It took ten long, arduous minutes, and by the end of it we were very short on time to actually execute the retrieval, but I successfully brought the SR-75’s docking port, which sat on the dorsal surface of the spaceplane, in contact with the target’s own.

Not that they were remotely designed to be compatible, being hundreds of years apart in origin, but fortunately the SR-75 had the advantage of smart materials incorporated into its construction. Its port sealed itself tight around the target’s, flashing a green light and hissing open to reveal the shiny metal surface of the target.

Kate was already out of her seat, plasma torch in hand, and the acrid smell of it hit my nostrils as she ignited it and started cutting through the ancient hull like butter. It was joined less than a minute later by new smells: faint traces of iodine and ethanol, urine, feces, and a wet, animal musk.

And, of course, I heard barking.

“Got her!” Kate called to me. “She’s in pretty rough shape, but she’s alive!”

“Strap back in, and get her secured too,” I told her. “We’ve passed apoapsis and I need to fire the engines right now for the Oberth effect or we’re going to be stuck in orbit forever.”

I keyed in the command for the docking port to close on our end and release. The leftover atmosphere inside the target puffed out of it in sudden decompression, pushing our two crafts apart, but not hard enough to seriously perturb either of our orbits. That was the engines’ job, and I brought them to life as soon as we were clear.

They sputtered out as they burned the last of the rocket fuel. I looked at our orbital readout. “Ah, shit,” I muttered. “This is going to be a bumpy ride.”

---

We all but rammed into the atmosphere with the entire length of the plane. The yoke bucked in my hand and the instrumentation suggested to me that I was a fucking moron that had doomed us all, but with polite numbers instead of those exact words. I kept an iron grip on the yoke, worked the rudders with both my leaden feet to keep us perpendicular to our approach vector so we would generate more drag and thus lose more speed, and prayed to every God I could think of. Behind me, Kate’s teeth were audibly chattering, but she managed to avoid screaming again, and the dog was remarkably quiet.

The interior of the SR-75 got incredibly hot, naturally. The instrument panel helpfully informed me that it was almost fifty-five degrees Celsius inside, and that was with the life-support system working as hard as it possibly could to cool it. The one saving grace we had was that the spaceplane’s designers had anticipated the need for this kind of extreme aerobraking, and the skin of the craft was designed to tolerate it – in theory. I sweated, and I panted, and I watched our velocity slowly decrease until we were no longer going to boomerang back up out of the atmosphere.

Then I pointed the plane’s nose down, let gravity take over, and switched the engines back into air-breathing mode.

They decided they did not want to start.

“Well, we’re fucked,” I laughed.

“This is a plane, right?” Kate asked through clenched teeth. “Aerodynamic? You can fly it without the engines, right?”

“Well, glide, yes. Fall slowly, yes. Land… maybe.”

I let us half-glide, half-fall until we were back in the troposphere. “Magic box time,” I told Kate.

Everything unfocused again, and when I was able to see once more, my global positioning displays were back online. They told me that, if I did nothing, we were going to crash into the ocean just off the coast of Hokkaido.

I tried the engines again. Still nothing. The reentry had fried them, as far as I could tell.

I started the plane’s nose trending up again, trying to bring us out of the dive and into a climb. The control surfaces bucked and the plane fought me.

“I’m sorry, Vee,” Kate said.

“Don’t start,” I told her. “We’re not dead yet.”

“I couldn’t go back and save you from what happened at Titan. I thought, if I could save Laika, maybe –”

“I know exactly what you were thinking, kitty.” I looked back at her, and the scared-looking mutt buckled into her lap. “It’s okay.”

“I just – when I read about how she died, all alone, in that terrible little capsule –”

“I said don’t start, Kate. I said it’s okay and I meant it.”

She kept going like she hadn’t heard me. “She was supposed to have enough food and oxygen for a week. But the satellite was rushed, and the temperature control system failed. So when she was –”

“FUCK me!” I shouted.

That finally got through to her. “What?!”

“Temperature control.” I quickly hit a series of switches. “The jet intakes were superheated by our reentry. When you switch the engines to rocket fuel mode, they have shutters at the front that close so you don’t get trace amounts of gaseous oxygen mixing with the liquid fuel. Those shutters are probably half-melted shut.”

“And?”

“There’s an emergency release that just drops them completely.” I pressed the button, felt the SR-75 shudder as explosive bolts fired and it shed hundreds of pounds of metal. “Okay. Now –”

I was cut off as the sudden force of the engines firing slammed me hard into my seat. The plane began to corkscrew wildly as the engines put out differing amounts of thrust for the first few moments until the oxygen feeds equalized. Clearly one of the intakes had had less of its shutters blown off than the other, and the plane had needed some time to adjust.

Kate coughed. “The engines? They’re working? We’re not going to die?”

“Oh, we’re still going to die,” I told her. “Eventually, of old age. But probably not today.”

She smacked the back of my head. “Jackass.”

---

The vet gave us a very suspicious stare as we paid our bill and accepted Laika’s carrier back from his nurse. “I have never seen an animal in that kind of shape before,” he said. “Malnourished, half-dead from heat exhaustion, matted shit in her fur, and primitive bio-monitoring equipment surgically grafted into parts of her. I assume you didn’t do this, since it would be colossally stupid to come into my office and ask me to fix her up if you did.”

Kate shakes her head. “No, it wasn’t us. She’s a stray. Found her while we were out on a trip. We felt so bad for the poor thing that we brought her back with us.”

Somewhat mollified, the vet nodded. “Well, make sure to give her the antibiotics for the rest of the week, and call me if there’s anything else she needs.”

We stepped outside, and I opened the carrier to let Laika out. She staggered out, still a little loopy from the anesthesia, and I got her leash onto her without too much trouble.

“You know,” I said to Kate, “when we first shacked up, I said I didn’t want any pets.”

She grinned at me. “For someone who was so against the idea, you went very far out of your way to get me one anyway.”

---

About six months after we brought Laika home, a very humorless man in a snazzy uniform, accompanied by many more humorless men in uniform with large guns, came and visited our house. The humorless man in charge sat and chatted with us for a while, and Laika sat in his lap and let him give her pets.

Nothing else ever came of the visit.

There is no neat bow to tie on this story, unfortunately. I still wake up screaming in the middle of the night, though not quite as often. That probably has more to do with the passage of time and a lot of therapy than pulling a time-travel dog rescue, though. The only point to any of it is that we spent a lot of taxpayer money (since Kate, Leon, and Ash are all paid by the government) and risked our lives to make the world a better place, even by the tiniest, slimmest possible margin.

And perhaps having read about it will have made your world a little better too.

#writing #my writing #story #short story #science fiction #sci-fi #spaceplane #cw: ptsd #ptsd

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