La Double Inconstance (2030–31) — Episode 1
1: A Tuesday in Early March
It’s ten past six; the dawn air is freezing as we wait for the shuttle bus. Overhead, silvery clouds are scudding east to west, riding a Siberian wind. I glance at Tania, huddled inside her parka and billowing over-trousers; I think she looks overtired.
We leave the dormitory behind. The bus is warm and stuffy; it’s just a short ride to the airport. The driver is walled off behind an opaque glass screen. Sensibly, Tania seems to be catching up on her sleep. This isn’t that old sleep-deprivation bullshit - breaking you down and remaking you; the launch window is tight, the mission evolves, the training has to follow suit.
Train hard, fight easy. So today won’t be easy: we were given a brief description last night - zero-g training, further details on the flight.
Tania, I think, it’s easy to make mistakes when you’re tired. Take your nap and please don’t screw up.
She’s my mission-buddy and I’d hate to have to change that with just a few weeks to go.
2: Tania Milet
Tania is from the Bundeswehr special forces - modelled, they say, after the Israeli counter-terror group (officially denied). In any event, I’ve seen how she handles herself. Tania and myself are a ‘psychologically matched pair’ so it’s really essential that neither of us screws up today. Tania is the comms and weapons systems specialist.
We board the helicopter at a remote apron without formalities; this is a military flight. Tania and myself sit at the back facing forwards. We strap in and pull the intercom headsets on. Staffers occupy seats in front of us, part of the support team, while at the pilot end two seats face us. On our left is Günter Schlierkamp, our training commander; on the right sits Dr Anna de Kasparis, the mission psychologist.
Schlierkamp will be giving the briefing once we’ve taken off, but my eyes are drawn to his companion. Anna is wearing a bulky parka just like the rest of us. She leans forward to slide it off as the heaters kick in. Her jacket underneath is a regulation uniform flaunting the ESA logo, but the rest is surely her own: a small black skirt with matching tights and pixie boots of soft leather.
I deliberately let my gaze linger and she stares right back: blue eyes neutral, expression confident. Anna continually assesses us: everything she does is designed to see how we, the subjects, respond. We could be down-checked any time for reasons we would never understand—though this far in the process that’s unlikely; the losers are long since gone.
Why is she so attentive to me? I turn away - no point wasting time on it - shift my gaze instead to Schlierkamp, who has the grizzled look of a veteran who will fly no more missions and is ambivalent about that.
The engine cranks up and with a small jolt the craft slowly lifts off. I second-guess the pilot. In my former life I flew helicopters for the French army. Special birds with hushed turbines, quiet rotors and a fractal e/m signature.
Piloting the module is not dissimilar.
3: Tuesday — Dropshaft
Schlierkamp is talking for our benefit (his staff are regulars for today’s exercise; they’ll have heard it all before). He clears his throat and I poke Tania in the ribs with my left elbow. She’s alert in a second.
“Team, today we’ll be doing zero-g exercises in a mocked-up mission capsule. Time at zero-g is limited. You will start the exercise within a routine duty profile. On the emergency warning you will move immediately to your combat couches. There will be limited time before sustained excess gees.”
This is so normal: the shortest possible briefing - studded with euphemisms. They like you to work it out for yourself so you can internalise it. They’re wasting their time with Tania, of course; she’s of the school of “Stop faffing, let’s get on with it.” It’s down to me to ask the questions.
So how do we get into zero-g today? We’re plainly not going orbital; that’s not done on a whim. We can do things with ‘diamagnetics’ but not on the scale of the whole module. It could be an aircraft pulling parabolic curves, but they could do that from our base - no need for our ride today. So I’m guessing a drop-shaft, probably in vacuum. They’re going to drop us into a deep, deep hole so that we float - and then stop us, real fast - so we don’t die.
“Where is the training facility we’re using today?” I ask to confirm my suspicions.
“A former deep mine in Magny-Danigon, north-east France, more than a thousand metres. We’ve widened and deepened it, hardened it for vacuum. Today it’s configured for your mission.”
I do the math in my head. It takes fourteen seconds to drop a kilometre in vacuum; you’re doing 140 metres per second when you arrive—more than 300 miles per hour, as our American friends would have it.
Fourteen seconds of zero-g experience: very good; 140 metres per second on impact: very, very bad.
They won’t let us fall all the way. At some point they’ll put the brakes on. If they’re prepared to really load us with gees, they can stretch our zero-g time further. Personally, I’d value the extra transfer time to our high-gee couches. I’m beginning to see the trade-offs, which I quietly share with Tania on our private channel.
“They’re going to drop us down a shaft in vacuum,” I say. “The exercise is to get to our acceleration couches in time. Then they’ll hit us with gees to stop us - probably lots of gees.”
“You’re the pilot,” she says.
I swear she’s falling asleep again.
It might depend on how much extra length they built into the shaft.
“How many seconds of zero-g can we expect?”
“We’ll start you with ten seconds. Then hit you with three, maybe four gee. If that works we might be generous and give you longer in free-fall. Some of the other teams were happy with ten gee by the end of their sessions.”
Almost certainly complete bullshit. At three gee you can barely move. Make one mistake at ten gee and you’ll break an arm or a leg. Still, he’s made it a competition and no doubt something important hangs on it: some pecking order on the mission roster, another opportunity to flunk.
The full story text can be found in my SF novel: here:
- "Donatien's Children" (2022) — as a PDF, and
- "Donatien's Children" (2022) — on Amazon for easier reading.
