“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “Six thousand kilos can’t be more than a rounding error in the mass of the ship.”
“It does matter,” Marshall said. “The answer, in case you were wondering, is just a bit more than four times ten to the twenty-third joules, and a similar amount of energy is needed at journey’s end to decelerate back to rest. Physics is cruel, Mr. Barnes, and the antimatter that fuels starships is heinously expensive. The mass of the Drakkar has been reduced to the absolute minimum necessary to allow it to keep you alive for the nine years or so that it will take us to reach our destination, at astronomical expense to the government of Midgard. I assume you are aware that ninety percent of your fellow colonists are traveling in the form of frozen embryos, are you not?”
“Yes, but—”
“Why do you suppose that is, Mr. Barnes? Do you think it’s because we all long to spend our waning years as nursemaids to a horde of children?” He paused and looked at me, as if he expected an answer. After it became clear that I wasn’t going to give him one, he went on. “No, it is not. It’s because embryos are light, and fully formed adult humans are heavy. Do you know what else is heavy? Food, Mr. Barnes. Once you see what your calorie ration is going to be for the remainder of your natural life, you may begin to wish that we had allocated those six thousand kilos to increasing our agricultural capacity. Personally, if we had that quantity of mass to spare, I would be much more inclined to allocate it to another seventy or eighty colonists. In any case, however, I’m sure we can all come up with hundreds of more productive ways to allocate any additional mass we might carry than to your luggage.”
I opened my mouth to point out that unlike another seventy colonists, my luggage wouldn’t require increasing the ship’s stores of food, water, oxygen, and living space by forty percent, and more importantly that if somebody had told me that my luggage would not be coming aboard with me I could have shoved my tablet and a couple of memory chips, which was all I really wanted, into a pocket or something before boarding the shuttle.
I’m not completely stupid, though. The look on Marshall’s face made me decide that maybe silent protest was the way to go.
“By the way,” Marshall said, “I didn’t quite catch your function, Mr. Barnes.”
“My what?”
“Your function, son. Mr. Dugan here is a biologist. What are you?”
This was where my initial mistake compounded itself. I grinned. “I’m your Expendable, sir.”
Marshall did not return my smile. His face twisted into the kind of scowl I was used to seeing on people who’d just bitten into something rotten, or maybe stepped barefoot into a pile of dung.
“I suppose I should have guessed,” he said. He kicked up to the grab bar again, pushed off with both hands toward an exit at the far side of the lounge, then executed a neat midair somersault that left him kicking off the floor and into a smooth swimmer’s glide.
“There obviously aren’t sufficient individual quarters available on the station to accommodate all of the mission’s colonists and crew,” he said over his shoulder as the exit door slid open. “There are, however, slings set up in many of the common spaces. Find one. That’s your home until we can board the Drakkar.”
He slipped through the door, and it slid shut behind him.
“Wow,” Dugan said when he was gone. “What was that about?”
“Commander Marshall is a Natalist,” a tall, dark-haired woman who’d been hanging back by the air lock said.
Dugan barked out a short, sharp laugh. “Seriously?” He turned to look at me. “You’re screwed, friend.”
I looked from Dugan to the woman and back. “I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s a Natalist?”
“They’re a cult,” Dugan said.
“They’re not a cult,” the woman said. She kicked off the wall with almost as much dexterity as Marshall had shown, caught herself on the grab bar, and plopped down in front of me. “They’re a serious religion, and Commander Marshall is a serious believer. I checked his digital profile. I checked out everyone in Command before I signed on to this gig. Didn’t you?”
I didn’t feel like this was necessarily the best time to get into the fact that I’d been too busy fleeing from gangsters with torture machines to worry about being a social media detective, so I just shook my head.
She laughed. “You’ve got to be kidding. You realize these people are going to own us for the rest of our lives, right? You didn’t even bother to look into who they are?”
“No,” I said. “No, I did not.”
Dugan laughed again. I had already decided that I didn’t like his laugh.
“He wouldn’t have,” he said. “You were conscripted, right? What were you, a prisoner or something?”
“What? No, I wasn’t a prisoner, and no, I wasn’t conscripted. I was selected for the mission, just like you were.”
“Right,” Dugan said. “Selected, conscripted, whatever. The point is, you didn’t have a choice.”
I shook my head. “You’re not listening. I had a choice. I walked into the recruitment office two days ago, all on my own. A lady named Gwen interviewed me. She said I was an excellent candidate, and they were very happy to have me.”
They both stared at me like I’d grown a second head.
“You’re kidding,” Dugan said.
“No,” I said. “I’m not.”
“If you don’t mind my asking,” the woman said, “what the hell were you thinking?”
I considered just spilling it about Darius Blank then, but good sense stopped me at the last second. I didn’t need the people I was going to be spending the rest of my life with thinking I was some kind of criminal.
“Doesn’t matter,” I said. “The point is, I volunteered, I’ve never been to prison, and no, I did not do a social media search on anyone before I signed on.”
“I didn’t either,” Dugan said. “This is Midgard’s first colony expedition, right? I assumed everyone involved would be the best and the brightest. I can’t believe they put a Natalist in charge of the whole show.”
“It’s not a big deal,” the woman said, then turned to look at me. “Well, not for anyone but this guy, anyway.” She gave me a sad look, then held her hand out to Dugan. “I’m Bree, by the way. I’m with Agriculture. I’d guess we’ll be working together.”
The rest of the new arrivals had drifted away by then, presumably looking for a sling to call their own. As Bree and Dugan smiled and shook, I began to suspect that this whole escape-the-planet thing might not have been as solid a plan as I’d hoped.
“Look,” I said. “I don’t mean to be stupid, but could one of you please explain what Marshall’s religion has to do with me?”
Bree pivoted back toward me. Her expression said that Dugan was much more interesting, probably because she’d concluded that there was something seriously wrong with me and that I was starting to get on her nerves.
“One of the prime doctrines of the Natalist Church,” she said, “is the belief in the sanctity of the unitary soul.”