Edge of Infinity

SAFETY TESTS





Kristine Kathryn Rusch





FIFTEEN MINUTES LATE, I’m always fifteen minutes late, even though I live not six metres from the office.

The nearest door is humble enough, with its cryptic sign: L&R: Employees Only.

L&R – Licensing and Regulation. Sounds so innocuous, yet everyone is afraid of us.

With good reason, I suppose.

We’re in the main part of the space station, although intuitively, you’d expect us to be on our own little platform along with our ships. I suspect that back in the days before anyone knew how dangerous L&R could be, the office was near the ships, which were probably docked not too far from here.

Now we all know that one pilot misstep could destroy an entire section of the station, so the test ships have their own docking platform far away from here. And L&R remains in its original location partly because it’s safer here, and safety is very, very important.

I step into the office, and take a deep whiff of the bad-coffee smell of the place. It’s almost like home, if a bland white (okay, grey) office with industrial chairs can be home. I say hello to Connie, and put my bag on the back of my chair in the actual office section.

Connie doesn’t say hello. She never says hello. Just once I’d like a “Nice to see you, Dev” or a “You’re late again, Devlin,” or maybe even a three-finger wave. Or a grunt. I’d be shocked if I ever got a grunt.

Today she’s leaning over the counter, dealing with whatever stupidity has walked into the waiting room. There’s a lot of stupidity here, which should worry people, since we’re the last stop between them and sheer disaster. But most people never come to our little bureaucracy. They think it’s better to have someone else operate space-faring vehicles. Which, considering the stupidity that walks through our door... Stupidity that has had one year of classwork, five written tests (minimum score: 80%), five hundred hours’ simulation, three hundred hours’ hands-on training with an instructor, and one solo journey that consists mostly of leaving the space station’s test bay, circling the instruction area, returning to the bay, and landing correctly at the same dock the ship had vacated probably ten minutes before.

And that’s just for the student license, the one that allows practice flights solo in areas inhabited by other space craft.

No automation here. There’s too much at stake, too many important decisions, too much that rests on those five-second impressions we get about other people – that feeling This guy is piloting a ship? Reeeally? that you can’t quite describe, but is much more accurate than some computerised test that doesn’t completely get at the complexities of the human emergency response.

Is it any wonder they call my profession high-burnout? The woman who had this job before me died when an actual pilot – a guy who had done supply runs from Earth to the Moon – decided to get a racer’s permit. He came in at the wrong angle, missed the tester’s dock completely, grazed one of our practice cargo vessels, looped, and somehow shut off the environmental controls – all of them – inside the cockpit. My predecessor somehow couldn’t regain control fast enough. She died horribly, the kind of death none of us want and all of us know is possible.

Here’s the key to this job: Get paid and get out. Once you’re promoted to my position, you’ve got maybe five years ahead of you. You get paid commensurately – with the amounts going up for each six months that you stay.

Me, I’ve been at it three years now, and I can feel the wear. That’s probably why I’m always late. I struggle just to get out of the apartment in the morning, wondering what fresh hell awaits me.

Today’s fresh hell – all six of them – sit in chairs in the waiting room. They each clutch a health monitor in one hand, and the small tablet that Connie gives them in the other. They’re told that the tablet will vibrate when it’s their turn, but really the tablet monitors everything that’s illegal to track through the health monitor – DNA, hormone balance, skin secretions. We find out if they have untreated genetic propensities toward schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, if they have too many genes for dementia and its cousins, if they have the markers for high blood pressure, diabetes, and all of those diseases we can treat but which would give our company a significant financial burden, particularly if someone were to suffer a stroke decades before the statistical likelihood because of the stress of our watch.

Yeah, it’s illegal, but we do it, because L&R always gets blamed for failing to weed out the defective ones. We also get blamed if someone goes off the deep end and flies a ship into a space station or just avoids the navigation plan altogether and heads out into the Great Beyond without enough fuel or oxygen or sense. Usually we can catch those idiots before they ruin a ship, kill their passengers or their crew or (worse, in the eyes of many corporations) dump or destroy the cargo.

All of this rests on guys like me. We’re supposed to find these nutballs before they go off the deep end, even if the deep end is five decades from now.

That’s why the illegal monitors. I’ll flunk someone’s ass for a violation they don’t commit if there’re any warning signs at all.

Let them sue. It’ll take forever to go through the courts, and by then, my six years of post-job liability will have waned, and someone else can take the blame for what I did. If they can figure it out. Connie and I cover our tracks pretty well, mostly because she doesn’t get paid as much, will work longer, and has ten times the likelihood of being successfully sued that I do.

Before I arrived, she’s weeded out four, probably sent them back for more training, trying to discourage them. Or maybe they weren’t qualified at all. Not for me to know or to care about, quite honestly. All I know is that by the time I arrive, ten bodies should have been in my waiting room, and I only have six.

Hallelujah. Maybe I can quit early.

And maybe pigs will fly out of my ass on an historic Saturn V rocket, singing the national anthem of the no-longer-existent Soviet Union. Yeah, I’m a space history buff. Yeah, that’s what got me into this job.

That, and an unwillingness to sleep in any bed but my own. I didn’t even want to do cargo runs, no matter how much the bosses begged me. You don’t get to be a Level One Military Pilot – something that happens to only a few of us – without job offers pelting you when you leave the service.

I did my time in zero g. I did my time in danger zones. I signed up here in the hopes that my life would get quiet from now on.

Yeah, right. Quiet.

I didn’t think it through.

There’s nothing more dangerous than a nervous baby pilot on his test flight.

And by the time I figured that out, I had passed the job’s probationary period and I couldn’t escape. I’m stuck here until I Section out (and the tests for a Section 52-Waiver are too complex to fake) or until I serve my time.

I traded one government master for another, one danger zone for dozens, and one headache for countless nightmares, each and every day.

Okay, not countless. Today’s count is six.

Different sizes, different ages, different levels of ambition. There’s the pretty youngish woman who sits at the edge of her chair, clutching the tablet as if she can squeeze it to death. She’s watching everyone and everything. She’s thin, in shape, and has her hair cropped short. Prepared for anything.

Three youngish guys, two muscular, one probably too big to fit into most cockpits. I’ll look at his tablet closely before I ever get him into our test ship. One older guy, salt-and-pepper hair, corded arms, lines around his mouth – probably a retest. Drugs? Alcohol? Health scare? Or maybe he let his license expire. Or someone ordered a flight test for the renewal, which would be odd.

One older woman, arms crossed, head back, eyes closed. She’s been through this before and she doesn’t want to seem too eager.

“Any wash-outs?” I ask Connie as quietly as I can.

“Already gone,” she says.

I grab one of the tablets behind the counter, then raise my eyebrows, asking without asking if someone has washed out because of the chemical components of his sweat or because of a genetic propensity to nervous disorders.

“Nothing that’s not on the reports,” Connie says.

The reports. We can’t wash candidates out if they have a doctor’s release or if they self-report the hypertension, the family history of mental illness, the time that they went off the deep end and threatened passengers with a gun. Okay, that would get them disqualified no matter what, but I’m always thinking these people are going to do something screwy like that.

“All right,” I say tiredly, already dreading the day. “Let’s get to it.”


I TAKE THE big guy first. I take him to our smallest cockpit, and he can’t fit into the chair. He asks for another ship, which I give him. His arms brush against the controls. He asks for his own ship, which I deny. We don’t give private ship licenses here. Those cost more money than anyone can contemplate and have a gold standard all their own. You think my job is high-burnout, you should see the folks who do the private license tests. The ships don’t work right half the time, the ships’ safety regs are usually out-of-date, and the controls are often screwy, sometimes not even set up for a co-pilot, let alone a flight instructor.

My job is crazy; theirs is insane.

I send Buff Guy to them, and pray he can’t afford the fees.

The other two guys are by-the-book. Standard mistakes – forgetting the visual check before entering the ship, not reviewing the safety equipment before starting – the stuff that everyone does, and no one gets penalised for, no matter how much I bitch.

As for the older guy, I was right: alcohol. Three years clean and sober. Hands don’t shake. Doesn’t use anything to keep the alcohol at bay. Has had genetic modification to get rid of the alcoholic tendencies, several schools to get rid of the behaviour, but wouldn’t do anything that touches the brain because he wants to get back piloting.

He was the only one so far whose visible nerves have no effect on his actual flying skills. I’d fly with him any day, and I tell him that.

He looks grateful. I think he actually is grateful, not something I get very often.

Then, the youngish woman.

She wears too much perfume. It’s some kind of floral fragrance, which would get her kicked out of her commercial flight test. That stuff sometimes interacts with the controls, particularly if it’s on a hand crème or something.

But I don’t tell her, not even when she gives me a pretty little smile as she introduces herself. Not many people smile when they see me, and usually the pretty ones never do.

She’s LaDonna something. It’s not my job to remember the names. They’re on the forms and in the registry. Connie has to keep track and make sure the right information gets to the right place.

I just have to hold the name in my head until the test is over. People respond to having their first name shouted authoritatively better than almost any other command. “LaDonna!” for example works twenty times faster than “Stop!”

She’s getting her student license so she can pilot cargo ships. I’d’ve figured her for a speed racer, but she’s not that kinda girl, apparently. She wants to work her way up in commercial flights, but not passengers, never passengers.

She’s one of those hyper types that never shuts up when she’s nervous, which means that for the next hour I will get to hear about her boyfriend, her parents, her pets, and maybe even her sex life. Not that I want to. Most people aren’t as interesting as they think they are.

I’m careful not to ask questions. Questions only make things worse. Questions give the talkers permission to continue. Questions make them believe I actually care.

Cargo plus student license plus first-time tester equals our oldest, biggest ship. It’s bulky to get out of the dock, which makes my job really easy. Because if she fails that, then the test is over and I can move to the last victim – um, candidate – of the day.

The ship we use is eighteen years old, and shaped like a gigantic rectangular box. It’s grey and dingy. It was donated by one of the cargo companies and modified not just for me to take over quickly, but with a special engine that only I can access that’ll get us out of an emergency faster than almost anything else can. These big ships aren’t made to go that fast, but the kind of emergency that killed my predecessor requires fast-thinking and fast-manoeuvring to avoid, and this ship has the manoeuvring power.

I’m supposed to supply the brain power.

The ship looks awful. Purposely. Covered with dings and dents. Ancient portholes with sealed metal covers. Flaps no longer in use because these things are no longer approved for Earth landings. All kinds of extras that don’t function any more.

We want to scare these candidates before they get on board. In fact, we want to discourage everyone from ever taking the test. Only the courageous or the truly prepared need apply.

This ship has its own dock, because it’s so hard to manoeuvre. The tester bay juts out of the station as far as it can be from everything else, and this dock just out of the tester bay. We have to walk through a bubbled passageway that takes us to the ship. The dock itself is tiny (comparatively speaking) and I’m always worried that the environmental controls won’t hold out here.

I brace myself for stupidity from the moment we arrive. But, remarkably, she knows what to do. She walks around the ship, inspecting itquietly. The ‘quietly’ part surprises me. I thought she’d talk through it all, and she doesn’t. She gets very serious, her thin face suddenly not so youngish and not so attractive.

I slip my hand into my pocket and pull out my info screen. One tap and I see the form Connie’s filled out for this one. Yep, at least ten years older than I thought, with a weird history. Perpetual student, then school teacher, then resigned to go to law school, which she quit after a few months.

I don’t like this history of quitting. It shows a character defect that isn’t readily apparent. If I’d looked before coming out here, I would’ve had Connie take her off the flight list for some damn reason.

Now I’ll have to think of one.

LaDonna takes out a little analysis device, synched to mine (because no one brings any device in here without it being certified, synched, and government-approved), and she examines some of the dings and dirt patches. Good girl. She realises that those things could threaten hull integrity, and a hull without integrity is worse than a lawyer with ethics.

Yeah, yeah, old joke. I have to amuse myself somehow.

Still, I’m impressed by her, and not sure I want to be. Scrub that: I don’t want to be. I want to disqualify her because of her dilettante nature.

“This thing barely passes safety regs,” she says to me as she comes around. “I’m amazed it flies.”

She wouldn’t be if she knew about its guts, which she doesn’t. None of the students know what’s really inside these ships. That way, no nutball student can disable anything before we get on board.

We have the occasional really awful accident, like the one that happened to my predecessor, but we also have a mountain of precautions to prevent those accidents from happening every day. And believe me, they could. If I’d allowed Buff Guy into this ship, his forearms alone could’ve caused an accident just by brushing one of the ancient controls. You think I’m kidding: I’m not.

I make her lead me inside. This is just sadistic of me; it’s hard to get into any ship, particularly a ship you’re not familiar with.

But she does a credible job. She only fumbles twice at the door, manages to get through the airlock without mishap, and finds her way to the cockpit easily.

That bugs me. It really does. The specs of the tester ships are supposed to be impossible to find. Plus she shouldn’t have known which ship she was going to be in. We rotate them, for one thing. For another, we generally don’t discuss which ships go with what test – although I suppose if you interview enough test-takers, you could figure that out.

I sigh and follow the perfume trail into the cockpit. It’s not as large as it should be, given the size of the ship. Yet another sign of age. Older ships were designed for only a few people in the cockpit, figuring that only a handful of people even knew what the controls were for, so those people should be the only ones allowed inside.

Newer models allow anyone to sit in the cockpit and watch. Of course, newer models are tied to the operators’ (and their pilots’) DNA. Harder to steal.

Impossible to use in this kind of situation.

She sits at the controls, hands on her lap, just like some instructor probably told her to do. It’s good advice, considering how much could go wrong with the brush of a fingertip.

I sit beside her and strap in. Then I use the voice command to release the ship to her. Kinda. I retain shadow control that no student knows about.

“Get us out of here,” I say.

She doesn’t lift her hands. “Where are we going?”

Correct question, if this were some other kind of flight besides a test flight. But right now, I want her to take everything one step at a time. I’ve learned from painful experience that if I tell her too much, she’ll jump ahead and screw up.

I’m not protecting her; I’m protecting me. I don’t want to end up a bloated corpse with burst eyeballs. I want to return to my bed tonight and come in fifteen minutes late tomorrow, while I’m working hard to save up for my Please-God-Make-It-Soon retirement.

“I’ll tell you when we get out of here,” I say.

She looks at me, and for a moment, I think she’s going to refuse until I give her our destination. Then she puts her hand on the docking controls. She taps them off as if she’s done it her entire life, and the ship rises slightly. She gives me a sideways glance, as if she expects me to tell her now, but I wait silently.

I suppose she thinks I should be impressed. I’m not impressed. I’m confused. The docking commands on this ship are complicated. They should have taken her a few minutes of study before she figured out how to access them, and I know she didn’t have time before I arrived in the cockpit.

I want to ask her if she took this test before, with this very ship, but I don’t. Instead, I not-so-surreptitiously remove my little info screen, turn the screen away from her, and tap it like I’m recording her movements. Instead, I’ve sent a request to Connie:

How many times has this LaDonna woman taken this test?

LaDonna leans forward and clicks on the automated request for departure. We leave departure and entry requests automated so that Control doesn’t have to ask for voice rec from every single student. Or so that I don’t have to verify the voice/entry. Because in emergency situations, every second counts, and a verification might be the difference between saving our lives and losing them.

The bay doors seal, and the environmental controls shut off.

The info screen vibrates in my hand, giving me Connie’s response.

This is the first time she has taken the test.

The top of the dock opens. We use top exits because they’re harder to manoeuvre than in-front-of-the-ship exits. Not that we can actually see this in real time. It’s all visible on the monitors. This tiny cockpit has no exterior windows.

Really? I send back. Because she knows this ship too well for it to be the first time. Check her records. See if someone snuck her in here for unauthorised practice.

I put the info screen face down on my knees. LaDonna’s hands hover over the controls as the ship slowly rises. This is a key moment, because if she messes with it too much, the ship will bang into things and she’ll be done.

Most first-timers bang into the wall at least once. They get one bang. Two puts them on probation. Three requires a second test. The thing is, you hit once, you’ll shove over to the other side and it’ll take some amazing skill to prevent the second bang. If there’s a second bang, it’ll take a miracle to avoid the third. That’s how this ship gets dinged up and that’s why we don’t fix the dings. More will happen the following day anyway.

LaDonna doesn’t hit anything. I can count on my left thumb the number of times that’s happened with a first-timer.

No record of unauthorised practice, Connie sends, like that’s going to show us anything. I mean, unauthorised generally does mean off the books.

Her instructor get any demerits for cheating on behalf of the students? I send.

Not that I can find, she sends so fast that I know she was anticipating the question. But as I said above...

I look away. I have to pay attention to LaDonna anyway. She’s got this gigantic ship hovering over the dock exit. The top of the dock closes. For the first time, she seems nervous. This isn’t part of the standard test.

Usually no one stops once they start moving. I really don’t care. I suspect this girl cheated somehow, so I’m going to have to give this test a little thought.

No part of the standard test seems to throw her. If she did cheat, then she knows everything I’m going to make her do. I tap a standard save instruction on my info screen without looking at it so that Connie makes our conversation part of the record.

Then I toss out the standard test. I can do that when I suspect the subject has taken the standard test too many times, or when I have reason to believe the standard test won’t provide the right information.

This, my friends, is why the system isn’t automated. There’s no beating the system when the system is subject to human whim.

“We’re going to Mars,” I say.

LaDonna glances at me, and unless I’m imagining things, that perfume smell has gotten really strong. She’s sweating. Soon I’ll actually smell the sweat, not the overlying protection some chemical has given her.

Good. I want her to sweat.

“This is a cargo test, not a speed test,” she says.

Suspicion confirmed. The racers go to Mars, even though they never arrive there. Too far to travel for the duration of a test. But racers can really cut loose on these routes.

The cargo ships all go to the Moon, or at least head toward the Moon. They usually don’t get to the Moon either, because none of us have the patience for the ten-hour trip.

“We can stop the test right now, if you want,” I say.

She opens her mouth, closes it, and then shakes her head. She glances at the controls for the first time, and finally she looks like a beginner. She’s not sure what to do.

I frown. She should know how to move to a different route with less thought than she put into the release from her docking bay.

If, of course, she’s not cheating.

“Problem?” I ask.

“N-No,” she says, but she still hesitates.

“We can go back.” I try to keep the hope out of my voice.

“N-No,” she says. “I just – you don’t want me to go fast, do you?”

“I want you to take this test the way you planned to take this test,” I say.

“Do you have family, Mr. Devlin?” she asks. I had forgotten about her nervous conversation tic. She had stopped when we got to the ship.

“Are you unable to take us to Mars, LaDonna?” I ask, using her name to bring her out of the nervous funk, just like I’m supposed to do.

“N-No,” she says.

“Well, then,” I say. “Time’s wasting.”

She nods and bursts into tears. I sigh to hide a smile, and then click on the shadow controls.

“I think you’ll have to finish the test another time,” I say as I bring us back to dock.

“Nooo.” She actually wails. I hate it when they wail.

“Sorry, LaDonna,” I say. “Those are the rules.”

She bows her head. “One more chance?”

They all ask that. As if I’d risk my job for them. As if I really want someone who freezes when something out of the ordinary happens to pilot ships in the tight traffic routes that spider out of Earth’s orbit.

“Sorry,” I say. “You can try again in thirty days.”

It only takes a few seconds to get back into the confines of the dock. She has to reverse the actions she took just a moment ago, but I don’t let her. I take control of the ship.

“Thirty days.” She chokes out the words. “I don’t know if I can make it for thirty days.”

I hit the docking controls, and the ship slides into place as if it’s never left.

“Sorry,” I say, not sorry at all. “But I don’t make the rules.”

I used to say, See you then, but I no longer believe I can make it another thirty days. Sometimes I doubt I can make it another hour. Today, though, I can make it.

One more test and I’m done. For a whole twelve hours. (And fifteen minutes.)


I GO BACK in and immediately glance at the waiting area. Only the sleeping woman remains, head tilted back, mouth open, small snores emerging at regular intervals.

Real pilots can sleep anywhere. I’m impressed, even though I don’t want to be.

I’m also impressed that Connie has taken pity on me and hasn’t added four more candidates to my pile. She could have, given the four she dismissed this morning.

I don’t thank her, though. Instead, I pick up the last candidate’s info screen and actually peruse it. I should do that with every candidate, but I don’t, and then I pay for it, like I did with LaDingdong.

This woman’s name is Iva, and she’s here for recertification. What a surprise. She’s flown cargo for decades, preceded by some classified military stuff. She went private for five years, and then a spectacular personal implosion – involving name-calling, food-throwing, and a refusal to take her client wherever he wanted to go. (The report states [probably because the report writer can’t resist] that she would take her client anywhere he wanted provided it was hell. Because he belonged in hell, and nowhere else, and she wasn’t about to inflict him on the good people of the universe.) That made me smile. It also made me like her.

I didn’t want to like her.

Such behaviour would have gotten her disqualified from any public and/or corporate job, but she worked for herself. She did lose her license for a while – that food-throwing thing led to a near-accident with a really expensive ship – and that lost license led her here.

She had to retest for everything and of course, she was passing with stellar grades. An easy test for the end of the day.

“Iva,” I say, and she sits up, the kind of awake soldiers have when aroused on the battlefield – hair mussed, eyes sleep-covered but alert, body ready for anything. “You still want this test?”

“No,” she says. Her voice is deep and sarcastic. “Who wants these tests? I’m told I need it.”

Oh, God, I like her. I don’t want to like her. I want her to be as impersonal a candidate as Buff Guy or LaDingdong. I want to be able to flunk her for picking her nose at the wrong moment, for farting indiscriminately and pissing me off, or for putting her hand on my knee and trying to flirt with me. I want to feel nothing for her, like I feel nothing for all the others, not even a sense of duty.

“If you don’t want to take the test, that’s fine with me,” I say in my most dispassionate voice.

“That’s not what I meant – ah, hell.” She shakes her head, runs her hand through her badly cut hair, and stands up. “Yes, sir, I am ready for the test, sir.”

“All right then,” I say. “Let’s go.”


SHE’S GOING FOR a cargo license too, and technically I should take her to the same ship I used for LaDingdong. But that ship’s old, and Iva’s experienced, and chances are that she actually flew that type of ship before.

So I take her to our newest baby, a repossess with every bell, whistle, and gadget known to man. There’s not one, not two, not three, but four shadow controls on this thing, and it took me nearly a week to figure out how each part of the ship worked.

It’s gold and sleek and moves like an eel in water. If larceny actually lived in my soul, I’d steal this son of a bitch and use it to get me out of here.

Only if I do that, I’d have to leave my very comfortable bed behind, and I’d be on the run for the rest of my life, neither of which really appeal to me.

We stop in front of the dock and Iva tilts her head back, looking up at my beautiful baby.

“You’re shitting me, right? Do you know how much this thing is worth?”

It unnerves me that she does. Maybe I should’ve taken her to the older vessel.

“You want the test or not?” I ask.

“Stop asking me if I want it,” she snaps, then sighs. “I’m sorry.”

I want to tell her never mind, that attitude isn’t an issue, but it is. That’s one mark against her because no one likes working with a mouthy pilot, particularly one who went off the deep end and lost her previous job due to some creative insubordination. Except me, of course.

“Yes,” she says somewhat meekly into my silence. “I want the test.”

Then she walks around the ship like she’s done it all her life, which, I suppose, she has. Hands clasped behind her, inspecting not the dings (there are a few) or the small scrapes, but the actual equipment, from the life pod releases to the outside engine access to the docking clamps.

A true professional.

When she reaches me, I sweep a hand toward the ship, indicating that she should board ahead of me. She nods, and does. It takes her the required minute or so to figure out the entry mechanism for this thing, and then she strides inside like it’s her ship.

If, of course, she meant to go to the sleeping quarters instead of the cockpit. Her cheeks are just a little red as she turns around and heads in the correct direction.

I follow closely, watching her absorb the ship. She’s never been inside it, nor has she seen a ship like this, but she’s acting like it’s not new to her. Her head moves slightly as she takes in the panelling, the extra monitors on the walls, the closed doors.

Then she turns left into the cockpit as if she’s done it a million times before.

By the time I get in there, she’s in the pilot’s seat, strapped in, and examining the controls, hands on her lap, just like she’s supposed to.

I expected her to be hands-on already. I’m a little surprised she hasn’t touched anything.

Either she’s taken some refresher courses or she flunked a previous test way back for moving too quickly. I’ll vote on the previous test. Pilots like her don’t take refresher courses.

I sit in the co-pilot’s chair, noting as I do every time, how very soft and plush it is. Would that I could always run tests out of this ship. I almost – almost – shut off all four shadow controls, but I don’t. I don’t trust anyone that much.

“I’m going to release the controls to you,” I say, of course, not mentioning the shadow controls.

She nods and listens as I speak to the folks on the Traffic Desk. Then I tell her to take the ship gently out of here.

I’m not sure which route to take – the fast ones to Mars or the standard cargo test routes to the Moon. It’s a shame to make this beautiful ship do something standard, but she hasn’t signed up for a racer license. She signed up for cargo, and a renewal at that.

“Here’s your route,” I say and punch Route Three on the control panel, just like a co-pilot/navigator would.

She nods, eases this ship out of the docking area with an ease I haven’t experienced in years. Not even this morning’s other retest, that male pilot I complimented so highly, had such a nice touch.

The ship unclamps and floats out as if no one controls it at all. Only real pilots know how hard that is to do.

We have an actual cockpit window on this ship, and she raises the metal curtain. Suddenly the cockpit fills with ship butts, running lights, glare, and three-dimensional nightmares. The Moon looms in the distance as if it were really our destination.

I can see the routes as clearly as if they’re marked. They’re not, of course. They change as the station’s orbit around the Earth changes, but I’ve done this so long it’s like there’s a map of the trajectories in my head.

There probably is, too. I can see which ships are a little off-course, which ones are travelling too fast for their route, which ones are not certified for the station itself.

She doesn’t seem distracted by the ships at all. She waits until she’s the required distance from the station before engaging the engines. Her hands on the controls are firm and delicate at the same time. She’s clearly used to hands-on flying. I wonder if she ever uses the automated system.

We ease forward, out of the first protected zone around the station. Speeds here are regulated just like everything else, from engine burn to communications chatter. The tiny robot deflector ships hover near the bays, ready to knock some ship aside if it gets too close to anything.

Farther ahead, through the second and third protected zones, ships move faster, some of them actually speeding their way to Mars.

But no one speeds here. Six ships surround us, all heading on different routes for different things. L&R learned long ago that we should have only one test course running per day, because any more and the stupid candidates might bump into each other (literally).

Add in the private pilots (some of whom are real doofuses), the folks who should have Sectioned out long ago, and the pilots from countries with regulations less stringent than ours (and who aren’t allowed to use our space station), and the first protected zone is the Wild West – ships moving every which way on trajectories not assigned by any standardised route.

I count at least three inexperienced or just plain inept pilots out of the six. One ship keeps turning on half of its running lights, then turning on the other half, never both at the same time. Another ship slides from one standard route entry to another as if the pilot can’t decide where he’s going, and a third seems to be on yet another attempt at docking with the station.

Iva manages to avoid all of them with an ease that would lead any passenger to think there’s no trouble at all. She seems to be able to do complicated equations in her head, adjusting for this, adjusting for that, working the three-dimensional space in a way that most pilots never learn.

Then she translates all of that math, all those spatial relations, into her fingers with a gentleness that I’m not even sure I can attempt.

We head toward the Moon at a pace that feels unnaturally slow.

I run Iva through the paces – a turn here, a pretend crisis there – and she does even better than I expect.

Then we begin our return. I’m going to ignore her attitude mistake, and pass her with the highest possible grade.

At least, that’s what I’m thinking until I realise we’re heading too fast into the high traffic around the station.

“You’re coming in hot,” I say.

She ignores me. Or maybe she didn’t hear me.

“Iva,” I say with a sharp twist on her name, “you’re going too fast.”

“You desk jockeys,” she says and that pisses me off. I am not a desk jockey. If I were, I wouldn’t be sitting here, feeling my heart rate increase.

“Iva,” I say, keeping my tone level, “slow down.”

“Yeah, yeah,” she says. “I can handle it.”

She narrowly avoids the ship with the running lights problem.

“You know that handling it isn’t an issue. You’re not allowed to come in too fast. It’s too dangerous.”

“I have the skills,” she says.

“Skills aren’t a problem.” I try not to raise my voice. I want to sound calm, even though I’m not calm. “There are rules.”

“Of course there are rules,” she says.

Warning: Your speed violates the safety protocols for the nearby space station.

We triggered the station’s automated warning system. I glance at the controls. That means there have to be robot deflector ships nearby.

“I hate rules,” Iva says.

“They keep us safe,” I say as I try to contact the station. I can’t. She has taken control of communications.

The robot deflector ships line up outside our ship. If I can see them, she can too.

“One of those things hits us,” I say, “and you automatically fail.”

“I won’t fail,” she says, deliberately ignoring me.

“I’ll have to flunk you,” I say.

“Of course you will,” she snaps. “All those stupid rules. You people and your stupid rules. This station and its stupid rules. The licensing board and its stupid rules.”

She’s supposed to be slowing down. She’s supposed to be easing toward the station. Or to be accurate, easing toward the docking ring. But she’s heading directly toward the station. That’s why the robot ships are crowding us. They assume we’re an out-of-control ship. They’ll nudge us off the path to the station, and then everything’ll be fine.

I don’t want to get hit. That happened on one of the first tests I ran, and it wasn’t pleasant. I orbited the Earth with that idiot driver for five rotations before the station would let us near it again.

I touch my console – and get a shock so strong that I pull my hand away.

She rigged it somehow. In those few seconds before I arrived, she strapped in, then rigged the console, and did it so beautifully I didn’t see it until now.

I shake my hand, but say nothing. Then I brace myself and reach in again.

No shock this time. But the first shadow control is off.

“It’s stupid, really,” she says. “You people don’t value talent or experience. All you want is someone who can follow the damn rules. Have I told you I hate the damn rules?”

I click over to the second shadow control. It’s off too.

Warning: We will move you off your course if you do not comply with regulations.

“Go for it, a*shole,” she says to the automated system.

And as if it heard her, one of the robot ships brushes against us. We will now drift off course for the station.

Except that Iva eases the ship back on its collision trajectory. And now she slows down. Waaay down. She’s actually aiming at the station.

I try the third shadow control. I can’t use it.

Warning: We will take control of your ship if you persist on this course.

Another robot ship brushes us. She corrects.

I can’t do anything. My hands ache from the continual shocks she’s sending through the system. I pull them off the controls for just a second. I try to unlatch my safety strap and it won’t come off. I can’t even shove her away from the console.

“If you hit the station,” I say, “we’ll all die.”

“Wow,” she says. “Did you just figure that out? And here I thought you were smarter than that.”

A signal flashes through the console. Technically, it should have shut the ship down, but she’s managed to lock out the station, too. Dammit. I was so dazzled by her skill that I didn’t even see her resetting the controls.

She’s good. She’s better than good. She’s better than me.

“Everyone on the station will die,” I say. “You’ll be a mass murderer.”

“I’ll be dead,” she says. “Who will care?”

“Then who will care how talented you are? They’re not going to say you were ignored or passed over or a great pilot. They’re going to call you crazy.”

She glances at me sideways. Then she shrugs. She takes the ship into a perfect line with the station itself.

I manage to activate the final shadow control. I’ve never used it before, but it works. I hit the automatic sensors through the shadow control – that’s the fastest way to regain control of a ship – and then I select the last navigation instruction sending us back to the Moon.

The ship veers, scraping a robot ship. Iva tries to regain control. She will, too. She’s that good.

We’re not heading toward the station any more. I have no idea where we’re going and I don’t care.

I need to stop her.

I slam one fist on my side of the console, disconnecting all of the safety protocols. Our straps slide off.

She grabs the controls and I push myself sideways, grabbing her. I knock her into the wall, then grab her shoulders and slam her head against the console.

The station warnings are coming in, plus warnings from other ships, and because I’ve shut off the safety protocols the ship is officially considered out of control. That means the robots ships are going to nudge us, and some fighter ships are supposed to blow us up (but they never do, or they would have saved the life of my predecessor way back when) and someone else has to warn the nearby ships about us, because my ship – our ship – this stupid out-of-control ship – is running silent.

I can’t care about that yet. I have to care about her. She’s reaching for me and I slam her head against the console again. She’s dazed. There isn’t a lot of room to manoeuvre in this cockpit, but I have to get her out of it.

I use her chin to pull her backwards. She grabs at the pilot’s chair, wraps her foot around the base, and holds on.

I’m half down myself, but still on my feet. I stomp on her elbow, then kick her in the stomach, dislodging her grip just briefly. She clutches my knee, ruining my balance. I hold onto my chair, and shake her off.

Then I grab her chin again and slam her head against the floor. The smacking sound sickens me. I slam again and again until I’m certain she’s unconscious.

I have to drag her out of here. I have to lock off the cockpit and all of the controls. This ship doesn’t have a brig. It doesn’t have anything except passenger straps for emergencies, and different environmental controls for different parts of the ship.

The passenger sections have no cockpit access. I drag her down the hall, into the passenger section. She’s heavy, and she’s starting to moan. At least I haven’t killed her. I pull her into one of the seats, and strap her down. As I leave, I shut off the gravity.

If she manages to free herself – which I don’t think she can do – she’ll have to deal with zero-gravity. She probably had military zero-g training, but that training happened more than a decade ago, and zero-g skills aren’t intuitive.

I had to work in zero-g for three years – that’s part of being a Level One Military Pilot – but most military pilots never do that. And I can tell just from her attitude issues that she never had the patience or the respect for authority to go that far.

I scurry back to the cockpit, and sit in her seat. We’re half an hour into the Moon flight, directly on the centre of the route, but the messages I’m getting from other pilots are rude to say the least. Fighter ships still flank me.

I don’t want to wear a strap at this point – I want the freedom of movement – so I turn the safety protocols on one by one. Then I let out a small sigh and send a message with my identification back to the station.

I’m fine. Ship in my control again. Need security when we arrive.

I get an automated response, which is just fine by me.

Then I send a message to Connie: This last student went seriously bonko nutball. Nearly killed us all. We need more than station security to deal with her. Plus, check her medical data, see what we missed.

By medical data, I mean the illegal stuff that we downloaded, just to see. I don’t expect to find anything, but in case we do, I want to prevent this from happening the next time.

I let the ship head toward the Moon for a few more minutes. I need to collect myself. My heart is racing, and I have blood on my hands. Literally. And it’s on the console and on the chair and in the cockpit itself.

I grin like a nutball myself. I haven’t felt this alive in years. Which is probably good, considering my future is filled with lawyers and police interviews and psychologists and more tests than I want to think about.

Not that I mind. What this means is that I’m done, and I will still get my pay raises. I get to serve out my five years without Sectioning. I’ll probably end up teaching emergency procedures or how to tell one nutcase from another (I’ll lie) or maybe I’ll become a consultant on improving regulations so that no one like Iva can slip through again.

Then I slide down in my chair. Who am I kidding? I’m not going to do any of that stuff. I’m not a consulting kinda guy, because it means I’ll have to leave the station.

After the required post-incident time off, I’ll be right back here, fifteen minutes late every single day, steering ships and dealing with dingdongs like LaDonna.

And I’ll be grateful for it.

Because I don’t mind the regulations. I rather like them. They keep us safe.

And I’m all about safety – especially my own.