Della
Five minutes after the stars moved, I walked across the showroom floor to Royce Ambler's desk and said it loud enough for the bedroom suites.
"Your slide said day two."
The room had gone back to being a church. Forty people on their feet, facing the front wall, where the ship's track was a green line with a second green line coming off it at a bad angle, like a hair on a lens. On the screen beside it was the livestream, the cabin, Tess's camera still swinging on its arm. Boyd Castellane was floating over the commander's seat with two fingers resting on the lid of the fire switch. Ronnie sat under him with his hands pushed beneath his thighs and his chin up. My client, sitting on his own hands in front of three million people and counting.
"Constance, Flight." Sully, from his console, thirty feet away and out of every speaker at once. "Mr Castellane, strap in, please. Nobody touches that guard but the commander."
On the screen Boyd looked at the ceiling as if the ceiling had spoken. Then he took his fingers off the lid, slowly, one and two, and floated back to his seat and clipped in, click click click click, grinning at the camera like he'd been asked to dance.
Royce had his hand over his mouth. When he took it away he said, "Della. Not here."
"It's a fist in a glove, Royce, on a joystick, with flames. The Moment, Day Two. It's day two. The ship just went off its path at four o'clock, on the day, and I'd like to know what the fist was going to do."
"It's a guy waving." His voice was low and fast and nearly smooth. "Thirty seconds of the commander waving at the stream. It was a concept. It was pulled."
"Pulled by who?"
"By me. Pulled. Gone. It's a guy waving, Della. How does a wave move a ship? Think about what you're saying."
I had nothing to say to that. It was a good point. Nobody had said a word to my client about a wave, either.
"So here's the thing," said Royce. He had both hands out, like he was holding a tray. "Stay with me. Right now we've got three million people watching a ship change direction. Right now that's a malfunction. In an hour it's a story. I need the stream's version. Something like, a historic hand-flown return burn."
"A what?"
"Historic. Hand-flown. Return. Burn. The commander takes the stick, he brings her home by hand. It's the Recovery again, bigger screen." He was looking past me at the wall, hunting for a word. "Four lines. Write it."
"The Recovery is a man dying, Royce."
"And he flew her home. Four lines."
"I'll give you one. The correction ran long, the crew is safe, the commander is handling it."
"Handling it, love it, but historic."
"Not historic."
"Heroic?"
"Royce."
At the back of the room a mint cracked between two molars. Ailsa Strachan had come up the side aisle with her laptop shut under one arm, and she stopped beside Kip's console and looked at Royce the way you'd look at a meter.
"Mr Ambler. Purchase agreement. Anything in it about a ship off course?"
"Ailsa, that's, we can absolutely discuss."
"Seventy-four hours. Long time to hold a price," said Ailsa, and went back down the aisle. Nobody answered her.
Then Sully stood up.
I'd never seen him do it. He rose from his console in two stages, with both hands flat on it and the glasses swinging on their cord, and he didn't touch the microphone. He didn't need to. He said it to the room, from the step.
"Ships don't make up numbers."
Nothing moved. A fan clicked on in the ceiling. Kip's energy drink stopped halfway to his mouth and stayed there.
Royce looked at the front wall. He looked at his phone. He said, "I need to take a call," to nobody, and he walked out through the corridor door, and the door closed on its slow hinge behind him, and I stood in the middle of forty people who were all very busy not looking at the corridor door.
"Seventy-four hours," said Sully to the room. "Burn's at the bottom of the swing round the Moon. Saturday, six in the evening. That's the clock, and it doesn't care who we're mad at. Anybody not working that, find me a reason."
They went to work.
At six o'clock Royce did the update. He'd been gone an hour and a half and he came back with his hair wet, combed flat, a dark wet line down the back of his quarter-zip, and he stood at the mic and said the journey was entering an exciting new phase with a few extra steps in it. I counted journeys on my fingers. I ran out on the second hand and didn't bother starting a third.
Afterwards he came into the Fishbowl with Sully behind him. Sully never came into the Fishbowl. He stood in the doorway with his arms folded, like it was a pool he'd been told was clean.
Royce had a plan. You could tell because he'd stopped using the tray hands. "So we turn the keys," he said. "You and me, Sully. Two keys, two thumbs, we give the engine back to the autopilot, Kip loads the right numbers, it fixes itself, the commander waves. Nobody flies anything."
"No," said Sully.
"Why not? It's the same computer that does everything else."
"It's the same computer that just did that." Sully took his time. "I'm not giving the engine back to the thing that just tried to kill them."
Royce opened his mouth. Sully put one finger up, not rudely, the way you'd stop a bus.
"And I'm not coaching the clown on the loop, either. He asks me a question on that frequency, I answer it, and three million people hear a commander learning to fly. Numbers go through the kid. Official ones, checked twice, nobody rounds. Kip gives them to Ms Quint. Ms Quint gives them to the clown on her own line, in whatever language gets it into his head."
"Whatever language," I said.
"You've got a talent for it." He looked at me over the glasses. "Use it."
"I've taught eleven spokesmen to say the word regret without crying."
"Then he'll be easy," said Sully, and went back to his step.
I'd never had a man pay me a compliment and give me a deadline in the same sentence.
At seven I put the headset on, at the Fishbowl table, with the glass all round me and the whole floor looking in.
"You there?"
"Where would I go." My own line, in my own voice, up half a step and ironed flat, sent straight back to me.
"Don't do that."
"It's very good, though."
"I know it's very good. That's why. Okay so. Listen. The ship's stopped trusting the ship. It won't take orders from us down here to fire the engine. It gives the trigger to you. The only way to take it back is two keys, two thumbs, Sully's and Royce's, and the keys know their thumbs. Sully can put it to sleep on his own. That's the only thing anybody can do alone."
"A ship with trust issues."
"Yes."
"I relate to that, Della. I really do."
"And before you ask, we were on a path that came home by itself. We're not now. So there has to be one burn, once, and it has to be at the Moon. Behind the Moon it's cheap. Anywhere else it costs fuel we haven't got."
"And that's Saturday."
"Seventy-four hours from the nudge. Seventy-one now." I counted it on my fingers, two hands, and Kip, through the glass, held up three fingers without being asked, as if helping a child with a clock. "Three days, near enough. It's a long weekend, Ronnie. You've done long weekends."
"I did a Fourth of July in Mims where I was a flag. I did a Santa at a mall for nine days."
"There you are."
"Nobody was relying on me to get home from the Santa."
"Here's how it works," I said. "It's a piñata."
"No."
"You're blindfolded. I tell you where to point the stick. You swing once, you swing hard, and you stop when I say stop. If you stop too late, you miss the Earth."
On the other side of the glass Kip leaped out of his chair. He had both hands flat on the pane and his whole face in it, and I heard him anyway, muffled, as if he were shouting under water. "Too short, you miss! Too long, you burn up!"
I put my hand over the mic. "For the love of God," I said, to the glass. "I know. I know that."
"You said it backwards!"
"I said it fast!" I turned my chair so I had my back to him. "Ronnie. Correction. Stop too early, you sail past the Earth and wave at it. Stop too late, you come in too steep and burn. Too short, miss. Too long, burn."
"I heard the first one," said Ronnie, very quietly. "I'm just going to hold onto the first one for a second."
"Don't hold onto the first one. The first one was wrong."
"I know, I know, I just want to feel it." A breath, in my headset. "Della. That is not how a piñata works."
"It's what I've got."
"In a piñata you don't stop. Nobody stops. Nobody says stop. A seven-year-old with a stick has no ears. I once watched a kid take out his own dad at a bounce-house in Cocoa and the dad had to be driven home."
"Then you're a better piñata than most. Point where I say. Fire. Stop when I say. That's all it is."
"Point," said Ronnie. He was thinking. I could hear him. A second voice came up under the first one, all teeth, bright as a dishwasher advert. "Point! Fire! Time! Johnny Jackpot here, and you, sir, you in the third row, you have won, you have won, Johnny, tell him what he's won!"
"Ronnie."
"A fabulous burn! A burn that'll last you a lifetime! You don't want to hear what's behind door number two!"
"Ronnie."
"Point, fire, time, folks, tell her what she's won."
I laughed. It was one big laugh and it came out of me through the nose and the mouth at once, in the glass box, loud enough that Kip's hands came off the pane. A man at the next console took out an earbud. I put my head on the table.
When I looked up Kip had leaned toward the engineer beside him and was whispering, not nearly quietly enough, "Does she do that?"
I took a breath. "Again," I said. "From the top."
At twenty past nine he asked me what the ship was called. I told him it was Constance. It said so on the side.
"Constance sounds like somebody who chairs a hospital board. I can't talk to a Constance. I need a ship I can say something to at three in the morning."
"She's not a person, Ronnie. She's got no personality. She beeps."
"Then I'll give her one. Linda."
"No."
"Big Linda. Linda ran the Waffle House on the causeway when I was a kid. Big woman, never dropped a plate, never let a drunk leave without a coffee. She got everybody where they were going. I'm going to call the ship Big Linda."
"Do whatever you want."
"I'm going to. I'm already doing it. Big Linda, we have a lot to talk about."
Ten minutes later I was on the floor with a number from Kip in one hand and the headset in the other, and I said, out loud, to the room, "Is Big Linda still on the same line, or have we moved her again?"
The room looked at me.
Then Kip started laughing. It came out of him in a squeak, and he put his hand over his mouth, and the engineer next to him, who hadn't said a word all day, said, "Big Linda," like he was trying a wine, and the one next to him said it, and I thought, oh, for Christ's sake. By the time I got back to the glass it was on a sticky note on Kip's console. Big Linda, in capitals, with a smiley face.
At eleven I went out to the Sentra. The car park was empty except for a security light and the night shift's three cars.
"Again," I said.
"Point," said Ronnie, in my headset, tired now, his own voice, flat, with the voices all taken off. "Fire. Time. Point where she says. Fire when she says. Stop when she says. Too short, we miss. Too long, we burn. I did it, didn't I? Didn't I just do it?"
"You said it," I said. "Say it again. Tomorrow, say it a hundred times. And Ronnie. Say it to nobody but me."
"I don't talk to anybody but you. Who would I talk to? Otis? Otis has a bus."
"Go to sleep, Commander."
"Okay. Okay. Goodnight, Della. Goodnight, Big Linda."
I got out my phone and recorded a memo, low. "One. Somebody. Two. Forty people in that room and only one of them walked out. Three. Eat."
I played it back twice. I didn't eat.