Children of the Banishment

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. For Guy Fontaine, the screams were crowding within his own head as he resigned behind the cockpit of the Dupleix, envisioning with lucid detail the 40 or so lashes that would thwack and split open his underfed back if ever the Captain of the colossal French Spaceliner, The Archambault, should find out he had been hired by his runaway daughter to jettison her onto an English Carrier en route back to Earth after the 100 year thermonuclear exile.

This was no handsome cab ride around the sable block, but a long-awaited getaway aboard a stolen reconnaissance craft being skippered by one of the Archambault’s oldest hull-engineers. He muttered to himself what a noodle he’d been for giving ear to the young and beautiful Gisele Archambault’s spiels on the ‘Renaissance de la Terre’ – a signed accord among space-exiled colonies to resettle their namesake territories on Earth following the radioactive decontamination reports, and that the French colonies were on the wrong side of history for not turning back.

She had paid him a considerable sum, Guy conceded, with the added perk of going his own way should their mission succeed. But what if they were thumbed down or worse, detained after being vetted? And if they did at least admit the girl aboard, what might be her fate? And where would he go in this great cosmic ocean without friendly French society?

He stared at the Halliburton case next his boots holding all his filthy lucre shut, much like Judas would have subsequent to his act of betrayal. At best, he figured he could disappear to a Martian tank farm and spend his remaining years working as a welder on a plot of red land leased out to him by the Bedouins.

A glance at the fuel gauge added to his already racked nerves. The needle was either faulty or he was to blame for miscalculating their distance to the next satellite refill station. Those nerves were further strained by anxious looks fed into the rearview mirror for possible signs of the Gendarmerie giving chase like flashing comets. But he remembered how he had removed the cosmic positioning system from the airframe.

He was more concerned about the tankers and escort ships returning to the Archambault from the Moon’s liquid nitrogen depots who were likely to be on the lookout for them.

Thwop.

He hoicked the chewing tobacco into a hollow spittoon, looking over his seat to see if Gisele had tossed. She was still sound asleep across the padded deck like a gilded princess, draped in Astro-Victorian couture next to a pile of indexed binders on the infamous “Vielle Terre” (Old Earth).

Gisele had, for all the years growing up amidst a floating society, suffered great gravitational longings for the Origin Planet as though she had been somehow subpoenaed by its loneliness. Whatever she had learned about its reputation during her formative years had mostly been recycled lore from her space-born contemporaries. That was until the day an underpaid guard manning the secured archives desk proposed to let her rummage through all of Earth’s primeval data in exchange for a fair kickback.

It had been a hard and fast rule on the Archambault as a way of ensuring the preservation of its pathfinder stock, that the earth-born were never to speak of or seduce the space-born with tales of the Earth as an effort to discourage inquiry and its potential knock-on effect, mutiny. This, however, naturally fed the intrigue of the young and restless minds on board such as Gisele’s.

She had tried to assimilate everything she could up until the day this backhanded watchman was mysteriously transferred to another terminal on the ship. But by then, her mind to quit deep space for Earth had already been made up. She had become well acquainted with the findings of the Swedish Atmospheric Teams about radioactive isotope lifespans and the safety of resettlement, granting her the encouragement she needed.

Yet some had suggested that it wasn’t until she had been apprised of a handsome English Officer quartered on The Birmingham who had come across a photograph of her during a bilateral ship trade and was rumored to have sworn true love at the sight of it, that her resolve had been punctuated. This, they teased, they knew since her cheeks had turned blush red ever since.

Rumour or not, life on the French Liner, with its puree dinners, survivalist head games and hazardous odysseys, had, despite the magnificence of interstellar journeys across breathtaking clusters and nebulas, left her feeling inorganic. She had even been diagnosed an incurable nostalgist by one of the head-doctors on the ark.

And now here she was, slingshotting to Earth as she had anticipated, distancing herself by the light-hour from friends and family. Unlike his daughter, Admiral Jacques Archambault felt that Earth was an irredeemable wasteland like so many before him who had witnessed the blast clouds. He believed the French were the ones destined to mind the stars and that the new frontier was through the velvety starlit black.

Gisele had admitted to Guy on the day of their vanishing act, that a likely rescue mission on her behalf was the surest possible way to get her father and the French flotilla to turn around. This had made Guy more skittish. His life up to this point had been a humdrum existence of logical executions. He had for the first time in his life gathered up the courage to be a sort of hero to a daughter he never had by doing something considerably gonzo at this stage of life. Capture might prove too cruel an indignity.

A Bleep.

The Dupleix’s radar began to noise off, ending Guy’s damning audit. He leaned over to trace the blip on the screen. A bogey at about 38 degrees, approximately two-hours out. Perhaps it was just a flotsam collector, a scooping vessel scouring the open cosmos for redeemable wreckage. Whatever it was, they had ample hardpoint loads, both internal and external, to meet with their anticipated challenges. Yet there remained one oversight for which Guy was unable to forgive himself for; the auxiliary spacesuit had not been accounted for, which meant they only had one between the two of them.

A gentle moan.

Gisele stirred, sending her long hair reaching for the floor. Guy stood up and toggled on the deck's coffee station, hoping to animate her with his own blend of fly-by-night espresso. He split a deck of cards on the coffee table between the two chairs. Perhaps it was just his way of distracting them from the subconscious oppression of the white noise buzzing from the engines….or the fear they both quietly shared about the low probability of ever reaching their extraction point in one piece.