Long Haul

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say. Truth be told, that was the main reason he took this job. He certainly didn’t need it. He was always good with money, and he’d made a decent living in his days at TransCon. He’d even convinced them to keep him on his routes long after everyone else had fully automated. Said he’d be a novelty. A bit of nostalgia for their older clients who were still pining for the “good old days”. And for a while he was. But when the legislation finally came down barring human-operated commercial transport vehicles, his good old days were officially done.

He could have retired. He had a small house, a patch of land in the shadow of the Rocky Mountains with a big pond stocked full of trout. Annalynne always loved fishing. But she wasn’t there anymore. Nobody was. And he knew that if he stopped moving, even for just a little while, it would come back. The screaming. The horrible, high-pitched wails that he just couldn’t ever seem to shake, no matter how fast or how far he went. So, when the opportunity arose to go farther and faster than he’d ever gone before, well… He figured it was worth a shot.

That the automation of commercial trucking aligned so perfectly with the start of construction on the first US lunar colony was too convenient to have been a coincidence. Aries Corp. was sending payloads to the moon at unprecedented rates, and the current overlap in technology and skillsets was just enough that it was not only possible, but easier—and cheaper—to retrain displaced truckers to haul them. The push for new recruits was massive.

WHEELS TO WINGS IN SIX MONTHS!! 90% PASS RATE!! FULL REFUND FOR MEDICAL EXCLUSION!!

The ads were everywhere. For a $10,000 “investment in your future” the newly-christened Aries Academy was offering a six-month intensive retraining program that would take (almost) anyone from the Earth to the moon. Even in the days of routine commercial space flight, it felt a bit outlandish. Many were skeptical (or just downright scared), many others were denied for medical reasons, but those who passed were rewarded with a comfortable six-figure salary, bonuses for priority runs, and top-notch health insurance.

It took him three months to secure an initial interview at the Academy. They thought he was too old to pass the medical and, to be fair, at 62 he was well above the average recruitment age. But he was strong and had always prided himself on eating clean and keeping fit. He didn’t smoke. He never drank. Not even after... Anyway, he not only passed the medical, but completed the training with top marks making him the oldest graduate of the Aries Academy, affectionately known to his fellow astronauts as “Pop”.

Astronaut. He wasn’t sure if he’d ever really get used to the word. If anyone had told him back in his heyday that he was going to be an astronaut, Pop would have laughed and called them crazy. Space just wasn’t a thing that was ever really on his radar. When he was a kid, if someone asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up, he’d say a school bus driver. Being from Montana, he knew the stars well enough, and he loved to lay out on the dock in the middle of the lake in the summer when the meteor showers were on and count them as they flew by. But he always took comfort in the fact that space was “out there” and he was here, safe and secure within the confines of the Earth—an Earth that had so many wonderous things to see that he couldn’t imagine how anyone could want for anything more. He’d never even been on a commercial space flight; not out of fear, but simply because he preferred to drive. He liked to see it all up close and personal.

But that first flight with Aries… That first look at his home from the other side of the divide… Despite his best attempts to remain a cynical curmudgeon about the whole thing, he couldn’t deny it was breathtaking. Exhilarating. Terrifying. Emotions he’d been actively avoiding for years washed over him like glacial melt cascading down a mountain. In an instant, he thought of everything and everyone he’d ever loved and how far away they seemed from him now; how insignificant they were in the infinite blackness of space, and yet how achingly important they remained in his own heart and mind. Annalynne would have loved this. A tear escaped from the corner of his eye and floated away in front of him.

“Happens to everyone on the first run.” The senior pilot, younger than Pop by a good 20 years, smiled at him and held out a tissue.

Pop watched the tear hover gracefully in the air in front of him for a moment before he took the tissue and wiped his face. Enough of that now. Down to business.

The stretch of I-80 through Nebraska was considered by many long haulers to be the most boring section of road in the country. There are those who would argue for I-10 through West Texas, but at least there you get the occasional armadillo sighting to liven things up a bit. I-80—for the six to seven hours between Cheyenne and Omaha—offers nothing but flat, lifeless plains, punctuated by the occasional unnerving, dilapidated Christian billboard:

When you die, you WILL meet God.

Population was growing at an unsustainable rate. Cities across the country were heaving and suburbs were sprawling farther and farther out, but still—it seemed—nobody wanted to live in Nebraska.

The Aries equivalent to Nebraska was nearly the entire stretch between exiting Lower Earth Orbit and the lunar approach, about 32 hours of the average 36-hour flight, a fact they definitely didn’t put in the Academy brochure. During that time—though they were required to maintain a minimum number of hours at the controls—the pilots were effectively redundant as the shuttle was being operated remotely from Aries’ home base. Pop never could have imagined on that first run that boredom would become a prominent feature of his new job; but as it happens, he had greatly underestimated the unique capacity that humans have for turning the extraordinary into the mundane.

He had been flying for Aries for six months now, and was currently 8 hours into his first solo run—and he was bored. He yawned as he gazed out the window at the never-ending blanket of stars. When you’ve seen one star… It was times like these when he most missed the red cliffs of Zion, the volcanic peaks of the Pacific Northwest, the massive willows weeping over alligator-infested Louisiana bayous. Anything but more stars.

“Aries Ground to Aries 272,” The radio crackled to life, startling Pop out of his reminiscing.

He grabbed his mic, thankful for the distraction, “272, go ahead, Ground”

“How’s it goin’ up there, Pop? You missin’ my ugly mug yet?”

Pop chuckled, “About as much as I’d miss a hole in the head.”

“Listen, everything looks good down here, so you’re clear to hit Nebraska.”

Nebraska had become pilot code for their required sleep breaks; a comforting echo of their former lives they’d come up with to help ease the transition.

“Roger that, Ground. 272 signing out at—" Pop squinted at the tiny digital clock display, his vision blurred from fatigue, “Zero four hundred”

“Have a good one. We’ll see you in Omaha”

Putting away the mic, Pop looked out at the stars once more. He was tired, and he knew a good seven hours’ sleep would fix him right up, but all the same it was the down time that was the hardest. Once he was cocooned into his sleeping harness—cabin lights dimmed and temperature adjusted, per regulations, to achieve a scientifically ideal sleep environment—there were no more distractions. No more checks, no more paperwork, not even any goddamned stars. It was when he was most vulnerable, left to the mercy of his own thoughts. It was also when he discovered that “they” (whoever they were) were wrong, because sometimes—if he wasn’t quite vigilant enough—he could still hear the screaming, even in space.

He shook off the thought and set about his obligatory checks around the cabin: Oxygen level, temperature control, fuel gauge, cargo hold air lock. Everything in order. He was about to unfasten his shoulder belt when he heard it. It was faint, but it was there. Some kind of groan or a creak, maybe? He froze, his eyes scanning the cabin for anything out of place. That’s when he heard it again; louder this time, but it wasn’t coming from the cabin. It was behind him.

He reached down and released a lever beneath the seat, allowing his chair to rotate 180 degrees so that he found himself staring down the long, narrow hallway that ended at the cargo hold. Pilots weren’t allowed access to the hold at any time; something about union regulations, or so they were told. To conserve fuel—and possibly to prevent lone pilots from letting their curiosity get the better of them—the oxygen levels in the hold were set throughout the run to just one-quarter of the level in the main cabin. Pop watched the green light that signaled a functional air lock between the hold and the main cabin as it blinked: OFF. ON. OFF. ON. The rhythm seemed to synch with the beating of his heart, that echoed now in his ears as he waited.

The third time was the loudest yet, and it was definitely coming from the hold. Pop tried to calm himself as he watched the light blink. He was at least reasonably sure that there couldn’t be anything living in there. He was probably overreacting. Ground had eyes on the cargo hold. Surely, they’d have said if something didn’t look right. It was most likely nothing. The shuttles certainly had their noises about them, the same way an old house might settle in the middle of the night… But Pop had heard those plenty of times before, and this wasn’t that. This was new, and when you’re on your own 60,000 miles from Earth and counting, new is a very unsettling word.