LIT 3. Flight Path

Lost in Translation Chapter 3

Previously: After the King of the Southern Lunar Colony died suddenly in his sleep, a member of the royal family, Marie, finds herself with an unexpected inheritance: the right to the throne and, possibly, a target on her back.

It took two tugs to get the duffel bag out from under my bed, its contents already making it nearly as tall as the space between the furniture and the floor. Everyone in the castle was prepared for some sort of emergency that would require evacuation. Mine had the same supplies as everyone else's – a few weeks of dried rations, a few changes of clothes, a minimal amount of soap, some basic tools, a compass, a water filter. I decided to just take it all rather than sort through what I would need and what I wouldn't.

My immediate family was less than day's journey away, on the construction site of the new transportation station, one of many manufactured Einstein-Rosen bridges turning the vastness of space into a highway of checkpoints. I just had to make it to them, then we would figure out what to do about the king's will – if my claim to the throne would be legitimate, if someone would try to poison me over it, and what to do if both those things were true.

I looked around the room, deciding what else I should take with me. Ideally, I would be back here by tomorrow and not even need the supplies already packed, let alone anything else, but if the king's unusual will sparked any kind of uproar it could be quite a while before saw this room again. I packed my journal, it was small enough that I could justify that. I packed some currency. I took a small jewelry box out from under my bed and dumped that in as well. Lunar currency was not worth much outside of orbit.

I had a few changes of clothes in my bag, but I opened my closet door anyway, if not chose anything than just to memorize it along with the rest of the room. Most of it was impractical for anything but a dinner party. I found and took out a scarf knit by a great aunt, a gift for my last birthday. I told myself that I’d be back here in a couple of days, and that there was no reason to pack keepsakes. I told myself this as I shoved the scarf under some dried rations and tested the zipper to make sure it would close.

I changed into simple, dark clothing, and cleaned the makeup off my face. I shoved the wig into a jacket pocket. I did one more check over the contents of my bag and my appearance in the mirror, grabbed my keys, and left the room before I could change my mind.

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The hallways were busy.

A blessing in disguise, because no one could get a good enough look at me as they hurried around each other to question my appearance or my duffel bag.

To get to the garage I had to pass through a small hallway filled with space travel memorabilia – a cousin's pet project. I passed posters and small models of Sputnik, Apollo, and Swan Song. I hurried through without looking at the displays. Swan Song had disappeared before I'd been born, but I'd heard the stories. A transporter malfunction no one had been able to explain, with no evidence of sabotage. I have to use those transports today, although I planned to stick to the larger portals, not the small kind which had swallowed the Swan Song crew.

I made it to the end and stumbled into a dark room. Typically, the garage door was open, but with all the activity at the castle and no scheduled departures, the door had been closed for security reasons.

Of course, my access key would open it – but not quietly.

I loaded my duffel bag into my vehicle. Roughly the shape of a large motorcycle encased in a glass bubble, it was not comfortable for long distances. I would be driving leaning forward, barely able to change positions, let alone stretch or stand up. It would have to do – it was the only thing I was able to pilot alone.

I left the vehicle door open and went to open the garage door. I hit the button with my access key, then ran back as the door creaked open. It was painfully slow and painfully loud. As it opened wide enough for me to exit, someone who had been working outside, shovel still in one hand, rushed around to see what was going on.

At the last minute I grabbed the purple wig out of my jacket and slapped it on top of my head, so that the gardener would recognize me. If he started telling people a vehicle was stolen right out of the garage I wouldn't even make it out of orbit.

I flew out of the garage, over the garden, and into the mid-morning traffic. The lunar colony was surrounded by a large energy field, to keep in the heat and oxygen we all needed. I fell in line behind the dozens of vehicles waiting above the tree tops to go through the nearest exit point.

The barrier was not visible, other than a slight haze, but the point at which the trees and grass ended and barren rock began was obvious. Each city across the lunar landscape was a small bubble of green dotting an ocean of harsh grey, with small roads and a few wires and robots in between.
I flipped through a few talk radio channels as I waited, to give my hands something to do. There were five people in front of me now.

There was generally no security at the access points, just an archway large enough for vehicles to pass through one at a time. However, it would be simple enough for someone to shut down the entry just long enough to stop my departure. It was done often enough for lesser reasons – maintenance, weather, measuring traffic flow.

There were three people ahead of me now. The advertisement on the radio ended and news briefing began. They talked about sports, they talked about a missing rover on one of Jupiter's moons. They didn't talk about the king's death. I started to relax a little bit – if the public didn't know that I was queen yet, my leaving the castle wouldn't seem so unusual.

There was one person ahead of me now. They stopped in front of the barrier, instead of simply slowing down to a crawl like the rest of them.

I looked around, waiting to see who had stopped them. There were a dozen more people behind me now, and I could see through my mirror that the man behind me was just as confused – and irritated – about the lack of movement as I was. As I wondered whether it would be wise to honk my horn at them, and draw attention to myself, they started to back up.

I backed up as much as I could without hitting the person behind me. The person in front of me turned their vehicle around and started back in the opposite direction, giving me a small wave of apology as they passed.

No one had stopped them; they were just lost.

Once out of the city, I directed my vehicle upwards toward the sky. Outside of the energy field surrounding my home, and the extra light it emitted, the sky was dark. Not so dark that I could see the stars, however. Those were all but washed out by the blinking lights of satellites and the dozen or so transportation stations that littered the space around Earth and her moon.

Bright blue disks in orbit around almost every planet and moon, the transport stations linked the solar system together, and our solar system to the ones beyond. We humans couldn’t take credit for the technology, it had been introduced to us by its creator from another system centuries ago. But we’d taken full advantage of the technology, once we’d understood it well enough to reverse engineer it, and now it was possible to get anywhere in the solar system in less than an hour.

My radio fell into static as I left the moon’s orbit, and my sound system began to search for something else to transmit. It settled on the radio communications from the main transport, the closest and easily the largest. “We apologize… the delay… folks.” The man’s voice struggled under a heavy dose of static. “We’ve been ordered by… close the… temporarily… we will… shortly… The Lunar… due to the... requested… will be temporary...”

I fiddled with the dial to improve the signal but it was no use. I had missed the message, other than a few words that sounded relevant to me: words like ‘ordered’ and ‘Lunar’. I looked over at the main bridge, the one I’d planned to use, now noticing the number of large vehicles parked in front of it, and the line forming behind them. The next closest transport was suffering the same fate. The only one that wasn’t, yet, was the smallest of the bunch and further than the rest. It led to Ceres, which had little in the way of entertainment for tourists or interest for politicians, and thus suffered very little traffic.

It was also the station that had malfunctioned once, decades ago, causing the disappearance of the Swan Song crew. Hundreds, if not thousands, of ships had passed through since with out issue. I tried to remember this second fact and not the first as I glanced over the other stations and their halted traffic, once, then twice. I took a deep breath and accelerated towards the Ceres transport.

As I passed through the blue light and onto the other side, I was hit by the beauty of a starry sky not diminished by the light of ships, satellites, and bright blue portals.

I was also hit by a frozen object, roughly the size of goat.