War Angel: part three

Gina Almond took a deep breath within her helmet and exhaled gently, steadying her arms and her aim. The surveying scanner required precision movement in order to get accurate readings, and the flaws in her data always came back to her inability to keep still, even in low-to-zero gravity. And gravity was certainly not an issue where she was standing that morning.

Pluto was a strange little rock, there was no question about that. At times in Earth’s past it had lost its “status” as a planet, which made Gina giggle a bit when she thought about it. “Since when,” she asked one of her professors, “do we get to decide what is a planet and what isn’t? No one died and made us official gatekeepers of the cosmos, did they?” It seemed even more ludicrous in the face of growing up on a world that had twice been invaded by a race from outside the solar system. Wouldn’t they, she wondered, be far more likely to be able to classify what counted as a planet? They had certainly seen more of them than any Earther had. Even now, Earth was just truly beginning to stretch beyond the edges of its own system.

Of all the students onboard the mission, no one would challenge that Gina was brilliant, a near-master in her fields of astrophysics and astrogeology. It was researchers like her that would ultimately, Earth’s government hoped, pave the way for the third planet from the sun to truly begin to explore and help expand humanity’s knowledge of its universe. Born to the Second Period’s version of a melting pot, her father Archibald had finished the Period living and working in an EAD laboratory on a quiet Japanese island. While there, he had fallen in love with one of his colleagues, a local woman named Rie, and as their skills were put to use in their every waking moment in attempts to drive away the alien invaders, at night their fatigue and passion for life combined to help them fall in love. As their daughter grew, her parents not only began to see that their daughter was stunningly intelligent, but that her intellectual capacity was going to far outstrip either of their own. Excited for Gina’s prospects, Archie did everything he could in order to make sure she had every advantage in her life in the hopes that she would reach the pinnacle of whatever fields she chose.

Rie felt differently. Gina remembered her mother’s parting words to her as she left to finish the final stage of her schooling as though they had been spoken to her yesterday.

“They will resent you, daughter. No matter how skilled you are, no matter how kind you are, they will resent you. Humanity’s history shows us that the masses can cope with one exceptionality in a woman. But those that are possessed of two face anger and betrayal. You are beautiful, my little hime, and you are of superior intellect. Thus you must guard yourself well, and choose your friends carefully.”

Looking skyward for a moment, she eyeballed the ship that had carried her to the far reaches of the solar system. Lowering her head back to the planet’s surface, she took in the desolation and the fact that she was alone on its surface. “You were right as always, mom. No friends here.”

Steadying her aim, she resumed scanning the surface. As she did, her mind wandered to the circumstances that had brought her on this mission.

“So basically, you want to hitchhike?” Sarah Matto had asked her.

Gina took a bite of what passed for salad in their university’s meal center. She knew it was going to be a tough pitch, but she needed to get herself to Pluto in order to complete her dissertation. A paper on the potential for sudden mass shift and how it alters a binary planet system would be useless without first-hand data and observation. She lacked the funding to get there on her own; but Sarah and Jack’s project was taking them right to where she needed to be. “It wouldn’t be a total hitchhike. I have some funding, and I’m more than happy to contribute it towards my personal upkeep. And I certainly wouldn’t be in yours and Jack’s way.”

Sarah took a drink of water from a small bottle, taking a moment to think about what Gina was asking. “Okay, here’s the deal though. It isn’t just me and Jack. Kate Stinson, and Richard Park are also involved….”

“I get along with both of them just fine,” Gina interjected.

“As well as Ben Drake.”

Gina’s mind went blank for a moment. That bastard! Taking him as a lover had been an enormous mistake, her worst since she had arrived at school, and just the sound of his name set her on edge.

“So you can see, Gina,” Sarah said gently, “why this might not be a good idea.”

“Why? Because he humiliated me? Spread my sex life out into the open? Took a term that mother used as a loving nickname and made it a nasty pejorative?” Gina stopped to take a drink, feeling dry mouth coming on. “Perish the thought.”

Sarah gave her a wan smile. “You aren’t the only one, you know. He’s done it to a lot of other women here.”

“Cold comfort, Sarah. Cold comfort.” Gina leaned back in her chair. “Wait; why the hell is he going on your mission? His specialty areas have nothing to do with engineering, physics, none of it. He’s an arts grad.”

The young blonde woman across the table looked pained for a moment, then bemused. “Because if he doesn’t, he’s screwed, and not even his Daddy can save him. He’s failing at least two classes from heavily tenured teachers. So pressuring them to pass him won’t work. He needs extra credit, which he can get if he works as a maintenance and comm. assistant on the ship while we finish her up.”

Gina perked up. “So in other words…”

“I hold his fate in my hands,” Sarah nodded. “Well, me and Captain Morrison. He screws up, he doesn’t get the credits, and he’s out.” Gina smiled broadly at that thought.

“There is no chance in hell that he doesn’t screw this up, Sarah. None.” Gina relished that thought. “Count me in. I want to be there to see him go down in flames.”

Sarah wiped her mouth with a napkin and rose from the table. “I’ll tell Captain Morrison to make arrangements for you to be aboard.” She turned to walk away, leaving Gina sitting and thinking about gathering her equipment to take on the journey. However, just as Gina was about to rise from the table, Sarah turned back around and left her with one more thought. “By the way, as we’ll be on a military ship and working under military command, every crew member will need an assigned code name. You might want to start thinking about one.”

Watching Sarah leave, Gina realized immediately what that code name would be. It was time to take back what Ben had taken from her those months ago.

The scanner vibrated and flared, sending out pulses into Pluto’s rocky crust, and Gina watched the data scramble across the small screen. Much of what she was seeing was expected; the ice deposits were fairly steady in their density, and the rocks were made up of mostly basic minerals. But as the numbers scrolled steadily, she was taken aback by something highly unusual, so unusual that she slowly moved the scanner back over the area just to be sure that the reading was accurate.

“That,” she said for the universe to hear, “is seriously weird.” Gina continued forward, looking for more examples of the anomaly. Her dissertation was starting to look an awful lot like an award winner.