Selected Short Stories Featuring Cry Wolf Page 9

would pad their numbers and make it look less like they got caught with their pants down if there was one fewer downed plane in their stats. They found trace amounts of liquor in me (like I said, I wasn’t on duty when they called me to fly). They did me for a dishonorable- and I always wondered if my dad had something to do with it (by then the Mars colonies were in the black, and even before then, the old man knew how to work a handshake).

  Anyway, I spent a bit of time flying for fun and profit. I was young, and reckless, and I flew for whoever asked. I think some of my father’s shit got stuck in my brain, and I wanted to be the delinquent he’d always figured me for. I almost got killed when I realized some smugglers weren’t just flying drugs- they had a hostage, and they made the mistake of shooting (but not killing) their pilot. Me and the hostage walked away with several kilos- which was just enough to buy me another plane, since the damned insurance wouldn’t cover one downed by smugglers.

  I decided I wanted to live a while longer, so I had to go legit- though not necessarily too legit. I got involved with flying pirate servers. Basically, they had a server farm on an old hollowed out E-3 Sentry AWAC. They jury-rigged the radome on top of the plane to connect to a satellite that connected to customers. The plane was constantly moving, in the air 23 hours a day, flying in international skies whenever possible. Me and the other pilot took twelve hours behind the controls for 3 month stints. It was grueling, and exciting and mostly insane- I can’t tell you how many different languages pilots swore at me that they were going to shoot me down, international law be fucked in the skull.

  But eventually I stopped being a young man. I was still young enough to be crazy, I think, but not young enough to work that many hours for a season at a time. So I retired, with enough of a wad that I could have sat out my golden years on a beach someplace drinking mai tais. But that wasn’t really me, either.

  A buddy of mine was a microbrewer. His old partner had run his previous distillery into the ground, but he knew the scene and thought the two of us could at least break even. We did a little better than that- at least, better enough that somebody bought us- on the condition that we came with the company and its recipes.

  They’d decided an untapped market, given the burgeoning space tourism industry, was beer designed for space. I guess there are problems, since without buoyancy force there’s no carbonation (and who wants a flat beer on vacation?), and something to do with lower gravity affecting the taste buds, but they’d mostly overcome those things by the time we came on board. Then somebody Googled me and found out I was an astronaut’s kid and suddenly my face was on the label.

  By this point my dad wasn’t even speaking with me. I bought up advertising space on the side of a building near my parents’ home and plastered my mug on the wall proudly holding up a stein and smiling from underneath a beer-froth mustache, with the words, “Astronaut Beer: Tastes like Freedom” across the bottom. I got a text message a few days later from my mother that apparently he decided to have all the windows on that side of the house papered over; she seemed in pretty good spirits about it, actually, since I think she’d figured out a while ago that he was more than a little crazy.

  I thought it was going to be a niche product, like astronaut ice cream, but it became a luxury item of a sort, since it was a little more expensive- but not such a luxury that normal folks couldn’t splurge on it- champagne for rednecks, I guess.

  A couple of the bigger beer companies reverse-engineered our beer enough that the market was starting to crowd us out. It was my old microbrew partner, Steve, that came up with the idea for the next gimmick, that it not just be beer made for space travel, but be beer brewed specifically in space. We all thought he was nuts at the time, laughed him practically out of the room- except when any normal person would have hung his head and walked out he gave me the devil’s grin and said. “Sleep on it. I thought it was crazy at first, too.”

  And the idea grew on me, must have grown on all of us. Our CEO, an old industry hand named Bert, took the management folks, all of us who’d been in on the meeting the day before, out to a Mongolian grill. He stood up, with his drink in his hand, like he was going to toast something, and slowly this big, wide grin grew across his face, until he finally said, “We’re going to make some fucking beer in space.”

  He told us all how he’d been up most of the night emailing; something about the idea had caught his imagination by the pole. And he’d talked to some contacts he had in China, and thought he had the perfect satellite for us to buy.

  It was the PanAsian Space Station. It had been the whacky idea of the Chinese, working with, of all countries, the Japanese, with limited participation from other nations on or floating near the continent. Basically, they wanted to make sure the western world didn’t screw them out of their slice of the space pie. When we didn’t, and cooperation on the ISS continued unabated, the project was all but mothballed, and the Chinese were planning on letting it drop into the sea, like the Ruskies had done with MIR.

  So the plan, admittedly sort of poorly thought-out, was to manufacture and bottle beer inside the satellite. The thinking was that people would be willing to pay the premium just to drink space liquors that were actually brewed in space. I thought it was insane at the time, but in a roundabout fashion I got to train, both for practical and promotional purposes, to fly into space.

  My first jaunt was exciting- I’d been having fever dreams of the Challenger explosion for weeks and had completely prepared myself to die in fire, and kept waiting for a shoe to drop. I was actually just staring out at space, imagining my fiery demise when the last Chinese astronaut on the station opened up the hatch and said, “Good seal.”

  Mostly because it was his crazy ass idea (but also because we couldn’t think of a nicer guy to put on the go-in-circles-until-you-throw-up-machine), Steve was with me. He was going to set up the barley and hop crops. For our first trip, we’d also brought enough raw materials to start brewing immediately- with the hopes that we’d be able to start subsidizing the immense costs of starting up the venture.

  We used old discarded inflatable hotels to expand the acreage of the station- it didn’t take too much to retrofit them as hydroponic green houses, and by the end of our fourth year we were growing enough wheat and barley to feed a medium-sized African country (or to keep Connecticut wasted 24/7).

  We were in the space station business six years. Margin on space beer was usually pretty thin, and we were always looking for ways to cut down on expenses, but we were profitable. Hell, we reconquered the space beer market by introducing partially space-brewed blends.

  And I never would have seen it coming. There was a backlash, and I think it had more to do with the political parties strawmanning drug liberalization for political gain (though not being a political sort, I don’t know who was trying to protect our fragile persons from ourselves). Rather than just repeal the laws legalizing pot and some of the milder opiates, they went after everything- even caffeine and liquor. Intense lobbying by Coke, Pepsi and a bunch of coffee companies protected caffeine, but MADD was rabid, and booze became an endangered species.

  This time the Coast Guard wasn’t fucking around, either, and they started sinking ships, even a couple of cruise liners, stupid enough to bring liquor into their territorial waters. A group of us got while the getting was good, and took one last ride up in our space taxi and stayed in the station. A few of the staff decided to quit, and rode a survival pod down to the surface- but room wasn’t much of an issue. In a telescope it looks like one of those hamster cities with colored tubes connecting tubes, but in raw acres it was the third largest barley farm in the world, and that’s not counting all the various storage and processing areas.

  One of the first things we’d done once the station turned a profit was purchase the mineral rights to a slice of the moon; the fewer things you have to bring up out of Earth’s atmosphere the fewer multimillion dollar launches you have to budget for.

  After the mine, we bought various p
roduction facilities, just enough that we could build further additions to the station in orbit. But now that we were the only potential supplier of liquor to the country, we came up with another idea: booze drops.

  The design is based on Multiple Reentry Vehicles used for modern nuclear weapons. It’s essentially a robotic glider that floats slowly into the atmosphere, and at specific times drops down individual shipments of booze to land within a quarter kilometer of the drop zone. For the drop the liquor has to be frozen- otherwise the changes in pressure would burst it like a puppy in the Marianas Trench.

  The MRVs are expensive, but our asking price is higher these days, so we can afford them. We’ve also near-perfected a just-add-water dehydrated liquor block, and the margin on those is even better.

  I got an email from my mother this morning; I guess she’d tracked me down from a Yahoo news story about bootleggers. She said my father doesn’t know yet; he’d hate me even more if he knew I was a space pirate, enabling other people to keep on drinking.

  I try not to consciously wish for him to die, but barring a half-dozen robotic organs, he would have been dead thirty years ago. Something about the thought of