“Aaaaa—urp!”
Yukari swallowed a yawn. It had been twenty-two hours since launch. She had taken naps in shifts with Matsuri, but with nothing to do besides the broadcast, being in orbit was pretty boring.
Three hours till we land.
It was time.
Yukari had refrained from taking any solids—there were no toilet facilities in the capsule, which could make things really uncomfortable—but some things were worth the risk.
“We have time until the next broadcast, right?”
“Hoi?”
Yukari pulled a duralumin case out from beneath her shock-absorption chair. Bringing personal items on board the capsule had been strictly forbidden, but claiming “womanly needs,” Yukari had managed to win this one small concession. The case was small, and its weight limited, but the contents were entirely her responsibility and most importantly, not subject to screening.
She opened the case to reveal an assortment of carefully wrapped dim sum.
“Ta-da! Shrimp dumplings, courtesy of Tianjin Restaurant. Tasty even when chilled.”
Matsuri’s usually cheerful face broke into an even bigger smile. “Good call!”
Yukari laughed. “You know it. I had Hanrei make one of her special midnight deliveries.”
Yukari seized one of the dumplings and crammed it into her mouth. Zero gravity made everything taste bland, but after suffering through a regimen of carefully portioned, utterly flavorless lumps of protein, the oily, shrimp-filled dough balls were deeply satisfying.
“Mmph, smell that shrimp! C’mon, Matsuri, you have some.”
“Any vinegar soy sauce?”
“Now don’t get greedy. You know how hard it was sneaking these in here?”
“I thought as much,” Matsuri said, shaking her head, “which is why I brought this.” Matsuri reached under her own seat and pulled out a case, which she opened to reveal a tube of vinegar soy sauce.
Yukari gaped at her. “When did you—”
“There’s more!” Matsuri grinned, turning the case to show Yukari. “Let’s see. Mayonnaise, ketchup, mustard...all here!”
“Hey, you keep those away from my dumplings!”
Matsuri loved condiments, the more garishly colored and artificially flavored the better. Her condiment tool kit could turn the finest cuisine into junk food. Other than her flight training, this was the only aspect of Yukari’s culture that Matsuri had fully embraced.
“Oh wait, there’s one more thing.”
“It better not be relish.”
“Dessert!” Matsuri crouched down and opened the storage space beneath their life raft. “Did you know there’s a dead space beneath here?”
“Don’t they check that before launch?”
“Oh, I asked the spirits to hide it so they wouldn’t find it.”
“Um...okay?”
Yukari’s eyes went wide when she saw the giant, spike-festooned tropical fruit in Matsuri’s hand.
“A durian?”
“I found one growing in the jungle off to the side of the runway the other day.” Matsuri reached up with her hand, retrieving the survival knife from a hatch above their heads.
“Wait, Matsuri, you know how bad those things reek—”
Oh, but they were delicious. Some people made special trips to the tropics just to eat durian. The smell, however, was appropriately likened to a pool of rancid custard sitting in a sewer.
“Ooh. Perfectly ripe!” Matsuri held the durian between her knees and sank the knife into it.
“Waah! Stop! Stop! You’ll stink the whole place up!” Yukari reached out and grabbed Matsuri’s hand holding the knife.
“Hoi? What’s wrong?”
When Yukari moved, the case had drifted off her lap. Then, when she grabbed Matsuri’s hand, her knee had gone up, scoring a direct hit on the bottom of Matsuri’s case and sending its contents flying—a Big Bang of shrimp dumplings and vinegar soy sauce.
“Whee! That’s cool!”
“It’s totally not cool! We have to clean this up!”
“Look, Yukari, you can scoop it out of the air with your mouth! Yummy!”
“Would you stop eating and start grabbing those dumplings! If we don’t hurry—”
✦ ✦ ✦
Director Holden stared at the screen in stunned silence.
The wide-angle lens of the camera showed the entire capsule in unforgiving clarity. Dumplings and droplets of vinegar soy sauce and the durian swam around, like a slow-motion computer model of Brownian motion, sometimes colliding and fusing, only to separate again.
In the middle of it all were the two girls, shock on their faces, arms flailing.
“I’m uncomfortably put in mind of the Apollo 1 tragedy,” the NASA director said to Nasuda. “So tell me. What else do your ‘astronauts’ do?”