A Celestial Rodentia adventure: Prepare for Lift-Off (4/4)
The sun was not even all the way up yet, and Luna was already awake, sitting very still at the edge of her bunk with her paws tucked under her chin.
She could feel it through the floor before she could hear it. A low hum, deep in the metal, like the ship was clearing its throat. Today the Celestial Rodentia was leaving the ground.
Luna had been waiting for this moment since the day she first looked up and realized the stars weren't just pretty lights, they were places. Real places, with real distances between them, and she was the one who would help steer the crew through all that open space. She knew the star charts by heart. She knew exactly how to read the tiny blinking numbers on the navigation screen. She had practiced the launch sequence in the simulator so many times she could probably do it with her eyes closed.
So why were her paws shaking just a little?
She pressed them flat against her fur to make them stop, took a slow breath, and told herself what she always told herself before something big: steady. That was her whole job. While everyone else got excited or nervous or loud, Luna stayed steady, like the fixed point on a compass that everything else turns around.
It was also, if she was honest, why she made such a good pilot. Luna's eyes sat on the sides of her head, the way guinea pig eyes always do, and that meant she could take in almost her entire bunk room without turning her head at all. The star charts on the wall. The door. The little window with the last of the stars fading outside. All of it, at once, without missing a thing. Good pilots noticed everything. That was the whole point of her.
Down the hall, she could hear Gizmo already awake too, humming some tune to himself while he checked his checklist for the fourth time. Rocky was banging around near the engine bay, probably giving the thrusters one last pat for good luck. Nova's voice drifted by, talking softly to the little tray of seedlings they'd decided to bring along, promising them a window seat. Cosmo was somewhere testing the radio, saying "can you hear me, can you hear me" in about six different funny voices. And Starlight, quiet as always, was already at her station, going through numbers on a screen with her nose almost touching the glass.
Six guinea pigs. One ship. One very big day.
Luna stood up, shook out her fur, and went to find her flight suit. Today, of all days, she needed to be the calm one.
✦ ✦ ✦
By the time the whole crew gathered at the base of the ship, the sky had turned a soft orange, and everything smelled sharp and metallic, like the inside of a fresh battery.
"Fuel's almost done loading," Rocky announced, trotting over from the propulsion bay with grease on one ear. "You would not believe how much this thing needs. I mean, we're small. You'd think a rocket for six guinea pigs could just sip a little fuel and go, right?"
"Wrong," said the propulsion engineer, the human who'd spent the last several weeks teaching Rocky everything about thrust and burn rates. She crouched down so the crew could see the readout on her tablet. "It's not really about your size. It's about how far and how fast you need to go. To leave Earth for good, this ship has to reach almost twenty five thousand miles an hour. That's called escape velocity. Below that speed, gravity always wins and pulls you back down, no matter how hard you try."
Nova's eyes went wide. "Twenty five thousand miles an hour? That's faster than anything!"
"That's why the ship is built in stages," the engineer explained, pointing up at the rocket, which did look, now that Luna noticed it, like it was made of three sections stacked on top of each other. "Think of it like carrying a heavy backpack up a hill. The fuel is heavy, so heavy that if we tried to carry it all the way to space in one piece, the ship would be too weighty to ever get moving fast enough. So instead, once the bottom section burns through its fuel and goes empty, we drop it. Empty tanks are just extra weight at that point. Dropping them makes everything above lighter, so the next stage can push the rest of you even faster with a lot less effort."
"So we get lighter as we go," Luna said slowly, turning the idea over in her head. "Less to carry, easier to speed up."
"Exactly," the engineer said. "Three stages, three drops, and by the time you reach orbit, you'll be a lot smaller than you started."
Rocky puffed out his chest a little. "I checked every bolt on those stage separators myself. They'll pop apart clean, right on schedule."
"Good," said Gizmo, clapping his paws together. "Because I would very much like this ship to stay in one piece. Well. Three pieces. On purpose."
Everyone laughed, even Starlight, who almost never laughed out loud but did a little snort that counted.
Luna looked up at the rocket towering above them, its nose pointed straight at the pale morning sky, and felt something settle inside her. Twenty five thousand miles an hour. Three stages. A hundred small moving parts that all had to work exactly right, one after another, for this to go smoothly.
She was the one who would be watching all of it happen.
✦ ✦ ✦
There was just enough time to get suited up before the crew walked the long ramp to the ship, and somehow that turned into its own kind of chaos.
"Does this helmet make my ears look big?" Cosmo asked, turning his head side to side in front of the mirror.
"Your ears are always big," Rocky said. "It's not the helmet."
"I'm choosing to hear that as a compliment."
Nova tucked her seedling tray carefully into a padded pouch at her side, murmuring reassurance to it like it could hear her. "You're going to see space before almost any plant in history," she told it. "No pressure."
Starlight said nothing, just quietly checked and rechecked the seals on her own suit three times, the way she always double checked things nobody else thought to check.
Gizmo found Luna near the end of the line, straightening her collar without being asked, the small gesture he always did before something important. "Ready, Commander," she said, which made him laugh, since technically he outranked her.
"You're the one flying us there," Gizmo said. "Today, you're the one in charge of the sky."
Luna didn't answer right away. She just nodded once, and the whole crew filed up the ramp together, six small shapes against one very large rocket.
Inside the cabin, six seats faced a wall of screens, dials, and one round window at the front, right above Luna's chair.
"Comm check," Cosmo said into his headset, then grinned. "Mission Control says we are go for launch. Also they said good luck. Also they said, and I quote, 'try not to eat the wiring this time,' which, rude, that was one time."
"T minus ten minutes," Starlight said quietly, eyes on her screen, whiskers twitching with concentration.
Luna settled into the pilot's seat and ran her paws over the controls one more time, the way she always did before anything important, just to feel their shape and know exactly where everything was. Above her, through the round window, she could see a thin slice of orange sky and one bright, steady star that hadn't faded yet.
She thought about that star for a second. Steady. Just like her.
"You good?" Gizmo asked from the seat beside her, his voice softer than his usual cheerful bounce.
"I'm good," Luna said, and meant it. "I've flown this a hundred times in the simulator."
"This isn't the simulator," Gizmo said, not to scare her, just because it was true, and Gizmo always told the truth gently.
"I know," Luna said. "That's the part that's different."
"T minus one minute," Starlight called.
Rocky's paw hovered near the engine controls. Nova hugged her little seedling tray tight to her chest. Cosmo counted along under his breath, matching the numbers coming through his headset. And Luna kept her eyes forward, watching the small round patch of sky through the window, waiting for it to start moving.
"T minus ten," the whole crew said together, without even planning to. "Nine. Eight. Seven."
Luna's paws found the controls.
"Six. Five. Four."
The hum in the floor turned into a rumble.
"Three. Two. One."
"Ignition," said Rocky, and the whole ship roared.
✦ ✦ ✦
Luna had imagined liftoff a thousand times, but nothing had prepared her for how loud steady could feel.
The ship shook so hard her teeth buzzed. The sound wasn't really a sound anymore, it was a pressure, a rumble that lived in her chest and her ears at the same time. She felt herself pressed back into her seat like a giant paw was holding her there, and for one dizzy second the whole world was just noise and shaking and the orange square of sky in the window slowly, slowly sliding away below them.
"We are moving," Cosmo shouted, half laughing, half terrified. "We are actually moving!"
Through the window, the sky was already changing color, orange fading into a deep blue, the blue deepening fast as they climbed. The shaking grew worse before it grew better, the whole ship rattling and groaning as it punched up through the thickest part of the sky, and Luna felt her own cheeks pull back against the pressure, heavy and strange, like an invisible paw pressing her into the seat. She kept her eyes fixed forward anyway, tracking the horizon line, watching the little markers on her screen tick upward. Speed. Altitude. Angle. She was built for exactly this, taking in a dozen things at once without losing track of any of them, and right now every part of her was doing exactly what it was supposed to do.
"First stage burning clean," Starlight called over the shaking. "Fuel at forty percent."
"Approaching first separation," the engineer's voice crackled through the comm from the ground. "Get ready, Luna. You'll want eyes on that separation."
"Copy that," Luna said, and leaned toward the window, ready to watch the bottom stage of the ship, the one Rocky had checked bolt by bolt, drop cleanly away right below them.
That was the moment everything went strange.
The ship gave one hard shudder as the first stage's engines cut off, and for a heartbeat, everything blurred. Luna's eyes darted to the exact spot where the separation should happen, right along the ship's belly, directly ahead and slightly below the window.
And she couldn't see it.
Not because the shaking was too much, though it was bad. Not because the window fogged, though it did, briefly. It was because that one small patch, right in front of her, right where she needed her eyes the most, was exactly where her eyes didn't reach. She turned her head, trying to catch it from an angle, and for one panicked second her whole body went rigid, frozen in her seat, paws locked on the controls, breath caught somewhere in her throat.
I can't see it. I can't see the one thing I need to see.
"Luna?" Gizmo's voice, right beside her, calm as ever. "Talk to me."
"I can't," Luna started, and her voice came out smaller than she meant it to. "I can't see the separation. It's right in my blind spot."
For half a second, nobody spoke, and the ship kept shaking, and Luna's heart pounded so hard she was sure the whole crew could hear it.
Then Rocky's voice cut through, steady and sure. "Stage one, thrust at zero. I've got it on the gauge."
"Separators reading green," Starlight added instantly, eyes locked on her own screen. "Bolts fired clean, right on time."
"Ground control confirms visual," Cosmo said, relaying it fast. "Clean drop. You are looking good, Luna."
"Second stage ignition in three, two, one," Nova called, bracing the seedling tray with one paw and reaching over to squeeze Luna's shoulder with the other. "Here we go."
The engines caught with a new roar, gentler than the first but still enough to press them all back into their seats, and Luna felt the ship steady itself, climbing again, faster now, lighter now.
She sat there for a second, paws still locked on the controls, catching her breath.
She hadn't seen it happen. Not with her own eyes. And it had gone perfectly anyway.
✦ ✦ ✦
By the time the second stage dropped away too, just as clean as the first, the sky outside the window had gone from blue to a deep, star-scattered black, and the shaking had smoothed out into a strange, floating quiet.
Luna felt her own paws lift gently off the armrests, and looked down to see herself drifting an inch above her seat.
"We're in space," she said, and even her steady voice cracked a little with wonder.
The whole cabin erupted, Rocky whooping and immediately bonking his head on the ceiling because he forgot he could float now, Nova gasping and clutching her seedling tray like she'd just remembered it existed, Cosmo announcing to Mission Control in his most dramatic voice that "the Celestial Rodentia has left the building, or, well, the planet," and Starlight allowing herself one small, real smile as she watched her numbers settle into a smooth, steady orbit.
Gizmo floated over and bumped Luna gently on the shoulder. "You okay? Really?"
Luna looked down at her paws, then out the window at the curve of the Earth falling away beneath them, blue and white and impossibly small already.
"I thought being a good pilot meant seeing everything myself," she said slowly. "That's what steady meant to me. Watching close enough that nothing could surprise me."
"And now?" Gizmo asked.
"Now I think steady means something a little different." Luna turned to look at her crewmates, all of them still buzzing with the joy of weightlessness, all of them the reason the separation had gone perfectly even though her own eyes had failed her at exactly the wrong moment. "I have a blind spot. Right in front of my nose, it turns out, which feels a little unfair. But I've got five other guinea pigs who can see and hear and read the gauges exactly where I can't. I don't have to catch everything myself. I just have to trust the crew who's filling in the gap."
"That," said Nova, drifting upside down now and clearly delighted about it, "sounds like a very good lesson for a pilot to learn on launch day."
"The best day to learn it," Luna agreed, and for the first time since sunrise, her paws weren't shaking at all.
Starlight drifted closer, still holding her screen, and said quietly, "For what it's worth, I wasn't just reading a gauge back there. I was watching for you the second you couldn't watch for yourself. That's kind of the job too."
Luna looked at her, surprised, then smiled. "I didn't know that's what having a crew meant. I thought it meant six pilots doing one pilot's job, just in case. Turns out it's more like one pilot with five extra sets of eyes."
"Six sets," Cosmo corrected, tapping the side of his helmet, "counting the ears."
Rocky pushed off the wall and drifted over to the window, peering out at the dark beyond the curve of the Earth. Far off, almost too small to notice unless you already knew where to look, hung a tiny reddish dot.
"Is that," he started.
"Mercury," Starlight confirmed quietly, checking her charts. "Still a long way off. But that's the direction we're headed."
The whole crew went quiet for a moment, looking at that small dot together, six guinea pigs floating in a metal ship that used to be strapped to the ground and was now, somehow, sailing through open space.
"Well," Gizmo said at last, breaking into a grin, "I suppose that means the next adventure is already waiting for us."
"Let it wait a little," Luna said, and pushed gently off her seat to float, weightless and unhurried, next to her whole crew. "Right now, I just want to look at this view. All three hundred and forty degrees of it. Even the parts I can't quite see."
A Celestial Rodentia adventure, brought to you by GCAGE.