The noise was so deafening that I did not notice her standing next to me until I felt a small hand touch my shoulder. I looked down to the short brunette at my side. Alicia. Unable to talk we just stood there looking up at the sky. Just like the day we first met.
That had been on my second day of ComServe. When we start twelfth form the Council issues us students ComServe assignments. Nothing very complicated. At the port, we mostly delivered afternoon snacks -- nothing that couldn’t be automated. But then, as Hank points out, ComServe is to teach us Duty and Humility. Where would the community service be in letting a robot do something we could?
As the only twelver assigned to the spaceport, I had been given the grunt run. None of the older students like driving the hovercarts out to the mechanics. They prefer serving the Admins, the Planet Hoppers and the SecPols. They’re all indoors, in clean, climitized rooms. The grunts are outside where the ships are.
Although at first I had been excited, I rapidly got discouraged. The mechanics were rude. They called me a lot of slang words I’m sure were insults, like “groundhog." The heat was stifling, as was the stench of the lubricants. Then I saw a ship launch.
When a ship goes up, nothing stands still. It’s not so much the noise; Hank says the old rocket engines were much louder. With these modern ships the only real sound is the sonic boom about four kilometers up. No, it’s more the wind, rushing to follow the ship upward, pulling with it all the heat and smells, leaving a brief patch of crisp air, tingling like after a thunder shower.