Gateway Chapter 8: Learning to Fly Ships Nobody Understands

Chapter 8 is long. It is also one of the best chapters so far. After the emotional wreckage of Chapter 7’s therapy session, we are back on Gateway. And now Rob starts learning what it actually means to be a prospector.

Hungover Morning

Rob wakes up feeling terrible. Too many drinks at the Blue Hell the night before. But someone is knocking at his door with tea. It is Shikitei Bakin, the man with no legs and the wing-like fabric that Rob met in Chapter 6.

Shikitei is kind. He brings tea. He is gentle. And every time Rob sees him, he is reminded of what Gateway can do to a person.

After the tea, Rob drags himself to a quick medical exam and then heads to his first class.

First Class with Jimmy Chou

The instructor is Jimmy Chou. He teaches the basics: ship-handling, surviving alien environments, and recognizing trade goods when you find them. The stuff that might keep you alive out there.

Chou takes them to see actual Heechee landers. This is when the numbers hit you.

The Heechee left 924 ships on Gateway. About 200 of those never worked. Of the rest, 304 have been tested. Only 33 are available for missions at any given time.

And here is the part that should scare anyone with basic math skills. About 80% of missions come back empty. The crew finds nothing, earns nothing, and wasted weeks or months of their life. About 15% of missions do not come back at all. The crew is just gone. Dead or lost somewhere in space with no rescue coming.

That leaves roughly 5% of missions that find something valuable. One in twenty. And you are betting your life on those odds.

Ship Classes

Chou explains the ship types. They come in three sizes.

Ones are solo ships. One person, one seat. You go alone, you come back alone, or you do not come back.

Threes carry three people. Most common for missions.

Fives carry five people. They tend to go to more dangerous places. Nobody knows exactly why. Maybe the Heechee sent bigger crews to harder destinations. Maybe it is just bad luck. But the statistics for Fives are worse than Ones or Threes.

The math is simple. Bigger ship, more danger, but also a bigger potential payout split fewer ways. Wait, no. Split more ways. So you need a bigger find to make it worthwhile. The economics of Gateway are brutal in every direction.

Enter Klara

Then Chou introduces his assistant instructor. Gelle-Klara Moynlin.

We have heard this name before. In the therapy chapters, Klara is the woman Rob cannot talk about without falling apart. The woman Sigfrid keeps pushing him toward. The source of all that guilt and pain.

And here she is. Walking into the classroom for the first time.

Klara has been out twice. Two missions. No score either time. She came back alive but empty-handed. Now she teaches to cover living costs while she waits for another chance.

Rob is immediately attracted to her. Pohl does not write a big romantic moment. It is just there. Rob notices her. Something shifts.

Knowing what we know from the therapy chapters, watching Rob meet Klara for the first time is like watching someone walk toward a cliff in slow motion. You know this ends badly. You just do not know how.

Inside a Three

Klara takes the students inside a Three-class ship. And Pohl gives us a detailed look at what these Heechee ships are like.

There is a mysterious golden spiral inside. Nobody knows what it does. It is just there, built into the ship, doing nothing anyone can figure out. The Heechee left no manuals.

Then there is the target selector. A column of spoked wheels. You turn them to set your destination. The problem is they are incredibly hard to move. They were built for Heechee hands, not human ones. And nobody fully understands the relationship between the wheel positions and where you end up.

Think about that for a second. You are climbing into a ship built by aliens who vanished thousands of years ago. The controls do not make sense. The navigation system is a puzzle nobody has solved. You turn some wheels, push a button, and hope you end up somewhere that does not kill you.

This is not space exploration. This is space lottery. And people do it because the alternative is the food mines.

The Diamond-Shaped Box

Pohl drops a detail in the world-building inserts about a diamond-shaped box found in every ship. Nobody knows what it does. Safety rules say do not touch it, do not mess with it, do not try to open it.

Naturally, this makes you extremely curious about it. Pohl is great at planting these little mysteries. The golden spiral. The diamond box. The missing Heechee. Everything about Gateway raises questions that might never get answered.

Sheri in the Night

That night, Sheri comes to Rob’s room. Not for sex. She just needs someone to be there. She is scared.

This is a small moment but it tells you a lot about the emotional climate on Gateway. Everyone here is terrified. They cover it with drinking and gambling and bravado, but at night, alone in a tiny room on an asteroid in space, the fear comes back. Sheri needs a warm body next to hers. Rob is the closest thing to comfort she can find.

The Siren

Then a siren goes off. A ship is coming back.

Rob and Sheri rush to the docking bay with everyone else. And what they see is not a triumphant return.

The Three-class ship has been split open by heat. Something went catastrophically wrong during the flight. The hull is cracked. Inside, the crew is dead.

Pohl does not spare you the details. The smell. The sight. The reality of what “15% do not come back” looks like when it comes back anyway, just wrong.

Sheri is terrified. Everyone is. This is not a statistic anymore. This is three dead people in a broken alien ship. This is what can happen to you. This is what might happen to you.

And tomorrow, people will still sign up for missions. Because the food mines are still worse.

Who Owns Gateway

Between the narrative sections, Pohl includes a breakdown of Gateway’s corporate structure. The asteroid is owned and managed by an international consortium. Multiple countries and corporations have stakes. There are politics, jurisdictions, competing interests.

Gateway is not just a launchpad for space prospectors. It is a business. A very profitable one. The house always wins. The prospectors take all the risk, the Corporation takes most of the reward, and everyone pretends this is fair because the prospectors technically agreed to it.

There is also a note about shower pricing. Because of course even water costs money on Gateway. Every basic human need has a price tag. Breathing, washing, eating. The asteroid squeezes money out of you whether you fly or not.

What Matters Here

Chapter 8 does three big things.

First, it shows us how insane the Gateway system really is. The odds, the ships nobody understands, the controls nobody can read. This is institutionalized gambling with human lives.

Second, it introduces Klara in the timeline where Rob actually meets her. We have been hearing about her in therapy for chapters. Now she is real. She is a teacher who has failed twice and is trying again. And Rob is drawn to her immediately.

Third, it shows us death. Not as a statistic or a risk assessment. As a cracked-open ship with bodies inside. Pohl makes sure you understand what the stakes actually are before Rob gets on a ship himself.

The training chapters are where Gateway stops being an idea and starts being a place where people die. Rob is learning the ropes. But the rope might be a noose.

Previous: Chapter 7 - Childhood Breakdown

Next: Chapter 9 - Buying Love