by Jack Dann
“Yes, sir.” Tyler grasped the handrail surrounding the plotting table; Mickey and I had to settle for rungs here and there along the low ceiling. “We’ve retrieved a cache of uranium fuel rods from the objective, and have transported them to . . .”
“Yes, I know. I can see that.” The captain gestured to a flatscreen above a console to our left. Looking at it, I saw an image of the hangar deck. Several spacesuited figures were guiding the stolen fuel rod canister from the shuttle, allowing its weightless condition to do most of the heavy-lifting for them. At the aft end of the hangar, another crewman hovered near an open hatch, apparently waiting for them to pass through. “Well done. But. . .”
He paused, then looked past Tyler at both Mickey and me. “Apparently there were some unforeseen difficulties.”
“Yes, sir, there were.” Mickey moved a little closer. “Captain, we had problems almost as soon as we entered the vicinity.” She glanced back at me. “However, if it hadn’t been for ...”
“Sir, I must protest.” Tyler interrupted her. “Midshipman McGyver overstates the situation ...”
“She does, does she?” Van Owen raised an eyebrow; he hadn’t missed the way Tyler had emphasized her rank. “She hasn’t even told me what that is . . . and as I recall, she was in charge of the retrieval phase, not you.”
“Yes, but...” Tyler’s face colored. “Sir, she allowed an indigenous native to observe the operation.” The way he said native made it sound as if I wore a loincloth and had a bone in my nose. “She then brought him aboard, despite my objections ...”
“Sir, with all due respect, the native observed the operation on his own initiative.” Mickey spoke as if I wasn’t beside her. “There was nothing we could do to prevent his intervention . . .”
“No, sir, that’s not true.” Tyler jabbed a finger at me. “When I had an opportunity to stun him, she deliberately intervened, and when I insisted that he be left behind ...”
“Tell him what happened when we almost had to leave you behind.” Letting go of the ceiling rail, she pushed herself closer to Tyler. “Tell him what he did after you fell off the ladder.”
“That’s enough, both of you.” Although Van Owen’s voice remained low, both Mickey and Tyler clammed up. “Lt. Ionesco, I’ll remind you that it was my order, relayed to Lt. Wu, that this person be brought aboard. Ms. McGyver was simply following my instructions.”
That settled Tyler’s hash. “Yes, sir,” he murmured. “I didn’t understand that, sir. ”
“Now you do.” Ignoring both him and Mickey for a moment, the captain looked straight at me. “What’s your name, son?”
“Eric . . . Eric Cosby, sir.” My mouth felt dry. “Captain, sir, I didn’t mean to ... I mean, I wasn’t trying to . . .”
“Easy, boy. You were just caught up in something you didn’t understand.” He paused, studying all three of us. “Nonetheless, this is a serious situation . . . and Tyler, you’ve made some serious charges. I’ll speak to you alone.”
Tyler nodded, not looking back at Mickey and me. The captain gestured toward the hatch behind us. “Ms. McGyver, please escort Mr. Cosby to the observation lounge. Remain there and keep him company until I summon you.”
“Yes, sir.”
The captain hesitated. “And while you’re at it, tell him whatever he needs to know.” A wry smile appeared on his face. “He’s come this far . . . might as well let him learn the rest.”
The observation lounge was located on the deck below the bridge. Barely wide enough for three people to stand abreast, it had two circular portholes, each six feet in diameter, on either side of the compartment, with chairs anchored to the floor in front of them. Like the rest of the ship, the lounge was almost totally dark, save for a red emergency light glowing above the hatch.
“This is my favorite place on the ship.” Grasping a ceiling rail, Mickey led me to the two chairs facing the starboard viewport. “I don’t get a chance to come here very often, though . . . usually too busy. Would you like to sit, or . . . ?”
“Uh-uh. I’d just as soon . . . um, float, if it’s okay with you.” I couldn’t take my eyes from the starboard window. Once my eyes became accustomed to the darkness, I saw billions of stars— planets, suns, nebulae, distant galaxies—spread out before us in a broad swath, with the Moon an oval patch of darkness, sunlight forming a slender crescent around its western terminator.
“So would I.” Mickey grasped a handrail encircling the porthole, anchoring herself next to the window; I took hold of the rail on the other side. “This is a treat, believe me. No gravity . . . and the place all to ourselves.”
Better than the drive-in, that’s for sure. But that wasn’t what was on my mind. “Mickey . . . what’s going on here? Why are you ... I mean, why did you . . . ?”
“Of course. Questions.” She took a deep breath, then released the handrail and folded her legs together in a position that I would’ve called “sitting” if she wasn’t three feet above the floor. “It’s like this ...”
By the year 2337 (she explained), the human race had not only colonized most of Earth’s solar system—the Moon, Mars, the asteroid belt and the major satellites of Jupiter and Saturn, along with space stations as close as Venus and as distant as the Kuiper belt—but it had also ventured out to the nearby star systems: Alpha Centauri B, Wolf 359, Epsilon Eridani, and Bernard’s Star, among others. The development of nuclear engines had opened the solar system as a frontier during the 21st century; the subsequent invention of hyperspace travel during the 23rd century had carried humankind to the stars.
During this time, Earth’s nearby colonies decided to form the Solar System Confederation, a democratic alliance that sought to maintain trade and diplomatic ties among both the near-Earth colonies and the extrasolar settlements. This wasn’t an easy task; the colonies often quarreled, and more than once war had threatened to tear the union apart. So in order to keep the peace, as well as facilitate further colonization, the Solar Confederation Fleet was established.
The Vincennes was one of three heavy cruisers belonging to Mars, which—next only to Earth itself—was the most populated and politically powerful of the SSC worlds, particularly after it had been terraformed during the 22nd century. The Vincennes took its name from the flagship of the United States Exploratory Expedition of 1838, and was the oldest of its class; constructed at the Deimos shipyards in 2278, it remained in service until 2329, when it was retired from active duty and turned over to the Mars campus of the Confederation Fleet Academy as a training vessel.
“Whoa, Wait a minute ...” Hearing this, I held up a hand. “You mean this . . . ?” I looked around myself, at everything I’d seen so far. “You mean this is . . . this is just a training ship?”
“Sort of a letdown, isn’t it?” There was a sad look in her eyes as Mickey glanced up at the ceiling. “Maybe she doesn’t look it, but she’s obsolete. Range limited to only fifty light-years. Nothing like the ...”
“Okay, I get it.” I shook my head. Only fifty light-years . . . “So I guess that, compared to whatever else you guys have, it’s beat to crap ...”
“Hey, that’s my ship you’re talking about.” Mickey scowled at me, and suddenly I realized that I’d just crossed the line. “Maybe you think this is funny, but here in this century, your people still thought liquid-fuel rockets were ...”
“Easy. Easy.” I held up my hands. “Bad joke, okay? No offense.”
Mickey relaxed. Uncurling her legs, she grasped the rail again. “Of course. I forget that irony was a preferred form of humor in your . . . never mind. Let’s go on.”
When it departed from Phobos Station on Aquarius 47, 2337, the Vincennes’ crew included sixty-five cadets, ranging from ensigns to junior-grade lieutenants, along with ten senior officers who acted as their instructors. Not to mention Alex, whose full name was Alex Elevendee and who was just as much a part of the Vincennes as its lifeboats and life-extinguishing equipment: another piece of hardware, albeit a little mor
e conversational than, say, the toaster. This particular mission was the third one for the Class of ’38, and was supposed to be relatively simple: a quick jaunt through hyperspace from Mars to the Moon, a couple of orbits around Earth to test the cadets’ knowledge of planetary rendezvous procedures, then another jaunt back through hyperspace to Mars. No one had brought more than the clothes on their backs and their datapads; they’d fully expected to be home by evening mess.
“But it didn’t work out that way, did it?” I asked.
“No, it didn’t.” Mickey shook her head. “The jaygee at the navigation station laid in the wrong jump coordinates. He accidentally transposed the elements for the c-factor for the t-factor, which in turn caused ...” She caught the look on my face. “You haven’t had quantum mechanics, have you?”
I snapped my fingers, glanced up at the ceiling. “Gee, y’know, they offered it this year, but I went for trig instead because I heard it was a crib course.”
“Never mind.” From her expression, I could see that she couldn’t tell whether I was putting her on again or not. “Look, plotting a hyperspace jaunt is a very precise business. You’ve got to get everything right the first time, or ... ”
“Uh-huh. And I take it this guy screwed up.”
She nodded. “In a major way, yes. Oh, he got us to the Moon, all right. . . but through a curved timelike loop that opened a wormhole through the space-time continuum. So instead of arriving here in our own year ...”
“You arrived here in my year. Let me guess the rest . . . you can’t get back, right?”
“Oh, no. Returning to our time isn’t the problem. Once we realized what had happened, all we had to do was sort through the onboard log, detect where the mistake had been made, and figure out how to correct it. If everything had worked out as it should have, we could have been home in less than an hour.”
“So what went wrong?” I corrected myself. “I mean, what else went wrong?”
“Because the main computer detected a flaw in the flight profile, it automatically tripped the master alarm as soon as we came out of hyperspace. I was on the bridge when it happened, and it was really scary. All the lights went red, and then the horns went off all at once, and then ...”
Mickey suddenly stopped. Looking away from me, she gazed out the porthole at the far side of the Moon. “It... it was my fault,” she said quietly. “I was minding the power control station. I was confused, just as they’d warned us might happen when we came out of hyperspace, when I saw the red-alert light on my console, I. . .”
Now I saw a strange thing. Tiny bubbles, like miniature spheres of water, departing from the corners of her eyes, gently floating upward. Tears in the moonlight. A girl crying in zero-g.
“Mickey...” I leaned forward, touched her arm. “C’mon ...”
“I’m sorry. I’m still ...” She reached up to her face, dried her eyes. “I dumped the reactor,” she murmured. “The alarm confused me, and I ... I mean, we didn’t know what had happened. All I knew was . . . that is, I thought the main reactor was about to melt down, so I jettisoned the rods. Which is what they tell us to do in an emergency.”
“You use a nuclear reactor?” As soon as I said this, I knew it sounded dumb. What was I expecting, dilithium crystals? Perhaps nuclear fission hadn’t worked out so well in my time, but that didn’t mean it couldn’t be used three hundred years later. “Sorry. Go on ... so you dumped the reactor, and that meant ...”
She didn’t say anything, only looked at me, and that was when everything came together. Sure, the crew of the Vincennes knew how to get home . . . but without fuel for their reactor, there was no way they’d be able to make another jump through space-time. So they did what they had to do: parked the ship in lunar stationary orbit on the far side of the Moon, where it couldn’t be seen from Earth, and sent down a team to steal some nuclear fuel rods.
“So how did you . . . ?” I paused. “I mean, how did you know about Narragansett Point?”
“The ship’s library system has complete historical records.” Mickey snuffled back her tears. “Meant for download into colony computers for educational purposes. Someone did a little research and discovered that, in this time, your nuclear power plant was being decommissioned.” She shrugged. “That seemed to be the least dangerous means of getting what we needed. Minimal security ... or at least nothing that our stun guns and Alex couldn’t take down ...”
“I was wondering about that. All those guards, and the guys inside the plant...”
“We used a sleeper. Sort of like a grenade, only it emits an electromagnetic pulse that temporarily disrupts higher brain functions. We hid in the vehicle we’d stolen while Alex penetrated the front gate, then detonated the sleeper to knock out the sentries.”
“Right. Got it.” But that still left much unexplained. “But if you guys knew about our nuke, then why come into town? Why ask me for directions?”
“We knew there was a plant near Bellingham, but we didn’t know exactly where it was located. Also, we needed to take out the security and find the spent fuel before we could bring in the shuttle to take it away. That was my part of the operation. So very early this morning, Hsing dropped us just outside town, then landed the shuttle out in the hills and waited for us to send him a signal. We hiked in, stole an automobile and hid it in an alley, then broke into a shop to steal some clothes ...”
“I know about that.” I tried not to grin as I glanced at her Dead T-shirt and faux-fur overcoat. “Someone should’ve told you how we dress in my century. You guys stuck out.”
“We did?” She looked down at herself, and laughed. “Well, what do I know? Besides, we would’ve looked even stranger in our academy uniforms.” Mickey sighed. “But I think our biggest mistake was asking you for directions.”
“Thanks a lot . . .”
“No!” Her eyes widened. “I didn’t mean it that way. It’s just that our orders were to avoid contact with the inhabitants as much as possible.” She frowned. “But Tyler was in charge of that part of the operation, and he became frustrated when we couldn’t find a map that would show us exactly where the plant was located. So when he saw you ...”
“Let me guess. Since I’m your age, he figured that asking me for directions wouldn’t be as risky as talking to an adult. Right?”
"Something like that.” She gave me a grim smile. “It wasn’t the first mistake Tyler made. The first was setting the wrong coordinates for the hyperspace jump.”
“He . . . ?” Now it was my turn to be surprised. “I don’t get it. If you two were the guys responsible for this mess, why did the captain pick you to . . . ?”
“Because we were responsible.” She let out her breath. “One of the first things they teach us in the academy is that, if you make a critical error, you’re the one who has to make it right. ”
“You break it, you bought it.” She gave me a quizzical look, and I smiled. “Something we say in my time.”
“ ‘You break it, you bought it.’ ” Mickey smiled as she repeated my words. “I like that. Anyway, once we knew how to find the plant, we went out there, and . . . well, you know the rest.”
“Yeah, okay.” Then I thought about it for a moment. “No, I don’t. What good would nuclear waste do you? I mean, what you stole were spent fuel rods. How could you . . . ?”
“Only about three-quarters of the U-235 contained within nuclear fuel rods is actually consumed during fission. The rest gets thrown away along with the U-237 and plutonium waste . . . or at least by the standards by which 20th century nuclear power plants normally operated. But our ships are designed to reprocess spent fuel rods from other ships in the event of an emergency.” She nodded in the general direction of the stern. “Right now, nanites are disassembling those uranium-dioxide pellets, molecule by molecule, and recombining the usable U-235 as fuel for our reactor. Believe me, it’s a very fast process. We should be back to full power any minute now.”
“Oh, I believe you.” I remembered how quick
ly nanites in the floor of the shuttle had cleaned up my vomit. Maybe it wasn’t the most savory example of the wonders of the 24th century, but nonetheless it was the one that came to mind. “Then ...”
Then? Then nothing. She’d told me everything I needed to know, just as the captain had told her to do. Once again, I gazed out the window. Here I was, aboard a starship lurking above the dark side of the Moon, farther from Earth than anyone had ever been before. I should have been awestruck, or delirious with wonder, or . . . something, I don’t know what. Yet instead, I only felt hollow. Something was missing, but I didn’t know what it was . .
“Eric?”
“Yeah?” I didn’t look at her. “What?”'
For a moment, Mickey said nothing. Then I felt her come closer to me, and as I turned around, she took my face within her hands, looked me straight in the eye, and kissed me.
Exactly three times before, a girl had given me a kiss. I won’t go into details about the earlier ones, but take my word for it: this was the best one yet.
And, by the way, did I forget to mention that zero-g is really cool?
It might have lasted longer, but then a shrill alarm came over a ceiling speaker. Hearing this, Mickey reluctantly pulled herself away from me. “Inertial dampeners are coming back online,” she murmured. “We’re going to get gravity again in about ten seconds.” She reached up to grasp the ceiling rail. “Brace yourself.”
I had just enough time to grab the rail myself before we went from microgravity to one-g. This time, I was ready for it; no puking in front of my new girlfriend, or at least not for the second time tonight. We waited until the alarms shut off, then dropped to the floor.
“Thanks.” I took a deep breath, then took a step closer to her. “So, where were we . . . ?”
Mickey blushed, but she didn’t back away as I took her hands. “I think I was thanking you for ...”
The hatch clicked, and we had a chance to retreat from each other before it swung open. Then the ceiling lights came open; squinting against the abrupt glare, I looked around to see Tyler standing in the hatchway.