First Flight

by Claremont, Chris

  "Oho! The l'il lady with fire in her eyes! I'd better pay attention."

  "Take the hint, mister..."

  "Major, Lieutenant. Daniel Morgan, USAF—retired."

  Good riddance, Nicole thought, but said: "You've accomplished your goal. You've wrecked our evening. Why not quit while you're ahead?"

  Morgan leaned forward and made a show of reading her ID tag. If he touches me, she decided, I'll break his fucking arms. He didn't, but the alcohol stench of his breath was enough to make her stomach lurch. "Shea!" he cried in delight and she wondered why he recognized her name; so far as she knew, they'd never met. At the same time, and without quite knowing why, she realized that if a fight started between them, it would be to the death. The look in Morgan's eyes told her he was just as aware of that and even looking forward to it. What the hell is going on here, she wondered desperately, this is crazy! "I should have recognized you sooner, cutie," he told her. "I am indeed honored to make your acquaintance; the fame of your family name precedes you."

  "Really?"

  "Ask Canfield, it's her precious little secret." He turned towards Elias, sloppily refilling his glass from the table's bottle of wine. "Naughty little trick you tried to pull this morning, Davy-boy. You think Jud'll appreciate how you tried to con her protege into a resignation when she'd already said the kid stays? Tsk-tsk-tsk! Ought'a be ashamed of yourself!" Nicole kept her focus on Morgan, but out of the corner of an eye she saw Elias's face become an emotionless mask; the accusation had struck home, and it had been said loudly enough to be heard at the tables around them. So much for an environment built on universal trust, Nicole thought bitterly. But why? What made him try such a thing? Politics with the General—something, impossible as that sounded, to do with me? He'll never tell. I wonder if I'll ever learn?

  Morgan, reading the confused questions on her face, seemed about to elaborate when he noticed that Marshal Ciari had slipped silently around the table to stand behind him.

  "I'm not asking, Major." Ciari's voice was as unassuming as his manner, deceptively casual. "Leave. This table, this establishment and, as soon as possible, the Moon."

  "Get outta town, huh, Marshal?"

  "Precisely."

  "That's a violation of my Civil Liberties."

  "As you are of ours. Disturbing the peace. Public nuisance. Drunk and Disorderly." A slight pause for emphasis. "Resisting arrest."

  "An old favorite, that, with you law-enforcement types." Ciari didn't rise to Morgan's bait and the Major evidently decided he'd pushed the outside of tonight's social envelope far enough. "Well, I don't want to be any bother...." He lumbered to his feet, taking Canfield's wine with him as he reeled towards the door. Nearly there, he staggered, seemed to trip, and careered into General Canfield's Vice-Commander who was just entering the Oak Room with his wife. Admiral Sheridan's face twisted with anger when he saw who'd hit him but, with an effort, he mastered himself, pulled back a step and saluted. Morgan returned it sloppily and continued on his way, his mocking laughter echoing after him.

  Nicole sensed Paul's outrage by her side. The young man's eyes shot daggers towards Elias, and she knew he was about to say something that would probably destroy his career. She moved quickly, instinctively, to head him off. "Did you see that?" she whispered, leaning as close as she could to him. "Admiral Sheridan actually saluted that sonofabitch!" At the same time, she caught his eye. Lay off, she commanded silently. Keep your peace.

  "It's customary, Ms. Shea," Cat said tightly. "Officers on active duty, regardless of service or rank, are required to salute holders of the Congressional Medal of Honor."

  "With respect, Major, General Canfield wears the medal, too. Why didn't she do something when that bastard insulted her?"

  "That 'bastard,' Lieutenant, is an authentic hero!"

  "I don't believe it!"

  "You have no right to judge," she snapped, the rawness of her emotion making her West Texas accent more pronounced. "In his day, which wasn't all that long ago, Daniel Morgan was the best!"

  Elias, who, Nicole realized, hadn't missed the exchange between her and Paul in the slightest, told the story: "His cruiser was shepherding a Cobri, Associates freighter Inbound from Titan when they were jumped by a Wolfpack. Textbook ambush. When it was over, the freighter was a gutted hulk, the cruiser not much better. Morgan bundled the survivors into a lifeboat and headed for the Sun. As things turned out, the nearest planetfall was Earth itself. The trip took seven months, but he brought his people home."

  "For which feat," Cat Garcia interrupted savagely, "NASA and the Air Force, in their infinite wisdom, gave him a medal—and a medical discharge. He was a hero, but they dumped him!"

  "It wasn't quite that simple, Major," Canfield said as she returned to her seat, surprisingly calm and relaxed considering what had occurred. Nicole wondered how much she had seen and what she made of it. "The Medical Board examined Morgan and concluded that his ordeal had left him permanently psychologically unfit for active service as an Astronaut. We offered administrative and teaching assignments, but he refused, preferring retirement with full disability pay. I understand he's done quite well for himself since, as a private spacer."

  "But isn't that an indication that the Board may have made a mistake?"

  "The criteria and responsibilities are markedly different between civilian and military operations, Cat. And I hardly think this is the time or place for such a discussion."

  "I'm sorry, ma'am. But it seems like such a godawful waste; Dan taught me everything I know."

  "His gifts were—are—undeniable but they're not enough. I've seen nothing since his hearing to convince me that my decision was wrong."

  "I was in that boat, too. I'd be dead if not for him."

  "He broke, you didn't. No one else could have done what he did, Catherine, but the wounds cut too deep. I know how close you were, I know what this cost you, but it's done."

  Canfield's gaze swept the table, fixing first on Paul, then on Nicole. No one dared say a word. "My apologies for this scene," she said finally, in a tone that made it clear the subject was closed. "Daniel Morgan was a respected and popular officer, deservedly so, and the circumstances of his retirement did not, and do not, sit well with a great many officers. Since I signed the Medical Board's report, approving their recommendations, his feelings for me are something special.

  "On this note, I believe I'll say goodnight. Please, stay, finish your meal. Wanderer is scheduled to depart Lunar orbit in six weeks. I strongly suggest you get as much rest tomorrow as possible—Ms. Shea and Mr. DaCuhna, especially—because I guarantee it's the last you'll enjoy for a considerable time. Preliminary flight orientation begins at 0700 the morning after, in Dr. Elias's office. "Heaven help you, if you're late."

  Chapter Three

  It was four weeks before they boarded the spacecraft, in her parking orbit a thousand kilometers above the Moon, twenty-eight jam-packed days that began on the mark at seven and, with occasional meal and bathroom breaks, lasted till midnight. In classrooms, they pored over briefing books on the mission and design schematics of the vessel that would be their home—their world—for the better part of a year, learning every aspect of Wanderer and her myriad systems. From there, they went into the maintenance facility for hands-on experience with Da Vinci's full-size mock-up, picking modules apart, stripping down the main engines—done in full pressure suits and radiation armor, just like in space—tracing wiring for endless miles through the body of the giant cruiser, until it seemed to them that they were as familiar with the spacecraft as the people who'd built her. At the same time, Elias's team put them through their paces in the simulator, beginning with the mundane, an introduction to basic flight operations, but quickly advancing to all manner of problems. Nicole and Paul faced systems failures, equipment malfunctions, natural disasters, combat. Everything from a family of mice in the ventilation ducts to a black hole, from deep-space rescue to planetfall, a feat Wanderer was never designed to perform. More often
than not, they died.

  Finally, a month into training, a fortnight before departure—to Nicole, it felt like a lifetime either way—they transferred up to Wanderer herself. She was huge and built for function rather than aesthetics, yet Nicole thought her the most beautiful thing she'd ever seen and blushed to realize it. Like a storybook sea captain, she thought, as the shuttle soared over the Lunar pole towards rendezvous, and I don't really care how ugly she looks. She's mine! And yet, with only fourteen days left until their scheduled departure, she wondered how they would get everything ready.

  From Command Module to exhaust, Wanderer was a long-stemmed toadstool 217 meters long—well over six hundred feet—the forward third the crew's living and working environment, the middle for stores, the rear consisting of fuel and ion-pulse engines. The CM stood at the apex of the central core, a gently pointed dome, with flight deck view ports directly below the nose. If all else fails, Nicole figured with a grin that no one else saw, at least the crew can see where we're going. Ringing the CM's base were hatchways for the small Rover craft, two work, two exploratory and two combat vehicles, for going places and doing things that the far larger and more cumbersome cruiser could not.

  Below the Command Module was "Home," two rotating "carousels," roughly thirty meters in diameter and fifteen thick, wherein the astronauts would live and work in a gravity field provided by the rings spinning around the central axis—hence, the nickname. The "carousels" were necessary because of the debilitating effects on the human body of extended periods of weightlessness; their main drawback was that the coriolis effect produced by the spin tended to be rather extreme. The floor was the outer shell of the ring but things dropped or liquids poured within it tended to fall a little sideways, in the direction of that spin, as well as down. It was a strange sensation but you quickly got used to it, or so Nicole had been told.

  Living quarters were in the upper stage, labs and the hydroponics greenhouse in the lower. Next along the core were the massive bulk storage modules, which held most of their supplies, followed by the communications and sensor antenna array. This, too, could be rotated around the core, to allow for the most precise possible alignment on target.

  Then came the fuel stacks and the engines themselves. Secondary thrusters were mounted on gimbals forward and aft, so that the spacecraft could be shifted along any axis, vertical or horizontal.

  Once aboard—the shuttle docked with a vacant Rover bay—Nicole was the first to crack her helmet and take a breath of Wanderer air. It had a homey, lived-in smell. They'd discovered only too well that she wasn't a new ship, in design or construction. Not what she'd expected but it wasn't bad. For most of the week that followed, she and Paul shared the ship with the training team, putting the finishing touches on their transition from schoolroom to reality. Like any machine, Wanderer had her idiosyncrasies, which in turn had to be learned the hard way, through experience. The trick was to make sure you knew how to handle the glitches when you ran into them.

  Throughout this shakedown process, Cat Garcia stayed mostly in the background. Some days, they hardly saw her, though she was aware of every move they made. She left Nicole and Paul on their own to make and hopefully discover their own mistakes. Surprisingly, there were few errors and all were caught by the rookies; in spite of herself, Cat was impressed, as was Elias, but they still double and triple-checked the novices' performance. More than a few good men and women had been killed by overconfidence and Cat had learned the hard way to take nothing for granted.

  That same week, the Mission Specialists began loading and stowing their gear, the crew spending as much time aboard the spacecraft as dirtside at Da Vinci. They divvied up the cubicles and got to know one another. The first night they were all together, Nicole went eyeball to eyeball with Ciari over a poker deck and learned that, good as she'd been on Earth, she'd met her match. She ruefully figured that in a year's time, if they kept playing, and she was certain they would, assuming the best, she'd owe him somewhere close to the National Debt.

  When they tested the "Carousel," running it up to two-thirds Earth-normal gravity, Andrei christened the galley by making crepes and everyone except Cat and Ciari made a mess of the compartment and themselves trying to pour the wine. Nicole had trouble sleeping, too, so much so that she eventually climbed up to the flight deck and curled up in her seat at the control console. She was worried. If she couldn't hack the "Carousel," that would effectively scrub her from the Mission, and NASA. But the gripes and rude comments at the breakfast table told her the other novices felt pretty much the same. This, too, would pass. Paul handled the computer and marveled to her at the size of its memory banks; then, they started loading programs and wondered how the hell everything would fit. An extraordinary amount of file space was devoted to entertainment—books, music, films, games—because the most dangerous enemy they had to face was boredom and the last thing they could afford was getting on each other's nerves. They couldn't work all the time and yet dared not lose their edge. The "goof programs were meant to make that a bit easier.

  On Wednesday, four days before Wanderer's scheduled departure, the crew was still commuting between the spacecraft and DaVinci; there was a helluva lot left to do but they were on track, the end was in sight. However, a routine check of the primary dish antenna revealed that one of the components had failed; Hana and Paul tinkered with it for an hour before deciding that it was a total wreck. Without the module, there was no way to keep the antenna locked onto the huge communications arrays on Luna and Earth, so it had to be replaced at once. There were three complete sets of spares, but since there was time they decided to grab the new unit from dirtside storage and took the shuttle down, leaving Nicole the only one aboard.

  Or so she thought. She was on the flight deck, working through the weapons systems checklist, when a sealed teapak floated past her nose, making her yelp in surprise. She grabbed for it, managing to catch the cup an instant before it splattered against the console.

  "Butterfingers," Ciari said as he pushed off the ceiling and eased his long, lanky form into the chair beside her.

  "Christ, you scared me! I thought I was on my own for a while."

  "Certainly for the night, by the looks of things. I'll wager DaCuhna and Murai have plans." Nicole snorted in mock disgust. It was hard to hide an incandescent smile and each lit up like a nova the moment the other entered the room. "I was on the shuttle," Ciari explained. "I should have reported in. Sorry, I'm too used to operating on my own."

  "No harm done, except to my nerves. 'On your own,' in a singleship?" He nodded. "I thought that wasn't allowed."

  "We Marshals tend to make our own rules."

  "So I've heard."

  He leaned towards her to get a better look at the ring-bound notebook clipped to the console. "How's it going?" he asked.

  "Page seven," Nicole replied, trying a cautious sip of tea before setting the cup aside to cool. "Only about forty more to go in this chapter, and that just covers the weapons board. The whole bloody book relates to the command console and it's five centimeters thick! There are a dozen like it, dealing with every aspect of spacecraft operations. This one's the smallest, and Paul and I had to memorize them all!"

  "Life is tough."

  "You're a great help." She shook her head. "Somehow, they didn't seem so big, or imposing, in class."

  "Nothing to lose in class."

  She reached out, hesitantly touching the candy-striped safety shields on the firing switches. "I still find it hard to imagine us ever getting into a fight."

  "We certainly have the hardware for one."

  "Yah! Missiles and anti-missile laser batteries on Wanderer herself, plus two Rover strikecraft loaded for bear with mini-missiles, rapid-fire gattling gun cannon, HighPower laser, plus hand weapons of all sizes and shapes. Plus battle armor. Y'know, Marshal, we could wage ourselves a fair-sized war with this lot."

  "It's been done."

  She looked at Ciari. He wasn't in uniform fatigues,
but a sweat-suit that softened his rough edges. He lounged easily in the chair. After weeks of close association Nicole recognized this as a pose. He could go into action anytime, without warning and to deadly effect. His mahogany hair was thinning at the temples, unfashionably long and clipped into a ponytail with a turquoise and silver clasp. His left ear was pierced twice, for a small silver ring and a ruby star, the latter according to rumor a farewell gift from a Russian colleague. There were very few facts known about him—like all Marshals, his personnel file was sealed—and he wasn't given to conversation, friendly or otherwise; indeed, this was the most relaxed and forthcoming she'd ever seen him. From the first, Nicole trusted him implicitly, but she didn't know yet if she liked him. He scared her. He was too much the loner, the hunter. The killer.

  Unless those stories were lies.

  "Ever been in a firefight, Marshal?"

  "In one of these buckets?" He shook his head, making no secret of his contempt.

  "But you've seen your share of action?"

  "I'm a Senior Marshal, Lieutenant, it comes with the territory."

  "Have you killed?"

  "None of your fucking business."

  She flushed at the flat dismissal in his voice, feeling thirteen years old and the consummate fool. "I'm sorry," she stammered, "I didn't mean to pry."

  "Bullshit. You've been dying to ask me since we met, you and DaCuhna both."

  "You have to admit, the tales they tell about you people are pretty incredible."

  "So?"

  "I was curious."

  "You'll learn soon enough."

  Nicole sipped some tea. "That's what my parents said about sex."

  "Probably didn't pay 'em any heed, either."

  "Suppose I freeze?"

  "You'll die. Or kill someone who's depending on you."

  "That's brutal."

  "It's the way we live up here."

  "I'm asking for help, Marshal!"

  "It isn't available, Lieutenant, not the kind you want. The moment, the experience, is unique for everyone who faces it. Yours could come with the press of a button and the detonation of a multi-megaton nuke a million miles away, or hand to hand, popping some bastard's helmet."