Heart's Refuge

by M. L. Buchman

  “There’s a difference between calculated risk and suicide.”

  He’d followed her missions?

  “Do you follow all the Night Stalkers?” They weren’t exactly public record—hell, most of her missions were extremely classified. But there was a fraternity among pilots that Brody did a better job of fitting into that than she did. He’d be able to get the stories if he tried.

  “Just yours,” it was barely a gruff mumble.

  “Why do you do this?” She waved toward Earth because she wasn’t comfortable pursuing why he followed her missions.

  He tapped for a full orbital display which filled the space between them. It made his face hard to read and any continuing conversation awkward. He didn’t speak, though she could see his jaw working hard.

  “They’re on a decaying ballistic arc.” Instead of reaching true orbit, their trajectory was off. They were going to make three orbits, then… The reality caught in her throat.

  “Early in the fourth orbit they’ll reenter and burn up,” Brody concluded softly.

  “We can’t cross through the I-Beam Zone!”

  “Even if they don’t fire off the I-Beam, these Lifters will already be in reentry by then. We have to find a way to catch them sooner.”

  Karina checked the fuel load and ran some rough calcs in her head. They were going to have to catch them in their second orbit to have time to get the Lifters offloaded before the I-Beam came over the horizon.

  “How about this?” She tapped out a course.

  “That places us inside the Aussie protection dome.”

  She spun the projection and saw that it did. The only other big Eastern Hemi player—the Australia-New Zealand dome—wasn’t playing at all. They’d put up an energy field and disappeared behind it three decades ago. No one had heard from them since. The dome was huge, reaching well beyond the atmosphere. Anything that hit its silvered surface disappeared in a flash of static discharge and was never seen again—no debris, nothing. Broken down to component molecules and no one knew how they did it. They weren’t telling either.

  Karina studied the problem again. Angle of insertion, delta-vee, the I-Beam Zone, the dome…the factors swirled about her. She looked out at the Earth, like a perfect blue-and-white Skyball, glittering among the stars. They were directly above the sunlit, daytime sky and the old planet glittered. There was no way to see the problems from up here: the disease, the political and religious rifts, the pollution, the radiation.

  And then she superimposed all the factors and obstacles in her mind on the actual Earth. It was one of those tricks that she’d concluded made her such an exceptional pilot. Others relied completely on the virtual projections, but she could see the multiple orbits in her head, superimposed on the real world.

  She finally saw one, and only one possibility. She keyed it in without looking.

  Chapter 5

  “Oh my god, you’ve totally lost it!” Brody looked at the shift in the projection. It broke a hundred safety rules. Maybe two hundred. He’d never have thought of that in a million years. The stress factors on the Mod18’s structure began rolling up the screen: a lot of yellow but, surprisingly, no red. Even factoring in her present condition, it should be okay.

  “But that’s…” he ran out of words. It was elegant. Risky, wild, and wholly unorthodox, but there was a beauty to it that told him it would work. There was no time to decide, but he didn’t need any. If Karina said it was good—

  He rammed his thumb down and print-authorized the course change into the flight computer.

  “Hang on! We’re—” his warnings to Vetch and Warwick in the rear were chopped off by the hard burn.

  A muttered curse was all that came over the intercom.

  Maybe he should have given them a little more warning. It didn’t really matter; the intercept wasn’t the hard part. It was the escape that was going to get interesting.

  They caught up with the Lifters over the remains of Canmerica East. The Melt had drowned most of the coastal cities, except New York which had built a skyscraper-high dike wall. Then in a final fit of isolationist paranoia, they’d dropped an asteroid on the Isthmus of Panama to cut apart the two continents—as if nations in South America didn’t have a navy or a space force.

  Brazil had collapsed early on, which hadn’t surprised anyone. But Argentina and Chile had joined together and retaliated with a line of meteor strikes from Quebec to Atlanta. Canmerica East had no longer existed by the time of The Exodus.

  He and Karina caught up to the Lifter halfway through their second orbit.

  “That was beautiful, Karina.”

  “Thanks,” she kept her head down, studying the controls.

  Brody temporarily cleared the nav projection and looked right at her over the much simpler docking control layout they’d need in a few minutes. “Seriously, Karina. I wouldn’t have come up with that in a decade.”

  “Actually, Brody, you already did. Last semester of flight school, Advanced Orbital Mechanics. There was a problem in the seventh chapter I couldn’t get.”

  He vaguely remembered her tracking him down one night with a flight problem. It was the one time she’d come to his room—which was what he really remembered.

  “I was so afraid I was going to flunk out if I missed it.”

  “It was only one problem, Karina. You always worried too much. You were the top of the entire class. And the way you flew, there wasn’t a chance of them failing you.”

  “I’d spent two days on it. You said you hadn’t looked at it yet, but you cracked it in under an hour.”

  Impressing Karina Rostov had been plenty of motivation. He didn’t even remember the problem now. But he could picture her electric smile the moment she’d understood his approach on it. Her kiss had been no mere peck of thanks. It hadn’t been romantic either, but it had sizzled in his mind for all of the years since. His “one big moment” with her—how utterly pitiful.

  A squawk from the computer forced him to focus on the docking procedure. Mating up with the old Ariane rockets was always a challenge. They’d never been engineered for human transport, so the fabricated ship-mating collars were often a challenge. More than one Lifter hadn’t thought it through beforehand. Open-space transfer without spacesuits had a very low survival rate. One Lifter ship hadn’t had a hatch at all and there’d been no way to cut one in time before they fell and burned up during reentry. That one had been hardest—their radio had worked most of the way down.

  Thankfully, these people had installed a universal docking collar on the side of the instrument delivery shell. He let Karina bring the ships together. Letting his hands ride on their linked controls, he could feel the incredible subtlety of skill she achieved as if it was second nature.

  There was a hard clang as the hulls came together, but the connection showed all green and was holding pressure. He left the problem of station-keeping to hold the ships together with the flight computer.

  “Come on,” he signaled Karina to unbuckle as he did the same. “This can be the hard part, but it can also be so good. And just in case…” he tapped his sidearm.

  Karina checked her own then nodded her understanding.

  They floated back to the belly hatch where Warwick waited. Vetch had the medical station warmed up.

  “Do it,” he gave the command to proceed.

  Chapter 6

  Karina forgot to breathe while the hatches were opened.

  How could Brody not remember that night? It had shaped so much of her flying ever since. He’d shown her a new way of conceptualizing orbits that had rocked her mental world. With a simple screen of calcs, he had revealed a level of mastery behind his easy-going exterior that had humbled her. He had made her a different pilot, a better one.

  She stole a glance over at him, but he wasn’t watching the hatch, he was watching her. He looked aside quickly.

  Felice had said that Brody was mooning over Queen Bitch Rostov. What possible reason…

  Then she
remembered something else about that long-ago night. She’d kissed him in thanks. It had been an unthinking gesture that she’d felt mostly embarrassed about. A senior pilot had been waiting for her that night and yet she’d kissed another man. Now, she couldn’t even remember the pilot’s name.

  She’d also forgotten that kiss. Apparently Brody Jones hadn’t.

  What sort of a woman was she that she’d blocked all that out? Easy answer: Queen Bitch Rostov. Yet somehow Brody always saw past that. She now knew that was part of why she kept being drawn back to him. Because only Brody Jones saw her differently than everyone else did—even herself.

  “I—” she turned to him, but his attention was now riveted on the first of the Lifters emerging awkwardly from the hatch that joined the two ships—unused to the zero-gee of space. A man, a woman, two teenage girls, a small boy. They were emaciated and weeping. They kept touching Brody’s crewmates as if to make sure they were real. They arrived in a cloud of smells she couldn’t separate. Salt tears, body odors, and something she didn’t recognize that reminded her of the hydroponic farms but was a hundred times more powerful. It made her wonder what humanity had lost in leaving Earth.

  More people followed and the ritual was the same. A broken arm was routed over to Vetch’s med station. There were any number of black-and-blue marks that they’d feel later. Soon there were forty people crowded in the Mod18’s bay. No more followed.

  “Stay here,” Brody told her before leveraging himself down into the Lifter’s hatch.

  She ignored him and pulled herself through the hatch too.

  The odors were different in here. The sharp tang of fear and human waste—released in fear or…

  A woman stared at her from a mattress on a steel deck floor. Her eyes were wide and her jaw slack. She looked as if she’d died while screaming.

  Brody was checking each body. Occasionally, he’d nudge one free and float it toward her. In the zero gravity, it didn’t take much for her to push them up toward Warwick waiting on the Mod18. Some were merely unconscious, others conscious but immobile with shock.

  She looked around. The Ariane’s equipment bay was barely three meters across and five tall. In that space they’d built mattressed tiers that had impossibly held fifty people. She counted seven of them who would never leave.

  Brody was grim as he double-checked each one left behind.

  “I had no idea,” her whisper sounded overloud in the cramped space.

  He nodded. “Out of choices, they take the only chance they can get.”

  She waited for him in the ill-lit stinking confines of the pod while he arranged a young boy’s body so that he almost looked natural.

  “He could have been my brother. Was almost me,” Brody’s voice was a whisper as he brushed the boy’s hair gently into place. “An ICBM was never meant to carry people. We didn’t know how hard the Minuteman missiles boosted. Three families totaling twenty people. I begged to ride at the top of the cone—I so wanted to be the first one into space—it was the only thing that saved my life. Dad built a small platform at the nose, just big enough for me. Everyone else packed in below, with only room to stand during the launch. They crushed one another under that awful acceleration. The only other survivors were an aunt, who ended up raising me, and the technician’s wife who killed herself just a month after losing her whole family—that was all out of twenty people. This is how I pay back.”

  His voice was even, calm, steady, though she could feel the pain surging from him into the close air.

  Karina wondered if she’d ever really known Brody Jones.

  She had always thought of him as a slacker. He’d been a top flyer at school. Not as good as she was on the actual piloting, but truly exceptional in the mechanics, and an outstanding leader. Then, when she’d suggested that they go military together—with some lame image of the two of them blazing paths of glory throughout the system—he’d just shaken his head.

  “Lift Rescue,” was all he’d said. That was a flyer level below Patrol, Cargo, or even Salvage.

  It hadn’t made any sense. But she’d been so hyped on the chance of a highly prestigious future that she’d been afraid to ask. His blue eyes had been so sad that she’d backed away rather than stepping forward. Was that what had kept drawing her back to him all these years?

  Hope that she would change his mind?

  Or the unanswered question of why he never would?

  Now she knew the answer. And as she slowly eased from the small pod, which was now just a coffin, she knew why she’d been afraid to ask. Her own life suddenly looked trivial and privileged compared to this.

  Chapter 7

  After kicking loose the Ariane, they rode in silence down the gravitational slope: thermosphere, mesosphere, stratosphere. He had double-checked that the Lifters were quiet and safely strapped into acceleration hammocks before he’d aimed the Mod18 down the path of Karina’s flight plan. They slid within fifty klicks of the Aussie dome: the shining silver that shrouded any view of the nations within and meant instant death to any who approached.

  Brody had never told that story of his own Lift to anyone. Only his aunt and the man who’d rescued them with his cargo vessel, flying well into range of the I-Beam to pull them out, knew the whole awful truth.

  The Mod18 skipped off the upper atmosphere at barely fifty kilometers above ground. At this low of an altitude—due to the curve of the horizon—they were flying below the I-Beam Zone. Barely.

  The mass of the northern Himalayas lay spread beneath them. He’d never thought he would see them in his lifetime, especially not so close. The jagged peaks, holding some of the world’s last few glaciers, glittered like corridor signs guiding their way.

  The Mod18 was never designed for an Earth reentry and definitely not a landing. He kept the spacecraft in a slow roll so that no one area took the brunt of the massive overheating. Alarms were triggering every few seconds. It took both of them working as fast as they could to deal with them.

  Overheated nose plate, he rolled slower across the back to give it a few more seconds of cooling.

  Primary computer core shut down, Karina force-fed the flight plan into the backup.

  At the bottom of their passage, they were little more than a meteor across the Tibetan night, a herald in a land where no one and nothing survived to interpret their passage.

  Forever and nineteen minutes later they clawed back up into Low Earth Orbit over the Hawaiian volcano that had finally made sure there was no more Hawaii.

  He checked in with the crew and passengers. They hadn’t lost anyone in the blazing passage.

  Karina didn’t speak once on the long flight back up to Luna’s L2 and the British habitat can. Medical and immigration took the passengers from them: shock, limping, tearful thanks.

  Soon it was just the two of them and Mod18 at the end of the long, quiet row of Stinger-60s.

  “She’s a good old girl. She’s fits in better now,” Karina patted the nose of the Mod18. She had a soft smile that he barely recognized. He turned away because it hurt to see it, knowing it would never be for him.

  Brody looked down the row. Five immaculate, well-maintained, stealth-black Stinger-60s. And his reentry-scorched Mod18. The NAS logo was long gone and the last of the white paint showed through the char only in a few well-protected spots.

  He nodded in agreement, not sure of what to say next. What to do. Karina the Queen Bitch who had started on the flight with him wasn’t the woman who now stood close beside him. A lot of crews had quit before he’d learned that he had to be the only one to go down through a Lifter’s hatch—there were some things that were too hard to ask others to face.

  Yet Karina hadn’t hesitated. But neither had she spoken afterward. She hadn’t been his to lose, but still he wondered if he’d lost her anyway.

  “I’ve been thinking,” Karina’s voice was soft and he couldn’t read anything in her dark eyes when he risked looking at her once more.

  “I suppose that’s
better than running away from me as fast as you can,” which is what he’d been waiting for. He leaned back against his ship because it grounded him in what was important. If she ran, he might just run after her, all the way to the Night Stalkers, and Lifters be damned. He crossed his arms over his chest, the only thing that kept him from reaching out for the impossible.

  Chapter 8

  Is that what she’d always done? Run away? Maybe it was. Unable to face his choices, his hidden sorrow, his eyes that hid so few of his thoughts now that she knew how to look.

  Yet she had kept coming back. Now she truly knew why.

  Whatever Brody had done, he’d done with a single reason and a single passion more pure than she’d imagined possible. Certainly better than any of her own motivations had ever been.

  “I was thinking about the Night Stalkers.”

  “I like my job just fine. Same answer I gave you after flight school, Karina. Lift Rescue,” and again she saw the sadness in his eyes. But it was different from the sadness she’d seen in the Ariane’s capsule. That had been about the Lifters who hadn’t survived their dream; this was personal.

  “I know that, Brody. You’d be less than who you are if you did anything other than LR. I get that now.”

  “So, why are you thinking about the Night Stalkers? If you’re suddenly talking about leaving them, I’ll never speak to you again.”

  “You’re not getting off that easy.” But actually, she had thought about that for a big piece of the flight back. What it would be like to fly with Brody? There was an immediacy to what he did. He saw the deaths, but she could still see the damp places where the men and women who he had saved had wept their thanks onto his shoulders. Lives he had changed, including his own.

  “Then…what?”

  “I thought about the similarities of what we do. There are a lot of soldiers who are alive because of what I do.”