by Allen Steele
Ben Skinner met with the other mission planners, and over the course of a six-hour boardroom session, they came up with a solution. Instead of putting Nathan 5 aboard an ocean vessel, the foundation would rent a cargo jet to fly it down to Ile Sombre. There was just such an aircraft suitable for this purpose: the C-110 Goliath, built by Boeing as a heavy-lift military transport. Its cargo bay was 130 feet by 45 feet, more than big enough for the module, and as it turned out, Boeing maintained two Goliaths in Seattle for private lease.
There was only one problem with this. Until then, the previous modules had been brought to Ile Sombre aboard ships, where they could offload at the same port where the Kubera was retrieved. The port was protected by chain-link fences and armed guards and lay close enough to the space center that security had never been an issue. But if Nathan 5 were flown in, the plane would have to land at the island airport, where the module would be offloaded onto the tractor-trailer rig used for transporting the Kubera and be driven across Ile Sombre all on public roads, where it could be easily blocked by the protesters who were steadily gaining numbers outside the space center.
“And to make matters worse, the rig’s going have to go slow,” Ben said, sitting at the end of the table where he’d just had dinner with his family. “You know the roads around here … they haven’t been resurfaced in years. They’re like washboards. So the driver will have to take it easy to keep Nat from being damaged en route from the airport, and if the protesters know it’s coming—”
“They will. It’s already in the news that we’re doing this.” Jill didn’t pause in clearing away the dinner plates. “But I don’t think they’re going to give us much trouble. They’ll probably just stand on the side of the road and wave those idiot signs of theirs. They’ve never been violent before.”
Hearing this, Matt looked across the table at Chandi. They’d started coming over for dinner once a week, but he still hadn’t told them about what happened that night in Ste. Genevieve. They weren’t aware that at least one member of the New American Congregation was capable of violence.
Chandi didn’t say anything, but she shook her head ever so slightly when their eyes met. “It might be smart to take precautions, anyway,” Matt said. “Maybe get some of our people to walk alongside the truck to keep them away.”
“Yeah, that could work.” Ben slowly nodded. “Nice idea. I’ll talk it over with the planning team.” He picked up the bottle of merlot on the table and poured another drink. “Maybe your grandmother will have some other suggestions once she gets here.”
“Grandma’s coming down?”
“The week after next,” Jill said. “I thought I told you.” She smiled as she returned to the table. “In fact, I’m sure I did.”
“Yeah. I just forgot.” Matt shrugged. “I’ve been kinda busy.”
“Yes, you have.” Ben’s gaze shifted from him to Chandi, and Matt could have killed him for the sly grin on his face. “In fact, I think she wants to have a talk with you about what you’re going to do once we close down operations here. Have you given any thought to that?”
Again, Matt traded a look with Chandi. This had been something they’d discussed more than once lately, usually as late-night pillow talk. “A little.”
“Yes, well, talk to Grandma when she gets here.” Again, a coy smile. “I think she has a something in mind.”
10
Grandma Kate had aged well for a woman in her eighties who’d never taken retrotherapy. Although she’d undergone the usual geriatric treatments available to the elderly, including cardiovascular nanosurgery and organ-clone transplants, genetic revitalization had come along too late for it to be effective for a woman of her years. So unlike her children, Kate Skinner looked her age, but nonetheless, she managed to get around, albeit slowly and carefully.
Matt and his mother met Grandma when she arrived at the airport. She was the last person to come off the plane, and once she endured the indignity of being helped down the stairs by a flight attendant, she gratefully took a seat in the two-wheel mobil that had been carried in the G8’s belly compartment. Once in the chair, though, she returned to her old self. The customs official who’d given Matt a hassle a few months earlier quailed before the old woman who wasn’t about to let him waste her time by opening each of her suitcases, and even her daughter-in-law knew better than to keep her waiting long at the curb for the van she’d borrowed from the space center to take her to the hotel. Kate didn’t suffer fools gladly.
To Matt’s surprise, though, Grandma treated him with a little more tenderness. She insisted that he ride with her in the back of the van, and once she’d dispensed with the small talk, she turned her attention to her grandson.
“So you took a job here, after all.” Not a question; a statement of fact.
“I didn’t have much choice, Grandma. The plane ticket was one way.”
“I know. I bought it, didn’t I?” A tight-lipped smile. “You didn’t need a handout from me, kiddo. You needed a chance at a fresh start. Ben tells me you’ve done pretty well with it too.”
“He has, Kate.” Jill turned her head slightly without taking her gaze from the road. “I couldn’t have done without Matt. He’s done everything from writing news releases to managing press conferences to booking flights for reporters. Everything you’d want from a good right-hand man.”
Matt said nothing. His mother was exaggerating; his first few weeks in the media relations department had been a train wreck, and even now he was still committing the occasional gaffe. Yet if she wanted to give Grandma a good report, he wasn’t about to argue.
“Are you enjoying the work?” Grandma asked.
“Yes, I am.” About this, he didn’t have to lie. “I’ve learned a lot, and I think I’ve got a better appreciation of what the project is all about.”
“Do you really?” She seemed to study him. “You’re not just saying that, are you?”
He decided not to reveal his lingering doubts about the feasibility of terraforming a planet and populating it with children raised by robots. “I think Galactique will get there,” he replied, and he hoped she’d be satisfied to let it go at that.
Apparently, she was, because she only nodded and shifted her gaze to the rain forest they were driving through. Yet the conversation wasn’t finished. She picked it up again once they’d arrived at the Hotel Au Soleil and she was taken to the cottage she’d be sharing with her children. Believing that he was no longer needed, Matt was about to leave, but then she raised a hand.
“Stick around a minute. I want to talk to you a little more.” She looked at Jill. “You can go now. He’ll catch up with you later.”
His mother was a little surprised by this, but she didn’t object. She left the cottage, closing the front door behind her. Grandma waited until she was gone, and then she turned to Matt again. “So … thought about what you’re going to do once we close up shop here?”
Matt remembered his father raising the same question over dinner a couple of weeks earlier. “I dunno. Do what everyone else is doing, I guess—go home and get another job. I might stay in media relations, turn that into a career.”
“Yeah, you could do that. Your job here will be a short item on your résumé, but I’m sure it’ll help you land a position somewhere. Maybe you’ll even keep it for a while, if you don’t get bored and quit. That’s always been a problem for you, hasn’t it?”
“Sort of.”
“Sort of.” She repeated what he’d said flatly as if she had little doubt that he would. “Well, if you want to go back to drifting, that’s your right. I won’t stop you. But I can offer you something better.”
She paused, waiting for him to say something. When he didn’t, she went on, “Even after Galactique is on its way, the foundation’s work won’t be done. It’s going to take almost fifty years for the ship to reach Eos, but it’s not like we’re just sticking a note in a bottle and tossing it into the sea. It’ll regularly report back to us, telling us what’s g
oing on, and even though those reports will get further and further apart, we’ll still have to listen for them just in case something happens that we should know about.”
“You want me to do that?”
“I’d like for you to join the tracking team, yes. The foundation is taking over an old university observatory in Massachusetts, out in the Berkshires not far from where your great-great-grandfather used to live. This is where the laser telemetry received by the lunar tracking station will be relayed. It’s rather isolated, but we’ll be keeping a small staff there, paying them from foundation funds to maintain contact with Galactique.”
“I don’t know anything about—”
“You can learn. Ben can teach you. In fact, he’s probably going to be running the operation; didn’t he tell you this already?” Matt shook his head, and his grandmother sighed. “Oh, well, I guess he was expecting me to tell you about it. Anyway, he’ll be in charge, but he’s not going to be around forever. Sooner or later, someone will have to take over for him.”
Grandma gave him a meaningful look. Matt said nothing, for he didn’t know what to say. He’d been half expecting her to offer him a job with the Arkwright Foundation, but a lifetime commitment was something else entirely. He didn’t know if he was ready to spend years on a mountain out in the middle of nowhere, listening for signals transmitted from a spacecraft receding farther and farther into the interstellar distance.
“I don’t know,” he began.
“You don’t have to say yes or no right away.” Grandma shook her head. “Just think about it awhile, all right? The job’s there if you want it. We won’t have any trouble finding someone else if you decide to give it a pass, but…” She smiled. “I’d like to keep it in the family, if you know what I mean.”
He did. But he was unsure whether he wanted to become part of that legacy.
11
Nathan 5 arrived the following week, flown in aboard a Boeing C-110 so large that an Air Carib G8 could have fit within its bulbous cargo hold. The enormous tiltjet, resembling a cucumber that had sprouted wings, touched down at Ile Sombre International with a roar that rivaled a Kubera launch. A large crowd of islanders had gathered at the airport to witness the landing of an aircraft that they’d probably never see in these parts again; they watched from the edge of the runway as the Goliath made its slow vertical descent alongside the space center staffers who’d volunteered to shepherd its payload across the island.
Matt and Chandi were among them, as was Matt’s father. The planning team had decided to take up Matt’s suggestion and recruited members of the launch team to walk alongside the truck that would carry the module from the airport to the space center. At first, many people thought it was an unnecessary precaution, but those who still believed that only had to look over their shoulders, where a mob of protesters from the New American Congregation and their supporters waited on the other side of sawhorses erected and patrolled by island police. As Matt’s mother had predicted, the protesters had known all along that Galactique’s landing module would be arriving by air instead of by sea, and they were taking advantage of this change of plan.
“Think we’ll have any trouble from them?” Chandi eyed the protesters nervously.
“No doubt we will,” Ben Skinner said quietly. “The question is, how much? If all they do is hold up their signs and yell, everything will be okay. But if they go further than that…” He nodded toward the private security force waiting nearby. Some carried sonics as well as the usual batons and stun guns. “They’ll break it up if things get bad. I’m not going to worry too much.”
Matt watched as the Goliath’s bow section, three stories tall, opened and swiveled upward beneath the cockpit, revealing the cargo bay. The module lay on a wheeled pallet, sealed within an airtight plastic shroud. The tractor-trailer rig was already backing up to the plane, waved into position by the runway crew. The flatbeds had been jacked up to same height as the cargo deck; once the tandem trailers were in place, the pallet could be rolled straight onto the truck from the plane. Once it was tied down and covered with tarps, the module would be ready to leave the airport.
That was the easy part. At a walking pace, it would take a little more than an hour for the truck to make the trip to the space center. If only the roads were better, but that couldn’t be helped. Like most Caribbean islands, Ile Sombre’s public roads weren’t maintained very well; the truck had to move slowly, or else the module might rock about and be damaged. To make matters worse, the road between the airport and the space center narrowed until it barely qualified as a two-lane thoroughfare; islanders were known to reach through open driver-side windows and briefly shake hands with friends whom they passed.
The island police were closing the road to local traffic, but nonetheless, it would be during this part of the passage that the truck and its precious cargo would be particularly vulnerable.
Matt hoped his father was right.
It was almost an hour before the truck was ready to depart from the airport. As the massive flatbeds slowly moved away from the plane, a pair of SUVs belonging to the island police took up position in front and behind the truck. They stopped and waited for the walking escorts to take their own positions on either side of the truck. Matt and Chandi found themselves near the front; he watched as his father climbed into the cab to watch the driver and make sure that he didn’t go too fast. Private security guards were scattered among the walkers, carrying their sonics at hip level where they’d be visible but not necessarily threatening. There was another long pause while everyone got ready, and then there was a long blast from the truck’s air horn, and the convoy began to creep forward.
The protesters were ready too. They’d remained behind the sawhorses the entire time, more or less quiet while the module was being offloaded from the Goliath, but when the truck slowly rolled through the airport’s freight entrance, they rushed to the roadside, placards above their heads, voices raised in fiery denunciation. Police and security guards did their best to hold them back, but the protesters were only a few yards from either side of the truck, and it was impossible for Matt to ignore either their shouts or their slogans.
“You’ll burn in hell for this!”
NO SIN FOR THE STARS!
“Repent! Destroy that thing!”
DON’T SEND BABYS TO SPACE
“Blasphemy! You’re committing blasphemy!”
JESUS HATES SCIANCE!
“Repent!”
Furious eyes. Shaking fists. Someone threw a rock. It missed the canvas-shrouded module and bounced off the side of the truck instead, but immediately a security guard raised his sonic and aimed it in the direction from which the rock had come. He didn’t fire—the guards had been ordered not to do so unless absolutely necessary—but the protesters in that part of the crowd quickly backed away. No more rocks were thrown … yet.
Chandi was walking in front of Matt, and although her back was to him, he could see her face whenever she turned her eyes toward the crowd. She was doing her best to remain calm, but he could tell how angry she was. The walking escort had been told not to engage the protesters, but he could tell that her patience was being sorely tempted. Chandi had little tolerance for the willfully stupid, and there, just a few feet away, were the very kind of people she detested the most.
He trotted forward to walk beside her. “Having fun yet?” he said, raising his voice to be heard.
Chandi’s mouth ticked upward in a terse smile. “Loads. Hey, how come you can’t take me on a normal date just once?”
“Do you like to dance?” he asked, and she nodded. “Okay, when we get back to the States, I’ll take you to a place I know in Philly. You’ll love it. Candlelight dinner, ballroom orchestra, just like—”
The truck horn blared, a prolonged honnnk! honnnnnk! that sounded like the driver pulling the cord as hard as he could. At first, Matt thought he was trying to get the protesters out of the way. Then a guard ran past them, and when Matt looked ahead, he saw
what was happening.
A rust-dappled pickup truck, the kind used on the nearby banana plantations, had pulled out from a side road about fifty yards ahead of the convoy. As Matt watched, it turned to face the approaching tractor-trailer. It idled there for a few moments, gray smoke coming from a muffler that needed replacing—Ile Sombre was one of the last places in the Western Hemisphere where gasoline engines were still being used—while police and security guards strode toward it, shouting and waving their arms as they tried to get the driver to move his heap.
“The hell?” Matt said as the tractor-trailer’s air brakes squealed as it came to a halt. Everyone stopped marching; even the protesters were confused. “Didn’t this guy hear that the road’s closed?”
Chandi said nothing but instead walked to the front bumper of the halted truck, shielding her eyes to peer at the pickup. “I don’t like it,” she said as Matt jogged up beside her. “Looks like there’s something in the back … see that?”
Matt raised his hand against the midday sun. Behind the raised wooden planks of the truck bed was something that didn’t look like a load of bananas. Large, rounded … were those fuel drums? “I don’t know, but it looks like…”
All at once, the pickup truck lurched forward, its engine roaring as it charged straight down the road. The police SUV was between it and the tractor-trailer, but the driver was already swerving to his left to avoid it. Protesters screamed as they threw themselves out of the way; the police and security guards, caught by surprise, were slow to raise their weapons.
“Go!” Matt grabbed Chandi by the shoulders to yank her away from the tractor-trailer. The other escorts were scattering, as well, but the two of them were right in the path of the pickup truck, which nearly ran over a couple of protesters as it careened toward the flatbed. “Run!”