by Allen Steele
Melissa noticed this, too. "You're going to get pulled over," she said, smug in her knowledge that our father was breaking the law.
"No, I'm not," Dad replied, not looking back at her. "I removed the GPS and traffic control chips before we left and put in ringers instead. So far as anyone is concerned, we're still parked in the driveway." He pointed to the traffic scanners we passed every hundred yards. "When they tag us, the phony chips identify us as another car and tell the system we're on auto. So long as I maintain a constant speed and don't make any strange moves..."
"It'll think we're someone else and won't be able to track us," I finished. "But why...?"
Jan gave me one of her looks--no questions, Jamey--and I shut up. At least I knew what my father had been doing when I caught him beneath the dashboard. And I had little doubt as to where he'd been able to lay his hands on outlaw tech like this; ISC was full of guys who could make ringers in their basement workshops. But Dad had always been the law-abiding type. Why would he do something like this?
From behind us, the warble of a siren. Turning my head, I looked back through the rear window to see flashing blue lights. A Maryland state trooper, approaching fast.
"Dad..." Jan had spotted it, too. "Do you think...?"
"No. Take it easy." Without reducing speed, my father moved quickly and easily from the center lane to the right, just as cars under traffic control would do. But he seemed to be holding his breath as the police cruiser came up on us. For a moment, I thought my father was wrong and that we were about to be pulled over. But then the cop flashed by...
And right behind it, the two hovertanks and three troop carriers the state trooper was escorting. We hadn't seen them earlier because the vehicles were in camouflage mode, darkened pitch-black so as to blend in with the night. Probably coming from the Navy base in Aberdeen.
Why would they be out on the highway at this time of night with a state police escort? I was about to ask this when Dad let out his breath. He glanced at Jan, and she slowly nodded.
"You were right," she said, looking straight ahead. "It's started."
"What's going on here?" Melissa yelled.
"MeeMee..." Dad began.
"Don't MeeMee me!" she snapped, which should have been funny but wasn't. She slapped the back of Dad's seat so hard that he jerked; the van swerved for an instant, and I found myself praying that the traffic control system wouldn't notice the slight deviation. "I want to know what...what this is all about!"
"Melissa..." My father started to reply, then shook his head. "Just shut up, okay." Melissa stared at him; he'd never spoken to her that way before. "Radio on," he said after a moment of stunned silence. "Scan news channels."
The radio skipped through the channels, pausing every few seconds so that we could listen to one news station or another. Baseball and soccer scores, a local weather forecast, a couple of late-night talk shows. "Nothing," Jan said after a few minutes.
"Didn't think so," Dad replied. "They're not going to make any sort of announcement until they've got the Capitol locked down." He gripped the yoke a little harder as he stared straight ahead. "They'll be closing the Beltway soon. I just hope we're not too late."
I-95 had just merged with the I-495 Beltway leading around Washington, DC; we were headed southeast, following the signs to the Maryland coast. I noticed that there was little traffic, unusual for the Beltway even in the early hours of a Wednesday morning. It wasn't hard to imagine armed soldiers taking up positions at the interstate ramps, forming roadblocks to prevent any vehicles from getting on the Beltway. But why...?
"The president is dead," my father said.
For a second or two, neither Melissa nor I knew what to say. Then I found my voice. "What...what did you say? How do you...?"
"I got a call from...from a friend...just before I woke you up. He told me that President Wilford died a few hours ago."
Dad spoke as matter-of-factly as if he was discussing the mineralogical contents of main-belt asteroids, his usual line of work, but he couldn't have shocked us more. "The president's dead?" Melissa shrieked. "What...how...?"
"I don't know that yet, but...well, something is going on." Dad shook his head. "It's too much to explain now, but..."
His voice trailed off, but it wasn't hard for me to guess the rest. "It's about the vice president, isn't it?" I asked.
"Uh-huh. Lina Shapar will be sworn in as president, if she hasn't already. And according to people I know, she's going to declare a national emergency."
"Which they haven't done yet," Jan added, "only because they're still getting everything in place. But it's coming, and when that happens..." She looked back at me again. "Dad will be in danger. We'll all be in danger."
"But why?" Melissa demanded. "I don't get it? What's this got to do with us?"
I closed my eyes and shook my head. Melissa lived in her own world of clothes and boys and sock bands, and rarely paid much attention to anything else, even when it was happening inside her own house. "This has something to do with the ISC petition you signed, doesn't it, Dad?"
My father didn't reply at once. In the soft blue light of the dashboard, his face was grim. "Yes, it does," he said after a few moments. "Shapar didn't like the position we took. From what I've heard, she considers everyone who signed it to be a political foe...and she's not the sort of person who tolerates opposition. If things happen the way I think they will..."
"They're going to be coming after him." Jan twisted around in her seat to look back at me. "Shapar is going to order Dad to be put under arrest, along with anyone else she considers to be an enemy." She paused. "And they may come after us, too. As collateral, to make sure that he cooperates."
"But they can't do that!" Melisa protested. "It's against the law!"
"You're right, MeeMee...sorry, Melissa, I mean. Not under the Constitution, at least. But Lina Shapar has never been a big fan of constitutional law and neither are her cronies, so there's no reason to believe that she's going to let a small matter like the Bill of Rights get in their way."
I was gazing out the window as Jan and Melissa spoke. In the far distance, beyond the rooftops of Washington's northeast neighborhoods, I could make out the spotlight-illuminated dome of the Capitol, the Washington Monument rising behind it like a tiny white pencil. The sight was familiar to me, and its serenity made it hard to believe that a crisis was unfolding within a stone's throw of these historic buildings.
The radio was still on, turned to a late-night sports talk show. A couple of guys were discussing the Orioles when a new voice broke in: "We interrupt this broadcast for a special news report from..."
"Turn up the volume," my father said.
The radio obeyed, and another voice came on. "We have received official word from the White House that President George F. Wilford is dead. Repeat...George F. Wilford, the president of the United States, died tonight in Washington, DC. White House Press Secretary Andreas Sullivan confirmed the initial Secret Service reports, and has stated that the president appears to be a victim of assassination carried out by a lone gunman who managed to penetrate White House security...."
"Oh my God!" Melissa's eyes were wide. "He was shot!"
"I don't think so." Dad's voice was very quiet, almost lost beneath the radio. "That's what they're saying, but that's not what my friend told me."
I stared at him. "How do you know? I mean, how could they know? The White House..."
"Quiet, Jamey." Jan reached over to turn up the volume.
"...Reports that Vice President Lina Shapar was summoned to the White House from her official residence at the Naval Observatory, where she was sworn in as the new president by Supreme Court Chief Justice Marco Gonzales. In response to the crisis, President Shapar has declared a national emergency, and issued an executive order placing the District of Columbia and its environs under military curfew. She has requested that the FBI and federal marshals immediately detain any individuals who may have played a role in President Wilford's deat
h..."
"I'm on the list." My father's voice was little more than a whisper. "You can count on that."
"But you're not involved." I stared at the back of his head.
"You couldn't be involved," Melissa insisted, almost as if to reassure herself. "You're not, are you?"
"No, Melissa, I'm not...but neither was Wilford assassinated." He let out his breath. "Look, I can't tell you anything else. At least not while there's still a chance that we may be arrested. Right now, the main thing is to get you kids to a place where you'll be safe."
"Where's that?" I asked.
A tense smile. "The last place they'd ever think of looking for you."
The fifteen minutes it took for us to get the rest of the way out of Washington were tense. Just before we left the Beltway, we spotted another military convoy, this one in the northbound lanes of I-495. My father continued driving as steadily as he could, maintaining the pretense that our van was under local traffic control, and the vehicles swept past us without incident. We left the Beltway at the New Carrolton exit and continued east on Route 50, and when we didn't see any more convoys we were able to breathe a little easier...but not much.
We listened to the radio, occasionally changing channels in an effort to get more info. By then all the stations had interrupted their normal routine to carry news about President Wilford's death. A lot of reporters must have been woken out of bed for this, but none of them seemed to have learned much more than what had been reported in the first few minutes. In the meantime, the White House imposed a press blackout until 10 a.m. local time, when President Shapar was scheduled to address the nation from the Oval Office.
I wanted to go online and see if I could learn anything from sites I regularly visited, but Dad stopped me. That would mean I'd have to uplink my pad through the van's satphone; like the GPS and traffic control systems, this could allow someone who might be searching for us to track our location. So we had to rely on normal radio stations for what little information we had.
We passed through Annapolis on our way toward the Chesapeake Bay. When we approached the long causeway that would take us to the other side of the bay, Dad headed for the cash-only tollbooth even though our van had all-state plates with toll stickers. The guy sitting in the booth was only half-awake; he didn't appear to notice that my father had stopped to hand him a few dollars when we could have driven straight through.
"Why did you do that?" Melissa asked after we moved through the tolls and entered the causeway. "We have stickers."
"Because the scanner would have recorded our plates," I said before Dad or Jan could reply.
Dad nodded. Jan gazed pensively at the dark waters of the Chesapeake Bay below us. Once again, Melissa asked where we were going, but neither of them would answer her.
On the other side of the causeway, Dad turned south on Route 50. As before, he continued to driving on manual, not switching to traffic control even though we were on a four-lane highway. There were only a few other cars on the road this time of morning, and there wasn't much to see except mile markers and motels. Now and then I'd catch sight of one the bay's many inlets and rivers; they glowed beneath the light of the full moon, an omen whose portent I'd only later appreciate.
After awhile I cranked back the mobil's seat and shut my eyes. I don't know how long I slept, but I was awakened by the soft jar of the van's wheels being lowered. Dad had taken the van out of hover mode; that meant that we must be on a road that didn't have a traffic control system. Sure enough, when I looked out the window, I spotted a sign stating we were now on Route 13. And a moment later, another one: WELCOME TO VIRGINIA.
"Where are we?" I asked, elevating my seat back to sitting position. Melissa had gone to sleep as well, but she didn't wake up when I did.
"The Outer Banks." Jan had pulled up a map of the Virginia coast on the van's dashboard screen. As I peered over her shoulder, she pointed to a long, narrow cape that separated the southern end of the Chesapeake Bay from the Atlantic Ocean. "We'll be there soon," she said. "If you look out MeeMee's window, you'll see where we're going."
I turned my head to the left. Through the windows on Melissa's side of the van, I could just make the dark expanse of the ocean. It was just a little after 3 a.m., so the sun hadn't come up yet, but I could see the tiny lights of ships heading to and from the Atlantic Sea Wall locks just south of us. If Dad was heading for Virginia Beach, where our family occasionally went for vacations, he'd picked an odd way to get there; a little shorter, maybe, but not as quick as if we'd stayed on the interstate.
Then I spotted something: a long string of lights, low upon the horizon, which extended straight out toward the ocean. Flashing red and green against the night sky, they resembled those you'd see on an airport runway, only the single row they formed was much longer. I'd just realized what they were when the van slowed to make a left turn. As Dad pulled onto a side road, I caught sight of a sign:
WALLOPS ISLAND SPACE LAUNCH CENTER
INTERNATIONAL SPACE CONSORTIUM
RESTRICTED AREA - AUTHORIZED VEHICLES ONLY
"That's the magcat!" I exclaimed.
That woke up Melissa. "Whu...where?" she said sleepily. "Are we there yet?"
"Yes, we are," Dad said. "And you're right, Jamey...that's the magcat. There's where you and your sisters are going."
Because my father was a planetary geologist who worked for the ISC--along with other reasons--I knew a little more about space than the average guy. Perhaps not quite as much as Jan, who actually aspired to go out there, but I'd picked up a few things over the years, not only from dinner table conversations but also from books and vids I'd downloaded into my pad.
One of the things I'd learned was a good working knowledge of ISC launch facilities. There were three in the United States: the primary one at Cape Canaveral, Florida; a slightly smaller one on Matagorda Island in the Gulf of Mexico off the Texas coast; and the smallest, located on Wallops Island, Virginia.
A long time ago, this place had been operated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration as a launch site for experimental rockets. After NASA was dissolved, ISC took over Wallops and expanded it to become the major East Coast launch spaceport. Rising ocean levels had damaged many of the launch pads at the old Kennedy Space Center before the Florida stretch of the Atlantic Sea Wall was finished, but Wallops had been protected by the mid-Atlantic part of the wall, and for awhile it and Matagorda Island had served as the two biggest US launch sites.
And the magcat was the principal means of sending people and cargo into space.
Something occurred to me just then. A thought that nearly stopped my heart.
"Dad," I asked, "why are you taking us to the magcat?"
He didn't reply, but instead stared straight ahead.
"Dad, are you putting us on the magcat?"
"Oh, no...no way." Melissa was fully awake by then. "There's no way I'm going to..."
"Hush, Melissa." Jan opened her armrest compartment and pulled out a laminated card. She placed it on the dashboard below the windshield. "Whatever you do, just be quiet."
The van was approaching another causeway, this one above a river. It was blocked by a security gate. A uniformed guard stepped out of a booth beside the gate and held up his hand. Dad came to stop beside him; rolling down his window, he held up his ID badge. The guard briefly inspected it, gave the dashboard card a quick glance, then nodded and walked back into the booth. The gate opened and Dad drove through.
Jan let out her breath. "We're in. So much for the hard part."
"No...that's just the beginning." Dad looked back at me. "All right, Jamey...now you and Melissa can hear the rest. Yes, I'm putting all three of you on the magcat. There's a cargo shuttle scheduled for takeoff at 5 a.m., just about--" he checked the windshield display "--an hour and a half from now. All three of you are going to be on it."
My fingers involuntarily curled around my mobil's armrests. "Dad...you know I can't ride that thing. It'll kill me."
One of the reasons why I was interested in space was because I was born on the Moon. However, I'd always figured that vids and books would be the closest I'd ever get to going there. Because I'd spent my infancy in low gravity, my bones were weaker than normal. Lunar Birth Deficiency Syndrome was why I'd spent almost my entire life in a mobil. I couldn't walk without crutches, and it was only in the neutral-buoyancy environment of a swimming pool that I was able to move about without assistance.
Sure, I could have been fitted with an exoskeleton, but they were incredibly expensive, and besides, I didn't want to go through life looking like a robot. So I'd tried to build up my muscles over the years, and swimming laps had put me in pretty good shape. There wasn't much anyone could do about my bones, though. Even with calcium supplements and other medicines I routinely took for LBDS, I'd break my legs if I tried to run, and a hearty bear hug could crush my ribs.
Mom made a major mistake when she decided to go to the Moon with Dad, but it wasn't her fault; neither of them realized she was pregnant. I was beginning to suspect that Dad was about to make a similar mistake, but this time consciously.
"Relax," he said. "We've taken that into account. There's a way of sending you up that won't hurt you. Trust me...you'll see."
We were on the causeway by then, and I could see the magcat more clearly. No longer simply a row of lights, it was now an elevated monorail nearly two and a half miles long that extended straight out toward the Sea Wall. Until then, I'd regarded it much the way just as about anything else I'd read about. A nice bit of engineering, but nothing I'd ever thought I'd have to experience myself.