“Hey look, this is—”
She shoved him backward, and he fell onto his bed. Kicking the door closed, she locked it and came at him. He held up his hands to protect himself. She caught his wrists, shoved his arms out of her way, and her mouth collided with his, hungry and searching. Her hands tugged at his clothes.
When his Industrial Physics professor asked him how an A student had failed to turn in three weeks worth of work and fallen to an F, he shrugged and said, “I fell in love.”
The professor looked over the tops of her glasses. “A broken heart?”
“No, Ma’am, a full one.”
She gave him an unsolicited incomplete.
Now Leif, with oxygen tanks as the measure of his life, lay trapped in a frozen cylinder orbiting a Jovian moon. The heat and joy Sarah had brought to his life would never return. The legacy of her in the child was also lost. They’d shared so many wonderful moments. When he’d first met her, he knew he would love her forever. Just as surely, he knew that allowing her to end her life as he had—balking at the child she offered him—would be his greatest failure.
Chapter Six
Cantwell took Jeffrey to Houston where they joined a launch shuttle filled with military leaders and civilian delegates. When Jeffrey stepped aboard, he saw the vice president seated on the right hand side of the passenger area. With her shoulder-length, blonde hair pulled into a loose ponytail and askew bangs framing her graceful face, there was no missing her. Almost as tall as the Marine sitting beside, she held an athletic power in her posture.
As Jeffrey followed Cantwell up the rows of full-body launch seats, he couldn’t help glaring at her. He didn’t make a practice of holding grudges, but for her he’d make an exception.
When she looked up, their eyes met, and she gave him a disinterested smile before saying something to a thick, balding man with glasses.
As Jeffrey sat, he asked Cantwell in a whisper, “What the hell is she doing here?”
“While there are many women joining us today, I can only assume by your tone you mean Vice President Delaney.”
Jeffrey nodded.
“Don’t let her bother you. The president asked her to join us.”
“He’s no better. You know interference by people like them will bring no good.”
“I do,” Cantwell said with a sigh, “but they’re the bosses. You have to take it easy Holt, or you’ll give yourself a stroke. This is command life. We have the power of the world’s destroyers at our fingertips and yet find ourselves with people like her holding us on a choke chain.” He shrugged. “Just remind yourself that restrictions bring humility, which is important.”
“You were always better at the ass kissing than I was.”
“Dammit Holt. It’s not ass kissing.”
“So says you. When are you going to give me details on what’s going on?”
Cantwell set his tablet face down and leaned his head back. “I suppose now’s as good a time as any.” He seemed unwilling to begin.
Hesitation from a man he’d never known to waver troubled Jeffrey. “It must be bad.”
With a bluntness most surely driven by doubt, Cantwell said, “Europa base has been destroyed.”
Jeffrey’s hands began to tremble as adrenaline flushed through him. He shook his head.
“I don’t understand. That doesn’t make any sense.”
Cantwell gripped Jeffrey’s forearm. “It happened at 8:34 GMT.”
As Cantwell walked him through the events, he closed his eyes, trying to remember what Leif had looked like the last time he’d seen him. Instead, the memory of an old Christmas photo came to him—Leif standing beside his mother wearing footie pajamas and holding up a model airplane. His smile was so much a reflection of hers.
In a quiet voice, he said, “I thought they were done taking from me.”
“I’m so sorry Jeff.”
Jeffrey tried, as he’d done so many times before, to wrap up the turmoil of emotion and shove it down. But it wouldn’t settle, so he said in an unsteady voice, “There’s no way it’s a mining operation.”
“Some are suggesting the destruction of Deimos fifty years ago could have been the same—a misunderstanding.”
Tears began to well in Jeffrey’s eyes, and he breathed deeply trying to quell them. “It wasn’t. They cracked the moon in half.”
“It’s a small moon,” Cantwell said flatly. “We attacked before any diplomacy was attempted.”
Anger rose up through Jeffrey’s sorrow. “You can’t seriously—”
Cantwell held up his hand. “I’m not. I just want you to know what we’re going to be up against.”
As Cantwell told Jeffrey about the destruction of the life pod, Jeffrey’s thoughts returned to Leif and Sarah. They’d had no children. In that the Holt line would end. He felt himself going numb. Nearly twenty years ago he’d lost his wife, and before that, so many others in the war. Now his only son… gone. It was the same brutality they’d faced fifty years ago.
He’d known they’d return, and all those who claimed the war had been a lie would be silenced by it. He also knew the return could mark the end of the human race. What he’d never guessed was that his son and Sarah would be among the first casualties of their final war.
Cantwell shoved his arm. “Jeffrey.”
“Sorry, I was thinking about the pod.”
“I said we have a Special Warfare team retrieving it now.”
“The pod?” Jeffery asked, sitting forward, “You said it was destroyed.”
“Were you listening at all?”
“No.”
A countdown interrupted them as a digital timer on the front wall dropped out of the teens. “…ten…nine…eight…”
Even as part of him was disintegrating in grief, Jeffrey felt a thrill at the prospect of returning to space. He hadn’t been off-planet in a long time. Imagining the depth of the stars and the limitless flight paths, he felt homeward bound.
The cabin lurched and vibrated as the huge trident engines far below fired and lifted them from the ground. The pressure in the seat felt familiar and welcome to Jeffrey, almost motherly.
“It’s been awhile hasn’t it?” Cantwell said to him over the rumble and vibration.
“I did miss it.”
Jeffrey wondered for a moment if leaving the military fifty years ago had been the wrong decision. When he thought of the final years with his wife, the moments he’d spent with her before she’d gone and how military life would have cost him most of those, the doubt vanished. He’d lived as best he knew how, and the one thing that mattered most, the solitary evidence he’d been a good man and all the pain had been worth it, was now gone, blown into the black abyss by the same monsters that had taken most of his closest friends. When he thought of them returning, and he always knew they would, he considered it would mean his death. He never thought he’d outlive his son. Leif… loved… now missed so deeply that his chest began to burn, and he told himself to shut it off, bury it down as he had with so many other deaths in those days, but he couldn’t get himself to do that to the memory of his son. Tears welled in his eyes and drew over his temples with the acceleration of the ship.
God, Leif… son, how did it come to this?
Cantwell said, “I was telling you that an airlock had come away from the lab.”
The burning pain in his chest went cooler. “An airlock?”
“Yes, with two detectible heart traces in it.”
“Two?”
“Yes.”
“Are they retrievable?”
“We’ve got a Special Warfare team on it now.”
And Jeffrey, drying his eyes with the back of his sleeve, let all hope for Leif and Sarah sit still. To hope meant going through the loss all over again. They were dead until he heard otherwise. He closed his eyes and imagined Leif alive before him, but as a little boy, six years old, smiling and holding up the model of a Delta Class Phantom. “This is what you flew, Dad! This is what you saved
us with!” And with that Jeffrey broke down in tears and Cantwell was polite enough to pretend it wasn’t happening.
Chapter Seven
The Warthog accelerated away from the Rhadamanthus as if swept forward by the hand of Jupiter himself, the deck thrumming. As they passed into the darkness behind the great planet, Stacy and her team sat in silence, the thrust pinning them into their articulated, forward-facing jump seats.
When Marco throttled off, weightlessness came on without warning, causing Stacy’s stomach to flip.
Dammit.
She drew a deep breath and closed her eyes, which made her head swim, so she looked out the side viewport. The stars spun, and the great, dark wall of Jupiter slid into view, blocking out all light. Marco had aimed the stern of the ship at their destination. Now flying backwards, Marco fired the engines, and Stacy sank into the seat’s padding, the sensation of lying on her back under several G’s a welcome respite.
When the burn ended, weightlessness returned. A lighter burn pressed her into her seat for a moment, then a bit more, and they were floating.
As they closed on Europa, the wall of Jupiter became a disk of blackness against a sea of stars. The bladed crescent of its terminator grew along the edge of that disk, glowing in sandstone hues, which blazed brightly after the darkness of the shadow-side transit.
Marco’s voice came over the intercom, “Okay folks, we’re on course to pass the airlock at a relative speed of approximately 1585 klicks per hour.”
“That’s going to be one hell of a shot,” Stacy said to X. “You sure you can make it? You only get one chance.”
“If I only have one shot,” X said, unbuckling himself and shoving off his seat, floating toward the rear of the transport, “whether I can or can’t doesn’t figure in. I have to.”
Stacy nodded her agreement.
Adanna unlatched her harness as Marco said, “Find a handhold folks. I’m turning us head on to Europa.”
Adanna and X grabbed for handholds. As the Warthog turned, their bodies arced around and pressed against the wall. When the Warthog stabilized, Stacy unlatched and pushed her way up to the cockpit.
Marco looked over his shoulder at her.
She looked past Marco’s glowing instrument panel, out the leaded, five-inch thick cockpit glass to the brilliant quarter crescent of Europa.
“How long?”
“Thirty minutes.”
Stacy patted Marco’s shoulder and pushed back into the rear cabin, finally settling into the sensation of weightlessness. “Adanna and Horace, you’re my side gunners on this run, get ‘em ready.”
“Marco,” she called forward.
Marco looked at her through the small passage. “Yes, O.C.?”
“How’s our glide path looking for debris?”
“I can’t do an active scan without painting us in the sky, but I think we’re looking fairly good to avoid anything large. We’re still going to make good use of our armor plating through the small stuff though.”
“Okay.” Stacy turned to Horace. “You and Adanna get the pulse-nukes prepped.”
Horace and Adanna both nodded and went to work.
“X,” Stacy called to the rear of the ship, “you ready?”
From down in the floor panels X called back, “I have the cable almost loaded.” His head of coarse, dark hair popped up. “About ten minutes away.”
“Get it done, X. I need you to have chair time to settle your nerves.”
“Yes O.C.” His head disappeared again.
“You need help?”
“Negative O.C.”
Jacqueline had remained strapped in. Stacy said to her, “You’re on when we get the survivors on board.” She scanned the team members, glanced at Marco’s shoulder in the cockpit and the hole in the floor where X was. “We won’t have time for quarantine as we have no idea how much oxygen these folks have. They were in a clean environment, and we have to bank on that environment as having stayed clean. They’re going to be cold and perhaps asphyxiated.” She looked back to Jacqueline. “You ready?”
“Affirmative O.C., totally ready.”
Stacy signed okay as she called up to the cockpit. “Time Marco.”
“Twenty-six minutes thirty-five seconds until we pass apex on the airlock.”
“You get that X?”
X’s voice came muffled from the floorboards. “Affirmative O.C.”
Stacy watched the hole in which X was working. What was taking so long? She felt the desire to check on him but knew she had to let him work, had to show trust, hell, had to have trust. They waited, Jacqueline looking at the floor as Horace worked with Adanna to prep the nukes. Adanna stole glances at Horace.
Stacy’s anger at them reignited. Their selfishness would force her to tear apart the best team she’d ever worked with. But that was often the price of excellence. As teams gelled, that kind of thing could and did happen. Excellence was balanced on a blade. Get arrogant, fall; get too intimate, fall.
Silence filled the cabin as time passed.
Marco called back, “We got ten minutes O.C.”
Five more minutes passed.
Stacy looked to the floor hatch where X worked. “X, where are you?”
No answer.
Damn it.
Kicking off, she drifted across the cabin. Coming over the hole, she looked down and saw X floating, his eyes closed, his index fingers touching his thumbs, legs crossed in a lotus, relaxed. The spool was loaded, and its green ‘armed’ light glowed.
“Go time X.”
His wide eyes opened and trained on her. As he unfolded his legs, she looked back to Horace and Adanna, who each gave her a thumbs up. She pulled a cord on her jumpsuit, deploying internal, Kevlar-wrapped airbags, which turned the soft fabric into articulated, air-cushioned body armor. “Activate your armor and get your helmets on.” Taking her helmet from the wall, she pulled it on. As each face disappeared behind a ruby-red visor and snub-nosed jaw plate, X rose up out of the hole.
Marco’s voice came through the earpieces in her helmet. “Five minutes.”
“Horace and Adanna, get yourselves strapped into the gunnery chairs.”
“Yes, O.C.,” they said in unison.
They moved amidships where two depressions in the floor held the gunnery seats. While they each faced blank walls, in their visors they would have a 280-degree view through the gunnery cameras.
“Marco, bring up a fifty percent ghost of the outer cameras on my optics.”
“Yes O.C.”
As she strapped herself into the command seat, mounted rear facing against the front bulkhead, the room flickered and dimmed. Now she could see, as if the ship were transparent, the Jovian system, the bright points of its moons, and the stars beyond. Looking over her shoulder, she saw Europa looming ahead, a disk of darkness in the stars with a thin blade of crescent light down the far side. She pressed the switch on her helmet to reduce the image of the ship’s interior, and the moon became more pronounced. To her left, the banded face of Jupiter felt far too close.
“X?”
He gave her a thumbs up from the rear gunnery seat. “Ready O.C.”
“Pulse-nukes Adanna?”
“Armed O.C.”
“Horace?”
“Check check O.C.”
“Marco?”
“Smooth as glass O.C. Two minutes.”
“One shot X.”
“On it O.C.” His tone suggested: with all due respect Zack, stuff it and let me do my job.
In a whisper, Marco said, “Mother of God.”
Stacy looked to Europa’s surface. Three claw marks scarred it, running away to the horizon, beyond which the alien ships still cut into the ice. She reached absently for the scar on her own face. Her gloved fingers thumped on her faceplate.
“Going dark in five, four, three… shit shit SHIT.” Marco said.
She quelled her inclination to ask what the problem was. She’d flown with Marco long enough to know when to let him be. Onc
e it was go time, there were moments where each member’s expertise caused them to become the most important individual in the group. Right now was Marco’s time.
Beyond the crystalline outline of the ship, debris blurred by, now and again cracking off the armored hull. She saw what troubled Marco. A huge section of the base turned with a lazy rotation end-over-end directly ahead. One side was exterior metal, the other ceiling tiles. Now and again, chunks of wall stripped away with the rotation’s centripetal force.
“It’s just not my day,” Marco said as the Warthog shifted. The straps of her seat hauled on her shoulders, pulling her downward as blood pressurized her head with the negative G’s. When the ship clipped the end of the base section, her external view went to static. Her helmet’s speakers lashed out with a deafening hiss for a split second before the volume cut out. When the image returned, she could only see outside. There seemed to be no cabin at all. Looking down, she saw no hands nor feet nor jump seat, only the vast darkness of space, the stars scattered infinitely in sharp points of burning light in whites and faintly tinted reds, blues and greens. As they passed under the huge turning section of the base, she saw a white lab coat snagged on a jagged arm of metal.
“X,” Marco said, “I didn’t get the angle I wanted. We’re passing a lot closer than we planned, so I’ll have to burn sooner and harder after we secure the airlock. We’re vectored too close to the moon. No more time. Dark now.”
Stacy’s vision went black. As her eyes adjusted to the dim light, she saw the inside of the cabin. The side window, rear window and cockpit passage glowed with the hard light reflecting from Europa. Silence. Nothing.
X’s seat shifted left, twitched, subtle adjustments. A thump came from the Warthog’s belly. The cable spool howled. After a moment, the howl slowed with the soft whine of the spool brake.
He’s got it.
She stilled her mind as she listened for the faint hints telling the story of their progress. The cable brake came on harder, the whine increasing bit by bit to a scream. She imagined the airlock, caught in the webbed net, accelerating hard. The cable slowed more and more, paying out less and less. A loud thump jerked the Warthog.
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