by Bobby Adair
The truck parks beneath a pavilion and the men groan as they unload.
Kane stretches his legs and back as he walks around in the thin, cold air. He looks west at the sun sinking toward the horizon. Fateful thoughts cross his mind. Is this my last breath of air on earth? Is this the last sunset?
The useless crap that goes through a man’s mind before he’s off to war.
If death finds me, so be it.
Kane won’t cower. He won’t throw his life away, but his mission is much bigger than him, more valuable than the lives of the men and women launching tonight. The little gray aliens on the moon are proof the universe is a hazardous place, and earthlings are a technologically backward people.
That needs to be remedied.
Garcia walks up. “I just talked to Captain Chamberlain. He’s switching spots with us.”
“What do you mean?” asks Kane.
Garcia points to the nearest of the three tall structures. “He’s taking Alpha.” Garcia then points to the third tin-covered structure a half-mile away. “We’ll take his ship, Charlie.”
Kane shakes his head. This ship. That ship. It shouldn’t make a difference. But a last-minute change makes him feel like something’s being taken from him. “Our pilot and copilot?”
“Jensen and Dorsey stay with the ship.”
Kane stifles a curse. The platoon has been drilling with Jensen and Dorsey for nearly eight months. “Why?”
Garcia shakes his head and looks away.
Kane suspects something. “You know. Tell me.”
Garcia grits his teeth and leans in close. In a voice just above a whisper, he says, “Jensen made the best score through the simulations, didn’t crash once. At least not when the ship wasn’t so damaged it couldn’t fly.”
“And?” Kane asks. He never bothered to ask any questions about pilot performance. He always figured the simulator runs were more about getting the platoon accustomed to the rigors of a moon assault.
“Howard and Booker,” says Garcia, “the captain’s pilot and copilot, killed the whole platoon at least once a week.”
“You’re shitting me.” Kane says it, but he already believes. “And Captain Chamberlain can take our guys, just like that?”
“Nothing I can do about it,” says Garcia. “It comes straight from Colonel Knox.”
Kane mutters a curse. The Army should have never put a colonel in charge of a company, no matter how important the mission.
Garcia taps his watch and points to the furthest tower again. “Thirty minutes and we need to be down there. Give the men a few more minutes, and then get them moving that way.”
“Yes, sir.” Kane’s fuming.
Another ore truck pulls up beneath the pavilion and stops. More soldiers climb out, Second Platoon.
Three ships will be launching from this site, each with one platoon inside. Each of the ships is standing inside one of the tall buildings that hide them. All of the ships’ components were manufactured offsite in airliner assembly plants or on factory lines producing fighter jets when the Grays’ ship showed up and reprioritized much of the world’s thinking.
Despite that, Kane knows there are only so many rocket scientists in the world, and they’re spread thin. The rushed design and construction of the peaceful ship that took the men to the moon to greet the aliens consumed much of earth’s limited resources where scientists were concerned.
The parallel process—to design and manufacture the assault ships the generals started cawing for the moment the aliens showed up—took the rest.
The end result is Kane knows he’ll be getting into a ship that was fast-tracked through design and never flight-tested. Worse, it was built mostly by people who’ve never been involved in the construction of a rocket or space vehicle of any type.
It’s their first time.
The odds don’t stack up well for a safe return.
Kane listened carefully to the details when he’d volunteered. In fact, he’d spent a good deal of time thinking about those details.
The thing about traveling to the moon and back is weight. You have to build a rocket that can take off, make the trip to the moon, land there, make the trip back, and then decelerate enough on the way down through earth’s atmosphere to protect anyone inside so they won’t be killed. You’ve got to bring along enough fuel for each of those segments of the mission. Then you’ve got to bring the payload—the soldiers, weapons, and enough air, water, and food to keep them alive.
Back in the Apollo days, they broke the task into two launches—one to bring up the astronauts, one to bring up the lunar lander. They didn’t need to get to the moon in a big hurry, so they used a little fuel and a lot of earth’s gravity to slingshot them along their way. Everything was about efficiency of resources, and getting the most benefit for every ounce of payload.
To NASA, in those days, the benefits were scientific in nature. And maybe a little glory-hounding.
The benefit of Kane’s mission came down to one thing: Maximizing the number of soldiers the earth could deploy to the moon, ready to bring the war to the Grays sitting up there on their ship, thinking themselves unassailable.
The generals did a little math and figured out if they didn’t budget for return vehicles, reentry vehicles, or fuel to get home, they could launch two or three times more one-way payload, two or three times more boots on the moon.
To make that math work, all they had to do was assume most of the soldiers they sent up wouldn’t need a ride home, because they’d be dead.
Nobody had anything but guesses about the types of armaments the Grays had on their ship. They’d all seen the shot that disabled the craft the scientists landed near their ship a year ago. The most popular idea was that they possessed a type of hyper-velocity railgun, hyper even compared to the experimental railguns being built on earth.
And then there were the odd constructs. The aliens were using their slave labor to burrow beneath the moon’s surface, creating circular depressions, each centered on a small round hole. But the holes only looked small from earth. They were all sizes, anywhere from seven or eight inches in diameter up to several meters.
Guesses were all over the map about their purpose, but most figured them to be some type of weapons system.
So, it was decided the more soldiers the generals sent up, the more likely it was humanity would prevail. And this was a war earth absolutely had to win.
Kane looks at the sky. The launch is less than two hours away. Transit time to the moon is thirty-six hours. In two days’ time—Kane figures—he’ll be dead.
But he’s got a new bride at home, pregnant with his first child. He won’t let the world be one where that boy grows up a slave to big-eyed aliens.
Chapter 4
Sitting inside, it’s hard not to think of the rocket as a bus. The men sit in ten rows, three abreast, soldiers in astronaut suits on their way to war.
The cockpit is packed with a dizzying array of buttons, gauges, toggles, joysticks, lights, and video screens. Pilot Howard and copilot Booker are busy with those buttons and toggles, checking and flipping, going through their lists, and sounding as competent as Jensen and Dorsey, the flight team Captain Chamberlain stole.
Because Chamberlain is a sissy-spit waste of a uniform.
Kane, of course, keeps that thought to himself.
He’s still stewing over the last minute change.
At least he didn’t lose his assigned seat in the first row, with Lieutenant Garcia in the middle, Sergeant Harney on his left, and Kane on the right. From here, Kane is able to look through the wide, wraparound cockpit windows.
It’ll be a hell of a sight, shooting off the earth and out toward the stars.
At the moment, the only interesting thing outside the windows is the other two rockets, Alpha and Bravo, both preparing for launch. Both look every bit like spacecraft welded together from an airliner fuselage, four ICBMs, and a trio of solid-rocket boosters. They make Kane think of giant bundles of dyn
amite painted white instead of cartoonish red.
That’s a thought he keeps to himself as well.
The tin walls have been lowered to the ground as they were designed to do, and tractors are nearly finished dragging the sections away from the launch pads. Those walls will be re-erected after the ships take off so evidence of the rockets’ origin can be hidden.
Just in case.
Just in case the lunar expeditionary force fails.
His thoughts turn to his pregnant wife and the son he might never meet. Dylan. They had just chosen the name weeks before. Tears ambush him like they always do these days when he thinks about the helpless boy whose fate rests in his father’s ability to make war on a faraway cold orb. That boy might possibly grow up without a father to teach him and protect him.
He glances around to make sure the others don’t see his weakness.
Kane pushes all of that out of his mind. He’s spent enough thought on the inevitability of his death. He needs to stay focused on the mission. Mostly, he tells himself Howard and Booker only need to get him to the moon. Kane needs to plant his feet in that barren gray dirt, and then he and his men will do whatever is necessary.
They’re armed. They’re trained. And they’re goddamned determined.
It doesn’t matter if eighteen puppet-sized Grays are up there or if a million are crammed into that ship. Kane will twist every one of their spindly necks and make a mountain of their hairless heads. No little extraterrestrial goblin is going to take his son’s freedom.
The anger keeps his sad thoughts from turning to embarrassing tears.
Not that it matters. He’s wearing a spacesuit helmet. His outbound comm is muted. None of the men behind him can see anything but his back. Howard and Booker are too busy to look back into the cabin. And Garcia is staring through the cockpit window at the black, star-sprinkled sky, probably thinking about his own wife and three kids.
The comm crackles with new activity. “Listen up, men.” It’s Captain Chamberlain. “Colonel Knox has something he’d like to say.”
Kane listens. It’s nothing special. Exactly what you’d expect to hear at a time like this. Do your job. Sacrifice is the price of freedom. We’re the pride of a people, the best of the best, blah, blah, blah.
Kane’s heard a thousand versions of the speech, halftime motivational bullshit. Such drivel has never been for him, though. It’s for men who can’t find enough drive in their hearts to put themselves in the right frame of mind to do what needs doing. Never been a problem for Kane.
Finally, the last of the words crackle through the connection.
The men cheer.
Why not?
Except that they haven’t blasted off yet and they’ve got a day and a half to passively sit strapped in a chair while eleven hundred tons of rocket fuel explodes beneath them.
Kane guesses most of Knox’s babble will be forgotten about three seconds after that first rocket ignites.
A flight controller comes over the line. “Three-nine-Alpha, prepare to count down on my mark.”
Lieutenant Garcia glances at Harney and Kane. “We go third. Get ready.”
Kane looks out the window to his right, seeing Alpha and Bravo rockets bathed in floodlights, each trickling white smoke from beneath, the high dark mountains behind. Alpha goes in ninety seconds. Twenty seconds later, Charlie rocket will take flight.
Voices from the flight control channel bleeds over the comm from the cockpit crew’s helmets. It’s the kind of launch chatter played during the simulations. It means nothing to Kane, except that the bone-jarring part is coming soon.
One of the screens in the center of the cockpit dashboard goes suddenly black. Booker curses.
Howard, Howard, leans forward and pounds it with his fist.
Does that ever work?
He pounds it again as somebody from Launch Control comes over the comm and says, “T minus thirty seconds.”
The pilot and copilot look at one another as Kane sees them toggle their comm switches. They’re talking between each other but leaving the platoon out.
A moment later, Howard looks over his shoulder and says, “To hell with it. We don’t need that one anyway.” He settles himself back in his seat.
“What does it do?” asks Lieutenant Garcia. His line is always open, so he can communicate with the flight crew.
Booker looks back. “Nothing important. Nothing to worry about.” He grins. “We’re going up, too, and we don’t want to die, either, right?” He laughs.
Garcia laughs too, but it’s forced.
Sergeant Harney laughs, like he truly thinks it’s funny.
Kane says nothing.
“Ten. Nine…
Seconds pass.
Kane hears a rumble start to grow. The mountainsides are splashed in yellow light. Alpha’s engines are starting to burn.
“Twenty seconds for us,” says Howard as Alpha’s engines go to full burn, shaking Charlie rocket, the air inside the cabin, and the earth beneath.
And that rocket’s a half-mile away!
A huge plume of smoke flows out and hides the mine and all its buildings. Alpha’s engines spew sunlight fire, pushing it skyward, slowly—too slowly.
That’s just Kane’s guess.
A handful of seconds pass and Alpha isn’t yet up to a hundred meters. But it’s climbing.
“Heavy load,” calls Booker over the comm. He’s watching Alpha, too.
Kane flips his tinted visor down over his faceplate so he can watch without blinding himself.
Alpha seems to get stuck in the sky, glued to the clouds billowing beneath.
Kane starts to say something, but stops.
Alpha leans sideways just as the second countdown reaches zero. Bravo fires its engines to full burn, and it lurches out of Alpha’s smoke.
Huge plumes of gray roil in the fire of the rockets’ engines.
It looks like high noon outside.
Kane can’t feel his breath or feel his heart. Every sensation in his body is thrust-rumble, shaking him down to his bones.
One of Alpha’s solid boosters jerks loose—just the lower support.
The booster twists on the upper mount.
Kane shouts.
No one hears.
Not a human in the universe could do anything if they did.
Booker’s head jerks right as he sees what’s happening. He shouts, too.
Howard looks. He says something loud and unintelligible.
Alpha is falling.
Bravo, blazing white flame, passes Alpha on its way into the heavens.
Howard is shouting, “I’m going now! I’m going now!”
Kane feels Charlie’s main engines and solid boosters fire.
The rumble from the other rockets was nothing compared to this.
The simulator was a kiddy ride.
Smashed into his seat as g’s start to pile on, it sounds like the thrown-together rocket is coming apart.
Kane pulls his head around to look forward in fear that his neck will wrench off from trying to see Alpha’s fate.
But he knows what’s coming.
A shockwave hammers Charlie rocket sideways in the air and Alpha’s fireball washes past the window.
Kane knows he’s going to die.
He closes his eyes and utters a prayer for his son.
But Charlie rocket’s g’s still push.
Kane is trying to breathe, but it feels like an elephant is stepping on his chest.
The fire in the windows slips past.
Bravo rocket is above, blazing into the black sky.
All the world below is fire and smoke—Alpha’s violent, sudden death.
Someone is cursing over the comm and Kane realizes he’s yelling nonsense.
He grits his teeth, happy to hear voices of living, shouting people.
“We’re gonna make it!” prays Howard out loud. “We’re gonna make it.”
Kane takes it up. “We’re gonna make it.”
Lieutenant Garcia sings the chant, as does Harney.
We’re gonna make it.
The ship starts a slow roll, and then Kane is upside down. Just like in the simulator. Normal.
Howard and Booker are tense, but working the ship, driving it into the void.
They’re following a curved column of glowing smoke, Bravo’s trail.
The nighttime world spreads out beneath the ship, and Kane looks up to see down to the earth’s surface.
The lights of cities spread across the globe.
“Fifteen miles up,” says Booker over the platoon comm. “Twenty-six hundred miles per hour. The fastest you boys have ever moved.” He laughs again.
Kane decides he likes Booker and stoic Howard.
An explosion shakes the ship.
Harney shouts a curse.
“Solid booster separation,” calls Howard.
“Nothing to worry about,” confirms Booker. “Totally natural.”
Kane knows that’s true. That part was just like the simulator.
“Thirty-six hundred miles per hour,” Booker tells them.
“Nothing damaged in the explosion?” asks Garcia.
“We’ll know soon enough,” says Howard.
The g’s are letting up. Kane’s guessing they’ve made it. He opens the platoon’s command comm link. “Sergeants, report.”
Each of the platoon’s other three sergeants takes a moment to check on their squads.
Everyone is fine.
“Tank separation coming up,” says Howard.
“Cutting engines now,” says Booker.
The rumble stops. The g’s disappear. Something bumps.
“Main tank separation,” confirms Howard.
The copilot laughs and looks over his shoulder. “I can’t believe we lived through that.”
Nobody else laughs.
Chapter 5
The failure and subsequent explosion of Alpha rocket wasn’t a surprise to those in charge. It was only a surprise to Kane and the other soldiers riding the ships into space.
With the moon rising on the day side of the planet, the launches started on the other. Russia, Japan, and Australia rotated into night and went first. As earth slowly spun to hide more of its landmass from the aliens above, China, India, and Europe sent their soldiers into the sky. The Americas launched last.