by Allen Steele
The decommissioning process began when the rods were removed from the pool, one at a time, by robotic cranes, and placed within carbon-steel drums three and half inches thick. Those in turn were transported by truck to the storage yard, where other cranes lowered them into the casks, which themselves were insulated with twenty-one inches of steel-reinforced concrete. Each cask weighed 110 tons and, as the Bellingham Times had said, they were “heavily guarded at all times.”
No doubt the last part was true. All the same, a half-dozen or so guys lay on the ground near the storage yard. And standing on top of one of the casks was Alex.
From the distance, it was hard to tell what he was doing. All I could see was that he was bent over, and a white-hot beam of energy coming from something within his hands. It lanced straight down into the cask, causing it to spit pieces of concrete, with molten steel drooling down the sides. He should have been wearing welder’s goggles and gloves, yet it appeared that he was both barehanded and bare-faced.
Once again, I found myself wondering what kind of guy he was. The Terminator when he was a teenager, with breaking into nuclear power plants as his idea of a high-school prank. And I thought picking up the basketball coach’s ’69 Volkswagen and carrying into the gym was a hoot…
Tyler and Mickey stood at the base of the cask. Tyler was watching Alex; he seemed nervous, because he restlessly paced back and forth. Mickey was a little more calm, but she had something in her hands that looked like an oversize calculator. She kept it pointed away from the cask, though, toward the plant instead.
A motion detector? I didn’t know, but when she moved it in my direction, I held my breath and froze, not daring to twitch a muscle. She paused for a moment, then continued to scan the vicinity.
Okay. Perhaps they weren’t your average Islamist terrorists. But neither were they the sort of guys I liked to find at my neighborhood nuclear power plant. Either way, I’d seen enough. I took a couple of steps back…
Wrong move. I was still within range of whatever Mickey was using to sweep the area. Shouting something that sounded only vaguely like English, she pointed in my direction. Tyler whipped around, drew something that looked like a weapon…
To this day, I don’t know why I did what I did. Maybe it was because I didn’t want to be more guy found unconscious at Narragansett Point. Maybe I was too stupid to be a hero and too brave to be a coward. Or maybe I just didn’t know what I was doing.
At any rate, instead of running, I stepped out from behind cover.
“Hold on, guys!” I yelled, throwing up my hands. “It’s me!”
Tyler stopped, his gun half-raised. Mickey stared at me is disbelief. Alex paused in whatever he was doing and peered in my direction. For a moment, I don’t think they recognized me. Then Mickey said something to Tyler, and he took a step closer to the fence.
“Is that you, Eric?” he called back, using plain English this time.
“Yeah, it’s me.” I kept my hands in the air. “Don’t shoot, okay? I’m harmless. Look…no gun, see?”
Tyler didn’t seem quite convinced, but since he wasn’t aiming his weapon at me, I supposed that I was getting through to him. “What are you doing here?” he demanded. “Did you follow us?”
How to answer that? The truth was too hard to explain, but a lie would have been obvious. So I settled for something in-between. “Just wondered why you guys wanted to come out here,” I said, thinking as fast as I could. “Thought…y’know, maybe there was a party going on.”
Tyler said nothing, but I heard Mickey stifle a laugh. Whoever these guys were, whatever they were up to, they were still teenagers all the same…and every teen who’s ever lived knows the attraction of a party. “Look, I’m coming up,” I added. “Just don’t shoot, all right? I’ve got nothing.”
“You shouldn’t be here,” Tyler said. “Go away.”
I hesitated for a second, then decided to ignore him. His weapon looked like something I could have bought at Toys ’R Us, but he’d managed to use it against a well-armed security force. If he was going to use it me, too, then fine, so be it. Maybe I’d wake up with a bad headache, but I knew already that its effects weren’t fatal. And I was damned if I was going to simply scamper home. Maybe they weren’t terrorists—and judging from what I’d seen so far, Ted’s theory that they were working for al-Qaeda or Islamic Jihad was highly unlikely—but nobody breaks into a nuclear power plant in my town and gets away with it.
“Eric…” Mickey watched as I approached the fence, stepping around the unconscious guards in my way. “Tyler’s right. The less you know what we’re doing, the better off you’ll be.”
“Yeah, well, maybe. But…” The gate was half-open, and it looked if something had melted the lock. Now I knew what. I pushed it open, stepped through. “Y’know, you didn’t leave me your phone number, so how else am I going to ask you for a date?”
This from a guy who would’ve never used that line on Pauline Coullete. Yet fear makes men accomplish impossible things. Mickey’s face broke into that incredible smile of hers, and I felt like James Bond sinking Ms. Moneypenny with the best wisecrack of all time.
“You’re brave,” she said quietly. “I like that.”
Tyler scowled at me. For a moment I thought I’d pushed my luck too far. Perhaps I did, because he glanced down at his pistol, as if remembering that he had it. Before he could do anything, Alex called down from the cask.
“I’ve penetrated the seal, Lieutenant. Shall I remove the outer cover?”
Tyler forgot about me for a moment. “Go ahead and open it, Alex.” Glancing my way, he suddenly became self-conscious. “Resume prior communications protocols,” he added. “Use period dialect from now on.”
Alex responded in the language I’d heard them use before, something that sounded like a polyglot of English, French, and Spanish. What made me more curious, though, was the formal way Alex had addressed him. Lieutenant? Lieutenant in which service? Whatever it was, it probably wasn’t the Coast Guard…
“You must leave.” Mickey’s voice was quiet. “Now, Eric. Please.”
“Uh-uh.” I folded my arms together. “Not until I…”
Whatever I was about to say, I didn’t get a chance finish it. I was too busy watching Alex bend down and grasp the steel handles on either side of the cask cover. It probably weighed two tons, at least; there was the grinding sound of concrete surfaces rasping across each other, then he hoisted the cover with little more effort than me picking up an armchair, and tossed it over the side of the cask.
It hit the ground with a solid thump. Alex stood erect, looked down at me, and smiled. I gulped. Whatever high school football team he belonged to, I prayed that I’d never meet them on the fifty-yard line.
Mickey was speaking into her pad, saying something urgent in whatever tongue she and her friends used. By then, I was having second-thoughts about being here. This was far too weird for me. When the cops showed up, maybe I could pretend to be unconscious. Play possum, claim that I hadn’t seen anything…
I began to back away, inching my way toward the gate, when there was a howl from somewhere above us. Wincing, I doubled over, gritting my teeth as I clasped my hands against my ears.
Then I looked up, and saw a spaceship coming down from the sky.
The spacecraft was a little larger than a commuter jet, or about half the size of a NASA shuttle. Sleek and streamlined, its broad delta-shaped wings tapered downward at their tips, while twin vertical stabilizers rose from either side of a hump at its aft section that I took to be a drive of some sort; there were no rocket engines so far as I could see. The bow canted slightly forward at the end of a short neck, and wraparound viewports above a beaklike prow lent the ship a vaguely avian appearance, like a giant sea gull.
I didn’t know whether to laugh, faint, or wet my pants. I did none of the above; instead, I stared at it with open-mouthed wonder, and hoped that I didn’t look like some hillbilly who’d never seen technology more advanced than
Grandpa’s moonshine still.
The ship slowly descended until it hovered twenty feet above the cask on which Alex was standing. A broad hatch on its underside slid open; standing within it was a lone figure, wearing what I took to be a spacesuit. Alex waved his right arm, motioning for the craft to move further to the left. The pilot complied, inching the craft a few degrees port until the hatch was directly above Alex and the cask.
“Seen enough?” Tyler asked. “Good. Time for you to take a nap.”
I looked down, saw that he’d raised his weapon again. There was nothing I could do; I stood still, and hoped that being zapped wouldn’t hurt…
“Stop!” Mickey suddenly put herself between him and me. “You can’t do this!”
Tyler quickly pointed the gun toward the ground. “What are you…?”
“You’re right…he’s seen enough. Too much, in fact.” Still shielding me from Tyler, she pointed up at the hovering spacecraft. “He’s the only witness. If you stun him now…”
Tyler muttered something I couldn’t understand, but that I figured was obscene. “But what else can we do if we don’t…?”
“Take me with you,” I blurted out.
Tyler’s eyes widened, and Mickey glanced back at me in astonishment. “Look,” I went on, talking as fast as I could, “maybe this is none of my business, but…hey, if you just showed me what this is all about, then maybe we can…I dunno, work something out.”
“Nice try.” Tyler raised his weapon again. “Stand down, McGyver. That’s an order.”
“Don’t try pulling me rank on me, Tyler.” Mickey glared at him. “Remember, Captain Van Owen put me in charge of…”
She was interrupted by another hatch opening within the spacecraft, this one on the port side. A teenage girl about our age stood within the hatch, her arms braced along its sides; she made an impatient gesture—c’mon, hurry up!—and Mickey lifted a hand to her right ear and ducked her head slightly, as if listening to something hidden by her hair. A moment passed, then she looked at me again.
“Do you know anything about local air defense network?” she asked.
“A little.” Which was the truth. I knew what everyone else who lived around here knew, plus whatever else Dad had told me. “Why, what do you…?”
Mickey muttered something in her own language, waited a moment, then looked at Tyler. “Hsing says bring him aboard. We’ll let the skipper sort it out later.”
“But…”
“We’re running out of time. Shut up and help Alex, or the captain’s going to get this in my report. Understood?”
Tyler nodded reluctantly, then put away his gun and turned toward the cask. From the cargo hatch, two thick cables with hooks at their ends were being lowered; Alex reached up, preparing to grab them once they came within reach. It was obvious what they intended to do, but why…?
“You do know what you say you know?” There was apprehension in Mickey’s eyes as she turned to look at me. “You’re not…um, putting us on…are you, Eric?”
“I’m no expert, but…” I shrugged. “I’ll do what I can do.”
“Very well. Let’s go.” She hesitated, then quietly added, “I just hope neither of us regrets this.”
Again, she reached beneath her hair to touch something at her ear, and murmured something in her language. A few seconds later, the girl standing in the side hatch tossed something overboard: a rope ladder, uncoiling as it fell. It snapped taut as its weighted end hit the ground; Mickey grasped its rungs and began to climb upward. I waited until she was nearly halfway up, then followed her.
The girl at the top of the ladder was no older than Mickey or me. Perhaps even younger; the baby-blue jumpsuit she wore looked a little too big for someone who would’ve been a freshman at my local middle school. The compartment was barely large enough for the three of us; while Mickey had a short conversation with her, I got a chance to look around. Recessed storage lockers, a couple of control panels here and there. Obviously an airlock; an interior hatch on one side of the compartment lay open, apparently leading forward to the cockpit, and on the opposite side of the airlock was another hatch. This one was shut, but it had a small window. Figuring that it led to the cargo bay, I was about to peer through the window when something caught my eye.
Hanging within one of the lockers was a spacesuit, although like none I’d ever seen before. Resembling a scuba diver’s wet-suit, it was made of some fabric that seemed impossibly thin, with a neck-ring around its collar and sockets along its sides. A helmet with an angular face-plate rested on a shelf above the suit, and a small backpack was clamped to the inside of the door.
But that wasn’t what got my attention. Above the locker was a small sign; the language was indecipherable, but I know Roman alphabet when I see it. Perhaps that alone should have been a shock—wow, it’s not Klingon!—yet then I saw the mission patch embroidered on the suit’s left shoulder, and I felt my heart skip a beat.
At the center of the patch was an emblem that looked much like a classic diagram of an atom—a nucleus surrounded by electrons—until I realized that it was actually a tiny sun surrounded by eight planets. And wrapped around above the emblem was:
SOLAR CONFEDERATION FLEET
S.C.S. VINCENNES
My knees went weak, and I grabbed for something for support. As it happened, it was the girl who’d helped us aboard. She wrapped an arm around my shoulder to keep me on my feet, then said something to Mickey. Following my gaze, she saw what I’d seen. Giving me a sympathetic smile, Mickey pried me from loose from her friend.
“There’s a lot that needs to be explained,” she murmured. “But not now. We have a job to do.”
The cockpit was larger on the inside than it appeared from the outside; seats for the pilot and co-pilot up front, with six passenger couches arranged behind it. The pilot was about Steve’s age; looking away from his console as we came in, he frowned when he saw me, and said something I couldn’t understand yet obviously wasn’t warm and friendly. Mickey gave him a curt reply, and he returned his attention to the controls.
His hands were gripped tight around a T-shaped control bar, and he was visibly making an effort to hold the craft in position. No wonder; the wind was causing the deck was pitch back and forth, and we had to hold tight to the seatbacks just to stay on our feet.
“Just a second.” Mickey reached up to an overhead storage bin and slid it open. The bin was stuffed with equipment I didn’t recognize; pulling out a small box, Mickey opened it to produce something that looked like a hearing aid, except that it had a tiny prong that curved to one side and a miniature wand that went in the other direction.
“Put it in your right ear,” she explained. “Like this, see?” Pulling back her hair, I saw that she wore an identical unit. When I fumbled with it, she patiently helped me insert the thing, with the prong fitting around my upper lobe and the wand nestled against my throat. Once it was in place, she touched a tiny button.
A double-beep, then nothing. “I don’t get it,” I said. “What’s this supposed to do?”
“Oh, for the love of…” The pilot glanced at me in irritation. “Where’d you find this idiot, Mickey?”
My left ear heard the same weird language he’d been speaking before; my right ear heard plain English. “She found me on the street corner,” I replied. “What’s it to you?”
He glared at me, and Mickey hid her smile behind her hand. An auto-translation device of some sort; now we could understand each other. “It’s a long story, Hsing,” she said. “His name’s Eric. He says he can help us. Give him a chance.”
Hsing hesitated. “Okay, kid. Come here and tell me what I’m looking at.”
Not really believing I was doing this, I stumbled forward until I was just behind his seat. His controls looked like nothing I’d ever seen before: row upon row of fluorescent touch screens arrayed along a wraparound console, with recessed holograms displaying information I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. I’d been inside cockp
its before during air shows at Westfield, but this one made the most advanced Air Force jet look like something the Wright brothers had cobbled together from birch wood and piano wire.
“What do you want to know?” I asked. As if I had anything to offer. Me know spaceship, uh-huh. Me want to help…
“This.” Hsing tapped a small holographic display midway between him and the co-pilot’s seat. It expanded, revealing a wire-frame hemisphere with a topographic map at its base. “That’s SLIR…” he pronounced it as sleer “…side-looking infrared radar. It works on the principal of…”
“I know radar. Go on.”
Hsing glanced first at me, then at Mickey. “Got a mouth on him, doesn’t he?” he said to her, then he pointed again at the display. “See those? They’re coming at us from the south-southwest. Now tell me what they are, smart guy.”
I looked closer. Three small red blips, near the outer edge of the hemisphere and one-quarter of the way to its apex, rapidly approaching a blue blip hovering close to the ground at the center of the map. “How far away are they?”
“Sixty-two kilometers and closing. Altitude 6,300 meters, speed…”
“Warthogs.” I felt something cold at the pit of my stomach.
Hsing looked at me again. “Repeat?”
“A-10 Thunderbolts…Warthogs, if you want to call then that. Coming in from Westfield.” I pointed to the lowermost right part of the holo, beneath the blips. “They belong to the 104th Fighter Wing, Barnes Air National Guard Base. They probably scrambled as soon as NORAD picked you up on the air-defense grid.” I gave him a sidelong look. “Guess they picked you up when you entered the atmosphere. Right?”
Hsing didn’t reply, but his face went pale. “Do they pose a threat to us?” Mickey quietly asked.