by Allen Steele
“Oh, yeah. You definitely have something to worry about.” I took a deep breath. “They’re built for low-level runs against tanks, anti-aircraft missile launchers, that sort of thing. Gatling guns, air-to-ground missiles…”
“Can they operate at night?” Hsing asked, and I threw him a glance he couldn’t help but understand. “Oh, boy…” he murmured, then he glanced over his shoulder. “Libbie, we have a situation!”
“We’ve got the canister!” the girl yelled from the airlock. “Alex and Deke are securing it now!”
“Then seal the cargo hatch and get back here!” Hsing tapped his headset wand. “Tyler, get aboard. We’re ready for liftoff.”
“Make a hole!” Libbie charged in from the airlock, unapologetically shoving me out of the way. She jumped into the right-hand seat and yanked down a padded harness bar. “Cargo hatch sealed,” she snapped, her hands racing across her side of the console. “Initiating main engine sequence…”
“Let’s get you strapped down.” Mickey pushed me into a couch behind Libbie. “We’re going to be pulling a few G’s until the inertial dampeners kick in, so be prepared for some rough flying.”
I had no idea what she meant by inertial dampeners, but I knew all about g’s. The harness was much like those on a ride at Six Flags; it came down over my head and shoulders and clicked into place across my chest. I gave Mickey a thumbs up; she acknowledged it with a brief nod as she secured herself into a seat across the aisle from me.
“MEI green for go.” Hsing’s voice was tight as a wire. “APU powered up. Main hatch…hey, why isn’t the hatch secure? Tyler, where are you?” Clasping his right hand over his headset. “What’s that? Repeat, please…”
I peered over his shoulder at the SLIR. The three red blips were very close to the center of the holo; they couldn’t be more than twenty miles away. If we were going to make a clean getaway, the ship would have to launch now…
“Aw, hell!” Hsing yelled. “Tyler’s down!”
“What?” Libbie stared at him. “How did he…?”
“I don’t know. He’s fallen off the ladder, says his knee’s twisted.” The pilot glanced at the SLIR again, swore under his breath. “We don’t have time for this. Libbie, prepare for liftoff.”
“You can do that!” Mickey grabbed the back of Hsing’s seat. “He’s…!”
“Those jets are almost on top of us.” Hsing jabbed a finger at the holo. “We don’t have a choice. We’re going to have to leave him…”
Leave no man behind…
“Hold the bus!” Before I knew what I was doing, I shoved the harness upward. Mickey stared at me as I leaped from of my seat; she raised a hand to stop me, but I was already halfway to the airlock. “Gimme a minute! I’ll get him back!”
“No way!” Hsing shouted. “I can’t risk…!”
“They won’t attack! Trust me!” I didn’t have time to explain; I could only hope that the pilot would take my word.
The side hatch was open, the ladder still lowered. Through the cargo bay window, I caught a glimpse of Alex and the other crewman, holding tight to bulkhead straps on either side of the fuel-rod canister. They stared at me in mute surprise as I turned around, kneeled down, and carefully put my legs through the airlock hatch. My feet found the top rungs; I grasped the ladder with both hands and began to climb down.
Tyler lay on the concrete pad below me, clutching at his left knee. He shouted something I couldn’t understand, so I chose to ignore him. The ladder swayed back and forth; the spacecraft was in motion, and for an instant I thought Hsing was about to lift off. Then I saw that the distance between me and Tyler was getting shorter, and realized the pilot was carefully maneuvering his ship closer to the ground.
I jumped the last five feet, bending my hips and knees to let my legs take the impact. Tyler saw what I intended to do; he struggled to his right knee, wincing as he put weight on his left leg. “Hang on!” I yelled, wrapping my left arm around him. “We’re gonna get you out of here!”
“You’re out of your…!”
He didn’t get a chance to finish before the rest was lost in the roar of three Warthogs making a low-level pass over Narragansett Point. Looking up, I saw the amber glow of their jets as they hurtled less than a thousand feet above us. The A-10s howled past us, then peeled apart from one another as they made a steep climb above the Connecticut River.
“C’mon, move!” I hauled Tyler to his feet, carried him to the dangling ladder. “Get your ass up there!”
Tyler didn’t argue. He grasped the rungs and began to climb, favoring his left leg but nonetheless using it to balance himself. He didn’t have far to travel; Hsing had brought the craft within fifteen feet of the ground, its starboard wingtip nearly grazing the top of the nearest waste cask. Looking up, I saw Mickey crouched within the hatch, reaching down to help Tyler climb aboard.
I didn’t wait to make sure he was safe. I grabbed the ladder, scrambled up it like a monkey on a coconut tree. The A-10s were gone, but they’d back as soon as the hog drivers reported what they’d seen. I had little doubt that whoever was in charge at Barnes would give them permission to open fire upon the strange craft they’d spotted hovering above the local nuclear power plant. Nonetheless, I knew that they wouldn’t attack immediately, but instead obey the chain of command. Thank heavens I’d grown up as a soldier’s boy. Otherwise I might not have known this.
Yet the clock was ticking, but seriously…
Reaching up, I planted my hand against Tyler’s butt, gave him a mighty shove. Mickey already had him by the shoulders; she dragged him the rest of the way through the hatch. I scampered up the ladder, then helped Mickey haul it up behind us.
“Clear!” Mickey slammed the hatch shut and twisted a lockwheel. “Main hatch sealed!”
“Copy that!” Libbie called back. “Hang on!”
Tyler had already limped to the nearest seat. Mickey shoved me into another couch, then planted herself in the one across the aisle. We barely had time to pull down our harnesses before the spacecraft’s prow tilted upward.
“Go for launch!” Hsing shouted.
“Punch it!” I yelled. Mickey’s hand grabbed mine, and then we fell into the sky.
Countless times, I’ve imagined what it might be like to be aboard a rocket during liftoff. Although the closest I’d ever been to a real spacecraft were the ones at the National Air & Space Museum, where my father had taken Steve and me during a family vacation to Washington D.C., my fantasies had been fueled by film clips of shuttle launches, movies like Apollo 13, and dozens of science fiction novels. So I thought I was ready for the real thing.
I wasn’t.
We went up fast. As the craft violently shook around me, an invisible hand pressed my body back into the couch. Blood pounded in my ears as I gulped air and fought to keep down the pizza I’d had for dinner.
“They’re after us, Hsing.” Libbie’s voice was tight. “Range three-fifty meters and closing.”
I glanced at the SLIR. Three blips following a blue dot straight up the center of the hemisphere, getting closer every second. On a small screen on Libbie’s side of the console, I caught a brief glimpse of three small, angular objects, fuzzy and green-tinted, a phosphorescent glow coming from their aft sections. The Warthogs were right on our tail. If they managed to lock on…
“Hang tight, everyone!” Hsing snapped. “I’m going evasive!”
Terrified, I instinctively turned my head away. Bad idea; the same invisible hand caused my neck to twist painfully. Not only that, but it was at this same moment that Hsing rolled the craft 180 degrees. Through a side-window, I caught a brief glimpse of my home town, as seen at night from about 10,000 feet. A small constellation of house lights and street lamps, very pretty…except that it was upside-down, and rapidly disappearing behind us.
“Easy. Easy.” Mickey clutched my hand. “Look straight ahead, take deep, short breaths.”
I managed to pull my face forward, concentrated on breathing. For a
moment, I saw clouds, backlit by the lights of town. Then we ripped through them, and suddenly there were only stars. Pretty, but I was in no mood to admire them; the invisible hand had become a fat guy who’d just come away from an all-you-can-eat buffet, and decided that my chest was a fine place to sit down.
“They’re falling back.” Libbie’s voice was taut, but no longer alarmed. “Range 400 meters…600…800…”
“We should be near the limits of their operational ceiling.” Hsing held tight to his yoke. “We’re almost in the clear, guys.”
My guts were beginning to settle down, and it getting a little easier to breathe; the fat guy got up and went to check out the dessert bar. By now I could see the stars more clearly; they didn’t glimmer and twinkle, as I’d seen them while standing on the ground, but instead shined steadily…and all of a sudden, I realized that there were far more than I’d ever seen in my life.
Carefully turning my head, I looked over a Mickey. She met my gaze, saw that I was doing okay, and gave me a wry smile. I was about to do the same when dawn broke.
As sunlight streamed through the starboard windows, I raised a hand against the sudden glare…and then stopped myself when I realized what I was seeing. No, not sunrise…sunset, my second one of the day. Or at least it would early if I was still in Bellingham, Vermont.
Yet I was no longer there, was I? What I was witnessing was the sun going down somewhere west of the Rockies. Out in California, some guy my age would be strolling the beaches of Monterey, watching the sun paint the waves of the Pacific. And meanwhile, I was witnessing the same thing, although from a considerably higher perspective.
It was then—my body floating upward against the seat harness, watching sunlight turn a vast curved horizon into a crimson-hued scimitar, feeling my ears pop as I swallowed—that I realized that I was no longer on Earth.
“Holy…” I swallowed again. “I’m in space.”
Sure, it sounded moronic. It probably was. All the same, I couldn’t get over what I was seeing. It wasn’t a movie or a TV show, it wasn’t something I’d read in a science fiction novel, it wasn’t even a particularly vivid dream. This was real…
Damn. I was in space.
“Really? No kidding?” From behind us, Tyler snickered. “Wow, what a revelation. And here I was, thinking we were…”
“Shut up.” Mickey looked at him in disgust, then her expression softened. “How’s your leg? Want me to break out the med kit?”
“I’ll manage.” Tyler reached down to gently massage his swollen knee. “It’ll wait until we’re back aboard ship. The doc will take care of it.” He regarded me for a moment, then slowly let out his breath. “Thanks,” he added, albeit reluctantly. “You didn’t have to do that.”
“No problem.” I was having trouble staying focused. “You’d have done the same for me if…”
My voice trailed off. No, he would not have, and we both knew it. Yet Tyler wasn’t about to let me have the last word. “I was thinking about dropping you off somewhere in China,” he muttered, “but I guess we can’t do that now, can we?”
My face must have gone red, because Mickey grasped my hand again. “You might try to be a little more grateful,” she said, then she turned her attention forward. “How are we doing?”
“Fine. On course for rendezvous and pick-up.” Hsing didn’t look back at us as his hands roamed across the console. “Sorry about the ride. We had to execute some high-g maneuvers to get away from those planes.”
“S’okay. Think nothing of it.” I was no longer queasy; astonishment had taken care of that problem. Besides, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for the A-10 pilots we’d left behind; they were probably on their way back to Westfield, going hummanahummanahummanna and trying to figure out how to explain this one to the CO.
Yeah, okay. Maybe the Massachusetts Air National Guard had a mystery on their hands, and so did the Narragansett Point security team. Yet I was only slightly less clueless than they were…
I looked at Mickey again. “Look, I know it’s a lot to ask, but…would you mind telling me what’s going on here?”
She said nothing for a moment. Libbie gazed back over her shoulder at her. “It’s not too late to consider China,” she murmured. “Maybe some remote village near the Tibetan border…?”
“No.” Mickey’s voice was cold. “Set course for rendezvous with the Vincennes. And re-engage the I-drive…I want us there in two and a half standard hours, max.”
Libbie and Hsing shared a glance. “On your orders, chief,” the pilot said, then he pressed his fingers against his console. “IDE in five…four…three…two…”
“Hold on,” Mickey said quietly to me. “This may be…”
“One…zero.”
Weight returned, as abruptly as if I was aboard an elevator that had been plummeting down a bottomless shaft, only to have its brakes abruptly kick in. All of a sudden, I went from zero-gee to one-gee…and even if the rest of my body was ready for change, my brain wasn’t, and neither was my stomach.
Particularly not my stomach. A Friday night special from Louie’s tastes great going down. Coming back up again, it’s not so wonderful.
“Aw, for the love of…someone get a bag under him!” Tyler snapped, while Mickey held my shoulders and let me heave all over the deck.
Libbie tossed back a folded paper bag from a compartment beneath her seat, but by then the damage was done. “Sorry ’bout that,” I apologized to no one in particular, sitting up straight and wiping my mouth with the back of my hand. “If you’ll show me where you keep the paper towels, I’ll…”
I stopped, staring down at where I’d thrown up. The pool of puke was disappearing, as if the deck itself had become a sponge and was rapidly absorbing it. Looking closer, I saw what looked like thousands of tiny maggots eating away at the edges of the vomit. Gross…
“Decontamination nanites,” Mickey explained. “They automatically activate when a foreign biological substance touches an interior surface and convert it into inert matter. Keeps the shuttle clean.” She touched my arm and stood up. “Come with me…I’ve got something to show you.”
I followed her only too gladly; the nanites creeped me out. Still feeling a bit rocky, I followed her back to the airlock. Tyler watched us go, and I could feel his eyes at my back. Perhaps I’d saved his bacon, but he still wasn’t ready to accept me as anything but a nuisance. Or maybe it was more than that…?
Mickey stopped at the cargo bay hatch. She glanced through the window, then stood aside to let me look inside. The fuel-rod canister was snug within a pair of padded braces; Deke, the third crew member, wore a thick outfit that I took to be anti-radiation armor of some sort, yet Alex was still wearing only the patch-work sweater, cammie trousers, and cowboy boots he’d swiped from the thrift shop. They stood on either side of the canister, patiently waiting for us to get to wherever we were going. Spotting me looking in on him, Alex smiled, then raised his hand to give me a happy, carefree wave.
“Aren’t you worried about him?” I asked. “I mean, no telling how many REMs he’s taking in there.”
“You don’t need to worry about him. Alex isn’t…”
She stopped herself. “He’s not human, is he?” I asked.
“No.” She shook her head. “Alex isn’t human. I suppose you could say that he’s an android, although that’s an antiquated term. His name is an acronym for Artificial Lifeform Experimental…”
“Right. Alex. I get it.” It explained a lot about him, but I wasn’t about to let her off the hook so easily. “Look, Mickey,” I went on, dropping my voice so that the others couldn’t hear us, “or whatever your name is, or what it stands for…”
“Mickey’s my real name.” Her face colored a little. “Alex is the only artificial person aboard.”
“Great. You had me worried there for a second.” I paused. “You might as well tell me the rest. I’m here, right? Either that, or dump me in China or Tibet or wherever. And if you do that, you ought to
just hurry up and kill me, because all I have are the clothes on my back, five bucks, my student I.D., and a Blockbuster Video card.”
“We’re not going to do that.” She glanced back at the cockpit. “Don’t mind Tyler. He’s just sore because…”
“Sure. Whatever. Just tell me one thing…are you guys from the future?”
Her face went pale, and she stepped back from me. Before she could say anything, though, I went on. “Don’t tell me you’re from another planet…”
“But we are.”
“Oh, yeah? Which one?”
“Mars.”
“Sure.” I tapped the sign above the suit locker I’d spotted earlier. “And I suppose that’s Martian, and what you’re speaking is…”
“Martian.” She hesitated. “Or at least the Martian dialect of what you know as English. That’s why we need the autotranslators. In my time…”
Once more, she stopped herself. “There it is again,” I said. “‘My time’…like that’s different from ‘your time.’ C’mon, I’m not stupid. Tell me the rest.”
She looked down, said nothing. From the corner of my eye, I could see that we were no longer alone. Tyler stood in the hatchway leading to the cockpit, and behind him was Libbie. I had no idea how much they’d overheard, but neither of them looked any more happy with me than Mickey.
Mickey must have noticed them, too. Although she tried not to acknowledge their presence, she was visibly uncomfortable. “I just wanted…I just wanted to show you that the fuel-rod canister was intact, and assure you that it wouldn’t be used to make an atomic weapon. Since that’s your major concern, that is…”
“Thanks.” She was stating the obvious; the real explanation was still unsaid, but I was in no position to press the issue. “I appreciate it.”
She nodded, then silently left the airlock, squeezing between Tyler and Libbie. I let her go, then turned to look at her two companions. “Okay, then,” I said, squaring my shoulders, “which one of you Martians wants to tell me where we’re going?”
I was trying to be funny, but neither of them were the type to take a joke. Libbie turned to follow Mickey, while Tyler gave me a cold look. “You want the truth?” he asked, and I nodded. “Lunar stationary orbit, on the far side of the Moon. We’ll be there in about two hours, twenty minutes, standard.”