Eventually Pete emerged from between the control panel and the co-pilot’s seat to announce that not everything was fixed, but he believed enough would work to get the capsule into the ocean. “You don’t want to try anything fancy,” he said. “De-orbit burn, reentry, fall into the water. That’s it.” To punctuate his advice he spun up the Fille’s systems. “You’ve got attitude control back. The engines are back online. The computer that keeps track of where you are and gets you where you want to be?” He gestured at a screen. “It’ll tell you. On this screen. It’ll say what your attitude has to be, any course correction, when to deploy your drogues, it’ll tell you all that. You’ll have to do it manually.” He looked at Sheri, who frowned but nodded.
“You say it’s got attitude control. Do the attitude jets still work?” Conn was concerned they might not after six weeks in space. But they tested them, and everything seemed OK.
Conn was glad to hear it. With Pete out of the way, Sheri applied heat-resistant adhesive to the inside part of the gash. Before she was finished, the bombing of Chicago had commenced.
FORTY-FIVE
Re-Entry
April 14, 2040
Conn ordered Pete and Sheri to Gasoline Alley on the capsule that had brought them there. Conn would ride the Fille back to Earth.
Sheri immediately wanted to revise her estimates of the likelihood of the Fille burning up on reentry, but Conn didn’t want to hear it. “I think you were honest with me before,” she said. “And I appreciate it. Besides, you told me you’d go if I asked you to. I should be willing to go myself if I’m willing to ask you to do it.”
Pete demonstrated all the systems that were working, and pointed out which were not. “The rotisserie, the thing that rotates you so the sun’s not on you for too long on a long flight? I didn’t fix that,” he said. “Joystick control, so you can rendezvous? Not working. You should have everything you need, but not much that you don’t.”
Conn knew she didn’t have forever, so she told Sheri and Pete to get going. She got the astronauts off the Fille and back to their capsule, and she repressurized. Free of her bubble and tanks, she was much nimbler.
Re-entry, splashdown, retrieval, conveyance to Menlo Park, removal of the gun, mounting on a new vehicle, new vehicle traveling to the Midwest—by the time all that happened, Chicago would be erased from the surface of the Earth.
Conn was in a position to do something about it now.
She worked out the latitude and longitude and feet above sea level where she wanted to go, and fed the data into the computer. She was worried that the computer would burp at her that that wasn’t a water landing and the computer wanted no part of it, but it didn’t. The display told her when and how long and at what attitude to fire the engines for a de-orbit burn.
The good news on the ground seemed to be that no other Aphelial spacecraft were inbound. The bad news was that Chicago was being leveled. The Loop was gone. The spacecraft had moved south from there, leaving a trail of death and destruction like slime from a slug.
Witnesses (from afar) claimed that bombs weren’t the Aphelials’ only weapon. Some force emanated from the spacecraft as well, scourging the ground. The feeds started calling it a death ray, though it was invisible and not concentrated into a ray.
Conn reoriented the capsule so its engines faced the direction of travel, and waited. After an excruciating twenty-five minutes, she fired the engines for the amount of time the computer said to, and she began to sink.
Her people on the ground in Menlo Park couldn’t help her go where she was trying to go, but they kept her apprised of the destruction of Chicago, when they weren’t yelling at her for taking the capsule somewhere that wasn’t the Pacific Ocean. The Aphelial spacecraft had proceeded north after it was done with the south side, turning west at the river that once demarcated the Loop. Presumably to take out the west side.
She had no idea if her father and Cora had escaped Wicker Park, on the north side of the city. If they hadn’t, they were surely next, after the west side and western suburbs were destroyed. (Chicago’s “east side” was Lake Michigan.)
No horizon check. She didn’t know which gradation along the rendezvous window it was supposed to line up with.
Periodically, the computer told her to adjust her roll, yaw, or pitch. She did so, as quickly as she could, not wanting there to be too long a lag between when the computer would have done it and when she did.
Thunderstorms around Lake Michigan. It was storming in Chicago.
She slowed again and inserted the capsule into the corridor she needed to follow down to the surface. She rolled a few degrees counter-clockwise to get a better view of the Earth out her port window. As beautiful as the moon and Mars had been, how majestic and ancient and still, the marble of the Earth was still the most beautiful of them all. The sight steeled Conn’s resolve to defend it.
Someone looking at telemetry data on the ground figured out what Conn was doing. The resulting uproar prompted her to shut off the radio.
The 0.05 g event occurred. Drag just beginning. She weighed more now than she weighed on Phobos.
Soon after, the capsule began to shudder and squeal as whorls of liquid light danced outside her windows.
According to Sheri, there was now a two percent chance she would burn up in the atmosphere. Assuming that Sheri was understating the odds, thinking she would be the one riding the capsule through re-entry, Conn figured there was a one-in-twenty chance.
Four g’s pressed her into her seat. She tried to watch out the window the awesome pyrotechnic display as her heat shield melted off, but she kept looking at Sheri’s repair job. She imagined she could hear the gash groaning, straining to pop out of its confines. Everything else was groaning and squeaking as the capsule burned through the late-afternoon sky.
It was 2,200 degrees Celsius outside.
She passed the “capture point.” She was headed to the surface of the Earth for sure, now.
The light show fizzled out, and she was sailing over the northwestern United States. She passed over Oregon, Idaho, Wyoming. Nebraska. Iowa.
She turned her radio back on. West side destroyed, the Aphelials were moving east back to the river. They were expected to turn north from there.
Five minutes after the pyrotechnics ended, Conn deployed the drogue chutes.
After a time, the three main chutes came flapping out, tugging her forward against her straps.
She was slowing now, drastically. She was still dropping, though. Drastically.
When a spacecraft splashed down, it was aiming for a five square kilometer area. She was aiming for an area half that the size, the size of downtown Chicago. She was aiming for downtown Chicago, in fact.
Light flashed outside. Lightning? It was dark gray outside, and Conn heard rain pelting the capsule as the capsule dropped through it.
But it wasn’t lightning. Conn knew it before she even thought it.
Out her starboard window, an Aphelial fighter bore down on her. She had no control over her drop. No place to go, nothing she could do. Rain spattered on the window, but she could see her destruction approaching as clearly as on a sunny day.
Out the port window, another Aphelial fighter. Which one would kill her?
Rain ticked like gravel off the skin of the capsule.
“Menlo Park, Fille,” she said. “I’ve got some Aphelial fighters here about to blow me up. If my family—”
The starboard fighter broke apart like it had been hit by a giant hammer. It dropped out of the sky. Behind it, another fighter approached.
Sidereal.
“Scratch that, the good guys are here!” she radioed. She heard yelling and applause in response.
Conn looked out her port window in time to see the other Aphelial destroyed by another Sidereal fighter.
If this was Ryan again, she was going to be very cross.
The two Sidereal spacecraft flew beside her, like an escort. I might get a shot off, she thought.
Out her rendezvous window, she could see above them. Over their heads, a silver “rocketship” knifed toward the Aphelials.
“Pelorians!” Conn exclaimed. Hoots and whoops from Menlo Park. She didn’t know where the Sidereals had come from, but she really didn’t know where the Pelorians had come from. It filled her heart to see her friends one last time, helping her.
She was lower than she wanted to be, approaching the Aphelial spacecraft. The good news was that she was going to crash into it. She had aimed perfectly. She’d get that one shot off, first.
The enormous spacecraft was rushing up to meet her. Conn couldn’t see it, but she knew it.
One of her escort fighters peeled off and went after somebody. “Go get ‘em!” she hollered.
She watched on the rear monitor for a sign she was over the Aphelial vessel. For now, an indistinct gray filled the screen—either weather, or what was left of the west side of Chicago, Illinois.
Her heart was galloping. She had kept from thinking about what she was going to do, or rather what happened after she did what she was going to do. She reflexively thought about it now, and fought off a wave of nausea.
On her monitor, the Aphelial spacecraft. Directly below her.
She had to time this right. If she fired too early, she might only wing the spacecraft. If she waited too long, she might crash into the vessel before she could fire.
She closed her eyes, and pulled the trigger.
The jet on top of the capsule fired, but the recoil nonetheless bounced her, slackening her parachute lines. She dropped again. The slack was soon gone and she jerked, a teeth-rattling spasm, as the chutes reasserted their influence on her fall.
The bounce had given her another shot. She took it. Pulled the trigger.
Bounced again.
This time when the parachute lines jerked taut one of them snapped.
She wasn’t dead yet. So she fired again.
She barely heard Menlo Park, begging her to tell them what was happening.
She saw fires erupt on either side of her.
Now she was falling in between parts of the Aphelial spacecraft. The parts were tilting and listing. They were dropping. She’d cut the awful thing in two.
She smiled.
She hoped Dad and Cora had fled as far north as possible. But even if they hadn’t, Wicker Park and the north side were safe.
The Aphelial spacecraft no longer beneath her, she had another two kilometers to fall. With two of three chutes. If she survived impact, on dry land, there would be 2.5 square kilometers of spacecraft wreckage falling on her.
She couldn’t have been happier.
“Menlo Park, this is Fille. Signing off.”
FORTY-SIX
Awake
May, 2040
Izzy came out of her first C-level meeting at Interstellar Aerospace none the worse. Yongpo hadn’t asked her any questions she wouldn’t know the answers to, and everybody had listened when she spoke.
She had an hour before a meeting with Ashlyn Flaherty, one Izzy might have expected Jake to handle, but it was a regular meeting that Conn had always kept.
Izzy resolved to spend forty-five minutes of that hour working out in the Interstellar headquarters’ fitness center. She started out jogging on the treadmill.
After the meeting with Ashlyn, she would be sequestering herself and working on an assignment from Yongpo: they had just acquired EMSpace; Yongpo wanted to know which of the initiatives the new company had been spending significant resources on most deserved to be continued. Izzy was excited about some of their research on radiation deflection. She had traveled through the Earth’s Van Allen radiation belts on the way to Mars, soaking herself in enough radiation for her to be concerned about her health. Then she’d been exposed to solar and cosmic radiation for seven and a half months on the way to Mars. Dyna-Tech spared no expense protecting its astronauts with the most current technology, but the most current technology wasn’t very good. EMSpace had made some interesting progress on true radiation protection that didn’t cost much or compromise in other ways.
Conn had passed through the Van Allen belts nine times. Izzy blew out some air after she’d done the math in her head.
Izzy would pass through the belts a second time (and then hopefully a third, on safe return) if she took Yongpo up on his offer of an interstellar mission. Now that the Pelorians weren’t a threat, Dyna-Tech was pursuing the possibility that its interstellar spacecraft they’d built to Pelorian specifications might be safe—that is, if Pelorians were the ones who blew the first spacecraft up, it shouldn’t happen again, now. Dyna-Tech was doing everything it could to determine if the spacecraft would explode, including long, thorough code audits, remote starting, and trying to get Yongpo to share the risk. Interstellar would send one astronaut on the flight along fifth-dimensional space to another star system. Yongpo wanted it to be Izzy.
Interstellar Girl, Izzy thought. Sounds like a science fiction novel.
She was still deciding how she felt about it, as she slapped her feet rhythmically on the exercise machine. It, the interstellar mission, seemed like the kind of thing Conn should be doing. Izzy was playing the role of Conn on the management team, but that didn’t mean she had to do everything Conn would have done. Or did she owe it to her friend to do just that?
Everybody owed Conn something.
# # #
The Sidereals wanted trade and other relations with the humans of Earth. Jeffrey’s party had indeed won the February vote. After a ten-day-long constitutional crisis when the ruling party refused to cede power, Jeffrey’s people had taken the reins. They had immediately dispatched their two remaining fighters to Earth to find out whether it was going to survive and to lend any assistance they could. They arrived to find a huge, flashing-red icon poised over America’s fourth-largest city.
Their fighters’ assistance allowed Conn Garrow to destroy the Aphelial spacecraft. She couldn’t have done it without her friends the Sidereals. Humankind wasn’t likely to forget that anytime soon. Now that the public understood better Mars’ two “factions” and that only one of them killed Scott Daniels, Sidereals—Jeffrey’s Sidereals—were in favor.
Now Jeffrey and his people would get their nitrogen. Ashlyn Flaherty had completed a study that concluded that the perchlorates from the Martian soil would indeed be viable for use as rocket fuel. Yongpo was excited. The nitrogen trade would involve technology, too, for all humankind—tools for planetary defense. The Sidereals were happy to share—giving humankind hope that it could thwart the next Aphelial attack, too.
# # #
Some four thousand Pelorians survived the Aphelial onslaught—one half of one percent of the race. Persisting had a home to return to, if he wished. It was a fixer-upper, but many civilizations have had to rebuild after calamity at one time or another.
The survivors had decided to approach the humans and offer a full surrender in exchange for material aid in their rebuilding effort. By the time they’d had two spacecraft repaired and fit for flight, the Aphelials were in orbit over Chicago. The Pelorians, to boost their chances at détente, decided to render aid if they could.
America was mulling sending NASA managers to consult on the Pelorians’ rebuilding efforts. But those efforts would proceed without Persisting, who remained convinced that a permanent home was not the solution to the Aphelial problem. He would have been happy to see humankind build arks and head for the hills themselves.
# # #
Ryan had forgiven Conn for not giving him a chance to say goodbye.
He might have a hard time forgiving himself for not being at her bedside when she woke up.
He jogged past the nurse’s station, almost passed her room, ski
dded to a halt, and fell out of breath into the room he’d spent so much of the last three weeks in.
She blinked at him. She smiled.
She really was. She was awake. She was back.
# # #
Conn had a million questions, and Ryan patiently answered all of them.
She’d been in a coma for twenty-one days. Yes, her father and Cora were still alive. They had been with her the first week, but couldn’t stay after that. The hospital was in northern California—the hospitals around Chicago were bursting. Ryan was sure they’d be back to see her now.
Yes, she’d destroyed the Aphelial spacecraft. No, no other Aphelials had shown up yet. He was fine, thanks, and he was sorry he wasn’t here when she woke up. Yongpo and the company were doing great. Yongpo had promoted Izzy to Chief Operating Officer, making her technically the Skylar Reece of Conn Air. Yongpo was having her do Conn’s job until Conn came back. He’d used investors’ money to buy EMSpace.
“How did the Sidereals . . . ?”
He explained.
“Did I really see a Pelorian rocketship . . . ?”
He explained.
Yongpo, Izzy, Persisting, Jake, everybody was doing fine. Ryan had called the company on his way to the hospital and told whoever answered the fone to spread the word that Conn was awake. She was due for a lot of visitors soon.
“How did you find out?”
“A nurse was kind enough to offer to call me if you woke up and I wasn’t here,” Ryan said. “I think she’s sweet on me.”
A doctor came in. Conn told him Ryan could stay.
She’d broken six bones, all on her right side, explaining all the casts. She had a cracked skull and some swelling of her brain after receiving a wicked shot to the head. They had feared spinal damage, but it looked like her spine was none the worse for the crash. It was in terrible shape overall, after going from weightless or low-gravity environments back to Earth so often over the last five years. Her bone density in general was a concern. After a week, then two, then three, the doctor was starting to worry about whether she was going to make it back.
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