“So will you do it?” Jack said. “If not, I can fly the SoD by myself and Alexei can fly the Victory. It’s not a very complicated maneuver.”
Linda scowled. Koichi’s dark eyes entreated her to say yes. To betray the mission, just like he’d done.
“OK, I suppose that’s a no,” Jack said. “Oh well. It would have been nice to feel like we were all in this together.” He pulled a face, mocking himself.
“I could do it,” Koichi said. “Would that help? I am qualified as a pilot, too.”
Jack slapped his forehead. “Of course you are!” With only three of them on the crew, they had all had to qualify in everything. “That would be brilliant, Koichi. As I said, it’s not a very tricky maneuver. I’ll align the thrust vectors ahead of time. You’ll just have to thrust on my mark.”
Koichi nodded. “I will do my best,” he said in his serious Japanese way.
“Fucking hell,” Linda said. “Your family’s at CELL, too, Koichi! Your mother and your brother and his family, right? Are you just going to write them off like they don’t matter?”
Koichi gazed steadily at her. “If I don’t do my best, I cannot look them in the face again,” he said.
A wave of dizziness washed over Linda. She lay down on her side and wrapped her arms around herself. In her mind she was hugging Rufus. But her arms went right through him, and she wept.
“Do her now,” Jack’s voice said, in the distance.
Some time later, in a faraway place, caressed by cool wind, her glitching mind took her to the Colorado mountains where she’d grown up. There was Grigory sitting on a tree stump. Large as life, smoking a stinky Russian cigarette. She rushed towards him. He held up a hand: stop. “I am dead, Linda.”
“I forgot,” she said, eyes prickling.
“Have you forgotten everything? Have you forgotten Plan B? Yes, of course you have. You poor kid. Too many neutrons to the brain. But look, they are inducing accelerated neuroplasticity to help you heal.” She tasted garlic. The mountain scene, and Grigory, started to grow misty. “Your mind will come back, and then you’ll know what to do …”
He was right. When she woke up, she remembered everything.
CHAPTER 38
Richard Burke cleaned out his office at Johnson Space Center. Two Texas militiamen watched him, cradling assault rifles above their bellies. Burke’s wife, Candy, fed documents through the shredder. The last thing Burke put into his cardboard box was the SoD poster that had hung on his wall since 2016. The idealistic dove logo now looked as stale and quaint as the United Nations logo that had inspired it. The United Nations had become the Earth Party’s rubber-stamp department, and the State of Texas had become the Free People’s Republic of Texas, population 50 million people and approximately 500 million guns. For a while, an extraterritoriality arrangement had left JSC in American hands. Now, with the Lightbringer only 10 days away from Earth, Texas was evicting them.
Burke told himself it was just as well. He’d grown weary of living in one country and working in another, enduring invasive security checks twice a day, while Candy coped with people spray-painting YANKEE RAUS on their rented house.
Carrying boxes, they walked down the stairs. Friendly Texan #1 and Friendly Texan #2 tromped after them. The building already smelled of neglect. A skeleton staff had manned it while New Hope was operational. Now the whole place was empty …
… except for Mission Control. A dedicated handful of men and women had camped out in FCR-1, the mission control center, monitoring the parabolic flight of the SoD and its companions around the sun.
Burke set his boxes down on one of the many unoccupied desks, taking the strain off his lower back. “Time to go, guys.”
Most of the computers had vanished off the desks. All but one of the big screens at the front of the room were dark. The single live one showed a computer-generated prediction of the SoD’s path towards Earth, in red. Another line also converged on Earth. That one was blue. It represented the Lightbringer. An angle of about 120° separated the two ships’ vectors.
Burke looked away from the screen after one glance. He had never been comfortable with the Victory deception. It preyed on his conscience. He didn’t know what was worse—that the mission had failed, or that he’d approved it in the first place.
“Guys. Time to go.”
“Sir?” CAPCOM—actually, the twenty-something comms specialist who now sat at CAPCOM’s desk—spoke diffidently. “They’re burning.”
Burke hurried over. The youngsters made room for him. He tapped keys, bringing up data on the infrared telescope image on the screen … and whistled. “Holy cow.” They were looking at the SoD’s drive plume. Formerly, the ship had been nearly impossible to observe, as it was hurtling at them straight out of the sun. But now, a flame of hot H and O plasma lit up the screen. The SoD was thrusting with all its might to decelerate. Its observationally calculated speed ticked lower as they watched.
“They might make it,” CAPCOM said, choking up.
By make it, she meant make it back, without overshooting Earth at 60,000 kph. But something else jumped out at Burke. He moved to the adjacent computer and clicked up their observational data on the Lightbringer. He compared velocities and rates of deceleration.
“They’re going to get here at the same time as the Lightbringer. To within a few hours.”
“No way, sir!”
“Yes way,” Burke said. Emotion choked him. After the failures, indignities, and hardships of the last two years, this news was almost too much to bear. It offered … hope.
“What’s the hold-up?” growled one of the Texans. “Y’all gotta be out of here by noon.”
Burke and his young staffers cringed in a Pavlovian reaction to authority, the only kind of authority that mattered these days: the kind with firepower.
But Candy Burke, uncomplaining veteran of America’s dissolution, who had put up with being the other woman in Burke’s marriage to NASA, and with the loss of her home, and the defection of two out of their three children to the Earth Party, turned on the militiamen.
“This is the Spirit of Destiny,” she yelled, jabbing a finger at the screen. “It’s coming home. And it just might save the world, so give us five goddamn minutes!”
Save the world? Burke wasn’t so sure about that. He knew the SoD still had three out of its original complement of four nuclear railgun rounds. Whether that’d be enough to take out the Lightbringer was another question. And that was assuming the Lightbringer did not swat the human ship out of the sky like a mosquito.
What moved him to the point of tears was the sheer achievement of the SoD’s return. Breaking speed records, varying its velocity wildly, swinging around Mars, hooking around the sun, while still hanging onto enough reaction mass to slam on the brakes at the last moment—it was an astounding feat that few non-professionals could fully appreciate. Just as the Free Republic of Texas hammered the final nail into NASA’s coffin, the SoD had achieved the greatest triumph in the history of human spaceflight.
It hardly mattered to Burke, at this moment, that it was also their last.
He grabbed CAPCOM’s headset. “Get me the secure channel.”
The remaining staffers had begun to pack up their sleeping bags and hotplates. They looked at Burke sadly. The SoD never so much as acknowledged Mission Control’s transmissions anymore. To be sure, for much of the last two months the SoD had been on the far side of the sun, where comms were impossible anyway.
“Here you go, sir,” CAPCOM murmured.
Burke cleared his throat. “SoD, this is Houston. We’re packing up the shop here. All good things come to an end, and JSC is being decommissioned. We will be moving to a new, secure location, but I can’t guarantee reliable comms in future.”
Where they were going, he wouldn’t even be able to see the sky.
“Just wanted to say I am goddamn proud of you. Whatever happens tomorrow, you’ve pushed back the boundaries of the possible. Nobody on Earth, ten years ag
o, would have said a human spaceship could make it to Europa and back. You are shining examples of the spirit of endeavor NASA has always tried to promote. You’re lightning in a bottle, boys. If this is the epitaph of the human race, well, we went out on a high note.”
Candy slid her hand into his and squeezed.
Some of the young staffers started to cry.
Burke knew he had to address Earth’s betrayal of the SoD. He said, “We let you down.” He forced himself to put it in plain English. “We tried to kill you and hijack your ship, because we were afraid. Just like the Bible says, we tried to kill the messenger because we didn’t like the message. I take full responsibility for what we did, and I am deeply sorry.”
That said, for all they knew, the Victory’s failure might have been the disaster it looked like to the NXC. Burke might be talking to a crew of squids right now. There was just no knowing. But he had to hope that his boys were still alive, because that’s all he had now: hope.
From the top of one of his cardboard boxes on the next desk, a framed photograph peeked out. Flaherty’s bold Sharpie strokes encircled four faces. Kildare, Ivanov, Boisselot, Taft.
“Killer, if you’re there, if you can hear me … Alexei, Giles, Skyler … all four of you are amazing human beings. I know that Kate would be proud of what you’ve achieved. I wish I could offer you the support you deserve, the support we promised you under false pretences. It’s too late for that. But I just want you to know you are in our prayers.”
He pulled the headset off as emotion threatened to overwhelm him. “Anyone got anything to add?”
The staffers shook their heads. They huddled together, weeping. Candy was hugging CAPCOM.
Burke put the headset on again for a moment. “Blow the fuckers away,” he blurted, and reached out to cut the transmission.
“Wait,” CAPCOM sniffled. “I want to send them something.”
“OK …” Burke smiled. “SoD, looks like we have one final musical selection for you.”
CAPCOM keyed up the track. Burke rolled his eyes. “Queen? Really? You weren’t even born when Freddie Mercury passed away.”
The cheesy song provided a much-needed injection of levity. The staffers packed away their emotions, wiped their eyes, and shut down their computers. They were not allowed to take any of the equipment with them. Millions of dollars in state-of-the-art hardware would be confiscated by the Texans. Not that it would do them much good, Burke suspected. The US government might not control much territory anymore, but it could still craft a mean computer virus.
Before they finished, more militiamen arrived. “That’s it, you’re out of time,” the sheriff shouted. “Move it, move it.”
The sheriff wore a ten-gallon hat, a dime-store star, and an Earth Party t-shirt, the one with the Shepard Fairey poster of Hannah Ginsburg’s face. Red, white and blue, an idealized goddess gazing at you above the single word RAUS.
Raus! The enigmatic one-word slogan had come from Germany, the Earth Party’s primary stronghold in Europe. Raus! Get out, get out, get out!
Raus, said Hannah to her old mentor as the Texans herded them out of the building. Raus, Rich. You’re the enemy now. Get out, get out, get out. All your base are belong to us.
The staffers dispersed to their cars and camper vans. Burke’s youngest child, Savannah, eighteen, drove the family RV around the building to pick her parents up. Burke and Candy loaded the boxes into the back.
“I’ll drive first,” Savannah said. “It’s a long-ass way to Colorado.” She narrowed her eyes at Burke. “Dad, why do you look so cheerful?”
“Last day on the job,” Burke quipped wryly. “Why wouldn’t I be cheerful?”
“You’re nuts if you think they’re gonna let you retire. We’ll all have to work. Mom and me will probably have to dig potatoes.”
The small NASA convoy drove out through the gates, and passed through the border checkpoint for the last time, bound for the Cheyenne Mountain Complex in Colorado.
Savannah continued to chatter as she drove. To the eighteen-year-old, this was an adventure. Candy squeezed her daughter’s knee. “What if the world doesn’t end after all, honey?”
After considering that for a moment, Savannah said, “What an anti-climax that would be.”
Candy smiled at her husband. Burke saw something in her eyes even more wonderful than the SoD’s drive plume, something he hadn’t seen for even longer … hope.
*
Back in the mission control center, a voice crackled from the speakers. CAPCOM had left the secure channel to the SoD open, and put it on speaker, as a passive-aggressive present for the Texans.
“Well, that was very kind of you, Rich,” said Jack Kildare. “Unfortunately it’s too little, too late. But thanks anyway, man. Really. Thanks.”
One person remained in the room: the sheriff in the Hannah Ginsburg t-shirt. He was wandering around touching stuff, picturing this Star Trek-looking pad as his own future headquarters. He stopped and gazed up at the speakers.
“It was also nice to hear We Are The Champions. Haven’t heard that one in a while. To show our appreciation, we’ve got a song for you.”
There was some crackling, and then four male voices began to sing in unison.
“Always look on the bright side of life! If life seems jolly rotten, there’s something you’ve forgotten …”
More voices joined the chorus. It was like a church choir bursting out of the speakers, and most of the voices, from soprano to bass, sounded like synthesized angels. The sheriff shuddered like he hadn’t done since he was eight years old and feared God.
“So always look on the bright side of death! Just before you draw your terminal breath …”
“Fucking fruitcakes,” the sheriff said. He was panicking. He didn’t know what to unplug, so he drew his .9mm, aimed at the speakers, and shot them to crap.
CHAPTER 39
In a high-ceilinged 19th-century house in Boston, Trekker Taft sucked on his nebulizer, tossed it aside, and dropped a hailstorm of keystrokes on his Mac. His sister Piper looked over his left shoulder. Their father, Avigdor, looked over his right shoulder.
“Stop crowding me,” Trek said. “I’ve almost got it!”
The lines of code on the screen made no sense to either of the onlookers. They were part of a program Trek had written himself, based on commercial malware he bought from some guy in Slovakia. Trek wasn’t a hacker. He was a gamer. But he used to mod games, which gave him a certain amount of coding expertise, and he’d taught himself more in the years since Skyler, the eldest of the three Taft siblings, vanished into space.
With the country rocking and rolling down the slippery slope to anarchy, it was no longer OK to sit around feeling sorry for yourself because you were gonna die of cystic fibrosis.
The internet had gone to shit, anyway.
Right now Trek was using the fiber-optic cable that connected Beacon Hill with Harvard University, where seven generations of Tafts had taught or studied. Skyler had been the last.
“Are you in?” Avigdor said.
“Yes, I’m in,” Trek wheezed. “The problem is all these other asswipes are in, too.” He turned briefly from the computer to explain. “The Harvard-Smithsonian Micro-Observatory is a robotic telescope array. The actual telescope is in Cambridge. There was one in Arizona, too, but that’s gone. Anyway, you can remotely program the telescope to look wherever you want in the sky. But it’s supremely hackable, obviously.” He allowed himself a chuckle, and coughed. His father passed him his nebulizer. He gulped the cool, mint-scented mist before going on. “Everyone on the planet wants to look at the Lightbringer. So I have to deauthorize them before I can point the telescope somewhere else.” He went back to typing.
Piper Taft wandered to the window and pressed her thin, sallow cheek to the icy glass. At the bottom of their steep street, torches flickered. Like every other city in the country, Boston had attracted hordes of Earth Partiers as the Lightbringer drew closer. Boston Common had
turned into a ghetto. Piper had walked with the Earth Party herself for a couple of years, because they sourced the best smack. She was clean for the moment, but sobriety came with a side dish of smouldering fear. The torches looked like the spume from a fiery tide creeping up the hill to engulf her and her fractured family. The Taft money had almost all gone, but the stigma of wealth remained. Piper felt like there was a target painted on their front door. She bit her nails.
Trek whooped. “Got it! This telescope is mine, baby, all mine!”
He copy-pasted the coordinates put out by Harvard, whose astrophysicists had calculated the courses of both the Lightbringer and the Spirit of Destiny. No one was interested in the latter. The profs just did it for the sake of completeness and fairness, Trek thought, because this was still Harvard and there was still such a thing as high academic standards, even if the apocalypse was coming in four days.
All three Tafts clustered around the screen.
The telescope at the Cambridge Observatory resolved an image in the night sky. High up, near the location of Venus. Just a blur.
“Is that them?” Avigdor said.
“Lotta light pollution,” Trek said. “But yeah, looks like that’s them.”
Piper kissed her fingers and touched the blur on the screen. “Skyler, you dummy, what are you doing?”
Trek reached for his pipe. He’d packed it with high-quality Vermont weed. You could still get that. He clicked his lighter above the bowl, inhaled, and blew out a cloud of aromatic smoke. “This one’s for you, big brother.”
Avigdor Taft grunted, perhaps about to issue his usual spiel about not smoking weed when you only had 15% of normal lung function. Then he changed his mind. “Gimme a hit.”
“Dad, you old dope fiend,” Trek said agreeably, passing the e-cig over.
Avigdor exhaled a long stream of smoke as he dialed on the cordless phone, consulting a printed-out email. “Hello? Yes, it’s me. We can see them …” He read off the coordinates.
*
Shiplord: A First Contact Technothriller (Earth's Last Gambit Book 3) Page 26