“Yeah, we’ve got another problem,” Jane says. “The kid locked up the thruster controls. I shut down the main engines, but I can’t change course.”
“How the hell did he—”
“What can we do?” Jessica asks.
“I can set off another charge against the dorsal hull and push the ship into the ground.”
“You want to crash us?” I ask.
“Hey, it’s plow into the museum or plow into the ground,” Jane says. “And there are fewer civilians outside the building, on the surface.”
“How about up into space?” I ask. “There’s no civilians out there—”
“There’s a whole fleet of security and military spacecraft circling overhead,” Jane says. “They can’t see us to avoid a collision, and I’d rather not be arrested for attacking a law enforcement vehicle. The ground will stop us from hitting anyone else.”
“Turn on your distress beacon,” I say to Jane. “You still have one of those, don’t you?”
“Kangaroo,” Jessica says.
“We’re done talking,” Jane says, standing up. “I’m going outside.”
I block the cockpit doorway. “They’re going to see us anyway when we crash.”
Jane glares at me. “This is my ship. And I say we go down.”
I narrow my eyes at her. “Who’s up there that you don’t want to run into?”
“Get out of my way,” she growls.
“Kangaroo!” Jessica says. “We don’t have time. Let her go.”
I give Jane one more glare, then move back out of her way. She grumbles something unintelligible as she moves past, bumping me with her shoulder.
* * *
Hong checks the controls while Jane Doe positions her charge on the outer hull. The rest of us all put on our spacesuits, except for Alisa, Rich, and Joey—they’re going into a rescue bubble. Hong comes to the same conclusion Jane did.
“Thrusters are locked,” he says. “We can’t change course.”
“How is that even possible?” I glance back through the open doorway at Joey, who’s lying on the deck with Alisa and Rich kneeling over him with a medkit. “Are you seriously telling me a five-year-old kid broke the spaceship?”
“Too clever for his own good, apparently,” Hong mutters.
“Sound familiar?” Jessica says.
I give her a dirty look.
“Look, I’m working on it. Just give me some time,” Hong says.
“Ready to blast,” Jane says. “Everybody brace yourselves!”
Jessica shouts back into the cabin. Alisa shouts something in return.
Jessica slaps the intercom. “Scorpion, you may fire when ready.”
“Blasting in three, two, one, now!”
A sizable explosion makes the entire ship shudder, and the view out the cockpit window tilts down. The gray Lunar surface reflects sunlight back at us, filling the window with a bright grayish glow.
“See you on the ground,” Jane says.
“Kangaroo!” Jessica says. “Pocket. Now!”
I step back into the cargo bay and open the pocket for Jessica to jump into, then close and open to another location for Hong. I walk farther back to where Alisa and Rich are carrying Joey inside the rescue bubble.
“Good to go,” Alisa shouts through the transparent material when they’re safely inside.
I try to think of something meaningful or at least amusing to say, but give up after a second and just open the pocket and push them inside.
Then I go back to the cockpit and strap myself into the pilot’s seat. If I’m going to crash on the Moon, I want to at least have a front-row view of the experience.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
The Moon—nearside—Sea of Tranquility
10 seconds to impact … 9 … 8 … 7 …
Crashing a moving vehicle is not pleasant under the best of circumstances. Every time I’m inside a hovercar when it jars against something—even if it’s as gentle as gliding over a curb or speed bump—my mind has to imagine the wreck that killed both my parents.
I was only five years old at the time, and I wasn’t in the car, so I don’t actually know what it was like. But maybe that’s why I can’t stop imagining it. I have a morbid curiosity about what their last moments must have been like. And, even more morbid, I wonder if I’ll die in a similar fashion. I wonder if that will bring me closer to them in some way.
It’s true, I had a really messed-up childhood.
The stealth ship plows into the ground with a loud crunch followed by a long groan of metal bending around me. The impact rattles my brain inside my skull, but the pilot’s seat absorbs a lot of the initial shock. The view out the cockpit window seems to be shaking a lot more than I am.
The ship continues plowing along the ground for several more seconds, digging up gray dust that may not have been disturbed for centuries or millennia and spreading it across the window, obscuring my view. Then I can’t see anything and am just left with the rough vibrations as we scrape across the ground, accompanied by the noise of loose equipment banging against walls and alarm sounds blaring on all sides of me.
How many different alerts do you really need when you’re crashing, anyway? The nature of the emergency should be pretty obvious at this point.
The ship finally shudders to a halt, and the dust settles in front of me, sliding down to cover just the lower part of the window. Without an atmosphere, the particles drop much faster than I’m used to, and I see something glinting as the dust falls away and onto—
The crumpled remains of the Apollo lander.
We appear to have crash-landed right in the middle of the museum courtyard—in the original Apollo 11 landing site. Where the first human beings set foot on the Moon. An unspeakably important historical monument, lovingly preserved for more than two centuries.
And we just ran a huge spaceship into it.
Fuck fuck fuck.
But, okay, let’s be totally honest here: that isn’t the original Lunar lander out there. The top section, the crew vehicle, is a re-creation—the original vehicle was launched back into orbit when the astronauts left, to rendezvous with the capsule that had the big engine that would get them back to Earth. And the lower section with the spidery legs has also been cleaned up.
Even if there’s no atmosphere out there to carry corrosive bacteria or other microorganisms, effectively preserving these artifacts indefinitely, there’s been nearly constant sunlight bleaching the color out of these parts for a long time. The museum staff must have been touching up these pieces over the years, making sure they continued to look pristine, replacing any damage done by vandals or souvenir-seekers. Most of what’s out there at this point is just a replica.
That doesn’t mitigate the fact that I just rode an out-of-control spaceship into a major historical site, but it does make me feel a little better about not having destroyed too much of an irreplaceable artifact.
My brain is a little more settled inside my skull now, and the ringing in my ears has subsided to a dull background hum. I check my surroundings for debris and then unbuckle my safety harness. The low gravity minimizes the lurch as I fall out of the pilot’s chair, but I still brace myself against the main control panel. The ship landed at an angle, tilted to port by maybe thirty degrees and canted forward at least fifteen or twenty degrees. I’ll have to climb up to get out of the cockpit, then continue upward to the cargo ramp. The airlock’s facing the ground now, so the ramp is my only way out of this wreck.
I wonder where Jane Doe went. Did she manage to stay on the outer hull during our little touchdown maneuver? Or did she jump off and clear the area on purpose? I thought I noticed some controls in her spacesuit, when I was wearing it before, which might have been maneuvering thrusters. It’s possible she bugged out to avoid running into the authorities after we crashed.
Two massive spotlights illuminate in front of the ship, shining into the cockpit.
And speaking of the authorities …
&nbs
p; These lights are supposed to do two things. One, illuminate the inside of a dark place so the good guys can see in. Two, blind whoever’s inside that dark place so they can’t see out.
I blink my left eye into blackout scanning mode, then cover my right eye with one hand so I can look around the area.
With my vision overlay blotting out the ultra-bright spots and the infrared and lidar sensor readings overlaid, I have a mixed-false-color image of the courtyard in front of me. The range finder says I’m about ten meters from the museum building, which rises three stories from the ground and has several decorative spires reaching into space above.
The two spotlights are positioned directly in front of me, and on the scans I can see more spotlights arrayed around the circumference of the circular courtyard. I wonder if law enforcement put them there, or if the museum had already set them up for the big anniversary celebration event.
There are a dozen spacesuited figures advancing toward the ship, all leveling various firearms at me. I tell my eye scanners to search for equipment profiles, bar codes if visible, and identify the weapons being used. That should give me some idea of who’s walking up, and also how dead I am if they open fire.
The eye scan completes, and green outlines appear around all the advancing figures.
“What the hell?” I say out loud. Green means friendly. But how would my implants know—
The answer pops up a second later in the form of headshots, names, and ranks in a small square readout above each green helmet. These are military personnel—OSS spacemen. And I have access to all their records through the agency’s data link.
I find the highest ranking spaceman on the field, a petty officer third class named Gorski who’s also the closest to me on the starboard side of the ship. Everyone else is a spaceman first class, one rung down the OSS rank ladder.
Obviously Copernicus wasn’t expecting much resistance here—if they really expected trouble, they’d have sent some X-4s instead—but they did want to cover their ass.
My eye also shows me the most likely radio channel that the spacemen would be using in this situation. I slowly move my right hand off my face and tap the wrist controls on my spacesuit’s left forearm to activate the microphone in the collar.
“OSS spacemen, this is Commander Edwin McDrona,” I say, doing my best to keep my voice even and to not shout in desperation. “If you can hear me on this frequency, please acknowledge.”
All the spacemen stop advancing. A couple of them turn their helmets toward each other—can they actually see through those things right now? I don’t hear anything, but they must have heard me. I keep talking.
“I say again, my name is Commander Edwin McDrona, on special assignment from—”
“Keep your hands where I can see them, sir,” says a female voice. “We’re verifying your identity now.”
I notice that one of the spacemen on my far left has lowered his weapon and is holding up a scanning device. I turn toward him and hold up both arms, palms up, wrists facing out, hoping this isn’t too far a distance for his scanner to read my subdermal identity chip. I also hope Oliver remembered to program the right security codes for this week.
The spaceman with the scanner lowers the device and nods to the next person on his left. They must be talking on a private channel in addition to monitoring the standard OSS frequency. I can’t imagine that a simple head nod would communicate enough information in this circumstance.
On my right, Gorski lowers his own weapon and makes a hand signal. All the spacemen stand down, pointing their weapons at the ground. I breathe out as quietly as I can.
“Commander McDrona, I’m Petty Officer Third Class Gorski,” comes a male voice. “We’d sure like to know what the hell you’re doing here, sir.”
“Happy to tell you all about it,” I say, picking up my spacesuit helmet. “But first let’s get inside to a private area.”
“Anyone coming out after you?” Gorski asks, looking at the crashed ship.
“Not that I know of.” I snap on my helmet and start climbing toward the back of the ship. “I’m coming out the cargo ramp. Meet me there?”
“Affirmative.”
It takes me a minute to remember how Jane Doe operated the ramp controls. The metal slab creaks open and stops when one corner hits the ground. I climb out and find myself standing in the middle of quite a bit of historical wreckage. I try not to think about that. It could have been worse, right?
I move forward, toward the advancing spacemen, and my boot catches on something large and curved and half-buried in the ground. I kneel down to dislodge my boot and move the debris.
It’s the plaque.
Well, most of it, anyway. The stealth ship must have landed right on top of it, and the centuries-old metal was no match for the armored stealth composite. I can barely read anything but the last line of the inscription stamped into the metal:
WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND
“Well,” I mutter, “that’s one small crash for Kangaroo, one giant fuck-up for Outback.”
“Say again, sir?” Gorski says, walking up to me.
“Nothing.” I gingerly step over the plaque fragment. “Let’s get inside.”
* * *
“Kangaroo!” Oliver’s voice shrills in my ear as I follow Gorski and the other spacemen. “Kangaroo, Equipment, please respond!”
“Kangaroo here,” I reply. “I hope your day’s going better than mine, EQ.”
“Please tell me that wasn’t you who just crashed a stealth spacecraft into the Sea of Tranquility,” Oliver says.
“Well, technically no, since I wasn’t operating the controls,” I say. “Like you always say. Blame Sir Isaac Newton.”
Oliver groans. “Let’s back up. Were you able to evacuate SDF1 before the incursion?”
“Yes. Everyone’s safe.” I give him a quick rundown. “Somebody needs to go pick up Khan and Clementine. Does Copernicus have any spare transports?”
“Lasher will arrange something,” Oliver says. “He’s going to have a lot more questions for Clementine.”
“Right. Hey, listen, can I call you back later?” I notice Gorski giving me a funny look. I muted my suit radio to talk to Oliver, so to Gorski, it must look like I’m talking to myself. “I’m actually a little busy right now.”
“Turn on your active locator beacon,” Oliver says. “We need to track you at all times.”
“Fine.” I turn on my shoulder-phone to broadcast my position and switch off the radio.
The temporary OSS command post is on the other side of the museum. It’s probably better that I don’t have to walk through the building proper, since everyone inside almost certainly saw me smash up the very thing they all came here to celebrate.
Once we’re inside the temporary shelter, all the spacemen and I take off our spacesuit helmets. Now I can see the full range of suspicious gazes being directed my way by the entire detachment. There’s nothing like pulling rank in the middle of a crisis to make people dislike you.
I use my agency data link to check the spacemen’s security clearance ratings. I’m going to have to read them in before using the pocket in front of them. And it’s probably going to have to be all of them, since they’ve been deployed together and trained not to split up too much. Well, this is what legends are for.
“Gorski,” I say, then turn to address the rest of the detachment, “and everyone, I’m going to need to read you in to a higher security clearance.”
“How do you know what our clearance is?” asks the woman who spoke first on the radio. Her name, according to my eye, is Varonfakis.
“You didn’t notice him blinking up a storm this whole time?” says another woman, Nguyen, pointing at my eye. “I’ll bet he’s got like half a dozen implants, including a display in his eye. We got us a cyborg here.”
Half of the spacemen take a step back, and those who don’t stiffen up. I see at least one finger moving off a trigger guard before Gorski turns to his subordina
tes.
“Everybody stay frosty,” he snaps, then turns back to me. “What do we need to know, Commander?”
“First of all, I’m not a cyborg,” I say. “I do have some tech implants, but they’re tech only. Electromotive interfaces. No biologics.” It’s not a lie. Even my nanobots are pure tech.
Everyone’s skittish about mixing Man and machine ever since the Fruitless Year. The military continued to experiment with implants during the Martian Independence War, but civilians didn’t really go for more than simple shoulder-phones and medically required, limited-function implants like cardiac pacemakers, insulin pumps, and vision correctors. Nobody wants actual cybernetics with organic components that could mutate out of control.
“Check my records if you want, Petty Officer Third Class,” I continue. “You should have access.”
“I will,” Gorski says, staring at me with an impressively flat expression. I’m sure he’s feeling some anxiety—my medical scanners are showing elevated heart rate and some heat flush around his collar—but he’s doing a good job of keeping it contained in front of his people. “What’s the security issue?”
“I’m carrying a device I need to use.” I make a point of tapping the wrist controls on my spacesuit instead of using my implants. It’ll be a bit slower, but I’d rather not make the armed soldiers more nervous than absolutely necessary. “I’m granting all of you a field-authorized security clearance right now.”
“Cyborg spy,” Nguyen whispers to Varonfakis. She doesn’t know how good my hearing is.
“Not a cyborg,” I say, glaring at her. She looks surprised for a moment, then her face settles back into a light scowl. Not too belligerent, just challenging enough to discourage casual conversation.
“But you are a spy,” Nguyen says.
I stare back at her. “Your security clearances should go through in just a few seconds.” Come on, Oliver, help me out here.
“Which agency?” she asks.
New status indicators light up above each of their heads. Security clearance granted. “You’re not cleared for that information. What I can tell you is that I have a wormhole device, and I need to use it right now to retrieve some passengers.”
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