by Alex Irvine
There was nothing else to which he could compare it.
“Give me more thrust!” Commander Belyaev shouted.
The technician in the copilot’s chair worked the controls as fast as he could.
“We’re at maximum output, sir!”
The tug’s frame groaned under the stresses between its engines and the opposing gravity. Smaller cracking sounds made a terrifying counterpoint. If they could get around to the other side of Rhea, Valeri thought, the mass of the moon would protect them for long enough that they could get away. Gravity diminished quickly with distance.
Belyaev seemed to have the same thought. Instead of steering the tug straight away from the vortex, he kept it at a low angle of ascent. The chunks of the moon flying past them grew to the size of hills. The moon itself was beginning to break apart. Valeri remembered the first time he had seen Rhea, wondering what was inside of it. Was it dead, ice and rock all the way through? Or did the pressures deep inside create heat? Measurements from the surface had been uncertain, and the Russian team had orders to build ESD defense turrets, not indulge their astrogeological curiosity. Valeri had a feeling they might find out shortly, though.
As the tug turned away, it rolled to the right and he saw geysers erupting through the mile-wide cracks in Rhea’s surface. There it was. Confirmation of a subsurface ocean. The scientifically curious child in him was glad to see it, glad to be in on one of the solar system’s mysteries. The adult in him looked forward to sharing the story over a glass of vodka back home.
The tug slewed to one side, slamming the cosmonauts against each other. As Rhea broke up, its gravitational pull was lessened and became unbalanced. Suddenly Belyaev was fighting different attractions from different directions.
He was a superb pilot. He had survived dogfights in the War of ’96, claiming four confirmed alien kills and two other probables. He had flown interplanetary missions, had landed on the Moon, Mars, and Rhea. He had overseen docking operations with an asteroid mining station. Belyaev could fly anything.
Even he couldn’t fly a ship straight, though, when the very space around it was being torn apart. The tug started to tumble. The groans in its hull turned into screams. Alarm klaxons went off, warning of leaks. Emergency oxygen pumps kicked in. The cosmonauts sat silent, relying on their commander to get them out of this. They could scream, they could thrash around, they could panic… but what good would it do?
Space flashed by the windows, and then the surface of Rhea as Belyaev shouted orders. The copilot fired impulse thrusters to arrest their tumble, but it was too violent, the forces around them too great. The moon passed through their view again. It was in fragments, torn completely into pieces. Liquid water, freezing rapidly, sped through space toward the distortion. It was one of the most beautiful things Valeri had ever seen, striking in the way the light caught the water in space, and then how that light changed when the water froze…
Then the tug was shaking too violently for Valeri to see. Belyaev was still shouting and the rest of the cosmonauts held their silence. Abruptly a loud metallic scream from the back of the ship got Valeri’s attention. He turned, and was looking out into empty space. Instinctively he grabbed a handrail. The ship’s atmosphere gusted past him, the cosmonauts screaming now but their voices growing thin as the air fled. Some of them were gone through the hole in the hull, others hanging onto the broken edges.
More of the ship broke away. Through a hole Valeri could see one of its thrusters. The other had been torn off. Valeri held the rail with one hand and the trailing edge of a suit harness with the other. Whoever had been in that seat was gone now.
The violence of the spinning began to disorient him, and he realized he had been holding his breath for a long time. He wanted to breathe again, but there was nothing to breathe.
Belyaev was gone too, the cockpit windows shattered and the two command chairs empty.
The last thing Valeri saw, as the ship disintegrated around him, was the majestic rings of Saturn, tearing themselves apart.
7
Jake held the tug steady. Charlie was still rambling about surfing and parties and women and whatever else. He had an active imagination. One of the things he imagined was that he was a ladies’ man.
“You realize there’s only thirty-six women on this Moon Base?” he said, and Jake was sure it was true. Charlie would know. The question was, how did he know? Had he counted them? Had he hacked the personnel database to find out? Either was possible.
“I’m sure one of them will eventually come around, pal,” he said just to be supportive.
Charlie turned to glare at him. “Hey! It’s not like they all rejected me. I happen to have standards.”
Standards, Jake reflected. Good thing to have. If it wasn’t for standards, I’d still be in the hybrid fighter program. I screwed up. That was that.
There was a flare of static over the radio and the voices from the command center cut out for a moment. Jake and Charlie winced at the sharp spike of white noise. The lights on the tug’s navigation console flickered, went out… then came back on, still flickering.
The tug dropped and pitched forward as the signals to its engines were interrupted, and with an awful grinding squeal the tug’s crane arms plowed into the cannon.
“What did you do?” Jake shouted.
Charlie was working the console. “Nothing!”
“That didn’t feel like nothing!”
Jake tried to get the tug back under control. The radio feed from inside the base command center came back on, and a tech was shouting.
“Tug Ten collided with the weapon! It’s listing!”
Everyone in the command center was shouting. Jake heard another engineer say, “The clamps have stopped—they’re not responding!”
As he got the tug level and stationary again, Jake saw that this was true. The clamps hadn’t closed all the way, and the huge turret, the size of a small hill, was starting to tip toward the lunar base. The Moon’s gravity was only one-sixth as strong as Earth’s, so the cannon wasn’t falling fast, but it was still falling, and when it landed…
“Override the system!” Commander Lao bellowed. Then his voice got louder as he spoke directly into the microphone. “All tugs, take evasive action!”
The cannon gathered momentum, its huge mass accelerating it downward. On Earth it already would have landed, crushing much of the base, but the slowness of gravitational acceleration on the Moon meant they still had a chance to act.
“That’s a negative, sir!” Jake shouted.
Charlie’s eyes popped. “What do you mean negative?”
Jake gunned the tug’s engines and dropped between the toppling cannon and the command center.
This is all Charlie’s fault, he thought furiously. If I hadn’t paid attention when he helped me study, I wouldn’t know all the basic physics. I wouldn’t know that the cannon would fall slower in this gravity. I wouldn’t know all that crap about how every action has an equal and opposite reaction. And I sure as hell never would’ve had a stupid idea like this.
As the tug angled around, they came close enough to the command center’s bay windows that they could see Lao’s astonished face. Charlie caught the commander’s eye and shrugged.
Sure, Jake thought. Throw me under the bus.
“Morrison!” Lao barked into the microphone. “Get out of there! That’s an order!”
Jake toggled the radio off. He had to concentrate.
“Charlie, strap in.”
“So we’re not even gonna talk about this?” Charlie yelled, but he strapped in, all right, and Jake swung the tug around so it faced the cannon—which was about halfway through its fall that would end in dozens of deaths, and billions of dollars in damage. Plus who knew how long it would take to repair everything and get the cannon defense-ready? Someone had to do something.
That someone was Jake. He flipped the tug’s arms around so they faced forward, spread wide like the arms of a wrestler ready to engage an
opponent, and then he rammed the thruster control all the way forward. The engines roared and the tug leapt ahead. It wasn’t built for speed, so “leapt” was kind of relative, but they sure were moving fast—directly at the cannon.
“This isn’t a fighter, Jake!” Charlie screamed.
“Don’t remind me!” Actually, Jake thought, it was a good thing it wasn’t a fighter. A fighter would go real fast, and then blow itself to tiny little pieces doing what he was about to do with this tug.
The cannon grew in their windows, huge and terrifying and approaching way too fast—and then they collided with it in a shower of sparks and an impact that rocked both of them forward in their harnesses. Jake heard all kinds of popping and snapping noises as little things inside the tug’s hull and in the control arms broke under the impact. But the arms held, locked against the turret just above where Jake had gauged its center of gravity to be.
“We’re gonna die,” Charlie moaned. “This is how I die!”
Jake wasn’t sure he was wrong. He held the tug’s thrusters at maximum power, listening to the echoing groans of overstressed metal, feeling the heavy vibrations of two huge forces opposing each other—the tug’s thrust against the cannon’s angular momentum. The tug wasn’t built for speed, but it was built to move large masses from place to place. Warning lights flashed in the cockpit as the engines started to overheat.
“Come on! Come on!” Jake said, holding the thrust and hoping the engines could last just a little bit longer.
The cannon started to slow.
The sounds coming from the front of the tug and from the arms weren’t good, though. Either this was going to work in the next few seconds, or the cannon’s fall would make Jake and Charlie the smeared middle of a sandwich, with the cannon on top and the wreckage of the command center on the bottom.
The cannon slowed a little more, and the engines still held. Hydraulic fluid and sparks shot and spewed from the crane arms, but they held, too. Jake had a feeling they were smashed into place and would never operate again, but replacement crane arms were a hell of a lot easier to come by than replacement moon bases.
Charlie tapped the control to activate the radio again, so they could hear whether it was working. From the inside of the tug, it looked as if it was. They couldn’t really see anything beyond the instruments, however, which said they were moving forward at the glacial pace of a few meters per second.
Still, they were moving forward.
The tug pushed the immense cannon slowly back into place. Over the comm link, they could hear techs shouting about getting the remote turret systems back online. The cannon reached its tipping point and settled back into the mount as slowly and ominously as it had toppled out.
“Commander!” an amazed engineer said. “The locks are reengaging!”
As the cannon settled back into its vertical rest position, Jake slowed the tug and let it go. The bent and overtaxed crane arms still stuck out forward from their mounts. Jake eased his grip on the thruster controls. His hands were cramped.
Charlie sat back in his chair, pale as a ghost but looking relieved. He started to get his composure back. Good old resilient Charlie.
“Was that stimulating enough for you?”
Jake chuckled. “I didn’t think that was gonna work.”
A huge metallic thunk reverberated through the tug as the cannon locked into place. All of the clamps were tight, the cannon was on center. The crisis was over.
Jake eased the tug back around to head for the landing pad and the hangar. It was going to need some serious repairs. Ordinarily denting up a tug like this would be a firing offense, but Jake figured he might catch a break, since he’d just saved the lives of everyone in the command center. Even Commander Lao might stop giving him a hard time.
At least for a couple of days.
8
President Thomas Whitmore woke up screaming. He sat bolt upright in bed, feet tangled in the sheets, sweat dripping into his eyes and soaking his beard. He sat wild-eyed and gasping, looking around, gradually coming back to himself and realizing he was awake in his bedroom in his house in Morristown, Virginia.
It wasn’t 1996—it was 2016.
He wasn’t in the Oval Office anymore. He was a former president, an old man now, haunted by memories and vulnerable to nightmares—and obsessed with a truth that hovered just out of reach on the other side of the visions that plagued his sleep.
He rubbed at his face and wiped away the sweat. Normally when he woke up from these nightmares he just wanted to be by himself, but this one was different. This time he’d awakened with a sense of purpose. He had to tell someone. There was no time to waste.
Whitmore got up and started moving. He looked at his desk as he passed it, momentarily lured by the chaotic piles of sketches and drawings he’d made over the years. The circle, the line cutting through it, in a thousand variations. The symbol he’d seen in a thousand dreams. Were they dreams? Or were they messages of some kind? Deliberately sent? He believed they were, but from where?
That was the problem. Whitmore knew his psychic link with the aliens had scarred him. It was a wound. Wars caused wounds, but he also believed—and Tom Whitmore had never been a man to fool himself or sugarcoat anything for anyone—that he could see the shape of the wound, and get outside of it. Understand at least most of what was going on in his mind.
Even if he couldn’t figure out how to say it out loud, to people he was sure wouldn’t understand.
Was he getting closer to understanding what it meant? It was in the aliens’ mind, that symbol, stronger than almost anything else. Burning like a beacon, like some kind of totem that they called out to. The alien mind was a strange and labyrinthine thing. If they never touched your mind, you never understood that—and if they did touch your mind, you were never the same.
Whitmore wasn’t the same.
What was he thinking about? The symbol. Those dreams were back, and more intense than ever. Things like that happened for reasons. Causes had effects, and vice versa. What was the cause here? Whitmore had a bone-deep, gut-deep, feeling that he knew—but he had to be sure.
He formed a plan, but it was really only the beginning of a plan because sometimes it was hard for him to hold long to-do lists in his head. He had to go, and he had to go quickly. If Agent Travis had heard Whitmore’s scream, he would be coming to check on him. That was the downside of still having Secret Service protection. They never really left you alone, they never let you do what you wanted to do. But Whitmore didn’t have time to deal with Travis.
He’d given a speech, a long time ago. Twenty years ago, was that right? About that. He’d tried to bring people together, focus them on a common menace. He’d given the speech not because he thought it would help the men live, but because he thought it might help them die better.
That had been a time for a speech. He’d been president. Sitting president. Now he was just an ex-president. No speeches. Nobody would care if he gave a speech.
This was a time for action.
* * *
Agent Travis took the stairs two at a time, heading up from the kitchen—where he’d been debating whether to have an afternoon cup of coffee—to the second floor where the president’s bedroom was.
Travis had been on Whitmore’s detail for almost four years now, and it wasn’t unusual for the president to wake up like this. The problem was that sometimes when he had nightmares, he took off into the neighborhood. The old pilot wasn’t what he used to be. His mind was going, and he was sinking into all kinds of crazy visions that followed him from sleep into the waking world.
If he wasn’t what he used to be, though, he was still crafty, quick, and real, real determined. Physically pretty spry for a guy his age who had been through what he’d been through. It took a lot to keep up with him sometimes, and it took a particular kind of patience because the Whitmore detail wasn’t like a lot of the other assignments. The service occasionally took pride—when nobody else was listening—i
n the fact that they’d only ever lost one president. Compared to some of the others out there now, Whitmore didn’t hardly have any enemies at all.
The brass didn’t think his safety was a high-level risk anymore, especially since his mental problems had become more or less an open secret. For whatever reason, people got a lot less likely to assassinate public figures who were unwell.
Being on the Whitmore detail was less a security operation and more a babysitting job, but Travis didn’t mind. He was proud to serve the man who had spearheaded the resistance in the War of ’96, and destroyed the alien mother ship. Not every agent could say that.
Most other Secret Service agents liked the active presidential detail, because it made you feel like you were defending the free world. Travis thought it was just as important to defend and protect those who had already served. As far as he was concerned, President Whitmore was a living monument to the best of American ideals and values.
But he was also frustrating, and Travis was frustrated again when he banged his way into the president’s bedroom and found it empty. Bedding twisted up and flung aside, bathrobe not hanging on its hook. Where was he? Travis noticed a breeze moving the curtains by the bedroom window. A moment later he noticed Whitmore’s cane leaning against the sill.
The window was open.
“Not again,” he groaned, and he ran out of the room. Why didn’t Patty just nail that freaking window shut?
Ten seconds later he was outside, in the front yard of Whitmore’s immaculate colonial house. He ran to the street and looked up and down. Quiet houses, someone just turning the corner walking a dog, sounds of a television through someone’s open living-room window.
No sign of the ex-president.
“Shit,” Travis said. He got out his phone and made a call.