by Alex Irvine
“I just think tomorrow would be a good chance for you two to talk…”
Sure, talk, Jake thought. Dylan and I have lots to talk about. “Hey, remember when I almost killed you in a training exercise? And then I got scrubbed because you were the golden boy and I was just a nobody? Yeah, my fault, but I was a good pilot. Everybody makes mistakes. Tugs? Sure, who wouldn’t love flying tugs? Cool, good talk—let’s go have a beer.”
That was never going to happen. Dylan was a rising star. Jake was a space mailman.
“So he gets to shake hands with the president, and I’m stuck on the Moon,” Jake said bitterly. “Must be nice.”
“Why do you always have to be so headstrong?” Patty looked like she was sorry she’d brought it up. So was Jake, but there they were.
“Everyone knows he wouldn’t be leading that squadron if it wasn’t for his father.”
Then Patty looked angry, and Jake didn’t know why.
“You nearly killed him, remember?” she said. “Give him a little credit, Jake.”
Jake didn’t feel like giving Dylan Superstar Hiller any credit for anything right then, and he was pretty sure whatever he said now he would regret later. Nevertheless, he started to reply—when suddenly a power surge cut the satellite link. The screen blacked out, then resolved for a moment, then a final burst of white noise faded away into nothing.
“P?” Jake said. Maybe she could hear him, even if the video was out. He didn’t want the conversation to end this way, right when it was turning into an argument. “P, you there?”
All over the room, video booths went dark. The power flickered on and off. Jake looked around. This time it was lasting longer than it had before, he thought, and it seemed stronger.
What the hell was going on?
* * *
Patricia slammed her laptop shut.
Why was Jake so stubborn about Dylan? He was like a big bundle of resentment when it came to anyone else’s successes, like the chip on his shoulder was this secret super power he was afraid to let go of. Sure, Dylan had a leg up because of his dad—but he was also a good pilot. The crash during fighter training had nearly killed them both. Jake ended up scrubbed from the program and relegated to space tugs, while Dylan had caught a break, despite sharing the blame. But Jake had played his part in their childish competition, and he didn’t have anyone but himself to blame for the outcome.
On her desk next to the laptop sat a photo of her, Jake, and Dylan back in flight school. They were standing next to a human–alien hybrid jet, smiling and happy, the world full of possibilities. That was before she had dropped out, before Jake and Dylan had become rivals, instead of friends.
Before Steve Hiller had died.
Before Patricia’s dad had begun his decline… and before the world had started sending them signals that maybe this adulthood thing wasn’t going to be that easy after all.
Patricia wished she’d stayed in flight school. She was good at politics—maybe it was in the blood—but it never gave her the feeling she’d had when the afterburners kicked in during a flight.
She and Jake had almost split up when she’d dropped out to deal with her father’s affairs. Jake had assumed everything was over, but the truth was, it was easier when they weren’t both officers in the same squadron, competing for the same assignments. She’d needed to send him a signal, back then, so she did, taking him on a road trip to a cabin up in the mountains where they could forget about school, forget about jets, forget about everything but each other for a while.
They’d been together ever since, and she wanted to spend the rest of her life with him… but it sure would be easier if he wasn’t so good at holding grudges.
Then another thought occurred to her. What happened to the uplink to the Moon? Frowning, she tried to reopen it, but couldn’t get through. After a couple of tries she gave up and decided it was one more worry she didn’t need. Maybe someone at work would know what was going on.
She would give Jake some time to cool off, and then talk to him again in the morning.
15
Julius Levinson had never thought much about being famous until he and his son, David, had helped save the world.
David had gotten all the glory, but Julius knew in his heart of hearts that he was the one who had breathed the last bit of hope into the resistance against the aliens, back in the War of ’96. After all, wasn’t it his idea to infect the alien computers with a virus? Maybe he’d come upon it accidentally, and maybe he’d just mentioned it in passing, and maybe only David could have made the intuitive leap that brought the invasion to its knees.
Okay. Maybe all that was true.
But it had started with Julius.
That’s what he told everyone on his book tour. “In our darkest moment, when all hope was lost,” he told his audience on this particular day of July 2, 2016, twenty years after David had cracked the alien code. He paused for effect, standing in front of a blown-up photo of himself—a little photoshopped, okay—and a huge image of his book cover, How I Saved the World. “That’s when I said, ‘Never give up! You have to have faith!’”
Sometimes they cheered then, depending on what time of day it was and how big the audience was. Julius liked the big energetic crowds.
Today they weren’t cheering. He kept going, believing that you gave the same speech to a packed house at Madison Square Garden as you did to a single person sitting at the chess tables over at Washington Square Park.
“And in that moment, pow! It came to me like a thunderbolt! That’s when I came up with the idea that saved the world—”
Or the common room of an assisted-living facility for the elderly in Galveston, Texas.
That’s where he was today. Yesterday he’d been in Corpus Christi, at another old folks’ home. He’d seen enough of them over the past few years that when it came time for him to settle down in one, he’d have more than enough information to make a good choice.
Today they weren’t cheering. They were snoring gently. A gentleman of especially advanced years was sleeping in the front row, lulled no doubt by the comforting sounds his oxygen tank made.
Frustrated, Julius did what he always did at times like this. He went for the comedic angle. If you couldn’t sell books based on the books, maybe you could sell them sometimes just by the force of your personality.
“Are we sure he’s not dead?” he asked. “Sir? Excuse me, sir?”
The man opened his eyes. “Huh?”
“There he is,” Julius said. He wanted to go back to his book spiel, but he couldn’t. Not today. Not after all the disappointments had piled up a little too high. Why not just have some fun instead? “You didn’t follow the light! Welcome back.”
It was time to give up. Once Julius had started up his Catskills shtick, it was hard to get back to the book. He knew when to cut his losses.
“Anyway, my book is a bargain at nine ninety-five. Makes a great gift for the grandchildren. If you’re lucky enough to have any.”
* * *
Twenty minutes later, after he’d talked to the home’s director, Julius carried a box of unsold books across the parking lot to his car. At least he had a decent car, a Cadillac. A car with a little class. He opened the trunk and set the box in with all of the other books he hadn’t sold.
Yet. Hadn’t sold yet.
At least the director had bought two, one for herself and one for the home’s library. That brought his total for the day to a magnificent… three.
Standing there in the sun, Julius deflated. Who was he kidding? There were no big energetic crowds. Not for him. He couldn’t even get David to come with him. His own son! He’d had to trick him into doing a few appearances when the book was new, and David was still angry about it.
What’s he got to be mad about? Julius hadn’t included how David was drunk and full of self-pity, back during the War of ’96. No, he’d spared his son’s reputation, yet still he was angry. He’d always been a temperamental child, and now that
he knew how smart he was, it was even worse. You couldn’t tell him anything. Julius wondered if he should put the scene back in the book. It would have been a good scene. Powerful, affecting. Full of emotions and then redemption—the downcast genius realizing his full potential, with the help of his father.
Julius had himself convinced. He’d have to do another printing—a revised edition.
Book publishing was a difficult business, but the problem surely wasn’t him. He was magnetic. He was funny and captivating. Women loved him. It was a great story.
The problem, Julius decided, was with the rest of the world. They wanted their heroes to have guns and jets, wear uniforms. Be young and handsome. They didn’t want to hear about computer viruses, or the geniuses who came up with them—or the fathers of those geniuses who planted the ideas in their stubborn sons’ heads.
The more he thought about it, the more Julius seethed. The big publishers hadn’t wanted his story. And why not? Oh, they were nice about it, but most of the times he’d approached a publisher he’d gotten a polite email back, crying about how the damage to their corporate and editorial offices made it very difficult to launch new projects. Especially books by unknown writers… blah blah blah bullshit.
Julius was a bullshitter from way back, and he knew it when he saw it. Especially he knew it when it was being directed at him.
Sure, most of their offices were in ruins, because the aliens had destroyed New York, but wasn’t there the Internet? They could have published the story. It was a great story. People needed to know that it wasn’t just the pilots and the generals who had fought the aliens. It was regular people like Julius Levinson and his son, David. That was the real story.
The pilots could shoot missiles, but if they didn’t have the brains behind them knocking the aliens’ shields down, the missiles didn’t do anyone any good, did they?
“What’s wrong with people?” he asked out loud. “No one reads books anymore. Maybe I should start selling online.”
He slammed the trunk and decided that what he really should be doing was fishing. What else was an old man to do? When the readers weren’t buying, at least maybe the fish would be biting. And if they weren’t, well, Julius wouldn’t be offended. At least he’d still be out on the boat.
Also, he reflected, he had to be careful about thinking of himself and David as regular people. They weren’t, not really. They had helped to save the world. How many people could say that?
He tapped on the trunk and said, “Ask the fish.” Then he went around and started the car and headed for the marina.
16
Jasmine Hiller was trying to focus on her job, but all the hoopla in advance of the anniversary celebrations made it difficult. She walked down the hallway on her rounds. Pediatric nursing was a long way from exotic dancing, but Jasmine herself had come a long way in the last twenty years.
Wall-mounted televisions were showing the press conference where the president and members of Legacy Squadron were taking questions from the assembled press corps. One of those pilots was her son, Dylan, who had also come a long way. Steve had adopted him after the war, and for the next eleven years they had been a real family—the kind of family Jasmine hadn’t stopped hoping for after everything had gone wrong with Dylan’s biological father.
About whom, she thought, the less said the better. The past was the past.
The room into which she walked was dim and quiet, the only lights coming from a lamp near the bathroom door and the TV on the opposite wall. A small boy, bald from chemotherapy, slept there, clutching a doll tightly in his tiny hands. His name was Lucas, and Jasmine had watched him go through his treatment with courage and good humor that broke her heart every time. This time, though, it looked like there might be a happy ending.
One of the other duty nurses, Emily, was straightening Lucas’s covers when she saw Jasmine come in. She nodded toward the object he was holding.
“He can’t fall asleep without it.”
“How’s he doing?”
“He’s recovering well. He even watched a little TV.”
Jasmine smiled. “Go home,” she said. “I’ll finish up in here.”
Emily left and Jasmine stood at Lucas’s bedside, looking down at the small boy and his favorite doll. It was a Steven Hiller action figure. Suddenly her heart was in her throat again, thinking of Steve, and the end of the war, and all the plans they’d made together…
Now Dylan was carrying on his father’s legacy.
That was the truth of Legacy Squadron. They were torchbearers, holding up the memories of those who had sacrificed everything. For a while Jasmine had been part of a support group made up of survivors who had lost pilots during the War of ’96, but she’d come into the group too late—in 2007, when Steve’s loss was so fresh and she hadn’t known where else to turn. They had their own losses, and to them Jasmine was one of the lucky ones whose husbands had survived the war. She’d had years with him that they hadn’t.
She couldn’t make them understand. The fact that Steve died in a test flight hurt just as deeply—maybe it hurt more, in a way, because his death had been so unnecessary. He had died because a bunch of goddamned bureaucrats had refused to put the lives of pilots ahead of their political agenda.
Steve’s death was heroic because he’d put himself at risk so no one else would have to fly a plane that wasn’t ready. But Jasmine had found that she couldn’t explain that to the support group. So she’d left. Since then she’d handled it on her own.
There were plenty of people at the hospital who didn’t even know she was Steve Hiller’s widow. She didn’t broadcast it. On the other hand, when your son was on television getting his picture taken with the president, it was pretty hard to remain incognito.
Jasmine went to turn off the TV so Lucas would sleep longer, but she stopped when she saw that it was a documentary retrospective about the hybrid program… and about Steve. There he was, walking through the shimmering heat on the Area 51 tarmac toward the sleek, lethal shape of a prototype fighter. Jasmine couldn’t help herself. She turned up the volume, just a little. She didn’t want to wake the boy up, but she wanted to hear what they had to say about her husband.
“The 2007 test flight of the first ever human–alien hybrid fighter was piloted by none other than Colonel Steven Hiller,” the announcer said. It was right after he’d gotten his final promotion, Jasmine remembered. He’d been convinced they wanted to move him out of his career as a pilot and into a desk job where he could use his clout to help move the program forward on Capitol Hill.
Steve being Steve, he’d said no way. He wanted to fly. If they wanted a poster boy, he would do that, but only when he wasn’t flying. Tensions had heated up when Steve had told the administration that he didn’t think the new hybrid prototypes were ready for flight tests. David Levinson had agreed. Nobody had listened to either of them, so when the test was scheduled, Steve pulled rank and demanded that he be allowed to fly it.
He was hoping they would cancel the test, not because he was afraid, but because he knew how valuable he was to the public perception of Earth Space Defense. Even Steve had underestimated the one thing in the world more stubborn than he was—a bureaucrat feeling political pressure. The test had gone ahead.
On the screen, the hybrid fighter streaked through a wide ascending arc, then accelerated upward at a steeper angle.
“His was a decision that would ultimately cost him his life,” the voice-over intoned.
Wrong, Jasmine thought fiercely. It wasn’t Steve. It was President Bell and Defense Secretary Tanner who cost him his life. Steve saved someone else. She was surprised at how quickly the emotions returned.
“These haunting images are forever etched in our hearts and minds—”
Jasmine held her breath.
The fighter exploded, disappearing in a huge fireball that trailed bits of burning wreckage across the sky. Every time it broke her heart. Every time it was like being there and seeing it when it happ
ened. Again. Again. Again.
Over the last nine years Jasmine had watched the footage more times than she could count—and definitely more than she would care to admit. It was a sore spot between her and Dylan. He wouldn’t watch it again, didn’t want to talk about it. “Enough is enough,” he said. “Past is past.” All they could do was look forward and live. But he’d had a different relationship with Steve. To Dylan, Steve was the dad whose example he was always trying to match.
To Jasmine, Steve Hiller was the one man she had met in the last twenty years who had looked past what she did for a living, and seen the potential for what she might do with the rest of her life. She’d had him for eleven years. A whirlwind, wonderful eleven years that had passed as if it was a single evening, and now was gone.
Steve was gone.
Nothing could diminish the shock of seeing it again, even though by now she had memorized every detail of the blossoming flames, every individual trajectory of falling debris. Piloting was a dangerous business. She’d known that. Steve had certainly known that—but there was a difference between knowing it and seeing it. That was Steve on the screen, disappearing from this life in a ball of fire.
She turned off the TV and made sure Lucas was still sleeping. She had work to do, and her job was saving lives.
Maybe the past wasn’t always just the past, Jasmine reflected as she walked down the hall toward the next stop on her rounds. Not when she had to live with it every day.
Suddenly she wanted very badly to hear Dylan’s voice.
17
Dylan Hiller was itchy to fly. He’d had enough of the parade of photo ops and press conferences and briefings and the rest of the stupidity that came with being the public face of Legacy Squadron.
He wanted to get up in the air, feel the power of the new anti-gravity thrusters carrying him higher than any winged aircraft had ever gone. They’d tested the hybrids in the upper atmosphere, and all the way up to the edge of space. They’d done experimental flights out into hard vacuum and then quickly back down. They’d even flown training missions along the Moon’s surface.