At the start of their second week there, Neil got a call on his special phone from Assistant Secretary of Defense Fonblanque. When he was done speaking to her, he told Glenda about it.
“The United States Navy recovered a communications drop from the Moon three days ago south of the Solomon Islands. The Moon is telling us they’ve embarked on their own mission to destroy the phytosphere.” And then, unexpectedly, after talking in official mode, Neil got choked up. “Gerry might have had something after all. With his stress band and flagella.” He looked at the airmen, then at his daughters, then at Glenda and her family. “It seems they’ve conducted experiments that prove the phytosphere is… sensitive to gravitational pressure… and that the Moon, all this time, has been creating a tidal flux in the phytosphere—Gerry’s stress band. Gerry says if he increases the gravitational pull of the Moon against the phytosphere by a factor of fifteen percent for a period of five days, the flagella will be overwhelmed and the phytosphere will break apart.” Neil spelled it out in one blunt summation: “He’s going to slam the asteroid Gaspra into the Moon, move the Moon closer to the Earth, and use the resulting stronger gravity to shake the phytosphere apart.” He then sketched in the technicalities.
When he was done, Glenda stared at her brother-in-law with unmitigated alarm. Colliding emotions rushed through her body. Her throat felt ticklish, tears sprang to her eyes, and her head swam. She stumbled backward and would have fallen if Rostov hadn’t caught her.
“And he’s going to be riding on this asteroid?”
“That’s what Fonblanque says. At the last minute they’re going to eject in a survival pod. The mission is already well under way.”
“What’s to stop the Moon from falling into the Earth?” asked Lenny.
“The Moon’s orbit has been widening for millions of years. It’s going to continue in that pattern. This will just be a momentary blip. Centrifugal forces will soon pull it back to its regular orbit.”
“Is he serious?” Glenda couldn’t seem to catch her breath.
“They’ve already gone. They’ve reached Gaspra. They’re rigging it with AviOrbit’s five biggest singularity drives.” Neil looked away. “I’ve always chastised him for taking wild risks… but even I couldn’t have imagined —”
“Is Daddy all right?” asked Hanna, her eyes like tombs after all the asthma, but showing some light for the first time in weeks.
Neil turned to Hanna. “
The reservation Glenda heard in Neil’s voice jabbed her like the point of a hypodermic needle. “And just what the hell’s that supposed to mean?”
Neil hesitated. “It seems some Tarsalans escaped to the Moon after the TMS became unviable. Before Nectaris mounted its mission, it neutralized those Tarsalans, and they’re now in detainment facilities on the Moon. This was to circumvent the possibility that the Tarsalans might sabotage the Gaspra mission.
But it seems the Tarsalans had automatic sabotage procedures in place, and that all the equipment and software for the Gaspra mission has now been infected with a slow-burning virus. Systems are failing one by one. As a result, one of the crew members has already been killed. But Gerry and… and you’ll never guess… Ian Hamilton—”
“Ian Hamilton?” The sudden appearance of this dark phantom from Gerry’s past alarmed Glenda to the core of her being.
“Apparently he’s been up there working as an AviOrbit test pilot for the last seven years. Now he’s mission pilot.”
“I’ve got to sit down,” she said.
Rostov led her to one of the overstuffed chairs Louise liked to decorate her various homes with, and she sat down heavily, hyperventilating. The components of the disastrous mission paraded darkly through her mind. Gerry, millions of miles away in deep space, riding on a giant rocket that was falling to pieces, one crew member already dead, and the other—the god of good times, as Gerry used to call him—ready to wreak havoc on Gerry’s life all over again.
“Did they take any alcohol with them?”
As ludicrous as the suggestion sounded, it was no joke, and Neil was sensitive enough to see that. For only Neil fully understood the pain Gerry’s alcoholism had caused her, because who could she turn to but Neil when Gerry didn’t come home for three days, or wound up in jail under Fulton’s mocking gaze, or tried to be affectionate to the children when he was so repugnantly drunk he could hardly stand? She would never forget her long telephone calls with Neil, and how Neil had gotten her through the worst of
it. And then what she called the New Sobriety had come along, the sobriety that had finally stuck, after so many times of Gerry trying to quit, but always falling back off the wagon. Was all that in jeopardy now? Surely Nectaris wasn’t such a party capital that they’d allow their astronauts to take booze with them on a critical mission.
“Glenda… it’s okay. For the first time in my life I actually believe in Gerry. He’s going to do this thing. I know he is. I might be smart. But Gerry’s the family genius. And I’ve finally got the guts to admit that.”
She broke down completely after that. Her nerves were shot.
“How long till he makes it light again?” she asked through her tears.
Because,
“Eight days. Ten at the most.”
So in ten days she would know if she was a widow or not. She wasn’t sure how she was going to make it through the uncertainty.
She didn’t have time to brood or think about it because Rostov, using the tiny state-of-the-art radar dish mounted on the roof, tracked seven TLVs landing within an hour of each other, all within a one-mile radius of Marblehill.
An hour later, Marblehill came under heavy attack. This attack was different in that it employed not only the regular VMs but also standard human weaponry.
“They must have found an armory somewhere,” was Lenny’s only comment.
So, amid the whining squeals of the VMs, there was also a lot of semiautomatic weapons fire. With all the gunfire, she was surprised that the surrounding dead forest, now dry as straw after all the heat, didn’t go up in flames.
She was in a sandbagged position under the drive-through portico with her fellow soldiers, Jake and Melissa.
She watched Melissa in amazement. Here was a girl who should have been more at home in a shopping mall, or out on a prom date, but now she was firing her Montclair like a seasoned grunt, her face darkened by military greasepaint, her jaw clenching each time she pulled the trigger. She stood up over the sandbags and sprayed the yard with gunfire, her long blond hair jerking around her shoulders and her lips pursed against the clenching of her jaw, and when she was done she ducked back down daintily, as if she were practicing a move in a cheerleading squad.
Then Jake got up, and he had the curious habit of holding out both elbows when he was firing his Montclair, as if he were a bird about to take flight. He fired a burst of nearly forty bullets, and as he neared the end of this fusillade, his elbows rose higher and higher until they were nearly parallel with his shoulders. Then he stopped firing, and his head ducked to the left and right, as if he were inspecting the damage; he reminded Glenda of a dentist drilling a tooth—drilling a bit, then looking—but in Jake’s case it was shooting a bit, then looking.
It was Glenda’s turn. This wasn’t like shooting Fulton from the rooftop. This was full-fledged combat shooting, and she was so scared she felt queasy. She flipped down her night goggles, scanned the yard, and saw two Tarsalans, ghostly figures in green, moving toward the helicopter, both carrying automatic weapons, man-made rifles. Hardly any VMs anymore, as if they were running out and had to make do with local resources. She took aim, just as she had taken aim at those partridges so many years ago, and fired, not a whole gusher of bullets the way Melissa had, but with her Montclair on its single-shot setting, believing she was more effective in sniper mode.
The first Tarsalan dropped dead. She aimed at the second. They had a dozen crates of Montclair rounds, including what could be made with the round-making kit, but someday even those were going to run out. Best to conserve. She squeezed the trigger and the weapon spit its bullet with a
She saw five more come through the gate.
So began what turned into a long night. Glenda, Jake, and Melissa covered the front yard. Rostov and
