They are extremely worried about the possibilities of the Martians manning those ships. You'll have complete, top secret Internet retrieval access of course.'
Jules shook his head again, still unable to believe what he'd just been told, still waiting for Lucid to tell him this was an elaborate joke. But it wasn't.
'Your T-7 pilot has been told to be ready to depart for Colorado Springs in one hour. See to it that you do not make him late.'
'Yes sir,' Jules said.
The face disappeared from the screen, leaving only the time display. From the speakers the soft music returned. He looked across the room at the young lieutenant. He no longer felt stimulated.
Armstrong Space Force Base — Departure
The T-7, and it's civilian counterpart, the LX-5, were among the smallest Earth-to-orbital vehicles manufactured. They were less than seventy meters in length, ten wide. Their primary purpose was the transportation of the elite, those that did not care to travel with the masses on standard orbital flights. In the civilian world the LX-5s were utilized by corporate heads and upper management. In the military world, they were used by executive committee members and high-ranking command staff. They were obscenely luxurious, equipped with plush seats, carpeting, overlarge Internet screens with full access, drink and marijuana delivery systems in each seat, and inertial dampened comfort to keep the occupants unaware of the stringent pitches, dives, and acceleration/deceleration cycles.
Though Admiral Jules was not important enough to rate his own personal T-7, he was important enough to rate the use of one of the spares that were always in waiting at Armstrong for people such as him. He and his two senior staff members boarded at the prescribed time, each grabbing a seat and plugging the briefing disks they'd been provided into the Internet screens before them. Though the craft was capable of carrying another twenty-two passengers in the same comfort as the Admiral and his staff, the pilot, a senior commander, knew that this was the load for the trip. It seemed an awful waste of the precious fuel that had come all the way from Jupiter to be burned, but that was not his concern. He sealed up the craft and was given immediate departure clearance.
The T-7 broke contact with the docking airlock and fired its starboard maneuvering thruster briefly, causing the orbiter to drift away. As it cleared the docking area, the thrusters were fired again, longer this time, pushing it out into the departure corridor. With further bursts of different maneuvering thrusters the craft spun around so it's main thrusters were facing in the direction of its orbit. This minute maneuvering was the main part of the pilot's job. While he was doing it, the computers calculated all of the factors to bring the craft out of orbit and onto a proper trajectory towards Colorado Springs and a soft landing at the field there.
When the pilot had the craft steady in the corridor he checked with Armstrong control. They gave him the go-ahead and he gave the computer the go-ahead. There was a brief countdown and the main thrusters fired, initiating the de-orbit burn. From the perspective of the T-7, the spacecraft seemed to streak rapidly away from the orbiting city of Departure, leaving it far behind. In actuality it was Departure that was continuing ahead on its normal orbital path while the T-7 was decelerating at three times the force of gravity. It began to drop towards the Earth and it's rendezvous with the atmosphere far below.
Inside the cabin Admiral Jules did not watch the Earth growing in his window and, thanks to the inertial damper, he was not pressed violently backwards into his seat. He was watching in disbelief as the events of the last eight hours were displayed for him on the screen. He watched the news clips of the shoot-out in New Pittsburgh, he watched the initial reports from TNB as the MPG troops attacked it. He replayed several of these over again, as did his staffers.
Just as he got to the cry for reinforcements from Admiral Rosewood to General Sega, the T-7 cut its engines and spun around once more, presenting it's belly to the approaching atmosphere of Earth. It continued to drift downward, pulled by the forces of gravity that were now stronger than its forward momentum. Shortly the craft entered the atmosphere where friction began the job of decelerating it from orbital velocity to atmospheric flight speed. The view out the side windows disappeared, replaced by steaks of fiery red as the tremendous heat of re- entry was bled off.
Normally during re-entry flights Jules would stare out the window at this point, nervously awaiting the reappearance of scenery, which would signify the end of the dangerous friction period. Over the course of history, re-entry had accounted for more spacecraft accidents than anything else. Accidents that were invariably fatal to the occupants. A single flaw in the heat shield, the simple result of a simple maintenance oversight, and the spacecraft in question would incinerate itself and everything inside of it. It was said that it usually happened so quickly that the occupants were dead before they even glimmered that something was wrong. Jules would ponder that knowledge while watching the streaks of intense heat outside his window, wondering what it was like to be there one moment and evaporated into ash the next, wondering if what was said was nothing but propaganda designed to make space travelers ride easier, if they actually died in burning agony, their deaths taking minutes.
But on this flight he paid scant attention to re-entry, not even breathing a sigh of relief when it was over and the many cities of Brazil, Venezuela, and Columbia regions could be seen glowing beneath them once more. As the wings deployed, slowing them further, and the T-7 turned northwest, heading across the Caribbean Sea towards North America, Jules continued his perusal of the attack on TNB, expressing guttural profanity but also feeling, very much against his will, a large measure of respect for the author of the attack. They had been caught with their pants down; nothing more, nothing less. But how could they have anticipated something like this? An attack on the base by so-called friendly forces? They had underestimated the MPG. It would not do to make such a mistake again.
WestHem Capital Building—Denver
The view was impressive from the large picture window in the executive council briefing room. The window looked east, out over the entire expanse of the thirty-eighth most populous city in WestHem; the sixty-third most populous in the solar system. The tops of innumerable high-rise buildings could be seen stretching away for kilometers in every visible direction. Each roof was dotted with landing pads and parked VTOLS, the transportation system for the elite. It was 0745, just fifteen minutes before the start of the workday, and the little craft could be seen buzzing and circling everywhere like flies, the computer systems that ran them delivering their corporate masters to their offices. Beyond the high rises of downtown were the housing complexes of the upper and then the middle class. Beyond those were the slums, which stretched to the horizon and beyond; thousands of square kilometers of unspeakably dangerous neighborhoods populated by more than eight million unemployed and unemployable. Every major city on the planet had similar ghettos of similar proportion.
Like most employed WestHem citizens, Admiral Jules got the screaming horrors at the mere thought of ever having to live in the squalor of WestHem's ghettos; the fate of those that suddenly had their income removed from them. They were the epitome of lawlessness and chaos. The cops themselves did not enter them in anything less than platoon strength; and even then they might take casualties. They only reason they did go in was to track down a person responsible for a crime against an employed person or to enforce the stringent breeding laws. Among themselves the unemployed were free to rape, kill, assault, rob, or even molest each other's children. They were an entity onto themselves with little chance to ever pull themselves free. They were not even counted in the census. As long as they stayed within their boundaries, obeyed the breeding law, and confined their crimes to each other, they were left alone, living on welfare money, free alcohol, free marijuana, free Internet, free substandard housing. He eyed the ghettos nervously from his chair in the briefing room while he awaited the arrival of the rulers of the western hemisphere. The TNB fiasco would be penned as
He was bleary from lack of sleep and his stomach burned from the three strong cups of coffee he'd consumed with his breakfast. He'd been up until well past 0400 researching and preparing his briefing; perhaps the most important briefing he would ever give in his career. He was dressed in his Class A uniform of course, all of his campaign and service metals neatly in place. Before him, at the large rounded oak table where the guests of the council sat, was an Internet terminal into which he'd already inserted the briefing disk he and his staff had created. At the front of the room, above the elevated seats that the executive council would soon occupy, was a larger screen, onto which his figures and the figures of the other briefers would appear.
Would there be other briefers? he wondered. Currently he and his staff were the only ones in the room besides the secret service team, who stood expressionless at their positions near the doors, the council chairs, and the window. Surely he would not be the only one called on the carpet for what had happened on Mars.
