Chapter Fifteen
“Specialist Wander?” Two buck-sergeant MPs stepped through the doorway in black berets, shoulder bands with MP lettered in white, and plink white gloves.
Crap. Crap, crap, crap. Caught in an opium den, drunk and underage. My fake ID lay in Ord’s personal- property envelope back at Indiantown Gap. And it had to be illegal to get lucky with a tanked woman this prime.
The MPs gaped at Chrissy while the first one said, “You gotta report back, Specialist.”
I shook my head. “I’m on leave.”
MP Number One waved old-fashioned paper, unsmiling. “Canceled.”
Crissy pulled a sheet across herself and pouted.
“Report where?”
“Nearest post. Canaveral.”
“When?”
“Now.”
“Okay. Gimmee a few minutes.” I jerked my head toward Crissy.
“ Now , Specialist!” The MP hooked a thumb in his belt He wore a sidearm.
I spread my arms, palms open. “Guys! I’ve been sleeping in a barracks with fifty hairy-butt privates for three months! Ten minutes—”
“The army doesn’t care if you sleep with yaks. Move!” He stepped forward.
Quitting in wartime is desertion. The army can execute a GI summarily, ignoring trifles like the Bill of Rights. And I hadn’t exactly built a reservoir of goodwill lately. I looked once more at his pistol, sighed, tucked in, and zipped up.
Crissy groaned and rolled on her side, facing the wall.
I stood. “How’d you find me?”
MP Number One tapped his chest with the index finger of one hand while he pointed skyward with the other. “Dogtag.”
I nodded. At induction, every soldier gets an identity chip implanted beneath his or her breastbone. One purpose is graves registration. That’s why the implant goes in the middle of the biggest piece of meat likely to be intact. The chip’s also detectable by global-positioning satellites, just like everybody’s car and bike. The Thirty- Eighth Amendment forbids satellite-tracking of natural persons, but it’s just one more civil right GIs waive. I think they’re called “dogtags” because the army tested the implants on canines. I heard another explanation, but it was stupid.
I glanced once more at Chrissy. She blew me a kiss, and my heart ached. Well, the ache was lower. The MPs flanked me, and three sets of clattering combat boots echoed as we wound down marble stairs, across Aaron Grodt’s entry hall, and to their butt-ugly, government-issue Chyota.
The door was open, and Metzger sat in the backseat, head back, eyes closed. MP Number One put a hand on my head as he tucked me in beside Metzger.
“You, too? Why?” I asked.
Metzger rolled his head my way and opened one eye. “I get called back to alert every time they spot incoming. I don’t know why they want you.”
“I thought it was for underage drinking.” The words sounded silly as they left my mouth.
Metzger closed his open eye. “Rest. Whatever it is will be here too soon.”
Like the end of my childhood.
The battery sedan retraced Metzger’s route from Canaveral, but slower, so I dozed, numb from champagne, my mind bubbling with questions.
I thought about Walter and Mom and a ship bound for Jupiter without me.
At some point I realized how much I had changed. The loss of a gorgeous woman wearing no pants scarcely bothered me.
A few months ago I would have stewed for hours about losing a quickie.
I wished Crissy and not Metzger was snoring next to me, but all I really cared about was getting a berth on that Jupiter ship, somehow.
The car crawled through Canaveral’s main gate and floodlights woke me. The notion that expensive wine leaves no hangover is a he as big as “Meals Ready to Eat.” I moaned.
The MPs stopped the car on a weedy, cracked-pavement apron in front of a windowless last-century building that stretched beyond the floodlights that lit its door.
Metzger jumped out, and I followed.
The Chyota whirred away as one MP slammed its door. I winced at the bang and stared at the building. “What’s this?”
Metzger led me inside and into a room filled with banks of old-fashioned instrument consoles at which rows of shirt-sleeved men sat. Light came from the image on a screen covering the far wall. The men muttered into headset microphones straight out of a history holo.
“Captain Metzger! Jason!”
The voice I knew. I turned and saw the wrinkled geek Intelligence captain from Pittsburgh, Howard Hibble.
Hibble shook our hands, then led us into a glassed-in conference room. He sat us at a table, sat himself, and folded his hands in front of him. “We would have found you eventually, of course.” He grinned at me. “But I didn’t expect you close by, Jason.”
A scrubs-clad medic stepped into the room carrying a vitals ‘puter. Hibble nodded toward me. The medic wrapped my biceps with a blood-pressure cuff hooked to his little assistant and read its display. “Low-normal,” he muttered.
I looked at Hibble. “I’m fine.” Were they drug-testing?
The medic poked a temp-infection probe in my ear and grunted at the readout
While the medic worked my knee joints, I looked back and forth at Metzger, then at Hibble. “What’s with this museum?”
Metzger smirked. “Museum?”
I pointed through the glass conference-room panel at the wall screen. It showed a flat video of a NASA rocket. The old crate stood gleaming white in floodlights, liquid-oxygen clouds boiling from its base. I used to collect spaceflight trading holos, mostly to get the gum. “That’s a Saturn booster.” I squinted at the nose. “With an Apollo module. Three hundred sixty feet tall. It launched manned missions to the moon in the 1960s.” There was a certain sadness to the truth that the seventy-year-old Apollo program marked high tide for manned space exploration. I pointed. “Which mission was this?”
“That’s a live image.”
“You mean it was live when they videoed it.”
Metzger broke in. “The old jigs and assembly equipment still existed, Jason. The frame and engines were rebuilt pretty much like the old design, with antique materials. But with updated computers, one pilot can fly it.”
I looked closer at the vehicles crawling antlike around the Saturn’s base. Electrovans. The first Electro hit pavement in 2032. My jaw dropped. We really had rebuilt an Apollo rocket! Just like we had demothballed Indiantown Gap and C-rations and the space shuttles Metzger and the other Rocket Jocks flew to intercept Projectiles.
I realized then how desperate the human race was, and my heart sank.
A century ago, in 1939, Polish horse cavalry attacked German tanks with lances. In the Insurrection of 2020, Tibetan rebels threw rocks at Chinese helicopter gunships.
Since the twenty-first century began, humanity had whipped AIDS, nurtured human rights, and back-burnered antimatter engines and death rays. Those had been dandy priorities. But they left us reduced to throwing a 360-
