foot-tall rock at our enemy.
Then it hit me. Humans had big rocks. For the first time, I was proud of us for inventing H-bombs. The Ganymede Expeditionary Force was a diversionary hoax. Why send Infantry into space when we could plaster the enemy with nuclear weapons?
Relief, hope, and a little disappointment, because Infantry wasn’t going to lead the way after all, flooded me.
I smiled at Hibble. “I get it That Saturn’s going to carry a nuke big enough to crack Ganymede like a walnut!”
Hibble frowned. “I can understand why you’d think that. We probably could adapt a Saturn to launch an interplanetary payload. Logical enough mistake.”
Mistake?
Metzger said, “The first nuclear warhead we fired to knock a Projectile off course didn’t detonate. We thought it was a dud. Nobody’s actually tested nukes since the late 1900s.”
Hibble said, “The next four didn’t explode, either. We tried conventional warheads. They worked. The enemy seems to be able to neutralize nuclear weapons. Our best guess is they permeate space with a subatomic particle that slows down neutrons. You can visualize how that would impede a chain reaction, of course.”
“Of course.” I had no earthly clue. Metzger, Hibble, and Einstein knew what that meant, but not me. Yet when I looked in their eyes I knew it was true. Humanity was screwed.
Hopelessness dripped through me as I realized that for some reason those MPs had dragged Metzger and me here like North America’s Most Wanted.
I pointed again at the oversized antique fueling up on the wall screen. “So why us? Why the rocket ship?”
Hibble looked up at the medic, who had ran out of body parts to abuse. The medic wrapped wires around his machine as he walked out. “He’s good to go, Captain Hibble.”
“Go where?” I asked.
Howard waited until the door closed behind the medic, then unlocked a drawer in the table and pulled out a paper book. Actually, it was bigger than the books I had read in the day room, the dimensions of an old laptop computer, or more accurately, a stack of them.
Yellow letters across its top read top secret. Howard let it thud on the tabletop, granted, then laid his palm over the letters. “This notebook details every artifact we’ve recovered from Projectile detonation sites worldwide. Learning what we’re fighting might turn the war. This book doesn’t tell us enough. We’ve mostly recovered cinders the size of rutabagas.”
I’d never seen a rutabaga, but I gathered it wasn’t very big. I shook my head. “So? Why me?”
Howard batoned an unlit cigarette with bony, yellowed fingers. “What science can’t explain, it calls luck or coincidence. Historically, certain humans have displayed a knack for attracting alien contact. I never had the knack. But in Pittsburgh you beelined to the single most significant alien artifact ever found. I don’t understand why that happened. I expect you don’t know either. But I flagged your records in our database. You’re attached temporary duty to my platoon for the next two weeks.”
Me an Intel weenie? Still, my chest swelled. I was the Chosen One. But chosen for what?
“So I’m an artifact bloodhound?” Hair stood on my neck.
Howard shrugged. “That’s my hunch. Besides…”
“Besides, what?”
Howard looked at his hands. “The scientist who trained for the slot you’re taking was tracking fragments in Nigeria when she came down with dysentery.”
“Oh.” I had been chosen by the runs. “What do you expect me to find?”
“Nothing. We already found it. A Projectile crashed, largely intact, four days ago. You’ve already signed the requisite secrecy paperwork—”
My heart skipped. “You want me to go with you to the wreck!” I was going to make history. This was almost better than going to Jupiter. My head spun. I saw myself hacking through jungle with a machete, leading Howard to his prize, vine-smothered like a ruined temple. But something was wrong with my picture.
The conference-room door opened again and a corporal wearing well-cut utilities with Quartermaster Branch collar brass came in. Hibble nodded at me again.
A yellow tape measure hung around the corporal’s neck. He made me stand and wrapped the tape around my chest while I talked.
“Okay. I’m the second-string artifact bloodhound.” I jerked my thumb at Metzger. “But why’s he here?”
Hibble paused while the Quartermaster corporal held out my arm and taped it, then my inseam, speaking measurements into a wrist ‘puter. He left.
Howard answered. “Captain Metzger is one of two pilots checked out to fly the Apollo Mark II The other guy’s on alert at Lop Nor in China.”
“Pilot?” A knot grew in my stomach. “To where?”
“The Projectile crash-landed at ten degrees, two minutes south latitude and fifty-five degrees, forty minutes east longitude—”
“That’s in—” I wrinkled my forehead, visualizing a globe.
“The middle of Mare Fecunditatis.” Howard looked at his watch. “At ten tomorrow morning, we three leave for the moon.”
Chapter Sixteen
A day later, they walked us three out on the gantry in baggy, white space suits. The one I’d been measured for actually fit. We carried little air-conditioner suitcases, just like old movies. Real old. They hadn’t used Canaveral’s launchpads since satellites went private. I shouldn’t have been surprised at the rusty girders. I shook. I hate heights. The narrow bridge to the capsule was latticed steel, so when I looked down between my feet the ground was 350 feet away.
In three days the ground would be 250,000 miles away. I stared ahead at the open capsule hatch, squeezed the bridge rail harder with shaking hands, and shuffled toward the capsule.
The Apollo capsule itself had just been built so it smelled like a new car inside. But it looked as old-fashioned as a laptop computer. I lay there flat on my back while technicians snapped fishbowl helmets over our heads, Howard on my right and Metzger on my left.
A tech patted my head, shot me a thumbs-up, then ducked back outside and sealed the hatch. Gray sky shone through the little capsule window. I scrunched my shoulders, hands at my sides, and tried to remember all the things I’d been taught over the last twenty-four hours, mostly what not to touch. The trip to the moon would last three days, but they had crammed me with three months’ training since yesterday. I had been nervous about learning my flight duties until they explained that I had none.
My trainer assured me, “The first American astronaut was just a monkey. He did fine.” Then my trainer eye- balled the Infantry tab on my file. “A really dumb monkey.”
My trainer taught me that the monkey wore a little space vest and diapers. My trainer never taught me how to pee in space.
Metzger’s voice and the ground controller’s rang inside my helmet. We had more room in the capsule than the old pioneers had because the old-fashioned instruments that had filled much of the capsule had been replaced by a wireless ‘puter Metzger held. It was not much bigger than a Playstation Model-40.
I sat atop history’s biggest conventional bomb. This spaceship was strictly forties, according to the briefings I’d sat through yesterday. But its ancestors had a few problems. Out of less than twenty Apollos, one incinerated its crew on the ground and another blew apart on its way to the moon and limped home. The space-shuttle airframes that had been revived to make Interceptors like Metzger flew exploded one trip every fifty. No wonder we started years ago to send robots to space instead of people.
My heart rattled like a stick dragged along a picket fence.
Metzger glanced over and raised his white-gloved thumb at me.
Pumps rumbled hundreds of feet below me and jostled my couch.
