“Her name is United Nations Spaceship Hope . UNSS Hope is one mile long, and she will carry us 300 million miles. And back, God willing. I’ll let her skipper tell you more. Most of you know him, by reputation, at least.”
The commodore commanding the biggest vessel in human history walked down the auditorium’s center aisle to the stage as troops stood on tiptoe for a look. Resplendent in Space Force dress blues, he looked old beyond his years, weary. Like a man who had been orphaned two weeks before.
Metzger reached the stage, and General Cobb walked over and handed him up.
I didn’t hear much of what Metzger said. I just watched him while my ears rang. I think it was mostly details of how they would pack ten thousand of us into Interceptor cargo bays like cordwood to fly us to the moon.
Afterward, Metzger, Munchkin, and I sat in the Officers’ Club and talked over beers.
“You could have told me.”
“It wasn’t final until two days ago.”
Metzger twirled his beer bottle. “The psych people needed to check me out. See if I was stable after the loss.”
“And are you?” I tried to see behind his eyes. I knew what ate him. Metzger had wangled a weekend pass to chase a girl when he could have been on duty, intercepting the Projectile that killed his parents and one million others. No guilt could attach to him, personally, any more than to the patrolling pilots who were up there, in crates too old and slow to stop every Projectile. But guilt is as personal as a thumbprint, and as indelible.
Such guilt and sorrow would have crippled most people. Metzger wasn’t most people. He could firewall those emotions from the calculating part of his brain that was going to exact revenge.
His voice echoed from behind the firewall. “I’m coping.”
“But why you, anyway? Hope’s an ocean liner. You drive speedboats.”
He shrugged. “It’s not like anybody else has experience at this. And there’s politics.”
Of course. There were lots of pilots. Few of them were heroes. None of them were war orphans. Until two weeks ago.
War never made sense. But the idea that losing your family passed for luck was hard to swallow.
I shook my head. “Even if you’re ready, we’re half-trained.”
He shrugged. “And the ship’s barely flyable. But the Slugs will expect us to embark so that we intercept Jupiter when it’s closest to Earth. That means departure in two years. Going now may surprise them, even though we fly farther.” His face darkened. “And Earth is running out of time faster than we knew. Ambient-temperature drops will freeze most harbors permanently within a year. The climate of Kansas is already Alaskan. Three years from now wheat won’t grow at the equator. We go half-ready or we may as well stay home and die.”
Two days later, after dark, a stream of Hercs landed without lights to fly ten thousand of us to Canaveral.
The five thousand alternate troops would remain at Camp Hale and impersonate fifteen thousand people, to keep the Slugs from knowing we were on the way. They had inflatable, fake vehicles to park where ours had been, and banks of radio and holo transmitters to send out tons of voice and coded traffic like we were all still here. They would go into Leadville for haircuts twice as often, so civilian businesses would see no drop-off. Since none of us had family to wonder where we were, the deception would be easier.
The Allies pulled off a similar trick before they invaded Europe in World War n. General Patton commanded a phony army in England. The Axis believed it was the main force for weeks after D-day.
Those who remained behind turned out on the runway to watch us go.
Headquarters Battalion formed up on the frozen tarmac, all of us navigating using our night-vision goggles. I saw Wire, the old SEAL, striding up the line, inspecting gear. He gigged a soldier who had a pocket unbuttoned, and the guy said, “Yes, Sergeant Major.”
Odd. Ord was the division sergeant major.
I glanced at the stay-behinds lining the runway. Ord stood among them, arms folded. He had been designated a mere decoy. My stomach knotted. I was about to fly 300 Bullion miles to fight a desperate battle. Now I had to do it without Ord.
Wire, our new division sergeant major, faced us right, and we marched to our Here’s rear ramp in the green darkness of a night-vision world. I snuck a glance at Wire. He had aged years in the last days. Losing family does that Would the next year shock me as gray as Uncle Sam?
Engines whined, and the smell of burned kerosene filled the wind. My boots hit the aluminum ramp, and I scanned the crowd until I picked out Ord again.
He snapped off a salute in our direction.
It was intended for me. That was impossible, of course, since I was an enlisted man, and one among thousands, at that. But I returned it, as a lump swelled in my throat.
I don’t remember much of our trip from Canaveral to Hope . They sedated us all to slow our metabolisms, made us wear diapers, then tucked us into individual, coffinlike tubes. The tubes got stacked inside Interceptor cabins and cargo bays like cordwood, one hundred per Interceptor. That meant a hundred ships had to fly to the moon. If we had all ridden up like airline coach passengers, it would have taken a thousand ships.
I understood why we had to travel that way. Still, I awoke three days later hungover, weightless, a quarter million miles from home, and needing a diaper change. I was among the few who awoke so early.
My travel tube had been loaded in the forward cabin of my transport. I popped the end off and wriggled out. Drifting forward, I anchored myself with two fingers on the pilot’s seat back. I peered out the windscreen, over the pilot’s shoulder.
Hope hung regally above the moon’s white curve, gray against space’s blackness, even bigger than my memory of her as an orbiting skeleton. Though she was built to move faster than any manned object in history, she needed no streamlining. She most resembled a mile-long beer can, with an open parasol attached to her front.
We drifted toward Hope while our pilot stretched arms above her helmeted head.
“Automatic pilot?” I asked.
She nodded. “For a couple more minutes.”
I pointed ahead at Hope . “What’s the parasol?”
“Solar-wind sail. Photons headed out from the sun bombard it and boost her speed. But her conventional engines do most of the work.”
“What happens when she gets to running as fast as the photons?”
“Photons move at light speed. Hope wouldn’t get going that fast if she accelerated on out past Pluto!” She snorted.
Well, pardon my dumb-grunt command of physics.
It occurred to me that I didn’t want another round of extravehicular activity like the one that nearly killed me on my last trip to the moon.
“How do we get aboard?”
She pointed at a belt of indentations that circled the big ship’s midsection. “Docking bays. There’s twenty. They’re really for those dropships that fly you from Ganymede orbit to the surface.”
A tawny-gray wedge shape drifted behind each docking bay, at the end of a slender tether. Actually, the drop-ships themselves were so small compared to Hope , and almost the same color, that what I saw were the black shadows they threw on the mother ship’s massive hull.
“They disengaged the dropships and hung them out on their umbilicals so we could deliver you guys.”
I squinted at the dropships and remembered my trading-holo pictures. “They’re Lockheed-Martin Venture Stars. NASA cancelled that project in 2000.”
She half-glanced my way. “2001. You’re smarter than I thought. The dropships are unpowered airframes. The troop-transport bays are 767-airliner fuselages stuffed in where the fuel tanks would have been in the old space plane.”
My jaw dropped. “We fly through space in antique airplanes?”
“The fuselages are reinforced. But they’re really just souped-up gliders.”
I swallowed and wished I hadn’t read so much military history. “Every major glider-borne assault in the history of warfare ended in catastrophe.”
“That’s because they didn’t have the world’s best pilot flying lead.”
“And that would be… ?”
“Me.”
