Shanghaied to the Moon (15 page)

The stuttering roar, the vibration, Val's desperate struggle with the engines—all those worries fade into the only important details I need to know to keep this thing on course: pitch, roll, yaw.

My fingers tighten on the joystick. I make my maneuver.

The main engines go silent … end of burn.

Pressure ceases. I come out of my intense focus on my flight panel and see him staring at #1 monitor. I stare, too. It's a perfect white on red match. We're headed to the Moon again.

“We did it,” he whispers. His voice grows stronger, louder. “We did it!”

He whoops and shakes my shoulder. He's grinning like crazy. I wonder how his dry old skin can stretch so much without cracking.

“Damn good piloting, kid! Damn good!”

A huge grin pushes at my own ears. I really flew this thing! I kept us on course. I made his struggle with the engines worth it.

My fingers curl lightly around the joystick. A stillness spreads through me. It's really possible now. Stewart Hale … graduating Space Academy … first assignment, navigator on the never before attempted—

The clunky old control panels of
Old Glory
blur around me. For a second, I believe it's the force of my own imagination making that happen, but then the air folds, shimmers, and I realize it's a squiggly. The squiggly drops me in front of the sleek, gleaming flight controls of an ultramodern shuttle …

I'm in the pilot's seat. A little kid. The foot pedals are far from my dangling feet. I admire my silvery gripper booties. Kick them in joy.

“I'm flying to Mars!”

A big, hairy hand closes over mine, gently tries to tug it off the joystick. I look up at Commander Derrick, who's smiling down at me.

“Got to have my seat back now, son.”

“No! Let me!”

A gust of laughter from behind the high back of the pilot's seat. Many voices mingle. One special voice …

“Mommy?”

I turn to look …

… and find myself back on
Old Glory
on my knees, turned backward, clinging to the high back of the copilot's seat like a bit of wreckage at sea. Nothing behind us but gutted controls. Dimness. Stink and cold. The beautiful ship is gone.

“What's the matter?” Val twists around to look behind us, too.

“I … I thought … I heard … Mom's voice.”

Val mutters, “Ghosts.”

I turn my head and meet his narrowed, nervous eyes. He licks his lips. “Get in the squid. We'll train.”

17

MISSION TIME

T plus 26:25:17

OKAY, that's enough.” The small speaker in the squid makes Val's voice sound tinny and distant. He's coaching me from flight deck so he can make course corrections whenever codes come up.

The simulator screen flickers, goes black. Images of the lunar landscape return every time I blink my eyes. I've been crammed in the squid since we got back on course—hours ago. Every part of my body is numb. I can barely move my left hand anymore. After the first few successful landings, he made me put on the space suit gloves. Every move is like squeezing a rubber ball. It's a real good thing we switched the joystick to my left hand. My right would never have been able to take the strain.

I made a dozen perfect landings in twenty tries. Val said I beat the odds a few times by getting out of some of the wild glitches he threw at me. I'm too exhausted to feel excited anymore. I never want to see Moon craters again!

Well, just once more. Real ones.

There's been no time to think or sort things out, just like in Jupiter Turnabout. Val bullied the crew with regulations, drills, cleanup, and maintenance. Everything by the book and to the letter. They never had a minute to worry about what would happen if the boomerang maneuver failed.

There's this super funny scene where Val badgers Tony to black his boots, again, and Tony says, “Okay, if make-work is what you want, I'll help.” He pulls off his boots and socks and puts the polish on his feet. Then he goes dancing all over the ship.

Only, that can't have happened …

Keep busy!

I twist out of the squid. It's dark in the canister—more power conservation. Goose bumps pop up as the cold air sucks away my body heat. Usually the problem is keeping a spaceship from getting too hot inside. But with so many systems shut down, there's too little waste heat being generated to keep the temperature anywhere near comfortable. We're running with just one fuel cell to save as much oxygen for breathing as possible.

Following the dim glow from a guide strip, I slip feetfirst into the narrow tunnel, hook a foothold, then haul the canister hatch shut. In the air lock, I strip off the gloves and clip them on the suit. I shake out the numbness, then close the tunnel hatch to the canister before pushing off into the blackness of middeck. It's cold, refrigerator cold. I pause to close the last hatch. The cold and the clang of the hatch make me think of old submarine movies, of sinking to the bottom of the sea.

Busy doesn't always work!

It's warmer on flight deck, but even here all the lights are off except for two shining on the controls. Val's snug in his jacket. He's squeezing green Gunk—spacer survival rations, officially—into his mouth. My nose wrinkles at the chalky smell of the Gunk as I settle into my seat. Close up, I notice he's shaved.

“Want some?” The words bubble through the paste.

I shake my head. “Makes me gag.”

“Drink this anyway. It's loaded with electrolytes and minerals.” He hands me some Squirt, then taps his clipboard. “A little surprise—don't look like that, it's a good one for once. I finished analyzing that burn. We shaved nearly six hours off our ETA.”

No wonder he was pushing me so hard in the squid. We had planned on one more training session. Twelve out of twenty doesn't seem so good anymore.

I finish sucking down the Squirt. Tastes straight from a chemistry lab. I buckle up. The shifting colors on the instrument panel blur. I force my eyes open. Try to stifle a yawn.

“Go ahead, sleep. I'll take the first watch.”

“Don't want to.”

“Been there, kid.” He washes a mouthful of Gunk down, makes a face at the Squirt. “Too bad you dumped all the booze.”

“That wouldn't do
me
any good!”

“Then you'll have to play solitaire.” He reaches over and taps a button on my keypad. The game flashes onto #3 monitor on my flight panel. Above the slots for aces is a number: 871,023.

I touch my finger over it. “What's that?”

“Lifetime total games played. I racked up two hundred thousand on the VT alone.” He sucks a bit of Gunk from between his teeth.

“If I played that many games, I'd go—”

“Crazy. Yeah. I thought I could handle anything space handed me, kid. I'd been to Mercury alone. Two years no problem. But
six
years!”

“Alone?” I can't be hearing right. Val shipped out with the same old crew in Pluto: A Star Too Far.

“You've got to shake those 3-Vids out of your head. Look.” Val clicks a few keys and #2 monitor displays the technical drawings of the Valadium Thruster. Val zeroes in on the crew section, a tiny part of the half-mile long ship. Definitely not big enough for all the people who were in the 3-Vid.

Mom never mentioned anyone else in her journal, either. I pull my knees up and twist in the seat to face him. With my heels wedged against the center console, the position is uncomfortable enough to keep me awake. “It could hold a few people. Why'd you go alone?”

“She was my ship, my design. I believed in her, but after the Jupiter disaster … well, I didn't want anyone else to take that risk.” He frowns. “As it turned out, a little company would've been welcome.”

“Tell me about it.”

“Why not?” Val squares his shoulders like a boxer about to step into the ring. “Everything went by the book until the Saturn Whip. The ship was falling into the gravity well, building speed for the final boost to Pluto. Every second I set a new speed record for a human being. Stretched the computers to the limit.”

A code flashes. He deals with it almost without looking.

“Just like that!” He snaps his fingers. “She died—
everything!
Then the power came back. And the main drives. They weren't supposed to be on. The controls wouldn't respond. I don't mind saying I panicked, kid, but then it happened, and I was too amazed to be terrified. The bulkheads faded away around me. My body expanded, thinned. It seemed as if solar systems were pushing in between my very cells, until I stood with one foot on Saturn and the other on some star at the other side of the galaxy. Maybe the ship was crashing. Maybe it had exploded. Maybe I was dead. I could've cared less. I felt this joy as I stood there astride the stars …”

Hushed, I say, “The transdimensional shift.”

He nods. “Then I blacked out. When I came to, everything was solid again and the ship was on her way to Andromeda at full thrust. There wasn't a thing I could do about it. The entire disaster had been programmed into the NavComp.”

“Alldrives …”

“To punish me. They could've thrown her into Saturn. Killed me outright. Instead, they left me alive and lost forever in space. At least, they thought they had.” He opens a shutter, and it's like letting in a winter's night. Andromeda Galaxy glitters, over two million light-years away. “I tell you, kid, the memory of that joy got me through a lot of bad days.”

I hug myself. “How were you able to get back?”

“Killed her, system by system. Took a week to get to the reaction chamber and shut down the drive. I purged every system of their treachery, then I brought her back to life. That took a few months. She was mine again, under
my
control. By then, we were way off the plane of the solar system. The Sun was a pinprick of light behind us.”

Another code flashes. He doesn't respond. I take care of it. The brief jolt starts him talking again.

“There were only two systems I couldn't repair: the NavComp and the radio-link to Earth.”

NavComp crash. Just like what happened to us.

“So that's why you froze when ours went down.”

“Yeah.”

Our eyes meet. He survived that crisis alone on the Valadium Thruster, but without my help, he would've died out here. The moment is too full of strong feelings. I look away, fix my eyes on that huge number above the aces. “How
did
you make it through?”

“Did I make it? Look at me … us … now … this tub.” He waves it all away, mouth set grimly with un-happiness.

I try to think of something to cheer him up. “When did you make contact with the lifeboat?”

“You can't imagine what it meant to pick up that blip.” His expression softens. “Your mom was something else, kid.”

“Did she know you made it back?”

“The radio in the lifeboat linked on a secret frequency straight to Maggie. We knew Alldrives would do anything to prevent the truth from being known. We made a plan to hide everything. Get me home quietly as possible. In my condition … they'd have chewed me up.” Val pauses, then seems to realize he hasn't answered my question. “I was still six months out when she stopped talking to me.”

She knew he was alive, knew her efforts had made a difference. She
talked
to him. That's something, even if she was gone when he finally got to Earth.

“Six months at full thrust—” He rakes his hands from temples to jaw. He presses them there, holding himself together. “Burn as long as I could stand it, recover, burn again. Every day … every day …”

“Full thrust! For months!”

“You've suffered a little in this tub, huh?” He takes his hands away, snorts dismissively. “Bottle rockets compared to what pushed the Valadium Thruster.”

“Why'd you stay with the VT when you had the lifeboat?”

“Like I said before, kid. I always bring home the ship. And in this case, it was the evidence against Alldrives. I had to bring it back. For Maggie and the others. Vindicate them. Redeem their years of work. Pilot needs a good team, kid. Never forget that.”

“But you don't have one for this mission.”

“I didn't before. Now I do.”

Part of his team, like Mom. “Why aren't Peter or Ulura helping you get the NavComp core back?”

“That was a dark time, kid.” He switches the solitaire to his monitor. Starts a game.

What could have happened to leave him all alone? I know better than to try and push him for an answer. He'd be reaching for a bottle if I hadn't dumped them.

After one rapid click through the pack, he stops. He missed several moves. Staring at the screen, he says with sudden intensity, “You've got to understand, kid. I was half-crazy by then. Maggie's voice was the first live voice I'd heard in years. We set it all up, then she stopped talking to me—”

“The crash.”

“Yeah, she was dead. But I didn't know about that! I worried she betrayed me. Can you believe it! When I finally learned what happened, I convinced myself Alldrives had killed her! I knew they would kill anyone who tried to help me.”

“But they couldn't … wouldn't … all those people—to kill my mother? It's not true, is it?”

“No, it isn't. But I believed it. I couldn't involve any of my friends with stakes like that. Tried to settle everything with Lance the Younger, man-to-man.”

“Single-handed?!” That sounds like Val Thorsten!

“Yeah. Big mistake. He isn't a man, kid. He's part of this … power.” He fumbles in his jacket pocket for a bottle. Must be a bad, bad memory. He notices what he's doing, forces his hands flat and still against the flight console. “Took a long time to crawl back into the light. When you bring that core up from the Moon, there'll be hell to pay!”

Fierce. Confident. Here's the Val Thorsten spacers fought to ship out with. That Mom worked so hard for.