Shanghaied to the Moon (16 page)

“You can count on me, Val.” I shiver with excitement.

He mistakes it for the cold. “It'll get colder still.”

He reaches under his seat, draws out a blanket. He spreads it over me, tucking the edges in tight.

“Sleep. Dream sweet dreams of revenge.” He calls up a new game, glances at me. Winks. “That's an order, kid.”

18

MISSION TIME

T plus 38:04:18

NEAR the end of my watch, the light level on flight deck takes a sudden jump. I look out the window. It's the Moon!

“Val! Val!” I shake him. “Val, we're here!”

Which is a stupid thing to say because we're really a couple thousand miles away. Val's sure to yell at me for waking him up. Why would he even care? He's been to nearly every planet, seen a dozen moons.

He struggles awake. One hand rubs at the sand in his eyes while his other hand fumbles with the harness buckle. Then he's free and sliding open a shutter. He puts his face close to the window. For a long time, we both stare.

Copernicus Crater is dead ahead. The crater-roughened and mountain-heaved areas are surrounded by huge patches of smooth surface that look like water. That's why they were given names like Ocean of Storms, Seething Bay, and Sea of Tranquility.

These flat plains are dark. Everything else is the color of a wasp's nest. Dustings of glowing silver grace the rims of the craters. We'll probably skim right over Luna Base before making the burn for orbital insertion. Too bad Dad isn't there to watch.

Something glints where the sharply defined horizon of the Moon meets black space. It could be a ship in orbit, or even the Telecomsat that Dad came here to fix. A tiny speck breaks free of the glittering object and glides toward the surface. A couple more objects flare into view as they swing around from the far side. One is big enough to show some detail. It's a long chain of ore barges from the asteroid belt.

Val grunts. “Crowded.”

I laugh because it's crazy. Just three sightings over all the enormous sky of the Moon. But I feel the same way. I liked having the whole universe to ourselves.

An elbow bumps me as Val reaches inside his jacket. He pulls out a key. “LunaCom is going to want to talk to me.” He slips the key into the lock on the radio power switch. Pauses. “You with me kid? One hundred percent?”

I bite my lip. He's worried I'll call out for help when he opens the channel. Not long ago, I would have. Might still be the smart thing to do. I don't want to lie to him, so I say, “Ninety-five percent.”

“Honest. I like that.” He smiles. “You won't mind waiting below while I get us squared away for orbit?”

“No, sir. On my way.” The harness releases with a snap and I kick toward the ceiling, tap it, altering my angle and momentum, and do a backflip over the seat. My stomach gently grazes the side wall before I twist and drop through the hatch. Soon as I'm out of sight, I grab a ladder rung, flip, and drift up close to the opening. I just gotta know how he pulls this off!

“
Old Glory
to LunaCom, come in.” There's a burst of static and squealing hiss. I peek. He's twisting knobs to make the radio squawk like that. “I say again, LunaCom this is
Old Glory,
do you copy?”

“Barely,
Old Glory
.” The voice from LunaCom flight control is perfectly clear on our end. “You copy us?”

“Minimal,” he lies and makes a big raspberry. “Got a VHF seven failure. Best I can do. Got CBH long-range telemetry out, too.” Squeal. “She's a bucket of bolts, but I love her.”

He's sly. Those particular system failures would make any ship practically untrackable.

“Ah, roger that
Old Glory.
Explains why we've had trouble verifying your approach. Are you still on flight path from asteroid field Beta Seven? Over.”

LunaCom thinks we're coming in from the asteroid belt! Now I remember. Just after declaring us dead in the capsule burn up, he said something about nobody being able to track us because we weren't coming from Earth. He must have filed a false flight plan.

“Affirmative. Request permission for lunar orbit insertion according to prefiled mission plan.”

“Roger that,
Old Glory.
LOI is go. Enjoy the view. And we just have to say, old man, there's more than one screw loose on that ship. LunaCom out.”

“Eat your heart out,” Val says, wrenching a final eruption of noise from the radio before shutting it off.

I poke my head up. “Wow!”

“Get up here.” He motions with his head and, as I settle in, smiles. “Pretty good, huh? They think I'm on a nostalgia cruise—you know, a crazy old spacer who can remember when ships like
Old Glory
were the Comet Catchers of every kid's dream.”

I needle him. “Can you really remember that?”

“Thanks, kid. Now shut up. It's time for pitchover.”

He works the joystick to rotate the shuttle nose over tail. The Moon slowly slides out of view as our rockets come around to point at it. When the angles are exactly right, he stabilizes us, then shifts right into setting up the burn. Not a motion wasted. He's the pilot of a shuttle preparing for an extremely important maneuver. Nothing else matters anymore. In two minutes, the engine will fire to put us into orbit.

Then
I'm
going to land on the Moon! Not like a tourist coming down in a liner so big and comfortable you might as well be landing anywhere on Earth, but in a miniature LEM, just like the first astronauts.

My excitement somersaults. A big lump sticks in my throat. My eyes water. The cockpit light refracts around Val. For a second, his image blurs. He's the Val Thorsten of Jupiter Turnabout. He's got the old stuff back again. He'll bring me down safe.

Why isn't someone filming now?

“Perfect.” He slaps the seat arm. “Time to suit up.”

He flows over the seat back, his big body arched like a breaching whale. A tight tuck and roll, then he kicks off the ceiling to plunge through the floor hatch.

I catch up with him in the air lock chamber. He's holding the undergarment of the space suit. It looks like thermal underwear, only it's made to keep you cool. Without that cooling system, a person would stew in their own body heat inside the superinsulated suit.

“Remember, once you're down, you've got to work fast,” Val says as I strip. My pants and shirt keep their shape, like in cartoons where the clothes are so dirty they stand up by themselves. “It'll only take twenty-four minutes for a park ranger to arrive once they get suspicious of us.”

I nod, slipping a leg into the undergarment. Balancing on one leg is hard on Earth, impossible in outer space. Gravity doesn't hold you to the floor. I start spinning. Val, who's always well anchored, stops me. I use him for a post, slip my other leg in, then my arms, and zip it up. Same procedure with the lower half of the space suit. He helps me with the boots.

I feel like a kid being stuffed into a snowsuit.

Val snugs the Snoopy cap on my head. The cap has a small microphone attached to it by a slender wire and earphones sewn into the sides. Last comes the helmet. He pokes a button on the chest plate and the suit pressurizes. I'm breathing the sweetest air since leaving the PLV. And I'm warm.

He clips the locator to my wrist. I'll use that to find where the bore tube containing the NavComp is drilled into the surface somewhere just outside the perimeter fence. He puts a Snoopy cap on. My earphones hiss. “All right in there?”

I nod.

He squints into the shaded helmet visor and grumbles, “Use your mike.”

I dip my chin to enable “talk” and say, “Okay.”

“Come on, then.”

The suit's too bulky to let me crawl through the tunnel. I hold my arms out in a
V
and use my toes to nudge along behind Val. The squid looks tiny in the giant cylinder. Perched on the boom, it's silent and fragile seeming, like a Chinese box kite.

At the console, Val makes the final adjustments to the remote telemetry link. “Climb aboard.”

I face the opening in the side. This is it. When I crawl in, it won't be for a simulator run. The readings will be real. The alarms will be real. And if something does go wrong, if I have to fly this thing, I'll find out if I've got what it takes to be like Val. Or if I'll fail, like Mom did.

I grip the edge of the opening to pull myself in.

“Hold it.” Val stops me. “She needs a name. Bad luck to fly a ship without a name.”

“It's been the
Squid
to me since I first saw it.”

“No points for creativity, kid.” Val takes a marker from his pocket and scrawls
SQUID
beneath the window. He draws squiggly lines trailing from the letters, like tentacles. “Okay, get in.”

I grip the edge again. Immediately, I sense a difference. Naming it has created something personal between the
Squid
and me. I wish suddenly that Val would let me fly her.

I pull. Thunk! The backpack catches on the edge of the opening. Val grips my calves. A tug down, a twist, then he jams me in. My shoulders come up against the padded restraints below the nose window. My feet settle on the curved top of the ascent stage fuel tank. This tank is separate from the one for the descent stage motor. It holds enough fuel to get me back to the shuttle, or, if anything goes wrong with the rocket, to become my own personal land mine.

I squirm to settle in better. My right hand comes down on the keypad. My left finds the joystick. It's such a tight fit, only my head and hands are free to move. “How am I going to get out?”

“Don't worry, there's gravity down there.” Val floats in front of the window. A disgusting sound warbles in the earphones, then
Ptaa!

He spit on my ship! “Hey, what're you doing?”

“Christening her. We're all out of the traditional stuff. Bon voyage, kid.” He gives a thumbs-up signal, then starts to turn away.

“Val!”

He pulls up short, presses his face close. “Yeah?”

“Can the Counselor bring the memories back?”

“Focus on the job at hand, kid.” Val looks stern. “It's what Maggie did. It's what we all do.”

“I'll try, Val.”

“Not good enough. Do it. Understood?”

“Yes, sir.”

19

MISSION TIME

T plus 39:09:19

A few minutes pass before the earphones in the Snoopy cap hiss to life. Val's back on flight deck. He says, “Power up checklist. Confirm status green for me.”

We work through the list smoothly, not like that first time in orbit around Earth preparing for translunar injection.

“I'm going to blow the lid. One minute.” His voice comes crisply over the headphones, but a different whispery soft voice, much more official sounding, echoes in my head.

“Tower Control to FSF Seven Eight, you're go for de-orbital burn.”

My heart thumps hard. The scar throbs. That's Mom's flight signature!

The
Squid
comes to life. The miniature readouts framing the window flash through a systems check. Rattled by that echo, the rapidly changing displays mean nothing to me. My guts clench like that time waiting in the wings at the school play—my cue was coming up, but I couldn't remember a single line!

The earphones crackle. “Here we go!”

Hundreds of tiny explosive charges blow the top off the canister. The moisture in the air crystallizes, surrounding me in a glittering fog that immediately whisks out into space.

The shuttle orbits upside down with the
Squid
riding like a bomb in a bomb bay. I'm looking straight down at the surface of the Moon and my arms instinctively try to jerk up to brace for a fall. But they're pinned at my sides over the control boxes. Sharply slanting sunlight makes inky pools of shadow in the craters. Goose bumps erupt all over me.

A thruster blasts and a sharp punch shakes the
Squid.
A quick surge of acceleration pushes my small ship out of the canister. The walls slide away. Black infinity slams into place around me.

Val says, “You're clear of the ship. DOI in sixty seconds.”

But that other voice is in my head again, shadowing his words:
“DOI looking good
…
on our way home, folks.”

“Not home,” I tell the confused voice. “The Moon.”

“Huh?” Val says. “What's that, kid?”

“Nothing.” That wasn't Val's voice! Another voice. Another ship. A different announcement of descent orbit initiation. It wasn't a squiggle though. My view of the Moon; the controls of the
Squid
; everything stayed perfectly clear.

A memory …?

“Fifteen seconds until DOI,” Val says.

Memory or not, I can't afford to listen now! I force myself to focus on the readouts. The
Squid
is seventy miles above the Moon with an orbital velocity of thirty-seven hundred miles per hour.

“Three … two … one … go.”

I feel a light push against the soles of my feet. There's no rattle and bump like on the shuttle. The thrust from the
Squid
's tiny descent engine never reaches an uncomfortable level. The push ends in twenty seconds. The landing radar shows a slight bend in the orbital path. The altimeter reading drops … slow and steady.

“Looking good,” Val says.

“Sure is.”

There's nothing to do until perilune, the lowest point in the new orbit, eight miles up. There isn't even much to look at. The
Squid
flies feetfirst with the window aimed at the stars. It'll pitchover into touchdown position at five thousand feet above the surface. That's when I might have to fly it, but only if the landing site is too rough for Val to deal with from above.

“Hey,Val.”

“Yeah?”

“I'm probably the first person to go down to the Moon in a ship this tiny in years.”

“Decades.”

“Really?”

“Hold the chatter.” The line goes silent. The displays flash a systems check. Then another one.