Chapter Seven

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Chapter 5

Photo courtesy NASA

Freedom looked like a spider with a monstrous golden egg sac to Group Captain Henry Ireton as they made their approach. The sac was actually a flimsy, unpressurized structure made of thin gold foil meant only to keep prying eyes from seeing what was going on inside.

Ireton oversaw the ship’s approach to the opposite side of the station. He probably should have been using the time to prepare for the day’s meetings but what the hell? Routine felt comforting.

Ireton had been involved in the planning of the Allies’ deep-space ship—code-named Yankee Clipper—at every stage, but this was the first time he’d actually come to see the beast in person. It was state-of-the-art all the way. Maybe pre-state-of-the-art when you came right down to it. But that was the American Way, wasn’t it? The flashier the better. No wonder they’d never really gotten along with the Ruskies, who preferred to do other things in space besides spend money.

The transfer into the station went quickly but Ireton chafed at having to go through the ritual of greeting, which including the playing of a nineteen-70s era rock and roll song chosen by some groundside space geek in his honor—Rocket Man, was it? At least it wasn’t the William Shatner version.

He was met by General Lewis N. Clark, who had been lured out of retirement at his villa in the Moon’s northwest corner to ramrod the project. He was surprisingly informal as he introduced the project engineers.

He was then escorted to a bay overlooking the worksite and there it was, his baby, the Yankee Clipper, its shell a lumpy irregularly dimpled shape courtesy of its double-icosahedral frame.

“Not exactly the interplanetary spermatozoa of 2001,” smiled Lomaine Brooks, the engineer assigned to give him the tour. She was wearing khaki pants and suspenders stretched over her ample frame, and a navy-blue Snorg T-shirt reading:

All this
and
brains, too!

Ireton shook his head. Typical of the US. They'd built a Bugatti when a Chevy would have nicely done the job.

“When can we take her out for a ride?”

“Soon. Maybe six months, eight if we glitch.”

“Hmm. Well, I have a lot of questions.”

“That’s why I’m here,” she answered brightly. “We pressurized the outer hull three days ago and there were no major leaks. We can go right inside.”

He followed her as she propelled herself down the large transparent oval tube leading to the Clipper’s shell. Reaching the airlock first, she opened it before he’d had a chance to catch up, causing him to tumble ass over teakettle when she moved the place he’d planned on landing.

“Newbies always do that,” she laughed, catching him in her powerful arms. For a moment he could feel her warm breath on his face.

“But would you have caught General Clarke?” he asked, grinning as he reached out for a handhold.

“I wouldn’t have had to,” she sniffed while opening the inner lock. “Besides, he’s an oldbie” They were inside a large dark space, lighted by a few safety lamps. Translucent walls surrounded them. Ireton rapped on one with his knuckles. There was a dead, dry sound.

“Aerogel inner walls,” she said proudly. “Light as air and you can bounce a bowling ball off them.”

“I don’t remember designing for a bowling alley.”

She ignored him. “This gridwork along the inner hull connects to bundles of carbon filaments doped with copper that act as radiators for the heat we’ll be generating. That’s what gives the hull its hairy look and buff color.”

“I thought it just needed a shave.” Ireton felt a sense of awe, as he looked around, despite its state of dishabille—the missing panels, the fiber and conduits snaking everywhere. Shining his light inside, he could see where the tanks of hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, lithium, carbon, and water would wrap around the crew’s living quarters.

“At the gooey center is the habitat,” Lieutenant Brooks poked her head into the opening where Ireton had been woolgathering. She looked at him from the tops of her eyes, forehead wrinkled like an inquisitive child’s. “But nothing’s been installed yet. It’s mostly empty space.”

At the end of the corridor they came to a gap leading into the large self-contained icosahedron within.

ØØØ

“The habitat has privacy areas that will be assigned throughout the chamber,” she said leading him across on a Buckyrope™ ladder into another airlock. The sides will be terraced green space, mostly crops but ornamental plants as well, that grow fast and make lots of oxygen. As you know, when the ion motors are lit there will be a very mild constant acceleration that should cause things to settle a bit although it still will be kind of like living in a big bubble.”

Once inside they pulled themselves along into the emergency bridge where Ireton stopped by the Captain’s chair. Around him closely grouped were the stations for NAV, Engineering, IT, and the seat he expected to occupy—second in command. Not what he’d wanted but it would have to do. He knew the Americans would never let a Brit run the show but it was still his baby. Even so the demotion stung a little.

“Questions, sir?”

He hesitated for a moment, lost in thought. “Not really. I helped design this room. I can see what a beautiful job you’ve done.”

“Thank you,” she beamed.

“Have you had dinner, yet?” he suddenly asked.

“Why, no,” she replied, surprised.

“Well?” he asked after a moment of silence.

“Its just newbies hardly want to eat when they first come up.”

“Well, I may be clumsy but I’m hardly a newbie,” he laughed. “And microgravity has never bothered my appetite.”

“Lucky man.”

She took him back, this time through the large void where the habitat would soon be constructed. Halfhearted scaffolding twined deep into the vault. It took his breath away—the largest controlled space ever placed in orbit.

“Watch this!” Lomaine said, pulling herself to the edge of the scaffolding and launching off.

Ireton heard her whoop as she crossed the wide space to the other side. After a moment, and with a silly grin, he leaped after. It was something like skydiving inside the atrium of a building but not so fast, in fact he could feel himself slowing down as he pushed through the air.

“Does anybody ever get stuck in the middle?”

“Only newbies,” she laughed, launching herself straight towards him. She thumped him on the chest hard enough to kill his momentum, while conserving enough of her own to spin lazily off towards the scaffolding. She watched him for awhile as he tried various swimming techniques to get himself to the edge without success.

“Patience, sir, you’ll come over, eventually” she called out to him. “There’s enough air circulation to suck you down a vent sooner or later.”

“Lieutenant, I don’t want to have to order you to rescue me.”

Grinning, she threw him a strand of a Buckyrope.

ØØØ

“My father was a military man, also in the RAF,” he told her as they queued at the cafeteria railing. The Sticko-pads™ beneath it were worn and gave his stockings little purchase, but it didn’t seem to bother him as he used his knees to hold himself in place at the counter while grabbing portions of bread, asparagus—with some kind of clearish sauce holding it together—a piece of blackened chicken (although he suspected the blackening had nothing to do with the recipe), and a hot block of scalloped potato. “He was on loan to the Jamaican Air Force as a jet-fighter trainer, which is where he met my mother. He married her despite, you know, the racial thing,” he said apologetically. He didn’t know why he felt he needed to apologize, perhaps because Lomaine’s skin was so godawful black.

“You’d hardly notice,” she laughed.

“They noticed it enough in school,” he shrugged. “But, really, it wasn’t too bad. Better than being a fatty.”

“I hear that.”

“I didn’t mean . . .”

“No, no,” she smiled. “There ain’t an ounce of fat on this.” She pinched her powerful thigh. “It’s just the way I’m built. But I have to watch it. I can gain five pounds just looking at a piece of cheesecake.”

“I’d like to see that.”

“Why, Group Captain!”

“Call me Henry,” he grinned.

“I’m, ah,” she replied, flustered.

He was surprised that he felt so attracted to her. Usually he preferred the willowy type, whereas Lomaine was built like an effing lorry, he thought, feeling guilty. And the blackest woman he’d ever met. Part of it, he realized, was that he’d been too busy over the previous eighteen months for a proper romance, but part of it was genuine attraction, which disturbed him somehow.

“How about yourself?”

“Oh, you know, science-nerd-girl in grade school. Discovered physics, sports, and boys in high school. Decided I liked physics best. A couple of PhDs along the way. My first job was on the Moon. The usual thing.”

Ireton laughed. “I’ve got to go,” he said looking at his watch and pulling away from the table. “I have to return to London in a few hours and I need to talk with the General first. Thank you for the briefing, Lomaine,” he said gripping her hand. “I enjoyed dinner.”

“Well, I did, too.”

“Call me the next time you’re downside.”

“I’m not sure that I should,” she looked at him questioningly.

“I’m sorry,” he said, feeling a little embarrassed by his oversight. “I just assumed there was no one else.”

“N-o-o,” she frowned. “It’s not that. It’s that I’ve applied for a position with the Clipper’s crew.”

“Ah,” he replied, heart sinking. “I’ve no input either way with the committee, if that’s what you’re worried about. That’s Dr. Monelly’s purview . . . although they say the important thing is compatibility between crewmembers,” he smiled like a naughty little boy.

“I just don’t want to get too compatible too quickly,” she frowned at him momentarily and then laughed, disturbing a nearby technician who’d fallen asleep at his table.

“If we’re going to be mates we should know each other in any case. Besides, I owe you dinner.”

“I’ll think about it . . . Henry,” she added after he’d left.

ØØØ

On the other side of the world, outside Novy Mir, they didn’t care who saw the ship they were building. To the blogosphere it looked like a Tinkertoys™ set that had been jammed together by a crack baby with a Soviet-era atomic submarine at the center. The French proclaimed it the ultimate expression of the modernist ideal, the Russians shrugged and said plumbing wasn’t supposed to be pretty, while the Japanese simply didn’t bother to answer the question.

“Big Banger” was the headline of the Internet ’papes when the Russians slid an immense neoprene sheath over the construct like an obscenely huge prophylactic. It looked like a bright red sausage needing a good grilling. When bags of water started arriving from the Moon the Tweeters™ speculated jokingly about steam-powered rockets.

Then a report circulated that the water was indeed to fuel the monstrosity. It was first to be split by electrolysis. Then the hydrogen would be shoved through the reactor core to be superheated and recombined with the oxygen, working as an afterburner—an oxygen-augmented nuclear thermal rocket. There were plenty of problems with this design but it was simple and they could refill their tanks at Charon. The biggest problem was that they would have to coast between burns while they distilled the fuel.

They christened their ship the Sergey Pavlovich Korolyov, after the “master builder” of the Soviet space program.

Sophie Täuber was living in the French quarter of their lunar base, called jVerne. The city was buried well underground. During the lunar day filtered sunlight reflected down into it from a large mirror on the surface. The gardens that Sophie and her crew were building were already famous for their beauty as well as their practicality. Tall, thin frames invited vines to climb explosively in the weak gravity.

“Who would have thought it, autumn on the Moon?” said “Long” Jean Albertine as he accompanied her beneath a row of young sugar maples.

“The hardest part is making decent soil,” she said. “Lunar dust is worthless for growing things. Right now we use hydroponics for the crops. As we gather compost we refine it, mix it with sanitized lunar dust and sewerage, and make these planting regions. It’s coming along but it’ll take a generation or two.”

They stopped by a vending machine and he bought her an Italian ice. “It’s been a long time since I strolled with a pretty girl,” he said.

“I don’t believe that for a minute!” she laughed. They walked for a while longer. “Why are you here?” Sophie finally asked.

“I think you can guess,” he answered after a pause. “We want you—we need you—to join the Charon expedition. No one has tried to keep a closed ecosystem alive for so long a time. You better than anyone know the complexity of what we’re attempting. To my mind there is no one else I’d trust to manage such a system.”

“Pish,” she replied, scornfully. “What about Robbie Frankel, or Meridia Lacombe?”

“Nobody likes Frankel and Meridia has . . . other problems.”

“Huh. You do know what you’re asking of me? My parents could be dead by the time I return. My nephews and nieces grown up. My friends will seem like strangers. My lovers . . .” She suddenly stopped walking, a distant look on her face. “And I’ll never have children of my own.”

“I know, Sophie,” Albertine stood next to her, resting his hand on her shoulder in sympathy. “I don’t like asking you to make this sacrifice. If we thought anyone else could do it . . . Not many of us get the opportunity to make history. Your name will be remembered as long as Marie Curie’s.”

“Who?” she joked feebly, watching him from the corners of her eyes while fussing over a small planting of wildflowers.

Albertine laughed. “You may discover alien life, be the first scientist to study it and evaluate it. Speak with it.”

“Don’t be melodramatic, Jean.”

“All right, but what scientist could pass this up? You must do this—for yourself, for the human race, for France!”

“Viva la France,” she echoed hollowly.

ØØØ

The von Braun spun like a top as it followed the Moon in orbit at the L5 Lagrange Point. It looked very similar to the space station Werner von Braun had envisioned during the 1950s and had been elaborated upon so famously in 2001: A Space Odyssey. By calling the ship the von Braun the Germans were deliberately goosing both the Brits—by honoring the developer of the V2 rocket—and the Americans—by reclaiming von Braun’s legacy.

Christain Monelly sat in his office finishing his day’s work. EURO–NOL’s strategy, largely at his suggestion, was succeeding. None of their competitors had an inkling of what they were planning or how close they were to their goal. Still, they were a long time from launching and could easily lose this race. It all depended on American hubris.

He snicked his teeth with a splinter of wood while studying the files on his proposed crew and their understudies, each carefully evaluated and selected by Christain personally. He would be meeting with them all soon, the first time they’d be together, but now he was meeting with the head engineer, Walter Thiel, a German, and the Dutch captain Ole Christensen Rømer.

The walls of his office were filled with a surprising amount of bric-a-brac, considering the expense of shipping them here. There were his awards and diplomas, photos, and paintings of him with various politicians and pop stars. And they were all in heavy frames. The walls were made of wood—very thin wood—but real wood. The carpet was lush and ornate, and the window had blinds he could close whenever he tired of watching the Earth meandering about his sky.

His intercom buzzed.

“Mr. Thiel is here.”

“Send him in.”

Walter Thiel was a thin, angular man, his thinning hair plastered straight back. Dead skin would have peppered his shoulders if the environmental manager allowed it, of that Christain was certain. Of course his looks didn’t matter but his competence did. He had been recruited from Forschungszentrum Jülich—the Jülich Research Centre.

“I hope you have gotten comfortably settled in.”

“Yes, of course, thank you.”

“How is progress on the powerplant?”

“No problems with that. The technology is very well known. The problem is keeping the tests secret.”

“As long as we can stay on schedule.”

“If that’s the case then what am I doing here?” he answered testily.

Monelly looked at him closely. His tests had shown that Thiel was high strung, but malleable. He’d be leaving behind an estranged wife and two children but by all accounts everyone would be the happier for it. He was a man looking for direction and Monelly was the person to give it to him.

“We have to prepare for the journey itself, Walter. I want the crew to start training together.”

“Is that necessary?”

“We’re going to be together a long time.”

“Then we’ll have plenty of time to get to know each other.”

Monelly laughed. “You’ll be back to work soon enough, Walter, I’ll see to it. For this week, though, relax, get to know your crewmates. We can lay out your training schedule and maybe share a few drinks in the meantime.”

Thiel sighed resignedly. “Of course, Dr. Monelly.”

“Christain.”

Watching him leave Monelly reflected that all the old boy really needed to cheer him up was to get laid regularly. He was pinning his hopes for that on Fraulein Katerina Egge, who liked the brainy but dumb type. The kind she could push around. Christain’s psychological testing, not to mention his personal experience with her, had indicated that the two could be a very good match, but of course with the human heart nothing was a sure thing. He shrugged. At times he felt like he was running a very expensive dating service.

Captain Rømer proved to be much more affable. The “Flying Dutchman,” as the press insisted on calling him, was renowned for his calm demeanor and cold deliberation. A former test pilot, he had been the head astronaut for the European Space Agency before the split with France and Britain, and the first person to ride the German booster, Hringhorni, into orbit. He had carried EURO–NOL’s flag to the Moon.

Christain met him in the onion shaped module along the north axis of the space station, attached to the framework that surrounded the station like an oversized Faraday shield. It did not spin along with the rest of the station and so was without pseudogravity.

They shook hands. Rømer was a short man, solidly built, square-shaped, seemingly as wide as he was tall.

“It’s good to see you, Captain.”

“My pleasure, Dr. Monelly. I’m looking forward to seeing my crew.”

“They should be along shortly but first I wanted to have a little talk with you.”

“About what?”

“The chain of command.”

Rømer regarded him warily. “Yes?”

“I want us to be clear on this. You command the ship, obviously. I command the mission.”

The Captain grinned. “Christain,” he chided. “How long have we known each other?”

“Officially, I’m an advisor. I have no power whatsoever.”

“Um hmm. And if I told you to go fuck yourself how long would it be before I was back on Earth?”

“Monelly smiled. “How long would it take you to walk?”

Rømer nodded. “You tell me what to cook, Christain, and then stay the hell out of the kitchen.”

“Good, I knew you’d understand.”

“Or I never would have been chosen in the first place.”

The door to the airlock opened and the first member of the crew arrived, the Belgian, ecologic specialist, Geo Lemaître. Walter Thiel soon followed bringing along the rest of his engineering crew, Antonia Carubia from the Czech Republic, and Monelly’s fellow Italian Emily Romagna, the IT specialist. Dr. Katerina Egge arrived next, promptly sneering at the sight of Thiel, who had a splash of lasagna on his shirtfront. He stared back at her, intrigued. The cook, Kirin Wahmke, and pilots Hermann Gromek and Venetia Katherine Phair, all German, arrived together. Last to arrive was the Icelander, security specialist Arne Sak. He coldly surveyed the room.

“I’m so happy we could finally get together,” Monelly said after they had quieted down. “We are about to embark on one of the greatest adventures in the history of humankind. Compared to us Armstrong and Aldrin did take a very small step for mankind. Columbus sailed across a mud puddle. Marco Polo visited his next door neighbor and Magellan took a stroll around the block. It takes light four hours to travel where we’re going. No one will be close by to rescue us if we fail. Our enemies will be nearby. We must be closer than friends, closer than colleagues, closer than family, closer than shipmates have ever been. We can have no conflict, no jealousy, no anger, no strife.” He looked around the room, deliberately meeting each and every eye.

“I’ll be watching you very closely this week. Not as a big brother, or a policeman, or priest, but as a therapist so that we can anticipate trouble before it becomes a problem. Make changes. Keep everyone, if not satisfied, then at least understanding. I’m depending on your help, your cooperation, and your honesty—with me and with each other.

“We will be the first to claim Charon for our nations and unravel its secret. I have no doubt the history of the next thousand years depends on us. We are truly harbingers of a new era, when our peoples, too long restrained by the jealousy and hatred of other, lesser races, will once again take our rightful place at the head of civilization.”

With that he opened the champagne, squeezing drinks into a bulb for each as they toasted one another.

Later, back in his office, he sat sharing a cognac with Arne Sak.

“Nice speech, boss. Do you think anyone bought it?”

Monelly shrugged, unconcerned. “What have you found out?”

“Nothing that’s not in my report. The Allies . . .”

Monelly snorted. “Are they really calling themselves that?”

“I’m afraid so. I don’t know who in the hell they think they are. World War Two was a long time ago.”

“As propaganda it’s useful.”

“If you say so.”

“What else?”

“The Americans are getting nervous thanks to our Slav-Jap-Frog pals but as long as they plan to slingshot around Venus first they’re on a schedule we can beat.”

“What about the Russians?”

“I wouldn’t worry about them. That piece of shit they’re constructing will probably fall apart halfway there.”

“How about the efforts at sabotage?”

“We’re stirring the pot, backing as many groups as will take our money, but they’re mostly amateurs and about as likely to strike at us as any of the others.”

“The Chinese?”

Sak grunted with frustration. “We know they’re sending nuclear material to the Moon. They’re definitely up to something but we don’t have a chance in hell of finding out what that is.”

“Do you have an estimate?”

“Assume that it’s going to be very close.”

“All right, Arne. I’ll see you in the morning.”

Once he’d left Christain opened his window’s blinds and contemplated the blue globe drifting there.
. .

Chapter Four

New rules about non-combatants in space required Banner to first join the US Army. Soon after filling out the application he found himself in basic training at Ft. Benning, Georgia with a bunch of regular army infantry recruits. It didn’t kill him but there were a few moments when he wished that it had.

For one thing he couldn’t understand the young kids’ music. “Whatever happened to good old Hip-Hop?” he wondered. There was no other way to say it but this new stuff wasn’t even music.

His opinion didn’t bother anybody. At 28 he was the old man of the group and when they discovered why he was there, and that he had been in outer space, he was treated with an awed deference that he found embarrassing. After awhile they started calling him Gramps because he was always trying to protect them from themselves, offering them advice, and loaning them money that he didn’t really expect to get back.

By the end of training he was as tough as a dog’s old chewstick, knew how to fight to the death, and had made more friends than he could count. Kids that were heading out to Afghanistan, Borneo, Saskatchewan, Nigeria, Venezuela, and a half dozen other nasty killing places where their government thought they should be. He might be there soon himself, he reflected, if this Charon thing didn’t work out.

Then he was off to Houston and the Johnson Space Center to begin training in earnest. The bus let him off at a barracks where, for the next three months, he and the other recruits were put through a rigorous process by a rough old Sergeant who pushed them hard as they learned the bare necessities about surviving in the nekkid vacuum and radioactivity of a space environment. It was all old hat to Banner but he knew better than to let Sarge know that and diligently went through the process with the rest.

Cape Canaveral never looked so beautiful as their bus approached from the coastal road. Banner was surprised to find tears in his eyes when he saw the gantries where rockets went up almost daily. They let them off near a sad little flat-roofed one-story building that could have been built way back in the 1950s where they were given their duffel bags, queued up, marched a quarter mile to a transport where they gave up them back, and then marched to another bus, which took them to a larger building where they were inspected, hosed down, and issued generic space gear that they hastily donned as their loving Sergeant growled encouragement.

Then they hiked a short way through an air-conditioned tunnel, its scuffed walls a bright yellow. Banner waited his turn to squeeze in the elevator with five other recruits. When the doors opened they were hurried into the EEV (Earth Egress Vehicle), nicknamed Little Boots by its mischievous crew. Soon after they strapped in the Wally Schirra “Black Hat” booster was lit, beginning their trip to the Moon. The brutal acceleration of the vehicle brought a few anonymous whimpers from the recruits but it filled Banner with fierce joy.

They wouldn’t let Banner visit his old haunts on the ISS, or rather Freedom as it had been rechristened, during their stopover. He was there to pee, eat, and transfer with the rest of the troops to the Moon Unit taking them the rest of the way to Armstrong Base. The place looked shabby, worn out, he reflected as he pulled himself through the corridor along with the rest, carefully observing military rules so that Sarge wouldn’t get his shorts in an uproar.

He did recognize the old hatch leading into the mess. Inside, he saw that the video screen had been removed and the food station streamlined. Gone were the big old pressurized carboys that held drinks and in their place spigots stuck out from the wall where you could plug in your canteen’s blow hole. One was labeled coffee, one was labeled water, and one was labeled citrus, which oozed out as orange as a Safety Stripe™.

The ass-pad on his chair was gone and he had to curl his legs around the seat base to stay in place. Still, he was doing better than some of the guys, who stared at the food on their trays with a green look about their gills. “Once one of them barfs it’ll all be over,” he thought contentedly. He’d seen it happen before with newbies once the smell hit them—the dreaded chain-puke. The first one who could get out of the room was required to close the hatch behind him and leave the others to their fate.

“You gonna eat that?” he asked the rookie sitting next to him. She shook her head very slowly, not daring to look up.

“Thanks.” He swallowed the gooey briquette happily. That’s when he saw a woman gesturing from the entrance. Her red hair was cropped short, a reddish fuzz, really, emphasizing the flat planes of her skull and sharp angles of her cheekbones. It took him a moment to realize the officer was his Dr. Ashlee Monelly!

“Sarge,” he said to the man glowering from his station on the ceiling above him. “The Captain wants to talk to me.” Sergeant Teigs squinted in the direction he was indicating before saying quietly, “OK, Brummett, but be ready to leave in ten.”

“Yes, sir.”

He was trying to think of what he should say as he drifted towards her self-consciously.

”Uh . . .” he squeaked as she grabbed him in a fierce hug. He put his arms around her and inhaled deeply. She smelled neutral, of course, as everyone did, but somehow her neutrality smelled better than the rest.

“Banner! It’s so good to see a friendly face.”

He was melting into her when he realized that the entire room had gone quiet. He peeked around the back of her skull and saw that, yes, dear mother, everyone was staring at them. Some were smiling, cynically or wistfully, he couldn’t tell. Others looked shocked. Sarge looked like he was about to go major Krakatoa.

“Maybe we should . . .” he pushed off from the footrail pulling her out into the corridor next to a stanchion that used to hold one of Sophie’s old hydrangeas. They huddled together, whispering like two conspirators.

“It is good to see you again,” she said smiling. He saw there was moisture in her blue eyes. —Oh god . . .

“I’m sorry about you and Dr. Christain . . .”

She made a face. “It was going to happen anyway. What about you?”

He shrugged. “Teaching school, thinking about getting married."

“Ah.”

“But I could hardly ask her to wait by the fireside for ten or fifteen years.”

She hugged him again. “Which college were you teaching at?” she said to change the subject.

He laughed. “High school math. I like to start at the bottom.”

“And now you’re going with us to Charon!”

“I hope so. I’ve gotta get through space-basic first.”

“I’m sure you’ll do fine,” she said placing her hand on the blade of his shoulder. He was about to kiss her when an angry gray head poked through the hatch.

“Brummett!” Sarge pulled himself into the corridor where he encouraged the cadets that followed to move along, “Can the bullshit!”

Banner stared at him hopelessly. “I have to go, Ashlee. But I’ll see you soon.”

“Good luck, Banner.” She kissed him on the cheek as rough hands pulled him away.

“Excuse me, M’am,” Sarge said to Captain Monelly.

“Carry on, Sergeant,” she replied, eyes twinkling with amusement.

It wasn’t until they were in the Moon Unit that the old soldier released him, observing dryly, “You don’t have to stand at attention, soldier.”

Banner looked down, turning red, as a nearby soldier guffawed, earning a hard stare from the sergeant.

“Get strapped in, son,” he said not unkindly as he pulled himself down the line, checking each young soldier in turn.

ØØØ

JJ Gatlinberg was a hundred yards from the Chinese far-side base. No one had ever been closer. He had spent the previous eighteen hours maneuvering into position but was way too pumped to feel tired. Even so there wasn’t much to see—some very large tractors, a couple of shacks. Everything else was nestled deep inside the crater, which was roofed by a thick flat sheath. A huge retractable door ran along one side, its motors as tall as five-story buildings. If he could just make it to them without being detected he might find a place to hide until he could slip inside.

He thought he knew where all the security cameras were hidden but must have missed one because halfway to the engine housing he saw soldiers emerging from one of the nearby shacks. He watched them approach. There was nowhere to run.

“Shit! Call the Cap!” he hollered to no one in particular.

He couldn’t see their features in the glare as they approached in their red and gold spacesuits, stopping just inches from him. He watched as one of them raised a thick boot, bringing it down with a crunch. All was blackness.

Gatlinberg turned from the screen with a sigh. Behind him Cap looked on sternly, but resigned.

“You did the best you could JJ.”

“The Nanos were able to move a little closer during the distraction,” someone said.

“So it wasn’t a total loss,” said Cap.

“I was so close.”

“We learned a lot.”

“The next time . . . “

Cap took him by the shoulder. “Not for you, Lieutenant.”

Gatlinberg looked up at him, not comprehending.

“You’re being reassigned. I’m sorry JJ. Lieutenant Gustefson was caught in that blow-out at Cassini the other day and they need someone to replace him with the newbies.”

“Aw, no! Not babysitting. We’re so close to getting in.”

“It’s just for one group,” Captain Spigot (he pronounced it "Spee-jo") replied. “The Chinese will still be here when you get back.”

“When do I leave?” JJ huffed with frustration.

“Can you be ready in ten minutes?”

“But I haven’t slept in . . . yes, sir.”

ØØØ

“Go, go, go, go!” Sarge yelled as they jumped into their spacesuits. Banner helped his partner run down her checklist and then she did the same for him. Soon after they were outside on the parade ground standing at attention, easy to do in a pressurized spacesuit that could stand on its own without any help from the person inside.

Sarge came down the line with that funny little hop people used on the Moon. Hopping right along beside him was an officer. They stopped in front of Banner. The officer seemed to be staring at him intently. Hard to tell when his face was behind a gold-tinted faceplate. “What the hell?” Banner thought.

“Private Brummett?”

“Yessir!” With mounting horror Banner realized that he recognized the officer’s voice. “It can’t be!” He glanced at the namepatch on the man’s chest. “Lieutenant Gatlinberg?” he gasped.

“That’s right, Gump,” the lieutenant grated, putting his helmet right against Banner’s. He had turned off his radio but Banner could still hear him loud and clear. “I don’t know how you made it here, loser, but if you fuck up once I’ll run you back to Earth so fast it’ll take two weeks for your asshole to catch up!”

“Original,” Banner muttered.

“What was that?”

“Yessir! Uh, thank you, sir!” Banner tried to salute but his arm couldn’t quite make it all the way up in his pressurized suit.

“Pathet . . .” Gatlinberg muttered as he pulled away. Sarge stared at him for a moment with what would have been a puzzled expression but Banner couldn’t see his face, either, before following the Lieutenant down the line.

“Holy fuck!” thought Banner, sweat stinging his eyes. “Holy Jesus fuck!”

ØØØ

Hurry up and wait was the same everywhere. Even on the Moon. Banner was sweating in his suit like Aunt Maude at the 4th of July picnic. “I’m even starting to think like a Gump,” he realized. “What a world.” They had brought them out in the long afternoon sun because they were using a leftover atomic bomb to blow a new hole in a crater wall and thought it would be a good idea to take the troopers somewhere dangerous to see how they’d hold up. And here Banner had thought that the whole point was to avoid danger entirely.

“Thinking like NASA,” they called people with his attitude, and it was discouraged in the military.

The ground beneath them began to shake violently. A crevasse opened up a half mile away spewing forth chunks of possibly radioactive debris in tall parabolic arcs.

“Eat dirt!” Sarge growled as the pieces thudded down amongst them, some pinging off their suits. It seemed to take forever as Banner fell like a soap bubble to the regolith.

“Check your status!” came the next command.

Banner ran through his displays. Nothing damaged. Radiation high but tolerable. He dared a quick look around. Sarge was stalking amongst them intently watching his readouts and verifying the answers with his own eyes. When he was satisfied he made them leave in small groups, taking no chances that a vault might have opened up beneath them. Then they were marched back to the transport. At the barracks they were subjected to decontamination procedures before being allowed inside. A few of them had to see the docs but no one would need to go back to Earth.

“What the hey, I didn’t want kids anyway,” someone joked.

“Oh, you can have kids, they’ll just be ugly.”

“Can’t blame radiation for that.”

ØØØ

“Born again to what?” Banner asked his bunkie who was trying to recruit him to a higher cause.

“Born again in Christ,” Antowaine replied with a smile. “I know because the holy Greene, Penrose, and whatisname proclaimed that God’s world is smaller than we can ever see, heaven is in what they call dark matter. God is what they call dark energy . . .” he hesitated. “Or zero point energy, I forget which.”

“Gosh, Ant, I was raised a Catholic and they didn’t exactly teach string theory.”

“The Manifold,” he corrected piously.

“Yeah, and they said we’d go to hell if we talked about it too much.”

“They don’t want you to hear the truth. Where do you think hell is?”

“Somewhere down below . . . and hot?”

“It’s in the dark matter that makes up 22% of all the stuff in the universe, my man!” Antowaine replied cheerfully. “We’re only 4%, God is the rest.”

“The dark energy?”

“They only call it that because they’re ignorant,” he sniffed. “It’s just the Energy, man. It’s where our spirits dwell. It’s where we’re judged.”

“I can live with that, I mean with being judged. I’ve lived a clean life.”

“But you ain’t been born again, Banner. You’ve gotta be washed in the blood of the lamb. You have to accept Jesus for what He is.”

“About that . . . see, the nuns were right, we’ve talked about it too much. Now is the part where you tell me I’m going to hell.”

“You are if you’re not born again!”

Banner shrugged. "Halle-fuckin'-lujah!"

ØØØ

Lieutenant Gatlinberg seemed like was never far away. Part of that was because the base wasn’t very big but it was also because he wasn’t content to sit back and administer the program while letting the Sergeant handle the up close and personal. No, he was in their shit all the time. He even took calisthenics with them in the morning and found inner peace with them during yoga class in the evening. And every minute Banner felt his eyes watching closely, begging for any excuse to wash him out.

The base was eight Quonset huts buried deep in the regolith beneath a dull gray dome of aluminum. Filtered sunlight dappled down two weeks a month, the rest of the time sickly orange sodium lights competed with common sense outside the huts. Not much attention had been paid to a biosphere but nevertheless some scrub grass was growing in the corners, and a few things that could be jimson weed.

At one end was a small parade ground beside two squat buildings. One housed the mess hall and the other was a storage facility. Between them was a slope where the roadway sunk beneath one end of the dome to the main airlock. An entire company could be decompressed at one time. On the other side of the airlock a second dome housed the garage.

One day, while standing on the lump of green-painted sward outside the barracks thinking about the butterscotch pudding they’d had with dinner, he looked up to see the Lieutenant frowning at him.

“Have you heard from her, Gump?” Gatlinberg suddenly asked.

“Sir?”

“Sophie. You were her friend, right? At least she talked about you while I pretended to listen.”

“That would be against regulation, sir.” Banner snapped to attention, adding after a moment’s silence. “I haven’t heard from her since she left the ISS.”

“Yeah. I thought you might know a way.”

“No, sir.”

Gatlinberg turned and hopped away. Was this some kind of test? Banner wondered, watching him leave, feeling shaken by the man’s intensity. The less Jesus Johnny talked to him the better.

The next day the troops were out on the shooting range trying out various weapons. Banner had always been a good shot as a kid, although the first time he’d killed something it gave him a sick feeling and he never did it again. Firing a weapon was different on the Moon. The trajectory was flatter and there was no air pressure to account for. Since his suit made sighting the regular way impossible the gun was held at hip level and sighted electronically through a display on the inside of his faceplate. He soon had the hang of it and was amazed at the distance he could accurately shoot the rocket-propelled fléchettes.

“You’re a regular Davy Crockett, ain’t you Brummett?” the sergeant noted after the results were tabulated.

“Tweren’t nothin’, sir,” he replied, Crockett-like.

Hand-to-hand combat was an especially frustrating exercise in futility. There wasn’t much you could do to an opponent in a battle-hardened pressure suit without a weapon, except crack his helmet open with a rock. “We’ve come all the way to the Moon to fight like cavemen,” Banner thought after one encounter left both him and his opponent lying in the artificial mud, exhausted—until Sarge came along and whacked them both soundly on their heads with his “lickin’ stick.”

Banner did better in the tactical training class. Sitting at a console while running through various scenarios based on actual combat situations, Banner was able to outmaneuver his opponents more often than not. “I guess all those hours of wiizing are finally paying off,” he thought with some satisfaction. Closely reading the manuals they’d been given helped, too, he realized, and gave him an edge on the younger guys who weren’t quite so diligent.

Once a week they were taken out for a long hike across the Moon’s surface. Lighter gravity meant little when you were required to haul eight times your own weight around with you. Sometimes they’d walk in a big circle, returning to base the same day. Other times they spent the “night” on the surface, inflating pressurized tents inside a rill canyon or in the shade of a crater wall. Above them the Earth hung like a revolving blue lamp, the shadow of night creeping across its surface teasing lattices of light from its cities and highways. Banner watched for hours sometimes, waiting for sleep to come.

One day near the end of training they were following along the edge of a steep crater when his buddy stumbled, danced briefly for a moment trying to regain her balance, and fell inside. Without hesitating Banner followed her into the dark shadow, flicking on his lamp, digging at the ground to help brake his fall. Somehow he reached the bottom on his feet. Looking around for the soldier in the gloom he made out a small blinking red light. He gasped, hopping desperately to reach the still figure. The light meant her suit was depressurizing. In less than a minute she’d be dead.

Dropping his pack he ripped open his emergency shelter. Within seconds it had pressurized and he shoved her inside its fallopian airlock. Fearing this would not be enough he started depressurizing his own suit and followed her inside. The fit was extremely tight but he managed to wrestle her helmet off. He saw blood around her mouth, nose, eyes, and ears and that she was fitfully breathing. Removing his own helmet he began giving her artificial respiration, the taste of her blood in his mouth. Finally, with a cough and a wretch, she began breathing regularly again.

“Thank God,” he said over and over as the other troops caught up, quickly erecting a field tent and cutting them out of the shelter. He watched numbly as the medics took over.

“Man, you’ll do anything for a piece of ass,” said one of his buddies admiringly.

“Shut up,” Banner smiled wanly. “Shut the fuck up.”

ØØØ

Training was over at last. Sporting his new corporal’s stripes Banner went into the nearby town of Neil with some of his buds. He bought a round of whiskey for his table. It really didn’t taste like any whiskey he’d ever had but he supposed oaken casks were hard to come by on the Moon.

“Too true,” said the bartender, whose establishment it was. “We make it in the back. It’s basically vodka mixed with a little Liquid Smoke.”

“Uk.”

“But since it’s your last night,” the barkeep learned over confidentially, “Let me buy you a drink from my private stock.” The man poured him a shot of single malt scotch.

“Word,” Banner gasped, rolling the liquid around in his mouth gratefully. “I can’t even afford to drink this stuff on Earth.”

Back at the table Roland was doing an impression of General Starks that caused Cindy Lou to blow beer through her nose. The table burst into raucous laughter as Banner rejoined them.

“To the corporal,” one of them raised his glass and the others followed.

“Dawg.”

“Muh man.”

They all drank.

“What’s next, Banner?” One of them asked.

“I go back to Earth and wait for them to decide whether or not I get to go.”

“That is so great,” Cindy Lou said.

“What about you?” he asked her.

“I’m going down to the edge of Mare Nubium with most of the guys to keep an eye on the Germans. Some of us are going out to Lagrange to help with the new space station and a few can’t say. But you’re going all the way!”

“I hope so,” he looked into her eyes like Jim Beam on a Sunday.

“It’s such an adventure,” she said, touching his forearm. “I’ll probably never see you again.”

“Oh, it’s only for ten or twenty years.”

“That seems like forever.”

“You know, you have the bluest eyes,” he said as she smiled at him.

“Brummett!” Suddenly a figure came up beside them. “You pointy-dicked SOB, let me buy you a drink,” a very drunken John Jesus Gatlinberg croaked while sitting down beside him.

“Lieutenant, ah . . .” Banner gulped, standing.

“Siddown, hoss, that’s an order.”

Banner sat, not knowing what to expect. “It’s a little late to cashier me,” he tried to joke.

“Naw, naw, naw, man!” To his shock Gatlinberg tried to hug him.

“This guy, this soldier,” Jesus Johnny proclaimed to the table of bemused recruits. “You done me proud. Who’d a thunk it, a punk like you? We were on Freedom together, did you know that?” he blearily looked around the table. “And this guy was a low-life weenie. Could barely wipe his ass with both hands. Now you can shoot—you’re the best in the troop. You can fight, I’ve seen ya. And you know how to take care of your own. That makes you a soldier I’m proud to serve with.”

Accepting the compliment Banner finished his beer and poured another, to try and get in the spirit of the thing after Cindy Lou, with sad eyes, said goodnight. Towards the end of the evening he found that Gatlinberg had put his arm around him and was whispering confidentially into his ear.

“You know, I loved that Sophie girl.”

“Sure. Me too.”

“No, I mean it,” he growled. “I’ve fucked plenty of women in my green time but none like her. Did joo fuck her?”

“No,” Banner answered defensively.

“Ah, you woosie. I didn’t think so. That gal is all woman. It takes a real man to get to her.”

Banner flushed with anger. “There’s more to her than just a roll in the hay!”

“Calm down,” Gatlinberg said with a laugh. “Relax. You’re right. I know it. She’s not like any woman I’ve ever had, goddamnit! That’s why it still bothers me. Here, have another beer. I think maybe you’ve got the hots for her, too,” he added pityingly.

“So?”

“Well, you’ll never get her that way, pardner. Women talk, you know, but what they want is another thing entirely. You can listen to them, sympathize—if all you want is to be their brother! That’s why they like faggots,” he burped loudly, and maybe farted, too, Banner realized with disgust. “Or you can be a man and take what you want—and what they want—why else put you through all that bullshit . . . like that little girl you were talking to when I interrupted,” he smirked.

Banner looked at him dumbly, thinking about what he’d lost with Sophie, Annabeth, and now Cindy Lou, and feeling deep, dark despair. He noticed that the bar was closing and the others had gone, except Ferd who lay unconscious on the table, blowing little bubbles in a wet puddle of beer. Banner hoisted him over his shoulder.

“Thanks for explaining things,” he said coldly to Gatlinberg before turning to leave.

“When a shark stops swimming he dies,” Jesus Johnny shrugged to no one in particular.
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More links:
Apollo Over the Moon: a View from Orbit Chapter 4: The Maria
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Chapter 3

It took only a week to destroy Banner’s little world. Sophie was gone so quickly that he didn’t even get to say goodbye. He returned after a day spent packing and shifting stuff around to find a glowering young marine living next to him. Dude was always banging into things, shaking the stall with loud curses, singing along with the 3Xper music he favored, and farting loudly—when he wasn’t masturbating furiously, slapping the end of his bad thing against the thin wall of the partition.

Camus disappeared the same time Sophie did. Banner didn’t know if the cat could survive full gravity on Earth but maybe the French had some way to resolve that problem. He couldn’t message her because it was now treasonous to communicate with anyone belonging to one of the other sides. Maybe he didn’t want to know anyway.

He spent a few days showing bored young soldiers how to polish knobs, change lights, and unplug the head. The International Space Station was literally being taken apart around them as the Russians prepared to move their part into another orbit. One day he was given fifteen minutes to pack his kit and then shipped unceremoniously back to Earth where he was immediately handed his pink slip. Only old Stubbsie stayed behind, muttering under his breath about the new recruits and slinging “shit on a shingle” like the pro that he was.

On the ground Banner drifted forlornly back to his home in Brown County, Indiana where he discovered that he was something of a local hero. He rented a small apartment in the village of Nashville, spending a few weeks collecting unemployment, drinking beer, and catching up with old friends. When he was offered a job teaching at the high school he didn’t say no and soon after started dating a woman he’d known most of his life, Annabeth Crunkle, a sales technician for Barnacle Bill the Realtor’s local office.

ØØØ

Novy Mir moved to an orbit on the other side of the world from the recently renamed ISS—once again called Freedom. The Russians worked doggedly, as was their style, while new alliances were forged on the planet below. Modules were quickly added, scavenged from hangers, museums, and monuments throughout the old USSR. Others were whanged together on the fly from the upper stages of booster rockets. If things occasionally decompressed, or quit working, you improvised, by god! Outer space wasn’t for pansies.

With nowhere else to turn the French joined with the Russians and, surprisingly, the Japanese. The three nations collaborated first on building a moonbase, Tsiolkovsky/jVerne/Itogawa (AKA TjVI or Tj6), taking advantage of the Russian’s share of the Lunar north pole and its hidden reserves of water.

As Europe’s leading expert in controlled ecological life support systems, Sophie Täuber was deeply involved in planning the spaceship from its inception. She routinely flew from Paris to Star City in Russia, then to French Guiana by way of Japan, where she boarded a rocket directly to jVerne, on the Moon. Nearby, in the Russian quarter, the hull of the spaceship was being manufactured. It looked hauntingly like a Soviet-era submarine.

Their conservative Russian partners had rejected her first design, where the cosmonauts would live within a park-like setting. She was forced to confine her efforts to a large bay up front where the plant life would consist mostly of tanks of algae soaking up the crew’s excess carbon dioxide. This biomass would then be pressed into yummy, artificially flavored briquettes, both nutritious and full of fiber. As compensation she was allowed a small, compact garden to supply just enough variety in their diet to prevent them all from going completely bugfuck, as the Americans liked to say.

She had to be careful about using Americanisms like “bugfuck” around her French colleagues, who were highly suspicious of her ties with NASA as it was. In contrast, the Japanese still loved all things American and the Russians just laughed when reminded of their former partners, as they would at the antics of their favorite circus clown, or an ape. In contrast, the French were taking it personally.

She also learned that she was expected to raise chickens and maybe even a few pigs and goats for the crew. She sighed, “The things I’ll do for science.”

ØØØ

Soon after returning to Earth she took a weekend off to drive up to the Vosges Mountains of Alsace.

“Why aren’t you married?” Her mother asked as they stood together in the yard of her uncle’s winery where their clan gathered every year for its reunion. It was a mild afternoon, a fresh breeze playfully blowing at the skirt of her sunny yellow dress, just enough to keep the lads interested. Her shoulders were bare, protected from the sun by the shade of a wide brimmed hat. As they talked she watched the children playing on the lawn around small parental islands.

“My career . . .”

“Your career!” Mama Täuber mocked. “Aren’t there any nice boys in astrology?”

“Astro-aeronautics, Mother. Of course there are. I just haven’t the time right now.”

“I don’t want to die without grandchildren.”

“What about René’s and Charlotte’s children?”

“Ach,” she snorted. “They never visit their grandmother.”

“There’s Charlotte right there,” she hurriedly motioned her sister over. They hugged. The sisters were very similar except that Charlotte’s eyes were lightly colored and her brown hair was long and swept back.

“You looked like you needed rescuing.”

“Mother’s trying to get me married again.”

“Stranger things have happened,” Charlotte laughed, reaching affectionately over to their mother.

In her wake came the twins and her husband André. He had once been Sophie’s lover, in fact she had been the one to introduce him to her sister.

“How’s the outer space thing going?” André asked after a quick hug.

“I can’t say too much about it,” she shrugged apologetically. “The government literally thinks of it as a war.”

André laughed, “Politicians are crazy.”

Sophie nodded agreeably.

ØØØ

The wind was cool and stiff coming off the mountainside as the kids were finishing off their salt water taffy. Sophie pulled her sweater around her shoulders.

“It’s all the darkies’ fault!” Her mother bitterly groaned. They had been arguing for a long time and the older woman was pulling out all stops, like a prune tree at a wholesale auction. “Those Arab bastards! For once we should listen to the Germans.”

“I wouldn’t put it exactly like that,” André cautioned. “After all, we invited them in to do our dirty work, but still . . . they’re different from us.”

“They have their traditions,” agreed Charlotte. “They may be as valid as ours but the two don’t mix.”

“Look at the way they treat their women,” said Mama Täuber. “They think of us as prostitutes!” She spit on the ground with contempt.

Her children looked at one another, wondering what that was all about.

“We’ve been in conflict with them for over a thousand years,” André added, the scent of antiseptic about him. “How many times must they invade us before we put an end to the argument?”

“I can’t believe I’m hearing this,” Sophie gasped.

André shook his head at her naiveté. “No one wants to see it happen this way but once the oil is gone—before they can get any more nuclear bombs—they must be dealt with. Mark my words: it’s Tours all over again, but this time for keeps. It has to be.”

Sophie didn’t know what to say so she said nothing and soon the conversation drifted back to children and old friends and their old friends’ children, but she remained disturbed for a long time after.

ØØØ

The evening sun glowered like the red eye of Osiris over the waters of Lake Monroe as Banner and Annabeth lifted their canoe out of the water, carrying it the short distance to her Toyota Trailseeker. As they secured it to the rack on top Banner had little to say. They had covered a good deal of the east end of the lake, gone into what felt like a hundred inlets, seen a thousand houses, heard several dozen barking dogs, and found a few areas that hadn’t yet been improved by the bulldozers. They’d had sex in the woods in one of them, later finding ticks in a few unlikely places, then swam in the drinking water for 250 thousand people and peed in it, to be frank. Now he was sunburned, a little lightheaded, and needed a beer.

But first they drove to the old ghost town of Elkinsville, depopulated in the previous century by the Army Corps of Engineers while they built the Monroe Reservoir. They parked the ’Seeker by the road and hiked up Browning Hill where several friends had set up shop at the Miller Memorial campgrounds. A cooling breeze whooshed through the trees as they climbed the hill. He hoped it didn’t mean rain. The day’s long slide into evening shadow having just begun.

“Whassup?” Smitty asked as they arrived at the camp. He was sitting on a large worn log with a banjo on his knee.

“Beer,” was all that Banner replied while opening the cooler. “Meadowbrook, Miller, or Footfall Light, m’dear?”

“Footfall.”

“‘Aw-Natch-uh-lee!™’” he said, mimicking the ad.

“Whatever. Where is everybody?”

“They went with Lia to look at the ruins,” Smitty said while giving the banjo a plunk.

“And you . . .”

“I’ve seen ‘em. They don’t look like ruins to me.”

“It’s still weird, though.”

“Yeah, well, maybe.”

“You don’t think the ancient Celts set themselves up a little Stonehenge up here?”

“I don’t think the Celts set up Stonehenge at all.”

“Um,” Banner muttered uncertainly.

“But flying saucers are another matter,” Smitty said standing up. “If we’re going to look for them I’d better take some reinforcements.” He started sticking beer cans in every available pocket.

“Reinforce me, too,” Banner said.

Ten minutes later they had reached the site. Large stone blocks lay like cordwood stacked by a mad hatter. No one knew how they got there but there were plenty of ideas. Some thought the Native-Americans had cut them out of the soil, as a place to honor the Eternal Spirit of the Land, even if that wasn’t exactly their style. Others thought that the formations were natural, first exposed by the glaciers’ retreat. Others believed they were quarried by the first Anglo settlers and then forgotten. And some imagined things stranger still—of a lost tribe of Celts or Vikings or little green men.

In the deepening twilight Banner didn’t care. It seemed mysterious and spiritual and that’s all that mattered. His sudden hug caught Annabeth by surprise. She looked to him questioningly.

ØØØ

It was fiendishly hot as Dr. Christain Monelly moved from chauffeured limousine to air-conditioned building and back again. Since returning from the International Space Station Monelly had been deeply involved in building a coalition out of the debris of the old European Space Agency. It was not an easy task since many of the primary facilities had gone with the French and the Russians. EURO-NOL, the union of the German Cultural Alliance with the Northern League (Scandinavia and the Baltic States), did not even have its own launch facility.

Which is why he was in the Democratic Republic of the Congo dicking with the locals. The equator was the best place of all to launch space vehicles and the Germans had maintained a small launch facility here briefly in the late-1970s before the onset of the great Congo wars devastated the area. Numerous militias and armies still controlled much of the Congo River watershed. He was there to shore up the Congo government without alarming its opposition.

To accomplish this he’d brought along Arne Sak as his Regulator. An Icelander, military expert, and true son of the Vikings Sak was tough, unflinching, and, when necessary, brutal—perfect for Christain’s needs.

Truly it saddened him when he was forced to use violence but he’d learned long ago that it was better to give than to receive. Arne was his gift to anyone who stood in his way.

He met with Sak at dusk in a small construction shack on the spaceport’s south side, amongst piles of material hastily unloaded from the huge oceangoing vessels that docked here 24/7, as the goddamned Americans would say. Christain was alone but Sak traveled with a small entourage that he left sweating outside in the evening heat.

“Arne, what have you got for me?” Sak gratefully took the beer that he offered.

“It’s just as you said,” he replied. “The hardest part is separating the dross from the bullshit, as they said in college.”

“I didn’t know you had cattle in Iceland.”

“We don’t. I went to school in Berkeley.”

“Ah. Plenty of bullshit there!”

“We’ve secured everything here in the Congo estuary,” Arne resumed. “River traffic is being restricted to the far bank. The Fourth Corps is taking care of that and they’ve blown up a few locals to prove we’re serious.”

“And the government?”

“Well, Nzuzi wants to use all his new weaponry but we've convinced him to follow our strategy.”

“And that strategy is? . . .”

“Carrot and stick. We’ll leave his rivals alone as long as they stay up river. There’s going to be fighting, sure, we just need to hold it far enough away from the spaceport to keep our investors from getting nervous. The perimeter is being watched by six different kinds of systems, not to mention mined, electrified, and systematically irradiated. If necessary we can create a dead zone around us to the horizon. But that’s a last resort.”

Christain grunted. “A delicate balance.”

Sak grinned. “Old Nzuzi has plenty of rivals in his own party to keep him occupied, hell, in his own family. We can pull the string on him at any time.”

Christain nodded, satisfied. “Good work.”

“If our business is done . . .” Sak walked over to the door and opened it, letting in a wave of thick, hot air. “Send them in.”

“What’s this?” Christain frowned. After a moment the ebony face of a girl appeared as she hesitantly climbed the steps into the trailer, two more girls following. “Benu kota ya benu,” Sak encouraged them inside.

“What is this, Arne?” Christian watched the young girls shyly clinging to one another as they entered the room. He realized that they were thirteen or fourteen at the oldest.

“It’s hard to find clean girls in this part of the world,” Sak answered matter-of-factly. “The younger you can buy them the better. These girls’ families are Christian, they raised them right. I’ve had them tested every which way and they’re not only clean but possibly virgin.”

Christain looked at him mutely.

“Which one do you want first?” Sak finally asked him laconically.

Christain looked at the three girls for a moment before standing up and walking towards them. “For god’s sake, Arne, they’re terrified. Get them something to drink. Please,” he said beckoning to them. “Sit down.”

“Beu,” Sak motioned. “Beu vwanda ya benu.”

Still holding to one another the girls shyly crossed the room to the couch. Monelly handed them each a soft drink. They giggled as the carbonated bubbles tickled their noses. “That’s better,” said Christain sitting on the edge of the couch, his hand softly touching the nearest girl’s knee.

“What’s this?” he asked, pulling a coin from behind her ear. She reacted with astonishment as he handed it to her, showing off her prize to the others, who laughed excitedly. For the next half-hour he amused them with parlor tricks and other childish games. He even managed to get Sak involved as the diversions became progressively more intimate. Finally he maneuvered them into the back room where the engineers kept a few small hard cots.

“What will happen to the girls?” Christain asked later after they were escorted out.

“We’ll sell them back to their families, at a discount of course,” Sak grimaced without concern. “If they don’t want them Whoretown can always use new girls.”

“You will try their families first?”

“Of course,” Sak answered gravely.

“Yes. Well, I must go now. There’s still work. Thank you for this evening, Commander. I want to meet with you again before I leave.” He hesitated. “Maybe you can delay returning the taller girl, Kath, I think she said her name is . . .”

Sak gave a sort of bow. “I’m sure she would enjoy being our guest for a while longer.”

“Thank you.” With that Monelly entered the soggy night air.

ØØØ

Group Captain Henry Ireton of His Majesty’s Royal Space Force felt like smacking his head against the wall. Sometimes he thought it would be easier to work with the French and Russians or even, God forbid, the Germans, rather than the Americans. Everything he did had to be vetted by seventeen committees and rewritten into a sort of gobbledygook to satisfy NASA and a hundred other agencies, some of them dating back to the Wright Brothers, he was sure of it. Still, they were seeing some progress. The plans for the so-called “Yankee Clipper” were firming up rapidly. Some of the raw material was already being boosted into space.

The project would have been unimaginable ten years before when even nearby Mars had been out of reach. The irony is that they had had the technology for decades but not the political will. Vast amounts of money had been pissed away on war technology with little to show. Modern warfare was ridiculous, either total extermination or indeterminate conflicts that could last decades and cost trillions of dollars and millions of lives. John Kennedy had been right all along. Space was the only substitute for war, a place where nations could compete safely, and where the effort would pay back many times more than all the gold the Spanish had squeezed out of the New World. Essential metals like copper, platinum, zinc, gallium, hafnium, and even elements like helium were severely depleted on Earth. If another source could be found within the solar system—and why not since it was made out of the same stuff as Earth—the race would be on.

It was also a matter of national security. Whatever was inside Charon could change the power balance on Earth forever. God forbid that anyone else got there first.

Inside JPL in Pasadena the plans for the Clipper were coming along nicely. It was hard to believe that they were building a ship large enough to carry twelve people, with room unimaginable to pioneers like Glenn, Armstrong, and Gagarin. Even compared to the ISS it was extravagant. The Americans were throwing their latest technology at it, a lightweight carbon frame, aerogel interior walls, and smart technology everywhere.

Of course the atomic powerplant would be tremendous, with enough power to run a city. It was already under construction at Camp Armstrong near the Moon’s north pole. Its uranium core was being launched in small, nearly indestructible packages, from a floating pad in the Pacific, a place where nary a terrorist, reporter, or protester could reach without having US Navy gunboats up their ass.

It was the ion-drive that would give them the edge, providing them a small but significant acceleration all the way to Uranus’s orbit nearly two billion miles out where they would flip the ship over and begin slowing down again. The engineers were confident in their design; after all, it wouldn’t do to flame out four billion miles from home.

The Germans were said to be working along similar lines but he didn’t see how they could possibly catch up. Their Moon facilities were small and they had no orbital platform. The Russian, French, and Japanese cartel certainly had the expertise to build an ion-drive but was rumored to be taking a more brute force approach. The Chinese—who in the hell knew what the Chinese were up to? They had been an x-factor ever since beating the Americans back to the Moon. Certainly they knew how to make an ion-drive but could they develop one quickly enough?

Well, he didn’t have time to worry about that. His secretary had left another stack of resumes to go through. He had to narrow it down to a hundred or so people who were qualified to go on this mission and then the real whittling would begin. Really, the problem wasn’t skill, they all had skill. The problem was compatibility. Which of them could stand to live for a decade or more in what amounted to a very small jail, closer than family, with no way out if the inmates couldn’t get along?

Each file contained an evaluation from Dr. Ashlee Monelly’s psychology task force broken down to a simple formula. But even these numbers had to fit together like some sociological Humpty Dumpty.

Sipping from a cold cup of coffee he went back to work.

ØØØ

Moon city lights could be seen from Earth, especially showboat towns like jVerne and Oberth. Banner and Annabeth sat gazing upward in the darkness above Browning Hill. Most of their friends were asleep or bumping uglies in their tents. Her head rested on his chest as they pointed out favorite stars and constellations in the sky above them. The flatworm-shaped Milky Way glowed wanly as it crossed the dark sky. Banner absently stroked her hair.

“You miss it, don’t you?”

Banner sighed. “God, I don’t know. It’s so beautiful tonight. The air is clean and there’s a cool breeze. And I got my best girl. In space there usually isn’t much to look at and you can smell a fart for weeks.”

“Sounds like your classroom.”

“Yah . . .” He sighed again. “When I was a kid I read a lot of science fiction.”

“I remember. You were one of the nerds.”

Banner laughed. “Naw, I was never ornery enough.” He sighed, “I always wanted to be out there, somewhere. Now I’ve been out there and the irony . . .”

“A nerdy word.”

“. . . is, is that out there you’re always crowded inside a small room with a bunch of people. There’s not much space in outer space.”

He rested his hand on her chest, above her heart, thumb tickling her chin.

“Hmm,” she smiled like a contented cat, closing her eyes. Banner continued watching the night sky as it moved about his head.

“I love you, sweet girl,” he finally said, but she was asleep.

ØØØ

When the news came Banner almost missed it. He was in the middle of moving from his apartment into Annabeth’s house outside Needmore and the envelope looked like a pre-approved credit card come-on at first. But when he saw the return address his breath caught and he had to sit down, even though there was only the floor left to sit on. It was a simple message, for all it asked of him, and at first he didn’t know what to do. Then he made a telephone call.

Annabeth took his halting explanation calmly, considering what he told her. He didn’t even bother unpacking his boxes, taking them over to his parent’s garage to store. He left her that night.

Sex sad is the sweetest kind.
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More links!
Osiris:
Ancient Egyptian Creation Myth
Osiris And The Golden Pipe (UFO)
The Light of Isis and Osiris
Browning Hill:
Browning Hill Stonehedge2
Wright Brothers:
XKCD
Milky Way:

Galactic Timelapse

Linked earlier:"A Milky-Way Band" photo credit & copyright: John P. Gleason, Celestial Images