Energized (18 page)

Dillon and Jonas started walking.

The shuttle was a fat dart studded with windows for the passengers. From the angle at which he approached, Dillon could not see the rocket nozzle. The entire back half of the shuttle was covered in frost condensed from the air by the frigid liquid-hydrogen and liquid-oxygen tanks. The rime weighed less than sufficient insulation to have kept the ice from forming.

Dillon first, they strode up the shallow ramp into the shuttle. A man and woman stood waiting inside, with big starburst logos emblazoned on their yellow flight suits. Pilot and copilot. Dillon did not know, or care, who was which.

“Welcome to Cosmic Adventures,” the man said. He had a scruffy mustache and a crooked smile. “It's a great day to fly.”

The shuttle accommodated six passengers, with three seats on a side, and the flight was going to be full. Lincoln and Felipe had taken the back row. Dillon thought he recognized the women, both raven-haired beauties, from space training. They sat in the middle seats, leaning into the aisle, speaking Spanish. He and Jonas took the remaining seats, in the front row.

Dillon immediately began fastening and tightening restraints: a lap belt and two shoulder harnesses. He would be damned if whoever came to check on the passengers would find anything to adjust on him.

Because the belts were something he
could
still control.

Mustache Man checked everyone's seat belts and double-checked the hatch seal before disappearing into the cockpit. The lock in the metal cockpit door engaged with a
clunk
.

“This is Captain Blackwell,” a woman's voice announced. She had a touch of Southern accent. “Prepare for departure. Our ride is cleared for takeoff.”

Dillon looked out his window. Though
Big Momma
blocked much of his view, he saw they were already, ever so slowly, creeping away from the terminal.

They trundled down the runway, the start of the trip to orbit eerily mundane. Using almost the entire long runway, the heavily laden plane more lurched than leapt into the air.

With the plane's top speed of only two hundred knots, Dillon had expected this phase of the “launch” would drag. Instead, as the ground receded beneath them—the Florida coast lush with life, the Atlantic waters a rich blue-green—he willed time to stop. A lump formed in his throat. So much beauty.

Too soon,
Big Momma
began leveling off and the next announcement came. “Approaching sixty thousand feet. Prepare for release and launch. Release in five. Four…”

At zero, Dillon's stomach fell out.

Faster than he could process
we've dropped
the shuttle's rocket roared to life. An elephant sat on him and crushed him into his seat. His cheeks sagged toward his spine. His eyeballs pressed into his head.

The shuttle tipped into a steep climb. “Ignition,” the pilot reported, unnecessarily.

It was not a whole elephant, not even close. Max acceleration would be only three gees and Dillon had taken four gees on the training centrifuge without breaking into a sweat. But with the ship's growl and shudder, as the ground withdrew and the sky grew darker by the moment, it
seemed
different.

“Whee!” the woman behind Dillon half cheered, half grunted.

“Next stop, The Space Place,” the pilot announced. “Is everyone comfy back there?”

Not even close, Dillon thought. But the gnawing in his gut had nothing to do with the roar of the engines.

*   *   *

Thaddeus Stankiewicz watched his baby sister, grinning from ear to ear, sashay across a crowded living room. A dozen people must have waylaid her en route. “You clean up good,” Thad said as she finally got to the phone.

“Thanks!” She twirled once for the camera.

In fact, Robin was gorgeous and dressed to kill in a short, low-cut, black sheath. Her hair, long and golden, was swept up into a fancy hairdo to which he could not put a name. He thought the dangly diamond earrings were new. Men in tuxes and women in cocktail dresses milled and murmured in the background.

“It's about time,” she said. “I thought you'd forgotten.”

“Never. And I hope you know I'd be there if I could. I wish I lived closer.” I wish we lived on the same world. “In my defense, it's still early afternoon, Phoebe time.”

“Well, it's almost eight in Stockholm. When
will
you deign to come down to—”

Twin girls,
so
like Robin at the same age, in matching pink party dresses, crowded the camera. “It's Uncle Thaddeus,” one shrieked. Deborah, he thought. She was always just a bit taller.

“Hello, Uncle Thaddeus,” the girls chanted in unison.

“Hi, girls,” he said. “You both look very pretty. Are you taking good care of your mother on her birthday?”

“Uh-huh,” Deborah said. Cynthia only nodded vigorously.

“My little darlings have been on their best behavior.” Robin put an arm around each girl. “When will their favorite uncle grace us with a visit?”

“Soon,” Thad lied. Beneath the camera's line of sight, he rapped the shelf of the comm console. He glanced over his shoulder at the locked door of his tiny room. “Sorry, kiddo. Duty calls. Enjoy your party.” He leaned closer to the camera. “Bye, girls.”

“Bye, Uncle Thad—”

He broke the connection before he lost self-control. “Take care, kiddo,” he told the final, frozen frame.

For weeks after … the incident, Thad had awakened every day, when he slept at all, expecting, and dreading, to be called upon again. To get new orders. As much as he wanted to leave—to flee—the scene of the crime, he had not dared. But the call never came and he had learned, once more, to sleep.

He had dared to hope, as the months passed, that new orders would never come. That he was done. That he was
out
. That he could carry his shame and guilt with him to the grave. That Robin would never know what he had had to do to protect her.

When two years passed without contact, he had dared to apply for a job Earthside—and an anonymous e-mail advised that his assignment was not complete. Every day since, he had awakened wondering if today was the day.

Thirty minutes earlier, the long-dreaded message had come at last. The innocent-seeming words had etched themselves into his brain. Something compelled him to reread the text anyway.

A great birthday party, cousin—too bad you aren't here. I wanted you to have some reminders of what's important. Enjoy. Jacob.

Cousin Jacob was imaginary.
Yakov
was all too real. And Thad's master, these past long years.

Thad tapped the text's first attachment, a file named
Birthday 2023
. A holo opened: of Robin, beaming, wearing the cocktail dress he had just seen, her adoring husband at her side. She held out dangly diamond earrings, still in their little, black-velvet-lined case, for her guests to admire. The twins, in identical pink party frocks, grinning goonily for the camera, stood hand in hand in front of their parents.

Without question, the vid had been taken today. And Yakov had it.

The remaining attachment was labeled
Birthday 2014
. He remembered that birthday all too well.

Robin had been a wild kid: rebellious, often drunk, hanging with a bad crowd. He was ten years older, and she had always looked up to him. Had he been around for her, maybe he could have done something. Instead he had been in Afghanistan.

Somehow we're always a world apart, kiddo.

When Robin's high school expelled her, their parents, calling it tough love, had thrown her out, too. She was long gone—out of touch, out of sight—before he even knew. When his regiment shipped home, he had had no idea where to look for her.

By 2014, she was a druggie, hopelessly addicted, hooking to support her habit. On her nineteenth birthday, taking stock of her life, she chugged a bottleful of pain pills.

From the ER, Robin had reached out to Thad. “I can't do this anymore,” she had said. “I can't take anymore.” Gaunt, trembling, with tears streaming down her face, she had put herself into his hands. He had sworn never to do what their parents had done. He would never abandon her. He would never fail her.

Together—and with lots of therapy—they somehow worked through things. Robin detoxed, learned to stop hating herself, and got her GED. She went to college and met her future husband. Randall Brill came from old money; he proudly carried a “Fifth” after his name to prove it. Randy and his family believed her late start at college came of two years backpacking across Europe.

I wanted you to have some reminders of what's important.

If Robin's past were revealed, it would destroy lives across the family. Could she go on after that? Or would she try again to kill herself?

I wanted you to have some reminders of what's important.

Yakov had used Robin's secret once to bend Thad to his will. Yakov had needed “a man I can trust,” on Phoebe. “A man with motivation, to perform a small, technical task.”

And because no one could know about Thad's task, a man had had to die.

Three years after that … murder, Yakov was back in touch. What horrible thing did he want?

His hand shaking, dreading what the second attachment would show, Thad tapped the 2014 icon.

File corrupted,
a pop-up proclaimed.

He found, as he expected, a message encrypted within the “corrupted” file:
Prepare the artifacts and await contact. Do not reveal yourself unnecessarily, but the success of the mission comes first.

Artifacts, Thad understood all too well. His “small, technical task” of three years earlier. He trembled to think what type of mission required them, because the devices he had built could serve only one purpose.

I do it for Robin, he told himself. Whatever
it
was. Because he had no choice.

To keep his promise to his baby sister, he had long ago compromised himself beyond redemption.

*   *   *

Beautiful beyond words, Earth receded in Dillon's window. While other passengers floated about, cavorting in freefall as the shuttle coasted toward their hotel, he remained in his seat. He could float just as well where they were headed, but Gaia's slow retreat was an almost religious experience.

Two clicks sounded on the loudspeaker. “This is Captain Blackwell. We've been flying tail-down so you can enjoy Earth. I hope everyone has appreciated the scenery. We're coming up to another quite spectacular view, though, so we'll be rolling over. If you might find that maneuver disorienting, you may want to buckle up. Regardless, stay alert and enjoy the show.”

Jonas and one of the women returned to their seats.

“Commencing slow roll in sixty seconds,” Blackwell updated, then gave a countdown from ten. “Commencing roll.”

The men and one woman still afloat in the cabin seemed to rotate in the air, but it was the shuttle, not the passengers, that turned. The earthlight streaming through the windows slid up the wall. As Earth fell from sight, a holo opened at the front of the cabin. Three small, bright objects glistened in the image.

Blackwell's travelogue resumed. “I'm relaying our view from the cockpit. We're overtaking Phoebe and its sunshield. At the moment we're about five hundred miles apart. The bright oval is the sunshield. The shield is actually round, but we're catching it at an angle. We don't see Phoebe itself. It's behind the shield from us, and too dark anyway to spot easily.

“What looks like a rectangle is a square we're viewing almost edge-on. That's NASA's prototype powersat, PS-1, constructed mostly with raw materials from Phoebe.” She spouted the usual bullshit about how great powersats would be. She rattled on how the onboard thrusters would lift PS-1, once its checkout was complete, to a stationary orbit above the Americas, while
more
such obscenities were built. “The powersat is dimmer even though it's about fifty miles closer to us than the sunshield. On to the third—”

“Why is PS-1 dimmer?” the still-floating woman asked.

The cabin must have had a microphone, because Blackwell answered. “The shield is white to reflect sunlight. The solar cells on the powersat are dark to absorb sunlight.

“On to the third object up ahead: the deformed-looking dot. It's both smaller by far than the other things we're seeing, and it's two hundred miles beyond the sunshield. That dot, ladies and gentlemen, is The Space Place. We'll be docking there soon. While we're busy in the cockpit, you're welcome to listen and watch on channel one.”

Spacecraft docking patter turned out to be as dry and formulaic as airplane cockpit chatter. Dillon began surfing other options on the in-flight entertainment system and came upon an educational vid. At least he assumed it was educational: the animation showed Olympian gods looking down on Earth.

“… was a Titan, a daughter of Gaia, whom some call Mother Earth. Phoebe was often described as ‘golden wreathed' and associated with the moon. How appropriate then that Phoebe now
is
a moon.”

He fast-forwarded, until the visual changed from animation to real imagery.

“… still debate the origins of the object that became Earth's second moon. The orbit on which it was spotted must have been new, or the object would have been observed years earlier. Regardless—”

He fast-forwarded again. Animation, when it resumed, defied recognition at the speed he scanned. He went back to
PLAY
and the image resolved into a dark, tumbling blob.

“… and without detailed knowledge of the object's exact nature, NASA's options were limited. The key question was: how solid and sturdy was the object? How hard of a shove could it withstand before shattering into an unstoppable hailstorm of debris? If, as turned out to be the case, it was a rubble pile, NASA would need to deflect it very gradually.”