Lights in the Deep (18 page)

• • •

…and jumped into the shrieking wind. Even through the muffled confines of the space suit’s helmet, Martha could hear the air rushing past as her stomach leapt into her throat and she fell like a rock towards the blue expanse of the ocean below. She slowly tipped over backwards and then sideways, and saw the open ramp of the NASA plane as it pulled up and away from the astronaut trainees who had so recently huddled on its cargo deck.

Martha had been in free-fall many times before. This was her sixth jump, and she had already been up in the Vomit Comets a dozen times. This was the first time she’d jumped with the suit on, though, and her movements were somewhat awkward. At least the new suits were better than the old clunkers they used to send up on the retired Space Shuttle fleet. These new station-rated suits were slimmer, more sophisticated, with hardened, articulated joints that allowed for greater internal air pressure without loss of limb function.

If all went well during this final series of training exercises, Martha would be on the next re-supply mission to one of the Lagrange point space stations. And if all went well on
that
flight, then…one could certainly hope.

They were already starting to drop preliminary supplies on the moon via robotic lander. The NASA grapevine was alive with gossip and chatter about whom would be the
first.
Who would be the one to step out and make history all over again? It had been sixty years since men had first walked on the moon. Maybe this time around they’d let a
woman
have that honor?

Martha thrilled within herself at that thought. It had taken long, hard work at NASA to qualify for the astronaut program. Now that Martha was finally completing training, the dream was almost within reach.

The Florida coast drifted off to Martha’s left and the Atlantic moved closer, the trainee recovery boat chugging patiently in circles, awaiting pickup. An electronic projection in Martha’s field of vision showed her altitude as the number spiraled downward. Martha’s suit computer then chimed in her ears, informing her that she had reached optimum height for chute release. Without needing to be told, the computer fired small charges on the back of her suit, deploying the orange and white emergency parachute from its stowing compartment in her backpack.

Martha grunted as the chute dragged and she was pulled down hard, blood forcing its way into her hands and feet. Then the pressure ebbed and the hurtling fall became a gentle drop. The radio started to buzz with comments from the other trainees, the trainers, and the recovery boat. The water was still a few hundred feet below, but coming quickly now. Martha stretched her legs down….

• • •

…and touched the soft surface. It was
amazingly
soft. Martha’s cleats sank deep into the regolith of Mare Imbrium; the whitish gray dust of the moon. It was almost like beach sand, but finer, powder-like, and as Martha stepped away from the lunar lander she gazed behind her and stared down at the perfect footprint of her first step at the base of the moon lander’s ladder. The image of that bas-relief impression stirred Martha’s memory, and she froze there at the base of the landing craft, suddenly a six year old girl standing on her mother’s driveway.

“You okay, Mar?” Called one of the other astronauts who looked down the ladder from above.

“Ummm…Yeah. Yeah, I’m fine,” Martha replied softly, her eyes suddenly blurry. It had been so long since that December morning in Eastern Washington. Mom was white-haired and Frank was taking care of her so she wouldn’t have to be in a home. Martha had been working for NASA for seventeen years, and though the moon landings had not come as quickly as hoped, they had come just the same. And even though Martha had not been the first to go back, she was the first to step foot in Mare Imbrium, where the third moon base would be built.

Thoughts of Dad suddenly stirred.

Old memories—of that awful September day when Dad’s plane had been crashed in New York—had since faded into the warmer memories of Dad himself: his gentle, huge hands as they scooped Martha off the floor and lifted her into his arms. His deep, happy laughter as he watched her play. The scratchy feeling of Dad’s chin on her cheek as he kissed her before she fell asleep at night. Dad had told her then she could be anybody she wanted to be, do anything she wanted to do, if she just tried hard enough.

“I made it Dad,” Martha sniffed as she reflexively reached a gloved hand to wipe the tears from her face, and bumped the clear bowl of her helmet instead. This elicited a giggle through the tears, which brought more puzzled questions from above. Martha told her partners not to worry, and took a final look at her first step on the moon, snapping a photo with the camera built into her helmet.

Then Martha pivoted on a heel, and began a loping motion into the virgin white landscape. For this little girl, it was finally time to play.

▼ ▲ ▼ ▲ ▼

This was the first story I ever wrote which passed muster with an editor, and went into print. The
Licton Springs Review
is the yearly literary journal of North Seattle Community College, where I was attending classes from 2000 to 2003. I didn’t get paid for this story, but it was a kick in the pants putting a science fiction tale into the pages of a lit publication. There, sandwiched between existentialist tales of angst and pain, was my hopeful little short about a girl going to the moon.

9/11 was fresh on my mind when I wrote this piece. Later that same year I joined the U.S. Army Reserve; because I wanted to participate in the defense of my country. To contribute something more to the moment than merely being some dude getting pissed off on the internet. “Footprints” too was a kind of statement: from these ashes, hope rises eternal. A theme I’ve found myself restating again and again.

As Captain Kirk once said, I don’t believe in the no-win scenario.

The Exchange Officers

The solar panels crumpled.

I didn’t hear them, but I felt them through the stimulus-feedback system. My proxy’s hands and feet still gripped the spars of the extended boom to which the panels had once been attached. Now those panels were splintered and floating away in bits—dangerous debris in an orbital zone already too clouded with fast-moving hazards. Not that I cared much at the moment. Half the team was red-lining towards black, and I had no telemetry from the other half at all, even though they were literally within shouting distance.

As long as I was still Operating, I knew only what my proxy knew, saw only what my proxy saw, and felt only what my proxy felt.

At present, my proxy’s camera eyes focused on the Chinese combat capsule which had collided with Grissom Platform. A stealth job. We hadn’t seen them coming. One of the capsule’s bay hatches snapped open—shards of ruined solar panel flinging away—and several vacuum-suited figures appeared at the threshold. They wore modified copies of the latest Russian suits, only beefed up with sections of hard plate, not too different from the SAPI stuff I’d trained in and worn during my younger days on the ground.

Of course, back then I’d also carried a rifle.

No such luck 500 miles from the surface of the Earth.

I spoke several obscenities.

If all of us had still been Operating, we’d have been able to overwhelm the enemy in moments. Each proxy moved faster than a man, and possessed many times the strength. But I seemed to be the only one who’d not been affected by the EMP weapon—which had fried so much else in the last 5 minutes.

“Hang on, Chopper,” said a familiar voice in my ears.

“Chesty,” I said, exhaling with relief. She’d been several kilometers distant, testing new equipment. The EMP had spared her too. I made a mental note to send an e-mail to the engineering liaison for the company that built the proxies—the contractor’s experimental, triple-layered electromagnetic hardening had paid off. It was a damn shame there hadn’t been time to bring all the rest of the proxies down and get them retrofitted before the Chinese came calling.

“How many Marines does it take to fight off a Communist horde?” I said.

“Just one, and I’m it,” she said. I detected a grin on her face, based just on the sound of her words as she spoke them.

“Well then you’d better make it fast,” I replied. “Because these guys are for real, and unless the Air Force and Navy want to lose several hundred million dollars worth in equipment to a hostile Chinese takeover, you and I are all that’s left to stand in their way.”

“Sounds like the perfect odds,” she said. “Just the two of us. Not a lot different from when we started, eh?”

• • •

Mission Control looked more like a penny arcade than a command center. No long desks populated with keyboards and computer displays. No super-sized jumbo screens on the walls. No bespectacled engineers with headsets perched on balding scalps. There were only control booths arrayed uniformly in neat bunches. And in each booth sat or stood an Operator, either male or female. Most of them were United States Navy or United States Air Force personnel—the facility being a joint USN-USAF operation. As the United States Army’s latest exchange officer to the Orbital Defense Initiative Station, I stuck out like a sore thumb. Both because of my rank, and because of my uniform.

“This way, sir,” said the tech sergeant who was playing tour guide on this, my first duty day at ODIS. She took me between the booths—my eyes catching glimpses of hooded people in olive-drab long underwear, each of them contorting this way and that, and their hands, arms, legs, and feet sprouting with innumerable wires—until we arrived at a booth labeled with the number 23. It was dark, and the tech sergeant reached in to snap on a small overhead light.

“Home sweet home?” I said, peering in.

“Yessir,” she said. “You’ll be in one just like it during simulator training, but once that’s over with, we’ll be putting you here for the other 9 months that we have you.

Simulator training.
I frowned. I’d cut my teeth flying ground attack and surveillance aircraft in over a dozen countries on four continents. Though, to be honest, I’d never set foot in an actual plane. The inside of one ROV control trailer looked like any other. What more could there be to learn? I gave myself a week to figure out the particular hardware and software that ODIS used. The rest of train-up time would be a snoozer—something to bore me while I waited for an actual mission.

A second tech sergeant arrived with a differently-camouflaged person in tow. This one’s pixilated duty uniform instantly marked her as a United States Marine. She had streaks of silver in her hair and lines on her face, and like me, bore the bar of a warrant officer.

I instinctively stuck out my hand.

“Dan Jaraczuk,” I said as she grasped my palm, and gave me a satisfying shake.

“Mavy Stoddard,” she replied. Her eyes were large, brown, and intelligent, with just a hint of hardness to them. I guesstimated her to be about ten years older than me, though she was one notch lower on the warrant officer totem pole. Which wasn’t too unusual. Many warrants spend years climbing the enlisted ladder, before finally putting in their packets for Candidate School. I’d jumped as soon as I was able, right from Specialist, because it had been one of the quickest routes I knew that might take me here, to this place—a small fortress of cutting-edge space technology located at Hill Air Force Base, in the desert valley wilderness of Northern Utah.

My tech sergeant nodded to her peer, then turned back to me.

“Warrant Officer Stoddard is going to be joining you for your training cycle. She’ll be in 24 when she’s done. We don’t get a lot of Army or Marines at ODIS, nor warrant officers of any sort, so you’ll have to forgive us if we’re not up to speed on the courtesies.”

“Most people just call me Chief,” I said.

“That will confuse some of the Navy and Air Force folk,” Stoddard said, correcting me. “I think we’ll both be doing them all favor if we just stick with
sir
and
ma’am.
”

I nodded, not wanting to contest the issue. “Fine by me.”

Stoddard tilted her head slightly—sizing me up. I got the sense she didn’t necessarily appreciate my informal manner. But then again, she didn’t have to. I’d paid my dues, and logged my hours. Whatever the Marine standard might have been, this wasn’t Jacksonville nor Quantico. And until some captain or major decided to get up in my business, I was going to be as informal as I wanted—one of the perks of the position, or so it had been said when I’d come out of Fort Rucker, Alabama, right after Basic Course.

The two tech sergeants watched us as Stoddard and I watched each other, then one of them cleared his throat and said, “if you’ll keep following us, we’ll show you to the simulator room.”

“After you,” I said, motioning with my arm, and putting a smile on my face.

Stoddard simply turned and walked away, the tech sergeants taking us rapidly out of Mission Control, through a series of hallways past office doors and junctions that were filled with milling Air Force and Navy personnel, until we passed through a set of double doors into a room that looked not too different from the one we’d just left. Only, each of the booths was double-sized. Room for two Operators.

“Right seat, left seat,” I said, surveying the equipment.

“More or less,” said a woman’s voice. Stoddard and I turned to see a flight-suited Air Force colonel approach us. The colonel’s hair was dark red and buzzed down past the usual female standards. Her face was plain, but her eyes were bright and she carried herself with confidence. She had a clip board under one arm and read our name tapes on our uniforms as she stopped in front of us.

“Stoddard, right. And…Jad
zook?
Jare
zuck?
How the heck do I pronounce that?”

“Jare-uh-chuck,” I said slowly.

“Okay,” said the colonel. “Well, however you say it, for the duration of your time at ODIS I’m going to be calling you
Chopper.
That’s your Operator Sign when you’re in training and on missions. Stoddard? You’ll be
Chesty.
”