by Greg Keyes
But he hadn’t, and he couldn’t.
He watched the gray Atlantic far below. People—his father in particular—had been urging him to get on with his life, but did that necessarily mean a new lover, or a new wife? Catherine was smart and beautiful and acerbically funny. He should be happy, counting the days until he saw her again, worried that she wouldn’t call. Instead he just felt guilty. Empty.
Connie had been the great love of his life. Maybe for him, there would not—could not—be another.
One thing felt certain. If there ever could be another, it wasn’t now. No matter what his father said, no matter what he had briefly thought he felt last night—it was too soon.
A few days later, when Catherine called, he reached for the phone—and then didn’t answer it. He didn’t know what to say or how to say it.
* * *
Dikembe didn’t know how long he had been in the hole, enveloped in darkness. He had first tried to keep track by counting the number of times he slept, but without night and day to set the pace, he soon became uncertain about the count.
After a certain point he didn’t care.
The hole was a concrete shaft about two meters in diameter. Food and water came down in a bucket on the end of a rope, apparently at night, because even then there was no light. Unable to see them, he identified the bucket and its contents by touch.
In the first few days of his captivity, he had made a grab for the rope and tried to climb up it. Whoever was at the end of it let him ascend a few meters and then simply let go of the rope.
After that the food and drink stopped coming for what seemed a very long time. Then, one night, a new rope came down. He ate and drank and placed the containers back in the basket. The rope was withdrawn. The bucket also served as his latrine, although when the food had been withheld, he had been forced to use a portion of his floor, which didn’t make things any more pleasant.
And so it went. He dreamed terrible dreams, asleep and awake. Tried to think of happier days, of his time in Oxford. Everything had been new then, life a broad river taking him somewhere brilliant. His only responsibilities in those days had been to himself, and he had stayed in England after school, might have stayed there forever. Even after the aliens came, he could have stayed, returned to Oxford for that matter.
But something in him knew he had to come to the place where he was born. For what? To watch it die of a human disease? To see his father metastasize into the very thing they had fought so hard against? To end his life at last in darkness?
He spoke to himself. He sang, and listened as his voice reverberated in the tube. He shouted and screamed and pounded on the concrete at times. He cursed Zuberi, and promised to kill him and the family he held so dear, but even that finally passed. What would more killing accomplish?
His wound healed—someone must have given him antibiotics, or perhaps they were in the food. He did jumping jacks and calisthenics and boxing footwork, punching into the darkness, sometimes to the point of exhaustion. He felt himself thinning, becoming less and less. Not physically, but inside. Despair rode on his shoulders, heavier every moment, and he knew that soon it would break him.
On one occasion when the basket came down it contained not only the usual fufu and water, but small, cylindrical objects. Most of them were quite smooth, but one was not—it had a flared end, and a little stud, and when he pushed the stud something happened, and he shut his eyes, because they hurt.
It took him several long, deep breaths to understand what was happening, that he was holding a small penlight and seeing something for the first time since Zuberi’s face had blurred into nothingness.
As his eyes adjusted, the ugly concrete wall and the filthy floor seemed like the most beautiful things he had ever seen.
It could be improved, however. Because the rest of the cylinders were pieces of colored chalk.
He took the chalk and began to draw, feeling like a cave painter at the dawn of human history, at that crucial point when something changed in humans, when they began using symbols and language to understand their world. To depict themselves and the animals around them for the spirits and one another to see. To bend sight and mind and hand into creation.
He started off trying to fashion a world for himself, a boundless savanna populated by giraffes and elephants, skies full of clouds, birds, and wind to bend the acacia trees. And yet somehow when he formed them on the concrete they weren’t the same as he remembered. The giraffes had the huge slanting eyes of aliens and were mottled gray and black. Their horns multiplied and formed a mane of squirming tentacles. He drew hyenas with flat, flaring heads but no mouths. Instead of birds and clouds his sky was populated with suns and full moons and round stars, all with lines bisecting them.
He went quickly at first, but then he began to conserve the chalk, to work less representationally and more essentially. He spent a long time on every line, curve, and dot as his drawings grew increasingly abstract—until one day he realized that he had just drawn a jumble of symbols that looked like the writing they had discovered in the alien ship. Furthermore, he thought he knew what some of them meant.
It was also possible, he realized, that he was going mad. He wondered who had sent him the gift—his mother? It seemed unlikely. Perhaps it wasn’t a gift at all, but a sort of taunt, something that would eventually be taken from him, to drive him to utter hopelessness.
He didn’t care, because he had them now. He kept going, even as his supply of chalk diminished and the penlight grew fainter, day by day. When he ran out of space, he erased something, and thought of it as a sort of ritual, the way the Navajo people of the American Southwest erased their sand paintings before dawn.
He had no dawn, so he made his own. He was God, making, unmaking, remaking the world. By the time the light finally failed and the chalk was all gone, he needed neither, but continued to paint with his fingers, in the darkness.
32
SEPTEMBER
The alarm that announced the training drill came right in the middle of dinner mess. Jake and Dylan looked at each other over their food, then bolted up from the table, racing toward the Steven Hiller hangar and the hybrid fighters it housed.
Alarms were blaring outside, too, and ground crews were rushing to their positions. The new surface-to-air cannon were already warming up. It was a full-on drill, a test not just of the pilots, but of everyone in the base.
Jake gave Dylan a fist bump and then mounted his fighter and dropped into the cockpit. There were twelve fighters in Lance Squadron. Jake listened as each one ran through a short checklist. Then Control came on.
“Pilots, good day. We have bogies inside of the orbit of the moon. You will see their present trajectories on your instruments. Your objective is not to engage, but to avoid enemy fliers and neutralize the much more immediate danger of an attack upon our moon base.”
Three other squadrons were involved—Claymore, Javelin, and Saber. Along with Lance, they represented the last pilots in the North American bracket who were still in competition for Legacy Squadron.
Of course, no one in the upper echelons was officially admitting it was a competition, but the media was, and the pilots all knew.
Okay, Jake thought. Team player. Whoever they make Lance One…
“Captain Hiller, you will lead your squadron as Lance One. The rest of you will see your call signs register on your display.”
Jake got Lance Two, of course. He tried to bite down on his disappointment, the unfairness of it. To put everything away but the flying.
“Lance Squadron,” Dylan said. “Let’s go.”
They rolled out onto the runway, and then Dylan’s ship leapt into the air.
* * *
As Dylan watched, the hangar named after his father dwindled, and he remembered that day again—the climb, the roar of the crowd, the flash of light.
“I wish you could see me, Dad,” he said, in barely a whisper. Then he pushed to forty-five degrees and increased the thrust. Be
hind him, Lance Squadron formed up like a flock of geese.
The sky went from azure to indigo to black in a matter of moments. The ship shuddered as it battered through the atmosphere, then the sensation subsided, and finally vanished.
“All squadrons,” Control said, “our long-range telemetry is down. You will have to proceed using only your own instruments.”
“And there’s the curve ball,” Jake said.
He was right—things had just become much more difficult. Even in a ship like this, you couldn’t just point at the moon and go—you had to aim for where your target was going to be when you got there. At the moment, the moon wasn’t even in line of sight, but on the other side of the planet.
Dylan started calculating a flight path, while keeping mindful of the approaching enemy fighters.
“Lance One,” his headphones crackled. It was Jake, coming over their internal channel—the other squadrons couldn’t hear them.
“What is it, Lance Two?” Dylan said.
“Submitting a flight path,” Jake said.
“You?” Dylan said. “You did some math?”
“Hey, I’m more than just smoking good looks,” Jake said.
Dylan stared at the plan as it appeared, and a little grin started on his face.
“You realize this is certifiable,” he said.
“Yeah,” Jake said. “It’s also gonna work.”
Jake’s plan involved doing something spacecraft usually worked very hard not to do, but the more he looked at it, the more Dylan liked it. Except for one teensy point.
“If we get through the first part,” Dylan pointed out, “that puts us in the thickest part of the mother ship debris field.”
“Yeah, but that’s good,” Jake said. “It’ll make it harder for the bogies to track us. You know they’re going to turn around and get right on our tails. As an added bonus, the other squadrons won’t know where we are, either.”
Dylan considered, running a few calculations of his own.
“It’s a good plan, Jake,” he admitted. “If we make it through, it could get us to the lunar target well ahead of the others. Just—stick to it, okay?”
“You bet, Lance One.”
Dylan switched back to the group frequency.
“I’m sending the flight plan,” he said. “Lock and load.”
“Holy crap,” Lance Five said, a minute or so later. “Are you kidding?”
“Anyone gets in real trouble, you know the drill,” Dylan said. “This is gonna be a cakewalk.”
The early training missions had been pretty safe, as such things went. Lack of real weapons, the presence of force fields, massive telemetry data to protect against impacts. The computers on the ground could still take control of the fliers if they needed to, so even after ejecting, odds were good that the fighter could be brought under control.
These drills, though, were pushing the boundaries of both the machines and the pilots, and the danger was increased, as well. Without real aliens shooting at them, blinding their instruments, cutting them off from ground control, they were still considerably safer than, say, the Blue Angels had been, performing their aerobatics back in the day. Still, he and the rest of Lance Squadron were definitely about to leave the comfort zone.
He took his heading, accelerating with his fusion engine, aiming at the edge of the world. A series of blips appeared on his long-range radar.
“We’ve got bogies,” he said. “Looks like ten of them.”
“I see them, Lance One,” Lance Eight confirmed.
“Got ’em,” Lance Twelve said.
“On my mark, long range missiles,” Dylan said.
“I’m locked,” Jake said.
“Away,” Dylan said.
The small but deadly missiles streaked out ahead of them, quickly becoming tiny points of actinic light. They were, of course, unarmed. He watched as they bent in an arc toward the approaching drones. The “alien” formation suddenly changed direction, like a school of fish.
“They’re flanking our spaceward side,” Lance Six said.
“We were expecting this,” Dylan said. “Maintain heading and acceleration. Do not break off to engage.”
As the fighters hurtled toward the atmosphere, the rim of the moon became visible beyond the Earth’s horizon. Dylan watched the aliens positioning themselves like a flying firing squad, with Earth’s atmosphere as the wall against which they were backed. Two of them were missing, taken out by missiles. The others had managed to shoot down the projectiles before they came into range.
Then they appeared visually, along with the inevitable lances of green light stabbing outward.
His ship started bucking a little as he entered the upper atmosphere.
“They’ve got a lock on me,” Lance Five shouted.
“Just hang on a few more seconds,” Jake said.
“Keep tight,” Dylan shouted as he watched the planetary horizon begin to flatten dangerously.
“Coming up on ninety klicks,” Jake said.
“I can’t shake it,” Lance Five said. “It’s right on my tail.”
“They’re tracking me, too,” Lance Three said.
“Hold on,” Dylan said. Then, “Noses up!”
When reentering the Earth’s atmosphere, the angle of descent was crucial. If the approach was too deep, the forces of reentry could crush and incinerate a spacecraft. Hit too shallow, though, and it was like a flat rock hitting the surface of a pond—the ship would skip right off of the atmosphere. That was very bad in the old days, with limited fuel, if what you were trying to do was land, but this wasn’t the old days, and they weren’t trying to land. They were trying to cut the corner as closely as possible.
The fighters slapped into the atmosphere with a force that rattled Dylan’s bones right through the inertial compensators. The stick felt suddenly sluggish, as if he was trying to steer through molasses. Then he was hurtling along a new trajectory, a few degrees north of being parallel to the Earth below.
Another few seconds, and they had returned to a relative vacuum.
“One more time,” Dylan said. “Then we’re flying straight. Lance Five?”
“They got me,” Five said.
“Three?”
“Nope, they missed me and cashed out in the atmosphere,” Lance Three said.
“Ouch,” Jake said. “Those drones are expensive.”
“They should have made them smarter, then,” Dylan said. “Not our worry right now. Let’s do that one more time.”
They dove again, skipped again, and then the moon was fully visible. The blips simulating alien ships fell well behind them, but they weren’t giving up—they were still coming, just taking a longer route.
“Sending course correction,” Dylan said. “We’re a few degrees off.”
Then they kicked their fusion drives to high and lit the sky.
* * *
“Entering the debris field,” Dylan said. “Heads up, everybody. Watch your radar, but use your eyes, too. We have the sun behind us—that’ll help.”
Technically, they had already been in the debris field for a while—it was huge—but they were only just entering the part of it that was statistically dense enough to pose a real risk. Dylan wished for functioning energy weapons rather than the training lasers, which were no stronger than flashlights.
If the space flotsam helped protect them from being discovered by the enemy, it also made it more difficult for him to detect the opposition—including the real enemy, the other squadrons. He could see the lunar face, but he still didn’t know the target, although it had to be somewhere near the moon base.
His radar showed him most of the bigger chunks well before he was in danger of hitting them, but the little ones could be just as nasty at these speeds.
“Crap!” someone shouted.
“Who is that?” Dylan said.
“Lance Three,” the pilot replied. “I just got dinged, that’s all.”
“How does everything look?” Dylan
asked.
“I’m okay,” Three said. “Just a scratch.”
“Okay, but check your engine readings every few minutes.”
“Will do.”
They had crossed in hours what it took the Apollo missions three days to traverse. In theory, everyone else was way behind them, and they were nearly out of the worst of the debris field. They still had no lunar target, though, and since the satellite net was supposed to be down, they’d have to find it themselves.
“Bogies!” Jake shouted.
Just appearing on Dylan’s radar, they must have been lying in wait at the edge of the debris field, but now they were powered on and screaming their way forward, energy weapons slicing through the perpetual night.
It seemed as if they were coming from everywhere.
“Evasive maneuvers,” Dylan said. “Two and Three, you’re with me—everyone else buddy up in counting order.”
“We’ve got four of them behind us,” Jake said.
“Round the world,” Dylan said. He went into a tight climb relative to the lunar surface. Jake and Fiona in Lance Three were off either of his wings.
The hybrid fighters were faster than the original alien ships, and they were maneuverable too. His anti-gravity thrusters were starting to complain, but he managed to drop in behind the alien flight group as they continued to pursue Jake and Fiona. He lined them up and started taking them out. One banked rapidly and arced back toward him, but his beams played across it, and the simulator became inert.
Then he had several on his tail. Jake and Fiona were turning to help, but in his gut Dylan knew they didn’t have time. He dove toward the lunar surface, whooping like a madman, and turned sharply just before plowing into the surface, going a Nap-of-the-Earth or, in this case, Nap-of-the-Moon, speeding along about ten meters from the barren landscape.
One pursuer took the bait and followed him as he dipped in and out of craters and jagged around lunar mountains, but the other enemy craft kept its high vantage, taking the occasional shot and keeping track of him for its brother.
