Shanghaied to the Moon Page 10

  AstroNav! When I was three years old! The Counselors did ruin my skills, just like the old spa—Val—warned they could. Why would they do that? This journal isn’t going to tell me. It’s finished. Last entry. Last page.

  One chance in a billion … and a lifeboat found him. How long from launch until lifeboat #5 intercepted the Valadium Thruster? I don’t know the angles, or the speeds.

  Did Mom ever know all her efforts paid off? Did she know Val survived?

  Even with so much to jog my memory, there’s this vast nothing where the answers should be. I recheck the dates—just over three years since the first entry. Now I’m really confused. In Pluto: A Star too Far, Val was lost for only three years. But according to the journal, after three years, Mom is just sending off the lifeboats.

  So when did Val really come back? Before or after Mom’s crash? I don’t know. I don’t know the real dates because the 3-Vids faked it and my family kept all this secret from me. Why?

  Maybe I missed something in one of the short entries. I need to read every word over again.

  14

  MISSION TIME

  T plus 19:24:14

  THE lights come on.

  “What the … my booze!”

  He’s halfway down the ladder, feet anchored in a rung, body jutting into middeck. He rips a squeeze bottle out of the air, tilts it against the light to see if even a drop is left. He crushes it. Flings it away. It ricochets off the wall, careens into several others.

  He sees me. “You messed with my stuff!”

  “You knew my mom!” I hold the journal toward him like a sacred offering. “I want my memories back!”

  “I don’t care what you want! You left your post. You messed with my stuff. I should blow you out the crap dump!”

  “It’s—”

  “Shut up!” The words are twin explosions that leave my ears ringing. He winces and grabs at his temple, mouth wrenched into an O of pain. Headache. He deserves it.

  I look hard at him. Nothing in the slatelike planes of his face, the whole ruggedness of him, reminds me of me, but people always say I got a double dose of Mom’s genes.

  No way I want him to be my father, but he and Mom were in the asteroid belt together the right amount of time before I was born.

  He continues in a whisper, each word edged with strangled rage. “Clean this mess. Get in that exercise machine. Put in your hour or so help me …”

  He takes one more look around. “You’re lucky I need you.”

  A fierce pull on a ladder rung rockets him into flight deck. I hear a thump and a curse. Another thump as he bumps around. Move slow and easy, he told me. I hope he busts something—

  Busted.

  Like the NavComp.

  Suddenly, I realize what I’ve done. I got so caught up in the journal, I forgot to watch the NavComp!

  “It’s your fault! You lie like the rest of them!” I soar around scooping up the empty bottles, the awards, the journal; stuff them all back in the duffel.

  None of this would be happening if people hadn’t lied to me! All those years, worshipping the 3-Vid Val Thorsten while Dad knew. Mark knew. They could’ve told me the real stories, about Val and Mom working together. Mom must’ve kept a copy of the journal. They never showed me.

  I attack the exercise machine.

  Hate him.

  Hate Dad.

  Hate Mark.

  How could they do that to me? Why would they?

  I pound through the routines until all my muscles ache as much as my heart. I stop, sweaty, warm at least, and winded. My breath turns cloudy. It’s getting colder in here than it should be. Maybe I messed something up that’s causing that. I can’t wait an hour to find out.

  I slip out of the straps and kick off for the hatch, brake to a stop with the upper half of my body sticking into flight deck.

  “Every stinking bottle …” he mutters as he consults the three pages of mission profile floating beside him. He doesn’t sound very focused.

  “Is everything okay?”

  He freezes. Sniffs hard. “Something stinks around here.”

  He grabs a manual, pulls it free with a rip of Velcro. He fires it over his shoulder. “Go change the odor filter.”

  I catch it: Commode Operations Manual. Latrine duty! “You can’t bully me.”

  “I gave you a job. Do it.”

  “No. I may have left my post, but you were passed out drunk. You might as well have abandoned ship! I had to get rid of that stuff.”

  He twists around to stare at me. His thin lips turn down grimly. His teeth grind once. Make a sound like tectonic plates shifting. He heaves a deep sigh. “You got me talking about my missions, didn’t you.”

  “Don’t you remember?”

  “I try never to remember … but you make it hard, kid. When I look at you, I see Maggie. And when you speak up to me … she did that, too.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew her?”

  “Secrecy’s become a habit and … well, I’ve seen the 3-Vids. Part of me wants to believe my life is still like that.”

  The best pilot in the universe. The one all the ladies want. “You’re my father, aren’t you?”

  He shakes his head. “That’s a load of romantic crap, kid. I didn’t think you watched those kind of 3-Vids.”

  “It’s in the journal.”

  “You didn’t read carefully enough! That was all in your father’s imagination. I loved Maggie, but never that way. These babies”—he slaps a sidewall strut—“they’re my true love, always have been. They’re not messy like people. They break down, sure, but it’s all in the laws of physics. You can count on it. It’s people you gotta watch out for.”

  “You’re telling me!”

  He laughs. It’s a full, deep sound. I like it.

  “Forget the stinking toilet,” he says. “Get in your seat.”

  I thrust out of the hatch, bump off the ceiling, and drop into the copilot seat, hard. I snug up my harness. “So why did you try to send me away?”

  “I figured I owed it to Maggie to keep you out of this.”

  “You were right about the Counselors messing with my head. I don’t remember anything about Mom’s connection to you. Can you help me get my memories of her back?”

  “Lot of memories of Maggie, kid. She was carrying you like a spare oxygen tank when I left for Pluto.” He looks away, fixes his eyes on the globe of the astrogator. “I could probably jog something loose in that head of yours. But not now. Not here. The mission—”

  “I don’t care about your stupid mission.”

  “You’ve got to!” He rounds on me and smacks the center console, making a loud crack of sound. “With all your heart and mind and soul or you’re going to die.”

  “You’re going to kill me?”

  “Jeez, kid, I’m not going to kill you.” He checks the timing on the next mission event, then folds the profile and returns it to the clipboard. Just when I think he’s giving me the silent treatment, he says, “Answer me this, Mister-I’m-going-to-Pluto. What’s the standard ratio of simulator time to actual flight time for a pilot training on an unfamiliar ship?”

  His question is straight from the Space Academy exam books. I tell him, “Two hundred to one.”

  “Right. We’re almost at midcourse. In just about nineteen hours, you’re going to take a ride in the squid. Have I made my point?”

  What have I got so far—four deadly crashes and less than an hour sim-time? “Yeah.”

  “Good. There’s a critical course correction burn coming up in seventy minutes. After that, you’re back in the squid.” He adjusts a few dials, then snugs up his seat harness. He hits a switch and solitaire comes up on #1 monitor in front of him.

  “Hey, I don’t get it. You just laid all this heavy stuff on me about sticking to the mission, but you can play games?”

  He makes a few bad moves, then switches the screen off with a strangled growl. He stares at the blackness. “Damn, kid, I could use my booze.
”

  Critical maneuver coming up, he said. I did the right thing dumping that stuff. “You know, I could focus on the mission a lot better if you told me what we’re after and what exactly you want me to do.”

  “This mission—” He stops and his jaw works like he’s chewing on a tough piece of meat. Is he going to dodge again? “It’s revenge, kid. Justice. Maggie guessed right—Alldrives sabotaged the Valadium Thruster.”

  “Sabotaged …?” Alldrives and Val Thorsten are the polestars of my universe. Now he’s telling me one of them is a false star. It’s hard to swallow.

  But Mom suspected Alldrives was involved in the failure of the Pluto mission. She said they faked the Pluto: A Star Too Far 3-Vid. If I hadn’t read that, I might think he was simply cracked. That he made it up to explain some flaw in the impulsor engines he designed. So he could live with himself.

  “What’s the Moon got to do with it?”

  He answers without any hesitation this time. “The proof I need to finger Alldrives is on the Moon. Hidden. You’re going to get it back for me.”

  “It?”

  “The NavComp core from the Valadium Thruster. I ditched it there for safekeeping as I flew by on my way to Earth in the lifeboat. Every line of code in that core is corrupted with Alldrives’ unique software signature, damning as a fingerprint.”

  He unzips yet another pocket in his jacket, reaches in, and takes out a folded paper. Hands it to me. It’s yellowed and crinkled and soft as leather. Carefully, I unfold it. It looks like a treasure map. There’s a drawing of a square in the center of the paper. Inside that, the coordinates 128 321 004 range sphere M—Tranquility Base! The square must represent the perimeter fence. The southwest post is circled. A line angles 45 degrees from there and ends in an X.

  “Now there are two people in the universe who know where that core is hidden, kid.” He sounds choked up.

  I’m holding something more precious than any of his medals. A piece of his life, he said at the Old Spaceport. Six years lost in space. And then what, another six lost to the booze? “You should’ve told me right at the beginning. I’d have come in a second to help you.”

  He shrugs. “Had to be cautious, kid. If Alldrives got the smallest hint of what I’m up to they’d strip mine half the Moon to find that core and destroy it.”

  The only evidence of what really happened all those years ago in the rings of Saturn, nearly eight hundred million miles away. I fold the map and hand it back to him. He tucks it in the pocket and zips it closed. “Why did they do it, Val?”

  “Because it was my ship, that’s why! I designed her. I raised the capital to build her. I tell ya, kid, the Valadium Thruster really knocked their gyros out of sync at Alldrives. Challenged their supremacy; their wallets; their pride. Old Man Lance, he and I saw eye to eye, had an understanding. But he was long dead when the government put out bids for a Pluto mission. Mr. Lance the Younger … what a piece of work. Thought he owned me because I let them make those 3-Vids.”

  “So you went off on your own?”

  “Yup. The Younger thought I was just a dumb flyboy—strap a new firecracker to my butt and I’m set to go. But I had a few ideas. When Alldrives wouldn’t listen, I started Thorsten Engineering. Put together quite a team. We won the bid for the Pluto mission. Took it away from Alldrives.”

  “And Mom was part of your team. Tell me more about her.”

  He shakes his head. “When you get back, after you see the Counselors—”

  “What?! You said stay away from them! You said it’s good to hang on to memories.”

  “I’m no model, kid. You’ve seen that. You’re caught in something they created. You’ll need their help to come out of it safely.”

  “You’re making me nervous.”

  “You should be. I’m nervous. The mnemonic suppression technique … well, it’s only for the worst cases.”

  “But that’s what I don’t understand. What could be worse than watching Mom die in a crash?”

  “Tell you something that never made it into a 3-Vid—”

  He’s off on a tangent again, but then, how would he know the answer to my question? He wasn’t even on Earth the first six years of my life. He didn’t come back until after the crash. By then, the Counselor had already tampered with my memory. Erased huge pieces of my life, including anything Mom might’ve told me about Val Thorsten. And Dad and Mark were part of it …

  I’ve been sabotaged, too. But it couldn’t be for the same reason Alldrives tried to kill Val. Dad wouldn’t let the Counselor do that to me because he hated me, would he?

  15

  MISSION TIME

  T plus 20:01:15

  YOU interested in this, kid?”

  “Yeah. Sorry.”

  “As I was saying, we experimented with mnemonic suppression on a few deep-space missions, to fight the boredom. The idea was to wipe a day’s memory of the routine, monotonous stuff. You’d wake up fresh, like the first day out. Only it’s not simple to erase a memory. The mind has multiple redundant systems. The technique left … ghosts.” He’s speaking from experience. Of course, Val Thorsten would try it, would test it. Cutting-edge stuff. “People got jumpy. Paranoid. Like they were just a footstep away from another world.”

  “Squiggly!”

  “Huh?”

  “That’s what I call … what happens. Things kind of shimmer and blur, and then it’s a different world.”

  He gives me a long look, then says, “Yeah. Something like that. Can’t have you stepping into a different world up here.”

  “Look who’s talking!”

  “We’re a sorry crew, kid.” He looks away. “From here on, both of us have got to stay focused on this mission. Work is the spacer’s friend. Never forget that.”

  Bing bing bing.

  Red lights flare across the board, but they make no sense to me. “What’s happening?”

  “NavComp crash.” He kills the alarm and starts tapping keys. He scans the monitors, head moving like a bird pecking at seeds. Row upon row of numbers stream across the screens. A trajectory plot on #1 monitor shows a time-plot of the course we’re supposed to be on with a bold white line. Starting about three hours ago, a red line deviates from the white one. It zigzags erratically. A flashing red dot at the end of it indicates our present position. We’re way off course!

  “That can’t be!” he says.

  He grabs the sextant, slams open a shutter. The star field out there is familiar to me from the Apollo simulations. I know what stars he’s sighting on: Rigel, Altair, and Fomalhaut. The very first navigators, the ancient Sumerians, named those stars thousands of years ago. Greek, Roman, and Arab mariners were guided by them. Columbus sighted on them to find the new world.

  Val’s been using them to get us to the Moon.

  He breezes through the AstroNav calculations to verify our position. I’ve never seen anyone do AstroNav like that. He makes another calculation, too quick for me to catch the details of his technique. “Show me how you did that.”

  He shoots me a disgusted look. “Get real, kid, we’re in big trouble. If we don’t get back on course before midcourse burn is due, we’re going to miss the Moon.”

  “What about the backup system?”

  “We’re using the backup.”

  “Can’t you get us on course?”

  “Some things aren’t humanly possible.” He looks over at me like I’m an idiot. “Course corrections at six thousand miles an hour without a NavComp happens to be one of them.”

  “Exactly what’s wrong with it anyway?”

  “Trim your jets.” He turns back to the controls. “I was just about to troubleshoot it.”

  Tap … tap … tap …

  He’s so slow! I can tell right off he hasn’t got any real computer sense—not like Dad or Mark.

  “How long until midcourse burn?”

  “Forty minutes.”

  “Forty minutes!” I switch NavComp control to my keyboard.

  “Hey,
what’re you doing?” He reaches over to shut down my terminal.

  “Leave me alone.” I push his hand away. “I can fly computers!”

  First thing is to put the machine through some simple tasks to get an idea if it’s a software or hardware problem. If we’ve got a software problem, we’re probably done for.

  I tell him to take notes. In a few minutes, I have him read them back to me. I see the problem immediately. “We’ve got a hardware failure in subsystem A12. Let’s open it up.”

  Together, we unscrew the retaining bolts from the faceplate of the NavComp. I pull the computer out. It’s a two-foot cube with hundreds of cables plugged into it. Floating between us, it looks like an upside-down jellyfish.

  “Oh God!” he groans, raising his hands in a protective gesture as if it’s a poisonous jellyfish.

  The complexity scares him, but I know this machine—an old model 2X50. Dad was always pushing me into his field. Away from Mom. I resented it then, but right now, I’m just glad I paid enough attention to know what to do next.

  “Got a test kit?”

  He takes a pouch from a locker under the seat. He passes it to me. “You really know what you’re doing, kid?”

  “I took these apart in my playpen.”

  He actually smiles. “Okay.”

  I splice in the test equipment. It doesn’t take long to isolate the problem: a black box between the NavComp and the automatic maneuvering system. It converts computer code into electromechanical signals that aim the thrusters. I try a test code. The monitor reads perfect data going in from the NavComp, but the output is total garbage. There’s a serious problem in there, all right. It’s a sealed unit, meant to be replaced, not repaired.

  “It’s dead. Got another one?”

  I know the answer even before he says, “No. Can’t you fix it?”

  I poke at the casing with the test probe. “It would take hours just to open it.”

  He stares at the half globe of the artificial horizon like it was a crystal ball. “Game’s up, then.”