Shanghaied to the Moon Read online

  I touch my finger over it. “What’s that?”

  “Lifetime total games played. I racked up two hundred thousand on the VT alone.” He sucks a bit of Gunk from between his teeth.

  “If I played that many games, I’d go—”

  “Crazy. Yeah. I thought I could handle anything space handed me, kid. I’d been to Mercury alone. Two years no problem. But six years!”

  “Alone?” I can’t be hearing right. Val shipped out with the same old crew in Pluto: A Star Too Far.

  “You’ve got to shake those 3-Vids out of your head. Look.” Val clicks a few keys and #2 monitor displays the technical drawings of the Valadium Thruster. Val zeroes in on the crew section, a tiny part of the half-mile long ship. Definitely not big enough for all the people who were in the 3-Vid.

  Mom never mentioned anyone else in her journal, either. I pull my knees up and twist in the seat to face him. With my heels wedged against the center console, the position is uncomfortable enough to keep me awake. “It could hold a few people. Why’d you go alone?”

  “She was my ship, my design. I believed in her, but after the Jupiter disaster … well, I didn’t want anyone else to take that risk.” He frowns. “As it turned out, a little company would’ve been welcome.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “Why not?” Val squares his shoulders like a boxer about to step into the ring. “Everything went by the book until the Saturn Whip. The ship was falling into the gravity well, building speed for the final boost to Pluto. Every second I set a new speed record for a human being. Stretched the computers to the limit.”

  A code flashes. He deals with it almost without looking.

  “Just like that!” He snaps his fingers. “She died—everything! Then the power came back. And the main drives. They weren’t supposed to be on. The controls wouldn’t respond. I don’t mind saying I panicked, kid, but then it happened, and I was too amazed to be terrified. The bulkheads faded away around me. My body expanded, thinned. It seemed as if solar systems were pushing in between my very cells, until I stood with one foot on Saturn and the other on some star at the other side of the galaxy. Maybe the ship was crashing. Maybe it had exploded. Maybe I was dead. I could’ve cared less. I felt this joy as I stood there astride the stars …”

  Hushed, I say, “The transdimensional shift.”

  He nods. “Then I blacked out. When I came to, everything was solid again and the ship was on her way to Andromeda at full thrust. There wasn’t a thing I could do about it. The entire disaster had been programmed into the NavComp.”

  “Alldrives …”

  “To punish me. They could’ve thrown her into Saturn. Killed me outright. Instead, they left me alive and lost forever in space. At least, they thought they had.” He opens a shutter, and it’s like letting in a winter’s night. Andromeda Galaxy glitters, over two million light-years away. “I tell you, kid, the memory of that joy got me through a lot of bad days.”

  I hug myself. “How were you able to get back?”

  “Killed her, system by system. Took a week to get to the reaction chamber and shut down the drive. I purged every system of their treachery, then I brought her back to life. That took a few months. She was mine again, under my control. By then, we were way off the plane of the solar system. The Sun was a pinprick of light behind us.”

  Another code flashes. He doesn’t respond. I take care of it. The brief jolt starts him talking again.

  “There were only two systems I couldn’t repair: the NavComp and the radio-link to Earth.”

  NavComp crash. Just like what happened to us.

  “So that’s why you froze when ours went down.”

  “Yeah.”

  Our eyes meet. He survived that crisis alone on the Valadium Thruster, but without my help, he would’ve died out here. The moment is too full of strong feelings. I look away, fix my eyes on that huge number above the aces. “How did you make it through?”

  “Did I make it? Look at me … us … now … this tub.” He waves it all away, mouth set grimly with un-happiness.

  I try to think of something to cheer him up. “When did you make contact with the lifeboat?”

  “You can’t imagine what it meant to pick up that blip.” His expression softens. “Your mom was something else, kid.”

  “Did she know you made it back?”

  “The radio in the lifeboat linked on a secret frequency straight to Maggie. We knew Alldrives would do anything to prevent the truth from being known. We made a plan to hide everything. Get me home quietly as possible. In my condition … they’d have chewed me up.” Val pauses, then seems to realize he hasn’t answered my question. “I was still six months out when she stopped talking to me.”

  She knew he was alive, knew her efforts had made a difference. She talked to him. That’s something, even if she was gone when he finally got to Earth.

  “Six months at full thrust—” He rakes his hands from temples to jaw. He presses them there, holding himself together. “Burn as long as I could stand it, recover, burn again. Every day … every day …”

  “Full thrust! For months!”

  “You’ve suffered a little in this tub, huh?” He takes his hands away, snorts dismissively. “Bottle rockets compared to what pushed the Valadium Thruster.”

  “Why’d you stay with the VT when you had the lifeboat?”

  “Like I said before, kid. I always bring home the ship. And in this case, it was the evidence against Alldrives. I had to bring it back. For Maggie and the others. Vindicate them. Redeem their years of work. Pilot needs a good team, kid. Never forget that.”

  “But you don’t have one for this mission.”

  “I didn’t before. Now I do.”

  Part of his team, like Mom. “Why aren’t Peter or Ulura helping you get the NavComp core back?”

  “That was a dark time, kid.” He switches the solitaire to his monitor. Starts a game.

  What could have happened to leave him all alone? I know better than to try and push him for an answer. He’d be reaching for a bottle if I hadn’t dumped them.

  After one rapid click through the pack, he stops. He missed several moves. Staring at the screen, he says with sudden intensity, “You’ve got to understand, kid. I was half-crazy by then. Maggie’s voice was the first live voice I’d heard in years. We set it all up, then she stopped talking to me—”

  “The crash.”

  “Yeah, she was dead. But I didn’t know about that! I worried she betrayed me. Can you believe it! When I finally learned what happened, I convinced myself Alldrives had killed her! I knew they would kill anyone who tried to help me.”

  “But they couldn’t … wouldn’t … all those people—to kill my mother? It’s not true, is it?”

  “No, it isn’t. But I believed it. I couldn’t involve any of my friends with stakes like that. Tried to settle everything with Lance the Younger, man-to-man.”

  “Single-handed?!” That sounds like Val Thorsten!

  “Yeah. Big mistake. He isn’t a man, kid. He’s part of this … power.” He fumbles in his jacket pocket for a bottle. Must be a bad, bad memory. He notices what he’s doing, forces his hands flat and still against the flight console. “Took a long time to crawl back into the light. When you bring that core up from the Moon, there’ll be hell to pay!”

  Fierce. Confident. Here’s the Val Thorsten spacers fought to ship out with. That Mom worked so hard for.

  “You can count on me, Val.” I shiver with excitement.

  He mistakes it for the cold. “It’ll get colder still.”

  He reaches under his seat, draws out a blanket. He spreads it over me, tucking the edges in tight.

  “Sleep. Dream sweet dreams of revenge.” He calls up a new game, glances at me. Winks. “That’s an order, kid.”

  18

  MISSION TIME

  T plus 38:04:18

  NEAR the end of my watch, the light level on flight deck takes a sudden jump. I look out the window. It’s the M
oon!

  “Val! Val!” I shake him. “Val, we’re here!”

  Which is a stupid thing to say because we’re really a couple thousand miles away. Val’s sure to yell at me for waking him up. Why would he even care? He’s been to nearly every planet, seen a dozen moons.

  He struggles awake. One hand rubs at the sand in his eyes while his other hand fumbles with the harness buckle. Then he’s free and sliding open a shutter. He puts his face close to the window. For a long time, we both stare.

  Copernicus Crater is dead ahead. The crater-roughened and mountain-heaved areas are surrounded by huge patches of smooth surface that look like water. That’s why they were given names like Ocean of Storms, Seething Bay, and Sea of Tranquility.

  These flat plains are dark. Everything else is the color of a wasp’s nest. Dustings of glowing silver grace the rims of the craters. We’ll probably skim right over Luna Base before making the burn for orbital insertion. Too bad Dad isn’t there to watch.

  Something glints where the sharply defined horizon of the Moon meets black space. It could be a ship in orbit, or even the Telecomsat that Dad came here to fix. A tiny speck breaks free of the glittering object and glides toward the surface. A couple more objects flare into view as they swing around from the far side. One is big enough to show some detail. It’s a long chain of ore barges from the asteroid belt.

  Val grunts. “Crowded.”

  I laugh because it’s crazy. Just three sightings over all the enormous sky of the Moon. But I feel the same way. I liked having the whole universe to ourselves.

  An elbow bumps me as Val reaches inside his jacket. He pulls out a key. “LunaCom is going to want to talk to me.” He slips the key into the lock on the radio power switch. Pauses. “You with me kid? One hundred percent?”

  I bite my lip. He’s worried I’ll call out for help when he opens the channel. Not long ago, I would have. Might still be the smart thing to do. I don’t want to lie to him, so I say, “Ninety-five percent.”

  “Honest. I like that.” He smiles. “You won’t mind waiting below while I get us squared away for orbit?”

  “No, sir. On my way.” The harness releases with a snap and I kick toward the ceiling, tap it, altering my angle and momentum, and do a backflip over the seat. My stomach gently grazes the side wall before I twist and drop through the hatch. Soon as I’m out of sight, I grab a ladder rung, flip, and drift up close to the opening. I just gotta know how he pulls this off!

  “Old Glory to LunaCom, come in.” There’s a burst of static and squealing hiss. I peek. He’s twisting knobs to make the radio squawk like that. “I say again, LunaCom this is Old Glory, do you copy?”

  “Barely, Old Glory.” The voice from LunaCom flight control is perfectly clear on our end. “You copy us?”

  “Minimal,” he lies and makes a big raspberry. “Got a VHF seven failure. Best I can do. Got CBH long-range telemetry out, too.” Squeal. “She’s a bucket of bolts, but I love her.”

  He’s sly. Those particular system failures would make any ship practically untrackable.

  “Ah, roger that Old Glory. Explains why we’ve had trouble verifying your approach. Are you still on flight path from asteroid field Beta Seven? Over.”

  LunaCom thinks we’re coming in from the asteroid belt! Now I remember. Just after declaring us dead in the capsule burn up, he said something about nobody being able to track us because we weren’t coming from Earth. He must have filed a false flight plan.

  “Affirmative. Request permission for lunar orbit insertion according to prefiled mission plan.”

  “Roger that, Old Glory. LOI is go. Enjoy the view. And we just have to say, old man, there’s more than one screw loose on that ship. LunaCom out.”

  “Eat your heart out,” Val says, wrenching a final eruption of noise from the radio before shutting it off.

  I poke my head up. “Wow!”

  “Get up here.” He motions with his head and, as I settle in, smiles. “Pretty good, huh? They think I’m on a nostalgia cruise—you know, a crazy old spacer who can remember when ships like Old Glory were the Comet Catchers of every kid’s dream.”

  I needle him. “Can you really remember that?”

  “Thanks, kid. Now shut up. It’s time for pitchover.”

  He works the joystick to rotate the shuttle nose over tail. The Moon slowly slides out of view as our rockets come around to point at it. When the angles are exactly right, he stabilizes us, then shifts right into setting up the burn. Not a motion wasted. He’s the pilot of a shuttle preparing for an extremely important maneuver. Nothing else matters anymore. In two minutes, the engine will fire to put us into orbit.

  Then I’m going to land on the Moon! Not like a tourist coming down in a liner so big and comfortable you might as well be landing anywhere on Earth, but in a miniature LEM, just like the first astronauts.

  My excitement somersaults. A big lump sticks in my throat. My eyes water. The cockpit light refracts around Val. For a second, his image blurs. He’s the Val Thorsten of Jupiter Turnabout. He’s got the old stuff back again. He’ll bring me down safe.

  Why isn’t someone filming now?

  “Perfect.” He slaps the seat arm. “Time to suit up.”

  He flows over the seat back, his big body arched like a breaching whale. A tight tuck and roll, then he kicks off the ceiling to plunge through the floor hatch.

  I catch up with him in the air lock chamber. He’s holding the undergarment of the space suit. It looks like thermal underwear, only it’s made to keep you cool. Without that cooling system, a person would stew in their own body heat inside the superinsulated suit.

  “Remember, once you’re down, you’ve got to work fast,” Val says as I strip. My pants and shirt keep their shape, like in cartoons where the clothes are so dirty they stand up by themselves. “It’ll only take twenty-four minutes for a park ranger to arrive once they get suspicious of us.”

  I nod, slipping a leg into the undergarment. Balancing on one leg is hard on Earth, impossible in outer space. Gravity doesn’t hold you to the floor. I start spinning. Val, who’s always well anchored, stops me. I use him for a post, slip my other leg in, then my arms, and zip it up. Same procedure with the lower half of the space suit. He helps me with the boots.

  I feel like a kid being stuffed into a snowsuit.

  Val snugs the Snoopy cap on my head. The cap has a small microphone attached to it by a slender wire and earphones sewn into the sides. Last comes the helmet. He pokes a button on the chest plate and the suit pressurizes. I’m breathing the sweetest air since leaving the PLV. And I’m warm.

  He clips the locator to my wrist. I’ll use that to find where the bore tube containing the NavComp is drilled into the surface somewhere just outside the perimeter fence. He puts a Snoopy cap on. My earphones hiss. “All right in there?”

  I nod.

  He squints into the shaded helmet visor and grumbles, “Use your mike.”

  I dip my chin to enable “talk” and say, “Okay.”

  “Come on, then.”

  The suit’s too bulky to let me crawl through the tunnel. I hold my arms out in a V and use my toes to nudge along behind Val. The squid looks tiny in the giant cylinder. Perched on the boom, it’s silent and fragile seeming, like a Chinese box kite.

  At the console, Val makes the final adjustments to the remote telemetry link. “Climb aboard.”

  I face the opening in the side. This is it. When I crawl in, it won’t be for a simulator run. The readings will be real. The alarms will be real. And if something does go wrong, if I have to fly this thing, I’ll find out if I’ve got what it takes to be like Val. Or if I’ll fail, like Mom did.

  I grip the edge of the opening to pull myself in.

  “Hold it.” Val stops me. “She needs a name. Bad luck to fly a ship without a name.”

  “It’s been the Squid to me since I first saw it.”

  “No points for creativity, kid.” Val takes a marker from his pocket and scrawls SQU
ID beneath the window. He draws squiggly lines trailing from the letters, like tentacles. “Okay, get in.”

  I grip the edge again. Immediately, I sense a difference. Naming it has created something personal between the Squid and me. I wish suddenly that Val would let me fly her.

  I pull. Thunk! The backpack catches on the edge of the opening. Val grips my calves. A tug down, a twist, then he jams me in. My shoulders come up against the padded restraints below the nose window. My feet settle on the curved top of the ascent stage fuel tank. This tank is separate from the one for the descent stage motor. It holds enough fuel to get me back to the shuttle, or, if anything goes wrong with the rocket, to become my own personal land mine.

  I squirm to settle in better. My right hand comes down on the keypad. My left finds the joystick. It’s such a tight fit, only my head and hands are free to move. “How am I going to get out?”

  “Don’t worry, there’s gravity down there.” Val floats in front of the window. A disgusting sound warbles in the earphones, then Ptaa!

  He spit on my ship! “Hey, what’re you doing?”

  “Christening her. We’re all out of the traditional stuff. Bon voyage, kid.” He gives a thumbs-up signal, then starts to turn away.

  “Val!”

  He pulls up short, presses his face close. “Yeah?”

  “Can the Counselor bring the memories back?”

  “Focus on the job at hand, kid.” Val looks stern. “It’s what Maggie did. It’s what we all do.”

  “I’ll try, Val.”

  “Not good enough. Do it. Understood?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  19

  MISSION TIME

  T plus 39:09:19

  A few minutes pass before the earphones in the Snoopy cap hiss to life. Val’s back on flight deck. He says, “Power up checklist. Confirm status green for me.”

  We work through the list smoothly, not like that first time in orbit around Earth preparing for translunar injection.

  “I’m going to blow the lid. One minute.” His voice comes crisply over the headphones, but a different whispery soft voice, much more official sounding, echoes in my head.