Shanghaied to the Moon Page 16
“That looks like fun. Wonder if I’ll get one?”
Val grunts. “This is quite a comedown for a guy who nearly hit the speed of light.”
“What happened to your face?”
“Bit of window.” Val shrugs. “And you?”
“Broken collarbone.”
“When you hit the dock.” Val looks dissatisfied. Maybe he blames himself for forgetting the docking ring was sticking out. “You’ve got guts, kid. I thought the core was a goner, but you stuck with the mission.”
“Val! What about … you know.” I roll my eyes, aiming them into corners to remind him about cameras and mikes.
“It’s okay, kid. We can talk about that part of the mission.”
Not the flag. Not Mom’s secret hideout. I wonder if I’ll know where it is when I get all my memories back? A sudden sense of excitement grips me. What else will I discover about my life that I don’t know I know?
“Soon as I was sure you were okay, I took the core to a judge. My arm broke, my face streaming blood, I got it into court custody. It’s been copied and certified and locked up for evidence. Gonna be like a supernova in the aerospace universe, kid. Everyone will know the Valadium Thruster wasn’t a failure. Restore my reputation. Good times will come again.”
“I want to be part of them, Val.”
His expression sours and, turning his face away, he says, “I don’t know, kid.”
The words come soft, wistful even, but they hit me like the end of the world. He doesn’t want me! I wrecked his mission and now I’m off the team. Val Thorsten never did tolerate screwups.
“Have you seen Old Glory?” A tight, stricken voice, coming at me with no connection I can figure, as usual.
“No.”
The airchair whooshes. Val maneuvers around to the other side of the bed. He backs into the space between the bed and the wall, pulling up next to my pillow. We’re close together again, just like aboard the shuttle. I expect him to show me a picture, but instead he presses a button on the wall. A shutter slides away from a big window. Across a flat plain, harshly lit by slanting sunshine, lies the shuttle. It looks huge, even half buried in moon dust. Debris litters a wide area around it. The hull is cracked in a dozen places.
“It really is space junk now,” Val says. His mouth draws into a thin line. I don’t share his sadness. It was always space junk to me.
With his good hand, he roots into a jacket pocket. Is he reaching for some booze?
He lays a fragment of heat shield tile from the shuttle and a shiny, crinkled bit of metal on my pillow. A squiggly line made by a marking pen is on the metal. It’s from the Squid.
“They found the Squid in a crater. I had a friend salvage that bit for you. The old-timers who flew the first airplanes, the barnstormers, they had a tradition. When a pilot went in, and lived, they always saved a bit of the canvas for a souvenir.”
An image comes: The Squid, her nose smashed, hull dented, rolling like a beached fish. My first ship. I lost her. A sniffle catches at the back of my throat. I start coughing. Val grabs the water bottle. He sticks the water tube between my lips … squeezes hard. I pull my mouth away, spluttering.
“You’ll drown me!”
Val mops up the spill. “What’s the matter?”
“I’m just remembering …” The whole mission cascades through my mind like a private 3-Vid. An avalanche of memories hits; the fear, the anger, the fights, midcourse, Val powering out of orbit, the crash … Mom …
Val’s eyes narrow. “Should I call the Counselor?”
“No! They’re my memories. I’m keeping them.”
“What makes you so sure you can handle them?” There’s challenge, and maybe bitterness, in Val’s voice.
“I’m not sure, exactly. I guess I saw her before, I mean in the Counselor’s version, making a mistake … a failure. But now I know the truth.” I feel the tears coming as I organize in my mind and heart the last thing Mom would have thought of. “She was worried the automatic grounding thrusters would fail. So she stayed at the controls to make sure they worked. A choice, not a mistake. She rode it out for me, for everyone.”
“Like Tony. Like Bob,” Val says, sad.
Things are so different now. I know what he means, what he sees and feels, when he turns inward to that memory. Val and I aren’t separated by this mist of make-believe anymore. And even though I wouldn’t get that flag for him, he rode it out for me.
“Like you, Val.”
Val reaches out and strokes my head, once, rough and awkward. “I tell ya, kid. The best of us don’t always make it.”
“Yeah.” I sniff and he sniffs and we both look away from each other toward the wreck of Old Glory.
Eventually, he says, “There’ll be an inquiry. Good thing we didn’t complete the whole mission, the way it turned out.”
“Sure is!” Imagine getting caught with that flag. But now the rich collector who financed the trip won’t get any return on his investment. “What about the expenses?”
“I’ll have more than enough to repay expenses once Alldrives settles up. I’m more worried about the kidnapping charge.”
“I told Dad you didn’t kidnap me. I’ll tell the court that, too, if I have to.”
Val considers this. “In that case, I should get off with only a few months in jail.”
“Jail!”
“I’ve done worse time, you know that.” He looks out at the stars. There’s Cassiopeia, the constellation Mom saw from the beach the day they canceled the official search for Val. How many times did she look at the stars, wondering, hoping?
“No booze in jail. Maybe I’ll write my memoirs. Set the record straight.”
He’s sitting here full of his own new hopes because of Mom. “Dad blames you for Mom’s death.”
“Sometimes I blame myself, kid, crazy as that is. So don’t be too hard on your dad, okay?”
I nod even though I don’t really understand what would make either of them feel that way.
Val sighs, then gets a look of deep remembering. “I’ll never forget how she came strutting into my AstroNav tutorial, confident as you please. She was shorter even than you. Had that coiled copper hair. All attitude, your mom, even as a freshman. Set my back up, until I saw what she could do …”
First year at Space Academy. Mom would’ve been fourteen, a year older than me. He knew her longer than any of us!
Val looks at me, blinks. “And now here you are.”
“Dad wants me to stay away from you. He says you’re dangerous.”
“What do you think?”
“I’m with you!”
He frowns. “We screwed up out there. It’s not supposed to be that exciting. You train and prepare so things go along smooth and dull. Most pilots run a tourist liner to Mars. Or haul ore.”
“Now you sound like Dad. No way I’m going to haul ore!”
“I figured,” Val says, nodding. “We need a star drive, kid. That’s the next step for our kind.”
“Do you think it’ll happen?”
“There are a few possibilities. One thing’s certain. If you aren’t a rocket pilot, and one of the best at that, you won’t ever get the chance.”
Val’s already given me a better chance than I ever had before. “If you coach me, I could be the best. Will you?”
“I’d like that, kid.” There’s a yearning in his voice. Mark sounds that way when he discovers a really neat new code, or Dad when he finds an amazing new electronics circuit. It’s an eagerness to get down to work with something new and wonderful. “But you shouldn’t be associated with me if you want to get into Space Academy.”
“Why?”
He looks into his lap. The eagerness slips behind a mask as slick as the plastiskin. “Alldrives owns the place. It’ll blow your whole career if they know we’re a team.”
“Then I won’t go! You can teach me everything.”
Val considers, then shakes his head. “No. You have to go to Space Academy. You’d nev
er get a decent job.”
“I don’t want a decent job. I want to do something!”
“Like go to Pluto?”
“Yeah. But how? There’s no ship.”
He looks straight at me. The harsh light bleaches his eyes to the palest blue, like the Moon in a daytime sky. “Oh, that’s right. Lost in the sun. I never could keep those 3-Vids straight.”
His words are like our own secret code. Of course Val Thorsten would never let the Valadium Thruster fall into the sun! Not that ship!
Hide everything! That was the plan he and Mom made. I didn’t understand before. He meant the Valadium Thruster, too! He used the lifeboat as a decoy. He made the last bit of his trip back to Earth in it and left the VT out there somewhere, parked, just like in my wildest dreams.
“You mean—”
“One step at a time, kid.” He silences me. “Let’s get you through Space Academy first.”
I can only nod. Always a surprise. Like when I first met him. I’m back on Pad 12 and he’s thrown open that tiny hatch to unknown adventure again …
About the Author
Michael J. Daley’s career as an author has been inspired by a lifelong love of science, spaceships, and science fiction. He writes his stories on a solar-powered laptop in a five-foot-square tower room. This keeps him well acquainted with the cramped conditions in spaceships! When not traveling among the stars, Daley lives in Westminster, Vermont, with his wife, children’s author Jessie Haas.
All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2007 by Michael J. Daley
Cover design by Jesse Hayes
ISBN: 978-1-4976-3830-3
This edition published in 2014 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.
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