CHAPTER
12
Ashton watched
Wentz’s progress through the range-finder. She clenched a moment,
grit her teeth, then shuddered as she reached for another
time-released Duramorph. Until recently, she’d been able to control
the pain fairly well but now it was just getting worse. Though the
doctors recommended higher doses, Ashton wouldn’t hear of
it. I’m not going to turn myself into a
junkie, she
vowed to herself.
The drug kicked
in, lifting her. By now, Wentz was out of radio range, and by the
time she’d composed herself and refocused the
range-finder…
“Damn
it.”
Wentz had
already climbed over the edge of the ridge.
««—»»
Wentz’s mind
was strangely blank as he climbed onto the second OEV, opened the
top-hatch, and lowered himself into the air-lock. The hatch sealed
shut above his head and then the chamber decompressed with a
familiar swoosh.
Only when he
stepped through the egress was he able to think,
Somebody’s got
some explaining to do…
He stepped into
the cabin, then hit the slidelocks and removed his helmet. The
flight seats were empty, but before he could turn around—
“It’s…Wentz,
isn’t it? 41st Test Wing out at Andrews?” a voice queried behind
him. “I saw you fly the upgraded 16s at the Paris Air Show in
88—damn good flying.”
Stifled, Wentz
turned around.
“Welcome to the
Tharsus Bulge, Wentz,” the voice continued. “My name is—”
Wentz could
only stare. He already knew. “You’re Willard Farrington, U.S.
Marine Corp,” he croaked. A pause stretched through the cabin.
“Operator ‘A.’”
The man looked
haggard in his S-4 white jumpsuit as he lay on a fold-down strap
bunk. An unkempt beard, trace specks of hair cropping up around the
sides of a bald head. Opened packages of MRE’s lay like litter
about the bunk.
“They told me
you were dead,” Wentz said flatly. “They told me there was only one
of these things.”
“They told you
a lot of stuff—most of it was a lie.” Farrington leaned up in the
bunk. He seemed exhausted, or in pain. “What do you expect from the
military? You know the game. But— congratulations, Wentz. You
earned the ultimate prize, fair and square.”
“What do you
mean?”
“You
truly are the best pilot in the world.”
“No I’m not,
sir. You are.”
Farrington
chuckled. “The best pilot in the world doesn’t
crash his kite, especially when it’s an operational
alien spacecraft.”
“You crashed?
Here?” Wentz was incredulous.
“I sure as shit
did,” Farrington admitted. “Don’t that beat all, with all the
nape-of-the-earth training we get? I came in too low over the first
rise, smacked my six right into the ridge and belly-landed here.
Still got air and climate-control but—” Farrington pointed toward
the detent panels. “No power. All prop systems are
deadlined.”
He wrecked, Wentz realized. “When?”
Farrington
shrugged. “About eight weeks ago. That’s how long I’ve been sitting
here.” Another chuckle. “Can you imagine how pissed off Rainier was
when he got the news that I trashed his UFO? Fuck. I feel like the
biggest asshole in the history of aviation. I make that meat-head
who cracked up his B-2 bomber look like Chuck Yeager.”
“You can come
back with us,” Wentz blurted at the news. “There’s enough
room.”
“You still
don’t get it, do you? Let me guess. They probably gave you some
line about how they identified the virus from intercepted data
transmissions or something.”
“Yeah… We knew
but the Russians and the Japanese didn’t because their analysis
technology isn’t as good as ours.”
“Um-hmm.
Typical military bullshit. The only thing they knew from the jacked
data was that there was live bacteria on the ridge. So they sent me
up here to get samples. I’m the one who found out it was a virus, and I found
out the hard way…”
Farrington
pulled up his sleeves: splotches showed on his arms like a
glittery, wet rash.
“You’re…infected?” Wentz asked.
“That’s right.
And so are you—the second you debarked. Look at your
boots.”
Wentz looked
down at his EVA boots; they were covered with similar glittery
splotches.
“A molecular
osmotic is what they call it,” Farrington continued. “It goes
through anything, it goes right through your suit on contact by
squeezing through the space between the molecules but won’t cause
your suit to lose its pressure. It invades living cells and
inorganic molecules as well. Hell, it even goes through the
hull—”
Then Farrington
pointed to the floor, where thin, crisscrossing lines of the wet
glitter shined.
Wentz was
appalled. “They sent me up here knowing I’d get infected!”
“Yeah. But this
stuff could kill everyone on earth. What choice did they
have?”
“No,
what right did they have to send me to my death?” Wentz
shouted.
Farrington
frowned. “Put a lid on it, will you? Every time we climb into a
cockpit we know we could die. It’s part of the job. Hell, I’d have
destroyed the probe myself but the EVA suits only have a hundred
and twenty minutes of life-support. By the time their analysis
determined that the shit up here was a deadly virus, my EVA gear
was out of air. I couldn’t make any more debarkations. I was
trapped inside this tin can.”
Wentz struggled
to let the information sift in between his
outrage.
“The QSR4
collector had to be destroyed. I no longer had the ability to
unass this fuckin’ crate and do it myself, so they determined that
you were the best bet to get the second OEV up here
successfully.”
“Those lying
sons of bitches!” Wentz railed.
“Give it a
rest, man. We’ve flown in wars, we’ve flown in planes that no one
else in world has the rocks to fly. Risk is part of our duty.
You knew that the minute you made your first test flight. So quit
bellyaching. Quit acting like a little kid and start acting like
what you are.”
Wentz scowled.
“What’s that? A chump? What else am I but an Air Force
sucker?”
“You’re the
best in the business,” Farrington said. “You’re the best to ever
fly—you’re even better than me.”
Wentz just
looked at him. Was there a tear in Farrington’s
eye?
“You are Operator ‘A’ now,” Farrington
said.
Wentz stood
forlorn, eyes in a daze. Eventually the reality cracked him in the
face. “How long…have I got?”
“I don’t know.
I’ve been here close to two months and I’m fading. Heartbeat’s
fucking up, dizzy spells, fever. Give yourself three months
max.”
Wentz gulped,
nodded.
“Jill’s with
you, right?”
“Yeah.”
“She tell you
she’s dying?”
“Yeah,” Wentz
said.
“She can handle
this… But can you?”
“I think so,”
Wentz felt strong enough to say.
“Don’t think
about your family,” Farrington added. “That just makes it worse.
You’ll want to kill yourself, which is what I almost did. Just
think of it this way: you did it for them.”
Wentz continued
nodding. “Come with us,” he offered. “I’ll go back to my ship, get
the second EVA suit, and bring it to you.”
“Naw, I’m a
loner, you know? Always have been. I’ve got more specs to pipe back
to earth. The apogee’s only optimal seventeen minutes a day. And
they pipe back ESPN for me, gives me a chance to catch the ball
scores.”
Wentz smiled.
“Yankees man?”
“Hell no. Orioles. The only team that
matters.”
“Marines, what
can I say? They’re all fucked up.”
Farrington
laughed. “Hey, and tell Jill I said hi.”
“I
will…”
Farrington
swung his feet off the bunk, coughed hard, then began to get
up—
“Don’t, sir,”
Wentz said.
“Fuck it.”
Farrington, after considerable effort, stood up straight. “At least
you’re not Navy. But I always knew there was some punk out there
who was a better pilot than me.”
“Sir, I’m not
better than you by any stretch of the imagination.”
Farrington
grinned. “Yeah. Maybe you’re right. Guess we’ll never really know,
will we?”
“Guess not,
sir.”
Farrington
saluted; Wentz saluted back. Then Farrington extended his
surgically-altered three-fingered right hand. Wentz awkwardly shook
it with his own gloved hand.
“It’s been an
honor to meet you,” Wentz said.
“Get the hell
out of here,” Farrington said. “And blow that piece of shit probe
right the fuck up.”
“With
pleasure.”
Wentz put his
helmet back on, recharged his pressure, then entered the air-lock
to exit the craft.
««—»»
He set the
pyrotechnic timer—the last thing to do—then trod back to his OEV.
He took one long last gaze at the planet’s desolate surface, then
turned just in time to see the QRS4 collector explode spectacularly
in dead silence. Brass-colored dust erupted, a twisted mushroom
cloud in the near-vacuum conditions and, via the explosive’s
design, the debris shot upward in a straight
plume.
So much for that, Wentz thought.
When the dust
cleared, nothing at all remained.