Nauvoo Vision, en route to Saint George, New Utah, 3035

Ship’s time, it was well past midnight. Reuben Fox padded silently through the empty corridor. The Delegation all slept like exhausted children, thanks to a generous dollop of melatonin in their evening nightcaps. “It’s a Mormon Tea,” he’d said, passing around the steaming cups, “No caffeine. Help you sleep like babies before we descend tomorrow.”

And indeed they did. He stopped before a door just outside the cargo bay, marked only by a small plate that read “Maintenance Access.” He tapped softly. Barely a tap, even. More like stroking the door with his fingertips. It opened, silently. “Twenty minutes to Fling,” he murmured. Asach Quinn nodded, stepped into the corridor, satchel in one hand, a sealed hard case in the other. Fox pulled the door shut noiselessly, and led the way.

Inside the cargo bay, they skirted two enormous, white, blunt-nosed cylinders cradled in Fling racks. Each bore a square red cross, half-encircled by a bright red crescent. They stopped at a double-walled safety lock beside the bay door. Quinn knelt on the floor, and unlocked the case. Three objects were lodged in form-fitting impact foam inside. The first was cylindrical, the size of a man’s fist, with several fittings around a collar at one end. The second was a spider of tubing, laced through a solid tubular framework with quick-connectors at either end and couplings at the ends of each hose. Third, there was a sphere, small enough to be enclosed by a woman’s hands cupped fingertip-to-fingertip, made of a tough, flexible composite compound.

Asach locked one end of the frame to the cylinder, then dogged a set of couplings to the collar fittings. Next, from the satchel came a tough, turgid, multi-celled, doughnut-shaped bladder, with more fittings ringing one base. Asach slipped it over the hose assembly, fitting side away from the cylinder, dogged down the other end of the hose couplings, and snapped the sphere to the top end of the frame. The whole thing—sphere, upon toroid surrounding the frame assembly, upon cylinder—was little longer than the distance from Asach’s elbow to wrist, and light enough to lift easily with one hand.

Fox tapped a code sequence, then pressed his thumb into the pad beside the safety lock. The door slid open. Coils of retractable lifeline were stowed neatly at four anchor points on the inner walls; it was otherwise empty. Asach slid the assembled contraption inside. It fit, just. Fox closed the door with another key sequence. It was still air-filled; still pressurized. It would not be for much longer.

A disembodied voice echoed in the quiet. “Commander Fox?”

“Present.”

“Cargo Bay cycle commencing, 60 seconds. Clear, or abort?”

“Clearing.”

“Aye-aye, sir. Clear to commence in fifty-nine. Fifty-eight. Fifty-seven…”

It took only a few moments to traverse the bay, exit the hold, and seal the door. Fox remained at the view panel. The faint hum as air was sucked from the bay and recompressed somewhere in the bowels of the ship was audible for a few moments, then faded as the hold neared vacuum. The fling racks began sliding along their rails. The bay doors opened to space. A few stars glittered. Most were obscured by the Coal Sack.

Fox put the readout on audio. “…Three. Two. One. Cargo Bay cycle complete. Commencing Fling sequence. Fling in F minus…”

The rail extender arms rolled the medical supply canisters out the doors, injected them into the Flinger, then folded back inside. The bay doors closed. The faint thrum of the charging Flinger pulsed through the hull.

“…Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

The ship shuddered slightly as the linear accelerator shoved twenty tons of medical supplies toward the Sorting Station in the Oquirrh foothills outside Saint George on New Utah. As Nauvoo Vision slowed and prepared to drop into geosynchronous orbit, the cannisters would blaze down through the atmosphere, ablating heat from their noses, drogue chutes jerking them to drop to the ground, spilling their contents like Santa’s reindeer making a clumsy chimney-top landing.

And, unnoticed alongside the Flinging, the safety lock cycled. Or rather, failed to cycle. Instead, its outer door merely opened, and the donut with its ball-nose and soda-can tail puffed out into space like so much jetsam. Floating alongside Nauvoo Vision, the assemblage coasted in toward New Utah for awhile. Then, as the medical cargo raced off to its mountain rendezvous, and as the ship dropped into its parking space, the little ball sailed on by itself, a speck, alone with its own thoughts in the vastness.

Its own thoughts were simple. They went something like this:

“…Four. Three. Two. One.”

And then the tiny rocket fired.