“And I say we go now!”
They were sitting in the satellite station’s tiny mess hall, which also served as a conference room. There were only four tables in the cramped metal-walled room. At this time of night, the other three were empty.
Sitting around the table with Alec were Kobol, Ron Jameson, and Bernard Harvey. Jameson was one of the few real military men of the settlement, an expert in weapons and tactics who had been a twenty-year-old soldier on duty at the lunar settlement when the sky burned. He had gone Earthside on every expedition since then, and now served as the commander’s chief aide, the man who translated strategy into order to the men. He was tall, utterly calm, flat-stomached, with unflinching gray eyes set in a hawk-nosed, hunter’s lean face. A hard man to panic. Harvey was a round, soft-faced, balding Councilor who would return to the settlement as soon as the expedition touched Earthside.
“But the schedule,” Harvey objected, “calls for your leaving three weeks from now.”
Kobol steepled his fingers in front of his face, hiding his mouth. “That’s when the spring rains will be over and the ground dried out,” he said. “Travel across country will be a lot easier then.”
Alec said, “If we land at the airport we’ll only have to travel a couple of kilometers, over paved roadway. We can be in and out overnight.”
“But your own battle plan...”
“Ron, what do the pilots say?” Alec asked Jameson.
“They’d prefer the airport,” he said in his easy drawl. “We’ve put the high-mag ‘scopes on the airfield every time since you suggested it. Runways are in a sorry state, but there’s plenty room for both shuttles. It’d be a lot better than trying to land in open country.”
“The shuttles will be sitting ducks at the airfield,” Kobol said. “That’s how we lost the last one, at an airfield.”
“Any sign of barbarian bands around the airfield?”
Jameson shook his head.
Tapping the table with a forefinger to make his points, Alec said, “The spring rainstorms keep the natives holed up, prevent them from travelling. In another three weeks those forests down there will be teeming with them and we’ll have to fight our way into Oak Ridge and back out again. Right now the only natives who could be there are the locals, who aren’t much of a threat. And no matter where we land the shuttles, they’re going to be vulnerable.”
Kobol looked impassive; Harvey upset.
“If we go now,” Alec insisted, “land at the airport, we can have the entire mission accomplished in two days, max. Before any barbarian hordes have had time to mass and reach us.”
“But that’s not the way the mission was planned,” Harvey pleaded. “It’s your own plan! The Council...”
“The Council gave me command. My decision is that we go now. Tomorrow, if possible. The next day at the latest.”
“It’s a mistake,” Kobol said flatly.
“Maybe,” Alec countered. “But it’s my mistake.”
They sat there under the bluish fluorescent light panels of the ceiling for a silent few moments.
“All right,” Alec said. “That’s it. Ron, please get the men ready for boarding as soon as possible. Inform the pilots and maintenance crews.”
Jameson nodded.
Turning to Harvey, Alec said, “You can report this back to the Council, if you want to.”
Visibly sweating, the Councilor said, “I guess I’ll have to.”
Alec got up from his chair, nodded to them, and walked out of the mess hall. The station’s main corridor was dimmed down for night. As he walked through the shadows to his own compartment, Alec told himself, At least I won’t have to see her anymore.
It took two days.
Two days of checking out the weapons, the communications gear, the food and clothing they would need. Two days of carefully observing the weather patterns across North America and predicting that the Oak Ridge area would be dry and clear. Two days of frenetic calls back and forth from the satellite station to the lunar settlement. Men who thought they had three weeks suddenly telescoping their homeward conversations into forty-eight hours. Questions from the Council. Technical data from the settlement’s main computers to the station’s.
Two days of innoculations and medical checks. Alec put off his final medical exam until the last possible moment. Lenore was all business with him, impersonal, clinical. Except as he got up to leave, she said calmly, “Good luck, Alec.”
He mumbled a thank you and hurried out of the infirmary.
They filed into the two shuttles, fifty men and four pilots glide-walking through the narrow access tunnels that connected the station’s hub to the waiting shuttles’ hatches. The pilots went in first, in their usual blue coveralls. Then came the troops, looking weirdly out of place in olive drab uniforms and metal helmets, with bulky packs on their backs and slung weapons poking awkwardly. They shuffled uncertainly through the tunnels, hands outstretched so that their fingertips could touch the fabric-covered walls for balance.
Alec hovered at the station’s main hatch and watched his men as they passed him, silent and grim-faced. The only sound was the occasional clink of metal or plastic, the shuffling of booted feet. When the last of them had disappeared into the tunnel, Alec pushed himself in, made his way through and stepped into the shuttle.
Two dozen men were strapping themselves into their seats. Packs and weapons were unslung and stowed in the special compartments overhead. Alec stood at the hatch for a moment. He had inspected the shuttles a dozen times over the previous weeks, but this was the first time he’d seen one occupied since they had arrived at the satellite station. The usual odors of lubricants and plastic and ozone were overwhelmed now by the smell of human sweat and gun oil. As he made his way up to the empty double seat at the front of the passenger compartment, Alec realized with a pang just how old the shuttles were. The plastic flooring was worn thin, the metal walls so scratched that they were starting to look almost polished. The shuttles had been built long before the sky burned, and kept in repair by the lunar engineers with a tenderness that approached blind religious faith.
Our link with Earth, Alec knew. And our only link back home again.
As he stopped in the aisle beside the seat and slipped off his own bulky pack, Alec wondered if he should say anything to his men. Many of them would have preferred Kobol’s leadership to his own, he knew. Many of them resented, even questioned, his speed-up of the mission schedule.
“With any luck at all,” he said, loudly enough to make them jerk with surprise, halt their whispered conversations, and look up at him.
“With any luck at all,” Alec repeated, “we’ll all be back aboard this bucket in thirty-six hours or less. That’s why I speeded up the schedule... so we could all make it back, quick and safe.”
They grinned, they nodded. They returned to their buzzing conversations, but it was brighter now, looser. Alec sat down and strapped in.
“Separation in five minutes,” said the pilot’s voice over the intercom. “Ignition in seven minutes.”
