Aboard the Sword of Liberty, the silencing of technology’s pervasive noise meant they were stranded on the furthest, most isolated, most inhospitable reef man had ever ventured toward. Out here, there was nothing that would not kill them, from the implacable vacuum to the impenetrable cold of space. Seeing the SSTOS come to life let many of them release bated breaths they had not even realized they had held.
The last to go aboard, Colonel Henson allowed Commander Torrance to precede him into the shuttle. Nathan placed himself just inside the shuttle’s hatch, ready to close it and conduct his door check. Henson stood at the threshold, halfway in the destroyer, halfway aboard their forlorn lifeboat. He looked wistfully at the ship. “One month. I’ll see you in a month … I promise,” he said, his voice a whisper.
He turned and pulled himself into the SSTOS. “XO, is everyone aboard?”
“Yes, sir. LCDR Oneida and Major Keller are in the cockpit, and Ms. Muñoz is back aft, completing the reactor and engine checks.” Torrance began putting on his five-point harness, settling in.
Henson pulled himself forward, drifting to his own seat next to the XO. “Very well. Mr. Kelley, if you would get the hatch, plea—”
The hatch, firmly shutting on his request, gave him pause. He turned around, just as everyone else began to crane around in their seats to get a look. Nathan Kelley had indeed shut the hatch to the shuttle.
Except that he was on the outside of it.
A horrible possibility suddenly dawned on the colonel, and he jumped off and flew to the hatch. He tried the auto release, but it would not work. Fumbling with the manual release cover, he opened it to find that the operating mechanism had been removed. The colonel growled in betrayal.
Henson spun around to glare at Torrance. “You said Muñoz was aboard? She’s back aft?”
“Yes, sir! I saw her go back there myself.”
“Is there another hatch back aft?”
He had his answer when the XO went pale and began fumbling to release his harness. Henson cursed and jetted himself into the cabin and then flew up onto the flight deck. He jerked open the door and stared at the pilot and co-pilot in the cockpit, going over their checklists. “Oneida! Do you have controls? Is your board up?”
The pilot looked confused and turned to his panel. He flipped a few switches, and tapped a few keys, but nothing seemed to happen. “That’s funny. It was working a minute ago . . . .”
“Damn it! Get it back online! Do whatever you have to.” Henson turned and flew back into the main cabin, just as the XO emerged from his trip into the shuttle’s small engineering space.
Torrance looked as if he did not know whether to be sick or to throw a fit. “She’s gone and the aft emergency hatch has been disabled.”
Henson growled and sought out his Chief Engineer among the assembled, strapped-down crew. “Commander Marcus, did you actually see any of the meteor damage? Any at all?”
The Navy astronaut looked around at his men and then shrugged, embarrassed. “Well, no, sir. The cameras were offline and the doors to that section were sealed for a vacuum and rad hazard. I thought we would at least do an EVA and survey, but the Muñoz woman said there wasn’t enough time. We had orders to spend the time shutting down and evacuating.”
“Good god, I’m an idiot.” Henson ran a hand over his face. Everyone else in the cabin stared at him, unsure of what to do, of what to say.
Pilot Oneida’s voice called out from the cockpit. “Colonel! You’re going to want to get up here.”
Henson re-entered the cockpit and saw Keller manipulating his controls to absolutely no effect. It was easy to see his fruitless efforts because the lighting in the hangar was fully on, no longer on battery backup. A red flashing light strobed over their heads. The two immense, armored hatches that separated them from the vacuum had each begun pulling away, revealing the stark black of empty space. Ship’s power was restored and the hangar had already been fully evacuated. In a few moments, he felt sure they would be left stranded in space.
Oneida held out a communications headset to his CO. Henson grabbed it and put it over his head, positioning the microphone in front of his mouth. He keyed the mike. “Kelley, this ship was never hit, was it?”
Nathan’s voice came back instantly. “I’m truly sorry, Colonel. Did I neglect to tell you about the rather robust damage control training simulation program the ship has? I really should put that in the next familiarization course.”
“I saw that meteor. I felt it strike the ship.”
“No, you saw a meteor test track overlaid on the actual tactical feed. You felt the engines pulse to provide the tactile simulation of a hit. And then the system closed off the appropriate locks and gave the expected alarms for this type of casualty. If we had gotten partial power restored, I could have even shown you video of the damage. But, no, we were never hit.”
The SSTOS lurched slightly, and Henson saw them float slowly up, out of the hangar and into the infinite void. “Kelley! What the hell do you think you’re doing?”
“I’m doing what I have to do. I’m fulfilling a promise I made to a man who endured the doubts of an entire planet to prepare mankind to defend itself.” The SSTOS cleared the hangar doors, revealing the trapezoidal armor plates of the destroyer’s forward dorsal hull. It looked stark and unreal out there, all alone, without the enveloping protection of the hangar in which it had been born, without the comforting proximity of the Earth’s broad horizon below it.
Nathan’s voice came over the headphones again. “Oh, look, Colonel. You seem to have abandoned your perfectly good ship for no reason at all. I’m afraid I’ll have to claim her as salvage before some ne’er-do-well absconds with her.”
Henson growled in frustration. “You can’t steal back your ship, Kelley. It’s not only petty, it’s treason!”
“I suppose I’ll have to rely on the vindication of history.”
“You have no crew, no shuttle. And what about the ammo and reactor power you expended thus far? I can guarantee you that you won’t be visiting any filling stations between here and the Deltans.”
Nathan’s voice was vaguely disappointed in response. “Let’s try to proceed on the assumption that I’m not a complete idiot, okay? This ship is fully stocked and has enough reactor power and delta-v for four years of continuous operation. As for the ammo and crew, trust me. I won’t be going off half-cocked or ill-prepared.”
Colonel Calvin Henson screamed with rage. Oneida and Keller stared at him, joined by Commander Torrance who appeared behind the CO to stare agog at the blackness of space surrounding them. Henson gripped the mike, as if to force his words into the instrument and through the ether. “What gives you the right, Nathan? What makes you think you’re entitled to first contact? What makes you believe you can do it better than we can?”
There was a long pause. Then, “I suppose it’s faith, faith in someone who had faith in me, faith that I’ve been tried in the crucible once already, and I’m tempered for whatever comes next.”
Below them, the Sword of Liberty began to pull away, acceleration building quickly to a full g. The wedge of the forward hull moved forward, followed by the dully glowing radiator panels laid out in front of the reactor vessel, and then the brilliant blue thrust of the photonic drive, boiling away with corpuscles of light so intense they seemed to be physical objects in and of themselves.
Nathan’s voice called back over the increasingly widening gulf. “Your controls should unfreeze in the next thirty minutes. Then, just follow the recorded flight plan to Earth and reentry. You should be there in about three days. Farewell, Colonel. Don’t take this personally, please. I hope to see you in command of the next Sword when we get back from our mission. You deserve one of these.