The African unification wars were going badly for all sides.
He had been enjoying the flying, coming back from a run over territory that had been cleared as friendly. He was not paying any attention to anything in particular when an antique Russian heatseeking SAM leaped away from a crag below and homed in on his wingman. He cued his mike. “Bravo, Alpha, looks like you’ve picked up a hitchhiker.”
A laconic reply. “I got him.” The jet next to him hit afterburners and rocketed upward, trailing flame. The missile, outclassed, fell away and then curved off to crash somewhere distant in the African twilight.
By luck, Radkowski had been looking in the right direction and had gotten a good fix on the hilltop the missile had come from. He made a wide turn and came back around and down, holding close to the treetops and then pulling up into position to rake the mountaintop with cannon fire. He cued his mike. “I’m gonna teach the bastards a brief lesson,” he said.
“Teach ’em good, Radko,” his wingman replied.
Only at the last minute did he see the face in his sights, a boy who could not have been any older than nine, frightened and alone, the empty missile launcher discarded at his feet. And then his cannon fire blew apart the hilltop, and the face disappeared into smoke and rock dust.
The face continued to haunt his nights for years.
After that night, he put in a transfer to fly evacuation transports. It was a lower prestige job, and the word that spread in the fighter squadron was that he’d lost his nerve. Nobody said that to his face, though.
Flying evacuation was better. He could at least pretend that he was helping people, ferrying endless planeloads of refugees, pencil-thin and nearly naked, each one carrying all of their belongings held wrapped up in a cloth or in a molded plastic basket balanced precariously on his head. The refugee camps outside Bangalore were not paradise, but they were better than the war zone. He could tell himself that he was saving lives.
It was no safer than flying fighters, and already he had been hit twice. The first one was a lucky rifle shot from the ground that had penetrated the transport’s sheet-metal skin right between his feet and ricocheted around the cabin. It had shattered the glass on his instruments, but done no actual damage. The second hit was from a surface-to-air missile that had detonated close enough to rip his right aileron to shreds. Despite the loss of control, he had babied the transport down to a flawless landing right on the numbers at the Diego Garcia airfield. After that, with no injuries from either hit, his ground crew started called him by a new nickname: Lucky Radkowski.
The third time he was not so lucky. Taking advantage of heavy cloud cover to hide from watching satellites, the Splinter faction of the Unification Army had set up an antiaircraft battery on the coast, in the mistaken belief that the evacuation transports were French bombers supporting the rebel Ugandan Liberation Front. The evacuation fleet flew right over it. Stoddart, on his left, took a hit dead center. Ritchmann, on his right, took fire that ripped off his left wing, and fell, in pieces, to the beach. Radkowski’s luck still held. The first SAM hit took out his outboard left engine and half his fuel. The second took out both his right engines.
Leaking oil and fuel, there was no way he could make the base at Diego Garcia on his one remaining engine. He broke radio silence—little point in it, now. “November seven two niner to base, two niner to base. Mayday, Mayday, Mayday. I’m hit.”
“Copy, November seven two niner. Can you make it as far as Mahajanga?”
“Will try.” He checked the charts, although he had memorized them long ago. Madagascar, if not friendly territory, at least was noncombatant.
He coaxed the damaged bird as far as he could, but even Madagascar turned out to be too much to hope. He ditched over open ocean.
The last thing he remembered, as the dark water came up like a fist to meet the airplane, was a fierce joy. It is over, he thought. My debt is paid. And then, immediately after, he remembered the refugees he was carrying, and thought, no! They have nobody. For he shall give his angels charge over thee, he thought, to keep thee in all thy ways.
And then the water hit, and the airplane broke apart and sank.
Later, they said he was a hero. They said that he saved half the refugees.
He had been clinging to a shred of floating wreckage for over five hours when the rescue helicopter pulled him out of the water, in shock, bleeding, and semiconscious from blood loss and exposure. A shark had bitten off half his hand, and then apparently found other food in the wreckage. He didn’t even remember it.
Post-traumatic amnesia, the medical examiners told him. Don’t worry about it. Maybe the memories would surface later.
Maybe they wouldn’t.
He had already been accepted into the astronaut corps. The evacuation had been his last mission in Africa.
27
Station T-r-e-v
Hello, Earth! Hello, stompers and rats and all the hominid life-forms on that big fuzzy ball we call home. This is Trevor Whitman, station T-R-E-V, your intrepid reporter, calling in from the pink planet, Mars.
“This is taped, but Commander Radkowski assures me that he’ll put it up to play to Earth over the low-gain antenna overnight, so you’ll be hearing this tomorrow, I guess. Anyway, tomorrow our time, that is!
“I’m sure you’re all watching our epic trek across the red desert back there. Mars is after us big time, but we’re not dead yet. I’m reporting in That we’ve got a tough goal of a hundred and fifty miles to cover on day one of our epic adventure, and we’re raring to get going.
“Uh, I guess Commander Radkowski has told you that we’re not going to be receiving your broadcasts once we start moving, so I won’t be answering mail this time. Something to do with the high-gain antenna back at the Don Quijote. I don’t know the technical stuff; I guess the commander told you all that stuff anyway, right? I have to admit here that I guess I sort of slept through some of the lectures about communications links and bandwidth and all that techno stuff. Anyway, I’m not receiving right now, but just keep those questions coming, right, and I guess they’ll forward them on to me when we get the communications from Earth back up.
“Uh, it’s been a great trip so far—I can tell you that for certain, once we get moving we are going to be seeing more of Mars than any other humans in history. I mean, that’s going to be some kind of record. It’s real big, there’s a lot of Mars to see, and they tell me just wait, it gets better.
“So stay tuned, okay? Don’t forget about us up here.
“So this is Trevor Whitman, your main man on Mars, signing off.
“Bye, Earth!
“Okay, that’s it. Okay, Earth? Mission control? Is there a mission control out there? Okay, don’t broadcast this part, okay? Look, things out here aren’t real good. I don’t know, but I think we’re in trouble. We need a rescue ship here, okay? Look, the commander tells me that it’s impossible, there isn’t enough time, but don’t listen to him, okay? Just send a rescue ship. We need a rescue ship. I don’t believe it when he says you won’t do it. Look, we’re going to die up here, and that’s going to be, like, major bad publicity, and you can count on that. Big-time bad publicity. So send help.
“Send help.
“Help.
“Please?”
PART TWO
Estrela Conselheiro
The destruction and abandonment of the ship was no sudden shock. The disaster had been looming ahead for many months, and I had studied my plans for all contingencies a hundred times…The task now was to secure the safety of the party, and to that I must bend my energies and mental powers and apply every bit of knowledge that experience of the Antarctic had given me. The task was likely to be long and strenuous, and an ordered mind and a clear program were essential if we were to come through without loss of life…