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.