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Ezekiel Denham whooped and hollered within his VR world as he and Steadfast Roger burned another cloned engine to a crisp, then dove in like a dolphin ramming a whale to give the next rock a steady five-second shove. With tens of millions of kilometers still to go, that tiny push was sufficient to divert the rock enough to miss Earth.
“Good job, Zeke,” he heard his father’s voice over his bio-radio. “Keep doing that as long as you can, but remember to get out of the way before the asteroid fortresses start firing. You don’t want to take a stray railgun round at those speeds.”
“Got it. Where are you, Dad?” Ezekiel asked.
Minutes passed before the answer came, during which time he knocked a few more rocks off course. “A long way away. You’re probably getting a lot of comm lag. Your mother and the quads are safe on the base, but I’ve got a few things to do to help out the defense.”
“Like what?” he asked, curiosity piqued.
The answer came a few seconds quicker this time, indicating Dad was getting closer, and pretty fast.
“Just like you, son, I’ve got a ship – I am a ship – and I can’t just sit idle while others fight.”
“I get it, Dad. Like when you were a Marine before.”
Of course, Ezekiel was also traveling at a quarter the speed of light in the direction of Earth, so between the two of them they must be closing fast. He wished he could take the time out to fish through all the memory data in Roger, but trying to find out where Dad and the Denham were without any clues would be far too distracting. He put that idea aside for the moment and concentrated on his game of whack-a-rock.
The fusor he’d had Roger create had been his first, but the Meme molecular memory programming made it easy. The only thing that was hard was how fast he was burning through fuel. Even if he wanted to, he wouldn’t have enough gas to stick around much longer before bingo. That was what the fighter jocks called “just enough fuel to get home.”
Ezekiel hoped one day he could be a fighter jock, but for now, this was as close as he would come.
When the next transmission finally came, it seemed his father’s voice filled his head, reverberating through his consciousness. “When you’re done, son, go back to the base and see your mother and the quads. I love you, son, and I’m very proud of you, and of all of them. Make sure you tell them how much I loved them.”
“What? Loved?” Ezekiel answered as if there weren’t a minute’s lag or more. He hadn’t missed the past tense. “What?”
He got no answer.
