As custom dictated, the morning before his launch, Pilot Major Ry Evine walked alone up the steep grassy slope to pay his respects to the gray stone statue of comrade Demitri—the father of the Astronaut Regiment, chief designer of the Silver Sword rocket and Liberty spacecraft, and people’s hero first class. The statue stood atop Arnice’s Peak—a modest hillock that formed the tip of the promontory where Port Jamenk stretched along the steep inclines above the shoreline. Yigulls soared overhead as he walked, squealing loudly, their blue-and-white wings spread wide so they could ride the strong winds from the sea with minimal effort.
Ry reached the plinth of granite slabs that circled the statue, and took his cap off so he could perform the required solemn solitary deliberation, head bowed before Demitri, deep in thought and thanks. Even though the footpaths to the crown had been closed yesterday evening by the town authorities, he knew he wasn’t really alone; there would be watchers from the People’s Security Regiment. The PSR was always watching, always suspicious, always judging. Even him, with his prestigious family ancestry: a direct relation to Slvasta himself, no less. There was no aristocracy on Bienvenido anymore, but he was about as close to the old concept as it was possible to be these days. It meant they’d watched him for all of his twenty-nine years, protectively at first, then with increasing interest as his flight drew near. He no longer cared; it was just another price to pay for being an astronaut, for being able to slip the surly bonds of Bienvenido, and dance defiantly among the shining enemy. Comrade Demitri himself had spoken that phrase the year he died, selflessly saving others from the horrific fuel dump explosion.
He raised his head and for once actually gave the statue a good look. The stone was old, more than two hundred years now. Host to a cloak of dark lichen blooms, those slightly melancholic features—familiar from countless photos and coins—were badly weatherworn, while yigull droppings adorned the head and shoulders. It was hardly the most noble of memorials, but he suspected that comrade Demitri wouldn’t have minded; he was supposedly a humble man, as the truly great always are.
“I won’t fail you,” Ry promised softly. Then he put his cap back on and saluted before turning smartly and striding back down the path.
It was only a couple of hours after dawn, but the air was already muggy, making him sweat in his full dress uniform. Port Jamenk was thirty-five kilometers south of the equator on Lamaran’s eastern coast. Built by the state, its core was a clutter of stone cottages bridging the saddle of land behind Arnice’s Peak. Walls of thick granite blocks were painted white to help ward off the tropical heat, inset with broad shuttered arches to allow the air to flow, and had roofs of red clay tiles crusted in sun-scorched yellow and green lichen. The cobbled roads were awkwardly narrow, roofed by vines and creepers that tangled around drainpipes and overhead power cables. They followed the inclines in zigzags and sharp curves, in contrast with the precise grids favored by most of Bienvenido’s post-Transition towns. But then Port Jamenk was an exception, born out of desperate necessity, its construction decreed by Prime Minister Slvasta himself, 250 years ago. It housed the state engineers and regiment personnel who built and operated Cape Ingmar, Bienvenido’s solitary rocket port. At first little more than dormitory barracks at the end of the new Eastern Equatorial Railway Line, it had grown over the centuries as the civilian population had expanded, their licensed enterprises slowly improving the comfort of the rocket port’s workforce.
Ry looked across the jumble of rooftops as the severe sun burned off the wisps of morning mist. Beyond the town, meadowland stretched back along the promontory, where broad fields contained flocks of goats and llamas and ostriches. Farther west, where the promontory merged into the mainland, ramshackle banana and breadfruit plantations covered acres and acres of rumpled ground. They were about the only terrestrial crops that would grow in the poor flinty soil.
Beaches stretched along the bottom of the promontory’s low cliffs, narrow strips of muddy gray sand where the water lapped gently—except for those times when Valatare was in conjunction. Then Bienvenido was subject to tides and hurricanes that the moonless planet had never known back in the Void.
A long curving stone harbor with a lighthouse on the far end protected the deepwater anchorage from those wild times. It had been built for the recovery fleet. Slvasta had commissioned nine big vessels capable of steaming across the Eastath Ocean in any weather so they could reach the splashdown sites, hauling the Liberty command modules out of the water and giving the victorious returning astronaut a well-deserved hero’s welcome.
Today there were only five ships. The oldest had been built seventy-eight years ago, and along with two other senior ships, it was anchored in the middle of the harbor, slowly rusting away. The three of them were mothballed, their fittings and cold engines constantly raided for spares by engineers to support the two operational ships.
General Delores, who commanded the Astronaut Regiment, assured her pilot corps that two was more than enough. These days, the return flight trajectory was known before launch, and reentry was far more precise; there would always be a ship on station to pick them up. But talk around the astronaut mess was that five hours wasn’t outside the norm, with some flights in the last decade waiting three days before a ship arrived.
Ry arrived at the fence at the bottom of Arnice’s Peak. Pilot Major Anala Em Yulei was waiting by the gate, wearing her white Astronaut Regiment dress uniform, chestnut hair tucked neatly into her cap. Her thin face was composed into a neutral expression, which her delicate features transformed to fierce disapproval. People who didn’t know her often assumed she wore a permanent scowl. When she did smile, Ry always had to smile in tandem, because it was such a burst of cheeriness.
They’d known each other for years. Ry had left the cooperative farm in Cham County at eighteen to take a general engineering degree at Varlan University. From there he entered the Air Defense Force flight officer school where Anala was in the class above.
She was from a Gretz family who before the revolution used to hold vast estates specializing in spice crops. That had all been nationalized by the state right after the Great Transition, but they got to keep the ancestral home and some farmland around it. She’d told him the big ancient building had been divided up into apartments where about fifteen branches of the family now lived. Despite all the institutional discrimination against her family legacy, they still had a strong tradition of regimental service. Anala joined up as soon as she finished her aeronautics degree.
After flight school they were posted to different squadrons—her back to Gretz, and him to Portlynn. Two years flying the new four-engine IA-509s on missions against Faller eggs had seen him notch up seven confirmed egg kills as testament to his piloting skill, before he applied to the astronaut academy—like every single pilot in the Air Defense Force always did.
Anala arrived at the academy as part of the same intake. Her small frame was always going to act in her favor, for the Astronaut Regiment didn’t accept anyone over one meter seventy-five, and certainly nobody who weighed in above eighty kilos. Those were the limits for the command module. In his case, some political pressure must have been brought to bear by Democratic Unity officials, who would have recognized the advantage of having someone related to Slvasta qualify as an astronaut.
They’d spent the next six years together in training, learning orbital mechanics, rocket systems engineering, electronics, atomic bomb design, physics, mathematics, astrogation, the entire layout of the Liberty spaceship modules, and the nuclear missile operational margins—so much knowledge was crammed into his head that, even with his phenomenal memory, he suspected his brain must be leaking most of it away again. Then there was the physical side of it: horrible survival training exercises on land and at sea, punishing recurring medical evaluations, endless fitness workouts, the divedown-upchuck flights in a modified transport plane to familiarize them all with free fall, and the endless flight simulations—most utterly boring, and the remainder so terrifyingly realistic he’d thought more than once that he wouldn’t get out alive.
All that they’d gone through together, enduring all the indignity and the strain and worry, the constant paranoid observation by the PSR for loyalty to the Democratic Unity party. And all of it endured because there, at the end, lay the greatest prize in the world: spaceflight. Taking the fight against the Fallers up to the Tree Ring. Six years of solid friendship, then last night they’d slept together.
Astronauts got laid a lot. On a world as devoid of glamour as Bienvenido, astronauts were more famous than even the prime minister. Schoolkids collected playing cards of them, the newspapers and cinema reels idolized them, and the whole planet kept the Liberty tally against the Trees. They were all straight icons, they were all gay icons; people just wanted them any way they could get them, in fantasies or in the flesh. The astronaut office had a whole building in Port Jamenk where two floors of clerks did nothing else but deal with the fan mail from across the planet.
So six years of laughing together, traveling together, attending parties, shared duties, covering each other’s backs against the training inspectors, total companionship, and then—
“I want to offer you a deal,” Anala had said in the middle of a dance at his Commencing Countdown party yesterday evening. They were swirling around gently as the band played old dance tunes. Ry had been hoping for some of the newer faster songs that were becoming fashionable in the cities, but this was Port Jamenk, after all. “I’ll sleep with you tonight if you sleep with me on my countdown night.”
It was a given for an astronaut to have someone (or more than one) sharing their bed the night before a launch. Officially, eighty-nine percent of missions returned—though if you actually did the math, it was more like 80 percent. Then there were the 3 percent of rockets that didn’t make it off the launch pad. And statistics about radiation damage to astronauts’ bodies were never available outside of fearful whispers.
So nobody—not even the PSR—was going to object to astronauts spending their last night having plenty of sex.
Ry had enjoyed that particular benefit of his status during the tedious and numbing publicity and propaganda tours that the astronaut corps were sent on—speaking to factory workers, universities, town halls, party rallies, and regiment headquarters right across the continent. Anala, he knew, wasn’t as promiscuous, though she hadn’t exactly been celibate.
“I…Me? Why?” he stammered in surprise.
“I’m going to want some human contact that night. Same as everyone. I just don’t want it to be some oaf I picked simply because he’s got a hot body and a narnik bong.”
“You can choose anybody. You know that.”
“So can you.” She glanced pointedly around the hall, where there were a lot of amazingly pretty girls in very small dresses waiting impatiently around the dance floor. “Most of these babes haven’t even got a Port Jamenk permit; Giu alone knows how they got past security at the station.”
He grinned. Port Jamenk was a closed area, only open to state-approved residents and visitors. “I guess our species can be just as determined as the Fallers.”
“Yeah. So?”
Ry didn’t even have to think about it. “I’d like that,” he said quietly.
She nuzzled up close. “We don’t have to have the sex, not if you don’t want. I know a lot of astronauts are too tense, or drunk, or tired to actu—”
He kissed her. “Oh, yes, we do.”
Anala now opened the gate in the fence and saluted. Ry grinned back at her. When he woke up that morning, there’d been a moment when he worried that they’d be self-conscious around each other; that too much had changed. But actually being with a friend—someone who understood—on countdown night had been perfect. It didn’t hurt that six years of intense physical training had made them as fit as marathon athletes, either.
“Respects paid, Major?” she asked in a formal voice.
Ry glanced at the escort group around her. Three astronaut trainees from their own squad, two medical technicians, five reporters, two newsfilm camera operators, and Colonel Eades, a three-flight veteran. An experienced astronaut always mentored a rookie on their first flight.
“Indeed.” He looked back up at the gray statue. “I think our father Demitri is smiling upon this launch.”
The group walked through Port Jamenk’s convoluted streets to the town’s small railway station. Bunting from the Fireyear celebration was still strung over the main street. There were few people about, though some had made the effort to gather along the route to quietly wish him luck. Fishermen on the way to their state-licensed boats stopped and applauded. When he looked out across the harbor, both the recovery ships were steaming away toward the horizon. He didn’t say anything, but knew all the astronauts were thinking the same thing. At least they both made it out of the harbor.
The train in the station had a single passenger carriage—the same one that took comrade Reshard, Bienvenido’s first astronaut, on his momentous journey to the launch pad for the Liberty 1 flight. Refurbished many times, but still operational. Astronauts could be a conservative, superstitious bunch.
In the carriage it was just Ry, Anala, Colonel Eades, and the medical techs. Ry sat down in Reshard’s chair and took his uniform jacket off. The techs immediately wrapped a rubber cuff around his arm and took his blood pressure. A thermometer was stuck in his mouth. He was given a small bottle and told to give them a sample as soon as he could.
“I trust you didn’t overdo it last night,” the colonel said.
“No, sir.”
Anala was staring solidly out the window as the steam engine let out a whistle and the pistons started to pump. The train pulled away from the platform.
“Good man. Glad you haven’t forgotten your duty. Bienvenido comes before any personal indulgence. There’ll be plenty of time for that when you come back. Giu, I remember my triumph parades. If you thought the girls were enthusiastic last night, you ain’t seen nothing yet.” He slapped Ry’s leg.
Ry gave Eades an embarrassed smile.
The train rattled along the track to Cape Ingmar, a raised stone-walled embankment that ran parallel to the coast a couple of kilometers inland. Outside, the ground was mainly jugobush swamp that had an ever-shifting boundary with the sea as gritty silt and vigorous fronds constantly pushed outward, only to be washed back again. There were no settlements here; this land was too difficult to ever tame and farm. Nor were there any fishing villages. The swamp covered river inlets and possible harbors.
The only sign of life was a village of Vatni huts—long cylinders woven from dried jugobush branches, looking like some kind of exposed tunnel network. The aliens from Aqueous had slowly spread their family enclaves along Lamaran’s coastlines since their arrival two and a half centuries ago, during the brief time Laura Brandt had opened a wormhole to their world. Some people muttered about their expanding population being as bad as a Faller incursion, but Ry knew that was stupid paranoia. They were semi-aquatic; they didn’t covet land. Besides, it was Slvasta himself who had negotiated the deal, allowing them new settlements on Bienvenido in exchange for protection. They had become invaluable in guarding the coastal waters from marine-Fallers. Eggs fell constantly into Bienvenido’s oceans, where they eggsumed larger, more aggressive species of fish. Crewing a trawler, and even some of the smaller commercial boats, was a hazardous profession. But since the Vatni arrived and began patrolling along the coast, that risk had reduced considerably.
To the west, the imposing Salalsav Mountains rose out of the horizon, snow sparkling on their upper slopes. The high range shielded the Desert of Bone from the clouds coming in off the ocean. Not even the post-Transition conjunction storms could break through their guard. Rain hadn’t fallen on that desert for thousands of years.
Looking at the jagged pinnacles, he thought of his brief time on the edge of the desert. Astronauts underwent two weeks of desert survival training just in case they came down in one. Afterward, Ry decided he’d prefer a leaking command module adrift in the ocean to that.
The train whistled again as the raised track began to follow the coastal curve eastward and start up a shallow incline. Ry and Anala stared out of the window. Cape Ingmar was a sight Ry knew he could never possibly tire of. The Cape itself was an oval of land protruding out from the low swamps, like a plateau that had never managed to rise more than thirty meters up from sea level. But its 190 square kilometers of scrub wasteland just south of the equator made it the perfect launch site.
The five assembly buildings occupied the neck of the Cape—massive metal hangars painted white to reflect the heat, with huge electrical air cooler boxes along the walls. A clutter of administration and engineering buildings, equally white with silvered windows, were huddled in their shadow. The flight control center out in front was a three-story cylinder of white marble, topped by big radar dishes and smaller radio aerial towers. The two basement levels were full of electrical computators that would guide his Liberty spacecraft up to the Tree Ring, and back again.
Dominating the eastern side of the rocket port were the eight launch pads. Big circles of concrete surrounding the deep blast pits, smothered in iron gantries. Seven of them were currently inactive, the gantry towers lying horizontally on their support columns as they underwent routine maintenance and refurbishment. But the eighth—
Ry couldn’t help the sigh of satisfaction as he saw the Silver Sword rocket standing proud against the burning azure sky. It stood fifty meters high, including the escape rocket at the top. The four first-stage boosters were matte gray, clustering around the core stage. The third stage was a three-meter-diameter cylinder standing on a simple truss segment above the core, its insulation foam snow white, protecting the cryogenic propellant tanks from the brutal sunlight. (Even then, the rocket was only ever fueled at night when the air was cooler.) Above that was the silver shroud, its aerodynamic segments encasing the Liberty spacecraft he was going to be riding tomorrow. Perched on top of the shroud was the spindly solid-fuel escape rocket.
Most of the Silver Sword was obscured by the four gantry towers that had levered up to clamp the fuselage and connect it to dozens of umbilical lines and fuel pipes. Hydraulic access platforms were extended all the way up, and he could see technicians crouched beside inspection hatches, running final tests.
“Now, that is something beautiful,” Ry murmured.
“Certainly is,” Anala agreed. “And it’s all yours.”
“You get the next one.” Pilot assignments were made fifteen flights in advance, allowing mission-specific training.
“Six weeks,” she replied wistfully. “It’s going to seem like forever.”
The train pulled up at Cape Ingmar’s solitary passenger platform. General Delores was waiting under the awning, heading the welcome committee of more officers and flight-veteran astronauts, several People’s Congress representatives, more reporters, more photographers, and more newsfilm cameras. Ry put his jacket and cap back on, let Anala straighten them, and gave her a quick kiss when Eades wasn’t looking. “I don’t want to wait six weeks,” he said.
Her grin was enigmatic, but promising. “Me neither. So make sure you come back.”
“Deal.”
The carriage door opened. Ry stepped out and saluted the general amid the clicking of cameras and loud applause. The general formally presented him his mission badge—a platinum Liberty craft with a C-curve of exhaust wrapping around the planet, number 2,673.
With 2,672 Liberty missions already completed over the last 250 years, the launch procedure at Cape Ingmar was now utterly rigid. There were no variables, no unknowns, no deviations from the long checklist.
Once his mission badge was pinned onto his uniform, Pilot Major Ry Evine became a piece of Cape Ingmar’s property, a component to be inserted into the Silver Sword rocket when tests and preparations had been completed satisfactorily. There was the final mission briefing, hourly reports on the Silver Sword status, two hours of preflight medical checks, the formal handover of the bomb codes, studying the weather reports for tomorrow morning.
When dusk fell he went out onto the roof of the flight center, where a small telescope had been set up. Trees of the Ring glimmered silver-white along their orbit, fifty thousand kilometers above Bienvenido. Laura Brandt had claimed they looked like stars in the Commonwealth galaxy, where they’d all come from originally. He looked through the eyepiece at his target, Tree 3,788-D. It hung just above the western horizon, magnified by the telescope to a small line of sparkling brilliance, with a hint of color in its radiance.
“I’m coming for you, fucker,” he promised it.
He ate his last meal in the astronaut suite on the second floor of the flight center: fillet steak, sautéed potatoes, grilled tomatoes, tolberry sauce. Chocolate ice cream with cherry sauce for dessert. Half a liter of water—no alcohol this close to the mission. Eades and Anala were his table companions. Talk was all trivia. One last weather report, predicting minimal wind at dawn. Silver Sword progress reports. At six thirty, the third-stage tanks were being chilled ready for fueling with liquid hydrogen and oxygen. First- and core-stage fueling was scheduled to commence in eighty minutes.
Six fifty: He changed into pajamas and entered the bedroom. Lights out, seven o’clock. Authenticated by Colonel Eades, who flicked the switch and shut the door.
Some veterans told the trainees they couldn’t sleep. Others claimed they were so tired by the preflight procedures and their Commencing Countdown festivities they even asked to go to bed early. Ry lay on the bed, staring at the ceiling, convinced he was going to be an awake-all-night guy. There was so much running through his mind, the flight manuals flipping up behind closed eyelids, reviewing everything. Then they faded away to be replaced by Anala—her touch, her warmth, her lithe body writhing energetically against him. He wished there could be an exception about being alone tonight. And if anyone was going to break regulations and sneak in, it would be Anala. But the door remained closed. It was going to be a long night—
Colonel Eades opened the door and switched the light on at three o’clock precisely.
“Flight control has issued a pilot ingress go,” he announced.
Cape Ingmar’s chief medical officer was waiting. Ry extended his hand, and the doctor jabbed his thumb with a needle. A drop of blood welled up.
“Confirmed red,” the doctor reported officially. “Pilot Major Ry Evine is human.” He smiled. “Good luck, Major.”
Fallers had dark-blue blood. There’d never been an attempt by a nest to hijack a Liberty flight in the 250 years of the program, and General Delores was determined there wouldn’t be one on her watch.
Breakfast. Yogurt, then bacon, eggs, toast. Orange juice. Colonel Matej, the mission controller—a five-flight veteran and living legend to the astronaut corps—came in for his briefing. The fueling had been completed during the night; all they were doing now was topping up the tanks. Tracking and communications stations around the planet were online. The recovery ships had reached the splashdown zone, two hundred kilometers east of Cape Ingmar. Weather planes were up, reporting excellent conditions. Two Falls were in progress, neither of which would come close to his projected orbit.
Down a floor to the suit room. The indignity of the fluid waste disposal tube, its tight rubber cap squeezing his cock, bladder sac strapped to his right thigh. Further indignity of the solid waste absorber pants—basically an adult diaper. Medical electrodes were stuck to his chest, a thermometer strapped into his armpit. Then they dressed him in a bright-blue one-piece cotton garment. Over that came the silver pressure suit. Tight gloves. Big bowl helmet, clicked into the metal ring around his neck. Thick flexible air tubes were plugged into the sockets on his chest, leading to a suitcase-sized personal environment module—carried by Colonel Eades as he walked out the door.
People were lining the corridor, applauding. Camera flashbulbs going off. Outside doors opening. The transfer van. Drive to the pad. Rocket and gantries illuminated against the dark predawn sky by powerful arc lights. Ride up the gantry in a cage lift. No nerves. Not yet. Just eagerness. And pride.
Five flight engineers were grinning in welcome. They were used to this. It was nothing special to them, just another spaceflight. Open hatch in the shroud, exposing the smaller circular command module hatch. Ingress: an incredibly difficult gymnastic maneuver while wearing the pressure suit, holding the rail and wiggling in horizontally. But then he was snug in the acceleration couch, looking up at a console wall that was all switches and dials and the orange glow of nixi tube numbers.
The inside of the command module was a simple hemisphere two and a half meters in diameter at the base, most of which was taken up by the controls, instruments, and various lockers. When the Liberty was in free fall, he would have just over two and a half cubic meters of space to move around it. On the ground it was like wearing a coffin, especially for him: one meter eighty-one tall, and eighty-four kilos. This capsule had to have customized fittings, and not even those could mitigate the way his legs were bent up to accommodate his height.
The engineers plugged his air tubes into the command module environmental circuit. Colonel Eades reached in and gave his hand a quick firm shake.
Ry switched on the com circuit.
“Good morning, Liberty two-six-seven-three,” Anala’s voice said in his earphones.
“Good morning, flight com,” Ry replied with a smile. It was comforting to have her as his flight com, and not just because of what had happened between them. Flight com was always the astronaut scheduled for the next flight; the intense shared training over the previous months helped them become familiar with each other, reducing the chances of misunderstanding.
He scanned the console, checking the lights and dials. “Ready to commence pre-launch checklist.”
“Roger that. The flight controller has given a go for hatch closure.”
A hand slapped his helmet, then the hatch, shut.
Ninety minutes spent confirming instrument data, putting switches in the correct position, watching the Liberty systems stabilize. Dawn light started to shine in through the tiny hatch port behind his head.
He became the machine he’d been trained to be: a piloting mechanism. Observing and responding correctly as the tanks were pressurized, the umbilicals withdrawn. Gantry retraction. First-stage booster motors’ turbine ignition. Not even when all twenty rocket motors of the boosters and core stage ignited simultaneously did he take a second out from the procedures.
Liberty mission 2,673 lifted smoothly from the pad as the rocket engines burned four hundred kilograms of liquid oxygen and eleven hundred kilograms of highly refined kerosene every second, delivering a combined thrust of four and a half thousand kilonewtons. Acceleration in the command module reached four gees, shoving Ry down hard into the couch. The instrument console blurred from the vibration and he couldn’t read anything; he just gritted his teeth and concentrated on trying to breathe.
Booster separation came at 120 seconds—a judder that made him yell half in fright, half in delight. Now he started to relax and take in the experience. Thirty seconds later the Liberty shroud split apart, and the segments peeled away from the spaceship amid a vigorous shaking. The guidance computator steered the core’s four small vernier rockets, keeping the trajectory steady, and the Silver Sword continued to power upward for a further 140 seconds until the core stage was exhausted and the third stage ignited. The hydrogen-oxygen rocket produced 250 kilonewtons and burned for a further 270 seconds, putting the Liberty into orbit 225 kilometers above Bienvenido.
Ry Evine finally got to experience real free fall, not just the twenty-second interludes delivered by the divedown-upchuck flights. When he confirmed the Liberty’s systems were all fully operational, he took his helmet off, loosened the acceleration couch’s straps, and looked out of the larger port that had been covered by the shroud. The crescent of the planet glowed brightly below. Ry flicked the safety guards off the Reaction Control System (RCS) joystick, confirmed the system readiness, and tipped the joystick slightly. The Liberty began to roll, responding just like it did in the training simulations. With the third stage still attached it was sluggish, but he turned it so the port on his right was aligned on Bienvenido, all the while checking the spherical flight director attitude indicator as he stabilized the spaceship.
Now he could look down directly. An astonishing amount of glaring white cloud was smeared across the planet. The Eastath Ocean was a deep enticing blue, and so smooth; some astronauts claimed they could see individual waves. The Liberty approached Fanrith’s western coast, and Ry grinned at the coastal outline—silly thought, that it was just like all the maps. He was surprised by how brown the land appeared; this section of Fanrith had plenty of tropical vegetation. He caught sight of rivers, silver veins slicing across the land. At least they were surrounded by the darker hues of vegetation. Farther east was the central desert. He touched two gloved fingers to his forehead in a respectful salute. So many Air Defense Force crews had died defending Bienvenido that day the Prime invaded—thirty-nine planes just from the Portlynn squadron he’d served with during his Air Force duty.
A light on the communications section of the console turned from amber to green as the spaceship came in range of the tracking station on the west coast of the Aflar Peninsula.
“Do you copy, Liberty two-six-seven-three?” Anala asked.
“Roger that, flight com, communications link operational. Good to hear you again.”
“Stand by for course tracking data.”
Radar stations across Lamaran locked on to the spaceship as it orbited, checking course and velocity with meticulous precision—data that he fed into the tiny onboard guidance computator. He had completed a full orbit, passing over Cape Ingmar again, when flight com gave him a go for the apogee kick burn. He checked the Liberty’s orientation, correcting its attitude with a series of RCS burns. Then when he was stable and aligned, the guidance computator took over. Numbers blurred in its display row of seven nixi tubes, counting him down. The ullage rockets fired first—small solid rocket engines around the base of the third stage, pushing the liquid fuel to the bottom of the tanks where the turbopumps could suck it in. Then the main rocket took over, firing for 135 seconds, thrusting the Liberty up away from Bienvenido.
The third stage shut down and separated. Ry fired the service module engines, moving the Liberty away from its spent third stage.
Flight com confirmed his course track was good. Liberty 2,673 was in a highly elliptical orbit, on its way up to the Ring, fifty thousand kilometers above Bienvenido.
It took a long time to take his pressure suit off, banging elbows and knees against the capsule’s equipment and console as he struggled, but eventually he stowed it in the locker. And he finally had a few moments to himself.
Everyone called it free fall, but to Ry it was flying, pure and simple. He didn’t even feel nauseous. Instead, he felt unshackled, as if space were where he’d been born to live. And through the main port, beautiful Bienvenido was visibly growing smaller as the Liberty rose farther and farther away on an elliptical orbit that would peak at the Ring.
Flight com asked for updates on systems. With a sigh he strapped himself loosely into the acceleration couch and began to run through another checklist. He had to establish a thermal roll, setting the Liberty rotating around its long axis, so that the heat from the sun was evenly distributed. The sextant was used to confirm the position of the other planets and fed into the guidance computator to check his position. Then he sighted the crosshairs on Tree 3,788-D. Flight time to bomb release was verified at seventeen hours, nineteen minutes.
Food had no taste; veteran astronauts had warned him about that. Fluid was pooling in his head as if he had a cold. His fingers swelled up until they resembled sausages. Systems whirred and buzzed loudly. Thick sunbeams stabbed through the ports, moving across the cabin like bizarre clock hands as the Liberty continued its stately thermal roll. Ry didn’t care. Out there beyond the port, Bienvenido dominated space. And the other planets glimmered excitingly. The blue jewel of Aqueous, the closest world to Bienvenido, sharing the same orbit but trailing by seventeen million kilometers. Weird Trüb—sliding along its orbit fourteen million kilometers closer to the G1 star, its elegant necklace of twelve moonlets glinting against the infinite black. Valatare, the cool shining rose-colored giant in its outer orbit. And hated Ursell, whose murky atmosphere was now more than a thousand kilometers thick; its tenuous upper layers toyed with the sunlight to crown it with an oddly beautiful haze that extended for hundreds of kilometers farther still.
Ry spent every spare second staring at the planets, tying to visualize the day Bienvenido would finally be free of the Trees and their vile Faller spawn. A future without fear of aliens, where human spacecraft would fly across the gulf between worlds, and astronauts would land on those exotic planets. He allowed himself to believe he might live to live in those times. Slvasta, in his historic speech after the Prime invasion was defeated, had declared that they could rid Bienvenido of Trees within three human lifetimes. Most people could live past two hundred years, and there were only 3,223 Trees left in the Ring. If they could increase their launch rate to fifteen a year, the Ring would be gone and the skies open before Ry passed his two hundredth birthday. It was a pleasant daydream to carry him along to apogee. But the factories were going flat-out to meet current Silver Sword and Liberty delivery schedules, and the current defense budget was a huge economic strain on the whole world.
Three hours from apogee, when Liberty 2,673 would reach the top of its elliptical orbit, flight com told him to start activating the bomb carrier missile.
Ry pulled his head back from the sextant. “Roger that, flight com. I’ll pull the manual out.” The sextant folded back neatly into its storage position. He’d been examining Tree 3,788-D with the device on full magnification. Trees were usually about eleven kilometers long, with little variance. Slender spires of crystal with a tip at one end always pointing planetward, while the other flared out into a broad bulb more than a kilometer wide. Their surface was made from deep folds and wrinkles in the crystal that hosted slow blooms of moiré light slithering along their length in random surges.
Laura Brandt said Captain Cornelius’s ship had estimated up to thirty thousand trees in the Forest that hung above Bienvenido back in the Void. Nigel Sheldon had destroyed about twenty-four thousand when he set off the quantumbuster in the center of the Forest—collateral damage to the distortion applied to the fabric of the Void. After the Great Transition, the surviving Trees had dispersed into the Ring, using what Laura said was some kind of gravity manipulation propulsion, like that of the Skylords, left behind in the Void. Some of them had taken longer than others. The newly formed Space Vigilance Office had cataloged their movements, then started to observe them closely with telescopes and Bienvenido’s newly built radars. They kept a file on every Tree, classifying them into two distinct types: S for standard, and D for damaged.
First-flight astronauts were always assigned to D Trees, as they were usually easier targets. Tree 3,788-D was short, barely nine kilometers long, indicating that a good two kilometers had broken off during the quantumbuster blast. Broad sections of it were permanently dark. The Space Vigilance Office had only recorded it releasing seventy-eight Faller eggs in 250 years. Well below average.
According to the sextant observations, it wasn’t moving. Not yet, anyway, Ry corrected himself. That made the mission so much easier. Trees inevitably moved when the missiles got close.
Ry unlocked the console’s missile section and took the thick manual from its recess. He didn’t really need to; every page was perfectly clear in his memory. But the microphones in the command module were picking up every sound, and transmitting it continually to mission control where tape recorders faithfully documented each cough, knock, and fart he made. If there was no sound of the manual’s pages being turned, someone might get suspicious about just how good his memory was—and why. Which was a high level of paranoia, he acknowledged wryly, but with the PSR you could never be sure. And he certainly wasn’t going to take the risk. So the manual was opened with a soft rustling sound, and he started down the checklist.
Prepping the missile took ninety minutes—powering up its systems and loading the inertial guidance system with the data from the command module guidance computator. The missile itself rode above the command module: a cylinder with the same two-and-a-half-meter diameter as the rest of the Liberty. At the front was a radar dish, then the electrical instrument section. Below that was the actual warhead: a fission bomb with a yield of three hundred kilotons, the largest practical size Bienvenido’s bomb factories could make. Propulsion was dual stage, with a hypergolic fuel rocket for launching it from the command module, and a clustered solid rocket motor stack for final high-velocity delivery. Total mass was two point two tons.
“Missile systems at preflight stage five, and holding steady,” Ry reported an hour from apogee. The Liberty was close enough now that he could make out the shape of Tree 3,788-D without any magnification. Even the dark areas were visible, slim fissures amid the bright entrancing shimmer.
“Good to hear that, Ry,” Anala replied.
It was probably imagination, but her voice seemed fainter—maybe just the static crackle that came with such a long-distance radio beam.
“Taking final radar reading of target,” he said. A muted mechanical clanking reverberated through the command module’s frame as the radar dish scanned around. Nixi numbers shifted and settled, sending a warm orange glow across his face as he floated over to that section of the console. “Navigation data locked and transferred. Flight profile confirmed. Requesting final missile sequence initiation.”
“You have a green light for missile fuel tank pressurization, Liberty two-six-seven-three.”
Ry went back to the port, where he could see the Tree—noticeably larger now. Radar gave him a separation distance of 327 kilometers. He flicked three switches on the missile console, moving them to mid-position. “Commencing propellant tank pressurization.”
“SVO reports Tree movement,” Anala said. “One percent gee.”
Ry pulled himself over to the port and swung the sextant out of its recess. Two readings a minute apart, centering the crosshairs on the bulbous end of 3,788-D. The coordinates were different. Sure enough, Tree 3,788-D was on the move, accelerating at just under 1 percent of Bienvenido gravity.
He grinned savagely through the port. “You can run,” he told Tree 3,788-D. “But you can’t hide.”
Most Trees moved when a Liberty spacecraft approached. That was the thing Ry found most amazing about them. Something so huge being able to move. The Silver Sword had burned 275 tons of propellant in order to lift a six-and-a-half-ton Liberty into space. Tree 3,788-D was nine kilometers long, and it was accelerating. A small acceleration, true, but he couldn’t even visualize the energy level necessary for such a motor. And some Trees accelerated at up to 5 percent gee. Seventeen Liberty astronauts had burned all the fuel in the service module so they could still intercept their fleeing target, completely altering the spacecraft’s orbit and thus throwing away their chance of a successful reentry. Only one of them—Matej—had ever made it back.
The next twenty minutes were spent calculating the catch-up burn that would change the Liberty’s course to give the missile its highest strike probability. Ry fed the figures flight com gave him into the guidance computator, and fired the service module’s main rocket for sixteen seconds.
The missile’s guidance data had to be reloaded to take the new course into account. Then it was time; the Tree was only seventy-five kilometers away. He entered the bomb arm code on the missile console’s red keyboard, and confirmed three green lights. A final check of missile systems and he turned the launch key. The Liberty shuddered as the missile detached. Ry saw sparkling gas flowing past the ports and used the joystick to turn the Liberty, aligning it for the retro burn. He caught sight of the missile through the port, its exhaust flaring wide from the small rocket nozzle at its base, accelerating toward the Tree. Radar confirmed its course was steady.
Ry fired the service module rocket again, retro burning to build distance between him and the impending blast, and putting him back onto his original reentry trajectory. It was a busy time, requiring two further short burns.
“Course correction verified,” Anala told him after the second one. “Good burn, Liberty two-six-seven-three.”
“Thank you, flight com. Appreciate that.”
“Flight control wants you to put Liberty into shield one orientation.”
“Roger. Beginning RCS maneuver for shield one.”
He reached for the joystick. Basically, shield one was positioning the Liberty so the back of the service module was pointing directly at the Tree; that way, when the atom bomb went off, the bulk of the spaceship would be between him and the blast, shielding him from the brutal gamma ray pulse. He canceled the thermal roll and began to turn the Liberty.
The missile panel buzzed a warning. Ry scanned it quickly, not quite understanding. That particular warning sound was for attitude correction. The numbers in the nixi tubes were slowly changing, as if he were updating the missile’s guidance computator.
“Flight com, I have a problem,” Ry said. He started flicking switches, trying to cancel the error. The numbers kept on changing.
“Say again, please?” Anala asked.
“There’s a malfunction in the missile guidance system. Course vectors are changing.” He growled in frustration as the numbers locked. Nothing he was doing was making any difference.
“Wait, please. Missile command is analyzing your telemetry.”
“They’re going to have to hurry,” Ry muttered. He tried to reload the original vector, but it wasn’t registering. An amber light came on at the side of the missile control panel. “No, no, no. Don’t do that!” The light turned green, indicating that the missile’s tiny RCS nozzles were belching out cold gas, changing its attitude in accordance with the new data. “Uracus!”
“Liberty two-six-seven-three, telemetry is showing you transmitting a new course to the missile.”
“Negative! I’m not! It’s changing. Oh, crud.” Another light turned amber, the missile’s engine was preparing to fire. “It’s going to course-correct. Flight control, do I abort? Do I abort?” His thumb hovered above the red key.
“Liberty two-six-seven-three, cancel your update to the missile.”
“I haven’t updated! It’s malfu— Crud!” Ry stared helplessly at the console as the light changed to green. The missile was fifty kilometers from the Tree, and the engine burned for three seconds. He read the new numbers again, and instantly worked out the course that would take the missile on. Procedure always had the strike aimed at the base of the bulbous end, the biggest target; but this new trajectory would take it to the midpoint. So it wasn’t going to miss. “It’s still aimed at the Tree,” he said numbly.
“Major Evine, what’s happening?”
Ry recognized the new voice in his headphones: Colonel Matej. That was a severe break with protocol.
“Something changed the missile’s course,” Ry said, hating how inadequate that sounded.
“Did you change the missile course, Liberty two-six-seven-three?”
“No, I did not.” Ry took a breath and made an effort to calm down. His medical telemetry would be showing them his quickened heartbeat and respiration—rising temperature, too. “There’s some kind of malfunction. I’m going to attempt to regain control of the missile.”
His fingers flew over the missile panel, flicking switches in a sequence he knew should work, wiping the computator’s memory ready for a clean reload.
“What are you doing?” Colonel Matej asked.
“Clearing the false data from the missile. I can reload the correct course.”
“Negative. Missile desk has confirmed the new track. It is still on course for the Tree.” There was a short pause. “But how did you know that?”
Ry grimaced, furious with himself. It took the big electrical computator sitting in the basement of the Cape Ingmar flight control building to work out orbital vectors. No normal human brain could perform that kind of calculation. “I guessed the burn wasn’t long enough to divert it,” he said. Come on Matej, you know an astronaut could make that guess.
“Okay. Consensus down here is to let it run. If the kill burn doesn’t initiate as programmed, we’ll consider a data reload.”
“Roger that.” Ry stopped trying to correct the anomaly, and looked at the missile countdown clock. They were seven minutes away from the kill burn, when the solid rocket cluster would ignite and send the missile streaking in toward the Tree. “Can I have an update on Tree thirty-seven-eighty-eight-D, please, flight com?”
It took a moment, but Anala’s voice returned to his headphones. “SVO is saying the Tree acceleration is holding constant. Its course is stable. Missile will not require a further update.”
He nearly said it hadn’t had an update, that something very strange was happening. The new data had to come from somewhere, and flight control had an override channel for the Liberty’s computator in case anything happened to an astronaut; they could continue the missile launch by remote. But why would anyone change the impact point? He just couldn’t understand that. Unless—Fallers!
They would be the only beneficiaries from a sabotaged Liberty mission. But the missile is still going to hit the Tree. So it can’t be them. Who then?
“Ry, are you all right?” Anala asked.
He realized his heart must have jumped at the thought. If they can change the missile course from the ground, what else could they change? But the flight center team gets blood checked almost as often as astronauts. “I’m fine,” he said, eyes tracking across every readout on the console, trying to spot any anomaly, but everything seemed to be functioning normally. The Liberty’s battery power was lower than he would have liked at 62 percent, but still well inside mission parameters. His eyes were fixed on the missile countdown display as the numbers wound down.
“The doctors would like to remind you to pull the viewport blinds down,” Anala said.
“Roger that, flight com.” He reached out and pulled the silver blinds across each of the command module’s ports. It was to protect his eyes from the explosion. “Strapping in, and locking down guidance data.” The electromagnetic pulse from an atom bomb explosion was fierce, and had knocked out circuits and instruments in the early Liberty craft until Demitri and his team came up with methods of hardening the electrical components on board. But even then, the protection wasn’t always 100 percent effective. Ry began copying the readouts onto a pad—not that he needed to, but the technicians who recovered the capsule might notice the absence. If the computator did get knocked out, he could reload it quickly enough.
“Stand by, one minute,” he said. His gaze was fixed on the missile panel. If anything happened now, there’d be no chance of correcting it. The numbers flicked downward. On ten seconds, a green light indicated separation of the missile’s hypergolic rocket engine module. Then, right on time, the green light for the solid rocket ignition lit up.
Ry let out a soft breath of release. He watched the radar, seeing the missile’s velocity build as the solid rocket cluster accelerated it at seven gees. The distance from the tree shrank rapidly.
“Looking good,” Anala said.
Twenty seconds.
All his console readouts were stable. “Switching on external cameras,” he announced. Footage of the Ring Trees exploding in nuclear fury always played well in the newsreels.
Ten seconds. The solid rockets were spent. Missile acceleration dropped to zero. The radar return was perfect; the nixi numbers measuring distance to the Tree merged together as they wound down to zero.
His earphones emitted a loud hissing, then went silent. Tiny cracks of intense light shone around the edge of the port blinds. Needles in the dials connected to the hull radiation instruments flipped over to maximum. Lights dipped from the EMP. He held his breath, scanning the console. There were two amber lights. One for an RCS tank pressure valve, which didn’t matter; the valve was triple redundant. And a second for a radar servo; again, the backup could cope. A red light glowed for the omnidirectional radio antenna receiver. He switched the backup set on immediately. His earphones started hissing again.
“Clean detonation,” Anala called through the static. “Visible down here.”
“Good to hear, flight com. Tell everyone to go ahead and start their Treefall parties. Systems nominal up here.” He checked the flight director attitude indicator and fired the RCS.
“It looks like you’re maneuvering, Liberty two-six-seven-three,” Anala said, and there was a note of strain in her voice evident even through the static.
“That’s confirmed, flight com: maneuvering. I want to see,” he said simply.
He stabilized the Liberty side-on to the Tree, and put on dark sunglasses before opening a blind.
There it was, a perfect sphere of dazzling white plasma; Bienvenido’s latest and very temporary secondary sun. It expanded fast, dimming as it went. A slender flare extended out from the northern surface. Ry frowned at it. Then the tip began to curve over. “What the crud…?” The tenuous line across the infinite blackness began to dwindle. “I can see something,” Ry gasped. He snatched the camera from its locker and tugged at the lens cap with comic ineptitude.
“What is your visual, Liberty two-six-seven-three?”
“Something’s moving.” The explosion’s plasma shell was shading down to a purple-blue, becoming translucent as its luminosity faded. The tenuous trail of ions had almost vanished. He managed to click off three fast shots. “Something came out of the plasma shell.”
“Repeat, please.”
“There’s something out there.” He peered through the camera’s viewfinder, trying to focus the lens properly. The tip of the dying streak was meandering aimlessly as it dissipated.
“SVO will begin tracking the debris constellation when the plasma shell scatters. There’s too much ionization interference right now.”
“That wasn’t debris, flight com. The trail the object left in the plasma shell curved. Whatever made it was changing course. It was under acceleration. It’s a spaceship of some kind.”
There was a long pause. “Liberty two-six-seven-three, please confirm you said there is an alien spacecraft in the Ring.”
Ry didn’t like the way all emotion had vanished from Anala’s voice. In his mind he could see the flight control center, all the dozens of technicians sitting at their desks, looking around at Anala with nervous astonishment, none of them saying a word.
“Affirmative, flight com. I don’t think I’m alone out here.”
“Can you see the anomaly now?”
Ry pressed his face against the cool glass of the port, twisting around to scan as much of the empty panorama as he could. There were definitely some chunks of Tree visible out there now that the plasma shell had dissolved, faint-glowing splinters tumbling slowly across the blackness. One segment must have been a kilometer long—presumably the end of the spire. But all of them formed a central cluster, expanding slowly. At least I did kill 3,788-D.
“Negative.” Now he began to doubt himself—up until he replayed his own memory. With his eyes closed, the tenuous strand of glowing ions was pushed out of the seething shell, energetic gases stretched along by some invisible force. Something created that wake, something accelerating. Something that could survive a three-hundred-kiloton atomic bomb. But what?
He glided back into the acceleration couch. “Flight com, I’m activating the radar. It might find something.”
“Roger that, Liberty two-six-seven-three. Nice thinking.”
Ry watched the tiny circular scope for several minutes. The cluster of Tree remnants showed as a faint fuzz at the radar’s extreme range. There was nothing else—and certainly nothing close or accelerating.
“All right, Ry,” Anala said. “We’ve alerted SVO; their radars will scan for it. If there’s a Prime ship hiding up there, they’ll find it.”
He blinked in surprise at the near-heresy. There are no Prime, not anymore. Mother Laura sacrificed herself to destroy them and save us. Besides, the Prime ships had a vast exhaust plume.
His training took over and he strapped himself in, barely realizing what he was doing. The more he thought about it, the less he understood what any kind of spaceship would be doing so close to the Tree. Research? Attack? But he was damn sure that it was the cause of the missile going awry. Nothing else could have done it.
So where did you come from? Which planet? Is there going to be another invasion?
Despite his urgency to find the intruder, Liberty continued its constant demands on his attention. He had to restart the thermal roll. Systems needed to be reset. Readings taken. Updates entered. Flight control’s astrogation team wanted Liberty to perform a course-correction burn.
Two hours after the strike, the Liberty’s orbit took it out of Bienvenido’s umbra. Sunlight shone into the command module as the spacecraft slipped back into the full glare of the G1 star. Ry always wondered why Laura Brandt had bothered classifying the star at all; it wasn’t like they had anything to compare it with. Apart from the planets, the sky above Bienvenido was completely empty.
Of course he’d seen pictures of the smudges the SVO and university observatories had photographed—galaxies: so far away that even Commonwealth starships would take decades to reach the closest. Invisible to the naked eye. Bienvenido was alone forever. The Void had made sure of that, banishing its woebegone exiles beyond any hope of return.
Something glinted amid the eternal black out there on the other side of the viewport—a tiny point of light far above the planet’s distant crescent. Not a Tree. The Liberty wasn’t oriented to let him see the Ring.
Ry unclipped his couch straps and slid over to the port. Sunlight was shining on something. An object in space. Distance undetermined. He grabbed the camera again and clicked off a few pictures before the thermal roll carried it out of view.
“Liberty two-six-seven-three, telemetry is showing you canceling the thermal roll. Do you have a problem?”
“It’s here,” he said, inanely using a near-whisper. “It’s with me. I can see it.”
“What is there? What are you seeing, Liberty two-six-seven-three?”
“I have visual contact. The alien…It’s following me down.” Ry watched the flight attitude indicator, and stabilized the Liberty’s attitude. When he looked out the viewport he found the gray glimmer where he’d seen it before.
His fingers moved over the console as if he were playing some complex piano music, flicking switches and clicking knobs around, always knowing what to do. Turning the radar toward the alien. The round scope lit up with a slight phosphorescent sheen. There was nothing there. He glanced out of the viewport, seeing the faint glimmer point. It wasn’t bright, not like the refraction you got off the crystal substance Trees were made from, but certainly not dark like a Faller egg. There was still nothing on the radar. “Crud!”
“Ry, we’re not getting any reports of anything near you from SVO.”
“Roger that; it’s immune to radar.” Ry pushed himself back to the port. Far away and big, or close and small? He brought the camera back up and took more shots. The rangefinder wasn’t helping. He pulled the sextant out of its recess and lined up the crosshairs, read the figures. Checked the guidance computator display.
“Can you describe it?” Anala asked. “Is it a Faller egg?”
“Negative. It’s a solid material that’s reflecting sunlight. I’m assuming that means it’s relatively small and close by. If it was big, the SVO observatories would spot it. Giu, they can see a Faller egg, and they’re dark.”
“Is it accelerating?”
“Taking a reading now.” He lined up the sextant crosshairs again and read the figures, compared them with the glowing numbers of the guidance computator. “I think it might be. A very small acceleration. This is right on the error margin.” Even with his eyes, he couldn’t see any kind of exhaust plume. Trees don’t have rocket exhausts.
“Roger. We’ll ask SVO to attempt visual observation of the anomaly.”
“Thank you, flight com.” Another sextant reading, and the figures were slightly different again. It is under power. Which means something is controlling it.
He took a deep breath, considering his options if it moved closer. What if it attacks me? Now that he had fired the nuclear missile, Liberty boasted a single pistol, and that was in the emergency landing survival pack. His gaze darted to the base of the console where it was stowed, and he grunted in exasperation at how desperate that was. A Liberty spacecraft was expendable, he’d always known that; he just hadn’t faced up to that situation ever becoming real.
He stayed by the viewport, determined not to let the enigmatic glint of light out of his sight. It was drifting slowly toward the base of the port. Ry checked it through the sextant again. Difficult now; it was definitely dimmer.
“Ry, the Prerov Observatory has visual acquisition of the Liberty,” Anala said. “They’re using their main telescope.”
Ry knew from her tone it wasn’t good news. “Glad to hear that, flight com.”
“They report empty skies. There are no Faller eggs around you.”
“It is not a Faller egg,” he said firmly. “It is a vehicle, under acceleration.”
“Stand by, Liberty two-six-seven-three.”
He knew what that meant. Flight control had become worried he was cracking up. Medical “incidents” were another rumor spoken about in hushed tones around the astronaut quarters; the unique stress of spaceflight with its cabin claustrophobia and simultaneous exposure to the infinite nothing of intergalactic space. It didn’t happen often, but even the best pilots had been known to get quirky out here, all alone.
“Ry, engineering believes the object you’re seeing may be a part of your third stage,” Anala was saying. “Possibly a section of the interstage fairing. That would account for the similar orbit.”
“Roger that, flight com. Could be.” He almost laughed with contempt at the amount of crud they were expecting him to swallow. After separation, the third stage would carry on along a similar elliptical orbit, true. But the third stage automatically vented the gas left in all its tanks, to avoid any later rupture producing a fragment cascade that might endanger a Liberty mission, and that venting alone would diverge from their orbital tracks. His continuing correction burns would add further distance and velocity difference. It would be impossible for any part of the third stage to run parallel with his own course by this time in the mission.
Ry grimaced and turned his attention back outside. The alien was still there, but very faint. “Flight com, the intruder is definitely darker now. Liberty is moving away from it.” He swung the sextant around, centered the crosshairs, and took another reading. It turned out to be the last. Less than a minute later, the speck had vanished.
Routine and training reclaimed him for the rest of the flight.
There was the seventeen-second mid-course correction burn. He needed to eat. He needed to sleep; flight com said the doctors were insisting on that.
For fifteen uneventful hours the Liberty spaceship glided along its elliptical orbit, back down toward perigee, 215 kilometers above Bienvenido.
After he woke from a troubled three-hour doze, Ry started working through the atmosphere reentry checklist. Now that he was approaching the planet, SVO’s radars were tracking him with greater precision. It was a critical time. The command module had to hit the ionosphere at the perfect angle. Too steep and it would burn up, too shallow and it would skip across the tenuous gas and pick up an unstoppable tumble.
Ry laboriously entered new data into the guidance computator. Everything checked out for his final course-correction burn. It lasted nine seconds, and flight com confirmed its accuracy.
“We need to start the checklist for command module separation,” Anala said.
Ry was staring out the viewport, half expecting to see the alien ship out there, a black splinter silhouetted by Bienvenido’s glaring blue-and-white panorama. “Roger that, flight com. I’m opening the manual now.”
He had to switch the command module power over to its own internal batteries. They could keep the spacecraft’s instruments and life support running for ninety minutes. Ry was back in the pressure suit for the descent.
The command module separated from the service module while the Liberty was three hundred kilometers above Nilsson Sound. Seven minutes later, Ry experienced the first effects of gravity reclaiming the spaceship when crumbs and scraps of food packets, a lost pen, all drifted gently down out of the air to settle on the rear bulkhead around him. Static built up in his headphones.
“See you on the other side of the sky,” Anala said encouragingly just before contact was lost.
Gravity was increasing now. The sky outside the ports began to glow a faint orange, swiftly rising to a brighter cherry red. Then the sound started—a low moan building fast to a full hurricane roar. Ry could see solar-bright streamers flaring for kilometers along the plummeting command module’s wake, clogging the air with the dazzling embers burning off its blunt heat shield base. Inside a minute, gravity reached one gee, then continued to climb. The whole command module started shaking, far worse than it had during launch. In front of him, the console was a blue-gray blur as he fought to inhale, gulping down air in short frantic bursts. After forty hours in free fall, the six-gee force that reentry exerted on his body was excruciating.
Finally the deceleration force began to ease off, and the brilliance of the tormented air died away. Blue sky was visible above as the command module sank through the lower atmosphere at terminal velocity. There was a terrific bang, and a yellow flash streaked across the port.
“Drogue chute deployed,” Ry managed to croak, not even knowing if he had regained radio communication.
Another giant impulse crushed him painfully down into the acceleration couch. He saw the three bright-orange main chutes opening across the sky, clumped together like a bunch of flowers.
“Welcome home, Liberty two-six-seven-three,” Anala said solemnly. “Recovery fleet reports they have a visual on your chutes.”
Ry scanned the console. His altitude was five hundred meters. Gravity was back to normal. He braced himself as the altimeter wound down to zero. The command module thudded down into the water—which, after the trauma of reentry, seemed quite mild. Spray sloshed over the viewports, and the flotation ring inflated out from the top of the command module. He began to bob about in the ocean swell. In his earphones, he could hear the flight control staff cheering.
“Great Giu,” he groaned, and started to laugh. “I made it. I actually crudding made it!”