“Actually, that stands for ‘caught and shot out-of-hand,’” Corporal Negley said, floating nearby. “Hey! Look at his jacket! He was with ‘Sands of Mars’!”
David was wearing a Marine-issue leather jacket with the beer-can insignia sewn to the left breast. “Guilty,” he said with a grin.
“It’s an honor to have you with us, sir,” Negley said.
Lee looked at Jack. “Okay, Flash. You want to see that your buddy here gets settled in?”
“Aye, aye, sir,” Jack replied.
“‘Flash?’” David said, eyebrows rising as the captain kicked off from a nearby bulkhead and floated toward the aft end of the squad bay.
“Long story,” Jack replied. “You don’t want to know.” Somehow, the name had caught up with him again after Siberia. He still wasn’t sure how. “Hey, it’s really great to see you. I, I thought you were dead, until you got that e-mail to me, right after Chicago.”
“Not quite. I would have been, though, if General Warhurst hadn’t sent for me. Your Aunt Liana…”
“Yeah. I heard. I’m awfully sorry.” An awkward silence hung between them.
“So, Flash, you two know each other?” Sergeant Bosnivic said, drifting closer and breaking the deepening seriousness with a bright grin. He looked from one to the other, appraisingly.
“My uncle,” Jack said proudly.
“Any guy who was with ‘Sands of Mars’ Garroway,” Bosnivic said, sticking out a hand. “Great to meet you, sir.”
“Thanks.” David looked about the squad bay, a cavernous space now crowded with a couple of dozen Marines performing various tasks in zero G. “So, where do I bunk down?”
“Any free space you can find, deck, bulkhead, or overhead!” Bosnivic said, laughing. “But I don’t think there’ll be much time for sleeping now.”
“Why’s that?”
“Scuttlebutt says the first prong has already gone in,” Jack said, pleased to be in the know for a change. “If it goes well for them, we’ll be getting the word to board and light off in another few hours.”
“Yeah? And where’s this new supership I’ve been hearing about?”
“Over here,” Jack said, lightly pushing off from a deck support and drifting toward a small, square viewing port in a nearby bulkhead. “You can see her from here.”
Tucking his duffel under his arm, David followed, with Bosnivic bringing up the rear. Jack caught hold of a hand grip by the port and gestured with his head. “Ain’t she a beaut?”
The view through the small port was breathtaking. Jack had been in the squad bay for three days now, ever since the assault group’s arrival at L-3 from Earth, and he never tired of looking through it…when he could find it free, that is, or when he had a few free moments. They’d been keeping him busy for the past several weeks, working on his “nutcracker,” as he called it, and he was still running through a long list of final checks and tests, making sure that his modified version of Sam was ready for the task ahead of her.
But when he could, he stared out the window.
L-3 was one of five points in gravitational balance with the Earth and the Moon, convenient spots to park a space station, or a small construction facility like this one. L-4 and L-5 were the best-known of these Lagrange points, sharing the Moon’s orbit around the Earth—one, sixty degrees ahead of the Moon, the other, sixty degrees behind it. L-1 was a halo point directly behind the Moon, as seen from Earth, while L-2 was a spot directly between the Earth and the Moon where the gravitational pull of the two was balanced.
L-3, like L-4 and L-5, also followed the Moon’s orbit, a quarter of a million miles from Earth, but directly opposite the Moon from the Earth. From there, the Moon was always hidden behind the blue-and-white glory of the Earth, which slowly changed phases as the construction shack moved through its twenty-seven-day orbit. At the moment, Earth showed a slender crescent, mostly white with a thin streak of blue along the lower limb. But the real spectacle lay much closer at hand.
The construction shack itself was little more than a girder-connected collection of tin cans, with tunnels leading from one hab or workshop to the next, with a huge, blue-black spread of solar panels like gleaming, rectilinear wings. Most of the structure which, together with the solar panels, covered a larger area than a football field, was invisible from the squad bay window, but they did have a good view of the docking port, where two cis-Lunar transports were parked just within the shadow of the USS Ranger.
The Ranger, clearly, was the featured sight for the squad bay window, at least with so little of the Earth visible right now. She was big—seventy-four meters long and massing sixteen hundred tons empty. She was also sleek, showing her origins as the upper half of a Zeus IIc piloted heavy-lift SSTO booster; only spacecraft that had to traverse atmosphere needed streamlining. Her smooth lines were broken, however, by the lower drive and landing assembly, which looked more like the Tinkertoy construction of a Lunar hopper than the sky-slicing curves of a hypersonic transport, and by the ungainly struts and angles of a pair of LSCPs strapped to her hull like outrigger pontoons. Her outer hull was deep black with a light-and radar-absorbing laminate, but the construction shack’s worklights revealed her in pools of white light. A heat-radiator panel unfolded from the landing assembly like a squared-off shark’s fin.