Another twenty kilometers to go.
“Okay,” she told Hartwell. “Keep an eye on the ship, but let’s engage those hoppers before they get close enough to fry us.”
“Roger that.” He manipulated a joystick, centering a targeting cursor to move the LAV’s laser turret topside. “Firing!”
PFC Jack Ramsey
USS Ranger
0035 hours GMT
The Ranger was now less than ten minutes from its objective, and only now was Jack beginning to hope that he was going to make it.
After only minutes at six Gs, he’d decided that he wasn’t going to be able even to think about doing more work on the nutcracker code. The pressure, the apparent weight of five full-grown men lying in a stack on top of him, was suffocating, crushing, and made gasping down each breath a struggle. Finally, he’d shut Sam down and switched the seatback display instead to a view relayed from a camera in Ranger’s nose.
The view of Earth, visibly growing larger minute by minute as the Ranger accelerated toward her, was absolutely spectacular, but Jack hadn’t been able to muster more than a passing and somewhat lethargic interest.
An hour after they’d cut free from the L-3 construction shack, at just before midnight GMT, they’d whipped past the Earth, traveling now at over two hundred kilometers per second. For a blessed span of minutes, zero gravity had returned as the Ranger pivoted, nose skewing toward the fast-passing Earth with an unpleasant wrench to the gut and head, until she was traveling tail first, past the Earth and on her way now toward the Moon.
Jack had heard hear the harsh retching sounds of several Marines being sick elsewhere in the cabin. He’d kept his eyes carefully on the screen, unwilling to let his own stomach rebel as well. Amazing how contagious nausea could be.
Then acceleration returned…deceleration now, rather, as the Ranger began killing her tremendous velocity after the turn-over. Jack’s maltreated stomach twisted, and he’d nearly lost it then; only the fact that he’d been on a special low-bulk diet for three days already saved him. The diet, evidently, hadn’t helped everyone in the company; when weight returned, Jack was glad he wasn’t farther aft, where, judging from the yells and curses, tiny, free-floating globules of vomit were suddenly falling like rain.
“Okay, people,” Captain Lee’s voice said over the cabin comm system, moments after the six-G torture resumed. “Not much longer. Remember, we’re going…for either Plan Alfa…or Plan Bravo. Which way we go…depends on…our fellow Marines. On whether they…were able to nail that damned cannon…or not. Either way…we have a good chance…of pulling this thing…off. Stay focused…stay alert…and you’ll come through fine….”
He spoke quietly, calmly, and reassuringly, despite the pauses between each phrase as he caught his breath and rallied his strength for the next handful of words. What Captain Lee was saying, Jack found, wasn’t nearly as important as the fact that he was saying it…demonstrating to each miserable Marine in that cabin that he or she was not alone, that this punishment was routine, that it was all part of the game. After a few moments more, he wasn’t even aware of the captain’s voice…only of the reassurance.
With a grunting effort, Jack found he was able to toggle the seatback screen’s display either to the receding blue-white beauty of Earth or to the fast-swelling, crater-battered visage of the Moon, visible now beyond the Tinkertoy struts of Ranger’s landing assembly. After several changes of mind, he settled on the Earth; he thought he knew now what the Apollo astronauts had felt, seventy-some years ago, when they’d looked back at the world of their birth and realized that all of humankind, all art, all history, everything that made him what he was, was contained in that one small and delicate bubble of cloud-swirled blue.
That bubble was so fragile. What if his Uncle David’s theory about the Hunters of the Dawn was right? Man’s birthworld seemed so vulnerable from out here; the attack on Chicago had demonstrated just how vulnerable it could be.
And if the Hunters of the Dawn didn’t destroy that frail beauty, how long before Man himself did?
He pushed the churning, unpleasant thoughts aside. For now, Earth’s beauty was enough, something to cling to, to lose himself in. For Jack, it felt as though all of the years he’d yearned to be out in space had been distilled to this one peaceful, crystalline moment.
Despite the discomfort, he wanted to savor the experience as long as he could.
Lieutenant Kaitlin Garroway
Tsiolkovsky Crater
0035 hours GMT
A point of incandescence appeared against the ungainly, strut-crisscrossed flank of the nearest hopper, and in seconds the vehicle was falling from the sky, its reaction mass tanks holed. A second flare of light appeared on the side of the UN ship.