Chapter 4
506 Words
Chapter FourNo! I didn’t come out here to die, Brody Jones. Not for you. Definitely not for—” Karina could feel her parents’ bitter epithet striving to surface, Aftermathers. By sheer will, she managed to suppress it. “—people I’ve never met.”
She wasn’t her parents—who were parochial even by modern isolationist standards. She refused to hold their system-view. But she wasn’t going to die for unknown Lifters either.
“I’ve followed your missions. Since when did you, a Night Stalker, shy away from risk?”
“There’s a difference between calculated risk and suicide.”
He’d followed her missions?
“Do you follow all the Night Stalkers?” They weren’t exactly public record—hell, most of her missions were extremely classified. But there was a fraternity among pilots that Brody did a better job of fitting into that than she did. He’d be able to get the stories if he tried.
“Just yours,” it was barely a gruff mumble.
“Why do you do this?” She waved toward Earth because she wasn’t comfortable pursuing why he followed her missions.
He tapped for a full orbital display which filled the space between them. It made his face hard to read and any continuing conversation awkward. He didn’t speak, though she could see his jaw working hard.
“They’re on a decaying ballistic arc.” Instead of reaching true orbit, their trajectory was off. They were going to make three orbits, then… The reality caught in her throat.
“Early in the fourth orbit they’ll reenter and burn up,” Brody concluded softly.
“We can’t cross through the I-Beam Zone!”
“Even if they don’t fire off the I-Beam, these Lifters will already be in reentry by then. We have to find a way to catch them sooner.”
Karina checked the fuel load and ran some rough calcs in her head. They were going to have to catch them in their second orbit to have time to get the Lifters offloaded before the I-Beam came over the horizon.
“How about this?” She tapped out a course.
“That places us inside the Aussie protection dome.”
She spun the projection and saw that it did. The only other big Eastern Hemi player—the Australia-New Zealand dome—wasn’t playing at all. They’d put up an energy field and disappeared behind it three decades ago. No one had heard from them since. The dome was huge, reaching well beyond the atmosphere. Anything that hit its silvered surface disappeared in a flash of static discharge and was never seen again—no debris, nothing. Broken down to component molecules and no one knew how they did it. They weren’t telling either.
Karina studied the problem again. Angle of insertion, delta-vee, the I-Beam Zone, the dome…the factors swirled about her. She looked out at the Earth, like a perfect blue-and-white Skyball, glittering among the stars. They were directly above the sunlit, daytime sky and the old planet glittered. There was no way to see the problems from up here: the disease, the political and religious rifts, the pollution, the radiation.
And then she superimposed all the factors and obstacles in her mind on the actual Earth. It was one of those tricks that she’d concluded made her such an exceptional pilot. Others relied completely on the virtual projections, but she could see the multiple orbits in her head, superimposed on the real world.
She finally saw one, and only one possibility. She keyed it in without looking.
- Writer
