Curtis had been part of that mission, of course, a younger, more dynamic Curtis, and Reese had watched with more than a hint of jealousy as Molly fell in love with him. Reese had been best man at their wedding, only days before he had to return to Earth.
Curtis’s name was on the tape as well. Reese rewound the cassette and started listening to it again.
“Uh, listen,”Walker said.“Shouldn’t we be getting out of here?”
“This is unbelievable,” Reese said.“Something’s going on, something really big.”
The first message made guarded reference to it.“Verb is toying around with some kind of matter transporter. She’s got a couple of the other kids working on it, and Molly and I are getting pieces for her out of the machine shop. I’d think it was a joke, but she’s already accomplished so much.”
The second message didn’t add anything, but the third said that Curtis was “getting suspicious.” Dian went on to say, “The political situation up here is getting weird. Curtis is coming down on everybody, and we’re now smuggling stuff up here from the machine shop. Molly doesn’t want him to know what we’ve got going, and I think she’s right.”
Reese had never liked Curtis; he was too self-consciously good looking, too much like Jenny’s husband. He didn’t like the idea of Curtis being in a position of power at Frontera, was desperate to know what was happening there, who this Verb person was.
The next transmission had more details:“...she thinks it’s really going to work.With enough information about the terminus, she’s going to be able to deliver anyplace within ten or twenty light years. If it works, it could be a way out of here for all of us.”
But by the next broadcast, a week later, something had gone wrong. Dian sounded drunk, despondent.“The first test was a flop, and Verb doesn’t seem as interested as she was...She doesn’t care how much it means to the rest of us...Christ, I want out of here.When are you going to start keeping up your end of this? Curtis would kill me if he knew I was leaking this stuff to you. I want a ship out of here...”
The tape had run into the last message, something about shift changes and a detailed description of the power panel for the transporter, when Morgan’s voice came from the door.
“Heard enough?” he said. He flicked on the overheads, and Reese blinked in surprise.“This is certainly cozy,” Morgan went on.“Sneaking around in the dark, spying—”
“Cut the bullshit,” Reese said.“They’re alive.You’ve known all along and still you lied to me about it.”Walker moved away from Reese, her frightened eyes fixed on Morgan.
“We’ve been over this, Reese,” Morgan said.“That was a management decision.”
“Goddamn it!” Reese shouted.“Those are my friends up there! It was just bad luck I was on rotation when the recall came or I’d still be with them, right now.And I wouldn’t be putting up with your bullshit counterplots and corporate images and lies.”
“That’s enough, Reese.”
“It is fucking well not enough! I want to know what’s going on. I want to know everything you can tell me about Frontera and what’s happening up there. I want to know what this matter transporter is they were talking about.”
“Or?” Morgan said.
Reese took a breath.“Or I’m finished here.” Morgan turned his head, a quick, predatory movement like a bird’s or a lizard’s. His eyes locked on Walker and she stepped forward.“Get the tape,” he told her, and she ejected it from the deck.“Bring it,” he said, and she did. Her helplessness made Reese feel a little sick.
“Think about it,” Morgan said, one hand on the woman’s upper arm.“If you walk out,the mission goes without you.You lose your last chance to get back to Mars, and all I lose are a few percentage points on the odds of this thing working.” He turned to go, then stopped in the doorway.
“One more thing.You’re now in possession of stolen information, whether you stay or not.The gold standard is dead, and we’re on the data standard now. That means that what you’ve got is extremely valuable and if you try to pass it on to anybody, and I mean Kane or Lena or anybody, then you die.You and anybody you tell it to.”
It had started in Mexico and it changed that night, changed the moment that Reese tried to bluff his way past Morgan and lost. He’d gone back to the mescal but been unable to finish it, its brutal anesthesia too much like the dark, slick edge of a long fall into nothingness.
Walker, of course, was gone the next day. Dead, brainwashed, or transferred; Reese never knew which.The four of them, Morgan said, would be perfectly adequate to fly the ship.
For the next eight days Reese worked them with cold precision, his brain shut down during the day, at night replaying the soft, breathless voice he’d heard on the tapes.“Ten or twenty light years,” she’d said, “with enough information.”
He slept badly. Faceless shadows dodged through his dreams while he flailed at gelatinous air. In the training sessions, his concentration faltered and his reflexes turned erratic. On the last morning of instruction, he crashed the mem simulator, and as he walked away he could feel waves of doubt and hostility move through the crew.
But none of it mattered.That afternoon they took one of Morgan’s private jets to Cocoa Beach, with Kane as co-pilot and Lena in the left seat, claiming it would help her nerves. Morgan had his own cabin in the rear of the plane and stayed in it for the entire flight;Takahashi slept, or at least pretended to.That left Reese to stare out the window by himself, watching the fertile soil of Earth turn under the plane, wondering if he would ever see it again.
At five the next morning they drove from the Sands Motel to the Cape, Reese in one car with Lena and Takahashi, Kane and Morgan alone in the second. By six o’clock they had changed to blue coveralls and were walking out to the shuttle on pad 39A.
The sky over the ocean was turning gray; overhead Reese could still see Vega and Altair. His stomach had the light, quivering feeling of hunger, excitement, and too little sleep.The Cape had barely changed, had been built to stand up under the exhaust of a Saturn V, and against its solidity he felt like a pretend astronaut, an astronaut who’d just spent the night in a motel, an astronaut who was being laughed at somewhere, by somebody, as he stopped at the foot of the service and access tower for a last look.
The orange shell of the shuttle’s external tank seemed unlucky to him; the orange girders of the floodlit tower were harsh and jangling. He pushed past the others into the pad elevator, and together they rode up to the white room, where Morgan’s shuttle pilots were waiting.
Reese nodded to the pilots and they gave him a thumbs-up signal and crawled through the small, square hatch into the orbiter.A technician fitted Reese with a soft white flight helmet, the dark ovals of the inset speakers protruding like cartoon ears.Then he swung into the middle deck of the ship.
The orbiter was designed for level flight and now, sitting on end on the launch pad, everything was on its side. Reese climbed awkwardly up to the flight deck and into one of the two seats in the back of the module, just in front of the on-orbit station.Takahashi, the mission commander, would take the other one, and Lena and Kane would ride out the takeoff from the middle deck.The gray-green nylon seat covers reminded Reese of army surplus air mattresses; the four separate seat belts and buckles were clumsy and oversized beyond any necessity.
He plugged in his headphones and they filled instantly with the jabbering of Morgan’s imported technicians, flown in from Houston two weeks before, less than half of them with any real launch experience. He wanted to pull the plug out again, knew it instantly for a disturbed and dangerous impulse, yet still had to struggle to resist it.