Stephen Baxter - Moonseed

The briefing between the two of them took a solid hour, led by Garry. He covered the mission objectives, and the motherhood stuff, the basic principles for every sortie: operating standards, radio procedures, contingency plans, SAR — search and rescue procedures — and the weapons, though today that just meant the two laser-guided bombs each F-16 would carry on its underwing pylons. There was some special briefing material on volcanic effects they might hit: hot updraughts, microbursts, ash in the carb, toxic gases, other shit.

Then it was back to the ops desk. There were no maintenance delays, no clouds, and the volcanic shit in the sky shouldn’t cause any hold-ups.

But here was Garry’s mother.

She was reduced to a shrivelled little husk, hair a wisp of grey, probably only half his weight. It just wasn’t damn fair, Garry thought. But she was smiling at him, so he smiled back and hugged her.

“My God, mom, what the — what are you doing here?”

“Well, it’s my fault you’re going,” Monica Beus said.

“Your fault?”

“The whole mission was my idea, I’m afraid. I wasn’t best pleased when you called and told me you’d been assigned to the flight.”

He grinned. “So, you want to split the hazardous-duty pay? It’s all of a hundred and fifty bucks.”

“I think you’re going to earn that today,” she said quietly.

Jake had joined them. “Don’t worry, Mrs Beus.”

“Doctor,” Garry said.

Jake said, “I’ll watch his ass, pardon my French, and bring him home safely.”

“Make sure you do that.” She looked up at Garry, as once he’d looked up to her, and he felt his heart break once more.

“Mom, how’s…”

She let him off the hook. “The brain tumour?” She smiled thinly. “Not so bad as you’d think. I get sickly headaches. Wiggly lines at the edge of my vision. If I had your job, they’d ground me.”

He wanted to hug her. “Mom—”

“Now, Garry, if I can handle it you can. Things can’t get any worse, after all. And I’m not ready to have a child die ahead of me. But you know how important this is.”

“…I know.”

“We need some good news here.” And she talked briefly through some of the issues that were coming across her desk.

The breakdown of government and society, the great swathes across Africa, Asia, even parts of Europe. Massive population movements. Deaths from geological events, and simple crop failure and breakdown of trade, on such a scale nobody dared estimate. The die-back they were calling it.

Even in Fortress USA the problems were immense. Rationing was already breaking down. The survivalist types had made some parts of the interior ungovernable. Lethal force was meeting refugees from Mexico and Cuba and Canada, for God’s sake.

It was worse than Garry had heard. Worse than had been made public. Somehow the censoring of the news was the most striking thing.

“We have to make a stand against this Moonseed. You are an American, fighting in the forces which guard your country and your way of life. You are prepared to give your life in their defense.” She was quoting the servicemen’s code of conduct. “That’s never been more true than today.”

Jake nodded gravely. “We’ll do our jobs, ma’am.”

When they walked off to the life support room, Jake nudged his arm. “Was she always so serious?”

Garry thought about that.

His mother had seemed a plump, warm giant to him throughout his growing-up years. Despite her high-powered jobs, as her academic career took her to a variety of universities around the world — and, at last to Washington, where she had, it seemed, got the ear of the President herself — she had always made time and space for Garry, never been less than a mother. Something he appreciated even more now he was thirty, and he thought about his own young family in LA, Jenine and young Tommy…

“Yeah,” Garry said. “She was always serious.”

When they were kitted out, they hopped into the van that would take them to their aircraft. The crew chief — a round, glum man of around fifty — showed him the aircraft forms; everything looked good today.

Garry’s F-16 stood waiting for him: fifty feet of sleek gun-metal grey, its colour darkened by the muddy sky. Garry walked around the bird and kicked the tyres, made sure the right weapons were loaded, and checked the oil. The weapons pods were two fat, sleek torpedoes slung under the wings.

He climbed the ladder that dangled from the cockpit, and perched for a moment on the canopy rail. He held onto the ledges and swung his legs into the foot wells, like James Dean hopping into a convertible. He finished up semi-reclining in the hardened seat pan, with his legs straddling the instrument console, his feet planted on the rudder pedals.

The F-16 was his idea of an airplane: a single-seater, single-engine bird in a tradition that dated back to the P-51 from the Second World War. And its primary mission was air-to-ground, which would give him the chance to fly at five hundred feet, the ground rushing by, the sensation of speed startling.

Garry thought his blood must be fizzing in his veins, loud enough for Jake to hear.

The preparations continued. He snapped an air hose to his G-suit, to swell the bladders that would keep his blood from pooling when he pulled Gs. He fixed clips at his shoulders and hips to his parachute risers and the seat kit with its survival gear, all of it contained within the seat pan. He pulled tight his lap belt, lifted on his helmet and fitted his oxygen mask.

The crew chief called up. “Rail clear?”

Garry gave him a thumbs-up.

The canopy came down, a clear polycarbonate bubble that slid down over him and locked into place, smooth as something out of Flash Gordon. He activated the seals to pressurize the cockpit, and set the climate controls to a little cooler than the flat desert air outside. He was in his own world, already cut off from the ground, the cockpit so tight and cramped around him it was as if he had donned the bird like some immense Batman suit.

He strapped on his knee clipboards, and set his switches to their start positions.

He called the crew chief. “Fore and aft clear, fire guard posted, chocks in place?”

Roger that, Garry. Ready for run-up.

He turned on his electrical power, and hit the jet fuel starter, the small engine that would turn over the main motor, the GE-100. He advanced the throttle from off to idle; the engine surged with a throaty roar.

When he was ready to taxi, the fire guard removed the chocks from his landing gear. The crew chief directed him forward, waving his hands back behind his head.

Garry pushed the throttle past idle, and led Jake out towards the runway, steering with his rudder pedals. The end-of-runway crew gave them a final systems check, and the weapons crew pulled the safeties on the bombs. He kept his hands in the air, where the crew could see them, just so the crew knew he wasn’t about to flatten them with a careless touch of a flight control.

They were cleared for takeoff, and he taxied onto the runway. He pushed the throttle to ninety per cent power. He ran one last check, cycling the flight controls. All was in order.

He took his feet off the brakes and pushed the throttle to military power.

The engine rose in pitch to a scream. He turned on his afterburner, injecting neat fuel into the hot exhaust stream, generating huge thrust.

The plane kicked him in the back, and the runway was ripped out from under him.

At three thousand feet he reached his takeoff speed, two hundred miles an hour. He touched his stick back, stroking the fly-by-wire, the plane’s nervous system.

The plane just leapt into the air, and he followed the flight-path marker on the head-up display into the sky.