Ben Bova - Test of Fire

After months of living alone, trapping small game and avoiding all human contact, he was snared by a wandering gang of teenaged boys.

They had split off from a larger, older band of roamers and were on the prowl for food, fun, and women when they found him with a brace of rabbits tucked into his ragged shorts. Their first thought was to take the rabbits and roast him along with them over a hot fire. But their leader, wise beyond his years, asked the emaciated youngster how he caught the rabbits.

Once they realized how much he knew about hunting and surviving in the woods they adopted him into the band. He was officially named Ferret, partly because of his looks, partly because of his quick furtive movements, but mainly because he killed small game by biting through their throats.

Ferret he was, and by the time he was twenty years old he had risen to second-in-command of the band, which now numbered more than fifty men and their women. It was the most feared band of raiders throughout the rolling, wooded hills around Oak Ridge.

The satellite station revolved at a steady one g.

Alec had spent at least one hour a day over the past five years in the lunar settlement’s big centrifuge, feeling six times his normal weight. His Earth-gened muscles had always responded to the full one-gravity load without complaint.

But here on the space station, after nearly a solid month of six lunar gravities, he was worried.

He woke in the mornings tired and aching. His back felt sore, the sullen kind of pain that never quite goes away. His pulse drummed in his ears after the simplest exertions, such as climbing a ladder from the sleeping deck to an observation blister.

At least the blister was in the zero-gravity hub of the satellite station. Alec warned himself against spending too much time there; it would be too easy to allow his complaining body to subvert the purpose of his will.

Kobol was already there when Alec poked his head up through the hatch in the blister’s floor.

The older man was sitting at one of the observation ports, safety belt latched loosely across his lap, peering intently through one of the stubby telescopes built into the bulkhead.

The observation blister had four such ports, spaced around its circular perimeter, and a fifth station dangling from the center of its domed ceiling. Taking up most of the floor space was a horseshoe set of consoles and viewscreens, where an observer crew of three monitored all the automated sensors that kept watch on the Earth.

Alec floated weightlessly up through the hatch.

Touching his slippered feet to the bare metal floor, he bent over slowly and pushed the hatch shut. The action made him drift toward the horseshoe console. Reaching for the console’s edge, he pushed off and glided toward an empty port.

The sight of Earth so close still made him gasp.

A huge curving blue immensity streaked with dazzling white, constantly changing as it drifted past the observation port, colors shifting, different textures revealing themselves as it slid past his widened eyes. It’s so huge, Alec thought. And so… alive.

“That’s the east coast of North America,”

Kobol’s voice drifted to him, like an ancient woodwind playing in its upper register, too refined to be impolite, but condescending, bored by the need to explain everything to inferiors.

“I know,” Alec snapped. “And our prime target area…”

“Look through your number three ’scope,” Kobol said. “I’ve got it slaved to mine.”

Alec sat lightly on the swivel chair and leaned toward the little telescope on his right.

“Clouds…” Kobol muttered.

Through a break in the white, Alec glimpsed brown and green ripples like old lava flows along the edge of a ringwall. But there were no craters in view. These ripples were razorback ridges, hundreds of meters high. Or so he had been told.

“There… in the clearing…”

Alec caught a glimpse of gray, a slightly lighter form that looked like a lopsided letter X.

“That’s the airport,” Kobol explained as clouds covered the scene again. Alec pulled away from the telescope and turned toward Kobol, who was still talking. “The Oak Ridge complex is only a few kilometers from the airport. If it’s still intact, that’s where we’ll find both processed and raw fissionables—enough for half a century, at least.”

Nodding, Alec pushed away from his seat and glided to the monitoring consoles.

“Any activity in that area?” he asked the youth sitting in the center chair.

He turned to face Alec. “Nothing much… at least, nothing we can detect. No vehicles, of course. No fires or signs of life that the infrareds can pick up. The area’s heavily forested; I don’t think we’d be able to detect small numbers of people moving around in there.”

Alec glanced at the fifty-odd screens that blinked and glowed across the curving bank of consoles. The other two technicians were steadily watching the screens, touching dials, making notations.

“We’ve got the strength to handle small numbers of raiders,” Alec said. “You keep your sensors alert for larger bands.”

The youth smiled. “Yessir. We’ll do that.”

The smile irritated Alec. He’s only a year or so younger than I am, but I’m in command, by order of the Council, so he has to call me “sir.” He wouldn’t grin like that at Kobol.

Then he noticed Kobol watching him, face impassive behind his brows and mustache.

Abruptly, Alec went back to the hatch and made his way down to the living and working area of the station.

Speed. Speed and firepower. Those were the keys. Alec lay on his bunk and watched the tapes play out on his viewscreen. His compartment was no bigger or better than anyone else’s: a bare little cell with a bunk, a desk, a chair, and a viewscreen.

We’ve got to get in and out before anyone realizes we’ve landed, Alec told himself. He knew that his fifty men, armed with automatic rifles and lasers, could deal with any ragtag band of barbarians that might stumble across them. But the observers had occasionally seen larger groups, more organized, marching along the crumbling old highways. Some on horses. Even a few mechanical vehicles now and then.

Suppose they have Oak Ridge defended?

Douglas knows the value of those fissionables. He might attempt to keep them from us.

Why?

Alec stirred uneasily on the narrow bunk. The fabric beneath him was wrinkled and cut into his bare skin annoyingly.

Why is he doing this? Why didn’t he return to us? Why is he trying to kill us all?

Then a new thought struck him. What if he doesn’t show up? That had not occurred to him before. What if I have to choose between returning to the Moon and finding him?

He lay there in the bunk, eyes watching the scenes of Tennessee’s rugged hill country unfolding on the viewscreen. “Speed and firepower,” he said aloud, trying to force his mind to focus on the mission. “Terrain is the key to speed. Get in and out before they know you’ve arrived.”

Do that and you’ll never find him, he knew.

Angrily, Alec reached out and punched the viewscreen’s OFF button. He turned over on the lumpy, wrinkled bed and tried to force himself to sleep.

Briefings. Exercises. Examinations. Training. The days in the satellite station blurred into a continuous round of automatic routine. Morning briefings on tactics. Physical therapy, mainly running along the central corridor of the satellite for an hour. Then medical exams. After lunch, training: weapons, communications, hand-to-hand combat.

“You’re losing weight.”

The medic was a woman, a handsome woman.

Alec had watched several of the men make fools of themselves, trying to impress her. She was big, with a broad Slavic face and strong, big-boned body that she kept in perfect shape. Her white coverall strained across her bosom and hips.