Edward Lee - Operator B

Wentz closed his eyes and heard a deafening silence. Behind the lids, he saw an insuperable void, a vastness like looking down from the highest places on the earth. He saw a pilot’s most fantastic dream come true, and then he saw the faces of Joyce and Pete…

“I can’t,” he said. “I promised my wife and kid. I’ve been breaking promises to them for the last ten years, but I can’t break this one.”

A final tempt, a final image to maraud his pilot’s ego: he saw somebody else, some other pilot bestowed with this impossible honor. It’d be some punk, he guessed, probably some boner’d up hot shot Navy kid from Whidbey NSA or Miramar or, worse, a Blue Angel. Am I really gonna step down let some cocky F-18 PUNK fill my shoes?

“Shit! God DAMN! ” Wentz bellowed.

Ashton and Jones just looked at him.

“Ain’t happening,” Wentz said through a painful grimace. Part of him could not conceive of what he was about to say. “I’m not going to fuck my family over again. Tomorrow at noon I retire. Get someone else.”

Jones leaned forward, amazed. “Are you serious?”

“Right now, I’m so pissed off I could kick you in the balls so hard they’d fly out your mouth. Does that sound serious? Do you have any idea how hard this is for me?”

“General, don’t you realize what we’ve got here?” Jones induced. “The OEV isn’t some—”

“Yeah, yeah, I know, it’s not some balsa-wood plane with a rubber-band prop. I already got that shtick from her. I know what it is, but I also know I can’t do it.”

Jones’ brow lifted. “I admire your resolve, General, but we still haven’t told you the actual mission.”

Wentz stalled. “I assumed that the mission is, well, to test fly the OEV.”

“Not exactly,” Ashton admitted. “There’s something else you need to know, sir. It’s much more important than you, me, the OEV—it’s more important than anything.”

“That’s why we need you,” Jones added, “and that’s why we need you now.”

A long silence hung over the office. Wentz sat there, waiting.

“Are you gonna tell me or do I have to guess?”

It was the sudden solemness of Jones and Ashton that most bothered Wentz. He didn’t like the feeling at all.

“Follow me please, General.”

Wentz followed Jones out while Ashton paused for the slightest moment then likewise left the in-briefing room.

Wentz didn’t see her pop the tiny pill in her mouth.

««—»»

Jones led them down another antiseptically white corridor lined with white key-padded doors. A maintenance tech at one of the doors began to snap to attention but Jones sluffed, “As you were, as you were, Sergeant.”

The tech was about to paint something on the door, and Wentz couldn’t help but notice. Shiny black letters on the door read: BRIGADIER GENERAL W. FARRINGTON, but then the tech painted over the W. FARRINGTON and raised a stencil that read J. WENTZ.

“You guys are a scream,” Wentz said, chuckling. “But I’m telling you, you can hard-sell me all day long but I’m still retiring tomorrow.”

Ashton and Jones said nothing.

Jones unlocked another door, marked simply CONFERENCE. Inside, Wentz noticed several chart graphs and murals, as if for a presentation. One mural seemed to be an artist’s depiction of some sort of space-flight mission. A bulletin board read:

-QSR4 JOINT JAPAN/RUSSIAN SAMPLE-RETURN MISSION

-SCHEDULE COURSE AND PERIHELIC TRAJECTORY (EST. 62,700,000 MILES).

-PROJECTED COST (US EQ.) $34 BILLION

-PROJECTED TIME EXPENDITURE (IN FLIGHT): 19 MONTHS.

Wentz sat down, ready to listen.

Jones began, “When the so-called Mars Meteor, designate ALH-84001, was found in August, 1996, and…well, you remember the news.”

“Sure,” Wentz recalled. “Fossilized microbacteria, fairly solid proof that there was rudimentary, one-celled life on Mars, something like 3.5 billion years ago.”

“Yes. After which every country in the world with space flight capability began to draw up plans for further investigations of the Martian surface. The ultimate end, of course, is a sample/return mission—quite sophisticated and very expensive, but this would enable a robotic surface device to collect soil samples, which would later be returned to earth by way of a staged orbiter rocket sent afterwards…”

“QSR4 is the codename for one such plan,” Ashton augmented, “and it’s already in service—”

Wentz pinched his chin. “I haven’t heard about any—”

“No, you haven’t, General, and neither has the rest of the world. The Japanese agreed to finance the Russian Space Administration on the mission you see outlined on the mural.”

“Why would the Japanese bankroll the Russians? Our aerospace technology is better than theirs.”

“Not so much as you think,” Jones said, “and, additionally, no other space administration in the world trusts us. They all think we’ve got field operatives planting discreet probe-implants and sensors on all their space hardware.”

Wentz looked duped. “Why would they think that?”

“Well…because it’s true. We’ve been doing it for decades—saves us lots of money. Why send up our own missions when we can tap and analyze their findings?”

“Cloak and Dagger is alive and well,” Wentz supposed. “The United States—the world’s best friend.”

Ashton ignored the sarcasm. “General, a year ago, the joint Japanese/Russian mission was initiated. A collection probe—QSR4—landed in the Tharsus Bulge on Mars and immediately began to relay findings back to earth—”

“And to us, ” Wentz finished, “from the taps we secretly planted in their probe.”

“Yes. And what the collector discovered was more than bacterial fiber fossils but… live bacteria.

“You’re not joking, are you?” Wentz asked.

“No, General, we’re not,” Jones said. “The mission’s analysis sensors positively identified the organisms as live. Our own analysis of the data, however, unbeknownst to the Japanese and the Russians, indicates quite a bit more. Our own spectrographic survey of the probe’s findings was processed through CDC and Langley, and the bacteria reveals characteristics consistent with a cytomegalic mutation.”

Wentz frowned. “Do I look like a microbiologist?”

Ashton crossed her legs in the chair. “What he means, sir, is that the CDC analysis of the molecular specs strongly suggests that the Tharsus bacteria is host to a virus more hazardous than anything ever found on earth.”

Wentz stared at them through a dark interlude.

“In about six months,” Jones went on, “the return stage of the QSR4 mission is going to pick up that collector and bring it back to earth.”

“So tell them to scrub the pickup,” Wentz made the most obvious suggestion. “I think if you told them they were bringing a deadly virus back to earth, they wouldn’t have to think long before they aborted the entire mission.”

“We can’t do that, General. That would acknowledge what they’ve suspected all along—that our own agents have been planting tap-sensors in their probes. It would ruin foreign relations.”

Wentz almost laughed. “Well then fuck foreign relations. This is a bit more important, isn’t it?”

“It’s not that simple, sir,” Ashton said.

Wentz considered this. “Fine, then do what you Big Brother guys do best. Destroy the return stage before it gets back—”

“That’s even less serviceable,” Jones countered. “It would be plainly detectable as a hostile attack on the geostatic DPS net. They’d never believe it was an accident, and since the U.S. is the only country in the world with the sufficient anti-satellite technology to pull something like that off—”