Chapter III

Exhausted, Justin settled back in his seat to try to grab at least a few minutes of sleep. It was hard to believe that only a week ago he was out on his porch, drunk, watching the sunset. Everything had been turned upside down since then. He spared a quick look over at Tanya, who was strapped in beside him, fast asleep.

The jump-jet banked sharply. There was no sense in trying to figure out where they were going. The windows in the cramped cabin were sealed shut, a curtain was drawn behind the pilot’s seat, and there was an MP sitting across from him, just to make sure that he didn’t attempt to peek outside. They might be willing to let him know where one of nearly a score of command and control bunkers was located, but there was only one R&D site where the Trac ship was hidden.

He looked over at the MP and smiled. The return gaze could, even with the best intentions, only be described as frigid. There was no sense in even trying to talk with him.

The jet banked again. It felt like it was in the opposite direction. Without instruments, and especially in the light gravity of Mars his inner ear couldn’t be trusted. Undoubtedly the pilot was jinking about a bit just to throw his sense of direction and distance off even further. For all he knew they might just be flying a big circle, coming back to land in the same canyon.

The whine of the engines changed and he sat back up, listening. The nose of the plane pitched up, there was a mild bounce, and then another.

"Here already?" Tanya whispered, sitting up.

"Guess so."

She looked at her watch.

"Only an hour and ten minutes. That means it could be a kilometer away or a thousand. Are you going to report that back to Mahan?"

Justin looked over at the MP, who was staring straight at him.

"Remember, the war’s supposed to be over," Justin replied, while staring straight back.

He felt the bump of a ladder against the side of the plane and the hatch opened. They were inside a pressurized bunker. Justin looked out and there was no one there.

The pilot stuck his head back through the curtain.

"This is where you get off, folks."

"Thanks for the hop."

Justin hoisted his flight bag and looked back at the MP.

"Hope you have a good day," and then he ducked out through the hatchway, not bothering to wait for a response.

In the dimly lit hangar he recognized Matt at once, the tall gangly frame, slightly hunched shoulders that the Academy could never seem to straighten, the unruly shock of red hair that no comb could ever give a semblance of neatness to. Justin felt a lump in his throat as he went down the ladder and started towards him, hand extended.

"Matt! Good lord, Matt."

Matt Everett stood silent, watching him approach. Tanya shoved her way past Justin, and ran up and threw her arms around him. Justin felt a twinge of jealousy. Hell, she never gave him a hug and he fleetingly wondered if something might have happened between the two of them in the years since the start of the war. After all, she was on Mars for a fair part of it, while he himself had been busy bombing the planet.

"How you doing, Leonov?" Matt asked, but his eyes were still on Justin.

"Hey, at least give me a kiss, will ya? It isn’t everybody I hug like this."

Matt stepped back slightly from her.

"I think your visit here is a waste of time," Matt said, his voice even, "so I suggest that the two of you just simply get back aboard that jump-jet and head for home."

He turned without another word and started to walk away.

"Damn you, Matt, wait a minute!" Justin snapped, pushing past Tanya to grab hold of Matt’s sleeve.

Matt turned and looked back at him.

"Justin, let’s just call it quits, and don’t lay that Academy comrade shit on me. The others might balm their conscience with it, I gave up on that a long time ago. Now just leave."

"Bullshit, Everett," and he tightened his grip.

Matt started to jerk his arm away but Justin hung on.

"Look, Bell, I could beat the shit out of you twenty years ago and from the looks of you I still can, so let go."

Tanya moved up in front of Matt.

"I can’t believe this crap, Everett. I don’t care what happened in the war, he’s still your friend."

"Yeah, right."

"You remember my uncle?" Matt asked, looking back savagely at Justin. "The one who saved me when my parents were killed back when I was a kid?"

Justin suddenly knew and loosened his grip.

"He died at Bradbury, along with a lot of others that you helped kill, including a girl I was . . ." His voice trailed off.

"Jesus, Matt, I’m sorry."

"I bet you are."

"If you only knew," Justin whispered.

Justin let his grip on Matt’s arm slip away. He turned and started to walk back towards the plane. Well, so much for the plans of Mahan and Seay. The nearly uncontrollable urge to get drunk tore into him as it had for every night for the last three years. Now it would be worse. Now there were more faces to put on the dead, faces belonging to the family of his closest friend.

"Bell, don’t you move a damn inch."

Justin looked back over his shoulder at Tanya.

"Both of you, you want to start rattling off the names of the class of ’76 that we all killed? Everett, you most likely helped to kill more than one of them. You were at Gilgamesh, Second Titan, Ceres, Mercury Station Ten, and, Bell, you were in several of those campaigns as well. You both have blood on your hands."

"I don’t need the speech or the memories," Matt said coldly.

"Well, hiding in a bottle, Bell, or burying yourself out here, Everett, isn’t going to change it. I’m not going to make any apologies for what Bell did other than to say that you might not know this, but he resigned his commission immediately after the strike and has been drinking himself quietly to death ever since."

Tanya looked up at him and he refused to return her gaze.

"So cut the crap and at the very least let’s go have a drink."

Matt hesitated for a long moment and then ever so imperceptibly nodded his head. Tanya looked back at Justin.

"Maybe some things are better off buried and forgotten," Justin said quietly.

"We don’t have the luxury of that now," Tanya retorted. "And Matt, you’ve had a briefing on what the Tracs did. That’s what Bell is here for."

Matt looked back at Justin, then lowered his head.

"Come on."

Matt led them through an airlock and down a narrow corridor into what Justin assumed was his private quarters. A couple of old holos hung on the wall, one he immediately recognized as a photo of Matt’s parents taken only days before the accident that killed them. That photo had rested on Matt’s desk back at the Academy so long ago. There was another one of a young oriental woman with long black hair, dressed in a Colonial uniform. He knew it was better not to ask.

"I don’t have anything to offer other than tea," Matt said.

"That’s fine, and besides, Bell went back on the wagon today."

"You look like you could use a drying out," Matt said looking over appraisingly at Justin.

"I don’t need the two of you nursing me along," Justin replied testily.

"Well, we sure as hell did it often enough at the Academy," Tanya said with a smile.

"Don’t talk about the Academy," Matt snapped bitterly, his back turned while putting three mugs into a microwave. Seconds later he pulled them out and passed two over to Tanya and Justin. Just the smell brought back memories to Justin—Lapsang Soochong tea. Matt always had a cup late at night while studying. It was an old sailor’s brew from a long-ago Earth, redolent with the scent of tar—an appropriate drink for the sailors of the solar wind, which Matt had once been.

Matt finally turned around and looked at Justin.

"It isn’t ready to fly and won’t be for another year, maybe two or three. So, that being said, your trip out here is a waste."

"Suppose Seay orders you to fly it?"

Matt laughed.

"I’m the only one who even half-understands it. Let him fire me. Whoever else they bring in will take a year just to figure it out. Hell, I’ll just hoist some sails and cruise off in the opposite direction of where these Tracs are coming from."

"And leave everyone to fry, is that it?" Tanya asked coldly.

"Look, Leonov, I was born to solitude. My mistake was to get involved, to believe in something, and then lose everything to it. A little solitude would do me some good right now. As long as they got the bastards who started the war it’d be fine with me."

"I can’t believe I’m hearing you say this," Justin interjected.

"You obviously found your answer to the madness," Matt snapped back, "though it’s kind of hard picturing old straight-arrow Bell a typical post-war drunk."

"That really sucks," Tanya shouted, slamming her mug down, spilling most of her tea across the table.

"It’s the truth, though," Justin whispered.

Matt seemed to soften a bit.

"So what was it, Justin, Bradbury?"

Justin nodded his head.

"We were lied to. We were told that there was confirmation that your antimatter facility was located in the heart of the city, concealed there in violation of the nonmilitary siting protocol. It was therefore a legitimate target."

"So why not surgical strike it?" Matt asked coldly. "Shit, you guys were getting good at that—work a target over, suppress ground fire, then send in the marines."

"That’s what I suggested. Mahan overruled it, though. Said we’d only have one chance to take it out, that if a surgical strike failed your people could pack it up and move it somewhere else in a matter of hours while we were trying to pull our people back before a second strike could be called in." He hesitated for a moment. "And besides, they wanted to get not just the site but your research personnel as well. We had a list of names and it was believed that most of your team was there. The only answer was nuke penetrator rounds to dig the city out and smash it."

"That was murder," Tanya snapped.

"No. If they were engaged in military R&D, they were part of the military," Matt interjected, to Justin’s surprise.

"But their families?"

Justin nodded his head.

"The argument was that there was only one chance at it, and the decision was made to use a nuke strike. They said that if we didn’t, your side would win the race and get antimatter first. So we went in and I helped. They told us guys who were delivering the strike that Bradbury had been evacuated of all personnel not related to the project and was therefore purely military."

Justin looked away for a moment.

"And Matt, I knew your unit was based there as well."

"It was war, buddy, couldn’t be helped."

"And then I saw the news footage the Bilateral people released," Justin continued in a flat voice. "The dead, the kids in the hospital, the euthanasia rooms for those who were going to die from radiation poisoning and didn’t want to wait around for the final act in the show."

Matt visibly flinched, and Justin suddenly knew that someone, either the girl or his uncle, had finished up in one of those rooms.

"So I quit, and you can fill in the next three years yourself."

"You know, you almost got it," Matt said.

"What do you mean?" Tanya asked cautiously.

"Just that—you almost got the R&D site and the team."

"Your side claimed after the armistice that it was hidden near Goddard."

Matt shook his head.

"It was right at Bradbury, but they moved it to Goddard, along with key personnel, ten days before you hit."

Justin leaned back in his chair, hoping that his paranoid assumption wasn’t true.

Matt nodded slowly.

"Don’t you get it? Someone in our government let it leak to your side that it was there, then quickly pulled the personnel out. I was there, already assigned to test-fly the first antimatter ship we were working on. They moved me, but they didn’t move a lot of other people. I didn’t know at the time why we pulled up stakes so quickly and got the hell out of town. It took awhile to figure it all out."

He hesitated for a moment, looking away.

"You hit it, we let you assume you took it out and then have a propaganda coup as well—even you Bilateral people were pulled into it. The whole thing was planned that way."

Matt sat down across from Justin.

"We both got the shitty end of the stick. Typical—governments start wars, tangle the military in, and then blame them for everything that goes wrong while they wash their hands of it."

Justin nodded, unable to reply.

"Who did it?" Tanya asked quietly.

"It doesn’t matter now," Matt replied.

"Why not?"

"Because when some of us found out, we killed the son of a bitch."

"You mean you murdered him?" Tanya asked.

"Not personally, but I flew in the team that paid a visit to his hideout. We made it look like some freebooters did it.

"I’ll still maintain that the Colonial government is a damn sight better than Earth’s. But by its very nature government can draw some real scum into its ranks. So some of us in the military took matters into our own hands when we found out the truth. There’ll be a couple of more reckonings over this. We didn’t fight a war of independence just to get another corrupt government that hides behind liberal platitudes while screwing everyone blind. Call it frontier justice, but I’d rather have justice coming from men and women who’ve laid their asses on the line for freedom than coming from the hands of some stinking politician who hid safely behind the lines while other folks died."

"And Seay buried you out here till things cooled off."

"You mean Seay was in on this killing too?" Tanya asked.

Matt merely smiled in reply.

"After it was all over I wanted out as well, and Brian posted me to this project. Besides, I spent a couple of summers here back before the war, and I guess I could say I was the best pilot they had. I test-flew the prototype antimatter engines and so I got the project."

"What’s it like?" Justin asked, trying not to show any curiosity.

"It’s sweet—generations ahead of what we have, but I tell you it isn’t ready to fly."

"We don’t have time for that now," Tanya said.

"And I say we do. Look, I got the report on the Trac attack. You people claim it’s the start of an offensive. Well, maybe I’m paranoid, but I don’t buy it. I saw just how effectively a couple of scum in my own government could lie to me, and I know damn well, Bell, that you know yours does too, and now they’re a hundred times worse with this new regime taking over. For the life of me I still can’t understand why you fought for it."

"I’d taken the oath, I couldn’t break it. Also, I never dreamed the war would last as long as it did. I figured we’d have a couple skirmishes, then wiser counsel would prevail and the old service would keep on going. I loved the service, I wanted to stay with it."

"If they’d let us professionals solve it, the war never would have gotten started. But they fooled all of us, didn’t they, and we paid the price."

"I guess so."

The two fell into a long silence, staring into their mugs of tea.

"Can we look at it?" Tanya asked, unable to contain her curiosity any longer.

Matt looked over at her and shook his head.

"No."

"Seay ordered you to cooperate."

Matt leaned back and laughed softly.

"For all I know this whole thing might just be a scam to get me to fly the thing. Then they take it over and have a real doomsday machine. Make fifty or a hundred of them and whichever side gets it first wins the war in a single day."

Justin looked at Matt closely. Yet another casualty, even though he was still whole. The man was half-crazy with paranoia. He had lost everything else—now there was nothing, except maybe for the project.

"You saw the evidence of the last attack."

"Could have been doctored, recycled footage from the war."

"Do you really believe that?" Tanya asked quietly.

Matt hesitated.

"I don’t know what to believe anymore."

"I saw the strike come in on Earth. Atlanta, Jacksonville, half the power grid, I saw them go down, Matt, it was for real," Justin replied quietly.

"Are you sure? It could be just an elaborate scam. I mean, did you go up to a wrecked Trac ship and poke the body inside with your own hands?"

"Come on, Matt, that’s crazy and you know it. Not even my government would blow up its own cities and kill millions just to get a hand on your precious ship. This is for real."

"You only saw the strikes in America. Hell, it might have been EDF getting even with your old country."

"Matt, as long as the Corps is around that will never happen and you know it."

Matt got up slowly.

"You can stay the night, both of you look beat. I’ll get somebody to haul you back to headquarters tomorrow. There’re bunks in the next room. Nice try, guys."

Matt walked out of the room, the door sliding shut behind him.

Tanya exhaled noisily.

"I think he’s nuts."

"Who isn’t?"

"No, I’m serious, Bell."

"No crazier than I am. Hell, Leonov, when we joined the Academy you couldn’t have found more idealistic kids anywhere in the system. Thorsson made sure of that. He taught us to dream a higher dream. Then the goddamn politicians screw it up and start a war. And when you think about it, just what the hell was the war about? It was over which government got to control space. Thorsson and most of us saw space as freedom for everyone, but the politicians couldn’t see it that way. They just couldn’t handle the idea of anyone just wiping their hands and saying ‘so long, suckers.’ So they started it and we did the dying."

"At least what Thorsson taught us kept it from turning into a blood bath that would have sent us back to the Dark Ages."

"Yeah, but it finished off a lot of young lives awful quickly, and most times rather nastily."

"Don’t forget, I fought in it as well for the first year."

"I know," Justin said, still surprised that in the opening action Tanya had led a Colonial militia unit.

Justin finished his tea.

"Let’s turn in."

She nodded in agreement and went into the next room. Suddenly he felt nervous, wondering what he should do next. Should he just follow her into the room? Was she in the head, undressing, or what?

A couple of minutes later he heard a soft voice.

"OK, Bell, come on in here."

He walked to the door and it slid open. She was curled up in the lower bunk, her clothes folded neatly on top of the dresser.

She looked up at him and smiled.

"Sorry, but it’s top bunk, Bell."

He turned off the light, not wanting her to see his disappointment.

* * *

A rattling noise out in the next room awoke him. Stifling a groan, Justin looked at his watch—0900. Which time, Greenwich standard or Mars standard? He couldn’t remember if he had changed it or not.

He rolled over and looked down at the bunk below. Tanya was fast asleep, the covers kicked back. Part of him wished she didn’t like to sleep naked . . . it was almost too much to bear. It was such a wonderful view, and he felt guilty for looking, let alone enjoying it. Again a rattle. Someone was in the next room using the microwave.

Moving down to the end of his bunk he lightly rolled off and landed on the balls of his feet, barely making a sound in the one-third gravity. He pulled on his trousers and shirt and went to the door, paused and then leaned over Tanya’s bunk, pulling the blanket back up around her shoulders. She murmured slightly and rolled over. Again that chilly feeling hit, remembering the brief time when they had shared a bunk together. He forced the thought aside and opened the door out to the kitchen and living room.

Matt looked up at him, a bit blurry-eyed.

"Sorry, did I wake you?"

Justin shook his head. Matt had always been waking him up to study at four in the morning, and he had always lied so his friend wouldn’t feel bad.

"Couldn’t sleep, guess I never lost the habit of getting up early," Justin said. "Make a cup for me while you’re at it."

"Already have. I heard you stirring in there," and he handed a steaming cup of tea over to Justin.

The two stood in awkward silence for a moment. How many watches had they stood together, talking the night through. He looked back over at his friend.

"I’m sorry," Justin finally whispered.

"About what?"

"Bradbury . . . everything! It’s torn at me ever since. Damn it, Matt, I knew you were down there. That by itself drove me crazy, but I didn’t know that, worse yet, people you loved were there. I hung on the casualty lists for days afterwards until I saw that you were safe. After that, after the news footage and the thought that I might have to face you again, I just couldn’t take it any more."

"Same here," Matt said quietly.

"Kind of drove me crazy after awhile. I guess it did for most of us. The volunteers and reservists never understood that about us, how the Academy bound us together stronger than any war could pull us apart."

"Got kind of morbid though, drinking the old toast to comrades gone even while we tried to kill each other."

"Weird as it sounds, I guess Thorsson wanted it that way," Justin replied. "He is a cagey old coot. Sometimes I think he had all this figured out. That our real enemy would be what was out there and this little war of ours was a training ground, to get us ready for the big show. I remember him talking about the two sides of war, that it was a natural process that tragically killed people, yet if controlled it was also a process of advancing, changing society and technology at an accelerated rate. He always said the real enemy some day would not be ourselves, but the process of survival in the universe."

"Yeah, I thought that too. Tell me, have you seen him?"

"Thorsson?"

"Yeah. Lord, he must be well over a hundred now."

"No, not since the day it all started and he resigned. Nobody sees him now. He stays holed up at his home in Norway, refuses to see anyone from the Academy except those on the Commission."

Justin hesitated for a moment.

"You know what he would want you to do," he finally ventured.

Matt looked up from his drink.

"That’s not fair."

"It’s the truth."

Matt finally nodded.

"I guess I knew all along how this would come out. There was part of me hoping the damn thing would never fly so we couldn’t use it on each other. But there were always the Tracs, the lousy bastards were always in the background. My only fear is, if they don’t show up again, that some bastard, either one of our damn civilians or yours, will get these things produced and use them to really finish the war up good and proper. Hell, Justin, this thing will supposedly go translight, and that will be the ultimate edge. We were barely able to control the war last time! I think blood is up so high now, especially with your coupist government claiming that they should have won, that it’d be impossible to control next time. Those crazy bastards will start launching nuke attacks and that will force us to nuke back in reply."

"You know the Corps would refuse to do that."

Matt shook his head.

"Then they’ll get rid of the Corps and send in those EDF storm troopers. That’s the problem with people who haven’t really fought—they can screw things up real easy-like, then step back and let others do the dying for their mistakes."

"Look, Matt, I’m here not for the UN, but for the Corps. Listen to me, this whole thing isn’t bullshit, it’s deadly and it’s real. The big concern now isn’t the coupist government rattling the saber, it’s the Tracs or whoever it is out there. They damn near swamped both your forces and ours last time. Mahan and Seay agree that after the defeat we handed them this time, they’ll come in next time loaded for bear. We need something to counter them and we need it now. And frankly, I think that whether you want to or not your ship is going to fly. It’s simply too important and if you don’t go with the flow, someone else will."

"If they drop me it’ll set things back months."

"I guess that’s why they sent Tanya and me. Damn it, Matt, you know you can still trust the two of us, and we’re both telling you it has to fly now."

"And suppose the Tracs don’t come back, then what?"

Justin wanted to give him a line but knew he couldn’t. "We’ll have to cross that bridge when we come to it. I’d like to think that if your government has some of these ships it’ll put you generations ahead of the UN."

"There’s always a leak at some point—no technology can ever really be kept secret for long."

"Then there’s a balance, but it’d be years before Earth could even get something online. In the interim I can promise you that we both have enough friends back with the old Corps serving Earth to block any wrong moves. The EDF might control the military environment out to Geosynch, but after that, out to lunar orbit it’s still Corps territory. We still hold the high ground. But that’s years away, Matt, and we’ve got to look at right now."

Justin paused for a moment.

"We were best friends once, and in all those years you know I never lied to you. Everett, you’re still my best friend in spite of everything that they made us do, and I’m telling you it has to fly and you’re the one who can do it, who has to do it."

Matt sat in silence for several minutes and then finally put his tea down.

"Come on, I’ll show you."

Justin hesitated.

"Should we get Leonov?"

Matt smiled conspiratorially. "Nah, let her sleep. It’ll drive her nuts that she didn’t get to see it first."

Justin put down his mug and followed Matt out of the room and down a series of corridors. The final set of plastisteel doors were blocked by Colonial marine commandos and not just the usual MPs. They eyed Justin with open hostility, but apparently had already received orders to let him pass. They stepped aside and the doors slid open.

Justin hesitated for a moment by the door, feeling like a kid on Christmas morning just before storming into the living room. He realized that for the first time in years he was truly excited about something. The two stepped out into a dark room that Justin could sense was expansive by the echo of their footsteps.

"Lights, one-half, rear quarter," Matt said.

The glare forced Justin to close his eyes for a moment. Excited, he opened them back up and squinted.

Somehow he expected more. He was standing about a dozen meters away at just about amidships, and quickly guessed that the ship was roughly thirty meters in length. It was obviously the original, the sides blackened, riven by thousands of fracture lines. He stepped back for a moment to look at it. It was streamlined, unlike the ungainly looking ships designed for flight outside a planetary atmosphere. It reminded him vaguely of the old drawings of space craft from the 1940s and ’50s—fins aft, sleek wings that were nearly razor thin. nose tapering to a needle-sharp point. He looked at it in awe. Before the war they’d reassembled barely a tenth of it, the one time he had been allowed a look at the ship. It was simply tens of thousands of pieces spread out on a hangar floor like some madman’s fantasy of a jigsaw puzzle.

He drew closer started to extend his hand, and then looked back at Matt.

"It’s all right," Matt said with a knowing smile.

With a near reverent wonder Justin touched the side of the ship.

So this was the great mystery, the dream of a thousand generations—to reach out and touch the stars.

"I wonder if it’s locked inside our genes somehow," Matt remarked.

Justin looked back at him questioning.

"This, the legend of Prometheus," Matt whispered. "He gave us fire, but the gods kept him from giving us the true secret, the secret of where we came from, of who we truly are. I think at times that I finally helped to unbind Prometheus from his aerie of torment, and this is the gift we were truly meant to have."

Justin reverently walked around the machine, pausing for a moment to study some writing on the side of the wing next to the fuselage.

"Near as we can figure, it simply says, ‘no step,’ " Matt said. "Funny, quite a few of the things written on the outside appear to match up with our own warnings."

Justin walked to the aft end. Five exhaust nozzles protruded from the back of the ship, each of them big enough that Justin was tempted to crawl inside for a better look, but he figured it was best not to.

"I don’t get it," Justin said quietly, stepping back from the ship. "They look like antimatter pods."

"They are."

"Hell, and that’s the secret of translight?"

"There’s a lot more inside, that’s the mystery. We figure the engines are for low-velocity maneuvering. Low velocity with acceleration up to .2 light, I should add, with two thousand gees of acceleration."

"You’re kidding!" Justin whispered. "We’ve only clocked your new fighters going .1 at three hundred gees."

Matt simply grinned, then motioned for him to come around to the starboard side of the ship. Part of the hull was wide open for nearly a third of the ship’s length.

"We’re still looking for that part. Chances are it was vaporized. Near as we can figure they had an antimatter destruct mechanism onboard . . . we found part of it. Fortunately for us the damn thing failed to detonate completely, so they only had a partial reaction. We’re guessing that it was secured to where this part of the hull was located. It got vaporized, but the rest of the ship was simply blown apart."

Matt stepped through the destroyed section and Justin followed. Most of the inside of the ship was bare, support beams fully exposed, and he felt a wave of disappointment.

"Most of the inside is in the lab; different teams working on the various components. We assembled the outside to get an idea of the dimensions. I’d take you in to the labs and show you, but there really isn’t all that much to look at, because everything’s disassembled for analysis. I don’t think you should know this, but what the hell—I heard that close to ten percent of our entire defense budget was going just for this one project. We had it so well covered that there were even some research firms on Earth working on it, figuring they were doing defense work for the Feds."

Matt stepped back out of the ship and walked off into the darkness, and Justin followed him.

"Light Section B, full power."

Another section of the cavernous hangar burst into light and Justin stopped, awestruck.

"This is Prometheus," Matt announced, the pride in his voice evident.

The ship was jet-black; it looked sinister and yet elegant. It was an exact replica of the first, but without the thousands of cracks and fissures it was one seamless streamlined hull. Justin walked up to it, running his hand along the side.

"It’s a single body," he said quietly.

"Unbelievable, I know. That really threw us. First off, you’re looking at a molecularly engineered alloy of titanium manufactured in vacuum and zero gravity. Spun plastititanium wire is built up around a mold into a single body, then the mold is melted out. That was one bitch of an operation; it took nearly four years and a hundred tries before we got that right. It was even tougher since there were hundreds of access channels grooved into the frame for various components, fiberoptical bundles and controls.

"Just figuring out how to make the metal drove us crazy until we offered an R&D team back on Earth a cool billion to come over to our side. They were reported missing in an attack; actually, they simply boarded one of our ships and then we blew theirs up. Hell, they’re living like kings now."

"This is generations ahead of anything we’ve been able to do up till now."

Matt nodded and smiled as he walked up to the side of the ship and put his hand against it just aft of the wing.

A door silently opened, the seam where it was located so well-crafted that Justin had not even been able to see it.

"Why all this streamlining? I mean, hell, the damn thing’s supposed to fly in space."

"That had me and everyone else confused as well to start with. It was even tougher because the wings fold in and inside the wings there are weapons pylons which can be extended down," Matt said, as he stepped into the ship and motioned for Justin to follow.

Justin bent low and then realized that the hatch had a high clearance. As he stepped into the ship he looked up and realized that there was a good seven feet of clearance in the narrow corridor running fore and aft. Matt looked back at him.

"Yeah, I kind of like it myself, being taller than you."

"The theory is they’ve been evolving on a planet with a lower gravity than Earth’s, and they’re taller as a result."

Matt turned and led Justin forward down the corridor. There were no side doors or access hatches.

"What’s behind these bulkheads?" Justin finally asked.

"The gizmo."

"The what?"

Matt looked back and shrugged his shoulders.

"We call it ‘the gizmo.’ "

"Oh, great."

"No, I’m serious. Farther aft are antimatter containment fields for the engines, but there’s a hell of a lot of other gear as well. It’s all what they used to call black-box units. No moving parts, nothing to burn out, you can access it all through a hatch back by what’s a pretty standard matter-antimatter reactor core. By the way, that helped give us some clues in building our own unit."

They reached the end of the corridor and a door slid open into what Justin guessed were living quarters. They were Spartan, three bunks, on one wall, what looked like a galley and a tiny compartment for a head and shower.

"Yeah, it’s pretty sparse arrangements. The sociological people went nuts over this; those types always do when given a couple of fragments of information to build a report on. Hell, a couple of those folks have built up case studies on the entire society of these Tracs based on the toilet and food prep area. Amazing what professor types can cook up with a little grant money to justify their existence."

Justin looked in at the toilet, it was remarkably similar to the old standard ship’s head.

"Well, I guess they have input and output the same way we do."

"Basic diet has the same elements as well. A couple of food fragments were found frozen to the remains of a storage container and some waste matter was found inside a section of pipe. Primarily meat, that’s the analysis. Some speculation is kicking around that there’s ritual tied to it, aggressive carnivores and all that. But then again, they could claim ritual around how we throw cocktail parties or cadet beer-bashes."

Justin looked around the room.

"Is this an exact replica?"

"That was debated out some years ago when the decision was made to build this ship. It was finally decided to make it exact in every way possible, otherwise we might unknowingly change something that might be crucial to the ship’s function."

"Where’s the control room?" Justin asked, unable to hide his eagerness.

"This way."

Matt walked towards the forward door, which opened at his approach, and stepped into the cramped forward cabin. There were three oversized chairs arranged side by side. Justin found himself a bit disappointed at first; he had expected some sort of bizarre science fiction type of instrumentation and equipment. The display panel in front of what he assumed was the pilot’s seat seemed almost familiar. There was a row of CRTs and holo field displays banked in a semi-circle around the seat, and to his amazement there was even a joystick, studded with half a dozen buttons on top.

Matt motioned for Justin to slip into the center seat, and then leaned over and punched a button.

The screens in front of Justin lit up, and directly ahead part of the hull pulled back to provide an outside view forward.

"The glass for the windshield is something entirely new, and a bitch to cast! Incredible stuff—it can take a near-miss from a nuke, instantly blocking out the light and damn near all the radiation within a millionth of a second after the first ions impact. It variably adjusts to even low-level solar radiation. The glass actually contains a magnetic coil that blocks the radiation, but only inches away it has no affect whatsoever on the instrumentation.

"We figure the seats are for the pilot in the middle, the co on the left and navigation and weapons officer on the right," and Matt sat down to the right of Justin.

A holo field mounted in front of Matt’s chair showed a projection of the solar system, starting with a broad view at right angles to the orbital plain and then focusing down on Mars, zipping through a projection of the planet and then zooming in on the surface, pinpointing in to where the ship was located. Watching the display, Justin realized that they were located less than a hundred kilometers from Bell Station, buried under the Titov Mountains.

Matt pursed his lips and looked at Justin.

"I’m going to have to ask you to forget what you just saw on that screen," Matt said.

Justin looked up at Matt and smiled.

"Sure, buddy, you know you can trust me to keep quiet if that’s what you want."

Matt sighed. "It’s been too long, Justin."

"So many times I wished we were back twenty years, still kids at the Academy, and that it could have stayed that way forever."

Matt smiled.

"Happens to everyone. It’s just that you never quite believe it’s going to happen to you, and then suddenly one day you turn around and you’re getting older. Lifelong friends are no longer friends and you realize that time is somehow speeding up and pushing you along with it."

"You had me worried sick," Matt said. "I kept an eye on the casualty reports same as you did. Funny, when I knew your unit was in an assault I actually was hoping it’d win just so you’d be OK."

"Same here." Justin said. "Even with Bradbury, I thought you were down there and . . ." His voice trailed away, and he struggled for a moment to hold back the tears.

"I’m sorry," he whispered. Funny, he had not cried in years and now suddenly it was impossible to hold it any longer. He lowered his head and the two friends sat in silence.

Justin finally looked back up. Matt, forcing a smile, fished a crumpled tissue out of his pocket and handed to Justin, who wiped his face.

"What was her name?" Justin asked.

"Mariko. Her parents were sailors like mine until the war started and their ship was confiscated by the Feds. She had a degree in magnetic containment field studies and was part of the R&D team for the antimatter system. When they moved us out she stayed behind since her dad was sick. Of course, no one tipped us off as to what was coming, so I left, figuring I’d see her a week or two later when she caught back up with us. She died three days after the strike."

"I’m sorry."

"You didn’t know," Matt said wearily. "I guess there are quite a few people I should be saying I’m sorry to. Remember Madison Smith?"

Justin grinned.

"Sure. I heard she was still doing archaeology work on that Martian site."

"She lost a brother at Gilgamesh fighting for the Feds. I was there, I might have been the one who did it."

Justin nodded his head for a moment, the memory coming back.

"Yeah, I remember hearing about that."

"You know something?" Matt said. "I think we’re all guilty and we’re all innocent. Sometimes I wish we of the old service had simply told our governments to go to hell! If they’re so eager for war, let them do the fighting."

Justin smiled at the thought.

"There’s another side to it, though," Justin finally said.

"What’s that?"

"This ship. If it had not been for the war research on this ship would have continued at a lower priority. Given the progress that was being made it’d still only be half-finished, and that’s after nearly twenty-five years. The pressure of the war goaded your side into a crash program, pegging the survival of the Colonial government on figuring out how this thing worked. You just told me your breakthroughs on antimatter containment came out of this, a good three years ahead of what my government’s been able to do. That’s the other side of the coin. That’s the only solace I can find out of the madness. Perhaps it might give us the chance for survival against what’s coming."

"Do you think it’s for real, then?" Matt asked cautiously.

"I told you I was there. My government’s done some amazingly stupid things, especially the coupists with their collective prosperity platform and claims that the wealth of the solar system has to be shared equally. But believe me, not even they would be so insane as to blow up the largest city in America."

Matt nodded thoughtfully.

"America. Sometimes I think we, the Colonies, are the real America. My uncle always used to say that America was not a place—it was an ideal that we carried inside ourselves. That it wasn’t a government, it was a dream of what should be, and that the Colonists were the true carriers of that dream."

Justin smiled, remembering his grandfather had often said the same thing.

"So tell me about the rest of this ship," Justin finally said, feeling relaxed for the first time since seeing Matt. He almost felt as if they were again back in their dorm room at the Academy, talking about dreams and schemes and all that they would do and see with the service. But now they were sitting inside a machine that might hold the promise of the stars.

"You know what scares me about this ship?"

"What?"

"No one yet has figured out how it really works. Let me put it to you this way. Suppose you could take an old-style internal combustion engine fighter plane, say a P-51, back to 16th century Italy and find a place to land it. A fair number of folks would most likely consider you a warlock and want to burn you at the stake. Something as innocent to us as a little nose art, say of a devil throwing a lightening bolt painted on the side, would send them into a frenzy, and they’d rip you and that plane apart. But let’s say that out of the crowd gathered around your plane comes a guy named Leonardo. He manages to get hold of the plane before the mob tears it apart, but you’ve already attended your own barbecue so there’s no one for Leonardo to talk to.

"I dare say that if given enough time fooling around with it, he most likely could get the damn thing to run. He might even get it off the ground after a little experimenting and maybe even get it back down again in one piece. But even a guy like that . . . if you asked him how it really worked he would scratch his head. He could come up with some theories, but most of it, especially the electrical equipment, would be a complete mystery to the poor guy. For that matter the electrical stuff wouldn’t be working right anyhow since there wouldn’t be any radio stations and nav beacons sending the signals in to tip him off. Beyond that, getting the gas, hydraulic fluid and oil to run it would be beyond him as well.

"That’s the situation we’re in. I heard some of the team leaders on this project say that a lot of the hardware strains the credibility of even our most far-out theoreticians."

"It still amazes me you got it back together again."

"We got lucky. The guts of the ship were pretty well intact, it’s just that we don’t know where it was until after the war started. A fair part of the midsection of the ship that contains all the goodies was picked up intact by a solar sailor who simply hauled it in as scrap and then hung onto it when he realized what it was. About six months after the war started he turned it in, claiming he just didn’t want the wrong guys to get it."

Justin shook his head and grinned, remembering how even his own father had been involved in the early search for parts of the ship after he and Thorsson had helped to destroy it out in the asteroid belt. After all the hundreds of thousands of man hours of searching, it turned out that some of the key equipment was already in someone else’s hands.

"Anyhow, they got all the internal stuff reassembled nearly five years ago. But then two big questions came up—first off, just what the hell is it? Second and far more basic, just how the hell do you turn it on?"

"What about computer hardware and software?"

"Ah, that became the holy grail in the search. We figured if we could reassemble the ship’s computers and somehow retrieve its memory we’d be onto something, since after all, unless these people are really strange, the software when broken down had to be binary code. Then again, imagine some tech-head from the 1970s or ’80s attempting to plug in our holo core memory fields and accessing into a couple million gigs of that data that go into the running of some of the latest orbital stations.

"About four years ago they finally managed to get a model of the ship’s computer up and running, and Justin, we’re talking about molecular-level hardware. Some of their stuff was holo, like ours, but other stuff involved the manipulation of individual electrons into memory fields contained within magnetic fields. Now here came the real problem. We figured that part of the autodestruct system involved wiping the memory field."

Justin nodded; it was to be expected. It was part of the mechanism built into any fighter or combat ship, frying the core memory if the ship crashed or was autodestructed.

"So we lost everything then?"

Matt grinned.

"Not completely. Yeah, some stuff we would have loved to get, especially their nav memory would have been great. It could have pinpointed exactly where this ship came from and how to get there. However, some of the basic operational software for the ship survived—with a lot of gaps in it, to be sure. So for the last four years we’ve had several thousand people and half a dozen of our latest 9000-series computers working on trying to fill in the gaps and program this ship."

"So the big question now is, just how does the damn thing work?"

Matt shrugged his shoulders.

"Beats the hell out of me and everyone else. One theory involves magnetic waves for maneuvering, another is that somehow they’re able to maneuver using gravitational fields. It seems like there are elements of both in here."

"What about interstellar flight?"

"Again, it beats the hell out of me. For awhile we thought they just simply got this thing up to relativistic speeds, up past .99, and simply took the long trip, but the argument against that was real simple."

"And that is?"

"Their galley only holds enough food for a couple of months and the same with air supply and liquids."

"Could it be that this is not a translight ship?"

"For awhile we thought that too, that maybe it was hauled here aboard a mother ship. If so, we’re really screwed. However, I don’t think so. For one thing, the whole aft end of this ship is packed with hardware that we don’t really understand and it has to be there for a reason. Secondly, this seems like some sort of cargo hauler as well . . . there’s a lot of space underneath and amidships that was empty. I can’t see hauling something like this in a mother ship just to come swinging in on a half-assed raid. They must have smaller, more maneuverable fighters for that. I think this baby was made for the long haul."

"Have you taken her out yet?"

Matt shook his head.

"We’ve tried to build reality simulators first, plugging every bit of data we have in, then running the simulation to see what happens. All I’ve done is flown the first-level sims using the antimatter engines, but this, the real thing, has never been out of the hangar."

"Well, I think it’s about time it was flown."

"And like I said, buddy, it just ain’t ready yet. I don’t care what Seay or anyone else says, we can’t risk losing this one just to speed up the schedule. This is the only prototype we have; there just wasn’t enough money to build a second one.

"If you let my side in on it, we could have mass production running inside of months, Matt. There’s been a lot of progress made on robotic replication machines, just feed the data and raw material in and out comes what you need."

"Great, and the damn coupists have a fleet and we don’t."

"Matt?"

"Yeah."

"After all these years, after all that’s happened between us, do you still trust me?"

Matt smiled, pushing back an unruly wisp of red hair off his forehead.

"Of course! I never lost trust in you in the first place."

"Then let me ask this. Take her up. You pilot, Tanya and I will fill the other two seats. Just sort of take her around the block, nothing fancy. I know you well enough to know that you are more seat of the pants than cautious engineer and you want to see this bird fly as much as anyone. Do that and I promise you this: If the threat does not come back, I’ll lie my ass off to everyone. I’ll tell them the damn thing is a deathtrap and you guys have wasted one hell of a lot of money on nothing."

He looked closely at Matt, not breaking eye contact.

"Come on, buddy. It’ll be even better then when we hijacked the assistant commander’s ship for that little binge down at Copernicus Station and then talked our way out of it later. And you know Leonov, she’ll play along, if only for the chance to fly it too. Otherwise you and the rest of those tech-heads playing around with this thing will still be thinking up excuses not to fly ten years from now. That’s always been the problem—you guys are afraid of breaking your toy. The damn thing gets so expensive and so precious no one has the balls to finally say go."

Matt looked at him, the beginning of a grin tracing the corners of his mouth.

"Think about it, Matt, we’ll be the first to fly a machine that must be worth a couple of trillion bucks. You got to do it sooner or later, and you even admitted that after all these years you’re still not sure how it works. Well, there’s only one way to find out. Take the keys, be Leonardo, climb into the cockpit and turn the ignition switch on. And besides, there won’t be another chance for me to be flying it with you."

Justin looked at him hopefully. For a moment all the burden of what he was really here for had slipped away. It was like the old days again, one of them trying to talk the other into some hare-brained caper.

A mischievous smile brightened Matt’s features.