Читать книгу Shattered Skies - Alice Henderson - Страница 10

Chapter 3

H124 gazed out over a flat, dry brown landscape. Orion and Onyx had dug around in the Rover archives, poring over ancient historical documents, and finally found a probable location for the A14. When low-lying areas in the east had flooded, museums had moved priceless collections westward to the interior of the continent. A lot of vehicles from the old space program had been moved to a location just east of Delta City called the Museum of Innovation and Science.

Gordon, her stalwart friend and pilot, had picked up H124, Raven, and Dirk in his Lockheed Vega, eager to see the A14, if it still existed. Dirk had healed in a medpod, but his side still bothered him. Sitting across the plane aisle from her, he winced. All three had developed the bends after surfacing so fast, and each had to spend time in a medpod.

As they approached the coordinates, H124 gazed out the plane window. Raven sat a few rows ahead in the small jet, studying the museum’s layout on his PRD. Below, dirt billowed and swirled in the relentless wind, and even though the plane’s climate controls hummed in the cabin, it couldn’t compensate for the hot, dry air outside. Dirt devils wound away on the landscape, and in the distance, a pair of long, parallel metal tracks stretched to the horizon. She swallowed, her throat dry and scratchy. She looked at her PRD, studying the photograph of what the original entrance to the museum had looked like.

A large glass structure had stood above ground, with lush green grass and bright rows of flowers surrounding the building. They’d built most of the museum underground as a way to protect the spacecraft and to keep visitors cool and comfortable without wasting a lot of energy on climate control. It stayed cool under there, and the protection from UV radiation had been an additional preservation measure for the air and spacecraft.

The old photo showed happy patrons approaching the entrance, while others read informative signs at outdoor displays. There had been demonstration gardens with plants from all over the world, an old Thor-Delta rocket standing off to one side, and a Republic P-47 Thunderbolt plane mounted on a stand a few dozen yards away.

Gordon circled, setting down right at the coordinates. He slowed, bumping along the rough ground and coming to a stop. She gazed out. All that had endured were the rusted remains of the stand the plane had been mounted on, now lying on its side in the dirt. She could see the vague outline of the foundation of the building’s aboveground portion.

A person could walk right over this area and not even know it was there.

They’d brought explosives in case they had to blast their way in, and from the looks of it, that was exactly what they’d have to do.

Raven consulted his PRD, gathering his bearings. “Looks like they probably loaded craft in through some big docking doors to the south. The public entrance was on the north side of the complex. For now, it’d be a smaller job just to blast our way through the smaller main entrance.”

They piled out of the plane, loading a maglev with packs of explosives. H124 checked her toolbag. It had been growing heavier by the week. In addition to her rain gear, water bottle, multitool, and pocket pyro, she now carried the flight suit she’d used to infiltrate Delta City with Astoria. It folded up neatly in a brick-sized pack, so it was worth keeping with her.

Raven moved to the north side of the complex, and studied a location in the dirt. “The main entrance should be under here.”

Gordon and Dirk set up the explosives, and they all withdrew to a safe distance. Sweat poured down her back in the sweltering heat. Gordon’s white hair stood out in unruly tufts on his beige scalp, and he dabbed at the sweat with the red rag that always hung out of his back pocket. She watched Gordon work, his body spry for his eighty-plus years, his overalls hanging loosely on his bony frame. She always found his energy and enthusiasm inspiring. “Fire in the hole!” Gordon called out as a deafening explosion tore through the afternoon, sending up a massive cloud of dirt. When it settled, the resulting crater exposed two rusted doors.

Raven cut through them with a pyro, and they fell away, exposing a cavernous underground space. Stale air rasped out, cobwebs fluttering in the darkness. H124 donned her headlamp and switched it on. The beam fell on displays and dusty equipment.

She entered the quiet cool of the museum, instantly grateful for the relief from the relentless heat. They’d been smart to build it underground. Much of the museum was still intact. A wide staircase led down to a lower level. On the ceiling hung a jet of some kind—she’d looked through numerous books on aircraft, but didn’t know this exact model, though she recognized it as a combat plane.

They split up, exploring different rooms. In the first hall on the right she discovered a collection of old planes. She explored the hall, reading their placards. A silver one with a painted name was called The Spirit of St. Louis. Hanging from the ceiling was a yellow Beechcraft C17L Staggerwing from 1936 and a black Curtiss R3C-2 seaplane from 1925. Nearby, taking up a section of floor space, stood a delicately winged 1903 Wright Flyer.

In the next room, she stopped before a display that read, “How Do You Contribute?” Originally it had been a powered display. A cord snaked off into the wall. She pulled out the wire and hooked it up to her PRD’s power cell. Light flickered from a contraption in the floor and filled the old display. H124 stepped back in wonder. Three-dimensional people suddenly stood before her, all made of light. Green grass stretched into the distance, and huge living trees shaded the area, their leaves rustling in the wind.

“What are you doing to help the planet?” the voice of an off-screen interviewer asked. A smiling man faced the camera. He wore brown shorts and a collared white-striped shirt, his hair cut short, his face red with sunburn.

“I teach my kids to respect the earth.”

“And what have they done so far?”

In the background H124 could see the man’s kids kicking around a black-and-white ball. One of them kicked it past the other and let out a whoop.

The man continued to beam. “Oh, well, nothing yet. But they’ll teach their kids, too.”

The scene shifted to show an older woman smiling into the camera. “And what do you do to help?” the interviewer asked.

She grinned. “If I can make just one person smile, I’ve made a difference.”

The display shifted to a woman with long blonde dreadlocks, a white knitted tank top, and a flowing rainbow skirt. “And what do you do to help?” asked the off-camera interviewer.

“I figure if I can convince two people to be more green-minded, then those two people will convince four more people, and those four will convince eight, and on and on until everyone on the planet has a greener mindset.”

“And why do you think that hasn’t already happened?”

Her smile faltered. “What do you mean?”

“Well, conservation has been a part of the global dialogue since the days of writers and thinkers like John Muir, Henry David Thoreau, and Rachel Carson. Why didn’t their thinking convince two people, who went on to convince four, who went on to convince eight? If that worked, wouldn’t we already be a predominantly green-minded society?”

The woman stared into the camera, her smile now gone.

The green display turned brown and black, and in the ensuing darkness, the off-camera voice said, “And what are you doing to help?”

The display went dark, and H124 stood for a few minutes, processing what she’d just seen, thinking of the ruined landscape above her. The last person interviewed…the idea wasn’t a bad one. So why hadn’t it worked, this passage of ideas from one person to the next?

But H124 already knew the answer. The PPC was the last holdout from this culture that valued greed and power over the preservation of the planet. The woman’s theory didn’t work because for every one of her, there were millions of other people passing on the idea that personal gain was more important than a communal, earth-friendly attitude. Make money. Take what you can get. Think in the short term. That signal had been a thousand times more powerful than conservation, and in the end, even when things had become so dire with rising sea levels, megastorms causing massive damage, and CO2 levels changing the very composition of the earth-ocean system, greed still won out.

She thought of the PPC destroying the experimental forest Raven’s parents had worked so hard to maintain, all so the media execs could furnish their offices with wood. The mentality was still present, and powerfully so.

“You okay?” came Dirk’s voice from across the room. She turned to him, unplugging her PRD from the display.

She turned to him. “Yeah. This place is just…”

“Haunting?”

She blinked. “Yeah. It’s hitting you that way, too?”

He gazed over his shoulder. “All these amazing inventions, this dedication to learning and exploration. I feel like we’re on some alien world, or that we discovered a long-lost civilization. Can’t believe these were our ancestors.”

He hooked his thumb to the left. “Looks like there’s a whole room about airships over there.” He moved past her, on to a different section of the museum.

The next room did indeed hold photographs and artifacts from a variety of early airships. And finally she knew why the PPC ships were called “airships.” Early ones had been filled with helium or hydrogen, the latter being highly flammable and dangerous. She stopped at a photograph depicting a huge airship on fire, anchored to a metal scaffolding of some kind. Over the years, airships had gotten sleeker and slimmer, more maneuverable. She stopped at a display showing the undercarriage of an airship prototype, instantly recognizing it as an early model of what the PPC now flew.

The base was triangular, with a sleek but small cabin, just big enough for a weapons officer, pilot, and two or three additional crew members. This particular airship had been fitted out in luxury, with a mirrored bar, comfortable sitting area, and several bedrooms at the back. The exhibit described how the airship was fitted with a flexible solar array that could create super-heated air to the give the airship lift. The original designer had gone bankrupt, unable to find backers for his new design. The military had stepped in, buying the patent and designing a series of weapons that could be mounted on the underside of the cabin, devastating discharges of energy that could destroy whole villages in a single blast.

She thought of the airship that had destroyed the Black Canyon Badlander camp, and of the one who had fired on them on the east coast when they’d been out retrieving the first piece of the blast deflection craft. The weapon was certainly effective.

She passed through to the next room, meeting Raven as he emerged from a connecting chamber. Here the room had been painted black, with constellations of stars dotting the walls, and a large depiction of the moon painted on the far side. Before the moon stood the lunar lander she’d seen in the flooded facility. A mannequin in a space suit stood in mid-descent on the ladder, one foot stepping onto a simulated grey lunar surface.

In a neighboring display stood a capsule-shaped craft called the Mercury.

She stopped at a third display, staring in awe. The shuttle Atlantis stood behind long velvet ropes. It was so much bigger than she’d imagined after seeing photographs of it.

“We’re getting closer,” Raven said. “It’s got to be here in this wing.”

In a section just after the shuttle towered a gigantic metal machine. It stood on treads, like the photos she’d seen of tanks in books. It was absolutely monstrous, bigger than some of the single-story houses she’d sheltered in during her trek from New Atlantic. The exhibit sign said it was a “Shuttle Crawler Transporter.” As huge as it was, she was staggered to see photos of even bigger ones that had transported gigantic rockets to lift-off areas.

Gordon joined them from an adjoining room as Raven moved off in a different direction. “This place is out of sight!” the pilot said, his eyes sparkling.

She and Gordon walked into the next exhibit hall and stopped abruptly. In the center of the room, roped off and still gleaming and silver, stood the A14. Its sleek body was not entirely unlike the shuttle, but it was narrower, and the wings were slightly sharper in shape.

Gordon gave a long, low whistle. “There she is.” Together they walked around the ship, making a complete circuit. It was in remarkably good shape, and H124 closed her eyes briefly, basking in relief.

She could hear Dirk and Raven talking in the next room. “In here!” she called out.

They hurried toward her, standing in wonder. “We found it,” Raven breathed. “And look at it! Looks like they just built it yesterday. It’s in fantastic shape.”

H124 leaned in to read the A14’s placard:

“While never launched, the A14 was the first and only craft in a planned series of spacecraft that would replace the shuttle program. Designed to take off directly from the ground on its own power, it did not require the use of rocket bodies. As space junk orbiting the earth became more and more of a hazard, designs like this became more valuable, as ejected rocket bodies became the biggest orbiting debris risks to communication satellites and other craft. The A14 was designed to make the trip quickly and efficiently, and could be used to repair orbiting telescopes and make delivery runs to the International Space Station.”

H124 paused at that part of the description. An international space station? Though a ceiling blocked her view of the sky, she found herself involuntarily looking up. There was a space station up there? Was it still there? How had all of this been lost? She returned her attention to the placard.

“Though this project was heralded as the next vital step in space exploration, due to numerous budget restrictions and funding cuts, ultimately the A14 project was abandoned. This is the only model that was ever built.”

“It was never even launched,” H124 said. She found a large stepladder on wheels in a back room, and Gordon climbed to the top to examine the A14’s engine. He gave a sigh, relieved to find the engine was still in there. Some of the planes had had theirs removed to make them lighter and easier to display. Dirk and Raven stood beside her, staring up anxiously.

“We’d have to do some tinkering before this thing will be able to fly,” Gordon told them. “Not the least of which, we’d have to convert it to a different fuel source. Not a lot of refined jet fuel lying around these days.”

“Do you think you could do it?” Raven asked.

Gordon turned, his eyes sweeping over the fuselage. “Needless to say, it’s pretty different from other craft I’ve worked with. But I think with Rivet’s help, we might be able to repair it.” Rivet was the Rover’s top engineer, and she was currently in Sanctuary City, piecing together the blast deflection craft. H124 gripped Raven’s arm happily. As Gordon climbed down, she hugged him fiercely, and he chuckled and hugged her back. “At least we can try.” He took in the size of the thing. “Getting it out is going to be a challenge.”

Already H124’s mind pored over possibilities. They’d brought along a number of maglev sleds, figuring they might have to maneuver the A14 out of a tight spot. But they wouldn’t be able to move it very far. The sheer weight of the craft meant that the sleds would only be able to labor for a few minutes before their power cells depleted. They could recharge in the sun, but it would take so many repeated cycles that it was completely impractical. And getting it to a place where there were no Death Riders, PPC, or hostile Badlander groups was essential if they were going to get it ready to go. They had to move it somewhere safe enough that Rivet and Gordon could get to work converting the fuel system. It would take teams of people coming and going, bringing supplies, and it wouldn’t be long before others noticed their presence and showed up in droves to pick them clean of whatever tech they had.

Dirk turned to Gordon. “We can’t just work on it here. It’s too exposed with that blasted crater now. It won’t be long before Death Riders notice we’re here.”

H124’s mind flashed to the bloodthirsty marauders and a chill swept through her. If they’re not already outside now. She brushed the thought aside.

Raven nodded. “I agree. We’d be a target for every band of scavengers once they saw activity in this area.” He paced, thinking. “We do have a satellite location near the west coast. It’s still across the country, but it’s a lot farther south than Sanctuary City, and would get us a little closer. It’s a protected location, and there’s an engineering lab, some living quarters, an armory.”

“We still have to get the A14 out of this museum,” Dirk pointed out.

H124 thought back to the previous room. “What if we use the synced maglevs to lift it onto the Shuttle Crawler Transporter?” She glanced around at their faces. Dirk seemed to like the idea. “It’s electric. The plaque said it had an enormous amount of torque. We can charge up the Crawler with the UV recharger. Then we just drive it, A14 and all, right out of the loading doors.”

Dirk brought this hand to his chin, then pointed at her. “I like it.”

“And then?” Gordon asked. “Once it’s outside?”

“Could we lift it somehow?” H124 asked. “Fly it under a helicopter?”

“It’s too heavy for what we’ve got,” Gordon put in. “I’ve been mentally going through all the aircraft I know of, stashed around the country and up in Sanctuary City. We don’t have anything that could carry something like this.”

H124 thought of the train tracks she’d seen from the plane. They weren’t far away from here, and they stretched all the way to the horizon, joining with a network of tracks that all converged in the ancient metropolis in the distance. Hadn’t Byron mentioned something that first night they met? Something about the “Big Worm,” a steam engine that glided along tracks just like these? “The Big Worm,” she said aloud, her eyes lighting up.

Dirk spun, staring at her in disbelief. “The Big Worm?”

“Yes. Isn’t that what’s called? It’s a steam train.”

Dirk shook his head adamantly. “That’s a crazy idea. They can only drive it so far before it gets too much unwanted attention. They’ve had to armor the whole train.”

She wouldn’t let the idea go. “But it’s possible, isn’t it?”

He looked at her skeptically. “We don’t even know where it is right now. It could be anywhere along the route.”

“Who operates it?”

“This Badlander Grant.”

“Do you know him?”

“I’ve never met him, but I hear he’s completely crackers. Spent too much time alone.”

“But Byron knows him, doesn’t he? He said he’d seen the Worm work.”

Dirk pursed his lips.

Opening up her comm window, she called Byron. In case their mission was unsuccessful, he and Rowan had been moving Badlander camps into an old network of bomb shelters they’d found.

“Halo!” he said, grinning when he saw her. He’d taken to calling her by that nickname more and more often.

“Byron.” She gave a little smile, though her stomach did flips at the sight of him. His long brown hair hung around his shoulders, his green eyes twinkling in his tawny face. She still hadn’t figured out what she was supposed to do with her feelings for him. “Do you remember that first night we met, when you kidnapped me and stole my car, then forced me to march through a river of fecal matter and break into a hostile megacity?”

“I’ll never forget it.” His grin widened.

“You mentioned something that night about The Big Worm.”

“I remember.”

“Is it still operational?”

“Sure is, and they’ve cleared an even longer track.”

“How long?”

“From a hundred or so miles east of where New Atlantic was, all the way to about two hundred miles shy of the west coast. Granted, it runs through some pretty desolate territory.”

“Could we, say, borrow the Big Worm? We found the launch vehicle and need to move it cross country.”

“You’d attract a lot of attention.”

“It’s our best chance.”

“A lot of hostile attention.”

“Yes.”

Byron cocked an eyebrow. “So you want to load this thing onto a steam train and drive it a thousand miles across the weather-ravaged, Death Rider-infested, PPC-airship-patrolled wastelands?”

“That’s about it.”

“I am so in.”

She laughed.

“Let me check with the engineer, Grant. See where he is right now, if he’d be up for this crazy adventure.”

“He would have bragging rights after.”

“Always important.”

“Tell him we need to get the A14 as far northwest as possible, to a safe place where Rivet can work on it. There’s a Rover satellite location there.”

“Give me a minute,” Byron told her. “And I’ll contact him.” He signed off.

“First step,” Dirk said, moving away, “is getting these loading doors opened.”

He retraced his steps through the museum entrance, the others following. Back at Gordon’s Lockheed Vega, they unloaded a portable UV charger and twenty heavy-lifting maglev sleds, transporting them all back to the museum.

The loading doors had been fitted with backup hand cranks in case of power outages, but hopefully the portable UV charger would provide enough power to get it open. They still had to blast through layers of windblown dirt that had accumulated over the loading doors, but didn’t want to do it until the last minute.

Unhooking the mobile UV charger, they laid it on a maglev and moved it to the Shuttle Crawler Transporter. After attaching it to the transporter’s massive bank of batteries, they programmed the maglev sled to hover beside it as it moved. They dragged a few displays out of the way to clear a path to the loading doors.

H124 climbed up into the controller booth of the Crawler and started it up. Lights blinked on the instrument panel, the battery meter flickering to life. She exhaled gratefully and inched the massive machine forward, out of the area where it had stood for so long. The treads groaned and creaked, breaking free after lying immobile. Angling it down the corridor toward the A14, she found it to be surprisingly maneuverable, able to turn even when stationary. The treads below rotated and trundled forward. She stopped in front of the A14.

Raven linked all the maglevs together, and maneuvered them beneath the body and wings of the A14. Then as one, the sleds lifted the craft. She could hear their whirring propellers working desperately to get lift, the tiny motors revving high. Then the A14 was aloft, slowly rising up. Raven steered it up, passing over H124 in the controller booth, and began to position it over the transport platform on top of the Crawler. The A14’s tires had gone flat long ago. He had just started to gently lower it when H124 heard the maglev rotors begin to wind down, their power depleting quickly.

They were still two feet above the Crawler when the humming of their rotors dropped to a barely perceptible thrum. Raven entered a command, and the maglevs slipped out from under the A14 just as the sleds gave out altogether. The A14 dropped the remaining two feet onto the Crawler, and the vibration shook H124 in her booth. The sleds fell to the floor, completely depleted.

Dirk climbed up the exterior of the Crawler and began strapping down the A14 with Gordon.

H124’s PRD beeped, and she opened the comm window to see Byron. “It’s all set,” he told her. “Here’s the coordinates where we’ll meet you.” Her map blinked, letting her know it had received the location. “See you tomorrow afternoon,” he said with a grin, and signed off.

For the rest of the evening and part of the next day, they hid underground, exploring the vast museum. H124 slept in the lunar display next to the Eagle lander. They’d placed the maglev copters outside to charge in the sun, and by the next morning, they were ready to go again.

Outside in the blistering heat, H124 helped Dirk transport more explosives over to the loading door area. Countless years of dirt and windblown debris had covered it, so they set up a few explosives and moved a safe distance away.

They lay down and covered their heads.

“Fire in the hole!” Gordon called out.

Dirt rained over H124, dusting her clothes.

They stood up, brushing themselves off, and approached the exposed door. Using small folding shovels, they uncovered what little dirt was left, completely clearing the opening. The aperture was definitely big enough to get the Crawler and A14 through. Now they just needed to feed power to the door’s mechanism to get it open.

They returned to the quiet cool of the museum, H124 taking a deep breath of the chilled air. It was musty and smelled mildewy, but it beat the brutal heat above.

H124 climbed back into the operator’s booth on the Crawler. With the A14 still secured on top, Raven gave H124 a thumbs-up. She turned the enormous transporter, aiming for the exterior doors. The progress was tortuously slow, inching forward across the floor of the museum. Her mind began to race, worrying that Death Riders or Badlanders might see the open doors above and come to check it out.

They turned on the power to the loading doors, and they wrenched open. Sunlight poured into the subterranean museum, illuminating displays that hadn’t seen light in too many years to count.

Finally she reached the bottom of the ramp and drove upward, feeling the weight of the craft pulling at the Crawler. But she managed to motor all the way to the top and out into the blinding sunlight.

She watched as the doors cranked down slowly, sealing once more, blending in with the desolate terrain. She checked her PRD. The intact railway track was close, only two miles away, but the going would be very slow. She started out, knowing the others would easily catch up to her. She’d only gone a hundred feet when they emerged from the museum entrance and walked over to her.

“How’s it going up there?” Raven called up to her.

“I might break a land speed record here for slowest vehicle ever.”

He chuckled and walked alongside her, the others joining him.

Above her the heat beat down, so she fished her sun goggles out of her toolbag and slipped them on. Better. Already sweat trickled down her back and her feet were starting to overheat in her boots.

Dust devils swirled by as she maneuvered around a stand of long dead trees. Just as she had outside New Atlantic, she spotted strange objects among the barren trunks. Large metal cylinders, hollow and riddled with rusted holes, lay scattered, some still upright. Metal benches, leaning and falling apart, had been situated throughout the trees. A small, crumbling footbridge spanned what was now a dry creek bed filled with sediment and dust.

They passed a dilapidated structure with the faded word “Café” barely visible above doors open to the elements.

A collapsing knee-high black fence encircled a large depression in the center of the trees. A worn metal sign read “Paddle bo…rent.” A plastic contraption with a steering wheel and foot pedals, sun-damaged almost to white, sat cockeyed in the middle of the dry depression.

They passed a few more dilapidated structures. Dirk walked out front by himself, his expression distant. Below her, Raven and Gordon chatted companionably about the experimental forests the Rovers had been planting.

When the tracks came into view ahead, H124 mentally urged the Crawler to go faster. She checked her PRD. The Big Worm would be here in just a few minutes. She edged up to the tracks, the glare of the sun still dazzling even with her goggles on.

To the west, the tracks bent away out of sight, angling gently northwest. She heard the train before she saw it, a metallic singing in the tracks. Dirk bent down and touched one of rails, feeling the vibration. “Right on time.”

Then she saw a column of white steam in the distance and the train came into sight, the sun glinting off its black metal sides. As it powered down the tracks toward them, she could hear the steam engine pumping away, the rhythmic chuffing as it moved the wheels.

It slowed, chugging to a hissing stop in front of them. She could see now that it was completely shielded in armor, thick iron plates covering all areas of ingress. With a clang and a hiss, a metal door covering the engine jutted out and slid upward. Inside she saw a few steps leading up to the engine compartment.

Byron appeared in the doorway, gripping a handle and leaning out. “Halo!” he called, jumping off the train. He waved up at her on top of the Crawler, and she waved back, her stomach once more doing acrobatics.

He greeted the others, then turned back to the train. The engineer stepped out, a bearded, heavy-set man with tousled brownish-black hair framing a tanned face. His brown eyes twinkled as he took them all in.

“This is Grant,” Byron said. He introduced the others.

“Make no mistake,” Grant said, eyeing them each in turn. “This is a crazy mission, and if my train gets messed up, I’m hunting you all to your graves.”

They stood in silence for a moment, and then Grant burst out laughing, holding his generous belly and shaking with laughter.

Raven gave an uneasy chuckle.

“I have a few ground rules for riding in my train,” Grant went on. “First, don’t spill coffee on the control board. Second, you go to the bathroom on your own time.” He scowled at them each in turn, and they all exchanged confused glances. “And lastly, and most importantly, don’t go drinking so much liquor that you shoot up the place, thinking it’s infested with opossums.”

They glanced at each other, then nodded hesitantly.

“All right. Let’s get this show on the road. Don’t like to stop too long in one place.” He returned to the engine and threw a few levers. In the middle of the train, one of the cars hissed. The top of it moved, parting at the top and splitting in half. It opened up and outward, unfolding into a huge metal platform.

“Load ’er up!” Grant called.

Raven checked the charging level of the maglevs. They were ready to go. He assembled them together and programmed them to work in tandem. Their power cells beeped in unison, indicating they were full.

He flew them up to the A14, angling them beneath the fuselage and wings. They lifted, their rotors working furiously, finally managing to get it aloft. He steered them over to the train’s platform, the rotors starting to whir erratically, the power cells already depleting. He barely got the A14 positioned over the platform when they gave out, slamming the A14 down onto the train.

“Hey!” shouted Grant. “You be careful up there. Not a scratch, remember? Not a scratch!” He rubbed his beard thoughtfully. “Forgot to mention that rule. Rule #4: Not a scratch!” He emerged from the engine compartment and climbed up onto the platform, bringing out tow ropes with hooks. Dirk helped him fasten these around the A14, securing it to the train.

In the cargo car, they loaded up the remaining explosives.

Then Grant hopped down to the ground, moving back toward the engine. “Let’s get movin’! There’s a turn around a few miles ahead. Hop aboard.”

Gordon stepped back. “I’ll leave you to your journey. I’m going to fly the plane back. I can help Rivet set up for converting the A14.”

Raven approached Gordon, then typed into the pilot’s PRD. “Here are the coordinates for the satellite location. I’ll tell her to meet you there.”

H124 started to climb down from the Crawler, then thought better of it. It was an amazing piece of engineering. She didn’t want it sitting out like this. It had helped them, and could be useful in the future, if not for her, then maybe someone else on a future mission. She remained in the control booth. “You guys go on ahead. I’m going to drive this back and stash it. Then I’ll meet you along the track after you turn around.”

Gordon looked up at her. “I’ll ride with you.” He grabbed a handle on the lower side of the Crawler and hopped up onto a small ledge.

“Here, you’ll need this,” Raven said, handing over the portable UV charger. Gordon grabbed it and hauled it up onto the Crawler.

Raven said goodbye to Gordon, shaking his hand, then looked up to H124. “See you in a few,” he called up. He climbed the stairs into the engine room. Byron joined him, leaning out again, hanging onto the handle. He gave her a small wave as the shielded doors came down. The train began to pull out, steam billowing from the chimney mounted on front of the engine.

H124 turned the Crawler around, and they made the creeping journey back to the museum. Gordon hopped off as they got close, carrying the portable UV charger. He made his way to the main museum entrance, where he disappeared. Moments later, the huge loading door screeched open. H124 drove the Crawler down the ramp into the welcoming cool and dark. She parked it back at its original display, then climbed down. They shut the loading doors again and made their way through the dark museum to the main entrance.

“This was an amazing place,” Gordon said as they paused at the door. “Must have been incredible to live back then. So much innovation. Exploration.”

She nodded. “To have been to the moon!”

“I know! Can you imagine?”

H124 could.

Outside, she accompanied him for the mile back to the plane. They loaded the UV charger into the plane, then she hugged him tightly.

“I’ll get everything set up with Rivet,” he told her, double-checking that he had the coordinates of the Rover satellite site.

She pulled away. “Good luck. Take care of yourself.”

He turned and boarded the plane.

She looked after him, watching him disappear through the door. Then he stuck his head back out. “About Dirk…you keep an eye on him. Everyone says time heals all wounds,” Gordon said quietly, “but I’ve always found that to be a complete dung pile of rubbish.” Then he climbed into the plane and pulled up the ladder.

She watched until he taxied off and the plane climbed into the sky. Then she squinted in the direction of the train tracks, wondering if they’d make it all the way to the satellite location.