Chapter 16: A Dark Spirit

TO STARMAN David Foster, it was a soft, rainy morning. He had just awakened after a night on the SE supply asteroid O344, and the only sound was the faint hum of the operating system. He wrapped himself a little more snugly into his blanket and kept his eyes shut. His imagination easily turned the murmur into the soft sound of rain sifting through the leaves of the tree outside his bedroom window on his uncle’s farm in West Virginia. With slightly more effort he could imagine a drizzle drumming lightly on the wooden shingles above and drifting out onto the empty fields in the early autumn days shortly after harvest.

His Uncle Francis and Aunt Clare were dear to David. Although he had been raised on the Moon, close to his father’s work, he had been born in Clark’s Bridge Crossing, the village near their farm. From the time he was old enough to show any notice of the world around him, David had loved the stars. Even now, he loved interplanetary travel, exploration, and adventure better than anything, but in his heart was an emotionally-intense place where he kept his memories of the West Virginia farm where he had spent so much of his childhood.

The small towns and family-owned farms had become indispensable to the rebuilding of America after the Collapse. In the United States the nuclear devastation of those horrifying years had been severe. Most major cities had been destroyed, but much of the outlying and rural areas had survived. In the latter half of the 21st century new leadership arose from these areas, and the American spirit, which for a hundred years had gradually been eclipsed by special-interest groups, lobbyists, fringe organizations, and major corrupt economic interests, was largely purified. The “old values” became popular again, if not always followed. A generation of leaders arose with an appeal similar to that enjoyed by the “log cabin” presidents. A candidate who claimed to have basic values and homespun philosophy was guaranteed to win support from the remaining American population.

With his eyes still closed, David smiled. He tried to imagine the aroma of his Aunt Clare’s freshly-ground coffee coming from the kitchen, mingled with the smell of hot-off-the-griddle blueberry pancakes. The drizzle was stopping, and the dawnlight of the newly-risen sun was sending sparkles through the light rainy haze that shrouded the fields and crowning the eastern fields with the arc of a rainbow. The haze would soon burn off, leaving the dark earth sodden and leaves dripping. He smiled even wider. He could hear his aunt’s voice now...

“Come and get it, Starmen!” pealed the voice of George St. George. “Got some more of that engine-oil coffee steaming away, and I managed to whip together some biscuits from some powdered stuff I found!”

Zip’s eyes shot open and took in the neutral walls of the cubicle where he, Mark, and Joe had slept. The faint hum of O344’s system was drowned out now with the rustle of human movement as the asteroid miners gathered around the table.

“There’s some sort of orangy liquid I mixed up from some other powder, too! Probably has some good vitamins in it!”

In minutes the Starmen and miners were tucking in to the best that George St. George could do with the supplies at hand.

After breakfast, the Starmen sat in the lounge. Mark was poring over the printout that he had taken from the power plant on the pirates’ asteroid. He had a digital copy of much of the layout of the asteroid, and information on the power plants, propulsion structures, and sheathing equipment. The papers were filled with charts, maps, and diagrams; a few sections were written in an unintelligible, alien language. He couldn’t even tell which symbols were letters and which were numbers.

“I hope they didn’t use a pictorial alphabet like Chinese,” said Joe, looking over Mark’s shoulder.

“No,” the big Starman answered. “There are plenty of recurring symbols, so I assume it’s a language like our own, with letters and words. Somebody will be able to decipher this without too much difficulty. It’s far beyond my skill, though.” He rubbed his chin. “But I can recognize a lot of the machinery.”

Zip was sitting nearby. He hadn’t spoken much during breakfast. The images of the farm pulled at him again. “Mark, Joe,” he began. He hesitated a moment while they turned to him. They could see he was puzzling through something, and waited patiently for him to continue. “SE says that Zimbardo has targeted Earth with an asteroid over forty miles long. What’ll that do to home?”

Mark was suddenly deeply saddened. Zip always referred to the Moon as home. He spoke softly.

“One of my professors at Starlight University talked about a study conducted in the early 21st century. Back then, scientists started becoming concerned about asteroid impacts, and they built a complex computer model to see what would happen if a large asteroid struck Earth.”

“What did they find?” whispered Joe.

“Well, the model found that, depending on the angle of entry, the impact can produce a massive corridor of incineration ahead of the impact site. In that area, just about all life ends in minutes. But the model predicted other changes that destroyed nearly all life on Earth within a few years.”

“Like what?” Zip’s voice was dusky.

“I’m sounding like a textbook,” complained Mark.

“Go on,” insisted Zip.

Mark closed his eyes and tilted his head back. “A few hours after the impact, clouds of noxious gases billow up and block out the sun for months. Temperatures drop drastically all over the Earth and corrosive acid snow and rain fall. These short-term effects alone-intense cold, darkness, and acid rain and snow-kill the plants and photosynthetic plankton, the base of most food chains. Herbivores starve, and then the carnivores that feed on the herbivores starve. This is enough to kill most of the remaining human life on the planet. After the clouds clear, the atmosphere is thick with carbon dioxide from fires and decaying matter. Then the carbon dioxide contributes to global warming that lasts for ages.”

Tears slowly escaped from Zip’s closed eyes and made tracks down his cheeks. He remembered that when he was small his aunt and uncle had taken him on a two-hour flight in their small plane to the place closest to their home where there was a field of nuclear devastation. His first view of the terrain beyond the boundary had been indelibly burned into his seven-year-old mind. The cities and towns surrounded by fields, orchards, streams, ponds, and woods had rapidly tapered off below a slight rise into a land of gray, utterly lifeless, gasping dust thatreached as far southeastward as the eye could see. The center of the field had been the nation’s capital, the third of the great American cities to be destroyed in the holocaust of 2048.

“How big was the asteroid they modeled?” asked Joe.

“About six to ten miles across,” said Mark.

“And the one Zimbardo has aimed at Earth is forty miles long?”

“Bigger. A little bigger than that,” answered Zip quietly. “Bigger.” He felt a chilling darkness come over him, almost as if he had walked into an inky refrigerator. He shivered uncontrollably for a moment, then sat up and took control of himself.

“Today we get the Star Ranger back!” he announced in a clear voice. “and we’re heading back to Earth! Be ready for immediate departure!”

An immense metal and glass wheel, half a mile in diameter, rotated slowly in the jeweled heavens. It was the primary manufacturing and launching headquarters of Nolan Mining Enterprise. It orbited the Moon about 500 miles above the surface.

Robert Nolan was burning with a zealous flame of energy. Although often close to burning out, he never went over the edge. His apparently bottomless resources had allowed him to achieve remarkable things in twenty years. Now he was in the command bubble that lifted like an antenna from the heart of the space station. A tower two hundred yards long lifted out from the plane of NME’s manufacturing and launching facility. At its end was a large observation and control center that commanded a view of every aspect of one side of the plant.