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  The transport, now showing no signs of trouble, crossed the width of the strip in minutes. When Jeffrey flew over the northern ridge of mountains and into the next steep valley, he turned hard right. On any other day he would have turned left, brought the transport down into the valley, and flown over the scrap yard surveying the cut pieces of wreckage set in stacks and rows. Today he flew straight toward the squat bunker on the eastern end of the valley. High, thin window slits broke the smooth surface of the bunker’s gray walls. He aimed the transport at the white landing pad next to the bunker.

  Smacking a toggle, he felt the landing skids thump into place. He stabilized the transport over the black X on the landing pad, jets firing down, and–without ceremony–dropped it to the ground. He reached up and yanked the yellow and black emergency stop handle. The engines went silent and all the lights on the console fluttered off. He exhaled and sat for a moment, feeling adrenaline still glowing in his arms and legs.

  “Not today, you pile,” he said.

  He had some trouble unbuckling his harness as his hands and arms felt weak and trembled slightly. Looking to his left, he saw coffee spattered across the cockpit glass. He took a rag from his pocket, wiped the window, and then the console between the instruments, then pocketed the rag and scowled at the smeared glass. He pressed a switch, and the seat pulled away from the controls. Stooping, he stepped around the seat and picked up his cooler. He found the coffee mug and its lid lying in the back corner. Opening the cooler, he put the mug in it. Then he flipped the manual ramp release and the ramp popped open, its weight pulling it to the tarmac. Turning his shoulders to fit through the doorway, he made his way down the ramp and into the desert’s warming morning.

  He looked up at the exhaust ports and saw white dust coating the carbon-stained metal.

  That’s not good.

  He reached up and held his hand near the metal. Heat radiated from it. He’d have to let it cool down and give it a look later, after the freighter crash. Stepping around the side of the transport, he set the cooler down and stuffed a hand and a foot into spring loaded panels and pulled himself up. He lay down on top of the transport, feeling the cold metal against his stomach and chest. He peered into a vent grid, but the sunlight glinting on the aluminum slats prevented him from seeing into the darkness. He took a penlight from a thigh pocket and shined it into the vent. Shielding his eyes with his hand, he could only make out a few dim shapes of wire bundles and pipes. He put the penlight back in his pocket and slid down to the hand holds.

  As he walked toward the bunker, dust lifted around his worn, steel-toed boots. He passed a weathered sign which read, “United States Government Orbital Reclamation Facility. No unauthorized personnel allowed.”

  Jeffrey made his way into the shade of the bunker, up the cement stairs, and into the cool doorway. He typed a code into the keypad, and the magnetic lock gave way with a thump. He pushed the door open.

  Stepping into the large one-room bunker, the door shut behind him, and he said, “How the hell did you get in here?”

  CHAPTER 2

  A tarantula the size of his hand walked across the center of the room. Jeffrey moved sideways around the edge of the room, keeping the spider in sight. He bumped into a table, and the spider turned and skittered towards him. He grabbed an empty box from the table and threw it onto the spider. Two hairy legs stuck out under the edge of the box and then rasped back.

  Jeffrey realized he was holding his breath and let it out, his spine tingling. He took another sheet of cardboard, slid it gently under the box and then picked the entire container up. The spider skittered around, dry feet on paper fibers. Goose flesh rose on Jeffrey’s arms. He took the container outside and tossed it off to the side of the bunker. He walked back inside, twitching once more as the door shut behind him.

  He walked to the desk near the center of the room and sat down. A computer monitor, keyboard, phone, and legal pad sat on the desk. Beside the monitor, a titanium cup that had once been part of a ship’s instrument console held two pens and one pencil. Jeffrey straightened the pens in the cup. Next to the cup sat a plain, black frame with a photo of his wife, young and pretty. A photo of his son lay over the lower corner of the frame, covering his wife’s shoulder. His son wore BDU’s and posed kneeling with his rifle. It had been taken the year before. The two photos complimented each other. His son was physically more his mother’s son, shorter and thin. The similar smiles hinted at broad senses of humor. Jeffrey smiled at his son’s photo, a living part of his wife still with him.

  Jeffrey tapped the screen with his finger. It glowed dark blue, booted, and brought up the operating system with a flick of light. He took a folded red cloth from the desk drawer and wiped the already clean screen.

  He brought up a Las Vegas news station on the computer and set it to run in the background. Opening his e-mail client, he typed:

  “Transport 1534-AF experienced trouble this morning. Engines lost power approximately 25 miles from work site. Repair crew requested. Note work done in AM by tech named ‘Arlo’ with Huntington Aircraft.” He tapped the send icon on the screen.

  Standing, he walked toward the kitchen area and looked back at where the tarantula had been on the floor. The bunker was sealed. He looked at the half-inch steel grates over the air vents. It could only have entered the bunker by hanging on his leg last Friday when he had come in the door from the yard. The thought made his shoulders twitch again and gooseflesh rise, so he put it out of his mind.

  “…protests of the new military spending budget met with greater public support over the weekend…,” the news program from his computer went on, as he stepped into the small kitchen area and took the stained carafe from the coffee maker. He reached into the cabinet above him and brought down a rumpled bag of sugar, a plastic container of creamer, and a mug with ‘Hoover Dam’ printed on the side. “…was quoted as saying that without an external threat there is no need for the new weapons systems…”

  He looked into the small mirror and saw coffee soaked in across his shirt. He turned on the faucet and washed his face and then, picking up a clean towel, scrubbed the water out of his trimmed white beard. He looked back in the mirror. He looked older every day. His white hair with shocks of gray had not one strand of its once jet black color. Even his eyebrows had gone silver. At least the smile lines in the corners of his eyes made him look younger, and he supposed he had held up well over the years, more distinguished than worn out. Looking down at the coffee stain on his shirt, he set the carafe aside. He’d had enough coffee for one day. He walked back to his desk, and began reviewing his work files.

  The transport’s engine failure kept coming back into his mind. He took out his sat-phone.

  “In local news the ‘landing strip’ will be active today.”

  Jeffrey’s eyebrows went up. He set his phone down and brought up the video to see a young, female reporter standing next to the image of a man positioned for effect on the bridge of a battle cruiser. The man wore a Naval Officer’s uniform. Behind him, the Earth floated at geosynchronous distance. The man’s evenly toned hair did not quite match the age of his face.

  Not six months earlier, that man had held a cup of coffee poured from the old carafe on the counter and sat in the chair across from Jeffrey’s desk.

  The woman said, “The 40-year-old freighter Jules Verne will be entering the Earth’s atmosphere at 11AM and touching down shortly after. So, if you feel a thump, just be glad we’re 175 miles away.”

  “I think I’ll get slightly more than a ‘thump’ here,” Jeffrey said to the screen.

  The reporter continued, “We have with us, via live feed, Admiral Sam Cantwell to give us some more information on the process.” She turned to the Admiral. “What is the purpose of landing the freighter here?”

  “Let’s start off with the fact that this is not a landing,” the Admiral said in his smooth, political voice. “This is a controlled crash. After the Jules Verne is ‘landed’ there will prob
ably be no pieces bigger than a living room.”

  The reporter said, “That’s quite an impact for a freighter that is nearly 1,500 feet long.”

  “Yes it is. But it is all well controlled. Safety is our highest priority. We will ‘land’ the ship far out in the desert away from population centers. This is more for the limitation of noise than for safety’s sake as we have the ability to autopilot these ships down out of orbit into a very precise area.”

  “Why don’t you just land them carefully and then dismantle them?” the reporter asked.

  “That’s a good question. First let’s touch on what is happening with these ships. They are being decommissioned. We would like to retain as much of the materials in the ships as possible, but dismantling in orbit is far too costly and dangerous. We cannot bring them in for a polite landing as they were never designed to come down out of orbit. Just the reentry tears them up badly. We add re-entry shielding, but it is only enough to prevent premature break up, not preserve the structure. Also, these ships have no landing gear, no method of safely touching down. Not to mention that the ‘landing’ starts the demolition process for us very nicely.”

  “That’s easy enough for you to say,” Jeffrey said to the screen. “Just make sure your folks land this one square so I don’t have to walk ten miles hunting hull fragments.”

  “What about any environmental impact from the burning of the hull on reentry? Some groups claim…”

  Jeffrey brought up his work files. He viewed a message reminding him that the Jules Verne would be coming in today. He had been waiting for the freighter for weeks. Over a month ago he had finished up his work out on the landing strip cleaning up a retired asteroid mining ship and was left organizing the scrap yard and coordinating shipments of materials out. This ‘new’ ship, the Jules Verne, was a Kappa class freighter built by the General Electric Corporation, a steel cage of a ship. Some ships came in and exploded into two inch strips of aluminum and powdered glass. With those he was left to sift through the wreck with magnets to separate the metals. A Kappa class freighter would leave him with a lot of demolition work, the best part of the job.

  He looked at his watch. It was getting up on 9AM. If he wanted to see the ship come in, he’d have to start walking soon.

  …

  The footpath switchbacked up the ridge. As Jeffrey hiked along the narrow trail, his back loosened up and the ache went out of his knees. He breathed in the now warm air, smelling the iron dust of lava rock and the faintly floral mark of the desert spring. By 10:45 he stood on the crest of the ridge. The heat of the day and the exertion of his hike brought out sweat on his forehead. Sweat also soaked the armpits of his shirt and the fabric between his shoulder blades. He wiped his face with his hand and looked out on the landing strip stretching away west, shimmering with heat waves. As he stood, the dull ache returned to his knees and the small of his back. He thought how he had not heard back from Huntington Aircraft yet, and he reached for his phone, realizing only then that he had left it on his desk.

  Oh well, soon enough.

  At 11AM Jeffrey held his hand up to shade his eyes and searched the eastern sky. The sun overhead blinded his eyes and he took his cap from his back pocket and put it on. Searching again, he caught a glowing point between two gauzy clouds. The point grew, and a faint trail of smoke rose behind it. He knew an arc of fire traced across the sky behind the ship, but he could not see it. Where he stood, the freighter was coming in, give or take, straight at him.

  The point became a ball, then a small sun, then a hulk searing the atmosphere at well over the speed of sound. Then the thing looked too close. It wasn’t coming down square into the valley. It appeared to be coming straight for the mountain ridge Jeffrey stood on. He shouldn’t have been on the ridge. When a ship came in, protocol directed him to stay in the bunker until he heard it hit, and then go to work. For years however, he had climbed the mountain and watched the spectacle of the ships slamming into the valley.

  As the fireball came closer, it took on the shape of the freighter. Small bits tore off and vaporized in streaks of smoke.

  The freighter cleared the mountain range, pelting the rocks with burning chunks and flashed past him no more than a quarter mile away. It hammered into the valley floor close to the base of the mountain range.

  He realized at the last moment that he had not put in ear protection, and he clapped his hands over his ears just as the sonic boom punched him in the chest. Then the shock wave from the ship’s impact, passing up through the ridge of rock, vibrated the ground. Dust and smoke wrapped over the freighter and accelerated outward, billowing up the mountainside. Jeffrey lowered his hands, his ears ringing.

  Well, I’m not getting any smarter apparently.

  He massaged the small of his back. The dust and smoke rolled up the ridge, and the wind caught it and brought it up and over. The blue sky hazed to brown as the clean acid smell of burning metal washed over him. Down below, the wind thinned the dust and smoke enough to expose debris glinting along the foot of the mountain.

  Great, what a mess.

  …

  An hour later, he sat in the bunker on the phone with the Commander of the re-entry team.

  “This is Holt.”

  “Holt?”

  “Yes, Holt with demolition.”

  “Oh yes, the breaker, good to hear from you. I assume everything is fine on your end then?”

  “We got a bit more of a bump than usual down here,” Jeffrey said, fishing for an admission that the ship had come in off-course.

  “Yes, we were close to you on that one; however, from here it looks like we hit the valley floor just fine. We’re calling the landing successful and handing responsibility of the Jules Verne over to you.”

  “What’s left of it anyway.”

  “That’s affirmative.”

  No sense of humor, those guys.

  Hanging up the phone, he pressed his hands on the tops of his thighs as he stood, walked over to a steel cabinet, and opened it. The inside smelled of gun oil. He took a jumpsuit from its hangar. The tough green fabric of the jumpsuit had thin metal bands mounted at the ankles, knees, elbows, and wrists. Stripping down to his boxers, he stepped into the suit’s legs, shuffled his arms into the sleeves, and zipped it up from crotch to neck. He put his boots back on and snapped a metal band around the arch of each foot. Reaching back into the cabinet, he pulled out gloves with similar metal bands around each finger joint and put them in a thigh pocket.

  A faint ticking sound caught his attention. He looked over at the door. The twig-on-glass tapping sound stood out in the silence of the bunker. Jeffrey walked to the door and pushed it open, shoving the tarantula aside.

  “What the hell are you doing back?”

  The tarantula ran at him, and Jeffrey stomped down on it. In that moment, he knew that his transport’s engine failure had not been accidental; someone was trying to kill him. Despite his best efforts to stay clear of them, he had stepped on tarantulas before, crushing one now and again as he walked around the scrap yard. For someone naturally troubled by spiders, crushing one the size of an apple was traumatic. The thin, woody crunch of the exoskeleton and the following sliding sensation, as the spider’s gutty smear filled his boot tread, made Jeffrey’s skin crawl for days after.

  He had failed to crush this spider. Instead, the abdomen of the spider still pressed into the sole of his boot. He lifted his boot, and the spider ran at his other foot. Jeffrey jumped back and brought his heel down hard. He heard a pop, and smoke puffed out one side of his boot tread.

  He lifted his heel and watched the legs. They did not move. He pulled his foot away, ready to bring it down again, and saw where a break in the abdomen of the spider revealed a circuit board. Jeffrey walked over to his workbench and brought back a pair of pliers. He picked the spider up with the pliers and took it back to the workbench, set it down, and looked it over. The outside had a natural appearance. The ‘skin’ had been torn away in a few places reveal
ing the glossy grid of carbon fiber. He gripped one leg with the pliers and turned the spider over. The bottom appeared to be a normal tarantula aside from a bevel cut hypodermic needle extending from the jaws.

  He touched the belly of the spider and his hand reflexively pulled away. He put his hands on the workbench, his right arm twitching.

  Damn thing’s too real.

  He took leather work gloves from a hook and put them on. Picking the spider up, he squeezed the thorax. The needle extended farther out of the mouth, a drop of clear liquid emerging on the tip.

  “I don’t know what you had for me there, but I hope you’re the only one.”

  He turned around and scanned the floor, his back and arms crawling with gooseflesh and his lower legs feeling exposed. Nothing moved in the bunker. Jeffrey walked across the room. He had been lucky. If he hadn’t come in just when he did, while the spider was crossing the room, it probably would have had him. He wondered if its programming had gone haywire causing it not to hide and wait for its target. As he walked, he stayed well clear of areas that had low lying shelves and boxes. He took an old ammo box from a shelf and returned to the workbench. He set the spider into the box, clamped it shut, took a black bag from under the work bench, placed the box into the bag, and set it aside.

  Pulling the work gloves off, he put a specialized screwdriver in his pocket, and walked out of the bunker. The sun felt warm on Jeffrey’s face and arms as it chased the morning’s coolness out of the shadows. When he reached the transport, he stepped into the shade of the tail section and looked up at the engine exhaust. A White layer coated the burned-in carbon of the exhaust. He ran his finger over the white material, and it cracked under his touch, falling away in chalky flakes. He caught a large flake and, holding it in the palm of his hand, jabbed it with his index finger. It crushed to powder. He smacked his hands together, knocking the powder off. Then, moving around to the side of the transport, he climbed up.