Apollo's Outcasts (24 page)

"There's still protests going on..."
began Sam, his copilot. Sam turned out to be short for Samantha, and I suspected that she might also be the roommate Gordie had told me about.

"And they're busting protesters as fast as they can cart 'em off to jail. This new president of ours doesn't have much respect for the Constitution, babe, and it's only to get worse before..."
He stopped himself as a light strobed on his navigation screen.
"Okay, here we are. Hang on back there, Jamey. It's gonna be a rough landing."

He wasn't kidding. The Pegasus came down fast, with a touchdown hard enough to rattle my teeth and cause me to nearly lose my grip on the strap. But we were in a hurry, and Mr. Garcia ordered me to get the hatch open at once. The dust was still settling as he and I clambered down the ladder. Nicole, Greg, and Logan had already climbed down from the ambulance; Nicole was carrying a large case with a red cross on its side.

Gordie had landed only a few dozen yards from the regolith harvester. It was a massive machine, nearly twelve feet high and sixty feet long, with a big scoop up front and a pair of funnels elevated above the rear. When in operation, the harvester would slowly roll across the terrain upon six wire-mesh wheels nearly as tall as I was, gathering regolith into its maw and feeding it through separators
that would comb out the ore containing He
³
and other vital materials; the stuff that couldn't be used was thrown out the back. Long, shallow furrows across the grey dust showed where the machine had already traveled; a bulldozer would move in front of it, pushing aside rocks and boulders big enough to jam the separators.

The harvester had come to a halt, and its searchlights revealed a couple of miners in moonsuits standing next to a third figure who lay face-down upon the ground. One of the workmen bounded over to us.
"He was standing on the upper platform when we ran through a small impact crater,"
the miner explained.
"The harvester lurched, and he fell off and hit the ground. He says he can't move his right leg and that he's having trouble breathing."

"Okay, we'll take care of it."
Mr. Garcia turned toward the four of us.
"Greg, Nicole, you'll assist me. Logan, Jamey, you can help, too. Fetch the stretcher from the ambulance."

Logan and I bunny-hopped back to the ambulance, but when we climbed inside, we ran into a problem. Dozens of white plastic containers were strapped against the bulkheads. All field equipment was boxed this way to protect them from moondust, and it wasn't obvious which one held the stretcher. Logan was about to go back and ask for help when a notion occurred to me.

"Arthur, what does a stretcher case look like?" I asked.

"It looks like this, Jamey,"
my suit replied, and an image immediately appeared on the inside of my helmet: a long, flat container with a red cross on its front.
"Serial number EM-676,"
Arthur added.

I looked around and there it was, identical to the picture Arthur had shown me, right down to the serial number. "Thanks, Arthur," I said, then Logan and I unstrapped the case from its tie-downs.

"Nice trick,"
Logan murmured as we carried the case from ambulance.
"Maybe you'll impress her yet."

"What are you talking about?" When I didn't get a response, I checked my heads-up display. Without my realizing it, Logan had switched to another channel. "Arthur, switch comlink to Three." I
said. A sharp beep, and then I went on: "I don't know what you're talking about. I'm not trying to impress anyone."

"Sure you are. And she's already taken."

I suddenly realized that he was talking about Nicole. "I'm not trying to impress her," I said, which wasn't entirely true. "If that's what you think, then you're..."

"Later. We've got work to do."

Logan was right; just then, our top priority was assisting in a medical emergency. But later, yes, we'd have a little discussion about who was trying to impress who.

We couldn't open the suit of the man who'd fallen from the harvester, of course; that would have to wait until he'd been brought into the ambulance and it had been pressurized. But when Mr. Garcia accessed the miner's suit comp, its associate told the Chief that it appeared as if the worker had suffered a cracked rib along with a fractured femur in his right upper leg. That diagnosis wasn't necessarily accurate, since it was based on the suit's internal biofeedback systems, yet it gave us something to work with until we got the miner to the ambulance.

Nicole found a cartridge inside the case she'd carried from the ambulance and handed it to Mr. Garcia. As I watched, the Chief tapped a combination into the cartridge's keypad, then attached it to a valve in the miner's life support pack. A push of a button, and the cartridge released a sedative into an epidermal skin patch located within the miner's suit. The poor guy's groans and muttered obscenities soon became a relieved sigh. The pain was gone, at least until he reached Apollo General.

By then, Logan and I had opened the container we'd brought from the ambulance, pulled out the stretcher, and spread it out upon the ground. Once the miner's condition was stabilized, Mr. Garcia told the two of us to pick him up and place him on the stretcher. This wasn't as hard as I thought it would be; with his suit included, the miner weighed only about 75 pounds, easy enough for both of us to carry. And I knew a bit about putting people on stretchers. After all,
I'd spent my life being carried around by other people. So I knew how to be gentle and told Logan what to do, and the Chief seemed to be impressed by the fact that I had this sort of knowledge and experience.

Mr. Garcia, Nicole, and Greg walked alongside Logan and me as we hauled the injured man back to the ambulance. This time, it was Greg, the Chief, and I who got to ride in the back while Logan and Nicole shared the cockpit with Gordie and Sam. Mr. Garcia waited until the Pegasus had lifted off again before he pressurized the ambulance, then he opened the miner's faceplate so that we could talk to him.

Until then, I didn't know who we'd rescued. His helmet had been covered with regolith that hid his face. So it came as a surprise when I saw that the injured man was Donald Hawthorne, Billy Tate's uncle.

He recognized me, too. "Hey...you're Crip," he said, peering up at me. "You're the kid my nephew was telling me about."

"My name is Jamey Barlowe," I said evenly.

"Ranger Third Class Jamey Barlowe," Mr. Garcia added.

"Yeah, well...good luck with that." He said this as if he believed that my new job was only temporary. "So when are you going home?"

"Not any time soon."

"Uh-huh. Sorry to hear that. You...
ow!
Dammit, Luis, what are you doing!"

"Just checking you out, Donald." The Chief had twisted Mr. Hawthorne's broken leg ever so slightly...and perhaps a little more roughly than necessary. "I figured that if you're going to pull my Ranger's leg, I'd return the favor."

Mr. Hawthorne glared at him, but wisely shut up. All the same, when he look at me, the hostility in his eyes was obvious. He clearly blamed me for all of Apollo's current problems.

And I had little doubt that I'd be hearing the same from Billy as well.

My premonition was correct. I saw Billy shortly after my search and rescue team brought his uncle to Apollo General.

A bus was waiting for the Pegasus at the landing field. Its boarding ramp connected directly to the long-range transport, and since we'd removed Mr. Hawthorne's suit on the way back to Apollo, that allowed us to carry him aboard the bus without having to depressurize the Pegasus again. Dr. Rice met us in the garage along with a couple of ER medics, and they took Donald Hawthorne straight to the hospital.

In the meantime, Mr. Garcia escorted Logan, Nicole, Greg, and me back to Airlock 7 so we could get out of our suits. He congratulated Logan and me for a job well done. I didn't think our performance had been anything special, but I wasn't about to argue with him.

Nicole was proud of us, too, but it was Logan who got a hug as soon as we were out of our suits; I had to settle for a smile. Better than nothing, I suppose, but all the same it became obvious Nicole had picked him as a boyfriend. Maybe he should have been happy about this, but the look on his face told me that he hadn't forgotten our unfinished conversation. Instead of picking up where we'd left off, though, I went to Apollo General.

I told myself that I wanted to see how Mr. Hawthorne was doing, but the fact of the matter was that I was looking for an excuse to avoid Logan. A wall had come up between us, and there was no easy way to tear it down.

I was able to dodge my friend, but I wasn't so lucky with my nemesis. Someone had notified Billy that his uncle had been in an accident, because he was already at the hospital by the time I arrived.
He was sitting in the ER waiting room when I walked in; he silently watched as I went to the front desk and asked how Mr. Hawthorne was doing. The receptionist told me that he was in surgery, but that his condition was satisfactory and he was expected to make a full recovery, and that a doctor would soon come out to speak with us. Meaning Billy and me, since we seemed to be the only people who cared enough about Donald Hawthorne to come to the hospital.

Billy hadn't said very much to me after I joined the Rangers. Someone had apparently told Mr. Garcia that there was bad blood between us--probably Mr. Speci, who'd coached both of us during my attempt at moonball--because I'd noticed the Chief was doing his best to keep Billy and me separated. But even though I'd tried to keep clear of him during school, it was only inevitable that we'd eventually meet up.

I had a choice. Either I could make a long and detailed study of the potted ferns, or I could talk to him. So I walked over to where he was sitting.

"Hi. Mind if I join you?"

He shrugged. "Suit yourself."

There was a vacant seat beside him; he didn't seem to care if I took it. "Sorry about what happened to your uncle," I said as I sat down. "Glad to hear that he's going to be okay."

"Yeah, I guess." He was leaning forward, elbows on his knees, staring at the floor's patterned tiles. He didn't look at me, and seemed to be indifferent to my presence.

I looked around the room, saw no one else there. "Umm...don't you have an aunt, or someone else who...?"

"My aunt moved back to Earth a couple of years ago after she got a divorce from my uncle. Haven't seen her since. I'll try to call her when I hear something from the doctor, but--" another shrug "--y'know, I think she'd care only if he died."

Wow
, I thought,
that's cold.
I knew a little about Billy; he was born on the Moon, but his parents were divorced when he was a little
kid and both had decided to return to Earth. Neither of them could take him with them, though, or otherwise he would've ended up in a mobil just like I had, so he'd remained in Apollo with his uncle and aunt. I wasn't aware that his aunt had left, too.

That made his uncle the only family he had on the Moon. Given the way Donald Hawthorne had carried on during the town meeting, it was no wonder that they didn't have many friends. However, when a half-dozen or so Americans loyal to President Shapar had left Apollo when the ISC embargo began, Mr. Hawthorne wasn't among them. I figured it was because he didn't want to give up a high-paying job as mining supervisor, but maybe it was because he would have had to leave his nephew alone.

I had taken a dislike to Billy the first moment we met, when he'd made fun of Eddie for being slow. But just then, I couldn't help but feel a little sorry for him...and wonder if he'd become a bully in response to his own insecurities.

I was trying to think of something to say when he beat me to it. "I suppose I ought to thank you now for saving Uncle Don," he said, still not looking at me.

"You don't have to. I didn't do much. Just put him on a stretcher, that's all."

"Yeah, sure, but..." He reluctantly stuck out his hand. "Thanks anyway."

That surprised me. I hesitated, then shook his hand. "No sweat. Just doing my job, that's all."

For the first time, he raised his eyes to meet mine. "You're serious, aren't you? About wanting to be a Ranger?"

"Sure, I'm serious. Why wouldn't I be?"

Billy didn't say anything for a second or two. He simply looked at me as if he was trying to make up his mind whether I was putting him on. "When I heard you were joining up, I thought you were just doing this to...I dunno. Try to be a big shot or something. I didn't think you could do it. Not after the way you screwed up at moonball."

My face became warm. "Moonball's a game. This is for real."

"I know how real it is...and I know you can screw up on an S & R mission even worse than you can playing moonball. But you didn't." He paused, then went on. "Look, if you think you can handle being a Ranger, then I've got your back. Understand?"

If a stray asteroid had crashed through the dome just then, I couldn't have been more shocked. "I understand, yeah. Thanks...I appreciate it."