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Authors: Edward Lee

BOOK: Operator B
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“Can you imagine if you
hadn’t
 found out about the virus?” he posed.
“Thank God we did.”
“It’s incredible that you could identify it all just through intercepted radio waves.”
“Not really. It’s just digitalized data based on photochemical analysis, spectrography, chromatography.”
Wentz figured he should stick with what he knew: flying. “How long till we find this thing and give it the eighty-six?”
“Right about…” Ashton leaned forward in her seat. “This should be it. We’re sitting right in the middle of the Tharsus grid-plat.”
They both squinted through the prismoid windows.
“There it is!” Ashton exclaimed. “See the treadmarks? Just right of center, one o’clock.”
“Uhhhh…yeah! Got it!”
Wentz slowed the OEV, then hovered. Treadmarks in the Martian dust ended at the QRS4 sample-collector. The mechanical probe was about the size of a golf cart on tractor treads. High-gain antennae spired from its top as a small radio dish spun lazily from the front end.
“What’s the safe-distance for the RDX charge?” Wentz asked. “A hundred feet?”
“A hundred
meters.
 “This is micro-gravity, remember?”
Wentz slowly backed up the OEV while Ashton held a portable rangefinder to her eye, focusing on the probe.
“You’re good,” she said.
Wentz took his hands out of the detents. He paused a moment, gazing out the window onto this otherworldly landscape.
“No time like the present, right?”
“Go for it,” Ashton said.
««—»»
Fifteen minutes later, Wentz hauled himself out of the OEV’s airlock, cumbersome as a tortoise in the bulky white EVA suit.
What a rip-off,
he thought.
I’m the first human being to walk on Mars…and no one will ever know.
 He skipped forward away from the craft, each step lifting him inches off the surface. In a gravitational field thirty-eight percent less than earth, clouds of dust looked like bizarre smoke trailing behind his footfalls. He bounced more than walked toward the tractored probe.
Once he got there, he almost felt disappointed. The probe didn’t look like much: a reflective box on treads.
“I’m here,” he radioed back to Ashton. “This thing doesn’t look like much of a big deal.”
“It cost the Russians and Japanese the equivalent of a hundred million dollars, and it cost fourteen
billion
 to get it here. They’ve spent an additional twenty billion to retrieve it.”
“Ouch!” Wentz replied. “And now I’m gonna blow it up with a demo charge that probably cost the Army ten bucks. This has to be the most outrageous act of vandalism in the history of humankind.”
“That’s right,” Ashton agreed in his earpiece. “And
you’re
 the perpetrator!”
“Thanks.” Wentz lowered to his knees, fumbling for his carry-satchel. “The ground here is sort of shiny.”
“Frozen noble gasses, sublimated argon, probably some good old-fashioned ice,” Ashton responded through crackles of mild static.
“Ice, huh? Too bad we didn’t bring some Johnny Black and a couple of glasses.”
His heavily gloved hands began to remove his demo gear. First came the cone-shaped, olive-drab bomb itself, the size of a coffee thermos. Stenciled letters read:
CHARGE, DEMOLITION, SHAPED (ONE) 2.2 POUNDS, PROPERTY OF U.S. ARMY MUNITIONS COMMAND.
 Then he removed a short coil of wire connected to a standard Herco-Tube blasting cap, and a small box-shaped timer with a knob. He placed the charge on the probe, connected the proper wires.
“I think we’re ready for the show,” he said.
“Set the timer for thirty minutes, then come back.”
His bulky hand reached for the broad timer knob but stopped just short of touching it. He was looking up toward the nearest ridge.
Something glinted. “Wait a sec, I see something…near the—”
“It’s probably just carbonaceous deposits,” Ashton returned. “Forget about it. Come on back.”
Wentz squinted through the gold-flaked NASA face-shield. “No, no, it’s… I’m gonna check it out.”
“Negative, Jack!” Ashton objected. “It could be a plate crack! It could be an ice shelf! You could fall in!”
“I’ll take my chances.”
Ashton’s voice shrilled through the static. “Jack—damn it! No! You’re violating your orders!”
Fuck orders,
Wentz thought.
He bounced away from the probe, moving sluggishly toward the ridge. Once at the edge, he stopped completely, staring down.
“God,” he muttered when he realized what he’d seen glinting between the crags.
It was another OEV.
CHAPTER 12
Ashton watched Wentz’s progress through the range-finder. She clenched a moment, grit her teeth, then shuddered as she reached for another time-released Duramorph. Until recently, she’d been able to control the pain fairly well but now it was just getting worse. Though the doctors recommended higher doses, Ashton wouldn’t hear of it.
I’m not going to turn myself into a junkie,
 she vowed to herself.
The drug kicked in, lifting her. By now, Wentz was out of radio range, and by the time she’d composed herself and refocused the range-finder…
“Damn it.”
Wentz had already climbed over the edge of the ridge.
««—»»
Wentz’s mind was strangely blank as he climbed onto the second OEV, opened the top-hatch, and lowered himself into the air-lock. The hatch sealed shut above his head and then the chamber decompressed with a familiar swoosh.
Only when he stepped through the egress was he able to think,
Somebody’s got some explaining to do…
He stepped into the cabin, then hit the slidelocks and removed his helmet. The flight seats were empty, but before he could turn around—
“It’s…Wentz, isn’t it? 41st Test Wing out at Andrews?” a voice queried behind him. “I saw you fly the upgraded 16s at the Paris Air Show in 88—damn good flying.”
Stifled, Wentz turned around.
“Welcome to the Tharsus Bulge, Wentz,” the voice continued. “My name is—”
Wentz could only stare. He already knew. “You’re Willard Farrington, U.S. Marine Corp,” he croaked. A pause stretched through the cabin. “Operator ‘A.’”
The man looked haggard in his S-4 white jumpsuit as he lay on a fold-down strap bunk. An unkempt beard, trace specks of hair cropping up around the sides of a bald head. Opened packages of MRE’s lay like litter about the bunk.
“They told me you were dead,” Wentz said flatly. “They told me there was only one of these things.”
“They told you a lot of stuff—most of it was a lie.” Farrington leaned up in the bunk. He seemed exhausted, or in pain. “What do you expect from the military? You know the game. But— congratulations, Wentz. You earned the ultimate prize, fair and square.”
“What do you mean?”
“You truly
are
 the best pilot in the world.”
“No I’m not, sir. You are.”
Farrington chuckled. “The best pilot in the world doesn’t
crash
 his kite, especially when it’s an operational alien spacecraft.”
“You crashed? Here?” Wentz was incredulous.
“I sure as shit did,” Farrington admitted. “Don’t that beat all, with all the nape-of-the-earth training we get? I came in too low over the first rise, smacked my six right into the ridge and belly-landed here. Still got air and climate-control but—” Farrington pointed toward the detent panels. “No power. All prop systems are deadlined.”
He wrecked,
 Wentz realized. “When?”
Farrington shrugged. “About eight weeks ago. That’s how long I’ve been sitting here.” Another chuckle. “Can you imagine how pissed off Rainier was when he got the news that I trashed his UFO? Fuck. I feel like the biggest asshole in the history of aviation. I make that meat-head who cracked up his B-2 bomber look like Chuck Yeager.”
“You can come back with us,” Wentz blurted at the news. “There’s enough room.”
“You still don’t get it, do you? Let me guess. They probably gave you some line about how they identified the virus from intercepted data transmissions or something.”
“Yeah… We knew but the Russians and the Japanese didn’t because their analysis technology isn’t as good as ours.”
“Um-hmm. Typical military bullshit. The only thing they knew from the jacked data was that there was live bacteria on the ridge. So they sent me up here to get samples.
I’m
 the one who found out it was a virus, and I found out the hard way…”
Farrington pulled up his sleeves: splotches showed on his arms like a glittery, wet rash.
“You’re…infected?” Wentz asked.
“That’s right. And so are you—the second you debarked. Look at your boots.”
Wentz looked down at his EVA boots; they were covered with similar glittery splotches.
“A molecular osmotic is what they call it,” Farrington continued. “It goes through anything, it goes right through your suit on contact by squeezing through the space between the molecules but won’t cause your suit to lose its pressure. It invades living cells and inorganic molecules as well. Hell, it even goes through the hull—”
Then Farrington pointed to the floor, where thin, crisscrossing lines of the wet glitter shined.
Wentz was appalled. “They sent me up here
knowing
 I’d get infected!”
“Yeah. But this stuff could kill everyone on earth. What choice did they have?”
“No, what
right
 did they have to send me to my death?” Wentz shouted.
Farrington frowned. “Put a lid on it, will you? Every time we climb into a cockpit we know we could die. It’s part of the job. Hell, I’d have destroyed the probe myself but the EVA suits only have a hundred and twenty minutes of life-support. By the time their analysis determined that the shit up here was a deadly virus, my EVA gear was out of air. I couldn’t make any more debarkations. I was trapped inside this tin can.”
Wentz struggled to let the information sift in between his outrage.
“The QSR4 collector
had
 to be destroyed. I no longer had the ability to unass this fuckin’ crate and do it myself, so they determined that you were the best bet to get the second OEV up here successfully.”
“Those lying sons of bitches!” Wentz railed.
“Give it a rest, man. We’ve flown in wars, we’ve flown in planes that no one else in
world
 has the rocks to fly. Risk is part of our duty. You knew that the minute you made your first test flight. So quit bellyaching. Quit acting like a little kid and start acting like what you are.”
Wentz scowled. “What’s that? A chump? What else am I but an Air Force sucker?”
“You’re the best in the business,” Farrington said. “You’re the best to ever fly—you’re even better than me.”
Wentz just looked at him. Was there a tear in Farrington’s eye?
“
You
 are Operator ‘A’ now,” Farrington said.

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