Arkwright (23 page)

He did. But he was unsure whether he wanted to become part of that legacy.

 

11

Nathan 5
arrived the following week, flown in aboard a Boeing C-110 so large that an Air Carib G8 could have fit within its bulbous cargo hold. The enormous tiltjet, resembling a cucumber that had sprouted wings, touched down at Ile Sombre International with a roar that rivaled a Kubera launch. A large crowd of islanders had gathered at the airport to witness the landing of an aircraft that they'd probably never see in these parts again; they watched from the edge of the runway as the Goliath made its slow vertical descent alongside the space center staffers who'd volunteered to shepherd its payload across the island.

Matt and Chandi were among them, as was Matt's father. The planning team had decided to take up Matt's suggestion and recruited members of the launch team to walk alongside the truck that would carry the module from the airport to the space center. At first, many people thought it was an unnecessary precaution, but those who still believed that only had to look over their shoulders, where a mob of protesters from the New American Congregation and their supporters waited on the other side of sawhorses erected and patrolled by island police. As Matt's mother had predicted, the protesters had known all along that
Galactique
's landing module would be arriving by air instead of by sea, and they were taking advantage of this change of plan.

“Think we'll have any trouble from them?” Chandi eyed the protesters nervously.

“No doubt we will,” Ben Skinner said quietly. “The question is, how much? If all they do is hold up their signs and yell, everything will be okay. But if they go further than that…” He nodded toward the private security force waiting nearby. Some carried sonics as well as the usual batons and stun guns. “They'll break it up if things get bad. I'm not going to worry too much.”

Matt watched as the Goliath's bow section, three stories tall, opened and swiveled upward beneath the cockpit, revealing the cargo bay. The module lay on a wheeled pallet, sealed within an airtight plastic shroud. The tractor-trailer rig was already backing up to the plane, waved into position by the runway crew. The flatbeds had been jacked up to same height as the cargo deck; once the tandem trailers were in place, the pallet could be rolled straight onto the truck from the plane. Once it was tied down and covered with tarps, the module would be ready to leave the airport.

That was the easy part. At a walking pace, it would take a little more than an hour for the truck to make the trip to the space center. If only the roads were better, but that couldn't be helped. Like most Caribbean islands, Ile Sombre's public roads weren't maintained very well; the truck had to move slowly, or else the module might rock about and be damaged. To make matters worse, the road between the airport and the space center narrowed until it barely qualified as a two-lane thoroughfare; islanders were known to reach through open driver-side windows and briefly shake hands with friends whom they passed.

The island police were closing the road to local traffic, but nonetheless, it would be during this part of the passage that the truck and its precious cargo would be particularly vulnerable.

Matt hoped his father was right.

It was almost an hour before the truck was ready to depart from the airport. As the massive flatbeds slowly moved away from the plane, a pair of SUVs belonging to the island police took up position in front and behind the truck. They stopped and waited for the walking escorts to take their own positions on either side of the truck. Matt and Chandi found themselves near the front; he watched as his father climbed into the cab to watch the driver and make sure that he didn't go too fast. Private security guards were scattered among the walkers, carrying their sonics at hip level where they'd be visible but not necessarily threatening. There was another long pause while everyone got ready, and then there was a long blast from the truck's air horn, and the convoy began to creep forward.

The protesters were ready too. They'd remained behind the sawhorses the entire time, more or less quiet while the module was being offloaded from the Goliath, but when the truck slowly rolled through the airport's freight entrance, they rushed to the roadside, placards above their heads, voices raised in fiery denunciation. Police and security guards did their best to hold them back, but the protesters were only a few yards from either side of the truck, and it was impossible for Matt to ignore either their shouts or their slogans.

“You'll burn in hell for this!”

NO SIN FOR THE STARS
!

“Repent! Destroy that thing!”

DON'T SEND BABYS TO SPACE

“Blasphemy! You're committing blasphemy!”

JESUS
HATES
SCIANCE
!

“Repent!”

Furious eyes. Shaking fists. Someone threw a rock. It missed the canvas-shrouded module and bounced off the side of the truck instead, but immediately a security guard raised his sonic and aimed it in the direction from which the rock had come. He didn't fire—the guards had been ordered not to do so unless absolutely necessary—but the protesters in that part of the crowd quickly backed away. No more rocks were thrown … yet.

Chandi was walking in front of Matt, and although her back was to him, he could see her face whenever she turned her eyes toward the crowd. She was doing her best to remain calm, but he could tell how angry she was. The walking escort had been told not to engage the protesters, but he could tell that her patience was being sorely tempted. Chandi had little tolerance for the willfully stupid, and there, just a few feet away, were the very kind of people she detested the most.

He trotted forward to walk beside her. “Having fun yet?” he said, raising his voice to be heard.

Chandi's mouth ticked upward in a terse smile. “Loads. Hey, how come you can't take me on a normal date just once?”

“Do you like to dance?” he asked, and she nodded. “Okay, when we get back to the States, I'll take you to a place I know in Philly. You'll love it. Candlelight dinner, ballroom orchestra, just like—”

The truck horn blared, a prolonged
honnnk! honnnnnk!
that sounded like the driver pulling the cord as hard as he could. At first, Matt thought he was trying to get the protesters out of the way. Then a guard ran past them, and when Matt looked ahead, he saw what was happening.

A rust-dappled pickup truck, the kind used on the nearby banana plantations, had pulled out from a side road about fifty yards ahead of the convoy. As Matt watched, it turned to face the approaching tractor-trailer. It idled there for a few moments, gray smoke coming from a muffler that needed replacing—Ile Sombre was one of the last places in the Western Hemisphere where gasoline engines were still being used—while police and security guards strode toward it, shouting and waving their arms as they tried to get the driver to move his heap.

“The hell?” Matt said as the tractor-trailer's air brakes squealed as it came to a halt. Everyone stopped marching; even the protesters were confused. “Didn't this guy hear that the road's closed?”

Chandi said nothing but instead walked to the front bumper of the halted truck, shielding her eyes to peer at the pickup. “I don't like it,” she said as Matt jogged up beside her. “Looks like there's something in the back … see that?”

Matt raised his hand against the midday sun. Behind the raised wooden planks of the truck bed was something that didn't look like a load of bananas. Large, rounded … were those fuel drums? “I don't know, but it looks like…”

All at once, the pickup truck lurched forward, its engine roaring as it charged straight down the road. The police SUV was between it and the tractor-trailer, but the driver was already swerving to his left to avoid it. Protesters screamed as they threw themselves out of the way; the police and security guards, caught by surprise, were slow to raise their weapons.

“Go!” Matt grabbed Chandi by the shoulders to yank her away from the tractor-trailer. The other escorts were scattering, as well, but the two of them were right in the path of the pickup truck, which nearly ran over a couple of protesters as it careened toward the flatbed. “
Run!
”

Yet Chandi seemed frozen. She was staring at the truck even as it raced toward them, her mouth open in shock. Matt followed her gaze and caught a glimpse of what startled her—the face of the driver behind the windshield: Frank Barton.

“Go, mon!
Get out of here!
” A security guard suddenly materialized behind them; he shoved Matt out of the way and then planted himself beside the tractor's bumper and raised the sonic in his hands. Other hollow booms accompanied his shots, but this was a time when old-style bullets would have been more effective; the truck's windshield fractured into snowflake patterns from the focused airbursts, but it still protected Barton.

“Chandi!” Matt had fallen to the unpaved roadside and lost his grasp on her. He fought to get back on his feet but was knocked down again by a fleeing protester. “Chandi, get—”

Then a well-aimed shot managed to shatter the windshield and cause Barton to lose control of the wheel. The truck veered to the right, sideswiped the SUV, tipped over on its side …

That was the last thing Matt remembered. The explosion took the rest.

 

12

Matt later came to realize that he owed his life to the guard who'd pushed him out of the way. That alone kept him from being killed when the gasoline bomb in the back of the stolen farm truck exploded. Matt escaped the blast with little more than a concussion and a scalp laceration from a piece of flying debris, but the guard had lost his life, while Chandi …

In the days that followed, as Matt sat by her bedside in the Ile Sombre hospital where the blast survivors were taken, his mind replayed the awful moments after he'd regained consciousness. One of the first things he'd seen were two paramedics carrying away the stretcher upon which Chandi lay. His father had been kneeling beside him, holding a gauze bandage against his son's head until doctors could get around to tending to the less critically injured. He'd had to hold Matt down when he spotted Chandi, unconscious, face streaked with blood, hastily being loaded into an ambulance parked alongside the tractor-trailer.

Everyone said that she was lucky. Five people died that day: the security guard, three protesters, and Frank Barton himself. There were numerous injuries, though, and hers were among the worst. The force of blast had thrown her against the tractor's right-front bumper, breaking the clavicle in her left shoulder and the humerus of her left arm and also fracturing the back of her skull. She might have died were it not for the fact that there happened to be a doctor on the scene who was able to stabilize her until the ambulances arrived. It was no small irony that the doctor also happened to be one of the protesters, and he'd put aside his opposition to the project in order to care for the wounded.

The Ile Sombre hospital outside Ste. Genevieve was remarkably well equipped, staffed by American-trained doctors. Chandi underwent four hours of surgery, during which the doctors managed to relieve the pressure in her skull before it caused brain damage and repair the fracture with bone grafts. Yet she remained unconscious, locked in a coma that no one was certain would end.

Matt stayed with her. He left the hospital only once to return to the hotel and change clothes before coming straight back. He sat in a chair he'd pulled up beside her bed in the ICU, where he could hold her hand while nurses changed her dressings or checked on the feeding tube they'd put down her throat. Sometimes he'd sleep, and every once in a while he'd go to the commissary and make himself eat something, but the next five days were a long, endless vigil in which he watched for the first indication that Chandraleska Sanyal was coming back to him.

So he was only vaguely aware that the landing module had been unscratched by the explosion or that once it arrived at the space center, clean-room technicians had worked day and night to make sure it was ready to be sent to the VAB and loaded aboard the waiting Kubera. Although the New American Congregation had formally condemned the attack, no one at the project was willing to bet that there wasn't another fanatic willing to try again. Matt's father and grandmother determined that the safest place for
Nathan 5
was in space; the sooner it got there, the better. The launch date was moved up by a week, and everyone at the space center did their best to meet the new deadline.

The day
Nathan 5
was rolled out to the pad, Chandi finally woke up. The first thing she saw when she opened her eyes was Matt's face. She couldn't speak because of the plastic tube in her throat, but in the brief time before she fell asleep again, she acknowledged his presence by squeezing his hand. Then the doctor who'd responded to his call bell asked him to leave, and he went to a nearby waiting room, fell into a chair, and caught the first decent sleep he'd had in almost a week.

Nathan 5
lifted off three days later. They watched the launch together on the TV in the recovery room where Chandi had been taken. It was still hard for her to talk, and the doctors had told him that it would take time for her to make a full recovery; Matt had to listen closely when she spoke. Nonetheless, when the Kubera cleared the tower and roared up into the cloudless blue sky, she whispered something that he had no trouble understanding.

“Knew it … it would go up,” she murmured.

Matt nodded. He knew what he should say. He was just having trouble saying it.

 

13

A week later,
Galactique
left Earth orbit.

By then,
Nathan
5 was attached to the rest of the ship, and
Galactique
had become a cylinder 440 feet long, its silver hull reflecting the sunlight as it coasted in high orbit above the world. Its image was caught by cameras aboard the nearby construction station and relayed to Mission Control, where everyone involved with the project had gathered for their final glimpse of the vessel they'd worked so long to create.