A Perfect World





Chapter 16



June 28, 2007



The MSS Calistoga was traveling once more at its cruising velocity of six 
million kilometers per hour, its eight-day, .25G acceleration burn having 
come to an end almost two weeks before. The ship was now between the orbits 
of Uranus and Saturn, though the planets themselves were both on the far 
sides of their orbits and barely visible. Calistoga would, however, pass 
within two million kilometers of Mars, an event the crew was looking forward 
to as it would allow them to make some observations of their home planet 
during a time human beings had yet to visit it and when the only man-made 
devices were a few probes circling in orbit or discarded on the surface. A 
viewing party had already been scheduled for the date when the flyby took 
place.



After passing Mars, the Calistoga would continue on past the orbit of Earth 
without slowing. Earth was inconveniently located on the other side of the 
sun at the moment. They would pass within 30 million kilometers of Venus, 14 
million kilometers of Mercury, and 40 million kilometers of the sun, close 
enough that the heat damping system would be forced to do triple duty. The 
sun's gravity would give them a course adjustment, just enough to steer them 
directly toward Earth's position. They would then begin their deceleration 
burn and enter low Earth orbit, or LEO, on September 4.



Once there, the waiting would begin. There would be a lot of it, even under 
the best of circumstances. As of yet, they didn't even know if the WestHem 
stealth ship had made its trip or not. Assuming the WestHems did make it 
through, Huffy would attempt to pin down their location and intercept them 
as they approached LEO some 75 days after they emerged into the past. There 
was high hope among the crew that this plot would be successful and the 
entire mission could be completed without anyone having to make the trip to 
the surface. But no matter what the outcome, the Calistoga and its crew 
absolutely needed to be back in deep space beyond Pluto on January 28, 2008. 
That was the pre-determined time the return wormhole was to be opened to 
bring them back home.



This fact, in and of itself, was one the crew often mused about. "Think 
about it," Slurry was fond of saying whenever the subject came up. "They 
opened that return wormhole six hours after we left. Six hours! From their 
perspective, this mission is already over and done, for better or for worse, 
and we're on our way home. Yet here we are, weeks later, still plowing 
through space on the way to our target. It's a Laura-fucking mind trip."



It was generally agreed that this was indeed a Laura-fucking mind trip. Nor 
was it the only one the crew discussed obsessively. The potential paradox 
that had occurred to Cumquat Cypress had also occurred to Slurry and a few 
others. If their mission were successful, they would emerge from the 
wormhole only six hours after entering it. The ship they were coming to stop 
would still be on its way to its jump-off point and would potentially be 
emerging from the return wormhole at the same time.



"Is that even possible?" was a subject that was debated endlessly. "What 
about the prohibition about creating matter without expending energy?" they 
would demand "That's a law of physics, isn't it? Yet that's exactly what 
we'll be doing. The same matter will exist in two different places at the 
same time. It can't happen."



But there were those who argued that it could happen and that it already had 
happened. This argument was quite compelling and involved Ken Frazier. "He's 
here with us, right now, correct?" someone would ask, usually-for dramatic 
effect-while Ken was floating in view of the conversation or actually a part 
of it. It would of course be agreed that Ken Frazier was indeed there with 
them, right at that particular time, living and breathing and thinking. 
"Okay, so he's here on this ship with us, but he's also in a warehouse in 
Los Angeles, cryogenically frozen, at this very moment. Ken Frazier is 
already existing in two places at the same time, isn't he?"



There were, of course, counter-arguments to this. "Ken is not the same 
person who is in that warehouse, at least not on a cellular and subatomic 
level. He spent almost three years on Mars after being awakened. His cells 
have regenerated and replaced themselves. He is not made of the same matter 
as the Ken Frazier in the warehouse. His thoughts and memories are still 
stored and he is, in essence, the same person, but the matter he is composed 
of is different. We haven't created matter without expending energy."



Round and round these debates would go. And while the possibility or 
impossibility of their mission was argued, the ship kept drawing closer and 
closer to Earth and the potential confrontation with the WestHem team.



For the most part, the routines of the ship continued as they always had. 
This group of 45 people had been aboard the cramped confines of Calistoga 
for almost 90 days and the day-to-day activities served both to keep them 
busy and provide comfort in the face of the unknown. While cleaning the 
decks or doing the laundry or cooking meals or participating in zero-G 
orgies, one did not have to think too much about what was going to happen 
when they reached Earth, or what would happen if they failed to stop the 
WestHem team from changing the past and their entire existence was 
eliminated.



But no matter how much work needed to be done each day and no matter how 
many orgies and botch sessions Commander Huffy allowed, there was still a 
lot of idle time on a trip of such a huge distance. The training sessions 
went on, of course, the special forces team and the ship's crew drilling 
endlessly through every conceivable contingency that could possibly arise in 
every step of the mission, but even this still left hours to fill in each 
day. Ron Sampson helped fill some of this time by opening the intelligence 
department's spare computer terminals to the crew to probe through the 
signals being received from 2007 Earth. This quickly became a favorite 
activity.



The syndicated reruns of situation comedies and dramatic series shows proved 
to be most popular, not for the entertainment value, but for the sheer 
amusement at how unrealistically life was portrayed. They most enjoyed the 
ones that purported to be "family values" type shows, in which problems were 
encountered and neatly solved in 22 minutes. Full House reruns were a 
particular favorite, as were episodes of Family Ties, Little House on the 
Prairie, Seventh Heaven, and The Cosby Show. Following a close second for 
sheer hilarity were the documentary shows broadcast on the so-called science 
channels in between commercials for psychic networks and get rich quick 
schemes. And then there were the commercials themselves. The sheer volume of 
advertisements Earthlings of the age were forced to and willing to put up 
with amazed everyone except Ken. On Mars advertising did exist, and there 
were even commercials slipped into the beginnings and ends of broadcast 
entertainment, but the ratio was around 50 seconds of commercial time for 
every 61 minutes of programming. There was also a rigidly enforced truth in 
advertising law on Mars, something that was alleged to exist in the United 
States, but which really didn't in practice. Slurry and Rigger were 
particularly fascinated by the advertisements and would frequently question 
Ken about something they'd seen.



"So these two corporations are both selling aspirin tablets, right?" Slurry 
would ask.



"Right," Ken would agree.



"And they're both basically the same drug in the same dosage and the same 
amount, right?"



"Right."



"Yet this company is going on television and claiming that its aspirin pills 
are better than the other corporation's aspirin pills because they come in a 
gel form. They actually say the pills will work faster in this form when 
even I, who am not a doctor, know this cannot be true. Aspirin is aspirin. 
Did people actually fall for this?"



"A certain percentage of the population did," Ken told her. "These 
corporations spent billions on advertising and what you see here was the 
main way of making their product stand out from other products that were 
essentially exactly the same, by creative packaging and out-of-context 
innuendo. Notice that they don't actually say their aspirin absorbs faster 
than the competitors."



"They did too," Slurry protested.



"Ah, but they didn't," he countered. "They said their new gel tabs get the 
medicine quickly to where it is needed. And they show you the competing 
brand's boring-looking, outdated, white tablet. The implication that their 
pill absorbs faster and is more effective is there, but they didn't actually 
say it, did they?"



"No," she said after considering for a moment. "They didn't."



"And that's how they get around the truth in advertising rules. It's a 
loophole that violates the spirit of the rule but not the letter, so it's 
allowed. Advertisers use a thousand loopholes like that one. Smart people 
learned to see through them and dumb people-which, I'm sad to say, make up 
the majority of the populace-fell for it."



Ken found himself watching many of the shows as well, though not with the 
same sort of hilarity the rest of the crew enjoyed. Instead, he would view 
episodes of Cheers or Seinfeld or M*A*S*H with a sense of nostalgia so 
strong it was like a physical sensation. These were the shows he used to 
watch in his youth and as a young adult. These were the reruns he used to 
watch late at night with his wife, both of them sipping a glass of wine, 
laughing at the admittedly simplistic humor. Hadn't he and Annie stayed up 
late and watched an old rerun of Cheers the very night before he was shot? 
Yes, like everything else about that last day, he remembered it well.



When he wasn't viewing old reruns Ken would tune into audio-only 
channels-the radio stations-and listen for hours to rock and roll tunes from 
his past, songs by Journey, Led Zeppelin, Pearl Jam, Alice in Chains, songs 
he used to hear in his car on the way to work, that he would play on his CD 
player while working in the garage. He had tuned into the Earthling Internet 
on Mars and pulled copies of these songs from it on occasion, but such 
occurrences had been rare and had not carried quite the same weight then as 
they did now. He was actually in his own time now-hearing the songs only 
hours after they'd been spit out of some transmitter in Los Angeles or New 
York or Denver. Once he had pulled in an actual San Jose station and had 
listened for almost three hours, hearing advertisements for businesses he 
knew, hearing disc jockeys who had spun CDs in his previous life, wondering 
at the knowledge that Annie was in San Jose at that very moment and had 
maybe been listening to the very broadcast.



Annie was never far from his mind as he grew closer and closer to her, 
though he took great pains to hide this fact from Slurry. If they went down 
to the surface to take the WestHem team down he would be within sixty miles 
of her when they made landfall-she in San Jose, living the life of a police 
widow, he in San Francisco. What did she do now? How did she spend her days? 
Did she still miss him as much as he missed her? It was a given that her 
grief had faded enough for her to enter another romantic relationship. 
Though she was yet to meet David Brown-who would become her next husband-the 
encounter was not terribly far in her future. Still, she would love him 
enough to retain the drive to keep him alive, the drive that would 
eventually succeed five generations later. And what of his son? The son he 
had never met would be in San Jose as well-three Earth years old and 
probably just getting out of diapers. Did Annie tell him stories of his 
father yet? Was she even now planting the seed that would culminate in his 
resurrection 185 years from now?



At times Ken would find himself staring at the main view screen on the 
bridge of Calistoga, fixating on the bright blue and white blob that was 
Earth. He would use the zoom controls to bring the image closer, until he 
could make out the blurry forms of the continents covered with clouds. They 
were down there and he would be so close to them, yet he knew he would not 
be able to see them, to meet them, to even put himself in the same telephone 
area code with them. This was not just because Lieutenant Spankworth would 
forbid such a thing-though he would. It was too dangerous to the time 
stream, potentially more dangerous then what the WestHems were planning. If 
Annie saw him or heard from him, it might sway her from the path she was 
supposed to follow. She might not end up marrying David Brown-which would 
mean his son would grow up without a father figure, which might have 
detrimental effects on his future life. Also, if they didn't become attached 
to David Brown, they would not move to Corpus Christi, Texas. Perhaps this 
would have no effect on her future, but there was a good possibility it 
would. San Jose, California was a major transportation hub and a major 
producer of electronics. During World War III, it would be extensively 
bombed by Chinese planes operating out of occupied Washington and flying in 
low over the ocean. Tens of thousands of San Jose citizens would be killed 
as a result. Would Annie and Ken Jr. be among them if they stayed? It was 
enough of a possibility that it had to be assumed to be a fact. If the life 
of Annie or Ken Jr. were changed in any small way in 2007, it was possible 
that the means by which Ken himself would one day be awakened would change 
as well. So no, he could not visit Annie, could not see her, could not talk 
to her. As he had told Slurry, she might as well still be 30 million miles 
and 188 years away, just as she had been on Mars.



+++++



There was no actual night and day aboard a spacecraft, only adherence to an 
agreed upon reference point of timekeeping. On EastHem and WestHem vessels 
that reference point was Greenwich Mean Time. Aboard Martian vessels the 
reference point was New Pittsburgh time since the original Martian 
settlement served as the prime meridian on Mars. When Calistoga had been in 
its own time period it had adhered to NP Standard time as the time aboard 
the ship just like any other Martian vessel. Now that it had crossed into 
the past, the reference point had been changed to coordinate with the time 
in their target area-namely Pacific Daylight Time. This had taken a bit of 
an adjustment for the crew since on the day they had gone through the 
apparent time on the ship had shifted forward eight and a half hours, but 
now, as they entered the third week since emerging in the past, everyone had 
shaken off the jet lag and were adjusted to living on Earth time.



At 2234 hours on a Friday night, Ken, Slurry, and Commander Huffy were all 
in Huffy's small but comparatively luxurious cabin just aft of the bridge. 
The doors were shut and locked and the computer screen was on stand-by, 
showing a screensaver image of classic Martian naval vessels. The room was 
warm and steamy, the scent of lust thick in the air, as were the sounds of 
moaning and the purrs of pleasure. The three of them were floating about a 
meter over Huffy's bed, their bodies intertwined and sweaty.



Slurry was on the bottom of the pile, floating horizontally, her back to the 
floor, her legs spread wide. Ken was vertical, his head toward the ceiling, 
his feet hooked into the headboard of the bed to anchor them, his throbbing 
penis buried in his wife's vagina, thrusting enthusiastically in and out. 
Huffy was by far receiving the most sensation. She was floating horizontally 
like Slurry, only with her chest facing the floor. Her legs were wrapped 
tightly around Slurry's head, her wet pussy pressed against Slurry's sucking 
lips. Her own lips were down low, just above the junction where Ken and 
Slurry were joined together. Her long tongue was sticking out, mostly 
stabbing at Slurry's erect clit but occasionally licking the juices from 
Ken's shaft as it slid in and out.



"Laura bless the Martians," Ken grunted as he powered in and out, feeling 
the tightness of Slurry's body gripping him and the simultaneous touch of 
his commander's tongue. His left hand was holding Slurry's body against his 
by the thigh while his right hand caressed Huffy's breast, his fingers 
tweaking the nipple in a way he had come to know she liked. He could tell 
Slurry was fast approaching orgasm. Her pelvis was starting to gyrate in an 
uncontrolled manor and he could hear the muffled grunts of her moans from 
within Huffy's crotch. He himself was under tight control as he had already 
cum once earlier-that time in Huffy's sucking mouth, where she had shared 
the deposit with Slurry in a deep tongue kiss that had been visually erotic 
enough to recharge him for the mission he was participating in now.



It was just as Slurry's spasms really started to go into overdrive that they 
were interrupted. The emergency intercom system suddenly beeped out its 
shrill alarm and the voice of Darla Ogle, the navigation officer who 
currently had the con, spoke out: "Commander Huffy to the bridge, 
immediately. I repeat, Commander Huffy to the bridge, immediately."



"Noooooooo," Slurry whined. "Rape my nostrils with a pig's cock! Not now!"



Huffy raised her head without hesitation and pushed off the sweating, lusty 
pile, floating up into the air. She became businesslike in an instant, 
looking at the intercom terminal. "On the way," she said. She didn't bother 
getting dressed or even toweling off. She put one foot on the side of the 
bed and pushed toward the hatch that led to the bridge.



Seeing this, and alarmed by the tone that had been in Ogle's voice, Ken 
disengaged from Slurry as well, pulling his shiny, dripping cock from her 
body.



"Ken!" Slurry yelled. "Get that thing back inside me!"



"We'll finish up in a minute," he promised. "Let's see what's going on."



"Oh, for the love of Laura," Slurry panted, watching helplessly as Ken 
pushed off the bed and followed Huffy to the hatch.



The night shift bridge crew were all peering intently at their instruments 
as Huffy floated into the room, drops of sweat, saliva, and vaginal 
secretions spinning off her body. "What's going on?" she asked.



"We've just had an unexplained change in momentum and course," Ogle 
reported. "Velocity dropped by .034 percent, course changed by nearly a 
tenth of a degree to the right. Some kind of force just acted on us."



Huffy frowned as she heard this. Since they were coasting in the vacuum of 
space, their momentum and course should have remained fixed at what it had 
been when their engine burn had ceased. This was in accordance to Newton's 
Laws of Motion, which stated that an object in motion would remain in motion 
and travel in a straight line until a force acted upon it to change that. 
"Are we still being influenced?" she asked.



"No," Ogle replied. "The duration of the force was 31 seconds and then it 
cut off."



"Check all systems to see if there was any rogue maneuvering thruster 
activity," she ordered, pushing off the wall again and drifting over to her 
command chair. She set herself down in it and strapped in. Behind her, Ken, 
equally naked and dripping, floated into the center of the room and looked 
over her shoulder. Slurry, her curiosity now aroused since her sexuality was 
not, came floating in from the hatch to see what was going on. She, like her 
partners, was still dressed in her birthday suit.



Ogle spoke a few commands into the computer and the text on her screen 
changed momentarily. She peered at it and then shook her head. "No thruster 
activity has occurred since an hour before the cessation of our acceleration 
burn. This is confirmed through computer record and exterior sensors."



"Did we vent anything?" Huffy asked next.



"There have been no hull breach alarms," Ogle said. "I'll check the 
propellant and the atmospheric generators, but we've had no indications of 
leaks from there either. In any case, if we'd vented enough to adjust our 
course that radically there would be no air left for us to breathe."



"Good point," Huffy said thoughtfully, scratching at her swollen vaginal 
lips.



Ogle went through an abbreviated diagnostic of Calistoga's systems and 
confirmed that everything was working just as it should, with no detectable 
expellation of gas into space, certainly not enough to affect the velocity 
of the ship. "Nothing in the ship caused this, Huff," she said. "The force 
had to be external. Best guess is gravitational."



"Gravitational," Huffy said, a strange grin on her face. "And there's only 
one thing we know of that would cause a 31 second pull of gravity powerful 
enough to move us off course, isn't there?"



"A wormhole opening," Slurry said.



"Fuckin' aye," Huffy said. "I think our friends just came through." She 
turned to Lieutenant Mike Spammer, who was working the detection and 
countermeasures terminal. "Spammy, get the computer to crunch the numbers 
and see if we can pinpoint the location of that gravitational source. If we 
can find where they came through, we can project their course and narrow 
down the search field."



Spammer looked doubtful. "I'll see what I can do, Huff," he said. "But there 
are a lot of unknown factors here. If we don't know exactly how powerful the 
gravitational influence was and how far away it was, we're not gonna be able 
to pinpoint anything. We need to know at least one variable for the equation 
to be solved."



"Use the force of our wormhole as an approximation of theirs," she said. 
"It'll at least be in the erogenous zone, if not exact. That'll give us a 
bearing and a starting point, if nothing else."



"You got it, Huff," he said, turning to his panel.



"Once you get that figured out, concentrate the passive sensors in that 
section of space. I know they're too far away to detect, but at least we'll 
get in the habit of looking for them there."



"Right."



"Helm," she said, turning back to Ogle. "Sound the acceleration alarm and 
get us back on course. Do it carefully. Our ass end is probably pointing 
toward the WestHems. I know they're probably too far off to detect us even 
if we burned our engines at full throttle, but we'll take no chances. The 
burn will be at no more a tenth of a G."



"Fuckin' aye, Huff," Ogle responded. "Sound acceleration and begin course 
correction. Engines at point one-zero G."



"From this moment out," Huffy announced, "we operate under the assumption 
that the WestHems are out there and closing in. Stealth procedures are now 
in effect. Waste heat is to be accumulated in the outer hull spaces and 
vented in controlled bursts. I don't want that ship detecting our presence 
in this time, not even a hint of it. If they find out we're here before they 
make their move, the whole fuckin' mission is blown."



+++++



Since they did not know exactly where in space the WestHem wormhole had 
opened, what time it had opened, or how powerful the gravitational influence 
it had caused actually was, their calculations involved more guesswork than 
fact. Based on the manner in which this force had acted upon Calistoga, they 
were able to determine at least the general direction to explore. The pull 
of gravity had come from an arc of space some thirty degrees wide and fifty 
degrees from top to bottom. This was, of course, a huge area, encompassing 
many millions of kilometers of space, but Martians tended to be 
glass-half-full type of people and Huffy and her crew were grateful to have 
eliminated more than 70 percent of their potential search area.



As far as determining distance, travel time, and exact course, their data 
was based on the assumption that the WestHem wormhole had been approximately 
of the same force as the Martian wormhole. This narrowed their search field 
down even further, but the margin for error was calculated out to a 
depressingly large factor. Huffy and the rest of the ship's operational crew 
were forced to admit that the chances of actually finding the WestHem vessel 
before it entered orbit around Earth were rather slim. It was an assumption 
that turned out to be correct.



Calistoga continued on toward its target, day-by-day, night-by-night. The 
detection crew kept a sharp eye out for the slightest indication of heat in 
the designated search area, but they received no hint of any kind that there 
was even a ship out there. If not for the gravitational influence they'd 
encountered, they might have been prone to believing the WestHem wormhole 
had failed.



In the meantime, the ship's routines went on. Training sessions continued 
every day until every member of the interdiction team was familiar with 
every aspect of the mission and had hundreds of contingency plans ready. 
Meals were prepared and consumed, and the mess cleaned up. Various members 
of the ship's crew got together during their off-duty hours and enjoyed 
recreation with each other in the grandest Martian tradition. At least once 
a week Commander Huffy gave authorization for intoxicant use and a party in 
the wardroom, which always turned into a full-blown sexual orgy. Morale 
remained high and the crew remained focused. Ken realized about twelve days 
after the WestHem wormhole had opened that he had now had sex with every 
female member of the crew. He felt absurdly proud of himself for this 
accomplishment. After all, how many sailors in his day could have truthfully 
made such a claim?



In the meantime, he kept a vigilant watch on Planet Earth as it grew larger 
and larger in the view screens. His home was getting closer and, as it did 
so, he found himself thinking more and more of Annie and his son. They were 
down there, with no idea that the patriarch of their family was approaching 
them at more than 1600 kilometers a second.



+++++



On August 18, 2007, Calistoga used bursts of its maneuvering thrusters to 
turn its ass toward Earth. The fusion engines were lit at a thrust of .15G 
and the deceleration burn began. Over the next eight days the ship was 
slowed from a velocity of six million kilometers per hour to a mere 27,000 
KPH, which was orbital speed for Earth. Upon reaching this magic number the 
burn ended and the ship continued to coast toward its objective. On 
September 4, Earth's gravity pulled Calistoga into a polar orbit at an 
altitude of 800 kilometers. They had arrived.



"Detection, how are we looking?" Huffy asked from her command chair as the 
first of what promised to be many orbits began.



Spacer Glory Trower was on duty at the time and her holographic display was 
liberally lit up with contacts and radio sources. "Still sorting through it, 
Huff," she replied. "A lot of these contacts are so outdated the computer is 
having trouble classifying them. As it stands now, I've identified the 
International Space Station with a space shuttle and a Soyuz capsule docked 
to it, 124 satellites, and more than twelve thousand pieces of space debris 
ranging in size from six millimeters to a meter and a half in LEO. Our orbit 
is not a standard altitude for the time so there is nothing in our projected 
path to worry about."



"Twelve thousand pieces of debris," Huffy said sadly, shaking her head. 
"Don't they know they're going to have to come up and clean up all of this 
shit eventually?" Her question was rhetorical, of course. They did not know 
they were going to have to perform all of that "housekeeping," at least not 
yet. They would learn that the hard way after several ships were lost due to 
collisions with this debris when the space race went into overdrive in the 
post World War III era.



"In addition," Trower continued, "there are 59 satellites in geosynchronous 
orbit-mostly communications, weather, or military birds. The coverage is 
such that we'll be able to tap into at least ten of them at any given point 
in our orbit."



"Very good," Huffy said. "And how about ESM?" she asked, referring to the 
detection of active sensors.



"I'm getting a shitload of search radar activity," she reported. "But all of 
it is ground based. Their coverage is spread throughout the globe but it's 
not really uniform. It overlaps in many places and there are huge gaps in 
it. My guess is it is not coordinated."



"It's not," Huffy said. "Every country with the capability is doing its own 
thing. The Americans and the Russians and the Chinese all have tracking 
stations in operation around the globe but refuse to cooperate with each 
other."



"In any case," Trower said, "there is nothing I'm picking up that is capable 
of detecting us up here. There is no active IR scan at all and the radar is 
so primitive it wouldn't get a hit off us unless we were less than twenty 
kilometers away. Even our advanced satellite passive infrared is incapable 
of detecting a stealth ship in orbit. I hardly think their system is 
anything to worry about, as long as we don't emit any unencrypted radio 
signals."



Huffy nodded and then used her intercom to contact the Intelligence 
Department. "How are we looking down there?" she asked Sampson.



"I've already tapped into the com-sats of all the major military powers," he 
reported. "Their encryption systems are a joke. I think the computer 
actually yawned while it broke their codes. Nothing but routine traffic 
going on, certainly nothing like what you'd expect if they'd just discovered 
a strange space ship establishing orbit around their planet. I'm confident 
they have no idea we're here."



"Perfect," Huffy said. She turned to the bridge crew. "Let's start getting 
our buoys laid, shall we?"



Over the next two hours, the amount of time it took to complete an orbit, 
six passive detection satellites known in naval tradition as "buoys" were 
launched from the top of Calistoga. Each buoy was one meter in diameter and 
constructed of radar-absorbent, infrared-neutral material that made it 
pretty much impossible to be detected even by modern sensors, let alone by 
primitive Earthling devices. These buoys used electric rockets to push 
themselves slowly upward into a high polar orbit where they would keep watch 
on the approaches to the planet. The hope was that they would detect the 
WestHem ship during its deceleration burn.  The buoys also kept their 
electronic eyes glued to the orbital plane itself where, if they failed in 
the first mission, they would at least detect the separation and 
deceleration of a landing ship. They were spaced so their coverage was 
exactly uniform, covering all portions of the globe and all areas 
approaching it, in overlapping patterns. When the mission was complete, they 
would be collected before the return to modern time. If, for whatever 
reason, they could not be collected, their orbital speed was such that 
within six months they would be pulled into the atmosphere and incinerated.



"All buoys operating within parameters," Trower reported when the job was 
complete, looking at a new series of displays the telemetry from the buoys 
had prompted. "Nothing but normal contacts so far."



"Very good," Huffy said, satisfied. "Now its time to do some more waiting."



"We're definitely getting good at that," replied the helm operator.



+++++



The days and nights went by and the routine aboard Calistoga continued, for 
the most part, unabated. The six billion Earthlings below and the six men 
and women onboard the International Space Station had no inkling that a 
futuristic space vessel was orbiting their planet, listening in on their 
communications, probing their Internet, and watching their television shows.



Three days after establishing orbit the crew watched as the space shuttle 
Discovery left the International Space Station and headed home to Cape 
Canaveral, Florida. During its re-entry burn it passed within sixty miles of 
Calistoga, again without anyone on Earth or above realizing it. The tracking 
crew on Calistoga used the event as a practical exercise in using their own 
passive detection equipment, including the buoys. They tracked Discovery 
from separation to landing with better coverage than could be seen on the 
NASA telemetry-which was also being monitored. The test was not all that 
realistic in comparison to tracking a WestHem landing ship-the space shuttle 
burned more than fifty times hotter since its engines were so primitively 
inefficient-but it did serve to test the equipment and break up the boredom.



One thing that did not pass was the fascination the crew held for actually 
being in the past. The spare computer terminals were in such demand that 
Huffy modified a security rule and allowed everyone to tap into the stream 
of data being received with their PCs. Once this became effective almost 
everyone spent all of their spare time looking at their computers and 
surfing through various Earth databases or watching TV shows. The main topic 
of conversation became who had seen what and where it could be found. Held 
in particularly high contempt was the pornography, or what passed for it. On 
Mars, erotic cinematography was considered among the highest of the fine 
arts, right up there with ballet and opera. A Martian porno flick was a 
masterpiece of plot and action, heavy on characterization and symbolism. An 
Earthling pornographic movie was basically nothing more than people fucking, 
usually with no explanation of who the characters were or why they were 
fucking, elements considered essential to any good stroke flick.



"Your people are down there polishing their torpedoes to this shit?" 
Lieutenant Spankworth demanded of Ken after one such viewing. "How does it 
even arouse them? It's two sluts with fake tits and dyed hair sucking some 
steroid-enhanced asshole's dick. There was no build-up at all! The scene 
just opened up with them already naked and getting stinky!"



Ken simply shrugged. "The idea was just to produce porn cheaply and sell it 
through packaging," he said. "They didn't waste money on things like writers 
or directors."



"And what's with pulling the cock out and cumming all over the slut's face 
or all over her ass?" asked McGraw, who had watched with them. "I mean, I 
can see doing that once in a while just to have a little variety, but every 
fucking time? Every one of these garbage flicks I've seen, that's how they 
end the shot."



"That's what they thought everyone wanted to see," Ken said.



This, as Slurry and Rigger both pointed out, was one of the fundamental 
problems with having the decision makers in any business too far removed 
from the operations. The porn industry was far from the only place in 21st 
century society where the people producing the product told themselves they 
knew exactly what their customers wanted when in reality they had not the 
slightest clue. Nearly the entire entertainment industry was guilty of this 
in some way. Constant updates and news flashes were given about the romantic 
relationship between two famous actors when nobody really gave a shit. 
Mainstream movies full of dazzling special effects had no actual story other 
than a weak plot designed to hold the effects together. Magazines did 
multi-page storylines and pictorial layouts no one actually read. The entire 
Western World media apparatus was filled with such things and the 
fascination with the drivel it produced was rampant among the Calistoga's 
crew.



If the rest of the crew was merely fascinated with the pre-modern Earthling 
Internet, Slurry was downright obsessed with it. By being in the same time 
period as the subject she studied and by having unfettered access to their 
communications and Internet systems, she was able to tap into things she 
never could have back on Mars. She spent nearly all of her free time using 
her PC to eavesdrop on telephone conversations and instant messages between 
individuals down on the surface. She heard secure transmissions between 
military leaders, between spies, between high government officials. She 
listened to conversations held by the President of the United States 
himself, by the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, by other 
English-speaking heads of state. She also listened to hundreds, if not 
thousands of conversations between ordinary citizens, getting a feel for the 
way those she studied talked and their motivations. She took copious notes 
on what she heard and recorded hours of audio and text files for storage in 
Calistoga's memory banks for more detailed perusal when they got home.



"This is a rankin' goldmine," she told Ken excitedly. "The information I've 
pulled in. It's unprecedented. I could stay here for years and never get 
bored with it."



Rigger too became quite gripped by the wealth of firsthand historical 
sourcing now available to him. Instead of listening to conversations and 
reading instant messages, he spent his time using the high-magnification 
cameras to actually peer down at the surface. With a resolution undreamed of 
in the best spy satellites of the day, he photographed and filmed everything 
he thought was even remotely interesting. He paid particular attention to 
historical structures that were no longer in existence in modern times, 
things such as the Golden Gate Bridge, The Great Wall of China, The United 
States Capital Building (after merging into WestHem, the location of the 
national capital was moved to Denver), the Sistine Chapel, Big Ben, 
Buckingham Palace, or the infamous Las Vegas strip. He spent an equal amount 
of time peering down at China, Japan, and India, documenting the frantic 
preparations for war that were being undertaken under the nose of the 
Western world. In this endeavor, Ken often joined him. As a former military 
man, he too was fascinated by the thought that the biggest war in human 
history was being set up as they watched and the countries that would be 
attacked had not the slightest clue.



"The global powers of the day, particularly the United States, vastly 
underestimated the abilities of the Asian Powers," Rigger lectured him as 
they made a pass over the area of interest one morning. "Those clever 
bastards constructed hundreds of thousands of armored vehicles, airplanes, 
bombs, missiles, and every other kind of war supply in the Japanese and 
Chinese factories, and then they moved all of this equipment, along with 
more than three million men, to staging areas on the Russian border and 
nobody knew they had done it until the attack came on January 1, 2009. Of 
course, all the clues were there. Hindsight would make them slap their heads 
and ask how they hadn't figured it out, but right now, the Asian Powers are 
full-steam into war production, and the other countries are sitting fat and 
happy, thinking that global war is a thing of the past."



And when Ken saw the shots of China and Japan and India that Calistoga's 
cameras took, he was awed at the efficiency of what the Asian Powers were 
doing.



"Look at that, right there," Rigger said excitedly, peering at the screen 
where the image he was currently shooting was displayed.



Ken looked and saw a column of tanks, APCs, and deuce and a half trucks 
moving up a highway from the port city of Dalian on the southeast coast of 
China toward the staging area on the Siberian border with Russia. The column 
was maybe half a mile long, using standard highways, and plainly visible.



"That's how they did it," Rigger told him. "They moved their armor a little 
bit at a time, in between spy satellite passes. Before the next satellite 
comes overhead, they'll pull off the road at a pre-set location and pull 
specially made camouflage netting over the entire column. This netting will 
dampen infrared imagery, absorb radar imagery, and cover visual to make it 
look like just part of the landscape. This was something they had to do 
every two hours on average while they made their march. Their discipline is 
something to be admired. It took them almost ten years to produce everything 
and move it into position, but on the night of the attack, all of it was 
there and raring to go. That's how they pushed so far into Russia on the 
first day and did what no other invader in history was able to do-capture 
Russia in two weeks in the midst of winter and hold it."



Rigger also homed the cameras in on the staging areas themselves, which were 
mostly crude tunnels and underground bunkers and which were also superbly 
camouflaged. Tread marks from the vehicles were carefully scrubbed clean by 
special vehicles between satellite passes. Fuel and ammunition depots were 
hidden in plain site, disguised as water towers, storage buildings, or other 
civilian infrastructure. Air bases were disguised as civilian airports, with 
the military aircraft disassembled and stored in secret hangers.



"And while all this is going on," Rigger said, "these countries that will 
comprise the core of the Asian Powers are pretending to be in conflict with 
each other. China, Japan, and India are all supposed to be antagonists. They 
snipe at each other in the United Nations meetings. They occasionally have 
minor military skirmishes. All of it is nothing more than an act. Their 
unity will be quite tight when the time comes to attack."



In addition to helping Rigger peer down at the surface for historical 
information, the cameras served a function for Ken as well. Twice every day, 
at 1300 hours and 0100 hours, Calistoga passed over the western United 
States. Ken was given control of the ship's camera at these times so he 
could take photos of their target area in Roseville and adapt them into maps 
for mission briefings. He took shots of the geography around the hospital, 
paying particular attention to the roads and traffic conditions. The 
resolution was such that he could actually zoom in on street signs with 
enough clarity to read them. He could pick out individual faces walking 
about in the hospital parking lot or peering out of windows. On one occasion 
he had actually been able to read the badge number from a security guard's 
chest.



It was during such passes that Ken put his knowledge of the camera system 
and the Calistoga main computer to other, more personal, uses as well. He 
was able to zoom in on his old house in Pleasanton, the house where Annie 
still lived. He would stare at the simple single story tract house tucked 
away in a standard suburban neighborhood. It looked almost exactly the same 
as he remembered it, save a few landscaping additions and a swing set in the 
back yard. That swing set, he knew, was for his son-for Ken Jr.



I'm looking at my backyard, he would think at such times, the backyard where 
my wife pushes my son on those swings, where he digs in that plastic sandbox 
I see. I'm looking at this four years after I've been killed in that world. 
Inevitably, no matter how many times he saw this sight, thought these 
thoughts, chills would race up and down his spine. He was actually in the 
same time with Annie. She was right down there, living out her life. If only 
he could see her.



And of course, eventually, he did see her. It was during the 1300 pass on 
September 4, a beautiful day down in the south bay. The ocean fog had burned 
off and the cloud cover was minimal to non-existent, allowing crystal clear 
clarity. As he always did, he took his shots of the Roseville area first, 
shots he would later go over in minute detail, looking for road 
construction, closed streets, traffic signals out of order, anything that 
would possibly affect the upcoming mission. Once these shots were taken he 
spoke a command to the computer, giving longitude and latitude coordinates. 
The cameras swung slightly on their axis and zoomed in and he was looking at 
Annie's house once more, expecting to see nothing but the empty backyard, 
the empty driveway, the front yard. Only this time, the back yard was not 
empty.



He saw Ken Jr. first, spotting him because the human eye is drawn toward 
movement. His son was playing on the slide, a tiny figure in blue shorts and 
white shirt climbing awkwardly up the small ladder that led to the top of 
the slide. His breath caught in his throat. And then he noticed Annie and 
his heart seemed to stop for a moment. Annie, dressed in a yellow bikini, 
was lying on her back on a towel in the middle of the lawn, taking advantage 
of the weather and doing a little sunbathing.



"Oh Laura," Ken whispered in awe, not realizing he'd spoken aloud. He zoomed 
in the shot as much as he could, which was a considerable amount in the 
clear air. Annie soon filled the entire screen, the resolution so clear it 
was almost as if he were hovering directly above her. He could see drops of 
perspiration on her chest and upper lip, could see the rise and fall of her 
breasts with each breath she took. She was so beautiful! Her bikini was 
skimpy, smaller than what she had worn in her pre-pregnancy days. And, 
despite having produced a child, she still did justice to it. Her breasts 
were fuller than they had been, bulging erotically from the sides of the 
bikini cups. Her belly was not completely flat but it was close, the small 
array of stretch marks and the infinitesimal bulge doing nothing but 
accenting her beauty. Her legs were truly magnificent, well toned and 
muscled, as if she were in the habit of running. They were the sort of legs 
that caused men to stare after them when they were seen in shorts or below 
the hem of a dress, the kind of legs that drove men to enough distraction 
that they were in danger of rear-ending the car in front of them if 
encountered while driving. But it was her face that drew his attention more 
than anything. That lovely, innocent-looking face he had fallen in love with 
nearly at first sight. It looked a little older than he remembered, of 
course, with a few lines where there had not been lines before, but it was 
the same face nonetheless, a face he'd kissed, stared into, caressed with 
his hand. It was the face of the woman he loved more than any other. Her 
head was turned to the side, toward Ken Jr's position, her eyes open and 
keeping a watch on his actions. Her expression was neutral, neither happy 
nor sad, neither whimsical nor melancholy. She would occasionally crack a 
small smile at something her son said or did.



Ken zoomed out a little, so he could see Ken Jr. again. His son was now 
standing at the bottom of the slide, a plastic baseball bat in his hands. He 
banged the bat on the slide a few times, obviously relishing the noise it 
made. He might've continued doing this for some time but Annie apparently 
didn't care for the repetition and said something to him. He seemed to plead 
with her but it seemed his appeal was rejected. With a pout he threw down 
the bat and sulked about, kicking at a plastic ball. Not receiving any sort 
of attention from this display, he gave up the effort and walked back to the 
ladder of the slide. He began to climb again.



Ken watched the two of them for almost fifteen minutes, until Calistoga 
passed out of range. When they finally disappeared from his view he sat 
there for a long time, strapped into the chair before the terminal, eyes 
oblivious to the display, just thinking over what he had seen. He had been 
looking at his family down there, the family that cranked-out asshole had 
stolen from him. He had not been seeing mere photographs of them, or video 
clips, but had actually been looking at them live. The nostalgia and love 
this experience produced in him was so powerful he actually felt sick to his 
stomach.



So close, he thought again. So close and yet so far.



+++++



September passed, leading into October, and still there was no sign of the 
approaching WestHem ship. Calistoga's passive sensors and the detection 
buoys scanned everywhere, looking for the slightest hint of artificial heat 
or electromagnetic radiation and saw nothing, not even a false alarm. By 
October 15, Huffy began to suspect their best window of opportunity to find 
their enemy had already passed, that the WestHem ship had already entered 
orbit around Earth and was merely waiting for the right time to send down 
its interdiction team. Confirmation of this assumption came on October 25.



As chance would have it, Huffy herself had the con when it happened. It was 
0908 hours, just after breakfast cleanup, and she was sitting in her command 
chair filling out the first of her daily log entries. Suddenly Glory Trower 
on the secondary detection terminal perked up.



"I got something from Buoy 5, Huff," she said, excitement in her tone. "A 
radio burst from bearing 145 mark 78 relative to the buoy. It's still going 
on."



Huffy knew that Buoy 5 was about a third of the way further along in its 
orbital plane than Calistoga, and about 80 degrees further west. Calistoga 
was currently passing over the Eastern Mediterranean Sea, heading in the 
direction of the North Pole. This meant the radio source being detected was 
coming from a position roughly over Manchuria. "Is there anything Earthling 
or natural there that could be causing the burst?" she asked.



"Nothing," Trower said. "The nearest Earth object I have is a military 
satellite at a relative bearing of 98 mark 105."



"Designate it as an unknown contact and try to catch it with Buoy 4 or 6," 
Huffy ordered. "Let's get a triangulation on it and pin down the exact 
location and course. Meanwhile, ship the transmission telemetry to 
Intelligence and get it decoded."



"Fuckin' aye, Huff," Trower said, turning to her terminal.



Things moved quickly for the next five minutes. The radio transmission they 
were detecting lasted less than forty seconds but Buoy 4 was able to get 
enough of a hit on it that Calistoga's computers could triangulate on the 
source with a fair degree of accuracy. They determined the source was moving 
at orbital speed in a due south direction, meaning it was in the far side of 
a polar orbit. Next, the Intelligence section decoded the signal and 
determined it had been directed at several military satellites in 
geosynchronous orbit.



"It's a WestHem signal," Ron Sampson confirmed. "Nothing from this time 
period could encrypt a message like that. They're setting up to mask an 
infrared re-entry signature from detection by the Earthlings."



"That's confirmation," Huffy announced. "That's our fucking target and 
they're about to launch a re-entry vehicle. Detection, mark it as a positive 
hostile contact."



"Fuckin' aye, Huff," Trower answered.



"Helm," Huffy said next, "plot an intercept course. I need to know how long 
it will take us to get into interception range." She already knew it would 
probably be too long. Catching up to another vehicle in LEO without having 
your own ship break orbit was not as simple as changing direction and 
putting on some gas. It was an exercise in time consumption.



"I'm on the motherfucker, Huff," replied Darla Ogle, who had the helm. Her 
fingers began to fly over her terminal, calling up the proper screens. It 
took her less than a minute to get the calculations. "Six hours, at best," 
she announced. "We'll have to change course and burn the engines at .25 for 
about an hour."



"Fuck me with a red jackhammer," Huffy said. "That's too much time."



"We'll run a fifty-fifty chance of them spotting us if we burn at that level 
and they have detection buoys of their own up," added Trower.



"Too risky," Huffy said. "Chances are they're going to launch their re-entry 
vehicle in the next hour, maybe less. Navigation, what's their optimum 
window based on their projected course and assuming they're going to land 
off-shore the west coast of California?"



"Checking," said the navigation officer. He consulted his screen for a 
moment, then said, "0940 hours approximately. That'll have them just over 
Antarctica for separation and bring them in for splashdown right off the San 
Francisco Bay area. That's assuming they're going ballistic separation and 
re-entry, of course."



"Of course," she said, nodding thoughtfully, mentally mulling over her 
options. It looked very much like preventing the WestHems from launching 
their team was not going to be in the cards. Conceding that, she would need 
to move more cautiously. She turned to Ogle. "Plot a course to catch up with 
them utilizing a tenth of a G burn. We'll take position behind them and move 
on them after our interdiction team takes their landing party down."



"Right, Huff," She said. She did a few more calculations on the screen. 
"It'll take eighteen hours to get behind them at point one-zero G."



Huffy nodded. You took what you could get. "Sound the acceleration alarm and 
light 'em up," she ordered.



"Fuckin' aye, Huff," Ogle replied.



A minute later the acceleration alarm brayed throughout the ship, warning 
that gravity was about to return to the environment. Two minutes after that, 
the maneuvering thrusters fired, turning the nose of the ship in a new 
direction, then the fusion engines came to life, slowly pushing the ship in 
pursuit of their enemies.



+++++



The navigation officer's estimate turned out to be off by only four minutes. 
At 0944 hours, from a position 778 kilometers over the Antarctic continent, 
two of the passive buoys detected heat sources in the high infrared 
spectrum.



"That's a positive fusion engine burn," Trower said. "I've even got an 
engine signature. The contact is positively identified as the WSS Rumsfeld, 
a Cheney-class WestHem stealth attack ship. It's burning at point three G's. 
Red shift shows the burn is decelerating the vessel. Velocity will reach 
sub-orbital speed in twelve minutes, eight seconds."



"Mark it and designate it," Huffy ordered, going over the information in her 
mind. A Cheney-class ship was far from state of the art in the WestHem naval 
inventory. In fact, the Cheneys had been outdated even before the Martian 
Revolutionary War, which meant the Rumsfeld was now at least eighty Earth 
years old. They must've pulled it out of a mothball fleet for this mission. 
That was typical WestHem thinking, Huffy reflected. Why waste an expensive, 
modern ship on a one-way mission that would end with the ship in question 
being crashed into the sun? In any case, WestHem's choice of vessel would 
make the job of tracking and capturing it child's play. Though an admirable 
stealth platform, the ship's armament left much to be desired. Cheneys were 
equipped with underpowered 92-millimeter anti-ship lasers that would not 
even be able to burn through the hull of Calistoga, let alone disable it. 
The anti-torpedo lasers were 20-millimeters controlled by servos notorious 
for jamming up and aimed by a software system notorious for locking up. In 
addition, the passive sensors on the vessel were at least four generations 
behind what a modern WestHem ship was equipped with. They would be lucky to 
detect the Calistoga if it actually collided with them. In short, a match-up 
between the Calistoga and the Rumsfeld was the equivalent of a nuclear 
powered attack submarine from the 21st century facing off against a World 
War II U-boat.



"At least they're making our job a little easier for us, huh Huff?" asked 
Trower, who was staring at the holographic display before her.



"Thank Laura for quick orgasms," Huffy agreed, pulling a cigarette from her 
pack and sparking up.



Thirteen minutes after it had begun, the deceleration burn from Rumsfeld 
came to an abrupt end. With the extinguishment of the engines came the loss 
of the lock the passive buoys held, but that hardly mattered. They had 
pinned down the exact location, course, and speed. With this information, 
they were now able to keep track of where the ship would be at any given 
moment without actually having to see it.



Ten more minutes clicked by before they made another detection, this one a 
burst of heat being released in the low-infrared spectrum.



"They just vented some atmospheric gas," Trower reported. "Probably 
evacuating an airlock."



"They're launching their re-entry vehicle," Huffy said with a sigh.



"It looks like it."



Sure enough, four minutes later they made another detection, this one a 
small, moving heat source, not quite as stealthy as the main ship, 
punctuated with occasional sharp spikes of hotter heat from around its 
perimeter.



"That's a confirmed re-entry pod," Trower said after isolating it. "The 
spikes are bursts of maneuvering thrusters. It's drifting away from the 
ship, toward the surface."



"Can we maintain a lock on it?" Huffy asked.



"Fuckin' aye," she replied. "I make it as a small pod, maybe five meters in 
length by two meters wide. Too small to have an engine or fuel storage. 
Strictly a ballistic vehicle."



"How many people can something like that hold?" she muttered to herself and 
then keyed the intercom button. "Intelligence," she said. "You copying all 
this?"



"Fuckin' aye," came Ron Sampson's voice. "Looks like they're heading in."



"What can you tell me about that re-entry vehicle? Have we ever observed any 
such thing from the WestHems or the EastHems before?"



"Yes and no," Sampson responded. "The Earthlings aren't much into stealthy 
atmospheric entry. That's more our forte'. But it looks like they've done a 
bit of improvising with this thing. From what I can see, it's a modified 
emergency re-entry pod of the sort used on Executive Committee or corporate 
spacecraft. You know, the shit they use to make sure their rich pricks are 
safe if their private spaceship takes a shit on them? They've obviously put 
a heat and radar absorbent layer on it to keep the natives here from 
detecting it and they've thought far enough ahead to hack into the 
satellites so they won't detect the re-entry heat."



"So how many people can it hold?" she asked next.



"The standard escape pod holds four in comfort, maybe six in discomfort. It 
doesn't look like they've made it any bigger. If anything, they've probably 
sacrificed internal room to put on the stealth layer."



Huffy nodded. "Thanks, Ron," she said.



"No skin off my ass," he shot back.



She puffed on her cigarette, blowing a smoke ring across the room. It was 
now official. The WestHem team was on its way down to the surface. The 
attempt to take their ship into custody beforehand had failed. She keyed up 
her intercom again, getting Lieutenant Spankworth on the line. She saw she 
had interrupted him in the middle of a recreational activity. His face was 
drenched with sweat and Spacer Ziffleman's erect cock was floating 
centimeters from his lips. "Spanky," she said, "this is Huffy. Sorry to 
interrupt your leisure time."



"No problem, Huff," he said, shrugging. "Just killing some time."



"Well, time's at a premium now," she told him. "The WestHem team is heading 
for re-entry. Get your people together and get them ready to head in. We'll 
launch you at the first available window."



+++++



Unlike the WestHems, who had cheaply fashioned a stealth entry vehicle for 
their mission, the Martians had put their best engineers on the job. Though 
the standard method of infiltrating agents to the surface of Earth in normal 
time was a pod not much unlike what the Earthlings had used, this mission 
needed a vessel that could bring the crew back up to orbit in addition to 
getting them down. That meant a powered vehicle. Thus the SESOV-01, or 
Stealth Earth Surface-to-Orbit Vessel, Model 1, had been developed by the 
Martian Navy specifically for this mission.



The SESOV's passenger compartment was ten meters long by three meters wide 
and was capable of carrying fifteen passengers and their equipment in 
addition to the two pilots. Behind the passenger compartment was an 
additional twenty meters of fuel and oxidizer storage and then the two main 
semi-rocket engines, which added another six meters of length. The entire 
vessel was composed of radar and infrared absorbent composites, was 
completely watertight for ocean take-off and landing, and had internal 
ballast tanks and a water-jet propulsion system so it could travel beneath 
the surface. It could suck in ocean water after landing and separate it into 
hydrogen for fuel and oxygen for oxidizer, thus refueling itself for the 
return trip. It was the most modern, state of the art, and well-engineered 
spacecraft currently in existence and it absolutely terrified every Martian 
who was slated to ride on it because it was also untested.



"You ask me, this is the most dangerous part of the whole fuckin' trip," 
said Sergeant McGraw as the SESOV, having finished its deceleration burn 
more than an hour before, descended slowly toward the planetary surface and 
the first contact with the atmosphere. "We're about to go screaming in at 
seventeen thousand miles an hour in a re-entry vehicle that has never passed 
through air before. It's a fuckin' theory on the engineer's computer screen 
and we're gonna trust our lives to it."



"What the fuck?" asked Spankworth with feigned casualness. He was strapped 
into the seat directly behind the pilot. "You wanna live forever or 
something?"



"Yeah, McGraw," added Corporal Mike Bingbutt, who was sitting near the rear 
of the passenger compartment. "This is why they pay us the big credits. 
We're fucking test dummies for Martian Industries prototype spacecraft."



"As if going through a wormhole wasn't dangerous enough," said Corporal 
Rosarita Wing, the junior member of team-or at least she had been junior 
until Ken's inception.



Ken, sitting in the third row of reinforced seats, kept his mouth shut. 
Though he was more than a bit nervous at the thought of going through a 
fiery re-entry in an untested vehicle, his twentieth century upbringing kept 
him from being as wary as his fellow passengers obviously were. The stink of 
terror radiated from them in waves. Even the pilots were terrified. But Ken 
just sat placidly in his seat, the four-point harness strapped tightly 
against his chest, his eyes looking out the small window toward the surface 
far below. Antarctica could be seen below them, a solid white landmass 
stretching off to the ocean. They had just passed over the South Pole and 
started back in a northerly direction. In less than ten minutes they would 
be over the South Pacific Ocean west of Argentina, where re-entry would 
begin in earnest. He wasn't exactly looking forward to it, but he was 
anxious to get it over with all the same. He was going home. After all this 
time, he was actually going home.



The comments by the passengers withered as they made first contact with the 
atmosphere. As had been the case when Ken had dived into Saturn's blanket of 
gas, there was nothing detectable at first except minute changes in the 
speed and temperature display the pilots were monitoring. As had also been 
the case with the Saturn dive, that soon changed.



"The air's thickening up," Cindee Marshall, the pilot, reported as streaks 
of red began to appear outside the windows.



"Fuckin' aye it is," agreed Diffy Kalahari, the co-pilot.



As the red streaks of the ionized atmospheric gas increased, finally 
obscuring the view of the surface, gravity returned to the environment with 
a vengeance. Ken felt himself pushed steadily downward in his seat, with 
more and more force, the sensation quickly becoming uncomfortable. It 
continued to build for the better part of five minutes before finally 
leveling off at what Marshall reported to be 3.6Gs.



"Just a walk in the park compared to what we went through at the wormhole," 
Spankworth remarked optimistically.



"Yeah," replied McGraw, ever the pessimist, "but we only had to endure that 
for thirty seconds. This is gonna take a bit longer, isn't it?"



Indeed it did. For the better part of fifteen minutes they were smashed 
downward in their seats as the friction of re-entry slowed them from orbital 
speed to atmospheric flight speed. It was during this portion that the 
Martians were most terrified, undoubtedly thinking of the fiery death that 
would suddenly engulf them if the Martian engineers or 
manufacturers-dedicated and efficient as they were-had been wrong about even 
one little thing.



They were not wrong. The red streaks slowly dissipated and the huge weight 
on their chests gradually lifted. They remained alive and drawing breath. As 
the view cleared they saw the Pacific Ocean below them, much closer now. 
Marshall and Kalahari allowed the ship to continue falling until they 
reached an altitude of 60,000 feet. At this point they powered up the 
engines and unfolded the four wings that would provide lift. The ballistic 
re-entry vehicle became a powered aircraft, heading for a water landing off 
the coast of California.



They descended to less than a thousand feet above the wave-tops and then 
leveled out, flying at supersonic speed in a northeasterly direction for 
about an hour. It was just after sunset when they touched down eighteen 
nautical miles west of San Francisco, the spacecraft hitting the choppy 
water at a speed of 124 knots. There was a violent shudder and everyone was 
thrown forward against their restraints. But the ship held together, just as 
promised, and soon they were at a complete stop, the main engines shut down. 
They bobbed up and down in ten-foot swells, rising and falling in a 
nauseating rhythm.



"I'm gonna puke if this shit doesn't stop," moaned McGraw. "Is this what 
seasickness is, Frazier?"



"Fuckin' aye," Ken replied. The environment was perfect for it-an enclosed 
space without much view of the outside. He was a man who had once made a 
yearly tradition out of deep-sea fishing and had never been bothered by 
seasickness before but even he could feel nausea worming through his system 
now. He could imagine how it was for his Martian friends, who had never even 
seen the ocean before, let alone been tossed around on it.



"We're checking systems for water integrity now," reported Marshall, who 
looked like she was pretty close to vomiting herself. "Once we get under the 
surface the rocking will stop."



"Thank Laura for that," Spankworth said, his head down between his knees, 
his eyes tightly closed.



The systems check took about five minutes, during which time both McGraw and 
Rosarita Wing had to utilize the barf bags thoughtfully stored by the 
maintenance crew. Finally, the ballast tanks were flooded and the ship sank 
beneath the waves. The rocking stopped, only to be replaced by the ominous 
creaks and pops of metal being subjected to high water pressure.



"We're at six hundred feet," Kalahari reported. "Still getting GPS signals."



"Let's trim the tanks and head in," Marshall said.



They moved through the blackness, the only sound the light hum of the 
electric engines driving the water jets. The ship was capable of traveling 
at 25 knots submerged. Ken-an avid reader of Tom Clancy and other such 
authors in his previous life-expressed concern that perhaps the United 
States Navy or Coast Guard might detect the sound of their ship moving 
through the water. This suggestion earned him a round of contemptuous 
laughter from the two pilots.



"Give us a little credit, Frazier," Marshall told him. "A minnow farting 
radiates more noise than this ship. We're perfectly safe from any aquatic 
detection technology of the day."



The condescending way in which Marshall said "aquatic detection technology" 
convinced him she spoke the truth. He stopped worrying about being depth 
charged by a naval destroyer or torpedoed by an attack submarine.



Fifty-six minutes after submerging, Marshall throttled down the engines and 
slowly brought up the ship to a depth of twenty feet. She utilized a hair 
thin periscope to peek at the surface, confirming they were 200 yards off 
the shore of China Beach. Ken, able to view the same screen, saw the 
familiar skyline of San Francisco-Coit Tower, the TransAmerica building, the 
piers of Fisherman's Wharf. He saw automobile headlights crawling along in 
the evening traffic and the specter of the Golden Gate Bridge off to the 
northeast.



"I'm home," he whispered, his words barely audible, but Spankworth still 
heard them.



"No," he said firmly, "you're not home. Mars is your home. You're not here 
for a stroll down memory lane. You're an agent of Mars operating in enemy 
territory. Don't ever forget that, Frazier."



"Sorry, Spanky," he mumbled, pretending not to notice the watchful look he 
was getting. "I won't forget."



The section of China Beach they were planning to land on was at the far 
eastern reach, nestled up against a rocky cliff. It was a section that would 
typically be deserted, that had been deserted every time they'd peered at it 
through Calistoga's cameras. But now that they were actually trying to come 
ashore and slip into the city undetected, human activity was occurring 
there. Pairs of men continually climbed down onto this section of the beach 
from a scenic lookout above to have sex with each other in the shadows.



"How did we miss this?" an exasperated Spankworth asked after they'd watched 
the fourth such couple engaging in either rear-entry anal sex or oral 
copulation. "How in the fuck did we miss the fact that our Laura-damned 
landing beach is a public sex zone?"



"We never looked at it at this time of the evening," Ken said. "Our passes 
were always at 1300, when it's bright daylight, and 0100, when the place 
really is deserted. Apparently this section of China Beach is where the rump 
rangers like to meet each other and do their thing."



"And how long will this go on?" Spankworth asked him.



Ken shrugged. "It'll stop some time before 0100," he said. "I'm pretty sure 
of that."



"Fuck me with a gun barrel," Spankworth sighed, settling in to wait.



As it turned out, the homosexual activity reached a furious peak around 2000 
hours and then tapered off by 2100. By 2130, the section of beach was 
finally deserted enough to allow them to go ashore. Spankworth, McGraw, 
Bingbutt, Wing, and Ken all stripped off their Martian shorts and 
half-shirts and put on insulated black wetsuits that would protect them from 
the frigid waters of San Francisco Bay. They covered their faces with black 
masks that contained oxygen extraction equipment that would allow them to 
breath underwater. They then picked up their equipment bags, which contained 
clothing of the period, several sets of identification, and a cell phone 
that wasn't really a cell phone. They attached the bags to their backs and 
made their way to the rear of the passenger compartment where a two-person 
airlock was installed in the ceiling.



"Frazier, you and Bingbutt go first," Spankworth ordered. "Float up and wait 
for the rest of us."



The airlock was a tight fit and they had to suck in their breath to allow 
the door to close behind them. Once it was shut, a valve opened with a muted 
clank and seawater began to pour in from above them at a rate of fifty 
gallons a minute. It took the better part of two minutes before the level of 
water cleared their heads and all of the air was evacuated. Ken felt mildly 
claustrophobic as he sucked in processed air through his facemask.



There was another muted clank and the hatch opened above them. Ken went out 
first, pushing up as if he were still in zero G and pulling himself free of 
the top of the ship. He inflated the air bladders in his suit just enough to 
achieve neutral buoyancy and kicked his way to the surface. It took a 
surprisingly long time to come up but finally his head broke through into 
the air and he looked around, trying to get his bearings. He turned back and 
forth until he was facing the beach 200 yards away. The miniscule waves that 
made it into the neck of the bay were breaking gently on the shore in the 
age-old rhythm, producing a sound that was unheard on Mars except on audio 
files. Once again he got that nostalgic feeling of coming home.



+++++



It took ten minutes to get all five of them out of the ship and up to the 
surface. Spankworth and McGraw both made a recon check with their night 
vision goggles and, satisfied the beach was still deserted, nodded to the 
others. They began to swim toward the beach, kicking their feet and paddling 
with their arms, their equipment bags weighting them down but the air 
bladders keeping them easily afloat.



Finally, their feet were padding through the rocky sand just outside the 
breakers and they were able to stand. They plodded onward, timing their 
approach between waves until they were standing on wet sand just above the 
low tide mark. This section of the beach was perhaps the darkest place that 
could be found in the entire city of San Francisco. They took off their 
masks and Ken was able to detect the sour odor of the seashore, an odor that 
smelled like heaven to his nose.



Spankworth wasted no time sampling the odors or the sounds. This was when 
they were most vulnerable, when they were standing on an enemy shore in 
possession of futuristic suits and equipment. "Let's move," he said quietly. 
"You know the drill."



And indeed they did. They had practiced the insertion in simulations more 
than a thousand times. They knew every square inch of China Beach from recon 
photos. Moving quickly they trotted across the sand toward a secluded 
section of rocks just below the path that led to the top of the cliff-the 
section most heavily occupied by the homosexual lovers. Up close now, they 
saw it was littered with used condoms, condom wrappers, cigarette butts, and 
empty liquor bottles-debris that had not shown up on Calistoga's cameras.



They moved into the most secluded portion they could find-which happened to 
be where the condoms and booze bottles were in thickest concentration-and 
stripped off their wetsuits, deflating them and folding them into small 
packages of less than half a meter square. The night air was somewhat chilly 
and they shivered violently while they pulled on their first Earth outfits 
of the mission. Ken put on a perfectly forged pair of Levi's denim jeans, a 
pair of forged Nike tennis shoes, and a white sweater that had an American 
flag on the front with "Support Our Troops" under that. Once dressed, he 
felt the worst of the chill passing. He shouldered his equipment bag, 
designed to look like a normal, American gym bag, and looked around while he 
waited for his comrades to finish.



Once everyone was ready, Spankworth looked at Ken. "Okay, Frazier," he said. 
"You've got the most time in this place. Take the point and get us to our 
objective."



"Right, Spanky," he said.



"From this point out," Spankworth reminded the rest of them, "Frazier does 
the talking whenever possible. Everyone else, keep your fucking mouths shut. 
Our accents will sound strange as hell to the natives here."



Everyone acknowledged with silence-the Martian way. Ken took a deep breath, 
inhaling that wonderful sea air one more time, and then headed for the trail 
that led to the top of the cliff. He began to climb, finding that walking in 
1G took a bit of getting used to after so long in zero-G, and the rest of 
the team followed him up.



They reached the top of the cliff and then followed a footpath through the 
parkland, finally coming out in a small public parking lot. A few cars 
parked in the more isolated sections displayed the steamed up windows that 
marked them as being occupied by lovers. Ken kept the group as far away from 
the cars as possible as they strolled casually across the pavement. If their 
presence was noted by any of the lovers, it went unchallenged. Soon they 
were on the access road-Sea Cliff Avenue-a narrow, dark, two-laner that 
twisted and turned over the hills. A quarter mile hike brought them to El 
Camino, a high income residential street lined with multi-million dollar 
mansions. Ken, knowing their presence in such a place would quickly attract 
the notice of the SFPD, moved them along as quickly as possible, finally 
bringing them to 25th Avenue, a main north-south artery.



They headed south on 25th and began to encounter other people-the natives, 
as Spankworth liked to put it-in the cars that zoomed up and down the street 
and walking on the sidewalks, heading to and from whatever business they 
had. Ken listened to their voices, relishing the Earthling accents that made 
them sound arrogant and aristocratic to the Martians. Ken and his group 
stayed in single file, moving efficiently southward, ignoring everyone as 
much as possible and trying to make a minimal impression. No one seemed to 
pay them any undue notice and they soon reached their first objective: the 
bus stop at the intersection of 25th Avenue and California Street. They 
waited for the next bus.



"Remember," Spankworth whispered to Ken, "we only get on a bus if it's at 
least half-empty."



"I remember," Ken replied, fighting to keep the annoyance out of his voice. 
Hadn't they gone over that particular point ten or fifteen thousand times 
now?



Though the prime directive of their mission was to prevent the manipulation 
of Mark Whiting by the WestHem operatives, their secondary directive was to 
do everything possible to avoid impacting the timeline themselves in the 
process. There was no way of telling just how much their interaction could 
change things and what the consequences of those changes might be in the 
long run. It was acknowledged that the simple act of splashing down in the 
ocean could potentially cause a catastrophic shift in the time stream. This 
was the reason why time travel had been outlawed in the first place. But, 
since the danger of inaction was clearly greater than the unknown danger of 
action, and since they were forced to exist in this time period and interact 
with the natives, they would do everything in their power to minimize the 
risk of changing things whenever they could. As such, they would not get on 
a bus that was full or nearly full for fear of displacing a passenger who 
should have been on that particular bus at that particular time. They would 
not check into a hotel that was nearly full for the same reason. It may be 
that nothing would transpire if they did displace a random bus passenger or 
a random hotel patron, but it was remotely possible such a simple act might 
destroy all of mankind.



As it was, there was no need to worry about the bus situation on this 
particular evening. An orange and white city bus pulled up ten minutes later 
with only about fifteen people aboard. Utilizing dollar bills forged by 
Martian printers that were indistinguishable from the real thing, they paid 
their fare and sat down near the middle of the bus leaving substantial space 
between themselves and their fellow passengers. The Martians were all 
nervous about riding in such a large, unsafe contraption, but they hid it 
well as the vehicle pulled away from the curb with a creak and a hiss of 
brakes and began to bump and bounce its way from one stop to the next. Their 
plan was to disembark in the Nob Hill section of the city where Sampson and 
his computer team had already reserved them a room at the Paradise Valley 
Hotel.



They arrived without incident and climbed off the bus, making the two block 
walk to the hotel entrance. The Paradise Valley was a sixteen story luxury 
accommodation that overlooked the Financial District and offered views of 
the Bay Bridge and the downtown skyscrapers. Ken and McGraw, who would pose 
as a married couple, entered the lobby to check in while the rest of the 
team wandered through the lobby, pretending to browse the shops. It was here 
that Ken began to feel a bit nervous. What if their fake ID didn't stand up? 
What if their fake credit cards were rejected? What if the desk clerk talked 
to McGraw and became suspicious of her accent? He commanded himself to 
remain calm and went to the desk, McGraw on his arm. Two bored-looking 
clerks were on duty, both attractive females. He chose the blonde one on the 
theory that she would be the ditzier of the two and less likely to notice 
anything amiss.



"I have a reservation for Mr. and Mrs. Frawler," he told her, speaking in a 
deliberate Earthling accent and utilizing the fake name he'd been assigned.



The clerk gave him a flash of her professional smile and then put her 
manicured nails to her computer keyboard. She found his reservation 
immediately and checked him in. She then asked for his credit card and 
identification.



He pulled a forged Visa and a forged California Driver's license from his 
wallet and handed them to her. He watched carefully as she swiped the Visa 
through her machine and waited for authorization. If there was going to be a 
problem, this is where it would be. But there wasn't one. The card went 
through just as Sampson had promised it would. He signed the form and the 
deal was done.



"Here you are, Mr. Frawler," the clerk told him, handing over two electronic 
passkeys. It was almost too easy.



Ten minutes later, the entire group was on the fourteenth floor, sequestered 
safely behind the locked door of their suite. While Spankworth checked in 
with Calistoga to report their safe arrival, and while McGraw and Wing 
entertained Bingbutt by stripping off their clothes and engaging in a 
lesbian love-fest on the double bed, Ken sat down by the window, staring out 
at the Bay Bridge and the traffic moving across it.



He was home. Less than 60 miles from Annie. Almost close enough to touch.