Apollo's Outcasts (25 page)

He nodded, then a wry grin spread across his face. "Just don't screw up, or it's back to calling you 'Crip' again."

I was about to ask him if it was too much trouble if he'd simply call me Jamey when the treatment room door opened. I looked up, thinking I'd see Dr. Rice or another one of the doctors, and instead saw someone I hadn't expected: Hannah.

I had completely forgotten that she'd taken a Colony Service job at Apollo General. Although she was only a nurse's assistant, she wore doctor's scrubs, complete with a stethoscope around her neck. I was still staring at her when she walked over to us.

"Billy?" she asked. "Dr. Rice sent me out to talk to you. Your uncle is going to be fine. His right femur is broken and he has a couple of cracked ribs on his right side, but there was no damage to internal organs."

Billy took a deep breath, slowly let it out. "Good. Great."

"He'll probably have to walk with crutches or a cane for the next several weeks, and the doctor is barring him from EVA until he fully heals, but he'll be okay after that." Hannah looked at me. "By the way, the doctor also sends her compliments for the nice work you and your team did out there. She's impressed with the way you handled your first rescue mission."

"I didn't do..."

"That's just what I was telling Cri...Jamey," Billy said. "For a provo, he showed that he's got what it takes to be a Ranger."

I bit my tongue, remembering that only a few weeks ago Billy
had been busting my chops for the way I played moonball. But Hannah's eyes were shining, and there was no mistaking the fact that she was proud of me...and maybe more.

"Can I see him now?" Billy asked.

"Umm...I think so, but let me check first, okay? Be right back." Hannah turned and went back into the treatment room. Billy waited until she was gone, then he turned to me.

"Want some advice?" he murmured. "You're not going to get anywhere with Nicole."

I blinked, wondering if my feelings for Nicole were so obvious that even the guy who'd been my enemy had noticed them. "But Hannah..." Looking away, he shook his head in disgust. "Man, you gotta be blind if you can't see she really likes you."

"We...we're just friends," I stammered. "I mean, she..."

The door swung open again; Hannah was returning to take Billy to see his Uncle Don. I shut up, but Billy had a sly grin on his face. "Don't pass up a good thing," he murmured, then he stood up to let her lead him away.

Hannah gave me one last glance before they disappeared through the door. There was a smile on her face. I wondered if Billy was right.

Even if I'd wanted to see more of Hannah, though, I didn't have much opportunity to do so. Matters back home soon took a turn for the worse, and they would affect everyone living on the Moon.

Demonstrations against President Shapar had become widespread over the past few weeks, occurring almost every day in one American city or another. Some may have been organized by the Resistance, but I suspect most were spontaneous. Not very many people believed the White House's story about President Wilford having been the victim of an assassination plot, and the administration's refusal to allow an independent investigation reeked of a cover-up. The demonstrations
were usually broken up by police or National Guard, and scores of protesters being carried off to jail, yet the crackdown did little to prevent them from happening again.

In the meantime, the ISC embargo was beginning to have an effect. It doesn't take a lot of He
³
to fuel a fusion reactor, but its scarcity meant that American power plants usually maintained low stockpiles. As reserves began to run low, utilities suddenly realized that it wouldn't be long before they might not be able to provide electricity to all their customers. When government negotiators failed to reach a settlement with the ISC to end the embargo, President Shapar reacted by withdrawing the United States from the consortium. This decision may have pleased the reactionaries in her party who didn't trust "Eurosocialists," but it didn't do anything to solve the looming energy shortage. And since it was now late October, the prospect of a long winter made colder by rolling blackouts didn't do anything to boost her standing in public opinion polls.

The real crunch came in the last week of October when a White House insider came forward to state that President Wilford had died of natural causes: Dr. Owen Edwards, the late president's personal physician, who'd fled the country a few days after Wilford's death. Speaking at a press conference in Germany, Dr. Edwards confirmed Hannah's assertion that her father had suffered from a preexisting condition that had been kept secret from the public. To prove his claim, he released Wilford's private medical records, including a list of medications he'd prescribed to the late president. Other doctors quickly verified that the records were real and hadn't been falsified.

That was the smoking gun. Overnight, Lina Shapar's last shred of credibility vanished. It could no longer be denied that she'd lied to the American people about President Wilford's death. Her claim to the White House was still constitutionally legitimate, but the actions she'd taken--particularly the arrest of ISC officials and others--were a clear abuse of power. On Capitol Hill, key members of her party realized that they couldn't continue to support the president. Within
days of the Edwards interview, forty-seven congressmen from all three parties--including her own--cosigned a formal motion calling for her impeachment.

But Lina Shapar wasn't about to go down without a fight. On Halloween night, she went live on the net to declare martial law.

The excuse she used for such an unprecedented action were the demonstrations and the coming energy crisis. Both posed a danger to civil order, she said, and so it was her responsibility to deploy military forces in order to keep the peace. The fact that the Constitution doesn't give the president the authority to impose martial law meant nothing to her. Within hours, trick-or-treaters were being swept indoors by their parents as federal troops moved to enforce the dusk-to-dawn national curfew ordered by the White House; by morning, the entire country was in lockdown, with arrest warrants being issued for known dissidents. Vice President H. P. O'Hanlon, the former New Hampshire senator who'd become Shapar's hatchet man on the Hill, officially dissolved the Senate, and when Speaker of the House Mildred Ferguson refused to do the same, she was detained by federal marshals and taken away from the Capitol in handcuffs.

On the Moon, we saw the president's speech on a netcast transmitted to Apollo. Until then, the problems back home seemed remote. Not that we didn't care what was happening, but 240,000 miles is a long distance; we weren't likely to have federal agents knocking on our doors any time soon. Yet one thing in the president's address was particularly ominous:

"The gravity of the situation demands that we take active measures to insure that all Americans continue to have sufficient electricity for their homes and businesses. Our country's access to vital lunar resources cannot be interrupted, and we must reclaim that which has been taken from us."

The next day at school, during a break between classes, a bunch of us kids discussed the speech. Mr. Lagler had just left, and Mr. Rupley's lit class was next. He was running late, though, so while some guys went outside to stretch their legs with a quick game of
hackey-sack--which is amazing in one-sixth gravity, by the way--a few of us chatted about what we'd heard the night before.

"She's going to invade us." Billy leaned against the teacher's desk, arms folded across his chest. "She'll send in the Marines, and they'll take over."

"She wouldn't dare." Nicole shook her head. "The other ISC members wouldn't let her. They'd consider it an act of war."

"Really?" Billy raised an eyebrow. "Do you think Canada, India or Brazil would declare war on the US just because Shapar sent troops up here?"

"They might..."

"No, they won't," said Gabrielle Frontnauc. Along with Greg Thomas, she was the oldest kid in the room. "I hate to say it, but all my country really cares about is whether it receives its helium-3 shipments. So long as America makes a deal with France and the other ISC countries..."

"That's the whole point." As usual, Logan was sitting next to Nicole; I tried to ignore the fact that their hands were almost touching. "That's what this is all about. Shapar's not going to make a deal with anyone. She wants total control of the helium-3 pipeline, because she knows that if she gets it, the US will have a monopoly over most of the global energy supply."

"You're forgetting the PSU," Greg said. "Moon Dragon refines almost as much He
³
as Apollo does."

"Yeah, but it all goes to China, Korea, and Taiwan," Logan replied. "They're not going to share what they have with Europe or South America...and especially not with Japan."

"Why not?" Melissa asked. "I mean, they're on the same side of the world, aren't they?"

Gabrielle turned to stare at my sister. "Short of a major earthquake, there is no way China will ever go to Japan's aid." There was just a touch of condescension in her voice. "The two of them have a long-standing distrust of one another. They've even gone to war a few times. We studied that last week in World History...remember?"

Melissa looked down at the floor. Even though she and I been on the Moon for almost nine weeks, MeeMee still hadn't gotten it through her head that Apollo High was a lot more serious than our school back home. She wasn't keeping up with her homework, was goofing off when she should be studying, and she'd sit in the back of the room and daydream when she needed to be paying attention. Occasionally she got away with it--MeeMee had always been good at conning teachers into believing that she was a better student than she really was--but at times like this her negligence became painfully obvious. I almost felt sorry for her, but not quite. If someone like Gabrielle, whose tongue was as sharp as her mind, wanted to come down on her, that was fine with me; I'd given up trying to change my sister's ways.

"Anyway," Melissa said, trying to save face, "I don't think they're going to attack us. Violence never solves anything."

The others regarded her with disbelief, and I wanted to crawl beneath my desk in embarrassment. Hannah was sitting across from me; she gave me a sympathetic smile and I refrained from rolling my eyes. Hannah knew that my sister could be a ditz at times.

"Actually, violence solves a lot of things," Logan said. "It's just messy, that's all."

Everyone laughed at this except Melissa. "I happen to be a pacifist," she replied, an arch tone in her voice.

"Oh, really?" Logan grinned at her. "You know what a cannibal calls a pacifist? Lunch."

That sparked even more laughter. My sister's face went red. "Oh, ha-ha-ha..."

"If you want to claim you're a pacifist," Logan went on, a little more seriously now, "that's your right. But if you were facing a hungry cannibal, I guarantee you'd forget all about being a pacifist and fight tooth and nail to stay alive."

Melissa scowled but didn't come back with anything. Maybe she couldn't. In any case, I decided to take the heat off her. "What do you
think?" I asked Hannah. "You know Lina Shapar. What do you think she's going to do?"

Hannah winced, and I immediately regretted the question. She didn't like to discuss the fact that her late father had been president; all she wanted to do, really, was fit in with the other kids. She didn't duck the question, though. "Logan's right. She's a cannibal...I mean, totally ruthless. All she wants is power." She gave Melissa a sympathetic nod. "But you're right, too. There's other ways of staying out of the stew pot than killing the guy who's trying to eat you. You just have to figure out how."

The classroom door opened just then. We looked around, expecting to see Mr. Rupley, but instead Mr. Speci came in, followed by the guys who'd gone out to play. The principal stepped behind the desk and waited until everyone had returned to their seats before he spoke.

"I have an announcement to make," he began. "How many of you saw President Shapar's speech last night?" Almost everyone in the room raised their hands. "Good. Then you know what she said, especially the part about lunar resources. That means us...and it also means that we've got to be prepared for trouble if it comes our way."

He paused, letting his words sink in, then went on. "Several of you belong to the Rangers, even if you're still in training--" his gaze traveled to Logan and me "--while some have Colony Service jobs that are in vital areas of the community, like the hospital." He nodded to Hannah, who said nothing. "In any case, no matter what you do, each and every one of you have essential roles that are going to be important over the next...well, however long it is before this situation is resolved. And as important as your education is, right now you need to be spending more time at your tasks than you do here in the classroom."

Everyone glanced at one another, not quite believing what we were hearing. If Mr. Speci noticed, though, he paid no attention. "I've spent the morning discussing this with the school board and the city
manager," he went on, "and we've decided that classes at both Apollo High and Apollo Elementary will be suspended until further notice."