Apollo's Outcasts (41 page)

It was unbelievable how long and loud everyone in the shelter cheered when Mr. Porter announced that the enemy was gone. All around me, people hugged each other, danced, yelled and screamed in delight. Of course, it was always possible that the White House might dispatch another strike force to the Moon, one better equipped and more determined than Ball North. For the time being, though, victory was ours, and it tasted sweet.

Yet our triumph wasn't complete, or without cost. Fifteen people had died during the invasion, including those who'd been killed defending Cabeus Station. The crater dome was still damaged, so most of Apollo was uninhabitable until it could be repaired; until then, we'd have to continue living like rats in a cellar. And there had been no further contact from anyone on Earth. The loss of the communications satellite had severed our broadband links, and there hadn't been any further transmissions since President Shapar's ultimatum. We didn't even know for certain whether anyone had picked up the speech I'd made; the only response was silence.

So we did the only things we could do. We recovered our dead and temporarily entombed them in an underground storage area, with Mr. Porter leading a memorial service in their honor. We took care of those who'd been injured; most were on the way to recovery,
and a few had already left the infirmary. And then we rolled up our sleeves, put on our moonsuits, and began the long, back-breaking business of rebuilding Apollo.

I was among those who entered the solarium for the first time since the attack, and it was awful to see what had happened. It was as if a tornado had ripped across the crater floor. The sudden decompression had torn apart the entire solarium, tearing up grass, gardens, and trees, then flash-freezing everything that hadn't been blown through the hole in the western side. Most of the livestock had been evacuated to the shelter, but a few didn't make it, and none of the songbirds had survived; their bodies lay everywhere. Most of the apartments in the crater wall were undamaged, since emergency pressure doors had come down when the blowout occurred, but the schools were in ruins, along with most of the other free-standing structures on the crater floor.

I didn't visit Ag Dome 2. I just didn't have the heart to go looking for Eddie's body. But Melissa surprised me by volunteering for that duty. She felt like she owed it to him. When she got back, she held Nina in her arms and cried for a long time.

I saw Hannah only occasionally. Both of us were too busy to do anything else besides have lunch now and then. Besides, privacy was scarce, and we'd become all too aware of the fact that curious eyes turned our way whenever the two of us were together. Perhaps it was only inevitable that, even if the invasion hadn't been forced everyone into the shelter, people would've learned that the former First Daughter had a new boyfriend. Neither of us were comfortable with the attention being paid to us, but there was nothing we could do about it.

At least, so I thought.

Four days after the
Duke
lifted off, that evening's vid was an obscure movie from the late 20th century called
Moon Zero Two
. The Apollo High kids decided to get together to watch it. Now that the crisis was over, we had a little more time to see each other again, and we wanted to get away from the adults for a little while.

So we claimed a spot over to one side of the room where we could rest our backs against the wall. As a bonus, there was also a support column that would hide us from most of the room. We dragged our sleeping cushions over there and put them close together, and cold-shouldered anyone older than eighteen who tried to sit with us. It had been weeks since the last time we all had been in the same place at the same time; the adults seemed to figure out that we wanted to be left alone, and so they gave us our space.

Hannah and I sat together near the edge of the group. We carefully maintained a couple of inches of distance between us until the lights went down, just in case anyone happened to look our way, but even before the opening credits were over I'd put my arm around her and she'd curled up against me. Nicole favored us with a sly smile and a wink, Melissa stared at me until I glared at her and she turned away, and after that everyone decided to ignore us.

The movie was terrible. Trying to show what life out here would be like and managing to get everything wrong, now and then it was unintentionally funny, but most of the time it was just a bore. As it dragged on, though, Hannah gradually drew closer to me, until her head was on my shoulder and her arm was draped across my knee. All I had to do was turn my head a little and her face would be against mine, her mouth only an inch or two away. It wasn't long before even that distance ceased to exist.

In the middle of the scene where the space cowboys start brawling in the space saloon, Hannah suddenly pulled herself away from me and rose to her feet. For a moment I thought I'd done something wrong, but then she reached down and took my hand. She didn't say anything, nor did she need to. I got up and let her lead me from the room. Glancing back, I saw Melissa watching us go. My sister didn't say anything, yet there was a knowing smile upon her face.

There was a large storage closet just down the corridor that Apollo General had turned into a temporary surgical room. It had all the necessary medical equipment, but just then the most important
thing in there was the operating table. It was narrow and not very soft, yet it was just large enough for two people. The ceiling lights went off again almost as soon we shut the door, leaving only the red and blue glow of diodes.

From nearby, we could hear the sounds of the movie, the occasional burst of laughter from the audience. Otherwise, we were alone. I started to sit on the table, but then Hannah pushed me all the way down upon its thin mattress. A second later she was on top of me, straddling my hips, her hair falling down around my face. My hands found her body in the darkness, and it was warm, tense, and eager. Her lips were soft against mine, and it wasn't long before we were fumbling at each other's clothes.

She'd just opened my shirt and I was starting to remove hers when there was an sudden uproar from the shelter, as if everyone in there was shouting at once. Both of us stopped for a second to listen, then we decided that nothing could be happening over there that was more important than what was happening in here. Yet Hannah was about to oblige me by pulling her shirt over her head when the door banged open.

"Jamey!" Melissa stood in the doorway, silhouetted against the light streaming in from the corridor. "You gotta...!" Seeing what she'd just interrupted, she stopped. "Oh...sorry," she mumbled. "I didn't know...I mean..."

"What do you want?" If there was ever a time that I wanted to murder my sister, this was it. Hannah hastily pushed herself off me, yanking her shirt back down. "You better have a..."

"There's a transmission coming in!" she snapped. "It's from the White House...and it's not President Shapar!"

Hannah and I stared at each other for a second. An instant later, we were off the table, straightening our clothes as fast as we could as we ran down back the corridor, Melissa right behind us.

Everyone in the shelter was on their feet, yet a silence had fallen across the room. The only thing we heard was the voice of the woman
on the wall screen. It took me a moment to recognize her: Mildred Ferguson, the Speaker of the House of Representatives, last seen in handcuffs as federal marshals escorted her down the front steps of the Capitol. Now she was standing behind a podium upon which was the symbol of the President of the United States.

Hannah, Melissa, and I came in after she'd begun speaking, so the first thing I heard was:
"...inform you that, at 5:45 PM Eastern Standard Time today, officials from the Department of Justice, under armed escort by members of the Virginia National Guard and the Federal Bureau of Investigation, accompanied me to the White House, where we confronted President Shapar in the Oval Office. There she was informed that the United States Supreme Court, by a majority decision of six-to-three, had ruled that there were sufficient grounds for immediate removal from office for both her and Vice President O'Hanlon, pending federal investigation of charges that her administration has acted against the interests of the people of the United States..."

Hannah's hand clenched mine so painfully that my knuckles hurt. I barely noticed. My attention was fully upon the woman on the screen.

"President Shapar refused to voluntarily surrender office, so she was taken into custody by FBI agents. Vice President O'Hanlon was arrested ten minutes later when a car containing him and his aides was pulled over by District of Columbia police while it was attempting to leave the city. By then, I was administered the oath of office by Chief Justice Marco Gonzales and sworn in as President Pro Tem, a duty I will serve while an impeachment trial is..."

I didn't hear the rest. Everyone around me was yelling too loud. All except Hannah, who let out her breath and closed her eyes.

"It's over," she murmured, almost too quietly to be heard. "It's all over."

In the end, it wasn't guns that brought down Lina Shapar, but words. Hannah's, the ones of the Resistance and the International Space
Consortium, even mine...but most of all her own. It wasn't until everything was over and done that we got the whole story, but what essentially happened was this:

When my firsthand account of what really happened at Cabeus Station was transmitted back to Earth, the Shapar administration made sure that it was blocked from American newsnets. As before, though, the transmission was also received in Europe and South America, and the Resistance made sure that it was fed to pirate servers in the United States that the government hadn't been able to shut down. So within hours of Shapar's speech, my rebuttal was seen by hundreds of millions of people across the world.

Public support for Lina Shapar had been steadily eroding ever since Hannah revealed the fact that her father had died of natural causes, not from an assassin's bullet. The declaration of martial law, the detainment of dissidents, the shutdown of the legislative branch, the US withdrawal from the ISC...all of these actions had led even the most passive citizen to become worried about what the president was doing. In the meantime, the Resistance wisely adopted a nonviolent approach; no bombings or other acts of sabotage that would have been considered terrorism, and therefore could have thrown public support behind the Shapar administration. Instead, they opted for peaceful demonstrations, even when the usual result was mass arrests, along with the dissemination of uncensored information about what Shapar and her cronies were doing.

When it came out that it wasn't American special forces who'd attacked Apollo and Cabeus, but private mercenaries instead, the public wasn't the only ones who were surprised. Throughout the crisis, the military had remained loyal to President Shapar in keeping with its mandate to follow any orders issued by the commander in chief. Nonetheless, the Pentagon had refused to send Marines to the Moon, the joint chiefs telling the president that it wasn't defense policy to attack American civilians when they did something the White House didn't like. So they were already aware that President
Shapar was lying when she told the nation that Marines had been dispatched to the Moon, and they were still trying to swallow this when they learned that the Shapar administration had attempted to get around them by hiring Ball North IU instead.

The fact that Lina Shapar was using the Cabeus Station battle as a pretext for declaring war on the PSU was a threat no one could ignore. So the chairman of the joint chiefs quietly got in touch with his counterpart in People's Army of the Pacific Socialist Union, using diplomatic back-channels that even the president didn't know about, and asked him if my account was true. The Chinese general who knew about these things confirmed my side of the story.

Further confirmation came a few days later, when the surviving Ball North forces returned to Station America following their retreat from Apollo. They were immediately taken into custody by real Marines, and once they were questioned by military intelligence officers, a classified report was sent to the Pentagon. When the joint chiefs received this information, they secretly convened to discuss the matter, whereupon they decided that the commander in chief had gone out of control. Like it or not, President Shapar had to be removed from office before she declared war on the PSU.

At the direct command of the Pentagon, a company of Virginia National Guard soldiers was sent to the former resort hotel in the Blue Ridge Mountains where the Speaker of the House and other government dissidents were being held in custody. Once they'd set Mildred Ferguson free, she immediately got in touch with the nine justices of Supreme Court; they convened in emergency session and, in private, determined that there was sufficient evidence for the removal both the president and vice president from office, pending investigation of the claim that President Shapar's actions were illegitimate and constituted a threat to the people of the United States.