Pathways - Jeri Taylor [123]
Tom, Tom, the piper’s son, kissed the girls and made them run . . .
It was Charlie, chanting the old rhyme and laughing with glee as he did, running ahead of a hard-charging Tom, who was running full speed to catch him and throw him onto the grass, making him stop.
They were five years old and the world was new. The hills of the Portola Valley stretched for kilometers, green from the winter rains, a vast playground for the two best friends, who’d first encountered each other when they were six months old and just crawling. Their mothers had described the first visit, when the babies, plopped down on the floor, had first stared in some amazement at each other, unable to categorize this creature who, unlike everyone else in their lives, was not a giant.
Baby Tom had extended a tentative hand to Charlie’s plump cheek and touched it, as though to verify the reality of this vision. Then he’d let out a whoop and started crawling away, immediately followed by a smiling and chirping Charlie.
They’d been friends ever since. They’d played, fought, teased, nagged, defended, and trusted each other for over twenty years. Charlie and Tom, Tom, the piper’s son . . .
His head hurt and his throat burned. Why was Charlie teasing him?
His eyes fluttered open and he looked into Charlie’s eyes. Odile and Bruno also hovered over him, looking pale and concerned. He struggled to orient himself, but it was hard to shake off his vision of childhood.
Odile was passing a medical device over him, and gradually his head cleared. Now he realized he was lying on the floor of the shuttle, and he remembered everything, his anger at his friends, his determination to traverse the snowfield, the avalanche . . .
Shame and embarrassment welled in him, but he subverted those vulnerable feelings into hostility. “Let’s get out of here,” he snapped, and those were the last words he spoke to them on the journey home.
A week later, Tom’s black mood hadn’t dissipated, but lay lodged in him like a heavy meal he couldn’t digest. He knew he was acting like a surly child, but the worse he behaved, the more tenacious the angry feelings became, until he was a seething mass of resentment and fury.
It was in this mood that he took his team of small attack vehicles—piloted by himself, Odile, Charlie, and Bruno—to practice strafing runs in the Vega system’s asteroid belt.
The exercise, developed for the purpose of dislodging comets, planetoids, or asteroids on a possible collision course with Earth, was a routine one. The lead pilot dived toward the chosen asteroid and fired a glancing phaser shot at one edge of the target, then pulled up and out, to be followed in succession by each of the others. The successive impact of the four shots would nudge the asteroid off its previous path. This maneuver would be performed as many times as necessary to deflect the object from an Earthbound trajectory.
In reality, there were easier ways of dealing with errant asteroids, and the exercise was merely a structured method of taking target practice. Timing was critical to its success, and the maneuver was considered valuable in terms of strengthening coordination among the four-vessel teams.
“Paris to SAV team beta-nine. We’re approaching the target.”
“Aye, aye, sir,” came Charlie’s response, tinged with sarcasm in reply to the formality of Tom’s announcement. They’d flown together for a long time, and were accustomed to more easygoing communications, but Tom hadn’t felt particularly friendly ever since the botched ski trip the week before, and had reverted to by-the-book procedures.
“Disengage automated systems.” The highly sophisticated attack vessels could of course perform