“Look at you,” I heard a female voice say behind me. “An officer and a gentleman!”
I turned to see Lex, standing at rigid attention in her new EDA uniform, which looked as if it had been tailored to accentuate her frame.
“Well?” she said. “What do you think?”
I think you might be the girl of my dreams and I’ll probably never see you again. That was what I was thinking. But I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud, so instead I took a step, straightened my spine, and snapped her a sharp salute.
“Lieutenant Zack Lightman,” I said. “Reporting for duty, ma’am!”
“Lieutenant Alexis Larkin,” she replied, returning the salute. “Ready to save the world!”
I dropped my hand and took a step back. “You look outstanding, Lieutenant.”
“Why, thank you, Lieutenant,” she said. “You don’t look too shabby yourself.” She studied the rank on my uniform. “So I take it the admiral decided not to court-martial your insubordinate ass?”
I shook my head. “He let me off with a warning.”
She shook her head. “See what I mean?” she said. “You’re clearly getting special treatment.” She gave me a shove. “Is your old man a senator or a mob boss or something?”
I wasn’t sure how to answer that, so I didn’t. “Where are they sending you?” I asked.
“Sapphire Station,” she said. “That’s the code name for another base like this one, located just outside Billings, Montana. How about you?”
I handed her the printout of my orders that Vance had given to me. When she finally located my destination, her eyes went wide and she looked back up at me.
“Moon Base Alpha?” she said. “It’s real?”
“Apparently.”
She shoved the sheet of paper back at me in disgust. “What a bunch of horseshit!” she said. “I get stationed in Montana, and you get to go to the fucking moon. That’s real fair.” She gave me another playful shove. “Maybe I need to start being insubordinate, like you.”
I knew she was joking, so I didn’t respond. An awkward silence descended.
Lex unsnapped her QComm from the strap on her forearm. “Hold your arm out for a second.”
I did as she asked. She touched her QComm to mine and both devices beeped.
“Now I’ve got your number, and you’ve got mine,” she said. “We can stay in touch.” She pointed to the countdown clock on her QComm and smiled. “We’ll probably only be able to stay in touch for another six hours and forty-three minutes, so it’s no big deal.”
“Thank you,” I said, staring down at her name on my own QComm’s display, and then at the countdown timer next to it.
“Wow, you’re a popular guy,” Lex said, staring down at her QComm screen. She tapped it a few times, then tilted it toward me again, and I saw the three names listed on my own contact list mirrored there: Arjang Dagh, Alexis Larkin, and Ray Habashaw. Then she tapped the music icon, and I saw that she had somehow pulled all of the music off of my device, too.
“Hey, how did you do that?” I said, making a halfhearted grab for her QComm. She snatched it out of my reach.
“I was pissed when they hacked into my old phone, so I decided to try hacking theirs. It was shockingly easy.” She smiled. “They may have used alien technology in these things,” she said. “But the software they installed to run it all was clearly created by humans—overworked, underpaid programmers like me who take all kinds of shortcuts. The security protocols on the file-sharing system are a total joke. It only took me about five minutes to jailbreak this thing.”
She tossed her QComm behind her back with one hand, then caught it effortlessly with the other, keeping her eyes on me the whole time. Then she held it back up in front of me.
“Access to the public phone network is still disabled, so I wasn’t able to call my grandma,” she said. “However, I did figure out how to enable admin privileges on the QComm network. Now I can pull private data stored on another QComm, just by calling it or touching it with mine. Contacts, text messages, emails, everything.”
“But why would those features even be included in the software?”
“Why do you think?” she said. “So Big Brother can keep on spying on each of us, right up to the bitter end.” She grabbed my phone. “Here, I’ll jailbreak yours, too.”
I handed my QComm back to her, then watched as her thumbs danced across the keyboard on its display for a moment.
“You’re kind of amazing,” I blurted out—because that was what I was thinking, and I’d recently been told the world was about to end. “Did you know that?”
She blushed, but didn’t avert her gaze from my QComm display.
“Yeah, well,” she said, playfully rolling her eyes. “That’s just, like, your opinion, man.”
I laughed and moved a step closer to her. She didn’t move away.
“Listen,” I said, as if she weren’t quite obviously already doing so, “I know we just met, but I just wanted to let you know that I wish we’d met each other a long time ago, under different circumstances.…”
She smiled. “Don’t go getting all mushy on me now, Princess,” she said, stepping back. “So long.”
She turned as if to walk away—then she abruptly turned again, spinning back around on her heel, grabbed me by my lapels, and then she kissed me—right on the lips, with tongue and everything. When we both finally came up for air, Lex wrapped her arms around me in a fierce hug. Then she stepped back and jerked a thumb over her shoulder, toward the lone shuttle on the opposite side of the bay.
“That’s my ride over there,” I said. “I think they’re probably waiting on me.”
“Yeah, we should both get going.”
“Yes. We should.”
Neither of us moved.
“Good luck, Lex,” I said finally.
“Give ’em hell, Zack,” she replied, grinning. “Call me from the far side of the moon. Let me know if you spot any Decepticons or secret Nazi bases hidden up there.”
“Will do.”
We saluted each other again; then she hoisted her new EDA backpack and ran over to her shuttle. I watched until she disappeared inside and its doors hissed closed. A few seconds later the shuttle lifted off and ascended through the narrow gap between the armored blast doors high above, which were now too warped and damaged to open all the way.
Then Lex’s shuttle tilted skyward and rocketed away, out of sight.
I took a deep breath, hoisted my own pack onto my shoulder, and turned to walk toward my own shuttle, wondering how long it would take to fly me to the moon.
AS I APPROACHED the shuttle, I could hear several loud, overlapping voices coming through its open hatchway.
“Why does everyone always automatically assume that RedJive is a man?” a woman asked in a thick, Fargo-esque accent. “That’s pretty damn sexist, if you ask me.”
“Yeah,” a younger female voice chimed in. “The Red Baroness might be a better nickname—for her.”
Female laughter followed. I paused a few yards from the shuttle and crouched, pretending to adjust the Velcro straps of my new EDA sneakers so that I could continue to eavesdrop.
“People assume RedJive is a guy because Red Five was a guy,” a male voice replied. He had some sort of East Coast accent that sounded equally thick to my Pacific-Northwestern ears. “Hate to tell ya, but the Red Baron was a dude, too—just like Maverick, Goose, Iceman, and every other ace fighter pilot in history.”
“You’re aware that those are all fictional characters, right?” the younger woman asked, talking over the man’s chuckling. “For your information, there have been female fighter pilots for over a hundred years now. I wrote a report about it for school. A woman named Marie Marvingt flew combat missions over France way back in World War I, and the Russians used female fighter pilots in World War II. And the US military has had women fighter pilots since the seventies.”
After a pregnant pause, the male voice responded with an annoyed “Yeah, whatever.”
This was followed by another round of high-pitched laughter and some scattered applause. I took it as my cue and stood up, then mounted the shuttle’s small retractable staircase.
The laughter died out as soon as the cabin’s four occupants saw me appear in the open hatchway and turned to face me. I stood there for an awkward beat, letting them size me up, while I did the same to them.
They were all dressed in newly pressed EDA flight officer uniforms like mine. To my immediate left sat a pretty middle-aged woman with tanned skin and dark hair, and the name LT. WINN stitched onto her uniform. There was an empty seat to her right while on her left sat a heavyset guy with an unruly beard who seemed to be eying me suspiciously. Seated across from him was a teenaged African-American girl who looked like she probably wasn’t old enough to drive yet. A young Asian man sat beside her. He looked like he was in his early twenties, and there was a small Chinese flag beneath the EDA emblem on his uniform, instead of the tiny embroidered version of Old Glory that adorned everyone else’s uniform, and instead of the words Earth Defense Alliance there was a string of characters in Chinese.