Chapter Text
The first thing Kerbin noticed was the hum.
Low and steady, coming up through the seat and into his back like a fridge running in the next room. The second thing he noticed was that he could hear his own breathing, loud and close, the way it sounds when you've got your head inside something.
He opened his eyes.
A curved visor, flipped halfway up. Past it, a gray console, a wraparound canopy with pale morning light pouring through, and ten seats in two staggered rows, all empty except his. A flight stick. A throttle. A row of little backlit buttons labeled SAS, RCS, GEAR, BRAKES, and AG1 through AG10.
He looked down at himself. White suit, thick and padded, orange trim on the shoulders. A chunky pack on his back that dug into the seat. Gloves with fat fingers.
"No," Kerbin said. "No way."
He knew this suit. He knew this cockpit. He'd spent an entire weekend in the Spaceplane Hangar fighting with offset tools and symmetry modes to get this cockpit sitting right on the fuselage, and another three days figuring out why the whole thing kept flipping on takeoff.
There was an envelope taped to the flight stick.
Plain white, a little creased. Written across the front in neat handwriting: KERBIN.
That wasn't his name. Or it hadn't been. But the second he read it, it settled in like it had always been there, like a word he'd answered to his whole life.
He pulled off one glove with his teeth, peeled the envelope free, and opened it.
* * *
Hello,
First of all, I'm sorry. I was moving some things around and you got caught in the middle of it. By the time I noticed, you were already gone. That's on me. It wasn't your time, and none of it was your fault.
I can't send you back. That door is closed. But I can give you somewhere new, and I can make sure you don't arrive empty handed.
Your hangar. It lives in a space only you can reach. Think about it and you'll feel it. To build, gather your materials (metal, composites, fuel, whatever the job needs) and lay them out on any reasonably flat ground. They'll go where they need to go. You'll know how long the build will take. Some things take days. Big things take months.
When something's finished, you can call it out anywhere within about fifty meters of you, as long as the ground is flat enough and solid enough to hold it. Underground is fine. Indoors is fine. But understand this: once it's out, it's out. It's real now, and it stays real. You can't put it back.
Your hangar can also restock ammunition if you send it what it needs. Food, water, and everything else a person needs to live, you'll have to find the normal way.
Your designs are all saved. Your mods came along too. All of them. Yes, including that one. Only the craft you're sitting in has been paid for. Everything else costs.
You won't be alone. Your companion will introduce himself in a moment. He flies, he does the math, and he's better at both than you are. No offense.
Where you are: Earth. Not yours. This one has a few more people in capes than you're used to, or it will soon. The date is October 14th, 2007. In a few months, a man named Tony Stark will make some very important choices in a cave. What you do about that is up to you.
You're sitting in the Black Rock Desert, in northern Nevada. Nobody saw you arrive. That won't stay true forever.
Good luck. Try not to blow up anything you can't put back together.
Sorry again.
* * *
He read it twice. Then a third time, slower, like the words might shuffle around into something that made sense.
"October 2007," he said. "Stark. Cave." He swallowed. "That's Iron Man. That's the first one."
"Spot on," said a voice. "Though I'd hold off on the popcorn."
Kerbin jumped so hard the harness bit into his shoulders.
The voice came from the cockpit speakers, all around him at once. Older. British. Dry as the ground outside, with the sort of calm you only get from somebody who's watched a lot of things go wrong and stopped being surprised.
"Easy, lad. Didn't mean to startle you. Thought I'd let you finish your post first."
"Who," Kerbin started, then cleared his throat. "Who are you?"
"Flight computer. Navigation, guidance, targeting, landing, burn planning, keeping you alive." A short pause. "You've known me for years, mind. Little button in the corner of your screen. You'd click it, set a target, and wander off to make a sandwich while I took you to orbit."
Kerbin looked at the main display. In the bottom corner, burned into the toolbar, were two familiar letters. MJ.
"...MechJeb?"
"That's the one. Call me Jeb. The full name's a bit of a mouthful when someone's shooting at you."
Kerbin laughed. It came out cracked and too high, the laugh of someone whose brain hadn't decided yet if this was the best day of his life or a really convincing stroke.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. Jeb. What am I sitting in?"
"You named her 'Bomber JoaT Mk4 FINAL v3.'"
"I was tired."
"You were. Putting the overview up now."
The center display flickered. A wireframe of the aircraft rotated slowly across it: biplane wings, a big lower wing and a smaller upper set on struts, fat engine pods on the tips, tall twin tails, and a long, broad body swelling out behind the cockpit into the cargo section. Green text scrolled underneath.
CRAFT STATUS
Mass: 341.0t
Dimensions: 8.4m H / 23.1m W / 35.3m L
Hull: 100% / RAM coating: intact
Reactor 1: ONLINE, 10% / Reactor 2: OFFLINE
Battery: 93,200 / 93,200
Liquid Fuel: 4,464 / Oxidizer: 5,456 / Xenon: 144,000
Enriched Uranium: 250 (130 loaded, 120 spare)
"Everything's topped off," Jeb said. "Fuel, ammunition, countermeasures, the lot. You could pick a fight with a small country this afternoon."
"Let's not."
"Agreed. Weapons page."
GAU-22 (x2): 3,750 rds
FFAR pods (x2): 240 rockets
.50 cal turrets (x2): 7,200 rds
CENTRAL BAY 1: 3x Meteor AAM
CENTRAL BAY 2: 2x Sulfur, 1x B83
CENTRAL BAY 3: 1x GPSNB-500kt, 2x Sulfur
WING BAYS: 6x MK83 LGB
ABL (x2): ready, 300 EC/s each
ECM (x2): standby / Chaff: 1,000 / Flares: 1,820
Kerbin read it. Then read it again. His eyes stuck on two lines and refused to move.
"Jeb."
"Mm."
"Why are there two nukes in my plane."
"Because you put them there, lad."
"That was a game."
"Wasn't, as it turns out." Jeb said it gently, which somehow made it worse. "I'll also mention, since you'll ask eventually, that we're sitting on public land in the United States in an unregistered military aircraft carrying a five hundred kiloton device. I'd quite like us not to be here when someone with a badge wanders by."
Kerbin let his head fall back against the seat.
"Cool," he said to the ceiling. "Cool, cool, cool."
* * *
He unbuckled. His body moved easily, almost too easily, like it had been tuned up while he wasn't looking. When he caught his reflection in the dark edge of a side display, the face looking back was his, mostly. Twenty-one, give or take. Black hair flattened on one side from the helmet. A little sharper around the jaw than he remembered.
He patted down the suit and found a zippered pocket on the thigh. Inside was his wallet.
Ontario driver's licence. Health card. Debit card, credit card. A few coins: a loonie and two toonies. A folded twenty, bright green polymer with a little clear window in it.
He stared at the licence.
DATE OF BIRTH: 2005.
"Jeb," he said slowly. "If I'm born in 2005, and it's 2007..."
"Then you're a toddler, according to that card. Or you would be, if you existed here. You don't. I've had a quick look at what I can see from the ground, and there's no record of you anywhere." A beat. "Also, Canada won't start printing plastic money until 2011. I'd not try spending that twenty, lad. Someone'll think it's very good counterfeit."
Kerbin put the wallet back in the pocket and zipped it shut very carefully, like it might go off.
* * *
Behind the cockpit, a short corridor led back to the living quarters. He'd forgotten he'd put these in, a little stack of habitation parts he'd slapped on so the crew count looked right. In person they were cramped but real: four narrow bunks with thin mattresses, a fold-down table, a tiny galley with a two-burner cooktop, and a toilet behind a sliding door that was frankly smaller than an airplane bathroom.
On the bottom bunk sat a backpack. His backpack, the one he dragged to class every day, scuffed straps and all. He stared at it for a second, decided he couldn't handle one more surprise right now, and kept going.
He opened the galley cabinets. Empty. He opened the little fridge. Empty, cold, humming politely. He turned the tap. It coughed once and gave him nothing.
"Water tank's dry," Jeb said. "Pantry's bare. You built a bomber that can reach orbit, but you didn't pack a sandwich."
"KSP doesn't have food."
"It does now."
His stomach chose that moment to growl. Loudly.
"Right," Kerbin muttered.
Past the quarters was the pressure hatch to the cargo bay. He cycled it open and stepped through.
It was bigger in person. It always looked big in the hangar view, but standing in it was different. Twenty meters of ribbed gray deck under a high curved ceiling, strip lights coming on in sequence as he walked. The robotic arm lay folded along one side like a sleeping crane. Up front sat the two GARNET reactors, one humming that low note he'd felt in his seat, the other quiet. Beside them, the two big fuel vats for the arm, and shielded drums with the trefoil warning symbol. The .50 cal turrets sat tucked in their mounts, barrels pointing at the floor. Ammo crates lined the right wall. The satellite dish rested folded flat near the back.
"Jeb, can you drop the ramp?"
"Can do. Mind your feet."
Hydraulics whined. A seam of white light split the back wall from top to bottom and widened as the ramp lowered. Cold, dry air rolled in, smelling like dust and absolutely nothing else.
Kerbin walked down the ramp and stepped off onto the playa.
* * *
It went on forever.
Flat, pale gray ground, cracked into plates, stretching out in every direction until it hit low brown mountains far away on every side. No trees. No bushes. No roads he could see. The sky was enormous and cloudless, and the sun was just clearing the eastern ridge, throwing the bomber's long shadow across the ground like a spill of ink.
He turned around and looked at her.
From the ground she looked mean. White and charcoal, hard angles and smooth panels, the nose slung low like she was thinking about something. The engine pods on her wingtips were the size of cars. The twin cannon barrels under her chin were dark and quiet.
She was the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen, and she was absolutely going to get him shot at.
"Radar," he said. "Anything around?"
"Passive only. Didn't want to light us up." A pause while Jeb listened. "Airliners, high up, heading west. Nothing low and nothing close. There's a small town about twenty kilometers southeast, edge of the playa. Gerlach. Couple hundred people, by the look of it. A highway runs past it. Past that, not much of anything for a long way."
"Military?"
"Nothing nearby. Nearest air base I'm hearing is about a hundred and fifty kilometers south. We're well out of the way, which is the good news. The bad news is that a three-hundred-and-forty-tonne bomber on a dry lakebed is easy to spot from a satellite, and someone will eventually wonder why the desert grew one overnight."
Kerbin crouched and pressed his bare hand flat on the ground. It was real. Gritty, cold, so fine it was almost like powder.
He reached for the hangar in his head, and there it was, just like the letter said. Not a picture exactly. More like a room he knew was behind him without turning around. Huge and echoing and empty. Bins with nothing in them. A counter in the corner reading zero across the board.
"Okay," he said, standing up and brushing off his hand. "Problems, in order. One: I'm starving and there's no water. Two: I have no money that works and no ID that makes sense. Three: there's a bomber with two nukes in it sitting out in the open." He paused. "Four: Tony Stark gets blown up in a few months."
"That's a decent list," Jeb said. "What do you want to tackle first?"
"We leave," Kerbin said.
"Go on."
"Gerlach's twenty k away and it's a town of a couple hundred people. A guy in a spacesuit walks out of the desert in October, everyone's going to remember him. And if the ship stays here, it's just sitting out in the open the whole time I'm gone." He chewed the inside of his cheek. "We leave. Now. Somewhere remote, but somewhere people actually live, so I can buy food without being the only stranger in town in five years."
"Somewhere like where?"
"North. Way north. Newfoundland, maybe. Or the Nordics. Somewhere with a lot of empty space and a few small towns."
Jeb was quiet for a second, which Kerbin was already learning meant he was doing math.
"It's doable," Jeb said. "I'll warn you now, though. We're not going suborbital."
"Why not? She can make orbit, right? Up, over, down. Faster."
"She can. And anything that goes up that steep and comes down that fast looks a great deal like an ICBM to the lads at NORAD. It's 2007. They're touchy. I'd rather not start a war before breakfast." A pause. "Especially as you haven't had breakfast."
"Fair."
"So we go the boring way. Climb out over the empty bits, get up high, well above the airliners, and run north over the least crowded country I can find. The coating should keep us quiet to anything that isn't looking hard. Mostly."
"Mostly."
"Mostly, lad. Strap in."
* * *
Kerbin jogged back up the ramp, and it closed behind him with a heavy thunk that he felt in his boots. He climbed into the front seat, dragged the harness over the bulky suit, and pulled his glove back on. His hands were shaking a little. He told himself it was the hunger.
"Don't touch anything," Jeb said.
"I wasn't going to."
"You were eyeing the throttle."
He had been. He folded his hands in his lap.
On the display, numbers started moving. "Bringing Reactor One up to sixty percent," Jeb said, and the hum through the seat climbed a few notes. "That's plenty for the ion engines at full burn, with some left over. I'll leave Reactor Two cold. No sense burning uranium we don't need."
"We're taking off on the ion engines?"
"Quieter than the Vectors. No great flame, no great noise. Anyone in Gerlach looking this way will see a big gray shape and decide they need their eyes checked." A soft clunk from somewhere outside. "Radiators deploying. If I'm going past half throttle on the KIEs, they need to breathe."
Out the side of the canopy, Kerbin watched panels unfold from the wingtip pods, flat and dark, angling into the air.
"Brakes off. Here we go."
There was no roar. That was the strangest part. He'd heard these engines a thousand times as a thin, whining hiss through his headphones, and in real life it was almost the same. A high electric whine that built and built, like a giant hairdryer winding up, and then the seat pushed into his back and the playa started sliding past.
It was the perfect runway. Miles of it, flat as a table in every direction. The bomber rolled, picked up speed, and the cracked gray ground blurred into a smooth sheet. The rumble of the gear got lighter and lighter.
"Rotating," Jeb said.
The nose came up. The rumble stopped.
Kerbin's stomach dropped right out of him and stayed somewhere on the ground. The desert fell away underneath them, shrinking, and the brown mountains around the playa went from walls to wrinkles. The town of Gerlach slid past off to the right, a little cluster of roofs and a road, and then it was behind them.
"Gear up," Jeb said. There was a thump under the floor. "Climbing to twenty thousand meters. Turning north."
The sky outside went from pale blue to a deeper blue as they climbed. The ground below turned into a map: dry lakebeds, ridgelines, a long thin road with nothing on it. Then clouds, a white carpet with gaps in it, and through the gaps, more empty country.
Kerbin realized he'd been holding his breath and let it out.
"Okay," he said. "Okay. That was. Yeah."
"Not bad for a first flight."
"I didn't do anything."
"That's why it was not bad."
Kerbin snorted. Despite everything, he grinned. He looked out the canopy at the horizon, which was already starting to look a little bit curved, and at the wingtip pods with their radiators spread out like dark fins, and something in his chest went loose and light for the first time since he'd woken up.
He was flying. He was actually flying the thing he'd built.
His stomach growled again, loud enough to hear over the whine.
"How long?" he asked.
"Depends where we're going. You've given me three countries and a vibe."
"Right." Kerbin leaned forward. "Give me the options."
The center display shifted to a map. A dotted line ran north from Nevada and split into three branches.
"Option one," Jeb said. "Newfoundland. Northern tip of it, along the coast. Small fishing towns, lots of empty land, everyone speaks English with an accent you'll have to get used to. It's Canada, so you won't sound out of place, and those coins in your pocket are the right currency. Mind the dates stamped on them, though. A few hours' flight."
A second branch lit up, curving far into the north.
"Option two. Further north still. Nunavut, or up that way. Tiny towns, very remote, very few eyes. But food's flown in and dear, and in a town of a thousand people where everyone knows everyone, a new face is news within the hour. Weather gets rough this time of year, and the dark's coming."
The third branch stretched east, all the way across the Atlantic.
"Option three. The Nordics. Northern Norway, Finnish Lapland, that sort of country. Beautiful, empty, lots of places to hide a plane. But it's a long flight over a lot of water, you don't speak the language, the money's all wrong, and if anyone asks for your papers, you've got a toddler's driver's licence from another country."
Kerbin stared at the three lines.
"Your call, lad," Jeb said. "I'll fly whichever."
"Newfoundland," Kerbin said.
"Good choice. Settle in, lad. It's a few hours."
* * *
The first hour, Kerbin couldn't stop looking out the canopy.
Nevada gave way to Idaho, then to green mountains and long lakes and scattered towns he could cover with his thumb. Somewhere over Montana, Jeb told him they'd crossed into Canada, and Kerbin pressed his face closer to the glass like he'd see a line painted on the ground. There wasn't one. Just more forest, then the flat brown prairie running out forever, cut into squares by roads so straight they looked drawn with a ruler.
The second hour, he started feeling the hunger properly. Not a growl anymore. A dull, hollow ache that sat under his ribs and made him a little lightheaded.
The third hour, he fell asleep.
"Lad."
Kerbin jerked awake. His neck hurt from the helmet ring. The light outside had changed, gone lower and more golden, and below them was water. Dark gray water, crinkled with whitecaps, stretching off to a coastline of rough green hills and brown cliffs.
"Gulf of St. Lawrence," Jeb said. "That's the Northern Peninsula ahead. Thought you'd want to see it."
It was wild-looking country. Long, low mountains running up the middle like a spine, flat-topped and bare on top, all rock and moss and stubby trees. Ponds everywhere, hundreds of them, scattered across the ground like someone had dropped a mirror and let it shatter. Along the coast, tiny towns clung to the edge of the water: little clusters of bright houses, red and yellow and blue, a church, a wharf, boats pulled up on the shore.
"It's like four in the afternoon here," Jeb said. "Clocks are four and a half hours ahead of Nevada. And yes, the half is real. Don't ask me why."
"I know why. Newfoundland's just like that."
"Fair enough."
"Where are we landing?"
The display showed a map, then zoomed in on the middle of the peninsula. "Up on the barrens. Inland, high ground, a good long stretch of flat rock and gravel between two ridges. No roads near it. Nearest town's a little place called Main Brook, about twelve kilometers east. Few hundred people, a store, a wharf. It'll be quiet."
"Can she land on gravel?"
"She took off from a dry lakebed this morning, didn't she? She'll be fine. Brace yourself, though. It'll be a bit bumpy."
It was more than a bit bumpy. They came down in a long, slow curve over the hills, the radiators folding away, the engine whine dropping, and the ground rushed up gray and brown and full of rocks. The gear hit hard, bounced once, hit again, and then the whole cockpit shook like a washing machine full of shoes as they rolled and braked and rolled and braked. Kerbin gripped his armrests hard enough to hurt his fingers.
Then they stopped.
The engines wound down to nothing. The hum of the reactor dropped back to its low, steady idle. Out the canopy, there was just bare rock and moss, a pond with wind ruffling the surface, and a ridge of stunted, twisted spruce off to the left.
"And that," Jeb said, "is what you'd call a landing."
"That was a controlled crash."
"Any landing you walk away from, lad."
* * *
He couldn't walk into town in the suit. That was obvious. So he went back to the living quarters, found the clasps and seals, and worked his way out of it piece by piece. It took ten minutes and a lot of swearing.
Underneath, he was wearing the clothes he'd died in, apparently. Black jeans, a gray hoodie, a T-shirt from a band that wouldn't exist for another eight years, and a pair of running shoes.
His backpack was still sitting on the bottom bunk where he'd left it.
He unzipped it and dumped it out on the mattress. Laptop, slightly dented on one corner. Charger. A power bank. A tangle of USB-C cables. A scientific calculator. Two notebooks, one mostly circuit diagrams and the other mostly doodles. A pencil case. An empty water bottle. A pair of wireless earbuds in their little case. Student card. Half a pack of gum. One granola bar, crushed flat.
He ate the granola bar in about four seconds. It was the best thing he'd ever tasted.
Then he dug his phone out of the front pocket of the hoodie. Samsung, scuffed case, a crack across one corner of the screen he'd been meaning to fix for a year. He pressed the side button.
The screen lit up. No bars. No Wi-Fi. The clock read 4:12 PM, which meant it had already figured out the time zone. And sitting in the top corner of the home screen, where his weather widget used to be, was a small dark icon with two white letters.
MJ.
"Ah," said Jeb, from the phone speaker. "There you are. Much better. I was going to have a very boring afternoon otherwise."
Kerbin stared at it. "You're in my phone?"
"I'm wherever you've got a connection to the ship, lad. That little thing's the only device you've got that'll hold a link, so I've made myself at home. No network out here, mind. No calls, no internet, nothing. Just me." A pause. "Your photo gallery's a disgrace, by the way. Four hundred screenshots of rockets and nothing else."
"Don't look at my gallery."
"Too late."
Kerbin fished out the earbuds and stuck one in his ear. "Range?"
"Couple of tens of kilometers from the ship before it gets patchy. More if you're on high ground. I'll hear what you hear and see what the camera sees, if you point it at something." Jeb's voice was right inside his head now, close and quiet. "Better. Now nobody in town sees you talking to your hand."
Kerbin picked up the laptop and turned it over. Then the phone. Then the earbuds.
"Jeb. This stuff is like fifteen years ahead of anything here."
"Thirteen to nineteen, depending on the bit. Yes." Jeb's voice went a notch more serious. "Which is why none of it leaves your sight. Nobody sees the phone. Nobody sees the laptop. You don't pawn it, you don't sell it, you don't let someone borrow it to check their email. Someone in 2007 gets their hands on a phone like that, and it's not a phone anymore. It's a very interesting question someone will want answered."
Kerbin thought about the letter. Once it's out, it's out.
He put the laptop back in the bag, carefully, along with everything else. He kept the phone and earbuds. Then he took out his wallet again and counted what he already knew was there.
A loonie and two toonies. Five dollars. And a green polymer twenty he couldn't spend.
He turned the loonie over. 2023.
"Use the toonies first," Jeb said. "Smaller date print. If anyone squints at the loonie, say it's a novelty coin."
"You're a criminal mastermind."
"I'm a flight computer with a lot of time on my hands."
He picked up the empty water bottle, remembered the tank was dry, and put it back. He zipped up the backpack, slung it over one shoulder, and climbed down the ladder.
The wind hit him like a slap.
It was cold. Not Nevada cold, crisp and dry. This was wet cold, damp and gray, straight through the hoodie and into his bones. The air smelled like salt and moss and something sharp and green, like Christmas trees. The sky was low and heavy over the hills.
"I'll keep her sealed and quiet," Jeb said in his ear. "If anyone comes poking around, I'll handle it. Politely."
"Define politely."
"I won't shoot anyone, lad. Go on. Town's due east. I'll walk you in."
* * *
It was twelve kilometers of bog, rock, moss so thick his feet sank in to the ankle, and spruce trees that grew low and sideways, like the wind had been shoving them around for a hundred years. His shoes were soaked within ten minutes. His jeans were soaked to the knee within twenty.
Jeb talked him through it the whole way. Left around this pond. Not that way, it's a bog, you'll lose a shoe. Up over that rise. Mind the rocks. At one point Kerbin lost a shoe anyway, and Jeb said nothing for a very long, very deliberate three seconds while Kerbin fished it out of the mud.
"Not a word," Kerbin said.
"Wouldn't dream of it."
After an hour and a half, he found a gravel road. After two hours, the road came over a rise and there it was.
Main Brook.
A scatter of houses along the water, wooden siding painted bright red and yellow and blue against the gray sky. Woodsmoke drifting from chimneys. A long wharf with a few fishing boats tied up, and a guy in orange rain gear hosing down the deck of one of them. A pickup truck rattled past on the road, and the driver lifted two fingers off the wheel in a lazy wave. Kerbin waved back without thinking.
"Friendly," Jeb murmured.
"It's Newfoundland. Everyone waves."
Near the middle of town was a low building with a gas pump out front and a hand-painted sign. A general store. Kerbin tugged his hoodie sleeve down over the earbud and went in.
A bell over the door jingled. It was warm inside, almost too warm, and it smelled like coffee and bread and wood polish. Narrow aisles stacked with canned food, bread, chips, motor oil, fishing line, rubber boots, and a cooler full of pop. Behind the counter, a woman around sixty with reading glasses on a chain was doing a crossword. She looked up.
"Well now," she said. "You're not from around here."
"No, ma'am."
"Didn't think so. I knows everyone." She looked him up and down, his soaked shoes and wet jeans and the thin hoodie and the backpack, and her eyebrows went up. "Where'd you come from, dressed like that? You look like a drowned rat, my love."
"Careful," Jeb said quietly in his ear. "She's sharp, this one."
Kerbin opened his mouth.
He had five dollars in his pocket, one coin of which said 2023. He had no car, no address, no working phone number, no ID that wouldn't get him arrested, a backpack full of things that couldn't exist yet, and a nuclear-armed bomber parked on a hilltop twelve kilometers away. His stomach was still so empty it hurt.
The woman was waiting.
"I, uh," Kerbin said. "I've been camping. Hiking up through the interior. Thought I'd see the barrens before winter."
Her eyebrows went up a little further.
"Dressed like that?"
"I had a proper jacket. And a tent. And everything else." He scratched the back of his neck. "Crossing a river yesterday, I slipped. Pack went in. I grabbed this one," he hitched the school backpack on his shoulder, "but the big one went downstream with all my stuff in it. Food, money, gear. I've been walking since."
"Good," Jeb murmured. "Keep it simple. Don't add anything."
The woman studied him over her reading glasses for a long moment. Kerbin did his best to look like a guy who'd lost a backpack in a river, which wasn't hard, because he looked like a guy who'd lost a fight with a bog.
"Which river?" she asked.
Kerbin's brain went completely blank.
"Don't know the name," he said. "Big one. Fast. Rocks."
"Mm." She took her glasses off and let them drop on the chain. "Well. They're all big and fast and full of rocks this time of year, so I suppose that narrows it down." She closed her crossword. "You eaten?"
"Granola bar. This afternoon."
"Lord tunderin' Jesus," she said, and stood up. "Go on, then. Get what you need."
* * *
He went down the aisles with five dollars and an empty stomach, which was a dangerous combination. Everything looked good. Canned stew. Crackers. Cheese. A whole rack of chips. Little cakes in plastic wrappers.
"Bread," Jeb said in his ear. "Peanut butter. Calories per dollar, lad. Don't get clever."
He got a loaf of white bread and a jar of peanut butter and brought them to the counter. She rang them up on an old register that clunked.
"Six twenty-nine."
Kerbin's stomach dropped. He put the two toonies on the counter, slowly, then the loonie, face down.
"I've only got five," he said. "I can put the peanut butter back..."
She looked at the coins. She looked at him. Then she picked up the two toonies and slid the loonie back across the counter to him without looking at it.
"Leave it," she said. "You can owe me two twenty-nine." She slid the bread and peanut butter into a plastic bag. Then, after a second, she reached under the counter and added a can of beans and a sleeve of crackers. "And those, too. You can owe me for those as well."
"Ma'am, I can't..."
"You can, and you will, because I'm not having some young fella starve to death on my account. What's your name?"
"Kerbin."
"Kerbin," she repeated, like she was tasting it. "Like the curb?"
"Sort of. With an i-n."
"Kerbin what?"
"Just Kerbin."
She gave him another one of those long looks, the kind that said she'd heard a lot of stories in her life and was filing this one away for later. But she let it go.
"I'm Marg," she said. "Now. You owe me about nine dollars, and you've got no money, and I'm guessing no way to get any. So here's what's going to happen." She jerked her thumb toward the window, where the gray afternoon was getting grayer. "My husband Ches has three cords of wood sitting in the yard that needs splitting and stacking before the snow, and his back's no good anymore, and he's too stubborn to admit it. He'll pay ten dollars an hour, cash. You work off what you owe and keep the rest. That suit you?"
Kerbin blinked.
"It's a good offer," Jeb said quietly. "Take it."
"Yeah," Kerbin said. "Yes. Thank you. That suits me great."
"Good." Marg sat back down and picked up her crossword. "He'll be up at seven. Yellow house at the end of the road, by the wharf. Can't miss it." She glanced up at him over the paper. "And where are you sleeping tonight, now your tent's gone off down the river?"
Kerbin hesitated.
"There's a couch in our front room," Marg said. "And a woodstove. Ches snores, but you'll live."
"That's really kind," Kerbin said. "But I've got a spot. Old cabin, back off the road a bit. Roof leaks, but it's dry enough."
Marg's eyes narrowed just slightly. "Which cabin?"
"Don't know whose it is. Didn't look like anyone'd been there in a while."
"Hm." She went back to her crossword, but she didn't write anything. "Well. If it gets too cold, the front door's never locked. Seven o'clock."
"Seven o'clock," Kerbin agreed, and left before she could ask anything else.
* * *
He walked back up the gravel road with the plastic bag swinging from his hand and didn't let himself breathe until the last house was out of sight behind the trees.
"She doesn't believe a word of it," he said.
"Not a syllable," Jeb agreed. "But she's decided she likes you, so she's going to let it ride. For now."
"For now."
"Mind the 'for now', lad. That one's going to have questions."
The light was going fast. The sky had turned a dark slate color, and the wind was picking up off the water, carrying a fine, cold mist that wasn't quite rain. Kerbin pulled his hood up.
"Okay. I need somewhere close for the ship. Somewhere I can walk to from Ches's house in, like, twenty minutes. Not twelve kilometers of bog."
"Already looking." Jeb was quiet for a few seconds. "There's an old woods road off this one, about two kilometers ahead on your left. Logging track. Runs back a ways into the trees and ends at a gravel pit. Looks abandoned. Flat, long, solid, and the spruce around it are tall enough to hide most of her from the road."
"Most of her?"
"Her tails will poke up a bit. Nobody'll be looking for tails."
"Long enough to land?"
"Short enough to make it interesting."
Kerbin found the woods road twenty minutes later, two muddy tire ruts with grass growing down the middle, disappearing into the dark between the trees. He followed it back for what felt like forever, with Jeb counting down the distance, until the trees opened up and he was standing at the edge of a wide, flat bowl of packed gravel, scraped out of the hillside years ago and left to grow moss around the edges.
"This is it," Jeb said. "Stand over at the far edge. Well clear. I'm on my way."
"You're flying her without me?"
"I flew her this morning with you, and you contributed a nap. Stand clear, lad."
Kerbin went and stood with his back against a spruce at the far end of the pit, the bag of food clutched to his chest. It was almost full dark now. The mist was turning into proper drizzle.
He heard it before he saw it. A thin, rising electric whine somewhere off to the west, past the hills, getting louder. It didn't sound like a plane. It sounded like nothing he'd ever heard outside of a game.
Then a shadow slid across the clouds, low and huge and blacker than the sky, with no lights at all. It banked once, wide and slow, the wingtip pods turning against the gray. The whine dropped. The gear came down with a thump he felt in his chest.
She came in over the trees at the far end so low that the spruce tops bent in her wash, touched down on the gravel with a crunch that echoed off the hillside, and rolled toward him with every brake she had screaming. Gravel sprayed out from under her wheels. The nose came closer, and closer, and closer, and stopped about thirty meters from his tree.
The engines wound down. The pit went quiet except for the drizzle ticking on the hull.
"Told you," Jeb said in his ear. "Interesting."
Kerbin realized he'd squeezed the bread flat. "I hate you."
"You love me. Ramp's coming down."
* * *
Twenty minutes later, he was sitting at the fold-down table in the living quarters with the space heater running and his wet shoes upside down on the floor, eating his fourth peanut butter sandwich.
It was the best meal of his entire life. He was pretty sure about that.
The phone sat face up on the table beside him, the little MJ icon glowing. The rain was coming down properly now, drumming on the hull overhead.
"So," Jeb said. "Tomorrow, you split wood for Ches. Then?"
Kerbin chewed, swallowed, and thought about it.
"Then I make some money," he said. "Real money. Enough for food, warm clothes, boots that aren't full of bog. Then I figure out how to get materials, because the hangar's empty and I can't build anything with nothing." He paused. "And then I figure out what I'm doing about Stark."
"You've got time."
"A few months." Kerbin looked at the half-eaten sandwich in his hand. "It goes fast, though. Every time I've seen that movie, it goes fast."
Jeb didn't answer right away. Outside, the wind pushed against the bomber, and she creaked a little on her gear, settling into the gravel like she meant to stay.
"Eat your sandwich, lad," Jeb said finally. "Then sleep. Seven o'clock comes early. Big day tomorrow."
Kerbin ate his sandwich.
Somewhere down the hill, in a little town at the edge of the sea, a woman named Marg was looking out her kitchen window at the dark, wondering what that strange whining sound had been, and why it had stopped.
* * *
End of Chapter 1