Ohio

9 - The Enemy

Since you've been gone

All that's left is a band of gold

All that's left of the dream I hold

is a band of gold.

And the dream of what love could be

If you are still here with me

– Freda Payne (Band of Gold)

=/\=

"Okay, time to fire the pulse shot," Levi said. He set the controls and aimed for the heart of the Halkan star.

"Cloak first, Levi," Carmen reminded him.

"Ah, yeah," he fiddled a bit with the controls. "All set, now for the shot."

He fired a bit of dark matter, and a gap opened up that could only be seen on the far side of the Halkan star, away from any curious onlookers on any nearby planetary surfaces. He fired again, and the gap opened up some more. It could be seen through, to a darker space on the other side.

"How long will it be until we can go through?" Marisol asked.

"Only a few minutes," Levi replied.

=/\=

"And here we are," Kevin said, "2026, our side of the pond."

"There are a lotta man-made satellites," Tom pointed out.

"Yeah. They had had a few accidents in their space program, and the International Space Station proved to be too expensive to maintain properly, so they started a program of only sendin' up man-made stuff. So right now they've got orbiters around not just the Earth, but the other seven planets as well, plus Ceres and the bigger plutoids, like Pluto and Eris."

"It seems like a lotta junk."

"It's state of the art for the time," Kevin said, "But it's outta control. Once World War Three gets crankin', all maintenance stops, and the lil buggers start crashing down. All over the Solar System, boom boom, down they go. Once Warp Drive is invented, our ancestors figgered out that was a bad idea, and came up with the model we even use now. You know – one satellite to a customer – and countries cooperate and just build and send up the thing, to Mars or Saturn or wherever. This makes it fiscally possible to get something flying around all of the larger moons as well. They figured, if we could potentially live on it, it needed to have a satellite."

"For communications?" Tom asked.

"Defense, too. This was also, this cooperation, it's the start of what eventually becomes the United Earth Government."

"But right now we're going to the dissolution?"

"Well, it's the start of it," Kevin said, "This is the big breakup, before the even bigger unification. Don't forget to look mean."

=/\=

"Rounding 2015," Sheilagh read of the Wells's instrument panel.

"Good. The Wells isn't the fastest ship. I think the Audrey II will be," Rick said.

"It seems fast enough."

"It definitely works well for our purposes. Let's do the birth control shots, before we forget them," he went back to the replicator and had it create two birth control shots – one for him, one for her, "Can you shoot yourself?"

"Yeah, I just hate doing that."

"Me, too," he admitted, "Bottoms up," he injected himself, and she did the same. Ready.