Sixteen missions, but none remotely like this one.
THE USAF TRANSPORT HAD ALREADY BEEN WARMING UP AT THE BASE when they bounded up the stairs and came on board. There was only one other passenger, and Trini took the seat directly opposite her. Roberto sat across the aisle, in a backward seat also facing the bright-eyed young woman in well-worn safari gear.
Trini held a hand out to her and the young woman took it. “Lieutenant Colonel Trini Romano.”
“Dr. Hero Martins.”
Trini just looked at her, nodding and popping in a piece of Nicorette, taking Hero’s measure, unafraid to hold silent eye contact while she sized her up. It was disconcerting. Roberto just gave Hero a half salute; he never enjoyed playing the whole I-see-right-through-you game.
“Major Roberto Diaz.”
“Nice to meet you, Major,” Hero said.
“What kind of doctor are you?” Roberto asked.
“Microbiologist. University of Chicago. I specialize in epidemiological surveillance.”
Trini was still looking at her. “That your real name? Hero?”
Hero hid her sigh. It was a question with which she was not unfamiliar after thirty-four years. “Yes, that’s my real name.”
“Hero like Superman or Hero like in Greek mythology?” Roberto asked.
She turned her gaze to Roberto. That was a question she didn’t hear nearly as much.
“The latter. My mother was a classics professor. You know the story?”
Roberto looked up, squinting his left eye and staring into the space just above and to the right of his head, the way he did when he was trying to pull an obscure fact out of his brain’s nether regions. He found the nugget of information and dragged it up out of the swamp.
“She lived in a tower on a river?”
Hero nodded. “The Hellespont.”
“Somebody was in love with her.”
“Leander. Every night he’d swim the river to the tower and make love to her. Hero would light a lamp in the tower so he could see his way to the shore.”
“But he drowned anyway, right?”
Trini turned and stared at Roberto, her displeasure plain. Roberto was good-looking to an irritating degree. The son of a Mexican father and a California blonde mother, he radiated good health and had a head of hair that would last forever. He also had a smart and funny wife named Annie, whom Trini actually found tolerable, which was saying something. Yet he’d been on this plane all of thirty seconds and was clearly trying to charm this woman. Trini had never picked her partner for a jerk before and hoped he wouldn’t turn out to be one now. She watched him, chewing her gum like she was mad at it.
But Hero was engaged. She kept on talking to Roberto, ignoring Trini.
“Aphrodite became jealous of their love. One night she blew out Hero’s light, and Leander was lost. When she saw he had drowned, Hero threw herself out of the tower to her death.”
Roberto took a moment and thought about that. “What exactly is the moral there? Try to meet somebody on your side of the river?”
Hero smiled and shrugged. “Don’t piss off the gods, I guess.”
Trini, weary of their banter, glanced back at the pilots and spun a finger in the air. The engines immediately whined, and the plane started to move down the runway with a jerk. Subject changed.
Hero looked around, concerned. “Wait, we’re going? Where is the rest of your team?”
“You’re looking at us,” Trini said.
“Are you—I mean, are you sure? This might not be something we can handle on our own.”
Roberto conveyed Trini’s confidence, but without the edge. “Why don’t you tell us what it is,” he said to Hero, “and we’ll let you know if we think we can handle it.”
“They told you nothing?” she asked.
“They told us we’re going to Australia,” Trini said, “and that you’d know the rest.”
Hero turned and looked out the window, watching as the plane left the earth. No turning back now. She shook her head. “I will never understand the army.”
“Me neither,” Roberto said. “We’re in the air force. Seconded to the Defense Nuclear Agency.”
“This isn’t nuclear.”
Trini frowned. “They sent you, so I assume they suspect a bioweapon?”
“No.”
“Then what is it?”
Hero thought about that for a second. “Good question.” She opened the file on the table in front of her and started talking.
Six hours later, she stopped.
WHAT ROBERTO KNEW ABOUT WESTERN AUSTRALIA COULD FIT INTO A very small book. More of a flyer, really: one page and with large type. Hero told them they were going to a remote township called Kiwirrkurra Community, in the middle of the Gibson Desert, about 1,200 kilometers east of Port Hedland. It had been established a decade earlier as a Pintupi outstation, part of the Australian government’s ongoing attempts to allow and encourage Aboriginal groups to move back to their traditional ancestral lands. They’d been mistreated and cleared out of those same territories for decades, most recently in the 1960s as a result of the Blue Streak missile tests. You can’t very well be living on land that we want to blow up. It’s unhealthy.
But by the midseventies the tests were over, political sensitivities were on the rise, and so the last of the Pintupi had been trucked back to Kiwirrkurra, which wasn’t even the middle of nowhere, but more like a few hundred miles outside the very outer rim of nowhere. But there they lived, all twenty-six Pintupi, as peaceful and happy as human beings can be in a stifling desert without power, telephone lines, or any connection to modern society. They rather liked being cut off, in fact, and the elders in particular were pleased with their return to their ancestral lands.
And then the sky fell.
Not all of it, Hero explained. Just a chunk.
“What was it?” Roberto asked. He’d been holding eye contact with her throughout the brief history so far, and don’t think for a second Trini didn’t notice. In fact, she was glaring at Roberto, as if psychically willing him to stop.
“Skylab.”
Now Trini turned her head and looked at Hero. “This was in ’79?”
“Yes.”
“I thought that fell into the Indian Ocean.”
Hero nodded. “Most of it did. The few pieces that hit land fell just outside a town called Esperance, also in Western Australia.”
“Close to Kiwirrkurra?” Roberto asked.
“Nothing is close to Kiwirrkurra. Esperance is about two thousand kilometers away and has ten thousand residents. It’s a metropolis by comparison.”
“What happened to the pieces that fell in Esperance?”
Hero turned to the next section of her notes. The pieces that fell in Esperance had been, rather enterprisingly, scooped up by the locals and put in the town’s museum—formerly a dance hall, but quickly converted to the Esperance Municipal Museum & Skylab Observatorium. Admission was four dollars, and for that you could see the largest oxygen tank from the orbiter, the space station’s storage freezer for food and other items, some nitrogen spheres used by its attitude control thrusters, and a piece of the hatch the astronauts would have crawled