Hell on Earth 1
As we hit the roof of Deimos, I looked up.

The pressure dome was cracked. Of course. That made sense, the way things had been going. Next thing you knew, thousand-year-old Martians would come along and wink us out of existence.

Fly Taggart stared at the crack, and his eyes bugged out like a frog. I wish he knew a bit more physics; if I have one complaint about Fly, it’s that he doesn’t hold with higher education. The crack was small, and I could see it wasn’t going to leak all the air out of the dome in the next few minutes. Days, more like; days, or even weeks. It’s a big facility.

Then I looked past the crack and saw what that huge Marine corporal was really staring at: we weren’t orbiting Mars anymore!

The entire moon of Deimos had just taken a whirlwind tour of the solar system. I swallowed hard; we were staring at Earth.

“I . . . guess we know their invasion plans now,” I said, feeling the blood rush to my face.

Fly plucked at his uniform—Lieutenant Weems’s uniform, except he’d pulled off the butter bars—like it had suddenly started itching. “Well at least we stopped them,” he said.

“Look again, Fly.” The globe was flecked with bright pinpoints of light, flares of explosives millions of times more powerful, more hellish, than any we had ducked or lobbed back here on Deimos. I pointed to the obvious nuclear exchange blanketing our home, dumping like a few billion tons of radiation, fallout, and sheer explosive muscle on—on everyone we had ever known. “Looks like they’ve already invaded.”

Fly suddenly latched onto my arm with a vise grip of raging emotion. I tried to pry his steel hands loose, while he hollered in my ear. “It’s not over, Arlene!” PFC Arlene Sanders, United States Marine Corps: that’s me. “We’ve already proven who’s tougher. We won’t let it end like this!”

Right. Me and Fly and nothing but weapons, ammo, and a hand with some fingers on it. We were going to jump from LEO down to the surface of the Earth. Or maybe we’d drive the planetoid down and land it at Point Mugu. I guess you couldn’t consider Deimos strictly a moon anymore, since it appeared to be mobile.

We were stuck a mere four hundred klicks from where we wanted to be: but that was four hundred kilometers straight up. What’s more, we were flying around the Earth at something better than ten kilometers per second—not only would we have to jump down, we’d better do one hell of a big foot-drag to kill that orbital velocity.

And after that we’d solve Fermat’s Last Theorem, simplify the tax code, and cure world hunger.

That last one was easy enough to fix. The problem wasn’t that there wasn’t enough food; it was just in the wrong places and didn’t last long enough. I once heard an old duffer say all we really needed was food irradiation, Seal-a-Meals, and a bunch of rocket mail tubes to plant the food in the center of the famine du jour.

Rocket mail tubes . . .

“Fly,” I shrieked, jumping up and down. “I know how to do it!”

“Do what, damn it?”

Could we do it? I did some fast, rule-of-thumb calculations: our mass versus that of a typical “care package” from Mars, the sort they sent up to the grunts like me serving on Deimos; the Earth’s gravitational pull compared to that of Mars—it’s harder to fly up and down off the Earth’s surface than the Martian surface. Maybe . . . no, it would work!

Well, maybe.

“I know how to get us across to Earth, Fly. Did you know there’s a maintenance shed for unmanned shipping rockets on this dump of a moon?”

“No,” he said suspiciously.

Of course he didn’t. He was never stationed here, like I’d been. It was a garage where the motor-pool sergeant kept all the mail tubes, the shipping rockets. I had no idea why they were called “mail tubes”; we send our mail electronically, as the universe intended.

“A one-way ticket to Earth,” I summed up, trying to penetrate that thick skull of his. “If we can find any kind of ship, we go home and kick some zombie ass. Again.”

“All over again,” he breathed, catching my drift at last. “Well, hell, we’re professionals at this now!”

We continued looking at the familiar blue-green sphere of Earth, as the unfamiliar white spots appeared and disappeared all over the globe. An old piece of advice floated up from deep in my memory: DON’T LOOK DOWN! We gazed upon white clouds so beautiful that they reminded me of what we’d been fighting to save.

Were we too late? Part of me hoped so, a part that just wanted to sit down and rest.

We’d fought those damned, ugly monsters until we were too tired to fight—and now it was looking like we had to do it all over again.

All at once I noticed a sprinkling of the flares all over California, my home state. “Oh, God, Fly,” I said, my stomach contracting.

“Yeah. Terrible.” Jesus, couldn’t my best bud think of anything stronger to say when Armageddon came to your hometown?

I shook my head. “You don’t understand. That’s not what I meant. I mean I don’t feel anything.” I trembled as I spoke.

Fly put his arm around me; well, that was more like it. “It’s all right,” he mumbled. “It’s not what you think. There’s nothing wrong with you. After what you’ve been through, you’re just numb. Your brain is tired.”

I let my head rest on his shoulder. “So my mind is coming loose. What about body and soul?”

Right then and there I decided we needed a new word to describe the state after you’ve reached exhaustion but had to keep going on automatic pilot.

Wherever that state was, Fly and I had been there a long, long time.