I glanced once more at Chrissy. She blew me a kiss, and my heart ached. Well, the ache was lower. The MPs flanked me, and three sets of clattering combat boots echoed as we wound down marble stairs, across Aaron Grodt’s entry hall, and to their butt-ugly, government-issue Chyota.

The door was open, and Metzger sat in the backseat, head back, eyes closed. MP Number One put a hand on my head as he tucked me in beside Metzger.

“You, too? Why?” I asked.

Metzger rolled his head my way and opened one eye. “I get called back to alert every time they spot incoming. I don’t know why they want you.”

“I thought it was for underage drinking.” The words sounded silly as they left my mouth.

Metzger closed his open eye. “Rest. Whatever it is will be here too soon.”

Like the end of my childhood.

The battery sedan retraced Metzger’s route from Canaveral, but slower, so I dozed, numb from champagne, my mind bubbling with questions.

I thought about Walter and Mom and a ship bound for Jupiter without me.

At some point I realized how much I had changed. The loss of a gorgeous woman wearing no pants scarcely bothered me.

A few months ago I would have stewed for hours about losing a quickie.

I wished Crissy and not Metzger was snoring next to me, but all I really cared about was getting a berth on that Jupiter ship, somehow.

The car crawled through Canaveral’s main gate and floodlights woke me. The notion that expensive wine leaves no hangover is a he as big as “Meals Ready to Eat.” I moaned.

The MPs stopped the car on a weedy, cracked-pavement apron in front of a windowless last-century building that stretched beyond the floodlights that lit its door.

Metzger jumped out, and I followed.

The Chyota whirred away as one MP slammed its door. I winced at the bang and stared at the building. “What’s this?”

Metzger led me inside and into a room filled with banks of old-fashioned instrument consoles at which rows of shirt-sleeved men sat. Light came from the image on a screen covering the far wall. The men muttered into headset microphones straight out of a history holo.

“Captain Metzger! Jason!”

The voice I knew. I turned and saw the wrinkled geek Intelligence captain from Pittsburgh, Howard Hibble.

Hibble shook our hands, then led us into a glassed-in conference room. He sat us at a table, sat himself, and folded his hands in front of him. “We would have found you eventually, of course.” He grinned at me. “But I didn’t expect you close by, Jason.”

A scrubs-clad medic stepped into the room carrying a vitals ‘puter. Hibble nodded toward me. The medic wrapped my biceps with a blood-pressure cuff hooked to his little assistant and read its display. “Low-normal,” he muttered.

I looked at Hibble. “I’m fine.” Were they drug-testing?

The medic poked a temp-infection probe in my ear and grunted at the readout

While the medic worked my knee joints, I looked back and forth at Metzger, then at Hibble. “What’s with this museum?”

Metzger smirked. “Museum?”

I pointed through the glass conference-room panel at the wall screen. It showed a flat video of a NASA rocket. The old crate stood gleaming white in floodlights, liquid-oxygen clouds boiling from its base. I used to collect spaceflight trading holos, mostly to get the gum. “That’s a Saturn booster.” I squinted at the nose. “With an Apollo module. Three hundred sixty feet tall. It launched manned missions to the moon in the 1960s.” There was a certain sadness to the truth that the seventy-year-old Apollo program marked high tide for manned space exploration. I pointed. “Which mission was this?”

“That’s a live image.”

“You mean it was live when they videoed it.”

Metzger broke in. “The old jigs and assembly equipment still existed, Jason. The frame and engines were rebuilt pretty much like the old design, with antique materials. But with updated computers, one pilot can fly it.”

I looked closer at the vehicles crawling antlike around the Saturn’s base. Electrovans. The first Electro hit pavement in 2032. My jaw dropped. We really had rebuilt an Apollo rocket! Just like we had demothballed Indiantown Gap and C-rations and the space shuttles Metzger and the other Rocket Jocks flew to intercept Projectiles.

I realized then how desperate the human race was, and my heart sank.

A century ago, in 1939, Polish horse cavalry attacked German tanks with lances. In the Insurrection of 2020, Tibetan rebels threw rocks at Chinese helicopter gunships.

Since the twenty-first century began, humanity had whipped AIDS, nurtured human rights, and back-burnered antimatter engines and death rays. Those had been dandy priorities. But they left us reduced to throwing a 360-foot-tall rock at our enemy.

Then it hit me. Humans had big rocks. For the first time, I was proud of us for inventing H-bombs. The Ganymede Expeditionary Force was a diversionary hoax. Why send Infantry into space when we could plaster the enemy with nuclear weapons?

Relief, hope, and a little disappointment, because Infantry wasn’t going to lead the way after all, flooded me.

I smiled at Hibble. “I get it That Saturn’s going to carry a nuke big enough to crack Ganymede like a walnut!”

Hibble frowned. “I can understand why you’d think that. We probably could adapt a Saturn to launch an interplanetary payload. Logical enough mistake.”

Mistake?

Metzger said, “The first nuclear warhead we fired to knock a Projectile off course didn’t detonate. We thought it was a dud. Nobody’s actually tested nukes since the late 1900s.”

Hibble said, “The next four didn’t explode, either. We tried conventional warheads. They worked. The enemy seems to be able to neutralize nuclear weapons. Our best guess is they permeate space with a subatomic particle that slows down neutrons. You can visualize how that would impede a chain reaction, of course.”

“Of course.” I had no earthly clue. Metzger, Hibble, and Einstein knew what that meant, but not me. Yet when I looked in their eyes I knew it was true. Humanity was screwed.

Hopelessness dripped through me as I realized that for some reason those MPs had dragged Metzger and me here like North America’s Most Wanted.

I pointed again at the oversized antique fueling up on the wall screen. “So why us? Why the rocket ship?”

Hibble looked up at the medic, who had ran out of body parts to abuse. The medic wrapped wires around his machine as he walked out. “He’s good to go, Captain Hibble.”

“Go where?” I asked.

Howard waited until the door closed behind the medic, then unlocked a drawer in the table and pulled out a paper book. Actually, it was bigger than the books I had read in the day room, the dimensions of an old laptop computer, or more accurately, a stack of them.

Yellow letters across its top read top secret. Howard let it thud on the tabletop, granted, then laid his palm over the letters. “This notebook details every artifact we’ve recovered from Projectile detonation sites worldwide. Learning what we’re fighting might turn the war. This book doesn’t tell us enough. We’ve mostly recovered cinders the size of rutabagas.”

I’d never seen a rutabaga, but I gathered it wasn’t very big. I shook my head. “So? Why me?”

Howard batoned an unlit cigarette with bony, yellowed fingers. “What science can’t explain, it calls luck or coincidence. Historically, certain humans have displayed a knack for attracting alien contact. I never had the knack. But in Pittsburgh you beelined to the single most significant alien artifact ever found. I don’t understand why that happened. I expect you don’t know either. But I flagged your records in our database. You’re attached temporary duty to my platoon for the next two weeks.”

Me an Intel weenie? Still, my chest swelled. I was the Chosen One. But chosen for what?