Chapter 97 Finally Earth

Chapter 97 Finally Earth
Kellan's ship ran quietly between the Moon and Earth. I sat in the crew mess, the Moon already small behind us and Earth not yet large enough ahead.

Kellan came in after an hour and poured himself something from the counter and sat across from me.

He looked at me for a moment.

"So you're the Vaelthor heir," he said.
"Apparently."
"Hm." He drank. "You don't look like one."
"What does one look like?"
"I don't know. More impressive maybe…" He tilted his head slightly. "You're a pretty boy. And for someone who owns two lunar nations, maybe not the best thing."
"Thank you, Kellan."
"I'm serious. I expected something more. A more serious face at least."
"My face is fine."
"It's alright," he said. "For a pretty boy."

I looked at him across the table.

"Are you going to do this the whole way to Earth," I said.
"Probably," he said. "It passes the time."

I wasn’t liking that one bit!

"Your grandfather built something real," Kellan said, without the humor from before. "The Vaelthor family. What they put into the colony's foundation. The legal architecture." He looked at his cup. "Men of Moon has been operating in violation of colonial law since the beginning. They knew it. They eliminated the people who could prove it." He looked up. "You can prove it now."
"Yeah I know. That’s why I’m here."
"That's worth more than killing three people on Earth."

"I intend to do both," I said.
He considered that. "Fair enough."

The eye-ring notification came through six hours into the transit, a channel I didn't recognize opening with an authentication code that I knew because Aldric's hologram had given it to me during our second conversation in the mansion entrance hall, two days ago when I'd gone downstairs alone at two in the morning unable to sleep and stood in front of the projection for an hour asking questions.

I entered the code. A single message resolved on the lens.

Coordinates attached. Someone will be waiting when you land. Present the watch and they will know you.

Below the text, a set of coordinates that meant nothing to me without an Earth map to place them against. I pulled up the navigation system on the ship's passenger terminal and entered the coordinates.

They resolved to a location on Earth's western continent, a private facility outside a city, something that appeared on the map as an unremarkable piece of land with no commercial or residential designation.

I went to find Kellan on the bridge.

He was at the main display when I came in, Earth filling the forward viewport through the screen now, large enough to see the cloud systems moving across its surface.

I showed him the coordinates. He looked at them for a moment.

"That's where I'm putting you down then," he said.

I looked at him.

"Those coordinates came up in our approach planning this morning," he said. "Best unmonitored landing zone within range of the Men of Moon primary facilities. I picked it three hours ago." He handed the tablet back to me. "Your grandfather planned well."

We came around to the western approach an hour later, dropping below the standard transit corridors, the ship running quiet.

Earth filled the viewport completely and the curve of it was enormous. I stood at the forward viewport and looked at it.

Kellan appeared beside me.

"We're putting you in a shuttle from here," he said. "Small enough to come in under their monitoring systems on the western approach. Automated landing, I'll program the coordinates, you just need to stay in the seat and not touch anything."
"I can fly a shuttle."
"I know you can. That's why I'm telling you not to touch anything." He handed me a small device. "Emergency signal. If something goes wrong before your people reach you, activate it and I'll know."

I took it.

"Kellan," I said.
He waited.
"Why are you helping me with this? I thought you hated us."

He looked at the planet in the viewport for a moment.

"Daniel Halverson has been a problem for this system for a long time," he said. "And Adrian Rothmere has been a worse one for longer." He looked at me. "I run supply operations to keep people alive on the Moon. Men of Moon has been intercepting those supplies, taxing them, redirecting them, and using the scarcity they create to maintain control for twenty years." He paused. "This is not charity, Da Vinci. This is business."

"Understood," I said.
"Don't get yourself killed," he said. "I went to considerable trouble getting you here."
"Not until those fuckers pay for what they did," I said.

The shuttle was small enough that sitting in it felt like wearing it rather than riding in it, the cockpit designed for one person, the viewport filling almost entirely with Earth's atmosphere as the automated system began the descent sequence.

Entry hit harder than I expected, the shuttle shaking in the upper atmosphere with a violence that the Moon's dome landings never produced, the hull heating at the edges visible through the viewport as a faint orange glow that the system's calm automated voice assured me was within acceptable parameters.

Below the clouds, the western continent resolved out of the grey, land and roads and the dark shapes of cities visible in the distance, none of it the Moon, none of it artificial, all of it heavy and real and pulling at me with a gravity I'd been away from long enough to feel as something new. Even the Moon’s strongest pulls weren’t as hard as this.

The coordinates drew the shuttle east of the city, away from the infrastructure, toward an open stretch of land that looked empty from above and probably looked the same from the ground.

The descent slowed. The landing struts deployed.

Through the viewport I could see the ground coming up, grass moving in the shuttle's landing wake. Then the shuttle touched down.

A moment later I took a breath deep breath and opened the shuttle door and stepped out onto Earth.