Like a Fox on the Run

ago it was: Man, in all his destructive and corruptive ways, wasn’t around then to impact it like he’d now been doing since the Industrial Age.
With the destruction of Cleveland in the Lunar Uprisings, humankind stood at the edge of the abyss. During those three weeks of temporary insanity, man finally saw what he was capable of and took a step back. Tiger hoped it had not been too late.
That big brown scar on the shore of a now-poisoned Lake Erie always gnawed at his gut whenever he had to look at it from any point during re-entry orbit. It was a constant reminder of how quickly things could get out of hand when a government no longer listened to the people they govern. When colonists from Lunas Three and Five took exception to the newly-founded Space Authority’s heavy-handed rule and declared their autonomy, it didn’t take long for angry words, threats, and accusations to quickly escalate into the first space war in the history of Sol. The Authority took the rebels lightly. It was a fatal mistake. It was to be a nasty, savage, little scrap. When it was over, hundreds of thousands of people were dead on Earth and the Moon, with almost ninety-nine percent of them killed in two atomic blasts. Two cities, one on Earth and one on its lone satellite, were completely obliterated. He felt that same sick feeling in the pit of his gut every time he thought about the many friends he now counted among the dead. Way too many! Most of them were vaporized, with no trace remaining that they ever even existed. save for the moon’s first man-made crater. Some had died fighting. Some had simply died because they had been trapped, with no way out. Trapped under a polyglass and hybristeel dome that had once offered so much promise, only to become an inescapable tomb when that missile roared out of the blackness of space. Many had been original settlers … settlers he’d ferried to their new home back in the early days of colonization. Ferried to their eventual deaths.
As he’d gotten older, he’d grown more and more partial to night landings. At night, you didn’t see man’s destructiveness, his cruelty, his callousness to his fellow man and to nature. You just simply saw the pretty lights below. The twinkling of the cities spread out below your ship in an electric panorama, colorful and misleading. They were a deception, he knew. They distracted one from all the pollution, crime, and filth beneath them, but that was all right with him. These days, more and more, he found himself in frequent need of distraction.
The Werner von Braun Spaceport was the shiny, new show palace of Huntsville’s status as the trendy, modern space boomtown. Only recently opened, and set on the banks of the lazy Tennessee River, it lay a few miles west of the old Redstone Spaceport, located on the former Arsenal grounds. Twice the size of Redstone, it could also handle twice the traffic. It was a modern marvel, a complex of domed hybristeel terminals with sparkling polyglass arched facades. The control tower spiraled into the sky, looking as if someone had twisted two great columns of magnicrete around each other and then topped it with some kind of glass flying saucer. Everything was aesthetic and abstract. Rings of whitewashed magnicrete launch pads circled each terminal, gleaming like pearl necklaces in the afternoon sun. Super-Pave runways, as smooth as the surface of a frozen country pond in early February, crisscrossed the landscape. Still, with ships and rockets of all types dotting the tarmac, it looked more like a suburban shopping mall than it did an uber-modern spaceport. In fact, it even had a shopping complex located on the grounds, as well as dozens of well-known franchise restaurants.
Set amidst the cotton fields and stands of oak and hickory of rural Madison County, it was nothing to see a farmer plowing away on his green and yellow Quadra Tract-R, while a rocket roared skywards in the background. White-tailed deer frolicked underneath the raised track of the Mag-Lev rail system that shuttled passengers and workers from the city to the airport at 250 mph. The whole modern she-bang just seemed to have sprouted up like bamboo out here by the river. For Tiger, it was somewhat fitting for the home of the Southern spacer. He was a different breed, always reaching for new horizons, new frontiers, yet firmly rooted in heritage, tradition and pride.
Granny’s Jesus! Again, with that romantic bullshit? Where does that stuff come from? You sound like one of the Cap’n’s recruiting flyers back in the day! Well … guess it does sound better than saying you were just a good ol’ boy interplanetary trucker. Hell, NASA didn’t even think enough of us to call us astronauts. Sorry bastards! Guess we didn’t have the “right stuff” … whatever that was. Called us Spacefarers … Spacers, for short. Treated us like plumbers … or pizza delivery guys. Always wanted us to know where we stood in the big scheme of things, I reckon.
As Jenny slowed herself for her final pad approach into Von Braun, Tiger felt a slight smile slip across his face. Times like this, he always thought of his father. The Old Man was old school Southern. He didn’t take charity, no siree, bub. But he’d give you the shirt off his back if you needed it. He believed a man made his own way in life. There was no shame in working for a living or getting your hands dirty. A real man did what he had to when he had a family to feed and bills to pay. Whatever it took. He would always scoff at Tiger’s perceived slights from NASA and their cronies.
“Who gives a damn what they think as long as they’re paying you while they’re thinking it?” the elder Thomas would scoff.
Fondly, Tiger remembered the tears