Captain Future xx - The Death of Captain Future (October 1995) by Allen Steele Page B

bold swath across the top of each cover, a title...
    CAPTAIN FUTURE
    Man Of Tomorrow
    At that moment, my reverie was broken by a harsh voice coming from the ceiling:
    "Furland! Where are you?"
    “In the wardroom, Captain.” I pinched off the lip of the squeezebulb and sealed it with a catheter, then clipped it to my belt. “Just grabbing some coffee. I'll be up there in a minute.”
    "You got sixty seconds to find your duty station or I'll dock your pay for your last shift! Now hustle your lazy butt up here!"
    “Coming right now...” I walked out of the wardroom, heading up the corridor toward the shaft. “Toad,” I whispered under my breath when I was through the hatch and out of earshot from the ship's comnet. Who's calling who lazy?
    Captain Future, Man of Tomorrow. God help us if that were true.
* * * *

Ten minutes later a small ship shaped like an elongated tear-drop rose from an underground hangar on the lunar surface. It was the Comet , super-swift craft of the Futuremen, known far and wide through the System as the swiftest ship in space.
— Hamilton; Calling Captain Future (1940)
    My name's Rohr Furland. For better or worse, I'm a spacer, just like my father and his mother before him.
    Call it family tradition. Grandma was one of the original beamjacks who helped build the first powersat in Earth orbit before she immigrated to the Moon, where she conceived my dad as the result of one-night stand with some nameless moondog who was killed in a blowout only two days later. Dad grew up as an unwanted child in Descartes Station; he ran away at eighteen and stowed away aboard a Skycorp freighter to Earth, where he lived like a stray dog in Memphis before he got homesick and signed up with a Russian company looking for native-born selenians. Dad got home in time to see Grandma through her last years, fight in the Moon War on the side of the Pax Astra and, not incidentally, meet my mother, who was a geologist at Tycho Station.
    I was born in the luxury of a two-room apartment beneath Tycho on the first anniversary of the Pax's independence. I'm told that my dad celebrated my arrival by getting drunk on cheap luna wine and balling the midwife who had delivered me. It's remarkable that my parents stayed together long enough for me to graduate from suit camp. Mom went back to Earth while Dad and I stayed on the Moon to receive the benefits of full citizenship in the Pax: Class A oxygen cards, good for air even if we were unemployed and dead broke. Which was quite often, in Dad's case.
    All of which makes me a mutt, a true son of a bastard, suckled on air bottles and moonwalking before I was out of my diapers. On my sixteenth birthday, I was given my union card and told to get a job; two weeks before my eighteenth birthday, the LEO shuttle which had just hired me as a cargo handler touched down on a landing strip in Galveston, and with the aid of an exoskeleton I walked for the first time on Earth. I spent one week there, long enough for me to break my right arm by falling on a Dallas sidewalk, lose my virginity to an El Paso whore, and get one hell of a case of agoraphobia from all that wide-open Texas landscape. Fuck the cradle of humanity and the horse it rode in on; I caught the next boat back to the Moon and turned eighteen with a birthday cake that had no candles.
    Twelve years later, I had handled almost every union job someone with my qualifications could hold—dock slob, cargo grunt, navigator, life support chief, even a couple of second-mate assignments—on more vessels than I could count, ranging from orbital tugs and lunar freighters to passenger shuttles and Apollo-class ore haulers. None of these gigs had ever lasted much longer than a year; in order to guarantee equal opportunity for all its members, the union shifted people from ship to ship, allowing only captains and first-mates to remain with their vessels for longer than eighteen months. It was a hell of a system; by the time you became accustomed