Blake Zarett will be the first human to meet an alien. The year will be 2081, on the Moon, and the future of humanity will change that day.

But on a day in 2074 he stands before a municipal court judge in Columbus, Ohio, charged with disturbing the peace. A rowdy junior-college student, a troublemaker, Blake thought it was just a bar fight. No big deal, nobody got hurt much.

“Mr. Zarett,” the judge says. “I believe we have met before.”

The stern man behind the high wooden bench looks middle-aged, pale, and gaunt. His hairpiece is slightly askew. Blake suppresses a grin.

His court-appointed lawyer nudges him. “Answer the judge,” she says. She is a young woman in a dark suit, slim and attractive. Her name is Alice something.

“Yes, sir,” Blake manages. He’s hungover after his night in jail, with a headache, dry mouth, foul breath. He smells from the dried beer on his clothes, and from his own dried sweat.

“You were charged with drunk driving six months ago, which we reduced to reckless driving. Today you are charged with disturbing the peace, Mr. Zarett. Do you understand that charge?”

Blake glances at Alice, who nods. “Yes, sir,” he says.

He spoke only briefly with Alice before the hearing. “The prosecutor is giving you a break,” she told him then. “He could have charged you with assault.”

“Assault,” he said, still groggy from being awakened in a cell, stiff and sore from the hard bunk, covered in bruises from the fight. “That asshole hit me first. How come they didn’t throw him in here!”

“Because that asshole has friends who told the police you started it. And that asshole is the one who ended up in the ER with a broken jaw.”

Blake chuckled. “Yeah, well, he fuckin’ deserved it. He said—”

“Mr. Zarett,” she interrupted him. “You’re about to go before the judge, who’s going to decide your fate.”

“Yes, ma’am.” She was pretty, and that she was a few years older only made her more appealing. He was tired of the silly junior-college girls. Should he ask her out? No, she’d never date a loser like him.

She said, “You would be wise not to laugh or curse or make any sort of excuse to this man. You need to stand up straight and answer him with ‘sir’ when he speaks to you.”

The crooked-hairpiece judge offers him three months’ jail time and a criminal record, or military enlistment and no record.

Blake grew up fatherless, with a mother who drank, wasn’t around much, and brought home random “boyfriends” who, at best, ignored him. His high-school baseball coach tried to help. Blake played a good third base—fast, tough, and smart. He could bat. A couple major-league scouts talked to him; the Cleveland scout even offered him training camp and a minor-league try-out. But Blake never showed up. At the junior college they had a team, but he missed that try-out too.

He’s a loser, and he knows it, except with girls. The college girls don’t think he’s a loser. Lean and athletic, rugged good looks, unruly black hair, and a little wild; you never know what he’ll do next.

Meanwhile the world around him is in chaos. Hints of it reach his awareness: headlines of disasters far away, coastal cities drowning, drought, starvation, terrorist bombings, war. He catches glimpses on TV when he browses for sports or movies: devastating storms, vast refugee camps. But it’s all easy to ignore; someone must be taking care of those things, right?

“The military is not a bad option, Blake,” Alice says to him before the judge. “You’re going to have to straighten out your life sometime. This might be the time.”

He looks at her. The military, right now? Drop college? Straighten out his life? He’s never given it much thought, or any thought, till now. He’s barely passing his classes anyway. He was only here to get away from home and to party.

A buddy told him about the Scavengers, space cowboys in cool ships, lassoing the junk orbiting Earth. They’re military. He saw a show about it: there’s tons of space junk circling Earth, thousands of tons—ancient boosters full of impact holes, old satellites, dead batteries, plutonium cores cooling, abandoned cargo containers drifting like tumbling boxcars. Even the occasional body ghosts around the planet, contorted and frozen in a tattered EVA suit. Not every country recovers its astronauts gone astray.

Scavenger pilots—they have that cowboy reputation, wild, hard-drinking, not mainstream military but close enough, part of Alliance Space Command. With a high-school degree you can become one in less than a year. So Blake signs up and shows up, right down the road in Dayton, at the Wright Patterson Alliance Base, an old Air Force base.

Boot camp first, six weeks of browbeating and physical conditioning—as if you have to be in good shape to fly a Scavenger ship. But no weapons training or self-defense. They won’t really be soldiers.

Blake likes it. Trainee Zarett is his name now, or just Zarett. He’s in good shape already, so the endless running, calisthenics, and obstacle courses don’t bother him. The authority thing is a little tough, but a smart guy named Forester in his trainee squad tells him to keep his mouth shut, his head down, and follow orders no matter how dumb. It’s good advice.

He likes the new clothes. He’s had no new clothes in years, and now he’s got nice sweats and crisp gray uniforms—as simple as a delivery-truck driver’s, but still.

Then flight training. He’s done a lot of gaming, and the flying is so automated that it isn’t much different from shooting aster-bats in Star Triton. He’s a natural. In six months they pin Scavenger wings on him.

He’s no fighter pilot, but he has his own H10 Scavenger for lassoing junk and whipping it down into the ocean. Sometimes he drags a net—a kilometer-wide magnetized cable net—catching small stuff. Dangerous work, catching those high-speed bowling balls. You can’t just grab them, like a baseball in a mitt; they’ll burst right through the net, or right through your ship if you’re off by a few meters. You have to cruise up behind them and let them drift into the net.

Mostly it’s cable-magnet work, going after bigger chunks with a hundred-meter smart cable made of stabilized carbon fiber, thick as your arm, maneuverable, with four magnetic feet. He flies up behind the bad guy, matches its speed and trajectory, brings the magnets to bear, and grab on. He scans it, and the ship’s computer calculates its mass, orbital momentum, and trajectory, giving him a vector and thrust level to degrade its orbit, slowing it, dragging it down. When it reaches the release point, he switches off the magnets and cuts it loose. Once he’s slowed the pieces enough to start falling, they burn up in the atmosphere.

For the big junk, the chunks too big to burn up, there are a dozen mid-ocean No-Ship Zones, Scavenger targets, thousand-kilometer circles where ships are forbidden. He grabs an old booster or dead satellite, drags it over one of the Zones—again with computer guidance—and lets her go, hoping for a bull’s eye, and hoping no ships have violated the Zone.

If an object is tumbling, he has to match its tumble, a dizzying job until he accustoms himself. The cable has a universal joint that accommodates one dimension of spin, but most pieces tumble in two. The ship’s brain does the hard part, firing auxiliary thrusters. He learns to ignore the whirling background of stars or sun and glowing stratosphere beneath him. He extends the cable till it attaches, backing off to the point of tension. Simple vector physics: the computer finds a solution to slow the tumble, at times whipping the ship and the object around like a bolas.

Blake lasts eleven months flying H10s. Not a bad life—based at Eglin, on the beach, flying four hours a day, with plenty of time off. The Scavs avoid the regular Air Force bars. The “real pilots” give them grief, make cracks, pick fights. But Pensacola has lots of bars and lots of girls, and the Scavs have a reputation to maintain.

On his last flight he chases down an old Israeli orbital missile launcher, top secret, never revealed. It was disarmed years ago, the missiles salvaged and the guidance scrambled. But the launcher itself is too big to bring back down, and too secret. It tumbles dangerously fast, in two axes, crumpled and derelict, with empty missile tubes, pocked with blast holes. Someone has used it for target practice.

The cable accommodates one axis of spin. The ship matches the second axis, circling the thing like a yo-yo, thrusters firing to slow it down.

“Damn, this is a tough one,” Blake mutters to himself. Nauseated from the vertigo of the motion, he sits back and closes his eyes, letting the guidance computer figure out its vectors.

But the launcher is too big and tumbling too fast. A cockpit alarm sounds. The ship is out of control. Time to release the damn thing. Black blobs crowd his vision as the G’s build up.

He hits the magnet-release button, but nothing happens. He hits it again; nothing. “What the hell!” His fingers fumble for the cable release, to disconnect the cable at his end. Again nothing. Is it the right switch? He can’t see the switches. He’s never released the cable before. He tries a couple other buttons, his muscle control going, his thoughts clouding.

With a final dim glance, he sees a flash between him and the launcher, and the cable parts. His ship streaks away, throwing him against the seat harness and into blackness.

He wakes up in a bed—pale green walls, antiseptic odor. He glances about: he’s in a hospital bed, controls on the rail, valves on the wall, a window with dirty gray sky beyond.

He moves and sits up. Am I hurt? Just a headache, a serious headache, but everything works, arms, legs. He lies back down, head throbbing.

What the hell? He waits for memory to return. The Israeli missile launcher, the spinning out of control, his mag cable wouldn’t release; the sequence of events slowly reassembles itself, but then stops short. He has no idea how he got away from that thing, how he got here.

A nurse walks in, a bearded man in pale green scrubs. “Oh, Sergeant Zarett, you’re awake. That’s very good. How do you feel?”

They talk, and the man helps him stand and walk about. His head pounds.

“How’d I get here?” Blake asks.

“I’m not exactly sure, sir. You were here when I came on shift this morning. But there are a couple people waiting to see you. They can probably answer your questions.”

“Can I take something for this headache?”

“Sure thing. Let’s get you back in bed first, and I’ll bring you something.”

Blake stares at the ceiling. Somebody’s here? He finds the button to raise himself up a to sitting position.

His Scavenger captain walks in, a decent guy named Andersen. A woman follows, in the navy blue of Alliance Space Command.

“How ya doin’ there, Sergeant Zarett?” Andersen says with a grin. “You had quite a ride yesterday. I’m glad we could bring you back in one piece.” His tone is more official than usual. Blake guesses it has to do with the woman accompanying him.

“Pretty bad headache, sir,” Blake says. “Otherwise I’m okay. Don’t remember much, though.”

“This is Commander Loftus from Space Command.” Andersen motions to the woman.

“Sergeant,” she says, pausing a few feet away. She looks about forty, pale serious features, short hair in a regulation cut. She sets a shoulder-bag down on a chair. Judging from her movements, it contains something heavy—clearly not a purse.

“Can you fill me in, sir,” Blake says, “on what happened, how I got back to base.”

Andersen nods. “We tracked your ship heading off into space, out of low orbit and really fast. Do you remember that?”

Blake shakes his head; the movement reminds him of his headache. “No, sir.”

“You weren’t responding, so we figured something had happened to you. We switched your ship to remote piloting. Takata was there, in the flight center. She’s a drone pilot; you may know her. She autopiloted her drones and flew you back, brought you down, and landed you. You were dragging about twenty meters of cable, but she landed your ship without incident and no apparent damage, although they’re still going over it. The cable was cut.”

“Cut?”

Andersen nods toward the woman and her bag. “We brought you a piece of it.”

“A piece of the cable?” This seems odd. Blake glances again at the woman standing expectantly nearby.

“Commander Loftus has a few questions for you. What happened to you was unusual.”

The nurse returns with a small paper cup. “Here’s a couple Tylenol, sir. Should help with that headache.”

“What happened to you is indeed unusual,” Commander Loftus says when Blake has swallowed the pills. Hefting her bag, she moves to the chair by his bed. She gives him a tiny smile but avoids eye contact. “What do you remember about yesterday, sergeant?”

“Well, I got vectored to this old missile launcher—top secret, I guess, or used to be. I was supposed to sling it.”

“Sling it?”

“Yes, ma’am. Snag it with my cable and sling it out of orbit, up into space.”

“Yes?” she says. “Please go on.”

“It was tumbling pretty bad, hard to latch onto. I tumbled the ship to match its primary axis, then moved in close to cable it. But it was hard to do. Finally the guidance program gave me the green light to cable it. So I got the mags onto it, but then the spin was so bad the ship went out of control.” The memory is dim, but he recalls the fear, near panic. “I tried to release the mags, but it wouldn’t release. And that’s the last thing I remember. I think I blacked out from the G’s.”

“The G’s?”

“The gravity,” Blake says, struggling to explain. “From the spin gravity. We were spinning so fast.”

“But you remember attaching the cable.”

“Yes, ma’am. And I don’t know why it wouldn’t release.” He makes a gesture of futility. “It’s never happened before. I really don’t remember any more. Maybe it will come back to me.”

Her expression hardens. “Are you sure, sergeant? This is very important.”

“I’m sorry, ma’am.” Blake isn’t sure what to say. Were they going to blame him for this, for whatever happened?

“We’ve tried to reconstruct the events from your ship’s data and our flight-control data. The cable broke, or parted somehow. But this end was still attached to your ship when you landed.” She holds up the meter-long piece of thick woven cable. One end is cut through, presumably by some ground-maintenance tool. The ends of the thousands of carbon fibers show their neat bundled arrangement. “And this is where it parted,” she continues, holding the other end close for his inspection.

The fiber ends are melted into a smooth silvery dome. He runs a finger over its flawless surface.

“Do you have any idea how this might have happened, sergeant?”

Again he shakes his head, and again the headache stops him. How’s he supposed to know? He remembers nothing. “No, ma’am,” he says. “I have no idea. Looks odd, though. Maintenance guys might have a better idea.” He glances at Andersen, who gives him a sympathetic shrug.

Commander Loftus sighs, watching him. “I wish they did. This is a mystery. No one knows how the cable could have parted like this. It takes an extremely high temperature to melt these fibers and bind them together in such a way.”

“Yes, ma’am. I wish I could be more helpful.”

“Do you remember anything else, sergeant? Anything you might have seen while you were trying to stabilize that object?”

He looks away, eyes to the ceiling, but there’s nothing. He has no idea.

“How about the whole flight, sergeant?” Andersen says. “Anything unusual before you went after that thing? Odd radio signals, anything flying around you?”

“Flying around me, sir?” What’s he talking about? Blake gives another show of thoughtfulness, then slowly shakes his head. “Is there something in particular you’re concerned about, ma’am?”

“Well, sergeant, you’ve had a concussion,” she says, ignoring his question and rising to her feet. “The doctors say that a loss of memory is not unusual. And sometimes memories return over time. It’s extremely important that you let Captain Andersen know if anything further comes back to you.”

“Yes, ma’am, I will.” So is he off the hook here? Is that all?

At the door she pauses, giving him another strained smile. “Sergeant, I hope you’re not holding anything back about this incident. We’re not holding you at fault here, not anticipating any disciplinary measures. We’re happy you returned safely. But the incident is quite unusual.” She pats the shoulder-bag. “The way this cable was cut is hard to explain. Any assistance you can give us would be welcome. I hope your recovery is rapid.”

Blake Zarett will never remember the incident, but in a few years he’ll think back and realize what must have happened—what must have saved him from spinning and spinning, unconscious, until the G-forces killed him. Or rather, he’ll understand who saved him.

Next day the Eglin doctors pull Blake’s flight status, telling him he can’t fly for at least six months. They’ll do cognitive testing then, to see if he can requalify. But he has less than four months left of his enlistment. He can receive an Honorable Discharge and be on his way, if he wants. He’s served his time, has no more legal obligation.

Scavenging was kinda fun, though. Gave him something to do. He could re-up in six months for another tour, or switch services. There’s an idea. He met a couple Marines once who told him the Corps was a good deal, tough but fair.

Blake likes military life, the taste of it he’s had anyway.

Near-future sci-fi, the climate apocalypse, an aimless teen rising from poverty and a broken family to become a hero, aliens arriving to save humanity, yet with their own agenda gradually revealed, colonization of other planets to save the human race, a war between alien races in deep space, where our hero and his team play a key role.

A VOICE FROM THE MOON is volume one of a series telling that story. But nothing new here, right? Same old stuff? Everybody doing sci-fi, books and films, is doing the apocalypse these days. Still, my hero is surrounded with intriguing characters, including an alien sidekick who is multi-talented, personable, funny—whose race has been watching us for thousands of years—and a genetically engineered “genoid,” given female form, trained as a soldier but uncomfortable in her role. Our protagonists gradually discover that another alien race, the evil bad guys, have evolved over many thousands of years from primitive humans kidnapped from Earth.

But “literary,” does it rise to literary? What does literary mean anyway? Does it mean a gripping story, intriguing characters, valid emotions, graceful writing, subtle phrasing, and a non-clichéd vocabulary, with a moral compass? Most sci-fi doesn’t rise to these levels, although some does—Le Guin, Butler, others I probably haven’t read. I modestly aspire to such heights, but also value excitement, adventure, humor, and intrigue. The two styles, I think, are not mutually exclusive, and I’ve added a dose of consciousness-raising regarding climate change, much needed these days.