Defeat

Also by Bernard Wilkerson

The Worlds of the Dead
series

Beaches of Brazil

Communion

Discovery

The Creation series

In the Beginning

The Hrwang Incursion

Book 1

Earth

Bernard Wilkerson

Copyright © 2015 by Bernard
Wilkerson

All rights reserved. No part of
this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by
any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopy, recording,
or any information storage and retrieval system, with the exception
of short quotes used in reviews, without permission from the
author.

Requests for permission should be submitted
to
[email protected]
.

For information about the author,
go to

www.bernardwilkerson.com

This book is a work of fiction.
The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the
writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to
be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead,
actual events, locales or organizations is entirely
coincidental.

Cover photo courtesy of
NASA.

To Terry,

the Hero of the Battle of the
Tenth of December

Episode 1

DEFEAT

1

Stanley Russell woke up, vaguely
aware of someone shaking him. He rolled over, pulled his blanket up
higher, and almost asked, “Just five more minutes, Mother,” when
the someone shook harder, tugged at his blanket, and hissed at
him.

“
Captain, you’ve
got to wake up!”

Stanley rolled to face the someone
and tried to open his eyes. A bright light behind the voice blinded
him and he squeezed his eyes tighter shut. This wasn’t fair. He had
pulled a twenty hour shift while his ship took atmospheric samples
over both the Martian poles and now he needed sleep.

“
Captain!”

He recognized the voice now. The
someone waking him up was Irina. Commander Samovitch, he corrected
himself, as she often did when he tried to call her Irina, which
annoyed him as much as she was annoying him now and led him to call
her Irina more, just to annoy her back.

“
Captain.
Opportunity Base is reporting they’ve lost contact with
Earth.”

“
Tell those
idiots they’re just out of line of sight, that’s
all.”

He rolled back over, away from his
Nigerian-Russian second-in-command’s voice.

She grabbed his shoulder and shook
him hard, her fingers digging like steel claws into him.

“
Sir! They should
have been able to contact Earth over two hours
ago.”

She pulled his shoulder as she
shook him, and he rolled towards her and sat up carefully, making
sure he didn’t knock his head into the upper bunk. Spaceship
captains in the movies got huge staterooms with attached lounges
and lots of privacy. They probably got lots of sleep
also.

She let go of him as he sat up,
and he raised his arm, it would probably have a small bruise where
her talons had dug into it, and shielded his eyes from the bright
light.

“
Sir, they want
to speak with you immediately.”

He groaned as he
stood slowly and stretched. Stand up too quickly and you fling
yourself to the ceiling; he’d done that a few times already.
The
Beagle
rotated slowly as it orbited Mars, providing the illusion of
minimal gravity, but you could hurt yourself all the
same.

He steadied himself on the upper
bunk, her bunk. He shared a cabin with this woman and he couldn’t
even call her by her first name? She rarely slept at the same time
as him, while often pulling the same, long shifts as he did. He
wondered how she did it. He needed more sleep than he was getting
on this mission and he finally understood why officers drank so
much coffee. You needed some kind of artificial stimulant to cope
with so little rest.

“
What do they
want from us?” he asked. “To hold their hands and wipe their noses
while they check their own equipment?”

“
Their equipment
is fine, sir. We already ran through diagnostics with
them.”

“
Then it’s just a
solar flare.”

“
I don’t think
so, sir.”

Something in Samovitch’s voice
bothered Stanley. He needed to wake up, to clear away the fog
caused by too little sleep, and to figure out what was going on. He
stretched and yawned. Maybe he should get some coffee.

He shook his head no at himself,
then stretched his neck from side to side to cover up the motion.
He wasn’t sure he wanted to start that bad habit this late in life,
and he certainly didn’t want to be like every other
officer.

He stretched again, his arms
pushing against the ceiling of their cabin, his feet against the
floor, and he heard several of his vertebrae cracking. Low gravity
was terrible for your body.

“
What’s going on,
Irina?” he asked, the fog in his head finally starting to
clear.

“
I don’t know,
sir. Spirit Base lost contact with Earth before they rotated out of
the window. We haven’t been able to establish contact with Earth
either.”

Irina’s voice was steadied,
measured, the perfect military tone, which bothered Stanley more.
She didn’t even correct him when he called her by her first name,
which meant she had something more on her mind than trying to prove
how military she could be to her civilian captain.

“
That just proves
it’s a solar flare.”

“
No, sir. Ping is
working.”

Whenever communication across a
network was having issues, the fall back was always to ping the
server or device in question. Even if all other programs on a
system were failing, if the system was up, it would respond to a
ping. It was built into the basic operating
instructions.

Earth had a ring
of satellites dedicated to communication with the twin bases on
Mars, Opportunity and Spirit, named after two of the most famous
Mars exploration craft, and
Beagle
used the same system to talk to mission control.
If they were able to ping the satellite system, they should also be
able to talk to someone behind the system.

Unless it was just a
glitch.

Talking to someone over two
hundred million kilometers away, the present distance between Mars
and Earth, wasn’t as simple as some might believe. Things could get
in the way. Solar flares, the Moon, Phobos or Deimos, a bad storm
on Earth, or a janitor unplugging a key server. It had happened
before. Communication would probably be restored in a few
hours.

“
Alright, let’s
see what’s going on,” Stanley sighed.

Everyone was being Nervous
Nellies, but with good reason, he supposed. Irina confirmed, a hint
of concern in her military voice, that she had the same worries,
the same fears, the same nightmares as everyone else on or over
Mars had had for the past two months.

“
It could be the
Hrwang, sir.”

“
Is something
wrong, Captain?”

Captain Christina Owenby could
feel the Colonel looking over her shoulder, could feel his presence
causing her thoughts to spiral out of control, could almost feel
his fingers binding her tongue, his hands choking her throat,
constricting her voice, making her completely unable to
talk.

Her husband kept telling her to
relax. Colonels were people too, he told her all the
time.

“
Well?”

“
Sorry, sir,” she
stammered. She took a breath. Ponies and beaches, right? Go to a
happy place. Just tell the man what he wanted to
hear.

“
It’s probably
nothing,” she said, then regretted it. If it was nothing, why was
the commander of the 614th Air and Space Operations Center at
Vandenberg Air Force Base, a distinguished unit with over sixty
years of operational history, standing behind her and registering
his reaction to her obvious stress? She flipped a set of screens
onto a larger monitor so he could see and she wouldn’t have to turn
to look at him.

“
Google
Operations is complaining that the signal from this satellite
stopped suddenly.”

She pointed out a tiny dot amid
the myriad dots on the tracking screen.

“
So?” the Colonel
asked.

So? So? She couldn’t
speak.

She hated this part. The follow up
questions. Always wanting to know every detail, as if she hadn’t
considered those details, hadn’t thought about everything. That was
her job, and she did it well. She thought about the details and
figured everything out first, then told someone else who would
bring it to the Colonel.

She hadn’t gathered enough
information yet on the problem she was investigating, hadn’t
figured out what, if anything, was going on, but it didn’t look
good and the Colonel must have seen her stress, must have noticed
her flipping through screens, mapping positions and orbits, must
have seen her spill her tiny styrofoam cup of coffee, only a little
of the brown liquid remaining, and not bother to clean it
up.

She shifted her weight in her
chair, her ever increasing weight that was going to force her out
of the military and into a civilian life, albeit one that would
probably pay a lot better, and Christina took another deep
breath.

“
It’s the third
one, sir.”

“
Third one,
what?”

“
The third,” she
stuttered the words. “The third commercial satellite that’s gone
down in the past ten minutes.”

The Colonel was quiet. Waiting for
more. She felt stupid, unable to say what she was thinking, worried
that she was worried over nothing, worried that if she said the
wrong thing or voiced concerns that were inappropriate, her career
would be over. As if it wasn’t over anyway. The stupid PT test
didn’t care how smart you were.

She took another deep breath and
just said it. Who cares, anyway? It’s just a career.

“
They were all
near the Hrwang vessel.”

She’d said it. She, Captain
Christina Owenby, United States Air Force, satellite tracker
extraordinaire, had just blamed a potentially coincidental series
of glitches on the bogeyman in the room. Her hand knocked the
tipped over styrofoam cup on her desk, pushing it in a semicircle,
as she pointed out the general region of space where the satellites
were glitching and where the big red dot of the Hrwang ship was
located. Despite the fact that the Hrwang seemed to be friendly,
they were still represented in red on her screen. It had just been
a choice.

“
NROL-273 is not
responding, sir,” came a male voice behind her. He sounded
confident and firm, his voice always professional in times of
urgency or crisis. She hated sergeants.