Far Space (11 page)

“Probably heading back to the same spots where they emerged from the gravitational anomalies,” Wu said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the data stick he had smuggled out of the command center. “They’re going home.”

“Now if only we could get home,” Deng muttered.

Wu inserted the memory stick into the console. He downloaded the latest readings on the alien ships, adding them to his earlier observations.

As the ships moved out of range of the hopper’s sensors, Wu said, “Wait a minute…” He pulled up the ship’s data logs and started scrolling backwards.

“I can wait all day,” Deng said. “But would you care to finish your sentence?”

Wu looked up at his friend and asked, “How many ships did you say there were?”

N-Motion Concepts

Seattle, Washington

After his recovery, Ian’s EERS suit was returned to N-Motion Concepts, the builders of the egress and reentry system. There, the suit was dissected, along with those from the other survivors of Car 47 and the data storage units were downloaded. These activities were performed in order to gather critical information on the performance of the suits in their infrequent ‘live-fire’ uses.

The N-Motion engineers ran their simulation program three times on all seventeen of the data sets they were able to retrieve. As far as their reconstruction of the event went, the engineers and software analysts were able to accurately model sixteen of the reentry profiles – each was well within the proscribed design parameters of a typical EERS suit. It was the outlier data set which made them run all the simulations a fourth and a fifth time. Each time the outlier was the same; plotted along with the rest of data sets, the temperatures and velocities experienced were red lines outside even the most optimistic limits of the suits.

In the end, they agreed it must be a fluke – some corruption of the data due to the intense environmental conditions of reentry. Or, as one engineer put it, the guy wearing the thing was just ‘damn lucky.’

The seventeenth suit had belonged to a passenger named Ian Langdon. And by all accounts of the N-Motion engineers, he should not have survived his fall to Earth.

Lagrange 5 – Vehicle Assembly Station (L5 VAS)

Five Days After Contact

Yates eyed the full bird Colonel sitting at the head of the conference table in the full-fledged virtual conference area occupying an entire hab module. Included in the furnishings was a simulated wood table and enough leather seats for eight people. More hangers-on could squeeze in between the seats and the curving outer hull. Despite the premium placed on any volume of habitable space in orbit, US Space Corps thought it absolutely essential to outfit the Vehicle Assembly Station with the conference room, saying a lot about the importance of meetings in keeping any government facility humming. Yates was seated at the table, the other Colonel was not.

“You understand your orders, Colonel Yates?” The hologram projection of Colonel Ware asked.

Yates nodded. He had been darkly amused to find surviving an attack by hostile aliens, even though it meant the complete loss of your spacecraft, warranted a promotion on his part. “I understand. But I’m not sure why the higher ups want me on this mission. The Schriever, after all…”

“You should know General Hatterus did argue against the assignment,” Ware said, smiling tightly, “Quite vehemently in fact. Lucky for you, General Porter and General Franks had the final say.”

Hatterus, a three star general, was the S3 overseeing all operations for the Space Corps. Porter was the Space Corp Commandant, Hatterus’ direct boss while Franks was the Air Force Chief of Staff. Since Space Corps fell under the U.S. Air Force, just as the U.S. Marine Corps fell under the U.S. Navy, the Chief still had some say in Corps matters.

Yates kept his face impassive. He did not think getting off a few good shots during the recent battle counted for much. It certainly didn’t warrant a bunch of generals going to bat for him.

Ware looked over his shoulder then leaned closer to the camera on his end. The effect in the VAS conference room was to have the Colonel grow larger as he seemed to lean over the table. “Look, Yates. You weren’t the only one to lose a ship.”

“But I was the only one to survive,” Yates added.

“Yes and you took out the enemy ship. Face it, Yates. You’re a hero,” Ware said. “Much as Hatterus or you don’t like it, the Corps needs a few of those right about now.”

Yates sighed and shook his head.

“Besides,” Ware began as he leaned back, “going out to Saturn sure beats the alternative.”

“What did Hatterus have in mind?” Yates asked.

“He mentioned something about a six-by-eight foot cell,” Ware replied. “You did disobey a Presidential Directive, after all.”

“In that case, I have no further objections,”

“Good,” Ware said. “The techs tell me Cheyenne should be ready in about two weeks. The mission specialists and crew augmentees took off from the Cape yesterday. They should be at L5 sometime late tomorrow. The rest of the Special Forces guys will join you there within a week.”

“We’ll be ready for them.”

“One more thing, Yates,” Ware said, unable to suppress a grin. “If you decide to disobey direct orders again, I suggest you shut down your comms and pretend not to have heard the message.”

“Think my reply was a little preachy?”

“A tad,” Ware said, holding up his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “If Hatterus could have reached through the net, he would have throttled you.”

“I’ll try harder to be a good soldier in the future,” Yates said as he gave a Boy Scout salute.

“Please do, especially when I’m on duty as CCAOC chief,” Ware replied. “Good hunting. Bring us back something good.” Ware’s hand reached forward and cut off the camera from his end. He and the virtual conference room in Colorado disappeared.

Yates sat quietly in the now-silent module and glanced down at a schematic detailing the flight path for his upcoming mission. It was displayed on an oversized data pad mag-locked to a strip of metal running under the tables’ veneer. He traced the curving line out past the orbit of Mars, through the Asteroid Belt and past Jupiter’s orbit. Saturn’s orbit was way, way beyond that of Jupiter.

“Cripes, it’s got to be cold all the way out there,” Yates muttered.

Unbuckling his lap belt, Yates pushed himself up from his seat and over to the narrow window running the length of the conference module. With the transmission from the CCAOC cut, the window tinting had automatically faded.

His new command hung there in space, surrounded by a framework of girders. The United States Spacecraft Cheyenne, the first in the Horizon class, was the latest in humanity’s long line of spacecraft. It was also the first interplanetary transport with anti-matter drives similar to those on Explorer and was designed to cut the travel time to Mars in half.

The USS Cheyenne was the only long range ship in Earth Space which had not suffered some damage during the alien attack. The Moon and the VAS at L5 had been on the sun-side of Earth when the attack had occurred. Either the aliens knew the station was there and ignored it or they simply felt they had made their point and left after striking a slew of assets from low earth orbit out to geosynchronous. Yates was glad they missed the beautiful vessel.

Snaking cables and inflatable tunnels connected the Cheyenne to the electrical grid and mechanical systems of the VAS. The ship was running off ‘ground power’ for now but Yates had been assured it would be ready to switch
over to internal power within five days…just as soon as they worked out a few bugs in the anti-matter power control software. He pushed the thought of finicky software and out of control anti-matter reactors to the back of his mind. He had to trust the tech crews on the VAS and support teams helping from Earth-side knew what they were doing.

As Yates watched, one of the containers which had been loaded up for Cheyenne’s inaugural run to Mars, drifted free of the spacecraft’s cargo section. The supplies would not be needed out in Saturn Space plus removing the additional mass made Cheyenne all the faster. Shipping containers were not the only cargo Cheyenne was designed for. Its habitation areas were large enough for up to thirty passengers, but they were not all outfitted yet. The first run was supposed to be cargo only. No one wanted to tempt a ‘Titanic’ scenario, even with all the aerospace engineers at Northern and Combs, the prime contractor building Cheyenne, betting their careers on the function and safety of the ship.

One Northern engineer had assured Yates there was absolutely no chance something could go wrong with the drive. As an example, they cited the perfect function of Explorer’s engines during the burn out to Alpha-Centari. Explorer had been doomed. But, the engineer was right; Explorer’s powerful engines had worked fine. The updates to the design used on Cheyenne were supposed to make them even more efficient.

Just need to work out those bugs, Yates thought.

Staring at the slender ship, its hab modules, cargo containers, mass reaction tanks and engines gleaming in the unwavering light of the Sun, Yates thought any risk was worth taking to get to their destination.

With the Mars mission scrubbed, Cheyenne was now heading to a point just beyond the orbit of Saturn’s giant moon, Titan. The largest moon in the entire solar system, Titan was still somewhat of a mystery to mankind. One of the few moons with an atmosphere, it was just now being explored to a greater degree by robotic probes. Now it held a new secret.

The alien ship which had destroyed the Schriever was there. Damaged by the rail gun shots Yates’ crew had managed to get off, the ship had plunged earthward, where it had simply vanished. In the aftermath of the attack, it was
a full 24 hours before anomalous readings in Saturn Space recorded from an orbiting planetary probe were analyzed. That tip-off had led to more intensive study by a variety of sensors. It was the team at Far Side on the Moon’s surface, who were the first to get a good image of the alien spacecraft.

Some blogger had tagged the ship simply as Six. The name had caught on in the media until it was impossible to talk of the alien ship without referring to it as such.

Yates looked beyond the Cheyenne out into the depths of the solar system.

“Just wait, Six. We’re coming.”

Orion-2 Orbital Transfer Vehicle

Earth Space

Ian Langdon looked around the Orion-2 Orbital Transfer Vehicle and sighed. He once again found himself on a long cruise with almost nothing to do. He stretched his legs as best he could and thought longingly back to the spacious accommodations he had enjoyed, however briefly, onboard the space elevator car. A quick glance around the capsule brought a smile to his face though.

At least the best part of that trip is still with me, Ian thought.

Jennifer had dozed off in her seat across the cabin. Her head tilted to the side, smashing her face up against her shoulder harness. A bit of drool drifted from the corner of her mouth – one of the dangers of sleeping with your mouth open in zero-gee.

Ian wanted nothing more than to float over and stroke her long black hair. Floating free for the moment from her usual pony tail, Jennifer’s long hair framed her face like a beautiful portrait. He imagined she would wake up and flutter her green eyes and say something witty. The hulk of another passenger moved clumsily between Ian and his daydreams. George Nubittem was a large man and occupied much of the open space in the Orion capsule when not in his seat. Although massive, Ian was glad to find the man was at least somewhat fit. On first sight, Ian was sure the man would suffer from zero-gee complications and require CPR at some point during their three day trip out to the Earth-Moon L5 point.

George squeezed into the seat next to Ian and strapped himself in with much effort and grunting. “They sure didn’t design this thing with guys like me in mind,” he said, nudging Ian painfully in the ribs. “Makes me wonder if those NASA types just hire short, skinny people to be astronauts.”

“Well, they…” Ian said, preparing to share what he knew of the NASA astronaut selection process.

“As I remember it, these things,” George interrupted and gestured around the capsule, “were supposed to be the future of space travel. You know, until those guys in Dubai financed that space elevator and blew just about everybody else out of the space business. Man, I wish I could have invested in that
deal. Sure grounded NASA’s plans didn’t it?” He laughed at his own joke. “Nearly killed NASA, too!”

And George was off.

From experience, Ian knew the speech would start with a long-winded discussion on the inadequacies of government bureaucracies in dealing with change. The one-sided conversation would then move on to a long list of grievances, beginning with the current US administration and moving back through at least the last two presidents and their cabinets. No one was safe; Mr. Nubittem had a problem with just about everyone, whether they were a congressman, senator, special interest, Supreme Court justice, or local mayor. A few of the other passengers enjoyed the discussions. Ian noted those individuals were currently taking their turn in the sleep cubes in the attached inflatable hab module.