Precipice: The Beginning (2 page)

3

T
ravis followed the line of men through a sterile grey corridor passing more than a dozen cells duplicate to his own. They didn’t like to refer to them as cells. The men and the security personnel universally referred to them as “private quarters,” but a prison cell is a prison cell. Travis didn’t know the names of the men he closely followed to the cafeteria. These were workers, men trained for the sole purpose of mining the Martian soil or building and maintaining the facility. Travis didn’t concern himself with finding out their names or where they came from. He wasn’t like them. Travis had come with a group of four men and one woman and they were the only ones he’d allow a moment of his time. They were the only ones that could possibly understand why he’d come to be millions of miles from his home.

Travis got in line and grabbed a plastic tray off the stack, sliding it along the thin metal bars. He thought back to when he’d been in high school, so many days spent in line behind an empty tray looking through a glass enclosure at what might have one day been eatable food. The scenery and the date sure had changed, but the gelatinous goop of food obviously hadn’t.

“Looks like someone threw up in a bowl,” Travis said, looking down into the bowl full of grey slop.

“It’s got all your vitamins,” Jerome McKinney said from behind him. “Kind of like porridge or gruel.” Jerome laughed as he took his bowl from the man behind the counter. “Tastes like total shit of course, but at least it’s good for you.”

“Something this terrible could only be good for you,” Travis said as he filled a plastic cup full of water and set it on the tray, turning from the counter to walk through rows of packed tables. A soft medley of classical music drifted down from the speakers above as it did every day.

Travis looked down at the men as he passed by, the tables full with burley men eating from plastic bowls with the same depressing food. The table directly ahead sat three people that didn’t quite fit in. The closest man to him was TJ Ames, thirty-one years old and their equipment specialist. He was six-foot-six and had the darkest skin Travis had ever seen. What set him above the rest was his vast training in hand-to-hand combat. There was Morgan Ellis, originally from Las Vegas, forty-nine years old and a mechanical genius. He had an uncanny way of looking at machinery and just knowing how it all fit together, like some kind of extra sense. On the opposite side of the table was Christina Perez, the only woman on the facility but not someone you could take advantage of. She was thirty-six, five-foot-six and very beautiful. Her blonde hair and hazel eyes could draw your attention from across the room, but her combat training and hand-to-hand combat went unmatched, except maybe by TJ. The final member of their special ops team was not found at their table. Across the room, sitting alone with his head down was Sean Jeffries, their pilot. He looked up from his bowl as Travis took a seat, giving him a scowl before returning to his loneliness.

“Don’t worry about him,” TJ said, speaking over a mouth full of food.

“Even with all these men, TJ, your sexiness just stands out,” Christina said with a smile.

“You know you want this goodness,” TJ said after taking another bite, making it a point to speak through as much food as possible for added effect.

The table shared a single laugh, glad to have the tension eased if only for a moment. Day in and day out they shared the same expression, longing to be back home where the grass was green and they could smell dew in the air. In the facility, the air always smelled stale. The huge drawback of recycled air was just that; it was recycled. Nothing was fresh here. The food was frozen or made from a powder, the water heavily filtered and reused from their own urine. Morgan had done repairs numerous times on the filtration devices within the toilets. It made him shudder with every sip from his plastic cup, looking over the rim at the men around him to wonder just who had deposited the liquid he was now consuming.

“Next week marks our eleventh month,” Christina said, holding up her cup for a toast. “Let us all give thanks for a job well done.”

“I guess we can drink to that,” Travis said, gently tapping cups so as not to spill a single drop. They were only rationed so much water a day, no exceptions. “Okay, where did we last leave off?” Travis set his cup on the table and leaned back, thinking back to yesterday to recall the last person to name off an item. It was a game they played, something to help pass the time while keeping Earth fresh in their minds. Sadly, after almost a year of mindless routine, Travis found it difficult to remember even the previous day. They all seemed to mesh together, like rain falling into the ocean until there was nothing but an endless blur. “I think it was TJ?”

“No, it was Jerome,” TJ said quickly, folding his arms about his chest as he passed the duties to Jerome with a sly smile. “I’m on deck.”

“Deck my ass,” Jerome laughed. “You just can’t stand the pressure.” Jerome took a spoonful and smiled over the awful taste, like mayo and sand served at room temperature. “Okay, let me run this through the massive computer that is my mind.” Jerome put his hands to his forehead and closed his eyes, shaking a bit for dramatic effect. He smiled as he often did, unable to keep a serious expression if his life depended on it. “I think the one thing I would like to see again would be a baseball game. Doesn’t matter the team. Just to sit down in the stands, a hotdog in one hand and a beer in the other.” Jerome closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “Would be very nice.”

“Okay Morgan, how about it,” Daniels said, passing the duty to Morgan.

“That’s a pretty tough one to pass up.” Morgan took a moment to think. “Probably drive-thru burgers.” He rubbed his stomach while licking his lips. “King Charlie’s drive-thru in Michigan. That would be so awesome right about now. I took my first girlfriend there on our first date.”

“Wow, what a big spender,” Jerome said with a laugh.

“Come on, fast food can be very romantic if done right,” Christina defended.

“All right little Casanova, what’s yours?” Jerome asked.

Christina smiled, closing her eyes as she ran through memories like a photo album, snagging the one that made her the happiest. “I would have to say that the thing I miss the most, right now, would be a nice warm bubble bath. Candles burning with the light off while watching a movie.”

They all nodded in unison as the image appealed to them, maybe not the bath itself, but the feeling of being encased in warmth and comfort. The air was always drafty and the water from the showers was icy and timed to conserve water.

“What about you, sir?” Christina asked Travis.

“Same as it is every day, my wife and son.” Travis looked down to the ring on his finger, tracing it absently as he thought back to the last time he’d felt the warmth of his wife’s touch.

The classical music overhead screeched to a halt and there was a brief pause. “Travis Daniels.” The voice was automated, echoing loudly through the large cafeteria. “Please report to sector seven for your monthly evaluation.”

“Nothing like a beautiful train ride through the country side,” Travis said sarcastically as he stood, leaving more than half his breakfast in the bowl for one of his men to finish if they so desired.

Travis gave them a brief nod before heading out the door, glancing over briefly to Sean as he passed. Sean looked up and gave him a stone cold glare before returning back to his food. Travis took a deep breath and let it out slowly, knowing there were some things he had to simply let go.

4

T
ravis exited the cafeteria and took a long walk down a corridor he traveled daily, only this time he’d be taking a slight alteration. Everyday his routine was exactly the same. He’d be summoned from his “living quarters” with the rest of the men to go have a hearty breakfast of tasteless snot. They were given forty minutes to shoot the shit while consuming their liquids and vitamins, then the door on the opposite wall of the door he’d taken today would slide open, the light above turning from red to green. Each of them would slide their food trays into the slot beside the door and follow a very short corridor into the staging area. There the men would get their suits from the lockers and suit up for the elevator ride deep within the planet. Those were the daily routines for the miners such as himself. If you were working on the systems maintenance, the atmospheric processors, or general construction, you’d grab your suits from the same lockers but continue down a corridor that ran behind the elevator and let out into Grand Central Station, as they called it, the main terminal for the network of trains that ran over the surface of the planet. These weren’t your average trains. They were airtight shuttles that ran along narrow tracks to the scientific facility set near the northern ice cap, the atmospheric processor at the southern pole, an adjoining dome shaped structure that housed the corporate honchos and the shrink, or one of three thousand thermal vents set up to vent greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere.

Travis entered the locker room and opened the one with his last name across the front. He stepped inside the tight fitting brown suit and zipped up the inner lining. Once the suit was sealed he fastened the outer straps and then the clamps over the front of the suit, making it airtight. He stuck his hands into the matching gloves and grabbed his helmet, kicking the locker shut with the back of his foot, the metallic bang echoing through the cavernous locker room. It was strange to see it empty. Travis turned toward the corridor at the opposite end of the wall, looking to the sealed airlock with the elevator behind, wondering if this little trip would last long enough to keep him from mining for the rest of the day. Travis turned his attention back to the hall and continued forth, figuring it really didn’t matter. Mining was at least a way to pass the time.

“Please step forward and scan your identification.” The train operator said as Travis came to the end of the hall and entered the loading dock of the train station.

Travis approached the podium with the train operator and extended his right hand, pulling the glove back. He rested it on the podium while the man ran a red laser over the barcode. Travis looked up to the screen behind the operator, a man named Danny Alino by the nametag, and saw his own face turning from side to side with the serial number they assigned him blinking beneath his head.

“Please enter the train and keep clear of the track,” the operator said without emotion. “Have your helmet securely fastened and take a seat. Do not stand.”

Travis placed his helmet over his head and turned it clockwise until he heard that all too familiar click, instantly followed by a cool rush of oxygen. The train went through the air blowers and crawled into the station at three miles an hour, coming to a jerky stop. The doors parted with a loud hiss, giving Travis only thirty seconds to enter before they sealed shut, that same hydraulic hiss as the metal door eased its way into the airtight rubber seal. Travis took a seat as the train took off, giving the man behind the controls a brief wave that was not returned.

The train rolled into a dark tunnel and stopped, waiting a brief moment for the station door to seal behind it before going forward toward the outer door. The train, if you could call it that with only four compartments, shook as it went up a slight incline. It moved toward two thick metal doors that slowly parted, allowing the light to fill in the darkness of the train’s interior. There was always a moment of fear, just a slight twinge somewhere in the back of him, that as soon as the train leveled out on the Martian surface the thick glass windows would shatter or there’d be a malfunction in the rubber sealant. Any number of things could happen to allow the deadly conditions outside to come rushing in. He knew it to be a completely foolish thing to worry about, especially while wearing a suit capable of withstanding the Martian environment, but fears often were foolish. He figured it’d be something to tell the shrink about.

The trip was brief, but very enjoyable. Anything to break up the day and add a dash of variety. The train emerged from the dark tunnel and leveled out upon the Martian surface, turning in an arch toward the small dome structure set just beside the main facility. Travis pressed his helmet to the glass and looked out on the alien landscape, taken back as he always was. This wasn’t like a casual drive through the Sahara or some kind of NASA look-alike to train their astronauts and rovers; this was the real deal. An eerie red soil as far as the eye could see, stretching off into the infinite. Mountains towered in the distance that made Earth’s Mt. Everest look like a molehill. But what got him the most was the vast darkness of the trench to his right, so deep you couldn’t see the bottom. Both the main facility and the corporate structure were built into the side of the canyon; only the tip of the dome from the corporate structure was visible from the surface. Travis had heard a few different reasons for this. One being that the meteorite activity was a concern and this would add much needed protection, which of course he was for. Another has something to do with the supply ship having an easier time docking from inside the walls of the canyons, like it cut down the wind resistance from the numerous sand storms or something. Such details were seldom shared with people in Travis’s situation.

The train made a complete one hundred and eighty degree turn and moved toward the dome at twenty miles an hour. Four minutes later and the train angled downward into a short cement tunnel, slowing to a complete stop. Powerful hoses ran the length of the train, spraying off any access soil. The doors to the only train station in this smaller structure opened to an exact duplicate of the scene he’d just left. An empty terminal with a single operator standing behind a podium-style control board with a vacant expression, barely bringing himself to look up as the train stopped and the doors parted.

“Please scan your identification,” the man said with a stone cold expression. The excitement of being stationed on the fourth planet from the sun had long since worn off.

Travis stuck his arm, wrist side up, under the red laser and let the light scan the barcode. His face popped up on the screen and spun slowly with his facility ID underneath. It was a little uncomfortable to see his severed head spinning like that.

“You have a scheduled session with Dr. Hoffman. Please take the corridor to your left and follow it ‘til you reach the last door on the right.” The man spoke in monotone, tilting his head to the right slightly from sheer boredom.

“Quite the life isn’t it?” Travis said with a joking smile.

“Just move along.” The man shooed him away with his hands.

Travis turned from the wonderfully exciting conversation with the train’s operator and headed down the corridor as instructed. He passed by numerous doors, all of them made of thin metal that slid inward. He passed the Communication Uplink Specialist, Mineral Analysis, Human Resources, Vice President of Off-World Mining. He couldn’t help but laugh. He and his men had all but been forced to come here, faced with both a court marshal and life in prison or work detail on Mars until the atmosphere was deemed breathable and the permanent facilities were all up and running. But the men and women behind those doors had fought hard to take the hundred-day trek across space to fulfill these pointless positions. The one that tickled him the most was the Human Resources Director, imagining him sitting behind his desk with a “Hang in There” kitty poster on the wall, listening to big strapping miners talk about how so and so sexually harassed them. It made him laugh. But that’s how the world worked. Even out here across the vastness of space you couldn’t escape the politics of big business and all the bullshit that went with it. Still, lame positions meant more jobs. Only in an environment such as this, more positions meant more of their air being sucked up by these wastes of space.

Travis controlled his wide smile and good humor, shaking the giggle from his face before knocking on the last door at the end of the hall, this one with Dr. Hoffman written across the front in black bold letters.

“Aw, thank you for accepting my invitation, Mr. Daniels,” Dr. Hoffman said as the door opened. He stood from his leather recliner and hurried across the small office, shaking his hand. “Please, why don’t you come in and have a seat.”

Travis crossed the flat carpet to the couch, taking a seat. His humor fought hard to surface as he took in the surroundings, looking from the evenly stacked books in the waist-high bookshelf and ending with the trinkets on his desk that seemed to be handed out as soon as you got your doctorate. A bronzed statue of Freud’s head, a globe with a brass axis. The desk organizer with the pens lined perfectly beside the pad of paper set dead in its center. What brought the smile to his face were not the items themselves, but just the need for them. Travis could picture Dr. Hoffman in his office back on Earth, deciding which couch would make the men more comfortable or which pieces of art might create the most calming atmosphere. But that was the real trick to every perfectly placed piece or art to the small half-moon shaped rug beneath Travis’s feet—to create the most calming atmosphere. To make everyone that stepped into his office feel as if they were right back home.

“What’s so funny?” Dr. Hoffman asked while taking his seat, patiently resting his right leg over his left knee. This position said:
You can talk to me. I’ll take the time to listen because I want to.

“I just find it interesting how things were brought over from Earth to create an ‘at home’ like feeling. Like the pictures you have on the wall. A man playing catch with his dog, a boy and his sailboat…I don’t know. It’s just humorous to me.” Travis sat back and folded his arms, not really knowing where he was going with this. He was letting his nerves get the best of him. Truth be told, Dr. Hoffman was the best friend they had on this distant red rock. He’s the man that could get you rest vouchers, calls from home, medication if you’re so inclined.

“You’re right. Everything I’ve brought with me has been hand selected to create a sense of comfort and peace. After all my main function here is to monitor the stress and overall mental state of the men stationed here. You and your unit especially.” Dr. Hoffman read the look on Travis’ face. “Part of your condition for being here is that you and your men undergo routine mental tests and monitoring. With your extensive military training you are the best suited for this type of isolation, but it is quite common for men to snap, experience heightened levels of aggression as your training seeks for a means.” The doc smiled, holding out his hands to ease the tension he saw rising in Travis’s shoulder. “Fortunately I don’t see a single instance that would arouse any concern. But…there are two issues I would like to review with you.”

“Sure,” Travis said, leaning forward to rest his elbows on his knees.

“I see you’re having trouble sleeping?” Dr. Hoffman asked with a concerned look.

“Just bad dreams. Plus the bed isn’t very comfortable.”

“I should imagine not,” the doc said as they shared an uncomfortable chuckle that quickly died. “Is there anything in particular you remember or care to discuss?”

Travis thought for a moment, shaking his head.

“Do they center around an individual?”

“No, just restless sleep.”

The doc nodded as he scribbled something on the legal pad on his lap. “My last concern is over Mr. Jeffries. I’ve noticed some more tension there and I want to hear if there’s anything on your mind.”

“No, just some bitterness toward me is all.” Travis rubbed his hands together. “Really nothing I can do about it.”

“Have you ever tried to open a line of communication with him?”

“Not in a few weeks, and it wasn’t very pleasant.”

Dr. Hoffman nodded as he made some more squiggles.

“I’m not all that concerned with him,” Travis lied, hiding his guilt as best he could. “I don’t foresee any problems there.”

“I have here your monthly report to General Campbell. Have there been any changes in your superiors or other coworkers? Any concerns over how the facility is being run? The General wants you to be as specific as possible.”

“Nothing that stands out.” Travis thought for a moment. “Maybe some better food or leisure activities for the men, games and cards. But other than that I can’t think of too much right now.”

“Excellent. Now, what about your family? I’m sure you miss them terribly.” Dr. Hoffman tapped his knee, hoping to get some kind of emotional response from his patient. These sessions were getting rather boring and he was starting to miss his practice back on earth. These men were so tightlipped, too well trained in shedding emotions.

“Every single day,” Travis said, his throat becoming choked with emotion. “I think about them, what they might be doing, where they are as I’m starting my day. But I feel better about our situations. At least up here I’m able to contact them every so often and let my son know that his father loves him.”

“Well then, I have excellent news for you. I’ve gone through your quarterly review and have arranged for a communications link with our facility back on Earth. I’ve already had them contact your wife and she’s in the comms room waiting to talk to you.”

“Oh that is fantastic.” Travis could hardly contain his excitement. “What about my son? Will I get to see Logan as well?”

“We informed Mrs. Daniel’s that it would be an excellent idea to bring your son.” Dr. Hoffman smiled. “I was told she reacted quite enthusiastically to the notion.”

“Oh thank you.” Travis stood and took Dr. Hoffman’s hand, pumping it rapidly. “I really do appreciate this.”