Replaceable: An Alan Lamb Thriller (19 page)

Excerpt from Project Diamond

By the time
I brace for the impact, it’s too late.

The ship crashes into a mile-long asteroid like a mosquito colliding with a dinosaur.

I try to breathe, but I can’t – all that happens is a strange whistling sound comes out of my throat and all I feel is incredible pain.

But that’s gone in a flash as a bright white explosion blinds me.

Then everything fades to black.

Then I wake up. That’s always when I wake up.

Because that’s not me I’m dreaming about. It’s just my mind’s fantasy about the way my dad died. Only it probably didn’t happen that way. He would have been spared any suffering because he would have been asleep in his cryo-unit, maybe dreaming about something pleasant when the end came. At least that’s the way I like to think it happened. It’s easier to stomach. Quick and painless. Here one minute, gone the next.

Accidents happen.

That’s what the corporation my dad worked for said afterward. They issued a formal apology, but denied any wrong doing. They had miscalculated the asteroid’s trajectory. Oops. Sorry. Everybody makes mistakes, right?

Nobody could prove anything one way or the other. Every ship had a black box on board, but since my dad’s ship practically disintegrated on impact with the asteroid, there wasn’t anything left to salvage. As a failsafe, in the event of a major disaster (which the corporation my dad worked for had always considered to be an infinitesimal possibility), the data from the black box should have been relayed back to Earth.

But it didn’t work out that way. Due to a glitch in the black box’s programming, all that data was lost in space. The science geeks say that information is never lost, so maybe it was still floating around out there somewhere; maybe it was still drifting through the vacuum. Doesn’t matter though, no one would ever see it.

The corporation received what amounted to a slap on the wrist. They were required to issue a formal apology to all of the victims’ families. Like that was supposed to make it all better.

My mom did get some money out of the deal. The corporation paid out Dad’s accumulated wages. It wasn’t much, and I didn’t see a dime of it.

When I was seventeen, my mom left. Maybe it was easier to pretend she had never had a family. Make a clean break and a fresh start. My dad died when I was fifteen, and in the two year interim between that and my mom skipping out, she was really only a ghost that bumped and banged during the night.

I wasn’t as broken up as I thought I would be after she was gone. She had been around, but only in a physical sense. Mentally, she had checked out a long time ago.

I had spent that two year period training for the inevitable. Learning how to fend for myself. It wasn’t hard. I knew how to cook well enough. At least anything that came in a can. Pour it in a bowl, nuke it for three minutes, and what you pulled out was a steaming pile of something almost edible.

My mom left me the apartment. I don’t mean she owned it and then deeded it over to me as a consolation prize for suddenly going MIA. What I mean is that she only rented the cramped apartment we had moved into shortly after Dad died (like I mentioned earlier, she hadn’t received any giant windfall after he passed, so in an effort to conserve what little she had, we had moved from a four bedroom house to a one bedroom apartment).

When she skipped out, I basically inherited the apartment. If I wanted to keep a roof over my head, I had to pay the rent somehow.

I was of average strength and intelligence, and that was enough to land me a job bagging groceries at a mom & pop store called Jeff’s Foods. It was one of the few stores left that wasn’t part of a chain. That lasted for six months, during which time I worked my way up from bagging groceries and stocking shelves to unloading the delivery trucks when they showed up at the back dock at five-thirty every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.

It was menial labor. Grunt work. I wasn’t exactly content.

I had just turned eighteen (seeing as how I was on my own, there was no celebration, but it didn’t bother me all that much seeing as how I hate birthdays with a passion) when I answered an online ad looking for training dummies.

The ad put it a little more eloquently than that, but
practice dummy
was really what the job boiled down to. What it was exactly was one of the fancy cadet training schools needed someone who could assist the survival training instructor with hand-to-hand combat training classes. It was all part of what they considered prerequisite training for the interstellar space missions that went out every year or two. Just like a lot of community colleges provided degrees that geared students up to eventually become doctors or lawyers, specialized academies had cropped up over the years that catered to students that wanted to qualify for prolonged space missions.

The consensus was still out as to whether these schools (accredited though they might be) actually helped a student gain an upperhand when later applying for a job with one of these missions, but I didn’t much care seeing as how my only interested was in getting a better paying job.

I can’t tell you how many applicants they had, but in the year 2171 obesity was as big a problem as it had ever been. Despite having dropped out of high school and having only a GED, apparently the fact that I was physically fit ranked me high on the potential job candidate list. I interviewed, was invited back for second interview a week later, and several days after that I sat down with a guy named Burnell Steinmeyer who was the lead combat instructor at the Hancock Interstellar Space Academy.

We hit it off. He was a no nonsense kind of guy, and I like to think he appreciated the fact that I told it how it was and didn’t pull any punches. I didn’t try to oversell myself either. I knew what I was, and I wasn’t ashamed of it. I didn’t have a lot of experience, but I was a quick learner, and I figured that counted for something.

That, and I made Burnell laugh.

He said, “Jacob Lansing?” I told him he could call me Jake. He told me he would call me whatever he damn well pleased. “Fair enough,” I said.

He hired me that day.

Burnell wasn’t a large man. Five-eight to my five-ten and thinner than me, but he had a wiry kind of strength to him. And, as I discovered on my first day of employment at Hancock, he was fast, too.

I remember that day pretty well. It was early spring in 2171. I was standing a few feet from Burnell as he addressed a crowd of twenty new recruits, all of them aspiring wannabes and still wet behind the ears. I remember sizing Burnell up as he spoke to them, thinking he was several inches shorter than I was, with a build thinner than my medium one. I knew he had years of training under his belt, but I had the size advantage, and since I did an hour-long workout regimen every day, I figured I had a better-than-average chance at taking him.

I was wrong.

Burnell didn’t waste any time that day. He wanted all the recruits to know what they were getting themselves into. He didn’t take it easy on me either. He motioned for me to advance, telling me I should try to take him down. “Okay, give it your best shot,” were his exact words. “And don’t be afraid to get rough. In real life, you’ve gotta remember one thing: no one’s gonna go easy on you.”

I took a few steps towards him, hands raised, smart enough to be cautious.

I swung at him with a right, but my fist sailed through empty air as he sidestepped out of the way. I told myself I was going easy, hadn’t been as quick as I could have been.

I took another shot, faster this time, coming in with a left jab, aiming straight for his face. Nothing but empty air again, only this time as he stepped to the side, he grabbed my outstretched arm, twisted it around and brought it up behind my back, painfully. I grunted with the pain. He shoved me away, motioning for me to try again.

It went on like that for a good five minutes, by which time I was chugging for air. I couldn’t touch him. I’d take a swing, and next thing I’d know he would have me in a headlock, or would have swept my legs out from under me, or would have me pinned to the ground.

After class had ended, I was ashamed of myself. Burnell could tell I was upset. “What’s eating at you?” he said.

“I’m not sure I’m cut out for this.”

“Quitting already?”

“I couldn’t even touch you.”

“So? What would it say about me if you had? Listen, I didn’t give you the job because I thought you knew everything there was to know. I just need someone that can keep getting up. The rest is cake.”

It wasn’t a speech. I don’t think it was even a pep talk really. Just letting me know that there was nothing to be ashamed of. I shook myself off and took his word for it. I ended up spending two years working with Burnell.

And he was right. I learned. In all that time, I don’t think we ever got close. We weren’t friends, he didn’t once sit down and ask me about my problems, and we sure as hell never went out to lunch together. But I respected him, and, by the end, I think he respected me.

In all that time, I never managed to beat him. I got close a couple of times though. I could hold my own, at least get him breathing heavy. One of the first things he always told the new recruits was that chances were they’d never have to use what he was teaching them. That given all the factors, a fist fight in space was probably the least of their worries. I think it was a lesson in confidence-building if nothing else. If you could make a person
feel
like they could handle a given situation, chances are they would be able to when the time comes.

There weren’t a lot of perks working at Hancock. The pay wasn’t great. Paid the rent, but not much else. One of the things they did do was let you audit any of the classes for free. You couldn’t attend as a student, the waiting list was too long for that, but you could sit and listen in. Which is what I did. I didn’t have any friends, and there wasn’t much to do at my apartment, so I spent most of my off time sitting in on the different classes, listening to instructors drone on about everything from ship mechanics to the basic principles of colonization of various planet types. What worked on one type of planet didn’t necessarily work on another.

There were classes on the history of space travel, from Sputnik to the first successful manned flight outside our solar system.

There were more ambitious courses that introduced students to mission hierarchies, ranking systems, and chain of command. They showed us video of the first astronauts to land on Mars (2043) and footage of a probe being swallowed up by a black hole (only the black hole wasn’t doing much “swallowing” per se, the probe looked more like it was just sitting there, suspended in space for eternity).

By the time I was twenty, I knew as much as any other punk that graduated from Hancock. Probably more. But since I hadn’t earned any credits for auditing classes, it didn’t do me a lot of good out in the real world. I didn’t have a degree, and the people that mattered – the people that hired – still put a lot of stock in those pieces of paper with gold seals and fancy writing on them. About the only thing I did have was a reputation for being a hard worker and being something of a bad ass (second to Burnell, of course).

But my time was up.

It wasn’t a conscious decision. I hadn’t spent any great amount of time weighing out the pros and cons, or convincing myself I had learned all there was to learn. It was more of an anxious feeling that had crept up on me little by little that last year at Hancock.

I was scared shitless of leaving. After all, the place had become my life, it was all I knew outside of coming to grips with being alone most of the time.

Was I meant for something better? Maybe during those long nights lying in bed and staring up at the apartment’s water-stained ceiling I had entertained such a notion, but I hadn’t put any stock in those fantasies. I had spent most of my life living day-to-day, not really giving the future much thought. But I had dreamed. Dreamed of being on one of those space missions, of streaking out into space at close to the speed of light, leaving Earth, the planets, and our known solar system behind.

That’s all it had ever been though: one big dream.

Something they taught in one of the psychology classes at Hancock, one of the things they really tried to beat into your skull, was the utter
aloneness
of being in space, especially if it was for any significant length of time. They stressed how the effects of such isolation worked on a person’s mind. It was cabin fever on steroids. And there was no escaping it. The psychology instructor had pointed out case study after case study, making it crystal clear that it was a genuine condition, and despite extensive testing protocols, there wasn’t a definitive way to predict if an individual would suffer from such an affliction or not.

Only they hadn’t met me. I had spent most of the last five years alone. Sure, maybe I was seventeen when my mom split,
physically
anyway, but I didn’t think that counted. I knew all about loneliness. It didn’t bother me. Not really. Didn’t affect me the way it did some people. Some people couldn’t be alone with themselves for more than five minutes before they went nuts. I was comfortable with myself.

A word on demons: everybody has them, but I knew how to keep mine at bay.

My decision to leave wasn’t without some regret. I’d be leaving what I knew; leaving the people I had met over the last two years, and even if I couldn’t exactly call them friends, some of them came damn close.

Especially Burnell. When I finally mustered up the courage to tell him, it was early December of 2173. I had dwelled on it for a while. I wasn’t a fan of goodbyes. I made a point of trying not to carry around a lot of extra baggage, but sometimes the baggage is heavy on your back whether you want it to be or not.

I approached Burnell that day after class was over. It was snowing lightly. I’d gone over what I was going to say to Burnell at least a hundred times in my head, but as I walked over to him, I still had a case of the nerves.

Before I even opened my mouth, he said, “Leaving, huh?”