Second Chances (113 page)

“True,” he admitted. “Weren't you set on the jet though?”

She nodded. “For the range and capacity. Fuel was a major issue, and as you know the manufacturing killed it. This is a pretty good consolation prize,” she said as the image of the updated Hercules floated in front of them. She spun the hologram with her hands, then made a pulling apart motion to explode the 3D image into subassemblies. “Going to be a pain in the ass to build. I don't think we have the room for the final assembly. And I know for a fact I don't have the hangar space,” she admitted.

“Well, the 3D printers are working on the various subassemblies of the model now. We'll leave the computer to crunch the numbers and see if it can sweat the range a bit. I still think the hybrid engines are a bit ahead of the time. We should stick to what we've got.”

“Conservative again?” Jackie asked, smiling to take the sting out of her tease. He shrugged. “I think we'll figure it out. I like the extra range.”

“Hey lady, it's your ass if it falls out of the sky. Well, mine too if I'm in the right seat,” he said making a face. She grinned. “So I guess we better make sure it works first time,” he sighed. She nodded. “Okay, but when the computers are busy I want your input on the full scale rocket engine.”

She raised an eyebrow at him. “I thought it failed?”

“If you think I'm back at the drawing board you are wrong lady,” he said. “The chute failed, not the engine. The engine worked just fine. We're going to run a full test as soon as the last of the parts are built. If I can get Candy to quit hogging the factory equipment,” he said.

Jackie grinned. “I think the best way to pop her bubble is to get in when she's not using the autoclave and then monopolize it. Sit on it if we have to.”

“Not go over her head?”

“And tattle to Mitch or Bill?” Jackie shook her head. “There are more subtle ways to get the sharing point across. I do like her insistence on making vehicles though. Hell if I'm going to go riding a dino around here,” she said making a face. Jim chuckled.

Chapter 27

In midsummer time, the southeast was hammered by two hurricanes. The hurricanes moved up the eastern coast line from the east. The first went west following the coast line before it disappeared. The second, however, came full bore for Crash Town. Crash Town battened down the hatches, but despite their best efforts, their cave fort took some weather damage and flooding. The storm crossed the continent towards the west but dropped in intensity over the land.

When the storm cell hit the bay it picked up strength again and hit the Falkland Island hard. It hammered the island good, tearing several of the roofs off and drowning a few of the animals. Colonel Dunn's fortress across the bay got the rear end of it, a light brushing. Then the storm hit the warm gulf water once more, picked up more energy and came back on a northwest track. It hit East Village and Prairie; the eye passed right over Prairie and then moved inland. Capital Base to the far north and Copper Town nearby had minor rains. The storm finally petered out of energy a couple hundred kilometers inland east of East Village, just before its outer edge hit the Asian community.

Once the radio network was reestablished, Jolie gathered the news. The structural damage was grim in some places, but fortunately there had been no loss of life. There had been some injuries however; Sandra worked with the various medics to triage over the radio. Once the weather was clear, Jackie flew out some humanitarian supplies to the Falklands, East, and Prairie. “We could use some of that our way,” Colonel Dunn said over the radio when he heard about the supplies.

“Send us a list and some images,” Jolie said coolly. Dunn grumbled but then subsided.

Jackie staged her AN-38 through the Falklands with Warrant Brown as her copilot. They refueled on the island then went south to Crash Town. They barely made it to the community, but they and their precious cargo of pumps, medical supplies, and canned foods was well received.

Three weeks later, a series of thunderstorms formed over the gulf and then moved inland. They moved due east, hitting Colonel Dunn's fortress, Prairie, the African village, and other communities in succession. They caused a series of down spouts and small tornadoes near the Asian and African communities before they faded out over the far east mountains.

Fires sparked by lightning strikes in the plains in the east rampaged for over a week, filling the air with smoke. Animals stampeded away from the fires, sometimes circling to get around the fire and then back onto still smoldering land. Another series of weaker storms finally put the fire out eleven days later.

------*------

While the southeast was reeling after feeling nature's fury, Jim Conklin and Jim Evall performed their first large scale rocket engine test on the graphite mine near the base. Unfortunately ten seconds into the burn the stand was damaged in a horrendous explosion when a fuel leaked and then burst under pressure.

A second test two weeks later was more successful. Conklin had wanted to use an aerospike engine at first, but the advanced manufacturing proved too much for the base so they went back to basics with the basic bell nozzle. The liquid rocket was hard to manufacture, and they lacked some of the more advanced materials needed to handle the high temperatures. The liquid fuel was harder to deal with, keeping hydrogen compressed and cold in the carbon fiber tanks turned into a headache. The same for the liquid oxygen.

Evall decided to build off his experiences with the fireworks to test chemical solid rockets that burned rubber or other materials in the presence of liquid oxygen. Casting the solid rockets was relatively easy, Evall had been making them for some time. They were cast in the shape of a hollow cylinder. The interior would be flooded with the oxidizer. The rockets were simple and worked quite well. They decided to go with a reusable rocket system like Space X eventually, but for now they based their efforts on a redesign of the Delta II. The Delta could use four to nine solid rocket boosters to help loft it's cargo into orbit. Since they were still having issues with the liquid rocket motors they replaced the liquid fueled rockets for the first, second, and third stages with solid rockets. The central tanks would hold oxidizer which would be fed into the first stage solid rocket. The entire package of seven rockets and various components were made out of as much carbon fiber as possible.

While Evall did test after successful test of the solid motors and other equipment, scaling each up for each test, Conklin oversaw the Lings and Summersets in the final construction of the rocket and payload as well as Brian, Sam, and Vance on the gantry and launch pad four kilometers south of base.

They had been gearing up for the project for the past Earth year; the Titan had been started in small subassemblies whenever they had the go ahead.

They had been tempted to launch just a dummy payload to test the systems but the need to make every shot count nixed that idea. “It either works or it doesn't,” Mitch said.

During the first week of fall they watched the first launch soar...and fail in a spectacular incident as two of the solid rockets failed to detach when they ran dry. The rocket tumbled in the air and then broke up as the various forces had their way with it.

“Pity,” Mitch said. “We'll try again,” he said. Both Jims nodded. “Have fun analyzing the telemetry feeds,” Mitch said, shaking his head.

“Fortunately all those radio stations have let us do so,” Conklin said. “We kept a pretty good lock on her right up until the end and LOS.”

Evall nodded. “Loss of signal was at...three minutes three seconds into the flight. We had the alarm at the two-minute mark. Obviously the explosive bolts failed.”

“Squib?” Conklin asked. “We didn't check enough in the batches. There was that one failure in the test batch,” he mused, rubbing his goatee.

“It only takes one failure to ruin a year's worth of work,” Mitch said, looking at the disappointed faces. Just about everyone had turned out to see the launch. He blew out a raspberry, knowing they had a morale issue. “How soon can you do another balloon test?”

“Tomorrow. We scrubbed the last couple of planned tests due to the storm, and then when we got wrapped up in this...” Conklin waved to the blast burned pad. He was pretty sure every alien and dino within kilometers had beat feet as far away from the rocket's launch as possible. There was something to be said about that, he thought with a half-smile.

“Do it. Get it up in the air tomorrow or by the end of the week,” Mitch said.

“So much for superstition,” Jackie mocked, eying the two Jims.

“Something I'm missing?” Mitch asked, turning from them to the pilot. Jim Evall made a face. Conklin snorted.

“You could say that,” Brian said turning from his seat in the improvised command center. “Today is Friday the thirteenth remember?”

Mitch cocked his head and then snorted. “It could have been just as much a hash up on any other day,” he said.

“Gee, thanks,” Conklin said dryly.

“That being said, I don't believe luck had much a role here. We're trying something expensive and new for the first time, and we're pushing the pace pretty hard. Accidents are bound to happen. I'm just glad there hasn't been any fatalities,” Mitch said. The other people nodded. “Make sure we keep that record,” he warned. They nodded again. “And I was serious about the balloon,” he said.

“Saving face?”

“Something like that,” Mitch replied with a shrug as he left.

------*------

Two days later, on a calm clear day they pulled the gear out into the field after the latest harvest. Tanks inflated the weather balloons. The two balloons lofted in the air, dragging spider silk cable underneath. The chute soon followed, then the coils of cable disappeared and the Styrofoam box lifted off the ground and into the air. After a few minutes, the balloons rose high enough for the jet stream to catch it. It moved away to the east and out of sight.

“Well, that was fun,” Jim Conklin said.

They and the other communities tracked the radio telemetry from the payload as it rose up to the stratosphere. When the balloons hit their limit they froze and exploded. Hydrogen gushed out as they fell. When the contraption had dropped low enough the chute deployed, arresting the fall to a gentle decent.

East Village tracked the decent and sent out a recovery team. They managed to watch the thing fall into the trees a dozen kilometers north of them in the hills nearby. When they got to the site they had to chase off a couple nosy Hadrosaurs before they could send Omar to climb the tree and cut the thing down. He used a sawzall to cut the limb; they bundled the mess up, threw it in the back of a pickup and then waited for him to jump onto the roof of the truck and then down into the bed. He banged on the roof, and they tore out of there. He nearly fell overboard in their haste to make a quick exit.

Evan plugged the payload's computer into their net and uploaded the images, sensory data, telemetry, and video the small camera and sensors had managed to record. His own people got to see the images before he uploaded the files to the World Wide Web. Everyone who had a connection and interest took time out of their harvest cleanup to see the images.

“That never gets old,” Mitch said, patiently holding Tucker in his lap as he showed his son the images and video.

------*------

Conklin and Evall decided to scale back their efforts and do a single solid rocket booster test. The rocket failed halfway up, but not before they got enough telemetry from the sensors to spot a few of the problems. They saved what they could from the data and then turned it over to the computers to process. Their second attempt a week later succeeded.

Their failures sparked debate on the project in the world wide community. People like Adam Sevant, Tsakhia and others saw the rockets and balloons as a waste of resources. Mitch let his people fight their battle. Jim Conklin waded in, using Jolie's nightly radio news broadcast to lay out his case why they want to do it, not just to see the planet and area, but also set up communications satellites, find other communities if there were any, and to set up a planetary GPS.

Mitch nodded as he listened to the address. “I think after what the southeast went through this summer weather satellites alone would be a major help,” Mitch said. Brian and other people listening in the great room as well nodded in agreement.

“Do you have another reason? I mean the rest is good but you are pushing this pretty hard Mitch,” Sandra said softly to him.

He smiled and tickled Tucker until the child squirmed out of his reach and then ducked behind Brian giggling. Cassie went after him, stooped over with her hands out like claws, ready to pounce on the little monster.

“You know me too well love,” Mitch said softly, making sure others didn't hear them.

“So you do have something else in mind,” she breathed. She looked at him, her eyes searching his for any hint. “And you aren't ready to tell me? Or them?” She asked, cocking her head to the population.

“You heard what Jim Conklin said. One of the goals is to check out this planet. To see if we're not alone,” he said. She nodded. Then that finally caught up to her fore-brain and she froze. He nodded grimly. “Right. Not alone. Others here. And on the other worlds,” he said.