SODIUM:3 Fusion (3 page)

Pop would be schooled in keeping every system operational while I would have the simple duties of starting, stopping and turning. If I could get us where we were going and back safely my duties as pilot would be fulfilled. Each of us also received training in the duties of the others. You could not have too much redundancy while at war and in space.

With a crew of four it would give us each six hours of sleep while rotating shifts if we were on duty. When the hour bell sounded we all made our way to our sleeping quarters. We would have our daily sonic shower and then slide on top of our anti-grav mattress beds.

The bedding was definitely a perk of being in the USAC. You would float on top of it giving you the most restful sleep you had ever had. That was especially true for a heavy guy like myself.

Even in our excited states, the prospect of the first flying Defender class ship the following morning was not enough to keep us awake after our third day in the classroom. The needed sleep was an uneven match as we each powered up our anti-grav beds. With the ultra-dark and ultra-quiet of our personal chambers sleep came quickly.

I was the first to arrive in the mess hall the following morning. The place was abuzz with anticipation of the launch. This would be the first of the Defender series ships to take to the sky. Whoever the first of our crew was to arrive in the morning would normally wait for the others before proceeding through the chow line. In my excited state I could not wait any longer.

I expected to be chastised by the others, but my eagerness had only brought about their laughter. I had been lucky with the crew I was with. There had not been any tension between us, no hostile outbursts and no jealous or selfish behavior, other than my minor infraction of the morning.

Our squadron of 28 crewmen would pilot seven Defenders. We had 11 other squadrons training in the chamber for a total of 84 crews. If construction and training went well, we were told those numbers would be quadrupled in the coming year.

While well over 300 craft should be enough to easily handle the current four alien fighters that plagued us, it seemed we might be grossly outnumbered when the full fleet arrived. It was scary stuff given the fact that the first Defender was just preparing for its first flight ever.

When we had finished eating we were herded out into the chamber and into an area that had been setup to address everyone. As we stood talking amongst ourselves, we waited patiently for a holo-screen to appear by the giant rock wall in front of us.

When the first image came to life the crowd quickly quieted, it was David Brenner. Everyone there was well aware of whom he was, so there was no need for an introduction. He gave a short greeting and then got right into the business of the day. Crew team A1 was standing behind him along with the first Defender, A000001.

David and the crew were topside at Regents airbase. I was unsure of how the Defender had gotten from the chamber to the hangar at Regents and at the time it seemed unimportant. David talked of the mission before us, he talked of the alien fleet that was on its way and he talked of the struggle that we all would face when it arrived.

Following David we were then shown a feed directly from the White House. The President spoke frankly and largely reiterated what David had already said. He then spoke of how not only our own nation was depending on our success, but the entire world and all Mankind. It seemed a heavy burden, but it was a burden we were being trained to fully take on.

When the President had finished, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs spoke thanking us all for our efforts and reminding us again of what we would be facing. When all the speeches were over the focus was turned to the crew.

As team A1 walked towards the Defender the tail end of the craft opened and lifted like the tailgate of an old SUV. The crew then stepped up into the Defender and walked to the forward cabin. The Defender was 60 feet in length, 12 feet high and 14 feet wide. It had the uncanny resemblance of a silvery white loaf of bread. I salivated at the momentary thought of bread.

The forward cabin contained the four crew seats while a rear cabin was for the ship systems and supplies. The crewmen wore reclamation suits that would feed them through an IV and then absorb and send any waste product to a device in the rear cabin.

The waste would then be reconstituted and fed back into the IV solution as nutrition. It sounded disgusting and I loathed the thought of not being able to eat, but we had been assured that the advantages far outweighed our fears.

The tailgate of the Defender then closed and sealed. The crew were seated, connected to the ships systems and then given the go ahead to start their test flight. We stood watching the holo-screen for several minutes as the crew went through a thorough checklist. Then, in an instant, the craft went clear. Only the slightest distortion was visible as the active skin had been engaged.

The Defender next lifted slowly off the hangar floor until it was floating about three feet in the air. As the Black Hole Drive came online the craft started to move forward. A cheer arose in the crowd. The hangar doors then opened as the craft moved towards them.

What we saw next was both frightening and discouraging. The Defender turned at the last moment, sending the front end along with the BHD straight into the edge of the now open hangar door. I cringed as I waited for the craft to crash into the door, ending its maiden flight.

As the Defender reached the door there was no impact. The door just disappeared as the craft moved through it. A perfect cutout of the craft in the door was the only damage done. The black holes of the BHD had disintegrated the door material which had come into close proximity with them. The craft was undamaged.

The nearly invisible Defender then proceeded out onto the tarmac as we all looked on silently. It came to a complete stop and then hovered for most of a minute. The crew executed a 180 degree turn and then moments later the craft turned up on end with the front facing skyward.

After several seconds of standing tall the Defender then shot straight up and within seconds the distortion disappeared from view. The hush and gloom of the crowd then turned back into cheers.

The holo-screen turned to a view from the rear of the crew cabin facing forward. The sky in front of the Defender turned quickly from a pale blue to the blackness of space. The HD views from the holo-screen were breathtaking. I turned and looked behind us and the holo-screen was also projecting a view from the rear of the craft. The Earth filled the view and then began to slowly shrink as the craft continued to accelerate.

As we watched in awe the Defender slowly turned as it made its way around the back side of the Moon. It had gone from the tarmac to the Moon in under nine minutes. The pilot relayed her flight status and every three minutes like clockwork the other crewmen chirped off a status of their systems.

On its return, the Defender did another 180 degree spin and then dropped straight into the atmosphere at more than 200,000 kph. I asked Whip why everything was displayed in kilometers. Her reply was that when it came to space, everyone used the metric system. I shrugged and thought of how it was just one more thing that I would have to brush up on.

When the Defender came through the atmosphere I expected the active skin to take on a bright white glow. When the air molecules came into contact with the skin they were absorbed, passed around the craft and then re-emitted. There were no sonic booms, there were no light shows, only the peaceful amplified sounds of the crewmen breathing.

The Defender then slowed rapidly and came to a complete stop just over a meter off the ground. After a 90 degree rotation the craft floated slowly back into the hangar. There was next a gentle set down and the active skin then turned back into its silvery white color.

Minutes later the tailgate opened and the crew of Defender A000001 emerged. Again the crowd around me erupted in cheers. The maiden flight of the first Defender had been a resounding success. It was soon determined that the glitch of destroying the hangar door had come about because ring number four of the BHD was only operating at 9%.

After the other four ring parameters had been adjusted downward to match the defect, the craft was easily steerable. The trip out and around the Moon had been done at only 9% potential throttle.

I quickly did the math in my head and was salivating as I spoke of my trip to Neptune taking just over a month. That's when Whip corrected me. 9% throttle only meant the rate at which you would accelerate and not the speed at which you would travel. Theoretically, at full throttle, the Defender would reach the speed of light in about six hours, making Neptune potentially less than a day away.

David Brenner then came back on the holo-screen, offering congratulations to the crew and everyone else involved. We were then all granted a two hour celebratory break before our work would continue. I convinced the others to join me in the mess hall for the first half hour as everyone else would be crowding into the lounge. The thought of my only meal while in flight, being from an IV, had increased my appetite. The others agreed, but reluctantly so.

As we sat in the mess hall we talked about what we had just seen. It was a historic moment that we would hopefully one day be able to tell our children and our grandchildren about. We were there when the first Defender flew.

I then made the statement to the others that we were only 10.5 light years away from Epsilon Eridani. Within our lifetimes it might be possible to take the fight to the alien's suspected home world. Bigg quipped that we would have to get past the incoming alien fleet first.

Whip then raised an interesting question. Why was it that my Great Uncle, David Brenner, looked like he was only 50 years old when in reality he was closer to 90. He had explained it to me when I had first arrived. Every cell in the human body has strands of DNA. Each time a cell divides the DNA strand divides and becomes shorter and less stable. When the typical human reaches their 50s the DNA strand becomes too short to divide leaving each of us with a more rapidly aging body... no new cells.

Just about the time David had reached the 50 year mark he was diagnosed with bone cancer. He was only given months to live when his doctors were told of a radical untested therapy. David's knowledge and work was too important to lose, so David and the doctors were given the orders to undergo the treatment, no matter what the expense.

The procedure involved 36 complete bone marrow transplants over a two month period along with numerous blood transfusions and drug injections. The bone marrow and blood had been grown from a single vial of blood that been taken from David during routine tests ten years before.

The operations were excruciatingly painful and the recovery period was fraught with problems of infection. And even though the marrow was from his blood, there were problems of rejection by his body. The result had been a six month downtime from his work, but the addition of another ten years or so to his life. He had just undergone the procedure for the fourth time a year earlier.

The work involved and the number of scientists and physicians required, along with the 36 rounds of bone marrow and blood transfusions, made the whole affair extremely expensive. So much so that there was little chance of it ever making its way into the general population. David Brenner had been worth the expense and was willing to go through the pain in order to continue his work. After all, his parents and almost everyone else he had known had been taken away from him by the aliens during the S.A. The usually mild mannered David Brenner still had a score to settle.

One effect of the procedure was the renewal and repair of some of his DNA. This allowed most of his cells to continue to divide for another ten year period. The area that was largely unaffected by the procedure was the brain. His brain was 90 and it continued to age. His time with us was limited.

We continued on from the mess hall into the lounge where Pop celebrated with his Tuesday beer. When our two hours was up it was back to the classroom for our daily drilling. By the time our four month classroom training period ended, the latest crews had reached as far as the Asteroid Belt... and had achieved one quarter light speed.

There had also been one tragic mishap. Defender A000014 and its crew had been lost when it hit an asteroid at one tenth the speed of light. The result had been that the ship had made it almost completely through before the active skin had failed. The tail end of the craft had been locked in the asteroid while the rest of it had torn away.

The contents of Defender A000014, including its crew, had been sucked into space at almost 66 million kph, causing them to instantly disintegrate. After months on a high we had all been brought back to reality. Our new toys were not toys and space was once again a very dangerous place.

Just about the time of the lost Defender and crew, I had taken note of the budding romance between Bigg and Whip. Bigg was a giant when standing next to Whip's petite frame. But the attraction to one another was there. There was one problem with romance down in the chamber. It was strictly forbidden. If caught in any compromising situations there was no hearing, no trial and no court-marshal. Only prison and only solitary confinement as the secrets we each knew were of the highest security level.

Bigg and Whip were professionals and had managed to keep the relationship under wraps, with only the occasional wink, nod or mild arm hug. I could tell it was a strain to keep it on the up and up, but Bigg and Whip knew their priorities. And their priorities were to follow orders and complete the training before us.

I sympathized with them as I had my own romantic problems with my handler. Ensign Braswell had been nothing but kind and attentive to my every training need, but she had not returned any of my winks or nods. I often felt a bit jilted, but I dare not bring the subject up when we were under such strict orders. I again feared that my family name would do me no good if I got out of line in the chamber.

As far as Pop was concerned he saved his love for his Tuesday and Friday beers. He was also an avid audiophile. Almost everything of the day for music was highly compressed digital. Pop detested any sound that was not coming from an old analog style amplifier.

Almost everyone had an audio implant stuck under the skin behind an ear except for Pop. He used the old style ear-buds and an external recording amp and comm device. I sometimes wondered if that was the reason he continued to grin unstoppably.

The implant served as a communication device as well as a radio, music player and recorder. Commands to the implant were thought activated. You could change channels, pick a song or album, adjust volume and make or receive comm calls. The telephone was now only found in museums and a few third world countries. I could not imagine being without my implant for more than a few minutes.

Our final week of classroom training had been about the ship's life support systems. We would have to know the intimate details of how each and every system worked if we wanted to have any chance of a repair while in space. We could easily be unreachable and a billion kilometers away when the ship's systems went offline. There would be no rescue chopper and no tow truck to come to bring us home.