It turned out that the Corps actually monitored a number of Class I planets, always seeking out useful technologies and knowledge. Just as with most human activity, it was a mix of good and bad, and pure evil. The Corps didn’t discuss what they found outside of the higher command, but they were aware.
“So, after we get through the training session, can I count on you?” Lewis asked the trio, whom Bill was starting to think of as the Three Amigos.
Bill and Matt turned to Jordan. Nothing was happening unless he agreed.
After several seconds, Jordan finally said, “Yeah. What the fuck. I’m in.”
The other two nodded, each saying “I’m in.”
“Okay, then. We’ll start prepping you. Lots of culture and history you’ll need to know before you cross over. You can tell your wife,” he said to Bill, “and if you marry that fine Kiwi, you can tell her,” he said to Matt. “Otherwise, tell nobody. If this was the Hayek Defense Forces, we’d classify this as Top Secret, Kill. Got me?”
All three nodded.
“Outstanding.” Turning to Bill, he said, “Until the new Probies show up, I want you and Meri to take some time off, and don’t either of you report in for at least forty-five days. Got that?”
“Yes sir,” Bill responded.
“Okay, then. Get outta here.”
The three stood and left.
Several hours later, the Clark family was ensconced in Lewis Landing, a small homestead on the banks of the Nisqually River in Cascadia. It was originally founded by Meri’s grandfather and was now a vacation retreat from the hectic Corps schedule that Commandant Lewis and the Clarks operated under.
Bill managed to get some spring Chinook salmon fishing in, so supper consisted of a baked salmon. Meri did an amazing job, which wasn’t difficult, considering the quality of the fish. Regardless, her culinary skills pushed the supper into extravagant territory.
“So, how’d the meeting with Dad go?” Meri asked over the meal.
“Interesting,” Bill said. “Did you know that, as prime witnesses to the Gaia Firsters’ sabotage, we’re gonna have to stay around for the trial?”
Meri nodded.
“Are you also aware that we’ll be helping out with the new Probies?”
Again, she nodded. “What about after that, though?” she asked.
“Well, how well do you know Earth history, especially U.S. history?”
“A bit. It’s part of our education, but not a major focus. Why?”
“What do you know of the Confederate States of America?”
PART THREE
EXPLORER
51
The late spring wind whipped down from Mt. Tahoma, as cold as Bill’s heart. Memorial services were never easy to sit through, particularly when you were the one who had to recover the bodies.
That could’ve been me, he thought. Turning to look at his young wife, Meri, he modified that thought. That could’ve been us.
Meri sensed his attention, turned, and gave him a slight smile, her blue eyes crinkling under her red hair. Reaching out with a free hand - the other held their infant son Jack in her lap, she took his hand in hers, squeezing it. He squeezed back.
Jack Lewis, Commandant of the Corps of Discovery, was at the podium, giving a brief eulogy of the flight crew, all four of whom had perished when their survey plane was sabotaged while conducting an aerial survey of Planet 42.
Bill listened without really paying attention. His mind was back on the Sudanian savannah, putting the desiccated remains of the crew members in body bags. That’s where Bill and the recovery crew had found them, their parachutes deliberately cut to shreds so that even jumping from a damaged aircraft was a death sentence.
If Ben and Meri hadn’t gotten us down safely, we’d have jumped too. With the same end result.
Shaking his head, Bill thought, Snap out of it. You’re an Explorer, not some ‘poor, poor pitiful me’ Earther whiner.
He was snapped out of it by the sound of many people rising from seats. The memorial service was too big for the base’s auditorium, so it had been held at Bowman Field. Thousands had attended. Every Explorer who was free made it, along with many residents of the nearby city of Milton. Bill rose with the others, bringing his attention back to the ceremony.
On either side of the large podium from where Lewis spoke were S-1 survey planes, better known as Monarchs. The exact same type of plane that the dead crew had flown in. In front of the podium were four wooden coffins, draped with the flag of Hayek. The stylized porcupine with the words “Don’t Tread On Me” were clearly visible from Bill’s position in the front row.
A column of Explorers came from one side of the podium, and four Explorers each took ahold of one of the simple wood coffins and carried them to pre-dug holes at the edge of the airfield.
Gently, the coffins were laid in place.
Lewis rendered a slow salute toward the coffins as they were lowered. Bill, along with everyone else, followed suit with either a salute or placing their hands over their hearts. A young woman in the Corps’ distinctive brown field uniform appeared at the rear of the graves. Raising a bugle, she began to play “Taps”. Bill was familiar with it from his days as a boy scout on Earth, but this was the first time he had heard it played on Hayek. It was a lot different hearing it at a memorial than hearing it when a flag was lowered.
Day is done, Bill thought along to the bugle, remembering the lyrics to the tune, gone the sun, from the lake, from the hills, from the sky. All is well, safely rest, God is nigh. His eyes watered and a lump formed in his throat, making it tough to swallow.
Meri leaned into him, holding onto his arm.
The memorial service over, Bill was more interested in leaving than hanging around. That wasn’t to be, though.
Before he and his small family could bolt, he heard the Commandant calling him.
Turning back, he saw Lewis waving to him, surrounded by a small group of people.
“Better head over.” Meri nodded in the Commandant’s direction.
“Think he’ll notice if we leave?”
Meri punched him in the arm. “Get over there,” she commanded, softening the words and action with another smile.
“Yes, dear.” Bill rubbed his arm, then rapidly leaned away as his wife raised her fist to pummel him again.
The three headed over to the small group surrounding the command. As they approached, Lewis said to his companions, “This is the man who led the expedition to retrieve the downed crew.”
It was then that Bill realized that the group consisted of the surviving family members of the four Explorers just buried.
The group was a mix, ranging in age from a toddler to several elderly people with gray hair. One, a young woman holding the hands of a toddler, was wearing the Corps of Discovery Explorer uniform.
“Hi,” Bill said, not knowing what else to say.
He was immediately engulfed by an older woman, who sobbed her thanks while holding him. Bill patted her on the back, feeling out of his depth.
Finally, the lady let go, stepped back, and wiped her eyes.
Bill looked at the group. “Actually, the person you should be thanking, besides the Commandant, here,” he gestured to Lewis, “is Jordan Washington. He’s the one who went out into the savannah by himself to recover their bodies.”
The Explorer in the group nodded, understanding just how much peril Jordan had put himself.
“Will we get a chance to thank him personally?” an older man asked.
Bill turned toward Lewis, waiting for him to respond.
“He should be there this evening.”
Bill raised a questioning eyebrow.
“Oh, I thought you knew. I told Meri, but I guess I forgot to mention it to you. There’ll be a small gathering this evening in my quarters. Just the families and the recovery team.”
“Well, I doubt that I’d miss that,” Bill said dryly.
Meri, being the daughter of the Commandant of the Corps of D
iscovery, took advantage of this by staying in the Commandant’s quarters upon their rescue from Planet 42. The small Clark family had a suite of rooms off the main room, so there was no way to avoid the gathering after the funeral.
More like an Irish wake, Bill thought, as he picked up a couple of whiskeys from the temporary bar the Commandant had set up in the living room. The quarters, while relatively large, were also crowded to capacity by the bereaved and the recovery team.
Since the recovery had been less than a week ago, it hadn’t been too long since Bill had had the opportunity to engage with others on the recovery team. He was pleasantly surprised to find that not only was Jordan there, but also his former roommate and best buddy Matt Green, along with the pilot, Mindy Hubert. The two gate operators, Ken Tanaka and Estela Cruz, were also present.
Good thing this event’s limited to family and those of us who were actually there, Bill thought, or else a bunch of us would be outside in the cold.
Bill was glad he wasn’t the center of attention, watching Jordan struggle with all the praise heaped on him by the dead Explorers’ family members.
Handing one of the whiskeys to his wife, he nodded toward Jordan. “He’s a braver man than I.”
“Malarkey,” she said. “He got dragged here. What you did with Ben’s parents was brave. Hell, what you did for the past year was brave, so don’t go downplaying your accomplishments, doofus.”
Bill thought back to their long trek across the planet after their own Monarch went down near the Eurasian Alps. Ben Weaver’s piloting skills were what had saved his crew, but Ben didn’t make it, having been eaten by sharks in the Caribbean. Ben’s parents were at the memorial ceremony just a short time ago. Meri’s comment was about when Bill presented them with his personal belongings they had carried for the remainder of the trek.
Matt joined the couple. “I hear you got Nicole to watch the little monster.”
“He’s not a monster,” Meri said, defiantly. “Besides, she wanted to.”
“Well, hopefully, she won’t get any ideas,” Matt said.
Bill just smiled.
52
Two days later the Clarks were enjoying a respite from the crowds of Sacagawea Base, relaxing in the relative quiet of Lewis Landing, a small cabin on the banks of the Nisqually River. The cabin, along with several hundred hectares, had been in the Lewis family since shortly after the first gate from Earth was opened, almost forty years ago.
Meri had told Bill that while she was growing up, she and her father would visit it every month for a weekend or two. They would also spend an entire month there each fall, salmon fishing. From Bill’s experience, he knew this meant a whole lot of fishing, and big fish, too. Without the decimation of the salmon runs on Earth that resource exploitation, heavy urbanization, and animal agriculture caused, the runs on Hayek were a sight to behold. Of course, this also meant that many of the larger animals that feasted on salmon, such as grizzly bears, still roamed around the Salish Sea edges. Bill had stopped thinking of the large body of water as the Puget Sound.
The spring Chinook salmon run was still on, so the two spent several hours a day over the course of several days fishing, mostly doing catch-and-release while retaining one salmon each day for eating. Bill waded in the river to fish. Meri fished from shore, because Jack was strapped to her chest in a baby carrier. Neither parent thought wading out into a potentially dangerous river with a baby strapped onto oneself was a particularly good idea.
Cognizant of the potential danger posed by the abundant wildlife, both Bill and Meri would glance around before each cast, ensuring that nothing big and hungry was about to participate in a meal consisting of a Clark. On one such cast, Bill’s eyes settled on Meri. Feeling his eyes upon her, she looked at him and smiled. The smile made her face light up, taking the serious edge of fishing off it for the moment.,
Man, how did I ever get so lucky? Just as Bill thought that, there was a sharp yank on his line, almost pulling the rod out of his hands. Turning his attention back to fishing, Bill spent the next fifteen minutes battling what he thought had to be the biggest fish of his entire fishing career.
Finally, after landing the salmon, he was surprised to see it was no bigger than the one before. I must be getting tired.
Bill knew it was only a dream, but the PTSD didn’t care. The PTSD wanted to remind him that he was almost killed when a cave bear broke into the hobbit-hole, the small abode they occupied with Karen Wilson, the fourth companion of their trek, during their winter on the Great Plains. Bill kept firing until his rifle ran empty, then threw himself on his wife and infant son to protect them.
The pain from the slash across his back woke him. Bathed in sweat, he could feel the scars from the bear’s claws burning. He was panting and sitting up. By the light of the moon entering through the bedroom’s window, he could see Meri looking at him from her position in the bed next to him.
“Rough one?” she asked, keeping her voice down so as not to wake Jack.
“Cave bear,” he replied in the same voice, low, but not a whisper.
Reaching over, she rubbed his bare back, over the barely healed scars. “He’s dead. You’re not,” she said, reaffirming their position in life, trying to beat back the post-traumatic stress before it took a stronger hold on him. “You want to go back to base today and see the counselor?”
“Naw. I’ll be seeing her the day after leave is up, so no rush. I’ll manage.”
Looking at his chronograph, Bill saw it was almost five in the morning.
“Don’t think I’m going back to sleep.” He tossed the blanket off and moved his legs over the edge of the bed. “Want some coffee?”
“Sure.”
Bill got up, glancing over to where Jack was sleeping in the crib. The infant was on his stomach, flannel, onesie-clad butt high in the air, and blanket off. He readjusted the blanket over his son’s body before leaving the bedroom.
He returned ten minutes later with two cups of coffee. Sitting back down on the bed, he handed one to Meri.
The two drank the brew in silence. Looking out the window, Bill could see the landscape bathed in the late full moonlight. Dawn wasn’t for another hour and a half.
This break would soon end: Bill remembered that both his and Meri’s fathers would be arriving later for a small family get together.
It was shortly before lunch when the two fathers arrived. Bill’s dad, David Clark was a recent immigrant to Hayek. Jack Lewis looked a bit like his daughter, but his red hair was turning gray. It looks a whole lot grayer than before our trek, Bill thought, as he greeted the two men. Bill’s dad’s hair was also grayer. I can’t imagine it was easy on either of them, he thought.
It had been less than a month since Meri, Little Jack, Bill, and their survey commander, Karen Wilson, had been rescued from Planet 42. During their nearly year-long trek across the planet, David Clark had decided to resign from the US Air Force and migrate to the parallel Earth, Hayek, to be closer to any possible activity related to his missing son. Naturally, he and Jack Lewis had hit it off.
While Bill got the grill going, Meri offered to get the men drinks.
“Gee, now that I’m no longer pregnant, I think I’ll even have a drink,” she said, before disappearing back into the cabin. This statement caused a chuckle among the three men: the entire time Meri was pregnant, she and Bill were trekking across Planet 42 subsisting on the land, and the only thing they had to drink was water or whatever tea-like concoction Meri could conjure up from the local flora.
The late April weather was still too cold to enjoy lunch on the deck, but that didn’t stop the four of them from congregating around the warming grill enjoying their beers.
“Man, I missed that,” Bill said, after taking a deep draught. The other two men nodded in understanding.
“So, what’s next for you two?” David asked.
“Well,” Meri said, “since we’ve got a child, the Corps will only let one of us at a time go out on any sur
veys now. And I do believe my crazy husband has already volunteered for another one.”
Bill nodded.
David raised an eyebrow, giving Bill and Meri a questioning look.
Bill shook his head. “Sorry, Dad. Classified.” David nodded in understanding. Bill also saw Jack give a perceptible nod. David, not being a part of the Corps, wasn’t authorized to know things the Corps didn’t want people outside the organization to know.
Jack spoke up. “What I can tell you, though, is that until Bill goes through the gate, he’s going to be spending a lot of time in training, and Meri’s going to be training Probies on survival tactics.
“Oh, didn’t I mention that before?” he asked, looking like butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. Looking at Meri, he said, “You and Karen are being assigned to training, and what better place to be than in survival training? Hell, you three wrote the book on it. You made history with your trek. Not just across one continent, but an ocean and another continent.”
“Just to set the record straight,” Bill said, “I’ll give you the ocean. But we only crossed parts of two continents. We never made it across a whole one.”
“Either way you’ve trekked further than anyone in Corps history.”
Meri looked at Bill. “Can’t argue with that one.”
“No. Can’t say that I can, either,” Bill agreed.
“So, in a bit over a month,” Jack said, “we’ll be getting a new batch of Probies in from Earth and all over Hayek. We’re also getting some in from some of the other planets in the multiverse. First time for that.”
“How’s that going to change things?” Bill asked.
“First off, they’re probably more in tune with survival than those from Earth. Second, they may have an inferiority or superiority complex. Not sure yet.” Looking at Bill, he asked, “You remember what it was like being a Probie?”
Bill nodded. He had felt completely out of his element.
“Remember what it was like talking to native Hayekers?”
The Corps of Discovery Trilogy Box Set: Books 1-3: A multiverse series of alternate history Page 57
