“HPC-359, acknowledge,” the Hermes voice says.
James punches the comm icon with his finger, irritated. “Acknowledged, Hermes.” He closes the channel and sighs. “Well, at least the medical facilities on the Hermes are probably better than the station’s.”
“If I get probed I’m going to be upset.”
“Hopefully just a day or two here, then we’ll see if I can get authorization to fly Bernard’s back to Earth orbit. If not, we’ll catch a flight back in a Pegasus. It’ll just take longer.”
“Sunshine. Trees. Semi-breathable atmosphere. Kinda looking forward to it.”
James points out of the cockpit, past Saturn, to a bright blue star. “Home stretch.”
It’s a warm, sunny, California day with leafy trees bracketing Sarah’s backyard. Her son, Gaige, wears a baseball glove on one hand. James stands a distance away, lobbing a soft throw to him. Gaige snatches it with his glove and switches the ball to his throwing arm.
“Can’t believe how big he’s gotten,” James says to Sarah.
The ball comes sailing his way, and James catches it in his glove.
“Second grade. Time flies,” Sarah says. “You’re heading back to Washington tomorrow?”
“Closed-door testimony this time. Should be interesting. You know, last time I was there Larson met with me one-on-one, wanted us to take Goose back out, control the situation.” James laughs. “Well, that plan went to hell. I actually have no idea what he’s going to say now.”
“You think they’re going to shut down Riggs?”
James catches the ball and tosses it back to Gaige. “I don’t know. But I do know that Riggs is faster than the alien tech, and we have no other ship besides Bernard’s that can match them.” He glances at her. “You upset about Goose?”
Sarah takes a deep breath. “She was a good ship, but I have no right to be upset when I bowed out.”
James glances back at Gaige. “No worries. Your priorities were right.”
“You going to build a new ship?”
A grin from James. “Oh, of course. Take everything we learned, make something better.”
“Got a name in mind?”
“What do you think about Gossamer Goose II?”
She smiles, shaking her head. “Nah, Goose had her time, and I know you built her intending her to be my ship. The next one should be a hundred percent James Hayden.” She considers him a second. “You going to arm this one?”
James sighs. “Me and Beckman talked about this a lot, and Hitoshi weighed in, too. I always wanted these to be pure exploration ships, but the further we go, the more I realize Beckman’s right. Some options you have to pack, if you want to keep everyone safe.”
“I think you should.”
“It also means Beckman’s staying on. We’re going to need a weapons specialist. So is Ava.” He tosses the ball again. “There’s something else I wanted to tell you. Something that happened to me. When the probe jumped with me, I had an experience. It was like all of the possible paths of my life were laid out before me, and I could see how different choices would’ve played out.”
Sarah shifts. “Really? What’d you see?”
“I saw that of all the lives I could have had, the one I’m in now is the best, even if it’s not perfect. You asked me once about the photo on my desk of the blonde woman wearing the silver ring. Her name was Kate, I loved her very much, and without her, I wouldn’t be the man I am today.”
James walks along the apron of Hayden-Pratt’s Space Operations Center. When he comes to the last hangar, he stops before the white doors. With a hefty pull he slides them open. Sunlight reflects off the concrete floor, casting a warm glow through the hangar interior. The Piper Arrow 3 is in pristine condition for a ninety-year-old plane. Block letters painted across the fuselage read N147CP. James sets his hands on his hips and takes the sight of it in for a minute. He fetches the towbar, wheels out the plane, and conducts his pre-flight inspections.
Stepping up onto the wing, his slips into the cockpit and settles into the pilot’s seat. When he turns the starter, the engine rumbles to life. He leans forward and looks up. The sun is high with crystal blue sky and wispy cirrus clouds.
James sets his COM1 frequency and clicks the mic button on the yoke. “HPSO Ground, Piper one four seven charlie papa at hangar twelve, ready to taxi.”
The controller’s voice responds in his headset. “Mister Hayden, taxi via lima and hold short of runway three zero.”
James repeats the instruction, then sets his feet on the rudder pedals and opens the throttle a notch. The Piper rolls forward, turns onto taxiway lima, and comes to a stop at the hold short lines. In front of him, the huge white block letters of the runway are just off to his right, reading 30. It’s one of the six runways here, but twenty-three years ago it was the only one, sitting beside an abandoned convenience store, long ago when Hayden-Pratt was just Hayden Aeronautics, and when Hayden-Pratt’s Space Operations Center was just one future possibility in a sea of choices.
“Mister Hayden, you are cleared for take off.”
James turns onto the runway. It’s a perfect day for a flight. He’s not exactly sure where he’s going to go, but for now, up will do. As he pushes the throttle to full, the Piper accelerates down the runway, lifts off, and sails into the azure sky.
Author’s Message
Thanks for reading Janus 2. If you’ve been following the Hayden’s World series, you’ll recognize that James Hayden often is more of a catalyst in my stories than the main character. It was fun to put him behind the flight controls for this one, and learn a bit more about what James did long before he was Hayden-Pratt’s chief visionary.
If you haven’t read Erebus, or 43 Seconds, be sure to pick them up. You’ll get to learn how Gossamer Goose came to be, and fly along on the maiden voyage with her original captain, Sarah Clark.
As always, check out “The Science of the Story” on the next page if you’re interested in the real-life inspirations for this novella. At the very least, you’ll find out how we may all be extraterrestrials.
More Hayden’s World stories are in the works, so please sign up for my newsletter to receive notifications of new releases and join me on Facebook and Twitter. Also, I have a blog where I babble about everything from movie reviews to virtual flying adventures. Drop on by.
Lastly, you may have noticed I’m an indie author. Would you help me out by leaving a rating or review for this story? I don’t have a big advertising budget to help people find my stories, but I do have awesome readers like you.
Thanks again, and keep dreaming big.
The Science of the Story
In 1978, I huddled around the tv awaiting the opening credits of one of my favorite series. Ethereal music overlaid glowing nebula as a wise man’s voice said, “There are those that believe, that life here, began out there.” Moments later trumpets fanfared as Cylon raiders spun to attack, Imperial vipers responding.
Six years later, in 1984 a few geologists riding snowmobiles in the Alan Hills region of Antartica found a four-billion-year-old meteorite. The rock was duly titled “Alan Hills 84001,” sounding a bit more like an 80s rock album than a meteorite. It’s no surprise that it wasn’t from Earth — it is a meteorite, after all — but what was interesting is that it was a little piece of Mars which made its way to our blue world. Far more intriguing was the presence of magnetite crystals. On Earth, such crystals are formed exclusively by microbes. This little rock from 1984 posed a huge question: did Mars once harbor life? It also rekindled our Mars fancy, resulting in a series of missions which included the now-famous Curiosity rover, and a series of Hollywood movies ranging from awful (Red Planet) to cheesy but watchable (Mission to Mars) to excellent (The Martian).
But I diverge.
In 2018, Curiosity Rover drilled into an ancient lakebed and found all the ingredients necessary to support life. If Mars were once warmer and had lakes and rivers, and pieces of Mars have landed on Earth, could Martian life have pigg
ybacked here? The concept of life originating elsewhere - panspermia - has been around since at least the nineteenth century. More recently, in 2013 scientists proposed a concept that RNA (DNA’s precursor) would have disintegrated on early Earth due to a lack of boron. Without RNA, we wouldn’t have DNA. But Mars, with its evidence of ancient lakes and rivers, has plenty of boron. So, they asked, could RNA have developed on Mars, rode a meteor to Earth, and led to DNA-based life?
As we travel to other worlds, we face a type of reverse panspermia. NASA has strict sterilization protocols for the Mars rovers to prevent accidentally transplanting Earth life to Mars. Certainly, if a Mars rock can carry RNA to Earth, then an Earth rock could conceivable carry Earth microbes to other planets and moons. It is entirely possible that if we do find life in our solar system, it will be an offshoot of Earth’s tree of life, because it is an immigrant from Earth.
In Janus 2, Ava tells the “throw a rock to the stars” story. The distance between stars is great, but so is the timescale of Earth’s existence. If you calculate how far it is to Alpha Centauri, then divide that distance by the speed of an average baseball pitch, a baseball could get there in sixty million years. That seems like a long time, but keep in mind that tyrannosaurus rexs were running around sixty-five million years ago, right about the time when the giant asteroid that wiped out seventy-five percent of Earth’s plant and animal life formed the Chicxulub Crater. Probably some bits of Earth got blown into space from that impact. Imagine for a moment a bit of tyrannosaur-DNA heading off to Alpha Centauri. By now, it would have arrived. This sounds like a great idea for my next story.
Switching gears, a key scene in Janus 2 occurs in a complex crater ringed with towering ice spikes called penitente. This term recently got some attention due to the New Horizons Pluto mission, which found penitente on Pluto’s Tarturus Dorsus region (which, as an aside, is an awesome name). Penitente are formed when ice erodes, usually through sublimation, creating dagger-like structures rising from the ground. If you’d like to see some first hand, you can find them on Earth in the Dry Andes. Jupiter’s icy moon, Europa — another candidate for life itself — also is home to penitente. If you’re an Arthur C. Clarke fan, you may recognize Europa from the ending of 2010: Odyssey Two, where the monolith creators warn, “All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landings there.” Perhaps the penitente will keep humans away, a spiked fortification warning off visitors.
Thanks again for reading Janus 2!
The Hayden’s World Series
James Hayden has a dream, and the Riggs test vehicle is going to take him there. But when failure after failure leads to his last chance exploding spectacularly, he must partner with an AI and gamble everything for one last shot at the stars.
43 Seconds includes the bonus short Silver-Side Up, a story about two friends, a silver ship, and a perfect day for a test flight.
Life aboard the Aristarchus isn’t much of an adventure, and Kyan just wants to do his job and get back to his family. When he discovers a mysterious object at the edge of the solar system and an unexpected contact during comms loss, data running turns life-or-death thirteen billion kilometers from home.
Signal Loss includes the bonus short Last Stand, a story where Kyan testifies about the events in Signal Loss, but other agendas are in play.
Jia can’t breathe, her ship is minutes from breaking apart in Uranus’s atmosphere, and the lifepod just burned up. Things aren’t going well. When her injured engineer’s solution sends them plummeting into the icy stratosphere, they find themselves trapped in a life-or-death battle against time, the elements, and unexpected visitors.
In 43 Seconds, James Hayden took us to near-light-speed with the world’s first Riggs ship. Now, construction of the second Riggs ship is nearly complete, and in one month Sarah will take the helm. But growing opposition may shut down the program before she gets her chance. When James’s last-ditch publicity stunt traps him light-days from rescue, Sarah must decide just how far she’s willing to go to save a friend.
In Aero One, Jia nearly lost everything during her encounter with the pirate ship Maya. A year later, she’s trying to restart her life as a freelancer aboard Saturn’s newly-built Cassini Station. But Cassini has its own secrets. When a chance encounter with a past adversary sets old battles in motion, she must unravel the mystery of Titan’s Shadow before more lives are lost.
In Erebus, James Hayden sacrificed the world’s first near-light-speed Riggs ship to make a remarkable discovery on the icy moon of Janus. Now, amidst mounting concerns about that discovery’s implications, he must assemble a crew to repair his crashed ship and fly it back to Saturn’s Cassini Station. But Janus still has secrets to discover, and the alien probe’s mission may not be finished.
Get the first five Hayden’s World stories (43 Seconds, Signal Loss, Aero One, Erebus, and Titan’s Shadow) plus the two shorts Silver-Side Up and Last Stand in one bundle.
About the Author
S.D. Falchetti is a mechanical engineer by day who dreams of fantastic voyages and far, far away places at night. He thinks that The Empire Strikes Back was the best of the Star Wars movies, and still has an original AT-AT from his childhood. He lives in the Northeastern United States.
www.sdfalchetti.com
[email protected]
Copyright
Copyright © 2018 S.D. Falchetti. All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
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