by Rick Chesler
“Here come our passengers. Is it just me or does it look like Blake has his hand on Imura’s ass?”
The two men sharing the crew space with Caitlin snickered as they glanced at a different monitor closer to them, showing the same view as Caitlin’s. On the tiny screen, Blake held his free hand out in a thumbs-up gesture while he grinned up at the closed-circuit camera. Besides Imura, Caitlin could see that he was phalanxed by the other four passengers who kept their eyes straight ahead as they walked the plank, as it was known—down the hall onto the elevator that would take them to the top of the rocket—the famous exobiologist, Blake’s marketing guru, the renowned selenologist, and, ugh—the FAA drone.
“She probably can’t feel that through her spacesuit,” Paul Abbott, the mission’s Commander, quipped as he flipped some switches.
“We could have Flight pipe in her heart rate data, see if it did anything for her.” Dallas Pace was a thirty-four year-old African American who served as their Lunar Module Pilot as well as the flight’s medical doctor.
Caitlin appreciated the moment of levity. Although they were highly trained for this mission with decades of combined experience between them, she was well aware of the ever-present litany of Things That Could Go Wrong. The takeoff, the lunar landing, Earth reentry. And not just in space either, she reflected. She’d reviewed the Russian flight in the 1960s that made history as the first-ever spacewalk. The spacewalk itself had gone great. But upon return to Earth, the craft had landed off course in a densely forested mountain region and the two cosmonauts had been forced to spend a night in the freezing wilderness, fending off wolves until their ground crew could get to them. Then there was the Apollo splashdown where the capsule hatch had blown prematurely and the capsule almost sank in the ocean, taking an astronaut with it. You just weren’t safe until you were all the way back home.
All three of the crew were ex-NASA, members of the ever-growing Astronauts-Who’ve-Never-Been-to-Space club the agency seemed to cultivate thus far in the 21st century. They’d each made the personal giant leap to the private space industry in the hopes of seeing the fabled black sky through a window instead of on a screen in their professional lifetimes. With Outer Limits, and definitely with Black Sky, it seemed they’d hit the jackpot. The moon. Mars was also a target, but so far, too far away into the future. The moon was doable right here, right now.
Caitlin turned to her associates. “Well, boys, after this trip we’re space virgins no more.”
Paul clicked a dial through various positions while staring at a digital readout. “You know what they say,” he said without looking up from what he was doing. “You never forget your first time.”
A new voice crackled through the communication loops, that of a throat clearing. “Ahem, gentlemen and lady, let’s stay focused here, okay?” Ray McCullough, one of a half-dozen Flight Controllers, spoke to them from behind the blue mirrored glass of the Flight Control Building a hundred yards away. Caitlin flashed on last night at Dos Pueblos as she matched Ray’s scruffy face with the voice, ensconced in the cactus-shrouded back patio at a table for two over plates of enchiladas and prickly pear margaritas, the evening air still 100 degrees, her emotions even hotter.
She keyed her transmitter. “Copy that, Ray, all systems nominal, monitoring countdown, passengers boarding. Command Module standing by, over.”
Caitlin saw an indicator light blink on in front of her. She watched as the capsule door slid open below them and Blake Garner stepped into the passenger bay followed by his handpicked team. Well, handpicked except for James Burton, that is. One by one they crossed over the threshold. Burton in particular seemed a little freaked out.
Meanwhile, the artificial voice continued her emotionally flat countdown.
6 | Liftoff
Caitlin Swain finished running through yet another checklist and turned to look down on the passenger bay as The Voice told her it was T-minus five minutes. The six passengers had taken their respective launch stations but presently an argument —maybe that was too strong a word — but a disagreement of some sort had been building between Blake and his Marketing VP, Suzette Calderon. Caitlin had worked with Suzette before for numerous Outer Limits promotional productions, and knew that the woman was a fiery Latina who insisted on getting her way – and that Blake was used to giving it to her.
There wasn’t a lot of small talk. The rest of the passengers seemed preoccupied with triple-checking their launch seat harnesses while Blake pointed an accusatory finger Suzette’s way. “I’m not blind. That camera doesn’t fit into the restraint, it’s too large. That’s not the one we spec’d out.”
Suzette shrugged. “It’s a bit bigger, but it has way more megapixels, so it’s entirely worth it.” With some effort, she snapped the device into a bulkhead recess and settled back into her seat, apparently satisfied.
Caitlin tuned out the conversation before she had the chance to hear Blake acquiesce as she knew he would. She did a final visual sweep of the passenger bay before her attention would be consumed completely by the control panels that surrounded her. James Burton was the last of them to stop obsessing over his restraint harness and now he fixated on Blake’s interaction with Suzette.
Martin Hughes gazed blankly at the wall, completely content. She had no idea how the hell he remained so tranquil. It wasn’t drugs, she knew; all eight of them had been subjected to the mandatory testing this morning. Forging out into the cosmos, she supposed. It wasn’t just a look of serenity. Hughes seemed to be positively beaming due to some kind of inner peace.
Meanwhile, the FAA man frowned as he watched the Blake-Suzette exchange and wrote something down in a small notepad. He’d been told that, as with commercial airline flights, no electronic devices of any kind would be permitted during sensitive operations like takeoffs and landings. Caitlin agreed with this, but at the same time she thought it was Blake’s way of limiting the FAA’s in-flight record-keeping capabilities. She agreed with that, too. Especially when it came to Burton, she thought, watching him underline something he wrote with a flourish.
And then it was time.
“…minus twenty, nineteen, eighteen…”
Caitlin willed the butterflies from her stomach, the “this-is-it-it’s-finally-happening” thoughts making her want to scream with joy and cry at the same time. A lifetime of devotion, training and singular focus was culminating with this launch. She looked over at her fellow crew; their steely-eyed gazes roving the sea of switches, knobs, buttons and lights filled her with confidence. They were good men. No, great men.
And then, over the comm loops she heard Ray’s throaty rasp confirming some expected weather activity in the mid-atmosphere.
There’s another great man. If only…
She had to abort her train of thought as The Voice demanded her utmost concentration.
“…three, two, one…ignition. Have a pleasant spaceflight!”
Caitlin felt the familiar rumble as the vibrations of the Boeing consumed her. There were scarcely words to describe the incredible, unnatural amount of power coming to life beneath their feet. She cleared her mind of all things extraneous. As always, she would be mentally prepared for anything.
Outside, Caitlin could picture the support apparatus that held the great machine in place on the launch pad falling away. She felt the rocket lift from the ground. Then a rush took hold, a sense of duty combined with a familiar set of tasks she was capable of completing almost by rote, and she gave her mind over completely to the job of being an astronaut.
Two minutes later, passing through a cloud layer, she glanced back at the passengers and noticed a thin line of blood on the selenologist’s forehead. Immediately, Caitlin heard the woman cry out through her headset. Caitlin was about to say something when a flash of bright light made her head turn.
The master alarm rang in her ears and her warning panel lit up like the tree at Rockefeller Center.
7 | Murphy’s Law
“Flight, this is Capsule Comman
d, you read?” Caitlin repeated the question for the third time while Paul and Dallas tried to interpret the chaos of flashing instrument lights and braying alarms.
“Electrical system took a hit,” Paul stated without emotion, throwing switches on the console with practiced skill.
“Ground comm’s out,” Caitlin said.
“We’re still in the clouds,” Dallas confirmed, eschewing instrumentation to look out the capsule window. “Three minutes, ten seconds post-launch. Losing gravity soon.”
Caitlin glanced down at the passengers again. Still strapped into their seats, still conscious. They were the priority. Asami Imura, the moon scientist, held two fingers of her right hand up to her forehead, but otherwise seemed alright. Caitlin was about to try the internal comm system to ask about the selenologist when a raspy voice crackled its way through her headset.
“…-opy that… —ing up, over.”
Ray. Right now, his throaty rasp was the most beautiful voice in the world. “Ray, I copy. Lost you for a bit. Electrical’s wonky, over.”
“You took a lightning strike 180 seconds after liftoff,” Ray said urgently. “We saw it—the bolt traveled all the way to the ground through your ionized gas plume. We lost flight telemetry for a few seconds but now it seems to be back.”
The crew’s eyes locked on one another with realization. “We saw a bright flash,” Caitlin confirmed to Ray.
“Do me a favor and try switching Main to Aux,” Ray said.
Paul found the switch and threw it. Instantly the Scrabble board of colored lights returned to normal.
“That did the trick,” Caitlin relayed to Ray. She breathed a sigh of relief. They would not have to abort the mission.
Ray’s next transmission confirmed that thought. “Proceed to parking orbit. We’ll do diagnostics from there.”
“Parking orbit” referred to a low-earth orbit trajectory where the spaceship could essentially sit idle and revolve safely around the Earth while the craft was examined.
“Copy that, Ray, we’re punching through to LEO now. See you on the other side, over.”
Ray’s voice was replaced by another Controller’s, and for the next several minutes a stream of technical chatter concerned with things like “escape velocity,” “main engine burn,” and “flight profile” filled the comm loops. Caitlin followed the conversation as she examined her controls, looking for signs that anything was not right. They only needed the big rocket for one more burn on the way to the moon—the one that would free them from Earth’s orbit.
Something caught Caitlin’s attention outside the window. Nothing specific, but a difference from moments before...black sky. She noted the dark velvet world outside her window, then looked back down at her controls.
Wait a minute. She whipped her head up and peered out the window again. With all the simulators she’d been in that provided realistic computer renderings to recreate specific flights, it had taken her a second to realize that this black sky was the real deal.
You’re in space.
And then it grew eerily quiet as the roar and rumble of the main rocket engines cut out. Caitlin recognized the softer hiss of smaller thrusters that now leveled out their ship so that they wouldn’t be tumbling end over end while orbiting the Earth.
Paul spoke into his comm unit. “Flight, Cap-Com here. Commencing diagnostics, over.” A series of computer programs began checking for errors relating to the capsule’s electrical system. Paul and Dallas monitored their progress while Caitlin turned and looked down into the crew bay.
All five passengers were still strapped to their seats, but she was surprised to see a tangible reminder that they had arrived in space. A video camera floated in the weightlessness, seemingly suspended in midair as if by magic.
Blake pointed to the camera. “Really, I don’t get off saying I told you so, Suzette.”
The others turned their heads to follow Blake’s finger. Their eyes lingered on the ultra high definition camcorder as it tumbled end-over-end in slow motion.
“God damn it, Suzette!” Asami Imura turned to glare at the Marketing VP. “Blake told you that thing was too big for the mount and you tried to force it anyway.”
“Relax. It’ll still work. Nobody got hurt.”
Asami pulled her hand down from her forehead and turned her head in Suzette’s direction. A thin gash across her right temple oozed blood. “What else are you going to be wrong about on this mission?”
James Burton had perked up considerably, shaking off the rush of the launch like a rider stepping off a rollercoaster and ambling away, wondering what else the park had in store. He scribbled in his pad, eyes darting from Asami’s forehead to the suspended camera to its failed mounting bracket and back to his notes.
Blake’s eyes widened at a developing situation he saw as a potential threat to Outer Limits’ perfect safety record. The Perfect Safety Record must not be jeopardized. The space tourism industry was still in its infancy, and nothing but perfection would lead to further flights. If Outer Limits couldn’t deliver, then there were half a dozen other private space outfits waiting in the wings—Black Sky chief among them. And they currently waited not in the wings, but on the moon, Blake reflected.
“Ladies, please. Relax. We followed protocol, the camera was secured, it came loose. No one is at fault.”
“What about that flash of light—what was that?” This from Martin Hughes, who appeared a bit flushed from the experience, but contained.
“It happened right after I got hit by the camera,” Asami said. “At first I thought I was seeing stars from being hit in the head. Scared the shit out of me,” she finished, narrowing her eyes at Suzette.
“We were hit by lightning,” Caitlin called down from the control deck. At this the passenger bay became silent. “No serious damage,” Caitlin explained. “Flight Control just gave us the okay to head for the moon. We just wanted to double-check the capsule electrical system while in orbit before we made the rest of the trip.”
Blake looked up at Caitlin and gave her a big smile and a thumbs-up sign. “The lightning is no one’s fault, people, except maybe God’s.”
Martin, the exobiologist, winced at the statement. Then he swept a large hand out at the thick carpet of stars visible through one window and the blue Earth from the opposite. “You don’t truly attribute all this to a god, do you, Blake? Surely He doesn’t watch over us, at any rate, or we wouldn’t have been struck by lightning in the first place, right?”
Blake let fly an exasperated sigh and was about to reply when a motion suddenly distracted him. The floating camera had slow-tumbled its way to within Asami’s grasp. She snatched it out of the air, pressed the Record button and turned the cam around on herself.
“Next time, Suzette, you ask before you go changing specs on your own,” she said, flipping the lens the bird. Then she flung it through the weightlessness back to Suzette, who never took her eyes off Asami as she cradled the spinning camera into her gut.
Asami stared the VP down but said nothing else as a drop of blood broke free from the gash on her temple. The scarlet globule floated before her eyes in the weightlessness, a crimson bauble representing a tiny but undeniable piece of her humanity.
“Medic,” she calmly requested through her headset.
Dallas was there quickly. With expert, economical movements calculated to counteract the lack of gravity, he cleaned, sterilized and bandaged the skin over Asami’s right eye.
“You’re good to go,” he pronounced, kicking off a bulkhead and grabbing strategically placed handholds to pull himself back “up” to the control deck, although that directional term no longer held any real meaning.
After a short countdown, the main engines fired and their craft accelerated deeper into space. Asami’s suspended blood drop was thrust into motion, splashing into a window through which Caitlin could now see the moon.
8 | Separation Anxiety
Forty hours later
Caitlin Swain took a deep bre
ath as she tried not to think about the quarter of a million miles that now separated her from home. The lunar surface slid beneath them from an altitude of about forty miles. During the last couple of days, she had watched the moon grow steadily larger in her window until now it filled her entire view. No longer simply a sphere hanging in blackness, the moon’s surface was a grayscale world with visible terrain including vast craters, flat plains and epic mountain ranges. This lunar relief map was rife with navigational hazards for their fragile craft. Caitlin took two more deep breaths to calm her nerves while reminding herself that a small flotilla of robotic reconnaissance orbiters had, in the years prior to this mission, mapped out their landing region—and that of rival Black Sky—in ultra-high definition detail.
It both relaxed her and induced anxiety that she would have little control over their descent to the moon. Dallas Pace, M.D., their Lunar Module Pilot, was in charge of that crucial leg of their journey, and he was as competent as one could be who had never actually done it. Still, she thought, peering into a huge crater that occupied her entire field of view, and then spotting another crater deep inside of that one, she would be glad once they touched down safely.
Caitlin’s current train of thought had begun about thirty minutes ago when they had transferred from the Command Module, where they’d cocooned for the last two days, to the Lunar Exploration Module. The LEM, as it was called for short, was actually larger than the Command Module since it would serve as their habitat while on the moon. At the end of their lunar stay, the LEM would take them back up to rendezvous with the Command Module for the return trip to Earth.
Caitlin and Dallas, instead of being seated above the passengers on a separate flight deck, were now situated on the same level as them but out to one side in a control alcove. Paul Abbott, as the Commander of the entire mission, would be the only member of the team to stay behind with the Command Module and orbit the moon while the other seven people rode the Lunar Module to the moon’s surface.
