“Fielding … get these shit bags back to base and get packed. Don’t let them eat or drink. I’m going to walk back. I’m fucking starving and I want the next four hours gone.” Aymes pivoted and stalked off.
Jonah watch her go. Her short cropped black hair following the curves of her head and hips twisting heavily as her muscular thighs fought to slide past each other. He’d been with Aymes for two years now and still knew almost nothing about her. Except she was as strong as anyone he knew and one of the best unit commanders in the Navy. She kept her people awake, scared, and alive.
Jonah turned back to his troops.
“Alright, you heard the Sargent. Double time back and pack your kit before they freeze our asses.”
Pham fell in beside Jonah, jogging easily. They moved in companionable silence for a while before Jonah broke the ice. “You good?” he asked, noticing the creases in Pham’s forehead.
“Yeah, I think so” he replied. “Aymes is jumpy though. Makes me nervous.”
Jonah nodded. “Why did you agree to this mission?”
Pham shrugged, “For the money, like most of us, I suppose…but, you know…it’ll be pretty cool … first humans out there and all that.”
Jonah nodded again. “I hear that.”
“What about you?” Pham asked.
“Family reasons mainly. Back about seven generations my grandmother, with a bunch of greats in front, was surrogate mother to one of the first Dianians that flew out there. A little girl. It’s a story that’s been passed down. I’ve always wanted to see them … everything about space actually but ‘especially Dianians. I know they aren’t blood relatives or anything, but it would be cool meet some of the descendants of the baby my family had…and for the money of course.”
It was Pham’s turn to nod in agreement. “Good a reason as any.”
They lapsed back into silence and Jonah found himself mirroring Pham’s frown. He’d had had very little time to think seriously about this mission and Aymes reaction had spooked him too. In hindsight, he’d agreed, perhaps a little too quickly. Now that he had more time to think, he realized he was as nervous as all hell.
Dianians were viewed on Earth, almost like fairytale creatures. They interacted with humans all the time, via vid link, managing the nets and stuff. Other than that, Jonah didn’t know much. He suddenly wondered if they even liked humans.
In movies, Dianians were usually portrayed either as saintly martyrs tirelessly saving the human race or as a backward, impressionable alien tribe ripe for exploitation. Jonah wondered what type of welcome they were in for.
One thing was for sure, Aymes warnings about CDSE were not without cause. Jonah more than most was aware that CDSE had a terrible human rights record on Earth. He had seen the impact of their brand of commerce first hand. It caused famine and millions of refugees. More than once he had guarded a gate, stopping one starving group of refugees from getting somewhere that someone else had decided they were not allowed to go.
There was always hope that CDSE had learned from the lessons of the past, but Jonah doubted it
CHAPTER 3
The chatter in the barracks was subdued as the marines and CDSE personal packed their kit for the last time. T-minus one hour before they were all pumped full of space goo and put to sleep for the better part of twelve years. Not a great topic for light banter.
Jonah overheard Casey Renton comment to somebody, “too late to change my mind?”
Pham packed beside Jonah and heard it too.
“I think I agree with Renton,” he muttered quietly, only half joking. Jonah looked sideways at him.
“Keep it down, Pham. You’ll spook the team even more.”
“I don’t know if that’s possible,” Pham replied, glancing over his shoulder. “Look at them. They’re shitting themselves. This hypersleep shit is still pretty new. I don’t mind the trip. I just didn’t sign up to be a Guinea Pig.”
“True,” Jonah replied. “You wanna tell Aymes we’re out, or should I?”
Pham stared at Aymes huge muscular back for a moment before resigning himself to his packing. “She’d kill us right now. At least we’ll have a chance in space.” Jonah grinned at that.
Renton had finished packing early and sidled up to Jonah. Every now and again she fired a shot across his bow, trying to get him in the sack. Today however she clearly had too much on her mind to flirt. She sat watching the two of them pack, frowned nervously and picked at her short nails.
“Why do you think they took out the Dianians’ lungs?” she finally asked.
Jonah stopped packing and glared at her. “Did you listen to any of the lectures, Renton?”
“What,” she replied. “They have no lungs, right?”
“They didn’t take them out, dummass,” Pham interrupted. They never had lungs in the first place. That CDSE guy told us last week. It was some sort of freaky accident when they were engineering them, but it was too late. They had to send them anyway, before Earth suffocated.”
“Shit,” Renton observed. “I slept through that bit. So, they are like … not finished or something. That would suck.”
Pham shrugged. “According to that cultural thingymajig chick, what was her name?”
“Prudence,” Jonah filled in.
“Prudence, yeah. It’s normal for them, right? If you got a lung implant as soon as you’ were born, it would be normal for you too. They all have them. They talk with their hands.” Pham shrugged to finish his point.
Renton mulled that over for a while. Her forehead creasing with concentration. “Fricken weird though.”
Jonah stopped packing again and looked pointedly at Renton. “What’s that Renton,” he spoke sharply, clearly annoyed with her pestering.
She seemed oblivious to his abruptness. “If they could make a whole new type of human. One that could survive space travel. If they can give them a lung implant that means they never have to breathe, why couldn’t they just fix the air? Make some sort of giant machine that cleans it. Shooting a bunch of half-finished mutants, all the way out to Diana seems way harder. Let alone G-Port nets and all that shit. Earth-Net is just so,” Renton paused, lost for words, “fucking huge.”
Renton was right. It was huge. All this had been explained over endless lectures building up to their departure. Jonah had felt like he was back in high school. God knows what Renton had been doing.
Most lectures were on the Hurst-Einstein-Rosen Bridge or HERB. Invented by Audrey Hurst in 2064, the HERB was a millimeter size worm hole between two tiny black holes created in a lab. The tiny specks could be separated by any distance but remained connected because, as far as the universe was concerned, the two ends of the worm hole were essentially in the same place.
Jonah didn’t even try to understand the details of how that was achieved but practically, he understood that they acted like a tiny teleport. Very small things could be directed into one end of a HERB, and they would pop out the other end, no matter how far apart they were. If you had a lot of them, you could teleport a lot of stuff. Like a planet’s atmosphere for instance.
“I think it was simply a matter of size,” Pham offered to Renton. “Earth’s whole atmosphere was fucked. That’s a lot of air. It needed a planet sized machine to fix it. We were just lucky that the HERB nets had been invented and Diana had been discovered. Without that the Earth-Net program, we wouldn’t have happened and humans would have died centuries ago. “
Renton knew that much, of course. Everybody did. But still she chewed her lip and picked at her nails. “Would be freakin’ weird not breathing though, wouldn’t it?”
Jonah had had enough. “Renton, fuck-off and talk to someone else or I’ll stop you breathing, myself.”
She held her hands up in mock defense.” Yes, Sargent,” she replied in an exaggerated tone and stalked away.
Jonah could feel Pham looking at him.
“What,” he said, “you got something to say too? I need to pack, alright?”
“Ok, Ok,” Pham relented.
Jonah packed angrily, still aware of Pham, rummaging listlessly though his own kit.
“Sorry,” Jonah apologized after a couple of minutes. “Perhaps I am a little freaked out. And you know how Renton gets on my nerves.”
“You should just let her fuck you,” Pham offered. “Get it out of her system. She won’t have anything to do with you after that.”
“You talking from experience?” Jonah joked. Pham grinned but said nothing.
Up until then, their departure had seemed distant and hadn’t caused Jonah much concern. With an hour to go his hands were shaking so much he could barely tie the drawstring on his kit bag. It wasn’t dying that freaked him out so much. It was waking up early. After a decade or so the ships lost their atmosphere. If you woke up early, you would probably just suffocate. That image had kept Jonah awake the last few nights.
He finished packing and sat, eyes shut. Out of habit, he flicked through his VI, eventually settling on one of the piped lectures they had been forced to watch. This one Jonah actually liked. He adjusted his position on the cot as the lecturer showed the launch of Earth-Net.
Jonah skipped the part where the nets were manufactured in vast space based factories. Endless kilometers of barely perceivable spider silk ribbon, rippling in the vacuum as the HERB plants reeled them through; loading them with millions upon millions of specks of mind bending physics. He rejoined just as the delicate nets destined for Earth were floated into position at the outer edges of the atmosphere.
He turned his head and zoomed in to watch one of the jet-pods pulling the net and adjusting the trim. The interactive switched to one of the pods containing the nets destined for the distant forest moon Diana. They were sent in sections and slowly accelerated to enormous speeds by gargantuan glistening, solar sails. Solar wind gently, but constantly, pushed against these sails. Acres of tissue thin gold foil, unfurling under the guidance of tiny gas jets, eclipsing the payloads suspended almost imperceptibly in their midst. Jonah let himself relax into the image.
All this stuff was ancient history now. Almost two hundred years since the nets were launched and the planet was saved. Jonah hadn’t had to think about it during his life time at all. The atmosphere was basically fixed now. Hence the CDSE buyout and the reason he and the others were going out to Diana.
A counter at the bottom of the interactive indicated the passage of time as the vessels traveled through the years. A planetary map flew into Jonah’s vision showing the flotilla about a quarter of the distance to Proxima Centauri. The great sails slowly retracted, snaking into containment arms, surrendering their vessels to the frozen nothingness of deep space. The counter flew through almost thirteen Earth years as the capsules traveled in the vast blackness at one third the speed of light.
Jonah fast forwarded through the deceleration and the arrival of the fleet. He’d seen many animations of Diana orbiting the gas planet Hades, the pair locked in a different orbit, around the dwarf star Proxima Centauri. Just like Earth’s moon, Diana had a light and darks side. Not days and nights like a planet. Jonah skipped that too.
The interactive timeline ticked past one year before the last of the nets unfurled into position. Finally, Earth had its air condition system. Polluted air from Earth teleported to Diana where it was cleaned and sent back.
The lecturer’s voice cut through the animation.
“OK great,” he announced. “That should give you all at least a rudimentary appreciation of the scale of the Earth-Net program and the timeline, at least. One major problem remained to be solved at this point in the Earth-Net program. There was no way to complete and maintain Earth-Net without intelligent operators on Diana. Earth-Net needed local comms and monitoring as well as tug drivers for the recycling centers and a whole lot of other jobs. There was a significant amount of set-up still needed in terms of remote monitoring towers and air quality tracking etc.
At that time hypersleep technology, for long space flight was not even close to being feasible, and the best available technology for large craft was rocket with G-Port refueling and multiple burns en route. I’m sure you have heard this all before but for the sake of completeness. The craft required to deliver humans to Diana would have required heavy radiation shielding, artificial gravity and full life support systems and would have been too heavy to make it to Diana on time.
Up on the interactive now is the woman most directly responsible for providing the solution. This is Geneticist Professor Astrid Copeland.”
Jonah watched a frozen, 3D image of a woman rotating slowly within the interactive. She had a stern, competent face with straight red hair cropped into a short bob. She wore a white lab coat with the CDSE logo emblazoned across the breast pocket. Jonah paused the interactive on the next frame, at the same place he always did.
Two 3D models of a male and a female Dianian stood against a black background. Their arms held out at a forty-five-degree angle. Astrid Copeland’s Magnum Opus. The first meta-humans, purpose built from the ground up. Their rendered skin was olive with almond shaped eyes from their largely East Asian and Icelandic genetics.
Jonah zoomed in on the young woman and rotated the model. Artificial light reflected off the smoothness of her rendered skin. Her fingers and toes were thinner and longer than those of humans by just enough to look distinctly alien. She also had prominent cheekbones, slim hips, and longer legs than an average human. All side effects of the heavy genetic manipulation that permitted her to survive deep space travel.
Like many Dianians, she had icy blue eyes and pale blond hair from the Icelandic part of her heritage. The effect was startling. Logically, Jonah recognized that she was a composite model. An average Dianian, but he couldn’t shake the sense of excitement that he was actually going to meet her. He rotated her face back and forth for a while appreciating the artist who had cleverly made the young Dianian woman’s eyes follow the camera. Human, but not human.
Jonah brought up a sidebar menu, and selected respiratory and cardiovascular system. The specular reflections from the woman’s skin faded as the view in Jonah’s VI shifted to show her internal physiology. There, resting in a surgical pocket inside her abdomen was the singular object that truly marked her as Dianian.
The undulating folds of natural tissue, veins and arteries, gave way to regular, manufactured reticulations of a RICMO. A Recycling Intracorporeal Membrane Oxygenator, or lung implant. The result of a birth defect that Astrid Copeland was unable to fix before the Dianians were sent on their way.
Jonah’s concentration was suddenly interrupted by a slap on the shoulder. He opened his eyes to Pham.
“We’re off, Sarg. This is it.”
Jonah took one last look at the Dianian woman and let the image fade from his VI.
As they flung their kits into the waiting trolleys and headed to the hypersleep prep room, Jonah made one last call to his mother. Her face and voice arrived in his eyes and ears immediately. She was crying already.
“Don’t cry, Mum,” Jonah soothed, hating the high-pitched voice he used when talking to her.
“I feel like I’m never going to see you again. I might not last another twelve years let alone thirty ‘till you get back,” she pleaded.
“I don’t really have a choice, Mum. I go where they tell me. Besides, I actually want to go anyway. It’s a great opportunity for me and we get active duty pay the whole time, even in hypersleep. It’ll pretty much set me up for life. I’ve told you all this already, though. “
The pair fell silent for a time. Jonah’s mother with her head down, not making eye contact. Eventually Jonah broke the silence.
“I’m sorry, Mum but it’s part of the job. Did they give you the link to check on the ship’s progress and check on my hypersleep pod?”
Jonah’s mother nodded wiping away tears.
“I would have loved grandchildren,” she added after another long, anguished pause.
‘You’re as healthy as an ox, Mum. And not tha
t old. I’m sure you’ll be fine when I get back.”
“Too old and tired to play with grandchildren,” she accused angrily.
“I’ve gotta go, Mum. They’re taking us in.”
“I love you,” she blurted, desperately.”
“I love you too, Mum.” They both stared at each other. Neither knowing when to hang up. Finally, Jonah disconnected. The image of her face leaving a fading negative lingering in his vision.
He looked around feeling guilty and desolate. Others were clearly doing the same thing. A last call home before twelve years locked in a box in space. He wondered if everybody on the verge of a great voyage felt like this, mourning the loss of the familiar in conflict with the desire for adventure.
CHAPTER 4
Min-654MilGr gazed up wistfully at a distant firework starburst burgeoning above the roofs of skyscrapers of the great Austro-German megacity formed when Vienna and Berlin finally merged in the late 21st century.
To her eyes the image of the far away city and festivities were a gossamer veil stretched across the clear blue Diana sky. Light from Earth’s celebrations teleported instantly through endless space, to the Diana based half of the great EURO-NET, one of many nets in the planetary air conditioning system EARTH-NET.
A gentle draft tickled the fine red hair on the back of her neck and she imagined she could feel Diana’s pristine oxygen laden air drifting up and diffusing through the thin web of G-Ports, floating and invisible above. One long clean exhalation of breathable air teleported 4.2 light years through space; drifting down over the cars, trucks, and buses and the acres of glistening glass that was Earth. A dream city, superimposed against the bright blue Diana Sky.
Not for the first time, she wondered if an Earthbound counterpart looked up at their half of the net and saw a small red-headed speck looking up from the alien greenery, faintly superimposed against the night sky of Earth. She guessed the blinding flashes of the fireworks probably meant the inhabitants could barely see the surface of Diana at all on this night of nights.
Earth-Net Page 2
