Galaxia

by Kevin McLaughlin

  He used the Hopper’s computer to cycle the airlock, closing the inner doors and opening the outer ones once the air was vented out. Pat cursed twice while the vents slowly did their work. He tapped his foot the entire time. Every second mattered right now. Every second put Carmen a little further away.

  The moment that the outer doors were open enough to let the Hopper out, Pat released the magnetic locks on the hull and activated the thrusters. Acceleration shoved him back into his harness as he jetted clear of the shuttle. He got a quick glance at the cockpit. The window was a ruin. There was nothing left of it, and he could see how they would have been flung free.

  He wasn’t going to find Pierce. The man’s body was lost out there in the black. But Carmen’s suit had a strong transponder. The Hopper was designed to be able to handle emergencies like this one. He could track her suit.

  Pat’s fingers raced over the keys, setting up the system. There! He had a signal. It was miles back, faint with distance, but it had to be her. He cranked the thrusters up as high as they would go. The Hopper leapt toward her at his command, the shuttle vanishing from sight.

  He turned on his radio and set it to the same channel Carmen’s suit would be using. “Carmen, can you hear me?”

  No response.

  Pat’s heart ached with fear. He had to be in time. She couldn’t be gone. He’d find her, get her into the Hopper somehow, and then…

  How was he going to get her into the Hopper?

  He didn’t have a space suit, and the Hopper didn’t have an airlock.

  “Shit.”

  It was too far to get her back to the shuttle. The thing was flying away from them at top speed. Fred would bring it back around, but it would take time – time Carmen didn’t have. She needed air. Which meant he needed to get her inside the Hopper fast. If her suit was empty, then every second counted. He was going to have to get creative.

  There she was! He saw the glint of sunlight against her suit. “Carmen, I see you. Hold on. I’m coming,” he said into the radio microphone. Pat didn’t know if she could hear him or not. There wasn’t any response. He didn’t know if that was because her radio out, or if she’d passed out. How long had she been out there? How many minutes since her bottle had run dry?

  He started to decelerate. If the Hopper was going too quickly he could smack right into her, or pass by completely. Carmen’s still form kept getting larger as he got closer. Just a little more reverse thrust… He slowed the Hopper down to a crawl and came up right alongside her. She still wasn’t moving. If she was conscious, she’d have done something – waved, wiggled, something. Pat’s heart was in his throat, seeing her drifting there motionless. She was only out here because of him.

  A few keystrokes brought the electromagnets on the Hopper’s rear to life. A few gentle puffs of the thrusters brought those magnets close enough for them to pull the metal in Carmen’s suit close. There was a soft thudding sound as her suit came to rest against the Hopper.

  Now for the hard part.

  Pat’s hands raced over the keyboard, overriding safety features. Damned if they hadn’t made this hard to do, but he knew all the back doors to make things happen on this machine. Air began to hiss out of the Hopper back into the storage tanks. The air pressure gauge rapidly plummeted from one hundred percent downward. It started getting harder to breathe fast. Pat grabbed a small air tank from the emergency kit. The Hopper didn’t have a suit for him, but the air would keep him going. The pressure went below 50%. Pat staggered to the rear of the hopper. He wouldn’t have a lot of time. Even with oxygen, the low pressure would knock him out and then kill him if he didn’t reverse it fast. Sparks flashed in front of his eyes. He slapped the panel on the back of the ship, and the door slid open. Air rushed from the Hopper out into space, and the ship obligingly pumped more in, trying to keep the interior at forty percent pressure.

  The result was a whirlwind, air pouring through the ship. Pat hoped that the lower pressure might keep the wind down just enough…

  He reached through the opening into space. There was nothing out there but a long fall into forever. If he slipped, lost his grip on the ship, he’d drift away and die in minutes. One hand locked on a loop of Carmen’s space suit. He pulled, hard, and yanked her free of the magnets. With an effort he brought her the rest of the way into the hopper and slapped the panel to shut the door again. It slid shut, and the wind stopped.

  Pat floated there a moment, shuddering, gasping. He wasn’t thinking clearly. The air was still too thin. He saw the oxygen mask, snatched it from where it was floating and took a breath. Cool air flowed into his lungs, and almost instantly he felt a little stronger. His fingers hurt where he’d grabbed Carmen’s suit. He ignored the pain and pushed himself back to the controls, reset the atmosphere to normal. Air hissed back into the cabin.

  Carmen still wasn’t moving. She was in her suit – he had to get her out! He grasped the helmet and worked the catches free. The movement was difficult – his right hand was stiff, as well as sore, and swollen. The helmet came free. There wasn’t a hiss. Her air bottle had been completely empty.

  Pat looked down. Carmen wasn’t breathing. He felt for a pulse in her neck, and for a terrible moment couldn’t find one. There it was! His own heart leapt in his chest. Her heart still beat, but he needed to get her breathing again. He pushed Carmen against the wall of the Hopper and braced her there carefully, one of his arms holding both of them in place while the other tilted her chin up. He took a deep breath – the air in the Hopper was blessedly back to normal. He brought his lips to hers. She was still warm. He remembered their first kiss, and hoped more than he’d ever wished for anything that this wouldn’t be their last.

  He exhaled into her mouth, and felt her lungs expand. Pat took another breath, and exhaled between her lips again, breathing for her.

  He waited, watching to see if there was any reaction. His fingertips found her pulse more easily this time. Was her heart beating a little more strongly? He took another breath, placed his mouth over hers, and exhaled again. Her lungs rose, fell. He took a deep breath and went to breathe for her again, but as soon as his lips brushed hers, Carmen began to cough. Patrick held her gently as her body took over breathing again. He brought his oxygen mask up to her mouth and held it there while she took long, gasping breaths.

  Carmen opened her eyes. Her smile broke his world and remade it again in an instant.

  “I love you,” he said.

  Her smile grew. “I know,” she mouthed.

  Chapter 20

  CARMEN WATCHED from the Tower as another dome was inflated with fresh air mined out of the very surface of the moon. The Tower – everyone on site was already calling it that – wasn’t very big yet. But it would be, in time. It was two stories tall, and would grow to at least fifty. One nifty thing about lower gravity – you could build a crazy tall structure. The plan was to extend the height of the tower clear out of the crater, so that they would have direct line of sight to other nearby bases, and so that the tip of the tower would never be in shadow.

  “How many domes will there be, in all?” her father asked. He spoke softly. She could hear regret in his voice, and worry, and loved him for all those things and more besides. She looked away from the construction, met his eyes, and smiled.

  “Who knows? At least twenty. But I think it will grow larger. Much larger.” They’d found even more reserves of water ice on the moon. With careful recycling of the oxygen, they could eventually have hundreds of people living here, maybe thousands, without ever bringing up another drop of water from Earth. The greatest expense of expanding the lunar city was always bringing up water and air. Without those as a factor, who knew how large they could grow in time?

  She turned back to watch the work being done. They were silent for a long moment, and she wondered if he would ever say what he was thinking. Her father was a good man, but he was as stubborn as they came.

  “I’m sorry, Carmen,” he said after a long pause.


  She turned her head sideways to look at him. “For?”

  “For getting in the way. You never would have been in danger if I hadn’t...”

  “Yes, I would have. We’ve been through this. You still had to go to Earth,” she ticked off each statement on her fingers, “the shuttle still would have been hijacked, and I still would have had to rescue you.” She grinned, taking some of the heat out of the statements.

  He nodded, waving his hands in surrender. “I know. I agree! Allow an old man his remorse, woman.” Then he put a hand on her shoulder. “Are you sure?”

  “About staying out here?” she asked. She was being coy, and that really wasn’t fair to him. She relented. “Or about Patrick?”

  “Yes,” he replied.

  “Yes,” she answered back, eyes wide open, a broad smile on her face. “Truly, dad, I haven’t felt so sure of anything since I was in medical school. They need you on Earth to help make that cure even better. And they need my help out here, to help prepare defenses so that we’re ready for whatever comes next.”

  Carmen looked back out the window. This wasn’t going to just be a city. It was going to be Earth’s first line of defense against whatever came at their home planet from out there in the stars. It still wasn’t public knowledge that the virus had been built as a weapon. That information was still highly classified. But humanity now knew that it wasn’t alone. There were other things out there – and at least some of them were unfriendly.

  She’d become very famous, very fast. Everyone in the world knew Carmen Rosa as the woman who had saved the human race. She’d gone back to Earth with Patrick and her father for a short while, and burst into tears the first time someone had come up to her, knelt down, and kissed the hem of her shirt. She’d cried the second, third, and fourth times, too. By the fiftieth, all she wanted to do was be someplace away from all these people. She couldn’t possibly live up to their expectations.

  So she argued for a base on the moon. The material existed. And the virus was clearly a first strike weapon, designed to clear any indigenous life out of the way. The virus might have been something that some alien race simply seeded out into the universe. Or it might be the precursor for an actual invasion.

  If it was the latter, the invasion would likely not be far behind. A base on the moon would be easier to launch ships from than their mother planet. They could keep things secret there which would be much more difficult to hide, back on Earth. And the governments which knew about the existence of aliens didn’t want to spread the word yet. They worried it would case a panic.

  They gave Carmen her base. They even put her in charge, as executive director of the base. In turn, she named Patrick as the base administrator. The military was sending people up, too. Mostly Air Force and Navy. She’d need to learn how to get along with them, but she’d worked with the military in the past during outbreaks in some rough corners of the world. She could do it again.

  She heard someone cough behind her and turned, beaming. She knew that gentle cough by now. Patrick smiled back, coming up alongside her.

  “Doctor Rosa, your shuttle is just about ready to depart,” Pat said.

  Carmen took her father’s hand. “Come. I’ll walk with you there.”

  Doctor Rosa reached out a hand to Pat, who accepted the gesture gravely. The two men shook, and then partway through the shake the older man smiled and pulled the younger into a hug that surprised both Pat and Carmen.

  “You did well out there, my boy,” Doctor Rosa said. “Take care of each other. And keep in touch!” he admonished Carmen.

  “We will, dad,” she replied.

  Rosa stood there, nodding at both of them a few times, almost absently. Carmen didn’t miss the hint of moisture in his eyes. She could feel her own eyes tearing up a little, too. She’d never lived so far away from her father as they would be now. Then he turned on his heel, and walked away. Carmen heard him whistling a little tune as he walked.

  “Well, he’s in a good mood,” Pat commented once the doctor was out of earshot.

  “He does seem to be,” Carmen admitted. She laced her arm around the small of Pat’s back. “Wonder why?”

  He looked down at her. “He loves you. And you’re happy. That makes him happy.”

  “Mmmm. You make me happy,” Carmen said.

  “I’m glad.”

  They looked out the window at the domes growing steadily on the crater floor. “We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us,” Carmen said, heaving a deep sigh.

  “We do,” Pat agreed. “But first, I thought you might want to come inspect our new quarters with me? We should make sure everything is just right.”

  Carmen could feel her cheeks heating up. “I’d love to.” She was sure everything would be as right as it could be. And she was looking forward to every moment of it.

  THE END

  — — —

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  WHEN THE STRONG FALL: A SHORT STORY

  by Sarah Noffke

  One organization is holding back worldwide chaos.

  The Lucidite Insitute secretly controls the world affairs, intervening in deadly situation before they escalate. They are the reason the world hasn’t turned to chaos.

  But what happens when a dark evil seeks to destroy this place that protects the planet? Technology and advanced systems can only help so much. Sooner or later when the strongest fall, inevitable chaos ensues.

  Can the Lucidites recover in time to protect the world they value so much?

  Copyright © 2019 Sarah Noffke

  “When the Strong Fall” (this story) is a work of fiction.

  All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Sometimes both.

  All rights reserved.

  First US edition, 2019

  Prologue

  Some say that home is where the heart is.

  That’s bullshit.

  Just some bullocks that people say to make themselves feel good.

  Home isn’t where the heart is. That’s in your chest. Look it up. Every goddamn anatomy textbook will prove I’m right.

  Home is, plain and simply, the place that you like more than anywhere else. It’s where you go when you’re fucking tired of the rest of the
world and the shitshow it’s constantly putting on for the dumbasses on this planet to watch.

  Home is not some warm place where a cozy fire is always burning, and pot roast is cooling on the kitchen table.

  Sometimes the best homes are cold. Damp. Full of repugnant technology and people who talk too fucking much. Still, that can be home despite its annoyance. Despite the frustrations that never seem to end inside those walls. Despite all the jerks who crowd the place, it’s the best goddamn place in the world.

  A home isn’t where the heart is. I get the metaphor, but it’s worthless. It’s just a cozy little set of words that doesn’t mean anything at the end of the day.

  You want to know what home is? You want a definition that you can actually do something with?

  Home is the place you’d die to protect.

  There. It’s that simple. No frills. No poetry. Just a law. One I stand by forever.

  I’m Ren Lewis, and if you mess with my home, you’ll die.

  Chapter One

  What was once referred to as the “crown jewel” of Pasadena sits almost unoccupied on this late spring night. The queen of England, my home country, probably loathes that repugnant Americans stole that phrase to refer to a modern building.

  Cars motor by on the neighboring streets, and a dog barks in the distance. A baby screams somewhere at my back, though it sounds like saxophone music. Both should be outlawed: babies and saxophones. Dogs too. And possibly cars, as well. Only the weak need them for travel.

  I shake away this fantasy of a world without noise disturbances, and focus on one of the few people I know to be occupying City Hall in Pasadena, California on this night. He goes by the name Yen Tang, but I’ve taken to calling him Fuckface. Sometimes I call him Jackfruit when I’m not feeling like my typical hostile self. Today, though, I’m tired, so Fucker will have to do.