Sonya picked up the microphone to pass to Commander Armstrong.
He gently handed it back to her, nodding. “This is your show, Sonya. Great job!” he said.
Sonya licked her lips, then spoke into the microphone.
“This is the International Space Station, broadcasting on 428 Mhz. We read you loud and clear. Please acknowledge,” she said.
There was a moment of silence, then joyous shouts from the speakers.
“Oh, thank God! ” came the response.
“This is Arecibo Station, transmitting on 428 Mhz. Dr. Tatania Golovonov as station operator in charge. We also read loud and clear, five by five. What is your status?”
Sonya passed the microphone to Armstrong.
This time, he took the mike.
He spoke at length about their predicament and the effects of The Wave on his crew.
He told them of Micha, and of their observations of the missile launches.
He gave a concise report of the nature of the heat loss, and that they had only a few days of survival under optimal conditions.
He somberly concluded by congratulated the Arecibo team on their ingenuity in establishing a novel manner to contact and again unite the survivors from The Wave.
Tatania and the others listened, excited at first that they had been able to find others. That they had managed to contact the ISS was remarkable.
As Armstrong spoke, they felt their hearts grow heavy.
What could they possibly do to help out the marooned spacefarers? Their celebration at having found a way to reach out quickly fell into despair at not having the resources to help the brave astronauts, doomed by time and physics to a freezing death.
*****
After some time, the two groups had managed to communicate information surrounding The Wave’s effects to a point that they all understood that, although they had physically been regressed in age, their mental faculties were still commensurate with their true ages.
They retained all their individual memories and skills. This was causing a bit of trouble, psychologically, as they would stumble over some item of personal importance, and then realized that they would likely not interact in that way ever again.
However, they pressed on and began to come up with alternative plans to see if they could solve the problem of the ISS heat loss.
After two days, they had managed to contact NASA, the remaining Russian government, and many areas of the United States, using Tatania’s moon-bounce techniques.
The initial novelty wore off, and routing transmissions again began to cross the radio spectrum.
The ISS crew, hungry but buoyed with some hope that a solution was at hand, assisted in every way they could with observations and data support from space.
Armstrong sat in his berth, thinking over the problem. The ISS was passing over North America and the Western United States in particular.
Sonya entered and joined him, and they spoke about the current situation frankly.
The talk turned to the kinds of subjects that interest astronauts and a spirited session of comparing programs and results began between them.
It helped them take their minds off the situation, and in the free form and random ways the human mind works allowed them to brainstorm without fear of criticism.
Sonya remarked that they were over New Mexico and that the new private Space Port was being constructed there, somewhat ruefully.
She idly mentioned that she knew Sir Richard Branson and continued speaking about how she thought the new efforts to market space tourism were droll, but also at least some way to generate enthusiasm for space again.
Armstrong mentioned that he thought that the new privatization of space flight was interesting, but he had never thought it a realistically viable alternative to government sponsored programs.
Suddenly, Sonya’s eyes grew wide.
She dashed out of the berth and straight to the radio room, where she unceremoniously elbowed Nicolai out of the way.
He sailed across the intervening space, in zero gravitational annoyance, and swore at her in Russian. She ignored him, making contact with NASA.
When she had established it, she spoke firmly into the microphone for a few minutes. Then, she stood up, leaving the receiver, and Nicolai, floating in the now stunned silence.
Everyone in the room looked at her in amazement.
She appeared momentarily flustered, but then she smiled hugely, and they all started laughing.
Nicolai was still angry at how she had pushed him aside.
But soon, he too, was laughing like a lunatic.
*****
NEW MEXICO
Sir Richard Branson sat at the head of a long, elegant teakwood table, facing the engineers and technicians on his team.
He hadn’t felt this young in years, he thought ironically.
He laughed out loud at the absurdity of the situation and ignored the strange looks he got from the team members.
“Gentlemen, we have a serious problem to which we must immediately attend,” he began.
Branson explained the situation, in detail.
It was his way.
He drank a Virgin Mary as he pontificated.
He covered all the angles of the problem for the assembled team and barked out orders to the relevant heads of his Space Port Operations.
Some objections were raised and dealt with logically and a decisive plan of action was constructed. For several hours, the engineers and Branson argued every aspect of the operation.
Each suggestion was analyzed for flaws and discarded if any was detected.
The best ideas were storyboarded, and input into a database that fed a computerized project management system.
The results were collated and project plan milestones were assigned to the relevant team leaders. The timetable was overlaid with the tasks, with a complete understanding of each person’s responsibility for achieving their goals and the deadlines that needed to be met.
At the conclusion of the meeting, the men and women left the room and ran to begin their tasks.
No one had found any real flaws in the procedures and the overall plan was sound.
The limitations were mainly ones of untested design, always risky in undertakings of this sort.
An aide caught up to Branson as he jogged across the hot tarmac to the hangars.
“Sir Richard!” she yelled.
“Yes, Beth, what is it?” he replied with a charming grin.
Him “You didn’t say who would be the pilot and co-pilot team?” she asked.
Branson stopped for a moment, glancing up at the blue New Mexico sky, and the clouds that were forming over the mountains in the distance.
He looked at her, and she thought, for just a moment, that he was thinking carefully about what he wanted to say to her.
She noticed him being uncharacteristically emotional and decided to wait for him to say what he wanted when he was ready.
“Well, Beth, we need all the space onboard Seven to seat the ISS crew,” he said.
“As you know, we can accommodate eight on board, in total. There are four astronauts. There is Sutton, the co-pilot.”
“And there is me,” he finished, grinning at her shocked look.
“You can’t be serious?” she said.
“Oh yes, quite,” said Sir Richard. “I am quite serious.”
He started off in the direction of the hangars again, where Spaceship Seven, his latest experimental prototype, was being readied for flight.
“Yes. Quite. I feel very strongly about it,” he said, almost in a whisper.
Looking Beth directly in the eyes, Sir Richard Branson spoke.
“After all, Sonya is my fiancé.”
“Why, I'd like nothing better than to achieve some bold adventure, worthy of our trip.”
-- Aristophanes
“I think risk-taking is a great adventure. And life should be full of adventures.”
-- Herbie Hancock
&n
bsp; "You never know with these things when you're trying something new what can happen. This is all experimental."
-- Richard Branson
“A good rule for rocket experimenters to follow is this: always assume that it will explode.”
-- "Letter to Editor", Astronautics, Vol. 7, No. 38 (1937), pp. 8-8.
Chapter Fifteen
SOMALIA, AFRICA – FOUR WEEKS BEFORE THE WAVE IMPACT[i]
The patient was suffering from a high fever. Her tiny body was horribly pock marked by the sores and boils from the Ebola virus that was tearing her up from the inside. A small mosquito bite had led to weeks of suffering and pain.
The nurses and doctor in her small village were terrified to get too close to her because of the extremely contagious nature of the virus. Red Cross and United Nations specialists had been instructed to avoid the area.
In spite of this, Dr. Amadu Mfala had decided to try to help. Ever since his family had been killed, he felt a driving need to seek to eradicate pain and suffering wherever he found it. Amadu watched as the tiny patient thrashed to and fro in spite of the restraints binding her small wrists and ankles.
Foam flecked her lips which were blistered and bloodied. Blood also was streaming from her ears and eyes and nose. The nurses always wiped her down with sponges and cheesecloth to absorb the virus laden fluids. It was easy for them to keep up with the constant effluent flow as the girl was only seven years old.
Amadu Mfala was attempting to understand the progress of the disease in this patient. It was not following the usual pathways. He had seen it before, and also had managed to successfully treat seven patients.
Of course 300 other patients had succumbed to the Ebola virus while, under his care, he thought dryly. He considered it a minor miracle that he had not become infected himself. But he did practice meticulous biomedical protocols and was scrupulous in his use of antibiotic cleansers, disinfectants, and autoclaving of tools.
There was something different about the progress of the disease in this patient. It followed other artificially influenced or genetically modified disease vectors with which he had experience. He suspected some government had developed this particular strain as a bioweapon.
He had managed to send samples to a DNA analysis laboratory with strict conditions on confidentiality regarding the results. He expected any day to find an email or courier package that would give him his answers.
Meanwhile, there had been some guerrilla activity in the vicinity of this particular village. He suspected that a nearby oil pipeline which had been sabotaged ignited a retaliatory strike.
Amadu was trying to attack the problem with the resources at his disposal and did not understand the true magnitude of the issue, nor its origin.
Early in the Spring of 2012, a number of international pharmaceutical conglomerates had developed medication that would ease the suffering of Ebola patients without necessarily curing the disease. Genetically modified versions of the virus were engineered in their labs to increase the probability of infection to almost 75%.
These companies stood to make huge profits by releasing a treatment schedule over a period of years, with a carefully orchestrated campaign to unleash a new version of the strain every other year, alternating with the updated medicines.
A testing regimen was developed and its management offloaded to a facility located in Somalia.
*****
Situated inside the Puntland University of Science and Technology (PUST), was a front for the conglomerate funded organization, the Office of Medical Technological Science Research (OMTSR), which was tasked to plan the various milestones.
The nature of the work was strictly bureaucratic, with detailed reports being prepared to provide status updates to the members of the various committees and boards collaborating on the project.
Couriers were used for transferring these reports amongst strategically located outposts in other educational institutions.
Unfortunately, these couriers were sometimes harassed by local brigands and ‘tax collectors’ on their rounds, and so carried small amounts of cash to pay any ‘fees’ to allow them perform their duties unabated.
This did not always work, so to avoid compromising the information, the reports were coded and encrypted as well. However, these coding schemes required the use of one-time pads, which were always sent via a separate courier.
*****
Amadu’s youngest daughter, Sophia, had been kidnapped by Rwandan Patriotic Army (RPA) forces during the 1994 Rwandan Genocide. A woman, whose child had died earlier that year of a snake bite, had managed to prevent her being killed outright. She had grabbed Sophia, and dragged her away from the killing area, and glared at any of the soldiers who would challenge her, perhaps arguing the senselessness of the crime with one or two of them. Sophia had been too young at the time to fully understand what was actually occurring. All she could remember, when she gave it any attention, were years of moving around from place to place.
The woman adopted Sophia as her own child, and in doing so managed to save Sophia’s life. They had moved out with the RPA when the Genocide had ended. Her adopted mother had by then found a new man, and followed him to Uganda, then to Kenya, where they finally settled into a somewhat stable life.
However, this stability came at a great personal cost to Sophia. The man sold her sexual services and pocketed the money. She was introduced to all manner of deviants and developed a reputation as “The Virgin” by using a simple trick to convince the men who used her that her childlike features implied her innocence. Many men were taken by her, and her mother’s boyfriend capitalized on this to charge even more for her exclusive use, although she was pimped out mercilessly.
Finally, when she was fourteen, an event occurred that gave her the out she had been seeking. One of the men who felt she was exclusively his had her followed and found out the identity of her pimp. The outraged customer demanded his money back, and when her pimp laughed in his face, the customer pulled out a large knife and decapitated him on the spot. He looked around and saw Sophia. He began to run after her, but she ducked around a bus, and then doubled back to an alley. The man ran past her, and she sped away from him in the opposite direction. She ran to another clearing, near a market, where she ducked into a small store.
The store owner saw her and asked what was happening. She explained to him that a man was trying to kill her. The proprietor, an old Muslim man, told her to go into a back room. She followed him into the room, where there were many children weaving mats. He showed her an empty place next to one of the other children and told her she could sit there for a while. He then told the other children to act as though Sophia had always been one of them. He showed her how to look as though she were working, and then left the room. He came back about ten minutes later, with some sooty powder and a foul-smelling liquid. He ordered her to go with him into a bathroom.
Warily, she followed him. He asked her to disrobe and get into a tub of warm water. At first, she was going to simply run away, but he left her alone while she got ready.
Shortly, one of the female children came in and gave her some soap, and she washed herself. The girl told her to wash her hair. She used the soap and then rinsed it in the tub basin. The water was gray with the soil and filth she had accumulated in her escape from the killer.
The girl gave her two damask towels and told her to dry off and then sit and wait in the drawing room next to the bathroom. She did as she was told. The proprietor returned, with a pair of shears. She looked frightened, but he told her he would help her, but she must do everything exactly as he said. She agreed, reluctantly.
He had some coffee and pastries brought into the room, by another child, this one a boy. He then cut her hair very short, and using some of the powder and the foul-smelling liquid, transformed her into a darker version of herself. Sophia was fair, compared to the other children, so she had commanded a premium for being an exotic whore. The makeup and dye made her appear more akin to the
native population.
“Now, you will work,” said the man.
*****
Three days later, the customer had entered the sweatshop and looked right at her. He didn’t even hesitate as he scanned the room of children. He left, convinced she was not there.
“Allah is good,” pronounced the shop proprietor to her. She very much doubted it. In fact, she had made her own plans for dealing with her pursuer.
She stayed working at the shop for four months, and just shy of her fifteenth birthday began her plan of retribution. She first walked out of the shop one evening, after everyone else had gone to bed. She thought about leaving some note, but she was not literate. She figured the old man would get over it in time. She walked to a small market stall and found a place to hole up until morning.
She slept fitfully, worried about the local militia or police, but thought she could manage to elude them if she was careful.
*****
In the morning, her first stop was the shack where her adopted mother had been living. It was vacant. She asked a few of the neighbors, who did not recognize her, what had happened to the family that had been living there. They told her that the man and woman were gone. The man had been killed, and the woman was questioned by the authorities, and then released. Another man had moved in within a few weeks, and then they had simply not been there one day. No one remembered her.
She took that as a good sign. She was not recognized, and her past presence was unremarkable. Sophia walked around the city that day, begging some food and stealing a fruit occasionally. She looked at pet monkeys, and other types of animals for sale. She had never really been much of a child, by necessity, and not had any pets. The thought of animals being owned bothered her. She walked by a café, where a patron had left a sharp dinner knife, and quickly and smoothly lifted it. She concealed it behind her in her pants, under her robes. Then, she set out on her quest.
*****
Sophia knew this city. She knew where the man who had killed her pimp lived, and where he had taken her many times to try to woo her. She camped out at a small pub, waiting to see if he would show. When he had not appeared, she found an alley and covered herself with scraps of newspapers. She slept, one eye open, waiting for the dawn.
Terminal Reset Omnibus: The Coming of The Wave Page 20
