Far Space

by Jason Kent

  “Just like Columbia,” Ian said, thinking back to his history lessons on the space shuttle disaster. A crack in the heat shield on the leading edge of the wing had failed. Investigations afterward reveled the destruction of the spacecraft had been the unfortunate result of a piece of foam dislodged from the huge external tank during liftoff. The foam struck and damaged the orbiter. The friction of reentry had heated the area until critical structural damage had destroyed the vehicle. Seven astronauts lost their lives to faulty design. Ian hoped he would not add to the tally.

  The EERS had been designed well. The Personal Reentry System, the mold, had been built with enough engineering margin to allow Ian’s suit to produce sufficient ablative material to absorb the energy it needed. This energy was transferred from Ian’s velocity to heat which was bled away with the burning debris. His speed was now slow enough to allow a safe parachute trip to the surface.

  Sensing its human cargo had achieved the appropriate speed and altitude, the EERS suit cracked what was left of the mold, allowing it to begin to crumble.

  Ian felt the pressure on his arms and legs lessen and pushed out, aiding the final disintegration of the mold into his slipstream.

  A lead parachute shot out from the side of Ian’s’ pack. It caught the wind and whipped Ian into a face-down orientation. The surface of the Earth was lost in the pitch blackness of full night so it was impossible for Ian to use his naked eyes to judge his altitude. Checking the display splashed against the upper left portion of his face plate, Ian noted he was at forty seven thousand feet and falling…fast.

  Watching the numbers scroll down, Ian forgot to brace for the initial parachute deployment. As the lead chute stabilized, EERS released the main chute. The broad canopy blossomed behind Ian, yanking him hard along the built in suit strap lines which had tightened automatically when he had donned the suit ages ago.

  Overcoming the initial shock, he noted his descent rate had slowed dramatically. With his eyes adjusting to the darkness below him, Ian could make out the lights of cities and even what appeared to be individual houses. He was suddenly worried about landing in the middle of some wood, far from any welcome.

  As if reading his mind, an icon began flashing in the upper right hand side of his face plate. His personal location beacon had been activated. Emergency personnel anywhere in the world were equipped to receive the standard format transmission.

  At the thought of locals, Ian scanned the lights, wracking his brain to figure out exactly where he was over South America. He was wishing he had paid a little more attention to his foreign language teachers. The limited Spanish he knew was as likely to help as the Mandarin Chinese he had thought would be a good idea to learn last year.

  Ian pushed the thought from his head. “Just concentrate on getting back on the ground in one piece.

  As it turned out, this last bit of the trip was the least exciting. The amazing pack had one more trick. EERS deployed another chute and Ian was brought to a near standstill above the surface.

  Ian’s emergency egress ended in a gentle flutter into a darkened field full of young plants he could not identify. He let his legs crumple beneath him and rolled over on his side. Ian clambered to his feet and pulled the parachute in before it caught in the breeze.

  Breaking the seal at his collar, Ian lifted his helmet and breathed in the cool night air. It reeked of manure from a nearby farm. Ian thought he had never smelled anything so wonderful.

  Ian did the only thing a man who had just gone through his situation could be expected to do – he fell to his knees and threw up all over the tilled earth.

  USS Schriever Command Module

  Earth Space

  Yates carefully unbuckled his harness and drifted up from his seat with only the slightest flexing of his legs. He reached above his head and grabbed a handhold from practice.

  The command module was pitch black. It was also dead silent.

  Before Yates could call out, a sob broke the stillness.

  “Everyone still here?” Yates asked.

  “We didn’t blow up,” Pearl’s voice growled, “where else would we be?”

  “Here, sir,” Reeves breathed.

  “This should help,” Mitchell said.

  A stab of light shot out from Mitchell’s station back toward the commander’s chair.

  Yates held his hand up to the light. “Down a little if you please, Mr. Mitchell.”

  Mitchell responded by sweeping his small flashlight from Yates to the rest of the crew in turn.

  Reeves sat strapped in his chair, his arms motionless to either side of his black control board, eyes staring forward at nothing.

  Maytree was busy unlatching her harness, careful to keep her face out of the light.

  Pearl shook his head slowly from side to side. His fists were curled in tight balls on top of his smashed console. He looked up at Yates, his grin standing out in the harsh light. “Can my engines give a show or what?”

  Yates had to grin back. He was alive. His crew was alive. “Steve, you can paint your name on my ship any day.” Nodding to Mitchell, Yates said, “Check life support and be sure our emergency beacon is broadcasting.”

  Mitchell glanced back at his own dark station. There were no weapons on the escape pod. “Should we try and get com up and call in fire support?”

  Pearl said what Yates was thinking. “Don’t worry, cowboy. If they were going to finish us off we wouldn’t be having this conversation.”

  Reeves, still staring ahead, asked, “Did we get them?”

  Maytree floated to the younger officer’s station and squeezed his arm. “Yeah, Chris, we did.”

  Reeves meet Maytree’s gaze. “So we won, right?”

  Yates looked around the powerless bridge, the last remnant of his command. He breathed, “Some victory.”

  Ganymede Research Station #1

  Jupiter Space

  After waiting two hours in the service tube, Wu and Deng finally decided it was probably safe to enter the hopper. Once inside the pair had at least been able to turn on the heater and warm themselves. There was also a small supply of rations.

  Wu had not dared to have Deng power up the hopper’s engines for fear of bringing attention to themselves. In their haste to destroy the main base, the alien craft had overlooked Deng’s hopper and at least one other shuttle on the far side of the field. Deng had wanted to move to the larger spacecraft right away. But, Wu cautioned against it preferring patience over roominess.

  Now, nearly four hours after the attack, even Wu had come to think it was now time to act.

  “No one’s coming for us,” Deng said.

  “We don’t know that,” Wu replied, staring out the forward viewport.

  “Someone should have come by now,” Deng said, more to himself to his friend. “Someone would have come by now if they knew we had been attacked.”

  Wu looked over at Deng. “Why? We haven’t actually put out the welcome mat to any of our neighbors.” Wu gestured overhead. “The Americans may have met the same fate on Europa and who knows about that EU ship.”

  Deng shook his head. “So what do we do?”

  “First, we have to check for other survivors,” Wu said, “then we try and boost the range on the hopper’s radio. You know, try and raise a ship.”

  “My friend,” Deng said, “I’m not sure if you’ve noticed, but we are in no position to perform a search.”

  “The pressure suits…” Wu started, pointing at the small locker by the airlock.

  “Pressure suit,” Deng corrected.

  “There’s only one?”

  Deng closed his eyes and nodded. “There are never enough to go around. I keep one for myself since supply is always running out.”

  “The emergency lockers in the hall,” Wu said, “they’re supposed to be stocked in case of emergency.”

  “Wu, you’ve been here long enough to know those things are empty.”

  “We should look anyway,” Wu said.

&nbs
p; Deng raised his hands. “If you must.”

  Wu cycled through the airlock and stepped out into the access tunnel. He regretted the decision immediately. With the central power plant gone or off-line, the environmental systems had transferred to battery power which had lasted only fifty minutes. Now, with the heaters and air cyclers off, the temperature was quickly dropping. Wu sucked in a lungful of bitterly cold air and dashed down to the end of the access tunnel.

  Wu paused as he reached for the emergency locker handle. Frost was already forming on the shiny metal surface. He pulled his shirt sleeve over his hand and yanked the door open before the cold could pass through the thin fabric.

  The locker, nominally equipped with four light pressure suits and two emergency packs containing a variety of equipment, was virtually empty. Only one suit helmet had been left on the rack. Wu grabbed it and cursed. There was a crack running down the middle of the face plate.

  Wu kicked the door shut and cursed the fools he worked with and the government which had failed to properly equip this miserable place.

  He looked around for anything else which might be of use. Wu contemplated trying to go through the sealed hatch at the end of the tunnel until he saw the red light on the control panel next to the doorway.

  Hard vacuum on the outside.

  Cursing again, Wu stood staring at the door trying to think of anything else he could do. The cold began to penetrate his bones. Coming up blank, he turned and hurried back to the hopper.

  Back inside, Deng asked, “Any luck?”

  Wu held up the cracked helmet.

  Deng tried to hide his smile.

  “What?” Wu said looking at the helmet. “Those idiots…”

  Deng burst out laughing.

  Wu stared at his friend as if Deng had gone made.

  Deng broke down into even more uncontrolled laughter.

  Wu could not help but crack a smile. They were lost. He began to laugh. And now they were going insane.

  Deng and Wu laughed until tears were streaming down both of the men’s faces. They slumped together onto the floor of their tiny lifeboat, the helmet propped up on Wu’s knee, its cracked face plate staring back at them.

  “We’re scr…” Deng started.

  A beeping began from the main control console.

  Deng and Wu jumped up.

  “Is someone calling us?” Wu asked, suddenly hopeful this nightmare might have a happy ending.

  Deng looked perplexed. He tapped a few keys and muttered, “This isn’t right.”

  Wu pressed close to look at the display. “They’re coming back,” Wu said, his tone flat, “They realized they missed a few of us and they’re coming back.”

  “No,” Deng said, tapping a few keys. “No, they won’t pass overhead. The hoppers sensors are not all that good, so I can’t be exactly sure. But, it looks like there are five big energy readings - that would be their engines. They’re heading back in toward Jupiter.”

  “Probably heading back to the same spots where they emerged from the gravitational anomalies,” Wu said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out the data stick he had smuggled out of the command center. “They’re going home.”

  “Now if only we could get home,” Deng muttered.

  Wu inserted the memory stick into the console. He downloaded the latest readings on the alien ships, adding them to his earlier observations.

  As the ships moved out of range of the hopper’s sensors, Wu said, “Wait a minute…” He pulled up the ship’s data logs and started scrolling backwards.

  “I can wait all day,” Deng said. “But would you care to finish your sentence?”

  Wu looked up at his friend and asked, “How many ships did you say there were?”

  N-Motion Concepts

  Seattle, Washington

  After his recovery, Ian’s EERS suit was returned to N-Motion Concepts, the builders of the egress and reentry system. There, the suit was dissected, along with those from the other survivors of Car 47 and the data storage units were downloaded. These activities were performed in order to gather critical information on the performance of the suits in their infrequent ‘live-fire’ uses.

  The N-Motion engineers ran their simulation program three times on all seventeen of the data sets they were able to retrieve. As far as their reconstruction of the event went, the engineers and software analysts were able to accurately model sixteen of the reentry profiles – each was well within the proscribed design parameters of a typical EERS suit. It was the outlier data set which made them run all the simulations a fourth and a fifth time. Each time the outlier was the same; plotted along with the rest of data sets, the temperatures and velocities experienced were red lines outside even the most optimistic limits of the suits.

  In the end, they agreed it must be a fluke – some corruption of the data due to the intense environmental conditions of reentry. Or, as one engineer put it, the guy wearing the thing was just ‘damn lucky.’

  The seventeenth suit had belonged to a passenger named Ian Langdon. And by all accounts of the N-Motion engineers, he should not have survived his fall to Earth.

  Lagrange 5 – Vehicle Assembly Station (L5 VAS)

  Five Days After Contact

  Yates eyed the full bird Colonel sitting at the head of the conference table in the full-fledged virtual conference area occupying an entire hab module. Included in the furnishings was a simulated wood table and enough leather seats for eight people. More hangers-on could squeeze in between the seats and the curving outer hull. Despite the premium placed on any volume of habitable space in orbit, US Space Corps thought it absolutely essential to outfit the Vehicle Assembly Station with the conference room, saying a lot about the importance of meetings in keeping any government facility humming. Yates was seated at the table, the other Colonel was not.

  “You understand your orders, Colonel Yates?” The hologram projection of Colonel Ware asked.

  Yates nodded. He had been darkly amused to find surviving an attack by hostile aliens, even though it meant the complete loss of your spacecraft, warranted a promotion on his part. “I understand. But I’m not sure why the higher ups want me on this mission. The Schriever, after all…”

  “You should know General Hatterus did argue against the assignment,” Ware said, smiling tightly, “Quite vehemently in fact. Lucky for you, General Porter and General Franks had the final say.”

  Hatterus, a three star general, was the S3 overseeing all operations for the Space Corps. Porter was the Space Corp Commandant, Hatterus’ direct boss while Franks was the Air Force Chief of Staff. Since Space Corps fell under the U.S. Air Force, just as the U.S. Marine Corps fell under the U.S. Navy, the Chief still had some say in Corps matters.

  Yates kept his face impassive. He did not think getting off a few good shots during the recent battle counted for much. It certainly didn’t warrant a bunch of generals going to bat for him.

  Ware looked over his shoulder then leaned closer to the camera on his end. The effect in the VAS conference room was to have the Colonel grow larger as he seemed to lean over the table. “Look, Yates. You weren’t the only one to lose a ship.”

  “But I was the only one to survive,” Yates added.

  “Yes and you took out the enemy ship. Face it, Yates. You’re a hero,” Ware said. “Much as Hatterus or you don’t like it, the Corps needs a few of those right about now.”

  Yates sighed and shook his head.

  “Besides,” Ware began as he leaned back, “going out to Saturn sure beats the alternative.”

  “What did Hatterus have in mind?” Yates asked.

  “He mentioned something about a six-by-eight foot cell,” Ware replied. “You did disobey a Presidential Directive, after all.”

  “In that case, I have no further objections,”

  “Good,” Ware said. “The techs tell me Cheyenne should be ready in about two weeks. The mission specialists and crew augmentees took off from the Cape yesterday. They should be at L5 sometime lat
e tomorrow. The rest of the Special Forces guys will join you there within a week.”

  “We’ll be ready for them.”

  “One more thing, Yates,” Ware said, unable to suppress a grin. “If you decide to disobey direct orders again, I suggest you shut down your comms and pretend not to have heard the message.”

  “Think my reply was a little preachy?”

  “A tad,” Ware said, holding up his thumb and forefinger an inch apart. “If Hatterus could have reached through the net, he would have throttled you.”

  “I’ll try harder to be a good soldier in the future,” Yates said as he gave a Boy Scout salute.

  “Please do, especially when I’m on duty as CCAOC chief,” Ware replied. “Good hunting. Bring us back something good.” Ware’s hand reached forward and cut off the camera from his end. He and the virtual conference room in Colorado disappeared.

  Yates sat quietly in the now-silent module and glanced down at a schematic detailing the flight path for his upcoming mission. It was displayed on an oversized data pad mag-locked to a strip of metal running under the tables’ veneer. He traced the curving line out past the orbit of Mars, through the Asteroid Belt and past Jupiter’s orbit. Saturn’s orbit was way, way beyond that of Jupiter.

  “Cripes, it’s got to be cold all the way out there,” Yates muttered.

  Unbuckling his lap belt, Yates pushed himself up from his seat and over to the narrow window running the length of the conference module. With the transmission from the CCAOC cut, the window tinting had automatically faded.

  His new command hung there in space, surrounded by a framework of girders. The United States Spacecraft Cheyenne, the first in the Horizon class, was the latest in humanity’s long line of spacecraft. It was also the first interplanetary transport with anti-matter drives similar to those on Explorer and was designed to cut the travel time to Mars in half.