Border Patrol

by Rod Galindo

  Border Patrol

  Rod Galindo

  V1-0

  Tin Can

  an imprint of Wordwraith Books, LLC

  Copyright © 2017 by Rod A. Galindo

  All rights reserved. This story or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the publisher except for the use of brief quotations in a literary review.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author's imagination. Any resemblance to actual events, places, government organizations or persons living or dead is purely coincidental or used fictitiously.

  Wordwraith Books, LLC

  705-B SE Melody Lane #147

  Lee's Summit, MO 64063

  www.wordwraiths.com

  @Wordwraiths

  Cover art by Rod Galindo

  Rod Galindo's website www.rodgalindo.com

  Rod Galindo's Twitter @RodAGalindo

  Dedication

  This story is dedicated to all the faithful scientists, engineers, communications experts, and everyone else who continue to keep the dream of our wayward robotic ambassadors alive.*

  I'd also like to dedicate this story to my fellow Kansas and Missouri Army National Guard soldiers who deployed with me to the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan. You always kept my compass true, and never faltered in your Army Buddy—ahem, Warrior Companion—duties. Can I get a HOOAH Santa Fe? 

  * Note to all Voyager subject matter experts, engineers, physicists, honest-to-God rocket scientists, and astronomy teachers/professors:

  I respectfully request that none of you drive over me with a Martian rover when you find I completely blew it on certain technical aspects of this book. Specifically my numerous speed and distance calculations, my understanding of simulated gravity physics and advanced propulsion concepts, and last but not least, the technical specifications of the Voyager spacecraft and the (hopefully feasible) technical specs of my fictional Explorer Two.

  I had intended to plead for an invaluable "beta read" from über-educated men and women like yourselves to help make this book as technically accurate as humanly possible prior to publication. Because let's face it, Internet research can only go so far, especially when it's done by a career soldier who likes to think of himself as an amateur "armchair physicist" thanks to being inspired at a young age by 1970s science fiction. Alas, another military deployment significantly pushed back this story's development and completion, and an unstoppable book launch window—namely the 40th Anniversary of Voyager 2's launch—subverted my best intentions. That said, please feel free to e-mail and chastise me regarding any gross errors you come across in the story, and I will diligently strive to correct them in a future edition (perhaps a re-release on the 50th Anniversary of the launch date?)!

  Thank you,

  Rod Galindo, Armchair (id est holographic) Physicist and Astronomer

  rod@rodwerks.net

  Teaser

  Thank you for checking out my short story, I hope you enjoy it!

  Allow me to send you the first three chapters from my upcoming novel, Distress Call.

  Simply hop over to RodWerks.net/SecretSCand tell me where to send it!

  For more information on upcoming projects and books, please visit RodGalindo.com

  Chapter 1

  READER NOTE: The e-book version of "Border Patrol" differs slightly from the paperback version. Some e-book devices cannot reproduce special character fonts, therefore the e-book uses only websafe, Kindle-approved fonts to reproduce certain fictional names, places, and items found within the paperback. The base manuscript remains unchanged, and is otherwise identical across both versions.

  Border Patrol

  ONE

  Sparks shot in all directions. Circuitry popped and crackled. Alarms blared.

  "Scales, shut your station down!" Commander Bouchard ordered.

  Jack "Scales" Scalia threw two switches and mashed his fist on a bright red button, and the navigation station went dark.

  The sparks died down, but the popping continued. Donnie "Darko" Bouchard slammed into the rear bulkhead of the command cabin in the zero-G environment. He ripped a bottle of compressed CO₂ from its wall mount and maneuvered to brace himself, lest he go zooming backwards as soon as he activated the extinguisher. The fire safety system had done all it could, and prevented a fatal fire in the command cabin, but the crew wasn't out of the woods yet.

  Don pulled the safety pin and placed his feet on the wall behind him, standing directly on the colorful logo that read "Space X", "Virgin Galactic", and "NASA" in big, bold letters, plus sported the flags of all the countries involved in their deep-space mission. He aimed the mini bottle rocket at the navigation station, and pulled the trigger. The extinguisher nearly jumped out of his hand, but in seconds, the station turned white, and the crackling dropped to a minimum. As Don watched and waited for more popping, the white coating evaporated before his eyes. He heard two more small pops, then nothing but the blaring of alarms and annoying beeping that signaled a whole lot of hard work ahead of the seven-strong crew. "Anyone hurt?" he yelled.

  Murmurs of "no" and "fine here" reached his ears from both his navigator and science officer.

  Science specialist Ray Isley executed a graceful backflip and darted through the rear hatch, "I'll be down at my station!"

  "Roger, X-Ray." Bouchard kicked off and floated back to his station in the small cockpit, to the right of the pilot's chair. He didn't bother to sit down among the plethora of screens surrounding the chair. His gaze locked onto the one that kept him up to date on the status of the small nuclear powerplant towards their spacecraft's stern. All the "bars and bubbles" were still green, as usual. Whew. So far, so good, he thought, and moved on to the health status of six delicate devices housed in the belly of the spacecraft, intended for defensive purposes. The bubbles on them showed green as well, and the word "DISARMED" next to each one allowed Don to exhale and relax a little. But only a little.

  Another screen informed him that alarms were blaring in every habitable area of his ship, which amounted to about one-half the length of their six hundred-meter-long vessel. As if he wasn't fully aware already. "Shut off that racket!" he hollered to no one in particular.

  Scales spun upside down, twisted his body 180 degrees, and flipped a switch on the panel opposite the now charred navigation station. Silence flooded the cabin.

  "Pearls, M&M, Treads, Mag-Lev, you guys all alright?" Bouchard asked, speaking into his wrist watch, which was a mini command station of its own.

  There was a moment's pause before a perky voice with a slight Mandarin ring erupted across the small space. "Mags and I are okay, Commander, we're in Storage Unit Twenty-One!" Medical Specialist Melodi Meng-Scalia replied. "We're a little shaken up, but no one's hurt. Mags is on his way to check on the engines. We got a lot of red lights down here!"

  "Roger, M&M, glad to hear it." Don said. "About you, not the warning lights!" He glanced over at Scales, whose cheeks puffed up as the man let out a long, slow breath, visibly relieved upon hearing his wife was okay. "Mags, I know you're on your way; I need to know how things look down there as soon as possible."

  "Rrrroger!" Mission Specialist Lawrence "Mag-Lev" Liev replied in his slow drawl. His deep-woods, southern-Missouri accent was about as far from his roots as a Russian could get. "I'm on my way to Ion Control, runnin' a Propulsion Systems Check on my watch as we speak. I should have the results by the time I get there. Just passed the 'gas station'; no leaks in the xenon tanks, or at least none that the sensors are registering. I'll have to do a one-by-one inspection when I have a minute, just to be sure. Moving through Nukie right now, he looks green, thank God." A pause. "Huh…"

  "What?
"

  "Oh, it's probably no biggie. It's just that he's running at 27.3 megawatts. Haven't seen the generator pushing that much juice, well, ever. Not even when we began the trip! Hold on… Okay. It looks like the smart system is giving us more power after detecting the system failures, knowing we'll need it to repair the ship."

  Don zipped through a menu on one of his screens. "Yep, I'm reading the same thing up here, Larry. How long can it run that hot?"

  "Honestly, I don't know. It's never gone past 25. Have to do a little research and get back to you."

  "Alright. And let me know when your system check completes."

  "Willll do!"

  "Has Pearls checked in yet?" Bouchard asked Jack.

  Scalia shook his head.

  As if on cue, a dark form zipped into the cabin at a high rate of speed, narrowly avoiding a collision with the navigator. "Sorry!"

  "Speak of the devil," said Bouchard, smiling.

  "Hey, careful!" Jack hollered. He couldn't have dived out of the way in zero-G even if he wanted to. "Those bionic legs of yours will shoot you right through the cockpit one of these days!"

  "Don't be jealous," said Adrienne Perle-Liev as she slammed hard into the back of her cushioned pilot's seat, but latched onto it before it sent her flying back towards Jack. She then executed a somersault, and landed square at her station.

  "I'll give you a seven point five on that one," said Bouchard. "You about lost your grip on the chair that time. But I blame Jack for distracting you."

  "Thanks. What did I miss?" she asked in her noticeable Bangalore, India accent.

  "Oh nothing," Don replied. "Just me acting all heroic and saving the ship again."

  "So, same old, same old?"

  "More or less."

  She smiled big, throwing switches left and right to bypass whatever she could in an attempt to shut off the red and amber warning lights on her console. The glow from the screens around her made her pearly white teeth glow in stark contrast to her dark skin. The effect was short lived; her smile faded as she studied the screens in front of her. "Just as I feared. We've lost acceleration."

  "Yeah," Don replied. "I hope that's all we've lost." There was one final person to check on. As Commander, he had to check on his crew first, his family last.

  Pearls looked over her shoulder. "So did you guys see them, too?"

  Don held up a finger to Adrienne, indicating she hold that thought for just a moment. He didn't know who the "they" were to which she was referring, but he was certain whatever she had to say could wait until he acquired some peace of mind in regards to the status of their starward home, not to mention the safety of his wife. "Treads, where are you?"

  "I'm here in the ring, Donnie," Brea Treadwell-Bouchard replied. "Bloody hell, what are you doin' up there?" Her charming British accent was music to Don's ears.

  "Just trying to keep us afloat at the moment," he replied. "Are you okay? How are things there?"

  "I'm peachy. But a few things down here aren't. Most of the mess is just books and non-breakables, but one of X-Ray's experiments is a lost cause. And I'm sorry to report one fatality."

  Bouchard's heart stopped. "But everyone reported—"

  "We lost Scales II."

  Upon hearing the name, Don started breathing again. "You scared me for a minute, babe."

  "Oh. Sorry, pet."

  Bouchard turned to the pilot. "Sorry, Adrienne, I know how fond you are of all the little critters we brought along. But look at it this way. Scales II made it a hundred and twenty-two AU! He traveled farther than any other fish that ever lived on Earth! Except for the other five we still have, of course."

  The young but clever former fighter pilot pressed her lips together and took a deep breath. "Poor little thing." Adrienne had been given the call sign "Pearls" by her peers either due to her name or her beautiful white teeth—Don wasn't sure which, but he guessed probably both. "Well," she said, "maybe I can talk them into a little goldfish ménage-a-troi to keep the population up?" Then she quickly added, "Larry, if you heard that, don't be getting any wild ideas."

  "Wouldn't think of it, darlin'," came Lawrence Liev's voice over the speaker system.

  Bouchard shook his head. "Understood on the goldfish, Brea. Anything else damaged?"

  "Just my pride. Thankfully no one saw me take a tumble down the ladder."

  "Well now that you just told us about it, we'll have to screen the video at dinner."

  "Go ahead," she challenged. "I'll drop a pillow and blanket out in the hall for you tonight."

  Bouchard grinned at the playful retort.

  "I'll be in Auxiliary."

  "Roger, babe."

  Mag-Lev's voice returned. "I have preliminaries, Darko. What do ya want first?"

  "Top to bottom," Bouchard replied.

  "Well, top would be the accelerators, I'm sure you can see from your screens up there what shape they're in."

  Don spun his head and found the screens showing the status of various parts of the ion engines. One illustrated clearly that four of their six long accelerator tubes were damaged. The tubes in question flashed red.

  "If I can't fix 'em," Larry Liev went on to say, we might as well forget about slowin' down to match speeds with Voyager, if and when we find the old gal. With less than half thrust, hell, we'd probably better think about spinnin' 'round and initiating a breaking maneuver now. Might slow down to a manageable speed by the time we're all walking with canes."

  "Great," said Bouchard, lowering his head. "Pearls, Mags may be exaggerating a bit, but he's right. We'd better start recalculating our deceleration point. We'll need to spin the ship and start braking a whole lot earlier than we intended, and possibly use a lot more fuel than we originally figured as well. How far out did you last say Voyager was, Scales?"

  "In Astronomical Units? If it's still speeding outward at 3.3 AU per year, she should be at five hundred twenty-eight by now, and add another ten by the time we reach her," Jack replied.

  "So we have to bring this baby down to 55,000 KPH using only two ion drives, and we've only got about four hundred AU to do it in."

  "Even if we still had our constant rate of acceleration," Pearls said, "we wouldn't have begun decelerating for another year and a half. Now that we're at a constant speed, and at only…" she checked a readout, "a measly 210,000 KPH, we probably won't have to adjust our numbers by much, even with only two engines."

  Don made a motion to the screens in front of her. "Give the old man a warm and fuzzy, will you? If Mag-Lev can't get the other four drives fixed in the next twelve months, we'll need the new numbers anyway."

  "No problem, Commander."

  "Go ahead with your report, Mags."

  "Roj-o! So the ionizers seem fine, the neutralizers all look good. Might have to print some more wiring. Hmm. I hope the 3D in the tunnel didn't crap the bed, I haven't had time to fix the one in the bay yet…" His voice trailed off.

  That's all we need, thought Bouchard. If they were to lose the ability to fabricate spare parts, the crew really would be in pickle; there were no "filling stations" out this way—as his great grandfather used to call them—and they were slightly outside the post office's delivery area. "Got it. What else?"

  "That about does it for the engines. After that, it looks like we'll need a new regulator unit on the air scrubbers. It's blacker'n my Pa's angus bull on a moonless night. Even worse than when it's full o' CO₂! Oh, and the toilet here in Ion Control is a lost cause, so I'll be usin' your and Treads' latrine from now on."

  "Is the one in your cabin broken?"

  "No, but Adrienne has it all fancy smelling in there. I'm a grease monkey. It's just too much. I've been using this one."

  Bouchard glanced over at Pearls and chuckled.

  The pilot looked over her shoulder. "Somebody's gotta keep the place proper, if I left it to him, our cabin would smell like a fraternity and a garage had a child."

  Don chuckled to himself.

  "Have you had time to loo
k into how long a fourth-generation Siemens GX2161 nuclear generator can run at ten percent over capacity?"

  "I have. It should be fine for several days. But it might be best if we give 'im a little breather after that. Just to be safe and all."

  "What does that mean?"

  "Oh, we take him down to three-quarters power for a little while. Dim the lights in here a little, ease up on the luxuries if we have to."

  "How long is a little while?"

  "A week should do it."

  Don considered it. "Long as we can keep the magnetic field and the life support at full power."

  "Of course."

  Bouchard nodded, even though Liev couldn't see him. "Alright, Mags, gather what you need for pulling apart the damaged accelerators. Keep me informed."

  "Roger dodger."

  Treads broke in. "Donnie?"

  "Yeah, babe."

  "I'm going to borrow a phrase from Mr. Mag-Lev himself. There 'ain't no way' Mags is using our loo."

  Bouchard looked around the cabin and saw everyone crack a smile. "Sorry, Mags," he said, "but you're going to have to bite the bullet and use the fancy toilet. The Lady of the Ring has spoken."

  "That's okay," replied Liev, "I'll just pee out the window."

  Someone giggled on the line, Bouchard couldn't tell who.

  Pearls turned to Don and spoke in a low tone, not keying her microphone implant so she could speak freely to him and Scalia. "So? Yes? No?"

  "Okay," said Bouchard, "what were you talking about earlier? Did we see what?"

  "The shots. Were you two in here when they hit us?"

  Jack spoke up. "Shots? What do you mean? Like gunshots?"

  "No," Adrienne replied, "I mean like lasers."