RENDEZVOUS WITH ROGUE 71 1 Kaitlyn O’Connor
Rendezvous with Rogue 719
By
Kaitlyn O’Connor
( c ) Copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, March 2017
Cover art by Jenny Dixon, March 2017
ISBN 978-1-60394-
New Concepts Publishing
Lake Park, GA 31636
www.newconceptspublishing.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.
Chapter One
They’d been lulled into a false sense of security. Almost three years into their mission, close to the point of turning around and heading back home—to Earth—and not one serious alarm.
The tedium had dulled their alertness to the danger surrounding every breath they took this far from Earth.
And then suddenly, without any warning, all hell broke loose. Alarms began blaring all over the ship so abruptly, navigator Lt. Claudia Milner, for one, damned near had a heart attack.
Chaos instantly erupted as most of the crew threw off their safety harnesses and shot from their seats.
They liked to consider it controlled chaos. But there wasn’t a single member of the crew that wasn’t having sphincter issues as they leapt from their seats and rushed to the locker area to dive into their space suits for whatever pathetic protection those might offer in the completely hostile environment that surrounded them.
Commander Wilkes thwarted that desperate bid for swift security for survival by diverting the power from the artificial gravity to pull up shields and increase the power to the mag field.
It was disorienting to say the least, to begin to float when they’d been running.
The bridge, located at the inner core of the vessel, had low-g anyway due to the delicate electronics that made the use of electro-magnets less than desirable. But after almost three years in space where they spent a minimum of eight hours in this area of the ship out of every twenty-four, they were used to working with the limitations and annoyance of the low-g. They weren’t used to working without any gravity at all and the lack made an already difficult task that much harder.
Gritting their teeth, trying to ignore the tumbling and bumping that resulted in their efforts to pull the protective gear on, they focused on getting into them and sealing them with a barely contained sense of desperation and frustration.
There was more at stake than protecting their own hides—which, naturally enough, was priority one in every mind.
The Commander and first mate couldn’t abandon their posts to get into their own suits until one of the other crew members completed the task and returned to take their place at the controls.
Reyes was first to finish and head back but by the time that Claudia headed back, he’d disappeared. That fact only barely registered and then vanished from her mind, however.
“Meteor—either huge or a cloud of small ones and dust—not sure,” Commander Wilkes explained succinctly as he turned control of the ship over to Claudia and headed to the locker for his own suit. “We made a course alteration, but I don’t know if it’ll be enough … or soon enough.”
Her heart felt like it was in her throat as Claudia studied the image on their radar and realized Lenard had marginalized the threat even though his announcement had sounded dire enough to make her blood run cold.
Huge didn’t begin to describe it. It filled the radar screen. It looked like … well a fucking planet!—Not that there should be one in this particular area of space! They were near the outer edge of the solar system, between the gravitational path of the planetoid Pluto and that of Neptune, although neither lay in their path at that time—or shouldn’t have been. They should be on the other side of the sun or close.
Regardless, whatever it was, to her mind, there was no way in hell they were going to avoid a collision.
She should have stayed home, she thought with a sinking heart.
She should have known it was a very, very bad omen when she was picked at the last minute to replace the original navigator—who’d died in a fiery car crash when his computer failed six days before launch.
She’d told herself she was being ridiculous, that it was pure superstition to think that way, and yet she hadn’t been able to completely shake the sense of doom that had followed her since launch.
The launch itself had gone off without a hitch—which should have allayed her fears. Well, in fact, it had.
They’d docked at the half-finished space hanger on the second day out—also without incident—and connected with the habitat for their mission, the wheel that housed their living quarters, the greenhouse, the laboratories, and supply storage. This area would have a close approximation of Earth’s gravity due to the centrifuge effect and the electromagnetic field generated to protect the crew—well and everything in the ship—from radiation and the smaller ‘bullets’ flying around in space—micro-meteors and dust.
This was also where they’d collected their cargo for the mission—eight space buoys/emergency supply capsules equipped with self-replicating AI robots designed to receive materials as delivered to them and expand the capsules to full-fledged space stations at some point in the future. And all of the equipment they needed to land, explore, and extract specimens from the moons and worlds they were scheduled to explore on the return trip to Earth.
They were delivering segments of the supply chain that would eventually make space travel within the inner solar system safer for the colonists that had begun to pile off the planet Earth and into the colony of Mars in ever increasing numbers since the first tiny settlement was established a decade earlier.
Because as hostile as the Mars environment was, things were getting more hostile in a big hurry on Earth, encouraging more and more people to ‘jump ship’ like rats from a sinking vessel.
The pendulum shift had begun slowly with overpopulation, climate change, shrinking resources, and withering economies. Then it seemed the cosmos had decided to take site on Earth and turn it into a shooting gallery. They’d had dozens of near misses and three really bad encounters with meteors since scientists had discovered a disturbance in the Ort cloud just prior to the first colonization attempts in the early years of the new millennium.
The first explorers and colonists had had to take everything with them or perish in their attempt. There’d been nothing between Earth and Mars but … well danger. Developing a supply chain hadn’t been easy and it had been damned expensive, but thanks to the latest advances in robotics these ‘satellites’ would eventually grow up to be manned, fully functional, strategically placed space stations—or way stations in historical terms—where no one was ever more than a few days from rescue/critical supplies if anything went wrong.
Plenty had already.
And it looked like they might be the latest fatality.
The communications officer, Lt. Shelly Adams, made it back to her seat and immediately started trying to hail Houston and report their situation.
It prompted Claudia to shake off her preoccupation with death and focus on the job.
She didn’t feel one whit better when she’d analyzed the data their instruments were collecting.
“It’s a planet,” she said hoarsely.
Shelly whipped a look of horror and disbelief at her, gaping open-mouthed.
“There’s no planet here!” Commander Wilkes growled, returning to the bridge at that moment.
Claudia shot out of her seat/his seat—literally—and rediscovered gravity. “Take a look at the data yourself, then!” she growled angrily but distractedly, wrestling with the fact that th
ere was gravity when there shouldn’t have been—hadn’t been thirty minutes before when the alarms had started blaring.
“What the hell have you done? Did you switch the power from the shields?” Wilkes bellowed at her when it dawned on him that he could feel gravity when he shouldn’t have been able to.
Claudia gaped at the back of Lenard’s head as he resumed his seat and began frantically checking the instruments, wrestling with the sudden desire to punch the back of his helmet. “Why do we have gravity?”
He’d muttered under his breath and she knew he wasn’t talking to her, but the question abruptly brought everything together in her mind.
“It’s a planet! I told you! It isn’t a meteor or a cloud of meteors and dust!”
He ignored her comment. “Get to your station! Everybody!”
Claudia discovered she was the only one that hadn’t taken her place. Embarrassed on top of everything else, she hurried to comply and began to check her instruments.
“How the hell could a navigator miss a whole fucking planet?”
“Watch the language!” Wilkes growled. “Adams has the com-link on.”
“Well! As long as we don’t say any bad words before we die …,” Adams muttered.
“Nobody’s dying today! Johnson, swing us around and see if you can break us loose and get us the hell out of here.”
Claudia felt a flicker of hope at the order.
“Rotating,” Johnson reported grimly. “15 degrees … 30 ….”
“Slow. Watch that you don’t deplete the booster fuel!”
Claudia could hear Johnson’s teeth grinding.
“Coming around, Commander.”
“Commander ….!” Claudia said, her heart in her throat as she got a visual on the object coming at them—a snowball the size of Earth if not larger. And they were firmly in the grip of its gravity by now, far too close for their auxiliary engines to pull them out. They needed the main engine they’d jettisoned when they’d cleared Earth’s atmosphere.
“I know,” Wilkes interrupted.
“But …!”
“Where are we, Johnson?”
“Coming into position now, Commander.”
“Fire engines!”
“Copy that.”
“Milner--Status?”
“Slowing descent …,” Claudia responded grimly.
“Descent?” Shelly practically screeched. “Tell me we aren’t landing on this thing!”
“Give it a little more, Johnson.”
“Fuel at 50%.”
“Do it! Progress, Milner?”
“No, Sir.”
“No …?”
“We’re still being pulled toward the surface …. Or it’s coming at us too fast. I’m not sure which,” Claudia said in a voice vibrating with the terror she was trying to keep under control.
“It wouldn’t be coming at us—shouldn’t,” Shelly muttered. “How?”
“Fuel at 35%.”
The Commander was silent for a handful of seconds. “Initiate landing procedures,” he said grimly. “Let’s see if we can set down on the son-of-a-bitch without breaking anything we need.”
“But … We haven’t looked at any of the data!” Shelly exclaimed, voicing the concerns of every crewmember. “We don’t even know if we can survive this thing if we do manage to land! We could be crushed ….”
“We don’t have a choice,” Johnson said pointedly, his voice harsh with his own fear. “We’re going down. All we can do now is try to control the crash.”
“Commander!”
“Do your damned job, Adams! Send Houston what you can while we still have communications,” Wilkes snapped, then added into his radio, “Reyes! Where the hell are you? We need to uncouple from the hab-wheel stat!”
“Already on it, Commander,” responded Reyes’ disembodied voice from somewhere in the ship. “Upper level airlock doors sealed. Heading for the lower level now.”
“Shit! Milner! Adams! Get down there and help him!”
“I can handle it!” Reyes responded.
The Commander hesitated and then jerked his head at Milner and Adams. “We don’t have time!”
“We could divert more power to the hub and seal the doors from here,” Johnson pointed out.
“Except we can afford it! Go! Get those doors sealed!”
The gravity was a help, not a hindrance. Claudia and Shelly hooked their heels on the ladders and slid down to the next level and then pelted down the corridor to close and seal the inner and outer doors. They ran into Reyes coming from the final corridor and the three of them raced to the bridge to secure themselves for crash or landing—or crash landing.
The shudder that went through the hub when the wheel was jettisoned almost knocked them off their feet, but they managed to catch themselves, climb the ladder, and dive into their safety harnesses.
Claudia tried not to think about the fact that they’d just jettisoned all of their supplies. If they survived the landing they might be facing a long, slow and very painful death.
Except for basically what amounted to snacks, they had nothing in the way of food or water on the ship with them.
They would’ve been facing a quick, fiery death if they hadn’t, however, and there’d been no time to grab more supplies if they’d thought about it. The ship wasn’t designed for takeoff and landing, but it was at least aerodynamic and had some ‘braking’ and maneuvering capabilities—without the hab wheel.
Of course, the hab wheel had their extra fuel, etc., etc..
The planet had just enough atmosphere to warm the capsule as they headed down.
It didn’t slow them appreciably.
Claudia thought, right up until they slammed into the surface, that their rockets must have slowed them enough with the push against the gravity if nothing else to manage a tolerably safe landing.
She was wrong. The impact with the icy ground rattled every bone in her body. Pain exploded inside of her and she blacked out.
There was no actual awareness of time passing before she swam upward toward the surface of consciousness, drawn by something she couldn’t explain, and managed to pry her eyelids up a fraction.
The bridge was black—the darkness so profound it seemed thick and almost tangible.
Then she saw the light—faint but growing stronger as it flickered over the Commander’s face. If moved from Wilkes to Johnson and grew far brighter—neon blue. Then it moved to Reyes and Adams. It danced over them. It became brighter with each crewmember it touched, hovered over almost as if it was studying them.
Finally, it turned to her, moved toward her, enveloped her.
She saw a face in the light, a male face.
Alien.
And then nothing.
* * * *
Torin paused, studying the female for many long moments.
He’d known she was alive—all of them. They would’ve been no use to him if they had not been.
So he wasn’t certain, afterwards, what had given him pause.
Frozen him in place, more like, he thought derisively.
It wasn’t concern that she’d seen him and might know what he was about. He hadn’t felt a jolt of guilt when he’d seen that her eyes were open.
He had felt a jolt of something that had frozen him in place. He just wasn’t sure of what that something was.
Or maybe he was and he just didn’t want to acknowledge it?
Because it was an inconvenient truth?
* * * *
“Lieutenant Milner! Lieutenant Milner! Claudia! Are you ok? Respond!”
The sound of her name finally penetrated the gray fog Claudia was floating in. She struggled and eventually managed to lift her eyelids, but it still took moments more for her eyes to focus. When they finally did, she realized someone was pressing their face shield against hers, peering at her through pitch blackness punctuated with blinding spots of light.
She managed a groan.
“You ok?” the male voice persisted. “H
ave you sustained any injuries that you’re aware of that need immediate attention?”
The question threw her for a handful of moments. She withdrew her focus to conduct an internal examination. “I don’t … know,” she responded finally. “I don’t think so.”
Wilkes released his grip on her helmet. “Good, because I don’t know how the fuck we’d do anything about it.”
“Where are we?” Claudia managed to get out after a few moments of searching for the answer herself.
“On the surface of a planet that shouldn’t be here,” Commander Wilkes responded grimly, then added somewhat vaguely in an under-breath, “We need to see what kind of damages we’ve sustained.”
It spoke volumes for his mental state that he wasn’t worried about ‘language’.
NASA was a stickler for maintaining a polite public face.
So if he wasn’t worried what NASA might think of his choice of adjectives ….
“Communications down?”
“Frankly, it would surprise the fuck out of me if the antenna was still intact.”
“Oh my god! We need to get out of here before this thing blows!” Claudia exclaimed abruptly as the dots finally connected.
“And go where?” Shelly Adams demanded shrilly.
“Keep it together!” Commander Wilkes commanded in a warning tone. “We have to keep our wits or we aren’t going to make it!”
“The good news is, there isn’t enough oxygen for any fuel left to ignite and there damned well wasn’t much of it. The bad news is there isn’t enough oxygen for us to blow up and we may not have anything except what’s in our suits,” Johnson said, “so you might want to consider calming the fuck down and conserving what you have.”
Reyes spoke for the first time. “We have reserves onboard.”
“Had,” Wilkes said pointedly. “Why don’t you go take a look and see what we still have? We need eyes-on anyway—search for and take notes on any and all visible damage and report back. We can go back over the ship … later and look for anything missed in the first round if we need to.”
Silence fell after Reyes had left except for business as they went down their check lists and exchanged status updates on their equipment.
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