The End of the Beginning
By: Mark H Culbertson
Chapter 1
Sometimes I sit up and I wonder…..
What would it be like if life were different? If we didn’t have war, if two men could disagree on something and then walk away, if everyone was the same color, the same nationality, the same religion. No greed, or hate or intolerance. But that’s a waste of time. It wasn’t to be, at least not this time around.
I remembered. Cars, birds, swing sets, snow and baseball games. All of those things that most people here had only seen on video, but never experienced, real gravity, not centrifugal force or the 6/10 gravity of the moon, but real gravity under which Man evolved. Few here have ever tasted a steak. No bleeding piece of meat that came from a living animal. They wouldn’t be able to stomach it. Don’t get me wrong, they’re tough, but not in the predatory type of way that I was accustomed to. No, on the Earth that I knew you needed eyes in the back of your head, if not for the four legged predators, then at least for the two legged ones. The folks here see life differently. They have no freedoms. They don’t see it, but I do. Everything that they do has an impact on someone else. And they know it. We didn’t. Maybe that’s the real reason it happened. I still see Earth as trees, grass and yes, Lions and Tigers and Bears. To them Earth is this big brown, blue and white ball in the sky that they don’t really see, it’s just there. They don’t see it as a daily competition to outperform your fellow man. But there is one thing that we do have in common, we wait and we watch and we hope and we survive. That’s all we can do. The only other choice is to die. And we weren’t bred that way.
I remember how it ended. In hindsight it wasn’t really a surprise. The war in Afghanistan and Iraq was still going strong and the Al Qaeda were still hiding along the border regions of those countries. Iran claimed to be developing nuclear power for peaceful purposes and the US and the UN Security council were still spouting rhetoric trying to use diplomacy to stop them. Syria was still supporting terrorism and was doing all they could to stop the United States in their “War of aggression on the Middle East”. It had been going on like this for years. We all took it in stride and didn’t pay much attention to most of the politics. It didn’t change from day to day. Until the day the Israeli satellites spotted an explosion with a nuclear signature inside the borders of Iran. Tehran had tested a nuclear warhead, and a thousand miles was way too close for the State of Israel to tolerate. No hesitation, no warning. Israel launched 17 nukes in as many seconds. Tehran got 2. One would have been enough, but I guess that they weren’t taking any chances. Tabriz, Karaj, Qom, Esfahan, and Mashad all got hit in the first 3 minutes. Syria responded before the first missile hit. They launched 19 times. Not a one of them hit an Israeli target. Eight were aimed for Jerusalem and were shot down before passing Amman, Jordan. The only Syrian nuclear warhead to actually make it through any defenses hit Istanbul, Turkey. Pakistan freaked, they saw it as a pre-emptive strike. Predictably, India launched within thirty seconds of Pakistan. North Korea took the opportunity to take out Seoul, Incheon and Pusan, South Korea. Bejing responded by taking out Pyongyang, North Korea as well as most of the rest of the Korean peninsula. The former Soviet States all panicked, and launched. Bejing was hit with over forty warheads in forty minutes. Adak Naval Station in Alaska took a direct hit, Los Angeles, San Francisco and San Diego all were hit with multiple warheads. Phoenix and Denver both had airbursts within fifty miles. In the first hour there were over two hundred nukes launched, over a thousand in the first four hours. That’s over four a minute. The only Nuclear age countries that didn’t launch were the United States and Great Britain. But it didn’t matter. Most of the population of the west coast died within the first week. The east coast was pretty well spared but the fallout levels were so high that the water supplies, food supplies, almost everything became contaminated within two weeks. The middle-east was non-existent. Most of southern Europe, northern Africa and southeast Asia died in the first month. They were the lucky ones. The rest of them became Stone Age countries within the first year. The windstorms carried enough dust into the air that it obscured the sun.
But the scientists were all wrong. It wasn’t a nuclear winter that occurred, but a nuclear summer. Ultraviolet went in, but the dust held the heat and didn’t let it out. The temperature rose almost 8 degrees Celsius at the poles, more than that at the equator. Over the next year the oceans rose almost 500 feet. Pasadena, California became ocean front property, so did Houston, Texas. All of Florida was under water as well as most of Louisiana, the Baja Peninsula and Panama no longer existed except as a chain of islands.
We listened to the radio broadcasts for a couple of weeks. After that we turned them off. Most were begging for help. And we couldn’t. Not if we wanted to survive. We were overcrowded as it was. Almost sixty extra bodies on Bravo station alone. In addition to the normal station crew and families, there were the visiting scientists and politicians, as well as the shuttle crew, that was me. I was one of those extra bodies. I was twenty eight when it happened, that was over twenty years ago.
Me, I’m Steven Ray. Just Ray to my friends, of which there were a few, and “dick head” along with whatever other names came to mind to the folks that weren’t. I have to admit, I didn’t try very hard to make friends. It didn’t matter. Life as I knew it was over. I hadn’t signed on to live in this tin can. I was one of the few who lived to feel the bite of air under my wings. I had flown over two hundred combat missions in Iraq and seventy completed shuttle missions after that. I knew that it wouldn’t happen again. That made it real hard to relate to the “tuna”, the folks who lived in the can that was Bravo Station or “BS” for short. I used to make jokes about which one of the tuna were going to shoot for Miss BS 2029. Most of them didn’t get the joke. Of the few that did, none were amused. Only Mike, but Mike wasn’t a tuna, far from it.
You have to know Mike. Mike has an IQ somewhere north of 200, loves the 3 stooges and thinks that the best sport ever invented is boxing in zero gee. Try that sometime. Think about it, every time you threw a punch you were moving backwards at the same speed you threw the punch. Real hard to hurt anyone, but if you were good you could land a few. It was all scored on points. Mike could beat me most of the time but occasionally I gave her a run for her money.
That’s right “her”. Mike’s a girl. A woman really, 5’11”, 165 pounds, blonde hair, blue eyes, with a sense of humor that would make a sailor blush and a right that would make you flinch even in zero gee. Mike’s short for Mikka, Mikka Nikolaevna, she was the Russian pilot who I was relieving on station when the idiots pushed the button. Mike was really from Romania, but was part of the Russian shuttle crew. She knew how to make vodka from pretty well anything organic and could drink more of it than any two men alive. She didn’t really care who liked her and who didn’t. All the guys were polite to Mike. She had this attitude that said it all. Great looking, knows it and knows that no one could ever meet the standards that she set, including yours truly. Not that I didn’t try. Almost cost me a broken arm, cost some more than that.
The women hated her, which is probably the reason that she acted like she didn’t care. Reckless as hell, she paid no attention to any authority when it didn’t suite her. Did what she knew needed doing regardless of orders or what anyone thought. She actually made a spoke jump one time. No tether. No jets. In case you don’t know what I’m talking about, I’ll explain. The station is laid out like a wheel, you have the rim, the hub and the spokes. There are various different antennae, lenses and sensors on the exterior. Sometimes these things would have to be repaired or replaced by someone. Someone meant yours truly, the shuttle staff. None of the rest of the crew had r
eal suit experience and it made us a productive part of the station. We were working on a set of antennae one day on spoke three and had just re-attached the wiring when we got a call from Station Ops that Artie on spoke four had got holed by a loose bolt. Mike didn’t even hesitate, she turned, spotted Artie and before the transmission had cut off she had jumped. Keep in mind that each spoke was over 150 meters long. We were about 100 meters out. Centripetal acceleration equals velocity squared over radius and that times mass equals force. Short answer was that we were moving real damn fast. But, she jumped, came by Artie moving too fast to grab anything but Artie. Grabbed him, quick patched the hole and held on tight. Artie’s mass was enough to slow her down so that when she passed spoke five her mag boots stuck. There wasn’t one guy in a thousand that could have made that jump. But Mike never thought about it. I did. And I didn’t jump. If it weren’t for Mike, Artie would have died that day.
After that she became untouchable. It was like everyone was in awe. No one tried to make friends or have real conversation. Oh, everyone was polite, but no one understood the how and why of the whole situation. I understood. With Mike it was all or nothing. No halfway measures. It was pretty tough on Mike, not that she would show it. She was the tough “guy” that didn’t need anything from anyone, but she cried in her sleep some nights. There were many nights that I would wake up to hear her crying. The first time I walked over and put my arms around her. If it hadn’t of been for the low gee she would have dislocated my shoulder. As it was I went flying. I didn’t try after that. We all cope in our own way. I vented and was pretty well an ass to most people I dealt with. Mike cried at night. I’m not sure which way was better but I know that I didn’t try to comfort her anymore. She didn’t mention it the next day so I let it be.
Shuttle crew shared the hanger quarters and unless you were screwing one of the tuna, which usually wasn’t for long, you were stuck there. This meant little, if no privacy. We all knew about everyone else’s flaws and insecurities. Except Mike didn’t have any. Not as far as anyone else was concerned, but I knew and I wasn’t saying anything. We were an elite group. We were the only one that could actually land anyone on real dirt. And none of us were gonna show that we needed anything from anyone. It didn’t matter how lonely we actually were. We used to be the elite. Not just landing the big guys, but also taking off. No one could touch us. That was still the case, but we didn’t get the respect we got when we were the lifeline to Earth.
The entire shuttle program had taken a radical turn in the early twenty-first century. The powers that be had decided that if we were ever going to develop the moon and outbases for general population and tourism that we had to get away from the massive boost system used in the late twentieth century. Shuttles like Atlantis, Endeavour and Discovery were out of date compared to Nemesis, Providence and Enterprise. The latter three were second generation. We were able to take off from a standard runway that would accommodate any passenger jet. We couldn’t haul the amount of payload that the earlier generations could carry, but that was what the massive boost systems were still for. We didn’t use any Solid Rocket Boosters, otherwise known as SRB’s, like the older shuttles did. We did carry more fuel and tended to take longer to get into orbit, but I could take off with a 70 year old man and a newborn on board and they really wouldn’t know the difference from any other plane flight until we hit freefall.
The shuttle Nemesis was attached to Bravo and was one of four working shuttles topside. There was the Discovery on Charlie, Enterprise on Echo and Providence was sitting on the moon. Discovery was the one old style shuttle that we had left and was strictly station to station payloads. Moonbase also had enough parts that we probably could have put together two more shuttles if need be but the four shuttles we had took up most of our spare resources to fly, so no one saw the need. We used them to bring in asteroids for ice and minerals and to trade between stations and the moon, although we avoided landings on the moon due to the risk factor. After all, there were only eight of us who had actually landed a shuttle. No one wanted to risk a crackup.
We traded among the stations and Moonbase. Alpha handled meds of all kinds. Delta and Echo handled electronics, metal recycling and almost anything that needed to be fabricated. Bravo and Charlie were fish farms. We exported caviar, frozen fish, dried fish, even smoked fish. Charlie exported lobsters, shrimp, crab, and pretty well any other shellfish you could think of. Moonbase had a few mines going, but mostly traded vegetables, corn, potatoes, tomatoes, etc, but sometimes there would be the rare canister of food delicacies. Like cheese, eggs and the occasional steak. You really had to do something right to get that one. It depended on what we had to trade. Mike would trade homemade vodka. She usually got the better end of the deal. One half liter of vodka for eight ounces of steak and she wouldn’t settle for just any cut either, pure prime rib. The last time I had a steak it cost me a hundred grams of caviar, and that cost me a hundred hours of doing recycle cleanup for Mannie. That’s right, a gram an hour, all for a hundred grams of beef steak, about four ounces. It wasn’t even a good cut of beef. But it was red, raw meat, slaughtered from a living steer. I cooked it on a hot plate in the hanger quarters. After all, the rest of the station crew frowned upon it. They would eat fish or lobster, but if it had the same color flesh as them….. no that wouldn’t work, they’d puke. We were looked on as savages, throwbacks to a different time. But we were good enough to do the jobs that they thought were too dangerous. There were seven of us on Bravo, there used to be eight, but Bill committed suicide the first week after Apocalypse. That’s what we called it. It brought about the advent of hell on earth. But I digress.
Moonbase used a carbon monoxide cannon to shoot canisters into lunar orbit. Our job was to pick them up before the orbit decayed. It was pretty simple really. Spot the can, match orbits, open the shuttle bay and retrieve it with the arm. We had been retrieving asteroids for ice and other raw materials the same way since before the idiots had blown up the world and it had worked out pretty good, until Enterprise, the Echo shuttle, cracked up trying to retrieve a chunk of ice that was about six thousand kilos. They were trying to match orbits with it. The procedure was to parallel the orbit from the front of the ice cube, and keep bumping the main burn jets until you match speed. It seems that it was moving about seventy kilometers a minute and Enterprise was only moving at about fifty. That wouldn’t have been too bad, but it developed a gas vent that moved it about eight degrees off course in a matter of a few seconds. You didn’t have any brakes in space, and Enterprise couldn’t turn fast enough to make a difference. She tried, but that asteroid caught her wing, and swung the crew cabin around directly into it. Not much left when a 13,000 pound chunk of ice hits you doing 720 miles per hour faster than you are.
That was the crash heard round the world, literally. We lost one fourth of our working shuttle contingent on that day. Not to mention a couple of good friends. Moonbase got real excited about that one. And after all, they ran the show. They decided that we had to be less interdependent, that we needed to be able to survive on our own, without outside interaction, that each outbase needed a shuttle. There were six bases, counting moonbase, three working shuttles with enough spare parts on Moonbase for maybe two more complete shuttles, less atmospheric shielding. The hell of it was that there were eight more working shuttles sitting Earthside. Three at Houston, three at Baikonur Cosmodrome, in Kkazakhstan, one at Plesetsk Cosmodrome and one more at Boeing in St.Louis. The Shuttle Prometheus was sitting in St.Louis. Tested but unflown, fully automated takeoff and would key off a radar transponder from orbit. She was supposed to have been mine. But I never got the chance. Moonbase decided we needed to pick up Prometheus and bring it back to them.
It didn’t really matter what happened to the shuttle jockey’s after that. They could figure out how Prometheus worked and overhaul the rest of the shuttles the same way. But they needed us, only if to bring about our own obsolescence. I didn’t like the idea, none of us did, but we
understood. Our entire society hinged upon our ability to trade between stations and Moonbase. And that was dependent on the remaining seven pilots, the youngest of which was over forty years old. Really didn’t give good odds for the survival of the species.
We all volunteered, but that wasn’t good enough. Moonbase decided that Mike was the only pilot that could get down and back up in one piece considering that we didn’t have a ground crew and that we didn’t know what the ground conditions would bring. Derrick Burns from Charlie was selected as co-pilot. That really pissed me off. But Derrick was the youngest and probably in the best physical shape of any of us other than Mike. It made sense to me even if I didn’t like it, even if he didn’t have the flight experience or combat experience that I had. That’s right combat. We fully expected to find absolutely anything.
Charlie Miller from Echo was selected as Engineer and Russell Curtis from Moonbase as Electronics Technician and Medic. Russell had to ride a canister up to make it over to Bravo. Like riding in a coffin he said, but without knowing for sure that you were dead. Most of these guys were selected because they knew the American Space Program. I had actually spent about six months with Miller in Iraq. He was the outgoing flight engineer for my squadron. Mike was selected because she was the best damn shuttle pilot that anyone had ever seen. That and she didn’t hesitate to make the tough decisions, ask Artie.
Charlie and Echo sent over extra crew members to help us get ready for atmosphere. We spent the next six weeks going over Nemesis from nose to tail. Things that would work in space, wouldn’t work on re-entry. We knew that. Not a loose screw. Not a rough spot on the hull. We replaced almost seventy-five square foot of ceramic tiles on the nose, along with the entire hydraulics on the landing gear. We had to vacuum test the interior, after all most of the time we operated with the crew cabin in vacuum, but this time we couldn’t, the pressure on re-entry could crush the hull as we heated up. We pumped the hanger bay to vacuum, with the hatches closed on Nemesis, and checked the pressure differential. We then reversed the process. She was tighter than a drum. I don’t think that a single molecule made it in or out of Nemesis.
The End of the Beginning Page 1
