We worked our asses off getting ready for the mission, even if I had been in a foul mood ever since Derrick had been named co-pilot, I still wanted the mission to succeed. That didn’t mean that people didn’t stay out of my way. I was hell to be around, knew it and didn’t care. Even the tuna were staying out of my way. I wasn’t even getting the “dick head” comments anymore. I think that they were scared of me.
The day before launch I got called to the Captain’s cabin, and I hate to admit it, but it made me a little nervous. The only times that I had been there before was when I pissed someone off for some reason or another and there were several of those. I felt kind of stupid, like a kid in school. I used to get pissed off afterwards, after all, what was he gonna do, fire me? Wasn’t happening.
That trip was pretty well the longest of my life. It seemed to take longer than my first shuttle launch. I finally got there and tapped on the door only to hear “It’s open”. I went in to see Admiral Roberts at his desk, with Mike sitting in the chair in front of the desk. I stood there at attention with kind of dumb look on my face. I was caught off guard. I was trying to figure out what I had done to Mike that would make her go to the skipper with a problem, when he spoke up, “Commander Ray, it seems that I have a mutiny on my hands.” The skipper looked from me to Mike “Commander Nikolaevna refuses to fly the mission without you on as co-pilot.”
The silence must have lasted and hour. Or at least seemed to, finally the skipper looked back at me and said “She feels that you have intimate knowledge of the St. Louis area, as well as specific knowledge of Prometheus, Commander Nikolaevna finds that indispensable”. After another uncomfortable bit of silence while I felt stupid, Roberts continued, “You can shut your mouth and sit down now Steve, we’ve got things to talk about.”
I sat, kind of dumb founded. We went over the approach and the general plan, which was to get down in one piece and to get both Nemesis and Prometheus back topside in one piece. But the key was Prometheus, without her we were done. We could build more shuttles, but we didn’t have unlimited personnel. There weren’t a lot of people volunteering to be shuttle jockeys and if we weren’t able to land a shuttle, then the human race was finished.
I left the briefing with my head spinning. I tried to ask Mike where the hell her head was at, but kept getting responses like “American’s have place to store head, in the ass” And “shut up and mind business”. Most of these answers didn’t make any sense to me, because Mike spoke better English than my next door neighbor on Earth and didn’t resort to broken English unless she was upset or emotionally wound up. Given that and the fact that I was trying to figure out why it wasn’t my business just made my head spin even more. But it didn’t matter, I was going to get to fly again and that was what mattered.
That night I had a hard time sleeping. So did everyone else. I had been laying there for about an hour when I heard Mike moving around. She got up and stood beside my bunk and after a few minutes said “Americans so stupid. They try to think instead of feel” and climbed into bed with me. We just held each other all night. Mike and I were the closest friends of anyone on station and we weren’t gonna screw it up by crossing that line. There was too much at stake.
I guess that we must have slept because I woke up with Artie looking down at me grinning from ear to ear. Mikka must have felt me move because she looked at Artie and said “One word from you and I’ll throw you from the spoke next time.” He just grinned even bigger and said “It’s time to suit up.” I don’t know if he was grinning at my discomfort or the fact that Mike was just wearing a t-shirt and panties.
We went down armed. M-16’s with depleted uranium slugs. More plentiful than lead and we could actually track the projectiles by the radiation signature. We had about 20 percent of the armaments topside. Four of us, each armed with an M-16, a 12-gauge riot gun and a Czech forty-caliber pistol. Ten thousand 5.56 rounds for each of the M-16’s as well as about a thousand rounds for each of the 40’s and about 250 rounds each for the 12’s, along with the standard US Marine combat knife for each of us. We had actually mounted a couple of compressed air cannons on each wing of Nemesis. We weren’t sure if they would work or not and we didn’t dare test them in the hanger bay, but they were set up to push one hundred and twenty kilos of compressed air out of a nozzle two inches across at a force of five thousand kilos per second squared. That would knock a hole in a brick wall at fifty feet. At least we thought it would, but we hoped that we’d never fire a shot. But if we needed to we were ready.
Launch was easy. Release from the hanger bay at a languid rate of half a km per second and float free. We waited until we were about ten km out before firing thrusters and another fifty km before firing the main engine. We weren’t worried about fuel. After all, Hydrox, hydrogen and oxygen, were the two most plentiful things on Earth and we had the means to compress it. So we burned all the way to atmosphere and started deceleration as soon as it started to get bumpy.
Moonbase had decided that we were the experts at this one and that everyone should stay out of it. We were on our own and it was eerie. No radio chatter. I really wanted to hear Houston on the headsets asking for telemetry or heat readings or just about anything. I started reading off outer skin temp just to cut the air. Mike followed up with headings and telemetry. Charlie and Russell chimed in extraneous readings that NASA would have wanted, including internal air pressure, temperature as well as our pulse rates and blood pressure. All of this was standard information that the computers would have given Houston without us having to say anything, but it gave me goose bumps. Moonbase must have thought we were nuts. Oxygen deprivation or something, but they didn’t say a word.
We made a high altitude orbit in order to line up from North to South on the Midwest United States, with the thought being to do a low flyover of the St.Louis area up Interstate 55 with a slow curve to I-270 Bypass and then to I-70 trying to find a suitable landing site either at Lambert International or somewhere close enough so that we wouldn’t have to hoof it too far. None of us relished a 50 km hike at a full gee with 20 kilo backpacks. We had some satellite imaging and infrared photos but the cloud cover was so bad that we couldn’t get an accurate assessment of the situation. We needed a bird’s eye view with details that couldn’t be seen from space. We figured we needed about 2 km to stop. The longest runway at Lambert was 3 kilometers, but we had no idea if it was clear or not. If it wasn’t, we were going to have to find an open stretch on one of the Interstate highways, land Nemesis, travel on foot to Lambert, clear the main runway, determine if Prometheus was flyable, fuel both shuttles and then return to Bravo with an un-tested prototype shuttle as well as get Nemesis back into orbit….
…..piece of cake.
Chapter 2
Optimism can be fatal. Almost was in our case. Lambert’s runways were a mass of junk strewn in all directions. We did four flyovers before we decided that the only stretch of highway that looked even close to clear was US 40/61 just outside of Chesterfield at the Spirit of St.Louis Airport about 25 km out. We flew out to the northwest and came in toward the city at about 1pm. The idea was to be clear of the Missouri River in order to make takeoff easier.
We were coming in pretty smooth and were feeling great as the wheels touched down. Not much different than a normal airplane landing except that you can’t stop as fast. We were doing about 190 knots at touchdown, just over two hundred mph, and had just kicked in the forward thrusters for a quicker stop when what appeared to be a very large dog darted out in front of the Nemesis. At almost two hundred miles per hour, with over two hundred fifty thousand pounds behind us, we barely had time to register what was going on. At that speed a pigeon would kill you. Mike fired the port air cannons as soon as she saw the dog. It worked but it was too little too late. He ended up right in the middle of our nose wheel. The tire exploded and the hydraulic cylinder folded. I hit the flaps to bring the nose up and Mike hit back thrust to reduce our speed. We ended up sliding backwards down the hig
hway at about 75 knots and came to rest against the post holding up the sign at the Chesterfield exit.
It took us a few seconds to figure out that we were at a standstill. First item of business was instrument readings. We were getting some real nasty readings from the hydraulic system and we were tilted at kind of an odd angle. Everything seemed to lean forward and to the right. Mike shouted a terse “Report!” I replied “interior pressure green, exterior pressure green, internal temperature green, exterior temperature green, internal atmosphere green, external atmosphere green, internal radiation green, external radiation green” followed by Charlie with “Nose hydraulics red, rear hydraulics green, Axial Tilt Red”, and Russell with “All systems green, crew pulse rate yellow, crew blood pressure yellow and I think that I shit my pants!” We all got a laugh until Moonbase responded with “remember guys you’re live to the rest of the us.” I grinned at Mike and flipped a finger at the cockpit dashboard, she just grinned back.
Unstrapping was kind of an adventure upon itself. We were tilted at about a 40 degree angle. That doesn’t sound like much, but most house roofs were tilted at about 2 foot per twelve foot, a 2 by 12 pitch, we were tilted at about 4 feet per 10 foot. I unstrapped and slid forward about 3 feet into the instrument panel. After popping my helmet, I took everyone else’s helmet so that they wouldn’t be dropping them on my head.
We decided that we needed to get mobile as quick as possible. After all, it’s kind of hard to handle an M-16 in a pressure suit. The plan was that I would get unsuited first, climb past everyone else to the gun locker and hand out the gear as we hit the ground. I positioned myself with my back to the locker as Mike climbed up past Charlie and Russell with their help. I handed her a CZ-40 and M-16 and then held the 12 gauge as she opened the outer hatch with her left hand and held the M-16 with her right. After all, we really didn’t know what to expect. We hadn’t set foot on Earth in over 20 years. I don’t think that we would have been surprised if Lewis Carroll’s white rabbit would have greeted us, we may have killed it, but we wouldn’t have been surprised.
The air tasted funny, too many different smells and flavors. Some I remembered, but I guess that most of them were the kind of background that you just don’t remember. It was just there without you realizing it. We were used to the mechanically cleaned canned air of Bravo, not the pollen rich, tainted atmosphere of Earth.
Charlie and Russell followed Mike. They set up a three point perimeter as I got out. Mike insisted on securing the hatch as soon as I hit the ground. I guess that was the reason she was in charge of the mission. I wouldn’t have worried about it, but she covered all of her bases. Mike was a combat veteran and knew that we had to cover our ass because no one else could. We had a pretty clear east, west view of our surroundings due to the highway, but only about 8 feet on the southern side and about 40 feet on the northern side. Mike looked at me and said, “Ray, you and Russell give me a forty south and north”, she wanted a forty-meter reconnaissance. I motioned Russell my direction and headed south and asked him “Ever done this before kid?” Knowing damn well that he hadn’t and also knowing that he was only 2 years younger than I was. He shook his head no and looked around expectantly. I told him how it worked. In a high concentration of cover a two man team moves a single man 2 meters at a time and leap frogged out to the limit of the recon circle. We would then work our way back to the tail end of the shuttle and sweep back and forth until we had covered the entire 40 meter by 40 meter square. I sent Russell out first knowing that would put me on the outer edge of the perimeter for the first sweep. We had passed each other a couple of times and Russell had just moved past me when he let loose with about 20 rounds from the 16. That pretty well scared the hell out of me and the rabbit that he scared up.
The recon went without further incidents, although Russell caught a lot of shit about killer rabbits. We swept the entire area and found nothing. Mike had walked back to the remains of the dog to take a look and after talking to Russell about not getting spooked, I walked back that direction. When I got close I could see what looked like a German Sheppard, but big, real big, about 90 kilos, it looked like it could have almost looked me in the eye. Seemed like an awful short time for a mutation this drastic to be showing up and I said so, but Mike informed me that human height had changed by almost an inch per generation. We could have been looking at a twentieth generation Sheppard.
When we got back, Charlie had food heating and juice packs out for us. He didn’t look too happy, but he waited until we got settled before he said anything. “There’s some cosmetic damage on the ass where we took out the sign but the big deal is that the nose tire is blown, nose wheel is bent, housing is cracked and the hydraulic cylinder will take a machine shop to repair.” We didn’t say anything, just sat there. We knew. It took a good pilot to land a damaged ride, but it took a damn stupid one to take off with one. That was a last resort. The odds that Nemesis would fly again were about a hundred to one. If we couldn’t get Prometheus off the ground then we would have to chance it.
We wanted to use Nemesis as a base of operations but with the tilt of the fuselage being so drastic it would have been almost impossible to sleep comfortably inside. Besides, none of us wanted to be the one that didn’t want to sleep under the stars that first night groundside.
Mike decided that we would stand watch in 2 shifts, of one person each. Each person on watch would hold a five hour watch. The idea was that half the team would be fresh each day. It was kind of a variation of what the Navy used to call port and starboard watches. Mike wanted first watch but we shouted her down. Landing Nemesis was probably harder on her physically than a sixteen round title fight on a boxer. She was the leader of the mission, but we were one team and all of us knew that she needed a night’s sleep and there was no way that any of us was going to sleep while she was awake. She finally acquiesced and Russell and I went out to collect firewood while Mike reported back to moonbase and Charlie started to look at our options. We had a couple of slings that the folks topside had the forethought to have made. They worked pretty well. We could handle about forty pounds of firewood at a time each, after about six trips we felt that we had enough for at least two nights and decided to check back in with Mike and Charlie to see what kind of shape we were in.
Mike had pulled the handheld GPS unit out of Nemesis and was sitting there with a printout. We were about fifteen miles from Lambert St.Louis and the Boeing hanger where Prometheus sat. We were also about a mile and a half from Spirit of St. Louis airport. Mike decided that we should recon the Spirit of St. Louis prior to moving on to Lambert. There was always the possibility that we could find something that would allow us to cover the distance to Lambert quicker. Not that we really expected to find a running car or truck but bicycles were always a possibility and it didn’t hurt to take stock of our surroundings before setting off blindly. We also need to try to find out what kind of resources we had at Spirit to repair Nemesis. I sure didn’t like the idea of having to lug two thousand pounds of spare parts 15 miles back from Lambert.
We drew straws for the first night’s watch, with Mike sitting next to the fire and grinning like the Cheshire cat for some reason that I couldn’t figure out. Charlie and I drew the short straws. My straw was shortest so Charlie got choice of watch. He had just decided that he wanted 1st watch when Mike stood up, and said “tonight we toast, tomorrow night you may toast” and pulled a metal flask from her coverall pocket. She made a big show out of pouring two metal cups full of what looked like water. She handed one to Russell and said “To future of Humanity, one race, one nationality, many people” and knocked back the cup. Russell did the same and I thought he was going to choke to death. Turns out that Mike had smuggled some of her hundred proof vodka aboard Nemesis. Russell just wasn’t ready for that. Poor kid. We got a pretty good laugh out of that one. Between unexpected vodka shots and killer rabbits this kid wasn’t getting any breaks. Mike told us both to keep a sharp eye and not to blow each other’s heads off
in the middle of the night and laid down on the opposite side of the fire from me.
Charlie woke me about 1am. He had the fire going pretty good and seemed relaxed but kept his eyes darting around the perimeter while I was waking up. He handed me a cup of what passed for coffee and said “It’s been quiet, almost too quiet, I would have expected some sort of night hunters, coyotes, or owls or something. I haven’t heard a thing, but you may want to keep an eye on the southeast quadrant.” When I asked him why he just shrugged and said “you’ll feel it.” It wasn’t too long before I figured out that he was right. I started to feel the eyes on me. There was something in the southeast quadrant. It may have been Charlie making me nervous, but I didn’t think so. When you’ve been in the shit, you know where the next bullet is coming from, just not when.
A trick that the Navy taught me was that when you were trying to spot movement, you don’t look directly at it. You look straight ahead, with the area that you’re trying to cover in your peripheral vision. Charlie was right. There was something out there. I was catching slight movements out of the corner of my eyes. I didn’t think that it was a wild animal either. Sooner or later an animal would give away something. A pack animal would send a signal to the rest of the pack. An individual hunter wouldn’t be able to help itself, sooner or later it would move closer to the circle of light to get a better look or smell of its prey. There was intelligence of some kind out there, I just didn’t know what.
The End of the Beginning Page 2
