The End of the Beginning

by Mark H Culbertson

  With that I tossed down the rest of the liquor in my cup and looked over at Mike and Charlie, who were trying very hard to be looking at absolutely anywhere but at Russell and I. Thomas was the one with balls. He was grinning like a hyena and was motioning to the boy with the bottle and holding out another cigarette all at the same time.

  “I knew that you would give him the correct guidance in the matter”, Thomas grinned.

  I laughed, “how in the hell was any of that correct guidance? I got pissed off, I gave him the worst possible scenario, and then told him that I would do the same thing myself, given the chance.”

  Thomas nodded, “You showed passion, you told him the major drawbacks of his plan, and then you told him that it was the same plan that you would have came up with in his situation. That’s how you gave him correct guidance. You figured out that he was going to do it regardless of what you told him and that if you gave your blessing, he wouldn’t spend the rest of his life second guessing what might have been.”

  “Giving him permission to get himself killed is more like it”, I replied as Thomas refilled my cup.

  “Oh, I don’t think that he needs your permission to get that done. He, like you, is perfectly able to do that without asking anyone’s permission.”

  I took a drink and thought about it. Russell was right, I wasn’t sure if Thomas was right or wrong, but he did have a point. It may even make sense in a twisted sort of way.

  I sat there and watched while Russell sat and talked with some of the men and teenagers that were in our group. He was very animated and seemed to be enjoying himself immensely, which is more than I could say for any of us before this mission started. I think that it was envy that I was actually feeling. It was hard to tell, there were so many emotions running through me that I had a hard time sorting them out.

  I don’t know how long I sat there watching Russ, but the cigarette was long gone and my cup was empty when Mike sat down beside me. I must not have been thinking clearly because I slipped my arm around her waist without a thought. It must have been the right thing to do because she pulled in close and whispered “concentrate on only one world’s problems at a time please. Not try to solve problems of all world’s at once.”

  I turned to her and said “Do all Romanians’ talk too much?” I never gave her a chance to respond. When she turned to answer me I pulled her in close and kissed her. There was only the briefest hesitation before she gave in. I could feel her tremble in my arms and knew that she felt as strongly about this as I did. I also knew that if I asked her to forget all of this and join Russell in going AWOL that she would firmly tell me that we had a responsibility to everyone topside and that I would fail her in a way that meant that I would never be able to redeem myself in her eyes. Regardless of how beautiful she was or how deep her eyes were when I was staring into them, she was still Mike and that meant doing what needed to be done regardless of the cost.

  I woke up with Mike still asleep in my arms. I didn’t want to move for fear that I would wake her. I shouldn’t have worried though, it was like she sensed I was awake and opened her eyes to look into mine.

  “Good thing we weren’t alone. American man may have taken advantage of good Romanian girl!”

  I couldn’t help myself, I grinned and said “I do believe that what’s left of your virtue is still intact my dear, besides where would I find a good Romanian girl?”

  Thomas appeared as if from nowhere, ”We have flat bread, acorn butter and what passes for coffee for those of you who like to sleep late.”

  He was pouring coffee into cups on the tailgate of the pickup and was busy not looking at us. It was almost like he had been waiting for us to wake up, hovering. I put it off as typical Thomas.

  We sat drinking coffee and eating the flat bread. Acorn butter was something that I wouldn’t have believed that I would ever have had a taste for, but I was wrong. I asked Thomas about the acorns as I was eating and he told me about the preparation of the acorns that was required to eliminate the tannic acid inside the nut. He also told me that it had pretty well taken the place of most wheat at the settlement. That it was used for baking, breakfast cereal and as a spread depending on how it was prepared.

  It wasn’t until he was pouring the second cup of coffee that he said “they found her.”

  I almost didn’t hear him and had to ask him to repeat himself.

  He said “They found her, Prometheus. She’s on the next level down, locked up in a sealed glass room. We can’t tell if the seals are still intact and no one has tried any of the controls, we wanted to wait for you to get your butt out of bed before we did anything else.”

  Chapter 16

  I don’t remember getting up from the bed of the pickup. I don’t remember if I set my coffee cup down or dropped it. I wasn’t sure if I had gotten to the top of the ramp alone or if Thomas and Mike were with me. I just remember thinking that this could possibly work.

  As I moved down the ramp I realized that someone must have gotten a generator going. They had the lights on and it appeared to be coming from the building’s power source.

  I looked at Thomas “Where’s the power coming from?”

  He replied “It seems that the building has a backup bank of fuel cells, with an ample supply of methane, along with some other treasures. If we can determine a way to move them we will take them back to the settlement to help provide power.”

  Charlie was waiting for us at the bottom of the ramp. “I think that the seals are still intact Steve, and along with the methane tanks, I found the lines and fueling valves for Prometheus. I don’t know if they still have enough pressure to stay at liquid temps or to fully fuel her, but there is pressure on them and that should gain us something.....”

  All of that went by me without really registering. I could see her. She didn’t look any different than the last time I had saw her except she was behind several inches of armored glass. Her wings were retracted to save space, but she was all there. All I could do was stare. It was like seeing the twelve year old girl next door that you used to play baseball with, only ten years later, at twenty two, after she had become a woman. Except for us it had been over twenty years.

  I caught up in mid sentence. “……the glass is armored”, Charlie was saying, “We don’t have anything big enough to take it out, so we need to figure out the control panel. It’s asking for a code and I don’t want to put in just anything in case there is an auto destruct programmed.”

  “Enter zero seven one six one nine six nine”, I said without even looking at him.

  Thomas and Mike looked at each other and both started to say something, but Charlie interrupted, “I should have thought of that!” and took off to the back side of the enclosure.

  I looked at the other two left standing there with their mouths open and said “July 16, 1969, the Apollo 11 launch date” and then strolled across the floor in time to hear the hiss of escaping Nitrogen and see the doors and walls start to slide into the floor. I didn’t tell them that I assumed that they would use the same code that they used for the door codes on Prometheus. I probably should have, but I needed them to think that I was infallible at this point.

  According to Thomas, there were several men around that had worked for either Douglas, Boeing or one of the airlines at Lambert. That became obvious as the walls dropped. Men immediately started scrambling. Two men got started unrolling refueling hoses from a set of valves along the back wall. Two more had sprinted into the enclosure and started dropping a side panel from her. I was pretty impressed in that I knew that none of them had done any of this kind of work in recent memory.

  There was a set of cables hooked into the section just under the wings that was used for external monitoring. Charlie was already at the panel looking at the telltales.

  “She’s under pressure Steve!” he yelled, “They’ve got her at 1.125 Earth normal, probably to keep the dust out.”

  “Go ahead and bleed it off Charlie, I want to get the hatch op
en and check her out” I replied.

  I was almost shaking at that point. Like a teenage boy who unbuttons the top button on his girlfriend’s blouse for the first time. The fact that she was under pressure meant that she was space worthy. If I could get her topside she would hold atmosphere. That was a good sign. It also meant that they had a chance to fill her with Nitrogen before they sealed her up in the chamber, kind of a double layer of protection. That and the power at the control panel from the fuel cells could make the difference between getting her topside and dying on takeoff.

  They had the side panel off of her and were attaching the refueling lines as I got to the hatch. As I approached I cautioned the men “I don’t think that we have to be in that big of a hurry to get her off the ground. Let’s check her out before refueling.” They pointedly looked at Thomas before continuing the refueling routine.

  I knew that look. That was the “you haven’t told him yet, look.”

  “Fess up”, I said, “there’s something that you need me to know and you’ve been holding back. I want to hear about it now.”

  Thomas didn’t blink. “Based on all the information that we can gather, the New Americans are massing for an attack on our settlement as well as Nemesis. They know that we can’t defend two fronts. That’s one of the reasons that we have been so fortunate here.”

  “How long do we have?” I asked.

  “At least two days, maybe three, but no more than four. But we need to remember that we have almost thirty percent of our defense force here and it will take us time to get them back to the settlement and in place for any attack.”

  “Then I have to take off tomorrow. We need to make sure that the runway is cleared and we need to get Prometheus top side before the day is over. That means that we need to start scavenging for any parts that we can use topside now. I need us to divide into groups. Other than the guys refueling, I need to have anyone who worked for Douglas, or any aircraft company, airline, or with any electronics experience over here to head a group. They’ll know what will be useful topside, anything else that you find that will work for you folks will be gravy. But I need electronic parts, heavy metals, lead, silver, gold and any extra room we need to fill with steel. It doesn’t matter what it is. Almost anything we find can be scavenged down to what we need it to do. I can handle almost twenty thousand pounds, so I don’t think that payload is going to be an issue but we’ve got to move now. I need to see those men with aviation experience now!”

  Thomas immediately called Ian over, “Get Roger, Bill, Ryan and Bob down here as soon as they are able. Tell them that the timetable has been moved up and to designate their duties to someone else.” He then turned to me, “I’m assuming that you want the men that are preparing the shuttle to continue doing so?” I started to nod, but realized that he had moved on from there without even looking at me.

  “Robert!” Thomas barked, “find your brother, tell him that we need to step up the operation a bit and he needs to bring his portion of the cargo down.”

  At that point Thomas turned to me, “now you have to explain to me how you plan on getting that machine out of here without the manual lift working.”

  “I need you to get every rope, chain and cable that you can get together. We’re going to use those hoists in the hanger bay and if I have to, I’ll use her steering thrusters to nudge her forward to take some of the strain off of them. I want to do that tonight before we bed down.”

  Thomas’ grin was a mile wide. “You must be a Missouri boy, I don’t know if that’s brave or stupid, but either way it takes balls!”

  With that he turned to meet the group of men that Ian had led down. “You men know what he needs”, he barked. “We need to get him moving. Let’s get everything into the hanger bay.”

  Russell, Charlie and Mike began to check the readings on Prometheus and refused to let me get into the middle of things. “You too emotionally involved right now. We do this and we do this right. You make sure that you get everything else that you need. We go through readings with you this afternoon.”

  And that was that. Prometheus may be my command, but I was still under Mike’s command here on the ground. But she was right. I was so hyped up on adrenalin that I may have missed something important. Best to let her give it the first once over.

  After that it was a slow morning. There was nothing that I could really do except answer the occasional question about what would be appropriate to take along. After the first few questions regarding cargo that I may want to take up, I started to notice looks of jealousy from some of the men. It took me a little while, but I’m not dumb. Some of the stuff that they were bringing me would be better used at the settlement than it would topside.

  I found Robert and told him to have someone bring one of the Humvees over and I began to sort through the stuff that was accumulating.

  These guys were smart. Someone had raided the cafeteria and retrieved all the silverware and kitchenware. I separated this out for the settlement. There were coils of shielded copper wiring that I left for them, but opted to take the rolls of shielded fiber-optic with me as cargo. Robert had rounded up more of the younger boys as help and was busy loading the stuff that I indicated into the Humvee. Someone had found about thirty garbage bags of crushed aluminum cans, probably about six hundred pounds, these I kept, along with angle iron, flat steel, tube steel and any other steel pieces that I could find that weren’t already in finished form. I would have taken junk engine blocks if we would have had time to get them into Prometheus.

  I had lost track of the time and was busy dividing up a box of drill bits when someone shoved a sandwich into my hand and said “Eat!” I tried to explain that I was busy, but that wasn’t working. The person said “Dammit, Steve you eat or I make you eat!” I realized then that it was Mike and that she was going to try and force feed me if I didn’t eat.

  I nodded, and took a bite of the flatbread sandwich as I looked around. The pile of material going into Prometheus had grown considerably. I saw that the Humvee was gone and was replaced with a pickup truck. Around a mouthful of whatever kind of meat that I was eating, I said to Mike “At least I got them two truckloads of material out that they can use.”

  Her brow wrinkled for a second and then she started to laugh. “No Steve, not two truckloads, more like twelve. All vehicles have some stuff in them. This is last truck that can be loaded. It’s almost four o’clock and we need to get Prometheus up to ground level so we can get this crap loaded and secured.”

  I nodded and looked for a place to sit down, when I didn’t find anything I settled for the hanger floor underneath my feet. Mike sat down beside me and began telling me that Prometheus was in better shape than Nemesis and that getting her back up was going to be a piece of cake. She started explaining that they had the cables hooked up and were ready to try to move Prometheus from the lower level.

  I could have sat there all night and listened to Mike’s voice. It didn’t matter what she was saying, just the fact that she was saying it while she was sitting next to me. But it wasn’t to be. She was waiting for me. They were all waiting for me. I had to be the person that I didn’t want to be. I had to be the one who got the job done. I didn’t want to. I wanted to hand it off to someone else. I wanted to do what Russell had planned. I wanted to stay behind and help raise healthy boys that didn’t know what the word “fear” meant, boys who could survive for days at a time on their own in the wilderness. But that wasn’t all. What I really wanted to do was to tell all those people waiting for me to go fuck themselves. I didn’t want to do this.

  But I knew that I had no choice.

  Chapter 17

  Getting her up to hanger level wasn’t as big of a problem that I had thought it would be. It seems that whoever had thought up the lower level with the lift had also envisioned some contingency plans and the folks that I had helping me had figured it out.

  There was an electric backup system to the hydraulic lift. They just lowered the other end of
the lift, winched Prometheus onto it and proceeded to lift. We didn’t produce as much amperage as they would have and you could see the lights dim when they engaged those winches, but the motors held and in less than ten minutes the lift was level with the floor and we were pulling her forward.

  Once we had her on solid floor we began to load. There wasn’t any rhyme or reason to how she was loaded, anyway to get it inside and get it secured. We were fighting time now. I wasn’t worried about a launch window, but everyone else was worried about the New Americans. They were pulling in some of their outlying forces in order to concentrate an attack on either Nemesis or the community. Neither would be good considering that we probably had anywhere from twenty-five to thirty-five percent of the fighting force with us.

  It was after five when I told Thomas that I wanted to walk the runways. He just nodded and motioned to Mike and I to follow.

  The longest runway at Lambert International was just short of 2.1 miles or 3.3 kilometers long. That was a little short for Nemesis, but I should be able to pull it off with Prometheus.

  After all, Prometheus was lighter and capable of more thrust than the second generation shuttles. It was on a heading of 122 degrees which wasn’t awful but I would have preferred 270 degrees heading into the Earth’s rotation, every little bit of momentum would help on clearing atmosphere.

  We were going to have to move her a little more than a mile to get her into place at the end of the runway. That was going to take us a while unless I could use thrusters to taxi her into place. It was possible because she would handle more like a jet than a shuttle, but a lot depended on how much fuel that they were able to get into her.

  The approach to the runway was clear. Thomas’ men seemed to have a good grasp of what was needed. They had cleared the approach well enough that there was nothing bigger than a bird dropping on the tarmac. Grass, weeds and even what appeared to be small trees had been pulled up to clear the approach. The runway was my main concern however. I did know that it was at least 24 inches thick, but twenty plus years was a long time to go without maintenance, even without landing 850,000 pound planes on it every day.