The End of the Beginning

by Mark H Culbertson

  “Commander Ray, please acknowledge.”

  I must have been lost in thought because I had stopped and the crawler had pulled me into a cavern that was very well lit that had people walking around without suits. I must be in the hangar bay.

  “Ray here.”

  “Commander Ray, request permission to open hatches”

  I wasn’t sure that they needed my permission, but they probably remembered that we went down there armed. The last thing they wanted was for me to blow some poor fool’s head off as he opened the hatch.

  “Granted.” I didn’t want to talk, didn’t want to see anyone. I wanted to walk out of the airlock without a suit, at least it would be quicker than waiting to die up here.

  I heard the hatch open with a slight release of pressure. I remember thinking that the inside of the cabin had been at Earth normal plus one percent and that Moonbase was at Earth normal minus three percent.

  I hadn’t moved from the acceleration couch. I knew that I had to get up but couldn’t think of a reason why it was important enough for me to do it.

  “Sir, sir, are you okay?” I wasn’t really sure that the voice was speaking to me. How in the hell could I be okay? I was never going to be okay again.

  “Captain McGuire, we have a problem, please send medical up asap, Commander Ray seems to be catatonic. Telltales are showing elevated blood pressure, uneven pulse and shallow respiration. He may be having a seizure of some kind.”

  I could hear them like they were on TV in the next room, something that was in my range of consciousness, but not directly affecting me. It wasn’t until a medic or doctor of some kind unlatched my helmet that I responded “She’s dead isn’t she?”

  I think that I confused her. She had a puzzled look on her face but it didn’t show in her voice “Sir, let’s just get you checked out and we can answer your questions later.” She was polite but firm. Every time that I asked her something she put me off. She kept putting me off until she had me entirely out of the pressure suit and onto a gurney on the floor of the hanger bay.

  Once she had me strapped down I asked the question again. She must have had been talking to someone, because I could see her eyes start to tear up as she reached out and touched my hand. I didn’t want to hear what she said next, “We saw a massive heat signature at about the same time that we lost the radio transmission. We’ve got every possible optic, including Hubble, turned Earthside, but the cloud coverage is too heavy. I’m sorry Commander Ray.”

  They put me through a battery of tests over the next two hours. It seems that there was nothing wrong with me but stubbornness.

  Captain McGuire came to talk to me after they were finished. I had just stepped out of the shower and was busy toweling dry my hair.

  “What do you think Steve? Do you want to stick around here and help us figure out what makes Prometheus tick? I could use a man like you here.”

  I resisted the impulse to tell him to go fuck himself. McGuire was a good guy, I was just being asked the wrong question at the wrong time. I didn’t want to stay here. Hell I would have rode a canister back down to Lambert and walked back if I thought that Mike still down there waiting for me, but she wasn’t. I had been on Bravo for over twenty years, Bravo was the next best place to home that I could see.

  I must have hesitated long enough that McGuire figured it out. He nodded, “The next canister for Bravo is headed out in an hour and seventeen minutes. I’ll have you a suit ready. Is there anything else you want to take with you?”

  I shook my head.

  “If you want we’ll sedate you for the trip, it seems to make it easier, especially for us older guys.”

  I nodded my assent. It wasn’t until after he left that I realized that I hadn’t said a word to him.

  The medic who came in with the hypodermic gun looked at me and said “They’ve got your weight at ninety five kilos, is that right?” I nodded, close enough. I was actually at ninety kilos when we left Bravo and I knew that I had dropped at least six kilos after we had left, but if he overdosed me it wouldn’t matter.

  They suited me up without much comment. I don’t think that I had said more than five words since I landed, so they weren’t going to go out of their way to talk to me. They may not have understood what I had lost, but they did know that I was the sole survivor of what was probably the last mission to Earth, a mission that I wished that I had died on and if I didn’t want to talk, they weren’t going to try to talk to me.

  I was thankful for that. I didn’t want to acknowledge the outside world. I was afraid if I did, everything would come crashing down and I wouldn’t be able to function.

  Whatever that medic gave me was good stuff because I was having trouble standing before they ever got my suit on. I was thinking that the fact that I hadn’t ate anything since the morning that I taken off from Earth was probably emphasizing its effect and that had been almost forty eight hours ago. I remember hoping that the capsule would explode in-flight, because if I was going to go out it would be better going out feeling like this than going out all morbid and depressed and committing suicide Bravo on the way I would probably go out.

  All I remember after that was being helped into the canister and the lid closing. It was total black, and then I remember nothing at all…….

  Chapter 22

  I could hear angels talking around me. I knew it was angels because I was hearing the voices of people who were dead. I could hear Charlie and I could hear Mike. I remember crying because I couldn’t talk to her and tell her how much I loved her.

  There were other angels that were constantly talking about me. It was a battle to make them hear. I wanted them to know how much she meant to me. I remember thinking that the angels where trying to decide my fate. I knew that I was bound for hell because I had let the woman that I loved die while I came out unscathed. I struggled to tell them. To explain to them that I couldn’t go to hell, that if they could just find Mike that she would tell them. She would tell them that I loved her and would never stand by and let anything happen to her.

  I could feel them holding me down. The more I struggled the more hands I could feel. I knew that they were trying to cast me out, trying to keep me from seeing Mike again. And I fought. With every last ounce of strength in my body, I fought. Several times I felt the satisfying feel of flesh against my fist and then I started to realize that angels can’t get hit. I wasn’t going to hurt one and one wouldn’t have had any problem restraining me in my drug induced state.

  I started to relax and listen to the voices. They were telling me that everything was going to be alright. I remember thinking that they were lying because without Mike nothing was going to be alright.

  They must have done something to me because I went totally black after that.

  When I next heard voices it was voices that I didn’t recognize talking about things like my heart rate, respiration and other stuff that actually didn’t matter to me. I knew then that I was in an infirmary either on Bravo or one of the other stations. I closed my eyes and went back to sleep.

  I awoke, groggy, hungry and confused. A nurse came in and after a comment about our Mr. Rip Van Winkle, gave me some broth to drink. It tasted good and she took it away long before I was done.

  I dozed a little more, it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds and a Doctor came in. At least I assumed it was a Doctor, he appeared to be, he was carrying a clipboard and talking to me without looking at me.

  “Mr. Ray are you stupid?”

  I wasn’t expecting that one, “what the fuck are you talking about doc?”

  “Your weight, you told the medic on Moonbase that you were 95 kilos, when your actual weight is 70.4 kilos, and you’re white blood count is way off. From the looks of the wounds on your body you’ve lost quite a bit of blood. He dosed you with almost fifty percent more tranquilizer than you actually needed. You’ve been out for most of the last two days. If they hadn’t checked mass on the capsule they would have overshot and you w
ould have been lucky if Charlie, Delta or Echo could have captured the capsule. It would have been hell to wake up in that thing with no oxygen wouldn’t it?”

  “It may have been better that way doc. It beats sitting around this piece of shit tin can waiting to die.”

  He looked a little confused when he did look up, I was waiting for the lecture, but all he said was “I’ve got someone you need to talk to, I’ll be back in a minute.”

  I didn’t want to talk to his shrink. I knew he thought I was nuts, hell, I’m not sure that I didn’t agree with him. I’d seen it happen to buddies in Iraq, they lost someone close and then went off the deep end. They started volunteering for the shit that you weren’t going to come back from if you did it too many times. Kind of a military version of Russian Roulette. That got me to thinking about Mike and I started to cry. Not out loud, but the tears were running down my face. I sat up on the bed and buried my face in my hands.

  “What fuck wrong with you, American got head up ass again?!”

  I jerked upright! I knew that voice!

  Striding towards me was Mike! I jumped up from the bed and almost hit the floor but she ran towards me and caught me before I did.

  I tried to ask so many questions at once that I knew I wasn’t making any sense.

  She finally put her fingers against my lips to shut me up. “Men, especially American men so stupid, expect Mike to die and not come back. No faith. No way Mike was going to leave stupid man she love to try to figure out world on his own. Mike love man, but he not too bright, can’t handle world by himself.”

  With that she kissed me. Not just any kiss either, it would have left me weak in the knees even if I hadn’t already been weak in the knees.

  When she helped me back to my bed I realized that we had company. The doctor was back and he had Charlie with him. Mike sat down beside of me.

  I finally managed “what happened? The last that I knew we had lost radio contact with you guys. Everyone assumed that you were dead.”

  Mike grinned “Stupid people underestimate shuttle jockeys!”, Charlie nodded “When got back to Nemesis things were tense. You could feel them watching. You’ve felt it, they were waiting. We gave Thomas the hatch code and he sent David up to unlock the hatch so that we would be able to get inside quickly once we got close to her. We knew that they wanted Nemesis and possibly one of us to run her and that couldn’t be allowed. We tried to act like nothing was wrong the entire time that we were getting into battle mode. Thomas had come up with the idea of Mike and I splitting up and approaching Nemesis from opposite directions so that it wouldn’t be obvious that we were trying to get on board. Mike and I figured that with the hatch unlocked, we could get inside in less than 4 seconds.”

  Mike couldn’t help herself, she had to speak up “Soon as they realized what was going on, those assholes started coming from everywhere.”

  Charlie agreed, “I’d never seen anything like it, the entire time I was hitting Mike with takeoff readings they were coming down the road towards us. Less than thirty seconds from closing the hatch and all I could see were people running at us. Thomas’ people had gone to ground, but you could see the New American’s dropping occasionally and I knew that those boys were doing their job. We needed to do ours and clear a path in front of us so that we could take off. Thomas had a trick or two up his sleeve because an entire section of roadway disappeared in flames people and all, I hit the air cannons to try to blast a hole, but all that happened was the smoke cleared and I was able to see what they had come up with. It was a log truck with a log fastened to the top of it like a battering ram with a point. I hit the napalm and the thrusters at the same time. I pity the poor bastard driving that rig because it went up hard. The explosion took off your glorified nose gear, most of our rear wheels, our communications antennae and our radar. We handled her blind all the way up and used suit communicators once we got within range of Delta station.”

  Charlie paused for a breath and I looked at Mike “what about Russell?”

  “Funny thing you ask, because we been asking the same question, but some amateur astronomers on moonbase picked up Morse code signals from about the location of where we landed.” They had been going for three nights solid before someone figured out it was Morse code and deciphered it.

  She stopped there, waiting for something, finally I couldn’t stand it any longer “Well, what they hell did it say”

  “It said nothing here but us rabbits!” I couldn’t help but laugh. Russell had let loose about twenty rounds from his m-16 the first day there when he kicked up a rabbit while he and I were patrolling.

  “So what now? Do we get to retire? Are they done with us now that they’ve got the machine that doesn’t need a crew?”

  Mike shook her head, “No, they have new machine but don’t want to risk it when can risk us instead, next stop for us, I believe they want us to bring back shuttle from Baikonur Cosmodrome. I think that they don’t want us topside because afraid of us!”