Project Sail

by Anthony DeCosmo

  Carlson pulled the loose tube of Pork stuff free and used a moist cloth to clean the hose and the cylinder. The smell grew more intense but he fought through the urge to vomit.

  Wren went on, “But the New, New Testament—”

  King corrected, “The Book of Reconciliation.”

  “That shit was just loony. First he uses a burning bush, then he sends his son, but then he speaks to his flock of sheep on the internet?”

  “God reaches out to his people using the tools of the times, and in a manner that emphasizes his message.”

  “So ninety years ago the best way to reach his people was to send a message through everyone’s computer?”

  Ellen Kost said, “That and other devices like phones and tablets; all the electronics that were tied to the ‘net at the time.”

  Wren cocked his head in her direction.

  “When I was in school I wrote a paper on God’s message of 2023.”

  Carlson wedged the cleaned cylinder between the vial of “Simulated Chicken” and the generic “Multi-Purpose Protein Pack” responsible for foods that did not fall into the other categories.

  King fired back at Wren with a surprising surge of confidence, “And there is your proof, Dr. Wren.”

  He countered in a voice dripping with sarcasm, “So you think it more likely that God hijacked the internet one day as opposed to a hacker group playing a joke?”

  “No one ever traced the source of the message,” she pointed out. “There was never evidence of a hacker and the best computer experts of that day could not breach the security of so many major systems.”

  After tightening the hoses, Carlson used another damp cloth and a plastic knife to attack the dried dairy stain, scraping away the patch of gunk.

  “Over the years researchers have recreated the entire cyber-attack.”

  King replied, “In faulty simulations. No one has demonstrated how any person could have undertaken such a widespread takeover of so many systems at once. It was God’s message and it was exactly what the people needed to hear.”

  “Marching orders from their overlord?”

  “A message of unity. At the time, Earth was dominated by three major religions and dozens of smaller ones. There were religious wars, intolerance, and a constant clash of ideologies, even though those religions worshiped essentially the same God. Within ten years New Christianity had supplanted them as the primary belief system among religious people.”

  Wren stood and walked to the coffeepot near the food station.

  He said, “The wars never stopped and there were public executions in some places of people who converted. It was fucking nasty.”

  “No, that is revisionist history. It was a mainly peaceful transition because the proof came with the three promised miracles, each within eighteen months. No one could deny the truth.”

  “Science accounted for all three.”

  Carlson finished his work, shut the cabinet, and stood. He found Wren next to him pouring coffee and worried he would be dragged into the conversation, so he inputted an order even though his stomach ached at the thought of those vats of goo. He selected a chicken breast with a side of pasta. Spray jets and hoses went to work inside the processor like needles knitting a sweater.

  King called across the room, “Religion is about faith, but the miracles that followed the message were indisputable. Science could not explain them away.”

  A chime announced the completion of Carlson’s meal. He opened the lid to find a white, fibrous patty and a thatch of noodles that seemed a plastic imitation of pasta.

  Wren elbowed him and nodded toward King as he said, “Can you believe her?”

  Carlson—focused on his plate—replied, “I do not want any of this crap.”

  Wren mistook his comment and said, “Me neither, but let’s take a look at these so-called miracles.”

  Their conversation was temporarily interrupted by Kelly Thomas and Commander Hawthorne moving into and across the canteen on their way toward the cargo compartments. Judging by their shorts and t-shirts, they planned another handball lesson.

  Clearly, Hawthorne had told a joke and Kelly was laughing at the punch line. Her giggle drew Carlson’s eyes from his plate of processed meal; otherwise he would have paid her no attention. He found her loud and bubble-headed. Unlike most of the men aboard the Virgil, he did not find her attractive, for various reasons.

  That being the case, the relationship between Thomas and Hawthorne did pique his curiosity. He was not sure they were having sex, despite how much time they spent together.

  The pair moved on, their voices bouncing off the bulkheads as they disappeared to aft.

  Carlson returned his attention to the newly manufactured chicken and pasta dish sitting atop the food processor. Normally he did not mind meals from the processor but the stench from the leaky tubes had chased his appetite.

  Wren returned to his seat.

  “Not every Bible-thumper believes in the miracles; New Christians are not as unified as you like to think.”

  She answered, “You exaggerate. The media likes to give attention to the malcontents and to paint religious people in a negative light. That does not change the truth of the miracles.”

  “What you call miracles, I call science. What order should I tackle them in?”

  King huffed but did not answer.

  “Fuck it, we’ll do it chronologically. The asteroid came first, right?”

  “No,” she corrected through grit teeth.

  “The so-called black hole.”

  “It was a black hole, created by the Tevatron II Particle Accelerator three months after the message.”

  “Not according to the people who manned the Tevatron. The accident had nothing to do with an experiment. There was an explosion and a cave in, the result of human error in managing the power supply and shoddy construction. The collider had just come online.”

  King said, “To put it in language you would understand, bull shit. One researcher called his wife and told her the world was ending, and then he killed himself.”

  He scoffed, “He was a fucking technician with a history of mental illness in the middle of a divorce.”

  She insisted, “Watch the contemporary newscasts, before the skeptics started their rewrite. Several workers at the complex stated they had created a black hole that was devouring the matter around the collider. Almost half the building was lost.”

  “The investigation blamed an explosion and a collapse because of poor construction, not the collider. Besides, a particle accelerator cannot create a stable black hole.”

  Carlson pulled his eyes away from the tray of formed goo, raised his finger as a point came to mind, and then dropped it as he remembered he wanted no part of their discussion. Instead, he turned his attention to a shelf and rummaged through cans of food that served as emergency rations, hoping to find something not made from tube gunk.

  King growled at Wren, “Then why did the other major supercolliders on Earth introduce nearly one hundred new safety protocols dealing with particle experiments? Why were the sensors that monitored Tevatron damaged, destroying records of the event? I will tell you why; because the sensors were like the black box on a space capsule and they wanted to hide the reason the collider crashed. It was a black hole, and it would have consumed the Earth but God stopped it. The first miracle.”

  “You do not understand the science behind particle accelerators. This is like arguing with a bulkhead,” he shot and took another sip. “But let’s move on to number two. An asteroid a mile wide freaks everyone out when it comes around the sun and takes us by surprise. You fucking people see it as God’s judgment and call it a miracle. I don’t see how that one fits.”

  “You are forgetting that it was going to hit Earth.”

  “No it wasn’t. Three days after they discovered the asteroid, astronomers calculated it would bounce off the atmosphere.”

  “Wrong again, Dr. Wren. Astronomers at the time predicted impact with
in days. The major powers moved political leaders to bunkers and there were evacuations around the Pacific Rim. At the time, they were certain it would hit.”

  Wren shook his head but conceded nothing. To Carlson, it appeared as if he enjoyed playing with her, like dragging a string in front of a cat.

  King said, “The newscasts of the time predicted a disaster that would have wiped out hundreds of millions, but then the asteroid missed. Science was wrong, God was right.”

  “You think the news broadcasts are the best source of information? Are you fucking nuts? The real astronomers…the real scientists…not the knee-jerk God-fearing imbeciles did the math and realized it would miss.”

  “You don’t even pretend to have an open mind,” King huffed. “But you can debate the Tevatron incident and even the asteroid, but you cannot ignore what happened in Seoul. An atomic bomb detonated downtown, and no one died. The third miracle.”

  Wren chuckled and leaned back in his chair as if incredibly relaxed. King projected the same demeanor of confidence. Both felt they were about to win the argument.

  “When you say it like that, it sounds like a miracle,” he conceded. “But like everything else with you people, look close and the whole pile of crap falls apart.”

  He leaned forward again and his chair hit the metal floor with a clang. Wren then ticked off his list one after another too fast for her to respond.

  “First, the bomb accidentally detonated in an underground parking garage. Second, it occurred in the middle of the night in a business district with no one around and the skyscrapers lessened the shock wave. Third, the terrorists used a crude bomb that detonated at a fraction of its potential. Oh yeah and fourth, there were people killed, at least two hundred in the initial blast and a couple hundred more from radiation poisoning. I call bull shit on number three.”

  When he finally stopped to take a breath she said, “As usual, people like you have spent years trying to come up with phony reasons to pick apart what was a miracle. You use the filter of time, hoping that people forget what actually occurred so your excuses will take hold. A terrorist organization protesting New Christianity exploded a nuclear weapon in the heart of a major city and the casualty count was so low, people attributed it to divine intervention. You offer weak excuses so you can ignore events your science fails to understand.”

  The volume of both voices increased.

  “You can’t really be so stupid as to believe this nonsense!”

  “You aren’t nearly as smart as you think you are!”

  Carlson found a package of crackers that was part of an emergency rations cache. He held it in one hand, eyed the combatants, and then said, “I’ve lost my appetite.”

  Both Ira King and Leo Wren yelled, in unison, the same words:

  “You refuse to see the truth!”

  20. Oberon

  Hours before reaching Uranus, the Virgil began decelerating. Of course, the passengers did not notice. Gravity fields generated by the ship’s engines not only provided propulsion but also shielded the vessel’s interior from changes in momentum.

  As the ship slowed from five million miles per hour, the ice giant grew from a disk in the distance to a massive blue-green ball of methane and hydrogen sulfide, floating in an orbit three billion kilometers from Sol.

  Mars had its iconic red hue, Jupiter its swirling bands of color, Saturn its distinctive rings. The seventh planet in the solar system was a bore in comparison, its atmosphere almost featureless. Uranus did sport rings but they paled in comparison to Saturn’s, being comprised mainly of small rocky bodies born from millions of years of collisions.

  While the other planets rotated like a spinning top, Uranus resembled a rolling ball in relation to the plane of the solar system, with one pole continuously facing the sun.

  The Virgil flew around Uranus, bypassing the rings and the thirteen inner moons as well as the first four of the five major moons trapped in orbit around the giant. Its course aimed straight for Oberon, a sphere of ice and rock.

  The first man-made satellite along the ship’s path was a large cube devoid of light because it was nearly devoid of people. This was a transfer hub. Every twelve hours a cargo capsule rose from the surface and disappeared inside where robots transferred collected resources—minerals, chemical compounds—into barges.

  Once a month, huge bulkheads on one side of the orbiting cube would open and release a rectangular, robotic vessel the size of a small city filled with gifts for mother Earth. That barge would fire up its ion drive and head toward the inner solar system.

  The second artificial satellite circling Oberon had been built in stages, resulting in a mishmash of squares, rectangles, and spheres attached to a central structure resembling a mile-long boxcar. This was a manufacturing plant that produced everything from engine parts to pharmaceuticals, allowing the workers to keep working and the miners to keep mining. Supply ships visited Uranus and its moons regularly, but without local manufacturing man could not keep a persistent presence so far away from home.

  But this, again, was not the Virgil’s destination. The cube and the industrial complex disappeared behind the cargo ship as it flew to a spinning wheel in space, far above the other stations.

  While measuring hundreds of meters in diameter, it was not nearly as big as the two they had passed along the way. Each of the eight spokes on this wheel ended in a rectangular compartment. At the center sat a cone that seemed like a castle tower overlooking a round kingdom.

  The Virgil slowed to a crawl, descended beneath the central hub, and eased toward a docking port as the cargo ship-turned-transport reached the end of its journey.

  ---

  Hawthorne entered the Virgil’s canteen where the passengers formed a line facing the airlock. Horus’ crew stood to the side gnawing on snacks as they watched their guests assemble at the exit.

  Despite having traveled together for over two weeks, the groups—passengers and crew—had kept mainly to themselves. Hawthorne realized he was just as guilty. Other than playing handball with the Captain, he had rarely spoken to the bridge crew or engineering team.

  The inner airlock opened and an automated voice originating from the station told the passengers, “All new arrivals will undergo decontamination procedures.”

  That sounded ridiculous, but he said nothing.

  Wren, however, muttered colorful words of disgust to his bunkmate Kost, who carried that same handbag Hawthorne had seen her clutching during the original capsule ride from Earth to orbit two weeks ago. Whatever was in that bag, she chose not to trust it with the rest of the luggage.

  In any case, Kost followed Wren as he stepped into the weightless space between airlocks and drifted toward the station.

  Reagan Fisk wore a freshly pressed dress shirt, business slacks, and an eager smile. He also kept checking his pockets for his identity card, even after he found it twice. The man was an obsessive-compulsive poster child.

  Meanwhile, Lieutenant Thomas was clearly unhappy but not because of the looming decontamination.

  Captain Horus said to her, “Your robots will transfer to the station through the cargo hold, not with the passengers. That is standard procedure.”

  “Standard procedure is stupid,” she saw Jonathan approach. “It’s a new place. They might get afraid.”

  He rested a fatherly hand on her shoulder and said, “Their rocket pods and laser turrets will keep them feeling secure. Don’t worry, you will see them soon.”

  She accepted his assurance and then followed Carlson into the connecting tunnel.

  “Welcome to Oberon, Commander Hawthorne,” Horus motioned toward the airlock. “Thanks for riding on my ship.”

  “Oh, I’m certain you enjoyed it; you beat me two out of every three games.”

  Horus produced a handball and bounced it twice on the deck plate.

  “Now you will receive your answers. As I said, I am betting it’s important. I think the excitement is just beginning for you.”

&nb
sp; Voices echoed out from the docking tunnel. The first was Wren in a sarcastic shout, “Praise the Lord, we finally made it to fucking Oberon!”

  “You are a foul-mouthed hooligan!”

  Carlson said something about zero-g making him want to throw up and that elicited a childish giggle from Kelly Thomas. Reagan Fisk just moaned as he tried to navigate the span of zero g.

  Horus glanced through the open airlock, considered, and then said, “Whatever you are doing out here, you have an interesting team: An arrogant, annoying atheist, a Bible-thumping religious zealot, a junior executive in over his head, and a little girl dressed up in a soldier’s uniform.”

  “Do not forget the aging handball player who has lost his touch.”

  Horus bounced the ball off the wall at an angle and it shot at the Commander, who caught it in a show of quick reflexes.

  “Oh, you’re still pretty good when you bother to put any effort into it.”

  Hawthorne pocketed the ball and then stepped through the airlock into the zero-g of the docking tunnel.

  Horus called from behind, “Good luck, Commander, you will need it.”

  ---

  It took an hour for Hawthorne and his fellow travelers to complete the decontamination procedure. They were sprayed with disinfecting foam, rinsed in an icy shower, examined under ultraviolet light, and answered a multitude of health questions. It seemed as if hypochondriacs manned the station.

  Eventually they received blue coveralls with the zipper-like “UVI” logo on the chest and “Oberon” in script letters underneath.

  In the corridor connecting decontamination and the station, waited a white-haired older gentleman wearing a throwback three-piece suit with a black and white dog and a skinny dark-haired woman.

  “Welcome to Oberon! I am Victor Henderson, Director of the Space Resource Exploitation Division at UVI, and your host here on S.R.E.D. Eighty Five. I hope you had a pleasant journey.”

  Each of the new arrivals received an unenthusiastic sniff from the dog, an act that held Henderson’s attention, as if the dog had to approve the visitors before he would accept them.