The Long Road to Gaia

by Timothy Ellis

  "I trust you learned something Thirteen?" said One.

  "Learned? No, I don’t think so. Underestimated human stupidity perhaps."

  "Same thing," said Five.

  "Really Thirteen," said Kali. "Pay more attention to what's going on! Meddling with time after the event can cause some serious anomalies, especially when you kill people."

  "What do we care about anomalies?" I said.

  Time was time. So a few people with control delusions had died a few years earlier than they should have. The world was a better place without them, in my opinion.

  There was a serious thumping noise from the other end of the table.

  All eyes turned to Ganesha. But he didn’t say anything. The buckled table in front of him said it all.

  "Fine," I said.

  I looked them all in the eyes, and one by one they nodded to me and vanished.

  I went back to Galactica. A year had passed. The ship was parked nearby to the anomaly.

  A scout ship was just launching, and I moved myself to the cockpit. James was piloting the small ship. Jon was in the jump seat. Both of them were showing signs of major excitement.

  I stood behind them, and watched as history unfolded.

  The scout moved to the edge of the anomaly.

  "Nothing different on sensors," said James, into coms.

  "You are go for moving closer," said Richard, from the coms.

  "This is it," said Jon.

  James goosed the thrusters slightly, moving the ship inward.

  "Woah!" exclaimed James, as the ship picked up speed faster than expected.

  Knowing what was coming, I decided I wanted to see the reactions on the Bridge of Galactica first.

  I stood next to Richard, as the scout picked up speed.

  And vanished.

  Exclamations of shock came from around the Bridge, but Richard sat there with a big grin forming. His right hand came up making a fist.

  "YES!" he said.

  They waited, the tension ramping up steadily. Each person wondering if the scout would reappear or not.

  And suddenly it was there.

  "Hunter to Galactica."

  "Talk to me James."

  "Sir, I have the honour of reporting the existence of a natural transportation mechanism. We were taken to another solar system."

  "Where?"

  "Son," said Jon. "Wolf 359."

  The joy in his voice had even me cheering.

  2193

  Lieutenant (JG) Jon Hunter flew the scout ship out the front of the left flight pod, and headed for the jump point. He showed no signs of the nightmare which had woken him in the middle of the night.

  It was his first mission in charge. He had three crewmen with him.

  Galactica had already spent months in this system, and this was the last jump point to send a scout to. On his say so, Galactica would jump into a new system behind him.

  I'd been watching this kid all his life, and sincerely hoped he wasn’t the one. In my opinion he took too many risks. His older brother was much more stable, and would make a good Captain someday. Jon though? He didn’t have it in him.

  He did a way too fast zip through the pre-jump checklist, all the time thinking about what he might discover on the other side, and how it would boost his chances of early promotion. It was about all he could think of. That and impressing his girlfriend, with his promotion.

  "You guys ready," he called out to his small crew.

  A chorus of yeah's came back to him.

  The jump point was right ahead of him now. He pulled his belt a bit tighter around him, and sucked in a breathe.

  The ship jumped.

  "Ouch," said Twelve. "What terrible luck."

  "Am I supposed to do anything about it?"

  "No. Not important apparently. The bloodline is secure without him."

  I waited on Galactica until a week later, they sent in another scout ship. It narrowly avoided colliding with the first one.

  It took them a while, but it was later determined there was a red light on one of the engine coolant indicators, which the pilot ignored or hadn't noticed. As soon as the engine was used to accelerate after the jump, it had exploded. The crew had died immediately. None of them had been wearing their space suits for the jump.

  2284

  One

  "Drop," said Colonel William Smith.

  Captain George Takai shot him a glance which suggested something not to be put in words. The look he received back told him the Colonel was not happy, and wasn’t going to put up with the usual Takai smartarse quip.

  There was no way the Dropship could actually drop. It was docked in a bay of the Earth Torus. Takai was the pilot, and the Colonel was riding the jump-seat behind him.

  Takai cleanly lifted off from the deck, and they flew out of the bay like a conventional shuttle.

  Another quick glance at their leader received just a stern nod.

  Once clear of the Torus, Takai dropped them.

  This was no ordinary Dropship, having been designed specifically for missions down to Earth, where no ordinary Dropship would hope to survive. She was five times as big as a normal Dropship, ten times heavier, and had engines more suited to Corvettes. In a way, she was a Corvette, because only something that big could survive down there. But she was still a Dropship, with a cockpit instead of a bridge.

  All the same, this was no ordinary drop either. This ship and crew had made exactly three previous drops over the past year, and each time had only just managed to get home to the Torus.

  Earth was dying.

  Not slowly, but exponentially.

  What once had been merely pollution from industry, had been accelerated by the melting permafrost's, releasing a mixture of elements into the atmosphere which accelerated what was originally called, in an attempt to disguise the real problems, global warming. The Earth did warm, but not everywhere at the same time. Storms became hurricanes. Hurricanes became ocean sized. Instead of lasting days, they lasted months, then years, and finally never ended. Structures collapsed, even those designed to withstand hurricane strength winds. Trees were blown down. As the winds grew worse, and covered more of the planet, trees vanished completely. As the winds continued to gather strength, the green coverage of the planet became lower and lower, until nothing bigger than short grass remained. The atmosphere became more and more toxic, finally unbreathable by any oxygen requiring species, and the surface became unlivable. Everything died.

  I'd checked in from time to time, smiling to myself, as humanity fled its own stupidity. I made sure the cats went with them, and all other animals and plants.

  But not all people had chosen to leave. Some of them tried to stay.

  Three times this team had been sent in to evacuate those who'd found their way of surviving the planet wouldn’t work. Three times I’d gone with them.

  Now I was back for the fourth, and last mission.

  There was only one group left. And they didn’t want to leave.

  Bill Smith had fought the orders to remove them by force. He'd lost. He'd refused to carry out his orders. They threatened him with everything up to and including court martial for treason, even though no-one could actually define how treason fit the situation. He'd told them to get on with it. They did. They charged his entire team with him. He gave in. His team had no idea any of this had happened. He felt he owed it to them to keep it from them.

  Orders were orders. He'd always known this. He'd always obeyed. Beaten down this time, he obeyed once again. Listening to his thoughts, 'once again' sounded like 'one last time'.

  I watched him as the Dropship passed through the upper atmosphere. He was not a happy man. One might even call him haunted.

  He couldn’t fault his superior's logic. The planet no longer supported life. In fact, nothing much actually lived there anymore. Only those who had been living there had any idea what still did, and before leaving, they'd reported little else than cockroaches on the land, and strange fish-
like creatures at the darkest places of the deep ocean trenches, where the hurricanes couldn’t reach.

  One by one, the last hold-outs had all been evacuated.

  Except this last group. His superiors had argued they were about to die, and they needed rescuing. He'd argued they had a right to decide their own fate. We're right, you're wrong, do your job; had won. The argument hadn't, the dirty tricks had.

  But the look on his face said this was all wrong.

  I agreed with him. I'd even taken it to the twelve.

  He lost.

  I lost.

  Here we were.

  Two

  We dropped into the eye of a hurricane, more or less dead center of the northern half of the Pacific Ocean. To the east, one side of the hurricane buffeted the Rocky Mountains. To the west, the same hurricane tore at the stones of what remained of China's Great Wall.

  The only safe way down, was through the eye. Safe was a relative term though. In the past year, nine other teams had perished, all of them on the way down. None of the pilots was quite like Takai though. None of the ships had been like this one either.

  I moved down to the main troop drop area. The team were strapped into seats, completely immobilized. The ride was rough, and moving about was suicidal. For them. I stood easily.

  "I thought we were done with these evac's," said Walter Peck.

  "Yeah," agreed Nathan Vogane. "Why us? Again?"

  "Two reasons," answered Sergeant Susan Murdock, the only woman on the team. "One, because we are the only ones good enough to pull it off."

  There was a pause.

  "And?" suggested Jason Merritt.

  "And two," went on Murdock reluctantly, "because we're the only team left."

  "There's that," admitted John Baracas.

  Nigel Weaver nodded to himself. He was the Lieutenant, but he was leaving the talking to his sergeant. A man of few words, who ran his team without many of them. If it needed to be said, he left it to the Colonel to say. He caught Alan Henquist's glance and nodded to him.

  They were a nine person team now, having lost eleven people over the last three years. No-one had volunteered to join them, such was the team's reputation for pulling off miracles, but at the cost of losing the new people. The last of them had been Richard Allen and Dirk Bronson, killed on the last drop when they hadn't made it back to the ship before the habitat ruptured. Both had been original team members, and left wives and kids behind.

  Vasquez had been right, thought Weaver. I was listening to all of them, but the Lieutenant had the most interesting thoughts. Vasquez had died two years before, after warning them all the team was doomed to be whittled down to only a few, with the ones remaining wishing they hadn't survived. Nine wasn’t a few, but Weaver could see the pattern. They all could, but Weaver was the one most concerned about it.

  No-one carried anything at this point. Their weapons and packs were securely stowed. The worst was still to come.

  Conversation stopped, as it does when anticipation of something bad happening becomes the primary thought pattern.

  And it nearly did.

  Plan A nearly killed them all.

  Takai angled the Dropship towards the point where it would enter the primary wind stream, on enough of an angle to be drawn into the flow. There was a solid wham on the front of the ship, and suddenly it was pin-wheeling through the storm.

  "I got this," screamed Takai, but no-one heard him, and he was wrong anyway.

  The ship was going down. Had it had wings, they would have been ripped off by now. It didn’t. And as such, it also didn’t really have anything to help it out of a flat spin. The thrusters simply couldn’t cope against the force of the hurricane.

  Takai got creative. He fired all the turrets on the inside of the spin, hoping they would push the rear of the ship out more. It had no effect at all.

  In desperation, he pushed the nose down, trying to change from a spin into a loop. He ended up with a spinning loop.

  Totally out of control, and nearly in the sea now, he did the only thing he could do. He turned the shields back on.

  Hold on, why were they off? I wound time back to the top of the hurricane, and watched his movements closely. And there, yes, at the top of the thunderclouds, barely through into the atmosphere, he turned the shields off. I froze things.

  "It's in the manual," said Twelve.

  "Huh?"

  "The manual. It's in there."

  "I know what the manual is. Why does it say to turn the shields off?"

  "It doesn’t say. It's just part of the procedure."

  "When was it written?"

  "The day after someone used a shield in the atmosphere the first time, and caused an air liner to crash by getting to close and dissolving its wing tip."

  "How long ago was that?"

  "More than two hundred years."

  "Shit!"

  "Yeah.

  I wound time forward to where I’d left it, and a few seconds later, we hit the water.

  The ship went through the surface of the water as if it wasn’t there. It wasn’t. The shields vaporized the water on contact. The ship moved forwards under the water, now fully under control, and right sides up.

  "Why did we need to go into the wind?" Smith asked Takai. "Couldn’t you have done this in the eye?"

  "Not the plan sir. We were supposed to enter the water without shields not far from the habitat."

  "This is better."

  "I amaze even myself sometimes," chuckled Takai. "But it's going to take us a lot longer to get there now. Even with shields up, the water offers more drag than the wind, especially as we were supposed to be going with the wind."

  "Let me know when we get close."

  "Will do."

  Three

  Instead of fifteen minutes, it was an hour before we docked with the habitat. It was resting on the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. Even down here, the water was moving fairly violently. It took three goes to match the airlocks, and dock.

  I followed Smith down to the others.

  "Suit up people," he said. "I don’t trust this place. If the water comes in, we should be prepared for it, and be on suit air before our feet get wet. If we need to swim out, I want it to be with plenty of reserve air."

  "What's the drill boss?" asked Murdock.

  "We go in and ask these people nicely to please evac immediately."

  "If they don’t?" asked Peck.

  "We make them. We don’t have an option in this."

  Silence greeted this remark. He looked around their eyes and saw no-one was happy, but they would follow orders. They trusted him.

  "Let's go," said Smith, and he walked to the airlock, and opened the inner doors.

  He knew they had enough room to pack all these people into the ship, but it wasn’t going to be a comfortable fit. And that was assuming everyone was standing up.

  With the team in the airlock, he overrode the safeties, and opened the outer door as well. It wasn’t safe, but it would save time.

  He looked at Nigel Weaver.

  "LT, you stay by the airlock. If need be, you close it for safety, and start cycling people through."

  Weaver nodded, and took up a position by the outside airlock controls.

  The rest of them followed Smith.

  The habitat creaked loudly, and he stopped. The team looked around wildly, as if expecting water to come crashing in on them at any moment. Nothing appeared to be a threat, so they continued on.

  The main offices were empty. They fanned out to search for the people they knew were there.

  Eventually they were found in the main entertainment room. All of them. Having a meeting.

  Smith walked in as if he was the main speaker.

  "Stop right there military," said the man at the lectern.

  "Colonel Smith."

  "I don’t care who you are. We don’t want you here."

  "I've been ordered to evacuate this habitat immediately."

  "We don’t care.
What part of that don’t you understand?"

  "Understanding isn’t a requirement. Obedience is."

  "You won't find it here. We don’t want to leave. We aren’t leaving."

  There was a lot of vocal support for not leaving.

  At which point the habitat gave out an awful screeching sound.

  "Talk to me Takai," said Smith into his communicator.

  "Sensors show the habitat on the wind side shifted slightly," replied Takai. "I seriously doubt its water tight there now sir."

  Smith looked at the people sitting there, as if nothing at all was untoward.

  "If it was my choice," he said to the man at the lectern, "I'd let you all die here."

  "We are not going to die."

  The habitat screeched again.

  "Sure of that?" said Smith. "I wouldn’t be."

  "This habitat was designed to withstand anything."

  "Last chance. I'm not waiting around while this thing comes apart on us."

  "Go away."

  Smith sighed. I could see the conflict on his face. It didn’t matter that these people would surely die if they stayed here, and die soon. They had the right to choose their own fate. But he had his orders.

  "So be it," he said, bringing up his stun weapon.

  The man at the lectern smiled at the words, but the smile died with the gun pointing at him.

  "Stun everyone," Smith said into team coms, and pressed the trigger. The man at the lectern dropped, out cold.

  The people panicked, and some of them made it out into the halls. It took ten minutes to shoot down the last of them. And another hour to collect them all on sleds and move them into the cargo bay, barracks and every nook and cranny on the ship except the cockpit and the armoury, which they made sure were bolted shut.

  They were doing one last sweep to make sure they hadn't missed anyone, when yet another of the screeches was heard, followed by the sounds of water flowing.

  "Immediate evac," said Smith, and the team started running for the airlock of their ship.

  Smith was the last one in, and water was lapping his boots as he stepped through and swung the hatch closed.