AMERICA ONE - NextGen II (Book 6)

by T I WADE

  He had been outside the vessel 155 minutes when he reached the outer hatch. He opened the hatch and was about to connect his suit’s “D” ring to the inner hatch and enter when Nancy’s high-pitched scream made him freeze.

  “Agggggggh! Pete, Pete, I think I heard somebody talking. They said something in gibberish, maybe Russian. Pete, Pete!”

  “Oh, crap!” Pete replied. “You scared the crap out of me. Nancy, I think I’ve made a small mistake.” Pete’s mistake was that he was no longer tethered to the spacecraft and his reaction to her scream—he had pushed his arms out or something, as he was already two feet away from the side of the craft and heading away. He froze.

  “Pete, Pete, I see you. Where is your cord? You are floating out there without your cord.”

  “Yes, I realize that, darling. I’m doing a VIN Noble and sort of showing off,” he replied, trying to make it a joke. He could see her face. She wasn’t talking into the hand radio, and her face had gone awfully pale.

  “Pete, use that jetpack thing! You are already ten feet away,” shouted Nancy.

  “I will, darling, if you would stop shouting in my ear and making me deaf. My ears are still ringing from your first scream.”

  “Hurry, Pete, you are floating away,” cried Nancy, holding her hand to her mouth.

  As his head cleared, and his wife shut up, he regained control of the jetpack. He checked its energy gauge. It was near empty and he pushed both levers forward. Pete’s backward movement stopped and he began to slowly move forward, but he was heading down and would pass under the craft. He tilted up both controls and he stopped in mid-space and began to go into a reverse somersault. He stopped that and a warning in his suit began a silent beep. He was running out of energy.

  Captain Pete closed his eyes and kept them closed, mentally making himself go forward until his helmet softly collided with something. He grabbed onto the open outer hatch and more relief went through his body than ever before in his life. He still didn’t like spacewalking.

  His wife was angry and crying when he entered the inner hatch, her cloths ready to wipe his suit down. With his helmet still on he could hear her whimpering through the ship’s intercom. Something had changed: she wasn’t using the handheld and he could hear her. Something was working.

  “You stupid oaf!” she stated once she helped him off with his helmet.

  “Hey, lady! You scared the bejesus out of me with that scream, and just at the wrong moment,” he replied, trying to calm her down.

  “But how could you? I forgot to pick up the radio.” Then what he had said clicked in her brain and she smiled. “The big radio works.”

  Once he had been wiped down and was relieved to finally get out of his suit, he floated it up into its storage rack for it to recharge. When he floated back down, Nancy had a bottle of vodka, Jonesy’s last half-bottle, for them to swig.

  Being weightless, they had to keep a finger on the top of the open bottle, and then they passed it to each other, shaking the bottle so the contents would move around inside and at the exact moment taking a swig. They were pretty good at zero-gravity drinking by now.

  Three months later, the same day that seven spacecraft left Mars, Pete realized that even with the radio working, they couldn’t get communications with anybody on Earth. He had tried every channel, given out Maydays daily, and still nobody had replied from Earth. It was his 68th birthday and time to figure out when to head towards Earth.

  They had ample supplies, ample heat and energy. Only one unit, an air filtration system, had gone down inside the pod, and he had repaired it twice before it failed for the third time. Now he had no more spares to repair it, and the air inside the supply pod was becoming stale and stinky when they exercised up there.

  Pete and Nancy spent the next month moving the exercise bike down and rearranging the office so that they could breathe the cleaner air inside the lower portion of the craft while working out.

  Then they tested the upper air for over a week and found that it was decreasing in quality very slowly, and they decided to spend less and less time up in the larger area.

  It was five weeks after his 68th birthday on Nancy’s next birthday that he finally got down to doing new calculations on using 50 pounds of hydrogen gas to leave orbit and head for Earth.

  “Darling, we will run out of fuel after one complete accelerating orbit and it should catapult us in the direction of Earth. The moon’s pull is far less than we had on Mars but it is going to take us 90 percent of our fuel to speed up to get the catapult effect towards Earth. If the fuel runs out before we get to our exit point, we will be out of control and just head away out of orbit.”

  “Is there a gas station anywhere close?” joked Nancy.

  “I wish. A hydrogen gas station. Just ten more gallons could get us into a high space orbit around Earth. We need twenty gallons to get into a low space orbit, but our radio should transmit and receive from as far as 200,000 miles out.”

  “So we head the 40-odd-thousand miles closer to Earth and send out a Mayday if we have a 200,000-mile range,” replied Nancy, arranging the warmed dinner in two plastic containers so that the pouches couldn’t float away.

  “Not so easy, girl,” Pete replied. “At 40,000 miles distance from the moon, it will slowly draw us back. Our forward speed would decrease over time and within a year or so we would end up in the dust by the flag. If we get closer to Earth, it will drag us in until we fry into French fries entering the atmosphere. We are sort of between a rock and a hard place.”

  “Well, we get as close to Earth as we can and let God make his or her decision on which planet we die on. Or NASA flies up a shuttle and rescues us. Simple,” smiled Nancy. To her, space travel was as simple as brain surgery was to her husband.

  “Well, I agree, and somebody should be arriving in from Mars soon. Gee, we’ve waited three years already. I just hope we didn’t miss them, but I’m very afraid we did. They might hear us in Australia, and Mars or Saturn might come up and rescue us. That is if the cubes are non-existent. Too many maybes for me, but if they have already arrived, I’m just hoping that they have cleared up the cubes and have somebody patrolling in orbit. Nancy, that is our only chance, but we must wait 78 more days until the moon and Earth are in the perfect position for us to head out.”

  It was a long wait. Captain Pete couldn’t leave before the due date and he often turned the side thrusters off during the night when they were asleep and motionless to save fuel. Every morning he was surprised to see how little the craft had rearranged itself, a millimeter or so without the side thrusters, but there were minute changes and he turned them off for three days, only to get a shock from the way the craft’s angles began to change after 48 hours.

  On average, the side thrusters worked once a day, normally two going off for a second or two to keep the craft stable. They used so little fuel that it didn’t really register over the final month.

  The day finally came, and after 48 hours of computer calculations, he fed thrust through the aft thruster for 58 minutes. As Earth appeared dead ahead, he hit two of the side thrusters and they powered away from the moon. Now he programmed the side thrusters to keep the center of the blue planet in his center. They were ahead of Earth in its rotation and over the next week the moon gradually headed away.

  “Not good news I’m afraid,” stated Captain Pete two weeks after they had left moon orbit. “We are being dragged along by the pull of Earth, but we are not quite out of the moon’s pull yet. Our paltry forward speed towards Earth has reduced in the last 24 hours from 65 miles an hour to 64.5.”

  “But we are going faster than Earth, right?” she asked.

  “Correct, but the planets are still orbiting and the moon is now on our port bow, not behind us. We are beginning to be pulled sideward, not backwards.”

  “How far have we travelled from the moon?”

  “Nearly 22,000 miles from our orbit, or 215,000 miles from Earth.”

  “But we are still going f
orward, are we not?” Nancy asked. Pete nodded. “And the moon is getting further and further away from us on its own orbit, right?” Again Pete nodded. “Darling, I bet you didn’t add that equation into the computer calculations, that the moon would get further away from us than we would get from it?”

  That gave Pete new ideas, and he spent another day working on new parameters to the calculations. He gave up. It was getting too complicated, but Nancy in her innocence was right. The pull from the moon was drawing them off course, but it was getting weaker by the day.

  Three days later he had no choice but to use 99 percent of the remainder of the fuel for two minutes and change course to keep Earth in his sights. At 66 miles an hour, they neared Earth. Two weeks later they were within 191,000 miles of the planet. Unfortunately, he only had 29 days of side thrusters left and still he did not get a reply from anybody. They were done for in 29 days.

  “America One to Earth, America One to Earth,” stated Pete over the radio hour after hour, a dozen times a day. There was still no response.

  With ten days of side thruster control left and their speed now increasing by a mile an hour a day due to closing with Earth, their time was running out. He was halfway through the year to his 69th birthday, and now he knew the age at when he was going to die. Nancy was a solid person to have around, but after three and a half years of playing poker with the solar system, they were down to their last hand and their last quarter-bottle of vodka.

  He had tried to add the vodka to the fuel tank, but he could not open the tank. It was sealed, and nobody had explained to him how it opened. It was sealed and pressurized, the opening was outside, and that didn’t help Pete add the remaining vodka to the tank. So it was time to drink it, and they did.

  They ate a hearty meal—there was no use saving the best parts of the stores anymore—and they went to sleep quite drunk and in the warmth of each other.

  “That is the most beautiful sight I have ever seen,” said a familiar voice over the radio. Captain Pete thought that he was napping on the bridge on America One and turned over to continue his warm comfortable sleep. The second familiar voice brought him back to consciousness.

  “I don’t ever want to leave Earth again, except to return to the moon to see this eclipse again.”

  “I don’t ever want to see the moon or an eclipse again,” added Nancy still semi-asleep.

  Captain Pete released his strap and floated out of bed and shook his head, holding onto the command console. Was he dreaming? Had he heard Lunar and Pluto Jane Saunders? He looked at the console and then at the speakers around the room. They were silent.

  Damn, it had been a trick of his imagination. Damn! And he wanted to throw something at something until the clear voice of Saturn Jones filled the room, as clear as if she were parked next door.

  “And by the way, I have excellent news for all now that we see Earth filling our windshields.” Captain Pete pulled himself into the chair, strapped himself in and pinched himself while he listened to Saturn’s rosy and happy voice tell the other astronauts that she was expecting a baby, Mars Noble’s baby. Nancy, now sitting up in bed but still strapped in, mentioned to Pete that maybe he should try the radio.

  “America One to SB-I, II or III. America One to any spaceship out there, do you copy, over?”

  “Whoever is playing a lousy joke, I don’t find it very funny, guys,” replied Mars Noble.

  “Me neither,” added Saturn Jones.

  “Mars, Saturn, this is Pete. We are stuck out here in Ryan’s office and supply pod. Surely you can see Nancy and me on your radar? Please, over.”

  “Captain Pete! Is that you? Don’t bullcrap me. If this is a joke… Captain Pete! I have a tiny dot on my radar, about 50,000 miles ahead of us. I thought it a piece of debris or something. If that’s you, you are not moving, over,” stated Saturn Jones.

  “How many debris dots do you have on your screens?” Pete asked.

  “Just the one,” Saturn replied. “Captain Pete, please be you!” Saturn’s voice filled with emotion over the radio.

  “Affirmative, we are days from death here, Nancy and I. Saturn, Mars, whoever, please come and get us now before we both go crazy. Forward speed 59 miles an hour, yes, 59 miles an hour, and we are losing our fight to reach Earth by a mile an hour a day.”

  “Roger, Captain Pete. Break, break all craft. This is Mars with Saturn in SB-III. You all heard that. All craft turn 180 degrees for reverse thrust at full power, we need to reduce speed fast. Target 48,800 miles on an angle of 27 degrees. Captain Pete, can you hold out for another couple of hours?”

  “My boy, Nancy and I have held out for three and a half years, so two more hours is fine with both of us. Nancy, put on your best dress. The Coast Guard is coming to save us!”

  Chapter 5

  Thank God

  Mars Noble looked out of SB-III’s cockpit window at the ungainly craft 100 feet off his starboard bow. It looked like it had gone through the wars, and he saw two old friends waving at him.

  Captain Pete thought the reversing pregnant-looking shuttle, with its supply pod underneath its belly and what looked like a Matt spacecraft latched onto its roof, the most beautiful sight he had ever seen.

  “Where are Jonesy and Maggie?” Pete asked, waving at the shuttle’s cockpit windows and now speaking through the handheld to SB-III’s intercom so that nobody on Earth would hear them.

  “Asleep,” replied Saturn.

  “Ryan and Kathy?” asked the captain of his commander.

  “Also asleep, cryogenically asleep on DX2017,” Saturn answered. “Dad wanted to be young enough to go fishing and so did several others. Thirty of the oldest members of the crew are to be reawakened when the little planet bypasses Earth in eleven years, one month’s time.”

  “Dr. Rogers, Nurse Martha, also asleep?” asked Dr. Nancy.

  “Yep!” replied Saturn. “Dr. Walls is our flight’s resident doctor in SB-I.”

  “Mars Noble, we beat you guys getting here in this lousy excuse for a spaceship?” joked Captain Pete.

  “You don’t know the storms we faced trying to get off the planet, Captain,” replied Mars seriously. “And we lost many good friends in the fight. We all thought you guys were dead. Now I can see how you survived. What are you two doing in that James Bond escape pod for Ryan anyway?”

  “I wanted to see the location the alien craft were coming from. I couldn’t see clearly through the shield, so Nancy and I headed outside the shield in this to get a better view. I didn’t have time to tell you guys before the explosion fried all our antennas. I had to go out there and modify our radio reception last year.”

  “Did you get the exact location of their base? We blew up part of the area they were firing at us, but maybe they had more than one base. Michael Pitt was close to the area when it went up.”

  “Yes, that was one of the last things I saw, but he was about 30 miles due south of where the last alien craft appeared out of the planet’s surface. Now, how are we going to get a ride back to Earth, Captain Noble? SB-III looks like it is all packed up for a long vacation.”

  “You have a complete docking port on your rear. I was about to release the Matt craft we found on DX2017 in a few hours anyway. I’ll bring my flight forward. We have a plan of action. We have orders to follow, from Ryan, and I’m going down in the Matt craft with Commander Roo, first to case Australia and our base while the shuttle lasers stay up here and back me up. Ryan told me not to trust anybody down on Earth except Bob Mathews, and to get in contact with him before the rest of the craft descend. He had wanted me to head down with you, but he didn’t know you are still alive. Captain Pete, I would sure prefer to have you as co-pilot instead of Commander Roo. He is too peaceful a person.”

  “I’ll be happy to head down with you, Captain Noble. I know how to get hold of Bob. We have all America One’s bridge communication records with us here in the office.”

  “That’s makes my day. Saturn, we will transfer the Matt craft pa
ssengers into the shuttle and then I’ll get her off our roof,” stated Mars Noble to her sitting beside him and over the intercom so that everybody could hear. “That will take about three hours, since we don’t have a docking port. Each crewmember will have to spacewalk with attachment along a tight cord to the shuttle’s docking port one by one. Once I’m away and empty of crew, Saturn, extend the docking hatch and lock it onto “The Office.” It sounds like Captain Pete has had fresh spacewalking experience. When we are in orbit around Earth, he can come and join me in the Matt craft to head down. I will then extend my shield to go invisible and follow you into orbit. Captain Pete, did you copy that?”

  “Copied that, Captain Noble, sounds like a good plan.”

  The six crewmembers aboard the smaller Matt craft were two mechanic crewmembers with their wives and teenage children. They had been chosen since they all had spacewalking experience, but after nearly six months, they were happy to get off the ship. One by one Mars helped them move along a cord set up between the two craft 30 feet apart.

  On his final return to the ship, he had a canister of supplies that would last him in orbit and down on Earth if he needed water and food.

  Nancy was extremely happy to enter the larger confines of the shuttle, slipping on metal shoes to walk and using her weak legs for the first time in 42 months. There was still no gravitational pull on the shuttle, but it did have its electromagnets along the entire floor.

  She was greeted by by the crew with screams and hugs. Then Captain Pete floated into the craft with all the astronauts aboard first standing to attention and saluting, then rushing up to hug him.

  “Saturn, you now look even uglier with that monstrosity attached to your docking port,” laughed Mars as he entered the Matt craft. SB-III did not look like a shuttle anymore. It had its pregnant belly below it, and now Ryan’s office and second cylinder locked vertically and facing upwards from its roof docking port. It had been tight, but the second cylinder pod was also facing upwards twelve feet and its rear side was only a foot away from the side of the shuttle. Saturn had done a great job attaching her vessel to the other, creating the ugliest-looking spacecraft he had ever seen.