Dragon Dawn (Dinosaurian Time Travel)

by Deborah O'Neill Cordes

  Well, Gus ol’ boy, she thought, it’s my way of staying sane on this hunk of space junk. As she followed him inside the safe room, she was determined to give as good as he did.

  “There’s time before the solar flares hit,” he said, “but stay in here. And that’s an order, Dawn.”

  On impulse, she saluted. “Yes, sir. Of course, sir.”

  He put his glasses back on, then turned, his face giving nothing away now, the consummate military man. He stood tall and straight, with close-cropped blond hair and hazel eyes, the brown of his irises flecked with bits of gold and emerald-green.

  Her thoughts veered, and she visualized a creek back home, the same bewitching color as the green in his irises. She had to admit this totally caught her off-guard, since she thought she had her emotions under control. Yet there it was again, that intense feeling of homesickness – mingled with what? Attraction?

  Get a grip. You’re just lonely for Arizona, she berated herself. Besides, Gus doesn’t seem all that interested in you.

  Dawn took her place at the table, ignoring the other astronauts as she let her memories take over. She visualized her home near Indian Gardens in Oak Creek Canyon, with its lovely view of a bend in the creek and the emerald pool where she loved to swim in summertime. It was a nice, old house with a massive river rock fireplace, overstuffed furniture, and large picture windows. She’d lived in it off and on for six years, when she wasn’t training in Houston or Florida. There, along with her housemates, a pair of mutts named Peter and Wendy, she had a casual, kick-off-your-shoes existence, which suited her just fine.

  But now, she was far removed from everything she held dear. She looked in the direction of Earth, imagining she could stare through the ship’s bulkhead and see the faint, blue point of light. From her vantage point in space, Earth would seem tiny now, so distant.

  “Well, were you plannin’ to keep us in suspense?” Gus asked, breaking into her thoughts.

  She glanced around. The rest of her crewmates were watching her, too.

  “About what?” she asked, mystified.

  “You said this morning you’d tell a story about one of your ancestors,” Gus reminded her. “Remember? We’d just gotten that message off to Sagan Base.”

  That prompted Dawn’s memory. Had they received a reply yet? Most likely they had, but she’d have to check just the same. Sometimes the scientists stuck on asteroids tended to be a little lax in their duties. The bunch at Sagan Base on Eros was the worst. Dawn had a theory; too much near-zero gravity and space sex dulled their minds.

  “Your story?” Gus asked.

  “Oh, that.” Dawn rose and went to the galley. Gus must want to play nice now, she decided. He knows me too well. Just get me talking about history.

  Standing before the replicator, so-called because it resembled the ones from the Star Trek series, she searched the recipe screen and then touched the icon for Beef Stroganoff. It seemed a fitting choice, since the ancestral tale was about her family’s famous recipe.

  “Hey, I’ll have whatever you’re having,” Gus said.

  Nodding, Dawn watched as the replicator’s 3-D printer combined molecules to create the Stroganoff, even to the level of reproducing its texture and delicious smell. A chime indicated when it was done, and she placed the meal on the table before Gus.

  “So, you want a story?” Dawn asked him as she returned to the replicator and started her own meal. “Okay. In the Middle Ages, I had an ancestor who was skinned alive.”

  “Whoa!”

  Gus’s response didn’t surprise her. Upon relating her family’s history, she’d often seen such a reaction: at first a show of shock, then total fascination.

  “You’re positive you want to hear this?” Dawn asked, as she put her plate on the table across from him and took a seat. “It’s gruesome. Maybe after we eat.”

  His expression relaxed. “Nah, go ahead. Tell it now. Anyway, there’s plenty of time.”

  That made sense to Dawn. Until the solar storm ended, they had to stay behind the safe room’s water-filled walls, which provided the only effective energy absorber against things like solar flares and gamma rays. Besides, they were all on edge after six months locked in this tin can. Maybe a good, old-fashioned B.S. session would do everyone some good.

  She could take the lead with the Stroganoff story. It’d be like they were all in summer camp telling scary tales around the fire. She tried to hide her smile as she took her first taste of the creamy dish.

  “I didn’t realize your family had such a long history,” Gus said.

  “It was long and illustrious history.” Natasha Antipova’s heavy Russian accent cut through the air. Tasha placed a bowl of salad on the table, then looked at Gus. “I am thinking you must learn more about history.” She scowled. “Particularly glorious history of my country. When you told me you had never heard of Pushkin––”

  The skin around Gus’s eyes crinkled as he fought laughter. “I know, you almost up and died.”

  To make a point, Tasha ran a hand through her prematurely white hair. “Almost,” she said.

  Dawn saw Lex Smith give Gus a sympathetic look. Lex, the crew’s oral surgeon, shared a long marriage and two grown sons with Tasha. Although he was his own man and never one to let his overbearing Russian wife bully himself or the others, he held his tongue now. Dawn understood his logic; why throw fuel on the fire while they were all trapped in the confines of the safe room?

  In the meantime, Tasha and Gus exchanged sardonic smiles, taking each other’s measure.

  “So, Dawn, how come you’ve never told us this story before?” Gus asked.

  “She told me,” Tasha said, not giving up.

  “Like I said before, it’s pretty gross,” Dawn said. “Not good dinner conversation.”

  Gus held his fork out, intent on spearing a piece of beef. “Well, that shouldn’t stop you,” he said, looking around at the crew. “Ya’all have strong stomachs, don’t you? After all, how many months have we been eating this stuff?”

  Tasha deliberately heaped salad onto her plate. “In addition to all my other duties––”

  “Hey, Doc, lighten up. No one’s asking you to give up your medical career for a permanent spot in hydroponics,” Gus said.

  “I realize that,” Tasha replied flatly, “but I hear no one else complaining about my salads, Eric Gustav Granberg.”

  Dawn knew if there was one thing Gus hated, it was his full name. He sat there, saying nothing, but his eyes had that glint she knew so well.

  Gus turned and gave Dawn a forced, yet charming, smile. “Tell your story.”

  She smiled back. “Okay, my ancestor was a Tartar tribesman who refused to convert to Islam. He left his people and joined up with the Russians. Eventually, he married a Russian woman.”

  “Smart fellow,” Lex interjected as he gave Tasha a wry look.

  Dawn nodded. “My ancestor... I mean the guy had a really bad day. His former people captured him. They carried a deep hatred for him, because he’d rejected their way of life, so they skinned him alive.”

  “Poor bastard!” Harry looked up from his food.

  A Canadian paleontologist, Harry Wong was not usually this demonstrative. Scholarly and a bit nerdy, the half-Chinese, half-English paleontologist was quite handsome, in a Keanu-Reeves-when-he-was-young sort of way.

  “Why’d they skin him?” Harry asked.

  “Hmm.” Dawn mulled this over. “Two reasons, I guess. It was a horribly painful death – and they apparently felt my ancestor deserved such an end – and also because the Tartars believed if you were executed in a bloody way, you lost your soul. You couldn’t go to Tartar heaven. Interestingly enough, the Stroganoffs decided to have a recipe created to honor the first ancestor. It was the thing to do, to have a dish named after your family, like Noodles Romanoff.” Dawn smiled at the co-pilot, Jean-Michel Gonin. “So, to make a long story short, the Stroganoffs hired a chef from France.”

  “Fantastique. Even then, t
he French were the best chefs in the world.” Jean-Michel had been half-listening to the conversation while monitoring the ship’s control room with a virtual reality, or VR, headset.

  “The chef was told the family history,” Dawn went on. “He learned about the flayed ancestor. That’s why the strips of beef are in Beef Stroganoff, to honor the flesh cut from my ancestor’s body.” With a grin, she dug into her meal and popped another forkful into her mouth.

  Gus stared at her and then pushed away from the table. “Damn,” he muttered, making a face.

  A deep, throaty laugh filled the air. “Don’t tell me you can’t finish, Commander,” said Kristina Jefferson in her soft, lovely drawl.

  Dawn smiled as Kris, the crew’s planetary geologist, removed her dish from the table. Tall and pretty, she had flawless cocoa skin and beautiful brown eyes, which she tried to hide behind a pair of antique, yet Google adapted, horn-rimmed glasses, the shape of the frames not remotely suitable for her face. But the pretense of plainness didn’t work. As Kris moved around the room, the men stared anyway. Even nerdy Harry could be seen casting her an occasional, furtive glance.

  After dinner, the conversation moved on to everyday topics. Then, over chocolate cake and some of Tasha’s smoky-flavored Russian Caravan tea, Dawn and her fellow scientists watched recorded news from Earth. Meanwhile, Gus and Jean-Michel monitored the solar storm by interfacing with the interactive computer display projected on the now cleared-off table.

  “Houston.” The Frenchman softly spoke into his headset, while his fingers moved over the tabletop, working the computer by touch. “Houston, this is Destiny. If you read, we are all clear. The solar storm has ended. Do you copy?”

  Because of the distance between Earth and Mars, it would take a little over nineteen minutes for the message to reach Mission Control. By then, the pilots would assess whether any electronic equipment had been damaged by the solar radiation. Repairs would be the first order of business should anything be amiss, but if all went as planned and the electronic systems were intact, the astronauts would soon be back in the midst of preparing for the Mars landing.

  As the ship approached the red planet, the pilots used virtual reality and the computer interface system to rehearse energy saving maneuvers called aerocapture and aerobraking. After despinning the spacecraft, they would dip its aerodynamically designed nose repeatedly into the upper atmosphere for aerocapture. This would utilize air friction to place the ship in a closed orbit around Mars.

  Then the lander Valiant would separate from the Destiny and use the aerodynamic braking procedure to slow its descent to the Martian surface. At that point, parachutes would deploy and drop the ship onto the landing site, near the robotic cargo barge that had preceded them. The first order of business after that was to establish a base for their year-and-a-half-long exploration of Mars.

  And all of this was happening in the next few days. Frowning thoughtfully, Dawn watched everyone file out of the safe room. She poured herself another cup of Russian Caravan tea, walked back to the viewing tunnel, and faced the window. After breathing in the heady aroma wafting from her mug, she closed her eyes – she could almost believe she smelled a camp fire. For some reason, she saw herself poking at embers with a stick, Gus sitting beside her.

  Dawn glanced over her shoulder, seeing no one, but feeling self-conscious just the same. She shook it off, however, knowing she had only a few moments for silent reflection before she would have to join the others.

  Taking a sip of tea, she observed Mars. Even after all these months in space, she still expected to see the ethereal blue, white, and soft browns of Earth. But instead, the barren Martian surface assaulted her eyes. Pale orange for the most part, the planet was dominated by endlessly sanguine hues. Actually, from orbit Mars looked more like a moldy tangerine, Dawn thought with a trace of amusement.

  But there was more down there, wasn’t there? So much more.

  She gazed at the rugged planet: at the great rift valleys streaked with rust; and at the leaden cones of towering volcanic peaks thrust high above the vermilion plains; at the dusty polar caps, with their strange, terraced, ellipsoidal tiers of frozen carbon dioxide and water; and, finally, at the shifting ocher sands abutting ancient, serpentine flood channels. The vibrant colors had parallels in a few areas on Earth, for here were hues as rich as the cinnabar sands of the Sahara, or the russet, bone-dry riverbeds of the Australian Outback.

  But unlike the predominant, yet fragile, milky blueness of Earth, almost everything on Mars was bold and ruddy. The planet seemed like an open wound in the universe, the ancient realm of the God of War.

  Dawn drew a deep breath and exhaled. The rotation of the ship caused the scene to change, and gradually the extinct volcano, Olympus Mons, rolled into view. It was the largest mountain in the Solar System, comparable in size to the entire state of Arizona.

  And we’re going there, Dawn thought. She pressed her forehead to the window, felt the soft vibration of the ship on her skin. Recalling her previous thoughts, she was struck again by the planet’s desolate landscape. But Mars had not always been so empty. There had been life there once, intelligent life. The Martian laser beam – which had emanated from the southern reaches of Olympus Mons – and the mines on Phobos were proof someone had lived on, or visited, the red planet long ago.

  It was the reason Dawn was making the journey. Years before, she would have laughed if anyone had predicted that an archeologist would travel to Mars. But after first contact in 2022, she’d raced to apply for the space program.

  And, despite the odds, she’d made it. At age twenty-eight she had begun her training. For seven years she prepared for the Mars expedition; from rigorous survival exercises in the jungle, tundra, and desert, to lessons on life science, astrophysics, atmospherics, and earth science, to learning how to fly the spacecraft in the unlikely event the pilots became incapacitated. A mission specialist now, she liked to joke with her friends, putting a new spin on the famous Star Trek phrase about boldly going “to Mars, where no archeologist has gone before.”

  But the knowledge of life on another planet – particularly of a neighboring world once visited by an alien civilization – always brought her back to sober reality. It meant long ago there had been other life-forms, including beings who could dream, hope, and plan for the future. It was considered the greatest scientific discovery of all time: life on Earth was not a fluke; we were not alone in the universe.

  Quietly, Dawn regarded the immense volcano, narrowing her eyes, imagining she could see into its interior. Who were the aliens who had constructed the laser beacon? What had happened to them? Or was someone down there still, waiting and watching, looking back at her now?

  She dismissed the questions, particularly the last. After all, Earthlings had answered the beacon with messages of reply, but in the years since first contact no one had responded back. It was as if the alien message had been sent on auto-pilot. No one was “home,” if you could call it that. Just the other day, Gus had speculated about this, saying maybe the aliens on Mars had died off ages ago, or simply mined Phobos for rocket fuel, then up and left our solar system, perhaps before human beings had even evolved.

  Once again, Dawn’s gaze fixed on the raw, rich flush of Mars. And then, she recalled how her Stroganoff ancestor had died. It was a bloody death, to steal his soul.

  She experienced another twinge of doubt, coupled with a curious sense of foreboding. What – or who – awaited her down there? What was going to happen next?

  The ship’s reverberations now sounded like a low growl, a warning. Sheesh, Dawn ordered herself. You’re a scientist. Act like one and think logically.

  But the question came back in a harrowing lament, a dark echoing in her mind. What’s going to happen? What will happen next?

  She took another mouthful from her mug and swallowed hard.

  Only time would tell.

  Chapter 11

  The great tide of civilization has long since ebbed,
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  Leaving these scattered wrecks on the solitary shore.

  Are these waters to flow again, bringing back the seeds of knowledge...?

  We wanderers were seeking what they had left behind,

  As children gather up the coloured shells on the deserted sands.

  ~Austen Henry Layard

  Two days after touchdown, the lander Valiant rested on the Martian surface one kilometer south of the volcano, Olympus Mons. The establishment of Percival Lowell Base was the top priority. Especially in the next few years, it would serve as a jumping off spot for all subsequent explorations of the red planet.

  But first, it was time for one stirring gesture. As Gus Granberg stood inside the ship’s airlock awaiting depressurization, Dawn looked through the inner window and focused on the virtual reality/telepresence headset affixed to his helmet. Through it, an estimated three billion people back on Earth would also participate in the first Mars walk on the new Pay-Per-View channel co-sponsored by NASA, the European Space Agency, and the North American Business Consortium. Now anyone with a VR set could hook in to the exploration of another world and help fund the space program.

  Gus Granberg would be the first human to walk on Mars. As the crew waited for the go ahead from Houston, time seemed to crawl. Despite his helmet’s reflected glare, Dawn could just make out Gus’s face, his sober stare, and she immediately understood his mood. This was one for the history books.

  Her mind played back over the previous few hours. Right after touchdown, Gus tried to be his usual, disciplined self. But then, when he saw Dawn fiddling nervously with her own gear, he relaxed and let his guard down.

  As he pulled on a glove, he asked her, “You think Neil and Buzz would’ve handled this better?”

  “By putting on their gloves, or taking the first steps on Mars?”

  He smiled. “Smart mouth.”

  She laughed. “At this moment, I’m sure every astronaut – past or present – wishes they were you.” She gave him a thumb’s up. “You’re going to do fine, Gus. You always do.”