Colonization

by Scott McElhaney

  Chapter Three

  All of our food stores were removed from deep freeze and then split between all four shuttles. The stores would thaw naturally over the next twenty-four hours and at which point spoilage would slowly begin setting in. The packaging and preservatives would slow down this process however. Most of the food would expire in six to eight months, meaning that we had to become a self-sustaining colony by that time… in Siberia.

  The same way we split the food stores between the shuttles, we also split up the three land rovers, the two boats, the tools, the reactors, heaters, lighting fixtures, seasoned firewood, water, tents, housing frames, and greenhouse materials. As morbid as it was to think about, we couldn’t risk losing 100% of any one supply should a shuttle not survive the atmospheric entry or landing. Even the ship’s command crew would be riding on separate shuttles. The captain and I would be split up and the two colonization officers would be as well. Our medical team now only consisted of a doctor and a nurse, so both of them would ride down on separate shuttles. Unfortunately the only surgeon we brought with us had died long before any of us woke up.

  Most of the crew received some limited training on basic survival, agriculture, ecology, geology, and structural engineering. Because of this, the whole crew would be split up equally between the four shuttles. The remaining thirteen people represented the crew’s family members, or ColSup (short for Colonial Support), who may have received little to no training all. While the ColSup lacked training, these people were expected to provide all manner of manual labor to what we now referred to as the Colonization Project in honor of our ship’s namesake. The reason why there were so few family members for a crew of sixteen plus a command crew of four was because children weren’t permitted on this journey and only one family member was permitted for each member of the crew. Anyone who wanted to be part of this mission had to either be childless or be willing to leave them behind forever. That was just one of the many qualifications that weren’t easy to accept. Even those with grown children were faced with the fact that a crew member was only permitted to bring one family member and that family member had to be healthy and willing to perform manual labor.

  Only one person, Biologist First Class Hannah Richards, chose to bring an adult child. She was divorced and only had one child, a nineteen-year old daughter, so she wasn’t making any real sacrifice in doing so. The other twelve ColSup were spouses of the crew. My spouse, Zane, was once a Welder First Class in the US Navy Space Division, but since our colonization crew didn’t require a welder, the Navy wouldn’t have allowed him join the crew. He was however permitted to accompany his wife on the journey, but only if he resigned from the Navy. The thing that didn’t make sense was the fact that he would still be supporting our colony as a welder which was needed to put together the greenhouse frames, some plumbing, and eventually housing frames. So while he wasn’t part of the crew, and he wasn’t part of the Navy, he would still be performing the job he did in the Navy.

  Zane would be permitted to ride down on my shuttle since the only other ColSup with prior military training was Commander McEwen’s wife Lieutenant Junior Grade Kennedy McEwen. Like Zane, she had also been part of the US Navy Space Division, but worked as a shuttle pilot. But did our colony need a shuttle pilot? No – the job would be useless the moment we landed, so the Navy didn’t approve of her as part of the crew. She also had to resign her position and join on as ColSup. And just like Zane, she would be performing the duty she had in the Navy, at least until we landed. She would be on a different shuttle from me, but sharing it with her husband.

  The captain and I did a walk-thru of the ship after everything had been loaded onto the shuttles. We made sure nothing was left behind. We even went so far as to take all the batteries out of the ship’s emergency lighting units so we could keep our electronics running on KMA just a little longer. I loaded a satchel with these batteries as we checked every room, closet, and dresser drawer.

  When we came to the freezer, I noticed the body bag on the shelf containing the body of Lieutenant Commander Barr. She had committed suicide shortly after waking. We originally believed that when she had been woken up by the ship’s auto pilot, she was completely confused and unable to release her grip on the dream world. We believed she then killed herself innocently before she discovered that it was all just a dream. This was not the case and it was the reason we decided not to take her body with us and give her a proper and honorable burial on KMA.

  When Barr woke up, she had made her way to the bridge where she accessed the command control panel. She left a digital trace behind of all her activities and this was how we learned that she didn’t just simply die by her Delayed Aging Chamber shortly after waking. She not only accessed the command controls nearly ten years ago, she also brought up the failed message that was supposed to bring us back to Earth. At that point, she called up the image of KMA and discovered a planet with significantly more cloud cover than it had today. The debris field in the space surrounding the globe appeared much worse as well on the image. During the ten years that had passed since that moment, a lot of the debris would have fallen back to the planet, leaving behind the smaller and lighter particles that appeared less foreboding today.

  After discovering that we were without hope, an assessment she made on her own, she refused to perform the one duty that had been required of her. She woke up none of the crew and instead returned to the medical bay where she located some vials of morphine and a syringe. She sat down beside her D.A.C. and then injected herself with enough morphine to give her a painless escape from this life. In the end, the Chief Medical Officer neglected her duties, failed the crew that she pledged to protect, and failed herself. It was decided after those discoveries that she wouldn’t be buried on a world that she was supposed to help colonize. Her body would remain on a dead ship without honor.

  The captain closed the freezer without even acknowledging the body on the shelf. I reached up and removed the battery from the back of the emergency light above the freezer and dropped it into my heavy satchel.

  “Looks like we’re clear for departure. Any last words, XO?” he asked as we walked down the passageway.

  I looked down the quiet, dark corridor ahead of us and felt like I should say something nice about the ship. As a naval officer with more than five years of command experience, I often grew attached to whatever ship happened to be my home. Unfortunately in this case, I had very few memories inside this ship. I barely had a week to familiarize myself with the ship before we left Earth’s orbit. After we took off for the Tau Ceti system, we monitored the systems for three days and then performed two final walk-throughs before ultimately turning all the controls over to the autopilot. We monitored the autopilot for another six hours and then that was the extent of my woken hours on the CP-4. I had slept the majority of the time on the ship, so I never had an opportunity to fall in love with my home. In some ways, I almost grew to hate it.

  “The best part of the journey, Captain… the dreams,” I said.

  He chuckled as we continued on.

  “Indeed, XO,” he laughed louder now, “Indeed.”

  Zane

  Chapter Four

  I’d found a vacant seat in the shuttle right between the biologist and her daughter. I couldn’t recall their names, but I obviously recognized them from our short time together. I knew of the daughter who was seated to my left mostly because she stood out like a sore thumb. And I meant that literally because she had bright red hair that she kept as long as Sarai’s. She also stood out because she looked to be barely fifteen years old, even more so now that she had the same anorexic appearance as the rest of us. It only served to bring her youthful features all the way back to prepubescence.

  I buckled myself in and looked down the row of seats. These seats were located in front of the side entrance, but were pressed up against the starboard (or right) wall of the shuttle extending lengthwise from just behind the piloting chamber onward toward the rear of the
shuttle. The space in front of the seating was taken up by storage trunks filled with a variety of things, not the least of which were personal effects and clothing. Toward the rear of the shuttle was one of the knobby-wheeled land rovers with the convertible top rolled down to accommodate all the supply bundles and rolled tents that had been piled inside. Plexiglas sheeting as well as some sheets of tempered glass were packed safely inside frames of foam and wood and they were propped between the land rover and the port wall. Also along the port side of the shuttle was a plethora of steel beams, pipes, and rods that would form three of the six greenhouses and its plumbing. The food stores were located to the rear of the land rover, up against the back gate. Everything had been packed tightly, leaving us little leg-room on our starboard row of seats.

  There were seven of us total in the rear of this shuttle. Sarai would be joining us shortly and sitting up front with the pilot, giving us a total of nine souls on this particular craft. I took note of the people inside the shuttle with me and came to the conclusion that this must have been dubbed the ‘female shuttlecraft’. The biologist woman had the end seat to my right nearest the entrance to the piloting chamber. On the other side of me was her red-headed daughter…

  Red-head… red…

  Ren… Renata Reynolds!

  I knew the name would eventually come to me. Okay, then the mother seated to my right was Biologist First Class Hannah Reynolds, then there was me in my own seat of course, then I had ColSup Renata Reynolds to my left, followed by Horticulturist Second Class Keyandra Reese, then her husband ColSup Chris Reese, Ensign Marie Lopez who I believed also specialized in horticulture, and finally Geologist First Class Nancy Cartwright.

  Everyone seemed to be in a somber mood with the exception of the two Reynolds’. The daughter bore an angry expression which explained why there had been an empty seat between the two. The mother was looking toward the front of the shuttle in an effort to visibly not acknowledge her daughter perhaps. I would have thought that two family members who were about to ride a shuttle through a debris field, then through a dirty atmosphere and finally onto an uncharted planet would be a little more forgiving of each other. I’d say our odds of surviving this little jaunt were reasonably less than one hundred percent.

  Sarai entered the shuttle through the side door and then hit the switch to close it behind her. She was carrying a bulky satchel which she brought over to me and asked that I hold it. She kissed me tenderly which still gave me chills in a good way. It also made me feel good because unlike the rest of the people in the shuttle, she was in full uniform. I couldn’t help but to feel a little pride in the fact that I went to bed each night with the ship’s beautiful executive officer and didn’t mind showing it off whenever I got a chance.

  She then headed to the pilot’s chamber and closed the door behind her. I peeked into the satchel and discovered about twenty or thirty UIBs, or Universal Ion Batteries. She must have taken them out of the emergency lighting units as they performed their final walk-thru. That was a smart move considering a lot of the equipment we were bringing down there used these same batteries.

  “How’d you two meet?” Renata startled me with the question.

  I turned to her and smiled, “Earth’s orbit. I worked in the shipyards as a welder. I usually worked on assembling shuttlecraft similar to this very one. But that particular week, I was pulled off my regular duties to assist with some shipbuilders who were far behind schedule. I’d have never seen Sarai had I not agreed to assist those poor souls. She happened to be passing through one day on an inspection of that ship and when I saw her, I lost my breath.”

  “Lost your breath?” she asked, arching her thin eyebrows.

  I realized then that this girl… this woman was really quite beautiful and would probably miss out on a lot of life and love while stuck on a cold moon with a very limited population. I doubted that there would be anyone else here her age, although I had to remember that I kept misjudging her age. I remembered hearing that the girl was nineteen, but everyone aged about three years while we slept in those Delayed Aging Chambers. That would make her twenty-two years old. She still looked to be fifteen or sixteen at the most, but again that was due to the weight-loss and muscle-degeneration we all suffered during the sleep. I did secretly wonder though why her mother would subject Renata to the life we were headed for. Renata could have had a normal life on Earth.

  “Yes, I literally felt my heart flutter like something was wrong and I had to take a moment to catch my breath. I’d never seen someone so beautiful as her and I simply had to meet her. Me – a lowly Third Class welder – a dirty working man, and yes, I approached her and asked her out. I didn’t even ask if she was married or engaged or anything else. I simply didn’t care,” I replied.

  “Wow. She was single though, right?” Renata asked.

  “Yes, of course. She accepted my offer of a date much to my surprise and here we are thirty-eight years later still happily married,” I grinned.

  “Thirty-eight years? Oh, you mean… wait, let me do the math,” she said thoughtfully.

  “Don’t forget to factor in the time dilation that took place due to our speed,” I reminded her.

  People often forgot that just because our ship’s clocks told us that a total of twenty-seven years had passed, that didn’t mean twenty-seven years had also passed on Earth.

  “We had just travelled to a star that was 11.9 light years from Earth in a span of seventeen years. But that was seventeen years inside the ship,” she said, still calculating, “I can’t do it. I don’t know how long it took us to accelerate to our maximum speed or how long it took us to decelerate.”

  “Twenty-two years is how much time passed on Earth before we reached KMA. A twenty-three percent warp factor using Einstein’s formula taking the square root of one minus the velocity over the speed of light squared. The acceleration and deceleration time didn’t cause a significant dent in the numbers considering we travelled at our maximum speed for ninety-two percent of our journey,” I said.

  She laughed, shaking her head as she stared at me, “I thought you were a welder, not a mathematician or a physicist.”

  “I like to read a lot in my spare time and besides, the XO told me that it took us twenty-two years Earth-time, so I kind of cheated. And don’t forget that we orbited KMA for ten years, so thirty-two years have passed on Earth now. I’ve actually been married for six years,” I said, “So I’ve been married to her for thirty-eight years now!”

  “You’re crazy,” she laughed.

  Suddenly the shuttle lurched, followed immediately by a few seconds of shuddering. Unlike flying in civilian aircraft, the Navy didn’t offer any warnings or any of those pleasant speeches at take-off. When you flew in space on a Navy craft, you were expected to bring common sense along with you even if you weren’t a member of the crew. When you sat down, you buckled your safety harness with no need for any prompting. When the aircraft shuddered, that meant that you were probably moving. No need for the pilot to tell you that. When it shuddered again, you probably landed. This was the way of flying in the US Navy Space Division.

  “Do you think we’ll crash?” Renata asked.

  “What kind of question is that, Ren?” her mother shot from the other side of me.

  “A question that I didn’t have an answer to,” Renata immediately shot back, “Which is why I asked it.”

  “This is a respected young man who wouldn’t be here with us if he didn’t think we were going to make it to the surface,” her mother stated, then patted me on the arm, “I apologize for my daughter’s ignorance, Mr. Stark.”

  “Your daughter’s not ignorant, ma’am,” I said a little too quickly, “I mean, it sounds to me like you raised a pretty sharp daughter and I commend you for it. I think she was being just a little curious about what we’d be facing between here and the time we landed. I’m sure we could all benefit by knowing what we might facing in the coming minutes.”

  I said that last sentenc
e a little louder, looking down toward the others, “While I’m not a scientist or a pilot, I did spend a lot of time in the US Navy Space Division which means I went in and out of orbit on many occasions. As a matter of fact, I’d gone to space a total of two-hundred and ninety-six times and most of that was due to me working at the orbital shipyard. During all that time, I never experienced a single crash landing.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Stark,” ColSup Chris Reese said, “Good to know.”

  “On the other hand,” I started to say, “I think it would be fair to let you know that there is a debris field surrounding KMA, but the debris should be relatively small. You should know that we might hear some minor objects hitting the shuttle. I built shuttlecraft for a living for the US Navy. All shuttlecraft are double-hulled with both hulls being made of at least three-inch thick steel coated in a heat resistant ceramic for atmospheric re-entry. If you hear some knocks, thuds, or clangs, I can assure you that we are simply turning rocks into dust while possibly putting some tiny scratches in the paint.”

  “You’re a good man, Mr. Stark,” Ensign Lopez said, just as the shuttle suddenly rocked side to side.

  I grabbed a firmer hold onto the satchel that I’d been somewhat neglecting.

  “They should have had you give a speech to all the people before we left,” Lopez added.

  “Some of the crew might just see me as a useless ColSup,” I replied, “And no offense to ColSups. I’m just saying that ship crews often look at our kind as ignorant civilians who will just get in the way. I heard many of the ColSups from the Martian Colony and the Europa Science Colony complain about this sort of attitude in the USN-SD. So our crew might not have thought that I’d know enough about shuttlecraft or the coming descent through the atmosphere to offer any advice.”