Turning Point (Book 3): A Time To Live

by Wandrey, Mark

  The module was the same as the one that had been cobbled together by Alice so the navy could get their C-17 off the deck. Alex should have known, as he and Alison were the ones who flew the plane. It still sat on the deck, right where they’d left it. The carrier looked like a ship in a bottle, complete with water under her keel. Only ships in a bottle weren’t surrounded by steaming water from a wonky reactor.

  “Mr. West,” Kuntzleman said suddenly, “Captain Gilchrist wants to talk to you.”

  “Oh?” Alex asked. “Sure.”

  “West? You in command of that spaceship?”

  “Yes, sir. I was a test pilot for NASA a long time ago.”

  “Look’s like you upgraded. I understand you’re trying to get this thing back into the damned ocean?”

  “We’ve been trying, sir.”

  “What happened a few minutes ago? The entire ship jerked.”

  “We tried to pass through your forcefield. Proved to be a bad decision. The fields are interacting in some strange way.”

  “We noticed. It’s also doing something to our reactor. The techs can’t get it to scram, or shutdown. It keeps making more power, and the cooling water is overheating.”

  “We saw. The ocean, or rather the water in there with you, is starting to boil.”

  “Yeah, getting hot in here too. West, you gotta help us get outta here, or I’m going to have a couple thousand dead sailors.”

  “We’re doing what we can. Kuntzleman said someone modified your drive module. Can you get him to work on it again?”

  “Mr. West, I’m not so inclined. Mr. Watts is in the brig for taking liberties which got us into this.”

  “He might be the only one who can get you out of it.”

  “I’d rather you unscrewed this.”

  “Stubborn,” Patty whispered.

  “Comes with the eagle,” Alex said. “You don’t get a carrier by letting others tell you how to do things.”

  “He ain’t gonna have a carrier much longer if he can’t get it out of space,” Patty said.

  “I heard that last part,” Gilchrist said. “As much as I’d like to be annoyed, I agree with you.”

  Alex thought for a second, then pointed at the carrier only a hundred meters away. “You know, there might be a way to solve both problems.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Your ship is watertight, isn’t it?”

  “Wouldn’t be much of a ship if it weren’t.”

  “Okay,” Alex said. “This is going to sound crazy, so if you’d rather let Mr. Watts get back to work on the controller…”

  “I wouldn’t.”

  “Fine, then listen. You don’t have a lot of time.”

  A minute later Captain Gilchrist spoke. “You’re right, that’s crazy.”

  “It might be your only choice, Captain. What’s it going to be?”

  The alarm claxon sounded over and over making Kathy Clifford look up from her computer in alarm. She’d been cutting and splicing video footage she’d obtained during her clandestine wanderings and other events on the Gerald R. Ford. It might be the end of the world, and she might be aboard an aircraft carrier in orbit, but she was still a reporter. Maybe it will make a great book someday.

  She got up and looked out into the corridor just as a voice blared over the big speaker they called a squawk box.

  “Now hear this, now hear this. All stations secure for NBC attack. All stations, secure for NBC attack. This is not a drill!”

  A dozen sailors had been within sight of where she stood. At the first mention of NBC, they leaped into motion, running in every direction. What does a TV network have to do with a carrier?

  “Clear the corridor!” one sailor yelled. Kathy barely pulled back in time to avoid being flattened by the man.

  “What’s going on?” she yelled after him. He didn’t reply.

  A sailor in an adjoining compartment came out and ran to her. “Ma’am, step back please?” He framed it like a question, but she knew he didn’t mean it as one. She stepped back.

  Before she had time to ask what was going on, he slammed the big metal door on the video room she’d been assigned shut. It closed with a rusty squeal of protest, and she saw the steel locking bars move as he spun the wheel. She didn’t know much about the workings of a ship, but she did know enough to realize she’d just been locked in. What the fuck is going on?

  Kathy tried the big handle in the middle of the door. It didn’t budge. The goddamned claxon kept blaring. She was below the waterline, so she didn’t have a window or porthole. What she did have was access to all the camera feeds.

  She sat at the metal desk where her equipment was set up and clicked through the camera feeds. They’d only given her access to a few. One was of the hangar deck and the few planes and helicopters on it. Another pair of cameras showed the flight deck, one looking forward, one aft. Sailors were scrambling around, checking the planes to be sure they were tied down. The hangar looked the same, only they were closing some weird-looking doors which she’d never seen closed before. They were dividing the hangar deck into sections. Everyone was moving like Satan was on their asses.

  “How can we be under attack? We’re in space,” she said to the empty room. It was then that she remembered her little handheld radio. Chris Tucker had one, and they’d used them occasionally to keep in contact, because they were forbidden to use the ship’s intercoms. It took her a second to find it. “Hey, Chris, you there?”

  He answered almost immediately. “Yeah, Kathy, you in your quarters?”

  “No, some damned sailor just locked me in the video room. I can’t open the door.”

  “Okay, good. I’m secured in the brig with Wade. Don’t try to leave.”

  “Why? What’s an NBC?”

  “It stands for Nuclear, Biological, and Chemical.”

  “Oh…shit.”

  “Yeah. The Marines down here are taking it seriously.”

  “But we’re in space, Chris. How can we get nuked?”

  “The Marines think the reactor might be leaking.”

  Kathy swallowed. She’d done some correspondence work around nuclear power plants. She’d even looked in the pool they stored fuel in and saw the ghostly blue glow. None of that made her nervous. She had visited Fukushima and done a report from the exclusion zone. The dosimeter she wore recorded that she had absorbed the equivalent of a dozen chest x-rays worth of radiation in less than a day. She hadn’t felt a thing, yet her skin still crawled, and she was nervous about every ache and pain for weeks afterwards.

  “Radiation,” she whispered.

  “Yeah,” Chris repeated. “Look, some of the Marines want me to secure in place. So, I gotta go; bye!”

  “Chris, wait!” He didn’t reply, and Kathy frowned. She didn’t like being locked up and not told what was going on. It was the investigative journalist in her; she liked answers.

  About 15 minutes passed before another announcement came over the PA.

  “Attention all hands, secure for rough sea and possible collision.” Like before, the message repeated another time.

  “Rough seas? Collision?” She tried to imagine what the message could mean as she looked at the views the monitors afforded. It was then that she noticed the flight deck was abandoned. As was the hangar deck. What’s going on? Then, everything exploded, and she flew across the compartment.

  * * *

  “I’d like to go on record as saying this is insane,” Patty said.

  “Yeah,” Alison said. “I’m gonna have to go with Patty on this one. Nuts.”

  “Your objection is duly noted. Their reactor is losing its mind, and the captain trusts Mr. Watts even less than this plan. So stand by, here we go.”

  “Oh shit,” Alison said and tugged on her straps to make sure they were tight.

  “Ford, this is the Azanti, you may proceed when ready.”

  “You sure about this, Mr. West?”

  “Yes, Captain Gilchrist. We’ve got more than a little e
xperience with these devices.”

  “We’ve never done this in space,” Alison hissed.

  Alex made a shushing gesture, and she glared back at him and flipped him the finger.

  “Very well. Standby, handing you back over to Chief Kuntzleman.”

  “Ready on this end,” the navy chief said after a few seconds.

  “Ready out here,” Alex replied.

  “Roger. In three…two…one…”

  From a short distance away, the view was spectacular. The slight shimmering of the atmosphere inside the forcefield was there one moment, gone the next. The water which sat under the huge supercarrier’s keel seemed to explode away from the hull in every direction. Alex thought it looked like a snow globe which had been shaken for several minutes.

  Alex could see innumerable small, unidentified objects, metal racks, a couple of plane tugs, and the venerable C-17 he’d rescued float away. Apparently, there hadn’t been time to tie it down properly. Too late to worry about it.

  “Here we go,” he said and carefully nudged the controls forward. He hadn’t had much experience flying the Azanti like an airplane. He lined it up with his target as best he could by eyeballing it, so when the Ford turned off their alien drive, he shot forward.

  “Easy, Jesus!” Patty cried as they raced toward the huge carrier like a bullet.

  Alex nodded but didn’t slow. They rocketed toward and into the side entrance to the carrier’s cavernous hangar deck. He zeroed the forward momentum control, and just like it had before, the ship came to an instant stop.

  “Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit,” Alison said repeatedly.

  “Crazy mother fucker,” Patty agreed.

  “Smooth as a baby’s ass,” Alex said. He moved them forward a couple meters and stopped. “Kill the drive,” he ordered.

  “I hope they welded the door on well,” Alison said.

  “Me too,” Alex agreed. Alison turned off the drive power.

  BOOM! The atmosphere around the Azanti vented in a split second. The spaceship’s hull groaned, and they could hear hissing from the temporary hatch the OOE techs had welded on the back. Alex didn’t waste any time; he switched to the ship’s OMS, orbital maneuvering system, the same one they’d used to get it off the ground. He pulsed it downward, pushing the ship onto the hangar deck with a gong which reverberated through the Azanti’s hull.

  “Now!” he yelled, and Alison turned the drive back on.

  With metal-to-metal contact against the Ford, the effect of the alien drive on the Azanti was miraculously extended from the 50-ton space craft to the 100,000-ton aircraft carrier, reestablishing the forcefield and gravity around both. The hissing of escaping air continued, and the ‘pressure loss’ alarm blared for attention.

  “Ford, this is the Azanti. We have established contact. We also have pressure loss, can you please open the doors?”

  “We’re working on it, Azanti,” Kuntzleman replied.

  “What do you mean by working on it?” Alex asked, his two crewmen exchanging nervous glances.

  “The doors are reluctant to move with all the interior pressure against them.”

  “Oh boy,” Patty said.

  “One of them is moving,” Alison said and pointed out the cockpit window.

  Sure enough, the big, wide door they’d flown through a minute ago was grinding slowly closed. It finished with what Alex was sure would have been an impressive boom worthy of an action film, but they didn’t hear anything since they were still in vacuum.

  “Halfway there,” Alex said.

  They sat and waited, pressure bleeding slowly off their ship, replaced by oxygen from internal tanks. Alex glanced at the displays. They could continue for another 30 minutes before the oxygen tanks were exhausted, at which point the cabin pressure would begin to fall. Once that happened, another 5 minutes, and they’d be sucking vacuum. Luckily, they didn’t have to worry about it.

  The big door on the other side moved with a sudden jerk. Slowly, it ground closed, and the hissing lessened.

  “We’re pumping air to the hangar from the rest of the ship,” Kuntzleman said. “The chief engineer says we can pressurize your bay and only lose about 2 PSI on the rest of the ship.”

  “That’s not too bad; we appreciate it.” He looked at the displays and saw that the outside pressure was already up to 5 PSI and climbing steadily. “In the meantime, want to go home?”

  “Mr. West,” Gilchrist cut in, “we’d very much appreciate being back in the water. However, don’t you have to come down to our drive module?”

  “Not at all, Captain. When we connected to your hull, our ship’s drive took over. If you can send me as many external camera feeds as you have, we’ll be happy to take us down to Earth. I’m blind in here, and need eyes outside.”

  “I’d appreciate it.”

  Alex grinned. The man sounded more than skeptical. That was fine; he was about to learn. “Let’s head down, shall we?” Alex asked.

  “Sounds good,” Alison said.

  “For sure,” Patty agreed.

  Their monitors displayed the somewhat grainy views of the carrier’s fore and aft. It looked like the view came from the bridge. Alex took the controls and moved the Z axis slowly down. On the camera feed, the horizon moved upward; the Gerald R. Ford was going back to Earth.

  * * *

  When the drive was cut off, aboard the Ford it was anarchy given birth. There wasn’t time to explain to the thousands aboard that they were about to experience freefall. Most didn’t fully understand that they were in space.

  The human body, in the simple act of standing, exerts enough force against the ground to keep itself upright. When gravity simply disappeared, anyone standing basically performed an unintended vertical leap straight up. Absent gravity, there was nothing to arrest the leap, so countless crewmen crashed into the roofs of the compartments they were in.

  In a second, hundreds were spinning around hangar decks, rec rooms, galleys, engine spaces, and everywhere else imaginable. People screamed and yelled. Some collided with metal roofs and supports with enough force to crack skulls.

  Kathy Clifford was lucky enough to not be standing. She still floated off the deck and squeaked in alarm, her hands shooting out to grab hold of something. She managed to catch the counter as one of her computers sailed past; however, all she succeeded in doing was changing her upward flight into an arc which caused her to collide with the wall and rebound.

  “What the hell?!” she screamed as she spun like a pinwheel. Her left arm slapped painfully against a steel beam running across the roof. She cried out, but still managed to grab the beam and stop her spin. She spent a minute looking at the room full of bouncing, spinning, rebounding electronics gear. It was like the movie Gravity, only there was air.

  “Is the air about to go away?” she wondered, suddenly worried.

  One of her laptops floated by, and she nabbed it with her sore left arm. The laptop showed the visual feed of the hangar deck, so she watched as the Azanti shot in and came to an instant stop.

  Despite her insane situation, she watched in amazement as the ship drifted down into contact with the deck and seemed to latch on, like a magnet. Suddenly, gravity returned. The deck came up and smashed her into unconsciousness.

  * * *

  “Kathy, you okay?”

  She opened her eyes and moaned. Her head felt like it had been used for a football by several exuberant punters. “No,” she said, recognizing Chris’s voice.

  “Should I call a corpsman?”

  “No,” she said and opened her eyes. She moved her limbs. Her left arm hurt, but nothing seemed broken. Her compartment looked like a bomb had gone off. There was scattered equipment everywhere and tons of broken stuff. It was a mess. “Would have been nice if they’d warned us.”

  “Probably didn’t have time,” Chris said. “The Marines had me hang onto something when it happened. They weren’t expecting Star Wars either, but they’re gung-ho about being ready for anythin
g. I think I was in the only place nobody got hurt. I hear a few people might have died.”

  “Holy shit,” Kathy said as she sat up. Her head was throbbing. “Where are we now?”

  “Back in the water,” he said.

  “What? How long was I out?”

  “Maybe 10 minutes. Apparently, a spaceship from OOE flew aboard and took us down to the ocean. Don’t look at me, I have no idea how.”

  Kathy started digging through the scattered and busted electronics, looking for her laptop. She found it and checked it out. Not only was the machine not broken, the camera over the bow had recorded everything!

  “Well, at least you’re smiling,” Chris said.

  “Oh, yeah,” she agreed. This was going to make a hell of a movie. Chris shook his head and left her to her fun.

  * * *

  Joint Combined Evacuation Fleet

  Just off Gulf of Nicoya, Costa Rica

  Theodore Alphonse Bennitti, III, had never been invited to the CIC on the USS Bataan. He and his scientists were aboard as a means to an end, not because they were considered essential. The Marines and the navy had a rather novel view of scientists on their ships. In short, they were treated more like cargo than passengers.

  “Don’t touch anything,” a young, navy sailor said as he held the door for Theodore.

  Theodore’s eyes narrowed in annoyance, though he kept his peace. As if he, a NASA director, needed to be told not to push random buttons. He stepped over the door lip, which the sailors called a knee knocker, into the CIC. It wasn’t like it was in the movies except it was kinda dark and had lots of computers. Admiral Jayne Kent saw him and waved toward a big, glass board with grease pencil marks on it.

  “Thanks for coming,” the gray-haired officer said.

  “Not sure what I can do for you,” Theodore replied.