by Jon Lymon
“So what happened?”
Haygue paused, trying to find the right words. He sighed. “The crew got greedy. Cut off more than their ship could carry. They tried to load up too big a chunk of the diamond. The robotic arm couldn’t handle it. Some rock fell onto the ship’s windscreen. Smashed it. The last radio message we got was an SOS.”
“I can see why you kept that quiet.”
“Not SEC’s proudest moment, and my biggest regret. Like I said, I handpicked the crew so the buck stopped with me.”
“Beard and Quinn had impeccable credentials, didn’t they?”
“I never said they were on board.”
“Maybe it was the third guy who rocked the boat. You can’t blame yourself for another man’s greed.”
“That’s one of the nicest things you’ve ever said to me, Stock.”
“Don’t worry, it won’t be going on the blog. So what’s happened between then and now?”
“Meetings, and more meetings with government officials, trying to secure funding to nail the asteroid and bring the diamond home.”
“Not a good time to be asking for billions of dollars, what with the economy in such a bad way.”
“It really wasn’t, and we didn’t get any. At first. The administration couldn’t afford to divert funds. The risk of getting exposed was too great. It would be the end of the President if his rivals discovered he was throwing billions behind the search for a diamond asteroid.”
“But the asteroid must be worth zillions.”
“Easily. But the risks and costs are too high for some in the corridors of power. And there’s a hell of a lot of red tape to negotiate. Things take so long, decisions, votes, all that shit takes time, and costs money.”
“But you obviously got the funding, right?”
“Sure, the money started coming in from somewhere. We were able to build what we needed. Most of it we launched in small enough pieces so as not to attract any attention. Not that anyone was interested in space.”
“I was. And I didn’t have a clue.”
Haygue beamed a self-satisfied smile.
Stock had so many questions he didn’t know which to ask first. “So are we going to be the ones who bring the diamond home? We’re going to be the first ones back?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“Come on Haygue, spill.”
Haygue yawned and prodded his swollen face. “You got your scoop, Stock. You’ll soon see what’s what.”
“Wow, I can only imagine the impact this news is going to have back home, Haygue. But I’m not sure you did the right thing, keeping the discovery a secret from the rest of the world.”
“Why should we tell anyone?”
“Because jealousy is a powerful and destructive force.”
Stock’s words reminded Haygue of his wife. He smiled and felt a wave of tiredness drape over him and he sunk into his bed. “This one’s over, Stock,” he mumbled, flicking a button on his remote control that lowered the lights and slid open the door. Stock left the room, clutching his iPad, wondering why his room didn’t contain such luxurious equipment. As he made his way back to his cabin, he congratulated himself on his decision to monetise his blog and charge a subscription fee for access to his Facebook fan page. One way or another, by the time he returned to Earth, Stock was convinced the diamond asteroid would make him a rich man.
28
‘You’ve treated our daughter like scum since the day she was born. What have you ever done for her, other than let her down, disappoint her and fail to provide for her?’
Remnant twisted and turned on the narrow bunk. Elena’s voice was coming through loud and clear and regularly. Not a day passed when Remnant didn’t think about how proud he would have felt as Chloe’s hand gripped his arm, at how beautiful his daughter would have looked, like her mother did on their wedding day.
Remnant sat half-upright on his elbows in his bunk. The skin on his face still bloated but now sweaty. He needed to clear his mind. To stop thinking and re-thinking about how he’d deserted his daughter. The same thoughts were going round and round in his head like a beam on a radar screen, and he was getting more and more uncomfortable living in his own bloated skin.
A tap on the cabin door interrupted his self-loathing. Without waiting for an invitation, DT opened it and peered around it. “Thought I heard a noise. A scream?”
Remnant shook his head. “Maybe I was dreaming.”
“Hey, my friend. I’ve been dreaming ever since I first heard about the asteroid. No shame in that. The shame is in not trying to make those dreams come true.’
Remnant nodded.
“Think I might grab some sleep,” said DT, vaulting himself into the bunk above “though I’m pretty sure I only woke up a few hours ago.”
Remnant smiled. Days and nights were becoming indistinguishable. Watches useless. Life had neither light nor shade. It was all monotonous darkness that caused the brain to think it was forever a winter’s night. Each man longed to feel the warm rays of the sun on his face, not the cool blast of the ship’s air conditioning system.
“Must be Christmas soon, yes?” DT askedd. Remnant had never had anything to celebrate during the festive season, and wasn’t about to start now.
“Don’t bother waking me up until we get there,” DT grunted as he turned on his side in the bunk above Remnant.
He was OK for a rich guy, Remnant thought. Maybe he’d misheard what they’d said in the cockpit. Maybe there was no plot against him.
As the Baton Uric continued its journey deeper into the solar system, the men on board drifted further from each other.
Uncertain about the intentions of his co-crew, Remnant found sleep difficult, every noise above the engine, or movement or opening of a door was to him a sign that either Bettis or DT was on his way to slay him. Bettis and Remnant had hardly spoken to one another, making their relationship an ever-present reminder of the kind of rapport he was enduring with his ex-wife. DT and Bettis seldom spoke to each other when Remnant was around. Bettis preferred to sit alone in the pilot’s seat, mentally joining the dots of stars to form cars, naked ladies, houses, guns, aliens. Diamonds.
As the first two months of the trip passed amid swathes of silence, each man began to search and yearn for links to home, noises and smells that would take them back to the world they’d left behind. They all missed the blue sky. The yearning for a calming, soothing turquoise reached such a level that Remnant was forced to tape his blue t-shirt over the strip light in the cabin. It gave the room a pleasant hue, taking the edge off the harsh white light and making spending time in the room pleasurable for a few precious days until the searing heat from the bulb burnt through the shirt.
“I’d take a wasp sting right now, like you wouldn’t believe,” said DT, as he lazed on his top bunk.
“A barking dog. A screech of brakes. A police siren. Any of those will do me,” said Remnant from beneath him.
Voices were beginning to remind the men of people back home. Bettis was beginning to sound like Remnant’s late Dad to Remnant. Give your Dad an ‘e’ and he’s dead. That’s exactly what happened to Remnant’s old man. Someone spiked his drink with an ecstasy tablet and it exploded his heart like it would a fifty-eight year old with history in that department who’d always looked to alcohol and tobacco to shorten his life, never considering processed pills for the task. No one ever found the culprit. There was no CCTV of the E going into the diet G and T, but plenty of Remnant’s dad going down to A and E and the paramedic going down and the resuscitating hands going up down up down until the stopping and the shaking of his head.
Remnant was reminding DT of a guy whom he’d employed and who was after his job. In fairness, all his employees were after his job. “That’s what happens when you run your own business,” he told Remnant during one of their rare cabin chats. “The senior staff all want what you have got. A slice of the cake you have mixed and lovingly baked and carefully iced. Whenever you talk to them, that i
s all they talk about. I will ask them out for a lunchtime drink and they will say sure, as long as we can talk about you giving me more shares. And I will tell them I think I will stay in or go on my own if that is the case. But I just want some shares, they will say. Go and start your own business if that is what you are after, I would reply. And that is why I always drink alone, my friend.”
DT reminded Bettis of a co-pilot he’d flown with for a while. He was from Africa, and like DT was well spoken, accentuating every word. He dressed like him too, always the smart suit and tie, and the thin, wire rimmed glasses, even when they were on the beach. As far as Bettis could remember, the guy went down on a take-off from Madrid in the late Nineties. Cool guy. Couldn’t remember his name, but at least he went out with a bang.
The sound of the onboard microwave oven was reminding DT of his microwave back home. ‘Bing.’ Meal for one ready to go. Count the E numbers, taste the plastic, ingest the salt. But it’s quick. No need to wait to fill that hole. Not like the waiting they were doing now. If only they could fly as fast as microwaves heated food, DT thought.
Although progress was slow, the forty-ninth day saw the Baton Uric pass the halfway mark between Earth and Mars, a fact that heralded a strange stage of the mission in which each man faced an overwhelming urge to turn back.
Bettis kept his urge to himself. He feared eternally heading into the black where nothing ever seemed to get nearer, and memories of home faded. He found himself sweating more, his puffed-out face in perma-blush mode, a nightmare for one who attached so much importance to his appearance. He was embarrassed by himself and refused to let the others get close enough to see the state of his face, ensuring the cockpit lights were off when anyone sat next to him.
During his urge, Remnant took himself to the cabin, and assumed the foetal position. His need to turn back confused him. He knew only grief awaited there. Yet he desperately wanted to smash a window and see how hard it really was to breathe in space. It felt like one of those death wishes he got when he peered over the edge of his balcony back home, thoughts of wanting to jump doing battle with the desire to live.
DT needed to talk about his urge and wanted his two crew to understand what he was going through. But his years of people management had taught him the dangers of showing weakness when you’re in charge. Whenever he was off sick at the jewellers, the rest of his staff got to thinking that, well, he can’t have a go at us for being off if he himself has been off. Consequently, DT always saw a big spike on the absence chart following any of his own absences. And so he dragged himself into work every day, even if he felt like death.
There was one final urge that Remnant experienced more than the others, evidenced when he inexplicably reached out to gently stroke the back of DT’s hand while they were both in the galley. In the immediate aftermath of the incident, DT didn’t know where to put himself or what to say. Remnant felt that to apologise would be to deny it was an accident, so he said nothing. After the predictable awkward pause, the men carried on, both feeling uncomfortable about the situation, but neither wishing to comment on it. But three days later, matters reached a head when Remnant shoulder barged DT out of the way as he headed for the toilet.
“What was that for?” DT asked, rubbing his shoulder.
“What was what for?”
“You banged into me.”
“Sorry. I thought I had room to squeeze by.”
DT shook his head but couldn’t deny that he’d enjoyed the contact.
Remnant reached the toilet and locked himself in. Why had he made a bee-line for DT back there? He smiled. It was as if the collision, however briefly, had made him feel alive. What was happening to him? He sat on the toilet, head in hands. He wanted to stop the thoughts coming, but knew they were on their way. They wanted him dead. Both of them. He’d have to take them out, one at a time. DT first because he needed Bettis alive to land him safely back on Earth. Then he’d kill him. Yeah. There was no way he was sharing diamond with either of them. If they wanted to play dirty, he’d play dirtier. But were they playing dirty? He pinched the white, wiry hairs on his earlobes. Had he heard it wrong? Had he heard it at all? He knew exactly when, where and how to dispose of DT. But planning it was one thing, executing it another. He felt happy with the theory, uncomfortable contemplating the practical side. He didn’t have the coldness of heart to carry it through. He’d always been told that and berated himself for it now. Nice guys get nowhere. He had to do it. These men wanted him dead. He’d heard them say as much. They were going to force him out through the trash chute. But two wrongs don’t make an eye for an eye and what goes around comes down. He’d got that all wrong. What was going on?
Remnant yanked the hair from his lobes and grimaced through the pain. Every part of him ached. Sleeping in a restricted space was playing havoc with his fragile, ageing bones. He was too old to keep pulling the foetal position. He needed to stretch his legs, clear his mind, make a fresh start.
29
When Mars started to declare itself from amid the sky’s countless white dots, its brick red hue slowly becoming distinguishable from the featureless giant stars in far-off galaxies, all three crew were captivated. And as they drew closer, they saw the Martian surface looked as lifeless as Earth’s moon.
Bettis had rehearsed the series of decisions and moves he’d need to make to successfully land, a challenging procedure that the entire aviation community had dubbed ‘a nightmare’, trickier even than the old Hong Kong airport in diagonal rain and an angry crosswind.
As the Baton Uric continued its approach, the thought, pressure and worry of taking responsibility for the landing preyed on Bettis’ mind. He strapped himself in and glanced at the damaged autopilot button, now covered with a plaster.
“We all need to sit down and strap up,” he announced with a dry mouth.
“What’s going on? Are you going to land my ship?” DT asked.
“It’s not your ship,” Remnant reminded him.
“It’s my fuel flying it.”
“Right. But it’s not your ship.”
DT decided to let it slide. When the Baton Uric fell into the cloudy beige upper Martian atmosphere, the mood in the cockpit became overwhelmed with tension. Although they’d been entering the unknown for the last thirty-six million miles, this was an even more dangerous unknown they were facing.
DT had grown accustomed to hearing the steady hum of the Baton Uric’s engines. Now, as Bettis was preparing to land, the pitch was changing, and DT felt his blood vessels filling with a much cooler variety of the red stuff, and the canals in his ears bloated with air.
He turned to face Bettis and saw the pilot was sweating.
“The autopilot is on, yes?” DT asked.
Bettis nodded, checking the plastered button. The lack of confidence in him was still as palpable as the tension that the lack of confidence was generating. Remnant gripped the arms of his seat and DT prayed to a God who hadn’t heard from him with such regularity since his primary school days in Peckham.
A computer was humiliating Bettis again, and all aboard could see how powerless he was. DT and Remnant looked on with a mixture of fear and disdain at a pilot who was shaking and flitting from one button to another without pressing anything. This was the real reason why passengers were banned from cockpits on commercial flights, DT thought. It was nothing to do with terror threats and everything to do with not letting the general public see how impotent and redundant computers had rendered pilots. Silicon was running the show now. Humans were merely a sideshow, a toothless support act. And DT had a front row seat for this pathetic performance, watching the pilot’s veneer not so much crack as totally and utterly shatter.
Bettis felt Remnant’s eyes bore into his back, and knew he’d be wondering why he was wasting his skills, wanting him to justify his place on the ship. He sensed DT’s disappointment too, predicting (correctly) that the jeweller was sitting next to him wondering why was he paying this pilot so much for precious little.
The pilot needed to make a decision. He wanted to fly, but he didn’t want to die. He glanced to his right where DT sat with eyes shut and lips muttering. Bettis leaned forward, then shot back. No, leave it. The computer offered their best hope of a safe landing. No question.
“That’s it. You sit back and relax,” Remnant mocked from behind. “Let the computer do it.”
After a deep breath Bettis bent forward again and switched off the autopilot.
The Baton Uric lost ten thousand feet in a second, all three crew leaving their senses and the lion’s share of their internal organs at the previous altitude.
“What the hell are you doing?” DT garbled, anticipating the re-emergence of vomit.
“I’m flying,” Bettis declared at high volume.
“Let the computer do it,” DT yelled, stretching for the autopilot button. Bettis veered the ship sharply right, a move that threw DT away from the dash.
“How do you know a computer can land this better than me?” Bettis yelled. “It’s the first time either of us has been here.”
“Computers don’t let emotions affect their decisions.”
“That doesn’t make them right.”
“No, but if you get it wrong, I will kill you.”
“Why don’t you try now?”
“There’s no room to swing a punch in here. Wait until we get on the ground.”
“But that’s what we’re fighting about, isn’t it? You don’t think I’m good enough to get us onto the ground alive.”
“The trouble is, mate, you don’t think you’re good enough either.” Remnant’s intervention was accurate and cut deep.
“You’re not even good enough to be on this ship,” Bettis snarled as he gripped the control stick.
“I’ve done more for this mission than you have,” Remnant shouted, pointing an accusing finger at the pilot.
Bettis glanced at DT who had his eyes scrunched shut, lips moving in near-silent recital of rapid prayer. The pilot used this opportunity to deftly switch autopilot back on. With a kidney wrenching jolt, the computer altered the Baton Uric’s angle of approach, a change that was enough to cause DT to shout out a few of the words of the prayer he was ad-libbing.