ERO

by F. P. Dorchak

  This new concept of constant acceleration just did not compute.

  17,546 miles per hour.

  Earth escape velocity.

  Cherko and the others shuddered and jerked within their harnesses as if an angry Hermes himself were trying to shake them out of the sky like an evil parent to a misbehaving child. There was no turning back now, and it hit Cherko for the very first time that, yes, they really could very well all perish at any point from now, on. They could all turn into sparkling, fiery bits screaming out of a bright blue sky.

  It’s not like there hadn’t been any precedent for that.

  And, in the case of ascent, that was the reason for the escape tower. It would ignite, more explosive bolts would detonate, and Orion would be yanked free from its Hermes stack at a force of well over 10 Gs, the malfunctioning booster would then be safely destroyed over open ocean.

  Or such was the plan.

  Commander Dunlow read off their altitude.

  And through all this Hermes just kept going....

  It was almost too much to register. As much training as he’d had, Centrifuge and everything else, as much simulator time as they’d had, nothing truly ever prepared you for the real deal. Of being strapped onto a rocket and manhandled into orbit.

  Space.

  Less than thirty seconds later they punched through the sound barrier. Seven hundred miles per hour. All the vibrations and buffeting that they’d been enduring since liftoff suddenly backed off and things smoothed out. At transonic speeds they were all now in front of the noise—or its shockwave. The crew cabin grew starkly quieter. Cherko again glanced out the window.

  “Fifty miles, astronauts,” Dunlow announced calmly, as they raced through the sound barrier. This made Cherko and another brand-new voyager full-fledged additions to the astronaut corps. Cherko and Pedersen immediately pulled out their Velcro patches with their names and newly minted astronaut wings, and slapped them onto their suits where an empty Velcro-receiving patch had been waiting.

  Astronaut.

  Finally.

  Finally—and he could never tell a soul.

  Cherko took in the crew cabin. The flight crew beside him and their various monitoring responsibilities, as they rocketed toward their orbital trajectory. Took in the control panels and instrumentation. The feel of the suit encasing him, the gloves.

  Flexed his fingers.

  Directed his eyes (he didn’t move his head, as the Commander had reminded him) toward one of the windows. Blue sky was quickly fading to black.

  A sudden reduction in thrust threw everyone forward in their harnesses. The first stage engine had cut off. Cherko emitted a forced grunt as he impacted his restraint harness. Five seconds later they were again thrown back into their couches. The second stage and its liquid oxygen-and-hydrogen engines had kicked in. For the next four-hundred-and-sixty seconds this forced them into an altitude of sixty-three miles, shoving them all back into their contour couches at 3.5 Gs. About thirty seconds later there was another jolt and explosion, and Cherko jumped, feeling a cold sweat—until he saw the readout that indicated jettison of their launch escape tower.

  There went their useless-at-this-point safety net.

  But something continued to nag at the back of Cherko’s mind. He continued to stare out the crew cabin’s windows.

  Something just wasn’t right.

  All blue sky was now replaced by the pure darkness of space.

  After all the unbridled fury of Hermes trying to shake them into human confetti, it had all just... stopped. They had “gone through the gate,” it was called, and the second stage had shut down. It felt exactly as had been described by others who had gone before: a car wreck.

  Ka-BOOM, and the exact feeling of being catapulted off the planet.

  An internal tumbling sensation.

  Cherko felt a sudden fullness in his head from his cardiovascular system having been working overtime to pump blood into a brain during the high-G ride into orbit, but now, suddenly without all those Gs, his face flushed like an embarrassed schoolboy. He reflexively reached for his face, despite having already been briefed on the affect, but of course the helmet prevented any facial contact. Man, itches were gonna be hell.

  He was no longer on Earth.

  He was a Rocket Man.

  They’d reached escape velocity. Officially become an Earth-orbiting satellite. NORAD had a number assigned to them and was dutifully tracking them.

  ERO was...

  The mission.

  Yes, all this excitement was overshadowed by the mission.

  What they were all up there for, and it was far from any amusement park thrill ride, nor any national adulation. They had a job to do, a serious one, and one that had a cover story fed to the public. Their real mandate the public would never know. Not even in fifty nor a hundred years, if things extended out that far. Never ever.

  Cherko gently rolled his head toward the view port and gazed longingly upon the Earth.

  It seemed, oh, so much farther away than it could ever have been....

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  1

  100-Mile Low Earth Orbit

  21 May 2021

  1600 Hours Zulu

  Dreams were a funny thing, James Francis Cherko thought, as he stared out the MOL’s viewport. When initiated, usually at young, naïve, highly impressionable stages of childhood, they didn’t take into account any kind of reality. All that’s involved in actually attaining said goals. Cherko’s dreams arose during the early sixties and seventies by consuming everything science fiction. Watching Star Trek reruns, reading their sixties and seventies paperbacks, and building a ceiling full of spaceship models. He frequently splurged his weekly allowances on books.

  Those were days of hard decisions.

  No, reality was rarely, if ever, factored in.

  And for Jimmy’s dreams it was partly because, at his young age and in that era, there really hadn’t been much of a reality to factor in. No one had really traveled through space back then, at least not until the early sixties with Yuri Gargarin’s and John Glenn’s orbital shots. Even with the 1969 lunar landing, and though the moon was definitely nothing to sneeze at, it wasn’t exactly screaming though interstellar space at warp speeds or visiting a city on the edge of forever.

  No, sometimes we had to be careful what we wished for.

  As an adult... nothing was naïve. Reality tainted and discolored our dreams, dreams we’d labored long and hard to achieve, blinded by our youthful, single-minded determination. Goals that were rosy when generated often became sullied with actualization.

  Cherko looked down to Earth.

  There was a certain air of surrealism to a guy who couldn’t get past navigator training in pursuit of an astronaut rating.

  And everything he knew existed there.

  Humanity loved to wax philosophical about stars and comets and moons. On the one hand being in orbit was a heady, spiritual experience—you don’t get much closer to touching the face of God—but get stuck up in a smelly tin can orbiting a little blue planet and see how “romantic” things really were... especially when you couldn’t talk to the ones you love because you didn’t officially exist up there. You weren’t officially where you were, because you were an on-orbit spy.

  Most of Cherko’s life had been oriented toward the stars, and most of his adult life had been focused toward space, but now that he was actually there, he'd grown homesick. That had never happened before—not when he left home at eighteen, and not when he’d entered the Air Force at twenty-two. But now, everything-and-anything, everyone he ever knew was on that planet below. All his problems, his woes, his loves. 7-Elevens, TV shows, and pets.

  Books.

  Cozy beds.

  Traffic lights, movie theaters, and Starbucks.

  Yeah, no Starbucks.

  People wished upon stars and gazed romantically lunar, but they just didn’t realize what it was they were doing.

  It's so utterly desolate u
p here.

  Lonely.

  Nothing.

  All wistful desires for space are centered around books and movies about space, but even Star Trek and Star Wars were filmed in studios and virtual reality—all still on Earth. At the end of a shoot, it's a “wrap,” cameras stop rolling, and reality returned to... sets, ground, and people. Trees. Bugs. What he’d give to see a cloud of black flies. Up here... there’s no soundtrack, no rolling credits, no house lights, no huge, expansive estates or their manicured lawns. Up here, all special effects were real. There’s no place to return to except straight down.

  Earth.

  The basis for all human experience.

  So what had he finally gotten out of attaining his dream?

  Being crammed within a set of strung-together tin cans? Spying on life by being utterly removed from it? Peeping in on satellites, terrestrial targets, even the official astronauts and their officially acknowledged space stations and EVAs?

  Romantic. Real romantic.

  So what’d happened to his life, real life, the one he’d lived down there... interacting among people, places, and all-things gravitationally-bound? What had become of his parents, his siblings, his friends, and

  Erica.

  Geeze, yes, he’d forgotten about her along the way, hadn’t he, so fueled had he been by his all-consuming ambition? He’d allowed himself to have been caught up in events of the Black World. The Black Onion. Clandestine operations.

  God and Country.

  Cherko nudged away from the viewport, drifting down the length of the SIGINT module. Eyed several panels.

  It was almost time.

  Time to collect more whoop-de-do intel on a country he didn’t even care about.

  So why the hell was he up here?

  Because, plain and simply, it’d been his dream.

  What he’d wanted out of life since being that starry-eyed kid in Lake Clear, NY. It was now his job. What got him up here. In space. His covert-never-can-tell astronaut rating. He was now one of those elusive, unblinking satellites that some other starry-eyed kid was staring up at from Earth this very minute.

  Erica.

  Had she also been a dream? Not so much a goal, “dream,” but a real, mentally fabricated psychological delusion? An illusion created by a homesick mind, not the real flesh-and-blood person he thought he’d loved? The one with the deep, loving eyes and stunning mane of red hair? The one with the most appealing, mesmerizing voice?

  Erica.

  He had loved her. Had been with her. Yes, he remembered that as plain as if it were yesterday and not forty years later. But, he’d been pulled out of Colorado, kidnapped by, essentially, his own kind, then subsequently “rescued” by General Hammond, who was now more than likely long gone and nothing but a distant memory rotting in a grave somewhere. Dust to dust.

  On Earth.

  Then he’d been sent to New Mexico and his world—everything he’d known—had spun upside down. But he’d—

  He’d what? Returned? Returned to reclaim her? The love of his life?

  Cherko shook his head, snorting. Zero-g wreaked havoc on his sinuses.

  Hadn’t he returned—married—Erica? Hadn’t they—

  No... wait wait wait...

  He hit the control panel before him and squinted hard into its glowing indicators and switches.

  He’d made the Air Force a career—attained the rank of colonel.

  Hadn’t he?

  Been a fast-burner. Lost within the skins of the Black Onion, he’d been able to excel like never before.

  Then... then how could he have married? It simply didn’t fit the timeline....

  Cherko braced himself, wedging two fingertips between modulator/demodulator equipment.

  Colonel. Air Force. ERO.

  Married? Erica? Civilian?

  How could both be true?

  Cherko stared down the length of the module.

  Empty.

  He was alone in this section of orbiting canister, surrounded by surveillance packages, advanced hardware and software—high technology. Preprocessor and processor modules. Crypto gear. Recorders. O-scopes.

  Think.

  He was no longer in the military, that much was true, but he still worked for ERO—that much was also true. He looked to his left hand.

  No wedding band.

  Yet he remembered marrying Erica.

  Erica... what was her last name? Her maiden name?

  He grunted.

  Erica... Taylor. Erica Taylor. Yes!

  A... car crash?

  Rear-ended a garbage truck?

  Bad dreams... dreams about—

  Goddammit, they had been married....

  2

  Colorado Springs,

  10 December 2010

  0320 Hours Mountain Time

  Reality always came too soon.

  Oh-dark-thirty.

  Getting up before the alarm, Cherko quietly left the room and his peacefully sleeping wife and entered the hallway. Having hardwood flooring, he always softly jammed a rolled-up towel into the space between the bottom of the bedroom door and the floor to lessen his morning noise. They’d had carpet across the upstairs, but when Erica had found beautiful hardwood floors hidden beneath thirty-plus-year-old carpet, they’d torn it up. They’d left a short patch on the stairs because of their eleven-year-old Black Lab at the time who’d had bone cancer, and therefore had trouble negotiating slippery surfaces. That had been seven years ago. Since ripping up the carpet, they’d discovered it quite noisy and cold on Erica’s beautiful feet in the winter months.

  By the low light of the stove’s fan hood down in the kitchen, Jimmy made sure Erica’s coffee was set up and ready for her when she awoke, then grabbed his tall glass, filled it with ice and home-brewed black tea, and left for his basement writing office. Powering up the printer and laptop, he listened to the haunting wail-bark of the coyotes outside his window. Coyotes that yipped and howled and actually sounded like they were right there. He poked aside the curtains and peered outside. Their activity continued, but he saw nothing. He returned to his laptop, entered his password, and brought up his manuscript.

  Pausing, he looked to pictures of Erica on his desk.

  Erica in that hot little black number.

  Erica smiling beautifully in front of their fireplace.

  And to possibly the most cutest picture ever: an adorable black-and-white of Erica three years old, in some checkered top.

  This was his wife, a woman whom he cherished and adored and couldn’t believe had married him.

  He smiled and took a clanking swig of iced tea.

  Time to get back to work.

  He pulled out his keyboard, and as soon as his fingers hit the keys, was lost within a world of government spies, Area 51, satellites, and UFOs....

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  1

  100-Mile Low Earth Orbit

  21 May 2021

  1710 Hours Zulu

  Okay, now how in the hell could that be?

  Cherko continued to adjust mux/demux components that had been giving attitude the past several days. He input a handful of commands into an attached laptop, one used to monitor input signal conditioning.

  How could he have been a technical writer ten years ago, only to now find himself in orbit above the Earth?

  He’d been in the Air Force... made a full career of doing covert space ops—only to have gotten out and become a technical writer?

  The mux/demux rack finally went green. Time to suit up.

  Cherko nudged away from the instrument rack and drifted over to another set of panels at the opposite bulkhead; looked to the Time Display Unit.

  17:10:54 hours.

  Looked to a locker and its own mini-TDU, displaying the same time. A red light was embedded on the locker alongside the TDU. When the time hit 17:11:04 hours, the red indicator switched to green. Hovering before it, Cherko quickly opened the locker and removed the headgear, its visor up. This was “suiting up.�
�� Multicolored leads floated about the helmeted contraption as Cherko fit it onto his crew-cut head. It always reminded him of a military pilot’s helmet.

  Cherko checked that the visor remained in its up and stowed position and went about connecting all the helmet leads into their panel sockets. Once all leads were connected and checked, Cherko lowered his legs from the zero-g floating position and shuffled his feet into the floor stirrups, anchoring in. He adjusted the Velcro straps to his helmet under his chin then activated a panel switch, bringing the unit to life. Cherko heard a muffled beep inside the earphones and immediately set about performing end-to-end bit error rate checks with the help of the laptop. Satisfied with the checks, he lowered the holographic visor.

  For all practical purposes, he was no longer in the MOL.

  As soon as the visor was lowered and in place, Cherko was outside the space station, floating in free space... or so it appeared.

  Mildly fumbling about over his equipment as he oriented himself, he grabbed two joy sticks. He then reached over to the laptop and quickly adjusted his visor settings to allow display of a tiny window to the lower right portion of his vision, in his visor’s heads-up display. The HUD permitted him to see what was actually—physically—before him, along with the mission’s virtual displays. Like a pilot’s preflight checks, he twisted and turned the “sticks,” as he called them, while viewing HUD indications. Maneuvering, or “flexing” the sticks, he performed quick systems and optics checks, not unlike the preflight operation of aircraft rudders and ailerons. He also gave a quick all-around look at the MOL’s optics and flexibility, and the helmet’s integration with them. All green. Good-to-Go.

  Cherko hit another switch, initiating mission operation.

  This gave Cherko a rush like nothing else. Virtually bi-located, all his visual senses were focused outside the MOL as if he were actually on an EVA, while his aural and tactile senses were still inside the station. Immediately Cherko’s field of vision went from on-orbit to serious terrestrial micro-zoom, as his holographic visor zoomed him in on a patch of Earth in brilliant clarity and detail. It was as if he’d performed an incredibly quick Earth reentry without the plasma envelope, as the program fed and directed him automated target acquisition data. He held back just a hint of motion