Mission One

by Samuel Best

  As soon as Frank’s footsteps had faded, Rick scurried to his chair and sat down quickly. “I thought he’d never leave.”

  “There you are!” Kate said. “Could have used you a few minutes ago.”

  He looked over his shoulder nervously as he pulled his cell phone out of his pocket.

  “Catch the news this morning?” he asked.

  She sighed, already weary of his circuitous way of arriving at whatever point he was trying to make.

  “Well,” he continued, “if you did turn on your TV, I’m pretty sure you wouldn’t have seen this.”

  He handed her his phone. The screen glowed with the image of a dead man in a dumpster. The man’s clothes were splashed with blood from multiple stab wounds.

  “Oh my God,” said Kate. “Why would you show this to me?”

  “Look closely.”

  She pushed the cell phone back into his hands. “No way.”

  He huffed in annoyance and held out the phone again, then lowered his voice and said, “It’s Michael Cochran.”

  She opened her mouth to speak, then stopped.

  “Yeah,” said Rick. “That guy.” He must have seen something in her face, a manifestation of the crawling dread she felt in her stomach. “What?” he asked. “What is it?”

  “Frank was just asking me about the time Cochran showed up at my house.”

  “How the hell does he know about that?”

  “He claims to have a contact at the Sheriff’s Department,” Kate said. She hesitated before asking her next question, knowing it would trigger Rick’s conspiracy gene. “You think the company is watching us?”

  Rick grunted. “Wouldn’t surprise me. Did he ask about yours truly?”

  “Why would he?”

  “Because I talked to Cochran,” Rick reminded her.

  “No, he didn’t mention you.”

  “Good.”

  Kate took the phone back and scrolled down past the picture, reading the attached article. “It says he was a local vagrant. No name.”

  “His teeth and fingertips are missing.”

  Kate frowned in disgust and swallowed hard. “What website is this?” she asked as she scrolled up to the top of the page. The site’s logo was a cartoon fist raised in defiance, clenching a magnifying glass.

  “The Daily Glass,” Rick said. “It’s a vigilant alternative news source that’s not afraid to print the truth. You’ll never see a story like this on regular television. To mainstream news he was just some homeless guy.”

  “Death is always news,” she said.

  “Not if someone pays to keep it quiet.”

  Kate’s brain seemed to be working slowly. She was having a hard time wrapping her thoughts around the fact that the man who had visited her home, albeit briefly, was now dead in a dumpster.

  Murder, she thought, and shivered.

  “Who would pay to keep this off the major networks?” she asked.

  “I don’t know about you,” Rick said, “but I’d rather not find out. I’m perfectly fine with all of my teeth, and I like my fingertips on the end of my fingers where they belong.” He leaned in close. “But something is going on.”

  “You mean…a conspiracy?” she said mockingly. Despite the unsettling circumstances, she couldn’t bring herself to admit the matter went beyond one man’s murder.

  “Laugh if you must, but when I come back with evidence, try not to act too surprised.”

  “What evidence?”

  He leaned back in his seat and shrugged. “Don’t worry about it,” he said guardedly.

  “Don’t do anything foolish, okay?” He shrugged and looked away. She would have to press him. “Okay, Rick?”

  “Define foolish.”

  “Whatever it is you’re thinking about doing.”

  He rolled his eyes dramatically. “Fine. I’ll just sit here and do my job like a good little boy, and pretend that nothing is going on behind the curtain.”

  Kate smiled, ignoring his sarcasm. “Good. Now help me run a check on the vehicle monitoring systems. It got bumped up on the schedule.”

  Rick grumbled as he put on his headset and wheeled his chair up to his workstation. Kate spun sideways in her chair and looked casually up at the viewing platform at the back of the room.

  Frank was staring right at her. He smiled slowly and gave her a thumb’s up. She returned the smile and spun back around. When she reached up to adjust her microphone, she couldn’t stop her hand from shaking.

  Noah stood at the large redwood desk in his office, arms crossed, staring at the image on his computer monitor: a dead man in a dumpster, his torso punctured by multiple knife wounds. The photograph was taken earlier that morning when a local sheriff’s deputy left a coffee shop and heard a little girl scream from a nearby alley. The girl lived across the street and was about to climb into the dumpster to retrieve a toy her brother threw away. Instead, she found the corpse of Michael Cochran.

  Noah picked up a manila folder on his desk and studied the file inside. It was an employee record of Cochran, who had worked for Diamond Aerospace five years ago, back when the company still operated a facility at Baikonur, just outside of Russia.

  How far we’ve come, thought Noah.

  He pushed the intercom button on his desk phone and said, “Trevor?”

  “It’s Neil, sir.”

  “Right. Sorry, Neil. I’ll get it eventually. Is Frank Johnson still in the building?”

  A slight pause, then: “Yes, sir. He’s at his desk in Mission Control. Shall I send for him?”

  “No, thank you. I’m going to take a walk. Back in a few.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Noah turned to face a recessed wall mirror and checked his appearance. He fastened one button of his gray tailored suit jacket and adjusted his scarlet pocket square.

  A man who used to work for you has been murdered, he thought as he stared into his own eyes in the mirror. How do you feel about that?

  He shook his head and walked away. He was doing it again: playing the role of the press as they grilled him for any small morsel of evening news fodder. It was a technique he employed to minimize the chances of being caught off guard by hard-hitting questions.

  Yet the report of Cochran’s murder had come to Noah through the private security detail he maintained for just such occurrences. The team was a safety net for his companies, keeping an eye on the countless ways any part of his empire could be damaged, whether it was by slander or sabotage.

  He stepped into his private elevator and descended toward the ground floor.

  Doubtless a small rumor regarding Cochran’s past involvement with Diamond Aerospace would eventually leak to the press. Somehow information always got out, especially when death was involved. Noah briefly reflected on how strange it must be to have a job as a news reporter. One moment you had to pretend to be deeply hurt by the untimely death of someone you had never met, and the next moment you were all smiles while you told your viewers about a surfing bulldog.

  Still, Michael Cochran hadn’t done anything to garner sympathy before his passing. The file on Noah’s desk stated he had been homeless for the last six months, drifting in and out of halfway homes and struggling with a severe alcohol problem. He had even voluntarily committed himself to a mental facility two months ago just outside of Dallas, Texas.

  In other words, even if mention of his death somehow reached the pages of a larger newspaper, it would, tragically, be forgotten as quickly as it appeared. He was no celebrity to mourn for months after his passing.

  The fact that his company’s most aggressive competitor, MarsCorp, was headquartered in Dallas didn’t bother Noah as much as Frank would tell him it should. Cochran had not been allowed access to the engine schematics of the vessels constructed inside the Baikonur facility, and therefore would have no useful knowledge to sell to an interested competitor. He had done little more than solder together stripped wires and make sure the comm systems wouldn’t black out after launch.


  Weighing on Noah’s mind was the fact that Cochran had checked himself out of the mental facility two days before showing up on Kate Bishop’s front doorstep in the middle of the night. The puzzle of what the two of them discussed during their brief encounter occupied his every resting thought.

  With a gentle bounce, the elevator stopped and the door opened onto a dim hallway. Noah swiped his security badge at the lock of the door on the far end, then pressed his thumb against the fingerprint scanner. The scanner beeped and the door slid silently open. The door leading to the hallway was made of the same dark paneling as the rest of the room, difficult to identify for anyone who didn’t know exactly where to look.

  He walked out onto the viewing platform at the back of Mission Control. Frank sat at a large desk on the platform, watching the slowly ticking data on the display wall. He had apparently chosen that location to set up an improvised, open-air office.

  The desk had suddenly shown up one morning after a long weekend. It was a monstrous thing of metal and glass, seven feet wide, pushed right up against the railing that overlooked the operations floor. Frank had five transparent monitors on the desk, arranged in an arc so they could all form one continuous display if he pressed the right button.

  “Frank, you’re giving me desk envy, and that’s not easy to do,” Noah said as he walked past. “Join me in the conference room?”

  Frank pushed back from his desk and followed. Noah scanned the operations floor below as he strolled across the viewing platform.

  Everything down there was quiet. The Ground and Flight Teams Manager, Kate Bishop, leaned back in her chair at her desk, watching the display wall readouts at the front of the room. Several members of her team were engrossed in their duties at other workstations.

  Frank was right on his heels as they entered the glass-fronted conference room.

  “Is this about Cochran?” Frank asked as he pushed the door shut behind him.

  Noah held up a finger for him to be silent, then leaned over the edge of the table and inspected the conference phone in the middle. There was no glowing red light, which meant there were no active outgoing lines in use.

  “Yes,” Noah answered.

  “Poor man,” Frank said, shaking his head. “What an awful way to go.” He turned to look out through the glass wall. “And abysmal timing on top of it. We’re trying to keep a lid on things until the team gets to Titan, and Cochran goes and gets himself killed.” His cheeks flushed red and he looked down at the floor. “I’m sorry,” he added quietly. “That sounded very…inhuman.”

  “Do you have any idea what he and Ms. Bishop could have discussed at her home?”

  Frank put his hands in his pockets and thought about it for a moment.

  “Nothing of significance,” he said. “If it was about the company, then maybe he dropped some veiled hints about the Baikonur facility where he used to work. At worst he told her outright lies about the stability of the Thermal Antimatter Propulsion System. I caught a glimpse of Cochran’s file from the mental institution. ‘Unfounded Paranoia’ ranked very high on his list of quirks.”

  Noah frowned. “Why do you think he would mention the TAPS specifically?”

  “Hell if I know,” Frank said with a shrug.

  “He could talk about any one of a hundred other systems, electrical first of all, since that was his main focus.”

  “The engine is the biggest target for scrutiny, Noah, not the damned wiring. We’re the only company in the world to have this technology. Maybe Cochran landed himself a job with MarsCorp, or another company we haven’t even heard of yet. He could have been trying to scare Kate into revealing some details about our project.”

  Noah looked at him evenly. “Would he have a valid reason for warning Ms. Bishop about the TAP System?”

  “Of course not! You have the same documentation that I do. The system has been cleared for practical application many times over.”

  Noah joined Frank by the glass wall and looked down at Kate. She seemed to sense that she was being watched, for she spun in her chair and glanced up at the conference room. Noah nodded at her, and she gave him a weak smile in return before turning back to her workstation.

  “I’m going to be staying close for a while,” said Noah, “just in case anything else comes up.”

  “What about the tech conference in London?” Frank asked. “You’re the keynote speaker.”

  “I’m sure they have a long list of billionaires to fall back on if I were to suddenly become unavailable. I feel like this is the right place for me right now.”

  “Well, then,” said Frank, “I’ll let the team know.”

  The asteroid belt’s only dwarf planet, Ceres, orbited the sun at a distance of four-hundred million kilometers. With an equatorial diameter greater than 950 kilometers, it was the largest object in a circumstellar donut of rocky space debris that looped, for the most part, between the orbits of Mars and Jupiter.

  By sheer coincidence, the dwarf planet was barely visible as Explorer I shot past at seven-thousand kilometers per second.

  Jeff sat strapped into his seat in the command module, looking out through the narrow window in front of the pilots’ seats. He was alone.

  Most of the time, the window at the nose of Explorer showed nothing more than a horizontal strip of pinpoint lights over a dark background. Now there was a small globe of brilliant light off to the left – a spherical object roughly a thousand kilometers in diameter that wouldn’t pass that way on its orbit again for another four-and-a-half years.

  From that distance, Ceres had the apparent size of a bead of water. It was only visible for a few seconds. Explorer I traveled onward, and the reflection of the sun’s light against the bone-white surface of the dwarf planet vanished.

  Diamond Aerospace had spent weeks making sure Explorer wouldn’t bump into Ceres as the ship zoomed through the asteroid belt. It was a simple fluke of timing that the flight team had to consider it at all. With an average distance approaching a million kilometers between objects in the belt, the chances of a collision with Explorer I were astronomically small.

  Jeff unbuckled his straps and floated up from his seat. He waited there a few moments, enjoying the weightlessness. His blue cargo pants and white t-shirt were brand new, fresh out of a vacuum-sealed pack. He and the others swapped out their underwear every four days, their shirts every seven, and their pants as needed for identical sets that had been pressed and infused with a freshly-laundered scent before leaving Earth. The soiled garments went into the garbage alongside their food scraps.

  Jeff smiled as he remembered Kate’s disgusted reaction when she learned the dirty details of life aboard Explorer I. Yet what he told her then had turned out to be true: the controlled environment of a spacecraft was much cleaner than a workstation in Mission Control, and he and the other crew members rarely exerted themselves to the point of sweating.

  He grabbed the top of his seat and pulled himself toward the back of the command module. Drifting through the T-junction that separated the modules, Jeff stayed close to the floor, anticipating the shift in gravity when he passed the barrier into the centrifuge.

  Gravity pulled down on his chest as he grabbed hold of the ladder at the entrance to the crew module. He swung his legs around in slow motion and climbed down the ladder, gravity slowly and inexorably squeezing the air from his lungs as he descended. Even when he was expecting it to happen, he found he couldn’t hold onto his breath during the transition, not until he was at the bottom of the ladder, standing upright in the three-quarter’s gravity of the centrifuge.

  He walked through the sleeping quarters and went into the kitchen. He prepared his rehydrated meal robotically, his mind back on Earth, with Kate.

  Monotony. Routine.

  Those were the two words that constantly tumbled around Jeff’s mind as he went about his daily work. Keeping an advanced piece of machinery like Explorer I running smoothly meant repeating the same maintenance procedures over and over agai
n; pushing the same buttons on the same console; wiping the oxygen filters in the same direction so particulates didn’t get wedged in the tight vent flaps. It only followed that the remainder of his time would mimic that pattern. Showers, meals, even sleep – all of it was routine by that point.

  He only knew it was a Tuesday because Gabriel had put a page-a-day calendar in the kitchen on top of the food rehydrator. There was a picture of a sunflower with the words “Brighten Up Your Life” in cursive type over it. Jeff stared at that sunflower for a long time, long after the rehydrator beeped to let him know his chicken casserole was ready.

  After lunch, he went aft, through the sectional ring containing communications systems access and vehicle monitoring systems, where he spent most of his time. The two divided areas after that belonged to the science lab and to space suit storage, which was the last section in the centrifuge before the cargo hold.

  Multiple workstations filled much of the floor space in the science lab, dedicated to the various experiments the crew had been and would be running throughout their voyage. With no cryostorage, any samples they brought along had to be freeze-dried and then thawed later. There was a small refrigerator next to one of the workstations for temporary sample storage until an experiment was complete. For the most part, Jeff and the others were stuck with ambient-temperature project material.

  Not that he had the science background to delve into the specifics, but Jeff would have loved to run a test on extremophile organisms in deep space. He knew it sounded too much like science fiction, but he hadn’t stopped hoping that a breakthrough in the understanding of such tough and adaptable little creatures like the vacuum-surviving tardigrade could lead to the advent of cold stasis for long-term space travel.

  Ming sat staring into a microscope at one of the workstations, still as a statue, a stylus gripped loosely in one hand. The tip of the slender instrument hovered over her glowing PDA. Gabriel sat two tables away, muttering to himself while he made notes in a leather-bound journal. A small, narrow pot rested on the table in front of him, filled only with black soil.