SODIUM:3 Fusion

by Arseneault, Stephen

  David and the crew were topside at Regents airbase. I was unsure of how the Defender had gotten from the chamber to the hangar at Regents and at the time it seemed unimportant. David talked of the mission before us, he talked of the alien fleet that was on its way and he talked of the struggle that we all would face when it arrived.

  Following David we were then shown a feed directly from the White House. The President spoke frankly and largely reiterated what David had already said. He then spoke of how not only our own nation was depending on our success, but the entire world and all Mankind. It seemed a heavy burden, but it was a burden we were being trained to fully take on.

  When the President had finished, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs spoke thanking us all for our efforts and reminding us again of what we would be facing. When all the speeches were over the focus was turned to the crew.

  As team A1 walked towards the Defender the tail end of the craft opened and lifted like the tailgate of an old SUV. The crew then stepped up into the Defender and walked to the forward cabin. The Defender was 60 feet in length, 12 feet high and 14 feet wide. It had the uncanny resemblance of a silvery white loaf of bread. I salivated at the momentary thought of bread.

  The forward cabin contained the four crew seats while a rear cabin was for the ship systems and supplies. The crewmen wore reclamation suits that would feed them through an IV and then absorb and send any waste product to a device in the rear cabin.

  The waste would then be reconstituted and fed back into the IV solution as nutrition. It sounded disgusting and I loathed the thought of not being able to eat, but we had been assured that the advantages far outweighed our fears.

  The tailgate of the Defender then closed and sealed. The crew were seated, connected to the ships systems and then given the go ahead to start their test flight. We stood watching the holo-screen for several minutes as the crew went through a thorough checklist. Then, in an instant, the craft went clear. Only the slightest distortion was visible as the active skin had been engaged.

  The Defender next lifted slowly off the hangar floor until it was floating about three feet in the air. As the Black Hole Drive came online the craft started to move forward. A cheer arose in the crowd. The hangar doors then opened as the craft moved towards them.

  What we saw next was both frightening and discouraging. The Defender turned at the last moment, sending the front end along with the BHD straight into the edge of the now open hangar door. I cringed as I waited for the craft to crash into the door, ending its maiden flight.

  As the Defender reached the door there was no impact. The door just disappeared as the craft moved through it. A perfect cutout of the craft in the door was the only damage done. The black holes of the BHD had disintegrated the door material which had come into close proximity with them. The craft was undamaged.

  The nearly invisible Defender then proceeded out onto the tarmac as we all looked on silently. It came to a complete stop and then hovered for most of a minute. The crew executed a 180 degree turn and then moments later the craft turned up on end with the front facing skyward.

  After several seconds of standing tall the Defender then shot straight up and within seconds the distortion disappeared from view. The hush and gloom of the crowd then turned back into cheers.

  The holo-screen turned to a view from the rear of the crew cabin facing forward. The sky in front of the Defender turned quickly from a pale blue to the blackness of space. The HD views from the holo-screen were breathtaking. I turned and looked behind us and the holo-screen was also projecting a view from the rear of the craft. The Earth filled the view and then began to slowly shrink as the craft continued to accelerate.

  As we watched in awe the Defender slowly turned as it made its way around the back side of the Moon. It had gone from the tarmac to the Moon in under nine minutes. The pilot relayed her flight status and every three minutes like clockwork the other crewmen chirped off a status of their systems.

  On its return, the Defender did another 180 degree spin and then dropped straight into the atmosphere at more than 200,000 kph. I asked Whip why everything was displayed in kilometers. Her reply was that when it came to space, everyone used the metric system. I shrugged and thought of how it was just one more thing that I would have to brush up on.

  When the Defender came through the atmosphere I expected the active skin to take on a bright white glow. When the air molecules came into contact with the skin they were absorbed, passed around the craft and then re-emitted. There were no sonic booms, there were no light shows, only the peaceful amplified sounds of the crewmen breathing.

  The Defender then slowed rapidly and came to a complete stop just over a meter off the ground. After a 90 degree rotation the craft floated slowly back into the hangar. There was next a gentle set down and the active skin then turned back into its silvery white color.

  Minutes later the tailgate opened and the crew of Defender A000001 emerged. Again the crowd around me erupted in cheers. The maiden flight of the first Defender had been a resounding success. It was soon determined that the glitch of destroying the hangar door had come about because ring number four of the BHD was only operating at 9%.

  After the other four ring parameters had been adjusted downward to match the defect, the craft was easily steerable. The trip out and around the Moon had been done at only 9% potential throttle.

  I quickly did the math in my head and was salivating as I spoke of my trip to Neptune taking just over a month. That's when Whip corrected me. 9% throttle only meant the rate at which you would accelerate and not the speed at which you would travel. Theoretically, at full throttle, the Defender would reach the speed of light in about six hours, making Neptune potentially less than a day away.

  David Brenner then came back on the holo-screen, offering congratulations to the crew and everyone else involved. We were then all granted a two hour celebratory break before our work would continue. I convinced the others to join me in the mess hall for the first half hour as everyone else would be crowding into the lounge. The thought of my only meal while in flight, being from an IV, had increased my appetite. The others agreed, but reluctantly so.

  As we sat in the mess hall we talked about what we had just seen. It was a historic moment that we would hopefully one day be able to tell our children and our grandchildren about. We were there when the first Defender flew.

  I then made the statement to the others that we were only 10.5 light years away from Epsilon Eridani. Within our lifetimes it might be possible to take the fight to the alien's suspected home world. Bigg quipped that we would have to get past the incoming alien fleet first.

  Whip then raised an interesting question. Why was it that my Great Uncle, David Brenner, looked like he was only 50 years old when in reality he was closer to 90. He had explained it to me when I had first arrived. Every cell in the human body has strands of DNA. Each time a cell divides the DNA strand divides and becomes shorter and less stable. When the typical human reaches their 50s the DNA strand becomes too short to divide leaving each of us with a more rapidly aging body... no new cells.

  Just about the time David had reached the 50 year mark he was diagnosed with bone cancer. He was only given months to live when his doctors were told of a radical untested therapy. David's knowledge and work was too important to lose, so David and the doctors were given the orders to undergo the treatment, no matter what the expense.

  The procedure involved 36 complete bone marrow transplants over a two month period along with numerous blood transfusions and drug injections. The bone marrow and blood had been grown from a single vial of blood that been taken from David during routine tests ten years before.

  The operations were excruciatingly painful and the recovery period was fraught with problems of infection. And even though the marrow was from his blood, there were problems of rejection by his body. The result had been a six month downtime from his work, but the addition of another ten years or so to his life. He had just undergone
the procedure for the fourth time a year earlier.

  The work involved and the number of scientists and physicians required, along with the 36 rounds of bone marrow and blood transfusions, made the whole affair extremely expensive. So much so that there was little chance of it ever making its way into the general population. David Brenner had been worth the expense and was willing to go through the pain in order to continue his work. After all, his parents and almost everyone else he had known had been taken away from him by the aliens during the S.A. The usually mild mannered David Brenner still had a score to settle.

  One effect of the procedure was the renewal and repair of some of his DNA. This allowed most of his cells to continue to divide for another ten year period. The area that was largely unaffected by the procedure was the brain. His brain was 90 and it continued to age. His time with us was limited.

  We continued on from the mess hall into the lounge where Pop celebrated with his Tuesday beer. When our two hours was up it was back to the classroom for our daily drilling. By the time our four month classroom training period ended, the latest crews had reached as far as the Asteroid Belt... and had achieved one quarter light speed.

  There had also been one tragic mishap. Defender A000014 and its crew had been lost when it hit an asteroid at one tenth the speed of light. The result had been that the ship had made it almost completely through before the active skin had failed. The tail end of the craft had been locked in the asteroid while the rest of it had torn away.

  The contents of Defender A000014, including its crew, had been sucked into space at almost 66 million kph, causing them to instantly disintegrate. After months on a high we had all been brought back to reality. Our new toys were not toys and space was once again a very dangerous place.

  Just about the time of the lost Defender and crew, I had taken note of the budding romance between Bigg and Whip. Bigg was a giant when standing next to Whip's petite frame. But the attraction to one another was there. There was one problem with romance down in the chamber. It was strictly forbidden. If caught in any compromising situations there was no hearing, no trial and no court-marshal. Only prison and only solitary confinement as the secrets we each knew were of the highest security level.

  Bigg and Whip were professionals and had managed to keep the relationship under wraps, with only the occasional wink, nod or mild arm hug. I could tell it was a strain to keep it on the up and up, but Bigg and Whip knew their priorities. And their priorities were to follow orders and complete the training before us.

  I sympathized with them as I had my own romantic problems with my handler. Ensign Braswell had been nothing but kind and attentive to my every training need, but she had not returned any of my winks or nods. I often felt a bit jilted, but I dare not bring the subject up when we were under such strict orders. I again feared that my family name would do me no good if I got out of line in the chamber.

  As far as Pop was concerned he saved his love for his Tuesday and Friday beers. He was also an avid audiophile. Almost everything of the day for music was highly compressed digital. Pop detested any sound that was not coming from an old analog style amplifier.

  Almost everyone had an audio implant stuck under the skin behind an ear except for Pop. He used the old style ear-buds and an external recording amp and comm device. I sometimes wondered if that was the reason he continued to grin unstoppably.

  The implant served as a communication device as well as a radio, music player and recorder. Commands to the implant were thought activated. You could change channels, pick a song or album, adjust volume and make or receive comm calls. The telephone was now only found in museums and a few third world countries. I could not imagine being without my implant for more than a few minutes.

  Our final week of classroom training had been about the ship's life support systems. We would have to know the intimate details of how each and every system worked if we wanted to have any chance of a repair while in space. We could easily be unreachable and a billion kilometers away when the ship's systems went offline. There would be no rescue chopper and no tow truck to come to bring us home.

  The ship's power was from a micro-reactor. It generated enough energy when at full bore to power a small town. The active skin and BHD were both power hogs, consuming as much energy as the micro-reactor could generate. The only maintenance we could do to the reactor was with the Sodium feed going into it. If the reactor were to fail, we would be completely powerless and left floating in space.

  Pop had already begun to toy with his own ideas of how to change the reactor feed. He had shown me a few of his sketches, but I had to say that the thought of changing around a system that we were completely dependent on made me nervous. If Pop's theories failed there would be no way to restart the reactor without the energy capabilities of a full sized reactor nearby.

  "Lights out", as we called it, was a very bad thing. Without power we would freeze to death in a matter of minutes. If we were lucky, we would be traveling at speed through an asteroid when the power was lost. The active skin would shut off leaving us to instantly disintegrate like Defender A000014 and its crew.

  Bigg had been busy trying to think of ways to increase our defensive capabilities and Whip our offensive ones. I was just happy at the time to steer the ship. Bigg's main creative focus had been on ways to extend the gravity shield by more than the current few meters. The aliens had done it and he was intent on figuring out how.

  For our final two weeks of classroom training Bigg had been using our one hour break to talk to the scientists in charge of the gravity shield. Whip had her own ideas. If Bigg was able to extend the gravity shield she wanted to be able to use it behind the BHD to try to push the black holes of the drive outward as a new type of weapon.

  With the black holes only lasting tiny fractions of a second she would have her work cut out for her. Besides, black holes would react strangely with gravity so she was not very hopeful about being able to weaponize them.

  I was glad to be on a crew with people who had ideas. I was already overwhelmed by much of our classwork, leaving my brain drained of any creativity by the time our day ended. If one of my crew-mates came up with something significant, I felt I could at least contribute by running it past my Great Uncle. That is, if he would even see me. We had not spoken since my initial arrival, because David Brenner was a very busy man.

  Chapter 4

  After four long months our classroom training period was complete. We were all excited about having our first lessons in the holo-sims. From what we had been told it was almost impossible to tell the difference between a sim and the real thing.

  After I completed my morning stuffing in the mess hall, I joined the others by the sim training area of the chamber. There were 32 sim trainers of which 28 were continuously occupied. The remaining four were spares for use when there were technical issues. Seven of the trainers had freed up the day before as that class of crewmen had graduated. They now had the privilege of training in the real Defenders.

  As I joined the others, we all stood for several minutes as we awaited our instructor’s guidance. Ensign Braswell and the other handlers for our team had been busy collecting the gear for our reclamation suits. I very much disliked the name, but it was what they were.

  I had a moment of sadness as I wondered if the meal I had just consumed might be my last. I had heard rumors that once you went into the reclamation suit you would remain there until the sim training was complete in four months. It was not something that I looked forward to.

  Our instructor, Commander Red Masters, then stepped up and greeted us one by one. For the next four months we would be spending our waking hours under his supervision. Commander Masters was the opposite of Colonel Rogers. He was slight of build and soft spoken, but he knew the Defenders inside and out. He had been on the engineering team that had come up with the initial design.

  Commander Masters ordered us to refer to him as Red. He had been given the nickname when just a kid. When he would
get embarrassed about anything his ears would turn bright red. I thought the story gave him the friendly personality that Colonel Rogers lacked.

  Red then walked us to the trainer that would largely be our home for the next four months... S-A000055. It was identical to the real A000055 in every humanly discernible way. Each Defender simulator, or DSim as they became known as, had a micro-reactor and active skin. The BHD was a simulation as well as the weapons and defensive systems, but we were told we would be unable to tell.

  Our training schedules were now a bit different too. We would arise at 6AM, complete breakfast by 7:30AM and be at our training station by 8AM. We then had a four hour training session, followed by an hour break and then four more hours of training. At 5PM we received another one hour break.

  From 6PM to 8PM it was free time in the DSims where the teams were encouraged to discover, explore and become intimately familiar with the ship's systems and capabilities. From 8PM to 10PM it was then fraternization time with the other teams where we were encouraged to have discussions about strategies, tactics and any discoveries or new ideas we might have come up with. It was then back to our personal quarters for the night. We would be back on 24 hour schedules.

  When the handlers returned we were each taken to a dressing area where we were outfitted with our reclamation suits. As we awaited personal adjustments we were each visited by a physician. A spot on our side just above where the elbow would rest then received a local anesthetic, was cleaned, cut and then a permanent IV port was installed. It was a little uncomfortable, but we were told that we would soon forget it was even there. I doubted that statement.

  Once the port install was complete, we were stripped naked, bio-washed and then squeezed into the reclamation suit. As a final gesture a physician’s tech then attached a hose to the suit. The air inside was vacuumed out and then a warm bio-gel pumped in. We were told it would help our bodies become accustomed to the long period of time we would be in the suit. It seemed my last meal fears had come true.