by T I WADE
In total silence—and without Frank Sinatra—VIN watched the vista pass by. Once the sun, and then the earth headed over the craft twice before he was fast asleep and dreaming of driving his silver Audi.
****
“Can I help you officer?” Ryan asked as the highway patrolman walked up to the window. “I don’t believe I was very much over the speed limit.”
“Seven miles an hour, Mr. Richmond,” replied the older cop. “I have orders to check any vehicle that I believe belongs to Astermine up north. Since you are the CEO, I would like to check your vehicle.”
“Do you have a search warrant, officer?” Ryan asked.
“No, Mr. Richmond, but you did break the law by seven miles an hour, which gives me the right in Nevada to search your vehicle. Also, this looks like the type of vehicle a drug dealer might drive around in.”
“And a casino boss officer,” Ryan replied.
“You are General Saunders, Commander of Nellis. Am I right, General?”
“Correct, and you are?”
“Former Lieutenant Dave Myer, U.S. Air Force Military Police, sir. I retired two years ago and wanted to add to my retirement benefits. The Highway Patrol was recruiting and I got this dead-end job sitting out here five days a week. I’ve seen this fancy car come and go several times between Creech and Tonopah, where you are stationed, Mr. Richmond. I have orders to search any vehicles going to Astermine, but since this is your private vehicle, I assume you are correct about the need for a search warrant. I don’t think seven miles over the limit is really breaking the law.”
“Why are you searching our trucks?” asked Ryan.
“We got orders from high up about searching all your vehicles. Why, I don’t know, I’m the bottom of the food chain, but it came from very high up. Some officers even said the order came from the president himself. It was nice you meet you, Mr. Richmond. I’ve watched you on television. I don’t like the way the government is harassing you, but they seem to have the power these days to do what they want. I wonder whatever happened to the Bill of Rights in this country. All the Nevada police units are stopping everybody, we are being told to harass normal citizens, and everybody seems to be guilty before trial. I just don’t know.”
“I’m sure Congress might enact a bill to halt all amendment rights very soon, Officer Myer. I believe that our new government is using everything possible to add more power to Washington. But we will see.”
They were allowed to leave and Ryan got back to the question he had wanted to ask Allen Saunders when the blue light had appeared in his rear view mirror.
“Why are you now a spy for the U.S. Government?”
“I signed your contract of employment two days ago as a normal retiring air force pilot. Yesterday, General Mortimer called me himself ordering me to get a job with you and become the umpteenth spy they have tried to get into your facility. Why these guys are so paranoid about your space project, I just don’t know. You can tell me what you want me to tell them and I will pass the message on. I would like to keep the respect given to me by Colonel Jones. I saw what the system did to him. One man with an attitude, Joe Bishop, with a blind greed for power, manages to get control over others; just like a bully in school. Do you understand what I’m getting at?”
Ryan nodded. He knew full well what bullies were like at school. “What about your family?”
“My kids are all grown and have their own lives. My wife works with a government relief organization and is currently in Eastern Europe somewhere, the Ukraine I think, and will be for another couple of years. She comes back twice a year and that’s about all the time we have together. She has been doing this for over a decade now, and I think we are as far apart as any married couple can get. My son is in Virginia. He is a surgeon at one of the hospitals in Richmond, and my daughter is with her mother.”
It didn’t sound like General Saunders would be missed, apart from his friends at Nellis.
“I have a pilot friend who used to be at Nellis, she was one of Colonel Sinclair’s crew. Lieutenant Colonel Jamie Watkins decided to leave the military three months ago after twenty-five years of flying, and she is as good a pilot as Colonel Sinclair was and Captain Sullivan is. I think she was devastated about Colonel Sinclair’s death. Is there room for her?”
“Would you two make a good pilot crew?” Ryan asked.
“As good as anybody you’ve got. I think you have some of the best pilots the Academy ever graduated,” replied the general.
“Then get her to drive up. I’m sure she has a car and since she is civilian, I don’t need to drive to Creech again. Where is your friend now?”
“On her way back to Las Vegas from Creech,” the colonel replied simply.
Ryan told him to tell her to turn around and gave him directions to give her to get to the airfield. She arrived an hour after they did.
While they were filling out the paperwork, he looked at his two new pilots. From his paperwork, he knew Allen Saunders was 58. Jamie Watkins was the same age as Ryan, 44. The retired general was a good-looking man, like an older version of Ben Affleck, the actor. In fact, he could pass as the actor’s older brother. His hair was going slightly grey, his eyes brown and hair nearly black. At six feet two inches he was close to Ryan’s height.
Then he asked himself why all these tall, sexy women became air force pilots. Jamie Watkins was tall, slim, a smidgen less than six feet, with raven black hair and dark brown eyes, exactly like Saunders. They could actually be taken as twins. Ryan smiled; they must have liked what each saw in the other.
Now, with Maggie, Penny, Kathy, and Jamie, his pilot crew looked even more out of a Hollywood film. And to boot, these women were extremely intelligent, and could fly aircraft as well as anybody. Ryan suddenly thought that he should have joined the air force to get married. That was where all the pretty long-legged girls were hiding. He wondered when he should break the news to the two that Colonel Sinclair was not dead. She was probably asleep with Mr. Jones millions of miles away.
He was absolutely correct and he thought about increasing the maternity ward on America One, his new space ship being built 22,500 miles above them.
Chapter 4
DX2014 has a problem
Jonesy stretched and felt the warm body next to him. Glancing at the alarm clock’s LED screen, he knew he still had an hour, so he turned over and went back to sleep. These twelve hour nights took a bit of getting used to.
VIN was already getting up in the forward area. He turned on his laptop and searched for “Simply Red” before deciding what to eat for breakfast. He decided on a scrambled egg pouch and orange juice pouch instead of his usual choice of an egg and sausage pouch and apple juice. He had a little of the jerky in a bag and decided to chew on that while sucking the eggs out of the self-heating pouch.
The temperature was 67 degrees, air pressure was good inside the craft, and the slight humming of the control monitors made him relax and think about the day’s work. Sipping his orange juice he checked on the morning mail from Nevada. There was just one message from Ryan; he wanted to know if both Jonesy and Maggie trusted Allen Saunders, and a new pilot, Jamie Watkins. They were the new pilot team, and about to start twelve-hour days on the shuttle simulator grind, the same one he and Suzi had done together. In the same message Ryan shared that the price of rhodium had dropped due to their bringing in a ton of it, but the platinum rocks were now more valuable. Ryan also indicated they should focus on collecting iridium on this trip. It was as if Ryan was deciding what they should collect for the day according to the market. Unfortunately, he and Jonesy had already found a large pile of rhodium and that was what they were going to collect. Anyway, who knew? Rhodium could be the most valuable metal tomorrow, or when they got back.
He still had an hour and decided to page through a book he was thinking about getting into.
That day, their first full day in the crater, the two men loaded three more canisters of the smaller rhodium rocks before returning to
Maggie in Astermine Two. As long as there was one other person in each spacecraft, everybody could be helped on and off with their helmets.
They discussed the two new pilots.
“VIN, I think Allen Saunders is a good guy. He is one of the best pilots I know of in the air force right now, and I’m sure could fly as well as anybody. I don’t know the lady. Maggie what do you think?”
“I think that your impression of Allen Saunders is on the button, Jonesy. I just don’t know why Ryan is so paranoid about the U.S. government. I’m sure he knows something we don’t, and he is our boss and pay packet. As for Jamie, she was my best friend in our Nellis crew. She was at Nellis far longer than I was and, I think she had an eye on the general, just like we all did. He is rather good-looking. As far as her abilities are concerned, although she is a year younger than me, and certainly not as experienced as General Saunders, I‘d bet she could out fly Penny and me if given the chance. I’m really looking forward to seeing her again.”
Maggie then declared that she wasn’t going to be cooped up at home while the men went out to work. She had not been cleared by Ryan to leave the craft but after a week of being cooped up with nothing to do, she demanded that VIN ask Ryan in the daily message to get permission for her to go on a spacewalk.
The gravity in the crater made it pretty easy to walk around and, over a dinner of jerky and chicken soup, she bribed the men with one swig of vodka if they would take her on the next day’s mining excursion; naturally, they both relented. The next morning Ryan gave her the needed permission to exit under the guidance of the two men.
Maggie was delighted to finally get out of the small craft’s interior. Jonesy and VIN helped her over the top and side of the craft on the ladder, and she found that walking around in the metal crater was just like back home.
While the two men used the sweepers to collect stones she decided to walk around the whole crater and see what was there. VIN and Jonesy had reconnoitered less than half of the massive crater. They suggested that Maggie visit the rear of the crater, VIN pointing over to an area about 600 or 700 hundred feet away that neither man had bothered to check yet. He warned her that the surface was rougher in that area with small cracks and fissures, and ordered her not to go too far. VIN handed Maggie a mining hammer, sharp on one end and blunt on the other, to chip at rocks. He then made sure her helmet light was on full power and working properly.
Maggie carefully walked over rocks that got larger and larger. They were the darker platinum rocks. After a couple of hundred feet, she was passing between boulders three to four feet high. She was happy to leave the guys to earn their pay.
Behind a three-foot high dark shelf across the crater she found a large hole where it looked like another asteroid had hit DX2014 pretty hard. There were chips of shattered black rock everywhere, and the impact looked like the smaller asteroid had either disintegrated on impact, or had broken apart and bounced back into space. This whole area of the crater appeared dark and sinister; it was certainly not the same rock as the rest of the larger crater they were in. It was too dark to see much, until the asteroid’s roll allowed the sun to lighten the area, giving an even more eerie and sinister appearance to the smaller crater a few feet in front of, and below where she stood. Maggie moved closer inch by inch.
Here she noticed the rocks were more like chips, black and sharp; they resembled the lead in a pencil, or the carbon graphite Michael’s spider were using to weld the panels together. The millions of small chips looked as if a huge, black, glass window had shattered into millions of pieces.
The vibration started again; she could just feel it far below her feet, and the very small chips, now in slight sunlight, could be seen vibrating, as though an earthquake was occurring. This was the second time she had felt the vibrations in an hour, and she was sure they were getting more rapid.
Jonesy and VIN had warned her about this. Jonesy suspected that the asteroid was under some sort of inner stress, maybe still vibrating from an impact that could be a year old, or a thousand years old. He was worried that the asteroid might break apart sometime.
Although Maggie expressed her concern about the vibrations, VIN continued to assure her that it couldn’t happen during the short time they were visiting. Or could it? They were occurring more frequently than during their last visit a month earlier, and they weren’t noticeable when they were standing outside the crater.
As she turned around to go back, Maggie used her helmet light to survey the floor of the smaller crater.
Maggie saw that there was another hole on one side of the floor of the second crater; a third small crater that was about six feet across. The larger crater was about twenty feet across and ten feet deep, and this third one six feet across and a few feet deep. Both craters were nearly perfectly round.
In the middle of the third crater she saw a deep fissure running across its floor. Something had hit this area really hard. Maggie could see the same black chips that were around her as her light slowly checked the little crater. Suddenly little balls of fire glistened back at her as her helmet light shined over the fissure; it was beautiful. She had seen that type of sparkle before, and her heart started pounding.
She walked around the second crater, trying to find a way to get to the third crater. There was a rubble pile and a narrow path of broken black chips gave her the opportunity to slowly work her way into the second crater.
“Are you OK over there, Maggie,” came Jonesy’s voice over the intercom. She had heard the two men speaking while she was surveying the darker area, and this gave her the courage to continue her inspection. The vibrations had stopped, and the rock below her feet felt still.
“Yes, I’m fine. I’ve found a crater within a crater, within the big crater. The smaller second crater is about 500 feet from you guys, about eight to ten feet deep. I’m working my way in. There is something sparkling down in a wide crack in the middle of the third little crater, and I want to see what it is,” she replied. ”There is a ledge of rubble chips I can get down….I’m halfway down.”
“VIN, I think we need to go and see if our explorer needs help. Grab a cord back at the ship, just in case.”
“Mind the rocks getting over here. You could fall over them, and it’s pretty dark on this side,” added Maggie.
“Maggie, the sun’s out, we can see pretty clearly up here. We already have a canister full, and 120 minutes of time left,” replied Jonesy.
Maggie reached the floor of the second crater and carefully inched her way to where the third hole was. Here the ground under her space boots was slippery with shards of the black rock. In the second crater there wasn’t one stone larger than a shard of glass.
Maggie peered down the couple of feet into the third crater and saw the fissure. Again her lamp illuminated sparkles of white and blue light. Now she could see something sticking out in the middle of the crack. It was right in the middle of the crater and what looked like a cube of glass, like a bubble of water. Her heart pounded even more and she gripped the hammer in her right hand hard.
The ground was loose and with her foot she scraped the chards into the hole making a slope to get down the last couple of feet into the little crater.
Maggie noticed that the gravitational pull on her body, seemed to get stronger and stronger as she got closer to the fissure, now only a dozen or so feet away. It was hard to move her foot to scrape the slope she was building.
“Where are you, Maggie?” She heard Jonesy ask over the intercom. “Point your light upwards so that I can see the beam.” She did. “OK! I saw it; you are further away than we anticipated.”
As she did on the first slope, she inched her way down her newly built slope keeping her light on the chards of black rock in front of her feet.
“Finally, guys, I’ve reached rock bottom. I’m inside the third crater. Here is my light again….do you see it?”
“Affirmative, about 200 feet in front of us, we are getting closer. Don’t go falling down a crevice
or anything!” warned VIN.
“You are taking up valuable mining time,” added Jonesy.
“I don’t think so,” Maggie stated slowly, her helmet light now on the rock she had come to collect.
It was big and rough. The clear glass looked like a big shard of rock, just like the tiny shards around it. The clear shard was sticking half out of a dense, black shelf with the fissure running away from it in all directions. She kneeled down on one knee and touched the glistening rock. A small part of the clear sparkling rock was sticking out of a larger rock about the size of a dog house; she tapped sharply on the top of the black rock with her hammer.
Suddenly it cracked into tiny shards, enabling the large piece of fire to roll out; she just managed to stop it from rolling towards the closest crack, which was wide enough to swallow it up.
It was heavy, and Maggie had to use all of her strength and balance to keep from falling forward into the crevice. She had the tennis ball sized stone cupped in her left hand and quickly used the hammer in her right hand to hit the rock hard to stop her fall. The hammer blow again splintered the black rock showering black chips everywhere.
What met her gaze was just too fantastic to behold. She had laid bare a second stone, far bigger than the one she had in her hand, and the hammer had only broken its surface. She put the first stone down and, now on two knees, began chipping away at the larger stone which starting to sparkle back at her. In her suit she didn’t hear the two men inch up behind her.
“Maggie, that looks like a diamond, a massive darn diamond,” said Jonesy, picking up the first one she had found.
“Guys, mind the cracks. VIN, kneel on my right side, Jonesy on my left. This bigger one might have a hollow space below it; I think the fissure goes right below this rock I’m chipping away at. Hold the thing, quickly its getting loose!”