Galactic - Ten Book Space Opera Sci-Fi Boxset

by Colin F. Barnes

  “Will?” he said softly, trying to respect the name the old man had told everyone to use.

  “Good, you’re here.” Lancaster didn’t open his eyes, but he smiled.

  Ian felt Heidi leave quietly, sliding the door shut behind her.

  “Go to the left cabinet,” Lancaster told him, “Open the long box there.”

  Curious, Ian did so. Inside was a beautiful bronze telescope, though he realized it was sealed on both ends and wouldn’t actually telescope open or closed from its half extended position.

  “Solomon,” the old man sighed. “His name was Solomon and he was my only son. He was born sick, you know. Damn sick, so tiny and broken. Lived beyond all expectation though. Made it to just past his ninth Christmas. I think he held on just to see what he’d get under the tree, too.”

  Ian touched the telescope, realizing it was really an urn. Solomon. He glanced at the old man, unsure what to say.

  “That telescope goes with me, to Pluto. Sol loved the stars; he wanted to be among them, free from his body. He liked Pluto best of all the planets, said it was tiny just like him. He didn’t even care that it wasn’t really a planet and I never argued. I promised him, Ian. Someday we’d go. I promised knowing I’d never have to keep it.”

  Ian closed the box and knelt at the side of the smooth plastic bed.

  “You are keeping that promise, sir, you are,” said Ian. He’d felt the smallness of the ship a few times during the course of the trip so far, felt suddenly like it was too tiny and the whole thing would collapse in on him. But not like this. There was nowhere to escape to, to flee from the lump climbing out of his heart and into his throat.

  Lancaster shook his head, half sitting up; his eyes finally opened and fixed on Ian, hazel bright.

  “Sol had a nurse, an El Salvadoran woman. You know what Rosa used to call me? Mr. Mañana.” He laughed, the sound thin and high. “That means Mr. Tomorrow. Because I’d always promise for tomorrow and never today.”

  Ian took a deep breath but Lancaster cut him off by placing one of his frail hands on Ian’s chest.

  “Take us to tomorrow, Ian, Sol and I. Keep my promise for me. Keep it.” He gripped Ian’s shirt.

  “I promise, Mr. Lancaster, for you and Sol.” Ian stared at the man, half stunned, half horrified. His heart raced and his head felt too large for the room, for the ship.

  He hadn’t realized that he’d already made the decision to turn around at Jupiter until that moment. The moment he’d suddenly changed his mind.

  Lancaster released his shirt and sank back into the bed, hazel eyes closing to never open again.

  * * *

  40 days in transit

  Heidi helped Ian seal Mr. Lancaster’s corpse into the body bag and put it away in the refrigerated drawer they’d designed into the storage area. The four remaining crew stood around for a moment.

  “Seems like we should say something,” Nick said. He’d produced a catholic saint’s candle, with the visage of St. Christopher. He’d been very annoyed when the other three jumped on him about not lighting it, as if he didn’t know better.

  Jack stared at Ian, arms folded. He was wearing his prosthetic legs and leaned awkwardly against the wall of the storage chamber.

  Ian felt the walls closing in again. He’d gotten no sleep in the last twenty seven hours, maybe thirty.

  “Say something if you wish,” he said. It came out more of a bark than he meant. “I’m going to go check the control room.” He left, taking big gulping breaths.

  Jack found him half curled in a seat in the control room an hour later.

  “When are you going to tell the others?” his little brother asked in a flat tone.

  Ian uncurled, letting his legs drift off the seat to the floor. He pinched the bridge of his nose, wishing he could just excise the pressure between his eyes.

  “Tell the others what?”

  “That we’re turning back at Jupiter. The old man died. So I guess you win, Ian. You made a good faith effort, right?” Jack’s tone stayed flat but his expression gave away the storm beneath.

  They could turn back. It was maybe the sane thing to do, despite that fact that so far, knock on hard plastic and metal, nothing had gone truly wrong. There’d be other journeys, now that they had Mr. Lancaster’s capitol to invest.

  Ian wondered how much of his life he’d spent telling his little brother these same things. Jack, only twenty-five at the time, had wanted to go on the first Prometheus voyage. Ian had told him to wait. Next time. Next trip. Yeah, that went well.

  Next time. His final talk with Lancaster hadn’t just been humoring a dying man, listening to his sorrow.

  It had been a warning.

  Ian shook his head slowly and raised his eyes to Jack’s. “I don’t want to be Mr. Tomorrow,” he said, drawing the words out, feeling the truth in them. “Come on, you’re right. Let’s go talk to the others.”

  He rose and bounced past Jack, his mouth forming a tight smile at his brother’s confused look.

  Heidi and Nick were playing gin in the lounge with Nick’s metal playing cards. The clink of cards and soft conversation stilled as Ian entered, followed by a bemused Jack.

  “We need to decide something, and when I say we, I do mean all of us.” Ian sat down, feeling lighter, determined.

  “Okay?” Nick left his mouth half open as he drew out the final syllable, head tilted to one side.

  Heidi just nodded, dark brows knitting together. Jack slid down to sit beside her and his fingers found hers beneath the table.

  “Lancaster’s lawyers pointed out a clause in the contract, a clause that says we only have to make a ‘good faith effort’ to get him to Pluto,” Ian began. He raised his hands for silence as both Heidi and Nick tried to break in with questions. “Hear me out. The lawyers said they wouldn’t fight it if we had to turn back sooner. Just going out here would be effort enough.”

  “That’s what you get for having lawyers named Roll’em and Fry,” Nick muttered.

  Ian thought about Rowland and Fry and smiled even as he raised a hand for quiet again. “Basically. But the idea has merit. We could swing around Jupiter and be home in another four or five months.”

  “No!” Jack yanked his hand free of Heidi’s and slammed both fists onto the table. The hard plastic vibrated under Ian’s arms.

  “It would be safer, realistically, if not at all keeping to the spirit of this journey,” Heidi said softly, placing a hand on Jack’s arm.

  “Yes. But I want to go to Pluto.”

  It took all three of them a moment to register Ian’s words.

  “What?” said Jack. “But before we left, you said if Lancaster died before Jupiter we’d turn back.”

  Ian shifted and looked away. “Yes. I considered it. But I want to finish this now. I didn’t build the Prometheus Project by being afraid of risk.” He took a deep breath and raised his eyes, fixing each of them with a look, slowly, until he came to rest on his brother’s handsome face.

  “Ten years ago, terrible things happened and I had no way to fix it, no brilliant ideas to make it all better, to bring everyone back to life, to heal Jack or Carlos. There was nothing I could do. It took longer on paper, but I lost myself then. Even though I rebuilt, it was just going through the motions. I put it off, thinking there would be time and that with time; I could find a way to make the Prometheus II whole again, to wash it all away.”

  “Ian,” Jack whispered, “it wasn’t your fault.”

  “The accident? No. But after? That was. I let things go. I didn’t think I was, but I see it now. I was waiting for that elusive tomorrow. I now I can’t make you all take the long road home with me, and if you vote to, we’ll still turn around. But I don’t want to wait. That’s my vote.” He smiled at Jack. “I think we all know what Jack’s vote is.”

  Jack’s signature grin cracked his face, his teeth glistening in the diffused light.

  “Hell, Ian,” Nick said, “I’m in. The way Heidi is beating me at
gin rummy; I might need a couple years to turn the game around.”

  “Heidi?” Ian looked at her.

  “To boldly go,” she said with a smile. “That’s my vote.”

  Jack and Nick groaned on cue and Ian bit the tip of his tongue, shaking his head.

  “That’s settled then. Also,” he said, still looking at Heidi, “Heidi, you’re fired.”

  Chapter Three

  49 days in transit

  Ian slid along the corridor linking the rooms in the half-walk, half-glide they’d all perfected over the last weeks. The few hundred square feet of space no longer felt as tight and lonely. He’d even been invited to play gin rummy with the rest of them, though he was woefully behind in points.

  He ducked his head into the lounge and was surprised to see it empty. He reversed his track and tapped lightly on Nick’s door. No answer.

  Heidi’s room was next to his own, and he’d seen the door open when he’d gotten up to head for the lounge. He moved on, wondering if she might be hiding in Jack’s room. The two of them seemed to have quietly rekindled the relationship they’d just started right before Jack left. It had fallen apart quickly, the broken and bitter Jack driving everyone away from him after the accident.

  Bitter and broken, until Ian had promised him he’d rebuild the Prometheus and they would go back. A promise I finally kept. Ian smiled.

  Jack’s door was open; his brother sprawled on the bed reading on his NetPad. Ian waved as he paused and then moved on toward the control room.

  Heidi and Nick were there, sitting next to the monitors, heads together, talking in low, tense voices. They jerked apart as Ian stepped into the doorway. They looked as guilty as teenagers.

  “Okay, I wasn’t worried, but now I am. What’s up?” Ian folded his arms, his eyes shifting between them.

  “Come on, Nick, we have to tell him,” Heidi said. She looked almost pale, her full lips pressed tight, drained of color.

  “We’ve got a leak.” Nick pushed the words out quickly.

  “What kind of leak?” Ian’s hands tightened into fists as he gripped his own arms. He felt his headache returning from its week-long hiatus.

  “In the IDG.”

  “No, no,” Ian said. He unfolded his arms and grabbed at the walls to steady himself. “Not this. Not again. It can’t happen again.”

  “No, not like Prometheus II, Ian,” Heidi said, rising and reaching out to him. “It’s not leaking anything like before.”

  “For one,” Nick said, “It’s leaking into the ship, not out. And as far as we can tell, the leak is really minor so far. Very small.”

  Ian took a deep breath. Another. “Leaking into the ship? So between the outer hull and the middle one?”

  “Yeah, exactly. So all the gel can pollute so far is just some empty space between hulls. Just like we designed.”

  “So far?” Ian shook his head. It didn’t sound like disaster, yet. But they both looked too worried for this to be as minor as they were saying.

  “Well, there might be some pocking, corrosion in the middle hull.” Nick swiveled in his seat and motioned to one of the monitors. “There’s too much stuff between us and the outside of the middle, I can’t get a good sensor reading and definitely no good images, not from in here. But what I can get, it looks. . . not good.”

  Ian bent over the monitor, slowly making sense of the data there.

  “How long has this leak been happening?”

  Beside him, Heidi shrugged but it was Nick who answered.

  “No way to know. Could have been on lift-off, could have been yesterday. If it’s a long time, that’s actually better for us, means the leak isn’t so bad. If yesterday, well, with how thin that spot on the middle hull is getting, I’d say it’s very not good.”

  Ian sighed. He wanted to ask a million more questions, most of them stupid. The IDG had always been a risk. The chemicals they used to create it and keep it stable were dangerous and hard on other materials. The outer hull was designed, hopefully, to withstand the corrosive forces. The middle hull was a safety barrier, kept thin and light to cut weight on the ship. It was there as an anchor for the framework holding the environmental systems steady and as a line of last defense against the void of space if the outer hull should breach. No way could that material stand up to any significant exposure to the gel.

  The IDG particles acted as a harmonic absorber on a sub-atomic level by forcing gravitons to ‘leak’ across branes. It was the only thing preventing the crew from being squashed like bugs in the g-forces generated by the speed at which they currently hurtled through space. And just like last time, now it’s leaking and might kill us.

  Ian ran a hand through his hair. “Okay, worst case scenario.”

  “Enough gel gets through the hull, into the environmental system, poisons us all, and we die. The end.” Nick looked truly scared for the first time Ian could remember, all the happy-go-lucky air drained from his tense body.

  “What’s going on?” Jack slid up to the doorway. He sat on his sled, one hand gripping the door frame, and stared around at them all.

  Heidi quickly brought him up to speed.

  “Jesus,” he said.

  “I think we can fix it. Probably,” Nick said. Ian looked at him and he amended, “Maybe.”

  “Spit it out, Nick.”

  “Actually, it was Heidi’s idea. That’s what we were talking about when you came in. I just supplied the means.”

  Heidi paced the few steps to the wall and took a deep breath before turning back to face them.

  “We need to patch the leak. This is going to be tough for two reasons. One, we know which cell inside the hull is leaking, but we don’t know exactly where the leak is. It’s too small. The other reason is that even if we did know exactly where it is, we don’t have the material to slap a patch on it or the means to repair a hull in mid-flight.”

  “Okay, now tell us the bad news,” Jack said, trying to dredge up a smile.

  “No, there is good news,” Heidi said, “We can maybe patch it from the inside.”

  “How? I thought you said we can’t repair it mid-flight?” Ian racked his brain, coming up with nothing. Helplessness and doubt swamped his mind in a black wave, seeping into everything.

  “We drop an egg in the radiator,” she said.

  She let that sit for a moment, waiting for comprehension. Finding none on either Jack or Ian’s faces, she went on, “If you put an egg in the radiator of a car that has a leak, the egg will cook and the proteins bond together to make a solid. The flow is toward the leak, right? So the solids clog it up. Bam. No more leak.”

  “That works?” Jack raised an eyebrow.

  “Sure. I mean, we can’t use a real egg. For obvious reasons. Nick?”

  “We need something tough, something that will act like egg protein but a million times stronger. I have it. The hull is partially constructed with it, in fact.”

  “Carbon nanotubes?” Ian said. He wasn’t getting any less confused yet.

  “Right. I have expended capacitors, fuzzy ones. I can easily, well, okay, not that easily but I can do it, collect the ‘fuzz’ from them. In theory we can drop the egg into the hull and the fibers will cook, twisting into a sort of wool-like material, only way way stronger. And then they’ll plug the leak. Hell, if we get lucky, they might even form bonds with the hull itself. Good as new. Better.” Nick splayed his hands.

  “Then we deliver it with the rover, I can modify it so that it will stick to the hull and we can walk it around. Fortunately, each cell has a small double door on the inside that we can remotely access.” Heidi smiled, tight energy bringing color back into her face. “Nick or I will have to go out there to use the rover, but we should be okay from just inside the middle hull. We can do this, Ian. It’s going to be fine.”

  “I agree. See? We’ve got a plan.” Jack looked up at his brother with earnest blue eyes, willing Ian to believe.

  “Okay. Plan is good. Crazy. But better than nothing. But N
ick is going out there, and I’m going with him,” Ian said. “No arguing.” He felt it was important to be there, to be involved in the solution. He was done with letting others take risks without him.

  “Okay, boss,” Heidi said. She gripped Nick’s shoulder and then walked past Ian to stand with her hand resting lightly on Jack’s shoulder.

  Ian noticed she smelled like raspberries as she squeezed by him. He shook himself.

  “Nick, go make a bucky-egg. How long will that take?”

  “Hours?” Nick guessed.

  “Do it, then get some sleep if you can. Then come get me and we’ll be mission go.” Ian sank down into the seat Heidi had vacated.

  Nick rose. “Guess that means I’m hired again, huh?” He tried for a grin and it looked almost natural.

  “Guess so,” said Ian, “Heidi, too.”

  * * *

  51 days in transit

  The make-shift plastic sleeve they’d glued over the hatch leading from the middle hull to the outer fell limp as the door sealed closed behind the rover. Ian didn’t realize he’d be holding his own breath until he heard Nick exhale, the sound like wind through the mic system in their helmets.

  Ian knew exactly the formula coating his visor, but he still expected it to fog up. The helmet felt too tight, too close. He imagined if his eyelashes were longer they’d brush the clear plastic. His pressure suit pinched at the ribs and knees as he clung awkwardly with his legs to the metal structure between the inner and middle hulls, dangling over the environmental system.

  “Hold the screen steady, Ian,” Nick said. Nick perched on the struts across from Ian, holding a computer pad.

  They were both arranged carefully. Upon exiting the inner ship, they’d found the metal frame between hulls had warped, bolts shearing or popping and in some cases the metal itself broken into jagged shards. Ian made a mental note to figure out a different way to secure the environmental systems in the next build.