by J J Perry
REAP
23
J J PERRY
Copyright © 2017 by J J Perry.
ISBN: Hardcover 978-1-5434-2742-4
Softcover 978-1-5434-2741-7
eBook 978-1-5434-2740-0
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to any actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.
Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.
Rev. date: 06/02/2017
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Contents
1.0
1.1 Launch Day -2
1.2 Launch Day -1
1.2
1.4
2.0 Launch Day
2.1 Launch + 8 Days
2.2 Launch + 8 Days
2.3 Launch + 11 Days
3.0 Launch + 87 Days
3.1 Launch + 88 Days
3.1
3.2 Launch + 91 Days
3.3
3.4 Launch + 119 Days
3.5 Launch + 121 Days
3.6
4.0 Launch + 141
4.1
4.2
4.3
4.4 Launch + 143 Days
4.5
4.6
5.0 Launch + 164
5.1
5.2
5.3
5.4
5.5
6.0 Launch + 177 Days
6.1 Launch + 159 Days
7.0 Mission Day 181
7.1 Launch + 182 Days
7.2
7.3 Launch + 183
7.4
8.0 Launch + 184 Days
8.1 Mission Day 185
8.2 Launch + 215 Days
8.4 Launch + 231
9.0 Launch + Approximately 8,000 Years
9.1 Beginning -254 Days
9.2
10.0 Beginning -99 Days
10.1 Beginning -85 Days
11.0 Beginning -6 Days
11.1
11.1 Beginning -5 Days
11.2 Beginning Day 0
Part Two
12.0
12.1 2051 AA
13.2 2051 AA
13.2
13.2
14.0
14.1 3947 AA
14.2
14.3
15.0
15.1
15.2
15.3
15.4
15.5
15.6
15.7
16.0
16.2
16.2
16.3
Part Three
17.0
17.1
17.2
17.3
17.4
17.5
18.0 Landing Plus Seven Years
18.1 Landing Plus Fourteen Years
18.2
18.3 Landing Plus Fifteen Years
18.0 Confirmation
18.1
Appendix One History of the Original World
1.0
Wildly adjusting pitch and yaw didn’t shake the port winglet loose. It was stuck to the wing where it had rested as five thousand years of space-time sculpted the spacecraft’s exterior. A bright amber warning icon pulsed slowly on the shuddering display in front of the pilot, Cyrus Paria. He swept a forearm quickly across his dripping brow. Friction froze the wing but heated the shield, the cockpit, the dialogue.
“Fix it, Cyrus!” Commander Chen Wong yelled. “We’re short of the landing zone!”
Savanna De Clercq, the copilot, threw a quick glance at the two men. “I can compensate by adjusting the flaps until you jar the wing loose.” Her edged voice was tinged with a French accent. Her short, black hair matted to her glistening face. The three astronauts sweltered in the spacious, dim cockpit, staining to land tons of ancient ship.
“Don’t help!” Cyrus jammed the joystick forward and left.
“Asymmetric lift, Cy. I have to.”
The ship dived steeper and rolled to port in response. It then rolled precipitously in the opposite direction and flared nose up. The painful shaking increased.
“Too steep, Cyrus,” Wong screamed. “We’re burning up.”
“Damn it, Cyrus! This isn’t a fighter,” Savanna muttered unheard. Rattling and rush buried it. “You’re going to damage the good wing.”
Two more bright amber lights appeared, pulsing faster. “Heat shield damage, level five,” a computer voice announced. Chen threw his hands up. “You torqued the starboard foil, Cyrus. You’re going to kill us all. Savanna, take the stick. Cyrus, copilot.” Chen leaned back, muttering obscenities.
Cyrus cursed as he threw his hands in the air, glaring angrily at Chen. “Your stick.”
“Pilot flying.” Savanna acknowledged and retracted the starboard winglet so that they had equal airfoil on each side of the ship. The shaking decreased.
Chen bellowed into the intercom. “Leila, put out the fire on five!”
“Already on it.” Engineer Leila’s voice came over the intercom from her station outside of command and control. “Xenon is flooding the compartment, and coolant is diverted to the hull at that location.”
“We need both winglets for lift,” Cyrus muttered.
“Then climb out and fix it,” Savanna spat.
“All this speed to maintain lift is burning us up.”
“Computer, display alternate landing sites within reach.” Savanna ignored his statement of the obvious.
Two sites came up on the two-meter screen. One was a desert, flat with minimal vegetation. The other was a wide bay.
“Come on!” Chen pounded his console with a fist.
“Desert,” Cyrus said.
“Water,” Savanna decided. “Give me a visual on the bay and put up the course.”
“Would you like me to land the ship?” The computer’s voice was Canadian, not that anyone noticed at the moment.
“Negative,” Savanna said.
“The water will be too choppy. It’ll rip us apart.” Cyrus glared at his wife.
“Damn it, Cy!” Chen screamed, pounding again. “Stop arguing! Savanna, why go wet?”
“We’re way too fast for dirt,” Savanna said.
“That’s what the suspension is for!”
“What if that works as well as the wing, Commander?” The ship lurched, dipping to starboard. “Are the flaps out and equal, Cy?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Computer, countdown to landing.” A digital display started at two minutes and twenty-nine seconds. The control room got warmer and continued to shake as it had for the last ten minutes. “Computer, assist with landing,” Savanna requested. Another countdown appeared on screen as well as a joystick setting for a slow left turn. LED lights at the edges of the room danced like the flames of hell as they did every time the computer assist kicked in. At zero, she started the turn. The shaking increased. “Cyrus!”
He adjusted a couple of
sliders. The ride improved marginally. “About a minute, forty seconds before we land.” Cyrus hesitated, bit his lower lip, and threw a glance at Cyrus. He whispered, “I would lose more altitude than the computer likes and then nose up and flare in the last ten seconds. I think that will decrease our speed a little better.”
“We could stall.”
“That’s the point.”
The image of the planet and landing zone on the large screen in front of both pilots blurred. “We’re losing visual on the forward camera. Suresh, can you fix that?”
“No.” The arrogant voice of the Suresh Parambi responded over the intercom after a delay. “Heat is warping the lens.”
“We still have the real-time schematics,” Chen said. “That’ll have to do. Christ! Can anything else go wrong?”
“Hull breach, level five,” Leila’s voice rasped over the intercom. “Level four is threatened.”
“Lucinda, Maricia!” Chen shouted into his mike. “Evacuate! Evacuate to Engineering! Now!”
“Yes, sir” came from both the medics. “What about the med-bots?” Lucinda asked.
“Get them out of there!”
“There’s no place to dock ’em on level one,” Lucinda stated.
“Get ’em out! Medical will be an inferno in seconds.”
Chen slammed his console with his fist. “Shit! Shit! Shit!”
“Commander! Pull it together,” Savanna called.
He stopped pounding but continued to curse. The slow port turn and descent continued. He checked his screen for the location of all eight crew members. Three including him were in command and control. The computer showed that two were one section back, and three were or would soon be in the rear compartment, separated from the rest by the breech but relatively safe.
Savanna looked at Chen, who was occupied by his screen then at Cyrus. He looked away.
“There’s the bay!” He leaned and pointed at Savanna’s display. “Now, where’s the wind?” There was no computer response.
“Show wind direction and velocity.” Savanna gritted her teeth.
The computer placed blue arrows diagonally across the display, indicating a headwind angling from right to left. “Show depth chart close to the eastern shore.” Cyrus drew a line of a proposed landing site in shallow water on his screen. It appeared on hers as well. “What do you think, Savanna?”
Savanna struggled with the controls, her arms straining. Heedless, the ship rolled to starboard. “I can’t compensate!” Savanna’s words were clipped. The roll continued. “Rockets, Cy!”
“Firing.” It did not stop the roll. Within seconds, the ship was upside down.
“Catastrophic wing failure,” the Canadian voice calmly intoned. “Structural integrity of the hull is lost—probable separation prior to impact.”
“Come on, we can do this. Cyrus, ideas?” Savanna pulled her joystick hard and leaned on three buttons.
Chen cursed continually. Cyrus kept his finger on the rocket icon. He looked at Savanna as the rain forest and blue sky cycled on the screen; her eyes in terror, locked on his until there was a deafening screech followed by a hard jerk and a deafening explosion cut short by pure silence and darkness.
1.1
LAUNCH DAY -2
“Well, that was a scenario that could never happen in reality,” Cyrus said, stretching and arching his back then mopping sweat from his neck and hair. A dark mantle on his tunic showed the effects of high temperature and stress.
“The probability of wing failure is 2 percent for every one thousand years in space, Laddie. That is 16 percent for your ship.” That was the Scottish-tinged voice of God, as Gen. Cecil McBain was known. It came from speakers in the black ceiling. “You now have a simulation survival rate of 81 percent, well below average, Commander. You killed the entire crew the last three sessions. Debrief in twenty minutes. Take a break.”
The simulation chamber stank; a combination of sweat and odors pumped in as part of the ordeal.
“Chen, it doesn’t help when you lose your temper. So why do it?” Savanna stood as she spoke. She had made the same comment in a dozen different ways before. She raised both arms in a frustrated expletive.
“Why? It’s not on purpose.”
“Well, come up with a more constructive and purposeful response to crisis.”
“It is distracting,” added Cyrus. “We have enough pressure dealing with these catastrophes. We had 30 or 40 percent less lift on the port side with the winglet stuck, and all you can do is curse and yell.”
“Give me a suggestion, then.” Chen remained seated, leaning back in his chair as if to challenge his critics.
“Take a deep, cleansing breath.” Savanna made an exaggerated motion with both arms.
“Or an enema.” Cyrus smiled.
“Go to your happy place.”
“Think Frisbee.”
Savanna and Cyrus went back and forth with variations on a theme as they had for months.
“Unless you have a practical statement”—Cyrus approached Chen, his face screwed with anger—“don’t just yell.”
The structure of the crew was functional, not hierarchal. They were all peers, young with different skills and assignments. Only Suresh was over twenty-eight. Savanna pulled Cyrus away and left the simulation mock-up together without talking, sweat glistening on their downturned faces, darkening their shirts.
Left alone, Chen sat at his console, head resting in his hands, muttering curses. Leila entered, saw his cropped black hair barely above the seat back, and approached in unintentional stealth. The smells, gritty floor, dim, industrial lighting, and the oppressive fog of failure hung in the room. She stood next to him for a minute. His tunic was wet stained and stank. “Where’s your wife?” She broke the spell.
“I don’t know.” Chen mopped his forehead with a sleeve. “Probably in Medical, where she always is.”
Leila looked around. There were a few cameras, probably turned off, but one never knew. “Let’s go,” she whispered near his ear.
Chen pulled his head up and looked at her. “Why do beautiful women never sweat?”
“When you make me sweat, it is beautiful.” He loved her Indian accent, luscious dark eyes, and the way she treated him.
“I’m tired of training, Leila. Really tired.”
“You should be. We’ve been at it for over a year. Let’s go.”
He struggled to straighten up. They walked slowly to the exit, taking care not to touch or stand too close in front of the camera monitors that were supposed to be inactive. Treat them like a gun, Chen had warned. Assume they are always loaded. “Is Suresh still at the ship?”
“Yes.”
“How long’ll he be there?”
“Until after dinner.”
“I hope the debrief is short.”
“If it is and if Lucinda is still working with the medical team, I’ll help you clean up.” Leila’s partial smile accented her seductive Kama Sutra eyes. Her cleaning up was inevitably a shower of slow, intense pleasure Chen had never known until a few months earlier when their relationship assumed a different aspect, the tone it had now.
“It’s risky.” His Chinese face was expressionless as his eyes searched for anyone or anything listening. The dim corridor was vacant. It held no monitors, a safe place to talk. A welcome draft of fresh air cleansed their lungs and chilled Chen from evaporation.
“The risk enhances the excitement, don’t you think?”
“Tell me again how you and your husband got selected for this gig.”
“Call him Suresh or Parambi or genius or His Highness. Anything but my husband, please. I wanted to go. He was against it at first, but something changed his mind. For all I know, he bribed some senators and psychologists to ignore”—she paused—“certain deficiencies.”
“Like his personality disorde
r?”
“For one.” She silently ticked off fingers, counting.
“Size.”
She nodded.
“Age.”
She stopped counting, reached to his chest, and rubbed, frivolous, the bright yang to his dark, worried yin. She stopped, turned, and walked down the hall.
He caught up. “If he learned about us, we might both be dead.”
She stopped in the penumbra between the spaced lights. He halted a step or two later, still facing down the rest of the short corridor. “I don’t think he would physically harm anyone, Chen.” She massaged his shoulders, digging deep with her thumbs, releasing tension with each slow stroke. “That’s not to say that he’s not vicious. I’ve seen him destroy both life and business.”
“Suresh is built. He probably lifts over 150 kilograms.”
“More.” She grimaced.
“He could break my skinny little Asian neck.” He squirmed at the thought.
She moved her fingers up the muscles of his neck to the base of his skull, caressing, kneading, and relaxing. “I would never let that happen.”
“God, you’re beautiful,” Chen uttered almost in whisper. He was not alone in that opinion. Her Asian facial features softened with multiracial genetics of the last two centuries; her figure was sculpted from years of physical conditioning. She was an international treasure acquired by her richer-than-god husband.
“And you don’t smell so good, Chen. Is that how they say it in California?” She laughed as did he.
“Maybe in Richmond. Not in LA.” They walked to the end of the corridor. On the other side of the doors was a large atrium, usually busy with people. It was the moon’s version of a busy downtown, stores lining the walkways. They both gave furtive glances in all directions before a short peck on the lips and a squeeze of hands. “You go in first, Leila. I’ll wait awhile as usual.”
“See you in fifteen minutes.” Chen stepped well back from the doors as Leila leisurely swayed through. Thirty seconds later he burst through as if in a rush. He did not need to wait so long. He was unnoticed as all eyes followed stunning Leila Nyguen wherever she went. Reporters, interviewers, and administrators asked over the last year, why would a successful model give up a career, fame, and money to travel to another planet and have babies? With her passing through the crowd, no one would have noticed a platoon entering, let alone a thin, plain guy who looked like a teen. The former Frisbee expert was an engineer, now a colonel and commander of the flight.