Twin Paradox_Book Two

by Purple Hazel

  Yet even in the absence of any dangerous predators living out on the surface, life was indeed difficult! High winds constantly threatened them, but the construction teams persevered. Frigid cold dogged them incessantly. It was certainly going to be a feat of skill as well as force of will that would pull them through during those difficult coming months; and most seemed to accept this. Those who didn’t, would simply have to swallow their pride and join right in, regardless of their rank or fitness levels. For some, the gravity and the harsh cold were more than they could bear at times.

  Nevertheless, most everyone was dedicated and reliable throughout this crucial phase, both men and women. B.J. for instance worked out there in that dusty lake bed right along with Shamiso and the other twins, helping build the agricultural center. Ozzie labored until his pressure suit was literally in tatters. So did Kelvin. So did Captain Stehter. So did practically everyone! During that time pretty much all the crew and their officers anteed up and kicked in. They seemed to know what was at stake and pushed themselves as hard as they possibly could.

  But not everyone was a “good comrade” during that period unfortunately. Sure, Captain Berwick and Captain Stehter were outstanding officers and in particular Tommy Berwick was in effect still the supreme commander of the mission by right of rank. He would remain so until he passed the reins onto Steinhart the day he and the Away Team finally went into stasis onboard the Santa Maria for the return trip to Earth.

  However, on the planet surface, Commander Cadorna was officially in command of the colony, and this presumed authority he seemed to believe he possessed over everyone, gradually turned him into a real - well many had their own term for it but others were more candid.

  “Asshole!” said B.J. one day, forgetting herself for a moment and not realizing her transmitter was on while she said it. Perhaps she didn’t care anymore. Not by then anyway. At the time, she was helping move some support beams with fellow crewmembers, most of them women, and as she passed Kelvin—who’d been field promoted to Lieutenant O-3 by Captain Berwick shortly after his heroic run to the ocean a couple months before—she looked over at her old friend and corrected herself. “Not you, of course, Lieutenant, I meant uh...well, you-know-who.”

  Kelvin chuckled to himself and pretended not to notice. If it had been anyone else, he’d very likely have addressed this insubordination personally. It was never allowed for a junior officer to refer to a superior in such a manner. Could even lead to “disciplinary action” if the Captain believed it was detrimental to crew morale! But then again, who could have disagreed with her? Not by this point, months after B-lander had set down on the surface. Indeed, Commander Cadorna had slowly become a royal pain in the ass; pissing off practically everyone at one point or another, and Kelvin himself truly loathed having to report to the little man. No one else could stand him either…

  Such a strange transformation. Luigi Cadorna had been a fine candidate for commander back on Earth. No one could have denied that. Said all the right things. Came from a good family. Top of his class back at college in Milan. He had it all. Certainly the right selection for the job, hands down.

  He had a worthy background, had known all the right people, had interviewed well, and was once married into the powerful Habsburg family. Sadly, his wife had passed away a few years earlier after a long battle with leukemia, which had devastated the family and left him a widower at only thirty-six. They had no children together, either. Yet this served well in making him practically perfect for the job right from the start. No real ties back on Earth—what’s more completely qualified for the position.

  He’d been promoted to commander and had gone into stasis shortly before launch right along with the other future colonists—many of whom he’d developed working relationships with already. Absolutely no one would have suspected anything was wrong with him. For that matter, if something had been wrong, it should have been identified during psychological examinations performed by Space Programme long before launch day. He’d passed, and done acceptably well in fitness testing, too.

  Yet something about Cadorna had changed, and it was somewhat hard to define, really. True, no one had really known him that well before the voyage. No one had known his wife or known what he’d gone through after her death. No one had grown up with him or palled around with him back in college, either. Certainly, both Berwick and Stehter had known of him, prior to the mission. They had met with him, and chanced to go have a beer with him several times during training. On those occasions, he seemed quite amiable and professional.

  “Quite a good mate, as I recall it,” Tommy would sometimes describe him when speaking with Captain Stehter—or in a rare moment when he felt compelled to confide in Lt. Kelvin.

  However, the man was clearly different from before, and suspicions arose among the two captains that something must have happened to him during, or due to, his cryogenic freezing process. He wasn’t the only example of this either. Another crewmember never fully recovered during physical therapy and her left leg would continually go numb when walking great distances, causing her to fall behind and occasionally require a rover to be sent for her. This concerned both captains immensely.

  Could there be something wrong with the machines themselves? The stasis machines, that is? Could there be a malfunction inside of them? Naturally Kelvin picked up on this implication by both captains when they were occasionally discussing the matter. But being the professional officer he was, Kelvin never spoke about it to anyone…

  “You know what he said to me...that...lunatic?” B.J. complained to Kelvin. He of course had to wave her off politely. Being a junior officer assigned to exploration, he did not dare involve himself in a conversation with a subordinate regarding suspected personality disorders in a fellow officer. She was about to tell him how Cadorna had referred to her as a “Puttana pigro” for which there was a clear, direct translation into English—and what it meant in Italian wasn’t very nice at all.

  At the time he’d said it, Commander Cadorna had been having some sort of conniption fit over workers taking breaks inside the B-lander during a fierce windstorm outside. Structures unfinished were withering under the strain and supervisors on the building site had ordered them inside until the danger subsided. That apparently had been the trigger which made him go ballistic.

  Kelvin pretty much knew what she was going to tell him, of course. He’d heard all about it by then. To be sure he’d experienced something just like it personally—when the crazy fellow seemed to be challenging him to fisticuffs over what to name the Kapteyn Sea! Others had complained already—and often. It seemed the angry little man, so charming when he’d first been selected commander back on Earth, had become a real nuisance. A petty tyrant really. Dressing down subordinates and flying into a rage whenever he became paranoid that his staff were slacking in their work. It was barely understandable given the circumstances.

  Acts of overt laziness or dereliction of duty could never be tolerated, of course. That was understood. But it was the way he went about things. He rubbed people raw; and the combination of pressures: the crushing gravity, the extreme cold they had to deal with, right along with the absurd timetables for tasks he often assigned them to, drove many among the crewmembers and future colonists to exhaustion and even elicited a few brave pleas to Captains Berwick and Stehter for intervention.

  “With all due respect; we’re not talking about mutiny here, Captain. We just need you to do something about this man. He’s deluded, I’m telling you. Paranoid and unreasonable,” declared one of the more blunt Australian colonists who’d had a recent run-in with the little fellow. “If he’s gonna run this colony after you go well...I’m not so sure we colonists can take much more of this.” Tommy Berwick could only thank the young man for his candor and input. At the moment he didn’t know just what he could do about it.

  “Thank you, Ensign, that will be all,” he replied in a kindly voice, and the young officer saluted, then exited Tommy’s cabin on the S
anta Maria. The captain tried and tried to come up with a solution but frankly...nothing seemed like a viable alternative.

  Essentially the situation put Tommy Berwick in the position of either having to tolerate the man’s erratic behavior until the Santa Maria departed; or discipline him in such a way that he’d be compelled to comply with proper rules of decorum and etiquette toward subordinates. That said, doing so might be quite dangerous whichever way he went about it:

  Cadorna could be demoted for one thing, and a different officer might be promoted to Commander of the Colony. Unfortunately, just who to replace him with was the real issue. He truly thought about it, that’s for sure! But in the end, he recognized that might not be the best option.

  Cadorna could be chastised privately, and that might very well accomplish an improvement in the situation. But...Captain Berwick knew better than to do that. If word got out, junior officers might then lose respect and fear of their commander and mutiny would likely be a threat from the moment Santa Maria took off for Earth. That would most certainly be utterly disastrous for the survival of the colony. At least with the current situation, he had to admit, even if the guy was a “tosser”, the colony’s construction was progressing rather nicely, either because of Cadorna’s bombastic tantrums or in spite of them. In those first few months it was anyone’s guess which might truly be the case.

  B.J. however had the ear of her lover Steinhart Stehter; and she leveraged their private time together to get the latest scoop on what he and Tommy Berwick were planning on doing about it. She and Steinhart would often go toddling off together on “special exploration missions” using a spare surface rover to go out and set up a four-man “jiffy pop” tent out on the beach.

  They might even spend an afternoon stealing away from the worksites to go “take some samples from nearby forests” which were only sporadic clumps of trees near mountain runoff streams up in the nearby hills. They’d drive off for an hour, “inflate” their little tent and set up its solar powered battery to face the afternoon sun, then make love for an hour or two before heading back in time for chow.

  B.J. would then carry back containers full of tree leaves or acquired insect larvae and turn them in to research labs onboard Santa Maria, before slipping into the chow line acting nonchalant like nothing had happened. Yes, it was a great way to take a little break from her tyrannical boss, that was for sure. But it came with a price, nonetheless. The next day she’d inevitably catch hell from Commander Cadorna who’d call her filthy names in Italian then assign her to the heaviest work detail he could devise for her. This in turn would send her off pleading to Steinhart for intervention once again.

  “Schnucki, I can’t take any more of this bullshit. Really. We’ve gotta do something,” she’d tell him desperately, sighing deeply and laying back on the inflatable floor mat after they’d been intimate together. “Can’t you get me out of this? You outrank him after all. Tell him I’ve been reassigned. Tell him...shit, I don’t know...tell him to go fuck himself, if you wanna. Fuck if I care. He’s a maniac, I’m tellin’ ya.”

  To this Steinhart could only appease her with, “Süsse, I know. Really. I know all about it. I’m hearing it practically every day. He’s unmanageable, really. Tommy and I are quite verwirrt, I can assure you.”

  Then one time, after a particularly abusive run-in with the commander, she’d finally had enough. She blurted out, “God damn it, I don’t think I’ve ever seen a man more desperately in need of a good blowjob in my whole fucking life!” And that’s when Steinhart finally had to pull rank and say, “Ensign Ariel, if you please madam, you are addressing a superior officer in regard to the competence of another senior officer and that’s grounds for disciplinary measures.” To this B.J. merely asked with a sexy grin, “Does that mean you’re gonna tie me up again?” and Captain Stehter could only laugh embarrassedly.

  “No Liebling, not this time. But please, for my sake and yours, let’s keep these discussions private, if you would. Both of us—the captain and myself—have discussed it and we’ve determined that it’s best to focus on getting the colony established as quickly as possible so we can depart this place before…”

  And that’s when B.J. interjected boldly with “before what, Schnucki? Before he kills somebody? ‘Cause he’s gonna do it, I’m tellin’ ya’. The little turd is gonna drive us too hard and somebody’s gonna get killed.” Captain Stehter could only cuddle her affectionately under their thermal blanket and reply, “I’m quite certain you’ll be right one of these days. Really, I am. If only we had a good, workable solution to this mess...well, I’d be all ears.”

  Chapter 14

  Somewhere. Anywhere. Nowhere.

  It was not long after that when B.J. did indeed devise such a bold “solution”, and when she presented it—or one might call it “broached the topic carefully” during pillow talk after one of their raucous lovemaking sessions—Steinhart was completely taken aback by her audacity!

  “You want to what?” he exclaimed with dismay, rolling over on his side to face her. “Darling please...not that. No, please put that out of your mind. Really?” B.J. however was quite adamant.

  “Yes, Schnucki. Let me try it. He’s goin’ off the deep end, ’n everyone knows it. And besides, he is an Italian after all. We all know that and we all know how they are. Italian men are...well, let’s just say he’ll respond to me eventually—I’m sure of it. It’s...well, you know, just something I know how to do. One of those things I’m kinda good at. That’s all I’m sayin’. Can I try it?”

  Steinhart flatly refused—for about a month that is. Then he gradually relented when things got progressively worse with complaints continuously coming in about the little commandante’s behavior.

  What B.J. proposed, frankly speaking, was to try and woo Luigi Cadorna, Commander of the Kapteyn B Planetary Colony, into a harmless afternoon tryst. Take him off in a surface rover, convince him she was smitten with him, convince him she desired him, and then quite brazenly seduce him into joining her inside one of the “jiffy pops” to make passionate love to her. She knew just how to propose it, knew just what would work on him, or so she claimed. “And from there, well...we’ll just let nature take its course,” as she put it.

  He was a man after all. Likely missing his lovely wife who’d passed away years before. Missed having a woman comfort him and “straighten him out” once in a while. “Hell, you know how guys are!” she added. Moreover, she theorized, “He’s probably just stressed out like the rest of us.”

  “Shit, this place...it’d make most any of us half crazy,” is the way she rationalized it to Captain Stehter. “I know it’s making me crazy, that’s for sure. A lot of folks are going nuts. And besides, if I’m wrong and the guy loses his mind again in a few days, hell, I’ll do him again just for good measure. Give me some time. I’ll fix him right up...you’ll see.”

  Steinhart saw it differently though. He knew if he allowed something like that—though it disgusted him even thinking about it—reality would be quite different than what his lover was imagining. It would be much more involved. Much more complicated than she was thinking that was for sure. No, the only way to pull this off effectively was to give up his beautiful companion for the duration of their time there...until the colony was finished...and finally they could return to Santa Maria for launch.

  In a few months—give or take a week—he knew the colony would be established. Farms would be planted and irrigated—plus the gigantic laser would be installed which would fire into orbit and send Santa Maria hurtling back toward Earth. At that point, they could thankfully put this behind them. They could blast off and forget about the place. Calculate a rendezvous point for the resupply ship returning toward Earth and catch a ride home.

  Best of all, they could be lovers again for the entire journey back, just like Steinhart had planned it. They could return to Germany together perhaps, marry when they arrived there safe and sound, then live out their lives together as man and wife, Steinh
art still in his early forties and B.J. pushing thirty-three.

  However, for now, there was dirty work afoot; and Steinhart had to accept what this would truly entail. B.J. would need to become Luigi’s girlfriend and convince him she was totally sincere; in whatever way or ways she could accomplish it. Anything short of that, and the suspicious little fellow would see through the ruse. Then, they’d have an even bigger problem! Could B.J. pull it off? Of course, she could; and she would. Steinhart had no doubt about that. She was the most incredible lover he’d ever experienced.

  But...could he actually let her go? Relinquish his relationship with her for that long of a period of time? The very thought of her with that...Sohn einer Hündin...practically turned his stomach and filled him with revulsion. Was this really the only solution? Could he manage himself and his temper without strangling the “little turd” as B.J. liked to call him when they were alone? He could only hope he’d be able to control himself until then.

  Sure, he certainly knew he’d have to do something. Two, maybe three more months of Cadorna’s tyrannical temper tantrums and most likely the colonists would solve the problem for him. He might in all likelihood find the man dead or mysteriously disappearing from B-lander one day very soon. They’d do it eventually—he could almost sense it—secretly one afternoon when they’d found a way to get him alone for a while. He fully believed, had little doubt, that they were capable of it, all those disgruntled colonists fearing the very near future when Santa Maria would blast off for Earth leaving them alone with that schwierigen Mann.

  What’s more none of his officers would ever admit to any knowledge of it. Kelvin, for one, would probably do it for them! That is, if the bright young Lieutenant even got to the nasty fellow before those angry female crewmembers did him in first. Chances were, they’d get together and gas him in his sleep using chemicals from the now-dormant stasis machines. Or maybe they’d get him out in the open...and mow him down with a surface rover!