Project Diamond (Jacob Lansing Series Book 1)

by J. W. Bouchard

  And then I remembered something Burnell had always said:

  Any action is better than no action.

  I probably heard him say that a few dozen times. He always told it to the new cadets, but when he said it to them it was like he was reciting something from a book, a tidbit of wisdom some academic institution forced him to stuff down new recruits’ throats. When he told it to me though, it seemed like he meant it. Like he was preparing me for something. Making sure it really sank in.

  The meaning of those words hit home. For once, I thought I actually understood what Burnell was trying to say. I took it to mean that I should be doing anything but what I had been doing for the last two days. That any decision, whether right or wrong, was preferable to never making one at all. With enough time I could come up with a hundred reasons not to go. Despite it being the opportunity of a lifetime, something I had dreamt about since I was a toddler, I had nearly managed to think myself into a box of inactivity. The mind will always skew things based on the desires of the thinker.

  I trudged back to my apartment. It had started to snow lightly. Tomorrow would be a long day, and I knew I should get some sleep, but my brain refused to switch off. I had made my decision. Had taken Burnell’s advice and, for better or for worse, I had decided on a definitive course of action. But none of that stopped the questions from coming.

  CHAPTER 4

  A blue driverless shuttle van pulled up outside of my apartment building at 5am on Monday morning. I was already waiting outside with my duffle in my hand when it arrived.

  I tried the handle on the passenger door, but it was locked. A holographic came up on the window, giving me instructions to press my thumb against the small biometric scanner mounted next to the side mirror. I did as instructed and waited. A moment later, the lock clicked and I was able to open the door. I tossed my duffle into the cargo bay and slid into the passenger seat. It didn’t matter how many times you had ridden in a driverless vehicle, it was always a little disconcerting to see the steering wheel moving by itself. I’m not even sure if the wheel was necessary, so much as it was a relic of an older time; something to make people more comfortable with the technology.

  Another HUD appeared on the windshield showing a map of the area and a tiny blinking dot that indicated our present location. A soothing voice came over the speakers saying, “Good Morning, Jake. Proceeding to the Warren Sarver Space Center (WSSC).

  The WSSC was located well out of town on about a million acres of former Iowa farmland. I’d always heard that people launched ships in places like Florida because the planetary spin was greater closer to the equator, but, apparently, Sarver hadn’t had any qualms with paying the extra cash.

  The van pulled off the highway and eventually took us onto a lesser maintained country road.

  I didn’t have any control of the vehicle, so I had to assume its internal navigation system knew where it was going and could get us to our location.

  I had grown up with robots. Everything seemed to have a brain made of silicon and transistors and solid-state memory these days, but it was still hard to put too much faith in something that wasn’t flesh and blood. Then again, life hadn’t given me a lot of trust in things of the flesh and blood variety either.

  After forty-five minutes of driving in the middle of nowhere, we reached a long stretch of flat terrain and suddenly I could see the WSSC looming in the distance.

  To say it was huge would have been an understatement.

  Spaceships stood with their noses pointed toward the heavens, looking as tall as skyscrapers from my distant point of view. As vague as the training materials that I had gone through over the weekend had been about the mission details, they had been more than informative when it came to the WSSC and its history.

  It was named after former astronaut Warren Sarver, who, after several successful trips to Mars, had gone on to become a successful entrepreneur (with a net worth of over a hundred billion, I figured that qualified the guy as successful anyway). He had used all that money to start the WSSC about seventy-five years ago, and the Center’s first order of business had been to start the first self-sustaining colony on Mars. And while that venture had been a success (there were now over ten thousand colonists permanently stationed on the red planet), it had also been a labor of love.

  After that, Sarver had set his sights on projects focused on turning a profit. Mostly mining operations. Landing equipment on asteroids and extracting raw materials that were useful in the production of commodities on Earth.

  There had been more on the subject after that, but I had lost interest when the literature had ceased to be about space exploration and had become more about annual revenue and profit and loss statistics.

  We pulled up to a tall security gate. A robot security guard with small tires for legs rolled out of the guard shack and came to a halt next to the shuttle van. The passenger-side window came down automatically and the security robot flashed a laser in my face, performed a retinal scan on me, and a few seconds later the gate slid open.

  We started moving again.

  An hour had passed since the driverless shuttle had picked me up. After passing several squat, faceless buildings, the van stopped in front of an enormous dome of glass and steel. The passenger door opened and the soothing robot voice said, “We have arrived at your destination. I hope you enjoyed the trip.”

  I grabbed my duffle out of the cargo bay and walked into the building. There were more security guards at a desk once I was inside, all of them human this time. I brought up my digital id on my phone and handed it to one of the guards. He inspected it, nodded, and handed the phone back to me. He gave me a lanyard with a plastic name badge fastened to the end of it. I examined the id badge. It had a picture of my face (it matched the picture on my digital driver’s license), and the word STAFF written across the bottom in bold letters. I threw the lanyard over my head as one of the guards directed me to a set of doors located near the rear of the building.

  I entered a large auditorium. Most of the seats were already taken. I figured there had to be close to a hundred people in the room. I wondered if they were all going on the mission like I was. I found an empty seat in the back row, sat down, and stuffed the duffle under the chair. I was facing a large stage with a screen as big as the ones they had in movie theaters behind it.

  A lot of nothing happened that first half hour. I tried to scan the room for recognizable faces, but being in the back row meant no one was facing me, and I didn’t recognize the back of anyone’s head. The last of the stragglers arrived and the lights dimmed. The nervous conversation that had filled the room died down as the screen behind the stage lit up with the words PROJECT DIAMOND.

  A man took the stage. He was wearing faded jeans and a gray hoodie with WSSC in blue lettering written across the front. His mouth moved, and a voice boomed like thunder over the auditorium’s speakers.

  “Hey there, everyone! Welcome to Project Diamond. Is everybody as excited to be here as I am?”

  Cheers filled the auditorium. The man paused, waiting for the commotion to die down.

  “My name is Kade Melbourne, your project coordinator. What that basically means is that I’ll be making sure everything stays on track until all of you guys head up there.” He stabbed a finger upward, eyes going to the ceiling. As he did this, the screen behind him changed to a scene of space, decorated by billions of twinkling stars, the Earth situated in the center. “Who’s ready for a little interstellar travel?”

  Applause again. I was beginning to suspect that Kade Melbourne was more of a motivational speaker than a project coordinator. The presentation was a helluva a lot more laid back than I would have guessed. Melbourne was acting like Mr. Casual up there, acting like we were a bunch of kids at summer camp. But as much as I wanted to be irritated by his infinite enthusiasm, I had to admit it was infectious. He had a way of making it seem like this was all in
the name of fun rather than work. Maybe that was the point. Maybe they didn’t want to stress us out prematurely.

  On the screen, in 3D so it looked like it was happening inches from my face, the Earth shot away, taking us through deep space, so fast the stars passing by looked like speeding lines of white light, and within seconds we were zooming past Mars and Jupiter until everything was a blur of color.

  The auditorium was silent. It was if everyone had taken a collective breath and held it.

  The movement on the screen began to slow down gradually. We passed colorful pillars of gas before cruising past stars again. Until, in the distance, a shape began to come into focus.

  A single star came into view, growing as we approached, burning with fiery intensity.

  A sun.

  Melbourne’s voice came over the speakers, filled with a certain amount of awe. “Fifty-five Cancri A in the constellation Cancer. A sun not unlike our own. Slightly less massive, a little cooler, but not by much.”

  We picked up speed, seeming to pinball away from 55 Cancri A and shoot around until we were hovering in front of another sun, this one noticeably smaller than the one we had just seen. “Fifty Cancri B. That’s right. Two suns.”

  We were moving again. This time a planet came into view. We slowed and passed by it lazily. “Fifty-five Cancri f,” Melbourne said. “Possibly lying within the habitable zone. Slim chance of supporting life, but crazier things have proven to be true. But don’t start breathing yet. This isn’t the prize.”

  Without moving far, another planet began to fill the screen. This time, instead of drifting by, we drew closer and closer until it looked as though we were going to collide with it, passing through an atmosphere of thick smog until we creeped along and landed on barren rocky terrain.

  “Here we are. The crown jewel. Literally.”

  Melbourne paused. On screen, we were moving along, the camera shaking as though someone was walking along the surface of the planet, recording the environment with a handheld camera.

  “Fifty-five Cancri e. A so-called super-Earth. A high carbon planet surrounded by a dense layer of carbon smog. It’s a speedy little guy. This is a place where an Earth year takes a meager eighteen hours. The side of the planet that faces its sun has surface temps of around thirty-one hundred Fahrenheit. That’s hot enough to melt metal. But here’s the real kicker: at least a third of its mass is composed of diamond.”

  Melbourne paused again, allowing us time to take it in. A planet made of diamond. My mind tried to picture it, but kept presenting the false image of a giant cut diamond, sparkling brightly, floating in the vastness of space.

  “In terms of dollars and cents,” Melbourne said, “that’s about twenty-seven nonillion. That’s twenty-seven with thirty zeroes behind it.”

  There it was. You could polish everything so it shined and sparkled, toss in a few twinkling stars, but in the end it all came down to money. It all came down to business. The thing was, sitting in the auditorium, surrounded by equally awestruck people, I didn’t care.

  “I’ve got some good news and some bad news. Which do you want first?”

  Melbourne waited. No one responded, but if the smile on his face had gotten any bigger it would have sliced his face in half.

  “Okay, let’s do bad first. This gem of a planet – pun intended – is about forty light years away.”

  I think the entire auditorium gasped in unison. I didn’t react, at least physically, but I knew enough about space travel to know that forty light years would take half a million years in our fastest rocket. And that’s a one-way trip. I started to think that Melbroune had been conning us. Showing us something pretty, getting our hopes up, just to pull the rug out from under us in the end.

  “That’s a long way off. Unreachable…”

  I wouldn’t have believed it, but Melbourne’s smile widened.

  “…until now.”

  The image on the screen faded. The lights came up. Melbourne kept talking, but he skipped the part about how we had mysteriously achieved the ability to travel at the speed of light.

  He opted to leave us in suspense.

  Even at the speed of light, a one-way trip would take forty years. Over half a lifetime. I hadn’t really considered that we might be handing over the duration of our lives to the mission. Pay for that period of time would make us rich by the time it ended, but what did that matter if we’d never get to spend it?

  Melbourne continued, but my mind was still trying to wrap itself around the impossible distance. I only caught snippets of what he said after that. He talked about how it would be, by far, the longest distance traveled into space by Man. That we would make history, and, potentially, become legend. He went on to talk about setting up mining operations on 55 Cancri e, which they had nicknamed the Diamond Planet.

  After fifteen minutes, it was obvious that our fearless project coordinator had used up his one and only magic trick when he had revealed the diamond planet and told us it was within our grasp. Despite his intense charisma, he had trouble holding our attention after that. At least some of us in the auditorium had been recruited as roughnecks, grunts that would spend a good chunk of their time below ground, mining for raw diamond. Melbourne did his best to make this sound romantic, droned on about the riches we would bring back with us. And maybe the guys that would be below surface found this all interesting, but it all sounded boring to me.

  Not that my hopes had been dashed. I still held onto it. Hope that there would be more than rock and diamond on the planet. Melbourne had told us that 55 Cancri e, as well as its sister planet 55 Cancri f were both within that elusive Goldilocks zone. Not too hot, not too cold. Maybe life was possible there.

  It was seven-thirty by the time the presentation ended. Melbourne wished us all good luck and said he’d be seeing us soon. My right leg was asleep by the time he finished. We got up and formed a haphazard line at the west side exit, which led to an adjoining room where, once we entered, we were to form groups based on our employment category.

  Since they had us assemble front to back, I was at the end of the line. That was when I spotted Lisa Chen. She was farther ahead in line, Thomas standing next to her. I didn’t want to lose my place in line, but I took comfort in the fact that I at least knew somebody that was going on the mission. I also knew that they would be splitting us up into our respective categories, so I wasn’t sure how soon I’d get the chance to talk to her again.

  Leaving my place in line, I went up to Lisa as her back was turned to me, tapped her on the shoulder and said, “Remember me?”

  “Jacob!”

  “Just Jake.”

  I was relieved that she remembered my name.

  “So you made it,” Lisa said.

  “I guess you guys did, too.”

  Thomas said, “Was there ever any doubt?”

  “Ignore him,” Lisa said. “His people skills are lacking.”

  “I’m not an expert either,” I said, looking at Thomas.

  Thomas asked, “What did you think of the presentation?”

  “I thought he was a little vague.”

  “Intentionally, I’m sure,” Thomas said.

  “About the whole travel time thing, yeah.”

  “As a physicist, I find it highly intriguing. As far as I was aware, we hadn’t come anywhere close to reaching fast as light travel.”

  “As a physicist, blah, blah, blah,” Lisa mocked.

  “Even then, it would take forty years to reach our destination,” I said. “That doesn’t make any sense either. It means most of us would be in our sixties by the time we got there.”

  “Not necessarily. If they put everyone in hypersleep, we would age much more slowly. It’s like hibernation on steroids. You aren’t dead, per se, but medically you couldn’t come much closer to it. I’m not familiar with the ratio, but it’s possible that in sta
sis, the aging process could slow down in such a way that ten Earth years would only equal one year for us. We would only age four years getting there.”

  “Is that possible?”

  Thomas shrugged. “I know they’ve used it to some degree in the past. It works. I’m just not sure how well. I think it’s safe to say they haven’t tested it over a time period as long as forty years. And that’s assuming we’re traveling at the speed of light.”

  “You aren’t thinking of backing out are you?” Lisa asked.

  I shook my head. “No. I’m going. Once I’ve made up my mind, I’m too stubborn to change it.”

  “Sounds like a deeply rooted character flaw to me,” Lisa said, smiling.

  The line was still moving. We had almost reached the entrance to the adjoining room.

  “Well, I better get back,” I said. “I don’t want to make enemies my first day.”

  “I’m glad you made it, Jake Lansing. We’ll see you soon. Hopefully.”

  I wished them luck and returned to my place at the back of the line. I started to wonder if I had come off as needy. I was used to being a loner and wasn’t exactly sure what had prompted me to seek Lisa out. Maybe it was the fact that it was looking more and more like this was the trip of a lifetime and that it was going to last that long, too. I told myself it didn’t hurt to have an ally. And a pretty one at that.

  CHAPTER 5

  Once I made it into the adjoining room, I found the group waiting in the security section. Captain Hayes, head of security, was standing at the front of the cluster, arms folded over his chest. He wasn’t the tallest or the broadest of the others standing there, but he was the most intimidating out of them. As I moved over to them, I took quick inventory. The security group consisted of seven of us, eight if you included Captain Hayes.

  Hayes sized me up, nodded, and said, “Okay, looks like that’s everybody. We’ll head to the training room in a minute. First, I want to level with you guys. I’m not going to sugar coat it the way that pansy Melbourne does. He wants you all to think this is going to be sunshine and roses. Don’t kid yourselves. It won’t be. This could be a harsh detail. Maybe not on the trip out there, but once we touchdown at our destination, things are going to be a cluster. It’ll be a mess. We’re going to be the only semblance of organization amongst a group of scientists and grunt laborers. None of them will be good at taking orders. Be prepared to be the redheaded stepchild of this operation. They’ll most likely grow to despise you, maybe even hate you, unless something goes wrong. If a shit storm goes down, then you’ll be the guys they turn to, the ones they rely on to save their sorry asses. Just don’t expect any respect in the interim. And I haven’t even gotten to the hostile environment. Any questions?”