Project Diamond (Jacob Lansing Series Book 1)

by J. W. Bouchard

  “You’re saying they wanted us to find it?”

  “I’m saying it is a distinct possibility. As I said, we don’t know what their motivation was. Maybe we were meant to find it when we were ready and introducing us to a planet as lucrative as fifty-five cancri e was their way of saying ‘hey, look what’s out there.’”

  “Okay, then why haven’t they made their presence known?” I asked.

  “Technically, they have. The existence of the warp bubble is proof of that.”

  “Yeah, but I mean why haven’t they shown themselves?”

  “It could be that they’re waiting to see what we do. How we use this newly found knowledge. If you left a powerful gift for a stranger, wouldn’t you want to wait and see what they did with it before you claimed credit for giving the gift? What if the people you left the gift for turned out to be savages or misused what they had been given?

  “My belief is that a civilization much more advanced than our own would take these factors into account. It is possible – more than likely, in fact – that we wouldn’t be the first life in the universe that they have encountered. Maybe they have learned from past mistakes. Maybe they have learned to be carefully observant before revealing themselves.”

  “I could see that,” Gloria said.

  Lisa had been mostly tight-lipped throughout the conversation, but I had been so wrapped up in what Thomas was saying that I hadn’t really noticed. She was still working on her first Coke. “Or,” she said, “they aren’t here anymore. A million years is a very long time.”

  “But Man has been around for close to six million years,” I said.

  Lisa said, “Less than two hundred thousand as homo sapiens though.”

  “Good point.”

  “We could speculate all night,” Thomas said. “My mind hasn’t stopped since they told us about it. The truth is that we might never know.”

  The lights in the bar flickered, indicating last call.

  “What time is it?”

  “Almost midnight.”

  “They close early.”

  “Mission protocol,” Gloria said.

  Thomas reiterated that the night’s conversation had been told in confidence. He stumbled slightly when he stood up from the table, and Lisa was there to steady him. I offered to walk back with them but she declined. “It was good seeing you, Jake,” she said, but I could tell she didn’t really mean it. She was still sore over the way I had pried the info out of Thomas. I couldn’t blame her.

  “Walk you back?” I asked. Gloria nodded.

  We took our time walking back to our rooms. We didn’t talk for most of it. I didn’t know where Gloria’s head was at, but mine was caught up in speculating on everything Thomas had told us about. From the beginning, my hope had been to learn that other life in the universe existed (or at least life similar to that on Earth). Our journey had barely begun and that hope had already become a reality.

  We stopped in the corridor outside of Gloria’s room and she said, “Some pretty heavy stuff, huh?”

  “That’s an understatement.”

  “You like her don’t you?”

  “Who?”

  “Lisa.”

  “As a friend? Yeah.”

  “You know what I’m talking about,” Gloria said.

  Was I that transparent? I had barely spoken to Lisa all night. I wondered how Gloria had arrived at her deduction based on so little information. “Yeah, maybe a little,” I said.

  “Don’t worry. She likes you too.”

  “Could’ve fooled me. If I did stand any chance, I blew it tonight.”

  “I wouldn’t be so hard on yourself. You disappointed her tonight, but she’ll get over it.”

  We said goodnight after that.

  I expected to find Harper awake and eager to hear about my night when I entered my room, but his bunk was empty. I remembered he was pulling night duty. That was a good thing because I didn’t know if I could have kept my word to Thomas otherwise. I was dying to tell someone. If what Thomas had said was true (and I didn’t have any reason to doubt him), then there was other life in the universe. Or, at least there had been at one time. They had built a massive transit system that was about to take us out of our own solar system and into another. I couldn’t help but feel that they had built it for us. Had left it for us to find and use when we were capable of understanding it. Why else build it so close to Earth? Or was I looking at it backward? Maybe the end closest to us was the destination point and they had started from the other end.

  What would we find? Would a higher intelligence go to all the trouble of leaving us a gateway to another part of the galaxy just so we could find a bunch of diamond? It didn’t seem right. There had to be more to it than that. Somehow I knew that couldn’t be the only reason, that we were meant to discover something more significant than some shiny rocks.

  I stripped down and climbed onto my bunk. I closed my eyes. I was exhausted, but the thoughts kept coming. The night’s events replayed themselves in my head. I thought about the Alcubierre drive, and about how drop dead gorgeous Gloria had looked. I wondered how long Lisa would stay pissed at me, and whether Gloria had been right about that – could I salvage whatever connection it was that we had?

  I drifted in and out, never skimming more than the surface of sleep. It seemed like a futile effort, and I considered getting dressed again and roaming the corridors, maybe see how Harper and Flynn were doing, but I didn’t have the energy. I didn’t feel alone anymore, even with the vastness of space lurking outside the window. At the moment, my thoughts were company enough.

  CHAPTER 9

  I kept my word. It was hard, but I kept it.

  In the week following our conversation with Thomas, I had come close to telling Harper about the secret on several occasions. Not because I thought he would provide the most ideal confidant, but because we were rooming together and I saw him more than I saw anybody else. I also knew he would be as excited as I was. Hell, he would probably have some obscure movie to compare it to.

  But I kept my mouth shut. We all did, as far as I know. I pulled two night shifts with Gloria and then a mid-shift in the command center with the flight crew. Jin had offered to trade me under the pretense that he would be doing me a favor seeing as how boring it was, but I knew what he really wanted was to spend more time drooling over Debby Huang. I would have traded just to do him a favor, but I wanted to get a feel for the flight crew and how things operated in the cockpit. Jin hadn’t been lying; it was boring as hell. The view wasn’t bad, but for the most part the flight crew was a no nonsense group of professionals.

  For the last day or two there had been tension in the air as we prepared ourselves for stasis. It was hard not to be nervous about it. Thomas had said the technology appeared sound, but I had a tough time trusting my life to machines. Especially when there was a fine line between deep hibernation and death. I had to hope the equipment performed its job. One slight error could mean the difference between keeping me heavily sedated and sending me into a coma. All of the crew except security and the flight crew would be going into stasis tomorrow. Security would follow the next day, and the flight crew would be sent off to the long nap later.

  As hard as I had tried over the last few days, I hadn’t run into Lisa. I had tried for a happy coincidence, roving the corridor outside her room more frequently than the other sections in hope that I would catch her coming or going, but my timing was never right.

  I had all but given up, figuring I wouldn’t see her again until we were awakened from stasis, but Fate finally came to my rescue.

  I had the evening off and headed to the cafeteria for a late dinner before I was supposed to meet Harper and Flynn at Finnigan’s for a kind of last hoorah. Lisa was seated at one of the tables. Thomas was seated next to her. She saw me when I came in, but I pretended I didn’t notice. I grabbed a tra
y and loaded it with food.

  Lisa was still eying me when I turned to find a table. I approached, feigning that I had just noticed her for the first time.

  “Fancy meeting you here,” I said. “Mind if I sit?”

  “It’s a free country,” Lisa said.

  “That’s unoriginal.”

  “Would ‘take a hike’ have been better?”

  “I guess I deserve that.”

  Thomas seemed to be the most uncomfortable with the situation. I already knew he was the type of person that would try to avoid confrontation like the plague. The food on his tray was mostly uneaten, but he stood up and said, “I was just finishing up.”

  “See you on the other side of the Milky Way?” I said, trying to be friendly.

  “Technically, we aren’t traveling to the other side of the galaxy. Not even halfway really. If put it into a context of scale, it would be more like crossing the street.”

  “Duly noted,” I said. After Thomas was out of earshot, I added, “He never quits does he?”

  Lisa acted like whatever was happening with her tray of food was too fascinating to take her eyes off of.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Okay? You can’t stay pissed at me forever.”

  “Actually, I can stay pissed at you as long as I would like.”

  “True. But it should be noted that I’m apologizing profusely to you right now. Do you really want to go to bed angry?”

  Lisa glanced up from her tray. “Something I realize about you, Jake, is that you have a difficult time taking things seriously.”

  “Why? Because I’m trying to get you to stop being mad at me? Listen, I know I ruffled your feathers when I put your boyfriend on the spot, but admit it, you were just as curious to know as I was.”

  “He’s not my boyfriend.”

  “Friend then.”

  “And I will admit to being curious, but I would never compromise our friendship for curiosity’s sake.”

  “I know you wouldn’t. I don’t have a lot of friends. Only acquaintances mostly. And I feel like you guys are the closest thing to friends that I’ve got on this ship, so I wouldn’t ruin that friendship on a whim either. Maybe I let my curiosity get the better of me. Maybe I felt like we had a right to know since our lives are involved. But despite me being a moron, can you find it in your heart to forgive me?”

  “Does this charming approach work on everyone?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I was hoping it would work in this case.”

  I saw the hint of a smile cross her lips. “For the record, I wouldn’t say you are a moron. An idiot maybe, but definitely not a moron.”

  “Then I’m moving up in the world. So? How about it? Forgiven?”

  “I guess. But just this once.”

  “I’ll take it. Now I’m going to eat because I’m nervous.”

  “Nervous?”

  “For stasis.”

  “Thomas says that there is nothing to worry about. The technology is sound.”

  “Yeah, but accidents happen. I think I’m going to stay nervous until we wake up on the other side of it. And pray for only good dreams.”

  I was thinking about my dad. About all the dreams I had had of him being incinerated within a millisecond. According to the company he had worked for, it was painless. Wouldn’t have felt a thing. After all, he was in stasis at the time it happened, which maybe meant he had been dreaming the whole time. As much as I thought passing away in your sleep might be the best way to go, a part of me wanted to be awake for it, with my eyes open. Otherwise, how would you even know you were dead?

  “You won’t dream,” Lisa said. “Not during hypersleep. Perhaps when you are slowly being put under or as they are waking us up, but otherwise stasis is too deep for dreaming. According to Thomas.”

  “Don’t crush my dreams.”

  I didn’t eat much. My stomach insisted that I was hungry, but I couldn’t bring myself to take more than a few small bites of food.

  Lisa said, “I’m only giving you the truth.”

  “Sometimes hope is better than the truth.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Do you want me to be there? You guys are being put under a day earlier than we are. If you want me there, if it would help at all, I could arrange to be there when it happens.”

  Lisa shook her head. She was nervous. I could tell. But she didn’t want to show it.

  I wondered if it was good or bad that I had shown her weakness, had admitted to being fearful of going under. She was sensitive and caring, but she wasn’t going to sugar coat anything. It would always be the truth with her and nothing but the truth. If it had been Gloria I had been talking to, she would have walked me through it. Would have tried to console me. I didn’t know which I appreciated more. A lie made with good intentions or the cold hard truth.

  “I should be going,” Lisa said.

  “I’ll walk you to your room.”

  I thought she might decline my offer, but she only nodded. We dumped our trays together and walked the corridor in silence. I tried to think of something profound (I would have settled for clever) to say, but nothing came. In the end, maybe the silence was better.

  When we arrived at the door to her room, I said, “Well, see you in three years?”

  “For us it will seem like overnight,” Lisa said. “I hope you have pleasant dreams.”

  “I thought you said we wouldn’t dream?”

  She shrugged. “One can still hope,” she said.

  PART II:

  ARRIVAL

  CHAPTER 10

  They don't prepare you for how bad it is.

  I opened my eyes as the fluid was flushed from the tight cocoon I had been imprisoned in. I yanked the IV from my arm, leaned over and vomited. My stomach was a twisted knot. The liquid contents of my stomach spilled onto the corrugated metal platform beneath the stasis pods. The overhead lights were blinding. I had to work to keep my eyes open. I glanced around the room, but everything was out of focus. Nothing but amorphous blurs surrounded me.

  Hayes’s voice filled the room.

  “Intense nausea is normal,” he said. “It’ll pass. Your sight will return to normal within a matter of minutes.”

  I couldn’t see Hayes. I said, “How long? How long were we out?”

  “Three years, one day, and seventeen hours.”

  “Did everything go okay?” Gloria’s voice.

  I looked to my left and saw movement, but couldn’t make out who it was.

  “No casualties. Take a few to get oriented and then meet me in the conference room.”

  I heard the whoosh of the doors opening and then closing. This was followed by a chorus of vomiting, the sickening splash of puke hitting the corrugated metal beneath our feet. I felt sorry for the janitorial team. There would be a real mess to clean up.

  “This reminds me of Aliens,” Harper said from somewhere not too far away.

  Then Flynn’s voice: “Think the bar’s open yet?”

  “You heard the Captain,” Perkins said. “Let’s walk it off and get to the conference room.”

  I touched my bare feet to the floor. The metal was cold. I tried to take a step and almost fell over. My legs were weak, and I had to brace myself against the pod’s frame to keep from collapsing.

  Normal symptoms of prolonged hypersleep. Intense nausea, vomiting, muscle atrophy, with the added possibility of vertigo, fainting spells, and migraines.

  I took a tentative step, allowed my legs to take some of the weight of the rest of my body as I kept a hand on the pod’s frame. I steadied myself and took another. It was excruciating at first, but it got better with each step. I wouldn’t be running any marathons, but my legs were starting to remember what it was like to walk again. I didn’t dare stray too far from the safety of my pod until my eyesight began to re
turn.

  Slowly, my vision cleared. I could make out the others struggling to regain normal use of their limbs, and could even make out distinguishing features if I squinted hard enough.

  “Instant hangover,” Flynn said. “Without the booze. No small feat.”

  Yuri muttered something in Russian before saying in English, “I’ve voken up verse.”

  “Is it weird,” Harper said, “if I’ve been asleep for three years and feel like I could go back to bed?”

  After what I guessed to be another twenty minutes, we headed out of the stasis room on stilted legs. To an outside observer, it would have been quite the sight. Would have made for a hilarious YouTube video.

  We made our way through the science corridor, past the lab which was dark and deserted, and stared longingly into the empty cafeteria. I had just finished puking my guts out, but I felt ravenous. The last food I had eaten had been in the cafeteria during my conversation with Lisa. After that, we had fasted for close to twenty-four hours. All the trials had shown that stasis went considerably better if you went in with an empty stomach.

  When we reached the conference room off the security corridor, Hayes was already seated at the head of the table.

  A translucent blue sphere hovered several inches above the center of the table. A hologram of a planet. But it wasn’t Earth.

  “Is that what I think it is?” Harper asked.

  “Meet your new home,” Hayes said. “Fifty-five cancri e.”

  The Astraeus had already dispatched a reconnaissance probe the day before. The hologram changed, zooming in on the planet until we were breaking through a thin atmosphere and giving way to nothing but rocky terrain. It appeared beautiful and barren even in the hologram’s standard ethereal blue. Similar to images I had seen of the grand canyon, only flatter and devoid of flora.

  Movement slowed until we were shown a lengthy patch of flat rock. In the distance, I could see a tall bluff which blocked the view beyond it.

  “This is the drop zone,” Hayes said. “On the dark side of the planet. Mining equipment will be sent down within the next two hours and operations will commence by zero-six hundred hours tomorrow.”