If there had been any romance in the situation, Hayes killed it quickly. He explained how he would have rotating two-man teams overseeing the operations zone, and another two man team covering the territory just outside of it. I didn’t see a reason for it, but I kept my mouth shut. If anything, I saw it as an opportunity to explore the planet.
In addition to the foot teams, Hayes wanted another team operating one of the rovers. He would maintain security on board the Astraeus himself.
“We’ll operate in shifts. You’ll each pull two shifts a day, and then you can catch a shuttle back to the mothership for R and R. I realize that leaves us stretched thin. Since we’re operating on the planet’s dark side, a good chunk of the day will be in a kind of twilight, with total darkness during remaining hours. This is temporary. Just until mining operations are underway and we can modify from there. Don’t expect much shut eye until after that.”
I didn’t care about any of that. I would go without any sleep at all if necessary. All I could think about was my first step on a new planet and whether we would find life there.
“Once operations are set up, I’ll limit teams so we can free up bodies to escort the science teams on their expeditions. I’ll need eyes on the ground while they send the equipment down. Any volunteers?”
I wasn’t the only one to raise my hand. Everyone else did, too. My body ached and I was still getting accustomed to using my legs again, but I didn’t care. I wanted down there first. It was a crapshoot. Every other member of the team had raised their hand as well.
“Perkins,” Hayes said. “You’re it. Pick somebody you can stomach. I want you suited up and ready for departure within the hour.”
Perkins nodded. “Yes, Captain.”
“The rest of you get your winks where you can. You won’t see sleep after tonight.”
Hayes exited the conference room. I shifted my gaze from the rocky landscape presented by the hologram to Perkins. It wasn’t any surprise that Hayes had selected him to go. He had more experience than the rest of us, and he had seen enough action to make the rest of us look like newborns in comparison. Not to mention that we all thought Hayes had a soft spot for the old grunt.
“Well, who’s it gonna be, Perky?” Flynn asked. As far as I knew, Flynn had created Perkin’s new nickname on the spot. I couldn’t tell if that sat well with Perkins or not. He was as stoic as ever as he mulled over the decision. I was trying to remember if I had ever offended the man. Had I done anything to endear myself? Did he have a favorite?
Flynn, Gloria, Harper, Jin, Yuri and I stared at Perkins. It didn’t seem to bother the old man. I wondered if anything made him nervous anymore.
“All right,” Perkins said. “Lansing, meet me in the docking bay in forty-five. Be ready to suit up.”
I was stunned.
“I’ll be there with bells on,” I said, immediately regretting it.
“Uh huh,” Perkins said and left us.
“You been bribin’ the elite, Lansing?” Flynn asked after Perkins had gone.
“What is that supposed to mean?”
Harper said, “Looks like Jake here made the favorites club.”
“Oh come on,” I said. “I’m no favorite.”
“We’re happy for you, Jake,” Gloria said. I could tell she meant it. “This was what you wanted. Feet on a new planet.”
“That’s right, buddy,” Flynn said. “You go play with some rocks. I think I’ll be just as happy tipping a few back in Finnigan’s.”
I told myself I didn’t care how the others felt. Didn’t care if they labeled me a favorite or not, but the truth was that I did feel a slight pang of guilt. It was a new feeling. I asked myself why it mattered. I couldn’t think of a reason.
Back in my room, I looked myself over in the mirror above the sink. I was pale and had lost some weight, my face thinner than it had been, but I couldn’t detect any signs that I had aged during the three years I had been in stasis. Thomas had said that the aging processed was slowed significantly while we were under. It wasn’t a trick of time dilation. It was simple biology. An effect of reducing the body’s functions to a state of absolute hibernation.
The world we had left behind would have aged at the same rate, which got me to wondering if we had communicated with the folks on Earth in all that time. Would anything have changed? I wondered if my mother had ever come looking for me in that time. Somehow, I doubted it.
Harper was in the top bunk, propped up on his side, leafing through a magazine. I knew he was disgruntled that Perkins hadn’t chosen him. He had said as much. He would go on a rant, stop for a few minutes, and then bring it up again like I hadn’t heard it all before.
“I don’t get it. Why you? This is just like our first night on the ship when I got night duty. Hayes has it in for me, and Perkins is practically his right hand man. There wasn’t a chance on God’s Green Earth that he was going to pick me to go out there. I’m last in line, the low man on the pole. Have been ever since Hayes laid eyes on me.”
“I don’t think it’s like that,” I said. I had already slid into my jumpsuit. My skin was extra sensitive since we had come out of stasis, and the jumpsuit’s fabric was unusually rough.
“You know what though? I’m an underdog. And people freaking love an underdog. Just take a look at any movie. Who do you root for? The underdog. It’s a law of nature.”
“So what are you complaining about then? Doesn’t that mean you’ll get your shot?”
Maybe I was moody after stasis, but Harper’s incessant whining was giving me a headache. Normally, I would have humored him, but I knew I was getting close to my snapping point. I was also hungry, but there wouldn’t be time to grab a bite before I had to meet Perkins in the docking bay. I didn’t want to be late and have him regret picking me. I didn’t think there was any credence in Hayes having favorites, but it couldn’t hurt to treat the situation as though there was some truth in it.
“It sucks waiting, man,” Harper said. “The underdog never wins until the end. They always have to go through a bunch of shit first. Then they save the day. And only then do people realize what a great guy he is.”
“Be patient. Your time’s coming.”
“Yeah, yeah, blow me off. It’s not like you have anything to worry about. You’re in like Flynn. Get it?”
“I got it.”
“But I’m better than all that. I’m going to wish you good luck.”
“I appreciate that.”
And I left. I hurried down the corridor. When I reached the docking bay, Perkins was already there and suited up. I was ten minutes ahead of schedule so I knew I wasn’t late, but Perkins was one of those guys that always showed up before you did. It could have been one of Harper’s laws of nature. Perkins was the kind of old school dude that would die rather than show weakness.
I suited up without a word, fumbling with my helmet (it had been over three years since I’d practice taking it on and off after all). I double-checked all the seals and then nodded to Perkins that I was ready. Our carrier ship had already docked with the Astraeus. Perkins spoke into the com and the doors slid open. We climbed into the row of seats and buckled in.
The carrier ship’s engines whined into life. The build was different than the one we had ridden on to reach the Astraeus. The front of the ship contained an angled rectangular window. Below it, we could see the control panel alive with various glowing buttons, the unmanned pilot seats. There was no pilot today though. The ship was being flown remotely by one of the flight crew on the Astraeus. It must have been like playing a highly realistic video game.
The bulk of the Astraeus had blocked our view, but once we detached from the docking port and had drifted away, 55 Cancri e came into full view. I had only seen the ethereal blue of the hologram in the conference room, a highly detailed representation of the planet, and for some reason I had expected someth
ing similar in real life. But instead what I saw was an enormous sand-colored sphere like tarnished gold. Nothing could have prepared me for seeing it with my own eyes.
Perkin’s voice came through my helmet com. “You don’t see that every day.” I think it was as close to awe as the man would ever get.
I reminded myself how we had gotten here. The Alcubierre drive, the advanced interstellar subway system that Thomas had told us about. It had worked. Somehow we had traveled three years to some unknown location near Jupiter and ridden a bubble that warped space in such a way that we had covered forty light years almost instantaneously. I wished they would have woken us up when we had neared Jupiter. Then I remembered the drive was supposed to be a secret. Probably only a handful of scientists and the flight crew knew about it, and possibly Captain Hayes.
I couldn’t take my eyes off the planet.
The ship sped up, and after several minutes 55 Cancri e filled the entirety of the window. We sliced through a thin layer of wispy clouds that gave way to nothing but dark rock for as far as the eye could see. Everything was shrouded in semi-darkness. We cruised ten thousand feet above ground, passing huge cratered areas and a chain of zigzagging mountains that appeared to divide the planet in half.
“What do we do when we touch down?” I asked.
“We wait,” Perkins said. “The equipment should start arriving within the hour.”
The ship slowed and hovered and sank toward the rocky terrain below. There was the sound of grinding metal as the landing feet locked into position from the ship’s underbelly. I had to give whoever was flying the ship credit. For performing such a maneuver remotely, we landed relatively gently.
The engines wound down. I followed Perkins’s lead and unbuckled my safety harness. We stood at the ship’s rear. The back hatch opened up and folded over until it formed a slanted ramp that we used to descend the last fifteen feet to the planet’s surface.
It was mostly dark. Not quite twilight. Our suits had lights attached to either side of our helmets as well as more powerful ones mounted in the shoulders. The headlamps came on automatically based on the amount of ambient light. There were also lights built into the plastic armor of each of our suit’s forearms, which we could control manually.
Behind us, the metal ramp scraped surface dirt as it folded back into place.
The planet had a gravity of its own. Not as strong as the gravity on Earth, but still substantial enough that we wouldn’t be able to perform any great feats of strength.
In the distance, I could see dust blowing. My suit’s HUD system measured wind speed at roughly twenty miles per hour. The temperature was a balmy nine hundred degrees. If not for our suits we would have melted like candle wax. As it was, I felt pretty comfortable if not slightly sweaty in my suit. According to what Hayes had told us, the temperature on the dark side of the planet was nothing compared to the side that perpetually faced its sun, which would have been closer to three thousand degrees.
I took several steps. For the most part, it was the same as walking on Earth, only my feet felt slightly lighter. I switched on one of my forearm lights and bent down to touch the ground, sliding my hand over the rock. When I examined my glove, it was covered in black grime. The surface was composed of a thick layer of graphite, much softer than the graphite found on Earth. I knew somewhere below this upper layer of graphite was a layer of pure diamond. I was standing on top of a fortune. Literally.
Perkins unshouldered a hard plastic capsule he had been carrying on his back. He unscrewed the top and shook out a bunch of domed wafers the size of hockey pucks.
“We need to set up a perimeter,” he said. He grasped one of the wafers and shook it. It lit up, giving off a bright green light. “Give it a good shake and it’ll activate the light. We’ll try to form a circle. Walk about a hundred yards out and start placing them about twenty feet apart.”
“They help guide the ships in?”
“The ships guide themselves, but these’ll help. It beats standing around with our thumbs up our asses.”
I scooped up an armful of the domed wafers and headed in the opposite direction of Perkins. Once I estimated I was about a hundred yards out, I began placing the wafers at twenty foot intervals. After ten minutes, Perkins and I had formed a large circle dotted with green lights. I switched my shoulder lights to manual and turned them off to conserve the suit’s battery power. Both the suit’s battery power and oxygen were rated for 72 hours, but I figured using the lights at full blast could substantially reduce that time.
The clock on my helmet display said it was 1800 hours Earth time. A Friday. February 7th, 2177.
It was still hard to believe we had jumped three years into the future. Or at least been unconscious for most of it. Time didn’t seem to have any meaning out here. When you were standing on a massive rock forty light years from your home, in a place where an Earth year passed in a mere eighteen hours, and where it was mostly dark 24/7, the concept of time didn’t seem to matter. A minute could have been an hour or vice versa.
Perkins and I stood there. There was more silence than I was comfortable with.
The fact that we were on another planet kept eluding me somehow. My mind wanted to believe that we were still stuck somewhere on Earth. And the distance from home was unfathomable. It was like trying to wrap your mind around what it must be like to be dead. You ask yourself what it must feel like, but have to admit that if you were dead you wouldn’t have feelings. What would you see? The short answer: nothing. But how does your brain imagine nothing? Total darkness? A blinding whiteness like a blank page? No, both of those things would be something. You had to imagine nothing, the complete absence of everything, including white or black or gray, forget the fact that you wouldn’t see anything at all since you wouldn’t have the ability of sight. After a while, you were forced to give up. The human mind is capable of many spectacular things, but envisioning the world without you in it, your complete nonexistence, isn’t one of them. Even that, I thought, must be a type of survival mechanism.
Silence was only there in the respect that neither Perkins nor I were talking. My head was crammed with loud thoughts. Maybe that was par for the course when you were milling around on a foreign planet.
Finally, I broke the silence and said, “Why me?”
“Why you what?”
“Out of everybody, why’d you pick me to come down here?”
“You’re one of the serious ones,” Perkins said over the com.
Which confused me. It had only been a few days (years if you counted the time we’d spent in stasis) since Lisa had told me the exact opposite. In her opinion, I didn’t know how to be serious. At least not when the time called for it. Perkins’s opinion obviously differed from hers, leaving me no more self-aware than I had been when we had first started out.
“And I had a hunch you wanted it the most. Me, I could care less. It’s just another rock to me.”
I believed him. I briefly wondered what a guy had to go through to be so indifferent to everything.
“Well, I appreciate it,” I said.
We stood there for a while. My HUD counted off the seconds. My attention was continually drawn to the looming ridge behind us. I wasn’t sure how directions worked on a foreign planet, but I figured the ridge was to the north of us. Judging by the distance, it was probably at least a two kilometer walk. It was tall and jagged, but a man could probably climb it. I didn’t know how long we would be waiting in that crude circle of green light, and my curiosity prodded me to go check it out, but if I ran off in a flight of fancy it might change Perkins’s opinion of me. I would have to hope I’d get a chance to explore later. Maybe if I could score one of the science expedition details.
Hayes’s voice came over the com. “Equipment’s on its way down. You should be seeing the carrier right about…now.”
Purple light shone in the clouds overhea
d. Half a minute later, one of the carrier ships cut through them, illuminating us in a blinding white light as it descended, kicking up flurries of dirt.
“Let’s get out of the way before that thing squashes us like bugs,” Perkins said. I followed him until we were outside the perimeter.
Perkins and I watched as the ship landed. The engines powered down, and the small dust storm settled. Much like the smaller carrier had done when we had arrived, the rear of the equipment carrier slid open and out, folding over until it formed a wide, angled platform.
We made our way toward it. Our shoulder lights penetrated the darkened interior of the ship and we could make out the bulky equipment hiding inside like sleeping animals.
“You know how to drive any of this stuff?” I asked.
“Nope. Don’t need to. It’s all remote operated. Standard cams in all the machinery, so they can teleoperate from the ship. Most of them have positioning software built in.”
As if taking a cue from Perkins’s statement, one of the Caterpillar mining trucks roared to life, its headlamps blinking on.
A robot voice issued from the truck’s speaker. “Please clear away from the platform.”
After we had descended the platform and moved away, the truck rumbled forward, came down the ramp, and circled around toward the edge of the perimeter we had created.
“Has a capacity of ninety tons,” Perkins said.
Two more trucks drove themselves down the ramp, both with the deep buckets on the back for hauling away debris. They joined the first truck and the engines died.
These were followed by two smaller vehicles, one with a boom lift in the back and the one following it had a grated platform on the back.
“Looks like that’s it,” Perkins said.
The ramp folded back into place and the ship’s engines started up. We watched it ascend into the sky and take off. It was followed by another ship several minutes later. Like the first, the ramp came down and the equipment came to life on its own. Loaders and dozers and excavators came down and parked themselves at a safe distance.
Project Diamond (Jacob Lansing Series Book 1) Page 10