AMERICA ONE - NextGen II (Book 6)

by T I WADE

  For hours he tried. The computers were working. Somehow the crew on the planet must be tracking the pod’s whereabouts, but nothing else was working. He had forgotten about the pod’s solar wings until the dull emergency lights dimmed, and he pushed the button to uncover the solar wings from the outer wall of the pod and extend them towards the sun. To his relief the system worked, and within an hour, weak radiant energy from the sun was being fed into the pod’s energy storage system.

  Nancy screamed a few hours later when the white LEDs lit up the small room again.

  By this time they were back over The Martian Club Retreat and Pete was doing his best to communicate over the radios.

  “Sorry, Nancy, the radar seems to be working, but it is only showing me 50 miles of range. America One, if it was out there, should be visible on the screen. Apart from one piece of debris floating away about twenty miles on our port bow, the screen is empty.”

  “Are we done for, Pete, without the mother ship? The good news, I did bring your birthday cake,” Nancy replied glumly.

  “So far, we have expected external power. The temperature is normal in here at 68 degrees, so the heating systems must be working. I checked the air systems are working. We have no radios, but the computers are recording our flight. We are in the exact orbit that America One was, and I think that pink glow of whatever-it-was killed our radio antennas outside. The cameras are dead, but thanks to Vitalily, we have large windows. Unfortunately, thanks to Ryan we only have 250 gallons of hydrogen for the thrusters. At full power, that is about 60 hours of juice. I cannot answer all your questions right now, but I believe I will see my 65th birthday tomorrow, and I look forward to your cake.”

  “What about the rest of the crew? Shouldn’t we cruise around and search for them?” Nancy continued, doing her best to compose herself. After all, she was with the captain, not some dumb arse like General Jones.

  “I think we should check out the one piece of debris out there but even the search lights are dead,” he replied.

  Captain Pete was tied into “The Office’s” command chair. He had tried the controls for the mother ship, but they showed failure notices on everything he tried. It was the same with the laser controls, but he left them on in case something changed. He changed course in a wide arc and began closing to the large piece of debris now in front of them.

  He didn’t get too close, but he brought the pod within a hundred feet of the radar blip and found a part of his destroyed bridge floating like it was at the bottom of the sea. Nancy had found a LED torch in the storage pod that was just powerful enough to give them a dim view of the old control center of America One. Part of the bridge was still intact, but empty inside. It looked like the blast had ripped out its entire innards, as the inside of the cylinder was as clean and shiny as the outside wall. There was absolutely nothing else floating around, and they now both knew that the mother ship was no more.

  Nancy said The Lord’s Prayer aloud for all the crew she now knew hadn’t escaped. She also said the names of each of the eleven crew members she had medically checked over during the last few days.

  “Did you know Mr. Rose only had months to live?” she asked her husband. He looked at her questioningly. “Since doctor/‌patient confidentiality doesn’t exist anymore up here, he was dying of cancer, and had been since Dr. Rogers and I found it after we left Titan. It didn’t seem to worry him, he just sort of shrugged it off.”

  “The crew died instantaneously. So would have we if we had been aboard or any closer to the ship when it exploded,” replied Captain Pete.

  “Well, we had better hurry up and get rescued, or Mr. Rose will outlive us if he is still alive. I might even be gracious to General Jones if he appears on our radar monitors.”

  He didn’t, and for three days they waited for rescue. Captain Pete did have his 65th birthday party 24 hours after the destruction of the mother ship. Dr. Nancy had rummaged in the pallets of supplies and found some dried fruit and a few bottles of beer to add to the birthday party.

  To Captain Pete, his last supper tasted wonderful, and he was just happy to be alive to enjoy such a delicious cake. It was worth living for.

  While his wife was upstairs trying to get used to biking upside down, he pored over the information the computers gave him.

  The crew aboard the mother ship had recorded daily the amounts of fuel aboard the mother ship and what the crew had in storage down on the planet. He then told Nancy the bad news, that the reason that she hadn’t seen Jonesy’s sarcastic face was because there couldn’t be enough fuel to come and save them after the fuel the shuttles had used during the fight.

  Water gathering would be next on Ryan’s to-do list, then the crew’s return to Earth. There was not enough extra fuel to come and see if anybody was still alive. Ryan, or whoever was in charge down there, and the astronauts would have certainly seen the explosion in space from the ground. He gently explained to his wife that he hadn’t told anybody of their movement into “The Office.” Everybody down there would think them to be dead.

  During most of his 65th birthday, he worked the computers, working out a way to reach Earth. They couldn’t enter the Martian atmosphere. The pod and its small room below wasn’t made for reentries to any planet. Their only choice was to return to an orbit around Earth and pray somebody other than a destruction cube noticed them.

  Captain Pete, not knowing that Ryan was unconscious and near death, tried to work out the best time somebody might find them hanging around in low orbit around home.

  He knew that they had just missed the closing of the window for the last Mars/‌Earth opposition. Unfortunately, or fortunately, he could wait two years for the next time Earth and Mars were closest, and anyway it would take them years to cross the threshold with one underpowered thruster and 239.75 gallons of fuel.

  He spent hours working out the supplies. Each item or food type in the cylinder was recorded on the computers. For 30 crewmembers, they had 358 days of supplies. If the air filtration system and the heaters worked, they had enough food and water to last them for at least a decade. That eased his tension a bit. He could live well into his seventies, and Dr. Nancy could see 60.

  On the third day, he spent a dozen hours poring over scenarios of planet opposition. Since each opposition was 779.94 days, they were 58 days behind the last opposition, and that really didn’t help him.

  Also, the real problem was that the two planets didn’t get close at the same place in space, but opposed every two years 48 degrees further around on their similar orbits around the sun. The last opposition 58 days earlier meant that he and Nancy were currently 61,555,330 miles from Earth. At the next opposition in 721 days’ time, the planets would be 79.977 million miles apart and well over 272 million miles from their current position.

  The second opposition, in 4 years’ time, was not even thinkable; the location over 396 million miles from their current position.

  It is maybe now or never, Pete thought. If they got off the Mars bus right now and headed for Earth, it would take them a year reach the position Earth was in at the moment, and Earth would be in a totally different position in space every hour, day, month, and next opposition. Nothing was still in the solar system. Even the sun most probably moved.

  Unfortunately, Mars was now pulling them away from this closeness to Earth’s orbit as it also orbited the sun. He would need an exact date to detach them from the red planet and then line up to reach Earth at its closest point to that position on its next annual orbit.

  Captain Pete’s next problem was that Earth was moving at 66,559 miles an hour on its way around the sun. Up to now, Jonesy and the other astronauts’ craft had always had this pre-programmed into their computers, and their forward speed always showed as forward speed above the speed of Earth.

  Mars unfortunately travelled slower through space at 52,113 miles an hour on a parallel course to Earth, so that when they left orbit, their speed through space would be in a sideward direction, not an immedi
ate forward movement towards Earth’s closer orbit to the sun.

  Without the computers and his experience sending America One around the solar system, Captain Pete wouldn’t have had a chance of being one percent accurate, but over time, with trillions of computer calculations, he got answers.

  The only big problem was that he couldn’t estimate the speed of this snail, “The Office,” compared to the massive thrusters of the mother ship. That was the $64,000 question. How fast could this tub go, leaving enough fuel for any braking maneuvers at the end of the journey and to keep the side thrusters in control during the long flight? He had no choice but to have faith in the numbers. He decided on a 25 percent thrust for 64 hours instead of full thrust for 14 hours, once they got away from orbiting Mars. The lower thrust seemed to use slightly less fuel but increased the connection time to Earth’s orbit by 57 days. To Captain Pete, they had more time than gas.

  He also realized that now was as good a time as any. Once they reached an orbit of Earth, and they had a few gallons of fuel, they could stay in orbit until somebody noticed them.

  “We need to make a decision, Nancy,” asked Captain Pete on their fifth day. He was tired out and didn’t care if he never had to do a math problem ever again. “We have two choices, both pretty remote in success. We either wait for them to see us from down there, or orbit Mars until the second opposition in 719 days, or we leave orbit now and work on getting to within a near passby with Earth on her next or her second orbit, praying that we’ll be close enough for her to sweep us up and take us along. What should we do?”

  “What are you telling me, that we can hang around here for a year or three, and then attempt to get to Earth, or we leave right now? As one not in the astronomy field, I can’t for the love of Mike think why we should wait around for General Jones to show his face, and then when he doesn’t, we leave. Let’s go yesterday. At least crashing into Earth’s atmosphere will be a quicker, warmer, more satisfying death than dying out here in the middle of nowhere.” And the decision was made.

  Before the dust storm even got close to The Martian Club Retreat, Captain Pete fired up the rear thruster and left Mars’ orbit for a place in the solar system Earth might be in 499 days, if he had the speed to get there in time.

  Chapter 3

  We Are All Going to Die!

  For the first 48 hours at quarter thrust, the speed of the supply pod increased from 52,200 miles an hour as it left Mars’ orbit to 55,000 miles an hour. Through the large windows surrounding them, they watched as the red planet began to edge away from them. On the second day it was noticeably smaller than during the first.

  Captain Pete now had very little to do. He had programmed the estimated course into the computers, made sure the thruster was at 25 percent thrust, and watched as the fuel gauge stayed on full. His new ship had used full thrust for 90 minutes just to get away from their orbit and must have used a valuable gallon or more just to do that.

  He had exited at the perfect time, using his orbital speed to propel them away from the red planet’s gravitational pull. They wouldn’t have escaped Earth, he already knew that, but they weren’t orbiting the blue planet, now a star off the starboard bow and heading away from them at over 3,000 miles an hour.

  Captain Pete needed to get close to Earth within 500 days, before it turned away from him to go around the other side of the sun, where he couldn’t follow. The problem was that after 55 hours and at 56,100 miles an hour, their forward speed to their destination was only 1,100 miles an hour. They were moving faster sideways to Earth’s orbit, which would help them over time, but would reduce in speed slowly.

  The readouts showed that it would take them 875 days at their current speed to connect with Earth on her orbit, 145 days into their third year from then. As their speed increased, the travel time would shorten.

  “We are all going to die!” joked Nancy on Day Three after leaving orbit, when Captain Pete told her the bad news. He had just explained that their forward speed had increased by 1,000 miles an hour over the last several hours and their flight time was still 770 days: two years and 40 days. And that was not all; the fuel gauges showed 90 percent full. He had closed down the thruster after 64 hours, wanting to save the fuel for the end of the journey. “So what are we going to do, lover boy? Watch Earth spin around us year after year until we bump into it?”

  “I think you put it in a nutshell. At least Mars is now a slightly small planet. Look at the bright side. We could see the moon on Earth in about a year,” smiled the captain. At least he was with the only person who really mattered to him, they had all the time in space, and it was certainly an adventure of a lifetime.

  Over time the pod’s forward speed increased slightly to just over 4,300 miles an hour forward speed, and the sideward movement had reduced to 53,000 miles per hour, which he had expected. The computer readouts didn’t change much, and Captain Pete began to learn what Jonesy and VIN had put up with on their journeys to mine the asteroid. They had been cramped in such a small space on their first trip, and he had seen the tiny area they were to survive in.

  The captain also remembered much about what the two men had told him, how they survived, and what they did to alleviate the continuous boredom.

  Nancy was the doctor. She set them both up with bike riding upside down for two periods of three hours per day. There wasn’t much else they could do in zero gravity conditions to stay fit except make love. So they worked with the supplies, unpacking them and completing new inventory lists written out by hand. During the first year, they completed listing half their stores and then tired of the boring work.

  A few highlights had been exciting though. At some time, somebody in the biology department had added items to the stores. Since the other five storage pods and the crew compartment, which had its own storage supplies, had been down on Mars since their arrival, the biology team members and others had decided to hide secret stashes here and there.

  Mr. Rose must have hidden some of his fine Swiss chocolate. Suzi must have been the one to add a bottle of German Schnapps. Or could it have been Dr. Petra, or Dr. Martha? Somebody with Russian interests had stashed several cans of caviar and two bottles of the original Russian vodka Jonesy had never found.

  It was the 100-pound tank that stated “Hydrogen Gas” on the side that really excited Captain Pete. The extra bottle of hydrogen even in gas form could give another several hours of fuel at full power to the thruster. He wondered who had added this to the stash. Maybe it was Ryan himself? Once they got tired of taking each bag and storage bin apart, they decided to leave the rest for the next year and watch movies instead.

  The computer system had all the mother ship’s movies and old television shows stored on the servers. They could play every computer game invented before 2015. Eve and SimCity was Captain Pete’s favorite, while Nancy was happy to reread every medical journal ever published on Earth and America One. After several months, she reckoned that she had at least 3 PhDs in medicine.

  They both relearned Matt so that they were fluent in it, and Captain Pete tried to make head and tail of the information added to the computers from the Matt “Inventor” boxes by the physics team. There was quite a bit on the blue shields, and after the first year, he reckoned he had a PhD in pure physics, and he now understood how they worked, in theory. It was all about electrical impulses and dying nanites.

  It was three weeks after Pete’s 66th birthday that their forward speed headed over the 4,350 mark and their sideward movement to Earth’s next passby dropped under 49,900 miles an hour. It was also the day that Earth passed in front of them 31 million miles ahead of them. They were exactly halfway home.

  They could see Earth; it was just another star in the heavens directly in front of them. The view outside their craft was totally three-dimensional, not the two-dimensional view they had been used to while living on Earth in their younger days. The moon was not yet visible, but over the months, Earth passed in front of them from port to starboard, so slo
wly that they hardly ever thought it actually moved. Since they were travelling slower than the planet in front of them was moving through space, it gave them an idea of how slow they were actually moving.

  Their sideward speed hardly wavered, and Captain Pete was counting on this speed to bond them with Earth as it sped by on its next orbit.

  The worst nightmare of the journey was the zero gravity. Aboard the mother ship, the electromagnetic batteries in the floor of the bridge and caps and metal shoes kept them feeling normal. The rest of the ship rotated twice a minute, giving them enough centrifugal force pull to make it feel like gravity was holding their bodies to the roof of the cylinders above. On the upper level it had been pleasant and had certainly kept their bone loss down. Now they thought they could feel the more rapid depletion of calcium in their bones and worked harder and harder to stay fit.

  They made love often, sometimes not getting out of their strapped-down bed, or read or watched movies. The real nightmare was that they were vacationing in Hotel California and the boring vacation would never end.

  “I’m sure there must be more surprises in the pallet of supplies we haven’t touched yet?” suggested Captain Pete with little to do one day, fifteen months into the voyage. Nancy looked up from her reading and like a lazy cat stretched. Yes, she needed some amusement. She had already read Dr. Rogers’ paper on “Blood Clotting In Zero Gravity Conditions” twice.

  She unstrapped herself from the horizontal bed they had built out of pallets in the middle where the three consoles had once stood, using mattresses from upstairs, and floated semi-naked into the supply pod.

  Captain Pete had rearranged the office to only one computer terminal and had packed away the rest which weren’t needed.

  “I wonder what goodies we might find in this one,” she stated, trying hard to get excited.

  It was more to alleviate boredom than anything, but as before they found the odd luxury that excited them. Again there was a can of caviar and a bottle of vodka. This time the box had Igor’s writing on it, stating that the contents were his and not to be consumed.