AMERICA ONE - NextGen II (Book 6)

by T I WADE

  For two days, Captain Pete, who had been the watchful eyes on The Martian Club Retreat for a couple of years in America One and was used to looking down at The Retreat every time it passed underneath, studied the current video and photos taken with the laser cameras. Everything looked peaceful down there, but he hadn’t seen how the base had been left for the return flight to Earth years earlier. Mars had.

  “Without the shields, or any external vegetation, it is hard to see anything down there on the ledge,” Captain Pete stated to Mars in SB-IV’s cockpit.

  “I took a mental photo of our base as I launched,” replied Mars. “It was a hurried departure and we only got out before the next storm by seconds. The external robotic guard house was left out, and that looks like it is still in the same place and doesn’t look destroyed or anything. I see piles of what I believe are the mounds of topsoil from the vegetable gardens. The biology crew reckon that it could be of further use, but we did get the robots to carry several tons of topsoil into the underground chambers before we closed down the shields.”

  “Well, there are no telltale marks of an aircraft landing,” added Captain Pete, “but all signs could have been covered up by another storm.”

  “I have sent a signal to the guardhouse for our robot soldiers to reboot and power up, and that will take them another 24 hours. If they walk out of the guardhouse once they are powered up, I believe it is safe to descend. I still think that we should take down SB-III first and not the Matt ship. At least we will be armed with one laser.”

  “I like the way you designed your robots to stay outside the base,” remarked Captain Pete. “If somebody had visited and destroyed the robots, they won’t be walking out of the chamber, and that would alert you that somebody had tampered with or destroyed them. Very ingenious.”

  “Well, we had so much time waiting the storms out,” replied Mars, “that we came up with so many ideas to let us know from orbit if we had visitors. It was more out of boredom than anything else.”

  Twenty-four hours later, with SB-III ready to head down, the six robots, now rebooted, walked out of the external security chamber and stood in a row so that Mars knew they hadn’t been tampered with and that it was reasonably safe to descend.

  Captain Pete was to command the orbital ships while Mars, Jenny Burgos, and two of Mars’ security guys, Johnny Walls and Dave Black, headed down. Saturn was not allowed to pilot this flight.

  Many watched from above as the smaller shuttle descended towards the red planet’s surface. For a whole orbit both craft stayed at the same forward orbital speed as the lower craft descended until it faded from eyesight. From then on, it could only be seen through the laser gun cameras and the ship’s three cameras pointing downwards.

  “This brings back memories,” stated Mars to SB-IV high above as they began to slow. “Captain Pete, I have reverse thrusters on full power. Forward speed decreasing through 13,000 knots, altitude 161 miles above the surface. We have you on radar, over.”

  “Copy that, Mars,” replied the captain. “I have nothing else showing up on radar and will be heading over the horizon ahead of you and out of radio comms in seventeen minutes, over.”

  During the first separated orbit, it took SB-IV in a far higher orbit three hours to get back into radio contact with the ship below, as both were still orbiting, but at far different altitudes and speeds.

  “Forward speed 7,000 knots, altitude 40 miles and will hold this altitude for two hours thirteen minutes until you catch us up and come back into radio contact over the western horizon,” replied Mars. It was imperative that SB-IV was in the space above them to give them added firepower if the smaller craft was attacked on approach to the base. Captain Pete acknowledged that the younger man’s math was correct.

  Again the larger shuttle orbited the red planet, and Mars began to decrease altitude again on the back side of the planet as SB-IV came back into radio communications. Now, at this lower speed and altitude, the higher shuttle headed over the horizon in far less time.

  By the time Captain Pete gave him the thirty-second warning that they were about to lose comms, Mars reported back that SB-III was at seven miles above the surface at 3,000 knots and on her final orbit.

  SB-IV would have two more orbits, travelling twenty times the speed and distance to SB-III’s slower, shorter distance in one orbit. They communicated each time both ships came into radio contact.

  Mars took over control of the shuttle manually for the last orbit and Jenny Burgos manned the laser.

  “Captain Pete to SB-III, we should be in radio contact. SB-III, do you copy?”

  “Roger, copying you, Captain Pete, altitude 2 miles, forward speed 600 knots, seven minutes to target. We are descending at 1,000 feet per minute and reducing speed through 590 knots. Anything on radar up here?”

  “Negative,” replied the captain. “Nothing above 5,000 feet. I have you at 6,200 feet and you are about to disappear from radar. I have your ship and the base on cameras, and still no movement on or around our base. The six robots are still standing in a line. We have eighteen minutes before we lose contact over.”

  Mars headed the craft in, and slowly The Martian Club Retreat came into view as the crater expanded below them. To Mars it looked the same as when he had left more than two years earlier. The piles of old topsoil were flatter than he remembered, and the flat area in front of the crater wall looked like another storm might have come through. He aimed one of the cameras towards where Rover Opportunity had fallen off the cliff, and a partly submerged robot was still there, covered in red soil or dust. At 1,000 feet and a mile out, he could see his six robot guards still in line as Pete had stated.

  “Have visual, going in,” Mars stated.

  “Laser ready,” added Jenny.

  The larger shuttle was now right above them and still there was nothing new on the radar screens. All knew that the radar couldn’t pick up much moving below 5,000 feet on Earth or Mars anyway.

  “Five hundred feet, 800 yards out, still no movement. Everything looks like we left it,” added Mars Noble over the radio. “Four hundred… 300… 200… On hover, 50 feet… We are down on our old landing area. Sure have dust spraying out in every direction. This place needs a clean. It looks all quiet here, and I’ll just sit here for a couple of minutes getting rid of the red dust before I get my helmet on.”

  “Roger, SB-III,” replied the captain 200 miles above the still shuttle. “You should have another six hours of daylight left. I can only see clear planet surface. It doesn’t look like a storm in my viewing area, so you do what you think is best.”

  For twenty minutes nobody in the cockpit moved. All four crewmembers just looked out of the cockpit windows to the usual eerie and dusty Martian landscape. The temperature, Mars noticed, was a warm minus ten degrees Fahrenheit. The sun, although tiny, was shining above them through the dust cloud, and the view horizontally slowly began to clear.

  After he felt sure that all was safe, he asked his two security guys to also don helmets. All three of the men had been here before and knew what to expect. Jenny was to be left manning the laser, the thrusters on idle in case she needed to exit quickly.

  “Ok, guys, let’s go,” Mars ordered, and he entered the docking port first. Within ten minutes he was on the soft cleared surface as the second pair of space boots belonging to Johnny landed gently next to where he was standing.

  Since leaving Earth, the whole mission hadn’t used the blue shields once they had entered orbit after leaving Earth. Mars had one of the black boxes in his hand and set it down where the closest shield had been placed in its position before they had left.

  Johnny Walls had the second shield, and Dave Black carried the third shield. Mars set up his box to the power connectors still placed a few inches below the surface of the hard ground, and then headed over to the six robots.

  Mars could give orders to the robots by giving them direct orders over the intercom and being within several hundred feet of them. Each order st
arted with the robot’s number, with the word robot in front of the number.

  “Robot One Chief. Any visitors since I left?” he asked, forgetting that they had been powered down.

  “Electrical command equipment working at 100 percent on all six personnel. Lasers now rebooted, systems powered up and ready. We did lose power for an unknown amount of time. I cannot answer correctly, Captain Mars,” the robot politely replied in its very robotic-type voice.

  “Do a complete perimeter check. Be prepared for possible ground or air attack, Robot One Chief,” added Mars. “There are three of us. Mars Noble, Johnny Walls and Dave Black. We will check out inside.”

  “Hallo, Mars, Johnny and Dave. Did you have a pleasant journey to Earth? It is good to see you again. Beginning perimeter check now.” The chief robot walked off with its usual slight jerk to check the football-field-size plateau for anything that wasn’t meant to be there.

  One of the two Cold Fusion plants was still active, and the protective door to the outer chamber’s airlock slid open. It moved as easily as it had done when he had closed it over two years earlier, and all three men stepped into the small room.

  Mars readied his hand controller and pressed the button to slide the outer door closed. Immediately the tiny room was filled with atmosphere air, and within a minute the inner door opened into the silicon-glassed room outside the two openings into the still-sealed underground area.

  All three men checked their suit readouts. Oxygen was high, carbon dioxide was normal, and so were the other gases, except for helium, which was slightly higher than normal, but still at safe levels. The temperature had cooled as the system had been left on low power. That was enough to give the outer room a zero temperature, ten degrees warmer than outside.

  They were carrying radiation into the inner area, and normally the spacesuits were taken off, cleaned and rubbed down in this outer area, but Mars wanted to do a quick walk through the underground chambers. They carried damp cloths in a sealed suit bag on their waists, and carefully they wiped each other’s suit down to collect most of the radiation attached to the suits.

  “Temperature inside the chamber, 30 degrees Fahrenheit, Captain Pete, Jenny. All gases are slightly low, so I’ll turn up the power first.” Mars could see that nothing had been moved. There was equipment that they had left in piles. If anybody had gone through the stuff, it would have been moved. He knew it would smell musty inside the inner area, and that with a few days on normal power, the systems would cleanse the air.

  Once they were ready, they opened one of the doors leading into the underground chamber. Dave Black would stay to keep eyes on the outside while the other two checked out the inner area.

  The lights were switched on as they passed through the areas, and the console in the command center was visited first to check out the systems and increase the whole power system to normal. “Feels so weird to be walking around in such weak gravity again,” Mars said to Johnny behind him.

  “Better a little than nothing, like on the shuttles,” Johnny Walls replied.

  “Well, it all looks like we haven’t had visitors, Jenny,” added Mars. Captain Pete was over the horizon and again out of radio reception.

  “Hurry back, it’s lonely out here by myself,” Jenny answered.

  “You have Dave in the sunroom who has eyes on you, and six good-looking robotic men out there with you,” Mars replied. “Better count them to make sure.”

  “What do you think I’m doing out here, counting sheep? There isn’t much to look at except the crater and your six metal men jerking around,” Jenny remarked.

  “Power is back up to normal. We certainly haven’t been visited, and I think our job here is done. Jenny, we’ll be out in ten minutes. I still have the lowest level to check.” Mars and his armed guard headed down the stairs to the third level, the lowest, and it was the same as the other two. Then they headed back up to the upper level, the ground floor, and checked the storage rooms.

  There was the water they had left, still in its old 50-gallon, twenty-year-old plastic containers brought from Earth two decades ago. Also there were the several dozen large aluminum canisters of dried food supplies. In several more silver canisters were other sorts of greens now dried and stored from the outside shields where they had grown. He realized how close they had been to starving to death before they had left. The crew would not have lasted another storm.

  Now it was time to restock the chicken area with the chickens that had grown up on the flight over, but first one of the three shields needed to be made active and the atmospheric air brought from Earth tanked into the shield. It was in the shuttle’s cargo hold and would take twenty-four hours.

  Jenny headed back into the rear cargo bay to ready the two dozen tanks of pure island-caught air, as Mars had wanted to breathe air on Mars from the Australian island. Mars hoped that it would still have the smell of the sea in it when released. She readied the docking port, exited the cargo bay, sucked the atmosphere into the ship’s storage tanks and opened the roof doors.

  The air tanks weren’t heavy and sort of floated down to the ground like an old air balloon did on Earth. One by one, the three men lifted the large silver air tanks. On Earth they would have weighed well over a hundred pounds, but on Mars they were easy to maneuver.

  All three shields grew simultaneously as Captain Noble activated the second Cold Fusion plant. One of the farther shields surrounded SB-III as it grew. Since it had a vacuum inside the shield until the air was released, it didn’t really matter where SB-III had been parked.

  What was important was that the closest shield overlapped the exterior wall and roof of the outer room, and once there was an atmosphere, the shuttle could be moved into the forward shield.

  Also, the three shields overlapped each other by several feet, which meant that the crew without wearing suits could carefully pass from one shield to another once there was atmosphere in each shield.

  That night they slept in the shuttle and watched a beautiful red sunset from the dust as the sun sank behind the cliff behind them. The cliff’s shadow moved across the large crater in front of them at its usual rapid rate.

  The weak gravity pull could be felt in the shuttle. For once, food stayed on a flat plate, just, and liquids could be drunk out of open cups, if they were moved very slowly.

  It was nice to be on Mars again, but Captain Noble, like his older generation, had learned to enjoy fishing and the blue sea, and suddenly that was where he would rather be right now. He had always thought that he would once again feel at home on the red planet. It was certainly beautiful, and the gravity soft and pleasant, but now that he had spent time back on Earth, he knew which planet he would rather call home.

  This could be his last mission to Mars. The Matts and people who wanted to live here could have it.

  Two weeks later, it was as if they had never left. The Martian Club Retreat was busy. All three shields had been given their atmospheres and each shield had a ship parked inside. The larger shuttle hadn’t been designed for the plateau, and on Mars the shield didn’t extend over its complete tail. Its stubby wings were just inside the walls, but it wasn’t supposed to call the surface home for very long.

  Captain Pete had brought her down to empty her of all the supplies, which would take several days, and then he and a few others would return to orbit and act as an early defense system until they knew for certain that there was no intended attack by the old Matts.

  It was getting to be time to go and see the coordinates Captain Pete had recorded before America One had exploded around him, but first the contents that had travelled through the solar system had to be carried carefully into wherever their new home was. The soil, plants, trees and animals and insects had to be taken out and introduced to their new environment.

  The old topsoil was tested and then the fresh soil brought from Earth was mixed in with the old and nutrients added. Then new soil was placed in the inner chamber’s growing area. Moving several tons of freshl
y mixed topsoil was pretty hard work. Not as hard as the gold extraction down on Earth, thanks to the lesser gravity, but it took time to carry it and make beds ready for growing.

  “Let’s get going,” stated Mars to the other astronauts two weeks after they had first arrived. The biologists were happy and the base was ready to grow food. The team of astronauts now had two jobs to do. First, water had to be gathered at the old watering hole in the planet. The crater was quite far away and 14,000 feet deep. The exact coordinates for landing had been recorded several times by Jonesy when he had taken the beginner astronauts on training flights to get water.

  The extremely cold, unfrozen and pure water in the crater had special equipment to collect it. Silicon buckets on silicon poles were used to gather the extremely cold liquid so that the utensils wouldn’t chip or break with the temperatures.

  The water was gathered, 2,000 gallons necessary for the new gardens and another 2,000 gallons to break down the hydrogen to make fuel and keep up the fuel reserves. Only once new fuel had been made could Mars head over to the area of the planet thought to have enemy.

  The mission had enough fuel for the return flight in two years’ time, and enough for another 50 hours of thrust for all ships combined, but that wasn’t enough to search a large part of the planet. The first water trip would give the scientists enough raw materials to double that amount of thrust time.

  The crew had discussed often how easy it was to fill up a shuttle on Earth with hydrogen fuel, but the making of the fuel and the necessary oxidizers on Mars was extremely slow and difficult.

  SB-III had always collected the water, and this time the Burgos sisters, who had learned to fly the same ship with Jonesy going to fetch water, were in command. Mars Noble was taking Dr. Barbara Messer in the Matt craft. She was a tiny lady about 55 and fitted perfectly into the rear seat. She was such a small woman that she had to wear a teenager/young child size spacesuit.