“Your wife?” Caty asked.
“My everything,” David said again, this time in English.
Caty nodded and looked out the window, watching blackened, fire-scorched trees blur by. “Alexander was mine,” she whispered.
Chapter 17
Max Carter sat in his quarters watching the approach to Wonderland under normal gravity. After passing through the so-called David Davorian Belts, the mission was back on track.
Max set the viewport in his room to show the view from the Lincoln’s bow cameras and then magnified and enhanced Wonderland for ease of study. A mottled blue and white ball appeared, surrounded by a profusion of stars.
Beautiful. Amazing what technology can do, he thought.
Max considered everything that lay ahead for him and the crew of the Lincoln. So far his mission was going according to plan, and the crew of the Lincoln was none the wiser. He had detected some suspicion from Commander Korbin during a routine interview before everyone had entered the G-tanks, but Korbin didn’t really have anything to go on, nor would she until he decided otherwise.
Suspicion and proof are two very different things.
Max smiled. Catch me if you can.
*
May 22nd, 2790
(The Lincoln’s Frame of Reference)
After three whole days of rest, Doctor Crespin reluctantly discharged Alexander from the infirmary so that he could watch the Lincoln’s final approach to Wonderland from his seat on the bridge.
The planet swelled before them, looking startlingly like Earth. The day side of the planet lay dead ahead with the terminator line on the far left side of the planet, making Wonderland look egg-shaped rather than spherical. The day side shone a familiar blue with white patches and swirls. Somewhere near the center of the planet, mottled reds and purples peeked out through the white.
Someone whistled.
“She’s a real exotic beauty,” Lieutenant Stone said, identifying himself as the whistler.
“Vasquez, what are sensors telling us so far?” Alexander asked.
“Land temperatures on the surface range from twenty degrees Celsius on the day side to five degrees on the night side. There’s ice at the poles and—”
“Ice?” Alexander interrupted. “Then you’ve confirmed that the blue we’re seeing is liquid water?”
“Yes, sir.”
A cheer went up from the crew. Water wasn’t all that rare, but liquid surface water was a big requirement for human habitability.
“What about those colorful smears? Are they what I think they are?” Alexander asked, pointing to the mottled red and purple areas.
“Possibly plants,” Vasquez replied.
“Damn straight!” Lieutenant Cardinal replied from gunnery.
Alexander smiled. As the mission’s botanist, Cardinal had a vested interest in finding alien plants on Wonderland.
“Could also be rock formations,” Stone replied. “If they’re plants, why aren’t they green? Don’t they need chlorophyll for photosynthesis?”
“Assuming alien plants derive energy from photosynthesis in the first place, they don’t need to absorb the same wavelengths as plants on Earth,” Cardinal replied. “The surface of Earth gets mostly green light, but that’s the color that our plants reflect away from them. Evolution doesn’t always yield the most efficient design. I’ll bet you a month’s wages those colorful regions are plants.”
“You’re on,” Stone replied.
Alexander smiled. “As long as we’re betting, I’ll bet that the atmosphere is breathable, and that we’ll find plants and animals.”
“Well, if we do find animals, the first thing I’m going to do is slap one of them on a grill and see if it tastes like chicken,” Stone said.
Laughter rippled across the bridge. Alexander joined in, but Korbin shot him a dark look, and he wiped the smile off his face.
“Our first encounter with alien life and you want to cook it?” she demanded.
“Why not?” Stone replied.
“All right, you do that, and when you die from some alien parasite, we’ll just chalk it up to karma being a bitch.”
Alexander cleared his throat. “He was joking, Korbin.”
She sent him a thin smile. “Who says I wasn’t?”
Alexander snorted. “Davorian, how long till we enter orbit?”
“Ten to fifteen minutes, sir, depending whether it’s a high or low orbit.”
“Make it a low one so we can do our first pass around the planet in less time.”
“Aye-aye, sir.”
“Vasquez, start scanning for the best place to land our shuttles.”
“Already on it, Captain.”
“Good.”
Alexander settled back against his couch to watch as Wonderland grew steadily larger on the MHD. It was a beautiful planet—mottled red and purple landmass, bright turquoise oceans, familiar white swirls of cloud. It looked startlingly like home, except for the odd colors and the greater percentage of surface water.
Once the Lincoln established a low orbit, Davorian killed thrust to the engines, and let Wonderland’s gravity do all the work. Without active thrust, the sensation of gravity disappeared, replaced by the zero-G free-fall of orbit.
It took a little over ninety minutes to orbit the planet once. During that time, Vasquez identified the primary landmass as the one they’d seen on their approach. There were also a number of islands, but everyone agreed that they’d learn more by setting down on the planet’s Pangaea-like super continent.
“Time to go pack our things, everyone,” Alexander said. “We’re all going down to the surface together—except for Davorian and Hayes.”
“Except for me, sir?” Davorian sounded crestfallen.
“We’re not going to see Wonderland?” Hayes added, putting in his own objection.
“Davorian, your specialty is astrophysics and astronomy, so you’re better off staying up here to see if you can find some indication of where we are in relation to Earth and the rest of the universe. And Hayes—we need someone manning the comms in case Earth tries to contact us. But besides that, we need at least two qualified bridge crew to take shifts up here on the bridge. Davorian, you have seniority, so I’m leaving you in charge.”
“Yes, sir,” Davorian said.
“We’ll be in touch. As for the rest of you, let’s go.” Buckles clattered as everyone unfastened their harnesses. Alexander lingered an extra moment to send Davorian a private comms. “Keep an eye on Hayes.”
There was a brief pause, and then Davorian replied, “What should I be looking for?”
“Acts of sabotage. When you leave him alone on bridge, I don’t want him manning anything besides the comms. Zero access to everything else. Make sure you shut down all of the ship’s stations and keep them locked whenever you’re not there. If there’s some kind of emergency while you’re away from the conn, all he needs to do is wake you up, and you can deal with it. Worst case, you give him your lock codes, and he can react while he’s waiting for you to get there, but that’s only in case of a dire emergency.”
“That’s… somewhat unconventional. What excuse am I going to give Hayes for locking him out?”
“We have one act of sabotage that’s still unaccounted for—the bad engine code. Until we know for sure who’s responsible, you’re the only one I can trust.”
“What makes you so sure you can trust me?”
“Because you were the one who stopped that bad code from leaving us derelict in space. If you were the one who inserted that code in the first place, you could have just let it execute and then covered your tracks after the fact.”
“Good point.”
“Keep an eye on things up here, and keep me posted.”
“Aye, Captain. Any chance I’m going to get to see Wonderland?”
“No promises, but I may be able to trade places with you at some point.”
Davorian sighed. “I guess that will have to do.”
“I
t will.”
“Captain, are you coming?”
Alexander turned to see Korbin floating free of her acceleration couch and angling herself to push off from the seat so she could float toward the elevators without the need to fire the maneuvering jets in the soles of her boots.
Switching from comms to external speakers, Alexander said, “I’ll be right there. Hold the elevator for me.”
“Aye-aye,” she said, and pushed off from her couch.
Alexander commed the rest of the crew on an open channel to let them know who would be joining the landing party, and who would not. Besides the bridge crew, he ordered Max Carter, Doctor Crespin, two of his nurses, and five of the ship’s seven surviving Rapier pilots to meet them in the shuttle bay. That done, he unbuckled his own seat restraints and maneuvered himself to push off from his seat.
Once he made it to the elevator, navigating the rest of the ship was easier. The bridge deck was one of the few places where the ceiling was high enough and the walls far enough apart that he could end up stranded, floating in mid-air too far from the nearest handrail to physically guide himself through the ship.
But even with handrails in easy reach, navigating the ship in zero-G was a slow, awkward business. Getting into his quarters took five minutes, which was five minutes longer than it should have taken, and packing his things took forever. Pulling things out of his locker resulted in them flying all around the room, and he spent a long time just catching up with his underwear.
When he was finally done, Alexander spent another five minutes dragging himself back down the corridors by the handrails to get to the nearest elevator. He didn’t encounter anyone else along the way, which meant they were all either faster or slower than him at packing their things. Alexander selected the deck marked ‘Shuttle Bay One (SB1)’ which was one deck down from the officers’ quarters. The elevator slowly jerked into motion, and he held on tight to the handrails to avoid hitting his head on the ceiling. A few seconds later the elevator stopped, and it began spinning on its axis, pulling him against the padded sides. Alexander grimaced. Davorian had already spun up the ring decks. That was going to make getting to them slightly more complicated.
He used the handrail to drag himself around the rim of the elevator until his back was resting against the doors. A moment later, pressure sensors detected he was ready, and the doors lowered him down like a platform until he was resting against the inner rim of a spinning hub.
Alexander crawled along the rim, heading toward the nearest spoke in the wheel. That spoke was a hollow drop tube running all the way from the central column of the ship to one of the outer rings. Alexander reached the lip of the drop tube and maneuvered himself until his feet were dangling over the padded edge.
Taking a second to steel himself for the fall, he shoved off and landed on the counter-weighted elevator platform waiting inside. The impact overcame the platform’s inertia and it began to drop at a lazy pace toward the distant bottom of the tube where the shuttle bay was located. As he fell, the tug of artificially-generated gravity grew progressively stronger until sensors judged the time had come to engage braking pads.
The elevator was un-powered while descending, using his weight and the physics of circular motion to pull him down to the spinning ring deck. The ship’s ring decks provided redundant living space for the crew to enjoy the effects of gravity while cruising on long voyages through space, but they were also ideal for launching shuttles, drones, fighters, and even missiles on trajectories that would carry them away from the Lincoln’s flight path and avoid deadly collisions.
Alexander felt the elevator touch ground, and the doors opened, allowing him to walk out onto the subtly-curving deck at a comfortable point five times standard gravity. Everyone else was already there and busy loading cargo crates onto counter-weighted loading platforms. The platforms were demarcated with safety rails and glowing black and yellow-striped boxes painted on the floor with the words Caution and Loading Zone blinking around them in red.
Each of those loading platforms rested above an airlock leading to one of the shuttles docked on the outer rim of the ring deck, so that once the airlocks opened, the platforms would drop down into the shuttles’ waiting cargo bays, functioning exactly like larger versions of the drop tube that Alexander had just ridden down. As he watched, the crew summoned a pair of loading platforms back from depositing their cargo inside waiting shuttles. Both platforms rose slowly until their safety rails came into view.
Alexander looked away and crossed over to Lieutenant Vasquez. The deck curved noticeably under his feet, making it feel like he was always walking uphill. At least under half of standard gravity, that wasn’t such a chore—even with the heavy pack on his shoulders. Vasquez had her helmet off, revealing short dark hair and a dark bronze skin. She was already snapping orders at the burly Rapier pilots, telling them what supplies to fetch and load onto the shuttles. Vasquez was Williams’ replacement as the Lincoln’s quartermaster, as well as its meteorologist and sensors operator, but she didn’t have much experience yet, so Alexander felt he had to check up on her to make sure they didn’t leave anything important behind.
“Vasquez.”
“Sir?” she replied.
“Do you have the cargo manifests ready for me to review?”
“Uh… they’re up here, sir,” she said, tapping her head. “Sorry, I haven’t had time to write them down yet. I can do that now if you like.”
“I like. Dictate to your pad. I’ll listen.”
“All right—sir,” Vasquez added hastily as she unslung her pack and withdrew a holopad. She began dictating, “Two shuttles, carrying one rover each. Twenty solar panels, and two fuel cell generators. A month’s supply of fuel for the fuel cells. A month’s supply of dry rations and drinking water. Spare pressure suits. Lab equipment—each of the bridge crew is responsible for making sure all the equipment they need is loaded. Fourteen inflatable habitation modules—one for each of the bridge crew, one for Max—I mean, Mr. Carter, two more between the infirmary and sleeping quarters for the medical staff, a shared module for the Rapier pilots, one more module for a mess hall and storage, another module for quarantine, and a final one to be used as a spare. Am I forgetting anything?”
Alexander frowned. “You’re asking me?”
“Sorry, no, sir. That’s it.”
“All right. I need you to—”
A new voice interrupted them, calling out across the loading bay, “What about weapons?”
Alexander turned to see Lieutenant Stone walking up to them. “What kind of weapons?”
“All kinds, sir,” Stone said, stopping in front of them. “We don’t know what we’re going to run into down there.”
“What do you suggest?”
“Sniper rifles with thermal and night vision scopes. Automatic rifles. Handguns. Grenades. Land mines. Cheetahs.”
“Land mines? Cheetahs? What do we need assault mechs for?”
“They’re faster than rovers over uneven terrain, and unlike the rovers, they’re armed, so they’ll make good escort vehicles. Not to mention their sensors will save us a lot of trouble watching our perimeter at night.”
“The rovers are armored, and we can guard our perimeter with those sniper rifles you mentioned. Cheetahs will be overkill, not to mention heavy as hell. We’ll need to take an extra shuttle for each of them.”
“Is that a problem, sir?”
“There are only six shuttles. If we take four, there won’t even be enough left for the Lincoln’s crew if they need to abandon ship.”
“Aye, but if they need to abandon ship, then we’re all screwed anyway. Besides, sir, when we meet T-rex’s hairy cousin on the surface you’ll be glad we brought the Cheetahs.”
Alexander snorted. “All right, fine.” Turning to Vasquez, he said, “You get all that? We’re taking four shuttles, two Cheetahs, and all that other stuff Stone mentioned.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’ll help her,” Ston
e replied.
“Good. While you’re at it, have your men check people’s packs, and all of the cargo before it’s loaded.”
Stone’s brow furrowed. “Check how, sir? Like a customs check?”
Alexander nodded. “Exactly like that. After the incident with Lieutenant Williams, we can’t be too careful.”
“Right. Understood, sir,” Stone saluted and about-faced. “Packs on the ground people!” he called out as he went. “Daddy wants to know if you packed your toothbrushes.”
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