THE CAMBRIDGE ANNEX: THE TRILOGY

by Peter Damon

  Samuel booked the items in and coordinated working parties to see that the items were stored in their respective places. Work was continuing on repairs to the SUV’s, giving them an opportunity to upgrade the vehicles with the latest life-support and communication facilities. The spacemen, once again having to work to short timeframes, were never happier, and that was reflected in the restaurant and lounge too.

  There was a feeling on board that the ship had weathered the worst, and yet Samuel couldn’t help but worry. Michael was still with the Chinese, whose borders remained shut, and Glen appeared to be continuing his daily trips to the White House, again, silent as a mouse.

  He broke off from his thoughts as half a dozen spacemen rolled the Mars coach out from its garage, Maddy following it, looking it over attentively.

  “What’s that for?” Samuel asked. The coach, created specifically for the trip to Mars, had limited application to any other purpose. Converting it to for a more useful role could only be done with greater access to spare parts and raw materials.

  “We’re going to give it to the Smithsonian,” Maddy told him.

  “With the HYPORT removed, I’m guessing,” Samuel nodded.

  Maddy agreed. “That’s why it’s being pushed,” she grinned.

  Once the Mars coach had been positioned in the largest of the loading-bays, an SUV was raised above it and the coach strapped to its underside. Brendon then transported it down to Washington DC.

  “That was a good idea,” Samuel told Maddy as they finished watching the SUV, sitting above the coach, move serenely towards the earth.

  “Diane’s idea, not mine,” she told him. “She couldn’t believe the amount of attention the American school-kids were giving the Apollo 11 capsule and the space shuttle Discovery. She really wanted us to give them an SUV, but I reckon that’s British. So I offered them the coach that landed on Mars instead,” she explained.

  “That will make one hell of a display,” Samuel agreed.

  +++++++++++++

  Allan pursed his lips, figuratively chewing on the problem of the second asteroid as it continued its slow, laborious path towards a high earth orbit.

  It was in the green, but only just so. It would only take a small anomaly, something they hadn’t considered, or something new happening, for it to veer out of the green. If that were to happen in the later stages of entering earth orbit, then they’d have precious little time before damage was done.

  Oliver laughed, distracting him, and he glanced up to look towards the one-time journalist.

  “The Moscow Times is recommending people buy additional winter clothing, because the addition of so much rock to the earth’s orbit is going to upset the weather and give them a severe winter,” he explained.

  Allan frowned.

  Oliver lost his grin. “You don’t think it’s true, do you?” he asked, the sudden thought making him go ashen.

  Allan grinned. “Gotcha!” he chuckled.

  Oliver glared at him before returning to his board to begin typing. Allan returned to his own problem and nodded to himself. “Matt, let’s send out the tugs early to that second asteroid. I’d prefer to know we already have the means to control it, should something untoward occur,” he pointed out.

  Matt nodded, already moving his finger across his board to bring up the tugs controls. “On their way,” he confirmed. The tugs would arrive in a little less than two hours, while the asteroid itself still had three days travel before sliding into orbit. Elsewhere in the heavens, just star-like to the visible eye, were more asteroids coming towards them.

  +++++++++++++

  Heather listened to the Secretary General of the United Nations as he brought her up-to-date with the steps he’d taken to try and reconcile the five seated members of the UN to the presence of Freedom One.

  “Of course,” he pointed out, “The People’s Republic of China is still not answering our communications,” he told her.

  “No. It will be a couple of days yet,” she let slip, preoccupied with Wendy-Claire’s attempts to get a hold of something she shouldn’t.

  Miguel Ortiz looked towards her pointedly and she blushed. “That’s to say, Michael is working on that,” she explained.

  “Really,” was his bland reply.

  She nodded. “You’ll have to trust me on that,” she told him. “No games, just confidential negotiations.

  “Has the Russian Federation accepted liability for their satellites?” she asked, diverting him from further talk of China.

  He shook his head. “No, and will not do so. They continue to view you as a threat, rather than consider the possibility that you may be an ally, or a resource,” he told her.

  “I assume all nations recognise our importance to their welfare over the next few weeks,” she asked him. “We control those incoming asteroids, and if any of them need their courses altering, then we can do it with a fair amount of ease. I doubt anyone on earth could say the same,” she judged.

  “It’s a good point,” he conceded. “Do you envisage any problems?” he asked.

  “No. Our sampling of the asteroids has given us a good idea of the weight of these things, and Allan has more experience that anyone on the trajectory of orbiting bodies. Apparently, the initial thrust towards earth orbit is always the most complicated, and the most likely to need revision, because of the uncertainty of the body’s mass and centre of gravity. But once we’ve established the exact mass by getting the velocity right, then the rest just follows. The first was the hardest, and that one is now in orbit,” she pointed out.

  Miguel nodded. “We will continue to work on your behalf. We recognise your value to the earth, and that should earn you a place at the table,” he told her before closing the link.

  November 26th.

  Allan saw the caller ID of the incoming call and put the feed onto the large monitor on the wall facing him to smile at the weather-worn face smiling back at him from earth.

  “We were getting worried,” Allan told Michael.

  “Some politics to put through the strainer,” Michael told him. “Nothing to do with the design or manufacture,” he explained. “We’re ready for the team to come down,” Michael reported.

  “Very well,” Allan nodded. “They’ll be down shortly.”

  +++++++++++++

  Maddy brought the SUV down to below 100 kilometres altitude over central China and turned the vehicle’s cameras down so that she could admire the diverse geography that was China. The colours seemed far richer than she recalled after 11 months of moving about the dark rocky sameness that were asteroids. The only bright colours had been the whirling browns and yellows of Saturn, although some of the asteroids could sparkle in the light, a sign of bismuth in the rock she had been told.

  Leanne, seated beside her, was busy at her own monitor, tapping and stroking it to find the signal that would direct them to Michael’s location. Meanwhile, in the back, the twins were engrossed in their tablets as they took the opportunity to review more of the data returned by the van during its sojourn to ‘somewhere else’.

  “There!” Leanne cried, finding the signal and pressing her finger on the bearing to transfer it to Maddy’s screen as their new heading.

  “Five minutes, folks,” Maddy told everyone, putting the SUVs into the green direction and noting the other two SUVs do the same behind her.

  As they approached, the other two SUVs moved out to encircle the large camp, looking for people and finding only four, all in plain view, Michael standing with the other three waving them in.

  Leanne broke into a grin as she saw the others, and before the SUV was fully on the ground, she had opened the door and stepped onto the skid, eager to be the first to welcome them back.

  Tony, Ricky and Joyce grinned happily as they shook hands and embraced the spacemen, welcoming them to China with the snippets of Mandarin that they had learnt. The Howard twins, more reserved, stepped forward to shake hands and congratulate them on their success.

  “I
t looks tremendous,” they agreed, nodding to the massive structures that sat all around them, dwarfing them.

  “Come into the office and I’ll explain what we need,” Ricky told them, leading them into a prefabricated building where a large oval table stood, the large screen that was its surface displaying the various structures that were sitting on the ground outside.

  “Wireless!” Leanne cried, looking at the table.

  “You remember the old Bluetooth protocol?” Ricky asked, knowing she would. “Tony helped update it for just this purpose. Very narrow, very precise, but fast,” he explained.

  The twins moved forward and intuitively opened one of the displayed structures to browse the detail, nodding their approval and making Ricky grin. “All modular,” he explained. “Fit them out any way you want, then move them up module by module and fit them together,” he explained, grinning as the spacemen began to understand what they were looking at.

  “How many?” Maddy asked, looking out of the window at the plant outside.

  “There are fifteen,” Joyce explained. “Each module is 400 by 50 by 50 metres, and can be maintained independently of the others.”

  “Fifteen,” Maddy breathed.

  “Fifteen already fitted out,” Ricky hurriedly explained. “The deal is for twenty, but the additional and yet-to-be-completed five units are laboratories and study areas. The modules that are ready have everything we need to create a new ARC. State of the art, spacious, safe, on a higher orbit.”

  “Somewhere where the Frank Hill Space Academy can really flourish,” Michael told her.

  Maddy turned and grinned. “What do you need us to do?” she asked.

  November 27th.

  Glen approached the usual meeting room with trepidation. Frankly, the incessant questions, often repeated by the group in the daily meetings, no longer worried him. But Pat had asked him to be firm and obtain a date when they could go home. She was heartily sick of staying in a hotel, even if it was the best in Washington DC. Diane, seeing an opening, had then demanded that her father reclaim her spacesuit too. There were no demands more stressful than those from a wife and daughter, he reflected.

  His guard took up his usual station, and Glen entered the meeting room to find everyone already there, and the Chief of Staff seated at the far end, a bland face turned to watch him as he took his place.

  “There have been some developments,” she told him.

  He waited, used to having all of them stare at him, waiting for him to respond to their repeated questions.

  Joanna lifted a remote to wake the monitor, and it displayed a grainy image of three SUVs entering earth’s atmosphere. “They were traced landing in mid-west China, in the Qinghai province. We have no further details,” she told him, throwing the sheet aside to show what she thought of the meagre intelligence. Continual cloud cover over that area of China had totally obscured whatever was on the ground while the other types of imaging were showing nothing of any significance.

  Glen nodded and licked his lips. “I guess they’ve gone to pick Michael up.”

  “Three vehicles?” Joanna asked pointedly.

  Glen shrugged. “In case of problems?” he suggested.

  “So the fact they’ve not taken off yet would suggest, what? That they’ve been destroyed?” she suggested for him.

  “Quite possibly,” he agreed. “Am I meant to know more?” he asked of them. “Would they have given me as much detail as possible about their future endeavours, before sending me into a hostile environment?” he asked.

  “So now we’re a hostile environment,” Joanna told him, closing the file in front of her.

  “My family and I have been imprisoned. That the prison is an exceedingly luxurious hotel is beside the point. We cannot go out of the door without an agent inquiring as to where we’re going, and other agents imposing themselves upon us. My daughter is a minor, I remind you all. Further, the state has removed an item of clothing of hers and has not returned it.”

  “A spacesuit,” Joanna nodded.

  He nodded. “A spacesuit made of a rubber that, along with the method of suit manufacture, was patented over a year ago,” he pointed out. “There is nothing regarding that suit that you could not have obtained from the public domain,” he stressed.

  Joanna looked at the others and nodded, and they rose and shuffled out of the meeting room, leaving Glen alone with the Chief of Staff.

  “What are they doing Glen? And I don’t want you to tell me what you know, or don’t know. I want you to tell me what you think, having spent a year with them,” she told him.

  “Then I’d say that they’re progressing their ideals with the nation that owes them several billion US Dollars. I would guess the Chinese have been constructing a new ship for them. It will be more than just a ship; it will be a space-station, something so grand, so massive, so advanced, that no one could ever dispute their presence, or their power.”

  “And make them King of the Castle,” she told him.

  “A castle that will need to trade,” he told her.

  “They’ll be the richest nation,” she reflected.

  Glen shook his head. “Money doesn’t help them, or at least, after a point it no longer helps them. What they need is people; skilled people.”

  “So they’ll recruit,” she surmised, thinking about the opportunities that presented. Google had been in a similar situation; leagues in front of its competitors and yet crying out for skilled people who could not only move them technically forward, but had the vision to move them still further ahead of their competitors.

  “Spacemen, cooks, cleaners, engineers, doctors, computing, you name it, and they’ll need the best,” he told her, watching her consider what he was saying.

  “Our graduates?” she wondered. She put another feed onto the screen and explained the context while Glen stared at the miniscule image of the van, still floating in outer-space, a light flashing on its cabin hood.

  Glen nodded, the activity of the last few weeks falling into place. “Increase the astronaut program, recruit men and women from the armed forces who hold more than one degree in anything related to engineering, medicine, psychology,” he suggested. “Get them out into space, however short a time, but get them up there,” he stressed.

  Joanna nodded and put her pen down. “And we need someone as a liaison point, someone they trust, but someone who won’t sell us short,” she told him.

  “That person will need to be an ambassador,” he told her. “The US has to support their bid to become an independent state.”

  “That’s opening a whole new can of worms,” she told him, shaking her head.

  “And closing a lot of others,” he told her. “Think on it; do you really want to be dealing with a company that owes allegiance to no one and operates in outer space, where there are no trade agreements? By making them a state, they become accountable to their peers in the United Nations,” he explained.

  Joanne saw the distinction and reluctantly nodded. “I’ll fly that by the president. Hold yourself ready for a meeting with her at short notice,” she told him, standing and gathering her papers.

  Glen took a deep breath. “My wife would like to go home,” he dared tell her.

  “Of course,” Joanna agreed. “We’ll have service personnel accompany her, but their role is to keep the media at bay. She shouldn’t feel uncomfortable telling them to stay back, or to dress less conspicuously,” she told him.

  “And Diane’s suit?” he asked.

  Joanna sighed. “Sure,” she agreed after a few moments of consideration. “But I hope you have it well insured. While we’ve assured ourselves that it holds nothing of value, I’m not sure others will accept that without they’ve taken it to pieces themselves,” she warned.

  “It’s been taken to pieces? What if Diane had worn it to go out into space?” he asked in shock.

  “Oh, come on Glen; we both know that suit isn’t the real thing,” she told him, smiling thinly as she left his the
re, his mouth hanging open.

  November 28th.

  Michael stood beside Ricky and Joyce as the first of their new space-station modules rose swiftly and silently into the morning sky, an SUV perched on its flat roof controlling the lift through the stubby HYPORT tugs they had attached to it. Each module was close to the same size as the Emma Maersh, the container ship they had converted into the very first spaceship. Now they were going to lift twenty such modules, creating a massive space-station, large enough to meet their needs for at least a decade.

  “You’ve done a good job,” Michael told Ricky, clapping him on the shoulder.

  “It’s going to be fantastic, living in space, designing new craft, colonising moons and planets,” he breathed.

  Michael nodded, silently wondering how many more friends he’d lose during that process. Less than if he’d done nothing, he thought, knowing that to be true. He took a deep breath and considered the people who walked alongside of him now, their spirits urging him not to fail them.

  They stepped into the office to watch the monitors, images fed to them from accompanying SUVs as they waited for the first module to be put into position, before the second module was brought up and slotted into its side.

  “What will it look like?” Michael asked.

  “Well, we’re not attaching them all now. It would just take too much energy to begin supporting all of that internal space, when at the moment, we hardly have enough people to fit into one module,” Ricky pointed out.

  “That means that we can be versatile with the configuration. Today, we might have just created a block, one on top of another, but in six months, when we’re ready to use additional modules, we might have better ideas, or different needs,” he explained.

  Joyce took out some white oversized Lego pieces, eight by one, from her desk drawer and began putting them together in quite strange and versatile structures to show Michael what Ricky meant.

  “They’re as versatile as that?” Michael asked, taking the group of three that crossed each other off-centre from Joyce.