by Peter Damon
“Completely,” Ricky agreed. “More so, because you can attach them side-to-side or edge-to-edge, which you can’t do with Lego unless you add another piece to hold them together. You don’t need that with the modules,” he explained.
“So, to begin with, we’ll put two together like this,” Joyce showed him, laying the blocks of Lego beside each other so that, together, they formed a single block that was eight by two, but represented a space-station that was 400 by 100 metres, and 50 metres tall.
“And who knows. In a year you may decide to send one to Mars, or have three space-stations around the earth,” Rick explained, clearly excited by the prospect.
“And the crèche?” Michael asked with an excited grin. “Where’s the crèche going to be?”
+++++++++++++
Allan, Matt and Leanne watched the numbers at the foot of the screen beneath the image of the second asteroid. It was coming into earth orbit, its velocity changing as the earth’s gravity began to pull on it, dragging it from its path to begin curving about the earth, 100,000 kilometres above it.
A new block of green colour was added to the others and Allan sighed with relief while the other two called hoorays and applauded the end of a very long flight.
“You can bring those tugs back, now,” Allan told Matt.
Matt worked his board and nodded. “On their way,” he told him.
“I think it time we found Cheryl and Gary, don’t you?” Allan asked.
“I’m on it boss,” Leanne told him, flicking her fingers across her board. Finding them wasn’t all that difficult; Professor Lovell had been in communication with the pair for several months, having them set up holding companies and bank accounts.
+++++++++++++
The opening of China’s borders was as sudden and unexpected as the closure had been five months previously. Amid the turmoil that the growing Russian situation had brought to the financial markets, China’s reappearance was the elixir that boosted the markets and sent them soaring to a high unseen for over a year.
Nor had the Chinese been idle during their five month period of self-imposed quarantine. Their manufacturers had new products and facilities, new multilingual web sites to promote their wares, and over 500 new patents, 20 of them of major significance to their respective markets.
Underpinning it all, were the metal markets, where there were new and lower prices from all Chinese suppliers. Iron, steel, and many alloys were now available at much lower costs than before, with bespoke products available at exceedingly short lead times and high stocks of regular products.
Amid the clamour of trade and industry, a single call was made to the Secretary General of the United Nations, advising him that the People’s Republic of China welcomed the spacemen’s return, and would sponsor their request to become an independent state.
Amid the confusion the sudden opening of Chinese markets brought to the financial markets, Professor Lovell was busy. He skipped between his holding companies, buying and selling, moving stealthily in some areas, loudly in others.
By the end of the day he was exhausted and sat at his desk, too tired to stand to make himself a cup of tea, his glasses on the table beside him as he tried rubbing the fatigue from his eyes.
The markets were continuing to move, but their tone had been set by the amount of trading he had completed, first on the Australian Securities Exchange, then the Tokyo Stock Exchange, and then Hong Kong, India, Dubai and so on from east to west, rolling up loose ends, financially killing off the last few people he considered might be involved in king-making before consolidating his position.
He tapped his tablet for the updated figures and smiled at the numbers. Not that they were good. In fact, had an auditor looked through his holdings, he would have advised an immediate sell of at least half of his assets. But then, the auditor wasn’t to know how Freedom One would affect the markets, and therefore understand the potential wealth that the professor had truly accumulated.
+++++++++++++
It had been a long day for Maddy and the other spacemen, and still a few of them worked; doing one more trip to earth. Behind them, circling the earth within the area they had cleaned of garbage, sat three of the large modules the Chinese had manufactured on their behalf, huge oblong structures, each one the size of the ARC, but each one fabricated specifically for outer-space.
When Maddy left Freedom One, Michael and Heather had been proudly showing off their daughter to the three who had returned from earth. Tomorrow, they would all return to China and lift another five modules, and hopefully finish the lifting the day after that.
Now, she piloted the Range Rover, Bert sandwiched in the back between Mickey and Lenny while Martha sat beside her, frowning with worry, never comfortable out in space but willing to do this, if only for Frankie and his vision.
The Range Rover sank into earth’s atmosphere over the North Pole, descending with the stealth systems turned on, all eyes on their radar scans as the vehicle negotiated the North Sea to cross the English coastline and into the lowlands of east Essex.
Martha kept her eyes firmly on the screen, disliking the Range Rover for its large windows. She was only really happy when she was in the heart of a spaceship, with as few reminders of where they actually were as possible.
Michael had assured Maddy that the British were no longer looking for them. Nevertheless, when she finally settled on a road to continue their journey, it was with a new set of number plates provided by a cousin in Chelmsford.
Bert and Martha exchanged excited comments as they looked out at the passing countryside, commenting on what had changed, and what hadn’t, and the other two were silent, bland facial expressions giving nothing away while Maddy didn’t care what her face showed; she would rather be out in space that back on earth, any day.
They joined the A12 at East Bergholt to head south on what had once been Ipswich road, and joined the M12 north of Colchester to head west, the roads quiet for a Tuesday afternoon so late in the year.
It took them an hour to get to the St John’s Ambulance hall just off White Hart Lane to the east of Chelmsford, memories of the district and her place in it making Maddy wince with embarrassment.
There was a group of men, three generations deep, standing outside the hall, taking the opportunity to smoke their last cigarette before having to go inside to listen to the visitors. They looked at her as she got out of the Range Rover, eyes roving over her spacesuit-clad figure, little about her hidden by its skin-tight fit. She stared back, allowing her face to portray a little disgust at their overweight, badly kept bodies, clothes creased and grubby, unchanged for at least a day, unwashed for probably longer.
This was a mistake, but she had vowed to try, and so, flanked by the others in her crew, she strode into the hall.
The hall was packed, surprising her. There were at least three times the fifty odd people she had anticipated, all standing and mingling, many more women and children than she had thought would be there, but more men too, some too old to be considered for space, but able bodied enough to assist on earth if they wished to. A space academy would need earth based recruitment stations. There were many adolescents too, teenagers dissatisfied with their lot, hungry for change and more than willing to leave the enclaves of their large families in order to find it.
“They came,” Lenny whispered at her side.
“They’re interested, Maddy. They’ll never tell you that, but they’re here to listen,” Mickey whispered in her other ear.
The crowd looked at her, and at Lenny and Mickey, appraising them, more than a few appreciatively. Maddy had long forgotten the strictness of the fitness regime Gail had implemented, and it was only when thrust among people who hadn’t undergone the same discipline of food and exercise that she noticed the difference. The spacemen were lean and hard muscled, their physique on display in their spacesuits. The rest of the crowd, fit enough by English standards, looked soft and ailing; poorly fitting clothing only serving to highlight poor
physique.
Bert and Martha ploughed into the host to embrace long surrendered friends and family, weeping and laughing in turn, grinning widely and nodding energetically at questions about their health.
“Come on,” Lenny told her, a hand on her arm to steer her through the close knit groups to mount the stairs at the side of the small stage.
She stood in front of them all, wishing Frankie were still there. He’d been doing this since his teens; squaring up to people twice his age, with twice the experience. “Experience is for nought, if it’s doing the same thing, year in year out,” he had once told her.
The hall fell silent but for the odd cough and a baby demanding feeding, eyes turning up to wait on her. “A year ago, 50 travellers agreed to go into the scrap metal business in outer-space,” she told them, and watched them look back at her, some clearly thinking more about her figure in the spacesuit than about what she was saying.
“But the authorities didn’t like us doing what they couldn’t do,” she told them, and smiled, because that was what Travellers had been doing all their lives, and her audience understood this and smiled with her, nodding their understanding.
“So, did we stop?” she asked them. “Did we ever! We went out and brought them billions of tons of metal ore,” she grinned. “Anyone else able to do that?” she asked.
“Not likely!”
“You tell ‘em lass!”
“Too fucking true!”
“But we’re a few less than when we went up there,” she confessed, and the room fell silent as they too remembered Frankie. “Yet the job is ten times as demanding.
“Ten times as demanding, and ten times as exhilarating. It’s ten times as rewarding too; there’s not one of us here from space who’s not a Euro-millionaire. But we’ve earned our money. Hard work, team work, learning new skills until we know them as well as we know stripping a car or rearing a horse, evading the pigs and working the crowd at a market. It’s what we are now; spacemen.
“This isn’t about the money. If it were, we’d all be retiring about now. No, this is about being in outer-space.”
She stopped for a breath, and they were silent too, watching her, appraising her, a group of men at the back still leering at her, nudging each other, sharing their vulgar thoughts in whispers while adjusting their pants in lewd gestures.
“It’s the most dangerous place you would ever choose to live in,” she confessed. “Just a second exposure to space and you’re dead, either frozen or boiled, it doesn’t matter. All that stands between you and death is your suit,” she told them, raising an arm to show them how tightly it fitted, and how thin it was – as if she need to.
“It’s also the loveliest place,” she told them, her voice lowering as she recalled her first time. “Earth from outer-space loses all the bad things about the place, and leaves just the loveliest. To watch the sun rise over the curve of the earth, to watch the seas glimmering as they move, to watch the weather systems cross the planet, to see the lights come on as dusk falls and the earth slowly rotates into the dark. You can’t describe it; it’s absolutely the loveliest thing you’ll ever see, and different every time.
“To be on an asteroid, dark and featureless, and watch Saturn, huge and so real, come up over the asteroid’s edge, colours swirling in bands, all shades of reds, yellows and browns. To be places no one, ever, has been before.
“More than that,” she told them, remembering Frankie’s early outburst. “To be a leader of earth, to be a spaceman!”
She stopped and inhaled. Some of the men at the back were still leering, but not as many, and others nearby had turned to tell them to shut up; a minor blessing. Maddy hoped they’d take up her offer and join the new academy. She wanted to watch them wet themselves as they went out into space for the first time.
“We’re the leaders,” she emphasised. She let them look at her, brazen and proud, the tattooed glyphs on her crown giving her a slightly alien look. “We’ve been further, faster, for longer than any American or Russian. We’re recovering their junk for them, and selling it back to them at prices you’d not believe!” she grinned. “And we’re learning all the time, getting better and better at what we do. And if you want to work and live in space, then you’re going to have to learn from us, because we’re the only people to have done it!
“It’s not for everyone,” she confessed. “And we don’t take just anyone,” she admonished, looking towards the leering men to let them know they would fail. “But we need to double our numbers again, and we’d rather take hard working travellers, who we know and trust, than toffee-nosed academics who don’t know real work if they fell over it in bright sunlight.”
That got a laugh and she smiled with relief. “Bert and Martha have the details. Come talk to us if you think you’d be interested,” she finished.
Her talk had barely lasted five minutes, but it was over an hour before they stepped out of the hall, exhausted by the amount of talking they’d done, their bodies beginning to recall the length of their day. It took a moment for their eyes to adjust to the dark, and still longer for them to find their black Range Rover amid a car park full of Range Rovers, Shoguns and Land-Cruisers. By then, the men from the back of the hall had stepped out from their hiding places to form a belligerent and threatening wall of male aggression in front of them.
“Hello Lass. I hear they made you their leader. I didn’t believe it, myself. You look to me like more of a bedding type, than a leading type,” the middle of five men said, his eyes once again sliding down her suit to settle at her groin.
“No, I’ll take care of this,” Maddy told Bert and the other men as they started forward. She stepped out in front of them and grinned up at the man. “If you had any balls under all that lard, you’d have come with us when Frankie first asked for help. But you haven’t, have you?” she said, her eyes finishing their appraisal of his 120 kilo frame to stare at him in the eyes. “You can’t even see your manhood beneath that belly, can you, even if you ever get it stiff enough to prod more than a sheep,” she giggled.
“You little tart. I’ll teach you,” he told her, wading forward.
There are few traveller girls over the age of thirteen who haven’t been taught by their mothers, fathers and brothers how to deal with unwanted advances, each in their own particular way. Knowledge is one thing; having the strength and resolve to use that knowledge is another. Maddy had both, and the kick she aimed at his groin rose far quicker than he had anticipated, far too quickly for him to turn aside, as he had anticipated. Instead, it landed perfectly, and forcefully, dropping him almost immediately into a ball that rolled and whimpered on the ground, holding himself as the agony swept over him, cramping his stomach until its contents spilled out over the ground he rolled on.
“I want you next, Walsh,” Maddy told the youngest of the men she faced, a man she’d met before, and disliked from the very first. “Want to try fucking me?” she grinned, hoping up and down with excitement, eagerly awaiting the opportunity to see him on the ground too. “Think you’re man enough?” she sneered.
The man looked at her and licked his lips. “Hey, Madeleine, come on, we were only messing with you,” he told her, trying to laugh it off. “We didn’t mean anything by it,” he explained, hands out at his sides. The others seemed to agree with him, stepping slightly back and nodding their heads.
“Fuck off, the lot of you,” Bert told them. “And take this pile of shit with you,” he told them, kicking the man who was still groaning on the ground.
November 29th.
Perth, Australia, in November was the idyllic place to be. Not only was the weather warm and sunny, the breeze from the sea keeping the temperature tolerable, but the city had all the amenities that could be enjoyed in the good weather.
Gary certainly thought so, rowing along the boating canal, enjoying the feel of his arm muscles tightening, a moment before he pulled on the oars to send his single scull surging forward through the placid water.
He rowed the length of the boating canal, and then repeated it just to feel the ache of his body before he slowed his pace to bring him to the boat-club landing strip where two club members were happy to take the scull from him and put it away.
“Hurry up, Gary,” Cheryl called from the upper gallery where a small cafe allowed non-rowers to gather, watch those that did, and enjoy a choice of drinks and light snacks. He waved and sauntered into the changing rooms to shower and change before joining her on the balcony where she’d obtained a fruit salad for him.
“Closed the deal?” he asked, biting into a crunchy piece of apple while Cheryl smiled at him from behind her dark glasses.
She nodded. “64 billion US Dollars, and all the concessions we requested” she told him softly, a lifted glass obscuring her moving mouth from anyone who might be lip-reading them.
Gary grinned. “Told Oliver yet?” he asked.
Cheryl nodded again. The sale would be confirmed by Freedom One to the media, and the whole planet would quickly learn that Australia had succeeded in obtaining the first asteroid that had recently entered into orbit about the earth.
Gary’s grin was as wide as her own as they shared thoughts of the discomfort nations like USA and the European Union would feel as the metals market seemed to move ever further from their grasp. Sooner or later they would need to wake up to the fact that trade with Freedom One was absolutely necessary to them, and would only be achieved on equal terms.
+++++++++++++
Glen winced as 100 men and women came to attention, 100 boots slamming down onto the hard wooden floor of the auditorium as he was led in by the senior commander of the Edwards Air Force Base in California.
He strode to the rostrum that stood to one side of the stage and, with a nod, allowed his audience to sit once more. He sipped his water while allowing his audience to settle, than looked about him.
“Good morning. I am Glen Schroder and your new Commander in Chief,” he told them. “My credentials,” he said, and tapped his tablet to have his first slide appear up on the screen behind him.