by Terry Mixon
Harry grinned. “Remind me never to get on your bad side. Did the papers have everything you needed?”
“I’ll know once Doctor Powell takes a look, but I think they might. It looked like it had a long segment of medieval Italian and the unknown language. That might be enough to figure most of it out.”
“My father asked if I was going on this mission,” he said. “What do you think?”
She looked at him in surprise. “Well, of course you are. You think this is all for physicists and pilots? You’d be exploring where no man—or woman—has ever gone before.”
“He said we might be going down to Mars, and that as an owner of Humanity Unlimited, I could be one of the first few people to step onto an alien world. Behind you, of course. As the senior owner present, you should go first. I hope you come up with something suitably historic to say by then.”
Jess froze with her sandwich halfway to her mouth. “Oh, shit!”
“I’d seriously recommend something classier.”
She swatted him. “You know what I mean! Me? The first human on Mars? Are you serious?”
“Why not? Though, to be fair, you might not be. Aliens, you know. They might have been there before us.”
That was true. “Yes, but I’d be the first modern human. Wow. No pressure.”
The flight director called out. “Jess, we’re about to launch.”
She rose to her feet and stepped over to his console. The timer was down to fifteen seconds. She watched it slowly drop to zero. The engines ignited right on schedule and the lifter rose from the pad.
In less than a minute, it was lost to sight. Ten minutes later, it was safely in orbit. It would dock in four hours.
Then the real fun started.
* * * * *
Clayton looked up when his assistant knocked on his door. “Sir, the courier is here and you have a call.”
“Who is it?”
“Your ex-wife.”
That surprised him. He’d lost count of the number of knives they’d planted in one another over the years, yet she’d never called him about any of the incidents. Not even to gloat when she’d won.
“Keep her on hold. If she wants to talk to me, she can wait for me to finish my business. Send the courier in.”
His assistant ushered in a young woman in a casual suit with a flat package. He closed the door behind her.
“Set it on the desk and I’ll sign for it,” Clayton said.
The papers were straightforward and he had the woman on her way in only a few minutes. Alone with the package, he spent a few minutes carefully opening it. They’d protected the contents very well, just as he’d asked. The old pages of the Voynich Manuscript had cost him a significant amount of money. Yale hadn’t wanted to give them up, but they could use the funds he’d offered for so many other projects. And the endowment hadn’t hurt, either.
Clayton didn’t know if the pages themselves would provide any extra clues, but he doubted that anyone had analyzed them rigorously since they’d been stored away. They might contain any number of undiscovered secrets.
Doctor Powell could examine them with the newly acquired pages. Well, she could once she and her associate had set up shop in orbit. They were going along, of course. The odds were very good the explorers would find new artifacts in space and Clayton wanted them preserved correctly.
Then he answered his ex-wife’s call. “Sorry to keep you waiting, Kathleen. Business, you know.”
“The wait only makes me more determined to hurt you,” she said. “What the hell are you doing, Clayton? You stole a nuclear reactor from me and shot it into orbit.”
“And you stole an ancient spacecraft from me. You also killed dozens of people and blew up my hotel.”
“Which you got even for when you destroyed my research facility. Drop the faux outrage.”
He shook his head. She’d never understand the difference between them. Or realize that she was a monster. “What do you want to talk about, Kathleen?”
“To tell you the kid gloves are off. You and Harry aren’t on the safe list anymore. Keep looking over your shoulder, Dear. One day, Nathan will be there and you’ll die.”
“You can’t believe how little that actually matters to me. Send whomever you like. I’ll return them to you in a body bag.”
He hung up the phone and pressed the buzzer. His assistant answered at once. “Sir?”
“Get Cradock on the phone. I want security around the spaceport tripled. No one gets onto the launch pads or into this hotel without being cleared.”
He stared out the window. Phase one was almost complete. If he could just hold things together for a while longer, he’d take all the marbles.
Chapter Twenty-Six
Harry made time to talk with Rex, Sandra, and Jeremy. The rest of his people were coordinating with the Rainforest security people to keep things sane while the last of the launches were taking place.
The four of them wedged themselves into a booth at the hotel restaurant. It was deserted. He got right to the point. “I wanted to let you know that I’m going up to the station.”
All of them stared at him. Rex finally spoke. “Look, I know I told you to stay close to your lady friend, but that might be a little too much commitment. Stalkerish, even.”
Sandra smacked Rex on the back of the head. “Sexist jerk. That sounds exciting, Harry. Maybe you’ll miss all the fallout of the theft, if you’ll forgive the pun.”
“I might be able to miss all that and more,” he said. “Before I talk about it, I wanted to make you three an offer. You’re the best people I have and I want to keep you with me. I’d pay very good money if you’d join me.”
Jeremy grinned. “In space? Hell, yeah!”
Harry smiled and shook his head. “Not so fast. There’s a lot more to this situation than you know. Let me lay it all out for you.”
He spent the next ten minutes explaining the whole space station being a spaceship surprise and the alien tech. That kept them quiet for a while.
Sandra was the first to speak. “So, you want us to leave the Earth and fly to Mars. Why?”
“Because I want people I can trust at my back.”
Rex nodded slowly. “Sure. Hey, I wasn’t doing anything for the next few months anyway.”
Sandra and Jeremy also agreed.
With their buy in, he relaxed. “Great. There’s room on the lifter for all of us. With luck, the last of the supplies will be on the ship tomorrow.”
Harry looked at his watch. “You have enough time to pack a bag. They’ll provide everything ordinary, so limit yourselves to personal items and luxuries. Meet me in the lobby in two hours.”
* * * * *
Jess already had her personal belongings on the ship, so she stuffed her bag with coffee, tea, and chocolate. They were going into deep space. There was no such thing as too much caffeine or chocolate.
Even though she shouldn’t take it into space, she put her pistols, holsters, and spare magazines in the bag, too. A few discreet inquiries with her guards got her a few boxes of ammunition. She’d turn them over to the ship’s captain. Maybe. She might just keep them close until they were safely away from Earth.
Once she’d stuffed her bag to the limit, she went down to the lobby. The bag was heavy enough to make her feel like a pack mule.
The other elevator opened and Harry walked out with Sandra, Rex, and the security guy at his back. Jeremy, that was his name.
She waved. “Hey. You guys excited about going into space?”
Harry shrugged. “Excited might not be the word I’d choose, but I’m ready to go. What happens next?”
“A van will pick us up in a few minutes and drive us to pad one. We’ll get into suits and board the lifter. Once we’re all aboard, they’ll launch when the station is at the right point in orbit. About an hour from now.”
Sandra hefted her bag. “Where do we check in our baggage?”
“They’ll put it in the back of the passenger cab
in when we board the lifter.”
The elevator opened again, and Clayton Rogers strolled out. “Ah, good. I was afraid I might miss you.”
He extended his hand to Jess. “My deepest congratulations on the magnificent engineering marvel you’ve helped design and build. This achievement will see humanity finally leave this planet for good. I couldn’t be prouder to be a part of such a grand venture. You’ll keep me up to date on everything you find?”
She shook his hand firmly. “Of course I will. This is a wonderful adventure. Thank you for allowing me to be part of it.”
The older man turned his attention to his son. “I know you don’t trust or approve of me, but that doesn’t matter. You’re helping to do something important. Keep her safe and enjoy the ride.”
Harry took his father’s hand. “Don’t make me regret this.”
The van pulled up out front. “Our ride is here,” Jess said. “Let’s mount up.”
The trip out to the pad took longer than she’d expected. Security stopped them twice, comparing the passenger’s faces to something on their security tablets. They searched the bags and scanned everyone with detection wands.
She expected trouble about her weaponry, but the man in charge of the checkpoint made a short call and put everything back. Clayton had cleared them to take weapons up with them.
The launch pad towered over the area where the van stopped. A protected door led them into the concrete base. The changing room wasn’t large, but a partition separated it in two for modesty.
Jess stripped down to her underwear and put on a ship’s jumpsuit in light blue. Once Sandra was ready, she picked up her freshly bagged clothes and led the mercenary through the door into the suit room. The three men were already on the other side.
Technicians fitted them into suits in short order. Gone were the days of bulky, hard to wear vacuum gear. These were relatively light and flexible. Not as much as the rotted suits in the crashed ship had been, but much easier to wear than twenty years ago. The helmets were clear composite. They’d be able to communicate through built-in radios.
They went up the elevator one at a time. A technician on the upper level escorted her into the lifter, helped her secure her gear, and strapped her in. Even though she’d been on a number of flights, she still got the safety lecture. She listened intently and reviewed it in her mind once the man left for the next passenger.
The two pilots were going through their checklists. The passenger cabin had three seats side-by-side and four rows. She didn’t know the other passengers, but waved anyway.
They strapped Harry in beside her and she had him switch to a private channel once he was settled in. “I’m so excited. This is really it.”
“At least you have some idea of what we’re getting into. Tell me about the ship. How many people does she carry?”
“More than you might think possible. The torus has three levels with the floors arranged so that our feet point outward. They rotate twice a minute giving the outermost level 95% of Earth’s gravity. The innermost level is about 85%.”
He looked impressed. “How many people are aboard?”
She smiled. “Get ready to have your mind blown. The torus supports about 2,500 people with plenty of space left for manufacturing, research, and cargo. It’s a mobile colony. We’ve been sneaking them up over the last six months as the ship came online.”
Harry looked a little stunned. “Considering how much the first international space station cost to house just six crewmembers, my father invested a lot more into this project than I thought possible. Even considering how he’s lowered the launch costs. I was thinking fifty or a hundred people, max.”
“We need a lot of people. We’re planning on dropping off three mining outposts. They’ll have a lot of work to do. They’ll be building stations similar to the ship for long-term colonies, at some point.
“We have habitat plans that would support more than half a million people in one massive space station. They’ll be building one like that in Mars orbit once we get to mining Demos and Phobos.”
He shook his head. “That’s staggering.”
“Your father thought big. He wants to get mankind off Earth in a permanent way. Imagine colonies around Venus and Mars. The asteroid belt. Jupiter and beyond. Ultimately, millions of people. Even billions at some far off future date. The planet that gave mankind birth would no longer limit us.”
The pilot turned in his seat and spoke over their radios. “Welcome aboard. I’m Lenny Kawasaki and I’ll be your pilot today. We hit the burners in about ten minutes. Once we reach orbit, we’ll have another three and a half hours to get to our destination. Thanks for flying with us and we hope you’ll choose Humanity Unlimited for all your orbital launch needs.”
Harry seemed disinclined to talk, so Jess settled back and meditated. The engine ignition caught her a little off guard, shaking her and then pressing her back into her acceleration couch firmly.
The boost to orbit took just over ten minutes. They didn’t have windows, but the small screen above the pilot’ cubby showed the view. It was breathtaking.
Once the engines shut off, they were in microgravity. Basically, they floated. The pilot allowed them to unbuckle once the lifter was on course. Jess decided to stay where she was.
Watching the mercenaries figure out how to move around was fun, though. They were surprisingly adept at it, though they had a tendency to overshoot their marks.
The fun and games kept them from being bored while Jess reviewed the data dump from the ship. They’d unloaded the reactor and had it roughly in place. She’d see to the final connections once she was on board, but she was satisfied with the work that her people had done so far.
* * * * *
Harry played around for a while and then buckled back in to watch Sandra, Rex, and Jeremy. The sniper was trying to figure out how to compensate for zero-G when she tossed a ping-pong ball toward a small basket someone had taped to the far wall.
Apparently, this was a fun game for everyone. They’d try to get the motions just right and mostly fail miserably.
“This is more complex than it looks,” Sandra said after a while. “I’ll figure it out, though. I wonder how a shooter does her business without gravity. The recoil would shove her hard enough to screw up her aim. And the slug might penetrate the hull.”
“They might not have weapons in space.”
She stared at him for a moment and laughed. “Stop trolling me. Of course they have weapons in space.”
Rex held onto the back of one of the chairs. “Maybe it uses compressed air and frangible rounds.”
That made some sense, Harry decided. Over-penetration would be a bad thing in space. “Most of the ship has gravity, just not as much as you’d expect. It would mean knowing how to shoot in every level and being able to compensate correctly the first time. That could be fun.”
“But the central area doesn’t have gravity, right?” Sandra asked. “I bet I could manage something, but it’ll take time to develop the right skills and tactics to secure the whole ship. I know what I’ll be doing most of the trip out. Chasing Rex around.”
“Just what I’d been hoping you’d say.”
“You are such a pervert.”
The big scout laughed. “Hardly that. It’s all natural.”
“I want to get a good look at their systems,” Jeremy said. “They must be seriously advanced.”
Jess tapped Harry on the shoulder. “We’re almost there. Check the screen.”
Harry watched the small dot grow into a ship on the screen. The lack of reference points made it hard to tell the size until they got close. Liberty Station was huge.
The shaft the torus rotated around was shorter than he’d expected and he couldn’t see any sign of the engines Jess had spoken of. Four massive spokes connected the rotating torus to the spine, helping it rotate majestically. The torus was thicker than he’d imagined, too, but there were thousands of people in there.
Thr
ee long arms projected from the ship above the torus. He suspected there was a fourth that he couldn’t see because of the ship itself. One looked like a dock. He could see two lifters attached to it. That gave him a new sense of scale. The station was even bigger than he’d thought.
One of the remaining arms held a solar array. The other held three large disks that looked ready to drop. Maybe the mining equipment Jess had mentioned.
As they came around the station, he saw a similar set of discs on the far side of the ship on the last arm. He’d have to ask about them when they had time.
A smaller disk, about a third the size of the torus, but just as thick, sat on the top of the station. It was rotating in the opposite direction from the torus. The ship looked amazing.
“We dock at the end of the arm to the left,” Jess said. “We’ll get off in zero gravity and unload the cargo they brought up. You guys can settle in and take a tour of the ship while I get the reactor installed. By this time tomorrow, we’ll have left Earth—and our troubles—behind.”
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Jess fidgeted during the approach. In space, ships and people moved slowly and carefully. The lifter edged close to the docking arm and allowed the clamps to lock it down.
The pilot instructed everyone to stay in their seats until someone came to get them, unless they were zero-G certified. Which she was.
She unbuckled, spun over her seat, and launched herself to the handhold beside the personnel lock. She opened a cubby, retrieved a line, and went back for Harry.
“You can get out of the suit, now. They’ll pack it away for you.”
Jess helped him get his suit off and then stripped off her own. She folded them and strapped them into their seats.
She held up the line. “Let me hook us up. Until they’re satisfied that you can maneuver on your own, you’ll need to be paired up with someone who can keep you from hurting yourself or others in microgravity.”