by WADE, T I
“We have it all figured out, boss,” said Jonesy. “Maggie and I will be down drinking beer before you know it.” Ryan didn’t bother to look at Commander Joot and his usual rolling eyeballs.
“I gave you the coordinates for the fuel location, Mr. Jones,” added Ryan. “You head straight there. The techies will give you fifty percent of all the fuel we have down here. Any excess once you are up there can be used for your next flight. From then on, we will depend on refueling from America One. Captain Pete, your fuel stocks please?”
“At thirty percent fuel load we have enough up here to refuel five shuttles and one Matt craft,” was the reply.
The large crew were happy to finally get off the shuttle, and Jonesy and Maggie were ordered to rest while SB-III was unloaded and readied for the return trip. Jonesy and Maggie were tired. It had been quite a few days shooting up China. Then once Ryan had halted the attack, it had taken the shuttle three orbits and several hours to climb up to America One 300 miles above Earth.
They had just four hours of sleep before they reentered the shuttle with Dr. Nancy for the return flight.
The first six hours of orbits decreased in altitude, which allowed Jonesy another three hours of sleep, and then Maggie the same before Ryan’s voice woke her. With this quick time, Jonesy reckoned that one day they could beat the old Southwest Airline’s rapid turnarounds.
For the last hour before reentry, SB-III’s computer was primed with speed and height adjustments. Commander Joot in the crater answered any questions relating to one of his reentries. He couldn’t see why everybody was so concerned.
Instead of the shuttle pulling up and flying with her heat tiles into the flame of atmospheric reentry, Jonesy had decided to head in at the exact speed Commander Joot entered, slightly faster than theirs, and this time Jonesy would point the shuttle’s nose down like an arrow. It shouldn’t matter inside the shield.
If the shield malfunctioned in any way, or broke up, he and his wife, and Dr. Nancy would be burnt toast within milliseconds.
“Speed accurate, height at minimum. Desert Control, we are heading in,” said Jonesy with full concentration, monitoring the computer readouts. He was one with his bird, and he and the shuttle knew it. What really excited Jonesy was that inside the shield he could take command of the shuttle at any time. There weren’t any of the deadly atmospheric high speed drags and pressures connected with their usual atmospheric reentry. He had also reentered with Commander Joot in the Matt craft once, and had seen how maneuverable the craft was inside the shield in atmospheric conditions.
If something went wrong, nobody inside SB-III would feel a thing. Death would be instantaneous, and everything around them would just disintegrate.
“We might lose communications soon. The shield is vibrating pretty badly, but holding together. Speed 24,900 knots,” said the chief astronaut calmly.
For Jonesy and Maggie, this reentry was totally different. Desert Control didn’t get lost on the radio. They communicated all the way down. At 150,000 feet, once past the flame altitudes, the craft began to try to rise. Smiling, Jonesy kept the nose down and simply used the rear thrusters. That worked for a couple of minutes, until even with the nose pointing toward Earth the craft slowed in its downward motion, even though its forward speed across the planet’s surface was still far higher than usual at this altitude. So he did the next best thing: he turned them upside down, and like a roller coaster, headed toward the growing planet, using the rear thrusters to descend like a rocket over the Atlantic.
The next problem was a serious speed reduction, so he began to treat the shuttle as if it were still in space. He turned the craft around using the small thrusters and began slowing them, reversing thrust in the direction they were going.
The computers followed and recorded his every move, and as they rapidly got closer to the desert base, a readout of what he did appeared on all their computer screens.
“I can read you on radar, but am I right: you are at 90,000 feet, still over 16,000 knots and going in reverse? I can see your computer readouts, but other than that, you don’t exist up there SB-III,” said Igor.
“Nor from up here,” added Captain Pete.
“This is the most fun flying I have ever done,” replied Jonesy. “Wow! And you won’t believe it, but we are reversing over Earth at Mach 16 with 30 percent rear thrust. The shield is vibrating pretty badly, but we are slowing and decreasing altitude faster than I have ever flown before.”
“Passing through 69,000 feet at 11,000 knots” added Maggie. “Mach 15, we are flying lower and ten times faster than an F-16. Increasing thrust to 40 percent…..now 45 percent….Jonesy, we are still going to overfly.”
“Maggie, increase thrust to 70 percent. I am increasing angle of attack to 75 percent,” said Jonesy.
They were nearly above the crater when they sped past still at 27,000 feet and at Mach 5. Ryan and the others ran outside, and with binoculars, watched one of their shuttles flying backward and traveling over them in the blue shield like an asteroid about to hit Earth. The only difference was that there was no smoke or flames. There wasn’t even a sonic boom.
“Where are you going, Mr. Jones?” asked Ryan, unbelieving at what he was seeing.
“India by the look of it, but we are slowing rapidly,” was Maggie’s sarcastic reply.
“India my foot, wife. At this speed reduction, Ryan can get the beers cold. We will be home in thirty minutes. Maggie, up the thrust to ninety percent. Let’s get this bucking bronco tied down and corral the beast.”
“Heading east over the Red Sea, Jonesy, and dropping like a stone. Keep her facing west. Prepare for a controlled hover; I’m increasing thrust to 99 percent, then will rapidly decrease down to 55.”
“Yee-hah!” shouted Jonesy, enjoying himself immensely.
Slowly, 600 miles east of the crater, at 20,000 feet, the Jones family finally obtained a perfect hover, with the craft completely stationary above ground.
“Allen, you up there?” Jonesy said into his mike excitedly.
“Negative,” replied Captain Pete. “SB-II is currently over central Asia, with four minutes to his start of reentry.”
“Dial into his computers, Pete, and I’ll send up to you my files on this approach. We overflew by 600 miles. He can decrease that by reversing the craft earlier. With the shield, he can reenter in reverse mode earlier than I did and nothing will happen. We flew through dense atmospheric conditions at over Mach 15. I’m sure another Mach or ten won’t matter. Maggie, give me 65 percent forward thrust, ten degrees above horizontal glideslope, and let’s go and get a cold one. Captain Pete, our files are on the way. Just tell Allen not to reverse thrust too quickly. The trick in all this is learning to fly all over again, and aiming the mathematics and shuttle toward the crater, over.”
“We get your drift, Jonesy. Files received, out,” replied Captain Pete, who began to talk the reentry through with the next shuttle.
Twenty minutes later, SB-III glided over the lip of the crater and came in for a perfect landing. Jonesy told everybody listening that he had used less than 15 percent fuel capacity, and with a straight launch should use no more than the same amount. It had been as difficult to slow the craft down as it would have been to accelerate it.
Less than an hour later, Allen and Jamie Saunders came in from the west. They had been short by 90 miles at 19,000 feet, but closer to the “pin” than SB-III.
SB-II had nearly lost control and dropped to ground once he reached a motionless hover, and Allen Saunders had used five percent less fuel than Jonesy and Maggie. Nobody had refueled yet.
By the time the Saunders family walked into the command tent, Jonesy was already on his second beer and trying to get Commander Joot to try one.
The astronauts even enjoyed a beer during the briefing. It was all pilot talk, looking at the computer readouts. Both pilot crews reckoned that they would be spot on next time, and Ryan breathed a sigh of relief. His shuttles didn’t need a runway anymor
e.
Jonesy was already working on numbers for a shield launch into space and asked Joot to get him another beer, which the small man refused. Ryan told them all that the next flight was not into space, but into the Gibson Desert in Western Australia.
Fish, big fish, small fish and big game fish began to swim in the eyes and mind of General John Jones, United States Air Force, Retired.
Chapter 11
The Third Level
As soon as the sun was up the next morning, spacesuits were donned and the four men who had surveyed the first two levels of the crater the day before, plus Jonesy and Allen Saunders, headed down the slope to the cavern. Ryan and Commander Joot had decided to leave the upper and second level doors open the previous night so that the air inside would be freshened. Now it was only the third level that needed an atmosphere.
Dr. Nancy and Dr. Walls were being helped into suits by Max Burgos, who had returned with Dr. Walls and Allen Saunders. It was only the third time the new doctor had worn a suit. All the newbies had been given several hours of the most basic spacesuit training once they had reached America One.
“Oxygen levels safe,” said VIN a few minutes after he had reached the flight deck on the upper level. He then headed down to the second layer and said the same. Only the helium statistics was out of alignment to the usual Earth’s atmospheric mix. It always seemed higher in the Matt bases.
VIN and Commander Joot checked out the two levels to make sure nothing was amiss or out of place before allowing the others in. Nothing had been moved. Now it was time to open the third level.
Commander Joot seemed to struggle to mentally open the door. He had to concentrate more than twice as hard as before. His eyes were tightly closed, and the deep frown lines appearing on his face could be seen through his visor before the door grudgingly moved a dozen inches, and then stopped.
“The door seems to have a security system or something,” Joot said to the others. “I believe that only a person of my rank or the current Supreme Ruler himself is allowed to open this door, and it doesn’t seem to want to open. Elder Roo’s concentration didn’t help me at all.”
“Well, I can see the door is double the width of all the other doors I have tried to open on your Matt bases,” replied VIN. Commander Joot looked at the door itself instead of closing his eyes and concentrating. VIN was right, this door had opened a foot, and he could see that this door was all of the foot wide.
“I don’t remember this door being made so secure and heavy. That is my difficulty,” Joot responded. “It was a normal door when I left the last time. I’m sure the changes were made by the last Ruler after my departure.”
“How long do you think they lived here after you left?” Jonesy asked.
The commander thought for a while. “I don’t believe that they would have been here longer than one more generation; 200 to 250 years,” he replied. “I suppose that is a lot of time to change things. It hadn’t rained for 20 years when I left. Let me open it some more,” and this time he concentrated hard enough to give VIN and Dr. Nancy a headache, but it worked. The door opened, and a thin telltale bubble of the shield began to grow out of the open door.
Everybody peered inside once they had manhandled it open. The enormous cavern was packed with hundreds of shelves of items. It was still very blue inside, and they couldn’t see the condition of the supplies. Commander Joot headed in and turned off the five black boxes in the power room.
Slowly the blue shields grew smaller and within a few minutes were gone. The lights in the walls were not so bright this time, as the rows of shelves darkened the cavern more than on the upper levels.
“I believe we now have enough shields for Suzi to start an entire farm on Mars,” VIN suggested as everybody stood still and looked at what they could see, not much except darkened shadows.
“We have two hours of suit time left, the doctors forty minutes more than us. The last cryogenic chambers took twelve hours to open, so I think we check them out first, and if they are operational begin the twelve hour countdown,” said Ryan.
“Since there was only a vacuum in here and the air above was clean, I believe the atmosphere should be stable with ten to fifteen minutes as it is sucked into the cavern from the upper level,” added Igor.
“Mr. Jones, Mr. Saunders, Commander,” continued Ryan. “Igor will hand you the black boxes. Please take them up two at a time and place them next to the others in the Matt craft. We are not leaving without them.” The three men headed up the stairs and returned within twenty minutes. Commander Joot had just opened the door to the medical area.
To VIN it seemed as if he were back in one of the other bases in space. The medical room looked exactly the same, but three times the size. “I count 72 cabinets, 24 in three walls. Each wall has three lines of eight. Not many for an end of a tribe,” VIN suggested.
“We are going to be rather full on Mars if they are all occupied,” added Ryan.
“I don’t think so,” replied VIN. “It seems that on the right-hand wall there are only six lights on the cabinet handles, and they are not blue, but red. That is not good news.”
“Same here, I only see two red handles,” said Igor. He was checking out the small cabinet handles on the opposite wall to VIN, and the two doctors were checking the far wall to the door, the third wall.
“I see eleven blue handles, and the rest have no color whatsoever,” said Nancy.
“Let’s start proceedings,” suggested Ryan. “Commander, if you please. I suggest we start with Dr. Nancy’s wall first. It seems there is no life in the other two.”
“I will begin the heating of all three walls,” replied Joot. “It doesn’t really matter; we might as well get the end results of the population of our base accounted for in one go. Sometimes the red color depicts a lesser coldness. Maybe frozen stores, papers, or seeds like you found on the planets.” With that he pushed the necessary buttons, and the usual foot-tingling vibrations, although much stronger than before, were felt under feet as the warming process was begun.
There was nothing else to do, apart for bringing down the medical supplies. Both shuttles had arrived with every saline drip and all the other supplies needed by the two doctors that was aboard the mother ship. Since there were so few blue lights, these could be carried down into the cavern on the next visit in eleven hours’ time.
“It will take ten hours to charge our suits. Therefore I believe we should inspect what we can in the next ten to twenty minutes, then head up to charge our suits for the next visit,” said Igor.
Everybody nodded and began looking at the supplies on hundreds of shelves. To Commander Joot, this was all that remained of his home, his people on Earth, and it didn’t look too good. The remains of his whole tribe—eleven blue handles—were all that was left, and that made him reach into his distant past.
Commander Joot’s mind went back to his younger days, and then he remembered—all these sleep chambers were far larger. He explained this to the others. Each cabinet could be holding up to a group, or family, of six people. Three adults, or six children. There could be far more people instead of eleven.
Once the system was activated, there was nothing more to do in the medical room, apart for the doctors to look at the tools they had at their disposal. The others headed back to the first long row of shelves.
The shelves as usual had dozens of piles of blankets, pillows, clothing, anfood supplies, but everything unfortunately turned to dust once touched.
One area had a dozen of the same gold cases, or Identity chests as Elder Roo had described them, found in the other bases. These were identical, but slightly larger.
On board America One, the chemistry lab had checked the first Matt Identity chests years earlier and had found them to be pure gold. These were larger than the smaller ones found in space. At eighteen inches long and high and a foot wide, with a flat lid, VIN tried to pick one up with its handle on each end. He struggled and had to get Jonesy to help him. Now having to fight
normal Earth gravity, these boxes, compared to the ones found in space, were very heavy.
“There must be half a ton of gold in these twelve boxes. Very heavy,” remarked Ryan.
“Commander chests. We used this metal you call gold because it was pretty, and soft and easy to mold,” Joot added.
“There are some even larger gold boxes over there, another dozen stacked on top of each other,” said Allen into his suit’s intercom. Everyone headed further down the row of shelves.
“Inventor chests,” said Commander Joot. These had curved lids, and were three feet long, only a foot wide and two feet high. “Look over here, six Ruler chests, the biggest chests of all. We had seven Supreme Rulers, so one chest is missing,” and everybody looked further down the row to the next area. Here the six chests weren’t stacked on top of each other, and there was a space above them. These chests were about the size of a treasure chest and were about two feet cubed with their curved lids closed.
“Check all these out!” VIN exclaimed, looking through the open hole above the big chests. He was looking through the gap at the second row, about ten feet behind the first row. Everybody looked, apart from Commander Joot, who said that he knew what was there and wanted to find his father’s chest among the Ruler chests.
All their mouths dropped. This whole row, a football field long, and with eight shelves, each a foot high, were the smaller gold chests found on the planets. VIN tried to count, but there were too many, so he scanned the numbers in one row and worked out that there must be well over a thousand gold boxes. Shocked, he walked around the end of the line of rows and found the same gold chests, thousands of them on the third, fourth and fifth rows—thousands upon thousands of gold chests, all the size of a shoe box.
“I think we have just ruined the price of gold on this planet,” was all Ryan could say.
The entire crew followed VIN and looked at what he had found. They hadn’t seen the rear rows behind the first one, and hadn’t noticed the mass of yellow behind the piles of dust. Only Joot, who had all six Ruler chests open, wasn’t shocked.