by L S Roebuck
“One final message, which could be our last,” Dek continued. “As the last captain of the American Spirit, I’ll use my prerogative to make it a personal one. Amberly Macready, I know the odds are against us, and I will probably never see you again. Still, the glimmer of a chance has become a bright flame of hope.”
Maybe I should have warned Amberly about this, thought Moreno as she remembered Dek’s public profession. Oops.
“Amberly,” Dek said, looking directly in the camera, “I will do everything in my power to get us to Magellan, to home, and if I make it there, I am never leaving again. There’s no one from Earth to Arara like you. Your brilliance. Your beauty. Your amazing capacity to love and inspire love. All my heart, Amberly. See you soon, Magellan. American Spirit out.”
Amberly had gone beet red. Standing next to Amberly, Trigs, her aspiring beau, shifted his weight uncomfortably. Lydia stood on the other side of Amberly and leaned toward her ear to whisper, “That was a little overdone.”
Trigs heard the whisper, and awkwardly said, “He’s right, Amberly. You are amazing.”
Thor, somewhat ignorant to the romantic positioning going on, but one of Amberly’s biggest supporters – who never stopped reminding everyone that if it weren’t for Amberly, her mother’s evil plan to destroy Magellan would have succeeded – raised his fist in the air. “Three cheers for Amberly, hero of Magellan.” The assembled crew awkwardly followed the governor’s suggestion.
Amberly wanted to die. Lydia took her friend’s hand. Amberly looked for an exit from the Command Center to escape this spontaneous unwanted attention when Boro spoke up with a non sequitur.
“This plan is crazy,” Boro said. The Marine, dark-skinned, tall and muscular, was a veteran of the worst of the Battle of Magellan. He saved North multiple times from the hand of Chasm. “Even if we make it to the American Spirit, there is no guarantee we’ll be able to revive the American Spirit antimatter reactor. And we’ll have no margin of error without an antimatter reactor ourselves.”
Boro was leading the security detail for the Elcano flotilla, named for the captain of the only surviving ship from Ferdinand Magellan’s historic circumnavigational voyage around the Earth. He also was serving as the command officer for the M.S.S Firebird.
The flagship of the flotilla was M.S.S. Nautilus, commanded by the mission leader, Wilder. The third Valkyrie, M.S.S. Palomino, was commanded by a young Magellan engineer, Kuuku Akachi. Just 25 years old, Akachi had already proven herself as particularly resourceful during the rebuilding of Magellan when she was able to shore up critical radiation shielding by recycling polymer compounds from large fragments broken off the topside garden’s viewport during the Battle of Magellan. As an engineer’s mate, she had worked for Magellan Chief Engineer Zelma, overseeing maintenance on the waypoint’s antimatter reactors for nearly four years.
Akachi sported an attractive figure, standing just over one and one-half meters tall with a smooth asymmetrical cut for her dark hair. She had striking, deep brown eyes that drew attention to the smooth skin of her face that had a copper sheen. She rarely smiled, but when she did, she’d light the room.
“Boro,” the young engineer countered, “we are here to save lives. To be an island of salvation in the Great Spaces.” She considered the Marine, who was in his dress uniform for this final top-secret mission briefing. “If you are going to command the Firebird, you must believe in the great purpose of the waypoints. This is it.”
“Kuuku, my child,” Boro spoke slowly, mixing his words with a hint of condescension, “you are idealistic, but you are young and naive. I was once as you are–”
“Lt. Boro,” Rita interrupted her recently commissioned officer. “I am neither young, nor am I naive. Akachi has the spirit we need for this mission to succeed. She is correct. If you do not believe in the mission then perhaps we should find someone else to take your place.”
“No, Commander,” Boro’s tone became humble. “My apologies. I am ready to do my part to save the American Spirit, even if that means we don’t return.”
“We’re coming back, Boro,” Wilder said. “We’ve run the simulations. We’ve done the math. We know the American Spirit trajectory.”
“I know what we know, Trot,” Boro said, putting his hands up to stop his friend from continuing. “What I am worried about is that we don’t know what we don’t know.”
“You better come back,” Moreno said to Wilder with a modicum of jocularity. “You are taking Skip, and Amberly is taking Skylar. Those are our best communications techs. Who will I have to decrypt those love letters I keep getting?” Moreno smiled, and her display of soft emotion put the assembled team at ease.
The Marine commander stepped four paces across the Command Center to where Amberly was standing. She took both of Amberly’s hands, and the older woman squeezed them. “I hope we rescue the American Spirit, but your mission is the one that must succeed, my dear Amberly. My instincts tell me Chasm will be back. You’ll make sure we are ready.”
Amberly and Moreno’s preparation to secretly launch a team to establish a permanent base at Fuentes Station had only one flaw – how to keep it a secret when the supplies and contingency of nearly 30 engineers, miners, biologists, Marines and others were leaving Magellan.
The distress call from American Spirit presented the perfect cover. Amberly’s team would take a Valkyrie, the Magnus-berthed runabout Liberty and a pair of corvettes pretending to be part of the rescue flotilla. And then when they were well out of visual and most signal ranges, the secret Spencer Belt team would part ways with the Elcano fleet, and any deep Chasm operatives would be none the wiser.
Once again, Dek Tigona, your timing is impeccable, Amberly thought. Part of her wished she could go with her sister and her sister’s husband, but she knew she was the more capable Macready sister. And as Morneo had said, harvesting new resources from the Spencer Belt was essential to the long-term survival of Magellan. Amberly wasn’t particularly vain or egotistical, but she was self-aware that she had amazing problem-solving skills, not unlike those of her mother.
Moreno looked as though she was about to give a motivational speech as she surveyed the leadership teams for both expeditions. Instead, she took a deep breath and kept it brief. “You know your jobs. Shove off in six hours. Get to work.”
“We’ll be praying for you,” the governor said.
At 20 years old, Amberly felt weird sitting in the command chair of the Liberty. Alone on the bridge, she looked out the viewport into the endless inky blackness of space. Off the bow of her ship, the darkness was broken up by the white blooms generated by the propulsion units on the Palomino, Firebird and Nautilus. The engines were powering up for weeks of acceleration.
The light illuminated the barge containers the Palomino and Firebird had in tow. Essentially a steel lock box made in space, these barges had no propulsion ability or life support. Inside one barge was extra batteries, emergency oxygen, food and other supplies. If that barge were lost, the flotilla would have to turn back. The loss of the supply barge could mean death for everyone.
The second barge held repair tools and supplies to fix the antimatter chamber on the American Spirit. If the chamber could be repaired and restarted, the amount of energy generated would be more than enough to ensure a safe return for the cruiser and the Elcano flotilla. Kuuku had engineered the rigging between the barges and Valkyries with enough strength to ensure that any structural stress from the long acceleration would not cause detachment.
“Verne, can you bring up the aft camera view please?” Amberly had requested that her VI be installed on the Liberty. When they arrived at Sonnet, she would transfer Verne to help her manage Fuentes Station. She needed an VI she could trust and she was comfortable with.
An image of a slowly shrinking Waypoint Magellan covered the viewport. Amberly couldn’t take her eyes off the spinning, grey-metallic waypoint, with beams of light piercing out into space from the various windows and ports speckled across th
e exterior hull. Within an hour, the waypoint would be just a speck of light, and not long after that, invisible to the naked eye. I hope I make it back, dear friend, Amberly thought as she glanced softly at her diminishing home.
The scars inflicted on Magellan by the hand of her mother were not as visible as they once were. Here home was healing, and that thought made her smile.
“I’m not intimidated by him, you know,” Skylar said. Amberly jumped.
“Sorry, I didn’t hear you come in,” Amberly said, looking back at the main view screen at Magellan. Skylar stood behind to Amberly’s chair, and placed his hands on her shoulders, and began to gently rub.
“We’ll be back there before you know, Amberly,” Skylar smoothly tipped his head toward the waypoint. “We’ll have a home to come back to, because you are going to save it.
Skylar resumed his seat at the communications station. Amberly turned to face her friend. She hadn’t gotten used to his new hairstyle, the practical, masculine crew cut. The new look jolted her with something positive, but she did miss his romance-novel golden locks. His neatly trimmed beard was also growing on her, and she imagined what it would be like to kiss someone with facial hair.
Besides an unfortunate smooch with the gangly and somewhat smelly Mike Opal when she was just fourteen, the only men she had kissed were Dek and North – both on the same day, she recalled. She believed, irrationally of course, at the time that she would learn something from the kiss with Dek. She enjoyed the kiss with North, but regretted it now because her lips were laced with deception. And that is the short history of the make-out sessions of Amberly Macready, she laughed in her head.
“I’m sorry, Sky,” Amberly said after a brief moment, shaking hot bussing memories from her head, “not intimidated by whom?”
“Dek. Dek Tigona,” Skylar said. “I know you both were friends, special friends.”
Oh, not this, again, Amberly thought. She remembered North’s jealousy of Dek, and how she felt when those two peacocks started their puffing their plumage.
“Let’s just focus on the mission, okay,” Amberly said, starting to get feel her face turn red from both anger and embarrassment. “I made my peace with Tigona when he left Magellan, and I do wish him well, but I wonder if he’ll make it back alive. He may already be dead.”
Amberly hadn’t considered the idea that Dek may have already perished until the words came out of her mouth. A flood of emotions hit her, and she worked to keep her composure in front of her second-in-command.
“But you told him that you love him,” Skylar stood and stepped toward the command chair. “Where does that leave us if he shows up at your portal?”
Amberly stood up and faced Skylar, her blood now starting to boil. “I don’t know. Where does that leave us?”
“Just friends, I guess,” Skylar snapped. “I mean, why would the hero of Magellan want to even be friends with a lowly comm operator.”
“I don’t know,” Amberly raised her voice, stepped face-to-face with Skylar, piercing him with her brilliant green eyes. “Why would the honorable councilman want to lower himself to slum with a red-headed lab rat?”
“Well... because...” Skylar reached his arms out and took Amberly’s head and pulled her into a messy kiss.
What in the waypoint is he doing? Amberly thought. She pulled her head out of his grip, her furious face still covered with conflicted emotion. Her temples were pulsating and her breathing had grown heavy. She stared unflinchingly at Skylar as she pulled the back of her hand over her mouth, wiping off saliva which she wasn’t sure was hers or his.
She was swimming in hormones and pheromones. She pushed herself up on her heels and threw her arms around Skylar’s back, returning the kiss with a prolonged lip lock at her slower, more powerful pace. Now she understood what Kora had meant when she told her about the so-wrong-it’s-right kiss. Her pulse raced.
“Oh, snap, I win the bet,” came Wong’s voice from the portal, surprising the pair and inspiring them to leap apart. “Moreno bet me that it would be at least two months before you guys became romantic. I knew it wouldn’t take that long. Let me get a picture so I have evidence when we get back.”
Amberly wanted to melt into the floor. Skylar was half embarrassed, but also proud that he’d been able to lure Amberly into a kiss, and was happy for others to know. It gave him a sense of power.
Amberly sat down in the command chair and started fidgeting with her infopad.
“Friends,” she mumbled. “Just friends.”
“I can see that,” Wong sat down at the navigator’s chair and started checking for space debris.
Skylar stepped toward the door. “I’m going to go help my other friends with kitchen patrol.” And he exited.
Amberly decided she was going to pretend she was invisible for at least the next week.
The Elcano flotilla, three Valkyries towing two barges, had taken the lead from what Midas had dubbed the Macready flotilla – a single Valkyrie and two smaller corvettes. Magellan had nearly emptied itself of all its runabouts and fighters for the two simultaneous expeditions. With nearly 15 hours of travel between them and the waypoint, Amberly knew it was time to say goodbye to her sister and her family.
The Macready flotilla would now alter course for the Spencer Belt, and Elcano group would try to intercept American Spirit before it was too late.
“New course set, awaiting your order, Amberly,” Verne spoke to its master through the bridge PA system.
Amberly tried to hold back her tears. She was looking at a live video of Kora, Trot and little Alroy in his father’s arms.
“I know you will take good care of my sister, Trot,” Amberly smiled at her brother-in-law through the video feed. Just then, Alroy made an unintelligible gurgle. “And my nephew, too. You are going to be so big when I see you again.”
A tall athletic blonde stepped into the frame. “Amberly, make us proud at Sonnet. I expect there to be a luxury hotel complete with swimming pool built on that asteroid by the time we get back.”
“There’s not enough gravity on Sonnet to hold down a pool,” Amberly heard Skip’s voice say off screen.
“Always crushing my dream,” Lydia shook her head and smirked. “Always crushing the dream.”
“Have you decided what you want me to tell Dek?” Kora asked her sister. “We’re going to find him alive … and the first thing he is going to do is ask after you. Do you want me to tell him your secret?”
“Which one,” Amberly asked half joking, and then nervously glanced at the rest of the Liberty bridge crew. She knew Kora probably meant how she left Dek thinking that she still loved him. Although she had strong emotions for Dek, Amberly believed she never really loved him. She used the pretense of love to manipulate Dek in order to save Magellan. The gambit paid off, but since he was exiled, Amberly figured that she would never see Dek again. She thought it an act of kindness for Dek, imprisoned on the American Spirit, to continue to believe the fiction that Amberly had some lingering romantic interest in the roguish rebel.
But maybe the secret Kora meant was if she should not tell Dek about the hottest gossip the flotilla had to offer — that a certain redhead scientist-commander and her charismatic first officer were seen making out in deep space.
Or the secret that she had given North a method to contact her in secret. In the second it took for her to consider these options, Amberly panicked.
“No, no, no,” she said with a bit of panic. “Don’t tell him anything.”
“Well, what should I tell him then,” Kora said, slightly amused, slightly concerned for her little sister.
“I don’t know, you’ll have at least two or three months of floating in space to figure it out,” Amberly sighed. “I am going to miss you so much, Kora.”
“We’ve never been apart this long,” Kora said. “I’m going to pray every day for you. You know what North likes to say, right?”
“Yeah, prayers are the only thing that travel faster than the speed
of light,” Amberly remembered.
“So it’s like I’ll be with you every day,” Kora sniffled, holding back tears.
“I’ll send you regular vid updates. You guys better get going, Kora,” Amberly said, now crying openly. “Go save, Dek.”
“You go save Magellan. Again.”
The Spencer Belt was not close to an optimal distance in its orbit from Magellan. The waypoint normally kept a very rough synchronic position with Earth, enabling the city in space to be found with relatively low-tech navigation systems. So as the asteroids orbited Spencer Minorum, the distance from Sonnet, the largest asteroid, and Magellan was variable. At its closet point, one could travel from Magellan to Sonnet in less than a day in even a small, slow ship, like a corvette. At its furthest point, it would take months for a speedy deep space ship like Magnus, to make the trip. Corvettes and Valkyries, unless they were towing extra batteries, just didn’t have the life support range. Instead, they would have to wait until Sonnet swung around on its six-year orbit again and ride the asteroid back into range of Magellan.
Nearly a week had passed since the Macready flotilla had parted with the rest of the Elcano flotilla. Amberly, who was naturally introverted, was already going crazy trying to find some solitude on Liberty. Besides the bridge crew, 15 other members of the new Fuentes Station team were riding along. She wished she had traveled on one of the escort corvettes now. Sure, they were cramped, but she would not have had been forced to interact with her team.
She had studied about the mystique of leadership, in particular the books by April Eaton. Eaton had warned new leaders about how certain types of followers tended to put their leaders on pedestals simply because of the position they held. “You’ll find that some people find security in placing their faith in the leader, which sometimes leads to an unhealthy lionization and expectations that the leader can do much more that she is actually capable of,” Eaton explained in her book, The Mind of the Follower.