Dash’s brows knit together. “How will I know?”
“If you see the armed Marines saying things like ‘Authorized personnel only!’ or ‘Halt or we’ll open fire!’ then you’ll know you’re in the wrong place.”
“Got it.” Dash turned around, then rolled his eyes.
At least sarcasm would survive the asteroid impact.
The directions were spot-on, though. Dash navigated down through the bowels of the aircraft carrier without any trouble. The stenciling over the hatch read 3204-CCTV, which sounded right to him. He grabbed the long handle and turned it, opened the hatch, and then stepped inside.
Luck, or God’s will, was with him. The compartment was unoccupied. Dash could explain his presence here, but anyone could stop him, so he needed to work fast.
The room was painted the same dull gray as all the other compartments, with pipes and conduit running through the ceiling. A tripod and video camera stood in front of a podium with the ship’s logo emblazoned upon it. CVNS-80 Enterprise – Where No One Has Gone Before. The obvious Star Trek reference made him smile despite his nerves.
Dash wondered if Captain Onsurez was a fan.
He didn’t care about the television equipment. Dash needed an internet connection—and time enough to do what needed to be done. Sure enough, four desktop computers were under the desks, boxed up and strapped down. The compartment had Wi-Fi, but it was password protected. Dash glanced around the desks, praying someone was lazy enough to write it down.
They had not.
Dash didn’t have time to mess around. He checked beneath each of the desks and found one with an Ethernet cable. He slid the plug into his laptop’s port, then opened the lid. His heart beat heavier with each passing moment. He saw the network indicator rotating, showing it was negotiating for an address and access, but it moved slow enough that he almost screamed.
“Come on, let me out,” Dash murmured as he opened Google. To his surprise, the page loaded almost immediately. Given the ship’s isolation and unknown connection speed, Dash had expected a bit more to load. Just to be safe, he ran a quick search for the latest Astros score, which came back straight away.
It wasn’t pretty. Detroit had trounced them.
“Well, all right then.”
Despite how early it was, warm air filled the ship’s interior and sweat beaded on his forehead. Dash launched a video chat and connected to his mother.
“Ah, darling!” An older, slightly wizened version of Rasul’s face appeared in the window. “To what do I owe this pleasure?” His mother wore her favorite Coach sunglasses, with a blue sunhat to shade her skin from the Houston sun.
Now that he had his chance, the opportunity, Dash hesitated. In the silence, he heard the grate of metal on metal and the air shifted as the hatch opened behind him.
Time was not on his side.
“Mother, I—”
“Have you heard from Rasul? I got one text from him last week, but when I replied, he ignored me. I’ve left messages all week. Texts, voicemail—I even tried emailing him.” His mother pouted. “Nothing.”
“Mother,” Dash rolled his eyes. “Nobody listens to voicemail anymore.” He sucked in a quick breath. “Listen to me, I need you to know something.”
His mother waited, one heartbeat, two, three…
“Well? What is it, dear?”
Dash’s foster mother wore the same enormous sunglasses anytime she thought the sun might add to her wrinkles. Staring at her, his mother had woken up, exercised, probably drank a Bloody Mary—his mother wasn’t as observant as his father had been. Judging from her outfit, she was waiting to go out for lunch or shopping. Something meaningless, harmless. That was her life and she enjoyed it.
It was on the tip of Dash’s tongue—to just blurt it all out. Rasul’s death, Erebus coming to destroy the world, and his own escape on a spaceship that was never designed to fly.
Dash couldn’t do it. His mother looked content and bored. Her day revolved around Houston’s social scene and the Iranian expat community. Why destroy that?
Even so, Dash fought back tears. This was the last time he would see his foster mother’s face, hear her voice.
“Um, I just wanted to tell you I love you.”
His mother removed her sunglasses and leaned closer to the phone. “Are you all right, darling? Do you have cancer? Is that why you’re in a hospital? Are you in a hospital? Or prison? Why is it so gray behind you?”
The tears slid down his face as he laughed. “No, I’m not in prison, Mother, and I don’t have cancer either. I just miss you.” Dash wiped his cheek and shook his head. “I’m actually on a ship.”
“A cruise ship?” Dash’s mother beamed. “Are there handsome men there, too?”
“No, not like that, Mother.” He sniffed and rubbed his eyes. “It’s, uh, for work. I’m on an aircraft carrier and I’m going to be out of touch for a while.”
“You’re not going to the Middle East, are you?” His mother glared.
“No, no, no. I’m just doing a story on the men and women who work here. What their lives are like, where they came from, what they left behind.”
“Ugh. Sounds boring. I hope you take time off afterward for a real cruise. We could go together!” The idea clearly excited his mother.
“Sounds great.” Dash glanced over his shoulder, half-expecting a Marine with a pistol, but he didn’t see anyone. “Look, I can’t stay on the line for long. I just didn’t want you to worry, okay? I love you.” Dash touched his lips, then brushed his fingers over the webcam.
“I love you, too, darling.” His mother blew him a kiss. “Call me when you get to a port near civilization, okay?”
Dash nodded. “I promise.”
“Good bye, darling!” His mom ended the call.
Dash’s throat ached, and the tears poured down his cheeks as sobs wracked him. “I’m sorry, Mom,” he whispered. “Forgive me.”
A hand gave his shoulder a gentle squeeze.
Dash sniffed hard. “Come to arrest me, captain?”
“Nope.” Onsurez replied as she pulled out the chair beside him.
“The nice man who gave me directions called you, didn’t he?” Dash lifted his head from his arms.
“As he was ordered. Everyone on my crew knows who you are, Dash,” Onsurez said. “You took hostages just a day ago and threatened to expose everything. It would be a poor commander indeed who didn’t guard against it happening again.”
The captain set a pistol down on the table.
Dash’s blood ran cold and his eyes widened. “You would have shot me in front of my mother?”
“I would have protected the mission, Dash.” Onsurez’s voice left no room for doubt. “This is bigger than you, than any of us.”
“I know.” Dash buried his head in his arms agin. “I’m sorry.”
Onsurez ran her hand over the back of Dash’s head. “It’s all right,” she murmured. “You did the right thing.”
“What the hell am I going to do?” Dash wailed. “Why am I here? Why didn’t you just shoot me?”
“You care about the people, Dash.” Onsurez pulled him back up and forced him to look her in the eye. “You aren’t one of us and so you bring a necessary reminder to this ship. We’re not doing this for science, or for the spirit of exploration.”
The captain stood up, walked to the podium, and rapped her knuckles on the ship’s motto.
“This sounds great, but the truth is we’re leaving the planet in a desperate attempt to escape extinction. This is about survival! If we go down, that’s it. No more humanity.” Onsurez tapped the silver eagle pinned to her collar. “My rank gives me the power of life and death over everyone aboard this ship, but my responsibility goes way beyond that.
“You wanted to warn the people of Earth, but we can’t help them. We’d like to, but all the ships pushing together wouldn’t be able to alter the trajectory enough to save the world. It’s too close, too big, and too damned fast.” Onsurez
shook her head. “So, we’ll do what we can and save as many lives as possible. Fourteen Noah’s arks, Dash, but we’re not carrying zoos.”
The captain strode over and squatted on her haunches. She put a comforting hand on Dash’s arm. “We’re carrying hope.”
Dash wiped his eyes on his sleeves and snorted. “And what am I going to do to help?”
Onsurez stood up. “One, you’re going to accept the situation and stop crying. You can’t bring hope when you’ve got snot running out of your nostrils.”
Dash’s face flushed, half in anger, half in embarrassment.
“Two, you’re going to help remind me that it’s the ordinary people that I’m fighting for. You’re going to bring me their stories.”
“Anything else?”
Onsurez nodded. “Yeah. You’re going to chronicle this story.” The captain crossed her arms. “If all this works, Dash, in a few years there will be babies on Mars. The children we’re carrying will remember Earth, but the ones born after all of this will never know about our blue skies, or the vast oceans that covered our home. They won’t know about the people we left to die so we might live.” She shrugged. “To them, Mars will just be home.”
Onsurez pulled out her phone and showed her two children on the screen. “My babies grew up with a Navy mom. I’ve spent half of their lives deployed at sea. They don’t have a home town, they’ve never even had a home. We had quarters.”
Dash nodded. Growing up as a foster child, he could relate.
“So, help them cherish what they had. Inspire them to recreate it.” Onsurez cocked her head. “Think you can manage?”
Dash swallowed and took a deep breath. “I could help with that.”
Onsurez smiled. “I know.” The captain pushed up her flight suit sleeve and glanced at her watch. “Well, I have just over seven hours until I do my part to save the human race. Lots to do. Big day.”
“So, what do I do right now?”
The captain grabbed Dash’s sleeve and tugged him out the chair. “Come with me. We can’t save the world without breakfast and this is the last meal we get with fresh food flown in today. Let’s fuel up, then get to the bridge.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
Onsurez cocked an eyebrow. “Aye aye is the proper response aboard my ship.”
Dash squirmed. “Uh, sorry.”
Onsurez shoved him towards the door with a laugh. “I’m joking. I don’t think I’m even in the Navy now.”
Twenty-Seven
DASH SNAPPED PICTURES OF the crew on the bridge as they went about their jobs. Commander Bruce talked into a headset microphone as he hunched over a light table and made notes on a clipboard. Captain Onsurez sat in her chair, the diminutive queen surveying her domain. She looked calm, even a little bit pleased.
Dash was sure it was all an act. If anyone had the right to be nervous about the day, it was the captain.
Onsurez and Dash had enjoyed a breakfast of fresh fruit, crisp hash browns, and scrambled eggs. Dash had abstained from the sausages and bacon, but Onsurez had attacked her bacon like a piranha coming off a crash diet.
Afterwards, Onsurez led him on a swift tour of the ship’s main areas and divisions. They didn’t spend much time in the reactor area, but Dash caught sight of Moray hard at work on something. They took a quick tour of what the captain called the civilian quarter.
“Everyone works aboard Enterprise, even the kids.” Onsurez pointed at the charts. “Different age groups will have different tasks, but most of that won’t start until we get artificial gravity working.”
“Captain,” Dash said, “don’t let the name of the ship fool you. This really isn’t Star Trek. How the heck are you going to get artificial gravity? Magnetize the floor plating and put metal strips in our shoes?”
“Of course not. What a waste of electricity.” Onsurez walked past a cluster of children scribbling on a whiteboard and snatched up a pen. “Enterprise and Kennedy will launch to low Earth orbit, rendezvous with the cargo pods the LONGHAUL launches have put into space, then assemble this superstructure.”
The captain drew a pair of lines between the two ships. “They’re just anchor chains, but they should suffice. We’ll use those to mate the vessels together, then synchronize the Orion engines and launch ourselves on our Mars trajectory.” Onsurez glanced at Dash. “In order to make sure we saved as many people as we could, we had to minimize bomblets, so we could spread them around the fleet. We won’t be under powered flight for most of the journey. Once we cut the engines, we’ll spin the two vessels around this axis—”
Onsurez drew another line parallel to both ships.
“—and use centrifugal force to give us the gravity we need.”
Dash pursed his lips. “Where are you getting the chains? I peeked at the launch manifests for many of the rockets. I never saw anything like that.”
“Kennedy has them secured to her deck. Good thing, too. As it is, we’re going to have a week without toilets.” Onsurez winked. “We’re going to be babies in space, wet wiping our butts and our armpits.”
Dash blanched. “That never occurred to me before yesterday.”
Movies never depicted the intimate indignities of bodily functions in space.
They arrived at the bridge, or what passed for the bridge now. Neither Kennedy nor Enterprise had superstructures on the flight deck, the traditional location for the ship’s bridge. The revamped compartment glowed with all the monitors. A couple showed video feeds outside the vessel, but most were task-focused assets.
The captain’s chair sat in the center of the compartment, with a sturdy arm mount for a tablet computer. Commander Bruce, on the other hand, had a workstation near the helmsmen, or what Onsurez said were the helmsmen. The former astronaut looked busy and Dash didn’t disturb him.
He brought up his phone’s camera. “Captain, can you make a statement for the record? We’re three hours away from launch. What do you say?”
Onsurez nodded. “I say we never had enough time. Not enough to save everyone. Now, we may not have enough time to save the ones we take off-planet. We’ve got an incredibly difficult journey ahead of us. Not everyone will survive it, but my deepest hope is that history looks upon us with a generous spirit. We tried to do the right thing.” Onsurez gave him a nod.
Dash tapped the screen to turn off the camera, slipped it into one of his pockets. “May I ask other people for statements?”
Onsurez nodded. “Certainly, but not on the bridge. I need these people focused.”
Dash didn’t know his way around the ship yet, but he’d learned that deck plans were posted near the ladders. He decided that getting a cross-section of the crew and passengers would be best. Many people had learned of the Earth’s impending doom a few short hours before. Shock still stunned some while others grappled with different stages of grief.
“Uh, Culinary Specialist Two Harry Dade. How do I feel about our mission? Oh, man! This is incredible. We’re going into space. I’m just a cook from Lawton. This is going to be one of hell of an adventure.”
“My name is Domingo Tarasco from El Paso, Texas. I’m a nurse practitioner. I, uh, applied to the initiative because I wanted to help others. I didn’t know we were going to...” Tears welled up in Tarasco’s eyes and he waved Dash off.
“I’m, uh, Yukari Taniguchi. I-I, uh, I’m a controller from JPL. I don’t know why I’m here. I’m not special...” She trembled, then fled down the corridor.
“As salamu-alaykum,” Faris Murad said, a calm expression on his face. “I’m Faris Murad, an imam from Los Angeles. I’m here to serve as a best I can, whether it’s to the Muslim community or anyone else in need. As to what we’re doing, God is ever merciful, and this mission just reinforces that. It was He who helped us make great strides in science and technology and, inshallah, those things will carry us to a new home.”
Dash killed the recording.
Murad smiled. “Good morning.”
“Good morning.”
> “Are you feeling better?” Murad cocked his head. “You disappeared after our briefing, though rumors got around that one of the initiative members went nuts and pulled a gun on some people.”
Dash nodded. “I’m doing better. A little.” He sighed. “I don’t know, honestly.”
“That’s understandable,” he said. “I don’t think anyone expected the news we got yesterday.”
“Can I ask you a question?”
“Of course.” Murad stroked his short beard.
“Did you leave anyone behind? Friends or family?”
He let out a long breath. “An ex-wife, though I haven’t seen her in fifteen years, since I went to prison, actually.” Murad studied a hatch as he considered the question. “My mother’s still alive. I never knew my father. I guess just my mother.”
“No kids?”
Murad grinned. “It’s not as easy as you might think to have kids when you’re divorced and in prison.”
“Part of me just wants to jump off the ship and swim back to LA.” Dash squirmed. “That sounds stupid, I know.”
“Survivor’s guilt, Dash. You’re just feeling it before you’re an official survivor. Many of us are and many more will.” He pointed at his flight suit. “The morale department sounded like a joke to some of us before we understood the initiative’s true mission. Now, however, I can see that it will be vital to our success.
“The world is about to come to an end and we few who survive will have to live with all kinds of agonies and endure hardships we probably don’t fully understand yet.” Murad tapped the gray wall of the passageway. “For now, this is our home and we’ll need to find ways and reasons to live, to thrive and be happy.”
“I’m not sure I’m up to that challenge,” Dash said. “I wasn’t exactly a cheerleader in high school.”
Murad smiled. “Alhamdulillah, we’re never given more of a burden than we can bear.”
“I must say, I’m surprised the initiative hired an imam for the mission,” Dash said.
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