Galactic Startup

by Brian Whiting

  “Right. I’ll build a failsafe for that,” Zeek said.

  “First, let’s repair the damage.”

  “It will take about six hours to repair the cables, and a week or so for the decking.”

  “Once the cables are repaired, will we have propulsion?” Mason asked, trying to sound calm and collected. He hated working with systems he didn’t know intimately.

  “Yes. The question is how far off course will we be.”

  “Okay. Take whoever you need to assist you,” Mason ordered.

  Jorge didn’t even reply, but spun around and exited the bridge in a hurry. Jack followed him out.

  Hours later, Jorge was splicing the last of the cables. Jack was holding a tool bag just below him, and had kept the floating debris from causing injury. The debris had now spread to all the decks. Jorge twisted the last two copper wires together.

  “That should-”

  Suddenly, Jorge had to brace himself in the hole where he was working, as the weight of the environment dramatically shifted.

  “Look out!” Jack called from the hallway. Not knowing what he meant, Jorge tried to raise his legs into the hole with him.

  Jack was watching a chunk of decking slide across the ceiling towards Jorge’s dangling legs.

  Jack pushed out and tried to deflect the jagged sheet in another direction, but he was no match for its weight and velocity. The decking gave Jorge a sharp, glancing blow below the knees.

  As Jack lost his grip, he was struck in the stomach by another large chunk of debris. Everything was being sucked towards the back of the ship, including himself. He was pinned by oncoming objects as his body was flung back against a bulkhead. He struggled as he felt his weight increasing, and he recognized the sensation: g-force. Strong enough that he couldn’t even get the air out of his lungs to call for help.

  Jorge couldn’t scream either. He was pinned in the hole. The damaged surfaces were jagged and he felt a pain in his hip, warm liquid spreading across his leg. The wall above Jack began to turn red.

  As suddenly as the pressure started, it ceased. The calm of zero gravity returned.

  “Damn it!” Jorge yelled, as he pushed his body away from the torn metal in the hole. Now he could sense the deep cut in his side. Blood was slowly pooling into a floating ball.

  Jack pushed himself out of the pile of debris at the end of the corridor and scrambled back to where Jorge was slowly tumbling from the ceiling in a cloud of red droplets. He tried a comm button, but it did nothing.

  Instead, he took Jorge by the shoulders and towed him awkwardly to the medical room, while Jorge used his own hand to try to slow the bleeding.

  Eventually, Jorge was strapped to a medical table, and Jack left to find Gloria.

  ***

  “Anti-grav online. Course correction complete,” Cindy said. “The ship is back on track for Mars.” There was a general exhaling among the bridge crew as everyone relaxed in their seats.

  “Battery power at eighty-four percent,” Zeek said. “Seems we lost a lot in the malfunction and the change of course.”

  A disheveled Jack pushed into the room.

  “Jorge’s injured!”

  By the time Alex made his way to the medical room, tools and supplies were already floating everywhere.

  Mason was keeping hallway debris out of the room. Gloria was examining the gash on Jorge’s hip. Cindy stood close by, putting on blue medical gloves. Gloria manipulated the wound with some kind of instrument. Alex hoped Jorge was hopped up on anti-pain meds. A sudden scream seemed to indicate that he was not.

  Alex looked to Jack.

  “What happened?”

  “We were working on the cables when everything became very heavy. Jorge was trapped in the wrecked ceiling

  “I am going to die,” Jorge whimpered, seeing how much blood was floating around the room. Tears were drifting away from his face.

  “Oh god. It’s my fault,” said Alex. “I told them to make the course correction as soon as the drive came online. I didn’t even think to give you guys time to get strapped back in.”

  “None of his organs were punctured, as far as I can tell. If I can stitch him up and give him some meds, he should fully recover,” said Gloria.

  Jorge groaned again.

  “What happened?” Timmy asked from the doorway.

  “Jorge was hurt during the course correction. He’s going to be fine.” Alex said.

  “I’m an idiot. I didn’t even think about people who weren’t strapped in,” Timmy said, putting a hand to his head. “We really need to have-”

  “Policies and procedures,” finished Alex. “I’m on it.” He pushed himself from the room.

  “Damn right we do,” Mason said, following him. Further down the corridor, he continued. “This is my fault. I should have known they weren’t strapped in.”

  Alex looked at Mason. “We have eighty-four percent power, plus our solar panels. We have everything we need for a successful mission and more. This ship is sound, we built it. Jorge will be okay. We’ll be okay.”

  “No one has ever been this far away from Earth before. We cannot have these mistakes. I would have made a different call if I’d seen the schematics for gravity plating. I don’t know what I need to know about this ship to be effective at my job.”

  “Gravity plating is proprietary technology. I won’t discuss it further. But as I just agreed, we will work on our procedures to ensure that this doesn’t happen again,” Alex said.

  “Your proprietary technology nearly got everyone killed. We need to act more like a command team or we won’t make it home alive.”

  He left Alex alone in the hallway. At least he thought he was alone. When he turned towards the bridge, he noticed Renee with a camera near the other end of the hallway, and a bandage around her ankle. She had been in the medical room with Jorge too. Alex pushed away, disappointed with himself.

  ***

  Drake had invited the families of the founding four to his residence to get the updates from the Destiny. They all had arrived except for Zeek’s parents, who he didn’t know how to contact. He thought he remembered someone saying Zeek didn’t have parents. That didn’t make sense, surely someone had been caring for him before the UEF.

  They were retelling the story of their encounter with the feds for the third time. Drake guessed it was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to them.

  It wasn’t long before a download icon appeared, indicating that information was being sent to the website. It took a couple minutes as a one hour video was uploaded in two parts.

  The video had clearly been prepared before the mission began. It started with the crew, as they went over the final checks before the launch. Renee was unbiased in her narration. Several times she mentioned how “these kids hold the world in their hands”. She compared them to baby sea turtles heading towards the ocean.

  The video cut to briefings where the team discussed and sometimes disagreed about the mission. It introduced all the crew members, and finally arrived at the launch.

  After a pleasant evening, the parents prepared to leave Drake’s house. But another, shorter clip appeared. An update from the Destiny.

  Renee had cut together dramatic footage of the gravity plate activation and the subsequent damages to the ship. The parents became deadly still, including Drake. Renee had shown everything, even Jorge on the operating table. It ended with him talking to the camera, telling his parents he was okay. They wanted more information but there was nowhere to turn. They simply had to wait.

  ***

  Everyone was back on the bridge and buckled in, aside from Jorge, who was strapped to the medical bed with Gloria in a chair alongside. She was keeping watch on him as they approached Mars.

  “Beginning deceleration,” said Timmy through the ship’s intercom. Mars was growing fast on the view-screen. It had expanded from a bright red pin-point to a large, rusty dish. Mason and Cindy were breathing slowly. They had seen this moment in their dre
ams since they were children.

  Timmy applied power to the drive for deceleration towards the planet. There hadn’t been time to clear all the debris from the hallways. Most of what remained unsecured were just nuts and bolts. The crew could hear gentle dings in the hush of the silent vessel. It was uncanny, especially for those who had traveled on the nose of rockets.

  They all braced against the return of the g-forces. But they were still monitoring their designated systems.

  “Power is at sixty seven percent,” Zeek said, with some concern.

  “Why are we using so much power?” Alex asked.

  It took Zeek a few moments to figure it out.

  “Mars is a smaller planet. A weaker gravitational field. We needed more power to compensate.”

  Timmy muttered a few expletives. He hadn’t thought of this either.

  They entered a high orbit over Mars. It took some time for them to decelerate and then maneuver the ship as they coasted to the broken rover’s position. Destiny slowly descended towards the red soil. They were hovering just above the surface, about fifty feet from the sand-covered rover.

  “Touchdown.” Timmy was smiling, along with everyone else.

  “Welcome to Mars,” Mason said. Alex looked over at him and Cindy. Their glistening eyes were locked on each other.

  “Thank you for using UEF space ways, please watch your step as you exit the craft,” said Zeek, laconically, with heavy sarcastic overtones in a line that would become famous to humanity.

  Alex, Zeek, Mason, Cindy, Jack, Mac, Amanda, and Renee wasted no time in getting to the EVA room and donning space suits. Jerry had trained them thoroughly for this part of the mission. Mason checked everyone’s suit and closed all the bulkheads. He lowered the exiting ramp. There was a loud hiss of decompression.

  After much debate, they had agreed to hold hands and jump together onto the surface of Mars, aside from Renee who would stay back and record the moment.

  “On zero, right?” said Alex, as they reached the edge of the ramp, He started counting down from five. They all jumped on one, laughing.

  They jumped around and congratulated each other. Mason and Cindy openly shed tears but couldn’t wipe them away in their EVA suits.

  After a half hour they shuffled around the dusty surface, absorbing the views of the alien landscape.

  “It’s like we’re back in Arizona,” said Timmy. “Only this time in a fancy outfit.”

  It took a while for the enormity of the experience to wear off, at least for everyone except Zeek, who surveyed the bleak horizon listlessly. Like a reddish beach without water, or a barren desert, Mars looked hard, and unwaveringly dry. He looked down at his cumbersome boots and kicked a nearby rock.

  “Ok, I was right. It’s boring here.”

  Alex gave them some time to grow accustomed to the strange feeling of Mars’ gravity and the sensation of the space suits. Then they started working on their assigned tasks. Cindy and Mason tended to the broken rover with a range of equipment they had brought. They had performed similar tasks during EVAs on the ISS.

  Alex grabbed a shovel and filled several five-gallon buckets with Martian dirt and rocks.

  Mac had a ground core drill and was busy drilling for much deeper ground material.

  But it was Amanda who won the day. She was exploring an outcrop of rocks. Less than an hour after landing, they heard her cry over the comm. A single word that would be immortalized in history.

  “WORM!”

  Everyone stopped what they were doing.

  “Amanda? Please repeat that,” said Alex, his heart pounding. Those who could see her watched as she turned and waved a small sample tube.

  “I have a worm! A worm, in a tube!”

  “Damn, that changes things,” said Mason, quietly.

  “Aliens!” she yelled into her helmet. She raised the worm into the air, shaking her fist in the process.

  Everyone rushed towards her. It was true. A short, brown grub wriggled among the dirt in her thin plastic container. Not slick like most earth worms, but hard and ridged, like an insect with an exoskeleton. Renee pushed everyone out of the way to get a clear shot. There were small, movable segments of hardened shell. The worm initially flailed around its enclosure, but its movements soon stopped altogether.

  Amanda immediately shooed everyone away and placed the sample in a foil bag, and sealed it with tape.

  “Is that necessary?” asked Alex.

  “It’s alien,” said Amanda. “We don’t know anything about it. It could be dangerous to us, and we are almost certainly dangerous to it. She was already taking the worm to the biohazard storage unit in one of the cargo bays.

  Amanda grabbed a few more jars and went to find more aliens.

  Alex knew the alien itself might fund everything that had been spent up to this point. He hoped that Amanda would find more, and he was excited to see what else they might be able to find.

  Zeek went to one of the cargo bays and jumped into a converted battery-powered golf cart. Everyone was surprised when he zipped by, heading off over a small sand ridge a little ways away.

  “Hey, Zeek is that you in the cart?” Mason asked.

  “It sure is”

  “Be careful! They don’t exactly have Triple A up here,” Mason said, grimly.

  Zeek frowned as he remembered Jorge who was still lying injured in the medical may. He slowed down, and turned the cart back towards the ship.

  After the discovery of the alien, it was hard to focus on their other tasks. It took another day to fix the rover. Meanwhile, Jorge was given a clean bill of health. He was advised to be careful not to rip the stitches holding his side together. But Gloria did allow him to briefly suit up and step outside, so as not to miss the unique occasion. She went with him.

  Amanda’s discovery had produced an intense nervous energy. The team was largely quiet as they completed their work. After the rover was repaired, they returned the ship and sped off to visit several other points on the planet, as requested by NASA. They dropped new rovers at each one. By the end of the second day, NASA had a fleet of a dozen robots patrolling the planet. Meanwhile, the Destiny was heading back to Earth.

  Chapter 9

  Homecoming

  Soon, the Destiny was lowering itself into the UEF hangar once again. The crowds outside had swelled in anticipation. The walls were swamped by a vast blanket of people. The crew could hear their welcoming cries even through the walls of the hangar itself.

  As soon as they landed, several things occurred at once. Gloria led Jorge to a waiting ambulance that took both of them to a hospital. Amanda transferred her precious material to the biohazard containment area in the hangar bay. She eyed Jack as he walked nearby.

  “Hey, since you’re the xeno biologist, I thought you might want to have first shot at the worm. I’m heading to the containment lab now.”

  “I’ve got to take a leak, give me a few minutes.”

  Alex exited the ship, and stopped the rest of the crew on the hangar floor.

  “Thank you, everyone. That was an extraordinary accomplishment for a first mission. But we’re just getting started. Renee, I want to talk to you about getting out a new video, and telling the world about our future plans. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Zeek, I want you to work with Jorge when he gets back to repair the gravity plating. I want to be sure there won’t be any more mistakes. Get some rest. We’ll have a meeting eight AM tomorrow. But be ready for another mission as soon as repairs are complete.”

  Alex made his way to his office within the compound, and Renee was following close behind. When he entered his office, he sat down in his chair and watched Renee set up a camera in the corner of the room.

  “I think we should start the next video with Jorge and his recovery, and the modifications we are going to make with to prevent that disaster from occurring again. Then on to our future plans for the UEF.”

  Renee looked at Alex, genuinely surprised by all that he had accomplished at hi
s young age.

  “How are you feeling?”

  “What?” Alex’s face contorted.

  “I asked you, how are you feeling?”

  “I feel great, why?”

  “You just accomplished something that thousands of people have spent their entire lives dreaming about. You seem unfazed.”

  “That might be true, but let’s consider a change of perspective… Do you know how to play the guitar?”

  “No.”

  “If you learned how to play the guitar, would it be something you would spend a lot of time celebrating?”

  “I doubt it.”

  “Exactly. See, I am not thinking about right now and what I’ve accomplished. Which I don’t mean to marginalize or belittle. I am thinking about five years from now, ten years from now, when this is all very routine. Do you get excited about driving a car? Space travel will be as common, I assure you.”

  Renee looked at Alex with slight disappointment.

  Alex’s phone began to ring. It was a call from his security team.

  “Go.”

  “We have the Chinese Ambassador here to see you. What do you want us to tell him?” the guard said. Alex paused.

  “Interesting. I’ll see him.” The guards led him to the back of the compound, where a helicopter had landed. Before it stood a man who introduced himself as Won Li Wei.

  “How can I help you, Ambassador?”

  “How can we help each other?” the ambassador corrected. “The People’s Republic of China has been following your progress. We would like to offer you a job.”

  The ambassador handed Alex a photo of a large tank. It was obviously built to carry liquid, but its contents were unknown. The tank looked heavy and robust.

  “What’s inside?”

  “The contents are classified. We simply want you to deliver it into the sun,” the ambassador said with a straight face.

  “The sun!” Alex raised his eyebrows.

  “Yes. We will pay you handsomely, and if the shipment goes well, we would like to make a regular arrangement.”

  “How handsomely?”

  “We will pay you five million dollars per shipment.”