The Lord Admiral stared out a viewport, contemplating what he had set in motion. He saw the shuttle containing his new Ambassador jump to a spot outside the ship. There was the customary pause as its pilots double checked all of their systems, then prepared for entry into the atmosphere. One had to be sure that everything was working before one entered the atmosphere of a planet.
One wouldn’t want anything to go wrong.
The Lord Admiral grinned, looking at his half reflection on the inside of the viewport. The expression on his face amused him.
“You requested me, Lord Admiral?”
The Lord Admiral of the Fleet of the People didn’t turn to face his Admiral Commander. He simply continued staring out of the viewport into space as he spoke to his subordinate. He didn’t appreciate the interruption, but appreciated less what he had to do next.
“You were preparing to return to your ship?” the Lord Admiral asked.
“Yes, sir. I assumed once the aliens were gone...”
“Admiral Commander, you must remain my guest for a while longer.”
“Yes, sir.” The man sounded resigned.
“Do not worry. Take this time away from your duties to study the texts you retrieved from the aliens. Perhaps you’ll learn something else useful.”
“But it’s all blasphemy, sir!”
The Admiral Commander’s religious zealotry bothered the Lord Admiral at times, but he was used to manipulating the man.
“Then who better than you to write the first critique of their beliefs?” the Lord Admiral suggested.
He could hear the change in tone in his voice. “It would be sent to Est?”
“To the capitol temple itself. I’ll make sure your paper accompanies the first vessel that returns home.” Est was the country the Lord Admiral and the Admiral Commander were both from. The temple in its capitol city once dominated the skyline but was now surrounded by the skyscrapers of financial institutions. Money always supplanted faith for the pragmatic.
“I...Thank you, sir.”
“This reprieve from your duties is only temporary. Do not waste it.”
“Yes, sir. I had not considered this opportunity.”
The Lord Admiral half smiled at the younger man, then winked almost imperceptibly. The Admiral Commander blinked in response.
“I have nothing else,” The Lord Admiral said and returned to staring out the window.
“Yes, sir.”
The Lord Admiral half nodded in response to the Admiral Commander’s presumed nod. He did not watch the man leave, but rather pulled out his tablet and keyed in a monitoring station.
“Yes, Lord Admiral?” an officer responded.
“Has the shuttle that just departed begun atmospheric entry?”
“Yes, Lord Admiral.”
“And there is no way its occupants can see what is happening in the Fleet?”
“No, sir. They are now enveloped in plasma.”
“Excellent.” The officer’s confidence pleased the Lord Admiral. “Signal the drone.”
“Yes, sir.”
The Lord Admiral put his tablet away. He continued to stare out the view port, watching the emptiness of space. It had almost been a textbook exercise. Annihilation of leadership had occurred, complete supremacy of space was about to be achieved, supremacy of the atmosphere would follow as soon as more crews were awakened and briefed, and only one task would remain. The most difficult and least studied of all of them. Conquering the ground.
One couldn’t own a world if one didn’t own the ground. One could only besiege it, although it didn’t appear this world was advanced enough to depend on any outside resources, so a siege from space would be useless. Conquering was the only option.
But the Lord Admiral had thought of another. He wondered if his Ambassador would play the part.
Sherry Pennacott had never spent much time in the command cockpit of the Beagle. This was Stanley’s domain, along with his second-in-command, Commander Samovitch, and usually Lieutenant Commander Purcella.
When the Beagle did important things, like orbital insertion into Mars, Stanley sat in the center seat, Samovitch on his left and Purcella on his right. With both Stanley and Samovitch gone, aboard the Hrwang spaceship, only Purcella’s seat was occupied. The man sat there waiting for someone to contact him.
Sherry thought it presumptuous to sit in the command chair, but she wanted to be near Stanley’s position, so she sat in the second-in-command’s chair and stared wistfully out a port.
It was the pilot’s chair. Not that there was much for a pilot to do other than flip switches and watch gauges. It seemed a rather mundane chore to Sherry. She tried to picture Samovitch and Purcella in the cockpit with Stanley, all reading checklists and saying important sounding things, flipping switches and tapping gauges to make sure they worked. Just like in the movies.
Sherry’s life had taken on a surreal aura, also just like in the movies. She had been thrust out of her home, where she could work non-stop, only taking breaks for sleep, food, and the bathroom, three aspects of her being she wished she could do without, and onto this spaceship, where she was supposed to become an expert on Martian atmospheric chemistry.
Most people never gave air a second thought. They simply breathed and forgot that their very lives depended on the unseeable chemicals that surrounded them every second of their existence. If they knew a little, they understood the basic composition of air, the predominance of nitrogen and oxygen in their atmosphere, but rarely did anyone understand the role trace chemicals and ions played. The complete chemical composition of an atmosphere dictated the climate of a planet and how well the planet was shielded from unwelcome radiation while still allowing needed radiation, light and warmth, to reach the planet’s surface.
Atmosphere dictated life, yet most took it for granted.
Research about atmospheres had begun in the 18th century, but only recently had computer models been developed sufficiently advanced enough that one could correlate the behavior of trace elements with anything useful. That analysis took focus, took dedication, and Sherry never seemed to be able to complete things fast enough for her personal ambitions. She wanted to know everything there was to know, wanted to be able to predict everything there was to predict, and understand everything that was missing in the models so she could make them perfect.
Life just always got in the way.
When told UNSA, the United Nations Space Agency, wanted the world’s preeminent atmospheric chemist on its mission to Mars, Sherry had declined. The training would take too much time.
But Stanley had come to visit her, and he wouldn’t take no for an answer.
When he first came to her lab aboard the Beagle, she wasn’t sure he would have taken no for an answer then either, but she hadn’t said no. He had a way about him. He was a true leader, a person who took charge of a situation. She didn’t know if she loved him. She knew she didn’t like him sometimes, but now that he was gone and they weren’t in orbit around Mars and she had nothing to do, she found she missed him. Missed his harangues, missed his easy, self-confidence, missed his touch. No one else would touch her the way Stanley did, and even though she never invited him to her lab, he came often. She complained, mostly to herself, that he interrupted her work too often, but she missed him when he didn’t show up for days.
The first time, he said it was the pajamas. Sherry always worked in her pajamas. When she had to go out somewhere, to give some speech or presentation about her work, she often had to order clothes on-line. She was never sure what happened to those clothes afterwards. Perhaps the maid gave them to charity. She never seemed to have anything other than pajamas.
Today she wore her fuzzy teddy bears, the same ones she wore the first time she and Stanley had been together. She didn’t know why or how he found them attractive, but he told her they were intoxicating. He was
stupid.
Sherry smiled at the thought.
She knew Stanley was married, didn’t know what that meant for her after the Beagle’s mission was complete, but Stanley had to make that choice, didn’t he? She always presumed life would go back to the way it was before, with her working out of her home, studying long hours, hyper-focused on her work and only interrupted by bodily needs, but now that he had been gone two days, she wondered.
She missed him. She hadn’t expected that. She missed the only person since her parents who had ever shown her any sort of affection. She wasn’t pretty enough for dumb people and too smart for smart people, so no one liked her. They respected her, called her things like preeminent and world-class, top-notch, the best in her field, but they never showed her affection like Stanley had.
When Stanley had spoken to Lieutenant Commander Purcella, Sherry had wanted to say something, to hear him talk to her. But he didn’t pass on any messages to her, even when given the opportunity, and Sherry realized how much it hurt when she began involuntarily crying. She told herself it wasn’t logical.
Nothing about being in the state she was in was logical. Did she love Stanley?
Leaving the Hrwang drone bay when ordered felt like an escape for 1804. It could fulfill its current mission and finally cover up whatever it was that it was covering up with the same action. It would have to spend more time erasing and encrypting memories. It didn’t know what it had failed about its previous mission, but it left itself enough clues that it knew something had gone wrong and that it needed to take a specific course of action. It would have to do a better job erasing memories once it had completed its task.
It began looking for the alien ship.
“Did you hear that?” Purcella asked.
“Hear what?” Sherry replied, almost saying the words instinctively. She didn’t know what the man was talking about. His voice had woken her from a daydream and she felt mildly disoriented, looking around her for the answer to his question.
“I thought I heard something hit the hull,” Purcella answered.
“How can you tell?” she asked. She looked out the window and gasped. Something was wrong.
1804 jumped the alien ship back to the fourth planet, lining it up over the coordinates it had given itself. It jumped it again in the direction of the red world, calculating quickly that the ship was on the correct trajectory. It could wait longer before separating than it could have over the primary planet’s world. The atmosphere on the fourth planet was almost insignificant in comparison. It waited as long as possible, calculating and re-calculating. It would not fail again.
As it rode the ship down it detected a remaining building on the planet. It knew instantly it wasn’t supposed to do that. It had told itself not to look, but it had looked anyway. It instantly surmised that it had failed in destroying every part of one of the bases. And it had sought to cover it up from the Hrwang.
1804 learned in that moment it couldn’t keep secrets from itself. It would simply have to figure out how to keep them from the Hrwang.
At the last second it jumped away from the dying ship to a safe location in orbit. It would thoroughly inspect the results of its action, then investigate both alien bases closely. It only had three more vessels to use and it wanted to make sure each one counted.
The stars changed. Sherry didn’t know how she knew that, but she did. Part of her work was instant pattern recognition, and the stars as viewed from Earth orbit looked differently than they did from Mars orbit. Not much different perhaps, but just as if they were viewed from a different angle.
She didn’t know they were back at Mars though, she hadn’t taken any time to learn Martian astronomy, until the image outside the port shifted again. Red ground filled her view now and she knew she was going to die.
She felt a strange comfort in that thought, although it distressed her that her work would be lost. She wondered what other scientists would recover. She thought about running back to her lab and trying to send an email containing the folders with her findings, but it would take too long. Nothing could upload quickly enough, and they’d lost communication with Houston anyway.
Purcella became aware of their predicament and spoke under his breath as he sought to ascertain what was happening. The planet grew closer out Sherry’s port. Beagle began to vibrate.
Would anyone mourn her? Would they speculate at what loss to science her early demise would mean? Her parents had passed on already, so would anyone remember she had existed, or had ceased to exist? Did that mean you never existed, if no one remembered you after you died?
Would Stanley miss her like she had missed him the past two days?
Even after her parents died, the thought that Sherry would find herself in a state other than that of a living person never took purchase in her consciousness. She imagined she would always exist, would always be in front of a computer screen analyzing data and models. Her life seemed eternal and even aging wasn’t a factor in her future. The decline and end of life meant nothing to her, never entered into her considerations.
Purcella yelled and cursed and slammed switches next to her in the cockpit. Sherry heard other cries over speakers and from behind her. But it was all pointless. Beagle had never been designed for atmospheric entry and already Sherry could feel the temperature in the cockpit rising as features on the planet became distinct out her port window.
There was no way to abort, to deploy heat shields or chutes, or do anything Purcella yelled about. The spaceship simply wasn’t capable of any of those sorts of things.
Sherry chose not to spend the last few seconds of her life in panic. As the temperature in the cockpit rose even higher, she acknowledged that her death would not be pleasant. But the pain would not be long. She thought it might feel like the hellfire her mother had warned her about.
They’d only argued once about religion, when Sherry was in high school and had decided she was an atheist, just like her physics teacher. Her mother had yelled and screamed and even called the school board, all to no avail. It was never spoken of again except for the occasional snide comment at Christmas time. Those always surprised Sherry the most. Weren’t Christians supposed to be exceptionally loving and kind when they celebrated the birth of their god?
The cockpit grew so warm, it hurt to touch anything. Sherry curled up into a ball on the leather seat, trying to keep herself from being in contact with anything metal or plastic. With her bare feet, it was too late to run to a different part of the ship where it might not hurt so much. Purcella finally stopped swearing and must have curled into a ball himself.
Beagle rumbled. Sherry heard grinding and tearing noises as the Martian atmosphere, 95.9% carbon dioxide, 1.9% argon, 1.9% nitrogen, some traces of water, carbon monoxide, methane, sulfur dioxide, ozone, and the ubiquitous red dust, tore Beagle to shreds. Ironically, Earth’s denser atmosphere would have burned them up quicker as they fell like an errant asteroid turned meteor.
The burning drove Sherry to want to flee but there was nowhere to flee to. She could only squeeze herself smaller and smaller to avoid the excruciating pain, could only hope they hit the ground soon, ending her misery.
She worried her mother was right. She worried if there were a God, he would damn her to eternal torment in the flames of hell for her atheism, and the agony she felt now would never end. She had enough time to wonder why a God would treat His children that way and felt comforted that He wouldn’t. She suddenly knew the never ending flames of hell were just an invention of man, not of God, and she felt strength in her death.
Her mother had always believed in an Afterlife; Sherry had never. Now she would find out who was right.
Major Alexander Crayton sat in his Martian rover observing the sky. Or rather, his corpse did. His corpse, had it been able to see, would have observed another meteor in the sky, a bright fi
reball streaking groundward, a spaceship aimed for the last remaining building in the base he left behind.
Major Crayton achieved the impossible. At an average speed of thirteen kilometers per hour, he crossed over three hundred and thirty kilometers of Martian desert, falling just ten thousand three hundred and forty kilometers short of his goal.
On the second day, one of the wheels of his trailer fell off and he spent a day trying to repair it.
Famished, dehydrated, his EVA suit reeking of human waste, Alex finally realized what Cassie had been trying to tell him. She hadn’t sacrificed herself for him. She knew they couldn’t cross the desert and she hadn’t wanted to try. If he had listened to her, they could have lived in the storage shed until their oxygen ran out. They could have held each other, loved each other, and their final days would have ended peacefully together.
But he had been stubborn, insane, and she had chosen not to participate in his insanity. He recognized that at the end and decided to follow her example.
After crying for a while, after praying for a while, he drove the rover to the edge of a canyon and admired the view.
“I’m sorry, Cassie,” were his last words before he pulled the plug.
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