Far Space (22 page)

“Crap,” Ian said, looking around the ship. “All that for nothing.”

“We need to get moving, Ian,” Jennifer said.

“Wait,” Ian said, holding his ground.

Jennifer looked at Ian quizzically.

“How long do we have?” Ian asked.

Jennifer shrugged in her soft suit. “Cheyenne will be close enough to shoot an emergency line to us in five minutes. After that the ship will hit Saturn’s outer atmosphere in about twenty minutes.” Jennifer looked into Ian’s eyes. “What are you thinking?”

“Something radical.” Ian clicked open the Ops channel. “Colonel Yates, this is Lieutenant Langdon.”

“Langdon,” Yates voice came back. “You’d better be at the port hatch in four minutes or your going be taking another atmospheric dive. And I don’t think there will be any Brazilian farmers to find you this time.”

“Sir, you need to dock with the alien ship and get us into a stable orbit.”

There was silence over the net until Pearl’s voice said, “Have you absolutely lost your mind, Langdon?”

“Listen,” Ian said quickly, “Cheyenne has plenty of power to insert both it and the alien ship into a new orbit. But, you need to get the ship onto the berth we have prepped and apply full thrusters within, say, ten minutes.”

Maytree’s voice came on the net. “That could work, sir.”

“I concur,” Marsha’s voice added. “But you must bring the engines to ninety percent in eight minutes.”

“Langdon,” Yates said, “I was about to blow that ship all the way to Hell and now you want me to risk my entire crew and my ship to save it?”

“Yes, sir,” Ian said.

Yates swore softly over the net then ordered, “Maytree, get us lined up. The world is expecting us to bring home some alien tech. Let’s see if we can deliver.”

Ian and Jennifer crowded into the hatch corridor just in time to see Cheyenne loom close beneath them. Just four minutes after Ian had made his proposal, Maytree nudged Cheyenne under the alien ship.

Jennifer fell back into Ian’s arms as the Cheyenne engaged a cargo maglock under its new passenger.

“Hang on,” Maytree called out.

Ian, Jennifer, and Pearl pushed themselves deeper into the corridor as the Cheyenne’s engines increased thrust.

“Five minute burn,” Maytree announced.

Ian looked at his wrist display and counted down the minutes as he felt Cheyenne’s engines engage.

The pressing thrust ended suddenly.

“Orbital transfer burn complete,” Maytree report over the net.

“Major Taylor, Lieutenant Langdon,” Yates began. “Get everyone aboard Cheyenne until we can figure out what happened.”

“Yes, sir,” Ian and the Major both replied over the net at once.

“If nothing else,” Ian said to Jennifer. “I’ve come to one conclusion.”

“Don’t play with buttons on an alien spacecraft?” Jennifer replied.

“No,” Ian said, suddenly flustered. “It’s just…uh, well…”

Pearl nudged Ian in the back. “Spit it out man, I would like to exit the alien spacecraft which has come to life around us.”

Ian blushed as he realized he had been broadcasting over the common Ops net. His eyes met Jennifer’s and he decided he did not care who heard what came out next. He lowered himself as best he could onto an armored knee and took Jennifer’s hand.

“Jennifer Wright,” Ian said. “It appears as if marauding aliens, falling elevators and runaway spaceships are determined to keep us apart. But we’ve come through all this together. I want to face whatever the universe throws at us together…”

“Langdon,” Pearl said, “Cut to the chase.”

“Jennifer, will you marry me?” Ian hurried to the finale.

Jennifer had her free hand up to her helmet. She could not believe this was happening. But, it had been a wild day already. Why should it not get crazier?

She looked Ian up and down in his combat suit, now crusted with water crystals which had flash frozen when he had exited the temporary airlock.

“How can I refuse my knight in shining armor?” Jennifer replied, smiling.

“Is that a ‘yes’?” Pearl asked from behind Ian.

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “That’s definitely yes.”

There were a few cheers over the common net.

“If you’re done, Lieutenant Langdon,” Yates said over the net, “Please get those people back onboard.”

“You’d better get back to work, Mr. Langdon,” Jennifer said, switching back to her and Ian’s private net.

“Would you have said yes if everyone else hadn’t been listening?” Ian asked.

“Yes,” Jennifer said. “The answer is still yes. Now get to work, sailor.”

Reagan Space Corps Base

Surface of Europa, Jupiter Space

Ian sat pondering the computer screen before him. The presentation he had been preparing for the last two days had just been cancelled. No back-up time was scheduled. Most likely it would be postponed indefinitely as the pressing issue which had called for the briefing in the first place would be surpassed by other matters. Another critical project O.B.E.; Overcome By Event. The carefully crafted slides would sit in his personal file, unused and gathering electronic dust.

“I don’t think so,” Ian snorted. He selected the ‘Delete File’ icon and with one swipe of a key blasted his work into thousands of separate, irretrievable bytes. He muttered, “That’ll save some disk space.”

Ian usually worked a ten hour day out here on Europa, twelve if he was on watch in the Ops Center. He checked his watch, only six and half hours had passed since he sat down at his desk.

“Close enough,” Ian pronounced. He hit the power switch on the front of his computer. His disk drive ground to an abrupt stop announcing the hard shutdown was successful. Ian pushed away from his desk and almost sailed out of his seat. The lower gravity on Europa was enough to keep Ian’s body at least slightly toned but still played havoc with his inner balance. He tended to
use a little too much oomph after he had been sitting awhile. It did not help he tended to forget he was half a solar system away from home after staring at a computer screen on a desk in an office, which for all intents and purposes, appeared to be just like every other cube he had ever inhabited.

Ian stalked off down the long corridor back from the rim office he occupied to the living quarters buried under the central portion of the base. The corridor was made from shipping containers buried in a trench dug into the icy surface of the Jovian moon – one of eight spokes being built from the main base out to a rim made of still more containers. Someday, most of the base structure would be built with reinforced permacrete, a substance of quick setting polymers and cement which had all the strength and protection of concrete without having to add the rocks, just a little water. Water, locked up in its moon-spanning glacier, was something Europa possessed in spades.

Reagan’s A-ring would eventually increase the size of the Reagan Space Corps Base by a factor of ten and allow the critical base functions to be spread out under Europa’s ice. This was hoped to give the base a better chance of surviving in the event of attack. The base was getting big enough there was talk of calling it a city. If so, it would be the first major settlement beyond the orbit of Mars, where Angel City had claimed the title of ‘First Human Deep Space City’ just a few years earlier. They had the signs posted to prove it.

To Ian, all this progress meant a walk of nearly a kilometer from his work area to his room in Officer Country, as Level 3 was called. Reagan’s OC was part of the base core, constructed as a single structure, not prefab units. His room was located two floors under the main Combined Space Operations Center, or CSOC, command room. The CSOC had been built first just under the surface ice. Additional levels had been dug out by nano-machines and construction crews. Each meter down meant more protection and radiation shielding to the permanent residents. A new command center and associated offices was planned for level ten and would be offset from the main core to the area between the outer ring and the base center. The ribbon would not be cut on that new facility for awhile yet as the nannites were still busy chewing through ice to make room for Level 7.

In the wake of the devastating alien attack nearly a year earlier, the Colorado Combined Aerospace Operations Center, the CCAOC, had gotten
out of the deep space defense business, keeping only Operational Control of those assets dedicated to Near Earth defense. The deep space mission had moved to the newly created CSOC. CSOC personnel had moved to Europa aboard spacecraft special ordered from lunar nano-factories.

Ian shook his head at the thought. The first ships had been built, molecule by molecule and were lifting off from the factory floor before he and the Cheyenne had even reached Saturn. On the plus side, the alien attack had invigorated the push into space like nothing since the Chinese Maelstrom of 2018. It was only in the aftermath of this limited war with China, waged mostly in orbit with satellite killers and over the worldwide web with offensive network attacks, that the world finally woke up and realized you could not build a society and world economy dependant on space technology and simply not protect those assets.

The thought of space weapons made Ian look up at the metal shell of the shipping container-turned-passageway he was walking through. He wondered how far down the weapons on one of those alien ships would penetrate. Superlumination of the ice from solid to gas thanks to the intense heat of a laser blast would cause enough of a pressure wave to cause severe damage to anything in the near vicinity of a hit. This section of the base was buried by at least three or four meters of ice and other rocky debris found on Europa’s crust.

“Hopefully someone was thinking of all that when they figured out how deep to lay in these corridors,” Ian said. He shrugged and moved on. Nothing much to do about it now.

Ice and location were the two essential elements which made Europa one of the most strategic spots in the Solar System. Europa’s ice, easily mined, was used to top off the mass drive tanks of ships using nuclear and anti-matter drive systems. It was the easiest place to set up what amounted to the last gas station before heading to the outer planets. Catching comets was not as easy as just rendezvousing over the Jovian moon and having the teams here fill you up.

The ideal set-up on Europa for refueling was only one of its strategic attributes. The second was its proximity to what scientist had discovered to be a large collection of wormhole entry points. Analysis of the data recorded as the alien spacecraft exited and entered the wormholes had shown scientists what
to look for. They were amazed by the proliferation of the wormholes around Jupiter and, indeed, around other planets as well.

From Europa, the CSOC could easily coordinate the traffic going in and out of the wormholes. The CSOC was also the key node for managing the defensive preparations in Jupiter Space; guarding against the possible return of the alien aggressors through what was now called the Jovian Wormhole Cluster.

Ian found himself routed out to the Reagan Space Corps Base as an assignment after he had returned to Earth on the Cheyenne. The personnel center promised him another ship assignment as soon as he had completed a one year remote tour.

“The Cohou will be back before I see another ship,” Ian had told the Major from personnel who appeared all to happy to deliver the news.

When the first Cohou ship had passed through the Solar System, they had made only radio contact. They did not stop; they were simply on their way to somewhere else. They said if humanity really wanted to talk, they should meet the next ship as it refueled on the icy moon of the largest planet in the system. Due to the inevitable bureaucratic wrangling and other development problems, humanity had missed meeting the next three ships. A small research station had finally been established on what was now the Space Corps landing field after the alien attack on Earth. Rotating teams had waited for nearly nine months until the next Cohou ship arrived in system.

The Cohou were not excited about talking to humans face-to-face, but agreed to a short dialog. The seven foot reptilian Cohou told the human representatives to go home, turn off their transmitters, and be glad humanity only had some of their space assets blown up. They had actually laughed when the United Nations team described the destruction of Explorer.