Odyssey Rising (8 page)

As Theo tried to stop the Escape Pod from jackknifing into a three-sixty death roll, the other Positives had little to do in the Escape Pod except scream bloody murder.

Sam had the loudest scream of all and used it frequently, “Oh my FREAKING CRAP! We’re going to DIE! We’re going to knife right into the FREAKING SOIL, stick a fork in us and call us DEADDDDD!”

Sam’s outburst was not without its merit.

On the computer screen, the huge MALFUNCTION kept flashing.

Theo grabbed hold of the Escape Pod’s control wheel.

Knifing through GidX7’s thin and volatile atmosphere, the Escape Pod had only about one hundred seconds to decelerate from Mach 6 to under Mach 1. This meant the Escape Pod had to make a quick, efficient and potentially deadly transition from space flying machine into a landing craft capable of withstanding the hard and immoveable impact of the surface. They were spinning and spinning, in free-fall in quick rotations.

Sam let out a quick bursts of: “Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap, do you know what you’re doing.”

Interrupting Sam’s nervous spasm of oh craps, they heard a loud POP on the outer shell of the Escape Pod.

“What was that?”

“Parachute,” Theo said.

“Oh my god,” Sam screamed as the Escape Pod jerked to the left and the right.

“Whoa!” Theo was enjoying the ride.

Ravi was completely quiet, almost calm.

Sam was shaking his head, “Holy crap. Holy freaking crap! And I wanted to be an astronaut when I was a kid! Well not anymore!”

“Man up, Sam. Man up!” Theo yelled.

“Easy for you to say. Harder for me to do!” Sam yelled back.

“This is a walk in the bloody park!” Ravi added.

“I’m an artist and a lover not a crazy lunatic!! Oh my God! Is this normal? Is it? Aren’t we going too freaking fast?” Sam questioned as he rocked back and forth.

“It’s normal!” Theo yelled.

“Normal? This is crazy!!! Ahhh!!!” Sam yelled.

“Didn’t you go to Landing Training?” Theo asked.

“No! I was sick!”

Ellie was the calmest and quietest of all. Perhaps it was her natural disposition to not over-react to physical or mental stress and perhaps it was because she kept her eyes closed the whole ride down.

As they plummeted to the surface, still going a crazy fast Mach 2, the main parachute and two side one’s finally opened. The Escape Pod rotated internally like a gymnast doing a slow, methodical tumble.

Airbags, on Earth, saved thousands of lives every day in automobiles and airbags were the best solution for landing robotic probes. For those daring enough to jump out of airplanes a simple parachute saved the day as well. In light of a better solution, they placed blind trust on three things: a vinyl parachute that deployed one gigamile above the surface of the planet, a series of round airbags that popped out from six crevices in the Escape Pod and the grace of any god who would listen.

Landing heavy objects on small planets was harder than most people knew. It was GidX7’s thin atmosphere that was the trouble. Though it was breathable, it was not amenable to landings.

“Take your pick of runways,” Ravi yelled.

“And try to make it smooth,” Sam yelled.

“I’ll do my best,” Theo yelled. “Hang on!”

The horizon of the planet came into view and Theo pulled upon on the control. He tried to right the flight equilibrium level. He was praying for a comfortable and safe landing.

The golden brown terrain was a series of hills and jagged canyons.

GidX7 was smaller than Earth with only three land continents separated by the driest of canyons that dwarfed the Grand Canyon by a factor of two. There were no liquid oceans spotted in any of the photos taken by Odyssey’s satellite imaging advance probe. The GidX7 probes had found the suggestion of water, similar to the dried canals of Mars. The planet also had three continents but no oceans. Rather there were tectonic gaps two and three times wider than the Grand Canyon and four miles deep. It was a rather small brown marble compared to Earth and its atmosphere was just thin enough to make landing a five metric ton Escape Pod a very daunting, nearly impossible though exciting challenge.

When the Escape Pod struck down on soil, the group of Positives held on to anything they could grab onto.

The landing was jarring and ripped a riot through they and sent them all hurtling forward in their canvas restraining straps. They were alive and trying to right themselves from the arrival. Odyssey was gone and they had not yet acquainted themselves with their surroundings, nor their new home, their hexagonal Escape Pod that was situated firmly on the surface of the planet known as GidX7. Their hair fell into their eyes. Blood rushed to their heads. Their fingers were numb from the pressurized, frantic ride and when they had calmed and settled their breath Theo looked over to Sam. He did not look well with sweat beading down his forehead, sweat in his palms.

Theo asked, “You okay there?”

Sam sort of nodded.

“Not like the flight simulator,” Ravi said, “this was so much more awesome!”

Sam looked ready to puke

Theo asked him, “You okay Sam?”

Before Sam answered, he coughed and puked into his hand. It was a slimy mess.

“Welcome to GidX7,” Ravi said.

“Hey Ellie,” Theo yelled.

“Yes?” she answered.

“You can open your eyes. We’re here.”

Ellie finally opened her eyes. She saw Theo leaning back and breathing a sigh of relief while looking at her. He gave her a big thumbs up and she did the same. They had arrived where no human being had ever set foot.

At the Escape Pod’s exit door, Harry Wolf was barking and barking. His gray snout was pressed firmly against the metal.

Theo yanked him away. “Stop boy. Stop. It’s okay. We’re safe now.”

“Are we?” Sam asked.

“Yeah, we’ve safely landed,” Ellie said. “That can be confirmed without a doubt.”

Theo’s mind reeled with the plan: go to GidX7. Go down to the surface. Find the host. Find the cure. Find a virus. Save their lives. It was such a simple plan, he thought, only complicated by the uncertainty and dust that swirled on the unforgiving surface of the planet and the inability to communicate with Odyssey, the Ark or Doctor Starling who was en route to the planet. All communication was offline.

What if scenarios danced in his thoughts. What if we don’t find what we’re looking for? What if this is a cruel, deathly game? What if life is short and unusual? What if life – especially here on a new planet – was absolute chaos imposed by a superficial order? And what if reason and justice and fairness were as arbitrary as this planet’s wind.

The positives looked out the viewing window and saw the hilly golden terrain.

“We’re here. We’re really here,” Ravi said.

“Now what?” Sam asked.

“Get the computer online. Check all protocols,” Theo said.

“And establish a link,” Ellie said.

“That’s if we can,” Ravi said.

Theo was already sitting down at the computer screen.

No Signal, No Signal pulsed on the Communication Devices and the main Pod computer console. The delay in communication was indefinite. As long as the atmospheric disturbances engulfed the planet, these five new world explorers were totally on their own. The communication devices would re-dial and re-dial until they made contact with Doctor Starling or the Ark mainframe, if they ever did.

Theo typed the protocols he had learned from his father. On screen there was a string of four digit numbers rolling down. The computer was searching for a connection with Odyssey’s mainframe. His classmates hovered over his shoulder.

“What’s the problem?” Ellie asked.

“It’s just taking a while,” Theo said.

“Is there a problem? There is. Isn’t there?”

There was silence, except for the keypad strokes that Theo kept repeating with precise frustration.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, enter.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, enter.

Again no signal was found.

Theo grimaced, ran his fingers through his closely shaven hair and tapped a series of four digit numbers once more.

Tap, tap, tap, tap, enter.

“What’s wrong?” Ravi asked.

“All protocols are offline,” Theo said.

Sam asked, “Then how do we get them online?”

“That depends.”

“On what?”

“Whether it’s a hardware problem.”

“Or a software.”

“Or something else.”

“Oh, this is great,” wheezed Sam. His hands flapped in anger. “Just great. We get sent down here. We have no link to Odyssey. No link to the Ark. This is not good. Not good at all.”

“The engineers have been complaining about this atmosphere since we started orbit,” Ravi said.

“Yeah, it’s possible that’s interfering with the connection,” Ellie said.

“What about our satellite location? Tell me that works,” Sam said.

Theo scrolled through the console screen, trying different commands and protocols.

“Nothing works,” Theo said with a frustrated sigh.

“We are so screwed,” Sam said.

“We’re not screwed,” Theo said. “We’ve got to stay focused. Positive. Okay?”

“Sure. Things are just great. Never better,” Sam said with a frown. “Oh yeah, I’m loving life right now.”

“We just have to improvise,” Theo said.

“Yeah, that’s great if we were jazz musicians,” Sam said. “But we’re not. Man, I did not sign up for this kind of mission.”

“None of us signed up for this,” Theo said, “but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re down here. Now, we have to focus on what we can do and not on what’s gone wrong.”

“Right. I hear you as loud and clear as Leo Hull’s accordion,” Sam said. “But this still sucks big monkey chunks.”

“We’ll be fine as soon as we evaluate where we’ve landed,” Theo said.

Sam said. “How much water do we have?”

“The tank holds around 300 liters,” Theo said.

“How long will that last?” Sam asked.

“Depends,” Ellie answered.

“On what?”

“We’ll add a few days if we conserve and use the WRS properly,” Ellie said.

“How many days of water do we have?”

“Enough,” Ravi said.

“And you’re the expert? How many?”

“Ten days,” Theo said.

“What about food? What did they give us?”

“Food isn’t our big problem right now,” Theo said. “We know what our real mission is.”

“Find a host. Find a virus. Find some kind of cure,” Ravi said.

“And if we’re not near the Discovery Site then where the hell are we?”

There was no answer. They had no GPS down here and they were forced to wonder how far off they were from their planned landing site near the Discovery Site where the bones were discovered.

Theo had definitely guided the Escape Pod to a safe landing, but the group knew safety was possibly just a temporary condition. They were about to be the first human beings to explore this new world.

There were no guarantees of survival and no crystal ball that would predict the next event. All they had was a mathematical forecast model, which said—with this current growth rate and virulence they had about ten days before the infection overcame the organ system.

Of course the forecast model used the rabbit’s swift infection and rapid demise as a proxy, which left everyone truly wondering if men and rabbits are all that similar.

This quarantine, this separation, being in the Escape Pod, none of it was planned. It wasn’t some experiment. It was real life, dangerous, unwritten and they had not even said their true good-byes. It was all so happening so quickly. The greatest danger to humankind has always been the unknown and the Positives were face to face with it in spades: a new parasite, a new atmosphere, a new planet, a new illness, a new world full of old fears and an Escape Pod that was more claustrophobic than their previous home of Odyssey.

Inside the Escape Pod, Theo went to a thin storage cubicle near the computer console. He opened it. Inside the cubicle there was a silver container, a supply box full of two essential things for survival: a series of gray goggles, breathing masks and dozens of blue nutrient tablets. They were the size of aspirin.

Stacked inside the box there were a dozen gray goggles with lenses filtered with gray. The goggles were more than just protection from the dust. They offered a sophisticated calculation of distances. Looking through the goggles, something that was ten miles away appeared to be as close as a hundred yards.

“Goggles for everyone and a lot of blue tablets. Here,” Theo said as he handed a pair of goggles to the others.

The other interesting and prominent content of the supply closet was a long silver pole with a white flag attached to it. Theo offered it to Ellie with a smile.

“Ladies first,” Theo said.

The emblem resembled the Lone Star state flag. It was emblazoned in red, white and blue and a big Furman Corporation.

Theo kept handing out various supplies, namely six sets of goggles. Ravi put his over his eyes. They made him look a little like a human fly, all big and gray bulging eyes.

Theo went to the keypad by the white door that had locked them in the Escape Pod. The only response came when the air suctioned the door open, producing a doorway to the planet’s surface. It was not like Earth and definitely not like Odyssey or the Ark. That much was readily observable.

This new world was something like a desert, without the fine sand. The terrain was chunkier, soil of brown with light orange streaks, filled with solid pieces of dirt. The sun of this new planet provided a dull and hazy golden glow through silver and gray clouds.

On the horizon, in a shallow valley that dipped into a low crater, there was nothing else, nothing man or alien made. No water. No water. No trees. No life of any kind. No welcoming committee. No little green men. No large blue aliens with tentacles. No rivers of blue or streams of gray and black. Just golden brown soil and hills and wind and dust swirling around them.

The Escape Pod door slammed shut.

For the first time, human feet stood on this golden brown soil. A few feet from where the Escape Pod landed, they gathered in a semi-circle.

“The goggles have two settings,” Ravi said as he adjusted a small knob on the side of his goggles.

“I know you little mutant,” Sam said.

“Standard and telescopic. Just think of them like binoculars. Only better. We’ll be able to see clearly for thirty-two times our vision,” Ravi added.

“Okay. Let’s make this quick. We have work to do,” Theo said.

“Yes sir,” Sam said.

Ellie threw the pole down into the ground. The Positives had officially claimed

“The Furman Corporation now claims this planet as its territory,” Ellie said. “This is one giant step for the Furman Corporation.”

“And one small step for the advancement of New World exploration!” Ravi yelled as he jumped up and down in the dusty soil.