The Long Road to Gaia (6 page)

Galactica launched without a hitch. Unknown
to the crew, at the exact moment the thrusters fired to move her out of the
construction platform, a bomb went off in a mansion they'd never heard of,
killing the owners, and a large group of people gathered to watch the launch on
television. Not only was the house completely destroyed, but the entire
property it was on was reduced to a hole in the ground. Local authorities wrote
it off to a gas leak.

Galactica headed out into the solar system.

The meeting room appeared around me, and I
took my chair, triggering the others to come. It was a full meeting.

"I trust you learned something
Thirteen?" said One.

"Learned? No, I don’t think so.
Underestimated human stupidity perhaps."

"Same thing," said Five.

"Really Thirteen," said Kali.
"Pay more attention to what's going on! Meddling with time after the event
can cause some serious anomalies, especially when you kill people."

"What do we care about
anomalies?" I said.

Time was time. So a few people with control
delusions had died a few years earlier than they should have. The world was a
better place without them, in my opinion.

There was a serious thumping noise from the
other end of the table.

All eyes turned to Ganesha. But he didn’t
say anything. The buckled table in front of him said it all.

"Fine," I said.

I looked them all in the eyes, and one by
one they nodded to me and vanished.

I went back to Galactica. A year had
passed. The ship was parked nearby to the anomaly.

A scout ship was just launching, and I
moved myself to the cockpit. James was piloting the small ship. Jon was in the
jump seat. Both of them were showing signs of major excitement.

I stood behind them, and watched as history
unfolded.

The scout moved to the edge of the anomaly.

"Nothing different on sensors,"
said James, into coms.

"You are go for moving closer,"
said Richard, from the coms.

"This is it," said Jon.

James goosed the thrusters slightly, moving
the ship inward.

"Woah!" exclaimed James, as the
ship picked up speed faster than expected.

Knowing what was coming, I decided I wanted
to see the reactions on the Bridge of Galactica first.

I stood next to Richard, as the scout
picked up speed.

And vanished.

Exclamations of shock came from around the
Bridge, but Richard sat there with a big grin forming. His right hand came up
making a fist.

"YES!" he said.

They waited, the tension ramping up
steadily. Each person wondering if the scout would reappear or not.

And suddenly it was there.

"Hunter to Galactica."

"Talk to me James."

"Sir, I have the honour of reporting
the existence of a natural transportation mechanism. We were taken to another
solar system."

"Where?"

"Son," said Jon. "Wolf
359."

The joy in his voice had even me cheering.

Lieutenant (JG) Jon Hunter flew the scout
ship out the front of the left flight pod, and headed for the jump point. He
showed no signs of the nightmare which had woken him in the middle of the
night.

It was his first mission in charge. He had
three crewmen with him.

Galactica had already spent months in this
system, and this was the last jump point to send a scout to. On his say so,
Galactica would jump into a new system behind him.

I'd been watching this kid all his life,
and sincerely hoped he wasn’t the one. In my opinion he took too many risks.
His older brother was much more stable, and would make a good Captain someday.
Jon though? He didn’t have it in him.

He did a way too fast zip through the
pre-jump checklist, all the time thinking about what he might discover on the
other side, and how it would boost his chances of early promotion. It was about
all he could think of. That and impressing his girlfriend, with his promotion.

"You guys ready," he called out
to his small crew.

A chorus of yeah's came back to him.

The jump point was right ahead of him now.
He pulled his belt a bit tighter around him, and sucked in a breathe.

The ship jumped.

"Ouch," said Twelve. "What
terrible luck."

"Am I supposed to do anything about
it?"

"No. Not important apparently. The
bloodline is secure without him."

I waited on Galactica until a week later,
they sent in another scout ship. It narrowly avoided colliding with the first
one.

It took them a while, but it was later
determined there was a red light on one of the engine coolant indicators, which
the pilot ignored or hadn't noticed. As soon as the engine was used to
accelerate after the jump, it had exploded. The crew had died immediately. None
of them had been wearing their space suits for the jump.

"Drop," said Colonel William
Smith.

Captain George Takai shot him a glance
which suggested something not to be put in words. The look he received back
told him the Colonel was not happy, and wasn’t going to put up with the usual
Takai smartarse quip.

There was no way the Dropship could
actually drop. It was docked in a bay of the Earth Torus. Takai was the pilot,
and the Colonel was riding the jump-seat behind him.

Takai cleanly lifted off from the deck, and
they flew out of the bay like a conventional shuttle.

Another quick glance at their leader
received just a stern nod.

Once clear of the Torus, Takai dropped
them.

This was no ordinary Dropship, having been
designed specifically for missions down to Earth, where no ordinary Dropship
would hope to survive. She was five times as big as a normal Dropship, ten
times heavier, and had engines more suited to Corvettes. In a way, she was a
Corvette, because only something that big could survive down there. But she was
still a Dropship, with a cockpit instead of a bridge.

All the same, this was no ordinary drop
either. This ship and crew had made exactly three previous drops over the past
year, and each time had only just managed to get home to the Torus.

Earth was dying.

Not slowly, but exponentially.

What once had been merely pollution from
industry, had been accelerated by the melting permafrost's, releasing a mixture
of elements into the atmosphere which accelerated what was originally called,
in an attempt to disguise the real problems, global warming. The Earth did
warm, but not everywhere at the same time. Storms became hurricanes. Hurricanes
became ocean sized. Instead of lasting days, they lasted months, then years,
and finally never ended. Structures collapsed, even those designed to withstand
hurricane strength winds. Trees were blown down. As the winds grew worse, and
covered more of the planet, trees vanished completely. As the winds continued
to gather strength, the green coverage of the planet became lower and lower,
until nothing bigger than short grass remained. The atmosphere became more and
more toxic, finally unbreathable by any oxygen requiring species, and the
surface became unlivable. Everything died.

I'd checked in from time to time, smiling
to myself, as humanity fled its own stupidity. I made sure the cats went with
them, and all other animals and plants.

But not all people had chosen to leave.
Some of them tried to stay.

Three times this team had been sent in to
evacuate those who'd found their way of surviving the planet wouldn’t work.
Three times I’d gone with them.

Now I was back for the fourth, and last
mission.

There was only one group left. And they
didn’t want to leave.

Bill Smith had fought the orders to remove
them by force. He'd lost. He'd refused to carry out his orders. They threatened
him with everything up to and including court martial for treason, even though
no-one could actually define how treason fit the situation. He'd told them to
get on with it. They did. They charged his entire team with him. He gave in.
His team had no idea any of this had happened. He felt he owed it to them to
keep it from them.

Orders were orders. He'd always known this.
He'd always obeyed. Beaten down this time, he obeyed once again. Listening to
his thoughts, 'once again' sounded like 'one last time'.

I watched him as the Dropship passed
through the upper atmosphere. He was not a happy man. One might even call him
haunted.

He couldn’t fault his superior's logic. The
planet no longer supported life. In fact, nothing much actually lived there
anymore. Only those who had been living there had any idea what still did, and
before leaving, they'd reported little else than cockroaches on the land, and
strange fish-like creatures at the darkest places of the deep ocean trenches,
where the hurricanes couldn’t reach.

One by one, the last hold-outs had all been
evacuated.

Except this last group. His superiors had
argued they were about to die, and they needed rescuing. He'd argued they had a
right to decide their own fate. We're right, you're wrong, do your job; had
won. The argument hadn't, the dirty tricks had.

But the look on his face said this was all
wrong.

I agreed with him. I'd even taken it to the
twelve.

He lost.

I lost.

Here we were.

We dropped into the eye of a hurricane,
more or less dead center of the northern half of the Pacific Ocean. To the
east, one side of the hurricane buffeted the Rocky Mountains. To the west, the
same hurricane tore at the stones of what remained of China's Great Wall.

The only safe way down, was through the
eye. Safe was a relative term though. In the past year, nine other teams had
perished, all of them on the way down. None of the pilots was quite like Takai
though. None of the ships had been like this one either.

I moved down to the main troop drop area.
The team were strapped into seats, completely immobilized. The ride was rough,
and moving about was suicidal. For them. I stood easily.

"I thought we were done with these evac's,"
said Walter Peck.

"Yeah," agreed Nathan Vogane.
"Why us? Again?"

"Two reasons," answered Sergeant
Susan Murdock, the only woman on the team. "One, because we are the only
ones good enough to pull it off."

There was a pause.

"And?" suggested Jason Merritt.

"And two," went on Murdock
reluctantly, "because we're the only team left."

"There's that," admitted John
Baracas.

Nigel Weaver nodded to himself. He was the
Lieutenant, but he was leaving the talking to his sergeant. A man of few words,
who ran his team without many of them. If it needed to be said, he left it to
the Colonel to say. He caught Alan Henquist's glance and nodded to him.

They were a nine person team now, having
lost eleven people over the last three years. No-one had volunteered to join
them, such was the team's reputation for pulling off miracles, but at the cost
of losing the new people. The last of them had been Richard Allen and Dirk
Bronson, killed on the last drop when they hadn't made it back to the ship
before the habitat ruptured. Both had been original team members, and left
wives and kids behind.

Vasquez had been right, thought Weaver. I
was listening to all of them, but the Lieutenant had the most interesting
thoughts. Vasquez had died two years before, after warning them all the team
was doomed to be whittled down to only a few, with the ones remaining wishing
they hadn't survived. Nine wasn’t a few, but Weaver could see the pattern. They
all could, but Weaver was the one most concerned about it.

No-one carried anything at this point.
Their weapons and packs were securely stowed. The worst was still to come.

Conversation stopped, as it does when
anticipation of something bad happening becomes the primary thought pattern.

And it nearly did.

Plan A nearly killed them all.

Takai angled the Dropship towards the point
where it would enter the primary wind stream, on enough of an angle to be drawn
into the flow. There was a solid wham on the front of the ship, and suddenly it
was pin-wheeling through the storm.

"I got this," screamed Takai, but
no-one heard him, and he was wrong anyway.

The ship was going down. Had it had wings,
they would have been ripped off by now. It didn’t. And as such, it also didn’t
really have anything to help it out of a flat spin. The thrusters simply
couldn’t cope against the force of the hurricane.

Takai got creative. He fired all the
turrets on the inside of the spin, hoping they would push the rear of the ship
out more. It had no effect at all.

In desperation, he pushed the nose down,
trying to change from a spin into a loop. He ended up with a spinning loop.

Totally out of control, and nearly in the
sea now, he did the only thing he could do. He turned the shields back on.

Hold on, why were they off? I wound time
back to the top of the hurricane, and watched his movements closely. And there,
yes, at the top of the thunderclouds, barely through into the atmosphere, he
turned the shields off. I froze things.

"It's in the manual," said
Twelve.

"Huh?"

"The manual. It's in there."

"I know what the manual is. Why does
it say to turn the shields off?"

"It doesn’t say. It's just part of the
procedure."

"When was it written?"

"The day after someone used a shield
in the atmosphere the first time, and caused an air liner to crash by getting
to close and dissolving its wing tip."

"How long ago was that?"

"More than two hundred years."

"Shit!"

"Yeah.

I wound time forward to where I’d left it,
and a few seconds later, we hit the water.

The ship went through the surface of the
water as if it wasn’t there. It wasn’t. The shields vaporized the water on
contact. The ship moved forwards under the water, now fully under control, and
right sides up.

"Why did we need to go into the
wind?" Smith asked Takai. "Couldn’t you have done this in the
eye?"

"Not the plan sir. We were supposed to
enter the water without shields not far from the habitat."

"This is better."

"I amaze even myself sometimes,"
chuckled Takai. "But it's going to take us a lot longer to get there now.
Even with shields up, the water offers more drag than the wind, especially as
we were supposed to be going with the wind."

"Let me know when we get close."

"Will do."