Reunion: Chapter 11

  “Hold up,” Kathryn ordered.  “I want to make sure they’re okay before we move on.”  

  The Koboli shuttle with Kathryn and Teresa’s teams had docked without incident at Orbital One.  At the very centre of its axis of rotation, the station had a docking port which an approaching shuttle had to match the rotation of before hard locking onto.   When the station was fully operational and a hub of orbital traffic, the vessels would then be moved out of the way around the side of the central hub to make room for another incoming shuttle.   Those days were long gone though.   

  Unfortunately, there had been a small shuttle blocking this main docking port, so they had to approach one of the outer ports designed for much larger ships.  Four long tines extend out from the central hub of orbital one in a curve like two pairs of giant pincers which provided enough room for much larger interplanetary ships to occupy all four at the same time.   Two of those were occupied by just such ship as well, but thankfully there were two which were open.  These abandoned large vessels at this point could only be added to the ever-expanding list of things which they wanted to later explore and study.  Kathryn tried not to dwell too much on the potential for conflict between their worlds over who had claim to them.

    For the larger vessels, the tines as well as the docking points on the vessels were structurally reinforced to tolerate the ships being carried around in a subtle circle along with the station as it rotated.   It was a fairly tenuous grapple for such a high degree of torque, and without such structural reinforcements the ships were too likely to sheer off of the tines with the force.  Given the small size of their shuttle and the absence of significant rotation to the station, docking the shuttle there posed no risk. 

  Teresa’s team was wearing environmental suits provided by the Koboli, and they were equipped with cameras on their helmets which provided the feed which Kathryn’s team was watching as they pulled themselves along the long narrow corridor from the outer docking port to the central hub of Orbital One.  Kathryn remarked to herself how much the internal structure reminded her of the central engineering corridor on the New Horizon itself, and she wondered if there was anything to read into that.

  “We have reached the central hub,” Teresa reported.

  “This portal will have to be pressure locked,” Felix reported.  “It won’t open unless it detects atmosphere on this side of the door.”  He applied a battery pack to the bulkhead beside the control panel and the touch panel lit up in response, but there was nothing on it.  “Yup, no response at all.  Okay well, there’s gotta be some sort of manual override somewhere…”   He felt around the perimeter of the hatch until he found a heavy hinged hole in the wall.  “Now this override could be… overridden by the operations team inside if they were in there, but that shouldn’t be a problem.”  He pulled the thick handle out of the wall and turned it several rotations until the portal unlocked and popped ajar.  “Friends,” he said with a welcoming wave of his hand, “welcome to Orbital One.”

  They entered onto what appeared to be a sort of arrivals and departures bay with airlocks on all sides of them marked with large numbers painted on them.   Identifying the correct way towards the rest of the station, they made their way along with hand and foot hold which were on every surface to allow movement about the space in the absence of gravity.  Their way was lit by the lights on their helmets and all of them were quiet.  They all had the overwhelming sense of walking through a graveyard, a mixture of reverence and irrational fear.

  Investigating the end of the arrival and departure bay, they found doorways to the four lifts which ran back and forth inside the struts connecting the central core to the habitat ring.

  “Like the hatch into this area,” Felix said, “none of these door or lifts will work for us.  Even with power, with the operations programs so badly degraded they wouldn’t know how to operate.”

  “Options?” Teresa asked.

  “There’s got to be an emergency crawlspace somewhere… ah, over here,” he noted.   Francis used a similar manual override to the one that got them past the tine to open the way to a tubular pathway which was just large enough for them to make their way single file.  They went up along the ladder which went off into the abyss as far as their lights could make out.  “Feet first everyone, you’ll experience progressively increasing gravity as we advance so be careful.  Remember that if you damage your suit you’ll be in trouble.  There’s pressurized atmosphere here so you won’t die from vacuum right away, but the air is completely anoxic, no oxygen to speak of so watch your step.”

  One by one the team filed into the access tube and began climbing down to the habitat ring.   Halfway through they felt a gravity level they were used to and began to worry.  “Captain,” Teresa called out, “we’re nowhere near the bottom and we’re already feeling heavy.  Is the station rotating faster than it should be?” she asked.

  “Jaren calculate the rotational gravity at the habitat ring.  Tell me we didn’t miss something that important?”

  “Might have I’m afraid,” Jaren admitted.  “We never ran the calculations.  Give me a second.”  Jaren consulted his hand device for a few moments.  “Hunh,” he uttered.  “One point nine eight four.  There’s nearly double gravity down there.”

  “You hear that, Teresa?” Kathryn asked. 

  “Yes…” she answered reservedly.  “Is that safe?”

  Jaren turned to Ana on the New Horizon’s bridge.  “In theory it shouldn’t be a problem,” she suggested.  “It’ll be hell on them physically, but it’s survivable.   It’ll tax their heart and circulatory system, but they’re all healthy.  We should limit their exposure just to be safe though.  I’d say no more than…” she made a face which betrayed that she was just picking a number out of the air, “two hours exposure at a time?   They could probably survive indefinitely in those conditions if they had to, but it would still be prudent to limit their exposure.”

  “I agree,” Elim confirmed.  “Let’s work in two-hour shifts.  Two of us should head back down and wait to switch off with you.”

  “Well,” Teresa lamented.  “We can’t climb past each other in this tunnel.  Since you’re behind me Nadelle you follow me on up.  Francis and Keri, you head back down to the central core and talk us through what we need to do.  We’ll switch up in a couple of hours.”

  Teresa and Nadelle continued climbing down as Francis and Keri headed back up to the central core.  As Teresa and Nadelle continued on, their weight became increasingly oppressive.   Each step seemed to bring a new strain on their bodies, but they eventually reached the bottom, climbed off the ladder, and found themselves in a small room.

  “Wow, that’s heavy.” Nadelle commented.  Kathryn noted that she felt it this strongly even with her slight frame.  “It’s almost hard to breathe, but… I think I feel okay.  How ‘bout you?” she asked Teresa.

  “Well I don’t feel my heart exploding or anything,” Teresa dryly offered, “but it’s hard to stand up straight; hard to keep my head up.  Ugh, and the weight of these damn suits sure isn’t helping either.”

  Scanning the room with her helmet lights, Nadelle looked around the small room they found themselves in.  “Ah,” she said, pleased with herself at having found the door handle and pulling on the latch handle.  “Here we go.”

  When they opened the door and stepped out, they tripped over something on the ground beneath them, and struggled mightily to stay on their feet in the extra gravity but succeeded.  Pointing their lights down they saw that it was a half decomposed human skeleton.

  “Oh my…” Teresa said as she touched her glove to the front of her helmet.

  “Well that’s ominous…” Felix observed.  “What do you make of it Nadelle?”

  “Hard to tell without further analysis,” she said, leaning down to examine the body.   “But I imagine it can’t decompose any further in this anoxic air.”  She pointed her helmet down one end of the hallway and then the other.  “I can see one more down the hall this way,” she observed, “but that’s it for now.”  She sighed and for a moment left a fog on the inside of her helmet.  “I suggest we press on.  Answers to bigger questions should shed light on the smaller mysteries.”

  “I agree,” Jaren offered from the ship.

  “Press on then,” Kathryn ordered from the shuttle.  “I think we should head on down to the planet now that you’re safely aboard.”

  “Sure.   We should be fine.  If we run into any trouble, we’ve got Jaren’s other shuttle for back up.  Good luck Captain.”

  “To you as well.  Don’t take any risks you don’t have to.”

   

  Under Irvina’s control, the shuttle disengaged from Orbital One and began its descent towards the surface.  Strapped into their seats, Kathryn, Elim, and Deirdre all marveled anew at the seamless projections on the interior walls.  They could only watch and revel in the sight as Irvina focused on piloting and navigation, the infinite starry expanse of space on one side, and the impossibly high-definition view which only reality could otherwise provide of the Earth’s surface racing along underneath them.  The ship tilted over to the appropriate angle of attack for the underside of the ship to directly confront the planet’s atmosphere with their direction of travel.  As the ship began atmospheric braking, the image on the surfaces about them broke up and flickered, left rendering only visual static as the imagers were disrupted by the super-heated plasma of the atmosphere set afire by their punching through it, translating their speed to heat. 

  When the image returned, they were equally awed by the sight.  Beneath them were rich green plains to the horizon on one side and on the other was ocean in the distance beyond a range of snow-capped mountains.  Irvina seemed either disinterested in it or too busy with her work, but the other three were free to be revel in the majesty of the view.  It wasn’t their first time seeing a sight like this, but they certainly hadn’t had the opportunity yet for it to be mundane, and Kathryn hoped it never would be.  Beyond the mere dazzlement of the view, Kathryn also found herself feeling a somehow mystical element to her experience as they got ever closer to a place of myth and legend, a place which some of her people had begun to doubt had ever really existed at all only a short couple of months ago.

  As they got closer, the mountain range they were descending towards could be seen in ever greater detail.

  “Okay…” Irvina cautiously started to say.  “We’re coming up on the site that you indicated.  It’s just on the other side of this mountain range.  As planned, I’m going to put us down at the base of that last mountain five kilometers north of the dam.”

  The shuttle required only a tiny fraction of its total thrust capacity to keep aloft against the planet’s gravity and move its way across the surface of the planet.   While at full power the engines made quite a loud noise, at this low level of power output it hardly made any sound at all.  The crew watched as the ship hovered over their landing coordinates and slowly descended.   As they approached the surface, the engines blew down and away the knee high green tinged yellow grasses beneath them at a steady rate, rhythmically accentuated by the pulsating energy.

  The ship touched down on its metal legs which bent at their joints as they assumed and accommodated the weight of the shuttle.  Irvina methodically powered down the engines and set all of the ship’s systems to standby.  “Welcome to Earth,” she said as she looked back at them with a bit of a smirk but betrayed by the excited twinkle in her eye.

   

  “Jaren?” Irvina asked through the communications system.  “Is the triad in position?”

  “Negative,” Kathryn heard him say after a view of New Horizon’s bridge replaced a section of the shuttle’s inner walls.  “Beta Team is still working their way towards the computer core on Orbital One, but they should be there soon.  For safety I sent Xion in the other shuttle to wait by the station as a lifeboat until they finish getting set up there just in case.  Until then we’ll keep New Horizon in geostationary position to maintain contact with your team and check in with Beta team whenever we have line of sight.”

  “Understood,” Irvina acknowledged.  “Well Captain Barnes, it’s your mission.  What’s our next move.”

  “We move out.”   She tried to command as casually as possible despite her internally erupting excitement.  She was responsible for all of them, and that had to come first regardless of how excited she might be.  “Everyone grab your gear.  Irvina when you’re ready you can go ahead and open the door.”

  Irvina nodded tapped at her control panel.  She seemed more openly positive and excited than Kathryn had ever seen her and took a moment to survey her crew.  They all had the same studious giddiness, and she took a beat to savour the moment as best as she could like when she first boarded New Horizon back above Haven.

  A vertical slice of the interior of the shuttle shifted.  The section swung down on its bottom hinges, revealing their first natural view of the landscape.  The section of ship projected out to double its original length and came down to form a ramp resting in the grass below.  The wild air rushed in, and Kathryn stepped to the doorway and took a deep breath through her nose, savouring the fresh scent of air.

  “Careful Captain,” Jaren warned, still on the wall opposite the doorway.  “I know you’re excited, but there’s a thousand ways you could get into trouble on an alien world.  I know its Earth, but don’t lose sight of the fact that for us it’s still just alien.  It may feel to you like a long-lost home but you still need to expect the unexpected.”

  “Your concern is noted and appreciated Jaren,” Kathryn said with a smirk.  “We will indeed proceed with all due caution.”

  Kathryn turned around to face her crew.  “He’s right.   Untold dangers face us out there.   But don’t let that stop you from taking a moment to appreciate the gravity of us being here and what it means.   As you come down the ramp, I want each of you to take a moment and savour this.  Do what you can to burn it into your memory and never forget the privilege of you being here doing this instead of someone else.”

  The nodded and seemed to understand.  It would mean different things to all of them.  Cautiously at first, she stepped down the ramp with the others following behind her.  She closed her eyes for the brief moment that she first set foot on Earth.  Earth, she mused.  Both the place and the material for the first time.  

  She allowed herself to become overwhelmed and her eyes grew wet as she looked back at the others and stepped out of the way to give them room to disembark.  After Irvina stepped off in a way Kathryn found a touch too casual, Elim hopped off of the last bit of ramp and enthusiastically planted both feet down to the ground with a wide grin to Kathryn.   Deirdre disembarked last with an expression which suggested her experiencing something on a more religious level.

  “We’ve got a bit of a walk people,” Kathryn said after wiping the wetness away from her eyes as casually as possible.  “We can take a moment here, but I’m eager to get moving.  We have limited daylight, and we’ll need to walk back here before its dark.”

  Before long they were on their way.  When the space allowed them, they walked side by side, but when the terrain narrowed, they fell into single file.  Elim openly marveled at the birds which flew overhead, while Kathryn ran her fingers through the long grass.

  A couple of kilometers along, Jaren contacted them again.  “The station has come into range on a pass underneath us,” he reported, “I’m opening the channels.”

  All four of the surface expedition team members were wearing the PANE devices they’d found on New Horizons.  They were like eyeglasses except that they were outfitted with cameras and microphones and were synched with their scrolls.  Instead of corrective lenses, the screens in front of their eyes could manipulate what they saw in any number of ways.  Beyond being able to merely be perfectly transparent, they could overlay any information or display fully immersive stereo video.

  They could hear Jaren and the station team speaking to them through the tiny speakers in the earpiece part of the devices.  “We’ve passed several other bodies along the way,” Teresa reported, “but we have arrived at the computer core area and Jaren was right.  There is a storage compartment adjacent to it with the physical backup memory sheets.  It’ll take some time, but with Francis directing us we should be able to power up the system with a Koboli power core and feed all of the sheets into the reader.   Then it should just be a matter of booting up the main computer core.  After that we should be able to get a communications network up and running.”

  “How long have you been under that double gravity?” Elim asked.

  “Just over an hour.” Nadelle reported.

  “How do you feel?”

  “Oh, we’re getting on… we’re actually kind of starting to get used to it.  I mean it’s still awful, but we’re managing.   You think that maybe going back and forth could be more stressful on the body than going back and forth to limit our exposure the way we’d planned?”

  Irvina piped up.  “There’s a chance that there may be reserve thruster fuel enough to slow down the rotational speed once you get the computers up and running.”

  “Yes, but we can’t count on that,” Jaren pointed out.  Irvina shrugged in response.

  “Where is the power core you brought with you?” Kathryn asked.

  “Still by the docking port we came through,” Francis answered from down the central hub.

  “Francis you and Keri grab the power cell and… wait, Jaren where will they have to install that core?”

  “Hold on…”  The four stood on the surface awkwardly looking around at each other as they waited for him to continue.  “Down in the central hub actually, not far from where they are now.”

  “Right,” Kathryn acknowledged.  Francis and Keri, you go to the station’s main power bus.  Install the energy core but feed it only to the computer core and communications systems for now, we don’t want to drain it too quickly by feeding all of the station’s systems at the same time.  Once you’ve restored power to the computer system Teresa and Nadelle can start feeding the sheets into the machine and you can head to the core to replace them, finish feeding the sheets, set up the comms relay, and then head back to the core section.  That way you should each only get the one high gravity shift and shouldn’t have to go back and forth.  Then on you should be able to access whatever you need to from down in the core section or have Jaren access it remotely.”

  “Sounds like a plan,” Teresa offered.

  “Once you’re both back to the centre we can evaluate potential further salvage options for the station and see if we can find any useful data in the sheets there beyond just the basic operating system.”

  Everyone in all three places acknowledged their understanding of the plan and got on with it.  A few kilometers further along, the team came to a place where the wooded area of the mountains gave way to more of an open meadow, and they paused before moving out into the more exposed area.