OUTPOST, Chapter One

OUTPOST
Chapter One
“Space---the final frontier? Kiss my ass, Captain Kirk---get me the hell out of here!”
---Guy Reisling, US space-program transport pilot, 2075

Nothing like a good shake-down and brutal emotional drubbing by your commanding officer, Guy was thinking. Makes me feel so important. The man now under the threat of career-ruin and complete professional and personal humiliation was Guy Askilav Reisling, a standard-issue muscle boy airman for duty in the abyss. Not un-important, but far from leadership or super-star status among his peers, which included astronauts, off-world walkers, Nobel-Prize scientists, space-pilots, and folks who knew how to get safely from Point-A to Point-B, when either spot was a few million miles apart, separated by vast regions of nothingness, and hard to find in the dark. His type were known as ‘vacuum-cleaners’, maybe because it’s hard to draw a breath in the deep-deep-deep, without a few preparations, at least, and about three million years of human evolution and science to help out. Not to mention progress in anti-gravity toilets (“To boldly go where no man has gone before---“).

Guy was seated now for his punishment, back on Earth, in a briefing room at the Vandenberg, California Space-Port Center. He was generally a joyful type of human being, as men go. But not at the moment. Solid and strong, only about 40 years-old, with a wide jaw, big shoulders and overall big-build. He had more-than-just-curly, slightly reddish hair, and tended to sport an unruly beard. Take it like a man, Guy, he told himself. It wasn’t your fault. If Guy had any actual freckles, on his face or shoulders, few would mock him for it. He was, after all, a space-ship pilot. The ‘right stuff’ for that, in the year 2075, definitely included kicking ass if he felt like it, maybe on leave, at a bar, or at the race-track, where the ground-level types seemed to get a thrill pretending that what he did for a living was a mere fly-boy luxury, or vanity for over-educated college-types who signed up only so they could brag about their true understanding of Elton John’s 1970’s-era pop-song, ‘Rocket Man’---ancient history, true, but the romance never really fades, when you’ve earned the privilege to work in space. But for the vast populace of humanity, work in space had no redeeming value.

The briefing room where Guy was reaping what he had sowed, now months behind him, but oh-so present, was like any such office or conference room the Earth had known for any time-period after 1975 or so. The Vandenberg Space-Port included many facilities that were that old, often a source of complaint from workers. Chairs, fluorescent-tube lights, walls, tables, plants, windows with thick bars or screens, a computer, a wall-map or two, chalk-board, plenty of good old-fashioned gravity---and Commander Okman, the Transport Crew head-honcho for the Western-region space-program. Although Okman had actually done ‘real’ space-flight work in the past, these days he only told program sub-ordinates the way it is, will be, and was, and should be, and cannot-be-otherwise, without instant death as a consequence. Okman was about 60 years-old, but presented a formidable form and content of opinion, standing on the other side of the conference table, across from Guy, pretty much raging. Both men were dressed in street-clothes, with name-tags and base-passes, and had known each other about five years.

“What were you thinking, Guy?” Okman spouted in his high-sounding vocal pattern. “What were you thinking? Every flight plan we provide for you to navigate from Earth to Mars on your run, is the product of about ten years of work, you know this, right? Did you forget or something? What were you going to do if you missed you re-entry corridor and ended up floating around in empty space for a year waiting for planet Earth to circle the Sun and come back up to meet your lifeless ship, if you even survived that long? Is that even possible? Have you done the math on that?? C’mon! You blew it!”

“I told you what happened, Commander,” Guy replied. “I was forced to make a flight-plan adjustment and I may have miscalculated in the rush. But I was able to correct the mistake later. It all worked out. It will never happen again, okay?”

Okman flexed his shoulders like his body was an old coat he had dragged from the closet that morning, wrinkled, dusty and unkempt. The look on his face could only be called disgust---something he probably practiced in private, for just such an occasion.

“No course-correction was necessary in the first place, Guy. You never needed to change course the first time. Those solar gas-cloud flares pass through the corridor all the time. They’re harmless, unless you take them at more than 100K caloric. You were less than 5K. That’s nothing. The energy-levels were acceptable, there was no danger.”

“My information at the time was otherwise, sir.”

“Do you have the luxury of being wrong, less than halfway home from Mars, in a ship worth more than entire nations, with a crew of seven highly skilled workers, transporting life-or-death supplies, in a deep-space environment? Give me a break, Guy. You were drinking or something. And why did you make alterations in your fuel consumption? Why did you switch to reserve-engines on hydrogen-only? What was the purpose of that?” Okman fumed.

Guy heaved a bitter sigh. “I’ve made this run more than 20 times, both ways, Commander,” he said. “We had the report from Molinari on the solar gas-flare---“

Okman huffed at mention of the deep-space Earth-Mars corridor mid-point dock-station. “Ha! Yeah! Molinari! Your girl-friend!”

“What’s that got to do with anything? Yeah, Lila works there, sure. But it didn’t come from her anyway. So my corridor had the solar-heat---the caloric wasn’t specific. If I get the heat, I either have to divert, slow-and-wait, shield, or just fucking go around it. So that’s what I did. Afterwards I went to hydrogen to make up for lost time, and match the previous flight-plan. The hydrogen is faster in deep-space than the peroxide. So that’s it. It all worked out. No one was hurt. No big loss.”

“Not really,” Okman said. “I had to bring in a team of five astro-navigators on triple-time for two weeks to figure out how to land you and coordinate docking. If they hadn’t been able to do it, you and your crew would be dead. I’m serious. You could have survived another six weeks, but planet Earth would have left you so far behind you’d never get back. Because we would have been about 100,000 miles ahead in orbit around the Sun, while you went spinning off the other way. I don’t care about the ship, Guy, and I don’t care about the cargo. I don’t even care you went to hydrogen engines without authorization. But I sure as hell care about my people. Including you.”

“Yes, sir,” Guy said, muffling resentment in the tone of his voice. Okman walked twice across the room, as Guy squirmed.

“So, okay. That’s it. You’re grounded, space-man. Your last flight is up for committee review for illegal operations and maneuvers. If the review finds you significantly at fault, your career is over. You’ll never go up again. And that’s okay, it’s for the best. We all make mistakes. We all get tired. But I can’t have any of my pilots making those kinds of errors, because lives are on the line, every single time.”

“Yes , sir. I realize that, sir. I care about my people, too.”

“Of course you do, Guy. I’m not---I’m not saying it was you---it’s not your fault, of course. And I know you give a damn. You were just tired. Burnt-out. Shit happens. You’re dismissed. Get out of here. I’ll message you on the next step and orders. But you’re grounded and so is your ship and your entire crew. At least for now. Now get out.”

Guy rose from his chair, looking sheepish. He waited long enough for Okman to look him in the eye.

“Go on, fly-boy,” Okman said tersely.

As he left the room, Guy knew Okman was basically right. The truth on the solar-heat flare needed to be confirmed prior to his course-correction, with more science to back up his decisions. At 5K caloric-energy, the heat was really minimal. At 100K caloric, his transport ship could fry. But at the same time, a flight-path alteration mid-way between worlds could easily have resulted in exactly the deadly situation Okman had described. And that’s a heck of a way to die, comparable to an Earthside nuclear submarine that sinks to the bottom of the North Sea with all hands, losing power, and no way back, the crew left inside, only to count the hours until they suffocate. Plenty of time for the ship’s captain to apologize to the dying men, something no one should ever have to do. And their only job, as transport-crew, was to haul needed items to the base on Mars, and then other items back to Earth. Not very exciting. Unless something went wrong.

It was because of the base on Mars that guy’s Condrum-21 Deep-Space Local Planetary Cruiser (his ship, known affectionately as ‘Penelope’) had been commissioned for service at all. The Penelope was designed only for the journey she had been intended for, the deep-space run between the two planets. She had a standard crew of nine highly-skilled persons. The pilot (Guy), his Second, two staff on nothing but life-support systems and ship-integrity, two tech-science staff with variable roles, also inter-changeable, two on navigation and astro-physics, and one to control and maintain propulsion-fuel and high-energy thruster mechanisms. Okman had said seven---true enough, one of the crew on life-support, and one of the navigators, had been dismissed at that time, which was fairly common, and not an alarm.

Guy made his way across the Vandenberg Space-Port campus, exiting from the hallways of the building where he was brought under orders for his meeting with Commander Okman. California, as always, even for hundreds of years, was the best the Earth had to offer, in many ways. The brisk winter air and high clouds, beneath the partridge blue hen’s egg sky, it was home forever, Paradise, so different than his ‘workplace’ as to bring to mind an entirely different realm of being---another planet, you might say. And one he certainly favored. Like a military installation, the Vandenberg facilities were filled with men and women in uniform, large concrete structures of imposing nature, huge equipment and machinery, various weapons. As he walked, he met a few people who recognized him, but not many. No super-star. A transport-pilot was minor-league around here. But that was okay with Guy. A smile and a wave, and any friends or co-workers were on their way. His big screw-up was maybe only painful to himself, and not really any kind of big news that would embarrass him forever.

Why Vandenberg? Why California? Why Mars? Relieved after his meeting with Okman, Guy suddenly remembered that he was ‘grounded’ from space-travel for a while. After about 20 round-trips in deep-space---this was also a relief. He wondered how he would spend his time until the big-shots decided if he was fit for service or not. His training had cost billions of dollars and more than 15 years of his life, and years of many other lives. All so the folks at the Mars-base could have a steady supply of toilet paper. And a few other essentials---like fresh O2 they could breathe. Or fresh H20 they could drink. Or methods to fabricate both. Or food they could eat.

Guy paused on one of the walkways, beneath a US flag, blustering high aloft in the winter air. He took a deep breath, just for himself. Then another, then counting, four-counts in, two-counts out, one-count hold. He glanced at a nearby trash-receptacle. “We recycle everything, but we’ve never developed a system that’s totally free of any kind of trash at all, or any wrappers or any packaging whatsoever,” he said to himself. “Look at this.”
He picked up a few bits of trash that had fallen near the receptacle. This is 2075, he thought to himself. We can do better.

“Plastic, cellophane, super-light metals, wood-fiber, plant-fiber, coal-and-oil by-products. What a waste! We could easily buy and sell, or share the same consumer-goods, with complete convenience, using no packaging whatsoever! This is insane!”

The space-transport pilot dropped the loose trash-items into the receptacle and pressed them down, alone in his thoughts. Somewhere, far away, yet nearer-than-near, Mars loomed and glared back at him, a distant star now, as he would see with his own eyes when night fell again. He didn’t miss the place. He didn’t miss the vast ‘space’ in-between, cold, empty, indigo, deadly. Being grounded for a while never looked so good.

(Chapter One, ‘OUTPOST’, to be continued---)
-Julian Phillips