The Alpha Project: Book One Page 3

  A lot worse, so maybe God was giving them a test that was well within their capability. He meant them to come through successfully and now it was Matthias’ task to lead them in creating a viable and thriving colony. He resolved that, whatever it demanded of any or all of them, he would make it succeed.

  With his mind suddenly clear and his resolve set, Matthais drowsed off in the comfort of the pilot’s seat. When he awoke, P2 was a visible dot in the sky.

  ******************************************************

  Manny plumped into the copilot’s seat beside Martha, waking her from a somewhat uneasy doze.

  “I didn’t mean to wake you, Mother.”

  “It was about time I woke up, Manny.” She turned bleary eyes to him, from a face that had become haggard with the weight of command. “How are the others?”

  “Still sleeping. Is everything alright, Mother?”

  “Well, not exactly, Manny, but we did well to fly off all the shuttles and we are well on course to P2. Also it looks like the ship survived and is safely coming after us, which is a great blessing.”

  “Mother, why was Amelie crying so much after you spoke to her?”

  “Didn’t she tell you?”

  “She wouldn’t say. Only she kept crying that she had sinned and we would all suffer because of it.”

  Martha nodded her head and frowned. “Alas, that is true, but if she shows repentance and learns from it, then maybe some good will have prevailed and that she has learned to grow up a little.” She looked at Manny with a darkly meaningful gaze. “You are all going to have to grow up much more quickly than your years deserve!”

  “Why do you say that?”

  Martha turned on the viewscreen and instructed the computer. “Maximum closeup on P2. Full visible spectrum.”

  Manny stared uncomprehending at the glistening white vista, banded with layers of clouds and obvious, vast polar caps.

  “Our new home has turned into a frozen wasteland. It may be impossible for us to create a viable colony there.”

  “So what are we going to do?”

  “Go into orbit and send down a shuttle to investigate and report. At least it can pick up water for the fusion drives while it’s at it.”

  Manny continued to stare at the bleak whiteness on the screen. It was impossible to distinguish cloud from ice and land from frozen sea. There didn’t seem to be any green areas or anything else that might give hope of life below. It was indeed a frozen wasteland. “We came all this way, just for this! Mother, how did it go so wrong?”

  “Com1 has calculated that the orbit is very eccentric and P2 is swinging out away from the sun, which has triggered it off into an ice age.”

  “Doesn’t that mean that it can get even colder than it is now? Even if we could make a life there, it would gradually become worse as time goes on. It’s hopeless, isn’t it!”

  Martha nodded sadly. “Yes, Manny. Basically it is hopeless. We have no home to go to. All that P2 can offer us is an abundance of water to refuel the ship and the shuttles, recharge the lox and liquid hydrogen tanks and so on.”

  His countenance suddenly brightened. “Maybe we can live underground and be protected from the cold. We could make tunnels and create an underground lake. We could use a fusion drive to act like a small sun and then grow things. Don’t be downhearted, Mother. We have all the energy we can possibly want, the rest would only take time.”

  “Oh Manny! How happy I am for your good spirits. With your youth and optimism, with God’s help we might just succeed. We’ll have to see what it’s like down there. Maybe we can do what you say, it sounds like a wonderful idea.”

  She opened channel to Matthias. “I’ve just been talking with Manny and he has had an inspiration. He says we should carve out a home under the ice and use a fusion drive like a small sun to heat us and give light for plants to grow and for us to live under. Matthias, I believe that he is speaking with the word of God. I believe that He is speaking to us through him. Matthias, it could work, couldn’t it?”

  “Martha, contain yourself!” Matthias’ voice over the radio sounded deflatingly weary. “I guess you are right and there is wisdom in the concept, but I wonder how much better off we would be than on the ship, with H3 to provide our ecosystem and a more congenial temperature regime.”

  “Well maybe that’s it, Matthias. We go back to the ship as our orbiting base as we were always intended to and then try to put a foothold on the planet, set up the colony but have the option to come back up to Alpha Four.”

  “OK Martha, we can certainly think about it, ask Com1 to do some feasibility studies and some research, in case anything like that has been done elsewhere. It will keep us occupied, at least. Meanwhile, we have only a standard day to go before we go into orbit, and the ship will only be a day or so after that. I for one will be glad to have more spacious quarters than in here.”

  “The others will be waking up soon, I guess. I think that we should give them a briefing. Better they know what the future has in store for them and we will be in direct visual sight of P2 soon enough. What do you say

  Chapter 4

  They were all crowded into the cockpit, gazing in a mixture of awe and apprehension at the planet rotating slowly beneath them. The surface of P2 was largely swathed in great swirling masses of cloud, even here at the equator where there might have been some chance that the surface was clear, but alas it wasn’t. They stared and stared as their destiny rolled by far below, revealing almost nothing of itself. On screen, however, Martha had set up a radar image to show the terrain below and this alone was revealing the relief of the hidden landscape – evidently there were high mountains and deep valleys, making it a dangerous place to fly down a shuttle and attempt a landing. As they pondered this, Matthias came in over the radio. He had taken up a more polar orbit and was now over what should have been a temperate zone, mixed landmasses and oceans but which now presented as a monotonous plain in which free water did not seem to exist.

  “Pretty flat around here, Martha. If we want to fly in, I suggest that it’s here. Question is who goes? Should be one of us, I’m not willing to let a crew of youngsters do this on their own and anyway, Alpha Four’s catching up fast so I want some of us back on board again so that we can do what we can to set her up as base station.”

  “Whatever you think, Matthias, though I must say that Manny here is jumping up and down in his seat with wanting to go.”

  “So maybe you should then. Let him see how practical his vision is going to turn out to be.”

  “OK then, Matthias. I’ll get the coordinates punched in and we might as well get on with it.”

  “Agreed, then Martha. Now you take care and keep me online the whole time. You know what to take care about. God speed Martha, and you all!”

  “Godspeed!” she responded, surprised to hear the others joining in the word with her. She looked around them. Manny, all eagerness and absolutely unfazed by their disturbing circumstances. Amelie, still a bit puffy around the eyes, pale and not saying anything, assiduously averting her sight from Martha’s firm stare. Desmond, anxious for his sad little paramour, Dana, not giving anything away behind impassive, curiously flattened, pale features and slanted eyes in marked contrast to Gitangali, tall and beautiful with long, curling black hair giving a tentative smile to reveal even and gleamingly white teeth. Suddenly, they had become her crew!

  She sent them back into the cabin to don their spacesuits so that they would best be prepared for an emergency. She then had them deploy, calibrate and initialise all the monitoring equipment that the shuttle boasted; external sensors for pressure, temperature, humidity and so on; air samplers to determine atmosphere composition, hepa filters to capture dust and microorganisms; gravimeters to detect subsurface anomalies, spectrometers covering the infrared and ultraviolet spectral ranges. Visible imaging from the forward and underside cameras were displayed in four windows on the mai
n cockpit screen with a repeater set up on the cabin wall to the rear. There were even speakers to pick up anything audible.

  The shuttle’s engine retrofired for some minutes, the crew feeling themselves thrusting back into their seats. Instruments steadily changed readings, dials winding around their clocks and digital displays tumbling steadily over their logic counters. The fuselage gave a distinct sense of falling down backwards, the external microphones began to pick up a noticeable whine as atmospheric drag began to bite, temperature and pressure readings began steadily to increase and a maze of other parameters began to display on various screens.

  “The air looks to be good.” Dana’s voice. “Oxygen about 20%, CO2 just over 30 000ppm, water vapour almost nothing, temperature minus 85C. Not picking up any significant particulates yet.”

  “Hull temperature’s coming up rapidly, though. Atmosphere’s pretty thick, I think. If we go on rising at this rate, we’re going to have to change the rate of descent in about three minutes or so. I’ll tell you when, Mother.” Manny sounded excited but unafraid.

  Martha initiated the rollover programme and the shuttle flipped sickeningly from backward facing rocket retarder to aircraft configuration, then began to ride on her wings. As soon as the vertigo subsided, she took over on manual and suddenly found herself enjoying the long-forgotten experience of flying a live vehicle. “Manny, get over here, I need a copilot” she sang out with a sudden exuberant cheerfulness, love of adventure overriding the hollow ache of anxiety which gnawed at her leader status.

  Manny fell into the seat beside her. “Don’t let her bite in too quick” he panted. “The hull’s beginning to roast.” He gripped the duplicate column and pulled back, Martha let him have control and the shuttle pushed her nose up higher, surfing across the atmosphere, now starting to slalom as a crosswind jet stream hit them, tipping a wing down so that he had the instantaneous choice of following the roll or fighting it. He opted to go with it and they went full-circle barrel roll, coming up nose into wind and heading back the way they had come, several thousand metres lower down and with the forward velocity down to 600kph.

  There was nothing visible ahead, just a thick opaqueness of cloud. Instruments gave their attitude as horizontal, descending on a slow glide path across an open plane with no hills, mountains or any other irregularities, now picking up a firm altitude of just under 1000m.

  “It’s going to be an instrument landing Manny. I was never any good at this sort of thing and I’m getting a bit old now!”

  “God help us, Mother!, he turned to her with a dazzling grin, “I never had time to finish my shuttle course, not even the simulator stage!”

  Whatever she might have said, or screamed back at him was lost in surprise. The screen had suddenly and instantly cleared. They were flying almost straight and level over a flat plane, interspersed here and there with random blocks of what was likely to be pack ice. It was a most unpromising landscape and not the easiest to put down on, assuming it to be solid enough to take the shuttle’s weight. Gitangali appeared between their seatbacks, stared out for a short while and then said “it’s only a few metres thick. There’s water beneath, we shouldn’t try to land”.

  “Well, I’m glad you said so!”

  Martha had used the main screen to display an archive photograph of the planet in all its former blue-green glory. “Looks as though we’re over this ocean” she touched a finger to the image, “and if that is so, there’s land mass on the equatorial side so I would change course about 30 degrees to port. God willing we might be able to get down there. Manny nodded, changed course and put the shuttle over to autopilot, allowing her to drop to 500 metres at the same time so that they could have a closer view of the surface and try to keep under the cloud layer which was gradually lowering ahead of them. Even so, they were flying through banks of white which occasionally roiled down almost to sea level, giving them only an intermittent view ahead. “All that flying’s made me thirsty!” He laughed and punched a peach and mango flavoured isotonic drink out of the meal service console, bit off the cap and sucked down the contents in one flamboyant go. “Sorry about the aerobatics!” He winked hugely at Gitangali who smiled and fluttered her eyelids in return. “Shuttle flies like a brick, I almost lost her in the crosswind up there.”

  “Manny, there isn’t any need to exaggerate just to impress everybody. You’ve got enough power to play with that you could have sent her straight back into orbit. You would have had to be a complete dunce to let her crash.” Martha tried to look stern but it didn’t really work.

  He had turned back to Gitangali to say something else when Martha grabbed and wrenched the controls over in a sharp turn, forcing the shuttle into a steep bank at the same instant that a proximity alarm wailed urgently through the cockpit. They had come upon a sheer, kilometre high wall of ice-covered rock with appalling suddenness, largely because they had failed to change the screen from archive image back to radar map. Amelie and Dana gripped each other as they were thrown off balance down at the other end of the cabin and fell together against the engine room hatch cover which somehow flexed and sprung open. Dana lost grip on the remote sampling kit she had just removed from its stowage and it flew inside, smashed violently against something within and, an instant later, the hatch snapped back and latched. They were still rolling about in a tangle of arms and legs when the engine room alarms shrieked and the fire suppression system operated, seconds later the fusion drive gave a series of jerks and abruptly cut out.

  “Let me have her!” screamed Manny. Martha threw her hands up in horror. “Please God, be merciful!” she wailed as Manny brought the shuttle back into level flight. Through a gap in the clouds rolling off the edge of the huge cliff he saw the surface of a glacier between towering walls of icy rock, it was deliverance of a sort, their only chance of survival in this dreadful wilderness and he took it. He banked cautiously left, perilously short of sideslipping into a fatal stall that would have plunged them nose first into the pack ice, mentally wrestling with the impossible conflicting demands of keeping both altitude and flying speed. The long, sloping and horribly crevassed surface rose towards them with terrifying speed. “Hold on!” he shouted. Dana and Amelie had no time to get into their places for landing, rolled against the back of the last pair of seats and held on to the struts. Gitangali threw herself down behind the pilots’ seats and did likewise. Only Desmond was still in his seat and able to fasten his seatbelt.

  Now it was all in Manny’s hands. ‘Now it’s all in your hands, God!’ he whispered to himself, otherwise pushing overwhelming terror to the back of his mind. He held the angle of descent to a whimper below stalling, no time to check their forward velocity, nothing to be done if he could, they were rushing towards their fate parallel to the long surface ridges of the glacier. It was only metres below them now, blurring by underneath. He gradually lifted the nose, flying exactly parallel, bleeding off speed until she stalled and he pancaked her down on to the ice. The shuttle landed foursquare and slalomed along on the surface with a terrible screeching and banging from below, holding direction for what seemed an eternity, doing her own thing now, the crew just passengers inside her as she slid along until her wing caught against a knob of rock and she slewed round in a semicircle, canted up on to one side and stopped.

  Manny met Martha’s eyes. He grinned with more than a hint of hysteria. “I told you she flies like a brick, didn’t I!”

  That they had survived was a miracle. That they had survived substantially intact and with no more casualties than a few bruises was proof enough of the existence of God, in case anybody had doubted it and Martha was quick to make the point to which they all uttered a grateful ‘amen!’

  The cabin temperature and air con. system were functioning with comforting normality. Apart from the 30degree angle of the floor and the incredible scenery outside, they could have been back in the safety and predictable void of space. While Martha tried unsu
ccessfully to make contact with Matthais, Dana and Gitangali opened up the engine compartment to inspect the damage. The remote sampling kit had smashed the main fuel cell which regulated the fuel supply, shorted out the electrics and caused the automatic extinguisher to fire. There seemed to be almost no other damage and it looked possible to replace the unit with a spare one from the comprehensive parts kit which the shuttle carried. But they wouldn’t be able to do any remote sensing which created a potential problem because they really needed to do a pathogens evaluation before setting foot outside.

  While Manny helped Dana and Gitangali with the complicated business of the repairs to the fuel cell, Amelie set to and tidied up the cabin, more to busy herself than anything else leaving Martha in the pilot’s seat to switch on and verify the emergency distress beacon, then continue to try to make radio contact, with Desmond joining her to monitor the various external sensors. They were not in a good place, shielded by the rocky walls either side, the direct line-of-sight they needed gave only a very narrow width envelope. Their best hope was that an orbiting ship would pick them up as they rotated below.

  “We’ve done what we can in here, Mother.” Manny spoke for them. “I’m pretty happy that the drive will fire up. If the shuttle is still flyable, there’s a chance we might be able to get ourselves out under our own power. But we have to go outside to see how she looks.”