The Alpha Project: Book One Page 4

  “And that we will have to do without a pathogens assessment” added Dana emphatically. “Which is against standard procedures and dangerous. We are tempting God’s anger if we do.”

  “So what’s the alternative, then?”

  “Why don’t we have the patience to await rescue? We are safe enough in here and they will find us before long, I expect.”

  “You are our Leader, Mother, what do you say?”

  Martha looked around at her little crew and felt a silent surge of anxiety. She didn’t know what was best and it was true that they could simply sit the situation out for however long it took. They didn’t know if the shuttle was even flyable, they were sturdily built and specified to make a glider landing if they had to, but the problem was likely to be the wing. She nodded towards Dana. “I think we should wait.”

  Within a few minutes she was forced to change her mind. The shuttle had begun to move. Inside the cabin it had been quiet, apart from a faint wind-buffeting from a downdraught over the glacier but now there were irregular creaking and cracking sounds and they could feel small but jerky movements through the hull. The shuttle was slowly turning in line with the direction of the ice. As they listened uneasily, there was a more powerful lurch as the wing came clear and should have straightened them up, but instead tilted them over further, the lower wing seeming to start burying itself in the glacier.

  “I’m going outside” said Manny. “I reckon it’s so cold that it’s pretty sterile anyway and at the temperature out there, I’m going to need my full suit, helmet and all. Desmond, will you come with me?”

  Despite Dana’s protestations and Martha’s equivocation, they entered the downsloping airlock and prepared to brave the external 30 degrees below zero along with a 25 knot wind that the telemetry promised them. As he prepared to don his helmet and Martha’s ‘God be with you’ still in his ears, Manny leaned towards Desmond and grinned lopsidedly. “The mumbo jumbo’s beginning to get a bit on the heavy side, don’t you think Dez?” He didn’t seem to need a reply, clamped down his visor and operated the air exhaust, forcing Desmond hastily to do the same.

  In no time, the pressures equalised with outside, the door swung back and Manny leaned forward, about to step out, even rehearsing the astronaut’s most famous line of all time, for Martha’s benefit. He gripped the sides of the hatchway, for an instant almost overcome with vertigo to find himself staring straight down into a blue-sided bottomless void. “Oh my God!” he croaked.

  She was straight there. “Manny, please don’t blaspheme!”

  “Mother, just believe me, this is no blasphemy! We are lying straight across a crevasse. There’s no way out of the airlock except down into the depths. All the way down to Hell!” he added needlessly.

  “What do we do now?” Desmond, just behind him was rubbing frost off the outside of his visor.

  “No point trying the other side, it won’t be a lot different. Listen, we need to rig a traverse line. There’s all the kit in the EVA suit locker. Gitangali, go get the permanent magnets and the personal lines, kit up and be ready to join us. Dez, help her in and belay me as I go out.” He rubbed the blinding layer of ice off the outside of his own helmet and looked more carefully around. “Mother, the ship’s lying right across the granddaddy of all crevasses. The rock we hit with the wing is actually in the wall of it. We have canted over and the wing is dropping into the crevasse itself. Seems to me that soon it’s going to dip in deeper and we will roll over completely on to the side, then fall in after it. And that’s the end.”

  “What can we do, Manny?”

  “You could try praying!”

  She missed the inflexion. “With all my spirit, oh Lord!”

  Manny continued to take stock. “As far as I can tell by looking, I think the wing is only a bit dented. As long as there’s nothing internal strained, I reckon she can be made to fly again, if we can ever get her out of this, that is!” His mind was working overtime, spurred by the almost continuous series of small tremors vibrating through the superstructure as the shuttle continued to settle into the jaws of her doom. “We have to haul her round so she’s facing back down the glacier if we are to have a chance. That means running a cable through the nearside front and offside rear anchorage points then finding somewhere to pull from. Gitangali, bring the longest lines you can find as well.”

  But it was Amelie who joined them in the airlock. Desmond touched visors with her just as they fogged once more into blind opacity and they had to scrape themselves some vision. Manny clapped a permanent magnet on to the hull as far across as he could safely reach and deployed a line through it which he passed back to Desmond for belaying, waited until he had it taught and swung himself out over the chasm, gripped the short line hanging off the belay point and clipped the snaphook from it’s end as an additional safety. He was then able to reach forward and fasten a second magnet, from which he could reclip the safety line and then was able to step down on to the surface of the glacier, just at the edge of the crevasse. Thereafter it was simply a matter of Desmond doing the same and they were both free of the ship and out into the path of the wind. Unaffected by its extreme wind-chill due to the protection of the suits, they were nonetheless immediately powdered with spindrift which already had coated the upwind side of the shuttle with a thick coating of rime.

  “We have to find an anchorage for the lines.”

  “Over there!” Desmond pointed to a vague blackness through the swirling misty drift and they made their way to a protruding boulder. “It will do!” averred Manny. Desmond unslung the line from his shoulder and they wrestled together to run two turns of it around the rock, used a snaphook in lieu of a slipknot and ran the free end back to Amelie who was down on the glacier with them. She had opened the offside rear anchorage point and run out several metres of cable against the ratchet mechanism. She took the line from them to feed it through the cable end, doubled and tied it off with remarkable competence. “I was in the guides when I was just a little girl” she offered in response to the unspoken question in Manny’s visor-hooded eyes.

  Desmond returned to the hatch and came back with a second line, passing the free end to Manny to pay out and secure to the rock in the same way, then going back to the hatch and leaping forward to the far side to the nearside forward anchorage point to do the same. While he was there he noticed that the down thrust nozzle, albeit fully retracted into its nacelle, had been irrevocably damaged by impact against something during the landing which meant that vertical takeoff was not going to be possible even if the other three were still functional. It would have to be back the way they had come, using the glacier as a slipway. ‘At least we know it can be done’ he pondered sombrely.

  “OK, Mother, start retracting the offside rear cable” ordered Manny. They stood well clear and watched as the slack took up and the line sprang up off the ice, singing audibly with the tension and the wind sawing through it. “Hold that, now the nearside front.” The second cable pulled taught and their reward came as the wing began to rotate back until it was almost horizontal, the shuttle began to slide rearwards and start to turn in line with the glacier. “OK, Amelie, Dez. Get back in the airlock. I’ll see her in from here then untie and join you.” Desmond was already on his way back, standing on the taught line, balanced by his hands against the hull. Amelie made a clumsy leap up to the second belay point, swung quickly past to the first and the sanctuary of the airlock door, gripped and reached a hand to him, giving him enough support that he could push off against the line, claw his other hand inside the airlock doorframe and he was in too.”

  “Go inside, leave me space” ordered Manny. “Mother, tighten both slowly together.” The cables pulled once more and the shuttle continued to rotate, she was now almost in line, almost there.

  The crack opened directly between his legs. He felt, rather than heard the fracture. The complete section on which the shuttle now lay was about to dr
op into nothingness. He went for the lines to cut them through, realised that he had nothing to do it with and screamed at Martha to unclip them from the cable ends so that seconds later both of them whiplashed, catching him in their frenzied swirling and throwing him backwards over the protruding rock. Something in his neck snapped with the brutal force of the impact, his visor starred all over and his stunned body fell on to the ice. Miraculously, he was still conscious but completely unable to move, only his voice seemed to be left. “Martha, you’ve got to go now. Now! Or you will all die.”

  “Manny!” she screamed, “we’re coming for you.”

  “No! Martha, listen. My neck’s broken. I don’t want to live crippled. Go!”

  “Manny, no!”

  He heard the ice ‘boom’ below him, felt the shockwave as the whole crevasse began to collapse into itself. “For the love of God, Martha. The whole thing’s going. Go! Now!”

  He felt the ground moving below him, tilting over, taking his helpless body down into itself, then a great sudden blast of bright yellow light and searing heat, even through his suit as the fusion drive ignited, then snuffed out in the last instant of his young life as thousands of tons of rock and ice crushed him down with it into oblivion.

  The shuttle careened down the glacier, Martha, eyes blurred with tears, pulled back to full throttle and the shuttle roared up, out and to safety, Amelie and Desmond still inside the unclosed airlock, clinging to each other and to the frame of the hatchway. She levelled it off at 5000m and switched over to autopilot before collapsing over the controls, prostrate with grief.

  Dimly she could hear Matthias’ voice calling her over the radio, beside himself with dread, repeating her name over and over. She sat up, drew herself together, threw the switch to transmit. “Oh Matthias. Matthias! Greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his friends! Manny! Plain Manny no more, you are henceforth Saint Manny and your memory will live forever. Praise be to God!”

  Chapter 5

  Com1 had linked with the onboard computer and guided the battered shuttle into its dock on board Alpha Four, itself seared by it’s recent passage of fire. As the shuttle bay doors fully closed, the airlock opened and the traumatised crew, led by Martha, floated out weightless along the walkway and to the elevator landing which took them down to the observatory. Martha and Gitangali went first, and Matthias was waiting for them at the bottom. He took their hands in his and led them to the cloakroom where they removed their oversuits. He sent Gitangali off to the shower room and took Martha into the nearest of the two sleeping quarters, closed the door behind them.

  “I have decided that we should have this room to live in.”

  “Oh Matthias!” she leaned against him for comfort. “Whatever are we going to do? Everything is so hopeless and now Manny is dead!”

  He held her against himself, as if to protect her against the forces of evil, led her to the big double bed and sat her down on it, took her hands and held her at arm’s length. “We have to be strong, Martha. We are the leaders, it is for us to find a way.”

  “But what can we do? There is nothing for us down there, it is just a frozen waste. It will not support us, we cannot live there.”

  “Was it not Manny who suggested making caves in the ice?”

  “He said we could use a fusion drive to carve ourselves living quarters. I don’t think he was very serious about it.”

  “He is a saint, now Martha. We should be guided by his wisdom. I am minded to fly a shuttle down and at least try it out.”

  “Oh, Matthias! Please don’t do that. We all rely on you as father of the expedition. If anything happened to you we are all lost.”

  He smiled wanly. “I wasn’t thinking of straight away, Martha. We have many other things to sort out here before we do anything else.”

  She snuffled into a tissue, wiped her eyes and looked into his face. “Of course!” She nodded. “We have to see what needs to be done to the ship.”

  “I have sent a crew down to the accommodation block to set about repairs and make it airtight, then make a damage assessment. Some of the cubicles may still be useable and we may have to use them.”

  “But we can’t all be hibernated.”

  “It would be a way to conserve what food we have if we took turns to sleep.”

  “Can’t we grow enough in the hydroponicum?”

  “I don’t know. I am going to set up some scenarios with Com1 to find out just what is possible, or not when I have all the information. I sent the other shuttle crew off to H3 to make an assessment and examine whether anything can be done for the collapsed canopies of the others. The rest have gone to the medical block to carry out an inventory and set up sleeping quarters, part of finding us all living room, we are going to need everything we can muster in the way of facilities.”

  The damage to the accommodation block had turned out to be worse than they had expected. The searing heat of the pure-oxygen fires had caused the cabin partitions to burn through even where the doors had been closed. Only F9 and F10 cabins were intact and the hibernation units functioning on that side of the corridor and three opposite them on the ‘M’ side along with L1 and L2, Martha and Matthias’ cabins, making a total of seven in all. The others were all so badly burnt that repair was out of the question. Usefully, the conference room and library had both survived and the five crewmembers had opted to make the accommodation block their base for the time being. They had sleeping quarters and a place to gather in with communal facilities and a meal service console. The library, a small room with a disk-based storage unit and DVD projector could provide enough entertainment and research media to occupy many hours with creative and recreational activity. There was even a link to remote screens in the individual cabins and the conference room.

  H3 was its warm humid self and the canopy was fine as far as they could tell by looking at it but the other three hydroponica had been completely destroyed, their canopies shrivelled into nothingness, their environments scorched and desiccated, all water evaporated away, the stores did not carry canopy fabric other than a small roll of it for repairs. The five crew members opted to stay there for the time being. It was pleasant, comfortable, warm and the only living, green ecosystem for many light years away.

  The crew of Alpha Four settled down to rest and contemplate after the trauma of their so-recent awakening into imminent peril. Matthias spent his time with Com1, trying out every scenario variation that occurred to him, sitting at his terminal while Martha slept, mentally exhausted. When she awoke, they sat together and had a light meal from the service console. When they had finished, he put the remains into the waste chute.

  “Martha, I’ve gone through just about everything with Com1. We don’t have all that many options and none of them are exactly attractive. What they amount to is this:

  firstly, we can just stay out here indefinitely and maybe experiment with ideas about P2. If we do that, we have resources for about half a local year, including everything we can grow in H3. That’s not hibernating anybody. Beyond that, we run out of food although atmosphere is infinitely sustainable as long as we bring up water from the planet from time to time;

  secondly, we can fly on to our secondary objective. We can make another planetary landfall in just over twelve standard years from now, assuming that we have taken on enough water from P2. To do that, we will need to hibernate crew members on a rotating basis. Even so, we will be about 15 to 20% short on essential proteins and vitamins. We will be half-starved for virtually the whole time we are travelling and beyond that, if the secondary objective is non-viable, there is nothing. We will all perish.”

  It took her a while to come to terms with what he was saying. “Isn’t is best if we hibernate seven crew and try to set up Manny’s caves? That way we must be able to get along for the best part of a standard year. Isn’t that the way to go?”

  “If Manny is right, it gives us the bes
t chance to survive. But it offers us a bleak long-term future, hiding underground, forever entombed beneath the ice, waiting for over six thousand years before the planet becomes properly able to be colonised. It isn’t what we set out for, is it, Martha?”

  She nodded her head. “Well then, Matthias. We do not actually have any choice. For the sake of our young crew, we have to go on to the next destination. And if then we die – well, it was the Will of God!”

  “Amen to that, Martha!”

  “Amen, then Matthias! So be it!”

  Chapter 6

  Desmond, Dana and Amelie squeezed into the elevator together, ignored the complaints of the overload alarm and went down to the observatory. On emerging through the airlock, they were spellbound by the beautifully clear astrodome above them, displaying the constellations which they knew so well, both from their lives before hibernation and in numerous training sessions once they had embarked as crew members on the project. The staggeringly lovely, vaulting veil of the Milky Way swept over in the centre of their field of view. None of them had seen this view before from this particular perspective and they were duly rendered speechless.