Maneuvers

Also by Bernard Wilkerson

  The Worlds of the Dead series

  Beaches of Brazil

  Communion

  Discovery

  The Creation series

  In the Beginning

  The Hrwang Incursion

  Earth: Book One

  Episode 1: Defeat

  Episode 2: Flight

  The Hrwang Incursion

  Book 1

  Earth

  Bernard Wilkerson

  Copyright © 2015 by Bernard Wilkerson

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, with the exception of short quotes used in reviews, without permission from the author.

  Requests for permission should be submitted to [email protected].

  For information about the author, go to

  www.bernardwilkerson.com

  This book is a work of fiction. The names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the writer’s imagination or have been used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to persons, living or dead, actual events, locales or organizations is entirely coincidental.

  Cover photo courtesy of NASA.

  Episode 3

  MANEUVERS

  22

  Major Alexander Crayton stared at the dimly lit ceiling of Opportunity Base instead of sleeping. He should be asleep. As soon as the sun rose over the tiny base, he had to be up and out in the rover to inspect water lines and pumps, a task he performed religiously every day. The water pumps were the lifeblood of the base, used to not only provide water, but oxygen for breathing and hydrogen for fuel.

  He expected Cassie to accompany him today. She often did, but she’d had nightmares again and had crawled into his hammock with him during the night and wouldn’t want to leave his side in the morning. Not that it was uncommon for them to be found in a hammock together, but it made it difficult to sleep. The hammocks were only made for one.

  When UNSA determined the crews of each Martian base should be two men and two women, he wondered why they didn’t just go ahead and provide hammocks large enough to accommodate the inevitable.

  He and Cassie were married; just not to each other. The other two in the crew were single and had wasted no time, but he and Cassie had taken a while to overcome their inhibitions. He wondered if his wife suspected. Before the communications blackout with Earth, she had become distant in her transmissions. Perhaps she had found someone else also. Three years was a long mission and a long time to be away from home. She never understood why he wanted to come to Mars.

  He’d be a Colonel now if he’d stayed in the US Army. Joining UNSA and accepting a UN rank meant a demotion. They had a more rigorous rank structure and officers stayed in the lower ranks much longer. Some in the Army viewed it as traitorous to accept a UN commission, others viewed it as patriotic. For Alex it had been a simple decision. It was his only way to get to Mars.

  As a boy, Alex had read the John Carter series. He knew they were ridiculous when he read them. Too much was known about Mars to expect to find any trace of intelligent life, but they instilled in him a sense of adventure that led him into the military first and into the astronaut corps second. Visiting Mars was the ultimate fantasy.

  It wouldn’t make him famous. Ernest Wright, who usually went by Boston and was the first person to set foot on the red planet, would become a legend like Neil Armstrong. But who remembered Harrison Schmitt? He was the twelfth and last Apollo astronaut to walk on the Moon, and yet no one knew his name, knew him, or even knew what he had accomplished. Alex expected to be the same type of footnote in history. Just another in a long list of astronauts who had walked on Mars.

  It wasn’t glamorous duty, either. Most of what the crew did in Opportunity would be rather mundane if done on Earth. Tapping a screw might be considered an ordinary task, but performed in low gravity, wearing an EVA suit, and using tools developed on a 3D printer, it became an engineering feat. Much of their success came from figuring out how to do ordinary things in an extraordinary environment.

  What Beagle and her idiot Captain didn’t get was how much they had to figure out. Contact with Earth wasn’t just about supplies. It was about access to scientific and engineering knowledge. Groundside support could make a tool a hundred times, making sure the pattern was perfect, before sending the design specification to Mars to be printed there. When contact with Earth was lost, thousands of brains were lost with it. The four crew of Opportunity and the four in Spirit had to rely now on themselves and each other, and no one else.

  Now Beagle had vanished, taking with it ten more brains that could be consulted for ideas on how to solve problems. As much as Alex despised Beagle’s Captain, it had been comforting to know other humans were close and a way to return home orbited above. When Beagle left after sending a cryptic message that they were going to go visit the aliens, panic set into the Martian residents. The crew of Spirit became hysterical. But they lived on the opposite side of the planet and Alex could do nothing for them.

  He helped the crew of Opportunity keep it together. He emphasized that panic would get them killed. They simply needed to focus. Problems would present themselves as they had during the entire mission, and they would simply take each one as it came. They couldn’t worry about the future. Mars required immediate and constant attention.

  Cassie had become despondent after that, but the other two recovered and resumed their duties.

  She shifted in the hammock and he snuggled closer to her. He kissed the top of her head and her eyes opened, looking up at him. They still held a nameless terror.

  “It’ll be okay,” he whispered and smiled at her.

  “Do you promise?” she whispered back.

  “I do.”

  “Okay.”

  She clung to him and he held her tightly. After a few minutes he kissed the top of her head again and she leaned her face up to his and kissed him hungrily. He pulled the hammock cover up over them for privacy. Despite their uncertain future there was nothing wrong in sharing a little physical comfort, was there?

  Everyone looked the same in an EVA suit. Big bulky gloves, big bulky arms, big bulky legs, big bulky body. Head covered by a helmet and face protected by a reflective shield. When Alex Crayton looked at Astronaut Cassandra Staunton, Cassie, the first British woman to walk on Mars, all he saw was the reflection of the Martian desert and his own EVA suit.

  But he looked at her anyway, trying to reassure her.

  “Let’s get to work,” he said on his private channel to her.

  Inspecting the water lines and pumps was a one person job and having her along didn’t speed up the task much, but he liked the company, and as much as she was afraid to be without him, he was afraid to leave her back on the station. She hadn’t asked to come along and he hadn’t said anything. When the time came to leave, they both simply suited up together.

  After they finished the current pump, he walked over to the passenger side of the rover and pretended to hold a nonexistent door open for her. She laughed. That was a good sign.

  They drove slowly along the piping to the next pump. A sensor in the rover examined the pipe as they traveled and would let him know if any leaks were developing. A big pool of water in the desert would also be a dead giveaway.

  But the pipe was still fine and they arrived at the next pump. He got out of the rover but Cassie didn’t. He wondered why for a moment, then remembered his wife sitting in the passenger side of their car on dates, waiting for him to open the door. Cassie was turning this trip into
a date, so Alex ran slowly over to her side and made a big show again of opening the nonexistent door.

  “Thank you,” she said in her lovely English accent and stepped out holding her hand up in the air. He took it and bowed and she laughed again.

  A loud boom broke their reverie and they turned in the direction of it. A large fireball screamed through the atmosphere, heading in the direction of Opportunity Base.

  1804 jumped to a point practically on top of the second communications satellite. It fired braking rockets, but still crashed hard into the device, carried into it by the momentum imparted by its jump.

  Jumping so close to the satellite was suboptimal by safety standards, but necessary to neutralize communication from the fourth planet. Two communications satellites traveled in geostationary orbit above the world, each maintaining a presence above one of the bases below. As soon as 1804 began its attack, the bases could alert others via the satellites. 1804 had come up with an effective plan to prevent that.

  It approached the first satellite slowly, without giving itself away, then attached to it, jumping it towards the base below. It made a precalculated jump to the second satellite, quickly directing it towards the second base. Thus both satellites were neutralized, and if they hit the bases, the entire threat would be removed. It would then retrieve the remaining satellites and send them towards what was left of the bases. Without the time pressure it had been under destroying the two communications satellites simultaneously, it would be able to target the other satellites more accurately, guaranteeing their destruction and the elimination of the enemy presence on this world. The Hrwang had no desire to preserve any of the structures here, as they had on the primary planet’s moon.

  The second satellite launched to the surface, 1804 watched to see how closely it hit. It was pleased when the satellite impacted next to what appeared to be the main structure of the base. It could now return to the space over the first base and send more satellites towards it.

  “Hurry, get in,” Alex yelled, running around to his side of the rover. He started the vehicle without putting his seatbelt on, just checking to make sure Cassie was fully aboard. The rover only went twenty-five kph.

  He drove as fast as he could, telling Cassie to make sure he didn’t hit any of the water pipes. Driving at maximum speed kicked up clouds of red dust that coated them and the equipment. It would take hours to clean. He wiped his visor with his glove as best as he could, leaving streaks of dust blocking his vision. No matter how much he wiped, he couldn’t seem to keep the dust off. He had to slow down.

  Closer to the base and within range of their headsets, he began calling. No one responded.

  Cassie sobbed next to him. He ignored her, trying to focus on driving and contacting the base.

  “What’s happening?” she finally screamed, startling him. “You said everything would be okay!”

  “It is. We just need to get back to Opportunity and find out what’s going on.”

  “You said it would be okay,” she yelled and hit him on the shoulder.

  “Hey, I gotta drive.”

  She hit him again.

  “Stop it! We’re going to crash.”

  She continued to hit him until he swerved the rover, jostling both of them in their seats. She changed the angle of her swing, catching him in the visor with her gloved hand balled into a fist. He stopped the rover.

  “What is wrong with you?” he yelled.

  “You lied! You said it would be okay.”

  She tried to hit him again but this time he caught her hand in his.

  “Stop it! I said. It will be okay. Just let me drive back to the base.”

  She threw herself back into her seat and tried to cross her arms, essentially impossible in the EVA suit. But he’d seen her do that before when she was upset, throwing herself into a corner, folding her arms up on her knees, and burying her face.

  Hoping she wouldn’t start hitting him again, Alex restarted the rover and headed off.

  1804 knew it had had no time to aim the first satellite at the base below, but it was still disappointed that it had missed by so far. It headed for another satellite.

  “Alex, Cassie? You guys okay?”

  It was Paolo’s voice over the radio. The Brazilian astronaut who was part of their team.

  “We’re fine,” Alex replied. “It’s good to hear your voice.”

  “What was zat?” Luisella’s heavy Italian accent was also good to hear.

  “It looked like a meteor or something. Are you okay?” Alex asked.

  “We’re fine,” Paolo answered. “It hit close to the base. I think we took some structural damage. Everything went offline. I’m recycling the reactor right now. We’re running on batteries.”

  “Oxygen?”

  “No leaks.”

  “Good.” Relief. Oxygen was life on Mars.

  Alex heard another boom twice, once directly and once with a slight delay over his headset radio. He stopped the rover instinctively, looking up. Another meteor streaked through the sky, heading straight towards them.

  23