Waypoint Magellan Read online

  North looked confused. Just was well, Amberly thought. “So you wanted to ask me something?” Amberly pretended as if the awkward advice about Dek had never been given.

  North went with it. “Well, Miss Macready, I have, in my possession, a private ship pass.”

  He pulled a blue authorization pass card from his breast pocket. The thin plastic rectangle bore the official Magellan civilian and military seals and had a microchip embedded in it, authorizing the use of one of Magellan’s public spacecraft. The cards were commonly used for keeping track of high value and transferable goods and services. This chip contained highly encrypted codes that were allegedly uncrackable, at least by any technology that had arrived at Magellan thus far.

  “Wow. How did you get that?” Amberly marveled, genuinely surprised. “It’s easier to space walk without a suit than get a private ship pass.”

  “Won it in a high stakes game of poker that I probably shouldn’t have been playing.”

  “What are you going to do with it? Where are you going?” Amberly asked.

  “The Shard Caves,” he said and then smiled, showing his perfect white teeth, “And was sort of hoping you’d come with me.”

  “What? You mean, like a date?” Amberly asked with an uncharacteristic jocular coyness.

  “Yes. Well, no, I mean we’re friends … I mean, now … you can call it that if you want.”

  Amberly reached out and took the pass in her hand and considered it. “A poker game? Are you sure this pass is legit?” Amberly teased.

  Going on a recreational trip, no matter how short, on one of the spacecraft assigned to Magellan was quite a luxury. Besides the privately-owned space vessels registered to the mining companies and traders, Magellan left earth with a complement of four Valkyrie-class space shuttles: the Magellan Space Shuttle Enterprise, the M.S.S. Normandy, the M.S.S. Firebird, and the M.S.S. Nautilus. The M.S.S. Normandy was the Valkyrie that carried Amberly’s parents when they were lost in space in 2596, and that ship had not been replaced. The M.S.S. Enterprise was decommissioned three decades before that, after excessive wear and too many collisions with cosmic dust and debris made that Valkyrie un-spaceworthy. Enterprise was replaced with the M.S.S. Palomino, which came in a supply convoy from earth in 2597, bringing the Magellan to three-fourths of its Valkyrie capacity. A fully equipped and stocked Valkyrie-class space shuttle could travel with a crew complement of 30 for a few billion kilometers before reaching the point of no return to Magellan. The Valkyries were used primarily for research trips and were also rented out to private users, notably booked by the mining companies when asteroids were in range of the Magellan.

  Magellan also employed a complement of about a dozen corvette-class shuttles. These small two-seat shuttles were mostly military, and about half of them had been constructed on Magellan itself in the larger microfactories. The corvettes built on Magellan were not off an assembly line, but hand crafted with their own unique modifications and style. The Marines controlled eight corvettes, armed with repeating 50mm chain guns.

  Mostly, the show of force was symbolic. There was no enemy. But even after thousands of years of not finding any extraterrestrial life, many people still religiously believed that man would have first contact with aliens, perhaps hostile. These alien-believers formed minority political parties on many waypoints – and on Earth and Arara, too. Centuries earlier, their political influence was essential to getting the intergovernmental support needed to make Project Waypoint a reality. Many of them believed ET would be making an interstellar call. But the aliens had not yet rung, and many lost faith; the political power of the alien hopefuls ended splitting evenly between the progressive and the traditionalist parties.

  The possibility of rogue humans needing to be engaged in space battle existed, however remote. History, up to his point, had never recorded any space battle of any kind – but with so many unknowns facing Project Waypoint, the hawks outvoted the doves, arguing it was better to be prepared than caught defenseless. Arming the corvettes was a compromise to avoid arming the Waypoints themselves. Unlike the Valkyries, the corvettes were severely limited in range. Running on battery power only, a fully charged corvette would have a reliable range of 100,000 kilometers. After that, passengers on a corvette risked life-support failure, or insufficient power for deceleration when the corvette reached its destination.

  The balance of corvettes was public-owned. These were not armed and available for public use by lottery. North had won his tickets from an unlucky schoolteacher who had won them in the 2602 lottery. The teacher, Jonus Ramon, a greying man in his 60s who had never been off the waypoint, put them up for collateral in a regular poker game held in a side room at Rick’s. Ramon thought he would be walking home with North’s monthly salary when he drew an inside straight. The blood drained from his face when he saw North lay down a full house, deuces over jacks, and then scoop up the authorization chit from among the credit coins in the pot.

  North was going on a vacation to the Shard Caves, and he knew just who he wanted to go with him. Ramon, on the other hand, was going to be very unpopular with his wife.

  “When I won the corvette pass, I thought long and hard for about three seconds about who I wanted to take,” North said. He smiled and teased, “Of course, I thought about Lydia and Kora, but those corvettes are a tight squeeze, so I though some one more petite might be a better co-pilot.”

  “You know how to fly one of those things?” asked Amberly, incredulously.

  “Well, I am not as good as –” North caught himself, but Amberly finished.

  “As my father?”

  “You have to admit, he was a great pilot,” North said. “But yes, I can fly a corvette. It’s been a year since I’ve been out in an actual one, but I am required to log 10 hours a month in a simulator just in case.”

  Amberly poked at a bowl of mostly uneaten cereal, then took a drink of her breakfast tea. “You know, I haven’t been out on a ship since my father died. In fact, now that I think about it, I’ve only ever been out on ships that my father piloted.” Amberly spoke aloud, but absentmindedly.

  “Does that mean you’ll go with me?”

  “Sure, I’ll go with you,” Amberly looked at North. Why wouldn’t she go with him? North was the closet thing she had to a big brother or any male family member, and he had always been there for her, especially after her parents disappeared. She enjoyed North’s company, and the thought of being in close quarters for what amounted to a daytrip seemed … pleasant.

  Being with North was comfortable, she decided, and right now, comfortable was good. Besides she had never seen the Shard Caves.

  Just then, Verne announced: “Amberly, if you don’t start heading for the lab, you are going to be late for work.”

  “Sorry North, gotta run.”

  “No problem.” North pushed back his seat and stood as she did. North smiled as he watched Amberly leave the Church commons eating area en route to the Tube.

  Amberly sat alone in the tubecar as it quietly sped to the next quadrant station. For so long, she was the object of no one’s affection. Now suddenly and out of nowhere, she had two men courting her attention: North, the good friend who maybe wanted something more, and Dek, the mysterious adventure, waiting to happen.

  Caution was the only imperative she was sure of. She didn’t want to lead anyone on, especially North, because of their friendship. But as the car decelerated, she knew that she didn’t know what she wanted, and she didn’t know how to figure out what she wanted, and she didn’t like the feeling of not knowing how to know what she wanted. She thought about asking Kora for advice, but then imagined her mother telling her she needed to figure this out by herself.

  As she stepped out of the tube car, Verne inquired, “Would you like me to set up an appointment for a corvette outing with North to the Shard Caves on your calendar?”

  “I don’t know, Verne,” Amberly told her infopad. “I don’t know.”

  The Shard Caves, known for t
heir colorful, crystalline formations, were found deep within the Spencer Belt, a group of asteroids that, depending on its orbital cycle, came an amazingly close 40,000 kilometers to Magellan. When astronomers, physicists, engineers and others determined the best spot to “anchor” Magellan, they did not know about the existence of the Spencer Belt. However, within a few years of the waypoint reaching its anchorage, the residents searching for raw resources needed for continued sustainment and economic development found the asteroid cluster.

  Spencer Belt was composed of several thousand chartable asteroids, with diameters ranging from a few hundred meters to the largest, Sonnet, which was more than 70 kilometers in diameter. The Spencer Belt was in deep orbit around the closest star to Magellan, HD 238921, a dim, relatively cool, low mass stellar object, know to the inhabitants of Magellan as Spencer Minorem, or Spencer the Lessor. The Spencer Belt was just over 14 billion kilometers from HD 238921, around twice the distance of Pluto to the Sun.

  Magellan itself never fell into the orbit of Spencer Minorem, not only because the gravitational pull of the starlet was so weak, but also because Magellan deployed powerful antimatter-fueled thrusters to maintain a rough synchronous travel pattern with Earth and its solar system, 76 trillion kilometers away.

  The Spencer Belt was in range of a runabout or corvette with the Magellan for about one Earth year of its six-year orbit around HD 238921. The proximity to the Spencer Belt ended up being a huge economic boon for the waypoint. The asteroids were rich with raw metallic ores, silicon, magnesium, sulfur, sodium chloride and hydric acid. Although most water is recycled on a waypoint, slow loss occurs over decades through atmospheric venting, and by resupplying deep space vehicles. With the frozen hydric acid found in pockets of the Spencer Belt, Magellan’s miners could collect water not only for themselves, but also for nearby waypoints. This made the waypoints less reliant for their water on the supply convoys that came from earth every two score years, and provided a profitable export that employed many on Magellan.

  In 2554, 29 years before Amberly was born, a team from the Magellan attempted to establish a permanent settlement on Sonnet. The construction of the 10,000 square meter facility began about one earth month into the yearlong window when the asteroids were accessible to Magellan. Construction fell behind schedule, and by the eleventh month of the orbital window, there was some question if the settlement, which contained the facilities needed to survive for the five years the Spencer Belt was out of contact with Magellan, could be completed successfully. Magellan’s then-Governor Ingo Fuentes had pushed the construction of the Sonnet colony against the advice of several of Magellan’s leading engineers. Convinced the colony was not folly, but what would help Magellan economically, culturally and politically dominate its waypoint neighbors, Fuentes resigned from his governorship to be the team commander of the Sonnet Colony itself. Corners were cut, sacrifices were made, tradeoffs considered, and with two days to spare, the final runabout, M.S.S. Normandy left the Sonnet Colony for the last time, carrying back to the Magellan the last of the construction crew. Left behind for the five-year dark cycle were three Marines, four miners, two medical specialists, two domestic logistics specialists, a greenhouse technician, an environmental engineer, a structural engineer, a researcher, and Fuentes, the mission commander.

  The success of the first two years of the colony — three years before the shuttle travel window would open again and people and supplies could be ferried between the Sonnet Colony and Magellan – was beyond the dreams of Fuentes. They did not have to rely entirely on the food synthesizers because the greenhouse technician had successfully coaxed an incredible farm yield that, square meter for square meter matched the Magellan’s topside gardens. The miners had found several new veins of rare ores, and the stellar researcher had been able to develop some new theories on small mass star origins based on data they gathered from the Spencer Belt’s orbit.

  Then little things started to go wrong. Doors between the colony building segments would jam. Both the air refreshers would clog and the environmental engineer did not have experience repairing this smaller model based on the Magellan refresher design. She would get one of the units fixed, but only for short times before they would fail again. The mechanical battles were constant. Too many errors had been made adapting the life support systems for the ultra-low gravity of Sonnet, as opposed to the artificial gravity of Magellan.

  The thermal units were hard pressed to be able to keep up with the extreme colds, which were harsher than expected when the colony was blocked from direct rays of HD 238921 by other asteroids in the belt. To preserve heat and energy, Fuentes was forced to order the greenhouses shut down and sealed, meaning the colonists had to rely on the food synth machines alone. Then the food synth machine broke for two days straight, giving the colonists their first real taste of hunger.

  In May of 2557, the mining team was out of the colony in spacesuits on an expedition where they were attempting to access pockets of hydric acid. They were using small explosive charges to remove the surface rubble and access the invaluable substance below. One of the explosives went off unexpectedly and threw a miner off the almost zero-G asteroid into the inky void of space.

  Reacting quickly according to training, a second miner, Illius Burke, put down a tether and anchor line and then leaped after the first miner in a vain attempt to save him from a frozen death in the vacuum of space. Unfortunately, in his haste to save his friend, he didn’t test the rock he tethered himself to. It was unsecured and floated up after him. The third miner, Rachel Risa, grabbed for the tether but missed it by centimeters.

  In horror, the blood drained from Rachel’s face as she saw Illius, a secret lover, float out of her would-be saving reach, into the cold embrace of nearly certain space death. Horror also flashed very briefly over Illius’ otherwise warm face. Rachel could still see the glint of the small, cold star in his eyes.

  Illius had often thought of what would ever happen if he were spaced, and knew his anchoring error would be fatal as he floated off into oblivion. In four or five hours, his spacesuit’s life support would give out. He quickly accepted his fate, and a sweet, sad smile washed over him – a smile for Rachel, who would only be able make out his face for another minute at most. He wanted his last contact with another person to be one of peace, one of love. And it was.

  Illius floated away slowly, like a balloon with barely enough helium to float, after being released by a child on the surface of the earth. Illuis wore a bright white suit, which reflected the dim stellar light for kilometers. Rachel sobbed openly as she saw him float away, salty tears running down her smooth mocha-colored cheeks. Inside her helmet, the tears could not be wiped away. Instead, they started to levitate and bounce into each other, floating drops of pain and loss and grief. She fell to her knees, resisting the temptation to jump after him, to join him in his endless grave of space. She would stay with him, and she could make out his suit as a speck of light for a few hours. And then he was gone. And Rachel, who had departed the Sonnet Colony that morning with a friend and lover, slowly walked back to base alone.

  Because of the time constraints during construction, Fuentes ordered that the corvette bay and docking station not be built, so they decided to not take a corvette with them. There was no ship to go after the men as they floated out of the Spencer Belt and into open space. Rachel knew a corvette could have easily recovered her colleagues before they perished.

  Once safely inside the base, Rachel forcefully, verbally abused Fuentes for rushing the project and letting them leave Magellan before they were ready. She said they were fools for thinking they could get the colony ready in a year, and they should have waited for the next cycle. Fuentes, unsympathetic to Rachel’s protests, reminded her she knew the risks. A week later, Rachel seduced one of the Marines, and stole his sidearm. She coldly and quietly went around the colony and put a bullet into the head of the remaining colonists. She left a message detailing what she had done and why, and then don
ned a spacesuit and left the safety of the colony for the surface of Sonnet.

  She jumped as hard as she could, pushing off the asteroid, and plunging into the darkness. Rachel wrote in her message that she would find Illius, even if she had to chase him to the edge of the universe. As she floated away, she turned and looked at Sonnet, the large rock that floated near the center of the Spencer Belt. The asteroid had a unique symmetry that made it stand out from its brothers. She was nearly a kilometer away, and she could see the opening to the shard caves now, on the opposite side of Sonnet from the colony base. She closed her eyes, thought of when she once explored those beautiful caves with Illius, and froze to death.

  When they discovered the massacre, the powers-that-be on Magellan found little appetite to revisit creating a permanent colony on Sonnet. The colony’s structures were converted into an unmanned emergency survival station. In the future, should anyone find themselves stranded in the Spencer Belt, if they could make it to Sonnet, they would find a cache of supplies that would last 200 people about 10 years, or two people 1,000 years. Otherwise, the site was a memorial to the misjudgment of Governor Fuentes, and a tragic reminder of the quiet rage of Rachel Risa.

  “Wait. North asked you to go with him to the Shard Caves?” Lydia seemed incredulous.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Amberly asked, as she punched up logs from the Magellan’s radiation sensors at her research station.

  “I’m surprised he didn’t ask Hannah or Ilia. I heard last week he went to the Wyoming Theater and to that new expensive restaurant in the Science commons with Flora,” Lydia reminded her.

  Flora Dillington. Just thinking of her put Amberly in a sour mood. The two were alike in many ways. They had both been born on Magellan. Both were the same age. They attended the same schools and had many of the same classes, had strong math and language aptitude, and were encouraged to seek careers in science. Amberly was fortunate to get an appointment as a junior researcher in the Science Corps; Flora secured lucrative work in the private sector for the Waypoint Research Group, the largest for-profit research company off planet. The women were even similar in size and appearance, except Flora was a dirty blonde. Amberly and Flora had been friends until they were 12, when Amberly told Flora about the crush she had on Theotinine Metopolin, a scrawny teenager who liked to recite romantic poets at length from memory. Flora then decided she wanted to be Theo’s girl, and proceeded to flaunt herself to that end. Amberly was too shy to act on her crush, and she never forgave Flora. Theo moved with his parents to Waypoint Estevancio soon after. Amberly and Flora rarely spoke after that. She admitted to herself that it was a silly grudge, but the thought of her middle school nemesis getting her hooks into North was somewhat unnerving.