Crucible of a Species (2 page)

It was over in the minute it took for the body to stiffen and go limp under his grip.
A damn terrorist ready to go and meet her maker. Just a little longer and
… he stopped. A hundred emotions flooded in; relaxing his grip,
good, the pulse returns.

Drake looked across the rooftop, regretting every second of the confrontation. He noticed the slight limp in Lieutenant Esperanza’s gait as she came over, growling a bit louder than normal, “Damn, every one of these guys is hell-bent on suicide? Whatever happened to peaceful demonstration?”

Judging by the slowly spreading pool of blood on the deck, a second terrorist was dead; three others were unconscious. The lieutenant’s report was short, “No one seriously injured, Colonel.” The sly smile on her face was evident even in the moonlight, “I see you ran into some real trouble, can I help?”

“Enough of your wisecracks, Esperanza.” …. black memories smoldered in his anger as he gazed out over the sea. “They had a nuke alright, a particularly dirty one,” he snarled at Esperanza. “They don’t care who they hurt as long as they make their point and they are ready to die to show the world how serious they are. Esperanza, bring them …”

“Colonel, they are disarmed. We can’t …”, Lieutenant Esperanza interrupted even though she knew it might be a career limiting action.

Drake’s glare stopped Esperanza in midsentence. She didn’t need the light of day to feel the rage and involuntarily stepped backwards as she met the cold steel of the colonel’s grey eyes. The station was deathly quiet except for the ever-present whisper of the trade winds and the soft sobbing of a terrorist.

To Esperanza’s credit, she held the gaze until acceptance passed across his face. Colonel Drake sighed in resignation but his command was strong, “String-tie and revive the survivors.”

A gagged cough rose from the young woman beneath his hand as she regained consciousness. She spoke with a throaty, pain-filled voice, “Is Nolen here? Let me speak with him. He can’t go on with this. We can’t trust them, they’re aliens and we know nothing about them.”

Drake stared into her eyes and squeezed just a little, “Your kind turns my stomach. If everything were proper in this world, I’d toss you overboard right now.

“No, you aren’t going to speak with the doctor. The ‘aliens’, as you call them, have given us everything. Now they only want us to come and visit and for that you’d kill us all. You’re not worthy of sharing the air we breathe. That’s it, now shaddup.”

Drake’s stomach turned on hearing tearful sobs as they led the terrorists off. Esperanza drew closer to his side, “I thought for sure you were going to throw them overboard. That would have tied up the project for months while they investigated.”

Drake stared out, deciding how much to tell her, “We don’t have months and you know it but that’s not why I let them live. Terrorism carries a death penalty. They’ll be in the courts with appeals for years to come.

“You saw the radiation leak from that nuke. For them it’s a fatal dose but they expected to gloriously die tonight, martyrs for their cause. Now, they’ll have years ahead of them, suffering in their cells while their bodies slowly rot from radiation damage. No, I didn’t do them any favors I just sent them to hell.”

Drake limped over to the nearest hatch. He’d had enough of all this bickering between politicians and idealists. In a few days they’d be on their way, leaving all this foolishness behind. After all, what could be more peaceful than a visit to a distant star complete with a golden invitation from its extra-terrestrial residents in hand? What could be worse than the consequences of ignoring that invitation?

*~~*~~*~~*

“File open editor …

Intro March 2036, Record:

“Our safe and comfortable Earth is actually a deadly crucible where over the past three point five billion years, ninety-nine percent of all nature’s species have ceased to exist. This cozy island in the universe currently harbors ten million living experiments in evolution, and out of this wide family, only one has the hubris to believe it has achieved the pinnacle in the grand experiment of life.”

“Pause.”

Linda Fretz wanted to close her eyes when writing using her personal implant, but she couldn’t tear them away from the receding beauty of the Earth’s glowing horizon. Bubbles tickled her nose as she took another sip from the flute of Armand de Brignac and marveled at how the sparkling rose and gold tones in the wine poorly mimicked the magnificent aura of moving, flowing colors in that distant horizon.

She updated her notes, “Okay, it’s a good foundation for the interview. Next, we’ll adapt the final lines of the previous month’s issue and tie them into the new topic.”

“Continue.

“In last month’s Geographic we saw how the bones of Africa unveiled the story of our ancestor’s first steps along evolution’s path a million years ago. A thousand-millennium is a very small segment in time if you consider that even the slow-witted dinosaurs managed to ply the trails of progression for more than one hundred and sixty-five million years. Yet today, still in the initial faltering steps of our journey, humanity will be the first species to leave this deadly cradle of life and venture into the unknown reaches of the universe beyond.

“Pause.”

She could hear Tom Bradley talking to the copilot in the forward section.
Young upstart, he sure tried to steal this assignment. Well, I fixed his ass. The world will be seeing me and where will he be? Off a million miles on his way to the stars and outta my hair.

Linda turned to stare intently at the scene outside as they neared the International Space Agency’s station, the ISA Skyport, A perfect angle!

“Take a ninety second video of area as marked, include tracking. Place clip as background for file. Continue:

“Our last special issue of World Geographic, ‘Evolution’s Path’, focused on the periodic nature of the evolutionary cycle of life. In our June 2036 issue, we examine the evolutionary trends of civilization and what is more appropriate than an on-site interview with one of the men now at the forefront of our latest effort as a species, Dr. Phillip Nolen?

“As I record this month’s
‘From the Editor’
, I’m surrounded by a black velvet sky filled with a billion brilliant pinpoints of light. This view is much more beautiful than any I have seen on Earth and that is because as I write this I am nearly thirty-thousand miles above the Pacific Ocean.

“From the subtle luxury of our shuttle cabin we can see the Earth’s blue, cloud-covered sphere, and in the distance before our craft, silhouetted against the steady burning of the stars, lay the white towers and web-like filaments of our modern version of the Emerald City of Oz, the ISA Skyport. It is here, at the top of the Skyport’s Space Elevator that we will be interviewing Dr. Phillip Nolen and other key members of the Argos team who will be the first of many to venture beyond the bounds of the life-giving star of our creation.”

“Recording stop, video stop. Merge files and edit for initial video fade-in, sync to ten seconds from start after black screen.”

Linda smiled as she set down her empty glass,
This will be one of my better intros. Now, let’s hope we can get Dr. Nolen to open up and let us know what is really going on.

*~~*~~*~~*

Ten inches
of carbon buckyball matrix polyfiber separated Colonel Daniel Drake from the certain death of hard vacuum but he cared nothing of the spectacular view beyond its vantage point. His cold blue eyes scanned the scene overlooking the broad exterior panorama of Skyport as a sentry might view across the expanse beyond a protected field camp. Hands folded behind his back, his erect figure hid the tension within the smooth muscular physique of a man long experienced in soldiering. Drake’s eyes shifted and focused, tracking the approaching shuttle, searching one last time for hidden threats with the burning intensity that only one who has been the hunted as well as the hunter can know.

From this wing of the Skyport, the station appeared to perch atop an impossibly high bundle of cables extending down to some invisible point in the blue Pacific far below. Large elevators or ‘climbers’ travelled the cables bringing great cargoes of supplies up to the spaceport and returning with raw materials from the asteroids.

The fibers of the bundle formed a fasces of carbon reinforced nanotubes, each ribbon averaging less than one-thousandths the width of a human hair in thickness and an inch wide. They extended from Skyport’s geostationary orbit, down thirty thousand miles to Terminus, an unseen port anchored in the Pacific. The ribbon-cables also extended above Skyport, passing through its center and outward to a counterweight floating high above at the Earth-Moon Lagrange Point.

Drake examined every nook and bump of the boxy shuttle as it entered the last phase of its flight to the tether-side dock, carefully noting each turn and weld on the exterior, looking for anything unexpected or out of place.

Four years now as project director, the colonel had drawn criticism for his extensive security network but he persisted, employing every resource to insure the safety of the Skyport and their mission. High tension filled these final days. Automated security systems should have been sufficient but politics had turned violent as of late and this point in the docking sequence was his last chance to stop any shuttle that might pose a threat. This was an easy and unofficial final check and Colonel Drake personally assumed the duty.

Soon they would be beyond the petty politics and conflicts of Earth and he would finally be part of something worthwhile as they carried humanity to new frontiers. One last public relations meeting that Dr Nolen had insisted upon then one more special shuttle delivery and he would be able to put all the misery of Earth-politics behind him.

The new Gravitonic, or ‘wave’ drive as most of the crew now called it, was a wonderful invention but it was much too easy for a saboteur to fix a deadly surprise to the outer skin of the shuttle. The fields of the operational drive encompass and saturate the entire craft including everything inside and as a result all moved as one whether it was an inside passenger or a small laptop nuke clinging to the hull.

This much-publicized arrival of Nolen’s journalists presented the perfect opportunity for headlines. One small package attached to the hull and their final communication to Earth would be little more than a bright flash in the sky.

Okay, time for another damn meeting. You think I’m gonna miss something if I don’t get there?
The colonel grumbled as he stepped onto the webway segment that activated on his approach. It carried him up two levels and over toward the meeting point.
Alex should already be there having completed the final checks. Shit, all it would take is just one ‘Earth First’ loony sneaking in and going wacko at the meeting. I should have made a bigger fuss about having all the key people in one room at the same time.

Turning down the last corridor, he saw a group in animated conversation at the entrance to the conference. In its center stood a trim brunette looking like she was going to Sunday Mass rather than visiting a working space factory. Next to her was the tall, thin frame of Dr. Phillip Nolen, his hands enthusiastically waving as he described the Argos.

Hasn’t he changed?
Dan reflected.
A quiet lab geek to a real, god-awful politician in a few years. Good Phil, you keep them busy and I’ll slip on by …

Dr. Nolen heard the footsteps and looked up, “Here’s the fellow to answer your question! Dan, come over and meet Ms Linda Fretz. This is Colonel Daniel Drake, our project director. Ms Fretz is one of the editors of World Geographic and this muscular fellow here’s Tom Bradley, the journalist who will be coming with us.

“Ms Fretz just asked why we need a military presence on this mission.”

Cobalt blue eyes sparkled above a heart-warming smile as she extended her hand. “Actually, what I asked Dr. Nolen was, given the entirely peaceable intentions of the Asteri, why do we need the military up here at all? It’s not as if we don’t have security screening. I just can’t see anyone getting into Skyport way up here.”

This was a question often asked, “Ms Fretz, you are correct, we have no immediate concern with the aliens or perhaps I should use the more fashionable name ‘Asteri’.

“Remember, this venture grew out of Dr. Nolen’s work at the Naval Research Labs. Gravitonic technology is a product of military funding and therefore under military jurisdiction. The first Asteri contacts and technology transfers occurred from those same NRL labs.

“As for security, the subsequent global leak by the Asteri of what should have remained classified information resulted in significant political stress across the planet. The security breach threw us into that rather nasty technology race until some of us realized the full scope and cost of these developments.

“As we moved into the next phases of development, the major nations came to realize that no single country had sufficient resources to properly put the full range of Asteri concepts into practice. The resulting compromise was the inception point for the ISA, or International Space Agency.

“Perhaps the greatest threat is from people who dogmatically believe we shouldn’t become dependent upon Asteri technology and resort to violence as a political expression.”

Linda’s smile turned to the physicist, “Dr. Nolen, do you really believe, as the Colonel implied, that the Asteri are behind the dissemination of the Gravitonics Theorems?”