Prototype

I stared at the crowd and told the biggest lie of my life. It was what I was expected to say after all, and I’ve never handled that kind of pressure well.

“This is an immense honor, and I’m grateful that the selection committee chose me for this mission. I’m ready to go.” My voice cracked a little, which the news reporters wrote off as emotion. My friends, though, know my tells.

While I sat in my prep room in the pre-launch lounge, a conference vidcall to me flashed on the screen. I answered to see my closest friends from all over the world on the call.

A cacophony of congratulations, take-cares, be-safes, and other banalities cascaded over each other until the chatter died down. Finally, one of the six took control of the call.

“G, you a bad liar girl,” she said.

“Melody,” another said, “that’s hardly fair. What do you think she should have said?”

“She shoulda’ said hell to the no, Leeza.” Melody shook her head. “G’s ’bout ready and happy for this as a mutt goin’ to get his nuts cut.”

“Glenna, ignore her. Mel’s just upset that you’re leaving.” Leeza’s previous smile faded.

“I ain’t the only one. We all upset.” Melody sighed and leaned closer to the camera. “You coulda’ turned it down.”

Leeza brightened back up. “Meantime, we’ll plan a bash when you get back. We’ve got six months, let’s all meet up in California for a beach party. It’ll beat the London weather for sure.”

The feeling that this would be the last real-time conversation I’d ever have with them weighed on me like an elephant on the chest. “Mel, I had to accept. The selection committee didn’t have much to work with. Ballsen, the second-best finisher in the training and evaluation, crashed the simulator on landing all but two out of seventeen times. He didn’t actually pass the training criteria. Not to mention, he’s borderline delusional with his religious stuff, seeing angels and demons and such. He passed the psych eval by two points, compared to my seven-hundred-twelve.”

“Y’all passed by seven-damn-hundred?” Melody asked. “Sounds like I could pass that test! That, or he the sane one and the test is to see who crazier.”

The laughter of the others was genuine, lightening my mood, even as the tears began to flow. The reality was on me. This was it. “I’m going to miss you all so much.”

Gunther, the lone male in the gang, overcame his shyness to get the group’s attention. “I’m very sorry, but I need to log off for work, now,” he said. “Talk to you all later, and I’ll see you soon, Glenna.”

Before I could correct him, he’d logged off. Maybe it was just a slip. We’d planned on meeting over the coming weekend, while he was in North America for work. Of course, that plan went by the wayside when the mission date got moved a full month earlier.

The call cut off and a notice to prepare replaced it on the screen. If they hadn’t bumped it a month, I would’ve had time to prepare. Instead, I was pacing back and forth, doing my best not to shake.

The door from the decon room opened and three techs in clean suits came in, pushing a cart with my gear for the launch. Everything I’d need post-launch was already sterilized, bagged, and stowed on board.

One of the techs stepped in front of me, waving his blue-gloved hand in my face to get my attention. I snapped out of my daze and looked at him. Behind the hood was a familiar face.

“Gunther! How?”

“I told you I would see you soon.” He winked, then went about helping me suit up in the vac suit I would wear. “If you want, I can go visit Melody instead this weekend and give her a spank.”

“Not necessary,” I said. “The spank, I mean. You should try to get the rest of the gang together, though, while there’s still time.” He fitted the helmet, locked it in place, and checked the seals. “I thought we’d have time before I left.”

“I thought this too,” he said, checking off items on a digital clipboard. “Today was supposed to be a pre-mission equipment check, but something has the top brass in a…,” he waved his hand in circles.

“In a tizzy,” I said. I knew what it was but was sworn to secrecy.

“That.” He put the clipboard on the now empty cart, and turned back to me. “Any message you want to pass to the gang, just send it with the regular equipment reports, and I’ll be sure to pass them on.”

“Thanks, Gunther.” A panicked laugh bubbled up that I had to fight to control.

“What is it?”

“What happens if I cry when I’m all sealed up?”

“Same as if you puke. You have to wait for the pumps to clear it out or live with it.” He gave me a light punch on the shoulder. “Just don’t puke, though.”

“I won’t. Too scared.” I surprised myself with the sudden honesty.

“If anyone can do this, it’s you.” Gunther patted my helmet and said, “Alles gut. Good to go.”

I joined the others of the crew on the electric tram that took us to the crew elevator. All of us knew what few others did. We would ascend to the crew cabin, take the boost to high-Earth orbit, board the brand-new ship built with the designs the aliens sent us, and take off on what was likely a one-way trip.

The way the others put on smiles and pretended everything was normal while we were in sight of the cameras helped me do the same. Once we were closed in, though, the facades dropped.

“Jake,” I said, “I’m not ready for this.”

“None of us are,” he said, “but that’s life.”

“We may not be ready, but our vitals look good,” Ella said. “Of course, some of that is down to the beta-blockers.”

“Amazing what they’ll do to make us look good for the cameras,” Jake said. “Terry, how about you? What’s your status?”

“I feel like I’m walking to the gallows, but can’t stop myself,” she said.

The radio crackled to life. “We have your vitals and telemetry. Everything clear on our end. T-minus seven minutes. Mission Commander, go or no-go?”

Jake checked his instrumentation. “Mission Commander is go,” he said.

“Pilot, go or no-go?”

“Pilot is go,” I said, after checking my indicators.

“Medical, go or no-go?”

“Medical is go,” Ella said.

“Science and engineering, go or no-go?”

“Science and engineering is go,” Terry said.

“All crew are go, all systems are go, T-minus five minutes and counting. Last abort window in forty seconds.”

The abort window passed by without notice, and we took off on possibly the last chemical rocket lift from Earth. The drive we’d built in space from the alien plans was only half, the gravity generator being built on the ground was the other.

Once we’d linked up with the ship and boarded, the transfer shuttle disconnected and set itself into a stable orbit away from us. We got into our positions and Jake confirmed with ground that we were all set.

“Glenna,” he said, “coordinates are set, engage the W-drive.”

“Engaging.” No sooner had I pushed the button than the light from the sun, the moon, and the Earth stretched and folded into red and disappeared. We were the first humans to break the light speed barrier. We hoped we wouldn’t be the last.

The minutes passed in silence as every rattle and hum of the ship made us tense, until we dropped back into normal space. The autopilot put us on a one-gee retro burn for 193 minutes until we bled away almost all our speed, settling in at 500 meters per second.

Engine cut-off left us once again weightless, and we all breathed a heavy sigh of relief. “We’re in one piece,” Terry said.

“I just hope we’re in time,” Jake said.

“We should be near the signal,” I said, hoping it wasn’t all for nothing.

“I have a fix on it,” Terry said. “Sending coordinates to navigation.”

“Glenna, get us there. Any signs of life?” Jake asked Terry.

“Underway now,” I said.

“Yes!” Terry cheered. “The message just changed. Translating now.”

Jake slapped his chair. “Time to target?”

“Orbit match phase in nine minutes.” I watched as we approached a massive object that could only be seen by the light it blocked.

“Translation complete,” Terry said. “All power off except life support. Damage to the hull, EVA suit storage is in vacuum. They can’t do a transfer without repair. They also want to know who we are.”

Jake took a deep breath. “We’ve come this far. Any concerns?”

When none were voiced, he set the communications to translate on send. “This is Mission Commander Jake Ingstrom, in charge of the first mission of the Interstellar One. We’ve come from Earth to assist. Request permission to dock.”

Instead of an umbilical dock, they opened a large bay on the ship as they began powering up. With the lights on, the ship became more visible. It was easily the size of a skyscraper, but spherical.

With a deep breath, I took manual control. “Let’s hope I don’t pull a Ballsen here and smash us into their deck.”

I caught snippets of conversation around the edges of my concentration. I heard Ballsen’s name in conjunction with words like “creepy” and “crazy” and “seriously unhinged.”

I did it just like the simulations, letting the auto-controls correct for the artificial gravity while I made a feather-light decent on the deck. That’s my story and I’m sticking to it. I don’t know what that sudden thump and ten-centimeter drop at the end was.

The door that dwarfed our ship behind us sealed shut and we could hear the rush of air against the hull as the dock was pressurized. When Terry gave us the all-clear on the air, we couldn’t wait to get out of the ship and meet our benefactors. It was probably unwise for all of us to pile out at once into the bay, but we did.

The aliens were tall, thin, looking like a Giger-esque monster, but not frightening. They walked on four limbs, their back bent at a ninety-degree angle above the forward pair. Moving up their body, three sets of arms on separate segments were in constant motion, while their two huge, black eyes surrounded by six small eyes moved about in subtle, independent movements. For as alien as they were with their centipede-like body plan, there was something about the way they looked at us that immediately struck us as being people, not just creatures.

They all carried a device in one of their six hands that translated their speech to English, and vice-versa. The alien commander took us to where the damage had occurred. A micrometeorite had punched through the ship just inside the main airlock. Damage control had sealed the area off, but the long suits with too many limbs and bubble helmets hung just past the sealed bulkhead.

After some consultation — and a crash course on how to use the aliens’ tools — Terry and Jake headed out for a spacewalk to patch the holes in the hull. Ella stayed on the radio with them, leaving me with the alien commander. I couldn’t pick up either his name or the name of his species, as they were in their weird, burbling language which all kind of sounded the same to me, but I called him Bubbles.

He showed me the controls for the pilot, which would be impossible for a human to operate as it required four feet and four hands, leaving two hands to work the console. Finally, we stopped in what looked like a mess hall or canteen.

Bubbles turned to me, all eight of his eyes doing that subtle rotation thing to look at me. “Your planet didn’t have four-space drive last I looked, and now you do. How did you get here so fast?” he asked.

“We started getting the messages a few years ago. Once we translated them, we learned it was plans to build a W-space transceiver, four-space or whatever.” I tried to remember as much as I could about four-dimensional space, but it wasn’t much, so I decided to skip it. “Anyway, once we built it and were in contact with the sender, we got plans for a W-drive. We spent the last year and a half building a test ship in orbit and were meant to take a one-way W-space trip, followed by a six month return trip through normal space.

“We were close to making that test run when one of our W-space transceivers picked up your distress call and the responses that no-one could come as they were all too far away. Twenty-thousand lives on the line, and the closest W-space capable ship was right there.”

I pushed the thoughts of my friends out my mind. “Instead of heading out just a short way and going back home, we maxed out our fuel load and made the transfer all the way here to Alpha Centauri B. We all knew what we signed up for, but we all agreed it was the right thing to do.”

I smiled a little. “Plus, we were kind of hoping you’d put in a good word for us humans when you get back home. Whoever sent us the plans has been very helpful, and we’d want to be friends rather than enemies or, more likely, an annoyance that you decide to swat out of existence.”

He made a sound I hadn’t heard from him before, his translator just saying, “Laughter.”

Bubbles got himself together and said, “We’re more alike than you know. We saw your lack of fuel to make another transfer and wondered at your altruism. Seeing that it’s based, at least in part, on selfish concerns is settling. That is something we understand.”

He moved one of his hand-claw things to my shoulder and set it there, waiting for a response. When I didn’t flinch or swat it away, he continued. “Even better than understanding your selfish altruism, however, is the awareness of it you show. This gives me great hope for your people.”

Jake, Terry, and Ella entered then, the first two covered in a sheen of sweat. “We fixed it, and your people are already in the area assessing further damage to suit storage and the airlock,” Jerry said.

I voiced the question we all had. “What do we do now?”

Terry muttered something, then said, “Before we left, I plotted a three-way slingshot around Alpha Centauri B, then A, then Proxima Centauri, followed by a Solar capture, braking around Jupiter and then again around the sun into a high parking orbit over Earth.”

“How long will that take?” I asked.

Terry looked at her feet and her gaze stayed there. “Twelve years. Assuming Proxima doesn’t decide to flare while we’re close and cook us all with X-rays.”

“With six months of food, if we ration, we last what, eight, nine months?” Jake asked.

“We could stretch it out to a year,” Ella said, “but we’d still be dead of starvation long before we got there. Of course, it wouldn’t take a year to run out of water, both for drinking and for oxygen, even with recycling. It’s not 100 percent efficient.”

“Can’t we beg some fuel from the aliens?” I asked. “Then repeat the W-drive transfer in reverse. Back in time for breakfast.”

“That would be the optimal course,” Bubbles said.

“We can’t refuel without disassembling the reactor.” Terry wore defeat like a heavy cloak. “Everything about this ship is a prototype. That’s why the W-space transfer was only one-way.”

Bubbles gurgled something with some of the other aliens without activating his translator, then turned back to us. “We have decided that we cannot let you die. If you wish, you and your ship can come with us to the shipyard around our star. We can help you refuel and maybe provide some other tech to make your return possible.”

“Sounds better than mailing our own corpses back to Earth,” I said.

“We cannot guarantee that we can complete the work on your ship,” Bubbles said, “but we will try.”

“Good enough for me,” Jake said. After getting a nod in the affirmative from the rest of us, the decision was made.

For two months, we worked alongside the aliens getting the I-1 ready to return. The main engines were removed, along with the fuel cells, and replaced with the aliens’ version of the gravity thrust they were working on back on Earth. The entire inside of the ship was sprayed with a nano-polymer that could provide gravity within the ship.

Due to the way the reactor was built, there was no way to add external fuel storage, so the space saved by removing the fuel cells was filled with trinkets and tech, including some translators, from the aliens. While some of it made me think of handing a thirteenth-century scientist a cell phone, a lot of it was, for lack of a better word, souvenir kitsch. Another thing we seemed to have in common.

We spent a few days with their astrogation folks and came up with a flight plan that minimized our time getting there, while maximizing our remaining reactor fuel. Most of the fuel spend was in translating to and from W-space, while the gravity drive would sip from the reactor, and could even be run from the massive battery they installed in one of the old fuel cell slots.

A week later, in front of the cameras and a crowd again, I told the truth. “It feels so good to be home.”