CONFESSION
Les Johnson
My name is Nitin Bakshi, and this is what really happened to Keegan Coran.
I vividly recall when it all began. It was my youngest sister Shahina’s birthday, February 29, 2140. She was seven—but not really. Since she was born on Leap Day of a Leap Year in 2112, she was really twenty-eight. I had been teasing her about her age since she was four, which she hated, and hadn’t stopped as she got older. It was now a tradition we both enjoyed. I was in the middle of my birthday holovid with her when I got the message that changed everything. Let me explain.
I was at my wit’s end. I’d met with all the elected officials from my district and from just about every district where I thought I’d have a chance to get interest and, of course, funding. I met with philanthropists (“You want to do what?”), CEOs of all the major North American space companies (“What’s the business case?”), and even some from Eurasia (“You are crazy!”). I’d spoken to lawyers about creating a public company (“What will be the investors’ return on investment?”), experts in creating nonprofits (“You’ll never get the tax exemption.”), and government space agencies (“It’s not our job.”). My partners and I had paid for a global ’net survey and found that while people generally thought it was a good idea, few would be willing to help pay for it.
I, the eternal optimist, had pretty much concluded that our dream of the last eight years was a bust and that we should just all give up on our dream, find real jobs, and get on with our lives. I was about to tell my sister this news—news that she would have welcomed, by the way—when I was notified that I had a message waiting from one of the many monied blue bloods that I’d been trying to reach for the last few years, completely unsuccessfully.
I had a message from Keegan Coran. The Keegan Coran of North American BioPharma. The message said simply, “Mr. Coran will see you on Friday at 1:00 in his Manhattan office regarding your proposal. RSVP.”
I told my sister I had to go so I could send a positive reply to the meeting request. She sounded disappointed and I think I called her back later and told her about why I had to go. But it’s been so long, I honestly don’t remember if I ever did.
It was a Monday, so getting to Manhattan by Friday would be easy. I had the pitch memorized and reserving a seat on one of the ballistics wouldn’t be a problem. Hell, if I had wanted to, I could have caught the next ballistic out of Denver and been in New York within the hour. Friday gave me plenty of time. Time to fret and worry. Time to prepare to again be rejected as I’d been rejected so many times before.
I landed at JFK Thursday afternoon and immediately caught the aerotaxi to my hotel. I stayed at the Varcak, which rose majestically out of the Atlantic and overlooked the Times Square Boardwalk. I could see the couples taking their very touristy water taxi rides down the thoroughfare of shopping bliss that was New York. In the distance was the Statue of Liberty, kept dry on Liberty Island by the thirty-foot walls surrounding her. The holoprojections of Times Square were proclaiming the news that Pakistan would host The World Cup in 2144 and that, for the first time, teams from the Moon would be competing. I remember thinking that was a funny thing—how could the Lunatics train to compete in 1 gravity when most of the players had never left 1/6 g? It’s funny what one remembers when their emotions are high. I was, as usual, nervous about tomorrow’s meeting.
Despite being nervous, I slept like a baby.
I was at the offices of North American BioPharma thirty minutes before my meeting. It was raining. And cold. And I didn’t care. I was in the zone and about to talk to one of the world’s richest men, hoping to convince him that my team and I had a viable plan to change the course of history.
Coran’s receptionist, an obviously bioengineered Adonis who appeared to be not a day over twenty-five but could have easily been fifty (you never knew what genes were spliced where these days), summoned me into the spacious and lavishly furnished office of Keegan Coran. Coran apparently was a wildlife buff. Throughout the room were running holovids of various wildlife, forests, and oceans. I couldn’t tell if they were real-time visuals or a recording. The whole time I was there I didn’t see any obvious repetition, but I wasn’t really paying that much attention to them. My attention was wholly undivided and held by Coran.
“Dr. Bakshi, I’ve read a lot about you and heard you speak on many occasions. Your lecture at the Interplanetary Astronautical Congress last summer was compelling. Compelling.” He actually said, “compelling” twice. Yeah, I was flattered.
I mumbled something that probably sounded like humble blathering; my own version of sucking up or groveling. Take your pick. I probably sounded pathetic. Before I could launch into my spiel, he resumed control of the meeting. Rich people like this can seem like a force of nature that cannot be ignored.
He said, “I’ve read your proposal and spoken with several to whom you’ve already made your appeal. I think your idea is revolutionary and I want to support it.”
One of the richest and most powerful people in the world talked about me, and my ideas, using the words “revolutionary” and “compelling” within five minutes of each other. My ego was bursting and my heart racing. I don’t really recall what else was said before we shook hands and he introduced me to his assistant and my new paymaster, Renee Blanc-Perot. Unlike the Adonis that escorted me into the room, Renee Blanc-Perot had that look of “I am this beautiful and intelligent naturally and you won’t ignore me.” To this day, I have never ignored her. I killed her, sure. But I never, ever ignored her.
As Ms. Blanc-Perot and I were leaving the room, Coran said, “Dr. Bakshi. There is a catch. I may ask you for a favor as the project nears completion. And when I ask, I expect you to do it.” This caused me to stop in my tracks. My spider sense was activated.
“Is this favor going to be illegal or immoral?” I remember asking. (I’m surprised I had the temerity to ask.)
He laughed and responded, “No. Nothing illegal or immoral, I assure you of that.”
I just nodded my head or said, “Okay, then,” or some such affirmation. In any event, I agreed, or I wouldn’t be telling this story.
That was it. By Friday afternoon, March 4, 2140, the funding for the Victoria was secured. The next several years were a blur. With a billionaire’s financial spigot wide open, hiring the design engineers, placing on retainer the always-necessary-but-never-wanted attorneys (who had always previously ignored me), and staffing a company to produce what would become humanity’s first interstellar starship began.
I can’t tell you how many trips I made to the Moon, but I can tell you about my first trip to Mars to see the orbital facility where the Victoria would be constructed—beginning within the next week or so. It was almost exactly ten years after the initial meeting with Caron and it was on this trip that, in hindsight, I should have begun paying more attention to my sponsor. But I was too amped up to notice anything and too distracted to care.
I flew on one of the commercial transports that departs for Mars weekly from the Moon Corp’s habitat and spaceport at L5. It wasn’t luxurious, but comfortable enough for the one-and-a-half month-long trip to Mars. It was off-season, meaning that the Earth and Mars weren’t optimally placed for quick travel between them. Had it been in season, the trip could have been as short as three weeks. As we departed, I couldn’t help but calculate how short the trip would have been had the ship been powered by our star drive operating at its maximum velocity—about two hours. It’s amazing the difference a little acceleration can make over a long time.
I can’t describe what it’s like to see Mars grow larger every day until it is finally all you see out the window—just like the Earth when viewed from LEO—Low Earth Orbit. But Mars was different from Earth. Instead of the blue oceans and puffy white clouds, it was big, red, and dusty—but beautiful in its own way. To me, the true beauty was Interstellar, Inc.’s space dock orbiting the planet’s equator. Mr. Coran hadn’t wasted any time using the fortune he’d amassed at North American BioPharma to buy—buy outright—the second largest aerospace corporation on Earth and turn its primary focus away from suborbitals, space mining habitats, and various dark programs for the military toward building the Victoria. I knew Coran was filthy rich, but I never imaged how much money he had at his disposal from the company that had vanquished cancer and increased the human lifespan by nearly one hundred percent. Now he was turning his efforts to help spread humanity and Earth life to the stars. And he was funding my starship.
Before you ask, yes, Ms. Blanc-Perot was with me on the trip and no, we weren’t and never had ever considered being in a relationship. She was beautiful but toward me she was iced coffee. Come to think of it, I’d never seen her be social with another man, or woman, in the whole time I knew her. She was all about business—Coran’s business.
“Mr. Coran will meet with you first thing tomorrow,” she said as we prepared to get off the ship and into the dock where we had guest rooms waiting.
“He’s here?” I asked. I was incredulous. In my mind, Coran lived in the world of meetings in fancy conference rooms, vacations in beach houses on private islands, and parties with the well heeled . . . just about everywhere but here. I didn’t expect him to be at Mars.
“Yes. Orbiting about sixty degrees out of phase with us is his latest biotech research facility. He comes out here at least once per year to meet with his researchers and check on their progress.”
This is when an alarm bell should have gone off. Why would anyone need to set up a biotech research facility away from anything that could be considered “bio”? Without the Earth environment being local, you had to create your own. Creating an orbiting laboratory beyond Earth orbit and stocking it with the supplies to perform any sort of research, let alone in biotechnology, was an expensive proposition. All I could think of to justify what I was hearing was secrecy. In the competitive biotech field, you didn’t stay ahead unless you kept your work mostly secret from the competition. That had to be the reason—yeah, right.
Sure enough, we met with Mr. Coran the next day and it was such a memorable meeting that I don’t really recall any of the details. He was just checking on our progress and then, poof, he was gone. “Places to be and people to see,” and all that.
It was about a year after that meeting, during my second trip to Mars, that it happened. It—the event that made all the newsfeeds and nearly caused the whole project to be set back by years, if not longer.
Most people think building a spaceship or just about anything that’s complicated is mostly about putting widgets together. Part A into Slot B, that sort of thing. And that’s ultimately true, but only after a lot of hard work by hundreds to thousands of engineers, scientists, technicians and other specialists who have to design all the widgets to make sure they all do their jobs and fit together like they should. Most of the cost of the Victoria would not be the hardware from which she was assembled, but the hours spent by the designers making sure everything fits together, doesn’t get too hot or too cold, survives the radiation environment, can handle the stresses and strains of acceleration, is instrumented correctly so the crew can understand what’s going on, doesn’t use too much power or too little, and has enough redundancy to operate even if it fails in five different ways.
Key to all this are the systems engineers who try to understand how it all comes together and works, taking input from the mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, thermal engineers, nuclear engineers, communications engineers, etcetera. You get the picture. The Victoria was going to be one complicated ship and the systems engineers were key to making sure everything was going to work as it should.
From the outside, the Victoria was finally starting to look like a real spaceship. The outer hull was complete, and the crews were busily outfitting the interior with every system, power conduit, cryofreezer, and bathroom that the crew would need for a successful journey. From the inside, it was obvious we were still at least a year from being ready. To be blunt, it was a mess. Some decks were missing their decks (seriously!), others had flooring to which the plumbing and electrical conduits were strung as the technicians meticulously placed them where they should be in what would soon be very utilitarian walls with removable access panels. And, without gravity, debris was floating everywhere. The FOD—Foreign Object Debris—was so bad that we had cleanup crews working continuously to keep the air free of metal shavings, metal flakes from less-than-perfect arc welds, pieces of insulation, and even the occasional bit of human waste. (Don’t ask me how that kept happening, because we don’t know.) The biggest concern of the risk management team was that some of this crap would get into places it shouldn’t, not be noticed, and then cause a short or other major malfunction sometime during the voyage. To protect everyone working inside the ship from inhaling something untoward or even lethal, we provided filtration masks—courtesy of Coran’s stockpile at his co-orbiting biotech research facility. Now that workers weren’t worrying about inhaling whatever happened to float by, their productivity actually increased—dramatically. It was Renee’s idea; I can take no credit.
The center of the ship, where the stored embryos and sleeping crew were to be kept, was being surrounded with metallic hydrogen plating that would act as a nearly impenetrable radiation shield. Once the ship was racing through interstellar space at twenty percent the speed of light, every hydrogen atom it encountered would become radiation capable of unzipping or breaking strands of the very fragile DNA that would be the cargo. But most of that radiation would be stopped before it ever reached the metallic hydrogen barrier. No, this innermost barrier was developed to stop the galactic cosmic rays that were otherwise virtually unstoppable. These aren’t wimpy single proton hydrogen atoms traveling at a relative speed of 0.2c. Galactic cosmic rays were heavy nuclei, like iron, that were traveling at speeds greater than ninety percent the speed of light. Those are the ones that, if not stopped, would damage the DNA or kill every living thing on the ship during its multidecade trip. Metallic hydrogen, with its densely packed protons, would stop just about all of them. A win for our side.
I had been at Mars for just over three weeks and was wrapping up all the business I had to attend to before returning to Earth when the FEF-ers struck. We all should have known it could happen, how vulnerable we were, but we didn’t. I guess we thought that the Fix Earth First Society, or Feffers, wouldn’t come all the way out to Mars to try and stop us. They are against space travel, after all. Sure, they protested in front of our offices in every city we had one. Yes, they sent threatening messages and interrupted more than one of my fund-raisers with their harangue against space development and travel, insisting that we instead focus our energies and money on making life on Earth better. What they didn’t get was that my team and I all agree with their goal. We want to make Earth better. We just believe we need to explore and develop space to help make that happen. Their response to our rationale? Ignore it and make more threats. So, we ignored them back. And that, in hindsight, was a mistake.
With all the hubbub surrounding the outfitting of the Victoria, people and material arriving every minute of every day, cleanup crews racing to stay ahead of the floating debris, and people working way too many hours without a break (the union nearly stopped us in our tracks on that one until we starting paying triple time for the extra hours), no one noticed the two relatively small shipping containers added to the stack of construction supplies being loaded aboard the ship. That is, no one noticed them until we tracked them down as the source of the poison gas.
Yes, poison gas. Tucked away in those crates weren’t bombs to damage the ship. No, it was much more insidious than that. And if it hadn’t been for the anti-FOD respirators, more than five people would have died—a lot more.
The first sign of trouble came when one of the electricians—I am embarrassed to say I don’t remember his name—had to remove his respirator to fit between two panels to install some circuit, power conduit, or something. He was working between them when his coworker saw him start shaking, like he was having a seizure, and then go limp. Of course, they thought the guy was having a heart attack or something, so they pulled him out to try and help him.
About one out of ten of our workers are cross-trained as medics. When you’re this far from a real hospital, it’s a precaution that just about every firm out here takes. It just makes sense. Except in this case. The nearest medic came to help and, you guessed it, took off her respirator thinking she might have to give CPR until a real medical team could get there. Seconds after removing her mask, the same damned seizures started, and we lost her. Fatality number two. The nearby workers put two and two together pretty quickly and didn’t make the same mistake of taking off their respirators. Unfortunately, by the time the warning reached everyone in the hull and we got the ship successfully evacuated, three other people died. One more had taken off her respirator, and two had damaged respirators and not bothered to get new ones.
We found the source of the gas quickly and caught the people who had brought it to Mars by tracing them through the logs. Every inch of the space dock, like just about everywhere else, is under constant surveillance. Each person’s implant ID can be traced and body-matched to the video logs. By the time we figured out who was responsible, they’d already boarded a ship bound for Earth and were on their way home.
Coran was livid. He shuttled over to the Victoria the day after we figured out what had happened and was there when we identified the perps. He said he would take care of notifying the authorities personally, since the attack was made on his property. I think the words he used were, “I’ll make sure no SOB Feffer ever does this again.” From what I understand, the authorities didn’t make their move until well after the ship landed. The perps were tracked on Earth until the authorities figured out with whom they were working and then nabbed them all. I forget what happened to them; I hope they are rotting away in some cell somewhere.
Needless to say, we got more careful. And we didn’t get any more trouble from the Feffers for quite some time.
But I could still kick myself for not asking more questions about the respirators. You see, we found out after the attack that simple, clean-air hospital-grade respirators wouldn’t have filtered out all the poison gas. No, the masks Coran gave us were the latest, highest-quality filtration masks money could buy. Coran and the Centers for Disease Control were the two largest customers for the company that made them. What was Coran’s biotech research facility researching that required them to have this kind of filtration?
The next year went by in a blur. We were in the midst of crew interviews and selection, selecting and stockpiling the frozen embryos that would provide the genetic diversity required for the colony to thrive, and working out the protocols that the crew would follow on their journey to maximize their chances of survival. The most troubling parts of the whole effort were the risk management meetings. As the Technical Director, I was required to attend.
For some engineers, risk management meetings are the reason they get out of bed in the morning. For others, these meetings are the reason they can’t sleep. It’s in risk management that key members of the technical team list all the things that could go wrong with the ship, the crew, or externally, and bin them into categories of “watch,” “mitigate,” or “accept.” Accept means that whatever the problem was, it was going to happen no matter what you did and therefore some backup system, or alternative approach had to be fielded to correct the inevitable problem. Mitigate means you could do something to keep the problem from happening, but it typically would require more time, more money, or both. Watch means you had no idea if it was going to happen or not—shit happens. Let me tell you, there is a lot that can go wrong.
Disease. Power failure. Reactor meltdown. Reactor explodes. Radiation fries everyone. Micrometeorite hit while traveling at twenty percent the speed of light blows it to smithereens. Cryocoolers fail; all the embryos die. Cryocoolers lose power briefly; all the embryos die. Engineers miscalculated the stresses on the hull during acceleration; everyone dies. Crew member goes crazy and damages a critical ship component; everyone is lost in space forever and dies. Feffers plant a bomb; everyone dies. Slight miscalculation in the trajectory causes the ship to miss the target star; everyone is lost in space forever and dies. Fuel leak prevents the ship from decelerating; it screams off into the cosmos forever and everyone dies. You get the idea. Our job was to engineer as many fail-safes and backups into the system as we could to “mitigate” as many of the risks as possible—which is impossible. But we did the best we could do.
I’m skipping over the next twenty years of hard work so that I can get to the salient points regarding what happened in those fateful days prior to the Victoria’s departure. Twenty years seems like a long time to those of you who are under fifty, but for those of us who are benefitting from the life extension therapies developed by Keegan Coran at North American BioPharma, it seems more like an extended adolescence—almost dreamlike. It went by quickly.
To make final preparations for the trip, I traveled to Mars three months prior to our planned departure. To say I wasn’t getting nervous would have been a complete lie. Two hundred and fifty souls will be awake and asleep in alternating cycles during the 160-year trip. But not me, I was to be among the ten thousand in cryostasis who wouldn’t know anything about the voyage until I was awakened upon arrival. If one of the identified risks struck, I would never know it.
A small group of humans were about to leave home forever for a chance at starting a new life somewhere else. Space telescopes all over the solar system had spent the last few years studying TRAPPIST-2c so that we would be as prepared as possible. The Breakthrough Starshot probe reported back that it had an atmosphere like Earth’s, meaning there is native, oxygen-producing life. We know there’s liquid water and most likely ice—a temperature range not too dissimilar to Earth. We also know there’s no alien civilization there using radio—the radio telescopes had not heard a peep.
My routine after arriving at Mars was anything but routine. There is absolutely nothing normal about preparing to forever leave Earth’s beautiful blue skies, warming oceans, or green forests. Still, I had a lot of work to do and not much time to think about it except when I tried to go to sleep at night. I was beginning to understand what Neil Armstrong must have felt like in the days and weeks leading up to Apollo 11. It was scary.
Coran summoned me to his biotech station two months out from launch. His shuttle came to the space dock to collect Ms. Blanc-Perot (yes, she was still there with me all the time) and me. Nothing about the short trip was particularly memorable, which means I’d actually gotten used to zooming around in Mars orbit, overseeing the construction of humanity’s first starship, and looking back at Earth only to see it as a small, starlike object—it was crazy.
When we arrived, Coran wasted no time in seeing us. Unlike the space dock with its construction zone appearance, look, and feel of barely controlled chaos, the biotech station was hyper sterile in appearance, quiet, and had the feel of being nearly empty of people. His office was the same—spartan, white, and minimalist. After we entered, he got right to the point. Everything that happened from this point forward is pinned in my memory like a movie. I can see, hear, and recall almost every detail. I’ve heard stress can do that.
“You’re taking my family with you,” he said. “You will make space available for Ruby, Ian, and Rhys.”
Ruby was his third wife. I’d met her only once and she seemed nice enough. Healthy too, I thought, as I began to internalize his request, beginning to assess her viability as a colonist. Ian and Rhys I hadn’t met. Both were studying at universities back on Earth and were a product of his second marriage. In retrospect, I wonder how the dynamics of that would have played out—he didn’t mention his second wife, the mother of the children he wanted to take on the voyage. Having his second wife along also would have provided some . . . interesting . . . dynamics.
“Mr. Coran, with all due respect, that will be very difficult to accommodate at this late a date. The crew has been selected for months and they have gone through extremely rigorous training. I—”
He cut me off.
“Dr. Bakshi, I’m not asking you to take my family as crew. I’m telling you to take my family on the voyage. I’m fine with them being asleep and awakened upon arrival.”
“Mr. Coran, I hear you. But your family hasn’t been through the genetic testing, the psychological interviews, the stress tests, all that. And in order to add them to the ship, we’ll have to drop four others from the roster—people who have been through all the screenings and are planning to go.”
“Three, not four,” he said. “I’ll not be going.”
“What? Oh, I assumed you wanted to accompany them on the trip,” I said, more than a bit surprised.
“No. I will remain here. But they are going. Do I need to remind you of our first meeting? I can play the recording if you like,” he said as he leaned forward.
I honestly thought he was going to lunge at me. I was taken aback at the intensity of his gaze.
“You don’t need to do that,” I said, remembering his cryptic warning that he might ask for a favor in return for funding the venture. I hadn’t forgotten the discussion, just partitioned it off in the hope that he would forget. He had not.
“Dr. Bakshi, I’ve taken the liberty to flag three candidates for de-rostering and have just sent you their profiles. The final choice is up to you, of course,” said the enigmatic Ms. Blanc-Perot.
That made me angry. She had known this was coming and not told me about it. How long had she known? Over the last few years, I had gradually overcome my suspicions of Renee and actually accepted her as a trusted colleague—even a friend. I felt betrayed at suddenly having her true loyalties made perfectly clear. My gaze at her must have looked like daggers. I remember her backing away from both me and Coran at that point.
That’s when it happened.
The entire station jumped two feet, the lights momentarily went out, and the rotation of the station went terribly askew, throwing us upward and to the side as the now-asymmetric rotational forces that were once providing simulated gravity now provided seemingly random forces that buffeted us about between wall and ceiling. As the lights returned, the alarm began going off—the alarm no one in space wants to hear.
Decompression.
Evacuate to the lifeboats.
That alarm.
Coran, with full Type-A personality on display, immediately grabbed a handhold near his desk and began making pronouncements. “Renee, you and Dr. Bakshi go to my personal lifeboat and get out of here while I find out what’s going on. I can take one of the staff boats. There are several.”
Another change in rotational state threw us all toward the outside wall of the station. Fortunately, though the shifts in rotational direction were dramatic, the spin-rate change was rather small, throwing us around with not-quite-enough force to break any bones.
The door to Coran’s office opened and a man I’d never seen before entered—he was armed with a flechette gun, which he pointed directly at Mr. Coran. I’m not a gun person, but I know about them because I’d had to authorize the security detail around Victoria to carry them after the incident with the poison gas. Flechette guns are the only “safe” type of gun to use on a spaceship. They fire small, fin-stabilized, metal darts that have semiautonomous aerodynamic control to remain on a target, even if it is moving. They have a high rate of fire and each flechette has roughly the same kinetic energy as a much-heavier bullet thanks to its high muzzle velocity. Perfect for killing people and not penetrating the relatively thin walls of a spaceship.
“This is where it ends, Mr. Coran,” said the stranger. He was apparently not a stranger to Coran or Ms. Blanc-Perot. They both reacted as if they knew him.
“Brandon, what’s this all about?” asked Coran, his gaze alternating between the man and his weapon.
“It’s about the end of your interstellar nightmare. We aren’t going to let you and your lackey here export humanity’s sins to other worlds before we’ve cleaned up the mess you made on Earth. Earth must come first and the only way the world gets the message is for those who are behind such obscenities to die. That means you.”
“Brandon, you’ve worked with me for years. Where did you pick up such beliefs?” asked Coran.
“Working with you to develop new drug therapies is one thing. That helps people back on Earth. But when you started working with him, that’s when I knew we were on opposite sides.” The him to whom he referred was undoubtedly me.
“What did you do?” asked Coran, moving ever so slowly toward the other man. I might not have noticed the movement had I not been “side on” to the confrontation with my view.
“Bombs. There were supposed to be three of them, but it looks like only two went off. But that is probably enough to wreck this station and bankrupt you. But you won’t care, because you’ll be dead,” said Brandon as he raised his gun and prepared to pull the trigger.
At that moment, the station’s rotation shifted again, throwing everyone sideways and upward, including Brandon and his gun. Sensing an opening during the shift in artificial gravity, Coran launched himself forward and tackled Brandon, knocking the air out of him. To Brandon’s credit, however, he didn’t let go of the gun.
Renee and I lunged forward to help restrain the gunman when we heard the whizzit of a series of flechettes being fired. Two caught Coran in the chest, several flew around him, and one superficially nicked my arm. Truth be told, I was so filled with adrenaline that I didn’t even notice the wound until much later.
Coran, despite being hit, had enough wherewithal and strength to wrestle the gun away from Brandon. Having me put him in a headlock and Renee grasping his legs certainly helped. Coran, finally realizing he had been shot, looked down at the blood now flowing freely from his chest and collapsed.
“You fool!” Coran snarled toward Brandon as I tightened my headlock on the captive and Ms. Blanc-Perot signaled for medical help.
The station lurched again as a new alarm sounded with an eerily calm woman’s voice announcing, “Biohazard containment breach. All personnel must put on protective gear immediately and evacuate the laboratory,” over and over again.
“You fool!” Coran repeated again as struggled to speak, blood now being coughed up with every syllable. “I’m on your side! Didn’t the Feffer leadership tell you to back off after that half-assed poison gas leak? Your petty attacks are a waste of time and won’t stop humanity in its foolishness and its destruction of the Earth. I can!”
What the hell? I thought.
Coran, now obviously oblivious to everyone present and very likely all-too-aware of his own life fading away, lashed out again. “Once the Victoria sets sail, I’m going to unleash the Omega Virus to wipe the slate clean. Not a single human can survive what we created. The Earth will be rid of the human pestilence for centuries until the colonists can return and re-colonize—this time building something more sustainable.”
He stopped speaking to cough—more blood. Despite the incredible pain he had to be in, he clutched the gun and kept it pointed at the man I was still restraining. I suddenly realized that him moving the barrel of the gun only a few inches would mean it was pointed at me.
“Biohazard containment breach. All personnel must put on protective gear immediately and evacuate the laboratory,” continued repeating incessantly in the background.
“It isn’t too late. Renee, get the suits. You can make sure the virus is secure and spread it after the Victoria departs,” Coran said, trying to regain a measure of the control he was used to having over every situation in his life. Correction—his soon-to-be-ending life.
Now I knew I was in trouble. And his next actions confirmed it.
Coran fired the gun at point-blank range into Brandon’s torso while I held him in the headlock. Instinctively knowing that I would be next, I used Brandon’s now lifeless body as a shield and pushed it onto both Coran and his flechette gun.
Whizzit. Another round of darts flew into poor Brandon as his body pummeled Coran and pinned him to the ground. The gun skidded across the floor as the laboratory shifted yet again.
I glanced toward Ms. Blanc-Perot as she looked from me to the dart gun, which now rested just next to her feet. I knew what she was thinking. Do I carry out the wishes of Mr. Coran, which means I need to kill the only remaining witness who could stop the plan? Or do I give up and claim to have had no knowledge of a madman’s plan to destroy the world? I guessed it would all depend upon how much she was aware of the plan and if there were a trail of evidence pointing toward her.
When she lunged for the gun, I knew what I had to do. She was in on the plan. And there must have been evidence out there to pin it on her or else why would she make such a foolish move?
Gauging the distance involved, I reasoned that she would get to the gun before I could, but she probably wouldn’t be able to aim it at me before I could tackle her. That would give me a chance. I lunged.
Sure enough, she did get the gun first and almost succeeded in filling me with holes. My tackle might have been successful in taking her down where my combination of larger body mass and likely greater upper-body strength could have taken the gun from her, but it didn’t work out that way. I did tackle her and knock her to the floor. I did grab the gun, which was pointed directly at my head, and I tried to take it from her. Her fingers were still near the trigger when the station’s rotation shifted again and lurched us up and to the side. Fortunately for me, the darts she was about to fire into my skull missed—and went into her own. I was blinded by the resulting mess as the darts ripped into her.
“Biohazard containment breach. All personnel must put on protective gear immediately and evacuate the laboratory.”
I had a decision to make and I had to make it quickly.
Should I relay what happened, all of it—including the “Omega Virus” and a madman’s plan to save the planet for the birds and the bees? If I did, then the authorities would likely impound anything and everything related to Mr. Coran and his fortune for years to come until they sorted it all out. That would likely include the Victoria and our plans to reach for the stars would be over. It would take too long to begin again and who knows if the money needed to do so would be available.
Or do I tell the story of how both this Brandon character and Ms. Blanc-Perot were in cahoots with the Feffers and I barely escaped with my life? No, that would have had the same outcome. The project would be ended, and the Victoria scrapped.
Then it dawned on me. Our individual implants had each recorded precisely what just transpired. And there were likely recording devices in the room that captured everything as well. No matter what I said, the truth would come out. Unless I destroyed the evidence. All of it.
The implants are always located in the upper-right chest, near the right armpit. Don’t ask me why, that’s just where they are located.
I took the flechette gun and shot so many darts into the upper right torsos of the three dead, crazy conspirators in the room that people will wonder if I was trying to cut their arms off. None of that data will survive. There wasn’t anything I could do about the recorders in the room except hope that the damage done by the bombs had messed up the recordings.
“Biohazard containment breach. All personnel must put on protective gear immediately and evacuate the laboratory.”
Then I heard, really heard, the announcement for the first time and realized I’d better get in a suit and off the station.
Being a biotech research facility, they had these emergency suits everywhere. They were almost one size fits all. One set was for women, the other for men. I put the suit on as quickly as I could and found Coran’s lifeboat, getting off the station just before the latter broke into two pieces. I’m guessing the fragments will remain in Mars orbit for years unless someone goes to the trouble to clean up the mess.
What about me? I’m recording this on my ship’s voice recorder as I look at the never-ending darkness of deep space that now surrounds me. Coran’s lifeboat is more than a mere survival pod, like the generic lifeboats used on most other space habitats and research facilities. No, Coran’s custom lifeboat has enough reaction mass and power to send me all the way back to Earth—if I wanted to go back to Earth. No, I turned off the transponder and used all the fuel to send me on a trajectory that will ultimately leave the solar system and never allow me, or this recording, to be found. I can’t risk the true story of what happened getting out too soon—if ever.
There’s enough water, air, and food here to last me for two months or so. That’s long enough for the Victoria to be safely on its way to the outer solar system. People need to think that all of us perished on the laboratory until the ship is so far into its journey that it can’t be called back.
The authorities may piece together that the station was attacked, but I doubt they can reconstruct what happened to the station from the thousands of pieces of debris into which it broke up. At least, I hope not. Not until the Victoria is long gone and impossible to recall.
From what I’ve read, dying from oxygen deprivation is just like getting groggy and going to sleep.
I guess I’ll find out.
Godspeed Victoria. Godspeed.