2.
Lee was first up the next morning. He did his daily tai chi exercises, settled down for thirty minutes of calisthenics and another half hour with the gravimetric weight machines. He followed up with a sonic shower to shake off the sweat before donning a fresh jumpsuit.
The others were still asleep, but Lee decided to wait for them before eating breakfast. Instead, he went into the computer library and called up some history. He put on one of the headsets and gave a set of verbal commands. Instantly, the history of the Tomahawk appeared. He scanned the information at an almost ridiculous pace, as he always preferred his own speed-reading abilities to having information wired directly into his brain.
From what he read, he knew the Tomahawk had been the first manned mission to 505-D. The crew of three men and one woman had made the initial discovery that, of the seven planets in System 505, D most closely resembled Earth and could be colonized. Lee scrolled through the crew list - Muryah Abernathy, mission specialist; Captain Michael Corvac, mission commander; Ang Wu, mission specialist; Commander Turkoman Hedu, engineer.
Lee scrolled further, reading where Tomahawk had made its final probe launch to send information back to Earth ahead of the shuttle. The shuttle had taken off, but had never made it home. It was determined - guessed was more like it - the ship had met a grisly fate in a collision with a meteor, despite the guidance system’s multi-layered sensor suite. That all the systems could fail simultaneously was nearly impossible, but so was just about every other explanation Lee could think of.
Since Tomahawk, three more missions had visited 505-D, all unmanned. They had showered the planet with sensor probes to determine factors such as environment, animal life, soil content, water content and weather patterns. The last part was very important. The planet had unique weather patterns, including a rainy season that made Asia’s monsoon season seem like drizzle by comparison.
What Lee was more interested in was Ang Wu. Like Lee, Wu was from China. Lee had always admired Wu. Both were of mixed heritage – Chinese/Vietnamese for Lee and Chinese/English for Wu. Wu’s perseverance against prejudice from two societies inspired Lee to cope with his own racial issues, making it easier for him to carry the aspirations of two nations on his shoulders.
Lee had the screen cursor highlight Wu and commanded the computer to pull up Wu’s oral history. He then closed his eyes to allow Wu’s own voice to inspire him to complete the mission.
Unbeknownst to Lee, Veronica Martine was watching the meteorologist as he listened to the library computer. She marveled at how much mileage he could get out of one audio file. It certainly couldn’t be as much fun as exploring the depths of the ocean, she thought.
Martine hoped she could take out one of the ATV’s and finally reach 505-D’s ocean. She hadn’t been able to do more than dangle her feet in the forest stream since arriving almost a week earlier. She longed to explore the depths of that ocean. Of course, that meant leaving the safety of the cockpit Calloway had strengthened and she wasn’t sure if she was ready to be that defiant of the engineer’s suffocating rules.
She had grown up in some of the worst slums of Rio de Janeiro; where life was traded and thrown away with alarming ease and appalling regularity, even in the 22nd century. She had escaped the trials and tribulations of those times by going to the ocean. While her friends were content to go topless along with the rest of the female beach-goers, Veronica had explored the water. She was fascinated by the sea life, not by the human life ashore that only ruined Earth’s most precious resource.
Martine took her turn in the workout room. As the most muscular and toned of the crew, she needed the most intense workout to keep her shape. Being a bodybuilder had its advantages. As a child, it kept boys from trying to have their way with her. As an adult, it helped build up her endurance for the rigors of scuba diving and deep-sea diving. With space travel, it worked to keep her body and mind sharp.
Max Harrigan wasn’t one to let on, but he really admired Martine. That admission was something he found very difficult to say aloud. The men in his family had always taken the stance of being in control of everything, especially women. Max had been no different, whether it was with his three ex-wives or female colleagues at the University of Edinburgh where he had been head of the zoology department. He remembered all too well the severe clash of egos he created with various members of the ISEA when he joined the organization’s extraterrestrial biology department.
Harrigan had been around long enough to know everything in life was gray. In the past, his use of women might have brought a clamor from women’s rights groups, but, in the 22nd century, men and women shared virtually equal footing in everything. Women used him as much as he did them.
Rather than a morning workout, Harrigan opted to go straight to the cargo bay to check his mountain climbing equipment. He wished Martine would come along. He admired her physique and definitely would not mind seeing her muscular curves move in sync under the skintight thermal jumpsuit required for work in cold-temperature environments like the deep sea.
Calloway was already in the bay when he got there. He wondered if the man ever slept. It was bad enough hearing the engineer remind everyone that he was the only regular professional in the crew (using a skewed definition based on being awake while the others hibernated). Harrigan hated vain bastards like that, if only because it challenged his own desire to dominate every environment.
“Good morning, Harrigan,” Calloway said, good-naturedly, looking up from one of the larger all-terrain vehicles.
This one was equipped with three transaxles, instead of the usual two, to ensure better traction on rocky ground. Unlike the deep-sea ATV, the mountain ATV’s enclosed interior was strengthened against the high winds and rockslides typical of many mountain ranges.
Harrigan liked that it was well-heated and comfortable. Growing up in the Firth of Forth, where the sun hardly ever shined and a hot summer to Scotsmen was a mild spring to the rest of the world, had made him keep all of his abodes and work spaces as warm as possible. Considering his penchant for mountain climbing in the coldest of climes, it was odd, to say the least, but there was no explaining the human psyche.
“Got your gear, Mr. Calloway?’’ Harrigan inquired, trying to be as polite as possible. “It’ll be a wee bit cold up on that mountain. Of course, I won’t expect ye to climb. Ye can monitor the server robots as I make my ascent and I’m sure Miss Boronova could use a hand finding the plant life underneath all the snow.’’
“Contrary to popular belief, Harrigan,’’ Calloway started, “I don’t spend all my time in engineering. I’ve done some climbing, believe it or not. On Mars and Jupiter.”
Harrigan raised his eyebrows in surprise; he hadn’t known that. Mountain climbing on Jupiter was extremely hazardous because of the intense gravity, the bizarre weather patterns and the thick cloud cover that hung low over almost the entire surface of the various floating continents within the planet’s atmosphere. Probes had yet to penetrate the intense gas clouds to see if Jupiter had any actually stationary land mass. Maybe the man can be useful after all, Harrigan thought to himself.
“Well, what made ye crazy enough to scale a mountain on Jupiter?” Harrigan inquired.
“Rescue mission,” Calloway replied, while checking the interior of the ATV. “Couple of idiot kids went sightseeing and ran right into the side of Jupiter Kilimanjaro, one of the highest peaks on the planet. Authorities quickly formed a rescue mission and just grabbed whoever was around. I was coming back from a remote post past Pluto and they snagged me.
“I can tell you I was scared spitless, but I went up. I mean, we had the server robots hovering alongside in case we fell. One guy did slip, though and, before they caught him, he broke his jaw against a rock and cracked six ribs. So, I’ll keep on eye on you, Harrigan, but if you get in trouble, expect to see the server robots before you see me, okay?”
“Aye, man, I’ll be careful,” Harrigan answered, with an unexpected smile.
“Besides, I’m not really climbing it, just hitting some predetermined points to set up some of Lee’s meteorological equipment. Maybe when the mission’s over, I’ll have time to really scale that peak, all the way to the top, the way a man is supposed to climb it.”
Harrigan heard footsteps and turned around, missing Calloway’s alarmed reaction to his boast. The Scotsman greeted Janice, who somehow managed to carry an armful of books while wiping the sleep from her eyes. He helped by placing the tomes within the ATV’s rear storage compartment. He looked up to see if she had anything else, but she had walked back to the cafeteria with nary a word.
“Och, this is going to be a quiet trip,” Harrigan quipped. “Let’s get some breakfast.”
Penski was the last to arrive at the cafeteria for breakfast. She clicked on the wall monitor before she sat down, giving the crew a constantly changing view of the exterior of the ship. A server robot flitted up and the small automaton hovered over the table long enough to place a tray of food in front of her before heading off.
“Good morning ladies and gentlemen,” she greeted. “I hope you all slept well because we have a full day ahead of us. Of course, all work and no play make Humboldt a dull shuttle. So, Martine, you and Lee get to go the ocean. I need wide scans of sea life, and I also need to see how the ocean fuels the weather. Harrigan, you, Janice and Calloway will test the mountain. I will suffer all by myself back here at the ship.
“I do want to stress, however, that we are behind schedule somewhat and we need to get as much work done as we can in the next few days. The equipment we’re setting up needs a one-week window for total completion, but I want extra time for any delays. We shouldn’t be hitting the colonists with last-minute news when they’re in orbit.”
If Calloway felt any vindication, he didn’t show it to Penski. She was hesitant to admit that he’d been right yesterday because she didn’t want to feed his ego. When she had compiled the data for the probe she later sent into orbit, she had seen that her mission was, indeed, behind schedule.
This factored into the assignments, but was not the most important one. She wasn’t blind to the fact that Harrigan and Martine admired each other. She also had seen Boronova and Lee exchange enough brief smiles to know something might have been smoldering between the two (of course, she hadn’t pegged Lee as a ladies’ man; how could a romantic relationship with the man last when compared to carrying the weight of two nations on his shoulders for so long, she mused). Whatever the romantic motivations, she couldn’t let those embers flare into a forest fire until after the mission was completed.
Thus, to keep their minds on their work, she had made sure the potential couples worked apart. Lee hated heights and Janice loved them, so it was natural to keep Lee off the mountain. Harrigan’s ego would not allow him to stand by and let Calloway complete the mountain survey so he would be apart from Martine for the day. And, Penski noted, her engineer’s brusque personality would probably bother Boronova to no end, keeping her on her toes.
“Looks like a stiff breeze is picking up out there,” Lee commented, out of the blue.
On screen, the camera was on the forest. They could see the tops of the trees swaying heavily. Fortunately, it wasn’t monsoon season and Lee’s forecast hadn’t predicted any rain for several more days.
“It’s funny,” Martine said. “But, it was almost like that yesterday. In the forest, the wind, it was almost like it was whispering to me. I know it sounds strange, but it was soothing. It actually made the day go by a lot smoother.”
“Hey, Harrigan,” Calloway called out. “Your friends are back.”
Harrigan looked up from his eggs and eyed the screen. Sure enough, about fifty yards from the ship, four creatures that closely resembled deer grazed on grass. Harrigan watched them for a while, but made no move to get up. It was useless trying to go outside to observe them up close; they ran at the first footstep they heard.
“Calloway, you’re the engineer,” Harrigan said, finally. “Can’t you rig up some kind of trap, maybe stun them so I can get some up-close time with them?”
Everyone got a good laugh out of that, everyone except Calloway. Penski started to ask him if he was okay with being the butt of the joke when she noticed he wasn’t even looking at her. He was staring past her, at the monitor screen. The look of shock on his face had her spin quickly around. Somebody dropped a fork on a plate, but she was too busy gasping to notice who had done it.
On the screen, the deer-like creatures had gone away. Instead, the camera had focused in on something else. It was about a hundred yards away, coming out of the forest, moving steadily towards the shuttle.
It was a woman!
The woman was almost to the ship by the time the crew got the cargo bay ramp down. Calloway was the first one out, but Penski quickly got ahead of him. She didn’t want him starting off any conversation with the stranger on a bad note.
Upon seeing them, the woman stopped. She eyed them with a big smile on her face, while the crew of the Humboldt gave her the once-over. She looked incredibly fit. Her hair appeared to have been professionally cut. She wore a one-piece jumpsuit and boots, which Calloway recognized as an ISEA uniform that had been in use a decade earlier. Calloway looked at the name sewn into the uniform’s left breast pocket and saw that it had faded away, but, he had seen the woman’s photo enough to recognize her even though she looked as if she had not aged a day.
“Muryah Abernathy,” he said, incredulously.
The woman smiled even wider at the mention of her name.
“Wow, how’d you guess that?”