The American way of life barely made it through the Secret War. We got lucky in a lot of respects. Tabitha and I talk about it every now and then. We both agree that neither of us would have thought of another way to defend against the final Chinese/Russian assault in time. If 'Becca hadn't been infected by that damn flubell virus, the outcome could have been a lot different. We might could have escaped with the partial Clemons Dumbbell ECC we had but who knows? I don't like thinking about how lucky we really were. Tabitha tells me that I think about "what-ifs?" way too much. I think she is right. We survived, America prevailed, the human race will continue.
CHAPTER 22
It was going to take a while to figure out the tricks of interstellar navigation. We decided to start small and take baby steps out of the solar system. We warped to Mars in about two and a half minutes. We had christened our little warpship the U.S.S. Einstein. Tabitha and Margie were at the controls. Jim and I were in charge of celestial navigation. Rebecca and Sara were watching the power plant and warp core. Al and Anne Marie were in charge of general mission logistics. We entered into an orbit around Mars and started looking for interesting things. We landed in Cydonia. There were no pyramids to be found anywhere. We found no face either. I was always hoping there would be something.
We traversed several canals and headed to the Martian North Pole. Near where the ice caps met the desert, we took a few core samples. I never noticed any living creatures crawling around. It's possible that there might be some microbes in the core samples. When we had completed checkout of our exploration capabilities, we would come back to Mars and hang out a while. This time was more of a shakedown flight. We did hit the list of experiments and observations that a lot of planetary scientists had been writing about for decades.
We started near the equator then flew southwest to Ophir Chasma and back around east to Juventae Chasma. We saw all sorts of slope and bedrock material, cratered plateaus, and degraded craters. Then we turned northward toward the northern plains, Kasei Vallis, and the Viking I landing site. We finally sat down on the peak of Olympus Mons.
We hadn't developed individual warp fields yet. In fact, we were several years from that if at all, so we had to steal about ten new SAFER EMUs from NASA. We had our Earthside black bag connection take care of the paper work. NASA never knew that they had the spacesuits to begin with. We sat up a group in the Research and Development Dome back on Moon Base 1 to reverse-engineer the EMUs, redesign them, and make them more mobile and useful. That would take a year or so also.
At any rate, we suited up, cycled through the airlock with a lights-off lights-on maneuver, and descended the loading ramp of the Einstein. Once we had set foot on the Martian surface, Tabitha and Margie set up an American flag. The view from Olympus Mons was incredible. Sara scratched into a rock with a screwdriver "Sara Tibbs was here." Then she passed it around and we each took turns. Jim signed it last and dated it.
This wasn't a science mission. This was a technology demonstration mission. We had proven we could fly about four times the speed of light and navigate to a specific point. We had proven we could determine where we were once we dropped out of warp. We then demonstrated that we could locate and land on a planet and conduct EVAs. It was time to head back home. Tabitha corralled us back into the Einstein and we began the liftoff checklists.
"Ramp up?" Tabitha asked.
"Check." Margie replied.
"Everybody on board?"
"Check."
"Okay, liftoff."
"Check."
Not much of a checklist. The warpships made spacetravel almost as easy as a Sunday drive, as long as there were no technical difficulties. This time we stressed the ECCs up to three percent and shaved another minute and thirty-seven seconds off the trip. It took about twenty-three seconds in warp to travel back to the Moon. The average speed was about twenty-four times the speed of light.
Tabitha brought us into the spaceport's waiting zone, which was just outside the spaceport warp field. The spaceport's field is always set to oscillate on and off at a kilohertz or so. She simply flew Einstein through it when it was in the off position—of course, that was done in fractions of a second via a flight control computer and was transparent to her. We debarked and transferred the samples and EVA suits to a quarantined lab for analysis and cleanup, respectively.
Analysis of Einstein showed that it was in tip-top condition. The space travel at twenty-four times the speed of light had had no ill effect on it. It was a good ship. We prepared it for our next flight. This time we planned to visit every planet in the outer solar system and a few Kuiper Belt objects to boot.
Our flight trajectory was designed as multiple warps. The first warp would be straight to Jupiter space. We clocked out at about thirty times the speed of light. I'm here to tell you that Jupiter is beautiful! We did a very fast orbit around it so we could look at the giant red spot. Absolutely amazing. A few times, we actually turned off the warp field so we could see it with our own eyes for a few seconds. Then we clicked the field back on and looked through the viewscreen. We wanted closer looks at the moons, and the radiation from Jupiter was a bit more than we wanted to deal with. After all, both Tabitha and 'Becca were about five weeks or so pregnant. Oh, I guess I forgot to mention that. It would appear that they are having a race to see who can have the first baby in space. We wanted to attempt our first interstellar jump before they got too uncomfortable and big for space travel. The EMUs aren't designed to accommodate a woman in her third trimester. And both Tabitha and 'Becca said that we're not setting foot on an alien world without them.
We mostly wanted to see Europa. It supposedly had a very deep ice coating along with a water ocean underneath the ice. We pushed Einstein through the thick layer of ice on Europa's surface. The ECCs operated at only two percent to do this. At about ninety-four kilometers, the stresses on the warp field stopped and we could tell that we had broken through to a water ocean. The hole that we had just made through the ice immediately froze shut above us. We slowly panned around and illuminated the dark ocean with the outside lights, which were set to oscillate opposite the outer warp field. Near what seemed to be the bottom of the Europan ocean we found a lava flow. There was a lot of particle debris floating and drifting in the water but we couldn't tell if it was alive or not. A larger piece of the floating material seemed to alter its path and then it darted toward a smaller chunk. The smaller chunk took off like a bat out of hell. We focused the cameras in on the region a little tighter and realized that the debris floating in the water were actually schools of some type of fish.
"I want one of those!" Al said.
"Not sure how we could catch it, Al," Margie responded. "We can come back and get one some other time."
We sat still for a while and watched the fish swim and eat each other. These weren't ordinary fish. Upon closer inspection, we could see that they had no eyes. I also wasn't sure if I saw any gills or not. We would have to catch some of these things and have the right folks study them. Some other time. We'd watched the fish for about twenty minutes when Tabitha decided we should continue with our mission. Again, we were on a technology demonstration mission, not a science exhibition.
We tunneled back up through the ice and out to a very high orbit around the Jupiter system. Jim and I did a little celestial navigation and then on to Saturn.
Okay maybe I'm an old softy when it comes to the beauty of our solar system, but Saturn is an incredible sight. It is hard to say which I like better, Jupiter or Saturn. The big ticket item at the Saturn system was Titan. Ever since I read The Puppet Masters I wanted to know if there really were Titans. Titan's dense atmosphere has kept its surface a secret from astronomers. We learned its secrets. In fact, the planetary scientist had hit it pretty damn close. At about a hundred and eighty kilometers from the surface we hit a layer of nitrogen that was at one Earth atmospheric pressure. At about twenty kilometers from the surface, we hit a cloud of methane vapor. Just below the clouds it was raining methane and the stresses on the warp field suggested atmospheric pressures on the order of a thousand or more times greater than that of Earth. Visibility was very poor and we couldn't see well enough to navigate. Infrared didn't help, because there was none. The cloudy moon was cold. We had to switch to radar navigation and if we came back, we would bring a sonar system or something also. We did feel our way around with the radar for a while until we found a lake. The lake was at about minus one hundred seventy-seven degrees Celsius. The lake was liquid methane.