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CHAPTER 38:
Anticipation

USSF Media Office @JBSpaceNews
US Space Force is inviting credentialed media reporters to cover the return of the Percheron. This historic event marks the first round-trip of a reusable Earth-to-Mars interplanetary ship. The mission has suffered many triumphs and tragedies, and will be docking with Heinlein Station in two weeks.
As a reminder, Heinlein Station is an access-controlled military base. Reporters requesting travel to Heinlein are directed to upload their credentials at the link below.

ChirpChat, March 2044



Communications between Percheron and Earth had gotten easier over the last four months. As the ship closed the distance, communications time dropped from more than fifteen minutes when Bat arrived, to now just under a minute. With the Mars-transfer ship due to dock at Heinlein Station in just a few days, Nik and Glenn had been discussing with General Boatright that Nik needed to be there to meet the crew.

After all, he was the surrogate psychiatrist for Percheron—he’d spent more than two months on comms trying to teach Glenn everything he could about how to treat and counsel a crew that had come so close to death. Once the communications delay had dropped to less than five minutes round trip, he’d been able to conduct counseling sessions himself.

Dialysis, chelation, medication, a few minor surgical procedures, and the crew members began to recover. Bialik and Takeda would need continuing treatment, but they were stable. Katou might still need regeneration; once the cerebral edema stabilized, Glenn resected a patch of necrotic tissue from her liver and started stem cell treatment.

The psychology of the crew was not as simple. Each crew member had to deal not only with how the copper poisoning had affected themselves, but how it had affected the crew dynamic and trust.

Yvette was looking at months-to-years of treatment and therapy. Nik diagnosed her with schizophrenia, which was not just a neurological disorder, but a psychological one as well. It was possible to correct the underlying organic cause; in her case, neurotransmitter imbalances led to altered cognitive abilities and erratic behavior. The problem was that once the pattern of mood swings, intrusive thoughts, and abnormal memories developed, they became a part of her. On top of that, she would have to face legal and ethical challenges to her actions.

Glenn really hoped Nik could be there. He wasn’t sure if Jen would be able to make it, and frankly, he needed to see a friendly face. He may have saved the crew—a crew he’d been part of for years in training before his accident sidelined him—but things had been awkward. Yvette had been with them on Mars; she’d been the authority figure they’d followed during a medical crisis. Despite their doubts, and her own behavior, Taketani and Dvorak had still deferred to her. From time to time over the past four months they slipped back to deferring to her and treated Glenn almost as if he’d usurped her position.

Glenn would need medical attention, too. Space Force was adamant that Yvette could not be reinstated as medical officer, and Bialik didn’t have the experience to deal with the lingering effects of his hard acceleration, two vacuum exposures, broken eardrum, fights, damaged bionic arm, and the emergency replacement. MMC was also concerned with possible lung scarring from multiple decompressions, and the sporadic heartbeat irregularity reported a year ago on the Moon had returned. Either condition could ground any astronaut, but more so a triple amputee with “experimental” prosthetics and a history of risk-taking.

It would be a shame if Glenn was banned from spaceflight just when he had proven as capable—in fact more so—than a non-augmented human.


A tall man in uniform knocked on the open door of Nik’s office and entered immediately. “Doctor Pillarisetty, pack your go-bag,” Lieutenant Colonel Richardson told him. Richardson was the person Boatright had put in charge of communications between Percheron and the Earthside mission controllers.

“My go-bag. Does this mean they’re letting me go up there?”

“The general has made special arrangements. He assures me that you can handle the acceleration. Once you’re in free-fall, you’ll probably get along as well as anybody else.” Richardson looked meaningfully at the wheelchair at the side of Nik’s desk, then smiled.

That was a rarity. In all of the time Nik had interacted with the Space Force officer over the past months, he’d never known the man to smile.

“Well in that case, my go bag is sitting in the corner there. If you would be so kind as to grab that, I’ll be with you in just a moment.” Nik pushed his chair back from the desk, and pushed the wheelchair beside it out of the way. He reached down and touched the small control box at his waist, and with the faintest whirring sounds, stood up and walked around the desk.

Richardson’s face registered shock at Nik’s own variation on the exoskeleton originally developed for Glenn.

“Let’s go, Colonel. I’ve been waiting for this my whole life.”


Nik was struck by the similarities in appearance between Heinlein Station and Percheron. The reception area had several screens showing the approaching ship. One of them showed the view from a work-tug standing off from the docking area. It showed both the station and the spaceship—one looking like a scale model of the other.

Percheron was narrower, but almost as long, as Heinlein’s core. The ship’s habitat ring was considerably smaller, but it was only designed to accommodate twenty to thirty crew for a year-and-a-half at a time. Other distinguishing features were the engines at one end, external fuel tanks, the ground to orbit shuttle docked just in front of the fuel tanks and the bulge of Bat, still attached to Cargo Bay One.

The other two Lagrange stations—O’Neill at L5, and Clarke at L4—each consisted of a single set of nested concentric habitat rings on a short, narrow hub. Heinlein—located at the Earth-Moon L2 Lagrange point—had a broad cylindrical core with a habitat ring at one end—like a wider version of the Mars transfer ship. Eventually, Heinlein would have three rotating rings spaced sequentially along its hub, marking a departure from the wheeled designs of O’Neill and Clarke, or the haphazard cylinder and strut designs of the ISS and ill-fated Asimov Station. Of course, O’Neill and Clarke didn’t need additional structures attached to their rings, since they had free-floating shipyards nearby, while Heinlein intended to have shuttles and work-boats match orbit and rotation to dock directly to the station.

Bat’s drive section was now being detached from the tethers which Glenn had placed, and which had dragged the valuable Helicity2 drive back to the Earth-Moon system. Two construction tugs pulled it loose and matched rotation to dock the drive at a construction bay along the station’s spindle. Four more tugs were shepherding Percheron to dock bow-to-spindle with the station.

The decision had been made to not return Percheron to O’Neill or Clarke because those docks were occupied with construction of two more large transfer ships—Augeron, intended to supplement Percheron on Earth-to-Mars runs, while the latter ship underwent refitting, and Clydesdale, which would initiate a triangle route between Earth, Mars, and the Space Force’s planned asteroid base at Ceres. Once all three ships were in use, their Helicity3 drives would allow point-to-point travel to anywhere within the inner solar system in less than a month. There was a fourth-generation Helicity drive in development which would take humans to the moons of Jupiter and Saturn in just a few months per round trip. Nik knew that Glenn had plans to ensure that bionic augmented personnel played an integral role in the exploration and colonization of the solar system, but so much of that would hinge on what was about to happen next.


SFSS Ares Percheron arriving, Bay One.”

Nik looked around at the party waiting to greet the first individuals to come through the airlock. Colonel Richardson had been at his side for most the trip so far; it was almost as if the OSI officer considered himself as an aide to Nik rather than as an officer awaiting the return of personnel. He proved to be quite personable, very concerned about Glenn, and supportive of Shepard and Boatright’s plan to include bionically augmented personnel in space. They’d discussed the reception plan, a restricted group—including themselves—would meet the crew as they disembarked. Medical technicians would take Bialik, Takeda, and Katou directly to sickbay, and media representatives would be waiting in one of the hangers to officially greet the returning astronauts.

Besides Nik, Richardson, and the three medical personnel, he saw Colonel William Webb, commander of Heinlein Station, and Doctor Peter Schlecht, representing MMC. There were also were two stern-faced Space Force police officers, suggesting that somebody—possibly Shep—would be taken into custody as soon as they stepped off of Percheron. Rumors had been rampant among news services and social media the past week as Percheron entered the Earth-Moon system. Las Vegas was even giving odds on whether Shepard would be tried for piracy, or Barbier would be tried for dereliction of duty.

Nik seriously doubted that Shep would face charges. General Boatright had been extremely supportive, taking both the credit and the blame for Shep being on Bat without NASA’s or MarsX’s knowledge. Jen’s articles, and her work with improving USSF’s media profile had done wonders to rally public opinion behind both Shep and the OSI. He might have to testify, but few people truly thought he’d be punished for saving fourteen people.

Another favored topic among the gossip media was whether charges would be brought against anyone associated with the design and construction of Percheron. While news that Shepard had discovered the cause of crew illness and “cured” it, those reports had not included any official details of how the water supplies had become contaminated with copper. That didn’t stop the information from leaking out, after all, the more people who knew a secret, the less likely it would be kept. Space Force investigated the source of the leaked information—after all, they knew it wasn’t them—but with both NASA and MarsX personnel in the loop, the chance of keeping information about the faulty fungicide tank secret was virtually nil.

Nik suspected that Boatright knew information leaks would occur, and had likely planted the seeds for some of the rumors himself. Particularly those regarding the consequences of Shep placing himself in danger aboard Bat. The past few months, with Jen advising the general on shaping opinion via chirps, and revamping the USSF Media Office, had paid off in the public seeing Shep as the hero of this story. If anyone had plans to blame or punish Shep for his actions, they’d find public opinion firmly on Shep and the general’s side.

An alert sounded and a rotating light above the docking airlock turned from red to amber. The Percheron and Marsbase crews were coming home.


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