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CHAPTER 40

December 31, 2094 (Earth timeline)

July 26, 2092 (Ship timeline)

approximately 2.122 light-years from Earth

2.122 light-years from Proxima

“At this point, we are far enough away from Earth that the information lag is probably three or more years behind.” Rain rolled her neck back and forth to get the kinks out. Her shoulders felt pretty stiff too. “Doc, how long before I feel normal here?”

“You’ve been lying down for several years, Dr. Gilster. It’ll probably take some time,” Dr. Maksim Kopylova told her. “My own neck and back both feel like I’ve been through twelve rounds of wrestling with a bear.”

“The electrostim didn’t keep us in as good of shape as they claim, huh?” Rain asked rhetorically. “Maybe I need to do some yoga or something.”

“Yoga would be good. At least do some walking and stretching. And make certain to hydrate well.” Kopylova shined a light in her eyes, checking her pupillary response. And then motioned to her that she was done. “You are as healthy as can be and seem steady enough on your feet. Get dressed and enjoy your week awake.”

“Thank you, Mak.” Rain slid off the examination table and started mingling through her articles of clothing laid across a cart at the foot of the table. “Anything else?”

“Well, not really. Just be prepared for the ‘all hands’ briefing at eleven hundred hours,” Maksim told her.

“What’s it about?”

“Captain’s update. I’d say that it is probably a typical thing for this point in a long-duration mission like this, but there’s never been a long-duration mission like this.” The doctor chuckled and grinned, causing his mustache and goatee to look even more overstated of a facial feature than usual. Rain liked it. The doctor was handsome and probably closer to her age than most on the ship, besides the captain.

“Alright, I’ll see you then,” Rain said awkwardly. After all, she was standing there in front of him mostly naked in a very clinical setting. Maksim was so professional he only nodded at her and let himself through the curtains of the examination room.

“See you then, Dr. Gilster,” he said from behind the curtain.

* * *

“Rain!” Enrico Vulpetti held out a hand to greet her. “Have you met Commander Rogers here? Mike, this is Dr. Lorraine Gilster. She’s the one who found the signal from Proxima in the first place.” Enrico introduced the man sitting next to him. The man stood up stiffly and held out a hand. Rain was surprised that he was not wearing the typical flight coveralls that the others onboard typically wore. Instead, he was wearing black tactical pants, a dark navy-blue T-shirt, and sneakers.

“Ma’am, it is my honor.” Rain shook the man’s hand. It was firm and strong but gentle. The man looked to be in his early thirties with dark closely cut straight hair, brown eyes that were bright and serious, and a solid, extremely athletic frame of nearly a hundred and eighty-three centimeters tall. As solid as he looked, Rain approximated his body weight to be over ninety kilograms, maybe more.

“Commander of what?” Rain asked.

“Hahaha! Rain, you’re funny.” Enrico laughed at her. “You’ve not spent much time with military, have you?”

“No, not really. I don’t really know much about it. Commander implies navy, right?” She asked politely.

“Yes ma’am, I’m in the navy.” Rogers smiled.

“Dammit, Mike, don’t be so humble.” Enrico slapped him on the shoulder. “Mike here is the leader of the US Navy SEAL team that has been appointed as security for our first embassy with Proxima. He’s here to protect us.”

“All by yourself, Commander?”

“No ma’am. There is a team of us here on security detail.”

“Where’s the team, then?” Rain asked. “And how did we not meet before we left Earth?”

“Well, ma’am, my team is over there at that table. We were brought on quickly and all of us went down to cryo almost immediately. That was done for, um, diplomatic reasons,” Rogers explained.

“Diplomatic reasons?” Rain didn’t understand what that meant. Why would a security team on the crew be kept from the rest of the crew? That made no sense to her.

“Rain, Rain, there was an entire multinational security force that was brought on quietly.” Enrico laughed. Rain wasn’t sure if he was laughing at her naivety or her lack of knowledge or what in particular was so funny.

“Dr. Gilster,” Commander Rogers interrupted. “It was done quietly, in order to keep any last-minute diplomatic disagreements from being stirred up within the crew.”

“Charles did this at the order of the UN Security Council and the White House,” Enrico said, motioning across the room at Charles Jesus. Both he and Rain had known him pretty much since the beginning of the entire Proxima affair. “While it is a multinational team, it isn’t uniformly spread and there isn’t complete representation from every nation that might have wanted it. So, it was done quietly, quickly, and before anyone could object.”

“Well, I still don’t know what that means, but Commander, it is nice to meet you.” Rain looked around the galley that was filling up. “How many are in this security force?”

“There are thirteen of us, ma’am. Not quite enough to protect you against an entire planet if it came to that, but we’ll do our best to keep you and the rest of the Samaritan’s crew safe,” Rogers said humbly.

“So, a baker’s dozen of you, ten of the flight crew including Captain Crosby, and um, let me see, eighteen of the science team . . . forty-one? Yes, forty-one total of us. That’s a considerable crew for a first interstellar mission. I hope they didn’t give any of you red shirts.” Rain laughed. Enrico and the commander didn’t seem to get her joke. “I refuse to wear the damned red coveralls.”

“Red shirts, ma’am?” Rogers inquired. “We do have some red coveralls, but most of us will stick to our uniform requirements.”

“Hahaha! Now who’s funny?” Rain asked. “I suggest you two go watch some late-last century space exploration science fiction entertainment. The guys wearing red shirts were always the expendable security teams and whatnot. They were the extras in the movies like ‘Crewman Jones’ that nobody ever knew more about and as soon as things went bad, they were the ones that got vaporized by the alien ray guns.”

“I see, ma’am.” Rogers grinned at her. “I’ll make a standing order for none of my team to wear red, then.”

“If any of them are named Jones or Smith, you might consider getting that changed as well.” She chortled.

“Can I have your attention, please?” Executive Officer Artur Clemons said in a loud but calm voice that was barely audible over the multiple conversations throughout the galley. He stood at the front of the room where the assembly stage was. The ship’s chief of security, Mike Rialto, stood next to him at the ready. Ready for what, Rain wasn’t so sure.

“Is it eleven hundred already?” Rain said in a normal voice. The commander had immediately quieted down and said softly to her that they would speak again soon. He filtered toward a table that had several other younger multinational people that she didn’t recognize. A quick head count tallied up to thirteen. Rain figured that was the security team. “Enrico, mind if I join you?”

“Please.” He pointed to the seat next to him. Rain caught a glimpse of Dr. Kopylova slipping in the back entrance to the galley, scanning for a place to sit. She smiled and nodded him in their direction.

“Thank you,” she told Enrico. “Do you mind if the doctor joins us?”

“Not at all.”

Can I have your attention, please?” the XO shouted this time. The chatter in the galley dropped to almost silence, but not quite.

“Doc,” Enrico whispered to Kopylova as he sat next to them.

“Alright, now that I have everyone’s attention, the captain has a few things to go over with you.” Artur turned and nodded to the door and Captain Crosby entered.

“Hey everyone . . . ” Crosby’s voice trailed off for a second as he shuffled through some things on his datapad and then set it aside. Finally, a briefing appeared on the data screen behind him. “Sorry about that. A captain’s job is never done.”

“Any idea what all this is about?” Rain whispered to Enrico.

“None.”

A graphic displaying the ship’s trajectory with Earth on the left side and Proxima marked on the right appeared on the screen. The ship flashed in light blue with a solid gray line behind it showing where they had been and a dotted one in front of it showing the path ahead.

“According to astronavigation, we are officially two point one two two light-years from Earth today. All estimates show us at halfway to Proxima. Our current relative speed with Earth and Proxima is about zero point eight five c. We’re moving faster than anybody ever has before—at least anybody from Earth that is. The doctor has reported in that all of the complement of the Samaritan is in good health and with no symptoms from long-duration cryo. To me, that is great news—best news I could have hoped for. Also, it is likely that sometime about now, the signal sent from Earth telling the Proximans that the Samaritan is on its way there should be reaching them. In other words, from this day forward we can assume that they know we’re on our way to them.

“We have the latest news from Earth. All the latest news feeds have been downloaded; just keep in mind they are almost three years behind due to the speed of light lag. Also note that you have all received personal data from home. I’ll let you folks filter through that as you desire. The highlights that are pertinent to us are as follows. One, construction of the Emissary is ongoing and crew choices are being made.” The latest video of the next interstellar ship to be built by humanity started. It was from what appeared to be a survey drone’s point of view. Rain guessed it must have been flying around it, making three-dimensional maps and historical records of the building process. The Moon in the background was a familiar and comforting sight to her. There were many audible approvals muttered throughout the crew.

“Initial design testing of the propulsion system suggests the Samara Drive for that ship will be much more efficient than ours and the speeds available might approach ninety-nine percent the speed of light. There is no scheduled launch date as of yet.

“Two, the Solar Gravity Lens Telescope has gone through initial checkout and is now fully operational. The first available images of the Proxima system are in the data download. I’m sure you will find them to be very interesting. I’ve looked at a couple of them and the images of Proxima b are absolutely stunning. Since the Proximans don’t have satellites yet, I suspect that these are better aerial images of their home planet than they have.”

The display screen switched to several views of Proxima b from the SGLT that caused quite the reaction throughout. The planet looked like Earth. The continents were all wrong, of course, but it looked blue and green and white just like Earth. There were two small moons that were clear in one of the images. Rain was amazed at the resolution the telescope was able to achieve. The images were beautiful. She was even more invigorated to see the planet and do what she could to save the Proximans from their genetic downward spiral—even though she wasn’t a geneticist.

“Three, as of yet there is no change on the status of birthrate on Proxima, which I guess none of us expected there to be. By this point, they’ve likely been able to absorb the data dump on genetics that we sent them but their technology level is still way too low to do much about it. We’ll just have to wait and see when we get there.

“Four, the whereabouts of Dr. Thomas Pinkersly are still unclear and nobody has been able to identify this man . . . ” An image of a man appeared on screen in multiple angles. One image set listed him as Patrick O’Hearn and the other as Ray Gaines. The images were clearly of the same man although the hair color was slightly different between them and the latter images showed the person wearing glasses. “Nobody knows who this man is or who he is affiliated with, but we do think he is key to understanding what happened to Dr. Pinkersly, Dr. Burbank, and the sabotage of the Samaritan. Anybody with any clues of this man’s identity please come see me, Artur, or Mike.”

“Enrico, doesn’t he look familiar to you?” Rain whispered. Then it hit her. Captain Crosby had just said sabotage of the Samaritan. Sabotage! She could see the same reaction spreading like wildfire across the galley.

“Please, please, hold it down. I plan to go into much more detail here.” Crosby held up a hand and was trying to calm the crowd as best Rain could tell. “We are currently out of danger. And that is mostly due to Dr. Roy Burbank of the design team at Interstellara, Incorporated. This man, Ray Gaines, or whoever the hell he is, actually managed to get onboard the ship, perform various types of sabotage to the PINS, and left us flying blind across the void. It was clear that the intent of the sabotage was to keep us from ever reaching Proxima. During the process of the sabotage Dr. Burbank, who just so happened to be near the Samaritan on a sightseeing cruise ship, came onboard and found the first bit of sabotage and fixed it for us. At the time, we believed that Dr. Burbank had then left with a fast Space Force vessel and was on his way to be safe and sound at home while we ramped up the Samara Drive to full power.”

“Did you two know any of this?” Enrico asked them. Rain shrugged. She was bewildered. It was all news to her. But something about that Gaines fellow was bothering her. Something way back years ago, deep in her memories.

“Pay attention.” Kopylova grunted.

“We were several months into the mission. The Samara Drive was running at full power on the Weak Energy Condition Acoustic Violator. In other words, we were on our way with no turning back. We then received a message from home explaining that Dr. Burbank had not reported home and was missing. Upon further investigation, we found Dr. Burbank here on the ship in the cryobed slated for Dr. Thomas Pinkersly. Dr. Burbank had a serious head trauma but was alive.”

Captain Crosby waited after that and Rain could tell he was letting the news sink in on the crew as to what had happened. Rain realized that the poor man was stuck in the cryobed on the starship against his will by this Gaines person. And it was highly likely that Dr. Pinkersly was in on this. It was all so crazy and almost unbelievable. Why would anybody want to keep the Samaritan from reaching Proxima so badly that they would do such a thing? Who didn’t want the ship making the trip anyway? There were only a few groups of isolationists across the Sol system that argued deeply against the mission, but there wasn’t that many of them. The only real opposition had been early on, by that jerk at the UN hearings she’d originally attended years prior. That jerk had parleyed the opposition into a political career. Rain was trying to recall the politician’s name. She made a note to discuss it with Charles. He had been there as well.

“We’ve yet to wake Dr. Burbank up to greet you all because there is more. Once we found Roy, well, we also learned from home that his wife was pregnant with their first child. Roy’s wife gave birth to a baby girl. She is, I think, about three years old or so by now. Folks, this is a seriously sad state of affairs for Dr. Burbank. On the one hand, we’d all be lost in space or maybe even dead by now, which is highly likely, had he not been here. We owe Roy for what he has done. He also came up with the solution to the sabotaged navigation system that is guiding us on our way currently. More that we owe him.

“But on the other hand, Roy is devastated emotionally. We’ve had him on suicide watch continuously since we found him. Imagine what he’s going through. He will never see his wife again. He will never get to meet his child. This has been a horrific and bizarre string of events.”

Rain was floored by the story. Just hearing it brought tears to her eyes. She could hear gasps and whispers, and people saying their own versions of “oh my God” under their breath. The general idea that somebody had done this to the ship and to this poor man was startling and unnerving. It still bothered Rain that she couldn’t remember that politician fellow’s name. She recalled mostly that he had been a total ass.

“We plan to wake Roy tomorrow morning. I’d ask that you all get to know him and do your best to make him feel like a part of the crew and the mission. He needs something to give him purpose. I’m sending all of you a datafile on Roy’s credentials and standard crew information. Get to know it and help this man out. He deserves better than we can give him.

“Alright, that was the hard part. Finally, I guess by now you have all noticed that there are about thirteen more people onboard the ship than when you were briefed before we launched. I’m going to go through the personnel information for each of these crew members one by one and I want you all to meet them today. These brave souls are here to act as our security team once we reach Proxima and set up an embassy there. They will be there to protect you on the ground. In a moment I will have Dr. Jesus brief us on their diplomatic status and mission. Before that, I want to make abundantly clear to all of you on this ship that I am the captain of this ship and Chief Mike Rialto is the top cop on the ship. Mike has top security authority over all matters on the ship. The security crew has no jurisdiction on the ship other than as passengers. I’m making this point to all of you, not the security force; they understand their mission orders. Commander Rogers, the leader of the security detail, has subordinated himself and the security force to Chief Rialto at all times while on the ship. Any matters of security while here, please bring them to Mike. Hopefully, we won’t have any such issues. God knows we’ve had enough trouble already with Gaines and the sabotage.

“Ambassador Jesus, please come up now and brief us on your mission orders,” Crosby said. He stepped podium right as Charles approached.

“Thank you, Captain Crosby,” Charles started. Rain watched and listened with fascination. So many things had happened while she was asleep. She couldn’t believe all that she’d missed.



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