America One: War of the Worlds (10 page)

“OK,”
replied Dave not yet seeing Ryan’s vision.

The long conversation ended as many of crew on both ends were trying to work out why this was so important.

To Ryan, it was easy, and seeing the way the people lived in the old mall, made him realize what had gone wrong on the first mother ship as well as on the Martian planet itself. The living quarters had not been optimized to a perfect level for habitation by humans.

Nobody really thought it that important, but Ryan wanted perfection before he retired from space travel, and he believed he had found the way. People living on Mars, or in the trading ships would live in the exact same conditions that they would be used to on earth. He even wanted to build a massive new mall on the Nevada base.

Chapter 6
 
Lots of Gold

“Disabling Fleet Autopilot,” stated Jonesy three days later and 250 miles above the Martian surface. They had activated all the shields in case they were attacked on arrival, and one by one the commanders took over the controls of their craft for the first time since leaving earth orbit. “
SB-IV
prepare for transfer of fuel to
SB-II
Maggie our excess fuel to
SB-V
, and the exchange of personnel.”

Only two of the ships were heading down to the surface. The two orbiting shuttles, full of fuel for the return flight and the extra fuel for the other two shuttles in their rear cargo bays would stay in orbit as protection. As usual there would always be one shuttle orbiting above the base on Mars at a time.

The ships heading down were to enter the Martian atmosphere with enough fuel to fetch water, and then head to where the gold was situated.

As the ships were launched to head back up with gold, they would be refueled in orbit as the gold was moved aboard to fill the forward cargo bays.

Four large nets had been brought with them, and the nets left outside in space would hold the balance of the gold until the second two ships took their fuel back for the return flight and leave enough room in the cargo bays to load the nets of gold. Sometimes working in zero gravity conditions had its benefits.

Also, the crew would take turns heading up and down to give everybody a few days at the base before heading back to earth.

“I remember teaching you as a student pilot on one of the water runs,” stated Jonesy to Lunar as they flew
SB-III
to the water lake down deep in the crater.

“Yes, it was the only time some of us ever flew a real first flight,” returned Lunar in the co-pilot’s seat.

“I flew three water flights during training as well,” added Mars Noble who was sitting in one of the rear chairs and next to his father VIN.

“I learned much of my flying when Jonesy was bored in the Astermine flights to DX2014,” stated VIN. “I reckon I flew most of those legs.”

“Except takeoff and landings,” admonished Jonesy.

“I did everything flyable on the second trip,” stated VIN. It all seemed so long ago and everybody needed to remind each other what had actually happened. “Remember the time you couldn’t get Astermine I off the asteroid, Jonesy? I honestly thought we were going to die that day.”

“Jonesy to Maggie,” how is the weather looking up there, darling?’ continued Jonesy speaking to his wife who was now orbital Flight Commander in
SB-V
, 250 miles above them.

“Still a nice hot day with low clouds, and a slight chance of rain,”
mimicked Maggie copying a weather announcer down on earth.

“Cut the crap lady, give me a weather report,” joked Jonesy as he took the shuttle in to, and down into the depths of the crater.

“This is “cut the crap lady” giving you the latest weather report to friends and foe alike. It hasn’t changed since you last asked an hour ago Mr. Jones! What do you expect a minute by minute report. If it changes I’ll let you know, so do your job and shut up. Love from “cut the crap lady”, out.”

VIN smiled, as did the others listening in. Maggie hadn’t taken Jonesy’s mouth since they had been married, and there always seemed an open conflict of words between her, and also Saturn when she got into the fray. It seemed that the Jones family thrived on their continuing conflict of words.

As usual the flat red area where the water was hadn’t changed. Jonesy used his thrusters and cleared the couple of inches of red dust off the surface and landed on the same piece of ice everyone had done many times.

Mars Noble was in a hurry. He really wanted to get back to the tunnels and to show a few others what he had found, but two water missions had to be completed first.

The two shuttles had landed first at the base, where the crew was to have a free day before beginning the water collection.

The Martian Club Retreat was as Mars Noble had left it years earlier. Dave Black’s hair had gone white. Two of the occupants had died of natural deaths. They had joined Jonesy’s mother and father in the outside graveyard, which would one day become nearly as famous as Arlington.

Overall, the Mars crew were thin and very pasty looking compared to the crew he had left back in Nevada. For the first time since Astermine had first achieved space travel, the returning astronauts could see what differences living on both planets did to the human body.

They had seen the slight changes over time on their own return flight to Mars. They had launched, the crew were tanned, fit and muscular. They had then looked as healthy as any Homo sapiens living on Earth.

The tans faded after a week to ten days, the skin color reverted back to normal, and during the third and fourth weeks aboard the shuttles, their skin color became pale and sallow.

Their muscles, even though they trained four to six hours a day slowly decreased in shape and size. The lack of gravity was the cause of this change. Again a month after leaving earth’s orbit, the entire crew had lost any additional muscular shape they had made on Earth, and everybody was thin, scrawny, and most even looked like they had the same build.

On Mars, the crew were even thinner and paler than the returning crewmembers. Dave Black was as tall as Jonesy, over six feet, but weighed in at 145 pounds. Jonesy was checked over when he reached the base, and his weight was 165 pounds. VIN, and even Ryan weighed in at much the same weight, and the difference in weight between the Mars crew and the returning crew was put down to diet, namely luxuries brought from Earth.

And there were luxuries aplenty for Dr. Messer, Dave and the Mars crew. Items were brought out from hideaways from every member of the flight crew.

Naturally Suzi had the most chocolate, even though the cocoa plants at the retreat were healthy and doing well. She and her new helper, Max Von Braun expertly cooked up a dozen of her famous chocolate cakes for everyone, and the reserves of beer and wine produced on the planet were given out in a celebration of Ruler Roo returning to lead his people.

Suzi had begun to consider Max Von Braun very special, once she had realized that her son owed his life to this brave man.

Life was a day of fun and celebrations on the first day, a rest day, for the crew on the planet. Ruler Roo was ceremoniously given the control of The Martian Club Retreat. The two craft had landed under the blue shields, which connected directly to the base, and after Ruler Roo was given the title, Mars Noble proudly showed his father his growing army of robotic troops.

Like they did when young Mars Noble was a little boy, VIN and Mars space-suited up walked with his son around the plateau.

“There is the Rover over there, Dad,”
stated Mars to his father pointing to what seemed a small hill of dust about 100 yards away from the edge of the plateau.
“Opportunity has moved since I last saw it. I’m sure the strong storms lift up the Rover and move it.”

“I wonder if NASA, or whoever built Opportunity wants it back,”
replied VIN thinking.

“Maybe we should take the machine back to Earth, I’m sure somebody wants to look it over. We have enough room in the larger shuttles,”
replied Mars.

“Well, we have the last coordinates for Rover Curiosity as well,”
added VIN.
“I remember I checked out the coordinates and it was on the opposite side of the planet. I’m sure I can get Ryan to give us permission to do a low level planet orbital check before we leave, and we could pick up that Rover as well, if it is still in its last recorded position.”

“Well, we have enough gas,”
replied Mars,
“as long as we leave a day early, and I think that looking for the storm that mysteriously disappeared has some importance, but first, on Day Four, I want to show you that tunnel I found.

Jonesy landed
SB-III
first on the ice shield, and
SB-IV
came in a few minutes later, once the dust had cleared.

Time was the essence on this trip. The first day was the only day of rest before the shuttles left. It was with much gratitude that the base was found without a storm. Somebody had been listening to many prayers on the way over, as the Martian Club Retreat had been easily seen by the cameras on the first orbit.

Throughout the 3 orbits before landing, nobody had seen a storm on the red planet. It seemed that the storm, or storms that had plagued them before had just disappeared. The Martian atmosphere looked still and clear all the way round.

As soon as the thrusters were powered down, the several crewmembers fitted into
SB-III’s
forward cargo bay in spacesuits were hoisted out by Mars through the cargo bay roof doors. By the time SB-IV landed all seven of the crew had opened a clear area on the water and were using the long-armed buckets to fill the first canister.

Half a dozen more crew members exited the second shuttle the same way and carried canisters to the water’s edge to begin filling them. They had 15 hours before they needed to lift off, and they were all to work three hours on and three hours off to let the suits recharge.

SB-IV
had a second shift of six more crewmembers in her rear cargo bay who would continue filling the aluminum canisters while the first crew rested.

Ryan had reckoned that they could fill at least 3,000 gallons of water on each trip to the watering hole, and 5,000 gallons was the minimum he wanted to transfer.

The work wasn’t that hard in the low Martian gravity, but it took teamwork to fill the 60 canisters they had brought. Sixty canisters if filled could hold 6,000 gallons, or one hundred gallons per canister. It took three men about an hour to fill a canister, and the canisters first had to be lifted out of the shuttle’s open cargo roof doors with a crane, each canister carried over to the where the filling was taking placed, stood upright, the hole in the top opened, filled, sealed and then it took four men to carry them back to the ship. This time they were singularly hoisted up by the crane into the cargo holds.

The crew worked hard and rested hard for the time they had between taking the suits off and putting them back on again. The remaining astronauts always ready in the cockpits, one in each, listened to the weather reports from above, any messages, and timed the outside crew. After two shifts, they had their turn outside.

Jonesy worked hard with VIN and Mars Noble. The crew could work fast, but they needed to make sure that no accidents happened. A ripped spacesuit, or collision of crew or ship could mean death if they weren’t carried into a shuttle fast enough. Two of Dr. Nancy’s medical crew worked outside, and were always ready to take over if a crewmember was injured.

On the first flight, they lifted off 24 hours later with approximately 3,900 gallons, or 39 filled canisters.

On the second flight three hours after the water had been unloaded in one of the blue shields, some of the tired crew as well as some fresh crewmembers headed back. This time it would be easier as they only had 25 more canisters to unload, more canisters were waiting for them at the site.

Again Maggie, or Jenny Burgos in
SB-II
gave the water detail a weather report every hour until since nothing had changed, they downgraded the reports to every orbit.

For Mars, the weather was as perfect as it would ever be. The temperature outside the hard working suits crept up to above freezing on both days. On the second day it actually reached 35 degrees Fahrenheit on VIN’s suit readings. The sun was bright for the red plant, the atmosphere clear and there was no movement of lazy dust around them.

Again they lifted off for the second and last time or that mission with 41 canisters filled, a record for the crew.

As Jonesy flew back to the base with Saturn behind in
SB-IV
, he surveyed the landscape while the rest of the crew slept. The yellow, brown and red surface never changed. He began to see the peaks and valleys where water had once flowed millions of years earlier. Even the storms didn’t change the topography that much. VIN Noble was nodding off in the co-pilot’s seat. He had worked hard, and Jonesy let him sleep.

The second load was taken off by the base crew while the men and women who had worked so hard had twelve hours to rest. The next mission, the one Mars Noble was waiting for was in the opposite direction, and twenty minutes closer flying time than the water.

Once Mars Noble was rested, he headed up to the command center where Dave Black was showing Max Von Braun the ropes of base command. From the command center Mars got his robotic guards active, and four of them headed out to the coordinates programed to them. Mars’ could see with their cameras, and the four robots easily picked up the broken remains of Rover Opportunity and carried it back to the plateau. The other Rover wouldn’t be so easy to save as it was on the other side of the planet, nearly 5,000 miles away.

The crew rested while the base’s crew readied the two shuttles for the flight to the tunnels.

Working inside the blue shields was much easier than with spacesuits in the Martian atmosphere. The shields were connected to each other by overlapping, and also connected to the underground base overlapping the “Porch”, the remains of the outer room built with the silicone glass panels when they had first arrived.