Galactic 60
The moon was the only light among the old park. An ancient lamppost stood guard over the clearing, but shed no light. He sat down on the picnic table and lit a cigarette. She pulled her coat closer around her instinctively, though no wind blew.
“Aren’t you a little young to be smoking?”
“I’m older than you.”
“Only by a couple months. But I suppose it doesn’t matter, since you already look like you’re in your fifties.”
He shot her a dirty look, which she ignored. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and dropped it on the wet leaves, stepping on it quickly.
“Look I put it out. Happy, now?”
She muttered something like damn Americans under her breathe before walking over to the other side of the picnic table. “That’s not important. What’s crucial is that we figure out who’s behind the assassination attempts at headquarters.”
“And you want me to help you.”
“Skepticism doesn’t look good on you.”
He smirked and sat down on the picnic table. “So, tell me more.”
“You know the point of this race is to go for a single unknown goal, picking up pieces of rock and other specimens as you go, a sort of relay, if you will. Headquarters from around the globe picks up radio signals and translates them to find out what we need to fetch. The data is then sent to a team of spaceships and they are given new coordinates and they rush off to the destination.”
“I still think its just some super intelligent aliens sending the stupid humans to do some errands for them. There is no liberation at the end just a ‘thanks you’ve done a great job getting my groceries’ and a pat on the back.”
She glared at him. “Do you want to know what your purpose is, or not.”
He waved her on with his hand and looked at her expectantly.
“As I was saying, there are five ships in a team. Each team is given a code for the first two digits and the third digit is the ship’s number, the larger the number, the more prominent the ship. The smallest is an assassin ship. It’s meant to go into larger ships or move in ways they can’t to take them down. Then you have the relay ship, designed to get the specimens. It’s only meant to land on a planet and holds maybe two large animals before dropping it off into the cargo ship. So, third you have your cargo ship to hold all the specimens, fourth the living quarters where anyone not on duty goes. And the largest is the storage ship. This has extra fuel, food, water, holds waste, purifies air content, water, waste products. It is largely self-sufficient and helps run the living quarters ship. Any other numbers larger than five (leaving four more ships to use) are extras and the type is registered in with headquarters. There are currently three different headquarter locations, obviously each stationed in a different country: Galactic is the United Kingdom, Discovery is the United States, and Trans-Mission is in Australia. They all work together, however, and answer to each country as a whole. No decision is issued without consent of either of the remaining countries.”
He nodded impatiently. “I knew all this before. You still aren’t getting to the point.”
“As you probably know,” she said putting emphasis on every word indignantly, “Galactic 60 is ahead of the race by a mere 5 coordinates. However, they’ve been having trouble with headquarters because calls don’t get through and messages are coming late. The British National Space Centre, the National Astronautics and Space Administration, and the Office of Space Science and Applications have decided to put two us in charge of figuring out the bugs in headquarters and helping it run.”
“Placing us as presidents of the corporation. Wouldn’t that be putting ourselves right in the line of fire for other assassins?”
“Well, it would be a secret job. They, of course, have someone already acting as the head. The trick is that the head will be answering to us. We would work alongside everyone, get the gossip, and figure out what’s been going on.”
“Why us?”
“Who else? Our parents are both on the police force and we’re not exactly average students. Or so I am told; I’m not sure about you. But regardless, we would go through training.”
“That’s stupid,” he said getting up and pulling a cigarette out of his pocket and holding it between his fingers, unlit, “getting training defeats the whole purpose. They seem to want us there, as fast as possible. As far as I understand, this is not a new threat and time is running out. But, they’re willing to wait until we’ve had training. People spend years learning how to run stations correctly, and they’re just going to hand it to us on a silver platter, trusting both of us completely. Competent or no, neither one of us can run a space race like this,” he lit the cigarette and took a drag. “So either the pressure is on to be perfectly normal during the day and run the race at night, or we go through training and things get worse without us. They’re walking on a fine line no matter what they choose. There are plenty of able bodies who have finished training with nothing to do, sitting around for instructions. It would seem more natural, anyway, to send someone just from training. Not only would these people be perfect for the job, but also they would blend right in. We would look so obvious it would be hard for any spy not to notice they did something about the problem. Whether the enemy knew or not what they were doing, we would be the next two gone out of pure suspicion. However, they choose to drag us in and stick us doing something that we don’t know how to do while people who are perfectly capable are forced to continue sitting on their butts wasting time. So, I ask you again: Why us?”
She looked at him shocked and searched for words to say. Her mouth moved in opposition, but no words came out.
“Exactly,” he faced away from her, but she could see smoke rising up over his head into the darkness.
“I don’t know,” she said, “I honestly don’t know.”
He paused before saying, quietly: “That’s why we don’t get along. You’re a conservative; I’m the rebel. You let them feed you this junk and I question it until it’s distorted. I still think there’s a conspiracy in the works and BNSC, NASA, and COSSA are just puppets. This whole race is just using us as puppets for something worse. You’ve seen the movies: mass extermination, domination, slavery? Somehow they want us out of the picture.”
“But, why us?”
He looked her in the eye. “That’s what we have to find out.”
“You’re not honestly suggesting we take their offer and try to find why they want us killed. Not only are you a rebel, you’re a risk taker.”
“All rebels are risk takers.”
She opened her mouth in protest, but closed it again and sat on the picnic bench, facing away from him. “It’s suicide,” she whispered, fighting back tears.
“Go ahead, let it out,” he said, reading her thoughts. “That was my problem. I never let myself cry because all of the men I knew never did. So what did I do when I finally lost it? I fell back on drugs,” he dropped the remainder of the cigarette on the ground and smashed the ashes. “Imagine my guilt and anger when I found out that my dad knew why I smoked and never said anything to me. Not even that it was all right to cry,” his voice cracked, slightly and she heard him take a sharp intake of air.
“Do you have a handkerchief?” she asked after a moment.
“A what?”
She laughed. “Never mind, I found one,” she pulled a white lace cloth out of her coat pocket and dabbed at her eyes. “Well, what are we going to do?”
“Accept, of course.”
“Just like that?” she sighed and put her handkerchief away. “Fine. I’ll send an email to them tomorrow morning. But, I still don’t like this idea.”
“You wouldn’t,” he muttered, but she didn’t hear him. “We’ll meet back here Thursday, if you can, and we’ll talk. Hopefully, you’ll have a response by then.”
She nodded and sniffed as she got up and left the clearing.
He pulled out a cigarette and rolled it in his fingers, thoughtfully. He finally put it back in the pack and walked away in the opposite direction, hands stuffed in his pockets, although it wasn’t cold.
This entry was posted on Friday, July 21st, 2006 at 9:27 pm and is filed under Science Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.