Kaijunaut Read online

  KAIJUNAUT

  Doug Goodman

  Copyright 2017 by Doug Goodman

  “Why does Rice play Texas?”

  -John F. Kennedy

  For my Dad, who would trade stories with me on the long trips between Lubbock and Austin and Tulsa. Thanks for helping me grow not just as a person, but as a storyteller.

  Chapter One: Crashing into the Cosmos

  1

  “This is totally ridiculous. I’m gonna die.”

  Cole followed his wife, Emily, and C.C. into the DSMU dock. He hoped he wouldn’t die. He didn’t want to die. He had so much to live for: a beautiful and highly intelligent wife, his family, his xenolinguistic studies, and a vintage collection of Edgar Rice Burroughs books. Maybe it wasn’t a life for everyone, but it was one he enjoyed, and he didn’t like the idea of how dying would negatively impact his ability to enjoy that life.

  The rest of the crew, Mathieu and Anna, were already in the dock and suited up in their Advanced eXploration Environmental Survival (AXES) suits. The closed-in room was full of large, floor-to-ceiling, white-and-black domed structures set into concave platforms. Cole thought they looked like giant dinosaur eggs set into satellite dishes.

  The airlock shut and sealed behind them. From this point forward, there was only one way out of this room: exploding out of the spacecraft.

  Cole took a deep breath. He pulled on his AXES suit. The AXES suits were full-body suits with protective padding for the joints. They also came with a full-filtration helmet and a small distiller tank. Each suit was highlighted in bright blue markings.

  Emily said, “Take it easy, baby. This will be just like the simulators.”

  “I failed the simulators.”

  “How do you fail the simulator?” C.C. asked. “Isn’t it autonomous? You press a button and then you sit back.”

  Anna said, “Cole pressed the wrong button and ejected himself from the EDLS before we left the ship.”

  “Oh, that’s right…”

  “Ignore them,” Emily said. “You’ll be fine.”

  “Right. Except for the part where I’m about to be jettisoned out of a ship that is itself orbiting an alien planet at about, what—six and a half kilometers per second? That’s three hundred ninety kilometers per minute, which is roughly twenty three thousand kilometers an hour.”

  “Twenty three thousand forty, to be exact,” Mathieu added.

  “Twenty three thousand four hundred,” Emily corrected.

  “You and numbers,” Cole said to Emily.

  “You and letters.”

  Emily continued. “Taking into account the DSMU’s burn rate, that means in the low gravity of the planet, the thrust-to-weight ratio is roughly 500:1. It is the safest landing possible. See, if you have a problem, you do the math, and the math will solve it.”

  “Erratic winds, alien planet with an unstable atmosphere. My words trump your math.”

  “I thought you were looking forward to this, hey” Mathieu said. “‘Exploration is the destiny of mankind,’ you said.”

  “I am. I’m just not looking forward to being dropped into an alien planet’s upper atmosphere.” He rubbed his stomach.

  “Did you take the antacid?” Emily asked.

  Cole nodded. “But I’m not sure it was enough.”

  “You’re cute when you’re nervous. Do you need help into the EDLS?”

  He shook his head. Emily kissed him tenderly. For a brief moment, he held her lips to his, like he could hold her safe and close to him. Like he could hold their lives together.

  She pushed away and crossed the room to her Entry, Descent, and Landing Shell (EDLS), where she pulled herself into the polished metal structure. Like butterflies reverse-engineering themselves into their cocoons, the astronauts pulled themselves into the domed EDL structures.

  “This way to the EDLS, sir,” JEVS said to Cole. JEVS, which was short for “JPL EVA System,” was the robot custodian of the Anchor while the astronauts were away.

  “Thank you, JEVS.”

  Cole had a little more trouble than his compatriots with climbing backwards into the EDLS. Granted, he hadn’t had half their training.

  “Here we sit like birds in the wilderness,” C.C. sang. “Birds in the wilderness, birds in the wilderness! Here we sit like birds in the wilderness, waiting on Cole Thomas Musgrove.”

  While the others chuckled, JEVS buckled Cole into his seat in the DSMU. Cole shot back, “I’m late cause I got to kiss the commander. She’s a damn good kisser, by the way.”

  “Stop it,” Emily said.

  Cole said, “I want that on the record before we plummet into history, or to death. My wife’s a damn good kisser and I would follow her to the ends of the galaxy if she asked.”

  “Got it,” C.C. said while the rest of the crew chuckled.

  Emily checked the status of her equipment. The screens and joysticks were all operating normally. She stretched her arms into the DSMU’s revolutionary dynamic chair. It was a multi-axis gimbal chair that allowed the user to sit in virtually any position and move freely while communicating with the DSMU.

  While she completed her status checks, C.C. said, “Hey, you’re not in charge yet. I’m still the commander of the Anchor.”

  Emily exhaled sharply. “C.C., are you going to give me any crap?” Her tone implied a cornucopia of bad things if C.C. responded incorrectly.

  “Not giving you any crap, sir. Just not ready to relinquish my command, I guess.” He cleared this throat and said to everyone: “Ahem. It’s been three years that I’ve been your commander onboard the Anchor. I want you all to know that it was an honor and a pleasure serving you. Thank you for flying with Titan Space. Please place your trays in the forward upright position. Bad jokes aside, I’d like to thank Mr. Dan Deerfield, the CEO of Titan Space, as well as the board of directors, chief engineer Rick Render, and all the hard-working engineers at Titan Space and NASA who developed and tested the Anchor.”

  “Gracias, C.C.,” Anna said.

  “Yeah, thanks, man,” Cole said.

  “Three big cheers for C.C.,” Mathieu said over the communications network, clapping.

  C.C. said, “Commander Musgrove, the mission is yours.”

  “Thank you, Commander Crenshaw. Crew, prepare for EDL.”

  “Let’s rock ’n’ roll,” Anna said. “I want to get off this ship. It’s time to see some wide open spaces.”

  “At least as much as you can from inside a DSMU,” Mathieu said.

  “I’ll take it.”

  Emily pulled up her crew’s vitals. Everybody looked good except her husband, whose heart rate was elevated. “Cole, I need you to breath slow and deep. Your vitals are too high.”

  “I guess I’m nervous. I’ve never jumped from orbit before.”

  “Neither have any of us.”

  “Technically, I have,” Mathieu said.

  “Except Mathieu,” Emily said. “Mathieu’s done it all. He could probably do this all without any of us, but NASA won’t let him work alone.”

  “She’s right, you know. I met with Director Craft about it. He said NASA policy hasn’t caught up with me yet. Cole, let me give you some advice. The trick is to not throw up on the way down, hey. Because if you do, your vomit will first hit the ceiling, but then eventually gravity will suck it right back down onto your face.”

  “Not helping,” Cole said.

  “Come on, Cole,” Anna said. “It’s ten minutes of the best thrill ride ever invented. Think of it like being on a roller coaster dreamed up by the best minds on earth. It is perfectly safe.”

  “So long as all one hundred pyrotechnics go off according to plan and nobody was sleeping on the job when they installed them,” C.C. said. “Also, there are the five hundred thousand lines of code tha
t—fingers crossed—all work and haven’t been affected by radiation.”

  “Those codes have been checked and double-checked by JPL,” Emily interjected. “Not to mention, we have radiation recovery protocols in place.”

  “Don’t forget, it’s all built by the lowest bidder,” C.C. added.

  “Really not helping, C.C.,” Cole said.

  “I don’t want to make you nervous, Cole, but there’s basically a zero percent margin of error or we die,” Mathieu said.

  “Mathieu, do you want to stay on this ship while the rest of us explore a world never before visited by mankind?” Emily barked. “Zip it. Cole, your blood pressure is elevated. I cannot start the EDL sequences until your blood pressure has gone down. So I need you to find a happy place. Use the words the brain trust at JSC gave you. The rest of you, I appreciate you taking the chance to get back at my husband’s humor, God knows I’ve wanted a little vengeance there myself. But you’ve had your fun. Enough.”

  “Mellifluous,” Cole said to himself. He thought of the DSMU frame at a station at the JPL, hung up on a giant crane in the Robot Assembly Building along with the other twelve DSMUs. Contractors wearing clean suits installed the wiring harnesses, the radio assemblies, and weeks later, the carapace. They would bolt the DSMUs to their heat shields. Hell, they would glue the tiles to the heat shield. He hoped they installed everything probably. He hoped they were clearheaded. He hoped that if they saw something wrong during the installation process, they reported it. He hoped that the testing was as thorough as possible and that all the bugs were discovered. It was a lot of hope, but he trusted them.

  With your life, his inner monologue reminded him.

  Cole stuck the photo of his family between the screens. There was him, Emily, and his sister Clara, who was holding a newborn child. Cole focused while a tear ran down his cheek. “Calm, balanced, serene. Mathieu, C.C., and Anna can go fuck themselves. Mellifluous.”

  Emily watched her husband’s heartbeat lower from 149 bpm to 118 bpm.

  “Much better, my love,” Emily said. In her EDLS, she toggled away from the abort menu that she had pulled up while everyone was razzing her husband. She moved to the sequence menu. “JEVS, you ready?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “DSMU 1 go for EDL.” She punched a button.

  The others sounded off.

  “DSMU 2 go for EDL.”

  “DSMU 3 go for EDL.”

  “DSMU 4 go for EDL.”

  Emily waited a second. “Cole?”

  “Mellifluous,” he said. She could hear his slow inhalation over the com, then, “DSMU 5 go for EDL.”

  Emily said, “JEVS, initiate EDL sequence in 3…2…”

  “Mellifluous,” Cole said, looking at his family. On his screen Distance from Ground read as 177 kilometers.

  “Oh, shit.”

  There was a loud boom and the floor fell out from under his EDLS. Cole was in gravitational freefall.

  2

  The group of school children sat quietly in the large theater auditorium. Normally, they would be picking their noses and squirming in their seats, but not that day. That day they were visiting an astronaut at the Johnson Space Center in Houston. The astronaut had their full attention.

  Dr. Emily Musgrove, who was introduced as the commander of Exo-Planetary Space Expedition (EPSP) 18, stood in a sky blue jumpsuit on a narrow stage above her rapt audience. Behind her, on the giant screen, was that universally revered symbol of space exploration, the NASA logo. A blue circle of the cosmos with the agency’s name orbited by some unknown space vehicle—perhaps it was John Glenn in the Friendship 7. The acronym “NASA” floated weightlessly among the stars and in between the lines of a bright red chevron, a tip of the hat to the aeronautic purpose behind the agency.

  The crowd of children had just finished watching a short video showing kids building all kinds of things using toys, including toy robot build kits, popular world-creation games, and even the old stalwart, Legos. In the video, the toys were always being used to build science fiction playsets or toy space vehicles.

  “Do you like the toys you get to play with?” Emily asked the room.

  “Yes!” the enthusiastic crowd shouted back at her.

  “Well, these are the toys I get to play with, and these are the things I get to build.”

  The NASA logo faded, and the agency-created sizzle reel started with old, historical footage of the Mercury and Gemini capsules and NASA’s early missions. The children oohed at the large booming thunder of Saturn rockets blasting off from Cape Canaveral. They awwed at the footage of a space shuttle landing at Kennedy air strip. They got silent as they watched space stations hurtling over the Earth and cheered with the first rockets to Mars. In less than two minutes, the entire history of NASA was provided to them in a historical perspective of space hardware: landers, robots, rovers, submarines, drones, and super drones. The footage video culminated in views of elegant interstellar vehicles and finally, the giant robotic mechs. Kids stood up to get a better view of the mechs. Emily smiled from the stage.

  As the video ended and the screen faded to black, a spotlight fell on Emily. “NASA is about exploration. But it is also about perspective.” She pressed the button on her clicker, and a life-size model of a Crawler appeared on the screen. The Crawler was too wide to fit on the screen.

  “This is a Crawler. It sits over two stories tall. Similar versions of the Crawler were used to move rockets over a hundred years ago.” As she spoke, the Crawler shrunk so that it could fit on the screen. The bottom of a rocket appeared to stand on top of the Crawler.

  “This is a Delta heavy rocket, which was the rocket that helped us get to Mars.”

  The Delta shrunk so that it could fit onto the screen. Now the Crawler, which seconds ago was too large for the giant screen, was no more than a small wedge at the bottom.

  “Now we have a better rocket, an Omega. These are the workhorses of the Exo-Planet Search Program, the EPSP. Like with your toys where you sometimes have to build one part of the set, then connect it to another part of the set, the Omegas deliver large payloads into low earth orbit, where robots and astronauts at Space Station Hephaestus assemble the interstellar vehicles.”

  Behind her, thick pieces of thrusters and drives and capsules were launched into the Earth’s atmosphere, where they were assembled into a large white and black space ship that made the Omegas look like two-door economy-sized cars parked next to eighteen wheelers.

  “Pretty big difference, right?” As the children nodded, she said, “This is IV-104, the Anchor. And it is the best and latest interstellar vehicle built by Titan Space and NASA. But that is only one part of the story. Because we now have to take this giant spaceship, which is bigger and more powerful than anything NASA has ever built, and we have to fling it through space to a faraway planet.”

  Up on the screen, the giant interstellar vehicle squeezed down next to the Earth, and then a red line shot out from the Earth, past the orbits of Mars and Jupiter and Saturn and then Neptune. With each passing planetary body, the speed of the red line picked up. Within seconds it had passed the Oort cloud and broken free of the solar system.

  The cloud joined the shrinking rings of the solar system’s planetary orbits, and suddenly stars began to pass at dizzying speeds.

  “We have now traveled farther than anyone has ever traveled in the history of humankind,” Emily said.

  Finally the red line settled on a small system with five orbital rings. The orbital rings grew and grew until large terrestrial bodies floated past the screen and out over the audience.

  As the projection moved over the students, a small planet covered in oceans of sand and islands of lakes appeared. “This is 51 Golgotha a, our final destination on our long voyage from Earth. We have traveled 7 light years at this point. We have arrived at a planet that caught our interest because it has something no other exo-planet has yet shown: signs of civilization.”

  The camera angle swept over the e
xo-planet’s many deserts and came to a jungle. Along the horizon, a tall, gray wall appeared. From behind the wall peeked the tops of twelve long pyramids. They rose slow and steady over the wall, like giant sentinels.

  “This is what we have been after since before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. We know we are not alone in the universe. Microbes and fungi have been discovered on other planets. 51 Golgotha has plants. But these pyramids are something totally different. They hold the answers to questions we’ve been asking since we first looked up at the stars thousands of years ago. Are we the only civilization in the universe?”

  The video did not show the fields of dead, mummified bodies that lay beyond the wall. Some things were not meant for school field trips. She was certain the children had seen photos of the aliens. Who hadn’t? They were aliens. But this was a government program, not a Ripley’s Believe It Or Not.

  She paused. “But that’s not what you came to see, is it?”

  Kids gasped. On the screen, the point of view of the camera swarmed from the planet back to IV-104 in orbit. The point of view breached the hull of the Anchor. Inside, small robots no bigger than a soccer ball whisked around the ship’s interior, performing maintenance chores. They whizzed by larger, bipedal robots that walked heavily down the interstellar vehicle’s halls.

  “There are robots like these already on 51 Golgotha, taking measurements and relaying data back to us. But not until humans get there will there be robots like these…”

  One of the bipedal robots seemed to walk across the screen. It bumped into a shadow, then stepped back as if it had run into something solid in the dark. Out of the shadow emerged the giant robot, a large DSMU, a Dynamic Supplemental Mobility Unit. It was 8 meters tall. The DSMU was painted white and black like a space shuttle, and it had the EPSP 18 mission patch painted on one shoulder and an American flag and NASA logo on the other. Its large feet stepped forward onto the stage. Each step made a big whumph noise as the weight of the DSMU met the stage. Only then did the children realize that while they had been looking at the holographic projections above them, the screen had been lifted. An actual DSMU stood on the stage with them. It was so tall it had to duck to fit into the theater. The DSMU raised its arms wide. Its giant robotic arms fanned over the children. Much like theater goers being mesmerized by a chained King Kong, some children smiled, others laughed, and others screamed in glee. And fear.