Foothold Read online

  FOOTHOLD

  Dennis Ingram

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations and events portrayed in this novel are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  ISBN: 978-0-473-29150-1

  FOOTHOLD

  Copyright © 2014 by Imaginative Possibilities Limited

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  Published by Imaginative Possibilities Limited.

  dennisingram.com

  ABOUT THE BOOK

  Fifty years in the future, mankind’s first starship is being prepared for launch.

  Eight people have survived the most rigorous crew selection process in history. Now they are ready to depart, but a last minute substitution has broken hearts and set the scene for a future surprise.

  Meanwhile, a shadowy figure watches in the background, planning, and waiting.

  The future is far from certain.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Firstly, I’d like to thank you for reading my book. I wrote this book for you, my readers, and I really hope you enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it.

  I’ve discovered that it’s one thing to write a book, quite another to get it to the point where it’s ready to be shared with the world.

  There are a number of special people I’d like to thank for helping me to get there.

  My “beta readers”, Craig, Viv, Mark, Renee, Benoit, Jeremy and Alex, who waded through early drafts full of errors, and still had encouragement to offer at the end.

  My editor Merle, who provided encouragement and grammar lessons.

  My wife Robyn, who does not like science fiction at all, but still read it and let me have the space to work.

  Thank you all.

  Low Earth Orbit

  March 20, 2063

  David Miller shifted uncomfortably in the confined space of his shuttle seat.

  The shuttle was clean, but showed signs of having seen years of service - the grey seat fabric had that used look to it, and the plastic moldings on the walls had scuffmarks that no amount of cleaning had been able to shift. The air had the familiar recycled smell typical of spacecraft, a faint trace of burned dust adding another hint of the shuttle’s age.

  He turned his head as the shuttle’s copilot appeared in the short corridor connecting the cockpit with the passenger compartment.

  “Captain? We’ve reached orbit and will soon be approaching the Hope,” she said. “Captain Pike would like to invite you to observe our approach from the cockpit.”

  David returned the copilot’s smile and raised his eyebrows. “Thank you…?”

  “It’s Cameron, sir, Cameron Johansson.”

  “Thanks Cameron, please lead the way.”

  The cockpit seemed even more cramped, but tucked behind the pilots was a jump seat that folded out and locked into place in the aisle just behind the two pilots’ seats.

  Captain Pike acknowledged David with a smile, his attention returning quickly to his instrument panel.

  “I thought you might like to observe the final approach to your new home Captain - no pun intended.”

  He grinned, knowing that it would probably be the last approach of any vessel towards the giant spaceship that was their destination.

  “Thanks - and it’s David.”

  “Thanks, David - my friends call me Phil, and it really is a pleasure to have you aboard.”

  Their destination was the starship Hope, mankind’s first true starship. There had been voyages to the edge of the solar system using technology similar to that utilized by the Hope, and unmanned probes that had reached far beyond into interstellar space, but the Hope was the first attempt to not only travel to another star system, but to also take people there.

  The Hope was a triumph of human ingenuity and technology. It was an even greater triumph of human politics - twenty years in the building, with numerous stops and starts as the enormous cost of construction was challenged, seemingly at each election held by the member states funding its construction. But finally, ten years later than planned and costing almost twice as much, it was completed. There had been many compromises made along the way, not least the name. The American contingent had barracked enthusiastically for Enterprise, but after much debate it was agreed that as the starship offered a new hope for cooperation between the building states, and fresh hope for mankind, Hope it would be. Now the name Hope was proudly written on the sides of the starship in English, Russian and each of the languages of the various member states of the European Union.

  Cameron was too young for the cynicism of age to have clouded any of her enthusiasm.

  “You must be so excited to be doing this. I just can’t imagine how it must feel to be the first ever starship captain.”

  David gave a wistful smile. He was excited at the prospect, having trained for nearly six years for this mission. But the circumstances of his appointment to captain had turned it into a bittersweet moment.

  Ten years ago, the mission to Tau Ceti had been off the table. The crew was disbanded and the project shelved for five years, until a new president had been elected in the United States on a platform that included expanded space exploration. With backing from the project’s European and Russian partners, not to mention the US aerospace industry, the project to build the Hope had been restarted. But it had been too late for the original crew. The Tau Ceti mission was a one-way trip; the astronauts and cosmonauts of the crew were to become colonists, adding another first to the mission’s objectives. An essential part of the crew profile therefore was youth - the crew needed experience, yes, but they also needed to have plenty of productive childbearing years ahead of them if their colony was to be successful.

  So a new crew selection program was started, even more rigorous than the first. The objective was the selection of a crew of eight people, four men and four women. Sixteen were chosen, eight primary choices and eight backups. David had been the leader of the backup crew. They knew that it was possible that they might yet crew the second mission, using the ship that was now under construction, but they definitely were not going to be crewing the Hope, unless something dramatic happened to the primary team.

  Something did.

  David thought for a moment then turned to Cameron, “It’s hard to put into words. After you’ve spent your life aiming for a goal, thinking of nothing else - it almost doesn’t seem real when it actually happens.”

  It wouldn’t have happened at all if Vasily Abramovich hadn’t had the surprising misfortune of suffering a heart attack the day before departure. After farewells and ceremonies on that fateful day, most of the crew, except for the captain and the ship’s navigator, had entered stasis and final preparations had been made. Then Vasily had suffered a mild heart attack after an exercise session in the ship’s small gym. It was very mild by any standard, but the level of monitoring they were all subjected to meant that there was no hiding it. The departure was postponed and Vasily was recalled.

  Heartbroken, his dreams shattered, he had returned to Earth the previous day. He had wanted to remain to handover command to David, but the mission psychologists had decided that it would be less traumatic for all if that didn’t happen.

  Damn shrinks, David thought. They spend so much time micro-analyzing every little thing that they forget to be human when it matters the most. The best he could manage was a video call just before he left, and that only happened with the complicity of those in the mission team that understood they both needed some closure.

  “We’ll catch a view of the Hope any second now,” Phil said, interrupting David’s reverie. The shuttle was arcing up from the night side of the planet and the Hope was positioned just ahead of the approach
ing dawn.

  “There - do you see it?”

  Phil pointed towards a brilliant white star that had appeared on their horizon.

  There could not have been a more perfect introduction to the Hope, thought David. He could see the beauty of his home planet below, and a vision of his future in the form of a bright star on the horizon.

  “It may surprise you to hear, but I’ve never seen the Hope fully completed,” he said. “We’ve all been up while construction was under way, but the backup crew have spent the last year hitting the sims.”

  “You’re in for a treat then,” said Cameron. “We couldn’t have picked a better time or approach trajectory if we tried!”

  As the shuttle drew closer, the star that was the Hope started to resolve itself into more detail, firstly becoming an elongated bar shape, and then a collection of white globes.

  The Hope was the largest spaceship ever constructed. It consisted of a line of three immense spherical fuel tanks that formed the forward part of the ship, followed by a cylindrical cargo compartment, a smaller sphere containing two compact fusion reactors and then finally the plumbing for the main drive.

  The shuttle was now close enough that the true size of the ship was becoming apparent, overwhelming even. Each of the fuel tanks was as wide across as a football field and the total length of the ship, including the cargo hold and power and drive units, was nearly half a kilometer.

  “It’s beautiful.” The words escaped David’s lips involuntarily as he took in the sight of his new command, his home for the next forty years.

  The two shuttle pilots smiled.

  “It sure is something,” Phil agreed. “I guess it’s something of a shock for you to be up here instead of warming a seat at mission control?”

  “You have no idea.”

  The sacrifices that all of them had made over the past six years had been hard, but on four of them it had been even harder. The original group of volunteers had numbered in the thousands, and over four years this had been whittled down to a short list of only one hundred. The crew selection panel was looking for perfection - not only did each potential crew member have to be of above average intelligence, physically superb and mentally stable, they were required to be genetically pure. They were to seed a new planet with human life, so it was important that they carried no genetic defects. The last one hundred, fifty men and fifty women, all had these attributes. All had impressive intellectual achievements to their names, were physically fit and would hold their own against movie stars for looks. Their family backgrounds had been extensively reviewed, and all could boast long-lived parents with a distinct lack of diseases and ailments in their wider family groups.

  The final selection again came down to genetics. The plan was that once the colony was established by the first eight, other colonists would come and help establish a more varied gene pool. However, the project planned for all contingencies, and one of those was that no other colonists ever arrived, due to a disaster on Earth or some other reason. If that happened, then the first eight would bear the responsibility of seeding the entire population of their new home. It was therefore essential that within the first eight there be as much genetic diversity as possible, and together with skill sets this was the deciding factor. The result was a crew of four couples that could produce children with the required diversity. With careful management, this would ensure subsequent generations could avoid the dangers of inbreeding.

  They did carry with them embryos that could mitigate these problems, but these were regarded as a contingency – not as reliable as breeding the old-fashioned way.

  The selection of the first eight in turn drove the selection of the second. David was selected as the secondary captain and lead pilot as much for his genetic compatibility with the first eight, as he was for his piloting skills, as impressive as they were.

  This accounted for the guilt and the sadness underlying what should have been the fulfillment of David’s life ambition. Once the two crews had been selected, the combinations chosen by the mission geneticists and their computers were made known. They all knew this was to happen, so there were no surprises. It was part of the conditions of the mission that they had all signed up for - on being accepted to a crew position, they would be assigned a mate, and expected to perform their duty for the human race once they arrived at their new home.

  As cold as the logic behind the selection process seemed, in practice it was not a serious problem for the two crews. A requirement of entry to the program was that they have no serious romantic attachments. They all knew what selection would mean for them. And despite the scientific ‘dating program’, their selected mates were all extremely attractive and compatible. David recalled the day when the final sixteen were gathered together and the crew announcements made. A big part of the excitement and apprehension he felt was not so much learning his position in the crew but discovering whom his partner was to be.

  As backup captain he was matched with the backup navigator. His heart was beating fast when Joyce Martin’s name was called, and despite the disappointment of not making the final eight, the excitement of the match with Joyce was a memory he would cherish forever. Joyce was blonde, vivacious and bright. The two of them hit it off immediately and didn’t need any encouragement to pair up for the remaining two years of their training - hell, the truth is they fell for each other pretty hard and if they’d left the program early, probably would still be together.

  It was never discussed, but they had all assumed that if there were a problem with the primary crew, they would swap a pair from the first eight for a pair from the back up team. Of course, it didn’t work that way. The geneticists hadn’t picked the backup crew based on compatibility with each other; they had picked them on compatibility with the first eight. In hindsight, it should have been obvious - they were individual spare parts for the first eight, not spare pairs.

  And then Vasily suffered a minor heart attack. The program team chose to believe was a congenital defect, although how it had gone for so long without notice was a mystery.

  And so David faced the choice of Joyce or the mission.

  They had discussed it with heavy hearts. There were tears, and there was rational discussion, but right from the start they both knew that either of them would make the hard choice for the sake of the mission, and to satisfy the driving ambition that had led to six years’ of sacrifice. And here he was, on his way, spare part for a mission that was the fulfillment of his dreams, but tainted with the guilt of rejecting the woman who was the first he had genuinely loved.

  C’est la vie.

  The shuttle was now only two kilometers from the Hope and Captain Pike began preparations to dock.

  “I’m going to miss this run.”

  “Been doing it for a while?” David asked.

  “Ten years, now. Pete Summers and I started together on permanent assignment, right before the tanks went on. Been a real buzz watching it change, every trip there’d be something new.”

  “I remember Pete, he brought us up the other two times I’ve been. He’s already been reassigned?”

  “Yep, we’re both assigned to the Inspiration project now, we’re only back here on account of you needing a taxi today.”

  “So the Inspiration has started already! I knew it’d had been approved but didn’t think it would start so soon.”

  “Yeah, well I guess it was easier to just roll the construction crew onto the next one. Not much to see yet anyway. All they’ve done so far is move the hab modules over, tacked on a couple new ones and called it ‘Shipyard 1’.”

  David grinned at the tone in his voice.

  “Yeah, I know. It’s a pretty grand name for the ugliest pile of hardware I’ve ever seen in orbit. But you gotta hand it to them though, they did build you a starship!”

  “That they did. So far as I’m concerned they can call their hab whatever they want if it gets us there in one piece!”

  “Amen to that. Cam, would you like th
e honor of the last docking?”

  “Thought you would never ask!” replied Cameron, as she called up the approach checklist.

  “Hope, this is orbital shuttle Blue Sky on final approach, requesting clearance to dock this time, over.”

  “Roger Blue Sky, you are cleared for docking, port side lock, over.”

  “Roger, Hope, docking port side this time, over.”

  Cameron used the forward thrusters to slow the approach of the shuttle. The Hope had two docking ports, one each side of the cylindrical cargo module that was attached to the rear fuel tank. The port lock had a temporary extension attached that incorporated a decontamination chamber. This was so that anyone entering the starship would go through it in a bid to prevent any unwanted diseases and organisms hitching a ride to Tau Ceti.

  Cameron deftly flipped the shuttle and made final adjustments with maneuvering thrusters. With a gentle clunk the docking collar locked to the shuttle and Cameron grinned and gave a thumbs up.

  “You know, most pilots let the computer do the docking,” David observed.

  “Nothing but the best of service for our starship customers,” Phil said. “Besides, Cameron needs the practice for her captain’s ticket.”

  Cameron nodded her agreement.

  “One more on the card!”

  David smiled at Cameron’s enthusiasm.

  “Well, good luck with that – from where I’m sitting you’re a shoo-in.”

  Cameron blushed at his praise.

  Phil completed the docking procedure.

  “Hope, this is Blue Sky, we have hard dock, over.”