Fractured Earth Saga 1: Apocalypse Orphan Page 5

  Wolf managed to open the port retro rockets at full throttle and turn on automatic flight commands. Then he climbed into the DSC. He was losing consciousness as the needles drilled into his head. Before he blacked out, he thought he saw a woman close the lid of the DSC.

  The fully activated Synthea sealed the lid and then engaged the DSC, taking the only available avenue to save Wolf’s life. Whether he would survive remained to be seen. He was frozen solid in milliseconds.

  The shuttle Atlantis was twenty-five thousand miles from the comet’s nucleus as Synthea initiated simultaneous downloads from the libraries of MBR, ISS, Earth, and the Saviors, storing massive amounts of data in her vast memory banks.

  Charlie stared at the console that tracked the position of the comet. He did not see the blinking lights or other telltale signs of Synthea’s downloads. He had always laughed at Wolf and his ignorance of space. Now, a man he called a friend had been ripped out of his life. Wolf knew he was going to die. Charlie had heard it in his final word: “Bye.” Then his life support readings flatlined at ISS Medical.

  Someone was crying. A woman’s voice kept sobbing, “It’s my fault he died.” It took a few seconds for Charlie to realize it was Dr. Mason. She was still on the line. But why was she crying? She barely knew Wolf.

  “Savior Two, this is ISS. What’s happening? Wolf’s life support readings flatlined on our screen. Over,” Ron announced.

  “Ron, this is Charlie. The shuttle was caught in Nomad’s gravity well. Wolf might have entered a DSC, or he may have frozen to death. Either way, we’ve lost him. I’m sorry.”

  “Wolf was a good man…and my friend,” Ron said with sadness in his voice.

  “That’s not all. We fed the partial data from the shuttle’s computers into the simulation. Wolf wasn’t able to scan for deployment of the OMPs, but we’ve discovered Earth’s gravity has influenced Nomad’s angle of impact. We have less than ten days before the comet hits. It has picked up speed. The gravitational effects are causing havoc on Earth even as we speak. And we’ve discovered Nomad has a solid hydrogen core. My god, we are in trouble! Do you know what happens when solid hydrogen ignites?” Charlie asked in a panicked voice.

  “There’s no such animal, Charlie. In 1935, a couple of physicists predicted that under the immense pressure of two or three million psi, hydrogen atoms would display metallic properties. The hold over their electrons would weaken, allowing them to escape. Since then, metallic hydrogen has been the holy grail of high-pressure physics. Hell, Charlie, we think that is what Jupiter is made of. How can we know what will happen if it’s ignited?”

  “We will know soon enough. Doctor Mason was right—if we had tried using the OMPs on the comet, it wouldn’t have worked,” Charlie said.

  “Probably not. I have to tell the crew about Wolf. I’ll check in with you later…if we’re still around. ISS out.”

  * * *

  Ten days later, nearly all of the earth’s remaining inhabitants were staring up at the sky in terror. Nomad was conspicuously visible now, even in broad daylight. It was like having another sun in the sky, but an intense, bright blue. Its tail seemed to wrap around the sky like an ancient dragon. The comet’s proximity to Earth was causing freak electrical storms, and the weather around the world was in chaos. Tsunamis and hurricanes hammered coastal cities, and several extinct volcanoes erupted. Doomsday had arrived.

  Less than a billion people were still alive on Earth, and a mere four million were packed into the military shelters that had been constructed to ride out the impact. No one seriously believed the shelters would hold up, but some remained hopeful. Several auditorium screens on the MBR showed the global destruction, and satellites provided a real-time feed of the incoming comet. The Saviors, MBR, and the underground bases on Earth watched the impact. All held their collective breath as death rained down on humanity’s once-proud accomplishments.

  All of the top scientists on the moon were watching the horrific scenes play out on earth, except Dr. Cynthia Mason, who had opted not to watch. She had spent the last week and a half in the underground storage area working on the DSC units. She had been obsessed with work and barely slept since the failed shuttle attempt in which Commander Wolf had been lost. An exact replica of the shuttle was stored in the massive underground area, and she had been working around the clock in a frantic attempt to rescue Wolf. She refused to believe he was dead.

  Dr. Mason had installed the DSCs and her newest AI computer technology into the replica ship. She attempted to establish a communication link with Wolf’s shuttle using her AI’s newer, state-of-the art capabilities. She believed that if Wolf had managed to activate SYNTHEA’s matrix, her newer and more powerful AI should be able to pinpoint and hijack his older, less sophisticated system. She would then be able to ascertain whether he had made it into the DSC...or died. A chill ran down her spine at the thought.

  Dr. Mason had just run a successful simulation on whether Wolf could have survived the cryogenic freezing. It was promising. Her newer AI also informed her it had finished scanning the comet and reported Wolf’s shuttle was intact and functional. Suddenly, a terrific impact shook the MBR. The force of the impact sent Dr. Mason staggering to the ground. She crawled to a command module and flipped a switch, gasping at what the cameras revealed. Another terrific concussion forced her to close up the shuttle. She waited impatiently while the payload bay doors closed. Several massive explosions rocked the underground chamber with the force of a dozen nuclear bombs. She shouted an order to the ship’s computer as an entire section of the room fell in and the lights went out.

  The noise from the impending collision was astounding. Howling winds tore down what remained of buildings and uprooted trees all over the planet. Major earthquakes shook the planet, loosening the lithospheres of the tectonic plates; somehow, the underlying asthenospheres remained intact. The comet lit up the sky as it approached within a few thousand miles of the earth, and then it hit in Antarctica.

  The explosion was immense. As Nomad hit the Antarctic plate, it impacted at such a shallow angle that it plowed through the planet like a bullet through an apple. Molten rock was thrown into space as Nomad burst through the earth’s crust. After losing some of its mass, the comet continued on its journey through the stars, slightly smaller and just a little slower. Still, volcanoes around the planet erupted and lava flowed in copious amounts, covering cities as pyroclastic clouds annihilated what remained of the land.

  When the comet hit, large chunks of the planet as well as the comet ricocheted into space. A small chunk of the southern hemisphere had been vaporized, and the earth had shifted ninety degrees, reversing latitude and longitude. It was now tipped like Uranus, and what was left of its southern pole pointed towards the sun. Its far northern region was in shambles but remained intact. The planet’s rotation also had changed. It spun, not like a top, but like a barrel rolling down a hill—a shaky, rattling roll caused by the missing chunk ripped from its southern pole.

  The Saviors, MBR and the ISS had watched the impact from the satellites positioned around the planet. As the devastation unfolded, the massive amounts of data Synthea was downloading went unnoticed. Planetary debris and meteors that followed destroyed the ISS and several of the domes on MBR. Of the one million people inhabiting the moon base, less than five thousand survived. Meteoric debris had smashed into the population domes, and thousands were killed instantly, blown into space, or suffocated as the atmosphere was sucked from the domes’ interiors. The science dome was buried under tons of rock, and several of the world's top minds were presumed dead. Among the missing was Dr. Cynthia Mason, who had gone to the underground storage area to try to help Wolf. Only the farming domes were spared.

  The three Savior ships had been manned as a fail-safe measure. One ship was exclusively military; another was designed for scientific research; and the third was a state-of-the-art farm ship equipped with areas for livestock and food processing. Fifty large farms occupied ten floors of the ves
sel. Each farm was the size of three football fields, or roughly four acres. The soil had been scooped from the rich, black earth in Illinois and Iowa. Artificial light was installed to photosynthesize plant life. A nitrogen freezer held several thousand species of eggs and sperm from man and animals. Only the crew and food animals were allowed on the ship. An enormous seed repository stored all the current plant life in stasis. If humans were ever going to reclaim the earth, at least they would have the means and the building blocks to do so.

  A badly shaken Charlie broke the silence. “Oh, my God! Everything is destroyed! It will be thousands of years before we can resettle there.” He stared at the faces of his command crew and then radioed, “MBR from Savior Two. Do you copy?” Static answered his call. “Rotate satellite three-two-one to view the moon base. Move people! We have to know what’s going on.”

  “MBR from Savior Two. Do you copy?” More static. “ISS from Savior. Do you read me?” Static.

  “Is the Hubble still operational?” Charlie asked, and someone answered that it was not. He tersely ordered, “Move satellite two-fifteen to high moon orbit, and get me General Mitchel on Savior One. Prepare this ship to move to the MBR landing zones.”

  “Savior Two, this is Savior One, I have General Mitchel on Com. Go ahead,” said a distraught female voice on the radio.

  “General Mitchel, are you able to raise anyone on MBR or Earth?” Charlie asked.

  “No, we lost contact with the bunkers a few minutes before impact. We were preparing to land on the MBR landing zones,” a gruff voice answered on the radio.

  “Yes, General Mitchel, we were of the same mind. Once we know what is going on, we need to meet face to face. Most of the world’s leaders were on MBR, and as of now, General, you are driving this train if no one else is alive.”

  “I know. Let us hope it is only temporary. Savior Three, stay put. Savior One and Two move to position to check out MBR,” General Mitchel ordered.

  The giant spacecraft moved silently, like sharks gliding through surf. There was so much debris surrounding Earth that it was impossible to determine the extent of the devastation, though the outline of the planet could be seen through the rubble. Looking beyond the earth, one could see Nomad speeding away, barely affected by its glancing blow with the planet. As the ships entered geosynchronous orbit, the damage became evident. MBR had been destroyed. Scattered life signs appeared on the screens, a few deep underground, but most in the agricultural dome. The central glass domes had shattered. Bodies floated in space like dust in the air after a bag of flour has been dropped. The agricultural domes were intact, so food would be available, but the other domes might be beyond repair. Thousands had died on MBR and tens of millions on Earth.

  “Savior Two from Savior One. Copy?”

  “Savior Two copies…go ahead.”

  “Charlie, this is worse than we thought. We need to land and send rescue parties to search for survivors. I want to take a ship close to Earth and see what we have left to work with. Get your team together and give me a timetable of when you think it might be safe to land. MBR’s farming dome will be our permanent base for now.”

  “Yes, General Mitchel, we’ll get to work on it immediately.”

  The three Saviors were repositioned to land on the moon in an attempt to save what was left of humanity. The ships carried sixty thousand people. Would humanity rise from this catastrophe? Could it bounce back? Fighting men and women, scientists, doctors, and farmers had survived. The mission would be a Herculean undertaking, and it would severely test the resilience of the human species to build from absolute destruction and the ultimate depths of despair. But this story is not about humanity’s resurrection from Nomad’s destruction; it is about a man who returns to Earth far in the future. This is the story of Commander Orlando Iron Wolf.

  Part 2

  The New World

  Chapter 4

  Nomad had hit planet Earth and knocked it off its axis, tearing away the southern pole. It would be fifty thousand years before the comet’s orbit brought it back to Earth. As the centuries passed, a small spacecraft remained trapped in coma of the comet, its compact but powerful engine playing a tug of war that kept the ship from being consumed in the comet’s nucleus. The ship’s lone occupant remained frozen solid in an experimental cryonics chamber. The comet sped through the galaxy, passing binary suns and skirting black holes, quasars, and blue giants. It streaked past alien planets where inhabitants marveled as it appeared in their night skies and eventually disappeared. Some worshiped it as a god or an ill omen; others were scientifically advanced enough to study it. None suspected the lone hitchhiker slept frozen in its coma.

  As Nomad traversed the galaxy, it lost about half its size after violent impacts with asteroids, meteors, and several moons. The tiny ship in its coma had been pulled in deeper after one collision with an asteroid many centuries ago. The ship was now frozen to the comet’s surface. Its diamond-hard shell protected it from damage; its nuclear engine remained operational and pointed inline to the comet’s trajectory. It was actually propelling the comet to some small extent, causing the comet to spin awkwardly, propelled by the thrust of the wide-open engine. The ship’s computer kept the engine operational, firing it at intervals, repeatedly trying to break it free from Nomad’s surface.

  Eventually, Nomad completed its vast orbit through the Milky Way and returned to the small solar system it had visited so long ago. If Nomad were sentient, it would say it wasn’t a terrible comet or a doomsday harbinger; merely that it was a traveler. It would recognize the solar system it was now entering and remember it had collided with a small blue planet. It would recall that there were eight planets in the solar system, some with multiple moons; a ringed planet; a hulking orange one with a red spot; and the small blue one, now with two moons. One of the moons orbiting this watery blue world was dead and cold; the other was blue like the planet it orbited. Nomad would remember the larger of the two blue marbles; a diversity of life had thrived there when it streaked through this remote part of the galaxy fifty thousand years ago. It had damaged the planet when it collided, and the planet had inflicted its own damage on the comet; yet both had survived. Now, Nomad was back to drop off something it had taken on its previous visit.

  Nomad lost more of its mass as it came within the gravitational pull of the huge orange planet. Large pieces of the comet were torn loose and crashed upon the moons in orbit around the gas giant. It continued on its course, ejecting a mixture of carbon dioxide and hydrogen gas from the intense heat of the yellow star at the center of this small solar system. Nomad passed Mars, and as the heat of the yellow sun intensified, more and more of its ice melted. A large piece of ice shattered, and a small metal object ejected from the comet’s surface, its computer firing the ship’s engines with precision timing to avoid the vast debris field of ice and rock strewn across its path. The craft was battered and beaten, yet it remained operational. It headed towards the earth, and at its maximum speed, it would take months to get there.

  The small vessel pulled away from Nomad, and the nuclear-powered heaters inside the cabin began to compensate for the extreme cold. Ever so slowly, the temperature rose and life support within the cabin was gradually reactivated. The onboard computer assessed the body frozen solid in the DSC unit and ran countless simulations on how to thaw it safely, settling on a plan to defrost the body gradually over a six-month period. The computer also slowed the engines and entered orbit around Mars. Nomad continued its lonely trek back into deep space. Perhaps, if the comet survived, its orbit would bring it back to this sector of the Milky Way in another fifty thousand years.

  * * *

  Six months after the shuttle broke loose from Nomad and entered an orbit around Mars, a weak magnetic storm shook the craft. Inside, a man slept in suspended animation on a metal cot in a clamshell-shaped cryonic chamber. The vibrations from the storm continued, and the man stirred. Suddenly, his eyes blinked open. The light in the module was intensely bright.
He had no idea where he was, and it took several minutes before he figured out who he was. He was lying on his back in the closed shell of the DSC. He heard a hum and felt excruciating pain as the needles embedded in his skull retracted. Lights on a nearby panel blinked rapidly. The man tried to roll over but was too weak to complete the action. His muscles were sore and numb; it felt like he hadn’t used them in weeks. Little did he realize that he had not stood and flexed his muscles for thousands of years. As a wave of vertigo hit him, he began sweating profusely.

  After about an hour, the man’s memory drifted back. With tremendous effort, he rolled onto his side. The clamshell opened, and he inhaled stale air. Touching his face and head, he discovered he had a full beard and two feet of tangled black hair extending down his back. He still wasn’t thinking clearly, so it didn’t register in his mind that something was amiss.

  When Synthea sensed Wolf had awakened, she activated the artificial gravity and opened the DSC. Thirty minutes later, he made it up into a sitting position. He lurched to his feet and stumbled to the captain’s chair, falling into it. Dizzy and out of breath, he pressed the communicator button and tried to talk but only managed a choked squawk. He swallowed hard, trying to make saliva in his mouth to alleviate the dryness. Finally, he uttered a few sounds. “At…Atl…Atlantis to ISS, do you copy?” The words rattled out as if he had been a smoker for years. He tried again. “Atlantis to ISS, do you read me?”

  Wolf reached out and initiated a channel scan, listening for sounds of civilization, but he heard only the crackling emptiness of static. He spooled up the positioning computers and attempted to power on the long-range cameras, but they didn’t respond. The positioning computer confirmed that he was orbiting Mars. He would need to wait several hours before he could use the ship’s telescope to view Earth. Turning on the radio, he looped his original transmission to MBR, ISS, and Earth every two minutes. Then he eased back in the chair and closed his eyes for a few seconds.