they didn’t frag us in the first place.”
Jansen took a whiff of the air. He didn’t need any instruments to know that oxygen was running low. “No power, no oxygen generation. So there’s our choice: do we suffocate all slow like, or do we perish in a glorious ball of flame?”
Marco chuckled. “Pretty clear which way you’re leaning. Why not? Put me down for the blaze of glory, too.”
Hopkins crossed his arms in frustration. “Sons of bitches. Fine. Do whatever you want. I’ll see you in hell.”
Jansen drifted toward the control panel. “That’s the spirit, Hop. You got what the French call a joie de vivre, you know that?” His hands danced through the generator activation procedure, and the console beeped in approval. After another second, he could hear the station’s generators starting to cycle.
Hopkins had turned ghost white. Even whiter and sweatier than normal, in fact. “What do we do if they come for us?”
Jansen said, “Say cheese.”
“Die,” Marco offered. “I suppose if it makes you feel better, you could go outside and chuck a stapler at ‘em. Who knows… maybe they have a secret vulnerability to staples. You could be a hero.”
“I’m pretty sure I’m gonna give ‘em the finger,” Jansen said after some thought. “But not just any finger. I mean, this would be a historic flip-off. The finger of the ages. See, I wouldn’t just be giving them the finger on account of myself, but as a representative of humanity.”
Hopkins pouted. “I fucking hate you guys.”
“With good reason,” Jansen agreed as he looked out the window at the smoking ash heap that was his planet. “Bad news, though. We’re all you’ve got left.”
Hopkins groaned for a very long time, so long that Jansen began to wonder if the man might be part whale. Hopkins certainly looked the part, with his big bald pasty white head. Maybe one of those melon headed whales, or a pilot whale. When Hopkin’s unnatural groan finally finished, Jansen looked back to the console and saw that the generator was running at full output. “In other news,” he said, “fiat lux.”
He hit ENGAGE and the lights came on, followed shortly afterward by a draft of sweet fresh air.
“Thank God,” Marco said. “It was starting to smell like a jock strap in here.”
Jansen smiled sheepishly. “Sorry. Skipped my shower this morning. Hey Hop, why don’t you give the comms a try?”
The whale man swam over to the comm console. “Sure thing, Nils. So you can blame me when the aliens blow us away, right?”
“You’re catching on. Getting anything?”
“Gimme a second.” The whale-man slapped the console several times with his sweaty flipper. “Nope. Whole network’s static.”
Marco, still in his imaginary floating space hammock, laughed. “Alrighty. There might be someone to call, but we still can’t call them. That brings us back to slow suicide.”
“Real slow if you like. We’ve got supplies to last for a couple months. Maybe more if we’re stingy.”
“Christ. Do you have to be such nihilists?”
Jansen gave Hopkins a dry look. “Hey man, I don’t hear you coming up with any brilliant escape plan.” He didn’t want to die. Not at all. It just seemed like the only option. He realized that the lack of options might stem from his atrophied imagination, though. “Here’s an idea. Instead of whinging, why don’t you use the contents of that massive cranium and come up with some way out of this?”
Marco had floated all the way across the command center, where he reached out and knocked on one of the numerous control stations. The dull metal clank echoed through the chamber. “Copernicus is, like, the pride of the Foundation, right? We’re inside a shiny new multi-billion credit deep space scanning doo-hickey, and you’re telling me there’s no way to send an e-mail?”
“Waaaaait,” Hopkins said, dragging the word out while his brain spooled up. “I bet the active scanners can cut through the interference. We fire up the actives… the microwave laser or the infra-red, and use it to send Morse code or something.”
Jansen sighed. “It’s a maser, dumb ass. And not to rain on your parade, but I don’t know Morse code. Do you know Morse code, Marco?”
“Do I look like a boy scout to you?” Marco chuckled derisively and went on. “Screw that noise. Use the comm networking protocols to generate a packet stream, and pipe it through the maser. Instant output device.”
“You can do that?” Jansen asked. “I thought you were just a wrench monkey.”
“I took network programming in college, so… maybe? Probably not. Won’t know till I try, though. You think Hopkins can do the bullshit he said?”
Jansen looked over at the sweaty, quivering mass of flesh that was Larry Hopkins, and they all shrugged in unison. “Sure. Why not? We’re literate, college educated men. We have tech manuals. We’ve got more time than we can shake a stick at, and we don’t have any TV to distract us. I’m filled to knees with hope.”
Marco climbed into a chair. “Sarcastic bastard. So, what message do we send?”
“Survivors on Copernicus. Send help.” Hopkins said.
Marco looked skeptical. “Yeah. That’ll bring ‘em running. How about ‘Busty bikini models on Copernicus. Starved for love. Come quick and bring beer’?”
Jansen looked down at the generator panel, and the long list of systems waiting to be activated. None of them had a purpose anymore. He idly wondered how things might have turned out if Copernicus were a great big railgun instead. Then he read the word ‘telescope’ and an idea caught fire. “Nobody out there has any clue what went down. Not Midway. Not the Moon. Not Mars. Why don’t we point our big fat telescope at Earth, and show them what’s happening?”
“Not bad,” Marco said.
Hopkins nodded enthusiastically. “Yeah, I like it.”
Each of them floated silently in their own corner of the command center. They had a plan and a vague idea of how to accomplish it. The deadline was months away, and since they were all professional technicians, they wouldn’t bother to start for at least another week. Not as if anyone was left to fire them for laziness.
As he stared at the wounded Earth and started to zone-out again, one thing really burned Nils Jansen’s biscuits: Donovan and his nerds were tens of millions of kilometers away, completely ignorant of this whole catastrophe, and having the time of their lives. He’d had his suspicions before but now it was official… he made the wrong damn decision.
He hated when that happened.
Chapter 14:
Valentine
The members of the Shackleton Expedition were having the time of their lives. It didn’t take them long to master Zebra-One’s unique method of transportation, and soon they were flitting about and mapping the ship’s internals faster than they ever could have dreamed. There was a specific approach that proved most effective: an explorer pictured the entire vessel in their mind then focused down to their intended destination, and the ship took care of the rest. Once a person had been to a location, though, all they needed do was picture it again and off they went. The system was learning.
A third of the group were especially talented, able to pick up the process in under a minute, and were then able to get around effortlessly. Most of the rest could navigate the ship after a half-hour of practice, and a few needed a couple hours, but precisely two simply couldn’t get any response at all. One of them was the cantankerous Professor Caldwell, and the other a young miner named Terrel. Both tried well into the second day under mounting frustration, but the ship wouldn’t take them anywhere. Zebra-One otherwise reacted to them normally, providing light and displaying the electrical pattern when they touched the walls, but they were both eventually forced, rather embarrassingly, to travel with someone else who could operate the transit system.
Doctor St. Martin latched onto both men and became their permanent tour guide in return for a chance to
