One Giant Mess For Mankind

Sandbox Earth #5

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Rivalry

“When you finally did hear from NASA again, what was the instruction?”

“Ha! The first thing they asked was how we were, whether we were still operational. If the EMP had hit us, we would be dead as a doorknob, to be sure. Kind of them to check in. But after that…things began to move very fast.

“Well—things moved fast in a slow kind of way. The second ship was gone, and now we had to navigate the International Space Station through this debris field falling from the first ship. Chunks of it were falling, my good friend Charles, he managed to get a good look out and saw that the…I don’t know what to call them, is people quite right? They weren’t quite people were they, but the beings anyway, they were desperately trying to repair their ship, it seemed. One thing that was clear to Charles and I and our crewmate, Elisa was her name, was that the first ship would be de-orbiting in only a matter of time. Our concern was our own safety, and making sure when the first ship crossed our orbital we weren’t anywhere near it. We started taking initiative on this. We were working on it for nearly a day, when NASA threw a wrench in the works.

“So, let me make sure you understand the dynamic on the international space station. It’s the year, 2035 yes? The first residents on the Station arrived in the year 2000, before I was even born. Due to the modular nature of the station, some minor upgrades had been made but the whole infrastructure was proposed in the 1980’s, built in the 1990’s, and deployed in the 2000’s. It was a totally zero-G environment, and intended as kind of an orbital research lab. It was narrow—all of the modules had to fit inside a space shuttle or a rocket—and it had a maximum crew of 7 people. At the time we had three Americans and three Russians. Americans of course had no love for the Russians due to the Firecracker Wars of the 2020’s; and Russians had no love for Americans because of the Great Reset they blame us for in 2030. Yet we maintained this illusion of concord—science, we hoped, could be a great unifier. All six of us were scientists of various varieties—again, motivated by that love of this last, great frontier of human exploration.

“NASA—and their military handlers, I am sure—NASA comes in and tells us we need to secure the space station. How the blazes are we supposed to do that? We aren’t soldiers, these Russians were our friends. Their names were…Anatoly, Vitaly, and Boris, I think. NASA gave us no instructions either—they just said secure the space station. After the EMP they didn’t have secure or regular communications so their messages were necessarily brief, understand.

“Now, Elisa, she was an Astronomer, and brilliant mathematician. She had begun taking observations of the first ship—we had taken to calling it The Diamond—and she figured that the whole ship would enter the atmosphere within 72 hours. We figured NASA was probably trying to figure out how to get to The Diamond before it de-orbited. The easiest way to get to orbit was—obviously—from orbit. It would be a heroic effort to get a rocket constructed, ready, and programmed to intercept in the time it had.

“At the time, before they built that Elevator in Cuba, there were only a few functional space programs in the world: America, obviously, Russia, Europe, China, Japan, and India. Of these, only America, Russia, and India happened to have a Rocket already ready. The American rocket was out of commission, of course, because of the EMP. Only the Russian payload was intended to have passengers—they were sending a resupply mission to the International Space Station, one of the Russians would be rolling off and two Russians would join.

“Elisa, Charles, and myself, we met in private and talked in hushed, conspiratorial tones. It was all very dramatic, but the truth is we were all scared out of our minds. I was thick skulled so most of the real discussion was between Elisa and Charles. Elisa, I remember, had figured it out first.

“She said something like, ‘NASA is going to want us to hop to the Diamond.’

“I remember saying, ‘We can’t do that. Our thrusters aren’t for navigating like that and we certainly can’t rendezvous with the blasted thing.’

“Charles brought some sense: ‘What about the Russians?’

“And that set the stage: We were sure that securing the space station meant get rid of the Russians but what came next was probably going to be something like get to the Diamond. Here Elisa showed her worth again. It was her idea to commandeer a supply capsule and hitch a spacewalk rig to it so we could transit from the supply capsule to the Diamond. Charles came up with a solution for the Russians. We could lock them in one wing of the station to neutralize them—but we had to choose which wing and figure out how we were going to co-exist.

“I said the best use of the capsule was to wrestle the Russians into it and let it take them safely back to Earth. I also said the Russians were probably getting similar instructions from Roscosmos, who, mind you, were not dealing with loss of power right now; so if we didn’t act they surely would. They had a flight crew already prepared to resupply the Station and give them a majority. We couldn’t wait to find out.

“It turns out we waited too long. Maybe 8 hours had passed while we were talking all this over and wringing our hands. The thing about Russians is that they are a pragmatic people. Anatoly, Vitaly, Boris—they were not evil people. They were scientists same as us, we were all friends. But they loved their country, same as us. They wanted Russia to be first, same as us. So the most practical method of preserving resources and eliminating threats had to be to force us out the airlock.

“They came for Elisa first, I heard her yelp. Charles and I arrived at the same time to find two Russians struggling with her arms and all three of them spinning in an odd and dangerous way in the middle of the capsule. The third—Boris I think it was—came up behind us. He had a sad look in his eyes. He said, ‘Sorry, friends. You understand don’t you?’

“I said— ‘We’re sorry too, Boris. You beat us to it.’ And the fight was on.

“Charles went to help Elisa while I grappled with Boris. In Zero G it was incredibly difficult—I launched myself at him full force and we both flew through one wing into the next. We were spinning while we were careening through the station. I tried to brace with my hand and cracked my wrist; he hit square on his back and knocked his wind out. I didn’t know what to do so I found a stretch of tether and I tried to tie up his arms while he got his breath back. Didn’t stop him from flailing at me and swinging his arms around—I grabbed a microscope and I cracked him in the temple with it—he went limp.

“Next I tied a stretch of tether around my wrist since I had hurt it pretty badly, and then I went back to see how Elisa and Charles were doing.

“They were spinning in a tangled mess still, it can’t have been fun for any of them. I still had the microscope so I reached in and grabbed Anatoly by the collar, and cracked him over the head too—he went out like a light. Elisa was able to get free and Charles helped cancel out our rotation. Vitaly was the only one left. I said, ‘Sorry, friend. You understand, don’t you?’

“He smiled through tears, and shrugged. ‘Do what you have to do my friend.’ he said.”

Here Mr. Graham goes quiet for a time. I see him touch his wrist which he has told me still hurts from time to time after this incident. It is clear this is a challenging topic for him to discuss.

“What happened next? What did you do with the unconscious Russians?”

He wipes a tear from his eyes and I offer him tissues before he continues.

“I, uh, I’m afraid I’m not allowed to say. Had to sign my soul away when I got back to Earth I’m afraid. I have probably already told you too much. Vitaly, Boris, and Anatoly were good men. If it wasn’t them, it would have been us. You would be in Moscow right now interviewing one of them.”

I looked up the three Russian astronauts when I was doing research for this interview. None of them is alive today. The dates of their deaths, and the cause, are not available.

“Uh, Anyway. The Space Station was secure. We began thinking of how to get from here to there safely, when we received a spot of surprising news.

“It turns out India of all places had managed to scrape together a mission to the Diamond, and they had already launched.”

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Thank You For Reading!

My prequel series continues! I hope you are enjoying. I am very excited to be bringing this series of deep lore from the Adventures of Tylus Worran to you, and I hope you are enjoying it. It tells the story of the infancy of humanity’s life among the stars.

Thank you for reading, and God Bless you!