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AD 2504 Term 1
Mission Briefing: Investigate Star System JUC-2066 for suitability for colonization. Prepare survey results, make formal recommendation.
Ship: JSS Extrapolator, Corvette Class, Hyperdrive mkII
Pilot: Terrence Sutter
Ground: Jerrick Marks
Sensors: Eduardo DeLeon
Specialist: Dr. Abbantine Leeds (Geologist)
In This Episode: When the ground-man loses contact with the Extrapolator, pilot Terrence Sutter must figure out what is wrong and find a way to bring his man back safely to the ship.
INDEX | Mission 1 | Next (Mission 2)>
One Last Mission
It was as ‘routine’ a mission as it could be, up to this point. Terrence was happy to seal that mouthy Jerrick in the drone shuttle, and watch it descend gracefully to the mysterious grey-green world waiting below. While Jerrick was on the ground, the Extrapolator would have some semblance of peace and quiet. One last mission… Terrence savored the thought. After this, he would cash in the Surveyor Corps retirement, and begin his second act. Maybe he would start a business? Maybe he would stake some land out in one of the younger colonies like Koslov or Iris.
He stood up from the navigation station—the closest thing to a ‘bridge’ the Surveyor Corps ships had, and decided to check in on how everyone else was doing. The Extrapolator was long and javelin-like, and the navigation room was at the forwardmost point. A narrow, metal paneled causeway wound down the operational rooms of the ship—rooms which allowed the control of all the specialized tools and equipment to explore new planets with a skeleton crew. The first room on the aftward journey was the observation station, for taking close examinations of the planet or stars. The lights were off, it was unoccupied. Then came the specialists station. Terrence could hear Abby rifling around in there as he approached.
“Hey, Abby,” he said, knocking on the doorframe. “Got everything you need?”
“It’s…Doctor…” she said, distractedly, as she reached into a bag. “And…yes. Nothing has changed on this ship since last time, and probably nothing will change long after I rotate off this ship. Thank you,” she said in a tone that didn’t sound especially grateful.
“No problem.” Terrence bit his tongue to keep from saying anything more. One last mission.
At the end of the causeway, before turning sharply left and further down the javelin was the sensors room. Terrence knocked on the doorframe. The rookie, Eduardo, was working on something, one had shoved in his pocket, his other hand moving a cursor around a screen.
He looked up, “Oh, hey Terrence.”
“Hey, Ed. Getting the hang of things? First tours can be rough.”
Eduardo shrugged—he was older, maybe older than Terrence, and had the calm of a man who had probably seen worse. “It’s not so bad, everything makes sense. I’ve worked with equipment like this before, which helps, I think!”
“With Jerrick heading to the ground I wanted to make sure you were doing okay too, I know he’s been giving you a hard time.”
Eduardo laughed, “Oh he doesn’t scare me. My oldest isn’t much younger than him and has called me much worse. Kids these days, right?”
Terrence laughed politely. “Well I don’t like how he was talking to you—a little jabbing can be good for camaraderie but before the last jump, the way he was going on about Sol…”
“No es nada,” Eduardo waved a hand casually. “I planned to invite him—and all of you, but him especially—to visit my home when he’s done galivanting about innerspace, so he can see what’s so nice about Earth. But, I think he loves his own home too much. I’ve never been to Theyst.”
“All Theysians—or, I should say, every Theysian I’ve met is madly in love with Theyst. Feels unhealthy to me sometimes but hey for all the talk we’re all in the Union right?”
“Right—uh, comrade,” Eduardo joked.
“I’ll let you get back to it. Jerrick should be landing soon, we’ll need everyone at the ready.”
Terrence found himself sitting in the small cube that passed for a ‘mess hall’ and realized he had been staring into space. He jolted up and rushed out and around the corner.
“Ed? Ed! Has Jerrick checked in yet?”
Eduardo’s face betrayed guilt mixed with concern— “Oh I, uh…”
Terrence frowned and smacked the doorframe. “Abby!”
“Doctooor!” she sang from her station up the hall.
Terrence was already at her door. “You haven’t heard from—”
“Not a peep!” she said. “This is a great planet, though. Lots of—”
“Save it, Doc.” Terrence rushed to navigation and grabbed a viewscreen and cycled through the views. Nothing—no drone shuttle. Had it crashed?
He leaned back and shouted down the hall. “Ed and Abby! Get down here now.”
Eduardo shuffled out of the Sensors station immediately, Abby brushed hair out of her face and tried to steal one last glimpse at her screens before coming down the hall after Ed.
“Jerrick hasn’t checked in, and we’ve got nothing on the drone cam. Abby—Doctor—you’ve been staring at the ground the most, take observation and check the landing site. We should be coming back around soon, so if he crashed we should see it. Eduardo, go to sensors and scan all frequencies, look for anything irregular. If it’s only comms that are down maybe he can find another way to get in touch. I’m going to try to figure out what happened to the drone shuttle. Got it?”
Ed nodded like he was a kid whose dad asked him to hold the flashlight during important repairs. Abby nodded like she had better things to do, turned, and shuffled into observation. Eduardo clattered down the metal causeway. Terrence let the door to navigation slide shut, and sighed heavily.
One last mission. One last mission.
He grabbed his viewscreen and pulled it close, cycling frantically between available cameras. The drone shuttle was totally offline. How did we miss this?
Shoving the viewscreen aside, Terrence turned to his console, frowning. He tried activating the manual override for the drone shuttle. He tried a few passkeys and some lucky guesses, but the result was a command terminal and a green light—it was…working? Not disabled, but working. Could it be the camera feed is bad?
He tried entering a mundane command, something to turn on portside searchlight. It went through, it responded as if the portside searchlight was on. No video, no audio, no way to verify. So the drone shuttle had to be out there somewhere.
Normally the drone shuttle acts like a relay between the ground-man and the survey ship, which is supposed to allow for faster response times in case of emergency. But in this case, it wouldn’t work. If it wasn’t on the ground helping Jerrick, it wasn’t helping anyone. Terrence entered the command for the drone shuttle to return to the survey ship.
Green light. Okay.
Only thing to do is…wait. For now.
Abby had to ask him to stop pacing. “Please go somewhere else, I can’t find Jerrick any faster with you clanking around out there,” she said.
Fine. The drone shuttle would return soon, Terrence could go to the shuttle bay and wait for it. The door to the shuttle bay was past Eduardo’s sensors station.
“Ed, you good?”
He had some beads in his hand, and jolted as if Terrence had caught him. “Yeah, good. I mean, no, I haven’t heard anything from Jerrick. Nothing on the all-frequency scan but I have it running cycles.”
“Alright.” Terrence kept walking.
The shuttle bay was like a mudroom, it had lockers with suits fitted to each crewmember, some supplies and equipment depending on who was going down—though, usually it was a solitary affair.
Every shuttle bay was different, like rings on a tree each told a story of the ship. Here and there, dents and stains. The Extrapolator had a little winged horseman carved into the side of one of the lockers. It was, perhaps, the most consequential single room in the whole ship—or, seemed that way to Terrence. It was the door that opened to other worlds, the room that moved the maps.
Maybe that’s why Terrence liked waiting here.
Mechanical whirring interrupted his thoughts as the bay doors opened. The drone shuttle inserted itself neatly into the little hangar in the interior of the ship. The airlock vented, and opened. Empty.
Terrence cursed. He turned and hit the intercom. “Shuttles back, no Jerrick. I’ll start diagnostics. Doctor, if you find Jerrick at the landing site tell me immediately. He had to have gotten off the shuttle somehow.”
Debugging the cameras took Terrence’s mind off the more pressing problems. He was almost sad when he cycled through the viewscreen and saw green lights for all cameras. He even fixed the communications relay—at least, so he thought. There wasn’t really a way to test it without sending the shuttle back out, and he wasn’t about to do that. Not yet.
One last mission. Of course it has to be the last mission.
He paced down the hallway navigation. Observation was his first stop.
“Anything yet?”
Abby sighed and swung her chair around almost playfully. “Well, there’s a smear at the landing site, I think that’s where the drone was. But it’s a heavily forested area, there’s no way to figure out which way he went. I’ve been doing a spiral search pattern as best as I can but he’s probably moving faster than I can scan.” She took her glasses off and jabbed them at Terrence. “That’s a long way of saying no, nothing yet.”
“Alright.” A seed of a thought was forming in Terrence’s mind but he didn’t like where it was going. He went to check on Eduardo.
Ed had his headphones on and was scanning frequencies again and again.
“Nothing,” he said before Terrence had a chance to ask. “No signals on any frequency. Do you think his equipment might be broken?”
Terrence did a doubletake. Rookies. “You think that might be it, huh?”
“I worked with radios back on Earth and—”
“You’re right Ed, it’s probably broken. Go get Abby and meet me in the shuttle bay.” Of course it has to be the last mission.
Terrence walked off and left Ed fumbling. In the shuttle bay, he took a couple deep breaths in front of the locker, touched his hand to that winged horseman someone carved years ago. “I’ll need some reinforcement with this one,” he whispered.
When Eduardo and Abby joined him in the shuttle bay, he already had the space suit on up to his waist.
“Wh—wait, what are you doing?”
“Communications are down. It’s been too many hours since Jerrick landed on that stupid rock and someone has to go get him. Ed, it’s your first tour, I’m not doing that to you. Abby, you’re no spring chicken and if you found Jerrick and he was injured I’m not sure you could bring him back. So that leaves me.”
Terrence watched the realization dawn on them.
“That leaves you without a ground man, a pilot, or a shuttle. Keep the camera feeds of the drone on, and keep observation focused on the landing site. Don’t leave unless you see me dead and even then wait a little bit.” He looked between Abby and Eduardo to make sure his instructions were registering. “There’s instructions on how to recall the drone in my desk, and if the worst should happen there’s the emergency escape but…I would rather you not think about that and just wait. Okay? Jerrick is probably fine so it’s just a matter of making contact and bringing him home.”
He zipped up his suit, and grabbed his helmet out of his locker. “If everything goes well I’ll be down and back in no time at all.”
Eduardo finally managed some words: “Stay safe, okay? We’ll keep the ship in orbit.”
“You—” Terrence stammered. Don’t touch the controls is what he wanted to say. Instead he said, “Thanks,” and pulled the helmet down over his head.
He slung his equipment pack over his shoulder and stepped through the narrow door of the shuttle airlock, and sealed it behind him. When he closed the second airlock door, he felt the hiss as the air pressurized. He sat down on the bench farthest from the airlock port-hole so he wouldn’t have to see the depths of space, and hit the launch button. One last mission.
The grey-green world he remembered from orbit had resolved out of the port-hole into a grey-green landscape with trees and mountains and low hanging grey clouds.
It looked like a rainy afternoon back home, but without the atmospheric data Jerrick was supposed to collect, there was no way to tell if it was poisonous or prosperous.
The shuttle settled onto the soft earth of the landing site. No two ways around it. Time to go.
He stepped into the airlock and got his first deliberate look at the planet. Hilly, mossy, wet, green. If it was non-toxic it might end up being a perfectly adequate world to colonize, and no one would remember this little drama.
The airlock door opened, and the planets native air rushed in. Terrence stepped slowly out, and got his first look around.
The landing site was a small clearing. It was mostly flat, though definitely soft as if it had been raining for a few days before they arrived. There was some of Jerrick’s equipment set down near the tree line of what looked very much like a deciduous forest. That suggested a direction but there was no way to be sure. And the ground-man tended to walk for miles…this could be problematic.
There was, however, a short range radio in the space suit. If Jerrick’s space suit hadn’t run out of air, or he wasn’t far, he might be able to receive. Terrence clicked his on, and listened.
Nothing.
“Jerrick, can you hear me?” he said. Nothing.
So, what else could he do? He started walking.
Terrence wasn’t much of an outdoorsman, he knew the possibility of tracks existed but when he looked at the ground it all looked like soggy leaves and mud to him. Anyway there was a reason Jerrick put the equipment in that place by the woods—surely he wanted to come back for them, or found something interesting about that direction.
He listened as best as he could through his helmet to the nature around him. It was eerie quiet. If there were animals here, they were keeping their distance. Every few yards he would stop, call out to Jerrick, and wait to see what he could hear. If Jerrick’s not dead I’m going to kill him.
As the shadows of the day crawled across the ground, Terrence finally heard something crackle in the static that sounded like a voice.
“Jerrick? Jerrick!” he called out.
He started walking in a circle to see if it got louder, like a game of hot-or-cold but with a crackling radio. Eventually it resolved into a voice: “Hello?”
“Jerrick! It’s Terrence, can you hear me?”
“Took you long enough. Come get me, I’m stuck.”
“Where are you?”
“Where are YOU?”
Terrence sighed. “Do you want help or not? We’ve got no frame of reference, help me out here.”
“Alright alright. I’m going to throw something, tell me if you hear it.”
He heard the exertion over the radio, and then a sound that made his skin crawl, like an animal running through the leaves. “What was that?”
“Big stick. Did you hear it? Move towards it.”
Terrence moved towards the sound.
“How are you stuck?”
“Slipped down a hill, foot caught in a root. I’m on a steep slope, can’t get myself free.”
There! The ground here was sloping down, and through a gap in the trees Terrence saw Jerrick from higher up the hill. He was face-down against a bare sloping cliff-face, one foot caught in a root, just like he said. Because he was face down he couldn’t hoist himself up, because the ground was wet he couldn’t climb—he really was stuck.
“I found you! I think I’ve got some rope.”
When Jerrick was finally hoisted out of the cliff, the late afternoon sun of this world had given way to dusk. It was getting dark.
“We’ve got to get back to the ship and make our report. How’s your foot?”
“I’ll be fine. Nice of you to come get me, I was starting to think you were going to leave me here. Where were you guys?”
“The drone shuttle had a comms issue, so it wasn’t relaying. We enjoyed how quiet the ship was so took us a while to realize you couldn’t communicate.”
“I figured. You know on Theyst we have a saying—”
“Took less than two minutes for you to mention Theyst, I lost that bet.”
“—That a man left is a man lost.”
“We weren’t going to leave you. But just wait till I tell Eduardo about this.”
“Please don’t.” Jerrick said quietly.
“Alright, I won’t. You tell him. For all the crap you gave him being the rookie, I figured you must’ve been killed or captured by some primitive alien race. Nope—just stuck on a root. Big brave Jerrick—”
Jerrick frowned. “Let’s get outta here.”
Terrence couldn’t help but feel relieved. My last mission. They picked their way through the woods towards the waiting shuttle. He waited for Jerrick to cross through the airlock before joining him inside. When the doors had sealed behind him he took off his helmet. “You know Jerrick, I’m retiring after this mission.”
“Are you now? See this was a parting gift, a little adventure to remember us by.”
The shuttle’s repulsors lifted it gently off the ground and into the air, as it’s engines roared to life.
“Whoever this haggard crew gets as a pilot next time is going to have to have nerves of steel just to handle you folks.”
“Ah, we’ll never have a pilot as tender and caring as you, Terrence. Besides, you can count on me to keep the other two in line.”
“Well I’ll leave some notes anyway. With a seasoned vet I’m sure it’ll be like I never left.”
The pair lapsed into silence. Terrence looked out the window, at the depths of space. The Extrapolator came into view. He would miss that old ship. He wondered where it would go without him.
To be continued…
Thank you very much for reading! This is Before The Maps Are Final, a science fiction adventure episodic serial set in the Sandbox Earth Universe. This will be a serial publishing every week, for a tentative total of twelve episodes. Please subscribe to be sure you don’t miss an installment sent directly to your inbox!
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God bless!
AJPM
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Oh good it ended happily, all is well, and I'm sure Terrence will retire safe and happy: why do I have a bad feeling about this?
Can't wait for the rest of this story. I love settings like this.