Chapter 1.6

It had been roughly two hundred years since the call came in from N21 now, showing what Freeman’s brother, Caesar, had done to them. Fredrik could hardly believe what his brother had done to them. The only crime they had committed was not considering that Willem was their leader.

He had not accepted Willem either, but he had not told those on N21 that. Rather, he had hidden. His mother and father had hidden with him. Willem’s mother, on the other hand, had gone along with what her son had done. She had been in the palace when it was flooded. It was suspected that Willem had turned her into a slave as well, which would explain why she had gone along with her deranged son.

Along with Fredrik and his parents, several people who had seen Willem’s growing insanity had hidden as well. Paul Robson was one of them. Freeman was pretty certain that was why he and Paul had been placed in the roles of authority that they had. They had never accepted Willem as their leader.

Archaeologists were now sifting through the ruined Death Valley. It had become an inland sea for many years. Eventually, the palace had degraded to the point it collapsed, and the valley drained back into the Pacific.

Much of the debris had been scattered as the water was pumped back When they opened the sealed room which held Caesar’s private workroom, much had been destroyed in the water. Luckily, much of the computer data storage was not destructible by water; even salt water, so by hooking them up to other computers, they were able to find out much.

Unfortunately, there was a section that without Caesar’s private codes was erased permanently from the storage. It mentioned something called ‘Total Fun’, and then nothing. None of the archaeologists could find anything other than that reference, but the general consensus was that if it was fun for Caesar, it would be misery for those on the station.

Still the search went on. They continued looking for some reference other than the name for another half a century till finally, they figured they should send what they had found.

As the archaeologists were searching the ruins, other people were searching looking at the technology that the people on the station would need. All that could be done, however, was to send information. There was really no way materials could be sent.

Or was there?

Engines were more powerful than had been on the station. N21 had been accelerated to ninety percent the speed of light. It was assumed that a similar size object, with new engines could be accelerated to ninety-five percent. That was with enough fuel to return to Earth.

Sitting in the briefing room, along with several scientists, were Paul and Fred. They were listening intently. What they heard was astounding.

A man with the unlikely name of Rashda Smythe was explaining how they could build another station and mount some of the new engines on it.

“Since we will be picking up the people on N21, we’ll be able to store much more fuel than otherwise. For the trip out, we will be able to use the bay space for fuel, so that we can stop and head the other direction.”

“I want them back as much as anyone,” Paul said, “but we’re talking about a huge investment to do this.”

“Not really,” Smythe disagreed.

Paul stared at him for a couple of moments, the got what he was saying. “No. Absolutely not. We need N22!”

“Why?” Smythe asked. “Are we going to stoop to the level of Wallace and have mutually assured destruction? We have a world government, so who are we going to assure destruction with?”

Fredrik was sitting back, watching and mulling the situation over. After a few minutes of the back and forth argument, he told Smythe, “I want you to draw up plans to do this. I’ll make sure you have a complete schematic on N22. You will not start on the station until I give the go ahead, however. Is that understood?”

“Thank you, Sir.”

Paul glared at his friend.

“I want you to give me an argument as to why we need that station full of warheads above us. That station has sixty bays, each with thirty missiles full of MRV’s aimed at this world. If all of them were set off, there wouldn’t even be a world here. You explain why we need that, Paul. You convince me, and I’ll tell Smythe here, to F off. Okay?”

There was nothing for Paul to do but simply nod.

Next to speak was a communications specialist. He ran the station that had multiple transmitters ready to send a message to N21 at a moment’s notice.

Again, the name of the man was completely strange. Noelle Rodriguez had hundreds of data transmissions ready to be sent. Multiple files of everything from recreational programming to news broadcasts since N21 left Earth orbit, would be compressed into highly crunched files to keep the size of the transmission down. It had to be sent as an ELF, or extremely low frequency to reach that far into space and not lose fidelity.

Next was Barb Johnson, who was the head hydroponics specialist on Earth. It was known that some of her teachers were on N21, but where she had centuries to fine tune the processes, N21 had aged only about a year.

The medical establishment was not nearly as far progressed, but archaeologists had found several millennia worth of medical research hidden away in Wallace’ palace. A copy of that would be sent to the station, as well as a complete course in medical research and practice for one or more people to take. There had to have been a reason for Wallace to space all of the medical scientists. Best to get people trained as soon as possible.

Freeman was back on the cliff overlooking Honolulu. He had a dilemma. He had decided to modify N22 and send it on it’s way. But should he tell those on N21 of the possibility of their rescue? It would be several decades, even in their subjective time, before the second station met up with them. In fact if their figures were slightly off, or if Wallace had not put the correct course down in his records, the stations would never even see each other in the void. Of course, as the station got farther away, their pinpointing of it was finer and finer as the direction the radio dishes had to be adjusted to receive and transmit data.

This time, Fredrik had no scotch with him. Instead, he wanted his mind clear. Should he tell them or not. To get their hopes up? What to do?

Once again, Paul Robson arrived. He knew this was Fred’s favorite place to meditate. He sat down beside his friend, but he didn’t say anything.

Finally, Fred asked, “You gonna try to talk me out of it?”

“Nope.”

“Why not?”

“I’ve already given my opinion. You don’t need me to repeat it. We’re going to send N22 after them, none of us can be second guessing ourselves.”

Fred nodded.

“Besides, you’re my friend, and even though we disagree, I’ve got your back. I’m gonna help to make this a success. Not a failure. I want them home too, Fred.”

“Thanks Paul. I want you to know, I really considered your opinion. I almost decided to go with your plan. If I did, however, I was going to have Smythe build a new one. My main concern here was the time factor. Doesn’t make much difference to them, but it does to us.”

Paul nodded. “I get that, and I understand your reasoning. I hope I was wrong in my treatise. I never want to see a need for N22 in it’s original purpose. I’d much rather it be used for this than MAD.”

It took Smythe and his teams more than ten years to modify N22 for it’s new purpose. It was the same basic layout as N21, but it was larger. While N21 had forty bays that had been full of missiles, N22 had sixty. The bays were correspondingly larger as well.

When the station was ready to depart Earth’s orbit, Smythe met with Freeman and Paul again.

“I want to let you know what we are doing. We have a crew of one thousand volunteers who will go on the station. Their purpose will be to build apartments as fuel is used. We have placed bladders of fuel in many of the bays. As bladders empty, they will be ejected and the bay that they are in will be turned into either apartments or other uses.”

“What about the missiles?” asked Paul.

“Well, we’ve had some thoughts about that, but I think our best bet is to mount the MRV’s around a few of the missiles, and then save the remaining empty shells for another purpose.”

“What’s that?” asked Fred.

“The missiles use the same engines as N21 had. It uses less than a gram of fuel to get to supersonic speeds as it enters the atmosphere. We’ve taken one hundred MRV’s out of each missile. With those gone, we can turn the missiles into engines for the station. If we use a third of them for accelerating from Earth, along with the main engines, we’ll get an extra boost, and jettison the used engines. We can then flip the station when it meets with N21 and we should be able to use a third of those engines to slow it to the same speed as N21. Then, we will use the rest of the fuel in those as well as the remaining fuel to bring the station to a relative stop to Earth. We will then jettison the remaining missiles to lower the station’s mass, and use it’s own engines to accelerate back to Earth. We’ll have to take into account the mass of the people from N21 for our return fuel consumption. We will not accelerate too much that we don’t have the fuel to stop relative to Earth when we arrive back.”

Paul nodded. He wasn’t a ‘rocket scientist’ but he understood enough to realize what Smythe was saying. His last question was, “Who’ll command N22?”

“I will,” Smythe responded.

Fred considered for awhile. “Very well. How long until you launch?”

“I figure we can get the missiles taken care of in about six months, and by that time, I believe we’ll be in the correct position for our launch window.”

Fred nodded. “Go to it.”

Author’s note:

Considering my love of Trek, It was so tempting to have Fredrik say, “Make it so” at the end, but the more boring won out. If you’re a fan of Trek, just imagine that Freeman ended with “Make it so”. I think it’s the perfect ending.