Evacuation (The Seamus Chronicles Book 2) (12 page)

Part 3

A few weeks ago life was cruising along at a nice comfortable pace. Then we discovered that the virus was evolving and activity accelerated to full throttle overnight. Somehow during the last few days, things have started to move even faster. Once Dad got the first plane lined up, it started to feel like we were leaving tomorrow. But that was three days ago.

I don’t know how many days I have left to wake up staring at this ceiling. Today I am going to mount the first two warp units on one of the C5 Galaxy’s. What a fitting name for the first earth-built craft to travel to another galaxy. I believe the mounting should be straightforward—basically bolting the units to the body of the airplane.

Neither Cassandra nor I believe that there will be a physical load placed on the mounting brackets. I would actually say that we are sure of it for the warp unit located up front. The solar sail unit in the rear is not as clear. What is clear to me, though, is that if a load shows up on the rear unit, all of my math was wrong and none of us will feel a thing as we become vaporized by the energy of the sun.

Mom insisted that no one work around the clock. There hasn’t been a positive blood test yet, so we know there is still some time. There was a small debate about leaving immediately or taking our time. Mom won, naturally, with the note that losing one of us to the virus is less bad than losing all of us to a warp jump accident that occurred because someone was over-tired. She may have upped her game because the stakes are survival, but I would not have wanted to compete with her in the business world.

It’s finally 6 a.m. and time to get out of bed. Showering every day is nice; waiting around the dining room for others to finish their breakfast is not. Somehow the chow and independent thinking that got us this far are no longer welcome as we near completion. I don’t know if it is an approach to project management or people management that is driving our updated work styles.

I guess that the chaos approach leads to distractions and diversions. It’s okay in the development stage when you are trying to find your way and don’t have a clear roadmap to success. Now that we have food, water and shelter for six months sorted out and three crafts we know will be capable of warp jumping, there is only execution left. We don’t need distractions and chaos; we need structure and direction.

I’m the first one in the dining room, but Liam comes in not long after I have made coffee. I swear he waited in the hall until I had it brewing. He was probably worried that I would try and force him to make it. It is a justifiable concern, or at least it used to be. I’ve treated him pretty poorly for most of our lives; I wonder if he knows that I love him?

“Will you help me run the reactor units over to Fred before the morning meeting?” I ask him while we both stand idly with coffee. Dad started referring to the planes as Fred a couple of days ago and the name kind of stuck.

“Yeah. I hate standing around here waiting for everyone else to get going. I’ll do anything to keep busy,” he says. He looks at his crutches and his coffee cup, not sure how he’ll manage the two.

“Morning, boys,” Dad says as he walks through the door.

“Morning, Dad,” Liam and I say in unison.

“Did I hear something about not standing around?” Dad takes a long sip of scalding hot coffee. “If so, I’m in. We need to shake things up a little. But let’s make sure we’re back for the meeting.”

The three of us walk out of the dining room and head outside. We could be members of the grounds crew heading out to work on any normal day. Instead we are headed to the lab building to get four pieces of the most advanced technology ever built by humans. We ride the short distance in silence, enjoying our coffee and the warm morning sun.

Liam stays with the golf cart and Dad and I go into the lab. I’m glad he came with us. I forgot how unwieldy the reactor had gotten with the additions we made. I could carry one unit by myself, but it’s more comfortable with two people per unit. Can you imagine the first warp jump failing because I banged a component on the doorframe trying to carry it myself?

In no time we have all four units loaded into the trailer attached to the cart and are heading out to the runway. While it’s not his call, I begin to lobby Dad shamelessly for a test warp jump before we all risk our lives. Even this is not as clear-cut as it should be. If we do a test, it should be Cassandra and I that are the first humans to ever warp jump. But I’m not so sure it’s a good idea for me to share something that risky with Cassandra. Maybe I should let her go alone, but then it would seem like I’m not confident enough in my invention to risk my life. Asking Liam to go makes it look like I don’t value his life and consider him disposable if something fails.

“There is no way you get to test warp jump without convincing Mom we have time,” Dad says, making it clear that even he needs Mom’s buy-in. “Now, let’s lay these units out and get back in time for the morning meeting. We’ll never get her to agree to anything if she thinks we might flake out.”

We lay a warp unit at the front of each plane and a solar sail unit at the rear. They are simply left on the concrete runway. I’m suddenly worried that they might be stolen if we leave them out in plain sight. I haven’t had a fear of the men in black jumpsuits for a long time, but it feels real once again. I suppose an animal could come and damage a unit, but it’s not likely. My fears need to be suppressed; this is a skill that will be in high demand in the coming days.

We make it back to the lab building about 15 minutes before the morning meeting. Just enough time to go the dining room and grab a fresh cup of coffee. Seems like everyone is savoring that last coffee before the meeting, as the dining room is full. Sofie and Grace are sitting with the boys playing yet another silly game that involves a piece of paper and some crayons. I wonder if these kids have any idea how remarkably normal their lives are in these insane circumstances?

Walking over to the kid’s table, I notice Cassandra and Jane at a corner table talking quietly and looking down at a paper. They are concerned about something, but it doesn’t seem like they are scared or angry. If they have found a flaw in one of my equations, I hope they will tell me in private. I don’t need my mistake called out to the whole world. If it’s a build problem with the reactor units, then I would be less upset finding out about it at the morning meeting. Still, if this is about something I’m involved with, they should call me over to discuss it now.

“Good morning, Seamus!” The chorus of kids’ voices snaps me back to attention.

“Good morning, everyone.” I say as I put my hand on Sofie’s shoulder. It’s not intimate or romantic, but I like touching her. I hope she doesn’t mind.

As the kids briefly explain their game, it is truly the calm before the storm. We are all having a normal relaxed breakfast. There is no fear and no urgency. Anger and tension are not present in the room. How is it that we are able to achieve this level of world peace only days before we are set to destroy the planet?

Dad is the first one to leave, but we all know it’s time. While it’s not steady, there is an orderly procession out the door. Some of us stop by the coffee pot for a last top off; others simply clear their places and head out. The boys leave their game on the table and push past Randy out the door. I assume they will be on their bikes before I even see the sun.

“Okay. Let’s settle down,” Mom says, probably speaking to herself. She is noticeably excited and started talking before everyone was even in the room. “Do we have a departure date?”

“I’ll need a day for each craft. That means we can leave in four days,” I say, but I am not as confident as I sound.

“We’ll need at least that much time to finish loading,” Dad says, trying to keep me from seeming like the long pole in the tent.

“We need two days to finish the next four units,” Cassandra says. She is not going to be the cause for delay.

“We’re ready when you are,” William says. He has been waiting for some time. Most of his work the last week has been on nice-to-have or fun projects.

“Ummm,” Randy says. He is the least confident. “We still can’t locate the actual warheads. It turns out that we were kind of duped. There is an extensive security network guarding what we thought were ICBM silos. Turns out they decommissioned the silos, but not the launch network.”

“Suggestions?” Mom surveys the room, lingering on Jane.

“Maybe we ask the guys from McMurdo to help out? Most of them spent some time in the service and probably heard things, even if they were just rumors,” Dad says. He is never afraid to speculate.

“Good idea. Randy, let the quarantined folks know that we need help and see who bites. I would say this needs to be figured out fast, but it seems like we have time,” Mom says. She doesn’t sound too worried about this roadblock.

“Excuse me,” Jane says, but quietly. “I’m not sure how to state it, but this morning Cassandra and I realized a problem. Actually, a pretty big problem.”

Oh no. This is what I have been afraid of. They found a simulation result that showed total failure. There is a catastrophic flaw in my warp unit or the solar sail or the timing with the gravitational mass. There are so many things that can go wrong. All of them will be my fault.

“Okay, what is it?” Mom says. She looks confused.

“We sort of know where ‘there’ is.” Jane pauses and takes a deep breath. “But we don’t know how to get there.”

“You’re right, you don’t know how to state it,” Mom says. It’s a little mean, but I’m guessing it’s because she’s scared.

“Sorry.” Jane is not trying to be difficult or obscure. “There are no Google Maps for our own galaxy, let alone the ones adjacent to us. Even if there were maps, I doubt they could give us directions based on a space warp and light speed jump.”

“So what you’re saying is that we are prepared to take the biggest road trip in history and we have everything but the map and directions?” Dad asks, trying to net this out into English for not only himself, but also the rest of us in the room.

“That’s a good way to put it. I can’t even give an estimate of how long it will take to figure something out. This requires true multi-dimensional measurements, over, up and out,” Jane says.

We thought of every physical aspect of the trip: the craft and its locomotion; provisions to sustain us for an extended stay away from land; even safety for protection from temperature fluctuations and radiation. But we forgot the intellectual component of travel: Navigation.

With our global positioning satellites and in-dash satellite navigation, we could get anywhere without knowing how to get there. Before that, humans had extensive collections of compasses, maps and directions. The sextant was invented in the 1700s. It has been generations since an individual had to worry about navigating.

Yet it is the one thing that has plagued explorers for all time. Historians are not fascinated by the fact that ancient Polynesians could build boats that float. Packing a boat with supplies for a weeklong journey is not something that generated years of academic debate. Knowing how to go from one island to the next without being able to see it or communicate with it still baffles experts. Not only did the ancient mariners know where the other island was located, they could account for varying speeds of winds and currents to actively direct their craft to the desired destination.

Before we set our own ships off on a journey through the heavens, we need to understand how to navigate. Our vessels are capable and well-stocked. We are an intelligent and resourceful group. The next challenge we have to solve lays before us.

My night was spent playing with cubes made of paper. I would place a dot on two separate faces; one dot for Earth and the other for the planet we’re trying to reach. Fingers clumsily folding and unfolding the cubes, searching for some formula or pattern to describe how to get them close together. The only success I achieved was more precise paper cubes.

The light from the morning sun does nothing to give me confidence. I’m not sure that I can even calculate an approximation of how to create a warp that gets us into the correct solar system, let alone hours away from a potentially habitable planet.

Computers must hold the answers. I know that a cube is relatively easy to describe mathematically. We simply need to give the computer dimensions that are suited to the scope of our problem. I close my eyes to think about the next step after mathematically describing a cube on the computer. Sleep wins a battle I didn’t know I was fighting.

“Seamus,” Grace calls, shaking my shoulder. “Seamus, wake up. You need to be at the morning meeting.” Grace surveys the paper scraps and the proliferation of crumpled paper cubes that surround me.

“Sorry about the mess,” I mumble. Waking up has not gotten any easier. “I know, tell Mom I’ll be a few minutes late.”

“No. You will not be late. You are coming with me now.” Grace used to wake me for school sometimes and she knows that I don’t close my eyes for an extra minute; I go back to sleep for hours.

“Okay. I want to shower quickly and see if I can wake up some more,” I say. There is not enough rubbing to get the sleep out of my eyes.

“I said no.” Grace is literally pulling me off the window ledge.

Apparently there is no time for a shower. I help Grace pull me up from the window. Together we hurry across the campus to the conference room. My sister can give me no clues as to why late is not an option, but she says that mom is insistent that I be there.

“We have to stop rat-holing on the where and focus on the who,” a man I haven’t met before says to the room.

“But if we can figure out the where, it might help us get in,” Randy says, more agitated.

“Randy, sit down,” Mom interjects, trying to keep the energy down. “You and Liam have worked tremendously hard. This is no reflection on you.”

“I suppose I should be grateful that it wasn’t easier to get into the nuclear weapons systems.” Randy slumps down into a chair before the room goes quiet.

“How long until you have figured out your navigation problem?” The man turns his attention to me.

“I’m not really sure. And I kind of consider it
our
navigation problem,” I say. I’m tired and I don’t like to be verbally accosted.

“Settle down, both of you.” Mom continues to assert her control. “Let’s follow the routine and continue this conversation as part of the regular morning meeting. We should give everyone a few more minutes to arrive.”

I glare at Grace, who doesn’t seem to mind. If this look were passed over the breakfast table at home, she would have melted into apology. The hustle across campus has woken me up but done nothing for my sour mood.

The delay in Cassandra and Jane’s arrival gives me time to get some coffee. For some reason, it tastes really good today. As I stare into the dark liquid, I can vaguely remember a time when I would have skipped coffee if there was no cream and sugar. Since we are not actively cultivating coffee plants, I realize that we will someday run out of coffee—not a pleasant thought.

For some reason, my mind drifts from the coffee to the mug. The circular shape of the cup grabs my attention as if it’s a detail I haven’t seen before. Cubes should be consuming the front of my mind as well as my subconscious. A circle is almost the exact opposite, so why does it seem so prominent now?

“Seamus,” Mom calls to me from the front of the room.

Everyone is present. I didn’t notice them coming in. I take my seat at the table and mom begins in her typical fashion.

“I would like to introduce you all to Roger. He is part of the McMurdo contingent and has come out of quarantine to help us locate the nuclear warheads,” Mom says. She pauses after she speaks so that we can all say hello.

“Leave the planet team?” Mom doesn’t even look to me for input.

“The navigation resources we have today mean that
we
can probably get to the solar system we’re shooting for,” I say, and emphasize ‘we’ as a less than subtle dig at Roger.

“Okay. I’d like to take us a step back to make sure everyone understands what you are talking about,” Jane cuts in. She can sense the tension but she has no idea of its cause. “With the naked eye, we can see the star for the solar system we want to get to. Our space telescopes allow us to ‘see’ the planets orbiting those stars, but they are not actually where we see them.”

“You mean they are some type of optical illusion?” Dad asks, a puzzled look on his face.

“Sort of,” Jane says, nodding. “The light from the star and even the light reflected off the planet gets refracted, bent and generally distorted on its way across the galaxies. So while we know the general direction of the solar system, we do not have a direct sight line to it.”

“And it’s not like we have GPS coordinates for it either,” Dad says with his nervous chuckle.

“Exactly.” Jane is pleased that the concept was remembered, if not understood.

“If I could extrapolate a little,” I say, because not everyone in the room seems to understand. “Since we are working with light-years, our aim being off by even a fraction of a millimeter would result in us being tens of light-years off course.”

“But can’t we just start out in the general direction and course-correct as we go until we get there?” Roger asks. He either doesn’t understand or doesn’t agree.

“There is no such thing as warp
speed
. We are making a warp jump,” I explain. “Time-space will warp in front of us, and we will hop over to the other side. Our top speed will be a little faster than the speed of light, but only for the blink of an eye.”

“Fine. Why not just delay the hopping part until you are sure we’ve found the correct other side?” Roger says. He thinks he has solved a problem Cassandra and I have been stressing about for days.

“If you could imagine the complexity, we wouldn’t be having this conversation,” I say tersely. “The short version is that we need the mass generated from creating the warp to balance us against the force of jumping from a standstill to the speed of light. Everything has to work together and happen in a fraction of a second. You can’t stop and turn around when you’re hopping across a stream; this is actually no different, except we cannot see what is on the other side.” I’ll give him some credit for trying to understand what we’re doing and not just blindly accepting things.

“I think I see your point,” Roger says. He is not happy about my answers. 

“Maybe you can explain to me what was going on before I got here?” I ask. I don’t want to restart an argument, but it may be relevant.

“Fine. Let’s move on to the nuke the planet team,” Mom says. She has taken all her notes and has no further requests of us.

“I’ve been helping Randy and Liam with the nuke the planet initiative.” Roger has somewhat aggressively taken over for Randy. “The access they have gained to date is quite impressive.”

“But much like your distant solar system, our aim appears to have been off,” Randy says, shaking his head. “Not only are most of the obvious missile silos non-nuclear, the DoD appears to have had very few nuclear weapons at all.”

“I’ve served this country my whole adult life,” Roger says. He has a hard-set look in his eyes. “In general, I believe that there are always good intentions. However, there have been too many misdirections for me to believe that our actions are always honest.”

“Roger believes that the nuclear warheads are under NASA control. Our focus has been on Strategic Air Command, SAC, and Department of Defense, DoD,” Liam explains.

“Absolutely not,” Jane says. She is not open to the idea that NASA has been holding all the nuclear warheads all this time.

“A subtle trick of nuclear disarmament. Move the weapons to NASA for ‘interplanetary defense’ or ‘advanced propulsion’ systems, and we get to call them scientific resources instead of WMDs,” Roger says. He certainly has convinced himself.

The idea makes sense to me. The United States had to stop aiming ICBM’s at the Soviet Union, but they were still good killing tools and we didn’t want to get rid of them. Let NASA convert a few warheads into power plants for some satellites and everyone thinks we’re green and peaceful.

“So what’s next?” Mom is fine with the theorizing but she needs an action item.

“Jane, would you be willing to help us look into impact deterrent programs NASA was working on?” Randy asks, reluctant in asking for this help.

“Of course, even just to disprove this crazy idea,” Jane answers sharply.

Mom moves the meeting along while Jane types what appear to be unpleasant notes into her laptop. Roger is new to the whole process and it is great that he wants to help, but he isn’t making friends with his attitude.

The response protocol team continues to amaze me. William seems to have been perfectly suited for this role. Grace and Sofie are awesome, too. The three of them have found this amazing intersection between artist, farmer and engineer. I am confident that not only will they successfully reintroduce life on Earth after the nuclear winter, they will also leave our story for future generations to find and understand. But the story won’t be left as a news article; it will reflect the character, ingenuity and hope of the people that were also dark enough to almost destroy the human species.