Sleeping With the Enemy

Sleeping with the Enemy

Kaitlyn O'’Connor

    Š copyright by Kaitlyn O’Connor, March 2010

    Cover Art by Eliza Black, March 2010

    ISBN 1-978-60394-396-3

    New Concepts Publishing

    Lake Park, GA 31636

    www.newconceptspublishing.com

    This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and places are of the author’s imagination and not to be confused with fact. Any resemblance to living persons or events is merely coincidence.

Chapter One

Moon Base 2028

    The agitation that had driven First Lieutenant Sybil Hunter from her quarters in the barracks to the Cosmos observation center eased as the lack of activity reflected on the huge screens caught her attention. For a solid week, dozens of workers had been carefully going over the hull of the colony ship, searching for micro-meteor holes to patch. The ship-as yet to have its maiden voyage-had been liberally peppered with them during the transition from external shielding to internal, forcing a frantic search and patch operation before the tiny holes could seriously jeopardize the hull’s integrity.

    They were conspicuous now by their absence. Undoubtedly, they’d finished and withdrawn inside the ship once more to help the others working on finishing the ship’s interior.

    It was amazing how often the simplest things worked best, Sybil reflected. Not that they knew yet whether it would in this particular case, but every study and every calculation had pointed to a high probability of success. After the finest minds had wracked their brains for a solution to the ‘gravity problem’ for decades and come up empty-handed, they’d finally decided to give the ‘harebrained’ solution a try and it looked like it was going to work.

    Of course moving an asteroid the size of this one out of the asteroid belt and into roughly the same orbit as the moon hadn’t been an easy task by any stretch of the imagination! The fact that it had its own gravity had only made it that much harder, but then there wouldn’t have been any point to the delicate operation if it hadn’t!

    Desperate times called for desperate measures, however. Poised to begin full scale colonization of Mars, they already had over a million volunteers signed up and the buses built a decade earlier to carry scientists, colonists, and sightseers to the moon were woefully inadequate for the task. Although advances in the past decade had resulted in ships that could make the trip to Mars and back three times faster than they’d been able to manage back in the teens and early twenties when they’d established the first bases for scientific studies, ferrying the colonists already signed up for land on the new world was a daunting task. With more people eager to escape the Earth and forge a new life on Mars every day, it had begun to seem an impossible task.

    The U.S.S. Cosmos had been the solution, but it had its own problems. Although big enough to carry nearly a hundred thousand colonists at the time, the ship was far slower than the smaller crafts they’d built. It would take nearly six months to make the round trip, and that meant that the colonists weren’t going to be in any shape to begin working when they arrived- not at nearly zero gravity. It would take months of rehabilitation to get them in shape even though Mars’ gravity was only 38% of Earth’s. The combination of ‘gravity’ suits, which worked in conjunction with electro-magnetic forces, and ‘artificial gravity’ created by centrifugal force used on the Moon colony wasn’t practical, even if it could be done-and everyone had been pretty convinced that it couldn’t-not on that scale.

    It was critical to the success of the Mars colonization project that the colonists be able to start to work when they arrived. The Mars colonist dormitory/holding/and processing facility was being completed even as the final touches were being completed on the U.S.S. Cosmos. It was fully stocked to house them for at least a year, but resources were at a premium and would be until the colonists began to produce their own goods. The first colonists needed to complete their personal habitats and begin growing their own food within the first six months or it would seriously jeopardize the chances of the next group and every group thereafter.

    So-the harebrained solution thought up by a pseudo-scientist who had no idea what sort of complications might arise from capturing and then building a ship around an asteroid with its own gravity. It had actually made construction of the ship much easier. Flying it was going to be a real bitch, but if they could manage it the colonists would arrive on Mars in excellent condition.

    She was to have been a member of the crew that would take the Cosmos on its maiden voyage.

    Not anymore!

    She shook her head as if she could shake the thought, but it was stuck, had been since she’d gotten her orders the day before.

    Her stomach knotted with anxiety. As much as she hated to admit it, even to herself, the ‘emergency mission’ she’d been reassigned to scared the piss out of her. She supposed, wryly, that it was crazy to be unnerved when she’d been prepared to take a flight on the totally experimental craft she was looking at, but she had confidence that the new design was going to outperform anything built before. She didn’t have a hell of a lot of confidence in the hastily re-outfitted ship that was to take her in the opposite direction-to Venus.

    There hadn’t been a single damned probe launched toward Venus in well over a decade, though! From the time Earth had entered its climate change and the situation on Earth had begun to decline rapidly all eyes were on the Moon and Mars. Neither had seemed like mankind’s last hope or a port in the storm before the climate change, but it hadn’t taken very many natural disasters to make them look better and better, despite the challenges of living on the Moon and Mars.

    A lot of people were still waiting for Armageddon, she thought wryly, but unlike the frog in the slowly heating pot of water, some of the ‘frogs’ had woke up and discovered they were already in the middle of Armageddon, not waiting for it to arrive.

    Shaking the thought, she glanced at her watch, muttered a curse under her breath, and left the observatory. She hardly noticed the transition from centrifugal weight to magnetic as she moved from the observatory into the corridor that connected it to the administration building. It had taken some getting used to when she’d first arrived, but she’d acclimated in the two months she’d been stationed on the moon base.

    The shift in ‘pull’ from overall-the centrifugal force of revolving buildings against her entire anatomy-to strictly external with the drag of magnetism against her grav suit still made her stomach flutter uncomfortably with a sense of weightlessness, but she’d ceased to really notice it. It also wasn’t nearly as much of a challenge to step from the corridor into the next revolving structure as it had been at first. With barely a pause to adjust her stride, she stepped from the corridor into the main lobby, glanced around, and headed toward the conference room.

    Her crewmates were already assembled in the conference room and they didn’t look any happier to be there than she was.

    After saluting her superior officer, Major Reed Powell, and exchanging salutes with Corporal Thomas Spencer, she moved toward the conference table where the two civilian scientists who would be accompanying them, Dipak Kushbu and Holly Rains, were already seated.

    She’d been training for the Mars mission with Major Powell and Corporal Spencer since her arrival and knew them in a strictly professional capacity. She hadn’t so much as lain eyes on Dr. Kushbu or Dr. Rains before, but since Kushbu was east Indian it wasn’t difficult to figure out who was who.

    Dr. Rains nodded a greeting and moved a hand that shook faintly toward the control of the holographic display in the center of the table. An image appeared that sent a shockwave through Sybil.

    Dr. Rains smiled thinly when she’d observed the reactions of everyone at the table. “As you can see, Venus looks a good bit different than it did before. These are the pictures we managed to take with the probe we… uh… appropriated before it malfunctioned.”

    Sybil wouldn’t have believed it
was
Venus if the woman hadn’t told her.

    “Any guesses as to what’s going on there?” Major Powell asked sharply, breaking the silence that had held them.

    Dr. Rains shrugged. “I can tell you what we think is happening. It’s the reason you were pulled off the Mars mission.”

    Sybil frowned when the doctor stopped, apparently weighing her next words. “Bad news? Or seriously bad news?”

    “I suppose that remains to be seen. Maybe it would be easier to digest if I go back a little bit?”

    Major Powell’s lips thinned, but he nodded to encourage Dr. Rains to proceed. She tapped the keys of the pad and different image appeared-one that was no more recognizable to Sybil than the first had been. “This is an image of Pluto captured a few days ago. The onset of the change was first observed back in 2006. The scientist that first noticed it thought that there was a problem with the images-an error in the data stream. After carefully going back over everything, he finally announced his findings in 2010, but we didn’t have anything that far out to help the scientific community understand what was causing the change to Pluto. We haven’t had anything since, for that matter, but he finally convinced the scientists in charge of the Inmar telescope sent up to replace the Kepler six years ago to realign the telescope for a better look. These images were captured,” she explained, tapping the keyboard to display a progression of startling images.

    Noticing tiny, fuzzy lights surrounding Pluto, Sybil narrowed her eyes, trying instinctively to bring the images into focus. “What are those-lights?”

    “Ships,” Dr. Kushbu said succinctly.

    Sybil glanced at him sharply, blinking while she tried to digest that.

    “Ships?” Major Powell demanded sharply.

    “Alien ships,” Dr. Rains clarified.

    Corporal Spencer uttered a snorting laugh. “Alien ships? You’re talking flying saucers? You aren’t serious? My god, we haven’t had UFO reports in over a decade!”

    Kushbu and Rains shared a look.

    “Maybe you can come up with an explanation that suits you better?” Dr. Rains asked tightly. “No one wanted to even suggest the possibility, but it’s hard to ignore. Those ‘lights’ have not behaved like any natural phenomena known to us. Moreover, when considered in conjunction with the undeniable changes we’ve discovered in Pluto, it seems a high probability that they are indeed alien crafts… and they are terra-forming Pluto.”

    Everyone sat back in their seats and glanced around at each other uncomfortably.

    “Why would they want to terra-form Pluto? I think that would be a good place to start the questions,” Major Powell said abruptly.

    Kushbu glanced at Rains and shrugged. “We don’t have a clue,” he responded. “But the fact remains that our instruments managed to detect changes to the dwarf over the past decade and half that have made it livable-extremely harsh conditions by our standards-but capable of sustaining life and it certainly wasn’t before. It doesn’t just
look
like there’s water on the surface. As far as we can tell, there is.”

    Dr. Rains studied her hands, clasped before her on the table. “The government thinks it’s merely a base and their target is Venus.”

    Sybil gaped at the older woman. “
That’s
why we’ve been pulled from the colonization project for this emergency mission to Venus?”

    “Well I sure as hell don’t follow!” Spencer snapped angrily. “Even supposing you’re right and those are alien ships out there, why colonize Pluto if their target was Venus?”

    “We’ve got more questions than we do answers!” Dr. Rains said. “The theory is that they’re using similar technology to what we’ve used to terra-form Mars-except better, because they’re obviously more advanced than we are. It’s pretty much all wild speculation at this point. We don’t have anything to really check out either planet, but look what
we
have managed in little more than a decade! The particle beam we’ve been using to clean up Earth’s greenhouse gasses by transferring them to Mars has not only cleaned up the Earth considerably, but it has transformed Mars-something we expected to take decades longer than it has.

    “If we consider that the aliens are doing much the same thing, then it certainly explains the drastic changes in both Pluto and Venus! And, since it would’ve been far more logical to take the gasses they needed from closer planets, then it seems to follow that they must have plans for Venus if they are, indeed, responsible for the changes. The government seems to think so, at any rate, and they’re… disturbed, to say the least, at the possibility of having aliens on our back doorstep.”

    The invention of the particle transporter had been a life-saver-literally. Of course the men working on it had intended it for use to transport living beings from place to place and that was something they still hadn’t figured out how to do. Even the emergence of quantum computers hadn’t, yet, solved that problem, but inanimate objects were a different matter altogether. By the time it had occurred to anyone to use it remove Earth’s harmful gases, it had been pretty well perfected-for that kind of use-and it had slowed the deterioration of Earth’s environment considerably, giving scientists and engineers much needed time to develop alternate energy sources.

    Those advances had also slowed the climate change, but it was generally accepted that nothing was going to stop the cycle-it was still a case of too little, too late. The Earth would recover, eventually, but there was no telling how long that might take or how many people would survive.

    Of course, the people focused on colonizing Mars had been livid. They’d fought the use of Mars as a dumping ground so ferociously that it had taken nearly three years to implement the plan but in the end, they’d lost. The government always won, and they had no intention of losing this particular battle. It had been pure dumb luck that they’d succeeded in terra-forming Mars at the same time-rather than intentional. Of course, the Mars colony project had intended to use a similar process to terra-form, but they’d planned to use ‘clean’ greenhouse gasses. They hadn’t wanted to risk ‘dirtying’ Mars with Earth’s pollution.