The Many Worlds of Dean: Book 1 - Mars (2 page)

When Dean had been chosen as the contest
winner, the executives at SpaceTek were overjoyed to see the
scrawny, stereotypical young bookworm that showed up for training.
Standing barely one point seven meters and weighing in at a
whopping fifty-four kilograms, Dean was exactly what they had been
hoping for.

Almost halfway through the two year program,
they began to worry. At first, Dean was completely hopeless when it
came to physical training. He couldn’t run more than half a
kilometer. He couldn’t perform a single pushup. No amount of effort
could pry a pull up out of him. But he never quit. Dean pushed
himself beyond what anyone would have believed possible. Many of
his trainers had served as special operations soldiers in various
militaries and were uniformly impressed with the sheer force of his
will. Once they knew that Dean would not give up, no matter what
they made him do, they secretly vowed to help him any way they
could.

They had been instructed to break Dean; to
provide physical goals which would be impossible to accomplish.
When he continued to reach those goals regardless, the instructors
were given new goals for him that were certain to result in
failure. Realizing that they themselves would be unable to perform
what was now being demanded of Dean, the trainers collectively
ignored orders and worked with Dean after hours and during
classroom breaks to help increase his stamina and strength.

The executives at SpaceTek then found that
the scrawny, underweight fifteen year old had become a
well-muscled, highly athletic sixteen year old, now standing right
at one point eight meters. They couldn’t allow this to stand, so
they continued to increase the physical requirements and they added
more and more to the educational requirements he was expected to
meet. None of which did them any good whatsoever. By the time the
two year program was over, Dean had completed the equivalent
studies of a master’s degree and had the physical stamina of a
typical Olympic athlete.

Still unable to discern the incredible asset
they had created, SpaceTek continued to search for an excuse to
disqualify Dean from the program. One of his instructors however,
refused to see Dean cheated in such a way after all he had
overcome. The instructor quietly contacted the media and leaked a
few unauthorized videos of Dean’s performance. The instructor was
discovered and fired, but the damage was done. With tremendous
public support behind him, SpaceTek could not prevent Dean from
being part of the mission.

So, an announcement was made with great
fanfare. Dean had passed his training and would become the fifth
member of the crew. Dean immediately became an international
celebrity. The media played the leaked videos of his training over
and over. With his light blonde hair, piercing blue eyes, and
well-muscled frame, teenage girls all over the world adorned their
walls with posters depicting him in various athletic poses.

Now, seventeen year old Dean Danforth,
teenage heartthrob and certified astronaut, sat in a rocket ready
to ascend to the heavens, both fearful and excited at achieving
what he had worked so hard to accomplish.

Dean Danforth was lucky; the entire world
said so. When he won the contest and was chosen to do something no
other human had ever done, he was touted as the luckiest human
alive. Of course, luck could sometimes carry a double edge. There
were times when the seemingly insurmountable mounds of schoolwork
and the grueling physical training had made luck a foreign concept
to his mind.

Now though, perched atop a Neptune four,
heavy lift rocket, just minutes away from initiating a controlled
explosion beneath him, the perception of being lucky had come back
to him fully, regardless of the trepidation he was also
experiencing. In mere minutes, thousands of liters of liquid rocket
fuel would ignite, sending Dean skyward at incredible velocities.
Any one of a million things could go wrong, turning Dean into a
giant firework in the night sky. He couldn’t keep the smile off his
face.

Topping out at one hundred and twenty-six
meters above the beautiful Hawaiian landscape, Dean was aware that
the monstrous rocket he was in would make a spectacular explosion
if something went wrong. Not only was it carrying enough fuel to
escape Earth’s atmosphere and carry the crew to its next waypoint,
it was also carrying a massive amount of additional fuel to be
delivered to the interplanetary craft that sat awaiting them in low
Earth orbit. The original plan had the crew being delivered with
water as the primary payload, however, some low level staffer had
screwed up when instituting the schedule and the crew had been
forced to accompany the last fuel delivery instead of water. Not
that it really mattered; eventually it was determined that twice
the fuel would not make the crew twice as dead if the rocket
malfunctioned.

SpaceTek, an American corporation that had
completely taken over all space travel within the United States as
well as a good portion of that conducted in the rest of the world,
was responsible for this launch. While most of the financing
required for space exploration still came from governments,
SpaceTek had remarkably reduced the costs by selling just about
anything they could bring back, to the highest bidder. Chunks of
moon rock, pieces of asteroid, and frozen blocks of comet fetched
ridiculous sums of money from private collectors. While a certain
percentage of whatever was collected on this next trip was set
aside for governments and institutes of higher learning, SpaceTek
was banking on the remaining material being highly profitable.

Dean looked around as much as he was able.
He was strapped tightly to his seat in a horizontal position. By
looking straight ahead, he could see the front viewports shaped
exactly like a vehicle windshield. If it had been daytime, he would
be staring at blue sky and fluffy clouds. Being night, all he saw
was black as he tried to peer out.

Banks of controls surrounded the viewports
in every direction. Monitors displayed critical information,
lighting the module in ghostly incandescence. Dials, knobs,
buttons, and switches were grouped together by the dozens and
covered every remaining wall and ceiling space. The whole thing
looked impossibly complicated, but Dean marveled to himself that he
knew what every single control was for and how each should be
operated.

Dean could see the other four crewmembers
strapped into seats arrayed equidistant about the space. Two men
and two women made up the core of the crew, while Dean had been
added later through the contest. Everyone appeared quiet and
contemplative as the last few minutes prior to launch were counting
down. There was an aura of nervousness in the air that made Dean
acutely aware of the fluttering he felt in his stomach.

The sound was incredible. Dean’s heart had
almost stopped as the countdown reached zero and the engine roared
to life. The seat he was laying on kicked him in the back, hard. He
vaguely heard mission control announce that they had achieved
liftoff, but somehow the words didn’t register. Pressed into his
seat, he was certain something had gone wrong. He couldn’t lift his
head, everything was vibrating wildly, and the sound was so intense
he was sure the rocket had exploded and the explosion just hadn’t
reached him yet.

Fear began to expand within his
consciousness. The certainty of his impending death left him sweaty
and unable to draw a breath. Time seemed to slow and the relentless
thunder began to fade. It took a few moments for his shocked mind
to realize that everything was fine. The rocket hadn’t exploded.
The wild shaking and deafening roar were exactly what he had been
told to expect. Dean marveled at how the stark fear had brought
about clarity to his senses. Feeling the sledge hammer in his chest
slow to something resembling a normal heartbeat, he looked to one
side and then the other, taking in the expressions of his fellow
crewmembers. They looked exactly like he felt. All of them had been
to space before, but still they looked nervous and pale; except for
Captain Rogers, he was grinning wildly.

After what seemed an eternity, the
oppressive force pushing him further and further into his seat,
Dean’s stomach tried to do a somersault inside of him as the first
stage booster cut out and the incredible weight on his chest
disappeared. Momentarily weightless, he struggled to adapt to the
confusing signals he was receiving from his inner ear. Just as he
was certain he had determined which way was up, stage two ignited
and he was slammed into his seat once more. Minutes later, although
he would have sworn it had been longer, the end of stage two and
the beginning of stage three went much the same.

Several more minutes passed as Dean
questioned the sanity of what had seemed like a dream come true
only a short time earlier. Finally, stage three cut out and he was
left feeling disoriented and exhausted. Before his mind had caught
up to the fact that he was weightless again, Captain Rogers was
calling out for reports.

“Stacy, how’s our trajectory look?”

“Uhh,” Stacy attempted to reply. “We’re on
course Captain,” she finally managed in a strangled voice.

“Systems Bill?”

“All systems show green,” Bill said with a
little more vigor than Stacy had managed. “All stage separations
were successful and we are optimum for docking.”

“Any word from control?” the Captain asked
while looking directly at Sarah.

“Mission control reports we’re five by
five,” Sarah answered.

“Outstanding,” Captain Rogers said with a
smile. “You still with us Dean?”

“Good to go sir,” Dean replied. He had been
able to gather his wits about him while the others were responding
to the Captain’s inquiries and spoke with more confidence than he
actually felt. The smirk on Captain Rogers’ face told Dean he
wasn’t fooling anyone.

“Alright everyone, let’s lock seats up and
prepare for docking.”

Dean pushed the control which would bring
his seat into an upright position and sighed in relief as it did
just that. He was in space. It was almost too much to believe. He
had been aware of what SpaceTek was doing to him and had thought he
would never get the opportunity to see the stars as he saw them now
through the front viewport. Only his stubbornness and the
persistence of his instructors had convinced him not to quit once
he figured out that SpaceTek had no intention of letting him go to
Mars. Now, he was immensely glad he had listened to his instructors
as they assured him they would make sure he got his chance. The
view was amazing and he took great pride in the fact that he had
earned the right to see it.

As he stared mesmerized out the viewports,
he watched stars wheel in a clockwise arc until the beautiful, blue
globe of Earth cycled into view. Some people go their entire lives
without seeing anything as breathtaking as what he saw now. As the
world below took up more of the viewports, he could make out Japan
and the eastern coast of Asia. He stared hard in an attempt to
discover if he really could see the great wall from space. An
abundance of clouds left his visual search inconclusive.
Disappointed, he brought his awareness back into the crew module he
was currently occupying.

He knew it would take almost an hour before
they reached and docked with Destiny. In the meantime, as he had no
assigned duties at this stage of the process, he sat back and
watched as the other crewmen began entering commands into their
computer interfaces. Even as the crew went about their various
duties, he double checked various readouts from the onboard
diagnostics to ensure nothing was overlooked and refigured any
calculations that were being entered.

He was double checking their work as a
courtesy, even though they wouldn’t take it that way. Pleasant
enough face to face, it was painfully obvious to Dean that the crew
felt he was just a kid and had no business being a part of this
mission. Since SpaceTek had felt he would not be going regardless
of his performance in training, he had not been given the
opportunity to train alongside his fellow crewmembers more than a
couple times. This had left him as the outsider, an unknown the
others could not count on. Now they simply regarded him as a
nuisance, an unneeded tool they were forced to work with but didn’t
much care for.

Captain Rogers was different. He had taken
an active part in Dean’s training and was well aware of what the
young man was capable of. As such, any time one of the other
crewmembers said something derogatory about Dean, the Captain would
angrily remind them that Dean was a part of the crew, and if they
didn’t like it, they could be replaced. This of course only made
them keep their thoughts to themselves and served to further
alienate them from Dean.

Because of this, when Dean noticed that Bill
had moved a decimal to the wrong place, he had quietly entered a
correction into his own control station. Bill was inputting the
necessary calculations to control the retro burn they would need to
do as they approached Destiny and had input an error which would
result in a fatal crash as they failed to slow enough for docking.
He tried to prevent anyone from seeing him put in a correction;
unfortunately, Bill noticed what had been done.

Looking at Dean with fire sparking in his
eyes, he asked, “Who said you could mess with my equations?”

“I was just trying to help,” Dean answered
plaintively. “You accidentally put in a wrong number.”

“I don’t care what you were trying to do. I
don’t need some snot nosed kid thinking he knows more –“

“Maybe you should check to see if his
correction is actually correct before you start yelling,” the
Captain interrupted.