The Gas Station Part 3
April 2018
Eric Hunt blinked a few times, trying to make sense of the colorful things in front of his eyes. His sight was getting better every minute until he finally managed to recognize the ‘thing’ in front of him.
“That’s Saturn... and there are the rings.” he thought, concentrating to clear his head. “I am... I am floating. What has happened?”
He still remembered working on the surface of Pan, trying to fix a problem with the anchor of the fusion reactor module they had brought to the Moon. Suddenly he recalled a bright flash.
“An accident. A malfunction?” he murmured, the adrenalin rush hitting him like a hammer. What was that red flashing nagging at his peripheral vision.
The suit had been damaged he realised, feeling sick. He reached for the diagnostic panel on his wrist, but stopped as a sharp pain shot up his arm like a bullet.
“Hey!” he called out, hoping the communicator was working. “Hey! This is Eric Hunt. I’m out in open space I need help! If anyone can hear me, please respond!”
He waited... a minute? A second? His head swam with dizziness.
“Mr. Hunt, please remain calm, we are currently in the midst of the recovery process.” a female voice on his right side announced. “Are you hurt or in immediate danger?”
The left speaker crackled.
“My suit is damaged and my right arm hurts when I move it.” He grimaced as another bolt of pain stabbed him hard “What happened? Where’s the rest of my crew?”
An exocomp popped up in front of him, searchlights ablaze. He shielded his vision with his good arm, struggling to figure out what it was carrying in it’s jaw.
“A roll of duct tape” Eric murmured as he felt something touching his helmet.
“Mr. Hunt, we just found you. We are moving you to our station, you will arrive any moment” the voice tried to reassure him. “Please try not to move at all!”
Finally he saw the edge of one of the catgirls space station’s airlocks. A catgirl in a suit became visible in his view, pointing a miniature pocket lamp to his face.
“He is still consciousness, get him inside immediately!”
He felt a light touch of gravity as he was lowered onto a stretcher and moved through another airlock. A catgirl carefully opened his helmet and fresh air rushed in.
“Please keep down. Your arm is broken, we have to get you out of the suit.” a catgirl with a Red Cross batch around the arm told him. “As soon as we have secured your arm you can move again.”
All around he could hear other dialogs between catgirls and his crew members. Finally they managed to cut him out of the suit and he felt something hardening around his arm. Something was pressed against his shoulder and he felt the pain ending.
“Thank you” he said, looking at the hypospray injector. “Again, what has happened?”
“Someone has attacked your construction site with a long-range weapon, that is all we currently know. Serina managed to hit the projectile moments before it impacted on the moon, unfortunately not early enough.” The catgirl looked at the injector. “Just something against the pain, no handwavium involved.”
“Is my crew okay?” Eric asked, trying to imagine a reason for someone to attack their unfinished base.
“We are still getting them all in but I fear that a few of them were hurt badly,” the catgirl answered. “Fortunately no one was killed.”
Just as if her words had been a bad omen, the airlock to the room opened again and Eric could hear a woman screaming in pain.
“Someone get me an anesthetic... and something to seal of a major wound!” a catgirl shouted and several Exocomps rushed towards the airlock. “And a Blood Orange group AB! Quickly!”
“I hope she knows what she is doing” Eric said and stood up to get to Sarah Meier. He couldn’t fail to notice the large pool of blood below one of her legs. “Sarah... what has happened to her?”
The catgirl just ignored Eric and continued scanning Sarah Meier carefully with a device. She stopped for a moment and stared on her scanner while listening to something, then she grabbed one of the closeby catgirls.
“Get the machine over here quickly, we might need it” she whispered into her ear and the catgirl ran out of the room. “Where is that orange?” she called loudly, just as an Exocomp with the large fruit arrived at her side.
She quickly began to set up a blood transfusion, then she looked up to Eric.
“I had a six month medical training at the Kandor City Hospital last year” she said and looked back to her scanner. “Unfortunately this is... this is be beyond my abilities.”
“What are you telling me?” Eric shouted and the catgirl flinched.
“Mrs Meier has lost a lot of blood. I managed to stop the bleeding at her leg, but the scanner tells me she still has lots of internal bleedings.” She hit a button on her scanner. “I fear she will be dead before we can get her to a real hospital at Coruscant. Unless...”
“Unless what?”
“Handwavium might be able to save her, but she will not look the same afterwards.” The catgirl sighed. “We never would do this against someone’s will, but she is already unconsciousness and will be dead before we can get more help. You are her commanding officer, it is your decision.”
“You mean...” Eric gulped at the thought, but he forced himself to stay on the topic. “You are sure this is the only way to survive?”
“I am reasonably sure she will survive the procedure” the catgirl answered. “And I am nearly certain she will die before we can get her to Coruscant. Say no and we will put her in the fastest vehicle we have, but decide now... time is running out!”
The Fleet Control room had been designed in 2011 to direct the coming fleets of the Galactic Republic on their missions through the galaxy. The plans had been updated multiple times during the war against the Boskones, but unfortunately there hadn’t been time to implement them.
When the war was over, several Senators argued that the design was oversized for the peacetime fleets of the Republic and that most warships would be integrated into Great Justice organized fleets anyways. The Fleet Control room had been downsized to a more ‘reasonable’ design and was renamed Traffic Control. But it was still considered an important part of the city.
“Commodore, there is a holocall from Pan, a catgirl called Cathy. She says they have an emergency on Pan and she has to talk to you right now!”
Commodore Gavin Amstrad looked up to the Lieutenant who had just entered his small office.
“Does she has told you a reason why she has to talk to me instead of going through the normal channels at Traffic Control?” he asked quietly and the Lieutenant shook his head.
“No, she has not. But she said it was very urgent, Coruscant might be in danger” the Lieutenant replied. “I checked her name, the Great Justice database marks her as ‘on call’.”
Gavin nodded. “I will take the call Lieutenant, thank you.”
The Lieutenant left his office and a hologram of a catgirl appeared on his desk. Gavin listened to her message, his eyes becoming wider and wider. Finally the call ended and Gavin stood up.
“Shit... not even a month until the Convention and suddenly hell breaks loose and someone is bombarding civilian targets” he murmured. “And no guarantee they won’t hit Coruscant too.”
“Okay, everyone listen!” he said loudly as he stepped out of his office. “There has been a kinetic attack on the Daneverse construction site on Pan from beyond sensor range. We will make sure Coruscant will not be hit next!”
He pointed to the officer at the large monitoring display. “Lt. Commander Delso, you and your team will bring every sensor online we have placed on and around Mimas. If it can look at the sky, I want it up and running now!”
“Lieutenant Simons, I want a list of all ships in the Saturn subsystem we know about.” He continued as he turned to the communication consoles. “Name and type of the ship, flag of record, current destination. If we have anyone unwilling to talk to us, tell me at once.”
“And you Lieutenant Vau, you will call Blue Squadron and tell them to launch immediately. When we find an unknown or unwilling contact, I want to have a few fighters to check it out immediately. In addition to this they will look out for incoming kinetic projectiles and anything suspicious.
Tell Red Squadron to stay on hot standby so they can launch any second. I will contact General Dana Maeter and get the okay to activate them too.” Gavin sighed, sometimes the regulations were a pain in the ass, but without the agreement of an Admiral or General, he wasn’t allowed to send both squadrons away from Coruscant. “Tell them what happened on Pan and that I cannot give them a launch order at the moment.”
He stepped back into his office and dialed the General’s holophone number. The General’s aide appeared on his screen.
“Good Morning Commodore Gavin, General Dana Maeter is not in her office at the moment. Maybe you want to leave a message?”
“Where is she? I need to speak with her at once!” Gavin shot back.
“I am sorry Commodore, but she is in a closed Senate session. You know, preparation for the upcoming Convention. ”
“Thank you for this information” Gavin said and ended the call, already thinking about the easiest way to contact the General without bumping into a dozen bureaucratic barriers first.
A display on his left showed him that both Red and Blue Squadron were already taking off into the sky.
He grinned.
She was floating, somewhere in a dark place. Sometimes she thought she could hear voices, but they were just a distant whisper among the continuous pulsing in the background. But there was this smell. She couldn’t recognize it, it was just strange.
‘I do not care’ she thought, ‘it is warm and comfy, it is okay.’
Comfy? How could this darkness she was floating in feeling comfy? Slowly she became aware that she was laying on something... or under something?
‘A bed, I am laying in a bed!’ flashed through her mind as she tried to remember. ‘The explosion, the flash! They found me in time!”
Sarah carefully opened her eyes, blinking many times until she got used to the light in the room. It took her a moment to recognize Eric Hunt sitting on a chair besides her bed, his arm fixed by an unfamiliar bandage.
“Sarah” he said and smiled, “welcome back among the living... I thought we had lost you.”
Sarah looked at him with suspicion. Did Eric felt responsible for what happened?
“What happened on Pan? I just remember some kind of explosion that hit me” she asked and shivered. “I do not remember much after this point.”
“Be grateful about this, when they brought you to the station your leg looked like the Thor Heyerdahl had rolled over it.” Eric took a deep breath, trying to find the right words. “In fact you would have died if I had not allowed the Fen to use their... their magical stuff.”
Sarah stared at him for a moment, then she looked down to her legs... or better her leg. Even now she could felt her other leg itching, but she could see that there was only one leg below the blanket. She pulled out her arm under the blanket and twitched.
“What... FUR? HOW?” she cried with wide eyes. “WHAT HAPPENED TO ME?”
The door suddenly opened and a catgirl rushed in. “Cathy! CATHY!!! We found it, we really found IT!”
Cathy slowly stood up from the communication terminal she had been using to talk with Coruscant a few minutes ago.
“Calm down Alice, the attack is over and we have more than enough time to breath” she said grinning. “Now sit down and tell me what you found.”
“No, you have to see it yourself” the other catgirl replied hectically, grabbed Cathy’s hand and pulled her up towards one of the corridors.
‘Keep calm, no reason to throw her around’ Cathy thought, trying to keep her martial arts training under control and stumbling along with Alice. “So what is so important that it cannot wait?”
“You remember we launched all of our drones for a sensor perimeter?” Alice asked while they both ran towards Jengas control tower. “We also sent one along the path of the projectile to backtrack it. It just reported back a minute ago!”
“So you found some evidence who shot us?” Cathy shot back. Suddenly she was a lot more interested in what Alice told her.
“No, we did not... but we found something else!”
With this they both reached the room of Jengas second holo-globe. Cathy could so a lot of small holographic dots floating in a roughly spherical configuration.
“This is a huge cloud of small and large pieces of matter, distributed over nearly a lightsecond diameter” Alice explained. “They are all moving outwards outwards from a common center... and their movement started the moment the projectile was there too.”
“We need the coordinates and vectors of each of the parts as precisely as possible” Cathy said, looking at the holographic image. “THIS might be the only evidence we have at the moment, maybe we can reconstruct what it was!”
Alice grinned.
“Cathy, we are not amateurs... we already have sent more drones there to get a real good sensor image of each part, and a group of Exocomps who will collect all the small part. They will arrive soon! Don’t worry, we have thought of everything!”
It took Eric nearly thirty minutes to calm down Sarah a bit. Finally he leaned forward and grabbed her at both shoulders.
“Sarah, look at me... LOOK AT ME! You were minutes away from DYING. Whatever they did, they SAVED YOU.” he said, looking directly into her eyes. “Don’t let me down now, you have to calm down.”
Sarah just stared at him silently for nearly a minute, then she slumped down into the bed again.
“So thats how it ends” she whispered as Eric took her hand. For more than ten minutes neither of them spoke a word.
Then someone knocked at the door and opened it. A catgirl with a Red Cross batch entered the room, carrying a tray with food on it.
“You are finally awake!” she said with a smile, “I am Taja, you gave me quite a shock when they brought you in. I worried we wouldn’t be able to save you.”
“Thank you for saving me” she said and sighed. “Our mission busted, ESA will fire me as soon as they learn about this and I am crippled. Just great.”
The catgirl looked a bit puzzled and showed her the tray.
“You shouldn’t be so negative... I am sure your mission will continue and ESA will surely not fire anyone until the mission is over.” Taja said. “Just eat something, you must be very hungry.”
“I am not really in the right mood to eat” Sarah said and shook her head. “Just give me something against the damned itching of my missing leg!”
“Oh, that is just your leg regrowing, the itching should go away in a few hours when the leg is finished. Now get something to eat!”
Sarah blinked a few times.
“Wait... WHAT?”
“... we cannot say what happened with the Aurora Mission, but rumors among the Fen suggest there has been an accident or an attack on the construction site. According to our sources, the moon Pan has been damaged badly by the attack, the fate of the astronauts is still unknown.”
Duree switched off his radio and sighed. The international and local news had been going crazy for hours, but reliable news reports were still unavailable. Something has happened on the moon and it had not be nice. He just wanted to turn on a different radio station as his private phone began to ring.
“Duree” he said, only to hear a very familiar voice.
“Good afternoon Mr. Duree” Allan Bossert, the ESA Director General replied. “I hope you had a pleasant day.”
“Mr. Bossert” Duree said, “I am not sure why you are even calling me. Don’t you have a crisis to manage?”
“Yes, of course, the crisis on Pan. I am very busy with it at the moment” Bossert continued, “but I thought it would be a good thing to remind you about our Press conference tomorrow morning. Would be a pity if you miss it.”
Duree laughed loudly. “Mr. Bossert, I don’t know if you consider this some kind of joke or not. I do not see any reason why I should suddenly change my schedule and go to a Press conference with YOU!”
“Oh, thats very easy Mr Duree, you owe me.”
It took Duree a moment to be able to talk again. “Mr. Bossert, the day when I owe YOU is the day when Hell will freeze over!”
“You think so Mr. Duree? Maybe you should look for your winter clothing, because I am the one who could have flushed down your career and all your little political favors down the drain. I hope you still remember.”
“Mr. Bossert... you cannot think that anyone will believe you, can you?”
“Oh, I think that will really depend on the kind of evidence I might have, don’t you think so, Mr. Duree? If the most important European project done in the last decade goes down the drain, why should I protect you?”
Duree suddenly felt a shiver going down his spine. Bossert had surely not recorded the meeting with him. Or maybe he had?
“What do you want?” Duree shot back, suddenly feeling a little bit ill.
“Oh, nothing outstanding. As you already know, everyone is nervous about the Aurora Mission at the moment and I think we need to calm them down a bit.” Bossert answered. “We will give the press a good show how committed ESA and the industry are to the project. If we manage the press, I will take care of the EU Commission.”
Durees thoughts were racing at the speed of a bullet while he tried to think through the idea. If they would get the press on their side and Bossert managed to keep the Commission quiet, maybe Aurora still had a chance.
“I have already some hard facts on what happened on Pan” Bossert continued, “and it is looking not that bad for the mission. We will have to improvise, but I think we can do it.”
Duree had always been a man of quick decisions. “Expect me at ESA in three hours, I want to see your facts before I meet the reporters” he said and ended the phone call.
‘To the hell with ESA and the Fen, this is also about my fortune’ he thought and called his secretary.
“Cancel all meetings the next two day, I have to personally handle something important!”
ESA’s press room was full of journalists, not a single seat was empty. Camera Flashlights were illuminating the ESA Director General Bossert and the French tycoon Duree as they entered the room.
“Thank you for coming to this Press Conference” Bossert began after both of them had sat down. “I am sure all of you heard the rumors about what happened on Pan, we are here to tell you what we know about it and how we see the future of Aurora.”
A few journalists raised their hands, but Bossert shook his head.
“There will be time for questions later, let me first summarize the situation on Pan.
Yesterday morning at 10am Middle European Time the construction site on Pan was attacked by an unknown force. They tried to hit the place a military grade kinetic weapon from many million kilometers away. Luckily for the astronauts and ESA the only projectile was detected by the Fen seconds before impact. It was deflected partly.”
“You mean the catgirls?” one of the journalists shouted and Bossert nodded.
“Yes. That are the Fen I was talking about.
Parts of the projectile still hit the construction site, doing a lot of damage and injured many of the astronauts. All of them were rescued and brought to the space station within minutes after the attack. The damage to the equipment was widespread but failed to penetrate the ice of the moon to reach the parts of the new station that were already burrowed.”
“When will the astronauts come home?” a voice from the back of the room demanded to know.
Bossert looked over to Mr. Duree, who rolled his eyes.
“This was a terror attack, and we should not pretend its the first one” Duree said. “It might have been the first time terrorists hit a space asset of the European Union, but that is not the point. Europa’s industry has spent a lot of time and resources in this project and we will not demand anyone will come home just because of a setback. We do not give in to terrorists.”
“Exactly,” Bossert agreed, “and more important than the setback is a simple fact. The terrorists had a state of the art weapon with an incredible range. They achieved a nearly total surprise.
They still FAILED.
Whoever they are, whatever they want, they will learn to accept this. They had their chance with a surprise attack, they will not get another one.
ESA has been in contact with Europol about this incident and according to my sources they and the Japanese National Police Agency will send a pair of investigators to Saturn. They will work together with the Fen police to find this terrorists and bring them to justice.”
“We also have a supply of spare materials that were meant for Aurora before the plan of the station was finalized” Mr. Duree added, “They are in the process of being shipped to Nouveau Paris at the moment. With these materials our specialists at Pan should be able to finish their mission.”
“Okay, now might be the time for a few questions” Bossert said with a smile and dozens of arms shot up to get the first one.
“Welcome to Bruessel Mr Bossert, we are curious what ESA can tell us about the status of the Aurora project.”
Meeting the EU Commission was always a headache in Bossert’s opinion, too many national interests without voter oversight in the same room. But they were also the group he had to convince that Aurora wasn’t wrecked beyond hope.
“Thank you for the invitation Commissioners. I have prepared a short presentation about the facts known about the attack on the Aurora mission and the current status of crew and material. My staff has also worked out a preliminary strategy how we can get out of the current current crisis and bring the project back on track within the projected timeline.”
“Spare us the details for the beginning, just tell us where we are and what we can expect from the future,” one of the Commissioners said, “we can only do a preliminary decision at the moment anyways. The rest will have to be decided when we get more facts about the incident.”
Bossert took a deep breath and put the small remote control for his notebook away.
“You know all the basics about the attack from the data sheet I sent you yesterday. Our astronauts got attacked by the Fenspace variant of a long range precision weapon. At the current time nobody knows what kind of group did this terror attack. Our astronauts survived the attack, Mrs Sarah Meier barely and only because she was rescued by Fen bio-technology.
Like most other terror attacks, nobody did predict this to happen, we have no knowledge who did it and what kind of damage they did. But certain facts allow us some speculation about the criminals.
Up to this point no group has taken responsibility for the attack. I also received the news that the Fen found the wreckage of the weapon system which fired on Pan. This suggests the weapon malfunctioned shortly after the shot or was a one-shot design. The terrorists also did only fire a single shot at the moon, which suggests a limit of their resources.”
“What if they do it again?”
“According to the Fen on board of the stations, this should be close to impossible. They are currently setting up an early warning system, and they promised to keep their stations defenses on hot standby until a permanent solution is available.
In addition to this the yearly political meeting of the Fen will be in three weeks on Mimas, which means the amount of security after the attack will be quite high. I am confident that no further attack will be successful in the next months. This gives us time to plan for the necessary defenses of the station.”
“Defenses? Did you forget that this is a civil project, not some military adventure Mr. Bossert!”
“I am sorry, maybe defenses was the wrong word.” Bossert replied carefully, “I was not thinking about weapon systems. But we are already doing a simulation at ESA if we can put the station deeper into the ice of the moon. Together with an Early Warning System this would help against any kind of attack and give the Fen at Mimas time to react.”
Bossert opened his briefcase and took out two folders, a thin one and a really thick one. He hold up the thin one.
“But the important point is that we cannot do this anymore just by following the plan. This here is the Aurora Mission Goal I presented you a few years ago. I can promise you we will still reach these goals, maybe with a few months delay. The whole station as ESA and JAXA described it, without any kind of Handwavium.”
He waited a few seconds, then he hold up the thick folder for a moment.
“This is the full plan how to do the Aurora mission, with all the details and pre-planned steps. Forget about it!”
This brought quite a bit concern into the faces of the Commissioners, Bossert could hear a few of them whispering to each other.
“We cannot do this mission as we planned it anymore, we have to improvise and adapt our planning if we want to reach the original goal. We have been dealt a huge blow, but we have the personal and resources at Pan to compensate for it if we let them do it. Trying to directly control this from Earth will only end in a disaster.
I propose to give our team on Pan the freedom to change plans if necessary to reach the defined goal. We might also need to ship them more materials than necessary, but I already got the confirmation that we still have reserves available. We still can make Aurora a success for all of us.”
“Thank you Mr. Bossert for this facts and proposal. We will have to talk about this but we will let you know about our decision this evening. But please keep in mind that this will only be a preliminary one, long term plans will depend on the progress made for Aurora.”
“Connecting, please wait...”
Kurt Coller waited impatiently for the connection to be established.
‘Radio to Nouveau Paris, radio to the Moon, Interwave to the catgirls space station, at least two of those connections should be unnecessary’ he thought, ‘time that we finally push against a few of those stupid rules. We could drop nearly 2 seconds round trip time’.
The screen in front of him changed and the face of Eric Hunt appeared, his arm still bandaged.
“Good morning Mr. Hunt.”
“Good morning Mr. Coller, what can I do for you? I had not expected a call like this.”
“Mr. Hunt, could you please get the stick I gave you before you left to Nouveau Paris?”
Hunt blinked for a moment and nodded. Every communication between the Aurora crew and the ESA control center in Darmstadt was encrypted by some ‘unbreakable’ security code. Still, just before he left for the ESA depot in orbit the mission director had given him a small flash-drive with onetime-pad data. ‘Just in case’ Koller had told him.
A few minutes later he appeared on Kurt Coller’s screen again. The image flickered for a few moments as the new encoding activated and a clock began to run backwards on the screen.
“Thank you Mr. Hunt. You should know this is NOT an official ESA call, this is just a message Mr. Allan Bossert asked me to relay to you.” Coller explained, “There will be no recordings on our side and I would like to ask you to delete any recording of the call on your side later.”
Eric nodded again, ‘This is getting stranger by the minute’ he thought.
“The ESA Director General has talked with the EU Commission and managed to get a few concessions, but we both know that the whole Aurora mission is vulnerable at the moment.
You will have to improvise for the rest of the mission. Our goal is still the same, the EU and Japan want the station and everything inside has to be as it is specified in the mission statement. Forget about the original instructions how to get there, you will have to make your own plans now.
We are preparing a third supply run for Pan at the moment, which contains all kind of spare materials we have available, but it might not be enough or parts might arrive too late. If you need to repair or replace things just do it, with or without help.
This became a fail-pass mission for ESA and JAXA in the last days. If we succeed, nobody will care if we played strictly by the rules. If we fail, there are more than enough people looking for our scalps. Enough that we won’t get a second chance in the next decade or more.
I know I can count on you. Get your crew together and draw up a new plan how to get out of this catastrophe. Nobody here on Earth needs to know the details, you have more things to do than to write up a new 1000 pages mission plan.
Good luck Eric...”
The video conference had ended minutes ago, but Eric Hunt was still staring on the screen, trying to make his mind up what he should think about the message. He listened to the message a second time, then a third time. Finally he suddenly grinned, pressed the ‘delete’ button and stood up.
There was a lot of work to do.
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