Chapter 2 - Mission Commander

Lunar 5

It was the 12th of May, a sunrise day in Lunar 5.  In the packed observation gallery atop the town’s tourism arcade cheering tourists recording the sunrise on their quadplexs as they watched the morning sun creep over the distant lunar horizon and lap at the crater’s edge peaks.  The lunar sunrise rolling across the lunar landscape towards the Sea of Tranquillity then delivered the usual and much quoted million atomic explosions, the result of the unfiltered sunlight refracting through the twisted and broken crystals littering the crater’s rim.  As the sun's rays filled the shattered crystals left over from the long ago explosive volcanic event which created the lunar mare, a glorious fiery rainbow erupted from the tops of the ranges to the east. 

Supporting the light show were the imperial tones of Strauss’s Also sprach Zarathustra broadcast loudly through the arcade’s sound system.  A few spectacular minutes later the rising sun overwhelmed the light from the crystals, changing the landscape from fire rimmed dappled shadows to one of pure white and stark grey.  When the sun rose a little higher, the tourists could finally see Lunar Five in all its glory.

In fact, all lunar sunrises over  Lunar Five were marked by spectacular flares from the eastern peaks.  Sunrise was something everyone, even the residents, looked forward to.  Tickets on the inbound lunar transports arriving just prior to sunrise were purposely higher than the price the rest of the time.

Lunar tourism, the third biggest money spinner for the lunar population after ³He mining and Earthgov infrastructure contracts, started from Lunar Five’s spaceport, and tourists usually arrived during lunar nights so as to start their tours with sunrise, or made a point of seeing a sunrise before they left. 

A person standing on the surface during the transition from dark to light would notice its arrival with the rapid onset of his moon suit's helmet visor's photo-chromic response darkening his view.  That's invariably followed by the automatic response of turning away from the sun and fiddling with the helmet's extra sun visors until a suitable level of shading was achieved.

For people watching from inside their building’s electro-chromic plasti-glass portholes automatically adjusted.  The portholes used inbuilt solar panels to power the darkening effect until it reached the preset level, and then maintained it.  For the truly wealthy, the luxury upper floors of the Hilton Hotel were fitted with floor to ceiling electro-chromic windows to take in the view. 

Just visible from the top of the tourism centre, thirty kilometres to the south-west, near the southern edge of the crater, was the site of the first landing on the Moon in 1969.  The number one tourist attraction, a special train took tourists to the site twice daily, where they could look upon the area where Armstrong and Aldrin stepped onto another planet, gathered rock and soil samples, and planted the US flag, from special viewing galleries surrounding the plasti-glass dome filled with an inert gas called krypton.  It protected the site from  the ravages of lunar tourists, micro meteorites, and cosmic particles. 

Despite the airless atmosphere, when permanent settlement occurred in the mid-21^st century, the lunar lander descent stage, the footprints surrounding it, and the other attendant relics, including the tottering US flag, had clearly deteriorated, been vandalised, tagged with graffiti, or been stolen.  Once the dome had been constructed, it took several more years to remove all the tourist graffiti from the descent stage, recreate the historic footprints left behind by Armstrong and Aldrin using the original spacesuit boots from the NASA museum, flatten out all the tourists footprints, and recover or replace the missing artefacts.

For everyone arriving on the moon, Lunar Five was the centre of humanity’s ongoing colonisation of its nearest celestial neighbour.  The town sprawls across the lunar terrain, encompassing both the civilian suburbs and the military base.  Its importance was based on its ³He strip mine, the largest on the Moon.  It was also the location of the only ³He refinery, the main lunar space port, and the Moon’s primary maglev train terminal.

The down town area was a mass of large buildings devoted to urban life support, energy production, food production, and water and sewerage management, and administration.  From the centre the town’s suburbs  expand to the south and west.  To the east is the ³He mine.  To the north is the space port and the maglev launch track, the point of departure for space transports.  On the other side of the strip mine, now slowly being ground up as the miners chewed through the foundations, stood the broken and blasted remnants of the old Moonbase One, humanity’s first outpost on the Moon before the Long War, and mute testimony to the devastating attacks which levelled the base.

Next to the space port stood the primary maglev terminal for the lunar rail system.  The system was the prime mover of people, materiel, and mined regolith from other lunar settlements and outposts.  The terminal also served as the primary transport hub for Lunar Five’s light passenger and freight services.  From each of the seven change stations on the great ring track around Lunar Five, pedestrian movers extended outwards to the smaller suburban hubs which in turn connected with the individual air locked communities through pedestrian walkways. 

The dispersal of the suburban living units did two things.  It reduced the potential loss of life from the impact of a large meteorite striking in or near Lunar Five, and provided a feeling of space for the inhabitants that mitigated the impact of living underground for much of their existence.  Nonetheless, the demand for natural light was unstoppable, and the result was that the terrain around Lunar Five looks like a vast grey field with patches of odd shaped mushrooms, their lights burning during the long nights. 

Some people liked the lunar view, and built structures which took advantage of it, whereas others were wary of micrometeorite impacts, although the house exteriors and windows were designed with a rapid sealing system in the event of an atmosphere breach.  The number of injuries and fatalities from micrometeorite strikes was statistically a non event, but this had not stopped insurance premiums for protruding houses to be about twice those with several metres of reinforced regolith above them.  What was notable to an observer looking at the houses is that, at sunrise, all the windows turned black as the light activated the electro-chromic elements in the plasti-glass.  One witty commentator noted that it looked like the entire city put on dark glasses.

For the users of the military base's gym, the tall cylindrical building at the centre of the military district, this effect meant that the plasti-glass ceiling darkened at sunrise, and the stars that normally competed with the discreet lighting inside became invisible until sunset two weeks later.  The reason why the building was cylindrical was that inside it five giant centrifuges were attached to a central hub on the uppermost levels.  On each centrifuge level a dozen arms emerged from the central hub.  At the end of each arm were pods hung from pivots.  In operation the pods pivoted until parallel with the direction of spin.  The pods were large enough for an exercise machine and the person using it. 

When the centrifuge was running, the occupants of each pod experienced a gravity field of one gee, which allowed them to exercise in the most Earth-like simulation available on the Moon.  To make it more believable, there was a window on the side of the pod looking towards the direction of spin.  For anyone using a treadmill or an exer-cycle it really felt like running or riding up a gentle incline.  The alternative was to switch off the view, and feel trapped in a large coffin for an hour.  Of course, if the bean counters could be convinced that soldiers really needed it, they could have installed Tri-D simulations in the pods to simulate riding down a pleasant country lane in rural France, or jogging in the New York marathon.  However, the military took the view that spending too much on home comforts made soldiers soft.

The reason for this arrangement was that the biggest problem with living in a moon base, aside from the sense of utter confinement, because you couldn’t just crack open a window to let in fresh air, was the havoc that living in a gravity field only one-sixth of Earth's wreaked on people.  Moving around, even in a moon suit, was easy, for the first month or so, at which point physical atrophy kicked in as the body adjusted to 0.16 gee, and then it was just like living on Earth.  Everything seemed just as heavy.  This was the result of serious muscle wasting.  Exercise in the lunar gravity helped, but it couldn’t help as much as is required to avoid calcium loss and reduced bone density.  The human body evolved the skeletal strength and musculature required to comfortably move around on Earth, and a lower gravity field resulted in unavoidable changes after a while.  In the early days of lunar occupation going home to Earth after a stint on a Moon base meant being carried out of the lander on a stretcher and months of physical therapy afterwards to recover lost strength and stop bones snapping when even a light load was placed on them.

There were two solutions to this problem.  The first is calcium supplements for the bone density loss.  This sort of worked, but calcium in large amounts is poisonous, and so there were absolute limits as to how much the medicos could prescribe.  Moreover, people’s bodies routinely threw away any calcium they didn’t need to cope with local gravity and manual work conditions.  This was a real problem for the waste disposal systems of the early long duration orbital missions.  The second, and far more successful approach, and mandatory for all the lunar bases, is to build  gigantic centrifuges which simulated a one gravity environment, and make people exercise in them.  In the mid 21^st century, the USA and Russia sent up the world’s most expensive gymnasium as a late addition to the International Space Station’s fifth mission extension based on this simple premise.

The effects on a person's sense of direction when getting in and out were disorientating for the first couple of minutes, and occasionally nauseating, hence the industrial strength vacuum cleaner built into the wall of the exercise cubicle, and the electrostatic air refresher, but the arrangement worked.

Even for Major-General Richard Cho, Commander of the Earthgov Defence Force base on Lunar Five, there was no respite from that hour in the gym each twenty four hours.  Everyone not confined to a sick bed had to go.

The real problem was that when he arrived at the base he hadn't really put that much effort into keeping up his exercise regimen.  Sitting in nice offices in Mexico City, Madrid, Johannesburg, and another six major cities around the world was the extent of his military career's hardships.  The last time he really had to rough was when he joined the  Royal New Zealand Army 20 odd years earlier.  Then it had been his six months of basic training as a raw teenager on the alternately frozen and frying scrub and grasslands around Waiouru in the central North Island of New Zealand, long before his transfer to the Earthgov Defence Force.

The result, by his previous standards, was that he was a ghost of his previous self.  Hard muscle had replaced flab, and he was as fit as his age and overall physique would allow him to be.  Tall and well built ,his Asian heritage and his New Zealand upbringing had each left their distinct marks on him both physically and culturally.  The thinning black hair with its small amounts of silver clashed with his now youthful face.  Moreover, he had actually gotten younger looking while on the Moon.  One of the discoveries made on the Moon by humanity's occupation was that lower gravity actually reduced gravity generated wrinkling and sagging, particularly around the face and neck, and made recovery from plastic surgery much easier.  This made the Moon the ideal location for nip and tuck practitioners, and a significant chunk of lunar tourism was devoted to the attractiveness surgery. 

Even Cho had taken a couple of weeks leave at a lunar clinic to fix up the legacy of sporting injuries, including cauliflower ear, from his days with the NZ Army's rugby team, and returned to work noticeably younger looking.  The results had made him a lot more attractive to some of his female colleagues, and the resulting affairs had ended his already tempestuous marriage.  The scandal was hushed up, as the Defence Force couldn't afford to lose good officers for trivial reasons, so Cho's immediate staff suddenly got a lot less attractive, more happily married, and/or noticeably more male during the second year of his tour.

It was during a long session on the exercycle that his aide, Captain Judith Harrington, a tall, blond, and married brunette from the 2^nd Texas Republic, walked in carrying an urgent order from Defence Force HQ on Cho’s personal datapad.  In practice, this meant she had to wait until the centrifuge had finished running for the full hour, and the occupants were disgorged for the next bunch to climb in.  When General Cho gingerly emerged from the pod, and after a minute or so remembering which direction was up, he took the datapad from Harrington, and read the order displayed on the unit's screen.

Eyebrows raised he looked at his aide, and asked the obvious question.  'Eh?'

'You have been reassigned, Sir,' Harrington said blandly.  Cho searched her expression to see what her reaction to the news was.  Her poker face, experienced from regular Hold 'Em tournaments on the base, gave nothing away.

'I can see that Captain,' he replied in a terse tone.  He looked down at his sweaty form, and added, 'I'll get cleaned up.  Book some extra bandwidth for me on the Earth link.  I have some calls to make.'

'Yes Sir,' she replied, as he wandered towards the men's showers down the corridor.  This area, like the rest of the military base, was decorated in the usual combination of military beige and military green.  Fortunately for the civilians, military accountants were not responsible for their decor choices.

Much thought had gone into the decor used through the rest of Lunar Five and the other towns and outposts on the Moon.  The grey concrete used to construct much of the base was the result of mixing water with regolith and graded moon rock and baking the slabs under solar lamps, and then adding clear interior and exterior sprayed on airtight layers post construction.  While some people felt the varying colours in the concrete made for an interesting pattern, they were in the distinct minority.  Everyone else demanded colour, and lots of it, and spray coated greens and warm colours predominated.  This contrasted with the greys, blacks, and whites on the lunar surface, and everyone afforded a view of the local terrain for anything length of time looked forward to the more appealing colours of the base's interiors.

Real plants were also in demand for air and aesthetic values.  Lunar regolith, while a reasonable medium for plant growth, needed substantial improvement with organic matter.  Getting the air treatment green cycle going for Lunar Five had taken several years, and required the establishment of a viable town and garden ecosystem.  This included establishing and maintaining soil flora and fauna, small meat animals such as guinea pigs and rabbits, and insects for pollination.  There was a proposal before the Town Board for the expansion of pastoral farms beyond the existing pilot dome.  The aim was to establish larger pastoral areas with small cattle and sheep breeds in large inflatable domes on the lunar surface, but the technical problems for that class of dome were still being ironed out.

To keep Lunar Five’s ecosystems working, the sewage recycling systems provided much of the necessary nutrients and other matter required, and during the long lunar days, plants grew extremely well in the greenhouses dotting the base's hinterlands.  The CO₂ and other greenhouse gases produced by the buildings and the inhabitants were piped into the greenhouses to improve production, and thus re-entered the carbon cycle.  During the long lunar nights, a mixture of white and UV lights provided the greenhouses and the town people with the necessary light and Vitamin D levels.

That farming was possible at all on the Moon required an extraordinary solution during the high days of Earth’s space going civilisation prior to the Long War.  While water and hydoxyl was present in the lunar regolith, and water had been found in quantity at the lunar poles, the absolute lunar water supply proved insufficient for human needs, while the energy and labour required to extract water from regolith were prohibitive for the results achieved.  The extraordinary solution was to borrow an old science fiction idea, and, in one of the most difficult space missions ever completed, soft land an ice asteroid in the Aitken Basin, a deep impact crater at the Moon's south pole.  Out of direct sunlight it remained solid, and the volume of water in the asteroid, in conjunction with the construction of massive water tanks, and a strict recycling process, proved sufficient to meet human needs for the foreseeable future.  It also meant that showers were possible.  The low lunar gravity meant that instead of beating against the skin, the water caressed it instead.  Somewhat bizarrely, showering on the Moon was one of the tourist attractions, and the hotels charged extra for the privilege.

Half an hour after showering at the military gym's rather less luxurious facilities, Cho was refreshed, dressed, and ready to face his duty shift.   Sitting in the real leather chair, shipped at enormous expense from Earth by his predecessor, in his office at the top level of Defence Force's ten storey skyscraper, the tallest building in Lunar Five, he read the material supporting the reassignment order on his desk vidscreen.  After doing so he felt much more assured. 

He had a meeting with the C-in-C of Earthgov's Defence Force, and a further meeting with Earthgov President Kazulu to look forward to.  That was virtually unprecedented when it came to reassignments.  There was no clue as to what the new assignment was. 

Accordingly, it was time to call in a few favours from his military and civilian contacts.  Perhaps they could through some light as to why he was being called back early.  He would start with a classmate from the Defence Force senior officer course he had attended when he made colonel.  Cho normally avoided doing live calls to Earth, because of the annoyance of the three second time delay, but this time he had a good reason.  He called up his contacts list on his computer, and selected the first name.  After a few seconds later the call was answered, and the tousled head of a man awoken from sleep framed the screen. 

'Hi Mike,' Cho began, 'Sorry to ring at this hour...' 

A few hours later he was into his twenty second call, and he was no further forward in his quest for information.  No one seemed to know anything.  Many were surprised to hear from him on the topic, and were generally praiseworthy about Cho's command skills and experience.  His tour on Lunar Five had been regarded as successful, and most importantly, uneventful after the ³He miner riots and the military response to restore order that had ruined his predecessor's tour at the base, and required Cho to be sent as his replacement.  Cho had successfully mediated an amicable solution between the miners union and the mining companies, and earned some serious brownie points when it came to future career prospects.

The rest of the week produced no greater results, and after a series of hurried meetings to bring his second in command up to speed, it was time to return to Earth.  Packed, and ready to go, he met Harrington at the boarding lounge for the Earth-bound transport.  Because of his rank he avoided the usual security checks for contraband, although Harrington was required to walk through the body scanner.  Once Earthgov Security was satisfied she wasn't carrying anything she shouldn't be, they were allowed on the transport.  Normally Harrington would be reassigned to the new base commander, but Cho had found her valuable in her current role, and felt she might be useful for the new assignment wherever it was.  She had tentatively agreed, although it was probable that she saw that where Cho went, so went her career.  Her husband was a civilian dentist attached to the Defence Force, so he could follow her anywhere.

Leaving the Moon involved walking down one of the four access tubes from the interplanetary terminal into a dumpy transport ship, finding the assigned seat, and strapping in.  Because the spaceport used a maglev rail system for ship launch, it means that there wasn’t the traditional launch sequence and extra gees worth of pressure as the rocket fought its way out of the Moon's gravity which had been so familiar to earlier colonists.  Instead, for the passenger, there was a slight shake as the ship stared down the maglev rail, and for those seated next to a window, watching the lunar landscape passing by at an increasingly higher speed.  As the velocity climbed as the ship neared the end of the launch rail, they rapidly realised that all the weight they had missed during their sojourn on the Moon was coming back with extra.  This always shocked people acclimatised to light lunar gravity, although the accumulating forces never exceeded three gees.  Nonetheless, they were a rude reminder of what was to come on the return to Earth, gym time in one gee notwithstanding. 

It was through this period of unpleasantly increased weight and heavy breathing that the track slowly inclined through the lunar uplands surrounding the mare.  At the end of the 120 kilometre track, the ship achieved escape velocity, and by use of small thrusters directed its course towards Earth. 

Landing back on the Moon still required a classic vertical landing, which was when the transport's load of hydrogen and oxygen fuel normally came into play.  The transports also support orbiting outposts, making Lunar Five a busy spaceport.  Earthgov has promised to install a maglev landing strip, where incoming transports could land like aircraft on Earth, but development and installation costs were proving ridiculous.

Cho’s transport launch went without a hitch, and soon they were travelling between planets.  However, the star field was obscured by the ship's iridescent plasma shield.  As the alternative was cosmic ray induced DNA mutation nobody particularly minded.

Pacific Space Elevator

Three weightless and under-exciting days later, the ship docked with High Point Station, the top end of Earth's Pacific Space Elevator.  There the passengers transiting to Earth took the internal train down to High Point's Hilton.  There they waited a further day and half until the next elevator train arrived to start the three day trip back down to Low Point Station. 

Because High Point has just enough mass, people were able to walk around the station, although magnetic shoes were required so as to not achieve escape velocity and bump heads against ceilings, or floors, or walls, depending on the point of view.  In practice, to reduce the disorienting effects of freefall, the convention was that people orient themselves to the designated floor, and didn’t piss everyone else off by floating upside down when talking or eating.

High Point Station itself was imbedded in a massive stony asteroid captured during a flypast two centuries earlier and pushed into geosynchronous orbit by mass drivers.  There it sat as the primary orbital anchor for the elevator, and has done so since the construction of the first space elevator.  It had to be moved when the terrestrial station was moved to the Central Pacific.  Another smaller asteroid, a C-Type named Angel, was tethered to High Point, and orbited a further 64,370 kilometres out.  Its purpose was to provide the orbital counterweight which held the whole elevator in place. 

Astronomers had not wasted the opportunity the C-Type provided.  A permanently manned observatory was mounted on Angel.  Unlike the elevator itself, no train connected the two asteroids, but small transports flew between the two, moving men and materials as required.  The Angels, as the team was inevitably called, spent their time running Hubble Six, a massive array of astronomical instruments.  Angel was also the centre of a vast radio telescope array of twelve satellites set in a vast pinwheel 10 million kilometres wide around Earth called the Giant Ear, which among other things looked for intelligent signals from outside the solar system.  The collective receiving capability of the system was such that comedians joked it could listen to little green men on their quadplex phones on the other side of the galaxy.  As to signals from human colonies, nothing had been heard from the ships sent out since the 22^nd century.

The Pacific Space Elevator was Earthgov's greatest civil engineering achievement.  Not even the construction of the colony ships of two centuries earlier came close to the sheer scale of the carbon nanotube ribbon tether which stretched 35,800 kilometres down to Low Point Station on Jarvis Island in the central Pacific Ocean. The elevator ribbon was relatively narrow at Low Point, a mere ten metres wide, while at the other end, the ribbon was 200 metres wide.  Its depth was uniform at two metres thick. 

Every third day, a train of ten elevator cars completed its descent to Low Point Station while another train of ten elevator cars on the other side of the elevator ribbon arrived at High Point.  The cars gripped tracks glued on both sides of the ribbon to stay in place, and the massive capacitors that make up the elevator car structures provided power to the driving engines which moved the cars up and down.  The power for the whole arrangement was drawn from the micro solar cells embedded in the surface of the ribbon, supplemented by backup fusion reactors in High Point and Low Point.

Cho and Harrington’s return to Earth necessitated the usual physiotherapy that followed long duration low or zero gee missions.  As in Lunar Five's gymnasiums, the great space elevator cars featured centrifuges dedicated to reconditioning the human body to a one gee environment.  These ones did have the pleasant Tri-D illusions, so for three days, Cho walked up a simulation of New Zealand wilderness. He hadn't been back in years, although now a trip back was mandatory. 

When he had lived in the country his holidays had been spent trekking through the bush, enjoying the splendours of the native forests that now engulfed the once marginal farmlands the country had formerly relied on for economic growth.  New Zealand bird populations had exploded with the elimination of the last possums, mustelids, and rats, and the recreation through advances in DNA recovery of once extinct species like the bush moa and huia from museum specimens.

At the Low Point end there was a ten storey docking terminal, while at the High Point end, an equivalent structure jutted from the base of the asteroid.  Running between the trains through a pulley arrangement embedded deep inside the asteroid was the other part of the elevator system, a secondary tether which was attached directly to the trains.  This significantly reduced the demands on the elevator ribbon, as it did not have the tensile strength to support the weight of the trains and itself. 

Fabricating the two ribbons required building a robot mine and a refinery/factory on Angel to extract the pure carbon needed.  Mining the C-type asteroid and then using the rump of the asteroid as the elevator's counterweight reduced the overall cost of the project from beyond the dreams of avarice to merely monumental.  This was because lofting the carbon fibre from Earth would have been prohibitively expensive, even with orbital space planes.  As some wag pointed out when constructing the elevator components, moving millions of tons of carbon ribbon into geosynchronous orbit required a space elevator.  The logical solution was to make the ribbon in orbit and then lower it to Jarvis Island in one of the most technically challenging operations of all time. 

The first, and considerably less capable, space elevator, had had its terrestrial end located in Africa, south of Libreville in the former state of Gabon before Gabon disappeared after the African Border Rationalisation Treaty resolved the old boundaries state boundaries at the Second Conference of Berlin in 2035.  The first elevator was the result of a joint United States and European Union project in the late 21^st century.  It was lost early in the Long War, the result of sneak attack by the Eastern Federation on the old High Station.  The collapse of the carbon ribbon had meant that the first 1500 miles or so crashed into the Atlantic, while the ribbon above that height burned through in re-entry, leaving thousands of miles of elevator ribbon in low orbit.  The ribbon’s impact created a tsunami which washed along the African and South American coasts, causing considerable damage and staggering loss of life.

Jarvis Island was been picked as the replacement site because it was so far away from inhabited areas, and an attack would be difficult to hide against the vastness of the central Pacific.  Jarvis Island spent the first few million years of its existence as a low lying equatorial island built by thousands of generations of sea birds depositing guano on a coral atoll.  Now the atoll was covered by thousands of tons of reinforced concrete to hold on down the planetary end of the space elevator. 

Not all the concrete and steel was devoted to keeping the elevator in place.  A great deal of it had gone into building the artificial port from rubble dredged up from a nearby seamount.  The gulls were not been forgotten in the transition, and their rookery was now on a new island a few kilometres further west.  They spend their time following fishing vessels operating out of the port. 

Getting to and from Low Point was normally done via fast hydrofoils running to and from the international airport on Kiribati to the northwest.  The risk of running a large aircraft into the ribbon has been judged too great to allow more than occasional and highly regulated use of Low Point’s airstrip for fixed wing aircraft.  The alternative was to take a jet copter, but the hydrofoil run was far more popular with travellers, and substantially cheaper.

Those restrictions did not apply to Cho and Harrington.  For them, a military hypersonic transport had been given special permission to use the airstrip, and was awaiting their arrival.

After they staggered out from the Low Point Station terminal they were driven at speed by ground car to the airstrip, as the full impact of one gee, and the heat and the humidity of the tropics, gave them a welcome back they were unlikely to forget.  To add to their discomfort, this was one the few times the driver had the opportunity to put his foot down at Low Point, and he took maximum advantage, because when they pulled up next to the HST, the vehicle noticeably rose on its hydraulic suspension as it recovered from being pushed downwards by its streamlining.  Once they had struggled up the steps into the HST, and their luggage had been loaded, it took off, its destination the Earthgov capital in the former Principality of Luxembourg.  Inside, Cho and Harrington lay down in their reclining chairs, as their bodies struggled with real gravity all the time.

The pilot of the HST lined it up on the runway, and took off using the in-wing electric jet engines.  Once the aircraft was cruising just below the speed of sound, he switched to the rocket assist modules, and accelerated through the sound barrier, getting to Mach 3.5 before engaging the hydrogen fuelled scramjet engines hanging from the wings in pods.  At Mach 8, it levelled out at 120,000 feet above the Earth, taking the direct rather than polar route, flying high above the Central Americas before starting its descent as the European coast came into view, midway over the Atlantic.  On the way, by accessing the HST’s external cameras from their individual data screens, the passengers were able to take in the view of the rewilding projects across North America, the reforestation projects in the Amazon Basin beneath them, and looking towards the far north, the new ice fields in the Arctic Ocean.  Directly below them the old cattle ranches and soy bean plantations and the other cleared sections of the Amazon basin forests were disappearing.  Instead, the trees were returning, along with the other plants and animals, across the great swathes carved out of the forest during the 20th and 21st centuries as an army of Earthgov Conservation Corp workers replanted the trees.  Just over three decades of peace and reconstruction had made a huge difference to lands once devastated by war and exploitation.

Earthgov Presidential Palace

Three hours later the HST landed with the usual three massive thumps as the wheels slammed down hard on the runway at Findel.  As far as Cho was concerned, this was a major improvement on the alternative, where one crash means something much worse. 

Looking at Harrington, reclining to his right on the other side of the cabin, her unnaturally pale face spoke of greater concern.  Cho was relaxed.  As the old pilots never tired of saying, any landing you could walk away from was a good one.  That was fine with him, after three hours in the air his legs ached to be stretched.  Internally he shuddered to think how people coped with sitting in economy class for many hours on sub-sonic transports.  Hypersonic sub-orbital was the way to go.  Of course, as the pre-flight instructions noted, someone famous had once pointed out that for half the flight you could not get to the toilet, and for the rest of it, you could not use it.  This meant that stretching his legs was not the only thing he had to do.  Of course, he could have worn the sub-orbital nappies the pre-flight instructions suggested, but he was not going to be seen wearing such things.  No man in his position would.  Fortunately, he knew there would be no long line going through Customs and Immigration to stretch out the agony.  Rank hath its privileges, he mused.  That extended to him not having to queue to use the aircraft’s toilet at the end of the flight before deplaning.

A Chrysler-Rolls limousine waited at the bottom of the aircraft's steps, into which Cho and Harrington climbed.  In front and behind the vehicle were two identical vehicles.  The vehicle almost silently whisked them away, apparently purring, although this was actually the noise maker required to protect blind pedestrians.  There were still many people carrying the effects of flash blindness from the Long War, so the modification was necessary even though electric vehicles had been the norm for nearly four hundred years.  Cho could hardly imagine the historical alternative of the internal combustion engine.  Burning precious oil to drive ground cars had been utterly preposterous.  Of course, if security had let him, he would have taken a personal electric air car from the airport to the meeting.

Cho looked into the night sky.  The Moon was just rising, showing a one-quarter face.  He sighed.  While he was up there the most pressing issue he had had in the past three months had been planning a major exercise.  Its aim was to test the defences of the Moon bases from a hostile force based on the dark side.  His former second in command was leading the defending Orange Force against the invading Blue Forces commanded by the colonel of the Defence Force Marine detachment. 

He also noticed how much his ankles and knees ached under the strain of walking in a full time one gee field again.  He was definitely looking forward to relaxing in the spa bath in his hotel room after this meeting.

He still wondered what the meeting was about.  All he had been able to glean from his inquiries was that the Earthgov Cabinet had recently made a major policy decision, but unusually, there were none of the usual scuttlebutt in the corridors of power about what it was.  All he had been able to make out was that the Earthgov President had proposed an off agenda motion at a recent Cabinet meeting, and the Cabinet had supported it, and then, incredibly, had not leaked it.

Unusually, the cortege was waved through the fortified entrance to the Earthgov Precinct.  Once through, the car stopped inside the underground car park of the Presidential Palace.  During daylight hours, the vehicle’s occupants would have had the opportunity to admire those historic buildings in the city centre, on the way to the Earthgov precinct, which had survived the war more or less in one piece.  By contrast, the outskirts of the city in which fighting had occurred were still the subject of an intense restoration programme.  The pleasant countryside that used to surround the city was now covered in expanding suburbia as the demands of the planet's capital exerted themselves.

A mass of security officers met them in the car park, before ushering Cho and Harrington to the building's lift foyer where Harrington was spirited away while Cho was accompanied up to the top floor of the building.  When Cho exited the lift, waiting in the lobby outside the President's ante office was Field Marshal Heinrich Kessler, Commander in Chief of Earthgov's Defence Force, flanked by two major-generals, and three full colonels.  Cho knew them all, having gone through the Defence Force Senior Officers Training Academy at Sandhurst with the colonels, and had been on the losing side with the generals during a Defence Force exercise in Brazil.  After going through the salutes, and then the pleasantries, he was shown to a waiting couch, and offered a really decent single malt and questioned briefly about Lunar Five before Kessler got down to the real business.

'What do you know of your new assignment,' he asked, his Westphalian accent crushing the more delicate tones of New English?

'Nothing Sir,' Cho was forced to admit.

'And not for want of trying, either, or so my aides tell me,' Kessler responded with a chuckle looking at his aides.  One of the generals and two of the colonels had the grace to look slightly red faced, 'You logged over fifty calls to friends in Earthgov and the Defence Force before you gave up trying to find out.'

'Are you going to tell me Sir,' Cho asked without any humour in his voice?  During his career he had found that only generals who had failed in their assignments very badly were reassigned mid tour.  Usually a team of senior officers was sent to support a non-performer if things were going badly, and then the latter was quietly retired.  Nothing like that had happened.  He did not think he had failed, or at least he hoped he hadn't.  On the other hand, unsuccessful generals did not find themselves invited to meet the President.  Clearly something big was about to happen to him.

'I'll leave that for the President," Kessler replied.  Before Cho could ask for just a hint from him, the door to the President's office opened, and the 'Madam President," Kessler said, as she approached them, 'may I present Major-General Richard Cho.'

'General,' replied in her soft East African accent, 'it is a great pleasure to meet you.'  After shaking Cho's hand, she led them back into her office, and they sat down in couches set out for visitors.  The office was decorated with the usual gifts from dignitaries, and with wall hangings and statuettes from her homeland in the East African Confederation.  She sat down in an armchair and regarded her guests.

'General Cho, no doubt you are wondering why you are here,' she began.  Cho must have revealed his questions in his expression, because she continued by saying, 'I see that you do.'  Cho remained perched on the front of the couch.  It didn't look good open relaxing in the presence of a superior officer, or the President, for that matter.

She leaned back in her chair, and then said, ‘Five weeks ago, we received the first proof that a human colony has been established in an exo-system.'

 Cho rocked back in his couch at the astonishment of the news.  For the last two centuries, Earth had been waiting for the exo-colonies to phone home.  To finally hear that a signal had finally been received was astonishing.  The dream of centuries had been achieved.  Humans had successfully travelled to the stars and established themselves in another solar system.  He was also astonished that this news hadn't leaked out of Earthgov before now.  Like all governments, it leaked like a sieve, especially when the news was this extraordinary.

'So one of them made it!  That's wonderful news.  Where did the signal come from?'

'The star HR4523A in the constellation of Centaurus.  I am told that the signal was in transit for 30 years before we received it.'

'I presume we have sent a message back,' Cho replied.

‘We will, the Giant Ear can send as well as receive, but a reply by radio will take 30 years to get to them, and so on.'  As quadplex calls go, it would be beyond tedious.  We have something else in mind.'

'What did they say in their transmission,' Cho asked, overwhelming curiosity framing his face, and unaccountably missing the serious hint the President had just dropped.

'I am sure Heinrich will ensure you are briefed,' Kazulu replied. 'I have asked you here on another matter.'

Cho sat back in the couch.  Whatever the President said next was the nub of why he was there.

'We are sending a new mission to the stars.  Earthgov wants to find out how the colonies are doing, and to know more than whatever a colony is prepared to tell us.  So we are fitting out an asteroid ship, and sending it.  We want you to command the expedition.  And we want it ready to depart in a year.'

Cho's face blushed in a combination of surprise and astonishment.  Momentarily speechless, he finally replied, ‘I don’t believe that is possible Madam President.  Each of the forty three asteroid ships sent two centuries ago took the companies building them at least ten years to fit out.  And they had the orbital construction facilities back then we just don't have now.  Just getting a suitable asteroid from the belt would take at least five years.  I don't see how that target date could possibly be achieved.'

'General, there were forty-four asteroid ships.  The last one, the Anubis, was never sent.'

Cho's face whitened with internal anger.  Keeping himself in check, he replied quietly.  'The Anubis was destroyed during the war, by a counter-attack after it destroyed the Chinese megalopolis in the Eastern Federation.  It was hit by over a hundred nukes.  There was nothing left of it.  As you know, its destruction led to the Western Alliance proposing a peace treaty - the one which founded Earthgov. '

'The Alliance leaders lied,' Kessler broke in with his matter-of-fact voice.  Cho's face fell in shock.

'Your parents were leaders within the Eastern Federation.  They died when sub-Shanghai was hit, didn't they?  You were raised by your grandmother in New Zealand,' the President softly interjected.  Cho nodded dumbly.  He knew only too well what had happened.  The Anubis' mass driver blasted China with projectiles accelerated to near light speed just before the armistice.  The impacts levelled what was left of the above ground structures, and collapsed the sub-surface ones, shaking the entire planet in the process.  The destruction to the surface and sub-surface habitations was so overwhelming that the Eastern Federation was forced to seek terms, but not before launching an overwhelming retaliatory strike on the Anubis from its sea based nuclear assets.  Destroying the ship restored the mutual assured destruction balance between the two sides which formed the basis of peace talks.

'The anti-ship weapons of the day used proximity fuses,' Kessler continued.   'A multi-megaton nuke doesn't have to be close to knock out a ship with heat and radiation.  Even with the best shielding available then and now, a near miss is good enough.  But the Anubis has a solid iron hull a minimum of a kilometre thick.  The mass driver was knocked out, and crew in the external pods were lost to the hits, and a few airlocks were ruptured, letting atmosphere escape from out in some areas.  The ship's ability to fight was destroyed.  But the ship itself survived.  During the armistice negotiations it was repaired enough to move to Lagrange Point L4 and has been parked in the dust cloud there ever since.  It's still hot in places, but otherwise intact.  The surviving Eastern Federation leaders knew that, but weren't prepared to let on to their own people.  They needed the propaganda bonus the destruction of Anubis brought them at the peace table.  The Western Alliance was prepared to let the war end on that basis.'

The shock was still evident on Cho's face.  It was little wonder that people at the highest levels of what was now Earthgov had kept the secret of the ship's continued existence.  If any region tried to secede in the future, it could be used again to win any subsequent war.  Why would Earthgov reveal its existence now, unless it was also going to use the news from Centaurus to swamp the news about Anubis' survival?

Then Cho realised that the two things were connected.  The political leaders in what used to the Eastern Federation must have demanded that Earthgov use the ship for the mission as the price for supporting a hugely expensive mission to the stars.  They also needed someone considered reliable by the various Earthgov factions to command the mission. 

They wanted him as mission commander because of his family connection with the old Eastern Federation regime, and also because he came from a country considered non-threatening, politically acceptable, and well liked by all the factions.  And this meeting was a test of his loyalty.  If he gave the wrong reaction here and now his career really was over.

'Madam President,’ he began, ‘while I recognise the ship's role in the past, I believe that I can best serve Earthgov by leading the expedition.  This is a tremendous opportunity, and I won't let you down.'

The smile on the President's face, and the less defined frown on Kessler's, told him that was what they wanted to hear.

'Then it is agreed general, you will lead the mission.  I will tell you this again in the future, but for now, I say God speed.  Thank you.'

And with that the interview was over.  Cho was ushered out, and Kessler and his staff escorted him to a nearby meeting room where they sat down around one end of a twenty seat table.

There Kessler activated his datapad, and transferred a stream of data to Cho’s own datapad..

'You can read that later, but I'll summarise the contents.'  Kessler paused for a moment, and then continued.  'Before you agree to this mission, I want you to really think about this.  For you, and everyone who goes under your command, it is a one way mission.  Neither you or they will ever see Earth again.'

Cho was rocked by these words.  Still overwhelmed by the offer, he had not had the time to consider all of the ramifications.

'But Sir,' he replied, 'with a combination of modern cold sleep technology and time dilation there is every reason we could be back after no more than five person years or so have passed.  Centaurus is not that far away.'

'This is no mythical five year exploratory mission, Richard,' Kessler responded in a deadly serious and almost angry tone.  The creases in his forehead quivered as he spoke.  'You are not Captain Kirk, and you will not be flitting about using a warp drive in sub space, hyper space, or jump space, or flying through worm holes, or whatever other verdamnt nonsense the science fiction writers ever dreamed up.  If you go, you will not come back.  You will spend the rest of your life in space, and die out there.  If you're very lucky, you will be buried on a human occupied planet instead of being jettisoned in space.  We are not just sending the mission to Centaurus.  Two centuries ago forty three colony ships left this system.  We know a half dozen of them went to the same quadrant of near space as the Centaurus ship.  You will be investigating the systems those six were sent to, as well as their alternates.  Over the next thirty years we plan to send out other missions to check out the other seven quadrants.  Earthgov wants to know whether they succeeded or not, and locate any other planets suitable for colonisation.  We have the Anubis available now, but there will be other ships like her in the future.  You're not going on a five year mission.  It is more like a five hundred year mission.  So I want you to give some long and hard thought as to whether you want to make that kind of commitment.  And I don't to hear any more glib nonsense like you trotted out to the President.  I doubt that she has given any real thought about what she has asked you to do.  After all, she's not going to be around when you report in.  It will be some future administration that has to deal with your news.'

'So why is she so enthusiastic about a mission that will cost billions to generate news that will only be of use decades after she leaves office?'

'Don't be a fool man.  She sees this mission as a way of shoring up Earthgov through pork barrel politics.  Her administration is under huge pressure from the Eastern factions to place more resources into reconstruction and economic development in the Eastern aligned states.  The whole point of the exploration programme is political unity on Earth by economic stimulation.  She doesn't give a damn about finding out what happened to people who left two centuries ago.'

His mouth apparently dry, Kessler stopped for a moment to clear his throat.  Now desperate to change the subject, Cho asked the big question rattling around his head.  'What did the Centaurus transmission say?'

'It's in the information package, and tomorrow's ESED briefing will cover it, along with a lot of other material,' Kessler coughed.  'It is a woman crying for help.  We don't know what to make of it, and just what she expected us to do I have no idea.'

After that bombshell, Cho had had enough.  'Thank you, Sir, for being so frank.  I have other questions, but I think I have enough to be going on with,' tapping his datapad.  'I won't have an answer to your question for a while, because, as you say, I will have to think long and hard on it.  Tomorrow's briefing will undoubtedly help me along.  Will I see you there?'

'No.  For here on, this is your show.  My staff will arrange regular progress briefings, and you will be in command of the expedition up until it is ready to go.  If you decide to stay, let me know as soon as possible so an alternative commander can be assigned.  You will have several understudies in any case in your command if for any reason you are unavailable.  Redundancy is the watchword of the mission.  Go get some rest.  You have a long day tomorrow.'  Kessler then stood, and left, leaving a couple of colonels behind to escort Cho back to the basement car park.

There Harrington rejoined him, along with a coterie of Earthgov Security men, who escorted took Cho to a luxury hotel in the centre of the city.  As Cho climbed into his car, his eyes turned upwards.  The cold stars stared down at him from the clear night sky, mocking him with their majesty.

Cho stared back at them.  If things went well, he would travel among them, and search for the first humans to dare to consider themselves star farers.