Blue Hope: (Book 2) (Red Hope) Read online

  “You mean, like, pay right now?”

  “Yes, I can wire it to you from my bank.”

  There was even more silence on the phone. Connie heard the phone get covered by a hand, some mumbling, another pause, and then the phone was uncovered.

  “Okay, well, they don’t let me handle the money, well, except for petty cash, but especially not a half million dollars,” she laughed nervously. “So I still need to transfer you to the finance people, okay? It’ll just take a second.”

  “Thanks.”

  Connie heard a click sound and some relaxing saxophone music to put her to sleep while she was on hold. It barely overcame the sound of the cackling birds just outside the kitchen windows.

  She looked toward the living room again to see what was on the news. A computer generated image of spacecraft capsules dangling from parachutes displayed on the screen. The scrolling banner said, “International Space Station Evacuated During Mishap.”

  Connie tilted her head and yelled toward the bedrooms, “Hey Cody and Catie, what are you two up to?”

  Silence.

  “Are you two playing Minecraft again?”

  A weak chorus of “Yes….” came back.

  “Hey, I told you —”

  The saxophone music stopped. The finance person picked up the phone.

  After a few minutes, her amazing bank balance on the laptop screen shrank by approximately five hundred thousand dollars. It was a real kick to the gut, but Connie was excited — a future without crutches was inspiring. She hung up the phone, satisfied.

  Reality swooped in. Connie remembered that her kids weren’t doing their chores.

  “Hey, I told you no Minecraft until you finish your chores!”

  Outside, the sound of the birds chirping faded until it was deadly silent.

  CHAPTER 3

  Building 12

  NASA Johnson Space Center

  Houston, Texas

  Ding!

  The elevator doors slid open and spit out the NASA director and his video technician Jimmy.

  The two of them marched into the video processing room located on the second floor. All footage sent from Mars ended up in this room, to be uncompressed and synced up with the audio streams. After that they were broadcast to the major networks for release, usually within 24 hours.

  The room had several long tables covered in computer workstations, each manned by an engineer. Chris pulled out his wallet and removed a handful of dollar bills. He whistled to get their attention. When they looked, he waved the dollar bills in the air.

  “Okay fellas, you want to earn a dollar from the director of NASA? I need you to go down to the vending machines and buy yourselves a coffee. Give me and Jimmy here a few minutes to discuss some important information in private.”

  The engineers filed past, each one snatching a volunteered dollar. The last engineer to walk out stopped in front of Chris and smiled. He grabbed the last two dollars and left.

  You little punk, Chris thought.

  Chris Tankovitch and Jimmy sat down in front of Jimmy’s computer. It was covered in Post-it notes holding Linux shortcuts that he used often.

  Jimmy was a young, but knowledgeable video processing engineer. He reached forward to push the Play button. Chris held up his hand to pause him.

  “Hang on, Jimmy… lock the door.”

  Jimmy leaned his chair back on two legs, shut the solid door, and turned the toggle lock.

  “Okay, let’s see it,” Chris said, nodding his head.

  Jimmy held his own hand up this time.

  “By the way, there’s no audio with this video. Normally the audio is transferred first and the two streams synched up later, but we never got audio.”

  “All right,” Chris nodded. “Understood.”

  Despite the twenty-four hour moratorium on news releases, information had leaked that morning about the death of beloved astronaut and Silicon Valley entrepreneur Keller Murch. Chris was relying on this video to shed some light on the incident. Captain Adam Alston had mentioned almost no details in his initial email description of the event. In a follow-on audio message they’d just received before heading upstairs, Adam stated, “We were trapped in the stone building. We ran out of air just as we figured out how to open the door on the stone building. Keller gave me his air tank to save my life.”

  Jimmy pushed Play .

  The black and white movie on the screen looked like a driving simulator rumbling through the Arizona desert. Chris and Jimmy watched as the Mars exploration cart drove the two astronauts toward a surreal setting. Chris furrowed his brow, paying rapt attention. The cart drove down a steep hill toward a sparkly boulder. Just beyond that, it focused on a building made from stone slabs leaning together, like a pyramid with the top cut off.

  “See there,” Chris explained. “That’s the boulder with the fossils in it.” He tapped his finger on the screen. “That’s what the Curiosity rover found – the thing that started this whole mission.”

  “Cool,” Jimmy said as he tinkered with some settings on the processing software, brightening the image. “These helmet cameras are really jerky. I’m turning on the image stabilization.”

  Jimmy’s mouse pointer flew through some on-screen menus that made the image become much less jumpy.

  The movie continued. The two astronauts stepped out of the exploration cart and made their way over to a granite-colored circular door leaning against the building. It was opened just enough to allow them to slide through sideways.

  Chris had already seen hundreds of high-resolution images of the pyramid interior. Adam and the Russian cosmonaut Yeva Turoskova had explored half of it the day before. Detailed engravings covered every wall. These images had been crowd-sourced to every major university on Earth to help interpret them. A group of students at the University of Moscow broke the code and deciphered them.

  As the video showed the astronauts exploring the interior, Chris leaned toward Jimmy and asked, “Have you heard what all those engravings mean?”

  “Some kind of history lesson, I think.”

  “Sort of. It tells about how the ancient Martians invented something that led to their own destruction. They sent an emergency mission of their own astronauts to Earth to see about colonizing it or maybe using it to grow food. However,” Chris sighed, “they eventually lost contact with their explorers.”

  “I heard the Martians called those explorers their ‘lost children’?”

  “Yeah, that’s the interpretation. Definitely a term of endearment for their lost friends. They waited for them to come back, but they never did. This stone building was meant as a shrine to what happened to their entire society. They built it from very thick granite to withstand the erosion. We assume there used to be whole cities, but they’ve been sandblasted out of existence over the past two hundred thousand years.”

  Jimmy’s ears perked up. “Two hundred thousand years? Isn’t that when modern-looking humans developed here on Earth?”

  “That’s right,” Chris said, looking impressed at Jimmy’s knowledge.

  “Interesting,” Jimmy said, revealing a mischievous smile. “I didn’t actually know that. One of the guys in the telemetry office told me that yesterday."

  On the screen, they saw the two astronauts walking over to a smaller alternate chamber inside the stone building. The carvings were more geometric – more mathematical-looking.

  Jimmy turned away from the monitor and asked, “So what was this thing that destroyed them?”

  “Well, we don’t know yet,” Chris admitted. “That’s one of the things our paleographers haven’t been able to interpret yet.”

  “Don’t paleographers study fossils?”

  Chris laughed and shook his head.

  “No, you’re thinking of paleontologists. Paleographers study ancient written languages.”

  Chris pointed to the new math-like engravings on the wall of the smaller chamber.

  “Can you stop the video here and take some scre
enshots?”

  “Sure. Zoom in and enhance, right?” Jimmy joked.

  “Hah, just regular screenshots will work.”

  Jimmy took a series of screenshots that showed all of the markings on the entire wall.

  “Email them to me and I’ll forward them to the paleographers and interpreters,” Chris instructed. “I have a feeling these engravings are going to tell us a lot about their invention.”

  “Screenshots taken, let’s continue to the good part,” Jimmy said.

  At that moment, the video focused on a small black cube, roughly five inches wide, floating above a small stone table.

  “That’s it,” said a wide-eyed Chris.

  “What?”

  “Yeva told me that they found a very peculiar cube that seemed to disobey gravity.”

  Jimmy laughed. “A cube of anti-gravity?”

  “Yes, that’s exactly what he called it.”

  They both stared intently as the astronaut’s arm reached into view and pushed the cube around, showing that it glided in whatever direction it was pushed, never stopping. Jimmy smirked when he saw the arm reach in – it reminded him of the thousands of hours of first-person-shooter video games he’d played in college.

  Suddenly, the video showed a lot of dust falling and shadows rocking back and forth.

  “This is probably one of the Marsquakes they told us about,” Chris said. “The seismographs in the main living habitat also recorded them.”

  “You mean the Little Turtle?” Jimmy asked.

  “No, the Little Turtle was the transport ship that took the astronauts to Mars. The Big Turtle was the permanent living quarters. It had all of the scientific instrumentation and...”

  Chris was interrupted by the onscreen action.

  The astronauts took off running back to the round door, but the stone slab had rolled shut, trapping them inside.

  Chris’s mouth dropped open.

  “Oh no…” he trailed off.

  Jimmy paused the video and turned to Chris.

  “The next ten minutes is just them sitting, standing, pacing… obviously talking about how the hell they’re going to move that big stone door. You want to skip to the action part? It’s pretty clever.”

  “Yes…. please.”

  Jimmy fast-forwarded until they saw the astronauts do something fascinating.

  Adam removes his own air tank and hands it to Keller. Keller, in turn, holds it in place up against the door. Then Adam starts hitting the valve on the tank with various objects – hammers, cameras, and finally the anti-gravity cube. Air shoots out of the tank like a rocket and slowly pushes on the granite door, which eventually falls away from the stone building and slams down to the ground.

  The image falls sideways.

  “What happened?” Chris asked.

  “As far as I can tell, Captain Adam Alston fell over. He’s on the ground. He’s probably suffocating and can’t get up.”

  Chris and Jimmy instinctively tilted their heads sideways to figure out what was happening.

  The image showed Adam reaching up toward Keller, but Keller shook his head. It looks like his lips say, “No.”

  Jimmy mimicked the “No” movement with his own lips, having obviously watched this video sequence several times already.

  Chris noticed Jimmy and asked, “How many times have you watched this already?”

  Jimmy shrugged his shoulders.

  “A couple times.”

  The video continued.

  Keller walks away from Adam’s camera. He’s leaving Captain Alston there to die.

  “Don’t do it,” Chris muttered, as if talking to a horror movie.

  The sideways video corrects itself. Adam stands back up, using the light post tripod as a crutch. He stumbles up behind an unsuspecting Keller. Adam grips the tripod like a baseball bat, reaches back and swings it violently at Keller’s helmet, smashing the glass in the visor of the unsuspecting astronaut – the one who’d just left him there to die.

  Chris’s hand rose up and covered his mouth.

  Oh my God, whispered Chris.

  Adam rolls the dead body over and detaches the oxygen tank from Keller’s suit. He attaches it to his own suit and then stumbles over to the exploration cart, climbs in, and races back into the sands of the Martian desert.

  “What happens after this?” Chris asked, almost afraid of the answer.

  “He just drives back to base at the Big Turtle spaceship habitat. Then it turns off.”

  “Okay, you can stop it, then.”

  Chris loosely gnawed on his index finger knuckle, thinking.

  “We just witnessed a murder,” Chris droned. “I mean, we were only on Mars for two days and somebody gets murdered?”

  Jimmy nodded his head.

  “Well, you did send a C-Team of astronauts,” Jimmy explained. “Besides, just because you send a human to another planet doesn’t mean they won’t act human. Who do we contact? The space police? Judge Dredd?”

  “Nobody yet,” Chris said. “I’ll set up a telecom with the remaining crew on Mars and ask for more details. This just got much more complicated.”

  Jimmy’s phone rang. He picked it up, put it against his ear and turned away from the NASA director. He said quietly, “Yes, he’s right here next to me. We’re reviewing a video. Really? You’re kidding. Oh man, oh man. Okay, hang on.”

  Jimmy put his hand over the receiver and turned to Chris, “There’s been an accident on the International Space Station. They say it launched missiles toward Russia or something crazy.”

  Chris’s mind began racing.

  That something crazy event was something the Pentagon promised Chris would absolutely one hundred percent never ever happen in his lifetime. He started to hyperventilate, but acted calm for Jimmy’s benefit.

  “They just had to abandon the entire station,” continued Jimmy. “The crew’s taken the emergency return vehicles. Sounds like something terrible is happening. They need you in the Mission Control Center immediately.”

  “This day just keeps getting worse and worse,” Chris said as he stood up. “Look, Jimmy, promise me you won’t tell a soul about this video until I get everything straightened out.”

  “Of course. Do you need me to come with you?” Jimmy asked, obviously curious about what was happening.

  “No thanks, I need you to send out those screen shots. Email them to me and my secretary.”

  Chris unlocked the office door and raced down the hallway. He skipped the elevator and trotted down the stairwell. His destination, the Christopher Kraft Mission Control building, was just a quick jog across the big parking lot through a humid wall of Houston air.

  How could this day get any worse, Chris thought to himself.

  The hallway suddenly lit up with flashing warning lights. A loud Klaxon-type siren spun up, piercing the air with a grinding squeal. Chris plugged his ears with his fingers as he reached the exit doors.

  Memories of his elementary school days in the 1980’s flooded back into his mind. The last time he’d heard this siren was when he had to practice hiding in the school’s bomb shelter, teachers protecting his classmates from the fictional nuclear attack Russia was sending toward his rural Ohio town.

  With his fingers still plugging his ears, Chris opened the bump latch on the exit doors with his hip. He stepped outside and saw other employees standing around and looking upward. He was pushed out even further as a wave of NASA employees poured outside behind him. They assumed the siren was trying to warn them about a tornado and they just wanted to see it with their own eyes. People are funny that way.

  The sky was blue and cloudless. The sirens blared, like a soundtrack to oblivion. Chris scanned the horizon and there it was – an enormous missile leaving a sputtering smoke-filled trail, heading toward downtown Houston. Further away, he saw another missile, but the nose had broken up into a hundred little dots, all streaming apart.

  His eyes opened wide as he saw all the people still outside. Nobody was he
ading for shelter.

  “Everybody, get inside!” he yelled.

  A woman stood next to him, clutching the hand of a little girl. Their name badges said Visitor, probably there for a tour. Both were terrified and couldn’t move. Chris ran up and grabbed the arms of the woman and the girl. He spun them around and pushed them toward the doors.

  “I said get back inside! For God sakes, run!”

  CHAPTER 4

  Temporary housing for the Alston family

  Houston, Texas

  In the distance, Connie heard a faint horn sound, like that of a train or an old truck. She turned away from the kitchen and back toward the TV screen — it showed more coverage of the disaster unfolding on the International Space Station. Her mind turned to her husband Adam who was currently exploring Mars. Connie knew that the main high-bandwidth data stream from Mars used the ISS as an information relay.

  I better call Chris about this Space Station problem, she thought.

  Suddenly, every window in the kitchen exploded inward, sending a horizontal rain of shattered glass streaking through the air and into the living room. The accompanying boom shook the house and knocked every cabinet door open, clearing the contents as fast as if the house had been spun upside down. The jolt released decades of dust, causing the entire house interior to resemble a smoke cloud. The unnerving sound of shattering glass kept going and going.

  Connie fell to the floor, shards coating her hair and clothes. Her arms had cuts and scratches, the glass just missing her face because she had been looking away from the kitchen toward the TV in the living room.

  Connie’s ears rang. She was stunned.

  The laptop sat on the ground next to the TV, the screen still on, but partially blacked out; a piece of glass pierced through it.

  Connie reached up for the table, her fingers finding broken glass. She screamed in pain, pulling her hand back. A shard of glass had pierced through the web of skin between her thumb and index finger. Her good hand reached over to help. With both arms shaking from shock, she closed her good hand over the shard and yanked it out.

  “Ouch!” Connie cried.