Next part of the Ripley story. A little longer arc today, so plenty of time for tea.

[The Animals \\ We Gotta Get Out Of This Place]

So, here were go…

C 2

Once the Walter in Antarctic Traffic Control had linked and cross loaded files with all the other Walters and Gordons in the Enterprise Battle Group, Denton Ripley now had access to the pure, unfiltered historical record of the last thirty years, or the relative time Agamemnon and the Enterprise Battle Group had been away. More importantly, Lars Jansen now had complete access to all the computers on Gateway Alpha and on the Moon. After Ripley had gone over the rough outlines with Lars and Gordon, he knew it was time to get all the ships’ captains together for a council of war.

Including the tankers and Agamemnon, the Enterprise Battle Group numbered 34 ships, and this number included the Enterprise, an immense assault carrier, the heavy cruisers Wainwright and Saratoga, the Kearsarge – a Mohican class troop carrier outfitted with an air wing of her own – six tankers and with the balance of the fleet comprised of frigates like the Stavridis and Darwin. But Ina Balin had almost finished building a second X-ray Maser on Stavridis, and this latest version incorporated the moving mirror design developed by Pak’s engineers. Ripley was going to send her to Enterprise as soon as she finished on Stavridis.

Stavridis’s skipper, Dean Farrell, had been with Ripley’s first task force on the Hyperion mission, and like Ripley he was an Annapolis grad. Unlike Ripley, Farrell had studied history and philosophy at the Academy and had always been considered an intellectual; he was also fiercely loyal – to Admiral Stanton, to Denton Ripley, and to the United States Navy, and pretty much in that order, too. Like all Navy captains, Farrell had a deep interest in engineering, but he’d enjoyed developing camaraderie even as an XO, and under Farrell, Stavridis was soon considered one of the happiest ships in the fleet.

So Ripley wasn’t at all surprised when Farrell showed up a half hour before the Admiral’s council of war – carrying a pile of books.

“What on earth do you have there?” Denton smiled as Dean walked into the Admiral’s in-port conference room.

“Homework,” Farrell smiled back.

“Oh?”

“Denton, I have a Gordon onboard, so I think I know what this is all about.”

“So, what’s this stuff for?”

“Background,” Farrell said. “In case anyone’s interested.”

Neal Davis from the Enterprise was the next to come into the room, and he too looked troubled – but so did each and every skipper as the group piled into Ripley’s suddenly far too small conference room. When everyone was seated, Ripley’s yeoman Joan Carson distributed drinks and snacks, then Ripley called the meeting to order.

“Does anyone here not have access to the Walter Downloads?” he asked as all eyes centered on him.

But then a few hands shot up.

Ripley nodded. “Okay, here’s a quick summary of what’s happened while we were away. As all of you are well aware, what passed as a few months for us – because of the amount of time we traveled at faster than light speeds, well, almost thirty years passed here on Earth, and a lot has happened while we were away.”

He paused and looked around the room, measuring the dour mood. 

“The United States of America is no more. For that matter, the old nation states we were all familiar with are now all gone, and the planet is now entirely encased in ice. There is a continuing human presence at McMurdo, but the ice is increasing in thickness, on average, at a rate of 30 centimeters per annum.

“Approximately seven hundred million people were evacuated from the planet’s surface over a fifteen year period, and yes, that means more than eight billion souls are entombed down there in the ice.”

He paused to let that sink in.

“About 28 years ago a Company survey ship located and charted a planet that’s now called Sparta, and a BAPist cult managed to get the upper hand, politically speaking, on that planet, and they established a monarchy…”

A hand shot up. “A what?”

Ripley turned to Captain Farrell: “Dean, you want to take this one?”

“Sure. I’m sure most of you remember basic 21^st century history, the economic collapse of 2008 and the Obama period that followed. This of course spurred on the revisionist nationalism of the Trump period, but it wasn’t until a few years later that one of the key philosophers of the Trump period was finally uncovered. This man billed himself as The Bronze Age Pervert, or BAP, and it turned out that this BAP had a number of acolytes in the Trump White House. BAP was a devotee of Nietzsche, the 19^th century German philosopher that lay at the heart of Naziism, and BAP carried the idea of the so-called übermensch, or superman, into the 21^st century. Here’s his manifesto, by the way, if anyone is interested,” Farrell said, holding up a copy of BAP’s book, Bronze Age Mindset. “This edition was published in 2018, by the way, and BAP was, like Nietzsche, like Hitler, and like Ayn Rand, dividing humanity into two groups: the men who accomplish great things and all the rest, which he referred to as subhuman slaves, and that’s putting it charitably.

“I’m sure that you all remember that after the tectonic events in the Pacific Northwest, when Rainier and Hood and Shasta erupted and the North American plate shifted, the resulting climate shifts brought on the current ice age, but looking over the Walter Downloads it appears that BAPists had by the mid-21st century almost completely infiltrated the remnants of state governments in the western US. There are indications that the space agencies in the US and EU were compromised as well, and that many of their members were well placed within the Weyland Corporation. It now appears that these BAPists decapitated the federal government’s response to the threat of encroaching ice, and that they may have executed key members of the Senate and Council…”

“And that,” Ripley said, “makes this King Leonidas our common enemy.”

“But…does it, really?” Neal Davis said. “I mean, Denton, let’s think this thing through. The United States no longer exists. There is, literally, no admiralty. No Council, not even a Senate. As the armed force of a democratically elected people that reports to a civilian command authority, we literally, well, we’re stateless and so have no legitimate purpose. This Leonidas may not be our elected leader, but he is, apparently, the leader of what’s left of the human race, so let’s face facts. We could go in tomorrow and wipe Sparta off the map, but in the end we’d only be hastening the end of mankind…”

Denton smiled – because this is exactly what he’d wanted to happen: a spirited discussion of the options facing the fleet – because somehow he was going to have to build a solid consensus among his skippers before any action could be taken, and he’d need everyone’s support.

“Well,” Dean Farrell replied, “let’s look at the problem another way. Leonidas wasn’t elected, he was selected, and probably by a group of corporate sponsors, so his leadership is anything but legitimate – in a democratic sense, at least as far as we’re concerned. And there have already been revolts on New Chicago and on Asia, so there are already strains in the system with this sort of leadership. Also, this new empire has limited resource processing ability and an almost primitive war fighting capability…”

“For now, you mean,” someone said.

“Yes,” Farrell said, “precisely. In ten years they may be armed to the teeth and ready to take us on, but right now it appears they are comparatively weak and we hold a real strategic advantage.”

“Your forgetting something important,” Judy Ripley interjected.

“Like what?” Neal Davis replied.

“This Leonidas has corporate patrons, and these patrons run all eleven planets in this new alliance, and Weyland is the biggest of these. That said, the Company is probably well armed with the organism.”

“But that’s a ground force, and besides,” Farrell said, “employing the organism all but dooms the targeted group, be it one of our ships or a planet. That’s a Doomsday Weapon, pure and simple.”

Denton Ripley nodded. “Mutually assured destruction. But how the hell do they expect to use it against us?”

+++++

Thedus had been discovered a few years after a Company probe transiting the Coalsack sectors had run an automated scan of the planet as it passed. When the results of the scan were transmitted to New Sparta, the Company dispatched an assay team to the planet to confirm the results of this first incomplete scan; when the results were confirmed several colony ships loaded with construction engineers and miners were sent to begin constructing the infrastructure necessary for large scale mineral extraction. Habitation modules under large pressure domes were the first things built, then the first ore processing modules were shuttled down to the planet’s surface. Crushing ferrous oxide under high pressure released oxygen – which was then further processed and stored to provide breathable air inside the domes, and not long after that milestone was passed facilities to distill liquor and to provide testicular release followed, and five years later more than nine thousand people called Thedus home. When a second brothel was built the miners knew they’d finally hit the big time.

And as it was a small planet, one that would be resource depleted within fifty years, the Company had decided against terraforming or building long term settlements there. More a planetoid than a planet like Earth, or even Mercury, Thedus had less than one-twentieth the gravity of Sparta – and while that made walking problematic it did make it economical to load minerals on the planet’s surface and then boost the payload into a low orbit. Because of these significant cost savings, miners working on Thedus were very well paid indeed, and productivity had remained high since Day One.

Sir Ian Tarkanian was the current governor general, and he “positively loathed” his latest posting. A sharp, lean man with hungry eyes, Sir Ian had made a small fortune transporting wealthy refugees from South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa up to orbiting colony ships, and ever since he’d lived the life of a wealthy sybarite wherever he happened to land. Accepting his peerage had come with the proviso that he take the offered assignment on Thedus and remain there for at least two years; now he was counting down the days until he could hop on one of his ships and return to Sparta. That he would be called Sir Ian, or Governor Tarkanian for the rest of his life, was only the very sweet icing on a very large cake he would happily call all his own.

His office, by any standard but especially so for Thedus, was garishly decorated in a red velveteen velcro material trimmed with ornately shaped solid gold trim – the gold freshly mined and processed from the vast deposits beneath Tarkanian’s feet. And while the Company took the biggest percentage of the haul and the Crown the second biggest, the sitting governor also took a decent percentage of all the minerals, ores, and precious metals extracted from the planet, and which would in the two years of his posting see Tarkanian move up the list from modestly wealthy to the obscenely rich. As such, his far-flung commercial enterprises also ensured he was dialed into all the comings and goings within the imperial aristocracy, and it was said that he knew who was in and who was most definitely on the outs long before anyone else on Sparta.

And this morning Sir Ian was reading through his dispatches from the regional capital on New Caledonia before his first appointment of the day, with this Ripley woman from one of the tugs. Reading through her dossier was like reading the summary of a condemned man, or woman, as was the case here; her parents were celebrated U.S. Naval officers that had been among the last to matriculate from the old Naval Academy on Earth, but they had disappeared during the course of the disastrous Mintaka expedition and had not been heard from since – until a month ago, that is. For the entire USNSF Enterprise Battle Group had instantly – and mysteriously – appeared in Earth orbit and been contacted by a disbelieving Antarctic Traffic Control. And that was when the shit had well and truly hit the imperial fan.

Yet of more immediate interest to Tarkanian, in that one instant the entire balance of power within the empire had seismically shifted into unknown territory, and he had been looking for a way to exploit the sudden appearance of this fleet.

Because there simply weren’t any ships like the Enterprise or the Constellation in the new Imperial Navy. Even the frigates Stavridis and Darwin were more powerful than anything built in recent decades, and this was the simple, unintended consequence of the so-called Peace Dividend declared by Leonidas after the final collapse of the Russian-Chinese alliance. “All threat of war is hereby abolished!” the King had merrily decreed, and so centuries of military tradition and war fighting capability had withered and died in the span of a single generation, and with it all threats to Leonidas’s continued reign.

And yet here was this girl, in effect raised by the last four star Admiral of that Navy and without any knowledge of the whereabouts of her real parents, and now he was going to get to break the news to her. Her parents were alive! She was to return to Earth immediately by the fastest available means! It was all very breathless and amusing, and he was almost looking forward to delivering some good news for a change – when Thomas Dolby floated into his office without so much as a knock on his Duraplast door.

“When is Ripley scheduled to meet with you?” Dolby growled as he floated across the room, finally sitting across from Tarkanian – and then putting his feet up on Sir Ian’s desk.

Doing his level best not to look supremely put out by this unwanted intrusion, Sir Ian looked at the CIAs local head-of-station and shook his head. “0800, I seem to recall.”

“She’s not to be told anything about her parents, and she is not to return Earth or the Gateway under any circumstances,” Dolby sighed. “Am I being clear? She’s not being sent back to Earth to meet up with dear old Mom and Dad. Got that?”

“And why the devil not, if you don’t mind my asking?”

“Because the Company wants it that way,” Dolby said, handing over a dispatch. “You’re to confer her adjustment in rank to Chief Warrant Officer, effective on the date noted, and mention that comes with a quarter point increase in shares for this flight – and that is all you are to tell her at this time.”

“And, that’s it?” Sir Ian grumbled. “But all that blather is normally transmitted internally, isn’t it?”

Dolby shrugged. “What the Company wants, the…”

“…the Company gets. Yes, yes, so I keep hearing. Any idea what this is all about?”

“No, not entirely, but I suspect it has something to do with her parents.”

“Obviously,” Sir Ian said. “But what the devil could they have done?”

“My guess is they’ve refused to swear the oath of allegiance to Leonidas, and that makes the situation a real problem.”

Tarkanian nodded in complete understanding. From what he remembered reading a few years ago, the Enterprise Battle Group was immensely powerful and could lay waste to entire planets, and the thought of an old school U.S. Navy admiral showing up in orbit over New Sparta with that fleet had to be keeping the imperial court up at night – because there was nothing at all in the new “Navy” capable of stopping Ripley and his fleet. If the admiral were to refuse to cede the disappearance of the old United States of America, and if they were to attempt to…

“Ah yes, I see the problem,” Tarkanian sighed.

“Do you? Well then, good, that’s excellent.”

Sir Ian nodded. The one thing that might sway Admiral Ripley could very well be to throw his daughter’s future into the mix. To, in effect, hold her hostage? Obviously the intel services would have to use the Company to pull off something like that, and he wondered what Dolby had come up with? 

+++++

There were currently three Tesotek 2100-B bulk ore carriers on Thedus, and as the captain of the Nostromo looked at the dispatcher’s display he sighed, then turned away in anger when he realized only one had been – partially – loaded. Time was money and this screw-up, Arthur Dallas knew, was going to cost the Company some real money. Though the ore separators would continue to process the bulk ore during the flight back to Sparta, tight construction deadlines on the imperial planet meant that a late arrival would slow progress on any number of major construction projects nearing completion, as a late ore arrival meant unnecessary delays in steel and aluminum production – and these types of delays always rippled downstream into further production bottlenecks and even more delays. Still, because Sparta was such a pristine, not to a mention gorgeous world, the Crown had long since decreed that the home of the imperial aristocracy would not suffer the same fate as Earth, and that meant ores would not be extracted from within Sparta, and to this day only the barest minimum hydro-carbon emissions were permitted. Turning these ores into steel beams and aluminum sheathing were considered within this framework, for the time being, anyway, but these ore ships carried an even more precious cargo.

Because in addition to the iron ores and bauxite carried in the massive storage domes, more than 110 tons of refined gold and and 35 tons of palladium had already been secured inside Nostromo’s internal cargo bays, and the Crown desperately needed these precious metals to pay for the massive infrastructure projects already in progress – both on Sparta and on the eleven settled worlds of the Co-Dominium.

Thomas Kane, Nostromo’s XO, pulled himself into the dispatch office wearing his habitually dour face, his eyes studying the latest ore download rates and departure estimates as he floated over to Captain Dallas. “Call it thirty hours to finish the load-out, and then two more hours to pressurize the reactor and dock with the refinery module,” Kane said.

Dallas knew it was almost impossible to maneuver into position and secure the docking clamps to a Tesotek in less than four hours, and he’d already guesstimated the time needed to finish loading the four domes with raw ore, so he wondered what Kane was up to. “We have any passengers this trip?”

“No, not this time,” Kane said. These bulk ore runs were slow, but passage could be booked on the cheap – and with no questions asked – because the crew usually pocketed the proceeds from these off-the-book transits.

“Any crew changes?”

“No. Lambert is still on NAV, Walter on Science, Ripley has the stick and it looks like we’re stuck with Parker and Brett again down in Engineering. Oh, in case you haven’t heard yet, Ripley’s promotion to CWO just came through, so she can officially handle all flight deck duties now.”

“Wow, that fast? Well, three more runs and she can sit for the Commissioned Officer’s Exam, then she’ll be gunning for your job…”

“You still gonna retire from the merchant marines?”

“Yup. This is my last trash run, Tom. I’ll be flying passengers between Sparta and New Chicago by this time next year.”

“Oh? Did your orders come through?”

Dallas held up a hand-held screen and pointed to an entry. “Final interview a week after we finish unloading.”

“Hey, congratulations! About time!”

“Thanks, Tom. Four more round trips and then you can sit for the exam, right?”

“You got that right. No more hyper sleep for me.” Big bulk haulers like Nostromo were simply too massive to generate Langston Fields, so they relied on a constant 1.1G acceleration to get up to near light speed, then at the halfway point flipped and applied a 1.1G braking thrust until reaching Sparta. If the ship ran into trouble, Earth was near the halfway point and the old Lunar Gateway was their alternate.

Joan Lambert floated in and Dallas immediately looked at the navigator’s fingernails – because she was constantly chewing on them, often to the point where they were a bleeding mess wrapped in gauze. The woman was perpetually nervous and, generally speaking, suspicious to the point of paranoia. Ripley was the only one onboard that seemed to get along with her, too, leaving Dallas to conclude that Lambert had been through a few bad relationships with men. Then again, he’d heard rumors that Lambert and Parker had a sex-type-thing of their own going on, so who knows, maybe he was wrong about her.

“Any surprises on our route this time, Joan?” Dallas said to Lambert as she hovered nearby – doing his best to ignore the little bits of fingernail under her perpetually scowling lower lip.

“Possible comet as we approach the Terran Oort Cloud. Nothing else listed,” she said – just before she began chewing on a thumb nail.

Dallas shook his head and looked away. “Oh, by the way, Ripley’s Chief Warrant Officer rating came through, just in case that comes up.”

Lambert nodded but she looked away, too. She’d been passed over for CWO two times already, which meant she was trapped now, that she’d spend the rest of her time with the Company as a navigator. Her only way up the ladder would be to dump flight status and go teach at the old merchant marine academy on Mars, something she had been considering for a while. Still, she’d need a few more trips to be considered for a ground-side teaching assignment, and she was already coming up on thirty years old. “That was quick,” Lambert finally said. “How long before we head out to the ship?”

Dallas looked at Kane again. “You want to take Ellen and go make sure the food-paks were  reloaded correctly this time?”

“Yeah, sure.”

Dallas nodded and then turned to Lambert. “We’d better go out and make sure Mother has the mission parameters sequenced correctly, and that her fuel calculations tally with yours.”

“Now?” Lambert asked.

“Yeah, now; unless you’ve got something better to do?”

“I’ll have to go download the files – and format a new drive,” she said, exasperated by having been asked to do her job.

“Okay,” Dallas said, suddenly tired of trying to work around Lambert’s incomprehensible moods. “Why don’t you bring out a hard copy, too. Just in case I want to look over the route.”

Ignoring his sarcasm, Lambert nodded brusquely and pushed off. “See you up at the ramp,” she said before she disappeared down the access way that led to the NAV Center. 

“Where’s Ripley?” Kane asked Dallas, shaking his head at Lambert when she finally drifted out of sight.

“Still in the BOQ with that goddamn cat; at least she was a half hour ago.”

“You want anything special this trip?”

“No, not really. Whatever the kitchen comes up with is fine by me.”

“We all liked that green stuff last trip out of here. Tasted kind of like spinach.”

Dallas shrugged and turned to his personal correspondence; Kane took the hint and turned to push off and make his way out to the BOQ, or the Bachelor Officer Quarters – relishing the pure freedom of zero-G up here in the orbital base station – while it lasted.

+++++

The Nostromo was a Lockheed Martin CM-88B Bison, an M-class interplanetary tug powered by one ChiCo contained fission pile reactor and two Westinghouse fusion plants. Power in a vacuum was provided by four large Rolls-Royce ion drives, while the command module was designed to detach for flight into known atmospheric conditions using either a scramjet or two high bypass turbofan engines. She was larger in all aspects than the ocean liners of the early 20^th century, and could generate enough power to supply the needs of a small city. That such a huge machine could be handled by a crew of seven was a testament to the power of the computer that, in truth, really ran the ship.

And for almost 20 years, the MU/TH/UR-5500 class computer had handled these routine duties, but M-class interplanetary tugs had recently switched over to the larger -6000 series. With six ten-terabyte cores, ‘Mother’ could handle the most complex astro-navigational chores with ease, and she interfaced with the computers servicing each of the ore processing towers, dispatching maintenance drones to all areas of the two ships.

Because both Walter and Gordon units could interface directly with Mother, though perhaps more a matter of economics, most ships were assigned synthetics as science officers. Their energy requirements were minuscule compared to human needs and, with the exception of the disastrous David model introduced in 2080s, synthetics subdued, quasi-human AI driven emotional reactions made them ideally suited to the conditions encountered during long-duration interplanetary voyages. 

Dallas and Ripley were on the bridge entering waypoints into the ship’s INS, a new, state-of-the-art Thales Inertial Navigation System, while Lambert entered the same data – manually – into Mother’s NavDat terminal. Done this way, Mother could independently crosscheck that waypoints had been correctly entered before departure, as well as monitor the progress of the ship during the voyage. Making major course corrections during transit had to be approved by a bridge officers, and on this trip that meant either Dallas, Kane, or Ripley had to sign off on such changes.

Dennis Parker, the ship’s engineer, and his assistant, Sam Brett, had already double checked hull integrity as well as the the three docking clamp mechanisms that would be used to secure the refinery complex to Nostromo, and they were off to see that all provisions were up to date in the ship’s lifeboat, the same Narcissus-class lifeboat affixed to all CM-88 tugs. This meant ensuring the oxygen scrubbers and food-paks were all replenished and up-to-date, and that the  hyper sleep chambers on the main deck were correctly pre-loaded with occupant information and their current flight profile.

Tom Kane, as the ship’s executive officer, was responsible for double checking Parker’s work, and more often than not he found maddening errors and glaring deficiencies, and while he’d long wanted Parker tossed out of the merchant marine, Parker, and to a degree his useless assistant Sam Brett, were protected by the powerful Spacer’s Union, so getting him fired would literally take an act of the crown, which meant it would never happen. Making his rounds behind Parker and Brett this morning he’d already found eight major errors in their pre-load settings, and he was only half way through his pre-takeoff checklist!

Ripley and Lambert had double checked the INS entries and now Ripley was waiting for the final load-out report so she could enter the cargo’s mass. With that information entered she could calculate the fuel requirements for the voyage as well as the fuel needed to enter a parking orbit around Sparta. Dallas would have to sign off on those calculations, and only then would the final flight profile be sent on to Mother for crosscheck and approval.

“Forty five minutes to cargo launch,” ground control said over the radio.

“We still need the numbers!” Ripley replied caustically.

“Right. Sending now,” a too young voice said over the circuit.

Ripley shook her head. Labor shortages were a fact of life in the Co-Dominium, and probably would remain that way for a hundred years, or so they’d been told. With more than ninety percent of the Earth’s population lost, automation had become more important than ever, but there were still too many things that required human intervention and judgement. Still, she’d been stunned to see a twelve year old girl working approach control in the tower on Thedus. 

And as she entered the cargo weights and performed balance calculations she noticed a short, squat-necked man walking onto the bridge. He appeared to be in his 40s, if his close-cropped steel gray hair was any indication, and his facial expression seemed guarded, his eyes furtive, almost evasive. 

The stranger walked over to Captain Dallas and handed him his orders.

His name was Ash, and he would be replacing the ship’s Walter for the duration of the voyage.

this chapter (c) 2023 adrian leverkühn | abw | fiction, plain and simple

[Status Quo \\ Pictures of Matchstick Men]