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Afternoon, Saturday, April 30
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The Flotilla, 150 Nautical Miles West of San Diego, CA
Jeremiah Osborne came running around the corner of the radio shack and almost crashed into the wall. One of the men already standing there caught him and kept him from wiping out. Jeremiah had been fast asleep after talking with his people late into the evening. He’d been dreaming about a big fat steak when his phone started blaring. He’d grabbed the offending device and listened, then rocketed out of his couch and raced down to the shack.
“You still have them?”
“You bet,” the technician said. He flipped a control and spoke. “This is OOE support platform calling Azanti.”
“Azanti here,” a voice responded immediately.
“Yes!” Jeremiah yipped and did a little dance. “Where’s the microphone?” One of the other men handed him a headset and showed him how it worked. “This is Jeremiah, how are you? Where are you? Who is that?”
“Morning, Jeremiah, we’re good, but looking forward to terra firma again. To answer your other questions, we’re about 300 miles west of your beacon, descending from 50,000 feet. And this is Alex West.”
“Mr. West,” Jeremiah said, “how’s your crew?”
“Alison McDill is fine. Lloyd Behm didn’t make it.”
Jeremiah looked shocked. “What happened?”
“We’ll be there in about five minutes. If you can prepare us a place to land, and something to eat, we’ll be happy to tell you all about it.” Jeremiah made urgent motions to the people standing around, who began to run out of the room.
“We’ll be waiting,” he said, and started to throw the headset down, them remembered protocol. “Oh, OOE out.” He ran again.
Up on the platform, the ground crew had just managed to move some equipment out of the way as a sonic boom rolled across the water. A dark spot in the sky was arrowing toward the flotilla, which was bobbing in the early morning waters. In just a minute, it grew to full size. The craft swung around the platform, flying as silently as an owl, lined up, extended stubby landing gear, and lowered itself to the deck.
As it came in, Jeremiah immediately noticed things. Scuffs on the paint. Scratches. The heat shield was scored heavily from reentry. As it turned to land, he saw the aft docking collar looked...wrong. What the hell happened? The ship was immediately secured to the deck by the ground crew, and the hatch started to open, but then it stopped. The ground crew moved a ramp over and began to examine it.
“It’s fucked,” one of the mechanics said. “We’ll either need to blow the emergency bolts or cut it.”
“Cut it,” Jeremiah ordered. Someone got a radio and warned the crew inside. A moment later a plasma cutter was rolled over, and the carefully-engineered doorway sliced in two. The super-heated cutting torch made short work of the expensive alloy. A crane moved in and the cut section was removed, revealing two very tired and dirty looking crew. “Welcome home!”
“Good to be home,” Alex West said. “Zombie apocalypse or not.”
“So you heard?” Jeremiah asked. A pair of the crew were covering the red-hot edges of the door with flexible sheets to protect the two. Alex moved aside and helped Alison out first, then followed.
“Hard to miss it,” Alison said. “We saw a couple nuclear blasts from space.” Jeremiah gawked.
“Well, we have food waiting. It’s all canned, and some fish paste. But it’s hot.”
“We’ll take it,” Alex smiled. “We can talk while Alison and I stuff our faces.” Ground crew was inside the Azanti already and going through the post-flight checklist.
Jeremiah and the flight engineers decided to let the two hungry, exhausted astronauts eat for a few minutes. They acted like they hadn’t eaten any real food in days, and Jeremiah realized they probably hadn’t. Finally, they both sighed and began to slow down. Alison was examining some of the fish.
“It’s all...over cooked. Not that I’m complaining, mind you.”
“It’s the zombie thing,” Jeremiah said, and took a minute to explain Strain Delta. “You have to cook stuff at a really high temp to kill it.” They both nodded. “What happened up there? How far out did you go?”
“Oh, maybe as far as Mars?” Jeremiah’s eyes bugged, and Alex began to explain. He started with how the ship had accidentally exceeded the speed of light, something they neither knew it was capable of, or intended. It was supposed to be a simple trip around the moon. They’d then had to fight the craft, which seemed to want to only go in one direction. The head of Jeremiah’s team working on the alien craft was excited by this.
“I think this supports the lifeboat theory,” he said.
“Life boat?” Alex asked.
“Later,” Jeremiah said and urged him to continue.
Alex did. He told how eventually Alison found the right signals to tell the alien drive to allow them to make a new course. He and Behm then did a dead reckoning flight and got them back to Earth.
“What happened to Behm?” Jeremiah asked.
“We’re getting to that.” He went on to explain that when they reached orbit, they saw the nuclear explosions in Europe and Asia, and how they were running low on consumables. They couldn’t raise OOE, so they eventually found the ISS and the commander allowed them to dock. After just a day there, one of the ISS crew had become infected, and it had turned into a fight for their lives, including how Lloyd Behm was murdered by one of the ISS crew members.
“After the station broke up, and I managed to get separated from the docking module, we made reentry, and here we are!”
“Mars,” Jeremiah said again. It was at least the third time he’d said it. “But you said the drive only had you FTL for a few minutes at a time?”
“Yes,” Alex confirmed, “Lloyd and I ran a clock. It’s all on the tablet in the ship.”
One of the two astrophysicists at the meeting was extremely excited. “Even at light speed, it should have taken you hours to reach Mars! You were traveling many times the speed of light. I need to see the logs, and I’ll know.”
“Sure,” Alex said, “but I’d like to know about this lifeboat thing.”
The team, who’d made progress with the alien radio and put forth the lifeboat theory, spent several minutes explaining what they’d found. Since initially telling Jeremiah about it, they now had a PowerPoint presentation. When it popped up on screen, both the Azanti survivors grinned hugely.
“Makes me feel like I’m back at NASA!” Alex West said.
“I feel like I’m back at MIT,” Alison agreed. By the end of the presentation, both astronauts were convinced, and Jeremiah was even more so.
“Good,” Alex agreed. “So what do we do?”
“We go get a couple for more experiments.”
“Jeremiah,” Alison said, “there’s a zombie apocalypse underway!”
“So?” he asked. Even the techs looked at the owner of Oceanic Orbital Enterprises askance. “Think about it,” he said. “Aliens, a plague, everything! These lifeboats are part of it.” Dumb stares. “We need to go get more and maybe find some clues how all this happened.”
“Or how to stop it,” Mary Merino, one of the propulsion experts agreed. Jeremiah pointed a finger at her, as if to say “See?”
“Okay, fine,” Alex said, “It’s better than sitting around waiting to get eaten. But how do we do it?”
“Get some rest,” Jeremiah said, “and we’ll put together an expedition by tomorrow morning.”
“Won’t the military have something to say about it?”
“Actually,” said a man who’d come in while they had been talking, “there’s a call for the boss. Someone on a carrier wants to know what the fuck landed here.”
The Navy ensign grilled Jeremiah for over an hour before leaving in his inflatable boat. The whole experience was giving him a negative opinion of the military. Of course, their curiosity was genuine. He wasn’t entirely certain his story about a planned high-speed test went over well. Especially since the ensign insisted they hadn’t seen the ship take off.
“Well, how about you let us know before you go pulling a stunt like this again, Mr. Osborne?” He’d mumbled something in assent then headed down to his team. They were already in Hangar Three, where two Bell 206 Jet Ranger helicopters rested opposite from the Azanti. The ground crew was busy working on them.
“Haven’t flown one of these in quite a while,” Alex said when he spotted the boss.
“You’re the only other helicopter pilot I have,” Jeremiah said.
“You talk the Navy out of being too nosy?”
“For now,” he said. On the wall of the hanger was a huge map of California. There was a green pin marking their location, and two red pins with a string linking all three in a triangle. “Tomorrow morning, first light.”
“We’ll be ready,” the crew chief said. Jeremiah nodded. He’d worried for days when he hadn’t returned two of the four helicopters as planned after he’d conducted the search NASA paid him for. Now he was glad he hadn’t. He didn’t know how he was going to get any sleep.
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