* * *
Today
The craft hung low over the landscape, skimming through the clouds slowly so as to not leave any visible disturbances through the air. It hovered slowly, searching for its prey, the two pilots chatting with some boredom. As the craft slid over the rugged mountains, it would stop periodically and randomly to capture another before continuing on.
“How many more?”
“Another thirteen.”
“Can we pick it up a bit? I don’t want to stick around here any longer than we need to.”
“No. They are exceedingly primitive, but more than capable of noticing visual disturbances if we go much faster.”
The copilot sighed but didn’t reply, continuing their pre-assigned flight path.
* * *
Joe McConnell had awoken in the early morning before the sunrise, his healthy breakfast and chores completed quickly. He left his crude camp and clambered up to the mountain peak to prepare for the day. He spent almost an hour carefully going through his katas for the day, spending a small portion of time on a set of katas from each martial arts he’d practiced. He didn’t spend long on each martial art, but made sure he spent time on at least two or three katas from each martial art and rotated through them each day. It took about two weeks to rotate completely through all katas for each martial art, but he made sure to always refresh them regularly as he had more than enough time. He was on summer vacation from his third year of college and was set to complete the last year starting at the end of this summer.
Usually, he spent the time with his family but this summer he had decided to spend some time alone as his family tended to travel all over the world in their incessant urge to explore everything martial arts or extreme physical sports related. Both his parents were avid enthusiasts of anything physical although his father preferred the more combative activities while his mother preferred the more cooperative or solo extreme sports. Together with his sister, he’d learned he quite enjoyed all the activities of both his parents but leaned towards his father’s proclivity for competitive combat. However, his current major was proving to be quite disillusioning and he didn’t know if he really want to spend the rest of his life in the field so different from the martial arts he loved so much. It wasn’t that the subject proved too difficult. He found it actually entertaining, exploring the physical universe and being able to explicitly understand it. It was just the sedentary nature of the field that left him uncertain. Trying to find a future or job that would combine his major and physical activity was proving to be elusive to his creativity.
This was what saw him deep in the mountains of northern Asia but technically still within China learning from another master of an obscure martial art. It was a comfortable escape as he was used to learning martial arts but it also gave him plenty of time to think on options for his future. As was the case with most apprenticeships with old style masters, Joe found himself required to take care of many different chores which allowed for plenty of time to think but did require that he wake early if he wished to focus on his other martial arts. Besides, he’s pissed off that I’m still practicing my other martial arts… Joe stifled a sigh at his master’s ornery demand that he not practice his older arts and had to restart his current kata as he’d been distracted. Settling his thoughts once again, he was able to finish his final round of practice before stretching and cooling down to prepare for his morning meditation.
He chose to climb the last bit to reach the absolute peak as it gave him a beautiful view of the valley and sunrise. He settled into a loose lotus pose as he stared towards the sunrise. The dark purple sky lightened as the sun rose and Joe prepared his mental state, his facial muscles completely relaxing and his eyes stared into the false dawn, capturing the first rays of reflected sunrise with his now vacant stare. His thoughts were now long turned inward, deep in meditation. The dark shape of his body resting peacefully on the mountain top brightened slowly as dark shadow gave way to tanned skin. Then, he disappeared.
* * *
“That’s the last one. Plot a course for home.”
“Finally! Let’s get out of here. I swear, the smell is overwhelming!”
“There is no smell.”
“There is!”
“Their quarters are sealed! And they were immediately put into individual stasis chambers. There is no way you could smell the atmosphere!”
“I can still smell something!”
The pilot sighed and refused to respond, leaving to move to the rear, “Take over the first shift. I’ll be resting in the rear.”
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“Righto, boss.”
The craft turned upward, bringing its main engines to bear against the force of gravity, thrusting upwards into the sky. As the craft escaped the atmosphere, the sun completed its rise over the north western Chinese steppes bordering the Middle East, leaving no evidence behind except for the mysterious disappearance of several dozen individuals.
The pilot moved through the quarters and traveled to the interior before taking a narrow ladder into the depths of the ship, coming upon the cargo hold. The hold door swooshed open and he came upon a strange construct taking up the center of his cargo hold; a self-contained unit with stasis chambers. He stepped up to the sealed chamber door before receiving permission to enter. He quickly donned the environmental suit before stepping through the triple containment doors into the inner control center. He came up and watched as several of the aides busied themselves in the main hold area, separated by a great window and several banks of equipment and displays. Stopping by the director of the whole specimen collection, he waited patiently as the activity continued.
“Stations, report status,” the director called out.
“All 100 specimens accounted for.”
“Stasis chambers report sealing complete. Stasis is stable, although the first several show some anomalies.”
The director turned at this report and interrupted the flow, “Details about the several anomalies?”
“Stasis shows as complete and stable, although the specimens seem to be outside baseline.”
“Possible complications?”
“Uncertain at this time, although with the completion of our autopsies, we may learn more.”
“Survival chances?”
“Uncertain.”
“Guess.”
The stasis director shook her head for several moments, uncertainty radiating in all her movements, “Low.”
The director nodded but said nothing in reply, simply giving a command for the next station to reply.
* * *
Travel took several weeks, and the routine mission was anything but, with several strange interruptions from the specimens. Several woke up throughout the journey and despite the caution and detailed autopsy studies, the team in charge of adapting the stasis process to this new species struggled to find the correct requirements for stable stasis. The team still failed to find long term stable stasis by the time their journey had come to an end, and the spacecraft found itself approaching a gas giant with several dozen orbiting moons all containing well developed ecosystems and societies. The specimen director had come to the cockpit to watch as they came in for a slingshot around the gas giant which would pass by its largest, furthest out moon before they were flung back towards a large orbiting research station that was as far from the gas giant as they could get while still being ‘useful’ in their studies of the wild variety of life on the various moons.
“I always hate this part,” the director mumbled.
“You hate it? I’m the one that has to fly a dead ship!” the pilot mumbled back.
The director glanced down at the pilot, a sternness to her face before she sighed and let the comment pass, “I can see that.”
The pilot shrugged, a tense silence falling on the cockpit, which began to tickle at the copilots patience before he finally responded, “Do you think it’s going to work? I mean, we’ve already killed a hundred or so dropping them in!”
“It should work. We’ve removed almost everything that could go wrong. It’s about as simple as it can be. A rock with a parachute on it and everything mechanical! No electronics at all.”
“You said that the last time,” the pilot shot back.
The director sighed, “We can only keep making it as simple as possible. The other tests worked, so this should work.”
“The test was a tenth the weight we’re throwing down there, and there was NO mechanical, electrical, or any kind of machinery. It was a literal rock with a chute tied to it!”
“We can only hope.”
Several minutes later, as the ship came under the influence of the gas giant, the equipment began to fail on the ship, starting with the most advanced or most complicated in a pattern that still eluded the scientific community. The ship soon became nothing more than a dead asteroid, and only the most simplistic of machinery still worked. The cargo bay became a hive of activity as the specimens were moved into primitive drop pods, having already been removed from stasis before the machinery could fail under the influence of whatever it was as the science community could not even begin to guess. Specimens were kept under with simple sleeping gas compounds as they were moved, and soon sealed into their pods. The pods were placed into a smaller bay before the workers began to furiously crank the doors shut, manually; first the inner door, then the outer door with a specially designed compressed gas where the pods drifted out with the puff of escaping gas. The pods then drifted directly towards the largest moon, as the spacecraft used incredibly primitive gas tanks as reactive rockets to push itself away from the pods and on just enough of a new orbit to slingshot itself back around towards the orbiting scientific station, and out of the influence of the gas giant where it could reengage its engines and support systems. The pods fell through space for several hours, their sedated passengers blissfully unaware as they hit atmosphere and tumbled deeply into the gravity well of the largest moon.
* * *
“So, what are the final numbers?” the pilot asked, tension dissipating as the last of the systems had come back online with their escape from the immediate gravity well of the gas giant.
“We won’t know for sure, but it was pretty abysmal,” the director of the Silverfish replied.
“Can we have a hint?”
“Well, stasis turned out pretty tricky for this species. We don’t know why. Sixty three of them died in stasis or coming out of it. That left us only 37 to drop into orbit, but twelve missed reentry, either burning up or …”
The pilot and copilot both shuddered at the idea, being trapped in the primitive pod falling silently into the gas giant. The specimens would likely wake up long before they fell into the gas giant and therefore would enjoy a dark and terrifying death of slow suffocation.
“They’re probably awake by now,” the copilot mentioned.
“They’re probably dead by now, their air would have run out about twenty minutes ago, even without panicking.”
The two pilots looked at each other grimly, but kept silent at the director’s blunt tone.
“Of the remaining twenty five falling into atmosphere, our sensors were able to pick up four failures, so only twenty one possible remaining. The orbital research station will be able to give us the hard numbers, but with the planet covered in about fifty percent water, that puts ten or eleven survivors, and ten or eleven dead, using probabilities. Excellent numbers, and redundancies. They should be happy even with five!” The director grimaced, failing to hide her distaste.
The pilots simply glanced at each other and remained silent.
* * *