…[ ANDREW ]…

Andrew was more than sure that Jake would not be on the expedition out of the Solar System. At his current age, he cared more about his basketball career than the existence of life on other places other than Earth. Andrew thought that less than one percent of humans actually cared for the existence of extraterrestrial life. And Andrew couldn’t blame them. Each were entitled to their own priorities in their own lives.

In his last message, Jake had talked a lot about his basketball matches. It had seemed unusual at first until he arrived at the scouts’ part. According to him, he had already been scouted by more than three different colleges, while not yet in his third year of high school. It meant that for the near future, Jake would be focusing on his basketball career. There would be no room for space adventures. Maybe in a decade or so.

Rachel had been happy that their son was on the cusp of seeing his dreams come true. She talked of them being there to support him. She didn’t want Jake to feel like the family had abandoned him; like they didn’t care about his life. Andrew knew it was understandable that she was having second thoughts about going on the expedition.

…

Getting into orbit around Mercury was easy. Compared to the early days of space exploration. There was a time when getting to orbit around was a difficult. The distance from Sol and Mercury’s orbital speed proved too daunting for early spacecrafts. They had to be careful; a fast approach was required to catch up Mercury and at the same time, the spacecraft needed to avoid going too fast that missed Mercury all together and got sucked into Sol’s great gravity field. Humanity’s first ever close up glimpse of Mercury came from the Mariner 10 spacecraft. It was the first spacecraft to use another planet to slingshot itself into a different flight path. It relied on a Venus flyby to adjust its orbit to one bringing it close enough to Mercury that it could take pictures of its surface close up. It had once been believed that the orbits of the planets were eternal and stable, helping maintain the structure of the Solar System. But it had been learnt that that wasn’t true. Far from it even. Take Mercury as an example. It is now belived that early on in the younger Solar System, it formed in an orbit as far out as past Earth’s current orbit. Humans had nothing more than the levels of volatile elements such as potassium and Sulphur as the only indicator of that past. The density helped too. It proved that it had an abnormally large core in relation to its overall size. Implying that it had been larger than its current size before a collision with another proto-planet after being kicked by Jupiter towards Sol during Jupiter’s inward migration before it was checked by the arrival of Saturn. The collision stripped away most of its crust and outer mantle and set it at its current highly elliptical orbit of all of the planets. There were even traces of water on its surface. Well, it was icy water and could only be found on the shaded regions of the poles that never, if ever, received any direct sunlight from Sol.

Andrew was not on the few exploration missions set for Mercury. But he heard that they had few mission goals, mostly something akin to a proof of concept. Trying to land on its surface. He spent most of that time in the lab working with the nanobots. Some of the others did top. Even Jacy joined them after her trip to Mercury.

…[ MATIVO ]…

I was still coming to terms with the fact that Sylvia was most definitely going to be on the next expedition. There was no question on whether she would be able make the cut. She was a hardworker and smart enough to have qualified for the Solar System expedition had she tried. And she was determined to get on that expedition.

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I was having issues knowing what effects her presence on the ship would have. What would she be doing? How high would she want to rise in the ship hierarchy? Would she be able to keep her identity secret as she thought she could? These, and many more questions, I didn’t have answers to. There was no way to know for sure until she was eventually on the ship. Could she be the thing that derailed my plans? I highly doubted that.

I pushed those thoughts away as I went back to the security report in front of me. It had been so boring that my mind had wandered away to other things. Or was it that I had lost the sense of danger to my life that I had had when we left Earth? That would be bad considering that we were less than a month away from returning to Earth.

We were back in the Inner Solar System. The visits to our destination would be short as we quickly moved on to the next destination. It was not that we were in a hurry, more that the Inner planets had already been explored extensively by humans. There wasn’t much left to explore.

And there I was again, moving to another topic. The security report was boring because it said what it had been saying from the start of the expedition. Which was nothing. They had found nothing, they had nothing. They had completely lost trace of everything that was related to the kidnapping. Even some of the people they had been keeping eyes on had simply vanished. Not dead, just disappeared. Ceased to exist.

I was starting to feel like I had the worst security team to ever exist. It was what I got for thinking myself a villain. The heroes always won in the end, and the good of humanity prevailed over the evil. The moment I had thought myself a villain must have meant that I would suffer lousy security personnel, allowing the so called good guys to walk all over me. It seemed to already be happening. Then again, maybe I wasn’t a villain like I thought I was.

I vacated my quarters and went in search of something that would lift my spirits. Or at least make it a little bit more bearable.

On the hallways of the top deck, I saw Park heading in to the laboratory, my personal laboratory. And I decided to follow him. It couldn’t be worse spending time there than moping along the hallways of the ship, I figured.

Inside, everybody was present. Which was a surprise, somewhat. Some of them had just been on Exploration Teams, I thought they would be taking rests before beginning to work on other things. I guess I didn’t know them as well as I thought I did.

They were all in the conference part of the lab, and Park looked to have moved to present something.

“Good, you are here.” He said as I took a seat. “At least, I will present this just once.”

“It also means we will not have the answers we might have had had he given us time to discuss about it.” Mbithe pointed out.

“Should I leave and give you that time?”

“No.” Both Dominic and Andrew said.

“This was not a diamond like we had previous thought. Rather a flesh eating element.”

“Was?”

“Yes. It no longer exists.”

“Explain.”

“An accident happened with the first diamond, or so the lab technician said. A technician had come into direct contact with it. They had lost two fingers for that. They would have lost a lot more than that had they not reacted quickly and severed the fingers. They were completely consumed, leaving nothing behind.”

“What about the diamond?”

“A portion of it was lost during the accident. They had performed another experiment with the remaining portion with a piece of meat acquired from the Kitchen Deck to similar results. A small crater was formed in the meat. Roughly a centimeter deep.”

“I guess it isn’t that destructive.”

“They performed a second test with me there on the remaining diamond. It consumed a creator five centimeters deep.”

“Did it turn into something? Liquid? Gas?”

“Not that we know of. More tests will need to be carried out to figure out what is happening.”

Then they all turned to look at me. “What? Now? But it hasn’t even been twelve hours since the last test. My body needs its rest.”

But they didn’t relent and so I promised them only one; but of course that wasn’t enough for them.