“Fifteen minutes everyone,” Tom announced. “Whatever the decision, up or down, we need to be strapped in and ready to fire thrusters in fifteen minutes. That’s One Five minutes, people! Make certain all of the hatches on each deck are secured, police your immediate area and nail down anything on this deck that even thinks it’s loose.”<\/p>\n
“Up or down?” Carl asked. “We still have that seventy-two hour fuel buffer. I’m not ready to give up, yet.”<\/p>\n
Tom replied, “Me neither, but what if we get the word from M.S. that it’s time to fire Trans-Earth thrusters? How long are we going to be able to stall?”<\/p>\n
Brandon offered, “I’ve been thinking about that. We could say ‘we could try to dock with the ERV in a couple of days for a safer, more comfortable ride home. That might give us the added time we need.”<\/p>\n
“Yeah!” Carl exclaimed. “I’ll start running a plot for the rendezvous.”<\/p>\n
“OK,” Tom agreed. “I doubt they’ll go for that, but it’s worth a shot.”<\/p>\n
“Tom, I’m gonna need to keep my laptop with me when I strap in,” Jackie insisted.<\/p>\n
Tom was against that idea at first, as it could slip out of her grasp and become a projectile, bouncing wildly around the cabin. But, knowing Jackie’s fragile state of mind, he obliged, “As long as you hold onto it real tight. If we wind up having to fire thrusters before the message comes in, you won’t be able to read it until we’re back in zero-gee and coasting again. And, if that thing gets out of your hands during the momentum, someone could get badly injured.”<\/p>\n
“OK,” Jackie agreed. “I’ll hang on with a death-grip. I want to have it in hand, just…” DING!<\/p>\n
Jackie almost dropped her laptop on the floor when the message indicator sounded. She sheepishly grimaced at Tom as she quickly recovered her composure and her grasp on the computer, then clicked onto the waiting message:<\/p>\n
From: Michael Miller
\nSubject: Safe at home
\nDate: November 27, 2018 11:25 p.m.
\nTo: Jackie Miller<\/p>\n
(CLT): 8 min 9.56 sec<\/p>\n
Stick the landing, Babe!
\nI love you, Mike<\/p>\n
< ≡ ♂ ≡ ><\/p>\n
“They did it! He’s safe! We’re free to land!” Jackie was literally jumping up and down in her exhilaration and excitement. Standing nearby, Carl looked over her shoulder and glanced at the message.<\/p>\n
“Wait, it says to stick the landing. As in: ‘where the sun don’t shine’?” Carl queried. Jackie laughed as she set the laptop on the table.<\/p>\n
“Oh, no. When a gymnast ‘sticks the landing’,” she explained using air quotes. “that means she lands standing up straight with no loss of balance, no half step to catch herself. In other words: a perfect routine with no faults. Sticking to the floor.”<\/p>\n
To demonstrate, Jackie made a short hop in the air, came down lightly with her feet together and knees slightly bent, paused for a second, then stood up straight with her arms up and out in the traditional victory stance, her body appearing like a block letter Y, and finally bowed to the rousing applause from the group on the control deck.<\/p>\n
“Alright, let’s get serious. You all need to strap in and make ready for the landing sequence,” ordered Tom. He displayed a confident smile and now radiated a manner of leadership that had only been at half power for the past two and a half months. “You can stow that laptop now, Jackie. We won’t be needing it again until we’re on the ground.”<\/p>\n
“Aye-Aye, Sir,” Jackie snapped him a smile followed by a smartly executed salute. But just as she reached for the laptop, it emitted another DING! The screen for the email was still open. Jackie looked at the subject line and sender. “Tom, there is another message here, addressed to me, but it is a message to you. It says: ‘A lot is happening here…..’,” Jackie read the message aloud and then interjected, “Commander Lewis? I wouldn’t have thought him to be a traitor. He must have been the one dad was talking about that suggested I apply to the program. But it was strange: dad said he didn’t want me to know who he was, supposedly because he didn’t want it to look like he was playing favorites. So dad never told me who had recommended me. It could have been any of a dozen big-wigs that dad knew.”<\/p>\n
Tom’s mind began to swim, as this new revelation sank in. ‘So, that’s why Morgan was so gung ho about us aborting the mission and returning to Earth. He must have been behind this plot from the start, or at the least, approached very early on. Ty’s message referred to murder. Had Morgan been party to a plot to kill Ty and Claire, and possibly Penny?’ Tom considered the notion, horrified. And the more he thought about it, the worse he felt. He could sense his face reddening and his heart thudding harder.<\/p>\n
“How’s our time?” he asked of Carl, in a raspy voice.<\/p>\n
“We have twelve minutes until we can fire the retros for atmospheric entry,” Carl replied, calmly.<\/p>\n
“Then, let’s get ready to land. Brandon, as soon as we take delivery of that message and I send an acknowledgement, I’ll give you a cut off signal. Then I want you to kill the microphone and telemetry. We’ll keep the comm. open so we can receive, but activate those firewall rules you wrote to block all outgoing traffic. Carl, start reeling in the tether now. That way, when we fire the explosive bolts on it, it might appear as a malfunction. To repeat, when I give you the signal, then I want you to cut mic, telemetry, blow the tether and the solar panels, all at once. We’re gonna make it look like Bolo One blew up and hopefully, we’ll be down into the atmosphere before they can get a satellite view of us.”<\/p>\n
“That should work,” Brandon remarked as he checked the radar screen for any satellites in their area. “And the good news is, we’ll be on the ground a couple of hours before they realize we even left orbit. No blips on the screen,” he added for good measure.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
“Fifteen minutes everyone,” Tom announced. “Whatever the decision, up or down, we need to be strapped in and ready to fire thrusters in fifteen minutes. That’s One Five minutes, people! Make certain all of the hatches on each deck are secured, police your immediate area and nail down anything on this deck that even thinks it’s loose.” “Up or down?” …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":203,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-53","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-chapter"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=53"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":309,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/53\/revisions\/309"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=53"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=53"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.emailfrommars.com\/outbound\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=53"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}