Hi, I am a new author on this site. This will be the first of three stories I am making on this site. And I am only making three. Due to how long they will be. If you ask me to do more, I will say no. I might not even finish this story.
YEARLY PROGRESS REPORT:
To: John-Sohn Corporation, Science Division
(Red: code 937)
Date (unspecified)
Transmission (pending)
My search continues.
PART 1: DREAMING OF MONSTERS
Chapter 1: MARION
Tyler Blu Gunderson dreamed of monsters.
As a youngster they'd fascinated him, as they did to all children. But unlike children born generations before him, there were places he could go, destinations he could explore, where he might just find them. No longer restricted to the pages of fairy tales or digital imagery of imaginative moviemakers, humankind's forays into space had opened up a whole galaxy of possibilities.
So from a young age, he looked to the stars, and those dreams persisted.
In his early twenties, he'd worked for a year on Calisto, one of Jupiter's moons. They'd been hauling ores from seventy miles below the surface, and in a nearby mine a Chinese team had broken through into a sub-surface sea. There had been a crustaceans and shrimp, tiny pilot fish and delicate fond-like creatures a hundred feet long. But no monsters to set his imagination on fire.
When he'd left the solar system to work in deep space, traveling as an engineer on various haulage, exploration, and mining ships, he's eagerly sought out tales of alien life forms encountered on those distant asteroids, planets, and moons. Though adulthood had diluted his youngster's vivid imagination with more mundane concerns-family estrangement, income, and well-being-he still told himself stories. But over the years, none of what he'd found had lived up to in the fictions he'd created.
As time passed, he'd come to terms with the fact that monsters were only monsters before they were found, and perhaps the universe wasn't quite so remarkable as he'd hoped.
Certainly not here.
Working in one of the Marion's four docking bays, he paused to look down at the planet below with a mixture of distaste and boredom. JP291. Such an inhospitable planet, storm-scoured, sand-blasted hell of a rock that they hadn't even bothered to give it a proper name. He's spent three long years here, making lots of money he had no opportunity to spend.
Trimonite was the hardest, strongest material known to man, and when a seam as rich as this one was found, it paid to mine it out. One day he would head home, he promised himself at the end of every fifty-day shift. Home to the two boys and girlfriend he'd broken up with seven years before. One day. But he was beginning to fear that his life had become a habit, and the longer it continued, the harder it might be to break.
"Blu!" The voice startled him, and as he spun around Rafael was already chuckling.
He and the captain had been involved briefly, a year before. These confined quarters and stressful work conditions meant that such liaisons were frequent, and inevitably brief. But Blu liked the fact that they had remained close. Once they'd got the screwing out of the way, they'd become the best of friends.
"Rafi, you scared the s*** out of me!"
"That's Captain Rafael to you!" He examined the machinery he'd been working on, without even glancing at the viewing window.
"All good here?"
"Yeah, heat baffles need replacing, but I'll get Pedro and Nico on that".
"The terrible Duo," Rafael said, smiling. Nico was close to five foot, tall, white, and slim as a pole. Pedro was more than a foot taller, black, and twice as heavy. As different as could be, yet the ship's engineers were both smartasses.
"Still no contact?" Blu asked. Rafael frowned briefly. It wasn't unusual to lose touch with the surface, but not for two days running.
"Not that I've seen" he said, nodding at the window. From three hundred miles up, the planet's surface looked even more inhospitable than usual-a smear of burnt orange and yellow browns and blood-reds, with the circling eyes of countless sandstorms raging across the equatorial regions. "They've gotta abate soon. I'm not too worried yet, but I'll be happy when we can talk to the dropships again."
"Yeah, you and me both. The Marion feels like a derelict when we're between shifts".
Rafael nodded. He was obviously concerned, and for an awkward, silent moment Blu thought he should say something to comfort him. But he was the captain because he could handle situations like this. That and because he was a badass.
"Ben is doing spaghetti again tonight," he said.
"For a Frenchman, he sure can cook Italian".
Rafael chuckled, but Blu could feel his tension.
"Rafi, it's just the storms," Blu said. He was sure of that. But he was equally sure that "just storms" could easily cause disaster. Out here in the furthest quadrants of known space-pushing the limits of technology, knowledge, and understanding, and doing their best to deal with the corners cut by Cokand Mining Company-it didn't take much for things to go wrong.
Blu had never met a ship's engineer better than him, and that was why he was here. Rafael was an experienced flight captain, knowledgeable and wise. Ben, cynical and gruff, was an excellent pilot who had a healthy respect for space and all it could throw at them. And the rest of their team, though mixed bunch, were all more than capable at their jobs. The miners themselves were a hardy breed, many of them experienced from stints on Jupiter's and Neptune's moons. Mean b***, with streaks of sick humour, most were as hard as the rimonite they sought.
But no experience, no confidence or hardness or pig-headedness, could dodge fate. They all knew how dangerous it was. Most of them had grown used to living with the danger, and the close proximity of death.
Only seven months ago they'd lost three miners in an accident in Bay One as the dropship Samson came into dock. No one's fault, really. Just eagerness to be back on board in relative comfort, after fifty days down the mine. The airlock hadn't sealed properly, an indicator had malfunctioned, and the two men and a woman had suffocated.
Blu knew that Rafael still had sleepless nights over that. For three days after transmitting her condolences to the miners' families, he hadn't left her cabin. As far as Blu was concerned, that was what made him a great captain-he was a badass who cared.
'Just the storms," he echoed. He leaned past Blu and rested against the bulkhead, looking down through the window. Despite the violence, from up here, the planet looked almost as beautiful, an artist's palette of autumnal colors. "I f***ing hate this place".
"Pays the bills".
"Ha! Bills..." He seemed in a maudlin mood, and Blu didn't like him like this. Perhaps that was a price of their closeness-he got to see a side of him the rest of the crew never would.
"Almost finished," he said, nudging some loose ducting with his foot. "Meet you in the rec room in an hour. Shoot some pool?" Rafael raised an eyebrow. "Another rematch?"
"You've got to let me win sometime".
"You've never, ever beaten me at pool!"
"But I used to let you play with my cue".
"As your captain, I could put you in the brig for such comments!"
"Yeah. Right. You and which army?"
Rafael turned his back on Blu. "Stop wasting time and get back to work, chief engineer".
"Yes, captain," he replied. He watched him walk away along the dusky corridor and through a sliding door, and then he was alone again. Alone with the atmosphere, the sounds, the smells of the ship... The stench of space-flea p*** from the small, annoying mites that managed to multiply, however many times the crew tried to purge them. They were tiny, but a million fleas p*** produced a sharp, rank odour that clung to the air.
The constant background hum of machinery was inaudible unless Blu really listened for it, because it was so ever-present. There were distant thuds, echoing gains, the whisper of air movement encouraged by conditioning fans and baffles, the occasional creak of the ship's huge bulk settling and shifting. Some of the noises he deceived problems simply because he knew them so well, and on occasion, he perceived problems simply through hearing or not hearing them-sticking doors, worn bearings in air duct seals, faulty transmissions. But there were also mysterious sounds that vibrate through the ship now and then, like hesitant, heavy footsteps in distant corridors, or someone is screaming from a level or two away. He'd never figured those out. Ben liked to say it was the ship screaming in boredom.
He hoped that was all they were.
The vessel was huge and would take him half an hour to walk from nose to tail, and yet it was a speck in the vastness of space. The void exerted negative pressure on him, and if he thought about it too much, he felt he would explode-be ripped apart, cell by cell, molecule by molecule, spread to the cosmos from which he had originally come. He was the staff of stars, and when he was a young boy-dreaming of monsters, and looking to space in the hope that he would find them-that he had made him feel special.
Now, it only made him feel small.
However close they all lived together on the Marion, They were alone out there.
Shaking away the thoughts, he went to work again, making more noise than was necessary-a clatter to keep him company. He was looking forward to shooting some pool with Rafael and having him whip his a** again. There were colleagues and acquaintances aplenty, but he was the closest thing he had to a good friend.
The recreation room was actually a block of four compartments to the rear of the Marion's accommodations hub. There was a movie theatre with a large screen and an array of seating, a music library with various listening posts, a reading room with comfortable chairs and reading devices-and then there was Bethan's Bar, better known as BeeBee's. Bethan was the ship's communications officer, but he also acted as their barman. He mixed a mean cocktail.
There's part one of my Rio fanfiction. I hope you like it. My explanation could have been better.
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Thanks to RiodanJanerio97 for helping writing this chapter.