Tom shuttered and shook in his chair as he slowly regained consciousness. Alarms continuously beeped audible warnings from all directions. Mentally in a fog, he tried to make sense of his surroundings. “Where am I?” he thought to himself.
He looked to his left and saw his unconscious passengers bouncing to and fro in their seats. To the right, he saw wooden block letters mounted on the wall above a screen of some kind. Together, they spelled Jericho.
“The Jericho!” he thought. “I am aboard the Jericho!” immediately, panic set in, and the ensuing adrenaline rush helped his mind push through the fog. As his vision cleared, he reviewed the panels before him. The ship was in a critically decaying orbit and needed an immediate adjustment to avoid burning up in the atmosphere. Frantically, he began adjusting the ship’s course heading to lift the vessel to a higher orbit. As the ship’s shaking and rumbling subsided, a new alarm took center stage. FUEL LEVEL LOW appeared in bold red letters before him. Tapping through the screens revealed insufficient fuel to lift him, his apparent passengers, and cargo into a safe orbit.
Simultaneously, he discovered a fuel line leak to the thrusters needed to put him on a safe vector for re-entry. He placed the palms of his hands on his temples as he tried to think of a solution to the growing crisis before him. A hand slowly rested on his shoulder. Tom shuddered at the unexpected touch and looked up at the figure to his left. “Too much mass?” the figure asked. “Uh, yeah, we need to lose about 3 – 4 tons in order to get back into a stable orbit. I cannot descend safely, and we cannot maintain our position for very long.” Tom replied.
“Can we evacuate?” the figure responded with an urgent tone.
“Yes, how many are on bo-” Tom stopped himself mid-sentence. “We need to jettison both escape pods and any cargo. If we do that, I should be able to get all the way back to my orbital lab and make repairs.”
“I need you to get all the passengers to the pods, I will release the cargo first so that the pods are not hit by any falling debris. We have less than five minutes to evacuate. Go!”
As Tom finished speaking, the figure turned to immediate action, reviving the other passengers and directing them to the escape pods. Tom pressed the control for cargo release, opening the cargo bay doors and forcing the cargo below into the atmosphere. Immediately, he began calculating a vector up into the much higher orbit of the lab.
The shipboard computer, ISIS, said, “Escaped pod one launched,” followed a few seconds later with “Escape pod two launched.”
“ISIS, execute ascent burn!”
With that, Tom was forced back in his seat as the G forces from the rapid acceleration took their toll on his body. Quickly, he lost consciousness as the ship continued on its calculated path.
Sometime later, Tom again regained consciousness and began searching for the escape pods. Finding no results with his instruments, he engaged ISIS.
“ISIS locate escape pod one.”
“Escape Pod one cannot be located.”
“And Escape Pod two?”
“Escape pod two cannot be located.”
Frustrated, Tom attempted to contact the lab.
“Valente One, come in. Valente One do you read me.”
“This is Valente One.” a female voice replied.
“Valente One, can you locate Escape pods one and two?”
“Negative Jericho, escape pods one and two are not responding, and no location can be determined.”
“They didn’t make it,” Tom sobbed, “they didn’t make it.”
“I didn’t read that last transmission Jericho; let’s talk once docking is complete..”
The voice trailed off. Tom hung his head and tried to process what he could remember of the disaster that had just ended.
The Collected Works of D. Alex Rhue 