Annie Somewhere

By Al Stevens

Their planet in total collapse, 500 of the best and brightest launch into space to find a new home, Earth being their chosen destination. Annie embarks on an advance expedition, but her craft is forced down outside a small Iowa town. With the help of three teenagers, she tries to gain acceptance for her people. Frightened citizens, hostile military forces, the media, and the President of the United States, treat the gentle colonists and their advanced technology as a threatening alien invasion. The survival of their race rides on Annie's ability to charm the Earthlings and establish a new home.
                

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mockingbird Songs & Stories
• Release date: Nov 11, 2014
• ISBN: 9781497757196

Book preview

1. The Explorer

The explorer craft undocked from the orbiting launch platform and drifted into space. The pilot touched icons on her control tablet, and the craft’s main booster rockets ignited and pushed the craft away.

After about twenty minutes out and clear of the mother ship’s gravitational pull, she jettisoned the boosters and touched a control to initiate her programmed course. Second stage rockets fired, and she was underway into the dark emptiness that foreshadowed her long journey.

She made an entry in the on-board log. Departure initiated without incident. Proceeding on schedule.

She already felt very much alone, strapped cramped into the small craft with nothing but space to view through the portals and not much room to stretch and exercise. Memories of farewell hugs and well-wishes from her friends and family comforted her and would have to sustain her when she put millions of miles between herself and them.

She could barely believe that it was finally happening. Exhilarated at the prospects and unaware of the grin that painted her face, she entered the coordinates into the navigation app of the critical points in the journey where the craft’s orbit would correct itself. She would orbit the big star en route and then the destination planet upon arrival. With half the mother ship’s orbit to travel, the trip would take approximately three months at the craft’s optimum speed, leaving enough fuel to establish an orbit at the destination planet and, when she had selected a landing site, to effect a controlled entry.

She wondered how she would endure this much time in the emptiness of space with the big star on one side, the universe on the other, in front, and behind her, and virtually no one to talk to. Her journey underway and with a bit of time to reflect, she opened the journal app and displayed an array of still holographic images of the people she’d left behind on the mother ship. Their faces seemed sad. She wept as she reached her hand into the hologram and touched their faces. She magnified her mother’s face and stroked the digital cheek, her hand touching empty space where the still image, frozen in time, floated above the tablet. The exuberant grin that had accompanied the launch faded and changed to tears as she looked at each face, knowing it was the only way she’d ever see them again.

The mission was time-sensitive, and urgency was at the forefront. The mother ship could not sustain its population much longer. Everyone who was going must be on board a carrier craft and ready to travel within the month. Anyone not boarded would eventually die of asphyxia. Among them would be the elderly and the sick, the ones who had not much longer anyway. They had been left with adequate medications to hasten and ease their passing. Saying goodbye to them had been the hardest part of this mission and made harder now as she scanned their images. But it couldn’t be avoided. The ten carrier craft could sustain the lives of only five hundred passengers.

Those five hundred were counting on her, and she knew it. It was a lot of responsibility. She popped up Charlie’s image to call in her first status report. He sat in the pilot house of the lead carrier craft ready to launch. She took a moment to look with affection at his rugged face. He had been one of the volunteers for her mission and had seemed disappointed that he hadn’t been chosen but proud that she had been instead. They had spent the night before together and she missed him already.

She touched an icon and said, Explorer here. Status.

His image looked up and smiled. Report, he said.

All systems operating within nominal readings. Course established and precise. No malfunctions.

Received, he said. Launching now. Then he broke protocol and said, I’ll see you soon. Think about my offer.

That last part wasn’t official. They weren’t supposed to consume precious energy with personal exchanges.

Explorer out, she said and switched off the hologram so he would not see her tears.

The fleet would be following behind with cruise speeds adjusted to arrive shortly after the explorer craft. She had three months in flight to prepare for their arrival. The fate of her civilization, what was left of it, depended on her ability to blaze a trail and pinpoint an ideal site.

With the course set in and the explorer craft underway, she initiated a program of study to hone her knowledge of the destination’s language, culture, and history. She used tutorials installed in her computer, and crammed it in, a lot to absorb in the time available. Whatever learning she missed during her en route studies she would have to learn by example and experience after she arrived at her destination.

It would be a lonely trip, she knew that. In her thirty-two years she had never been away from the people she loved for more than a few days at a time, and then only in temporary self-imposed exile to finish some solo task—a bit of study, to compose an essay, to work out a complex algorithm. She had made many such trips into the solace of near space but had always known that home was close and available if she needed it. That was never to be again.

This was her first time ever away from the mother ship where her generation had been born and had grown up. She had spent time in orbit to train and learn, but the huge sphere had always been there, below and awaiting her return. That, too, was never to be again.

Now she traveled to a new and unknown destination, and she was doing it solo. The others would follow, but except for infrequent status and progress reports, she would talk to no one. And there was always the possibility that either she or they might not make it. The future was unsure, and the past could not be recovered.

What would it look like, this new planet? Hers had been a completely man-made environment, everything perfect and controlled, all she had ever known. The destination was more an accident of nature than of human design. What would it feel like, the wind on her face, the changing seasons, rain, snow, and what would the plants smell like? Everything she had ever sensed had been artificial, even her food and drink. What new smells and tastes awaited her? These were the things that occupied her mind in the few idle moments she allowed herself as she flew further away from her old home.

To her, the engineered and fabricated home she was leaving had been her only reality. Now she traveled to a new reality, one that people adapted to rather than one that people had designed to suit their needs. Her ancestors had lived on such a planet in ancient times prior to the mother ship, and she had always wondered about it as she studied her origins and the history of a long-gone world. What had it been like? Soon she would experience something similar.

What would the inhabitants be like? It excited her to know that a world of billions of strangers awaited her unknowingly. She knew what they looked and sounded like from her scans, but how would they react to unexpected intruders from so far away? She had high hopes for a long and fertile future for her and her people but deep concerns, too, that the going might not be as easy as she wanted so desperately for it to be.

She thought back to the induction ceremony in which the committee announced her selection as the lone forward explorer. She had screamed in delight when they announced her name and when the other nominees crowded around her in congratulatory celebration. They hugged her, shook her hand, and pounded her on the back. It was the proudest moment of her life. Despite the sheer loneliness of the cruise and the uncertain destination and outcome, she remained elated that the committee had chosen her from the score of volunteers for this mission. She would deliver on the promise she’d made. She must not fail them.

***

After three months in a half orbit of the star, the destination planet was under her. She established a geosynchronous low orbit over the mid-western region of the northwestern continent, the least densely-populated habitable region. From this vantage point she could scan the surface for a likely location to land, one that offered the least resistance to the intrusion. She must identify a site by the time the carrier craft arrived. Those craft had limited life support systems and could not sustain their occupants in orbit for long. They’d be ready to descend to wherever she specified.

Her on-board log and status reports recorded her progress. Each time she called in, Charlie had appended the exchange with something like, We’ll be together soon, and each time her longing for that to happen grew.

She spent the remaining days until the carrier craft arrived, concentrating her scans on a village nestled in the middle of a large rural region, the boondocks according to her library of local colloquialisms. There were several thousand people in the town itself, but the surrounding land was virtually unpopulated, comprised mostly of abandoned farms and virgin forests. One of the farms would be a likely place to land with sufficient open space for the cluster of carrier craft. It would have to have been abandoned and far enough away from the town to ensure their privacy yet close enough to allow them to penetrate the community at times of their choosing.

She was about to select a landing site when an unscheduled event happened. She was thrown forward violently in her seat, and then the craft spun erratically in its zero gravity orbit. She righted herself in the pilot’s chair and strapped herself in. Because there was no gravity, the only effect on her after the abrupt deceleration was visual. The planet below and the universe itself seemed to spin around her. She scanned the tablet’s propulsion and directional control displays to determine the cause of the problem and her options for a solution.

A few passes of the tablet’s rocket status sensors provided the answer, and it was not a good one. A retro thrust rocket had fired when it shouldn’t have. She arrested the spin with a counter thrust from a functional rocket and brought the spinning universe to a standstill, but the craft’s orbiting speed decelerated, causing decay of the orbit and initiating an unplanned descent. She didn’t have time to be scared, although she knew she should be. These could very well be her last moments of life. She quickly stepped through the emergency procedures to shut down the malfunctioning rocket and reestablish orbit, but the power platform did not respond to her commands. She changed her procedure to use the other retro-rockets in an attempt to control where she would touch down. It was hit and miss, but she managed to project an impact within range of the site she had been scanning at the time the rocket malfunctioned. She almost breathed a sigh of relief, but it wasn’t over yet. Somehow she needed to survive the erratic entry and the landing, which would surely be a crash.

A capable skilled woman under even the most stressful of circumstances with the advantages of advanced conditioning and training, she had never in her career as a pilot and scientist felt panic, but she felt it now. It was flutter, weakness, collapse. It started in her knees and crept up her body. Her heart beat rapidly, and her breathing came in short spurts. Somehow she knew that if the feeling reached her head, she’d be out of control and would probably die.

Death did not faze her, or hadn’t until now. The destinies of the five hundred who counted on her did, however. To panic would be to fail them, and without her guidance to the surface, an advanced civilization would go extinct in the time it took to fall from the sky much as she was doing now.

She had to cast out the fear and suppress the panic. She gritted her teeth, closed her eyes, took a deep breath, and willed the feeling to return to wherever it had come from. It took everything she had, but it worked, and the disabling feeling subsided.

The operational retro-rockets and the out-of-control burn of the errant one spent the fuel she had in reserve for a controlled touchdown. She was falling like a brick. With descent to the surface now inevitable and her fuel exhausted, the retro-rockets were flamed out, and her only propellant was gravity, her only control would be airflow when she entered the atmosphere. With no retro-rockets to arrest her descent, the touchdown would be a crash, not a landing. For the first time, the explorer craft’s structural design, integrity, and durability would be tested to the extreme, not that its success would contribute anything to aerospace technology. The craft would never fly again. Neither would she, assuming she survived the crash.

The interior temperature began to rise when the craft entered the planet’s atmosphere, but, although uncomfortable, it was tolerable. The heat shields were functioning. At least something is working, she thought. She would have had to endure such heat during a normal entry, and she was trained for it. Her uniform did its best to compensate for the increased temperature, and she adjusted the cabin’s temperature control system.

No longer able to select a precise touchdown position, and with minimal directional control, she had the tablet predict an approximate touchdown, which was two miles west of the town. The only attitude control she had was provided by aerodynamic flight surfaces on the craft’s exterior. She could control roll, pitch, yaw, and airspeed if the servo motors held out and the surfaces survived the structural stress of an uncontrolled entry.

She opened the visual sensors at the nose of the craft and viewed her course. The glow radiating off the heat shields obscured much of what she could see, the heat rippling up around the vehicle and distorting the view. She wished she had an in-focus view of her course, but that was not possible. With luck she’d hit flat land or water at a shallow angle of impact, and knife into the surface to minimize damage and the potential for fire. With no luck, she’d plummet straight into a vertical or steep surface and die in the crash.

Even given a flat surface, she doubted she would be able to execute anything approaching a gentle touchdown. A crash was inevitable, which she hoped would be at best a controlled crash. The heat shields would absorb the friction of a belly landing. The sharp edge of the hull would plow a row into which the craft could burrow, burying her alive. That was the plan, what they had designed the explorer craft to do based on their limited knowledge of the destination’s terrain and physical makeup. An embedded crash landing had never been tested, and she was unsure how she would disinter herself if it worked. If her life support systems survived the impact, she would have sufficient oxygen underground to figure out an escape after the crash. If not, the craft would become her coffin.

Communications channels to the lead carrier craft were still open and operational. She keyed the control tablet’s transmit command and submitted her final status report.

Charlie, she said, throwing protocol aside, I’ve had a malfunction. I’m going in. Descend without me if you have to. Estimated coordinates uploaded.

Noted, came the response. If you survive, please advise as to your position, condition, and circumstances. Good luck, Annie. We’ll be together soon.

One way or another, she thought as she shut down the hologram and braced herself for the crash.

2. From the Sky

If Mark Small had been sleeping like he should have been, he’d have missed seeing the fiery object that shot across the sky and crashed outside of town. If he hadn’t been sitting at his bedroom window, the flaming projectile on its east-to-west trajectory that bathed the night sky in a blazing light would have passed by without him. He would have slept through an amazing event that would change his life.

Mark wasn’t stargazing at four in the morning. He wasn’t studying constellations, moon craters, or the alignment of Venus and Mars. His telescope was in the corner of the room, lens caps on and tripod collapsed. He wasn’t watching the heavens; he was watching the upstairs window in the house next door.

She might come to the window.

He didn’t really expect to see Sandy Simmons that late at night. He didn’t even know for sure that the window across from his looked into her bedroom. He’d been in that house many times before she moved in, so he knew it was a bedroom window, but he didn’t know whose.

The shade was drawn and had been since before the light went out hours earlier when he’d taken up his vigil.

He wasn’t fooling himself. He didn’t expect anything. He just didn’t want to miss anything.

Mark didn’t think he was in love with Sandy. That would be a stretch. He hadn’t even met her; he’d only seen her and her family from his porch when they moved in and more recently when they came and went. But he was infatuated. Who wouldn’t be? There were other girls in Sealings Grove, but none of them were like her.

So he sat up during late hours, hoping she’d awaken from a dream or something and come to the window. He might as well sit up and watch; he couldn’t sleep for thinking about her, just knowing she was that close, wearing pajamas or a nightgown and nothing else with only two