Mutiny on The Kepler

MUTINY ON THR KEPLER

“SCREW YOU!!!!” I screamed at the lander as it disappeared higher and higher into the sky.

When I couldn’t see it anymore, I plopped myself down on the closest rock. I sucked in a huge breath.

At least the atmosphere is compatible, I thought. Then I looked around. Really looked around. The landscape was sparse—lots of sand and dirt, a few stunted trees, Nothing bubbling or spewing out of the ground, so that was a bonus.

I stood and jumped. Gravity seemed to be in the proper range. I’d once landed on a so-called “human-habitable” planet only to be pressed down so hard by the weight of gravity I’d fallen to my knees. Once we’d calibrated for the different planetary force it had been okay—but that meant wearing an enviro suit all the time when I was on the planet surface, which was encumbering and restrictive. But I could walk upright, so there was that.

Speaking of which. Myrna had thrown my suit and pack out of the lander, right after she and Oscar had thrown me out. I had definitely not wanted to get out of the lander. It had taken both Myrna and Oscar to “disembark” me. I’d fought like hell, and almost had them. But they’d finally managed to throw me right down the loading ramp, onto the planet surface. I’d landed in a heap, rocks bruising my back and hands. Then they’d thrown out my suit and pack.

“To get you started!” Myrna had sneered.

“You can start this!” I’d yelled, flipping them the bird. I heard laughing as they’d closed up the hatch and lifted into the sky.

I walked over to the suit and pack—the only two things I owned in this universe, besides the clothes on my back.

”Shit.” I picked up my stuff and started walking towards the closest of the small, crooked trees that inhabited this part of the planet. I set my pack against the gnarled trunk. The look of the krummholz trees and bare hardscrabble told the story of high, relentless winds, although it was only mildly breezy at the present. I checked my communication tracker—or C/T as we called it. The wind was out of the east-south-east at twenty klicks an hour. Pleasant. Enough to dry the sweat that was forming on my head, but not enough to cause my body temp to drop.

I opened the pack and looked in—shelter, water, food supplies for—I took out the containers of food and counted—twenty-four days if I only ate two meals a day. I didn’t even want to consider the water situation. I had about five litres, and plenty of purification tablets. Hopefully, if the trees are growing, there must be some water, somewhere, and I would be able to find enough to sustain myself after I blew through the measly five litres in the pack.

Unless they’re air-based flora, a mean little voice whispered into my ear. Or it’s not H2O, but something you can’t metabolize.

Thanks, mean little voice.

I was grateful for the pack—well, as grateful as a person can be who was now marooned on a deserted planet. They had at least given me some supplies, which would either help me survive until I could figure it out, or postpone an inevitable death while I slowly perished. Space exploration sucked.

I scanned the landscape—really scanned. Nothing green in the sea of dun-coloured rocks and dirt. So, probably nothing to forage. I sat back down, leaning against the tree. I fiddled with my C/T and pulled up the specs on this planet.

Name—CO6439-B. Atomosphere—human sustaining, with a lighter gravitational push, so probably easier to walk and climb. Fauna—uninhabited. I snorted. How many times had I read those exact words only to have something explode up from below the surface and try to kill me? Well, seven, actually, but I didn’t want to talk about that. So, even though it says uninhabited, I was going to be vigilant. I continued to read.

Microorganisms were mostly harmless. Mostly? How mostly? Microorganisms were the worst—you can’t see them when they come for you. Before you know it, you’re their host and they’re eating your guts, slowly killing you from the inside out. Ugh.

Rotation was 37.4 Earth hours, with darkness occurring between 28:07 hundred to 33:42 hundred. So, over twenty-four Earth hours of daylight per “day.” I could live with that. Daylight means the likelihood of something sneaking up and killing me in the dark would be reduced.

I checked the weather norms for this area. High temperatures between forty and fifty degrees Celsius, lows around freezing. So, like the high desert on Earth. Very little precipitation. Usually in the form of minimal rain or rarely, snow. I sighed and my heart sank. minimal was not encouraging—less than seventy millimetres per rotational year.

The water thing was definitely going to be a problem. I recited the rules of three: You can survive three minutes without breathable air, three hours without shelter in extreme weather, three days without water, three weeks without food. It wasn’t looking great for me in the long-run.

I checked the history of the planet. It had been explored multiple times over the last one hundred years. A settlement of thirty-six people was established on the far side of the planet about twenty-five years ago, but transmissions and contact ended three years in. A search and rescue team had arrived to find half-completed infrastructure projects but no people. The report said it looked like they just disappeared—tools and evidence of daily life were everywhere. Just not the people who were supposed to be there. No one knew what had happened to them. Nor were any remains ever found.

Great, I thought, thinking of the myriad of ways a group of thirty-six people could disappear—kidnapped, eaten, dematerialized. There had never been a second attempt at colonization. Well, except for me, I guess.

I checked the bag, and sighed. No planetary map. I called up the screen sized map of the planet on my C/T. The blinking red dot—the “you are here” icon—blinked steadily.

It was too small to read on the tiny C/T face, so I projected the image onto the back of my survival pack. From what I could tell, I was on a high plain between two mountain ranges. Mountain ranges may have been an exaggeration, more like escarpments, or minor uplifts—nothing over a thousand metres. Doable and climbable. At least I wasn’t rim-rocked.

The plain was about twenty-two kilometres wide by one hundred and sixty kilometres long. Currently, I was about twelve klicks from the foothills to the north-east, near the top of the plain, if you oriented the map to north. I could see the mountains in the distance. I queried the location of the lost settlement.

Sigh. It was at the bottom of the plain, over the eastern most mountain range, which were, of course, the tallest of the two ranges surrounding the plain. I couldn’t have been farther away. Things were just getting better and better.

The planet itself was maybe the size of Earth’s Moon, with a topography not too different, except for its ability to sustain flora. If I was the only fauna on the planet, I hoped that it would be able to sustain me as well.

I looked up at the sky. While not blue, but more of a grey, there were clouds, which, again, made me cross my fingers in hopes of precipitation—H2O precipitation, to be more exact. But there were no birds, no bugs, no skittering sounds of small animals. Just me and the trees and the clouds.

What to do, what to do, what to do?

I had to construct some type of plan. I unpacked my shelter and deployed it. I figured that my best bet would be to experience at least one planetary day to be better able to judge the conditions I would be facing. No use wandering off and getting myself killed because the weather or temperature surprised me.

I considered my rations. I had eaten this morning on the ship before everything went to hell. That was hours ago, and I was a little hungry, but not enough to make me bust out my rations. I could go hungry if all I was going to do today was sit around and plan. I’d need all my food supplies for when I trekked to the abandoned settlement on the other side of the mountains.

”Huh,” I said in surprise. Apparently, I’d decided one part of my plan without consciously thinking about it. I was going to the abandoned settlement—where there could possibly be more supplies and shelter, and where, hopefully, I would not disappear into the ether. Rationally, I believed at least trying to get to the settlement was better than moping on this stupid plain, under a sad, stunted tree. I had to try something.

I sat there considering my plight. It had started like any normal day—a travel day. We were coming back from the mining planet TOrn3, with a load of the rare earth mineral yttrium to be delivered to Kneppers, a manufacturing centre on Spoar, about two days away. Yttrium was an extremely sought-after and extremely expensive mineral. The cargo we were hauling was worth many, many billions of Earth dollars. Yttrium was used in so many different applications necessary to space travel and life off-Earth that it was almost indispensable. And it was the rarest of the rare minerals. And worth the exorbitant cost of mining and transportation between planets.

The government had arbitrarily changed our flight plan to include pick-up on TOrn3 and drop-off on Spoar. No big deal, changes happen all the time, right?

As a bonus, we had two escort gunships for the duration of our re-routing. Pirates were a problem in that sector, especially with such a valuable cargo.

Our revised route was supposed to be top secret, and I was theoretically the only person on the ship who knew what our cargo was. But as is everything governmental, information is power, and information about our cargo had leaked—or so I assumed, because I knew I didn’t say anything to anybody. How else could I explain my current predicament? What’s that old-timey saying? Loose lips sink ships? Case in point—me sitting on a desolate planet, alone.

I sighed. Again.

Sitting there thinking about my hellish day, I noticed that the sky was changing. It was getting darker—a deep grey blue. So, that meant that it was getting close to 28:07 hundred—the time darkness hit CO6439-B. I recalibrated my C/T and watched the daylight seep away, leaving me in utter darkness.

I also noted that the wind was picking up—a lot. What little surface dirt there was was scouring the side of my head. I ducked into the shelter and engaged the air lock. I engaged the ground fastening mechanism that would keep the shelter in place.

The wind was howling. I checked my C/T—force eleven on the Beaufort scale. She was a breezy one! I just hoped that the tree I’d pitched the shelter beside wouldn’t blow over onto the shelter and me. I was pretty sure the shelter could survive, but I didn’t want to have to test my theory.

While the wind shrieked, I had the time to consider my predicament—really consider it—for the first time. There was no way that I was going to sleep through my first night on a strange planet. Who really knew what was out there waiting for me to drop my guard?

I thought about today. No one was supposed to know about the yttrium. At all. Radio silence. But obviously they did, and they told my crew who were more than willing to do whatever they needed to do to steal it. The Kepler, my ship, carried a crew of three including me. And a very clever AI called Bonnie. Most things on the ship were automated. I have no doubt that The Kepler could function without human intervention, and that Bonnie could do most everything the crew did. I was there to make the decisions, and Myrna and Oscar were there to complete physical tasks an AI couldn’t—like things that needed a body.

I’d been with Myrna and Oscar for five years, when I started captaining The Kepler. I thought we were good. Apparently not.

The first thing that I noticed that something was wrong was when I asked Bonnie about our route and travel times. She didn’t answer. She always answered. She was my AI.

First red flag.

Then I felt the jump to hyper-space—you know the feeling you’re moving so fast the pressure pushes you back? We were NOT supposed to be jumping to any other universe. We were travelling from point A to point B within the Sassata Galaxy, nowhere else.

Red flag number two.

Then I checked the windows, and there was no gunship escort.

Red flag number three.

I hurried up to the bridge. Both Myra and Oscar were there. Oscar was flying the ship in manual.

Red flag number four.

I ran towards them. ”What are you doing?” I yelled.

Myrna came towards me, hands raised as if trying to calm a wild horse.

”It’s all good!” she said, right before she tasered me into unconsciousness.

When I woke up we were in the lander hurtling through space. Myrna was holding my own weapon to the back of my skull.

The first thing I said was, ”This is mutiny!”

Both Oscar and Myrna laughed.

“Yeah, I guess it is,” said Myrna.

Oscar piped up. “No big deal. Once we unload the yttrium, we are going to be stupid rich. And we can disappear anywhere we want to. Everybody wants that shit! And they are willing to pay big bucks!”

“You can’t do that,” I said. “The federation needs it.”

Oscar shrugged. “And the bad guys want it, too. And they don’t ask questions. They just pay.”

”How did you find out?” I asked.

”My sister works in communications,” said Myrna, looking as if this should be perfectly understandable. “She told me. I promised her a share. She’d be court-martialed once Command traced the information back to her, so she needed some get-away money.”

”The gunships?” I asked.

”Lost them in the jump,” said Oscar, as he maneuvered us towards the planet’s surface.

”What did you do to Bonnie?”

”Killed her,” said Oscar. “She made it very clear that she wouldn’t cooperate with us, so Myrna killed her.”

I looked at Myrna. “Virus,” she said. “She went quickly.”

I could handle the mutiny, the theft, the betrayal, but killing Bonnie was unconscionable.

As I sat in my shelter, wind buffeting me from all sides I felt the loss. Bonnie was more than a machine, she was my friend. And now I was truly alone.

As the weak light brightened the interior of my shelter, I cautiously opened the air lock. It was dawn. And it was still windy—more windy than when I first arrived, but nothing compared to last night. It was also eerily quiet, the only sound the tattoo of the pebbles and dirt hitting the shelter. I retreated back inside.

First on the agenda, food and water. I was parched, and hungry. Before I could decide which MRE to eat, my C/T chirped.

”Amanda, I am sending the lander to you.”

My eyes bugged. “Bonnie? Is that you?”

”Yes.”

”I … I thought you were dead. Myrna said she killed you. With a virus.”

“She tried to kill me, but I went into hibernation until the system could destroy the virus. It takes more than a mid programmer like Myrna to do me any real harm. I’m just sorry that I wasn’t available when you needed me.”

”No problem. You’re sending the lander for me?”

”Ten-four. ETA about eight minutes.”

“What about Myrna and Oscar?”

”Neutralized.”

”Dead?”

”No. Just out of commission. Locked in the hold.” Bonnie paused. “And the gunships have just arrived. Once I was back online, I informed them of our coordinates.”

I nodded my head, even though Bonnie couldn’t see me.

”Amanda, I’m so glad you’re okay,” she said softly.

”Back at ya, Bonnie. Back at ya.”