Chapter 1

The population of Earth came to a standstill and stared at their TV’s, those that didn’t use their telescopes, watching the night sky for a red blinking light, smaller than a pinhead from three hundred million kilometers away. Legacy III was the latest attempt by SI’s Marissa Milsner’s Dimensional Boring Device, mounted inside of a building sized space ship, to attempt to traverse the distance to Alpha Centauri at speeds faster than light.

Scientists were heavily divided on whether or not Milsner’s and Strife International’s test results were fabricated.

According to the reported results of the last test, Legacy II reached Alpha Centauri A, 4.3 light years away, in under fifteen days. The spacecraft lasted long enough to activate a beacon before everything failed. The size of the craft and distance between the two solar systems made locating the spaceship remains impossible with our current telescopes and technology.

Milsner’s team claimed to have received a signal across the quantum entangled water molecule sent from SI’s spaceship when it reentered our dimension at Alpha Centauri. Not my forte, don’t ask me how it worked, but it was supposedly a near instantaneous method for communication regardless of the distance involved. Since Milsner’s team were the only ones with access to the machines which linked the Legacy II and their space station, Hope, located in the asteroid field orbiting Psyche, similar to countless small moon sized chunk of rocks found in the galaxy, no one off station could verify their findings. The lack of access to the Milsner’s Machines angered Earth based scientists, which led to a great deal of dissatisfaction and questioning of the veracity of the Super-Genius’s teams’ results, her equations, her methods, and her integrity.

Even the veracity of quantum entanglement communication working at all was called in question by a great many scientists worldwide for the second time; ever since Lady Strife first used that method to get real time data between her headquarters in Missouri and her space station Hope over twenty years ago.

But Marissa Milsner and her team were able to convince the right people of Legacy II’s success, ensuring that more than enough funding for the third multi-billion-dollar craft was not an issue. Most importantly, Lady Strife of Strife International and Catherine Larkin of L&S were involved as co-sponsors. The two most brilliant Scientists of the Space age fully backed Milsner’s ideas and accepted her results by placing near unlimited funds behind Milsner’s Dimensional Boring Device and their Legacy Program.

What was not up for debate was the witnessed disappearance of the Legacies I and II from the exact points in space at the exact points in time when Milsner said they would. The tens of thousands of telescopes focused on the hundred-meter-long spacecrafts each had billions of witnesses as both crafts in turn vanished when and where Milsner’s team said they would. Even the high energy telescopes and observatories watching and tracking the spaceships admitted that, after the initial silvery burst of light, no further energy waves were emitted. The über-math geeks argued and concluded, for the most part, that the energy released was not enough to account for even partial destruction of the ships.

No debris, no explosions, and not enough energy released to account for disintegration of the ship as it translated from the launch point left room for the unexplained, and a chance for Milsner’s assertions to be correct. All too many Earth-side eggheads and skeptics refused to conclude anything, nor believe Milsner’s results.

Warp, wormholes, FTL, and other ‘fictional’ means of traveling stellar distances faster than the speed of light, would forever be hogwash to those inflexible minds. Einstein was an absolute god to them and so were his equations. Even though some of his theories had already been proven incorrect in quantum, along with some of his space related theories, was immaterial to those learned physicists.

Then there were those that believed, mainly believed because they wanted to. The rest of the humans in Sol system watched for a repeat and hoped.

Legacy III was supposed to have fixed the radiation shielding issue that was suspected to have caused the demise of the last spaceship.

I was among the hopeful, not one of those on Earth though. I earned my way to Mars as one of the team comprised of five maintenance personnel planetwide who were responsible for maintaining the ‘Leftwise algae’ spreaders located across the planet. Those blasted things had a tendency of jamming on a regular basis — the spreaders, not the algae.

It was almost as if they were designed to clog. A theory that every Tech on Mars had, but none dared to speak aloud.

At least once every four to five days, Martian days, I would board my assigned rover and fly to one of the eight kilometer-long spreaders that I was assigned to. Spend the five to nine necessary hours fixing the latest malfunction — everything from flushing out one clogged intake or another of the hyperactive red algae, to trouble shooting the fusion connection. Fusion reactors were never meant to be shaken around as much as those were, and even they glitched now and then.

At the same time, the powers that be, aka my bosses at L&S, insisted that while I was onsite, I spend the hours needed running over the logs and tweak what the readouts hinted might need preventive maintenance, each and every time a spreader encountered a hiccup. None of my repair trips ever ended being less than eight-hour sessions, some even took more than a full day. Mars Day. I gave up on Earth time a week after my arrival at Athens base. The thirty-nine minutes extra actually made acclimating to the new day length easy on my circadian rhythm.

Since I was between maintenance cycles, I too watched the countdown of Legacy III’s launch with the company provided twenty-inch telescope and wished for their success.

3... 2... 1... 0.

I waited the three minutes for the light to reach my location while snacking on flavored algae-crackers – of which I had a limitless supply.

I could have sworn that I saw a tiny silver dot replace the ship before it disappeared from my telescope’s aperture. No explosions, no burst of light, no color changes via Doppler in the vanished dull gray vehicle. Now I, along with everyone else, would have to wait for the announced results some two weeks away.

...

I woke a Friday morning sixteen days later, checked my messages and the news. Milsner’s team reported a success. Strife International received the signal from Legacy’s beacon and, according to their press release, performed a few undisclosed pre-programmed experiments before sending the recall signal to Legacy III, which was still intact.

Hopefully, we would all find out soon. Marissa Milsner’s team even promised to provide coordinates and time of the expected return location for the ship. Lady Strife, of Strife International, reported that Legacy III would spend 48 hours in system gathering data before returning home and repeated their promise to let us know of their findings once they were determined.

Until then, I had work to do. Unfortunately, I wouldn’t be able to personally watch the reentry, since my position on Mars’ surface would be facing away from the reentry quadrant of space when Legacy reentered our solar system.

...

Reclining on my chair, I relaxed while listening to an older Metal song by a band long since retired, watched the night sky, and waited for the news. Jupiter twinkled overhead and for the hundredth time I thought of journeying to Hope station for a closer view once my time here was completed. Mars’ atmosphere wasn’t much, still only eight percent of Earth’s, but it was slowly improving. At most, twelve to fifteen more years and mankind would be able to walk the surface without a mask. Hopefully earlier, but doubtful.

The discovery of three mammoth underground oceans, only one was too far underground to access, gave mankind reason for the final push forward on making this formerly barren world humanity’s second home. That, along with the space anchor at L1 supporting the thousands of kilometers wide magnetic shield which blocked most of the harmful cosmic radiation headed Mars’s way, were the two main catalysts to jump-start humankind’s colonization of the red planet.

Mrs. Larkin, she had refused all attempts of conferring her doctorates by nearly every university on Earth, guaranteed a third upgraded magnetic shield for Mars in the next three years to replace the current one at the L1 point between Mars and the sun, blocking 71% of the sun’s harmful radiation.

I thought seriously about the future hardships that Mars would undergo while taking a break from my telescope.

To my consternation and surprise, a large silver sphere entered Mars’ night sky, forty degrees over the horizon. The silver bubble popped, disappeared or never was there to begin with. I was not sure at all which of those was the correct choice. The elapsed time from its appearance to the sphere vanishing must have been half of a second. Or less.

Less than a minute later, the Vid announcer excitedly reported that Legacy III arrived back in our solar system, at the exact coordinates that the Milsner team stated and at the exact time predicted...

Which couldn’t have been right.

If it was over there, then what was that up here at 40 degrees ... I wasn’t sure I wanted to know the answer. The time and distance were off too. Unless Milsner’s team had a secret second craft running, or they might have been followed. Or I could have been seeing things.

I wouldn’t have been the first person stationed on Mars to Fray or even Crack without recognizing the signs...

I did report my sighting though. Everything of note was reported. Always. Even if you saw little green men or silver bubbles in the night sky.

One of the first techs stationed on Mars kept seeing ghosts and didn’t report it until too late. The low-grade uranium rock that he had kept on his desk, one that he thought looked so pretty, emitted enough radiation to slowly destroy his eyes and other soft tissue glands in his face.

L&S had learned their lesson, so did all the subsequent Techs stationed here.

The silver bubble spooked me enough that I gave up stargazing and went inside for a drink. My unofficial algae still produced a bitter but decent vodka, light-years better than my algae beer, which tasted like red pea swill.

Seventeen minutes and nine seconds after my UFO report, I received a signal from corporate, indicating that in five minutes I would get a Vid message and to standby.

Peachy...

My camera LED lit blue, letting me know that my end was being recorded while I waited for the incoming Vid.

“Geoffrey?”

Great, it was the Wicked Witch of Earth, Mars, and the rest of the Solar System. “This is Geoffrey Volkstag,” I replied to the blasted camera, trying to keep my face and voice neutral.