AMERICA ONE - NextGen II (Book 6) Read online

  AMERICA ONE

  NextGen II

  Book VI

  By

  T I WADE

  AMERICA ONE – NextGen II

  First Edition

  Copyright © 2014 by T I Wade.

  All Rights Reserved.

  Published in the United States of America.

  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address: T I WADE, 200 Grayson Senters Way, Fuquay Varina, NC 27526.

  Please visit our website http://www.TIWADE.com to become a friend of the AMERICA ONE Series, and get updates on new releases.

  T I WADE’s books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales promotional use. For information, please write: T I WADE, 200 Grayson Senters Way, Fuquay Varina, NC 27526.

  Library of Congress Catalogue-in-Publication Data

  Wade, America One / T I Wade.

  Library of Congress Data.

  Thanks to:

  Editor – Jim Doak, Hayden, AL

  Proofreader – Kayla West, Weatherby, Missouri

  Cover design – Jack Hillman, Hillman Design Group, Sedona, Arizona

  eBook edition layout by eBooks By Barb for booknook.biz

  Dedication:

  AMERICA ONE – NextGen II. Book VI is dedicated to you, the series’ readers and fans.

  Writing a 7-novel series is daunting, but investing in and reading each book by the reader is just as daunting. I hope that Book VI is the fitting continuation of a saga that will one day reach and be an epic on the movie and television screens. All thanks to you reading the novels and telling others about the first sci-fi series since Star Wars.

  NextGen II is dedicated to you.

  Table of Contents:

  Chapter 1

  AMERICA ONE–Her Final Hour

  Chapter 2

  Oh Crap!

  Chapter 3

  We Are All Going to Die!

  Chapter 4

  Is Anybody Ever Going to Finally Arrive?

  Chapter 5

  Thank God

  Chapter 6

  Australia, Here We Come

  Chapter 7

  Joanne Dithers Roo–First Visit to the U.S.A.

  Chapter 8

  Russia, Nevada and Israel

  Chapter 9

  New Ships in Nevada and The Pig’s Snout

  Chapter 10

  Joanne Dithers Roo Goes to Washington

  Chapter 11

  Gold and Battle

  Chapter 12

  New Blood

  Chapter 13

  Move to Nevada

  Chapter 14

  A New President, Asteroid Mining, and a New Mission to Mars

  Chapter 15

  Setup for Mars

  Chapter 16

  Mars

  Chapter 17

  2030JD

  Chapter 18

  We Were Getting Worried

  Chapter 19

  Damn Bogeys!

  Chapter 20

  We Can’t Go Down

  Chapter 21

  Thank God!

  Chapter 22

  Wake Up Time!

  Chapter 1

  AMERICA ONE—Her Final Hour

  “America One bridge to Mars Control. Bogeys, five of them, heading down the canyon, the same canyon you guys saw them in the first time several months ago,” stated Captain Pete into the bridge’s communications system.

  “Copy that,” replied teenage Penelope Pitt on late afternoon radio duty down at The Martian Club Retreat. She pressed the single red button on the command console that would alert the whole base of incoming craft and waited for the rest of Captain Pete’s message.

  “The five Bogeys are flying in a line and currently abreast of Lookout Mountain. The ship’s computers didn’t pick them up early enough to locate their base. This group seems an hour or so earlier than the last flight, and they are traveling extremely slowly. I assume the timing reason is for a sunset approach. If I were the commander of an aircraft carrier down on Earth, I reckon this looks like a surprise attack to me, over.”

  “Copy that, Captain Pete,” replied the alert Penelope. “Alarms ringing. Ryan heading up to the command center now. All three shuttles about to light up. Accurate ETA for the astronauts, over?”

  “Thirty minutes to arrival at your base, all five ships currently 1,000 feet above the planet surface. I believe they will head east, then turn towards you once they are due south of the base. Hold on, Penelope, their speed has reduced down to 180 knots. I don’t believe they can actually fly so slow in these limited atmospheric conditions. Maybe they have tires and are driving instead of being airborne, they are hardly moving. New ETA to your position; 39 minutes at current speed, over.”

  “We’ll be ready for them,” stated the radio operator on Mars.

  “I cannot see where the spacecraft originated from through this damn shield!” stated Captain Pete to Dr. Nancy. He sounded frustrated.

  They were sitting on the bridge of the virtually empty ship built 20 years ago. Since then they had travelled over a billion miles in her together.

  “Why don’t you turn off the shield?” suggested Nancy, sipping her sealed sippy-cup of freshly-brewed hot chocolate. She had just finished baking a chocolate cake for Captain Pete’s birthday the next day, up in the kitchen on the mid-level.

  The two crewmembers were the only two awake aboard the near-empty spaceship. “Turn it off. I’m sure your laser cameras will pick up their next takeoff, if there is one, more accurately without having to search through the shield wall.” That gave Captain Pete an idea.

  Two hundred miles high and orbiting Mars several times a day, the crew aboard the mother ship didn’t work on the same times, night and day, as the base on Mars some 200 miles below them. Captain Pete and Dr. Nancy ate, slept and worked on the bridge.

  They had floated in and tied down their bed and much of the furniture from their apartment, and had made the bridge home, even though there was less artificial gravity from the centrifugal force of the rotating accommodations 700 feet above them.

  The view out of the massive windows was very romantic while lying tied down in bed, and far better than no windows in their apartment. Just off the bridge was a space bag bath and a space toilet, and that would suffice for their needs. Ryan had been told and didn’t see why the lovebirds couldn’t have the best wedding suite aboard, until life became normal back on the ship one day in the future.

  The rest of the ship, apart from Mr. Rose and a couple of his biology crew working in the first few cubes, and a few other scientists and mechanics in the science areas, was quiet and desolate, miserable and empty. To the captain, his beloved ship had never been the same since their arrival and the entire crew had begun living on Mars. It was his ship, his home, and the bridge was where he was most comfortable.

  Life was much of the same for Dr. Nancy, his new wife. She had the medical research station still up on the middle, medical level and had much work to do to continue the long-term files of each and every member of the crew.

  “Ryan gave specific orders never to close the shield, but you just gave me a fantastic idea. I’ll reboot everything to Ryan’s office and we can head up there. Since we completed the build of Ryan’s escape pod on the first return to Earth several years ago, it has never been used but to store our latest computers, the ship’s servers and all our information. Nancy, reboot your computers directly to “The Office.” Let’s go, we have thirty minutes or so to launch.”

  “Why do you guys need a new project?” Ryan had asked several years earlier at a build and mechanic mee
ting in the cafeteria a week after they had left Titan and were heading back to Mars.

  “I need a project to keep the mechanics busy,” Vitalily replied, smiling at his commander. “We have all our ship’s ion drives and hydrogen thrusters working at absolute peak performance. That old American goat, General John Jones, has our engines working so efficiently that we have nothing to do.”

  Jonesy was listening in on the meeting. He had been part of the mechanics crew since leaving Mars for their odyssey years earlier, and with the mechanics had serviced, checked, and refined every working part of the mother ship’s propulsion units, even the small side thrusters so many times that several were hoping for a major meltdown or mechanical problem to alleviate the growing boredom.

  “How do you say goat in Russian, Mr. Know-It-All?” Jonesy, smiling, asked Vitalily, one of his best friends. Vitalily wasn’t bad for a Ruskie, and after working hundreds of hours together listening to the whine of the engines, each had grown a respect for the other’s experience.

  “Kozel is the best I can match it with English language,” replied Vitalily, always with his serious look on his straight Russian face.

  “So how do you say nanny-goat, you lousy excuse for a vodka-drinker?” Jonesy then asked. The rest just looked on, bored, and smiled. Thanks to Jonesy, the Russians aboard ship had nearly as good a sense of humor as Roo had, now several months into his voyage.

  “Koza,” replied Vitalily. “Why?”

  “Because if I am a kozel, then you are a goat far worse than me, Vitalily. If I am a goat, then you must be a koza, a nanny goat to us Americans, the female version of what I am.”

  The others smiled as Vitalily tried to think up a return to the insult Jonesy had just laid at his feet. His face never lost its straightness, just his eyes showed his brain’s search for another insult.

  “Let’s get back to your first suggestion, Vitalily, and as far as the ship’s log and inventory are concerned, Mr. Jones, we have no goats or nanny goats currently aboard our spaceship.”

  “Oh, da! My crew need work, Commander. We have a couple of years before we reach Mars, and I need my crew to be sharp and practiced.”

  “Vitalily, then why don’t you stick a thruster to one of the supply pods and whizz around space trying to work out the Big Bang Theory?” Jonesy continued.

  “Thank you, Mr. Jones,” interjected Ryan. Jonesy could sometimes be a handful to deal with, and the idea of Mr. Jones becoming bored made Ryan want to act. “Vitalily, as long as you keep our American friend, Mr. Einstein here, busy as well, I’m open to ideas. Our mother ship has six supply pods ready to be picked up by the smaller craft to return to Earth in an emergency. Why should our esteemed mechanics crew add a thruster to them, Mr. Jones? They are not meant to be self-propelled.”

  “It was just a joke, boss,” replied Jonesy.

  “I have an idea,” added VIN. He had entered the cafeteria to get a snack after being relieved on the bridge by Captain Pete. “We learned in Iraq that we had to be better prepared than we thought when the crap exploded around us. Humvees had to be armored. The number of IEDs was growing faster than that of the trucks to replace the destroyed vehicles. We began driving with water in the trucks’ wheels. We sat on sandbags inside the vehicles. We had to think out any new ideas to keep ourselves alive.”

  “Not many IEDs out here off the beaten path I think, Mr. Noble,” remarked Jonesy, not quite finished with his lesson on humor for the day.

  “General John Kozel Jones, aka, kozel with two blunt horns for short, or would you like it to be koza instead of kozel for your middle name? You are beginning to bleat as bad as a damn Russian nanny goat,” smirked VIN.

  Vitalily liked that return and memorized it for the next encounter with his American friend.

  “We are trying to have an adult quality mechanics meeting here, not a scene from Dumb and Dumber,” added Ryan testily. “Let’s get back to work, shall we?”

  “You just gave me an idea for a weak link we might have,” VIN replied. Ryan nodded for him to continue. “We need the supply pods to be lifted out and attached to one of the shuttles or mining craft, right? What happens if we lost one mining ship, the mother ship suddenly needs to be evacuated, and we have to feed our crew on a long journey back to Earth? What happens to the extra supply pod?” Everyone thought for a few seconds.

  “We could get the mechanics to set up a system where a shuttle could collect two pods instead of one?” Ryan suggested.

  “Or, as I said, fit one of our old mother ship’s thrusters to one of them and leave the Ruskies adrift so there is more of Mr. Rose’s vodka for the rest of us?” added Jonesy.

  “Ok?” suggested Ryan, ignoring the humor of his Chief Astronaut. “We do have several thrusters of different sizes aboard. Mr. Jones, I believe if we fit one of those large thrusters to an escape pod, even the shuttles would have a problem chasing after it.”

  “My view to increase permanent vodka supplies exactly,” Jonesy replied, smiling at Vitalily’s still straight face. His friend was very deep in thought.

  “The Russian Space Agency never angled away from brute power,” Vitalily replied. “The more thrust the better. But the older mining craft thrusters, the one that couldn’t get my American friend here off the asteroid, one of those could be used as a safety thruster. With power and guidance on board, the supply pod could travel in formation with the returning craft, not attached to any of them.”

  “Just like a drone in Iraq,” smiled VIN. “I liked those guys.”

  “Sounds like an idea worth working on. We could do tests on one, and one day the supply pods could be controlled delivery drones, like that shipping idea the Amazon guy, Jeff Benzes, or Jeff Bezos, I think his name was, had decades ago.

  “Yes, I remember those delivery drones,” laughed VIN. “After the third collision over someone’s house, the idea was scrapped. Many believed it was just an advertising stunt anyway. Maybe we can prove them wrong and show that it does actually work.”

  “Do you ever use your office off your apartment?” VIN asked Ryan.

  “No, never spent more than an occasional look,” Ryan replied. “Why?”

  “The supply pod attached above your office is the only one that has a room directly beneath it. If you don’t use your office, then maybe the crew could use it to test ideas on affixing thrusters?” was VIN’s reply.

  It sounded crazy, but over the next few meetings, a sound idea came to the group.

  Ryan and his family moved into a temporary apartment while the ideas were worked on in his old unit. His forward apartment on the upper level became a club for the mechanics.

  With years of time to keep busy, nobody was in a rush to get anything finished, and often the wives had to go in search of their husbands. It seemed the “men only club” now used the space as a secret clubhouse and often had vodka parties in there, once Mr. Rose or Suzi came out with the next batch. It was two months later when the plan came together.

  The entire mechanics’ crew and several of the astronauts’ crew had completed a successful commando raid on Cube Two’s storeroom right under Mr. Rose’s sleeping nose, silently extracting five gallons of the latest brew from the locked confines of the storage room. They were on their second nasty toast to all Earth politicians when Allen Saunders silenced the club.

  “Why don’t we attach this office permanently to the supply pod? Ryan, it could be your secret escape pod, just like in those old James Bond movies.”

  “I think we need new movies,” laughed Ryan. “We are all stuck in the twentieth century, like the old movies we watch time and time again.

  “Not a bad project,” added Vitalily. “It has merit. Months—no, years—of work and it could be fun, no?”

  “So when Mr. Jones here tires of my command, he can lock me in here, press a button down on the bridge, and suddenly Commander Richmond floats off, away from the ship, never to be heard of again?”

  “I think your sense of humor has just been born,
boss,” remarked Jonesy, agreeing with the idea.

  “Except that you have a thruster to return to laugh in his face,” added VIN, smiling.

  Everyone looked around the small office. Only six of the fifteen or so club members could fit into the office at any one time, it was that small.

  “Larger than what my partner and I had for our first visit to the asteroid in Astermine One,” added Jonesy. “Nearly twice the size and height.”

  “Could be a real decent Man Cave,” stated VIN, winking at Jonesy and downing his third shot.

  “You could even fit in a few young heavenly beauties and several of these large bottles of vodka,” returned Jonesy, winking at Vitalily.

  Of course, by now Vitalily wasn’t keeping up with the humor, and he looked back at his friend, trying to figure out what was being said.

  “Man Cave, my foot,” exclaimed Kathy Richmond, who had walked in with Maggie, helping Suzi, to see what their men were up to.

  “Ja, and why do you think Herr Richmond needs a Man Cave?” asked Suzi of VIN, who blushed sheepishly.

  “Heavenly beauties and vodka? Is that all you can come up with, Chief Astronaut Jones, you dirty old man?” added Maggie Jones sarcastically.

  “I’m not a dirty old man, darling, just a happily drunk, sexy senior space citizen,” remarked her husband, smiling.

  “It is now time you guys get down to remodeling my living quarters, or this boys’ club is history,” stated Kathy sternly, her hands on her hips. “I’m getting rather tired of you old men having your midlife crises instead of running this ship like real military personnel would.”

  “Hear, hear,” added Maggie. The men said nothing as they witnessed Suzi notice the date mark on the five-gallon vodka bottle’s label.

  “Herr Rose and myself are now making this a dry ship for the next 90 days, due to stealing and bad crew behavior,” stated Suzi angrily. “I’m sure Frau Commander Kathy Richmond can take over the command of the ship while the crew and its commander are drunk. Maybe your big project should be more drunk jail cells for you and the crew, Herr Noble?”

  With that, Maggie picked up the half-full remains of liquid, and the ladies, helping Suzi, stormed out.