Chapter 01: Pilot
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She sat in the back of the room listening to the Admiral speak. He had been one of her heroes since she first started thinking of spaceflight as a career, and later he had become an inspiration to her. Valentina, or Val as most people called her, had followed Admiral Chan’s career very closely for at least half her life and she watched him speak whenever she could. He was the one who had first put the theory of Novikov’s effect to the test, and had been responsible for the first successful unmanned intermomentary flight. Of course, she felt honored now that she received an invitation to take part in his newest brainchild: a manned journey into time itself. Although the particulars were not available to the public, the mere fact that he was even talking to the press meant that something was about to happen. If one watched his career closely enough, they would know that he never made public statements unless there was something big on the horizon. He never told anyone what was going to happen; it just always seemed to follow a conference like this.
Chan offered one last question to the press, so Val realized that he was about finished. She snuck out the rear door and walked down the hall that ran parallel to the press-hall, arriving at the backstage door just as he was wrapping up. Brushing her short, red-flecked hair from around her freckled face, she stood as tall and straight as she could. Val was not a tall woman, only five-foot-six, and having spent so much time in flight seats, her posture was not the best. Val could just see him through the opening door as he waved off the other questions. Chan shook his head and walked past Val, expecting her to keep up.
“They are like vultures, the media: Always trying to pick the bone clean long after the meat is digested.” The Admiral shook his head as if disgusted, and Val walked quickly to keep up with his long strides. He was much older than her thirty-two years, although she couldn’t make out how much older. He had gone gray, and his hair was thinning a bit, but his face was still smooth and tan. Clearly his name was based in the orient, but he was hard to identify as having a single Asian heritage. “Do you know why I gave the press conference today, Valentina?”
“I assume, sir, that it’s because you have a new discovery that you are about to unveil,” she answered. “Everybody knows your conferences are always followed by something amazing.”
“That may be true, but have you ever wondered why that is? I don’t want a textbook answer from a subordinate to her superior either. If we are working together, I want you always to be truthful with me.”
Val hesitated. Admiral Chan came across as a politician, someone who either was picketed by the masses or else had yes-men following them around, not someone to just be yourself with.
“I mean it, I want to know what you think. I want to know what all those people in there think of my conferences,” he pushed.
“To be honest, I always thought you gave press conferences before releasing you discoveries because you might be a bit of a showman, garnering everyone’s attention so that your discovery or advancement of science was noted all over.”
“Really?” the Admiral questioned, seeming a little offended. “Do I come across as arrogant?” He stepped into a waiting elevator at the end of the hall they had been walking, and Val rushed in behind him, embarrassed a little of possibly mistaking his request for honesty as a trap.
“No! Not at all,” Val backpedalled. “Just that you don’t want people to lose interest before you have something to show.” The elevator closed and they were totally alone, climbing from the basement of the building slowly.
Chan chuckled. “You would have to try rather harder than that to shock me. Don’t let this get beyond the two of us, but I’ll tell you the real reason I do things with the public this way. I give conferences prior to having information to actually report in order to avoid answering any questions.” He let that sit a moment so she could absorb it before continuing. “Those conferences are very long and, in my opinion, a complete waste of time. If people simply read the research we release rather than asking me to explain it to them, there wouldn’t be so many questions. My position is obligated, however, to update the public on the work I am doing, and I carry out that obligation before there are any questions to really be asked.”
Now it was Val’s turn to chuckle. As she did so, the elevator slowed. She hadn’t noticed that he had pressed the button to go all the way to the roof, but that was where they were about to exit.
Chan began a new topic as they walked through the security gate that was the entirety of the roof’s elevator lobby. “I understand that you claim that you can fly anything,” he charged.
Her eyes were blinded by the sunlight after having been in the lower levels for the last few hours. She hadn’t arrived with the Admiral, but rather arrived early to meet him here for a briefing that was to happen after the conference ended. “I have never been unable to pilot something which I have attempted to pilot,” she clarified.
Chan’s reply was simply, “Good.”
He walked across the rooftop tarmac toward his personal transport. It was obviously made to pilot both in and out of the Earth’s atmosphere, a rare occurrence for anything that wasn’t a shuttle to LunaBase. Due to the reentry burn that ships undergo when coming into Earth from beyond, most craft were either designed to stay below the ozone, to stay above it, or to only travel back and forth through it without going anywhere else. From LunaBase, you could change to your private yacht (if you were so lucky) or to a public shuttle to move around the rest of the system. The Admiral’s craft was one of the exceptions. This could obviously fly within, through, or without an atmosphere.
“Sir, I have my car parked downstairs in the garage…” Val wasn’t sure what the plan was, so she was trying to cover her bases and not be too presumptive.
Chan stopped by the door to his ship and faced Val, looking her in her still squinting eyes. “Your car was delivered back to your home within an hour of your having parked it. You are part of my team now, so there are a couple of things you will need to understand. First, everything about our project is top secret. I tell the public what they need to know, nothing more. Don’t become a leak in my ship, and I won’t become a leak in yours, I like to say. Second, my team needs to focus on their tasks. I have brought every person into my team for a purpose, and if you expect to stay on my team, you will need to focus on what your purpose is. We will not accomplish very much if we are distracted by trivial things like who is paying for a meal or where we parked the car.”
Just then, the door to Chan’s ship opened, the hatch being a stairway that folded down toward the ground to allow access. At the top of the stairs was a young woman, maybe only nineteen or twenty. She wore her long blonde hair in a thick braid down to the middle of her back, and held a TekBoard in her hands. “Valentina, this is my personal assistant, Ms. Audrey. Ms. Audrey’s purpose in my team is to take care of all the trivial things.” Valentina expected a casual hello from someone so young, but instead she just tapped on the nine-by-eleven black board she had in her hands.
“We should be clear for departure as soon as you are ready, sir,” she said, not looking up at either of them. Chan walked up the stairway past her, and Val climbed the stairs behind him. As Val was within an arm’s reach of Ms. Audrey, she finally looked up. Chan’s assistant suddenly seemed very warm with a shy little smile as she reached into her navy smock’s pocket and fished around for something. “These are for you.” As Ms. Audrey’s hand extended, Val saw she held two things. The first was a scratched pair of sunglasses that Val recognized as being from her car’s glove compartment, and the other was a small bag of peanut-butter candy, Val’s favorite. “Welcome to the team.”
“Thank you,” Val said, astonished. She was rather hungry, but didn’t understand why she would need her sunglasses in this spacious ship. It appeared to be a luxury yacht on the inside, with seating for thirty or so guests during launch or turbulence. She’d need only to sit away from the window.
“Valentina, I trust that you will be able to pilot this, despite never having flown this type of craft. I’ll co-pilot for you, of course. If you’ll follow me…” Admiral Chan walked down a hall that led to the front of the vessel as Ms. Audrey began to retract the stairs. Val, surprised, followed down the hall to the small bridge. While the rest of the ship was spacious, usually only the hired pilots were allowed on the bridge of a yacht, so the space was fairly compact. Val brushed Chan’s arm as she climbed into the pilot’s chair, and as she started strapping herself in, she set the glasses and the candy on the console for a moment. “You may want to eat those now, while the engines warm up,” the Admiral suggested.
The sun was shining brightly through the front window and Chan pulled a pair of his own sunglasses out of a compartment in the central console and put them on, exposing two bottles of water in the process. Val put on her scratched sunglasses and opened her candy while Chan turned the engines on. As she ate in silence, Chan continued as if they were still standing on the tarmac outside.
“Third, almost nothing requires more than three people at a time. A chair or table with four or more legs can develop a wobble, with one leg not carrying its own weight anymore. A tripod will never wobble. Currently there are three people on this craft, two of which are on the bridge, and the third is getting our coordinates and authorization to exit the Seattle skyway. The pilot who flew my craft, Ms. Audrey, and I to this rooftop has returned your car to your home, and is probably on his way to charter pilot another vessel for another agency right now.”
Val noticed the small trash receptacle between the two water bottles and deposited her candy wrapper, picking up her bottle of water for a swig. She was in awe of how streamlined Admiral Chan’s procession appeared. Everything and everyone had a purpose, and they all worked like cogs in a giant machine churning out the career that she had been following for so long. She was utterly speechless and nearly gagged on her water when Ms. Audrey’s voice came across the intercom.
“Coordinates have been entered into the skyway guidance system. We are clear for departure for LunaBase whenever you are ready.”
