Space Man – EP2
Sweet Home Coming
8:12 AM New Geneva Time
Emma Wineberg, the twenty-nine-year-old has been living for last five years, a hundred million kilometres away from Earth, halfway to Mars. She was the youngest head-of-engineering in charge of a hundred-men construction crew on six-month rotation. The tired men were meant to be replaced by a new crew from Earth a month ago. Wineberg was desperately running out of food, water and patience. The protocol allowed for a week of delay for the new crew to arrive, hungry to earn their space dollars and carrying the much-needed supplies. She’s been on her console trying to contact Earth for the last three days. She stared at the cold sun straight ahead, out of her window and angry at the blue dot to her left for not answering her calls. All sorts of things were going through her mind, and they were all bad. She had to make quick decisions. She didn’t have enough fuel to make it to the next station where she could get supplies and get medical treatments for her injured workers. Two of them had broken legs due to an incident two weeks ago that she didn’t care to think about.
Every second that passed brought Wineberg and her men closer to imminent danger at a light speed. She frantically typed to check the supply levels. She had enough food for three days, oxygen for a week. She’s never felt this helpless in her life. She’s always been in control of every aspect of her life. She blitzed through school, university and rose in the ranks in the space program to make the youngest manager of the hyper bridge construction. The construction of the bridge was to take twenty years to complete that allowed travel between Earth and Mars take hours and not months. Wineberg had dedicated her life for the last five years to oversee the construction crew. She should have stuck to a teaching job.
Wineberg checked to see if the coms are down and the operational status of the satellites. They were all perfectly functional. The only thing that was malfunctioning was the ground crew back on Earth. At first, she thought they must be playing pranks on her, but jokes don’t have a place in the space program. Her only option was to turn the hyper bridge on and reverse the direction back to Earth. But that was a terrible idea. The closest junction near Earth was two million kilometres from the moon. Even if they could make it to the junction near the Moon, Earth didn’t have the landing platform set up yet for them to land safely. So even if they could make it to the portal, millions of kilometres from the Moon and somehow steer this massive hunk of spaceship back to Earth, their best bet was to crash land somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. That was not an option she was willing to explore. Everyone onboard would be dead.
Wineberg clenched her eyes as she thought of another way.
At that moment, she saw a cargo ship approaching.
TO BE CONTINUED…