First Flight

By Michael W. Lindow

"Main Mission to Eagle 3. Your altitude is decreasing. You need to pull up."

The voice of Paul Morrow came through loud and clear to Alex Koenig in Eagle 3. He had a hold with both hands on the controls of Eagle three as the cockpit headed violently down.

"Eagle 3 to Main Mission. Roger that. Trying to pull up." Alex pulled with all his strength to bring the nose up. "Still loosing altitude. Thruster fault indicators on."

Alex glanced out the forward view ports and saw the moonscape rushing toward him as he descended. He slid the shield of his helmet down over his face in preparation for what was to come.

"Altitude: 150 meters," Alex said firmly. "120 Meters, and still falling."

Alex hoped his voice sounded steadier than he felt.

"Altitude, 90 meters."

"Crash position, Alex," Paul Morrow sounded sorry.

"Roger. 50 meters." Alex reached for the switch to shut down the engines.

"Engine shutoff, now." Eerie quiet engulfed the cockpit of Eagle 3. "20 meters and emergency landing thrusters, now." Alex tucked his head and stabbed the Emergency thruster switch. Thrusters roared in the cockpit, lifting the nose just as the Eagle crashed into the gray-dust surface of the moon. Alex slammed head first into the control panel, and tasted blood in his mouth. The ship shuddered violently like a faithful workhorse in the throes of death. Waves of gray-brown dust splashed the view ports until finally mercifully. Eagle3 ground to a halt.

The ship made creaks and groans from the post-crash trauma, and then a louder metallic 'scrunch' and the entire cockpit roof lifted upward. Alex looked up into intense white light at the silhouetted figure reaching out to him.

"Sorry Alex. You're dead." Alan Carter said.

"Oy'm not dead yet!" Alex retorted in his best Monty Python impression.

"Soon will be," Alan Carter monotoned back, as he pulled Alex up out of the simulator with a powerful tug.

Alex, still in his space suit, walked dejectedly from the Eagle simulator, absently banging his helmet against the walls and thinking about his failure.

"Saavik," Alex muttered, tousling his flattened "helmet hair" back into his normal unkempt shag rug look. He had watched all the Star Trek disks in the base library and Alex couldn't help comparing himself to Saavik in the "Kobayashi Maru" scenario. He'd passed every flight exam except the emergency power failure test. Without that, Alan would never certify him as a pilot, and he had to get certified. His sister Emma was already taking flight training and, much to Alex's chagrin, excelling in everything. She would get to this test in less than six months, and Alex was sure she'd be certified early.

Alex didn't think he could stand it if she became a pilot before he did. He'd already toyed with the idea of sabotaging her tests, but he had to admit she had a real talent, and the Alphan community needed all the talent it could get if they intended to survive.

Walking slowly and lost in his thoughts, Alex banged his helmet against the wall a little harder. All the lights in the corridor flickered briefly and went out, and Alex was plunged momentarily into darkness. He felt a brief moment of panic-not from the darkness, but from the momentary idea he had damaged something. Emergency battery-backed lights came on at intervals along the corridor, and Alex held his helmet up to look at it.

"If this is some kind of test, I'm not impressed." Alex said to himself. He'd not seen another Alphan in the corridors except Alan Carter since before his simulator test. This could be a surprise test, but Alex didn't think so. He had a sense something was really wrong.

Alex held his helmet up to his ear, switching from the simulator channel to the standard Comm frequencies, and was surprised at the massive level of Comm chatter. Everyone was trying to report at once and he could hear Main Mission trying to clear the frequencies. He heard someone reporting damage to the reactor area, and the word "moonquake".

The moon had been drawn into the Loki system and into orbit; but not into orbit around Loki. As the moon traveled with Loki around its star in an elliptical orbit, tidal forces fluctuated greatly. The moon was currently near Loki, as distances go, and aligned with Loki and its star. This caused stress on the moon's structure.

The quake traveled as a ripple across the pond of the Moon's surface striking the power facility on the far side of Alpha first. The simulator was located in a new wing as yet deserted except for Alan and Alex. Emergency Klaxons blared, echoing down vacant hallways, causing Alex to slam his helmet over his head. Every child on Alpha was trained to react to the emergency warning by getting to a suit, airlock or other sealed location. Like pavlovian pets, Alphan children from their twentieth month of life are taught because it's not a matter of choice, but rather, one of life.

Locking the helmet in place, Alex grabbed for his slate, but his hand never reached it. The floor seemed to take on a life of it's own and leapt from beneath his feet. The air was driven from his lungs as a wall reached out to slap him in the back, while the floor gyrated. A new siren sounded through his Comm link-one that for Alphans was synonymous with a death knell. This section was venting to space.

Ahead of him, toward the rest of Alpha, emergency bulkheads were closing off this wing to prevent further loss of atmosphere. Alex, still wearing a fully functional flight suit, put himself on self -containment. After self-preservation, his next priority was rescuing others. Alan Carter was here somewhere too.

A grim smile touched his lips.

"If this is another exercise, I'll never speak to you again, Uncle Alan."

The power outage had shut down the artificial gravity grid, so Alex had to use his 'outdoor' reflexes in the emergency lit corridor as he bounded in great one-sixth-gravity strides toward the simulator. The air in this corridor was rushing the same direction and kept knocking him off balance. As he approached the open doorway of the last room in the hall, the simulator room, Alex tried to stop. The venturi force of air rushing from the hall into the room blew him, tumbling, through the doorway. He slid to a stop, with his feet against the simulator's control desk. The wind was letting up now, but Alex knew that was bad news. It meant the air was almost gone.

The heads-up display in Alex's helmet told him the atmosphere pressure was down to 5 psi and dropping. Another minute and this area would be hard vacuum by human standards. Alex got to his feet, and surveyed his surroundings. The high bayed room had an Eagle-sized bay door with a four-meter tear running upward from the floor. The tear was nearly 80 centimeters wide at its center. Parts of the room were canted at strange angles. This area was the end of the wing and took the rippling quake like the frayed end of a whip.

"So much for the emergency patch idea." Alex said with resignation. Alan was lying near the gash, unmoving and apparently unconscious. He had apparently been trying to get to the airlock room near the bay door, but had run out of oxygen or been knocked out in the jolt. It would not have helped because the airlock was bent and no longer airtight.

Alex's mind raced. Even a conscious person needs at least a minute to don an emergency suit. I don't have enough time!

Then the seed of a plan sprouted in his mind. He bounded to the emergency locker and returned to Alan with a helmet and oxygen supply. Pulling a roll of gray, sticky tape out of a leg pouch, Alex held it up proudly.

"Never leave home without duct tape, Dad always says. Thousands of uses, plus one if this works!"

Working quickly, Alex taped around the base of the helmet to Alan's neck, and turned on the air supply.

"That will keep him for a couple more minutes." Alex always talked to himself when he was under stress, but he had no illusions that he had saved Alan as yet. The tape would leak horrendously and never hold pressure once the air in the room was gone---but there was another way. Thanks to the low gravity, carrying Alan to the Eagle Simulator was no problem. Once inside Alex belted them both in and cycled the Simulator to a full power restart, skipping the normal pre-flight checks.

"One thing about Uncle Alan is, he does everything to the max. Thank Loki he's obsessive!" The Simulator was really the forward section of a real Eagle spacecraft, with all the functionality of an Eagle command module. Alex pried the protective maneuvering thruster cover up and reached above the pilot's position and opened the explosive release panel and activated both simultaneously. The explosion slammed him into the seat, and the maneuvering jets lifted the command module upward. Alex pulled back on the throttle and the module crashed through the gap in the bay door and out over the lunar landscape.

"I wish you could see me, Alan! I'm soloing!" Alex was almost giddy that the plan worked, but the next obstacle was that he had about 90 seconds before the reserve fuel was gone. Alan needed immediate medical attention, so Alex guided his little craft to the airlock nearest Medical Center, and docked the module with expert ease before calling Main Mission and informing them of his and Alan's status. A moment later his father's face appeared on the comm screen.

"You all right, Alex?" His father's concern was clear in his voice, as Alan let out a moan.

"I'm fine, Dad. How bad was it? Anyone else hurt?"

"A few cracks in the armor," John Koenig smiled slightly, "but no fatalities. Just bumps and bruises. How's Alan?"

"No troubles." Alan croaked out as the module door opened and an emergency team appeared and extracted Alan from the module.

"Nice work, getting Alan out of there, son. You'll have to tell me about it over a nice cold dinner. The Base is on emergency batteries until the power station is secured.

"Do you need any help?" Roy Parker of the emergency team asked Alex.

"No. I'm okay."

"Good job of flying." Roy said as they carried Alan away.

"Thanks."

"Interesting solution," John Koenig chimed with a wry grin.

"It had the advantage of never having been tried before." Alex smiled wanly as the adrenaline began to fade. "Sorry about the Simulator, Dad."

"Probably set the flight school back six months between that and Alan being injured."

"Yeah. Probably so." He grinned a little, thinking of Em. " I'll see you at home, Dad. Later."

Alex signed off and got out of the pilot's seat. Out of one of the leg pouches he produced his duct tape and a marking pen. He tore a decimeter of tape off, put it over the hatchway and in block letters wrote 'Lollipop', and exited smiling.

"Let them figure that one out."

Michael W. Lindow

May, 1999