Zara's Flight: Book One of the Kato's War series Read online

  “Holy cow! So, that’s how they’re going to get to Jupiter in six months!” Kato said. “That puts my two hundred kilometers a second to shame. They’ll use up half of that capability going, and half coming back, of course, but if it were unleashed in a straight line… it would leave Eternity in the dust!”

  Chapter 7

  The $5,000-per-night suite at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas was trashed: clothes lay everywhere, as did food containers, unopened daily newspapers, room service trays, wine and liquor bottles, and glasses bearing traces of lipstick. Anna-Nicole awoke and rubbed her throbbing temples. She stumbled out of bed, her disheveled red hair falling down across the shoulders of her nightshirt, and walked across the main living area into Zara’s room.

  “Zay?” Anna-Nicole said. Zara grunted sleepily in response.

  “Zara, I want to go home now.” Anna-Nicole’s annoyance was clear. “We’ve now been on a two-week bender. Don’t you think it’s enough?”

  “It’s never enough,” came the sleepy reply.

  Anna-Nicole put her hands on her hips. “It is enough. We’ve missed two weeks of classes. Unlike you, I actually give a crap about my education.”

  “You know where the airport is,” came the flippant response.

  Anna-Nicole threw her hands up in exasperation. “We were supposed to be doing this together. I know Kayla’s fed up, too. She wants to go back to New York.”

  Zara sighed. “Fine. Go. There’s plenty of other people to party with.”

  Anna-Nicole shook her head slowly, her jaw tightening in anger. “I thought I knew you, but you’ve changed. You’re up most of the night and asleep most of the day! Every day! You’ve become a depressive borderline alcoholic!” Unable to contain her rage any longer, Anna-Nicole yelled: “You know, some of us don’t have billionaire parents! You can just live on daddy’s dime as long as you want. You’ll never have to work a day in your life! My dad didn’t just hand me everything on a plate and I’m a better person for it!”

  Zara sat up now. Was this some kind of waking nightmare? They’re my best friends… What on earth is their problem? “What? Why are you judging me? Your family isn’t exactly poor! They could support you,” she shot back.

  “They could, but they don’t!” Anna-Nicole snapped. “Don’t you get it? They’re paying for school, but that’s it. I’m on my own two feet after that. I know I’ll become somebody, not just somebody else’s shadow!”

  Zara sat bolt upright, jaw clenched tight, and eyes full of fire. “What the heck? That’s all you see me as? My dad’s shadow? Well, let me tell you, it’s not as easy as you think being me. You still have both your parents and they were there for you growing up. All I’ve got is photos of me and my mom, and I can’t even look at them.”

  “Oh, so that’s it? A pity kick?” Anna-Nicole yelled. “I know it had to suck royally losing your mom, but you’re not the only person who’s had it rough. My parents split up when I was seventeen. But, of course, you wouldn’t see that because you live in Zara-world, where the only person that matters is you!”

  “What the…? Why are you treating me this way?” the now teary-eyed Zara said, perplexed.

  “I’ve been wanting to say this stuff for a long time, but I guess I was afraid to. I’m done with just going along with your crazy shit!” Anna-Nicole yelled.

  Mikayla walked in, rubbing her eyes. “What’s going on?”

  “Nothing,” Anna-Nicole snapped. “I’ll see you guys back in New York.” With that, she stormed back to her room and began to change and pack. Mikayla just stood there, not knowing what to say. Zara flopped back down on her bed, her face red and her jaw clenched with a nameless rage, as her life and the inside of the room spun around her.

  Chapter 8

  Kato had dreaded this day ever since his decision to go into space. Training, construction, loading, and final checkout of Eternity were complete. TAON’s new CEO had been appointed some time ago and was doing a fine job. There was little left to do now before departure—except the most important thing of all.

  As his car wound its way through the streets of Manhattan, Kato closed his eyes. He felt the bile rising in his stomach as his destination drew ever closer, and tried not to think about what was coming. Seconds ticked by, as though the devil himself controlled time and mocked him with its passing. He purposely avoided looking at the Manhattan Interchange, as it recalled an equally painful wave of dread, fear, and sadness—indeed, he had not even looked at a picture of it since the day fifteen years ago. He had been in that building when the news of his beloved wife Susan’s death had shattered his world.

  The car pulled over to the curb. Kato took a deep breath and dialed Zara. It rang three times.

  “Zara? It’s Dad.”

  A sigh could be heard at the other end of the line and then silence.

  At last, she said: “I suppose you’ve come to say goodbye.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence again. “I’ll come down.” She hung up.

  Kato breathed an enormous sigh of relief. He could not have borne it if she hadn’t wanted to see him. He hadn’t seen her for two years at that point, as they had become estranged. He climbed out of the car and entered the apartment building’s grand, ornate lobby, with its gold trim and marble staircase. Presently, the vintage elevator pinged, its scissor-cage door opened, and Zara stepped out. She wore jeans, flip-flops, and a white button-up blouse. Kato was surprised at how much older she looked.

  The pair hugged in silence. Both their eyes teared up and the doormen shuffled discreetly away.

  “Zara, I have something for you. Two things really,” Kato said. He produced a small box from his pocket and opened it. “This is your mother’s wedding ring. She would have wanted you to have it.” Zara took the small gold band from the box and examined it closely. It was a simple and inexpensive department store design with a coating of diamond dust. She could picture it being placed on her mother’s finger during happier, simpler times, when the couple still had all their lives before them.

  “The other thing is this.” Kato handed her a plain white envelope bearing her name. Written across it was FOR YOUR EYES ONLY. “I bought two billion dollars of gold bullion,” he said, “as a hedge against economic crises. It’s in the vault at the New York Central Bank. It’s not going to do me much good where I’m going. I want you to have it.”

  Zara stared at the envelope, wide-eyed. “But, Dad… I can’t accept this!” She attempted to hand the envelope back.

  Kato gently pushed it back to her. “Keep it. You might need it. In there, besides the bank and attorney details, are the numbers for James Harrell, my right-hand man at TAON, and Uncle Chris.” Christopher Fay. Family friend, and Kato’s godfather. She hadn’t thought about him in years. “They’re my best friends,” Kato continued. “They’ve known you since you were a baby, and love you almost as much as I do. Call them if you need anything.”

  Business out of the way, the finality hit them.

  Kato sighed. “Can I have a lock of your hair to take with me?”

  Zara, wincing, pulled out some strands, and handed them to him.

  “Thanks, baby. I love you more than anything.”

  Zara looked down. “I love you, too.” They hugged again, and then Kato started towards the door. He stopped, turned around, and looked at Zara. She didn’t look back.

  Chapter 9

  Kato wondered why, with all the technology and design that had been put into the Eternity, floating in the observation bubble at the very front of the ship was such a nuisance. Being inside a five-meter sphere of perfectly smooth glass was akin to being surrounded by a funhouse mirror: his own magnified, distorted face stared back at him from all directions. The blue-white swirls of the Earth also reflected in the non-Earth-facing side of the glass, and the light from the interface projected in 3D in front of him bounced everywhere.

  “Pushback is good, Eternity,” came the radio message from the ISS2 as Eternity drifted further from th
e station. “Heading check?”

  “Correct to one milliradian,” Kato replied, checking over the displays projected in the air in front of him.

  Mission control then chimed in with their status checks. They had one CAPCOM, or capsule communicator in old space terminology—a single person who would speak directly to the crew. “Surgeon?” he asked.

  A different voice spoke. “Go.”

  “Propulsion?”

  Another voice. “Power output nominal; magnetic fields good. Levels look stable at four hundred eighty-six megawatts.”

  “ECLSS?”

  A third voice. “All good. Oxygen and water filtration and recyclers operating at one hundred percent.”

  “Navigation?”

  “Go.”

  “Once we reach the ten-kilometer mark from the station, you are go for engine start,” the CAPCOM said.

  Two weeks already spent in space for acclimation and quarantine had quelled Kato’s space sickness; he supposed the tight feeling in his gut had more to do with traveling billions of kilometers from home than anything else. To fill the awkward silence, the Flight Director said, somewhat redundantly: “Today we witness the historic launch of the spaceship Eternity, whose mission, beyond a flyby of the planet Saturn, is to deliver the first human being to interstellar space.” Billions on Earth watched. The thriving Mars colony had faded into the background of news and public discourse long ago, but this was something completely new.

  Excitement, fear, anticipation, and wonder all competed for Kato’s attention as the ISS2 got smaller and smaller. On trusses extending below the station, he could see Dawn under construction; her truss, engines, and tanks were already complete, and robots worked tirelessly on the front section. The Bigelow Orbital Complex shone brightly in the distance. The wealthy had paid millions of dollars extra to be there to watch him leave.

  “You are go for engine start.”

  He touched the engine panel of the interface, and it opened to include a symbolic big red button. He pushed it. A display showing all 390 engines in their hexagonal array opened and, one by one, they lit up.

  The seconds ticked by. At first, nothing seemed to happen, but then Kato noticed himself drifting slowly to the back of the sphere. Though the acceleration was very gentle, it continued for a long, long time. Kato could imagine the power of the reactors pumping billions of electrons to the engine chambers, which heated xenon gas into a plasma and ejected it at unimaginable speeds from nozzles made of magnetic fields. His steed had barely begun to walk, but she would eventually convey him at a blistering speed through the cosmos.

  “Godspeed, Eternity. Carry the hopes and dreams of all mankind to the stars.”

  Chapter 10

  Tears. So many tears. Zara wailed, and then drew short, ragged breaths. Wet. Cold. Oblivious. So what if people recognized her? Her life was pretty much over anyway. Heavy rain sloshed down gutters and drains around her, as she strode through the dark streets of Manhattan.

  Dad was gone, and she would never see him again. Mom was gone too. Zara was alone in a crowd. Anguished sobs burst forth, and her tears fell, mingling with the rain. The heavens seemed to feel her pain. One or two passersby’s’ faces lit up with recognition, but most of them ignored her. You saw all sorts of strange things in New York. Street lights reflected from their coats and umbrellas. Tires sprayed water onto the sidewalks. Zara strode furiously on, soaked to the skin, not caring where she was headed. Maybe if she reached the side of the island, she could ‘accidentally’ drown. Then it would all over. No more pain. Just another unsolved celebrity death for the NYPD.

  Chapter 11

  A week later, Kato watched the craters and seas of the Moon, stretching and distorting as reflections on the inside of the observation bubble. His ship fell towards the satellite on a tangential trajectory. The surface moved by with appreciable speed.

  Kato imagined himself as one of the Apollo crew members who had gone this way generations before. He had James and the rest of the TAON team on one video conference window and Christopher Fay in another.

  Kato’s parents Martin Robbins and Kinuko Sasake had grudgingly accepted Kato’s plans. They were linked in yet another window. The windows appeared in mid-air, at the front of the bubble. The participants could see and talk to each other, as well as seeing Kato and the view from the ship.

  “I couldn’t in all good conscience fly into space without buzzing the Moon,” Kato joked.

  “Paying for your own mission gives you that luxury,” Christopher said.

  “It’s not like you needed a specific launch window for Saturn, anyway, since you aren’t doing a gravity assist,” Martin chimed in, “so you had the freedom to plan it around the lunar phases.”

  “Yeah. I’m accelerating now, as the Moon’s gravity is pulling me in,” Kato said matter-of-factly. “When I pass it, I’ll have picked up maybe another one and a half kilometers a second.”

  “How close are you going to pass?” Kinuko asked.

  “Five kilometers!”

  Martin was aghast. “What?”

  “Yep!”

  “Dude!” Christopher said.

  “But… there are mountains higher than that on the far side!” Martin protested. “You’d better hope you miss them!”

  “Don’t worry, Dad, I know exactly what I’m doing!”

  “Better hope your navigation system does,” Martin grumbled. “The only one who’d approve of something this crazy would be Aleksandr,” he said, referring to their mutual friend Aleksandr Kozlov, the commander of the original International Mars Explorer.

  “I do approve!” Aleksandr said, having just joined the conference. “You go, boy! I’d have done the same stunt if I’d had sole control of the IME!”

  “You’re nuts, Alex,” Christopher said. Aleksandr was famous for having pulled a death-defying stunt on Mars’ moon Phobos, among other things.

  “Here we go! The Moon is ready for its closeup!” Kato said. His point of closest approach to the lunar craters and seas came up to meet him at fourteen kilometers per second. “Woohooooo!” Plains, mountains, and crater walls flashed past.

  “Kato! There’s a mountain range up ahead!” Kinuko said, alarmed. “The Moon’s gravity is so irregular… are you sure they programmed your trajectory correctly to account for it?”

  “Absolutely!” he replied. The mountains started to loom large ahead. Uplands came alarmingly close to the ship—within one kilometer—and flashed past too quickly to make out any features. Two peaks towered above him on either side.

  “O… M… G…” James said, in awe. “This makes all the late nights worth it!”

  The ship slipped between the peaks like a perfect field goal. Another peak appeared over the horizon—directly in front of him! Kato became distinctly uneasy, and the others could see it on his face. It was much too late for any kind of trajectory correction.

  Martin and Kinuko hugged each other tight, afraid that the video link would suddenly end. The wreckage would be vaporized at that speed, and hence never be found.

  The craggy mountainside filled up the view and then, just as quickly, flashed by below the ship and out of sight. Everyone let out a huge sigh of relief as the lunar surface began to fall away.

  “Whoa, dude… I can breathe again!” Aleksandr said. “You’ve earned your astronaut man points! Bravo!” Relief was written on all the others’ faces.

  “Oh my god, baby,” Kinuko said, clutching her chest. “Don’t ever scare us like that again!”

  “Five kilometers, my ass! You’re grounded!” Martin joked.

  “You have to catch me first!” Kato said as his ship’s course, bent by the Moon’s gravity, took him rapidly away from the satellite. Earth came back into view. “Next stop, Saturn!”

  Kinuko brushed away a tear.

  Chapter 12

  “This is very worrying indeed,” Randall, TAON’s CTO, said to James Harrell who was now Director of Research and Development. The pair talked in Randall�
�s office. Randall thought about sitting on James’s desk, but was too energized and agitated to sit. “Customer complaints have been going up for the last two months,” he said. “Not incrementally, but exponentially.”

  “Whoa!” James’s face registered his shock. “What’s going on?”

  Randall pursed his lips. “Mostly fine motor coordination problems. However, some robots are shaking every now and again and moving more stiffly than usual.”

  James stood, and walked over to the window. “Crap. Any idea what’s causing it?”

  “None yet. I don’t even know how to start troubleshooting it.”

  “Hmph.” James stroked his beard. “How come this is only coming to my attention now? Does Orson know?” he asked, referring to the CEO appointed before Kato stepped down.

  Randall sighed. “I was hoping it was just a blip, and that it would go away. I was afraid of alarming people.”

  James was now clearly angry. “That’s a problem, if you were afraid to approach anyone else in the C-suite about it.”

  Randall was now on the defensive. “It’s just that Orson’s so…”

  “Intimidating? You know, it’s just an act. He puts on that front in order to get things done.”

  Randall looked hurt. “Kato was never that way, and he got plenty accomplished. We were all friends…”

  James shrugged. “That was a different age… We’re the biggest company in the world by revenue now, and Wall Street expects a certain… image. Call it bravado. They want aggressive, golf-loving CEOs, not nice ones. Why do you think the stock went up when Kato left? They had him figured for an engineer—not the best guy to run things.”