My book "Outpost" [UPDATE: Chapter 18: The End] Completed!

[The Raging Sandwich]

Since it's more of a short story than a novel, I'm more than likely going to take out the chapter headings and lump them into one big story by using

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[0111narwhalz]

If you have as many chapters as you have, I think you want breaks. Otherwise you get into "giant wall of text" status, and a little break of a few lines and asterisks seems insufficient. Just my opinion. Do with it as you will.

[The Raging Sandwich]

Chapter 14

Spoiler

After 10 more days, the blizzard only got worse. The snow was now up to their chests, causing all sorts of problems with their oxygen tanks. Sometimes they got ahead of schedule, knocking out 10 to 13 miles a day. Other days they were behind, only getting 4 miles a day in bad circumstances. They had travelled 102 miles so far, only half way there.

            “I just got a radio ping from the Nighthawk about forty minutes ago. I remotely told it to do a composition scan of the hills to see if they have drinkable water on them or not,” said Mikhail. “Once it comes back around it will – gaah! Help me!” his voice seemingly vanished into the distance.

            Johnson and Hernandez stopped pushing and joined Quick in looking down a huge cliff. Quick’s face was aghast, like he just saw a ghost. Down at the bottom of the cliff was Mikhail, sprawled out on the ground, lifeless. “Get some cables, hurry!” Johnson commanded, his leadership instincts immediately kicking in at full effect.

            Hernandez sprinted into the rover to get spare cables from the MBM. He ran back with a large role of them. “It has to at least be a thousand feet deep!” said Quick panicked.

            “All of this just for drinking water!” yelled Hernandez, tossing the cables to Johnson. A tear rolled down his face at the loss of his friend.

            “Get ahold of yourself,” said Johnson. He secured a cable to the edge of the cliff and threw it down to the bottom. “Quick, how could you not see this?”

            “Well, Mikhail was looking down at the monitor and I was looking over at him,” Quick answered.

            “Lord almighty. Okay, I’ll go down first, then Quick, and Hernandez last,” said Johnson. He grabbed ahold of the cable and started sliding down the cliff.

            “You’re crazy!” Quick yelled out to him. He looked down at his bandaged foot and sighed. He grabbed the cables and slid down carefully and a bit slower than Johnson. Hernandez looked down the cliff again, starting to sweat a little. He gripped the cables tightly and slid down slowly.

            Johnson was already down at the bottom. He searched for Mikhail’s body, not finding it right away. Mikhail was lying face down in the snow. Johnson was unsure of turning him around, fearing what he might see. Eventually, Quick and Hernandez joined him at the bottom of the cliff.

            Hernandez gasped at the sight of his friend’s lifeless body. Johnson finally gathered up the courage to turn Mikhail around. His faceplate was broken. Shards of glass littered the snow below him, some even indented into his face. There was a deep, bloody gash right across his forehead. Johnson unlatched his glove, there wasn’t a pulse. He wasn’t breathing either.

They all looked at each other, not sure what to do. Eventually, Johnson unlatched Mikhail’s helmet. With a soft hiss he pulled off the helmet. Strands of his hair was soaked with blood. It wasn’t coming from his forehead, but a deeper gash on the top of his head. It was deep enough to see his skull, which was cracked open ever so slightly.

Johnson looked away at the sight, Hernandez turning away and puking, and Quick still looking but not knowing what to do. “Wait, is- is something blinking?” said Quick. Johnson and Hernandez dared to look at Mikhail’s head again. There was a faint blinking inside Mikhail’s head.

“Could this trip get any weirder?” Hernandez exclaimed.

Johnson pulled back Mikhail’s hair leaving red spots on his gloved fingers. “It must be the light playing tricks on us,” he said.

“Then why is the light yellow?” said Quick sarcastically.

“I don’t know. Guys, look away,” Johnson responded. Almost looking away himself, he tore through Mikhail’s skull. The light wasn’t a trick from the light in the atmosphere, it belonged to a motherboard on top of Mikhail’s brain. Johnson didn’t know what to say. “It’s definitely not a trick.”

Hernandez and Quick looked back. A small circuit board sat on top of Mikhail’s brain, the light flashing on it every few seconds. A tiny SD card stuck out of the side. Tiny, almost frail wires stuck out of the board in all directions, connecting to different parts of his brain. He took the SD card out of its port and the light stopped blinking.

He stuck the SD card into his utilities pocket and stood back up. “Where are we going to bury him?” asked Hernandez.

“We don’t need to. The snow will,” Johnson responded.

“But the snow will melt,” said Quick.

“Then screw it. We’ll leave him where he is, let nature decide what to do with him,” said Johnson.

“That’s my friend you’re talking about,” said Hernandez angrily.

“He was our friends too, but now he’s dead. There’s nothing we can do.”

“I’ve known him a hell of a lot longer than you have!”

“Guys!” Quick interrupted, “I don’t want to have to be the one to remind you that we have to stay calm, even in a situation like this. Let’s calm down and think rationally about this!”

Johnson and Hernandez looked down at the ground. “You’re right,” Johnson started. “You’re right. He was our friend and colleague; he deserves a proper burial.”

“Do we have to bury him, though? On second thought, we can still look into his brain, see if there are any more artificial components of it. I mean, what if we’re probed too?” Hernandez said.

Johnson and Quick stopped at what Hernandez said. What if? “That’s probably the best thing to do at this point. But we need to find a way to get him back up there,” Johnson said.

They all looked back up the enormous cliff. It was at least 1,000 feet tall. It might take hours just climbing back up, let alone carrying a dead body along as well. “We were trained in rock climbing, right?” Quick said. “It’s as simple as that, we just need to carry him with us. Whoever’s the strongest can carry him on their back on the way up.”

“You do realize that’s nearly three hundred pounds of dead weight we’re carrying up a ninety-degree incline, right?” Hernandez retorted.

“Not necessarily…” Johnson answered, almost with an unsure voice. “On the way down I saw how the cliff face was slanted in some places, even flattening off in parts so we can take short breaks.” He looked back at the giant wall of icy salt rocks, finding just what he was looking for. “There, I see a couple nearly going in a straight line up the cliff, we can climb up there.”

“Yeah, but how are we going to get the cables down from where they already are?” asked Hernandez.

“Easy,” Johnson said. He grabbed a cable and tugged on it as hard as he could. At the top of the cliff, the nail popped out of the ground and started falling down to the bottom of the cliff face. The cable fell with it, twisting and curving in the air like a slithering snake. The nail plunged right into the snow with a soft poof, and the winding cable fell all around them, almost hitting Quick in the head.

“Okay, so how are we supposed to get it back up there?” Hernandez asked.

 Johnson pondered that thought. He realized his mistake. It was the only cable that they had and he wasted it, and now there was no way to get back up. His mind was going, and it was all because of this blizzard. The one thing he was trying to protect his crew of had been brought upon him instead.

He collapsed. He gave up. He fell face down in the snow at the realization that one action he took doomed the lives of two other men. He wallowed in self-pity at the realization that just one action could’ve saved the life of Mikhail as well.

“Commander, don’t be this way,” said Hernandez.

“Johnson, you are our Commander. Our leader. Snap out of it, man!” said Quick.

Johnson got up, small flakes of melting ice covering his faceplate. “You’re right. The one thing I was protecting you guys from got me instead.”

No one really knew what to say. But what Quick knew was that he would have to start assuming the role of commander if Johnson continued on that downward climb of his sanity. He would have to protect himself and Hernandez from it too.

 

Because of the cable incident before, it was decided to not take Mikhail with them up the cliff. It was a long and silent trek up the cliff face. They eventually got back up to the rover after two hours of climbing (and the occasional rest).

Only when they plugged the SD card into the rover computer did they realize how old and out of date it was. It had tons of capacity in it, enough to hold millions, even billions, of files in it. At the very top was one particular file. Johnson opened it, but they were not surprised to see what was in it.

 

[The Raging Sandwich]

Chapter 15

Spoiler

To whom it may concern,

            You must have many questions. Let me address them one by one. Why was there a computer chip in your crewmate’s head? It was a gamble you would find it. The backstory behind all of this will answer your question.

            The year as of writing this is 2021. The war was brewing. We, and the President, knew it was a nuclear war. You also know what the ramifications a nuclear war would have on the world. Eventually, it would grow full scale, resulting in a nuclear winter, the end of humanity. It was growing quickly, a country joining in nearly every day. This was a last minute effort.

                To save humanity, we needed to send someone out of the solar system completely. None of the planets or moons in our solar system could house humans completely without heavy human modification. All we had to do was inject the DNA of a small marine animal into your bloodstreams. Spending all those years in suspended animation let your bodies become modified in its own time.

                You may also be wondering how you have no memory of training during the war. The billions of files in this SD card are your artificial memories. Achieving all of this was the hardest thing anyone has ever done. All of this was nearly a hundred years ahead of our time, but we did it.

                We have included an incubator of human embryos given to us by very willing donors. We selected the offspring of the healthiest people from select nations to keep the human diversity alive. It is up to you, if you are actually seeing this, to not teach them the wrong doing of the past humans. They must know right from wrong so they are not doomed to repeat our warring past.

                The second question you may ask. Why did we choose to tell you this way instead of telling you directly? Well, it is only a tale of error under stress. We trained you in only two weeks, two weeks being the deadline. We simply did not have enough time to teach you. We did, however, have time to deliver this message. The embryos are located in the walls of the lab labeled with a black cross.

                This message may seem a little confusing, and it’s because of the limited time we had to do this. But it’s okay, you know all you need to know. We believe in you. Godspeed.

                -NASA

                Johnson, Quick, and Hernandez stared at the screen after Johnson had read the message aloud. They did still have a lot of questions, but like the message said, they needed not to ask them. They had no idea what to think about it.

Small chapter.

[The Raging Sandwich]

Chapter 16

Spoiler

It’s been a long three months. We had to cope with keeping our minds mentally balanced as well as the effects the trip had on us physically. We all lost a few pounds, Hernandez losing the most of all of us with more than 10.

            Lowering the rover down the cliff did a number on us. All three of us had to work together to lower it down via cables. It was like all three of us were lowering down a 12-year-old child down via cable. Quick got the worst of it. It was mostly due to his broken foot, but that wasn’t all.

            At one point, his cable slipped for a second, ripping a hole in his glove leaving it open nearly unprotected to the bitterly cold air. He hadn’t bothered with it because he didn’t even know it was there, it was more of a minor inconvenience to him. The coldness in the air ended up giving him frostbite. It wasn’t that bad in his hands, it was more in his fingers.

            His hand would be okay, but his fingers got really bad. We had no choice but to cut off two of his fingers which had lost all feeling and he couldn’t move at all. We gave him painkillers before the operation (which Hernandez did as he has more experience in the medical field than I do.) and we knocked him out as well with another medicine. I’d really rather not go into the other details.

            Our mentality was constantly slipping away from us. We all constantly reminded ourselves to pull ourselves together.

I also tripped and fell on a rock, breaking my faceplate. It left a cut in my nose, it eventually healed over and left a nasty scar. My faceplate was shattered though. I used clear plastic wrap to seal it and wore extra caps around my head to keep myself warm.

We constantly kept our muscles in check by pushing the rover and walking constantly, along with sometimes climbing over and under obstacles. The trip was bad for us; the best thing that happened during it was that we actually got what we went out for. The frost on the mountains had significantly less carbon in it, just safe enough for us to drink.

We toted back several pounds of water in the rover back to base. We found a natural ramp to climb back up the cliff when we reached that point. According to Hernandez’s calculations, we averaged 7.62 miles a day.

About halfway back, the snow started to melt. Luckily, it didn’t melt very fast so most of it evaporated before I drowned (Hernandez and Quick wouldn’t have, but I would, and so would the rover in some ways).

The skies began to clear. Before, there were absolutely no breaks in the clouds to let in any light whatsoever. Then suddenly, we heard Quick say, “Whoa, look guys.” He was pointing towards the dark clouds, but there was a small hole in them that was slowly getting wider and wider letting in rays of ambient light from the planet we are orbiting. Now I grew up in the south and was always excited if we had snow and always prayed for it if we didn’t, but now that I’ve been through this, I hope I never see it again.

Soon, all the clouds were gone and all that were left were wispy ice crystals floating in the upper atmosphere. It was still complete darkness on the moon, but the ambient light from the planet still lit up the “daytime” side. It was almost like a world-wide sunset, really. The skies were orange like the setting sun made the horizon just like on Earth, or as I should say, was on Earth.

We finally got back to base. The lander was safely back on the ground. We checked the bottom of the landing legs. It was still on ice! We looked at the ground beneath our feet too, we were also standing on ice. It was odd really, we never slipped and fell, it was as if the ice had traction.

The beacon was still on, sending its light circling around the calm, sparkling waters, still visible by the “sunset” sky. We got in the lander to get a good rest. As I thought, my log was in the lander. Wish I had it then, it would’ve definitely kept me saner. This is where I’m writing know.

 

We woke up after sleeping for 10 hours (I woke up a bit earlier out of habit). The first thing we need to do before leaving is transfer all the water from the rover to the lander. We ate, changed back into our EVA suits, and went outside. Only when we took the suits off last night did we realize how badly we stank. We kept good oral hygiene, but that was all we could really manage. We could clean ourselves really well back at the Nighthawk.

I left the lander first, then Hernandez and Quick following behind. When I got out, I looked back up at the giant planet. Even with us being millions of miles away from it, it was still taking up a large portion of the sky. I then realized we hadn’t been taking any pictures! (Not that they would do much good anyways with us being probably the last humans and all.)

The water was stored in several containers in the back of the MBM. We have about 25 gallons in all, which is a lot from just getting it from frost we scooped up from the mountains and melted. We carried them one by one, Quick sometimes carrying two, into the lander’s storage compartment. We finished carrying all 13 containers back into the lander and prepared to leave.

We said goodbye to the planet we had lived and worked on for more than three months. It was actually sort of sad leaving it. You know how you stay at a place long enough and never want to leave it. But we knew we had to, the future of the human race is at stake. I was to maneuver the lander, Quick would manage the throttles.

I activated the lander. Quick and I piloted the lander together. Hernandez sat behind us, looking over at the seat next to him and the two more behind it. Quick throttled the engines up and we heard the almost unfamiliar sound of the engines roaring to life, something we were forced to only remember, something we wished to hear again for a while.

The lander shook and wobbled as it hovered off the ground, but I corrected it. Quick activated the back engines, and the spacecraft started to move forward over the mirroring waters. It was an even more beautiful sight to see the waters during “sunset.” I pitched it up and Quick throttled down the bottom engines and throttled up the back engines.

Soon, we broke the moon’s sound barrier. We started to see the atmosphere pushing against us after a sonic boom. The higher we got, the colder it was, causing the edges of the windows to frost over. We then ascended through the top layer of icy clouds. The sky started to get darker and we started to see stars, galaxies, planets, and nebulae, sights we missed seeing.

We soon reached orbital velocity, injecting ourselves into a low orbit of the moon. We looked back down at the surface, it was still one of the most beautiful things one could ever see, even under the low-light. We launched just in time to see the twinkling light of the Nighthawk just overhead. A short burst to raise the apogee sent us towards it.

The gravity of different moons and the planet affected the ship’s orbit, but not my much at all. We successfully rendezvoused with the ship, seeing it for the first time in person in over three months. Its giant doors sat open welcoming us towards it. We entered the bay, docked to the spacecraft, closed the doors, and entered back into the ship. Everything was still like it was when we left.

 

[The Raging Sandwich]

Chapter 17

Spoiler

The crew of the Nighthawk didn’t settle in immediately. In fact, they got right to work on travelling to their final destination, CO 123572b. Johnson turned on the Alcubierre drive and space itself lurched forward. They immediately went into escape trajectory out of the moon’s orbit and out of the planet system itself, eventually escaping the solar system.

            The trip to the next solar system would take hours. Therefore, each crewmember took turns cleaning themselves. They all got something to eat as well. They stayed inside the command module most of the time though, reading magazines or looking out the window at the short streaks that were actually stars moving past them. Some were yellow, some were red, some were blue, and some where white, and all the other colors in between.

            After an hour, they saw their target star. It was a red dwarf, a rather small sized one. Two specks of light danced around it, one moderately close to the star and the other one very far away. They got closer and closer. The first planet they saw had an atmosphere, a blue one. Yes, definitely a blue one.

            The second one was all white, more than likely an ice-covered world. It too had an atmosphere. A large solar flare shot up out of the star, millions and millions of miles away from the Nighthawk. Even at that distance, the ship did get a bit warmer inside, but not much. The first planet, CO 123572b, was their target.

            It was not too far nor too close from the star, just right to house a temperature sustainable for human life. It was a bit colder than Earth, only about 20 degrees colder on average. It had a slightly elliptical orbit, making it have a winter on its far side. It typically snowed on the far side, sometimes even at the near side at nights when it rained.

            It had a slightly thicker atmosphere than Earth. That made storms more deadly. Hurricanes could be up to 2 times stronger. Lightning was also worse and happened a lot more often. It had its flaws, but it was the best thing interplanetary scientists could find in their limited search time.

            As they got nearer, they started to see its blue oceans. Oceans made up most of its surface, most of it was actually frozen due to the planet being on its far side. Only parts of it weren’t frozen, deep parts of the ocean that almost looked like giant holes. The entire part of the planet that was land was almost entirely grass covered by a thick frost, turning the normally green land into almost a light brown.

            They approached the planet further until it dominated the view in front of them. A large swirling mass of clouds almost swallowed part of the planet, a hurricane. An aurora surrounded the north pole. Occasional lightning strikes lit up tiny patches of the sky.

            Johnson deactivated the Alcubierre drive and the spacecraft began a normal flyby of the planet. “Getting ready for orbital insertion in T-ten minutes,” he said.

            The ship started coasting until it arrived at the lowest point of the flyby. The main rockets fired sending almost a mile of plasma away from the ship, slowing it down into an orbital trajectory. After about 5 minutes, the spacecraft and its crew fell into orbit. They were ready to land.

            It was time to set up the Outpost where the human race would spend the remainder of its time.

Only one more chapter.

[The Raging Sandwich]

Chapter 18: The End

Spoiler

I see a light just off in the distance. It’s twinkling, almost like its spinning very quickly and reflecting the light of the star off of its surfaces. Maybe I can get to it. It’s my only hope. There are no stars to guide me, I’m orbiting the light side of the planet. I estimate it’s only about two or three miles out.

            I jet towards the light, the incubator full of the only human race other than myself left latched onto my utility belt. It’s only me and them, and no others. The light is getting bigger and bigger. It starts to manifest a sort of shape. It’s odd and irregular. Its round in its center and it has 5 different things jutting out of it. Two are very thin and short, one is very long, and two are very short and stubby looking.

            It’s definitely spinning. It’s not in a fixed spin, its stumbling in all directions. As I get closer, I see a small round object on its side every time it spins around. It’s tiny compared to the rest of the object.

            The object looks like some sort of probe, definitely made by humans. I know what it is. It’s one of the Voyagers. I’ve only heard about them in stories, yet here I am face to face with one. The golden circle is a golden disk that contains a message for any aliens who happen to encounter it. Who knew a human himself would encounter it first? I’m not necessarily the first one to encounter it.

            It looks like on its huge magnetometer boom, there is a chunk missing off the top.

            How did it get way out here in the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy? It was supposed to just orbit the Milky Way forever! Unless, it was encountered by something, or some living being.

It encountered a star. It was thrown out of its original orbit and out into the Sagittarius Dwarf Galaxy. There, it was brought into the Tycho 12849 system where it encountered planet e. It was captured by the past civilization of its largest moon. It was studied, measured, and the golden disk was taken back down to the planet.

It took several decades to decipher the message brought to them by this strange civilization. They understood it. They understood it far more than the humans even could. They had predicted almost exactly what would happen to the humans, how they would destroy themselves.

They knew the humans would go interstellar, looking for a planet just right for them. They had looked on at Earth over the nearly 50 years it took them to leave their blue sphere. They had probed the human society right until the last moment, figuring out where they would end up.

Over the next hundred years, the civilization had received many crushing blows limiting its population. It went the strange human probe to their target planet to await the last 10,000 years until the last humans arrived to find it, to find the most perfect world right within their grasp. One final blow wiped out the very last of the moon’s population, officially eliminating the last form of intelligent life left in the whole entire galaxy.

All this I learn by simply touching the golden disk with my gloved hands. All this I learned just comes to me. And all of a sudden, I come face to face with a perfect world. A planet not yet known to humanity, but know is, a new place called home.

Please, tell me what you think about the book and what I can improve or change.

Yes, it's actually done.

[The Raging Sandwich]

Here's a book trailer I made for this:

 

[The Raging Sandwich]

I'll b rewriting small bits of this, so what you're seeing here isn't the finished version.