Tehom: The Tehom Legacy Book One Read online

  The crowd started to buzz with conversation though many simply looked up at the blurry computer enhanced picture of Tehom Prime.

  The response began slowly; one person silently raised their hand and pointed straight up. Then another, then ten, fifty, five hundred, five thousand then the chant began.

  “Up!”

  “Up!”

  “Up!” The bulk of the crowd shouted over and over, mimicking the gesture of legend Simon

  had given to the Tehom Board of Directors years ago as a young man.

  “Ambassador Xiang, President Starkey… you have your answer.” Simon walked off stage silently, allowing someone else to close the company meeting. Liberty followed him out of the amphitheatre with her slight pregnancy induced waddle. Cameras and video recorders followed both of them as they politely waved to the crowd.

  Liberty could feel the rage and pain building in her husband the entire journey across the Consortium campus. Simon’s eyes were filled with tears of seething hate, his jaw clinched in an attempt to steady himself long enough for them to get well away from the crowds and cameras. Neither said anything until they were well behind the soundproof door of his private office.

  “Arrrrrgh!” Simon grabbed the top of his oak desk and flung it over in a display of strength Liberty had never seen out of her normally calm and collected husband. Papers, office supplies and files dispersed like a cloud across the small office.

  “Simon…” Liberty reached out to comfort him.

  “That is the most ghastly, disgusting, revolting thing I have ever done in my life!” Simon shouted into the deadened walls.

  “Simon you…”

  “I know I had to Elle, I know. It doesn’t make it any easier; we should be fighting for what we believe in, we should be the last patriots of freedom in the world. We are Texans! Cutting and running?! He was right, that is exactly what we are doing, and it’s fucking disgusting Elle!” Simon closed his eyes and sunk in to his high-backed leather chair.

  “You do not hold the whole world on your back Simon, the Company trusts you. I trust you. If we are on the Titanic, let’s get in the life boats early or get off at the next port before we turn south.” Liberty stood in the center of the floor, pear shaped, her right hand on her belly.

  “Your daughter is kicking.”

  Simon looked defeated, empty and hollow, but the mention of his unborn daughter made him look up and across the room at his wife.

  “It is for your child you have done this. I know you feel like you have betrayed everyone in the world, but you are giving hope where before there were only whispers of coming darkness.” Liberty took a few steps toward her husband, convinced his tantrum was finished.

  He wrapped his arms around her and rested his head on her belly, greeted by resistance from the jutting foot of his daughter against his ear. They stayed in the intimate embrace for several minutes.

  “I feel like I have disappointed my mother, my grandfather… I can almost see the disappointment in both of their faces when I close my eyes.” Simon finally whispered.

  “They would both be proud of you, difficult decisions come. You compromised when the only other option was defeat. They would both be very proud of you.” Liberty rested her hand on the top of his head and held him close.

  “I lied Elle. I lied to them. I lied to you, I have never done that before.”

  “How did you lie?”

  “I said we could take twenty thousand. We can’t take even half of that, it is just not possible to construct a ship that size. The Bierre Drive can’t handle the mass of a ship that size. We are limited by the size of the radioactive core rod, we can’t make one that big. We would have to retool the entire moon colony and we can’t launch a single piece that size from the Earth.”

  “How many? How many can you… we… take?”

  “Right now, as designed, 4,200. We are hoping that advancements over the next decade will allow us to double that. With genetic planning and zero population loss minimum viable population for an isolated colony is 4,200. The problem is, we have to account for death, sickness, population atrophy and it isn’t ethical to force people into genetic matches simply for diversity.”

  “So there are issues to work out, so what? You will figure something out, you always do. This is the project of a lifetime.” Liberty hated that Simon had lied to her, even about a company issue. She didn’t like seeing her husband frail, saddened and defeated. She was strong enough for both of them, for better and for worse.

  Chapter Ten: Banking on Genetics

  The Chinese had so far kept their end of the bargain, and the three hundred meter central core rod for the Bierre Drive stood like a monolith in space at the L2 Lagrangian Point outside the orbit of the moon shielded from most solar radiation. For months teams of people and machines looked over every centimeter, ran structural scans, and harmonic stability tests on the structure to make sure the Thorium rod was perfect and flawless before being placed within its Uranium encasement which together formed the core of the Bierre propulsion drive.

  “The Chinese are already upping their rhetoric, they have this billed as a final western capitulation.” Simon shook his head, “But they are also calling it a grand experiment and are embracing the spirit of human cooperation.” Trigg Fallon began his briefing.

  “A paradox, but that is the Chinese.” Rhett Granger chimed in right on queue.

  “When are the carbon fiber tubes being delivered to L2?” Simon crossed his arms, he had grown tired of the constant political commentary.

  “They are in the payload for next month along with the injectable resin component. We expect the frame to be completed within six months.” Gerald Baker delivered his matter-of-fact report.

  “Six months?”

  “Then the real work begins.”

  “How are we on the population question?” Simon continued the checklist and the constant question that began every day.

  “Unchanged, for every individual we add the elements that it takes to support the whole group expands exponentially. We are fine on oxygen and water, we are still limited on the overall mass which limits our population size. Once we are outside the initial gravitation field of the home solar system population can increase without issue.”

  “So mass and gravity? Can we decrease either in order to give us more room? Smaller living spaces, less water, anything?” Simon reviewed the same track of ideas at every meeting, hoping someone would come up with something different.

  “All the departments have gone over their section for efficiency, we are just not finding the right math to increase beyond the 6500 figure I gave you last month.” Gerald shifted in his seat.

  “Mr. Tehom…” A young intern stood up, he was awkward and unsure of himself, and spoke out of turn.

  “This isn’t a brain storm session Philip, sit down. I told you no.” His supervisor Freda chided him. She had little patience for anyone breaking protocol.

  “Let him speak, it is obvious we are out of ideas here.”

  “Well, my girlfriend and I were going over some of the math and we had an idea to solve the overall problem. But it…”

  “You think you and your girlfriend can solve a problem the best scientists in three countries haven’t?” Freda glared at him.

  “Well, you are trying to solve a problem of genetic diversity by creating a crew manifest. Increasing diversity by increasing population in a closed genetic environment.” Philip waited for a couple nods of agreement. “…we all know you know you are limited in space.”

  “Mass. Space is irrelevant.”Rhett corrected his terminology more for the sake of accuracy than anything.

  “Redefine the problem, change the equation. Instead of a closed genetics environment, have an open one, you take the best people as far as education, knowledge and health of course. But you also take the genetic code of thousands of others. For your initial passengers and crew you put a preference on female population. But rather than a generational ship and try
ing to maintain population, make it a seed ship.”

  “You are talking about a sperm bank?” Simon smiled slightly.

  Philip blushed and nodded, “Yes, Mr. Tehom.”

  The meeting sat in silence for several minutes. The idea of a floating sperm bank on a space ship seemed silly at first glance, almost laughable. Then the possibilities and mathematics of the equation began to seep into the collective consciousness of the group of executives.

  Can it really be that simple?

  Simon Tehom mashed a button on the conference room phone and spoke aloud, “Elle, get Walt Carver up here from genetics. ASAP.”

  When Walt Carver finally arrived the conference room was in chaos, executives of various fields, specialties and departments argued and slid pieces of paper toward one other with hosts of figures and population makeup equations.

  Finally.

  “Walt, we have a question we need answering.” Simon spoke as Walt entered the room and everyone instantly turned and looked at the man as he walked through the door.

  “Our friend Philip here just turned the entire board on its head. We need to know if his idea is possible. You are aware of our population quandary?”

  “The whole company knows about it.”

  “If we stack a population of healthy females with some kind of a fertility bank, is that a feasible way to solve the long term minimum population density equation? Some kind of hybrid seed ship where we grow as we go, and at the same time become more diverse as time passes?”

  “There is no way the ship will support another system Simon. We have a closed biosphere, food production, livestock, oxygen generation facilities, machine shops, manufacturing, sleeping quarters, café, you even put in a hangar bay and an extra air lock. We have this thing worked out to the kilogram Simon! Now you want to start from the ground up and shoehorn a fertility clinic in?” Freda said.

  “If it will solve the problem, damned right!” Simon stood up and his chair slammed against the wall behind him, he had grown increasingly tired of Freda’s bad attitude getting in the way of progress, over the years she had become sour and her personality got in the way of her genius.

  Walt spoke slowly, his mind awash in different approaches, “Well, there are a couple ways you could do it. If you are talking full in-vitro fertilization with no genetic relation to any of the passengers, there is no way we have the room. You would need embryo facilities, surgical facilities well beyond the medical bay we currently have planned. I don’t think you could do it. You are talking about moving a hospital into a full office building for the scope you are talking. Less than a hundred embryos and we could talk, but…” Walt paused a moment and began jotting grids and sketching figures, “Give me a twelve foot by twelve foot room and uh… 45,000 pounds and I think I could work something out.”

  “But you just said...” Trigg’s mind grasped politics extremely well, but science and mathematics poorly.

  “That is if you wanted a full fertilization clinic, I assume you are talking about sending a healthy and fertile population, not anyone with reproductive problems or medical issues that would prevent pregnancy. In which case you do not need all that. You just need a sperm bank, a cryobank with the male half of the genetic code. You are still going to have to be careful in the third generation to prevent a bottleneck. But this would increase your genetic population size enormously.”

  “How much? You are talking about getting rid of 250 individuals to get to the weight you are asking for.” Rhett was doing the math in his head, and was unconvinced.

  “Ah, um.” Walt scribbled a few figures and spoke as he wrote; the whole board room huddled around him with his paper and pen. “One foot square trays, 625 per tray, twelve trays per box, so 7500, could probably fit fifteen boxes along a wall freezer, it would have to stay cold and secure, and be shielded from any radiation and all warmth. Rough guess without a design team 112,500 individual samples. Normally I would suggest five samples per individual so 22,500 samples. But if you are going for pure numbers and diversity it isn’t the individual that matters, its pure numbers and you wouldn’t want to duplicate in this situation, no reason to. So yea, at least that many, maybe even 150,000.”

  “We don’t need that many, that is 150,000 pregnancies!”

  “Well you would have to factor in that only a third might actually result in a successful pregnancy, and that would be with proper timing of ovulation and fertility. You might also have some loss over time depending on any number of factors. You want as much diversity as possible stemming from as many healthy individuals as possible.”

  “Walt, this is now your project. Bring me what you come up with in a week; we need to get on this.”

  “What is our ratio? Females to Males?” Philip asked sheepishly.

  “Most efficient? 100% female. But there is no real reason to do it that way, with three generations in space till arrival on Tehom Prime, I would argue for a three to one split. Three women for every one male.”

  “The men will have it made then!” Philip replied, his young years showing through.

  Rhett frowned and chuckled slightly, “Says you, I can barely keep up with the one.”

  The meeting broke on a light note with everyone walking away from the table with a new sense of hope. The population bottleneck had always been a concern, and with this new plan it gave a bit of hope that maybe a small piece of them would thrive in this adventure even if they could not go on the voyage.

  “Walt, stay with me a moment?” said Simon.

  The room emptied, leaving only Simon and Walt.

  “I thought there might be more.”

  “We have room and facilities for a full 12,000 people once the ship achieves full speed. So we can double our population by the time we arrive. The ship will still feel full, but there will be room to grow. What I wanted to talk to you privately about is redundancy. Some of the board already considers this low priority, we are well over the minimum viable population barrier already. They are still looking at this in a skewed way.”

  Walt leaned against the table with a melancholy look on his face, “It hasn’t sunk in that none of us are going has it?”

  “Not at all, Eleanor is three years old and she will be going. But it is highly doubtful that very many of our generation will be chosen to go. We are considering a hard age limit of thirty, and a soft one of twenty.” Simon echoed the feeling of being left behind on the adventure.

  “Meaning?”

  “Meaning that unless the individual is between fifteen and twenty, or has a vital skill or special education, they won’t be going.”

  “You took my initial recommendation then.”

  “Or course.”

  “You said something about redundancy?” Walt wanted to get to the heart of the matter.

  “150,000 samples is great, perfect in fact. But I want a bit of redundancy built into the equation. Give me that, and a smaller storage area elsewhere on the ship, just in case. I hate having anything at all centralized to a single area. I want to spread everything out all over. Decentralized secure depositories in case of ship damage, power failures or other unforeseen mishaps.”

  “Makes sense, ship could always take damage or suffer some sort of a failure.”

  “Also, and this may sound odd to you, but I would like the redhead samples spread out randomly into each tray. Maybe it is narcissistic, but I’d like to preclude we gingers from ever going the way of extinction. We are taking every precaution, but decentralization of the samples will serve as a fail safe.”

  “Understood. As you say, I’ll have a proposal for you by Monday.” Walt nodded his head and left Simon alone to process the changed in dynamics that had just occurred.

  Chapter Eleven: on the edge of Oblivion

  “I hate this. This is nothing like the simulator or the training.” David Rush, a hard worker but a bit skittish around heights.

  “Just don’t look down, we have a lot of work to do.” Replied an electronically modified voi
ce through the radio in David’s helmet.

  “How do you know it’s down? Maybe it is up, or sideways, or backwards? There is no real way to know!” David peered out into the darkened expanse away from the permanent eclipse of the blocked sun.

  “Down is where your feet are, up is where your head is, same as always. Now shut up and help me with this one.”

  The two men perched on the massive frame of the half finished Tehom One spacecraft. Beyond the ship a few floating supply docks and cargo paddocks which were dwarfed by the massive structure of the vessel. David Rush and Reggie Kennedy found themselves perched on the edge of oblivion, virtually alone in the vastness of space. Around them buzzed small probes and tool receptacles that followed them as they traversed the frame, hand fitting both the Plutonium 238 and Helium 3 reactors. Four of each had been specially built and requisitioned to provide a renewable and permanent power source to the craft.

  The reactors were deceptively similar in size externally; internally their mechanisms were completely foreign to one another. Only the external ports remained the same so that they would be standardized and could be moved to replace another unit easily. Each reactor a self contained unit protected by six inches of shielding, protecting both the delicate components inside and the people outside who were to live and work around them from radiation.

  The fitting of the reactors remained to be one of the few nail biting pieces of the puzzle. No one from the consortium of scientists and politicians trusted the immense value of the eight reactors to unmanned drones and builder robotics controlled from a string of satellites.

  The first reactor slid directly into place, the tolerances were so perfectly measured that the bronze casing took no modification or tooling. One by one the first four slid into their respective places, across the aft section of the ship. Reggie tested each connection twice and plugged the massive cables into each port and secured the connection with a massive wrench that looked like it came off an oil platform.