Expedition

Fiction: Two starpilots enter the unknown in search of mysterious cargo.

"You're late," the pilot sniped.

"I was born late," replied Hank with a broad smile. 

"Giving your mother trouble even then..." She clicked her tongue.

"Nah, I was a good boy. Used my first paycheck to get her faulty Beta chip replaced. And you thought you knew everything about me."

"No way, champ," replied Delilah, leaning against the craft that was to take them to that distant blue-green planet. "Your still waters run deep. I'm sure there's plenty about you I don't know."

"We don't know much about this Terra run," grumbled Hank, as they climbed into the pilot seats and secured the doors. "Unless you're holding out on me."

"Code Name LK. Commissioned by X-Industries, retrieve bio specimens—"

"Must be a helluva lot we’re hauling back!" exclaimed Hank, jerking a thumb back to the capacious cargo module behind them.

"—direct assignment from the CEO," she continued, used to ignoring his interruptions.

"Chesky? That guy with the kyawthuite pinky ring who’s hyping a new colony?"

"Safety check, Novak," she said dryly, ignoring the Metawire gossip field her co-pilot was heading for.

Delilah flipped switches, checked screens, listened carefully. Sometimes, you need to listen to a ship to know its rhythm, to feel its pulse in the vibration of the hull. That's how she had known something was wrong with the Icarus, shouted for the crew to bail. She’d known the bones of that old ship, every hum and chirp, when it was right and smooth, and when it was dangerously wrong. 

Boomerang II was a new vessel, only taken out on test runs. Delilah shifted her lean, muscular frame in the seat, not quite at ease. Checking sensors, listening again.

“I think this hauler’s gonna be okay.”

“Better be,” said Hank, logging into the console with a hopeful grin. “I’ve got a date next week.”

“Lola? I thought she ditched you for that burly stevedore.”

She regretted her jab, when she saw it hit home. She liked throwing punches around with Hank, but not landing them. A shadow of sadness doused his countenance for a moment, then flickered away. She let him change the subject.

“You know why they called it this, though?” 

“Boomerang? Because it’s made to come back, round trip, no refueling. Took the Manatee cargo hauler and spliced on the X-In regenerative fuel system.”

“Yeah, but we’re not piloting Boomerang, this is Boo-II. Because there was a Boo before this, thirty years ago.”

Delilah tensed, closed her eyes. She remembered the names: Cooper, Chen, Silva, Masri, Joshi. Carved in the black granite memorial plaque at the ASM. All hands lost on a Terra run just like this.

She took a deep breath and listened to the ambient sounds of the spacecraft. It was okay. It was going to be okay.

“Never lost a ship yet,” she said, snapping her eyes open, “Never lost any crew. Just a load of skunk melons off an air-tuk when I was fifteen, and that probably was on purpose.”

Hank chuckled as the pilot signaled the control station with a hand motion and a pulse of lights. They got the all-clear. The vast door of the loading bay heaved open, and the stars spread out before them, boundless, welcoming, familiar. 

“Time to fly.” Delilah breathed out the words like a prayer.

“Right beside you,” said Hank, as he always did.

She was his senior by seven years. It was enough longer that she remembered the five-man crews on cargo runs, the long journeys through space. Now things were faster, streamlined. A ship like this one could run on its own, return on its own in an ideal world. But things aren’t ideal, so a crew of two was the standard. One in case of machine malfunction, and another in case something went wrong with the human looking after the machine.

Delilah and Hank were paid well to babysit capable cargo ships, on the off chance that something went wrong. They had a lot of time together.

“Okay, so I checked out the Archive about this LK code for the mission, and I think I’ve got it,” announced Hank.

She gave him the skeptical sideways glance again.

“Archive? Who uses that? They never update it.”

“Exactly!” he said emphatically. “That’s why it’s so good. It’s been locked down. No one can rewrite history. Everything there is real. I get why you use the ColonyNet. You do science, and you need the latest, because that’s always changing. But for history, Archive is the way.”

“What’ve you got?” she asked.

He tapped the Alltdisc on his wrist, and a hologram emerged. It was an oval, with crimson, green, orange and gold geometric patterns, and some kind of animal form obscured by the letters LK. He was beaming. Delilah’s face was deadpan, unimpressed.

“Automotive decal, circa 2026,” he announced in his most dignified admiral-giving-a-speech voice. “Representing the equatorial island nation of Sri Lanka.”

“Nice. LK can mean a lot of things. Lake. Lion King. Laister-Kauffman. Lenny Kravitz…”

“Who?”

“History. Check your precious Archive.”

“Remember our health screenings for this mission, the inoculations?” he pressed on, bringing up another hologram. “They were worried about malaria and rat lungworm. Tropical diseases. We have desiccants for the cargo hold. That’s gotta mean someplace warm and rainy.”

“We’ll know soon enough,” said Deliah, stretching her lean body as much as the tight quarters of the cockpit allowed. “Records unseal when we approach the destination.”

They settled in for the ride, talking, resting. Hank napped. Delilah stayed vigilant as they passed the space detritus that Hank lamented as the debris of failed civilizations. Just as well he didn’t see it. A grander view awaited, as they neared the journey’s end.

She nudged him and he opened his eyes.

“Wow. Oh, wow,” said the copilot.

Before them, the beautiful planet floated like a suspended cabochon, sapphire blue with swirls of white, patches of rust and green. The ancestral homelands. Delilah had been there once, as a cadet. It was a mission to install a radiation monitor for the Pancolonial Science Foundation. She remembered landing roughly in a semi-arid desert with crumbled concrete, eyeless buildings and throttling vines. There were packs of wild dogs, wary and wiry—so different from the plush and gentle pet foxes back home. She’d been glad to leave Terra and get back to the comfort and safety of the Tiāntáng Colony. 

This time was different. She was a pilot, not a kid. They were on a corporate haul, not a science expedition. And it was just her and Hank. She noticed him glancing over wistfully as she stretched. It wasn’t the first time.

“I’m a married woman, Hank,” she reminded him.

“Well, I know, lucky guy,” he said awkwardly. 

“He is. And you deserve better than Lola. She’s got a black hole in her heart that’s going to devour anyone who gets too close. Poor stevedore. Move on, champ.”

“Okay. Yeah,” he said, internalizing this rare bit of personal advice from Deliah, absorbing it, venturing for a little more. “How do you make it work, when you spend so much time apart?”

“Me and Lee? We’re always together,” she said, tapping her heart. “A million miles, that’s just space.”

“Space…” murmured Hank.

“Here we go,” said Deliah, as the center console popped open and the projection cylinder emerged.

A pre-recorded hologram appeared of a well-preserved man of indeterminate middle age, glossy side-swept hair dyed dark against a taut, pale face with a familiar thin-lipped smile. He held a tumbler in his hand, his bejeweled pinky ring gleaming.

“Greetings to the crew of the Boo-II. What’s new with you?” he intoned.

Hank practically shrieked, “It’s him! O Lord Jesus Krishna, it’s Chesky!”

“Pipe down,” scolded the pilot, eyes and ears fixed on the hologram to glean the mission details.

“I’m sure you are wondering where on Earth you are going, and what vital resource you are bringing back for X-Industries. The landing coordinates will soon be visible on your instrument panel displays, along with the acquisition target for Mission LK. Your onboard X-In drones can help fetch the cargo for you. Radiation and temperatures for this region are unknown. Good luck with that. By the way, whatever Cargolink is paying you for this run, multiply that by ten and that’s your bonus - from me - for returning home with what I want. Prepare to be rich. Not as rich as I am, but better off than you are.”

The recorded hologram took a sip from the straw, kyawthuite gem sparkling on his pinky finger. 

“Ta-ta! And ta.”

The image of Chesky was enveloped in a swirl of digitally generated rocket exhaust plume and replaced with the image of a smoothie cup tilting back and forth.

“X-Industries. Fuel your ride, fuel your body,” chimed the tagline. 

The projector receded back into the console.

“He’s so awful… he’s so great,” said Hank in breathless confusion.

“We have a big payday coming,” said Delilah. 

Her mind was trained to focus on the present, but for a moment it drifted to leaving her job, taking a ‘vacation’ with Lee for a year, and coming back with a baby. Fertility treatments and surrogacy were forbidden at Tiāntáng but allowed at Fólkvangr. There was a brisk, secretive intercolonial business resulting in happy couples returning to Tiāntáng as happy families… but it cost plenty. 

She pushed the thought aside and deftly flicked the instrument panel, bringing the mission console briefing open.  The final instructions were now unlocked.

A disembodied voice, smoother and calmer than Chesky’s, filled the cockpit, echoing the words that appeared on the screen.

“Crew of the Boomerang Two, you are scheduled to land the craft at Latitude: 19.4428 Longitude: -155.2340. Your job is to fill the cargo hold with live lilikoi. Dead lilikoi will be accepted, but will diminish the payment from X-Industries to Cargolink by 66 percent, per the contract.”

“We’re zookeepers?” muttered the pilot, more to herself than to Hank.

She imagined these lilikoi creatures like wild dogs, fierce and fragile, each one that died in the hold diminishing her chance of bringing life forth herself, as the bankroll dwindled.

Hank was laughing and clutching his stomach, tears at the corner of his eyes. He tried to speak, but had to compose himself.

“Fruit. It’s fruit for his smoothies. Oh, man, this is so ridiculous it has to be true.”

“X-In does Pharma,” Delilah countered. “Before synthtech, 90% of medicines came from plants. We could be saving lives.”

The conversation was slammed to oblivion as the spacecraft entered the planet’s atmosphere. An orange glow subsumed the cargo ship, and the pilots were pressed back into their seats. Despite the simulator practice, Hank was overwhelmed by the tangerine fire consuming his view, the intense pressure on his chest. Entering an atmosphere this thick, a gravity well this large, was nothing like docking with a space station.

‘Breathe, champ,’ Delilah thought.

The fireglow of atmospheric entry subsided, and the world revealed itself below, ancient and yet new, familiar and alien—the planet once known as Earth.
“Not Lanka,” admitted Hank. “But we’ve completely missed the continents. It’s just blue down there.”

“Pacific Ocean,” said Delilah, summoning a map. “Zoom in. Closer. Largest island, targeted coordinates for mission.”

“Are those…?” 

“Volcanoes. Active.”

The younger pilot gave a clenched smile and a nod. Grade school films flashed in his mind. Radiation sickness, raging fires, haunted shells of massive cities. Uninhabitable planet. And now these mountains, bleeding fire.

No lava consumed them as they touched down. Landing was perfect, radiation levels safe, oxygen good. Beside them, they found a shadow image of their own ship, destroyed.

“Boomerang,” said Hank with reverence as he walked up to the skeletal hull, dark with ash and green with vines. “This is where they died.”

The older pilot surveyed the bones of the ship as they lay resting on the black earth, dissolving into it.

“It didn’t crash. The landing was good. It was stripped for parts, then rusted out.”

She didn’t look at her co-pilot’s face. That privacy gave him a moment to hide the fear. 

“Let’s go,” she said, setting her scanner for dense vegetation. “We have a mission.”

They headed down the slope, into the tropical forest and towards the sea.

---

Hank was the first to spot the village at the foot of the mountain. Under Delilah’s orders, the pilots approached, weapons ready but not brandished. As the sky darkened, a lone star appeared above, then a companion. A torch flickered to life in the village ahead, then another and another. When the pilots emerged from the brush into a clearing of beaten earth, they were met by a crowd of people, all ages, perhaps five hundred. The villagers were dressed in bark cloth and plaited leaves, save for one tall, gray haired man who wore an old space suit as a ceremonial cape across his shoulders. 

Hank stood dumbfounded. Delilah saluted, and Hank quickly followed suit. The tall man raised a hand in greeting and spoke in a calm, gravelly voice. “We saw your ship come down to the land. Come. Rest. Eat.”

As they sat together near the firepit, Kupa, the last remaining elder from the sky, spoke to the strangers with keen attention, talking about old times and far off places. 

“What happened to the others, Cooper?” asked Delilah.

“Two went with the traders from Maui, live there now. Another passed long ago The ocean took Silva. Try to save his daughter’s fella, but no can.” 

The elder nodded across the firelight to a young woman with golden skin and hair like a curtain of silk, wrists bedecked with fragrant bracelets of plumeria.  The young pilot’s eyes caught hers and she smiled at him. Hank smiled back, glad the firelight hid his flushed face. 

Kupa looked at the two of them, thoughtfully, appraising Hank, then looking back to Silva’s daughter and the two children beside her. 

“Leilani, take the stranger to the mala and he will help you bring lilikoi and kalo for the sky woman to see.”

Leilana stood gracefully in one fluid movement, motioning for the children to stay. Hank rose and joined her. The moon curved above, casting silvery light. The fragrance of the plumeria wafted on the warm air. The village voices rose in song from the clearing, growing fainter as the two walked to the kitchen garden.

---

“Safe travels,” said Hank, as Delilah stood by the Boo-2 some time later. Her hull was now loaded with fruit by a few drones and the many hands of the village. 

“Cargolink won’t give your pay to the charity fund if you desert the mission. And they’ll send someone after you. And if it gets out that part of Terra is habitable, what happens to this place, these people?” 

“This was a hellhole, dangerous. Diseases, radiation. I didn’t make it,” offered Hank.

Dalilah contemplated the lie, weighed it. A tiny saffron-colored bird flitted, brushed Delilah’s midriff and flew off. Leilani let go of Hank’s hand so she could raise both towards Delilah’s belly in reverence. Delilah felt a flutter in her abdomen, like the bird’s wing still flitting. She took a deep breath.

“Time to fly,” said Daliah, stepping up into the craft.

“Right beside you,” said Hank quietly, stepping away as the spacecraft door sealed the lone returning pilot into her cockpit. He reached for Leilani’s hand, gently grasping at the providence of time and space.

---

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