Fear and Aggression by Dane Bagley Read Free Book Online

have any craters, but rather lines of mountain ranges. They
looked like the swirls on the top of a large piece of a boxed
chocolate. Though officially it, like its planet, had a large
technical name with letters and numbers like all of the heavenly
bodies discovered, it was lovingly referred to as the dark
chocolate moon by everyone on the space station. The planet had a
pale green appearance with white cloud like whorls. However,
depending on its orientation relative to the distant star it was
orbiting, it sometimes had a lighter yellow or darker blue hue. So,
throughout the station’s two-hour rotation, the scene through one’s
window would change from views of the moon, to views of the planet
with a glimpse of its star, to a full, spellbinding star-scape
against a pitch black sky. It was breathtaking, to say the
least.
    Coming around the
corridor, one of the civilian girls was walking in the direction
towards Steve. He had noticed her around a couple of times before,
as she was very beautiful. She had long, curly, red hair, and
strikingly blue eyes. Her head was slightly down, and she was
looking away from him, so he looked directly at her nametag—Tammy
Rogers, Medical and Research. She looked up and over at Steve, and
smiled as they passed. She was even prettier than he
thought. I wonder if it’s too late to
change my mind about Mike; Tammy Rogers would make a perfect
handpicked member of my crew , he joked to himself as he headed to his
quarters.
    Captain’s quarters were tiny, but single
occupancy, rather than dual occupancy like the lower-ranked
quarters. It consisted of a fold-down bed that doubled as a desk, a
couple of drawers, and a tiny closet. With the bed up, it was
conceivable to change one’s clothes, but not comfortably. With the
bed up, the desk revealed a small built-in computer. Steve sat on
his small stool and turned his computer on. He wrote an email, and
filed a couple of reports. The Internet was not complete to the
space station yet. It would still be a while before a
fully-functional, nearly instantaneous Internet would be available
in space; the technology was incomplete. Sending electrical signals
at the speed of light through fourth-dimensional space was
possible, effectively making communications from anywhere for all
intents and purposes without delay. But the ability to do this was
new, and at the moment expensive, so it was fairly limited in
capacity. The space station sent and received signals constantly,
but sometimes it would be hours before something, like an email,
got to the front of the queue. They would receive portions of the
Internet daily, and then make those pages immediately accessible on
space station computers. It was even possible to have telephone
conversations with earth, but because of bandwidth limitations, it
was not ordinarily done. The Captains were told earlier that day
that they would each be permitted one fifteen-minute phone call,
and were given a schedule for their call. As the bandwidth
increased, it was expected that every room would have a useable
phone, and instantaneous Internet, email, and television.
    After checking the latest news on the L.A.
Dodgers, Steve changed into his formal Captain’s attire, and headed
out to Captain’s dining for dinner. Showing up a little early, and
expecting to be the first there, he was taken aback by seeing,
already seated, Kenny Spearman and another man whom he was not
familiar with. He headed towards the table and before he knew it,
the two men stood to attention and saluted him.
    “ Captain Jenners, this is
James Smith,” spoke Kenny.
    “ Pleased to meet you,
Captain Jenners,” replied James. James was a thirty-two-year-old
black man. He had moderately dark skin, very short hair, and two
small vertical scars on his left check. His head was somewhat big
and long, and he had a very sober expression on his face. Kenny, on
the other hand, had a warmer expression on his face. Kenny had
light brown, curly hair that was