Colony Wars 1: War Never Ends

Chapter Ten - The Shipyard

19th April 2076 – 1st Galactic Step

ESA Ariane-12 Space Shuttle

Chateau Airstrip

New Dawn City

Earth

Solar System

The inside of the shuttle craft was like nothing that Lara had seen before, all the surfaces were a gleaming white colour and the control units had old fashioned toggle buttons instead of touch screen displays. Viktor had told her that the shuttle had been built almost fifty years ago, by a European nation with very little funding and technological prowess. Yet the shuttle looked just so clean and inviting, Lara thought that despite all its construction woes, the Ariane-12 shuttle was quite possibly the prettiest thing she had ever seen.

Lara was wearing one of the thick white environmental space suits, because today was going to be the day that she was going to go into space. Apparently, she was going to be the youngest person to ever leave the Earth's atmosphere according to the remaining historical records. Lara was quite apprehensive about the journey into space, she reached up and pulled a few strands of her now clean brown hair down and began to nibble on the lock nervously.

"Stop that," Viktor said, slapping the back of her hand gently. Viktor sat down next to her and passed her a thick bowl like helmet. "Put this on, while I check over your suit's seals and air recyclers."

Lara nodded mutely at the man who had taken her on as his personal apprentice; she took hold of the domed lid and popped it on over her head. Viktor then proceeded to check each of the suits seals and then he ran his long fingers over the control panel to pressurise the suit. Lara heard the rushing hiss of air fill her space suit and a cool fresh tasting blast of oxygen filled her lungs.

A buzzing crackling sound filled her ears and a new voice suddenly started talking in her ear about altitude variances, which made absolutely no sense to her whatsoever. Then another voice said the launch time would be in t-minus three minutes.

Lara was suddenly startled about just how little time she had left to prepare herself. Viktor had taken her to a massive partially submerged cave within the Pomona facility to show her what moving around in space would be like, he had stuffed her into a suit like the one she was wearing now and told her to go walk around under the water. She had not liked it at first, the fear of drowning was too much for her to handle until she eventually discovered that there was no way she could possibly run out of air if she was inside the suit. Her movements in the lake had felt slow and sluggish, which was according to Viktor exactly how they would be in space, apart from something called velocity distribution, which Lara just did not understand.

The voice returned in her ear suddenly and it was counting down from ten, which panicked Lara immensely. She looked at Viktor who was now in his suit and strapped down into his seat, she looked down suddenly to check her seatbelt and saw that he must have done hers up at some point earlier while she was daydreaming about the lake.

The voice got to zero and Lara felt the pressure crush down upon her tiny frame, forcing her awkwardly into her padded chair. Spots started dancing before her eyes due to the shifting air density and the edges of her vision darkened considerably. She felt tears start to roll down her face and her throat felt so very dry.

She tried to focus on something, anything to help her forget about what was going on around her and Lara found herself seeing a smiling picture of her brother Toby. He had been so excited to hear that his sister was going into space, and he told her that he wished that he could come too. Toby's scrawny body had gone through a huge transformation in the last six weeks, he had put on pounds of muscle and his arms had thickened considerably, all thanks to Lance's cadet training program.