Hidden Treasures Of Science Fiction: Traveller!

Popular science fiction works tend to fall into two broad camps: Those that focus mostly on exploration stories, such as in Star Trek's various incarnations, which deal with venturing into the unknown. Then there are battle stories championed by Star Wars and its many imitators, which deal with conflicts and wars, either overt or covert, fought between various factions in a fantastic setting.

But there is a third, less often seen type of science fiction adventure, which the Traveller tabletop RPG champions so well: the scifi road trip.

Like most freeform tabletop RPGs, Traveller can encompass almost any type of story or activity within its setting. It all depends on tastes of the GM and players. But the game is set up almost always the same kind of overall structure: the player characters travel around in small, often beat-up starships, visiting planets within a gigantic interstellar civilization called the Imperium, with no nobler intention than earning a living and just seeing the sights.

They may be merchants, trying to stay one step ahead of the mortgage on their 30-year old merhcant trader. They may be enjoying retirement cruising around in one of the scout service's old surplus starships. They be ex-military bouncing from one mercenary contract to another. They may be scoundrels or refugees or agents fleeing their past. But no matter how you slice it, Traveller campaigns tend to feel like the far future equivalent of setting off on an open highway with a whole continent ahead of you. But instead of a beat-up chevrolet and untold miles of asphalt, you have a worn-down scout/courier starship and the thirty thousand star systems of Charted Space.

Traveller is definitely a working man's, middle-class, vision of science fiction. There is great emphasis in the game on just making a living, including an elaborate system on working out trade and money-making cargoes, and the like. Granted, the characters make a living in what to us seems a very exotic way, hopping from star system to star system, but they need not engage in anything loftier than the pursuit of the Imperial credit if they don't want to. The characters are also not great movers and shakers, and probably won't be determining the destiny of the galaxy. And they most likely won't be going anywhere that hasn't already been charted and explored at least cursorily by someone else. But its new to them and what happens along the way is important to the people that they meet. Like any good road trip, its about the experience and personal discovery, and that's what has always helped to make Traveller such a rewarding RPG to play.

The game has gone through many different revisions and updates since its introduction in 1977 by Game Designers' Workshop (GDW.) The original incarnation of the game, what's now called "classic" Traveller, ruled for the first ten years. It was set in the 57th century, when explored space was dominated by the 11,000-world Third Imperium and its surrounding states. In 1987 GDW updated both the game mechanics and the background, called MegaTraveller as the Imperium shattered into more than a dozen warring states after the assassination of the Emperor. In the early 90s, GDW introduced a new update, Traveller: The New Era, which took place seventy years later as interstellar civilization tried to recover from the apocalyptic war that ultimately resulted from the shattering of the Third Imperium.

Unfortunately, GDW suffered the fate of many game companies of that time as the RPG market imploded. The license was picked up by STEVE JACKSON GAMES and was released as GURPS Traveller, which took place in an 'alternate' timeline where the Third Imperium never disintegrated. The games' original designers tried to reboot the game on their own, with a version called Traveller 4 or more simply T4. There has also been a D20 version.

Today, Traveller lives on at MONGOOSE PUBLISHING and is backed by many of its original creators. The game's historical clock has been set back to the beginning year of Classic Traveller, with the future of its fictional universe wide open. Steve Jackson Games also continues to support its own version of the game.

One aspect of Traveller's game mechanics I always really enjoyed was its character creation. It was way ahead of its time in creating nuanced, interesting player characters, when most other games had PCs who were mostly collections of basic stats and an alignment.

InTraveller you don't just create a character, you create a career for him or her. After rolling base attributes, you 'enroll' him in a chosen job--soldier, starman, merchant, etc. Then you work the character through year by year, gaining skills, rank, and benefits. The more years your character goes through before mustering out, the more skilled he will be, but the older he will be as well, and may be subject to the dreaded aging rolls, that could decrease strength or endurance or such. Thus, most characters don't enter the game as snot-nosed young punks, but people in their thirties or forties (sometimes older) with a lot of life experience and stories already behind them that the GM and player can draw upon for inspiration in the game.

Another very cool aspect of the game, at least for a techno-nerd like me, is its vehicle and starship design systems. Its changed somewhat from version to version, but allows one to create almost any kind of customized, detailed vehicle for use within a campaign. One can design anything from a basic gas-powered motorcycle up through a 500,000-ton interstellar battleship. Many a fan website of the game is overflowing with such original designs.

The game's setting is one of the most highly detailed ever created, either for a science fiction setting or an RPG universe. In fact, in the late 80s, it purportedly surpassed both Star Trek and Star Wars in terms of sheer amount of written material created for it (of course in the years since both those franchises have catapulted ahead again.) Just check out the TRAVELLER WIKI to get a taste for its expansive universe.

The Third Imperium is a very wide and diverse place to explore, with a very classic space-opera feel to it. Humans and human variants dominate explored space, thanks to a mysterious race of 'Ancients' who trasported prehistoric humans from Earth to dozens of different worlds to use as slave labor (a plot point also used by the Stargate franchise years later.) In fact, two of these 'other' human races beat us Earthers into interstellar space by thousands of years.

There are also major non-human races, such as the Aslan, the Hivers, and the K'Kree; and hundreds of 'minor' races who never achieved interstellar flight on their own. In fact, one of Traveller's great strengths as far as its background goes is the amazing amount of detail and verisimilitude it gives its alien races. They all come across as believable.

But despite being a classic-type space opera, the game's setting is also very nuts-and-bolts when it comes to its technological details. The idea of detailed Tech Levels on OV originated with Traveller (but it also has been borrowed by many others as well since), and the Imperium is made up of a huge diversity of planets at different Tech Levels, from Rennaissance-level worlds, to those equivalent to modern day Earth, to worlds with Star Wars level tech or better. Each world is allowed to develop on its own and tend to its own affairs, as long as it pays at least token tribute to the Imperium. This technological diversity, along with the huge variations in physical conditions and culture and inhabitants, creates an amazing array of possible worlds that player characters can visit, pretty much ensuring that their interstellar road trip never need be boring.

Of course, not every aspect of the game is rave-worthy. Some compromises had to be made in order to keep it accessible to the average, non-science-savvy player. For example, the Imperium and its neighbors inhabit very three-dimensional space, but all the game's star systems are mapped out on two-dimensional hex grids. I also never really liked the game's use of psionics; when I ran a Traveller campaign years ago, it turned out to be the single most unbalancing element of it.

But even so, if you have a gaming group and are getting tired of endlessly bonking orcs and hoarding gold pieces, you may want to give the interstellar adventure of Traveller a try. Its well worth the time to seek out its source material, both old and new.

Space Travel Feasibility Round-Up

In gathering articles for the main ORBITAL VECTOR site, I try to stay clear of favoritism for any particular idea. I DO try to make clear a particular technology's real-world feasibility, whether its hard science or soft science, how advanced society likely needs to be to produce it, etc.

However, that doesn't mean I think that all technologies I write about are equally probable. There are other factors besides just purely technological to overcome. Economics, politics, circumstance, location, culture, are as likely to determine if a technology becomes widely used or if it just sits on the shelves of history as a curiosity. The Segway is a perfect example. As a technology, it exceeded expectations, and fulfills its utility niche almost perfectly. However, it was cultural and economic factors--basically the fear of lawsuits--that killed its wide-spread use.

With all that in mind, I thought I'd give my own personal views of the likelihood of various Space Travel technologies I've written about so far on the main site. Just keep in mind these represent my own personal views of what will likely be developed or not based on political, economic, cultural, and other factors in the real world. Believe me, I would love to see a huge flowering of advanced space technology within the next decade, but I try to be as realistically constrained with the predictions as I could, while still assuming the world community in general continues to slowly develop space capabilities. Also, the needs and attitudes of various space-faring nations/companies/groups may change over time, so what seems likely now may also change in the future.

Each technology discussed is linked to an article explaining how it works.

CHEMICAL ROCKETS: Will probably remain the main means of obtaining orbit and maneuvering in space for at least the next half-century, if not longer. Its just too reliable and well proven a technology, and with so much infrastructure already in place to manufacture rocket components they will likely remain the cheapest option for some time to come. In the second half of the century I think they'll start slowly being replaced by other technology, but even so they will still linger for many decades.

SPACE PLANES: Also a well-proven technology, from the old X-series rocket planes to Virgin Galactic's SpaceShipOne. As Virgin Galactic gears up and actually begins running tourist flights, imitators will likely blossom from every corner, and I think the rocket/space plane will have a serious renaissance in the 2020s and beyond.

ION DRIVES: Now a proven technology, ion drives are very fuel efficient and will likely begin to slowly supplant chemical rockets as the main thrusters on deep space robes. Will likely be a routine technology by mid-century, used mostly for unmanned scientific and (hopefully) industrial payloads.

PLASMA ROCKETS: I do think old-style chemical rockets will begin turning over to these within a few decades, starting in the 2030s or 2040s; they have many of the same characteristics s chemical rockets but with much greater power. By the end of the century they will likely be the dominant space propulsion technology.

FISSION ROCKETS: Toxic radioactive exhaust will make sure this technology is never seriously used, despite its near-term feasibility and other advantages.

NUCLEAR PULSE DRIVES: Despite being actually much more dangerous than fission rockets, nuclear pulse drives have much more support among the space and scientific communities. Plus they also deliver phenomenal amounts of thrust compared to most other drives to compensate. Will likely be used for large deep-space missions in the second half of the century and beyond, perhaps even for the first interstellar probes.

SOLAR BOILER ROCKETS: Nominally a very cheap form of deep space rocket, these only become economically feasible if enough infrastructure in space exists to easily refuel them with water, which probably won't happen until the next century. But when that does happen, they will likely become the cheap transport workhorses of any emerging space culture.

SOLAR/MAGNETIC SAILS: A little too far out-there as a concept to gain a lot of real popular or political support, plus in order to turn them into decent-performance vehicles, you need to build powerful laser or particle beam facilities that could too easily be interpreted as weapons, making them a political sticking point. I foresee them being used only occasionally for certain scientific missions into the foreseeable future.

FUSION ROCKETS: Fusion has always one of the big "ifs" of science. They've been promising the big breakthrough for cheap, sustainable fusion power for half a century now, but if that will actually happen anytime soon is up for speculation. IF it comes within the next few decades, fusion rocket spacecraft may begin plying deep space sometime in the last half of the century, I'd guess. However, like with fission rockets, its radioactive exhaust will make its use infrequent at first, but as humanity moves further out into the solar system its superior power will become a premium. That likely won't happen until well into the next century, however.

ANTIMATTER DRIVES: The ultimate rockets, but the problems, technical and economic (and probably political, as antimatter can easily be turned into a weapon), involved in producing and storing antimatter means these probably won' be used in any significant way until well into the next century.

LAUNCH TOWERS: Feasible, but would probably only be seriously pursued if a space elevator proves definitively unobtainable. Even so they probably wouldn't be constructed until late in the century, after any space elevator projects fail.

SPACE ELEVATORS: With the development of carbon nanotubes, these seem definitively feasible, and there is currently a large populist push within the space and scientific community to develop one. It still unfortunately remains a little too far-out-there as an idea to get any significant funding politically, which probably won't really change for at least few decades yet. However, by the 2030s or 2040s I can see space elevator technology being seriously pursued, and the first commercial one may open in the second half of the century.

I'd love to hear other peoples' opinions. I may do another feasibility round-up of space technology (focusing on space stations and planetary exploration and such) some time in the future.

Hidden Treasures Of Science Fiction: 2010!

I'm sure some people are going to look at the title to this entry and wonder why I'm plugging next year as a "Hidden Treasure." But 2010 is actually the 1984 sequel to the critically-acclaimed science fiction masterpiece 2001: A Space Odyssey.

In my opinion, 2010 has always been unfairly overshadowed by its predecessor. While not as ground-breaking as Stanley Kubrick's work, it is still one of the most solid and thought-provoking works of science fiction put to film. Its director, Peter Hyam, made the wise decision not to try and emulate Kubrick but instead to create his own vision of the future using Clarke's sequel story.

As the title may suggest, it is nine years after the ill fated Discovery mission to Jupiter, and what happened is shrouded in mystery. Doctor Heywood Floyd (Roy Schieder, in probably his best role after Jaws) is selected to put together the American contingent of a joint American/Russian mission to the giant planet to find out what happened. And by 'Russian', I mean 'Soviet'; remember the film was made in 1984 and no one expected at the time that the USSR wasn't going to be around in the 21st Century. But watching the film nowadays, its just easier, at least for myself, to simply think of them as Russians.

The Russian-built Leonov spends two years in transit to Jupiter. As the vessel approaches, Floyd and his fellow Americans are wakened from cryosleep when the derelict Discovery is spotted abandoned but undamaged in a decaying orbit around the Jovian moon Io. The vessel is boarded and reactivated, including a befuddled and amnesiac Hal 9000. Apparently the AI has no memory of turning against the crew, and seems at least for now to be back to his old mellow, non-homicidal self.

Then both ships turn toward what everyone really came to Jupiter for: the alien Monolith. But that is only the first of many mysteries that pile up for the crew in quick succession: chlorophyll-bearing life forms are spotted on Europa; a mysterious but growing dark spot appears on Jupiter; and what might or might not be Dave Bowman is spotted on the Discovery, telling of 'something wonderful' about to happen in a few days. But if the Leonov and the Discovery is still at Jupiter when this 'something wonderful' happens, everyone aboard will die. And, oh yeah, WWIII is about to break out on Earth.

The movie takes all those plot strings and ties them together in a tight, crisp, storytelling package, and what that 'something wonderful' is at the end of the film is indeed quite a jaw-dropper. Not in the mind-bending psychedelic sort of way in the first film, but in much more visceral demonstration of just how far above humanity the aliens are.

Discounting what the insanely advanced monolith makers do, the science and space flight shown in the film is very hard-science and realistic. I especially like how it was one of the first movies to really show just how soil-your-pants scary real space travel may be for future travelers. One example is with the Leonov's fiery aerobraking maneuver to insert itself into Jupiter orbit. When we first see the interplanetary vessel, it looks bold, blocky, and impressive. But as it screams through Jupiter's outer atmosphere behind inflatable shielding, it looks like little more than a glowing dust speck against the immense horizon of the gas giant. This is intercut with shots on board, as Dr. Floyd and unnamed (but very cute!) female Russian crewmember hold onto each other in mutual terror as the ship seems ready to shake apart, even though he can't speak Russian nor she English.

And let me as a scifi technophile wax for a bit about the Leonov, one of the most smartly-designed fictional spaceships I've seen. Most futuristic spaceships are designed more to be sleek eyecandy than anything else, but the Leonov looks like an interplanetary vessel that might actually fly some day. The designers' attention to detail is apparent, from the ship's large outrigger communication dish to the twin, counter-rotating crew sections.

Also well done is the resolution of what happened to HAL 9000, and the intelligent computer's ultimate fate. His breakdown in the first film is explained, and fears of a second episode is one of the many points of tension as the story builds toward a climax, especially after he starts talking to apparent ghosts.

Perhaps one disappointment in the film is that the aliens go from unknowable enigmas in 2001, to being merely mysterious and a bit creepy here. That's inevitable as their motivation and methods become clearer in this film. I'm not giving much away by saying that they seem interested in seeding the universe with life, and that humanity (which the first movie implied were helped toward sentience by the Monoliths) was just one of their many interests along these lines.

If all this sounds like your kind of movie, go HERE for a copy of the DVD. The real 2010 is almost upon us. How better to celebrate it than by exploring an alternate version, one of thrilling space exploration, terrifying discoveries, and extraterrestrial contact?

Fuel Is Expensive (Fiction)

A recent article I read reminded me of a short story I wrote a few years ago. Fuel Is Expensive was originally published in 2006 in Tales of the Talisman Volume 2 Issue 3. Its set in the not too distant future on Mars. Image courtesy NASA.

Fuel Is Expensive
By Paul Lucas

The maser drill slipped from Sam's fingers as a thousand needles of pain sliced into her skull. She fell to her knees in a rusty cloud of Martian dust, hands clawing at her faceplate.

The words returned, so familiar now after a dozen similar attacks, whispered in her mind by a fearful voice she couldn't quite recall. Fuel is expensive, it rasped.

Jesus and Buddha, what did it mean?

"Sam?" Ken's voice in her ear, tinny with radio noise. "Sam! You okay?"

The pain ebbed, the words faded. "I...think so. It just hit me all of a sudden."

"Another migraine?"

"Yeah. A real bastard too."

"Mission Control's going to freak. Thirty billion dollars to get here and we're hurting for four dollar aspirin."

She narrowed her eyes at him, standing a dozen meters away in his bulky white EVA suit. "Thanks. Obvious irony is so much comfort right now."

"All part of the astronaut service, ma'am. But seriously, go back to the hab and lie down. EVA is dangerous enough without a brain bleed. I'll go grab Getch and meet you back there. He can look you over again."

Sam grimaced. Getch had examined her every time she'd suffered through her attacks, but always found nothing physically wrong with her. The prevailing theory was that she was having an allergic reaction to the microfine dust creeping into everything after a month on Mars' surface, but nothing had come of it so far.

Sam methodically packed away the maser permafrost drill and trundled back to the Surface Habitat Module, a grayish, inflatable dome twenty meters across, their base and living quarters since landing on the dark-soiled Chryse Planitia in Mars' Northern hemisphere three weeks ago. A hundred meters behind it squatted their lander, a bulky steely polyp against the pale blue-pink Martian sky.

She waved at Getch on the far hillrise, doing a routine check on the automated fuel plant. Drawing on the carbon dioxide in the thin Martian atmosphere and treating it with the water they mined from the Martian permafrost, they were slowly stockpiling methane fuel to use on the return trip home.

Getch waved back but was busy with a conversation with Ken on a private channel. Talking about her, no doubt.

Getch and Ken were decent enough guys. She had slept with both of them at one time or another on the nine-month trip out, even though that was technically a big regulations no-no. But on a very cramped, very dull voyage out, there was simply not much else to do. It was easy enough to loop old monitor vids of them sleeping separately to Mission Control back Earthside to cover up first one liaison, then the other. Who exactly that fooled was a matter of debate. The people at MisCon weren't idiots, after all, and could probably easily see through the ruse. But no one had said anything yet.

She stripped out of the vacc suit. It was a much lighter model than previous NASA space suits, even though this first flight to Mars was expected to encounter much heavier radiation exposure than any other manned mission. A NASA gearhead had lectured to her about some new breakthrough layer that provided superior shielding, but it always mystified her how they managed to make it so thin that she could never see it.

Maybe that was the problem. Maybe her suit's shielding was wearing away or breaking up, causing the migraines as a preliminary stage to radiation sickness. She should mention the possibility to Ken.

She grunted as the pain in her head returned.

Fuel is expensive.

The words were the strangest part of her attacks. Why did they flash through her mind every time? And who did that strange voice belong to, speaking them?

Thankfully, this migraine was proving to be much less severe than the last one.

Focusing through the dull ache, she shucked her vacuum suit's thermal layer and undersheath and put on her oversized sleeping shirt. She knew from the previous incidents that Getch would want a full physical from her and there was little sense in making things difficult by getting fully dressed and then undressed again.

The headache wasn't going away.

She really should check the vacc suit's shielding while she waited. Sam reached for the vacc suit maintenance tools beside the airlock.

A thousand rusty knives stabbed behind her eyes.

Fuel is expensive.

She screamed.

Then stopped in mid-yell, the pain suddenly gone.

Her hands felt warm and wet. She looked down. They dripped with crimson up to her elbows.

Blood? Oh, God, was she hemorrhaging?

She blinked again.

The blood vanished, her hands normal.

Fuel is expensive.

Her vision swirled as she suddenly realized the hab was gone. She stood trapped in a small, bookish apartment back on Earth. Tidy shelves, cramped furniture, and small paintings drowning on bare pastel walls.

Someone rasped her name from a nearby room.

Bright blood pooled across meticulously polished floorboards, a trail leading to the darkened doorway.

Pain again. Her teeth ground so hard she heard enamel cracking.

Darkness.

- - -

Getch with his shaggy mane of blond hair peered down at her as she blinked her eyes open, a steely-cold stethoscope lodged rudely between her breasts. "Sam?" he asked tentatively. "You okay?"

She slowly sat up, cradling her head, holding onto his arm for support. "What...what happened?"

Both men were still in their EVA suits, their helmets orphaned on the floor by the airlock. "You tell us. We found you passed out on the deck. Was it another attack?"

"Yeah. The worst one yet." She told them about it, even the vision of the blood-stained apartment, shivering as she described how real it all felt. Ken held her fingers for reassurance as Getch pulled off his EVA suit's outer armor to continue his examination. As before, he found nothing wrong with her physically.

"I'll have to run more extensive tests," he said. "But there's only so much we can do here. I'll have to consult with MisCon. Those hallucinations worry me. Maybe we can see if there might be some psychological treatment."

She grunted noncommittally. "But it didn't seem like a hallucination. It all seemed so real."

"I'm sure it did. The brain's perception of reality is pretty fluid, actually. You'd be surprised what it can be fooled into thinking is real."

For a moment, just a brief flash, the apartment she had seen earlier appeared behind Getch, its green pastel walls bright with blood. She blinked and shook her head, and it was gone. She cradled her head in her hands. "Maybe I should just get some sleep."

The mission's medic nodded. "That would probably be best, actually. I'm gonna relieve you of any further duties until we can find out what's happening."

Sam started to protest but Ken cut her off. "I think that's for the best, too. Until we know what's up with all this we can't have you risking yourself."

Outranked and outvoted. "I guess," she sighed. "Just let me know if you find anything."

"You'll be the first I tell," Getch said as the two men helped her to her bunk.

- - -

Fuel is expensive.

She woke in the darkened hab, pain lashing through her. A quick glance at the wall clock and the reddish-black glow outside the small viewport told her Mars was sliding into night. Both men slept on their bunks nearby, separated from hers by a partially-pulled curtain. The pain didn't seem so bad this time. She slowly unknotted herself and made her way to the hab's fresher to take some pills.

As soon as the recycled water in the tiny sink began running, it hit her again.
Fuel is expensive.

She blinked and blood suddenly splashed back onto her arms, redder than Martian sands. She staggered back, mouthing a scream that would not come. She was in the apartment again, the plastic handle of a large carving knife curled into her fingers.

An inferno hotter than the sun crashed through her skull. She thrashed about, her limbs thumping uselessly against the thin plastic walls.

And she remembered.

- - -

Cold stone walls framing colder metal bars. The stench of the scratchy brown toilet. Huddling for hours on a stiff bunk, hating her cell, but hating even more what lay beyond it.

Pushed around at mess. Beaten in the laundry. Humiliated in the showers. Day after day after day. How could she survive thirty more years?

Then two mysterious men came to see here. Impeccable gray suits, their voices as crisp as their attire.

"Sheila Polara?" one asked. "Geological researcher? Did a graduate thesis on primordial Earth geochemistry?"

She gaped, then nodded slowly.

"How would you like to get out of here?"

A flurry of paperwork later, and she was outside, stepping into a taxi. She bawled like a little girl, her relief at escaping those hellish walls that intense. Neither of her primly-suited escorts made any move to comfort her.

An expansive office, severe right angles everywhere. Except for the huge round man behind the fortress of a desk, smelling faintly of sour milk.

His voice was a baritone sing-song, talking to her of a new identity, of limited emancipation, of a historic space mission. She blinked at him, bewildered. But she did not care. It was not prison. She readily agreed.

Then the training. Long, long days and weeks of studying, exercising, and testing, broken occasionally by flight training, exhausting survival courses, technical seminars by the hundred. She met her crewmates, Kentaro Hale and Thomas Getch, coming from hopeless criminal situations similar to hers. The three of them were to go to Mars.

Insanity. Three convicted felons, the first humans on another planet?

The men in the suits were evasive in their explanations. But no longer cold, in pain, and hungry, she could think much more clearly than when they had first brought her from her cell. Over many weeks she eventually pieced together that it was all about the fuel.

It was expensive.

She had traded prison for something far, far worse.

She told her companions, and they all balked. No more training, no more exercises, no more seminars, nothing. She quit. Better the mess and the laundry and the showers than this.

Then their new jailers broke out the needles. And the electrodes. And looked the other way when the beatings and the rapes began. A year-long ordeal of intense hypnotherapy and torture and mind control followed. They wanted perfect astronauts, and they were going to get them no matter what.

Starving, filthy, in agony in a frigid darkened cell, she repeated a mantra to herself over and over all through that year, concentrating as best she could through the drug-induced haze.

Rote memorization was used in schools for so long because it worked so well, wearing a groove in memory paths so deep that people could remember fifty years later things like Oliver Cromwell's middle name, the atomic weight of cesium, i before e except after c. The mantra whispered to herself a thousand, thousand times was a warning she only prayed would survive to whoever or whatever she became.

She didn't remember exactly when she had stopped being Sheila the convicted murderer and started being Sam the perfect astronaut mission specialist. All the horror from that year still cast too many shadows in her memory. Perhaps she would never know.

Fuel is expensive.

One final spike of pain, and the memories crashed to a stop. Darkness reclaimed her.

- - -

Again, she woke up on the examining table with Ken and Getch very worriedly looking down on her.

"Thank God," Ken said as she blinked her eyes open. "You okay Sam? You were out nearly two hours."

She looked at her two cremates, sighed heavily and hugged herself. Everything was so clear now, so lucid, as if it was the first time she had been truly awake in months. "I remember. My husband's name was Gray Valentin. Oh God, poor Gray..."

The men exchanged worried glances. "Um, you never mentioned being married, Sam," Ken said.

She got up and slowly pulled herself to the farside of the room. She looked out the tiny viewport at the fuel processor on the nearby hillock, illuminated by work lights. What she saw confirmed all her suspicions. Bastards.

"Fuel is expensive," she whispered. She had expected to be hit by a wave of agony, but nothing. "My own warning from a lifetime ago. But that's only half the sentence."

Ken walked over to her, laying his hands gently, almost fatherly, on her shoulders. "Sam, if you need to tell us anything..."

She sighed. "Five years ago--I think it was five years--I killed Gray. Stabbed him."

"Sam..."

"We had this hideous fight when he finally blurted out all his sleeping around. We screamed each other hoarse for hours. Finally he slunk away to the bedroom, saying we'd talk more the next day. As soon as I heard him snoring I shuffled into the kitchen for a knife, then went into the bedroom. It slid in so easily. I only remember the first stab, but the police told me I did it twenty-eight more times. He woke up dying, begging for his life, but it was too late."

Ken and Getch stared at her, stunned. "Um, look, Sam, remember those hallucinations you were telling us about? Maybe they're getting worse. Maybe we can get MisCon to cut the mission short. Get you back Earthside at the earliest possible window."

She barked out a short, loud laugh. "NASA already knows all about the 'hallucinations,' Ken. Its why we're all here. Don't you remember?" Her laughter stopped. Of course he didn't. "We're never going back."

She looked over her shoulder and saw their uncomprehending expressions. For them it was too soon. The mission planners must have known their carefully-wrought psychological alterations couldn't last forever, but had time-tabled everything so that the mission would be over long before it became an issue. Getch and Ken would never have a breakthrough like hers until it was too late.

Her migraines were all too transparent a ploy now. A conditioned response. A primal distraction in case one of them began skirting the truth.

She abruptly changed the subject to tomorrow's schedule and the experiments they needed to run. Getch and Ken visibly relaxed, apparently relieved that her "episode" had passed. They were careful to avoid the subject of her odd behavior the rest of the night, but still looked at her with an odd mixture of concern and a little bit of fear.

When they settled in for sleep again, Getch sat at a chair beside her cot, in case she had a relapse. A sweet gesture. But not surprisingly, he was slumped and snoring within an hour.

Getch and Ken had been her friends on this long, long journey to Mars, even her lovers a few times. She knew they cared for her, and would probably do anything to help her. She owed them.

Sam quietly slipped out of her bunk to the equipment locker. There, she dug out the maser permafrost drill she had used earlier. She lugged it toward Getch snoozing in the chair.

Getch blearily fluttered his eyes open as she approached. "Sam, what--"

Sam pointed the drill and toggled the power switch. In a heartbeat Getch's face bubbled as his head was flooded with high-powered microwaves, his skull cracking open from the hideous steam pressure within. Before Ken could do more than stir at the disturbance she walked over and turned the drill on him.

She stared at their ruined bodies for many minutes before she collapsed to her knees, body-wrenching sobs ripping through her for the rest of the night.

At dawn, Sam scrubbed herself long and hard, damning the water rationing, donned her EVA suit, and went outside to lock down all the experiments. When she returned, she reprogrammed the three mission comsats in orbit to begin transmitting, in a non-stop broadband loop, the next fifteen minutes that would be recorded by the hab's internal cameras. She made sure Ken and Getch's corpses were clearly in view.

She was sure that many sites on Earth would pick up the transmissions. By the time NASA got the comsats back under control, hopefully not for weeks thanks to her hastily-hacked programs, the truth would be out.

"It was all about fuel," she said to the cameras. "Spacecraft fuel is very expensive, especially for a manned interplanetary mission. That's why a Mars mission was talked about for decades, but nothing was ever done. Hauling the fuel out of Earth's gravity well and then lugging it all the way to Mars and back would cost many billions of dollars no one wanted to spend."

"One plan was to manufacture methane fuel out of materials on-site. But every automated probe sent to test the feasibility of that failed miserably. A chemical quirk in the Martian environment no one had foreseen prevented it.

"But budget cuts were looming, and both the public and politicians sniveled for a return to Apollo-era glory. The answer: a high-publicity Mars mission. But let's see...how to cut costs? The mission would have to carry all the fuel it would need to get out there and back. Tens of billions of dollars to haul hundreds of tons of exotic fuel on a hundred-million-mile round trip. That would break the back of the cash-strapped space program right there.

"But what if they could cut the fuel costs directly in half? Why not only supply just enough fuel to get there, but not to get back?

"Sounds good, right? Now all you have to do is sign up a crew for a one-way mission. You'd think that would be the hard part, but some wily budget genius found a way. Take people who would never be missed--say, prison lifers who happened to have the right technical backgrounds. Train them, give them new, PR-friendly IDs, and send them off.

"But of course its bad PR to have your crew morose and rebellious over their imminent deaths. So make the crew believe the lies. Through months and months of brain washing, drugs, hypnosis, torture. Drill it into their brains that they never committed any crimes, that the astronaut training program had been their life-long goals. From that moment on, to themselves and to the rest of the world, they were heroes.

"And because they were not coming back, other means of cutting the budget could be taken, like skimping on the radiation protection in EVA suits, then lying about some new non-existent breakthrough layer that we could ever find. Let your suicide crew believe that the fuel processing plant was not really just a pile of soldered-together pipes and an empty tank. Let them believe they would not die a long, lingering, painful death as the food and water and air ran out and that the people back Earthside would just cover it up with some invented system failure, then paint them as noble sacrifices to squeeze out more taxpayer dollars for the budget."

She brought the tip of the maser drill to her temple. Tears brimmed. She was thankful that she at least had given Getch and Ken the mercy of dying quickly and painlessly, when they still believed that they were heroes.

"After all, fuel is expensive..."

Her finger tensed on the toggle switch.

"...But martyrs are cheap."

Hidden Treasures Of Science Fiction: Planetes!

(I don't know why I keep putting exclamations after the titles for the 'hidden treasures', it just somehow seems appropriate.)

Planetes is a 2003 hard science fiction anime TV series that, like Cowboy Bebop before it, is quickly building up a substantial fanbase in North America mostly from sheer word of mouth about its quality. You don't even have to be an anime fan to like Planetes; its very West-friendly, features a broad cast of international characters, and like most great fiction, speaks to universal themes independent of cultural nuance.

The series begins in 2075, when an international treaty organization of space-capable nations (the US, Japan, Russia, and some European countries) have built up a substantial infrastructure both in orbit and on the Moon. The development of Helium-3 fusion, with Helium-3 mined from the Moon, has replaced the old oil economy and has led to a major financial boom among the treaty countries, allowing them to fully expand into space. Hundreds of thousands of people now live and work off-Earth.

But of course there's a downside; all that activity in space has produced a tremendous amount of debris; i.e., space junk. Today, in real life, orbital junk represents a potential hazard to space missions. Sixty plus years from now, its a primary ongoing danger to all orbital activity. So who gets the thankless job of cleaning it up?

The series focuses on a crew of these space-going garbagemen. Called 'Half Section' because they are constantly under-funded and undermanned, they go out in an outmoded shuttle and haul off rogue satellites, old space station sections, abandoned experiments, and much more for recycling.

The crew includes Hachi, the series' main character, who is a young, cynical Japanese EVA specialist. Tanabe, the female lead, is another young Japanese national and the idealistic rookie on her first day in the first episode. The pilot is American Fee Carmichael, a brash, loud chain smoker. System specialist Yuri Mihairokov rounds out the space crew, a stoic, soft-spoken Russian. There's also a small office staff, and they all get their moments to shine throughout the 26-episode run, but the focus is definitively on the crew of the garbage scow shuttle called Toybox.

Planetes shines above most other on-screen SF, both live-action and anime, Japanese or American, in two areas: depth of character and scientific accuracy. The series' great strength lies within its characters' stories and their interactions. As the series progresses, they come across as real and compelling, with both noble moments as well as petty. In other words, they act very human, and the viewer very easily can get caught up in their daily lives.

The series also gives us the most realistic representation of future space travel I've ever seen, and given all the research I've done on space tech for orbitalvector.com over the last several years, that's saying a lot. There's not a single scientific or technological gaffe that I could spot in the series. It is hard science fiction the way it should be, and reminded me in some ways of Allen Steele's Near Space series of novels, which also contemplated a very similar type of future in space. This technological accuracy greatly adds to the series' verisimilitude.

This isn't to say Planetes is perfect, however. The series' greatest weakness is its female lead, Tanabe, who is annoying in the extreme. This is especially true in the first handful of episodes where, as the rookie, the viewer is introduced to Half Section through her POV. There is nothing wrong with portraying a character as idealistic or foolish or reckless, but she takes all three to such a degree that its hard to believe the other characters would keep her around, especially after she deliberately endangers the crew more than once. In fact, of all the characters, it takes her almost until the series' very end to find any real depth. Fortunately, after the first three episodes or so, the series begins focusing less on her and much more on the its larger cast, and quickly becomes much more watchable. Planetes also relies too much on unlikely coincidences to move its plot along at times.

But if you can get past these gaffes, you're definitely in for a science fiction treat. Episodes 10, 11, ands 12 are the series highlight, in my opinion. Episode 10, focusing on Yuri's past, has an intense emotional gut-punch. Episode 11 features a wannabe space explorer from a third world country's humble program, and though he starts out as a kind of comedic character, one can't help but be moved by his underdog determination by the end. Epsiode 12 focuses on Fee and her bad habit of smoking, but her obsession turns out to be an unlikely salvation for everyone in orbit in the wake of a terrorist attack. The last third of the series focuses on a sprawling eight-episode storyline involving an expedition to Jupiter that Hachi tries to qualify for while also trying to deal with a personal crisis. This is in addition to the mounting terrorist plot to stop it. Planetes also has something very rare among not only anime, but just about all TV series as well--a pitch-perfect ending.

The complete series of Planetes is available on DVD, which you can find HERE and other outlets that sell anime products. Select episodes are also available for viewing online.