Mermaid Pirate Dispatch

I took a slow but deep breath and eyed Jon steadily. “Don’t you think you should at least perform some low power tests? I feel like this is something that could benefit from a more… measured approach.”

He looked up at me over his thick rimmed bottle-cap lenses. “Nah. I’ve got a good feeling about it. And every other time I’ve gone with my gut everything has gone fine.” He went head down in an open cavity of his latest creation.

“What about that glider you built in high school?”

“Those were my learning days,” Jon spat quickly, laughing to himself. His muffled voice echoed around inside his creation. “That’s when I honed my skills. That’s why I can just eyeball things now. Remember that two stage rocket I sent to orbit five years ago? That was all intuition baby, not a single test flight.”

“Sure, but that’s rocketry. It’s a tough thing to get right, but it’s also been studied to death and you’ve seen a hundred launches. I can see how you could get that right first try. Plus there are a lot of off-the-shelf parts for it…”

He pulled out again and glared at me. “It was a custom chemical rocket man. You know how hard those are to get right first try? I think I’m the first person in history to get a chemical rocket into orbit without ever test-firing the system before launch.” He smiled and closed the panel he had opened, then walked over to a flat dolly and carefully sat on it before reclining and lying down. He used his feet to maneuver to the underbelly of the craft opposite where I stood.

I paced around nervously. “And tell me again what you plan to do with this thing on its maiden flight? You said this is some kind of rocket plane?”

His head appeared on my side of the vehicle and he looked up at me. A hand popped up to adjust his glasses. “Rocket plane? Do you even hear yourself right now?” He shook his head and slid back underneath. “It’s an orbital class space plane with an electric propulsion drive and a hyperdimensional spatial distortion field generator. I’m generating instantaneous near-infinite on-demand power with an antimatter-matter annihilator. This sucker is gonna tear through the atmosphere at speeds that would melt a tungsten bullet and once I’m in a vacuum I’ll be able to literally warp space. I’ll be generating a distortion field big enough to get from here to Alpha Centauri in about a day, give or take a few hours.”

I had stopped pacing and I stared at his creation. “Are you serious? And you’ve never even turned it on?”

He didn’t say anything, but I swore I could hear him shrug.

“Where the heck are you getting antimatter? Isn’t that stuff incredibly hard to make and store?”

His curly brown hair popped out again followed by the rest of his smug smile. “That’s the best part,” he said. “I don’t have to generate it here on earth. It’s too dangerous. So the generator is a dual operation system with a fusion reactor that runs in the primary annihilation chamber. I’ll run off fusion to get to orbit, then I can generate all the antimatter I need once I’m in the near-vacuum of space.” He was beaming like a kid who had just found his mommy’s chocolate stash.

“Fusion?” I cried. “Nobody has been able to sustain a productive fusion reaction outside of massive research labs, and they’ve been trying for decades! Are you saying you have a working fusion reactor in this little ship of yours?” It wasn’t exactly small, much larger than a Cessna or even a twin engine Beechcraft, but not much larger. It was sleek and it looked like something straight out of a science fiction movie, but it was way too small to contain a working fusion reactor.

He slid back out slowly this time, clicking his tongue. “They seem easy enough,” he said. “It’s just magnetic fields to contain a bit of plasma. Not that big of a deal. I’m pretty sure I can prime a little capacitor bank that’ll discharge to get the whole thing running, then the fields can be powered by the output of the generator with plenty left over for the electromagnetic propulsion drive.” He squinted at me. “What sounds so hard about that?”

I stared at him with wide, dry eyes. “Jon, please, I’m begging you. Start small. Test the fusion reactor on some kind of low setting. Move on to seeing how much thrust your engine produces. Do this scientifically. Please.”

He shook his head and disappeared again. “Nope,” he said. “I’ve got a good mind for numbers. I’m pretty sure if I don’t kick it on at full power nothing will work. It really is all or nothing on this one buddy. Don’t worry. I’ve got this.”

I sighed. “Well,” I said. “I’m sticking around, just in case.”

Jon was quiet for a moment. “Why?” he asked. “If it goes south, nobody in a ten mile radius will survive. I didn’t ask you to come out in the first place. You came running when I told you I was launching today, and since you can’t talk me out of it I see no reason for you to stay.”

I felt my shoulders slump on their own. I hated when he was right. “I’m staying,” I said stubbornly.

He rolled out from under the craft on the other side and grunted as he got to his feet. He clapped his hands. “Well, suit yourself.” He walked over to a workbench where he emptied a few tools out of his pockets onto the pocked wooden surface. “Maybe you want to come along?” he asked. “It’s got two seats.”

“Heck no!” I responded immediately, but right away I realized it was a knee-jerk reaction. Why not?

Jon shrugged and smiled at me. “Well, have it your way. I’ll see you…” he paused and thought. “Actually I’m not really sure when I’ll see you. I’m pretty sure Einstein’s time dilation principles will still apply, so it’s possible I’ll see you in a few years, or decades. I actually have no idea.” He laughed. It was a strange laugh, one I’d never heard from him before. Almost as though he was laughing at the world he wanted so desperately to leave behind.

Why wasn’t I volunteering to go with him? I wouldn’t survive if his craft failed immediately, and if it made it off the ground and out of the hangar where he’d built it, there was a good chance it would survive the rest of his testing anyhow. But instead of repealing the rejection of his offer, I just sad, “what is your planned route?”

He shrugged and climbed up onto the wing near the open cockpit. “Probably nothing too fancy at first, so in reality the time offset should be pretty minimal. But who knows? I might visit Mars, then the moons of Jupiter, then I might decide Alpha Centauri sounds interesting.” He smiled. “I really don’t know.”

I let out a breath I’d been holding in too long and shook my head. “Safe travels buddy,” I said.

He nodded at me and climbed into the cockpit. The craft had a low, wide stance with a side-by-side dual seat cockpit layout. He turned around to face between the seats and checked on a few things. “I’ve got a space suit in case I want to get out and explore,” he said. “And I’m bringing a solar charging array for the capacitor bank in case I need to jump start the fusion reactor. I think I’m all good.”

“Do you have air?” I asked with a hint of sarcasm.

He furrowed his brow and looked around. After a second he dropped his head and shook it. “Oh,” he said. “Very funny. Of course I have air. I have a whole carbon dioxide scrubber system, water and waste recycler, and a decent supply of fresh water and food.”

“Wow,” I said, genuinely impressed. “You’re really planning on getting out there and exploring, huh?”

Jon smiled proudly. “Yup. Sure you don’t want to come?”

I snorted a burst of air and shook my head. “Have fun. See you whenever.”

He shrugged one last time, waved, and pressed a button. There was a sharp whine that stabbed the air around me and made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. I smelled a burst of ozone just as the hatch began to lower over my friend. The glass had a shimmering golden coating of some kind. He hadn’t been kidding about reaching speeds that would melt tungsten in the atmosphere. I knew he had studied high temperature materials science in college before dropping out of school, but whatever he had going on here defied my limited understanding.

A super low frequency rumble, inaudible but powerful, shook the ground as the craft’s landing gear lifted up into its body, folding like stork legs while the body of the vehicle hovered in place. I gasped and took a step back, my heart pumping wildly in my chest. By all accounts, this was impossible with 2030 technology, and it was still only 2028. Heck, the rest of the scientific community would probably be maintaining that this kind of propulsion technology was impossible for the next few decades unless Jon decided to make his craft and tech public.

I glanced at the hangar doors, which were still closed, and wondered if I should go open them. Right on cue, an electric motor spun up and the two massive doors grumbled and twanged their way open, rattling and shaking as they slowly rolled away from each other. I shook my head. The guy had even put a garage door opener in the thing.

Silently the vehicle glided toward the night air outside the stuffy hangar. Even piles of sawdust on the floor were undisturbed as the craft floated. It reminded me of magnets moving along superconducting tracks without making any contact with the liquid-nitrogen cooled surfaces. Except in this case, there was no off gassing from supercooled materials, just an unearthly floating mass.

Once it was outside the hangar I jogged over for a closer look as its low hum gathered additional tones that were barely registering in my ears but violently shaking my ribcage. In a flash the craft seemed to disappear. I was knocked off my feet by a blast of air and a sonic boom. I instinctively grabbed my ears and felt the wet warmth of blood against my palms. A faintly glowing trail traced out a sweeping, arcing path away from the hangar into the night’s sky.

Breathless and with an ear-splitting ringing in my head, I struggled to my feet and walked back into the hangar, kicking myself for staying behind.

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