The Black Pod by Martin Wilsey

"When it began… I was just a
man."
    -- Solstice 31 Incident Investigation Testimony Transcript:
SecTech Chief Anthony Adams, Senior Security Technology Specialist
on the Ventura .
    <<<>>>
    SecTech Chief Anthony
Adams witnessed, more than experienced, the destruction of
the Ventura and
the death of the crew. He watched missile after missile detonate
its nuclear payload and never felt so much as a vibration from
inside the Black Pod.
    The pod was designed to
survive anything, even a direct strike from a nuclear bomb. It had
to survive. It held the story of the demise of the Ventura . That was the
Black Pod’s purpose. The hull was Polycarbon, and made of a fiber more than a meter thick. The internal power system was
comprised of dual dark matter reactors, and would last 200 years
without additional fuel. The internal inertial dampeners were so powerful, Adams never
felt the initial blast. There was no sense
of the three axis spin that the Black Pod was in, as its orbit decayed. It housed the Ventura’s main data store and Central Artificial
Intelligence SYstem , CAISY.
    The Chief’s eyes welled
with tears a s he watched via the external camera
array, as the plasma cannons hammered the life pods and
shuttles.
    “ Box, I need a status, ” Adams said, the words catching in his throat. At
his command, virtual computer screens opened all around the
dome. He sat in the center, in the single, massive command chair.
His fingers flashed across the huge curved control
console.
    “ The Ventura has been struck with a total
of eleven Javelin nuclear missiles,” AI~CAISY said in a cautious
tone. “Automated re-entry systems are fully functional. Grav-plates
will be activated when we are 50 kilometers
from the surface.”
    “ Caisy, how did this
happen?” There was despair in his voice. AI~CAISY knew Adams was
upset, because he didn’t use the nickname ‘Box’.
    “ There was an automated
defense grid. It had stealth satellites with weapons platforms.
There was no warning, no hail, no radio challenge of any
kind.”
    “ Did I ever tell you why I
call you ‘Box’?” Adams asked AI~CAISY.
    “ No. It’s the primary
user’s privilege to call the AI anything he likes.”
    “ Back home, commercial craft used to have a recorder called a Black Box.
It was the seed concept for the Black Pod. The same idea, except
for… me…” Adams sat in the command chair staring out at
nothing.
    “ You call me Box and I
will call you Tony.” It sounded as if the AI had decided something.
“Tony, we are now in hostile environment survival mode. Passive
sensors only. No beacons. Besides, all the external antennas have
been burned off,” Box said as the dome view changed to external
simulated static positioning. Adams could see the virtual Black Pod
in the center of the virtual screen of the dome, tumbling end over
end. Inside it, however, he felt nothing. He didn’t even have
his five-point harness buckled. He never did.
    “ What else?”
    Box continued, “We are coming in
really steep. We have less than another orbit before we are down.
Entering the atmosphere in seven minutes.”
    There was debris all
around them, moving at the same velocity and vector as they were.
“Hold off on the grav-plate and thrusters as long as possible. If
we want any choice at all where we set down, we will need all we’ve
got,” Adams said. The Black Pod was not a spaceship. It was even
less maneuverable than a lifeboat. It was an incredibly dense rock that was fitted with a large grav-plate so the builders
could move it. It could hit the planet without the grav-plate
activated and Adams would probably not even feel the impact because
of the powerful dampeners.
    As they entered the upper
atmosphere, chunks of the Ventura surrounding him began to burn up. At 50 kilometers, the thrusters halted the spin and oriented the
grav-plate towards the planet surface. As the pod started to slow, the rest of the pieces around him appeared to speed
ahead.
    Long-range