T.A.C. Force - Sons of Khan

Everything I did was for the love of a woman.

I always hated this part. It was bad enough, sitting in a padded chair with a video monitor ten inches from your face watching the countdown as your gut got yanked to your feet. I knew it was coming but didn't know when. I heard rumbling. Everything started shaking. I sat anxiously scrunched in a small dark cabinet clutching a backpack with my knees at my chin. Not the best idea I've ever had, but my options were limited.

The sudden shock of the thrusters felt like a swift kick in the ass. The vibration and pressure intensified pushing my body painfully down against the smooth hard walls of the black box I had secured myself.

The pounding thrust of thirty-one raptor engines was deafening. The sudden shock and jarring tremors transitioned to an oscillating numbness as the Star Cruiser accelerated through the lower atmosphere at two-point five G's.

Earth wouldn't let go of me. The claws of gravity pulled me back as the rocket fought against the force powering ever upward. My body position, ow. My nose was forced between my knees. Try doing that. I bet you can't do it. I'm not a little kid. My back doesn't bend that way. It hurt like hell.

The backpack, the only soft thing in that hard box was my single comfort. I couldn't breathe. It felt like I was trapped under a block of cement. Hell yes, I was scared. I was afraid I'd black out or worse. I could have died in that cramped box. How disappointing that would have been. All my efforts, months of planning only to die a crumpled heap in a storage cabinet. I concentrated on sipping air into my lungs. My body screamed pain sounding the alarm that I should not be doing this.

I endured that agony for what felt like an eternity, yet it lasted only a minute or two before the pressure eased off. This was a momentary pause to reduce stress on the spacecrafts structure while it experienced maximum dynamic pressure or Max Q.

I straightened my back, feeling vertebrate crack and gulped air in deep breaths until I felt woozy then I was suddenly compressed against the box once again as the engines throttled to full thrust. The eerie cry of an injured cat screaming outside penetrated the darkness. From experience, I knew it was thin air slipstreaming past the passenger compartment.

The torturous ascent continued through a series of explosive booster separations, periods of one G acceleration when I attempted to stretch my cramped aching legs followed by a final intense acceleration to three G's that felt like I was being crushed in a trash compactor. I prayed the spacecraft wouldn't implode or get crushed like an aluminum can under the pressure.

Then the thrust stopped. Silence never sounded so sweet. The pressure ceased; the pain diminished until I bumped my head on the roof of the cabinet. I floated, weightless in my box. Oh, the joy of being in space. We had accelerated from zero to seventeen thousand five hundred miles per hour in eight minutes.

I opened the door of my cabinet and drifted out stretching my arms, legs and back in the open space. I was on the storage deck, the lowest level of the six-deck one hundred passenger cruiser. I had thought about hiding away in a bathroom, that would have been more spacious, but bathrooms are on the passenger decks and triple checked before liftoff.

I snatched my backpack floating behind me and began changing into a United Launch Systems flight suit I had snagged weeks before. Changing clothes in zero gravity isn't as fun as it sounds. I'd like to see you try it. I'm sure if anyone were watching me wriggle into floating pants and pushing off the wall to chase runaway shoes, it would have looked comical.

I stuffed my black jumpsuit into the backpack and pushed it into the cabinet. At least now I wouldn't look like a loading porter, which is what I was. I'd taken the job loading food, water and supplies on passenger flights four months earlier. The job put me on the vessels flying to the Moon. I worked for months learning the ins and outs, looking for a crack in the system that would allow me to sneak my way on a flight. I had a single goal that would satisfy an overwhelming, undeniable desire. I had to get back to the Moon.