Stargazers

12. An Unexpected Guest

     Following the first video conference with the Stargazer colony, the meeting itself was declared highly classified. That meant all records of the conversation, or what was said during that highly charged conversation were also deemed classified and kept a secret from the public. The United States has spent trillions on these projects to save humanity, almost doubling the national debt, so it was decided to keep the public in the dark about the Mars Colony. If the people were to hear that a project they funded just declared their independence and left the taxpayers holding the bill, it would not be taken that well. Congress would also freak out about how the debt was used to build a new nation, and since it could become an election deciding issue, so it was decided to kept things under wraps for the time being. Anything that mentioned the Stargazer project was wiped clean from the system. The money used to fund it was reclassified as funding used for other projects, especially the one that actually did save the Earth from the extinction level event. Politicians had no problem fudging the books because it made them look like heroes who put their money on the right horse and came out smelling like roses.

     Yet there were still people who believed the Stargazer project existed, even if they didn't know it's actual name. There were witnesses who claimed they saw one of the space cruisers launch into the sky. Others online claimed that NASA had been exchanging text only messages with the colony on Mars, but that was denied as nothing more than just more conspiracy theories, all speculation with zero evidence to back it up. These people were laughed off as loons that were asked what kind of tin foil they wore on their heads while creating these farfetched stories.

     Nathan Jones was one of those people who claimed to have seen something, but was always dismissed by everyone as a quack looking for attention. He as only a teenager when it happened, when he saw the massive ship rise up and float up into the clouds with massive engines propelling it. Not even his father believed it, because the old man was in the bathroom taking a leak at the gas station when it happened. Before the old man can back from the latrine, the ship had already entered the clouds and was gone. The boy was endlessly teased at school, called a liar and was picked on for spreading stories that were just not true.

     By the time he reached high school, Nathan had learned that hard way to keep his story to himself. He stopped telling people what he saw and instead chose to look for the answers himself privately. He studied engineering in school and even became a pilot in the air force, learning as much as he could about agronomics so that he could prove or even disprove what he had seen that day. While he never came close to finding out what the truth was, he came a lot closer on his twenty-sixth birthday. Almost fifteen years after the asteroid disaster that was averted, a wealthy entrepreneur named Richard Hawkes came to him with an offer he simply couldn't refuse. He was building what he told the governments all around the world was a new deep space satellite that was going to observe and look at distant stars, but he was in fact lying to them. The massive probe that he wanted to launch into space was actually a deep space explorer, a manned explorer that he wanted to send to Mars.

     Mr. Hawkes even had details about the Stargazer program that no one else had access to. He even showed Nathan emails that he exchanged with Doctor Eric Saunders, asking for funding for something that he didn't want to pass by the government out of fear they would deny his request and jeopardize the mission to colonize Mars. Nathan read that email a few times, and he was just happy to meet someone hat he didn't have to convince what he saw that day was true. What the rich old man needed was a pilot, and Nathan was one of the best in the world. Upon hearing the destination, Nathan was eager to accept the mission. He along with two others would make up the crew of the make shift shuttle. They would have to mask themselves as a probe for the first week or two until they were far away enough from earth to change and expand the ship to make things more comfortable for the crew. Hawkes spent a quarter of his family's fortune creating the rocket that would send the probe/shuttle into space.