Burning Skies (Prologue of Onslaught)

Part 1

        Patrick Foster walked up the podium, hands sweating. "Open speech fourteen", he said to the touch screen, voice activated podium. His speech appeared on the top. He mentally read through it. In just a few minutes, he would give his speech to the council of NASTD (New Age Space Travel Department). For the last few minutes before his speech, he mentally prepared himself. Millions of lives were at stake, and the council of NASTD was not known for changing their minds. But he was ready. Patrick turned on the holo machine and the NASTD council immediately appeared in front of him, and he appeared in front of them.

        "Hello", Patrick said to them. None of them even acknowledged his presence. He counted eleven total, and the few that weren't looking down at their touch screen desks were talking to each other. This immediately made Patrick upset. "Hello", he said louder and more confidently than before. A few of them looked up from their desks, and towards the hologram of Patrick. This was good enough for him. "I have a speech regarding the migration to the planet Terminus. Before he could continue, one of the board members interrupted him. "Another one of these nuts", he said, and most of the council gave out a small chuckle.

        Patrick found this very insulting, and came back at them with, "I might have extreme ideas, but I can guarantee you I now more about your little project then you do". This caught the council's attention, and the ones that hadn't looked up before were now angrily staring at the hologram of Patrick. "Go on", the same council member that spoke before said. Now Patrick was feeling fully confident, and continued his speech. "I was one of the leading engineers in the planning of the space crafts. The original plans were completely safe and reliable. In this original design, the space crafts were being made by extremely high entropy metals. It would get you to the planet Terminus, but at a high price. And that just wasn't good enough for the council, now was it". Now the entire was glaring heatedly at the hologram of Patrick.

         "So, you told us to redo everything, start from scratch just because you didn't want to pay full price for a space craft", Patrick continued. "Reluctantly, we threw away four months of hard work so you didn't have to buy the expensive metals. So we started designing new space crafts, primarily from titanium. After a year of designing, we finally designed a space craft safe enough for space travel, but we still had some problems. First of all, we didn't have an accurate measurement of the distance from earth to the planet Terminus. Depending on the distance, our space crafts might not make it in the required ten years.

        Still, this was not good enough. You then told us as long as they were cheap enough, and were proven to get to planet Terminus in ten years, you didn't care how safe it was. So, after two more months of designing, we had finally had made a craft capable of getting to planet Terminus in ten years. It only had one major flaw, that it wasn't yet strong enough to hold humans inside. No matter how many times we told you, you wouldn't listen. We were all immediately fired and you sent our craft to planet Terminus along with a tracking system and some cameras. Ten years later, you showed the world the exotic and inhabitable lands of planet Terminus. And you could get them there for about the cost of a house.

        What you are about to do will make you money. It will make you famous. But it will also make you all monsters. Half the population is going to get on those crafts tomorrow. And tomorrow they will all be dead. So this is your last chance to save billions of lives, and your reputation. Don't kill these people".

        The council thought about it for awhile, and responded. "Okay, thank you for your speech. But those people are getting on those crafts tomorrow. And if they do crash, well, I don't think it's the council that will get blamed. You did designed the ships after all".

        With that, they shut off the holo device. Patrick broke into tears. Billions of people would die, and he would get blamed for it.