Felicity Ch. 69

His name was Albert Ritter but few called him Al and his mother was the only one that called him Albert.

The world called him Tex.

He was The NASA hot shot astronaut but Nasa was no longer flying which royally pissed him off. He had just finished his training when the space shuttles were confined to museums.

He was assigned to Edwards AFB and did flight testing on new and improved aircraft. He was assigned 'the over the hump' test flights, the ones after all knew the thing would fly and not disintegrate before landing.

It was not his idea, he had always volunteered for first flights but others were chosen. Those guys were by the book and would not have tested the limits of their craft or themselves.

It took him a while to understand those guys would not have minded if their crafts committed suicide.

Tex would test the limits of the crafts but had an innate ability to sense when it was enough and back off. He was an aeronautical engineer and could also give useful details about the performance of the air ship.

On the ground he was much less successful. He had adopted a brash cowboy persona that seemed to attract bimbos well so he got laid often. But he was now thirty three years old and was wishing for intelligent conversation, a sense of humor, and some comprehension of what he did for a living from the women around him.

Those type of women didn't like Tex.

An opportunity arose that would change his life although it would be years before he understood it did.

The RAM rocket craft had been built and the pilotless prototype had been successfully tested. Larger ones were being built and Tex saw it as an X-15 experience waiting to happen.

That second pilotless craft did not perform well in test flights and someone decided craft number three needed to have a pilot. It would be called the Armstrong.

A training mock up was built and he was one of ten pilots assigned too train in it. He was the only one not to have a catastrophic failure, in fact he was the only on to have fewer than three so he was chosen for the first flight.

After many delays he and the ship were ready. The ship was strapped under a B-52 and was released at an altitude of forty seven thousand feet and a velocity of five hundred eighty mile an hour. The ships rockets fired but quit forty seconds too soon so the RAM engines never had the speed needed even though he had achieved mach 3.

Tex glided the ship to the ground effortlessly and was debriefed for a week.

Everyone was sure the RAM engine should have ignited and were at a loss on why it did not. They asked Tex if he had tried the emergency override button.

"What override button?" he asked.

Sure enough the option of pilot initiated ignition had not been built into the craft.

They decided to go ahead with the second test even though many knew an asteroid of some size was going to hit the Earth in just over a year. The powers that be had decided to see if the engine would be capable of fast enough travel through space to save "just the right people."

Tex was unaware of that.

His glimpse of space on his first flight had amazed him and wanted to see that again, after all, he was a trained astronaut.

The fact that he had not been in space had eaten into him a lot more than he realized.

When the RAM engine ignited he was supposed to stop it before his ship achieved escape velocity but the acceleration was so smooth he never looked at his instruments.

He did not notice he was in space until his clipboard floated past him.

"I fucked up," he said to ground control.

"Yes you did," ground control said back.

"While you are there see if you can guide the ship into a turn. When after facing west turn the engines off."

"Roger," he said and using the side thrusters turned the ship around.

"Done," he said, "but my instruments say I have gained a hundred thousand feet during the turn. Is that right?"

"Yes it is. Turn the RAM engine off and fire forward thrusters for thirty seven seconds, that should slow you enough for re-entry.

We read an anomaly near you, do you see anything?"

"No. Wait, the universe just winked at me."

That was the last anyone heard of Albert Ritter. He and his ship had simply vanished for the land controllers.

It caused some stir on Earth but that was the day an evacuation was ordered for the entire U.S. Gulf coast so only a few in NASA wondered what happened to him, all others were busy getting their families away from the Gulf from Florida to Texas.

Tex found himself in what felt like a dark tunnel, an impossibility he knew but it still felt that way. He felt he was traveling to somewhere but did not feel like he was in motion, his ships instruments were not not recording anything at all.

That state of reality lasted only a bit over a minute and he suddenly saw himself hurtling to a planet below. He turned the RAM vehicle around then killed its engine when he felt he had shed enough speed then turned it to face the planet.

It was not Earth he immediately saw, this planet was covered with Ice. He was also still going towards it too fast. He began to fire his thrusters and managed to put himself in orbit around it.

His instruments told him the planets atmosphere was sitting just above five hundred feet of its icy surface. Its atmosphere was in the process of freezing. He saw no signs of life on his first orbit and spent the next three orbits trying to figure out where he was in space.

He tried to contact Earth but he knew he was not on his own solar system so he knew that was futile. He ate his smuggled empanadillas and drank his gatorade as he visually scanned the planet.

He saw what may be the only piece of land not frozen over completely at what may be the planets equator. He lowered his orbit enough to see it was a mountain with what looked like a building on top. A frozen lake surrounded the building.

He aimed his antenna to it and began to jabber and sing for an entire orbit, he had realized he was going to die there.

His ships life support system read it would keep him alive three more days but he knew that had to be wrong, he had travelled interstellar space.

He was jolted out of his pre-death euphoria by a voice over his communicator. He did not recognized the language and had no idea what they said but they sounded friendly.

He introduced himself as a lost traveller and sympathized with their predicament. He also said he would be there for lunch.

He began to lower his orbit until he wondered if the planet had enough of an atmosphere to fly. He was at a thousand feet before he learned it did. He ignited the RAM engine and flew a very long approach to the building.

Intuitively he shut the RAM off as he glided over the lake. He managed to land and his drag chute opened. Tex coaxed the ship to within three feet of the building.

He knew he had perhaps a thirty second survival time once he got out of the ship but he saw people looking out at him so decided to try it. He was wearing only a flight suit and no portable oxygen mask, he would need to hurry.

But before loosing consciousness he saw the door open and three people in spacesuits came out and helped him inside.

He passed out.

Two women and an old man were looking at him when he woke up. They asked him questions and he made sure they knew he did not understand them but thanked them anyway.

He sat up and noticed he was in an infirmary of some kind. He saw his helmet and water was dripping out of it.

It was water vapor from his lungs that had frozen immediately when he exhaled.

It took several weeks before Tex could communicate with anyone there. He learned that the people that had treated him the first day were the Queen, her father the King, and the Princess of the planet.

He also learned that nearly every being on their planet was in the building. There were around one eighty of them there and perhaps another twenty in a space station orbiting the planet.

Unfortunately they had no way to resupply the space station, all their crafts were buried in miles of ice. The ones in the space station were barely surviving.

Three weeks after his arrival he volunteered to take supplies to them if his craft worked. Two chosen by the Queen went with him mostly because they had already picked up some English.

The atmosphere was so thick the RAM engine started after just a bit of coaxing. They went up with him with supplies and after several minutes of conversation they figured out a way to make the transfers with just two people exposed to space.

Tex gave the space station the coordinates of the wrinkle in space and asked them to monitor any strangeness there. Two said they had seen the universe wink at that location twice, once when he came through.

It does that every seven years" they said.

The space station had been in orbit over one hundred years but before they could explore the wrinkle their planet was hit by several large comets and everything had frozen before the could get another spacecraft up.

A crewman later told Tex, "The male members of Royalty tried to get to it along with their rich friends thinking it was a shortcut to other planets but their three ships exploded on take off. The ships were constructed to hold over two thousand passengers but were less than half full when they took off."

"Sabotage?" Tex asked.

"Unlikely, no one knew they were escaping the soon to be frozen planet. All of us thought they were coming here to oversee the evacuation of all.

No one else thought that was a portal but seeing you suddenly appear by it has changed a lot of minds."

"You will need to build a pod for me to carry under my ship six and a half years from now. It needs to be big enough to carry all survivors."

"How much food and water?"

"Just one days worth. Time stood still while I was in the anomaly."

"We will be ready."

The two that had gone up with Tex stayed and he took the worst five back to the planet.

Six years passed and Tex had made twenty four trips to their space station to take them supplies and check the progress of the passenger shuttle. All of the original space station crew member had been replaced but some were back to supervise the work crew of now forty.

Tex's personal life had taken a turn for the better. He taught everyone English and the ways of Earth. He did enjoy the free sex part of his new temporary home and said nothing to indicate it was not the norm for Earth.

Somehow his most common sex partner ended up being the Queen. He did have sex with about twenty of the fifty seven women, some of them several times but after three years he was always in the Queens bed each night. They lived together.

Tex liked her, her name was Tri. She was pragmatic, funny, very intelligent, and a good mother. Also a fabulous fuck.

The princess became of age during that time and she had been offered to Tex but he declined, she was too much like a daughter to him by then.

When she learned that the Queen ravished him for a week.

Her father died six months before the anomaly would return. During the ceremony of succession Tex was named a Consort.

All began to treat him as royalty, although most people had been doing so for years but there was now a touch of ceremony with it.

When the anomaly reappeared Tex had approached it and was sure he could navigate into it but could only hope Earth was at the other end. The space station crew had documented that the wrinkle stayed stable for thirty days. Tex had decided to go on its fifteenth day.

The time to leave the planet approached and Tex scoured the planet for other survivors. He now had a crew of two that knew the planet and could communicate in their language. They found just four, a father and three daughters.

A week was spent taking all to the space station, the Princess went first, the Queen last. The passenger capsule was attached to the underside of his ship and he hurtled them to the anomaly.

Before any one realized it they were on the other side.

A devastated planet Earth greeted them, continents had moved and cities were gone. The land masses were barren.

Suddenly a ship was by their side.

"Do you need help getting down?" it asked.

"Yes please, There are ninety four people on the module beneath me and six in my ship. They are fine with an oxygen/nitrogen atmosphere by the way. All are human."

"Good to hear that. There are no landing strips for you to land the Armstrong, you will need to board our ship too"

"Ok, it is in a stable orbit, I will just park here."

"Tex, leave the keys in it in case it needs to be moved."

"How did you know it was me?"

"You are as famous in space travel as they come. Expect to be treated as a celebrity for a while.

OK we have all in your passengers from the pod on board. We will send out a connection to your door, you will be able to breathe but it will be cold in there, wear your woolies."

"Woolies we got,"

Twenty minutes later they were at a spaceport being greeted and twenty minutes after that they were in the capital city named Clara being assigned housing and ID cards.

Two hours later all were asleep on their respective porches as they enjoyed the warmth except Tex and the Queen. They were having dinner with Cel's King and Queen and four noble couples being filled in on the fate of the planet.

Some alien beings were present.

QueenTri related that a similar event had occurred on her planet but the collisions were all with comets.

Everyone marveled and gushed at how human they all were. The only thing to tell anyone they may not be human was their bronze hair.

Tex smiled and apologized to the non-human species present.

An awkward moment of silence later Sehel the Devl turned to Ahn the Akkad and said, "Well, there goes the neighborhood."

All burst into laughter and the awkward moment passed.

The Queen and Tex were assigned to the same home and neither objected to it.

Tri said, "I can no longer be Queen, I need to abdicate my title. You will no longer be Consort, we would need to marry."

"Maybe but you just became a Duchess here and I am your Duke so we are already married. You will continue to be Queen to all that came with us but not those born here.

Tan-Tan is also a Duchess and like you will be the Duchess of the children born afer today.

The local Royalty have given us that leeway and may find it disappointing if we do not use it."

"Since when have you been royalty."

"Since about four years ago when we began to sleep each night in the same bed. You may not have noticed but some of those "Your Majesty" entreaties before you accended the throne have been directed to me."

"Yes, I had noticed. I assumed you noticed I never corrected anyone."

"Yes, I noticed. On two planets we are already married."

"In that case lets take a nap, eventually."

"Eventually will be fine, my Lady."