bermudatetrahedron_prologue_v2

Prologue.

Eight sleek, shining white cigars stood propped up on big grey crane towers on the flat swampy grounds of the Kennedy Space Center. Four of the cigars were spaceships bound for Mars. They were the sixth convoy departing for the red planet, part of the Space Conglomerate's campaign to colonize the solar system. Each ship carried different materials. IPS-21 *Way Of Life* carried 250 passengers and crew for the colony: tourists, scientists, engineers. IPS-22 *Endurance* and IPS-23 *Heart of Gold* carried building materials and machines for the colony, as well as a dozen passengers each and some scientific equipment. The IPS-23 *Bigger On The Inside* carried resource utilization equipment, fabrication machines, and a new large rover. It only had a crew of 10. The other four cigars were fuel tankers.

Once on their way to Mars, the constellation of space ships would pair off, *Endurance* and *Way of Life*, *Heart of Gold* and *Bigger On The Inside*. Each pair would remain within half a kilometer of each other for safety reasons. If there was an emergency on one ship relief may come from another within half an hour. But each ship within a pair would be connected together at the nose and connected by a 15 meter long tether. Then they would be spun up such that they revolve six times a minute. The centrifugal force would provide between 60% and 100% Earth's gravity for the crew and passengers during the months long voyage.

One morning, a month, two days, and four hours into the mission, the crew and passengers of the *Bigger On The Inside* woke up without gravity. The crew in particular woke up to alarms and red lights shining into their eyes. The Mission Director, Charlie Borman assembled a meeting of the Mission Control team in the ship's bridge immediately. The bridge has a few viewports in the wall to look out into space, including the docking window which looks up directly towards the *Heart of Gold*. The crew all assembled at their stations, in an attempt to figure out what was the matter. Before they could boot up their monitors, Gary Druman sat down at his pilot's station and looked up through the docking window. "Uh, Charlie?"

"What is it?" Borman looked at the pilot's computer monitor, then Gary, and then the docking window. Borman kept staring, and then he looked around at the other mission control officers, gulped, and said: "Does anyone happen to know where the *Heart of Gold* went?"

A detailed examination of ship's sensor and camera logs show that the *Heart of Gold* disappeared. It was there one moment, and the next it was gone. The tether was cleanly severed--no burn marks or indications of tearing or meteor damage. The *Bigger On The Inside* had been thrown off course by the anomalous disappearance of the *Heart of Gold* (nothing that a simple 10 meter/second course correction wouldn't fix). But no one ever had any answer to the disappearance of the space ship. Ground controllers at the Space Conglomerate headquarters in Virginia worked out a solution to tie the three remaining spacecraft together to fix the artificial gravity, and the convoy limped to Mars with half of its supplies missing.