Chapter Text
I write this as we rest on the surface of the planet. We awoke as the ship began its descent. Cryo-stasis is not a subject with which I am knowledgeable. I have used its medical applications in small ways in my practice back home, but freezing entire human beings for reanimation down the line was something I initially believed to be beyond our current capabilities. When I say we awoke, I stress that we were not allowed to be free from our capsules. I could see across the room to see my friend, Sherlock Holmes, with his head moving around as he tried to take in the grand whole of sensory data from the experience. I can describe the experience as being possibly the loudest I have ever experienced, with the computer systems beeping and buzzing as they processed the information.
The ship’s onboard automaton, Manowar, was rushing to and from pods to check the vitals of each of us. Thankfully, we only sustained one loss. I cannot say that I was overly familiar with the work of the young Belgian journalist, but he was to be, in a sense, our scribe while on the planet.
Perhaps this is a poor place to start off. The story truly begins in our digs at the now-famed fortified flat at 221B Baker Street. I was lounging in my chair, and my friend had recently inhaled what I might generously describe as a small mountain of pure, uncut cocaine. I don’t touch the stuff myself, so I felt the need to sit on the sidelines to ensure he didn’t have another overdose. The way he described it, he thought of it as a way of staving off boredom. After all, why wouldn’t he be bored? He’d recently defeated the crime lord, Moriarty, and dismantled the monster’s network of horrors. Afterwards, he found himself suddenly listless as cases became like drops of water in the Sahara.
“Must you do that?” I asked.
Holmes shot me a very mean look, and I opted to drop the case entirely.
He didn’t drop it. In a sense, Sherlock Holmes is akin to a dog, and you have to force him to drop things. Otherwise, he gets territorial.
“It’s essential the, the, the fucking process, Watson,” said Holmes. The repeated use of ‘the’ is not in fact a typo, but an accurate recreation of him being trapped in a loop following a heavy intake of the drug.
The drug-induced mania and euphoria that my friend associates with it must have been short-lived because moments after taking it in, we were treated to a knock and the door to our room, and he quickly had to hide the Zip-Lok baggie of white powder in the folds of the couch.
Good timing, too, because Mrs. Hudson opened up the door without warning and let two strange men into our flat. A man with hair that was very obviously dyed a fluorescent shade of blonde, wearing a white suit, stepped in first, followed close behind by a nearly identical-looking man with brown hair in a black suit.
“Hope we haven’t caught you at a bad time,” said the blonde man.
“Never better,” lied my friend. “Watson, would you be so kind as to offer Mr. Pierce and Mr. White a brandy?”
“It’s like one in the afternoon,” said the man in the black suit.
“John,” said the blonde man. “Don’t be rude.”
The blonde man spoke with a pronounced accent typical of the American South, while his counterpart spoke with an indistinct accent that Holmes would later tell me originates from Upstate New York.
“I am fascinated to see you work your detective magic in real time, Mister Holmes,” said the blonde man. “Can I ask how you knew our names?”
“I read the papers,” said Holmes. “Even now I collect every edition of a newspaper printed in the Greater London Metropolitan Area. You and Mister Pierce arrived in London just yesterday, and The Daily Express was quick to print up a piece about Adventure Inc. coming to Britain.”
“Could I get some clarification on who is who?” I asked.
“Of course,” said the blonde man.
He introduced himself as Buck White, and his partner introduced himself as John Pierce.
“As your detective friend helpfully stated,” said Buck White. “We’re the financiers behind the company known to the wider world as Adventure Inc., and we’re here to see about offering you boys a job.”
“There isn’t a mystery to be solved?” I asked. “That’s more of our typical business.”
“We have been what you might call collecting,” said John Pierce. “For the past two years, we’ve been recruiting people for a project called the 'Star Shot Programme’.”
Holmes took the end of a pipe between his teeth and lit it, blowing smoke into the air as the two men explained the Star Shot Programme.
“What it boils down to is, we’ve been seeking out extraordinary people, and we are putting them together as a team who will touch down on the surface of a recently discovered planet. A little place we’ve been calling Copernicus Twelve,” explained John Pierce.
“Which is what we settled on because everyone seemed real mad when I wanted to call it ‘Buckland 1000, ’” quipped Buck White.
“And I fit your bill?” asked Holmes.
“Who else but…what was it you called him in your most recent blog, doc?” asked Buck White. “The foremost champion of the law.”
Holmes turned to me with a look that was wholly atypical of his usual non-expression. It almost looked pleading. Then he turned back to John Pierce and Buck White. “Will Watson be able to accompany me into space?”
“I like to think of us as a package deal,” I said, immediately excited by the prospect of venturing into the stars.
Pierce and White exchanged a look with each other.
“I’m sure we can accommodate the doctor,” said John Pierce. “You have to understand, though, there will be no coming back to Earth.”
“That’s fine,” I said.
Holmes nodded.
“No, you really need to understand, there will be minimal communication with Earth,” said Buck White. “You’ll never see your families again.”
“That’s fine,” parroted Holmes. “My brother can manage things without me.”
“I haven’t any relations still alive that I would write home to,” I said.
Pierce smiled, and White looked a bit saddened by our collective response.