by F P Adriani
Destinations And Captain’s Choice
by F. P. Adriani
Copyright © 2019 by F. P. Adriani
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Published by F. P. Adriani
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*
Captain’s Choice
Without any commands from its crew, the Star Rover suddenly turned in a ten-degree arc starboard.
“Did I not have enough coffee this morning—or did you not, Gene?” said Captain Robert Halloway to his science officer. Halloway’s widening brown eyes were down on his silver electronic panel, looking at the numbers of what had just happened: the Rover was now on a direct course toward a distant small planet—so small that as far as Halloway could interpret from his panel, there was no way the planet’s mass could be changing the curvature of spacetime enough to effectively pull the Rover toward the planet this much, and the curvature between the Rover and the planet probably didn’t suddenly greatly change shape and shrink on its own. Nevertheless, the Rover’s pull toward the planet was indeed happening.
The Star Rover was part of the Galactic Exploration Service, and for weeks now, Halloway and his crew had been working on mapping this layer, The Infinite Layer. TIL was a lesser-known area of space; very little of the layer had been mapped by manned flights especially. However, because some of TIL’s physical properties were fundamentally different compared to the more known layers of space, scientists expected this layer to not have any “ends,” though it did have exit flumes to other layers.
Halloway looked at his pilot, Meredith, seated on his left. “Turn twenty-five degrees toward the Carvine exit flume.”
“Done,” Meredith said, but Halloway watched her slow frown, feeling his heart beginning to pump faster. Her face and his own knowledge of the feel and sounds of his ship told him what he needed to know.
His left hand pounded at his panel’s intercom button for his crew in the engineering bay. “What’s happening here? Our movement’s locked onto the one path. We have no steering control.”
“I’m working on it with Gene,” said Kerry, the Rover’s lead engineer.
“You need to work faster,” Halloway barked, his eyes on the small greenish planet on the bridge’s front viewscreen. He’d enlarged the image, but he could tell by how fast the image was expanding that either the Rover was speeding up, or the planet was expanding in size, or maybe both were happening. But a planet expanding seemed even more contrary to the Universe’s laws than what had been happening to the Rover. “What’s going on?” Halloway asked no one in particular.
He looked over at Gene, whose long fingers were flying over his keyboard on the black panel-table in front of him. “We—we’re not sure yet—analyzing—”
“No time,” Halloway shot out. “We’re still quite far away, but not for long at this speed. Full reverse thrust—now.”
His crew followed his orders, and his panel showed that the forward nozzles were emitting maximum exhaust; however, when Halloway glanced up at the viewscreen again, he saw that the planet’s image was filling the screen even faster than before.
“What the fuck is going on?” Halloway shouted.
“Thrusting isn’t powering us—we’re stuck!” Kerry said. “I’ve been looking at the numbers from since we came in the zone of this planet, and our speed in any direction other than toward the planet is directly proportional to the force pulling us toward the planet. The faster we go away, the greater the force yanking us.”
“How come we didn’t notice that before?” Halloway asked fast, looking over at Gene again.
“There are always deviations from the ‘expected’ speeds here,” Gene said now. “It’s a product of the lack of information—there are probably forces here from strange mass or masses we haven’t identified yet. And spacetime appears to curve slightly more easily here. We’ve been correcting our flight path all along—and gathering data as if for the first time here, because, well, it practically is the first time. And this is what we’re supposed to do when mapping: not make assumptions. Just take whatever numbers we get as being the numbers for here.”
Halloway was looking down at some of those numbers now. He wasn’t an expert anywhere near Gene’s level or Kerry’s, but even Halloway could see that the Rover was indeed being pulled right to the planet. “Maybe it’s not the planet that’s responsible?” Halloway said. “Could there be a black hole or some other phenomenon on the other side of the planet?”
“I’m not getting any markers for a black hole,” Gene said fast. “It could be something’s using the energy we release—converting it into another form, and powering our quicker slide through spacetime. We’ve just got to reduce speed—”
“Do it,” said Halloway. “Down to zero. Kill the engines.”
He watched Gene’s gray-haired head jerk toward him; then Halloway watched the incredulous look growing on Gene’s broad face. “But, Captain, the atmosphere I’m reading is only 2.54% of standard. If we keep getting pulled toward the surface, we’ll eventually have to land. We’ll have little atmosphere to use for braking—”
“We’ll worry about that when we’re landing. We have no choice. If we run the engines, we’re pulled even faster, so then we’ll probably be landing even harder.” Halloway pressed the intercom for engineering again. “Is there evidence of a tractor beam of some kind—could there be a civilization on the planet?”
“No, to the first question. Yes, to the second. But we won’t know for sure till we land, at least I hope we’ll know then,” Kerry finished in a dry voice. Halloway could hear shouting coming from behind Kerry’s voice, from her engineering crew. The shouting wasn’t any louder than what Halloway had heard during other emergencies. Still, it made him feel uneasy how quickly things could turn bad in space, especially fatally bad.
His thoughts scrambled over some options: his crew might be able to use the Rover’s engines to power the gravitational dampeners and the antigravity fields when the Rover would hit the planet’s minimal atmosphere. But, then again, his crew might not be able to do anything without making the situation worse.
Halloway swore again, only under his breath now. This was the first ship he had ever captained. He was only thirty, and he did not want to die yet.
*
The crew of the Rover continued being pulled toward the planet, and things began happening even faster now—things both out of their control and in their control. There was still shouting going on in engineering, and now there was shouting on the bridge too. There were only five people on it, including Halloway, but all of them were feeling their mortality, and that made them fight even harder.
Not far from the planet’s exosphere, Gene finally shouted that they should try thrusting again, but, through the intercom, Kerry shouted over him that it would definitely equal suicide if they sped up even more.
Now Gene asked in a frantic voice, “Well then, what the hell do we do—Captain?”
Halloway was standing between his panel and the front viewscreen. For some reason, he couldn’t take his eyes from the enlarged image of the green planet. He would be “buried” there soon, and he wasn’t sure he liked where his grave would lie. Who would know and c
ome see it? he thought bizarrely….
“Captain?” Gene repeated then.
Halloway’s head jerked at him sharply. “Everyone get strapped in!” Halloway said fast. “We’ll do our best to mitigate the landing with every mechanism that won’t cause any frigging thrust upward. As soon as you get better info on the atmosphere’s composition, calculate the best height to release the dampeners laterally.”
“But we’re mass-heavy on the Rover’s forward end, so laterally probably won’t be enough to prevent a nose-dive!” Meredith shouted as her head turned Halloway’s way.
“It’s the best we can do,” he said, feeling glad that the bridge wasn’t at the ship’s nose but was instead on two levels above the nose and set farther back, above the cargo and shuttle bays, which bays he’d told his crew to evacuate. Still, the shields surrounding the hull would probably be breached by the impact with the planet’s surface, so the position of the bridge wouldn’t make much difference: the bridge wouldn’t be as crushed as the nose, but the bridge would still be crushed.
“I can’t get the dampeners to release—and the antigravity fields won’t activate!” Kerry’s frantic voice said over the intercom.
“What!” Halloway shouted, his heart pounding so hard that he could feel blood shooting into his face. He was strapped into his seat now, but he was nevertheless bouncing around as the forces of the imminent landing increased.
“I’ve lost the controls—” Kerry said “—I can’t make any changes to outside the ship—as if we’re locked in our space, only even more isolated than when we’re traveling using the curon-beam spacetime bubbles. Maybe it’s—it’s the natural forces of the landing—we’re just stuck by whatever—”
“Everyone off the bridge—now!” Halloway said as he quickly scrambled to undo his brown chair’s strap, which was an almost impossible feat, considering he was being thrown around and tossed against his strap even worse than before. When he finally managed to release himself, he grabbed Meredith as she rushed from her chair; he gave her a back-shove toward the bridge’s wide doorway; then he ran over to Gene, whose hands were jerking at his brown strap.
“I can’t get it to release!” Gene shouted then.
“Cut it loose!” Halloway’s head whipped around the bridge, his eyes trying to locate something sharp. But it was no good. The bridge was a streamlined space with few storage compartments. If he jumped up now, by the time he ran across the room, opened the maintenance closet and located a tool for cutting, the Rover would be crashing into the ground.
“Just go, Robert!” Gene said. But Halloway wasn’t about to leave a member of his crew to die alone so summarily, especially a friend he’d known for over a decade.
Only the two of them were left on the bridge now, so Halloway used all of his strength to yank and yank and yank at Gene’s strap. Gene’s hands joined his and then they managed to slip and slide the strap looser from its clamp; Halloway pushed Gene down beneath the strap, and Gene grabbed onto his panel-table and slid from the chair—but right at that moment, the ship lurched, throwing Gene off balance, till he banged his head hard into the base of the metal wall behind his chair.
“Shit!” Halloway said as he grabbed his friend. He could see Gene’s dark eyes roll weirdly as he lost consciousness.
Halloway glanced over his own shoulder at the front viewscreen, at where the view was a turbulent mix of green misty dust and hard brown surface.
Halloway closed his eyes and sighed. “We’re going down, my friend,” he said to Gene, right before they did go down.
*
Gene didn’t make it; neither did Kerry and eight more members of Halloway’s crew.
Halloway looked through the door of the Rover’s medic station, his eyes lingering on his crew’s lifeless forms arranged on tables inside. Kerry’s broken body had been pierced through the back, near her heart. He couldn’t even bear to look at her trademark red ponytail. They had been stationed on the same ship for several years before he’d picked her as his engineer for this ship. Going into engineering would never be the same for him. Neither would his bridge: Gene’s tall form wouldn’t be there ever again.
Halloway felt a mixture of rage, sadness and confusion: his crew was no longer whole, but his ship was. What the ship had gone through during landing hadn’t even made a dent in the exterior and had barely harmed the interior either.
“I don’t understand it,” he said to Tyler, Kerry’s lead assistant and now Halloway’s lead engineer.
Tyler’s shaky voice was coming from the communicator on Halloway’s brown uniform-belt. The shaky voice was giving him a technical update, but a part of Halloway just didn’t want to believe Tyler’s data. “Captain, I can’t explain how we landed perfectly on the landing gear. And you can see that almost every system, every weld and every screw is fine from your own readings on the bridge.”
“I’m not on the bridge,” Halloway said, and, at that moment, he didn’t want to see the bridge ever again. He’d only been a captain in the GES for less than two years, and already he’d lost a tenth of his crew. How many would he lose by next year?
“Captain,” Tyler said, “outside the ship makes even less sense: the readings from before—the atmosphere isn’t what we thought. The layer right near the surface—it’s breathable. It’s at Earth pressures.”
“That can’t be,” Halloway said, but even as he said it, he knew it was true: as he had carried Gene’s body off the bridge, he glimpsed the view to outside on the still-working viewscreen; he glimpsed the plants along the ground, the trees in the distance, the mountains. It was so lush, so beautiful, and just thinking of it now made Halloway feel like grabbing his face and crying like a child.
*
He decided to bury his dead crewmembers there, on the planet. He didn’t even ask his other crewmembers what they thought about that; simply thinking of dumping the dead bodies of his friends into space, or even worse, of carrying their frozen bodies across the galaxy to back home on Earth—he couldn’t do it.
Even though the ship’s computer indicated that the planet’s lower atmosphere was safe, Halloway and fifteen other crewmembers still suited up before they took the bodies out of the Rover. They had laid them out on silver carts, beneath the nicest blankets Halloway could find on the ship.
The planet’s ground near the ship was quite stony, and as they pulled the carts across the earth, the wheels kept making rhythmic clicking sounds, almost like music from striking metal drums.
Tyler was beside Halloway, running analyses on the small computer in his large, white-gloved right hand. “There seem to be a lot of hollow formations here—even pockets of air in the ground. We thought there was no air here; now we find it everywhere.”
“A lot of good it did them,” Halloway said quite sharply. He felt his crew’s helmeted heads jerk in his direction, but his eyes were on the horizon, or, more correctly, on before the horizon. There was something…. “Wait,” he said in a sharp voice again, coming to an abrupt stop, “I see something moving—”
“There’s someone coming,” Tyler said, looking down at his device’s screen. “Human!”
“How the hell can that be?” another crewmember cut in. “Oh—is it just some crew from the ship? Did anyone leave to explore?”
“No,” Halloway said, his eyes still on the moving figures. They were closer now and Halloway could see their colorful clothes, the long hair on some of them. There were about a dozen people, and they moved over the ground beneath the warmth of the orangey sunshine. It was quite a pretty scene, but Halloway was seeing it at the wrong time; he felt sour toward it all. No one should be walking around so alive while his friends were dead. And this planet had killed them.
“Get out your weapons,” Halloway said fast to his crew as he pulled his own pulse gun from a tab on his suit. With his other hand, he turned on his suit’s speaker. “Stop where you are!” he shouted at the strangers.
They were quite close now, and they did stop moving.
But, their faces didn’t look frightened. They didn’t look anything really, except blank. Thirteen adult faces, both female and male, standing there quite still in their colorful clothing.
Halloway’s heart pounded hard and sweat beaded up all over his face. He was pretty sure his wild eyes and sweaty face behind his clear helmet looked quite scary, especially when accompanied by his long silver gun. Yet the people before him looked as if they registered none of that.
One of the women among them—her eyes finally moved over to the carts. Then she said in a soft, breezy voice, “We’re very sorry about your friends.”
“You should be,” Halloway spat. “You killed them.”
Her pale blue eyes turned back to Halloway. She was wearing an orange, sleeveless, robe-like garment, and she looked to be around his age; yet he couldn’t find even a drop of cynicism in her still-bland expression.
“You killed my crewmembers,” Halloway repeated then.
“No, we did not,” the woman said. “The Entity did it.”
“What ‘entity’?”
“The Entity,” the woman repeated, spreading her bare arms to encompass the sunlit air around her.
“This planet, you mean?” Halloway said, in an incredulous voice, hearing a few exclamations and loud exhalations from his crew. He glanced at all the strangers before him, but he continued speaking only to the woman. “What the hell are you talking about? How can a planet be alive?”
“I don’t know,” the woman said. “But it is. It brought the thirteen of us here seventy-five years ago.”
Halloway’s eyes snapped right to hers. “Seventy-five?”
He was surprised to see her nod now, quite rapidly, which speed hadn’t seemed like something she was capable of achieving. “Seventy-five years ago?” he said now. “You look like you’re thirty!”
“I’m much older than that. I was captaining an exploratory vessel, just as you are. We had a reactor core failure and lost some navigational ability, and wound up in this layer. Then we reached near here, and now we are here. Permanently. I lost almost half of my crew.”