The Furthest Planet

by James Ross Wilks

  She kicked off the far wall for the starlit space beyond, dragging the boy behind her.

  “Jang and the others are clear,” Charis reported.

  “Good,” Staples said.

  “You’re sure you can do this?” Charis asked Bethany.

  Bethany did not respond. All her concentration was on her controls and the polycarbonate window in front of her. She had brought Gringolet to within a terrifying fifty meters of the other ship and matched their spin and drift. The nose of their vessel faced the exposed hallway of the severed half-ship, and Gringolet’s shuttle bay was open and waiting.

  “Now!” came the unfamiliar boy’s voice through the coms of Dinah’s suit. “We’re out of the room!”

  Bethany nudged Gringolet forward, and Staples winced unconsciously as the nose of her vessel struck the other ship. Once it had made contact, Bethany gave the engines more thrust to compensate for the added inertia.

  Inside the broken hallway, Dinah had begun to lose consciousness. The moisture in her mouth had boiled away, as had the sheen of ocular fluid on her eyes. She could no longer pull herself towards the stars. Her initial kick had sent her in the right direction, but she had bounced off a wall and lost much of her momentum. Then the hallway around her began to move on its own, to fall back from her and the boy.

  From the EVA prep room window that looked down into the shuttle bay of Gringolet, Jabir could see the other ship. From his perspective, it was not moving, though he knew that Bethany was pushing it with their ship. It was Dinah and the boy she had rescued who were stationary as the two objects moved around them.

  Suddenly he could see them as they emerged from the darkened hallway. Dinah was floating, unmoving. There was a tether extending from her waist to a suited figure that flailed weakly behind her.

  “They’re free, Bethany,” he said into his watch. “Speed up.”

  Jabir felt the ship move slightly, and the two bodies drifted towards them more rapidly. Not fast enough, he thought. His hand quivered over the button that would close the bay door. The second he judged that they were inside, he struck the controls. The door began to close, laboriously slowly, and Jabir tripped the overrides to flood the room with atmosphere and heat before it had even sealed.

  “Slow down please,” he said into his watch. Bethany immediately obeyed. Under the effects of the light thrust, Dinah and the boy drifted through the cavernous room towards the back wall. Jabir clambered out onto the rear wall of the shuttle bay with blankets draped over his arms and shoulders. His forearms broke out in gooseflesh in response to the cold, but the heaters were bringing the room up to temperature quickly. A few awkward steps in the low G environment put him in position directly under the slowly moving Dinah.

  “More thrust please,” he said into his watch, and then Dinah Hazra fell into his arms at a gentle five meters per second.

  “Got you,” he said, placing her on what currently passed for the floor. He hastily untied the tether from her waist as the boy in the suit managed an ungainly landing next to them, then he wrapped her in the blankets. Her body was swollen from the lack of pressure, but he estimated that there would be no permanent damage based on previous cases of exposure.

  To his surprise, the engineer had regained consciousness.

  “Of all the stupid, ill-considered things to do…” he began. “I may have you committed if we ever make port, Miss Hazra.”

  Dinah reached up a shaky, swollen, and bruised hand in front of the doctor’s face, then offered him her middle finger.

  Chapter 5

  When Clea Staples was just a girl, her father had said that there were only three inevitabilities in life: death, taxes, and Monday morning traffic jams. She had spent the past two and a half years blissfully free from the third of these, but now she found herself in the first spaceship traffic jam of her life.

  Gringolet had joined nearly a dozen other ships in Lunar orbit over Chaandanee, their planned destination. Despite all that had happened, they still had a job to complete. Three cargo bays, including the one that had once held the stasis chambers of Evelyn Schilling and Herc Bauer, were full of expensive handmade rugs, various tools of the weaver trade, and other sundry business items. The people they had rescued from the Sunflower class transport might have bumped them up in line, but Jabir had declared them shaken but fit, and so there was no particular rush. Their delivery would have to wait for the medical, search and rescue, and passenger ships that took priority given the recent crisis.

  Staples wasn’t actually sure how much of a crisis it was. All news reports said that every person, every structure, even every pet on the moon had survived the move intact and unharmed. Hospitals were naturally flooded with anxiety conditions, heart attacks, exacerbations of mental illness, and the results of some petty violence, but there seemed to be no obvious damage to the societal structure of the nearly three million people who lived on Luna. The larger concerns were the effects on the psychological culture of the entire solar system and whatever astronomical problems that might arise from the moon’s new position in the sky.

  Once Staples had greeted their rescued passengers and tucked them safely away in guest quarters, she had called a town hall meeting after dinner. The only member of the crew not in attendance was Dinah. Though the engineer had stated that she was well enough to join them, Jabir had absolutely insisted that she remain in medical while she recovered; she had spent nearly a minute exposed to the cold vacuum of space. Though her swelling had gone down, she was suffering from burst capillaries in various places, including her eyes, and a general case of shock. In order to keep her in the loop, Evelyn had opened a coms channel between the mess hall and medical. This had the side benefit of allowing Brutus to participate in the discussion as well. Amit, their captive who had so far remained docile, was locked in a cabin near the bottom of the ship. Though he was unguarded at the moment, every member of the crew was accounted for, which Staples assumed would make a repeat of the Quinn and Parsells incident impossible.

  Staples felt naked facing the crew. For over two years Don Templeton had stood or sat next to her during these meetings, and he was usually the one to start things off. She wasn’t entirely sure how to begin.

  Facing her was a frightened crew looking for answers. She swept her eyes over them. John and Charis, whose marital difficulties seemed to have been at least temporarily solved by Charis’ terrible injury, sat with their daughter Gwen. Evelyn and Jabir sat at another table not far away. Jang and Yoli seemed to be slowly dropping their pretense of noninvolvement; they occupied a nearby bench. Bethany, deprived of her usual corner by the lack of gravity, sat at a table near the entry door. Carl Overton was seated nearby, held in place by a light seatbelt like the rest of the crew. Ian Inboden was at a bench some distance away. Staples had not yet spoken to him about his refusal to follow her order, but she would have to soon. She was still deciding how to handle the matter.

  Sitting at the head of the table, Staples felt like some mockery of a medieval king addressing his warriors in his mead hall. Nevertheless, she forged ahead.

  “I don’t really know how to start. We’ve got probably two or three hours more before we can dock at Chaandanee. We’re still waiting to hear. I guess I’ll say how proud I am of everyone for the work we did earlier today. We saved four lives today. You all did your jobs splendidly.”

  Under more normal circumstances that might have elicited cheers or applause from the crew, but the enormity of the moon’s displacement cast a pall over the room, so all Staples saw were some tense smiles and a few moments of congratulatory back-patting.

  Staples brushed a lock of her blonde hair out of her eyes. She had forgotten her barrettes. “So let’s address the real issue here. Charis?”

  Everyone looked at Charis. As the navigator on the ship, she was the best educated and most qualified to speak about what the new position of the moon would mean.

  “Well,” she began, “data is still coming in, but it looks like the m
oon moved about sixty thousand kilometers. No one can say why or how for sure, but of course everyone thinks that there was alien involvement. There are almost no readings that explain it. The only thing they’ve been able to determine is that some kind of sphere briefly surrounded the moon, and everything inside it got moved. No one saw the sphere.”

  “Forgive me,” Jabir broke in, “But that’s hardly surprising. The human eye cannot detect most frequencies of light.”

  Charis nodded. “That’s assuming there was any light to see. We have no idea what this sphere was made of. It could have been magnetic or… who knows?” She shrugged. “The only reason we know that it was a sphere is because anything that happened to be caught on the line was severed. The ship we encountered, the Meili,” she struggled with the Chinese pronunciation, “was on approach when it was cut in half. The front half went with the moon. Their flight log says that they were two kilometers out, so the theory is that’s where the sphere was.”

  “Most of the other passengers in the front half were rescued,” Evelyn added.

  “That’s good news,” Charis said before continuing. “I can’t really speak to what’s going to happen to society now that we have more evidence of alien existence than some top-secret file lifted from the government, but I can talk about astronomy.” Charis collected herself for a second, taking a large breath clearly in preparation for delivering some unpleasant news. “The real problem is that the moon moved sixty thousand kilometers towards Earth. That’s about sixteen percent of the total distance. What exactly this is going to do is still up for debate, but there are a few effects that we can be sure of.

  “One of these is the effect on the tides. Higher high tide and lower low tide. This is going to cause some major flooding in some areas on Earth. Coastal cities are going to have some real problems. It’s only been six hours, but we’re already seeing the effects. The proximity of the moon to Earth will actually speed up the spin of the planet, though it will take a little while for this to happen.”

  “Come again?” Yoli asked.

  “The theory,” Charis responded, “is that over the last four billion years the moon has been moving steadily further away from the Earth. The days have slowed as a result. We can only guess, but there is every expectation that the new position of the moon will cut Earth’s day by two to three hours. We’ll see this gradually as the planet’s spin increases. The move doesn’t appear to have affected the moon’s natural momentum, but it’s picking up speed too. Good thing, or else it wouldn’t maintain orbit. On the bright side,” Charis glanced at her husband and daughter, “the view of the moon from Earth must be fantastic right now.”

  “Any chance we can… fix it?” Ian asked.

  Charis saw that all eyes were still on her. “Don’t look at me. Find some aliens and ask them. We’re actually kind of lucky. All things considered, it could be worse. The closer the moon is to the Earth, the greater the damage. If it had cut the distance by say fifty percent, there probably wouldn’t be many coastal cities anymore. You’d be seeing tidal waves ten meters high or more hitting every equatorial coast every day. Move it even closer, say to within fifty thousand kilometers, and Earth’s gravity would literally rip the moon apart. And I suppose they could have just rammed the moon into the Earth.”

  Brutus’ voice issued from the speakers set in the walls. “Which begs the question: why didn’t they?”

  “We can only reason one of two possibilities,” Jabir said, holding up a finger. “Either they couldn’t,” he added a second finger, “or they chose not to.”

  “Why do it at all?” John asked. “I mean, as an attack, it was pretty ineffective. What did it accomplish?”

  Charis shook her head. “Physically? Not much. It will cause serious damage to infrastructure, but it’s predictable. There’s time to get people out. Besides, we got pretty good at handling rising sea levels around 2050. Psychologically? I can’t say. If it was supposed to be an attack, it’s a pretty weird one. If you’ve got the power to move moons around, there’s got to be a better way to cripple humanity.”

  “So it is a demonstration of power,” Jang reasoned, his deep voice filling the room.

  “It’s certainly got people’s attention,” Evelyn said. “I think you can give up on getting much more investigative reporting into the Nightshades. People are already starting to praise the US for their foresight. Some pundit said that the US must have had an oracle.”

  John grunted. “A mechanical one.” He looked up at one of the speakers in the room. “Any idea if Victor is involved in this?”

  Brutus’ response was immediate. “None, I’m afraid. I have no reason to believe that he has access to this type of technology. I don’t believe my father is capable of moving moons. He may be in collusion with these aliens, or the movement of the moon may have nothing to do with him at all. I think I can say with some certainty, however, that he will use the resulting chaos to his advantage. We should be careful.”

  Several moments of silence followed. Everyone seemed to be processing the new layout of their solar system. The long-term effects seemed too overwhelming to predict. Bereft of any prior life experience that might have prepared them for something like this, they were adrift in an unprecedented situation.

  “Well, it seems like an odd time to bring this up, but the planets keep turning, even if the speed is changing.” Staples smiled lamely at her own joke and saw more than a few answering grins. They needed this, she realized. Some normality.

  She continued. “I’ve asked Carl Overton to… to succeed Don Templeton as first mate. He’s accepted, but this is the kind of decision we said we’d vote on. I want you to know that I considered many options, but you’re all so damn good at your own jobs that I want to keep you there. This is not the time to start playing musical chairs.”

  All eyes turned to Overton, who had not yet said anything during the meeting. He waved. “I… don’t have a speech prepared or anything. I’ve gotten to know most of you over the last few months, I think. I didn’t ask for the job, but I’ll accept it until you find someone better. If you want me in the job, cool. If not, that’s cool too.”

  When it was clear that he had finished speaking, Staples tried to bring things to a close. “We should get the vote done and then prepare for docking at Chaandanee. I’ve got a line on another job that we’ll be following up on.”

  Confronting Ian Inboden on his refusal to follow an order in a crisis situation was exactly the kind of thing that Staples would have liked to run by Don Templeton, but she no longer had that luxury. As she made her way to the ReC and thought about his flat answer, her mood shifted from annoyed to angry. By the time she entered the chamber where Ian was monitoring a reactor vent irregularity, she didn’t give a damn what her former first mate might have said. She was livid.

  It was difficult to advance aggressively towards someone when weightless, but Staples did her best. She pushed herself across the room and grasped a support beam not two meters from Ian. He watched her approach, his face a mix of petulance and affected boredom.

  “You want to tell me what the hell you’re thinking refusing a direct order?” she asked, shouting over the sound of the reactor next to them.

  “This isn’t the military, Captain,” he replied, making the last word sound like a slur.

  “It’s my damn ship,” she shouted, more loudly than she needed to.

  “So what are you going to do?” he challenged.

  “Kick you the hell off it.”

  He shrugged. “You can’t. That’s a death sentence. Victor’d kill me. You said it yourself. We’re trapped here, so it’s not fair to give us orders.”

  “That’s why we voted-” she began.

  “I didn’t vote for you,” he interrupted her cleanly, as if on cue. It was clear to her that he had thought this through, but she suspected she could surprise him.

  “All right,” she said, more quietly but with no less ire. “Let’s get some things clear. A democracy m
eans you vote, and majority rules. I don’t care if you voted for me. The crew voted for me, and that makes me the Captain. You don’t get to participate in a democracy and then refuse to accept the people’s will when it doesn’t match yours. I also hold a slip of paper which says this is my ship. That’s two different reasons you have to do what I say if you want to stay on this ship. I don’t care if you don’t like it. I don’t care if you don’t like me. If you refuse to follow orders, you put lives at risk. Maybe someone else’s, maybe ours. I ordered you to that ship because you have more EVA experience than Overton. That difference in experience could have gotten someone killed.”

  “Or I could have gotten someone killed,” he shouted back.

  Staples was momentarily stunned.

  “You know,” he shook his head derisively, “you’re on this quest. You’ve got all these morals and ideas about what’s the right thing to do and who should do what when. And when it’s our ship, our crew, sure, you give the orders. Just don’t think we all share your damned do-right attitude. It’s easy to sit up there,” he pointed to the nose of the ship, though without gravity there was no true up at the moment, “and order us to perform a dangerous rescue of some perfect strangers when you’re sitting nice and cozy.”

  “It wasn’t that dangerous,” she objected, some of her anger dissipating. “You’ve got EVA experience that-”

  “And none of it is in recuing people from ships that got sliced in half by aliens. Besides, it wasn’t just dangerous for me. What if those people died because I messed up? Because I didn’t do something right?”

  “How is that better than sitting on your ass while they die?”

  “Because I didn’t do that,” he replied bitterly.

  “Really, Ian? The trolley problem?”

  He ignored her. “That’s your problem, Captain. You think everyone just sees the universe as black and white as you do, that they’ll just follow your morals because they see it all as clearly as you do. Ask me, we should have dumped that robot out the airlock as soon as we found him. But you didn’t, and now the one guy who could explain all this to you is dead.”