On the wall screen, the chronometer has skipped twenty minutes forward. Next to it, the eject icon still blinks, waiting.
12
Freeze Frame
Hitoshi stares out the window at Goose’s glowing wreckage as the lifeboat’s thrusters scale back to one-quarter gee. His chest rises and falls with each breath, his body numb. Behind him, clothes rustle and a harness unclicks, then an access panel slides open. When Hitoshi looks over his shoulder, Julian has unpacked the emergency medical kit and passes a hand-held imager over an unconscious Beckman. Isaac sits opposite, his hands draped between his knees, head low, bloody scratches marring his face and arms. When, Hitoshi glances down at his own hands, cuts score the backs of his forearms and palms from where he shielded himself from the probe.
Beckman stirs, shifting his weight.
“Guthrie,” Julian says. “Can you hear me?”
Beckman blinks a few times, staring straight ahead. “My name is Beckman.” He moves and winces. “No Guthrie, no mister.”
“That is good to hear. Can you rate your pain on a scale of one to ten?”
He grimaces. “Two.”
“I very much doubt that, with that wrist fracture. No point in downplaying, my friend.”
A deep breath and another wince. “Five.”
Julian selects a dermal and applies it to the side of his neck. “This will help. You have a concussion, right ulna fracture, three bruised ribs, and contusions along your right leg, elbow, shoulder, and back of your head.”
“Did I kill it?”
“Unfortunately, no, but what you did was very brave.” He produces a pair of shears and cuts open Beckman’s sleeve. “No displacement for the fracture, which is good, so we’ll cast it.” He lifts the aerosol dispenser and sprays it over both sides of Beckman’s arm and palm. At first it glistens like oil, then the gel rapidly expands until it’s half-a-centimeter thick, quickly drying. Next, Julian affixes a clear rectangle just over Beckman’s left eyebrow. “Your concussion is mild. This is just for telemetry.”
Beckman glances over at the two empty chairs. “Are James and Ava still aboard Goose?”
Hitoshi’s been watching Beckman and Julian, but he turns away, looking at the floor.
Julian reads the telemetry on his slate. “Let’s focus on you. Is there any place else that you are hurt?”
“What happened with the probe? Is it gone?”
Hitoshi looks up. “Goose is gone.”
“Jumped?” Beckman says.
Hitoshi’s throat is tight and his voice cracks. “Destroyed.” He can see the next question Beckman’s about to ask. “No one else got out.”
Beckman’s shoulders sink as he takes a deep breath.
Julian sets his hand on Beckman’s shoulder. “Try to stay put. I’ll give you some anti-inflammatories, then I need to look at Hitoshi and Isaac, okay?”
Beckman nods.
Julian gives him another dermal, then crosses over to Hitoshi. He produces an antiseptic toilette and cleans Hitoshi’s face and arms. It stings a bit and feels cool as it evaporates. Hitoshi looks ahead, unfocused, as Julian applies sealant to one of the deeper cuts on his cheek. “You could have went straight to the emergency area,” Julian says, “but you stayed to rescue Isaac. That was quite heroic.”
Hitoshi looks at Julian. “I don’t feel very heroic.”
“Do you have any other injuries?”
“No, just the cuts.”
Julian finishes sealing two cuts on his arms, then lays a hand on Hitoshi’s. “Try to rest. I’ll be back.”
Hitoshi blinks a few times, breathing. He stares out the window. Something clicks in his head and he feels like he’s just awakened from a daze. “I don’t know what I’m thinking. I should be scanning the wreckage. Ananke could be in it. Even the bridge escape capsule could be in it.” He reaches for the wall panel and opens the sensor display.
Isaac looks over, Julian dabbing at his head. “I’m okay, Julian. I’ll help Hitoshi.”
Julian squeezes on some sealant. “One minute.”
After Julian finishes, Isaac swivels his chair to face the wall display. “Sending out a radar pulse.”
Hitoshi’s breathing regularly now, the numbness subsiding. “Let’s catalogue everything in the field. I’ll monitor comms for the emergency beacon.”
On his screen, the active radar pulse tags thousands of pieces ranging from centimeter-wide metal fragments to entire chunks of Goose.
“Roster’s up,” Hitoshi says. “Let’s divide it into sectors. I’ll take odd, you take even.”
“Roger,” Isaac says.
Over his shoulder, Beckman has his shirt up while Julian sprays something along his ribs.
“Hey, man,” Hitoshi says to Beckman. “Thanks for going all Worf back there to save me.”
Beckman squints. “I have no idea what that means, but you’re welcome.”
Hitoshi nods, then returns to his display.
It’s just after midnight when the crew convenes at the media screen. Isaac has moved their lifeboat into the same orbit as the debris field. No longer under acceleration, they now all hold tethers floating in orbital free fall. Much to Julian’s objections, Hitoshi has brewed some coffee in the galley, and both he and Isaac drink some from zero gee bulbs. Beckman sips water. The display looks like a forensic reconstruction after an aircraft crash.
“We’ve accounted for almost all of Goose,” Hitoshi says. “No sight of Ananke’s slate or the bridge capsule, and most of the cockpit is missing.” Julian looks over at Hitoshi with an unspoken question. Hitoshi hesitates, then says, “There were no bodies in the wreckage.”
“What does that mean?” Beckman asks.
“I don’t know,” Hitoshi says. “But I think the next step is to review the lifeboat’s external cameras from when we ejected.” He pauses. “It’s going to be hard to watch.”
Everyone nods and Hitoshi puts it on screen. The camera view is situated just over their lifeboat’s thrusters, looking back at Goose. In the video, Gossamer Goose falls away, the star field turning slowly. As the time index spins higher, red light strobes from Goose’s cockpit. Ten seconds later the cockpit explodes in a brilliant flash, spiraling bits and pieces of metal in a semi-sphere.
Everyone shifts uncomfortably.
Isaac freezes the video, rewinds it, and zooms on the cabin. The video advances in slow motion. At first, the cockpit flashes red, but the color of the light changes, the interior flickering with prismatic flashes. Even in slow motion, when the cockpit explodes, it happens in only a second.
Hitoshi rewinds back to the prismatic light, advancing frame-by-frame.
One: The cockpit is intact.
Two: Colors distort and and the image twists, swirls forming in a sphere encompassing the right half of the cockpit. Where the distortion extends outside of Goose, light from a star in the background stretches into an arc.
Hitoshi raises an eyebrow and glances over at Isaac. “You see that? Gravitational lensing.”
Isaac nods. “Space-time geometry change.”
Beckman squints.
Hitoshi moves to the next frame.
Three: A spherical fireball replaces two-thirds of the cockpit.
Four: Two-thirds of the cockpit disappears. It looks like someone has taken a scooper and carved a perfect sphere out of the starboard-side of the ship. The remaining structure glows, fragments blurred and flying apart.
Five: The cockpit explodes out in a debris cone covering a semi-sphere on Goose’s port side.
Hitoshi’s pulse quickens. “That’s why the cockpit is missing. It was a jump. The same thing would happen if we could activate the Riggs drive within a mass field. Anything within the radius of the Riggs boundary would get scooped up and come along with us.”
“Jump?” Beckman says. “You mean from the alien?”
Hitoshi nods. “Yeah, rainbow light show, fireball.”
Beckman furrows his brow. “What does that mean for James?”
/>
“I don’t know. If they all got inside the escape capsule, they might be traveling with the probe.”
He doesn’t want to say that if they didn’t, they would’ve been ejected into space from the open cockpit.
Beckman raises his eyebrows. “Damn.”
Isaac pecks at his arm console. “We should connect to the Sierra orbitals now.”
Hitoshi’s with him. “Yeah.”
“Got them,” Isaac says.
“Bring up the Sierra log from the first probe jump flash.”
Isaac reads the telemetry from the probe’s first jump to Janus. “If they jumped at light speed, it would take eighty-two minutes to travel that distance.”
“Yeah,” Hitoshi says. “But the probe arrived after the flash, so it wasn’t traveling at light-speed. Thank God, because that would be freakin’ impossible.”
Isaac does some quick math on his console. “We can figure out how fast it’s going, right? Light flash took eighty-two minutes to get here. It arrived two minutes, fifty-two seconds later. Means it travels at ninety-seven percent light speed.”
“Well, well,” Hitoshi says, “not so mighty after all.” He pauses. “We’re faster than it. Goose was a lot faster than it.”
Isaac adds, “If the probe jumped around ten-thirty, then they should have arrived fourteen minutes ago.”
Beckman frowns. “I really hate math problems.”
“Yeah,” Hitoshi says, “assuming it went back to the same place it came from.”
“The orbitals should see it, then?” Julian asks.
“Once the light gets here, just past one a.m.,” Hitoshi says.
Julian shifts, turning in zero gee. “If they’re in the escape capsule, how long would it take for them to fly back here from that distance?”
Hitoshi shakes his head. “Chemical thrusters only. A few years.”
“And if we go to them?”
Hitoshi does some quick math on the console. “Lifeboat’s got an RF drive, so, eighteen days.”
Julian hesitates. He clearly doesn’t want to ask the next question. “And for all of us to get back to Earth?”
“That one’s a bit of a problem,” Hitoshi says. “Twenty-seven years.”
13
Adrift
As James lifts his hand and reaches for the eject button, something stirs on the other side of the capsule airlock. Metal groans. A jolt shakes the capsule and James’s harness straps press lightly into his shoulders. He eyes the airlock status. Vacuum on the other side. Tentatively, he slides his hand away from the eject icon, unclicks his harness and pushes out of his seat, weightless. A kick against the wall sends him drifting towards Ava. As he does, the nearest wall falls towards him. Centrifugal force. The capsule is rotating, he realizes. He grabs onto the bar beside Ava’s seat and swings in front of her.
Ava opens her eyes and focuses on him.
“Are you alright?” James says.
“Did Goose jump?”
James shakes his head. “No, that was something else. I lost twenty minutes. Were you awake for any of it?”
“Twenty minutes? Uh, no…I don’t know. I was dreaming, I think. It was so real. It felt like hours.”
Dreaming, James thinks. He considers her for a second. “Did you see yourself? Choices never taken, versions of you that could’ve been?”
Ava pulls back and grips her arm rests. She raises her eyebrows, confusion in her expression, and tears well into a weightless film over her eyes. “Yes,” she says, her voice cracking. “What does it mean?”
“I don’t know. Everything’s quiet on the other side of the airlock. Cockpit’s in vacuum.” James turns towards Ananke’s slate. “Ananke, are you alright?”
Ava says, “Her screen’s black.”
James swivels the slate towards himself. The display is translucent black, like smoked glass. He taps twice on the screen and it reboots. When it finishes, it’s deep blue with a slowly rotating ring. The text beneath reads, error - unsupported matrix transfer - intelligence purged.
“No!” James says, undocking the slate and grabbing it. He swipes through the logs. Twenty minutes ago Ananke’s quantum matrix was removed from the slate. He just holds it, staring at the rotating ring. His chest rises and falls with each deep breath.
Ava sets her hand on the back on his.
“She’s not dead,” James says. “She said it was trying to access her matrix. Goddammit, it took her. ” He watches the slate, then spins to face the wall panel. “We have to find it.” When he taps a few commands, the navcon buzzes and scrolls through several alerts. “Goose isn’t responding,” James says. “I’m going to try the lifeboat.” He taps the comms channel. “Hitoshi, James, acknowledge.”
Ava shifts forward. Thirty seconds go by without a response.
James turns and faces her. “Alright, so we’re blind in here until we eject. Ready?”
Ava nods her head. “Yes.”
James pushes towards his seat. He drifts down into it and fastens his harness, reaching for the button. “Eject in three, two, one. Now.”
A dozen firecrackers pop just on the other side of the airlock, lurching them sideways. The capsule spins and slows. When the thrusters kick on, the force pushes up from beneath the floor. James keys a command on his armrest screen and two joysticks rotate out an angles near each of his hands. The slanted screen in front of him scrolls with telemetry. Constellation diagrams appear.
“Got a fix on the Sun,” James says. “Constellations are all in the right place. Found Erebus. I’ll share my screen.”
Erebus is a blue star against a field of white stars. A smaller, fainter star is adjacent it. Janus.
“That’s…really small,” Ava says.
“Getting range…alright, we’re eighty-three light-minutes from Erebus. And we lost twenty minutes getting here. Can’t be Goose. I think the probe jumped us.”
“You think that was time compression, like when Goose jumps?”
Something clicks in James’s head. “Yeah, but Goose can do eighty-three light-minutes in a minute or so. The probe’s gotta be slower. A lot slower.”
“Hmm,” Ava says. “I always thought if we found alien tech it’d be more advanced than us.”
“Maybe they’re just different,” James says. “Let’s get a look at Goose and see how badly she’s damaged.”
When he flips on the aft external camera, at first there is only a colorful star field. When he toggles the display to infrared, his stomach sinks. The cockpit wreckage spins slowly in the void, the starboard side facing him with a circular breach where the escape capsule ejected. Above it, the side windows are perfectly intact with most of Goose’s nose untouched. The hull, however, ends in a cleanly-cut arc just aft of the cockpit seats. As the wreckage continues to rotate, the cross-sectional view of the interior comes into view. Two of the three cockpit seats are present. Naked hull frame, interior shielding, and circuitry is exposed where the frame is cut. The cut is like nothing James has ever seen, perfectly spherical. The frame glows bright in the infrared along the edges. There is no sign of the rest of the ship.
At first James says nothing, his lips flattening. He wants to punch something, but he feels Ava’s gaze upon him. “Shit,” he says. “That means Goose is disabled and the others are stranded.” He rubs his forehead, closing his eyes.
The hiss of the capsule’s atmospheric system and the rumbling thrusters fill the silence.
James opens his eyes and glances over at her. She looks frightened. “Okay,” James says, focusing on controlling his vocal tone. “Their lifeboat has a month of food, we’ve got half-a-month. We’re going to figure something out.”
“Okay,” Ava says, swallowing.
“I’m going to flip on the emergency beacon so they know we’re out here. Let’s have a look on the cameras and see if we can spot our silver friend.” Endless stars appears on their wall screens. “Can you help me with the scan?”
Ava nods.
They comple
te a three-sixty assessment under increasing magnification. After a few minutes of scanning Ava says, “Got it.” She brackets it and shares it with James’s display. At first, it’s a blue star sliding against a static background of the Milky Way. When they enhance it, the star is a slightly blurry silver asterisk with blue lights at its tips. Two of the rods are broken, their lights extinguished.
“Just over five-hundred clicks,” James says. “Looks damaged. I heard pulse fire back in the cabin. I’ll bet Beckman shot the hell out of it.”
“This makes me a bad exobiologist, but if I had a pistol I’d probably shoot it too,” Ava says.
James smiles. “You are fitting right in.” He eyes the graphic. “We can’t catch it unless it slows, but we can shadow it until it gets out of range.”
Ava contemplates that. “You want to go after it?”
He looks over at her. “That thing took Ananke, and I want to get her back.”
She’s nervous, rubbing her leg. “Any ideas how to do that?”
“Don’t know. Going to have to find a way to talk with it.”
Ava looks away. James waits, his hands resting by the joysticks.
“Let’s start with what we know,” Ava says. “Talk me through everything you saw the first time you encountered it on Janus, and then we’ll go through what just happened. We’ve got a first contact protocol. Let’s modify it for when you catch up with it.”
A subtle grin pulls across James’s face as he slips his hands onto the joysticks. “Changing course,” he says. As the thrusters fire, his weight shifts, the chair pressing against his left shoulder. He pulses another burst, leveling the capsule’s nose. The alien probe is dead ahead. James dials up the main engines for a slow and steady burn as he and Ava sink back into their seats.
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