Hitoshi floats next to Isaac, monitoring the external camera. Goose’s wreckage is thousands of glittering metal shards enveloping islands of fuselage. Every few minutes a shooting star burns up in Janus’s upper atmosphere. Pieces of Goose.
“Question is,” Hitoshi says, “whether we want to try and fish anything out of the debris field. Risky. A lot of stuff to collide with. Someone would have to go EV.”
“What do you think we need?” Isaac says.
“Oh, just off the top of my head. Guns. Lots and lots of guns. In case our friend the silver destroyer reappears. Beckman practically turned the cargo bay into an armory. I’m sure some of it’s out there.”
Beckman stirs. “We don’t need to do that.”
Hitoshi turns both of his palms up. “Seriously? Figured you’d be first in line for this idea.”
“I mean, we don’t need to risk going into the wreckage to get guns.” He pushes away from his chair and drifts to the personnel lockers. When he accesses the first locker, its door slides open to reveal three pistols.
Hitoshi blinks. “Good God, man, you hid guns on the lifeboat?”
Beckman shrugs. “Where do you think I got the pistol from before? Basic op security, have a fallback point stocked with what you need. If we ended up on the lifeboat, we’d need more than granola bars.”
Hitoshi smiles. “I could totally hug you right now.”
Beckman just stares at him.
“I won’t,” Hitoshi says, “but I could.”
From the console, an alarm chirps. Everyone freezes. The alert window reads image anomaly, Sierra One and Two.
Hitoshi pushes back to his station and switches to the Sierra feed. In the image, a new star flares blue before fading back to black.
Isaac taps calculations on his workstation. “Location is identical to initial probe jump, one-point-four billion kilometers from here, in the direction of the Oort Cloud.”
“I knew it,” Hitoshi says. “It took them back to where it came from. Anything on radio?”
Isaac shakes his head.
A tense stillness befalls the group. Hitoshi doesn’t say it, but he knows everyone’s thinking the same thing. If anyone is in the escape capsule, they may activate the emergency beacon. And a beacon would mean they were alive to throw it.
Thirty seconds goes by. Sixty. Ninety. The Sierra telemetry scrolls. Two minutes. Three minutes. Hitoshi looks over at Isaac. Isaac’s shoulders start to slump, his expression falling. Hitoshi takes a deep breath and wills the screen into action. Four minutes. Five minutes.
When the chirp sounds, it is the unmistakable ping of the escape capsule’s emergency beacon.
“Yeah!” Hitoshi yells, everyone else hooting and clapping. His stomach drops and he has trouble processing that he’s simultaneously elated and feeling like vomiting. Quietly he says to the screen, “Knew you were out there, boss.”
14
Departure
James and Ava have been following the silver probe for two hours now, but it’s simply much faster than the capsule. At a distance of two-hundred-thousand kilometers the probe is no more than a twinkling star when viewed at maximum magnification. James glances at the chronometer. It’s just after two a.m. and he’s feeling the fatigue. He sips a silver-foiled coffee pouch he’s fetched from the galley. To his left, Ava taps at her slate, also drinking coffee.
An alert sounds from the navcon. When James looks at the distance to the probe, the numbers start to decrease. He was hoping for this.
“It’s slowing,” James says. “One-point-five gee.”
Ava looks up from her slate. “Can we catch it?”
“If it keeps slowing until it stops, it’ll get where it’s going in ninety-minutes.” He plots an intercept on the navcon. “Best scenario is to slow now and meet it there. Looks like we’ll arrive an hour after it does.”
Ava nods, a bit worried.
“Going to swing us starboard to have a look around it, then we’ll flip around for decel,” James says, setting his hand on the joystick. “Here we go.” He tabs the controls and the lateral thrust fires, accelerating the capsule to the starboard. After thirty seconds he neutralizes the sideways motion with a counter-burn, locking the forward camera on the probe’s destination.
On the forward camera, inky black space and salted white stars fill the view. When James steps up the magnification, an irregular patch of black sits slightly lighter than the background space, an angled line of starlight reflecting along an unseen geometry. The image is pixelated and hard to make out.
“There is something there,” James says.
Ava eyes the image on her wall screen. “I’m seeing a bit of structure. Maybe segments.”
“Might be a ship. Probably a hundred meters, based on this zoom level.”
Ava furrows her eyebrows, gripping her arm rests. “What should we do?”
James quirks his head. “Yeager said ‘at the moment of truth there’s either results or reasons.’ Let’s go for results. We’re going to get her back.” He sets his hand back on the joystick. “Prepare for decel.”
Janus spins beneath the lifeboat, Erebus rising over the blue horizon. Goose’s wreckage has long since fallen out of view. Ahead, nestled in the stars, a glittering metal speck flashes.
“There she is,” Isaac says.
Hitoshi finishes donning his EV suit, tethering his helmet and gloves to his hip. The room is filled with activity as others get into their suits.
On the lifeboat’s forward camera, the metal speck grows into an illuminated silver ring. In its center, Bernard’s Beauty gleams with reflected light. All of the hull plates have been replaced and the ring’s robotic arms are back in their sleep positions.
Hitoshi glances at his workstation. The display scrolls with the repair list queued up for the orbital ring. More than a quarter of the items are highlighted red, cancelled by him to shave off time. Those will have to wait until they get home. In exchange, Bernard’s is ready three hours earlier than planned. He takes a deep breath. “Oh my God, I can’t believe we’re going to do this.”
Isaac’s console beeps. “Okay, Bernard’s and the boat are talking. Auto-dock initiated.”
The lifeboat responds with a gentle course correction. Everyone sways right as Bernard’s grows larger on the main display.
Beckman drifts towards Hitoshi, holding a holstered pistol in his right hand. Part of the gel cast is visible beneath his ungloved EV suit. “Your sidearm. Magnetic holster mount,” he says. He clicks the holster onto Hitoshi’s right hip, then draws the pistol. “Safety, charge, mode selector…keep it in semi-auto…trigger. You ever fire one before?”
“Uh, not in real life.”
“Don’t shoot me. I will be very unhappy.”
“I’ll try not to confuse you with a spinning orb of doom.”
Beckman only had three pistols, Hitoshi realizes. Julian received one, Beckman the other, and Hitoshi the last. Hitoshi glances at the pistol, then to Isaac, and back to Beckman, asking the question without vocalizing it.
“Because you didn’t freeze,” Beckman says quietly. He turns away.
Back at his workstation, Isaac says, “Seats please. Prepare for dock.”
Everyone clicks into their harness. On the screen, the orbital repair ring’s structure slips past the camera, spotlights glaring into lens flares. Bernard’s airlock is just forward of the dock clamps. They glide smoothly towards it, thrusters firing in bursts, decelerating to a gentle bump. A green light illuminates over the airlock door.
The crew exits their seats and drifts towards the door, Hitoshi in the lead. When he cycles the airlock, they pass through the small entry chamber and into the cramped corridor adjacent Bernard’s reactor. One-by-one they sail into the cockpit. Three chairs await them. Hitoshi eyes the center chair, James’s chair, hesitating.
Julian clicks into the left-most chair, glancing up to Hitoshi. “Captain’s chair,” he says, “and you’re the captain, my friend.”
Hitoshi’s hand shakes as he sets it upon the head rest. The foam molds into his palm. No one here knows this ship better than me, he tells himself. When he glances to his right, Isaac settles into the navigation seat, pecking at the arm panel. Hitoshi takes a deep breath and swings around into the captain’s chair. Straight ahead, gold stars and the luminous smudges of the Milky Way filter through the cockpit windows. Beneath them, the consoles glow with hundreds of icons and displays.
“Okay…okay,” Hitoshi says. “We can do this.” He opens the interior camera feed to the aft fusion reactor chamber. In it, Beckman folds down a jump seat from the wall and reels out a three point harness. “Doing okay back there?” Hitoshi says.
“I’ve been in tighter quarters,” Beckman says. “No worries. Got a good view of the entry corridor from here. Decent tactical spot.”
“Okay. Going to work the pre-flight checklist now.”
To Hitoshi’s left, Julian has the startup checklist running. He annunciates each item as he completes it. “Fusion inlet at centerline, field coils in the green.”
Isaac interacts with the navcon. A dotted line projects the path of their orbital exit to minimum safe jump distance. What happens after that is all Hitoshi’s responsibility.
Hitoshi reaches up to the overhead panel and taps the running lights icon. On the external camera feed, white light illuminates the Hayden-Pratt logos. Next, he opens the Riggs screen on the main console. As he syncs his jump course with Isaac’s normal-space course, parameters scroll down the screen. He aligns the interferometers and begins scanning the manifold geometry along their intended path. After that, he’s got some tough math to do to work out the Boseman parameters, and then adjust the Riggs emitters to the correct geometry. If he gets any part of it wrong, he’s painfully aware, they’ll implode. Tension spreads across his neck and shoulders.
“Hey,” Isaac says, watching him.
Hitoshi’s focusing on the panel, tapping instructions and not looking up. “Yeah?”
“You’re going to kick some ass.”
Hitoshi blinks and does a double-take. It’s a very un-Isaac thing to say. “You feeling okay?”
“Yeah. It’s what James would say if he were here, so, you know. But I mean it.”
“Thanks, buddy. We’re going to do this.”
Isaac holds out his fist and Hitoshi smiles, bumping the top of his fist with the bottom of his. “Game on,” Hitoshi says.
Bernard’s slips out of the ring, the dock lights falling quickly behind it. As it accelerates, it rises to a higher orbit. Janus turns a full half-orbit beneath it before it breaks free and streaks ahead towards the band of the Milky Way.
In the cockpit, Hitoshi smoothly works the controls. They’ve been monitoring the escape capsule’s radio beacon and know where it was, and where it will be when they arrive. If he’s done his math right, they’ll come out a thousand kilometers short, do a one gee deceleration for ten minutes to shed their Riggs boost velocity, and cozy up right alongside the capsule.
“Minimum safe distance,” Isaac says.
Hitoshi’s breathing hard, his pulse increasing. He triple checks his calculations on the arm panel.
“Drive charge at one hundred percent,” Julian says. “Ship’s ready.” When Hitoshi looks over at him, he smiles and gives a thumbs up.
“Okay, everything’s set.” He glances ahead through the windows. Yellow stars, red stars, blue stars, waiting. “Here we go.” He toggles the intercom. “Prep for jump.” As he reaches for the controls, he spots the back of his wrist where the dermal would usually rest. The skin is bare. Oddly, he doesn’t want one. There’s too much to concentrate on. He slides his finger along the Riggs display. The icon blinks, standing by.
Hitoshi breathes deeply, closing his eyes for a moment, then opens them. “Jump in three, two, one. Engage.”
The stars fade to blue and slip towards the center of the universe.
15
Goose Egg
James finishes donning his orange EV suit as the emergency capsule slows to a stop. It’s just after four-thirty in the morning and they’ve arrived at the intercept point with the silver probe. To his left, Ava clicks her helmet into place. On the wall screens, the navcon shows them holding position at a distance of one kilometer from the larger alien vessel. The ship is one-hundred-and-twenty-one meters wide by two-hundred-and-ten meters long, resembling a hollow metal log constructed of irregular rectangular tapered slats. The exterior gleams like polished stone and is caked with a dozen meters of water ice. The open interior is smooth and completely dark, except for the soccer-ball-shaped buds peppering its surface. James counts twenty-three buds in total. Each has a dull red ember glowing from the center of its exposed face. As best he and Ava can tell, they are identical to the silver probe. The entire cylindrical ship rotates slowly about its axis, and they can’t tell if the buds are held in place by the artificial gravity of the spin or some other mechanism. So far, there is no reaction from the vessel to their presence.
James attaches Ananke’s slate to his suit mount and sets the software to open its input port for matrix transfer. He glances over at Ava as he reaches for the comm. “Here goes.” He taps it open. “This is James Hayden of the space vessel Goose Egg, respond.”
Ava arches an eyebrow. “I like the name.”
James shrugs. “Yeah, just came up with that. Every ship’s gotta have one. Figured I may as well do it right.” He watches the radio display. No emissions from the vessel. A glance at the navcon. The rotational velocity numbers are just a hair higher than the last time he looked. “Anything yet on the scan?”
Ava’s screen has a five-by-five grid filled with images of the twenty-three buds. The display is running in low-light enhanced mode, giving everything a blue tinge. “Maybe three candidates. Hard to see, we’re at a bad angle. Visible light would make this easier, but I don’t think we should turn on the floods.”
James nods. “Agreed.” He sets his hands on the joysticks. “Gonna have to get closer.”
Ava takes a deep breath, and James edges the thrust forward. The range display spins down. Nine hundred meters. Five hundred. One hundred. The deceleration kicks in hard and they coast to a stop at twenty meters. At this distance, the alien vessel is a massive mouth waiting to swallow them whole.
“Okay, yeah, that is really close,” Ava says. “Let’s see what we can see.” She enlarges the three candidate buds. Numbers one and two are identical silver soccer balls. The third, however, has melted pock marks marring its silver skin, like craters from micrometeorite impacts. Except James knows they aren’t micrometeorites. They’re pulse pistol wounds.
“Either Beckman gets around, or that’s our guy,” James says. “Next part’s a bit dicey, ready?”
“Got my pulse going now, but yes.”
James opens the tight beam and targets the damaged silver probe with the comms laser. He sends out a basic number series along the beam. They both wait. After a minute of no response, he tries other patterns they’ve agreed on — prime numbers, numbers representing universal constants, like pi — but still gets no response.
“Similar to previous encounters,” she says. “We can’t do what we need to with the capsule lights, so on to plan B.”
James eyes the spinning vessel, the rotational numbers ever increasing. “You got grit, doctor. Glad you’re with me.” He takes a deep breath. “Alright. Going in.”
When the capsule thrusters fire, the seat presses up against James. On the display, the alien vessel engulfs them, and, it has a strangely familiar feeling to it, like when James threaded Bernard’s through the eye of the orbital repair ring. Straight ahead, stars are visible through the other end of the ship. James taps the joystick and their capsule rotates ninety-degrees, thrusters cancelling their forward motion. He nudges up the nose until it is lined up with the damaged silver probe. It sits fifty-meters in front of them, rotating with the vessel’s inner surface. James puts their capsule into a matching rotation to
keep the probe aligned.
“Nothing yet on the slate comm port,” Ava says.
James eyes the rotational display. “Spin rate’s making a quarter-gee gravity. Kind of like walking on the moon.”
“Sure,” Ava says, “if the moon were made by extraterrestrials.”
He points to a flat spot just south of the silver probe. “I’m going to set down there.” He glances back towards her. “Bet you didn’t think this would happen when you signed on.”
“A girl can dream.”
“Here goes.” He nudges the capsule forward and the vessel’s wall rises up to meet them. As it nears, he rotates them to align with the landing surface and accelerates, matching the spin rate. A downward push from the dorsal thrusters jolts them against the alien structure. They bounce once, James compensating, and drift back down for a gentler landing. Although all of the thrusters are off, it still feels like they’re on, pushing up against them at one-quarter gravity.
James links the capsule’s controls to his suit display and stands. Ava steps over the nearby seat and meets him. He extends his retractable lanyard from his suit and clicks it into Ava’s carabiner. “You’re stuck with me now,” he says.
She sets her hand on his shoulder. “However this turns out, it’s been a hell of an adventure, James.”
He takes her hand and squeezes it. “It’s not done yet.” He takes a step towards the airlock and she follows. Red lights announce the depressurization in the cramped entry chamber, then he opens the door to space. The silver probe is ten meters in front of them, waiting.
When he steps out onto the surface, it’s a bit of a drunken walk, a combination of low gravity and Coriolis spin force. The metal floor curves up with each step. In his peripheral vision, stars constantly rotate.
Ava wobbles and James steadies her. “Try to look ahead and avoid the stars,” James says.
None of the capsule’s exterior lights are on and it’s dark, even with his helmet running in enhanced mode. Aside from the starlight, the only visible light here is the dull red clusters of the silver probe’s retracted rods. To his left, a half-dozen other silver probes fan out, the nearest twenty-meters away. He feels like he’s walking through a mine field. Ava steps beside him, a tether trailing from her to the capsule airlock. His comms channel is open to her suit and he hears her elevated breathing. He reaches over and takes her hand, holding it with his right. She glances down at it, then to him, and gives a faint smile. “We’re in this together,” he says.
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