Across the Void

by S. K. Vaughn

  May’s mind drifted to her husband, and she could no longer hear Eve’s rambling. It wasn’t that she had forgotten him. Being so focused on the ship and basic survival, trying to find her way through the mental fog, she had not had either the time or the ability to think much about him. But the more she regained her faculties, the more he was on her mind.

  Although her heart swelled with warmth and affection, she felt butterflies of anxiety in her stomach. Was it that she simply missed him and worried he was convinced she was dead? That he was in the kind of pain she might feel if she thought the same thing about him? Or was it something more? She remembered what Eve had said about retrograde amnesia. The older memories would come first, or at least be more accessible. Memories closer to her illness would be harder to access.

  Eventually it would come to her. He would come to her. But for now, he felt so very far away.

  8

  Houston, Texas

  February 14, 2066

  Sunday afternoon. May was in the Hawking II simulator at Johnson Space Center. The flight deck was encased in a metal sphere suspended in a huge electromagnetic field, capable of simulating space travel with a high degree of accuracy. May was running through her antigravity training programs, floating from station to station with a belt-mounted thruster unit.

  “Training sequence complete,” the onboard AI said. “Perfect score. Excellent work, Commander.”

  “Thank you,” May replied, coming slowly back down to earth.

  “Would you like to go again?”

  “No. I should probably go outside and simulate being a human being for a while.”

  “Have fun,” the AI said.

  “Please, that’s way too much pressure,” May said, laughing.

  Outside, the world was wet from rain, and broken light dappled the asphalt. There was still plenty of work to be done in the simulator, but her mind was mush and she hadn’t seen the sun in days.

  “Time for a drink. Maybe two.”

  Walking to her car, she allowed a straggling shower to soak her clothes. It felt good not to care. As commander, all she did was agonize over every detail, no matter how small. That was the NASA way. At the moment, the only details she cared about were finding a good margarita, with salt, and chasing it with a long drag on a cigarette. Normally she would have just gone back to her nondescript condominium to drink and smoke alone, but she was tired of feeling sorry for herself for being such a pathetic loner. Monday was a day off. Might as well use it to recover from something in the realm of fun.

  May walked out to the only car in the parking lot, a very American red Mustang convertible she’d purchased with every last penny of her savings. It was even one of the ancient beasts that actually allowed you to drive yourself. Autopilot was bullshit, and driving was one of life’s great privileges—especially in a sports car with the wind blowing through your hair. There wasn’t a nerd in the universe who could invent anything to replace that.

  Nineteenth Street in the Heights was thronged with people. It seemed as though everywhere May looked, there were couples holding hands, eating and drinking on restaurant patios, kissing in public. Traffic was heavy, so she calmed her nerves with a Dunhill red and dialed some pop nonsense into the sound system.

  “Valentine’s Day. Yanks and their public shows of affection,” she shuddered. “I think I might be sick.”

  Getting that drink, or two, became urgent, and May’s patience ran thin as she drove at a snail’s pace, scanning the street for places that weren’t advertising death by fried everything. Half a block up, someone was backing out of a spot in front of a Mexican place, and she was in perfect position to grab it. “Hallelujah,” she said happily. But as soon as the car pulled out, another car on the opposite side of the road pulled a U-turn and slid into her space.

  “Son of a bitch,” she hissed.

  As she prepared a verbal diatribe to unleash on the offending driver, she didn’t notice the man on the sidewalk next to her wearing a droopy wool cardigan and old sneakers. His nose was buried in a cumbersome old hardcover book, and he was trying to negotiate a rapidly melting ice cream cone—green pistachio, no less—of preposterous size. When he blindly stepped off the curb in front of her car to cross the street, he was so close that, even at less than fifteen miles per hour, it was impossible to stop. Her right front bumper cut him off at the knees, and he let out a doglike yelp. May hit the brakes, and he slumped awkwardly over the hood.

  At first she gasped in horror at having run someone down, but then burst out laughing when his ice cream scoop flew over the top of the windshield and into her lap. The man struggled angrily to his feet, an empty sugar cone in his shaking hand.

  “Why didn’t you slow down?” he yelled.

  “I was going so slow I was practically moving backward,” she said, fighting to stifle her laughter. “Maybe you should watch where you’re walking instead of wearing a book on your face and eating that ridiculous ice cream cone. What are you, eight years old?”

  His face turned red. A crowd gathered to gawk and laugh, which made May instantly feel sorry for ridiculing him. What the hell happened to her manners? She was about to apologize when he threw fuel on the fire.

  “It’s not funny,” he shouted, rubbing his knee. “Maybe you should learn to drive properly in this country before you kill someone.”

  The gawkers chuckled and clapped. Devices were out and recording. May’s pity for the man evaporated as quickly as her vitriol for the crowd spiked. She’d be damned if she were going to be viewed as the hapless foreigner, unable to navigate something as brainless as driving on the right side of the road.

  “Or maybe you should pull your head out of your arse,” she replied evenly. “And by the way, the mental hospital called. They’d like their dirty sweater back.”

  The crowd roared with laughter and applauded her, which instantly took the fight out of him. It was clear he was feeling self-conscious and wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible, perhaps to crawl into a hole and die. In his haste to retreat, he went to retrieve his book from the street and nearly got his head taken off by a speeding pickup truck. Once the book was in his hand, he jogged down the sidewalk and sat on a bus bench to collect himself.

  May felt horribly ashamed as the drawling crowd jeered his exit. She parked a few spaces down and walked back to him.

  “Did you come back to finish me off?” he quipped.

  May showed him her driver’s license. “I came back to apologize and offer to take you to a doctor to make sure you’re all right. And here’s my license if you want to call the authorities. I’m Maryam, by the way.”

  “Stephen.”

  She offered him her hand, which he flatly ignored. At first, she was offended by his childish behavior, but then she saw the blood leaking through his sweater at the wrist.

  “Oh, you’re hurt,” she lamented. “I have a first aid kit in the car. Be right back.”

  She jogged to her car and grabbed the kit. But when she looked back, the bench was empty.

  9

  Orville and Wilbur Wright Space Station, Lunar Orbit

  December 26, 2067

  “Loading latest search imagery,” a male AI voice said, “Completed 3.26 hours ago.”

  On a curved floor-to-ceiling screen, a high-resolution image of Europa appeared. The detail was so vivid and clear that it looked as though one could reach into the screen and touch the moon’s icy surface. Its crisscross patterns of dark fissures broke up the moon’s otherwise brilliantly reflective patina. Planted in the frozen, glittering sea was a pod of multinational flags representing all the countries involved in the historic mission.

  NASA’s UV optical infrared telescope, built to survey exoplanets millions of light-years away, had been trained on Jupiter to search for signs of the missing Hawking II vessel. The search pattern began with a view of Europa and slowly reversed through space, like a movie camera on a dolly. As it moved back in increments of hundreds of millions of miles,
it covered what would have been the Hawking II’s return voyage trajectory. From Europa, it moved through the orbit of gas giant Jupiter, looming so massive that it covered most of the screen for several increments, then through the main asteroid belt between the orbits of Jupiter and Mars, and then past Mars’s orbit, ending at Wright Station’s lunar orbit.

  In the final image, Jupiter was visible only as a minuscule, barely discernible pinpoint of light buried in the enormous expanse of stars. The distance covered in the search pattern was nearly 372 million miles. This number, and this image, were what Stephen Knox was left to behold as he analyzed the data feeds in the lower half of the screen. He was also forced to accept the most damning of data: the dry, machine-fed line at the bottom that stated Vessel Not Detected.

  “Screen off,” he said quietly.

  The image faded, and the screen returned to its function as his office observation window. The empty hangar, in full view outside, looked like an open, bloodless wound. Seeing his reflection, Stephen thought he looked similarly hollow. His usual scholarly appearance—a mess of raven, gray-flecked hair perpetually being swept out of his dark, interrogative stare, matching beard transitioning from kempt and professorial to bordering on hermitic, and his long, provincial face deeply lined by principles—appeared consumed by the ravenous appetite of worry.

  It was almost inconceivable that only a few months ago, he’d watched the Hawking II depart with his wife, May, at the helm and his entire research team in tow. As the vessel had pulled out of dock to great fanfare, he’d felt none of the joy he’d anticipated at seeing his life’s work so literally realized in one of the most ambitious missions in NASA history. Instead, he had fidgeted with his wedding ring, feeling its relevance fading as the distance between station and vessel grew. He’d watched the video feed of May from the flight deck, a similarly bleak expression on her face. And when the Hawking II was swallowed by darkness, he had slipped his ring off and placed it in his desk drawer, along with other weightless relics.

  All had gone well with the voyage, which had taken a little over thirteen weeks to complete. Humans had set foot for the first time on the icy frontier of Europa. The seven-day exploration and sample excavation was a resounding success. But then . . . total loss of contact—another first for NASA. And not just temporary, which was to be expected with deep-space missions. Eleven days of sustained radio silence. Nothing coming in or going out. Telemetry gone. Condition of crew and vessel unknown.

  Above all else, Stephen was a scientist. For most of his existence, he’d lived and breathed empirical data and understood the cold equations it wrought. The Hawking II equation was the coldest. With each passing day, the crew’s chances for survival were exponentially diminished. Space was eternally unforgiving. There was no such thing as a small problem. Every minuscule crack overlooked had the potential to become a gaping hole, hungry for human life. For May’s life.

  Despite that cold calculation, an unfamiliar part of him clung to the superstitious notion that he needed to stand watch, offering his will as a beacon in the vastness of space. He imagined the wives of ancient mariners dutifully doing the widow’s walk to bring their husbands back, a fool’s errand in the face of the unforgiving sea. But, like them, his ritual was the only thing that kept him from succumbing to the depths of fear. He’d always scoffed at hope and at optimism, its more agnostic cousin. But he wanted to crawl back to them now, begging forgiveness, asking for even the smallest measure of peace. The thought of having potentially sent thirty-five people to their deaths, one of whom had been the love of his life, was like a malignant tumor spreading into every corner of his mind. What would make it lethal was the possibility that he might never again have the opportunity to tell May how much she meant to him.

  But that particular gun to the head was another story altogether.

  Stephen’s AI admin chimed in on the intercom.

  “How long?” Stephen asked before it could speak.

  “Thirty minutes, sir.”

  “Get me a blindfold and a cigarette, please.”

  “Excuse me, sir?”

  “Never mind.”

  “Would you like some coffee? Or perhaps a stress patch?”

  “Nothing, thank you.”

  Robert Warren, NASA’s director of deep-space missions and Stephen’s boss, had requested his presence for a mandatory meeting. Stephen had no illusions about what that meeting would entail. It was as predictable as most of Robert’s actions. In a mild form of protest, Stephen did not intend to go to the man’s office to suffer the indignity he knew was in store. He can come to me for once, the bastard.

  Instead, he switched off his AI intercom and all incoming communication lines and returned to the observation window. As a boy, he’d spent countless summer nights tracking constellations. In what he was convinced were his final hours there, that was how he planned to pass the time until the axe fell. But his heart wasn’t in it. What had been a source of inspiration his entire life now felt like a hostile, betraying force. No matter how hard he tried to look beyond the hangar, his mind was anchored there, the last place he saw her, maybe the last place he would ever see her.

  No. He had to get her home.

  10

  Orville and Wilbur Wright Space Station, Lunar Orbit

  May 9, 2066

  Stephen and May were frequently required to shuttle to Wright Station so that May could continue her training and Stephen could supervise the building of the Hawking II’s onboard labs. On one of May’s EVA vessel inspections, she convinced Stephen to join her. He’d never done one before and thinking about it filled him with mortal terror. But she always had a way of drawing him outside his comfort zone, so he found himself floating and tethered, waiting for May, in the hangar. The Hawking II was in dock, still under construction. He marveled at its planetary shape, cross-sectioned into seven decks of varying sizes. The vessel had been designed by Raj Kapoor, a brilliant engineer from STMD, NASA’s Space Technology Mission Directorate, who had become one of Stephen’s close friends. As much as it was a technical marvel, it was also a work of art. More important, it was the physical manifestation of his life’s work.

  “Are we having fun yet?” May asked. Having finished her inspection, she floated up to Stephen, untethered, a fiendish grin flashing him from behind her helmet glass.

  “Actually, yes, believe it or not,” he said. “It’s quite a ship, when you see it in person.”

  “Want to see more?”

  “Um, sure, but how can we . . . ?” He motioned to his tether line.

  “Oh, you won’t be needing that old thing,” she said.

  “This is Control,” the station commander droned. “We’re seeing a heart rate and blood pressure spike in Dr. Knox.”

  “I’m fine,” Stephen said.

  “Just nerves,” May said.

  “Copy that.”

  “May, I don’t know about this,” he said anxiously.

  “Come on, there’s nothing to it.” Using her thrusters, she did a few trick rolls and backflips and floated up next to him. “See? You’re going to love it.”

  May unhooked his tether.

  “Uh, this is Control. We’re seeing a tether release for Dr. Knox.”

  “Intentional, Control,” May said. “I’m going to walk with Dr. Knox for a bit, show him the rest of the vessel.”

  “Copy. Enjoy, Dr. Knox.”

  “Thanks,” Stephen said, glaring at May.

  May floated away from him. It was only about fifteen feet, but it felt like five hundred to Stephen.

  “Okay, use your thrusters to come over to me. Baby steps.”

  He had no intention of appearing to be a coward, but being surrounded by the complete abyss of space, with nothing to serve as the “ground” below, made him feel panicked.

  “Uh, this is Control—”

  “Just nerves,” Stephen blurted out through short, rapid breaths.

  “Breathe normally,” May said, “or you’ll screw up your
mixture and pass out. Just look right at me, okay? Focus on my face.”

  Stephen focused on May’s face and slowed his breathing to normal. Then he awkwardly activated his thrusters and jerked across the space between them, nearly throwing himself into a spinning somersault. She caught him and slowed them both.

  “Outstanding,” she said, slightly out of breath. “Uh, why don’t we start by tethering our suits? I’ll fly us around the ship, and you can watch and learn. Then you can try. Okay?”

  “Just no flips or stunts.”

  She sighed. “Oh, all right.”

  She tethered them, and they flew along the outside edge of the ship, examining all its stunning details. It was so quiet and peaceful that Stephen almost forgot they were surrounded by the vastness of space. If he looked away from the ship or the back of May’s helmet, though, he was immediately reminded, and had to fight off a powerful feeling of vertigo. After several minutes of this, the feeling was not as strong, and he felt more confident. May stopped, and they hovered in front of the massive window to the bridge. The gleaming flight deck behind it was swarmed with engineers working in zero gravity.

  “Isn’t it lovely?” she said excitedly.

  “It’s gorgeous beyond words. Appropriate for such an accomplished commander.”

  “Why, thank you, good sir.” She bowed.

  “I envy you,” Stephen said. “Being an astronaut.”

  “Being a supergenius whose research and fearlessness in the face of an army of ignorant—and potentially violent, I might add—dissenters is the impetus for one of the most important missions in the history of space exploration, and potentially all of humanity, isn’t good enough for you?”