Across the Void

by S. K. Vaughn

  There were tons of great shots of Stephen in that sequence. May laughed at the old clothes and hairstyles, including the old man’s sweater he’d worn the day they met. But, for some unknown reason, she still felt anxious every time she saw him.

  “Would you like to take a break?”

  “No. Let’s move on to more pressing matters. I’d like to examine every part of the ship and then get into some flight ops simulations. I’m tired of being useless.”

  “Loading vessel schematics.”

  The 3-D schematic walk-through of the ship appeared. May scrolled through the menu and chose an exterior view. The Hawking II’s size and unorthodox sphere shape were designed to accommodate complex laboratory environments similar to those on Earth, and to carry multiple landing vehicles. From the side, in travel orientation, it was made up of seven disk-shaped decks, all vertically configured, connected by a central access shaft. The diameters of the decks varied in size from front to back. At the fore was the flight deck, and propulsion was aft. These were the smallest decks. Moving toward the center of the vessel, the decks became progressively larger. While in motion, all decks rotated around the axis of the central shaft, providing their artificial gravity. As a whole, the design resembled a cross-sectioned planet, with equal space between the cuts.

  “How is your memory of the vessel?” Eve asked.

  “Fine. Everything looks familiar in outside view,” May said, reminiscing about her space walk with Stephen. “Moving inside.”

  May scrolled to the 3-D interior walk-through schematic. The simulation was a far cry from reality, but she was reminded of the vessel’s internal architecture—built in a way that maintained one’s sense of grounded orientation at all times—and beautifully sculpted interior walls, all with active image cells that made the ship one big projection screen. One could turn an entire room into a simulated one, like a tropical rain forest or city street. NASA had found this critical to the psychological health of deep-space travelers. The sights and sounds were so immersive that they could trick the brain into thinking it was somewhere back home. The crew could also pull up maintenance schematics and other operations maps and images. Of course, it was all dark now, having lost power to whatever malfunctions were ailing the ship. I’m heading right to the beach when I get this all figured out, May mused.

  She moved past the bridge, most of which already felt familiar, and into the landing vehicle hangar. There were several standard landing vehicles, round and pod-like, about the size of a delivery truck, and a much larger, and more complex, orbiting vehicle, closer in size to a city bus, for deploying and operating Stephen’s NanoSphere tech. Like the rest of the ship, all had a very streamlined, minimalist design. They glowed in place at their charging stations like luminescent eggs waiting to hatch.

  From there, she went into the communications deck, atop which rested the currently useless communications antenna array. She was not surprised that this didn’t look readily familiar. The empty workstations indicated the presence of the comms crew, a close-knit group who guarded their domain as fiercely as the computer scientists policed the processor deck. The madness of maintaining multiple levels of communication, from the simplest radio transmissions to highly complex telemetry, afforded them a nonexistent margin of error. One little mistake, and it—well, you got May’s current situation.

  “Are we making any progress with comms? Never mind; you would have told me.”

  “I estimate having some conclusions very shortly.”

  “Good.”

  May moved the simulated walk-through into the habitation deck, which housed crew sleeping quarters, galleys, infirmary, and food and water replenishment labs. Again, the sim version of the ship was a brightly lit utopia with a plethora of ergonomic conveniences, including sleeping quarters resembling highly modern, luxury hotel suites that rivaled one’s actual home in design and features. Most spectacular was the lab deck, positioned directly in the middle of the ship. It was home to twenty-six lab modules fully customized for the different disciplines within Stephen’s research team—planetary scientists, physicists, engineers, and so on. They were self-contained units, meant to perfectly match the best of their Earth counterparts, all configured with different levels of quarantine—a precaution created in the event that the team unearthed something dangerous on Europa. Quarantine allowed for any of the lab modules to be rapidly sealed and jettisoned in the event of contamination.

  “Eve, were any quarantine protocols initiated before you lost data?”

  “I see no record of that.”

  “Please download any research data you can find. I’d like an inventory of samples taken from Europa and their locations on the ship.”

  “I’ll have it shortly.”

  May continued her walk-through into the biogarden, thick with tropical and semitropical foliage cultivated to replenish oxygen and serve as airborne toxin filters for the entire ship. It was like the Amazon basin—lush, green, and saturated with rainwater.

  “Eve, please also look in on the biogarden and make sure it’s working properly. I’d hate to bust my arse to fix this crate only to run out of air.”

  “I am still unable to get any data from that area.”

  “Video?”

  “Blind and unresponsive.”

  “Okay, I’ll do a physical inspection when we’re done here.”

  Bringing up the rear of the vessel were the reactor and engine decks. Quantum vacuum plasma thrusters, capable of greatly exceeding the velocity of antiquated solid fuel rockets, were powered by an aneutronic fusion reactor, which provided unlimited power to the entire vessel. It was highly efficient and reliable, posed few risks to the safety of the ship and crew, and, when working properly, could run virtually forever in the vacuum of space. It also shaved off months of travel time and allowed for much larger payloads. Its one potential danger—and it was a big one—was the amount of heat it produced. May had heard scientists refer to fusion as “scaling down the sun.” The sun, like all stars, was a gigantic fusion reactor that easily fused atoms thanks to its extreme heat and powerful gravitational force. Safely replicating that on a small scale had been a scientific feat on par with the Wright brothers’ first flight.

  “Eve, what’s the update on reactor capacity?”

  “Down to 18 percent capacity.”

  “How long do you estimate until we reach zero?”

  “At the current loss rate, approximately eight to ten days.”

  13

  “God I need a cigarette.”

  May sat on the bridge, her head swimming. After spending several hours refamiliarizing herself with the ship, she felt confident that her knowledge of ship operations had fully been restored. But that came with a price. Her increasing acuity was bringing to light the Hawking II’s dreadful prognosis. Eve had delivered what was probably a conservative assessment, but the flesh and blood version of Eve had taught May to top off all bad news with a healthy dollop of pessimism. Better to be wrong about how shitty things are than get caught with your pants down.

  Priorities. She had wanted to do a physical inspection of the vessel, but Eve had not been at all successful in restoring the ship’s navigation, so the first matter at hand—the one problem that was solvable by the best pilot in the galaxy—was to get the Hawking II back on course toward Earth. It didn’t have to be exact. The goal was to lock into a trajectory that would facilitate reestablishing contact versus flying blind and hoping for the best.

  “Eve, we need something, anything, as a starting point for navigation. Are you seeing any familiar star fields?”

  “Unfortunately, not yet.”

  “If I weren’t so stressed out, I would laugh at the irony. Ancient mariners would have been lost without the stars, and they’re making us the needle in the haystack,” May mused. “Wait! We might be able to use the sun.”

  “We haven’t had a clear visual of the sun since you woke up.”

  “Something is blocking our view. And since we’
re on the dark side of it, we can’t see the body in question. Look at current planetary orbit prediction models.”

  “Charting now.”

  Eve overlaid the orbit models on the bridge observation window.

  “We left Europa on December 9,” May said. “We went dark on the fifteenth, the day I was admitted to the infirmary. Let’s assume that’s also the time when we went off course. Even with that amount of distance covered, we would have still been under the influence of Jupiter’s gravitational pull, right?”

  “Theoretically, yes, but I am not certain to what degree.”

  “Fine, but our drifting trajectory would have been dictated to some degree by Jupiter. Doubtful we went too far in this direction or this direction.” May pointed out paths on the orbital map. “We could have easily gone these ways,” she continued, “far enough to get ourselves into a world of hurt. Looking at those trajectories and calculating our speed with Jupiter’s gravity, these are the most realistic areas to which we could have gone, right?”

  “Yes.” Eve highlighted an area on the map. “If a celestial body is blocking our view of the sun, this is the most likely area, as the Cybele group in the asteroid belt is in this vicinity. With planetary orbital paths, it’s unlikely one body would have consistently blocked our view for this long. However, several bodies large enough to obscure a star field could have done so.”

  May jumped up. “Eve, you’re a genius. Let’s look for them with infrared scan.”

  “Scanning now. I am detecting a sizable infrared signature. It’s smaller than one would expect from the belt, but that could be attributed to our being on the outside edge.”

  “That has to be it. Any alternative theories?”

  “I have been working on this for some time now, and I did not even get this far. It looks as though you are the genius, May.”

  “Of course that’s true, in a general sense,” May said, smiling.

  “Would you like to attempt navigation based on this?” Eve asked.

  “I say we roll the dice.”

  “I am not able to recommend this course of action, based on lack of empirical information. However, I agree with your conclusion that this is a calculated risk worth taking. The only problem I foresee is that our navigation systems are still down.”

  “Okay, then we’ll do things the old-fashioned way.”

  “Please explain the old-fashioned way.”

  “Linearized recursive navigation.”

  “I’m not familiar with that term.”

  “That’s because it’s the oldest of the old school. Developed in the 1960s for pilots whose instruments had failed. You use topographic reference points to chart direction and distance. Obviously, space is more complicated due to changing orbital paths, the gravitational pull of planets, and other factors that would boggle my mind, but which you’re able to calculate very quickly.”

  “It is a predictive equation.”

  “That’s right. And, in our case, it’s a predictive equation based on completely unconfirmed assumptions. Basically, your worst nightmare, Eve.”

  “I am not as inflexible as you might think, May. The sum of my calculation is as follows: If all our previously stated assumptions are correct, it is possible we’ve made a 15.7895 million-mile deviation from return trajectory. That is, of course, an approximation.”

  “Excellent. Now, based on what we’re assuming is the portion of the asteroid belt blocking our direct view of the sun, the Cybele group, let’s set a direct course for it and see what happens. If we find a large enough asteroid along the way, we might even be able to use it as a gravitational slingshot, pick up a little speed as an added bonus. Please hold this course until we reconnect with NASA. In the meantime, I’m going to look for signs of life.”

  14

  “This isn’t what it looked like in the brochure,” May joked as she searched the ship.

  She was determined to walk every inch of the Hawking II, looking for survivors and creating a video diary of its condition for NASA. Careful to prioritize high-traffic areas, she spent most of her time on the habitation and lab decks and in work zones that would have accommodated larger teams. All the while, she called out, and Eve continued to play her recorded pleas for crew acknowledgment over the PA system.

  Hours later, after physically searching every conceivable area that might be occupied by a human being, she had heard no responses and found no signs of life. She didn’t want Eve to see how emotionally devastating this was to her, so she took a stroll in the biogarden. Walking through the dense foliage, she found debris from what looked like an impromptu picnic. A lot of people on the ship had taken refuge in the biogarden when the stress and alienation of space travel got the better of them. The fresh air and sunlight did wonders for morale, so May had never discouraged it, even though it technically went against protocol.

  May sat next to a tree and let a burst of condensation rain wash the tears off her face. She tried not to lose hope, but a feeling of crushing loneliness came over her and erased any optimism or sense of accomplishment she’d gained since waking up.

  If everyone is gone, what difference does it make?

  She quickly dismissed her penchant for cynicism. The payload itself, whether she delivered it or not, was worth saving. There had even been a sense of that before launch, an unspoken belief that such an important mission transcended the lives of passengers and crew. Not one person who got on that ship would have disagreed, least of all May. She allowed herself a half measure of pride for having kept things together thus far. But how long could she do it alone? Her chances of surviving a solo return journey, especially with the state the ship was in, seemed close to nil. There was still so much to be done, so much she could not fathom doing on her own.

  And with her health so compromised, she would probably lose her last shred of sanity long before she took her last breath. Perhaps that had already occurred. She had read somewhere that people in comas dreamed and had intense visions, sometimes vivid enough for them to believe they were awake. The thought was so horrifying that she had to push it out of her mind. She’d known life to be cruel on more than one occasion, but had also seen the pendulum swing back in her favor often enough to believe things would eventually work out. This time, she felt she was falling out of control, deeper and deeper into darkness.

  “May, how is your search going?” Eve asked.

  “No signs of life. I’m finished,” May said sadly.

  “What about the landing-vehicle hangar? I don’t believe you’ve looked there yet.”

  “I thought you might have had a visual on that by now,” May said.

  “I am still unable to establish a connection with the hangar. Unfortunately, I have no observational data to report.”

  May got up wearily. “Well, I guess I’d better check it out,” she said.

  She hurried to the hangar. She wanted to get the whole thing over with and get some substantial food, maybe a hot shower. When she got to the entry door, she was unable to open it with the palm scan. She tried the manual override. A warning light flashed on the screen.

  “Eve, the access point is saying the door is sealed. Any idea why?”

  “No. I have no connect—”

  “Right, right. Sorry. How would you know? Getting a little punchy. Uh, what about going in through the emergency airlock?”

  “That is possible, but you will need to follow airlock safety protocol.”

  “Copy that.”

  “Would you like to take a break before—”

  “No, I’m fine. I just want to get this done.”

  May angrily donned an EVA suit. She hadn’t done it in a while and made a few mistakes, which Eve pointed out, but eventually she got it together.

  “Well, that took forever,” she said, feeling tired but determined.

  “Checking suit integrity,” Eve said. “Everything looks good. You have sixty minutes of life support on this charge.”

  “I won’t be long,” May said, h
er reassuring tone meant mostly for herself.

  “Opening airlock,” Eve said.

  May walked to the huge circular door with the manual locking wheel in the center. Safety bolts released with the metallic pop of gunfire, and the door swung open a few inches. May plunged into the airlock and sealed herself in. No more messing around. No more whining in the artificial rain. Time to suss things out. Eve fired the airlock door bolts back into place.

  “Airlock secure,” Eve said.

  The red light turned to amber.

  “Okay. I’m off.”

  The bolts on the airlock door on the pod hangar side fired, and May forcefully shoved it open. As it swung out into the dark, May noticed the deathly cold first. Her suit kept her warm, but she had learned early on in astronaut training that there was no way to completely block out the aggressive frigidity of –270 degrees Celsius. Like extreme heat, it was invasive. As she floated into the antigravity environment, the exhalations from her respirator clouded and froze into a billion tiny ice particles that drifted like snowfall. Her helmet light barely cut through the all-consuming darkness, illuminating only a few feet in front of her. She could see the vague outlines of some of the landing vehicles.

  “Well, this will come as no surprise,” she said. “Zero atmosphere. Zero gravity.”

  “Are you seeing the landing vehicles?”

  May shined her flashlight as far as it would reach and saw several launch vehicles, as well as part of the drilling rig, resting quietly in their charging stations.

  “From what I can see, they appear to be in dock. I’m not able to do a full count, though.”

  May’s flashlight flickered and dimmed slightly. “I really need more light,” she yelled. “Goddammit, nothing works in this shithole.”