by S. K. Vaughn
The way he was posturing when he spoke of the president made Stephen want to pull on Robert’s tie until the life ran out of his condescending eyes.
“Oh,” Robert said, recalling something. “Recently, I asked May to record a message for the families of the deceased passengers and crew. She sent something quite exceptional. Would you like to hear it?”
Stephen nodded. The pain of hearing her voice one last time would be bad, but never hearing it again would be worse.
Robert tapped something on his pad, and the audio played.
“This is Maryam Knox, commander of the Hawking II. I want to say to the families of my crew and passengers—our friends and comrades—that I am so very sorry for your loss. Although the events that led to the demise of so many great men and women are still unknown, I take full responsibility, and the sorrow of this catastrophe will remain heavy in my heart until the day I die . . .”
41
Stowe, Vermont
January 1, 2043
Fire. The only light in hundreds of miles of dark. Stephen looked skyward. There was no sky, only a canopy of nothingness connecting to the same nothingness all around him. Cold. The worst cold he’d ever felt in his young life. The dark-green parka he wore was brand-new, along with the black mittens and hat. Aunt Sarah, his father’s sister, had given them to him a few hours ago—late Christmas presents. Stephen and his parents had attended her New Year’s Eve party in Stowe, an annual tradition. Sarah and her family always had a nice party, though maybe a bit wild, like them. Their house was a time capsule, a museum with wood-burning heat and photos of humorless ancestors stiffly framed against ancient floral wallpaper. Stephen loved it. And them. They gave him grief for being smart, an “egghead” they would say, laughing through cigarette smoke and the vapors of homemade botanical liqueurs. In their presence, he felt connected to something safe and warm, something like home.
Sitting on the side of a snow-packed road, perched on his father’s suitcase, he was no longer safe or warm. Although he shivered and cried, he could not, would not, use the fire to warm him. It smelled of auto fuel and melting rubber, and something else, sweet and sickly. His mind could define it, he thought, but his tongue would not allow him to utter the words. The fire came from a mouth of twisted metal, with broken glass for teeth. It blackened everything, like the soot on the inside of Aunt Sarah’s wood stove.
“You’d better come with us,” a man’s voice said.
Stephen didn’t hear him. He was still forbidding himself from going near the fire.
“Son, can you hear me?”
“I can’t go,” Stephen said weakly.
“You have to, son. You’ll freeze out here.”
“I can’t go to the fire. I won’t go.”
“No, you can’t go to the fire.”
A blanket fell over his shoulders. The man spoke to someone else, telling them he’d come upon an accident. He used the word fatalities. Car and a truck. Found a kid on the side of the road. Definitely in shock. As he spoke, Stephen held his stomach and closed his eyes. He didn’t want to see it again. The total darkness, the sudden headlights and horn blast, his father’s wide eyes in the rearview mirror. His mother reaching for him in the backseat, saying something that sounded like “Hold your breath.” The cloud of glass and splintering car lights as they rolled upside down, right side up, sliding, falling. Then the fire. Stephen had crawled out the back window and through the snow, looking for his parents. Their suitcases were in the snow, but not them. They were screaming in the car. Can’t go to the fire.
A voice on a radio spoke back to the man. Forty-five minutes, the voice had said. Storm getting worse, the voice also said. Snow fell, dry flakes swirling in a bitter wind, stinging his face and neck. A hand wrapped around Stephen’s elbow and pulled him gently to his feet.
“Aunt Sarah gave me this coat.”
“Let’s get in my truck, son.”
“I can’t leave them.”
“Can’t leave who?”
Stephen looked at the fire.
“I can’t leave them.”
The man sighed and patted Stephen’s back. “We won’t.”
42
“Let’s get you home,” Raj said.
The two of them were back in Stephen’s office. After telling Raj what Robert had said, he had broken down and was inconsolable. Grasping at straws, he had told Raj about the fact that Robert had said there was no personal message in May’s SOS, but this had not had the same impact on Raj as it had on him.
“What about our sabotage theory?” Stephen asked.
“What about it? Either it’s true or it isn’t, but it doesn’t change the outcome.”
“I know that. What I’m trying to say is—”
“Maybe she’s still alive,” Raj said.
“If you do that again, I’ll kill you.”
“Okay, this is going nowhere.”
“Why are you so opposed to even talking about this?” Stephen asked.
“It’s my way. I don’t entertain wild speculation. It’s too abstract for me. And it makes me break out in hives. There is absolutely nothing to support this.”
“Hear me out,” Stephen said. “First, May sends the personal note before the explosion. It could be she knew it was coming and had the wherewithal to send the message. Which means maybe she had the wherewithal to get out in a landing vehicle.”
“That’s a stretch, seriously.”
“Agreed, but it’s not impossible. Next—and I didn’t think about this until now—Robert asked May to record a nice message for the families of the deceased, just before the explosion occurred.”
“Now you’ve lost me.”
“He’s going to spin everything as an unfortunate incident in which May was a victim. It was his idea to give her the commission. If the whole thing fails miserably but she’s the sole survivor, that makes him look really bad. But if she goes out heroicly, the way she sounds in the recording, it can all be packaged nicely with a yellow fucking ribbon and die a noble death in the press.”
“I’m going to pretend I agree with you. So now what do we do? The ship is no longer a ship, it’s a debris field. If she’s in a landing vehicle, she’s maybe bought herself another twenty-four hours, max. Same result.”
Stephen broke down again.
“Shit, I’m sorry,” Raj said. “Arguing with you was a terrible idea. Come on, let’s just get drunk, kill the pain for a while.”
Raj tried to wipe away his own tears, but Stephen caught a glimpse.
“No,” he said, sucking back the emotion, “that will only make things worse. I know this all sounds like bullshit and wishful thinking, and it probably is. I’m not saying I have ironclad anything to support what’s more a feeling than anything else. You know me. I don’t get hunches. I hate that word as much as you do. I just want more than anything to . . . one last time, to say something to her. Is there any way I can do that, just send a transmission? If it goes into oblivion, so be it. Can you help me?”
“Don’t think I haven’t been trying to work that out since you brought it up, dude. I really can’t think of a way it’s possible. I can’t send a radio communication to the ship or the landing vehicles. Only Mission Control can do that, and I have no friends in Comms. And I can’t think of any other ways to transmit that we could access.”
“What about my research patches? NASA gave me channel-coded data transmission so I could monitor all the lab work. Glenn said they were still live. Robert wanted the team to download all my research data in case the Hawking II didn’t make it back. All the landing vehicles have our data terminals.”
“Okay, that’s interesting. But how would she know if we were transmitting?”
“I can make some noise with the systems, tell them to operate erratically. And I can run command lines that are messages to her. If she goes to investigate, she’ll see them.”
“Not bad,” Raj said. “We can use my system. Better do it now, before Robert closes up shop f
or good.”
43
“Internal power, critical. Navigation, critical. Propulsion, failed . . .”
The cargo rig flight computer droned on while it tumbled through space. It looked like a damaged fighter jet in a death spiral; one of its wings had been completely ripped off, while the other remained in its hangar position, flipped up next to the fuselage. The landing struts were partially torn away, dangling and twisting. White smoke and sparks randomly plumed from the engine nozzles.
The shriek of May’s suit alarm slapped her awake. Her helmet display was showing that she was nearly out of life-support power. It took her a few minutes to fully come to and remember she was in the cargo rig. At the fore was a small, fairly simple flight deck with instrumentation geared for space and atmospheric flight. The bulk of the vessel was a 950-square-foot cargo area that had been built to house all the heavy equipment the landing party needed to carry out its research and deploy Stephen’s NanoSphere. In the aft part of the ship were massive solid-fuel rockets, built to heft the nearly twenty-two tons of equipment that went back and forth from the Hawking II to Europa. To allow for piloting in atmosphere, it had retractable wings that spanned seventy-five feet.
The internal lighting was dim and getting worse. Grabbing on to a cargo support rod, May looked through the window and saw stars passing by erratically.
“Shit. Eve, do you copy?” she called out. “Please say something.”
Nothing. Her helmet display showed no connection to the Hawking II.
“Eve, do you copy?”
Using her dimming headlamp as a guide, she made her way to the bridge. The flight computer was still droning on about the failing ship.
“Flight computer, shut the fuck up.”
“Unrecognizable command.”
“Shut down alarms.”
The alarms ceased, and May could think. She strapped herself into a seat at the flight deck. After several tries with the manual control panel, she was able to get some more juice flowing into the vehicle’s internal power system. Interior lighting activated, along with the wide touch-screen flight controls. Life support showed nominal, and her suit was on the brink of shutting down, so she popped off her helmet. There was atmosphere, but it was so cold that the water vapor in her nose immediately froze.
Coughing hard, she put her helmet back on without sealing it to the suit, just to keep from succumbing to hypothermia. There were extra battery packs in the EVA locker. She found one with some juice and swapped it out for the dead one on her suit. Reading the temperature, the suit automatically kicked its internal heating system into high gear. May resealed her helmet and sat back, thawing out and drawing in much-needed oxygen. Finally, she was able to fully assess her situation.
“Flight computer, I need status on internal power.”
“Twelve percent of capacity.”
“Life support, time to failure?”
“Seven hours, thirty-five minutes.”
“A nice round number. Propulsion status?”
“Zero percent of capacity.”
“The engines are gone? Completely?”
“Engine 1, 100 percent failure. Engine 2, no readings.”
May switched on the aft camera. Engine 2 had been torn from its housing. It was a miracle the cargo rig had not been blown to pieces.
“Engine 1, repair requirements?”
“High-pressure fuel turbo pump, replace; high-pressure oxidizer turbo pump, replace; main combustion chamber, replace—”
“You might as well just tell me to replace the entire engine.”
“Recommend return to space dock—”
“Again, shut the fuck up.”
May found the external maneuvering thruster controls and righted the ship. “There goes an hour of life support, but I’d rather not spend my last moments flopping around like a dying mackerel, thanks very much.”
May looked out at the stars and let out a weary sigh of resignation. She felt a slight pinch in her lower abdomen, followed by a brief wave of nausea. Her hand reflexively went there. The area that before had felt a bit firm now had a gentle rise to it and was harder to the touch. She imagined it as a tiny person, ear pressed to her abdomen, hanging on May’s every word.
“Hello there . . . baby, for lack of a better moniker. Got something to say about our predicament? Your own two cents? Or, based on size and experience, would it be more like one cent?”
The sharp edge of loneliness she was beginning to feel was slightly dulled by the minuscule presence in her belly. She remembered how awful she’d felt that her mom had died alone and got some small comfort in knowing she wasn’t facing the same fate—even if her little stowaway was most likely the size of a pear.
“Considering that I’m the adult here—which isn’t saying much—perhaps I should inform you of our predicament. Suffice it to say that this big bucket of bolts is about as useless as tits on a bull—might as well learn some Americanisms in honor of your dear old dad—and there’s absolutely no hope that the cavalry is going to ride in to save us. As unpleasant as it might sound, it appears . . . we are going to die. In a little over six hours’ time.”
May choked back tears.
“My apologies. You didn’t get much of a life. And we don’t even know each other very well, so I don’t mean to embarrass us both by being so emotional. Sometimes I just can’t help it, you know? Mom tried to beat all that out of me—well, not literally—but to no avail. I’ve always thought I got it from my dad. He died when I was young, so I didn’t know him all that well either. But I do remember him sitting on the edge of my bed from time to time, very early in the morning, still dark and all, watching me sleep, stroking my hair . . . and he would cry a bit. Not much, mind you. He was a fighter pilot, and they’re supposed to have ice water in their veins. I think he was worried he might not come back . . . and one day he didn’t.”
The memory of the day he died came back with greater ease than she would have expected. Her room had been very yellow. She loved yellow, and extremely frilly bed covers and pillowcases, things Mom couldn’t stand. Dad had hung wallpaper, white with a flock of champagne-colored jays sweeping around the entire room. May liked how determined they looked, their eyes fixed with a singular purpose, whatever it was. The gray sky kept the room dark in the early morning, and try as she might, May couldn’t make out the details of his face. He stroked her hair, and when he bent down to kiss her good-bye, she felt one of his tears fall into her hair. He’d whispered that he loved her, as always, and tiptoed out.
“I feel bad you won’t get to meet your own dad,” she said. “A very brilliant man. A scientist. He had this idea that he could make a new world, throw up his hands like a wizard and give it a sun, an ocean, maybe even a sky. Crazy, right? Sounds like magic. It was. He did it. A brilliant man, Stephen Knox. That’s his name. But people call him Dr. Knox because he’s so smart. Anyway, I’m sorry you won’t get to meet him. I’m sure he would have let you have a yellow room too if you wanted it.”
The pang returned. A little more intense this time.
“Can you not do that? I hate that feeling. It was like when I was a kid and I first woke up. I’d be so hungry that I’d feel . . . Ah, I get it. I’m a bit peckish myself. Not to be morbid, but everyone deserves a decent last meal. Although don’t get your hopes up. In this crate we’ll be lucky to find anything at all.”
May unstrapped from the flight deck chair and floated through the ship, looking for ration stores. It was her first time on the cargo rig, so she wasn’t quite sure where to look. Around the flight deck, there were water sleeves and nutrigel packs, but she held out hope for something a little more substantial. She floated through the cargo hold, examining all the storage pods. Near the back, she heard faint machine noises. She followed them until she found the source: a piece of equipment under a polyethylene cover. In addition to the sounds, lights pulsed on and off, glowing behind the cover’s opaque surface.
“That won’t do. We can’t have w
hatever this thing is drawing our precious power.”
May pulled herself down to the floor and removed the cover.
44
“Wake up,” Raj yelled.
Stephen had been asleep on the couch in Raj’s office, a dark, windowless cavern with furniture that looked as though it had been taken from a condemned building and a C-shaped desk lined with glowing monitor screens that took up half the space. Raj stared into one of the screens, looking like a hacker whose lair was in the basement of a crack house.
“What?” Stephen yelled back as he sat up and tried to remember where he was.
“Get over here, you gotta see this.”
Stephen got up and stumbled over countless unseen things, cursing each one, on his way to Raj. “This what?” He peered at the screen.
Got your messages, cheeky bastards. Music to my ears.
“Holy shit,” Stephen said, hugging Raj so hard he almost fell out of his chair.
“Told you she was still alive,” Raj said, smiling broadly.
“Holy shit.”
“You said that already.”
“I’m at a loss for words, Raj,” Stephen said, giddy with excitement. “Holy shit.”
“There’s bad news too, man.”
“Yeah,” Stephen said, lowering his voice, “I know. We—”
Raj held his finger to his lips. He walked to another worktable that was littered with various mechanical parts and odd-looking machines. He turned one of the machines on. It made a very aggravating pulsing sound, similar to submarine sonar but with a higher pitch. He walked up next to Stephen.
“Okay, we can talk. Low voices.”
“What is that horrible thing?”
“A gravitational wave sound amplifier. For transmitting sound waves in space. Something I’ve been working on. Also good for creating feedback on listening devices.”
“So, we’re in agreement on the sabotage theory? Strong-enough evidence?”