by Richard Fox
They’d been building Soyuz capsules for nearly two hundred years and they’d changed very little, save for the additional computing power needed to control the displacement drive and navigate the skein. The two empty seats beside him were a reminder his friends would be stranded on Konstantinov while he was away.
They were stranded here, falling around Miranda once per week on their slow spiral. The sickly blue green gas giant Uranus whirled past the kupola nearly thirty times every minute. Nine thousand seconds from Earth.
“System checks.” His gloved fingers flicked switches on the console in front of him. “Green board.”
“You are showing all green here as well. Good flight, Yuri.”
“See you soon, Tolya. Aika. Disengaging clamps.” Metallic shocks reverberated through the tiny cockpit around him, then a palpable sense of additional weightlessness as the tiny ship fell away from the spinning habitat module at three meters per second, the station unseen beyond the closed nose of his ship, the tiny windows surrounding the circular hatch affording little view of space outside.
His inner ears fought against the sudden loss of spin and caused him to lean in his seat, as his ship fell away from Konstantinov in a straight line. “Firing thrusters.” This was it. The moment of truth. He squeezed the stick and pulled back, and maneuvering thrusters popped and hissed underneath him, pulling the nose of the tiny craft up and pushing him further away from the station. He dabbed the other stick and added some port yaw, and his stomach lurched and threatened to roll him out of his seat. He took a full breath and steadied himself for a moment, focusing on the instruments in front of him, watching the gimbal wobble as the ship’s rotation steadied.
Breathe. Relax. Get comfortable.
Leonov has painted us a picture, Aika had said to him. The object she found was large, but impossible to resolve at nearly three thousand astronomical units away. Scans from that region during the prior weeks had showed no signs of anything there. It was clearly new. The great distance provided almost no detail and meant that their images were already two weeks out of date.
There was something out there, and it was hot.
“Sumerki, you are clear of station. Flight looks… nominal. How are you feeling?”
“Dizzy, but it will pass.” He looked out the small window beside him and watched the spinning station whirling away beneath him. The habitat module and opposite counter-balance, packed with scientific equipment and supplies, spun at a steady half revolution per second on the ends of their tethers. Now that the sky was no longer spinning, he took a moment to appreciate the limited view through the tiny port holes. A calm descended over him in the tiny grey capsule. He exhaled and began the procedure to spool up the displacement drive. He felt the thrum of the engine, the machinery clattering in its cage, and the whole body of the small ship began to shake and vibrate around him.
“Displacement drive coming online. Programming jump to Mars-L2 anchor point. Sol station.” He pulled up the coordinates from the nav bank. It was the first entry. The second one was their station. “Parameters loaded. Drive ready.” He had to yell over the sound of the spinning engine shaking him in his seat.
“Say hello to Sally.” Aika.
It was decided that he should go by himself. They would not abandon their science station, and one was not enough in the event something happened. United Earth Foundation protocols were clear on the matter: in the event of contact with an alien sphere ship, Earth must be notified as soon as possible. It would take almost two and a half hours for a radio signal to reach the home planet, and they had no communications drones on board; they were deemed too expensive for a bare bones astronomical station scanning the Kuiper belt. No. He had to go alone, by displacement; he could be in Mars orbit in twenty minutes with his message, refuel and make the jump back before tonight’s episode of X-Faktor. He patted the small computer in his pocket carrying the sensor data from Leonov.
“I will tell her Konstantinov misses them. If we are lucky, I will bring back little cakes. Displacing!” He stabbed the button and the throbbing engine reached an almost deafening beat, the machine wail increasing in amplitude as the sky around him stretched out ahead. The stars shifted through the spectrum into prismatic streaks.
Then a flash of light, and the quiet was deafening.
Ganymede
The white light flashed and was no more.
Dr. Yuri Markov held onto the sticks as his tiny ship Sumerki shuddered and dropped back into real space. The displacement drive had only been in operation for three seconds, but it had traveled…
Alarms sounded. Screeching buzzers wailed in Yuri’s helmet as the displacement drive wound down with a stuttering whine, the displacement shield winking out, leaving the small ship exposed to the dangers of space. The star-streaked sky flashed around him, and then his windows filled with the roiling, lurid face of Jupiter in the distance – but only for an instant as it whirled past. The switches and screens on his console all stuttered and blinked out.
The mechanical gimbal on his console was rolling on three axes. Once again, he was glad of his empty stomach when something caught his eye in the window: a brown and scarred surface streaked with white. He nudged the stick in what he hoped was the opposite direction, but nothing happened. It wobbled loose on its moorings. Dead stick. No joy.
He thumbed his comms open, praying there was someone out here to hear him. He started, then shook his head, his inner ear reminding him not to do that, before switching to English. “Mayday, mayday, mayday! This is Russian science vessel Sumerki. I have lost power and am out of position. Is anyone there? Mayday…” He looked at his console again, the radio lights dead.
Jupiter flashed past in the other window and he had the sick impression it was distorted, maybe by the negative forces acting on his eyeballs. It didn’t feel right. Ganymede rose up in front of him, closer this time. He was falling at an incredible speed, pulled in by the big moon’s gravity.
Frantically, he began the process to reboot the systems. Pumping the handle, he primed the battery and purged any excess static, then pushed the start button. Lights flashed and a wall of Cyrillic filled the main screen as the computer booted up.
“Come on…” The radio blinked at him. He dialled in the emergency channel and thumbed his mic open. “Mayday, mayday, mayday. This is Russian science vessel Sumerki. I need help. Anyone! …”
Jupiter rolled by again as his console came to life. Yuri grabbed the sticks and he felt the thrusters firing all around him with hisses and pops. Ganymede filled the screen as he straightened the ship’s roll out, flinging him forward in his straps.
“Sumerki, this is FCF Morrison. You are on a collision course for Ganymede. You need to pull out. Over.”
Yuri cursed, then opened the channel again. Ganymede filled the windows around the forward hatch. The industrial spires and towers of Herschef Colony in the distance beneath his feet, spewing fire, came towards him at nauseating speed. He checked the displacement drive again on his console and watched a wall of diagnostics scroll past. “Morrison, I cannot. I have no engines. Over.”
Another siren began wailing in Yuri’s helmet as the collision warning systems realized his ship was about to crash and burn on the surface. “Hold tight,” the voice on the radio told him.
“Hold ti…” He never had the chance to finish what he was about to tell the radio operator aboard the Morrison to do with his instructions. A flash in his window, and the numbers 15-097 appeared in white on the dark grey hull of a rapidly approaching gunship falling straight ahead of him.
Yuri screamed as his ship hurtled towards the new obstacle in his descent. He could see Ganymede beneath the ship ahead of him, mountains and rocks and craters coming into terrifying clarity before the oncoming ship blotted it out with its hull. Onscreen readouts jumped and threw error messages as the two ships plummeted closer to the surface. Doors slid open amidships on the larger vessel and a line snaked towards him at high speed, terminated by a loud
bang and a painful jolt. He felt a startling sense of acceleration. The gunship grew even larger in a fraction of a second, then darkness as the Sumerki was enveloped. Yuri was still screaming from a single breath as the windows turned black and a voice in his headset spoke. “Got him.”
Hissing and popping on the hull of his ship. Lights. High intensity floods illuminated the cargo hold aboard the Morrison where the Sumerki was now parked amidst containers packed tight with secure webbing. “Sumerki. Requesting that you power down your craft and please stop screaming. Over.”
Yuri inhaled and there was a knock on the hull.
“Sir? Permission to open?”
Yuri blinked. He took a tentative breath and clutched the arms of his seat, trying to stop his hands from shaking. The gimbal on his console was rock steady.
“Sir? We are going to open your hatch.” A pop and a hiss from the pressure differential as they unlocked the circular door. The men and women outside eased the door open when the pressure had equalized.
Yuri watched the front of the module swing open at his feet and two men peered inside. “You can come out, sir.”
“Have we crashed?”
“No sir. Please step out of the …” the men looked at each other, “… vessel.”
Yuri forced his hands to unbuckle his straps and move them aside. He tentatively placed a foot on the edge of the hatch and eased himself towards it. The two men reached up and guided him down. He was still shaking too hard to unfasten his helmet, so they did it for him. When it was off, they placed it inside the capsule on the floor.
“You’re all right now. We’ve got you.”
“I am supposed to be at Mars L2.”
“You’re all right. We’d better get him to medical.”
“I am fine. I just need some tea.”
The woman on the deck was securing his ship, nylon straps through metal rings. With practiced motion, she ratcheted the clamps down, pulling the straps tighter. She surveyed the ungainly device and threw a webbed net over the top of the hissing engine section and walked around behind it, clipping hooks into rings on the deck plates. The operator on the big magnetic harpoon gun they’d lanced him with released the clamp and it dropped to the deck with a loud bang as she released it from his ship. “This thing is shut down, right?” she asked Yuri before they took him away.
“Da, da.” He nodded, not really paying attention.
“Are you armed?” A man in a grey uniform with insignia he didn’t recognize. A gun stuck out of a holster on his hip.
“We are not crashing?”
“No sir. Do you have any weapons on you? Guns? Knives?” He asked more loudly this time.
“No weapons. But …” He looked back at Sumerki one last time as the two men led him out of the cargo bay. Two armored security officers, holding serious-looking automatic weapons beside the doors, gave Yuri a stern look and fell in behind them, escorting him out.
***
Captain Hap Garland stepped between the two saluting marines guarding the entrance, and regarded the scruffy-looking, bearded man in the orange flight suit on the exam table in the cramped medical bay. The ship’s doctor backed away from the table.
“At ease, gentlemen.” Captain Garland returned the salute with a nonchalant wave of his hand, his eyes focused like lasers on the man sitting on the table. The marines dropped into a somewhat more relaxed posture, but failed to take up any less space.
The Captain furrowed his brows and glared at the man on the table. “You mind telling me why the hell you just endangered my ship and my crew?”
“I am Doctor Yuri Markov. From Moscow Institut of Astrophysics station Konstantinov…”
“I didn’t ask who you were, or where you were from. I asked you why you willfully endangered my ship and my crew.” The Captain leaned in closer, his nostrils flaring over his waxed handlebar moustache.
One of the marines cleared his throat and tried to suppress a grin.
Captain Garland half-turned. “You have something to add, Sergeant Quale?”
“No, sir.” Quale contained himself, hands folded behind his back.
“Captain.” The ship’s doctor interrupted. “Do we need armed men in here? This man is not a threat.”
The Captain turned fractionally to the doctor, not taking his eyes off the Russian scientist. “I’ll be the judge of that.”
“I… I am sorry, sir. I was programmed for Mars. My displacement drive malfunctioned.” His accent was thick, but he spoke English well enough. “I did not intend to be here, sir. Something is very strange.”
The Captain relaxed after hearing the apology and pulled an apple from his pocket, biting deep, his moustache tilted as he chewed.
The marines shuffled behind him and he half-turned. “You two wait outside. Don’t go far.” He waved them out and turned back to Yuri. “Why were you going to Mars?”
“I have scientific information. We detected… something. In Kuiper belt.”
“What’d it look like?”
Yuri looked surprised. Not expecting a question about the data. “It was round. Sphere. I have analysis from Leonov – our sensor platform…”
“Was it hot?”
“Hot? It was detected on infrared. Certainly warmer than background, radiating across wide band, but our sensors… Why?”
The Captain took another bite of his apple and chewed. The muscles on his chiseled jaw working. “Your information’s out of date, Doctor. Eighteen minutes ago, an alien vessel jumped into the middle of the inner system, bound for Earth. We are in the process of going after it…” He hesitated and his eyes glazed over as new information swarmed in on his implants. He held a finger to his ear and said, “I’ll be right there.”
“Wait. You said it was… hot? Like, engine?”
The Captain was already half-turned away from the man on the table. “What? No. Hot like star. It’s not like anything of ours. Look, you can talk to our UEF Attaché. He can decide what to do with your information. I have a ship to run and we are on alert.”
“You have zampolitik?”
“I don’t know what that is. Stay out of the way.”
Captain Garland turned and left the room. “Keep an eye on him,” he said to Sergeant Quale on his way past, gesturing with his apple back into the medbay. He ducked under a bulkhead and walked briskly through the tight passageway, his crew saluting and clambering to get out of his way. It was a short walk to the stairs, and he jumped up in the lighter gravity of the tube, guiding his flight with one hand on the railing to the command deck above.
“What have we got?” He spoke into his throat mic as he stepped out of the tube and walked down the passage towards the C&C, eyes scanning the flood of data coming from the bridge to his implants. Ships were breaking formation, moving off. A new wash of EM radiation was ballooning up around Io in a sea of virtual color.
“Not sure, Captain, but you’d better get in here. Traffic’s gone haywire across the fleet. Something just dropped in on the other side of Jupiter and our D-drives are all reporting lost locks.”
He picked up his pace and weaved around a startled junior spacer who barely had time to raise a salute as he barreled past her. He ran to the end of the short accessway and a marine saluted and stood aside, letting him through the door to the C&C.
“Report. What’ve we got, Turk?”
The marine sealed the hatch shut behind him as he walked into the darkened command and control center. Orange-tinted holographic displays hung in the air around the techs and operators on the command systems. The shared virtual space constructed and displayed in the bridge crew’s headsets and implants floated in the air all around them. His XO, Commander Mitch Turkel, walked out from behind a visualization of Jupiter and its moons hanging in the center of the room. A clump of dots floated in space just inside the orbit of Ganymede.
“The Fifteenth had just started jumping out when we picked up the wash from a new incursion.” Turkel swung the display around and Jupiter’s face t
urned to a blue blob, streaks emanating out around it in magnetic lines of force. He gestured at the swirling ball of gas with a hand. “Somewhere in here. We haven’t got eyes in there yet.”
“Has the flag moved?”
“No, sir. The Saratoga is still in place.” Mitch indicated it on the displays.
“Good. Patch us through. Tell them we’re awaiting instructions.”
“Aye, sir. Online, sir,” the junior signals operator reported from his nest amongst the holograms. The Captain looked down at him briefly and took a bite of his apple, crunching noisily. The signals operator had the beginnings of a truly pitiful moustache on his lip. Hap pointed the apple at him. “Shave that off.”
“Yessir.”
The Captain took his chair, still chewing on his apple, before he reached out and passed it to a nearby apprentice spacer, who hastily escorted it to a waste chute. The Captain sat back and rubbed his hands together. “Let’s get some eyes out there. Sensors, shoot a probe out to the far side of Jupiter. Give me a five second sweep at five hundred thousand kilometers altitude over the equator.”
“Aye, sir,” specialist Gloria Haim replied from the other side of the C&C.
“Now we wait.”
A brief exchange as Haim consulted with navigation, then the faintest of thumps as a torpedo port opened and the ship’s sensor probe launched and displaced away from the Morrison.
Incursion
“Tight beam coming in from Saratoga,” the radio operator announced.
The Captain watched on his inset display, their ship cruising into beam range some eight hundred kilometers off the Saratoga’s port side. A line appeared between them, showing the connection through the intervening ships flying in loose formation, invisible under low power at these distances.