by David Hardy
Jupiter was a harsh planet.
What were the aliens like? Was their world like Ganymede or tidal locked like Europa? Oceans? Did they even breathe oxygen or have a carbon based environment? Longstreet studied radio waves, but this truly excited him. He wanted all the answers. Now.
“We’re closing fast on the probe. I can make out markings on the underside. Nothing like I’ve ever seen, but that’s to be expected.”
Longstreet realized he was babbling. He clamped his mouth shut and made sure every recording device aboard the ship that could be trained on the probe worked to full capacity. The capsule’s dimensions were wrong. They had misinterpreted the alien measurements by a factor of two. More. They could not open the cargo bay and draw in the other vessel as they had intended. Doing so would have given great insight into the other race’s technology, the metallurgy and engines and guidance. Now, they had to get into their spacesuits, open the capsule and transfer whatever they could by hand.
All the while, they worked in radiation so intense they might not survive long afterward. But the moment! They were creating history.
“Are we going to open the probe or can we magnetically attached it to our hull? We never discussed that. That would keep us safe from the radiation. We—”
“Goddamn!”
Longstreet wasn’t sure who cursed. It could have been any of them – or all of them.
“We’re losing it. The probe’s moving away. It’s losing orbital speed and going down! It will crash on Jupiter where we’ll never be able to retrieve it!” Chin worked on the controls and rolled the Macaulay to keep the cargo bay toward the alien ship.
“I don’t want to be the one to radio the aliens that we’ve lost it. Keep after it, Chin. Don’t lose it!”
Longstreet’s mouth turned to cotton when the probe spun about and pointed directly toward Jupiter. A waxy sheet flowed from the atmosphere and gathered around its entire hull, then blocked all sight. Tiny tendrils fluttered about, but the covering hid the probe. Then it lost all orbital speed and arrowed downward.
“It can’t do that. That’s not possible.” Chin cursed and started to send their ship after the probe. Enahoro stopped him.
Longstreet tracked the plunging alien vessel until the swirling methane atmosphere hid it entirely. He began running playback on the visuals, then worked through the spectrum. He blinked hard as the IR cameras revealed all they had recorded.
“We lost it. We lost it,” moaned Chin. “All this for nothing.”
“We should tell the aliens. We have fuel and supplies. We can stay in Jupiter orbit and they can send another.” Enahoro sounded more confident that she looked. Her crestfallen look echoed Chin’s anger.
“There’s an incoming signal from Liber,” Longstreet said. “They’re congratulating us for successfully capturing their probe.” He sank back. His mind went blank. “What do we tell them?”
“I’m picking up another transmission,” Chin said. “It’s coming from below us.”
“The probe!”
Longstreet sprang to his comm devices and then shook his head.
“What’s wrong, Hugh? That signal is strong. It must have gone into a lower orbit.”
“It’s not from the probe. It’s a thank you for sending the probe.”
“The probe sent a thank you for being sent? Make sense. That’s just stupid.” Chin threw up his hands in surrender. There was nothing more they could do.
“It’s not coming from the probe.”
“What do you mean?” Enahoro left her couch and came back to peer over his shoulder again. “That signal’s originating from the surface.”
“Or close to it.” Longstreet looked at her, desolate. “I know why the time delays were wrong during all our communications. The Liberans weren’t answering our questions.”
“But—”
“They were answering those sent by others of their kind.” Longstreet felt as if he had been kicked in the belly. “They were never communicating with us. That waxy thing that wrapped around the probe? That’s a native Jovian. The aliens made contact – with them.”
“Aliens here on Jupiter?”
“And similar ones, I suspect, to those on Liber. I mean on the planet and not the satellites around it.”
“What’s this mean?” Chin joined Enahoro to peer at the IR replays showing the boneless, waxy creature wrap tentacles about the probe and drag it downward. Small veins showed inside the amorphous creature, along with small vibrating vacuoles and what might be lyosomes and microtubules.
“It means we might have to ask our new neighbors what they received from the rogue planet.” He laughed. “How’s the UN going to keep this quiet? We’re the other intelligent race in the solar system.”
Hugh Longstreet started planning how to contact the Jovians. There was so much they had to exchange. Maybe they would even let him set up a radio telescope on one of their moons. Ganymede would be a good choice.
About the Author – Robert E. Vardeman
Robert E. Vardeman has been writing professionally for almost four decades, authoring dozens of science fiction and fantasy novels, mysteries and thrillers, and historical novels. More information about work under his own name and a legion of pen names can be found on his author's website www.cenotaphroad.com
Graveyard Orbit
Christopher M. Chupik
Low Earth Orbit is full of ghosts, Sierra thought as she sat alone in the Scrapper’s cockpit. Remnants of vanished space programs – Vostok, Mercury, Shenzhou and Orion – and more recent private space ventures, had made it a minefield. Dead satellites, discarded boosters and stage fairings from old rockets, she had seen them all. Once, she even found a camera which her husband, Kurt, believed had been lost by the crew of Gemini 10 nearly a century earlier.
She was looking at one of those ghosts now, an antiquated Russian probe, the blinking contact on her radar screen growing stronger as the Scrapper closed with it.
Behind her, Kurt glided out of the access hatch. He pulled himself into his station beside her and strapped himself into his seat, bringing up his virtual display and keyboard with a swipe across his screens. Her husband, clad as she was in a simple blue overall, was her opposite in every way. Kurt was large where she was small, his short hair blond where hers was dark. He loved space, while she merely liked it. Space was a nice place to work, but she didn’t like to live there.
“We’re close enough to get a look at it,” she told him.
“Good.” He looked out the cockpit window, down at the gleaming blue and white expanse of the Pacific Ocean far below. “Great view today.”
She smiled, shaking her head. “Same view as always.”
“And it’s still great.”
Sierra had been an aerospace shuttle pilot once, and been on the verge of giving it up for an earthbound job. But that changed when she met Kurt Helm, an engineer working for Boeing Galactic. They had been married three years now, almost half of that spent in orbit. Kurt liked to joke that if their marriage could survive space, it could survive anything.
The fact he couldn’t snore in microgravity didn’t hurt.
Long periods of tedium. Lousy food and stale air. She had to concede, though, that the view was indeed nice.
She glanced over at her husband.
The company wasn’t bad either.
Turning her attention back to her display, she selected the feed from their external cams and zoomed in on their target.
It was cylindrical, seven meters long and two wide, with a pair of solar panels jutting out from its sides like insect wings. One end was a sphere bristling with antennae. She cranked the magnification until she could make out the red letters emblazoned on the hull.
“C-C-C-P. Soviet Union, right?”
Kurt nodded.
“Damn, that’s old.”
“They literally don’t make them like this anymore,” he said with a sigh. “Damn shame to junk it.”
She shrugged. “A job’s a job
.” It was still a nice change from the usual communications satellites and sacks of frozen astronaut poop.
After the Chinese space station was damaged in a collision that killed two taikonauts, an international effort to clear LEO of debris had begun. The Scrapper and a handful of other ships were tasked with either deorbiting junk or boosting it to “graveyard orbits” where it posed no hazard. In a few rare cases, an effort was made to salvage objects of historical value.
It was hard work, but it paid well for those willing to brave the dangers of space. Their current contract was from the Russian government, to move this Zond probe to a graveyard orbit.
“I thought the Scrapper was cramped, but that’s half our size.”
“Actually the Zond were unmanned,” Kurt said.
Bringing up the entry on the Zond program, Sierra skimmed it to bring herself up to speed.
Name was given to two programs between 1964 and 1970, Zond was intended to pave the way for the aborted Soviet moonshot . . .
Sierra frowned.
“That’s odd,” she said.
“What?”
“This says that all Zond probes are accounted for. And it doesn’t mention the one we’re looking at. But the debris catalogue insists this is a Zond.”
Kurt nodded. “Yeah, that is odd.”
“A mistake?”
“You’d think the Russians would know. They’ve been tracking this for decades.”
“And those markings prove it’s from that era.”
Kurt brought up something on his display and scrutinized it.
“What is it?”
Instead of answering, Kurt enlarged the picture and typed something on his virtual console. A second window popped up in his display and he tapped the image and made a flicking gesture with his fingers. The window appeared in her display.
“Well, that’s what we’re looking at,” she said as she saw the image, not understanding what he was driving for.
“That’s a Soviet era Soyuz. Compare that to the feed from our sensors.”
She did.
“Almost the same,” Kurt said, echoing her thoughts. “I know that some of the Zond probes had a similar configuration to Soyuz, but this is nearly exact.” He pointed at one of the mystery spacecraft’s antennae. “Except that.”
She shook her head. “No. Can’t be.” She looked up Soyuz in their database. “All Soyuz vehicles are accounted for.”
“You mean, the same way all Zond probes are?”
Sierra didn’t know what to say.
“I don’t understand,” she finally admitted.
Her husband gazed thoughtfully at the image for a moment before answering.
“You know, there’s stories from back in the First Space Age. Lost cosmonauts. Failed missions the Kremlin tried to hush up. Some say Gargarin wasn’t the first man in space, just the first to survive.”
“Conspiracy theories.”
“Maybe so, but that doesn’t change the fact that we’re looking at a Soyuz that shouldn’t be here.”
If their identification was right, this was the discovery of the decade, something that would rewrite the history books. Bloggers and newsnets would be paying big money for the vid rights. They could take a vacation. They might even be able to retire.
“Think we should tell the Russians?” Kurt asked.
She shook her head. “C’mon, you know what they’ll do. They’ll tell us to stand by while they send up one of their shuttles and they’ll claim the discovery for themselves. No salvage bonus. Hell, we’ll be lucky if they even mention us in the press release. They won’t give a couple of American salvagers the credit for recovering a lost piece of their history.”
“True, but the Russians are touchy about interference with their spacecraft.”
“You’re right about that.” Last thing they needed was legal problems. Sierra opened a channel to the Soyuz. “Unidentified spacecraft, this is the American salvage craft Scrapper. Do you require assistance? Please respond.”
After the answering silence, she repeated the call, then turned to Kurt.
“I believe that satisfies the International Convention on the Law of Space.”
Kurt nodded. “So how do want to do this? Tow it to Branson Station, or board and examine it first?”
“Board it, definitely. Take a look and see what we’ve found. Make sure this isn’t a mistaken identification or hoax.”
Sierra brought the autopilot online and programmed an approach and docking maneuver into it.
“C’mon. Let’s get you suited up,” she said.
For the next hour, the autopilot fired the Scrapper’s thrusters through the elaborate series of maneuvers necessary to match velocity and orbit with the mysterious spacecraft.
While this was happening, Kurt and Sierra were in the airlock, prepping for EVA. The oxygen in the airlock was pure, and Kurt needed to breathe it for at least forty minutes to remove the nitrogen from his blood and tissues. He stripped out of his jumpsuit and donned his “astronaut undies”, a form-fitting undergarment with embedded biometric sensors that would allow Sierra to monitor his vitals from the cockpit.
She wished they could hurry up and dock already, but there was no way they could rush the process without risking collision or overshooting the other spacecraft altogether.
Sierra helped him into his EVA suit, fitting his gloves and air tank. Last came his helmet, which she fitted into the locking ring around his neck, sealing it shut with a solid thunk. On either side of his neck small releases popped out. Both would have to be depressed simultaneously to remove the helmet again, a safety precaution. Running her fingers along the rim, Sierra checked for any gaps.
Finding none, she gave him the thumbs-up.
Kurt spoke a verbal command she couldn’t hear and the fibre-optics in his clear ceramic faceplate lit up with his suit’s head’s-up display. The HUD framed Kurt’s face with flickering windows of data.
“Showing green in here,” he replied over his radio, his voice issuing from the airlock speakers.
She glanced over at her handscreen, which she had left stuck to the bulkhead, right next to the niche holding the bright orange decompression kit. It showed the data from her piloting display, so she could keep an eye on things.
The Scrapper was about to make its final approach.
“Gotta go,” Sierra said and planted a quick kiss on her husband’s faceplate.
Kurt’s eyes narrowed. “What’s that for?”
“Luck, silly.”
He made a mock frown. “I remember when you used to kiss me for fun.”
She grinned. “Saving that for later.” More seriously: “Stay safe.”
Kurt’s frown turned to a smile. “Always. And, Sierra?”
“Yeah?”
“Could you clean my faceplate? It got smudged.”
Rolling her eyes, Sierra wiped the faceplate clean with her sleeve. Kurt selected an EyeSpy drone, a polymer ball the size of a baseball.
“This detects radiation, right?” He asked.
She nodded and frowned. “They didn’t carry nukes on those things, did they?”
“Who knows? An hour ago, I didn’t think there were lost Soviet spacecraft. There has to be a reason this mission isn’t in the history books.”
“Good thinking,” she said.
Then he kicked himself upwards, catching the handholds on either side of the airlock.
Sierra closed the hatch behind her and returned to the cockpit. Taking the autopilot offline, she brought up the piloting interface and guided the Scrapper in manually.
The external cams showed something that looked like a hatch on the side of the forward module, confirmation they were dealing with a Soyuz and not a Zond. She adjusted their course, the thrusters moving the spacecraft through a complex Newtonian dance. When the Scrapper pulled up alongside the Soyuz, Sierra extended the docking collar. Smart plastic tubing expanded and then contracted until it closed snugly around the other ship’s hatch. A faint
tremor through the Scrapper’s spaceframe told her that the two ships had joined as one.
“Contact!” Sierra said. “Airtight seal established and collar pressurized. You’re good to go.”
“Roger that,” Kurt said.
She opened a trio of windows that showed her the feed from Kurt’s helmet cam and the EyeSpy, as well as his suit’s biometric sensors. Her husband opened the ship’s airlock and pushed himself down the tube. Reaching the other end, he opened the membrane and climbed through.
His helmet feed showed a circular hatch with a wheel in the center, like on a submarine. Kurt swam towards the hatch, gripped the wheel and began turning until it stopped. He pulled, and the hatch swung open, revealing a dark interior.
“Releasing drone.” He let go of his EyeSpy and tiny jets propelled it from his grasp as Sierra steered it.
The interior revealed by the drone’s searchlight was impossibly cramped by modern standards. One empty cushioned seat, the restraints floating loose, faced a panel of switches and a radar screen that showed nothing but black.
“Like going back in time,” he breathed.
Sierra nodded. “Yeah,” she said, transfixed by the feed. This was the real thing. It was going to be huge when it broke.
But first, they had to document it.
“What about radiation?”
“Radiation within normal levels. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
Sierra sighed with relief.
Kurt grasped the sides of the hatch and gently pulled himself into the capsule. There was so little room to maneuver, Sierra wondered how two grown men had fit inside it.
“I’m in the descent module,” Kurt said. “I think I see the hatch into the orbital module.”
The descent module. The realization of what that meant hit Sierra like a kick in the gut. None of the crew had returned to Earth. They were opening a tomb, and all she had thought about was the glory.