by Samuel Best
Jeff checked to make sure all the panels in the maintenance tube were secure because he couldn’t remember which ones he had accessed over the last few hours, then he followed Riley down the ladder to the floor of the centrifuge.
Gabriel was already sitting at one of the lab tables when Jeff arrived. Ming walked over from the crew quarters a few moments later, yawning and stretching. She eased down onto a secured stool next to Gabriel and rubbed her tired eyes. Jeff took a seat at the table next to theirs. Riley remained standing, his arms folded, leaning against another table.
“I just received two messages,” he said stiffly. “One from my demon of an ex-wife, which I will not recount because I already complain about her too much…”
Gabriel chuckled. He had borne the brunt of a vast majority of the commander’s polemics denouncing the unsavory antics of his former bride – diatribes that came to be known affectionately amongst the crew as ‘Riley’s Rants’.
“…and one from the man himself, Mr. Noah Bell,” he continued. “He wanted me to congratulate all of you on your excellent work thus far. He’s very proud that you’re part of the crew taking humanity’s first steps into a wider universe.”
Gabriel’s eyes opened wide. “Wow,” he said. “I didn’t know you were a robot.”
Riley breathed out heavily, clearly relieved to be done with the speech. “I agree, rhetoric usually isn’t my thing.”
“Did Bell tell you to say that?” Ming asked.
“More or less. I may have left out some of the more effusive paragraphs, but I couldn’t help it. The guy sounded like a giddy little kid who thinks he has to tell everyone else that he’s excited.” Riley’s face went suddenly red with anger, and it looked like he wanted to punch someone. Jeff thought there might be something else going on behind the curtain, some detail about their conversation that Riley was dwelling on but not divulging.
“Why is he softening us up?” Jeff asked.
“Because you all have a monumental task ahead of you,” Riley answered. His posture relaxed slightly and he breathed out evenly as his anger retreated.
Gabriel chuckled. “All we’re doing is bolting together a few pieces of scrap in orbit around Titan.”
“Laying the groundwork for a space station is not a trivial undertaking,” Ming said.
“That’s correct,” Riley agreed. “Bell wants the station fully staffed and operating within five years, which is a tall order. It will mean multiple trips to Titan with crews that won’t do anything more than add another section to the facility.” He paused for a moment. “But that’s not what I wanted to talk to you about.”
“Are we going to be on Sesame Street or something?” asked Gabriel.
Jeff laughed unexpectedly – the first genuine laugh since his accident.
“Unfortunately, no,” Riley said with a grin. “I think you’ll like it better. Bell showed me a picture in the video message he sent. A picture of Titan.”
“I have one of those in my bunk,” Ming said.
“Not with an alien artifact in it,” Riley added.
The three of them stared at Riley for a long moment, then looked at each other. The slight hum of the air filtration system was the only audible noise in their small, pressurized universe.
“Did Noah really send you a video message?” Jeff asked.
“He really did.”
“And he showed you a picture of an alien spaceship on Titan,” Gabriel stated.
“Not on Titan,” Riley corrected. “In orbit around it. And they’re not calling it a spaceship. It’s an artifact.”
Another silence. Jeff sat with his mouth half-open, hung up because he wanted to ask a dozen questions, but wasn’t sure where to start.
“Did they know about this artifact before we launched?” Ming asked.
Riley hesitated, then said, “I believe so.”
“But you only learned of it in the message from Bell.”
Riley shrugged. “We’re ten days from Titan. I think he wanted us to be prepared for what we’re going to see.”
“And he’s clearly in a hurry to get us there,” said Ming.
“What do you mean?” asked Gabriel.
“I went back over the logs preceding and following the ‘accidental’ primary burn. It was triggered a few seconds before I was about to initiate a microburn. I checked who was logged into the remote access system at the time. Only two people, Noah Bell and Frank Johnson.”
“You think one of them scheduled a big burn at the same time they knew you would perform a smaller one?” Jeff asked.
“It wasn’t an equipment glitch,” Ming said. “It wasn’t pilot error. What does that leave?”
No one had an answer.
“So what the hell do we do when we get there?” Gabriel asked a few moments later, throwing up his hands. “I’m supposed to install incubators for greenhouses on a space station!”
“You’ll do exactly that,” Riley said calmly. “Just like Dolan and Lieutenant Ming will install the central computer systems, and I’ll operate the extension arms.”
“Surely they want us to take a closer look at whatever’s out there,” Jeff said.
Riley nodded. “Absolutely. Since we’re arriving early, we’ll run our scans, take enough photos and videos to fill a mainframe, and wait for instructions. When Mission Control says it’s time to go home, we go home.”
They were silent for a long time. Riley watched them stew in their own thoughts.
“What’s it look like?” Gabriel asked.
“The picture was blurry. Black and white. It was a dark object. Ovoid, I would say, like a slender egg.”
“How do they know it’s alien?” Jeff asked,
“They don’t. Bell admits it could be a hoax from one of his competitors, or some kind of new satellite system the government is testing.”
“How did Bell get the picture?” Ming asked.
“Beats the hell out of me,” said Riley. “I didn’t ask.
But we’re still the only ones with the TAP System, or anything close to it. Anyone else would have needed to launch years ago to beat us here.”
“So the bottom line is that there’s no way to know what we’re walking into,” Jeff said.
They sat together in wary silence as the ship hurtled toward its rendezvous with Titan.
Kate stood in the open doorway at the back of her apartment, sipping hot lemon tea and watching the orange clouds of sunset over the ocean. The soft but powerful glow came from behind the building, illuminating the beach that stretched from her backyard fence to the water’s edge. Beachgrass wavered in the warm, gentle evening breeze. A man and woman walked barefoot in the wet sand, laughing and flirting. Kate watched them until they passed, then took another sip of tea.
It felt good to be away from Mission Control. She had been putting in such long hours recently that it felt like she was only ever home long enough to fall asleep and wake up. If she had been forced to admit the truth, she didn’t need to be at work that much in the first place. She mostly just sat at her workstation, watching the data feeds on the display wall and waiting for the next message from Explorer I.
What else am I supposed to do? she wondered. Jeff’s return date keeps getting pushed back, but it’s not like I’m going to hit the bars and find a replacement because he’s a little late.
Still, she had to admit to herself that she could use a friend or two to help distract her from her daily worries.
Kate went into the apartment, to her small kitchen, and rinsed out her tea cup. She was turning over names in her mind, trying to decide which of her local friends she could call to get things moving, when tires squealed on the road outside. She hurried to one of the front windows, hands still wet from the sink.
A blue Jetta, older than her Mustang, had mounted the curb of her front yard and sat parked half on her grass and half on the road. Rick was behind the wheel, looking scared. Amid a symphony of honks from stopped drivers, he backed off the grass haltingly,
then pulled into the small parking lot.
Kate opened the front door and leaned against the doorway, arms folded, mentally steeling herself for whatever craziness was headed her way. Rick got out of his car in a hurry, clutching a thick blue file folder to his chest with one hand and a half-gallon fountain soda with the other.
“Nobody knows how to drive around here!” he exclaimed as he hustled from his car, gesturing toward the road with his large soda. “They act like they’ve never seen a turn signal before.”
“It might help if you stuck to veering into driveways instead of onto lawns,” Kate offered. “You ruined my future rose bushes.”
She pointed to the two deep score marks left in the grass by the Jetta’s tires. Rick turned back and winced at the sight.
“Good thing you hate gardening, right?” he said hopefully.
“Yeah, right. Anyway, what’s the rush?”
Rick tapped the blue folder hesitantly, then gestured into the apartment. “You mind if I come in?” he asked breathlessly. “Feels a little awkward standing out here on the porch.”
Kate waited a moment, then stepped aside and gestured for him to enter.
“Thanks,” he said as he walked past.
Kate sighed, regretting not calling one of her friends sooner.
Careful what you wish for, she thought.
Rick sat at the dining room table with the folder in front of him. He tapped his fingers on it nervously. Kate remained standing, hoping his visit wouldn’t last long.
“Are you going to tell what’s in there, or do I have to guess?” she asked.
He regarded her intensely, as if scrutinizing her ability to handle whatever he was about to say.
“Before I spill the beans,” Rick said, “I need to be sure you can detach any feelings you might have for certain people on the mission from the actual mission itself. What I have in here,” he continued, resting his hands on the folder, “will change everything.”
“Enough with the suspense!”
She held out an eager hand for Rick to give her the folder. He pressed it to his chest with white-knuckled hands, eyeing her suspiciously. Finally he relinquished it, looking as uncertain as a new mother who just handed her baby to a stranger.
Kate flipped open the thick folder. It was filled with computer printouts detailing the construction of a Diamond Aerospace launch facility in Kazakhstan, near the Baikonur Cosmodrome. The Baikonur spaceport had been the primary launch site for all of Russia’s space missions until the country built the Vostochny spaceport on their own soil. It was still used occasionally by the Russians when launch conditions to the International Space Station weren’t favorable from the newer facility.
“Rick…” she said slowly. “I’ve never seen this. I doubt anyone has. Where in the hell did you get it?”
“Archives,” he said.
“You mean the locked and sealed archives inside the Diamond Aerospace building?”
“Yes.”
“The archives to which we don’t have any legal access?”
“Yes, yes! Fine, so I wasn’t supposed to go inside. Was anybody supposed to ask Nixon about Watergate?”
She snapped the folder shut and dropped it on her dining table with a dull thud.
“I don’t care about Nixon,” said Kate. “I care about my job.”
“Well, you should care about the people on the spacecraft, too,” he said. “There is a lot more in that folder besides building schematics.”
“Like what?” she asked hesitantly.
“Like evidence that the antimatter propulsion system wasn’t ready for real-world flight.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Kate said dismissively. “That system was subjected to more tests than any other piece of equipment in the history of spaceflight.”
“And the test results were faked.” Rick leaned in close. His voice dropped to barely a whisper as he said, “Explorer One is not the first ship Diamond Aerospace has sent to Titan.”
She sat down hard, unable to make her eyes focus on the data in front of her.
“That can’t be right,” she whispered weakly. “I…I’ve been with the company for two years, ever since they opened the Canaveral facility. The only launches before Explorer were near-Earth commercial satellites for third party companies.”
“Launches from Cape Canaveral, yes,” said Rick. He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose and pointed to the blueprint of a large warehouse facility. “But not from Baikonur.”
“We never partnered with the Russians. China won all of our Titan contracts.”
“Look,” Rick said. He shuffled through the papers in the folder until he found one with a list of dates and coordinates. “Six probes in three years, launched from Baikonur All of them but one malfunctioned on the way to Titan because the engine was faulty. The one that made it all the way disappeared when it got there. They think it probably disintegrated in the atmosphere, but not before snapping a single photo and sending it back to Earth. There’s a record of it here,” he added, tapping a line of text on the page.
“Where is the photo?”
“Not in the folder,” Rick admitted begrudgingly. “I may have missed something while I was snooping around in the archives.”
Kate stared at the folder. “You said the TAPS malfunctioned…”
“It habitually blew up on the way to Titan.”
“…Oh.”
“I was trying to break it to you gently. According to these records, each probe completed two successful primary burns en route before losing all contact with the Diamond Aerospace facility near Russia. The engineers suspect that something happened during the ignition process of the third and final primary burn.”
“But Explorer has already completed three primary burns!” Kate said urgently.
“And the crew will need another two to get home, if their fuel levels hold.”
“We already know they don’t have enough fuel for two more major burns.”
“Then they’re safer taking it slow. It’s not a question of if the engine will fail, but when.”
“Do the reports show the cause of the malfunction?”
“The engineers never figured it out,” Rick said, “but not for lack of trying. The company sank millions into the problem and came up with nothing.”
“How could they do this?” she asked. “How could the company send people into space using unproven technology?”
“Explorer was only supposed to initiate four primary burns total,” Rick said. “Two there and two back. My guess is that as soon as the probe sent that picture back from Titan, Bell decided whatever’s in the photo was worth the risk of rushing to green-light the TAP System.”
“It’s murder.”
“Legal murder,” Rick corrected. “There are copies of the crew contracts in the folder. Everyone on Explorer, including Jeff, signed an agreement not to hold the company liable for any risks, known or unknown. The contracts are riddled with dense verbiage, but the bottom line is that there has always been a high chance of failure. The crew knew that from the beginning.”
Kate shook her head slowly as she tried to think of a way to rage against a seemingly helpless situation.
“But…what about Michael Cochran?” she asked.
“Now that most definitely was murder.”
“Cochran worked for Diamond Aerospace, right?”
Rick nodded. “He was on the operations floor of their Baikonur facility during the probe launches.”
“Then let’s take this to the cops. We’ll show them the folder and everything that’s in it. We’ll tell them about Cochran.”
Rick held up his hands to slow her down. “Just hold on a second.”
“I don’t want to wait anymore, Rick!”
“You told me that Frank might know someone at the Sheriff’s Department–”–”
“So?”
“If we take this information to them, who’s to say they won’t squash the story…and us…before it gets out?�
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She fidgeted nervously with a corner of the blue folder. “What are you suggesting?”
“Just give me one more day to work some magic,” he said. “I know a reporter who would kill to broadcast this kind of a story. Not literally, of course. If we can get the story out, then Diamond Aerospace would be forced to play by the rules. They’ve been free from public scrutiny throughout this entire ordeal, and it’s time that changed.”
“You want to force them to be accountable for anything that happens next,” Kate said.
“Exactly.”
“You’re not talking about a reporter from The Daily Glass, are you?”
“They ran that picture of Cochran when no one else would!” he said defensively. “These are noble people sticking it to Big Media any chance they can.”
She was silent for a long moment. “We might be working with a murderer, Rick.”
He nodded slowly. “What do you think we should do?”
“I have to go back to work,” she said helplessly. “I don’t have any other choice.”
Rick reached across the table and squeezed her hand. “I’m going to try and arrange a meeting tonight with that reporter. Hopefully we’ll have to wade through a sea of them to get inside the Diamond Aerospace building tomorrow morning.”
“Just…be careful,” she said.
It was dark when he collected the papers into the blue folder and said goodbye. Kate watched from the front doorway as he backed out into the street in his beat-up Jetta and drove away. She turned around and went inside, not seeing the heavily tinted black SUV without a license plate following after him.
Jupiter was on the far side of the sun when Explorer I passed the boundary of its orbit on the way to Titan. The crew had originally been promised a distant glimpse of the largest planet in the solar system as the ship hurtled toward its destination, but everything changed with the early and unexpected primary burn.
Now the only object worth seeing through the narrow window of the command module was a pinpoint light three-hundred million kilometers ahead.