Mission One

by Samuel Best

  I’m starting to sound as paranoid as Rick, Kate thought. I bet he would say I still wasn’t half as paranoid as I should be.

  Regardless of the consequences to herself, or even to Rick, she needed to warn the crew of Explorer I that there was a potentially lethal problem with their engine, not just a glitch with the secondary fuel line sensor.

  She kept repeating the question in her mind: How can I get a coded message to just one person on a ship hundreds of millions of miles away without everyone in Mission Control knowing what was in the message?

  And if she did manage to send a message, what could she say? What kind of code would she use? How could she be sure Jeff would understand what she was sending him? Telling him not to initiate another antimatter burn would mean another few years before she saw him again. Yet, the more times the system ignited, the greater the risk of catastrophic failure. If the crew had to come home without the antimatter engine, they wouldn’t have enough food to last them the journey. Gabriel might be able to supplement their diet if he could manage to rig a makeshift greenhouse for vegetables, but even that may not be enough for four people.

  I have to let him know the risk, Kate painfully realized, even if they’re ordered to use the engine anyway.

  Her eyes landed on Walt and lingered there. The flight surgeon sat at his workstation, contentedly chewing on a glazed donut and sipping his coffee as he halfheartedly kept an eye on crew members’ biometric graphs on the display wall. The lights from the high ceiling penetrated his thin, white hair and reflected off his shiny scalp.

  Kate felt a shiver of revelation. All the little gears in her mind clicked into place as Walt ate his donut with steady chews.

  She checked her watch. There was still time.

  She accessed the cloud on her workstation computer and started researching.

  Titan was the size of a nickel when Jeff first saw it.

  The hazy, pale ochre moon was positioned in the center of the narrow command module window. All four crew members were buckled into their seats, sitting quietly and staring.

  “I don’t see Saturn,” said Gabriel.

  “It’s behind Titan at the moment,” Riley said, tapping at his controls. “She’ll pop out soon enough.”

  Ming called up the status display of the orbital systems on her control panel and checked the settings.

  “Entering orbit in fifty-eight minutes,” she said. “All systems in the green.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” said Riley. “Orbital thrusters only from this point.”

  Ming nodded and flipped a switch to lock out some of the engine controls. “Copy that.”

  Jeff watched Titan as Explorer I approached. As fast as the ship was traveling even during the deceleration process, it was still mind-twistingly far from the moon, and it would be a while until it appeared as large as a quarter.

  He hadn’t given a second thought to the fact that none of them were going down to the surface until he saw the moon from the command module. Before, he had been perfectly content with the original plan to remain in orbit and assemble the skeleton of what would become the farthest manned space station from Earth. Perhaps in twenty years or so, he expected, the company would send a few brave souls down to the surface to explore. Jeff and the rest of the crew of Explorer I were the plumbers and electricians; the architects of that potential future who built and then vacated.

  At roughly half the size of Earth, Titan had a little over one-tenth of its gravity. Each day was as long as sixteen Earth days. The moon had a fixed orbit – the same side always faced Saturn. If it were possible to stand on the surface and see through the thick atmospheric haze, Saturn and its rings would fill roughly a third of the sky.

  Jeff knew it was dangerous down there on the surface. The haze masked a frigid world of hydrocarbon lakes and methane rivers fed by torrential downpours of the same volatile chemical in liquid form. Cryovolcanoes dotted the hostile landscape. Being the only moon in the solar system with a dense atmosphere, it had taken a long time to discover what was really happening beneath the fog.

  Despite the methane, a visitor wouldn’t need a pressure suit to explore, just an oxygen mask and protective clothing that could withstand the moon’s temperatures that could plunge to negative 290-degrees Fahrenheit. With slightly less gravity than Earth’s moon and an average surface pressure 1.6 times that of Earth itself, walking around on Titan would be more like bouncing through thick soup.

  None of that deterred Jeff from wanting to set foot on the surface. It was torturous to know he would be so close without the chance for further exploration.

  A green button flashed on the pilot’s control console. Riley pressed it, then put a finger to his ear while a message came in over his headset.

  “Dolan,” he said, “Canaveral wants you to run a diagnostic on the biometric equipment.”

  “I just went through the whole routine this morning.”

  “They said something about a calibration error on our end, and it could screw with their readings.”

  Jeff hesitated, not wanting to miss the approach to Titan.

  “It should only take twenty minutes, right?” Gabriel offered.

  “Yeah,” Jeff conceded. He unbuckled his straps and hovered over his seat. “Fine. But if anything happens, call me back.”

  “Will do,” said Riley.

  Jeff pushed off gently from the back of his chair and floated down through the open hatch in the floor, reluctantly leaving the others to enjoy the view.

  The biometrics monitor in the science lab was already on when Jeff arrived, which meant that someone on Earth had sent an automated power trigger over an hour ago. The black screen was sectioned into quadrants, each displaying the biometric data of a crew member in glowing green letters, numbers, and lines.

  “Must really want me to run this test,” Jeff mumbled as he swapped wires on the back of the monitor.

  He temporarily routed the ship’s communications mainframe into the narrow-field biometrics equipment so it could listen to more from Earth than the simple automated trigger that had switched it on in the first place.

  Then he waited.

  He leaned against a lab desk, his arms folded, and watched the data on the biometrics screen. A thin line at the bottom of each of the four quadrants blipped with the heart rate of each crew member. The three in the command module watching the approach to Titan had noticeably quicker heartbeats, beyond the normal resting rates for individuals in great condition.

  No wonder, he thought, looking longingly toward the command module. I bet they’re getting a great show.

  His own EKG readout was a steady fifty-two beats per minute. He yawned as the data from Mission Control flowed into the monitor. The EKG lines went flat temporarily, then spiked rapidly during the initial testing cycles.

  Jeff pushed off the desk and started walking toward the command module. He was supposed to babysit the equipment during the tests, but he had just run the same routine that morning, and he would be damned if he was going to miss the reveal of Saturn.

  The biometrics monitor beeped three times and he froze in his tracks. Three beeps during a test cycle meant there was an error in the system.

  It can’t be too bad, he thought as he hurried back to the equipment. All of the readouts were perfectly fine.

  All of the EKG lines were flat at the bottom of each quadrant. Jeff frowned and patted his chest, feeling for the small suction cup monitors that had been attached to his skin since he left Earth. He lifted his shirt and inspected the four flexible discs. They were still there. The wireless data nodes, like small beads of mercury, were still embedded securely in the center of each cup.

  It might be possible for one sensor to fail, but not all four on the same person. And certainly not all four on each member of the crew.

  Jeff reached for the keyboard to run a diagnostic and the screen flashed off.

  “Oh, come on,” he whispered.

  The screen popped back on and Jeff shoo
k his head in frustration. Only a single flat line showed on the screen instead of the usual quadrant display.

  A moment later, the line began to pulse with a heart rate. Jeff watched the beats and checked his own pulse, trying to match the two. The beats on the screen were erratic and came in short bursts. It wasn’t a heartbeat at all.

  It was Morse code.

  He translated the message and forgot all about missing the approach to Titan.

  Gabriel’s jubilance could barely be contained. His legs bounced anxiously and he sat on the edge of his seat, straining against his straps as he leaned toward the window.

  One of Saturn’s rings appeared from behind Titan, rising steadily from behind the moon as Explorer I drew near.

  “You almost missed it!” he said as Jeff floated into the crew module. “Can you believe it? We are the first people in history to see Saturn with our own eyes!”

  “No, I really can’t believe it,” Jeff said darkly as he strapped into his chair.

  Ming noted the tone of his voice and cast a sideways glance, but remained silent. The edge of Saturn peeked out behind Titan; a sliver of the striped and sand-colored gas giant from which projected its trademark flat rings.

  “How’s the equipment?” Riley asked as he stared out the window.

  “The biometric scanner is fine,” Jeff said. “Probably the only piece of this ship that wasn’t broken before we launched.”

  Riley twisted in his seat and stared at Jeff with a furrowed brow.

  “What the hell does that mean, Dolan?”

  “Mission Control didn’t want me to run another diagnostic on the equipment. It was Kate sending me a message using Morse code.”

  “The EKG readout,” Ming said. “Clever.”

  “Why didn’t she just send you a video?” asked Gabriel.

  “Because she knows it would be seen by others before it left Earth,” Jeff said.

  “What was in the message?” Ming asked.

  “Kate said the antimatter engine was unstable. During all the tests, the system would only get two or three uses before something went wrong. They never solved the problem.”

  “They wouldn’t send us out here if that were the case,” Gabriel said. “Besides, we made it just fine.”

  “She said ‘fake results’,” Jeff replied. “Noah or Frank had to know. Maybe both.”

  “You don’t know that, Dolan,” Riley said.

  “What are we supposed to do if she’s right?” Jeff asked. “Disconnect the primary engine and paddle home?”

  “If we don’t use the antimatter drive again,” Ming said, “it will take us years to get back.”

  A third of Saturn had emerged from behind its moon. Jeff watched the slow reveal with regretful detachment.

  “But all the tests were conducted on Earth,” said Gabriel. “The only way to know if the system was unstable would be to launch a prolonged mission, and we are the first.”

  Jeff shook his head. “Diamond Aerospace sent six probes to Titan before we launched. All of them failed except one.”

  “That must have been one hell of a long message if she used Morse code,” Riley said.

  “It was.”

  Ming’s control panel beeped, and she pushed a button. Lines of data scrolled across her screen.

  “What is it, Lieutenant?” Riley asked.

  “I’m picking up a strange signal from Titan.”

  “Radiation interference?”

  She shook her head. “Our scanners are set to ignore the moon’s natural emissions. This is…something else.”

  “Elaborate,” Riley ordered. He turned to his own control panel and called up the same information.

  “It’s in the audible spectrum, sir.” She pressed her headset against her ear and listened. “Sounds mechanical.”

  Jeff put on his headset and patched it into what she was hearing: a deep, constant thrumming.

  “It’s an oxygen compressor,” he said. “This is exactly what our ship would sound like in low-power mode. Most of the electronics would switch off, but the atmospheric regulators would constantly churn out breathable air.”

  “You’re telling me there’s another ship out here?” Riley asked.

  “Look!” Gabriel shouted, pointing at Titan.

  They were now close enough to the hazy moon that a rectangular segment of it completely filled the narrow crew module window. Jeff struggled to find anything out of place on the pale yellowish swath of atmosphere he could see.

  Then, from the edge of the window, a black speck appeared. It was locked in orbit around Titan, circling the moon quickly, moving from one side of the crew module window to the other.

  “That’s not what was in the photograph,” Riley said.

  “It’s another ship,” Jeff whispered.

  “No way.”

  “What else could it be?” Gabriel insisted.

  “An asteroid caught in the moon’s gravity.”

  “Not with that audio signature,” Ming said. She studied her control panel. “Sir, at our current rate of deceleration, we’ll begin entering orbit in less than twenty minutes.”

  Riley squinted at the black speck as it moved over Titan. It disappeared past the edge of the window, and he slowly leaned back in his chair.

  “Stay the course, Lieutenant,” he said. “Our primary mission is to build a space station, and that’s what we’re going to do.”

  “We were supposed to be the first ones here,” Gabriel said with disappointment. His face instantly brightened as a thought occurred to him. “What if it’s just one of the probes? The one that didn’t blow up? Those were unmanned, right?”

  “They wouldn’t need an oxygen system,” Jeff said.

  Gabriel’s shoulders sank. “No, I guess not.”

  The four crew members sat in silence, looking out through the window.

  Jeff kept expecting to see a variation in the surface of Titan, some kind of pattern in the methane atmosphere. There was none. The crew module window had turned from a solid strip of black space to a solid strip of foggy yellow.

  “Ready those orbital thrusters,” Riley said a few minutes later.

  “Aye, Commander,” Ming replied. Her fingers moved rapidly over her console. She paused and looked out the window. “Here it comes again.”

  Jeff didn’t realize he was holding his breath until the object appeared at the edge of the window. In the few minutes since the speck was last visible, Explorer I had covered half its own distance to the moon. Now the speck had grown to the size of a bullet, and its features became more distinguishable.

  “It is a ship,” Jeff said finally. “You can clearly see the design of the fuselage, there, and the engine shield.”

  “It looks a hell of a lot like Explorer from here,” Gabriel said.

  “It sure does. There’s writing on the side.”

  “Sweet mother,” Riley said grimly. “I’d bet my ex-wife’s purse collection that’s the MarsCorp logo.”

  “There’s something else, sir,” Ming said.

  “How can there possibly be anything else?!” he roared. He forced his shoulders to relax and took two deep breaths. “Apologies, Lieutenant. Please continue.”

  “There’s a pocket of interference that looks like it’s coming off the other ship, but when I try to zero in on the pocket, our scanners slip off and give me a reading from Titan.”

  “Maybe they used a different kind of engine,” Gabriel offered. “Something we’ve never seen.”

  “Wait a minute. It’s coming from about a hundred meters off the nose of the ship,” said Ming. “Not from inside.”

  “I don’t see it,” Riley said, squinting.

  Jeff leaned forward. “I do,” he said. “Barely. It’s like a shadow, a short distance in front of the ship.”

  “Do you think they’re building a space station, too?” Gabriel asked.

  “I’m not reading anything like that on my equipment,” Ming said.

  She cycled through the menus on
her console monitor, bombarding the orbiting ship with every type of scan at her disposal.

  “I see it, too,” said Gabriel. “Jeff is right. It’s just off the nose.”

  “I wish we could magnify this stupid window,” Riley said angrily.

  The ship and whatever it chased disappeared from view as it orbited the far side of Titan.

  “It will be back soon,” Ming said.

  The time passed quickly. Jeff drummed his fingers on the arm rests of his chair, eagerly awaiting the ship’s return. When it finally showed up, as large in the window as his own thumb, he sat back in surprise.

  The other ship was parked in front of a large torus – a hoop twice the diameter of the MarsCorp vessel made of a black, non-reflective material. The crew of Explorer hadn’t been able to see it clearly because they were looking at the relatively thin object from its side, so it appeared as the whisper of a black line, only truly detectable at a closer distance. The ship and the object were locked in orbit around the moon, their velocities matched so perfectly that they appeared to be attached by an invisible connector.

  As the pair traversed the space above the surface of the moon, the torus rotated, always keeping one edge of the hoop toward Titan. It gave Jeff and the others a clearer view of the strange object as it followed its course.

  It wasn’t like anything he’d ever seen before. He could think of no practical reason MarsCorp, or any other company for that matter, would want to install such an object in orbit around one of Saturn’s moons.

  “MarsCorp didn’t put this here,” he said. “It is the artifact, isn’t it?”

  Looking at the design of the torus, he could not see any seams in its construction. It was just a guess at that distance, but Jeff would have said it was cut from a single piece of material. The costs would be astronomical, and the transport unthinkable over such a distance.

  All those considerations led him to believe, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that the torus wasn’t made on Earth at all.

  “Should we try to contact the other ship, sir?” Ming asked, breaking the prolonged silence.