Mission One

by Samuel Best

  Other small displays at the corners of his face shield HUD showed his relative distance to nearby objects, his vital readouts, and remaining suit power. Directional air jets positioned around the pack would allow him to navigate easily once outside the ship, but drained his power more quickly.

  Ming knocked on the top of his helmet.

  Jeff pushed a button on his wrist pad and the golden visor sheathed up, leaving only the clear polycarbonate bubble.

  She touched a finger to her ear and looked at him questioningly. Another few taps on his wrist data pad with bulky, gloved fingers, and Jeff patched his suit comms into the ship. Ming drifted over to the curved airlock wall and held down a button on the comm panel as she spoke.

  “You hearing me okay?”

  “Loud and clear. All readings in the green.”

  “Glad to hear it. I’ll get out of your hair so you can get to work.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  She gave him a thumb’s up and pushed off the wall, coasting through the inner airlock door. Once she was through, Jeff keyed a number into the wall panel, and the door slowly closed. He saw her floating down the T-junction through the small polycarbonate porthole in the center of the door.

  With a gentle tap on the wall, he spun around to face the outer door. There was no window in the round slab of metal, just a smooth exterior which hid a complex series of locks and seals. He reached out and pushed a sequence of buttons on the control panel. Two of them lit up: one green, one red. He pushed the green one.

  The powerful white light in the ceiling dimmed instantly and was replaced with a pulsing yellow hazard strobe as the air was quickly sucked from the room. Jeff saw the evidence of this as streaks of cold air flowed down the walls of the room and disappeared into floor vents. He heard nothing from within his suit except his own breathing.

  The yellow strobe painted the room in flashes, flicking on and off. The two buttons lit up again. Jeff pushed the green one. The outer airlock door swung slowly inward, opening up a hole in space. Stars dotted the infinite blackness – tiny pinpoints of light glimmering with an intensity that astronomers on Earth could only imagine. Titan was behind him, on the side of the ship opposite the airlock.

  Jeff stared into the void beyond the hatch. For a brief moment, he was convinced he would fall to eternity if he crossed the barrier separating the two worlds. It would be like jumping into a hole over an endless chasm – some kind of gravity well would seize hold of his body and pull him on and on, away from the ship.

  The sensation passed. He tapped a command on his wrist data pad to extend the flight control stick attached to the underside of his left forearm. With the smallest amount of pressure on the stick, the jets on his pack let out tiny bursts of air, and he coasted forward, out of the airlock and into space.

  There was nothing to see but the sparkling pinpoint lights of a billion distant stars, and the sight took Jeff’s breath away. A few seconds ago, he still had the solid walls of the airlock to reassure him he was still in a physical realm. Now there was nothing below his feet but an emptiness that had no end.

  “I’m clear of the airlock,” he said.

  “Copy that,” Ming replied over his headset from inside Explorer. “I see you.”

  He manipulated the flight control stick with his left hand, jets in his pack spat air, and he turned around slowly.

  “Are you recording?” he asked.

  “Of course.”

  The command module at the front of Explorer I came into view as he rotated, as sleek as a polished bullet except for the narrow black window cut into the top of its tapered nose.

  “No bugs on the windshield,” Jeff said. “Clean as a whistle, from where I’m standing – er, floating.”

  “Excellent.”

  “Maintenance panel for secondary fuel line access is port-side, directly behind the cargo hold,” he said, speaking for the benefit of the official record rather than to Ming, who already knew the panel’s location. “Heading there now.”

  He navigated away from the front of the ship and drifted aft, staying parallel to the cylindrical crew module. Inside, the centrifuge was divided into sectional rings, each with a distinctive function. Outside the ship, the crew module was a smooth piece of seamless metal, adorned only with the three-meter-tall Diamond Aerospace logo and the words Explorer I in sweeping, triumphant lettering.

  “Can you see the others?” Ming asked.

  “Negative. Crew module’s too wide. Maybe when I get past the hold. How’re they looking?”

  “They’re at the hatch of the other ship. Looks like there was a minor explosion from inside the airlock.”

  “We heard the oxygen compressor.”

  “Yes, the interior is still pressurized. They’re trying to close the outer airlock door now.”

  Jeff studied the spartan HUD readout in his helmet as he continued to drift farther aft. “Is there any way to pump a video feed into the helmet? I don’t remember that from training.”

  “They never mentioned it, but give me a second,” Ming said. “I’m pulling up that model’s documentation.”

  “It came with an instruction manual?”

  “Not exactly. Looks like it was written by someone from the coding department. Hold on…I found something. I’m giving your suit permission to access the ship’s video feeds, but you have to manually patch in.”

  She read off a long string of letters and numbers, which Jeff dutifully typed into his wrist data pad.

  “Get all that?” she asked.

  A new option appeared along the bottom of his HUD, at the lowest edge of his face shield: a button-style object with, naturally, the word VIDEO in the middle. He used the arrow keys on his wrist pad to activate it. A small picture-in-picture video box popped up in the lower left corner of his HUD, slightly transparent so it wouldn’t fully block what was behind.

  “I got it,” Jeff answered. “Thanks, Lieutenant.”

  The feed showed Explorer’s view of North Star. Riley and Silva appeared small at that distance as they crowded the airlock of the other ship. Jeff cycled through all the available feeds until he found one from Riley’s helmet camera.

  “–tried that already,” Riley was saying. “Damn thing’s stuck.” It seemed the system fed both video and audio to Jeff’s suit. Riley’s camera showed the interior of a spherical airlock identical to Explorer’s. Melted black streaks gouged the smooth metal walls, originating from the interior side of the sealed inner airlock door. He had a bottle-sized multipurpose hex driver in his gloved hands, and was working to open a panel in the charred wall.

  Gabriel said, “But if that’s not the manual override for the outer door–”

  “Wait a sec,” Riley said, grunting. “Almost there.”

  The tool slipped out of its groove and he cursed – but the panel popped open.

  “Gotcha!” he said, pushing the loose panel aside. He drifted down to shine his helmet’s light into the open panel. Another curse. “Explorer, are you seeing this?”

  “Copy, Commander,” Ming replied.

  Jeff saw it, too. The manual door override was fried – melted and fused to the wall.

  “Must have been one hell of a fire,” said Riley. “Explorer, it seems we’re unable to pressurize the airlock.”

  Jeff floated past the end of the crew module where it tapered down to the narrower cargo hold. “If that ship was built like Explorer,” he said, “there should also be an exterior manual override.”

  “We know about the other override, Dolan,” Riley said testily. “But then we couldn’t get back inside.”

  “I could close the door with the manual override outside the airlock.”

  “Do it,” Kate said suddenly, and Jeff jumped in his suit.

  “Hi, Ms. Bishop,” he said, grinning from ear to ear. “Have you been listening this whole time?”

  “Hey, Dolan,” Riley said. “Stop flirting and just let us into the ship.”

  “Say please.”

&n
bsp; “What did you just say to me?”

  “Play nice, boys,” Noah interrupted from Mission Control.

  “And you stay out of this,” spat Riley.

  “Ease up on the hostility, Commander,” Frank said. “It’s not benefiting anyone. Jeff, you are approved for task deviation. Close North Star’s outer hatch, then continue with your repairs as planned.”

  What the hell was that about? Jeff wondered. He’d never heard the commander snap like that. Riley was a tough guy when he needed to be, sure, but he had always kept his cool during tense moments of training.

  Explorer dropped away below Jeff as he maneuvered toward North Star, revealing the full disc of Titan ahead. The hazy, yellowish moon appeared as smooth and uniform as a solid-colored billiards ball. It filled his field of vision, and he craned his neck up to take it all in.

  The surface wasn’t distinguishable beneath Titan’s thick, nitrogen-rich atmosphere – the only one of its kind in the solar system.

  Since Explorer matched orbital velocity with North Star, the two ships were seemingly stuck in the sky together, as if connected by an invisible, rigid pole.

  The alien torus floated a hundred meters off North Star’s bow, silent and still, as all three objects circled Titan. Jeff stared at it as he accelerated away from Explorer. Its diameter was larger than North Star’s, and there was nothing in the middle. It was just a hoop comprised of deep black material, with no visible machinery.

  Nothing in the middle, Jeff thought as he looked more closely at the empty space inside the torus. He had crossed half the distance to North Star, and was now looking at the artifact obliquely, instead of directly from the side when it would appear as a solid line.

  He set his comms to wide broadcast.

  “There’s nothing inside the torus,” he said.

  “Of course not,” Gabriel said, amused. “It’s a circle.”

  “I mean there’s nothing. No stars, no Titan. If you look through the middle, it’s just a black disc.”

  Jeff had been watching Gabriel’s video feed from his own HUD. Riley and Silva were both visible within the darkness of North Star’s airlock – even so far from the heart of the solar system, there was enough sunlight to cast dim shadows in the spherical room. Riley turned to Gabriel and did his best to approximate a shrug.

  “Silva and I ogled that thing on the way over, Dolan,” he said. “We both saw stars through the middle.”

  “You might want to look again.”

  Gabriel drifted out of the airlock and turned toward the torus.

  “My God,” he said reverently. “It’s empty.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Riley said, floating next to Gabriel. “Dolan’s right. That’s kind of creepy, actually. Canaveral, do you have a visual?”

  “We see it,” Kate said.

  “Silva and I were looking at it from the other side,” Riley continued. “From over here, the stars on the outside go right up to the outer edge of the hoop. Then it’s almost as if there’s a black sheet covering the interior of the torus. I should be able to see a little bit of Titan in the lower-left quadrant, but now it looks like something took a perfect little bite out of it.”

  Jeff reset his comms to send only to Explorer.

  “Hey, Ming?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Can you stop recording my feed for a minute?”

  He heard a few clicks on the other end of the line. “Done.”

  “I’m starting to feel a little unsure about this whole thing.”

  “You and me both.”

  “What would happen if we left early?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If we left without building the orbital station.”

  “You mean right now?”

  “Sure, now. What would happen?”

  “They’re already saying it’s going to take almost twice as long to get home. I would say it’s up to us whether or not we want to spend a few extra weeks in orbit around Titan or waiting closer to Earth.”

  “In other words, we’re screwed either way, so it doesn’t matter.”

  “Right. What about Space Station Glory?”

  Gabriel and Riley maneuvered back into the ship as Jeff neared the airlock. His HUD counted down the distance in the upper-right corner of his face shield.

  “I’m not saying I want to vote on it just yet,” Jeff continued. “But I am saying my reasons for sticking around are quickly evaporating. It’s hard to stay confident in a company when it becomes increasingly obvious they’re merely improvising on a large scale…especially when that same company sent you halfway across the solar system in a ship that could blow up with each ignition.”

  “I don’t owe the company anything else,” Ming said. “If it comes down to it, you have my vote.”

  Jeff smiled. “Thank you. Okay, I’m patching back into main comms now.”

  “Reactivating recording. Hope we can get the glitch figured out so we don’t lose your comms again.”

  Twenty meters out from North Star, Jeff no longer maintained any doubt that it was mostly identical to Explorer. If the company logos were swapped, he may have even found it impossible to tell the difference.

  He slowed his approach with a few forward bursts of air from his pack, then bumped gently into the side of the ship, next to its airlock. Jeff hooked his pack’s retractable safety tether into a welded loop on the hull. He had almost thirty meters of line to work with, if he needed it.

  “Hang tight, guys,” he said as he used his multipurpose hex driver to loosen the bolts of a square panel in the hull.

  The panel hinged outward from one side, revealing a gray lever shielded by a plastic cover. A sticker bright with yellow stripes warned him that it was the emergency door release. If he pulled the lever, the pneumatic governors that lowered the outer airlock door at a controlled speed would open and the door would slide shut like a spring-loaded guillotine.

  Below the emergency door release were two hexagonal holes side by side labeled INNER and OUTER. The tool that fit the holes resembled a T-shaped tire iron. Jeff pulled it from its clamp next to the holes and inserted the long end into the hole labeled OUTER. With a forceful twist, he managed half a turn.

  “The outer hatch just dropped a few centimeters,” Gabriel said.

  “There’s some resistance,” Jeff said, already breathing a little heavier. “Give me another few hours and it will be down all the way,” he added jokingly.

  He gripped the handles and gave the tool another turn, working to seal the outer airlock door.

  Kate watched Jeff’s progress from her chair on the operations floor. He had succeeded in fully closing the outer hatch, and was now inching the inner door open, slowly letting the ship’s atmosphere bleed into the airlock. It wasn’t the ideal method, but without power to what remained of the airlock control panels, there wasn’t much choice.

  A smaller window on the display wall showed Riley’s camera feed. He and Silva were hooked to welded metal loops on the airlock wall in case the outer door failed.

  “Ten more minutes,” Jeff panted between turns. “Hope you… can get the… power back on.”

  “It is on,” Ming said. “Well, the air system seems to be functioning, at least. Looks like the rest of the ship’s systems were suspended.”

  Kate turned in her seat to ask Rick a question, then stopped short when she remembered he had never shown up for work. She glanced to the back of the room. Frank and Noah were engaged in a heated conversation in the conference room.

  Farther down her row of workstations, Juan sat staring intently at the video feeds. Kate walked over to him and touched his shoulder.

  “Juan,” she said.

  He jumped in surprise, his concentration severed from the display wall.

  “Geez, you scared me,” he said.

  She sat in the empty chair next to his. “Sorry about that. Can I borrow your cell phone?”

  He shook his head. “The guard took it from me this morning.”

/>   “Mine, too,” she admitted.

  She turned when Noah burst out of the conference room and disappeared into his private elevator. Frank stayed behind, aggressively jabbing numbers into the dial pad of the conference phone.

  “I’m worried about Rick,” Kate said.

  “Why?”

  Frank spoke quickly to someone on the other end of the conference phone line, then jabbed a button to terminate the call. He walked out of the conference room and stopped at the viewing platform railing, gripping it tightly.

  “Just a bad feeling,” Kate answered distractedly.

  Moments later, the door leading from the front of the building to the operations floor slid open to admit a dozen security guards in dark blue uniforms. They all resembled the same bulked-out guard who had taken Kate’s phone when she arrived at work that morning. Like him, they all wore guns in their belt holsters.

  Every tech on the operations floor stopped what they were doing and watched the guards as they took up innocuous positions around the outer edges of the room, standing in the shadows when they could, as still as statues.

  “What’s happening, Ms. Bishop?” Juan asked.

  “I don’t know,” she replied. “But let’s find out.”

  She stood and walked toward the stairs at the back of the room, heading for Frank, half expecting for the security thugs to stop her. He was joined by the very same guard she’d met that morning, and the two of them entered Noah’s private elevator.

  “Alright,” said Riley in the feed on the display wall. “We should be able to squeeze through. Thanks, Dolan.”

  Kate looked at the closed elevator door for a long moment, then reluctantly turned back to watch the screen.