Mission One

by Samuel Best

  On the display wall, Noah watched Silva traversing the distance between Explorer I and the torus. Riley’s video feed showed that he was in the airlock, already suited up and waiting for the outer door to open. Ming sat on her hands in the crew module, looking like a scared child, leaning forward against the chair straps to stare out the narrow window at North Star and the artifact.

  Jeff floated unconscious in the zero-g of the T-junction, still as a corpse but for a slight rotation. Blood dripped from a cut on his scalp, creating a widening spiral halo of floating globules around his head. His arms were outstretched slightly over his head. They passed through the blood spiral and the globules platted gently against his skin.

  What a mess this is, Noah thought drunkenly, wondering what happened to Jeff. He held the cold compress to his temple and turned slightly until he could see Kate in the conference room. Frank pushed open the glass door and joined her. Whatever she has planned, he thought, I hope it really knocks him for a loop.

  Frank came alone, without one of his bulky security guards.

  Kate took it as a good sign.

  He slowed as the door closed behind him, and he looked around the conference room like a cautious animal searching for the mechanisms of a trap. His gaze lingered on the black conference phone in the middle of the glass table. Seeing no glowing lights which signaled an outgoing signal, he deigned to look at her.

  “What are you doing in here, Ms. Bishop?” he asked.

  “I wanted to talk,” she said.

  “What could you possibly have to say?”

  “I want you to tell me why you’re doing this. What happened between you and Noah to spark your mutiny?”

  “Mutiny?” he asked with a sour face, as if the word were bitter on his tongue. “Don’t be so melodramatic. This is business, and it’s how our relationship works. Noah toes the line, and I push him over it. He’ll thank me when it’s over.”

  “I doubt he’ll thank you for bashing his skull in.”

  He held up a corrective finger. “I didn’t do that. That was the guard.”

  “Just like it was a guard who killed Michael Cochran?” she said. Annoyance flashed across his face and he waved her away as he prepared to leave the room. “I think you had him murdered” Kate added. “Along with Rick Teller.”

  Frank stopped in his tracks and turned back to her, a barely-suppressed fire behind his eyes.

  “And what makes you think I didn’t do the deed myself, if you’re so sure?”

  “Because you’d get blood on your hands,” Kate admitted. “And you’re not the type of person to stick the blade in yourself. Why else would you hire an army of thugs?”

  Frank let out a long, exhausted sigh. “Rick Teller is a nuisance of an employee, beyond question,” he said. “Yet his truancy does not make me a murderer.”

  “Having one of your mercenaries kill Michael Cochran does.”

  He laughed. “What do you want to hear, Ms. Bishop? Shall I say that Michael Cochran sold company secrets to our competitors? Or that he tried to sabotage this mission by disseminating false information to key staff members before launch?” He clasped his hands behind his back thoughtfully and began to pace around the circular table. Kate matched his movement, keeping the table between them. “Perhaps you’d like to hear that it takes a hell of a lot more blood than rocket fuel to get a ship like Explorer off the ground. You think permission from the government for our kind of operation is cheap? I’m not just talking about money, Ms. Bishop. I’m talking about owing big favors to fat cats who sharpen their claws on the bones of men just like me every morning before breakfast.” He ticked off numbers on his fingers as he said, “The moon. Mars. The asteroid belt. And now Titan. Diamond Aerospace baked the biggest pie in the history of mankind, and everyone wants a piece. If the hand reaching in is small, I chop it off. But the larger hands always get their share. That’s the system.”

  He stopped pacing and fixed her with a steady glare, eager for a challenge.

  “Sounds like you have it justified, then,” Kate said.

  “It isn’t about justification. It’s about adapting my thoughts to rules that were chiseled in stone long before I ever came along. That’s your problem, Ms. Bishop. You keep expecting the rules to change, yet you yourself remain unaltered. And you will always fall short because of it. We are expanding the horizon for all of humanity with what we’re trying to accomplish.” He smirked. “Who can blame us if we make a little money along the way?”

  She stuck a hand in her pocket and felt the circular object within. “And who could blame you for eliminating a few people who caused trouble?” she asked.

  He snorted. “If you think Cochran’s the only one who got in the way, you’re more naive than you look.”

  “A child found him in a dumpster, Frank.”

  “Yes, I warned them about that.” He looked up at her sharply, realizing he’d said too much, and she grinned. “Why are you smiling? Tell me now!” he demanded.

  Kate pulled the circular object out of her pocket and tossed it to him. He caught the roll of black electrical tape and stared at it, dumbfounded. She leaned over the table and peeled off a small square of the tape from the black conference phone. A red light glowed solid underneath.

  “Say ‘hello’, Ada,” Kate said.

  A woman with a deep voice spoke on the other end of the conference phone line. “Hello, Frank.”

  “What is this?” Frank asked, his expression a mixture of rage and confusion. The roll of tape crumpled in his crushing grasp. “What the hell are you doing?!”

  “I’m recording your confession,” Ada said.

  “Ada Quinn works for Channel 8 News in Chicago,” Kate said. “She’s an old friend of mine. Focuses on corruption in high places. Thanks, Ada.”

  “Always happy to help,” she replied. “This is going to be a great headliner for tomorrow.”

  The line went dead and the light blinked off.

  Frank’s eyes narrowed. “You’re lying.”

  Kate shrugged. “Wait and see, then. In the meantime…”

  She walked past him and left the conference room. It was the single most terrifying moment of the whole encounter for her. She could feel his anger as a palpable force when she passed. Her racing mind showed her how easy it would be for him to lash out and snap her neck.

  He didn’t lash out. Seething with bubbling rage, he followed her out of the conference room and to the railing of the viewing platform.

  “Juan,” Kate called down to the operations floor.

  He looked up at her and she nodded. Juan typed at his workstation keyboard and the display wall blinked off. Several of the guards looked up at Frank expectantly, no doubt hoping this would be another opportunity to bash someone’s skull. Frank ignored him. He stared at the display wall, eyes searching.

  A video popped up, filling the entire wall from edge to edge. It was the tail-end of the same footage Juan had shown Kate earlier. Frank watched as officers took down the guard at the gatehouse.

  “Can’t lie about that,” Kate said.

  Now the security guards on the operations floor were watching the display wall instead of waiting on an order from Frank.

  The screen changed to show a real-time exterior feed of the Diamond Aerospace building. A dozen patrol cars with spinning red and blue lights now occupied the parking lot. A group of officers in dark green uniforms conferred near the main entrance. One of them spoke into a phone and nodded. It seemed that a tip from a paranoid like Rick was only enough to subdue a cocky gatehouse guard and sit on the front stoop of the building, not enough to institute a full-force raid.

  There was a sharp whistle from one of the security guards on the operations floor. The rest of them turned to look, and the whistler signaled silently. Then as one, they unhooked their heavy belts and let them drop. Holstered pistols thudded heavily to the floor.

  “What…” Frank started, looking down in horror. “What are you doing?!”

  They
didn’t answer. They formed up on the whistler and walked single-file from the operations floor, through the door that led to the main entrance. Kate watched the display wall. The officers near the entrance grabbed for their weapons when the front door opened, keeping them trained on the security guards as they filed outside with their hands up. The whistler slowly offered a badge of some sort to one of the officers, who studied it and passed it to the officer who had been on the phone.

  The lead officer pulled out his phone again and dialed a number read from the card. After a few seconds of nodding to whoever was on the other end of the line, he handed the badge back and told his men to stand down. The officers holstered their pistols and the guards jogged toward the parking lot, out of range of the security cameras.

  “Looks like your boys get a pass,” Kate said.

  Frank stood with his mouth agape, sucking air like a fish.

  “I don’t…” he said. “I don’t…”

  “You don’t stand a chance,” Kate finished. “Ada recorded your confession.”

  Frank looked at her, a question in his eyes. All his rage had vanished along with the security guards. Now he was weakened, and he grabbed at the railing of the viewing platform as if Mission Control were the deck of a heaving, storm-battered corsair.

  “Yes, she really is a reporter,” Kate said. “Leave now, Frank. Tell the officers what you did.” She took a deep breath, filling her chest. “If you do that, I won’t call them in here to drag you away. I know you’d find that undignified, as if it matters now.”

  He tried to speak one last time, but only managed a barely-audible whisper. Without looking her in the eye, he trudged downstairs and left the building. To Kate’s everlasting surprise, the feed on the display wall showed him walking outside with his arms raised, speaking to the officers. One of them approached warily, and with lightning speed grabbed Frank’s wrist and twisted it, forcing him to his stomach on the ground. Frank was sobbing, his mouth wide open and the veins in his neck bulging. With a knee in Frank’s back, the officer handcuffed him, then pulled him up by the cuffs. Kate grinned. If the feed had an audio component, she bet she would hear Frank howling in pain.

  “Noah Bell!” she called down from the viewing platform. He looked up at her from Rick’s chair, holding a compress to his bloodied temple. “You have your mission back. Let’s get our people home.”

  Her smile faded as the display wall flicked back to its normal configuration. In one of the screens, Jeff floated unconscious in the T-junction, a galaxy of blood droplets encircling his head.

  “What happened?!” she asked the room.

  Juan turned from his workstation and called up to her, “Riley hit him with a spanner and choked him until he passed out.”

  Christ, thought Kate as she hurried down the steps to the operations floor, her flats clicking on black tile. Plug one hole and another pops open.

  The display wall had Noah’s complete attention as he sat at Rick’s desk, holding the compress to his temple. With unblinking eyes, he watched Gabriel’s video feed as he drew closer to the torus.

  Kate stopped behind Walt and gripped the back of his chair, mentally urging Jeff to wake up as her eyes scanned the video feed. A wrench-like torsion spanner drifted lazily into view behind Jeff, slowly tumbling end over end, until it tapped the wall and hung in the air as if stuck in some invisible webbing.

  “What’s his condition?” Kate asked.

  “He’s stable,” the flight surgeon replied, studying Jeff’s biometric data on his workstation monitor. “Just out cold.”

  “And the others?”

  Walt tapped on his screen, pulling up more data. “Green across the board, though Silva’s heart rate is elevated.”

  “You think?” Juan said.

  “What about Riley?” Kate asked.

  “Steady as a metronome.”

  Outside the ship, Riley was a couple minutes behind Gabriel, heading for the torus. In his video feed, the artifact waited silently in the distance.

  “What should we do?” Juan asked, looking at Kate.

  She glanced at Noah, but he seemed disinterested in anything but Gabriel’s video feed.

  “We tell Ming to prep the ship for departure,” Kate said.

  “Frank locked them out of the system,” Juan said.

  “So unlock it.”

  “Can’t,” Noah said, shaking his head. “Need Frank’s password.”

  Kate ran her fingers slowly through her hair, gripping it hard, wanting to rip it out and scream.

  She looked up at the display wall at the front of the room. That time she didn’t see individual monitor frames displaying various mission functions – she saw the whole: a grid-like tapestry of data and moving images showcasing discovery alongside borderline absurdities, all conflated to present her with the singular impression that the crew of Explorer I, let alone the rest of humanity, obviously wasn’t ready to go knocking on Titan’s door.

  Jeff awoke slowly, with a groggy uncertainty of displacement. Despite realizing he was floating in zero-g, it took his mind a moment to register his surroundings and remind him he wasn’t on Earth – instead, he was farther from it than anyone else had ever been.

  The memory of Riley hammering him in the skull with the prong-end of a spanner woke him fully, and he breathed in sharply, blinking to focus on the flat spiral of blood droplets in the T-junction corridor. One kissed his cheek and he rubbed at it with the back of his hand, leaving a crimson streak. His scalp throbbed just above his left ear, but he was no longer bleeding. He touched his throat and winced at the pain where Riley had held him vice-locked in the crook of his elbow, squeezing out his consciousness after he tried to stop Riley from leaving the ship.

  “Ming,” he croaked. He coughed and tried again.

  “I’m in the command module, Jeff.”

  He ducked under the floating disc of blood droplets and used a handhold on the wall to propel himself to the center of the T-junction. Ming said nothing when he drifted into the command module and strapped into Riley’s pilot chair. She stared out the narrow window above the nose of the module, seemingly lost in a maze of her own thoughts. The two small monitors in the pilots’ control panel were blank. Jeff switched both of them on from the controls on the wall to the right of Riley’s chair. He flipped through available video feeds, blinking past the empty interior of the crew module, the exterior of Explorer, and its darkened airlock with Jeff’s Constellation Suit tethered to the wall.

  Jeff found the two feeds he wanted and sent them to the pilots’ control panel monitors. On the left, Gabriel’s helmet camera looked toward the torus. Data pumping into the ship systems from his Mark IV glowed in blue text at the bottom of the screen. If Gabriel held his current speed, he’d get to the torus in just under two minutes.

  On the right-side monitor, Riley was focused wholly on Gabriel in the distance.

  Jeff stopped flipping switches and twisting dials and settled back into the chair, holding loosely onto the shoulder straps while he watched the monitors. Needles danced over the cut in his scalp, and his throat burned where it had been squeezed shut. Coupled with the occasional shooting pains in his chest from catching a grenade blast of shrapnel when the fuel pump exploded, he wasn’t exactly a perfect picture of health.

  “I’m sorry I couldn’t stop Riley,” Ming said, breaking the silence. “I know you wanted everyone to stick together.”

  “Yeah, well,” Jeff replied, then shrugged. “I doubt anyone would have been able to stop him.”

  “Mission Control still wants us to move locations before we start on the space station.”

  Jeff turned to her. “You really think we can last long enough out here to finish the mission?”

  “Well, we have enough oxygen, and North Star probably has plenty of food stores.”

  “No, I mean can we last long enough with each other?”

  Ming didn’t have an answer for him.

  “When do they want us to move?” he asked.


  “As soon as Riley and Gabriel return to the ship. But I’m still locked out of the system remotely.”

  “I can regain control if I go outside,” Jeff said. He looked out the window at the two small, suited figures. “But even if I do, what about the engine?”

  “That’s what I wanted to know. They wouldn’t give me a guarantee. Noah said it was up to us. We’re fine with orbital thrusters this close to Titan, but when it’s time to go home… it will take either eight months utilizing one major burn, or four years without.”

  He clenched his teeth and took a deep breath, suppressing a rising anger at having to make that kind of decision in the first place.

  “Rock and a hard place,” he said. “What do you think?”

  Ming was silent for a long moment, then she said, “I want to see my daughter again. Only one of those options maximizes my chances.”

  Jeff shook his head. “Four years is a long time.” Too long for Kate to wait, he thought. It wasn’t that he thought she wouldn’t try to await his return if he asked – it was that he could never ask her for that kind of sacrifice.

  A speaker embedded next to the monitor crackled.

  “Slow down, Silva,” Riley said. “Wait for me.”

  His feed showed the small figure of Gabriel as he spun around up ahead, small white jets of air geysering in quick flashes from his pack. Yet his momentum toward the artifact didn’t slow.

  “Oh. Hi, Commander,” said Gabriel, and he waved. “I plan to keep going.”

  “Silva, goddammit,” Riley said irritably, “wait for backup.”

  The small figure of Gabriel spun away. In his feed, the torus swung back into view, nearly touching the top and bottom edges of the monitor.

  “I think I will do what everyone else on this mission is doing,” he said, sounding cheerful enough, “and put my own interests first.”