by Samuel Best
“He’s got a point,” Ming said.
Riley let out a long string of the vilest curses Jeff had ever heard, so Jeff cut off his suit’s audio. He could still hear Gabriel mutter occasionally in Portuguese as he neared the torus – what sounded to Jeff like little exclamations of surprise and wonder.
“I feel a…” Gabriel said, then paused. “…a kind of tingling, I guess. Almost like static electricity.”
“Does it hurt?” Walt asked from Mission Control.
“Not at all.”
“Jeff,” Kate said. “Is it safe to talk?”
He cut Riley’s Mark IV out of Explorer’s comm loop and said, “It is now.”
“I wanted to let you know that things here are back under control.”
He shared a quick glance with Ming. “I never realized they were out of control.”
“Well, they were,” Kate said. “Office politics, you know.”
He couldn’t help but smile. “Sounds like you’ve had it pretty rough down there.”
“We’re managing. Frank was arrested.”
“Hold on while I weep uncontrollably. Okay, finished.”
“I hope you’ll be able to move on.”
“Only time will tell.” Out of the corner of his eye, he saw Ming shaking her head. “Is that why we’re locked out of the system?”
“That would be it, yes. Anything you can do on your end?”
“No promises, but I can try.”
“Thank you. I also wanted to say that we’re glad you’re alright,” Kate said. “There’s no excuse for Riley’s behavior.”
“I think he’s convinced he’s ultimately doing what’s best for the mission.”
“That sounds like an excuse.”
Jeff said, “Call it an understanding.”
“And what about you?”
“What about me?”
“Are you trying to do what’s best for the mission?” asked Kate. He looked from the two monitors to the narrow window, then over to Ming. When he didn’t answer, Kate asked, “Did Lieutenant Ming update you?”
“She gave me what I imagine is the abbreviated version, yes.”
“Good. I know it’s a hard decision, and we’re not going to pretend we can make it for you. You don’t have to make it yet. There are enough food rations in Explorer’s hold to last you ten months, and we’re guessing at least that inside North Star.”
“But it wouldn’t last us four years.”
She sighed in frustration, and he realized how aggravating it must be for her to relay the information to him as if she were dictating from a manual instead of saying everything she truly felt.
“If you’re not planning to fire up the antimatter drive,” she said, “you’ll have to check North Star for food, and ration whatever you find.”
“And if it doesn’t have any extra food stores?”
“It will. If you go the other route, you’ll have enough fuel for one major burn, and maybe two smaller boosts…but that’s it.”
An expectant pause stretched on, becoming uncomfortable.
“Please say something,” Jeff said as he stared at the control panel speaker, cursing his lack of eloquence even as the words left his mouth.
At first, he thought she wouldn’t answer. Then she said, with a pained voice, “There’ too much to say, Jeffrey,” and the line went dead.
Jeff pushed the heels of his hands into his eye sockets, rubbing until it hurt.
“Damn it all,” he whispered, shaking his head.
“What do you think he’s going to find?” Ming asked.
Jeff slowly let his hands slip from his face. He looked at Ming with stinging, water-filled eyes.
“Who?” he asked.
She nodded toward the monitors.
Jeff relaxed a little, sinking into his seat. “I know what you’re doing.”
“You do?”
“Yeah. You’re trying to distract me. Okay then, I’ll bite. I don’t think Gabe will find anything. I think he’s going to walk around on the surface of the torus, then come back to the ship, disappointed.”
“What about the other crew, and the instant comms?”
“If the torus is responsible for the comms, the only way we’re going to figure it out is to drag that thing all the way home, and we’re not doing that. As for the other crew… I don’t know if we can do anything for them.”
Ming suddenly sat up straighter. “We could dump our fuel into North Star,” she said.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“We could transfer our remaining fuel to the other ship and use its antimatter drive to get home.”
“Why the hell would we trust an identical engine design?”
“It isn’t identical,” Ming said. “Bell and I talked while you were outside. The CEO of MarsCorp claims his engineers found a way to eliminate the instability in our engine.”
“And you trust him?” Jeff asked.
“Bell? Yes. If the information had come from Frank, I wouldn’t have mentioned it.”
“What’s the catch?”
“The new design burns a lot more fuel than our engine.”
Jeff looked back and forth between the two video monitors quickly, without really seeing what was on them. The rust that had settled on his mind over the past several hours began to crack off as the gears of critical thought reengaged.
“Even if the North Star’s tanks are empty,” he said, talking faster, “we only need enough for one major burn, and we eliminate the risk of, you know, blowing up.”
“And if we end up with enough fuel for two burns,” Ming added, “we can halve our return time to four months.”
He frowned. “How do we transfer the fuel?”
“With the umbilical.”
“That’s only sixty meters.”
Ming stared at him, waiting for him to figure it out. “We don’t need to do the transfer now,” she said, raising her eyebrows expectantly. “But we do need access to the orbital thrusters.”
“Oh,” he said at last. “Right. The remote override. I’ll go get suited up.”
Jeff moved to unbuckle his straps. The initial stirrings of fresh hope playing at the periphery of his current state of mind evaporated when Gabriel gasped. Jeff’s attention snapped down to the video feed, which showed that Gabriel was now only about five meters away from the side of the torus. The image vibrated, as if the camera were on the table of a speeding train traveling over uneven tracks.
“Is he shaking?” Jeff asked.
“Everything is shaking,” said Gabriel. His teeth chattered and his voice quivered. He grunted. “Hurts. Can feel…my chest rattling.”
“Back away, Gabe,” Ming said.
He had approached the torus from the side, so that the thirty-meter-diameter hoop appeared as a thin pillar with sharp corners. Now he maneuvered sideways, drifting farther away from North Star to look at the torus from an oblique angle. The artifact morphed from a pillar to a narrow, vertical oval.
“I can see…the stars,” Gabriel said shakily, forcing out the words.
An arc of pale Titan and the field of stars beyond were clearly visible in the center of the large torus.
“He’s right,” Ming said.
Jeff remembered the view of the torus from North Star. When he had been opening the airlock doors, it looked as if a solid black film permanently covered the opening, occluding the infinite reaches beyond.
Riley was still a good distance from the torus – his suit data claimed he wouldn’t get there for another minute. Jeff reactivated his comm channel, but Riley was silent as he closed the distance to the artifact.
Gabriel drifted up, following the curvature of the torus. He maneuvered closer, and the shake in his visual field grew so pronounced that it was impossible for Jeff to make out any details on the four-meter-wide black side surface. He was, however, able to see that the torus appeared not to be polished into a perfect hoop, like a wedding band, but instead was flat on the front and back, as if it were only a cr
oss-section that had been cut from a longer tube.
“It’s etched with…designs,” Gabriel stuttered. He swallowed and grunted again, trying to focus on the discovery before him. A small laugh escaped his lips, followed quickly by a groan of pain.
“Gabe, pull back!” Jeff urged.
“I see something…up ahead. Shadow on…the surface.”
The outer edge of the torus rotated downward as Gabriel jetted around its perimeter, staying only a couple meters away. A quivering Titan slipped past the top border of the screen.
Despite the shaking camera, Jeff could indeed see an approaching dark patch on the surface of the torus.
“There–” said Gabe, and then the shadow jumped for him. His video feed cut to static.
“Holy Christ,” Riley said darkly. “That thing just sucked him into the wall.”
“Gabe!” Jeff shouted.
He looked at Riley’s video feed. Gabriel had disappeared. The torus waited, orbiting Titan as innocuously as when Explorer first arrived.
Then, ever so slowly, it began turning toward Riley.
“What happened?!” Kate shouted from her workstation. The entire room had erupted into chaos the moment Gabriel vanished.
On the display wall, his vitals blipped weakly.
“I–I don’t know,” Walt sputtered as he fumbled with his keyboard. “He’s gone!”
“Dead?” Kate demanded.
“No…I mean, I don’t think so. I’m still registering a faint heartbeat.”
The airlock video feed showed Ming struggling to get Jeff into his space suit in zero-g.
“Jeff, what are you doing?” Kate asked. No answer. “Jeff?”
Outside the ship, Riley had slowed his approach to the artifact and waited a hundred meters away. From that distance, there was no camera shake.
Out of habit, Kate readjusted her headset microphone to make sure it was properly positioned.
“Riley, can you hear me?” she asked.
“I hear you.”
Noah held up a hand, asking her to wait, and said, “Commander, I advise you return to Explorer and begin preparations for the return journey.”
He grunted with amusement. “Now you want me to leave someone behind? I can still read his vitals, Bell. Let me talk to Frank.”
“Frank no longer works for Diamond Aerospace. I’m in charge of the mission.”
Kate expected another rebellion, but Riley grit his teeth and said, “This damn thing is turning toward me. Can you see it?”
“Yes, we see it.”
With a spurt of air, he drifted a little closer to the torus. “It’s staying close to North Star.”
“Riley, please get back to Explorer,” Kate said.
She looked at the airlock video feed. Jeff was having trouble sealing his Mark IV. She thought that maybe he could bring Riley back in, then she remembered what happened the last time Jeff tried to intervene.
“She’s right, Commander,” Noah said into his headset. “You can’t help Gabriel, but you can help the other members of your crew.”
“Well, look who’s so quick to abandon his ‘vision’ of humanity’s future,” Riley chided.
“We’ll come back to Titan,” said Noah.
Riley thumbed the control stick in his left glove and glided toward the artifact, propelled by tiny streams of air from his pack.
Kate threw up her hands. “He won’t listen.”
“Then let’s hope he can find Gabriel,” Noah said.
Kate watched the video feeds from more than a billion kilometers away, feeling every micrometer of that distance as an expansive, impassable gulf separating the drama in orbit around Titan from her reality. She might as well have been watching a fictional movie for all the influence she had on the fate of Explorer’s crew.
“Ms. Bishop,” Noah said, snapping her out of the crushing chasm into which she’d fallen. He seemed to be looking right down into her soul, exposing every thought to his keen scrutiny. Somehow, it made her feel better. “Don’t worry. We’re not finished yet.”
“Something’s happening,” said Riley.
Everyone in the room turned to look up at the display wall. Kate tapped her workstation monitor and enlarged Riley’s video feed. The torus was facing him now, instead of its original configuration facing North Star.
“It’s rotating,” Juan said.
“Wasn’t it before?” asked Walt.
Kate shook her head. “This is new.”
“I’m feeling a slight vibration,” Riley said.
His camera feed registered the shake. Thirty meters ahead of him, the edges of the torus blurred. Its center was a black disc. From Riley’s perspective, Titan was in the immediate background, its uniform surface marred by the single, perfect black circle of the torus.
“He’s feeling that much earlier than Silva,” said Noah.
Riley swore as he drifted closer to the artifact. “I’m trying to reverse, but my controls aren’t responding.”
His helmet camera looked down at his gloved left hand. The thick fingers of his glove twisted the control stick and mashed the oversized buttons on its side.
“His suit systems are all in the green,” Juan said, gesturing at his monitor.
“What about his pack?” Kate asked.
“I’m seeing a drain on his propulsion reserves. His maneuvering jets are definitely firing.”
“Then why they hell can’t I go back?” Riley asked, fear creeping into his voice. “Oh God, I’m moving faster.”
The torus hadn’t yet budged from its original position other than to face Riley. Its axial rotation increased as he drew nearer, and the shake in his video feed intensified.
He looked down at his suit. Forward-facing thrusters on his pack released steady streams of white air, flowing toward the artifact and dissipating a meter from Riley’s suit. He kicked his legs, grunting in consternation.
“It’s pulling me in,” he said in a shaking, matter-of-fact tone. “Help… please help me.”
The air streams jetting from his pack cut out, and he stopped struggling against whatever invisible force pulled him toward the artifact.
“Thruster reserves depleted,” Juan said. He blinked hard and absentmindedly wiped a bead of sweat from the side of his brow.
“Please help me,” Riley repeated, his voice monotonous.
The torus loomed large in his vision, quickly increasing in size. He was heading right for the middle of the black disc. The data from his suit system relayed a distance counter that rapidly approached zero.
“Please help me,” he begged. “Please help me… please help me–”
The torus itself slipped out of sight past the borders of the display wall monitor. Riley was now so close that all his camera saw was the solid black surface of whatever filled the space between the artifact’s inner edges.
He gulped air and let out a terrified whimper.
“Someone, please,” he said. “PleasehelpmeeeEEEEAAAGGH!!!–”
He screamed for another six seconds as he passed through the center of the torus. The wall speakers crackled and strained at the very peak of their playback capabilities.
Silence chopped off the end of his scream, and his vitals flat-lined. Kate sucked in air, realizing she’d been holding her breath.
“Riley?” she asked softly.
“His camera’s still working,” Juan said. He sounded on the verge of passing out.
Riley’s video feed panned gently over vast reaches of space as his suit rotated. He retained a small percentage of the momentum that carried him through the center of the torus, and he drifted away from it slowly, like he was sinking deeper into a black ocean.
Explorer I moved in and out of his camera’s view, then Titan rolled up from the bottom edge of the screen. North Star was revealed aft-first, and then came the torus. There was no black disc to cover its opening when viewed from that side, only the stars and a slice of Titan.
The torus slowly turned to resume its origin
al configuration, facing North Star.
Numbly, Kate tapped on the screen of her workstation monitor, switching the focus on the display wall to an exterior view from one of the cameras in Explorer’s comm arrays. North Star and the torus appeared exactly as they had when Explorer first arrived in orbit around Titan.
The only new addition to the scene was the motionless, suited form of Commander Riley, drifting steadily away.
Yellow light strobed in the relative darkness of the airlock, flashing briefly inside Jeff’s sealed helmet with each pulse. The outer airlock door rose slowly as he floated weightlessly within the safe confines of the metal sphere.
According to his HUD data, the suit had only been charged halfway since his last excursion. He had just over two hours of oxygen remaining and barely enough power to last him that long.
Silently, the door locked into place at the terminus of its rise, but Jeff didn’t move. After what he’d just heard over comms, he was finding it difficult to hurry.
He took a long drink from his helmet’s water straw to soothe his desert of a throat, then said, “I’m, uh…I’m open to suggestions.”
Without hesitation, Noah said, “Go back inside and get the hell out of there.”
“Can’t,” he said reflexively.
That admission was enough to make him leave the airlock, anyway. He coasted gently forward, passing the threshold into space.
“I’m clear. Seal her up, Lieutenant.”
“Be careful, Jeff,” Ming said over his suit comms.
Behind him, the outer airlock door slid closed.
Ming had tried to talk him out of his EVA the entire time she reluctantly helped him suit up. Only when she had turned the final seal lock on his helmet collar did she acquiesce to his unalterable decision.
Now that he was outside Explorer, he looked upon the distant torus, and at the intermittently reflective speck that was Riley’s slowly tumbling form. Beyond the cold confines of the ship, he felt more inclined to pay heed to thoughts of retreat.
“What’s the hold-up?” he said aloud.
Gripping his pack’s control stick, he aligned himself with Riley’s receding space suit and set off at three meters per second. The HUD data overlaid around the edges of his face shield informed him he’d get to Riley in over six minutes, considering he’d be chasing a moving target. Jeff thumbed the control stick, increasing his speed to four meters per second, and was satisfied when a minute was shaved from his rendezvous.