Mission One

by Samuel Best

  “Okay, Lieutenant,” Kate said from Mission Control. “Looks like it’s on you. If you’re willing, I’ll talk you through the remote system override process.”

  “Excellent,” Ming said. “Jeff and I have another idea, as well.”

  She explained the plan to Kate, such as it was, outlining her intentions for the ship-to-ship fuel transfer for the crew’s return voyage aboard North Star. It went unsaid that the crew were no longer being asked to stick to the original mission plan.

  Ming finished with, “What do you think?”

  “I think your plan puts Explorer too close to the torus,” Kate said.

  “They have a long umbilical,” Noah offered over the comms. “If she parked Explorer at max distance from North Star on the side opposite the artifact, she might not trigger a response.”

  “What do you mean by trigger?” Jeff asked.

  “Noah thinks it reacts to stimulus,” Kate said.

  “Care to elaborate?”

  “It woke up when Riley got too close,” Noah said. “Perhaps it was designed to respond to objects that passed some arbitrary proximity barrier.”

  “But it didn’t react at all to Gabriel,” Jeff reminded him.

  “Until he disappeared. Speaking of which…what exactly do you plan to do out there, Mr. Dolan?”

  Jeff had been trying to decide that himself. “After Riley, I’ll…I guess I’ll improvise,” he answered. “If I can help Gabe, I will.”

  “Riley’s gone, Jeff,” said Kate.

  “I still have to try.”

  “Requesting permission to leave the ship,” Ming said.

  “You no longer need our permission, Lieutenant,” Noah said. “Not for anything. Do what you need to do.”

  “Copy that. I’m going EVA to override the remote system.”

  “I should warn you that we will no longer be able to take control from here after the override, Lieutenant,” Noah said.

  “I understand.”

  “I’m two minutes away,” Jeff said, referencing his HUD data. “Commander, can you hear me?”

  No static on the other end of the line. No breathing. Riley’s suit held the unmistakable pose indicative of an unconscious occupant: arms loosely reaching forward, legs slightly bent at the knees. Jeff periodically tried to raise him on comms as he drew nearer.

  When he was a few seconds from intersecting Riley, Jeff slowed his speed to match the commander’s. Riley faced the other direction, tumbling sideways. Their suits bumped into each other and Jeff grabbed hold of the stitched nylon loop on the back of Riley’s suit, at the base of his helmet.

  “Got him,” Jeff said.

  He spun the suit around, instinctively closing his eyes and suppressing a gag reflex when he saw the bloody smear across the inside of Riley’s face shield.

  “How is he?” Kate asked, the finality in her voice betraying that she had already seen the video feed from Jeff’s helmet camera.

  Jeff forced himself to look at Riley. He could see nothing beyond the mess on the inside of the helmet.

  “I think we know what happened to the crew of North Star.”

  “The artifact passed over their ship,” Noah said.

  “They managed to get their suits on before it happened,” Jeff added, looking at what remained of Riley. “Not that it made a difference.”

  He turned the commander around and programmed a collision course with Titan into the wrist pad. Then he gave it a gentle push toward the moon, drifting farther away himself in the process. No one in Mission Control asked him why he wasn’t bringing Riley’s body back to the ship. They already knew the answer. It wasn’t out of bitterness or some twisted ideal of revenge. It was because Jeff thought there was a Gabriel still had a chance, and he couldn’t do what he needed to do while dragging around so much extra mass.

  A few seconds later, the air thrusters in Riley’s pack fired, and he gently accelerated toward the pale yellow moon.

  From Jeff’s position, Titan filled most of the starry landscape to the right of the artifact and the two ships. Using his wrist pad, Jeff programmed an arc-shaped trajectory toward the torus which would ultimately place him on its side. He would be looking at it from the same angle as Gabriel had been when he disappeared. Yet Jeff would maintain a greater distance, planning to traverse a complete rotation around the perimeter of the artifact before heading to the ship.

  His plan was predicated on the hope that the damned thing wouldn’t turn to face him, as it had done with Riley. If that happened, Jeff didn’t intend to wait until his vision began to shake; he would turn-tail and make for Explorer with all possible speed.

  He finished programming the maneuver and executed the command with one final press of a button. The pack system took over, firing jets of air to send Jeff in a wide arc, swinging out from the torus to deposit him a hundred meters away to look at it from the side.

  The artifact did not turn.

  Now in position, Jeff regained manual control of the pack and began coasting around the diameter of the torus, focusing on the hard, black material. Gabriel had mentioned etchings in the surface, but Jeff could see no markings at that distance.

  He drifted a little closer.

  “Jeff…” Kate warned.

  He had drifted past ninety degrees of the outer diameter, then he said, “I see a shadow on the surface.”

  Jeff squinted hard. It was difficult to see the black smudge outlined against the black material of the torus…but it was definitely there.

  He risked a small spurt of air from his pack, nudging closer to the artifact.

  “Jeff, that’s far enough,” Noah said.

  “I don’t feel any vibrations.”

  “That doesn’t mean you won’t.”

  The borders of the shadow solidified into a shape that would have been obvious to anyone looking at it.

  “It’s a door,” Jeff said with surprise. The edges of his vision began to shake as he drifted closer to the torus. “I feel it now.” He fired his forward-facing pack thrusters and halted his acceleration. “It’s not pulling me in.”

  “Jeff, please don’t go any closer,” Kate said.

  The sound of her voice struck his core, and his thumb hesitated over his flight control stick. She was afraid.

  “I can’t leave him,” he said.

  “And I can’t lose you,” she pleaded.

  He felt a piece of his soul rip off from the whole and stay behind as he coasted closer to the artifact and farther away from Earth.

  It was the hardest decision he had ever made.

  His teeth chattered as he approached. He seemed to be falling now, accelerating toward the shadow on the side of the artifact as he gained momentum. The laser-precise edges of the torus became dancing waveforms as the vibrations rattled his skull. Jeff’s extremities went numb, turning into icy blocks heavy in his suit. If he was receiving tactile feedback from his gloved left hand, he couldn’t feel it. He sent the motor commands to his fingers anyway, attempting to perform the rote motions that would slow him down before he splatted against the outer surface of the torus like a bug on the windshield of a speeding car.

  Broken voices sputtered from his helmet speakers – clipped fragments amid hissing static.

  His original trajectory toward the shadowy door had been slightly skewed, he realized he drew closer. When he was ten meters from the torus and still gaining momentum, he suddenly lurched to the side without the aid of his pack, as if an invisible giant had yanked him sideways, aligning him perfectly with the shaking shadow below.

  Then he was upon it, and was sucked into a darkness so complete that had the stars themselves vanished from the sky, the remaining void would have seemed bright by comparison.

  Kate ripped off her headset and fell back into her chair, staring blankly at the display wall.

  Jeff’s vitals had diminished to almost nothing, the same as Gabriel’s. The video feed from his helmet camera flicked to static. Kate felt the eyes of her coworkers during
the silence that followed.

  “I could use a little help here,” Ming said.

  Her helmet camera showed that she was outside Explorer, waiting near an access panel in the hull.

  Kate felt as if everyone in Mission Control was waiting for her to speak. When she didn’t, Noah said, “Stand by, Lieutenant.” He swiveled his chair to look at Juan. “Help her unlock the system. Once she’s finished with the fuel transfer, we’ll need to prep North Star for the return voyage.”

  “You got it,” Juan said with a nod. He wheeled his chair closer to his workstation and called up the designs.

  “Where’s Propulsion?” Noah called, searching the usual workstations but finding them empty.

  “Back here,” said Lucius Howell. He stood and pushed his wireframe glasses farther up his nose, waiting impatiently with raised eyebrows.

  “We need an updated timeline for their arrival.”

  “Using what departure window?” Lucius asked, not missing a beat.

  “Give me estimates for each hour over the next ten hours.”

  Lucius nodded and sat back down.

  Noah sighed. “That should get us started.”

  “Where’s Allison?” Kate said, standing up slowly. Noah watched her, a faint smile tugging at the corner of his mouth.

  “Here,” Allison Jones replied from her System Logistics workstation farther down the same row as Kate’s. Her usually-neat gray hair had been hastily brushed back.

  “Pull up North Star’s schematics, as well,” Kate said. “We need to know ahead of time if we’re going to run into any surprises after making the switch. Pay special attention to comms. I want to make sure we won’t get stonewalled by an encrypted system.”

  “My team will handle it,” she replied.

  Across the aisle, Juan began to talk Ming through the process of bypassing the remote system.

  “Looks like we’re in business,” said Noah.

  Jeff slammed against the hard floor, unable to breathe. White lights danced across his darkened vision. He finally managed to suck in air as if he were breathing through a pinched straw.

  Despite his pressurized suit and more than an hour’s worth of air remaining in his pack, the air had been crushed from his lungs as soon as he passed into the shadowy door. The only explanation that came to his oxygen-starved mind was that he had passed through some kind of gravity barrier and had barely survived the transition.

  The fact that he was firmly on the floor instead of floating weightlessly in zero-g supported his theory. He managed to painfully suck in a lungful of air, then he was seized by a fit of harsh, rasping coughs that contracted his body into a fetal position.

  When the coughing subsided, he slowly unfolded, lying on his side, breathing heavily. The dancing white lights in his vision faded, and the fog of darkness lifted. He was looking directly at the back of Gabriel’s suit.

  Jeff sat up as quickly as his suit would allow, wincing at the stabbing pain in his chest. He pulled himself over to Gabe’s prostrate form, noticing a soft blue-green glow emanating several centimeters beneath the hard, semi-translucent floor wherever he touched.

  “Gabe?” he asked, his words strained as he focused on pulling stinging oxygen into his lungs.

  He grabbed Gabriel’s shoulder and hesitated. Then he pulled Gabe onto his pack to face the ceiling, and a wave of relief washed over him when Gabe’s eyes popped open wide.

  “Can you hear me?” Jeff asked.

  Gabriel coughed and spasmed, thrashing on the floor. Jeff held him down, gripping the padded chest of his suit. Gabriel’s booted heels bounced off the hard floor, triggering bursts of blue-green light under the translucent surface.

  “Easy, buddy!” Jeff said loudly, hoping Gabriel could hear him. “I’m right here!”

  Gabe reached up for the seal of his helmet lock, scrambling to slide it open.

  “Hey!” Jeff yelled, pulling Gabe’s hands away. He sat on one arm and held the other to his own chest as Gabriel tried to twist free.

  Eventually Gabriel’s resistance subsided and he relaxed, his face beaded with sweat.

  “Explorer, I’ve found Gabriel,” Jeff said. A moment passed without reply. “Ming? Kate?” He heard nothing but silence on the other end of the line. “Anyone?”

  Gabriel blinked hard and his eyes snapped into focus. His body spasmed once and settled. He looked up at Jeff.

  “Where the hell are we?” he croaked, his voice loud inside Jeff’s helmet.

  “Inside the torus,” Jeff answered. At least the suit-to-suit comms were functioning.

  “Now I remember,” Gabriel said. He cradled his helmet as he sat up. “You know something? That hurt.” There was a sucking noise over the comm line as he drank from his helmet straw. Then he looked around and whistled appreciatively.

  “You just had to see it up close,” Jeff scolded. “Couldn’t wait.”

  “I’m sorry.” He looked around.

  They were in a wide corridor that curved gently out of sight in both directions, apparently following the curvature of the torus. The entirety of the floor was comprised of the same hard, green-tinted translucent material Jeff had smacked down upon during his violent arrival. Soft pulses of brilliant blue-green light glowed to life and danced below the surface, moving without any kind of noticeable pattern before fading out and reappearing half a meter away.

  The ceiling and walls were a half-moon arch made of the same dark material as the exterior. The arch was roughly four meters across at its base. A narrow, unbroken spine, like a smooth tube, lined the corridor at its peak, running parallel to the floor. A spherical, spinning purple-green light appeared inside the spine at one end of the corridor and shot past overhead, disappearing farther down its hollow track.

  There was no sign in the ceiling of the shadowy door through which the two of them had arrived.

  Jeff stumbled to his feet and stood up slowly, for some reason expecting to be knocked back down at any second.

  Gabriel panted hard on the floor. “I thought…I left asthma…in my childhood,” he said.

  “Can you walk?” Jeff asked.

  Gabriel held out his gloved hand. “Let’s find out.”

  Jeff strained to pull him upright, but eventually the two of them stood next to each other, breathing hard in their heavy space suits as they studied the corridor.

  Gabriel tapped the chest of his suit with closed fists. “Something…pushing down on my chest.”

  Jeff nodded. “Gravity is different.”

  “Where’s Riley?” Gabriel asked.

  “He’s dead. Followed you to the torus, but it sucked him into the black hole.”

  “Oh my God,” Gabe said, shaking his head. “Oh, no.”

  Jeff gestured farther down the corridor. Under normal circumstances, he would have wasted air to say something as superfluous as We need to find a way out of here. Now, though, he saved that air for breathing.

  Jeff chose a direction without deliberation and started walking. Blue-green light bloomed within the floor under his boots like the phosphorescent glow of a deep-sea organism. Gabriel wandered to the smooth wall and held his gloved palm to it as he walked.

  “Same etchings as outside,” he said.

  The walls looked unadorned from Jeff’s track in the middle of the corridor. Then the spherical purple-green light shot past in the ceiling, and he briefly glimpsed a shimmer of superficial gossamer lines.

  “Any ideas?” Jeff asked. He had to breathe hard after the simple exertion of talking.

  “Looks like a circuit diagram.” He paused to breathe. “Probably just decoration.”

  I wouldn’t be too sure about that, Jeff thought. Whatever the torus was, it had been constructed with a clear and specific purpose. In Jeff’s experience, that left little room for extraneous aesthetics. On the other hand, humans still painted their cars. Go figure.

  “What if there is no exit?” Gabriel asked as they walked on, following the interior curvature of the artifact.


  Jeff didn’t have an answer for him. The real answer was that, without an exit, they were doomed. Ming would eventually leave, and Jeff and Gabriel would die of thirst or starvation – but not boredom. Jeff glanced down at his HUD data. Fifty minutes of air left. He doubted he could walk a full circuit of the torus corridor before his oxygen ran out.

  “Look,” said Gabriel. He pointed down the corridor.

  A shadow split the smooth wall up ahead. Jeff increased the pace of his belabored shamble, struggling against the increased gravity. He was sweating freely, soaking his clingy unitard, by the time he discovered it wasn’t the exterior door after all, but a square-cut opening in the wall.

  He and Gabriel left the corridor and stepped through the opening, entering the cube-shaped room beyond.

  The walls and ceiling had been constructed with the same translucent component as the floor. Thin tubes of solid-colored light threaded every surface, occasionally converging behind bowl-shaped cutouts in the wall. Small, red squares of light were embedded in the wall beside each cutout.

  Each of the cutouts contained a small amount of foreign material. In one, a slick of black goo undulated within the confines of the vertical cutout, attempting to crawl beyond the bowl’s edge. Every time it came close, the lights behind the cutout grew brighter, and the goo folded back into itself, retreating to the center of the cutout.

  In another, bright red algae hugged the curving wall of its cutout. Gabriel held his gloved hand a few centimeters away, and the algae extended a geometric part of itself, like a tiny skyscraper extending from a single-story city.

  “Remarkable,” he whispered. Then, more loudly, “You know what this is?”

  “Specimen lab,” Jeff guessed.

  “Right.” Gabriel moved from cutout to cutout with wide-eyed wonder. “That’s exactly right.”

  “Gabe, we need to go.”

  Gabriel held up a delaying hand as he continued around the room. Jeff was about to grab his arm and haul him out to the corridor when one of the square red lights on the wall caught his eye. It pulsed enticingly, like a big button aching to be pushed. The cutout next to the pulsing light only had a small sample within, as if it hadn’t had as much time to mature as the other specimens.