Magellan

by Scott Baird

  “I'm fine. Just need to get back up there!” He threw himself at the cliff, leaping as high as he could and clawing at the rock face. The time for caution was over, and he needed to put some serious hurry on.

  “Commander Nelson, your suit pressure is still in the stable zone but there appears to be a very slight oxygen leak, probably caused by your fall. The self-healing fabric of your outer suit layer should close it soon.”

  Nelson ignored Neil and continued up the rock face like a wild man, abandoning his previous route and moving left up a section of wall that was initially steeper but had easier holds farther up.

  Two minutes later he had gained the same height as before, but now had to move laterally to retrieve the container with the sphere and his ice sample in it. He was grateful to see that it was still resting where he had tossed it.

  “Our window closes in six minutes, sir.”

  “I'm coming, I'm coming!” Nelson stretched his body out to the limits of its reach, feeling everywhere for the tiniest finger holds that would get him where he needed to go.

  Planting a foot on a small outcropping, he was able to lunge over to the rocks holding his container and scoop it up. Then, looking up, he saw a number of good handholds, but now he only had one free hand. The other was tightly clutching the container.

  “Five minutes!”

  He inched his way up as quickly as he could without risking another fall or dropping the container. He was nearing the lip of the crater now, and knew he had time as long as he didn't screw up again. A few more footholds and one close call with a slick patch got him within a few meters of the cliff top.

  Finally his arms came up over the edge, and he deposited the container on top of the crater's rim.

  “Three minutes, sir. You need to get to the lander quickly so we can lift off in time!”

  “Turn all systems on, Neil. Have that thing ready to blast off the moment I come aboard.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Nelson swung a leg up and heaved himself over the rim, rolling free of the ragged crust near the edge. Suddenly a warning tone sounded in his ear.

  “Sir, your suit pressure is dropping rapidly! Can you locate the leak and patch it?”

  The crater’s teeth had gotten him after all. Nelson stood up and quickly checked himself. “I can't see it. Where is it?”

  “I can’t tell, sir, but if it rips you'll be in grave danger. You need to quickly patch it.”

  Nelson grabbed the transport container and started half running, half bounding like a mad jackrabbit toward the lander. “There's no time. We have to get out of here or we'll never make it to Eris. Charge the VTOLs!”

  “They are charged, sir. I highly recommend you stop and patch that leak. Rapid movement increases the risk of a catastrophic suit tear, and if it widens—”

  “I know! I just need to make it into the lander. Keep that hatch open!”

  The X-57 was mere yards away now, and he could see the open airlock waiting for him.

  Nelson bounced the last several feet with only the toes of his boots touching the ground, and threw himself head first inside the landing craft and slapped at the button to close the hatch.

  “Lift off immediately, Neil! I’m on board.”

  “Lifting, off, sir.”

  Seconds later the interior of the airlock pressurized, and the warning tone in Nelson's helmet eased off. He opened the inner door and scrambled across the floor of the lander, grabbing at the pilot chair as the ground fell away outside the cockpit. He felt the g-forces pulling at him more strongly than before, but it still wasn’t anything he couldn’t handle.

  “Full power on those VTOLs, Neil. Don't worry about me!” He stood up, gripping the seat back for support, then collapsed into the chair and strapped in.

  With a sigh of relief, he watched Triton gradually shrinking into view out the port. Its shiny gray surface was placid and steady, betraying no evidence of how close he’d come to a worst-case scenario.

  Still gripping the transport container in his gloved fist, broken tether cable and all, he breathed out a long, shuddering sigh.

  15 – Transmission Anomalies

  The lander intercepted the Magellan with a few minutes to spare. Nelson didn't remove his helmet until after docking securely with the larger ship.

  “Welcome back, sir,” Ferdinand's voice echoed as he left the pilot's chair and moved toward the lab area. “It appears that you were successful.”

  “Yes. Get us on our trajectory right away, Ferdinand. I do not want to be caught chasing Eris' tail out of the solar system. We don't have fuel or time for that.”

  “We are on our way, sir.”

  Nelson stowed the ice sample but held on to the sphere in its container. He positioned himself in front of a camera and began a video transmission to NASA.

  “I found the second transmitter,” he said, holding up the sphere in front of the camera. “It's a little smaller and grayer in color than the last, now that I’ve got it under the lights in my space lab here. Otherwise it appears much the same as the one from Titan. I barely made it back in time to get to Eris, but it looks like we're still on schedule. In my next transmission you can expect a full analysis of this object as well as an ice sample I collected.”

  He ended the transmission and took a moment to catch his breath.

  “Okay, Ferd. Are we clear of Triton?”

  “The Magellan has moved into position to escape Neptune’s gravitational well, and we are now accelerating to intercept Eris, sir.”

  “Great. Good. Whew! That was a closer shave than I meant to have on this trip. But we’re gonna make it. We’re gonna make it, Ferd.”

  “Yes, sir. We are.”

  Nelson removed his EVA suit and changed into a pair of scrubs. Then he got to work, and drank a full liter of water while imaging the new artifact and comparing it to the sphere from Titan.

  He carefully prepared the ice sample for chemical analysis, dialing the glovebox to Triton-like temperature and pressure conditions. Using the gloves, he carefully inserted a test probe into the chunk of ice. “Ferdinand, see what that's made of, will you?”

  “Right away, sir.”

  Seconds later, the AI spoke again. “You have a new transmission from Abigail.”

  “Great! Play it,” Nelson replied, eagerly turning to the nearest screen.

  “Hey there,” Abigail said the moment her image came on-screen. The sight of her thrilled Nelson. It had only been one day for him, but he felt the weight of the years piled up behind the transmission, and almost wanted to whoop out loud. The strain of those years was written on Abby's face, however, which dampened his excitement.

  “Becker told me you'd be coming out of stasis today, and my guess is by the time you get this you'll have been awake for some time. Becker's letting me hang out here for your reply, despite Stewart's objections. I guess he feels bad for the 'astronaut widow'.”

  She brushed her bangs out of her eyes, and Nelson noticed that she had a completely different look to her hair. He made a mental note to compliment her on it in his reply.

  “So, it's been fifty months,” she went on. “That's just over four years. A lot's been going on. My sister's been living with me for the last six months or so, and it’s been nice to have some company.”

  She was speaking calmly, almost droning on, as if disinterested in her own words. And she had a distracted look in her dark eyes. Nelson frowned, staring intently at the monitor.

  “I thought I was up for a promotion at work, but...” At this point, Abigail looked over her shoulder and cleared her throat. “It didn't happen. Quite the opposite, in fact.”

  She swallowed, waited a moment, and then continued. “I don't know, I can't even seem to get a speaking gig at the local A.I. symposium anymore. But everyone wants an interview with the Astronaut's Wife. That's all anyone is ever interested in these days.” She rolled her eyes. “They're not really interviews anymore. I guess if I wanted a weekly opportunity to sob in front
of a camera about the heartache and the loneliness, I'd have it. But I don't want that.”

  She gazed into the camera as if trying to imagine Nelson in front of her. “I mean, the heartache is real. I'm not saying I don't feel it. I just don't think the world needs to hear about it all the time.”

  Nelson felt a flood of suppressed emotions welling up in him, and now that he was seeing his wife face to face—almost—it was nearly impossible to keep them in check. Clearly, four years of separation had been a lot harder on her than he could understand from his position. And it was far from over.

  Abby shook her head as if to clear it, and began a new line of one-sided conversation. “This ball you found, Roger... it's amazing. All I know is what they've publicly released, but everyone I know is fascinated by it. You should hear some of the theories that are gaining traction. My cousin thinks it’s all a hoax to enrich the aerospace industry, and my sister found an article suggesting that you’re actually an alien yourself, planted here by the Russians. We had a good laugh over it.”

  Her serene face briefly wrinkled into a grin, but then moments later creased in worry. “I'm... scared of it, Roger. I keep having these dreams of you floating off into space. And worse. Becker keeps telling me you're okay, that Ferdinand's reports are constant and vital signs are good. But they're not giving me full access to the mission anymore. And after what happened to the Chinese mission, I'm just afraid. I'm afraid you're going to die out there, far from me.”

  She sighed and brushed away a tear. “Sorry. I shouldn't talk like this, I promised myself that this time I'd put on a good face. I know you only have a short time between stints in the stasis box to get your work done. But I miss you, Roger. A lot.”

  She reached up to end the recording, then added one more thing. “Um... queen's side castle.”

  The transmission ended, and all the words she hadn't said echoed loudly in the silence of Nelson's mind. All she had talked about was the current state of things, the mission and her fears for it.

  Before leaving he’d offered Abby whatever emotional buffers she needed to deal with their unprecedented situation. It was only fair—his mission demanded focus on NASA priorities while he was awake and he owed her nothing while he was asleep. He'd been proud and pleased when she rejected that offer, vowing to keep a fire burning brightly in her heart despite having no real guarantee that he'd return in the end. Now he was surprised at how much her emotional distance stung.

  Theirs was the ultimate long-distance relationship, but was it really so unprecedented? Sailors and explorers in the old days left their families for years at a time with only a yearly letter or two to maintain the connection. As often as not, the family would get word of their loved one’s death months after the fact, and that was it.

  At least Abby had admitted how much she missed him.

  Nelson made his wife’s move on his chessboard, then considered his response, but found it hard to think ahead. There was noise in his mind, something distracting him, and it wasn't just thoughts of Abby. Usually chess helped him focus, but now there was something tickling his subconscious that was making it difficult.

  Was it the sound of waves? He looked over at the second beacon, the sphere he'd just collected from Triton. The thing seemed to be humming at him, just out of audible range, and he wondered what it would show him if he touched this one.

  He'd gone to such lengths to get it. Was it calling to him, or taunting him?

  Resisting the urge to push his luck with Stewart and the rest, he turned to examine his ruptured EVA suit instead. The hole was bound to be tiny, and would be difficult to find, but hopefully easy to patch once he found it.

  “Analysis on the ice sample from Triton is complete, sir.” Ferdinand sounded as even-tempered as ever. In the moment, Nelson found it annoying that Abby’s team of programmers had seen fit to include so much psychology and social fine-tuning, but hadn't given their creation a more expansive tone-of-voice range to cue Nelson as to whether the AI was proud of what he was reporting, or tentative, or disappointed, or excited.

  It was probably an effort to help Nelson maintain his own temperament, and he certainly didn't need Neil's level of spunk all day. But a little personality would have been nice, to go along with all the intelligence and helpfulness of his artificial shipmate.

  “Let’s have it, Ferd.”

  “The sample is mostly frozen water, with some carbon dioxide and nitrogen ice crystals as well. There are other trace ices present: ammonia, methane, carbon monoxide. Also, chloride, magnesium, and sulfate. Not unlike seawater on Earth, sir.”

  “Hmmm,” Nelson responded. “Very, very cold seawater. You didn't find any amino acids or proteins this time?”

  “None at all. But there are some interesting anomalies in the results from the radio survey I performed while you were on the surface.”

  The humming of the spheres in his mind seemed louder, more difficult to ignore. Nelson refused to look at them, locked away in their transparent containers. “Do you have a readout?”

  “You can access it on the main console, where you'll be able to view a dynamic charting visualization. It confirms the presence of the subterranean ocean that NASA suspected we'd find. It's vast, beneath the ice crust of Triton, which averages one and a half kilometers thick. Similar to Europa's liquid water mass, but closer to the surface.”

  “And the anomalies?” Nelson scanned the visualization that had replaced Abby’s face on the monitor nearest him. It showed a simulated three dimensional rendering of the radio survey's results, comparing two different scans of the same area.

  “A number of dense protrusions that come near the ice crust.”

  “Some kind of mineral pinnacle? Buildup from an underwater cryovolcano?”

  “As you'll see on the screen, they appeared to change position on subsequent scans.”

  Nelson noted the changed position of the dense underwater masses, even though the terrain around them lined up perfectly.

  Nelson scratched his chin. “What are these, then, Ferd? Icebergs floating around down there?”

  “No, sir. The protrusions stand out from the material around them, and are much denser than water ice. The density varies among them, and the movement didn't follow any distinguishable pattern that might indicate currents or convection. They seem random, even Brownian, in their motion.”

  Nelson puzzled over it. “Ferdinand, are you telling me there are fish down there?” A sly smile crossed his face, but it occurred to him that after holding an alien artifact in his hand, he shouldn't consider anything absurd enough for sarcastic ridicule.

  “I would hesitate to suggest that, sir. It’s possible that the anomalies are organic in nature, but they would be far larger than Earth's whales, if they were life forms. That seems an unacceptable leap to make based on this data, however. It could just be some form of subsurface distortion, or globs of some compound being broken up by undersea geysers.”

  Nelson continued looking over the survey results. “I don't know, Ferdinand. I don't know. The last beacon seemed to be marking a site where we discovered amino acids. I’d be surprised if there's nothing but seawater in the ice where I found this one from Triton. It makes me wonder…”

  He left the thought unfinished and went back to mending his EVA suit. He found the leak by spreading some cleaning agent on the exterior and pressurizing the suit slightly until he noticed tiny bubbles around a thin slit in the outer layer. It was a minor scratch and the suit’s self-healing material had kept it from rupturing completely, but it could have proved fatal if it widened at all, as Neil had warned. The earlier pinprick scratch from his fall was completely auto-sealed.

  He applied the patch to the larger leak, which instantly bonded as strong as the original material, and replaced the EVA suit in its wall compartment.

  Abigail's words were still filling his mind, competing for space with the call of the Triton beacon. “After what happened to the Chinese mission, I'm scared you're going to die
out there.” She was the one who’d been dealing with security issues, not him. And the chances of mechanical failure aboard the Magellan were slim; everything on this ship had backups, and sometimes backups of backups. He wasn't concerned.

  He was still brooding, however, when Ferdinand spoke some time later. “Incoming transmission from Mission Control, sir.”

  “Play it!”

  Nelson moved to the nearest screen and watched as not Becker but Secretary Stewart appeared. “Commander Nelson! I'm sending this message because some of my people have done some analysis of their own,” he said. He had gained weight since the last time Nelson had seen him, and he looked a little red in the face. “We viewed your 'touch experiment' and we're getting very concerned. I know you and NASA are advancing the future of mankind at a breathtaking pace, but in all the excitement of your discoveries, it's crucial that we don't lose our heads and do something we'll all regret.

  “I'm sure you can see the sense in this. There could be any number of unknown risks and dangers associated with these extraterrestrial objects. And the truth is, we just don't know anything about them yet. We don't know who put them here or for what purpose. And until we do know, I implore you to exercise the utmost caution in handling them or exposing them to any databases or feeds on board the Magellan.”

  The Secretary grew even more stern, as if he was losing confidence that Nelson would take his words seriously and was resorting to intimidation now. “I want you to keep them contained and separate from you. As you can tell by the failed Chinese mission, this is a very delicate situation, and we can't take any chances. I will be your direct contact from this point on, as Becker seems to have made a habit of forwarding unauthorized messages to the Magellan without running them through formal channels.”

  He looked off-camera and nodded at someone. “Until you leave Eris and begin your return journey,” he continued, “civilian personnel will no longer be admitted to critical Mission Control facilities for any reason. This includes your wife, Commander. I understand how difficult this may be for you, but due to the sensitive nature of the mission, it is a necessity. You signed up for this, and I know you'll cooperate fully with mission protocols. Messages can still be relayed through us.