by Mark Anson
‘I’m sorry, sir.’ Clare’s knees were shaking.
He looked up again, his eyes blazing. ‘Sorry? I’m afraid sorry isn’t going to cut it, Foster! This is the worst day we’ve had in the Interceptor Corps for years, and it happened under my command. I should never have let you continue in command after your news; I should have relieved you and let Collins do the run instead. I let you persuade me – I trusted you not to screw up – and this is how you repay my trust!’ His voice rose to a yell again.
He got himself back under control again with an effort. ‘You’re going to be facing a disciplinary hearing, so you’d better be prepared for that when you get to Venus. Yes, you heard me right – you’re going straight back to Venus, and Collins too; they’ll want to speak to him. You’re also taking the VIP passenger from the Las Vegas in stasis; we’re transferring his chamber on board as we speak. I’ve ordered the Mesa to be refuelled from our tanks before you leave. We’re to make our way back to Earth at the earliest opportunity, which given our orbital situation is going to take quite some time – in my opinion it should be the other way round, and you should be the one trying to figure out how you’re going to get home!’
Clare didn’t know what to say, but her mind was whirling. A USAC disciplinary hearing. People’s careers ended there. If they found—
‘Speaking of Collins, what’s he doing?’ Randall’s voice cut into her thoughts.
‘Uh, he’s assessing the damage to one of our fuel tanks. We’re going to have to patch it before we can refuel.’
‘Get Adams to help him. I want you out of here as soon as possible.’
‘Yes sir. Sir, can I just say—’
‘No, Foster, you can’t.’ Randall cut her dead. ‘I don’t want to hear anything else from you today except that you’re ready for immediate departure. Not only have you probably ended your career, you’ve damaged mine too. Jesus, all you had to do was follow orders and get a reasonable deflection, and everybody would have been happy. Instead, I almost lost two ships instead of one!’ His voice was rising again as his anger, barely controlled, began to boil over again. He strode over to the hibernaculum door and lifted the locking handle.
As the heavy door started to open, Randall spoke over his shoulder, not looking at her. ‘I want you and Collins at the service for Lieutenant Petersen in one hour, then get that tank patched, get the fuel transferred, and get the fuck out of my sight.’
In the end, it took nearly ten hours before the Mesa was ready to move again. After the sombre funeral service for Petersen, Collins and two of the crew from the Arlington had to go outside and patch not just one, but two punctures in one of Mesa’s liquid ammonia tanks, before it would hold pressure. Only then could the slow process of transferring fuel from the Arlington begin; the Mesa’s transfer trajectory to Venus and its eventual return to Mars demanded a full fuel load. Clare would take one of the regular flights back to Earth from Venus. If she was allocated a berth on one of the faster transfers, she could be back on Earth by April. She felt a lump in her throat at the thought of being home, without her father there. He had been so proud of her, and now her career was in jeopardy, perhaps even at an end. She felt she had betrayed him.
Collins said very little as they prepared the Mesa for the interplanetary injection burn, and Clare didn’t press him. Randall must have briefed him about the disciplinary hearing, and not to discuss the matter further until they were back on Earth. It suited Clare fine; she wasn’t in the mood for talking anyway.
It was some consolation that the measurements taken after the deflection attempt showed that it had been a success; Clare’s charge had been delivered almost spot on target and had imparted the required change in velocity. Although another deflection would be required in three years to assure complete safety, TG4 no longer posed a certain threat of impact, and it could start making its way downwards in the risk assessments.
As they pulled away from the larger Arlington, its navigation lights winking in the darkness, Clare wondered if this would be the last time she would be in command of an interceptor. The ruins of her career lay in front of her; she had never heard of anyone coming through a disciplinary hearing and returning to a command. And then there was her own loss. She thought of what her father would have said if he could see her now, and it took all her self-control not to burst into tears, sat there on the command deck.
‘Mesa, report when safe distance reached.’
‘Mesa, roger.’ Her voice sounded strange and far-away in her headset.
She had been allowed one message to her mother, letting her know that she had got the news about her father’s death. Knowing how many eyes would be scrutinising it before it reached her mother made it hard to write what she really felt, and in the end, she just had to send it and hope that she would understand, until they could see each other again.
Collins fired the rockets in one long burst to move them away from the vicinity of the Las Vegas. It dwindled into the distance, until it was lost to view. The minutes passed slowly, until Collins broke the silence:
‘Two hundred kilometres.’
Clare pressed the transmit. ‘Arlington, Mesa. We are at safe distance.’
‘Mesa, roger. Standby for detonation.’
A few moments later, the two departing ships were silhouetted against the searing white-violet light of a nuclear explosion, and the body of Lieutenant Petersen, along with what was left of the Las Vegas, became an expanding ball of incandescent vapour far behind them. Clare watched the fireball fade against the stars, and then turned to the nav display and their long voyage to Venus. She punched buttons on the autopilot, and finally glanced across at Collins: ‘Bring the reactor up to full power – let’s get out of here.’
The injection burn took place on schedule, the nuclear engine firing for just under twenty minutes to reduce their speed and place them onto a trajectory that arrived over Venus in five months’ time. After the distant thunder of the long burn had ended, they put the Mesa into rotation and started getting ready for stasis. There was nothing more to be said, or to be done, until they arrived over Venus in November.
Clare helped Collins prepare for stasis, and watched his vital signs ebb as the automatic sequence chilled his blood and took him under.
She closed the clear plastic cover on his unconscious form and went to check on their passenger, on the other side of the chamber. No name on the chamber, just Passenger 6034, bound for Venus. His face was turned away from her, so she couldn’t even see his features. Everything was normal, and she returned to her own chamber and slumped down by the medical console.
Her grief, which she had kept bottled up since before the encounter with the asteroid, rose to overwhelm her, and she wept, her head on her hands, until the sedatives that she had taken started to take effect. With a dull deliberation, she dried her eyes, opened her stasis chamber and swung inside, and programmed the sequencer for an automatic induction. The captain was always the last to go into stasis away from home, and there were no nurses to assist her; she had to do the initial injections herself, and press the sealing tape over the wound.
Venus. Last time she was there, she had nearly been killed by Captain Shaffer and his cronies after she stumbled on some of his nasty little secrets on board the carrier Langley. She fingered the scar on her cheek, and the sound of Shaffer’s dying scream, as he was sucked into an aircraft engine, echoed distantly in her mind. Back then, she had given evidence to an investigation into the things he had done. This time, it would be her conduct that would be under scrutiny.
She decided that she didn’t really care whether she woke or not. She shoved the intubation guide into her mouth and lay down, hardly hearing the synthesised voice of the medical computer telling her to relax. The last thing that she remembered, before she finally lost consciousness, was wondering what she would do, when they finally kicked her out of the Corps. The dismal thought pursued her as she fell backwards, away from the world of light, and into the inky darkne
ss of stasis.
PART III
Ulysses
CHAPTER NINE
They say that in stasis, you don’t dream.
The human body’s vital functions are maintained at such a low level that even the random nerve impulses of dreams are suppressed, and the mind sits suspended in nothingness, with no memory of the experience.
Time passes – days, weeks, and months drift by, and the body floats on the very edge of death, in some grey netherworld which holds no memory. Only the blood circulators, turning slowly in the medical cabinets next to each stasis unit, show any movement, and the rolling lines on the monitor consoles, tracing out the slow heartbeats.
Outside the thick, shielded walls of the hibernaculum, the Mesa turns slowly in its journey through space, falling through the emptiness towards its next port of call. The ship is entirely automated during its cruise phase, with life support systems shut down, making any mid-course corrections of its own accord. Updates to its planned flight path from the control centres on Earth are executed automatically, the ship making all necessary adjustments to arrive at the prescribed place and time. From time to time, the ship sends signals, letting the controllers know: here I am.
About a day before arrival, the ship brings the life support systems back on line, checking the air pressure and oxygen levels, and preparing the crew module for its human passengers again. Only when it is satisfied that there is no problem will the revival sequences be triggered, reversing the induction of stasis. In a series of careful steps, body temperature, blood oxygen levels and drug concentrations are altered to bring the body back to normal functioning.
But during revival, somewhere in between death and wakefulness, there are a few minutes when the brain is coming back to life, but consciousness has not yet dawned, when the nerve impulses flood across the mind, and the nightmares come thick and fast …
There had been meteor showers before, every three years or so, but this one was bigger than all the others. Clare looked up above the fronded leaves of the giant tree ferns, where the brontosaurus herd had just moved on, and watched two giant fireballs roll across the late afternoon sky. They moved slowly, leaving a roiling trail of fire and dense smoke in their wake, shedding lesser fragments as they passed overhead and faded from view.
It was strangely quiet in the forest. There were no birds yet – it was millions of years too early for that – but the sound of countless smaller animals, the buzz and humming of the giant insects, even the rustlings in the undergrowth were muted. It was as if everything was listening, waiting for something, as if they knew what was coming.
She looked around herself, at the giant plants and tree ferns, the animals, the incredible sight of the dinosaur herd as they trekked slowly down into the river valley. Their heads moved slowly, gracefully, on their long necks, scanning the area for predators. It was warm, like a sultry summer’s afternoon in one of the Southern states, and a sound like crickets, made by some ancient insect, sawed the heavy air.
A sudden commotion in the trees above her head, and a winged animal, like a bird, but trailing a long, fur-covered tail, broke free and flapped its way across the scene, letting out a loud croak as it passed overhead. It disappeared into some trees further down the slope.
A giant dragonfly, thirty centimetres long, nearly blundered into her, its wings clattering as it veered away. It was joined by another, and they chased each other, back and forth through the air, reversing direction and hovering, then racing away, like miniature helicopters.
Something moved in the undergrowth by her foot, and she looked down to see a small shrew-like animal look up at her, its slender proboscis questing upwards, before scuttling away, followed by four tiny versions of itself.
There was no warning when it came, just a long, intense burst of violet light from over the horizon, which gradually faded. Perhaps there was a half-guessed blur a moment before, a black streak against the horizon that moved too fast for the mind to take in, but she knew instantly what it was, and what it meant.
All this world – all this life – she could feel the tears starting in her eyes, and she glanced down at the green foliage around her knees; plants that she didn’t recognise, strange fronded shapes, nodding in the faint breeze. Hundreds of millions of years of evolution – mountain ranges born and worn down again, warm seas filled with sea creatures, their shells turned to chalk beneath the hills – all this, for nothing.
The brontosaurus herd paused in their march, and their long necks lifted, staring at the oncoming ejecta melt sheet; a glowing nimbus that raced up into the sky. There was no sound at all; it was moving at supersonic speed, an enormous inverted cone of molten rock droplets, spreading out overhead. Above her, smaller fireballs streaked across the darkening sky, fragments of the huge asteroid, and she knew that this was the end of everything.
She wondered if it would hurt, if she would be aware of anything when the surface blast wave hit her. It was racing towards her now, moving faster than sound, just seconds away, its passage tearing everything off the planet behind it, throwing pulverised rock and ash high into the stratosphere. It would be decades before blue skies would be seen again.
It felt like a sudden dusk had arrived; the sky had gone dark. Bolts of lightning flickered as the ejecta sheet, cooling and darkening now, rose overhead, blotting out the light.
The dinosaurs looked up one last time, and then the shock wave struck them like an express train from hell. Some of them managed to bellow, but any sound was drowned by the tornado shriek of the blast wave, that blew the dinosaurs to bloody fragments and ripped the top few metres of bedrock off in its terrible passage.
In a ghastly slow motion, Clare saw the wave rushing up the slope towards her – it was as if the trees and the ground on which they stood were exploding upwards – and then it hit her. Her flesh was ripped away from her arms, leaving the bones behind, which crackled and broke like dry twigs. The ground burst apart and disintegrated around her, scattering her remains high into the burning, choking air. Her vision went black, but she could still feel; there was intense, searing heat all around her, and a soundless scream of pain grew and grew inside her head until it felt like her skull would explode …
CHAPTER TEN
Clare awoke, and knew instantly that something was terribly wrong.
The strident sound of the emergency alarm filled her ears, and the hibernaculum was bathed in a garish red light that she had never seen before. Her restraints were all released, and the stasis sleeve over her right arm had already opened.
‘Captain Foster, there is a medical emergency. Please disconnect your monitoring lines and attend to Lieutenant Collins.’ The automated voice of the medical system was insistent.
Clare pulled out her intubation guide and flung it aside, and threw the lid of the chamber wide open. She staggered out, forgetting to disconnect her electrical lines, and the biomedical patches ripped painfully off her skin.
‘Shit!’ She winced at the sting of pain, and got to Collins’s stasis chamber. His medical console was a sea of red traces. The lid of the chamber was fogged with moisture, and Collins’s limbs thumped and squeaked erratically against it. Blood spattered over the inside. Jesus, what had happened—
‘Lieutenant Collins has reacted to the revival sequence. His intravenous lines have been disconnected. Urgent intervention is required.’
‘Emergency protocol!’ Clare yelled, yanking open the lid of his chamber. Collins lay struggling inside, unconscious and convulsing, his black skin turned a deathly grey. He had torn open his stasis sleeve, and blood flew from the puncture wounds in his right arm. His electrical connections had come off his medical patches, but he was still intubated, and the air hoses thrashed about as he struggled.
‘Authorisation required.’
‘Foster, Clare J., commanding officer Mesa! Come on, come on!’
‘Command authorisation verified. Emergency protocol. Reconnect monitoring lines.’
Clare grabbed
the ends of the electrical lines, and tried to plug them back into the patches on Collins’s struggling form. He was jumping about too much, and she had to hold him down with one arm while she got the connectors in.
The traces on the medical console changed and started showing his vital signs, but several remained red.
‘Reclose stasis sleeve.’
This was much harder. Both of Collins’s arms were flailing about, and she couldn’t hold his arm down and close the sleeve at the same time; he kept forcing it open again.
Suddenly he relaxed, and she pressed the sleeve closed around his arm and latched it. But her relief was short-lived.
‘Emergency. Lieutenant Collins is in ventricular fibrillation. Shocking, stand clear.’
Clare stepped back, just in time, as Collin’s body tensed, then relaxed, as his heart received a powerful electrical shock from the biomedical patches on his chest
‘Negative result, increasing charge. Stand clear.’
Another shock, and no response.
‘Negative result. Increasing oxygen flow. Administering one milligram of emergency epinephrine.’ There was a moment’s pause as the machine found a vein in his arm inside the stasis sleeve, and injected the medication into his bloodstream.
‘Shocking, stand clear.’ His body tensed, and relaxed once more.
‘Negative result. Increasing to maximum charge. Stand clear.’
This time, the body in the chamber arched its back as the huge shock was delivered, then fell back onto the couch. Nothing.