Torino Nine

by Mark Anson

  After unlocking the file copy that Collins had sent up to her, she had gone back through every event, in reverse order from the final entry, which was an automatic entry from the ship as it shut down for lack of power. The log was mainly filled with automatic entries, pages and pages of them, and she had to scroll through all of them, looking for anything of significance.

  After an hour’s work, she had found the point where the lander separated from the ship. There were no manual entries, no notes from the captain, nothing to tell her anything. She sighed, and carried on searching backwards. Several days of automatic entries flowed by. She stopped, and backed up.

  That was odd. The lander had separated from the ship, and redocked, several times, before the final departure.

  What had they been doing? Almost immediately, she knew the answer – they had been searching for something. And when they found it, they left the ship for good.

  For some reason, the thought sent a chill down her spine. Whatever they were searching for, must have been on Psyche; there were no other objects within range of the lander.

  She scrolled backwards some more, and then she found a burst of entries from the nav system; the Ulysses had arrived at Psyche. Still no manual entries. She checked the dates; just over six days between arriving at Psyche and the final departure of the lander. And in between, they had made eight – no, nine sorties in the lander.

  What had they been looking for?

  She continued scrolling backwards, and then she found it – a video log entry from the captain. She opened it immediately. This was the last recording of anyone from on board the ship. She checked the date – it had been made about a week before the Ulysses arrived at Psyche.

  A bearded, unkempt man’s face came into view, sat at the commander’s seat. She froze the playback and peered closer. It was Captain Young, although his face was gaunt and sunken, presumably from spending months on reduced rations.

  She resumed the recording, and on the recording, Young spoke:

  ‘We’re nearly there.’ He closed his eyes and a half-smile of relief crossed his emaciated features. ‘Less than a week away. Moreno’s sacrifice wasn’t in vain. I don’t know if anyone’s going to hear this, ever.’ He paused, and looked up, and he seemed almost to be in some kind of rapture. ‘They said we couldn’t make it, but we did. We did! We made it all the way, and we only lost one of us. Moreno’s sacrifice was … Moreno just didn’t believe.’ His face twisted into a snarl. ‘He didn’t have the – faith that we all had after we saw it … the vision, and what it showed us.’

  He leaned back, and his head tilted to one side. He looked at the camera almost disdainfully, as if he was talking to lesser beings. ‘I can’t expect you all to understand – to comprehend the things we’ve seen. When we woke up … it was as if we’d been …’ he shook his head and muttered something inaudible, and then waved something at the camera. Clare couldn’t make it out, he was shaking it about too much, then he held it still for a moment, and she saw that it was one of the drawings that littered the Ulysses.

  The captain gesticulated with his hands. ‘This – this is what we were looking for, all this time. We know where it is, and nobody’s going to stop us. We’re going there, and we’ve done what we were told, and then we’ll see; we’ll see what happens! We know what’s beyond it – we’ve seen it; all of us have seen it! We’re going to enter the kingdom of shadows, and no one’s going to stop us! Do you see? Do you see! Do you see!’ His voice rose to a screech, and the drawing of the door shook to a blur in front of the lens. There was a loud rustling of the microphone, and the sound of wild laughter and shouting in the background.

  The recording ended abruptly, and Clare stared at the blank screen for several seconds.

  The kingdom of shadows. What the hell did that mean? The empty spacecraft below, already a place of dread, seemed to acquire new menace with the captain’s last words, and she shivered.

  We’ve done what we were told. Done what? And told – by whom?

  ‘Captain.’ A voice spoke from behind her, and she nearly jumped out of her skin.

  ‘Shit!’ She glared up at Collins. ‘What the fuck are you doing, creeping up behind me!’

  ‘Sorry.’ He looked surprised, and she realised she had overreacted. She sighed, and shook her head. ‘Sorry, you startled me. How’s it going down there?’

  ‘I’ve started bringing the reactor up. It’s on automatic startup, seems normal so far. I think we can leave it to itself now – it’ll soon tell us if there’s a problem.’

  ‘Okay.’

  He was looking tired, she noticed. And she realised that they hadn’t had a rest period for over twenty-two hours. Well, that was something they were going to have to fix.

  ‘Listen, we need to take some rest. You’re going first as you’re still not fully recovered. Can you manage on six hours?’

  ‘Sure I can – are you going to be okay on your own?’

  ‘Yeah – what’s Mordecai doing?’

  ‘Still on the memory deck – hasn’t come out since you last saw him.’

  ‘Okay. I’m going to keep going through the Ulysses’ log.’

  ‘Have you found anything yet?’ Collins looked interested.

  Clare hesitated. She didn’t want to delay Collins’s rest period, as this would just put off her own. ‘I’m still going back through system events. I’ll show you what I’ve found when you take over.’

  ‘Okay – thanks. You may need to wake me, okay?’ He pushed off, and floated back towards his berth in the rear of the command deck. He looked beat.

  Claire watched him climb into his berth and pull the curtain across, and then returned to the Ulysses’ log. She put on her headset, ostensibly so that she wouldn’t disturb Collins, but if she was honest with herself, she didn’t want him to hear what Captain Young had been saying.

  She replayed his last log entry once more. It still didn’t make any sense, and once again a chill ran down her body at his last words.

  Maybe there would be more. She returned to scrolling back through the myriad of automated log entries, running through the pages of system events as the Ulysses retreated from Psyche. About three weeks before the last video entry, she found another one, again from Captain Young.

  This time, he wasn’t so untidy, but he looked emaciated, and his eyes burned with a feral intensity in his sunken face. He stared at the camera for several seconds before speaking:

  ‘We are just one month away from our goal, and we are running out of food. Despite heroic efforts from everybody on board, there is not enough left to keep all ten of us alive until we are there. We have decided that one of us must be sacrificed for the others. As captain, it is my painful duty to choose which one, and do what is necessary to ensure the survival of the crew. God help us all.’ He looked down, and the video finished.

  Clare was stunned. What the hell were they trying to get to, that was so important that they would resort to this? Putting together these last two entries, it seemed likely that the human remains they had found on the command deck were Moreno’s.

  She thought back to Young’s later message, just before they arrived at Psyche. What hadn’t Moreno believed?

  Frowning, she continued back through the log. Another video entry, just a few days before the last. Again, the captain looked up at the camera:

  ‘We have only five weeks to go to our target, and our spirits are high. Food is a problem, but we have reduced our rations further to ensure that we can last. Moreno has been confined to the airlock module; he had been spreading discontent – telling people lies, that the doorway would be shut to us, or that we wouldn’t be able to find it. Last night we found that he had taken more than his share of rations. A fight broke out – we had to restrain Williams from beating him.’

  So, that was the origin of all the writing on the wall of the airlock module – Moreno had been imprisoned there while they figured out what to do with him. The video continued:

  ‘As c
aptain, I cannot allow any form of interference to the smooth running of this vessel. Some painful decisions may be necessary for the greater good. I will pray for guidance.’

  Clare stopped the recording; she felt like a stone had settled in her chest. It was painfully apparent what had happened in the last month of the voyage, then. For some reason, the crew had turned on Lieutenant Moreno; he had been imprisoned, and later killed for food. She wondered how they had killed him, who had done it. Had they drawn lots? He had been held in the airlock module; they could have just depressurised it. Nobody would have had to look.

  She felt sick at the thought. Moreno was one of the USAC crew, responsible for the piloting and navigation of the ship; he had been one of her own. She suddenly didn’t want to listen any more to the later stages of the voyage. What had happened earlier, when the crew awoke at Jupiter? There might be something there, some clue to the sequence of events that had led them here. She checked the dates, and scrolled back at high speed, to just before the Ulysses rounded Jupiter.

  This was where she guessed Mordecai and his colleagues back at USAC would be most interested; everything seemed to stem from this point onwards. She found the log events recording the Ulysses entering Jupiter space, some routine course corrections for the gravitational slingshot manoeuvre, and the outside radiation count rising. That wasn’t unusual; the trapped particles in Jupiter’s powerful magnetosphere were a well-known hazard, and the hibernacula on USAC deep space fleet were well-shielded against such dangers.

  She stepped through the events more slowly now, reading every one. Minor course adjustment, radiation count increasing, a reference check on the fixed stars, a slight attitude adjustment, a change to an external sensor reading – nothing but what you’d expect for a ship on autopilot nearing closest approach to a planet. The crew were in stasis; they were oblivious to everything going on.

  The outside radiation count was fluctuating now; occasionally there was an alarm message as the reading went over safety limits, then fell away again.

  Suddenly, the reading went off the scale, and a moment later, the flight computer went offline. There were no log entries until it came back up again, about two minutes later. A stream of problems flowed past. The ship wasn’t pointing in the same direction any more, and the antenna had lost its automatic lock on Earth.

  Then finally, the event that she had been expecting, ever since they had told her what happened:

  > 02:07:33: EXC: MISSION EMERGENCY: NAV DISENGAGE

  > 02:07:36: NAV: CRUISE MODE TERMINATED

  > 02:07:47: EXC: INITIATE EMERGENCY REVIVAL SEQUENCE: 020733 CODE E - ENTIRE CREW

  > 02:07:48: EXC: REACTOR TO HIGH

  > 02:07:49: NUC: REACTOR HIGH CRUISE ACK

  > 02:07:54: MED: REVIVAL COMMAND ACK: 020733 CODE E

  > 02:08:10: MED: REVIVAL SEQUENCE STARTED

  So, that was what initiated the crew revival – the ship had encountered some problem as it rounded Jupiter, and it had knocked all the ship’s systems out. And with the antenna not pointing at Earth, the telemetry wouldn’t have shown any of this.

  Her first reaction was that the ship had hit something, but she realised quickly that it hadn’t been that – a hit at these speeds would cause catastrophic damage, maybe even a hull breach, and the Ulysses was undamaged. She flicked back to the radiation count, and the way it shot off the scale in the space of a few moments. A radiation storm – some concentration of high-energy particles, whirling around, waiting to ambush the ship as it sailed by? The ship’s systems were hardened against such events, but it was always possible that it had encountered some event that had exceeded its limits. Whatever, something bad had happened, and it seemed to be linked to that radiation spike.

  She paged through the next few hours of entries fairly quickly. The radiation count fell back to normal as the ship sailed through the storm and out the other side. The onboard systems gradually came back on line, and interspersed with these were the progress reports from the medical systems as the revival sequences progressed. Everything seemed be going okay – in the context of an emergency situation, that is. The crew were being revived, the mission would be terminated, and they would all return to Earth or Mars at the earliest opportunity.

  Ah – now the captain was on the flight deck; she could see manual commands being entered. She stopped, and went back. The commands were all related to the navigation system and mission plan. That made sense. If it had been her in that situation, her first action would have been to find out where they were, and what had happened. She thought back to her recent revival, and remembered her actions and thoughts then. So, any minute now, he would be contacting Deep Space Command.

  Except he didn’t.

  The very next thing he did was to disable the remote command system, to prevent Deep Space Command from taking remote control of the ship. Why had he done that? He must have known or suspected that his subsequent actions would cause DSC to attempt to take control.

  Then both the main and the backup radio systems were shut down, cutting off the downlink with Earth. He had left the transponder on, she remembered, until they left Jupiter space; that must have been an oversight on his part.

  Now she saw the navigation system being accessed, and a new trajectory solution being calculated; direct to Psyche. They were climbing out and away from Jupiter now so they had to do it quickly, to make the most effective use of Jupiter’s gravity. The new trajectory was entered into the navigation system and activated.

  Reactor to full power. Then main engine ignition, and the long burn to alter their course. And that was that. No manual log entries, no obvious additional information that would help them, although no doubt USAC experts might be able to glean something from the detailed event entries. She sighed, and was about to take a break when she saw a video entry, made a few days after they left Jupiter space. She hesitated for a moment, and then opened it.

  Once again, Young’s face looked out at her. In contrast to the later entries, he was clean-shaven and well-nourished, and looked relaxed and confident:

  ‘This is Captain Young, commanding the USSV Ulysses. We are one week into our journey to our new target and I have decided to keep a record, so that in future ages, people will marvel at our courage and determination, to follow the divine vision and seek out the ultimate goal.

  ‘When we awoke, I cannot tell you what we all felt, when we realised we had all had the same vision. The door, how it opened, and the sight of what lay beyond. Some of us were scared to say it out loud, what we had seen – an entrance to the kingdom of shadows, a way in. On the world of iron, at the end of the valley of night, it awaits those who seek to find it.’

  The captain glance downwards, as if afraid of what he had just said. Clare leaned closer, listening intently.

  ‘We know we have to make the journey unaided; we cannot use the hibernation units; the vision made it clear what would happen to us if we did. They would become – our tombs.’ His face took on an expression of fear. ‘We need to go to the gate as pilgrims, and endure the hardships along the way. It will not be easy; we will have to ration our food, but we are all agreed; we will make the journey together, and our strength will be each other, and the vision will sustain us along the way.

  ‘We know the doorway will be there for us; of that there cannot be any doubt. I cannot tell you what I felt – what we all felt – when we awoke, with the image fresh in our minds, and for it to be an identical vision, it—’

  ‘Mesa, USAC Deep Space Command. Mesa, USAC Deep Space Command on secure coded channel.’

  Clare’s head snapped up instantly, and she halted the playback. The incoming transmission would be automatically recorded, but she wanted to hear it as it came in.

  ‘Roger your transmission confirming successful rendezvous and docking with target confirmed as USSV Ulysses. Have received your initial investigation report and note that crew and lander are missing.

  ‘Imperative you transmit entire ship’s log as soon as
possible for urgent analysis. You are authorised to take further instructions from Dr Mordecai on any actions necessary to support the investigation, and to give him all necessary assistance. The safety of the Mesa and its crew remains your responsibility at all times. If compatible with existing mission objectives, you are authorised to attempt to locate missing lander on surface of Psyche. Command out.’

  The radio transmission ceased.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Clare Foster sat alone on the flight deck, surrounded by her hopes and fears.

  At times like these, when you are quite alone in the middle of the night, the rational and the irrational worlds blur at the edges, and strange thoughts drift in from the cold emptiness beyond the ship’s portholes, thoughts that you would rather not have.

  Clare was thinking about her father, and her grief, which she had kept ruthlessly bottled up since the bombing run on the asteroid, was rising to engulf her. The tears welled up as she thought of her time with him, all the things they had done together. She remembered him leading her out into the stockyard one day, her eyes tight closed …

  ‘Okay, you stand here. Don’t open your eyes until I tell you.’ Her father’s hand was reassuring on her shoulder. She could feel him make some unseen signal to someone. There was a thunder of hooves, and she caught her breath.

  ‘Okay, open them!’

  ‘Dad!’ she screamed, seeing the lovely Connemara pony, knowing it was true. ‘Oh, Dad, he’s lovely! Is it a he?’ she said quickly.

  ‘Yes, he’s a gelding. Just under fourteen hands, so he’s not too big for you. Nice temperament, beautifully schooled. You’ll love him.’ Her father was grinning nearly as much as she was. The pony cantered around the fence, then fell back to a trot and came over to the gate where Clare stood. It eyed her suspiciously, and snorted.

  ‘Can I go in?’ she said excitedly.

  ‘Sure.’ Her father opened the gate, and shouted to her mother: ‘Hey Judith, have you got the saddle?’