“Just be careful. If you ding up my spaceship, it’s coming out of your allowance,” she told him.
It helped to joke around a little. It made her feel less as if she were about to climb headfirst into a crypt full of ghosts.
She pushed her way out of the airlock, into the orbital module. It was hard to see anything by just her suit lights, but she could tell the place was a mess. Tools and empty cartons of equipment floated all around her. A food tube bounced off her faceplate, splattering her view with what looked like spaghetti sauce. There was a patch of soft cloth on the back of her right glove, which she used to wipe the mess away.
She could hear something. That meant there was air in the module—sound didn’t travel in a vacuum. She followed her ears and found a bulky equipment box mounted on one wall. Fumes vented from its side, and the whole box juddered back and forth, as if it were trying to rip itself off the wall. She looked through its clear plastic front and saw that it was a 3-D printer, currently sintering together some piece of equipment she didn’t immediately recognize. Maybe a replacement for something that had broken.
Why didn’t we get a 3-D printer? she wondered. The KSpace ship might be based on an antique spacecraft design, but everything she could see was shiny and high tech, the best equipment private sector money could buy.
There were no bodies in the orbital module. She searched carefully to make sure. But she did find something weird. The interior walls were covered in thin padding with a white vinyl covering, and back near the airlock leading to the command module, someone had drawn on the padding with a red pen. At first she thought it was a note—maybe left behind by a desperate crew in case anyone ever found their abandoned ship. She steeled herself to read the last words of a dying astronaut.
Then she saw there were no words. Just crude drawings of a woman with exceptionally large breasts, and next to her a giant penis with hairy testicles.
She laughed out loud.
“What’s up?” Hawkins asked her. “Did you find them?”
“No,” she called back. “Just—well, they must have gotten pretty bored on their way here, that’s all. I’m going to check the reentry module now, keep me updated on your maneuver. Let me just—”
She stopped talking. She had been reaching for the hatch between the orbital and reentry modules. It started moving before she could even touch it.
A thing that looked exactly like a human skull poked through the hatch and stared at her with blazing blue eyes.
OK.
OK.
Not exactly like a skull. It was made of plastic, for one thing. It didn’t have a nasal cavity or any teeth. It was mounted on a spindly neck and it used one very thin arm to push open the hatch. It was a robot designed to look like a human being, but built out of very thin parts, presumably to save on weight and materials. Maybe that was also why it didn’t have any legs, just a stubby torso.
“My name is GRAM, for general robotic assistant and medic,” the robot told her. “Commander Foster and his crew are away from the spacecraft right now. Can I take a message?”
JOINT ACTIVITY
EXCERPT FROM KSPACE MARKETING MATERIALS
KSpace is a subsidiary concern of CentroCore Corporation. KSpace was founded in 2021 by Kyung Leonard, the man who would become Asia’s first trillionaire. KSpace launches satellites for the private sector and the military of every first world nation. KSpace operates three orbital factories that are set up to create drugs and raw materials that can’t be produced under the effect of Earth’s gravity. KSpace: Working Always, for a Future for All. KSpace: Busy as Little Bees!
McAllister took a maglev train to Atlanta. To visit the Hive.
The American headquarters of CentroCore took up hundreds of acres outside Atlanta. Whole towns had been taken over as housing and office space for the corporation’s employees. The actual nerve center was a geodesic dome half a kilometer wide—one of the largest buildings in America, just slightly smaller than the Pentagon. Two more domes were stacked on top of it, giving it a distinct beehive look. The skin of each dome was subdivided into hexagons ten meters wide. These were normally transparent, but they could be individually polarized if the people inside wanted privacy or shade. The whole structure functioned as one giant solar cell, soaking up the Georgia sunshine.
McAllister straightened his bolo tie and walked toward the front door, passing between a double row of giant plastic bees.
There was a woman waiting for him at the front entrance. She was perhaps forty and dressed in a conservative suit, but half of her head had been shaved and then tattooed with the image of a stylized dragon. As McAllister approached, the dragon reared back and breathed fire across her temple. He hadn’t been expecting that, and he flinched a little.
Maybe that was the point of the display.
She smiled and offered her hand. “Charlotte Harriwell,” she said. “I’m KSpace’s vice president of crewed operations.” His opposite number, in other words. “Thank you so much for—”
“Is this McAllister?” a man asked, running over to meet them. He wore a blazer over a dark-blue shirt, and sharply pressed trousers—but no shoes. He looked about fifty years old, though he’d clearly had extensive plastic surgery, so it was hard to tell.
NASA had relaxed its dress codes since the days of oxford cloth shirts and pocket protectors, but whatever was happening here was beyond McAllister’s experience. He was an old man and he found younger people exhausting, most of the time. “I am,” he said. “May I ask—”
“Kyung Leonard. Leonard Kyung, take your pick. In Korea we go surname first, but this is America. Right?”
Charlotte Harriwell confirmed that it was with a nod.
“We want to thank you for coming all the way out here,” she said. “We know just how busy you must be. When we invited you, we weren’t sure you would come.”
McAllister shook the woman’s hand. “Professional courtesy demanded it, at the very least,” he said.
Kyung Leonard laughed. “Professional courtesy! Damn, I love working with public sector people. They’re always so fucking helpful!”
He was almost shouting. McAllister looked around and saw dozens of people in the lobby, but not a single one of them even looked up. Maybe they were used to this.
“Sorry, sorry. Sorry,” Kyung said. “I had to fly in from Singapore and there was no time for sleep. Thank God that’s optional these days. Come on! I have an office here, it’s the top dome, right?” Harriwell nodded. “Right. The best view. Come on. Wait—did you want a coffee or something?”
“I’m fine,” McAllister said.
“Great.” Kyung threw an arm around his neck and nearly dragged him toward an elevator.
EXCERPT FROM WIKIPEDIA ENTRY: “KSPACE,” 10/11/2055
KSpace is one of five main subsidiaries of CentroCore, a transnational corporation. It is joined by KMed, KHome, KTelecom, and KLife, the corporation’s food and beverage division. While KSpace is the least profitable of the five, Kyung Leonard himself is quoted[by whom?] as saying he considers it his most important contribution to the future. Mr. Kyung is famous for committing millions[how many?] from his own personal fortune to the construction of the KStation in low earth orbit, which was the world’s first orbital hotel, operating from 2028 to 2029, when an unexpected system failure caused it to deorbit well before the end of its planned life span.
The office at the top of the Hive did have a spectacular view, though Kyung waved a hand as they entered, and most of the transparent dome turned solid black. “Circadian rhythms. They’ll fuck you every time.” The trillionaire went to sit behind a desk that was a single slab of wood three meters long. There was nothing on it except a pair of disposable devices—rubber dots that Kyung affixed to the sides of his nose.
This was the man, McAllister remembered, who had convinced the world to stop referring to their smart devices as “phones,” mostly by selling billions of wearable computers at reduced prices. He’d destroyed most of his c
ompetition within five years. Even McAllister used a KDevice, which clipped on to his ear.
“Funny how things work out, right? If that little thieving piece of shit Stevens hadn’t run to you—well. If he hadn’t stolen from me, nobody would know about this thing. And you and me wouldn’t be talking right now. Funny.”
“I suppose that’s true,” McAllister said, attempting to be diplomatic.
“Charlotte’s going to tell you everything, OK? She’s got me up to speed, broad-picture-wise, but she knows the whole story. Charlotte’s great,” Kyung said. He tapped his devices and his eyes glazed over. Clearly he had entered a VR trance. “Don’t worry, I can still hear you.”
Harriwell smiled. There was nothing strained in that smile. She didn’t seem put off by her boss in the least. “I’ll give you a quick briefing as to where we are,” she said, “and then we’ll discuss our options. All right?”
McAllister nodded. No one had offered him a seat. He decided to pick a chair and sit in it. At seventy-five years old, he disliked standing for too long.
Harriwell moved around the dome as she spoke. She would occasionally lift a hand and an image would appear in the air around her, until she was surrounded by translucent panes of light.
First she brought up three photographs. They showed young, smiling people dressed in orange KSpace hoodies—just like the one Sunny Stevens had worn when he first came to NASA. “These are Commander Willem Foster, Mission Specialist Taryn Holmes, and Mission Specialist Sandra Channarong. Our coworkers. As you know, they approached 2I/2055 D1—we call it the Object. I know you’ve chosen to refer to it by its provisional name, 2I. They arrived near the Object about fifty-two hours ago. The Wanderer had made the journey in good condition. All of our telemetry shows ship systems optimal. Commander Foster reported they were in good health and high spirits. They were anxious to get to work. They approached the Object at a minimum distance of one kilometer and started their attempts to make contact immediately. About nineteen hours ago, shortly before Orion was due to arrive, they performed an EVA.”
“All of them? At the same time?”
Harriwell looked surprised he would ask that. “That was part of their mission profile.”
NASA would never have heard of such a thing. “We do things differently. Please continue.”
Harriwell nodded. “Foster and his crew proceeded directly to the Object, where they… made contact with the surface. I was going to say they landed on it, but of course its surface gravity is far too low for anyone to stand on it. Commander Foster reported all was well, and that they were going to proceed to examine the airlock at one of the Object’s distal points.”
An image appeared before her, a simplified view of 2I. McAllister had been studying his own maps of 2I for long enough that he recognized the pattern of the spines that stuck out from its hull.
There were only two spots on 2I’s surface that were free of the crystalline spines, and they were at each of its ends—what NASA called its poles. The one on the south pole—the end pointing away from Earth—was a thin seam about ten meters long. The hull around the seam was cracked as if the seam had been open at some point, but now had sealed itself shut. The discontinuity at the north pole—near where they’d found Wanderer—was much larger. It took the shape of a dome about fifty meters across, with an irregularly shaped opening at its topmost point.
NASA’s imagery analysts believed that the two discontinuities were airlocks. Access points to the interior of 2I. That was only a tentative analysis, however—Jansen and her crew had not yet explored either of them in detail.
The view Charlotte Harriwell shared with McAllister rotated until the north pole was centered. The words PRIMARY AIRLOCK hovered over the image, with an arrow pointing at the dome.
“The Wanderer’s crew proceeded to examine this area with their own eyes. They performed some experiments to determine how the airlock worked. It’s a completely automatic system—whenever someone enters the dome through this aperture, the whole dome rotates to face the interior. They reported that they were all in good health and ready to explore the Object.”
McAllister coughed discreetly. “I’m sorry. Are you saying they just—went inside? They didn’t send any probes or drones in first?”
“It was Commander Foster’s call to make. Here at KSpace we believe in individual initiative,” Charlotte Harriwell said.
He managed to keep from rolling his eyes. “At NASA we’re big believers in safety first.”
“That’s why we’re winning this particular space race,” Kyung said.
Both McAllister and Harriwell turned to look at the trillionaire. He said nothing more, though, but simply sat there staring into empty space.
Harriwell continued. “Our astronauts went inside the Object to perform an extended reconnaissance. That was our last communication with them. It appears that whatever the Object is made of, radio waves can’t penetrate it. There’s no way to communicate with anyone inside.”
The view expanded until 2I’s airlock looked like a giant red eye staring right at McAllister. Gnat-like objects appeared, swarming around the airlock. He blinked and realized what he was looking at—this was video, presumably shot from Wanderer. The gnats were people.
He watched the three KSpace astronauts fly into the pupil of the eye until they were swallowed up by its darkness. A few seconds later, the eye started to move. The pupil drifted to the left—and then disappeared as it reached the edge of the clearing.
For about a minute, the dome was unbroken, a dark-red hemisphere in the middle of a forest of complicated dark-red trees. Then the pupil of the eye reappeared—on the right side of the dome this time. It moved steadily until it was back at the center of the eye.
The gnats didn’t come back out.
“How long was their EVA supposed to last?”
“Six hours,” Harriwell said. She looked down at her hands. “They’re more than twelve hours overdue right now.”
McAllister nodded. “I see why you wanted to speak with me in person. This is… a delicate situation.”
How do you tell someone their people are probably dead?
“Three days of consumables,” Kyung said, without otherwise moving. The sudden eruption made McAllister jump.
“I’m sorry?”
“Charlotte, tell him the consumables situation. Tell him they’re still alive.”
Harriwell nodded. “They took three days’ worth of food, water, and oxygen with them. We believe they can survive for another fifty-six hours. It’s possible they’ll emerge from the airlock anytime now, and be confused why we were so worried.” She scratched herself under her chin. “Obviously that’s what we’re all hoping for.”
“At KSpace we don’t hope,” Kyung said fervently. “We believe.”
McAllister ignored him.
“We know NASA’s mission to the Object is vital,” Harriwell said. “Out of everyone on Earth, the three of us here probably understand that better than anyone. We know what could be at stake if your crew suffers a delay to their operations.”
McAllister nodded. This was what they’d brought him here for, then. He decided he wouldn’t make them beg. That was beneath him—his entire life had been devoted to safe human exploration of space. “We’re ready to offer any assistance we can in helping your crew get home,” he said.
Charlotte Harriwell bit her lip. She looked as if she wanted to say something but didn’t dare.
“He doesn’t get it,” Kyung said. He tore the devices off his face and jumped up out of his chair. He stalked toward McAllister, his hands in the air. “He doesn’t get this at all. Charlotte, tell him. Tell him what we wanted to say.”
Harriwell took a deep breath. “We’re very grateful that you want to help. But the official position of KSpace is that our astronauts are in no danger.”
“No danger,” McAllister repeated. The KSpace crew was twelve hours overdue on an EVA. If one of his astronauts were that late, with no communication—dea
r God. He would be running to anyone he could think of who might be able to help. He would be tearing out what was left of his hair.
“Hell, for all we know,” Kyung said, “they could be in there having a tea party with the aliens. Who did we send from market development? Sandy, Sandy Channarong? Ooh, she’s good. She’s probably in there making deals with the aliens already.”
“It’s extremely unlikely your people would be able to communicate with 2I’s crew, much less make business deals with them,” McAllister pointed out.
“You know how you get rich in this world?” Kyung asked. “You ignore everyone when they tell you something is unlikely. Because they didn’t say ’impossible,’ did they?”
McAllister rose from his chair. “I’m sorry. You had me come all the way out here so you could tell me to leave your people alone? To back off?”
“You are familiar with the laws about exploitation of objects in space?” Kyung asked. “They say we have the rights to whatever we find. Sovereign rights.”
McAllister was no legal scholar, but he knew the basics. The United Nations had long held that everything outside the atmosphere of Earth was the common property of all humanity. In the last few decades, though, the United States had taken a different view. For instance, there were laws on the books now that allowed a commercial space agency like KSpace to plunder asteroids for their resources—and keep all the profits.
2I was no asteroid. Kyung’s message was clear, however. If NASA tried to intrude on KSpace’s salvage rights, it would be running the risk of a long and costly legal battle.
“You could have told me as much in a text message,” McAllister said.
Charlotte Harriwell gave him a meaningless smile. “We wanted to discuss this with you face-to-face, as a gesture of goodwill. How did you describe it? Professional courtesy,” she said.
Kyung seemed to think that was hilarious. He laughed and laughed.
EXCERPT FROM A BROCHURE CIRCULATED AT THE PARIS AIR SHOW, 2054
The Last Astronaut Page 9