She lay there for a while just breathing, just focusing on her own body. Her brain still needed time to catch up. She’d grown disoriented there toward the end, sometimes feeling as if she were climbing up instead of down. Sometimes all too aware that she wasn’t standing on a planet’s surface but inside a rotating drum. She’d started to feel as if she were upside down, a fly crawling on an inverted surface.
She looked over and saw Stevens had fallen facefirst onto the ground, which he clutched with his hands as if he was afraid he was going to go flying off into space. His eyes were closed, and his mouth was moving, but she couldn’t hear him saying anything.
“Are you praying?” she asked him.
“Doing math,” he gasped. “Angular momentum. Doesn’t make sense. The outer hull should be rotating, too. Conservation of…”
She blocked him out.
She climbed to her feet and used her suit lights to check out the ground around the final piton. It looked as if KSpace had set up a base camp there. She found a stack of oxygen cartridges for their space suits—all of them still fully charged, ready to be used. They weren’t compatible with NASA suits, so she left them alone. She found a box of assorted climbing gear: mallets and pitons, more rope, what looked like maybe crampons that would fit over space suit boots. Scattered around the supply cache were a dozen or so glow sticks, presumably left there so Wanderer’s crew could find this place again when it returned.
The glow sticks were dull and dead. They were supposed to work for only twelve hours, and that deadline had long since passed. KSpace must not have been back this way since it entered 2I.
Jansen understood what that was likely to mean. She didn’t care. Until she saw bodies, she had to assume that Foster, Holmes, and Channarong were all still alive.
The equipment cache was neatly arranged, and it seemed all the foil bags and plastic cases were untouched. At least that was something—it meant no aliens had been this way. Even friendly extraterrestrials would have examined the gear, right? Out of sheer curiosity they would have opened everything and checked it out. But it looked as if this stuff had been untouched since KSpace left camp. The one exception was an orange flag, just a square piece of vinyl mounted on a wire stand. It lay on the floor a couple of meters away, as if it had been dropped in haste. She picked it up and studied it—and noticed there was something attached to the stand. A tiny memory stick, about two centimeters long.
She plugged it into a port on the side of the communications panel on her HUT. There was only one file on it, a video clip. She blinked twice in rapid succession, and her devices brought the file up in an AR window that seemed to be projected on the inside of her helmet. It made her wince right away—the video was badly degraded, mostly just snarling glitches and artifacts. Likely that was a result of 2I’s magnetic field, just like the pops and clicks on her radio. She thought she could make out the shape of a helmeted figure, but then it was gone again. The audio was nearly as bad, but she could hear a few of the words.
VIDEO FILE TRANSCRIPT (1)
Taryn Holmes:… descent was… we’re…
Willem Foster: [indecipherable]
Foster:… of Wanderer. My crew is in good physical shape and… not yet made contact, if indeed there’s anyone… no signs. Nothing?
Holmes: They must be… don’t want to talk. They’ve been pretty clear on that so far and… or…
Sandra Channarong: First scans look… not much to… better idea when we’re closer to [indecipherable]
Foster: OK. I’ll leave this record here, at base camp, in the interest of being thorough. We’re going to take an hour’s… have a meal, and then…
Foster: I’ll make another log entry when we find something. Right now I’ll set off a flare, to make sure we don’t…
Foster: [indecipherable]
Jansen played the file three times, but couldn’t make out any more of what the KSpace astronauts were saying.
It was all so maddening. The file was garbage, almost completely devoid of content. Yet what was there suggested…
No. She couldn’t get ahead of herself.
She wasted about ten minutes trying to raise the missing astronauts on her suit radio. It occurred to her that the alien crew of 2I might hear her as well, and for a second she panicked. Then she remembered that that was the reason she was here in the first place. To make contact.
It had sounded like a better idea when she was safe outside, in her own ship.
It didn’t matter, anyway. No aliens appeared to seize them. No one at all answered her call.
With the gain turned all the way up on her comm set, all she could hear was static and a ghostly, distant popping. A constant, rhythmic click that rose in volume, then faded away, but never quite disappeared.
“You hear that?” she asked Stevens.
He rolled over on his back and stared at her through the faceplate of his helmet. “Yes,” he said, as if he had chosen the simplest possible answer that would make her leave him alone.
She listened to the noise for a long time. Hoping it would resolve into voices, or maybe just a beacon of some kind.
The clicking, popping sound was almost inaudible sometimes. Other times it grew so loud she had to turn the gain down or risk being deafened. She wanted very much for it to mean something. She wanted it to be a signal from Wanderer’s crew.
It sounded too basic, though. Too natural, in its way. It wasn’t a human sound.
“Wanderer, come in,” she said into the ambient noise. “This is Jansen, commander of the NASA spacecraft Orion. We’re here to help. Please acknowledge.”
There was no response.
She walked over to where Stevens lay. He hadn’t moved since they arrived. Bending only from the waist—her back groaned in complaint, but her knees were all but locked up—she held out a hand. Stevens took it and, grumbling a little himself, let her lever him up to his feet.
She checked the display on the front of her suit. “It took two hours to get here. Let’s be conservative and say it’s going to take three hours to get back up to the airlock, even using the motorized ascenders.”
“Oh, let’s,” Stevens said.
“That gives us seven hours to find your friends. You ready?”
His face grew serious behind the polycarbonate of his faceplate. “Yeah,” he said.
SUNNY STEVENS: I wanted to find Sandra and Taryn and Commander Foster. Yeah. I was very worried for them. After what we’d seen, after failing to get them on the radio, though, I don’t know. Maybe I was starting to accept that Hawkins had been right. I was pretty sure at that point we were looking for bodies.
Sally Jansen had wanted to go to Mars. It had been her dream since she was a child, to walk on another world.
This was the closest she was ever going to get. She knew that. She wished she could feel excited. She wanted that thrill to run down her spine, her stomach to clench in knots as she thought of what she would say, the first words spoken by a great explorer.
Instead—there wasn’t a lot inside her just then. Mostly fear and worry.
The inner hull of 2I was a dull, nonreflective grayish brown. A noncolor. Jansen kept one of her suit lights pointed down at the ground directly ahead of her so she could see where she was walking. She needn’t have bothered. The surface they crossed was perfectly flat and seamless. Slightly rough, enough to provide good traction for walking, but not so rough she had to worry about scraping her gloves on it if she fell onto her hands.
“Porous,” Stevens said.
“What?”
“I was wondering why the floor isn’t covered in water. The mist ought to stick to it, right? Except it’s bone dry. The floor here is porous. It’s draining the water away as fast as it can accumulate.”
“Noted.”
She kept her other light moving back and forth, searching for any sign of the Wanderer’s crew. It never showed her anything new. The murky fog that had lain over them like a wet blanket on the way down had thinned out
, and visibility had increased to about thirty meters. At least, she thought, they might have some warning if aliens came charging at them out of the dark. If they were looking in the right direction at the time.
With no light, and no landmarks, navigation could have been a problem. Luckily there was an inertial compass built into her suit display. It showed that they were walking straight forward from KSpace’s base camp, along a line parallel to 2I’s axis. She had no reason to assume that Foster and his crew had headed in that direction, rather than right or left around the curve of the drum, but she had to start somewhere.
She paused every five minutes or so, both so she could try the radio again and because walking was exhausting. If their suits had been heavy and unwieldy in microgravity, they’d certainly never been designed for use at the bottom of a gravity well. They were each carrying an extra thirty kilograms on their back just to keep them alive, and every step sapped some of her energy.
“Seven kilometers down the slope means five kilometers down in elevation,” Stevens said, working out a math problem, maybe to fill the silence. “Back at the airlock I didn’t think to actually time the rotation of the drum, but it felt like about one rotation every two and a half minutes. So the centripetal acceleration feels like—”
“Point eight g,” she said. Beating him to it.
“Yeah,” he said. “That’s about right. How did you…?”
“I’m an astronaut. You learn what different kinds of gravity feel like. Do me a favor, will you? Save your breath for walking.”
But of course he couldn’t.
She supposed different people handled fear different ways. For her it was focusing on what she was doing. Paying perfect attention to each step, to maintaining a routine of checking her compass, checking her radio, sweeping her lights back and forth. Repeated actions that rewarded her with exactly the same results every time, which made her feel a kind of security even in the endless dark of 2I.
Stevens was a scientist. Which meant his way of dealing with an uncertain world was to try to understand it. To measure it and draw hypotheses about its terrors. Jansen had known plenty of scientists in her time—she’d seen it before.
“The temperature’s gone up a few degrees since we arrived,” he said. “This place should have its own weather, sure, assuming the drum is one large continuous space.”
“It’s getting hotter?” she asked, suddenly interested. “How hot? Dangerously hot?”
“Well, no. It was hovering about five below zero when we came in. Now it’s about two above.”
“Let me know if it gets much warmer than that,” she said. She hadn’t felt the temperature before. There were kilometers of water-filled tubing inside her suit to make sure she kept comfortable in freezing cold or boiling heat—in space you could get either one, depending on whether you were standing in sun or shade.
Now that he’d made her think about how cold it was, though, she couldn’t stop thinking about it. The misty darkness was cold enough to freeze her solid if her suit lost power. Good to know.
She held up one hand to warn him she was going to stop. She checked her radio again.
Nothing but that clicking that went in and out, fading away and then rising to buzz in her ear, loud enough to make her want to switch off her radio. She didn’t. There could be a distress signal hidden in that noise, and she wouldn’t be able to hear it. Frustration threatened to overwhelm her. She fought it back and kept listening.
Occasionally there was a brief warbling tone, a kind of wavering ghost voice that she knew meant nothing but was maddeningly close to a human sound. Like a voice sped up to a hundred times its normal speed.
“Static discharge,” Stevens told her.
“What?”
“An object this big can build up an electric charge without even trying. The floor material, whatever it is, is probably a good insulator. Just the friction of the air sliding against the floor of the drum builds up a static charge. There’s nothing to carry that charge away—no good conductors in here—so the charge just builds and builds. Eventually the floor can’t hold any more electricity and it has to discharge somehow.”
“Like… lightning? You’re saying there are lightning storms in here, and that’s what I’m hearing?”
“Doubtful,” he told her. “We would see flashes if that was the case, not just hear them over the radio. No, I think there must be some other method for the charge to drain away. Maybe the argon in the air is constantly getting ionized, but then—sorry, Jansen. I don’t know. But I don’t think we’re going to be electrocuted anytime soon.”
“I suppose that’s something,” she told him.
She tried calling out to Foster and his crew again.
There was no response.
“So that explains the squeals. What about the clicking sound?” she asked. “You definitely hear it. It’s not just me. So what is it?” she asked.
Stevens lifted his hands and let them drop again. “Some kind of rapidly oscillating electromagnetic field. Your guess is as good as mine.”
Jansen nodded. She’d thought of something. “Electromagnetic fields can interfere with radio signals, right?”
“Sure,” he said.
“So it’s possible that Foster and his crew can’t hear me. That my signal is getting drowned out.”
“Well… maybe,” Stevens said.
Her suit light caught the edge of his faceplate and he blinked and winced and threw up a hand to screen it out.
“Sorry,” she told him. She swung her head around and pointed her light out into the dark.
She would take a maybe. Life was full of maybes, and sometimes they turned into yeses, and—
A sudden wave of fatigue ran through her, and she felt a desperate need to sit down. She wasn’t as young as she used to be, and her body wasn’t used to this level of exertion under the crushing weight of real gravity, not after a month in space. She’d started to sweat inside her liquid cooling and ventilation garment. She laughed. Getting her hopes up took way more energy than she had to spare.
“Listen, we need to take a real rest. Twenty minutes.”
“Yeah, sounds good,” he said.
Together they sat down on the floor, back to back so they could prop each other up. So nothing could sneak up on them.
Not that it seemed likely. If the aliens inside 2I wanted to approach them, surely they would have done so already.
Right?
Jansen set her lights to sweep back and forth in a regular pattern, sweep all she could survey. All the nothing that was out there.
There was a little tube in her helmet that was full of water. She sucked on it, not having realized how dry her mouth had gotten until just that moment.
She stared out into the dark and the fog.
She couldn’t see Stevens. She couldn’t see anything but the nothingness her lights played across, rolling back and forth, back and forth.
For the moment she was all alone in that great, empty space. It didn’t feel big to her. Instead she felt tiny. Microscopic.
She called out, called the KSpace astronauts by name. And in that moment she was sure they couldn’t hear her. That nobody could, or ever would. She didn’t even think the KSpace crew was dead. Instead she thought they’d never been there. That this had all been some cruel prank, that she’d been led here just to feel this alone, this small.
Her imagination was getting to her. In astronaut training one of the things they’d told her was the importance of not seeing shapes in every shadow, not falling prey to the phantoms inside your own head. You had to hold on to what you could prove, the data your own senses provided, and let everything else go.
So when she saw the flicker of light off in the distance, at first she wouldn’t let herself believe it was there. It had to be a hallucination. Then her light swept around again and—there. Yes. There was a little glimmer dead ahead of them, a half-seen glow.
“Come on,” she said, scrambling to her feet. “Come o
n!”
Jansen ran forward, toward the light.
She could hear her boots thundering on the hard surface of the interior hull. Her lungs burned with the effort, and her shoulders ached from the weight of her suit pulling down on them. The D rings on her torso jangled and bounced and she heard them ringing like bells—the air in 2I was thick enough to carry sound waves.
She reached up to adjust her suit lights to point straight ahead as she ran. She half expected the gleam of light up there to vanish. For it to have been nothing but a mirage. Instead it grew stronger. Brighter.
It could be the lights of the KSpace crew’s suits. It could be some procession of aliens come to meet them. It could be…
A reflection.
Her own lights bouncing back at her.
Her boots slipped a little under her, and she nearly tumbled to the floor. She threw her arms out to her sides for balance and skidded forward another meter or so.
She gasped for breath. She steadied herself. Looked straight ahead. At a wall of ice.
Ice. That was what she’d seen. Her lights reflecting off a surface of frozen water.
The floor she’d skidded on was covered in a thin layer of it, a sheet maybe a centimeter thick. Dead ahead the ice grew thicker and rose around her in phantasmagorical shapes. Humps and piles of it, growlers and bergs, ribbons and arches and caves of ice. Great curving prominences of ice, as if enormous waves of water had flash-frozen in place, overhangs of ice bearded with icicles like dragon’s teeth.
Her light caught a million bright surfaces like facets of a titanic diamond. Some of them were bright enough to blind her, some just dull gleams. Meltwater dripped from every spike and curve in the ice, pooling in the depressions and caverns, trickling around her feet. She could hear it falling, the rhythm just slightly off, each drop taking just a fraction of a second too long to fall and splash to the ground.
Ice. Some of it as thin and transparent as glass, in some places grown so thick it looked blue and solid as stone.
The Last Astronaut Page 12