The Last Astronaut

by David Wellington

  She turned and faced Jansen straight on.

  “We’re inside the alien right now.”

  Hawkins’s head spun. He tried to make sense of what she was saying. He looked back up the slope, in the direction of the structure at its top.

  If that was 2I’s heart, if she was right, this could be exactly the thing they’d been looking for. Not a way to communicate with the aliens—Hawkins had always considered that a fantasy. No. A way to kill 2I. To stop it before it reached Earth. General Kalitzakis needed a target. If they could shoot a KV right through this thing, kill it in one stroke—

  But then Rao had to go and ruin everything.

  “That thing is its heart. One of them, anyway,” she added.

  Hawkins closed his eyes. Tried to stay calm.

  “One of them?” he asked.

  “An organism this big would never have just one heart—it’s got too much surface area to supply with blood. It would need a whole network of pumps, just like a power grid needs electrical substations.”

  “How many?” Hawkins demanded.

  “Dozens,” Rao said. “Maybe fifty, a hundred?” She threw her hands up. “I have no idea. You keep asking me questions like I must know the answers. Like I’ve studied this thing for years and I’m an expert on it now. I’ve spent just as long as you have looking at this—”

  Hawkins groaned in frustration, cutting her off. They’d been so close to finding a solution to the problem of 2I.

  No, he thought. It couldn’t that be easy.

  “Hawkins,” Rao said. “Hawkins!”

  He looked up. How long had he been lost in thought?

  “What?” he demanded.

  “Where’s Jansen?” Rao asked.

  ROY MCALLISTER: On Earth, some of us scoffed at Dr. Rao’s theory. Some found merit there. All of us in the control room agreed it had the potential to change everything. More specifically, it could mean we were doomed. If 2I was not, in fact, a starship, but instead an enormous animal, not the work of intelligent hands but of blind evolution—how could we possibly expect to communicate with it? How could we hope to turn it away from Earth? I wanted to do something, to put my best people on the question, to find some solution. Yet with no way to contact the astronauts—we could only watch, and hope they found an answer themselves.

  Jansen worked her way around the crest of the island, as close to the heart as she dared to get. The pulse of the thing repelled her, pushed her away.

  But Jansen couldn’t stop climbing. She forced herself to keep going, alone, even though her leg was just a numb block of wood that wouldn’t bend. Even when she had to grab on to the tendrils—the blood vessels—every few seconds as the next pulse came.

  She knew that Hawkins thought she’d gone crazy. Because she would go to such elaborate lengths to search for the KSpace crew, to rescue them. He didn’t understand.

  When she’d been a younger woman she wanted to go to Mars. It had been all she cared about, all she dreamed of.

  Then she’d grown up and instead her life had been about memorializing a dead astronaut. The guilt and sorrow she’d felt for Blaine Wilson’s death had remade her. Changed her into someone else. For a long time she’d thought she could pay off that debt only by punishing herself, by wrecking her own life. Roy McAllister had changed that. He’d suggested to her something else, a new path. A way to make things right. This mission, coming to 2I—it was going to make her whole again.

  Finding Foster and his crew was the price she needed to pay. The cost of getting her soul back.

  She knew it wasn’t that easy, of course. She understood there was no moral calculus, a life for a life… nothing worked that way. Life didn’t work that way. But it was the best idea she had.

  She had almost given up. She had started to think that Hawkins was right, that the KSpace team was dead. That her rescue attempt was a foolish debacle that had accomplished nothing more than getting Stevens killed.

  But now—they’d seen Channarong, if only secondhand on a memory stick. They knew she was still alive in here. Which meant there was a chance that the others were alive, as well. That she could find them.

  She’d had the clue she needed to get this far. Foster had announced he was heading here, to the heart. There had to be some sign of him here, some indication of where he’d gone next.

  She kept her eyes peeled for any trace of orange, any sign of a little triangular flag. She didn’t need another memory stick with a message on it. She didn’t need much of a sign at all. Just one of those flags. Just a dead glow stick lying on the ground. Anything.

  When the time came, when she had made two circuits of the heart and turned up nothing at all, she had to face the inevitable conclusion. If KSpace had been here, if they’d even made it this far, they’d left no evidence behind. Or maybe—the interior of 2I had changed so fast, maybe the little orange flag had been swallowed up as the dome of the island rose from the melting ice.

  There was nothing to find.

  She sat down hard on a thick tendril. She could feel it pulse under her, feel its life surge through it. She wanted very much to weep.

  Channarong was alive. They’d all seen the message she left, the cryptic warning. She had to be close by. Why hadn’t she stuck around to talk to them? Why hadn’t she greeted them with open arms, the team that had come in here to save her?

  Why had the KSpace team never responded to her radio calls?

  It made no sense. It made no damned sense at all.

  She stared out into the dark from the top of the island. She stared out into the infinite darkness of 2I. She’d had a plan. She’d had a plan, and it had failed.

  She had to keep trying. She had to do something.

  She reached up and worked the controls of her suit radio. She set it to transmit with as much power as it could muster.

  “KSpace, this is Jansen, of Orion,” she said. “Foster. Channarong. Holmes. Come in, please. Come in, guys.”

  She switched her radio to receive. For a while she just listened to the clicking beat of 2I’s wings. Above her lightning swept across the surface of the heart, and her headphones spit hateful noises into her ears, deafening her. She slapped at her controls, setting them to transmit again.

  “KSpace,” she called. “Come in. This is Orion. You want us to leave. Just tell me why. Give me something. KSpace? You must have heard me by now. You must have…”

  Her voice broke. Why was she doing this? It was hopeless.

  She switched the radio to receive. Then she turned up the gain, hoping to catch some faint whisper of a call. Words, human voices, on the wind.

  Nothing. Silence. And then—

  “Shit!” she howled, as lightning hit the heart again, and the noise burst through her ears like a spike shoved right through her brain.

  She opened up a virtual screen and looked at the code that ran her radio system. They had designed a destructive interference signal to help weed out the sound of 2I’s wings. Maybe she could silence the lightning strokes as well. She looked at a graph of all the waveforms her radio had received in the last few seconds and started tapping in the code—

  And saw something she hadn’t expected. Among the wild scratchy frequency spread of the electrical discharges, hidden in the carrier wave of 2I’s wings, there was a signal. A single unmodulated pulse that showed up every sixty seconds. Exactly every sixty seconds, at 121.5 megahertz. Well, there were plenty of stray signals all over the spectrum, beeps and blips that could mean anything. And this one was a very faint signal, too weak for her to have heard it amid all the noise. It stuck out to her, though. This particular signal was cleaner than the random sounds, more precise. She scrolled back through her radio’s log and found it in exactly the same place. Every sixty seconds for the last sixteen hours.

  121.5 megahertz. The number sounded familiar. She knew she’d seen it before, something that broadcast at 121.5 megahertz—

  In a second she was on her feet, hurtling down the slope to where the
others were.

  They had to see this.

  “We wait for her to come back,” Hawkins said. He refused to go searching for Jansen in the dark.

  Rao looked up the slope, worried. She’d heard Jansen calling out to KSpace over the radio, but then… nothing. She had tried calling Jansen herself, to tell her to come back and join them, but there had been no reply. If Jansen had heard her and was on her way, she was taking a long time with it. If Jansen fell and broke her leg in the dark—if she wandered into some fatal trap, some unknown horror of 2I’s interior—but Hawkins just waved away her concerns.

  “She’s too smart to go too far on her own. And we need to make a plan,” he said.

  He opened up ARCS’s map in AR and shared it with Rao’s devices. A grainy, black-and-white image that—now she had started truly believing in her hypothesis—looked altogether too much like an X-ray or an MRI scan.

  “What about this, here?” he asked, pointing at a large spiky shadow on the map, an area on the far side of the drum from where they stood. “What does this part do?”

  “I don’t know,” she said, as she had a dozen times already.

  “Then what about this long structure here, do you see the way it connects one of the domes to the arch scaffolding?” he asked, his hand deep inside the map. It looked as if he were a surgeon rummaging around inside a body cavity.

  “I keep telling you—my theory isn’t descriptive. There’s no reason to think that any of these structures are analogous to organs in terrestrial organisms. 2I evolved in an environment so different from Earth—it would be beyond belief if it had all the same organs and tissues we do.” She took a deep breath. “I can’t tell you how any of this works. It would take years of study just to understand the gross anatomy. I would need to dissect 2I to even begin to get how it fits together. And it’s a little big to get at with a scalpel and a pair of forceps!”

  She walked away from him and his map, her fingers laced behind the back of her helmet. She’d been worried about telling the others her theory, for exactly this reason. Hawkins didn’t want vague hypotheses, he wanted practical advice. He wanted a local guide.

  She looked up the slope again. She was sure Jansen had gone back up there, back to the heart. It was dangerous up there.

  He wasn’t done with her, though. “I need your help, Rao,” he said. “Come look at this map. We have to make sense of it.”

  She shook her head.

  “I thought,” he said, “that you were committed to this mission.”

  She grimaced behind her faceplate.

  “I thought you were focused on the job NASA gave you. I thought you would try a little harder than this before you gave up.”

  She bit her lip and tried not to listen. Tried to ignore his blatant attempt at manipulation. Even though her cheeks were burning and her hands had started to shake.

  She knew exactly what he would say next. He would tell her he’d thought she believed in the cause that Stevens had given his life for. The bastard was going to say that. And then she would have two choices. She could run over and punch him in the jaw—in which case he would win, because he would have gotten a rise out of her. Or—

  She walked over to the map. Expanded it with a gesture and zoomed in. “Ask me the question you really want answered,” she said.

  Hawkins nodded. “What’s this?”

  He pointed at one end of the spindle. The place where the drum narrowed down to a point, the far end from where they’d come in by the airlock. The map was hard to read there, full of shadows and strange textures. She could make out one structure, though. The final quarter of the spindle’s length, nearly twenty kilometers long, was where the arch scaffolding grew the thickest. It rose from the floor of the drum in great flying buttresses that supported a structure like a cage, bars of the arch material forming an ellipsoid enclosure.

  Something shifted behind her eyes and she realized—

  “That looks like a rib cage,” she said.

  She’d been calling the concrete-like structures “arches” this whole time. She knew better. She was certain they were exactly what they appeared to be—bones.

  “Assuming your theory is true, that 2I is just one big animal.” He held up one hand to suggest that he was speaking only hypothetically, but she could see from his face that he believed her. That he’d accepted her theory. She wished she felt that strongly about it herself.

  “Assuming that’s a rib cage, or something. What’s inside it?” Hawkins asked. As much as he expanded the map, as many times as he zoomed in, the interior of the cage was nothing but vague shapes and deep, unexplored shadows. “We know the heart isn’t in there. The heart—hearts, sorry—are spread all over the place. So—are 2I’s lungs inside that cage?”

  Rao considered this. 2I had to have some kind of respiratory system. There had to be organs for purifying and pumping air around the drum, but those would need to be distributed just like the hearts, so they wouldn’t be inside the cage.

  “Liver? Kidneys? Glands?”

  “Imagine you’re natural selection, rewarding evolving traits in a life-form with reproductive success,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I’m just thinking out loud.” She looked at his uncomprehending face and sighed in frustration. “OK, put it another way. You’re God and you’re designing an animal. You have all these different organs you need to put inside its body, and some are more important than others. The really important ones get encased in bone, for protection. I mean, 2I already has its outer hull and then the shell of the drum to serve as two exoskeletons, which are clearly enough to protect the heart and lungs. So what’s so important that it needs a whole other layer of armor? What can’t your animal live without?”

  Hawkins’s face went very serious.

  “A brain,” he said.

  She shrugged. “You wanted my best guess. Yeah.”

  “That’s its brain in there,” Hawkins said. He reached into the map with both hands and expanded and expanded it until the shadowy contents of the bony cage hovered in front of him, big as his head. It almost looked as if he were going to take a bite out of the AR image.

  “Gotcha, you bastard,” he said.

  Jansen came down the hill limping, dragging her bad leg. The pain didn’t bother her, not anymore. She could hear the beacon.

  Every sixty seconds it sounded inside her helmet. A plaintive chime. She just had to triangulate the signal, and then she would know where they had to go next.

  When she spotted the lights of the others, though, it looked as if they were already moving on without her, and for a moment she panicked, thinking they had left her behind. Hawkins was walking down the hill, using a long, loping stride to stay balanced on the rubbery ground. His lights bounced in front of him from the helmet dangling at his waist. Rao was just picking up some of their equipment—clearly getting ready to follow him. “He’s in a hurry,” she said, as Jansen came up even with her. “He saw your light coming and figured it was time to move.”

  “But he doesn’t know where we’re going,” Jansen said. “I need to triangulate. Hawkins! Give me a second!”

  “I’ll walk slow so you can catch up,” he called back over his shoulder. He didn’t even turn his head to look at her.

  “I found something,” Jansen shouted, running after him as fast as she could. Half the time she stumbled and had to catch herself with her hands. “I found something!”

  “We have a new target destination,” he told her. “While you were busy chasing ghosts, Dr. Rao actually figured something out that can help with our mission.”

  “No,” Jansen said. “Not ghosts. The others are still alive. They’re alive and they need our help.”

  “Channarong seemed to be doing just fine. Fine enough to spy on us.”

  She grabbed his arm and he finally stopped and turned to look at her. It wasn’t a friendly look. She felt as if she were locking eyes with an angry dog, so much she could almost hear the growl f
orming in the back of his throat.

  “I’m not going to remind you again who’s in charge,” he told her.

  Jansen didn’t bother trying to placate him. She activated an external speaker on the front of her suit and played the beacon for him. “Do you hear that? Do you know what that is?”

  “2I makes all kinds of sounds,” he told her.

  “No. That’s a human sound,” she said. “It plays every sixty seconds at 121.5 megahertz. 121.5—you’re in the military, you must know what that frequency means.”

  His eyes narrowed. He knew. He wasn’t going to give her an inch, though.

  “Wait,” Rao said, hurrying up. “You found a radio source that repeats every sixty seconds?”

  “Exactly every sixty seconds,” Jansen said, nodding.

  “Maybe,” Hawkins said, “there’s something inside 2I that releases an electrical discharge every so often. Maybe you’re just picking up the sound of the lightning we saw on the heart back there.”

  Jansen shook her head. He couldn’t deny this.

  “It would be one serious coincidence if something in here was on a sixty-second cycle,” Rao said, shaking her head. “Exactly one minute? A minute is a human unit of measure. You think some animal from a distant star uses minutes?”

  “And you know that frequency. It’s a distress call.”

  She could see from his face he wanted to deny it, but he couldn’t. 121.5 megahertz was the exact frequency used by civilian aircraft to indicate an emergency. NASA and the military used a harmonic frequency, 243 megahertz. The signal could only be coming from KSpace equipment.

  “You picked up this signal from the top of the island?” Rao asked. “We haven’t heard it before.”

  “It’s a low-power transponder signal,” Jansen said. “We weren’t close enough to hear it before. Hawkins! Listen to me—we’re required by law to provide whatever assistance we can when someone sends that signal.”

  He scowled, but she had him, and they both knew it.

  After a moment he opened ARCS’s map and pointed at the far end of the spindle. “That’s where we’re headed. Where’s your goddamned signal?”