Close Encounter

by Deanna Lee

  “Just three,” Arti said. “When she woke for the third time, I offered to activate her hibernation protocol, but she was vehemently opposed.”

  “I imagine getting her to surrender to a hibernation cycle will be quite difficult,” Sean murmured as he left operations and headed toward the cargo bay.

  Eliza was sitting about a foot from the open pod with a small nylon bag in hand. Sean sat down on the floor beside her and took a deep breath. He had no idea what to say to her, no idea how to quantify the loss that she’d suffered. Her crew, her ship, and her place in the scheme of things. She was a hundred years out of her time. Wars had been fought, countries had been created, and technology had made leaps and bounds since her departure from Mars.

  “The youngest member of my crew was twenty-two years old,” Eliza murmured. “He was brilliant—they all were—brilliant and brave. They were murdered in their sleep and someone should pay for it.”

  “Any speculation as to why you were spared?” Sean questioned.

  “I wasn’t,” Eliza said. “My cryo-unit was sabotaged as well. What they didn’t—what no one on the ship knew—was that I didn’t need the unit. I was the only member of the crew with nano-tech and a neural implant. None of the civilians had either, but the military had one or the other. You needed both for unassisted cryo-sleep back then.”

  “What’s in the bag?”

  “I don’t remember.”

  Sean’s eyes widened, and he shifted around on his knees abruptly. He took her face in his hands and tilted her head so that their gazes connected. “What do you mean, you don’t remember? You have memory gaps? How much time do you think you lost?”

  “Not gaps…” Eliza took a deep breath and shuddered. “The last day when I was working so hard to get the evacuation pod functional and the ship was burning around me. It’s all a blur. The bag was tucked into the bottom of the pod, and I haven’t opened it.”

  He released her and carefully took the bag from her hands. “Arti, have you scanned the contents of the bag?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Are the contents dangerous?”

  “Not in the traditional sense, Dr. Cohen, but I’ve learned that nothing is quite so dangerous as information. It appears to be a solid-state hard drive. Such drives would’ve been commonplace on the captain’s ship.”

  “Oh.” She relaxed. “Oh.”

  “You remember?”

  “Yes, of course. I don’t know how I forgot.”

  He put the bag on the floor between them and let out a shaky breath. “Well, you’ve had a lot to deal with since you woke up. I think we can give you a break on the memory front.”

  “It’s all the ship sensory data from the moment of our launch until about thirty minutes before I evac’d,” Eliza murmured. “It’s…the proof that my crew was murdered. The ship’s computer didn’t interfere, but it recorded every single thing they did while they were on board.”

  “Governing computers of the time period were not programmed for free thinking,” Arti supplied neutrally. “The computer on board would’ve been unable to do anything without orders or established protocols.”

  “I guess it didn’t occur to the programmer to make sure the ship’s governor could act in the defense of the crew even from other crew members,” Sean said.

  “No, agreed,” Eliza murmured. “Such acts are beyond the imagination of most outside the military, and academics are the worst.” She shot him a look and blushed. “Present company excluded, of course.”

  He laughed and shrugged. “I can handle weapons, Captain, but even when I was in uniform I was an academic. I never saw combat, never went farther than Armstrong Station until I went to work in the private sector.”

  “What is Armstrong Station?” Eliza asked.

  “Earth orbital space station funded and operated by the UN Security Council. It is military run and has a very small civilian population, which is regularly rotated out. Most of its operations are classified at an extremely high level.”

  “Spying on other nations and black ops,” Eliza said. “I don’t…know that I’m ready for whatever Space Command is up to these days, Sean. I want to explore and learn.” She bit down on her lip and looked at the bag. “Back when I joined up, it was NAU only. How did a citizen of the European Union join up?”

  “Space Command is a joint operation of the NAU and EU at this time,” Sean explained. “It’s been that way for about sixty years. The Security Council funds fifty percent of the operation costs in exchange for oversight and world-peace-keeping efforts.”

  Eliza nodded. “Arti, can you make a copy of the data on this hard drive? I don’t think it’s wise to leave it only in one place.”

  “I am unable to access it wirelessly, Dr. Cohen. It’ll need to be plugged into a compu-station for analysis.”

  Sean shook his head. “No way. What if… Just no. Is there an option that does not leave you or the Stooges at risk?”

  “Stooges?” Eliza asked with a confused frown. “Who are the Stooges? I was told we were alone on this station.”

  Sean grinned. “The three super computers up top,” he explained with a jerk of his thumb. “We call them Larry, Mo, and Curly.” He offered a stern look. “If you don’t know who they are, I’m afraid it spells disaster for the fate of our marriage.”

  “Why?” Eliza asked. “Why are men so…enamored with three grown men who physically abused each other on a regular basis? It makes no sense.” She poked him in the chest to emphasize her point.

  “I don’t have the time to explain the complexities of my manhood to you,” Sean answered wryly. “Just…take me as I am, and I’ll do you the favor of doing the same.”

  She inclined her head. “All right, Dr. Cohen, you have yourself a deal.”

  “Excellent, Mrs. Cohen.” He stood and offered her his hand, which she took with a startled look on her face. “What?”

  “You… I’m… Who says I’m going to take your name? You caveman!”

  Sean shrugged and snatched the hard drive off the floor. “Arti, options?”

  “We can isolate one of the unused data-pads from the network so you can run tests on the drive to make sure it hasn’t been corrupted by the data the captain downloaded. I’ll upload several anti-viral programs to a data-pad to prepare for the extraction. It is doubtful that anything programmed that long ago would have any impact on my systems, sir. If a computer virus was let loose on the Columbus, it was designed for the ship’s systems specifically, and the likelihood of compatibility between a hundred-year-old military-grade system and me is so small as to be utterly impossible.”

  “Arrogance is ugly, Arti,” Sean said as he motioned his wife out of the room ahead of him. “No more moping over your escape pod. It’s creepy, and I’ll have to suggest a psych-eval on you if you keep shit like that up.”

  “And it would be doctor,” Eliza protested. “I have a doctorate.”

  “Dr. Eliza Hawthorne-Cohen?”

  She huffed. “A hyphen? That’s probably pretentious.”

  “Nah, it’s very fashionable these days. Twenty or so years back, there was this whole feminist movement about women reclaiming their role as a wife and mother while maintaining their social and intellectual individuality in marriage. It’s all the rage.”

  “I really don’t care about fashion…. You know I only had those cosmetic enhancements because the PR people for the Kepler mission forced me to, right? They also did a hair enhancement to cover my gray hair. It’s ridiculous.”

  “I’m sure your gray hair was stunning,” Sean soothed as he gently pushed her into a chair in the operations center and sat down with the drive as a data-pad slid out of a slot on the station in front of him.

  “How old are you?”

  Sean looked over at her and found her frowning at him. It was a cute, pouty sort of frown that he figured many women had to practice to accomplish, but it looked utterly natural on her full mouth. “Forty-two. The average lifespan of a human being th
ese days is 347 for women and 338 for men without hibernation protocols and cryo-sleep. Women often choose to be reproductive well into the middle 200s. Due to birth defects and catastrophic mutations following the last nuclear detonation, many in my parents’ generation are functionally sterile. Though that won’t matter much in the future—a company in the EuroDome recently unveiled the first fully functional artificial womb. They are gestating animals at this point—species on the brink of extinction. It’s controversial in some religious circles, but for the most part the technology is a dream come true for a lot of childless couples.”

  “Do your parents plan to have more children?” Eliza asked.

  “Not that I’m aware of, but I’ve never asked.” Sean shrugged when she raised an eyebrow at him. “Look, myself and all of my siblings were immaculate conceptions, and my parents don’t fuck. Period. I won’t hear otherwise.”

  She laughed. “You poor thing.”

  Sean scowled at her and returned his attention to the hard drive in the bag. He pulled it free and turned it over in his hands several times. “We’re going to need a cable, Arti.”

  “There is nothing compatible on the station, Dr. Cohen. We’ll have to add a wireless module to the device.”

  “Ah.” Sean stood and crossed the room. He rummaged quickly through a drawer that slid out of the wall and dropped several pieces of equipment into a pocket on his flight suit before pulling a small box out of another drawer. He carried his haul back over to his work station.

  “What’s that?”

  “Tool box,” Sean murmured. “It’s honestly a bit beyond my scope. I only took a few mechanical classes when I was pursuing my bio-engineering degree. In fact, I learned more working out here about that sort of engineering than I did during my time at the university.”

  She stood up and joined him at the console. “Let me… Maybe I should do it then.”

  “You’re about a hundred years out of date,” Sean reminded.

  “Still, I know more about the hard drive than you do.”

  “But nothing about the wireless relay.”

  “Together then,” Eliza murmured and slid right into his lap. She grinned as he pulled the chair closer to the station and propped his chin on her shoulder to watch her work. She removed the screws, holding the back of the hard drive into place first, and opened the casing. “Okay.”

  “We’ll want to connect the wireless relay to the output.” Sean reached around her and grabbed the relay. He pulled the casing apart so the components were revealed. “It won’t be an exact fit. There is a soldering iron in the tool box if you need it for the hard drive.”

  “Right.”

  “Why isn’t this wireless?” Sean asked. “Wi-Fi isn’t exactly new.”

  “No,” Eliza agreed as she arranged the parts. “We had plenty of wireless storage on board, but this was… I didn’t have a lot of time to think, honestly, and I knew a solid-state drive would last longer. I mined a lot of data, so it was also a matter of how much space I needed. None of the tablets on board would have held it all, and most of them were slaved to the ship’s governor. They would’ve literally died the moment the ship’s computer did. It was a security measure. The pads couldn’t be removed from the ship either.”

  “Makes sense,” he murmured as his hand dropped to her hip. He curled his fingers around and held her steady on his thigh as she turned on the soldering iron. “My grandmother says that humanity’s real enslavement is to technology. A lot of people on Earth go on and on about repopulation and the extinction of our species and the Ice Age. They call our planet a prison of our own making.”

  “It is,” Eliza said. “But it was long before I left, perhaps even before I was born. The new Ice Age didn’t happen overnight. It was coming for literally decades, and we did nothing until resources started to disappear and living became too expensive for everyone. People started to fight over land, over fresh water, over glacier rights, and finally over the right to live. War was inevitable.” She hissed and jerked her hand back.

  He caught her wrist before she could stick her burned finger in her mouth. “Don’t. Just give it a few seconds—there is no need to add insult to injury. Your bots will handle it more quickly if you don’t contaminate the wound with germs from your mouth.”

  Eliza turned in his lap and frowned at him. “It would hurt less.”

  “I thought all you space commando girls were fierce. Is this your war face? I have to say…I’m not at all intimidated.” He grinned when shock flickered over her face. “Besides, your finger has already stopped hurting.”

  “Yeah.”

  He released her wrist and merely raised one eyebrow when she didn’t turn back to the work. “The wonders of modern science.”

  Eliza’s gaze flicked briefly to his mouth, and she leaned in. “I hope I’m not taking you from your work.”

  “I’ve finished the bulk of my assignments for this rotation,” Sean admitted. “I’ve been working on a few pet projects and monitoring the data collection from the moon’s surface.”

  “Right.” Eliza turned her attention back to the hard drive. “Okay, talk to me about the transponder.”

  “The circuits are suspended in an inert gel that’s very similar to the circuit boards you are used to. Military technology was already moving into gel components for their systems when you left due to the fact that an EMP is useless against gel-based technology.”

  “Nice,” Eliza murmured. She used a pair of tweezers from the kit to lift the slim, firm block of gel from the transponder. “This has nanites in it, right?”

  “Right, so once you place it in the hard drive, the nanites should marry to the device. They are programmed for a specific duty, but if the embedded protocols fail, Arti can prod them in the right direction.”

  “I saw reports on this technology and several other projects before I left Mars. The scientists on the projects said it would be two hundred years before it was available to the public sector if not longer.”

  “When the UN Security Council announced the cease fire…” Sean shrugged. “Lots of things changed at that point. They admitted how bad off the populations were all over the world and how close we were to causing the extinction of our species. Less than a third of the population was capable of reproduction at that time. Some were helped with technology, but not all. The infant mortality rate was obscene due to environmental factors. Later reports would emerge that would illuminate the eventual fate of our species if we didn’t focus on medical and science developments.”

  “Like what?”

  “Three-hundred twenty-two children were born in the last year of the war; only eighty-five of them survived to their first birthday.”

  “In the NAU?”

  “No, sweetheart, on the planet.”

  “That’s…horrific.”

  “Three hundred people starved to death on Moonbase due to the war, lack of supplies, and abandonment by both the European Union and the North American Union. Not intentional abandonment, mind you, but it became extremely difficult during the height of the war to get any sort of craft off the surface of Earth. Some countries were extremely opposed to any resources leaving the planet—even for the colonies we’d already established. Twenty-two ships were destroyed trying to resupply the two colonies before both the NAU and the EU gave up and concentrated on protecting their own borders. Mars was smaller, all military, and they had rationing protocols in place. They also had access to cryo-sleep technology. Ninety-five percent of the colony was asleep at any given moment. They managed to survive for three years alternating out of cryo-sleep. The people on Moonbase weren’t so lucky.”

  Her hands were steady as she carefully put the gel into place. It adhered to the circuit board in the hard drive. “When I took the Kepler mission—it was because I wanted a better fate for our people. I didn’t do it for the NAU but for Earth, for mankind. The war was small, and most believed it would end soon. To find out that it continued for so long after we left and th
at it only ended after biological and nuclear weapons were launched is such a betrayal. I gave up the chance to have a family; I gave up a life on one of the colonies or even on Earth for the opportunity to expand our knowledge of the universe and maybe to find a new world. My whole crew sacrificed their lives for that ideal, and it’s obscene to realize how little it mattered.”

  “I can’t disagree,” Sean said and frowned when she slipped from his lap without ever acknowledging her knowing invasion of his personal space. He said nothing else as he figured the conversation had subverted any desire she’d had to flirt with him further.

  He shifted in the chair and pulled in closer to the console. Having her perched on his thigh for nearly twenty minutes had made his cock wake up and take notice.

  “Sorry,” she murmured as she stared out of the large window that made up the outer wall of the station in the operations center. “Beautiful view.”

  “Jupiter doesn’t have a prettier moon in my opinion,” Sean said quietly. “Perhaps you’d like to rest some more?”

  She laughed, bitter and low. “I nearly slept through the extinction of our fucking species. I’ve rested enough.”

  “The transponder has completed its connection with the hard drive, and the data is being accessed,” Arti interrupted. “The drive appears to have survived intact with only a few corrupted sectors. All of the data will be reviewed for threats before it is transferred to the station server.”

  “Thank you, Arti,” Sean said as he closed the casing on the hard drive and put away the tools that Eliza had used. “The captain will review it and let you know what she wants packed for the data-burst to Armstrong Station.”

  “I want to send it to your grandmother as well and whoever is in charge of the UN Security Council. I don’t want the NAU or Space Command covering this all up without someone being accountable.” She turned and faced him. “I assume you have a direct, encrypted connection with her?”

  “When I’m within range, yes. She insists on being able to contact us whenever it is possible. I can assume she’s already waiting for the station to come into range again. I wouldn’t be surprised if she tried to order Jupiter Station to move in order to act as a relay for her.”