Event Horizon

by Steven E. Mcdonald

  Weir watched the double doors to Hollis’ office, trying not to shuffle his feet while he waited. After a few moments, one of the doors opened and Lyle emerged, walking quickly over to Weir. Lyle was still wearing her diplomatic face, still covering something. Weir favored her with an aggravated expression, hoping to give Lyle the impression he was as clueless as Lyle would like.

  No more than nods were exchanged before they went into Hollis’ office. At this rate, Weir thought, we’re going to have a conference in sign language and grunts.

  Hollis’ office was still impressive, Weir noted. A video wall, currently blank, took up one side. Other monitors around the room played views of Earth from several different BlackSats. Hollis’ desk was a dark monolith sitting to the back of the room, an object even more imposing than the ominous video wall. There was a scattering of equipment on the top, arranged around an impressive black desk lamp that shone with halogen fury. The lights in the office were dimmed down, so that Hollis’ lair occupied the most visible spot.

  Behind the desk, in the pool of light cast by his desk lamp, sat Admiral John Hollis, looking like a bear considering mayhem. Weir had learned to trust Hollis over time, despite the gruff manner the Admiral cultivated. Unlike many people, Hollis was uninterested in what was good for ensuring the annual appropriation, and had solid notions of what was and was not reasonable in the course of a project. Hollis had been Weir’s savior when everything went to hell in a handbasket.

  Weir stopped in the center of the office. The USAC seal on the wall glittered with the light from the desk. Lyle passed by Weir and went to stand before the video wall, her hands clasped behind her back, unsmiling, unmoving.

  Hollis leaned forward, watching Weir with the air of a concerned uncle. It had been a while since they had seen each other, Weir realized. Hollis’ hair had thinned, and he could see deeper lines in the Admiral’s face.

  Hollis steepled his hands and tried a small smile. “How are you, Bill?”

  Hollis’ voice was gentle, kind.

  Automatically, Weir said, “I’m fine.” His voice sounded flat, lost in the huge office.

  There was a long, uncomfortable pause. Hollis waited, watching Weir, who had nothing more to say and no will or desire to invent small talk to keep his favorite brass hat entertained.

  Hollis glanced over at Lyle. Weir noted that the adjutant barely flinched.

  It was obvious that Lyle could give the Admiral no clues as to the next step.

  Hollis looked back at Weir, sighed, and sat back in his chair, idly playing with a pencil. Weir felt a pang of sympathy for the Admiral—there were no easy decisions, no simple approaches to anything. Even so, he wished this meeting was over.

  Hollis glanced over at Lyle again, then turned back to Weir. All business now, leaning forward and dropping the pencil on the desk, Hollis said, “I apologize for the short notice, but we’ve had something come up that requires your immediate attention.” The Admiral nodded sharply at his assistant.

  “Lyle?”

  This is it, Weir thought.

  Lyle produced a remote, apparently from up her sleeve, gesturing with it.

  The video wall lit, bathing the office in a faded blue glow that quickly coalesced. The solar system faded up, turned, closed in. Lyle aimed and fired, and the view tilted and accelerated, closing in on the eighth planet. Virtual boundaries surrounded the chosen area, forcing it to grow in size, magnified until the occupants of the office seemed dwarfed.

  In the heart of the video wall, confined within a box filled with stars, Neptune shone blue and cold, methane winds rearranging the patterns of its cloudy surface.

  A red dot was blinking in close orbit around the planet.

  Stepping away from the video wall and looking intently at Weir, Lyle picked up the thread. “At oh-three-hundred this morning, TDRS picked up an automated navigation beacon broadcasting at two minute intervals in Neptune orbit.”

  Passing by Hollis’ desk, Lyle picked up a sheaf of papers, riffling through them quickly, selecting a small stack to hand to Weir, who went through them hurriedly, going back to confirm the data he had been handed.

  “Incredible…” Weir muttered. He looked up from the papers, at Lyle, at the video wall, back at the papers, at Hollis. His chest felt hollow, but his heart felt huge and leathery, pounding helplessly in his chest. “These are the same coordinates as before the ship disappeared… this, this happened?” He swallowed, hard, trying to force control, trying to grab hold of the scientific approach before his growing excitement started him shaking. “This isn’t some kind of hoax?”

  Hollis laid his hand flat on his desk, watching Weir now with a flinty, hard look that had a dangerous edge to it. Weir turned his head and saw that Lyle had a nervous look about her now.

  “I wouldn’t bring you here on a hoax,” Hollis said. The Admiral’s hand closed into a fist, and he looked down at it as though it had taken on a life of its own and was becoming a threat to national security. Weir recalled too well that strange and unusual events did not go over too well with Hollis.

  “Houston confirmed the telemetry and ID codes.”

  Weir took several steps toward Hollis’ desk, then one back, turning to stare at the video wall. “It’s the Event Horizon,” Weir said, trying to get his breath, trying to force his heart to slow down. “She’s come back.”

  Hollis heaved a tremendous sigh, squeezing his eyes shut for a moment, then opening them to stare at Weir. “That ship was lost in deep space, seven years ago. If the Titanic sailed into New York Harbor I’d find it more plausible.”

  Hollis paused, waiting to see if Weir had anything to say. The scientist settled for running his fingers through his hair, trying to smooth it into place. “Houston wants Aerospace to send out a search and rescue team, investigate the source of the transmission. If it really is the Event Horizon, they’ll attempt a salvage.”

  There was another pause then. Weir turned to look at Lyle, who was watching him intently, then at Hollis. What were they expecting him to say, these military people? This was some kind of foolish game they needed to play, run by arcane rules. As far as he was concerned, Hollis and Lyle could run through their piece, and then they could parlay and get to where they really needed to be.

  “We need you to prepare a detailed briefing on the ship’s systems for the salvage crew,” Hollis said. There it was: write a report and go away.

  That was not the way it was supposed to work.

  Weir turned fully away from the video wall, approaching Hollis’ desk. The Admiral sat up straighter, giving Weir a hard look. People could, Weir mused, mistake the Admiral’s bulk for flab, not realizing that there was a hard man under that uniform. Hollis was a damn good man, but there were no needless soft edges.

  “With respect,” Weir said softly, meeting Hollis’ eyes, “a written briefing can’t possibly anticipate the variables on a mission like this. I have to go with them.”

  Lyle took a step towards Weir, who turned his head, wary of the young woman. Lyle had a shocked expression, the sort of look that comes when realizing that another person in the room is a dangerous psychotic rather than a simple milquetoast.

  “Dr. Weir,” Lyle said, her voice harsh, “you have no experience with salvage procedures.”

  “But I know the ship,” Weir said, willing the woman to back down now. “You can’t send a search-and-rescue team out there alone and expect them to succeed. That would be like…” He hesitated, struggling for a simile, running with the first thing that presented itself. He had always been miserable on college debating teams. “Like sending an auto mechanic to work on the shuttle.”

  Lyle was face to face with him now, determined to make Weir back down and forget this lunatic idea he had that he would hare off into deep space. “I don’t see how sending you would improve their chances.”

  Weir had no intention of giving ground. His ship was back. His ship. Lyle could not understand that. “I designed that ship.” He took a deep breath
, staring at Lyle, then at Hollis, then back at Lyle. “I put fourteen years of research into this project. I spent the last seven exploring every possible scenario, trying to discover what went wrong.”

  Lyle’s eyes narrowed. The adjutant seemed convinced that she had victory close at hand. “Your desire to redeem your reputation doesn’t factor into this.”

  Weir had been shoving anger into little corners of his soul for so long that he had been convinced that he could not lose his temper any more. Now, fury starting to burn white-hot inside him, he realized that he had made an incorrect assumption: his anger was only waiting for the right reason.

  “This is not about my reputation!” he snapped at Lyle, and for good measure he glared at Hollis. “This is not about me at all!”

  He turned back to Lyle, balling his fists, planting his feet. Let them think him belligerent, even dangerous. They had to understand. There was too much at stake for everyone.

  “The Event Horizon,” he went on, measuring his words, speaking as though talking to idiots, “was created for one reason: to go faster than light.

  Without it, we will never reach new stars, we will never colonize new planets.

  Mankind’s evolution will end here.” He looked from Lyle to Hollis. Both were watching him, either rapt or guarded or both. “I have to go.”

  Hollis sighed and sat back, shaking his head. “It’s not that simple.” He held up a hand as Weir glared angrily at him and started to speak. “Lyle, play the recording for Dr. Weir.”

  Lyle came back to Hollis’ desk, reached down to one of the scattered pieces of equipment. She had the look of a woman with a mission. Weir feared that the mission might well be to make certain that the salvage team traveled unencumbered.

  “Navigation Control tried to hail the vessel,” Lyle said. She stabbed at a button and looked up at Weir, nodding toward a chair. Weir sat down. “This was the only response.”

  Waves of sound poured from the office speakers. At first Weir mistook it for amplified white noise, but then he became aware of other things pushing out from the torrent of static: noises that caused him to recoil in his chair, sounds so primal that he had to struggle not to react instinctively.

  Screeching, chattering voices, barely heard, that chilled him to the bone and sent the hair on his arms and the back of his neck prickling up. He found himself gripping the sides of the chair, his hands locked.

  The terrible mixture of sounds suddenly broke, plunging back to nothing more than static. Weir sank back into his chair, limp, shaken by the sounds he had heard. Something in those voices had somehow reached into him, touching the cold parts of his soul.

  He shivered, remembering, seeing himself floating, eyeless, on the bridge of the Event Horizon.

  Lyle shut off the recording. The office was almost silent, only the background noises of Daylight Station being heard. The quiet lasted for a while, none of them daring to speak immediately.

  Chapter Three

  Hollis watched the door close behind Weir. Then the strength went out of him for a moment, and he slumped in his padded chair. Allowing Weir to go on the mission had not been his preference, considering the shape Weir was in and how he felt about the loss of the Event Horizon in the first place.

  That’s the trouble with women, Hollis thought sourly, glancing down at the pale patch on his left ring finger, men will go right up to the gates of Hell for them, no questions asked. Twenty-two years getting one finger indented. A couple of years did little to erase the mark. He felt for Weir. Marks upon the soul could never be erased.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw Lyle sliding forward out of the shadows. Out of the adjutants he had had, Lyle was the smoothest, a slick character who had the marbles of a press agent and the chutzpah of a berserker. It was a rare treat to see her unnerved.

  Softly, Lyle said, “You’re not seriously considering sending him?”

  Hollis turned his chair so that he could look directly into his aide’s eyes, a tactic that made the woman flinch. It was a good idea to keep the Young Turks on their toes. “You don’t just dismiss Bill Weir,” he said, his gruff tone meant to indicate that the listener should expect a miniature lecture. Here beginneth the lesson, O Daughter. “The man held Oppenheimer’s chair at Princeton.”

  Hollis paused briefly, wondering whether he should ask if Lyle even knew who J. Robert Oppenheimer was, if she knew the correspondences to Weir’s life.

  What the hell, it sounds impressive enough.

  “If the Event Horizon had worked,” Hollis went on, while Lyle stood patiently, her head cocked to one side like a faithful dog, “he would have gone down in history as the greatest mind in physics since Einstein. And we have him here, categorizing stellar objects.”

  Listening faithfully or not, Lyle was not to be deterred from her course of objections. “The official inquiry blamed Weir’s design for the ship’s loss.”

  Hollis slammed a hand down on the desk, making Lyle jump. “That doesn’t mean a damn thing.” Hollis reined his temper in, calming himself. Never a good idea to blow a fuse in front of junior staff. He continued in a more reasonable tone. “They wanted a scapegoat, and Weir’s an easy target. He’s not responsible for what happened.”

  “Does he know that?”

  Hollis raised his eyebrows, surprised at the tone of concern in Lyle’s voice. “What’s on your mind?”

  “He doesn’t belong on this mission,” Lyle said firmly. She did not flinch away from Hollis’ unwavering stare. Hollis had to give her credit for her willingness to take a flag officer on in an argument. “Responsible or not, he blames himself. He’s too close to it,”

  Lyle paused and Hollis waited. His aide had yet to conclude the argument.

  Hollis was not about to make it easier for the adjutant—better for everyone if Lyle got everything shaken out now.

  Hollis inclined his head.

  Lyle licked her lips, swallowed. “And then there’s his wife.”

  There it was. God knows we’ve all wondered about Bill’s mental state, he thought. “It’s been two years since she died.”

  “Some things you don’t get over,” Lyle said, her tone flat.

  Hollis glanced involuntarily at his ring finger. He had to concede that point, if only because some people were unlikely to get over certain kinds of emotional trauma. He had seen William Weir on his knees while the gates of Hell swung open before him. Perhaps this was Weir’s chance for redemption. The man could use some serious recovery.

  “Bill Weir is the best chance we have at recovering the ship,” Hollis said, and this time his tone brooked no further argument from Lyle. “He’s going. I want our best people on this.”

  Lyle nodded, moving smoothly back to business at hand, the tension sloughing away like water off a duck’s back. “The Lewis and Clark just returned from patrol in the asteroid belt. She’s docked in Bay Four.”

  Hollis hated to do this to a hard-worked crew that was due for some downtime and R&R, but he had no choice. If Lyle was pointing to the Lewis and Clark rather than an overhauled ship with a rested crew, then there was no other ship within reasonable distance of Daylight Station.

  The Lewis and Clark had a crack USAC crew, one that was used to the pressure and knew how to take orders. They would deal with it. Hollis could trust their captain to keep them in line.

  “Tell Miller to round up his crew,” he told Lyle. “They’re going back out.”

  Chapter Four

  The hull of the Lewis and Clark did a good job of reflecting the state of its crew. The ship was badly in need of a full overhaul, perhaps even a partial refit, after long-haul duty out in the Big Rock Range. Asteroid belt patrol duty offered little in the way of rewards and a great deal in the way of hazards and ship wear.

  The Lewis and Clark had been peppered with micrometeorites and feathered with dust motes that chewed into the metal as she sailed her way through the gulfs between Mars and Jupiter. She was well known to the Belters, the determined asteroid
miners who dug their living out of the rock; for more than a few the Lewis and Clark was a lifesaver.

  The Lewis and Clark was not a pretty ship. Her builders had essentially taken an enormous ion drive and built a spaceship around it, making a place for instrumentation and, grudgingly, for a small crew, a configuration that one British wag had proclaimed to her captain, Miller, as being “All arse and no fore’ead.” A muscleship with armor that would make a cockroach cheer, she could stand up to almost anything short of a high-speed encounter with a big chunk of

  rock. She could easily deal with a no-maintenance turnaround and another run, this one taking them much further than the Big Rock Range.

  Inside, she was no great comfort. Captain Miller, poised loosely in his con as he tried to remain relaxed, looked down on his demesne. Behind thick quartz windows in the nose, the bridge was a compacted nightmare of instruments on two horseshoe levels. Operator’s chairs seemed to have been wedged into the best available positions that might still allow some movement, suggesting that the human component had been the last consideration here.

  Two of those human components were packed too closely together at the front of the bridge. There was enough elbow room, but the feeling on these boats was that you had better maintain a friendship prayer on a long haul, or someone was surely going to get mauled, maimed, or murdered.

  Starck sat to the left, focused on her navigational readouts, running cool but intense. She was on this crew because Miller had wanted her on this crew, and he had had enough clout somewhere to get away with demanding that she be assigned to the Lewis and Clark. Her hair was pulled back, pinned severely in place, giving her angular face the look of a professional ascetic.

  Smith sat to her right,- hunched over his console. Starck glanced aside at the pilot, who was fluttering his hands over keypads, laying hi their course as he read it from her navigational feed to his console. Where she was slim and sharp, Smith was somehow blocky, cropped where she was trim, an abrupt, stiff man. A good pilot, Miller thought, but a lousy diplomat. Fortunately, Smith’s scraps with Belters were few and far between, and someone usually got in between quickly enough to prevent anyone from getting damaged.