Event Horizon

by Steven E. Mcdonald

  That should have been impossible, Weir reflected. Miller knew that too, going by the tinny sigh over the radio link.

  A change in the frantic movement on Justin’s monitor drew Weir’s attention away from Starck’s predicament. Justin had given up his fastball flying technique now, in favor of more considered movement. As Weir watched, the image from Justin’s camera stabilized and focused. Weir smiled, though it was an empty smile. Justin was about to encounter one of the truths of the Event Horizon.

  Justin stood before an immense dark door, perhaps the biggest pressure door he had ever seen in his life. Despite himself, he was extremely impressed. If he had believed in such books of mythology, he might even have found something biblical about it.

  As it was, it was big. Goddamned big. Huge, in fact.

  Cheerfully, he said, “I’ve reached the First Containment door.”

  “The engineering decks are on the other side,” Weir answered. Justin felt a flash of annoyance at the scientist. Weir might be one of the most brilliant minds ever to juggle an equation, but he was surely one condescending sonofabitch when he felt like it.

  Justin did not bother to acknowledge Weir’s statement. He reached out and touched the access panel at his right hand side. The door opened with ponderous grace.

  Justin was delighted to see yet more mystery revealed behind this First Containment door. He moved forward to see more clearly, and to give his camera a better chance to pick up what he was seeing. He was looking into a long corridor section, tube-shaped. The engineers who had built the ship had, for some arcane reason, set this section of corridor to spinning like a turbine, a shell outside the access tube whirling at dizzying speed. From Justin’s vantage point, it looked as though alternating sections were spinning in different directions. There was surprisingly little noise, but he figured most of it operated in vacuum to cut down on friction.

  His head spun as he tried to focus on this weird assembly. Finally, he looked away, trying to get his bearings back. “Cool,” he said. “What’s all this do?”

  Weir said, “It allows you to enter the Second Containment without compromising the magnetic fields.”

  Okay, so you ‘re into big showy rigs. Justin suspected that the same result could have been achieved with half the equipment and a quarter of the power, but he wasn’t the one who had the brain the size of Betelgeuse.

  “Looks like a meatgrinder,” he said, and stepped forward, his breath echoing in his helmet.

  Dr. Weir, what’s this door?” Peters asked.

  She had continued all the way down the main corridor until the corridor had ended in a pressure door. She played her helmet light over it, over the walls and floor nearby. Nothing to be seen.

  “You’re at the bridge, Ms. Peters,” Weir said over the radio link.

  She took a deep breath and started to reach for the door controls.

  Miller passed through a hatchway into what appeared to be some kind of medical facility, either the operating theater or some kind of surgical lab.

  All of the tables were empty, reflecting his helmet light, and as he turned his head he caught glimpses of surgical instruments and equipment floating aimlessly in the microgravity.

  “I’m in Medical,” he said, ducking out of the way of a wandering forceps.

  He continued his exploration, moving cautiously through the room, inspecting everything. “No casualties. It looks like this place hasn’t been used.”

  Secured drug lockers, empty biohazard and sharps containers, just an ugly assortment of floating hardware to con-‘tend with. Miller’s skin was crawling with cold. He was beginning to think Smith was right, that they should not have come here.

  Over the radio link, Weir said, “You still haven’t seen any crew?”

  “If we saw any crew, Doctor, you’d know about it.” He turned his head, looked down at the floor, looking for clues and coming up with nothing. Under his breath he muttered, “This place is a tomb.”

  He took a step forward.

  Someone tapped him on the shoulder.

  “Fuck!” Miller yelled, whirling, his hands coming up, ready to strike out.

  An empty glove drifted past his faceplate, tumbling slowly. He stared at it as it floated away. His heart was thundering in his chest and his breathing was roaring in his ears.

  “Miller?” Starck was demanding over the radio link. “You okay?”

  “I’m fine,” he said, the words coming as a reflex. He slowed his breathing, tried to get his heart to slow down to a more normal rate. He could feel the clamminess of sweat on his skin, cooled by the air circulating through his suit.

  “Your pulse is elevated,” DJ said over the radio link. “Are you sure you’re—”

  “I’m fine,” Miller snapped, which put a stop to any further questions from DJ.

  He turned, pushing the fright to the back of his mind. Only inanimate objects, nothing more. Finding a computer console, he set to work. He had had enough of fishing around in the dark. They needed light, air, warmth.

  He settled in to start hacking into the ship’s systems.

  Weir hunched over in his seat, his hands clenched into fists. He stared at the monitors, but nothing new was revealed.

  “Where are they?” he whispered.

  Starck turned to him, her face set. “If anyone’s there to be saved, Miller’s going to save them. No one’s got more hands-on experience in this.

  He’s one of the few captains who’ve ever worked the Outer Reach.”

  That got Weir’s attention for the moment. “He’s been past Mars?”

  Starck turned her head, checking displays. “He served on the Goliath.’”

  Weir shuffled information in his mind. “The Goliath? Wasn’t that ship destroyed in a fire?”

  “They were trying to rescue a supply shuttle bound for Titan,” Starck said, slowly. “The freighter’s tanks ruptured, flooded both ships with pure oxygen.”

  That was one of the great spacer nightmares: a ship filled with oxygen was a deathtrap about to happen. “Miller and three others barely made it to a lifeboat. If not for Miller, no one would have made it.”

  Weir gazed at her, thoughtful. Miller was strong, then, resourceful. That was good.

  Wasn’t it?

  Peters had managed to open the hatch to the bridge. Taking a deep breath, she eased inside, glancing quickly around.

  “Okay,” she said, “I’m on the bridge.”

  She moved slowly around, finding a briefing table and several chairs. This was an antechamber to the bridge, a small briefing room that the crew would have used for mission discussions and assignments. She looked over the table and chairs but found no indication that they had ever been used.

  There was a brilliant flash of lightning, storm activity going on in the atmosphere of the planet beneath them. She started to look up, but the flash had thrown off her night vision for a few moments.

  She turned to move deeper into the bridge, leaving behind, high up on a wall, unnoticed, a frozen mass of blood and tissue that had once been a living human being.

  Miller worked at the science station for a couple of minutes, and was suddenly rewarded by displays lighting up. He smiled to himself. Something was finally going the way he wanted it. This was something he could deal with.

  Pausing for a moment, he said, ‘ The science workstation has power. I’ll see if I can find the crew from here.”

  He got back to work.

  We’re not going to find anyone,” Smith said to Starck, his face an angry mask. “This place is dead.”

  Weir ignored him, ignored Miller’s monitor and Justin’s continuing walk into engineering. He was staring at Peters’ monitor now, reading the details of the bridge as best he could. They needed to restore power to the Event Horizon as quickly as possible.

  “Ms. Peters,” Weir said softly, “turn back and to your left, please.”

  He watched as Peters’ camera view moved, bringing something new into view.

 
Starck leaned over, peering at the monitor, then at Weir. “What is it?”

  “Ship’s log,” Weir said.

  “I see it,” Peters said, and the view on her monitor shifted again.

  Peters stepped toward the log unit. It was really nothing more than a small videodisc unit built into one of the consoles, but it was enough to keep a running record of bridge and ship activities.

  She reached down and pressed the eject tab. Nothing happened. She leaned down, checked that it was receiving power. A small green light was glowing in one corner of the operations panel. She tried the eject button again, without success.

  “It’s stuck,” she said.

  She reached down to her utility belt, extracting a small probe. Carefully, she slipped the probe into the video unit, feeling around until she was sure she had the eject mechanism. She pressed down, pulled back, felt something give.

  A tiny laserdisc emerged halfway from the unit, jamming there. Peters grasped it carefully and pulled, but the disc would not move any further. She tugged again, frustrating herself in the effort.

  “It’s really jammed in there,” she said.

  She sighed, then growled softly. They needed that disc, needed it badly. It might well answer a lot of the questions about the fate of the crew. It might even answer some of the questions about the disappearance of the Event Horizon. All things considered, she would be glad to see Weir’s mind put at ease.

  She tried the probe again, trying to pull the laserdisc away from whatever part of the mechanism was jamming it in place. This did not seem to help. Once again she grasped the disc and pulled, was frustrated, tugged harder, thought she had it this time, but didn’t.

  All the air rushing out of her in one explosive gasp, she put all of her strength into getting the disc loose. This time it came free, sending her spinning and tumbling in the microgravity.

  She flung an arm out, trying to stabilize herself long enough to get back to a position where she might be able to stop her motion. Her heart leapt into her mouth as her helmet lights flashed on something floating in the bridge with her.

  She turned helplessly, only to find herself being struck by something with considerable mass. Holding on to the laserdisc with her right hand, she reached out with her left, grasping cloth and, beneath that, something hard.

  A face came into view, lit brightly by her helmet lamps. A man’s face, contorted, mouth open, swollen tongue protruding. The veins stood out, bloated and frozen, all over his face and neck.

  She stared for a moment, her breath catching in her throat. She pushed away from the body, rebounded from a wall, managed to bounce herself down to the deck, catching hold of the edge of a console to stop herself from moving any further.

  Her tone utterly professional, she said, “I found one.” Her heart was pounding, but it did not feel as though she was in any danger of her control slipping. Good enough.

  Over the radio link, Miller said, “Alive?”

  “Corpsicle,” she said.

  She lifted her head, aiming her lights up at the floating corpse. Anchoring herself against one of the console units, she reached up, snagging the corpse by a foot, pulling it down.

  Weir sat back now, regarding the face of the dead man on Peters’ monitor.

  Whoever he was, he was a mess, and they’d be lucky to identify him easily.

  DJ came into the bridge, joining Weir and Starck at the monitors.

  “What happened to his eyes?” Smith said, staring at the screen.

  “Explosive decompression,” Starck said.

  DJ shook his head. “Decompression wouldn’t do that.”

  Weir had to agree there. The dead man’s eyes had been gouged out, going by the images.

  That would have to wait for the time being. Justin had finished his long walk.

  Chapter Fourteen

  Justin walked slowly out of the spinning tube, his head filled with an annoying buzz that he knew he would not be rid of for some time. He looked around, finding himself in some kind of operational alcove that opened out into a huge spherical chamber.

  It was not easy to see anything. His helmet light reflected from a gray slick that seemed to coat everything in the alcove. He had only a moment to try and figure out which way to turn before something wet and massy struck his suit. Liquid gray shot up in front of his faceplate, out in front of his hands, splashing over his fingers. Other floating globules of liquid caught the light from his helmet.

  Then his light was gone, coated by the same thick gray fluid as a another globule struck his helmet.

  He reached up, trying to clear the stuff from his helmet. He managed to get some of his light back, but it was very little help. This was already trouble, and not likely to get much better if he stayed in here.

  For the benefit of those on the bridge, he said, “I’m in the Second Containment. There must have been a coolant leak.” He wiped at his faceplate and helmet lights again. Looking around, he was able to get an idea of just how much of the gray stuff was actually hanging in the air. Fluid in microgravity was a menace. “Man, this shit is everywhere. I can’t see a damn thing.”

  That wasn’t quite true. There was a console nearby, facing out into the larger chamber. He could, see some dim lights on the board, beneath the muck.

  He floated himself over to it, batting balls of coolant out of the way, mainly causing them to become smaller balls of coolant. Grabbing the edge of the console with one hand, he hauled himself down, anchoring himself as best he could while he used one glove to wipe coolant away from the console. He tried not to think about the radiation level.

  His attempt at cleanup yielded good results. The board was alive and functional, operating in standby mode. He tapped keypads and was rewarded by the appearance of a variety of readouts.

  “The reactor’s still hot,” he said, putting pieces together as he gathered data from the console. “Coolant level is on reserve, but within the safe-line.”

  He tapped in more commands.

  The lights came up abruptly, almost blinding him. “I did it!” he crowed, feeling pleased with himself for a moment.

  The air was thick with lead-gray balls of coolant. He looked around, finding that the viscous fluid had indeed coated just about every surface.

  He turned his attention away from the control area and looked out towards the larger chamber. That chamber had lit up too, lights coming on at all angles.

  Justin stood and stared for a few moments, his mouth hanging open in awe.

  He had expected a large open area here, but this was off the scale. There were baseball stadiums smaller than the Second Containment. The curving walls rose for dozens of meters overhead, sank for dozens of meters below, a rippling darkness studded with the spiky forms of control rods.

  “Holy shit,” Justin said, trying to take it all in.

  At the center of the Second Containment, as black as midnight, was an unholy-looking construction. Justin estimated it to be at least ten meters in diameter, perhaps larger, a broad torus covered on the outside by a series of spikes, occupied on the inside by a huge dark sphere that resembled nothing more than a rotted, mottled orange. Trying to make sense of the construction, Justin felt his sense of perspective being twisted around. He felt faintly sick.

  Parts of the device seemed to be moving, shifting, the surfaces slick and oily. He had the feeling that there was enormous power here. Time and space were under siege.

  His gut clenched.

  “Justin?” It was Cooper. The voice jolted him back into place, letting him grasp his professional state of mind.

  “I think I found something,” he said.

  He could not stop staring.

  Starck, Weir, and Smith were huddled around the monitor carrying Justin’s video feed. For a while the images had been smeary, thanks to the coolant, but Justin had managed to remove most of it, clearing the image up considerably.

  The addition of decent amounts of light had helped.

  Weir felt relaxed. The
Event Horizon was not in the best shape, but it was still flightworthy, perhaps even capable of carrying out its intended function of warp flight.

  “What is that?” Starck asked, pointing at the construction hi the middle of the screen. It was tricky to watch—even seen through a relatively poor vid feed, the device seemed to shift and twist, playing hell with rational perspective.

  Weir sat forward, not bothering to hide the pleasure he felt in his creation. “That’s the Core—the gravity drive. The heart of the ship,”

  Smith turned to look at Weir. “You built that?”

  “Yes.”

  Smith was silent for a long moment, watching Weir. “You didn’t have a very happy childhood, did you?”

  Justin eased past the main console, and down onto the gantry that led out into the center of the Second Containment. From this point of view, the containment unit was even more impressive, even if it did feel a little like being on the inside of the universe’s biggest Iron Maiden.

  He looked upward, having to strain to do so, seeing lights overhead that appeared to be barely more than twinkles in the night. He had to wonder at the design ethic behind all of this—Weir and his team had to have lived by night alone to have created something as grim as this section.

  He did not want to consider what it took to create something like the strangeness lurking in the heart of this darkness. The human mind was not meant to go around such corners, even if the corporeal form could make the journey. He was used to the notion of crossing between the worlds, but this was a doorway it would be safer not to go through.

  He closed on the construction, focusing on the sphere inside the torus.

  Something rippled across the surface, vanished, rippled again. The last thing they needed now was for this thing to crack open and spill itself all over the ship.

  “I think I see something,” he said, and reached down to his belt, pulling out a tool, a sensor unit that would give him a better idea as to whether or not there was a rupture in the Core.

  He leaned in toward the Core.

  Starck jerked back, startled as Justin’s monitor went to static. The radio link hissed like a snakepit for a moment, before the filters cut in and squelched the racket.