by Jon Sauve
Russ reached the door. His light found Augie, floating several inches off the floor and struggling to ground himself again. His light had indeed gone off, and his face looked panicked for the first time that Russ could remember.
Before Russ had taken a third step toward him, Augie’s light suddenly came back on and beamed into his eyes. The face shield tinted automatically, protecting his vision.
“…god!” Augie said. “Oh my god!”
“Augie,” Russ said. “Augie, what happened? Can’t I leave you for two seconds?”
Augie just breathed heavy through his radio for a few moments. Russ came over to pull him back to the floor.
“Captain,” Augie said, breathless. “Emergency signal to Apollonia. Captain.”
“I’m already here,” Max said. “I don’t know what just happened, but your suit’s looking normal again. Carlene and Leena are getting suited up.”
Augie bent over, hands on his knees. “Radio went out completely. Air stopped flowing.”
“Did anything happen directly before?” Max asked.
“Yeah. Russ left.” Augie gave him a dirty look, but it was quickly gone. “Sorry. It was nothing to do with Russ. I was looking through the cupboard, and my light just blinked out. That’s it.”
“Russ,” Max said. “Escort Augie back to the ship at once.”
“You should call Leena and Carlene back,” Augie replied.
“Already have. Come back. You can help me up here. Russ, I’ll send Carlene out with you. That is, if you want to keep going.”
“Of course, captain,” said Russ. “But I’d like to get my suit checked out first.”
“Affirmative. A one hour break. You two get back here and get something to eat.”
“Aye, sir. One last thing. I thought I heard Augie talking a minute ago, but it couldn’t have been him if his radio was out. Interference again?”
“It definitely wasn’t me,” Augie said.
“Interference,” the captain agreed. “I’ll look into it. It’s not your duty to worry about that. Get moving.”
“You’re so brave,” Leena said, burrowing against his chest.
Russ shrugged. They were in the bathrooms, sitting together on a bench by the shower. There was barely room for him to stretch his legs, but it was the only place without active cameras.
“This is my job,” Russ said simply. “I always dreamed of doing this. I always wanted to discover something amazing, or at least weird. Looks like we’ve got both here.”
“Yeah…” Leena looked up at him, her sharp, hawk-like eyes growing softer for a moment. “Do you think Max will send me out?”
“Next shift is me and Carlene. By the time that’s done, I’ll bet Carlene will still be raring to go and Augie will want to get back out and redeem himself. You don’t have to worry for a while.”
She shut her eyes. He held her tighter. There was a knock on the door.
“Russ?” said Augie’s voice. “I know you’re trying to unwind, but I really have to get in there.”
Russ sighed and sat up to open the door. Leena groaned disappointment, drawing her legs up under her on the bench.
Augie looked like he’d been holding it for a while, but as always nothing showed on his face but a bulging vein on his forehead that wasn’t there unless he strained himself. Russ beckoned Leena out, and Augie rushed in with a quick thanks.
“Looks like a number two situation,” Leena said as they headed down the hall. “But I never see that guy eating, or really doing anything but checking our equipment and stores over and over. And watching us.”
“Huh?” Russ looked at her. “Watching us?”
Leena smiled. “You never notice anything, Russ. I always catch him staring. Maybe he thinks we’re just another piece of equipment that’s malfunctioning.”
“Well, I don’t think he cares.” They had reached communications; Russ bent down to pick up the shriveled snow pea pod that Leena had thrown at him earlier. “He just likes to know everything that’s going on.”
Russ suddenly remembered something. He went back to the bathroom and knocked.
“Yeah?” Augie called.
“Hey, Augie,” said Russ. “I just wanted to ask if you found anything in that cupboard.”
“I did. Some papers. I didn’t get a chance to read them before my light went out, though.”
Russ nodded to himself. “Alright, thanks. I’ll let you know what they say when Carlene and I go out again.”
Someone touched his back. Leena had come up behind him. He looked over his shoulder, into her eyes. They told him everything, though she didn’t say a word.
“Hey,” Russ whispered. “You should try and get some sleep. By the time you get up, Carlene and I’ll be back with some great stories. Alright?”
She nodded, drawing him into a quick hug before heading toward crew quarters. Russ stood alone for a moment, wondering if it had been an hour yet. Just then, the cockpit door opened up further down the hall. Max took a half-step out and crooked a finger at him.
Russ was too exhausted to be worried. He went up and let Max herd him in. It hadn’t been long enough since he’d seen the stretch of street they had landed on. Now that he was looking out at it from such familiar surroundings, he couldn’t believe the things he had found, or that he had even been out there at all.
Carlene was here, going through the images from their picture feed. She was lingering around the series Russ had taken showing the view off the edge of the street. Her finger was tangled in the ends of her hair, and she kept tapping her foot.
“Come,” Max said. “Sit.”
“It was just a hug,” Russ said. The captain had never cared much about him and Leena, but he sometimes got more serious during actual missions.
Max stared at him. “What, you and Leena? I’d give you a hug right now too, Russ, if it were my style.” He turned, sweeping his arm at the scene before them. “Look out there. And look at us.”
Russ nodded. He kept remembering the teeth.
“This is gonna change some things,” Max went on. “We’ve made a very large discovery. Now…” His expression changed. “We can’t let anything we find out there dampen our spirit, but… well, there are troublesome things coming to light.”
“Like what? You mean the teeth Augie and me found?”
“More than that. Come over here.”
They went to the controls. Max sat Russ down in his own seat and pointed at a diagram on the screen, showing the pattern of a radio signal.
“That,” the captain said. “The ‘interference’ you heard out there.”
He played it.
“I saw you. Hello?”
“That,” Max said again.
“Can I hear again?” Russ asked. The captain played it again, and Russ listened carefully. “Sounds just like Augie,” he finally said.
“The signal is not very strong,” Max said. “But I agree, it does sound something like Augie. Of course, it wasn’t him. Even if he had pranked us the first time we heard it, which he wouldn’t, the second time his radio wasn’t even functioning. I have the evidence of that here as well.”
“It wasn’t Augie,” Russ agreed. “Then what?”
“GEP has been checking, and there are no other vessels anywhere in the neighborhood of us. Actually, they specifically requested that all ships keep their distance. So, interference… highly unlikely.”
“Still could be.”
“What’s more, though,” Max added, “our radios right now are set to hear only each other, or from GEP HQ on the moon. Private frequency. I didn’t know until just a moment ago. GEP went and changed it on us. Apparently, we are temporarily no longer working for Triple P. We are working straight for the GEP.”
Russ’s mouth fell open. He stared out into the street.
“It wasn’t Augie,” said Max, “and it wasn’t from another ship. You can come to your own conclusions, but I’d like to hear them.”
“Someone at GEP messing wi
th us,” said Russ.
“They’d have been fired after the first incident and we wouldn’t have had a second one.”
“Someone from the ship.”
“Not like Augie, and again, he couldn’t have. Carlene and Leena were here with me for the duration of your and Augie’s spacewalk, except for a few short moments between when I sent them to help Augie and when I drew them back. Besides, it didn’t sound like a woman to me.”
Carlene was still moving slowly through the pictures, but it was obvious her mind wasn’t on them.
“From…” Russ shivered and sat lower in the seat. “From out there?”
“The street.” Max nodded. “That’s the question, Russ. I’ve been thinking about what you said before we landed, that the street and the houses were a façade created by some alien civilization, or maybe a band of creative and wealthy criminals. I still don’t think either of those are it. What I think…”
Carlene had stopped going through the pictures now. Russ shut his eyes, then opened them; now he couldn’t get the image of Augie, drifting off the floor and choking in his suit, out of his mind.
“What I think,” Max said, “is that this was some independent, off-the-record experiment. Maybe to try and find out how various things degrade while in space. The voice… could be a distress signal on a loop.”
“So, it’s a ship of some kind?” Russ asked.
“That’s my belief. I think there must be an entrance to a lower deck somewhere out there.” Max had been pacing, but now he stopped before the windscreen, gazing out with his hands on his hips. “Something must have went wrong with it. Even disregarding the style of the architecture, all of this looks very old. It’s been out here a while. If we can get below deck, we’ll either find empty rooms or skeletons. But we have to find the way in first.”
“This isn’t sitting right with me,” said Russ. “If it’s a cycling distress signal, it would say the same thing each time.”
“And it wouldn’t be so sporadic. Unless the hardware were damaged in some way.”
Russ nodded and got to his feet. “Aye, sir. So, what’s the priority of the next walk?”
Max waved a hand. “I’m not the sort of man to get ahead of myself. First, you will finish your exploration of the second house, and then move through the others. I’ll send Augie and Leena out in a little while to look into that locked basement. And I have one new objective; keep your eyes extra sharp this time, search for anything that could be an entrance into the lower deck. If you do find it, you are not to even touch it until I give the word. Got that, Carlene?”
She had started looking through the pictures again. “Aye, captain. Whenever you’re ready, Russ.”
“My suit?” he asked.
“Carlene triple-checked it,” said Max. “Nothing wrong with it. But there didn’t seem to be anything wrong with Augie’s either, so be careful.”
Russ nodded and left the cockpit.
Carlene already had her suit half-on when Russ finally came into the airlock. He must have been with Leena. There was a sickly paleness to his face.
“Alright?” Carlene asked, pausing to do up her hair.
He wiped his mouth. “Alright. Let’s, uh… let’s get suited up.”
They did so. Apart from Augie, Russ was the most experienced of the crew in suiting up, and he was finished quickly. Max began the opening sequence as soon as Carlene was ready.
She had thought the pictures and video feed from Russ and Augie would have given her a good idea of the street - or the stretch, as GEP had codenamed it – but they did not. As soon as she stepped out she felt as if something was pulling her toward the edge, trying to shove her over. She pressed her back into the wall of the ship and slid along it until she was at a safe distance.
Russ was already powering on toward the second house. She followed, trying to suppress the urge to look behind her. But it got the better of her a few times, and she had to give in.
“If you’re not fond of a hundred teeth hitting you in the face,” Russ said, “you should wait out here.”
Carlene looked ahead. They had reached the second house, and Russ was waiting for her near the doorway. “You shouldn’t get ahead of me like that,” she said.
“You shouldn’t fall behind,” he replied. “I was moving at an ordinary pace.”
Carlene licked her lips, suppressing a rebuttal. She had never liked Russ much, but he was still another human being, and she wanted to rush over next to him. But her scientific mind won over; she paused for a time, looking further up the street. The three houses no one had entered yet stood as desolate and abandoned as they had for centuries, as far as she knew. At the very end there was a small, open metal structure with what looked like a bench inside.
“Captain,” she said. “Do you see that? Captain?”
“I’m here, just distracted. Yeah, I see it. Looks like… a waiting area for public transport. Very good. Continue on.”
She went to Russ. He stood aside to let her enter first.
“I guess you’re setting the pace?” he said.
She ignored him and the teeth drifting past her, instead heading toward the cupboard that Augie had been searching through. She opened it; the door came off completely, and she shoved it aside.
“Here we go,” she said.
“Envelopes,” said the captain. “Mail. See who it’s addressed to.”
Russ came to look over her shoulder. “To Karl Ryan. The doctor.”
The captain laughed. “Remember that drill you found? ‘He’ was supposed to be a dentist, I think.”
“I guess we know who lived here,” Carlene said.
“Did you get anything about the drugs we found?” Russ asked.
“Uh-huh, both of them,” the captain replied. “Hydrocodone acetaminophen was a pain reliever. Misoprostol was used for a number of things, most of them disturbing and probably unimportant. Carlene, are the envelopes sealed?”
“No, sir.”
“Open? Good. Then it won’t matter if you take the mail out and read it. Just be careful.”
“Aye, sir.” She pressed at each end of the envelope to flare the opening, then pinched the paper inside between two fingers. “The letters have faded,” she announced as she unfolded the sheet, “but seem legible.”
She began to read, and Russ followed along with his eyes.
“To Mr. Karl Connor Ryan,
We regret to inform you that your paper was not accepted by our publication. None of the messages you tried to get across reached us fully, we are sorry to say. Perhaps we are just not the intended recipient.
Best of luck,
The S.A. Society of Science and Medicine”
“Got it,” Max said. “I’m sending it to GEP to see what they think. The other envelope, now.”
“Aye, sir,” said Carlene, and she read it aloud.
“Dear Karl,
I’ve tried reaching you over the phone. I even came to your door, and perhaps it was better you didn’t answer, because I realize now this isn’t a message to give you face to face.
Things are fine here. But I keep thinking of you, and the duty we share, and I can’t even enjoy my time off.
But I came to a final decision last night. Final, and forever. By the time you get this in your mailbox, I’ll be long gone and you will never see me again. This is the best way. I couldn’t stand to hear your voice again.
When we lost the baby, I think it destroyed something in my soul. None of this is right. I told you I could never be happy without you. That is still true, but the thing is, I’ll never be happy with you either. I am so sorry about what happened.”
“Doesn’t say who it’s from,” Russ remarked.
Carlene looked back at the envelope. “Here. From… what? Tertia Araneta!”
The name was instantly familiar. Max groaned over the radio, then said, “I get it now. Misoprostol. It was sometimes used to induce birth, either in the case of unwanted pregnancy or miscarriage.”
Carlene shut her eyes. “Oh, Jesus, don’t say that, please.”
“It’s fine, Carlene. As I said earlier, I doubt any of this is real. If it was an experiment, I’ll bet the creators made up this story to give themselves some entertainment. Could have picked something less depressing, though.”
Carlene put the letters back, sniffing back her tears. Russ moved away, swatting teeth around with his hand.
“Huh,” he said. “What was the bottle doing in De Acosta’s house?”
“Who knows?” said Max. “Was that the last envelope? Good. Move on to the next room.”
Max leaned back in his seat after giving the instruction, watching on two screens as Carlene and Russ headed past the stairs.
He nearly fell out of it when a loud sound blared through the radio. It was a crunching, grating, static-filled sound. Flinging all the curses he usually kept in when Carlene was around, he reached out to turn the volume down.
“-was that!” Carlene was saying.
“Quiet,” Max ordered, slowly dialing the volume back up. “Apollonia, begin analysis on incoming radio signal.”
Even without the output of the analyzer to guide him, he could begin to pick out words. They showed up on the screen, known phrases listed one after the other. First, what the analyzer had picked up of their own words. Then, things none of them had said.
“Apollonia RSA output on designated signal:
Detected words –
“What was that”
“Quiet”
“Watching us”
“Everything”
“Don’t go”
“Where is it”
“Not a thing”
“Give me”
The analyzer stopped outputting, and there was nothing but white noise. Finally, the signal cut off entirely.
“What did it get?” Russ asked. “Captain, what did it hear?”
“Apollonia,” Max said, “run voice analysis on last RSA file.”
The words vanished, whisked away into the ship’s records. Others replaced them.
“Voice analysis complete.
Number of unique voices: 1 male, 1 female
Signal strength: weak
Broadcast address:”