The Daedalus Incident

by Michael J. Martinez

Weatherby scowled. “You’re a meddler of the worst sort.”

  “Most assuredly.” Finch winked at him, then walked off toward the hatch to the gun deck, nodding at Anne as he went.

  Weatherby and Anne stood apart for a few moments before she broke the awkward silence. “I did wonder why Dr. Finch kept filling that boy’s glass.”

  “Indeed,” Weatherby allowed, his eyes focused on the planking at Anne’s feet. “He may yet infect us all with his decadent ways.”

  Anne walked past him, back toward the bowsprit, leaving a swirl of dress and hair in her wake. “I find his heart to be in the right place, even if his judgment is lacking,” she said.

  Weatherby kept pace a few feet back. “I will say he has come a long way from whence I found him.”

  They walked on in silence, meandering around the main deck in a circle for several minutes. A frigate is large enough for a person to gain exercise under the stars, but not so long that the sights and sounds of the ship do not bore after a short while.

  Finally, Anne stopped and turned suddenly, prompting Weatherby to nearly stumble in his effort not to collide with her. “So what is it, Tom?”

  Weatherby straightened up, pulling on his coat to smooth it out. “I’m not sure I understand.”

  Anne scowled deeply at him, anguish beginning to mar the simple beauty of her face. “You must think me a fool, then, for not noticing how you’ve barely spoken to me since Callisto. You have switched watches with your fellows so that we are never alone together. You treat me distantly and, some would say, quite rudely, even though I bargained with both the Xan and St. Germain to bring you back from death’s very door! So I say again, what is it, Tom?”

  Weatherby felt his heart tighten, seemingly echoing the pistol shot he endured on Callisto. “I have not meant to offend you,” he stammered. “I—”

  “No, you simply mean to avoid me,” she snapped. “You’ve removed yourself from all kindness, compassion and intimacy. Why?”

  “Perhaps now is not the best time,” Weatherby said softly, looking at the boards of the deck.

  “It is the only time,” Anne said. “What sin have I committed against you?”

  “You’ve committed no sin against…me,” he said, wishing desperately to be done with the conversation.

  “As I thought,” Anne snapped, stalking off down the deck before whirling around again. “You would hold my other sins against me, even though I’ve given you naught but my very best self.”

  Weatherby looked up at her. “I am sorry, Miss Baker. I know that your life has not been an easy one.”

  “You know nothing of it,” she said coldly. “You write to your father often, I’ve seen it. Your mother and sisters await you in England. You do your duty and bury your head in your books. You’ve never known hunger, or thirst, or loneliness. You’ve never known desperation.”

  The young officer was stunned by the forthrightness of her words, and the truth of them. “No, I have not,” he said quietly.

  “You think it a sin to survive?” she went on. “God gave me this life, and then saw fit to inflict the travails through which I’ve suffered. So should I have wasted His gift and gone to meet Him early, or broken His rules for a chance at survival? What is the greater sin?”

  Weatherby regarded the decking once more, at a complete loss for words. His chest ached, his stomach protested, and his mind reeled. But Anne was in no mood to grant him reprieve.

  “Yes, I sold my favor on Elizabeth Mercuris,” she hissed. “Yes, that is how I learned to use a blade to defend myself, for if I did not, I’d surely be dead already. Yes, that is how I met Roger. And despite how we met, he still showed me kindness, perhaps the first person in the Known Worlds to do so. He educated me, prepared me to make a better life for myself. He was a blessing.

  “And you,” she added, waving a dismissive hand at Weatherby. “You would judge me for it. Even after seeing Elizabeth Mercuris with your own eyes. Surely the Royal Navy has not beaten all the imagination from you. How would you expect a 12-year-old orphan to survive in such a place? There is no almshouse. No Church of England. No missionary would dare set foot upon the place.

  “So tell me, Mister Weatherby,” she said. “Would you rather I not have been here at all? Or would you rather I have taken the road I chose, if it meant meeting you in the end?”

  Weatherby’s mind raced, but he could form no words, torn between her past, their present and his future. He could only look her in the eye, the remorse and sorrow in his face meeting her anger.

  “Good night, Lieutenant,” she said, stalking off toward the stairs leading below.

  Weatherby watched her go before slumping down upon the railing, his heart once again pierced—and far more thoroughly than mere shot could accomplish.

  Shortly after Anne went below, another flash of light erupted forward, threatening to engulf the entire bow of the ship in bright white light. Laughter and cheers filtered through the Void to Weatherby’s ears.

  He could hear Anne’s voice among them. He watched sullenly as an arc of what appeared to be lightning blazed out of one of the forward gun ports, into the Void—he was too heartbroken to even start at the sight.

  July 28, 2132

  McAuliffe felt empty—and eerie. Granted, it was well past midnight, and Shaila pulled enough night shifts to know what the base looked like when everyone was asleep. But they weren’t asleep—they were gone. She walked through the Hub, looking at the rows and rows of pressure suit lockers. Would anybody be using them again? Would Billiton be able to come back? Or was Mars irreparably broken somehow?

  Shaila shunted those thoughts aside and made her way to the containment lab. She had a couple of pings from the computer to let her know that the book had written itself more than once during the evac. And while she wanted to read what happened next—Did Weatherby escape from the Xan? Was that the real Count St. Germain?—Washington’s comment had latched onto her brain.

  She pulled over a chair and sat down in front of a workstation. There were at least four major instances in which Mars was getting crazy—the initial earthquake with Stephane and Kaczynski; the second one with Stephane and Yuna; the collapse at Site Six; and whatever happened earlier that afternoon that knocked out the satellites and sensor array.

  She isolated the time-stamps on every one of those incidents, right down to the millisecond, then opened the sensor database and ran a search over the five minutes preceding each instance. It was a massive task, considering that she was combing through the data generated by every sensor on base, as well as those outside, and looking at every single bit of data generated by those sensors. Full radiation scans, audio/video, radio transmissions—she was looking at the complete spectrum of data available to her.

  Shaila hoped that the computer would find some similarity in those five minutes, some miniscule bit of…something…that she could use to track down what was happening. She slumped in her chair. It was a needle in a haystack if there ever was one, and the computer would take a while to crunch the numbers.

  The door to the lab opened. “Hello,” came a familiar and welcome voice.

  “Shouldn’t you be getting some shut-eye?”

  She turned to see Stephane taking a seat next to her. “How? A pyramid shows up on Mars and I am supposed to just take a nap?”

  “I know how you feel,” she said. “What have you been up to?”

  Stephane called up some notes on his datapad as he spoke. “We have analyzed the holovid that miner took. We found some things.”

  “Such as?”

  “Well, it cannot be the result of some natural occurrence. The angles on each of these levels—tiers, is it?—is now a perfect 90 degrees, give or take a minute or two. And each tier is exactly five-sixths the volume of the one beneath it. If that is not an intelligent design, I do not know what is,” he said. “I once visited Egypt, and their older pyramids were step pyramids. They were tombs, ancient things.”

  “Yeah, this reminds me of th
at, too. Like a ceremonial structure. A tomb, or a temple or something. And those canals?” Shaila shook her head. “Christ, this is crazy.”

  Stephane sighed, tossing his datapad on the workstation. “So what do you think it is? Aliens?” Shaila tried to see if he was kidding or not, but his face was dead serious.

  “It sounds weird, right?” she said. “Aliens. I keep thinking of little green men, pointy ears, bumpy foreheads. But something just sprouted up out there, something that isn’t natural. Something that was made by someone. That someone wasn’t us—us as in people. So, by definition, yes, that leaves aliens.”

  Stephane gave a small chuckle. “Oh, my. That would be something. What do you think Houston will tell us to do?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if Houston just orders us right off the planet,” she said. “If you were running Earth, would you want a bunch of misfits and newbies making your first contact with an alien species? No, you’d get them on the next ship home and bring in someone else.”

  “You are not a misfit, Shay. Neither is Diaz. Or Dr. Hiyashi. You could do it,” Stephane said earnestly. “Maybe you will.”

  Shaila slouched further in her chair, watching the computer sift data. “Oh, no. Nobody wants me shaking hands with the little green men.”

  “Please. You are perfectly qualified to be here, you know. You are trained.”

  “Stephane, trust me,” she said with growing impatience. “JSC does not want me on the front lines of something like that.”

  The Frenchman threw up his hands, becoming agitated once more. “Why? All I see here is a competent person who is doing very well even though she is facing something very extraordinary. Did you not come up with a theory that even Evan Greene liked? Did you not save lives today?”

  “Dammit, Steve,” Shaila began, sitting up again, prepared to say something angry and dismissive. She thought better of it after a moment, however. “Stephane…”

  He gave her a look that, in any other moment, would’ve gotten him either punched or kissed. Potentially both. “All right. Please. Talk to me. What happened to you?”

  Shaila stood up and began slowly walking around the small room, arms wrapped around her. She took a deep breath before starting, realizing that it felt good to be able to talk about this. Whether it was with him in particular, or just in general, she didn’t know. “OK. Atlantis. Two years ago. Jovian survey mission. I was the pilot, the number two, even though the official record doesn’t reflect that. The reports said we had an accident way before reaching Jupiter, but that was a cover.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the mission was a clusterfuck from the start,” Shaila said. “The Chinese were way ahead of us in getting their Jovian exploitation program up and running. Their ships were shit hot—multiple landers, all the bells and whistles, you name it. They would’ve owned Jupiter space. It would’ve been their first major win, and they had some heavy corporate backing. Any and all resources there would’ve been all theirs for the taking.

  “So the Atlantis program was rushed. Yeah, JSC had been to Jupiter a bunch of times. Hell, Yuna was on the first Galilean survey mission. But we never did anything serious after that. So with all those tensions rising politically between the E.U. and the Chinese, they wanted us to get there first. And we had our own corporate backers who were itching to get one up on the competition.

  “So we went, secretly. We launched a full year ahead of schedule, and we went without a few key pieces. But we were going to get there first. And we did, too.”

  “Atlantis actually made it to Jupiter?” Stephane asked, stunned. “You made it to Jupiter?”

  “For all of two days,” Shaila said ruefully.

  “I do not understand.”

  “I’m getting to that. So we’re inserting ourselves into Jupiter orbit, and the commander had the stick for the atmospheric braking maneuver.”

  “Atmospheric breaking?” Stephane asked. “You broke Jupiter’s atmosphere?”

  “Jesus, no. That’s where you use Jupiter’s gravity and atmospheric drag to slow the vehicle,” Shaila said, smiling despite herself. “Otherwise, you just slingshot off Jupiter and probably head right out of the solar system.”

  “I see. And?”

  “Everything was fine. Our thrusters fired on cue, our heat shield deployed, we hit the atmosphere at the right angle. It went swimmingly until we ran smack into a bloody rock.”

  “A rock?” Stephane asked. “A real rock?”

  “Jupiter’s gravity captures asteroids from the Belt, rogue comets, you name it. It even has a ring system, though not as big as Saturn’s. So there are rocks out there. And this particular rock was small enough to go undetected—perhaps only four meters by five meters. But big enough to cause a massive problem for us when it hit our midsection.”

  Shaila paused a moment to gather herself. “We knew going in there could be a potential problem with debris, but the countermeasures weren’t ready. JSC figured we could maneuver around anything we might encounter. But when you’re in the middle of atmospheric braking, you can’t exactly bob and weave. And the right rock came floating by at exactly the right moment. Million-to-one shot, and it was our lucky day.”

  Shaila smiled sadly at her own joke, but Stephane looked very serious, watching her intently as he listened.

  “Anyway, we immediately lost pressurization in the labs, four people gone, just like that. The skipper gave me the stick, went back to assess the damage. That was the last time I saw him. We could’ve survived the hit intact, but the rad shielding was compromised in several places. Only a handful of compartments remained rad-safe. The cockpit, the forward crew space. That’s it.”

  “How much radiation?” Stephane asked quietly.

  “About 8,000 rems.”

  Stephane nodded soberly. Few people could survive exposure to even a tenth that amount, and even then, their lives would be hellish. “How quick was it for them?”

  Shaila closed her eyes once more and continued, haltingly. “Not quick enough. It took about seven hours for the last of them to die. And they were in excruciating pain. They begged me to let them back into the forward compartments. And I couldn’t. Not without exposing myself to the radiation. They were already dead, right? They had zero chance of survival. But I had to hear them. Talk to them. Be with them on the comm. All the while, they’re dying horribly.” She shivered. “Seven people.”

  Stephane nodded, but didn’t say anything. Shaila appreciated that, somehow.

  “The impact took out the antenna, so calling Earth was impossible,” she said, wiping away a few errant tears and focusing on the story itself. “They had no idea what happened, and I was the only one left. Computers were still functioning, but most of the processing power was in the lab section. It took two days to harness enough computing power to calculate a course home. It was a crap orbit, too—Earth was too far off. So between that and a jury-rigged engine routine, it took thirteen months to get home.”

  “How did you survive that long?”

  She actually smiled at that. “I’m bloody stubborn, I suppose. The crew area had enough food. I managed to get the ship in a spin that would give me at least a little gravity, but the rehab was awful anyway. A month before I could walk again.”

  Stephane nodded. “You are right. You are stubborn. What happened when you came back?”

  Shaila shrugged. “They managed to catch my local comm signals a few weeks out, so they were ready. I figured out a lunar braking orbit, and one of the shuttles rendezvoused with me, brought me back to Earth. There was a review board, of course. I was cleared. They said I did the right thing after, with the crew and all.”

  “Of course you did,” he said.

  “Didn’t feel like it. I suppose I at least brought their bodies home for burial.” She wiped away her tears angrily. “They asked if I wanted out, wanted to start over somehow. How do you do that? This was all I’ve ever known, you know? I always wanted to be in space. So I said no. And after reh
ab and a little stint in psych—which was useless and awful—here I am. I applied for other missions, but got turned down enough to know that nobody wants me on board. Nobody knows enough of the details to get the full picture, so there’s just this big hunk of dark matter on my record that raises eyebrows.” And that, she thought to herself, is why nobody—not even Stephane—will ever know about the visions and voices she heard in that cave.

  Stephane weighed his thoughts carefully before speaking. “Shay, darling. What happened was unfair. But you are still a very good astronaut. You brought that ship back all the way from Jupiter, all by yourself. You have such experience now. You must keep trying.”

  She grimaced. “Trying to do what? Get rejected again for more missions? Maybe they’re right. I’ve thought about leaving JSC, going corporate. I don’t know what to do, Steve. Sorry, Stephane.”

  He smiled. “It is OK for you to call me Steve. Everyone does.”

  “Well, it’s not your name. You deserve Stephane.” She gathered herself, wiped her face with her hands, and gave him a smile, the first genuine one she sported in quite some time. “Thanks.”

  “Not at all. I listen well,” he said. “And you, mademoiselle, should get up off of your cute little ass and help us solve all these riddles. You are obviously quite good in a crisis, yes? This seems to be a crisis. Do something about it.”

  She sighed. “Right. Like what?”

  “Your workstation came back with something while you were talking,” Stephane said with a grin. “I did not want to interrupt.”

  Shaila dashed back to her seat. “Bastard,” she muttered. She scrolled through the latest results. Some atmospheric changes, some electrical fluctuations again, a few blips of odd radio noise.

  Radio noise.

  “Look at this,” she said, pointing at the screen. “Anywhere from one to six seconds before each incident, there was a brief radio transmission. It’s at a really odd frequency, one that wouldn’t show up on the usual comm channels.”

  “Can you find out where the transmissions came from?”