The Void

by Greig Beck

  It was high, cold, and virtually inaccessible. On this day it was calm, but Hammerson had been in the territory and knew it normally would have been a freezing hell of hurricane winds and chill factor of a hundred below in unsheltered areas. The only other place he could think of to make a fast extraction any more difficult might be the bottom of the ocean.

  “Long way up,” Hammerson observed.

  “Sure is, and a long way from home,” Chilton responded. “Average altitude where Orlando came down is 10,000 feet, and it’s close to absolutely nothing.”

  Hammerson enlarged one of the images. He could easily make out the impact skid-line of the craft as it obviously came in at a hard angle. There was a debris plume, but the craft seemed to be primarily intact. The several pictures he looked at were time-stamped only minutes apart but as each image progressed in time they showed what looked to be a growing stain around the craft. The first was a dozen feet, and the last, hundreds. In addition, the last picture seemed to be blurred, but only over the spreading stain.

  “What am I looking at here? Is that some sort of chemical leak, or fuel burn?” Hammerson squinted at the images.

  “Unknown, but something sure is spreading, Jack, and it’s not a burn. Our tech teams believe something is growing down there.” He exhaled. “And that weird distortion of the image – well, we think that whatever that stuff is that’s spreading on that mountaintop, it’s giving off some sort of gas.”

  “That’s a pretty damned hostile environment to be growing in; extremophile, maybe?” Hammerson asked. He knew that only a few creatures could live in a place that was deadly to anything else. Extremophiles, named after their extreme environments, could thrive in hot vents at the bottom of the ocean, sulfur pools, or underneath permanent ice sheets.

  “What else could it be?” Chilton replied. “But what sort?”

  “Nothing I’ve heard of.” Hammerson stared at the images. “Especially something with that speed of spread …” He checked the time stamps. “… this is happening over a matter of minutes.”

  “Indeed,” Chilton said. “But it gets even weirder – we got movement as well.”

  “Holy shit – survivors?” Hammerson began thinking through the rescue implications.

  “Could be, but how? There’s some audio from the cockpit; it’s not encouraging.”

  “Sir?” Hammerson’s brow’s knitted.

  “Best if you hear it yourself, Jack. Anyways, Sabers has lost sight now, and we can’t improve resolution any better than what we’ve got. But before we went over the horizon, we picked up some thermal signatures before it whited-out completely. The signs definitely showed objects – life forms – moving away from the downed craft.”

  “Well, if it is our people, those guys won’t stay warm for long,” Hammerson observed.

  “I know. Make a plan, Jack, ASAP. Work with NASA. Find out what happened. First prize is you bring back that film, and locate any survivors. Second prize is no one else gets it. Anyone tries to stop you, well, you know what to do.”

  Hammerson’s mouth pressed into a grim smile. “Yes sir, that’s what we do.”

  “Okay, that’s it for now. You come up with anything else, feel free to share your observations with me. Good luck, God’s speed and strength to you and your team.” The general disconnected.

  Jack Hammerson quickly read through the remaining briefing papers, and went to the bios of the missing astronauts – all quality pilots, technicians and scientists themselves. Not one of them looked prone to making mistakes, or freaking out.

  He read the mission report and saw that the crew had been attempting to evade some space debris, and eventually had brought it onboard … and then everything went to shit. Two possibilities: it was all a coincidence, which as far as he was concerned, never happened. Or whatever they dragged into their hold made everything go bad, real quick.

  Hammerson rubbed his chin and opened the attached audio and visual files from the shuttle orbiter’s last moments that Chilton had mentioned.

  “Jes-uuus Christ.” He sat back – the screaming, moaning and other sounds of pain, utter desperation and hopelessness made the hair on his neck prickle.

  “What the hell happened up there?” He narrowed his eyes and then ran the recording forward and back a few more times. The voice analyzer couldn’t determine which astronaut’s voice was which, or for that matter, even which was male or female. When Hammerson closed his eyes then ran the recording again, he wasn’t sure the screams even sounded human.

  He checked the cargo manifest. There were lab animals onboard. Maybe, he thought. The visuals were even more inconclusive as something greasy looking seemed to have been smeared or splattered over the internal camera, and the cabin became indistinct as it filled with something like smoke or fog.

  Could have been an onboard fire. He sat back, thinking. There were other possibilities, of course – one was sabotage. After all, the Russians were a little too quick off the mark for his liking. And the Orlando going down in Alaska, separated from Russian territory by around fifty miles of Bering Sea, was also a little too convenient.

  He hated the thought of having to work with civs, but at least he’d worked with NASA before and found them competent. Sending them up there without HAWCs might be a death sentence if the Russians decided they wanted to play hardball. He imagined what was likely to happen if a Russian team of torpedoes came across a wounded astronaut or unarmed civilian. If the Russians wanted to remain invisible, they’d eradicate all evidence of having been there. Basically, if anyone saw them, they didn’t live to tell.

  Well, if the Russians were sending torpedoes, then he’d send nukes. “And that’s why they call me the Hammer.” He smiled as he brought up his active HAWC list.

  CHAPTER 9

  Los Angeles Times, Major News Desk

  Morag O’Sullivan pushed her shock of thick, red hair back up off her forehead as she scanned the NASA news feed. Her brows drew together.

  “Hey …” She leaned back in her chair. “… the news feed about the Orlando space shuttle has been removed.” She tapped her lips with a pencil for a moment. “Weird.” She remembered the last time NASA’s news feeds went dark on their space program, and that was during the horrific Challenger disaster. She rested her chin on a hand. “Does anyone care?”

  “Nope.” Phil Bellows, her older colleague, could not have sounded more disinterested.

  “Well, I do.” Morag leaned forward to look at a tiny picture on her desk of a smiling woman dressed in an astronaut’s space suit. It was Eileen Marie Collins, now retired, but in her day she had been an air-force colonel, test pilot, first female commander of a space shuttle, and was awarded medals for her work. Collins was also born in County Cork, Ireland, where Morag was born. To Morag, and all of Cork, the woman was a hero. Her exploits in the space program had made Morag a fan of NASA since she was a little girl.

  “Yeah, I definitely do.”

  At 32 years of age, Morag already knew that few were like her and she reflected on changing tastes and the attention span of the space-watching public these days. There was a time when the shuttle simply taking off was big news. Today, a few people floating around up in the darkness, deploying a multimillion dollar satellite or doing tumble-turns in zero gravity, was about as exciting as having your tax done.

  Just give me more Lady Gaga hair care tips. She snorted as she tried to find anything on the deep web about the Orlando.

  As Fred Benson, her editor, often said, “If you’re interested, then your job is to make the public interested. But first give them something to be interested about.”

  And that’s where the ’ol O’Sullivan magic came in. She smiled as she scrolled through more data, looking for something, anything, on the Orlando. After another ten minutes, she gave up – there was nothing.

  Odd. Shit always went wrong in space flight – human error, equipment failure, and the unforeseen weird stuff were always happening. NASA, to its credit, managed to work
through most problems, big and small, before they even got reported. But they still got reported – NASA kept up a constant stream of media-friendly babble.

  A shuttle landing might get a few lines toward the middle of the paper. But a shuttle crash was still front-page news. Their news feed had gone dark and that made her investigative journalist’s antennae quiver.

  The news business these days was so competitive that sometimes it seemed like a cross between dog fighting and a race track. You had to be first in with a story, and then be prepared to fight for it, and even rip it right out of someone else’s mouth if it came down to it. She had a feeling about this missing shuttle, there was a story there, and knew it could be the break she desperately needed.

  Her fingers now flew over the keyboard, and she quickly found an image of the Orlando’s crew and studied their faces: flight engineer Gerry Fifield, mission specialist Beth Power, and Commander Mitch Granger. She snorted, the commander looked straight from central casting – strong jaw; thick, dark hair and a piercing gaze that radiated intelligence and good humor. They shouldn’t have been able to shut NASA up about them. So where were they?

  She twisted in her chair. “Hey Phil, where was the Orlando shuttle supposed to land?”

  The older reporter kept scowling at information on his screen. “Earth probably.” He looked up and winked. “But seriously, who even cares anymore?”

  “Yeah, thanks Phil; that’s why they pay you the big bucks.” Morag put her hand on the phone. “As my mother always used to say – fly free, girl.” She grinned. “I’ll find out myself.”

  “Wise mother.” Phil nodded. “Go ahead and call them. But I wouldn’t.” He glanced at her. “Because, if there is something going on, as soon as you, a reporter, asks them a question, you’ll be telling them you’re onto them.”

  Morag paused, phone in midair. He was right; if there was anything of interest being kept from the public, any leads would disappear like smoke as soon as she poked her head up.

  “Fuck.” She slammed the phone down.

  “And that’s why they pay me the big bucks.” He went back to scowling at his own screen.

  Morag eased back into her seat, her fingers steepled at her chin. The shuttle had gone missing as soon as it entered western airspace, and the deep web indicated it had been somewhere over Alaska. She knew there were several emergency runways up around that area long enough to accommodate the bulk of a shuttle orbiter landing if something had gone wrong. So what had happened then?

  If it’s crashed, then tell us – what’s the big goddamn secret?

  She lunged at her keyboard to dive back into the deep web, this time trying foreign data sources. Sure enough, one in Chinese looked like it had extrapolated a descent trajectory for the craft.

  She hit the translation app on her screen. “Bingo.” She leaned forward, enlarging the area where it came down. Freaking Alaska – about as remote as you could get … and that was a good thing, as there’d be no one else checking it out.

  Morag tapped her lips with a knuckle. If she went, it’d mean dropping everything and going, like right now. Possible, as all she had waiting at home was a half tub of yoghurt in the refrigerator, a few pot plants, and a cat … that liked the neighbors more anyway. It was doable.

  So much to do. Her fingers flew again over the keyboard as she entered some travel queries. It was around five hours to get to Anchorage in Alaska from Los Angeles. She could then hire a chopper out to the NASA test base or hitch a ride or stowaway or whatever it took. She sat back, thinking. She’d need a camera guy, one who was a climber. That narrowed it down to one. She’d worked with Calvin Renner before, and knew he was just off assignment, had climbing experience and was big and tough enough to scale the Matterhorn, while lugging fifty pounds of equipment.

  She tried to calm her surging excitement. If she was the gun reporter, then money, time, and materials were no object. But as she was still making her bones, it meant begging for scraps. She bit her lip. And this job was way above her expense allowance.

  Her hands slowly moved to the keyboard, and she opened her email. Morag began to type carefully, crafting every word as she prepared a meeting request with her editor. She included all the hot buttons she could think of: government cover-up, potential death in space, exclusivity, breaking now. She read it back three times before she was satisfied with the few lines.

  Show time. She hit ‘send’.

  The corners of her mouth turned up. Once she had her budget, NASA wouldn’t dare turn her away or refuse to answer a major media organization’s questions. Sure, she’d have to bluff and double bluff, but, NASA. She felt a warm flutter in her stomach, just thinking the name.

  Morag’s email pinged – Fred Benson, calling her up for a meeting. She swiveled in her seat. “Gotta date, Phil. Don’t wait up.”

  “Never do,” he said without turning away from his screen.

  * * *

  Benson was a big guy, the color of dark coffee and with a shaved head. He smelled of cigars and overwork. He had an infectious belly laugh but could strike fear and crush dreams with a yell that just about burst eardrums. To say he didn’t suffer fools was an understatement.

  Morag put her hand on the door handle, paused, collecting herself. She pasted on a smile, pushed the door inwards, but just poked her head around it.

  “Morning, Mister Benson.” Her smile widened.

  He waved her in. “Mister Benson, huh? Must want something, Morag.” He continued to sort through a pile of papers several inches thick.

  Morag took a seat. “Nope, but got something for you.”

  His eyes flicked up at her. “I read your email; impress me.”

  “The Orlando Space Shuttle has vanished from the space-monitoring feeds. Now NASA has gone dark on it. Last time they did that was during the Challenger disaster.”

  “So a shuttle has tech problems. What else you got?” Benson went back to his papers.

  “I think there’s more to it. It looks like it’s come down in Alaska. Even the Chinese are confused; and they seem to know more about what we do, than even we do.”

  He bobbed his head. “Yeah, okay; write up a few lines on it, and keep watching for anything that eventuates. We might get a few grabs out of it.”

  Morag licked her lips. This was getting away on her. “Like I said, there’s more to it.” Time to bluff, she thought. “NASA is scrambling a secret team to head up there now. Something big is happening … and I can join them.”

  He looked up slowly. “Really? How the hell would you know that, let alone be able to join them?”

  She held his eyes, her own unwavering even though her heart was racing. Here goes nothing. “Because I know Eileen Marie Collins, the retired NASA astronaut and first female commander of a space shuttle.”

  His eyebrows went up. “You got an in?”

  “You bet. I can join their team, and be first on the ground – we’re talking first breakers.” She nodded, trying to radiate confidence.

  “I’m listening; what would you need?” Benson sat back.

  She shrugged. “Not much really; a cameraman with high-altitude experience, travel expenses, plus my exclusive byline. It’s my story.”

  She sat frozen, waiting as she saw him ruminating.

  “When?” he asked, still holding her gaze.

  “Gotta go right now if I’m going to catch that NASA team.”

  Benson continued to stare, and time seemed to stand still. And then …

  “Go.”

  “Yes.” Her face split with a grin as she got to her feet.

  “And Morag.”

  She paused.

  “You better bring me something hot.”

  “Count on it.” She headed for the door.

  CHAPTER 10

  Jack Hammerson reread the summary of the report before him, titled: BREAKOUT. It was the result of several years’ observational analysis, interviews and conversations with Captain Alex Hunter, Hammerson’s HAWC team leader.r />
  Alex Hunter was the first, and probably the last of their AWP, or Advanced Warrior Program, soldiers. The Arcadian program, from which he had drawn his codename, had literally caused him to rise from the ashes of a living death. Science had given him gifts and curses, but it was looking more likely they were in unequal measure.

  He rubbed a hand across his face, his focus still on just a few paragraphs as if his mind had become a wheel stuck in sand, ever spinning, but not able to escape.

  The military psychologists; Hammerson; Alex’s partner, Aimee Weir; and even Alex Hunter himself had worked hard to suppress the psychopathic urges of The Other that inhabited the deep, dark places in his mind. Alex had been given techniques to calm himself, and usually they worked, or at least he said they did.

  Early diagnosis of a dissociative identity, or in layman’s terms, a split personality disorder, were far from satisfactory, and in fact, the detection of a neocortical mass in the center of his head led to theories that there was a physical aspect to the aberrant personality that haunted him. What they had at first thought to be a benign knot of scar tissue that surrounded an old bullet fragment in his brain was suspected of being something far more sinister.

  Under MRI analysis, the mass was neuro-architecturally determined to be a bundle of synapses that had its own blood flow and was even triggering independent electrical coupling and neuronal synchronization, just like his brain did. But when they tried to investigate it more thoroughly, Alex’s body and mind had reacted – it was if the mass, the source of The Other, was defending itself.

  “Hmm.” Hammerson scratched his chin. Yeah, that’s you, isn’t it? He thought. That’s where you live; the monster from his Id.

  The HAWC commander turned the page, feeling his heart sink even further as he read on. There was the potential for total takeover of his personality. Alex Hunter, the person they knew, loved, and respected was currently the dominant personality pattern. And The Other was the rogue pattern he kept locked away. But the report’s author suggested that this psychological entity was becoming stronger not weaker, and perhaps it wasn’t Alex who freed it at will, but The Other that let itself out, whenever it chose.