by CK Burch
″Sir.″ It was Jessups. She stood wearing a HES, the helmet cradled in one arm. Jessups and her repair crew had been down in the engine bay for the last hour and a half doing another patch pass at the external shielding. ″We've got the heatshield patch back in place, but we hit a snag.″
″I think I'd like to stop hearing that now,″ Mac said. He turned to Hartman and Clarke. ″You boys get back to brainstorming, I'm going to investigate our latest situation.″ He followed Jessups away from the schematic holo and down through engineering. ″What's the commotion?″
″It's the routers,″ she said, and they passed through a sea of sweaty engineers who were themselves headed towards other issues with the ship. Mac swore that if he ever got his baby into drydock he was going to take a week off, shower for a day, and then come in here and personally oversee any overhauls that were made. No more trusting any other motherfuckers with his ship.
″I thought we'd solved the problem of the routers,″ he said. ″Did the patchwork not hold?″
″It held,″ Jessups replied, ″but there's been a burnout.″ They came to another schematic bench, this one displaying a very different set of holo blueprints. It was the power systems mapwork, showing the branching veins of energy traveling throughout the ship. Jessups pointed at the main engines. ″We were working here, finishing up the heatshield reinforcement, and I double-checked the routers to ensure they were carrying enough positive charge through the system.″ She circled her pointer finger around one of the power veins and the holo zoomed in on her circle, showing the positive charge flowing in green waves and the antimatter charge flowing in red. ″The patchwork we did throughout the port side has been extensive, and it's ensured that we have power flowing through to the thrusters, but the patch resulted in a burnout here, and here.″ She pointed at branches that led up through the port thruster, and then, oh god, up towards the orbital thrusters. The orbital thrusters had a power malfunction.
″Christ,″ Mac whispered. This was not just bad; this was worse case scenario. ″We're going to lose our orbit. How long?″
″Two hours,″ Jessups said. ″Two hours and then orbital thrust goes down. The degradation of the lines in the port section are just too far gone. I would try and get our boys out to rework the lines in there, but that would require a spacewalk out through the starboard side and then around to the port, seeing as how we've nailed down anything that could potentially open outward to the port.″
And since the Sun was currently on the starboard side of the Icarus to minimalize damage to the port heatshielding, there would be no walks into outer space. There wasn't a goddamn thing onboard that could go outside this close to Sol without getting annihilated. Sure, Icarus was prepped for Sun orbit, but had anyone else thought of shuttlecraft or personal suits? Fuck no. Mac swore up and down that he was going to do more than just oversee the next revamp of the i bulkheads, he was going to work up some new heatshielding for shuttle and HESs. This was ridiculous. This was absolutely fucking ridiculous. ″How long will we have once the orbital thrust goes down before orbit decay begins?″
″Thirty minutes. Forty-five tops. And after that, taking into solar wind and magnetic waves into consideration to keep us aloft somewhat, it'll be another two hours before we drop below max safe dive, pre-experimental shields. I can't speak to the quality of these new shields after seeing the port side. It looks like melted fucking cheese over there.″ Jessups rubbed her temple. ″Sir.″
″No need to stand on ceremony with me. Right now we need get moving before we get fucked. Otherwise we'll be headed right back down into the frying pan.″ Mac took a deep breath and thought. ″What if we use maneuvering thrusters to pull us up out of orbit? We'll throw the orbital thrust into high gear and make a quick escape of it.″
She shook her head. ″I ran the numbers. We'll burn out the maneuvering thrust well before we get out of orbit. The pull of the Sun's gravitational field would put too much strain on them. We've only ever used main thrust when diving or pulling out of a dive, maneuvering isn't built for it. Even if we compensated for the burnout it would only buy us an extra fifteen minutes of time to bring up the main engines. And if we can't bring everything online, we'll have no backup. I think – ″ She leaned forward and dragged the holo around and then out to show the ship in its entirety. Then she pointed at the underbelly. ″ – that if we reroute power from orbital to maneuvering, and fire a concentrated burst of maneuvering thrust from the belly once every thirty minutes or so, we could buy ourselves as much as another half-hour from orbital decay. All we have to do is reroute the power before the degradation of the lines to orbital breaks down. Otherwise we'll risk a massive feedback to the maneuvering and that could spread out to the main engines as well. Any progress we'll have made will be lost.″
″Okay, do it,″ he replied. ″Keep me updated on the status of the orbital thrust.″ He cracked his knuckles. ″I don't mind telling you that unless we get moving double-time we've got no chance at this.″
″How long is it going to take to get the main thrust back up and going?″
″Five hours.″
She stared at him. ″Five.″
″Yeah.″
Jessups shook her head. ″That's just too fucking close. Too fucking close.″ Because if her numbers were correct, they had maybe five and a half hours before the ship passed the point of no return and they all burned straight to Hell. She replaced her helmet. ″I'll keep you updated on the orbital engines. If I work out something else that will buy us more time...″
″Bring it to the table immediately. We're not going to have time to wait on anything as of right now. You have my frequency?″ He held up his comm. She nodded. ″Good. Next time contact me directly. We're only going to get one shot at all of this. And stay frosty. Keep the deadline to yourself, keep people moving, and keep yourself focused. I need you calm and collected or we might as well just sit back and let it all happen. Clear?″
Jessups nodded, turned and moved toward the engine bay. As Mac watched her go, he thought I brought the best and brightest on this mission. I hand-picked them all myself. If we fuck up, if this all goes shit-to-pot, what fucking good are any of us? He couldn't afford to think like that. None of them could, not with the clock running down the way it currently was. There was only one thing to do, and that was keep calm and think clearly. Anything else meant that close to a hundred men and women would incinerate in the chromosphere of the Sun, something that they had come here equipped to defy. Mac chuckled. They'd defied the Sun, penetrated her intimate depths, and now they were paying for it. In a way it was almost poetic, but Mac fucking hated poetry.
He turned back to join Hartman and Clarke at their schematic bench. The captain was going to need to hear about this, and quickly, but Mac wanted a few extra options before bringing the bad news to the table. ″Alright,″ he said, ″we have a new huge wedge in our shorts and after I tell you, we have five minutes to come up with potential solutions before we need to get a move on. Time is unfortunately of the fucking essence.″
***
Straub and Tybalt were both wearing HESs, at Straub's insistence, and he fucking hated it. It moved surprisingly smoother than he'd anticipated, bending and flexing and letting him stride with ease. It was the fingertips that bothered him. He felt as though he were wearing boxing gloves. Gripping felt wrong. Pressing buttons felt like he needed to take careful aim before placing his fingertip down or he'd hit three other keys instead of the right one. Some fucking modern piece of equipment this was. If he ever were to wear one again, it wouldn't be long enough between.
They'd been in the cargo bay for the last hour, with barely a word spoken between them. At first Straub had thought Tybalt would be hostile towards his presence, but instead she'd done nothing but offer up the dataflow on both the radiation profile and the artifact’s pliability. At first, trying to circumvent the effects of the radiation, he'd devoted his attention to the extrawave rads and their pulse rate, focusing on their patt
erns and intervals between pulses as Tybalt applied more heat via the hydrogen/electromagnet composite. But the more Tybalt experimented, the more the artifact reacted, the more Straub realized that this was an incredible device before them, and he found himself caught up in the experiment’s results.
Device was the only word he could think of in relation to the artifact. It couldn't be anything else. Somehow the relationship between the thermal rads and the malleable composition of the artifact felt entirely intentional, as though it were designed specifically to absorb thermal radiation in the way it did, rather than as a natural occurrence. What Straub couldn't figure out was the why – why would such an object exist? Thinking purely of chromospheric affectation, it didn't seem logical that an alien race would construct something that intentionally became adaptive in the presence of such intense heat. So far, through a spectrographical analysis, the scientists had confirmed that the interior void was hollow. Straub was beginning to wonder if, when the artifact's surface temperature reached a zenith, the outside surface could be passed through entirely to the void inside. And if so, what was the artifact? Was it an alien container only able to be opened in the presence of high thermal radiation? And if that were true, it yielded another question: what could survive in such an environment as to utilize the artifact in such a way? Straub didn't want to know. He didn't care. All he knew was that the inspection of the materials had turned from application to solar dive technology into a thorough investigation of just how far they could raise the temperature in the cargo bay and to see if they could reach the void. Tybalt was determined; he'd never seen someone so concentrated on a task. Thank god they were wearing the HESs. Even with the electromagnetic field in place to prevent the hydrogen reactions from escaping, the temperature of the cargo bay had elevated fast. Really fast.
Straub went over the most recent data extrapolation. The extrawave radiation had not grown in magnitude, but it had increased in volume. The rads had an apex, which was comforting at least, but the concentrates of the extrawaves were astounding. No wonder they'd lost signal strength in the face of this stuff: it was a dense, static-laced amplitude that coated electronic frequencies like syrup. The more he researched it, the more Straub wondered how it could possibly affect human beings. If it did at all. It was seeming less and less likely that these extrawaves were doing anything to anyone on the crew, and that both Kerrick and Udeh were just coincidental happenstance, and that maybe Laguardia had been right: he couldn't stop thinking of Sarah because he felt guilty about sleeping with Kerrick. It was a sobering thought, but one that nagged at him. Why now? After these past two years, why was it now that he suddenly couldn't get her off of his mind? He'd had sex with other women. He'd found himself in bed a half-dozen or more times over the last couple of years with no regrets. Well, none of the kind that resulted from memories of the last woman he'd loved. Still, he couldn't shake it. The idea refused to die away. He knew that something was wrong, but based on these readings there was nothing externally prodding his guilt into action. As far as he could tell, the communications systems had been looping back on themselves, bouncing the signal inward before it began a broadcast. And the short-range sensors worked only because they were actually the long-range sensors cutting through the thick fog presented by the rads. But they presented no affectation to the human brain. Straub felt dejected.
″Straub,″ Tybalt said.
He looked up. She hadn't said his name since they'd gotten here. ″Yes, Doctor?″
″I'm going to reset the output of the hydrogen to simulate the thermal radiation of the depth the Icarus was at when we retrieved the artifact. Will you please calibrate the magnetic shield to compensate?″
He was taken aback. Partly because she was going to take the hydrogen experiment to its terminus, mostly because she'd said please. ″Does that seem wise? The electromagnetic shield will contain the reaction, but the residual heat alone – ″
He couldn't tell from the facial display of Tybalt's helmet – Straub could never discern why these things didn't have standard window-plates – but it looked like she was pleading with her eyes. She would never say so out loud. That was not Catherine Tybalt, especially not from what he'd seen in the past couple of weeks. She had a determination about her. But the look on her face suggested that she was tired, tried, worn, and possibly ready for a very long sleep cycle. This was not the woman that he'd come to work with on the Icarus. This was a young girl who'd been under more stress than she needed in the last twelve hours, with far more yet to come before they reached any sort of plateau.
Straub nodded. The heat generated by the reaction wouldn't be anything like the chromosphere; it was, after all, just a simulation. The hydrogen reaction coated the exterior of the artifact with a concentrated burst that produced the same effects as the Sun, with none of the personal danger. And they were wearing the HESs, after all, something that he'd insisted on personally. If they hadn't been, he might have balked at this, but there was no one else here and no danger to themselves. And the look on Tybalt's face...Jesus. He felt haunted. He'd not seen that kind of gaze from a woman in a long time. The last time had been years ago, when he and Sarah had been dating. Her mother was in the hospital with cancer, and he'd just arrived and found her outside her mother's room sitting on a bench while the orderlies and the nurses ran about attending to other patients. She had happened to look up in his direction while he approached. Her eyes had been pleading for comfort, for release, for a shoulder to lean on and to take solace in. That had been Tybalt's face only a moment ago, but only for the holo representation of her helmet he couldn't entirely be certain. Instinctually, he knew. He knew.
They were down to the last of the hydrogen extractors, ten pounds of pressurized plasma. They'd already gone through thirty pounds of it just getting to this point. Maybe that's why Tybalt looked exhausted. Her experimentation would only go so far, lead to a certain point to where she'd finally have to stop her experiments. Fuck, that's why she wanted to hit the ceiling now. If they attempted to simulate radiation beyond the point that they were shooting for now, there could be serious damage potential, so this was it, this was the last stop on the experimental tour bus. Last call for hydrogen, step on up and get your fill. Once this was done and over with they would just be forced to go over the data they'd recovered and then jettison the artifact once the ship got underway, leaving it until it could retrieved later. Tybalt wanted to push.
Alright, Straub thought, let's push then.
He began with field strength. If Tybalt was going for the gusto, then he decided he was going to take no chances. Moving the sliders on the holo controls, he set the field so it would be at maximum thickness and strength; it would take a small reactor explosion to punch through that fucker. Then he looked up at Tybalt and said, ″How long did the artifact's malleability last after the previous exposure? I wasn't paying attention to the data.″
″Seven minutes and forty-two seconds,″ she replied, hooking up the new extractor, rolling the old one away. ″If my calculations are correct, the surface of the artifact should be pliable for fourteen minutes at the very least, and should provide enough leeway for us to take a sounding and see how deep the void goes.″ She clicked the connector tube into place, opened the plasma tank, and it hissed as it flowed through to the electromagnetic battery. Tybalt took two large steps backward and held her hands up. ″Clear!″
″Field up,″ Straub replied, activating the shield, which came to life with a translucent blue pulse. Then he placed his finger over the magnet control and said, ″Contact.″
He pressed it.
The surface of the artifact went blue-white and rippled, like before, but this time it was different. Waves of heat shimmered between the object and the electro shield, obscuring his vision, but Straub swore that the surface was reacting differently. The geometric sides rounded and swelled, bulging outward, like something was pushing from within; the jagged, pointed spear of the top rolled like a snake. Straub blinked; it
didn't look right. It didn't look normal. Until now, the rippling, watery consistency of the artifact's reactions had seemed alien, but this was worse than that. This was...he didn't know what it was. It held no words in his mind, just held his gaze as he followed the movement, mouth agape, trying desperately to grasp a term, a definition, fucking anything that could allow him to understand what he was seeing. Because it looked like it was alive.
″Do you see that?″ Tybalt cried out. She had to shout to be heard over the roaring noise of the hydrogen reaction. ″Look at that! Look at the reaction waves!″
″It doesn't look right!″ Straub shouted back. He was terrified. He didn't want to be, but he was terrified. He looked down at the thermal gauge: they were approaching the apex. The urge to simply turn it off now, before it hit the highest field temp, was stronger than he wanted it to be. Jesus Christ, I'm panicking, he thought, and took a long, slow, deep breath. Get a grip, get a fucking grip. He looked over at Tybalt, who was entranced, grinning from ear to ear, watching the inhuman rolling of the artifact's skin. Why did he keep thinking of it as an organism? Why not an inert object? He risked a quick glance at it; the way it moved, bulges in the surface from beneath rolling across the flat planes then disappearing, like maggots beneath skin, it reminded him of a dying, cancerous animal. Or maybe one that was coming back to life.
He looked away and down at the controls. He needed to contain himself. He needed to get that fucking grip he told himself to grasp.