Out in the Styx — A Biotech Legacy Adventure

by Chris J. Randolph

  Out in the Styx

  A Biotech Legacy Adventure

  by Chris J. Randolph

  Note: The following story is a self-contained excerpt from the upcoming novel, Biotech Legacy: Long Fall, due out in November, 2013.

  Second Note: All events and names are absolutely real, and any appearance of being fanciful, ridiculous, or impossible are surely figments of the reader's imagination.

  Contents

  Termination Shock

  Cracking Safe

  Space Commando

  After These Messages…

  807 Words from the Author

  Termination Shock

  The Beagle hurtled through the solar system's far reaches. The ship was a Maguro Class Shuttle, shaped rather like a squared-off shuttlecock, with a short body covered at the aft in feather-like spines that trailed out behind it. The forward section was bisected by a ring of glass, behind which sat her bridge.

  The bridge was particularly small as far as such things went. Captain Marco Esquivel preferred to think of it as cozy, but he'd always been one to look on the bright side of life. The most recent silver lining was his assignment to Fleet Remote Maintenance (a perfectly adequate job, if ever there was one), and the ensuing promotion to commander of a very cool little interplanetary shuttle.

  Sure… the Earth was toast and all the remaining survivors were at each other's throats, but Marco had it pretty good, relatively speaking. He was out there in the mysterious dark, away from all the earthly problems, the screaming, shooting, and madness.

  With that thought reclining peacefully in mind, he settled into his command chair and admired the piece of furniture for a moment, a sleek and dignified thing with swooping curves and the squishiest padding he could ever recall having sat in.

  "Gentlemen, let's all take a moment to reflect on just how good we have it."

  "All both of us?" Nils Jansen asked. His native tongue was sarcasm.

  "All both of you," Marco replied emphatically.

  Jansen was trying to undermine his authority again. If Marco didn't know the man's middle name to be Alvis (of all ridiculous damned things), he might suspect it was mutineer instead.

  Marco shook it off and peered out the front viewport. The glass was some kind of resin produced by the alien starship Legacy, an amber shaded material with a faint hexagonal imprint from the manner of its excretion. It gave Marco the impression that, despite the ship's canine name, he was actually sitting inside of an unusually corpulent house-fly.

  But at least it was his corpulent house-fly.

  The stars outside the viewport sat maddeningly still. Marco didn't feel like he was traveling all that fast, even though the shuttle was hurtling through the cosmos at some percentage (of a percentage) of the speed of light… or uber wikiwiki fast by his own rough and linguistically tortured estimation.

  He sighed. "At what velocity do the stars start to streak like in sci-fi movies?"

  "Warp two, maybe three," Jansen said. The man was so pathologically unhelpful that Marco wondered if he came from a long line of DMV workers.

  Marco shooed that thought from his head as well, and tried to steer his crew back on track. "Faster than light? Would that do it?"

  Larry Hopkins, who'd been silent as the dead for the past several hours, suddenly let out a strange and high-pitched growl. He sounded like a girl scout who'd just discovered that her best friend had stolen her cookie territory, and the sound was all the more surprising coming out of a man who looked like a young and dumpy version of Tor Johnson.

  Hop finally said, "You can't travel faster than light, you frigging morons. It's physically impossible. I mean, did you pay for your diplomas? The closer you are to c, the more energy you need to accelerate… until it reaches infinity. Infinity. You do know what infinity is, right?"

  Jansen was giggling insidiously.

  "And even if you somehow got close to the speed of light, the stars would never look like streaks of light. Never ever. They'd disappear and all you'd see is a faint glow ahead of you. Oh. And hello X-rays."

  Marco inspected his cuticles.

  "Idiots," Hop grumbled in sotto voce. He chased the epithet with a noisy sip from his coffee cup.

  Once upon a time, Marco and Jansen had taken turns intentionally pissing Hopkins off. It started when they were first stationed together aboard the Copernicus Observatory in Earth orbit, but the game ascended to all new heights when the satellite became their prison. They'd watched the world below burn and had nothing but childish antics to leaven the mood while they patiently waited to die.

  They didn't die though, and three years on, Marco and Jansen simply did it by instinct, as naturally as a cat toying with a terrified lizard.

  Marco leaned forward in his chair and draped an arm between his legs like a lounging orangutan. An orangutan with a command insignia on his collar. "Crewman Hopkins, what's our current ETA?"

  "We're twelve minutes out, sir."

  Marco could have easily checked on his own console, but he liked to make Hop feel useful. It was just good management.

  He checked his cuticles again.

  Jansen said, "Marco."

  "Call me Captain."

  "Sure. Captain Marco, we're not going really insanely fast, are we?"

  Jansen could have easily checked that information on his own screen, but he liked to make himself a damned nuisance.

  "No, Jansen. We are not going, quote really, insanely fast close-quote."

  Jansen wasn't listening to him anymore. He was gawping like a hunting dog, the entirety of his feeble brain consumed by something out the window. For a second, Marco could swear on his mother's ashpile that Jansen's arm was about to raise up and literally point, like a hammy child actor in a horror film.

  Then Marco looked up. The far sky was glowing deep red. "Hopkins, uplink with…"

  "The Fleet," Hop interjected. "Message already sent with full sensor logs."

  Marco despised being cut off. It reminded him an awful lot of long afternoons with his little sister.

  "Well, then… good work, Crewman Hopkins."

  "Hrm. Comms are glitching out," Hop said. He smacked his monitor, and when that apparently didn't produce the result he wanted, he smacked it again.

  Jansen suddenly showed faint sparks of actually caring about his job. His fingers flew through interface screens, comparing graphs and figures of things Marco couldn't make out from his seat. "I think I know what it is," Jansen said.

  Silence.

  Marco's impatience got the better of him. "Well what the fuck is it, technician?" He'd chosen to motivate his subordinate using a firm tone, and empowered him by properly acknowledging his position.

  "I think…" Jansen said, "It's… Gah. I can't think of the word."

  Marco's eyes tightened. His lips scrunched up and twitched.

  Jansen started tapping the metal casing of the console and said, "Damn. It's right on the tip of my tongue. You know the feeling… Ag. It's right there."

  Marco could strangle him if he were just a few meters closer.

  "Heliocrash?" Jansen finally spit out. His face said he was anything but confident. "It's like… our sun creates a bubble within the interstellar medium, and the… damned thing I can't remember the name of… it's where the solar wind mashes up against all the stuff outside."

  Hopkins sighed, placed fingers on either side of his nose, and shook his head for a very long time.

  "And?" Marco said.

  "Well, if I'm reading this right, something may be exciting the particles that sit along the… thing."

  Marco stroked his goatee. "Intriguing," he said. "How far awa
y…"

  "The heliopause," Hop said haughtily, "is forty-two AU away. What we're seeing is just under six hours old."

  "Hmm." The light show was interesting, but all Marco could think about was confining Hopkins to his quarters for breaching Fleet etiquette. The punishment seemed a little steep though; their quarters were small storage lockers the size of a shower stall, like one of those old Japanese capsule hotels. They were essentially human kennels.

  "Dangerous?" Marco asked, cannily preventing Hopkins from cutting him off by only speaking a single word.

  Hopkins said, "Unknown."

  "Meh," Jansen said, as he so often did.

  Marco had to admit that Jansen made a compelling case. "Well, the mission awaits," he said. "Resume course to Charon, Crewman. Full steam ahead."

  "I never stopped the…"

  "Just let him have this," Jansen said in a stage-whisper, dripping thickly with feigned pity.

  And so The Beagle journeyed on.

  The shuttle and its intrepid crew arrived at Pluto and its near twin Charon without incident, the two bodies glittering pallidly against the oddly lambent redness beyond. Hopkins pressed at a few panels in front of him, took hold of the flight yoke and guided the ship around toward Charon, which looked rather comically like an old and mistreated golf ball.

  Pluto was the larger of the two by half, a mottled white and red-brown ball of speckled ice. Marco found it awfully pretty, especially for an object that had received so much abuse and indignity at the hands of organized science. It had long-ago been downgraded from planet to dwarf planet, and things only got worse when the Global Aerospace Foundation took charge. They reclassified it a large dwarf planet, a moonlike planetoid, and finally part of a binary outer orbit object.

  The resulting acronym was surely coincidental.

  The Beagle approached Charon at a deliberate pace and came to a stop several hundred meters from the surface. They sat there for a few seconds in silence, then the ground visibly rumbled, cracked, and split open. It was a hatch, a perfect circle split into four parts which folded outward like lotus petals.

  "Crewman," Marco said, "commence docking procedures."

  "Aye aye," Hopkins said smartly, adding under his breath, "jagweed."

  Marco grimaced but held his tongue. He'd need to consult his command pamphlet about chronic insubordination later.

  The shuttle swooped in and gently set down in a marked landing bay while the outer hatch closed behind it. Sensors showed the room's seal had been re-established, and the environment checked out.

  The team got out of their seats and began to stretch and yawn. Marco plucked a device from his arm-rest–a metallic bead on an attractive silver chain–and snapped it around his wrist. It was what passed for a phone in the Legacy Fleet, and its like were distributed to all personnel for communication, mission recording, and the occasional game. He technically wasn't supposed to have taken it off in the first place, but who was going to report him?

  Jansen groaned as he put his own phone on. "You know this is how the military tracks you, right? Government espionnage, man."

  Hopkins' phone had never left his wrist. "I do know that, Nils. It's in the manual. And on the back of the box. And on the front of the box. In case you missed it, we are the dang military. True story."

  "Psh," Jansen said. "I never signed any enlistment papers." He looked to Marco. "Hey, are we bringing the blasters along?"

  Of course they weren't. After The Europa Incident, The Beagle's crew were only allowed access to the arsenal with Fleet Command's express authorization.

  Marco shook his head.

  Jansen's shoulders drooped gloomily.

  Hopkins mumbled, "They're not blasters," but no one paid him any attention.

  With that matter settled, they headed for the ramp. They passed the pressure suits still hanging in their lockers, glanced at them and kept walking. Fleet regulations required personnel to wear the fancy new skinsuits on all off-world operations, but even Hopkins was willing to thumb his nose up at that one. They'd all lived in similar outfits for six straight months, and that was more than enough for one lifetime.

  The Beagle's ramp lowered and they walked down into a cavernous hangar bay. As they came out from under the shuttle's shadow, Marco took a look around and marveled at the installation. Charon had been transformed into a big pair of eyes and ears attached to one very large cannon, less a boatman than a gatekeeper it seemed. It was a tiger-trap waiting at the edge of the solar system.

  The base had essentially built itself. Legacy launched a seed-pod at the binary-moon-planet-thing-a-doo, and it hit the surface, dug underground, and turned the insides into a surveillance and early response post. While the delivery method had been borrowed from ancient Eireki technology, the actual design of the installation was entirely human.

  Marco somehow doubted any other design teams had worked together across a span of sixty-five million years.

  "So what's the job?" Jansen asked.

  Marco flicked his wrist and a glowing screen popped up at the edge of his vision. Most people could control their phones entirely with mental commands, but Marco was stuck using small gestures, much to his annoyance. The phone was always listening to their conversation though, and had already prepared the mission brief. He waved his fingers and made the image full-screen.

  After a minute, he minimized the display and said, "Looks like a faulty memory module. Cron jobs aren't executing on-time, and the mainframe has thrown up a few kernel panics."

  "Easy one," Jansen replied. "We'll be back aboard Legacy for dinner."

  The hangar's lights dimmed, turned red and began to pulse. A klaxon started.

  "Aww, what now?" Jansen moaned.

  Marco brought his display back up and checked for local network alerts. "Incoming vessel detected," he said with a hundred questions swarming his voice.

  Heavy machinery moved all around them. Thousands of tonnes of metal and stone shuddered and shook the ground, then locked into place.

  There was a flash of light, not blindingly bright but enough to surprise the three technicians.

  Marco glanced back at his phone's display. "We just fired on someone?"

  Sparks exploded from the wall a few stories above them. Similar explosions sounded throughout the installation's corridors.

  The lights went out everywhere.

  "You've got to be kidding me," Hopkins said.

  With that, they all turned around in unison and walked back up the ramp, and it automatically closed behind them.

  Cracking Safe

  While his two companions paced, Nils Jansen sat cross-legged on The Beagle's floor with his attention fixed firmly on his phone's display. The images were projected onto his eyes using Eireki technology, and though he originally distrusted the machine's ability to read commands directly from his nervous system, that was no longer an issue.

  Fleet regulations allowed personnel to change a small and very specific set of options on their phones, and like most regulations, Jansen had blatantly ignored the lot of them. He replaced the operating system with an unlocked version that gave him access to all of its inner workings, and then went about covertly installing a number of tools that the brass certainly wouldn't appreciate. His phone had packet sniffers, network scanners, password crackers… Lots of fun toys, for girls and boys.

  He'd also switched the drab background color to a looping animation that he watched whenever he was bored or stressed out. It was a crudely drawn cartoon of Larry Hopkins being repeatedly slapped in the face with a big fish, who looked positively scandalized at his own involvement in the affair.

  Jansen hadn't always been interested in computer security, but he'd spent six months trapped in a shoe-box with only two things to occupy his time: a pile of dry technical manuals, and a project that required considerable technical expertise. He shielded himself against the slings and arrows of outrageous boredom with books that were only mildly less dull.

  After being miracu
lously rescued, he was sure he'd never want to see another manual as long as he lived, but the truth was far stranger. The books had become a source of comfort (rather like the asinine radio show he'd broadcast during the ordeal), and he soon realized they were the only thing left that could still hold his attention… well, that and psychologically abusing Larry Hopkins.

  Jansen's heavily modded phone was presently trying and failing to brute force its way past the armory's combination lock. He'd already spent the past several hours looking for more elegant ways to override its security, but ultimately came up empty handed and frustrated. His only remaining option was to sit and wait while the phone spat millions and millions of passwords at the door.

  He felt rotten right down to the pit of his stomach because of one unanswered question. They couldn't know if the outpost had killed its target or not, and Jansen absolutely refused to face another unknown alien menace with a pointed stick. A gun would make him feel a lot better.

  "Any progress, Technician?"

  He hated when Marco called him Technician, but he generally hated when Marco called him anything. The blast of annoyance made him momentarily forget which lie he'd told his stalwart captain. "About that," he said slowly to buy time, and he dragged the last word out until the memory resurfaced. "I've been trying everything to jimmy the bay doors open, but they won't budge. The mainframe hasn't rebooted yet."

  None of that was a lie, per se. He'd set his phone to ping the outpost's command network every few minutes, and shoot him a notification if anything showed signs of life. He just wasn't actively working on that particular problem because it would be a giant waste of his otherwise valuable time. He had more pressing matters, like getting hold of the damned blasters.

  Hopkins said, "I still say we head for Station Control. We can fix the mainframe and get automated defenses back online." He was obviously trying to hit that perfect balance between commanding and inspirational, and he was just as obviously failing. His voice was an octave too high, and the way he raised tone at the end of each sentence made him sound like a drunk leprechaun.