by Angel Wedge
Silence again, until Elle nodded and spoke in an awed whisper.
“The unknown.”
* * *
Another Story…
This story was first seen as Probe, which appeared in the short story collections A Dozen Skies and Pasts & Futures, though with very different characters. I'm including it here, so you can see how the idea evolved over time. If you want to see more stories, and maybe leave me a comment saying which should be the next novella, then please check out the books.
Probe
The Space Programme was supposed to be pushing the limits of technology, at least if you read the news. Warren had read all the articles before he came out here, and wondered if the people back home would ever realise what it was actually like.
It wasn’t the isolation, though that was a dramatic change for anyone who’d grown up with instant messengers available every minute of the day, friends all over the world able to talk in just a few seconds. On board the Hephaestus, if you couldn’t sleep that was just tough. There was nobody else to talk to unless someone else was restless too. Back home, Warren had a big enough contact list that there was bound to be someone ready to chat at any time, day or night. But anything going into space had to be old technology.
They wouldn’t take the latest and greatest. If it wasn’t simple enough for them to test in every possible circumstance, it wasn’t allowed on this ship. So there were no cyborgs, no supplants. No full AI, no implanted clatternet. There were less than a hundred computers on the whole vessel, and most of them were restricted to a single purpose. Talking to other crew members was done in person, or by leaving physical notes. Sending a message to Earth was via the Pulse, a single compressed data burst every 12 hours. If you wanted a reply from someone living planetside, you’d be waiting a week or more while both your question and the response went through the Programme’s censors to determine whether it was a meaningful use of resources and presented the right public image.
Now, anyone could run a point to point laser grid. Half the planet had independent internet service, not monitored or censored by corporations or governments. The Mars probes were the only place now completely dependent on a single communications link. They’d known it was worth it, to be the first people to set foot on another planet. Warren hadn’t been the first, but he’d been close. The honour of the first step had gone to Kruzchev, but the plaque back on Earth had five names on it. Mission Commander Jay Laurence, Captain Lee Kruzchev, Captain Anna Farley, Captain Stef Miles, and Captain Warren Grace.
Hephaestus had been followed by three other ships. Between them they could carry enough resources to make camp in the Martian dust for seven months, until the alignment of the Earth, Mars, and their moons was right to minimise the fuel cost, and enough crew that cabin fever wouldn’t drive them all insane. For most of the journey, they’d fended off boredom by building a jury-rigged set of radio equipment to let them communicate more easily between the four vessels. For some reason, the planning committee had seen fit to make the lines of communication between the vessels be restricted to mission critical messages only, and logged for posterity. So in typical resourceful-pioneer fashion, they’d come up with their own ways to talk.
Now that wouldn’t help. Commander Laurence had transferred over to command the Vulcan for the journey back to Earth, with Goibniu and Weyland following. Kruzchev too had decided to go home. But they couldn’t all return as planned. Because in the shadow of a high cliff, where it would never be visible from a flyby, they had found evidence of another craft landing on Mars. Evidence of another camp. The marks weren’t the same as theirs, but it was clearly where someone had stayed. There were high-energy impact marks where something had landed; burn craters from launches. Places where caves had been blasted into the rock, with fracture patterns that could only be the work of explosives. The base of the caves had been cut perfectly level, like a foundation. But no other evidence had been left behind.
The only sign of who had cut those caves, whose ships had landed there years before the first official human mission to the red planet, was a carving on the wall. A pattern of circles representing the orbits of planets and moons in the solar system, with a deeper groove marking the route to Mars from Jupiter’s moon Ganymede.
Three months after they’d found the map, Hephaestus had set off for Ganymede. It was a longer voyage than their original plan, but with the right gravitational slingshot their fuel reserves would just be sufficient. If they missed this window, the scientists calculated it would have been at least twelve years until they could try again.
As they passed the asteroid belt, by which time Vulcan and its companions were half way home, a team Earthside was launching another ship to join them. No crew could survive the acceleration, even with all the advances in medicine over the last hundred years, but they could send an unmanned rocket packed with supplies for the Hephaestus. Replacements for the few parts that the ship’s own systems couldn’t recycle, and more fuel for the eventual return to Earth.
What they couldn’t provide was anything that would relieve the boredom. Laurence and Kruzchev were home now, but Damien Crusher, the Weyland’s chief biologist, had joined them. The final member of the crew was Ana Petrova, formerly commander of the Vulcan. Five astronauts, whose six year mission had been extended to nearly twenty. They all had second thoughts, so the final crew was made up only of those whose desire to unlock the mysteries of the solar system was more powerful than any ties they had to family back on Earth.
For the next five years, Hephaestus really became their home. They’d been aboard for years already, even the most efficient safe route took a long time to travel. But now they knew that they were going into the unknown, that even after they’d caught the supply pod to replenish their fuel stocks, there was a good chance they wouldn’t ever be coming back.
Warren knew it was probably the hardest decision of his life; but from the first moment he’d seen that diagram of the planets, he’d known he would be going out there. Though he hadn’t told the crew, or the mission profilers on the other end of a laser link, exactly why he’d decided that. They might not have let him go if he’d told them the full story, and they certainly wouldn’t have put him in command of the Hephaestus.
It was only near the end of their journey, with Jupiter filling the sky and less than a month to their destination, that Mission Commander Grace finally considered letting his crew in on the big secret. The hard part would be telling them without sounding crazy.
Because Warren Grace already knew who was waiting for them on Ganymede; he’d spent half his life searching for them, and now his chance was finally here.
* * *
By the Same Author
Novels & Novellas
Sandpaper Kiss
Mr Hook’s Big Black Box (serialised online)
* * *
Short Stories and Collections
A Dozen Monsters (coming Feb 2018)
A Dozen Comedies
Into Dreams: A Bouquet of Fantastic Tales
A Dozen Quests
A Dozen Secrets
Unlocked
Nine Lights
A Dozen Curiosities
Pasts & Futures: A Science Fiction Selection
A Dozen Experiments
A Dozen Skies
A Dozen Tomorrows
Hallowe’en specials:
A Dozen Fears
A Dozen Nightmares
Stories from Hope City (Superheroes)
After Hope
Forbidden Hope
Another Hope
Whispersmiths (and Other Rumours)
About the Author
Angel keeps on writing, from short stories to much longer ones, and also loves to dabble in all kinds of creative endeavours. He’s never had any particularly interesting jobs, so doesn’t have much to write about here, but has devoted an insane amount of time to writing a short story every day for more than a year. Hopefully, this will help to keep the books coming for qu
ite a while. When not writing, you can usually find him trying to make the household budget stretch, and trying out culinary experiments on his friends and housemates.