Impact

by Brandon Q Morris

  Geralt dropped heavily into the seat and acknowledged the connection.

  “About time,” the commander’s voice sounded through the command center.

  “Sorry, Geraldine,” Jenna apologized. “We were just exploring the ship. Boris discovered a glass cockpit in the nose of the ship. We lost track of time. We could see Saturn from there, and it was simply fascinating.”

  “I’m jealous. I doubt we’ll ever get to see it.”

  “When we come back, we can arrange orbital flights for everyone,” Boris said.

  “If you come back, yes. I’d like to talk to all of you about that,” Geraldine said.

  “What do you mean? What’s happened?”

  “Basically nothing, Jenna. We just took advantage of some especially good weather and used a radio telescope to scan the asteroid belt. There seems to be a lot of human activity there right now. I never imagined humans would be back in space so far so soon. It hasn’t even been 15 generations since the Great War. So, you should be prepared to be attacked if you’re discovered. Humans shoot first and ask questions later.”

  “Then shouldn’t they be able to take care of the asteroid themselves?” Geralt asked.

  Geraldine sighed. “There have been some down here saying the same thing, yes. But if they get the impression that we had something to do with it, they’re sure to take revenge. We’ve got to solve this problem. An asteroid doesn’t simply leave its orbit for no reason. There must be some cause behind it.”

  “If they attack us, how will we defend ourselves?” Geralt asked.

  “I trust that you can figure out how the onboard weapons work. But they are certainly technically obsolete and inferior to anything the Earthlings might have today. Two hundred and fifty Earth years. That’s the difference between feudalism and the industrial age.”

  “Then we’ll just have to make sure they don’t find us,” Jenna said.

  “That shouldn’t be too difficult,” Boris said. “The distances in the asteroid belt are still gigantic, and we don’t have to fly around making ourselves noticeable.”

  “Neither active nor passive,” Jenna said. “That also means that we’ll have to use the engines very carefully.”

  “You’ll have some time to prepare yourselves,” the commander said. “It’ll take eleven orbital periods just to reach Jupiter’s orbit. But before that, I need to ask each of you if this is what you want. This is a mission that I would never order someone to do involuntarily. I will not hold it against any of you if you decline this journey with so many unknown variables. Do you need time to think it over?”

  “Not me,” Boris said. “I’m in. This is a huge opportunity, one I’ll never get again.”

  “I’ve got to go with my brother,” Anna said. “Otherwise he’ll do something stupid.”

  “A meeting with the humans would advance Titan’s archeological and scientific knowledge enormously,” Geralt observed. “I can’t miss that chance.”

  “I...” Jenna started out.

  Boris’s heart began beating wildly. If she didn’t join the trip, he’d go and jump in a methane lake right now. And he’d already said yes! Could he change his answer? Why was she thinking about this so long? Was it because of him? He was sure it had to do with him. He shouldn’t have embraced her. Everything was going much too fast. She wanted her space. They would be much too close on the ship, and for far too long a time.

  “I’m in,” Jenna said finally. “I was only trying to decide if I have the right experience for this undertaking, but I guess I completed our last mission well enough.”

  She was coming! Boris would have liked to break out in loud jubilation, but he was able to restrain himself.

  “Good,” Geraldine said. “Then I wish you all good luck. If we receive new data, we’ll transmit it to you. But I’m afraid that after you reach Jupiter you’ll be on your own.”

  4794.6

  He was disappointed. Going back down the long passageway, Boris always took two steps at a time. He should’ve known there wouldn’t be anything special. While they were crossing the path of Jupiter’s orbit, the Giant Planet was on the complete other side of the solar system. Nevertheless, he’d hoped he’d be able to see something special from the dome. But there wasn’t anything—nothing but 10,000 stars discernable with the naked eye, and the just-barely-visible ball of Saturn. He’d lost sight of Titan a few orbital periods ago.

  The only thing fascinating in the celestial sky right now was the sun. Previously he’d only known it as a fuzzy bright spot, brightest in infrared. It had transformed into a white ball, stretching out its fingers toward them. He believed he could even feel its warmth when he put one of his cheeks against the glass. Geralt had said that was impossible because the dome was well insulated, but he could see the sun, so at least part of its infrared spectrum was getting to him.

  The temperature rose as he moved into the lower part of the passageway. He would have to leave the command center quickly after he opened the hatch. Geralt had proposed—and all had agreed—that they had to create conditions suitable for Wnutri during most of the flight time. Boris was against it at first, until his friend told him that Jenna was already developing minor frostbite on her toes. Then he had immediately agreed to the full activation of the life-support system.

  Since then he had spent most of his time in the storage room or in his tank, rarely seeing Jenna. Was she on duty now? he wondered. He pushed the hatch to the side and let himself down. The ship was currently decelerating, so there was up and down.

  Jenna was sitting in the commander’s seat and seemed to be engrossed in a book. But she had definitely heard him when he landed. She turned to him and smiled. Due to the tropical heat in the command center, Boris started feeling hot within seconds. He waved to Jenna quickly, ran to the airlock, and closed the airlock door by pressing the button.

  The air was sucked out of the airlock. First, he heard a loud droning sound that became quieter and quieter until it finally went silent. Jenna’s spacesuit was in a corner of the little room. Yesterday she had packed herself into her spacesuit and visited him in the storage room. Now she had simply deposited her suit right here.

  It had been a strange visit. They had lurked around each other like two cats who had never met before. In her spacesuit, she seemed like any other person to him. But he was still the same as before. Had she changed? Had he done something wrong? Life was so complicated.

  The green light on the opposite door blinked on, indicating he could leave the airlock now. Boris bent down and touched her helmet. If somebody had been watching, they would have thought he was crazy.

  He suddenly had an idea. He stood up, exited the airlock, and ran down the entire long corridor to the garden. He passed through the glass cubicle, looked for the first flower he could find, and picked it. Then he turned around, ran back up the corridor, and returned to Jenna’s spacesuit again, all out of breath. The blossom had immediately frozen when he left the garden, so he carefully placed the now-brittle flower on her helmet.

  But he didn’t like the way it looked. He picked up the flower, lifted the helmet, and set them back down with the flower underneath. Now the flower was visible through the transparent visor. Boris was satisfied.

  That afternoon, Geralt and Jenna unexpectedly arrived at the storage room. Boris was in the middle of cleaning the outside of the tank with Anna and noticed them only after Anna smacked him on the shoulder and turned him around. He took a deep breath, but he wasn’t able to shake his feelings of uncertainty.

  He could feel his shoulder muscles tensing up. Apparently, that could be seen from the outside, too, because Anna suddenly started to massage his back. Her powerful touch was painful, but it was just what he needed at that moment.

  “We wanted to have lunch with you,” Geralt said.

  “How nice,” Anna answered. “Unfortunately, all we have to offer is a few servings of powdered food.”

  “That’s okay. We’re in our suits, so we’d have
to decline, anyway,” Geralt said.

  Boris didn’t join the small talk, and Jenna remained quiet, too. He looked for her to look at him, but whenever he thought he was about to catch her gaze, she quickly looked away in a different direction.

  “Should we play some games?” Anna asked. She indicated the open area in the storage room with a sweeping motion of her arms. “We’ve got lots of space here.”

  “How about baseball? What do you say?” Geralt said. “I learned about it ages ago.”

  “I’m afraid we don’t have the right equipment for that,” Anna said. “I was thinking something a little simpler like tag.”

  “Tag?” Geralt laughed. “That’s what we used to play as kids in my father’s lab. Once I knocked over a reaction oven.”

  “But you had fun, right?”

  “Yes, of course. Okay, let’s play tag.”

  Geralt tagged Anna. “You’re it.”

  Then he dashed away around the tank. Boris reacted too slowly. Anna had already tagged him and then run away. He wanted to go after Jenna, but she was faster than he was and already had a two-meter start.

  “Hold on,” he called, storming after her.

  “You can’t catch me,” she replied in a teasing tone.

  That’s the problem in a nutshell, he thought. Then he wiped non-existent sweat from his forehead and began to chase Jenna, who was surprisingly quick. The force boosters in her suit could obviously keep up with those in his outer skin. But she also had to be in good physical shape, because no technology could boost something that wasn’t there to begin with.

  He could catch up to her on the straightaways, because he could take bigger steps, but she kept making quick and nimble turns to stay just out of his reach. Twice he almost managed to touch her spacesuit, but both times she darted out of reach at the last second. It wasn’t fair! Geralt came close, but that was just him trying to be nice. He had to tag Jenna. He started huffing and puffing. How could she keep going?

  He stopped, bent down at the waist, and put his arms on his thighs until he had caught his breath. Then he slowly moved forward. Jenna was nowhere to be found. Anna was standing by the tank and jerked her head to one side. Was that a hint? Maybe Jenna was hiding behind the tank. Surely she was looking left and right repeatedly, in order to quickly run away in the other direction when he came around one or the other corner. He won’t give her the pleasure.

  He carefully started climbing the tank. His footsteps weren’t audible due to the thin air, but the tank’s metallic outer wall would transmit any sound. He carefully crossed the tank until he could look down on the other side. There she was, right in front of him, only two meters away. He could easily jump that distance. Boris aimed and then jumped backward, so that he would land straight in front of her. He flew!

  The plan worked. He reached forward with both arms and grabbed Jenna. “Got you!”

  “That was very clever.” She nestled imperceptibly in his arms and didn’t move.

  He should really let her go. Otherwise the others would get suspicious. He loosened his grip, and Jenna immediately ran off. She raced around the tank. “You’re it,” she called.

  Apparently, she had tagged Anna.

  They played for a good hour. Surprisingly, Anna knew lots of games with physical activity. Boris remembered that she had once helped out in a kindergarten for a few weeks before becoming a Snarushi. The games made a nice diversion. When he was exerting physical energy, he couldn’t think of anything else. The games were so innocent. He felt like he’d been transferred back to his childhood, although he had almost no memory of it.

  “Ugh. My oxygen’s running low,” Geralt finally said. The activity had depleted his oxygen supply faster than usual.

  “Yes, and we should check our trajectory again,” Jenna said.

  “Okay, then,” Anna agreed.

  Boris nodded. “That was a nice visit,” he said. “Thank you.”

  The storage room door closed. He was alone with Anna again.

  She put her hand on his shoulder. “That was nice,” she said.

  He didn’t feel like asking what she meant, because he suddenly felt exhausted. “I’m going to get in the tank,” he said, even though it was not late at all yet.

  “See you later, then,” Anna replied.

  He walked to the tank’s entrance. Something was on the floor in front of it. Boris bent down and saw a flower, frozen and brittle, and looking completely different from the one he had placed under Jenna’s helmet. Had she left it there for him?

  4801.9

  “Careful there,” called his sister.

  “I know.”

  Boris clipped the safety line’s carabiner into one of the numerous eye brackets, pushed off, and sailed over the outer wall of the spaceship. From his perspective, the ship looked like a giant tube. Anna waved at him from below. So that they could approach unnoticed, the engines had been deactivated days ago, but that was hardly even necessary.

  Boris landed close to the main engine’s exhaust opening. He attached a second line and then examined the material. He could find no damage to the surface. The founders’ ship had survived the long flight very well. He set the material scanner directly on the metal. The device looked for structural changes. It displayed a green light after a second, signaling that it couldn’t find any potential problems.

  Boris could now very clearly feel the sun on his back. He turned around. Automatically, his outer skin changed to a darker pigment. He thought he could see flicks of fire around the edge of the sun, but he knew that it had to be some kind of optical illusion. The sun didn’t have prominences large enough to be seen from this distance. Otherwise, the space around the ship seemed empty.

  If they hadn’t known better, none of them would have thought they were inside an asteroid belt. They were simply in an area where the concentration of freely orbiting chunks of rock was somewhat higher than elsewhere. The closest asteroid that the ship’s scanners could find was about 600,000 kilometers away.

  Anna had disappeared from his field of vision. She must have moved to the other side of the ship.

  “Find anything?” he asked by radio.

  “No, everything checks out okay so far,” she replied.

  “Remember to clean the windows at the front,” he said.

  “Haha. It must be all your fingerprints on the inside, making it hard to see out. They’re sparkling clean on this side. You can clean that side yourself when we go back in.”

  More than anything else, he liked to spend his free time in the dome. Anna had already started to complain that she rarely saw him anymore. But the storage room just depressed him. It had absolutely no windows and was bathed in a horrible, dirty-brown artificial light, making everything look ghastly. If they could at least open a window!

  But that wasn’t actually a problem in the storage room if he thought about it, since it had a giant window when the terrace was opened. They’d used it at the beginning to load the tank and rover into the ship. Why hadn’t he thought of it before? The storage room wasn’t filled with air, so there really shouldn’t be any argument against opening the loading door.

  “Anna? I’ve got an idea.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Why don’t we just open the cargo hatch? We’d have the best view anyone could imagine.”

  “And if we weren’t careful, we’d sail away into infinity.”

  That was a valid objection. The hatch was very wide and tall. If he pushed off something in zero gravity without being extremely careful, he could push himself right out the hole in the wall into space. The risk wasn’t great, but there would be no way to rescue him if it happened.

  “We could stretch a thin net in front of the opening,” he said.

  “If you can find one.”

  “If nothing else, I could build one out of rope. I’ve found ropes of all different widths and lengths in storage. The founders seemed to have a real love of rope.”

  “That might work. At l
east then you wouldn’t spend all your time in that dark and gloomy dome.”

  “The dome’s not dark. The closer we get to the sun, the brighter it gets.”

  “I wouldn’t exactly call it bright,” Anna said, “and I hope that we don’t get too much closer.”

  “I don’t know,” Boris said. “Wouldn’t you like to experience the sun as our founders once did?”

  “The sun, maybe... Sure, but you’re forgetting that we’d also be getting closer to where all the Earthlings are, and I don’t think much good could be expected from running into them.”

  “If the legends are accurate.”

  “Come on, Boris. You haven’t been listening to any of those conspiracy theorists who think the Earth’s remained a paradise this whole time, and we were sent to live on Titan as punishment for some crime?”

  “No, I don’t believe that. Are there really Titanians who think that?”

  “Yes, Jenna told me about them. The leaders try to keep them out of the spotlight and not to give them much attention.”

  “I think we’ve found our little runaway,” Jenna announced.

  “Great. We were already on our way back in,” Anna replied.

  “Any signs of wear or aging?”

  “Boris has a pain in his hip, and sometimes I can’t think of the right word when I need it. But the ship looks great.”

  “Sounds like both of you need to follow its example. After all, it’s more than five thousand orbital periods older than you.”

  “That’s easy to say for someone just out of diapers herself,” Anna said with a laugh.

  “Whatever you say. I’m still wearing diapers, and I wear them with pride,” Jenna said. “Geralt insisted I work wearing my spacesuit today.”

  Spacesuit? Why? Did Jenna want to take a spacewalk today, maybe? The mystery was solved when he opened the airlock door to the command center. It was so cold in the room that he would be able to stay there for at least a few hours. However, for the two Wnutri it meant that they would need their suits to protect themselves from the cold.