Jasmine had a choice to make. She could dismiss Mike as crazy or she could believe he was sane, that he had the crew’s best interests at heart. One belief caused her anguish, the other brought relief, and deep down she knew it was a simple choice.
“Oh, Mike,” she said, lowering her mental defenses. “Who else knows?”
“I've told Nadir, but he doesn't believe me. He thinks I'm losing it. I'm not crazy, Jazz. You've got to believe me.”
“I do,” she replied. She had always wanted to believe him, regardless of his aged look, his shaved head and the rough stubble on his face. Jasmine felt overwhelmed by a sense of being lost. She wanted Mike to be her knight in shining armor, only his disheveled look and erratic behavior had thrown her. That he would confide in her was a turning point, and she finally felt she had someone she could really trust.
“I'm torn, Jazz. I want to believe we won't need this. I really do, but I'm afraid. We have no idea what a nuclear detonation would accomplish, if anything. We could be swinging a baseball bat at a hornet’s nest.
“Chuck knows, I’m sure of it. If it comes to it, I’m afraid he'll put down on Bestla and detonate.”
“Is that why they woke you and not him?” she asked.
“Oh, Jazz,” Mike replied, resting his hands tenderly on either side of her neck. “You never were one to miss the subtleties. They woke me with strict instructions for an abort. I was to babysit the Copernicus on a course back past Jupiter. No one else was supposed to be woken, but they screwed me over.”
“Who?” she asked.
“Houston. They activated the revival sequence remotely.”
He sighed. “For all that’s happening up here, it’s worse on Earth. There's a number of factions. One is calling for a preemptive strike, saying even if we don't destroy Bestla at least we can disable her and stop her from fulfilling her threat.
“Cooler heads are calling for calm. They want us to withdraw altogether, to sit back and observe.
“Others are pushing for us to proceed with the exploration portion of the mission. They’re ignoring the message entirely. They think we need more evidence before drawing any conclusions.”
“And you?” Jasmine asked. “What do you think we should do?”
“I think we need to be cautious. We’ve only got one planet. We lose that, we lose everything. A hundred million species depend on the decisions we make. I think we could provoke a hostile act if we detonate the power core. We have no idea if we’d even so much as scratch the paintwork on Bestla with a nuke.”
His lips trembled. Jasmine could see he believed every word he spoke.
“Why go along with all this then?” she asked. “Why support the burn?”
“I’m buying time. I’m trying to figure out how the craft has been wired so I can defuse this thing and take that option off the table.”
She nodded. Jasmine was still coming to grips with being thrust two decades into the future. Nothing seemed right to her. Space was unnatural, unsettling. She nodded because she was playing a part on a stage, because she had to hold to something in the confusion that clogged her mind.
“I'm worried about Chuck,” Mike confessed. “They woke me and had us accelerate into a new orbit because they wanted to give us some breathing space, an opportunity to think. They didn’t want us to be forced into one action or another.”
“But Chuck?”
“Chuck makes out as though he wants to proceed with exploration, but I'm not convinced. I think this is a feint on his part. I think he's getting us close enough to carry out his orders if need be.”
“His orders?” she said, surprised by such a notion.
“He'll kill us, Jazz. He's already got enough to justify this in his mind.”
“But you don't know that,” she protested, keeping her voice low.
“You watch,” he replied. “You'll see I'm right. He's not interested in Bestla, not really. Chuck was an air force pilot. He understands the chain of command. He has his orders. He won't hesitate, Jazz. I'm telling you. I've seen his type before. He'll do whatever he thinks he needs to in order to protect Earth, whether Earth needs protecting or not.”
Mike dropped his hands to his side, saying, “I'm worried about where he's getting his orders. NASA made it clear their preference was for a general abort, but he's not listening to them. I'm worried about who he is listening to back there on Earth.”
Jasmine went to reply when Mei's voice cut in from behind her.
“Jazz,” Mei's said. “Can I get you to come down to medical?”
Mei’s voice didn’t sound as though it had been transmitted by a radio or intercom. Jasmine could have sworn Mei was standing right behind her, but she turned to see only a control panel.
“Ah, OK,” she replied, not sure how inter-ship communications worked. Had her conversation with Mike been private? Had Mei activated some kind of intercom and overheard the tail end of their discussion?
Mei must have sensed the hesitancy in Jasmine’s reply as she added, “Is everything OK up there?”
“Sure,” Jasmine said. “It’s just a long way down there, you know.”
“A bit of exercise will do you good,” Mei replied. “Jason’s processed your tox-scan. I need to give you a shot of nano-biotics and an infusion to bring your white blood cell count back up.”
“Oh,” Jasmine replied, looking at Mike, not really sure what that meant.
He whispered, “Go.”
“I'm on my way.”
“Bring some coffee with you,” Mei said, and as quickly as she'd interrupted their conversation she was gone.
“Coffee?” Jasmine asked. Mike opened a cabinet beside the galley.
“Mei drinks the stuff like a fish,” Mike replied, handing Jasmine a couple of freeze-dried plastic packets. The look on her face must have told him she had no idea if this was all she needed to take. He added, “Mei will have hot water and cups down there. As for me, I hate instant coffee. I’d much rather make the trek up here to get a fresh latte, but hey, no surprises there, right?”
“Right,” Jasmine replied, smiling and feigning remembrance.
She took the coffee packets from him as he leaned in and kissed her on the forehead. His gesture seemed a little forced, almost parental rather than being the affection of a husband for his wife, and she wondered how aware he was of her memory loss. Was he compensating, trying to be considerate?
“I love you. Remember that.”
“I will,” she replied.
Love was a big word, one that meant different things to each of them. How long had they been married? How much had their love waxed or waned over the decades? For her, love was a feeling, a delight. For Mike, love seemed more pragmatic, almost clinical. Standing there in front of him, she was unsure how to respond. She wanted to say something like, I love you too, but the words felt forced, almost corny, so she remained silent and nodded slowly, smiling with what she hoped was a display of warmth and tenderness.
“Whatever happens,” he said. “Don't forget that I love you.”
“I won’t,” she promised. In the back of her mind, Jasmine had an uneasy feeling that Mike was being deliberately cryptic, as though he knew something dire was going to happen. Should she take his words at face value or read more into them? She didn’t know. Deep down, she didn’t want to know. Jasmine was struggling to keep up with everything that was unfolding around her. There was only so much she could handle, and she hoped there was nothing more to his words.
The central shaft reaching through the Copernicus was circular, easily spanning fifteen feet in diameter. Cables snaked over the edge, disappearing into the shaft.
Jasmine walked carefully around the opening, keeping one hand running along a console to help her balance. She smiled weakly at Mike, trying not to worry about any hidden meaning in his words.
As she crouched and turned, holding onto the rungs of the ladder, she stepped down into the shaft she'd previously drifted so effortlessly through. Jasmine w
as acutely aware of the gravity-like acceleration of the Copernicus. They were increasing their speed at 0.6G every second, making her feel as though she was floating in a swimming pool, slowly sinking, drifting toward the bottom. Climbing down the shaft was dangerous.
“Don't forget to hook in,” Jason said softly to her as though he were an angel sitting on her shoulder, watching her every move.
Although Jasmine appreciated the reminder, those electronic words made her wonder about him and his role on the ship. Was Jason privy to everything that was spoken, to every interaction between the crew? Was there no privacy? What were his operating rules and standards? Did he watch from afar, only moving closer electronically at those points where he was needed? Or was he a voyeur catching every detail? She breathed deeply, making a mental note to ask Mike or Nadir at a later point in time. Jason was an enigma.
Jasmine pulled the carabiner from her waist, pulling a thin cord out from the waist band and hooking the aluminum carabiner onto a clip beside the ladder. A mechanical catch twisted, locking into place.
“I've got you,” Jason said.
As Jasmine worked her way down the ladder, she took one last glance at Mike. He was talking with Nadir. Perhaps talking at Nadir would have been a better description. From their body language and the occasional raised word floating through the air, it was clear the two men vehemently disagreed.
She descended the ladder slowly. Even with the carabiner running through the track beside the rungs, preventing her from falling should she lose her grip, the awkward sensation of almost-Earth-like gravity slowed her progress. Climbing backwards down a ladder hundreds of feet above what looked like the bottom of an open elevator shaft some ten stories deep was unnerving. She moved slowly, focusing on her breathing, surprised by how physically taxing it was to go down, always keeping three points of contact on the ladder. The corridor hadn’t seem so long when she was weightless.
Large black numbers marked the decks in the Copernicus, with each deck being spaced almost two stories apart. The craft was huge and surprisingly spacious given the small crew, and Jasmine got the feeling the Copernicus had been repurposed, having been taken from some larger crew for this mission. She passed the sleeping berths on level one, the communication deck on level two, and caught a glimpse of Anastasia at work in the science lab on level three.
Anastasia looked lonely inside the vast chamber. Most of the lights were out, making the science lab seem even larger than it was, with a solitary light coming down from above.
It had taken some time for Jasmine to recognize the internal shape of the Copernicus. The habitable areas within the craft were shaped like an hourglass. No, she thought, perhaps it was more like one of the old handheld dumbbells from the 1920s. Like everything else, those archaic weights had come back in vogue almost a century later. Rather than being an H-shape with heavy metal slabs on each side of the bar, the weights were spherical. Each end of the dumbbell was a black circular set-weight. In the same way, the Copernicus had a spherical command deck and a long corridor connecting it to the spherical medical bay at the rear of the craft. In between, the levels were like floors in a building.
Where was engineering? She paused on the ladder, looking over her shoulder. The ladder extended out into the medical bay, dropping down as the spherical ceiling curled away from the shaft. There hadn’t been a ladder there when she’d awoken, so this had to be something temporary, put in place while they were under acceleration. At the base of the medical bay, in the low center was a hatch that must have led through the floor into engineering, she thought, and she remembered seeing Chuck emerge from there when he’d first received the message.
As she descended into the spherical chamber, Jasmine noted the cryo-pods were arranged upside down in a circle around the opening that led into the shaft. They radiated outwards. It took her a moment to realize they only appeared upside down relative to their current acceleration. She marveled at how efficiently the medical bay was laid out, with all the clunky equipment on the roof or the walls, neatly out of the way. There was no clutter.
A spherical room, though, was unnatural. Circular platforms wrapped around the deck, forming tiers or risers, almost like a curved podium breaking up the deck into different heights.
Unnatural. That thought lingered in her mind as she stepped down into the sphere next to the hatch. Mei was standing with her back to Jasmine on the far side of the chamber. Jasmine hadn’t been able to put her finger on what was so upsetting about the Copernicus, but it was the absence of anything that even remotely resembled life on Earth.
The last thing she remembered before waking up on the spacecraft was sitting on a wooden swing, but there was no timber here in orbit around Saturn. She’d never really thought about it before, but her parent’s home was made from rectangles. From the planks of wood on the deck to the right-angle formed by the wooden pillars holding up the porch roof, and the square windows with their white painted frames, straight lines dominated homes on Earth, and yet everything on the Copernicus revolved around circles and spheres, curves and bends.
Earth had always seemed rather flat, she thought, even with the odd hill and mountain range. Life was largely conducted in two dimensions. When entering a sky-scraper, Jasmine never really had the sense of life in three dimensions. She’d walk into an elevator, lose all sense of spatial location, feel a modicum of acceleration, and then walk out on the nineteenth floor. With her eyes, she only saw motion in two dimensions, even though she moved in three, but here on the Copernicus, with the artificial sense of gravity imparted by their constant acceleration, the ship assaulted her with so many new, unfamiliar perspectives. Jasmine felt uneasy, and figured it was because of the unnatural environment in which she found herself.
“Hello,” she said, deliberately trying to sound upbeat as she walked up behind Mei.
“Hey, I didn’t see you there,” Mei replied with a smile that looked natural and friendly. Her eyes glistened.
Mei gestured to a fold-out seat on the wall beside her. Straps from a four-point harness hung to either side of the seat. This must have been where Mei had sat out the maneuver.
Jasmine sat down and Mei unfolded a second seat beside her. Although the artificial gravity was less than it would have been on Earth, Jasmine was relieved to rest her weary legs. The descent from the command deck had worn her out.
“How are you feeling?” Mei asked, taking Jasmine’s hand. Mei’s fingers were warm. She held Jasmine’s right hand with both of her hands. “You had a nasty shock back there.”
“Yes, I did,” Jasmine replied sheepishly, thinking Mei didn’t know the half of what she really felt.
“Are you dizzy? Light-headed?”
“No,” Jasmine replied, sensing genuine concern in Mei’s soft voice.
“Any ringing in the ears? Sensitivity to light?”
“No.”
“Any more nausea?”
“No,” Jasmine said. “Not since we began moving.”
Was moving the right word? They were constantly in motion, even back when the crew appeared to be floating stationary within the spacecraft. Jasmine knew enough to understand that what seemed stationary to her when she first came out of suspended animation was an illusion. Their orbital speed around Saturn had to be measured in thousands, perhaps tens of thousands of miles an hour.
Even on Earth, sitting on her porch swing, the planet dragged her along at over sixty thousand miles an hour as it orbited the Sun. Such speeds were impossible to imagine sitting there on her swinging seat with birds hunting for worms in the long, green grass, but that was reality for you, she thought. Reality was an illusion of perspective. Accelerating, that was the word she was looking for, not moving. She went to correct herself but Mei moved the conversation on.
“Have you passed a stool since waking?”
“No.”
“Urine?”
“No.”
Mei pinched gently at the back of Jasmine’s hand, raising the skin up an
d watching it fall. Her pinch was gentle, more of a tug than to cause pain.
“Well, you’re lucid,” Mei said. “But I’m a bit concerned about dehydration. Are you drinking water?”
“No.”
Jasmine hadn’t given any of these rudimentary human activities any thought. She’d been so wrapped up in the exotic nature of life in space she’d barely thought about normal bodily activities like eating and drinking. The shock of being thrown decades into the future left her with an almost dreamlike awareness of the things around her. She fully expected to blink and find herself sitting on the porch again outside her parent’s home in Atlanta. She blinked, but this reality never receded.
“OK, let’s get some electrolytes into you and some bran to unblock the drain. We can’t have the plumbing getting clogged now, can we?”
Mei smiled warmly.
Jasmine wasn’t used to someone talking so frankly about her bowel movements, or the lack of them. Mei was a doctor, Jasmine understood that, but Mei didn’t look or sound like a doctor to her, more like a professor in some obscure, quirky lab.
Mei got up and fetched a few items from a nearby cabinet: a bottle of clear liquid that looked like water, some pills and a crusty bar that could have been made from dried muesli. She set them down on the table, handing the pills to Jasmine, saying, “Take these first.”
Jasmine looked at the tablets in her hand. There were red capsules, a couple of white powdery tablets in a variety of shapes and a long green capsule that looked impossible to swallow.
Mei unscrewed the cap on the clear water bottle and handed it to Jasmine, saying, “There’s nothing odd here. Just some nano-biotic purgers, vitamins and a mild sedative, something to help you relax.”
Jasmine arched her head back, looking up the shaft and taking all the tablets at once. She gulped down the water, tasting the salty/sweet electrolytes and swallowing the tablets.
“Thanks.”
Jasmine reached into her pocket and pulled out the coffee packets.
“Ah, wonderful,” Mei said, “I’ve been dying for coffee.”
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