A cold wind swirled into the open cranial structure of the vast dark beast.
Jason turned, but his vantage point had narrowed.
The pickaxe in his hand looked magnified.
He dropped the ax and staggered forward, his mind reeling from the physiological change that had been thrust upon it.
Thoughts he'd had just moments before were lost to him. There was something he needed to remember, but he couldn't grasp what had seemed so important just seconds before. A few, brief flashes of memory lit his mind, that of a woman dying in his arms, and an old man with a mutilated hand, but beyond that his mind was blank.
Jason's clothes were too big and baggy. He reached out a tiny hand. steadying himself against a bank of flashing lights, looking out into the darkness.
Clouds raced by.
The alien creature banked to one side.
Wind howled beyond the cockpit.
Dawn broke in the distance. The sun peeked over the horizon as the massive craft crashed into the sea, sending up a wall of spray.
Cold sea water flooded into the fractured cavern, washing over Jason and causing him to choke. He spluttered, struggling to swim against the inflow of water flooding the vessel. Frantically, he kicked with his legs, freeing himself from his oversized, baggy clothing and pushing toward the surface.
The craft slipped quietly beneath the waves.
Jason swallowed sea water. Struggling and coughing, he fought to stay afloat, but he was sinking beneath the waves. Suddenly, a hand grabbed him, hauling him up into a rough wooden boat and he turned, seeing a familiar, friendly face, a face he'd seen thousands of times before.
Jason smiled at the aging North Korean fisherman.
He'd escaped, yet again.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Epilogue
The lights in the airlock dimmed as the pressure dropped, slowly forming a vacuum in the chamber. Jae-Sun could feel his spacesuit flex slightly. The pressure within his suit hadn't changed, but the dropping pressure around him forced the material to take shape, swelling slightly.
The interior of the airlock was white. Various touch panels indicated readings from inside and outside the lock. A green light came on, signaling that a vacuum had been established, matching that outside the vast exploration craft. The lighting inside the lock remained dim, ensuring the astronaut's eyes remained accustomed to the low light outside the spaceship.
The iris on the outside of the airlock opened, beginning as a tiny dot and spreading to more than twenty feet in diameter, which was more than enough given that there were only two astronauts preparing to exit. Normally, this lock handled up to fifteen astronauts at a time, including construction equipment.
“You are clear for EVA,” a disembodied voice said over the radio com link.
“Roger that,” Commander Lassiter replied from opposite Jae-Sun.
The young man grinned from behind his glass faceplate, smiling at Jae-Sun. Such excitement was contagious. For a moment, Jae-Sun could almost pretend he was a young man, but four hundred and eighty seven years were taking their toll on his aging frame.
Even with gene therapy and rejuvenation sleeps, there was only so much the cells of his body could endure. He wanted to make five hundred, and why not? It was more than just an arbitrary number, it was his life. Jae-Sun was a bio-geneticist before switching to complete a double PhD in physics. He was one of the first to undergo live gene reconstruction in the twenty-first century. There was no known upper limit to the therapy, but his body still aged, just far more slowly. By the twenty-fifth century, he had the appearance of a sixty year old under natural aging.
Lassiter gestured to the old man, signaling for him to leave the airlock first.
Jae-Sun stretched the fingers on his right hand and his spacesuit responded effortlessly, following his every impulse. He twisted his hand slightly, adjusting his orientation and rotated to one side relative to Lassiter. A jet-propelled equipment case mimicked the motion of his suit, staying several feet behind him and off to one side.
Jae-Sun lined himself up with what he thought of as vertical on the distant asteroid. The equipment case aligned itself with Jae-Sun so that it remained behind him to his left, exactly as it had been in the airlock. The white cube was a meter square, but Jae-Sun, even after all these years still thought in imperial measurements. To him, it was three feet square, and some. The dials and gauges covering its six faces were overly large, having been designed to be easy to operate with thick gloves, but this was no ordinary instrument array.
Lassiter followed him out of the airlock.
“Keep the Excelsior on station in this orbital path,” Jae-Sun said over his radio.
“Yes sir,” came the distant reply.
“Under no circumstances is the Excelsior to approach OA-5772, is that understood?”
“Yes sir.”
“Regardless of what happens to me, you are to maintain the isolation of the asteroid and report into sector command.”
“Understood, sir.”
“Commander,” Jae-Sun said, turning toward the young man. “You have command of the EVA helm.”
“Roger that,” Lassiter replied, tapping on his wrist computer.
Jae-Sun never tired of the majesty of seeing a man or woman in a spacesuit, defying the cold, harsh vacuum of deep space. Over the centuries, the suits had changed from the bulky EVA packs he'd once used on the International Space Station. They were still white, as that was universally recognized as the most distinct color in space. There had been some experimentation with other colors like fluorescent green and DayGlo-orange. Both of these worked from a practical perspective, but they weren't aesthetically pleasing, and in the harsh, hard life of an astronaut, even small concessions were highly significant. White had prevailed. White seemed to link the astronauts of today with those silver suits of the Mercury program, the emergence of EVA suits with Gemini, and the moonwalks of Apollo. White linked far-flung astronauts with a planet few would ever see again. White was important, and Jae-Sun understood that, having participated in space travel ever since the exploration of Mars.
“Setting way-points,” Lassiter said. “On your command.”
Jae-Sun turned to face the distant asteroid and said, “Go.”
Lassiter eased them forward, accelerating slowly. He was more considerate than most of the pilots Jae-Sun had worked with over the centuries, which was the reason Jae-Sun had requested him for this mission.
They pulled away from the Excelsior, leaving the three quarter mile long exploration vessel behind them. Within fifteen seconds, the two astronauts had passed the spinning centrifugal cabin used to maintain artificial gravity in deep space. The instrumentation cube followed faithfully behind them. Faces peered out from portholes swinging briskly by. They were better off watching on a vid-monitor, Jae-Sun thought.
Lassiter continued to accelerate, taking them up to a sustained one gravity, allowing them to cross the four hundred miles to the tiny, distant asteroid in less than seven minutes. Jae-Sun's suit was in buddy-mode, matching the flight commands issued by Lassiter.
Jae-Sun felt some grit in the corner of his eyes. He should have cleared it out before the space walk. He closed his eyes for a moment, pinching his eyelids tight and then slowly releasing. While his eyes were closed, flashes of blue and white sparkled on the inside of his eyelids, appearing fleetingly, shining briefly like diamonds. It was Cherenkov radiation, the effect of cosmic rays passing clear through his skull and exiting out through his eyeballs. Astronauts had seen this phenomena for hundreds of years, ever since the first Apollo missions. Nothing short of the shielding on the Excelsior could prevent it. He opened his eyes, and for a second, it looked as though there were blue flashes in the distance.
“Are you OK, sir?”
“I'm fine,” Jae-Sun replied.
It took several minutes, but as the asteroid began to loom larger in front of them, the commander reversed their thrust and where once Jae-Sun felt flung
toward the asteroid he now felt as though he were diving through water, being held back by some invisible current dragging on his body. Commander Lassiter decelerated as smoothly as he'd taken off from the Excelsior.
Looking back, Jae-Sun couldn't make out the exploration vessel against the pitch-black of space. At this distance, she was invisible to the naked eye. A soft yellow light pulsed on his heads-up display, artificially marking the distant ship.
OA-5772 was fifty seven miles long, twenty miles wide, and was shaped like a peanut. She was one of over five hundred thousand celestial objects being tracked in the Oort cloud. The asteroid had a rotation period of four hours, turning lazily before a sun so distant that it looked like Mars or Jupiter from Earth, blending in with the other nearby stars.
“Why this asteroid, sir?” Lassiter asked.
Jae-Sun decided Lassiter deserved to know, but before answering, he asked, “Are we transmitting to the Excelsior?”
“No sir. We're on local coms only at this distance. I can align a directional transmission if you want.”
“No, no,” Jae-Sun replied. “That won't be necessary.”
“Is it true, sir? Are you hunting a dragon?”
“How long have you been out here in the deep?” Jae-Sun asked, not intentionally ignoring Lassiter, but wanting to understand a little about the man from a personal perspective.
“Fourteen years, sir. Eight spent in transit, two on station and four on the Excelsior.”
“What brings you to the deep?”
“I want to get a place on Enceladus,” Lassiter replied.
“You like working with bugs?” Jae-Sun asked. “There's nothing down there but microbes.”
“My wife, well, my girlfriend, my fiancée. She's a biologist.”
“You're a long way from Enceladus, son.”
“I know,” Lassiter replied as the asteroid grew in size before them, slowly filling the view in their faceplates. “But I figure it's worth doing my time out here. The pay is good. It should set me up for a couple of centuries in the inner system.”
“Enceladus is an icy wasteland,” Jae-Sun said, probing. “You're not tempted by Mars or Titan? They've got some serious terraforming going on in those provinces. You could buy yourself a nice view of the space elevator disappearing above Olympus Mons, or get an apartment overlooking the atriums in Valles Marineris. I guess you like Saturn, huh?”
“Saturn's beautiful,” Lassiter replied. “But not as beautiful as my Peg.”
Jae-Sun laughed softly in reply.
“So,” Lassiter asked again as the craters and mounds on the asteroid came into view. “Are the rumors true? Are there really dragons in the deep?”
“Yes.”
“And you've seen them?” Lassiter asked.
“No. Not with my own eyes, but I’ve been tracking gamma ray bursts out here in the Oort Cloud for almost two hundred years, narrowing down the possibilities.
“At first, I didn’t believe the old spacer stories. No one did. But after eliminating all the other possibilities, the only possibility that remains is the presence of extraterrestrials skirting the edge of our solar system.”
“So now you believe?” Lassiter asked.
“It’s not so much a question of belief. It’s about accepting the evidence,” Jae-Sun replied. “Science is the realization that natural phenomena have an explanation independent of beliefs and opinions.”
“But dragons?” Lassiter asked ironically, his skepticism clear in his voice.
“What do you know about them?” Jae-Sun asked, watching as the rugged terrain of the asteroid slowly began to reveal its torrid, chaotic past. Boulders the size of an apartment came into view, casting long shadows over the dusty surface of the asteroid.
“Just rumors,” Lassiter replied. “I didn't think they were real. They just seem like the stuff of myth and legend.”
Jae-Sun listened carefully to the young man as he looked around, marveling at darkness that surrounded them. Tens of thousands of stars fought against the pitch black void, pinpricks of light shining in defiance of the eternal night.
At a distance of just over a light-year, the sun's rays had lost most of their potency, making the asteroid appear bathed in dull starlight. Photon amplifiers in the spacesuit helmets compensated for the low light, but those areas in shade appeared pitch black.
Jae-Sun marveled at the stark contrast between the grubby asteroid and their crisp clean spacesuits. He replied to Lassiter, saying, “The majority of the science we're doing out here is to try to catch one of these aliens. The placement of probes, the scanners and patrols, we're looking for telltale signs.
“Oh, the official line is that we’re monitoring the stability of the cloud to keep long-cycle comets from threatening the inner system, but that’s just a cover. Sure, there’s the potential for mining vessels to disrupt orbits, but it’s a low risk and one that would take thousands, perhaps millions of years to form a credible threat.”
“But dragons?” Lassiter whispered softly.
Lassiter seemed unusually flustered. Jae-Sun realized he had his undivided attention. Central command might consider the existence of dragons classified, but Jae-Sun didn't care. The ever changing whims of bureaucrats were an annoyance to the old man. He'd lived to see Homo sapiens escape the shackles of Earth and fight off the concept of death, extending human life by a factor of ten. As one of the theoretical physicists that made the space-time compression drive possible, he had a certain amount of latitude. Some called it irreverence.
“It’s not that much of a surprise when you think about it,” Jae-Sun said. “The Oort cloud is impossibly large. There’s more pre-organic matter here than there is in all the planets combined, but it is so broadly spread out that it appears insignificant. The Oort cloud drifts on the edge of interstellar space, held loosely in place by the weakened pull of the sun, over a light-year away.
“To us, the Oort cloud seems like a far-flung, desolate, rocky, icy shell surrounding the sun, an unlikely place to find life. But think about space as a biological environment. Stars are like tar pits, sucking in any creature that strays too close. But out here, we're on the edge of the tidal zone. Out here, a nudge one way or the other can send you to the Oort Cloud of dozens of other stars with very little exertion.”
Lassiter asked, “And these dragons? They inhabit the Oort Cloud?”
“Yes. Although dragon isn't the term I'd use,” Jae-Sun replied. “Dragon conjures up images of fire and damnation raining down from some dark, winged monster. No, I'd call them celestial cetaceans or migratory birds. If we're going to use some kind of terrestrial analogy, we should make it one befitting their character.”
“Birds? Whales?” Lassiter asked.
“Yes. Both of them are renowned for their astonishing migrations, and from what I've observed these dragons, for lack of a better term, have a similar mode of being.”
“Are they intelligent?”
“I suspect they're more intelligent than we believe.” Jae-Sun paused before adding, “They may be more intelligent than us.”
“Then why don't they make contact with us?” Lassiter asked as the two astronauts slowed to barely fifty miles an hour and began skimming over the surface of the asteroid toward a predetermined waypoint. Due to the undulating nature of the asteroid, their altitude fluctuated anywhere from a few hundred feet to almost a thousand feet.
“Why don't dolphins learn English?” Jae-Sun asked. “Why doesn't an octopus learn how to use a crowbar? Why don't chimps have a mastery of fire?”
He paused for a moment, letting those thoughts sink in before continuing.
“It's not in their nature. Contact may be a biological imperative for us, but it's apparently not for them. If anything, they seem wary of us. We're the aggressors, escaping the gravitational confines of our planet and encroaching on their natural habitat. From their perspective, they have every reason to avoid us.”
Lassiter slowed their forward momentum, dropping them
closer to the asteroid as the waypoint approached. The instrumentation cube slowed in tandem with Jae-Sun.
“But you've found one?” Lassiter asked.
“I think I may have found one,” Jae-Sun replied. “It's hard to be sure. These things can move through both space and time, but they leave a trail. Each time they warp, they emit high-energy particles. And they follow a pattern, in the same way that birds will follow the same path to escape the coming of winter.”
Lassiter pulled them to a halt, lowering them down to within two feet of the asteroid. Jae-Sun watched as he established buoyancy, ensuring their suits automatically counteracted the weak pull of gravity from the asteroid.
The two astronauts were side on to the asteroid, so the surface appeared like a wall in front of them, with the distant sunlight running left to right. Pin pricks of light edged around the raised, stippled surface, while long black shadows stretched away from them.
Jae-Sun reached out his gloved hand. His fingers sank effortlessly into the fine powder on the surface of the asteroid. He moved his fingers in a figure eight and watched as the fine powder swirled as though it were suspended in water.
“Never lose your childlike sense of wonder,” Jae-Sun said, turning to Lassiter. “When you go to Enceladus, don't lose your appreciation for how astonishing it is to walk on another world. Even the humblest of microbes on that small moon represent billions of years of evolutionary change, and that's not something to be taken lightly.”
Lassiter nodded inside his helmet.
“First contact protocols necessitate that you wait here,” Jae-Sun said. “Is that understood?”
“Yes sir,” Lassiter replied. “Buddy mode is off.”
Lassiter’s gloved hands tapped at his wrist computer, returning local EVA control to Jae-Sun.
“Whatever happens,” Jae-Sun said, already drifting away from him. “Do not follow me. If I fail to return, you are to initiate the containment plan and deploy robotic probes. Understood?”
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