by Samuel Best
He pulled up the comm interface on the ship’s control panel.
“Venus Lab, this is Seeker on approach.”
The intercom in Jeff’s helmet clicked on.
“Okay,” came the raspy response.
“All systems in the green,” Jeff continued. “You should be coming into view shortly.”
“Fine, fine. Call me if something goes wrong.”
The line went silent.
Jeff shook his head. “So much for protocol,” he mumbled.
Venus now filled the cockpit window from edge to edge.
“Fifty thousand kilometers,” said Jeff. “Starting orbital maneuvers.”
He swiped at the control panel and input a sequence of commands. With a few gentle bursts from the orbital thrusters, the ship began a slow spin. The image of Venus slid from the window and was replaced with a panorama of space. A small glint appeared in the distance.
“Venus Lab, I see you. Starting my approach.”
The space station orbited Venus at a maximum distance of fifty-five thousand kilometers. Its thirty hour prograde orbit was much faster than the planet’s own retrograde spin. Venus was unique among the planets in the solar system. Several moons maintained backward orbits, but Venus was the only primary body to do so.
Jeff let the ship’s systems do most of the work. His gloved hands hovered over the control panel. He tapped the occasional acknowledgment box and confirmed the longer thruster burns.
The Seeker slowly caught up to the space station.
Venus Lab looked like two identical stations fused together at their noses, creating a mirror image. The design of each half was a rather simple main tube section with four rising solar panels spaced evenly along the outer hull. Each end of the station had a single engine, while several orbital thrusters dotted the exterior. Jutting from the center of the craft, where the two halves met, was a small satellite dish aimed at the surface of the nearby planet.
As Jeff approached, one of the thrusters spat air, sending the station into a gentle spin to better present the Seeker with its airlock door.
After an overly cautious dance of alignment, the Seeker bumped gently against the station and successfully docked. It kissed Venus Lab at a right angle, protruding from the smaller craft like an elongated tumor.
Jeff pulled himself into the cramped spherical airlock of the Seeker and sealed the hatch behind him. After the ready lights flicked from red to green, he cranked the handle on the outer hatch of the station and pushed it open.
No one was there to greet him.
Jeff floated awkwardly for a few moments, waiting.
“Okay,” he said to himself finally, then moved into the other ship.
He closed the hatch behind him and pulled off his helmet, drifted into the station’s central corridor. It ran the length of the craft save for two small compartments at either end, each with a circular window set into a round door. Several cutouts in the corridor opened onto small workspaces and sleeping nooks.
A man with a mop of dark hair drifted into view behind the window at the end of one of the corridors. He seemed to be using a screwdriver to pry at a cube-like object in his hand. Jeff spun to face him and was about to push himself in that direction when the man’s eyes met Jeff’s. He drifted toward the window and promptly pulled down a shade to cover it.
“That’s Hideo,” said a man from behind, startling Jeff. “He’s been in there for a week. Won’t come out.”
The man near Jeff was probably in his early seventies. He wore wireframe spectacles and was bald except for two shock-white tufts of hair behind each temple that stuck out like he’d just licked an electrical socket. Bright green nursing scrubs hung loose on his gaunt frame. Scrawled across the breast pocket in chicken-scratch permanent ink was the name DR. ERIKSON.
“Why won’t he come out?” Jeff asked.
Erikson grunted and drifted away down the corridor. “He thinks I’m trying to kill him.”
Jeff stared at the occluded window for a moment longer, then followed after the older man.
“And are you?” asked Jeff.
Erikson grunted again. “Hideo has a flair for the dramatic. If I wanted him dead, he’d be dead!”
“How does he go to the bathroom in that compartment?”
“He sneaks out when he thinks I’m sleeping.” Erikson cocked his head toward the sealed compartment and shouted, “But I always know, don’t I, Hideo?! Always! He sneaks extra rations and he moves my equipment. Petty!”
Jeff blinked. He opened his mouth and shut it several times, then cleared his throat and finally managed to say, “I’m Jeff Dolan.”
“I know who you are.” Erikson opened a laptop secured to the wall of the corridor and typed rapidly on the keyboard. “Hm. Your ship seems to be in good order. Oh! It has the new 5.0 control operating system! Did you notice any lag after issuing commands?”
“No lag,” said Jeff. “You’re Niels Erikson, aren’t you?”
The older man spun toward him, eyes glaring. “And what of it?!”
Jeff studied his twitching face for a long moment. “The magazine articles described you differently.”
Erikson’s sneer became a frown, and he turned back to the laptop. “Yes, well. They got a lot of things wrong, didn’t they?”
“How long have you been out here, doctor?”
“Eleven months and thirteen days,” he replied quickly. “They were supposed to send a replacement crew. Instead, they sent the news we’ll have to stay here another four months, at least. Four months! My poor bones. Sandy was right. She knew, but I didn’t listen.”
“Who’s Sandy?”
Erikson snapped his mouth shut and froze. “It’s not important,” he said quietly. The tension left his shoulders. “Forgive my lack of manners, Mr. Dolan. We don’t have a proper dining area, but I can show you where we keep our stores, if you’re hungry.”
“What I’d really like is some information.”
Erikson slowly closed the laptop, then nodded. “Very well. Let’s have a drink, shall we?”
11
RILEY
Riley was alone in the command cabin. He sat in the copilot seat, his attention alternating between the control console in front of him and the view through the cockpit window.
Commander Brighton and Sergeant Miller were asleep in their berths in the crew cabin. Riley and Piper were on duty. She was undoubtedly in the small work lab behind the crew cabin, tinkering with her linguistics equipment. Colonel Brighton had gifted her with an abundance of data the government had collected during crew interactions with the tori, and with the basketball-sized spheres of multicolored light that seemed to power them. Power them, or operate them…no one could decide which was the case.
One of the spheres had communicated with Kate on Earth, according to the report Riley scanned. The Colonel gave Piper every signal that little ball of light emitted in the hope that she could feed it into one of her language processors and discover something useful.
As for Riley, he was content. He was piloting a spacecraft again, able to reclaim his boyhood dream.
No more peanut butter indecision, he thought with a smile.
The view out the window was of endless black, save for one small speck of blue in the dead center.
The comet.
The Odyssey had passed the Sun at a distance of a hundred million miles four days ago. If the comet’s rate of speed remained steady—which, so far, it hadn’t—Riley and the others would intercept it in just under two days.
Five weeks to travel from Earth to the Sun and beyond, thought Riley. Bell designed an amazing engine.
He thought solemnly about Noah’s grave on that unknown planet, and hoped someone would find it someday. Bell was the kind of man to be remembered, he decided.
Riley turned his attention to the command console and swiped through a set of menus to call up the design specifications for the ship. He had gone over them a dozen times since the crew had transferred from
their small shuttle to the much roomier Odyssey, but he found comfort in memorizing every detail.
The interior of the command cabin was almost spherical, with four chairs aligned two-by-two in the center. The two rearward seats swiveled to access controls built into the flat back wall of the cabin.
Moving aft, one drifted through a narrow tube to enter the crew cabin, where four wall cutouts served as bunks, two to each side. There was a small hygiene station tucked away in a closet on one side.
After that came the work lab and galley, such as it was. A barstool-sized table had been bolted to one wall next to food storage. Everyone ate while they worked and sucked their food through tubes. One of the things Riley had come to admire about his current crew was that they knew they were on a short-term mission and didn’t quibble about the details. More people should be like that in a tight spot—willing to give up little luxuries such as tables and chairs for a few weeks.
The work lab was afforded most of the space in that small compartment. It consisted of a proper-sized table and two chairs bolted to the floor beside it. Clamps in the table surface allowed one to secure equipment during experiments or repairs.
A three-meters-long cargo hold behind the work lab section of the ship was accessible only during EVA. It carried the fission bomb the crew was to place directly in the path of the approaching comet.
The rest of the ship was all engine. It had performed three full burns since departing Earth orbit, and a dozen minor course corrections.
Riley glanced out the window once again. The Odyssey would have to start its braking maneuvers soon, well before its expected rendezvous with the comet. The ship would have to match its speed heading in the other direction, back toward Earth. That would mean pushing the engine to its limits, as the window for acceleration was much shorter than when departing Earth.
I think I’ll run those numbers again, come to mention it, thought Riley.
He called up the burn parameters on the console, but was distracted by a small red rectangle that started rapidly blinking. He tapped it and the rectangle expanded to fill the console.
It was the collision alarm.
Riley tapped again for more details but the alarm vanished.
He squinted through the window, at the tiny blue speck glimmering in the great distance.
The red rectangle flashed again, and this time the ship’s intercom let out a shrill WOOP of alarm before the console flicked back to green.
Riley quickly swiped over to the ship’s sensor logs and navigated to the radar visual. Every scannable wavelength was displayed on that screen. It was blank. He scrolled back through the past minute of data and saw two blips pop up on the screen, each lasting no more than a few milliseconds.
Commander Brighton drifted into the command cabin, still rubbing sleep from her eyes.
“What was that?” she asked groggily.
“Collision alarm,” Riley answered. “Two anomalies, but they disappeared.”
She peered through the window for a moment, then pulled herself down into the pilot seat and strapped in.
“Send it over?” she asked.
He bundled the data and swiped it over to her side of the console. Soon she was looking at the same thing Riley had pulled up on his side.
“Two warnings,” she confirmed. “More than one object each time.”
“What?”
She zoomed in on her screen and froze the timeline at the moment the ship’s sensors registered the anomaly. At least a dozen green dots glowed on the screen.
“Then they disappear,” she said, her brow knit in confusion. “Then come back, then gone again.”
“Look,” said Riley, nodding toward the window.
“I don’t see anything.”
“Straight ahead.”
Brighton squinted. “It looks like…sparkles. Blue sparkles. What is that?”
The console flicked to red.
WOOPWOOPWOOP screeched the collision alarm.
“Suits on NOW!” screamed Commander Brighton into the ship-wide intercom.
The first micrometeor streaked past the Odyssey faster than the blink of an eye. It gave only the vaguest hint of blue as it shot past.
Riley unbuckled his harness and launched himself aftward.
“I’ll bring yours!” he called back to Brighton.
At the airlock, Piper and Miller floated near each other, bumping elbows and heads while they scrambled to pull on their spacesuits.
“What is it?” Piper asked, her voice nervous.
“Micrometeor shower,” Riley answered as he yanked his and Brighton’s suits off their wall clips. “Suit up and strap in.”
He shoved two helmets toward the front of the ship and floated after them. Brighton was out of her chair waiting when he returned. She snatched up her suit and quickly slipped into it, fumbling with the neck seal.
“Here,” said Riley.
He dropped a helmet over her head and slid her neck seal into place. She moved to help him with the same but he waved her off.
“I got it!”
She didn’t argue. Instead, she strapped into her chair and opened a data stream back home. As Riley got into his seat beside her, she issued a command for the ship’s computer to recommend an evasive course.
It spit back a litany of options, then retracted every one of them.
“It can’t lock onto the projectiles!” Riley shouted.
Blue streaks shot past the cockpit window.
Then came the first impact.
TINK!
Riley and Brighton shared a glance. Behind them, Piper and Miller buckled their harnesses.
“What was that?!” asked Piper.
“That was a micrometeor puncturing our hull,” said Riley.
TINK-TINK!
The cabin went dark. Red emergency lights glowed from recessed lighting in the wall. The control console was almost completely red.
After a long period of silence, Piper asked, “Is it over?”
No one seemed willing to issue a definitive answer on the subject.
Riley and Brighton cycled through the various warnings on the console, dismissing the innocuous.
“We’re venting O-2,” said Riley.
His screen showed a flashing icon of the oxygen pump located just aft of the crew cabin, starboard side.
“I told them those wings were USELESS!” Commander Brighton growled as she fumbled with her safety harness.
“I’ll check it out,” said Sergeant Miller.
He unbuckled his harness and floated out of the command cabin.
“Can we plug the leak from here?” Riley asked.
Brighton tapped quickly through a series of warning screens. “Doesn’t look like it. Hull’s compromised. Pressure is dropping. Slowly, but it’s dropping.” She looked at him. “We have to stop the ship early for repairs.”
Riley nodded. “Then let’s make it happen.”
12
JEFF
Jeff drank his second sachet of lemonade and belched politely, then ate a protein bar and stuffed the wrapper into a trash pocket secured to the wall. He floated in a coffin-sized cutout along the main corridor. Erikson floated in a seated position in the cutout across from him, chugging amber liquid from a large plastic bag through a straw. A small glob of the liquid popped free of the straw and floated into the middle of the corridor. Both men watched it intently.
“How long until we’re in visual range of the creature?” Jeff asked.
“Seven hours,” Erikson replied. “We’ll maintain visual contact for six hours after that.”
“It’s really not orbiting the planet?”
Erikson slowly shook his head, his eyes glazed and distant. “It is stationary.”
“How long has this research station been here?”
“Four years.”
“That long?” Jeff said in disbelief.
“They put it here as soon as they discovered where the alien went after it left Earth.”
&nbs
p; “How did they keep it a secret?”
“They told everyone it was the Venera-D mission.”
Jeff frowned. “I thought that launched over a decade ago.”
“And the satellite in orbit around Venus disappeared five years ago, along with the Japanese Akatsuki.”
“Do you think the creature destroyed the satellites?”
Erikson shrugged and stretched out in the sleeping compartment. His drink sachet floated away while he zipped himself into the secured sleeping bag.
“Why would it do that but leave us alone?” Erikson pondered. “One more mystery.”
There was a loud clank from somewhere in the station and Erikson’s eyes popped open wide.
Jeff poked his head out into the corridor just as Hideo slid up the shade over his window. The noise had come from the opposite end of the station.
“That wasn’t Hideo,” said Jeff.
Hideo snapped the shade back down.
“Just another mystery,” Erikson replied. “We have a ghost. Did I tell you this already?”
“No,” said Jeff hesitantly. “Well, you said you weren’t alone. I thought you meant the alien.”
Erikson chuckled. It didn’t suit him.
“I know how it sounds. I, a man of science, believe this station is haunted by a ghost. Laughable. Absurd!” His chuckle cut off abruptly. “But it’s true.” He turned in his sleeping bag until his back was to Jeff. “Three weeks ago, it started.”
“That’s when you stopped sending long-range messages back to Earth.”
"That's no coincidence. Our long-range relay was damaged. Sabotaged.”
“By...the ghost?”
Erikson sighed. “It doesn’t matter. You’re here now, and you’re going to fix all our problems, yes? You’ll understand soon, when we reach the other side.”