by Samuel Best
“Burn complete in three…two…one.”
The engine cut out, plunging Riley’s world into screaming silence. He went limp inside his suit as he drifted out of the recessed cubby.
After sucking in a deep, painful breath, blackness crept in from the edges of his vision. His head lolled in his helmet and he lost consciousness, floating inside the airlock.
20
JEFF
Hideo kept his distance from Sandra as she took small sips of lemonade from a sachet. He watched her warily from the corner of his eye, his arms crossed over his chest, as if he wasn’t convinced it was really her.
Erikson, by contrast, could barely contain himself with enthusiasm.
“I don’t believe it!” he kept saying. “I absolutely don’t believe it!” He gripped a handhold on the corridor wall and would pull himself closer to Sandra, studying her face, her hair, her hands. “Oh, Sandy, I just don’t believe it!”
“Neither do I,” she whispered.
Hideo drifted a little bit closer to Jeff.
“You disappeared,” he said.
“Yes, I did.”
“And then you came back in the supply room with Sandra.”
“It’s called fold space,” said Jeff. “It’s a…a gift from the torus that brought me back to Earth. They put something in my head. A small black sphere that allows me to perform the same trick.”
Jeff paused.
“Well, don’t stop there!” Erikson said with excitement.
“I saw the phenomenon inside a torus during my first Titan mission,” Jeff continued. “The tori were using fold space to store hundreds of biological samples in a room that could only hold twenty. Somehow the tori are able to stack the same version of a room on top of itself. If you know how to travel between the stacked rooms, you get infinite storage space.”
“There was no torus here when Sandra vanished,” Hideo said.
“But the alien was,” Jeff replied. “Sandra, what were you doing when it happened?”
Her hands shook uncontrollably as she took another sip of lemonade.
“I was…I was testing signal frequencies. Trying to find a way to communicate with it. When I set our dish to receive, I discovered it was using our own long range communications to send out a signal.”
“A signal to where?” Hideo asked.
“Earth.”
“Hmm,” said Erikson. “So you removed the long range comm relay.”
“And tossed it out the airlock,” Hideo added. “That’s what I heard when you disappeared.”
“That was dramatic of me, but yes,” Sandra admitted.
“It could have been trying to communicate,” Jeff said.
She shook her head slowly, with obvious effort. “It was the same signal the comm satellites picked up in Earth orbit right before the comet hit.”
Erikson looked from her, to Jeff, to Hideo. “But what does that mean?”
“It’s a pilot signal,” said Hideo. “A guide for the comet to follow.”
“The bigger comet,” Erikson said quietly. “One of the three.”
“I sent the same signal back to the creature,” said Sandra. “Except I forgot to adjust the delay. Instead of the wavelengths cancelling each other out, they were amplified.”
“You poked the hornet’s nest and got stung,” Jeff said.
Sandra nodded. “It obviously didn’t like what I did.”
“Wait a second!” Erikson said, holding up a finger. “Fold space. We can use it to duplicate the oxygen scrubbers in your ship!”
Jeff shook his head. “It doesn’t work like that. It won’t create matter by duplicating objects. If I put a box in a room and create another instance of that room, the box won’t be in both places.”
Erikson’s shoulders fell. “And now there are four of us.”
A heavy silence hung in the air.
“Can we move Venus Lab out of the comet’s trajectory?” Jeff asked.
“To what end?” Erikson replied. “Without a planet to orbit, we’re adrift in space. Eventually our oxygen will run out.”
“It would buy us some time until the Odyssey could pick us up on its way back. I sent a request in the last data packet to Earth.”
“I’ll start crunching numbers,” said Sandra.
She winced as she grabbed a handhold in the corridor.
“Not alone, you won’t,” Erikson told her.
He gently took her hand and guided her to a nearby workstation.
Jeff drifted over to look at the screen but Hideo got in his way.
“You have to go out and try again,” he said. “We have limited options, and we need to exhaust all of them.”
Jeff searched his face to find any hint that he was joking.
“Last time I went out there I got sideswiped by a comet and almost died.”
“Statistically, it won’t happen twice,” said Hideo.
“Until that big one gets here.”
“There is still time. Besides, I have an idea on how to get the creature’s attention.”
Jeff sighed. “Oh?”
“Is the fold space technology limited to enclosed spaces?”
“I’m not sure. I’ve only ever tried it inside a room, and that’s tricky enough.”
“Never outside, in an untethered space?”
“Never had a reason to, I guess.”
Hideo smiled. “Now you do.”
Which is how Jeff Dolan found himself outside Venus Lab in his spacesuit, approaching the alien for a second time.
“But this time I’ll be fine,” he mumbled to himself. “Because this time I have a box.”
It was a metal container the size of a shoebox. Hideo had cut a hole in one side and stuffed a receiver, a speaker, and an LED flashlight inside. The speaker played a distorted version of the signal that had caused the alien to create another fold space instance within Venus Lab. The flashlight beam shone through the hole in the box, and was just for presentation.
Jeff adjusted his angle of approach and swung wide in front of the alien, placing himself between it and Venus.
Looking at the creature from a hundred meters away, at what Jeff assumed was head-on, all he could see was an oval pool of dark lava-like material, edged by an ellipse of rock-textured skin.
Jeff held the box out and released it, giving it a gentle spin. The flashlight beam glided over his bright orange spacesuit while the speaker relayed the signal Sandra was sending to the receiver from Venus Lab.
With a small spurt of nitrogen from his pack, Jeff moved away from the box. He spun around when he was ten meters away, then he stabilized.
“Here goes nothing,” he whispered.
He closed his eyes and slipped into fold space. The sphere in his skull turned to ice.
And suddenly he was falling into an abyss, plummeting down even though he couldn’t fall in space, screaming and clawing at the air as he was yanked deeper and deeper into a never-ending pit—
Jeff sucked in air and opened his eyes. He was breathing heavily, and sweat pouring down his face inside his helmet.
The box was still there, spinning slowly. The alien hadn’t moved.
“Jeff, are you okay?” Hideo asked from the station. “Your heart rate just went through the roof.”
“Yeah,” Jeff said between breaths. “Just…experimenting.”
He had tried to grapple with too large of a space, he realized. Whenever he used fold space to create another instance of a room, he had six walls to contain the duplicate. In the vastness of space, there were no limits.
He decided to focus on the spinning metal box.
Jeff closed his eyes and pictured it tumbling in slow motion. The sphere at the base of his skull shocked him as he created another instance of the box’s interior.
That was the easy part, Jeff thought.
Instead of filling an instance to fit inside the walls of a container, Jeff tried to expand the instance he’d created beyond the walls of the cube. If he could get i
t past the metal walls, the box should—
It disappeared.
“Woo!” Jeff shouted in surprise.
The red light glowing from the cracks of the alien’s skin dimmed to black. It contracted at the middle, both its ends retreating slightly inward. They pushed back out, elongating the creature and narrowing its midsection.
Venus disappeared, plunging Jeff into darkness.
He thumbed his control stick and slowly turned around in disbelief. The stars were gone as well, and so was the space station.
The creature drifted closer. The red light in its skin intensified, shining out from the deep cracks until they bathed the alien in a bright red glow.
Jeff was alone with the creature in an infinite void.
Well, I wanted its attention, he thought. Looks like I have it.
21
JEFF
Jeff thumbed the control stick attached to his glove. Nitrogen spurted out from the waist of his spacesuit, but he didn’t move farther away from the alien.
The red light on its igneous skin pulsed like a heartbeat. Its lava-filled maw now appeared the size of a football field. Jeff felt himself hopelessly drawn toward it—or was the creature moving toward him? Everything else in the universe had blinked out of existence. With no frame of reference, it was impossible to tell which one of them was moving.
Jeff had tried backing away from the creature, but he had yet to try going over it. He manipulated his control stick and a steady stream of nitrogen spat from the bottom of his pack. He drifted up, rising past the creature’s maw, until he was looking down the length of the alien from above.
A vibration took hold in his feet and traveled up his body, shaking his bones and his vision. He stopped in place despite the nitrogen shooting out of his pack. Jeff cut the stream and the vibration stopped.
“Okay, okay,” he whispered. “I’ll stay put.” He raised his voice and said, “Can anyone hear me? Hideo? Sandra?”
The line was dead.
“What about you?” Jeff asked, addressing the alien. “Anything you want to say?”
The little metal shoebox suddenly reappeared in front of Jeff, still spinning and sending the flashlight beam into the black.
Jeff concentrated and accessed the instance of fold space he had created around the box. It was much easier than last time—like slipping into a pair of comfortable shoes.
The box vanished. Despite himself, he grinned.
The box reappeared.
Is it playing a game? Jeff wondered. Or are we talking?
He decided to try sending it mental images. Jeff closed his eyes and imagined the shoreline near Kate’s old condo in Florida. Waves gently lapped the shore, and gulls called in the distance.
He opened his eyes.
Nothing.
“We need to know what you’re up to,” he said loudly. “That comet is going to wipe out our species if we can’t stop it. You used our planet to come back to life. Seems only fitting that you don’t let it be destroyed.”
Venus blinked back into existence.
Jeff stared at it in wonder. The clouds were gone. There was no visible atmosphere. He had a clear, unobstructed view of the brownish-red surface.
Nearly every bit of that surface was swarming with activity.
Jeff was too far away to make out the little details, but he could tell that a network of sprawling complexes was being built, all of them interlinked by straight runs of black material hundreds of kilometers long. Tiny specks moved in swarms over the emerging complexes, adding more material to the mass.
The landscape below was dominated by a torus the size of North America, seemingly embedded on its side into the surface of Venus. Despite being buried half inside the rocky surface, it spun slowly in place.
Arches of black material emerged from the void that stretched across its inner hole, curving up toward the empty sky before curling back to the ground.
The swarms formed clouds around these arches, harvesting the material at a pace equal to their emergence from the black hole at the center of the giant torus.
Next to the torus, a small patch of blue glowed like a beacon.
The comet impact site, he thought.
Jeff watched the civilization spread before his eyes.
A bright blue light bloomed from behind.
A comet a third the size of the planet streaked down to the surface and impacted where the smaller one had fallen. A blue explosion blinded Jeff, and he turned his head away.
When he looked back, the clouds of Venus returned in a flash, then disappeared again with a blink, as if someone had flicked a light switch on and off. Each time they disappeared, the blue plasma carried by the comet had spread farther across the surface, like a creeping fungus.
It happened again: the clouds blinked into existence, then vanished.
“It’s not a civilization,” said Jeff. “You’re terraforming.”
Venus disappeared.
“What about the comets?” Jeff asked.
Several minutes passed with no response.
Jeff maneuvered along the length of the creature until he was over its middle. Then, before he could second-guess himself, he drifted closer.
Up close, the alien’s skin was indistinguishable from the jagged surface of a rocky asteroid. Jeff intended to maintain a distance of a few meters away, but as he got closer, he felt the unmistakeable pull of gravity.
He fired a strong burst of nitrogen to back away, but he was inexorably drawn to the surface. He bumped into it between two deep crevices, each glowing red from their depths. Clumsily, Jeff pushed himself to his feet.
Either gravity or some other force was indeed keeping him pinned to the alien. He tried a little test jump and floated upward, then gently came back down.
Jeff turned in place, surveying the terrain. It all looked the same from where he stood: a hard, rocky shell split by deep cracks filled with lava.
With a grunt, he knelt down.
“Not sure if this will work either,” he said, “but I’ll try anything at this point.”
He placed his gloved palms against the alien and closed his eyes. In his mind’s eye, he quickly replayed all of his experiences with the tori, going all the way back to his first mission to Titan. Jeff imagined he was standing once again next to Kate on the debris of her ruined floating science lab as the alien emerged from a torus in the Gulf of Mexico. He recalled meeting himself on Titan—coming face to face with one of the countless drones that had been created to build alien machinery on Saturn’s largest moon.
When he had run through his entire history of encounters with the alien culture, Jeff slowly opened his eyes and stood.
Venus was back in place, complete with its bright, reflective cloudy atmosphere. The stars had returned as well.
And there, too, was Venus Lab.
“—effrey, are you there?” said Hideo over the comm channel.
“I’m here.”
“Our equipment went fuzzy for a second. Is everything okay?”
Jeff pressed his control stick and jumped up. He felt none of the gravitational pull toward the alien’s surface. He easily drifted away, heading toward the space station.
“I think we need to get ready for that other comet.”
22
KATE
His name was Edward Condon.
Colonel Brighton had him placed in a quarantine tent separate from the rest of the camp. The infected man was inside a metal lung with a long observation window.
As Kate watched, his hazmat suit had been peeled off by robotic arms inside the metal lung, revealing that the blue substance had penetrated his protective covering. Ed’s arms were dark blue from his fingertips to his shoulders. Blue veins reached across his chest like the branches of a dead tree.
Three medical technicians huddled over a monitoring station behind Kate. Colonel Brighton leaned against the metal lung, staring in through the window.
“Two weeks,” he muttered. “We went two whol
e weeks without something like this happening. Should’ve made the safety net wider.”
Ed jerked within the metal lung and Brighton jumped back. Alarms blared from the monitoring equipment, then fell silent just as quickly.
“What was that?” Brighton asked the medical team.
“I don’t know,” said one, turning to her colleague. “Seizure?”
“Maybe,” he said, struggling for an answer. “Maybe not.”
“Look at his chest,” said Kate, stepping closer to the window.
Ed’s body went taut. He clenched his fists and twisted his head from side to side, the cords in his neck bulging.
His pectoral muscles turned blue before their eyes, as if dipped into a vat of ink. The blue spread down his stomach, and Ed started to convulse.
“Sedate him,” said Brighton.
“He is sedated!”
“More!”
The blue on his chest turned dark purple and seemed to crystallize, forming a surface like that of amethyst. Ed arched his back, then went still. The skin over his chest crumbled inward, almost like sand falling through an hourglass, exposing his ribs.
Kate covered her mouth with her hands and stepped back slowly.
“He’s gone,” said one of the medical technicians.
“Asphyxiated,” said another in surprise.
“He suffocated?” Kate asked.
“That didn’t look like suffocation to me,” Brighton added.
The med tech pointed at one of the monitors. “The air inside the chamber is eighty-six percent nitrogen.”
The Colonel squinted at the readout, mumbling numbers to himself. Without another word, he spun on his heel and hurried out of the tent.
Kate chased after him, plunging into the bright midday sunlight.
“Colonel Brighton!” she shouted.
“We were right!” he called back, shaking his head. “I hate being right about this kind of thing!”
She caught up with him but had to jog to keep his pace.
“Right about what?” she asked between quick breaths.
“It changed the composition of the air in his chamber,” Brighton explained. “The blue gunk. It did the same thing when it chewed up the grass near the crater.”