Nick exchanged looks with Rose before he said to Eve, “No matter what, we don’t want to give up yet. We may or may not find a solution by that time, but I can guarantee I’m representing most of my fellows.”
After a moment’s muse, Eve said, “I can’t shut the program at this stage, but there is a way for you to destroy it.”
A blue line emerged on the counter’s surface next to where Nick was standing. Beneath the line a cubic box with sophisticated substructures was highlighted amid the pink material.
“That’s the battery, which can be charged through the interface marked by the line. The only brittle spot on the surface.” After Eve had said the words, she turned around and began walking away.
“Thank you, Eve!” Nick said to her back.
A sour pain grabbed Rose’s chest. “Nick, I know you love her, don’t you?” she said loudly.
Eve came to a stop but didn’t look back. “Love is not about learning each other’s secrets, or sticking together every living day. You think I didn’t know that?”
With that said, her image disappeared.
“Rose, be quick!” Nick urged.
Forcing herself not to look at him, Rose raised the axe and hewed at the blue line. This time a notable crack occurred, and darkness was spreading out. She repeated it, more darkness. With every cut she felt as if she were chopping his flesh. After a while, she took a break, seemingly catching her breath, but was in fact trying to delay the inevitable.
“Rose,” she heard him calling her gently. “Remember the first time we went out to dinner? You were wearing a blue-printed dress, weren’t you?”
She turned to look at his image, half fading, and he was looking back. For a short moment, she no longer remembered the surroundings, or the catastrophe that loomed ahead. She was back to the twenty-six-year-old girl, sitting at an Italian restaurant and having a seemingly ordinary dinner that had determined her life for the next twenty years …
“Yes,” she murmured. Then she bit her lips, raised the axe, and made a hard hit. The entire counter flashed for a few times before it went completely lightless.
She dropped the axe and collapsed to the ground.
* * *
“Devin, Kenton wants to speak to you.”
Inside the bridge of Rosetta, Devin was sitting in front of the navigation panel, his hands pushing on two levers. Having flown away from the comet and turned around, the ship was now accelerating toward it.
“Crash anticipated in four minutes!” A mechanical voice blared inside the room. “Please change your course!”
That was why a person had to remain here. Devin didn’t need to navigate the ship. He had simply locked the ship’s destination to the lander’s current position. However, without someone manually pushing the levers, the ship’s Collision Avoidance System would have overturned the preset destination and improvised a different course.
“I don’t want to talk to him,” he said to the intercom.
Whoever wasn’t physically here wouldn’t be able to grasp the situation. He had no time left for explanations. And for the time being, Devin didn’t feel like talking to anybody. Not even to Tracy. What would he say to her? That I’m sorry? How pale the word sorry is, when you know what the other person is supposed to take!
The warning signal reoccurred over and over, and the levers trembled in his hands. The image of the comet quickly grew in his view and filled the front window. Now he could even discern the lander on the surface. To protect Earth from a lethal bomb, he himself had become a bomb …
“Devin! Stop it and come back!” he heard Connor and Matt shouting in the speaker.
“What?”
“We think the comet has ceased turning!”
Devin checked a monitor on his right. The comet did seem to fly in a straight line now. If it remained this way, it would bypass Earth at a close distance but wouldn’t crash onto it. He then looked through the front window. The several exhaust holes were no longer spouting gases.
It didn’t make sense, but he had no time to dwell on that. He reversed the acceleration and pulled on a different lever. The image in front of him changed rapidly as the ship slowed down and veered in an upward direction. Up, up! He prayed. He was never trained as a pilot. He held the levers with all his strength and closed his eyes.
Somebody must have helped him. He remembered the earlier conversations. Who were those people? What happened to them? Whether he survived or not, he knew he probably would never find out.
Chapter 5 The Interview
When Rose arrived at her company on Monday afternoon, she was uncertain of what to expect. Today could have been marked as the third post-apocalyptic day in the modern human history. Were coworkers celebrating that they could still see one another? Friends and relatives making long-distance calls and speculations of all the “what-ifs”? In fact, would anyone even come to work besides her?
To her surprise, nobody acted differently. It was just like a typical business day. More specifically, a typical Monday filled with aversions of a full week’s work ahead, as well as fatigues left by a convivial weekend.
Upon entering her office, the secretary told her that Mr. Perez had called during lunch time.
“I’ll call him back.” She headed to her room and heard footsteps catching up from behind. Needless to say, it was Leo.
“Rose, you’ve got to hear about this movie! And I’m sure you’ll like it. It has space travel in it.”
She paused at the door, turned, and put a hand on the doorknob.
“A team of miners arrive at a barren planet. After they’ve been digging for a day, they suddenly fall into a giant underground facility that has a zoo, a few real-estate agencies, and an interstellar strip club—”
Rose slammed the door in his face.
She sat down at her desk and turned on the TV. A news channel was conducting a remote interview. The speaker was a man probably in his late fifties, with stiff gray hair, dark eyes carrying an air of unassailable authority, and the name Kenton Clifton written below his face.
“Mr. Clifton,” a woman said rapidly in the background. “Over the weekend we have received thousands of reports from professional and amateur organizations, as well as individuals, claiming that they had observed unusual activity with Comet 195F. Is there a scientific explanation for this phenomenon?”
“First, we admit that over a short period of time, Comet 195F had deviated from its presumed trajectory. It was possibly due to some unknown force that had transiently appeared in the nearby space. But other than that, it’s an ordinary and almost mundane object. You can find all the test results on our—”
“That sounds scary!” the woman interrupted. “What kind of force was it?”
“We don’t know the answer, but it’s not as disconcerting as it sounds. Remember, the comet nucleus is tiny. Similar forces would not have generated any measurable effect on Earth or even on our moon.”
“Hmm … Could it have been a spontaneously-created small black hole, as some people have suggested?”
Kenton shrugged.
“How are the three astronomers who have landed on the comet? Did they find anything unusual?”
“They came home Saturday evening, all in good conditions. In fact, only two landed on the comet. When the deviation occurred, the two tried to identify the cause but nothing unusual popped up.”
“There are also hypotheses saying that the comet has been in someone’s control.”
“Controlled?” Kenton chuckled. “By whom? People have wild imaginations.”
Rose turned off the TV and sat back in her chair. Liar! She called in her head, but she probably would’ve said the same thing if she were in his position.
She grabbed the phone from her table and dialed Perez’s number. “I’m sorry, Dave. There was a personal issue I had to deal with over the weekend.”
And it wasn’t over yet, she reflected. The Rosetta project had ended, but soon she would have to start contacting those guys
about the so-called Maura’s Gate, and she didn’t look forward to it. How were they going to react? This time she would not be welcomed as a generous donor.
“Whatever it was,” he said, “I hope it went well.”
That was why she liked him. He never pressed her for things she didn’t want to talk about.
“How about this weekend?” he asked. “Would you like to deal with another personal issue?”
“Only if it’s pleasant.” And she was sure it would be, given what had just happened.
“Where do you want to go?”
“Your boat.”
“Out to the ocean?”
Rose revolved her chair to face the glass wall behind her. The autumn sky was a refreshing blue, but she thought she could see Comet 195F traveling in the dark space toward the sun, with its sparkling long tail dragged behind. A few months later, it would turn around the sun and head off to the periphery of the solar system, back to a vapid stone, back to its lonely journey, flying, in a cold abyss long after Rose and the others died. But prior to that, there would be a moment of glory, a moment of splendor, though not as bright or eternal as a star, still memorable enough for the thousands of years that were yet to come.
“Out to the deep, deep ocean.”
(End of Book 2; Next, Chapter 1 of the next book in the series)
Chapter 1 of THE LOST JUPITER The Message
“What?” Devin shouted, his voice immediately obliterated by the howling wind. “I can’t hear you!”
The flickering shadow ahead of him waved frantically. It barely resembled a human form, but Devin knew it was Roland, a retired professor specialized in astrobiology. Roland was trying to tell him something. Devin couldn’t see his face, but he simply knew it.
The storm had escalated into a hurricane. In fact, Devin was no longer on the ground. Wind carried him up and threw him in the midst of clouds, reddish-brown clouds the size of Earth. Now Roland was nowhere to be found. Devin was soaring in the sky at a high speed, turning and bouncing yet miraculously maintaining an upright posture with his body stiff and mouth dry …
He opened his eyes and gasped for air. Wind lingered inside the sleep cabin for quite a while before it eventually dissolved into hush and darkness. It took him even longer to regain control of his limbs. He turned his head to read the clock on the bed stand. Only 3 am? Felt like he had slept for days. He pushed himself up from the trunk bed and sat on the stool next to a window no larger than a dinner plate. This was his first time to travel in a military spaceship, and he hated it. In his previous missions he always had spacious bedrooms with nice views.
Lowering his head, he caught a glimpse of the gas giant as the ship made a turn. A familiar image to him, but never from such a close distance. Unlike the majority of his colleagues who were Mars’s fans, Devin had been enchanted by Jupiter since he was a child. The size twice as big as all the other planets combined. The heated ocean of metallic hydrogen. The fierce storm that had been raging for centuries …
He frowned as he thought of the Great Red Spot. Lately NASA had held three emergency meetings, the contents of which were all classified. Rumor had it that Gary Kinley, the United States Secretary of Defense, had shown up at one of the meetings. Even now, on a trip to one of the worst places you’d ever want to visit in this solar system, Devin knew nothing about those meetings except that an electromagnetic signal from the Storm King had been received a few times since a month ago.
An English sentence that read, “The day is coming.”
* * *
He tried to resume sleeping at dawn but was soon awaken up by heavy knocking on the door.
“You have a phone call, Mr. Lee,” said Lieutenant Thurman Cooper.
Devin smiled feebly. Despite all the efforts, he realized Thurman would never call him by his first name. The young officer had amber eyes with steady gazes, in which Devin saw both indifference and determination. How old was he? Thirty, thirty-five? Whatever. With no wrinkle showing on the tanned skin, he looked young to Devin, probably a combined result of incessant military training and personality.
Devin wanted to ask who was on the phone, but the young man was already walking away. A minute later they arrived at a tiny room that barely fit a table and a chair inside. Devin sat down and found himself facing an old-fashioned LCD screen, which presented a typical remote-communication interface, except that the image window was marked N/A. That was okay. Good, actually. Since he had his fifty-fourth birthday two years ago, he had been unconsciously avoiding photography and videotaping. Besides, at the moment he probably had red eyes and sagging eyelids due to sleep deprivation.
Before he touched the ACCEPT button on the screen, he heard Thurman saying at the door, “Boss asked me to remind you we are on a mission. Your conversation will be recorded and forwarded to Base and Headquarters when it’s done.”
Am I an inmate? Devin sighed quietly as he accepted the incoming call, hoping this was his first and only time to travel on a military ship.
His dismay vanished upon realizing who was calling.
“Roland! Where are you?” Devin leaned over to the microphone, as if doing so reduced their distance. They had become good friends since the trip to Mullos 17, but the old professor was notorious for not replying emails.
“I’m in Indonesia,” Roland said in a husky voice.
No surprise. “Found a fossil of alien animals?”
Chuckles came from the other end. “In the past two years, I was looking for evidence pointing toward a global earthquake that happened around twenty thousand years ago. A large number of animals and humans died. Recently I came across some cave paintings here, probably of the same age, which actually documented the earthquake.”
“So?” Devin knew this wasn’t the full story, or Roland wouldn’t have called.
“The strange part is, in some of the paintings, you can identify two moons in the sky. One the regular size of our moon, another about half in diameter.”
Two moons? As an astronaut, Devin almost inquired about the color and brightness of the smaller moon, before he realized it was already a miracle for those cavemen to record it as a simple circle. “Are there similar pictures painted before the earthquake?”
“I think I found one. It didn’t show the second moon, but could be a particular day.”
Devin didn’t think so. He remembered his daughters’ artwork in elementary school. When they pictured things happening during the day, there was always a sun in the sky. At night, always a moon. That was kids’ logic. If a moon wasn’t represented, it most likely never existed. Of course, he couldn’t prove it to Roland.
“What’s your theory?” Devin asked.
“I’m not sure …” There was hesitation on the other side. “Another thing I’ve been thinking of a lot lately. You know, primates came into being a hundred million years ago, even before dinosaurs extinguished. Imagine that! Then half million years ago, we began to have modern humans, the Homo sapiens. Still, things were going rather slow. We didn’t start agriculture until twelve thousand years ago. Since then, it sped up exponentially. So I wonder: does evolution always stagnate in its early stage, or …”
Roland paused. Devin waited for a while before he asked, “Or what?”
“Maybe—I’m just guessing—maybe some prehistoric event has made our world a better place.”
* * *
Around dinnertime, the transport spaceship arrived at a temporary U.S. base orbiting Jupiter. Devin had heard about the so-called spacecarriers being constructed by a few countries, but he hadn’t been able to appreciate their mightiness until he saw one with his own eyes. The USS Cassiopeia was about the same size as a sea aircraft carrier, but its structure differed. No longer working against air or water when it traveled in space, Cassiopeia had abandoned the traditional streamline design. It looked quite childish, in fact, like a small disc sitting on top of a large one.
“I know!” Thurman said with a broad smile—the first smile Devin had spotted o
n the face of the young officer since they met four days ago. “We call it the Toy. It spins. I mean, the top.”
“And I assume it’s not for sightseeing?” Devin could see the tiny holes alongside the top disc.
“Different types of weapons are mounted at the rim. During an ongoing battle we can quickly direct the right weapon to a particular direction. Ammunition is stored at the center.”
The transport entered the lower disc through one of the sixteen entrances. Stepping out of the ship onto a mobile platform, Devin was appalled by the sheer size of the hanger desk and its automation. About a dozen ships occupied the space, but instead of being lined up on the ground, each ship was supported by a platform. The platform Devin and Thurman were standing on quickly moved to a designated spot inside a three-dimensional array. Meanwhile, a pliable arm approached them with a small booth at the front end. Within seconds they were transported through an exit to a security-check area.
“That’s why they kept slashing NASA’s budgets,” Devin said when he and Thurman boarded a tram, similar to what was usually found in an airport people-mover system. “When was it commissioned?”
“It hasn’t been yet.”
They arrived at the meeting room twenty minutes later. The sophistication of the equipment would make NASA’s newly-renovated conference building an antique house. Chairs around the long table were made of cushioned materials, but not cloth-and-foam. After Devin sat down, he sensed a few gentle touches on his back followed by readjustments in the chair’s contour.
“Boss should be here soon.” Thurman left and shut the door behind.
At first, the room was remarkably quiet, probably a result of sound-proofing. Then a soft and soothing noise came from the distance, and Devin couldn’t help smiling and looking at the windows. It was raining! Outside or somewhere. Streams of water flew down the glass, shifting and wiggling as the wind blew. The humidity of the room also seemed to have increased. He knew it was a simulation, but so what? It felt no difference …
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