The Veil

by Torstein Beck

  ‘Sir, don’t hang up — I’m calling from the GSC Headquarters in Cape Canaveral, Florida. The shuttle is back in range.’ The voice said quickly.

  Gertlinger sat upright, the sleep gone from his brain in an instant. ‘What?’

  ‘The shuttle. The Argus. It’s back in range, sir. We received the first transmissions nineteen minutes ago. We had a list of people to inform immediately, you were on that list.’

  ‘You call nineteen minutes immediately?’ Gertlinger snapped, rolling to his feet and rubbing his eyes.

  ‘Sorry, sir, you weren’t first on the list, and as you can imagine, it’s been difficult to reach some of the names at this hour,’ Kaleb replied frantically.

  ‘Okay. It’s okay. Don’t worry. I’m on my way.’ Gertlinger said, hanging up.

  He and a handful of other key staff were contracted to live in Orlando during the years that the shuttle was estimated to come back in range. He’d been there for two already. They weren’t sure when it would begin transmitting again, so it was all approximations. But now, all of a sudden, it was back on their doorstep again. The first technical readings would be in within the hour and then the mission data would start coming through in lumps. It was about forty-five minutes to the GSC HQ from where he was now, so by the time he got there, the information should be rolling in at a steady pace.

  Just under an hour later, he was in a queue of people, flashing his ID badge at the GSC gate. The guard waved him through, and still shrouded in the predawn darkness, he swung his car into the parking lot and got out. He was getting old now, almost seventy-five, but he was still fairly spritely. Top-notch health care and living life without a care in the world about the cost will do that for you. His life expectancy was well over a hundred and that gave him some comfort — but he still felt a little stiff, especially with such a rude awakening under his belt.

  He swiped his clearance card at the automated employee entrance and entered. The elevator took him swiftly to the sixteenth floor. The command centre. The parking lot was quiet, the corridors and the elevators empty, but when the doors opened into the small corridor that housed the break rooms and bathrooms, opening at the end via glass double doors into the command centre itself, it was not deserted, empty, or quiet.

  Even muffled by the closed doors, the excited sounds of discussions and shouts rang loudly through to him as he approached. Throngs of bodies moved seamlessly in the room beyond and the motion-sensitive doors gave way to an odour of tangled limbs and flop sweat. The room was huge, with a back wall entirely filled with monitors. Sixty of them, which could display singular images alone, or link up to display one huge one. In the front were rows of computers on desks and around the back, in front of the door, where Gertlinger currently stood, was a raised catwalk with stairs leading down to the command floor. The catwalk was dotted with screens affixed to the rails and had seats that extended from the walls for the higher-ups to perch and watch the action, away from the mass of subordinate bodies below.

  Still trying to fully wake himself up, Gertlinger stayed back from the melee and didn’t descend the steps. He paced the catwalk and surveyed the images on the screens, making his eyes focus, gathering his own conclusions. The entire right half of the wall was filled with a huge schematic layout of the Argus. It was reeling off numbers and code that was alien to him, but from the systematic flashing of small sections of the blueprint, he assumed that it was a full mechanical readout of the ship. Areas that had already been checked were painted in green, which he guessed was good. But some areas were coloured red, which he guessed was bad. The status readout of the check was at twenty-six percent and rising as the program ticked off the sections one by one.

  On the left-hand side of the wall, individual screens displayed timelapse photo feeds from inside the shuttle hull, shot from different angles. All lined up neatly like coffins were the cryo tubes that kept his creations sleeping peacefully. The images were dark and grainy with tinges of green. Gertlinger studied them but they didn’t change, even as the timestamps rolled forward days at a time.

  Across the bottom was a grid with one hundred coffin shaped icons lined up. Seventeen of them were black, the rest were white. Just as he came to the conclusion of what that signified, someone called out him.

  ‘Doctor, I didn’t see you come in,’ McPherson said, beaming. He was now older too, a little more so than Gertlinger, his hair nearly all grey and white, but looking well all the same. He was holding what was probably his fifth coffee of the hour judging by how it was shaking in his hand. No one could be so upbeat at this hour without a considerable amount of caffeine in their system.

  ‘And yet, here I am,’ Gertlinger retorted with a wry smile.

  ‘Yes, quite. Have you been briefed?’

  ‘No, I didn’t want to interrupt,’ he said, gesturing to the manic crowd below.

  ‘Well, there’s good news and there’s bad news,’ McPherson said glumly.

  ‘Isn’t there always. What’s the good news?’

  ‘The mission data looks strong.’ McPherson leaned on the rail and interlaced his fingers. ‘Everything went better than we planned. We only lost seventeen Varas. It means that the atmosphere on Orus is habitable. We half expected them all to die the moment they stepped off the landing craft. And not just that but the timers on the ground rigs, the harnesses that the Varas wore, well, they clocked in at more than two months. Which means that they were able to survive out there, too. The vitals look good, even. We don’t know what happened to the other seventeen, whether they died accidentally, didn’t make it back to the shuttle, or they simply managed to get out of their harnesses… But the important thing is that eighty-three did survive, and got back to the ship.’

  ‘How the hell did you get them to come back?’ Gertlinger questioned. surely if they were surviving out there — food, water — they wouldn’t just come back? And the food scent wouldn’t carry very far.”

  ‘That was the issue we were grappling with. What if they did survive and didn’t come back to the ship looking for food? We just figured that the craft would return home without them and we’d have the mission data to play with, but then, a programmer named… Smith, or Smithe, or Sma— or something with an S came up with this idea… We wrote it into the system a few months before we lost contact. It was a simple idea that would either work or not, but we had nothing to lose either way. The harness rigs had audio recording built in. So, Smi— the Programmer got them to detect and record the noises the Varas made, discerning based on information gathered about wolf-pack-mentality here on Earth, the different sounds. They would take howls and calls that were of a distressed nature and catalogue them, so that when the Varas were moving too far away or had been away for too long, the ship would literally beckon them back with their own calls. The program re-used the ships built-in communications system to play the distress call and, well, it obviously worked.’ He gestured to the screens with his hand. ‘When they came within a certain range of the ship, the proximity sensors triggered on the harnesses as normal and the cryo chambers dropped food scent — pungent pheromones that lured the Varas inside. They climbed back into the chambers to find the source of the smell, the pressure sensors in the chambers activated and the lids snap shut. After that, it was all automatic. The shuttle lifted off and rejoined the Argus before heading home,' McPherson finished proudly.

  ‘And that’s the good news?’ Gertlinger asked. ‘Why was it so important to have them back, and not just the mission data?’

  ‘Well,’ McPherson laughed, ‘apart from being global heroes, those ugly bastards are going to give us much, much more. We’re gonna cut them open and see how the atmosphere and change in gravity affected them physically, if they were affected at all. It will allow us to plan for a manned mission in the future. It was a welcomed addition to the mission data. It will take a lot of guesswork out of the next mission. So yes, that is the good news.’

  ‘And the bad news?’ Gertlinger refused to get his hopes up
.

  ‘It seems the Argus ran into some problems on the return journey.’

  ‘What problems?’

  ‘We think it entered an asteroid field. The variables for planning the trip were infinite. We couldn’t have known, only hoped.’

  ‘So how bad is the damage?’

  ‘We’re waiting on the full system scan to run its course and then we’ll know, but so far, we know there’s at least one hull breach.’ He sighed. ‘That’s why the monitors are all dark like that. The hull is a vacuum. The emergency systems have gone into effect to save power and the lights have turned off. The cameras have switched to night vision mode, which is why we’ve got this grainy green shit going on here.’ He flicked his hand at the monitors.

  ‘And the Varas?’

  ‘We’re pretty sure they’re all fine. The vitals are reading normal. The cryo chambers are sealed and still have atmosphere to sustain them. We’re more worried about re-entry. The external cameras are all down, battered and broken by the asteroids, we’re guessing. The field was full of small objects it seems, from what we can piece together from the data we have so far — not enough to destroy the shuttle, but enough to strip a few layers of paint off. When the ship comes back into the atmosphere, depending on the external damage, it could be fine, or it could be a disaster. The aerodynamics could all be off, or the landing gear may not deploy. The flaps probably won’t open like they should. It will be near impossible to estimate the trajectory the ship will take prior to its entry. Worst case scenario, the whole thing comes apart and the breaks up entirely. We’ve just got to pray that it’s not over a populated area.’

  Gertlinger nodded slowly, taking it all in. ‘Sounds like a shit-storm.’

  ‘You have no idea.'

  TWENTY-FOUR

  THE VEIL

  2122 AD

  ‘I’m not complaining, I’m just saying I’m a little surprised is all,’ Sorina mused.

  Her and Aaro lay on a cot, entwined, her fingers laced through his. They’d been on the road for more than seven hours now and Sorina was commenting on the level of attention they were attracting, or seemingly not attracting, from the local fauna.

  ‘You say stuff like that and you’ll jinx it,’ Ek replied, scanning the screen for anything out of the ordinary. ‘We are pretty close to the gulf though. There’s not much food down here and they aren’t exactly known for their love of swimming.’

  ‘Yeah, this is the middle of nowhere,’ Bjork chimed in. ‘There’s probably nothing out here for them to eat.’ He was slumped on his cot opposite Sorina and Aaro.

  ‘Enjoy it while it lasts, I doubt our luck will stretch all the way to Murmansk.’ As the words left Ek’s mouth, the engine noise changed and started to wind down. He pushed the intercom and leaned in. ‘Everything alright? Why are we slowing down?’

  Sabina appeared on the screen and she gave a thumbs up. ‘Yeah, nothing to worry about. We’re a couple of miles outside of Umea. The debris on the road is getting thicker. We’ll be at a crawl from here on out. Robin called us, we’re stopping for a few minutes, swapping drivers. Stretch our legs a bit. It’s going to be a long night.’ She cut the connection and changed down through the gears smoothly. The trucks slowed to a halt and Sorina looked at Aaro.

  ‘You wanna go for a walk?’ he asked quietly.

  ‘No, I don’t,’ she replied abruptly, her eyes suddenly wide.

  ‘Me neither,’ he laughed.

  Ek moved between them and Bjork and jumped, grabbing the handle that was affixed to the ceiling. His weight swung a ladder down and he climbed to the hatch at the top of it. He unlocked it and pushed upwards. A flood of fresh air poured into the space and Aaro drank it in. He hadn’t realised how stuffy it had gotten in there.

  Ek hauled himself up and sat on the lip, his legs dangling into the trailer. He whistled to Bjork and held his hand out. Bjork was up and had pulled two scoped rifles from their gun chest under the cot. He passed them up to Ek and then climbed out after him, disappearing into the afternoon sun.

  After a minute or two of silence, Aaro stirred. ‘I could do with a breath of fresh air.’

  He rose and moved towards the ladder, mounting the steps quickly. He emerged onto the roof to find himself surrounded by trees. ‘I thought we were right on the gulf?; he said out loud, turning to survey the area.

  ‘We are. It’s just through those trees,’ Bjork called back, motioning with his rifle to the right of the trucks. The two soldiers were both crouched, scanning the trees and the spaces between them with their scopes just in case. Below them, Sabina and Sam were at the side of the truck, stretching. Sam was urinating into the grass and Sabina was programming her watch. Ahead, the Fido was sitting idle. Robin and Alva were standing around, smoking a cigarette and chatting.

  Now Aaro wanted one. He lit up and offered the pack to Ek and Bjork. They declined. He took off at a slow pace, meandering down the length of the trailer, around the turret, until he reached the back. He paused and stood, surveying the trees and wide open spaces, something he hadn’t seen for more than a decade. He forgot how nice trees were, how much he liked the smell of pines and firs, and just how quiet the countryside was.

  And then it became a lot less quiet. From behind the mask of trees came a low and rumbling howl. Aaro paused mid-drag and stared at the solid wall of greenery. The sound echoed in the silence and sustained in the still air for what seemed like an age. Ek and Bjork snapped up their rifles and pressed the scopes against their eyes.

  They scanned for the source, finding nothing but an impenetrable curtain of branches gently swaying in the breeze

  ‘Time to move,’ Ek mumbled, strafing towards the hatch.

  ‘Emmerson — back in the truck!' Bjork yelled angrily. 'Jansson — shake the drips off and let’s go!'

  Sam zipped up and bundled back into the truck after his sister.

  The hatch slammed shut, the engines fired up and the trucks lumbered forwards once more. Ek and Bjork stayed glued to the screen, flicking through the feeds from thermal to motion and back again. Bjork had plugged in a pair of headphones and had one firmly against his ear.

  The camera danced across the landscape but revealed nothing other than trees. There was no sign of the Varas, but they were out there, that much was certain. Skulking, lurking, just beyond the realm of the visible. They were just choosing their moment to strike.

  The trucks ploughed forward in sequence, weaving in and out between abandoned cars at a steady pace. Fido, the lead truck continued to gain pace. Ek and Bjork were in constant contact with Sabina and Sam in the cab, feeding them information and updates, letting them concentrate on the driving.

  Sab’s voice echoed through the trailer. ‘Shit!’ she swore, swerving around a car that the Fido clipped. ‘That was close.’

  They continued on until the shapes of buildings loomed ahead. Umea. They closed in on it quickly and the voice of Alva from the Fido crackled around them. It was from the radio in the cab, and the noise filtered through to them second hand.

  ‘The road is blocked ahead. Looks like a bus has overturned, we’re going to have to swing through the centre of Umea to get around it. Hold on.’ Alva sighed and grunted and the Fido swerved four lanes, bouncing through the gravel ditch that separated the carriages. Sam swore into the mic and followed blindly. Aaro reached for the wall to steady himself but was thrown from his cot as the truck dropped into the depression. He hit the ground hard and slid, scrambling to his feet as Bjork did the same. The trailer lurched violently back up before settling and continuing on. The engine roared and everything whined under the strain of being pulled forwards, the metal groaning as it twisted. They were keeping as much speed as they could. The two trucks cornered violently and sailed through a roundabout up towards the town. They stuck on the gas and straight-lined the next one too, the wheels thundering over the curbs.

  There was a loud crash beyond the trailer walls and on the screen the broken corpse of a car flew out from in front of the F
ido. The road was filled with abandoned cars and there was no choice but to plough through. The microphones tried fitfully to filter out the engine noise, and give some semblance of what was transpiring outside, but it was useless. Between the grinding of metal on metal as they scraped and slid past cars, and the scream of the struggling engines as they gained and lost revs with every metre, it was nothing but white noise, that is until the howls came back, one at a time, rising in volume until they were all there was.

  Things started slowly. Ek called Bjork over and they stood side by side, flicking through the screens, panning the camera from left to right. Bjork had the headphones pressed to his head and a walkie talkie in his hand, exchanging information with the Fido. After a few minutes, the first shot sounded. It was dull through the steel hull of the truck and emanated from the road ahead. But it was still unmistakable.

  The Fido had begun firing. Aaro didn’t need to see what at to know.

  Bjork started gesturing wildly for Ek to pan left and turn on the motion scope. From then on it was incessant. A constant chatter of rounds. Flurries of gold streaked on the screen, darting between cars and inside abandoned buildings at the roadside. Ek kept his finger on the trigger, shooting at everything that moved, and lots of things that didn’t. The sound of the bullets tearing through metal and glass was reassuring in a way, like they might actually serve as protection against everything that was out there. But then, there was a different sound. A sharp crack that wasn’t distant or dull. The trailer rocked and a loud bang echoed through it. Aaro cursed and stumbled, staring at the wall.

  Something heavy had smashed against the side of the truck.

  Sorina swore loudly and leapt away from the wall, and Bjork and Ek wheeled around to look to their right. There was another loud crack and the whole trailer jostled again. Aaro looked at Sorina who was staring at him, terror in her eyes.

  ‘What was that?’ she asked, breath tight.