It was suddenly quiet. The only sound was the wind blowing through the surrounding grasslands. They gathered around the capsule as one of the men climbed to its top and began to open the hatch. Marie peered through the circular window on the side. As the hatch opened, enough light shone in that she could just make out the yang on the control panel. The last character on its face flickered. 000.
A piercing high pitch, like a whistle, interrupted the stillness. An intensely bright yellow light flashed inside the cabin and blasted out through the window and the open hatch. For a brief moment, night turned into the brilliance of day. Marie pulled her head away, shielded her eyes and dropped backwards. The man squatting on the top of the capsule fell back, grabbing the hatch at the last instant to keep from falling off. The screaming sound stopped and the flash quickly faded, while blinded eyes took a few seconds longer to recover. The man on top of the capsule readjusted his position and carefully leaned over the edge of the hatchway.
“They’re here!” he yelled.
Marie raced back to the Soyuz window, her heart pounding. She held one hand to block the glare of the floodlight and peered inside. Three men in flight suits sat side by side in their seats. Sergei turned toward the window, his eyes bloodshot, his chin covered in a two-day growth and his head sweaty—and he smiled. “Marie,” he mouthed through the thick window.
“Sergei!” she screamed back. “Oh my God, you’re back! It worked—you’re back!”
She pressed a hand to the window, and Sergei slowly raised his own to match it. They smiled to each other. Only the thickness of the glass separated their palms—a few millimeters. She felt it again, his presence. The same feeling she’d had a few hours earlier while sitting alone in the capsule in the middle of an empty hangar. She now realized that even then, he had been close to her. A few millimeters, perhaps, but pushed ever so slightly in a kata direction. He had been inside Soyuz all along.
She looked up. The man on top was pulling Jeremy out through the hatch. He looked weary, but still able to move. Jeremy sat on the edge of the capsule and reached down. “Marie, you’re a sight for sore eyes.” She reached up and touched his fingers. A second later he was gently lowered down, and she held him up from the gravity of Earth, wrapping her arms around him.
The tears flowed. “Jeremy, I thought we’d…” Her voice broke.
He put a hand on her cheek. “Me, too. I don’t know how we got here, but I’m sure thankful.”
An ambulance pulled up, its emergency lights turning the scene into a chaos of red and blue. Two EMTs rushed out and took Jeremy out of her arms. Another brought a stretcher.
“My dear Marie!” the familiar Russian voice called from above. Sergei sat on the edge of the capsule, his legs dangling down. “My darling, where have you been? I’ve missed you!”
She burst into tears all over again, laughing even as the tears streamed down her face. Sergei was lowered and soon in her arms. They embraced, her face beside his, not wanting to let go. “Oh, Sergei,” she sobbed. “I was so worried. I…”
“It’s okay. It’s over now.” She felt the drips from his face too.
She gently pushed back, laughing while she brushed her swollen eyes and wet cheeks. “I must look terrible.”
Sergei held her shoulders in his hands as he studied her face. “On the contrary, my dear Marie, you are the loveliest thing I have ever seen.”
As promised months before, a promise made even before he had departed for launch, a promise made between colleagues who had become cherished friends—she kissed him full on the lips. She kissed him for all the time that had passed and all the emotions that had exploded over these grim and inconsolable days. She kissed him hard, and he kissed her back.
“I told you I would,” she said as they pulled apart.
“I remember. I’m glad you did, too.” He laughed. “Can any of this be real? Kiss me again.”
“In America, we say ‘pinch me.’”
“What a terrible custom,” Sergei declared. “Why would I want to be pinched when I could be kissed?”
“Couldn’t agree more.” She kissed him again.
She felt the EMT tap her shoulder with a gloved hand. “Sorry, ma’am, we need to get him under care.”
“I’ve never felt better,” Sergei shouted.
“And, ma’am,” the EMT said, “given that you had… uh, contact with him, you might need to spend time in quarantine too.” Gladly, she thought as the EMT helped Sergei to the ambulance.
Anton was out of the capsule now too, lying on a rolling stretcher and sipping from a bottle of water. Another ambulance pulled up, adding to the chaos of lights flooding the surrounding sage. Marie approached the stretcher. “Do I get the same greeting?” Anton asked sheepishly.
“Close,” she replied with a smile. “But I don’t know you as well, so you’ll understand why I’m shy.” She kissed him on the cheek and wrapped her arms around his neck. “Welcome home, Anton.”
As she pulled away, she noticed a spot of blood on his forehead. “What happened here? Sergei had that too.”
Anton reached up and touched his forehead. “I don’t know. There was a floating thing, like that Chinese yin-yang shape, then a flash of light, and we were here. That’s all I remember.”
Marie laughed. “There’s a lot you don’t know. We’ll debrief when you guys feel better.”
He nodded. “Marie, thanks for getting us home.”
She shook her head. “Don’t thank me. Somebody else brought you home—they’re not from around here.” She patted him on the shoulder. “We’ll talk.”
Pixie ran up beside her, his excitement obvious. “I need to show you something.” He motioned toward Soyuz. Marie followed him to the side of the capsule. “Inside,” he said. “Can I give you a boost?” She nodded and he boosted her up. Grabbing some handholds, she pulled herself to the top.
She peered inside the capsule, now empty once more. She looked back at Pixie below her. “What?”
“Climb in and take a look at that thing. Don’t worry, I’ll help you get out.”
She hesitated. Her last time alone in Soyuz had been a terrifying experience. Still, if there was one last job to do…
She summoned her courage and dropped down through the hatch. Inside it was cold and only dimly lit from the floodlight. Sergei’s handprint was still on the window, but otherwise the cabin hadn’t changed since she had sat there a few hours before.
She looked up at the yang device. It was still in the same position on the control panel, but the characters on its front had changed. Instead of three, there were now four. She’d seen the characters enough to have them memorized. The yang read 7773. A quick calculation told her the time represented a little more than six days. The yang was counting down once again.
On a hunch, she reached up and touched it. The yang moved easily to one side and righted itself on its point. “You weren’t doing that before,” she said aloud. Without any effort, she lifted it from its place on the control panel. “Full of surprises, aren’t you? Just like your mate.”
She looked up into the hatchway and saw Pixie staring down. She wrapped one hand around the stem of the yang, like a movie star grabs an Oscar, and shook it in front of her face. “This time, you’re coming with me.”
Overflowing with pride and confidence, Marie hoisted herself up through the hatchway and toward a night sky filled with stars.
48 Humans
The sound of Daniel’s measured steps on the marble floor produced small echoes as he walked the empty corridor of the West Wing. He visualized sound waves bouncing off the far wall and expected the slight delay to decrease as he approached. It did.
A day of rest, another flight, and he was back where he had started. Near the end of the corridor, bright light streamed into the hallway through an open door. Daniel turned and entered the Roosevelt Room. Teddy hung on one wall, Franklin on another. In between was a long conference table where one woman sat alone. She turned as he entered and b
urst into a broad smile.
“Daniel.”
He wasn’t going to let the formality of the White House ruin this reunion. Daniel embraced Marie and hugged her tight. “You had me worried for a while,” he said. They held hands and smiled at each other.
“Daniel, that was no attack. The yang was watching over that space, making sure it would be clear when the countdown hit zero.” She hugged him again. “But thanks for being worried. I’m fine, really.”
“Not a bad interpretation,” he said. They took chairs at the table. “That thing turned out to have quite a few functions, beyond just counting.”
“I carried it out with me. It somehow unlocked itself from Soyuz—I could just lift it up.” She pointed to a direction that could have been anywhere in the city. “It’s over at NASA HQ right now—some of the engineers are studying it. You know, it’s counting again.”
“I heard. It restarted at 7777, right? About six days, our time?”
“You’d think they’d just send us a calendar invite.” She laughed. “Maybe we have something we can teach them?”
Daniel smiled. “You’d think they already know. They learned our computer formats pretty quickly. They were inside our Internet for less than two minutes, downloaded twenty pages and a few YouTube videos. And that was enough. The quality of the conversation really picked up.” Daniel ran a hand through his hair. “His ability to absorb the nuance of our language was incredible. I’m not sure how much of that you heard.”
“Some of it,” she replied. “But as soon as he said the guys were alive and they were home… well, I knew exactly what that meant. We went straight to Soyuz.” She looked down pensively. “Daniel, it was so strange, but I absolutely knew they were there. I’d felt it when I’d sat in there alone. It was like Sergei was sitting next to me.”
“And in a sense, he was.”
She nodded. “But they weren’t just in 4-D space. They were frozen, suspended somehow. None of them had any recollection beyond their first twenty-four hours. All that time Soyuz sat in that hangar—those guys were right there. Maybe offset just a little from our space, but suspended. They don’t remember any of it.”
“And the doctors at Ellsworth checked them for medications?”
“Yeah. They’d each been stabbed in the forehead—probably by the same needle that was pointed at me. But there were no drugs in their systems, nothing that would have put them to sleep. Their body temperatures were normal, so it wasn’t cryogenics either. They were suspended in a physical sense, not medically. Pushed into quantum space, but also frozen in time.”
Daniel didn’t disagree. “Time answers, he told us. The solution to returning anything alive from 4-D space. If they’ve got control over both space and time… well, as he said, you will learn.”
Marie beamed. “We have so much opportunity. I really want to be there.”
“Is Ibarra going to keep you involved? Really, except for the debrief today, our job is done. Shea told me the government has initiated a discussion with the Chinese, and apparently, they’re already hinting they might make an official apology. I’m heading back to Fermilab tomorrow to make sure we have a solid plan for the next event with Core. But even there, other people will step in to handle the conversation itself.”
She put her glasses on, and she did look five years older, just as she’d told him—was it months before? “Ibarra should be here in a few minutes, and a bunch of other NASA people. Once we’re done briefing the president, Ibarra’s going to ask him to appoint a team for all future contact. I so want to be part of that. It’s the chance of a lifetime and I’m not going to miss out. Help me, will you?”
Her face was bright with the wide-open potential of her future. “Of course,” he said. “You earned a slot. You think you’re ready to do some kata traveling?”
Her eyes widened in mock shock. “Maybe we’ll stick with radios and cameras for a while. We’re lucky we have those guys back in one piece.”
“By the way, where are they now?”
“Sergei and Anton are on a plane to Moscow. They’ve got their own debrief to do. And Jeremy should be back in Houston by now. He’s got two of the cutest kids you’ve ever seen, and his wife Elise…” She stopped and her eyes filled with tears. “I can’t imagine what she must have gone through.”
Daniel reached for a box of tissues on the credenza and handed her one.
“Thanks.” She dabbed her eyes. “Sorry, some of these things get to me.”
“Sergei, too,” Daniel said. “He’s special, I think.”
She nodded and scrunched the tissue in her hand. A large smile broke out across her face. “He’s coming back, once he’s done in Moscow. I’m going to meet him in New York, show him the city. R and R, as they call it.”
“That’s great, you’ll have fun. Marie, I’m really glad you were there when they… materialized.”
She laughed and looked up at Daniel. “What a strange world we live in now. I know it sounds clichéd, but everything is completely different than just four days ago, isn’t it?”
Daniel had the feeling that there was a great adventure to come for the young woman in front of him. He was proud to have partnered with her. She was going places.
They both looked up as Augustin Ibarra walked into the room, the very man who could help make her wish come true. Daniel stood up and shook his hand. “Director Ibarra, good to see you again.”
“Ready to talk to the president?” Ibarra seemed as relaxed as anyone could be when just minutes away from explaining one of the most bizarre tales ever told to the most powerful man on Earth.
“I am. Do you think he’s ready to listen?”
Ibarra squinted. “He’ll listen to you… and to Shea. But show him what you learned, and don’t be afraid to speak your mind. In the end, I think he’ll see things the same way we do.”
Marie interjected, “There’d better not be any nukes sent out to VY Canis Majoris.”
Daniel wasn’t overly concerned about a war scenario. It didn’t seem likely that an advanced species would reveal the location of their communications hub to an unknown civilization without defenses of some kind. But then, who knew? Earth might be the only aggressor among a sea of pacifists. Maybe the many people Core had referred to were the Federation, and humans were the Klingons. There was so much yet to learn. But if any fear-mongering developed, he was ready to counter it.
Ibarra put an arm on Daniel’s shoulder. “Before the briefing, I wanted to get your input directly. The hub. What do you think it is? Why is it out there?”
With only a day to ponder their discovery, Daniel didn’t have the answers. They might come with time—and lessons from Core. “We at least know it’s a communications center. The swarm of objects around it—they could be equivalents to our geosynchronous satellites. Communication relays that use 4-D space to send messages back to a hundred home planets. Plus, Core made it clear we’re expected to return to the hub. They’re not coming to Earth—we go there.”
“Why there?” Ibarra asked. “What’s important about that star?”
Daniel shook his head. “VY Canis Majoris? Well, it’s big—that’s an understatement, it’s enormous. It makes our sun look like mote of dust. Who knows why they picked that spot. Maybe it really is a central location to lots of civilizations—the many people he told us about. But maybe we’ve only seen a small part of what’s out there. There could be more hubs like Core. Maybe more quantum space, too. For all we know, there might be a maze of constructed space, filled with more technology like the hub. We may have just found the entrance to a cavern we never knew existed.”
“We are brand-new to all of this,” Marie added. “All we’ve seen is one pathway between Earth and the hub.”
Daniel nodded. “One small slice of a galaxy filled with billions of stars… and maybe much more.”
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
At eight o’clock that evening, the downtown Chicago bar was alive with laughing friends, after-work c
olleagues, and happy people simply enjoying the evening in the company of others. Daniel and Nala sat on high barstools at a small round table covered with plates of food and tall glasses of beer. Every other table in the bar was similarly covered, with one exception. Only their table displayed a blue plastic cube in its center, unique not only within the bar, but probably within the entire world.
Daniel picked up the tesseract. “I’ll have to find a place of honor in my office for this.”
“Jae-ho is giving it to you?” Nala asked.
He shrugged. “He said he could make more.”
Daniel studied the tesseract in his hand. It was nothing more than two sets of eight vertices attaching one cube inside another. He flicked his wrist and felt the odd delay in its momentum shift—a clear indication of additional mass, unseen. The feeling and the thought were fascinating.
His eyes focused beyond the plastic cube and absorbed the fine features of his dining partner. A day of rest, a chance to groom and change clothes, and the talented physicist had transformed into an exquisitely beautiful woman. Her hair was pulled back, her eyes sparkled and her smile dazzled. In a word, she was stunning.
“You’d make a good representative from our planet,” he said, grinning.
Nala burst into laughter. “Where’d that come from?”
“You’re smart, you know your science, you’re beautiful. Perfect. Except…”
“Except?”
“You’d probably have to clean up your language.”
She rolled with laughter again. “Fuck that!”
“Or maybe not.” Daniel laughed.
“Sorry, no interest in being a representative. I’ll stick with my current job, thank you very much. Hey, I’m employed again.”
“Park made it official?”
The Quantum Series Box Set Page 29