The Tempest (First Contact), page 5
The casket/pod rises from the floor of the hibernation chamber. Vapor drifts from the cold storage hold beneath the floor. A sliding door closes beneath the pod, but the temperature in the med-bay has already dropped twenty degrees, sending a chill through his bones.
Dozens of metrics are displayed on the lid of the pod, but they’re meaningless to Marc. The bright flashing red light, though, is ominous.
Emma has her back to the pod. She’s monitoring progress on the main console. With her feet looped under a rail on the floor to hold her in place in microgravity, she taps madly, entering various commands. Marc would follow each and every computer prompt to the letter, but she’s selective, accepting some and sweeping others away with the brush of her hand. She works through a checklist of fifty items within a minute.
A deep thunk comes from the pod. The hatch opens. White mist drifts out from within the slick tube, dissipating in the air.
Given he’s been woken in a rushed, uncontrolled manner, Marc expects Commander Raddison to spring from the pod like he did during basic training. To his surprise, the commander doesn’t move. He’s breathing, but he looks dead. His bloodshot eyes stare at the ceiling.
Emma drifts over to the pod. She leans over him.
“Sir, this is Lieutenant Emma Madi.”
With tears forming in the corner of his eyes, he stutters. “M—Madi?”
“Yes, sir.”
“W—What happened?”
“Best I understand it, we flew through a particle storm—a relativistic jet. We’ve dropped out of warp. We’ve lost a lot of systems. At the moment, we’re entering orbit around an unseen gravitational anomaly.”
“B—Black hole?” he asks, but his eyes haven’t moved. He hasn’t blinked. He’s not looking at her. He’s looking past her, staring through her to the ceiling beyond. His hand twitches.
“I think so, sir. There’s nothing on the charts. Nothing on the nav instruments. I’ve never heard of anything like this before, but it’s out there. Sensors indicate the presence of a mass equal to four hundred thousand Sols. And there’s a planet down there—an ice giant. At first, we thought it was a rogue. We’re going to seek a safe harbor there and shelter from any magnetic storms. I—I think we might be able to mine basic resources from its moons.”
“G—Good job, Emma. Well done. You’re doing a good job. You’ve done a great job.”
“Sir?”
Emma doesn’t realize it yet, but Marc does—the commander’s paralyzed, probably from the neck down.
Marc sails over to the med-cabinet and retrieves a nanobot pack and injector.
Commander Raddison says, “Get us in a stable orbit. Radio for help. Go into stasis to conserve power and await rescue.”
“Sir, I don’t understand.”
She was expecting him to take charge.
Marc hands her the nanobot injector. He speaks to the commander, saying, “We’re going to get you out of there, sir. We’ll give you a shot of bots and you’ll be right.”
“No. No,” he says. “You have your orders. P—Put me back under.”
“We have nanobots,” Emma says.
Drops of blood drift from the commander’s lips. “Follow your orders, lieutenant.”
Again, his fingers twitch but don’t move. He adds a feeble, “Please,” which shouldn’t be necessary from a starship commander. His jumpsuit is soaked in blood. The deep red fluid has frozen around his abdomen. Unlike regular bleeding, it’s patchy, forming large blobs.
Emma looks at Marc with tears in her eyes. She goes to speak but words fail to come out. Marc taps the close command on the lid of the pod. A slight hiss indicates the life support routines kicking in as the pod lowers into the floor.
“W—What? What just happened?” she asks, stunned. She looks at the nanobot injector in his hand. “I don’t understand. Why? Why wouldn’t he try?”
“Too much damage,” Marc says. “He must have known. He must have been able to sense it—to feel it in his bones. My grandfather went like this. They call it multi-organ failure. I’m sorry.”
“But we have nanobots,” she says.
Marc is somber in his assessment. “We could prolong his agony, but not his life.”
Tears well up in her eyes. Marc’s sure Emma knows he’s right, but in the heartbreak of the moment, she wants to hear it from someone else. It’s one thing to know nothing can be done. It’s another to accept it. Death never comes easy.
In the weightlessness within the Sycorax, Emma’s tears build up in front of her eyes, forming large blobs of clear water. It must affect her vision, but she’s too distraught to notice. Her hands are shaking.
“Hey,” Marc says, pushing softly off the hull and drifting over to her. He hugs her. Emma buries her head in his shoulder and sobs. He understands. She’s held herself together for the sake of the crew and the colonists. To suddenly realize most of them are dead is too much. To see her commander paralyzed and dying cuts deep. Mercifully, the pod will put him back to sleep—where he’ll never wake.
The two of them float there, holding each other for a moment. Life demands comfort. All they have is each other. As bad as their injuries were, they were protected by the dense fluid in the holding tanks. Marc can’t help but wonder how many of those remaining green metrics in the hibernation system are slowly failing, waiting to be revived, only to die.
His heart sinks. They’re all going to die out here in the bitter, cold darkness of space. Marc suspects they’ll be dead long before a rescue craft can reach them in several decades’ time.
Altair IV
Miranda wanders through the endless night on the icy moon known as Altair IV. Her eyes adjust to the ambient starlight. Hundreds of thousands of kilometers away, an ice giant looms over the horizon. It’s barely visible in the sky but it blots out the stars as it rises into the eternal dark. Thin wisps of ammonia ice caught high in its stratosphere reflect what little light reaches the planet, suggesting rather than announcing its presence. To Miranda, the faint, white ribbons curling around the distant equator are beautiful. The differences between them are subtle, changing from one day to the next. To her, it’s as though they’re curtains blowing in a breeze—and they are, only that breeze is a cyclonic wind whirling around the ice giant at hundreds of kilometers an hour.
Miranda knows the ice giant is in orbit around a black hole, but the concept is meaningless to her. The black hole is so far away she can’t hope to see even the faintest impression with her naked eye. Her father, Professor Spiro, has used his telescope to show her how the black hole warps spacetime. She remembers peering through the scope and watching as a distant star smeared itself around a tiny point in the sky. One moment, the star was burning bright, high and to the right, and the next it was low and to the left, while the other stars remained where they were. “That’s it,” her father said when she queried him about it, “that tiny invisible point is the black hole.” Miranda doesn’t understand why her father calls it a hole. It’s the remnants of a star—a dead star. It may not give off any light, but neither does her moon. Her father speaks of the black hole with a sense of reverence. She’s more interested in the ice giant Altair with its dark, swirling clouds. To her, Altair is pretty.
Miranda has a satchel slung over her shoulder. She holds a bunch of flowers in her left hand. She picked them from the greenhouse before walking out into the wilderness. In the darkness, their vibrant reds and yellows appear as muted shades of grey, but her mom would love them regardless.
Miranda walks on toward the distant plateau. Crushed rock crunches beneath her boots. Behind her, each footstep lights up in pale shades of blue as alien microbes react to her presence. It takes a few minutes for their bioluminescence to fade. The glowing trail behind her extends for thirty to forty meters, revealing the path she trod.
Miranda walks beneath a jagged cliff. The vast shadow blocks easily half the star field. She takes a handful of grit from her satchel, scattering it ahead of her like a farmer sowing seeds in a field. As the tiny bits of gravel bounce across the path, bioluminescent archaea spark into life, lighting her way. These single-celled extraterrestrial organisms lack a nucleus. They’re invisible to the naked eye until dislodged by a landslide or a handful of pebbles. On a planetoid without a nearby blazing star, they evolved to emit light as a warning to grazing animals that they should eat something else. They’re toxic chemotrophs, feeding on the sulfur and ammonium released by geothermal vents scattered around the equator of the moon. Miranda’s father has told her these particular chemical compounds stink, but she barely notices. She’s grown up with them. To her, they’re normal.
Rolling fields of glass grass stretch out to one side of her, reaching up to waist height. The grass on Altair IV forms in a manner similar to corals on Earth. Microbes grow at the tip of the crystalline leaves, leaving silicates that form a structure as fine as spun glass on Earth. The fields are fragile. Storms periodically ravage the grass, crushing the glass like some giant stomping across the land. The microbes, though, are hardy. They regrow these complex structures within days, reaching up for what little, precious starlight there is to feed upon.
Firefly-like insects dance above the crystalline grass, calling to each other with waves of light. They blink in and out of existence. They compete with the stars for attention—only they have a motive—to attract a mate.
In the distance, a herd of bioluminescent deer grazes on the field of glass. These elegant alien creatures float above the sea of sharp edges, being held aloft by dozens of overlapping balloons growing out of their backs like blisters. Their floatation bladders light up with the remnants of the tiny creatures they’re eating. Deer nibble at the tips of the glass, consuming microbes and spitting the silicates back to the ground. Little do they know, their saliva contains the nutrients needed for the worms that host the microbial larvae that form the glass. They’re feeding the next generation—a generation they’ll eventually eat.
During the mating season, the stags will fight over the does for mating rights. Aerial dogfights will unfold with a rainbow of colors as various males seek to puncture their rival’s gaseous bladders with their antlers. Males will seek the best approach, wanting to outflank each other before committing to a charge. Foes are vanquished rather than crippled. It’s rare to see a deer lose all its buoyancy as wounded bucks will flee once they start losing altitude. For now, the deer are content to feed.
Miranda reaches the original landing site of the Copernicus—the interstellar craft that brought her and her father to Altair IV. The Copernicus departed the icy moon decades ago, but the temporary labs and containers it dropped off still dot the landscape. There’s no power so they appear as little more than sharp right-angle corners in the darkness.
Miranda walks up to her mother’s memorial. Rocks have been piled on top of a shallow grave. The headstone is rough and unfinished. Only one face has been polished. It catches the starlight, making the words engraved there easy to read. There’s no name, no age, no date of birth or death, just a few solemn, sad words carved into the rock. It’s both a testament and a promise.
I love you.
I will never forget you.
Miranda kneels in the gravel. Bioluminescent dust swirls with her motion, settling over the rocks and causing them to glow.
“Hi, Mom,” she says, laying her flowers on the grave.
Miranda feels torn. Her father says it isn’t healthy to talk to the dead. She disagrees. She knows her mother cannot hear her, but it doesn’t matter. She’s content to speak for herself, roleplaying a conversation with a mother she never really knew. It’s important to remember the dead. Speaking as though they can hear is neither mad nor sad. It’s honest. It’s defiance—a refusal to forget.
“I’m letting my hair grow now. Yes, the angsty teen days are gone. No more crew cuts.”
Why is she talking about her hair? Her mother wouldn’t mind what she did with her long, flowing locks, and her dad doesn’t care. On an alien moon, her hairstyle doesn’t matter to anyone other than herself.
Deep down, Miranda wants to be understood. Perhaps that’s why she cut her hair short in the first place, to provoke her father into seeing her with more than mere eyes. She wanted him to see her as an adult, not a child. Would her mother be any different? Or would she side with her father when arguments invariably arose? Miranda’s aware that her dreamy desire for a mother full of understanding and compassion could be entirely misplaced, but she knows she’s inherited her mother’s traits. Miranda’s seen the video logs. She has more than her mother’s blonde cowlick of hair rising from her forehead before curling down beside her face. She has more than her mother’s pale blue eyes and fair skin. She has her aptitude for art, her humor and her curiosity.
Miranda fusses with the rocks. She picks up a few stones that have become dislodged by an ice storm. Gently, she places them back on the grave.
“I’m eighteen. Can you believe it? Eighteen years old!”
Tears fall from her eyes. In the dry cold, they evaporate from her cheeks within a few seconds. As it is, she has to wear lip balm whenever she’s outside to prevent her lips from getting chapped. Her eyes always feel dry, but it doesn’t bother her. Tears, though, are unusual. Miranda never cries. Why be sad on a world where you can have anything and everything you want? Is it her mother she misses or friendship with someone other than her dad? Her father means well, but he’s stuffy. What he sees as care, she finds stifling. His concern is overbearing. He’s too protective. He wants to be her friend, but he can’t be. It’s the imbalance between them. Friends are equals.
She speaks softly. “I mean, you’d know. You’d remember. I’m sure you would. Dad didn’t. I don’t think he’s being mean or anything. It’s difficult for him to keep track of dates.
“What do Earth years mean on a moon with days that only last sixteen hours? With no sunrise or sunset to mark each day? We orbit Altair once every five of our brief days. What does that even mean in Earth days? Dad tells me we undergo a hundred and eighty-two orbits of Altair for every one revolution of that dark monster at the heart of our system. What does that make a year out here compared to a year back there? I could get Ariel to do the math for me, but I don’t want to know.
“As for me? I’m like you. I can’t let go of Earth. If I were back there, I’d celebrate with a party. Out here, I’d celebrate being ten years old or something dumb like that, but Ariel assures me I’m eighteen in Earth years so I guess I am.”
She laughs.
“I’ve never seen Earth, but it’s home, right? Not here. Not Altair IV.”
Miranda wipes her eyes.
“You’re the only one I can talk to, Mom. Ariel doesn’t understand me. She’s a machine—my father’s machine. She’s supposed to be you, I think. She means well.”
The cold seeps through her clothing, chilling her bones. Miranda gets up off her knees. She stands before the grave, dusting herself off and watching as bursts of blue light settle to the ground.
“He doesn’t mean to forget,” she says as her fingers settle on the words engraved on the tombstone. “He remembers you in his own way. I know he does. It’s just that Earth dates are meaningless to him.”
The ground shakes. A deep rumble reaches her ears. Miranda doesn’t care. She continues talking to a woman she doesn’t remember, to a mother she never knew but feels she understands.
“Birth means different things to men and women. A mother never forgets. I know you wouldn’t forget. Oh, how I wish you were still here.”
In the distance, a geyser erupts from the plateau. Steam races into the sky. The boiling hot water freezes as it rises high into the eternal night. A fine white snow forms as the geyser hits the thermal boundary almost a kilometer above the surface of the moon. After rushing up in a column, it drifts sideways, creating a snow cloud in the dark sky.
Miranda blows a kiss over the grave, saying, “I love you, Momma.”
She turns and walks away without looking back.
She can’t.
Distant lights guide her home.
The dim outline of her footprints are still visible beneath the cliff.
Out to her right, down by the shoreline, boiling water emerges from the honeycomb of caves that riddle the mantle. As the tides ebb and flow beneath the surface of the moon, water surges, exploding out of blowholes. It crashes against the rocks, sending out a wall of white spray that quickly freezes, falling as ice crystals along the edge of the cliff. Bioluminescent microbes glow in the wake of receding waves, washing across the shore as the water drains back into the caves.
High in the sky, a flash of light catches Miranda’s attention. A meteor blazes through the night, but the trajectory is wrong. Miranda’s seen plenty of space rocks and dust particles burn up in the atmosphere, but this is different. There’s no chemical glow. Miranda prides herself on identifying meteorites. Red indicates the presence of lithium. Green highlights copper. Potassium is pink, while calcium burns yellow. This meteor, though, is a brilliant, bright white.
As the various meteors that strike Altair IV are drawn in by the ice giant Altair itself, they tend to streak in that direction. This one, though, is moving at a right angle to the massive, dark planet and it’s high, far too high. It’s almost as though it missed both the moon and the ice giant, but that’s not possible. It has to skim the atmosphere of something to burn up. It’s then Miranda realizes she’s looking at an object well beyond the reach of her tiny moon, beyond even the vast reach of Altair. She’s seeing something in deep space. How and why is it lighting up? If it’s well beyond Altair, the amount of energy being released must be astonishing. What could cause that?
Miranda runs.
“Father… Father,” she yells, running down a tunnel set into the mountain and throwing open the heavy door to their home. She jogs up the granite staircase, following the curve carved into the mountainside. The stairs seem endless. It’s the excitement coursing through her veins.
