The Tempest (First Contact), page 6
“What is it?” her father calls out in alarm. From the tone of his voice, he’s expecting her to be hurt, but Miranda is beaming with excitement.
“Did you see it? Tell me you saw it.”
“Saw what?” the professor asks, leaning over the railing of his fourth-floor laboratory as she comes up the stairs. The professor’s home is grand, having been cut into the side of the mountain. Each of the floors is a balcony in its own right. There are no walls beyond the various storage rooms, bathrooms and bedrooms carved directly into the rock. The open-plan lounge, kitchen and dining room on the first floor are lavish, but the furniture is sparse given the size. A clear dome surrounds the home. Warm air circulates.
“The flare,” Miranda says, rushing up the final flight of stairs to reach him. She’s out of breath but she doesn’t care.
“The flare?”
“It wasn’t a comet,” she says, panting for breath. “Or a meteor. It was something else.”
“Okay,” he says, laughing at her. He holds out his hands. “Slow down. Tell me what you saw.”
“Look up there,” she says, leaning forward and holding onto her knees as she draws in deep breaths. The sky, though, is dark.
“I’ll take a look through the logs,” he says, smiling at her contagious enthusiasm. “I’m sure it’ll be in there.”
“I think it’s a spaceship.”
“A spaceship?” the professor says, raising an eyebrow. “I doubt that. We’re a long way from the space lanes.”
“Look for it, Papa. Look.”
“I will, I will,” he says, bringing up a hologram in the middle of his laboratory on the top floor of his spacious home.
As the mansion is built into the side of a granite mountain reaching several thousand meters above the plain, the various levels are offset from each other. Even though there are only two of them living there, the house is large enough for fifteen to twenty people to live side by side in comfort. There are bedrooms along with bathrooms scattered on the various levels. Polished marble floors give way to rough-hewn walls carved out of the granite hillside by robotic diggers. A single diamond-infused glass dome spans all of the floors, allowing the starlight to drift in on every level. The dark canyon beyond the glass gives way to a broad plain and distant mountains and finally stars. The decor is modest, which makes the home seem even larger.
“There,” Miranda says, pointing at the replay rushing past on the hologram.
“Interesting,” the professor says. “Well, you’re right. It’s a spacecraft. Or it was.”
“What do you mean?”
The professor uses his fingers to manipulate the hologram. He zooms in while changing the portion of the electromagnetic spectrum that’s visible in the image. A false-color sphere appears, only it’s a teardrop in shape, with a tail reaching out behind it like a tadpole.
“That’s a warp bubble,” he says, pointing. “See how it forms like a drop of water falling from a tap?”
He zooms in. The spacecraft itself is little more than an elongated smudge within the bubble. The leading edge of the sphere is red in the direction of travel, while the tail fades to blue.
“That’s a warp signature, all right,” he says. “It’s distorting spacetime, bending light around the spacecraft, but watch what happens as I replay the logs.”
With a slight twist of his wrist, the timestamp races forward. Rather than bursting, the bubble dissipates, fading to match the background. The craft contracts and slows, but it remains a blur.
“What happened?” Miranda asks.
“From what I can tell, they flew through the jet emanating from the black hole.”
“Jet?” she asks, confused by the concept.
“It’s like a geyser,” he says. “Any matter that doesn’t get drawn into that monster is sent hurling out into space along its poles. It would have shredded their spacecraft. For them, it would have been like flying through a hail storm.”
Miranda asks, “Who were they? Why did they come here?”
“The outer colonies must have expanded into the Nu Phoenicis system. It was only a matter of time before they did. That would bring them near us.”
“But why?” Miranda asks.
“Nu Phoenicis has a lot of similarities to Sol. Same radiation profile and age.”
“Is it close?” she asks.
The professor chuckles. “In a universe spanning billions of light years, everything we can see is close. Oh, I think it is roughly twenty light years from here. At a guess, it’s probably about fifty light years from Earth.”
“They didn’t see it?” she asks, surprised. “They didn’t know about the monster?”
“No one knows about it,” the professor says. “And it needs to stay that way.”
“But they’ll send a rescue ship,” Miranda says.
“Maybe. Maybe not. It depends on whether they get a distress call and whether they think it’s a survivable incident. Even if someone has survived up there, they’re probably not going to survive for long.”
“But they might want to investigate.”
“It doesn’t matter. It’ll take years for another craft to get here. Decades.”
“And by then?” she asks.
“By then, we’ll be gone,” the professor says. “All of us. You. Me. Ariel and even Caliban.”
Miranda hesitates. Her father seems to catch her reluctance.
“It’s not worth it,” he says.
“Earth?” she asks, even though she knows what his response will be.
“Our future lies with the Krell and that black hole,” he says.
Softly, she replies, “I’d like to see Earth.”
“I know.”
Now, it’s his turn to measure his words. Whether he’s lying or withholding the truth is impossible to tell, but Miranda is no fool. Outwardly, she smiles. Inwardly, she seeks to decipher the truth.
“Our work is important,” he says, but she notes he’s unable to come up with an actual reason for not letting her visit Earth. Miranda was hoping for something more from him.
“I know,” she says, echoing his earlier sentiment. That doesn’t mean she agrees with her father, but she keeps that thought to herself. “But…”
“They’re dead,” he says, tapping the console with his fingers. “They must be.”
The professor is getting impatient with his daughter. His hand lingers over the controls but he’s not inputting any commands or directing the computer. It’s habitual. He drums his fingers, reinforcing his point.
Miranda’s not sure why her father felt he needed to emphasize their loss. She never questioned him about the spacecraft. If anything, his insistence causes doubts to linger in her mind. He seems to sense her reluctance.
“Given the amount of energy released when they flew through that tempest, if they’re not dead, they’re dying.”
“That’s sad.”
“It is,” he says, looking away from the hologram and out at the stars beyond the dome.
“Wait,” she says. bubbling with excitement. She points. “Look, Papa. They’re alive!”
“What? How could you possibly know that?” the professor asks, turning back to the hologram. There’s hesitancy in his voice. It’s not that he wants them dead. That can’t be his motive. It’s Ariel and Caliban. She knows he doesn’t want anyone else to learn the secret of Altair IV.
“Look,” she says. The hologram is still racing through the log retrieval at an accelerated rate. What has been just a few seconds for them would be ten to fifteen minutes for that distant spacecraft. “They’re performing a burn. They’re changing course.”
“Hmm,” he says, narrowing his eyes as he looks at the faint glow of engines at the rear of the craft. He works with his fingers, running them through the air and touching at a virtual keyboard. The controls automatically position themselves within reach of his hands as he moves around the edge of the spherical hologram. Miranda’s father could activate his implants. Miranda finds them easier to work with, but he seems to prefer laying out calculations visually.
“It’s a controlled burn, but they haven’t reached escape velocity.”
“I don’t understand,” she says.
“They’re firing at an acute angle,” he says. “To leave this system, they should be firing long. They need to climb out of the gravity well of this monster.”
“But?”
“But they’re dropping into it.”
“Why would they do that?” she asks. “Why would they fly in toward a black hole?”
“They’re not.” His jaw drops. “They’re coming here.”
“Really?” she says, unable to hide her excitement.
“It’s impossible,” he says with a growl in his voice. “Futile. The damage they’ve suffered would be immense. It will take them months to reach us. They’ll be dead before they get here. This is desperation. They won’t make it to Altair.”
Miranda dares to defy her father, saying, “Maybe they will.”
Adrian
Marc bounces softly off a dead instrument panel at the rear of the cockpit. It’s cold within the Sycorax. Emma has been able to revive the CO2 scrubbers but not the heaters. Fresh air circulates around Marc, gently pushing him on.
Frost forms on the glass panels. The moisture in the air is condensing as the temperature drops below freezing.
Marc wraps his arms around his chest, keeping himself warm. He’s put on two layers of shirts and trousers along with a jacket to trap body heat close to his skin but it doesn’t seem to help. At some point, they’re going to have to suit up to get the passive thermal insulation system in their spacesuits working for them. If he was thinking clearly, he’d climb into his sleeping bag, but he knows it’ll take time to warm the material. Marc’s tired. Too tired. Wriggling into a cold sleeping bag is as appealing as jumping into a lake in the dead of winter.
Marc yawns. His mind demands rest. He knows he needs to recharge his brain cells if he wants to think clearly. As it was, the two of them were almost eight hours into their shift when the Sycorax struck a relativistic jet streaming off the poles of that darkest of black holes. That was easily ten hours ago.
Emma’s already asleep. She slipped on a second flight suit and cuddled up in the pilot’s seat. Even though it’s eight days until the next orbital burn, she’s not going to abandon her post. For now, they’re safe. Logically, they both know that. Deep down, though, they’re both afraid. The laws of physics say the Sycorax is following a well-understood trajectory and will swing past the black hole, but it seems neither of them can shake the feeling they’re about to be torn apart by a monster looming somewhere out there in the pitch-black darkness of space.
Seatbelt restraints loop over Emma’s shoulders, holding her loosely in place just inches from the controls.
Marc prefers to float as he sleeps. The sensation reminds him of the ocean swell back home. He pushes off the side of the hull and drifts toward his quarters. There’s no light beyond the single LED on the flight deck. A soft touch on the bulkhead allows him to float on. Shadows grow around him. He drifts into the crew deck and positions himself near the hatch.
Marc feels he needs to be ready to react if Emma suddenly yells for help—not that a poop specialist can do much with electronics. He tells himself not to worry. The ship’s systems might not be fully functional, but the Sycorax is stable. Nothing is going to happen. He needs to sleep.
Even on the best of flights, space travel is short bursts of insane intensity followed by long periods of utter boredom. Now is the time for nothing much of anything. Marc’s a biologist. He’s excess baggage in an emergency. Oh, Emma humors him by having him work on the astronavigation console, but only ever under her watchful eye. Emma can work on system repairs, but even she’s limited by what she can accomplish. Any radiation damage to their computer circuitry would have happened at the nanometer range, putting it well below anything they can fix with the equipment onboard the Sycorax. They need spares from a star base—and that’s going to take decades. The best they can hope for is to stabilize the ship and drop into cryo-sleep to await rescue. Marc hooks one leg under a strap and drifts off to sleep.
He snores. With no clocks running and most of the electronics fried, there’s no way to tell how long he’s out, but when Marc wakes, he finds he’s drifted into the hibernation bay on the lower deck. It’s unsettling to wake up where Raddison died.
The sound of distant drums reaches his ears.
“What the hell?”
That there’s any noise at all is alarming, shocking him into sudden, conscious awareness.
“What is going on?” he mutters. “Emma? Is that you?”
Why would it be?
There’s no reply beyond the deep, resonant thump of what could be a large bongo drum. The rhythm is erratic. One, two or three beats and then a pause for a few seconds. At first, doubts linger in his thinking. Is he still dreaming? Is he imagining this? But the banging continues.
Marc turns his back on the noise. He pushes out into the shaft leading to the cockpit.
“Emma? Are you awake?”
A feeble, “Yes,” is offered in reply. Emma’s not convincing. She floats into view at the end of the darkened corridor. Her hair is disheveled. Like a lion’s mane, it sticks out at all angles in microgravity. Her darkened silhouette blots out the stars. “Is everything okay?”
“No,” he says. “I need light and power in medical.”
“Oh, no, no, no,” she says, shaking her head. Her hair ruffles in response to that motion. She must be able to hear the thumping noise drifting down the corridor. “We’ve got to keep them under. You heard the commander.”
“Someone’s awake.”
“It’s not possible,” she replies, but she’s been through the training. She knows. If someone is awake down in the hold, they’ll be panicked and in pain.
Emma stutters. “I—I divided the remaining nanobots between survivors—and I upped the meds. They’re out of it. They must be. They have to be.”
“If someone’s awake,” Marc says, “we have to let them out. We can’t keep them in a coffin.”
“No, we have to keep them down,” she says, drifting toward him. “You know the protocol. Even if the Sycorax was under power, we couldn’t bring them up. We don’t have the capacity to support wakers. Standard Operating Procedure says we put them back to sleep.”
“The SOP is gone,” Marc says. “It’s over. There is nothing standard about what we’re doing.”
“I know. I know,” Emma says, grabbing at her forehead. Like him, she’s dehydrated and suffering from a headache. “But we can’t bring anyone else up. Our supplies are frozen. Food, water, and waste management are all in the red. As it is, we don’t have enough power to sustain ourselves. Before long, we too will have to go into stasis. It’s that or we won’t reach that moon alive.”
“He’s awake, Em. You know what that means.”
“Which capsule?” she asks. “I’ll see if I can increase the meds remotely.”
“It won’t work,” Marc says. “If he’s awake, he’s lost his IV line. We need to bring him up.”
Emma is adamant. “Then he goes straight back down. Agreed?”
“Agreed.”
Emma has a handheld flashlight. She turns it on and shines it in Marc’s eyes, ruining his night vision. It’s deliberate. She’s not happy with him. He squints, turning away, but he understands. The pressure is getting to her. Their feeble hold on reality is tenuous at best. They don’t need this. It’s a waste of power, a waste of meds, and a waste of their time, but someone’s awake down there.
Emma uses a battery-powered screwdriver to open a console on the wall by the door. The tiny nuts are magnetized, allowing her to touch them against the metal casing to stop them from floating away. She positions the light beside her, leaving it drifting in the frigid air as she works with her tools to bring the power on within the medical bay. This will give them more light to work with than when they brought up the commander, but it’ll put more of a drain on the batteries. The hibernation controls come to life followed by the main lights.
Marc hovers nearby.
“Do you mind?” she says, peering over her shoulder as he floats there, watching what she’s doing by the main power console.
“Sorry. It’s just I—”
“What?” she snaps.
“I just want to help. I feel useless.”
“Welcome to the club.”
Emma pushes off the hull. She glides through the air, flying over to the hibernation controls. Marc hangs back.
“Let’s see who’s making all this noise.”
To his surprise, there’s no change in the erratic tempo or the intensity of the beat. Whoever this is, they have no idea he and Emma have sprung into action. The hibernation capsules/coffins are hermetically sealed, insulating them not just from heat and/or atmospheric loss but even external lights and loud sounds. It’s supposed to be soothing. It’s not. Whoever it is that’s down there, they’re persistent, but isn’t hope always that way? Since when has life succumbed without a fight?
“Fuck,” Emma mutters.
“What?” Marc asks, drifting up beside her. He feels as though her comment is an invitation to get involved.
“It’s not one of the colonists. It’s Adrian.”
“Adrian?” Marc replies, surprised by her concern. “But that’s good. He’s flight crew. He specializes in warp dynamics.”
“It’s not good,” Emma says, rummaging through a drawer. “We need to leave him down there.”
“What? No!”
“You still don’t get it, do you,” she says. “We’re dead in the water. There’s no warp field. There won’t be a warp field. The fusion core is shot to hell.”
“But we have to try.”
“No, we don’t,” she replies. “The commander was right. Our best strategy is to send out an SOS and make for that ice giant. It’ll shield us from any future radiation storms. Hell, we might even find some raw material on one of those moons. With a bit of luck, we might make it out of this cluster fuck alive.”
