THROWBACK
Edward J. McFadden III
www.severedpress.com
Copyright 2018 by Edward J. McFadden III
1
Humanity held its breath.
NASA Commander Jonah “Hawk” Hawkins floated before a monitor in Destiny lab aboard the International Space Station, his stomach crawling up his throat. The display showed the approaching space cloud, nothing more than a thin gray-white haze drifting across the black star-filled horizon like smoke. The big heads said the cloud was the size of fifty Jupiters, and the outer edge of the cosmic fart would blow past Earth at 190,000 MPH.
“T-Minus three minutes and counting. All systems are go,” said Flight Engineer Svetlana Savitska. The cosmonaut’s voice was rock solid as she stabbed her control panel with one hand while grasping a handhold with the other, a ponytail of blonde hair floating behind her. From Hawk’s perspective she was upside-down, monitoring the equipment on the ceiling. All of Destiny’s bulkheads had a function in the near-weightless environment.
Hawk said, “Max, any new data?”
“Nothing,” the German ESA physicist said. The crew communicated via wireless headsets, and they all wore jumpsuits with various patches on their breasts and shoulders.
“Our probes? The sensor array? We’re still getting nothing at all?”
“Static and random noise. No new predictions as to composition. Speed and density confirmed, again,” Max said.
Hawk said nothing. Probes had been sent into the cloud as it moved through the solar system, and a minefield of sensors had been deployed, but they’d yielded no significant data or clues as to what effect the cloud’s passage might have.
Earth was a blue arc at the bottom of the screen, and Hawk’s chest ached as he watched the space fog advance on his home. He’d gladly given up chunks of his life to live in a soup can, and he’d never admit it to anyone, but Hawk missed his old ball of dirt. Sea breezes and rain. Wind tearing at his face. Cold chilling his toes. Well, the station did provide that pleasure.
“Two minutes thirty seconds and counting,” Svet said.
French Mission Specialist Michel Fulcello floated into the lab and took up position at his work station. “Everything’s secure, sir,” he said. Michel was the first French astronaut to serve on the ISS.
Hawk nodded. He didn’t expect any turbulence, but he had Michel check the station anyway, making sure nothing was floating around and that all nonessential equipment was powered down and secured. It gave him something to do. Hawk had noticed early signs of space dementia in Michel; depression, lethargy, expressing feelings of isolation and loss of family and he needed to snap out of it.
“Mission control at Houston, do you copy?” Hawk said.
“Mission control here.” Hawk could picture his old friend and rival Theo Rantic sitting in his command chair, staring obsessively at his status display.
“Nothing to report, control,” Hawk said.
“Same here. We’re on a party line, so speak now or forever hold thy peace.”
Hawk didn’t know how many governments were listening in. In addition to NASA, Roscosmos, JAXA, ESA, the CSA, many other agencies monitored their communications, as well as universities and private citizens and businesses. They were the only humans in space, outside the protective shell of Earth’s atmosphere, and that made them prime observers, which made them news. Hawk and his crew were on point, the enemy a cosmic mystery.
Svet said, “Sir?”
Hawk nodded. Svet and Hawk had been together on the station for eleven months, and they’d reached marriage level on the mind reading scale.
“Roscomos, this is Flight Engineer Svetlana Savitska, do you copy?”
“We copy, Svet,” a male Russian voice said.
Svet rocked back, her motion smooth due to lack of stress. Hawk knew the voice; it was Svet’s husband, Vladimir. “T-Minus two minutes and counting and nothing new to report here,” she said.
The U.S. and the Soviets had been partners on the station through thick and thin, good times and bad, and there’d been times the diplomats attributed the survival of the free world to the series of connected metal cans powered by solar energy and manned by an international team of space hounds who spent months drinking recycled water, breathing manufactured air, and tolerating each other’s failing mental states and increasing body odors. All in the name of science, progress, international relations, and nationalistic ego.
“Roscomos wishes you luck,” Vladimir said, the comm crackling under his deep accent.
“You as well. ISS out,” Svet said. She pushed away from the bulkhead. Hawk had never seen the woman upset, but in these final moments before the cloud’s arrival, one couldn’t help but imagine the worst.
The space cloud continued to fill Hawk’s screen, and a dread crept over him that turned his stomach to ice. Doomsayers, religious zealots, profiteers and politicians had put forth many end-of-the-world scenarios that filled the endless hours of TV talk shows and gave new meaning to the word paranoia.
But just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
Nothing like the cloud had ever happened in recorded history, and to Hawk, the unknown it presented was exhilarating and scary. Some preached the anomaly was Earth’s salvation, and it would renew a failing world by boosting Earth’s oxygen content, or adding elements to the atmosphere that could strengthen it against harmful radiation and cosmic rays. Some said God sent the cloud to destroy the world in the end times. All of this meant nothing to Hawk. He believed the anomaly’s passage would be akin to Y2K. Years of buildup and expense, and one train broke down in Europe. Some argued that was because of preventative measures, but Hawk believed the entire thing to be an overreaction, like the cloud.
“Ninety seconds,” Svet said.
Static burst through the comm. “ISS, this is Roscomos, are you seeing increased radiation levels on your long-range spectrometer?”
Hawk spun and looked at Michel, who pushed off and glided to another monitoring station, where he cued up a data set and asked the onboard computer to graph it. The low electric hum of the station and the occasional snap of static filled the silence as Michel studied his monitor and fingered his headset. “I’m not sure. The sensors are reading something, but whatever it is isn’t matching with the identification software,” Michel said.
“An unknown element?” Hawk said.
“Most likely a combination of many, otherwise I’d see a clear pattern in the numbers. In this case the sensors are detecting so many unknowns they’re all falling below the materiality threshold.”
“No density changes?”
Michel pushed to another bulkhead before saying, “No.”
“T-Minus one minute,” Svet said.
“All stations are go, and all recorders are green,” said Max.
Hawk grabbed a handhold with both hands as if bracing for an impact. Sweat inched off his neck, yet he was cold. As his monitor filled with the gray-white fog of the cloud, his confidence fled. He didn’t like the feeling.
Hawk had always wanted to be an action star, growing up watching Rambo, Predator, and Platoon, and playing war with the most elaborate collection of plastic guns and knives any kid would’ve envied. He also loved the sea, and those two things drove him to the Navy, where he’d become a pilot and then a SEAL. He’d given most of his life to the service, and it had given him adventures few had experienced.
But the cost had been great. Floating in the ISS, everyone he loved and cared about on Earth, doubt gnawed at him, as it always did. A worm burrowing through his flesh and soul, always asking if he was being selfish, or if his sacrifice had been worth it, giving up the time with his family? He barely knew his two children, and Andrea stayed
with him because they loved each other, and she’d known what she was getting into. They’d had their first date, and Hawk had been deployed the next day and they didn’t see each other or speak for a year before he’d shown up unannounced when he’d gotten leave.
“Prepare for passage in 10, 9, 8...” said the voice of mission control.
Hawk resolved in that moment that this would be it. He was only forty-seven, he wasn’t dead. He still had time. He could turn everything around. What would he do? What could he do? Desk job? Pilot? Would he be happy? Would his family even want him around if he wasn’t?
“...7, 6...”
It all came down to what was important. He’d wanted to go to the stars, and he’d done it, multiple times. He couldn’t let the fear of the unknown imprison him. His mind spun, and he almost laughed. He floated two hundred and fifty miles above the Earth with nothing but a thin layer of metal between himself and the chilling vacuum of space, and he worried about the unknown. Hawk decided this would be his last mission, and he’d announce it live after the cloud passed. A little surprise to Andrea. He was coming home, for good.
“...4, 3, 2—”
A sharp burst of static tore through Hawk’s headset. “Mcfly, turn down the amp,” he said. Svet and Michel chuckled, but Max ignored him. The Russian and Frenchman had seen more American movies than he had. The only American entertainment Max knew was Friends and Star Trek.
The screens showing the external cameras were obscured in gray. Miniscule lights twinkled like rainbow colored stars in the cloud, and they reminded Hawk of how sun rays caught dirt and sand particles as they floated in clear water. There was no sound, no vibration, and the spacefarers looked to each other, as if to say, “Anything?”
The ache started in the tips of Hawk’s toes and fingers, a dull throbbing that grew to a stabbing pain that spread up his arms and down his legs. Hawk’s station mates felt it too, because Max rubbed his feet and Michel jerked and shook like his limbs had fallen asleep. Svet’s hands were clamped to her head.
Hawk once had a minor case of the bends, and that pain was nothing compared to the agony that pushed into every corner of his body. He squeaked, and Max yelled as he spun across the lab and slammed into a rack of equipment.
Svet grabbed handholds, head down, but didn’t make a sound.
Like a receding flood the pain eased, but lingered in the extremities where it began. Hawk was winded, and he pulled for air, his chest heaving.
Svet grabbed an oxygen mask and tossed it in Michel’s direction, then slipped one over her face. Svet’s instrument panel flashed red with warning lights. The station’s power went out and Destiny lab fell into darkness.
Hawk took shallow breaths, conserving the oxygen in his body, preserving the air still available in the compartment. He’d never felt more alone, closer to death, as he floated in the blackness.
Snap. The control panel came on, then the lighting.
Svet’s head glided up, and she went back to her station. “The system appears to be rebooting. We should be up and running in ninety seconds,” she said.
Hawk waited as the blank monitor laughed at him. He had to see what was happening. He tapped his headset and said, “Let me know when the system comes up.”
“Aye,” Svet said.
Hawk pulled himself along the bulkhead out of Destiny lab, flying like Superman into Unity node one.
“Hawk, you copy?” Max said.
“Go ahead.”
“The chronometer is…”
“What?”
“Malfunctioning,” the German said.
Hawk made a right into Tranquility node three, twisted around, and braced himself against the bulkhead.
“All Earth-side communications are dead, and I’m getting no signal from any of the comm satellites,” Svet said.
Hawk floated down into the cupola, a seven-window observatory that resembled the turret on the Millennium Falcon. When Hawk looked down at Earth his mouth fell open a crack, then he said, “I might know why that is.”
The planet below was nothing but blue ocean from horizon to horizon, no land masses visible.
There had been a moment in Hawk’s first flight test as a cadet when he believed he’d lost control of his plane. A panic filled him that was so all encompassing he froze, unable to react. Sometimes Hawk believed the paralysis had saved his life, stopped him from making some knee-jerk reaction that would have made things worse, but that wasn’t how he felt now.
There were no brown mountain peaks on Earth’s surface, no massive swathes of green life or tan deserts. No continental shapes outlined the globe, and the streams of white clouds covered only water. His house had been on one of those continents. Everything and everyone he loved.
All of it was gone.
2
Hawk found Michel’s corpse floating in Columbus lab, tongue hanging out, eyes cloudy pools. There was no blood, no note. Hawk blamed himself for leaving the man alone. He’d seen the signs of space dementia, and he should have sat with him, never left him alone, but Hawk was lost in his own grief and couldn’t remember what he’d done for the last half-hour.
None of the astronauts spoke of it, but each space hound had a way out, a last resort death pill for when no other option was available. The French poison of choice was a cocktail of cyanide and cloglestrial, a new acid that destroyed living tissue and replicated. Hawk had considered taking his pill, but he was just too scared, his grief and worry for his family consuming him, the shock of their situation still too new. That same shock that had pushed Michel over the edge made him focus.
The spacefarers sealed Michel’s body in an airlock, out of sight. Hawk said a short prayer and looked at each of his shipmates and saw fear and doubt. What had kept them from taking their pills?
The station passed the terminator into night, and the outlines of several large landmasses bunched together stood out in the blackness below. It was as if Earth had been tipped over and all the continents ran to one side. At the sight of land, Hawk breathed a sigh of relief, but his thunderous nerves returned as the reality of the situation broke through his cocoon of denial.
Hawk tried to push Michel from his mind and went about his business in stunned shock as the International Space Station moved through space at 17,000 MPH, with the Earth, or what had once been the Earth, slipping by below. The stars looked the same, but the station’s instrumentation was showing something different. According to the onboard computer the star map had changed, and the chronometer showed numbers that were so far off the chart Hawk assumed it was broken. No satellites responded to their pings, and there’d been no signs of life.
Daylight revealed the problem in full color. Swathes of green, brown, and white filled the surface of the planet, but the land masses were bunched together and didn’t look much like Earth.
“Looks like a broken Pangaea,” Max said. “Or something like it.” When Max wasn’t flying around in space, or pressing the limits of the known universe at the large Hadron Collider at CERN, he was a professor at Oxford, and his areas of expertise extended well beyond physics.
“When everything on Earth was together? That was long time ago, nyet?” Svet said.
“Very long.”
“You think the planet below is Earth? How could it be? You’re saying we traveled back in time?” Hawk said.
“I’m saying the landmasses below resemble what scientists think Pangaea looked like fifty million years ago as it broke apart into the continents we know now. We were orbiting Earth, and the current configuration of land masses is somewhat recognizable. What are you suggesting? The station was transported to another point in the galaxy and placed in orbit around a different planet that just happens to resemble Earth of the past?” Max said.
“Govnó,” Svet spat. “Délo drjan'.” Svet lapsed into Russian when she got excited.
“Shit is right. And “things don’t look good” is an understatement,” Max said.
“Is there another option?” Ha
wk was pleading, because he couldn’t get his noddle wrapped around the other possibilities.
Svet and Max said nothing.
The earthlings sat bunched together in the cupola, watching the oncoming twilight zone cut across the horizon like a dark blade. Svet pressed her face against the thick glass, and Max rubbed something from his eye. Wherever or whenever they were, what wasn’t in dispute was they were alone. Michel’s suicide had driven home they only had each other, and it might be that way for a long time. Hawk smiled ruefully. Might be that way forever, and that burned his chest as he thought of his family. Were they OK? What had happened to the Earth he’d known?
The space station crossed the terminator and the planet surface went dark save for moon glow, a giant erupting volcano, and… something else. Hawk leaned forward, his heart pounding. Toward the center of the largest land mass, a bright multi-colored light blinked in a rhythmic pattern.
“You see that?” he said.
“Da.” Svet pulled back from the glass, her hair floating around her head like Medusa’s snakes.
“What could it be?” Hawk said.
“My first thought is it looks like a beacon,” Max said.
“Me also. I thought of Morse code,” Hawk said.
“This changes things. Someone—”
“Or something,” Hawk interrupted. “Humans aren’t due to hang around these parts for millions of years if we have our location and time period right.”
“It got here somehow. It’s not a natural formation, and that’s the only clue we have. Whether the planet below is Earth or not doesn’t matter,” Max said.
Svet said, “How you know the light isn’t natural?”
Max said nothing, but looked to Hawk.
“We don’t, but we only have so much food, so staying up here isn’t possible long term. Why wait? If we make it to the surface it would be nice to have some food to get started,” Hawk said.
“What if it is trap?” Svet said.
“Set by who?”
“Or just some cosmic rock?” Max said.
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