Prelude to Extinction

by Andreas Karpf

  Jack chewed on his lower lip for a moment before saying, “It’s cyclic.”

  “Yes.”

  Devon interjected, “I think I know why. Give me a second to get the main view screen on line. I’ve got a video feed from one of the nav-cameras.”

  The screen display came to life, showing a field of stars, slowly slewing past. Jack was transfixed by their leisurely movement from left to right. “So, we’re spinning,” he said softly.

  “Yes sir.”

  The bright light of a sun entered from the left, quickly saturating the camera for a moment before the automated filters kicked in. They watched in silence as the star’s disk made the same slow journey across the display.

  “OK, so we’ve got E-Eri there. I should be able to have us stabilized in a moment,” Devon said.

  “The spin explains our signal loss,” Kate added. “Our antenna’s been rotating into and out of alignment with the shuttle.”

  The star moved out of view, and as the filters disengaged, the star field returned. Their march slowed until they finally stopped, and Devon said, “There, got it.”

  “What’s our position and speed?” Jack asked quickly.

  “I can’t tell yet. I need more than just E-Eri. Let me get some references first.”

  “Kate,” Jack said, “While he’s doing that, see if you can get a fix on the shuttle.”

  “Already on it. Devon, can you bring us back another forty-five degrees away from E-Eri. Stay in our horizontal plane. I think that’ll point us roughly at the shuttle.”

  The stars crawled across the screen again. After a few seconds they began to slow as Devon was completing his maneuver, when Kate called out, “No Dev, go a little further. It’s still getting stronger.”

  “I don’t have anything visual yet,” Devon said.

  “A little further...there, stop.”

  “I see it,” Devon called out. “Jack, I’ve got radar contact. Five degrees to port, elevation fourteen degrees, distance fifteen thousand kilometers.”

  “Kate,” Jack said, “still only the beacon?”

  “Yes, but its origin matches Devon’s radar contact. That’s definitely them.”

  “Now we’ve got to get there.”

  “I’ll need the nav-system on line before I can plot a course,” Devon said.

  Jack activated the intercom and called, “Maurice, respond please.”

  “I’m here,” was the surprisingly quick answer.

  “How’re we doing down there?”

  “It’s checked out. There’s nothing wrong with the navigation software.”

  “Was it operating properly before?”

  “Best that I can tell, yeah.”

  Jack looked up to Devon’s waiting gaze, and said, “Reset the initialization program. Maybe it needs to start from scratch.”

  Devon went straight to work at his console without answering. Barely a minute passed before he muttered something under his breath and spun around to face Jack. “I’m still getting the same fault.”

  “Damn it all,” Jack said as he slapped the comm. button again. “Maurice, you still there?”

  “Yeah. I’ve been following it from down here.”

  “So what the hell’s going on?”

  “I don’t know. Everything’s running right. I can see the video data going in, and the pattern matching routine’s starting up.”

  “And then?”

  “It’s not getting a match.”

  “I can see that,” Jack said abrasively.

  Maurice continued, “What I mean is that up until the fault, everything is running as programmed. The video feed is being properly converted into a comparison matrix. The program then goes through the matching routine, but doesn’t get any hits.”

  Jack had a less than civil response on the tip of his tongue, but held it. Forcing some level of composure into his voice, he just said, “Stand by.”

  He stared momentarily at the display screen attached to his armrest, and noticed a shadow being cast across it. He turned around to find Don hovering just behind his chair.

  “How long’ve you been there?”

  “Only long enough to see that we have a navigation problem. I finished the crew check with Helena and thought that I could be of more use up here.”

  “Good. I was just thinking that since we can’t get the system on line, why don’t we start from the beginning? See if you can use one of the ship’s telescopes to identify the position of E-Eri-D with respect to us. Then work backward from there and derive our position.”

  “I’ll get on it right away.”

  As Don headed to the science station, Jack said, “Devon, I want you to fly us to the shuttle.”

  “But the nav...”

  “Don’t worry about using computer guidance. Just, do it manually. We don’t have the time to sit around waiting for this thing to get fixed.”

  “OK, give me a few minutes to get a couple of relative positional fixes, and we can get under way.”

  He flipped the intercom switch again, and called, “Maurice?”

  “Here.”

  “For now, skip the nav-system. Just work on getting the main computer systems fully on line.”

  “I’ve already started on it. I should have it back in a few more minutes.”

  The bridge was silent again. Jack looked around and watched as everyone was fully engulfed in their tasks. It gave him a welcome moment to organize his thoughts. They only had two simple, but urgent goals: Get to the shuttle, and get their nav-system on line so that they could get back to Epsilon Eri-D. With any luck, Palmer and Masako were OK and just stranded on a disabled ship. For a split second he played devil’s advocate with himself and wondered if his last thought was just wishful thinking – it didn’t matter. Right now they had to focus on rendezvousing with the shuttle and pulling it into the bay. He leaned back and a wave of fatigue washed over him and dulled his senses. He quickly shook it off, but then grew frustrated with not having an active role in these tasks. His mind was still locked into the sense of urgency; sitting idly was unacceptable.

  The sound of Devon’s voice provided a reprieve as he announced, “Prepare for engine ignition in thirty seconds.”

  “How much power do we have?” Jack quickly asked.

  “Nadya said I can run them at full throttle if I want. So I plan on doing just that. Figure on an ETA of thirty minutes.”

  “Excellent,” he said quietly.

  Devon used the ship-wide intercom again to announce, “Ten seconds to ignition.”

  After a short pause, his pilot counted the final three seconds aloud. At zero, Jack heard the hum of tens of millions of volts coursing through the IPV’s powerful ion engines. Barely perceptible, high-frequency vibrations tingled his senses as the ionizing grates charged. He felt the gentle, but building pressure of acceleration push him into his seat. It would take a few minutes for the engines to reach their full thrust, but he was relieved that at least they were moving. His mind raced again: there was more that needed to be done. He became acutely aware of how little he actually knew of the ship’s status, and called into the intercom, “Kurt, respond please.”

  It took a few seconds before he heard the reply, “Kurt here.”

  “Do you have a damage report yet?”

  “I just completed a walk-through inspection of the ship, and was about to call you. Surprisingly, we’re in pretty good shape.”

  “What do you mean, ‘pretty good’?”

  “There are no hull breaches, and most ship functions are operating properly. We’ve just got some minor damage. Basically, anything that was loose got tossed about a bit.”

  “That’s all?” Jack said, realizing only after the fact that he sounded a bit too shocked.

  Kurt took it in stride though, saying, “Yeah, that’s why I said ‘surprisingly.’ Anyway, the problem is, we still don’t know what happened.”

  “Can you make any guesses from what you’ve seen?” Jack allowed Kurt a few secon
ds to think it over before offering, “What you’ve said seems consistent with sudden deceleration like from an impact.”

  “Yes and no. The problem is that the hull shows no damage at all.”

  Jack replayed the last few seconds before he blacked out in his mind. “What about sudden acceleration?”

  “You’d get the same damage I saw, but you’d need something to push...or pull us pretty hard to get that. I don’t see what could have. What makes you think that?”

  “I vaguely remember being thrown pretty hard into the back of my seat. How about you?”

  “I’m not sure. I remember the green light outside. And ... it’s pretty fuzzy from there. I think I might have been thrown backwards too. Then nothing else till you woke me. But I’m not sure I’m buying into something suddenly pulling us in toward it. Wait a minute, Maurice’s trying to get my attention.”

  Jack waited a few intolerably long seconds before Kurt’s voice came back on the comm., “He says the computer’s fully back on line. Give it a try. I’ll check back with you later.”

  Jack disconnected the comm. link and said, “Computer?”

  “Yes captain?” was the polite reply.

  “What information do you have on our current situation?”

  “I only have a partial understanding of our status. There is an approximately six-hour gap in my memory records which is disconcerting.”

  “Welcome to the club,” Jack quipped.

  Though the machine’s programming allowed it to seem almost human at times, its lack of response told Jack it still didn’t understand the irony. He continued, “We’ll address that later. Right now the nav-systems are down. Review Devon’s logs and see if you can explain the errors he’s been getting.”

  There was a barely noticeable pause before the computer replied, “I am unsure. The most probable answer is that some of the archived data was corrupted.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The routines that compare the observed star fields with our stored maps are unable to make a match. I’ve reviewed the performance of the comparison code and it is properly formatting the stored map data with the images from the three external nav cameras. Since they are not getting a match, and the cameras are operating properly, then there must have been some corruption of the archived data.”

  “How is that possible?”

  “I know of no likely cause. I can take some of our astronomical data and re-process it into chart format. It’s highly unlikely that it too would have been corrupted.”

  “Good, proceed.”

  “It will take a few ...”

  The machine’s answer was cut off, as Don shouted, “Jack!”

  “Just a minute.”

  “No, I need you to see this now.”

  He spun around in his chair, and answered with an exasperated, “What?”

  “Look up on the main screen.”

  Jack obliged. A massive, dark globe shrouded in clouds lay before him. Thick bands of steely grays mixed and swirled with adjacent bands of browns and reds, reminding him of Jupiter. But, the colors were wrong. These were dark like smoke, and had an air of in-hospitability about them. He studied the alien world more closely, and was able to make out a couple spots near the northern pole where the atmosphere thinned to a haze. The small breaks in the cloud-cover revealed glimpses of an even more shocking surface. Its dull, blue-gray sheen, was distinctly metallic, and was covered with geometric patterns so detailed his eye couldn’t take them all in. Groups of straight, parallel lines ran for hundreds of kilometers before intersecting with sets of concentric circles that must themselves have been tens or hundreds of kilometers in diameter. Jack strained his eyes, but was unable to discern any individual structures and assumed they were just too far away to see. It felt as though he was just able to steal a glimpse of some beautifully etched metal sphere. The scene was nothing short of hypnotic and he had to fight to pull his attention away. “Don?” he said softly.

  When there was no answer, he turned to the station behind him and saw his science officer transfixed by the image. “Don! What the hell am I looking at?”

  “I’m at a loss here.”

  “That’s not an answer.” He took a deep breath and said, “That’s not Epsilon Eri-D.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  “How big is it? Is it one of the large asteroids with a hell of a large colony?”

  “I don’t think so. My grav readings show it to be larger than E Eri-D by about ten percent.”

  Jack stared at the man and asked abrasively, “How many Earth-sized planets are there in the E Eri system?”

  “Aside from Eri-D, none within thirty percent.”

  “Since this obviously isn’t E Eri-D, explain how it could have been missed?”

  Don just stared blankly back at him. Jack continued, “Is there any chance the lunar telescopes or our probes could’ve missed this?”

  “None. They’re all quite capable of seeing things down to large asteroids.”

  “But obviously we did,” Jack shot back.

  Don looked back down at his workstation. Jack assumed the man was hoping to escape into his data, and decided to let him do so for the moment. The escape was short-lived though, as Don said, “Jack, it gets stranger. Look at this.”

  On cue, the main display changed. The drab disk was replaced by a sphere awash in brilliant colors. Don said, “This is an infra-red view of the planet. I’ve used the standard artificial color assignments. Violets and blues are cool regions and reds are hot. Deep violet here represents roughly room temperature at twenty-five degrees C; bright red is about a hundred-eighty degrees, and white is over two-hundred.”

  Jack began to take in the patterns. The planet was evenly peppered with small white circles. Each was surrounded by a thick red region that then faded through shades of orange and yellow. Before most could fade to something close to room-temperature, they butted up against adjacent hot zones. The only area that had a few small regions of blues and violets was the northern polar zone. “It doesn’t look very hospitable at all,” he said softly.

  “No, it doesn’t,” Don agreed.

  “What about those structures we saw in the visible image?”

  “It does appear to be technology on a scale we’ve never imagined, but I can’t begin to understand why they’d build it here.”

  “I’m guessing that the cooler regions here match up with the breaks we saw in the clouds,” Jack said. “Can you magnify the image?”

  “Not at this distance,” Devon answered.

  The bridge was silent as Jack mulled over the options. He quickly pushed aside his curiosity, as there was a more pressing issue. “There’ll be more time for this later. Devon, what’s our ETA to the shuttle?”

  “About twenty more minutes.”

  “Don, I need you to get back to determining our position using E Eri-D. Find it, and get the nav-system fully updated. Follow up with the computer’s results using the astronomical database. After we get that done, and retrieve the shuttle, we can investigate this place further.”

  Don answered with a slightly disapproving “OK.”

  Jack activated the comm. again and said, “Kurt, meet me by the shuttle bay. Helena, meet us there too in case there’s a problem.” Without another word, he got up and left the bridge.

  Chapter 16 – July 17, 2124; 23:30:00

  Jack drummed his fingers anxiously against the shuttle bay bulkhead. The IPV had reached the shuttle on schedule, however bringing the unpowered vehicle aboard proved to be a delicate and agonizingly slow task. He watched as Kurt carefully manipulated the IPV’s robot arm – he was in the final stages of setting the craft down in the bay. The hatch would be open in only a few more minutes, but Jack was still frustrated by being so close, yet unable to know if they were injured. He turned away for a moment, but quickly peered again through the bulkhead’s small window. As before, there was nothing to see: the shuttle’s windows were covered by its emergency shielding. Finally,
he heard the welcome hum of motors closing the outer doors, followed by a deep, resonating bang as the locks and seals engaged. There was a muted hiss of atmosphere flowing back into the chamber; their eyes, though, were fixed on the door’s red hazard indicator.

  The hissing softened, then ceased altogether, and the hazard light changed to green with an anticlimactic beep. Jack stepped back as Kurt and Helena pressed through the airlock door. By the time he finally entered, Kurt was already attaching an emergency hand-crank to the shuttle’s outer door. Helena, hovered near the cockpit window, repeatedly tapping on the shielding. She paused periodically to bring her ear close to its surface to listen for a response. After her third iteration, she looked up excitedly. “Someone’s tapping back!”

  Jack felt some tension ease with the statement, and asked, “Kurt, how much longer?”

  Kurt answered as he turned the hand-crank, “I should have it open in a minute or so.”

  The door creaked with each turn, and slowly slid aside, revealing the small airlock within. The inner door was still sealed; but to their relief, they saw Masako’s face peering back at them. She gave them a quick wave and then disappeared from view. Barely a second later, the inner door swung open. Palmer exited first, squinting in the brightly lit bay. He didn’t have a chance to say a word before Helena took him by the elbow and pulled him aside for a quick examination. Masako then stepped out of the darkened shuttle, and Helena quickly said, “You too, over here.”

  Jack went to his rescued crewmen. On the surface, at least, they both looked fine. Before he could get a word out though, Masako said, “So guys, what took you so long? We were beginning to wonder if you even missed us.”

  As they laughed, Jack noted that both were shivering. “So, how’re you two holding up?”

  Palmer made a deliberate effort to free himself from the doctor’s prodding, and answered, “OK, I think. But we were without power for a while – I don’t even know how long. Even our emergency battery was off-line. Plus, I think we may have been unconscious.”

  “I know,” Jack answered, “We were too.”

  Palmer gave him a questioning look, to which Jack replied, “I’ll explain in a bit.”