by Marko Kloos
“Settling on a rock with no sun,” he says. “Darkness twenty-four seven. Depression rates would go through the roof.”
“Mission commander, this is Flight,” the pilot says over the intercom. “We are approaching the decision point for the powered flyby. You want to wave off, you have thirty minutes. After that, we are on a committed trajectory.”
“Copy that, Flight,” I reply. “Stand by.”
I study the screens in front of me for some last-minute divining, some evidence that would justify ordering the pilot to change our trajectory and avoid the gravity well of the planet altogether. The mission plan calls for using the rogue planet for a gravitational assist to slingshot the ship around and back the way we came. If we don’t use that method for whatever reason, we have to expend onboard fuel to change direction much slower and more laboriously, and we’ll have to tack over a week onto the journey. I’m not wild about the idea of spending that much extra time in a tiny drop ship with one toilet and two bunks to share among six people.
“If there are seed ships in the neighborhood, we won’t see them until we’re on top of them,” Drentlaw says. “They don’t show on infrared. And there’s fuck all for sunlight out here.”
“But they won’t see us either,” I say. “When we made the stealth run back to Earth in an Indy-class, we dodged their blockade at the Alcubierre point. And a Blackfly is a lot smaller than an Indy.”
“Let’s buckle in and ride the roller coaster, then,” Drentlaw replies. “I better get Staff Sergeant Murray up. This is the only excitement we’ll get on this field trip.”
“I sincerely hope you’re right, Master Sergeant,” I say.
The dark rogue planet fills most of our sensor window as we begin our slingshot maneuver. Even at this short distance, the surface looks indistinct in the blackness of interstellar space, a swirling mass that seems to twist and writhe, patterns of shadows flowing like oil on a puddle. All the pod sensors are active and recording, shoveling surveillance data into the ship’s memory banks for later analysis. Passing this planet in pitch-darkness at close range triggers a sense of dread in me. It feels like I am taking a swim in the ocean on a moonless night, aware of all the things that may be lurking in the deep but powerless to see any of them coming until they’re close enough to yank me down into the darkness with them and swallow me. But for better or worse, we are committed to the flyby now, and all I can do is hang on and make sure all the ship’s eyes and ears are taking in whatever they can.
“Six and a half minutes to the periapsis. We are really hauling ass,” Staff Sergeant Murray says to my right. He has a plot on one of the displays in front of him, and a triangle-shaped representation of our drop ship is hurtling along a course projection that curves around the planet. The Blackfly has been accelerating in bursts every hour for over three days of mission time, building up more speed with every burn. We are going hundreds of kilometers per second, and if we slice through an atmosphere at this speed, we’ll end up as a beautiful shower of superheated metal and alloy bits.
“Coming around the bend,” the pilot sends.
On my infrared screen, an alert chirps. I turn my head to look at the display, and for a moment, my brain refuses to compute what I am seeing.
“Contact,” I call out automatically even as my blood runs cold. “Multiple contacts on IR. Flight, do you have this?”
“Affirmative,” the pilot replies. “Fifteen degrees by positive twenty-one, distance six thousand. And—shit, two more. Three.”
“Make that five,” Master Sergeant Drentlaw says. His gravelly voice sounds a little hoarse. “Six. Seven.”
“What in the hell,” I say.
More contacts are popping up on infrared with every passing second of our high-speed trajectory around the planet. After a few moments, nobody bothers calling out bearings and distances anymore because the values are changing so rapidly at our speed that the callouts are instantly obsolete. But as jolted as I am to find that there’s something out here, it’s more surprising that we are able to spot them at all.
“Flight, is our shit busted or are you seeing the same thing on IR?”
“IR is lit up like a Christmas tree, sir,” the pilot says. “Twelve seed ships and counting. We’re going to pass less than fifty klicks from the closest one. Twenty-one seconds.”
“Hold the periapsis burn,” I order. “Don’t light those engines. We’ll take the fuel penalty.”
“Oh, that’s a given. I’m not touching those levers.”
“How the fuck can we even see them?” Sergeant Murray says. “Seed ships don’t show on infrared.”
“These sure as hell do.” I look at the scattered Lanky fleet in front of us with a sudden dryness in my mouth. Every single seed ship we have encountered so far was a black hole on infrared. These seed ships are so clearly visible on the sensor screen that it looks like someone drew them onto the display in fluorescent paint.
“That’s going to be a close pass,” Murray says in a tense voice. “Forty-seven klicks’ separation.”
I watch the nearest Lanky grow bigger on the display. Nothing I can do will make a difference to our detectability, but I feel like I should be holding my breath or turning off the lights in the hold anyway, my instincts screaming at me to run and hide from the saber-toothed tiger at the cave entrance. We are well inside the weapons range of the quill-like penetrator rods the seed ships fire in enormous volleys when they engage our warships. If this one senses us, we’ll get peppered by meter-thick spikes that won’t even slow down as they tear through the drop ship’s armor.
The Lanky ship is moving around the rogue planet in the same direction we’re hurtling, but our speed advantage is so great that we pass the closest point of approach in a blink. The distance between us and the Lanky opens up to hundreds of kilometers again, then a thousand. The other seed ships are in higher and lower orbits in relation to our path, well beyond the known range of their weapons. I throw my head back against the headrest of my chair and exhale loudly.
“I feel like a minnow dashing through a school of sharks,” I say.
“If we’d plotted that slingshot fifty klicks closer to atmo, we would have had a rear-end collision and a shitty day at the office,” Master Sergeant Drentlaw says.
“Day’s not over yet,” I caution.
“We’re going around the track like a missile,” Sergeant Murray says. “Even if they notice us, they won’t be able to catch up.”
“Yeah, but they can let their friends know we’re here,” I say without looking away from the infrared sensor screens. The recon pods are tracking sixteen seed ships in the space around the rogue planet. As I watch, one more shows up above the planetary horizon as we complete another degree of angle on our course, and the computer tallies and tags it with velocity and distance readouts.
“Anyone want to wager a guess why they show up on IR and thermal imaging all of a sudden?” I ask.
“Maybe it’s a stealth thing they do with their hulls,” Lieutenant Murray offers. “Something they can turn off when they don’t need it. No human’s ever been in this place until now, right?”
On the plot, the drop ship reaches the periapsis of our maneuver, the spot where our trajectory is closest to the planetary atmosphere. In uncontested space, the pilot would light the engines at full throttle right now to take advantage of the kinetic energy boost, but I know that the last thing the flight crew wants to do is fire up the propulsion system and make us glow like a signal flare in the darkness. We pass the periapsis and pick up even more speed as the laws of physics make the orbital energy of the planet give us a kick in the back. Minute by minute, we’re leaving the loose conglomeration of seed ships farther behind.
“Another moon,” Drentlaw says and points it out on infrared. “That’s four satellites around that rock. Wish we had time to stop and look closer after coming all this way.”
“The recon pods did all the looking we need,” I say.
“Well, that w
as exciting,” the pilot says over the intercom.
“That’s one way to put it,” I reply.
“I sure as shit won’t need any stim pills for a while,” Master Sergeant Drentlaw says. “Four days of boredom, ten minutes of terror. Ain’t that just the grunt life in a fucking nutshell.”
I turn one of the sensor pods in its mounting until the infrared detection cone points toward our stern. The planet we’re leaving in our wake is still filling most of the sensor’s field of view, its infrared image glowing faintly with the heat from whatever process keeps the surface and the atmosphere from freezing solid in the absence of a nearby sun. Any moment, I expect to see a cigar-shaped blotch coming over the equatorial horizon in hot pursuit of our little drop ship. But the minutes tick by, and the only movement I see is the slow and steady orbit of the three moons that are on our side of the planet.
“Flight, I suggest we keep coasting ballistic for a while,” I send. “I want to keep eyeballs on our six with the IR gear.”
“Copy that.”
I’m familiar with the drained feeling that is settling in after our brush with the unexpected Lanky presence. It’s the mental residue from a brain that was firing on all cylinders, telling the body to fight or run, the flood of stress hormones that are now slowly receding in my system. I could work them off more quickly if I had an opportunity to physically exert myself. Because I am hemmed into the tight quarters of the drop ship’s cargo hold, it will take a while before I’m back to normal. But there’s a kind of pleasant rush to it as well, the elation that comes with the knowledge I’ve once again faced death head-on and managed to avoid it. There’s no substance I’ve ever tried that comes even close to having the same effect. I remember what Masoud said to me on Iceland a few weeks ago, but I know he was wrong when he said I miss the war. Combat soldiers don’t get hooked on war. They get hooked on the exhilaration of being alive.
Next to me, Master Sergeant Drentlaw leans back in his chair so hard that it makes the hinges of the backrest creak in protest. He runs both hands through his hair and exhales a long breath.
“Join the Fleet, see the galaxy,” he says. “I need to track down my recruiter and break his jaw in three places.”
I laugh, and the adrenaline still in my system gives it a slightly shaky quality.
“You’ve been in for fifteen years, Drentlaw,” I say. “Since before the Lankies. You didn’t have a recruiter. You applied for this. Just like I did.”
Master Sergeant Drentlaw tilts his head back and frowns at the ballistic liner on the cargo hold’s ceiling.
“Well, sir,” he says. “Then I guess we’re both colossal dipshits. No offense.”
“None taken,” I say. “I’ll never ding someone for stating the truth.”
Four days of boredom, ten minutes of terror.
Once we are reasonably sure that we don’t have a seed ship on our tail, we settle in for the long ride back to the carrier. Because the pilots weren’t able to boost our return trip with a periapsis burn, our inbound journey will not see any time shaved off it, and we’re in for another long haul that I hope will be boring and singularly uneventful.
With nothing else to do, I poke around in the petabytes of data the recon pods recorded while we were on our white-knuckle ride around the rogue planet. I am not a scientist, and even the ninety hours back to the ship won’t be enough to do more than scratch the surface of so much data, but I review the sensor readouts anyway out of burning curiosity. The fact that the seed ships near the planet are plainly visible is hugely important from a tactical perspective, and it contradicts over a decade of our accumulated knowledge and experience. But that’s not even the most significant thing the sensor pods have recorded on our flyby.
“I’ll be damned,” I say when I look at the images of the moon we spotted almost as an afterthought on the far side of the rogue planet. “Take a look at this, Murray.”
Staff Sergeant Murray leans over to see the series of images on my center screen. The moon on the far side is rendered in a variety of filters, all primed for a different sensor spectrum.
“Look at that thermal image,” I say and point at one of the frames.
“Warm little rock, isn’t it?” Murray says. “And look at all those hotspots.”
I put the IR image right next to the thermal one and point at the overlapping regions.
“I don’t know about you, but that looks like geological activity to me,” I say. “And that’s not even the best part.”
I minimize the IR and thermal screens and bring up the spectroscopic view. It shows the moon as a black circle surrounded by a halo of various colors.
“That’s an atmosphere,” I say.
Murray isolates a section of the spectroscopic view and expands it. Then he punches up the menu palette that shows the corresponding values for the colors.
“Not just an atmosphere,” he says and looks at me with a grin. “One with water vapor.”
I examine the segment Murray isolated on my screen and compare the values again. The readings are weak because there isn’t much light behind the moon’s horizon, but it’s enough for the computer to predict an atmosphere with water molecules suspended in it.
“Thirty-one percent likelihood of water in that atmosphere,” I read. “Under normal circumstances, I wouldn’t be wild about putting money on those odds.”
I look at the IR image from the backward-facing recon pod, where the rogue gas giant is slowly receding into the distance. Those four moons are the only port of call for us right now, with no alternative we’d be able to reach in ten lifetimes.
“We can make air,” I say. “We can’t make more water. But if that rock has it floating around in the atmosphere, I’d bet my pension that there’s water somewhere on the surface, too. And if there’s water, there’s probably other stuff we can use.”
The excitement I feel makes me drum my fingers on the edge of the console. If we weren’t operating under strict EMCON, I’d get on comms back to Washington right now and inform them that we have hit the jackpot, that the mission has discovered exactly what we were hoping to find. As things stand, I’ll have to sit on that knowledge for a few more days. We still don’t know how to find a way out of this place, but a water source on that moon will buy us a lot more time to look.
I reach for the display again and move the images of the moon’s spectrograph readings aside. Then I restore the view of the Lanky seed ships scattered in various orbits around the rogue planet.
“That’s going to be a problem,” Murray says. “One ship versus fourteen. I don’t think they’ll just let us pull up and fill our tanks, sir.”
I look at the IR images of the Lankies, clearly visible against the backdrop of the planet and the darkness of space like signal lamps, somehow no longer invisible to our technology.
“We either take it from them, or we die of thirst in the dark,” I reply. “We have to roll those dice. Whatever the odds are, at least they’re above zero now.”
When we get back to the carrier over a hundred hours later, I am in the cockpit, strapped into the seats behind the pilots who are on duty for the approach. From my station in the cargo hold, I have access to all the drop-ship sensors and the recon pods, so there’s nothing up here I can’t see much better with the filters from the sensors and their 360-degree vision. But seeing the ship with my own eyes through the transparent cockpit canopy makes it more real somehow, without all the electronic layers between the photons and my retinas.
“Twenty kilometers, turning for final,” the pilot in command says and lightly touches the thruster controls to match course with the carrier. At this distance, I can only spot NACS Washington thanks to her brilliant-white paint coat, which reflects the minimal starlight reaching the ship from dozens and hundreds of light-years away.
As we get inside of ten kilometers, a green light appears in the near-total darkness in front of us. It’s in the shape of a horizontal bar, with a white dot in the center.
&n
bsp; “There’s our meatball,” the pilot says. “On track for the docking approach.”
I know the function of the meatball—the pilot nickname for the Optical Landing System—because Halley is a drop-ship jock. I’ve seen this sight a thousand times from the back of the ship and a few times directly from the cockpit. It’s just a visual aid, a large electronic light bar mounted beside the assigned docking hatch to let the pilots know they’re on course and cleared for their approach. But in the darkness out here far between the stars, it’s the most welcome thing I’ve seen in days. It’s evidence that we’re not alone, that other humans are still with us in this hostile nothingness, a tiny oasis of light and warmth and life.
We catch up with Washington and make our way along her underside, where another set of lights starts pulsing, marking our final approach to the docking hatch. The pilot triggers the forward thrusters to slow us down and match our speed with the carrier. A set of lights flashes on the cockpit console to let the flight crew know that the automated docking system has taken over for the final step of the maneuver. A few moments later, the docking clamp descends from the hatch above us and locks onto the hardpoints on the drop ship.
“Blackfly One, this is Washington flight ops,” a new voice says over the hardwired intercom. “Confirm hard lock. Welcome home.”
“Thank you, Flight Ops. It’s good to be back,” the pilot responds. He flicks a series of switches on one of the overhead panels, and the low-pitched sound from the engines dies down gradually.
“Well, this one’s over,” the copilot says.
I smile as I remember those words, spoken by a different drop-ship crew member many years ago on the deck of a different carrier, when Halley and I first said good-bye to each other after Willoughby. It feels like hearing an echo from the past, and I take it as a good omen.
This one’s just begun, I think.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
