Gatekeeper

by Orr, Richard

  “Can you get a visual?”

  “Yes, I can. I’ll bring it up on your monitor.”

  The telescopic view of the other side of the stargate wavered as the optical sensors brought substation Gamma into the frame. It was almost an exact duplicate of the control station where Diego lived. Nothing appeared to be out of the ordinary.

  “Are you still unable to contact Gamma?”

  “Still no telemetry, sir.”

  “Well, I guess you know what this means.”

  “A trip, sir?”

  “Yup.”

  “Do you wish for me to prepare a pod for you, sir?”

  “I guess so Max, its what I’m here for isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Diego hopped out of bed and began to dress himself. He was probably going to end up in a spacesuit at some time so he tried to dress appropriately.

  “Max, are there any starships currently in route to the stargate?”

  “Not at this time, sir. We are not expecting anyone for at least another 72 hours.”

  “Well, that’s good news at least. I’m going to have to get over to the other side and back, otherwise no one will be using the stargate for anything in 72 hours.”

  “This should give you plenty of time, sir. You should be able to take a pod and get there in 12 hours, fix the problem, and be back here in another 12 hours.”

  “I can only hope so Max. Who knows what I’m going to find when I get over to the other side?”

  Diego finished dressing himself and grabbed his pad and tools off his desk. He headed out the door and down the hall, passing Marta’s door as he went. Again, nothing seemed out of the ordinary. Just as Diego passed the door a thought occurred to him. Had Marta left behind a message in her room? It suddenly occurred to him that he had never checked after her death and after the incident yesterday he still felt strangely drawn to her quarters. What a fool he was for not realizing this sooner. He stopped, turned and walked into her room.

  In the time since her death, Diego had not been in Marta’s room except for that brief moment of time yesterday evening. Everything was as he remembered it. Marta had been a minimalist in decorating her quarters. She had few wall hangings, but she certainly liked family pictures. At least Diego assumed they were family pictures. Several of them had a woman that bore a definite resemblance to Marta. He glanced briefly at a few of them and then turned to her desk. There was nothing on the surface except a keyboard and monitor. Diego sat down in the chair and felt around under the desk and around the sides. Still nothing. The desk had a few drawers. Diego opened the top drawer. Inside, he found a small leatherbound book. It contained one page, the display for an electronic device embedded within the book itself. The device was not connected to the station’s network. He swept a finger along the side of the page and words blossomed into existence, a date and timestamp were in the upper corner. After reading a few words, Diego’s suspicion about the book was confirmed. It was her journal.

  Diego snapped the journal shut and stood up. He didn’t have time to sit and read it here but he would have plenty of time in the pod.

  Out in the hall, Diego again headed to the airlock complex. The pod that would take him to the other side of the stargate waited for him there. It probably would have been faster to take the more direct route in a shuttle across the diameter of the stargate, but after Marta’s death Diego didn’t feel like taking chances. Too many things had recently been malfunctioning on the stargate and one death by stargate was more than Diego was ready to accept. A nice uneventful trip to the other side would be nice.

  It felt as if there should be some sort of music playing in the lift as Diego descended to the airlock complex. The complex was several levels down from the living quarters and against the surface of the gate.

  The pod itself was a capsule that was attached by rail to the surface of the stargate. It was large enough to transport twenty to thirty people in relative comfort from one side of the stargate to the other. During the construction of the stargate several different pods had been in use at the same time to transfer people and cargo from one part of the structure to another.

  Diego stepped in to the waiting pod, the crisp air from the interior raised goosebumps on his skin. The heaters in the pod had not yet had time to warm the air to a comfortable temperature. Once the interior was warm enough he would be able to sit in comfort and relax as the pod took him to his destination. He walked up the center aisle and dropped into the couch at the front. He could see the ring of the stargate stretching ahead of him like the surface of some strange metallic planet, the horizon off in the distance, the curve of the ring hardly noticeable from its surface.

  “Alright Max, let’s get this show on the road.”

  “Yes, sir. I estimate you should reach Substation Gamma in 12.25 hours. Enjoy the trip. I have placed food and supplies for you in the rear of the pod if you should need them.”

  “Thanks Max.”

  A monitor located just above the window showed the current location of the pod and the time as estimated by Max. Diego decided it was time he did a little snooping in the journal he had found in Marta’s quarters. He pulled the leatherbound book from his pocket. It really was a strange little device. Most people Diego knew chose to store their data and personal documents in the networks around where they lived and worked. There was no point in carrying something around with you when you could access it from any location. Of course, having that information in the networks didn’t guarantee total security. The wall between you and others was not always going to keep others out. Diego assumed that what was in the journal would be something she didn’t want available to others for any reason.

  Diego opened the journal and began to read.

  Marta had clearly written in this journal for a long period of time. The first entry in the journal started nearly ten years ago, after a rather disastrous trip from the terraforming project on the moons of Epsilon Eridani b. An imbalance in the engines of the starship she had been traveling on had caused a deadly resonance with the stargate as the ship had begun its entry. According to Marta’s journal, it had thrown the ship into a strange and beautiful place, a place full of light and love. She wrote that as she was sitting in the forward observation lounge a voice had come to her. It seemed to fill the immensity of space and yet was only as loud as a whisper. It told her not to worry and that she had found what all men had sought from the beginning of time. After a few moments, she turned her head and found someone sitting next to her. It was her mother. Her mother who had been killed only a few months before on the moon which she was leaving and never coming back to. She reached over and pulled her mother close as tears filled her eyes. There had never been a chance to say goodbye. Her mother wiped her tears from her cheeks and told her she loved her and that she should come find her some day. Then reality snapped. Everything turned inside and out, in an instant. Marta had opened her eyes to find everything normal, her mother gone, and the starship she was in receding from the stargate as if nothing had happened.

  Marta had never said anything of the incident to Diego. Months of time together and many discussions about many different things and this had never come up. The implications of what he had just read stunned Diego for a moment. Suddenly, some of the things that Marta had alluded to while talking with him made sense. Was this why she had asked him, all those months ago, about God?

  It had been strange, really. As a matter of course, with two people alone on the edge of space, you talked about some strange stuff. You talked about almost everything there was to talk about. What else do you have to do? Talking with Max was usually entirely too serious. Honestly, conversing about life to an AI doesn’t render a lot of new perspectives for a human. Still, out here on the edge of the well, for some reason, no one liked to talk about God. It bothered them.

  So, it really was a strange day when Marta sat down across from Diego for dinner and brought up the topic of God. Of course, she didn’t call it that at
first.

  “You see the news?”

  “What news?” Diego replied.

  “Well, I guess there was some kind of attack on the dome at Mons Olympus today. Apparently, a lot of people were killed.”

  “Really? I haven’t checked the news feed today.”

  “I guess there were a lot of children near the blast, a school bus or something.”

  Diego was silent for a moment. Hearing about the death of a child always affected him.

  “Do they know who did it?”

  “I guess Real Mars is taking responsibility.”

  “I just don’t understand it. Can’t they leave the kids out of it?”

  “Yeah, it makes me upset too. I mean, it really doesn’t help with what they are trying to do there. Killing their children is just going to make it worse.”

  They sat in the silence for a few moments, each contemplating what could happen on Mars.

  “Well, at least everything isn’t lost.” Marta said.

  “For who, the kids?” Diego asked. A little of the anger and confusion he felt slipped into his voice.

  “Of course the kids, they aren’t lost. Don’t you believe in a higher power or something?”

  “No way, I’ve seen too much crap in my life to believe in something like that.”

  “Are you serious? Do you believe in good or evil?”

  “Well, sure, I mean people do good things and they do bad things, but it seems to me that you’re the one that decides whether its good or bad, not some invisible, unknowable, uncaring deity hiding in the clouds.”

  “Whoa! Okay, I get it. So you don’t believe in God. Okay, well, I do and I’m fairly certain that those kids are going to be okay.”

  “Alright then, if it makes you happy. I kinda thought as a civilization we were kinda getting beyond that stuff, but, alright.” He shrugged.

  “I have my reasons, and I think I’ll find out soon enough if I’m right,” she said quietly.

  Diego went back to eating his dinner that night, his thoughts on the tragedy that had occurred on Mars, not on the somewhat interesting and strange things that Marta had confessed to believing.

  _____

  A lone drop of water formed from the condensation gathering on the upper observation windows. Once its mass was greater than the strength of its surface tension, it bowed downward in the slight gravity field produced by the pod’s motor. It slipped free from the bond holding it to the window and fell. The vagaries of the air currents within the pod ensured that the drop fell directly into the corner of Diego’s right eye. He bolted forward in his seat, only to have the restraints catch him.

  “Wha...!!” He exclaimed as he came to full awareness. He had fallen asleep hours earlier while reading Marta’s journal.

  He looked around trying to figure out why he had suddenly gotten water in his face. It was so cold. Where had it come from? He shivered and realized that the temperature within the pod had dropped considerably. It had to be twenty degrees cooler than it should have been. There was actually frost on the windows.

  None of the systems within the pod seemed to be up and running. The monitor at the front of the cabin was blank.

  “Max?”

  No response.

  Diego shook his head. It felt full of cotton. He leaned forward and looked out the window. Maybe the pod had reached its destination while he was asleep and had stopped, somehow shutting down the systems. There was no way to check the time to find out how long he had been out.

  Something was outside the window. A spacesuit. It hung there in space about twenty feet from the window. It was turned away from the pod. Diego could make out the markings on the arm and legs. It was a suit from the station. Could it be? He looked harder, hoping that he would be able to see if there was movement of any kind, some indication that there was a live person inside. As he watched, the suit seemed to grow larger in size, slowly turning toward him. Suddenly, Diego was outside the window of the pod. His heart began beating at his chest, straining for the air he had just lost. The helmeted face of the spacesuit turned toward him. He reached toward it, grasping, knowing he had only moments to live. Nothing. Emptiness showed its face to him and swallowed him whole.

  He bolted upright, water dripping into his face, the restraints once again catching him.

  He sat back, his heart beating faster in his chest more than he thought was possible. He was back in the pod.

  Diego could see the working monitor in front of him. Four hours left to go. It had been a dream. A deep sigh escaped his lips as he sat back in the couch.

  ____

  No matter how hard he tried, Diego could not get back to sleep. He tossed and turned on the couch until finally he stood up and walked back to the galley. Maybe a good ham sandwich would help him settle down.

  A few minutes later, Diego settled back into his seat with a giant sandwich. Wasn’t it always the case that the sandwich ended up so much bigger the more stressed you were and darker it was outside?

  He pulled out the journal again. It was still strange that after all Marta had written, she had committed suicide. She had seemed so hopeful, so full of excitement about being aboard the stargate and getting a chance to work with such amazing technology. Diego had thought she seemed like someone who had something to prove. Not someone looking to end it all. The events surrounding her death flooded into Diego’s mind. Finally, he allowed himself to remember.

  Marta had been with Diego on the station for five months when everything went wrong. Late one night, as he was preparing for bed, an alarm had gone off. It was loud and obnoxious and, at first, had angered him. Why would the airlock warning be going off in the middle of the night? He assumed there was some sort of problem and had asked Max if that was the case, only to be informed a moment later that Marta had just exited the station. She was wearing a spacesuit from storage that had seldom been used but was on the station just in case of an emergency. He had run quickly to the control center. What he found baffled him. A program was running that was preparing the stargate for transit. Diego tried everything he knew to stop the program, but all the systems were locked out. Marta clearly intended to do something drastic. He turned to the communications systems and signaled to the spacesuit as it sped away from the station and towards the center of the coalescing ocean filling the center of the stargate. It would take her some time to reach the center. Maybe he could talk her out of doing what he thought she intended to do. His signals returned no response at first. He became even more anxious when he noticed that the stargate had not been tuned to a specific destination. Finally, after several hours of waiting, Marta arrived over the center of the stargate. She had said one thing.

  “You’ll see Diego. Goodbye.”

  And then she was gone.

  This of course greatly bothered the normally unflappable Diego. He was a rational person and had a very difficult time understanding what had happened that day. His mind rejected much of what she had done and said in recent days. So, in an effort to maintain his sanity, Diego’s mind relegated the events surrounding Marta’s death to the depths of his skull and out of his daily life. Sanity was everything in the depths of space.

  Diego was beginning to realize that the journal was not a suicide note as he had first suspected, but that it was actually a chronicle of Marta’s personal attempts to get back to her mother and that strange place she had encountered. She had not been trying to kill herself. She had been trying to recreate the accident that had almost destroyed her and the ship during her first transit. All completely under his nose. He had noticed nothing.

  The sheer audacity of what she had attempted astounded him. In the journal, Marta talked of actually trying to use a ship to recreate the circumstances of what she had experienced. She had been methodical in trying to understand what had happened to her. She had made the understanding of hyper transit technology the focus of her studies. Marta had become one of the foremost specialists in the technology that enabled the stargate to function.
It was why she had been able to get an assignment to the stargate itself. In truth, she had wanted to be here for something else entirely. Over and over again she had experimented with the technology until she was able to modify the existing stargate to recreate the phenomenon that she thought had allowed her to be with her mother.

  How had she modified the stargate without anyone noticing? Diego had seen nothing that seemed out of the ordinary. But of course, as part of the routine, they each had been apart for weeks at a time, when one or the other had gone to different parts of the stargate.

  The realization that Marta’s death had not been a suicide attempt was a balm to Diego. He had thought that his inattentiveness to her and his attitude about some of the things she had said had caused her to fall apart, somehow it had been his fault.

  Still, he could not help but think that all had not gone as planned. If Marta had succeeded with her plan how would anyone know?

  A soft chime came from the front of the pod, an early warning that he would be at its destination in five minutes. Diego could see substation Gamma coming closer in the forward window. There was no light coming from the substation itself, everything was dark but for the light shining from the front of the pod.

  “Max, have you been able to make contact with any part of Gamma in the last twelve hours?”

  “No, I have nothing to report, sir.”

  “Okay, so I guess its a mystery as to why it looks dead over there.”

  “Yes, sir. I would suggest an inspection of the communication facilities first. Even though everything is hardwired through the stargate, something may have happened there.”

  “Sounds like a plan to me.”

  Diego could see that there wasn’t likely to be a hospitable environment on the station when he got there, so he decided to don his spacesuit. It had been stashed by Max in a storage closet to the rear of the pod. A quick external check of the suit and then Diego climbed in and closed it up. Everything was running normally.

  “Hey Max?”

  “Yes.”