by Richard Fox
He limped to Matthew’s station with Stephane right behind him. A grainy optic feed from one of their surviving surface robots was focused up toward the stars, but the glowing blue exotic energy swirl of the terminus was clearly visible. Matthew adjusted a control and the view zoomed.
The terminus was still widening, light spilling in from its apparent two-dimensional slice of sky. Something dark and solid appeared, moving quickly through the opening. The object grew as the terminus spread open, until a spacecraft of a type Six had never seen before slid into view and the terminus snapped closed behind it a half second later.
A tone sounded in the control center as the radio clicked to life. A voice—feminine and speaking English—crackled over the intercom speakers.
“I’ve got their frequency, Hale. Visual’s coming in now.”
Six realized that if the base intercom system was working, the closed circuit video system was still active. His instinctive response was to send a command through the datanet to shut it down immediately, but the datanet had collapsed and he, quite frankly, didn’t know how to shut the cameras down manually.
“There we go,” the voice said.
Another voice, still in English but definitely not human, yelled, “What a dump! And who’s the space pirate?”
Everyone in the control center glanced around in confusion until they realized Fazion was smiling broadly. He was also wearing an eyepatch, had a little robot perched on his shoulder of his mangled EVA suit, and was leaning on a crutch due to missing half a leg. Six smiled back at him. The kid’s genuine joy at being called a space pirate was infectious.
“Greetings! I am Fazion Sedaris,” the young main exclaimed through a huge, bright smile. “Looks like you have a starship.”
Six nudged Stephane and leaned over to whisper in her ear. “Looks like we have options.”
Scott McGlasson Biography
Scott McGlasson is the author of NOCK – the winning entry in the Infected Books Year of the Zombie Pitch and Page competition. He is a veteran of both the US Air Force and rock radio, somehow ending up with a career in logistics. Scott currently lives in St Louis, Missouri USA with his wife, Monica, and has two sons, Nicholas and Trip, and two daughters, Evelyn and Emily
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The One Who Waits
By Scarlett R. Algee
He waits.
He is patient.
Charon orbit, Sol system
Survivor’s guilt. Captain Gina Salter can’t quite get the phrase out of her mind. She’s reminded of it now, sitting here aboard Persephone, watching the dust-pale surface of Charon crawl below; she’s reminded of it every time she glances back over her shoulder and sees Isobel Sanchez huddled small beneath her harness, the passenger Gina hadn’t needed or wanted, the burden, the survivor.
Their target, the Cerberus-Kuiper Atmospheric Observatory, is a lightless black cylinder tracking ahead of her ship in increments, north toward Mordor Macula, made small by the bulk of the moon beneath. Gina finds the stick without looking down, this time, but her grip doesn’t tighten.
Charon is stark, sand-colored, cratered, its northern pole a wide rusty stain; Gina could swear she’d glimpsed a condensation cloud along the terminator. It would be a beautiful view under any other circumstances.
“Chief?” Tyne reaches across from the copilot’s seat and touches her arm with a gloved hand. “I know you ain’t exactly hossin’ to do this, but we’re wastin’ daylight, so to speak.”
Gina spares him a glance, then looks back at Isobel Sanchez. Their gazes meet and Isobel, wan and thin, curled in tight on herself like a cocooned caterpillar, is the first to look away.
There’s something about this woman that just rubs her the wrong way, something in the way she won’t hold eye contact.
Survivor’s guilt.
“Right.” Gina tightens her hold and goads Persephone forward. “We’re going in.”
Heritage Station, Callisto orbit, about four days earlier
Gina hadn’t wanted this job. She likes predictable. She likes familiar.
Familiar is good. Familiar is her own little mining ship Seraph—scuffed, battered, nothing special, but hers, dammit—currently safely tucked into Docking Bay 18. Familiar is her crew: her copilot, Brett Tyne, who hides a mind like a diamond, usually, somewhere under the accent of a clown at a redneck rodeo. Holly Montague, her quiet mining specialist, who’d ditched a perfectly adequate career in botany once she’d realized the real money was under the topsoil. And Adéja Keita, the medic Gina had taken on about four years back, because there are a million million little things that can go wrong with a mining job and Gina likes to be prepared for all of them.
She’s definitely not prepared for being manhandled into the station commander’s office by security before her haul has been unloaded.
Commander Anna Yue’s office is spartan: gray walls, gray carpet, a tall wobbly-looking cactus in a brass pot. One wall is a steel-edged acrylic pane filled with the starred and pockmarked darkness of Callisto’s leading hemisphere. The commander sits at a steel desk that looks assembled from foreign-language instructions; she waves Gina into the only other chair and dismisses the security officer with the same gesture.
Yue’s eyes crinkle at the corners, but she doesn’t smile. “Gina. I apologize for the theatrics, but we have a situation to remedy and you happened to be the first person in the door.”
Gina stares at her, then out the window; there’s no glimpse of Jupiter from this perspective. She’s sticky and grimy and acutely aware that her suit liner needs changing. “What kind of situation?”
Yue swipes at the screen built into her desktop and a small holographic image forms in midair, a modular space station captured above an unfamiliar surface. The station’s fairly small and almost perfectly cylindrical, built to a century-old American design; it’s practically bristling with solar arrays, sticking out like crooked fan blades. Gina counts ten sets of wings. Antennas cluster around one end. The commander picks at her graying hair and sighs.
“This is Cerberus. It’s in orbit around Charon, monitoring weather conditions on the nearer Kuiper Belt objects like Pluto, looking for proof of atmospheres, tracking comets, that sort of thing.” Yue rotates the view, takes in Gina’s bewildered look and adds, “It’s small and not well known. Given all the hostile activity lately, the UEF is trying to keep our observatories safe, because future colonies depend on their data, but...” Her mouth tightens. “We’re stretched. I’m afraid we’re not doing a very good job sometimes.”
The commander sits back in her chair. “Thirty-nine local hours ago, the freighter Nocturnal laid in supplies there and departed. They reported nothing out of the ordinary. Two hours later, two Cerberus crew members began an EVA to examine one of the solar array wings. Again, routine.
“Forty minutes after the EVA began, Cerberus went dark. Completely dark. Off the radar, no communications, nothing. Captain Harriman of Nocturnal noticed and turned back. His crew found Dr. Sanchez and Dr. Rostov still tethered on the station’s skin, but bleeding from their everything—eyes, noses, mouths—and unconscious, though not yet hypoxic. The other six scientists aboard...” Yue spreads her hands helplessly. “Well. Harriman said he couldn’t get anyone in, the inner airlock doors wouldn’t function, but he sent a microprobe through an emergency exhaust manifold and the probe reported all the indications of a disastrously sudden atmospheric systems failure. No oxygen...no onboard life signs. Dr. Sanchez says that when she and Rostov exited the station, none of the other crew members were suited up except for the commander, Alia Eliassen, who wasn’t wearing her helmet.”
No oxygen. Thirty seconds to unconsciousness, maybe six hundred to death, and they probably hadn’t even had time to notice anything was wrong. Gina winces. “What went wrong?”
“We don’t know,” Yue admits. “Harriman didn’t report anything unusual in the vicinity in that rough three-hour window between his initial arrival and re
turn, but to be fair, his mind was on his deadlines. He intended to take Rostov and Sanchez back to Earth, but a displacement glitch spat Nocturnal out here. Still, any port in a storm.”
Gina nods; true enough, especially since displacement failures seem to get reported a lot lately. “So what’s this got to do with me?”
“Nocturnal has an extremely tight schedule. They only performed the rescue and inserted the microprobe; they didn’t have the time to do more. Our existing colonists do have to eat,” Commander Yue answers, “so tying up the loose ends is another matter.” She grimaces. “We have Persephone waiting. The cryopods have been fitted and she’s ready to go. She’s a light exploration ship: small, fusion ion drive with displacement, manual control—a bit more than you and your crew are accustomed to, but I have confidence you’re up to the task and more importantly, you’re here. Without a colony on the surface here, we don’t get much traffic.” The grimace becomes an outright frown; Yue’s forehead creases. “Dr. Rostov still hasn’t really regained consciousness properly, but Dr. Sanchez is well enough to accompany you. She can help you salvage the recorded data—we need that data—and provide positive identification for the retrieval. I don’t have a manifest. To be honest, the official UEF opinion is to keep this quiet until we know more.”
Gina rubs her eyes. Tiredness is making her vision blur. “Retrieval?” she asks, latching on to that word, and immediately feels stupid.
Yue gives her a long hard look that softens into something like pity. “The bodies, Gina. The crew of Cerberus. Someone has to go after the bodies.”
Bodies. Of course. Of course. Gina turns to the window and swallows.
“Can I at least get a decent shower first?”
***
“I told Commander Yue I wanted to go with you.” Isobel Sanchez stands at the doorway of Heritage’s infirmary. She’s washed out, anemic-looking, her dark eyes seeming too large for her white face; she sways on her feet and knots her fingers together. Her beige station suit is just noticeably too big; it makes her look childlike and brittle. “It’s the least I can do. For all of them. For Jaromir. I’ve been keeping an eye on him.”
“She’s already cleared it. I’d like to see Dr. Rostov for myself.” Gina gestures for Isobel to show her the way. “Tell me what you remember.”
The smaller woman’s shrug is barely a movement. “I’d gone out with Jaromir to look at the fifth array wing. It wasn’t rotating properly, and we thought we’d caught some kind of debris. The arrays aren’t useful for power so far out, we run on fusion, but we get just enough photoactivity from Sol to measure.” Another shrug. “I’m an astrometeorologist and not a technician—we’re all weather and climate scientists—but when there are only eight of you aboard, everybody learns to do everything. We were coming up on the equator and I stopped to look at Charon. It’s...striking when there’s decent light. Then Jaromir screamed out that our boots were glowing.”
“He was right. They were glowing. Orange, but much paler. Looking at it made my eyes hurt, even through my helmet visor.” Isobel stops beside an isolation pod and laces her fingers together again. “I thought it was some sort of particulate effect, a trick of the light, but then the ‘glow’ crawled up my legs—literally crawled—and I lost feeling in my feet. Commander Eliassen was yelling at us over the radio, demanding to know what was happening, and Jaromir was just babbling, and then our channel died.”
She fidgets. “The glow spread out over the wing. Then it came up to my neck, and my head started pounding like my skull was too tight. I couldn’t breathe, I couldn’t hear anything from Jaromir, and I couldn’t talk to him or the commander. None of our comms were functional, and to me it looked like the whole exterior of the station was lit up in this sick yellow haze. My nose started bleeding, I could feel it running down my face and collecting in my helmet. I could taste it in my mouth. I started getting nauseous, then lightheaded. The next thing I knew, I was here.”
Gina looks down into the pod, at the burly man drawn up fetally within, surrounded by snaking tubes carrying fluids and oxygen. His eyes are open and fixed; his lips are moving, and though no sound escapes the pod, Gina can pick out the words.
It saw me, Jaromir Rostov is saying. It saw me. It saw me. It saw me.
Cerberus Station, Charon orbit
That had been three days ago. Displacement could have put them here in five hours, but Tyne had argued it was a waste of the drive.
Gina had let him win. Everyone’s heard what had happened to Yuri Markov; at least Sumerki had been snatched up so Markov had missed Ganymede. There are rumors on the newsfeeds of worse things happening. It’s better not to take the chance yet.
Besides, she suspects her crew doesn’t really want to do this either.
Docking Persephone with Cerberus, with no living humans or automated system on the station side to guide her in, is more complicated than Gina remembers: she hasn’t tried docking with an uncooperative object in years. But Cerberus’ external mechanism, contact activated and not requiring power, engages with a clunk that shudders through the ship, and Gina lets out the breath she hadn’t realized she was holding. There’s a low whine and a subtler shake as the main engine powers down; the secondaries are a faint rumbling purr under her feet. Gina lolls back in her seat, feeling some of the ache in her shoulders ease as her arms drift, in the few seconds before the artificial gravity re-engages and tugs them back down.
Cerberus fills the viewscreen, stretching away before her, just visibly outlined from this perspective by Charon’s reflected light. Gina unfastens one glove and then the other, cracking her knuckles. “That’s one thing gone right. Too bad Nocturnal couldn’t have done the dirty work for us.”
“Not enough room an’ not enough time.” Tyne’s already free of his harness. He twists in his seat. “Hol? Gimme Harriman’s report from that probe again.” It isn’t necessary—they’ve all been over it half a dozen times—but Gina appreciates his asking; it gives her a little mental prep time.
“Failed systems.” Holly Montague is on her feet at her workstation, reading from a console screen; she and Tyne will share the heavy lifting. “Air revitalization and oxygen generating racks, nonfunctional. Exhaust system, nonfunctional. Water reclamation, nonfunctional. Pressure was at standard when Nocturnal arrived for rescue, and ambient temperature was two-ninety kelvin. Carbon dioxide at seventy percent, nitrogen at fifteen, the rest was mixed trace gases with no measurable oxygen. Since the inner airlock doors were unresponsive and the probe wasn’t getting any kind of vitals, Captain Harriman ordered the equalization valves partially opened—ten percent—but that was nearly six days ago, so we don’t know what the atmospherics are now.”
She looks up from her screen, frowning at Gina. “Interior lights weren’t sensed, but the gravitational generator still worked. The outer airlock doors are functional. Communications aside, only the life-support systems seem to have been—”
“That’s enough,” Gina decides, “we’re not here to speculate.” She’s glad Harriman had ordered the valves opened, even a little. Lower pressure means a lower temperature means a less unpleasant experience, hopefully; she knows how long it takes for full decay to take root in an occupied station’s usual warmth. She pauses at the sound of footsteps in the medbay access well; it’s Adéja Keita. The doctor’s not in her mask and scrubs yet, but she’s carrying an armful of self-sealing Mylar containment bags, still folded. Isobel is out of sight, somewhere below; Gina had given her the job of helping Adéja prep the cryopods yesterday, just to not have to watch her mope. “Brett, how’s it look to you?”
“Ain’t gonna be no cakewalk.” Tyne turns back to his console, swiping one screen away, pulling up another. “Still got a little residual atmosphere. I’m showin’ roughly point-two bars, two-fifty kelvin, maybe a little less.” He dismisses the screen and gets to his feet. “It’ll be ‘bout like the time I went ice fishin’ in North Dakota.”
North Dakota. Earth. Earth almost seems like
a myth out here, it’s so faint and small. Gina shakes her head. “Should I ask how it was?”
“Damn cold. It was January.” Tyne beckons to Holly as he walks past her, back toward the suit lockers. “Come on, ol’ girl, let’s get kitted out. This is gonna take a while.”
“Don’t forget Dr. Sanchez,” Gina reminds him. “She’s going too.”
***
Fortunately, Isobel had had only a brief breakdown while getting into her suit. Now, walking into Cerberus’ main module through the inner airlock door Holly and Tyne had opened with a small plasma cutter and sheer force, she takes a few steps and stops quickly, looking down in the radiance of the interior LEDs. “...There’s ice.” She lifts her head, uncomprehending. “Everywhere. Something’s ruptured.”
“Probably part o’ the water reclamation system.” She’s right; every surface, even the upper ones, has at least a light glaze. In some spots, marble-sized accretions have crystallized, spiky as frozen moss. Small stalactites of captured condensation hang from the mod’s ceiling. Tyne reaches up carefully and breaks off one of the thin spikes; it shivers apart in his grasp. He lets the pieces go and starts to move forward, mindful of the icy patches on the floor. A faint crackle—Gina exhaling, he realizes, waiting—makes him remember his helmet radio. It’s the only audible noise they have in here; nothing beeps, nothing drips, even the gravity generator’s inaudible. “Chief? You want video o’ this?”
“Are there bod—is there anyone in your section?” she answers. “Because I’ll pass on that, thanks.”
“Not yet.” The LEDs aren’t as bright as they should be, but they’re not dim enough yet to trigger his helmet’s auto-lights. “Give us some extra light in the corners here, Hol?”
He has a torch among his own suit’s tools, of course, but Holly is hovering over Isobel in the center of the space. She lights up with a wide beam and twists slowly in place to make an initial sweep, floor to ceiling, over cold-cracked consoles and ice-glazed wiring. “Not seeing anything,” Holly says, then stops, stretching out her arm toward a heavily frosted shape. “Wait. Forward, toward the command mod. I think that’s someone.”
