Explorations: War

by Richard Fox

  Gina frowns and tries not to breathe deeply; every time a pod is opened, its contents start to thaw in the ship’s relative warmth, and the effect is beginning to be perceptible in a way that sets her teeth on edge. She looks into the open container; the sterile drapes Adéja had laid across the man’s bare chest and torso have been removed, showing the blue-gray discoloration of the light skin, but the hands and face are still covered. Not having gloves on, she’s not about to touch anything, not even for the sake of recognition. The pod’s not labeled. “Dr. Sanchez? Isobel, who is this again?”

  Isobel comes forward, but only as far as the nearest closed pod. “That’s Dr. Sawyer. The xenoclimatologist. He was second to Commander Eliassen. I don’t know if I said that before.”

  “Sawyer,” Gina repeats, and remembers how Tyne had reacted when Isobel had walked around in here and named off all the victims. “Right.”

  She watches Adéja make a minute adjustment to the remaining drapes. “Look, Adéja, I’m sorry about this. Do whatever you need to do. I’ll try to find out what’s going on.”

  ***

  Tyne’s back in the copilot’s seat, scowling at his console, at the video of Commander Eliassen he’d extracted and the last frozen, beseeching frame. At Gina’s approach he minimizes the still image and pulls up another time-delayed shot of Sol instead, one she recognizes as part of yesterday’s footage from Heritage, their sun orange and bloated and ejecting huge lashings of plasma that stretch past Mars like grasping arms. “Whatever you’re gonna say, Chief, save yourself the trouble.”

  “Brett, why were you shouting at Adéja?”

  “Because she cain’t just—I mean I cain’t—” His accent’s thickening; half under his breath he mutters, “Here I was thinkin’ I’d never see him again, an’ then this...”

  Silence hangs for a second. Just somebody I used to know, he’d said inside Cerberus, and abruptly Gina thinks she understands what he’s not saying. “This Dr. Sawyer,” she offers.

  “Jesse.”

  “You’re not acting like he was just an acquaintance.” Gina puts a hand on his shoulder and makes the most obvious guess. “...You loved him, didn’t you.”

  “Heh.” There’s no humor in it. Tyne rolls his shoulders back, pushing her hand off. The set of his jaw has changed, become a hard line; he’s not looking at the image on the screen now, but through it. He exhales heavily. “Yeah. I did. Do. It’s...hell, it’s complicated.”

  Gina takes her own seat and swivels to face him. “You’ve never talked about anyone.”

  “Wasn’t really any o’ your business.” He shrugs. “We never got to see enough of each other anyway. Too much distance, too much goin’ in different directions, never enough time in the same place. That ain’t tractable.”

  “So that’s why you disappeared on me every time we spent a weekend on Mars.” Gina hesitates. “Brett? Did you know he was here?”

  “No.” It comes out hard. “…No. Last time we parted ways, it wasn’t exactly on the best o’ terms.” Tyne’s nostrils flare as he lets out his breath; he scrubs both hands through his blond hair, sending it awry. A spasm crosses his face. He turns away from Gina, hands curling reflexively into fists, and says carefully, “Can we please talk about anythin’ else.”

  Gina bites her lip and nods. “Let me see the Eliassen video again. Maybe with the volume down this time.”

  “You sure?” Tyne swipes the image of the convulsing sun away. “Thought you wanted to wait till tomorrow.”

  She checks the chronometer; it’s been set to display a twenty-four-hour terrestrial clock. “Technically it is tomorrow.”

  “Always a stickler,” he observes dryly, but he does as she says, putting the video from Cerberus back on screen, rolling back to the beginning. He taps the icons along the bottom of the interactive image, dropping the audio to one notch above mute, increasing the definition, turning on captioning. The playback begins.

  Gina studies Commander Eliassen’s anguished face, the sheen of sweat already beginning to freeze, the blood vessels in her eyes growing increasingly prominent with her physical agitation. Her chest heaves visibly—I shouldn’t be able to see that, Gina thinks, not when she has that suit on—and a needle-thin red trickle worms out of her left nostril. Gina looks away, down to the captioning.

  [I CAN’T. I CAN’T REACH. HE’S COMING.]

  The sickly light spills into the frame, and Gina’s heart is in her throat again, an unconscious reaction to its wrongness.

  [(SCREAM) HE IS COMING! HE IS COMING! HE IS HERE. (COUGH)]

  Sprayed mist of blood, fogging the tablet camera for an instant.

  [HERE. HERE. HERE. (UNINTELLIGIBLE)]

  “Stop,” Gina says. “It’s that. She’s saying something there, but I can’t make it out from her lip movements. Holly said it sounded like numbers.”

  “Lemme see.” Tyne freezes the video and turns back a few frames, studying the icons. “Translate?”

  “Try it.”

  He starts playback again, and this time the volume’s kicked back up to full. Alia Eliassen wails and groans and mutters, and bit by bit, a line of numbers begins to spread across the bottom of the image, stopping abruptly when the commander lapses back into mindless painful noises. Against the white text of the captioning, the numerics are rendered in yellow. Tyne stops the playback again and stares at it. “Coordinates to somethin’,” he decides. “Wouldn’t be rendered as a link otherwise.”

  “Pull them up,” Gina orders.

  He taps the hologram’s yellow text and shifts to view his own screens. “She’s lookin’,” he says, but scowls when a tiny beep indicates the end of the search. “...Unknown orbital object. Well hell, that ain’t helpful.”

  That’s not comforting. Gina leans over to view the results for herself. “How far away?”

  “Eight point one-five billion kilometers, in the vicinity of Dysnomia.” Tyne’s scanning Persephone’s list of coordinates for known objects. “Maybe in Dysnomian orbit. Close to Eris, anyhow.”

  “And if we use the displacement drive, we can be at this object in...what, eight hours? Nine?”

  “Somethin’ like that.” Tyne blocks a yawn. “We’ll have to undock first, ‘less you wanna take Cerberus along for the ride.”

  Dammit. Gina curses herself; she’d practically forgotten their connection to the station, given all that’s happened in the past few hours. She knows Holly’s in her cabin, and looks back toward the medbay access well. Its blue-white lights have been dimmed, though she hasn’t had any sign of Adéja or Isobel coming up to this deck to go to bed. Maybe they’re sleeping down there; she can see how that might give Isobel some comfort. “I’m not doing anything until I know everybody’s awake and strapped in.” She drums her fingers on the armrests of her seat. “Brett, what do you think we’d be walking into?”

  “Chief, you gotta have an idea already, or you wouldn’t be askin’.”

  “What is this?” At some point, Gina’s dropped her voice to a whisper. “What could have done this? Some kind of alien entity we’re not aware of? The Star? Could it be the Star? A Star?”

  “The, a, it’s just semantics. Dunno,” he admits. “This was a Kuiper Belt observatory, you’d think they’d have detected somethin’. Maybe they did, maybe it’s on that data recorder, but somebody smarter’n me’ll have to crack that.” Tyne shifts in his seat uneasily. “Although...”

  There it is. The dread’s back, a lump in Gina’s throat she can’t swallow. “Say it.”

  He shrugs. “You read the news as much as I do. This Star, this Empyrean, you’ve seen the stories o’ people sayin’ the thing talked to ‘em.”

  “Commander Eliassen sensed something,” Gina agrees. “‘He’s coming. He’s here.’ And Jaromir Rostov—he kept saying ‘it saw me’. Can it communicate over distance? Can it, I don’t know, hide itself? Cloak somehow? For that matter, can it attack a space station like this? Whatever happened here, it was purposeful. You heard Holly read Captain Har
riman’s report. Only the functions essential to life were disabled. The lights still work. So does the gravity. And this weird glow that keeps cropping up—is that a remote weapon? Some kind of sentient emanation?”

  “We are talkin’ about an intelligent entity that was ancient when our ancestors decided to ditch the fur an’ start walkin’ upright,” Tyne answers wearily. “What the hell do you think?”

  Gina’s silent for a long moment. She’s abruptly aware of an ache in her joints, of the ten- to fifteen-year age difference between herself and her crew, of the ease with which they’ve adapted to this sleek new ship. “...I think I’d really like to go back to blasting ore out of space rocks.”

  “I’ll agree with that.” Tyne stands slowly. “But right now I’ll settle for some decent sleep.” His smile is tight and grim. “Maybe this time I’ll get lucky.”

  ***

  The humans are learning. They are listening. They will come closer.

  He will wait. He will be patient.

  ***

  After two hours or so of tossing and turning in her bunk, Gina’s decided that sleep just isn’t happening, no matter how much she wants it. At some point Adéja’s returned to her cabin; Gina can hear her praying, the rise and fall of her smooth voice, and it’s comforting. It’s normal.

  Holly has stopped snoring.

  In the bunk above her, Tyne shifts and inhales sharply, and Gina knows he’s awake. She grimaces; she needs her copilot alert if they’re going to make a jump to Dysnomia to chase down Alia Eliassen’s clue. If she wants to do it. She can just uncouple Persephone from Cerberus in another few hours and jump the hell back to Callisto and leave well enough alone, go back to the ship she owns and the life she knows and never think of this place again.

  And yet. Gina studies the underside of the upper bunk and knows what her next move needs to be. “Brett?”

  He sighs. “You’re supposed to be asleep, Chief.”

  “So are you.”

  “Yeah, well...like I said, hell an’ ice water.” Tyne sits up. “What’s on your mind?”

  “We’re doing it, aren’t we?” she asks. “You know, the object, the—”

  He cuts her off. “We’re doin’ it, yeah. It’s a mite personal at this point.”

  “Brett, I’m sorry about—”

  “Don’t. Don’t, Chief. Ain’t your fault you didn’t know.”

  The silence of the next two seconds is uncomfortable, so Gina breaks it with an old standby: “When are you going to stop calling me ‘Chief’?”

  Tyne huffs; this time, at least, there’s a little amusement in the sound. They’ve swapped this joke for six years. “When you start callin’ me ‘Doctor’.”

  “Not with that hick accent.” She’s read his dissertation; she’s the least educated member of her own crew, as well as the oldest. Maybe that explains her unease: she doesn’t want to look in the face of her own mortality yet. Gina shakes her head, just grateful for a chance to smile a little for once. He’s moving. “Where are you going?”

  Tyne slides over the side of his bunk feet first, legs dangling mere inches from Gina’s face for a moment before he drops to the floor. “I’m gonna go apologize to Adéja while she’s still awake.”

  Gina sits up; she can still hear the doctor’s voice. “Don’t bother her while she’s praying.”

  “Well, I got plans to make some coffee too, if you’re interested.” He helps her to her feet. “You know, I asked her once how she locates Mecca when we can’t even see a planet.”

  The captain rolls her eyes. That’s just like him. “What did she tell you?”

  “She said, ‘God knows.’” Grinning, Tyne pauses; Adéja’s gone silent. He sobers quickly. “I ain’t got the heart to tell her I don’t think he’s real interested right now.”

  ***

  When Persephone slides free of the grip of Cerberus, the whole ship seems to sigh with relief.

  Holly blinks, and chews the last mouthful of her breakfast burrito. She still doesn’t look completely awake—but neither do Adéja or Isobel, which is why Gina had banished all three of them to the crash couches and strapped them down herself. “We’re doing what?”

  “Paying a visit to Dysnomia.” Gina’s mentally ticking off the seconds until the displacement drive’s ready. “Brett and I looked at the Eliassen video again. You were right about the numbers; they’re coordinates to something in orbit there. What, we don’t know, but it might give us some answers to take back to Heritage, so we’re going to have a look. Don’t worry, it’s eight and a half hours, you can go back to sleep.” She checks her harness again and turns to Tyne. “Time to jump?”

  “Four seconds,” he says. “Three. Two. One—”

  “Engaging,” Gina says.

  There’s a split second of terrific surge, making her grunt as she’s pushed into her seat. The starfield in her view begins to stretch and then snaps back, the drive spooling down with a deep sinking whine.

  “...What the hell just happened?” Tyne asks.

  “I don’t know.” Gina studies her console, taps the navscreen. “We...haven’t appreciably moved.” Her stomach’s a tight ball of ice; her heart gallops. “This is not supposed to happen!”

  “Yeah, that took off maybe five minutes.” Tyne scratches his chin; he hasn’t shaved since they’d left Callisto. He sighs. “That batshit ol’ Russian’s right, ain’t he? The skein’s unravelin’. Even this far out.” He glances down at the screens, then out at the starred vastness of space. “What do you wanna do, Chief? Soon as the drive’s spooled back up, we’ll be green across. We can go the long way about it, but sooner or later Commander Yue’s gonna be on the horn demandin’ to know where we are.”

  “I know that.” Gina knows it and she’s dreading it. They could have been back to Heritage by now. “How long till we’re ready?”

  “Fifty-eight seconds.”

  Fifty-eight seconds. That’s acceptable. Gina counts her breaths. “Try again.”

  Dysnomia orbit

  It had worked, on the fourth try.

  Gina frets while Tyne searches for their unidentified object. “Got a track,” he announces at last, “adjustin’ for interception.” The hologram he projects against the main screen is a long boxy thing, like a capsule with squared edges, just discernible against the dark surface of Dysnomia.

  “What is it?” Her nerves are so jangly she can barely get the words out. She’s never had a ship fail in any way, not under manual control. “I don’t think I can take another weather station full of dead people.”

  Isobel winces audibly and is ignored. “UEF-6810S,” Tyne says. “If the identifyin’ signature’s right. Unmanned automated supply depository. Contents ain’t listed. May not have any.”

  Adéja strains forward from her position on the couch, trying to see the screen. “And our answers are here? In this...box? How even do we get in?”

  “Well, you don’t, Doc, there’s no sense sendin’ more than one person,” he answers. “Any ship with a valid UEF signature should be able to dock an’ gain entry. Cain’t be complicated, freighters gotta drop their overage somewhere. Barrin’ that”—he shrugs—”plasma cutter to the inner doors. Again.”

  Tyne gestures to Gina. “Hook us up, Chief, I’ll just go knock on the door an’ stick my head in.”

  ***

  Once Tyne is safely and uneventfully inside the supply station—suited up, despite his objections—Gina flips their comms to an open channel so she can put her head back. Get in, get out, he’d said. Five, ten minutes, tops.

  Holly is asleep again; so is Isobel. Only Adéja is alert enough to be interested in listening. “I think it is more than ten minutes.”

  “I heard that, Doc.” There’s just a trace of static undercutting Tyne’s voice. “I was just lookin’ through the logs to see who’s been here. Helluva lot o’ boxes.”

  Gina nods unconsciously. “Recent drop?”

  “Yep. Last known ship was Nocturnal. Unloaded seed stock—fun
ny thing to leave way out here—an’ loaded up...huh.” Tyne’s silent a second. “They took somethin’ out o’ the restricted section. Computer says it’s classified. Lemme look around a minute, cache out here in the sticks shouldn’t even have a restricted section.”

  In a supply depository, that’s things like old munitions and fissionable materials, anything deemed too unsafe to keep close to an occupied world; it’s not entirely surprising there’s something dangerous this far from Sol, but it’s odd. Gina frowns. “Wouldn’t Harriman need security clearance for that? Nobody gives security privileges to a freighter captain.”

  “You’d think, but...hell, they left the door open.” Tyne sniffs audibly. “...Man, what is that.”

  It’s flat, not a question. Gina’s immediate mental image is of Alia Eliassen, dead beside her helmet. “Brett, no. Don’t you dare.”

  “Aw, Chief. I’m wastin’ a perfectly good breathable atmosphere in here, just the readin’s are a little weird.” There’s the distinct sound of him unfastening his helmet’s seals, two pops that come across the channel as too-loud static bursts. He takes a deep breath. “See? Perfectly fi—ohJesusChrist.”

  Adéja unbuckles her harness and scrambles forward into his seat. “Brett? Talk to me, tell me what’s going on.”

  “I’m fine, Doc, just...aw, hell.” If the noise is any indication, he’s just put his helmet back on, fastening the seals with thunks that make Gina want to cover her ears. “Somethin’s gone off in here. Good God, people, these things ain’t meant to hold perishables...oh. Oh, I think I just found it.”

  He trails off. “Brett. Brett, come on,” Gina says, fighting the urge to shout. “What is it, what’s in there?”

  “Um. You might wanna come see this for yourself, Chief. Bring the Doc too, I think I’m gonna need a bag.” He hesitates. “Maybe a shovel.”

  ***

  He is coming. He is coming.