Mission One

by Samuel Best

  Jeff walked to the wall and stood before that particular cutout. The little square light illuminated the inside of his face shield with a red glow. The light wasn’t a protruding button, just a patch of red embedded flush with the wall. Jeff stroked it with a gloved finger, and the light expanded. He took an awkward step back as the square of light grew to be half a meter on each side.

  At first, the square appeared to be comprised of solid red light. Jeff leaned in closer and realized it had a textured, almost organic quality. Hair-thin black filaments twisted circuitous paths across the surface of the square. The filaments seemed to be shaping themselves into a very specific pattern.

  He snapped upright, not entirely believing what he saw.

  Gabriel lumbered over and stood next to him, panting. “What is it?”

  “Look closely.”

  Gabe leaned in, squinting against the bright red light. Then he laughed. “It’s a picture of a human!”

  The black filaments were indeed shaped to resemble the rudimentary Vitruvian form of a human being, arms and legs splayed proportionally. Fine braids of filament represented the core body shape, and special focus was paid to the anatomically neutral area between the figure’s legs, where animated threads of the wire-like substance interlaced to weave a denser, more active pattern.

  Jeff looked at the shallow, muddled black and gray pool of cells in the cutout next to the red square of light. Almost at the edge of perception, he could tell the cells were multiplying – synthesizing impossible fast and spreading to cover every allowable centimeter of their bowl-shaped prison.

  Gabriel started to speak, then stopped. He leaned in close to the weaving filaments, then to the slowly filling cutout.

  “Those are cancer cells,” he said.

  “And these…” Jeff said, motioning to the other cutouts in the room. Not one of them was empty. “These are all the samples it’s collected. That one’s a liver.”

  He pointed to a cutout nearby. Inside the vertical bowl, a glistening human liver fluttered gently. In the cutout next to that was a human eye, its ocular nerve splayed out behind it in a gruesome asterisk. The eye’s gold-flecked, dark brown iris stared out at nothing.

  Gabriel turned in place, mumbling numbers under his breath. “Barely a hundred,” he said.

  “Must be more rooms.” Jeff took a moment to suck in a lungful of air. “It assimilated them,” he said. “It must have…copied somehow…” He had to stop to breathe.

  “I guess it didn’t need anything from us,” said Gabriel.

  Jeff caught his breath and said, “I’ve seen enough.”

  Gabriel’s gaze lingered on the light-tubes criss-crossing the walls and ceiling. “I could spend a lifetime in this one room.” Finally, he nodded. “Let’s find the door.”

  Jeff led the way out, feeling somewhat relieved when he stepped onto the light-blooming surface of the corridor.

  “Wait,” Gabriel said after he had left the room. “I was broadcasting visual, but I want to record. The ship probably isn’t getting any of this.”

  Jeff shook his head. “I’m moving on.”

  “One second,” Gabriel said, pretending not to hear him as he turned away.

  “Come on, man, we can’t–”

  Gabriel stepped back into the room and disappeared.

  Jeff reached out and stumbled, pulling up short just outside the opening to the room. He peered inside, seeing no one.

  “Gabe?”

  Static on the suit comms. Jeff’s HUD beeped at him: thirty minutes of oxygen remaining.

  “Damn,” he muttered as he walked into the room.

  It was different. The configuration of lights in the walls and the ceiling had noticeably changed, following curving paths instead of straight lines. Nearly half of the bowl-shaped wall cutouts were sealed by plastic domes, containing the writhing specimens within. Still others contained asymmetrical lumps of solid matter resembling more familiar materials such as copper and iron.

  Jeff hurried out of the room, and Gabe was suddenly standing next to him, shouting Jeff’s name.

  Grabbing a fistful of Gabe’s suit, Jeff pulled him away from the room, farther down the corridor. They passed and ignored the square-cut openings to other specimen rooms.

  “Fold-space,” Gabriel huffed between strained breaths. He grinned as he allowed Jeff to haul him down the corridor. “Stacked rooms…”

  He tripped and fell to the floor, landing hard on his side. For half a minute, he lay there wheezing while Jeff stood next to him, hands on his own knees, trying to catch his breath.

  “Getting…worse?” he asked.

  Gabriel nodded, blinking sleepily. “Heavier.”

  Jeff was fast-approaching the limits of exhaustion, seeing nothing that signaled a way out of the torus. He hoisted Gabriel back to his feet and they set out down the corridor, encountering more sample rooms and no exits.

  The spherical, purple-green light running a track along the spine of the corridor reappeared on the horizon. It slowed as it approached, then halted, shimmering and swirling overhead, casting thin shafts of light in all directions.

  A disembodied voice filled Jeff’s mind, as if he were thinking the words himself.

  “COME-the-real-DOWN-you,” it said.

  The unseen speaker used an amalgam of different voices – words stolen from the staff in Mission Control and the crew of Explorer, then stitched together to form broken sentences. At first it was Riley’s voice, then suddenly Kate’s, and even Jeff’s, as if someone had recorded every communication during the mission and spliced the words together. Each word had the tinny overlay of a voice piped through a small comm system to be played from inadequate speakers.

  “Do you hear that?” Gabriel whispered, looking around the corridor for the source of the voice.

  “I hear it,” Jeff said. “It’s us.”

  “COME-the real-DOWN-you,” the voice repeated. After a moment of confused silence, it said, using Gabriel’s voice, “Oh. Hi, Commander.”

  Jeff turned his helmet slowly to look at Gabriel, who shrugged.

  “Hello,” Jeff said to no one in particular.

  The ball of light in the ceiling twirled faster, then slowed.

  The rotating cast of voices said, “TAKE-the long-HOME-system-system-CAREFUL.”

  “I think it wants us to leave,” Gabriel said.

  Jeff gestured helplessly with heavy arms. “We’re trying!”

  “Hello,” said Jeff’s disembodied voice.

  He groaned in frustration and pulled Gabriel down the corridor. The ball of light in the ceiling followed above.

  “We’re running out of oxygen,” Jeff said. “No more games.”

  “No more games,” the voice mimicked. Then it switched to Noah’s voice to say, “Looks like they put a bomb inside the panel.”

  Screams tore the air, piercing Jeff’s mind like knives. He and Gabriel buckled to their knees, gloved hands pressed to their helmets. There was an explosion, and then someone Jeff didn’t recognize said, “It didn’t work!” Another yelled, “Here it comes!”

  The screaming stopped. Jeff knelt on the glowing floor, breathing like a spent marathon runner.

  “Both-NOTHING-NOTHING-without the object,” said the symphony of voices. Then it played a series of beeps, long and short.

  Morse code, Jeff thought. He waited for silence from the voice, then said, “Per aspera ad astra.”

  “‘Through hardships to the stars’,” Gabriel translated breathlessly. “What’s it mean?”

  Jeff stared up at the light at the top of the ceiling, watching it spin, as if it were part of a larger program waiting for an input response.

  He said, “It means the universe just got a lot smaller.”

  The light spun faster, then shot away down the spine of the corridor arch and disappeared. As soon as it vanished, a shadow blossomed in its place. The shadow slid over the ceiling like water over tile, whispering toward Jeff and Gabriel.

  They stoo
d, grunting against the heavy gravity, to face the oncoming shadow.

  “Well,” Gabriel said, “I guess–”

  With a violent jerk, the shadow yanked them up to the ceiling and they were slammed into crushing darkness once more.

  Red light flashed rhythmically through Jeff’s closed eyelids. He opened them to see his angrily-blinking HUD, informing him he had less than twenty minutes of oxygen remaining. He was in space, outside the torus. Gabriel floated a couple of meters away, eyes closed serenely.

  They had been deposited – or had drifted – a little over a hundred meters away from the torus, on the side opposite Titan. It was very close to where Explorer had been before Ming parked it near North Star.

  Jeff did a double-take of the ships. When he had gone into the torus, Explorer was still where it had been when the crew first arrived. Now it was only sixty meters from North Star, connected to it by a long fuel umbilical.

  Jeff saw Ming’s suited form in the distance, maneuvering into North Star’s open cargo hold.

  “Gabe?” he said, testing his own voice. It was markedly easier to speak and breathe outside the confines of the torus. He took a long drink of tepid water from the straw positioned near his mouth as he coasted over to Gabriel and checked his vitals from his wrist pad – all in the green. “You gotta stop passing out on me, bud, or I’ll start taking it personally.”

  He clipped the end of his safety tether to the nylon loop on Gabe’s suit, then thumbed his control stick toward North Star.

  Gabriel bounced at the end of the tether when it snapped taut, jerking Jeff backward. With no slack in the line, their momentums synched and Jeff was able to tow Gabe behind him without feeling a strain on his own system.

  “Ming?” Jeff asked as he coasted forward. “Kate? Anyone listening back home?”

  No answer.

  He checked his wrist pad, noticed that his comm system was off, and rebooted it with a few taps on the small screen.

  “–hear me, Jeff?” Kate was saying after the system turned on with a static pop. “You need to get back inside now. Your oxygen levels are almost critical.”

  “You weren’t worried about me, were you?” he asked with a grin.

  “There you are,” she said, sighing with relief.

  “I’m headed to the ship now.”

  “How’s Gabriel?”

  “He looks alright. The transition from the torus knocked him out.”

  “It’s no wonder. The thing spit you two out like bullets from a gun.”

  “How’d we stop?” he asked.

  “No idea. We thought you’d know.”

  “I’m still trying to process everything we saw inside.”

  Static crackled, and Noah said, “You were conscious inside the artifact?”

  “Wide awake.” Jeff adjusted his course, and Gabriel tugged slightly against the tether as it went slack and snapped taut again.

  “What did you see?” Noah asked, excited.

  “Can’t spare the oxygen for the details just yet,” Jeff said.

  After a pause, Noah, sounding crushed, came back with, “I understand.”

  “I bet if you stopped flirting with Kate,” Juan said eagerly, “you could at least tell us something.”

  “Is that Juan?” Jeff asked, still smiling. “Who gave you a microphone?”

  “I’ve always had one.”

  “Two words,” Jeff said. “Fold-space.”

  Kate and Juan simultaneously said, “What-space?” while Noah replied, “You’re joking.”

  “Ask Gabe about it when he wakes up. Just say ‘stacked rooms’ and I bet he’ll chatter all the way back to Earth.”

  “Speaking of getting home…” Ming said.

  Jeff was happy to hear her voice. “Leaving so soon?”

  “No point in sticking around. I was just waiting for you to wrap up the reunion.”

  “I appreciate that,” Jeff said. “What’s the status?”

  His flashing red HUD beeped urgently: fifteen minutes of air remaining. No problem, he thought. I’ll be in the airlock with Gabe in less than three.

  “I transferred all the fuel I could to North Star’s empty tanks,” Ming said. “She’ll give us one major burns, two max. Should get us home within six months at the most.”

  “No fuel at all left in Explorer?”

  “There’s probably enough sloshing around at the bottom of the tank for a quick burn. The umbilical couldn’t suck up the dregs. Not that we need it.”

  “Could be worse,” Jeff conceded.

  As he approached North Star and watched Ming coasting back and forth in the hold, a half-remembered thought tugged at his brain. Then he looked toward the front of the ship, at the open airlock door.

  “Actually,” he said, “it is worse.”

  “What do you mean?” Ming asked.

  “The airlock,” he said. “I forgot about the damn airlock. Someone has to manually close the outer door or the ship won’t let us fire the engine.”

  “Oh,” she said without concern. “That’s not a problem.”

  “You can override the system?”

  “No, but I worked out a different solution while you were dinking around the artifact.”

  “Dinking?”

  “That’s right,” she said.

  “How long were we inside?”

  “Three hours.”

  “What?!”

  Jeff looked at his HUD again. According to his oxygen reserves, he had only lost ten minutes.

  “Tell me about it,” Ming said. “If your vitals hadn’t been coming in, I would have left.”

  “Right.”

  “What gets me is wondering why the crew would set off an explosive in their own airlock.”

  Jeff remembered the recorded screams he heard inside the torus. “They were afraid,” he said.

  “Lieutenant,” Kate said over comms.

  “I’m here,” Ming replied.

  “According to North Star’s manifest, the three of you should have enough food in the crew module to last you eleven months.”

  “So I can stop untethering this crate of dehydrated soy steak?”

  “By all means. You’ll also be pleased to know the computer systems on both ships are analogous. You should have no trouble accessing North Star’s controls and communicating with us in Mission Control.”

  “Excellent. I’m going to seal the hold.”

  “Maybe grab one box of soy steak,” Jeff said. “You know, for Gabriel.”

  “Right,” said Ming. “For Gabriel.”

  The distance meter in Jeff’s HUD ticked down to zero as he bumped into North Star’s hull next to the airlock. He grabbed a welded handhold and turned sideways to allow Gabriel a cushioned halt against his padded shoulder. After the soft impact, he noticed the access panel to the manual door override was open. He was certain he closed it after he’d let Riley and Gabriel out of the ship earlier.

  Jeff held onto the tether near the nylon loop in Gabe’s suit and kept him close as Ming maneuvered over to them, the cargo hold door closing automatically behind her.

  “Got your fake steak,” she said, tapping the rectangular box she held to her chest.

  “Perfect. Now what do you say we get the hell out of here?”

  “Sounds good to me.”

  Streams of air slowed Ming down before she bumped into Jeff. She met his gaze then searched his face thoughtfully.

  “What is it?” he asked, stuck halfway between amusement and concern.

  “Just thinking about how we ended up here.”

  “Let’s do that after we get inside, okay?”

  She hesitated, then said, “I’m glad you were part of the mission.”

  He nodded. “Feeling’s mutual.”

  She pulled herself into the darkened airlock and let go of the box, letting it spin toward the wall in slow motion as she fiddled with the fused and melted door controls. Jeff followed her inside, pulling Gabe after him. He unclipped his own tether from Gabe’s
suit and released it to automatically spool into his pack.

  “So what are we doing?” he asked.

  She kept her back to him and didn’t answer. He drifted closer to look over her shoulder when she lifted her legs to plant her boots against the wall and pushed off, ramming her pack into Jeff’s chest. They coasted backward across the width of the spherical airlock as if falling through water. Jeff’s pack hit the opposite wall and fresh warning lights flashed in his HUD as if he were standing under the psychedelic lights of some midnight carnival.

  With a grunt, she stepped on his thighs and pushed off again, flying with extended arms toward the open outer door.

  Jeff let go of Gabriel’s suit and reached out, grabbing her ankle when she was halfway outside. He jerked forward with her momentum but slowed her down.

  “There was never any workaround, was there?” he said as he reeled her back into the airlock. He pulled her close and turned her around so he could look into her steely eyes. “You were going to seal us in.”

  “One of us has to close it from the outside,” she said. “It’s the only way. I tried to reactivate the automated controls.”

  Jeff shook her shoulders. “What about your family?”

  “What about your family?” she said. “What about Gabriel’s?”

  Left unattended, Gabriel floated freely around the airlock. One of his arms drifted into Jeff’s peripheral vision, and he noticed the wrist pad, its screen still aglow with power. While holding Ming’s shoulder with one hand, he used the other to pull Gabriel between them, facing Ming.

  “Jeff, what are you doing?!”

  “Hug your daughter for me,” he said.

  Jeff tapped a string of commands into Gabriel’s wrist pad and executed the sequence. He jammed Gabe’s gloved hand forward against his control stick, and air blasted from the back of his pack, pushing Gabe and Ming deeper into the airlock and Jeff toward the open door.

  “Jeffreeeeey!” she screamed.

  He scrabbled at the threshold as he drifted out of the airlock, grabbing a welded rung on the exterior and swinging his body around to bounce against the hull.