by Samuel Best
The manual override access panel was right in front of him. He flipped up the plastic shield over the spring-loaded manual release, then pulled the lever. The outer airlock door slammed shut, and he was alone.
His HUD beeped.
Ten minutes of air remaining.
He planted the soles of his boots against the hull and inserted the T-shaped tool into the hexagonal hole labeled INNER. Pain stabbed the wounds in his chest as he struggled to twist the handle. He paused after only half a turn, leaving time for the main cabin pressure inside North Star to leak under the crack at the bottom of the inner airlock door.
“Jeff…” Kate said, her voice heavy with sorrow.
“Hey, don’t worry,” he said, trying his damnedest to sound upbeat. “I still have Explorer, right? It’ll be a slow journey home with just the orbital thrusters, but you guys can pick me up on the way.”
“We’ll find you,” Noah said resolutely.
“See, babe?” Jeff said. “It’s just a little delay.”
“Airlock pressurized,” Ming said remorsefully.
Jeff gripped the handle of the T-shaped tool and twisted, breathing hard and exerting what little energy remained in his tired limbs. The oxygen meter in his HUD skipped a minute, dropping from nine minutes remaining to seven.
“Door is halfway open,” Ming said, and Jeff let go of the handle.
“Sorry,” he breathed, clenching his aching hands. “Hope it’s enough.”
“We can slip through.” A few moments later, she said, “We’re inside.”
Aided by mechanisms within, closing the door to its resting state was easier. Afterward, Jeff returned the T-shaped tool to its clamp within the access panel with shaking hands, knowing whoever picked up North Star on the other side of the solar system would need it to open the door.
He kicked off from the hull and jetted toward Explorer, leaving North Star and the torus behind.
Just you and me, honey, he thought.
“Hope you eggheads back home can talk me through the flight procedures,” he said.
“We’ll be with you every step of the way,” Kate replied.
Ming’s helmet camera was still active. She hadn’t bothered removing her suit as she sat inside North Star’s command module. In his flashing red HUD, Jeff could see her working the ship controls, powering up all the necessary systems. The star field outside the narrow window shifted as the ship slowly peeled out of orbit under minimal thrust.
“I want to put some distance between us and the artifact before I warm the antimatter drive,” Ming said.
Jeff turned back to look as he continued toward Explorer.
The torus followed North Star as it left orbit, matching the ship’s velocity.
“You have company,” he said.
On the little video feed in his HUD, he watched Ming page through North Star’s external video feeds until she was looking back at the pursuing torus.
“Full stop,” she said, manipulating the controls.
Forward-facing thrusters spit air, and the ship slowed to a halt, hanging in space like a forgotten relic. The torus maintained its distance, waiting silently behind the ship.
“That thing is going to follow you all the way home,” Jeff said.
“Maybe that’s not such a bad thing,” Noah said. “We could learn so much from its composition alone.”
“Did you forget what it did to Riley?” Jeff asked. “And to the other crew?”
“But not to you and Gabriel. Regrettably, I agree that it’s too dangerous to bring back.”
Jeff bounced gently off Explorer’s closed airlock, using his pack thrusters to stabilize himself after impact. He grabbed onto a handhold and stared at the door’s control panel, his gloved hand hovering centimeters from the access button. Then he looked over to North Star waiting to be swallowed by the torus, should it so choose.
“Any suggestions?” Ming asked.
“Yeah,” Jeff said reluctantly, pulling his hand away from the control panel. “I have one.”
But you’re not going to like it, he thought.
Jeff opened the maintenance panel over the main fuel line, hinging it up after loosening all the fasteners. He studied the organized layout of wires, tubes, and black boxes within.
His HUD beeped: five minutes of oxygen left.
“Hey,” he said thoughtfully as he began opening black boxes. “Someone want to remind me about the reserve oxygen tank you put into these suits?”
“There is no reserve tank,” Kate said. “The meter is accurate. If you don’t get inside right now, Jeff, you’re going to suffocate.”
“I was kind of hoping it was like a car,” he continued, “where if the meter hit empty you could still squeeze out a few more miles.”
After he flipped up the lids to all of the black boxes, he began pulling out the copper cubes within and pushing them out into space. They tumbled slowly, catching the reflected light of Titan and glimmering like tiny stars.
He didn’t bother closing the panel as he maneuvered down the fuselage, drifting toward the back of the ship. Halfway down the ship’s 130-meter length, he found the panel he needed. Using his multipurpose hex driver, he unscrewed the fasteners and pushed the loose panel away.
“Jeff,” Kate pleaded. “What the hell are you doing?”
He looked over at North Star and the torus behind it. “Just fiddling with Ming’s fine handiwork. I have to tweak it a little.”
He was still for a moment, then he nodded to himself and reached into the open compartment to pull out a hard, silver circuit sheet from a tight slot in a rack filled with more than a hundred similar boards.
“I’m synching the remote system with my suit computer,” he said.
“Why?” Noah demanded.
Jeff didn’t answer. With the arc-torch setting on his multipurpose hex driver, he burnt the circuits used for connecting the remote system to the ship’s comm arrays. He replaced the silver board and pulled out another from farther down the rack. Embedded in its surface was a small, transparent screen. Jeff activated the screen and scrolled through a list of commands. He tapped the right one and held the board close to his wrist pad. A second later, the screen flashed, signaling it had paired with a new master system.
He replaced the silver board and said, “Almost there.”
“Jeff, you can’t,” Kate said.
He paused, caught off-guard by the honest pain in her voice – a tone that triggered some ancient protective mechanism deep in his core. If he had more time to think about it, he probably would have abandoned his plan and retreated inside Explorer, clinging to the minuscule hope of seeing her once again.
But he didn’t have more time. His HUD flashed that he only had a minute of air left. He pushed away from Explorer and thumbed his control stick, jetting away at max velocity.
“Ming, you’re going to want to punch it as soon the torus turns my way.”
“How do you know it will?”
“Because if it doesn’t,” he said, “we’re all screwed.”
Jeff turned around as he put more distance between himself and Explorer. Using his wrist pad, he sent a command to the ship’s mainframe to warm the antimatter drive. Orange light glowed from within the flared engine wash shield at the back of the ship. At the same time, he triggered orbital thrusters to fire, pushing Explorer closer to the torus.
Two hundred meters out, Jeff coasted to a stop, floating motionless in space as Explorer inched toward the artifact, which remained firmly aimed at North Star.
“It’s not moving,” Ming said.
Jeff swiped his finger over a slider on the screen of his wrist pad, bumping up the power flowing to the drive. The orange light emanating from the flared engine wash shield brightened to a star in its own right.
The torus swiveled in place, turning to face Explorer.
There we go, Jeff thought. Come get your new sample.
He pushed the ignition button on the screen of his wrist pad, engaging Ex
plorer’s antimatter drive. Fire belched from the tail-end of the ship as fuel ignited in the engine chamber, sparking the reaction that would propel the ship forward at inhuman speeds.
Yet the ship didn’t budge.
It shook in place as it tried to tip free of some invisible force. Behind it, the torus approached, its frame rotating around the black disc in its center.
“Now, Ming,” Jeff said loudly. “Go now.”
Orbital thrusters fired, and North Star pulled away from the artifact, heading away from Titan.
“Jeff,” she said, “the antimatter drive is priming. I can’t stop it or else we’ll lose the fuel.”
“I know.”
A silence grew, then she said, “Thank you.”
Explorer shook so violently it threatened to snap apart at the seams. The torus closed in, now only thirty meters behind. Its frame rotated more quickly, and flashes of transparency skittered across the surface, revealing the corridor within. A sphere of purple-green light shot past inside the corridor, then again and again as it traversed the interior perimeter, moving faster and faster.
“Firing engine,” Ming said. “See you, Jeff.”
“Good luck,” he answered.
Light bloomed from the tail of North Star, and the ship accelerated quickly, shrinking in apparent size until it was only a pinpoint light in a sea of stars. Its light blinked out in the distance.
His HUD stopped flashing and switched to solid red. His oxygen meter read zero, but he didn’t yet feel the strain of a failing air system.
Between him and Titan, the torus engulfed the tail-end of Explorer, swallowing the belching flames, then the engine wash shield, moving as methodically as a snake consuming a large rat. The back of the ship disappeared briefly into the void strung between the inner edges of the torus.
A few seconds later, the engine wash shield emerged from the other side without a glowing light within. The flames had been extinguished. It emerged a few meters below and much more slowly than the front of the ship was being consumed. Seen from the side, it looked as if one ship were entering, and another ship were exiting at decreased speed and slightly off-center.
“Mission Control,” Jeff said, “we’ll probably lose instant comms very soon. Kate…” he added, “…I’m sorry.”
Explorer snapped in half under the tortuous pressures rending its hull. The outer walls of the torus were completely transparent. The purple-green light within zipped around the perimeter so quickly that it was a solid ring of glowing energy.
“No trigger required,” Jeff whispered, remembering Riley’s exact words.
The torus passed over the cargo hold, and the box of modified Semtex within.
Boom.
The explosion tore open the twisted hull of Explorer and licked briefly into space, blasting forth a shockwave that cracked the wall of the torus, splitting it open.
The torus wobbled in its rotation like an uneven bike tire. Jagged shards of black material spun away. The crack in its surface widened, and a chunk of the artifact broke from the whole, tumbling out into space. The black disc of its interior blinked out, and Jeff could see Titan through the broken loop.
Drifting away from the remains of Explorer, the torus wobbled toward the atmosphere of the moon.
Explorer itself was in two mangled pieces. The aft twenty percent was mostly intact up to the laser-clean cut at its forward-most end. The front half wasn’t swallowed by the torus. It had become a twisted clump of metal, terminating at the cargo hold, which was peeled open by the explosion like a metal flower. The rest of the ship – the part that constituted the length between the surviving pieces – had vanished along with the black hole of the torus.
“Kate?” Jeff said.
His comms crackled, and he switched them off. Staring at the blinking number zero inside his HUD’s oxygen meter, Jeff wondered how many breaths he had left. Sometime during the explosion, pulling air into his lungs had become increasingly difficult.
He turned to fully face Titan, and gazed upon its full disc unaided, drinking up every detail of its surface. His face and the tears which streamed down his cheeks were clearly visible in the red reflection inside his helmet.
Warning alarms beeped loudly, and his HUD went dark. Jeff tapped on his blank wrist pad screen, then looked at Titan. He decided to watch it until the very end, when he could no longer keep his eyes open. There was no desire to reflect back on his life, except upon those warm weekend mornings in bed with Kate.
That was happiness, he thought contentedly.
His eyelids grew heavy.
Just as they were about to close, he thought he imagined a dark shape just beneath the outer layers of Titan’s atmosphere, moving toward him.
He forced his eyes open.
The shape was mostly occluded by the thick gases hugging the moon. Then it broke free of the atmosphere suddenly, leaving sworls of pale gases in its wake. Immediately after, a second object followed behind the first, bursting from the hazy atmosphere at a terrible speed.
Not just one torus, but two, the center of each a solid black hole, like widening circular blemishes on the surface of Titan.
The first one shot past in a blur barely three meters to Jeff’s right, heading in the direction of the receding North Star. Its passage didn’t affect the vacuum around Jeff in the slightest. He comforted himself in the knowledge that it would never catch up to Ming and Gabriel even at that impressive velocity.
As the second torus approached, Jeff became increasingly certain it was coming right for him. It was moving so quickly and growing so rapidly in apparent size that he hardly had time to think that yes, it was going to swallow him up just as it had Riley.
He didn’t have the oxygen to scream, or he would have. Instead, he was silent as he was engulfed by the black hole of the torus.
He emerged in the atmosphere of Titan, falling toward the surface.
Turning back, Jeff saw another torus – or the same one – disappear behind him in thick yellow smog. At one-tenth Earth’s gravity, he knew he shouldn’t be plummeting so quickly. It felt like he had jumped off a ludicrously tall building on Earth.
As he turned back around, dark, massive shapes moved in the fog on both sides. The thick yellow haze parted briefly to give a hint of hard black material, much like that on the exterior of the torus, yet on a gargantuan scale, as if the impossibly tall skyscraper from which Jeff imagined himself jumping had uprooted and floated freely in the upper atmosphere.
With his powerless suit, there were no HUD lights to cast reflections on the interior of his face shield. There was also no temperature regulation. Jeff’s thin breaths fogged the polycarbonate in fleeting blooms. It pained him to breath the diminishing oxygen trapped inside the suit, his chest stabbing with each inhalation and burning every time he exhaled.
The atmosphere thinned, transitioning from a yellow soup to a flowing ochre mist.
With increased visibility, Jeff could see why he was falling so quickly. Another torus awaited him below, its walls transparent and spinning around its black core.
He fell into it silently and popped out of another one a kilometer above Titan’s glistening white surface. Anything in his stomach would have lurched its way out of his mouth from the way his organs twisted every time he passed through one of the artifacts, yet all he could do was fight back a gag reflex and waste precious air by breathing heavily for a few seconds.
The surface was as clear as Earth’s on a cloudless summer day, despite the blanketing atmosphere. Light from the distant sun refracted off nitrogen crystals trapped within the yellow smog, illuminating the ice-covered surface.
A vast hydrocarbon lake stretched out directly beneath him, its gray edges touching razored shores of water-ice tundra. In the distance, a towering cryovolcano spewed ice and water high into the air.
Jeff’s rate of descent slowed noticeably half a kilometer above the hydrocarbon lake. He was close enough to see white-capped waves on its surface, formed by a st
rong, westerly wind.
Dark structures dotted the landscape of Titan, and moving among them were many tori, hovering over the surface, unimpeded by the moon’s reduced gravity. The structures were clusters of various-sized black arches all criss-crossing and lying on top of each other, as if gigantic atoms had frozen half-out of the ice.
The tori tended to the structures, adding arches here and platforms there. Jeff watched as one rested parallel to the surface, then gently rose into the air. Threading from its black core was the arch of a structure. As the torus moved along its curved path, the arch appeared from its center, as if being sketched or molded into existence.
Many of the structures were clustered near the shore of the hydrocarbon lake. From his vantage point, Jeff thought it looked like a small village.
He was only able to manage a breath every couple of seconds. His lungs compressed with each exhalation, and darkness played at the edge of his vision. The hydrocarbon lake slowly drew closer. If he didn’t slow down, he thought dreamily, he would hit it soon.
Focusing on the nearest structure on the shore’s edge, Jeff saw a figure in an orange suit walking on one of the arches. He tried to rub his blurring eyes but his hands thumped against his face shield. The orange figure pushed off the arch and drifted into the air in a prolonged jump, deftly alighting on a taller arch. It knelt down and opened some kind of panel, then dropped inside, out of sight.
Two more orange suited figures crawled over the arches of another structure. Another emerged from the void in the center of a torus. It was joined by additional figures wearing red. Some of them walked on the arches, others hovered about, seemingly propelled by whatever mechanism powered the tori. Looking around at the structures that dotted the wind-swept dunes of the icy tundra, Jeff counted dozens of orange and red suits.
One of the orange-suited figures pushed off the icy surface and hovered across the lake, moving toward a rising structure on the other side. It was only a few meters above the water, and the closer Jeff got, the more it looked like he was going to crash into its back.
