Mission One

by Samuel Best

  He didn’t.

  He passed right by the figure, who wore an orange Mark IV Constellation Suit. The helmet had a darkened face shield instead of the usual golden sun visor. Etched in clean black letters in the nameplate over the face shield was the name RILEY.

  The figure ignored Jeff as he dropped into the lake feet-first, swallowed by an abyss far more terrifying to him than the cold vacuum of space. The liquid attacked his suit, hammering him with ungodly cold.

  As he took the last gulp of oxygen in his disintegrating suit, a torus materialized in the black depths below, rising slowly like the eager maw of some alien nightmare.

  Noah slowly pulled off his headset and dropped it on Rick’s workstation. He had been watching the display wall for hours, waiting with diminishing optimism for some word from Jeff Dolan.

  A lonely representative from the Sheriff’s Department poked around the conference room, the last of a cadre that had swept through the building after Frank was arrested. The excitement of their inspection quickly abated once the officers scanned Frank’s computer and found archived messages regarding Michael Cochran, Rick Teller, and another employee who had disappeared under mysterious circumstances from the old Diamond Aerospace facility near Baikonur.

  Kate left shortly after most of the officers had departed, as soon as Ming called in from North Star to say that she and Gabriel were safely through their first major burn and probably had enough fuel for half of a second. Now that they were back on a standard delay, Mission Control only buzzed to life every other hour or so during the status updates.

  Noah stood and cracked his back, looking around the disheveled room. Food wrappers and empty overturned coffee cups littered the floor. Half the workstation monitors rested at crooked angles, and the other half were dark.

  The display wall showed two sets of vitals: Lieutenant Ming’s and Dr. Silva’s. Both were in the green. Silva had awoken briefly to hydrate and ask about Jeff before passing out again.

  Noah took stock of the present employees as he walked to the back of the room and climbed the stairs to the viewing platform. Most of them had stayed through the debacle with Frank Johnson, no doubt spurred on by the perseverance and loyalty of their department heads. Noah would have to remember to give everyone a raise before the next payout, even though the mission didn’t go exactly as planned.

  Rick Teller had called in his resignation when Riley was being turned inside-out by the torus, and Noah couldn’t blame him. How Rick had evaded Frank’s goon squad was beyond the grasp of his most acute guesswork.

  Noah doubted he would ever see Kate Bishop again.

  She had left without a word, walking from the building in a daze. She sat in her car in the parking lot for a long time, staring forward, still as a statue. Then she started her car and drove away. It was the most uneventful resignation Noah had ever encountered, if in fact it was a resignation at all. Yet something about the finality of her absence told him she was finished with Diamond Aerospace.

  Noah rode his private elevator to the top floor and stood at the threshold, staring at his ostentatious desk. He had ordered Frank’s to be broken apart and hauled away shortly after his arrest. Not that he needed the extra space on the viewing platform – he just didn’t want any reminders of such a dark time for his company.

  Yet hadn’t Frank been doing what he thought was right? It was certainly true that he had pushed Noah to make uncomfortable decisions in the past – decisions which ultimately ended up benefiting the company.

  He stewed over the moral conundrum as he walked to his desk and sat down, feeling as if he were acting out predetermined motions instead of doing something purposeful. There was no real reason for him to be in his office – he simply didn’t want to be on the operations floor. The image of the broken torus haunted his mind, as he knew it would for years to come. He had been so close to something with Titan – so close to altering the course of human history for the better with new technology that he could smell the changing winds.

  Then it had slipped through his fingers like so much sand.

  He didn’t regret choosing the crew over the mission, even though only half of them survived. Anyway, the damn torus probably would have swallowed half of Earth before he could figure out a way to unravel its mysteries.

  The words fold-space stuck in his mind like darts in a wall – a tease from Dolan after exiting the torus. The lost prospect of near-infinite storage rooms occupying the same physical location sent shivers of wonder coursing through his body. Whoever had built the torus had somehow harnessed the ability to manipulate dimensional space. Remarkable.

  He sighed, remembering the old adage about spilled milk.

  What’s done is done, he thought.

  His desk phone beeped, and he pushed the intercom button.

  “Sir, I thought you should know that Riley’s feed is still active,” said his assistant.

  “I’d rather not look at the shattered torus right now, Neil, but thank you.”

  “I think you should see it, sir, even though it’s on a massive delay. It’s not what you think.”

  Noah had earlier ordered Riley’s feed stricken from the display wall in Mission Control. He thought it rude to look through the lens of a dead man. Now, he instructed Neil to patch the feed to his monitor.

  Riley’s camera feed was indeed active as the commander’s body fell through a dense yellow fog.

  “Sever the feed everywhere else,” Noah said quickly. “Even you, Neil. Turn it off.”

  Neil grumbled, then said, “Done.”

  He hung up and watched as Riley’s body emerged from the lowest barrier of Titan’s atmosphere, his camera panning across the alien landscape below.

  Noah’s breath caught in his throat. He leaned closer to the monitor, his eyes filled with wonder.

  Kate sipped coffee on her back porch, a warm, salty breeze teasing her hair. It was a cloudy day in Cape Canaveral. The usual afternoon storms had rolled in early, leaving behind wet sand and a gray horizon.

  She didn’t let her gaze drift too high into the sky – she wasn’t ready to look up that far quite yet. Instead she focused on what was right in front of her. Since she had left Diamond Aerospace, she started a garden. Kate hadn’t been able to think of anything else to do. She didn’t want to look for another job so soon, though she had several interesting leads. Rick had promised to introduce her to his new boss over at Deep Black, an upstart private space company that was rumored to be gunning for investor capital.

  She took a sip from her mug and rubbed a tomato plant leaf between her fingers. The rest of her meager garden was faring well enough, but the tomatoes really seemed to thrive.

  The wind picked up and blew stinging sand against her cheek. She turned away, closing her eyes. When she looked out toward the ocean, she noticed people running. Even in Florida’s stormy weather, you couldn’t keep a tourist from their day at the beach.

  A family of four, two parents and two young girls, had gathered around something on the shore. Gray waves lapped over the splayed orange form of–

  “Oh my God,” Kate whispered.

  She dropped her coffee mug and leaped over the low fence hedging her garden, pounding across the wet sand with bare feet. The wind plastered her blue t-shirt to her skin. Sand sprayed up from her feet and splattered against her jean shorts.

  The two girls were pointing at the helmeted, orange-suited figure and talking loudly to their parents. The father knelt next to the figure as Kate burst forward, nearly bowling him over.

  “Please!” she said.

  She fell to her knees in the wet sand. The face shield was too dark to see through. With shaking hands, she touched the nameplate on the helmet that read DOLAN. She pushed against the Explorer I mission patch on the shoulder of the suit, terrified there would be no occupant.

  Someone was inside.

  “Daddy?” asked one of the girls, an edge of fear in her voice.

  The parents hurriedly led the young girls awa
y.

  The tide washed in, pushing Jeff’s orange space suit a few inches farther onto shore. Kate probed the seal of his helmet with shaking hands, feeling that it was intact. She slid the helmet’s seal lock to the side and gently pried it off. Water dripped from the inside, spattering against Jeff’s peaceful face.

  His eyes were closed; his face ashen. She touched his cold cheek with the back of her fingers. He wasn’t breathing. Then she covered her hands with her mouth, knowing she was about to cry.

  Jeff coughed and spasmed, his limbs thrashing in the surf, and Kate backed away, unsure what to do. He sucked in air and his eyes popped open, looking around wildly. He noticed Kate and went still, panting as if he’d just awoken from a nightmare. She knelt at his side and he blinked up at her, squinting in the daylight.

  Kate bent lower and pressed her forehead against his, tears dripping down her cheeks to splash against his as she laughed through her sobs. Jeff reached up and held the back of her head, pressing them harder together. She finally sat up so she could look at him. His short hair was soaking wet.

  Jeff looked down at himself as the tide washed over the legs of his suit. It looked brand new, as if he had just put it on for the first time.

  “I thought I was drowning,” he said. “How did I get here?”

  Kate shook her head, looking over his suit in disbelief. “I thought you’d tell me.”

  “Where are the others? Ming and Gabriel.”

  “On their way home. You made it back first.”

  “But they’re okay?”

  “Last I heard, yes. They still have five months to go.”

  He sat up, patting the neck of his suit.

  Kate found the zipper for him and ran it down one side of his torso before it took a right turn over his stomach. He peeled open the outer layers to reveal his bare chest. He looked down in confusion as he probed the unscarred flesh over his ribcage.

  “What’s wrong?” Kate asked.

  He looked behind him, at the ocean, then at his left arm. His wrist pad was missing. “I was falling.”

  Lightning cracked in the distance, spiderwebbing over the Atlantic.

  “Toward Earth?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “Titan. The torus, it – it took me…” He squeezed his eyes shut and held a palm to his temple. “I can’t remember.” Then his eyes popped open. “Wait. Yes, I can. I fell into a lake.”

  “A lake on Titan?”

  “A torus came for me. They function as builders, or gateways…I don’t really know how to describe it.”

  “They?” Kate asked.

  His eyes darted back and forth as he became excited. “I was pulled through the atmosphere by a series of them. I saw…oh, Kate, you won’t believe what I saw!”

  She helped him shrug out of his pack and stand on unsteady legs, surprised he’d been able to get off the ground wearing the heavy suit. Water dripped from the orange fabric as he took his first steps in the wet sand. He put his arm around her shoulders, and she wrapped hers around his chest.

  “Tell me everything,” she said as they slowly walked toward her apartment. Lightning split the sky over the ocean, followed by a rumble of distant thunder.

  Behind them, Jeff’s helmet floated in the surf, its darkened face shield looking out to sea.

  FROM THE AUTHOR

  Hello, dear reader. What did you think of the book? How about that ending? I tried to infuse a sense of scope and wonder into what Jeff saw as he fell through Titan’s atmosphere. I hope it raised some interesting questions for you to ponder later over pizza or lima beans or rehydrated beef cubes.

  If you enjoyed it, might I ask that you please consider leaving a review on Amazon? Other than your purchase (for which I’m very grateful), it’s the single best way to ensure that I keep more awesome science fiction books coming your way. More reviews = better rankings = higher visibility = more good stories for everyone.

  Thank you, thank you, thank you for taking the time to read Mission One. As you are reading this very sentence, I’m hard at work on my next science fiction novel. You can sign up for my newsletter to be alerted when it’s available on Amazon.

  If you’d like to chat about the book, or anything else, you can follow me on Facebook, catch me on Twitter, and/or send an email to samuel@sam-best.com. I look forward to hearing from you.

  Thank you once again for embarking on this thrilling mission with me. See ya next time.

  -Samuel

  This book and parts thereof may not be reproduced in any form, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopying, or otherwise—without prior written permission of the author.

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any similarities to actual persons, organizations, and/or events is purely coincidental.

  MISSION ONE Copyright © 2017 by Samuel Best

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

  Launch

  The Voyage

  The Artifact

  Author Notes