by Graeme Hurry
‘I.e. not a lousy rig captain.’ He wanted to spit. ‘You handle these claims a lot?’
‘No, this is a first.’ After a pause, ‘I think the first, in fact.’
‘Well. You know they’re charging me with criminal negligence in the deaths of my crew and the crew of the Interceptor 7. Doesn’t that put holes in the Acts of God explanation?’
‘Maybe. But as I understand it, your story does contain elements of the extraordinary, and mine is a separate investigation. I’m not focusing on the incidentals.’
‘Oh good. Is ‘incidentals’ the company word for it?’
The left corner of the investigator’s mouth twitched. ‘You’ve been through some terrible things,’ she said after a moment. ‘This will go much more quickly if we stay as far from sentiment as possible.’ No irony in her voice, but no real sympathy, either. Lech thought of a newscaster.
‘Sure,’ he answered, and looked out the window. ‘So.’
She tapped her pad twice with a stylus.
‘So,’ he said again, ‘your first time out with this business and you’ve got ‘elements of the extraordinary.’ You know there’s no evidence of the things I saw on Castalia, right?’
She nodded.
‘So where do we start?’
‘Let’s start with a personal narrative.’
* * *
The man at the flight console sucked in his breath and grinned. ‘Hey Lech — do asteroids dream of eccentric sheep?’
‘What the hell is wrong with you?’
‘What? I like funny.’
‘No you don’t, you kill it.’ He pressed the intercom. ‘Neeru?’
‘Yes?’ came a female voice over the comm.
‘Tell David he’s not funny.’
A pause, then she answered, ‘It would make me feel better if I knew someone were monitoring the drill ops.’
‘Someone is,’ David said. ‘I’d feel better if we could disengage the umbilicus without two people and a, what is it you used, a hand wrench?’
A second female voice, Christina, responded, ‘You want to complain, you come out here and do it yourself. I don’t replace servos for fun.’
‘We love you, Chris,’ Lech said, then added, ‘and Neeru.’ He was grateful for the diversion of an unforseen repair — over the past decade, the jobs had become alarmingly automated. So much skill was built into the machines now that his crew had been reduced from six to four, and David Liu, his IT specialist, was ordinarily the most active of them. Lech, like his mechanic Christina Ibarra and his navigator, Neeru Bonjani, spent more time babysitting processes than performing calculations or manning equipment.
Neeru prompted David to try the disengage again. He pressed a button and reported an error message back to her, only to be interrupted by an alarm buzz and an indicator light on the console to his right.
‘Hold the presses,’ Lech said.
‘Is that a drill stall?’ Neeru asked.
‘Yeah. It’s — hold on.’ For a second Lech was too startled by the information on screen to speak. ‘It’s an auto shut-off? Looks like it hit a… cavern or something.’
‘A what?’ David leaned into the screen. ‘A zero-density space,’ he said with frank disbelief.
‘Video feed.’ Lech cut the alarm and sent the drill cam feed to the monitor in front of them. The image was dark, obscured by the clumps of dust, ice, and rock in front of the lens. ‘The harvesters fell behind. There’s too much debris. Neeru, I’m going to relieve you two.’
‘Okay.’
‘Give me a minute to get into a suit, then go check out the site.’
Outside, Lech anchored his tether to an eye hook abutting the airlock and checked it with a tug. Around him the asteroid surface was bright, with hard shadows cut from the array of the rig and service installations. The de-spin crew that had surveyed and prepped Castalia for the operation before the Arrigato’s arrival had given them a solid face to the sun — enough juice to run the rig and charge the batteries, and with the reflectors, enough heat to melt ice to vapor and cook volatiles out of the mining slag.
It was important that every crew member take regular space walks, Lech thought, to remind them that no amount of routine, procedure, or technique ever made the job any safer, ever made them less vulnerable and alone. One look at the perilously close and lumpy horizon of the rock, pock-marked like a skin disease, and usually all Lech could think of was the paralyzing black. In training, Lech’s instructor had told them Keep your eyes on your work or it will swallow you. Lech used to call it a ‘maw’ or a ‘monster.’ A miner he hated had once called it, ‘The Great Bitch,’ as though space were responsible for the man’s divorce. But personification seemed pointless to Lech now — space was just too empty to be a thing.
Ahead of him Lech could see the outline of Neeru and the shorter Christina drifting along the guide cable to the mining site. He grabbed hold of the hull and pulled himself along to the juncture where the umbilicus from the bulk processor fed the liquid O2 harvested from the asteroidal ice into the rig, for fuel and injection into the air mixture. Its locking mechanism had failed, meaning without repairs it would have to be disconnected manually for the return trip.
Above the trunk line, the panel in question was still open, Neeru and Christina’s work unfinished. A magnetic utility bag was stuck to the hull.
‘Chris, where’d you leave this?’ Lech asked her over the comm as he opened the bag.
‘Uh, servomotor’s in place, but we might have some socket damage or power supply failure. I couldn’t —’
‘A moment,’ Neeru broke in. ‘We’re at the site now.’
‘What do you see?’ Lech asked while probing the servo socket with a voltimeter.
From Christina, ‘Hold up a sec, Lech. We’ve got a lot of debris.’
Lech waited.
‘Looks like the harvesters stalled,’ she continued. ‘There’s a… opening.’
‘I think I can fit through there,’ Neeru said.
‘Jeez, it’s an opening into the rock,’ came David from the flight deck comm. ‘How does that happen?’
Lech kept working, probing the electrical lines for a break.
‘Give us a second, we’re going to climb through,’ Neeru said.
They’d left their voice lines open, so Lech could hear their breathing pick up with whatever exertions took them through the opening. A moment later, both of the women gasped.
‘What —’ from Neeru.
Christina said, ‘Jesus. Oh god.’
From David, ‘Christina, go back, what is that, go back,’ in quick succession.
‘What the hell does it look like, David?’
‘What is it?’ Lech said sharply. He could hear the women’s rapid exhales colliding with the glass of their faceplates. Christina took in air in gulps.
‘Lech,’ Neeru said, ‘there’s some kind of —’
‘Get away from it,’ Christina barked.
‘Someone show me,’ Lech said in frustration.
A heads-up display of the video from Neeru’s helmet cam blipped onto Lech’s faceplate. The image was awash in digital noise in the low light and shaking inside the frame, in sync with her heavy breathing. Most of the space was too dark to see, but scatterings of floating debris were everywhere. Lech followed the lines of the the women’s flashlight beams to something in the middle of frame, and his breath caught.
He saw human bodies.
‘We have two humanoid — human — males and two human females,’ Neeru broke in, ‘ah, I’m sorry… laying, or arranged parallel —’
Lech swore silently.
‘— as if sleeping. Naked, ah, no covering of any kind.’ Her words trembled and came between deep inhales. ‘Young, maybe twenties or thirties. Completely hairless. Hard to tell by their skin, but, ah, maybe Islander or Mediterranean or —’
Almost to himself, Lech said, ‘Why are their mouths open?’
‘Christina,’ David broke in, ‘you need to calm your
breathing. You are hyperventilating pure oxygen.’
She tried to speak and barely managed the words, ‘I can’t.’
‘Lech, she’s going to pass out,’ David said.
‘Get out of there,’ Lech said.
From Neeru, ‘Yes. Yes. Lech, she’s curling up on herself, I think she’s going to throw up —’
‘Hold on, Chris.’ Lech slapped the winch on his belt and reeled back to the airlock, then switched his tether to the guide cable and kicked off the hull with both legs as hard as he could. ‘Get her out of that space, Neeru. I’ll be right there.’
On the cramped flight deck, Lech and his crew sat strapped to their chairs in silence. Christina had her arms wrapped around her stocky frame, head down. Clammy skin under Neeru’s eyes made her look drawn and gaunt, with a crease between her eyebrows, eyes distant. David’s broad shoulders were hunched inward, and he was turned away from the group, staring at a display.
‘Obviously,’ Lech began slowly, ‘we’re going to cease drill ops.’
Silence. No one looked at him.
‘Company’s probably got some kind of regs for…’ he paused to find the right word. ‘… anomalies, like this is, but I don’t know what they are yet.’
‘They’re going to quarantine us,’ Neeru broke in quietly.
‘You shut that up,’ Lech told her loudly, and he pointed his finger at her face. ‘They’ve got no reason to quarantine us.’
‘They’re dead bodies,’ David said without turning around.
‘They appear to be,’ Neeru corrected him.
‘Appear?’ Lech said. ‘They’re naked in space, you want to tell me they’re alive?’
David turned around. ‘They could be covered in jello and it wouldn’t be any stranger than the fact that we found them inside a sealed chamber on an S-class rock that’s had no human contact before us.’
He said it matter-of-factly, one of his characteristic info dumps. Lech never tolerated them well when stress was high. ‘I didn’t ask you to tell me how weird it is, ‘ he said. ‘It’s not really our business, anyway. The job is ore.’
Christina looked up and laughed like she’d heard a bad joke. ‘The job? You think the job leaves any room for whatever those things are? Why don’t we just leave, let corporate deal with it?’
‘We can’t leave without permission,’ Lech told her, and she scoffed and looked away. He continued. ‘That’d be a serious demerit situation. Besides, we’re not in any danger if we leave things where they are.’
From Neeru, ‘How do you know that?’
Lech stared at her for a second. ‘What do you mean?’
‘I mean we have no information,’ she said evenly. ‘It doesn’t make any more sense for them to be dead bodies than it does for this to be a prank, or a shared hallucination, or something worse. We might be in some kind of danger, but there’s no way to know based on what we have.’
‘So what? You do the best you can. David, get a comm buoy up. I want a confidential with Ceres.’
David turned back to the console.
‘What are you going to tell them?’ Neeru asked.
‘A clip from the footage with a fucking big flashing ‘PLEASE ADVISE.’’ His right hand placed the words across the air in front of him.
‘Lech,’ Neeru said a little louder, ‘we’ve got line-of-sight with the earth.sol gateways and more than enough power for a solid transmit. Why not send a bundle to one of the labs?’
The suggestion confused him so much that at first he didn’t know how to respond. ‘A lab? Why would I do that?’
She frowned. ‘It’s perfectly reasonable. We’ve seen something that needs an explanation, and the people best equipped —’
He had it figured it out before she finished the sentence. ‘No, this is you. You just want to put your name on something big so you can get published or something —’
‘That’s not it at all,’ she answered, with barely maintained composure, he could see.
‘Really? What’s a lab going to tell us about bodies on a rock?’
‘Nothing. But they might be able to tell us how that chamber formed. It’s not something that happened during accretion. There was no outgassing, so it’s unlikely it was caused by any kind of combustion or melting, and I can’t think of any technology that could —’
Lech closed his eyes. ‘Shut up.’
They all looked at him.
‘Everyone out. I’m going to ask Ceres for clearance to debark and then we’re sitting tight inside this rig until we hear back. We’re not going anywhere near the site unless we get word to do otherwise. Clear?’
They were slow to respond, but David and Christina acknowledged him. Neeru looked at the floor.
‘Neeru?’
She nodded without facing him.
‘Good.’
His crew filed off the deck, leaving him alone with the rig’s ambient electrical hum and the looming silence of space on the other side of the front window. He made his way to the communications console and called up Neeru’s and Christina’s footage. Of the two, Neeru’s was more useful. She got closer to the bodies than Chris, and in general she always maintained an awareness of her suit cam, turning her torso instead of her head, so that the record always showed what occupied her attention.
After clipping an appropriate portion of the video and appending his message to it, he dropped it in the transmit queue and set the rig to standby mode for the sleep cycle. He did not look out the front window again before leaving the deck for his cabin.
Nine cubic meters awaited him — if it had been a closet, it would have had ample room for shoes. He sealed the cabin hatch behind him and undressed immediately. Nakedness made him feel human, a kind of defiance to the pressure-sealed sterility of the miner’s life. His other defiance, nestled carefully into the lining of his sleeping bag, was the only breach he ever made of company policy.
He pulled a clear, unlabled eyedrop bottle with a narrow spout from a one-inch opening in the seam at the bag’s bottom right corner. Slip, as most people called it, was widely known as a spacer’s drug. The active molecule was designed for perfect absorption, meaning nowhere near enough of it entered the urine to be detected by the analysers installed in most corporate spacecraft. Its liquid vector meant none of the complications of combustion and inhalation in the synthetic life-support atmospheres. Its users rarely showed outward signs of their addiction. Companies struggling for a clean workforce were fighting a losing battle.
Lech had first tried it at twenty, with a girl he was seeing on Tabriz Ring in Mars orbit. She’d dropped some under her tongue and into the tear ducts of each eye and a moment later shivered along her entire body and went slack, her jaw hanging open and her eyes staring past the ceiling. Afterwards she’d responded to his touch with extreme pleasure, and he made sure they both took it frequently when they were together.
He remembered himself at twenty as though he’d watched it on screen rather than living it. His sense of self depended on a feeling of continuity with his past, but it was so difficult to mark time out in the black that it didn’t feel like past anymore — it felt like stories from a stranger. He was constantly a voyeur watching one man change into another.
The slip, at least, had stuck with him. He took his three drops and felt the reassertion of parts of himself that work always managed to turn off. He found also that if he took it before sleep, he stood a good chance of lucid dreaming, which he hoped for tonight to quiet thoughts of bodies confined to rocks in the middle of empty space. Slackened in his cocoon, he fell asleep and dreamed of sex and earth.
Lech appreciated the centripetal gravity of the holding cell. He liked watching the investigator set her stylus down on a table, liked seeing the tail of her tied-back hair lay flat against her neck. His own weight, defined by the press of the chair against his buttocks, thighs, and back, was a comfort to him even if he couldn’t connect it to solid ground. Months on a job was a long time to spend in the tiny gravities of
the asteroid belt, a long time to spend falling through nothing.
The investigator of course reminded him that the Arrigato’s computer held no record of the footage of Neeru and Christina’s sighting, nor of the clip of it he had sent to Ceres, which, no, he could not explain, and yes, he was aware did not help his case. He suspected the records had been erased remotely by the Interceptor 7, and when he voiced this she responded that the Interceptor’s blackbox had recorded no interaction with the Arrigato’s computer. He did his best not to press it.
She was more interested in how his crew had responded when the company had denied his debark request and ordered them to remain inside the rig until the Interceptor could relieve them. They were to leave the rig behind with the team that arrived and take the Interceptor in instead. He told her, ‘Not well,’ and watched her note it down.
Then she asked him, ‘Can you elaborate also on why Ms. Bonjani might have advocated for contacting a research station instead of following company policy?’
‘You’ve read her file, right? She’s a doctoral student. Cosmology.’
She glanced at her pad. ‘Didn’t that overqualify her for her position on the Arrigato?’
Lech laughed. ‘It hugely overqualifies—’ He stumbled over the tense. ‘Overqualified her. Most of the heavy nav lifting is done by the computer.’
The investigator waited.
‘But… she wanted work in an offworld lab. So many PhDs these days and so little grant money, she thought space experience would help her chances with the selection committees.’
‘You believe she wanted to contact a lab to curry favor with a research council?’
Lech leaned back and sighed. ‘Actually no. She wasn’t like that. I think it’s that she was bored, and this was the first thing to grab her since she was hired.’
‘She was bored?’
‘She loved space,’ he said, drawing out the ‘o’ with minor contempt. ‘And she loved the rocks. But she hated the work. Thought it was, I don’t know — soul-crushing. She used to take notes on the stuff we dug up, but of course we didn’t have any real research equipment, so it must have felt like trying to type with boxing gloves.’
