by Graeme Hurry
The investigator studied him for a moment, and he couldn’t read her expression. ‘I’m confused, Mr. Karolczak,’ she said.
‘How’s that?’
‘Company records show that you’ve been an employee for twenty years.’
‘That’s right.’
‘I know that you were hired at nineteen, and since then have never been back to Earth. Not once.’
Lech swallowed. ‘Transit times to Earth can be months depending on where you start, and they don’t let you piggyback on Ceres’ orbit and call it travel time. That’s a lot of chemostasis.’
She stared at him. ‘Correct me if I’m wrong, Mr. Karolczak — don’t you hate space?’
Lech looked down at the floor to get the window out of his peripheral vision. ‘Most days, yeah. If I can even find a day,’ he laughed half-heartedly. ‘Never seen anything so unfriendly as the vacuum sky. Company’s got some Earth-side positions, project managers and so on, but they all want command hours — a lot of them — or a degree, and I don’t have one of those.’ He noticed that the investigator was not taking any notes, had set her stylus down. ‘So I figured I can log those hours quicker if I skip the Earth-side vacations and just keep my nose to the ground until I get through it.’
‘For twenty years?’
Lech nodded slowly. ‘You’d be surprised what you can get used to. Turned out home wasn’t any prettier than the rocks.’
‘I’m sorry, but I find that a little difficult to believe. Wasn’t there anyone on Earth who’d miss you?’
He inhaled deeply and held it for a few seconds, searching for words, but finally said nothing. He gave her a look he hoped brooked no argument.
After a moment she said, ‘I see.’ Then she looked at her pad. ‘What happened after you got the reply from Ceres?’
When Neeru went to David’s cabin after lights-out and asked him for his help, he told her yes almost before she finished speaking.
‘When do you want to do this? Now?’ he asked her.
His t-shirt, clearly put on in haste, was not pulled down all the way, and the bottom of it drifted above his abdomen as though suspended in water. Neeru caught herself staring, her eye drawn to the smooth ochre skin against the white shirt, and the lines of lean muscle that disappeared into his boxers. It always amazed her that he kept in such shape with months out of the year in stasis or microgravity. Sometimes it distracted her.
‘Yes.’ She cleared her throat. ‘He basically forced it when he contacted Ceres. As soon as the Interceptor gets here they’ll bar us from site and we’ll never learn what it is we found, or how it got here.’
David drifted out of his cabin into the narrow corridor and shut the hatch. ‘I don’t think they can do that. They don’t actually own anything but the ore.’
‘What do you mean?’ In the confines of the space, her face was inches from the spot where the long muscle of his neck joined the back of his jaw. She wondered if he noticed her breath on his skin, or if he could feel her body heat through his clothes.
‘Come on, Neeru,’ he said, smiling. ‘The Second Outer Space Treaty expressly forbids claims of ownership over evidence of unexplained phenom—’
‘It forbids state actors, not private entities,’ she said. ‘Corporate owns whatever it touches out here, which probably includes any work we do studying these things if we’re not careful.’
‘Wait, really? But that’s so toothless.’
‘You see my point.’
‘Yeah. Go get in a suit. I’ll head up to the flight deck.’
‘Quietly,’ she said.
‘Yeah,’ he laughed and turned to shove off in the opposite direction.
She placed her hand on his forearm, thick, warm, and hard beneath her fingers. He turned back to her. ‘And David,’ she said, meeting his eyes. ‘Thank you.’
He smiled.
Neeru had taken the MMU instead of the tether, to give her maneuverability inside the chamber once she got there. Outside the airlock, she applied a burst of forward thrust, felt it press the jet pack into her back, and went skimming above the surface of the asteroid, her motion blurring the regolith into lanes of umber beneath her feet. The tip of her boot caught a small rise as she passed over it, and clumps of dust went scattering along ballistic trajectories, Newtonian actors to impersonal forces.
She found the site unchanged since the unplanned retreat from hours before. Her heads-up display showed the opening in the rock to be large enough for her and the added bulk of the MMU, and she dragged herself through it.
‘All right, Neeru, I’ve still got you. How are you doing?’ David asked her over the comm.
‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’m going to clear some debris away from the drill, then you hit the running lights.’
In a moment the space was lit.
‘Oh,’ she said in shock. It was roughly spherical, still littered with floating regolith, and her display measured it to be about 130 cubic meters, the size of a large living room. What shocked her were the walls.
‘David, are you seeing this?’
‘I know, I know.’
She got closer and touched the surface. Dark, flecked, and almost flawlessly smooth, with minor bulges and recesses like hand-blown glass.
‘What is it?’ David asked.
‘I don’t… it could be the rock itself.’
‘What?’
‘If it were heated to melting, then flash cooled extremely rapidly. But —’
‘Like how rapidly?’
‘Space couldn’t do it alone. It would have to be done by some kind of technology.’
Silence for a moment over the comm. ‘Some kind?’
Her voice got softer. ‘There’s nothing on Earth that could do this, David.’
She turned slowly to the four bodies laying peacefully behind her.
‘Can you show me navnet data on Castalia for the past year?’ she asked.
He told her sure, and a detailed image of color-coded orbital paths overlaid her heads-up. The asteroid was marked in red.
‘What are you looking for?’ he asked.
‘Encounters.’
‘Nothing but the de-spin.’
‘I know, but I want to see what else was in its path.’
She scrubbed the timecode forward and watched the data update with the tracking of her gloved finger across the space in front of her. Measurements of the asteroid’s gravity well and those it passed through appeared in a column to the right of the orbit diagram. David was right — nothing unusual showed up anywhere along the path.
‘Maybe you need to go back further,’ he said.
She sighed. ‘How much further? How far back would I have to go to find something that I could relate to this?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘And what am I looking for,’ she said to herself.
A number flickered for an instant.
From David, ‘What was that?’
She scrubbed backward and saw it again — Castalia’s gravity well had spiked. She stared at the number like it had sprouted horns. ‘This is not too long after the de-spin crew left.’
‘Gotta be a glitch. Only lasts about a second.’
‘I’ve never heard of a navnet error that shows a spontaneous twenty-fold increase in mass, even if it is a second.’
‘I’ve never heard of a spontaneous twenty-fold increase in mass. Besides, if that were right, then the rock’s orbit would have shifted.’
True, she thought and increased the path’s resolution. But both the diagram and tracking data confirmed it — Castalia’s orbit made a miniscule shift as the result of a brief change in its acceleration.
‘This is crazy,’ he said.
‘Are you thinking what I’m thinking?’
‘What?’
She spoke softly to calm herself. ‘Spacefolding.’
‘Also crazy,’ David said.
‘So it’s appropriate, then.’
‘There is nothing you could come up with that would
be ‘appropriate.’’
‘I’m not coming up with anything. I’m just calling it like I see it. Now…’ She cleared her display and took a deep breath.
‘Are you sure you want to —’ David asked her.
‘Of course. Just keep an eye on me,’ she answered, then maneuvered herself above the bodies.
The hard light from the drill threw their features into expressionist relief with long shadows. Neeru was struck by how uniformly hairless they were — with the exception of dark eyebrows and hints of pubic hair, both the men and the women were completely bald and smooth.
‘While I’ve got them all in view,’ she said, ‘why don’t you bundle a search query of their faces?’
‘Good idea. Web?’
‘Web, public records, news feeds. Everything.’
‘Take a while to get the results this far out.’
‘I know,’ she said.
She maneuvered closer to the first male in line, then took a breath for composure. ‘Okay. They appear… healthy.’ The word sounded absurd to her as soon as she said it. ‘I can’t see any signs of tissue damage or embolism or cyanocis. Or any decomposition at all.’
‘So they didn’t die in vacuum.’
Neeru looked closer in disbelief. Behind white teeth, the man’s tongue lay flat against his bottom pallete. It looked soft. ‘No. They may even have been dropped to space temperatures in a pressurized environment.’ She shuddered. ‘I’m going to see if I can collect some kind of sample.’
A pause. ‘You’re what?’
‘Just please talk to me.’
‘Is that a good idea? What are you going to do?’
She could feel her hands shaking inside her gloves. ‘I’m going to… just let me hear your voice. Keep talking and don’t stop.’
She opened her utility bag and drew out a flathead screwdriver.
‘Um,’ David began, ‘Let’s see. I tell you what Lech said to me the other day? He said, ‘David, Mars is a shithole.’’ He spoke in Lech’s voice, and laughed. ‘’Nothing but rust-mud brick and recycled water.’’
Her breathing picked up. She drew as close to the body as she could and brought the tip of the screwdriver into the mouth, against the left cheek, then drew it away quickly and glanced at the face.
Eyes still closed, no reaction. Silently she urged herself to pull it together.
‘’Whole damn colony smells like a body shop and looks like the boring level of Hell.’’
‘That’s a pretty good Lech.’ Neeru said, though her voice was tight and she had to inhale quickly.
‘Thanks,’ David said. ‘But can you believe that?’
Again she put the screwdriver against the inside of the cheek, then appalled herself by dragging it back toward the opening with a good deal of pressure. Stiff with the cold, the facial tissues barely moved.
‘Mars has got to be one of the coolest parts of the settled solar system, and he talks about it like a dump.’
Neeru placed the screwdriver back in the bag and let go of the breath she was holding. ‘We’ve both worked with him,’ she panted. ‘He’s a good person, he just lacks imagination.’
She drew a pair of needle-nose pliers out of the bag and positioned herself over one of the females.
‘Speaking of — do asteroids dream of eccentric sheep?’
She gathered some eyebrow hairs between the pliers, planted her boot on the body, and held her breath. ‘Asteroids. That’s funny.’
She jerked out the hairs.
David yelled, ‘Shit!’
Neeru screamed at the noise and flailed, releasing the pliers. Her hand hit the joystick on the MMU and sent her spinning sideways. Her boot collided with the bag and flung tools spinning out all over the chamber.
‘Are you all right?’ David asked her.
‘What is it?!’
‘I just saw Lech on a cam. He’s awake. You need to get moving.’
Neeru reached a hand out to the wall to halt her spin. Her face was flush and hot, and she couldn’t stop shaking. ‘Damn it, David. I’ve got to get my samples.’
‘Leave it and come back for it.’
‘No, it’ll just —’
‘There’s no time. He is going to catch us.’
Neeru swore and maneuvered to the chamber opening.
Lech was waiting for her at the inner hatch.
When it opened, her face registered everything.
‘Welcome back,’ Lech said, almost placidly.
She looked at him. ‘You’re going to be angry, I know.’
‘You look terrible,’ he told her. It was true. Her hair was matted and limp, and sweat had left salt marks on her skin where it had collected and dried.
Her eyes looked left, then right, then back at him. ‘David —’
‘David told me everything and is confined to his cabin. Chris is on the flight deck. I want you to get cleaned up and meet us there.’ He saw her flinch and was surprised to find it gave him a small measure of satisfaction.
She drifted through the hatch onto deck without saying a word. Neither Lech nor Christina had strapped themselves to chairs, and Christina pushed over to Neeru’s side when she entered.
Neeru broke the silence. ‘Why is David confined to his cabin?’ she asked softly. She’d folded her arms and hunched her shoulders, as if bracing herself.
‘Stupid question,’ Lech said.
‘I’m the one who instigated it.’
‘And he’s an accessory to insubordination. Do you know he figured out how to alter the system logs to hide this from me? Your search returned no results, by the way.’
Lech could see her working out her response and anticipated her question. ‘I also had him scrub out the video you took.’
‘No.’ She closed her eyes and said something under her breath. Then she looked up at him, frustration written on her face. ‘Why would you do that?’
Lech glared at her. ‘Maybe for your protection. The Interceptor is almost here, and I’m figuring with flight time like that, it’s got to be equipped with fusion drive. Why would they send such a fast, expensive spacecraft to a low-priority mining operation?’
Neeru shook her head and exchanged a look with Christina that he couldn’t read. ‘David told me what you learned,’ he said. ‘I think we all overlooked something. We’ve been thinking we were the first to touch this rock, but that’s wrong. The de-spin crew got here before us.’
‘You think the de-spin crew magically put four bodies inside an asteroid without breaking the surface?’
‘No,’ he said, his jaw tight in anger, ‘but I do think corporate is involved, and the more we look like we know, the more they’re going to want to shut us up.’
Neeru gave him a frank stare. ‘That’s ridiculous.’
Christina chuckled. ‘I told him. Can’t trust the paranoid.’ She said it out of the side of her mouth.
‘Yeah, let’s talk about issues of trust,’ Lech yelled. He grabbed hold of the ceiling and pulled himself up so that he towered over the both of them. ‘Like I trust my orders to be followed,’ he added, his face heating up. Christina tried to position herself between Lech and Neeru, but he held up a hand to block her path.
‘I have done no harm to anyone or anything on this rig,’ Neeru yelled back at him.
‘Luckily, no, but you didn’t have enough ‘information,’’ he quoted her with his fingers, ‘to know if that would be the case. You put us in danger, and I’m the one who takes the hit for it. Not you, me.’
‘I think you need to calm down,’ Christina warned him. Her nostrils had flared, and her eyes were wide open.
‘Chris,’ he told her tightly, with a finger in her face, ‘I will not play with you. I will charge you and you will lose your post. Understand me.’
‘This is bigger than your employee record, Lech,’ Neeru said, shaking in agitation. ‘This is something strange and maybe wonderful, we don’t know. Consider what I saw out there. It could be a first extraterrestrial contact, taking a
form no one has seriously anticipated.’
Lech rolled his eyes. ‘Oh aliens, of course. Look like human beings to me, but why the hell not? Sure sounds good.’
‘I am just open to the possibilities. You’re like someone who only looks under the light when he loses something because it’s too dark to see everywhere else.’
‘It’s not our job to look. That’s what the Interceptor is for.’
‘And a minute ago you suggested they were coming to clean up evidence of a conspiracy.’ She took a few breaths. Lech glared at her but didn’t say anything. She lowered her voice and asked him, ‘What are you actually afraid of?’
A hailing chime interrupted Lech before he could speak. He pushed off toward the console and opened the channel. ‘Lech Karolczak of the Arrigato.’
‘Ladarius Walker of the Interceptor 7,’ came a deep voice over the comm. He spoke quickly and in monotone. ‘Karolczak. You the CO?’
‘Yes sir.’
‘Our ETA is forty-five minutes. Get your crew in their EVAs and prepare to evacuate your rig. Do not, I repeat, do not take any personal effects with you.’
‘What —’
‘That’s everything, Captain. Forty-five minutes.’ The channel closed.
Lech looked back at the two of them, accusingly, though he couldn’t say why.
‘You heard him,’ he said. ‘Grab David and get into your suits.’
In the prep chamber, outside the airlock’s inner hatch, the four of them were suited and locked into MMUs for the thirty-meter cross to the Interceptor’s targeted landing site. Together they crowded the space like blocks in a box, back-to-back and shoulder-to-shoulder.
No one had spoken in Lech’s presence since the flight deck, and though he couldn’t see her face because she was in front of him, he guessed Neeru was deliberately shunning him. It didn’t make sense to Lech that he should find her anger so offensive, that he couldn’t simply resign himself to her opinion. He made up his mind to talk through it completely once they were on board the Interceptor and safely under way.
Walker came back over the comm. ‘Interceptor should be docked in ten minutes, Arrigato. Exit the rig whenever you’re ready.’
