by Mark Anson
‘Coming!’
Clare went up to her pony, her eyes shining. He backed away slightly, then let her approach him. She spoke softly to him as she ran her hand over his neck, and turned to her father, tears in her eyes.
‘Thank you,’ was all she managed, and her father nodded, not trusting himself to speak. Instead, he turned to her mother, who was coming up with the saddle.
‘This is a present from me,’ she said, as she came through the gate. Here, you take the saddle pad.’
They put the saddle and bridle on together. Clare’s hands worked as she always knew they would; she had lived this moment so many times in her imagination, as she took lessons in Mrs. Braun’s riding school, imagining what it would be like to have her own pony.
Her mother gave her a leg up, and stood back by the gate, trying to conceal her anxiety. Her husband put his arm round her shoulder and said something, and her mother relaxed and smiled, and Clare made the pony walk on.
‘You were right about those stirrup leathers; they aren’t too long for her,’ he said quietly to her mother as they watched her walk round the yard.
‘She’ll be out of those in a year, Blake, you just wait.’
‘She’s got your long legs,’ he said, and kissed her on the forehead, and she reached over and held his hand as Clare broke into a trot. She grinned at her mother and father, stood by the gate, and they waved back at her, and stood there, frozen in her childhood.
The image faded to monochrome, and the memory burned up slowly like an old photograph in the fire, her mother and father standing there by the gate, as the picture twisted, blackened and was consumed.
When Clare had chosen to go to the USAC Academy against her mother’s wishes, her father had supported her; the only time she had ever been aware of dissent between her parents. And how … proud of her he had always been.
She knew he wouldn’t have had it any other way; he had wanted her to go on the interception mission. Had he known how ill he was? Possibly. Would he have told her even if he knew? Never. And yet in the lonely watch of the night, the small voice whispered in her head: you should have been there.
She was dreading having to put together a message to her mother. Whatever could she say, that would bring any comfort to her in her grief, when she could hardly cope with her own? She started to form the words in her head, and realised how useless they were. Better to say nothing until she had some inspiration, or some clichés and platitudes to string together into sentences. Perhaps there was a locker full of them, somewhere on the ship: USELESS PLATITUDE STORAGE.
She had several hours still before Collins would take over. It was unhealthy for her, she knew, but she couldn’t help but wallow in her misery and despair. She wasn’t given to bouts like this, but this time, this time – it was more than she could take. She finally gave up and let the tears come, and let them keep on coming until the black wings of tiredness folded round her, and her head fell back into the headrest and she fell into an exhausted sleep.
‘Hey.’
Clare snapped awake. Collins was sitting alongside her in the copilot’s seat. She struggled upright in her seat, sought out the time, and swore under her breath. She had been asleep for four hours, way past when she should have woken him.
‘I’m sorry; I’m late to my post.’ Collins smiled ruefully. ‘I guess we were both tired.’
‘We’ll both be more than tired if we haven’t acknowledged a transmission,’ she said, scrolling quickly through the radio log for any urgent signals. She felt wretched, while Collins looked refreshed and alert.
‘I can do that,’ he offered. ‘Go get some sleep.’
‘I’ve had some sleep,’ she snapped, ‘we’re on a mission, not an airliner.’ She regretted saying it the moment the words were out of her mouth, but Collins said nothing, just busied himself with checking their position and status.
Plenty of signals, but nothing marked urgent. She opened them all, to let them know she had received them. Okay. She closed her eyes, and breathed deeply in and out before speaking:
‘Right. I need to bring you up to speed. Command have responded to my message. I’ve sent them the ship’s log for analysis, and I’ve taken a quick look at it myself. It looks like there was some kind of incident around Jupiter that upset the ship’s systems, triggering the emergency revival sequence. There’s not much beyond that, except that something happened during the revival sequence that seems to have sent the entire crew into some kind of … shared psychosis, and the drawings we’ve seen appear to be part of it.’
‘Shared psychosis? What do you mean?’
Clare moved her head from side to side. ‘I’m no expert. But the way the captain talks, it’s as if he’s been converted to a cause. They seem to believe that there’s something on Psyche, some … gateway or other …’ she waved her hands uncertainly.
‘Gateway? Is that what’s in the drawings?’
‘Look, I don’t know what to make of it. Take a look yourself and see what you think; I’ve tagged the video reports. Thing is, they want us to search for the lander. Mordecai is—’ she stopped abruptly, realising that neither of them had checked on him for hours. ‘Shit.’
She turned to the console, punched up the video monitors for the Ulysses, and cycled through them. Mordecai was nowhere to be seen, but there were no monitors on the third deck, which was where he was most likely to be.
She tried the intercom: ‘Doctor Mordecai. Doctor, can you respond?’
They waited for several seconds, and she exchanged glances with Collins. ‘I’ll go check on him. You stay here.’ She got up from her seat. She felt cold, and her neck muscles were stiff from sleeping in the seat.
She shrugged on a jacket over her flight suit to keep herself warm, and began the climb up the central ladder towards the airlock. As she climbed higher, her weight ebbed away, and by the time she was inside the airlock, at the centre of rotation of the two vessels, she was floating. She turned around the other way, and gently eased herself backwards, ‘down’ the ladder into the Ulysses, closing the airlock door behind her.
Weight returned as she descended into the older ship. She glanced round the command deck, but Mordecai wasn’t there, and she continued down into the lounge deck.
She stopped and stared round the room. Evidently Mordecai had been busy. All the drawings had been arranged around the walls, grouped by the crew’s berths, apparently in an attempt to identify the artists. Only one berth had no drawings by it – was this Moreno’s?
The hatch into the third deck was closed. Clare stared at it for several seconds, then rapped loudly on it.
Silence. She grasped the hatch release, and swung it open.
‘Doctor Mordecai?’
A faint humming of electronic equipment came from within the chamber.
‘Doctor Mordecai, are you in here?’
There was no response, and she climbed down the ladder into the centre of the room. Mordecai was in the couch, apparently asleep, one hand lying open on the control console next to him. The memory banks around the circumference of the chamber glowed with their strange blue light. The humming sound grew stronger as she approached the couch; it was coming from the drum-shaped unit close to Mordecai’s head, but it was swung up out of the way.
One of the drawings lay open on his lap; it was one of the cruder ones, and it showed the stars in the sky above the cliff. She wondered why he had been looking at this one, when there were so many better ones in the room above.
The console by his arm showed an array of displays for the memory systems. She tilted her head sideways to look at them, but the text was incomprehensible – arcane mnemonics and symbols flowed off the screen.
She turned her attention to the glowing banks of memory modules that lines the walls. As she drew closer, she could see that the modules were filled with a clear liquid; trails of tiny bubbles showed where it flowed through the densely-packed ranks of memory chips. She gazed it the sight for several moments; the blue
light coming through the liquid had a mesmeric quality. She remembered what Mordecai had said about the chips needing to be kept cold, and reached out her hand slowly to touch—
‘Captain.’
She spun round. Mordecai was sitting up in the couch, looking at her. ‘Can I help you?’
‘I – You didn’t answer my call.’
‘I’m sorry, I must have fallen asleep.’ He didn’t smile, and his eyes flickered to the memory module next to her. ‘Captain, it’s my turn to ask that you don’t touch the equipment, I’m still working on my investigation.’
‘Sure.’ They stared at each other. The mood in the room wasn’t friendly. ‘Have you found anything?’
Something in his eyes made her feel uneasy; she felt reluctant to share everything she had seen. ‘Nothing yet. I’m still going through the logs. It’s going to take quite a while.’ She glanced at the drawing, lying next to the couch. ‘I saw your arrangement upstairs. What do you think the significance is of the drawings?’
Mordecai’s eyes were opaque, as if shutters had been closed behind them. ‘I don’t know. They all seem to be different interpretations of the same scene.’
‘Did the berth with no drawings belong to Moreno?’
‘Yes. How did you guess that?’
‘Moreno was mentioned in the logs. I have reason to believe that it was his remains we found on the command deck.’
‘Moreno …’ his eyes looked down as he thought. ‘Was there anything else?’
‘Yes – the captain referred to “the kingdom of shadows” – he seemed to be saying that they were seeking it.’
Mordecai didn’t move an eyelid. ‘The kingdom of shadows,’ he repeated slowly and levelly, ‘What do you think it means?’
‘I was hoping you could maybe tell me that. The captain said they were seeking it, “on the world of iron”. Psyche’s made of iron; he could be referring to the asteroid.’
‘Is this in the logs?’
‘Yes.’
‘Captain, can you send me the relevant extracts from the log, I would like to examine them.’
‘Sure.’ She had no intention of doing so; he could slog through the bloody file on his own.
There was a silence, while Mordecai stared back at her. His face had gone cold, as if sensing her thoughts. ‘Have you sent any copies of the drawings to Earth?’
‘Yes I have – one of the better ones.’
‘It – might be better not to send any more until I have completed my analysis of the logs.’
Clare sensed something. ‘Certainly, Doctor, but why is that? They’re just drawings, surely?’
‘Why, yes, but I believe they are giving us a vital clue as to what happened. A – group psychosis like this, is very unusual, and I am sure there is something here. I need to investigate further. In the hands of non-experts, this could be misinterpreted. We don’t want anyone jumping to conclusions and diverting attention from my investigations.’
She nodded obligingly. She had in fact sent three, but she wasn’t going to tell him that. She realised, with a sudden flash of insight, that she had crossed some threshold with him; she no longer trusted him or his motives. The thought made her feel oddly in control. ‘Doctor, is there anything else I can do for you?’
‘No – no, thank you. I think that’s it, I have everything I need down here.’
‘All right, just call on the intercom if you need anything. By the way, I’ve received orders to search for the lander if I can. I may need to move the ships to a better position.’
‘Yes.’ He nodded slowly. ‘Yes, it would be useful to know if they landed on Psyche.’ His eyes were opaque again, giving nothing away.
‘Okay.’ She turned to go. Mordecai watched her climb up the ladder, and then turned back to the memory systems console.
He noticed the drawing, where he had left it on the couch. He stopped what he was doing and leant forward to pick it up. He held it in front of him for a moment, his eyes flickering over the scene, and then put it back carefully, face-down.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Clare and Collins pored over the Ulysses’ navigation system, on the ship’s command deck.
‘How about this one?’ Collins punched up another course plan from the system memory. There were so many of them, it was bewildering. It seemed that, once they had arrived over Psyche, the crew had tried out just about every possible trajectory down to the asteroid’s surface.
‘No, see here – they didn’t develop that one any further.’ Clare sighed and sat back. They had already spent nearly two hours trying to deduce where the lander had gone, and had got nowhere. ‘Look, the most likely route they took is the last course plan they entered.’
‘It doesn’t make sense – none of the other trial plots are to that area of the surface. They’re all spread over here.’ Collins pointed to a cluster of red crosses that ran in a ragged diagonal line, from the equator to half-way to the pole.
‘How would they know where to look for it?’ she asked herself out loud. She unclipped the drawing from the control console, and stared at it again.
‘Look for what?’ Collins was staring at her. ‘You think they were looking for this?’ He indicated the drawing, incredulous. ‘Are you serious?’
Clare sighed. She knew how it would sound. ‘Look, I know this won’t make sense. One of the captain’s log entries suggests that this – artefact – is what they were looking for, and they believe it’s down there.’
Collins stared back at her, his mouth half-open. ‘This object – is on Psyche?’
She nodded glumly. ‘That’s what they seemed to believe. I think they may have been looking for it, but it’s not a random search – they were following some kind of direction.’
‘You found this out from the logs?’
‘Some of it. The rest – well, I’m just second-guessing. But these trajectory plots; don’t they look like a search pattern to you?’
Collins glanced back to the display. ‘I guess so. But –’ his eyes flicked back to the drawing in Clare’s hand ‘– this looks like a man-made object. How can it be all the way out here – on an asteroid?’
Clare shook her head. ‘I know it sounds far-fetched. But the crew seemed to believe it, and it’s their actions that we’re trying to piece together. If we could find the lander, it would explain a lot.’
Collins raised his eyebrows. ‘Okay. I’ll go along with it. I admit it looks like a search pattern, even if I don’t buy what they were looking for.’ He looked at the display, and frowned.
Eventually Clare asked: ‘If you were looking for this, how would you go about it?’
Collins didn’t answer; he was still staring at the display. Suddenly he held out his hand for the drawing. His eyes flickered over it for a moment, then he looked up at Clare. ‘Come with me.’
‘What do you think it is?’
‘I’m not sure yet. Come with me.’ He jumped up and crossed over to the central ladder, and started to climb down to the ship’s lounge deck. Clare raised her eyebrows and followed him down.
She found him standing by one of the groups of drawings that Mordecai had arranged by each berth. Collins held up the drawing in his hand and compared it to the drawings on the wall. An expression of triumph crossed his face, and he smiled.
‘Do you see it?’
Clare stared at the drawings on the wall. They all depicted the same scene, from slightly different angles; some closer, some further away. Eventually, she sighed. ‘Okay, I give up. What is it?’
Collins held his drawing next to one of the others. ‘Now do you see it?’
‘No, I really don’t. Look, will you please tell me what—’
‘Look at the stars.’
Clare looked at both drawings. ‘Oh, shit.’ Once it had been pointed out to her, it was impossible to miss. She took the drawing from Collins, walked across to another group of drawings, and compared them.
‘The stars – they’re all the same.’
‘Exactly. All the drawings that have stars in, have them in the same positions. Different artists each time, but the stars are in exactly the same place.’
‘That’s – spooky.’
‘Yeah. And if I’m not mistaken, that’s the corner of Orion. Which makes these stars here –’ he stabbed his finger once, twice – ‘not stars at all, but—’
‘Planets,’ Clare said quietly. ‘They’re planets.’
‘So if you knew or guessed which planets these were, and against the fixed stars, you’d have an observation point.’
‘Which I’d guess is on Psyche. They must have been running the calculations to figure out where it was.’
‘Right. But Psyche rotates. Unless you knew the precise time, the best you could do would be a line running round the asteroid.’
Clare thought about the line of trajectory plots they had just seen. It made sense. ‘We know from the ship’s log that they left several times in the lander – they may have been searching the terrain in all the likely places.’
‘Yeah – the gravity’s so low on Psyche, the lander could make several trips and still have plenty of fuel left. They keep going out and back, trying all the likely sites, until—’
‘Until they found what they were looking for. And then they never came back. So it’ll be that last trajectory plot in the nav log, the one some distance away from all the others. I’d say we’ve found the likely final landing site.’ Clare looked at the drawing in her hand. It seemed incredible that the crew had come this far, undergone such hardship, all on the strength of a – a vision. But what exactly had they found, down there on the surface? And why hadn’t they come back? Once again, Clare felt suddenly cold.
They both fell silent for a moment. Clare turned to the closed hatch in the middle of the deck. ‘Mordecai’s still in there, right?’
‘Hasn’t come out in all the time since we last saw him.’
‘You know what; I think we should tell Command about this first,’ she said at last.
‘Yeah; I was thinking the same. He’s been pretty wrapped up in his precious memory banks since we got here. He hasn’t shared anything with us – we don’t know what he’s doing in there.’
