by Mark Anson
Clare was into the chamber first.
It was as she feared; Mordecai was slumped, half-out of the couch in the centre of the deck, seemingly unconscious. He seemed to have fallen away from the head unit; a shrill whine came from it, and she could see something whirring round very fast inside.
She scanned the control panel. She didn’t understand the stuff scrolling past and some of the symbols, but there was a red STOP icon at the bottom of the screen, and she hit that. The whine of the machine faded.
‘Help me get him back into the couch,’ she said to Collins.She swung the head unit out of the way and opened Mordecai’s eyelids, checked his pupils. A line of angry red puncture marks, like insect bites, ran across his forehead.
‘He’s still breathing,’ Collins said as they lifted him back upright. ‘He’s still with us.’ He snapped open the medical pack. ‘I’d suggest oxygen, what do you think?’
‘Yeah – nothing else until we know what’s happened to him. Are his airways clear?’
‘Yup.’ Collins positioned the transparent mask over Mordecai’s face and turned the oxygen on. A faint mist appeared and disappeared inside the mask, in time with his breathing.
Clare’s face was grim as she checked his pulse. ‘All right. What do we think happened here?’
Collins glanced round, and back up to the console. ‘Well I’m no expert, but it looks like he’s taken it up to maximum power.’
‘Yeah, I’d say so. I’m guessing these marks on his forehead must be something to do with the power level. What’s his blood pressure?’
‘A bit low. One thirty over eighty.’
Clare considered the situation. ‘Okay, I say we treat him as for neurological trauma. We need to make sure he’s got enough oxygen, and support the head and neck, which we’re doing. I’ll contact Command and see what they say, but I suspect they’re going to want us to cut the mission short and bring him home. Will you stay with him? Don’t touch anything else in here.’
Collins nodded, and Clare took one more glance round, and set off back up the ladder. She climbed up quickly, though the lounge deck, past the command deck, through the airlock with its cryptic message, and back into the Mesa. She didn’t waste any time, and got straight onto a secure channel to USAC Command:
‘Command, this is Interceptor three three Mesa, we have a situation. Our passenger is unconscious after locking himself on deck three and apparently exceeding maximum safe power on classified equipment there. Passenger is conscious and breathing, BP one seventy over eighty, administering oxygen. No apparent sign of any major injury. Request new orders and urgent medical advice, Mesa out.’
She flung the headset off. Damn him! These scientist types had the most impossible arrogance. Due to his selfish actions, she would probably have to abandon their mission, including any possibility of going down to the surface of Psyche, and bring him back. And getting him into stasis wasn’t going to be easy; she doubted she could do it until he had regained consciousness.
She found herself staring at the comms display. There were no messages waiting for her, which was odd; she had been expecting at least some reply to her message from last night. She frowned. Considering what she had told them about Mordecai’s actions, she assumed they’d get back to her straight away. That suggested the top brass had been consulted. The thought made her feel uneasy.
Well, they would have to get back to her after this had happened; Mordecai’s judgement could no longer be trusted. She flipped the intercom to the Ulysses:
‘Hey.’
‘Yeah?’
‘How’s our patient?’
‘Looking better. BP’s up. Still not moving though.’
‘Okay, let me know if anything changes.’
‘Sure.’
She released the switch, stared at the control console. She had an ominous, sinking feeling inside her that the mission was getting out of hand.
Well, if it is, she thought, you’d better start working on options. She pulled up the Nav page on the flight computer and started entering some rough details on a direct return. Earth wasn’t in an ideal position, but it wasn’t bad either; it looked like they could make it back inside nine months, if they had enough fuel.
If they had enough fuel … Clare’s brow furrowed as she considered fuel margins. Making this kind of extreme return trajectory always looked fine until you considered how much fuel was needed – the delta-vee requirements shot up dramatically the tighter the return ellipse was. Her eye ran down the calculations. This one pushed the margins to the limit, but it could be done. She ran a couple more options through the flight planner to be sure.
So. They could get home, with enough of the mission objectives accomplished to make it a qualified success. The next problem was, could they take the Ulysses in tow? That was a whole different ball park. The Ulysses added a large mass, but it still had fuel in its tanks. They could transfer the fuel to the Mesa, and burn the engine for longer. When she ran the calculations again, however, the trajectories and fuel margins were all red; there just wasn’t enough fuel. She tried a slower return, but that didn’t make enough difference, and then Earth started moving past the point where a direct return was feasible.
If they were to do it, they had to lose mass. That got her thinking. They could take the Ulysses’ fuel on board, and then jettison the heavy nuclear stage, and just bring the crew module back … would it work? She punched up the specifications page for the Ulysses and started making some estimates. She took quite some time; she had to keep referring to various tables to figure out how heavy the crew compartment would be in its current condition, and how much she could lighten it by jettisoning spare stores, and then trying the return calculations again.
She was deep in these thoughts when the message alert sounded.
She looked up in surprise – she must have spent longer than she’d thought. Then she glanced at the time, and saw that the message had come back in barely forty minutes. That was close to the minimum round-tip time, so they were responding urgently.
She opened the message and started listening. As she did so, a half-formed thought niggled at the back of her mind; something was wrong, but she couldn’t put her finger on it.
‘Interceptor three three, this is USAC Command. Stand by for a coded transmission, priority, AA-1, commander only.’
Her heart rate quickened as she entered her command code. Something was seriously up. The screen cleared to show the familiar face of Major General Wesley. This time, he wasn’t seated at his desk, but leaning forward into a console camera. Behind him, figures crossed back and forth against a background of video displays, and she knew he was speaking from USAC Command, deep underground back on Earth:
‘Captain Foster. We have received your message and we have urgent instructions for you. Please listen carefully and carry out these orders immediately; do not delay.
From our analysis of the ship’s log and the images you have returned to us, we have identified a significant risk to the mission if Doctor Mordecai continues his investigation. The memory engrams on board the Ulysses are corrupted and represent a significant danger if they are accessed through the equipment. You are to take the following steps: One – seal off all access to deck three, and bring Doctor Mordecai back to the Mesa. He will recover consciousness within an hour or two. Once he is conscious and his vital signs have stabilised, get him into stasis as soon as possible.
‘Two – retrieve all movable evidence from the Ulysses, including all data records. Three – undock and move to minimum safe distance, and destroy, repeat destroy the Ulysses, using one of the bombs in your inventory. We will transmit a presidential code in the next hour.’
His eyes bored into her. ‘After acknowledgement of these orders, take immediate, repeat immediate action, and confirm when these orders have been carried out.’
The image faded, and Clare found herself staring at her reflection in the blank screen, a look of shock on her face.
Destroy the Ul
ysses? But why? The orders were explicit, and they were to be carried out at once.
Suddenly, like a cloud crossing over the Sun, she realised what had been bothering her. Over forty minutes had passed, and Collins hadn’t reported back.
The intercom circuit was open, and I couldn’t help overhear …
An icy chill ran down her back, and the hairs on the back of her neck rose.
Collins.
She flicked the intercom switch.
‘Hey!’
Nothing. ‘Hey, Collins!’ she shouted again, more urgently this time. There was no response, and she stood up from the commander’s seat. She unfastened her sidearm holster, drew the gun, and pulled back the slide to check that a round was chambered.
She slipped it back into the holster, and was heading for the ladder when the deck lights blinked, as if a major load transient had occurred. She looked up in surprise. Then a muffled boom sounded from somewhere deep inside the ship, and the deck beneath her quivered.
A moment later, the high-pitched scream of the emergency alarm cut across the flight deck, and a tremendous roar of air lifted everything movable, and sucked it towards the airlock.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
The deck lights went out, and Clare’s world became a tornado of screaming air and loose objects, whirling around her in the darkness. Something smacked into her face, and she staggered, and the floor started to move, to turn under her. It became a violent motion; she was flung bodily across the width of the command deck, and crashed into the wall, knocking the breath out of her. A terrific force pinned her in place, as if she was in a training centrifuge, and then released. She scrabbled frantically for a handhold as the ship turned again and she was flung the other way.
The roar of air was fading; in her mind, she knew she had only seconds left – what was it, fourteen, fifteen? – before deoxygenated blood reached her brain and she blacked out. She didn’t need the emergency alarm, now fading into the silence of vacuum, to tell her what had happened; the Ulysses had separated from the Mesa, and all the air in her ship had exhausted into space. The ship gyrated wildly as its rotational inertia released, and she hung on grimly as the deck reversed direction and the forces tore at her again.
The red emergency lighting came on, painting the scene in a nightmare of black and crimson. She had to get to air. There was only one place in reach. She flung herself into the small bathroom nearby, and slammed the door shut behind her. It wasn’t a hermetic seal, but it had its own separate ventilation system, and it might just give her enough air to breathe. A great roar of air came from the ventilation duct above her head, and she held her nose, swallowed, and swallowed again to equalise her eardrums as the pressure built.
She felt dizzy. Shit! She was blacking out! She panted hard to get more oxygen into her lungs. Black specks swam before her eyes, and she had a sensation of falling. Of course – the ship was moving back into zero-gee. The dizziness passed, slowly, and she began to feel more normal.
The ventilator was still blowing out air, which meant there was a leak round the door, but it was holding enough pressure to breathe. Then, to her horror, she saw that the door was bulging outward; the thin metal, and the door frame itself, were bending under the pressure on this side of the door.
Think! Quickly!
Where had she left her spacesuit? Somewhere on the deck, but where? And how long to struggle into it, close the zips, and get the helmet on? Longer than fifteen seconds, that was for sure.
The door creaked, and the noise of the ventilation increased. The door was bending, opening up around the edges. It was going to burst any moment. There was only one thing for it. She took several deep breaths of air, as fast as she could, opened her mouth wide, and emptied her lungs.
The door gave a deep groan, and suddenly burst open, spinning off wildly into the command deck. The air in the bathroom exploded outwards, carrying Clare with it across the deck. She grabbed hold of the central ladder as she cannoned into it, and started pulling herself upwards, hand-over-hand, towards the airlock.
It was totally silent in the deadly vacuum. Ahead of her, at the top of the ladder, she could see the stars tumbling past through the open airlock hatch. She knew if she didn’t get the main hatch closed, or if it had been damaged, she would have no hope. Her eyes stung as her tears started to freeze, and she felt warm blood leaking from her nose as the fragile capillaries ruptured.
Come on, come on!
She was in the airlock module. The inner door flapped uselessly; it had been torn off one of its hinges. She ignored it and hauled herself over to the outer door, which hung open and appeared undamaged. She grabbed hold of it, and then suddenly, she felt her vision starting to go; the exertion must have reduced the time she had left.
With her last strength, she braced herself on one of the grab handles, and managed to pull the hatch closed. She tried to turn the locking handle, but her fingers defied her; all the strength left them and they turned to putty, and then her arms turned to water, and her vision contracted to a tunnel, in which the hatch fell away from her into a roaring, red-shot darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
16 PSYCHE (SY-kee): M-class main belt asteroid, discovered by Annibale de Gasparis on March 17, 1852. Sixteenth asteroid to be discovered and ranked eleventh most massive asteroid. Named after the Greek mythological figure Psyche. Symbol is semicircle surmounted by a star, representing the soul (psyche is the Greek word for ‘soul’).
Physical characteristics: Ellipsoidal, 240 x 185 x 145 km. Mass 2.28 x 1019 kg, approx. 0.9% of mass of entire main asteroid belt. Densest main belt asteroid and largest M-class object. Axial tilt 94.5°. Rotation period 4.192h.
Composition: Almost entirely iron-nickel. Surface is 90% metallic iron with small amounts of pyroxene. Trace amounts of water ice in crater floors, likely to be of meteoric origin.
Geology: Iron-nickel body formed from differentiation of primordial parent body. Remnants of silicate mantle material overlying surface in places, mainly pyroxene with trace amounts of olivine. Primordial terrain is strongly wrinkled, with deep valleys exceeding hundreds of metres in depth. Rift-like features in places from shrinkage cracking. Subsequent impact cratering has both ductile and brittle fracturing features characteristic of high-velocity impacts in metal.
Genesis: Psyche is the exposed iron core of unknown protoplanet approximately 650km in diameter. Principal source of enstatite chondrite meteorites found on Earth and Mars.
Exploration: Psyche orbiter, launched 2023, arrived 2028. Conducted photographic mapping of surface features, measurements of surface composition and other science experiments.
Of interest: Strong remanent magnetic field, suggesting core was at least partly molten in the past. Body is strongly reflective to radar due to metallic composition.
Orbital characteristics:
Aphelion: 3.328 AU
Perihelion: 2.513 AU
Semi-major axis: 2.921 AU
Eccentricity: 0.140
Orbital period: 4.99 yr (1823.115 d)
Mean anomaly: 323.379°
Inclination: 3.095°
Longitude of ascending node: 150.352°
Argument of perihelion: 228.047°
Excerpt from Concise Atlas of Minor Bodies of the Solar System (USAC Geological Survey, 3rd edn, 2134).
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
She heard the fluttering first.
It came from beside her cheek; a thin, high-frequency thrumming, like the beat of some insect’s wing. She waved her hand, but it didn’t go away, it just kept going.
She opened her eyes, and she was in the airlock of the Mesa. The fluttering came from a half-folded sheet of paper, trapped in the flange of the outer airlock hatch. It had prevented the hatch from closing properly and making an airtight seal, and a thin stream of air raced out past the paper, making it flutter.
She put one finger next to the paper, and it changed to a buzzing noise, but she could barely feel a breeze. So. A tiny leak, then
; nothing to worry about. She couldn’t do anything about it in any case; not without depressurising the whole ship to release one piece of paper.
How was she feeling? She was all tensed up, waiting for the pain, but none came, except a throb of discomfort if she moved her head.
She took an experimental breath, then another. The air was back in the ship; she must have managed to get the hatch closed, or at least closed enough, and the automatic repress had done the rest. The emergency alarm still wailed from inside the ship – that could wait. Was she okay? She must be okay; she was breathing, and the red emergency lighting had gone, to be replaced by the familiar white light.
She lifted her head, and saw that there was blood on the back of her hand and down the front of her overalls. She examined herself hastily for the injury, but then felt the crusting of dried blood in one of her nostrils, and realised that it was just from her earlier nosebleed, which had stopped.
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply. She had been within moments of dying from anoxia, and her limbs started to shake as she realised just how narrow her escape had been. She knew it was shock, and she tried to fight it, but her arms, and her hands, trembled uncontrollably. She desperately needed them to function, but they wouldn’t cooperate, and she let out a cry of frustration.
It made her feel better, and she did it again, and she felt a growing anger, rising to a cold fury at what Mordecai had done. He had almost certainly killed Collins, and nearly succeeded in killing her, and now he was somewhere out there, getting further and further away with every moment.
She turned, and somehow forced her shaking arms to pull herself out through the airlock, and into the command deck below. The inner hatch was useless, but she could manage without it.
The stars were still tumbling past madly outside. She avoided looking out at them, and grimly made her way over to the spacesuit storage lockers. She wasn’t going to get caught out like that again, and she found her suit and started to get into it, planning her next moves as she did so. Her personal sidearm was still in its holster on her belt, and after a moment’s thought, she took off the belt and removed the gun, and shoved it into one of the pockets on the upper arm of her spacesuit.
