Torino Nine

by Mark Anson

  She was betting that if he saw her, he would assume she was making for the forward airlock, and would go forward and attempt to prevent her entering. There was only one problem in her plan – the emergency airlock was tiny; only just big enough for one person wearing a standard spacesuit. Her large backpack wouldn’t fit. She would have to abandon it outside, and rely on the emergency air cylinder built into the suit. She went over the options again, but couldn’t see any alternatives, and she needed to hurry; the longer she left it, the more chance he would guess what she was doing.

  It was now or never. She loosened the straps of the backpack, ready to throw it off. She took careful aim at the hatch, took a couple of deep breaths, and squeezed the thruster control handle.

  The thrusters hissed out into space, sending her scurrying across the expanse of shiny helium spheres, towards the crew module. The two lower decks slid past underneath her, and she could see the emergency hatch approaching. With a rush of fear, she realised she was going too fast, and she braked hurriedly, but it was too late. She cannoned flat into the side of the command deck, knocking the wind out of her, and almost bounced off – her arms flailed for the grab handles, and caught one, and her arm was pulled painfully as it absorbed the recoil of her own mass. Ignoring the pain in her arm and shoulder blades, she shrugged out of the backpack and pulled out the quick-release hoses. The backpack spun off lazily into the jet-black sky behind her. She hung on tightly to the grab handles; if she let go now, she would drift away into space forever.

  Well, Mordecai would know she was here; he couldn’t have missed the colossal thump she had just made against the ship’s hull. She barely glanced at the instructions stencilled on the side of the hatch, and pulled out the release handle. It was stiff after its long time in space, and she winced with pain as she turned it anticlockwise to release the hatch. There was a puff of misty air as the hatch came open, and she swung herself inside quickly.

  She knew she only had seconds to gain the upper hand. She slammed the hatch shut behind her and pulled her sidearm from her arm pocket.

  Here we go.

  With a rapid movement, she unlatched the inner door and slammed her left palm onto the repress valve. The empty airlock filled with air almost instantly, and as the pressures equalised, she shoved the inner hatch wide open and propelled herself into the command deck.

  She splayed her legs wide to hold herself in the airlock opening, and quartered the deck rapidly with her gun. She would have no compunction over shooting Mordecai if he came at her, but she didn’t want to shoot Collins by mistake; the hollow-cavity bullets, designed to reduce any chance of puncturing the hull, would kill anyone instantly in a chest shot.

  There was no-one on the deck.

  The deck lighting had been turned right down, so that the place was in semi-darkness, making it difficult to see. She checked all round again, keeping her gun pointing in front of her, but the place was empty.

  She pushed herself over to the central ladder, and aimed her gun quickly in turn down into the lower decks, then up into the airlock module, but there was no sign of him.

  Where the hell was he, and where was Collins? She unfastened her helmet, and lifted it off her head. There was no sound, just the faint background hiss of the air conditioning. She pushed herself over to the flight deck, and glanced at the controls, which glowed in the semi-darkness. The ship’s operations had been transferred to the console on the third deck, and most of the controls appeared to be disabled. Red indicators flashed on nearly every system. She flipped a couple of controls on the thruster console, wondering if she could override them from here, but there was no response.

  So. That was where he was; he had anticipated how she would get on board, and she had lost any element of surprise. He would be waiting for her on the third deck. Well, she was committed now; she had to follow it through. She hoped he wasn’t armed; there was a gun locker on board, but he would need a command code to unlock it, and she didn’t think they would give that to a civilian.

  She moved back to the central ladder, and looked down cautiously. The decks below were dark as well. Way down, past the lounge deck, the hatch to the memory deck lay open. A red light flickered through the opening. For some reason, she found the sight enormously disturbing, as if she was glimpsing something she wasn’t meant to see.

  He could be waiting for her anywhere, and he had Collins hostage. She tried to think where she would hide, if the situation were reversed, but that didn’t help; there were too many places. She had to make a move, force him out into the open, where she could get a clean shot at him without hitting Collins.

  She turned and started pulling herself down the ladder, head-first and very slowly, her gun held in front of her. She paused by the entrance to the lounge deck. She had been taught not to peek round corners, and she took several deep breaths, then thrust herself forwards and quartered the room. Her heart thumped in her chest.

  The deck was empty, like the one above.

  So, they both had to be on the third deck, through the opening with the flickering red light, directly below her. At least she knew now where they were. Mordecai could probably hear her; she had made plenty of scuffling noises on the ladder, so there was no way she could surprise him.‘Doctor Mordecai,’ she called through the open hatchway, ‘this is Captain Foster. I’m armed and I know you’re in there. This is your last chance to give yourself up. Put your hands above your head and move where I can see you.’

  Silence. The blood pounded in her ears.

  ‘Very well. If you make any movement I don’t like, or attempt to injure Lieutenant Collins, I will shoot you.’

  This was it. Her breath rasped in her chest. She coiled herself on the ladder. Where was he likely to be standing? There was no way of knowing. She had to be quick.

  She had to be quick. She closed her eyes. Here goes.

  She pushed suddenly off the ladder, and flew through the opening, gun in hand.

  There he was. She saw him immediately, almost in front of her, making no attempt at concealment. She grabbed the ladder and pulled herself to a halt, and turned over to face him, her gun pointed directly at his chest.

  Mordecai sat upright, supported in the couch in the centre of the deck, his forehead hidden behind the drum of the head unit. Something was spinning inside it.

  ‘Don’t move,’ she warned him, but his eyes were blank and unseeing; he didn’t appear to have even heard her.

  Clare checked round herself quickly; the place looked very different from how it had been before. The circular room throbbed with blue light from the memory banks, and the clear coolant was filled with bubbles as it flowed over the circuit boards. The red light, that she had seen from the command deck, came from somewhere behind the memory banks. It flickered and pulsed unsteadily behind the circular wall of unit, sending brief flashes of red light up and onto the ceiling.

  ‘Welcome, captain.’

  She spun round. Mordecai’s lips hadn’t moved, but his voice, amplified and distorted into a deep, resonating bass, came from speakers around the room. Clare’s jaw dropped, but she kept her gun pointing at him.

  ‘I can see you’re surprised,’ the voice said slowly, and a slow smile creased his vacant features. ‘Don’t worry, you’re not imagining it. The machine is amplifying my thoughts. It’s just one of … many things that it can do.’ His eyes, which had been staring at a point in the ceiling, lowered slowly, and settled on her. The speakers gave out a low noise like distant thunder, and his expression darkened. ‘You’ve caused me a lot of trouble, captain.’

  Clare glanced round her, refusing to be cowed. ‘All these tricks are very impressive, but all this must be chewing a lot of power. How much longer before your batteries give out, and your precious machine stops working? You’ve no means of making power, and you’re dead in space.’

  ‘Don’t try my patience, captain!’ His voice reverberated through the ship, battering at Clare’s eardrums. The cold liquid running past the memo
ry banks boiled furiously, and the red light splashed up the walls.

  She moved closer to him, and raised her gun until it pointed directly at his forehead. The safety was off. If she fired now, his brains would be all over the room.

  ‘No, doctor, you listen to me. Shut this machine down right now, and give control of this ship back to me, or this will be the last thing you’ll see.’ She spoke with a deadly calm.

  ‘I don’t think you understand, captain.’ Mordecai’s amplified thoughts chuckled menacingly around her.

  Something in his voice made her hesitate. ‘Where’s Collins?’

  He smiled. ‘Right behind you.’

  Something cold and metal pressed into the back of her head, and she froze. What the hell—

  ‘Don’t move, captain.’ The voice was Collins’s. She felt a sliding rush of fear, mixed with incredulity. Collins?

  ‘I’ve holding my personal sidearm, and I won’t hesitate to fire,’ he said, his voice sounding slow and strange in her ears.

  She cursed herself for a fool. He must have been hiding in one of the decks above, waiting for her to come past. He had followed her silently down the ladder, until he was behind her. But what the hell was he doing, holding a gun to her?

  Keeping her hands where they were, she turned her head, very slowly, to glimpse him standing directly behind her, his left arm extended, holding the gun against the back of her head.

  ‘Yes, it’s loaded, and I’d use it.’ His voice had a curiously flat quality that she had never heard before, and something in it told her that he meant it. ‘Raise your gun, slowly, put the safety on, and hold it out to your side. Hold it between two fingers. I’m resting my finger on the trigger, so don’t do anything that might shake my arm.’

  ‘You realise what you’re doing here?’ she said as calmly as she could. ‘You do this, and you’ll be facing a mutiny charge – you’ll never go into space again.’

  Mordecai’s amplified laughter burst out around her, and she could hear Collins laughing as well.

  ‘You think we care about a court martial, captain?’ he boomed. ‘where we’re going, USAC doesn’t matter any more!’

  Collins jabbed the gun sharply into her head. ‘Come on.’

  She lifted her gun slowly, put the safety on, and held it out as he asked. She felt him reach out and take it from her, then back away so that he was out of her reach.

  ‘Hands behind your back.’ She reluctantly did as she was told, and Collins deftly fastened a plastic handcuff round her wrists, and zipped it up tightly.

  ‘Tie her to the ladder,’ Mordecai whispered, ‘and make sure she can’t escape. If she resists, shoot her in the leg.’

  Collins shoved Clare backward, towards the ladder in the centre of the deck. ‘Stand with your back to it,’ he ordered.

  She looked up at his face, and was shocked at the change that had come over him. His eyes had changed; they were dead and vacant, and were staring right through her, looking at something hundreds of metres away. It looked as if all the light had been drained from his soul. A line of tiny puncture wounds was stitched across his forehead, and she knew he had been in the machine.

  ‘You bastard,’ she said to Mordecai, ‘you couldn’t do it on your own, so you had to make him like you!’

  ‘A crude summary, but basically accurate.’ Mordecai’s voice sounded amused. ‘He knows where we’re going now, and what we’ll see. And in a little while, so will you.’ His voice changed. ‘Secure her.’

  Collins pointed the gun at her thigh, and walked round behind her as she stood by the ladder. ‘Don’t think I won’t shoot,’ he said menacingly, ‘you know what this will do to you.’

  She briefly considered trying to overpower him, but her hands were tied behind her back; there was no way she could get to his gun before he fired. The hollow-cavity bullet would blow half her leg off – she would likely collapse from shock if he fired at that range.

  ‘You’re going to regret doing this, Collins,’ she said quietly, as he zipped another handcuff between her wrists, and fastened her to the ladder.

  He ignored her, and left her there as he returned to the console in the centre of the room.

  ‘Let’s take a look outside, lieutenant,’ Mordecai ordered, and the deck lighting went out, plunging the room into darkness. Viewscreens around the walls came on, showing the scene outside the ship.

  Below them, the black shape of Psyche blotted out the distant Sun, leaving the sky open to the stars. The view switched to infra-red, and the asteroid below was illuminated in lurid black and scarlet. They were seeing the remnants of the Sun’s heat on the surface, carried round to the night side by Psyche’s slow rotation. The strangely wrinkled terrain of the primordial surface was punctured by countless meteorite impacts, all with razor-sharp edges where the molten iron had splashed and then frozen, and rift valleys zig-zagging crazily over the surface. Valleys and other features that had been in shadow during the asteroid’s day were black slashes across the landscape, while mountains showed up in contoured shades of red.

  ‘Lieutenant, I don’t think the captain will be giving us any more trouble. You can move us away when you’re ready.’

  ‘Roger that.’ Collins tapped at the console, and a loud boom shuddered through the ship, followed by a series of smaller, staccato bangs and flashes of light outside, as explosive bolts fired, splitting the ship in half. The six forward rocket engines outside ignited with a roar, tearing the manned portion of the Ulysses free of its wrecked main section. The crew module jerked from side to side. A further series of bangs followed, and various items of science equipment were jettisoned in an automatic sequence. They fell away from the ship in a widening circle of debris.

  The crew module acceleration was enormous; Clare sagged at the knees as the rockets pushed them away from the crumpled remains of the parent vessel. Somewhere below her, she could hear the muffled whine of the emergency power turbine, a small, rocket-powered generator which could only operate when the ship was free of the main stage.

  ‘You see, captain?’ Mordecai’s triumphant thoughts rang out again. ‘We have power, and we can manoeuvre. All your efforts were in vain. And your ship, and your link with USAC Command, is falling behind, and you’re here with us. Not so confident now, are we?’ His mocking laughter reverberated around her.

  ‘Where are … we going?’ Clare said with an effort, as she fought to stand upright.

  ‘I think you know that, captain.’ The voice sank down to a whisper, barely audible above the roar of the engines. ‘We’re going down to Psyche, we’re going where the crew of the Ulysses went, all those years ago, and you’re coming with us. We’re going through the door. They found it and they went through, and so will we.’

  ‘You’re mad! There’s nothing down there!’

  ‘Oh, but there is. You’ve seen it, haven’t you, lieutenant?’ Collins nodded, and grinned like a pantomime demon. ‘We’ve both seen it – the gate is down there on Psyche, and it’s open.’

  ‘There isn’t a gate! They were just drawings – the crew suffered a mass delusion from a malfunction of the memory banks – you said so yourself!’

  ‘No captain, it’s very real …’ his voice faded into the distance, and then came back again. ‘It’s a pity there isn’t time to show you what we’ve seen, what’s waiting for us past the doorway, in the land of shadows … But you’ll get to see. Yes, you’ll get to see …’ His voice trailed off, and she thought she could hear whisperings, like other voices in the darkness of his mind. His eyes closed, and when they opened again, he was looking at Collins. ‘Take us down to the surface.’

  The engines’ roar altered, and the stars moved outside as the ship’s thrust vector changed, putting them on a descent course to the surface of Psyche. Collins let them continue for a while, watching the ship’s progress on the viewscreens.

  ‘There’s nothing down there,’ Clare appealed to Collins as he stood there. ‘You can’t land this ship on a surface, it’s g
ot no landing gear. We’ll tip over and crash.’

  ‘No, we won’t,’ Collins said flatly. ‘There,’ he announced, as the sound of the rocket engines faded into silence, ‘Descent burn complete. We’re established on the descent. We’ll need one more burn when we’re a few kilometres from the target, but then we can descend on the thrusters.’

  ‘Good …’ Mordecai’s thoughts suffused the room with contentment. ‘And now, I think it’s time to prepare our captain.’ He turned his face towards Clare, and this time she felt the full force of his malice. The unseen lighting in the room darkened, and a low rumbling shook the deck.

  ‘You’re probably wondering what I’ve got in store for you,’ he continued. ‘Rest assured, I’m not keeping you here for my – amusement.’ His eyes dropped. ‘No, you’ve got a job to do, and you’ll be privileged to watch what happens as we near the doorway, you’ll see.’ He glanced at Collins. ‘Show her where we’re heading.’

  Collins tapped in some commands, and on the forward viewscreens, a thin green line arced down and away, ending at a point on the dark side of the asteroid, half-way to the pole.

  Clare looked around on the other viewscreens for the navigation lights of the Mesa and Ulysses, locked together in their final embrace, but they were already too far away, high above them now.

  ‘That’s it,’ Mordecai breathed, ‘I can feel it, drawing us closer.’

  Right where the green trajectory line ended, a huge black valley splayed its form, ending in a sharp line.

  ‘Two minutes to final descent,’ Collins said, his voice beginning to show the anticipation.

  ‘Take us in slowly, along the length of the valley; I want to savour the approach. And we need time to – prepare.’ Mordecai’s glance flickered to Clare.