Holding on to the rope with one hand, Rao used the other to point behind Jansen.
She turned around, careful not to step on any more of the spherical growths. She moved her lights around, looking for what had made the others panic. It didn’t take long to find.
The rope leading downward into the shadows was coated in the black goo, a thick, dripping film of it. It looked as if the rope had been dipped in crude oil. About two meters below Jansen, the rope just disappeared.
Whatever the black stuff was, it had eaten right through the woven aramid line. Only a frayed end remained. There was no rope below them, as far as Jansen’s lights could show her.
HAROLD GLOUCESTER, MATERIALS ANALYST: The purpose of most of what the astronauts saw and experienced inside 2I still baffles us. For the black slime we have… don’t even call it a theory. Call it an educated guess. During 2I’s long trip between stars, it was likely that all manner of debris would get caught in the airlock, and might work its way inside the cone. The acidic slime was there to neutralize and dissolve any foreign matter before it could reach the floor of the drum. Maybe. Like I said—it’s a guess. Don’t quote me.
Hawkins didn’t suggest they turn around and go back. They were already most of the way down to the floor of the drum, and Jansen had decided her best bet was to get down to the ice and find some water to wash the black slime off her suit. It was an open question whether she could get that far before it ate through all the layers of suit fabric and she was left exposed to 2I’s atmosphere.
If that happened—no, it didn’t bear thinking about.
Of course, going down—going forward—meant descending without a rope. The three of them made their way around the patch of black discoloration and hurried downward as best they could. Sometimes that meant walking with bent legs, fighting the increasing gravity as their boots slipped and scraped on the smooth material of the drum. More often than not it meant sliding down on their backs, slowing their descent by holding their arms out, hands flat against the surface.
Their suits were made of very tough materials that were designed to resist abrasion and heat. They would just have to be strong enough.
Sometimes they found ropes that were still in place, and the going was a lot easier. Except they had to worry the whole time—watching the rope below them, expecting at any moment to find a place where the slime had crossed its path. Jansen was even more worried that while they were attached to an existing rope, the slime might be working on it somewhere above them, that any moment the rope might give way and send them flying downhill.
She kept one eye on the legs of her suit the whole way down. Looking to see if they were smoking or dripping where they’d been splattered with black.
When the slope grew gentler, when she knew they were near the bottom, she told Hawkins and Rao that she would race ahead and try to find some water. That they should set up camp at the bottom of the last rope and wait there for her. Hawkins didn’t contradict her orders or try to pull rank.
It turned out she didn’t need to go far to find water. When she reached the bottom, she found that KSpace’s base camp was half-submerged in an icy pool. The dead glow sticks bobbed on gentle waves. The crates of supplies were soaked through.
Jansen immediately splashed into the water and start washing off her legs. As she scrubbed at the black slime she pointed her lights out across what had once been all dry floor.
The ice had melted. Her lights showed her thick floes, some dozens of meters across, dotted across the surface of a black and placid lake. Even the biggest slabs of ice were melting, shrinking almost as she watched.
The temperature inside the drum, according to her suit, had risen to a tropical twenty-four degrees.
The black slime came off easily enough when she scrubbed at it. It left a dark residue on her boots and the leg of her suit, and she could see it had partially degraded the outermost layer of fabric. Still, she thought she was safe. For the moment.
SALLY JANSEN: I was supposed to be our local guide, the one with experience of conditions inside 2I. By the time we reached level ground I already knew I would be useless in that capacity. I hadn’t been gone for twenty-four hours, but so much changed in that time. It was like a whole new world, one I didn’t even begin to know how to navigate.
The darkness was so utterly complete. Rao’s suit lights speared out ahead of her, but they showed her only a tiny slice of what was around her. Just outside their beams, the true dark waited, so thick it felt as if the air had clotted and turned solid. So deep it could hide anything.
Maybe—maybe the lights made it worse. She reached up and carefully switched them off. Instantly she was plunged into nothingness, a profundity deeper than the abyss of space. Her eyes couldn’t handle it. They darted back and forth, desperate for light—and her brain responded. She saw tiny flashes all around her, little sparks. They moved when she moved her head, always staying right in front of her. Hallucinations of a brain starved of visual input.
It was—it was—she suddenly felt very dizzy.
I’m hyperventilating, Rao thought.
She switched her lights back on. Then she forced herself to take long, shallow breaths. She tried to make herself calm.
It wasn’t easy.
Jansen had told her this place was horrible. She hadn’t known what that meant, and now she wasn’t sure horrible was strictly accurate. Horrible would suggest that the place was actively trying to kill them, maybe. While instead this place was just—so different. Different from anything she’d known before.
Rao had spent her whole life wanting to be here. A place like this, an alien place. She’d never dreamed it would come to her. And that it would take so much away—
She closed her eyes and breathed through her mouth.
All she could see was the nest of snakes writhing inside Stevens’s abdomen. She felt her skin crawl as if the tendrils were on her, as if they were wrapping around her like a net.
She forced herself to open her eyes and walk forward. To let her lights fall on Jansen, who was splashing around in dark water. The astronaut looked up and blinked as Rao’s lights hit her face.
Rao had to be here, now.
She could grieve for Stevens later. She would figure out what had happened to him first—and then she would mourn.
Hawkins set up camp. Funny how little that meant when you were wearing space suits. He climbed back up the slope a little ways to get out of the reach of the dark water, then unloaded all the gear they’d brought with them. He cracked open a pair of glow sticks raided from Wanderer, then used their light to examine the two pieces of special equipment they’d brought with them, both removed from the exterior skin of Orion’s HabLab.
The first was the neutrino gun. Some bright person back on Earth had realized that NASA had a dedicated telescope set up in Pasadena designed to catch and analyze neutrinos. The particles the gun emitted could pass easily through 2I’s hull—they could pass through solid lead. The neutrino signals could be picked up on Earth and decoded into audio or video as necessary. The transmission would be strictly one way, and the bandwidth would be terrible, but at least Roy McAllister would know what they found inside 2I. Even if none of them made it back to Orion, NASA could get some useful information. Setting it up was simple enough—he simply opened a screen in AR and tapped in a few quick commands. The gun had its own power source and would take care of all the signal processing on its own. He tested it out with a quick message.
WINDSOR HAWKINS: Our descent was a little trickier than expected, but there were no injuries or significant difficulties. We’re ready to get started with the primary experiment.
Which brought him to the second piece of equipment they’d salvaged from Orion. He carefully unwrapped the dish of the multiwavelength antenna and placed it on the ground in front of him, its dish pointing deeper into the interior of 2I. It was a hell of a lot more powerful than the antennae built into their suit radios. It looked as if it had survived intact,
even if it had taken a few nasty bumps as they slid their way down.
What came next might be extremely dangerous. It had to be done, though. He uploaded the signal they wanted to send.
His finger hovered over the button that would transmit the signal. He hesitated. Just for a moment.
He looked over at Rao. He couldn’t see her face—her suit lights were pointed right at him, and he could barely make out the silhouette of her helmet. He imagined she was thinking the same thing he was, though. None of them had any idea what was going to happen when they sent this message.
He pressed the button.
He could hear the signal go out, over the rising and falling chirp of static on the radio. It was a recording of Stevens’s final biodata, the last signal they’d recorded as his neural activity spiked. The same signal that had caused 2I to spread its wings.
“Puh,” the signal said. “Puh. Puh.”
What had Stevens been trying to say? Had he actually been trying to form a word—maybe please? Or was it just the spastic firing of dying neurons?
Hawkins ran through the full signal three times. During the third transmission Jansen came stumbling back into his suit lights. He could see her face just fine. She wasn’t pleased he had done this without her.
“If it worked and you made 2I accelerate again, we could have been thrown around in here like ants inside a soda can,” she told him.
Hawkins reached over and switched off the multifrequency antenna.
“Lucky for all of us, then. It didn’t work.”
There had been no response. Maybe the unseen crew of 2I knew what it was trying to do. Maybe the aliens could tell the difference between the final cry of a dying man and a recording. Or maybe they’d gotten this all wrong. It would help if they knew what they were trying to communicate with. If any of the alien crew of 2I had ever shown itself.
Cowards, Hawkins thought. He smiled, careful not to show his face to the others. Lousy stinking cowards. He felt like a cowboy in a western video, challenging some unseen black hat to a showdown on a dusty, sunbaked street. Fill your hand, he thought.
He ran through the signal a couple more times, just to be sure. The aliens didn’t take the bait.
WINDSOR HAWKINS: Initial results of the primary experiment were negative. We’ll need to try something different.
“I want to try to get in touch with the KSpace crew,” Jansen said, when they’d all agreed the experiment was a failure. “Maybe they couldn’t hear me the last time I was here, not with all the noise on the radio.” She touched the big dish of the multifrequency antenna. “Maybe this thing can punch through that and get a signal to Foster and his people.”
Hawkins just shrugged. She knew what he thought about her desire to find the KSpace crew.
“Maybe you’re right and they’re dead,” she said. “But in that case—what harm could it possibly do?”
“It could waste battery power,” he said.
Rao came to her defense. “Foster and his crew have been in here this whole time,” she said. “Assuming they’re alive. They were inside 2I when it responded to Stevens’s signal. Maybe they saw something—maybe they know something we don’t.”
Hawkins didn’t even look at them. He just waved one hand in resignation.
Jansen plugged the signal feed of the antenna into her suit. “KSpace,” she called. “This is NASA Orion. We’ve come to help. Please respond.” She repeated the message three times, just as they’d done with the experimental signal.
Then she sat down to wait for a reply.
As the three of them sat there, listening to the weird pops and ticking sounds and occasional crackle picked up by the antenna, she tried not to lose heart. She repeated her message a fourth time, then unplugged from the antenna. She left the dish switched on, in low-power mode. It would continue to function as a receiver if KSpace sent them a response. As unlikely as that seemed.
“It should have plenty of range,” she said. “It’s designed to send a signal across thousands of kilometers of space. It ought to reach every corner of the drum. If they’re in here, they’ll hear us.”
Hawkins said nothing. He just sipped some water from the hose in his helmet and stared out into the darkness.
“We’ll stick here for a while,” he said. “Run through some more experimental signals. Anyway, I don’t really feel like going any further, at least not until we’ve rested. We can sleep in shifts, so one of us is always awake and keeping an eye out for…” He shrugged. “Surprises.”
“You want to sleep?” Rao asked. “In here?”
Hawkins looked over at her. “Nothing has actively tried to kill us yet. We don’t know what we’ll be in for when we get moving, though. Could be anything. Best to be well rested when it arrives.”
“That’s not really reassuring,” she told him. “Did you mean it to be?”
ROY MCALLISTER: When we suggested to Orion that they use the neutrino gun to communicate with Earth, it was really anybody’s guess whether it would work at all. When the first trickle of data came in from the interior of 2I, the entire control room erupted in applause. We had audio and video from inside an alien starship. Even if the experimental signal failed to make contact with the crew of 2I, we were in business. It was immensely beneficial to our morale. You have to celebrate the little victories.
Despite her protests, Rao was the first one to fall asleep. Maybe she was worn out after the long climb down from the airlock. Maybe it was just the darkness.
Jansen had been here before. She knew the effect the utter lack of light could have on you. It made the margin between sleep and wakefulness feel very thin. Even when your body had plenty of energy, your mind, in the absence of anything useful to do, fell into a kind of hypnosis. At least, when it wasn’t populating your head with phantoms and hallucinations.
To keep the figments away, Jansen had set her lights to rotate automatically, sweeping the darkness and the edge of the water. When they passed over Hawkins’s face she saw a gentle, amused smile there. Not what she had been expecting at all.
Eventually he must have noticed her staring. He turned slowly, a rustling in the darkness. When the light hit him again he was looking her right in the eye. His smile hadn’t changed.
“You and I have never really got along,” he said.
“That’s one way of putting it.”
He leaned forward a little. Put his hands on his knees. “OK. We’re not friends. So I won’t pretend like this isn’t happening. I’ve been put in charge of the mission. You’ve been replaced.”
“You keep telling me that.”
He lifted his hands for peace. He sighed, a strange sound that was nearly lost in the ambient clicks and crackles of 2I. “You’ve been an astronaut a long time. Flown a lot of missions.”
She shrugged. Was he going to ask her how many times she’d screwed up? How many missions she’d ruined? It was a question she’d been asked many, many times.
It turned out that wasn’t where he was going, though.
He shifted a little, scooting toward her. “I’ve heard about the overview effect. Right? The way astronauts feel like seeing Earth from space changes them. It makes them feel—”
“Like none of it matters,” Jansen said. She nodded. “None of the human nonsense we waste so much time worrying about. From up there you look down and you can’t see any national borders. You can’t see why we have to fight wars.”
“Before all this, I flew the X-37d. You know that.”
“Yeah.”
“I’ve seen what you saw,” he told her. “Don’t scoff—I know you think my experience doesn’t count, because I was flying a drone from a trailer on Earth. But my missions felt just as real to me as yours did to you. When I’m in VR, when I’m flying, I see what my spaceship sees. I feel how cold its skin gets, and how hot. Its engines become an extension of my body.” He was hunched forward even farther now, his hands up in the air making sweeping gestures. She could tell how strongly he felt a
bout this. “And when I look down at Earth, I see it, too.”
“What do you see?” she asked.
“I see how fragile it is. The thin margin of the atmosphere, like a glass shell around the planet. The way the rivers empty out into the oceans, the waters mixing and changing colors. I’ve watched storm clouds gather over the mountains, and I’ve seen—a thousand times—the sun come up over the curved horizon. Jansen, I’ve seen the Earth from space. And all I wanted was to protect it. To defend it.”
She watched him carefully. Waited for him to say more.
“You think I’m a bad guy. You think I’m a scary soldier guy who wants to take what’s yours. It just isn’t true. I want to keep people safe. That’s all I’ve ever wanted, to keep people safe.”
She lay back on the floor of the drum. Closed her eyes for a second. Dear God, how she needed to sleep.
“That’s why I agreed to take over command of this mission. The only reason.”
She nodded.
“You said you knew where Foster and his people went. They were headed toward this—I think you called it a structure?”
“For lack of a better term,” she said.
He nodded. “We’ll go to this structure you saw. We’ll look for KSpace,” he said.
She turned over and looked at him. “I thought you assumed they were dead.”
“They probably are,” he said. “But we need to find something, some way to communicate with the aliens. And I don’t have any other leads. So for now, we do this your way.”
SALLY JANSEN: I was tired. So tired. And it was kind of nice that somebody had the energy to make a plan. I know I didn’t—I was operating by instinct at that point, with no rational thoughts informing my decisions at all. It was a need pulling me back to 2I, an urge to save people I’d never met. Something that wasn’t quite rational. I can admit that now.
Rao lay curled on her side, her hands folded under her helmet.
The Last Astronaut Page 20
