Dark Secret (2016)

by Edward M. Lerner

  “Good talking to you guys,” Blake said. “I’m going to get this little lady”—said looking up at Rikki, and with a self-deprecating grin—“to a chair.”

  She found a seat on the sofa, between Mom and Grandma Betty. Grandma had a crochet hook in hand and a half-made doily on her lap. Knitting, tatting, crocheting: Grandma did them all. She kept her hands busy with needlecraft at all times. When time permitted, Rikki had always intended to have Grandma teach her the ancient arts. Only time would never permit….

  There on the sofa, people kept seeking out Rikki. Whatever she saw or heard or said, she knew could be her last memory of that friend, that neighbor, that relative.

  Never able to say goodbye.

  And poor Blake? His family was on Earth, with just about everyone he’d known before meeting her. There wasn’t time, not even by DED, for sentimental journeys. Which of them had it worse?

  Her eyes brimmed, and her cheeks quivered with the struggle not to weep.

  Mom tugged on Rikki’s sleeve. “How should I say this? You seem very emotional today. Are you and Blake all right? The truth, now.”

  The truth? The truth was that untold eons ago, two neutron stars fell into a deadly embrace. That the longer their mutual orbit decayed, the more they warped space-time itself. That shortly before the stars smashed together—before they collapsed into a black hole, in that cataclysmic process spewing gamma rays and subatomic debris—the gravitational waves cast off by the inspiraling stars had become so intense that even across 7500 light-years they were detectable—

  To herald the doom that followed close behind. Day by day, as the gravitational waves intensified and measurements accumulated, Antonio revised his estimate downward.

  The truth was that within days she must leave. The truth was that in a few years everyone here to see her off would die a horrible death.

  “You’re scaring me, sweetie,” Mom said.

  The truth, even if Rikki weren’t sworn to secrecy, could not help. But a lie might. She knew the news Mom and Dad and her grandparents had been hoping to hear, words that beyond excusing her moodiness and exhaustion would create a bit of joy.

  “Blake and I are pregnant,” Rikki whispered. “It’s early. We’re not talking about it yet.”

  “That’s terrific!” Mom whispered back. “You two will make great parents.”

  “Hold on,” Grandma Betty said. “You’re pregnant and you’re going to Titan? For two years?”

  “Titan’s not far, not using the new drive.” Rikki’s guts clenched with the evasion. “Besides, we’ll have a doctor and infirmary onboard.”

  “You don’t look so well.” Grandma patted Rikki’s hand. “Take it from a pro, dear. The morning sickness goes away.”

  Later Rikki saw Mom take Dad aside to whisper in his ear, and Dad breaking into an ear-to-ear grin. As they were leaving, Dad picked up Rikki and spun them both around as though she were a toddler.

  “See,” Dad said, beaming, “I still have it in me.”

  After the last guest finally departed, Rikki sobbed for hours.

  6

  Dana imagined herself as an island of stability amid a sea of chaos. In smart specs and a headset, she figured she looked like a cyborg.

  She stood on Clermont’s bridge, where mechanics had unbolted an arc of consoles—for nav, comm, flight, and sensors—to accommodate extra radiation shielding in the bow. Simulations drawing on the ship’s design and maintenance files predicted that, with a handful of exceptions, the existing wiring harnesses would accommodate repositioning everything twenty centimeters aft. With the consoles moved, she and Blake, without a lot of knee room, would still manage to sit here. Most others among the crew, when they drew watch duty, would want to stand.

  Flick.

  Her specs cut to an external security camera. Beyond the thirty-meter ellipsoid that was Clermont, like some giant North American football perched on fore-and-aft landing legs, stretched the gentle curve of the temporary dome that by nautical tradition was called a dry dock. White mist rose from the LOX and liquid-deuterium tanker trucks waiting to offload. Stevedores bounded up the ramp into Clermont’s aft air lock toting crated chunks of a short-range shuttle and up the ramp into the fore air lock with starter-culture tanks for the newly installed food-synth vats.

  Flick.

  In the already cramped crew quarters, under the deck beneath her feet, sparks flew as welders attached a closet-sized bio lab and infirmary. Other workers stocked the galley with basic rations, and yet more laborers bolted a multipurpose exercise machine to a bulkhead.

  Flick.

  Astern, in engine room one, several of Jumoke’s acolytes were replacing the rat’s nest of sensors and cables accumulated over the many DED test flights with a tidy array of permanent instruments.

  Flick.

  Stacked and heaped halfway around the dome, packaged in assorted crates, cases, canisters, satchels, cabinets, racks, and tied bundles, an exterior camera showed her yet more supplies remaining to be loaded. Geometry and simulations be damned, it seemed impossible that all this stuff could fit aboard.

  Flick.

  Mid-ship, in cargo hold two, workers had removed several deck plates to run cable bundles and liquid helium lines to the cold-sleep pods. Dana tried to forget that cold-sleep pods were meant for medical emergencies, and for intervals measured in hours, not years. She tried and failed.

  Across the hold, out an interior hatch, at an oblique angle down the central corridor, and into an open equipment closet, she glimpsed mechanics at work doubling life-support capacity.

  Flick.

  At Dana’s elbow, someone cleared his throat. She turned. “What?”

  “Captain, we’ve got an anomaly,” the mechanic said. Jerry Tanaka, she thought his name was.

  Blake should be directing this three-ring circus—only he had done just that nonstop for three days running. She had had to order him to get some sleep, and still not gotten him farther than a borrowed cot in the foreman’s shed, still inside the dome. That he could nap amid this din, even wearing earplugs….

  “Captain?” Tanaka pointed at a many-colored cable bundle stretched taut between the bulkhead and the back of the unbolted copilot’s flight console.

  “Hold on,” Dana told Tanaka. In a crouch, Dana got a better view behind the console. “Specs, display mode off. Camera mode on. Ten X zoom. Marvin, what do you know about this?”

  Marvin was among the first of the mission retrofits, networked into every sensor and control across the ship. Marvin’s program resided in an anachronism: entire freaking deck-to-overhead, two meters wide, racks of computing equipment. That much circuitry allowed for massive redundancy, and so, in theory, resilience against even multiple failures. Its storage capacity was into the zettabyte range.

  Unlike Dana, Marvin could handle many camera feeds at once, even while sifting through huge databases. Marvin didn’t think, not in the human sense, or show initiative. It did follow directions, match patterns, find correlations, draw inferences, and, with reasonable accuracy, speak and interpret spoken language.

  “I see it,” Marvin said. “That cable bundle is nowhere in my files. The logo and string of digits I see pressed into the insulation of the yellow wire suggest a manufacturing batch from eighteen years ago.”

  If the undocumented whatever had been installed new, that meant two owners prior to the university’s purchase of the ship. At a word from Dana, Hawthorne would doubtless sic half the government on hunting down both prior owners. She was tempted for perhaps a nanosecond, but what was the point? She would never trust the ancient memories of anyone sloppy enough to mod his ship without updating its records.

  “Tanaka, figure out what that is before you touch it,” Dana directed. “Open the console if you must. Trace signals through the ship. Marvin can help. If you need other resources, tell me.”

  Because once they started to snip mystery wires, the checkout time for this latest overhaul would expand to….


  Dana had no idea, beyond way longer than she could afford.

  “Yesterday, Mr. Tanaka,” she ordered. He got back to work.

  “Specs, resume security-camera scan.”

  Flick…flick…flick….

  “Specs, pause.” Dana pressed the intercom button. “Cargo hold one, I’m seeing crates for both shuttles stowed all over.” And intermixed, which was worse. “Keep the crate sets together, one shuttle to each side of the exterior hatch.”

  “We’re arranging things to get the snuggest fit,” a worker answered, sweat soaking his tunic and trickling down his face and neck. “Your way would reduce packing density.”

  “Understood, but at the other end”—an eventuality Dana didn’t dare to find fantastical—“when we’re ready to assemble a shuttle, it won’t do to first have to rearrange half the contents of the hold.”

  And with every nook and cranny of the ship to be filled, shift the contents to where? The memory flashed of a fifteen-piece sliding number puzzle she had played with as a little girl—only this puzzle involved hundreds of pieces, in an endless array of shapes and sizes.

  “Marvin, what do you think?” Dana asked.

  “There is an enormous number of ways to pack and unpack so many items. Are the shuttle crates the only cargo to which you will want optimized access, or are there others? I have ideas about staging items through the crew quarters, but I will need your confirmation.”

  While she and Marvin talked, another crate of shuttle parts got stowed in the deep recesses of the cargo hold. Dana hit the intercom again. “Cargo hold one, am I not making myself clear?”

  The worker said, “To accommodate your suggestion, I’d have to unload and repack most of—”

  “It wasn’t a suggestion,” Dana snapped. “Do it.”

  Flick…flick…flick….

  Blake shuffled onto the bridge, yawning. Dark, puffy skin pouched below his specs. “What’d I miss, Dana?”

  “The opportunity to sleep,” she told him. “Blake, go back to bed. I’ll handle things for another…few hours…”

  “What?” Blake asked.

  An exterior camera showed her a cloud of red dust. “Specs, freeze on camera twenty-six.”

  “Specs, camera twenty-six,” Blake repeated. “Got it.”

  “Too localized for a dust storm,” Dana said, tapping her headset. “Security officer. Do you see incoming vehicles?”

  “Yes, Captain. It’s nothing.”

  “And you are?”

  “Lieutenant Anderson, Captain, ma’am.”

  Anderson: a freckle-faced militia officer fresh out of OCS, little more than a boy. Any conspicuous security presence would have undermined the cover story of a university-sponsored Titan mission.

  Dana asked, “Who’s coming, Lieutenant?”

  “Supply trucks. Nothing to be concerned about.”

  “No trucks are due for hours,” she reminded him. Because more trucks inside the dome could only get in the way.

  “They radioed ahead with the proper codes,” Anderson insisted.

  Blake had zoomed the outside camera. “Is it just me, or do most of those vehicles look military?”

  Within this dome alone, fifty-plus people might have inferred that Clermont was headed for somewhere not Titan. Hundreds more constructing the three new “space habitats” and the scaled-up DEDs to propel them must have their suspicions. How many diggers were questioning the sudden massive “ice mining” projects? How many legislators had the governor taken into her confidence to get these mega-projects approved? How many people were involved in the urgent, long-range consultations with governments on Earth and elsewhere?

  The nightmare-within-a-nightmare, the disclosure of the GRB secret, had been all but inevitable. And if, in a panic, people had decided to flee?

  Dana said, “Lieutenant, you may need to defend this ship.”

  A familiar voice came onto the command channel: Hawthorne. “That won’t be necessary, Captain McElwain. I’ll be at the dome within five minutes to explain.”

  As she and Blake waited outside the ship, three stevedores toting crated microsats went up the aft ramp. In a sane universe, they would take aboard cargo after the final shakedown cruise. Still….

  Another few days and we will be ready to go, Dana thought. Unless Hawthorne screws things up.

  A convoy of cars and trucks braked to a halt outside the dome’s primary entrance. A sleek limo, its tinted windows concealing those inside, was the first vehicle to emerge from the air lock.

  Dana and Blake strode after the car as it parked. From the corner of an eye she saw a truck pull close to the ship’s aft ramp. More cargo? Cargo she had not reviewed and approved? What the hell was going on?

  “Change in plan, Captain,” Hawthorne said, getting out of his car.

  “What do you mean?” Dana asked. “Who are the people going into my ship, and what are they doing?”

  Hawthorne said, “The short answer to all your questions is that this ship leaves as soon as the new cargo is loaded.”

  “Leaves for where?” Blake asked.

  Dana said, “Specs, translucent mode, cycle among shipboard cameras only, two-second loiter per view.” The madness had only grown since she’d walked off her ship. And Tanaka, his forehead furrowed, had removed the back panel from a bridge console and was peering inside. “Hawthorne, the ship is still torn apart. Half the systems need to be checked out again.”

  “Do checkout on your way,” Hawthorne said. “Use fusion drive at first, if you must.”

  “Our way where?” Blake tried again.

  Dana said, “At the moment, the bridge consoles aren’t even bolted to the deck. We’re still making room to cram lead shielding into the bow.”

  “Put the consoles back where they were, if that gets you away faster,” Hawthorne said.

  Two troops stomped down a ramp carrying out a cold-sleep pod. Wiring harnesses and cryogenic lines looked like they had been sheared off! Then another pod came out, and a third.

  “Hawthorne!” Dana said. “Without cold-sleep pods, we don’t have a mission. We can’t carry enough food and water, or maintain life support long enough, to reach a safe distance from the GRB. If we could, it wouldn’t matter. Before we get anywhere near light speed, the interstellar muck turned to radiation will have killed us.”

  “You’ll have pods in hold three for a crew of six,” Hawthorne said. “I need hold two for more important things.”

  Blake said, “This is insane. Explain yourself.”

  “Or what, Westford? Or you won’t go?” Hawthorne thumped the top of his car. “Everyone out.”

  First Antonio appeared, then two people Dana didn’t recognize. All were ashen. And then—

  “Rikki!” Blake said. “What’s going on?”

  “Quiet!” Hawthorne gestured at a squad of troops. “Westford, you will go. If necessary, you’ll be carried aboard bound and gagged. If that’s how things play out, one of these marines takes your wife’s berth.”

  Troops emerged from the ship carrying three additional cold-sleep pods.

  Swallowing hard, Rikki said, “I go where Blake goes.”

  Antonio shuffled toward Dana. “The ship leaves right…away…or…it’s the end.”

  The longer superior officers put off the bad news, the iffier the mission would be. “So what’s the new mission, Neil?” Dana asked softly.

  Hawthorne said, “Walk with me, Captain. Everyone else, get back to work.”

  7

  Two hours after tight-lipped soldiers had hustled Rikki from an astrobiology drill, she was buckling herself into one of the jump seats that folded down from the aft wall of Clermont’s crew quarters. To her left sat Antonio, already strapped in, wringing his hands. To her right, fumbling with their five-point harnesses, were the woman and man Rikki had met in Hawthorne’s limo.

  They were dazed.

  The end of the world. Rikki remembered when she’d first heard: the shock and pain. The days of denial. The su
rvivors’ guilt at being included in the scouting mission. The crushing depression at the futility of it all.

  Compared to Li and Carlos, learning of the apocalypse as the limo jolted and swayed, Rikki had had an easy time of it.

  The cabin’s forward wall awakened, to display the scene off the ship’s bow. Jettisoned equipment, mostly cold-sleep pods, lay in a jumble to their right. (To starboard, she chided herself inanely, remembering one of her many lessons. Yeah, that’s important.) Outside the clear plastic dome, cars and trucks trailing clouds of dust sped away. Virtual ship’s instruments shone through the exterior view.

  Rikki thought, I’m seeing what Blake is seeing. The thought calmed her.

  “Attention, all hands,” Dana announced over the intercom. “This is the captain speaking. We are about to launch. Prepare for immediate acceleration.”

  Not an hour earlier, Rikki had heard Dana declare this ship a shambles, unfit to fly. And now….

  On-screen, a dazzling red light sprang from the bow. The laser beam swept up and aft, and as it did the fabric of the dome sagged. Knowing it was her imagination, Rikki heard pressure alarms keening through the hull.

  “Comm laser,” Antonio muttered. “Faster than…deflating and removing…the dome.”

  Dana came back on the intercom. “Launch in ten seconds. Nine. Eight…”

  On zero, to the eerily silent workings of the DED, the bulkhead at Rikki’s back became the floor. Her weight surged. She’d only seen elephants in holos, but now the invisible, metaphorical kind dropped onto her. In the hold aft of the crew quarters, hastily stowed cargo thudded and crashed.

  In an instant, Clermont burst through the slit in the still settling dome.

  Within seconds, Rikki lost sight of the ground convoy. The dry-dock area shrank into the landscape and the horizon began to curve. As they climbed, the night side of the world came into view, and only the occasional brave glimmer of a domed city relieved the darkness. Cargo in the holds must have fallen as far as it could, because the clamor from aft began trailing off.

  But the acceleration went on and on and on….