Event Horizon

by Steven E. Mcdonald

  “I put in for a replacement for you,” Miller said, without even glancing at Weir, “but on short notice like this…”

  He might as well have pointed a finger directly at Weir. Shame burned in Weir’s chest, mixed with an uncomfortable rage. It isn’t my fault! he thought angrily. He had not planned this, arid he had not singled out Miller’s ship and crew. Miller did not seem to want to approach this rationally.

  Peters shrugged and shut off the vid unit, putting it aside. “No, no, it’s all right,” she said, and gave Weir a friendly, understanding glance, almost speaking to him. “I talked to my ex. He’ll keep Denny over Christmas and I’ll get him this summer.” She gave Miller a brittle smile that told the truth about her dilemma and her feelings. “So everything’s all right.”

  Miller continued to look at her for a few moments, his dark face unreadable. He wanted his scapegoat, Weir thought, his reason for being furious with the world. USAC High Command was too far away, too impersonal, for that purpose. Right or wrong, he had a passenger he could focus on.

  Now Peters was trying to take that away from him by not letting Miller use her as a reason to put the screws to his enigmatic guest.

  Miller softened momentarily, a flash that was gone as quickly as it came.

  He glanced quickly at Weir, but there was no challenge there now. He did not expect this ad hoc truce to last.

  Starck and Smith arrived, also coming back from the bridge, both of them looking tense, neither of them paying Weir much attention. Starck sat down next to Miller, leaning forward, while Smith took up a position behind the chair Weir was huddling on. Weir looked around, up, for a moment, risking a crick in his neck. Smith looked down at him like the wrath of God, his dark eyes unwavering. It figured, Weir thought. He had managed to usurp the pilot’s regular crew quarters chair.

  Cooper and Justin paid the psychodrama no attention whatsoever, tossing the ball back and forth.

  Behind Weir, Smith intoned, “Two hours to Neptune orbit.” The words had all the sound and authority of the Last Trump, meant to make Weir quake.

  Smith’s pronouncement out of the way, Starck looked at Miller and said,

  “All boards are green, everything’s five by five.”

  “That’s good to know,” Miller rumbled. The ball whizzed by him, on its way from Cooper to Justin. Miller gave the younger man an impatient look that was tinged with the suggestion of violence. “Justin, you wanna stow that?”

  Justin clutched the ball to his chest, looking abashed. Cooper grinned at him, while Peters offered a “I told you so!” look. Mom might let the boys get away with it, but Dad was home now….

  Miller leaned forward, clasping his hands together, his expression deadly serious. “Okay, listen up,” he said, looking around at his crew. “As you all know, we have an addition to our crew. Dr. Weir, this is: Starck, my XO; Smith, pilot; Justin, ship’s engineer—”

  “You can call him Baby Bear,” Cooper interrupted, sliding smoothly into the gap that Miller granted him. Justin grinned and Starck snorted, amused.

  Miller looked around at Cooper, who was lounging insouciantly on his bunk.

  “This is Cooper. What the hell do you do on this ship, anyway?”

  Cooper gave a show of thinking, his eyebrows working.

  Taking his cue, Justin said, “Ballast.”

  Cooper leaned down over the side of the bunk, threatening to slide off onto the deck. He gave Weir a kissy-face stare that made the scientist flinch back.

  “I am your best friend,” Cooper said, his voice singsong, “I am a lifesaver and a heartbreaker…”

  Weir was not sure how he should react to this particular display, so he chose to avoid a response altogether. Helplessly, he looked at Miller, who looked impatiently back. “He’s a rescue technician. Peters, medical technician, DJ…”

  “Trauma,” DJ said, softly.

  So DJ and Peters were the medical tag team, one dealing with the broken ones Peters could not easily fix.

  Cooper hauled himself back onto his bunk, his expression serious for once.

  “All right, everybody knows each other. So what are we doing all the way out here, Skipper?”

  “Dr. Weir?” Miller said, turning to look at the bedraggled scientist.

  Weir cleared his throat, hesitating. At the beginning he had imagined dramatic pronouncements and grand moments. Instead, he was wrapped in a blanket, stuffed into a spacecraft that had very little to do with human comfort, and presented with a small crew that was almost openly hostile. Had he known how things were to have worked out, he would still have demanded to go with the salvage crew.

  It was time he tried to smooth things over.

  This in mind, he said, “First of all, I’d like to say how much I appreciate this opportunity—”

  Miller rolled his eyes, shook his head, anger radiating off of him in waves. “Dr. Weir,” he growled slowly, “we did not volunteer for this mission.

  We were pulled off leave to be sent to Neptune. It is three billion klicks past even the remotest outpost.” Miller took a deep breath. “And the last time the USAC attempted a rescue this far out, we lost both ships. So, please… cut to it.”

  So there was another root cause of Miller’s attitude. Rescue and salvage was Miller’s life, and he knew the odds for success in most situations. What Weir knew and he believed Miller would eventually learn was that the Event Horizon was extraordinary, that the mission they were on was without precedent.

  Weir took a deep breath. “Everything I am about to tell you is considered Code Black by the NSA.”

  Weir paused, letting the crew have time to look at each other. A Code Black classification was not something a crew like this would hear on a regular basis. Interservice rivalries had not waned since the paranoia of the 1950s, with bureaucratic interchanges turning into nightmares of documents, codes, classifications, protocols, and formats. For USAC to accept a National Security Agency Code Black without apparent comment indicated something very serious, very unpleasant.

  Whatever was going on here, it was bigger than USAC. The crew had not known that beforehand. Weir wondered if they would develop an increased respect for him. He doubted it.

  Cooper looked back at Weir, then at Miller. From his bunk, Justin said,

  “That means top secret, Coop.”

  Cooper looked around at Justin. “You don’t need to tell me about Code Black, Baby Bear.” Weir heard the attempt at joviality in Cooper’s voice. The rescue tech simply could not sustain it.

  Weir took a deep breath. The crew was finding its own level for this, giving him a chance to go on. He tugged the blanket more tightly around his body, resisting the urge to shiver. “The USAC intercepted a radio transmission from a decaying orbit around Neptune. The source has been identified as the Event Horizon.’”

  There was dead silence.

  Weir waited. He wished he could hide. This was not his job.

  Her eyes flashing as she turned to glare at him, Starck snapped, “That’s impossible!” She looked around the cabin, almost surged forward. “She was lost with all hands, what, seven years ago?”

  Justin winced, all playfulness lost. “Yeah, the reactor blew.”

  “How can we salvage—” Peters started, turning to Weir, a confused expression on her face. He knew what she had to be thinking: there could be nothing to salvage, aside from a few bits of radioactive debris.

  Standing behind Weir, now leaning closer to him, an angry, threatening presence, Smith growled, “Let the dead rest, man.” Weir turned to look at Smith, chills racing up his spine.

  Cooper was getting wound up now. Weir turned his attention back to him, hearing him yelling angrily, “… Cancel our leave and send us out on some bullshit mission!” as he waved his fists in the air. He looked as though he was about to slide down from his bunk to stalk furiously around the crew quarters. Weir did not think that Cooper was about to turn violent, but he was no psychologist. He figured that there was no good reason to p
ut theory to the test in this case.

  Miller let the racket go on for a few more moments, then stood up, holding his hands in the air as he bellowed, “Everybody shut up!” Silence fell again.

  Weir’s ears were ringing. “Let the man speak.”

  Miller sat down again.

  Weir took another deep breath. He hoped that what he was about to say would change the perspective of this crew enough for them to be of use to him in retrieving his ship.

  “What was made public about the Event Horizon,” Weir went on, “that she was a deep-space research vessel, that its reactor went critical, that the ship blew up… none of that is true.” There was silence now, and he had their undivided attention, having introduced them to the idea of cover-up and conspiracy. That was juicy, something for them to fasten on to. “The Event Horizon was the culmination of a secret government project to create a spacecraft capable of faster-than-light flight.”

  They were all staring at him again, their expressions shocked. This was not something they had heard about, had not even suspected. It had not been possible to keep the Event Horizon completely secret once the pure development process was over and the construction process began, but it had been possible to keep a lid on the true nature and purpose of the project. There had been a desire for a deep-space research platform after the successes in exploiting the asteroid belt, and the Event Horizon project had played into that, hiding the truth in plain sight. No one had known what might happen.

  In the end, no one had known what had happened, out here at Neptune.

  Smith, the ominous edge gone from his voice, said, “You can’t do that.”

  “The law of relativity prohibits faster-than-light travel,” Starck said, before Weir could answer Smith. These people were still trying to deal with the concepts and ideas illuminated by Einstein; they were unlikely to reach as high as the work of Hawking, or even Gribbin, probably considering quarks to be the noises made by ducks and tachyons as something you used to hang a picture.

  Patiently, Weir said, “Relativity, yes.” He paused for a moment, trying to bring things a bit closer to the level of those he had to deal with. “We can’t break the law of relativity, but we can go around it. The ship doesn’t really move faster than light”—he gestured with his hands, his blanket becoming more precarious with his motion—“it creates a dimensional gateway that allows the ship to instantaneously jump from one point in the universe to another, light years away.”

  They were all watching intently now, trying to understand him. No matter what, he still felt like an advanced Jungian in a room filled with Freudian novices.

  “How?” Starck asked. Her voice had a glassy edge.

  Weir shrugged. “Well, it’s difficult to…” He stopped, feeling helpless as the equations glowed across his mind, a pure blend of mathematics and practical physics. One day he had known how to bend space and had then set out to prove it. “It’s all math, you see… but…” He trailed off again, still trying to reduce the concepts. He had cracked the sky. Now he had to explain it to these people. “In layman’s terms, you use a rotating magnetic field to focus a narrow beam of gravitons; these in turn fold space-time consistent with Weyl tensor dynamics until the space-time curvature becomes infinitely large and you have a singularity…”

  Miller was staring at him, shaking his head. “‘Layman’s terms.’”

  Weir closed his eyes momentarily, trying to compose himself.

  Cooper was lunging over the side of his bunk again. “Fuck ‘laymen’s terms,’

  what about English?”

  Weir opened his eyes, sighing. How in the name of hell was he supposed to get these concepts across to people who could barely function without an Ezy-Guide and good fortune? He looked around the cramped crew’s quarters, spotting the edge of something, a poster, on the inside of an open locker door.

  “Let’s try this,” he said, reaching out without thinking, and tearing the poster down. The name on the locker door, as it bounced shut, was SMITH. That did not matter now.

  “Excuse me…” Smith started, more shocked at Weir’s abrupt action than outraged at his audacity. Weir shot him a look, and the pilot took a step backwards, not saying anything else.

  Weir turned back to the other crew members, holding up the poster, making the paper snap in his hands. Doggedly, he said, “Say this paper represents space-time…” He slapped the pinup onto the nearest flat surface then made a half-turn, picking up a pen as he did so. He quickly marked an X on the pinup, putting the letter A at one side. “And you want to get from point A here to point B here.” He scribbled another X, this time marked with a B. “Now. What’s the shortest distance between two points?”

  The crew members stared at him as though he had turned into a raving idiot.

  What did they expect? There were non-Euclidian geometries involved here, and many human minds could not go around the requisite corners. He knew that his audience resented being thrown back into grade school, but it was the only way he knew how to get even a fraction of the concepts across.

  Finally, Justin said, “A straight line.” He had a confused look, as though he was certain something was missing from the answer. The other crew members turned to stare at the engineer, who proceeded to glare back at them, annoyed and embarrassed. “What?”

  “Wrong,” Weir said, trying for a sympathetic smile that he knew was forced and looked uncomfortable. Everyone turned to stare at the scientist again.

  “The shortest distance between two points is zero.” He held the poster up, folding it so that the first X was over the second. With a fast, vicious, movement he drove the pen through the layers of paper. Melodramatic but functional; Smith hadn’t even complained about the wanton destruction of his pinup.

  He lowered the poster, looking at them intently. “That’s what the singularity does—it folds space, so that point A and point B coexist in the same space and time. After the ship passes through this gateway, space returns to normal.” He handed the punctured poster back to Smith, who took it gingerly, looking at Weir as though the scientist might turn rabid at any moment. “It’s called a gravity drive.”

  Justin was watching Weir intently, genuinely curious. “How do you know all this?”

  There was the $64,000 Question. Weir squared his shoulders and said, “I built it.”

  Cooper made a noise that indicated that he was either impressed or coming to a boil. For good measure, he added, “I can see why they sent you along.”

  Justin was frowning now, though, obviously putting the bits and pieces of information together and coming up with a result he liked less and less with each passing moment. “So if the ship didn’t blow up, what happened?”

  “The mission was going perfectly,” Weir said, frowning, remembering. “Like a textbook. The ship reached safe distance using conventional thrusters. All the systems looked good.” He sat back, his enthusiasm and drive draining as the memories flooded back in. The Event Horizon had torn a hole in the heavens and his life had been sucked into it. “All the systems looked good… they received the go-ahead to activate the gravity drive and open the gateway to Proxima Centauri, the sun’s closest star.”

  Weir paused for a few moments, lost in the past, replaying those hours, those days in Central Operations. Everything had come crashing down in such a short span of time, taking the foundations of his entire life.

  “She vanished from all our scopes. Disappeared without a trace.” He paused, looked at Miller. The Captain was watching him intently. “Until now.”

  Miller grimaced, but his eyes were full of curiosity. He needed to know.

  “Where has it been the past seven years?”

  Weir sat back, his blanket forgotten. “That’s what we’re here to find out.”

  Chapter Nine

  The bridge was not a place for fast movement, but Weir I was managing all right, fitting into a corner. Miller had assumed his throne, of course, but had chosen to sit quietly, listening to all that Weir had t
o say without spending his energy to comment. So far. It was obvious to Weir that Miller considered his crew to be far more than mere functional appendages.

  They had gone as far as possible in the crew quarters, then moved up to the bridge for the second part of the show. If the introduction had rattled the Lewis and Clark’s crew, Weir thought, then the next part would freeze their blood.

  “We haven’t been able to confirm any live contact,” Weir said, leaning backwards, his arms crossed over his chest, “but TDRS did receive a single transmission.” He felt a little more in control now, a little more together.

  He reached out and pressed a key on a nearby computer keypad. The terrifying sound that poured from the bridge speakers had become familiar before leaving Daylight Station, but he could still feel the effects, could still sense the inhuman swirl beneath the static and corruption. Some of the elements rose and fell in a familiar pattern while others seemed to rise and fade in new patterns each time.

  Weir watched their faces as the recording played through, watched them

  .become pale and fearful as they endured the voice of the Event Horizon. The sounds ceased abruptly, causing them to respond with spasmodic physical movements before anyone could gain control of themselves.

  They looked at each other, at Weir.

  “What the hell is that?” Smith whispered, all of his posturing and his energy drained for the moment. He was staring at Weir like a lost man.

  Peters looked up at Miller, who sat impassively in his chair, then back at Weir. “It doesn’t sound like anything human,” she said, her words coming slowly.

  Weir nodded. “Houston has passed the recording through several filters and isolated what appears to be a human voice.” It was stretching things somewhat to describe that voice as human, he knew, but it seemed to be the best that anyone could do at the time. There had been no communication from Earth regarding further refinements.