The Echo taq-2

by James Smythe

  ‘I’ll run it,’ he says. He floats back towards the changing rooms and the airlock, and I follow him, and Lennox. He straps himself to one of the benches and brings up a screen and he types on it, synchronizes the probe with his interface, and then he throws it to Lennox. ‘Put it in the airlock,’ he says. ‘We’ll flush it out, start it out there.’

  ‘It will definitely hold,’ I say, more a question than not. These things have been tested underwater and in our labs, in the vacuums that we created. Lennox lets it rest inside the airlock and then shuts the inner door. This will hold as well: the first time we have opened up any part of the ship to space itself. The seals, the panelling, the joins: they will all hold. Lennox types the code into the panel to release the outer door and it opens. We are still alive, and still fine. We watch on the camera inside the airlock as the ball stays drifting, unaffected by the vacuum.

  ‘We’re go,’ Lennox says, and Wallace types something into the computer and the blue light flashes more. It shoots gas from the back, a puff of white, and the ball leaves the Lära and goes out into the nothingness. Wallace calls up another screen: this one showing the tiny camera that rests in the front of the probe.

  ‘Let’s see what’s out there,’ Wallace says.

  He sends the probe forward, moving it slowly. From here we can get as close to the anomaly as possible: seeing the sheen of it up next to the camera. Through it, the Ishiguro. It looks the same as it ever did. It is clean and almost new; were it not for the technological advances we have made, you wouldn’t think that it was twenty-something years old. There are very few marks on it. Nothing that would suggest it had any troubles. Nothing that gives us a clue as to what happened.

  ‘Stay here a second,’ I say to Wallace. ‘Tomas, do you need anything from the anomaly?’ We have to wait for the reply, and it’s interminable. I don’t know how we ever thought that this would be acceptable.

  ‘Not just yet,’ he says. ‘Worry about the Ishiguro now.’

  ‘Fine,’ I say, and I tell Wallace to move the probe to the cockpit and through, into the anomaly.

  ‘We don’t know how it will react,’ he says.

  ‘So we discover,’ I say. He moves the probe adjacent to the cockpit, and he rolls his shoulders, gearing up for this.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. He directs the probe straight for the cockpit. It passes into the anomaly as if it was nothing; as if it had been in there the entire time. Not even like water or glass: no ripples, and nothing shatters. We see the ship come closer, but the probe doesn’t slow down. Instead it heads for the cockpit glass, and it collides, and the picture on the screen that we are watching it on crackles and fades into static, and the probe spins. The picture goes; out of the airlock I can see it, the blue lights now deadened. ‘I didn’t make it do that,’ Wallace says. He furiously types and pulls at the keyboard to get a reaction. It spurts, left and right. It moves, but only just. Something’s damaged on it, and it sits there like any other piece of debris.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Tomas asks. ‘What the fuck happened?’ The image he’ll be looking at will be of such a low resolution that it won’t be worth much in way of an explanation. ‘Did you crash it?’ he asks.

  ‘No,’ Wallace says. ‘I lost control. It fucked up.’ He continues typing, and I watch it there, drifting now, away from the Ishiguro and back towards us. It seems to stop, somehow, and just floats there. It’s almost tranquil.

  ‘It won’t have just fucked up,’ Tomas says. ‘That’s not how they work.’

  ‘So it’s the anomaly,’ I say. ‘It must be.’

  ‘Wait,’ Wallace says. He rewinds the live feed, back into the recorded footage, and then plays it back: slower than real-time we watch the probe go off, and we watch it pass the boundary, and then frames start dropping and noise comes in, and we see the cockpit for a second as it collides with the glass, and then the static takes over. ‘You’re right,’ Wallace says. ‘It happened as soon as it went over. It was dropping frames in the video as well. Must be something interfering with the signal.’ He rewinds it again, to see the moment it passed through. He slows it to an absolute crawl: as many frames of static as there are of the ship. ‘Fucking madness,’ he says. ‘We don’t know enough about this thing.’ He types something, and there’s a hiss of static on the screen, then the footage again.

  ‘You’ve got it back?’ Lennox asks.

  ‘No,’ he says. ‘No, it’s just playing video. It’s looping video.’ He jabs at the keyboard. ‘I can’t stop it.’ We see the probe go on its journey again, hit the cockpit again, spin out. The footage starts again almost immediately. Again, and again, and we watch it. Wallace stands up, unclips, and looks to see through the airlock. ‘If we can get it back, I might be able to fix it. It’s obviously still got some life left in it.’

  ‘We do have another,’ I say.

  ‘Not the point.’

  ‘Guys,’ Lennox says. ‘The fuck has happened?’ He watches the loop, and then, when it starts again, waits until it hits the cockpit. He pauses the video, and we all stare at this still frame. There is a glimpse, barely even a split second, where we have footage of inside the cockpit: and the blue light from the probe shines in there, and we can see chaos: debris floating, detritus, parts and pieces of who knows what. On the walls run dark smears. ‘That’s blood, right?’ He advances the footage, frame by frame, but that’s all we’ve got. The camera spins and tumbles.

  ‘We have to go in there,’ I say. ‘We have to see it for ourselves. We have to see what it is.’ I try to sound convinced when I say it; I try to sound as if this is second nature to me, and not something that I am guessing at, and praying for. Lennox and Wallace are both silent. Neither knows if I am right.

  Somebody needs to go into the anomaly. We don’t know what it is, still; and we don’t know the dangers. We have a few absolutes, certainties: we can tell that it will not kill whoever goes into it, because everything about the Ishiguro tells us so. Somebody is alive in there. Why they haven’t seen us, we don’t know. Why they haven’t come to us, rolled out a welcome wagon, desperate to thank us for rescuing them – if that’s what they need – we do not know. But we need people out there. They are all trained. They have all done this in simulations and real-world practice. They are all capable. Now it’s just drawing straws.

  We need two volunteers, and Tobi says that one should be her. She’s logged the most time in zero-g simulators. She’s used the boosters on the suits so many times before; there is less chance of anything going wrong with her out there. And, in case a pilot is needed for the Ishiguro, she will be invaluable. Wallace agrees: she’s good in this sort of situation, he says. He doesn’t raise his own hand, though: instead he looks down at the floor, and at his feet, and he mumbles. I catch Inna staring at him, and I wonder what’s going on. Something that I do not know. She raises her hand as well, then.

  ‘I should go,’ she says. ‘There could be people on the other ship who need my help.’ I shouldn’t worry: hers is not mine to worry about, and it makes sense, and this is perfectly safe. Those suits are built to withstand so much. But still.

  ‘What about Lennox?’ I say, thinking that he is equal parts young and limber and athletic and ballsy and expendable. And I think these things, and I don’t feel guilty. It is safe, but if it is not, he is the one that we can stand to lose. Not Inna.

  ‘Sounds good,’ he says.

  ‘If somebody is injured and can’t be moved, I could save them,’ Inna says. ‘There was blood in there, wasn’t there? This shouldn’t even be a discussion.’ Lennox looks disappointed, but then Wallace throws him back into play.

  ‘Lennox, you should go with them. You know how to get the ship started if you need to, right? All three of you go.’ We wait for approval: from Tomas, or maybe me. But I am not the one to call this. I don’t know why, but I defer to my brother.

  ‘Fine, the three of you,’ Tomas eventually says. ‘Get suited.’ Wallace pushes off to go and get the suits, and the other
three begin to take their clothes off. Inna stands in front of me: she unzips herself, pulling her suit down. Underneath she has a vest covering herself: her underwear, thin and blue.

  ‘Help me?’ she asks. She is looking at me. We were told that we couldn’t be shy on the ship. Everybody sees everything. They’ll see you shower, eat, sleep, shit. All of it, at some point or other. Wallace passes me a suit for Inna, and I open it. She bends down to pull it onto her feet, and I see more of the tattoo, eking out from the edges of her white vest. There are stretched claws and wild blue feathers. This is plumage. She seems to watch me as she undresses. She doesn’t make eye contact, not to hold my own gaze, but she flits between looking directly at me and not: drawing my eyes to her as she meets my stare and then looking down at her own body, to slide her legs into the full-body suit, to push her fingers, one by one, into the slight, pinched tips of the gloves. The suits aren’t like they used to be. They’re thin and figure-hugging, a composite designed to withstand temperatures and pressures that the old ones – swollen and puffy, missing only the diving bell – couldn’t have come close to holding up to. They’re designed for movement, for freedom. I am sealing the suit for Inna at the back when Lennox finishes dressing himself. He pulls up a full-body screen and turns a camera onto himself, examining himself as if it’s a mirror.

  ‘Okay,’ he says. ‘Anything happens, you’ll pull us in, right?’ They’re going to attach themselves with tethers to our ship: a metal-fibre wire that we can control the tension on. I don’t say this, but the tethered line is a last-chance Hail Mary: if they lose consciousness, or if we lose contact (I think about the probe turning to static, dying in the middle of the nothing, just spinning out of control), it’s how we get them back. He looks at the two women, both putting the final touches to their body suits.

  Inna leaves the end of the zip-seal until last: leaving that part of her bird exposed again, on her collarbone. She watches me as she closes it.

  ‘Roomy, aren’t they?’ Lennox says. They laugh. He’s joking; he’s slightly scared.

  Wallace helps them with their helmets. He fastens the braces over their suits; they’re tied at the waist and the chest and the back, fastened and clamped; and then the helmets are on, locked down, cranked tightly. He runs diagnostics on the helmets to check, and they’re all sealed. No rips – the fabric is almost impenetrable, so it’s what we expected – and they’re ready to go. He calls up their helmet cameras on tiny screens: inside the glass, angled at their faces. Inna and Tobi are serious with this, but Lennox pulls a face and look at himself on the screen. This has all happened so quickly. This is what we intended: that we could make a choice to leave the ship and be outside within minutes. None of the protocols or procedures that might have held us up, causing us to miss an opportunity. This is easy. This is, Tomas and I decided, how it should be.

  The three of them stand in the airlock to say goodbye. Wallace clips them to the safety cable, daisy-chained together: Lennox to Tobi to Inna. If one of them needs help, the others are always attached. They wave at me, as if this is an adventure. Inna leans out before we shut the door and beckons me towards her. I come, and she leans in, cranes her neck so that I can see into her eyes. She doesn’t say anything, but there is something. She smiles at me, and pushes backwards. Wallace closes the inner door.

  ‘Are you ready?’ he asks through the intercom. We can see them through the window into the airlock: nervous, twitching, bracing themselves. This is what they’re all trained for. This is it. ‘Thumbs up to show you’re ready.’ They all hold their thumbs out. Wallace types something, and the outer door opens, and they spill out in that first sudden rush.

  ‘They’re clear!’ Hikaru shouts. We hear Lennox cheer over the comms – a long, drawn-out howl of joy, the howl of a sportsman scoring a goal, of a man climbing a mountain – and Wallace and I watch their cables become taut through the seals in the glass. They’re so free. It’s like swimming: driving through the darkness, the tiny boosters on their packs propelling them forward.

  ‘When do they reach the anomaly?’ I ask.

  ‘Ten seconds,’ Hikaru says from the cockpit.

  ‘Slow down,’ I say to them, but that’s easier said than done. I intend for them to stop at it, to examine it briefly; to see if it is tangible. There is something that we refer to as a wall: this must be something. But then they pass through it, and it is as if they do not even notice. One by one they break it, and they carry on as if nothing even happened. They do not realize. Hikaru turns on the intercom so that we can speak to them. ‘You guys okay? You’re inside it.’

  ‘Holy shit!’ Lennox says. He somersaults; he spins, around and around, tucked up. When he stops, he is facing the darkness that stretches off in front of him, and he reaches out towards it. ‘So weird,’ he says, ‘like it’s not there.’ He turns to us, and his face. We can see his face on the monitors. ‘What the fuck!’ he says.

  ‘What is it?’ I ask.

  ‘There’s… It’s like fog. It’s hard to see through this.’ Inna and Tobi turn and look as well, and their faces match. ‘Turn up your lights,’ he says, ‘it’s easier to see with the lights on.’ We do.

  ‘It’s like looking through ink,’ Inna says. ‘It is so strange.’

  ‘The mission,’ Tomas says. ‘You all should get on with this.’ They do. No questions. Lennox swims forward, deeper into the anomaly, towards the Ishiguro, his arm outstretched.

  ‘I can see my arm, but nothing past it. Can you see this? It’s so weird.’ He turns and pushes back towards us, his arm still outstretched. Wallace switches one of the screens to his camera view, so we can see what he sees. ‘Are you watching this?’ Lennox asks. It’s patchy, and static-filled, and loose. His ouststretched arm: there is nothing there. Wallace flicks to show Tobi’s camera. She has nothing in her view except the expanse of the anomaly. It’s the darkest blackness I’ve ever seen. It’s not like black paper or black metal, because it’s nothing. The signal is frazzled and crackling with static, so the picture is fractured, but the gist is there.

  ‘Tobi, what can you see?’ Wallace asks.

  ‘Nothing.’ She sounds terrified. ‘If I couldn’t see my own hands, this would be like I was blind or something.’

  ‘Put your flashlight on,’ Wallace says. Tobi reaches up and flicks the switch, and the light comes on, but it deadens in front of her. There’s nothing to illuminate.

  ‘My God,’ she says. ‘Can you see this?’ Her voice crackles through the speakers.

  ‘We can see it,’ I say, as if that is the right phrase. There is nothing to see.

  ‘Listen,’ Tomas says, over the intercom, ‘you need to go to the ship. We have to get on with this.’ I wonder how much exactly he can see down there. How bad the picture is: the static from their feeds mingling with the static that he’ll be picking up from the bounce. They don’t argue: all three of them turn to the ship. We keep watching their cameras as they move towards it: and it looks so mundane suddenly, so dull, just another billion-dollar piece of technology floating further from home than anybody’s ever been before.

  Wallace talks to Lennox. ‘There’s a panel on the side of the ship, near the airlock. You can open that, start to cycle the airlock from that.’

  ‘Isn’t that dangerous? For them inside?’

  ‘It seals the inner door when you open the outer one. It’s an automated process.’ I wonder why he didn’t go out there himself. He would have been much more suited to this. I look at him, so dishevelled and tired.

  ‘Should we knock on the door first?’ Inna asks.

  ‘You can try,’ he says. ‘They won’t hear you, though. The metal’s too thick for that.’ Through Lennox’s camera we watch him swim towards the panel. He reaches it.

  ‘This one?’

  ‘There are grips on the side. Pull them away and it’ll swing loose.’ He does – it’s a strain, and we see Lennox struggle with it – and the panel opens. It’s a mess in there, even I can see that. Some of the w
ires cut. Some of them tangled.

  ‘It’s not meant to look like that,’ Wallace says.

  ‘Can you still open the airlock?’ I ask him.

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘That part looks fine. It’s the comms that are ruined in there. They’ll have no satellite use, I reckon. Probably why we haven’t heard from them.’ He talks Lennox through what he should be doing, and then tells the other two to get to the entrance hatch. ‘It’ll open as soon as the internal one is shut,’ he tells them. They pull themselves around to it, all clinging to the hull. Their cables snap and slap across the ship, and we can hear them reverberate inside our ship, where they go taut at their attach points. ‘Ready?’ he asks. They wait. ‘Not long now.’

  We wait and watch. ‘Did he do it right?’ Tomas asks, because of the lag, and then the door starts to hiss open, only a crack, a smidgeon. They are going inside. We see glimpses on their cameras of the inside, past the airlock window: how dark it is.

  But there is movement in there. There is something moving.

  ‘What was that?’ Lennox asks, and then he hears something and snaps his head to face the rear of the ship, and the engines on the Ishiguro kick into action. They flare up and the light – which is blue, like the burn of a blowtorch, rather than the flame-yellow of a fire or an explosion – fills the monitors, each of them. They all look at it, and the Ishiguro lurches – bursts – forward, away from them. I see it happen, and it is as if it’s too slow: as if we are not watching this for real, but we are on Earth in that second, watching a video. This is why you don’t go into space, we are being told. Chaos and death will only follow.

  ‘No!’ we hear, Lennox’s voice this absolute mess of panic; and Wallace howls and launches himself towards the safety wires and hits the button to pull them back to the ship, and they start winding up but it’s too slow, much too slow. On each screen we can see them turned towards the blue flames, coming through the static like exhaust trails, and then their monitors blink off one by one, no signal at all. It’s not the static or the interference; it’s the engines. The suits were meant to withstand temperatures, but the cameras weren’t.