by Greg Cox
“Copy that, Shaun,” Marcus replied via the radio. “Have a safe flight.”
“Just wait until you see the souvenir I bring back.”
Letting go of the rail, he activated the jet pack. A burst of nitrogen gas propelled him out of the cargo bay and into the endless void outside the ship. Two dozen miniature jets, pointed at various angles, allowed him to direct his flight via the hand controls at his waist. Momentum carried him toward the probe.
Saturn’s crown loomed before him, seeming even larger and more intimidating than before. As even the ship was nothing but an infinitesimal speck compared with the magnificent gas giant and its glittering rings, Shaun suddenly felt like the smallest of subatomic particles. “There is no zero,” he whispered, quoting one of his favorite science-fiction movies. “I still exist.”
Despite the crucial and risky task before him, he took a moment to marvel at the awe-inspiring vista, which boggled the mind. He wondered if people would ever get used to unearthly sights like that. Part of him still couldn’t believe that he was really there, where no man had gone before . . .
That’s enough sightseeing, he thought, snapping out of his reverie. His oxygen tanks held at least eight hours of air, but that was no reason to waste time gawking. He jetted toward the probe, letting Saturn’s meager gravity, which, despite the gas giant’s size, was roughly comparable to Earth’s, add to his acceleration. Within minutes, the probe was directly ahead of him, approximately three hundred yards away.
The alien artifact looked like no Earthly spacecraft that Shaun was familiar with. At least three meters long, it had not budged from its stationary orbit high above the hexagon. He would have whistled in appreciation, but that wasn’t an option; as generations of astronauts had discovered, pressurized space helmets made whistling impossible. Inspecting the probe with his own eyes, he noted how shiny and undamaged it appeared, despite having traversed the solar system inside a comet. He wondered how long and how far it had traveled. All the way from another solar system?
Probably, he thought. Millennia of observation of Earth’s brother and sister planets had never turned up even a hint of a civilization capable of launching a probe like this. The spacecraft had to have come from an extrasolar planet light-years away. Unless, of course, this was the world’s most elaborate practical joke. You know, I wouldn’t put that past Zoe.
“Closing on target,” he reported. “Will conduct visual survey before attempting capture.”
“Take your time, Shaun,” Marcus said. “No need to rush this.”
“Copy that.” Shaun used his braking jets to slow his approach. He circled the probe cautiously, alert to any unexpected developments, yet the onetime comet continued to ignore him. That was fine with Shaun.
Where did you come from? he wondered. And why are you here?
The next step was to determine whether it could be easily moved. Its weight was no issue in space; as an astronaut, he had routinely carted two-thousand-pound satellites around. But it was still unclear what means of propulsion the probe employed to hold itself in place above the planet. It was very possible that it might resist being relocated, in which case, they would have to rethink their plans.
Let’s try just a little shove first, he decided. “Pre-paring to make contact with object. Stand by.”
He moved in closer, a meter at a time. Ten meters, six meters, three meters—
Without warning, the probe’s lower dish lit up. It fired pulses of incandescent cobalt energy at Saturn, straight into the heart of the faded polar vortex. The pulse crossed the distance between the planet and the probe at the speed of light. Shaun frantically hit the brakes to avoid flying into the path of the pulses.
“Crap!” he blurted. “What the hell?”
Despite the vacuum of space, a sort of drumbeat pounded in his head. He tapped the side of his helmet, but the staccato rhythm didn’t go away, making it hard to think. He jetted away from the probe, which fired one last pulse at the planet below.
What was it doing?
He stared down at the probe’s target. To his amazement, a bright blue glow flared up at the center of the vortex, then rapidly expanded outward. The image of a giant glowing hexagon, matching the storm’s original dimensions, was briefly imprinted on his retinas before he was forced to look away despite his tinted visor. A blinding glare lit up the vacuum.
“Shaun!” Fontana shouted. “Get out of there now!”
Before he could respond, what felt like a shock wave hit him, sending him tumbling away from the probe. He struggled to regain control of his flight but found himself tossed through space like a piece of cosmic flotsam. His jets failed to arrest his headlong flight.
Damn! he thought. Maybe we should have used the robot arm after all . . .
And then it was over. The light subsided, and the shock wave moved past him. Testing the controls, he managed to come to a halt thirty meters away from the probe. Gasping, he sucked down precious oxygen. His heart pounded in his chest.
Fontana yelled in his ears. “Shaun! Talk to me! Are you all right?”
“I think so.” He conducted a quick visual inspection of his suit but didn’t spot any burns or punctures. No vapor seemed to be escaping into the vacuum. All gauges read green. He patted himself just to be safe. “Just a little shaken up, that’s all.” He could still see the energy bursts pulsing in his memory. An afterimage of a shining hexagon lingered in his vision. “What just happened there?”
“Beats me,” O’Herlihy confessed. “I can’t make head or tail of these readings. And I’m not sure I ever will. All I know is that the probe directed some sort of incredibly powerful electromagnetic discharge at the planet, and you were nearly caught in the line of fire.”
Shaun remembered the shock wave that had sent him hurtling through space. “What about the ship? Was there any damage?”
“Not that I can determine,” O’Herlihy reported. “There was some momentary turbulence but nothing we couldn’t withstand. You don’t need to worry about us, Shaun. We’re fine.”
“Glad to hear it.”
“We can exchange status reports later,” Fontana said impatiently. “You need to get back to the ship, Shaun, pronto. This was a mistake. That thing, whatever it is, is too dangerous.”
The colonel knew she had to be kicking herself for agreeing to this operation in the first place, but how could they have anticipated the probe firing on the planet like that? Satisfied that he was still in one piece, he turned himself around to see what the probe was up to now.
The enigmatic device appeared to have gone dormant again. It had stopped blasting at Saturn and was just hovering above the north pole once more. His eyes widened behind his visor as he gazed at the planet. Was it just his imagination, or was the ailing hexagon looking more like its old self again? All six sides seemed to be spreading outward, as though heading back toward their original positions, while the swirling vortex within the hexagon appeared to be brighter and more energetic than before.
“How—?” he murmured. Had the probe done that?
“Please, Shaun,” Fontana urged him. “Turn around and come back. We don’t know what that thing could do next.”
He knew he should listen to her, but he wasn’t ready to give up on the probe yet. If anything, what he had just witnessed made him even more eager to retrieve the probe if possible. Any technology that could affect storm patterns from space was too valuable to be left behind. He needed at least to get a closer look at it.
“I’m sorry, Fontana,” he said. “I’m going in for another pass.”
“Shaun, wait! Don’t be crazy! It’s not safe!”
The panic in her voice tugged at his heart, but he fired his jets anyway. He knew she might never forgive him, but he didn’t have any choice. This was bigger than any of them. He needed to find out more.
“I’ll be okay.” He hoped that wasn’t just wishful thinking. “I think maybe the worst is over.”
O’Herlihy didn’t try to talk
him out of it. “We don’t know that, Shaun. Be careful.”
“Copy that.”
Ignoring Fontana’s heartfelt protests, Christopher warily returned to the probe. His fingers hovered over the jet controls, ready to execute a hasty retreat if the unpredictable artifact acted up again. Moving slowly, he came within arm’s reach of the probe. The beam from his helmet light fell on the probe’s metallic casing. This close, he was able to make out what appeared to be bizarre hieroglyphics embossed on the hull. The exotic symbols resembled no language, ancient or otherwise, that he was familiar with. Then again, he was no linguist.
“Are you seeing this?” he asked the others. In theory, the camera in his helmet was transmitting the images back to the ship.
“Yes, Shaun,” O’Herlihy responded, audibly awed. “It’s fantastic. This may be our first true glimpse of an alien language.”
Not counting that classified Ferengi hardware back at Area 51, Shaun thought. He was suddenly very glad that he had not headed back to the ship right away. These images alone were worth the risk he was taking, not to mention their entire voyage. “What about you, Fontana? You getting this, too?”
“It’s amazing,” she conceded. “You’re making history.”
The unearthly hieroglyphics called out to him. He couldn’t resist the urge to touch them. His fingers drummed impatiently. He reached out for the probe. A gloved hand made contact with the unknown.
A blinding white flash caught him by surprise.
“Shaun!” Fontana cried out.
Ten
2020
One minute, James Kirk was standing in the trans-porter room aboard the Enterprise. The next, he found himself floating in space. An environmental suit, bulkier and more cumbersome than the Starfleet-issue suits he was accustomed to, protected him from the vacuum. Kirk blinked in surprise. His eyes watered from the brilliant white flash that had transported him there, and, without thinking, he reached to wipe them. A gloved hand bumped into the gold-tinted visor of a spacesuit helmet. His own breathing echoed in his ears.
What the devil?
He glanced around, trying to orient himself. The north pole of Klondike VI appeared to be thousands of kilometers below him, if below meant anything in zero g. Or was it Klondike VI? The color wasn’t right, more mustard yellow than violet as before. And the furious hexagonal vortex at the pole looked much as it once had, not shrunken and pallid as in the most recent recordings. If Kirk didn’t know better, he’d swear he was drifting above Saturn instead. But that was impossible, wasn’t it? Saturn was months away, in a completely different sector.
The only familiar object in view was the probe, but even that seemed to have changed in an instant. The battered relic now looked much newer and less weathered than it had only seconds ago. He could see the alien hieroglyphics more clearly now; the gleaming bronze casing was no longer charred and pitted. The turquoise ring glowed more brightly than before. Additional lights flickered across its circuitry.
Kirk’s fingers tingled beneath his gloves. He recalled touching the probe right before he found himself here, along with the mysterious relic, which was also not on the transporter pad where it belonged. Had the probe transported them both outside the Enterprise somehow? It seemed so, but Kirk was still confused. Why had the probe reacted this way? And where had this clumsy spacesuit come from?
He was anxious to get back to his ship and get some answers. Come on, Scotty, he thought impatiently. Beam me back aboard.
But as long moments passed and he remained adrift in the void, Kirk began to fear that something was amiss on his ship. Had the transporters been damaged by the alien energies unleashed by the probe? And what about the rest of the ship? And his crew?
Blast it, he thought. Somebody open a frequency and talk to me!
He glared at the probe, knowing that it was somehow responsible for his predicament. He kept his distance, reluctant to touch it again. The glowing propulsion ring flared up brighter and started spinning faster than ever. Kirk could tell that something was happening.
The probe rotated in space, turning its dish arrays away from the planet. Kirk felt a surge of energy all the way through his spacesuit. All at once, the probe accelerated away from him at incredible speed. He watched in amazement as it left orbit and disappeared into space in a heartbeat. At the rate it was going, Kirk estimated that it would be out of the solar system in a matter of hours, if not minutes.
Heading home?
Kirk didn’t know whether to be relieved or dismayed by the probe’s abrupt departure. Even though the probe had brought nothing but trouble so far, he hoped it hadn’t taken Skagway’s last chance with it. They had never found out what it was doing there—besides transporting him into space.
“Shaun!” A frantic voice addressed him via the headphones inside his helmet. “Oh, my God, Shaun! Are you okay?”
Kirk didn’t recognize the woman’s voice. It didn’t sound at all like Uhura, or Qat Zaldana, for that matter. And why was she calling him Shaun? Had she gotten the wrong frequency?
“Kirk here,” he answered. “Who is this?”
“What’s that?” the voice responded. Static garbled the transmission. “I’m not reading you.”
Where was the transmission coming from? The Enterprise? Skagway? A rescue shuttle? Kirk hoped for the shuttle.
“Who is this?” he repeated. “Identify yourself.”
“Shaun? Can you hear me?”
Kirk tried to look for the Enterprise, only to discover that his helmet severely restricted his field of vision. Maneuvering in a vacuum, without anything solid to hold on to, made turning around problematic, but he bent backward at the knees until it looked as if he was competing in some kind of zero-g limbo competition and was able to gaze up and behind him. His jaw dropped.
The Enterprise was nowhere to be seen. In its place was an antique spacecraft only a fraction of its size, cruising in orbit several hundred meters away. The relic was composed of four large steel modules linked together in a chain. A pair of rectangular wings, extending from the rear propulsion unit, supported a series of solar panels designed to capture the distant sunlight while the ship was in orbit. Kirk immediately recognized the anachronistic vessel as an old, pre-warp ship of the sort used by human astronauts to explore Earth’s own solar system back in the twenty-first century. A spaceship, not a starship.
He didn’t understand. Ships like this were moth-balled centuries ago, at least on Earth. They were the stuff of history tapes and museum exhibits. But this ship looked brand-new and operational. What was it doing way out there in the Klondike system?
All at once, he thought of the Ares IV. That ship, one of the early Mars expeditions, had been lost in space more than two hundred years ago, when it had been swallowed up by an unexplained subspace anomaly. Was it possible that the ship had somehow ended up here, practically on the other side of the quadrant?
Maybe, he thought. Certainly, Khan’s ship, the Botany Bay, had ended up far from home, and that had been an even earlier model of spacecraft, equipped with only crude, atomic-powered engines. The Ares IV, or some other twenty-first-century spacecraft, could have conceivably traveled just as far.
But that didn’t explain what had happened to the Enterprise.
His own ship had vanished just as inexplicably as his spacesuit had appeared. A thought occurred to him, and he tilted his head forward to look down (up?) at himself. Upon closer inspection, his spacesuit was revealed to be as much a museum relic as the ship orbiting nearby. A hard white carapace protected his upper body. Cooling water seemed to course through tubes close to his skin. An old-fashioned microphone was mounted inside the helmet in front of his mouth. Fans and pumps churned within the breathing apparatus. The entire outfit was astonishingly stiff and bulky compared with a modern EVA suit. He would have been only slightly more surprised to find himself wearing a suit of chain mail.
Unwelcome questions pushed themselves into his brain.
Where am I? Whe
n am I?
“Shaun!” the voice shouted over the static. “You’re drifting away! Use your jets!”
Jets? Kirk couldn’t feel the weight of a thruster pack on his back, but he assumed it was there. He glanced down and spotted a pair of hand-operated controls jutting out on either side of his waist. Fortunately, the controls didn’t appear all that different from those on the more advanced thruster suits he was used to. He guessed he could figure them out. There were really only three basic movements to master: yaw, pitch, and roll. He just needed to learn which toggle did which.
Maybe the one on the right was for basic propulsion?
“Message received.” He hoped the woman could hear him. “Activating thrusters now.”
He pressed the toggle forward slightly.
Nothing happened.
Kirk scowled inside the helmet and tried operating the other controls but with equally futile results. The thrusters refused to fire. Leaning back, he confirmed that he was indeed drifting away from the antique spaceship.
“Shaun!” the woman repeated. She clearly seemed to be hailing him from the old ship. “Use your jets!”
“I’m trying! They’re not working!”
“What’s that?” she shouted. “You’re breaking up!”
Never mind, Kirk thought. In desperation, he smacked the controls with his hand, but they remained unresponsive. He recalled the blinding energy surge that had transported him there in the first place. Had the flash shorted out the thruster controls and perhaps the helmet’s communications equipment, too? That might explain why the woman on the mystery ship couldn’t seem to hear him.
The planet spun slowly beneath him. He seemed to be drifting toward it, although it was hard to tell. The sheer size of the gas giant, relative to himself, dwarfed any minor changes in his perspective. It would be a while before he could perceive it getting larger, but it already seemed intimidating enough. The fierce hexagonal vortex waited for him, even though he knew he would be long dead before he came within thousands of kilometers of it. He was doomed to burn up in its atmosphere, provided his oxygen supply lasted that long, which was doubtful. How much air could this primitive suit carry, anyway? Glancing around, he spotted a head-up display inside his helmet. Judging from an illuminated gauge, he still had about seven hours left.
