Space Eldritch
Page 15
It wasn’t until the tarp had cut Chu off from Cooper’s sight that she blinked and redirected her gaze. Directly behind her from where Saxon stood, the viewscreen flashed its simple geometric patterns and lines, showing the current orbits of the solar aggregator, paragravity and radio satellites. A new arc, this one in yellow, showed the progress of the rogue skimmer toward Isidis Planitia.
Saxon looked at the viewscreen and Cooper at the same time. The dotted lines of the satellites’ paths intersected with the line of her eyes, wide and unblinking.
And Saxon felt something leap into his mind, as fully formed as the appetites of It Sees And Eats had been. But this was sweetly, blissfully human in its tenor. It was glorious.
It was an idea.
“Cooper,” he said deliberately, as if he didn’t want to scare away this idea by any sudden movements. “You’re trained on the paragrav satellite.”
She nodded mechanically.
“It’s a full-range paragrav unit, right? I mean, it can intensify gravity as well as weaken it?”
“It’s the same thing,” Cooper said. “There’s not a separate push and pull. The g-metric field only changes in apparent effect because of right-angle orientation in...” She trailed off when she realized she was over-answering the question. “Yes, it can strengthen gravity as well as weaken it.”
“How strongly?”
Her brow knit in confusion. “I don’t know how to answer—”
“Come here.” He marched over to the viewscreen, anxious energy accelerating his pace. He pointed at the line which showed the orbit of the paragravity satellite, waiting near the polar circle for its part in the melt migration.
“How long would it take to get this satellite down to here?”
His finger trailed across the representation of the Martian globe to the circle that marked Isidis Planitia.
Comprehension broke like dawn over Cooper’s face.
“Two hours—no, wait.” She examined the string of digits beside the icon for the satellite. “Closer to three, I think.”
Saxon looked at the yellow line marking the skimmer’s progress toward Isidis. It would be close.
“Get it there,” he said.
***
Once Cooper had input the new orbital path to bring the paragravity satellite directly over Isidis Planitia, a search found Swann’s body twenty yards farther down the corridor in the direction he and Chu had gone, apparently coming back toward the garage. His neck had been broken so severely that his head had been hidden entirely underneath his torso.
Saxon and Duchesne put the bodies of Swann, Huyck and Chatterjee in the back of a rover and drove out to the far side of the gentle rise that stood half a mile to the northwest of the base. They used plasma saws and a paragrav winch to create five lateral trenches in the soil, then laid the bodies in three of them. Draney’s and Rutter’s corpses had been in the skimmer that Caldwell had stolen, and Saxon didn’t hold much hope of retrieving them, but it seemed like a respectful gesture to dig graves for them anyway. Rigby and Ishida would forever be buried in the catacombs under the surface, and Saxon hoped that they would stay irretrievable.
When they had used the winch to cover the three bodies, Saxon felt it was his place to say something over their resting place, but the state of anxious tension he had existed in for over twenty-four hours now had left him almost tremulous with the adrenal byproducts in his veins. For the first time since he’d landed on Mars, he felt no desire for coffee. After a moment of silence over the graves, Saxon gave up. “We’ll have a proper memorial when all this is over,” he said to Duchesne, and they drove back in the rover in silence.
That feeling of over-tense anxiety didn’t ease when they got back inside. Even though there were tasks to see to all over the base, everyone had congregated back to the garage, where Cooper was monitoring the viewscreen with eyes that rarely blinked. She had added to the display estimated times until both the skimmer and the satellite reached their mutual destination. The skimmer’s ETA wasn’t concrete, as they couldn’t be sure of Caldwell’s intended approach and deceleration. The satellite’s time, on the other hand, was a certainty: forty-two minutes and change until it came directly over the complex beneath Isidis Planitia, the optimum position for crushing the tunnel complex.
The minutes ticked by slowly as everyone first puttered, trying to keep themselves occupied, then surrendered and found a seat to watch the viewscreen over Cooper’s shoulder.
Saxon regularly stood up and leaned over Cooper to read the numbers by each colored arc. After three or four times, he could see a trend becoming more and more definite.
“We’re not going to make it,” he said.
Cooper slowly shook her head, having apparently already reached that conclusion. According to the displayed estimate of the skimmer’s flight path, it would arrive at its destination a full twenty-eight minutes before the paragravity satellite.
Twenty-eight minutes. How much could Caldwell accomplish in twenty-eight minutes? Did Caldwell—or whatever wore Caldwell like an environment suit—suspect their intention to crush the ancient tomb before the cubes could be moved to another location? How well had Rigby managed to block the entrance? Could Caldwell tunnel through it quickly with a plasma saw? Or was there another entrance to the underground complex after all, one which Caldwell could use to slip inside and carry out a cargo of shiny green cubes before the satellite could be brought to bear?
“He’s down,” said Cooper. Now everyone was at Saxon’s elbows, all sharing the meager information that the viewscreen provided.
“Do we know if he put it down safely?” Swann asked.
“Well, the transponder’s still working,” Cooper answered. “No auto-distress beacon, so he couldn’t have done too badly.”
“Maybe he’s learning,” Mendez said. “Or maybe he has better command of Caldwell’s skills.”
The satellite was still lagging behind. Saxon could imagine the planet’s surface from the satellite’s vantage point: The lip of Isidis Planitia protecting the interior of the bowl until it slowly, slowly revealed the basin with the skimmer at the bottom.
“activate the satellite,” Saxon said.
“It’s not direct yet,” Cooper said. “An angular discharge would stress the harmonic—”
“If we put enough juice into it, the paragravity will do its damage no matter what the angle is. I don’t care if you burn it out, fire it up now!”
Cooper’s fingers manipulated the controls. The viewscreen showed the stretched ovoid of the paragrav field extending from the satellite to its target. Other numbers and tangents appeared, proclaiming data beyond Saxon’s ability to understand. A dot on the satellite’s icon changed from green to yellow to red. And then—
Saxon’s brain, his consciousness, his very soul turned inside out in every direction at once. That bitter, metallic taste overwhelmed each of his senses, as if his brain had become one sensory organ
(It Sees And Eats)
and through that organ which was now all he was, he saw/heard/smelled/felt/tasted the web of alien intelligences which had laid beneath Mars these millions of years—no, not years, what he felt wasn’t the years, it was each of the many many many seconds of granular time which had passed since their escape from the fifth planet, unmediated by the illusions of perspective or larger units that humans had created to protect themselves from the full comprehension of just how long a second was, and two seconds and three up until the billions of billions of seconds that the alien minds had waited, fully conscious of the inexorable march of existence, feeling the unsated need and hunger that their god demanded of them and through them
(It Sees And Eats)
while they were powerless to do anything but marinate endlessly in that sentient need that knew time, that knew space, that bellowed in their intertwined awareness to be filled but which had nothing to fill It except the emptiness of time itself as it ground heedlessly from instant to instant to instant to instant to—<
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...
And then it was over. Saxon’s closed, provincial human perspective returned, bringing with it such a flood of relief that it was some time (seconds? minutes? he didn’t know, and rejoiced in not feeling the precision of time passing) before he began to be process the input from his senses again, as if they were unfamiliar extensions to his self that he had forgotten how to use.
His sense of balance returned first, the simplest and most primal awareness seated in his reptile brain, and he knew that he was on the floor and that “down” was somewhere beneath his left temple. After that, the ability to process the stimuli from his eyeballs returned and he became aware that his eyes were open and staring.
He pushed himself to a sitting position. Everyone in the room had been similarly affected. Only Mendez had regained his feet, his hands on his knees, breathing slowly.
“Cooper,” said Saxon. He didn’t recognize his own voice; he didn’t know whether to blame that on his mouth or his ears. “What do we know?”
Cooper, the only one who had been sitting in a chair and thus the only one who hadn’t collapsed to the floor, forced her hands to the controls. She fiddled back and forth and stared at the small rows of characters on the viewscreen.
“The paragrav satellite has tripped its overload,” she said, voice breaking like a teenager’s. “The sideways projection put an acute cross-strain on the field—”
“Isidis. What happened in Isidis?”
She blinked hard and refocused her eyes. “No transponder signal. Not even a distress beacon—nothing.”
That meant the skimmer had been destroyed. And the complex beneath it? Had that synaesthetic mental roar been its death-cry?
Saxon turned to Mendez, who was staring at his fingers as if he had never seen them before. “I want satellite flyovers,” he said. “All the same ones that Caldwell used to find the anomalies in the first place. I want to see what’s left. Then we’ll go out there and make sure. Before we talk to Earth. I need to know.”
He probed the back of his throat with his tongue. He didn’t know if he was sensing that anomalous taste or not—his head was still ringing with its echoes. A taste that echoed; would his senses ever feel truly distinct again?
The viewscreen continued to blink in its bright colors, and Saxon was suddenly sick of those simple lines and shapes which recorded so little of what had really happened. He stumbled away, ending up at the viewslit cut in the wall, and stared through the plasteel window with unfocused eyes.
There was the surface of Mars, inchoate, senseless, a barren sphere which had been the site of two attempted colonizations by foreign life forms so far, and the planet’s only immunity against such infestations was its total disinterest in fostering or supporting life from either the third or the fifth planet.
Above the eastern horizon, twinkling through the sullen gloom of the Martian evening, two lights shone before any of the stars: Mars’s two asteroid moons, Phobos and Deimos. Saxon stared at Deimos’s lesser spark, thinking of the Artifact jutting from its surface, the last monument of an extinct race, alien beyond his previous understanding of the word.
He hoped they were extinct. But he could never, ever be sure.
Gods in Darkness
David J. West
I can calculate the motion of heavenly bodies, but not the madness of men. ~ Isaac Newton
They felt a brief hard drop before the Promethean Titan snatched the three men from the grip of Gaia’s pull and hurled them blindingly aloft.
“Owl Eight, you are a go. This final transmission is coming to you. And fade to black.”
“You got it.”
The B-52 Stratofortress that had carried them seven and a half miles up disappeared in an unfamiliar haze, far below and behind. They would continue the two hundred-odd miles up on their own in an experimental vomit comet: a modified three seater X-20 DynaSoar space plane that did not officially exist. Despite the sound dampening insulation, the roar of the second stage Titan booster rattled teeth for another two minutes as they blasted higher into the east to gain orbital push.
Azure skies bruised quickly to navy then fathomless black, as stars were suddenly kindled as if from a million pilgrims’ candles. Then silence took them.
“We won’t hear anything outside of this cockpit again until re-entry,” said Captain Cormac ‘Jack-Hammer’ Ross over their private intercom. His voice was grim and deep as befitted a hulking man who barely dodged the maximum height requirements of the Air Force test pilots. He had piercing gray eyes and a face that seemed incapable of smiling. A scar from Korea arced down his forehead, across his right eye and to the edge of his lantern jaw. No number of medals could take away the sinister look and make him presentable for the polished public expectations, and as such he was never invited to be a part of the standard astronaut program. He wasn’t promotional material, the colonel had said; but there was still a place with the classified and secret side of the space race, the Crypto-Cosmic side.
“Take us to the appointed Lagrange point,” ordered the mysterious passenger. A slight man with dark deep set eyes, he had a confident air enshrouding him and though clearly not military, he commanded like a Field Marshal.
“You got it.”
“How many times have you been in orbit, Captain Ross?” asked the passenger with an air of indifference. What looked like three strangely colored and ornately engraved medals clanked together over his tight-fitting space suit.
Cormac shrugged, careless if the rear passenger could even see his response at the helm. The very notion that a relatively untrained person could tag along, flaunting what appeared to be contraband weight blatantly around his neck, grated at him. But the sole order of the mission did specify following the directions of the as yet unnamed person.
“Captain ‘Jack-Hammer’ Ross! He has been up, what, seven times now?” answered the co-pilot, Major James Driscoll.
A blue-eyed California native, Driscoll was a respected test pilot in his own right. He had been too young for Korea but there was no good reason he had not been a part of the officially recognized space program. In contrast to Cormac, Driscoll would have been a NASA publicist’s dream candidate, but now that both he and Cormac were on the Crypto-Cosmic side, all histories and records had been sanitized and sterilized.
For this “lost” aspect, each were perfect for the Crypto-Cosmic program in that neither had families. The successful and handsome Driscoll, an Irish-Catholic teetotaler, had climbed through the ranks very well for his age but he was unmarried as well as being an orphan.
No one in the program knew of any family for Cormac either—rumor said he was from Montana—but he was certainly no teetotaler.
“Eight times. He has been in orbit eight times,” corrected the passenger.
“Then why’d you ask?” rumbled Cormac.
“I am making conversation. I know a good deal about both of you already, yet you know nothing of me.”
Driscoll asked, “What do you know? Sir?”
“I am not a ‘sir,’ Major Driscoll. I am not military. But understand that I know enough classified material to have specifically requested both of you for this most unusual, yet supremely important mission.”
“You can tell us your name, then,” said Cormac, as he adjusted the yaw control of the X-20. “You have sway enough to make this operation happen, whoever you are.”
“And with full-black radio silence, no less. Somebody trusts you,” added Driscoll.
“I hope that does not make you nervous, but we cannot afford to have anyone overhear us. And someone is always listening.”
“The Cordiglia brothers?”
“Possibly, but more importantly the Soviets and what is left of Das Reich.”
Cormac grunted at that.
“My name for now is A.H. Ryman. And I do have extreme influence at the J.P.L. and with General Manning. We would not be having this conversation otherwise.”
“So do we call you A. H. or Ryman?”
> “Ryman is fine. How much farther to the Lagrange point?”
Cormac glanced over the controls and calculated. “We’re around halfway, but I can’t promise a time frame just yet. Have some debris I need to get around. The lower Detritosphere is getting especially bad.”
“Is that the official Crypto-Cosmic term for the low earth orbit region?”
“It is.”
Letting the aft winglet give a tiny burst, the X-20 rolled around the oncoming twisted carcass of a shredded capsule. A portion of the booster, held together by the barest skin of metal, lingered alongside. A single insulated wire, like an umbilicus, linked the dead ships together in cruel mockery of life.
“One of ours?” asked Driscoll.
“You could say it was mine,” said Cormac.
A red star resembling nothing so much as a cheese grater identified the victim.
Ryman chuckled. “Why would you say that?”
“I made that. At this orbit, it’s gotta be one of the Voskhods I dumped a load of ball bearings on last month.”
“Only one?”
“If you’ve read the classified reports, Ryman, you know how many I’ve encountered.”
“‘Encountered is’ not really the right word, is it? Perhaps ‘annihilated’ is better.”
“It’s my job.”
“Of course it is. That is why I selected both of you. You follow orders.”
Driscoll responded, “Be that as it may, Mr. Ryman, I haven’t fought the Reds like the Jack-Hammer has.”
“No one has. But we all have our talents. Mark my words, you have an important future before you, Major Driscoll. But I must admit I would like to hear more from Captain Ross about encountering cosmonauts.”