Erebus

by Ralph Kern

  Without warning, an androgynous voice blasted loud in his earphones. “Jupiter Control, this vessel will strike Io. Begin your evacuation procedures. You have thirty minutes.”

  “What the fuck?” Henning exclaimed. “Bill, repeat your last.”

  Henning got no answer. “Bill!”

  “Gunter, standby. We’re figuring out what’s going on,” Bill finally answered.

  The German engineer stood up and looked back at the rover that suddenly seemed very far away.

  “Come on, Bill. I need to know if I should be heading back,” he said.

  “Standby. We’re linking with Jupiter Control.”

  “Screw this,” Henning murmured to himself. “Bill, I’m going to head back to the hopper.”

  “Yeah, you do that.” Bill’s voice had a distracted edge to it.

  In a lumbering, loping run, Henning headed for the hopper, trying his best to re-tread his footsteps that had already faded in the vibrations of the last aftershock; he didn’t want to be stuck in some drift in an emergency.

  “Henning, Jupiter Control has called for evacuation. We’re all going to be lifting.”

  “Bill, I’m not even close to being near a shuttle in the thirty minutes that voice was talking about.”

  “You’re going to have to do the best you can. We’re going to pack into one shuttle and leave you the other one.”

  Henning tripped and fell, nearly burying himself in the dust, the sound of his breathing loud in the confines of the helmet. Starting with a crawl, he managed to pick himself up and carried on bounding toward the hopper. “Okay, just lift as soon as you’re onboard. I’ll be fine.”

  “I hate to leave you, man…We can try a site-to-site bounce in the shuttle to get to you?”

  “And risk landing in a drift and getting stuck? No, just go,” Henning called as he finally got to the hopper and, in a single leap, reached the cabin hatch of the spiderlike vehicle and opened it. He shortchanged the pressurization of the cabin and, moving as fast as he could in his bulky suit, entered the control blister. Climbing into the chair, Henning activated the hopper with his awkward, gauntleted fingers. By the chronometer on his HUD, he had less than fifteen minutes left before the strike.

  The tiny, vulnerable hopper began its lumbering, bouncing motion that was the safest way of getting around on the surface of Io. Henning turned it toward the distant lights of the habitat that he had called home for the last year.

  “Henning, we’re ready to go. Good luck, man.”

  “You too. Get going.”

  Through the hopper’s thick clear canopy, Henning watched as a column of fire began to lift straight up from the surface—his colleagues and friends striving to reach safety.

  The hopper wasn’t particularly fast, and it was crystal clear that it would get nowhere near the base before the time elapsed. Henning kept glancing at the chronometer. It ticked down far faster than was right or fair. Well before he got anywhere near the base, it ticked down to zero.

  To his left, a strange, bright illumination bloomed over the horizon, almost like an aurora. It faded quickly. Then he felt it. The whole surface shifted. It was small, a matter of a few feet, but still, he clutched onto the safety handles in the control blister.

  Panicked, Henning glanced around, trying to see what was going on—then he saw it. Off the right side of the blister, a huge cloud of fire swelled from below the horizon, roiling, tumultuous. Mixed in the cloud, he could see vast chunks of crustal material. The whole surface of the moon was lifting off. Then the shaking started.

  Moonquakes were one thing, this was another. The whole hopper felt like it was being shaken into little pieces by the sheer violence of it. Henning gripped the handles as tightly as he could. Huge chasms began to open. Massive rocks smashed their way up into the sky. All around him, vast mountain ranges were forming or being destroyed in seconds, and lava was shooting into the sky in geysers of fire.

  With what must have been near superhuman effort, Henning manipulated his HUD, finding the controls to send a total dump from his sensory implants in a burst transmission, including the cache that automatically stored the last few minutes. Everything Henning saw and heard was packaged up and sent to the fleeing shuttle, including a live feed.

  Crying out in pain from the sheer ferocity of the vibrations, the last thing Henning saw was a chasm opening beneath the hopper as it plummeted nose first toward an upward surge of lava.

  ***

  I came out of the VR recording and pinched the bridge of my nose, giving myself a moment. It was never pleasant to replay someone’s last moments, especially when it was a full immersion of their final experiences. I was just thankful that Henning hadn’t set his HUD to record his impressions, something I did as a matter of course.

  I’m a fairly cynical soul at heart. I’d seen some very nasty people do some very bad things in my time, but Henning’s last moments touched me. He’d not begged his companions to try some vain rescue attempt. He’d faced things with a certain stoicism. His last thoughts were to send what he was seeing in the hope someone could use it to figure out what had happened to him, to help them find out who had murdered him…

  The same person responsible for my partner’s death.

  I leaned back and gazed out of the window, losing myself in thought as the car raced ever up to Haven.

  INTERLUDE

  The HUD replay shut down. Outside, the superscrapers had lit up in all their glory as the evening darkness had pressed in—hundreds of buildings, miles high with screens and holos adorning them, displaying advertisements of every type.

  “I think that is a suitable place to pause for a moment,” the host said. “I think it bears noting that the Henning download is still considered the best eyewitness account of what occurred on Io—”

  “We’re all aware of the Henning download,” Patrice replied. “However, I am somewhat perplexed by the connection to the artifact you found around Sirius. Your position affords you a lot of patience from us, but not an inexhaustible amount. Let’s cut to the chase.”

  The others in the room nodded their agreement—except one.

  “Voice Patrice, you of all people should want to know what happened in the Jupiter system,” Kara Hanley of Red Star said.

  “Of course I do,” Patrice said levelly. “However, all the information I have seen says that the incident is still unexplained.”

  “All the information you have seen,” the host said pointedly. “If no one wishes to partake in a break, shall we press on?”

  CHAPTER 10

  HAVEN

  “Welcome to Haven,” the station’s AI announced. “Please be careful in the zero-gravity areas until reaching the habitat ring.”

  We were here, thirty-six thousand kilometers up in space where Earth was quite obviously just a small ball meandering its way through the cosmos. I’m not overly given to introspection and I’m certainly not a poetic soul, but looking down on that orb from all the way up here put things into perspective.

  Nearly everyone who have ever lived and died had done so on that small sphere. The sunny, clean Hague, the hip and happening nightlife of London, the lawless, sandy mayhem of Eastern Africa. All of it was reduced to a tiny blue, green, yellow, and white sphere. Home.

  Still, my philosophical mood was somewhat tempered by the fact that I felt sick as a dog. I remembered this from last time I’d been up here. In the tour guides, VRs, and holos, people in space seemed all happy, turning summersaults and generally looking like they were having a whale of a time. For me, it felt like I was going over the top of a roller coaster, the same sinking feeling as my stomach rose into my chest. Only the feeling was constant; it didn’t go away.

  I gingerly crawled my way along the handholds down the brightly lit entrance tunnel, desperate to avoid the embarrassment of being stranded in the middle of it, out of reach of anything. The regular commuters were obvious, pulling or kicking their way confidently down the white access passageway, chatting
away to one another. For me, it reminded me of the odd times I’d been dragged to go ice skating where I refused to leave the safety of clutching onto the barrier for dear life.

  “Layton, do you need help?” Sihota’s deep voice came from behind me. Gripping the handle tightly, I brought myself to an unsteady halt and slowly turned to look at him.

  “No, I’m good, thank you. Piece of cake.”

  The serious air force officer smiled slightly at me. “It got me the first few times. The antinausea drugs will kick in in a few minutes. I promise you’ll soon be bouncing around like you were born up here.”

  I couldn’t think of much worse right then than “bouncing around.” It was the same when I was up here with the ex. Fantasies of athletic, wild zero-gravity sex had quickly gone out of the window and into free fall.

  “Besides, you won’t be in zero-g long. We’re going to be cleared straight onto the Erebus. They have a habitat ring, full gravity. It’ll be like being on Earth.”

  The sooner the better as far as I was concerned. I nodded at Sihota and resumed hauling myself one unsteady hand after another down the guideline.

  ***

  The hangar where Erebus berthed was huge. It was one of the dry dock slips that could be pressurized to allow work to be conducted in shirtsleeves. Erebus had been slated to go through one of the many interstellar gateways that were hovering between the Earth and the moon and had just completed a retrofit for that mission. Now that trip had been postponed—indefinitely.

  Other than being bombarded with adverts for people to sign up with one of the colonization missions going through the gateways, I didn’t really give interstellar travel a lot of thought. The idea of leading a frontier lifestyle on some primitive world like Eden in Tau Ceti or, even worse, one of the space station colonies being set up in some of the more unfriendly star systems didn’t hold a lot of appeal for me. I was a police officer, and there simply wasn’t a lot of policing to do out in space.

  Still, looking at the Erebus, I felt a certain sense of admiration for the crews of the explorer ships. What these people did was the opposite of scrabbling out a living on a barely habitable world or, worse, an asteroid city.

  They went into uncharted territory, saw things that no one else had ever seen, picked their way through strange and distant star systems. I wouldn’t even make it past the expressions of interest for those crews, though; they were seriously clever guys. Apparently, Sihota had tried to sign up and got drummed out, and he probably ticked all the boxes with his academic history and military background.

  Even so, most children went through a stage where if they were asked what they wanted to do when they grew up, they answered to be like Tom Hites, Harry Cosgrove, Karen Cole, or one of those other pioneers. I was no different when I was a kid. The flickering image of Karen Cole’s hologram played in my memory. Funny thing was, even though the hospital had been old and run-down even before the bandits torched it, Karen Cole was out there on the other side of one of those gateways somewhere looking very much the same. That was the strange thing about gate travel: because of the weirdness of how the gateways worked, those guys were still out in deep space and not much older than when they first set off all those years ago.

  When someone traveled through a gateway, the distance in terms of light-years was the amount of time it took. If someone went to Tau Ceti, twelve light-years away, it would still take twelve years for someone watching from Earth, but an instant for the crew. The first wave explorers were literally refugees from the past when they returned—a strange thought. Some of them wanted that to escape their past, others to simply take an express trip into the future. There was even a name for these people: Skippers.

  Erebus was a fairly typical explorer ship: a long, thin spine, a habitat ring around the rear third of it, and another smaller ring behind that. It was one of the latest E-ships. Helios vessels were named after famous exploration vessels of the past. A moment’s glance at the Hypernet showed it was named for the HMS Erebus, which explored the cold reaches of the Antarctic rather than the cold reaches of space as the E-ship before me was set to do. This one had an A-drive of its own. She was one of the newer models; instead of the old-fashioned ram-scoop drives, she had an antimatter torch. Even I knew that made her pretty damn fast.

  Sihota had explained to me, in layman terms, that overall speed wasn’t the primary propulsive concern in space travel. Acceleration is what counted. The harder and longer something could accelerate, and decelerate for that matter, the faster it would get to its destination. Erebus could accelerate hard. Now that the A-liners had all been grounded out of nervousness of a repeat of the Magellan incident, Erebus had been retasked to be at our beck and call.

  She was our ride out to Jupiter.

  ***

  Commander Beverly Tasker was not a happy woman. It didn’t take the brains of a genius to figure that one out. But who could blame her? She’d spent months, years probably, preparing for command of an interstellar mission to the distant star Groombridge 1618. Now, she was taking us to Jupiter space, and her mission had been postponed, pretty much indefinitely, until we said so.

  “Ladies and gentlemen,” the commander said to us as we gathered in Erebus’s mess, “I’ll make no bones about the fact that I am not pleased. I appreciate that the events of the last week are very serious, but just so we’re all clear, I will be fighting to get my ship and mission back as soon as possible.”

  Good luck with that one. The ship and crew had effectively been shanghaied by the UN for our use. Some clause in the Outer Space Treaty allowed it. I’m sure Helios Industries, who the ship belonged to, would be fighting it tooth and nail, but they had an obligation under that treaty for disaster relief. Two other explorer ships, the Gagarin and Han Xin, were also slated to assist and had been shuttling people and material back and forth between Earth and Jupiter space.

  “Commander, I speak for us all when I offer my sincere thanks for the use of your ship and crew,” Vance said. “I can assure you we will release her at the soonest opportunity.”

  Tasker looked at Vance, a cold expression on her face. “I’m sure you will. We have been authorized to use our A-drive as soon as we’re clear of Haven. Transit time will be two hours. Any questions?”

  “I presume the command and control systems of this vessel have been thoroughly checked over? I for one don’t want to find ourselves ramming into another moon…in case whoever has done this has used some kind of virus or software worm,” Cheng inquired—quite reasonably in my opinion.

  “Mr. Cheng, there are quite literally billions of lines of command code in the various systems onboard. If you’re asking if we have picked through every line to see if there’s anything that could cause a repeat of Io, then the answer is no. However, if you’re asking if we have run every self-diagnostic and test we can think of and come out with nothing to be concerned about, then yes.” I got the impression she was a bit on the defensive about someone questioning the integrity of her ship.

  “Good,” Cheng said, leaning back in his chair.

  “If there’s nothing else, I will be on the bridge preparing for departure.”

  “I have a question,” I said, raising my hand. “What do you think happened?”

  Tasker paused, looking at me with steel in her eyes before saying, “Answering that question is your job. I’m just the taxi driver.” Without waiting for any more questions, she swept out of the room.

  I’ve learned that, depending on the context, between sixty and ninety percent of communication is nonverbal. Something about her slightest of pauses suggested she knew a bit more than she was letting on. I looked around the mess. The spooks in the room all had vague looks of consideration on their faces. Vance, Cheng, Agapov, and Drayton had all caught it, too.

  CHAPTER 11

  EREBUS

  The strange thing about the A-drive was how underwhelming it was when you were lounging around in the pristine white mess of a starship, drinking a coffee. You di
dn’t feel any acceleration, no noises of an engine burning—nothing. Only Tasker’s announcement over the PA system indicated we were underway.

  Most of the others in the group were seated in the comfortable chairs with the glazed, unfocused looks on their faces of people reading on their HUDS. I wandered over to Frampton and tapped him on the shoulder. He gave a start, and his eyes focused on me.

  “A thought’s occurred to me,” I said as I drew up a chair. “You spoke about the Magellan as if it was a bullet, right?”

  “Yeah, the biggest one in history,” Frampton agreed.

  “Okay, I get that. Walk me through what you think happened. I mean in terms of the A-drive.” Frampton opened his mouth and took a breath to start talking, but before he could speak, I quickly added, “And remember, I’m a pretty simple guy, so keep it in simple terms.”

  Frampton nodded, and his eyes looked up as if he was searching for basic enough words to speak to me. “Right, well, keeping it simple...An A-drive essentially does two things, both of which are required for the drive to move an object. First, it creates a bubble of folded space-time around the object. Second, it stretches the space on one side of the bubble while contracting the space on the other side. This gives the appearance of the object traveling at high velocity. Imagine, if you will, an elastic band being stretched out from one end. Are you with me so far?”

  “Yeah, I’m with you. You say the appearance of moving?”

  “Yes, for an outside observer, that is. The object itself remains stationary; it’s space itself that is manipulated, hence the nickname warp drive. That’s why we’re feeling no acceleration now. To put it in perspective, it would take us half a year accelerating at one-g to reach our current velocity of half the speed of light. With the A-drive, we’ve reached that speed instantly. When we near our destination, the stretched space is relaxed, and we find ourselves at our destination.”