Vessel

by Andrew J. Morgan

  'RS0ISS, RS0ISS, how do you read?'

  A loud burst of garbled static gave his heart a jolt, and he instinctively snatched at the gain controls to manage the harsh levels.

  'RS0ISS,' Aleks repeated, desperate to hear a voice through the digital mess, 'can you hear me? I repeat, can you hear me?'

  He held his breath as he waited, searching the soundscape for signs of life. There were nigh on a hundred people in the room, but at that moment it felt like it was him on his own, his world shrinking around him as he focussed his attention on his hearing. The radio hissed and crackled again, this time more quietly, and Aleks' trained ear heard a voice hidden somewhere in the confused mass of sound.

  'I think I've got them,' he said, hands darting from one control to the next to isolate the signal. 'Negative copy RS0ISS,' he said, his calm voice hiding the racing energy in his chest. 'Please modulate your downlink on the DSKY using manual. I'm trying a connection through an alternate satellite.'

  The static came through again; this time the voice was definite, but still not understandable.

  'I've almost got you, RS0ISS. Try again.'

  The crackle died and Aleks waited, his thumb and index finger poised on the gain control.

  'TsUP, TsUP — RS0ISS, please confirm — signal,' came Mikhail's voice, laden with static and broken up into chunks, but clear enough to understand. Relief flooded through Aleks. He nodded to Lev and switched the main loudspeaker on.

  'RS0ISS, readability two, strength four — we're reading you with some noise, but we can hear you clearly enough. Can you confirm your current situation?'

  The intermittent replay came intertwined with the hiss of millions of radioactive particles as the solar storm thundered through the ISS at the speed of light:

  'The situation — okay — reading — levels of radiation.'

  'Copy, RS0ISS, remain inside your radiation protection compartments where possible and limit your exposure time. Anything to report on UV One?'

  'Negative — no change to — continue to maintain — aft.'

  'Okay, RS0ISS. Please cease all activity and remain inside your radiation protection compartments until further notice.'

  '—opy, TsUP.'

  Then there was silence, and Aleks waited to see if Mikhail had anything more to add. He did.

  'TsUP, how long — we transfer — to Earth?'

  Aleks was taken aback by this unexpected question. Looking to Lev, whose corrugated brow mirrored his own concern, he pushed the broadcast button.

  'You've got just over a week until Progress arrives with the resupply for the refit and return, and then another four weeks until the next team goes up on Soyuz TMA Eleven M and you come back.'

  He released the button, frowned, and then pressed it again. 'Is everything okay up there?'

  The response came a little later than felt normal.

  'Yeah, yeah — think so. Just getting a little — up here. It feels close.'

  There was a pause. Aleks thought Mikhail sounded anxious. Mikhail never sounded anxious.

  'Aleks,' Mikhail said, 'I'm getting — that normal?'

  'Negative copy, negative copy,' Aleks responded. He could feel his chest becoming tight and constricted.

  'I'm — hallucinations — I don't — if — awake …'

  'Mikhail, I'm losing signal, negative copy, please repeat, please repeat,' Aleks said, his fingers jumping from dial to dial, adjusting settings as they went. All that came back was static, and then nothing. He called out to the ISS a couple more times, and when not even a distorted signal was being received back, he pulled off his headset and tossed it onto the desk with a clatter.

  'Shit!' he growled.

  Mikhail's voice still rang discordant in his mind even hours later as he sat in one of the centre's many boardrooms, waiting for Bales. On the opposite side of the long table sat Lev, whose usual aura of capability and authority had all but vanished. A clock ticked, each tick-tick-tick long, loud and clear. The atmosphere was thick, but the ticking clock cut right through it with utmost clarity.

  When the door opened and Bales entered, striding through in his quiet way, Aleks realised that he'd slipped into a doze. He’d been mesmerised by the clock, the humidity and not least by his exhaustion. An invisible weight pressed down onto his weary shoulders, so he didn't get up to pull his chair in as Bales squeezed past.

  'Gentlemen,' Bales said, sitting at the head of the table and placing upon it a thin blue folder, 'I've called this meeting because I need to know what happened in the brief conversation that took place between Mr Dezhurov and Major Romanenko at around zero five hundred hours this morning.'

  Lev's face contorted with frustration and annoyance. 'We didn't have enough time to —'

  'As you are aware,' Bales interrupted, not looking up as he drew a pile of paper from the folder and sifted through it, 'I specifically requested that any change in the situation be reported to me, particularly any conversation that you may have had with the crew of the ISS.'

  He turned to Lev, his narrow eyes unblinking beneath his stark white eyebrows. He was obviously allowing Lev to speak, and Lev seized the opportunity, regardless of why Bales had let him take it.

  'The window was small and there wasn't enough time to call you down to Mission Control. Hell, I didn't even know where you'd gone.'

  Bales still didn't blink, but he broke eye contact with Lev for a moment as he placed the pile of paper on the table, pinching the corners together so they lay perfectly square.

  'Mr Ryumin,' Bales said in a slow, deliberate way, 'there was plenty of time between then and now for you to inform me.'

  'But you weren't anywhere to be seen,' protested Lev, who held his hands up in exasperation. 'You would have been informed as soon as you'd returned from whatever it was you were doing.'

  If Bales was as frustrated with Lev as Lev was with Bales, he didn't show it.

  'Had there been another window for us to resume contact with the ISS,' he continued in his deliberate way, 'I would not have known all the facts and I would not have been able to instruct the crew in the best possible manner. It is imperative,' he prodded the pile of paper, 'that this kind of information be reported to me as soon as possible.'

  He emphasised the last few words, looking hard at Lev, who glared at the opposite wall above Aleks' head. Bales pulled his chair closer to the table, licked his index finger and flicked through the sheets of paper.

  'Before we continue,' he said, as though the previous conversation hadn't even taken place, 'I want to clarify a few details from the conversation with the ISS this morning. I have read through the transcript and listened to the playback, so it would be good to utilise your professional opinions to find the distinction between what we think we heard and what was actually said.'

  Bales had divided his pile of paper into three smaller piles of equal thickness, and he handed one to Lev and one to Aleks. It was the transcript from the conversation, documented like a script, with initials for the speakers and occasional commentary that allowed for context.

  'If you could look at page three,' Bales asked. They all turned to page three. 'You can see that Major Romanenko questions the duration of the mission. What would you say had happened here? Is the Major asking a legitimate and understandable question, or would you say he had forgotten what the date was?'

  Aleks could see Bales looking at him from the corner of his eye.

  'Mr Dezhurov, would you say that Major Romanenko had forgotten what the date was? It's a simple question.'

  'Well,' Aleks said, looking to Lev for help, but not getting it, 'I can't say for sure. Keeping track of time can be difficu—'

  'That's not what I asked,' Bales said, clasping his hands together in front of him. 'I just want to know if Major Romanenko was having trouble with his temporal orientation.'

  Aleks sighed. He couldn't dance around the question forever. 'It seems that way, yes,' he said reluctantly.

  'Good. Thank you,' Bales said as he turned to the
next page. 'Could you continue to page four, please.'

  He looked on until the other two had turned to page four, then his eyes returned to his own transcript.

  'Here, on the eighth line down, Major Romanenko makes a statement that is broken up by interference. I need a best estimate as to the subject and context of his statement, and an assumption as to what he means by it. He says, just getting a little, then there's a section missing, before we hear him say, up here.'

  Bales read the text aloud without any shred of emotion. It sounded so strange read like that. The desperate words, haunting and unnatural, made his skin crawl.

  'It feels close,' Bales said. 'What do you make of that, Mr Dezhurov?'

  'I don't know,' said Aleks. He could feel his words being led someplace he didn't want them to go. 'I wouldn't want to assume what Mikhail meant.'

  'But you must be able to make an educated guess, surely?'

  Bales wasn't going to let Aleks get away with not answering this — or any other — question, that much was clear.

  'It seems,' Aleks said, 'at a purely hypothetical guess, that Mikhail is experiencing the symptoms of claustrophobia, an expected side effect of the —'

  'Thank you, Mr Dezhurov.'

  '— of the stresses of being in space during a period of loss of communication and confinement to the radiation protection compartment,' Aleks finished through gritted teeth.

  'Thank you, Mr Dezhurov,' Bales repeated, his voice firm, but still calm. 'Lastly,' he continued, 'at the bottom of page five.'

  Aleks already knew which bit he meant.

  'Hallucinations…'

  'We don't know the intensity, the duration or the frequency of his hallucinations,' Aleks said, his face flushing with angry heat. 'He could be seeing stars for all we know, a normal reaction to the increased radiation levels of the solar storm.'

  'Would Major Romanenko know that seeing stars was a normal reaction to the increased levels of radiation?' Bales asked.

  'Well yes, but —'

  'So he wouldn't feel it necessary to waste precious radio time telling you about it, then?'

  Aleks had no answer, and that frustrated him even more. Bales gathered his papers together and slotted them back into the folder.

  'I think it likely,' he said as he placed the folder on the table, 'that what we heard this morning was nothing more than the symptoms of an anxiety disorder, perhaps induced by impaired cognitive reasoning though long-term and short-term stress. I believe we can expect more behaviour like this, perhaps to an even greater degree than we saw today, with the distinct possibility that Major Romanenko's psychoses may even pose a threat to the safety of himself and the other two crewmen.'

  'But that's ridiculous!' Lev shouted, snapping from his distant state. 'He's the best cosmonaut we have, a veteran of many successful missions on Earth and in space!'

  'I've also seen in his file that he has a history of depression.'

  'When he was a teenager for goodness' sake!'

  'Depressive behaviour is not something that can be ignored, and as this case shows, cannot be indefinitely cured. Major Romanenko's mental instability should have had him filtered out during the selection process and he should have never been allowed to wear a space suit. He is a discredit to the RFSA, a discredit to the partners of the ISS and a discredit to space exploration.'

  Bales shot a look at Aleks. 'I'm disappointed you couldn't tell me about this. I wanted you to be honest with me, even gave you the opportunity to speak your mind, and you held information back — important information. In light of this situation, my conclusion — and the conclusion I shall be reporting to my superiors — is that Major Romanenko is a threat to our mission, the crew, and potentially to the future of mankind. We will retrieve your crew as soon as possible and replace them with our own so we can be certain that the future of this mission is not jeopardised any more than it already has been.'

  'This is insane …' Lev said, shaking his head in disbelief.

  'Furthermore, Mr Ryumin,' Bales said, standing up and pushing his chair under the table, 'you have been granted three month's leave so you can take some time to rest and recover from this ordeal. It hasn't been easy for you, I'm sure.'

  'But — but I'm fine,' Lev said, getting to his feet so fast that his chair snapped back against the wall.

  'It wasn't a suggestion.'

  The door swung open and a young man rushed in. He was red faced and panting.

  'Sorry to disturb you,' he said between gasps, 'but you're needed in Mission Control right away.'

  Bales squeezed past and set off down the corridor at a run, and Aleks, with Lev in tow, scrambled out after him. Foregoing the elevator, they clattered down a flight of stairs, crashing one by one through the swinging double doors and into the corridor. When they got to Mission Control, security swept them in, and Aleks entered, hands on hips, chest rising and falling.

  'What's the situation?' asked Bales, his apparent fitness allowing him to speak in his usual composed way. The junior flight controller led them to the comms desk as he spoke.

  'We had another window — a brief one — and we had enough time to catch a message from the ISS.'

  He nodded to the operator sat at Aleks' desk, who, waiting for the command, thumbed the playback button on the recorder.

  'It isn't much,' the junior flight controller said, the whites of his eyes bold and bright, 'but I think you need to hear it.'

  The speakers erupted with a distorted chatter, swelling and throbbing with guttural hisses and stabs of noise that sounded like tearing paper. An underlying current of speech also seemed to be threading its way through the static, but it sounded distant and muffled, and not quite defined enough to form any recognisable words. The operator turned the gain up, and the hiss rose, becoming almost too loud to bear.

  Then, clearly, through the mist of distortion flushing from the speakers, a word — and then another — pressed against the eardrums of everyone in the room, the voice made unrecognisable through the strain of distress:

  'Help … me …' it said.

  Section 2 — Progress

  Chapter 4

  An orange flame of dawn light pierced through the small window, straight into Sally Fisher's eyes. She pulled the blind down and repositioned herself so her head was resting up against the small jet's leather-trimmed fuselage.

  Sally had received the call from NASA the evening before, around ten thirty at night. A call from NASA wasn't unusual, because they sponsored her SETI work in the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, but the timing was. Although she had still been working — as she always seemed to be, and that's how she liked it — it was way past what she considered to be an appropriate time for a business call.

  Her annoyances were soon forgotten when the voice on the other end of the phone relayed its message. She had been summoned, not to the NASA headquarters in Washington D.C. or to the Kennedy Space Centre like she had been on a few previous occasions, but to Moscow. Her work was her life; there was no spouse, partner, or even cat to consult with, and so her response had been an immediate, resounding, and what she hoped didn't sound too much like an over-excited schoolgirl, yes.

  Not six hours later, she had met her NASA liaison at the Moffett Federal Airfield, a short drive from the Carl Sagan Centre where she conducted most of her research. She had been ushered onto a small, unexpectedly luxurious private jet. The jet's turbines where already whining at idle as she boarded, and within minutes of buckling up her seatbelt, they were airborne. No one had even asked to see her passport.

  The soft, creamy leather should have been comfortable, yet Sally struggled to sit still on its velvety folds. Her brain was a muddle of exhilaration, anticipation, nervousness; a mixed bag of pure ecstasy and unadulterated fear.

  They had told her on the phone that she was needed right away in Moscow, but little more than that. The NASA escort at the airport hadn't uttered a word beyond polite pleasantries and the odd instruction. She surmised that wh
atever it was they wanted from her, it could only be one of two things: firstly, Sally was a communications expert. That didn't mean she was good with radios — although she was — more that her research led the way in the field of deep space transmission. Her first MIT doctorate thesis, completed when she was just twenty-three, helped NASA extend its field of view into the cosmos to make sense of the fine detail received by its space telescopes like Hubble and ROSAT. Her second thesis helped NASA and CalTech push space telescope technology to the next generation, enabling NuSTAR to be launched. Despite her extraordinary technical ability and almost god-like understanding of light in all its wavelengths, Sally had chosen to reject a position at NASA and had joined the SETI Institute instead, driven by an insatiable urge to find life outside the reaches of Earth. This association was the basis of her second assumption for NASA's motives.

  Of course, NASA wouldn't let such talent as hers go to waste, and so in exchange for their support of her search for extra-terrestrial intelligence, both through financial investment and access to their facilities, equipment and man-power, Sally would undertake research and assist in the development of technology for NASA and its partners. Her complete lack of ability to put less than her all into what she did meant that she effectively had two full time jobs — one she worked during the day, and the other she worked at night. It would be a strange day — even hour — when Sally Fisher wasn't poring over a computer screen or a printout.

  Although it wasn't unusual for NASA to request something vague at short notice, the likelihood of them flying her all the way to Moscow for SETI purposes seemed monumentally slim. She couldn't overlook the obvious fact that her encyclopaedic knowledge of communications could easily be imparted over the phone, by email or through Skype, so to send her to Russia for a mere technical query seemed just as unlikely. Her brain spun, tying itself in tighter and tighter knots as she sat alone in the leather-clad flying cigar tube. She considered turning on the polished wood-framed television, but she knew nothing on that could possibly distract her overactive mind.