The Harbinger

by Graham Leslie

  I review the next event: it looks like a soil container has shifted position in one of the Riyadh’s belly cargo units; it must not have been secured well when loaded. The agents don’t have enough power to tighten the come-alongs on the chains securing the container, so this one falls in my lap. I’ll head down and fix this later, so I leave it queued and move to the next event.

  Hm. I learn forward in my chair.

  The event is a logged distress signal broadcast from the colony on Saturn’s moon Rhea where we just orbit-dropped supplies. The broadcast was a short, binary-encoded packet of text data. The Riyadh’s Ops system figures this out and opens the text file in a viewer.

  RHEA BURNS. DO NOT APPROACH RHEA. DO NOT APPROACH THE HARBINGER.

  Well, that’s not a message you get every day.

  I draft a text response querying the meaning of the cryptic message, and ask the Ops system to send it in a binary-encoded tight beam back to the Rhea source, and then I forward the received message to corporate on Ganymede. It will be some time before anyone receives either message. Whatever happened, it happened some time ago. I prompt the Ops system if there are any other vessels in visual range, but our scopes haven’t picked up anything. I start a deep scan trained on Rhea, which will scan at intervals of increasingly high resolution to see if it can pick up any visuals. The scan will take some time to complete given the vast distance between us.

  Rhea burns?

  I log out of the system, feeling a bit disturbed by the cryptic message. It bugs me I can’t figure out any more. I figure a walk will be good, so I suppose I might as well travel down and fix the dislodged cargo in the belly. I stand from my chair and start the short walk. I pass through the Operations port and travel down the corridor until I reach the Spine, where I stand on the central service elevator platform. I wave my hand to call up the holographic control, select the cargo level of the culprit soil container, and engage the elevator. The hulking metal platform groans, grinds, and with a lurch, begins the slow travel down.

  The Riyadh is an old ship. The walls are rusted steel, scarred from scrapes and nicks of many a cargo container loaded on and off the ship through the Spine. The many peeling layers of different colored paint tell a story of the many hands this ship has passed through before her current owners. Behind each access panel is a soldered-in replacement part or spliced-in new component. Ninety percent of the issues on this rust-bucket are fixed by agents. I’m just here for the shit that falls through the cracks.

  Eventually, we reach the correct level and I exit through the port to the belly cargo deck. The deck isn’t long but has high ceilings. Typically, cargo is flown into orbit and transferred to the Riyadh in zero-g to make moving, stacking, and securing cargo easy. The deck is near-empty for the return trip, aside from the sample containers ratcheted to the ceiling and floor, and a massive Yunbow fabricator. Yunbow, of course, requires their outrageously expensive fabricators to be shipped back for repairs lest risk voiding the warranty, even for distant colonists. I still prefer the ruthless capitalism of the Jovian moons to the corrupt socialism of my Martian homeworld.

  Chip, easily identifiable by the poorly painted name I added to his plastic shell, whirrs through the Spine port and guides me across the deck to the massive soil container. I look past Chip and see the large container is off center by about a quarter of a meter, so I find the come-along and slowly work the arm back and fourth, ratcheting the chain, to guide the container back into place. The container finally dips into the bevelled flooring to a snug resting-place, and I pump the come-along a few more times until it’s taught to secure it for the rest of the journey. Chip, apparently satisfied having observed the completed task, whirrs off to find something else to do.

  “Thanks, Chip,” I say, knowing that Chip isn’t actually listening.

  I knead my hands, a bit sore from pumping the come-along. Suddenly I’m overwhelmed by thirst. I don’t think I’ve had any water since yesterday and didn’t break a sweat while working the come-along, but didn’t realize it until my bolt-in hypothalamus inconveniently kicked in later than it should have. I make my way back to the Spine and engage the elevator to the forward deck to return to my quarters to rehydrate.

  The PA system crackles to life, startling me.

  “Apollo, Operations. Anomalous object detected during deep scan. Event logged for review.”

  Bizarre. The deep scan should have taken significantly longer, unless something was detected closer than expected. My curiosity runs while the elevator crawls. I finally reach the top deck, jog to my quarters to grab a metallic bottle of recycled water, fill it, and jog to Ops, drinking along the way.

  At Ops, I slide into the seat and pull up the deep scan results.

  Hm.

  That doesn’t make any sense, but I’m staring right at it. It’s distant, but I can make out the outline of a huge ship — it fact, it looks like an old generation ship. I order the Ops artificial intelligence to focus the deep scan on the point-of-interest, and in a few moments I see higher fidelity images.

  Unbelievable. It really is a generation ship.

  Few generation ships have ever been launched in the history of mankind, most explorers choosing to venture to the far reaches of our own solar system that going beyond it. Never once has one returned — well, until now, I suppose. I mean, shit must have definitely hit the fan for them to turn around and head back. These massive ships launched from civilized space with the intent of traveling far beyond our solar system with the equipment and pioneers to create new colonies across the galaxy. They are called generation ships because their travel actually lasts longer than the first generation to set out — entire generations will pass before the descendants plant the flag in the soil of their final destination. No generation ship has been launched by the Jovian families, only by the old Martians, and not since the unfathomable cost and economic downturns excluded future projects. I drink more water and just stare for a moment, looking at this incredible piece of history. I recall a fact about these ships - the tight beams were actually disabled by a hardware lock and programmed to only unlock once they reached beyond effective range to be able to communicate with the civilization they left. So much for no turning back.

  The images update with another level of detail. Awe turns to concern.

  The ship is absolutely ragged. Scorch marks cover the body of the craft, few designations or markings left visible. Entire sections of hull have peeled away under damage; interior decks of the ship are actually visible. Yet, the craft cruises under thrust. It heads in the same direction as my ship, but its larger ion engines propel it faster. What fateful expedition had them so damaged to turn on their heels to flee back to civilization? I have a hard time wrapping my head around the scorch marks — it’s not like you fly into some hazardous area of deep space without a few months of visual warning… mutiny then?

  “Apollo, the craft has been recognized with a high degree of confidence,” says the Ops system. Given the advent of enormous data storage with crystalline data technology, the Ops system comes with a highly compressed download of most human history and knowledge to provide a basis for logical deduction. It must have matched the profile of the ship to one of the few historical generation ships in the encyclopedic data.

  “Ops — what is the ship’s name?”

  “The spacecraft appears to be, with a high degree of confidence, the generation ship Harbinger.”

  Chapter 3

  The Harbinger is closing in. It’s burning at a higher velocity than the Riyadh. As much as I’d like to cut thrust to glide back and investigate the approaching ship or heed the warning and burn like hell, Ops’ pathfinding subsystems are driven by command and control back on Ganymede. Without an emergency recognized by Ops, all I can do is wait.

  I send a follow up tight beam back to corporate to let them know I’ve come into visual contact with the ship. It will be some time before they receive it, and some time further before a reply can get to me. The Harbinge
r will be in range before they could order any change in trajectory. This situation is making me nervous.

  I flip back to the scopes. The old colony ship is a disaster. As the deep scan images process, I continue to observe what I can, peering through the battered decks with the Riydah’s scopes. I don’t see any signs of life. Best I can tell, the decks are empty. Explosive decompression tore most everything out from the inside of the ship. I suppose it’s possible that the crew was killed during the decompression and Ops is navigating the ship back to port, but then again, how would returning to known space in any way achieve the generation ship’s Ops AI’s objectives? As unlikely as this whole situation is, it’s more likely someone is alive and piloting the Harbinger.

  I should check out the ship’s Ops deck. If there’s anyone piloting the ship, that’s where I’ll find them.

  “Ops, find me a cross section of the Harbinger,” I prompt the artificial intelligence.

  “Searching… just a moment…” Ops replies. Electrons speed through crystalline data lattices as the Ops computer queries along its indexes, find the result, and begins decompressing the data. The decompression finishes quickly.

  “Apollo, here is a cross section of the Harbinger,” Ops says as the silhouette of the ship appears on the holographic display. I quickly locate the Ops deck’s relative location, switch back to the last deep scan, and lean in towards the display to get a closer look. Ops decks usually exclude viewports from their bulkheads; they’re just another potential source for a breach that agents couldn’t quickly weld shut. I’m banking on the Harbinger’s hull damage giving me a visual inside the Ops deck for survivors. I can make out some patchwork deck but the resolution isn’t high enough.

  “Ops,” I say as I trace the relative location of the ops deck with my finger, “train the scopes on this location and give me a a higher resolution.”

  “Aligning scopes,” a pause, then, “On display.”

  At this resolution, the display is only updated every few seconds as the scopes process the extremely high resolution images, resulting in a choppy but clear feed. My hunch paid off. The Ops deck hull is no less battered than the rest of the vessel, and I can see inside through the missing plating. It’s in vacuum, as I expected. Conduit and electrical wiring spiderweb the deck. Damaged, scattered components and jagged metal take the place of missing chairs and control systems. There’s nothing lit to indicate any systems are online, but still the ship moves under thrust. How is this thing being flown in such a state? I scan around the Ops deck as a few more frames pass, and that’s when I see something.

  For one frame — maybe for a second and a half, I think I see something pass in a gap in the hull. It disappears when the next frame is displayed. Did I really see that?

  “Ops, rewind to that frame with the movement.”

  “Apollo, returning to that frame.”

  Ops brings that frame back up on display. There’s definitely something there. A red blur between the jagged bulkheads. It’s something in motion; the digital exposure must have been long enough to catch the object in travel. Debris, perhaps? No, inertia from this burn will pull anything down to keep it from sliding across the deck. Any agent maybe? Unlikely, they were probably spaced too during decompression. I can’t think of any other possibilities, but I keep staring at the frame.

  “Ops, any recognition on the red form in this frame?” I say as I trace the holographic blur with my finger.

  “Apollo, I have no results with confidence.”

  “Ops, save this frame and bring me back to the feed.” I pick up my water for another sip.

  “Apollo; saved the frame. Loading up the feed.”

  My hand goes limp, and the metallic bottle slowly drops and rings against the steel floor. The sound echos.

  A figure in a blood-red space suit with a pitch black helmet is standing on the floor of the Harbinger’s Ops deck. The red space suit is ragged and stained, torn and scorched. The gaze from the black helmet leads directly into my scopes, staring at me through the holographic display. Without seeing through the black helmet, I can feel eyes pierce my soul. It’s corrosive, like acid. My stomach drops, my heart beats faster, and I start to sweat.

  I’m not even sure how this is possible. Without scopes, I’m nowhere near close enough to be seen by human eyes. Yet this figure stares straight into me. No way he’s just looking —

  “Apollo! Brace!” Ops has just enough time to blurt out before I’m hurled out of my chair into the ceiling — I crash against it like a ragdoll. Gravity distorts and I’m launched across the ceiling to the right bulkhead, then into the floor. I slide across the floor then I’m tossed off the chair, and then onto the left bulkhead. The Riyadh groans and creaks. Alarms blare. I grab a passing oh-shit handle as gravity continues to roll and I pivot against the ceiling, holding in place. I puke in my mouth but swallow it down. Of course everything else is messed up but my inner ear still works in a time like this.

  “Apollo, gravity anomaly detected; experiencing disconnect from multiple subsystems. Emergency shipboard control has been delegated to you. Spawning recovery threads—” The audio abruptly stops. The display glows a bright white and shorts out.

  “Ops, what is going on?” I yell as I hold on to the steel handle with white-knuckles. The Riyadh must be rolling along all axes because gravity is rotating all over the damn place; I’m swinging around like a flag in a Martian dust storm. The lighting goes out in Ops. Suddenly it’s pitch black.

  “Ops!”

  No response from Ops. This is bad; Ops is down. Emergency lighting comes on — small self-powered LED pods that switch on in the event that the powerplant is disconnected from this portion of the ship.

  I start to figure out the cycle of gravity reorientation and time it just right to release as gravity drops me down near the Ops chair. I grab hold, swing my legs around until I'm firmly in the chair, then I quickly buckle myself in. I wave my hand over the holographic display and get nothing. Shit, power, of course. This isn’t going to work.

  There’s an emergency agent docked in the back of Ops. While holding on tightly, I unbuckle from the chair, rotate to straddle it backwards, then, timing myself with the rolling gravity, push off to propel myself to the agent dock. I reach for the wall’s oh-shit handle but I crash in to it. Damn it! I use one hand to reach and rotate the lever, releasing the agent. It powers up, unlatches from the dock, pushes off with its low-velocity ion drives, and is immediately pulled across the room and into the right wall where it smacks and sputters. The agent quickly learns the gravitational roll and gets itself back over to the back wall where I hold on, ion thrusters firing madly to hold it mostly in-place.

  “Agent, get to the powerplant and get me a status report!”

  “Command received,” the dull agent echos back. The fallback text-to-speech neural networks on agents are poor quality; usually they interface with Ops for communication with humans. The agent, firing all of its small thrusters, whirs off out of the Ops port, where it will navigate to the Spine and take a maintenance shaft directly down to the far end of the ship and check the status of the powerplant.

  I have a couple minutes to wait while the agent performs his task. That’s when it slips into my mind again - the adrenaline distracted me for a moment. The figure in the in the Harbinger! That generation ship has been gone for well over a hundred years. We must be looking at a second or maybe even a third generation descendant of the original crew to be piloting the ship. But how was he, assuming he is a he, looking at right at me from that distance?

  No, that question doesn’t even make sense. He couldn’t have been looking at me, I’m hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. It’s not even in the realm of possibility that he was looking at me. Something else must have caught his eye.

  Even still, what just happened?

  Everything starts to hurt. My arms are getting tired from holding on to this oh-shit bar as gravity keeps madly rolling. I rotate my back to the bulkhead and slip bo
th my arms through the bar behind me to pin myself against the surface to give my hands a break from the death grip. My water bottle whizzes past my face and clangs off a wall. I’m getting dizzy and lightheaded. Not enough blood is getting to my head. The lab-grown heart in my chest isn’t pumping hard enough.

  I hear the whine of an agent as it whizzes back to Ops. It jets through the doorway and barely holds position in front of me, fighting the mad rotation of gravity.

  “Powerplant offline. Emergency battery backup has failed over,” the agent explains. The Riyadh has a decent emergency battery backup store, but that’s no luxury as deep space travel requires an enormous amount of energy. Just staying warm is no small task; the cosmic background temperature of deep space is less than negative two hundred degrees Celsius. By default, the emergency battery backup will only power life support.

  “Agent, restore battery backup to onboard networks and the navigation subsystem and return to me.”

  “Command received,” and the agent whizzes off again.

  If I can get the onboard network back online, I can at least have the agents networked so I can have real time communication across the ship. I’ll need to leave a minimum essential number of agents online. I don’t want them recharging on precious emergency backup battery, so I’ll keep the remainder on standby as backups to cycle in. Now, the first course will be to have the navigation subsystem calculate a solution to this gravity roll problem.

  Damn, my arms are getting really tired. This sucks.

  After too long, the agent returns and gives me confirmation it completed its task.