by Jay Posey
It still struck Piper as funny that the station had a down. Technically the station’s top-most section was supposed to be aligned along the same axis as Earth’s magnetic northern pole, but that didn’t really make any sense either when you thought about it, because it’s not like ground folk went around with all their heads northward. And it all seemed a little sad to her too, the amount of effort everyone put into trying to make life in space just like life on one of the planets. Such a waste, to get so far out and then to refuse to embrace all the promise the Deep offered. Like going to the beach for the first time and spending the whole day inside.
Maybe Piper had never really been meant to live on-planet. She had some affection for Earth, and a mild loyalty to the United American Federation, but she credited that more to her place of birth than anything else. Many of her hopmates spent endless hours talking about the politics between planets, making predictions about what the latest treaty or interplanetary report would mean, arguing about whose fault it would be if a war ever started, and who would win. But to Piper that was exactly the kind of thing that was holding the entire human race back. Her forebears had moved to a neighboring planet, but nothing had really changed. They were all still doing the same things they’d always done.
For Piper, it was a disappointment to see people so concerned with such petty nonsense. There was so much more out there, so much waiting to be discovered, and yet everyone was still obsessed with deciding which patch of dirt belonged to whom. Terran dirt, Lunar dirt, Martian dirt – it was still just dirt, and there was a whole universe full of it.
The strained relationship between Earth and Mars had about as much impact on YN-773 as any of the millions of disputes that took place on either planet’s surface every single day. It was all too distant to matter, the station too remote to feel any noticeable effect. And yet it was still a constant source of chatter. The fact that her coworkers relished the meaningless debates probably played into Piper’s decision to volunteer for so many shifts on watch. Though, if she was being fair, she had to admit there usually wasn’t a whole lot else for them to do. It just all seemed like a waste of energy and brainpower to her.
Of course, there had been a bit of excitement of late, at least as far as the hop was concerned. A hauler, called Destiny’s Undertow, was limping its way towards YN-773 and had been for a couple of weeks, supposedly all the way from the belt. According to the ship’s captain, they’d been hoping for a gravity sling off Mars to help them get all the way back to Earth, but took damage from a collision and missed the window. Somehow that put them far enough out of the way of anything that 773 was the closest hop that could provide service, and so they were slowly trundling their way towards the station.
The story didn’t completely add up. Unless the captain was really bad at math, there was no way 773 was the best choice for anyone trying to sling Mars. Of course everyone on 773 had their own theories about what had really happened. The most elaborate involved pirates and an attempted hijacking. The most mundane were that the captain was trying to save money and ran his ship too long without good maintenance. The most likely, at least in Piper’s mind, was that they’d been hauling something they shouldn’t have been and whatever deal they thought they were going to make didn’t go so well. People didn’t just show up at 773 for convenience. It was too far out of the way from… well, everything.
Still, business was business and any business that showed up at 773 was probably good for everyone. No one thought much about the out-of-the-way stations until they were low on juice and drifting, then everyone prayed for one. Destiny’s Undertow was finally close enough that a couple of tugs had gone out to meet her and were bringing her in. Piper pinched one of the sensor windows to compress it and then expanded a new window from exterior cameras to check out the progress. The tugs were already flaring thrusters in their slowing protocol, which meant they were maybe a half hour out from starting the docking procedure. Maybe when it got closer to time, she’d flip her main view around to watch the ship come in. Maybe.
For the time being, Piper was content to let her gaze fall out into the soft and endless expanse of the Deep. A few minutes later, out in the nothingness, motion caught her eye. Reflexively her gaze snapped to it, but when she looked, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. Just the pinprick lights of stars so distant they might no longer exist. It struck her then, oddly; the idea that some of those pale, cold lights might be ghosts of things long dead. And while she was staring out into the emptiness pondering what such an ending would look like, and whether she’d ever get to see such a spectacle, one of the stars winked out. Vanished.
No. As she continued to look, a shadow shifted across the void; a blackness against the deep charcoal of the Deep.
Something was out there.
Piper sat up in her chair and swept her fingers over the console, waking it from standby. With a few deft strokes, she brought up the short and medium-range sensors. It took a moment for her to orient herself to where her current viewpoint was on the top-down display, and a few moments afterward to confirm what she knew ought to be… namely, there was nothing there. But when she looked up at her giant window, she couldn’t stop seeing it. It looked like a hole in space.
She thumbed a virtual slider and opened comms to Gennady, her supervisor. He answered on the fourth tone, which probably meant he’d been out cold.
“Yeah, Pip,” he said, and then cleared his throat. “What’s up kid?”
“Hey, chief, sorry to wake you, but I think something’s busted up here.”
“Annoying busted, or can’t-wait-till-morning busted?”
“The can’t-wait kind.”
Gennady let out a heavy exhale that was about a fifty-fifty mix between resigned sigh and gearing up for the effort to hoist himself out of bed. “All right. Be up in a couple.”
“Thanks, chief.”
“Yep.”
Piper spent the next few minutes staring intently out into the void, torn between hoping she really had spotted something and hadn’t awoken her supervisor for nothing, and hoping she was wrong. And just when she’d about convinced herself that she’d imagined it all, the star that had winked out reappeared for half a heartbeat. Piper shivered. Things weren’t supposed to surprise you out on a hop. Not when a stray chunk of comet could tear a hole through your life support and send your friends spiraling out to a horrible death. Sometimes in the break room they’d argue about whether you’d freeze to death before your lungs got sucked out through your mouth. Fortunately, no one had settled that one yet for sure.
The door slid open behind her, and Piper swiveled her chair around to see a groggy Gennady stumble in. He’d taken the time to throw on a T-shirt and some pants, but his zipper was down.
“What’s bothering you, Pip?” He still had a bit of a Russian accent. On other hops Piper had worked on, that would have been a source of friction since most of the Veryn-Hakakuri crews were strictly United American Federation. But out on 773, no one really held original nationality against anyone else. All the unpleasantness was too remote for any of them to really worry about, and the further out you got, the more ridiculous it all seemed anyway.
“I think there’s something out there, chief.”
“Yeah? What’s the sensors got?”
“Well, that’s kind of the thing. They aren’t showing anything.”
Gennady’s eyebrows crumpled together like a crushed beer can. “Then why do you think there’s something?”
“I saw it.”
He crossed the tiny room in three steps and bent over her to look at the display. “Where?”
Piper pointed out the details on the console as she talked. “I’m showing Cam 61 through 64, composite. So that’s here, looking out that way. But see? Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Yeah, so how’d you see something then?” Gennady said, scanning the console and checking its various readouts. “You mean like it showed up on one of these and then went away?”
&
nbsp; “No, chief, with my eyes. Look.” She pointed at the wall-sized projection. Gennady looked up at it like it was the first time he’d noticed it.
“What, out there?”
“Yeah. There was a star, and it went out. Something got between it and us.”
Gennady stood up straight, let out another heavy sigh, and ran his hand over his face. “Please tell me you didn’t get me out of bed because a star went dark.”
“There’s something there, chief. I can see it, just barely. Look, right there,” Piper said, and she leaned forward over the console and touched the projection. “Doesn’t that look like a dark patch to you?”
“It’s space, Pip! The whole thing’s one big dark patch!”
“Well why wouldn’t that… thing, whatever it is, show up on the sensors?”
“I dunno, maybe ’cause it’s five light years away? Maybe it’s some dust cloud moving through? If the sensors aren’t showing it, it’s because it ain’t a problem. I got early shift tomorrow, Pip.”
He was just turning around to leave again when the hole in space suddenly glinted, light reflecting off a rough edge for the span of a blink.
Gennady looked at the projection, and then at Piper.
“You see that?” he asked.
“Yes. Did you?”
“I dunno.”
He checked the sensors again, fiddled with the settings.
“Is that a ship?” he said, more to himself than to Piper. She answered anyway.
“I don’t think so. It looks more like a rock, chief.”
“Don’t say that.”
“I’m just saying.”
“Well don’t.”
Gennady patted her shoulder three times with the back of his hand, and she slid sideways out of the chair to let him take over. He plopped down and started opening a whole new set of windows, some that Piper had never seen before.
“Straussveeja, Gennady,” the console said in Gennady’s native Russian.
“Hi Gus,” he said. “Any trouble lately?”
“Nyet.”
Gennady grunted and focused in on the console display, reading a long, streaming block of characters Piper couldn’t interpret. There was a good reason everyone called him chief. After a couple of silent minutes working the console, Gennady finally looked up at the projection again, squinting at the spot Piper had pointed out. A few more stars had disappeared.
“You ran diags when you came in?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Everything green?”
“Yeah.”
“Well…” Gennady said as he scrolled through data, “there’s nothing on the charts, so at least it’s not a rock.”
“Just because it’s not on the charts doesn’t mean it’s not a rock. Could be the charts are wrong.”
“It’s the latest, crossindexed from Earth, Luna, and Mars. Maybe one of them would miss it, but not all three. Maybe it’s a dead ship.”
Gennady opened another window on the console and had a quick verbal exchange with Gus in Russian that Piper couldn’t follow. A few moments later, his expression darkened.
“OK, so yeah, something’s definitely not right,” he said. He pointed at a data field on the display that read NULL. “That’s all right, if there’s nothing there.” He moved his finger to a jagged line, which Piper took to be some representation of sensor data. “But that form’s a little too regular for my liking.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it looks manufactured to me.”
“That doesn’t help, chief.”
Without looking at it, Gennady traced over the line with irritated haste. “No random spikes or dots. No outliers. No stuff that looks out of place. That doesn’t look random, it looks like someone wanted it to look random. Manufactured.”
That opened more questions than it answered, but the way he’d said it had been enough to frighten Piper into silence. Gennady was former Russian Navy. It was a rare occasion that he ever mentioned anything about that past life, but whenever he did, his voice took on a particular tone and his vowels got a little sharper. Just like when he said that form looked manufactured. He obviously meant more by it than she understood, but she understood enough. Bad things. Piper had a thousand more questions; fortunately she had sense enough not to ask any of them while Gennady was staring at the display with such intensity.
After a couple of minutes of strained silence, Gennady’s brow suddenly smoothed, his face relaxed. But not in any kind of relief. Some thought, dawning on him.
“That hauler,” he said, looking at her. “We did a sync with it?”
“I think so, yeah,” Piper answered. “Came in on Annie’s shift, though. I could check.”
“Anybody talked to the captain?”
“Sure, a few times.”
He looked back at the console, said something in Russian to Gus, and then started working some figures again. “Anybody confirm he’s actually on that ship?”
Piper didn’t understand the question.
“Where else would he be?”
Gennady shook his head.
“What is it, chief?”
“You checked the pod lately?”
“Every shift,” Piper said. “Why?”
“I want you to get in it.”
She blinked at him. He might as well have said it in Russian.
“Get in the pod,” he repeated, still not looking at her. He was too focused on the data streams flooding his console. “Now.”
“Why? What’s going on?”
“I don’t know, Pip, but I got a bad feeling. I think that hauler slipped us something.”
Piper looked at the console, then at the projection. She raised her hands from her sides and then dropped them again, feeling lost and momentarily useless.
“I’m about to do something here,” Gennady said. Finally, he looked up at her. “And I’m not sure what’s going to happen when I do it. So I don’t want you standing here.”
“You’re scaring me, chief.”
“It’s because I’m a little scared myself, kid.” He stared at her for a few moments, long enough for her to see he wasn’t lying. She’d never seen his eyes like that before. “Look, just hop in and button up. For me. I’d feel better if you were sitting in there. If I’m wrong, no harm done.”
“I’m more worried about if you’re right,” Piper said.
“Get in the pod, Piper. Please.”
Piper couldn’t remember Gennady ever saying please to her. She nodded and moved to the hatch that led to the emergency lifepod. It was a small affair, just a two-man pod, intended for the usually single inhabitant of the bubble. Someone at Veryn-Hakakuri probably thought they were being extra cautious by putting a two-man pod up here. All the big ones were below. Piper typed in a code and both the inner and outer hatches eased open. She glanced back at Gennady; he was hunched over the console, fingers flying, muttering in Russian to Gus, who was chattering right back. If he noticed her looking at him, he didn’t make any sign of it.
With a deep breath, Piper turned back and ducked down through the hatch. It was slightly shorter than a normal doorway, but the connecting corridor was only a few steps long so she didn’t have to hunch over long. The pod was pretty straightforward. A couple of crash couches with harnesses, nav rig, full sensor suite. Supplies were locked in a rugged case. Efficient, but not without some thought for at least a little comfort. Whoever had designed it seemed to understand that people might have to sit in there for a couple of weeks before anyone found them. Piper tried not think too much about that as she slipped inside and punched the code to close the hatches. She sat down on one of the crash couches, but she didn’t strap in. That was a little more than she could handle.
She’d never actually used a lifepod before, except for the basic training scenario everyone had to go through before getting assigned to a hop, and that one had been back on-planet. There was something eerie about the real thing; knowing that she was hanging out in space, just a f
ew button presses away from being cut loose. To her surprise, space didn’t seem quite so inviting at that particular moment.
It was only a minute or two before Piper couldn’t handle the silence anymore. She picked at her fingernails, thought about opening the hatches again so she could at least hear Gennady working, but decided against it for fear of interfering with whatever the “something” was he was planning to do. Finally, she decided to power up the pod’s sensor suite and see if she could get a different perspective on whatever was going on. She scooted over to the console and ran through the activation protocol. Pale blue patterns arced to life as the sensors cycled online. The console bleeped once with a cheery tone.
And then promptly went dark.
Everything went dark.
A moment later, the pod vibrated with a dull, metallic thunder. Piper shot up from the crash couch, punched at the panel by the hatch. Too late. She went lightheaded and fell back into the couch. A few seconds later she started falling the wrong direction, up from the floor towards what used to be a wall.
The pod was tumbling out of the station’s gravity aura.
Gennady had cut her loose.
Piper snatched the strap of a harness on one of the crash couches, scrambled to pull herself into it. She hadn’t been in zero-G since her emergency training course almost ten years before. It took her almost a full minute to get her body under control. While she was still fastening the buckles, the pod’s power spun up again as if nothing unusual had happened a few minutes before; sensors came online, the nav rig initialized, internal gravity stabilized. Piper immediately went to work on the nearest console, running a sensor sweep and bringing a projection up on the pod wall.
