“I don’t feel good about it. It’s not like Jenna to go so long without checking in. Ten minutes, maybe, and that’s what she told you at the beginning. But sixty?” Geralt added.
“The handwheel still doesn’t work,” Boris said.
“We’ve got to find out what’s going on in there,” Anna said.
“But how? The airlock’s solid. I’d never get it open with just my bare hands.”
“How long until you need to be back here, Boris?”
“I’ve got somewhat more than an hour.”
“Good. I can be there in about thirty minutes,” his sister assured him. “Then we’ll figure out what to do.”
“Do you think the two of us can open the door? I don’t think the problem’s a lack of force. We’d simply destroy it.”
“That’s true. But maybe we don’t have to turn the wheel. Let’s just wait until I get there.”
One hour and nineteen minutes. Anna should be here soon. It was probably not the smartest thing. If there was some unknown danger lurking here, it would be better for him to retreat to safety, instead of sending another crewmember into danger. But they were certainly acting like Jenna would have. She would never have abandoned anyone. Did Anna have a plan?
She descended out of the dark sky toward him. He recognized her only right before she landed. It seemed to him that she was holding her plan in both hands. It looked like some kind of powerful device. Boris had never seen anything like it before, but it seemed to him like it was a weapon. He had no idea, however, what it would do.
“I’m glad you’re here,” he said.
Anna let go of the weapon and hugged him. “We’ll figure this out,” she said. “So far, there’s nothing we haven’t been able to get through together.”
He thought of her accident on Titan, but he didn’t say anything. He would have liked to share her optimism. Anna let him go and grabbed the weapon, which had moved to one side but was still floating at the same height as before.
“So let’s do this,” she said.
“You know how to work that thing? Where did you even find it?”
“The locked storage room. As we suspected, it’s full of weapons. I only wonder why the founders brought so many with them in the first place.”
“And how to use it?” Boris asked.
“Every box has illustrated instructions. They must’ve thought we might use them someday.”
Anna was very practical. He felt much calmer in her presence. Yes, they would get through this—whatever happened.
“Maybe they were afraid the Earthlings would invade someday,” he said.
“Maybe. Or civil war. Who knows?”
“And you’re sure that thing works the way the instructions showed you?”
“Absolutely. Unfortunately, the ship now has a hole in its outer wall, but it’s not a problem. It’s in an area that was already being kept in a vacuum, anyway.”
“You tested that weapon on board the ship?”
“You bet. I had to make sure it could blast through that door. I couldn’t just shoot it into space, and we were in a hurry. The first two times I tried it, nothing. But it worked the third time. Now, don’t you think we should get started?”
“Okay.”
Anna placed the weapon to one side, leaving it floating in the air again. She reached into her toolbelt and took out a safety rope. She put the end with a carabiner in Boris’s hand.
“Please hold onto that and then get yourself into a reasonably secure position. This thing’s got quite a nice recoil. It flung me across the whole storage room, and I knocked into some shelves. Luckily, I’m pretty tough. I doubt a Wnutri would have survived it in a spacesuit. So, I’d rather not go flying off into space when I shoot it here.”
“Roger.”
Anna maneuvered herself so that she was above the rectangular hole and facing downward.
“What if Jenna’s in the airlock now, right behind the door?” he asked.
“I’m not going to just aim straight at the door, little brother. Do you think I’m crazy? I’ll try to blast off part of the door on the right side. Or do you have a better idea?”
“What if she’s taken off her spacesuit?”
“Was she wearing it when you left?”
“Yes, but she’d taken her helmet off.”
“I think Jenna’s much too thorough and cautious to have taken off her suit in these circumstances. And it’d take her three seconds to get her helmet on. The air in there’s not going to be sucked out that fast. Can I start now, or do you have other concerns? I understand you’re worried about her, but waiting out here’s not going to give us any answers.”
“Just start. We need to get in there.”
Anna got herself into firing position and aimed the weapon. “On three,” she said. “One... two... three!”
A barely visible flame shot soundlessly out of the weapon’s mouth. A part of the right side of the airlock door broke off as if struck by a supernatural hand. The weapon hit Anna in the stomach and knocked her upward and away from the surface. A piece of the airlock door followed her at a tremendous speed. She was paying attention well enough to throw her hands up in front of her face, but she’d have no chance against the sharp metal of the door.
Boris pulled with all his strength on the safety line. Anna’s trajectory curved. The debris flew past her, just missing her head, and off into space, never to be seen again. Anna’s inertial momentum wanted to drag him into space, too, via the safety line, but Boris used his jet pack to counteract her motion. He succeeded in keeping himself on the asteroid’s surface.
Anna activated her jet pack, and soon she was standing next to him. “Thanks,” she said.
“Let’s take a look at the door.”
She let him take the lead, and he moved into the airlock. The remnants of the round outer hatch could now be easily swung open. Anna had obliterated the locking mechanism, allowing gas to seep out of the airlock. She must’ve damaged the inner door, too. He could see an arm’s-length crack in it.
He worked his fingers into the crack and then succeeded in bending the metal out, but the hole was much too small to climb through. He tried to look into the bunker, but most of the interior couldn’t be seen. The lights were flickering.
“I’ve got a crowbar,” Anna offered.
“Give it here.” He tore open the hole with the crowbar so that he could crawl through.
“Should I come in, too?” Anna asked.
“No.” He wanted to find Jenna by himself. She was probably dead. If not, she would have already come out to meet him. He didn’t want anyone there when he found her body. He searched the room. A narrow corridor connected it to a second room. Just as Jenna had described, everything was empty. There was nothing here at all, not even a body.
He felt dizzy, so he leaned against the wall. It didn’t make any sense. Then, suddenly, hope rushed back in. As long as there was no evidence of her death, she was, logically, alive. Somewhere, she was alive.
“What’s going on?” Anna asked. “Do you need me?”
“Jenna’s not here,” he said. “There’s nobody here.”
4802.11
A Wnutri in a spacesuit was sitting in the commander’s seat in the command center. Boris tripped over the low threshold. Was that...? Had everything been just a bad dream?
Geralt, the Wnutri, turned toward him and waved.
Boris sighed loudly.
Geralt looked at him with concern. “Sleep well?” he asked.
“Not a bit.”
He had nodded off for at most 10 minutes, and then had dreamed of Jenna being torn apart into thousands of pieces and scattered across the walls of the bunker in the asteroid. After that he had been afraid to fall asleep again, but he’d had no alternative but to endure the regeneration process in the tank. At least now the six hours of inactivity to which he had been damned had ended.
“Anything new?” he asked.
“No,” his friend replied. �
�We’re following the asteroid, but there’s no sign of any activity there. Anna’s preparing an experiment to try to figure out its propulsion system.”
“Where is she?”
“In the weapons storage room.”
“Is she going to put holes in the asteroid with projectiles until she hits its secret engine?”
Maybe that wasn’t such a bad idea. If they could deactivate the engine, Santa wouldn’t be able to change its trajectory, but the Earth would have a lot more time to prepare for a possible impact.
“I don’t know,” Geralt said. “She said she had an idea that she needed to test first.”
“Let’s hope she doesn’t blow up the whole ship.”
“That’s exactly what I said to her.”
“Then maybe I should go and check on her.”
“I’ll keep you updated if anything comes in over the radio, or if I see anything happening down there.”
“Thanks.”
Where there had previously been a door, all that remained was a gaping hole. The panel’s charred remnants could be seen at the top. Anna had really done a number on it. The armory was a storage room with many floor-to-ceiling shelves covering almost the entire footprint of the ship. If there had been weapons stored on all those shelves, the founders must have been expecting the worst. And yet there had been almost no criminal activity on Titan since their colony was founded.
“Little sister?” he called on the general radio frequency.
The room had no atmosphere, so it was the only way for Anna to hear him. Suddenly she was standing right next to him. She must’ve come through between the shelves on the right.
“Here I am,” she said.
“Good girl. You came when I called you.”
“Haha.”
He pointed to the obliterated entrance. “Is that your work?”
“I didn’t have much time. I had to find some way to help my brother. Luckily, I knew how to make a functional explosive by combining the right kinds of food. Do you still remember that?”
He remembered. They had once experimented with a homemade bomb on the shores of a methane lake and created a mini-methane volcano. Back then, neither of them had their outer skin yet, and liquid methane was a bit dangerous for a Wnutri spacesuit. They had claimed that Anna had fallen into the lake. No one had suspected anything.
“Yes, we were fortunate,” he said.
“Have you heard anything from Jenna?”
“Can we not talk about her, please? I’m trying to think of anything else for just a few minutes. Geralt said you had an idea?”
“Yes, well, it’s not very well thought out yet. It came from the idea that the asteroid might be using some kind of magnetic sail. Our ship doesn’t seem to have any suitable sensors, but maybe there’s a weapon that works according to the same principle.”
“You want to try to disrupt the magnetic field?”
“Like I said, I haven’t thought that far yet. First, we’d have to detect it. And it seems that a weapon that could generate strong magnetic fields would also be able to, conversely, detect such fields. Just like an electric motor and a generator, current can be used to produce motion, and conversely, motion can also produce current.”
“Okay. So how far have you gotten?”
“I still haven’t found a suitable weapon.”
“So, how are you looking?”
“I open one box after another, look at the founders’ instructions, and try to understand the weapon’s operating principle. Sometimes I have to look at the matching ammunition, too.” She pointed at the shelves with her outstretched arm. “Want to help me? Ten for me, ten for you? I’ve already done two.”
Boris shook his head. “I’d just be thinking the whole time about how this could’ve happened.”
“It’s not your fault. You did everything right.”
“I don’t believe that. The rooms behind the airlock were empty, and I was in front of the airlock the entire time. Do you understand? How did they get Jenna out of there? Even if they had some sort of cloaking device, I should have noticed the airlock being opened.”
“There must be a back exit that we missed,” Anna said.
“That’s exactly what I thought. But that wouldn’t be enough. They had to have transported Jenna away somehow.”
“You mean with a ship or something?”
“Yes.”
“But why didn’t we see it? Wouldn’t you have seen it when you walked around the asteroid?”
“We only covered half of it. Then I stupidly found the entrance.”
“But our ship’s scanners surely would have seen another spaceship,” Anna said.
“No, not if they knew we were coming. Santa is big enough. All they had to do was stay on the side facing away from our ship. Maybe they don’t even have a very big ship, maybe just a shuttle.”
“So you’re saying this was all some kind of trap?”
“I don’t know. Maybe they didn’t set it deliberately. What if it was just some ordinary mining crew? Suddenly, they discover their asteroid has changed its orbit, and then they find an alien ship coming toward them from Titan. You’d probably want to hide, too, and then if you were given the chance to catch one of those aliens, you’d probably do it, too... so you could question them.”
“That’s an interesting theory, but I don’t think the details match reality. The asteroid’s orbit changed eleven orbital periods ago. That’s, let me convert it... That’s half an Earth year ago. Don’t you think they would have at least asked for help from some other mining operation sometime during that time?”
“Maybe, maybe not. We don’t know what the conditions on Earth are like right now. Maybe these are all independent miners, like small cooperatives or something, and everyone’s working for themselves. But it also doesn’t really matter. What’s important is that we turn the tables on them. They caught us by surprise. Now we’ve got to catch them by surprise.”
“And how are we supposed to do that? You’re assuming that they’ve been watching us continuously.”
“If these are Earthlings without superpowers and magical abilities, then I assume they can only see us by what we emit—infrared, radio, things like that.”
“And what we reflect. Don’t forget radar and sunlight,” Anna added.
“Right. So if we want to surprise them, we’ve got to proceed without any emissions, and with the smallest reflection profile we can create.”
“You can’t do that, Boris. It’d be much too dangerous!” She had seen right through him. She was his sister, after all.
“Yes, I can. I’ve got to. They can’t expect that someone could come to them without any equipment at all. They’ve got Jenna. She’s a Wnutri, and I’m positive she won’t tell them what a Snarushi can do.”
“But you can’t perform miracles. How would you get to the asteroid without any equipment?”
“Mechanically, according to the principle of a catapult. You’ll launch me toward the asteroid. My outer skin will provide good insulation so that I won’t be detectable in the infrared. Even if they have a very sensitive radar, I won’t look any different from a hunk of rock coming in to impact the asteroid. I’m sure that happens all the time. Santa is covered with craters.”
“You’d only have one chance. If we don’t aim just right, you’d be flung off into deep space.”
“You don’t have to be so dramatic. You could always come and get me with the ship. But that, of course, would be very noticeable, and you’d give away our surprise. It’d be better if you aim right the first time.”
“And the impact?”
“We can calculate that all out in advance. My relative velocity shouldn’t exceed a certain threshold, but that’s all classical physics.”
“Assuming I agree to do this—”
“There’s no question about that. You’ve got to agree, Anna. I’m going to do this no matter what. I’m responsible for what’s happened to Jenna.”
“I understand
. But how will you get back? Eventually you’ve got to return to the tank.”
“I’ll fly over there, rescue Jenna, and then we’ll use her jet pack to get back here.”
“Assuming you succeed.”
“Of course I’m assuming that. And in case of an emergency, you can come and get me.”
“Man, little brother, I wish you weren’t so stubborn. I don’t want to lose you, too. Can’t I convince you not to take any unnecessary risks for my sake?”
“Of course, Anna, I promise not to take any unnecessary risks. Only the essential ones.”
The asteroid was positioned directly in front of them. Gerald had turned the ship somewhat, so that they could launch him directly out of the cargo bay. Boris could see Santa’s shape only because they were on the side opposite the sun. Jenna could be anywhere out there where he couldn’t see any stars. Even if he arrived on the asteroid again, unnoticed, he still had to find her. His chances were probably smaller than he wanted to admit to himself. It simply must work.
With each step back, the rubber cable pressed more firmly into his back. They had fastened it on both sides of the wide cargo bay door, and they had also secured him for now with a safety line. He was the projectile that their makeshift catapult would fling into space so that he would catch up with, and land on, the asteroid. ‘Land’ was probably not the right word. He would impact it like a small meteorite.
“Wait,” Anna said.
He stopped moving back and she gave him a hug. Then she pressed something heavy into his hand. It weighed almost a kilogram and had a barrel and a comfortable handle. “If you get caught in any traps,” she said, “here’s your way out.”
She moved his index finger to a rounded trigger. “You’ve got eight shots. Don’t worry, it operates on a chemical basis and won’t be discoverable from a distance. Unless you fire it—then it’ll produce heat.”
“And recoil,” he said.
“Yes. In an emergency you could use it to change your trajectory, I guess, at least a little. Its bullets can penetrate spacesuits and will be soundless in space. It’d probably be better if you could refrain from injuring any Earthlings, though, just in the spirit of peaceful coexistence. Right?”
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