And yet, she had survived. She'd fought for her life, and she was still alive out here in orbit around Saturn.
Connecting to the communications satellite had distracted her. She needed to focus, to decelerate and shed her approach speed to Bestla.
With a deft touch of the MMU controls Jasmine oriented the MMU away from the direction of travel. She lost sight of the Copernicus, but her onboard computer continued to track the distance to both the craft and the alien moon. Transparent arrows on the edge of her visor glowed in soft orange indicating where these two spacecraft lay. For Jasmine, it was hard to think of Bestla as a spacecraft, but it was, every bit as much as the Copernicus. Distance and relative speeds flashed before her in tiny numbers. Her distance to Bestla was shrinking, rapidly scrolling down toward zero.
“Two hundred and seventy eight meters per second,” she whispered, reminding herself.
Jasmine knew full well her words would be scrutinized for decades to come as researchers struggled to understand what had happened on this fateful flight, but there was no time to explain. A digit disappeared from the stream of numbers flicking past. Her distance to Bestla had dropped below 10,000. Whether that was meters, feet, miles or kilometers seemed irrelevant at that point. Everything was happening too quickly. Jasmine fired the thrusters on her MMU and accelerated smoothly. She’d hoped for some kind of head jarring slap-in-the-back rocket launch, but the MMU simply eased forward.
“COME ON, DAMN YOU!”
Seconds passed slowly—painfully. Jasmine felt as though she was being held back, as though she were in her grandfather’s old Cadillac heading up a steep onramp and struggling to reach sixty before merging with the freeway traffic.
“COME ON!” she screamed.
The distance to the alien craft continued to fall. Was the rate of change slowing? She desperately wanted to think it was, but the numbers continued to plummet.
Less than a minute had passed when another digit disappeared from the stream of numbers showing her approach to Bestla. She was under a thousand what? Meters? Yards? Feet? It had to be meters. A thousand meters was a kilometer, she reminded herself as her MMU continued to accelerate. A kilometer was a long way, right? She thought, quickly realizing it was roughly a half mile. Her heart sank.
“Oh, please, please,” she pleaded as she willed the MMU to accelerate faster, but the thrusters continued precisely as they had, with no more, no less thrust than when she began, and she berated herself for not acting sooner. The truth was, Jasmine was exhausted. Mentally, she was falling apart. Physically, her body ached. Each breath hurt. She couldn’t stop her hands shaking. What was she fighting for? Why didn’t she just give up and die? She had nothing to live for. There was no escape, no possibility of surviving, and yet to cling to just one more minute meant something. This was her life in the balance. She couldn’t give up. She had to fight to the bitter end, regardless of how feeble or pathetic her efforts might be.
“Please,” she said, watching as the distance rolled below one hundred. The rate was slower, and she tried to estimate just how fast she was going, but the rational, logical part of her mind had shut down. At that point, she couldn’t have added two and two together. Minutes earlier, math had been a welcome distraction. Now, math was a futile gesture, one her mind refused to entertain.
Her body stiffened as the readout dropped into single digits and she braced herself. A dark shadow fell across her, blotting out the distant Sun.
Her hips collided with something hard and unmovable, flipping her end over end. The sudden jolt knocked the wind out of her, and she tumbled away from the black alien spacecraft.
Jasmine found herself spinning out of control. She fought with the controls of the MMU, trying to counteract her spin. In the midst of the confusion, she managed to arrest her spin only to realize she had ended up thrusting back toward Bestla. She couldn’t have been more than a hundred feet from the long black craft. Craters marred the surface. Dust kicked up by her initial impact drifted along with her through space.
Jasmine still had considerable sideways momentum. Bestla raced beneath her, but she also had forward motion. She used the jets on her MMU to hold herself some fifty feet from the alien vessel.
The material on her left arm had been torn, revealing the complex layers beneath her spacesuit, but the suit hadn’t punctured. She could see a thick rubber layer swelling slightly with the internal pressure of her suit, but it held. A large scratch ran down the left side of her glass face plate, scarring the visor.
Once Jasmine had composed herself, she worked on arresting her sideways motion, but not before a vast circular iris set into the side of Bestla passed silently beneath her.
She was breathing hard. Adrenalin pumped through her veins. A burst of her lateral jets brought her stationary with Bestla. She released the controls of her MMU and looked down at her gloved hands. Even with several layers of rubber and thick suit material wrapped around them, she could see her hands shaking.
Floating there, she realized she was still transmitting. Someone somewhere back on Earth would watch precisely what she was seeing in roughly an hour and a half. To them, this was monumentus. Was monumentus even a word, she wondered. If it wasn’t, it should be, she decided. Thinking about a world with over eight billion people on it all intently watching her video feed helped her to see past her impending death. Yes, she’d die, but this was First Contact. She understood how important these fleeting few minutes were for humanity. For now, there were questions to be answered. What would scientists want to know? What would they consider important?
She powered forward toward Bestla at a rate of only a few feet per second. The spotlights on the side of her helmet illuminated the rough, asteroid-like surface of the alien craft.
“Ah, the surface is covered in dust,” she said, composing herself. “There’s hundreds of craters, but none more than ten feet across. Whatever this thing is, it’s been out here a long time. I saw a hatch or an opening further back. It’s the only thing I’ve seen that looks artificial. I’m going to go back and take a closer look.”
This was good, she decided. Having a sense of purpose helped her to relax. As she flew above the pitted dark surface, she felt strangely alive. The pain in her joints and legs subsided. Her breathing slowed.
“Yes, here it is,” she said, soaring up to the rim. “Most of what I’ve seen here looks like the surface of our Moon, only in miniature. I can’t imagine that’s the design of this craft. Something must have happened to them. How long would it take for dust like this to accumulate? There are some stretches of the craft without any craters, while some stretches have numerous overlapping impact craters. I don’t know how you’d date this thing, but the large circular formation I’m approaching is strangely free of any dust or any sign of impact. It looks new. Surely, it too must have been struck in the past, but it appears pristine. From what I can see, the iris is roughly a hundred yards in diameter, with overlapping, interlaced panels converging on the center. Much like the old camera apertures.”
She was babbling, but she didn’t care. Talking helped.
“I’m going to touch it.”
Should she touch the craft? What would the experts back in Houston want her to do? Jasmine had no idea. She wasn’t an astronaut. She was a teenaged girl out of her depth. To her, touch was life. Until she touched the smooth surface, she wasn’t sure the iris really existed. She felt as though she was in a dream. Given her mental state over the past few days, she had to know for sure if the iris was real.
As she approached the middle of the iris, she slowed her MMU. The lights on the side of her helmet highlighted thousands of fine lines converging on the center of the aperture. Jasmine nudged the MMU closer, stopping with the armrest just inches from the surface.
“There’s an oily sheen.”
She felt stupid providing a running commentary on everything that those on Earth could see as clearly as she could, but she had to talk. They probably had more idea what she w
as looking at than she did, or maybe they didn’t. There wasn’t anything that could prepare anyone for a moment like this. The real Jazz had decades of training and experience, but at that moment, the two women were finally equals. Teenaged Jasmine might not know about orbits and emergency procedures, but before Bestla, she didn’t need to.
Her gloved hand reached out but she never touched the surface. The iris opened, rapidly retreating to the rim and leaving a vast chasm a hundred feet wide in front of her. The opening seemed to swallow her whole. Although Jasmine hadn’t moved relative to Bestla, there was an illusion of being sucked into the craft. She had to look to her left and then to her right to assure herself she hadn’t drifted forward. She could still see the rim roughly level with her.
“OK, well, that was easy enough. From what I can see, there’s no beware of the dog signs, so I’m going inside.”
God, she hoped they had a sense of humor at NASA. What would NASA make of her behavior? She probably didn’t sound or act like an astronaut with over twenty years’ experience. To her mind, she sounded like a snotty nosed kid, and she was, she thought.
“I’m moving forward,” she said as her hands lightly touched at the control sticks for a split second and a burst of compressed gas shot out behind her.
Yes, they can see you’re moving forward, she thought. Stop sounding like a goddamn teenager!
Her fuel gauge turned red.
“I hope there’s a reserve tank on this Camaro,” she joked. “I’m dropping below ten percent.”
The interior of the alien craft was hidden in shadow, but Jasmine could make out a curved, smooth bowl stretching from around the rim of the iris. She had drifted no more than ten feet into the craft when the iris slid shut behind her, sealing her in the pitch black darkness.
“Ah, that’s not good,” she whispered, trying to calm herself. Slowly, cautiously, she rotated her MMU and edged back to the iris. The vast aperture opened as she approached, opening again before she was close enough to touch it.
“Ok. Just like automatic doors at the Mall. I can live with that. I’m continuing on.”
She turned and moved parallel with the surface, over toward the rim of the iris rather than descending into the darkness.
Jasmine so wanted someone to talk to, someone to respond to her. To be able to speak to someone would have been immensely helpful. It wasn’t that she felt lonely. It was that she felt lost. She didn’t know what to do other than to do something, and she wondered how dumb those back on Earth thought she was for entering the alien craft. She was sure she was making a fool of herself. As her momentum carried her close to the inner wall below the edge of the iris, she adjusted the pitch of her motion and started to descend. As soon as she dropped to roughly ten feet below the rim, the iris closed overhead, sealing her in the darkness again. Her spotlights illuminated the wall, providing the only light in the inky black interior of the craft.
“If this was a movie, I’d be hiding behind the seat by now,” she joked, looking intently at the signal strength meter on her heads-up display. The signal had dropped by one bar as the iris closed. It was irrational, but somehow, as long as she was connected with the universe outside, she felt safe. She felt as though nothing could happen to her as long as she could be heard. There was no justification for her rationale, but she had to cling to something.
Jasmine focused on what was in front of her, trying to ignore her dwindling supplies of oxygen and propellant. It seemed the only thing she had an abundance of was carbon dioxide. A warning light flashed, informing her she needed to change her CO2 filter, whatever that was. Jasmine clicked “cancel alarm” on her forearm pad to clear the semi-transparent message from her visor.
She came to a halt no more than five feet from the inner wall of the vast chamber. The smooth, curving bowl stretched away for several hundred yards. It looked as though it was made from highly polished black marble, reflecting her lights back at her, providing her with a darkened distorted image of her spacesuit and Manned Maneuvering Unit.
“There’s some kind of gravity here,” she said. “I can feel the MMU drifting slightly to one side, like a balloon with not enough helium to rise to the ceiling. It’s not much, but I’ll have to correct for it every minute or so, and that’s going to suck more gas.”
A light touch on her jets brought her to within a foot and a second burst brought her to a stop. She liked the MMU. It was intuitive, navigating with the bulky jetpack had become second nature.
“I’m going to touch the wall.”
Stupid. Stupid. Stupid, she berated herself. What? Haven’t you ever been to a museum or a fancy department store? Don’t touch! And yet despite those thoughts, she had to touch the craft. Her curiosity demanded such a distinctly human interaction. What did she hope to learn? What would those watching on Earth learn? Nothing, she thought. And yet touch was such a primal part of humanity, she had to reach out. Her thick, gloved hand came within inches of the surface, and slowly her fingers made contact.
Ripples spread out from her fingertips like water on a pond, slowly losing their shape as they grew wider.
“It looks like a fluid,” she said, “but even through the rubber padding on my glove, I can feel a gritty texture, something like sand.”
Slowly, Jasmine pushed her hand into what appeared to be a shiny marble wall until her fingers disappeared into the inky darkness. She pulled her hand out, holding the dark sand in her gloved palm. She held the sand up close to the camera. As she worked the gritty substance through her fingers, tiny flecks came loose, but instead of floating in the almost-weightless environment they fell back into place on the wall.
“Wow, that is something!”
With each sentence, Jasmine felt less and less like an astronaut, and certainly not a scientist. She really was just a kid in an adult’s body.
The dark material blended back into the wall, leaving an unblemished polished surface.
“I’m going to go deeper,” she said, emboldened by her first contact with the mysterious alien craft.
Jasmine used her jets to follow the curved bowl-shaped chamber with gentle course corrections every ten to twenty feet. She didn’t feel comfortable losing sight of the wall. Without the wall, she’d have no sense of spatial location in the darkness, so to her it was worth the extra effort required to adjust her course as the curve arced inward. By the time she reached the center, she figured she was roughly fifty meters below the iris, if the chamber was indeed a half sphere.
Another, smaller iris opened, revealing a dark tunnel leading away from the center of the chamber.
“I’m guessing this is some kind of airlock or docking station,” she said. “But it’s nondescript. Our airlocks are cramped and full of stuff. Theirs is completely devoid of any objects. No spacesuits, MMUs. I can’t see anything on the walls, no markings of any kind, no compartments or cabinets.”
Her spotlights highlighted the tunnel, but they failed to illuminate the far end, leaving it hidden in darkness.
“I—I don’t want to go on, but I will. I have to. I owe you that much. If I am to die out here. Oh, don’t you love that—if. Since—is more realistic. Since I am going to die out here, I don’t want my death to be in vain. Hopefully, you can learn something from what you see.”
She choked up.
“I’m sorry.”
The silence was deafening.
“I wish I was who you think I am. I wish I could do what you want me to, but I just don’t know what I should be doing.”
She sniffed.
“Feeling a bit sorry for myself, you know. It’s hard up here, out here or wherever. A billion miles of empty space can do that to you. Don’t worry. I’ll go on. I won’t let you down.”
There was so much hidden within her words, so many assumptions about expectations. What would her parents think? Would they ever see this? Were they even still alive? They should be, she thought. She hoped they were, but she really didn’t know.
“OK, let’s d
o this,” she said, and she fired her thrusters and drifted slowly into the dark tunnel. A single blast allowed her to cruise the entire length of the tunnel at a leisurely pace. Her spotlights lit up the sides of the pipe-like tunnel, and eventually illuminated a T-junction at the end.
There was movement.
Jasmine felt her heart stop.
She brought the MMU to a halt and floated stationary in the darkness, catching the flicker of motion on the edge of her spotlights. She dared not speak. A quick glance at the signal strength on the side of her HUD confirmed she was still in contact with the communications satellite. Houston should be able to see this, she thought.
Slowly, Jasmine proceeded forward. She wanted to look either way along the T-junction, but her eyes were glued to the undulating motion in front of her. She simply could not pull herself away. As she approached, her lights lit up a sea of confusion. The far wall looked as though it was teeming with life. Drifting closer, Jasmine could see a variety of dark shapes moving at various angles across the wall. No, she thought, across the wall was the wrong description. Beneath the wall. It was as though cats were crawling beneath a bedspread. Whatever this was, it was the same material she’d touched by the iris.
“I’m going to touch one of them,” she said.
Mentally, she berated herself. Good thinking. Real scientific.
“I’m not afraid,” she said. “I probably should be, I guess, but I’m not. I’m curious. I want to learn what I can in what little time I have left.”
Jasmine brought the MMU to a halt with the armrest barely half a foot from the wall. She observed the different shapes moving within the wall for a moment, noting some were symmetrical, while others looked chaotic. She never saw any two that looked the same. Rather than moving in a pattern, like cars on a freeway, they crisscrossed, sometimes merging briefly with each other as they overlapped, but always continuing on their way.
My Sweet Satan Page 24
