Spindrift

by Allen Steele

  Ramirez was aching to continue their exploration. One look at him, and Harker knew that if he didn’t put a stop to this immediately, Ramirez’s insatiable curiosity would lead them even farther into Spindrift’s depths. “All right, that’s it,” he said, backing away from the blister. “We’re done here. Time to head back.”

  “You can’t be serious.” Through his helmet faceplate, Ramirez’s expression registered astonishment. “Ted, please…we’ve found something no one has seen before. We can’t just…”

  “We’ve seen enough…and Jorge paid for that.” Harker pointed toward the lightstick a few meters away. “Cole and Rauchle and the rest of the team can take it from here, for all I care. I just want to get back to the shuttle and…” He shook his head within his helmet. “I don’t know. Get sick or something.”

  He turned away, heading toward the wan glow of the lightstick. After a moment, Ramirez followed him, if only reluctantly. At that moment, Harker didn’t care whether he came along or not. If the price of knowledge was the life of someone as blameless as Jorge Cruz, then perhaps ignorance was a reasonable alternative.

  Either way, he just wanted to get out of there.

  Harker was surprised to see how easy it was for them to find their way out of Spindrift and how soon they were able to make their way back to the surface.

  The staircase leading up from the pit was the most difficult part. He and Ramirez had to help each other climb the chaotically arranged steps, which they now understood were meant to be used by insectlike creatures with two pairs of legs. But once they reached the room at the top of the stairs—which Ramirez now believed was the control center for this one particular biostasis area—it was a simple matter of following the lightsticks they’d left behind until they found the airlock.

  They were careful to enter the compartment at the same time. Once again, unseen sensors registered their presence and automatically shut the hatch behind them. The ascent was just as swift as the descent; the airlock depressurized on the way up, and by the time they reached the entrance shaft, Harker’s heads-up display told him they’d returned to hard vacuum.

  Somewhere behind them must be a locker where the aliens stowed their version of EVA suits, but that would be something the next team would have to find. Just then, all he wanted to do was get back to the Maria Celeste.

  Even so, once the elevator doors opened, Harker deliberately avoided treading upon the alien footprints they’d found on the floor at the bottom of the shaft. If Ramirez was correct, then they’d been left behind uncounted ages ago. Perhaps by the last alien who’d entered Spindrift before the rest of its kind had committed themselves to centuries of hibernation. Gazing down at them, he found himself imagining the scene. One lone alien—perhaps his own counterpart, an extraterrestrial first officer of some kind—whose task it was to close the surface hatch once everyone else had gone below. Perhaps it had taken one last look at the stars before it committed itself to the dreamless oblivion of biostasis, a voyage between the stars that would last centuries, perhaps even…

  But why would they do something like that if they had hyperspace technology?

  The question came to him as he grasped the safety rope and began the long climb up the spiral stairs to the outer hatch. There was a starbridge in orbit around Spindrift. Obviously it was alien in origin. Therefore, it stood to reason that it led somewhere. So why would a race capable of opening wormholes between one point and another, just as humankind had learned to do, undertake the enormous effort to hollow out an asteroid, turn it into a huge ship, then place millions of its kind in biostasis? Why construct something like this when there was no apparent need to do so?

  It made no sense…and yet, there had to be a reason. Harker considered this as he made his way up the ramp one step at a time, clutching the rope for support. All he’d seen below told him that everything these creatures designed had a clear and very direct sense of purpose. There were no redundancies, no belt-and-suspenders second measures. Hatches that opened the same way every single time. Ramps and staircases that had no guardrails. Control panels, although inscribed with an alien language, were symbolic enough that an intelligent visitor could figure out how to operate them. Everything this race did was simple and straightforward.

  So why would they build a vessel meant for a voyage lasting countless years, when they had the ability to make the same journey in only a few seconds?

  Harker looked back at Ramirez, struggling up the ramp just behind him. He was tempted to talk to him about this…but no, not just yet. For the time being, his primary concern was getting back to the Maria Celeste in one piece. After Cruz’s hideous death, he wasn’t going to feel safe until they’d left Spindrift behind.

  It can wait until we’re back on the shuttle, he thought as he climbed the last few meters to the surface hatch. Hell, let it wait until we’re aboard Galileo. All I want to do is get out of here alive.

  Opening the hatch from the inside was a bit of a trick; now that he knew what the aliens looked like, it was clear that it had been designed by beings whose bodies had a different range of movement. Harker had to squat down on his knees, then reach above his head, in order to manipulate the panel that lay next to the hatch’s underside. Once this was done, though, the flanges peeled apart as they had before.

  “You doing okay there?” He looked down at Ramirez, still making his way up the stairs. Ramirez raised a hand to give him a silent thumbs-up. Pulling himself back to his feet, Harker climbed the rest of the way out of hatch. He gazed up at the cold, black sky that lay above Spindrift. The stars had never looked so beautiful.

  Thank God I’m out of there. Time to contact Emily; she was probably worried sick about them. “Survey team to Maria Celeste, do you copy?” He waited a moment, heard nothing. “Team to shuttle,” he said, “do you hear me?”

  Again, no response. “I wouldn’t worry too much,” Ramirez said as he emerged from the hatch behind him. “She’s probably sacked out.”

  More likely than not, he was right. Harker glanced at the chronometer on his heads-up display: 02:11 shiptime. Yet he couldn’t help but feel that something was wrong. As if enough hadn’t gone wrong already. “Leave the gear behind,” he said. “We’re heading straight back.”

  “Sure, but first things first.” Kneeling beside the hatch, Ramirez reached out to close it…then jerked back as the panels slid shut by themselves. “Damn,” he murmured. “Guess something must have noticed that we’ve left the premises.”

  Harker said nothing. Little about this place surprised him anymore. At least the safety line was still in place; the next team would need it. If another team came down; after what happened to Cruz, he sure as hell wasn’t going to volunteer to lead another survey.

  “Let’s just get out of here,” he muttered as he turned away from the hatch. “I never want to see this goddamn place again.”

  It took only a few minutes for them to hike back to the spot where they’d left the belay ropes, and only slightly longer to make the climb up the crater wall. Twice more, Harker tried to contact the shuttle, yet all he heard was the low hum of carrier-wave static. By the time they’d reached the crater rim, he’d become seriously concerned; when he discovered that he couldn’t see the Maria Celeste except as a low form visible only through his visor’s ultraviolet function, he abandoned caution and bounded down the slope, making reckless broad jumps that could kill him if he fell face-first upon any one of the dozens of rocks that lay between him and the landing craft.

  He didn’t care. The shuttle’s floodlights were extinguished, its cockpit windows dark. Even the formation lights were out. Something was wrong; he knew that for a fact. “Survey team to Maria Celeste!” he yelled as he charged across the plain, leaving Ramirez far behind. “Answer if you can! Repeat, survey team to…!”

  “Copy.” Emily’s voice came through his headset just as he was within twenty meters of the shuttle. “Go silent.”

  Startled by her abrupt response, Harker skid
ded to a halt. Looking up, he saw a faint spot of light within the cockpit. Emily was aiming a flashlight at him. “Emcee, what are you…?”

  “Airlock’s open.” For an instant, he caught a glimpse of her face, back-lit by the flashlight’s reflection off the glass. “Go silent and get aboard, right now.”

  “Emcee, what…?”

  Then he heard the low snap of the comlink going dead. Harker looked back at Ramirez; only then was the scientist catching up with him. He started to say something, but realized that if Emily wanted him to go radio-silent, it must be for good reason. Instead, he pointed to the shuttle’s belly ramp. Ramirez raised a hand: he’d heard, and understood.

  Harker headed for the ramp. As badly as things had gone beneath the surface of Spindrift, something just as terrible must have occurred topside as well.

  Even so, the last thing he expected to hear was that the Galileo had been destroyed.

  Emily gave him the news as soon as he and Ramirez cycled through the airlock. Even so, it was difficult to understand what had happened; still in a state of shock, what little she was able to tell him came as a rush of disconnected details. An alien vessel coming though the starbridge. Some sort of interference with Galileo’s communication system. Captain Lawrence ordering the torpedo to be launched. The nuke’s premature detonation, apparently before it reached its intended target.

  Harker took all this in while squatting on the floor of the aft compartment, a cup of lukewarm coffee nestled in his hands. It wasn’t until he removed his EVA gear that he realized that the shuttle was colder than when he’d left it; his skinsuit, damp with unrecycled sweat, clung to him like long underwear in which he’d gone for a swim, and he longed to peel out of it. The only interior light was the dim glow of the emergency lamps. Emily had powered down all nonessential systems; although she’d heard him through the comlink as soon as he and Ramirez had emerged from the hatch, she’d dared not respond until they were close enough to the shuttle that she could signal them with a flashlight. In hindsight, he realized that she’d done the right thing. If there was a hostile vessel in orbit…

  A cold hand closed its fingers around his heart. He found himself beginning to shake. In the space of a little less than two hours, twelve lives had been snuffed out: eleven in space and another on the ground.

  Only the three of them remained alive.

  For a long time, no one said anything. Emily sat cross-legged on the floor, staring at nothing in particular; her last remaining iota of courage seemed to have left her once she’d learned that Cruz was dead. Harker realized that she’d been holding on to the hope that all three of them would return alive. When only he and Ramirez returned…

  “Well, that’s it for us.” Ramirez slowly rose to his feet, sauntered over to the locker where he’d left his clothes. “We’re screwed.”

  At first, Harker thought Ramirez only intended to remove his EVA gear. Instead, he pulled out his jumpsuit, unsnapped a pocket, and produced the pipe he’d caught him smoking aboard Galileo. Harker had forgotten that he’d given it back to him shortly before they’d left the ship.

  “Don’t light that,” he said. “We have only a limited supply of air.”

  “Why, does it matter?” Ramirez shook his head. “Six days, maybe a little more…ifwe don’t suffocate first, then we’ll starve to death. Or freeze, if we should be so lucky as to last that long.”

  “Smoke if you want to.” Emily gave Ramirez a careless wave of her hand. “I may even join you.”

  “Thank you, dear.” Ramirez pulled out a small plastic canister; opening it, he began to stuff the pipe’s bowl with cannabis. “How about you, Ted? Might make you…”

  “No thanks.” The last thing Harker wanted to do was to try to escape their situation within a cloud of stupor. Even if that form of escape was their only option. “I’d rather change, if you don’t mind,” he added, standing up and walking over to his own locker.

  “Suit yourself…no pun intended, of course.”

  It should have been funny, but Harker was in no mood. He tried to consider the alternatives as he unzipped his skinsuit, and realized that there were none that were worth discussion.

  Even if the shuttle lifted off from Spindrift, Earth was nearly two light-years away, far beyond Maria Celeste’s range, and KX-1 was almost as distant. They could activate the emergency transponder, but its signal wouldn’t be received for almost two years, if at all. And even if, by some stroke of luck, its faint radio signal was intercepted by the deep-space antenna at Mare Muscoviense, a rescue mission from Earth wouldn’t arrive for at least two and a half years after that…by which time Spindrift would have receded even farther from the solar system, once again being lost in the depths of interstellar space.

  By then, he thought, we’ll be the stuff of legend. The notion brought a wan smile to his face. The Galileo would soon enter the history books as one more vessel whose fate remained unknown. No one would ever learn what happened to them. And meanwhile, they’d lie here together, joining the dreamless sleep of the dead…

  Just like the aliens below us, he thought. They’re going somewhere, but they put themselves to sleep. Now they’re waiting to get to wherever they’ve got to go…

  An idea occurred to him, one so desperate that he wouldn’t have taken it into consideration if the only alternative wasn’t certain death. Even as Ramirez’s pipe began to fill the closed air of the compartment with herb-scented fumes, Harker turned toward the emergency biostasis cells.

  There was a chance…

  “Put out the pipe,” he said. “No more water, no more coffee. Use the head one last time. Then strip down.”

  “What are you…?” Ramirez stared at him, then followed his gaze to the cells. “Are you crazy? What’s that going to…?”

  “Yes, he’s mad…and I’m sorry I didn’t think of that earlier.” Emily had caught on. Raising a hand, she let Harker help her stand up. “Transponder on?”

  “Of course. Standard frequency.”

  “Sure.” She hesitated. “You’ll have to activate the cells, though. My only experience with them has been in training.”

  “Mine, too. We’re just going to have to check each other to make sure we do this right.” He patted her arm, gave her what he hoped was a reassuring smile, then stood aside to let her go forward to the cockpit. Then he reached down to take the pipe from Ramirez’s hands. “No time for that, I’m afraid,” he added. “Go take a piss, then get naked. We’re putting you down first.”

  “You can’t be serious.” Ramirez regarded him with shock even as he surrendered his precious vice. “What good is that going to do us?”

  “I don’t know.” Harker stepped over to the nearest cell. A touch of the control panel, and its lid wheezed open. “But these things can keep us alive almost indefinitely.”

  “Sure, all right.” Ramirez glanced toward the ceiling. “But what if they…?”

  “Find us?” Harker didn’t have an answer for this. From the cockpit, Emily looked over her shoulder, silently asking the same question. “It’s a risk we’ll have to take. I just know that we don’t have anything to lose…unless you’d rather die, of course.”

  Ramirez said nothing. He took a deep breath, then opened the chest zipper of his skinsuit. Turning away from him, Harker opened the lids of the next two cells. He almost started to open the fourth before he remembered that it wouldn’t be needed.

  Sorry, Jorge, he thought. If you’d made it just a little while longer…

  “I knew what I was doing,” Ramirez said, very quietly.

  Harker looked around at him. “Pardon me?”

  Ramirez had removed his skinsuit. Save for his briefs, he was almost naked; in the cold of the cabin, he hugged himself. “When I…when I did what I did,” he said, his teeth chattering, “I knew what I was doing. Because I thought it was the right thing.”

  Harker suddenly realized that he was talking about his role in the Savant genocide. Ramirez had always claimed to be a victim
of circumstance, an innocent who’d been swept up in a plot with inner dimensions that had not been revealed to him. Now, like a man facing the gallows, he was confessing his sins in hope that the truth would save his soul.

  “Why did you do it?” he asked.

  “Because I thought…” Ramirez looked away. “Because I thought it was the only way to save the human race. And because…”

  “Never mind.” Harker glanced toward the cockpit. Emily heard nothing of this. “You can tell me the rest if…when we get through this.”

  Ramirez’s eyes widened. “Then you understand…?”

  “No. That’s a matter between you and…well, someone else.” Harker motioned to the nearest cell. “If we’re lucky, then you’ll be answering to me first.”

  It didn’t take long for them to go into hibernation. In fact, Harker was surprised by how easy the entire procedure was once they accessed the tutorial program. Once they administered the proper antibiotics to themselves from the emergency kit, it was a relatively simple matter of inserting rubber lines into major arteries and strapping oxygen masks to faces. They weren’t able to shave their body hair, though, but they’d just have to accept the consequences.

  He and Emily put Ramirez down first. Once he was safely in hibernation, they had a little more confidence. Harker helped Emily climb into her cell; one last kiss, then the mask went over her face. He shut the hatch, flooded the casing, and waited until its panel lights went green. Then he programmed his cell to repeat the same procedure for him.

  Harker closed the hatch behind him, then pulled the air mask over his face. As he laid his arms next to him, he felt consciousness slipping away from him even as warm blue began to ooze up around his body.

  You’re about to die, he thought, and for a moment he felt a surge of panic.

  No, you’re not going to die. He forced himself to relax. You’re just going away for a while. And when you wake up, you’ll be in another place…