Last Contact

by Samuel Best

  LAST CONTACT

  Samuel Best

  DEDICATION

  For my nieces and nephews

  Wishing you the brightest futures

  PROLOGUE

  Cold night air chilled Hope to the bone as she stomped through the waist-high grass behind her parents’ farmhouse. The grass whispered in a gentle breeze, rippling like the surface of a lake toward the darkness that awaited her. Behind her, the warm glow of kitchen light spilled onto the back porch.

  Her evening chores were finished. She had cleaned the dining room table after dinner, washed the dishes, and now it was time to work.

  While she was toiling inside, stars had been sprayed across the clear night sky after the last light of the Sun faded behind the western mountains.

  Hope repositioned a custom-ordered 120mm telescope on her shoulder and shifted a laptop covered with faded NASA stickers to her other hand. Sharing equal rank with the smattering of NASA logos was a newer Diamond Aerospace sticker, its bright blue chevron swooping like a rocket tail behind white block letters. The laptop’s spare battery weighed heavily in her backpack, along with the other gadgets she always brought along for a night of stargazing. As often as she’d complained to her parents about being raised in the middle of nowhere, it turned out to be absolutely perfect for studying the night sky.

  She adjusted her thick glasses with a gloved hand and scratched her scalp through a blue wool cap. Long, curly brown locks trailed from beneath the cap, brushing her shoulders.

  The grass field behind her parents’ farmhouse extended for several acres before it hit the narrow river which marked the edge of the pastures. Hope walked up a low hill and found a folding metal chair waiting for her. It commanded an inspiring view of the river, twinkling with starlight as it meandered by, and of the farmhouse behind her, its small square windows aglow with welcoming light.

  Hope set her laptop down on the metal chair and unfolded the sturdy computerized tripod of her telescope.

  Her kit came together quickly: battery packs, tracking servos, laser-positioning guides, extra wool blanket, gummy bears. Hope picked up her laptop and sat in the metal chair, grimacing as the frigid metal bit through her thick pants and padded jacket.

  Her body heat warmed it quickly, and she released a captured breath as she draped the blanket over her legs, pulled off her gloves, and opened her laptop.

  With a few fast keystrokes, she bypassed several scrolling lines of text—programs compiling in the background for various projects at school—and opened a program called Hope’s Night Sky_V3. A splash screen of a starscape popped up onscreen with a line of text which read This program is copyright Hope Avahra, so hands off!

  She paired her telescope’s tracking system with her laptop and opened her bag of gummy bears while the servos whirred, automatically moving the scope to where she left off last night. A quick glance at her notebook reminded her she had been focused on galaxy M86 in the Virgo Cluster.

  The telescope went still, and a moment later a blurry image materialized on her screen. Hope absentmindedly chewed a gummy bear while her laptop processor crunched the high-resolution image. If she didn’t have to spend all of her scholarship money on textbooks, she could get herself a real computer, one that could handle more than one image at a time.

  She was supposed to have finished with the Virgo Cluster two days ago along with the rest of her classmates so they could move on to quasars, but Hope’s program needed to digest more numbers before it spit back accurate distance measurements between galaxy clusters, let alone individual stars. She had reworked the algorithms multiple times, but her results were always off by a significant number of light years.

  The entire two-hour lecture on dark matter she sat through at the University of Montana earlier that day had been spent tweaking and updating her algorithms instead of listening. Her digital recorder had captured everything for later review.

  As the image on her laptop screen resolved to perfect clarity alongside a steady stream of numbers scrolling upward, she grinned around a mouthful of gummy bears. The myriad galaxies within the cluster took on a sharper appearance as data streamed in.

  It was working. Instead of her program telling her that everything in the telescope’s field of view was sandwiched on top of each other along one plane, it was, to her surprise, quite accurately predicting the distance between celestial objects—even ones obscured by something in the foreground.

  Hope scribbled a few notes on her pad, still smiling. She glanced back at the screen and her pen froze. Her smile slowly faded as she leaned closer, her pinched face glowing from the light of the screen.

  A single red line of text in her program told her there was an unknown object in the sky. Hope zoomed in on that section of the image. Chunky pixels disappeared one by one to be replaced by a crystal-clear region of the Virgo Cluster. In the lower-left corner, a solid black circle with a faint blue corona of light blotted out half of galaxy M87.

  Hope dropped her bag of gummy bears into her backpack and sat up. She paused all of her compiling programs and tasked her algorithms with crunching more numbers. The first chunk of data that scrolled up the screen told her the object was nowhere near the Virgo Cluster. Her program placed it a mere four light years away from Earth.

  Hope’s frown deepened. Surely it was an error in her coding—a glitch in her algorithm. She ran a quick test on the other visible objects in the image and received verifiable data that the program was working without error.

  The second piece of data that the distance program reported was from a celestial mass subroutine she had included in the calculations. Nearly every object she studied in the night sky had already been picked over by countless other astronomers, amateur and professional, yet she liked to verify her own data. Including an extra few hundred lines of code that calculated an object’s mass seemed only natural.

  Her mass subroutine reported that the solid unknown object was the size of Greenland.

  Hope slowly looked up at the night sky and pushed her glasses up the bridge of her nose.

  Her laptop beeped and her gaze slowly lowered to the screen.

  The third bit of data came not from her distance program, but from her trajectory algorithm—a piece of software she’d written that saw infrequent use owing to the fact that she usually studied stationary celestial objects.

  It told her the object was moving, and it was headed straight for Earth.

  1

  JEFF

  THREE DAYS LATER

  Jeff Dolan looked down at Earth from an altitude of 270 miles. He slowly raised one arm of his bulky spacesuit and slid up his sun visor to get an unobstructed view of his little home in the cosmos.

  Below, the green and brown mountains and valleys of South America slipped by, giving way to the brilliant blue waters of the South Atlantic.

  He and the partially-completed space station behind him orbited the planet at a little over 17,000 miles per hour, bringing him a sunrise every ninety minutes. The next wouldn’t be for another thirty minutes. Jeff glanced at his wristpad, checking his remaining oxygen levels. He’d already been outside for two hours, so he’d have to skip the next sunrise.

  “All done out here,” he said. “Heading to the main airlock.”

  “Copy that,” said Alexandra Dimiov from the station control room. Her calm voice filled his helmet and seemed to linger. In the background, soothing ambient music played over small, tinny speakers. “Thought you fell asleep out there.”

  “Almost,” Jeff admitted, smiling.

  He secured his floating tools, reeling them in on their safety cables and stuffing them into the oversized cargo pocket on the left leg of his suit. Next, he unclipped his own tether from a steel hoop on the station’s hull and clipped it to t
he safety line running down the length of the space station from the airlock.

  At its current state of construction, the station was a single row of large white boxes intersected by delicate folding solar panel wings. Stuck to one end of the station was a slice of curved metal a quarter-mile long from tip to tapered tip. It looked like an orange peel curling away from the station, which was tiny by comparison.

  “Everything looking good?” asked Alexandra as Jeff pulled himself along the safety line on the inside of the curved slice of metal, toward the airlock.

  “Swapped out the joint servo on arm four,” he replied. “That was our last spare. I’ll see if I can repair the damaged one before sending it back with the next resupply.”

  “Aren’t you going home in a week? You can just take it with you.”

  “I'll check the weight. You know, if the servos keep failing during simple tests, we’re going to have more than a few crates of useless equipment back home. We’ll need to find a new supplier.”

  “Kate would just love that, wouldn’t she?” joked Alexandra.

  Jeff chuckled and shook his head inside his helmet. The joint contract the United States government had signed with Diamond Aerospace over the construction of the space station was already over budget, and the station wasn’t even ten percent complete. Union negotiations at the company’s Mars mining facility had stalled, and hauling materials into orbit from Earth was too cost prohibitive to progress much further. The last thing Kate would want to hear about was added expenses and time delays brought on by simple machine failures.

  Jeff floated past a robotic arm folded over on itself like a giant metallic crab claw. He was traversing what would eventually be the inside of a large warehouse in space where the company he worked for, Diamond Aerospace, would build starships. The orange-peel shaped piece of metal was but one slice of many that would come together to form a solid, half-mile long ovoid shell. The robotic arms would line the interior hull of the ovular shipyard.

  If everything went according to plan, the launch vehicle under construction in Diamond Aerospace’s rocket facility in Cape Canaveral would be the last starship built on Earth, at least by that particular company. Jeff envisioned several ovoid shipyards in orbit, available for lease to the government or to private space companies.

  He paused and stared beyond the station, into the vastness of space. Only he and a handful of others knew what was out there—knew that humans were not alone in the universe.

  A star blinked out of existence in Jeff's periphery, and was shining brightly again half a second later. Humans were not alone in the universe, and the proof was right there, orbiting Earth just far enough away to not be visible to the human eye.

  The object that blotted out the star was a torus—an alien artifact built by a race that had gone extinct millennia ago due to a cataclysm on their homeworld. Five years past, Jeff witnessed the birth of one of those creatures, brought back from extinction by the machines they had left behind.

  Now one of those machines was orbiting Earth, waiting silently...but for what? So far the only impact it had on the human race was to cause a brief bout of mass hysteria when every world government confirmed it wasn't them who put the giant metal donut in space to begin with. For the last year, there was no escaping the opinions, speculations, and conspiracy theories surrounding the arrival of the torus. Every other day was predicted to be the end of life on Earth as we knew it.

  Yet the world kept spinning, and Jeff kept working.

  He continued to pull himself along the safety tether bolted to the hull of the station. Each movement was in slow motion, but he didn't begrudge the deliberate pace. It was a good way to unwind after several hours of work inside the bulky suit.

  The alien artifact certainly made him uneasy. He knew how fast it could travel. It would reach him in a matter of seconds if that was its intent, perhaps even faster. He looked up again, expecting to see another star temporarily blink out as the torus drifted past.

  Instead, the artifact was only a few hundred meters away, having moved silently closer. Its matte black exterior absorbed the light of the Sun behind it, creating the perfect silhouette of a donut one hundred meters across. For a brief moment, Jeff could see right through the middle of the torus. Then a black shimmer swept across the hole from the inner edge, covering the void with a sheet of endless black.

  Jeff's voice caught in his throat as he pulled himself faster along the safety tether attached to the space station. The torus drifted away, and it took Jeff a moment to realize that the station hadn’t stopped moving as it orbited Earth—the alien artifact remained in place.

  “You alright out there, Dolan?” asked Alexandra from inside the station. “Sounds like you're choking on a cheese puff.”

  Jeff tapped on his wristpad. “My comm line to the surface is down.”

  A moment later, Alexandra said, “Mine, too.”

  “We need to tell them we have company.”

  “What are you talking about? Sensors aren't picking up anything.”

  “You won't see it on the sensors. Look out the window in Hab-2.”

  Jeff reached the airlock and keyed in the commands for it to open. As he waited, he turned back to look at the torus. It hovered silently, the black sheet that covered its hole staring down at Earth like a malignant eye.

  “I don’t see anything,” said Alexandra.

  A blue light glowed from the center of the torus, reaching out like fingers toward the space station. It crawled over the metal, bathing it in a vibrant blue light. Jeff instinctively held up his arm to cover his face shield as the light swept over him.

  “Do you see it now?” he asked.

  Alexandra didn't respond.

  “Alex?” said Jeff.

  His comms crackled and went silent. The halogen lamps illuminating the outer airlock door flicked off just as the cooling system within Jeff’s suit cycled down to a complete stop. His breath was suddenly very loud in his helmet. He tapped his wristpad, but the screen was blank.

  “Alex?” he said again.

  Jeff mashed the open button for the outer airlock door, but nothing happened.

  A moment later, the flat hull of the station vibrated like a struck tuning fork. He placed his gloved hand against the metal and the vibration moved into his bones, blurring his vision. The robotic arms bolted to the outside of the hull shook violently, as if they would break free at any second.

  Then, suddenly, the vibration stopped.

  A comet of blue plasma the size of a skyscraper shot out from the center of the torus. It emerged from the hole as if appearing from nowhere.

  The comet punched through a white blanket of clouds over South Africa and slammed into the surface of Earth, sending out a shockwave that rippled across the land.

  The outer airlock door slid open to reveal Alexandra, fully suited, her eyes wide with fear. Jeff's comms crackled to life inside his helmet.

  “The station is on emergency backup power,” she told him. “My suit power just came back on.”

  “Did you see it?” Jeff whispered.

  Alexandra nodded shakily.

  Jeff turned slowly to look at the torus. As silent as a tombstone, it drifted away from Earth, disappearing into the black.

  2

  KATE

  Stacks of binders formed a small city on the floor of Kate Bishop’s office. She stood in the middle of the room, hands on her hips, surrounded by paper-filled mini-skyscrapers.

  Each binder was a project proposal containing a thousand pages of diagrams, schematics, and safety code.

  Kate rubbed her stinging eyes.

  She had been steadily moving her company, Diamond Aerospace, away from paper ever since she took over leadership from Noah Bell. It seemed to go without saying that a private space company on the forefront of cutting edge technology would be one-hundred percent digital. Yet the process was not as black-and-white as she had expected. Engineers preferred tangible documents to manipulate. They liked to
mark up table-sized blueprints and rip out sheets from their manuals when they were frustrated.

  She paid a king’s ransom for off-site data storage and processing, yet her office had apparently been deemed a perpetual resting place for every binder on the property.

  Her consolation prize was the fact that she was hardly ever in her office. When she wasn't out on the factory floor or flying for business, she was at her beachfront condo, trying not to think about work.

  Kate brushed a crumb of her morning danish off her white blouse, and flicked a couple more from the thighs of her gray slacks. Her breakfasts usually consisted of a pastry and a cup of rarely-finished coffee. At about two o’clock she would realize she was hungry, then, more often than not, get so busy that she didn't stop for another meal until dinner.

  Except when Jeff was in town. They always managed to carve out time for a proper lunch together.

  A binder atop the nearest stack caught her eye. It was a proposal for something called the Starliner Program. She flipped it open to a random page and scanned the list of construction materials required for this single massive spacecraft.

  Her eyebrows went up at the sheer volume of raw ore needed just for the hull. She would have to funnel every ounce of ore coming from the Mars mining facility to the Starliner Program for a decade just to build the shell of one ship.

  Yet, scanning the business proposal within the same binder, she was impressed by the projected earnings a single starliner could net the company after two years of operation.

  Cruise ships in space, she thought in disbelief. Then she shrugged. Why not?

  Her phone chimed from somewhere amongst the miniature city of binders. After the third chime, she found it on the shortest stack, under the paper plate that held most of the crumbs from her pastry.

  Her assistant, a young woman named Neesha Jordan, popped up on the screen. She was on the factory floor in the building next door, standing in front of a half-finished tug that was designated for the orbital shipyards. Her black-rimmed glasses reflected the bright rectangle of her own phone.