Last Contact

by Samuel Best

  She tucked a strand of straight, jet-black hair behind her ear and opened her mouth to undoubtedly launch into one of her patented run-on sentences when she suddenly stopped and frowned at Kate.

  “You have food in your hair,” said Neesha.

  Kate swiped at the tips of her shoulder-length brown hair.

  “Other side. Just…it’s right…you got it.”

  “What’s up?” Kate asked.

  “Union shenanigans on Mars is what’s up. The rep won’t budge until he talks with you.”

  Kate shook her head. “We’ve talked a dozen times. I don’t know what he expects—”

  “In person,” said Neesha. “He wants to talk in person.”

  “He’s willing to come to Earth?”

  Neesha shook her head.

  Realization dawned on Kate, and she slowly nodded.

  “I see.”

  “My contact in the union at the mining facility thinks the rep is willing to sign a deal, but he wants corporate to extend the olive branch.”

  “Extend it halfway across the solar system in person,” Kate clarified.

  “It’s only the next planet out, Ms. Bishop,” Neesha teased. “Don’t be so dramatic.”

  Kate sighed wearily. “How’s it going on the floor?”

  Neesha turned her phone to show a wide panorama of the expansive build facility Diamond Aerospace leased from the government at the area known as the Rocketyards in Cape Canaveral. Four small ships were in various stages of construction, along with a larger vessel that was very near to completion.

  The founder of the company, Noah Bell, had impressed upon her the necessity of innovation for the sake of innovation, even if there were no immediate tangible benefits for executives’ bank accounts. Of course, that was contingent upon money coming in the door elsewhere—hence the government contracts.

  Most of the projects on the company’s current slate were greenlit under those contracts. Yet the largest ship on the factory floor was commissioned by Kate herself, completely independent of any outside contract—one of those “dozen-for-them, one-for-her” kind of deals.

  That ship—the Luna—was to be the first of its kind: a modular spacecraft that could be customized for a dozen different purposes. From cargo hauler to research vessel; crew transport to low-orbit permanent space station. Using the standard Luna body, modules of varying shapes and sizes could dock with the craft in space.

  Kate’s design team had done their best to make the Luna appear as anything other than a large cube, but, to be fair, there wasn't a whole lot that could be done short of stripping out vital equipment.

  One side of the cube was dedicated to the single-core hybrid antimatter propulsion drive, while the remaining five sides were covered with large airlock hatches. It didn’t leave a whole lot of room for aesthetics.

  The hundred or so Diamond Aerospace employees on the factory floor crawled over the skeletons of the ships, bolting on bars of carbon alloy in place of bones, adding radiation shielding in place of skin.

  “Everything looks good down here,” Neesha confirmed, pointing the phone’s camera back on herself. “You have that meeting with the Deep Black rep in an hour, then you’re scheduled to skip your lunch, as usual, followed by another meeting with the nice lady from the Treasury Department, after which—”

  Kate stopped listening when she noticed someone standing at the door to her office. He was a gruff-looking, uniformed military man in his early sixties, with a shock-white buzz-cut and a deep-set frown.

  “Neesha, I have to call you back,” Kate said, clipping the call. She smiled warmly at the man by her door. “Colonel Brighton. It’s good to see you again.”

  He almost took a step into the office but stopped, casting a quick glance around at the stacks of binders.

  “Under normal circumstances, I would agree,” he replied.

  Kate’s smiles vanished. “Did something happen to Jeff?”

  “No,” he quickly answered. “Nothing bad. You haven’t seen the news?”

  Kate laughed without humor. “If only I had the time.”

  “A meteor just hit South Africa.”

  “A meteor,” she repeated slowly. “I thought the military had a defense system in place for that.”

  “This one didn’t come from deep space,” said Brighton. “It popped out of a torus in Earth’s orbit, covered in glowing blue plasma.”

  Kate swallowed hard as she tried to process the fact that a torus had been so close to Earth.

  “What do you need from me, Colonel?”

  “Resources. My hands are tied by six hundred miles of bureaucratic red tape. You could have a team on the ground in South Africa in less than a day, with all the proper permits and liaison credentials.”

  “Surely you have people already there, at the site.”

  “I do. But they’re not you.”

  “I’m not a scientist.”

  Brighton straightened his back. “Ms. Bishop, after all we’ve been through, I can confidently say you are uniquely qualified to be at ground zero for a situation like this. Dolan is en route back to Canaveral.”

  “Jeff’s coming home early?” she asked.

  He nodded. “There will be a private conference where all the details will be laid out. After that, we’ll get you and a team of your choosing on the first private jet to South Africa.” He offered her his version of a smile, which was a slight curling upward at the edges of his lips. “That is, unless you’d rather go to Mars to argue semantics with the union.”

  “Oh, I imagine that problem will still be there when I get back,” she said.

  Brighton winked at her. “You never know. I heard a rumor they might be receiving a generous subsidy from Washington…pending an increase in ore shipments, naturally.”

  Kate smiled, genuinely relieved.

  “Well, Colonel,” she said. “What’s the weather in South Africa like this time of year?”

  3

  RILEY

  Tag Riley—commander of humanity’s first mission to Titan—tumbled out of nothingness, fell two meters, and hit the ground. His head cracked against the inside of his helmet, shooting starbursts across his vision.

  Breathing hard from the effort, he awkwardly shifted the bulk of his bright orange Constellation-class spacesuit as he rolled over on a patch of damp, spongy, dark green moss.

  His view was of a bright blue sky streaked by wispy white clouds. Towering trees rose around him, their naked, ash-colored trunks terminating abruptly in three broad branches without leaves.

  Nearby was a silver-gray boulder the size of a small car. Next to that, hovering two meters above the ground, was the torus through which he had arrived on this planet.

  The hole in its center was three meters across, and the ring of pitch-black material that formed its perimeter was a half-meter in diameter.

  Riley looked around. He was alone.

  “Noah!” he shouted.

  The nearby silver-gray boulder gleamed from the light of the planet’s sun. If Riley had landed just a few feet closer to it, he would have cracked open his face shield. With all he’d been through over the past few days, wouldn’t that just be the way to end it? Choking for air on an alien planet.

  With a loud groan, he rolled over onto his stomach and pushed himself up to his feet. Mud covered the front of his spacesuit. He smeared some of it across his face shield with a dirty glove, making it only marginally more clear.

  He patted the side of his utility belt. Two more flimsy emergency oxygen packs remaining—roughly eight hours of breathable air.

  Riley let out a howl of pain as he straightened his back to take in his surroundings.

  He was in a sparse forest of those odd, naked trees. Even though they were of slightly different height, they all boasted the same configuration of three broad branches splayed out at their flat tops. The branches bent sharply at ninety degrees halfway to their tips, making the trees look like arms with three-clawed hands grasping for the sky.<
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  In the distance, the silhouette of a jagged mountain range traced an EKG line across the horizon.

  Riley jumped in place on the spongy ground and discovered that the gravity was very similar to Earth’s own.

  He glanced at his wristpad and found that it was caked with dirt. He wiped some away but the screen was blank.

  “Bell?” Riley said loudly as he turned to face the hovering torus, his voice loud in his helmet. “Noah!”

  Riley let out a weary sigh and leaned back against the boulder.

  This was the third planet he’d visited since parting ways with Jeff Dolan inside the hall of the torus. He studied the artifact before him now—much smaller than the others he’d seen. Yet when he went inside its ring—when he was pulled in through the shadowy door on its black exterior—he discovered that the interior was a shared space between all tori. The inside hallway of the artifact before him now looked barely big enough to crawl through, yet, once inside, it would prove to be three or four meters in diameter.

  Phosphorescent light glowed under his boots whenever he walked inside that circular hallway. Brilliant aurorae followed his gloved fingertips when he touched the walls.

  And there were many doors—doors that led to new worlds humanity did not even know existed.

  Tag Riley and Noah Bell had visited two of those worlds together.

  The first was a dead planet, seemingly barren of all life. There was no water, no mountains, no structure of any kind—simply a vast landscape of flat ground the color of straw. The sky was a lighter shade of pale yellow, and two suns shone feebly through the gauzy veil, casting only enough light to blanket the world in a melancholy twilight.

  Wind tore across the surface, threatening to send Riley and Bell tumbling forever over the unbroken continent if they didn’t hold on to each other for support.

  The torus they had fallen through was one of countless others hovering over the ground, spread out as far as the eye could see.

  Despite there being no apparent resources to harvest, the tori drew the yellow dust of the planet into the black voids that stretched to fill the inner edges of their rings. Long, narrow streams of swirling dust rose from the ground like devils and tilted into the mouths of the tori.

  “Remarkable,” Noah said weakly.

  Standing next to Riley, he stared at the image with unblinking eyes—eyes brimming with tears and filled with wonder.

  “We did it, Tag.”

  Riley looked through the other man’s mask. Noah wasn’t wearing a protective spacesuit. When they had met inside the torus a few days ago, Noah had just piloted a submarine inside. He was wearing a heavily modified dive suit, with extra layers of protection and increased oxygen capacity—but that paled in comparison to the radiation shielding provided by a Constellation-class spacesuit.

  Now Noah’s face was sunken at his cheeks. Deep purple bags hung under his bloodshot eyes. Riley was sure that if he let go of Noah, he would collapse onto the yellow planet and never get up.

  “Let’s keep moving,” said Riley through his helmet intercom. “We still have more to see.”

  Holding on to each other, they shuffled against the wind, back to the torus.

  “You agreed to come with me,” said Noah as they struggled to walk. “Even though you knew it was a one-way trip. Why?”

  “Who said it was one-way?”

  Noah smiled behind his wide diver’s mask. “What’s next?”

  Riley positioned them both beneath the outer ring of the nearest torus and waited for the shadowy door to slide across the surface of the exterior. The black material soaked in the light around it, making the torus appear to be sheathed in negative light.

  “Here it comes,” said Riley as the door glided into view.

  The vibration started slowly, rattling his entire body. As the door approached, the vibration grew so violent that his vision was merely a blur, with a single black streak through the middle representing the torus.

  A few moments later, he and Noah were coughing and sputtering on the floor of the torus, having been sucked inside through some mechanism they still couldn’t understand.

  They were only on the surface of the next planet for less than twenty seconds.

  As soon as they hit the ground after spilling out the side of the torus, Noah began to choke. Without a spacesuit like Riley’s, his lungs couldn’t handle the vast pressure difference on this strange new world.

  The glimpse Riley caught of his surroundings before he carried Noah back to the door of the torus was of blue—just blue, as if they were in the atmosphere of Neptune. He couldn’t differentiate between the ground beneath him and the sky above. It was all the same vibrant blue, offering less than a meter of visibility in any direction.

  They lay on the floor of the inner torus hallway for a long time after that while Noah caught his breath.

  From private space entrepreneur to explorer of alien worlds, thought Riley as he waited for Noah to sit up. Quite the résumé.

  “Let’s hope the third one is a little more hospitable,” Noah said at last.

  And indeed it was.

  Riley thought the last planet upon which the torus had dumped him could be a good stand-in for Earth—if it weren’t for the fact that he was the only person on it.

  After five minutes of solitude, Riley marched back to stand beneath the torus. He waited for the door to slide across the artifact’s void-black surface so he could get back in and look for Noah.

  As he was preparing for the transition, Noah blinked into existence at the edge of the torus and fell to the ground with a wet thud. Riley helped him out of the mud and did what he could to brush some of it off his dive suit.

  “There you are,” said Riley. “I was starting to think it sent you somewhere else.”

  Noah said something from behind his mask but Riley couldn’t hear it over the intercom. He tapped the side of his helmet and made a shrugging gesture. Comms were out.

  Noah put his hands on his hips and looked around with a huge smile, then promptly undid the slide lock under his chin and popped off his helmet.

  Riley screamed at him to put it back on but Noah took a deep breath, coughed once, then laughed.

  “You idiot,” Riley scolded his friend, knowing he couldn’t be heard.

  A moment later, he took off his own helmet and hesitantly sniffed the air.

  “Smells like wet soil,” he said. “And cut grass.”

  Noah knelt down and, after pulling off his gloves, gently pressed his open palm against the spongy ground. Then he walked to the silver-gray boulder and ran his fingers over its surface.

  “This is the place,” he said, still smiling.

  “Place?” Riley asked, confused. “What place?”

  “The place where…where I…”

  Noah’s eyes rolled up into his head and he crumpled to the ground.

  “Bell!” Riley shouted as he ran to his side.

  Riley supported Noah’s head and looked around helplessly.

  Noah’s eyelids fluttered open and his gaze solidified.

  “Help me over to the tree,” he whispered.

  “Okay,” said Riley.

  He supported Noah’s weight as they stumbled to the nearest tree. Riley helped him ease down to sit with his back against the smooth, ash-colored trunk. Somehow Noah was looking worse by the minute. His face was now a pale green color, and thin lines of blood trickled from his ears.

  “Should have…added more radiation shielding to my dive suit,” Noah said weakly.

  “You don’t usually need that sort of thing underwater,” Riley replied.

  Noah tried to chuckle, but coughed instead.

  “At least this is on my own terms.” He tapped the side of his head, and Riley knew he was referencing the terminal brain tumor with which he’d been diagnosed.

  Riley nodded. “Everyone should be so lucky.”

  Noah leaned forward suddenly and grabbed Riley’s hand with both of his. “We are lucky, Tag.
So very lucky.” He fell back against the tree and looked up the length of the trunk above him, toward the sky. “No one else has seen this. We’ve traveled to…other worlds…”

  Riley lowered his head as Noah’s last breath left his body.

  The grave wasn’t hard to dig. The soil was soft, and Riley used his hands for most of it. He used a slab of silver-gray rock as a shovel to finish the last half-meter before easing Noah’s thin body into the hole.

  Next he got to work on the headstone. Using another chunk of rock as a hammer, and one as a chisel, Riley etched the initials NB into the slab he had used as a shovel. Then, to the best of his ability, he chiseled a crude rendition of Earth’s solar system into the headstone, adding a little arrow pointing toward the third planet from the Sun.

  Noah Bell was here, thought Riley as he sank the stone deep into the soft soil. And this is where he came from.

  Riley set Noah’s dive helmet next to the headstone, then he stood up straight and cleared his throat.

  “We had some differences,” he said. “I can be…bullish, I know. You were stubborn, and driven, and…I…never would have experienced any of these marvelous things if it weren’t for you. You gave me a life after I thought I had none.” He stood at attention and saluted. “Thank you.”

  Riley turned and walked away, his jaw set, his eyes hard-focused ahead.

  Noah Bell passed away staring up at the sky of an alien planet, which is exactly the way he wanted to go.

  Yes, thought Riley as he made his way back to the torus. We should all be so lucky.

  4

  JEFF

  Flames engulfed the bell-shaped Cygnus capsule as it plunged into Earth’s atmosphere.

  The world turned from black to orange through the narrow triangular window of the capsule. Fire licked across the high-temperature quartz glass as if the reentry vehicle were in a stoked furnace.