Last Contact

by Samuel Best

  “You can’t be serious,” said a man to Jeff’s right.

  “Deadly,” Brighton replied, meeting the man’s glare. “I am deadly serious, Wallace. That meteor shot out of a torus. The same kind of torus from which that creature emerged in the Gulf of Mexico five years ago. There is clearly a link.”

  Kate squeezed Jeff’s hand under the table. He looked at his lap, ashamed to look her in the eye.

  Her heart ached for him. After his return from the second mission to Titan, he had vowed to her that he would never again leave Earth’s orbit. Not just for her, but for the both of them. Now he was faced with a difficult choice: break his vow, or do everything he could to help the Colonel.

  “Commander Carol Brighton, along with Commander Riley…” said Brighton, pausing while he waited out the surprised murmuring from around the table.

  Jeff made eye contact with Kate and nodded slightly.

  “Brighton, Riley, and their team will prep a ship named Odyssey to intercept a comet that’s going to hit the Earth and cause an Extinction Level Event.”

  The murmurs exploded into shouting, with everyone trying to be heard at once.

  “Have you asked Riley about this?” said Jeff over the din. “What if he says no?”

  “He won’t,” Brighton replied.

  The Odyssey, thought Kate. She remembered that ship. It had been one of the first completed vessels under the new government contracts. Diamond Aerospace had little to do with the actual design, though it was built at their facility.

  Brighton held up his hands to quiet the room.

  “I’ll share what I know,” he said. “Three days ago, an amateur astronomer in Montana realized that the new star she thought she’d discovered wasn’t a star at all. It was a comet headed for Earth.”

  He took a breath. The room was dead silent.

  “My people tell me it’s roughly the size of Greenland, and it’s speeding up. At its current rate of acceleration, they predict impact in two months.”

  “Impact with Earth?” someone asked in disbelief.

  “That is correct. Now you see why it’s imperative we pursue every option to stop that from happening.”

  “What about the people?” Kate asked. “What will you tell them?”

  “Nothing,” said Brighton. “There’s no time. If we don’t figure out a way to stop that comet or alter its course, telling people now won’t make one iota of difference.”

  “It will give them time to say goodbye,” Kate said, her voice firm.

  That stopped his next thought before he could speak it. He leaned to one of his aides and whispered. The aide nodded and left the room.

  “Thank you, Ms. Bishop,” said the Colonel sincerely. He addressed the entire group once more, tapping a folder in front of him. “Commander Riley and the crew of the Odyssey will place a fission bomb in the path of the comet to break it apart or knock it off-course. Every government in the world is scrambling to figure out their own game plan. This is ours. We’ve partnered with more than thirty other countries to pool our resources and information, all with the singular goal of saving humanity.”

  Jeff pinched Kate’s leg to get her attention while the Colonel told an anecdote about his meeting with the President discussing the situation.

  He held out his two hands to her, balled into fists. She tapped the left one and he smiled. That hand was empty. Then he opened his right hand to reveal a shining chrome ring, slender and delicate.

  Jeff slid the ring onto her left middle finger. It fit perfectly.

  “And that’s all of it,” said Brighton, closing the folder in front of him. He leaned back in his chair, a wave of visible exhaustion washing over him. “I know you can’t buy me a lot of time,” he continued, looking at each of the attendees in turn. “Whatever you can do to keep your departments in the dark about my departure as long as possible would go a long way to making sure the right people are in control of the situation.”

  “The right people being you and Ms. Bishop?” asked the military man next to Brighton, his voice thick with skepticism.

  Colonel Brighton’s exhaustion evaporated. He turned toward the man beside him, barely-contained rage in his eyes.

  “The right people being anyone who won’t drag their feet or twist this toward their own personal gain for the last two months of human existence. So, in this case, yes, like me and Ms. Bishop.”

  The military man nodded in deference, conceding the point.

  Colonel Brighton stood, and everyone else followed suit.

  “Thank you for your time,” he said formally. “Ms. Bishop,” he added, looking directly at her. “Inform your team that I’ll have a car ready to take them to the airport in one hour.”

  “My team,” Kate said, caught off guard. “Right. Okay.”

  He left the conference room, his aide close behind. One by one the others followed after him, leaving Jeff and Kate alone.

  “I felt like I couldn’t say no,” Jeff told her. “If you think—”

  She hugged him tightly, stopping him before he could finish that thought.

  “Of course you have to go,” she whispered. “But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.”

  Kate sniffed and let go. After a quick swipe at her wet eyes, she held up her left hand, admiring the ring.

  “It’s chromium,” said Jeff. “From one of the Mars shipments. The rest of it went into the Luna. I thought that was meaningful.”

  “You thought right,” she told him.

  He held a hand to his ear and pretended he couldn’t hear her. “What was that? The part about me being right?”

  She hugged him again.

  “Don’t get used to hearing it,” she said quietly.

  Kate meant it to tease him, but she couldn’t force her voice to be playful. She couldn’t help but think about the comet, the crew racing to meet it—and of Jeff, alone in a ship as it hurtled toward Venus, heading once again away from her and closer to danger.

  6

  RILEY

  Riley sat inside the small conference room, hands folded on the glass table, seething at everyone who walked by without acknowledging him. He wasn't angry because he thought he deserved recognition. He was angry because he had been waiting for two hours without any information as to why he was there in the first place.

  After emerging from the torus in high Earth orbit, and after spending two days back on Earth, he had found himself standing in the grocery aisle, basket in hand, staring at twenty different kinds of peanut butter. He had wrongfully shouted at a young employee about why there were so many peanut butter choices, then apologized for his behavior and left empty-handed.

  And that pretty much summed up how he felt since his return. Riley couldn’t seem to make a decision about anything. The stack of takeout boxes in his hotel room was growing larger with each meal, and he still didn't have a plan about where he was going to live or what he was going to do for work.

  When his phone rang in his hotel room later that night following the peanut butter incident, it could have been his ex-wife asking to go on a date. He would have agreed to it on the spot with zero regrets. Those would have undoubtedly come later. As it happened, it was someone claiming to be from Colonel Brighton's office, asking if Riley wouldn't mind coming in for a debrief. Riley informed the gentleman on the phone that he had already been debriefed forward and backward after he popped out of the torus. But given the circumstances, he would be happy to get out of his self-described casket of a hotel room—even if it meant being scrutinized by more doctors and questioned yet again by government employees with less experience than Riley's little finger.

  “Hey!” he barked at a passing government employee.

  The young lady smiled and waved at him, but kept walking.

  “I’m still waiting!” Riley called after her.

  He sank back into his chair, exasperated.

  The government mook who picked him up at the hotel drove him to the base at Cape Canaveral in a tinted-out bl
ack sedan. Riley hadn't expected to be back there again so soon. He thought maybe Brighton would have moved his operation to D.C. after the second mission to Titan.

  A lot had happened after Riley stepped into the torus on Titan while the moon’s surface was crumbling around him. For he and Noah Bell, only a few days had passed since they started world-hopping. Yet for everyone back on Earth, five years had gone by.

  Riley took the news of his missing five years in stride. What else was he supposed to do? He had seen and heard crazier things on his two trips to Titan. He had gotten a big kick out of the government kid’s face when the kid told him about the time difference, and Riley’s response was simply, “So?”

  The people were still mostly the same, the technology was still mostly the same, and the same type of bureaucrats were still in charge. By Riley's estimation, he considered that a win. Good old stability. That's why he was sitting there in that conference room, steaming about being ignored for two hours—he wanted stability.

  “Sorry to keep you waiting,” said Colonel Brighton as he hurried into the room and quickly took a seat across the table. He wiped sweat from his brow and smoothed down the front of his uniform.

  “It’s only time, right?” said Riley.

  Brighton grunted. “I have to admit, I missed having your…unique…attitude on the team for the past five years. Too many stuffy bookworms crawling out of universities. Some of them are okay, but…”

  He shrugged.

  “Why am I here, Colonel?” Riley asked. “I told the shrinks everything I knew. If there's an inch of my body the doctors don't know by heart, I'd be shocked.”

  Brighton cleared his throat and paused while he framed his thoughts.

  “You know about the meteor that hit South Africa around the same time you returned.”

  “It's the only thing on the news. No one died, which is something.”

  “It struck near the border of Namibia. Mostly desert, thankfully. Jeff Dolan was EVA when it passed. Saw it make landfall.”

  “So he stayed busy. Is he working on the orbital shipyards?”

  “Diamond Aerospace is under contract with the government to build six of them, along with a new space station hub. Once this current crisis has passed, I thought about asking if you'd like to be a part of the project.”

  “I’ll check my schedule and get back to you.” Riley paused a moment. “Okay, I checked. I’m in.”

  “I’m sure Ms. Bishop would love to have you on the project. They’ll need someone to fly the ships after they build them.”

  “With all due respect, Colonel, what’s the real reason you asked me to come back?”

  Brighton tapped on the table while he drew a deep breath.

  “There’s another one,” he said.

  “Another one that hit Earth?”

  He shook his head. “Another one on the way. Bigger. Much, much bigger.”

  “Headed here?” Riley asked. “For Earth?”

  Brighton nodded.

  “When?”

  “All we have to go on is a visual image. It doesn’t show up on any other sensors, just like the tori. But we’ve been tracking it, and our best estimates say two months, at most.”

  “Two months,” Riley repeated.

  “I’m launching an intercept mission, and I want you to be part of it. If we don't do everything we can to stop that comet before it hits Earth, it will be the end of us.”

  “You called it a meteor earlier.”

  “It’s a comet when it’s in space,” said Brighton. “It’s a meteor once it hits Earth’s atmosphere.”

  “How can you stop it?” Riley asked.

  “With a very big fission bomb. There’s all kinds of science involved that I don't have the gray matter to comprehend. The bottom line is that the comet should be mostly energy or plasma, and if we can detonate the right kind of explosive close enough, it should break apart well before it hits our atmosphere. Theoretically.”

  Riley was silent for a long moment. “You want me to place the bomb.”

  “I want you to copilot the ship. My daughter is the commander.”

  “Carol is going?”

  “And so is Piper Lereaux.”

  Riley perked up at that. “Why? She’s a linguist.”

  “Same reason Jeff is going to Venus,” said Brighton, “and why I want to send you to the comet. If there’s any avenue of communication, I want it open.”

  “I doubt she can talk to space debris,” said Riley. “I doubt I can either, for that matter. I’ve always been better on the bomb side of things, Colonel. Jeff won’t be on the intercept mission?”

  Brighton shook his head. “He has a different objective. This is a multi-pronged approach to the same problem, Commander. You’re the brute force aspect of the plan.”

  Riley grinned. “Finally. Something worth coming back for.”

  7

  KATE

  The plane jolted, waking Kate from a deep sleep.

  “Just a little turbulence,” said the pilot over the intercom.

  The plane seemed to drop a few feet in the air before leveling out, eliciting gasps from the passengers.

  “We’re almost through it,” added the pilot.

  Kate slowly released her white-knuckle grip on the armrests of her chair, trying to relax after several minutes without turbulence. Soon the flight attendants walked the aisles, offering drinks and snacks.

  Beside her, Neesha gratefully accepted a cocktail from a young flight attendant and drank it in one quick gulp. The flight attendant looked at her with wide eyes as Neesha gave back the empty cup and gestured with her finger to keep them coming.

  “Don’t stop now,” she said. “Didn’t you hear the captain? There was turbulence.” As the flight attendant walked away, Neesha added, “Oh, God, I hope those are free.”

  “Tell the airline to bill you,” said Kate, laughing.

  “Uh oh. Hysterics setting in?”

  “Oh, no,” Kate answered sarcastically. “What is there to be hysterical about?”

  She sighed and attempted to get more comfortable in her seat, to no avail.

  The plane was a Boeing 757, chartered by Colonel Brighton to carry the first round of scientific and military personnel to the meteor impact site in South Africa. It was a mostly-empty flight with only forty people on board.

  Kate and Neesha rode with half-a-dozen hand-picked employees from her company. Combined, they possessed enough brainpower to put a dent in any problem they were presented with. Buttressed by the small army Brighton had assured her was on its way to the site, he seemed confident in establishing what he called a “net-positive result for the vast majority of the planet’s inhabitants”.

  “I can’t believe you agreed to come,” said Neesha after drinking another cocktail.

  “Why not?”

  “I mean, with all the stuff going on back at the office, and with the Mars union guy giving you the runaround, and with Jeff coming back early, it just seems like—”

  “Jeff didn’t stick around, either,” Kate reminded her.

  Neesha studied her boss’s face for a moment. “Are you mad about that?”

  Kate thought for a long moment. “Not at him. I can be mad about it and still understand it at the same time.”

  A big grin spread across Neesha’s face. “I love working for you. I really do.”

  “Do you remember when you first started at Diamond Aerospace four years ago?” asked Kate.

  “You mean how my parents kicked me out of the house for not becoming a doctor, and then you hired me, helped me through school, and I went back and showed them my doctorate and it didn’t change their opinion of me at all? Is that what you mean?”

  “I was thinking more about how everything seemed fresh again. The government contracts were rolling in and new projects were starting every other day.”

  “Oh,” said Neesha. “Right.”

  Kate gestured around her. “This feels a lot like that.”

  Nees
ha thought about it a moment. “Shame about the comet, though.”

  She gestured to the flight attendant for another drink.

  Kate unbuckled her seatbelt and excused herself. She waited out another small jolt of turbulence, then slowly made her way toward the front of the plane and took a seat next to Colonel Brighton, who was watching rain streak sideways on his window.

  “Mind if I join you?” she asked.

  “Be my guest.”

  “Colonel, have you ever given any thought to retirement?”

  He slowly turned to look at her.

  “Is that a joke?” he asked.

  She smiled. “No, it’s a serious question.”

  He sighed. “I think about it every day. In fact, I was supposed to be on a beach in Lauderdale this week. These things tend to be put on hold when the world is threatened.”

  Kate checked her watch: eight hours of flight time down, eight more to go.

  “Am I allowed to ask you about the alien?”

  He seemed to think about it for a moment. “You can certainly try.”

  “Where has it been for the last five years?”

  “Hugging Venus in low orbit.”

  “Just sitting there?”

  “Just sitting.”

  “And none of your buddies tried to blow it out of the sky.”

  He offered a sad smile. “Oh, there was plenty of talk. There was a brief moment three years ago when I thought it might actually happen.”

  “But you stopped it.”

  He nodded.

  “Do you wish you hadn’t?” Kate asked.

  Brighton answered carefully. “I don’t think destroying the alien would have prevented the meteor. Or the other comet.”

  “And you sent Jeff so he could talk to it.”

  “I sent him because we need to pursue every possible way to save our planet. One of the tori brought him back to life. Him and Riley. They have a better chance than anyone of exploiting a link with whatever’s out there.”

  “Exploiting,” Kate repeated.

  “Poor choice of words,” Brighton admitted. “Look, Kate. Venus Lab is safe. It’s secure. Jeff is going to see if there’s anything he can do to speed up their research. That’s all.”