by Samuel Best
A torus hovered directly above the meteor impact site, its obsidian ring slowly spinning. It was the same diameter as the thirty-meter hole in the ground. Kate had seen a much bigger alien artifact in the Gulf of Mexico. The torus from which the alien creature had emerged was one hundred meters in diameter. It would have dwarfed the torus looming over the ruined tent city.
Yet Kate felt the same dread she experienced five years ago. It crawled over her skin as a black film spread across the opening of the torus, filling the hole like ink spilled into water.
The torus rotated in place until it was parallel to the ground.
Kate looked down at her dirty shoes. Tiny pebbles danced atop the dirt. A fast vibration coursed through the ground, shaking her feet.
She ran forward and snatched the detonator from Colonel Brighton’s outstretched hand.
“NO!” Kate screamed at the torus. “No no no no NO!”
She mashed the buttons on the sides of the detonator, then checked the screen. A green rectangle flashed the word SUCCESS over and over again, yet there was no explosion.
Kate howled in rage and threw the detonator at the torus in the distance. She collapsed to her knees as the cube-shaped bomb slowly rose from the deep pit and disappeared into the black void covering the hole of the torus.
Another black streak appeared from ground to sky, and the image of the torus blurred. The bottom edge of the pillar shot up and vanished far above.
The torus was gone.
The rest of Kate’s energy flooded out of her. She sat on the dusty ground, breathing hard, too tired to cry.
Colonel Brighton knelt next to her. He rested his hand on her shoulder.
“We have to try something else,” she said hoarsely.
He shook his head. “There is nothing else. All we can do now is prepare.”
26
JEFF
Erikson’s aggravated voice came on the line first. “But we’ve barely started our calculations—”
“It’s here,” Jeff interrupted. “Leave the station! Go!”
He unstrapped his safety harness and pulled himself toward the airlock. The door swung open and he floated into Venus Lab. Sandra floated within the spherical room, struggling to pull on her compression suit.
“Just bring it!” Jeff shouted.
He peeled the other two suits off the wall and grabbed the helmets. Without looking behind him, he pushed them toward the open door leading to the Seeker.
“Where are the other two?”
“I’ll get them,” Sandra said.
Jeff pushed past her, into the station. “You stay in the ship. Get ready to detach.” He saw Erikson, still at his workstation. “What’s the hold-up?!”
“The data!” said Erikson. “We haven’t been able to send it back to Earth!”
The lights in the corridor blinked off and on. A slow vibration rattled the equipment bolted to the walls.
Jeff grabbed a handhold and pulled himself forward. He grabbed Erikson by the arms and kicked off the wall, flying back toward the airlock.
“We’ll lose it all!” shouted Erikson in protest.
Hideo was still in his supply room at the end of the corridor, hurriedly trying to detach his laptop from its workstation.
“Time to leave, Hideo!” Jeff yelled at him.
Hideo nodded and yanked on the laptop. It ripped free, sending shiny bolts spinning slowly across the room.
Erikson had seemingly resigned himself to losing the data. He allowed Jeff to pull him through the open airlock and into the Seeker.
Sandra had strapped herself into the command chair. Her hands flew over the control panel.
A strong blue light bloomed outside the cockpit window.
“How’re we looking?” Jeff asked, breathless.
“It’s gonna be close,” Sandra replied.
Jeff went back to the airlock. Hideo appeared on the other side, laptop in hand. Just as he was about to enter the airlock, he stopped.
“Wait!” he said.
He went back into the station.
“Hideo!” Jeff yelled.
The airlock door swung shut automatically, sealing Hideo inside Venus Lab.
“Sandra!”
“It wasn’t me! It was the system!”
The ship lurched as it decoupled from the space station.
“Go back!” Jeff shouted.
“I can’t! I’m locked out of the controls!”
“Oh, no,” Erikson groaned.
Jeff kicked off the wall and smashed into a storage crate. He quickly pulled out his spacesuit.
“Niels, help me.”
“It’s too late.”
“Help me!”
Erikson blinked and seemed to wake up. With shaking hands, he helped Jeff get into his spacesuit yet again.
“Sandra, he can open the airlock from inside, right?”
“As long as he has power.”
Jeff pulled on his gloves and glanced out the cockpit window. The blue light steadily grew brighter.
“Spin the ship around after I’m out,” Jeff told her. “Set the engine for a stage two burn. Keep your finger on the trigger. If something happens to us, get out.”
She swallowed hard, then nodded.
Erikson handed Jeff his helmet.
“Thank you, Niels.”
“Please save him,” said Erikson.
Jeff pulled on his helmet and slid the neck lock into place. He waited inside the Seeker’s small airlock until it depressurized, then keyed in the command to open the door.
Blue light spilled into the airlock as the door rose, painting Jeff’s boots, legs, then his torso. He lowered his sun visor as he drifted out of the airlock.
The space station was fifty meters away. Venus appeared blue behind it. Jeff let out a steady stream of nitrogen from his pack and coasted away from the Seeker.
“Hideo, if you can hear me, I’m coming to get you. Put your suit on.”
Hideo grunted over the intercom. “Working on it. I’m sorry, Jeff.”
A small blue comet shot past the station, and the lights inside flickered.
Jeff was twenty meters away.
“Get ready to open the airlock,” said Jeff.
“I’m ready. As soon as you—”
A comet shot past Jeff and ripped through one end of the space station. Blue plasma smacked the hull like a paintball around the ragged hole. Shining metal debris tumbled away into space.
“Hideo!”
The lights in the station went dark. Venus Lab went into a slow spin.
“Jeffrey…” Sandra said from the Seeker, her voice filled with fear.
Jeff turned far enough to look back out of the corner of his eye.
A new planet had appeared behind the Seeker—a planet of pure blue energy.
The comet.
“Hideo?”
No response.
Jeff drifted closer to the spinning station. He only saw one way to get inside—through the hole the meteorite had just ripped in the hull.
And he only saw one way to get to it.
As he drifted closer, he readied the hook of his safety tether, unspooling a length of cable and holding the hook out in front of him.
The damaged portion of the station swung in front of him as he approached. He pushed his control stick and shot forward. The undamaged end of Venus Lab crashed into him on its spin like a bat hitting a baseball.
Jeff’s sun visor slammed against the hull, cracking it down the middle.
The station’s spin pulled him along the hull, toward the end. He felt like a lizard trying to hold on to the windshield of a speeding car. The hook of his safety tether scraped over the hull.
Jeff thrashed wildly, trying to grab onto something to stop his inexorable slide.
Light from the comet pierced through his cracked sun visor, and he howled in pain and frustration.
Jeff’s legs drifted past the edge of the station.
The hook caught.
And
held.
He was on the end of the station opposite the damage, but at least he had a lifeline. Hand over hand, he climbed across the hull, his safety tether extending behind him. The spin of the station gave him a view of Venus, then the comet—a constantly-changing vista of different shades of blue.
Jeff tried his best to avoid the glowing blue goop on the hull. The goop had spread out into a root-like network of tendrils that now covered nearly half the station. It seemed to pulse with a life of its own.
He reached the edge of the jagged hole and pulled himself inside Venus Lab.
“Hideo?”
The corridor was dark except for a patch of blue light spilling in from the small observation window. At the edge of the light, Hideo floated. Jeff drifted over to him and spun him around until they were face-to-face.
“Did you find him?” Erikson asked.
Jeff tapped a command on his wristpad and light on his helmet flicked on. Hideo was unconscious inside his suit…or worse. Jeff tapped on Hideo’s wristpad, but it had shorted out.
“His system’s down!” said Jeff. “He needs air. Coming back now.”
He kicked off the wall and floated back to the hole, bringing Hideo with him.
“Jeff, I have to move the ship,” said Sandra.
“I know! We’re almost there.”
“I have to move it now.”
“One more minute.”
“We don’t have a minute!”
Jeff slammed against the inner wall of the station. With fumbling, gloved hands, he tied a knot in his safety line. Then he snapped Hideo’s safety hook to the loop. Jeff drifted up through the hole and pulled Hideo up after him by his tether.
“There must be thousands of them,” said Erikson.
Jeff looked up. The space around Venus was filled with countless blue meteorites. Debris from the larger comet had become a meteor shower that now rained down on Venus. Blue streaks of plasma punctured the cloudy atmosphere.
“We’re coming back now,” said Jeff.
He pulled Hideo close and prepared to kick off the hull of Venus Lab.
A meteorite hit the station next to him, breaking it in half and launching him sideways. Hideo slipped from his grasp as they tumbled away from each other, hurtling through space.
Jeff’s safety line attached to the hull snapped taut, jerking him to a dead stop. He swung away from the station in a wide arc, like a pendulum.
Hideo drifted away quickly. His tether reached the end of its line and snapped fifty meters from Jeff. The jerking movement from the snapping tether slowed his drift, but he was still moving toward the incoming comet…and also the Seeker.
Jeff was still tethered to the spinning space station.
“I…” said Sandra over the intercom. “Jeff, I…”
“Grab Hideo,” he said. “Then get out.”
“But what about—”
“No discussion! You’re going to lose power any second if you stay.”
Another meteorite struck the half of Venus Lab to which Jeff was attached. It pushed the station farther away from the Seeker, carrying Jeff with it. He pawed at the tether controls near his waist, then twisted a dial and punched a button. The tether popped free.
Jeff maneuvered away from Venus Lab, short streams of nitrogen spurting from his pack. He managed to stabilize his tumble enough to face the Seeker, two hundred meters away. Hideo disappeared into the airlock.
Then the ship turned toward Jeff.
He thumbed his control stick in reverse and moved back, farther away from the ship.
“What are you doing?” Sandra asked.
“I told you to leave.”
“No!”
“I have six hours of air left in this suit,” said Jeff. “After the comet passes, you can come back and get me.”
“It’s not going to ‘pass you’, Mr. Dolan,” said Erikson. “It’s going to atomize you.”
“Sandra,” Jeff said, “if I don’t see you turn that ship around right now, I will program my suit to drop me into the atmosphere. We don’t have time for this!”
After a long moment, the nose of the ship swung away from him. Small orbital thrusters on the hull fired, pushing the ship out of the path of the comet. Light bloomed from the engine wash shield at the back of the craft as Sandra initiated a stage two burn.
Soon, the Seeker was no more than a speck in the distance.
Atta girl, Jeff thought.
A dozen meteorites passed through the area in space the Seeker had just occupied. The ship would have been ripped to shreds.
Jeff spun in place, then maneuvered parallel to the planet below, drifting away from the path of the incoming comet.
Deep down, he doubted if the small distance he could put between himself and its path would make any difference.
Not much else to do out here, he thought.
The crack in his sun visor glowed with the intensity of a cutting torch. His face tingled with uncomfortable warmth. Jeff had the terrifying thought of being cooked alive within his suit.
He spun around until he was traveling backward, spurting nitrogen now from the waist of his suit.
“Jeff,” said Erikson. “You remember what happened last time your suit lost power. You barely survived.”
“I remember.”
Sandra’s voice came on the line. “We won’t be able to get you in time.”
“Well, let’s hope I don’t lose power. Are you three okay?”
“Hideo is stable. I believe we’re a safe distance away, though the lights keep flick—”
The line went dead.
Jeff glanced at his wristpad. His suit still had power. He slowed his drift until he was stationary.
A good a spot as any, he thought.
The comet rapidly grew in apparent size as it approached Venus. Its electric blue trail extended for thousands of miles into the distance. A million meteorites preceded its arrival, peppering the clouds of Venus like a handful of tiny pebbles thrown into a lake.
The HUD in Jeff’s helmet flickered and went blank. He glanced at his wristpad. His system was down.
A vibration grew in his bones. He held his gloved hands in front of him. They were shaking so rapidly their edges were a blur.
The clouds over Venus parted as the comet breached the atmosphere, revealing a surface crawling with activity. There was no time to register any of it. The comet hit the surface, and the planet shook.
The cloud layer continued to peel back as a blue dome of plasma swelled up from the impact site, rapidly growing until it would have been large enough to cover the African continent on Earth.
Then it burst like a bubble, sending out a blue shockwave that demolished a good part of the working machinery on the surface.
Jeff watched as the cloud layer slowly crept back over the planet after its retreat, concealing the activity below.
And then it was over.
Jeff squeezed his hands into loose fists as the first sensation of cold crept in.
An object appeared in the distance, growing larger each second.
The alien.
Jeff was still orbiting the planet, but the creature was maintaining the same position as when Jeff first arrived at Venus Lab.
If it’s directly in my path, I’ll splat into it like a bug, Jeff thought morbidly.
He passed several hundred meters above it.
Jeff reached for it with his thoughts, but soon the creature was out of sight—waiting in orbit around Venus for its new home to become habitable.
He strained his neck to look away from the planet. The Seeker was nowhere to be found.
It became harder and harder to breathe. Time slowed. Jeff’s eyelids drooped lower, and lower. The last thing he saw before his vision darkened was a blurry vision of Venus, its clouds passing beneath him, drifting toward change.
27
KATE
In the small room, Kate gently tugged on the fresh bandage wrapped around Santi’s head, nudging it down to fully cov
er the cut on his temple. The cut on her own arm wasn’t deep enough for stitches, so the nurse had tossed her some gauze and a role of medical tape as she rushed out the door to help another patient.
The nurses at the Namibian Defense Force naval base were competent but overworked, pushing through their exhaustion, operating mostly on a triage system that prioritized the many gravely wounded scientists and military personnel that were brought in from the comet impact site.
With a quick phone call, Colonel Brighton had arranged a helicopter for himself, Kate, Santi, and Neesha. It carried them 1000 kilometers north of the impact site, to the west coast of Namibia. The naval base overlooked the Atlantic Ocean—a view which Kate would otherwise have considered beautiful if it weren’t for the steady rain of meteors plunging into the choppy surface.
Riley and the crew of the Odyssey had been somewhat successful, she had learned. While they managed to break apart the large comet that was on a collision course with Earth, they had shattered it into countless smaller projectiles.
Mercury was not so lucky. The comet intended for the closest planet to the Sun suffered the full brunt of an impact, leaving behind a crater the size of Australia and a haze of blue atmosphere that seemed to thicken by the minute.
Kate rubbed the tip of her thumb against the chromium ring Jeff had given her. There had been no word yet from Venus Lab, or from the Odyssey, regarding anything that happened after she sent her last message.
Santi slept peacefully despite his broken wrist, in no small part due to the pain medication the nurses had given him. Kate sighed and patted his uninjured arm. She stood and stretched with a groan. The adrenaline that had kept her moving for the past ten hours had all but fled her system, leaving behind aching muscles and a desire to sleep for several days without interruption.
A painting on the bare concrete wall of the small room depicted a fisherman on the coast, hauling in a net overflowing with his catch.
There were no windows in this section of the base. Everyone had been evacuated to the reinforced underground bunker two kilometers inland. It was connected to the coastal base by three long, descending tunnels wide enough for supply trucks.
