Explorations: First Contact Read online

  “The list,” said Marcus, his eyes connecting with Susan’s as they both reveled in the thought of it.

  “The list,” Marcus said again, “of other worlds.”

  But Susan was already thinking of it, curiosity suddenly blossoming inside her explorer’s heart, and as it did so, the entity was feeding her curiosity, filling her mind with what images it still had as she fell backward into it, her eyes going blank, then opening onto glory.

  The fear was not gone; the star remained, a grim example of what threats might be out there, but it was only one among billions of stars now, flying by her, as she was freed from the limitations of her evolution, communing fully with the machine once more. And just as the ship’s dying mind had been able to fill her with dread, it now began to fill her with joy, as it started to show her the way.

  Déjà Vu

  By Peter Cawdron

  Chapter 01: Orbit

  My gloved hand slides effortlessly across the hull of the Intrepid as she sits in LEO—a low Earth orbit. Ordinarily, the sight of an entire planet drifting by so calm and serene would be hypnotic, but this particular spacewalk just hit eleven hours. Swirling white clouds, deep blue seas, jagged coastlines, and rugged mountains slide effortlessly beneath me, but I’m stressing.

  “Coming up on the terminator,” a voice says over my headset, reminding me that a day in orbit is barely an hour long. It takes us just on two hours to complete each orbit, and night falls fast—within seconds. My glare visor is only partially down, lessening the brilliance of the sun reflecting off the azure waters on Earth. As I’m in the shadow of the craft, I raise the visor and pause, waiting for the abrupt change. Dawn is more of a challenge than dusk, as the sun appears from nowhere and can be blinding. At eleven hours, this is “day five” coming to a close.

  “In four, three, two.”

  Darkness collapses around me. The spotlights on my helmet come on automatically and I continue on, working my way along the outside of the Intrepid.

  Working in a weightless environment is exhausting. Weightless doesn’t equate to effortless. The pressure within my suit makes it stiff—unyielding. Even simple tasks, like squeezing a handhold, are difficult after eleven hours. My gloves resist each motion of my hand and fingers, constantly flexing back to a neutral, open position. Legs are useless—biggest muscle group in the human body, and they’re entirely redundant in space.

  My shoulders ache from pulling myself along, fighting against the thick material in my suit. Funny thing is, the boys have it worse on long-duration space walks. Bigger muscles, yes, but most of them aren’t in use, and they have big bones. Lots of mass to drag around. Us petite girls might be physically weaker, but we have a better strength-to-mass ratio.

  “What’s the status on the cooling pumps?” Commander Jansen asks over the radio. I’m listening on the open channel as she talks to Specialist Jonathan MacArthur at the rear of the Intrepid.

  “Still getting patchy readings.”

  The Intrepid uses a fusion ion drive for interplanetary travel, and an experimental displacement drive for interstellar journeys. Powerful electromagnets within the engine bay house a sustained fusion core. Feed the dragon hydrogen and it spits out helium at crazy speeds of up to 50,000 km/s. Even so, the mass of the Intrepid is such that our acceleration is lazy, but given time we can reach speeds in excess of three hundred thousand kilometers an hour, more than fifty miles a second. We could go faster, but we need to spend an equal amount of time slowing down when heading to a planet, so it’s a trade-off of fuel for time in transit. The new displacement drive, though, is a game changer, potentially opening up the stars to humanity—if it works as well as it has in the test runs.

  My scanner detects an inconsistency in output readings from a nearby component.

  “I’ve got two faulty sensors on the emergency exhaust manifold.”

  With thick, clumsy, gloved fingers, I punch the details into my wrist pad computer.

  “If she was a car, she’d be recalled,” MacArthur says, sensing the frustration we all feel. We’re two days out from lighting the candle and leaving Earth’s orbit. It’ll take a year before we’re beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Only then can we engage the displacement drive to jump beyond light speed. There’s so much energy involved in the maneuver, the boffins at FCF are worried the drive may malfunction and shower Earth with cosmic rays, so distance is prudent. I guess it’s not a good look to go off searching for life elsewhere while sterilizing your own planet. Doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in punching that big red button. On the bright side, if we go nova, we won’t know it. Our bodies will be vaporized in a nanosecond. For the briefest of moments, we’ll outshine every other star visible in the night sky.

  Making contact with intelligent alien life forms is worth the risk, but it would be nice if we started with a clean build. The Intrepid was constructed on Earth but assembled in space. Eat your heart out, IKEA. Our starship is far too big and clumsy to have been launched as a rocket, so it was built as a kit set in orbit. Think LEGO, but with lots of wiring. The problem is, the chassis was developed in France, the engines in Tennessee, the living quarters in Japan, and so on.

  I mumble under my breath, forgetting I’m set to transmit. “We are not ready.”

  “Stow it, Jess.”

  Jansen’s not going to delay the departure. Too much at stake politically. Who gives a crap? Honestly. Time is meaningless when it comes to the stars. They’ve told us the displacement drive will negate relativity. It’s a case of known physics plus salvaged alien technology equals magic, I guess. Personally, I don’t believe them. I think it’s a ruse. I’ve seen the sums put together by MacArthur. He’s not stupid. We’re going to exceed the speed of light by several orders of magnitude. That doesn’t come without a price. He puts it at tens of thousands of years elapsed back here on Earth for every year outbound. Over a beer, he told me even those figures are optimistic. If all this mumbo jumbo about suspending time-dilation is complete bullshit, we’re looking at potentially millions of years elapsing back here. Millions. Fuck. And yet, here I am, volunteering to explore the stars.

  I’m insanely tired. At some point, Commander Jansen’s going to have to call it a day. The law of reverse efforts is setting in. Everything’s becoming stupidly difficult. We’re eating into tomorrow’s reserves. We’re better off hitting the sack and starting fresh with a new day.

  My heads-up display blinks as MacArthur speaks.

  “Deaf two awe hoo-mans.”

  “Say again,” is the response from Jansen. Like me, I think she’s wondering if she heard him right.

  “That’s the slogan in the Proc,” he says, referring to Procyon Alpha A, the lead star in a binary system just over 11 light years away and our exploration target. “Death to all humans.”

  That’s better. Not. I laugh on the open channel.

  Jansen says, “MacArthur, you’re not helping.”

  “Come on, Jansen. Lighten up. You’re pushing us too hard.”

  The commander’s quiet.

  “I can’t keep going,” I say. “The tank’s empty.” As Jansen can see my remote telemetry, she must realize I’m not talking about air reserves or electricity. I’m exhausted.

  She waits before replying, but there’s a hint of resignation. “We are less than a third of a way through the checklist.”

  “They need to give us more time,” I say. “Like everyone else. I’d love to launch on the Fourth of July, but we’re in danger of missing something critical by rushing this.”

  “It’s not our fault,” MacArthur says.

  Back on Earth, mission controllers don’t look fondly on open defiance in space. When the crew of Skylab 4 pushed back against their workload, they got concessions in space, and feet stuck firmly on the ground when they returned to Earth. But, hey, none of them will be alive when we get back. If MacArthur’s right, Homo sapiens could have evolved into some other species by then, just as Homo egaster and Homo erectus led down to us.


  I feel for Jansen. She’s the meat in the sandwich. Damned if she gives into us. Damned if she doesn’t, and pushes us to breaking point.

  “Intrepid—Houston,” she says, as though Houston hasn’t been listening in all along (I bet they’re not still on the same shift down there).

  “We copy you, Intrepid.”

  “We’ve working through the commissioning checklist, but we are not able to reach the halfway mark today. Over.”

  “Copy that, Intrepid. Standby.”

  I float where I am, mentally tracing the route to the main airlock, hoping a recall is approved. The guys at FCF aren’t stupid. They’ll do the mental arithmetic. FCF doesn’t live on dumb luck. If we haven’t been able to get more than a third of the checklist complete today, we’re not going to miraculously do any better tomorrow. July Fourth is gone. Cutting corners on Earth has caught up to us in orbit.

  “Intrepid, we confirm your assessment. Flight says hold. Eight hour rest cycle and continue. Over.”

  “Copy that, Houston.”

  Eight hours sounds generous, but it’s the bare minimum. For me, it’s twenty, maybe thirty minutes to the hatch even though it’s less than fifty yards away. Then at least thirty minutes to pressurize, get out of the suit, and through the airlock. That’s an hour. Seven for sleep? Forget it. Not if I want to eat. Besides, I’ve got the same thing at the other end. Thirty minutes to suit-up, and probably an hour to acclimatize breathing pure oxygen at five PSI before I can leave the airlock and get back to work out here. By my reckoning, being optimistic, I’ll get five and a half hours shut eye—if that. Join the astronaut corps, they said. See the universe, they said. All I want to see is the inside of my eyelids.

  Lightning ripples through a darkened cloud bank hundreds of miles below me. Storm clouds swirl in eddies, forming distinct layers. For a moment, Earth looks alien—some dark, foreboding planet and not the birthplace of humanity. I squeeze my eyes in a tight, sustained blink for a few seconds. If I could, I’d rub them, and my gloved hand instinctively touches the smooth curve of my helmet in response to that desire.

  I’m tired. I don’t want to open my eyes, but I have to.

  I’m in a dreamlike state.

  Even though the Intrepid is in the shadow of the mighty planet, sunlight still catches the thin, icy rings surrounding this alien world. The rings extend tens of thousands of miles out into space with a sense of majesty that echoes Saturn. The dark shadow of the planet renders the nearby portion of the rings almost invisible, leaving the visible section glowing like horns wrapped around the planet.

  “What the?” I whisper, unsure what I’m seeing. I blink again, and the rings are gone. Earth rolls by sedately above my head. I’ve been out here too long.

  “Bring it in,” Jensen says, as I shake the hallucination from my mind, and my focus shifts to her. I have no doubt she’ll take some heat over this decision when she talks with Houston on the private channel, but there’s nothing more to be done out here. I begin working hand over hand along a safety rail, making my way back to the airlock. My support strap drags behind me in silence. Heavy breathing is my only companion.

  Space is clear. It sounds like a strange thing to notice, but being in space is like putting on reading glasses for the first time. The universe unfolds in high definition. Everything is crisp, especially at a distance. Even in low light.

  The Intrepid is half a mile long, with a crew of eight. That’s a lot of spaceship to cover, but I can see MacArthur on a sled, being hauled along the hull of the craft back toward the airlock. I’ll beat him to the hatch, but will have to wait for him, or he’ll be stuck outside while I clear the lock—space walks have their own brand of etiquette.

  I clip onto the latch of the airlock and float there, waiting for MacArthur. My body relaxes, naturally adopting a neutral-buoyant position with my arms floating freely in front of me and my legs drifting up before my hips. It’s not so much a fetal position as like relaxing in a spa pool minus the bubbles.

  My eyelids are heavy. There’s chatter on the comms channel, but it quickly becomes background noise. Ordinarily, no one notices when they blink, and I’m no exception, but my blinks are becoming progressively longer, submerging me in darkness for a second, then two, then five.

  Thousands of eyes stare at me. They’re clustered tightly together, like frogs’ eggs in a pond. Pupils move in perfect syncopation, darting around, but with purpose, as though they’re intently watching something to my left, then the center of my chest, and off to the right. There’s blood. At first, I’m not sure what it is as the dark balls of liquid drift in front of me like billiard balls—perfectly smooth and reflecting the light around them. It’s only from the variety of their shapes, and the occasional merger of two globs, that I realize this is blood—my blood. Still, thousands of eyes watch me. Tiny arms reach for me—long and thin, like those of a spider. Each hand has three fingers, but as there’s no wrist, they protrude from a joint in the lower arm, poking at me.

  I try to speak but no words come out. My lips refuse to move. It’s as though they’re sealed.

  “Jess?”

  A gloved hand touches at my shoulder, and I wake, although I could swear I didn’t open my eyes. It sounds impossible, but it’s as though I switched scenes, shifting from one form of reality to another.

  “Tired, huh?” MacArthur says. He’s smiling from behind his crystal clear glass visor. Like me, his face looks tiny beneath the helmet. Lights on the side of his helmet catch my eyes, causing me to squint. With thick gloved fingers, he punches a button and turns off the lights. “Come on.”

  I follow him into the airlock. As with everything that’s undertaken while using a tether, there are two clips required to move. The idea is, astronauts can only move one clip at a time, so switching between rungs, or moving in/out of an airlock, leaves no opportunity to drift away. There’s always at least one tether connected.

  After shifting both of my tether lines, I pull myself into the airlock, with my legs drifting behind me. Spacewalking and vertigo go hand in hand. There’s no up. Up constantly shifts. It helps to think of up as above my helmet, but in reality, my helmet is constantly shifting in relation to the Intrepid, giving me a distorted sense of placement. While the airlock was in front of me, by pulling myself in, it’s shifted to above me. When I’m tired, little things like this can be disorienting, and I shake the crazy dream from my head. I have to focus on the ingress.

  The outer hatch closes, and we wait for the pressure around us to build. There are subtle changes in our suit material as oxygen is pumped into the airlock. It’s not so much like wind hitting fabric as water pressing down around us.

  “I can’t even see a day’s extension working for us,” MacArthur says, taking his gloves off now that the airlock indicator has switched to green. I remove my gloves as well, followed by my helmet. “It’s a mess down there. If the H3 leaks, they won’t have to worry about us going nova out by Jupiter.”

  I remove my helmet, saying, “FCF may get its Fourth of July fireworks after all.” Dark humor, but it’s honest. Rushing safety checks to meet political deadlines is not smart.

  We help each other out of our suits, stowing them on the side of the airlock. As much as I’m looking forward to getting some sleep, part of me is already back here in the airlock, kitting up for another spacewalk tomorrow. It’s difficult to unwind in space. There’s no clocking off at 5pm and heading home. Work is always on call.

  We charge the backpacks, and hook them up to the recycle unit to purge the CO2 captured during our walk and swap it out with fresh oxygen. Even though it’s twenty minutes’ effort, we’re both so tired we barely talk during the process. When MacArthur finally opens the inner airlock, I feel an immense sense of release. I’ll grab a quick bite to eat—probably some cold turkey cuts and reconstituted mashed potatoes—and head to our sleeping quarters in the cargo deck.

  “Everything stowed?” Jensen asks, greeting us as we drift through the bridge.r />
  “Sure is,” MacArthur replies. “Ready for—” He never finishes his sentence.

  Warning lights flash on the main instrumentation panel. I see them too. It’s not that an alarm’s sounding that’s worrying, we get false positives all the time, it’s that they’re all flashing at once. There must be several thousand toggle switches and flat screen panels arranged around the cockpit. Toggle switches might seem like a relic from the Apollo era, but they have their usefulness—no dependence on computer screens, no ambiguity about position and setting, and direct links to subsystems. With three primary computers constantly double checking each other, there are still a few critical systems that are on entirely separate circuits, like fire suppression and life support. It wouldn’t do for an email virus to take down our air circulation, so it’s wise to keep them physically separate. That everything is flashing is unheard of, even in our simulation training.

  “Houston,” Jensen says, holding onto one of the railings. “Are you seeing this?”

  “It’s the goddamn H3,” MacArthur yells as the superstructure of the Intrepid shudders. He pulls up a status monitor, saying, “The inverter has ruptured. I told you. I fucking told you we shouldn’t push her.”

  I’m still trying to process what’s happening when the craft flexes around us. Metal groans, then yells, then screams. The craft is coming apart. Outside in the darkness, there are flashes of light from further down the ship.

  I reach for a handhold, only it seems to recede from me, drawing away at a steady rate. It’s as though I’m on an escalator, being carried away—I’m being sucked backwards.

  “Hull breach!” Jensen yells. Her hair washes over her face as she loops her hand over the support rung, holding on as our atmosphere rushes out into space. I grab for the walls, trying to catch myself, but I can’t. The last thing I hear is the sound of metal crumpling, and then complete and utter silence.

  The speed with which I’m ejected from the Intrepid is surreal. One moment, I’m within the main corridor, the next, I’m plunging into darkness, having been dragged through a gaping hole on the side of the Intrepid. She’s buckling under the force of multiple explosions cascading along her hull, tearing holes in the thin sheet metal that’s supposed to protect us from the vacuum of space.