The big red eye of the brown dwarf seemed to be watching us once more. Our position was just right so that out of the side portals we could see the distant silver specks of its satellites. We gathered in the forward airlock near the flight deck for a crew meeting. Too much had happened to assume the mission would simply continue.
“So, here we are back where we started. Personally, I’d like to go find my lug nut key, despite everything that’s happened. Does anyone see any reason why we should not continue?”
Paris Denard would not be denied. He seemed to be getting past space sickness. “Absurd. Totally absurd. Every standard of discipline there is has been violated, along with a variety of international laws. It is time to abort this fiasco and return to Earth. There is no decision to be made. After everything we’ve been through, are we now to risk my life in search of some idiotic used car part? That’s it. It’s over.”
We all looked at each other. No one seemed moved.
RJ turned in his engineering station seat and spoke, “Adrian, I just got a message from that security ship asking where the Doctor is and why the Griffin has left the area. They’ve sent it to us and Ground Control. How should I reply?”
“All Griffin personnel certified as uncontaminated and released from quarantine. Griffin and crew have resumed their assigned mission.”
RJ hesitated as though there might be more, then sent the message.
Denard burst forth. “See? See!”
Shelly was in the pilot’s seat. She leaned back and eyed Denard. He stiffened and pointed with one bouncing finger. “You don’t intimidate me. I have international law on my side.”
“Sweetheart, we haven’t had any time alone together. I get off in an hour.”
He opened his mouth to protest but discovered there was nothing he dared say. For once, he seemed at a loss for words.
I attempted civility. “Does anyone else have anything constructive to offer?”
No one did.
“Then if no one else objects, we are already here. Let’s resume scanning and find the Easter egg, and then go home. Has anyone gotten any sleep?”
No one answered.
“Danica, you guys up front, no sleep?”
“We traded off some rest periods, Adrian. No one could sleep.”
“We’ll all need to get some before we head back. Let’s go find the package, then we’ll hang for a while and try to catch up some.”
Denard growled and pushed off toward the back of the ship. Everyone resumed their positions or headed for the habitat module. I floated over RJ as he set up his scans.
“We’ve already done most of the scanning, Adrian. It won’t take long. All we need to do is catch our grid pattern up to the new position. We already have distinct signatures.”
“Let me know when you hear back from Ground.”
“You sure you want to know?”
“Whenever we transmit, just try to sound innocent.”
“Well, aren’t we?”
“Good start.”
He leaned into the scanning console and began synchronizing previous data with current changes, while Erin, Wilson, Doc, and I coasted back and raided the galley, bumping each other out of the way, and squeezing tube food out into the air to capture it in our mouths. A faux pas occurred when Wilson squeezed a coffee creamer too hard and sprayed Erin square in the eye. Unwilling to allow the indignation, Erin responded by pasting her full applesauce cup on his nose. There were exclamations and giggling. Before the conflict could escalate, RJ called out. “Adrian, I think we have it. Wow! It’s close.”
We hovered over RJ as he forwarded the coordinates to Shelly and Danica. Shelly looked back. “It’s in the red zone, Adrian, too close to use stellar, but a bit of a haul with OMS.”
“You have my permission to get underway, Shelly.”
She smiled and tapped the intercom. “All personnel, brace for acceleration.”
Denard had disappeared into his sleeper cell. The rest of us found something to hang on to. After a minute of setup, we felt the OMS drives kick the ship forward and come up to speed.
Shelly’s voice came back. “It’ll be twenty minutes of thrust, an hour and fifteen minutes of coast, then twenty of breaking.”
So for twenty minutes we had gravity against the back walls, which Wilson used to pretend he was doing knee bends, causing Erin to giggle and point.
RJ turned and looked up from his seat. “It looks cluttered where we’re going, Adrian, kind of like a piece of an asteroid belt. There’s big stuff and little stuff, and a lot of it. I’m guessing there won’t be a landing anywhere.”
“Okay.”
“I want to be wingman on this one. I need to get out and stretch my legs.”
“Well, no one else has thought to ask, so I guess you’re it.”
He raised one hand to protest, but realized I had agreed. He shook his head in approval. “Okay. Okay, then. Great.”
“Get some rest first. I am.”
I checked around to make sure all things looked as they should, then released my handhold and let the acceleration drop me back to the habitat module and into the sleeper cell section. I tapped open my cell and pulled in. The white, photo-synth door mercifully rolled down and shut out the world. My compartment seemed larger than I remembered. I tapped the control on the wall and set the display at my feet to the ship’s forward view. The stars made it look like we weren’t moving. The press of the wall against my feet assured me we were. Mag sensors in the bed helped hold my body comfortably in place. The water tube fed cold water. My small refrigerator had absolutely nothing in it. I rubbed my eyes, pinched the bridge of my nose, and decided not to let my mind start replaying everything that had happened.
Five minutes later, vibration from the OMS engines kicked off and zero-G seeped back in. Sleeping in zero-G is a very different kind of rest. Though many people do not realize it, we all do a subconscious version of yoga when we climb into bed at night. We use gravity to stretch out the muscles and relax them. We spend time on one side or the other, changing positions, using contact with the bed as pressure points. We rotate from back to front, side to side, subconsciously employing the technique to unwind everything that is contracted or misaligned, and even after we’re asleep this treatment continues, part of nature’s way of resetting physical elasticity.
It’s not like that in weightlessness. You do not have gravity contact to put pressure on muscles and tendons. No matter which way you lay, it’s the same. The closest comparison would be sleeping in a dead-man’s float in a swimming pool. But, though your usual nightly relationship with gravity massage is not available, your heart no longer has the extra work of overcoming gravity’s pull. Your veins and arteries do not need to resist that earthly drag with each pulse. Your circulatory system tends to relax and disengage because all weight has quite literally been removed. Your toes and fingers often tingle, and sleep becomes a pleasant sensory deprivation of its own.
A voice echoing down from a deep tunnel pulled me up to consciousness. “…for deceleration.” Shelly, notifying us that braking was about to begin.
I squinted, shocked that I had fallen asleep. The braking cut in, gently dragging my feet down against the sleeper cell wall so that I had to push back against it as we slowed. She had turned us around and I had not even sensed it. I touched my forehead where there was a sore spot from bumping an equipment box in the Akuma’s service crawlway.
In the habitat module, Erin and Paris were in seats staring out portals on opposite sides of the spacecraft. Wilson was up front with Shelly and Danica. I stood with my arms folded and my back pressed against the habitat module back wall, and waited for the braking to ease. Shelly’s voice came over the intercom, “Ten minutes.”
RJ pulled himself into the room, and took a place against the wall on the other side. He rubbed his face with both hands and then squinted as he took in the surroundings. He looked at me with raised eyebrows and a half smile. “Can’t wait to see this place.
It will be very, very interesting.”
“Bunch a’ rocks?”
“Yeah. Interesting rocks.”
“A forest of floating fragments?”
“A veritable banquet of boulders.”
“Were there chunks at all big enough to land on?”
“Only if you want things banging into you while you’re there.”
“We have shields.”
“What? Who said?”
“Can’t tell you.”
“Or you’d have to kill me.”
“Yep. But, you’ll find out soon enough.”
“That’s okay. I have a theory. I’m betting there won’t be any reason for a landing.”
“Why not?”
“I think originally they meant to put our target down on a large enough body so that we would be forced to land and get out to find it. I think they screwed up. I think in their hurry to place the item, they didn’t take the time to map the target. They didn’t realize how populated the area was. They used a standard probe delivery system, assigned it to crash or land on the chosen body, but it wasn’t smart enough to navigate through the garbage. It was determined enough, though. It smashed into, or was hit by something. I think we’re going to be looking for a smashed up probe that didn’t make it to its assigned destination.”
“Boy. There you go again. Analyzing crap that nobody else would. You are a seer, Sir.”
Shelly’s voice interrupted. “Thirty seconds. Brace.”
Seconds later, the engine cutoff gave us a slight bounce back into weightlessness. Shelly came over the intercom once more. “It’s a jungle out there, folks. This is as close as we’re gonna get.”
We all floated to the side windows. Someone exclaimed, “Wow!” Outside, a glorious field of large and small animated rock shapes decorated the blackness. Many were as big as a car, many more the size of medicine balls. Smaller stones drifted among them. Occasionally I could make out chunks the size of an airliner, and there were two in the far distance as large as small moons. The rock field went above us and below us as far as I could see. We were one hundred yards outside it. It was an incredible choreography of slow motion going on everywhere. Large stones turning in place, others rotating away, smaller pieces tumbling gradually by them. There was enough separation within the tumbling, turning mass for a man in a spacesuit, but the heads-up attitude display in the spacesuit helmet would be needed to avoid disorientation and conflict.
I pushed myself up to the flight deck and hung over Wilson as he worked the scanners.
“What’da you got?”
“We’re in the right place. There’s definitely composite metal out there, not naturally occurring. But I can’t pinpoint it. It’s a foggy footprint. I can feed it to the suit-navs, though, and you will be able to track it and find it, whatever or wherever it is.”
“How far?”
“Two hundred-eighty to three hundred and fifteen meters. It’s a debris field. That’s its volume. That will be your search radius.”
I looked back to find RJ in my face. He smiled a big smile.
RJ had not yet fit a suit so it took some extra time. Wilson had to shorten the arms and legs slightly to keep his head up in the helmet. When it was done we sealed in and engaged our depressurization cycles. We sat waiting with the inner and outer doors still sealed. RJ had a wide grin on his face the whole time. I got the feeling he couldn’t stop it. Finally, with suit permissions, the airlock depressurized.
The outer door opened to a glorious collage of motion. The Nav display on my visor showed a blue line leading to our target, and next to it the cross hairs that would keep us headed in the right direction no matter how we were oriented. On the sides of my visor a few small outlines flashed yellow, showing they were within caution range. Outside the airlock, we lowered the backpack handles and jetted slowly toward the mass.
We paused at the border and checked everything. There was a small amount of ambient light from the dwarf, but our helmet lamps were staying on just the same. It made for a shadowy environment. Griffin was tracking all transiting objects, so there would be no chance of getting clobbered by something. We cautiously entered the field and the visuals became mesmerizing enough to make you want to stop and watch, a temptation we resisted. We coasted beneath behemoths the size of elephants, and circled around shapes that looked like rock carvings of giant diamonds and pendulums. We passed over a few so closely we could have walked along the tops. I heard RJ laughing under his breath over the com. It pleased me. Deep into the forest, there was a particularly large stone with a naturally formed face that had an uncanny resemblance to a high school French teacher who had flunked me. It glared at me as I passed, and made me realize I had never used the French language even once.
RJ came over the com. “Uh-oh.”
I maneuvered around to look. He was holding a gold-plated bar in one glove. He pointed ahead with his other.
It was the debris field. Golden pieces of a small probe scattered everywhere.
“You are indeed a prophet, RJ.”
“I now predict this will be quite a job.”
“Maybe it’s not even the right spacecraft.”
“It is.”
“How do you know?”
“It’s new. It hasn’t been out here long. It’s still pretty much all in one place. It hasn’t scattered yet.”
“See why I brought you along?”
“We will have to pick through the pieces for the containment vessel and hope we get lucky.”
“We could just beg off. We’ve accomplished the mission.”
“I’m not in hurry to get back. I don’t have a date for tonight. It’s kind of nice out here.”
So that’s what we did. It was a playful task not often enjoyed by man. One for the family photo album. Piece by piece we searched. We pushed off nearby boulders, and swam carefully through clouds of golden probe debris, looking for something that might be a container. Some parts had loosely adhered to chunks of stone. Others seemed to be trying to orbit the larger rocks. The endeavor was not work at all. It was a treasure hunt in a celestial rock garden. It was fun. It took three hours. RJ won. He found a brass-colored artifact that looked like a toothbrush tube. He pulled it apart and my frozen, silver lug nut key floated out. It meant enough to me that I thought to grab it from him, but he pulled it away and zipped it into a torso pocket. He pointed at me as though it was bragging rights. We jetted back like victorious hunters, and sat smiling at each other in the airlock feeling as though we had just gotten the best of Bernard Porre.
I ordered four hours in sleeper cell rotations for everyone before heading back. No one minded, except Paris. He milled about, having already slept. We took shifts up front, and when everyone had filled their rest requirement made a smooth jump back to a parking orbit above Earth. Doc took the pilot seat for the descent. I rode shotgun. To our surprise, they did not hold us in orbit because of the Akuma incident. We set down on the Space Center apron as the rising Florida sun began turning distant storm clouds orange. A variety of dignitaries were there to greet us.
Some friendly. Some not.
Chapter 25