Desperate scanning found no additional traces of the creature. It was a new kind of nightmare. I had lost people before but never that quickly and never that unexpectedly. And, it was a cheat. It had happened so fast there was very little memory to replay in search of understanding. We had set up the relay station, then twenty seconds later Doc was gone. Should I have reacted differently? How? There had been no time to react at all. Could I have tried to make myself the creature’s target so the others could escape? How could I have done that? If I can’t figure it out now, how could I have in those twenty seconds?
I speed-read the pilot’s checklist, lost my temper, and threw it at the floor. It had very little mass. It rushed downward, bounced off, and floated away. As if in response to the emotional outburst a power alarm popped up on the system’s monitor and began chirping. I looked back at Wilson who had taken a seat at RJ’s engineering station. He shrugged. It was an easy problem to correct. For me, it was a good problem to have. It forced the analytical portion of my mind to kick back in and focus. We reset the phase balance for the system and the master alarm chirped a last time and cleared.
There could be no time for soul searching or mourning. We were in orbit around a strange planet many light years from home, and we still had a long way to go. Command does not allow the luxury of sentimental self-abuse, or perhaps command has the greatest excuse of all to put that off until later. Any commander would be negligent to give himself to the lost, rather than being responsible to the living. Mine were scattered about the ship, trying to get a handle on the unthinkable. By ducking out to the flight deck, I was not helping. I tapped the intercom. “Danica, please come up.”
It took her less than a minute. She started to climb into the copilot seat, but I held up a hand. “Would you take the spacecraft and call everyone up here?”
I pushed out and let her slip into the seat. She switched on the intercom. “All personnel, please report to the flight deck.”
I hung by the empty engineering station next to Wilson and watched them gather in the forward airlock. Last to arrive was Shelly and Paris. She was helping him along, talking all the way. He still looked a little dazed as though he was unsure exactly what had happened. To my surprise, there was no pang of guilt associated with seeing him.
When I had their attention, I did my best to sound consoling. “Here’s where we are. All ship systems are online and nominal. We’re parked in a stable orbit. Obviously there will be no further landings on ZY627a. RJ, did Doc finish activating the relay station before we lost him?”
“Yes, Adrian. It is scanning and transmitting.”
“Would you or Wilson please download a repeating warning to its send folder, something that will go out regularly to warn other ships of the danger down there?”
“No problem.”
“Okay, I know how you all feel, but we need to continue on. We would not gain anything by returning to Earth at this point. We would have spent months in space and not accomplished what we came to do. So if anybody knows of any reason that would prevent us from breaking orbit and continuing, now’s the time.”
Silence.
“We’ll set up and make the jump as soon as we’re in position. Last chance, does anyone have any input why we shouldn’t do that?”
I expected Paris to begin again. He floated silently beside Shelly.
“I believe all of us are with you, Adrian,” said Shelly.
“RJ or Wilson, before we break orbit, would you use the Nasebian FM transmitter and send back a communication explaining everything that happened and that we’ve lost Doc? It’ll still take a long time to get there but at least they’ll know as soon as possible. I do not believe he had any remaining family except for his ex-wife, but he had a lot of friends.”
“I’ll write something up,” said Erin.
“Great. Maybe just before we break orbit we can all get together and have a small service for him. I’m not so good at that. Anyone willing to help, I would appreciate it. I’m sorry for what you’ve all just been through. I think we did everything we knew to do. I don’t know what we could have done differently. If there’s anything I can do to help any of you through this, please come and see me. I’ll do whatever I can. Do your best to focus on what’s ahead. I know it’s not easy. That’s all I have. Does anyone have anything else to add?”
They did not. The air was still heavy with shock and grief. It had been far from a qualified motivational speech but at least it set them to preparing for the next jump. We came around on our loop, and thirty minutes before break-orbit time everyone quietly regrouped in the forward airlock. I put aside my guilt trip and said my best words, all empty, futile expressions of loss. Others made better offerings. Wilson suggested a toast to Doc and there was a discomfited scramble to grab our squeeze bottles. We toasted our lost crewmate and paused for a moment of silence. With no further addresses I changed places with Danica to resume my scheduled shift. She took the copilot seat for the jump as everyone else strapped in. Despite the ceremony, it felt like we were leaving Doc behind. At the designated time we broke orbit and took a position beyond ZY627a, and with a five count the FMC engaged and once again, we became light.
There was one thing I had intentionally left out of my inept little speech: the void. It would mark our departure from the Orion Spiral Arm into the zone that separated the Sagittarius Arm. Ship’s computers would record an ingress never before made by humans. I had to hope that we were not going from one bad dream to another. The flight path blue line on the navigation display showed us beginning that deep crossing in less than a week. We would be inside for two. Since the Nasebians provided our charting it was almost certainly accurate. The classified Nasebian Nadir mission documents warned that no stars would be seen once within the void, an isolation that could give the impression the spacecraft was not moving. Pilots would need to maintain a mindset in which they trusted instrumentation completely, and not personal instinct. It was unknown whether there would be any other side effects. Stopping within was not recommended.
In the time we had leading up to trans-void passage, we held discussion sessions in an attempt to prepare mentally. The realization that we were about to fly into an inkwell was certainly not a morale booster, but it did help detract from the solemn attitudes left behind by the loss of Doc. As we closed in on the void we could see a fog of darkness ahead. With each passing day, it grew larger and larger. The rear-facing cameras showed a wall of stars. The forward cameras and windows began to show nothing. In a strange way, the area ahead looked like silence waiting. It was as though the essence of want had claimed this area of space for its own.
We plummeted into it and watched all the monitor cameras suddenly go dark. I happened to be in the pilot seat when it happened. It was exactly as described. All the instruments were still clicking and spinning away. The digital readouts were racing along. The blue line on our navigation displays continued to move and track, but aside from those electronic reassurances there was no sense of time or distance at all. Everyone hung at the portals trying to see something in nowhere. There was nothing to focus on, no depth or dimension. There was more spatial sensation in a sleeper compartment with the lights off than there was outside our portals.
We had been humans existing in the vacuum of space in a tin can. We were now humans existing in a tin can in nothingness. Somehow, we had lost something. We were smart enough to understand, but too human not to feel it.
The daily routines resumed. The habitat table games slowly resurfaced. The exercise equipment in the gym was used even more. The galley jokes returned. But behind it all it felt like we were all looking over our shoulder, because what lay outside did not seem real.
On the fourth day of our exile, RJ’s chessboard finally made an appearance. He had several offers, but was still after the bounty on my head. His pieces in the opening game remained symbolic of chickens that had escaped their pen. Toward the middle game he shored things up and settled in, as he always does.
We drew an audience.
“This area of space reminds me of the fish story,” he said as I pondered sacrificing a pawn, an outlay I always consider significant.
“I don’t think I know that one.”
“A young goldfish goes up to an old goldfish and says grandfather, what lies beyond our aquarium? The old goldfish says that’s a very good question, grandson. We don’t have all the answers, but we do know a few things. Some of us have jumped high enough out of the water to look around. Some have even jumped completely out and have miraculously returned. What we know is that the aquarium exists in a gigantic room, so large it could hold a hundred aquariums just like ours. We also know from some of the old ones that our aquarium was once located in a different room altogether, so we know that as large as our room is, there are other rooms besides this one. So, we are in a structure filled with rooms, and the structure is so large it’s beyond imagination. In fact, the structure is so large it could hold thousands of aquariums like ours.”
“Wow, says the young goldfish. That’s amazing!”
“Yes, says the grandfather goldfish. We don’t know everything, but at least we know that the structure containing all these rooms is so big that nothing can possibly lie beyond it.”
I held one finger on the pawn, studying the consequences of my sacrifice. “And the void reminds you of this?”
“Yes. It looks so final out there. Like there could be nothing beyond it.”
“Pawn takes pawn.”
“And pawn takes pawn. Doesn’t it give you the creeps?”
“I think we’re all in agreement on that.”
“And since there are no stars to navigate by, we’re just holding course per gyros till we’re through.”
“True.”
“There could be a big brick wall ahead and we wouldn’t know it.”
“No, the CAS would reflect back off it and warn us.”
“Well, yes, when we got close enough. But the idea is, we really don’t know what’s on the other side.”
“Bishop takes Knight. But that’s true of all space exploration.”
“Bishop takes Bishop. I don’t know. This feels different.” He looked at me with his Nostradamus expression. The gears were turning. Something premonise had called for the analytical RJ to kick in. Even he did not know what it was yet, but some piece of something hadn’t fit quite right in the back of his mind and he was now in search mode for the underlying problem. The chess game was providing a distraction from his more elemental psyche. There was a good chance at some point he would come to me with a real problem, or at least a mystery. I could only hope it would be minor.
We played to stalemate. RJ celebrated. I begged off, turned the board over to Wilson, and headed for my sleep cell. I sealed myself inside, called up a Yosemite compartment display with an active sunset, and chomped on a moon pie from my mini refrigerator. From the overhead compartment, I drew out my Nasebian crystal and let it float above me. I hit the button on the wall and the gentle mag force drew me down to the bed cushion. The crystal drifted about. It had become its special ocean-blue passive. As it hung in the zero-G I suddenly had an idea. Gently, I spun it so that it slowly rotated. I wondered, based on the previous message about Paris Denard, if I had just activated some sort of psyche-transmitter. To my surprise, it flashed a brief pulse of red and immediately I knew that meant system off-line, even though a few moments before I had not even known there was a system at all. I captured it, placed it back in its holder and lay back with my eyes closed.
Something woke me. My cell was dark. I called for lights and they slowly came up to dim. It was 3:00A.M. I squinted myself the rest of the way awake and tapped open the sleeper cell door. All the other cells were closed. No one seemed to be up. I made my way to the flight deck and put one hand on Danica’s shoulder. She looked up and gave me a tired smile.
“You need a break? I’m your relief.”
“In that case, it’s all yours, Sir.” She rose up and moved backward out of the flight deck. No sooner had I pulled down into the copilot seat than a master power alarm cut in. Phase balance in the OMS power system, the same alarm I had cleared earlier. I did the realignment, canceled it and puzzled over the recurrence.
Danica returned with a coffee dispenser in her hand and jockeyed herself back into the left seat. “Boy, you came to the rescue just in time. The old eyelids were getting heavy. This mocha will do the trick.”
“Have you had any power alarms?”
“Just one. An out of phase in the OMS.”
“I just had that one for a second time. That makes three. That’s too many. We’d better have the systems guys take a serious look at that. When I relieve you in the morning, I’ll have one of the engineers take a look at it.”
Danica smiled and raised her cup in salute. I floated up and out and headed back to my compartment to finish my assigned rest period. Power phase alarms were fairly common. Nothing to worry about.
Chapter 31