Her husband's amused smile twisted into a grimace. Odd-job duty was the government's way of helping its expedition trainees prepare for various duties when the crews were finally selected and sent on the years-long mission to alpha centauri, planned for the near future. At least that was the official version. Richard liked to think odd-job duty was the government's way of putting the elite corps of trainees in their place, of trying to humble a bunch of arrogant fucks.
"Don't remind me." Richard shook his head, then brushed his short, dark hair away from his eyes and looked up with a serious face. "I hadn't thought about it, but I've never heard about canceling all of the classes and training flights before. Honestly, I don't know. There could be a connection—but no one will say anything who knows what’s going on. Gurney says he overheard a radar operator talking about a supply shuttle that was out of control—she said something crashed in sector eight. It's strange though, that—and for the moment I’m assuming the story's true—we haven't heard of any reported casualties."
"You'd think they would have made the announcement already as to whether or not anyone was killed. They should know by now." Sasha agreed, considering the scenario.
"I thought of that, too," Richard said. "But that isn’t what’s been bothering me. Have you ever heard of a shuttle pilot who lost control of his craft being able to warn us about it?"
"It doesn’t happen very often. So?"
"Neither have I. The ships usually just crash. And the rest of us find out what went wrong afterward. So, how does anyone know this shuttle pilot had lost helm control? We can’t know what really went wrong yet. How do we know there wasn’t just some kind of spontaneous navigational system malfunction at work—or one that the pilot didn’t know about?”
“What would it matter?” She asked, not following. “Aren’t both cases essentially the same thing?”
“At first glance,” Richard said. “But it doesn’t really make sense.”
“Why not?”
“Think of it this way: if there was some kind of accident in the shuttle cabin out in space, some hull leak which killed the pilots en route—”
“No one said they were dead.”
“No, but suppose if they were, then the automatic guidance systems would have activated as they always do so that the ship and any cargo isn’t lost. Thus,” he raised a forefinger, “no shuttle can ever be lost—or crash—solely because of a pilot’s death.”
“Yes.”
“And we would have automatically guided the ship through a landing window and safely to the ground.”
“Agreed.”
“So if the shuttle was out of control, there had to be something wrong with the entire navigational system, and it wasn’t the pilot or the co-pilot’s fault. They didn’t know about it in time. And they were alive. If not, why worry so much about a shuttle crash in a rural zone? Only a search and rescue mission would be worth all of this effort.”
“All true. Your point?”
“In that case, there’s no way we wouldn’t have been able to track that thing and not realize something was wrong for some time before the shuttle crashed, even if the pilots didn’t know. If the pilots were alive, we would have warned them. And we would have advised them to use an escape capsule. We wouldn’t have waited. So—”
“No need for a search and rescue mission.”
“Exactly. So everything had to seem fine from the ground—unless for some strange reason we wanted the shuttle to crash and the pilots to die.”
“Richard, I’m confused.”
“So am I. Even if there was damage to the communications system, and the pilots couldn’t warn us, we had to know. Yet we waited—why? If you ask me, this whole situation almost sounds like some kind of cover-up story, but for what?”
Sasha’s face took on an uneasy expression that Richard caught with a mild sense of alarm.
“Still, I guess there’s no way of knowing until we get there.” Richard shook his head, summarily abandoning the argument.
"Richard, do you suppose this is all just an elaborate disaster drill?" Sasha asked a moment later.
Richard thought about that, then shrugged. "We just had one," he reminded her.
"Ah—but this would be the best time for another one, then." Sasha laughed. "After all, who would be expecting it? Getting the whole base involved and canceling classes would certainly be the best way to fool us."
"I don't know," Richard admitted, considering. "If that’s the case, I’d have to say whoever’s in charge has a warped sense of humor." He declared, unamused.
"You’d be the one to know, now wouldn’t you?" Sasha teased, grabbing her helmet and heading for the door.
Chapter Three
Sweat trickled down Sasha’s temple within her flight helmet. She took several controlled breaths, then let her eye wander, surveying the gauges and gears surrounding her. She’d already made several studies as they waited in the East Wing Airport near the Command Shuttle, amidst the hurried activity of attendants and technicians.
Then finally, a heavy echo signaled the beginning retraction of the great overhead dome. A scraping sound came and went as the heavy dome laboriously arced away. The seconds ticked away slowly, and the sunlight filtering through grew brighter, the massive arc of daylight yawning before them. After a moment, the ground crews retreated, leaving the planes alone on the outlying runway, exposed to the open sky.
Sasha activated her engines; they suddenly thrummed with life, growling as though they, too, waited impatiently for take-off. It's surreal, Sasha thought to herself, glancing at the last of the retreating flight crews. What if she wasn't ready for this mission?
However, by the time they were airborne, such doubts had dissipated.
The simple truth of it was that the love of flying never worked its way out of a pilot’s system.
Sasha pulled in her breath sharply when her husband's image flashed onto the left video screen without warning.
"Take it easy, there," Richard laughed. "I just thought I'd see how you were doing."
"Oh you did, did you?" she reacted with a humorless smile. "Well, I'm fine. Everything's fine." She said abrasively, but Richard only laughed again. Even in her excitement, and perhaps because of it, Sasha barely held her nerves in check. The concentration-boosting chemicals kicked in, injecting fluid into her arm, in response to her nerves. A steady flight usually helped to calm the pilots down, but though they had been in the air nearly ten minutes, the escort had yet to receive any explanations from the shuttle crew. Now the automatic mood-elevators were coming through.
Richard chuckled to himself, but he spared his wife his amusement. She hadn’t much cared for his interruption. He had hesitated a moment, admiring the rapt expression in her eyes, sorry to have to break it, but at the same time he really enjoyed making a pest of himself. At length, she began to relax, and he suppressed a desire to startle her again.
Usually, Richard naturally coped better with anxiety by refusing to allow it any hold over him, even sometimes sacrificing his better judgment with it; today, however, he perceived that this mission was special. He couldn’t help being curious about just what had happened to bring them out here.
A moment later, it came at last—the flash of a hailing signal from the shuttle crew.
"This is space pilot Richard A. Mathieson from Pegasus recon escort crew. We read you—over." He responded.
"Security Chief Hollendar requests you to follow orders of recon shuttle crew." The shuttle co-pilot, a freckle-faced, red-headed youth of about twenty years, was trying very hard to sound composed and efficient, as if this kind of mission were routine. "We are breaking communication during descent. Signing off." And he meant it, not waiting for an answer. The video comline buzzed with static as the message ended.
"Hollendar's back?" Sasha asked, intrigued. She knew that Ho
llendar had been gone for several days now. He would have to have taken a private shuttle to get back this early. What could bring him back so soon? she wondered. Did it somehow have to do with this strange recon mission? Given that Hollendar liked to be where the action was... exactly what was going on here?
"Isn't he always wherever the action is?" her husband asked, voicing her own thoughts. "I wonder if he knows about this shuttle."
Sasha had made the same connection, he saw by her face.
"Pardon the interruption, Mathieson," Gurney's scratchy voice came over the net; his face appeared in the monitor.
“Perfect timing as usual,” Richard said. If there was anyone on Earth who could make Mathieson look like a stick-in-the-mud, it was Gurney.
"It’s a gift, I know,” Gurney responded with a wry grin and a nod. “But I thought I’d let you both know that the recon crew is sending us a green light to proceed ahead and land with them at point Acadia." He paused, listening to another communication. "Roger that, taking her down," he chirped, and his ship, the Pride of Progress suddenly descended before the others, looping and spinning like a paper airplane.
"Are you in some kind of hurry?" Richard demanded sharply.
"They said to proceed ahead," Gurney offered a moment later, unapologetic and with a hint of dry, playful humor. "So I thought I might practice some maneuvers on the way."
Richard suddenly burst into laughter but held back some in light of the gravity of the situation; Sasha shook her head yet cracked an involuntary smile. Few outsiders understood the pilots’ way of staying sane on long training flights. The body became physically cramped, but the pilots ignored that. Sometimes they remained airborne for hours at a time, but they had to stay alert. As long as they kept their wits about them, they were safe.
Mathieson had been Gurney’s friend it seemed like forever, but Gurney wasn’t really jealous of Sasha, as much as he could have been. In the old days, they had all worked together on recon over the rural zones and in training for the future alpha centauri mission.
"As ordered, taking her down." Richard said, letting his ship, the Harlequin, plunge through the clouds. The sudden dive took him past Gurney, as he had planned. They were the greatest of friends; part of this was that they were always trying to out do each other. Meanwhile, Sasha stuck to the recon as it slowly descended through the clouds. After a moment of quiet, the ship hailed her.
"This is Doctor Knightwood aboard recon shuttle. We are descending to one thousand meters. I want to take it slow, though, so we can get a good look at the waterfall at point Acadia. Signing off."
Sasha waited until she was within two thousand meters to re-establish the visual linkup between her, Richard, and Gurney. "Okay, listen up!” She shouted. Immediately the pair redirected their attention to her, sensing news. “Knightwood wants us to head down low to the waterfall so that we can survey the landscape."
"Knightwood's—on the shuttle herself? 'Must be something pretty serious." Gurney whistled and shook his head as best as he could with his heavy helmet and harness holding him stationary. "I thought she hated recon. She's been afraid of flying ever since that shuttle to Gabriel blew up—"
"Exactly." Sasha agreed, cutting him off; Sasha had been thinking the same thing. The explosion that had destroyed the shuttle Halcyon was common knowledge; it was a miracle Knightwood had survived, drifting for two days in her spacesuit before she was rescued. People knew that Knightwood had hated flying ever since. So, Sasha thought, this wasn't an elaborate drill. Knightwood wouldn't have agreed to come out here for nothing. Sasha felt suddenly anxious. "But in case she's listening, I suggest—"
"Play time's over," Richard coughed and opened the frequency to the command shuttle. "Message understood," his voice resumed in a more serious tone. "This is Mathieson slowing down for initial flyby..."
* * * * *
The ground was so hot that Selerael’s feet at last began to burn within the shoe coverings she wore. She yawned a couple of times, then shot up from where she had fallen hours earlier, awake now that she felt pain.
"E-ah! I’m burning!" She screamed, jumping up and scrambling away from the super-heated ground. The words themselves startled her, remembered instinctively, but she had almost forgotten the meaning. It was as though she spoke in unintelligible animal sounds, something she knew had meaning but could not comprehend. Memory was nothing to her but white shadows. She did not know herself anymore, and that was the most frightening thing of all.
Yet as all living things, even a careless child will blindly seek its own comfort, and soon her thoughts centered on finding somewhere to cool her feet and to sit, for she was growing tired again. However, a thick, moist, warm fog billowing around her cut off all view. It was like the blindness that had afflicted her before; she recalled the moments of her awakening and hoped that if she could only find the light to illuminate this world, the vapors would dissipate. She did not understand that the sun was already shining high above, a luminous white orb in the gloom.
A moment later, she could just make out something dark up ahead, a distant, ant-sized, brown pole rooted in the ground. She rushed to it as though it had been an oasis.
Up close, the brown pole was charred black, pitifully twisted and ugly, but in its shadow, the ground was cooler. She could see nothing else nearby, having lost all sense of direction, having no idea at all where she was. Breathless, she sat down carelessly to rest again, burying her toes deep into the cool earth.
* * * * *
"Lord almighty! What happened here!?" Richard Mathieson exclaimed as the recon shuttle and escort ships approached the area that had once been the Acadia waterfall. Steam rose from the ground in great clouds stretching at a guess around a radius of a thousand meters from the center of where the waterfall had been into an ever-increasing sphere of vapor that persisted in the still spring air.
"It looks like something hit all right." Gurney announced just as the team received a communication from the shuttle.
"We're going to circle around several times until the clouds clear away. Then we'll have a look." Knightwood's said in a smooth, decisive voice over the videonet. "Stay sharp, everyone. We might have—some difficulties out here." She added, rather tersely, mysteriously.
"Now she tells us," Gurney whistled, feeling more uncertain than ever about the secretive nature of this detail and sure that the scientists were keeping something big to themselves.
Ten minutes later, a clearing broke in the artificial cloudcover. Something dim and dark showed beneath, like still, black water.
"What does it look like? Can you see?" Zhdanov asked on the videonet. The artificial clouds drifted further, dissipating as they met cooler air beyond the impact site.
"I don't believe it." Richard breathed, the blood draining from his face.
The pulverized cliff side appeared on the verge of landsliding over the object that had vaporized the Acadia waterfall, a gargantuan vessel from space that had crashed headlong into the ground at an angle of about twenty degrees. Already the clouds of dust had deposited a fine layer over the lower half of the ship, and loose rocks blown into the air by the impact had fallen into the crater and over the part of the bow that remained topside. With the exposed third of the ship and the buried silhouette, the ship measured more than seventeen kilometers long.
Richard suddenly felt as though someone had played a cruel trick on him. He watched, mute, yet his mind continued its train of thought where speech had failed. Dawe had to have known about this! he thought. And yet he hadn't said a word about it when he sent them out here. Good Lord, though! An out of control shuttle? This was an alien spaceship, for God's sake!
Richard tried to calm himself down, but anger was better than fear, he reasoned in a small corner of his mind; the anger occupied the better half of it. He looked over to the monitor; Sasha's pale face had gone w
hite as a sheet, but she seemed to be managing her ship well.
Right now, though, he wished that she were anywhere on the planet but here.
For a long time, silence prevailed on the net. Then Knightwood's inappropriately calm voice ventured, "Let's land on the other side of the cliff and take a look. Our scanners aren't identifying the composition. It seems to be emitting some electromagnetic interference."
"There's probably a good explanation for that." Gurney said. There was a tremulous quality to Gurney's voice that had never been there before. "You know what they say—curiosity killed the cat," he added, attempting a joke.
Actually, Gurney was re-evaluating the importance of life in general and his own in particular at that moment, and something told him he had more to accomplish before becoming air garbage, assuming that thing was what his eyes were telling him it was and that little hostile green men inside it weren't planning on making sure he didn't come too close.
"Where the devil did it come from?" Richard wondered out loud, thinking that it was time to start their mission—and get it over with all the sooner. Not that he thought this ship was going anywhere now, but he didn’t want to have anything further to do with it after today, if at all possible. "We could run a few electromagnetic scans, but we may risk antagonizing whatever's inside that thing."
"Yes," Zhdanov agreed over the videonet again. "It would be foolish to do anything which they might perceive as threatening."
“They?” Gurney echoed uncomfortably.
"The proportional counter reports safe levels of gamma radiation," Sasha announced evenly.
A minute later, the planes landed as instructed beside the shuttle just at the curling edge of a crater the ship had created, about thirty meters ahead. The various members of the expedition disembarked and met formally. Like the recon team, the shuttle crew was attired in flightsuits, but they carried their compu-helmets down the gangway.