Trajectory Book 1 (New Providence) (10 page)

Doctor Powell cleared his throat and started the conversation. “Here we are. Commander Mancuso, this is Emma Franklin, Greg Pohl and Tamra Wheeler.” He gestured around the table introducing them. “They were the ones who found the object in the Olympus feeds. I think before even Watchtower picked it up.”

Mancuso grumbled at the mention of Watchtower missing the object, but nodded in greeting. He was still bristling at the thought of a malfunction on their most important piece of sensing equipment.

They were on a sub-second communications lag. The station was mercifully close at the moment and didn’t require multiple satellite relays. “Nice to meet you all. I have with me Dr. Nelson Ortega and Dan Wilkins from my science team.” Heads nodded around the table.

“So, let’s get into this then. This is all highly-confidential information. You are not to relate it to anyone. Not even your families.” Mancuso looked at each of them on his screen in the boardroom.

Emma and Tam exchanged a look. Tamra looked miserable, wiping her mouth on her wrist, stifling a cough.

Mancuso leaned into the table. “Ortega, give us a run-down on where we are right now and what we know. We can save speculation until everyone’s on the same page.”

Ortega cleared his throat and sat forward, lifting himself straighter in his seat. Emma knew he was the science team lead onboard Lighthouse Station. He looked tired, but his shirt was crisp. “Almost twenty eight hours ago, we witnessed what appeared to be the total destruction of MSS13 Pandora. I’m going to show you the footage we received from Watchtower around the time of the event.”

The secondary screen lit up and the video began playing. The room was silent except for Tamra’s occasional sniffling.

“Wilkins ran it through our image processing suite and was able to pull out some more detail from the original. We’ll let you take a look on your own time at the raw footage and data after this meeting. What I want to show you are these frames, at the Tower’s full resolution, enhanced for detail.”

The screen zoomed into a grainy view of the scene, Pandora’s engines forming a small round blob of light in the left of the frame. You could almost make out the tiny dot of the ship in its center.

“This happens so quickly we only get a couple of frames.” Ortega shifted in his seat and advanced the video. “First frame, the object flashes here.” A red arrow pointed to the pinpoint flash at the right of the frame. “This frame represents a width of approximately two thousand kilometers.” A red line appeared from edge to edge with the scale imprinted on the bottom, 2000kms. Pandora’s engine flare was maybe a third of the way from the left edge.

“Next frame,” he advanced the image, “we see a much fainter flash much closer to Pandora.” Another red arrow pointed to another tiny pinpoint of light this time half as bright as the initial one. Everyone at the table leaned in, willing more information onto the image than was there. “We couldn’t see this secondary flash before we ran the enhancement on it. You’re seeing this at the same time as our ships.”

Emma sat up, looking at Ortega through the camera. “It’s much dimmer. All of the previous flashes had been the same intensity.”

Ortega had already started to speak and paused as Emma cut in over his feed. Their lag was starting to increase as the station rounded the planet and more satellites picked up and bounced their signal. “The flash is… that’s right, much fainter than the original and all previous flashes. We can get to theories about that in a moment.” He shifted in his seat, looked back at the screen and then back down at his tablet and advanced the frame.

Ortega continued his explanation of what they were looking at. “The explosion begins here, I think slightly after the blast began. We probably missed the beginning of this event between frames it happened so quickly.” The bloom from Pandora’s engines was expanded brighter. Either noise from the sensor or debris from the ship or object added to the graininess, but mostly it was just a white blob twice the size as it was before. The scale zoomed in to show a range of five hundred kilometers edge-to-edge. The blackness of space became a dark grainy grey with some bright stars dotting the picture.

Next frame. Still larger blob, but less intense as it expanded outward and faded. A two-pixel dark diagonal line at the top right of the explosion. Ortega waggled a red arrow around it on his tablet. “We don’t know what this is. Debris. Object. Not sure. Not enough detail.”

Next frame. The bloom was fainter and larger. Some more dark pixels near the center of the light. “Maybe debris here and here.” A waggled red pointer around the dark areas. Next frame, more dissipation. Some lighter sources near the interior and so on until the bloom faded out and was replaced with the stellar background.

Ortega sat back. Everyone watched in silence.

Mancuso cleared his throat. “What have we seen since, Nelson?”

“No flashes until this morning.”

Mancuso narrowed his eyes. Emma thought he looked like this caused him physical pain.

Ortega carried on with the explanation. “This morning, at 0900, Captain Franklin aboard Calypso,” he nodded fractionally at the camera, “entered a new flight plan.” The image on the left from Watchtower was replaced with an orbital trajectory, tilted down by forty-five degrees. “Calypso intends to break out of the ecliptic into a high trajectory and drop back towards us, skirting the previous trajectory of the object.” He paused. Chewing something inside his mouth with a crunch. “Wilkins, show them what you found.”

Dan Wilkins sat up, his hands went from the table to his lap. “Uh, this morning at 0915 Calypso started a burn, ran for sixty minutes, waited for fifteen, started another burn for sixty and so on. She’s accelerating hard on her new plan.”

Wilkins tapped at his tablet and a new image came up beside the orbital trajectory. “Watchtower picked up a flash past the position of Pandora’s last contact around 1020. Then another at 1030. Then 1032… And then it did something really unexpected. A series of flashes on a decreasing timescale down to the framerate of Watchtower’s video feed for nearly a full minute followed by an increase in period back up to ten minutes.”

He paused and looked around at the faces on his screen. Everyone’s eyes were widening with the possible exception of Tamra who just looked increasingly uncomfortable. Even administrator Brennan was starting to look alarmed for her. The implications of Ortega’s message were clear to everyone in the room.

“The time series appeared to be a cubic bezier curve. An S-curve. Symmetrical. Perfect.”

The room burst with gasps and exclamations. “I knew it!” Emma could be heard over the din. Powell reigned himself in and attempted to calm the room. Administrator Brennan just looked stunned in his suit. Doctor Powell pushed his glasses up on his nose and frowned.

After everybody’d been contained, Mancuso picked up the conversation again. “Now, what does the new trajectory of the object look like?”

Wilkins looked at Ortega who gave him a quick nod. “It’s, uh, moving up out of the plane of the ecliptic. It looks like it’s tracking Calypso.”

Wilkins added the plot to the orbital graph and showed them intersecting.

“If these plots are correct, they’ll rendezvous in about forty hours.”

Quiet.

Mancuso leaned forward. “We really appreciate your help. Which one of you wants to come up here to help us work on this?”

Emma and Greg gawped at each other. Tamra covered her mouth preventing another wheezing cough.
 

023

The Terror. 1.2 AU from Mars.

Reggie Talbot and Vanessa Macgregor struggled with the suits in the equipment locker. For the second time in an hour they were under hard acceleration, almost Earth gravity. The suits and EVA equipment they had arrayed in front of them crashed to the floor along with themselves.

“God damn it!” Reggie tried to untangle himself from the suit he was checking.

“Didn’t you hear the countdown? What did you think was going to happen?” Vanessa, arrayed with somewhat more dignity on the floor, sat up and continued her suit check.

“I figured I’d be able to get this suit section checked out before it started.” Reggie tried in vain to right himself under the bulky suit torso. His helmet rolled out of his reach and he had to crawl after it. “What is with these burn patterns anyway? Everything’s all fucked up.”

“We’re on a new course.” Vanessa had caught the new flight plan while she was drinking her coffee earlier. “Low trajectory, under the ecliptic. We’re plotting an intercept with Making Time.”

That explained the higher burn frequency. They needed to course correct along two axes and it required a lot more energy to break out of the solar system’s rotational disc. Reggie was unimpressed.

“This is nuts.”

Vanessa finished her checks and bolted her suit into its locker. It loomed over them like a headless, exploded humanoid, arms outstretched in the cold light of the equipment room. The helmet stowed away in its protective case at its side.

“Here, let me help you.” She picked up a glove and the stray pieces from his toolbelt and gave them to Reggie.

Reggie looked up at her, the snake tattooed on his shaved head and around his neck uncoiling. “This thing can’t possibly move out of an orbit like this, can it?”

“Don’t know.” She snapped Reggie’s torso piece into its harness and it slid up on the rails with a bang. “I do know, I don’t want to be anywhere near it if it can.”

Reggie locked the boots into the bindings of his locker. “That’s for sure.” He looked back at Vanessa who was crouched down again, gathering some more tools. She’d been working on getting these suits cleaned and fixed for the past two days and there were parts everywhere. “You still seein’ that girl? What’s her name?”

“Delia. Yes.” She looked at him, her brown eyes narrowing. “That girl.”

“Hey, was just wondering. Never hear you talkin’ about her, is all.” He scratched his head from his seat on the floor, a grin creeping over his face. “I figured if it was serious you wouldn’t shut up about her.”

Vanessa smirked, picking up the stack of tools and carrying them to the drawer. “Just because I don’t talk about her ass all the time doesn’t mean it’s not serious.”

Reggie grinned. “Since you mentioned it, how is her ass, anyway?”

Vanessa tossed a glove at him, barely deflected before hitting him in the face. She made a fist pumping gesture in the air as she bent over towards him. “Here, use that. See ya later, Jack.” She turned and climbed up the ladder towards the galley.

Reggie was still grinning as she climbed up, watching her go.
 

024

Calypso.

“Engine’s running hot, Captain. Got an orange light in the core.” Carl was grinding his teeth. His jaw hurt.

Captain Edson Franklin checked the board, watching the readouts climbing towards dangerous levels. The engine compartment glowed hot behind them on the aft camera. The shaky sensor pod mounted on the edge of the radiation shield gave them a grainy view of the engine module in a sea of noise.

“Five minutes until reactor shut-down.” Edson announced over the intercom. Trigger was in his bunk. Carl sitting beside him in the co-pilot’s seat, his face and neck tight with the strain. They were holding one-point-five gees and none of them were used to it.

“I should be lifting weights in this shit.” Carl said through gritted teeth.

“You’re welcome to try it. I could probably find some lifting for you to do down in the cargo hold.”

On their last pause they’d received the latest package from Lighthouse detailing the object’s new course. It had left Carl more than a little shaky. Ben said nothing during Edson’s walkthrough of Ortega’s explanation.

“I knew it! It’s gotta be aliens!” Carl had exclaimed after Edson showed them the perfect S-curve course correction the bogey had made, retargeting itself towards them on their new plan.

That was nearly an hour ago. Edson checked the clock on his console, the count-down to engine shut-off was running. “Thirty seconds until engine stop. Brace for zero gravity.” He waited, ticking off the seconds in his head until the ten second mark. He read the count-down aloud over the intercom until the engine wound down with a thump, leaving everyone weightless again.

Something clattered around in the cabin below. Edson looked over at Carl. “You mind taking a look at that?”

Carl was recovering from the shock of zero gravity and nodded at the captain, unbuckling himself. He looked annoyed, Edson thought. “It’s probably just something came loose in one of the drawers down there. But I’ll check it.”

Edson watched Carl float to the hatch and down. When he had the cockpit to himself, Edson brought up the video from Watchtower again and ran through it, frame by frame. Was that dark object what they were running from? What was that second flash? He took a sip from the now cold bulb of tea he had beside his seat in its webbing. Grimaced at the bitter liquid. He loaded the plot of the object’s S-curve. It was impossibly perfect. None of their navigation systems could execute something like that. Even if they knew what kind of propulsion it was using. It gave him the chills.

It was probably his turn to cook dinner. Might as well let the ship cool off for a couple of hours. He locked his console, tightened the controls down and slid them to the sides with a bang. He unhooked himself from his seat and floated up, the ribbon lighting strung along his console’s edges illuminating him from below as he floated to the ladder and grabbed a rung.