Close Encounter (3 page)

“He explained that his plan had been to redirect your pod to Mars, and that might have been what he let his people believe,
but
I must have looked like a really attractive option sitting out here all by myself for ten months,” Sean said dryly. “Why not toss a beautiful, endangered woman in my lap? I was fucking patriotic enough to join Space Command and serve for ten years despite the wealth of my family after all.”

“He was always a very good strategist,” Eliza said. “Why didn’t you bring any of this up when I woke up?”

“Our time was short and…” He ran a hand over short, dark brown hair. “Well, I can’t say I’m strictly opposed to playing the hero for a beautiful woman.”

“Thanks.” Eliza relaxed and laid back down on the platform. The scanner swung back over and resumed its duties.

“What were their names?” Sean asked.

“Who?”

“The men who murdered your crew and abandoned the
Columbus
?”

“Dr. Alan Christian and Lt. Commander Eli Felix, but I can assume those names are false.”

“But you know their faces,” Sean murmured. “That is if they haven’t gotten any cosmetic work done, and why would they have? They never expected any of the crew to make it back. How did they explain their return to Mars or Earth?”

“Maybe they had temporary enhancements done,” Eliza theorized. “Maybe they were killed before they could return themselves. None of the evacuation pods
looked
damaged. I checked them because of the rest of the sabotage done to the ship. I was just being paranoid. Maybe they didn’t check the ones they used and they’re out there—somewhere drifting.”

“Maybe, but I wouldn’t count on it,” Sean cautioned. “Someone’s got McAlister worried, and he has four stars on his collar. Men of his rank don’t often appear as rattled as he was on that transmission.”

The scanner disappeared into the ceiling, and she sat back up. “Arti tells me you’re a Sherlock Holmes fan.”

“I’m a fan of mystery and intelligence,” Sean said and leaned one hip against the platform. “We can probably find something a little more comfortable for you to wear than those thin scrubs.”

“Arti did offer me the entire contents of your closet,” Eliza said with a slight quirk of her lips. “But I figured our marriage was a bit too new for clothes sharing.”

“Our courtship was short but epic,” Sean said firmly. “I’ll allow no one else to believe otherwise.” He grinned when she laughed. “Come on then, I’ll review your scans, plan the updates to your implant, and see about a standard set of bio-mods. We’ll get those sent from Jupiter Station. They have a full medical lab over there, so they can manufacture anything I need to get you up to standard. You’ll need a few vaccinations as well.”

“Do I really need biological modification?” she asked as she scooted off the platform and snatched her data-pad off the wall.

“If you want to visit Earth without having to receive cancer treatments, yes. The long-term survival rate without bio-mods on Earth is
zero
. Between nuclear fallout and the biological weapons used during the last stages of the global war—our species hovered on the edge of extinction for nearly eighty years. The last and most significant biological attack happened about six months after your mission left Mars, and the impact of it still lingers over sixty percent of the planet. The bio-domes didn’t keep it out, and if it weren’t for nano-tech and bio-mods, you’d have come home to an empty world and two sparsely populated colonies.”

“I take it Moonbase and Mars are still thriving?”

“Moonbase achieved independence and was recognized as a sovereign nation by the UN Security Council sixteen years ago. Mars Colony remains a joint military/civilian operation, though these days there are more military personnel on the colony than there are civilians. The NAU keeps a tight rein on the colony, and
any
talk of independence is quickly dealt with.”

She made a face but nodded as he guided her out of the medical lab and down a narrow hall. “I have no doubts.”

“This research station is set up to be manned by a crew of one but can easily support up to eight without significant strain on the environmental systems. I receive fresh food from Jupiter Station and only just recently received a supply, so we’re good on that front. That being said, I have enough rations for a year if something catastrophic happened.”

“Have rations improved at all?”

“You’ll survive on them,” Sean said. “That’s about all you can expect. A half dozen people have proposed improvements over the years for the things, but it never seems to go anywhere.”

She laughed. “A half dozen people or you a half dozen times?”

He grinned. “I can’t say I didn’t submit a few ideas. Even nutrition bars would be an improvement over the current ration formulas, which all taste like crème of wheat no matter what the package says.”

“Fantastic. So much for the future having it better.”

“Right.” Sean shrugged. “So basically the habitat area of the station is one floor, and this hall circles around the entire thing. Living quarters, workout room, the medical lab, the kitchen, and the operations center are all here. Below us is engineering, but droids handle most of the station maintenance. I rarely have to go down myself. The top of the station is dedicated to sensors, relays, communication systems, and of course computer processing. There are three super computers on the station, each currently engaged in projects which I’m overseeing. Arti is housed on a server in the command deck but currently has access to everything on the station. He directs repairs, keeps my schedule, and all of that jazz.”

“Does everyone at Teko Solutions have their own personal AI?”

“No, but there is an AI for this station. It is currently hibernating. Arti and I have done this rotation three times since joining Teko Solutions, and the on board AI has hibernated each time. Arti travels with me no matter where I go.”

“He did say he was your brother from another mother,” Eliza admitted and shrugged when Sean glanced at her with a slightly horrified look on his face. “You might want to take him aside and let him know what a secret is.”

“Arti,” Sean complained.

“She is your
wife
, Dr. Cohen.”

“You know there is a Bro Code, and I think you’ve violated it,” Sean said. “This is a serious program failure.”

Eliza just laughed as she followed him into a kitchen area. She slid up onto a stool and put her data-pad on the counter in front of her. “Anything I should read first?”

Sean winced and glanced her way. “Regulations regarding domestic partnerships probably. Apparently, we have to consummate…the marriage.”

She raised an eyebrow in question and wet her bottom lip. “Well, I’d been celibate for nearly three years
before
my mission.”

“With or without a libido inhibitor?” Sean asked, shocked.

“A what?”

“Never mind.” Sean sighed. “Jesus, women are like sexual camels or something.”

“Men, on the other hand, are gluttons. Arti told me all about your sordid past.”

Sean just grinned. “I love to fuck, but I’m a considerate partner, and I have a birth control protocol in place.”

“STDs?” she asked.

He blinked in surprise and paused in his collection of sandwich supplies. “Oh, well, hmm, they eradicated sexually transmitted diseases before I was
born
.”

Her mouth dropped open. “Wha… How old are you?”

“How old do I look?” he asked.

“Not falling for that trick, and I’m completely unwilling to feed your ego.”

“You already told most of the people I know and your commanding officer that I’m smoking hot,” Sean reminded. “The entire crew of the Jupiter Station watched us get married, you know. An edited version of the little ceremony is probably already on Earth being viewed by various powers that be.”

“Including your grandmother.”

“She probably got an unedited version,” Sean said. “She went to high school with the CEO of Teko Solutions, so…there’s that.” He made them both sandwiches in the silence that followed and pushed a plate across the counter toward her. “Eat slowly. There is no telling how your stomach is going to react to food after such a long cryo-sleep.”

“Right.” Eliza stared at the plate for a few seconds. “Your grandmother…is she going to be amused, proud, or furious?”

“A mixture, I can assume. The details of how and why your mission failed will infuriate her. I can’t imagine how many people will suffer her wrath on that front. I get my impulsive, foolish heroic crap from her, so she won’t be angry with me or you for our hasty little marriage of convenience. Amused, obviously, because I vowed on my sixteenth birthday to never, ever get married.”

She snorted and covered her mouth in embarrassment. “Sorry.”

Sean sighed. “How can you still be hot after that?”

“Tits?”

He nodded. “Could be. Eat your sandwich, Captain.”

“Slowly.”

“Very slowly,” he admonished.

Eliza pulled her data-pad close and sighed. “Arti, show me the marriage laws for the NAU. Everything that pertains to our situation.”

Sean let her read in silence and instead focused on the results from the scans he’d done on her nano-bots and implant. The neural implant would have to be replaced, but it was easily done with nanites. He input a few orders manually to get the medical lab set up for the procedure and had Arti set up a production run on reconstruction nanites.

She was basically healthy, but extended cryo-sleep had caused some of her organs to labor far beyond what standard nano-bots could repair. He pinched his nose as he made a list of bio-mods to request that Jupiter Station could create for her. Her heart and kidneys had suffered the most atrophy in cryo-sleep, and it would take standard nano-bots working at a hundred percent at all times to prevent further damage. It wasn’t optimal and would strain the technology to its limits.

“You look upset.”

“The long-term impact of cryo-sleep on the human body isn’t pretty. Frankly, you’re the first person I’ve ever known of to come out of a hundred-year cryo-sleep. There was another mission that the NAU funded about forty years ago, and the entire crew was accidentally left in cryo-sleep for twenty-two years. They all recovered pretty easily.”

“I’m sick.”

“No, nothing like that. Standard nano-bots have a finite skill-set, and the organ atrophy you are experiencing will wear the ones I’ve given you out in just a few years.”

“So the solution?”

“Bio-mods sooner rather than later,” Sean admitted. “Even if I was willing to wait until you were on Earth to give them to you before, I’m not now. To be frank, you couldn’t pass the physical for active duty at this moment.”

“I’m not sure I will remain with Space Command.”

“I honestly don’t recommend it, but that is your call. They might try to compel you to stay with them, but since I’m not a NAU citizen, they’ll have to acknowledge your dual citizenship. The European Union has laws in place to prevent forced service in the military,” Sean said. “They’ll want to debrief you and submit you to truth testing.”

“Truth testing?”

“We’ve come a long way, Eliza,” Sean began. “You won’t be able to lie or mislead them during your debrief. They’ll inject you with a special nano-bot protocol that will tell them when you are being dishonest.”

“So, I won’t be able to lie and say our marriage has been consummated.”

“No.”

She exhaled deeply and finished off her sandwich with a little frown. “Well, there is one good thing.”

“What’s that?” Sean asked.

“You apparently love to fuck.”

He grinned and saluted her with his water bottle.

Chapter Three

“Captain Hawthorne’s location?” Sean asked absently as he continued to review the specs for an atmospheric probe Jupiter Station had manufactured and sent to him.

“She is in the cargo bay sitting on the floor in front of the evacuation pod.” Arti paused. “I believe, Dr. Cohen, that this is where you offer physical comfort.”

“I’m not socially inept,” Sean muttered as he set aside the data-pad he’d been reading and stood up. “How many hours of rest did she get?”

“Just three,” Arti said. “When she woke for the third time, I offered to activate her hibernation protocol, but she was vehemently opposed.”

“I imagine getting her to surrender to a hibernation cycle will be quite difficult,” Sean murmured as he left operations and headed toward the cargo bay.

Eliza was sitting about a foot from the open pod with a small nylon bag in hand. Sean sat down on the floor beside her and took a deep breath. He had no idea what to say to her, no idea how to quantify the loss that she’d suffered. Her crew, her ship, and her place in the scheme of things. She was a hundred years out of her time. Wars had been fought, countries had been created, and technology had made leaps and bounds since her departure from Mars.

“The youngest member of my crew was twenty-two years old,” Eliza murmured. “He was brilliant—they all were—brilliant and brave. They were murdered in their sleep and someone should pay for it.”

“Any speculation as to why you were spared?” Sean questioned.

“I wasn’t,” Eliza said. “My cryo-unit was sabotaged as well. What they didn’t—what no one on the ship knew—was that I didn’t need the unit. I was the only member of the crew with nano-tech and a neural implant. None of the civilians had either, but the military had one or the other. You needed both for unassisted cryo-sleep back then.”

“What’s in the bag?”

“I don’t remember.”

Sean’s eyes widened, and he shifted around on his knees abruptly. He took her face in his hands and tilted her head so that their gazes connected. “What do you mean, you don’t remember? You have memory gaps? How much time do you think you lost?”

“Not gaps…” Eliza took a deep breath and shuddered. “The last day when I was working so hard to get the evacuation pod functional and the ship was burning around me. It’s all a blur. The bag was tucked into the bottom of the pod, and I haven’t opened it.”

He released her and carefully took the bag from her hands. “Arti, have you scanned the contents of the bag?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Are the contents dangerous?”

“Not in the traditional sense, Dr. Cohen, but I’ve learned that nothing is quite so dangerous as information. It appears to be a solid-state hard drive. Such drives would’ve been commonplace on the captain’s ship.”

“Oh.” She relaxed. “Oh.”

“You remember?”

“Yes, of course. I don’t know how I forgot.”

He put the bag on the floor between them and let out a shaky breath. “Well, you’ve had a lot to deal with since you woke up. I think we can give you a break on the memory front.”

“It’s all the ship sensory data from the moment of our launch until about thirty minutes before I evac’d,” Eliza murmured. “It’s…the proof that my crew was murdered. The ship’s computer didn’t interfere, but it recorded every single thing they did while they were on board.”

“Governing computers of the time period were not programmed for free thinking,” Arti supplied neutrally. “The computer on board would’ve been unable to do anything without orders or established protocols.”

“I guess it didn’t occur to the programmer to make sure the ship’s governor could act in the defense of the crew even from other crew members,” Sean said.

“No, agreed,” Eliza murmured. “Such acts are beyond the imagination of most outside the military, and academics are the worst.” She shot him a look and blushed. “Present company excluded, of course.”

He laughed and shrugged. “I can handle weapons, Captain, but even when I was in uniform I was an academic. I never saw combat, never went farther than Armstrong Station until I went to work in the private sector.”

“What is Armstrong Station?” Eliza asked.

“Earth orbital space station funded and operated by the UN Security Council. It is military run and has a very small civilian population, which is regularly rotated out. Most of its operations are classified at an extremely high level.”

“Spying on other nations and black ops,” Eliza said. “I don’t…know that I’m ready for whatever Space Command is up to these days, Sean. I want to explore and learn.” She bit down on her lip and looked at the bag. “Back when I joined up, it was NAU only. How did a citizen of the European Union join up?”

“Space Command is a joint operation of the NAU and EU at this time,” Sean explained. “It’s been that way for about sixty years. The Security Council funds fifty percent of the operation costs in exchange for oversight and world-peace-keeping efforts.”

Eliza nodded. “Arti, can you make a copy of the data on this hard drive? I don’t think it’s wise to leave it only in one place.”

“I am unable to access it wirelessly, Dr. Cohen. It’ll need to be plugged into a compu-station for analysis.”

Sean shook his head. “No way. What if… Just no. Is there an option that does not leave you or the Stooges at risk?”

“Stooges?” Eliza asked with a confused frown. “Who are the Stooges? I was told we were alone on this station.”

Sean grinned. “The three super computers up top,” he explained with a jerk of his thumb. “We call them Larry, Mo, and Curly.” He offered a stern look. “If you don’t know who they are, I’m afraid it spells disaster for the fate of our marriage.”

“Why?” Eliza asked. “Why are men so…enamored with three grown men who physically abused each other on a regular basis? It makes no sense.” She poked him in the chest to emphasize her point.

“I don’t have the time to explain the complexities of my manhood to you,” Sean answered wryly. “Just…take me as I am, and I’ll do you the favor of doing the same.”

She inclined her head. “All right, Dr. Cohen, you have yourself a deal.”

“Excellent, Mrs. Cohen.” He stood and offered her his hand, which she took with a startled look on her face. “What?”

“You… I’m… Who says I’m going to take your name? You caveman!”

Sean shrugged and snatched the hard drive off the floor. “Arti, options?”

“We can isolate one of the unused data-pads from the network so you can run tests on the drive to make sure it hasn’t been corrupted by the data the captain downloaded. I’ll upload several anti-viral programs to a data-pad to prepare for the extraction. It is doubtful that anything programmed that long ago would have any impact on my systems, sir. If a computer virus was let loose on the
Columbus
, it was designed for the ship’s systems specifically, and the likelihood of compatibility between a hundred-year-old military-grade system and
me
is so small as to be utterly impossible.”

“Arrogance is
ugly
, Arti,” Sean said as he motioned his wife out of the room ahead of him. “No more moping over your escape pod. It’s creepy, and I’ll have to suggest a psych-eval on you if you keep shit like that up.”

“And it would be doctor,” Eliza protested. “I have a doctorate.”

“Dr. Eliza Hawthorne-Cohen?”

She huffed. “A hyphen? That’s probably pretentious.”

“Nah, it’s very fashionable these days. Twenty or so years back, there was this whole feminist movement about women reclaiming their role as a wife and mother while maintaining their social and intellectual individuality in marriage. It’s all the rage.”

“I really don’t care about fashion…. You know I only had those cosmetic enhancements because the PR people for the Kepler mission forced me to, right? They also did a hair enhancement to cover my gray hair. It’s ridiculous.”

“I’m sure your gray hair was stunning,” Sean soothed as he gently pushed her into a chair in the operations center and sat down with the drive as a data-pad slid out of a slot on the station in front of him.

“How old are you?”

Sean looked over at her and found her frowning at him. It was a cute, pouty sort of frown that he figured many women had to practice to accomplish, but it looked utterly natural on her full mouth. “Forty-two. The average lifespan of a human being these days is 347 for women and 338 for men without hibernation protocols and cryo-sleep. Women often choose to be reproductive well into the middle 200s. Due to birth defects and catastrophic mutations following the last nuclear detonation, many in my parents’ generation are functionally sterile. Though that won’t matter much in the future—a company in the EuroDome recently unveiled the first fully functional artificial womb. They are gestating animals at this point—species on the brink of extinction. It’s controversial in some religious circles, but for the most part the technology is a dream come true for a lot of childless couples.”

“Do your parents plan to have more children?” Eliza asked.

“Not that I’m aware of, but I’ve never asked.” Sean shrugged when she raised an eyebrow at him. “Look, myself and all of my siblings were immaculate conceptions, and my parents don’t fuck. Period. I won’t hear otherwise.”

She laughed. “You poor thing.”

Sean scowled at her and returned his attention to the hard drive in the bag. He pulled it free and turned it over in his hands several times. “We’re going to need a
cable
, Arti.”

“There is nothing compatible on the station, Dr. Cohen. We’ll have to add a wireless module to the device.”

“Ah.” Sean stood and crossed the room. He rummaged quickly through a drawer that slid out of the wall and dropped several pieces of equipment into a pocket on his flight suit before pulling a small box out of another drawer. He carried his haul back over to his work station.

“What’s that?”

“Tool box,” Sean murmured. “It’s honestly a bit beyond my scope. I only took a few mechanical classes when I was pursuing my bio-engineering degree. In fact, I learned more working out here about that sort of engineering than I did during my time at the university.”

She stood up and joined him at the console. “Let me… Maybe I should do it then.”

“You’re about a hundred years out of date,” Sean reminded.

“Still, I know more about the hard drive than you do.”

“But nothing about the wireless relay.”

“Together then,” Eliza murmured and slid right into his lap. She grinned as he pulled the chair closer to the station and propped his chin on her shoulder to watch her work. She removed the screws, holding the back of the hard drive into place first, and opened the casing. “Okay.”

“We’ll want to connect the wireless relay to the output.” Sean reached around her and grabbed the relay. He pulled the casing apart so the components were revealed. “It won’t be an exact fit. There is a soldering iron in the tool box if you need it for the hard drive.”

“Right.”

“Why isn’t this wireless?” Sean asked. “Wi-Fi isn’t exactly new.”

“No,” Eliza agreed as she arranged the parts. “We had plenty of wireless storage on board, but this was… I didn’t have a lot of time to think, honestly, and I knew a solid-state drive would last longer. I mined a lot of data, so it was also a matter of how much space I needed. None of the tablets on board would have held it all, and most of them were slaved to the ship’s governor. They would’ve literally died the moment the ship’s computer did. It was a security measure. The pads couldn’t be removed from the ship either.”

“Makes sense,” he murmured as his hand dropped to her hip. He curled his fingers around and held her steady on his thigh as she turned on the soldering iron. “My grandmother says that humanity’s real enslavement is to technology. A lot of people on Earth go on and on about repopulation and the extinction of our species and the Ice Age. They call our planet a prison of our own making.”

“It is,” Eliza said. “But it was long before I left, perhaps even before I was born. The
new
Ice Age didn’t happen overnight. It was coming for literally decades, and we did nothing until resources started to disappear and living became too expensive for everyone. People started to fight over land, over fresh water, over glacier rights, and finally over the right to live. War was inevitable.” She hissed and jerked her hand back.

He caught her wrist before she could stick her burned finger in her mouth. “Don’t. Just give it a few seconds—there is no need to add insult to injury. Your bots will handle it more quickly if you don’t contaminate the wound with germs from your mouth.”

Eliza turned in his lap and frowned at him. “It would hurt less.”

“I thought all you space commando girls were fierce. Is this your war face? I have to say…I’m not at all intimidated.” He grinned when shock flickered over her face. “Besides, your finger has already stopped hurting.”

“Yeah.”

He released her wrist and merely raised one eyebrow when she didn’t turn back to the work. “The wonders of modern science.”

Eliza’s gaze flicked briefly to his mouth, and she leaned in. “I hope I’m not taking you from your work.”

“I’ve finished the bulk of my assignments for this rotation,” Sean admitted. “I’ve been working on a few pet projects and monitoring the data collection from the moon’s surface.”

“Right.” Eliza turned her attention back to the hard drive. “Okay, talk to me about the transponder.”

“The circuits are suspended in an inert gel that’s very similar to the circuit boards you are used to. Military technology was already moving into gel components for their systems when you left due to the fact that an EMP is useless against gel-based technology.”

“Nice,” Eliza murmured. She used a pair of tweezers from the kit to lift the slim, firm block of gel from the transponder. “This has nanites in it, right?”

“Right, so once you place it in the hard drive, the nanites should marry to the device. They are programmed for a specific duty, but if the embedded protocols fail, Arti can prod them in the right direction.”

“I saw reports on this technology and several other projects before I left Mars. The scientists on the projects said it would be two hundred years before it was available to the public sector if not longer.”