Damocles (3 page)

Thousands lost their lives, including Aaronson’s husband. Earthers and colonials reeled at the horror, but the International Space Commission reacted decisively. Leveraging the worlds-wide outrage, they pressed for and received expedited funding for the controversial mission.

Despite the uncertainty of the coordinates and the overwhelming probability that the mission would be one-way, a staggering number of officers applied to join the
Damocles
. The physical demands of such a trip were easily met by most fliers; it was the psychological profiling that thinned the herd. Wagner knew he needed men and women who weren’t looking for glory, who weren’t afraid of isolation, who hungered for discovery, and, most importantly, could say good-bye to whomever or whatever they would be leaving behind.

Even before deep sleep, even before launch from Hyperion, the pressure of the mission had bound the crew together. Knowing at least a third of your species was praying for you to fail hardened a lot of rough edges among them. Each member of the
Damocles
crew had his or her own reason for being out here,
for shedding light on the truth of their existence. Haters and jeerers and doubters were as far from them now as the believers, the optimists, and the supporters.

Out here, the only signs of Earth and Earth-sourced humanity were the signs they had brought with them. Photographs and recordings, the Gro-Walls, and their own bodies were the only proof Earth had ever existed. Now they orbited another planet with another humanity and another set of beliefs about their own uniqueness. They drifted in silence above the yellowed atmosphere of the multisunned planet, listening and spying, trying to decode the culture and determine the best way to make contact. They all knew it could take months to bridge the gap between their worlds. It could take years to untangle the language and culture and technology, and they all knew that after all that untangling, it might only result in a humanity so violent and xenophobic that contact would result in their deaths. And if that was the verdict, if the collective intellect of the
Damocles
’s crew determined from the tonnage of evidence being gathered that contact couldn’t be made, they knew that they would retreat from orbit, shut the ship’s extraneous systems down, and go back into deep sleep. They would go on to the next planet and the next and the next until they either contacted another human race or ran out of resources.

This is what all six of them had signed on for, and now, buried in their respective data streams, they all knew in their hearts they’d made the right decision. They welcomed the work, they reveled in the discovery, and they settled in for the months of work they knew awaited them.

Then Prader got on the loudspeaker from the engine room and spoke the first sentence Meg had ever heard her utter without profanity. “Listen up, people. We have forty-eight hours to get off this ship.”

“Right there.” Po pointed a fat finger at the blurry magazine photo. “The Roana Temple. There have been multiple reports of sightings, unexplained tidal changes, dead fish floating up in masses. But the news doesn’t report it, and why?”

“Because dead fish are ugly?” Hark nudged Loul in the ribs with a laugh. Hark and Loul might have some out-there ideas about aliens and government conspiracies, but their buddy Po put them both to shame. Po ignored their laughter as he always did and flipped through the wrinkled, glossy pages.

“And here too, look. This guy right here got fired from his job with Search and Rescue because he made an official statement about unearthing the remains of a craft that could not have been manufactured on Didet. He saw the ship himself when they were clearing up a supposed helicopter crash just six miles from another archaeological dig.” Po’s face flushed with its usual urgency as he slammed the magazine shut and reached for his laptop. “And that’s nothing compared to this.”

Loul spoke around the last bite of his lunch. “You know you’re going to have to listen to the rest of this alone, right?” Hark rolled his eyes as Loul swept crumbs off the table. “I have to
get to work in twenty minutes.” He tossed his napkin toward the huge garbage nets hanging against the wall of the social center. As always, he missed, and as always, he ignored the sign posted over the net to not leave trash on the ground.

“Not until you see this!” Po spun the screen around to show them a map of the northern hemisphere sprinkled with red and orange dots. “Look at this. Do you know what this is?”

“Yeah, Po,” Loul said. “I work in Weather, remember? I recognize our own continent.”

“Do you? Do you? Do you?” Po’s head nodded at his own question, and Hark had to stifle a laugh. The three of them had been friends since kinderschool, and they knew that once Po started talking in sets of three, he was really working himself up. “Well then, bright boy, guess what those marks are? You don’t know, do you? I do. I do. I do.”

“I’m on the edge of my seat, buddy.”

“Communication interruptions.” Po slammed his hands down on the table.

Loul stared at him for a moment, judging just how far he could push his high-strung friend. “I don’t mean to burst your bubble, Po, but we have a dozen of those a day all over the continent. It’s called obsolescence. Our satellites haven’t been updated since before we were born. They break down. A lot.”

“Not like this. Not like this. Not like this.”

Hark leaned in on his elbow. “I think Po’s trying to tell you that they don’t break down like this. Not like this. Not like this.”

Po shoved him with both fists. “Shut up, you wad, and listen to me. Since the Zobos twins went off the horizon, there has been a systematic level of interference on the multiple broadcast frequencies all over the globe. And not just video. Independent webcasts, terrestrial radio, cable, and vidaphone. And not just in our hemisphere and not just randomly. Look.” He brought
up another screen. “Here The Searcher has documented levels of interference in electronic broadcasts that aren’t random, natural, or solar-based. Documented. Documented—”

“Documented,” Loul finished for him. “Gotcha. But you know, The Searcher also swears that the Roana Temple is secretly visited by the superbeings that live under the volcanoes in the Ketter Sea.”

A feminine voice broke in over the noise of the social center. “Oh no, you all aren’t talking about the volcano creatures again, are you?”

Loul felt his face flush as Reno Dado, Po’s cousin, settled in at the table across from him. She smiled at him and Hark and then nudged her cousin with her shoulder. Loul tried not to be too obvious as he watched the light play off the gold necklace that twisted just so across the smooth expanse of skin underneath her jaw or the way the violet of her overblouse set off the slightly rosy tone of that skin. She didn’t look up as he tried and failed not to stare. Instead she spun Po’s computer around to see the screen.

“What is this?” She squinted at the screen. “Nonsolar textural interspatial…what the hell are you all looking at?”

Loul shook his head, floundering for words the way he usually did in Reno Dado’s presence. Po jumped in before he could think of anything to say. “The interference. The communication interference. It’s happening all over. Disrupting communication all over the—”

“I’ve heard.” She laughed at Po’s shocked face. “Hey, you’re not the only one who reads the news, although you’re probably the only one who starts with The Searcher for your headlines.” She swiped a chip from Hark’s plate, and Loul wished he hadn’t thrown the rest of his chips away. “We lost three shifts of transactions today at the bank because of some weird interference in the
wire system. The tech guys couldn’t explain it, but it did let me get out of there early. Anyone want to go to a movie?”

“I’ll go,” Hark said, and then bit back the groan of pain as Loul’s foot drove into his ankle. “Oh no, I can’t. Sorry, I forgot I had to get back to the warehouse for inventory.” He looked to Loul be sure his excuse was good enough to spare him another painful kick. When he saw the flush on his friend’s cheeks, he kept the chatter up. “And of course Loul’s got to go back to work too, right?”

“Yeah. Back.” Loul resisted the urge to crawl under the table and hide from his own brilliant eloquence. He brightened a little, though, at Reno Dado’s disappointed frown.

“Aw shoot. That just leaves me with you, Po, and no, you don’t get to pick the movie.” She shouted down his protest. “I’m serious. We’re not sitting through another alien movie, and I’m not playing Circle with you.”

Loul prayed that Po wouldn’t bring up the game they were halfway through. Even though he loved meeting his buddies at the social center on their off shifts and even though he threw himself into the role-simulating game with as much enthusiasm as any of the others, he didn’t need Reno Dado to see him as any bigger of a geek than she already saw him. Hark especially knew what a crush he had on her, so Loul felt he had to work doubly hard to not make an idiot of himself in front of her. So far, his record wasn’t great.

Fortunately, the bell for the fourth shift sounded. “That’s my cue,” he said, pushing back from the table. He braced himself on his knuckles as he spoke to Reno Dado. “I’m off at tenth shift if you’re going to be around. We could get something to eat or something or, you know.”

She tilted her head in a way that showed off the rose-tinted skin beneath her jaw that made it hard for him to make out her
words. “I’m heading to my parents’ place at twelve to help get ready for the holiday. Maybe next round? Loul?”

It was Hark’s turn to kick, and he did so with power, snapping Loul from his reverie. “Yeah, yeah. Okay. Next round. See you here. I’ll be here. I come here usually for most of my off shifts.” He tried in vain to stop talking as he backed away from the table. “Because, you know, we have this booth and we’re usually here, so yeah, next round, I’ll see you and…”

He didn’t know exactly how long it took him to stop babbling as he backed his way through the crowded aisle of the social center, but he was pretty sure he was out of Reno Dado’s hearing range before he stopped talking. Someone grumbled at him when he bumped into a booth, and he felt his cheeks burning red as he hurried out to the street. Now that the Zobos twins were off the horizon, the North Sun shone red and warm, no doubt matching his blush as he hurried back to the satellite office. He felt his phone buzzing in his pocket and fumbled it open. It was a text from Hark.

“Could be worse,” the message read. “You could have fallen on your ass.”

“Thanks, buddy,” Loul muttered to himself, shoving the phone back into his pocket. He had two shifts ahead of him monitoring storms over the Attar Mountains. Two shifts to relive in great detail another brilliant example of looking like a dork in front of Reno Dado. He tried to comfort himself that at least she wouldn’t be there after his shift, so he couldn’t make it any worse. He pushed open the door to his office building and swiped his ID card against the scanner. Some days, he figured, all you could hope for was for things not to get worse. That’s when two thickset guards stepped in front of him.

“Loul Pell?” the thicker of the two really thick men said to him. “Come with us.”

Trying to comprehend syntax at five g’s was not advisable, Meg knew as she bit down on the mouthpiece and let herself be shoved into the molded chair, but she couldn’t stop herself. What might very well have been a four-year job had been shortened to forty-eight hours when it turned out that the last set of alarms from the engine room could not be ignored by any of them. While the rest of the crew had been throwing themselves into the massive amounts of data streaming in from the drones, engineering officer Prader had been unraveling a complicated series of misfires snaking through the life-support system of the
Damocles
.

The first sign had been the Gro-Walls. Only 80 percent of the genetically modified vining plants had sprouted after stasis. That percentage alone wasn’t unusual. Everyone knew Gro-Walls always had a dead spot or two in them. Meg hadn’t paid a bit of attention to the wilted patch of vines that had spread over her bunk in the weeks they’d orbited the planet. Some sprouts just didn’t survive. The rest of the wall had been fine, tiny white flowers opening and quickly turning into the dense purple-pod beans that tasted like boiled peanuts. The Gro-Walls reminded Meg of the hyacinth beans that used to grow along the fencing of her childhood home. Of course, the hyacinth beans hadn’t been genetically modified to mature in less than a week in deep space, and the beans themselves had not contained a balanced mix of protein and amino acids to sustain human life. But, Meg assured herself with a petty Earth bias, Gro-Walls weren’t as pretty as hyacinth beans.

Pretty or not, the Gro-Walls did more than supply ready living food for emergencies. They also filtered the air, helped recycle water through the root system that was engineered to integrate into the ship’s plumbing system, and acted like a deep-space
version of a canary in a coal mine. If anything disrupted or tainted the atmosphere in the ship, the Gro-Walls’ leaves had been designed to change color according to the chemicals affecting them. When the Gro-Walls near the engine room turned red, Prader had sworn. When they’d turned red in the kitchenette and yellow at the navigation system, Prader had kicked the panel to the central wiring system so hard she’d had to take it down. When the Gro-Walls around the edges of the observation window turned black and fell to the floor, Prader had gotten quiet.