Far Space (16 page)

Jennifer came close to Ian. Standing toe to toe, she said, “So, you’re like the newest member of the Special Forces team?”

“Well,” Ian said, shrugging. “Yeah, I guess I am.”

“That is so hot.”

Ian’s wrist display beeped. He ignored it, staring in Jennifer’s green eyes until it beeped a second time. His lips close to Jennifer’s Ian said, “I have the watch for the next eight hour shift.”

“Too bad,” Jennifer said as she brushed a finger over Ian’s lips. She gave Ian a quick kiss. “Congratulations sailor.” She turned and walked back to the ladder-way swinging her hips. She looked back over her shoulder before climbing up. “Try to keep you mind on work.”

“Right,” Ian breathed as he watched Jennifer climb until she disappeared up the ladder.

Right. Turning back to the dark suit, Ian muttered, “And what do you think of all this?”

The black suit did not answer. “Yeah, I’m not sure what to think of it either.” Ian turned and hurried up the access ladder. Maytree would be even grumpier than usual if he were late relieving her.

USS Cheyenne

Entering Saturn Space

“There it is,” Mitchell said. As the weapons officer aboard the Cheyenne, he also controlled several drones flying in formation about the spacecraft. One of these drones, launched five days ago, was far ahead of the still breaking Cheyenne and had gotten an up-close image of the alien ship. He routed the data stream to the main monitors.

“Looks dead in the water,” Colonel Yates noted. “Whatever damage we did back at Earth did the trick to keep it here in local space.”

Mitchell tapped a few keys. “Only slightly elevated levels of radiation compared to background. Whatever they’re using for power is off-line.”

“I’d sure like to know how they get enough oomph to open up a wormhole,” Pearl said, staring at one of the screens. “They must be able to generate massive amounts for raw energy.” The Cheyenne crew had fed Ian and Jennifer’s initial theory of wormhole travel back to specialists on Earth. The theory had been expanded and the events studied in greater detail. There were some other competing theories, but the ‘Wormhole Insertion’ theory still seemed the most likely.

“Well, we’ll find out one way or another tomorrow,” Yates said. “The thing hasn’t moved in over three months. I’m pretty sure it’ll be there when we finally chuck Langdon and the SOF guys over.”

There were some snickers from the rest of Cheyenne’s bridge crew.

Ian did not laugh. He was still studying the image on the screen. The mottled ship looked just like it had when he had seen it up close on his fall to Earth. Only this time mighty ringed Saturn served as its backdrop instead of his home world.

“Why didn’t they come back for it?” Ian wondered aloud.

Everyone looked toward the co-pilot station.

Ian, by far the youngest member of the crew, blushed slightly at the attention. He did his job and did it well. But he was hardly asked his opinion while the more experienced pilot, Captain Maytree, was there with him. This was the case today since they were making their final orbital insertion burn.

“What I mean is,” Ian hurried on, turning to look back at the other stations, “why didn’t the other ships come back looking for Six? You know, some kind of rescue mission.”

“When we hit it,” Mitchell said, shrugging, “there were some large and unusual energy readings.”

“Maybe they thought the ship was destroyed,” Pearl said.

“Acceptable losses,” Yates mused.

Ian, surprised his simple question had gotten the entire bridge crew into a thoughtful mode, added, “Don’t you think they were able to get off some sort of emergency message?”

“Or,” Pearl began and rubbed his chin, “the other little green men didn’t know where the ship ended up.”

“But, how can they use wormholes if they don’t know where they come out?” Reeves jumped in.

“I’ve been following the wormhole thing,” Pearl said. “A few buddies of mine have been slugging it out on-line with their theories. One of them thinks the Jupiter wormholes attach to some other star system. They say the mass of Jupiter is great enough to attract the ends of them. He also thinks there may be wormholes which only stretch through our own solar system. Given those assumptions, Six would seem to have entered a wormhole in near-earth orbit and been deposited out at Saturn.”

“Why would they want to go there if the wormholes back to where they came from are out at Jupiter?” Reeves asked.

“Their ship was damaged and they were just trying to retreat,” Mitchell suggested.

“They probably were more interested in escape than where it would take them,” Ian said, thinking back to his own experience. “Sometimes you just have to jump.”

“Langdon,” Pearl said, going back to his console, “did I ever tell you how insane I think you are?”

“No,” Ian said.

“You’re insane,” Pearl said again. Turning back to the topic of Six, he said, “They must have been hurt bad if they couldn’t just turn around and book it back to Jupiter and their entrance wormholes.”

“So, there may be wormholes all over our solar system,” Ian mused, thinking of the implications.

“Yeah,” Pearl said, “and the green guys who know how to use them can’t always tell where they end up. You could probably just as easily end up next to a supernova as a planet.”

“There’s an interesting nav problem,” Reeves said. “Maybe smaller planets have most of the inter-system holes and the bigger planets have the extra-system ones.”

“True,” Pearl said. “If that’s true for Jupiter, it’d certainly be true for Saturn.”

“With the right wormhole, they might be able to show up here just as easily as Jupiter,” Ian said.

Mitchell met Ian’s gaze and held the young officer’s stare. “Then we’d better pray they don’t decide to make a second appearance. We got lucky once, I’m not sure we’d be so lucky a second time.”

“What’s your other friend’s theory?” Ian asked.

“He thinks we should do what the Cohou said,” Pearl said, his mouth turning down in a frown. “Forget all this space travel stuff and keep everyone on the surface.” Pearl paused and rubbed his chin. “Never did like that guy.”

Maytree had command of the controls for the final braking approach which would put the Cheyenne into an orbit exactly matching the alien craft’s around Saturn, except offset by five kilometers. Thanks to the wonder of orbital mechanics, the Cheyenne would circle around the alien vessel each time they completed one complete orbit of the ringed planet, which at this distance would take approximately fourteen hours. The orbit, known as natural motion circumnavigation, or NMC, took advantage of the differences in speed which would occur as the Cheyenne sped near its perigee inside the other ships orbit. Cheyenne would then pass in front of the vessel at ninety degrees argument of perigee, slowing as it approached the apogee of its orbit, now outside the orbit of the alien vessel and speed up again, and passing directly behind the other ship at 270 degrees argument of perigee. Cheyenne would end up directly below the alien ship when it completed one orbit and then perform another NMC all over again.

While the Cheyenne pilot worked her magic, Ian kept his eyes on the ship’s myriad sensor feeds and tapped into the drone network Captain Mitchell had released. The alien ship had shown no signs of life and appeared to be quite dead in the water, so to speak. There were other bits of debris roughly in the same orbit as the ship. Ian and the rest of the bridge crew had come to the agreement this was probably debris which shook loose from the damaged craft as it passed through the wormhole between Earth and Saturn. Ian was anxious to gather up a few samples to see if any of the material came from his ill-fated elevator car. He had told his story about getting sucked closer to the ship and wondered if anything else had gotten pulled in.

Actually, Ian could not get the image of the space-suited figure, as he was being pulled closer and closer to the alien ship out of his mind. He had not been able to see what had happened to the other elevator jumpers before the blinding flash and disappearance of the alien spacecraft.

Ian pushed the thought of the falling figure from his mind and tried to concentrate on the active radar sweeps of the local region of space.

Something went active two hundred kilometers out from the alien vessel, returning its own RF signal after it got painted by Cheyenne’s.

Ian did a double take. There should not be anything active on the radio frequencies out here. He checked the local catalog. The three ESA probes were on the far side of the planet and the American space probe was trailing behind and above their current orbit. The active signal repeated itself.

Ian did one more check. The Chinese lander on the moon Titan would defiantly be out of alignment for this signal. “Sir, I’ve got something.”

Everyone on the Cheyenne’s bridge looked up.

Not taking his eyes off the reading, which had just repeated itself for the third time, Ian said, “There’s an active signal bearing zero mark ten mark five, two hundred fifteen kilometers.”

“Verified,” Reeves said, double checking the calculations on his nav console.

“Is it from the alien ship?” Yates asked.

“I don’t think so, sir.” Ian studied the wave pattern as it cycled through for a fourth time. “It looks more like an emergency beacon. But it’s very weak.”

“If I may, Commander,” Marsha said.

“Please,” Yates answered the computer.

“I concur with Lieutenant Langdon’s assessment,” Marsha said. “The signal pattern is consistent with emergency beacons used by civil authorities.”

“Crud.” Ian ran his hand over his face. “It’s probably him,” Ian muttered.

“Care to elaborate, Langdon?” Steve Pearl asked from his seat. “You got some friends out here?”

“When I was evacuating from the elevator,” Ian began, “I almost got whacked by the alien ship out there. Right before it jumped, I started getting pulled in by some sort of gravity distortion from the ship. There was also this…” Ian could not say it. He played the scene again in his head. The EERS suited figure being pulled toward the alien ship. The flash. The joy he felt when he found out it had not been Jennifer. “I saw another person from the elevator who had evac’d before me. I think he may have gotten sucked into the wormhole with the other ship.”

“You think that’s the guy?” Captain Maytree asked.

“I hope not,” Ian said. He shuddered; suddenly ashamed he had not taken the time to find out who had escaped the elevator and who the figure may have been.

“Is our orbit stabilized?” Yates asked.

Maytree checked her readings from the inertial navigation system, verifying their desired and actually orbital elements. “Perfect sir.”

“Good. Langdon, grab O’Brian and take one of the shuttles,” Yates said. “See if that’s your man.”

Jennifer was at the airlock with Dr. Imuro three hours later when Ian and O’Brian returned to the Cheyenne from their search and rescue mission. She helped Ian off with his helmet.

“It was someone from the elevator, wasn’t it?” Jennifer asked.

Ian simply nodded and moved aside as Imuro brushed past to check on the suited figure strapped to the floor of the small shuttle.

Jennifer leaned inside the capsule as Imuro managed to break the seal on the dead man’s suit. “It’s definitely one of the EERS suits.” She gasped when she saw the man’s face.

“I’ll need to perform a thorough study,” Imuro said as he probed the man’s frozen skin. “It is not clear how he died. There’s some tissue damage from the extreme cold after his suit systems failed. I’m not sure how he broke his nose, though.”

“I did it,” Ian muttered, not looking at the man’s face again.

“On the way in?” Imuro asked.

“Nah,” O’Brian said, pulling himself from the command seat. “Pilot-boy here seems to have gotten into a fight with the guy as they got off the elevator.”

“It wasn’t like that,” Jennifer said, jumping to Ian’s defense. “That guy was terrified and acting irrational. The only reason he made it off was because Ian knocked some sense into him.”

“Whatever,” O’Brian sniffed. “He won’t be causing any more problems, I guess.”

Jennifer rolled her eyes and exited the shuttle with a smooth flip. She ushered Ian off to the side of the airlock dressing room.

Two Marines pulled themselves past Ian and Jennifer. They had been asked to transport the body to the Cheyenne infirmary. Imuro wanted to perform an examination on the body and try to determine if the man had survived his trip through the wormhole only to die here in the cold darkness of Saturn Space.

“Ian,” Jennifer said, leaning close, “This was not your fault.”

“I know,” Ian said quietly. He shrugged. “I didn’t even know his name. Didn’t even care what his name was, until now.”

“A lot of other people are alive today because of you.” Jennifer squeezed his arm. She emphasized, “I’m alive because of you.”

Ian looked up when the Marines drifted by, pulling and pushing the newly filled body bag along the corridor. “It’s not that,” Ian said. “I just feel…so guilty.”

“Don’t…” Jennifer began.

“I feel guilty because I’m actually glad it was someone else,” Ian interrupted.

“Ian, its okay to be glad you’re alive. It’s only natural.”

“Not me,” Ian said, shaking his head, “you.” He looked up to meet Jennifer’s gaze.

“In that case, I’m glad you were wrong,” Jennifer said.

ST-47A Drop Ship

Saturn Space

Ian looked up and down the cargo section of the ST-47A drop ship. Designed to hold twelve fully armored and armed space combat troops, the bay looked decidedly empty with just seven.

This peculiar ST-47A belonged to the 712
^th
Special Operations Space Wing, or SOSW, US Space Corps. It had shown up at the L5 VAS just in time to be loaded onto Cheyenne for its sprint out to Saturn. The 712
^th
had thought to include a qualified pilot for the mission.

Right now, Ian wondered if he might be better at piloting the SOF drop ship than Captain Chet “Val” Valiant. The man seemed to take delight in performing the most gut wrenching, puke inducing maneuvers possible in the 47A. That was saying a lot since the ship could turn on a dime. The other SOF troops cursed the pilot every time he zigged, zagged, or rolled. At least Ian was not alone in his assessment.