Fiction River: Moonscapes (2 page)

Nearing the end of her long journey, the starship plunged toward one of the bright pinpricks of light, coming in high and steep. Only one of these suns mattered to Saxon. One sun. One world.

And one moon.

“I’m glad you came,” he whispered.

“Me, too,” she said, slurring the words.

“Glad,” he said. “And surprised.”

At first she said nothing and he thought he’d lost her to slumber, but something must have penetrated her sleep-addled mind, because after a minute she said, “What?”

They were close enough that he could see the system primary, a star with the artless name of HD 209458. The sun was a twin to Earth’s sun, a golden sphere speckled with granules of orange, cherry-bright flames ringing its disk, great molten loops of fire sculpted by powerful magnetic fields arcing across its surface.

“All that time in cold storage,” he said. “A thousand years out and another thousand back. Nothing but you and me. And who knows what it’ll be like when we get back to Earth? You never really
wanted
to come.”

Now she placed her hand on his chest and pushed back slightly, looking up at him. He could feel her eyes on him.

But he didn’t look back at her. The planet had come into view, close enough to the star to kiss.

The world was a monster, bigger than Jupiter, a gas giant colored methane-green and banded with the chocolate-dark stripes of hydrogen sulfide and thin cream filigrees of water ice. A great red eye watched them from the southern hemisphere. The planet’s official name was HD 209458b, but everyone called it Osiris.

After the Egyptian god of the underworld.

It was a hot jupiter, a gas giant circling improbably close to its primary. In the case of Osiris, it orbited only 7 million klicks from its sun, only one-eighth the distance that Mercury lay from Earth’s sun. A long, cometary tail stretched out from the gas giant, extending a quarter-million kilometers into space, its star ripping its atmosphere away.

A mother murdering her child.

“I
love
you,” she said, an undercurrent of hurt in her voice, hurt and
pleading
.

He knew she wanted him to say, “I love you, too.”
Expected
him to say it.

Instead he said, “Do you?”

“I do,
of course
I do. Why else would I have come with you, spent two thousand years of my life, if I didn’t love you?”

“That,” said Saxon, “is an excellent question.”

Now he did look down at her and he saw she was angry, her eyes burning with blue fire. It made her lovelier still, the blush of color in her cheeks, even with her black hair simultaneously sticking up and matted to her skull. He’d never known another woman more beautiful.

“How old are you?” he asked.

She peered at him, trying to understand where he was going. “One-ninety subjective,” she finally said.

“So you’re telling me that I mean more to you than any man you’ve been with in the last couple centuries?”

“Yes, that’s what I’m telling you.”

“What about Charlie Fowler?”

Her body stiffened. He knew she was thinking hard, thinking
fast
.

“H-how did you—”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said.

Before launch she’d gone back to Earth, to Maine, to visit her family one last time. Even though she’d been half a solar system away, Saxon had been watching her. Had known it when she had slipped.

“I’m thinking if you really loved me you wouldn’t have been so quick to jump into bed with Charlie Fowler.”

Guilt and pain flickered across her face. She masked both with anger.

She jumped out of bed, turned her body away from him, grabbed for a dark blue robe of shimmering silk. She shrugged into the garment with quick, jerky movements.

“You were
spying
on me?” she snarled, turning back to him.

“Come on. You’re not the injured party here.”

And just like that the anger was gone, flashing away like a sliver of ice dropped on a hot griddle. Her face twisted into something grief-stricken and desperate. “I’m sorry, Saxon. I’m so sorry. I was just so lonely. Charlie—He was from a time in my life—college—when the whole universe seemed to be open to me and I guess I needed—” She shook her head helplessly. “I was just so lonely,” she whispered.

“Lonely, because you don’t love me.”

“Lonely, because of the long journey.”

“You never wanted to come.”

“I’m trying, Saxon. I’m trying to work things out with you.”

“Trying to love me is not the same thing as loving me.”

Two roses bloomed high on her cheeks and that long, graceful neck flushed red. She awkwardly held the robe closed, the silk bunched up in her clenched fist. “If you knew, why did you let me come with you? Why didn’t you tell me? Why did you make me come all this way and
then
—”

She couldn’t finish.

“You betrayed me,” he shot back, “but I still wanted you with me.”

She took an angry step toward him. “Then why couldn’t you keep your ugly little secret to yourself? Why did you have to rub my face in it?”

He glanced past her and suddenly he saw the moon. He stood up and went to look at it, unconcerned with his nakedness, unconcerned with Monica seething behind him.

Most gas giants commanded fleets of moons, but not hot jupiters. It was too easy for a stray asteroid to be caught in the powerful eddies of gravitational force that swirled between sun and world, too easy for a candidate moon to be swallowed up by one behemoth or the other.

But, inexplicably, this hot jupiter
did
have a moon, a burnt and blistered body the size of Mars, orbiting close-in.

It was the moon, the battered little world they were calling Horus, that would answer so many questions about the mysterious hot jupiters.

“Saxon.
Saxon
. Are you even listening? Why did you do this to me?”

Reluctantly he turned back to her. “Because it’s the truth, Monica. It’s the truth.”

“
The truth
.” She spat the words out. “There is more to human existence than your precious truth.”

He shook his head. “Truth is the engine that runs the universe. There is nothing else.”

“You are one cold son of a bitch,” she said bitterly. “Maybe
that’s
why I don’t love you.”

“That hurts,” he said. “But at least it’s true.”

“Truth is a blade,” she said savagely. “One day you will cut yourself with it just like you cut me today.”

Her words hung there for a moment, but
only
a moment, before the pregnant silence was sliced open by the shriek of bells and alarms, sirens and klaxons,
Pravda
crying for help in a thousand panicked voices.

***

Saxon ran for the bridge, pulling on a pair of navy coveralls as he went. The starship shuddered, knocking him to his hands and knees. He scrambled to his feet, only to be knocked down again, a stuttering palsy running through the vessel’s deck. Beneath the crying alarms, he heard an ominous rumble and then the moan of steel under stress, bending, straining,
deforming
.

Disbelief filled him, but disbelief threaded through with terror.

What the hell is going on?

He fought his way to his feet and staggered forward in the shaking passageway, his outstretched hand braced against the nearest bulkhead as the ship tried to buck him off. The terrible vibration throbbed in his flesh and buzzed in his teeth.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and looked back.

Monica was behind him, her face the color of chalk. “
We’ll never make the bridge!
” she shouted.

He could barely hear her over the din.

A loud
crash
filled the passageway as some unsecured piece of equipment smashed itself against the deck, shattering like a decanter fashioned from cut-glass crystal.

“
Shuttle!”
he shouted back.

She nodded vigorously, her eyes very wide.

He stumbled down the passageway, collided with a spacetight hatch, jerked the striker arm down. The plate-steel hatch flew open and slammed against the bulkhead with a hard
clang
. Saxon pushed into the space, but not before the hatch swung back and slammed into his shoulder. Crimson agony lanced through his back and he found himself on the deck. He scrambled up and fought his way into the left-hand chair, quickly pulling the five-point safety restraint down over his chest and buckling in.

“
Cut auditory alarms!
” he shouted above the cacophony.

The shriek of the alarms instantly cut out, leaving only the terrible thunder of the ship shaking itself apart.

Monica threw herself into the right-hand chair, a purple-black bruise the size of a fist blooming beneath her right eye.

“
Shipmind
,” she yelled. “
What’s going on?
”

“LOCAL GRAVITATIONAL STRESSES EXCEED SHIP TEST PARAMETERS BY TWENTY-TWO PERCENT,” said a calm male voice.

Saxon scowled. But that’s impossible, he thought.

They couldn’t have inserted close to a planet. The Hot Jupiter Anomaly Mission had thoroughly mapped the system in advance of
Pravda
’s insertion and shipmind would have been continuously updating HJAM’s data with its own observations.

“
Show planned course
,” he shouted.

At once a holoschematic of the Osiris system appeared. A dashed blue line plunged through the system, skimming the planet’s cloud tops in a refueling run before whipping around to settle in a high polar orbit.

“
Now actual course
.”

A gold line appeared, diverging from the dashed blue line, plunging toward the gas giant’s center like an arrow racing toward a bullseye.

“What the hell?” Saxon breathed. He glanced back at Monica.

Her mouth sagged open in shock.

“
We have to course correct
,” he shouted.

She shook her head. “
Delta vee. We don’t have the delta vee
.”

“
But
—”

“
That’s why the refueling maneuver was programmed in the first place
.”

Saxon opened his mouth to argue and then closed it again. She was right, he knew she was right. The long voyage had left the starship almost no fuel to maneuver.

For a moment he watched the gold line inch toward the gas giant.

There was no way to save the starship.

“
Shipmind, is there enough delta vee for shuttle
Veritas
to reach Horus?
”

“YES, ASSUMING CONSTANT GRAVITATIONAL LOADING.”

Saxon blinked. Constant gravitational loading? What the hell did that mean?

“
Plot course,
” Monica shouted.

“PLOTTED.”

“
Launch!
” she bellowed.

A
clang
reverberated through the shuttle’s hull as it detached from its dying mother. There was a second of silence and then the shuttle’s engines kicked in, punching Saxon back into his chair. It was a high-gravity burn, three gees pinning them to their seats as the little vessel raced away from the danger.

Unable to move his head, Saxon had no choice but to stare out the shuttle’s canopy, watching through a red haze as the great, dying world Osiris tore apart his beautiful starship.

***

The little shuttle whose name was just another word for “truth” skimmed over the scarred surface of a moon never before seen by any human being. Despite its novelty, it looked no different from any of a thousand other moons—including the first one, the one that rode Earth’s sky.

Seas of black basalt covered this moon’s ragged face. Its highlands were smothered in gray dust. And everywhere,
everywhere,
craters had been punched into the battered surface.

“The craters,” Saxon murmured. “Do you see the craters?”

Monica shook her head, but didn’t answer. Didn’t look up at him.

“They’re wrong,” he said. “There shouldn’t be so many.”

She flashed him an exasperated look. “Horus is at the bottom of the deepest gravity well in this system. Of course there are craters.”

“But half the time it’s shielded from the debris by the planet. And even when it orbits on the planet’s night side a meteor strike is unlikely. The odds of an asteroid plunging in and hitting the moon instead of the planet or the star—” He shook his head. “It would be like threading a needle every time. There should be some, yes, but not nearly this many.”