Trang



  TRANG

  by Mary Sisson

  Copyright 2011 by Mary Sisson

  To Beth Trilling

  Every writer should have a friend like you.

  Chapter 1

  August 31, 2113

  It was the greatest event in the history of the space program—quite possibly in the history of Earth. It marked the dawn of the Golden Age of Space, a time when space captured the popular imagination like never before. It was a seminal moment, the kind of watershed event that changes everything afterward.

  But to Wouter Hoopen, general manager of the Titan station, it was just another fuck-up. Another embarrassing, stupid little fuck-up by his station, which was embarrassing him enough as it was.

  As Wouter would later note in his own, very private defense, the timing could not have been worse. He found out about it just as he got back from a weeklong trip to a Space Authority conference on Earth—a conference that was supposed to be a break, a rest from the claustrophobia of the station and the stress of seeing the same damned people every damned day.

  And instead of a vacation, all he had gotten had been variations of the question, What, exactly—? What, exactly, was the Titan station for? What, exactly, could scientists do there that would ever justify its cost? What, exactly, was its purpose?

  Why were people even asking these questions? For God’s sake, there used to be enthusiasm for space exploration, thanks to a charismatic, popular, and now, alas, quite deceased prime minister who spearheaded the construction of the Titan station some 20 years before. And now Wouter was left managing an aging station with a budget set by a gaggle of bean counters in Beijing who didn’t have to live on it and certainly weren’t going to die on it if they didn’t allot quite enough money for maintenance.

  Even among the spacers—and this was where Wouter really felt the knife in his back—fervor for the Titan station had waned. His reception at the conference had been positively chilly. The planetary scientists were saying that actually being on Saturn’s moon was less helpful than one might imagine. Astronomers interested in deep space saw no advantage to the station whatsoever. Nothing living had been found, so the life-science types weren’t even at the conference, having long ago decided that space travel just sucked up their funding.

  The only solid support came from the Malthusians and other catastrophiles, who continued to insist that the dwindling growth of Earth’s population, along with the ever-decreasing levels of pollution emitted by increasingly environmentally friendly industrial technologies, would someday, somehow render the planet uninhabitable. Needless to say, their opinion was hardly mainstream. And when your most ardent backers were wearing “Accept Suicide” buttons, you had a problem.

  Wouter had cashed in every favor and used every connection he had to become manager of Titan Station specifically because he had wanted to stand out from the crowd. Being on Titan, having actually been in space, seemed like the perfect antidote to what he had to admit was an all-too-mediocre resumé as a Space Authority middle manager. But if Titan was mothballed, then what would he do? Given how far the station’s star had fallen, he’d likely wind up back on a cubicle farm, laboring in obscurity until his necessarily modest retirement.

  Worse yet, if there was some kind of disaster—no, he couldn’t even think about that. Even if he survived, he would be a pariah, a deathwatch. There would be investigations, and Wouter was certain that those unimaginative bean counters in Beijing would prove surprisingly creative when it came to shifting blame to the station’s general manager.

  The best-case scenario was this: Things would eke along, with Wouter the head of this marginally useful, greatly resented, shabby little station.

  Dear God. There was no escaping it. He would never be promoted again.

  Wouter had reached this conclusion during his trip back to Titan station, so he was in a very black mood indeed when he arrived. The first thing he was told when he stepped off the ship was that someone had lost a research satellite. At that point he was just about ready to take a calming stroll outside without his suit, or—and this was always the advantage of being general manager—to make someone else take one.

  Instead, he chewed out everyone on the station and demanded a frantic investigation into the satellite’s whereabouts.

  Not that it helped. The satellite, which was doing radio mapping—a project one astronomer at the conference called “typical of the make-work the Space Authority cooks up in its pathetic efforts to justify the existence of that boondoggle”—had vanished. There was no trace of wreckage. There was nothing odd about the satellite’s transmissions or trajectory before it disappeared. It was just gone.

  Wouter’s resulting tantrum was sufficiently dramatic that his staff was still diligently looking for the satellite five days later. It was a lucky thing that they were, because when the satellite reappeared in exactly the same place where they lost it, its trajectory was totally off. Given the busyness of space around Saturn, it probably would have smashed into something if they hadn’t found it as quickly as they had. Wouter’s people tried to fix the satellite’s trajectory remotely, but it had apparently been damaged and was transmitting something that made the computer crash, so they cut off communications and sent out a retriever.

  Using a retriever satellite was always tricky—you had to match trajectories and deploy the grapplers without damaging the target too much, all via remote control—but Wouter’s techs proved up to the job and brought in the research satellite intact.

  And after that great save, did Wouter get one iota of appreciation from the Space Authority? Of course not. Instead, he was ordered to ship that satellite right back to Beijing, where people who were so very much smarter than he was could figure out what went wrong.

  The station still had its records, though, so Wouter sent the incident data to everyone’s file, just to see if his people couldn’t show up those smug SA bastards a little.

  They didn’t disappoint. The next day, when Wouter entered the grubby cafeteria, he saw two of his techs laughing over some of the data.

  “What’s so funny?” Wouter asked, sitting gingerly in one of the chairs. It had been fashionable, and perhaps even comfortable, when it had been installed 20 years before.

  “Oh, see, it’s like a joke,” said the first tech, Manuel.

  “It’s a computer joke—a computer-language joke,” said Edmary, the other. “See this?”

  He pointed at some data on his scroll.

  Wouter recognized it. “That’s what the satellite was broadcasting when it reappeared,” he said.

  “Yeah, someone was goofing,” said Edmary.

  “It explains why the computer went haywire,” said Manuel.

  “I think it does,” Edmary agreed.

  “What is it?” asked Wouter, feeling slightly excluded, which made him feel slightly annoyed.

  “Oh, well—I mean, don’t get mad, we didn’t put it in here,” said Manuel. “But sometimes programmers will write to each other in computer language. It’s kind of like a secret code or something.”

  “Yeah, like if I need to borrow money, I might send Manuel here a little note that says, ‘This unit has insufficient power and requires a temporary influx of power from another unit with a surplus,’” said Edmary.

  Manuel made a quick flip of his palm, clearly rejecting the request. Edmary put his hand to his heart in mock-hurt, and then continued.

  “You’d write it in code, you know, just like a computer would send out a request on the network. It’s a little joke. But you have to be careful where you send that kind of stuff, because if it goes to the computer and not to Manuel, the computer might actually try to follow the orders.”

  He pointed at the scroll again. “See, this message is in the same language the satelli
te uses to communicate with the station computer, which is why it caused problems. Somehow it wound up where it didn’t belong.”

  “What does it say?” Wouter asked.

  “This is like what you might write somebody new—like a girl or something—somebody who you wanted to meet. Like, this line is, ‘This unit requires information from other units.’ And that line is, like, an approval code—that means, you know, that the unit is cleared.”

  “Friendly, basically,” said Manuel. “Trustworthy.”

  “Right, it’s like, ‘Tell me about yourself, I’m a nice guy,’” Edmary continued. “And then, this is a request for the other unit to transmit the contents of its databases, and that’s a priority code.”

  Manuel smiled. “Someone wanted to meet someone really badly.”

  Wouter frowned deeply. If Beijing found out about this, would they figure out a way to blame him somehow?

  “We are totally not the ones who did this,” said Edmary to Wouter.

  “Maybe a little green man is looking for love,” said Manuel, with a laugh.

  Manuel’s joke stuck in Wouter’s mind as he lay in his lumpy bed later that evening. It was crazy, of course, but what if a—?

  No—he couldn’t even think it without hearing, “Typical of the make-work the Space Authority cooks up in its pathetic efforts to justify the existence of that boondoggle.”

  But if he found life, intelligent life, wouldn’t that actually justify the existence of his station? In moments of budgetary desperation Wouter had toyed with the idea of passing off some of the Titan’s more bizarre crystalline structures as a form of life. Imagine if he found the real thing?

  Think of what it would mean for Earth.

  Think of what it would mean for Titan station.

  Think of what it would mean for his career!

  Think of the funding!

  The key, Wouter decided, would be to figure out a way to investigate without anyone knowing what he was doing.

  He could look at where that satellite had vanished. That would look good to any outsider—maybe there was some odd feature at that point in space that would be of scientific interest. He could send another satellite there—one of the ones that took video images of the rings, maybe. God knows, no one in the SA would care if one of the viewfinder satellites went offline for an hour or twelve: The general public thought the images they sent back were pretty, but scientifically, they weren’t worth much.

  So the next shift, he asked his staff to send one of the viewfinders to the coordinates where the radio telescope had vanished and reappeared.

  They did.

  And it disappeared.

  Wouter sent his report to Beijing with mixed emotions—they could roast him for losing a second satellite, but on the other hand, it was intriguing, wasn’t it? He had his staff look through old satellite trajectories, and other satellites had passed through those coordinates as recently as four months ago without any incident. None of the telescopes picked up anything strange there, and his staff reviewed four months of observational data without finding anything of note. He sent the results of their research on to Beijing, hoping that it would help guide their bean-counting minds toward the “intriguing” and away from the “wasteful” school of thought.

  But the viewfinder got back to Wouter before Beijing did, reappearing 46 hours after it vanished. Again, its trajectory had obviously been interrupted. The staff sent a retriever after it, not risking communication this time. The retrieval into the satellite bay went off without a hitch, as did the automated quarantined download of the viewfinder’s data. Wouter and several of his staffers gathered around the one working screen in his office to see what the satellite had seen.

  The image was clear, but at the moment of disappearance there was what looked like a jump in the star field. A circle of light appeared and vanished at the periphery of the image, which became distorted for a moment as the viewfinder compensated for a sudden change in light levels.

  Then, a small, white, oval object appeared. It sped up to the viewfinder quickly, making Wouter wonder if it was an asteroid shooting past.

  But then it slowed. The object hovered in the image, only a few meters away from the satellite.

  “What’s that?” asked a staffer.

  Act skeptical, thought Wouter, suppressing a smile. “Let’s not get excited—it could be a hoax,” he said.

  It wasn’t a hoax, he knew it, and he clasped his hands in his lap to conceal his excitement. I’ll be able to write my own ticket! he thought.

  The oval paced the viewfinder for a bit, matching its trajectory. There were no markings on its surface, and no indication of any sort of door or window. There was, however, a little dimple in the center of the oval.

  After a few moments, a tail snaked out of it, seeming to feel its way through space toward the viewfinder.

  Suddenly the station’s breach alarm went off, making one of his staffers scream and nearly scaring Wouter out of his seat.

  He would later think it odd that he didn’t have the same initial reaction that everyone on Earth seemed to have—he didn’t wrongly assume his station was under alien attack. Instead, he foolishly wondered for a moment if the alarm was coming from the soundless video. Then, as he scrambled to seal his environmental suit, the chilling thought occurred to him: I’m too late. My station’s fallen apart.

  Once everyone was sealed up, he found the frantic staffer who had set off the alarm. There had been no breach, thank God, but the staffer had seen something on the viewfinder satellite, something that had left him gibbering.

  Wouter looked through the window at the satellite bay, which had sealed and was now pumping out the toxic Titan atmosphere.

  He saw it then, sitting on the outside of the satellite, nestled next to the camera aperture.

  Later investigation would reveal that that same camera had prevented Wouter’s techs from spotting it during the retrieval. They had instructed the retriever to approach the viewfinder from behind, so as not to damage the camera, and from that angle the camera itself had blocked their view of the thing.

  That thing was a large cluster of round purple lumps, a bit like the inside of a pomegranate or a bizarre and fatal tumor.

  Wouter ordered the area sealed off completely, sent a missive to Beijing, and ordered a decontamination of the rest of the station before allowing his staff to unseal their suits.

  Then he went back to his office and watched the video. He saw in fast-forward what the rest of Earth would watch in detail, over and over and over again, in the months and years to come. He saw the other ovals and their tails as they looped around the satellite and pulled it through space. He saw the appearance on the edge of the screen of a structure that grew larger and larger until it swallowed up the view. He saw the strange things—creatures? robots?—that examined and worked on the satellite in an open bay on the structure’s side. He saw the left hand of the image replaced by a white field, while the right half showed the ovals reattaching to the satellite and hauling it away. He saw the ring of light marking the spot where the ovals detached and let the satellite float away, and then the sudden appearance of Saturn, with its familiar rings and moons.

  And he saw the equally dramatic change in the white side of the screen as the viewfinder approached the ring. There, in the middle of an unchanging field of white, was a round, growing spot of black.

  A hole.