Best of Breed
by David Alexander & Hayford Peirce
Illustration by Vincent Di Fate
Tuesday morning, July 27, 2047, should have been the beginning of the most triumphant period of Royce Hunter’s life. And—for almost forty-four hours—it was. In the forty-fourth hour the nightmare began.
It started with a minor blip on the Titan Explorer’s radar screen. Six days earlier the Explorer III had passed the invisible halfway point between the orbits of Jupiter and Saturn and was now within a hundred million miles of its goal, a landing on Saturn’s largest moon. Earth was more than eight astronomical units away, nearly three-quarters of a billion miles.
More relevantly, with the Asteroid Belt and its millions of fragments of nickel-iron rock also five AUs behind the ship, it was almost inconceivable that a wandering body could be this near the Explorer. The object on the screen was a mere .0019 AUs away, something less than the distance from Earth to the Moon.
The ship’s AI control program pondered the situation, noted that its two human directors were still deep in REM sleep, and decided to do nothing more for the moment.
Twelve minutes later, unseen by either Stefan Lubchek or Nancy Chang, the blip abruptly changed course and moved to intercept the Titan Explorer III.
Now the two sleeping crew members were alerted by the ship’s control program. Natural bodies, even tumbling hunks of asteroidal rock or meteorites from beyond the Solar System, follow a ballistic course whose only deviations are the result of gravity and the pressure of the solar wind. Without doubt, the computer reported, the approaching object was, if not actively manned, at least controlled. The program also noted that it had no record of any Earth-built ship closer than those at Port Dexter on the Moon.
It took 69.7 minutes for a radio transmission to reach Earth from the Titan Explorer III. Ninety-seven minutes after the computer first roused Major Lubchek and Lt. Commander Chang, Royce Hunter stumbled groggily from his bed. Bleary-eved, he waited for his coffee to brew while he stared through the kitchen window at the infinite canopy of stars shimmering in the clear air of the Nevada desert. Now, it seemed, those stars were coming to man before he could go to them.
Hunter, the director of OSEP—the Outer System Exploration Program—took his first sip of scalding coffee, shook his head at the wonder of it all, and debated reawakening Caroline. No, he decided, there would be plenty of time for celebrating once they knew exactly what they were dealing with. Let her sleep.
Two hours and twenty minutes after the first radar contact, the object matched course and speed with the Titan Explorer III. The two crew members crowded against the forward viewport, their eyes wide, their hearts pounding. The lumpy gray shape before them was clearly an artifact—and equally clearly not the product of human hands or minds.
A hatch opened and a space-suited arm beckoned in what they provisionally took to be a universal gesture of invitation. With no regard at all for what he knew his superiors on Earth—principally Royce Hunter—would have ordered him to do, Major Stefan Lubchek donned his EVA suit, tethered a cable to the outer lock, and launched himself across the fifteen yards that now separated the two craft. To hell with Nevada and Royce Hunter—this was his chance for immortality! His copilot and longtime companion, Lt. Commander Nancy Chang, began transmitting a running commentary to program headquarters.
Nine hours later Major Lubchek returned to the Titan Explorer III and began to transmit his own encrypted report. Earth’s last major war lay more than a century in the past and acute paranoia was no longer a global state of mind; security—by old-fashioned standards—was consequently minimal. The official inquiry later established that the transmission was received by hundreds of amateur and professional space watchers and that its archaic code was quickly deciphered by at least four different supercomputers.
Royce Hunter had hardly slept in the nearly two days since being told of the alien presence in the Solar System. Now, forty-four hours later, light-headed with a mixture of sleeplessness and jubilation, he staggered blearily across his carport and into the kitchen—and Caroline’s welcoming arms. It was ten o’clock at night, normally far past their bedtime, but tonight Maureena and Charlie-Boy had been allowed to wait up for him.
“Tell us about the Men from the Stars,” begged Maureena, his seven-year-old. She tugged frantically at Hunter’s shirtsleeve, while the five-year-old wrapped himself python-like around his leg.
“Have you got a picture of them, can you—”
“Hush,” interrupted their mother. “First let Daddy sit down for a moment and then—”
Royce Hunter heard the unmistakable sound of glass shattering in the living room, followed almost instantly by a thunderous explosion, a single flash of terrible, blinding light, and the dreamlike sensation of seeing the kitchen wall expanding toward him like the opening petals of a gigantic flower.
It was three days before he awoke to learn that he was in the base hospital, that his wife and two children were dead, and that he himself was now missing both arms, both ears, one eye, and one leg. It was, the doctors said, a miracle that he was still alive.
Alive. In the days to come, Hunter often wondered if he was or not. And then wished he wasn’t.
When he was coherent enough to dimly understand that he was in the grip of near-catatonic depression, he demanded that a VR socket be installed in his head. After that he was content to retreat into the blissful world of virtual reality. There life was an endless laze in the shade of a luxuriant sycamore. From his hammock a hundred yards away, he watched Maureena and Charlie-Boy splash in the swimming pool under Caroline’s watchful gaze. Their shrieks and shouts drifted toward him on the soft breeze as he took another sip of lemonade. Languidly he replaced the glass in the drink-holder, then closed his eyes and drifted off to sleep with his children’s laughter ringing in his ears.
On the fourteenth day a new voice intruded into the dream-world of hammock and children, that of Chalukya Rashtrakuta, the program’s chief of staff. The voice had been calling his name for what seemed like hours, whispering softly but relentlessly into the artificial ear that had been fused directly into his auditory system.
“Go away,” muttered Hunter, intent now on the image of Maureena chasing Charlie-Boy around a plastic flamingo.
“We need your help.”
“I don’t want to help.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Nothing. No, to die. Go away.”
Rashtrakuta refused to go away. “They caught the people who threw the bomb. There were over two hundred of them. You and your family weren’t the only ones. They were trying to destroy the entire project. Besides the half-billion dollars in physical damage, they killed forty-seven of us-. Hirakawa, Hardecker, Monico, Fajardo, Cheun, Stumpel, Parson, Dmitriy, Sally Pack—”
“Sally Packworth? She’s dead too?”
“Yes. Along with Hutchins, Rossi, Wengel…” The terrible litany went on and on.
“Why?” whispered Hunter finally, unaware of the tears that were flowing from his one remaining eye. “Why?”
“A religious sect from the Oregon rain forests. Somehow they got into someone’s computer who had already tapped into ours. They were convinced that we were responsible for bringing Satan to Earth.”
“Satan?”
“The Trajendi.”
“Oh.” Hunter was silent for a long time. “Maybe there is a Satan, you know. If there weren’t, how can you explain things like this? Caroline, Maureena, Charlie-Boy?”