FEDERAL SPACE AGENCY (ROSCOSMOS) PRESS RELEASE, 23 AUGUST 2019
“Zack, check this out.”
The beam from Pogo’s torch wiggled as it described a circle farther down the branching passage.
A passage that ended in shimmering brightness. Zack had to blink several times, clearing the sweat from his eyes, to be sure what he was seeing. It looked like a wall of ice, something found in an Antarctic cave . . . but it also reminded him of the northern lights . . . It was gauzy, somehow insubstantial.
“Stop right there,” Zack said.
“Don’t worry, I wasn’t going anywhere.”
“Lucas? Natalia?” Zack knew they had to be behind the American pair. He just wanted to hear their voices.
“I see it,” Lucas said.
“We all see it,” Natalia said, sounding snappish. Her suit was probably still overheating, making her hot and causing her faceplate to fog. “What is it?”
“Bubbles.” “I see texture.” “It looks like a curtain.” All three of them had instant theories.
“I just hope it isn’t one of them,” Pogo said. Of course, why couldn’t the inhabitants of Keanu be shimmering energy beings? The Air Force astronaut continued to surprise Zack with his imagination.
“Let’s get some snaps for the folks back home,” Zack said, really missing real-time communication with Houston or Venture. “Lucas, what does the radar say?”
“Scattered return,” the Coalition astronaut said. “It’s not a solid surface.”
“Is it moving or held in place?” That was Natalia.
“Seems to be attached around the edges.”
Lucas’s information confirmed Zack’s own perceptions. They were looking at some kind of curtain blocking the end of the passage. “I hate to say it, but there’s really only one way to find out what this is.”
Zack patted the equipment belted to his suit. He had a small geological hammer. Unhooking it, he waved it in front of the curtain. Got no response.
So he chucked it at the shimmering surface, which swallowed it instantly.
“What do you suppose that means?” Pogo said.
“It means a hunk of metal could pass through. Which means—”
“Copy that, Commander.” Pogo skipped forward, but Zack followed and caught him.
“Commander’s prerogative. If I don’t come back, you’re in charge.”
Without further discussion, or hesitation, Zack headed right toward the curtain, which shimmered and glittered, but did not move.
He stopped a meter away. For an instant he thought the curtain might be nothing more than an image, some kind of 3-D projection. Slowly, he reached out until his gloved fingertips disappeared into it. The gloves prevented him from feeling texture or temperature . . . but there was a kind of resistance, like pressing against a pillow, or, more likely, an energy field.
“Zack, let us put a line on you.” Pogo was right behind him.
“You don’t have a line. Come on,” he said, feeling impatient, “where’s your sense of adventure?”
“Patrick is right,” Natalia said. “You can’t be reckless!”
“I’m simply going to see if this is permeable. I’ll keep talking. If I lose comm, give me one minute, then come and get me.”
He stepped forward, right into the curtain . . . and was immediately bathed in light and drowned in bubbles that literally flowed across the surface of his suit and helmet. “It’s as if I’m taking a bubble bath, but they have substance. They’re more like transparent ball bearings, maybe.”
No answer. He counted. “Step three, step four.” The bubbly bearings did not resist him. He was able to step just as freely as he had in the outer passage.
“Six, seven . . .” On the eighth step he was through the bubble curtain—
—Into another passage much like the one he had just left, just as broad, high, and dark!
The beam from Zack’s helmet light simply vanished, as if dying in a vast open space. He turned right and left. Another marker sat on the wall to his right. Unlike the one outside the curtain, this marker looked untouched.
Maybe it was new.
He took one more step and felt himself slip. He did not fall, but what he saw then almost staggered him.
He was standing in a pool of water. The snow that had accumulated on his boots and legs from the excursion across the surface of Keanu was melting.
There was air pressure on this side of the curtain. The temperature was above the melting point of water.
Which meant that the bubble-beaded curtain was actually some kind of airlock.
Going to a rocket launch killed my mother. Now NASA is trying to kill my father. Fuckmylife some more, NASA.
RACHEL STEWART, ON HER SLATE, FREQUENTLY
“Can we go in?”
Looking up from her phone, Amy Meyer peered past Rachel into the auditorium, where several dozen reporters with computers and camera operators were bombarding Gabriel Jones, Shane Weldon, and Harley Drake with shouts. It didn’t appear to be going well.
“Why would you want to do that?”
“Never mind,” Amy said, possibly remembering that Rachel’s mother had died on the way to a press conference. “Hey,” she said, “just in case.” She pulled something from her shorts pocket . . . opening her hand, she revealed a brownish cigarette.
“I can’t believe you brought a joint here!”
“Fine, I’ll go flush it—”
“No!” Rachel said, wrapping her hand around Amy’s. “We just might need it.”
Rachel had her back to the door, which kept opening and closing every few seconds. She and Amy had escaped from the family holding cell to go in search of food and had been swept here by the crowd.
But they didn’t have to stay, and they wouldn’t. Rachel had a headache; she felt sick to her stomach.
Nevertheless, getting this far had been useful. From what she’d heard through the open door and being talked about in the hallway, Rachel knew that her father was alive, but now completely out of touch inside the NEO. And that he and Patrick Downey had been in their suits for something like five hours, with no end in sight, and that the doctors didn’t see any problem with that, even though Rachel remembered her father coming home from five hours of spacewalk training in the big pool with his hands so bruised the fingernails were black, and with giant welts on his neck.
She didn’t expect to be able to talk to him, not during the EVA . . . but what she really hated was not being able to hear him. She thought of her Slate and how really useless it was sometimes.
“Rachel!” It was Jillianne Dwight, the Destiny-7 crew secretary, striding toward her with a frown on her face. “You’re not supposed to be out here!”
Rachel didn’t know Jillianne very well—her father had been on the crew for only a couple of months—but she liked her.
Until today. The moment Rachel’s name broke through the general din, several reporters turned and made eye contact. “You’re the daughter!”
Rachel turned to Jillianne. “Happy now?”
Before anyone could ask a question—at least, a question that Rachel understood—Jillianne and Amy formed a human shield around her and marched her down the hall and out a back door.
Jillianne said, “I need to get you back to the family room.”
“I’m not going back to the family room.”
“Well, you can’t be out here. They’ll eat you alive.”
Rachel thought. “Let me talk to Tea.”
Jillianne considered this. “Fine. But phones off.”