Where the hell had he found a flare gun? Of course—in the Brahma’s survival kit! There was one advantage of having your Earth return craft double as your lander. “Is it okay?” Lucas asked.
“Might as well,” Zack said. “We can’t see much without it.”
The Brazilian astronaut fired the flare, which corkscrewed in the low gravity, reaching high into the chamber before igniting.
“Holy shit!”
Pogo couldn’t help himself. Not only was the chamber so big that its far reaches could not be seen, but the Beehive itself had opened. The floor spread right and left with no walls, honey-combed or not.
Stranger yet, the collection of markers had been replaced by different structures—actually, they looked to Pogo more like growths. They were tall, fragile-appearing things that in some cases stood ten or fifteen meters high. “Corals,” Pogo said. He had dived the Great Barrier Reef.
“Not quite,” Natalia said, going closer and examining the nearest growth with her focals. “Corals have a jagged, irregular structure . . . these look spherical.”
“Like the filling in the membrane?” Zack said.
“Apparently.”
“Too bad Houston can’t see this. They’d freak.”
“I’m freaking,” Zack said. “It was bad enough to realize that Keanu was a vehicle, not a natural object. I frankly don’t know how to handle alien artifacts and landscapes.”
“And the rest of us do?” Pogo said.
Even Natalia laughed. “Your openmindedness makes you the perfect choice to lead us, Dr. Stewart.”
“We have two hours of consumables before we have to turn back,” Pogo said. “We can camp out in Buzz and upload everything we’ve found. Then we would have input from Houston before we came back.”
“That’s my big worry,” Zack said. “I don’t know Yvonne’s condition. We might get back in touch and be told the mission is over, we’re going home.
“This might be the only chance we get—and I don’t want to miss something important, because no human may ever be here again.”
“Relax. We’re doing everything we can.” Pogo was getting impatient with Zack’s expressions of doubt. Sure, they were justified. But a commander can’t afford to appear indecisive or weak.
Of course, a good soldier doesn’t question or undermine his commander, either. Both of them were no doubt getting tired. The suits were ridiculously easy to wear and work in, but they were still heavy and confining.
And even though gravity here was light, being on your feet for hours—
“I have a theory,” Lucas said. Pogo realized that the other three had been clustered at the base of a coral tower.
“Please share.”
“These corals might be building blocks.”
“Building blocks of what?” Pogo said.
“Of life! What else?” Natalia said.
“Oh, hell, I don’t know. Maybe they’re building blocks of a new car or a piece of cheesecake! Goddammit, people—”
“Calm down, Pogo.”
He really was feeling impatient. “I just don’t think it’s a smart idea to be putting everything in familiar boxes. . . .”
Lucas spoke up. “Of course, we will leave the analysis to the experts on Earth.”
“Absolutely,” Zack said. “It’s just human nature. And now I have an entirely new image to confuse the matter: These corals look like fractal structures—”
“Yes,” Lucas said, either warming to the idea or simply playing along, “Mandelbrot sets!”
Pogo noticed that Natalia had not only gone silent . . . she had stopped working her way around the coral and was frantically trying to reattach one of her scanners to the front of her suit.
Shit, he thought, she’s gone blind. As he got closer, he saw that her visor was completely fogged over. “Boss, we’ve got a problem here!”
“Don’t,” Natalia said. The astronaut code: death before dishonor.
“Shut up. You’re overheating. You can’t continue to function in that suit.”
Zack and Lucas came up. Zack took in the situation quickly. “Okay, Lucas,” he said. “The EVA is officially over. You guide her back to the membrane. Wait on this side of it. Pogo and I will be right behind you.”
Lucas didn’t argue. He was probably as exhausted and overwhelmed as Pogo.
The Coalition team turned and started back the way they had come. Pogo realized now that they had not only walked into a huge chamber . . . they had come down a gentle slope—
“Pogo,” Zack said. “Is it my imagination, or are we seeing better?”
Pogo had just noticed that himself. He looked away from Lucas and Natalia toward the center of the chamber.
The view forward was brighter. “It’s like dawn. . . .”
It was indeed. As the four of them watched in openmouthed wonder, high above them on the “ceiling,” a dozen long mobile shapes lit up, strong enough to brighten the chamber like a summer sunrise.
Pogo put his hand on Zack’s shoulder. “And the Lord said, ‘Let there be a light in the firmaments.’”
It bordered on blasphemy. But given the circumstances, Zack could not argue.
Can someone explain to me why we’re doing this crazy mission? Especiallysince NASA clearly didn’t know what it was getting into? Couldn’t we have spent three billion dollars closer to home?
POSTER TRACEE34 AT HUFFPOST.COM
Her PPK still clutched to her chest, Yvonne listened to Tea’s side of two and sometimes three conversations. One was the open channel with Houston, the other the encrypted one. Then there was the link to Brahma and cosmonaut Dennis Chertok, her savior, who had now returned to the Coalition craft.
There was even a fourth . . . Tea’s regular call every minute or so for “Zack, Pogo, from Venture, do you read?” That conversation was one-sided, and increasingly pointless. Yvonne wondered if Zack and Patrick, and Lucas and Natalia, were even still alive, because as far as she could tell, Keanu was a hostile environment.
She wanted off.
From the encrypted comm, she knew that the planners in Houston were preparing Venture for a departure—“R plus ten hours,” R being the moment the explorers returned.
That was one scenario, she knew, the one assuming her condition didn’t worsen. It allowed the crew to have some kind of rest before managing a liftoff from another planet, and a life-or-death rendezvous with the Destiny mother ship.
There was an R plus six, and even an R plus two. Knowing how difficult a rendezvous would be—and, frankly, remembering that the shorter the gap, the worse her health—Yvonne was hoping the choice would be R plus ten.
That would bring the Destiny-Venture crew back to Earth within three days . . . carrying samples from this NEO starship-or-whatever-the-fuck-it-was. They could be astronaut heroes.
And Yvonne could forget about what was in her PPK.
Given the effects of the tranquilizer Dennis had given her, she wasn’t sure she really believed it, anyway. A bomb—an honest-to-God suitcase nuke, the kind she’d heard about in spy movies.
It had happened eight days before launch, the day the crew was to move into the trailer at Johnson Space Center where they would be kept in medical isolation, and would start sleep-shifting to accommodate liftoff at a ridiculous hour.
Yvonne had just parked her car and was pulling her travel bag out of the trunk when her cell phone rang. There was a text asking her to stop by Building 30 on her way to the trailer.
She had walked into a hallway to find her father waiting for her.
Gabriel Jones had divorced his wife, Camille, when their daughter Yvonne was thirteen years old. The young space scientist had been caught having not one but two extramarital affairs, one with a fellow researcher, the other with the producer of a Discovery Channel series in which he had starred. “He just found a more exciting life.”