“Fully self-contained.” I pointed to near-invisible sensors on the ceiling. “Those pick up the resident’s life signs. Just to monitor health. Otherwise everything is completely private. State-of-the-art.”
He gave a slow whistle. “I’ll say. What I wouldn’t give to have this technology for my Sensavision.”
“Speaking of which, I had one installed in the spare bedroom.” I walked in that direction.
“For your grandmother?” he said, giving a short laugh. “What a waste. She’s never going to use it.”
He followed me. This room was larger than the real one at Gran’s house and I’d had it stripped bare of all decor. All four walls held Sensavisions. And since this was a holo-home, I tried not to think of how this was just a holographic image of holographic screens, because it hurt my head to make sense of it.
“I have a surprise for you.”
I flicked the “on” switch. Before us, the spaceship’s bridge shimmered to life. No cinnamon in the air; this time, I smelled the metallic freshness of a brand-new vessel. Space stretched out before us and aliens suddenly appeared, ready to fight. A blue-jumpsuited officer walked in and locked eyes with Don. “Captain,” he said, “we’re under attack.” He handed Don a weapon.
Don looked at me, then the scene, then at me again.
“I want you to have something to keep you busy,” I said, in my best conciliatory voice, “while Gran and I get ourselves together.”
He smiled then, and for a moment, heartbreaking in its brevity, I saw a flash of the man I married.
“Have fun,” I said.
But he didn’t hear me say goodbye.
Back at the front door, Gran took my hand. “Are you okay?” she asked.
I nodded, thinking about the playhouse-how many hours of enjoyment Gramps and I had had with it when I was little, and how much fun Emily would have with it now. Gran had been right all along. That little pretend shuttle really did have the power to transport us to our destiny.
And I held Emily tight as the three of us rode the elevator down.
COLD COMFORT by Dean Wesley Smith
‘Houston Space Center, do you copy?”
I sat in the big command chair, leaning back, listening to nothing as the time lag between the asteroid belt and Earth played out. The time lag wasn’t as bad as it used to be during the early days of the Martian missions, thanks to some new developments in laser communications cutting through a close-warp space, but it still took some time. About four seconds each direction from this far out. Nowhere near as slow as the speed of light, thank heavens.
Although, at this point, it didn’t much matter.
I glanced around at the five empty chairs in the big control room of Asteroid Six, code-named Klondike after the gold rush back in Alaska. After all, that was what we had been out here to get. Minerals, from gold to anything else worth mining, to make part of this exploration profitable. I always knew that someone would get rich off of mining these asteroids, and we had proved that to be true, but now it wasn’t going to be me.
The big room with its six chairs facing six large control panels smelled of burnt wires and felt far too hot. Usually it smelled of cooking mixed with a faint odor of Captain Carry’s socks. Even with the faint burnt smell, the environmental instruments on the board in front of me were telling me everything was still all right in here, as much as it could be, considering.
The room felt even bigger than normal, with me being the only one left. I was used to this room with two or three people in it at all times. I kept thinking that one of them would come in and say something. After months together, I had gotten used to the constant interaction with the others. Now I missed it and wanted it back.
“Go ahead, Klondike. How are they doing out there, Ben?”
The voice was Devon Daniels, the day shift voice of Mission Control, and one of my best friends. He had stood up for me as my best man when Tammie and I got married twenty-two years ago. We had come up through the space program together in the late 1980’s, flying missions to both the moon and Mars. Together, we had helped establish the first bases on both places. He’d been grounded because of a bad lung condition after his sixth Mars trip, and I had planned on joining him on the ground after this mission. Now he was lucky he wasn’t on this mission. He’d be just as dead as the rest were and I was soon going to be.
I took a deep breath. “Can we go to visual? And get some recorders on this, some extra ones? I got a lot to download.”
I sat back, waiting as they brought everything online at Mission Control, thinking over the last two hours. I had been asleep, off shift, tucked in my bunk when the grinding crash had snapped me awake.
Our pilot, Toby Terhume from the European Union, had been scheduled to land us on an asteroid with a number for a name that was longer than a worldwide phone number. We were to do the same tests we had been doing on other rocks for the last two weeks. It was the tenth such landing. Standard procedure. From what I could tell, he misjudged the timing on the spin of the thing and instead of landing the Klondike on the rough surface and clamping on, the ship hit, tipped over, and then bounced.
And we bounced hard.
We lost Kevin Chin because he was also off shift and it was his cabin that just happened to be the one that got hit by a large rock jutting out of the asteroid. The automatic controls sealed off the rest of the ship, but it was far too late for Chin. We all figured his body was going to have to ride in there until we got back.
I had liked Chin. He was young, this being his first real mission. he didn’t deserve to die like that in his sleep.
It didn’t take long for the rest of us to discover what else was wrong. The collision had damaged some relays to the engines and they had to be repaired. Outside.
Until they were, we were just more floating debris in this field of debris, with no way to move out of the way of drifting rocks.
The five of us remaining were all heavily experienced on outside work, so we drew straws and I got the short one, meaning I’d man the controls while the other four went out to get the work done as fast as possible.
We told Mission Control what we were planning and they agreed that time was of the essence.
They had only been out there less than five minutes when an asteroid on my screen appeared out of nowhere, a rock the size of a small house, spinning slowly.
I tried to warn them. But with our speed and the rock’s speed, it happened fast. Far too fast. It scraped all four off the outside of the ship like so much crap off a shoe. If the engines and side thrusters had been working, the computer would have automatically moved the ship just a few feet out of the way as it had done hundreds of times in the past two weeks.
Instead, that nasty grinding sound of my friends dying would be something that would haunt my last hours.
Suddenly, I was alone, farther from Earth than any human had ever been, drifting in a field of debris without power, or any way to get power that I could figure out. That last rock had pretty much taken out a good part of the port side of the ship, leaving me with air and environmental systems in the control room and the galley only. I suppose I could say I was lucky to have survived as well.
I didn’t feel lucky.
I had enough to eat; I had enough oxygen to breathe for months. But in this mess of swirling rocks, I wouldn’t last that long. I’d be lucky to get through the conversation with Earth.
Again, I didn’t feel lucky.
“We’re set up, Ben,” Devon’s voice came back on strong; then a picture flickered into place.
I clicked on my uplink, then without a comment ran the recorded events of what had happened.
I sat and stared at Devon’s face for a few seconds as he just waited for the time lag; then he got my video uplink transmission and his face went white.
For a moment, I thought he was going to be sick as he watched. I knew exactly how he felt. There had been a camera on all four of them out there. What had happened was not something anyone would want to see in the news services.