The Last Astronaut Page 7

  They were still a hundred kilometers away from 2I, and closing that distance very slowly. The mission profile suggested they approach in the most nonaggressive way possible. For the last day they’d been edging forward.

  Now there was just this little distance to cover. She tapped a touchscreen, and the service module at the back of Orion came to life, the engines belching flame—just for a moment. The spacecraft surged forward until the mass of 2I filled her entire view. She felt a gentle tug pulling her back toward the HabLab, but nothing her muscles couldn’t counteract.

  2I had been visible with the naked eye for a while now, and they’d spent plenty of time looking at the red dot as it grew steadily larger. This was the first time they were close enough to see it for real, to make out fine detail.

  The first thing Jansen noticed was that 2I was big. Very big. She knew it could be difficult to judge the size of objects in space when you had no points of reference, but when you looked at 2I you felt its size. It already looked big enough to swallow Orion in one bite—if it had had a mouth.

  It was dark red in color, just as Stevens had predicted. It had an albedo of just .09—meaning it reflected only 9 percent of the sun’s light that hit it. About as dark as asphalt. That red wasn’t original to 2I—it was discoloration, the result of constant bombardment by cosmic rays as the object moved through interstellar space.

  In shape it was long and thin, as expected—though rather than “cigar shaped,” as Stevens had originally described it, it was spindle shaped, thick in the middle and tapering toward the ends. It was hard to tell, however, because the shape was obscured by profuse superstructures on the hull. Every part of 2I’s surface was covered in incredibly convoluted shapes like pyramids or conical towers or… spines? Horns? Thorns? Some of them were fifty meters long, sticking straight out from the surface of 2I—though they covered it so densely that it was impossible to say where they stopped and that surface began. Each of the spiky towers was covered in smaller versions of itself, cone-shaped projections mounted in a spiraling procession over the full surface of the tower. Those smaller towers were in turn covered in miniature versions of themselves. They had examined that surface structure through a telescope at various magnifications and found that the pattern was repeated no matter how deep you went. The shapes, the angles, the spiraling curves were replicated ad infinitum.

  “It’s a fractal. Those are like Sierpinski pyramids,” Rao said after they’d studied it for a while. Jansen and Hawkins looked back at her in incomprehension. She shrugged. She would explain as best she could without giving them a math lecture. “Near-infinite complexity created by elaborating on simple rules. If you wanted to build a shape with as much surface area as physically possible, this is what you would come up with. It’s amazing.”

  “It doesn’t look like any spaceship I’ve ever seen,” Jansen said.

  “Well, it wouldn’t, would it?” Stevens replied. “Humans didn’t make this thing. It’s not going to look like what you’d expect.”

  Jansen shook her head. “There are rules, though. Laws of physics, of aerodynamics. You want the hull of your ship sleek. Even if it’s only ever going to be exposed to interstellar hydrogen, you want it smooth so debris just bounces off of it rather than catching in those—I don’t know. Spikes.”

  “Unless the whole point is to catch stuff. Specifically interstellar hydrogen,” Stevens said. “You want all that surface area to gather as much hydrogen as possible, so you can use it as fuel.”

  “Maybe,” Jansen said. She wasn’t thinking about science just then.

  “I don’t see any sign of weapons,” Hawkins said, as if he’d read her mind. “No gun barrels, no missile racks.” He snorted in derision. “Though they could have all kinds of guns and nasty toys and I would have no idea what I was looking at.”

  No one in the control room at JPL spoke. The silence was broken only by the occasional beep of a telemetry tracker marking time or the crackle of radio static as the first images of 2I were beamed across millions of kilometers of space.

  Roy McAllister stood before the big screen, taking in every detail. Watching as the red towers on the hull of the starship slipped by, looking for anything he could get a handle on, anything that might suggest that this was a vehicle built by intelligent beings—beings they could understand, beings they could reason with.

  He turned and made eye contact with General Kalitzakis, the man in charge of the military aspect of the mission. Kalitzakis was shorter than McAllister by nearly a foot. He’d been a fighter pilot thirty years earlier, and back then, when the pilots actually had to control their aircraft from inside their cockpits, there had been a maximum height for the specialty. His face was tense as he watched the screen, looking for any sign of aggression.

  They both knew there was a chance that 2I would simply attack Orion on sight, that the big ship would swat Jansen and her crew out of the sky. No one doubted it had the technology to obliterate them without real effort. If that happened, Kalitzakis would immediately take over, pushing McAllister out of the way. At that point the mission wouldn’t be about first contact anymore. It would be about the defense of Earth.

  “Pasadena, this is Orion.” Jansen’s voice over the radio made everyone in the control room jump a little. “We’re watching 2I closely. So far there’s been no change. I’m taking us in a little closer.”

  Kalitzakis gave McAllister a tiny nod. McAllister touched the device on his ear. “Orion, we copy,” he said.

  They were so far away from Orion it would take nearly a minute for his voice to reach the astronauts. Radio signals moved at the speed of light, but over these distances even that was achingly slow. If something did go wrong, it would take that long before anyone on Earth even knew it had happened.

  2I grew larger and closer and larger and closer. Jansen started to worry that it might change course while she was approaching and ram right into them. It was an irrational fear, but she had a hard time shaking it. It was very difficult to look at something that big and not imagine it rolling over on you, falling on you—crushing you to a pulp. The idea made Jansen’s stomach flutter more than the acceleration.

  It wasn’t so much the threat of instant death, she thought. The instant part was good—you knew there would be no pain. No, the reason she was afraid of being crushed by 2I came from a different quarter. She was afraid it wouldn’t even notice when it killed her. It would smash her to a stain on one of its spikes—and never even know she’d been there.

  How the hell were they supposed to get this thing’s attention? They were gnats buzzing around the horns of a water buffalo. At the very best they might hope to make it swish its tail in annoyance.

  She fired Orion’s retros to cut their acceleration. Two plumes of vapor lanced forward across the view from the cupola. She fired some positioning jets for a tiny fraction of a second to cancel any drift, then switched on Orion’s reaction wheels to keep them from tumbling.

  When she was done, Orion seemed to hang motionless in the sky, next to an equally becalmed 2I. It was as if they were locked together, though nothing but Newton’s laws kept them so closely paired.

  McAllister called to confirm that she’d finished her maneuver. “Orion, we need a STAY/NO STAY check.”

  “Pasadena,” she said, “we are STAY.”

  She took one last look through the cupola and saw nothing but dark red. She’d brought them within two kilometers of the tops of the spikes, about halfway along 2I’s length. And there, for the moment at least, they would remain.

  “‘As idle as a painted ship / Upon a painted ocean,’” Hawkins muttered.

  “Hmm?”

  “Sorry. I was quoting Coleridge,” he told her.

  “‘Rime of the Ancient Mariner,’” Stevens added.

  Jansen knew the poem. The story of a sailor who lost his crewmates. She wondered if, on some level, Hawkins was making a dig at her. She decided to be generous and assume he wasn’t. She said nothing. None of them
did, for a long time. There was too much to see.

  “Huh,” Rao said. “There—you see what I see, ma’am?”

  Jansen nodded. “You’ve got good eyes.”

  For the benefit of the others she pointed out a dot of orangish light hovering near one of 2I’s narrow ends. Just a tiny speck of brightness against the dark landscape of red. “I thought it was a star at first, maybe Sirius,” Rao said. “But then it passed in front of one of the towers.”

  Jansen brought up an AR overlay and shared it with the others, a magnified image that filled one pane of the cupola’s polycarbonate. The orange dot resolved into an actual shape, a little like a chess pawn, with a large round head atop a cylindrical body. At the back the cylinder flared out in a short skirt.

  The entire ship was painted bright orange, with a pattern of tessellating hexagons twisting around the cylindrical section. They could see the corporate name painted on the spherical module, with the name of the ship underneath it in a different font:

  KSPACE

  wanderer

  There was no sign of activity around the KSpace ship. Jansen tried to hail it on the radio but got no response. “They’ve been here for at least a day already. I’m hoping we can convince them to share their data,” she said.

  “Unlikely,” Stevens told her. He knew his former employers. “KSpace never gives anything away for free.”

  “If they’ve learned something useful,” Jansen said, “if they’ve found a way to communicate with 2I—they can name their price.”

  McAllister felt a touch on his elbow. He was so keyed up he whirled around to face Kalitzakis. The space force general was smiling, though his eyes were still guarded. “Looks like the immediate crisis has passed,” he said. “If the aliens didn’t open fire on KSpace, I doubt they’re going to shoot down our people, either. Copy me on all the data you collect about the surface structures, will you? I need to put a reaction plan together.” He picked up his hat from where it lay on a nearby console. “For now, I’m going to assume the mission goes ahead as scheduled. Which means I’ll get out of your hair. Though if anything changes, especially if 2I shows any sign of hostility—”

  “You’ll be the first to know,” McAllister told him.

  “We have a saying in the space force,” Kalitzakis said. “‘Trust, but verify.’” He nodded and took one last look around the control room before he headed for the door.

  Once he was gone McAllister sank back down into his chair and stared up at the big screen, the one that showed the view from Orion’s cameras. 2I filled the view, its weird spiral superstructures glinting as the light caught one peak, then another.

  The control room was suddenly full of noise, of people congratulating each other. Someone passed around a bag of peanuts—an old JPL tradition. Eating peanuts was supposed to be good luck. Mostly it was a way to recognize the anxious moments of a mission. They’d certainly reached one of those.

  When the peanuts reached McAllister, he took a few, even though his doctor had warned him to cut out all sodium. He made a mental note to order unsalted peanuts—there would be plenty more tense moments to come.

  “All right,” McAllister said to the alien starship. To its crew, or whatever had steered it here. “You came a long way to get here. You must want to tell us something. So talk.”

  MERYL NGUYEN, NASA PHYSICIST: Communicating with 2I began with contact, and that was the A-number-one priority for Orion. We needed to send a signal and then have the aliens respond to that signal. That would prove they even knew we were there. And that would be the first step toward finding out what they wanted.

  “KSpace Wanderer. Come in, please. This is NASA Orion. Come in.”

  Jansen had been trying to reach the KSpace ship since they arrived, and it hadn’t answered. The irony wasn’t lost on Rao. There were three spacecraft in the local vicinity, and none of them were talking to each other.

  She didn’t worry about it too much. They had work to do.

  Their current task was assembling specialized pieces of equipment designed by NASA for contacting 2I in wavelengths other than radio waves. For months now Earth had been trying to send radio signals to 2I. Enormous networks of radio telescopes had pointed their dishes at it, hoping for an answer—any kind of answer.

  There had been none. No response whatsoever, on any radio frequency. So NASA had provided Orion with a bunch of experiments in nonradio communication. The gear for these experiments had been packed neatly in special crates, where they had remained, untouched, since launch. To save space they had been packed in pieces that needed to be assembled before they could be used.

  The crew spread out, making room wherever they could. The absence of gravity meant they didn’t need workbenches or tables, but it also meant that packing materials and empty boxes and loose screws and hardware filled up all the available space. Hawkins and Jansen had claimed the wardroom, the larger forward section of the HabLab. They were putting together a multiwavelength antenna, a big parabolic dish that could broadcast everything from microwaves to gamma rays, in case 2I could hear only longer frequencies.

  The antenna had a lot of small parts that needed to be assembled. Hawkins pulled open a plastic bag full of nuts and bolts, and they went flying in every direction, unbound by gravity.

  “Son of a bitch!” he growled. Then he looked up, sheepish, and met Rao’s gaze.

  She forced herself not to so much as smile, much less laugh, as he bounced off the walls, trying to snag all the floating hardware before it could get sucked into their air vents.

  She pushed her way back into the dormitory, where Stevens was putting together a tunable laser that looked like a bazooka with a rainbow-sheened lens on one end. He sent her the assembly manual, and it popped up in her augmented reality view. “It’s like the world’s largest laser pointer,” she said as she studied the diagrams and instructions.

  “If there’s a giant cat inside 2I,” Stevens said, “we’re golden.” Rao let out the laugh she’d held back before. It came out a little too loud. There’d been a lot of that, lately, people laughing too loud or talking over each other or just staring off into space. The closeness of 2I—the realness of it—had them all on edge.

  “What’s this thing?” Stevens asked, holding up a big cylinder with a tiny hole on one end.

  “It’s a neutrino gun,” she said. “Maybe don’t look directly into the aperture?”

  Stevens laughed. “Are you kidding? Neutrinos barely interact with matter. Billions of ’em shoot through Earth all the time, and come out the other side without even changing direction.”

  “Still, now,” she said. “I like your face the way it is. Don’t go blowing it off just because you got curious.”

  It was the first time the two of them had been alone since they’d danced in the air, since the day Wanderer blew right past them. It was the first time she’d had to think about what being alone with him meant.

  So far it had meant watching him, watching him move and float through the HabLab. Then darting her eyes away whenever he caught her looking. It meant laughing too hard whenever they bumped into each other in the close confines of Orion. It meant treating each other as professionals. Serious professionals.

  Rao knew what she wanted from him. She also knew she was very, very good at controlling her impulses when she needed to focus. Most of the time.

  She reached under their collapsible shower unit for a bolt that had floated away from her. When she came back up, Stevens put his hands on her shoulders. He leaned in close to kiss her neck. She’d kind of been expecting that, so she stiffened up.

  “Hey,” he said. “Was that… OK?”

  Rao laughed. “It was… extremely OK. Honestly,” she said. “But Sunny—we’re working.” When he didn’t let go immediately, she turned around and pushed him gently away. She tried to think of something to say that would defuse the situation. “You must be as excited to meet the aliens as I am, don’t lie.”

  “I’m excited about a l
ot of things,” he said, with an utterly innocent expression. That made her laugh again.

  It had been a long time since they’d left Earth. A long time to spend so close to him, often sleeping right next to him. She’d never even tried to deny the attraction.

  He put his mouth very close to her ear. “Are you seriously going to tell me you don’t want to be the first person to have sex in space?” he asked.

  Her eyes popped open wide and she yanked her head back to see his face. When she saw the big, overly innocent grin there, she exploded in laughter. He’d been joking. He’d only been joking.

  “That is so not fair, saying that to an overachiever like me.” It had taken a lot of drive to get where she had in life. Telling her she could break a record or get higher marks than someone else or—dear Lord—be the very first person to do something—

  He grasped her shoulders—very gently—and pulled her close. She laughed, but it was more of a nervous laugh this time. A long streamer of bubble wrap tried to drift between them, and she batted it away from his face. That made her snort at the absurdity of everything.

  He smiled. But he wasn’t laughing. He’d been at least a little bit serious.

  She took a deep breath. Let the tingles run down into the small of her back. Then she cleared her throat. “I think,” she said, “that I’m not thinking very clearly right now. And that maybe as excited as I am by getting to meet our alien friends, I might be a little less able than usual to make good decisions. What I do know is if Commander Jansen found out, we’d both be in hot water.”

  She reached out and grabbed his hand. Rubbed the back of it with her thumb. He never looked as cute as he did when he was pouting, honestly. “It won’t be much longer until we’re back on Earth. They say anticipation makes it better, right?”

  The expression on his face made her want to melt—to give in—but she stood firm. She turned around and got back to work.