Magic Dirt: The Best of Sean Williams (48 page)

It
was
a man, that much was obvious close up. His suit was identical to the one Hallows himself wore—except for the visor, which dangled open.

Hallows forced himself to lean closer. The name-tag on the suit said:

PROSILIS 1422K7A31

The name evoked memories of a small, fair-haired man with a lively sense of humour and relaxed demeanour. Hallows had trained with Antonio Prosilis for a month, before the latter had left on the refit mission previous to his. Had he been asked to, he would gladly have wagered that Prosilis was the least likely of all the refitters to commit suicide.

The recollection jarred with the black-faced corpse floating in the drive shaft before him. That Prosilis had deliberately unsealed his suit was unarguable: one hand remained tightly clenched around the plastic visor, and there were no signs of a struggle; just solitary agony followed shortly by death. Prosilis’ contorted features were mottled by vacuum-bruises around eyes squeezed tightly shut.

Trying hard to quash the tide of speculation rising in him, Hallows crawled out of the shaft. A radiation alarm, an inactive mainframe, a misaligned transmit dish and a dead body .... The list of misfortunes seemed endless. Until Gehrke arrived and examined the mainframe, the best he could do was explore the probe as well as he could, hoping he would stumble by chance upon a possible cause of the tragedy.

A cause, and a cure. Without the latter, they would be stranded aboard the probe until their air-supply ran out. There were no other options. By stepping into the disembarkation booth on Earth, they had deliberately cut themselves off from the rest of humanity. Nothing but empty space lay between the probe and home: trillions of kilometres of void, forever ...

He shook his head, trying to banish the image, to erase the reference point of Sol. He could only think about here and now— the probe and him—or he’d go crazy.

Like Prosilis ...
?

Then, as he swung himself carefully around the lip of the aft end, intending to head back to the d-mat airlock via the other side of the probe, a black patch appeared in the shimmer of stars to his left. Thinking a ball of dust had smudged his visor, he automatically raised a hand to brush it away. Only when he lowered his hand and the circular patch remained did he actually turn to study it. Another second passed before he truly understood what he was seeing.

Floating in space not two hundred metres from the probe, and stationary with respect to it, was another ship.

~ * ~

Jimmy Tarasento took the news badly—as Hallows had expected— although he hid it well. Of the three of them, he had the most to lose.

The refit crew huddled on the spine of the probe not far from the d-mat airlock. Hallows had been on
Saul-i
for six hours, Gehrke half that long. The three-hour lag between revelations—the time the d-mat receiver took to process the data comprising each refitter beamed from Earth—had worn Hallows’ nerves ragged. He was heartily glad that he only had to break the news twice.

Gehrke barely contained his frustration. His face burned red in the starlight as he waited for Tarasento to absorb the situation. The big systems analyst had never been renowned for his patience. Ever since his arrival he had been a furious knot of energy, twisting and writhing in an attempt to untangle itself.

Tarasento was more composed. A full minute passed before he finally opened his mouth and said “Fuck.” He raised a hand to his visor, as though to wipe his forehead, then let it drift limply to his chest. His brown eyes rolled upwards to a sky that wasn’t there. “I guess that’s it. We’re stuck here forever.”

“Not forever,” corrected Gehrke. “Twenty-six days. That’s how much air we have.”

“Until we die, then.” Tarasento sounded like he was about to cry. “That’s the same as forever, isn’t it?”

“Easy.” Hallows reached out to grip the younger man’s shoulder. “We don’t know for sure yet.”

“Like hell we don’t,” growled Gehrke. “The transmission dish is off-target. God only knows what it’s pointing at, but it isn’t Earth. If we try to leave, we’ll be sprayed across the universe like water from a fucking hose. They’ll never track the signal.”

“Maybe we can realign the dish,” Hallows said, refusing to admit defeat in front of the others, and still trying his best to keep the conversation focused on the
now.

“Yeah, maybe. And maybe we’ll build a warp drive and fly back home instead.”

“What happened?” Tarasento said softly, almost afraid to ask the question. “What went wrong?”

Gehrke deflated instantly. “We don’t know. I’ve only logged into the mainframe as far as the maintenance systems. We’re not supposed to mess with the guidance or transmission programs, so they’ll take a while to get into. I’ll do it, though, if I have to.”

“Is it something to do with
that?”
For the first time since his arrival, Tarasento acknowledged the dark scar in the starfield. “Whatever the hell it is.”

“It’s a ship,” said Hallows. “And it’s the source of the radiation. Beyond that, we don’t know much.”

“Could it be human?”

“I doubt it.” Hallows felt the hollow in his chest widen as it did every time he thought about the other ship.

“Surely the others left some sort of explanation?” Tarasento leaned forward to clutch Gehrke’s arm. “A log, a message—there must be—”

“None that I’ve found,” Gehrke said. “Just the usual mission reports, filed by automatics. The core programs have been tampered with though, and the mainframe’s running a little slow, which usually means there’s some heavy data stashed away on it somewhere. That might be what we’re looking for, or it might be the problem itself. We’ll only know when I find it.”

“And how long will that take?”

“As long as it takes.” Gehrke’s eyes flashed. “Which depends on how long I have to sit here wasting my time.”

Tarasento leaned back, chastened. “I’m sorry, Roald. It’s just ... it’s still sinking in. You’ve had longer to think about it, to get used to the idea. Give me a day or two and I’ll catch up.”

“You can rest for a while, if you like,” Hallows interjected. “But not too long. As Roald says, we’re wasting time. We can talk just as easily programming the refit as we can sitting here.”

Gehrke laughed bitterly. “Why bother? It’s not going to do
us
any good, is it?”

“I didn’t mean you, Roald. I want you to keep digging into the mainframe, to see if you can find out what happened. Get us access to the observation systems at least, so we can take a better look at that ... thing.” Hallows took a deep breath. The dark shadow seemed to watch him like an eye. “Jimmy and I will do the work. Whether we’ll die in four weeks or not doesn’t change what we came here to do. We’ve got mods to install, nanoware to program, repairs to make. The other refitters are still on the way, and there’s nothing we can do about that.
Saul-i
is the important thing, not us.”

“Can’t let the side down,” mumbled Gehrke.

“No, it’s more than that. We don’t have a choice, dammit.”

“We either work or go crazy.” Tarasento shrugged and tried to smile. “It’ll make the time pass, anyway.”

“Right.” Hallows was grateful for the young man’s rapid comprehension of the situation. He didn’t think he could handle a volatile confrontation at that moment—doubted that
any
of them could. Even through the thick fabric of his companions’ suits, and the stubborn bluff that kept weakness carefully from view, he could plainly see the stress in their postures, faces and eyes.

Behind them, as thought on cue, the d-mat airlock cycled open and automated systems began dispensing equipment and raw materials freshly-arrived from Earth. Hallows uncoiled from his squat, signalling the end of the impromptu debriefing.

“Time to work,” he said.

“Hey-bloody-ho,” muttered Gehrke, but obeyed nonetheless.

~ * ~

Hours passed in an unmarked blur. A green chronometer in one corner of Hallows’ field of view patiently ticked off the time, but the numbers soon became meaningless. Without a sun or a moon to make a difference, every hour was identical to the previous; the only thing that changed was the task he was performing at any given moment.

The fifth of seven refit crews, their prime objective was to prepare the probe for its period of deceleration; after twenty-two years of coasting at near-light-speed, the time was approaching for the mighty engines to fire again. The loss of Gehrke’s input made little difference. At a pinch, one person could have done the work required. Three had been sent to insure against unforeseen catastrophes, just as most of the probe’s basic systems had been designed in triplicate. Had things gone according to plan, Hallows would have been anticipating a speedy return to Earth—although the apparent swiftness of the round trip was relative only to him and his crew.

It still seemed strange to him that, although he had left Earth less than four years behind
Saul-1,
he wouldn’t return—if he
could
return—until eleven years after it had arrived at Eta Bootis. He could tackle the paradox intellectually—by calculating the changing velocity of the probe and its position in space at various stages of its thirty-seven year journey, then superimposing the vector of his own body as it travelled from and to Earth as what amounted to a beam of high-energy coherent light—but it still didn’t make
sense.

He had expected to lose forty-five years of history and gain up to four weeks of experience in deep-space. The trade-off had seemed acceptable when he had applied for a position in the Program. Since the moment he’d stepped from the d-mat however, he had hardly stopped to look at the sky around him. He’d been unconsciously avoiding the alien ship, and the probable fate awaiting him.

He’d known the risks, of course. They had been drummed into him from day one. There was no way to turn back. The constraints of light-speed were unbreakable. If the probe had blown up an hour or a decade before they arrived, the loss of signal wouldn’t have been noticed on Earth until years after they had left. And the same constraints applied now to a cry for help: twenty-two years would pass before Earth even heard it.

Perhaps, he mused, it would have been better if the probe
had
blown up before they arrived. At least that way they would have been unaware that the three of them were, to all intents and purposes, dead. Unless, since their departure, someone had invented an
FTL
drive and arrived in the nick of time to save the three stranded refitters ...

Hallows tasted bitterness on his tongue. Not three refitters, but
six.
Lockley, Pearce and Prosilis had been in exactly the same predicament as he, Gehrke and Tarasento. Prosilis had killed himself, and no trace had been found of the other two. Hallows couldn’t stop himself from wondering what they would choose when
their
time came.

He shook sweat from his eyes, wishing he could take off the suit just once to wipe his face. The breathing of his companions rasped loudly in his ears. The paste from his mouth-tube tasted like plastic. Avoidance of the problem didn’t seem to be proving a viable alternative to dealing with it—at least for him.

“Christ,” he said. “I need a drink. A
real
drink.”

“Hear, hear.” Tarasento’s voice, from the far side of the probe, came clear and brittle through the suit’s earphones. “I’ll hop into the ‘mat and get one, shall I?”

“Great.” And
that
was the problem. From anywhere to anywhere in Sol System took little more than a step by d-mat. It was hard to believe that Earth was really over two decades away.

“I’ve been studying the other ship,” Tarasento said. “The magnification on my visor isn’t great, but it’s better than nothing.”

“And?” Hallows allowed curiosity free reign for a moment; anything was better than the gloom that threatened to envelop him again. “Has it moved?”

“No.”

“Good.” Unless it did, he could continue to ignore it.

“It’s strange, though,” Tarasento went on. “The angles are all wrong. I don’t know how to describe it exactly, and it’s hard to tell through the shadows, but it looks like it might be damaged.”

Hallows nodded to himself; he had noticed that as well. The ship seemed oddly proportioned, almost contorted, as though someone had crumpled it into a ball and flung it into space. What he said was: “How can there be shadows, Jimmy, when there’s no primary source of light?”

Tarasento hesitated. “I don’t know. But that’s what they
look
like ...”

“Maybe it’s paint, or the natural colour of the hull.” If it
is
a hull, he added to himself. Sometimes it looked like folded sheets of paper, sometimes like the twisted planes of a mangled, multidimensional windmill. For all he knew, the design constituted the very apex of architectural perfection from an alien’s point of view.

“Yeah, maybe. If we could get closer, we’d know for sure.” The sudden eagerness in Tarasento’s voice was thinly-disguised. “It’d only take fifteen minutes there by EMU; less if I burned a little longer—”

“No, Jimmy. It’s too radioactive. You’d be dead in under ten minutes.”

“So? We’re picking up plenty of rads now, aren’t we? What difference is a few weeks going to make?”

“Forget the other ship.” Gehrke’s voice cut in abruptly on the open line. “I’ve found something.”