Origin - Season One (51 page)

Francis’s first impression as he stepped onto the observation deck was that they hadn’t gone anywhere at all. Then he realized that what he had first taken for the dock inside Aurora was in fact the hull of a small vessel. Neither boat was showing any lights. When he looked up he saw there were no stars out. The wind was blowing an ice-cold draft off the water that made him shiver in the thin coveralls.

“You’ll want to get down here and across quickly,” someone said from below. “We’re leaving.”

Francis looked down and saw a crewman standing at the bottom of the ladder leading down onto the hull. He was shining a dim red beam of light up to indicate where the ladder was and Francis climbed down.

“Gangway’s over there,” the man said when Francis was down. He pointed the beam at a set of steps suspended by a small crane from the boat.

“Where are we?” Francis asked.

“The Karl Gustav. Although if you don’t get moving you’ll be in Davy Jones’s locker in about sixty seconds.”

The man ushered Francis toward the steps and he scrambled up just as they began to rise. As he stepped onto the deck of the Karl Gustav, Francis almost walked straight into a short, stocky man with a battered old captain’s cap covering a thick tangle of red hair.

“I was just coming to see where you were,” the man said in a thick Scottish accent. “I’m Captain MacDonald. Francis Moore, I presume?”

“That’s me,” Francis said.

“A good name, that,” the captain said. “Welcome aboard. I’m afraid Richelle neglected to tell me we had a guest until I ordered the gangway raised. Things have taken an unexpected turn for the worse and as you can see we’re all shitting bricks.”

Francis wasn’t sure if the man was joking or just crazy; he was smiling as he said it.

“What the hell is going on?” Francis asked.

“We’re about to witness a miracle,” the captain said. “Although if the weather gets any worse it may be a short-lived one. Come, follow me.”

Francis, no closer to getting an intelligible answer to his question, followed the captain across the deck and through a small door at the bottom of the superstructure. It had started to rain by the time they got inside. As soon as the door closed, a light came on in the ceiling and he saw they were in a narrow hallway leading to a set of steps.

“When I get a hold of the arseholes at the weather station who promised us clear skies and smooth seas for tonight I’m going to castrate them with my bare hands,” MacDonald said as he led Francis down the hall. “Up you go. Straight through the door at the end. I’ve got to get back outside.”

Francis watched the captain run back to the door and disappear. He stood there for a moment feeling the ship rock gently and thanked the cook on board the Callisto, he of the dog-shit cocktail, for his uncanny foresight. Had he still been feeling like death warmed up, Francis thought he would have had to race the captain back to the door and onto the nearest rail for a spot of projectile vomiting. What he did instead was take a deep breath and climb the steps.

When he walked through the door at the end of the passage onto the bridge, what greeted him was pandemonium. There were at least a dozen people present. Francis recognized only Richelle and Heinz. Most of the crew were gathered around the communications console where several of the panels below the control interface had been removed. Someone had climbed inside and was buried to his waist in a jumble of wires and cables.

Francis walked over to Richelle. “What’s going on?”

It was Heinz who answered. “The transponder for the remote piloting system has shorted out.”

“Okay,” Francis said. “In English?”

Before Heinz could answer the door flew open and Captain MacDonald and one of his crew came stumbling in carrying a large red steel box. Both men were drenched and panting heavily. As soon as they set the box down two of the crew began removing the lid. When the man below the console extracted himself and stood up, Francis saw it was Mitch.

“Hey, double-O-seven,” Mitch said. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

“I feel a bit like a fifth wheel around here,” Francis said.

Mitch cocked a thumb back at the hole he had just climbed out of. “So did I until things started falling apart.”

As soon as the lid was off the box Mitch reached inside and pulled out a long narrow circuit board. He crawled back to the hole beneath the console and began pulling out wires. “Charlie, these things aren’t going to connect themselves.”

A young man – Francis thought he looked no older than seventeen – handed Mitch a small butane soldering iron. They all watched as he began stripping the wires and attaching them to the board. When he was done, Mitch tucked everything back inside and said, “All right boss, try that.”

Heinz was standing below a monitor mounted to the ceiling of the bridge. It displayed two identical outlines of a ship’s hull against a dark graph background. One was white and centered on the screen, while the one in red was several centimeters to its right and at a slight angle. He typed something on the keyboard below the screen and stood back. The bridge was silent for almost a minute as they all watched. When the distance between the two outlines began to decrease Heinz breathed a long sigh of relief and said, “She’s back online.”

A cheer went up among the crew. Several of them slapped Mitch on the back. Everyone was celebrating but Francis, who remained clueless as to what was happening.

Heinz raised his hands and said, “That’s all very well, people. But we still have a job to do here and we’re not out of the woods yet by any stretch. Jonas, get her back into position. And someone contact Captain Almila and let him know.”

Richelle walked over to Francis and pointed to a ladder at the back of the bridge, “Come on, let’s go up. We’ll get a better view from there.”

“Better view of what?” Francis said.

“You’ll see.”

When he emerged from the hatch at the top of the ladder, Francis saw they were on a large helipad. Where the helicopter was supposed to be, however, there was now a row of large video cameras mounted to the deck on heavy-duty tripods. To Francis they looked like the cameras used to shoot movies or record television programs. Richelle joined him, spoke briefly to one of the people operating the cameras then came back.

“All right,” Francis said. “I’m officially dying of curiosity. What are we doing here?”

Richelle smiled. “I’m sorry. I had intended to bring you up to speed on events when you arrived. But as you can see, things weren’t going so well.”

“Okay,” Francis said, “And now?”

“Much better.”

“So?”

Richelle looked at Francis the way a teacher might look at a pupil when deciding how best to explain a particularly complicated idea. When she appeared to have made up her mind, she pointed at the camera nearest them and said, “Come. Have a look.”

When the man operating it stepped aside, Francis saw it was a night vision camera. Although unlike the ones he had used many times himself, this one was clearly state-of-the-art. The screen still had a slight green tint to it, but the image wasn’t grainy at all. What he saw was a large ship with its superstructure in the bow.

“That’s the Pandora,” Richelle said. “She was commissioned at Busan eighteen months ago. In reality, she isn’t so much a ship as a landing platform for what we’ve been calling RP One.”

“RP One?” Francis said.

“It stands for reconnaissance platform. It’s a small scout module used to survey the surface of a planet in preparation for a mass landing. RP One left Origin six days ago. Until we actually sent the launch signal, we had no idea it was even going to work. It’s also the reason Brendan made his move when he did.”

Francis was looking at her as if she were making him the butt of an intriguing but ridiculous joke. Only if it was a joke, the three people now standing next to him must have been in on it, because none of them looked remotely amused.

“Let me get this right,” Francis said. “We’re waiting for a spaceship to land?
On
that ship?”

“Now you understand why I didn’t bother trying to explain it before. But yes, that’s exactly what we’re doing. Although it’s not really a spaceship. It was launched from Origin by catapult. If Heinz is right, and he has been about everything else so far, it uses some kind of ion converter engine in the upper atmosphere to slow down as it descends because it has no propulsion of its own.”

“Onto that?” Francis said pointing at the screen.

“That’s the theory,” Richelle said. “The Pandora is being controlled from here. Which is why she began to drift out of position when the transponder failed.”

“You’re saying there is nobody on that ship?”

Richelle shook her head. “If the calculations are right, RP One will be about three hundred and fifty degrees Celsius when it touches down. Not only that, but the electric charge it will be putting out would probably fry anyone on board. And that’s not the worst of it. Because of the alloy it’s made of it’s extremely heavy for its size. The Pandora was built with all these things in mind, but the truth is, we’re really not sure how accurate any of our predictions are.”

“And if you’re wrong?” Francis said.

“I’d rather not think –”

She was interrupted by one of the others who pointed at the sky and said, “There,” before running back to his camera and pointing it upwards.

Francis looked up and saw what looked like a bright star, a sight that was only peculiar because there were no others. A moment later Heinz’s voice came over the radio in Richelle’s pocket. He sounded almost delirious with excitement. “Richelle, are you seeing this?”

“I see it.”

“I can’t believe it,” Heinz said.

“Well, if
you
can’t,” Richelle said, “where does that leave
us
?”

Francis thought it was a very good question. Heinz replied with a burst of nervous laughter.

As they watched, the light grew steadily brighter and began to take on a pale orange tint. To Francis’s mind, struggling now for dear life to bring what it was seeing into line with what it could accept, the thing up there was not a spaceship, but a giant meteor, hurtling to earth with promises of Armageddon. As if to confirm this, the spot began to glow brighter and grow in length.

A moment later they heard it. It began as a low humming, like the sound of overhead power lines or a low note on an amplified bass guitar, then quickly increased in tone until it was almost a screech. Francis felt Richelle’s hand first brush his own then curl around it in a death grip as the thing appeared to pick up speed.

“Jesus Christ,” Francis said, “It’s going to crash!”

Richelle didn’t reply, but the look on her face suggested she was thinking the same thing.

That’s when it exploded.

Or so it seemed.

Francis saw the Pandora, looking tiny and insignificant as the fireball descended like the wrath of God himself. When it seemed only a few hundred yards above the ship it erupted in a flash of blinding brilliance. Bolts of lightning began to shoot out in all directions, some touching down on the surface of the water, others arching around and finding the ship. The high-pitched whine grew louder for a moment, then suddenly turned into the roar of a thousand afterburners spinning up for takeoff. Francis felt his ears pop. He closed his eyes, convinced that the next thing they would see was either a mushroom cloud or a wave several stories high rushing at them across the water. But when he opened them again, what he saw was nothing. Other than the ringing in his ears and the bright spot in the center of his vision, the night had returned as quickly as it had been interrupted.

Richelle looked at him, then down at her hand, which was still clutching his. She let go and said, “What the hell just happened?”

The way she said it and the expression on her face made her look twelve years old. Francis, who had no idea what the hell had just happened, only reciprocated the look. When he turned to the camera crew he saw they were no better off. Richelle raised the radio in her right hand and said, “Heinz? You there?”

“Hold on a moment,” Heinz said, “We’ve got a visual, but it looks like the sensor readouts are… no wait, I think we’re getting something.”

“Heinz,” Richelle said, “never mind the fucking readouts, have we lost the Pandora?”

There was a pause. When he answered, Heinz sounded both elated and a little annoyed. “Lost the Pandora? No, of course not.”

“And RP One?”

“Well, we’re still waiting for a response from the –”

“Heinz, just tell me if RP One is on board that ship.”

“Yes.”

Richelle let the radio fall from her hand, then sank to her knees and looked up at the sky. Francis thought she had started to cry, but when she looked at him he saw only relief in her eyes. A moment later Heinz appeared in the hatch behind them and climbed out onto the landing pad. Richelle got to her feet. When Heinz extended his hand she ignored it and put her arms around him instead.

“We did it,” she said.

“We did,” Heinz said. “We really did. And if we don’t get out of here we’ll probably all be in jail by this time tomorrow.”

She let go of him and stepped back, the smile on her face widening as she turned to Francis. “Never one to waste time on sentiment is our chief scientist.”

“What?” Heinz said, “I’m serious. We can’t –”

“I know you are,” Richelle said, “Go on, off you go. Get us out of here. I’d give you a week off when we get back, but I don’t see the point in making you miserable after all you’ve done.”

Heinz hesitated for a moment, apparently unsure if the conversation was over, then he lifted his radio and said, “Get the Pandora out of there. I want full thrust on all motors. She’s going to struggle to pick up speed with the extra weight.”

The Karl Gustav began to vibrate as her engines were pushed to full throttle. Richelle and Francis stood looking out at the sea where the first glow of the coming dawn was just breaking over the horizon. In the distance, the silhouette of the Pandora painted both a majestic and somehow ominous picture, a silent promise of things to come.

To be continued…