3. Its eye was enormous. Dozens of metres across, it was sunk deep in the crater of which it formed the base, the only part of its anatomy not protected by the mantle of rock that covered its massive body. It had only one eye: binocular vision was redundant in the vast expanses of space where nearly everything it observed was so far away that depth estimation was impossible.
Its vision was unbelievably keen, able to make out planets round individual stars halfway across the galaxy, and the organ was used continuously since it had nothing else to do during the thousands of years it had traversed the great gulfs between one star and the next. It had studied the nearer stars, memorising the movements of their planets and what it could make out of their size and composition though this, in the case of the smaller worlds, was limited. It needed to be close to a sun system if it was to observe its planets in detail and determine whether they were habitable.
It had seen the explosive impact on 1036 Ganymed, and after observing the asteroid for three weeks had judged that it would hit the third planet of the system. This caused it a twinge of regret. The third planet had been the goal of its two-hundred-year voyage from Gliese 581. Weighing up the size of Ganymed, it concluded that after the impact the planet would not be immediately approachable. The regret was transient. Time meant nothing to it and it was prepared to wait until the planet recovered from the devastation.
It passed a few more weeks gathering all the information it could. Finally, a decision was reached. It would push itself into orbit around the fourth planet of the system and stay there until it judged it safe to move on. It knew the third planet harboured life. How much would survive the coming cataclysm was yet unsure, but of one thing it was certain. There its wanderings would come to an end. It could go no further.
I’m not in the habit of lying and in this case it was going to be doubly difficult. My crew knew me and they were not fools. I needed some details to make my story convincing. It was necessary to get Trinny to co-operate first.
Eyes only. Commander Jason Montague to Director Eugene Trinny Acknowledge boosters will be sent to supply supplementary power to Terra Nova. To reassure crew on this matter please send specs on procedures for attaching boosters to Terra Nova and their operation. Also date and orbital insertion details of supply ships. Will communicate this information to crew once received.
Get creative, I thought, as I transmitted the message.
The reply came twenty-four hours later and contained all I hoped for: schematic diagrams of the booster rockets, grappling mechanisms to attach them to the Terra Nova, and the power and duration of their burns. They were to be ordinary chemical rockets: nuclear thermal rockets would be too improbable given the limited time available to construct them. The video was neatly put together, like a multimedia training manual. I ran it on the Rec room screen. It seemed to convince everybody with the exception, of course, of Cloe.
Domingo whistled when it was over. “That’s pretty good construction in so short a time.”
“Nicht wirklich,” said Dieter. “Standard components. Just a question of putting them together like a jigsaw puzzle. I could do it better.”
“Sure you could.”
“The bottom line is we won’t need to aerobrake,” I said. “Suits me. Damn nerve-wracking idea, having to do an atmospheric pass every two hours.”
“Every thirty-five hours decreasing to two hours,” corrected Dieter.
“OK, you’re the expert. Anyhow we do a full orbital insertion burn as scheduled. The next video has details of the supply ships. We’ll need to fit them into our timetable and decide when we pick them up.”
By the end of the session I gave myself a mental pat on the back. Acting a part is easy once you get the hang of it. It wasn’t that difficult working up the performance if one was sufficiently motivated. And sure as hell I was going to keep the lid on this cauldron. That is where my duty began and ended. Our job was to get to Mars and back. Earth could fix the bloody asteroid.
The next three weeks were relatively uneventful, in the sense that we didn’t have any more nasty revelations calculated to turn our little world upside down. Underneath the daily routine, however, a tension began to build up. We had known each other for years, heck we were friends, which is why we had been picked for this mission in the first place. But every now and then there came a moment when I had the peculiar sensation of being a stranger. It was just a transient feeling, founded seemingly on nothing. We acted and spoke to each other as before—no, not quite. I got the impression that we were trying just a little too hard to behave like a solid, united team. There was a slight touch of the overdone in our banter. It came and went. Sometimes things seemed almost normal. I didn’t like it one little bit. I wanted to land on Mars, stick the flag in the ground, and get back to Earth as quickly as possible.
The only significant incident during our final approach was almost trivial compared to what had already happened. It was a message from Mission, informing us that a large body, probably another rogue asteroid, had just been detected on a path that would fly close by Mars before exiting the solar system. The new asteroid’s existence had hitherto been overlooked due to the fact that every sizeable telescope was busy monitoring Ganymed. It was an amateur astronomer who noticed it whilst tracking our own progress.
“It’s about four kilometres in length,” I said using a laser pointer to trace a circle around a blurry object in the photo on the Rec room screen. “It’s black or nearly so, which is why no-one spotted it until now. Only prominent feature is a jet-black crater—there—see it?”
Domingo shifted in his couch. “Where’d it come from?”
“Outside the solar system it seems. They’re still looking through photo archives for earlier traces of it. It’s not any known body.”
“It comes close to Mars,” said Dieter. “Will it affect us?”
“No. Its periapsis is about seventeen thousand kilometres from the surface. Slightly different plane to our own orbit. We’ll watch it go by from a safe distance and take a few photos, though the Mars Orbiter will probably take better ones.”
Tessa glanced at me. “Is that the only picture of it? You haven’t got anything better?”
I reached towards the remote buttons on the coffee table. “Yuh, there are a couple more....not much clearer though...there.” A succession of pictures appeared on the screen, each with the same blurry, darkish object in the middle.
“Strange,” said Dieter.
“What is?”
“That black crater. It is in all of them.”
I replayed the photos. Sure enough, it was.
“The point being...?”
“Either it is not rotating or it is rotating directly around its axis of movement. That is....unusual.”
“A bit of a coincidence, but these photos are only a couple of weeks apart. They might even have been snapped just as the crater was facing the same direction. We don’t know for sure yet.”
Dieter shrugged. “It is interesting, but not enough to make me lose any sleep.”
“OK, got some family messages. Who’s first?”
From space, Mars, like any planet, is beautiful. A huge, russet sphere, tinged with pink and grey and a scattering of darker mottling. It comforted me to see it, like a surrogate mother would appear to an orphan child. But Mars was no mother. An unprotected human being on the Martian surface would be fully conscious for ten seconds and completely unconscious after twenty. Death would occur about a minute after that. On its endless near-vacuum desert nothing lived or ever would.
As I strapped myself into the Annex control seat and began the count-down procedure for the de-spin manoeuvre I thought about it. Why go to Mars? There was some sense in going to the moon: it was near enough to be usefully exploited, perhaps, though I had not yet heard of anything in the lunar crust that could not be got more cheaply from the Earth itself.
But Mars, now. What drove us to go all the way there? Biologically, Mars is as dead as a brick, in fact a good deal deader. From the inorganic angle it has little more to offer. Martian soil is slightly alkaline and contains magnesium, sodium, potassium and chloride. The Martian dust consists of iron oxides in very fine grains like talcum powder that could remain suspended indefinitely in the thin atmosphere, giving it its reddish hue. There was plenty of ice below the ground, where it had ended up after flowing as liquid water on the surface millions of years ago. All very interesting from a speculative point of view, but of no practical use. And yet here we were.
The comm link pinged. “Mission here. We’re picking up a slight fluctuation in the input from the nav computer. Could just be a transmission error. Abort the despin at your discretion until you’ve run a check. Mission out.”
I glanced at Domingo. “Reckon you can do it on manual?”
He grinned. “I owe you one.”
“I’ll hold you to that. Right, all yours. Activate spin jets.”
“Activated, check.”
“One hundred percent thrust for ninety-seven seconds then taper off.”
“One hundred ninety-seven, check.”
“At your discretion.”
“Ready.”
“Go.”
Domingo waited a few moments then pressed a button on his joystick control. Nothing happened at first, then, slowly, on my screen, the virtual 3D image of the Terra Nova began to slow its rate of rotation. A feeling of lightness crept up on me, about my eyes, throat and stomach, rather like the sensation of being in a roller coaster just beginning its plunge. The rotating image slowed further and the feeling of lightness grew. I glanced around briefly. Everything loose had been stowed away or tied down. In any case a stray object would not suddenly start flying about. I can be a little over cautious.
After a minute and a half the image of the Terra Nova stopped all movement. Domingo had executed a perfect de-spin. If he hadn’t I would have been surprised.
“Shut down spin jets.”
“Spin jets off.”
“Systems check.”
Domingo’s fingers flew over the keyboard, his eyes on the succession of windows that opened on the screen before him. “All systems normal.”
I unstrapped myself and flipped on the mike. “All right, people, time to find our space legs.”
Microgravity takes a little getting used to. For two to three days after entering a weightless state about 40 percent of astronauts experience space sickness, with feelings of nausea and general malaise, accompanied by vomiting, headaches and dizziness. That wouldn’t be a problem on the Terra Nova: everyone aboard had been selected partly because they were not subject to this condition.
Tessa was the first up from the lower deck. Using handholds set in the walls for the purpose she manoeuvred herself over to Domingo and glanced at the screen. Then holding him round the neck she planted a kiss on his crown.
“Well done, darling.”
“Piece of cake.”
A little stab of loneliness found its way inside me. NASA had made me commander because Sylvia and I could manage—and manage all too well—to live apart for nearly two years. Her illness that had ruled her out as a crewmember had not affected NASA’s decision. They needed a commander who would treat all his crew with equal impartiality. But being alone had not turned out as easy as I had anticipated.
Tessa looked over. “And well done for letting hubby put us on the straight and narrow.”
“Ah, just call him the ship’s chaplain.”
The next twenty-four hours were occupied with a thorough systems check-up and an external examination of the Terra Nova’s robotic arm which had been hit by a micrometeoroid. EVA work was Dieter’s speciality. Given the long duration of the mission and the possibility of incapacitation of one or more crew members, roles were interchangeable: any one of the crew could perform the tasks of any other. But if anyone could be said to be a born engineer, it was Dieter. With what amounted to a genius for systems electronics and a diagnostic instinct that seemed at times supernatural, he was the one who could fix anything that went wrong. So far nothing had, due in part to his preventive double-checking. He had a feel for the ship, like a long-wedded husband who knew what his wife would say before she said it. It was something that amused me, and I liked ribbing him about it.
“You should become a Moslem.” I said as we did a minute point-by-point examination of the robotic arm’s joints, manoeuvring round it with our built-in suit jets. The structure of the ISS2 had made tethers awkward, and NASA finally dispensed with them when the Z4 space suit jets had proven to be reliable.
“Why so?” he asked whilst applying lubricant with a grease gun.
“They can have eight wives.”
“No—two is enough.”
Behind us Mars glowed brilliantly in the perpetual night sky. The checking procedure completed I turned around using my suit jets to take in its vista. It was the real thing. Not a photograph or an image on a monitor, but the great splendid orb itself, and it was beautiful. A planet is a world, and a world is a marvellous thing, as the New World had been to Columbus when first he beheld it from the creaking foredeck of the Santa Maria. Out here, floating in the endless nothingness of space, it made perfect sense to me that we had travelled half a billion kilometres to visit it.
“Jason,” came Dieter’s voice over the radio.
I swung back slowly. “What is it?”
“You miss this.” Between his thumb and forefinger he held a tiny black grain. “Another micrometeoroid. Inside the joint. It must have been travelling slow, not to be pulverised on impact.”
“Does it make a difference?”
“It might, which means it probably will. I don’t want anything affecting the arm when we use it. She is sensitive, the ship.” He gave the arm a pat.
Slowly, methodically, we continued our surgical examination whilst the russet sphere shimmered behind us.
It was looking for a possible place to descend when it noticed three tiny metallic glints orbiting the planet. Its sight was equally acute across its entire field of vision: its brain was capable of processing an enormous amount of data and hence did not need to focus on a particular point. It was examining a flat plain at the base of Olympus Mons when the glints appeared off to the side, moving rapidly across its sight before being hidden in the night side of the planet, reappearing again in its dawn.
The new objects were strange, unlike the two small moons it had already noticed. A careful examination of the objects’ shapes and texture led to the conclusion that they were not natural but were artefacts, similar to those it had seen on the third planet of the system. They disappeared around the far end of the planet and after a time reappeared. The watcher could not imagine their purpose. After a few hours it deduced that their orbits were not perfectly stable, which meant they could not have been circling this world for very long.
As it watched, one of the objects suddenly emitted a brief flash of flame, and shortly afterwards was surrounded by a glowing aura of fiery heat as it entered the atmosphere. The watcher adjusted its vision to see into the blackness of the planet’s night. The object did not crash as it expected, but managed to slow itself down with a billowing canopy before finally landing intact on the planet’s surface. A short while later another of the objects descended in the same manner to the same spot on the ground.
For some time afterwards the watcher studied the objects on the surface but could discern no further movement. It waited for the third object to enter the atmosphere like its predecessors, but it remained in orbit, showing no sign of activity.
After much deliberation a decision was reached. It would descend near the objects on the ground so they could be studied close at hand. It was imperative that it learn more. Not for a moment did the thought of caution cross the watcher’s mind. Whatever the glints were, they had nothing within them that posed any threat. It felt within itself. For a hundred years it had painfully, laboriously regrown the organ with which it would spin its great thread, and for fifty years after that the thread had been spun. It was old beyond imagining and unutterably weary, and much of its body was decayed past the point of resuscitation, but what still lived had sufficed for the task. Soon the weaving would be complete.
4. “This is Commander Montague to Mission Control. We confirm the Shirase and Atlantis have landed successfully and are fully functional. We are beginning the final check-up before orbital insertion burn. The external arm is functional again and we are commencing a scan of the internal systems prior to firing up the main engine. Will report in due course. Montague out.”
I ran through the video clip once on the Annex screen and clicked on Transmit. I turned to Dieter sitting next to me. “Right, you want to take it from here?”
“Ja, Jason.” He seemed preoccupied, his fingers poised over the keyboard. “We do not have to do this.”
“What do you mean?”
He turned to face me. “Go through this comedy, hein? There are no supply ships or boosters.”
I began to reply. He cut in: “I hear you and Cloe talk together. I was coming from the PriFly deck. The time for lies is over.”
I was silent.
“We can force them to do as we wish. We do a partial burn into aerobraking orbit and tell everyone on earth why we do. They must send a supply ship after that. They cannot let us die.”
I rubbed the back of my neck. “What makes you think they won’t?”
“Because we are the last hope of humanity. They can make at least one booster ready just before Ganymed hits. It is pointless to use it on the asteroid. It is too late then to make any difference. That is the one they use to send supplies to us. Verdammen the mission and pretending everything is well. We must come down to reality, Jason.” The glint of fear in his eyes was unmistakeable.
I said nothing for a time. There were just the two of us on the Annex deck. Domingo and Tessa had been outside on EVA for over two hours and were busy with their last task: replacing the forward external camera that Dieter had noticed was faulty on his previous EVA. Cloe was in the PriFly deck. For a moment I wished she was present but put the thought aside. I wasn’t sure she would back me up. Heck, I wasn’t sure of my own position.
I shook my head. “If we go rogue there’s no telling what they’ll do. So long as there’s any chance of diverting Ganymed, even with a last minute hit, we won’t be getting anything.”
“A last minute hit will make no difference, you know this.”
“Sure but do you think everyone else does? Figure the politics. A booster that’s ready for lift-off just before Ganymed hits Earth still has to be configured for a bomb or a supply ship weeks ahead of time. They can’t switch payloads the day before launch. You think NASA can tell everyone that it’s got one last booster left but it won’t be using it on the asteroid since it’ll be sending supplies to us instead? Guess what reaction they’ll get.”
“They can say nothing.”
“That’s too big a secret to keep, Dieter. Somebody won’t like the idea that his last survival ticket is going to us, and he’ll blow the whistle.”
Dieter was silent a moment before replying: “We speak to Trinny. He can tell us what our chances are for a ship.”
“I do that and we’ve gone rogue. Trinny might back us but he doesn’t call the shots. The President does. There’s no way Pearson’ll green light anything that even looks likes it might threaten national security. He’ll have no choice but to drop us.” The conversation had cleared my thinking. “Sorry, Dieter. No can do. Our only chance is to keep on track. Ninety-four percent is good odds.”
Dieter turned away from me. “Ja, sicher, ninety-four percent. You live in Fairyland.” He unstrapped himself. “We pause check-up for a minute. I must go to the toilet. I come back soon.” I nodded and watched him pull himself away along the wall rungs. I had feared this might happen but it had gone better than I expected. Dieter had taken the reality check well, leaving me free at long last to drop the subterfuge, come clean with Tessa and Domingo, and concentrate on the job at hand. The sense of relief was deep.
A short time later Dieter returned and manoeuvred himself into his seat. He switched on the mike and tuned it to the suit radio frequency. “Domingo?”
“Yeah, Dieter?”
“The camera is in place?”
“Yup, just done it. We’re coming in now. Suit jets are getting low. Oxygen too for some reason. Must be a leak.”
Tessa’s voice cut in. “My oxygen’s low too.”
“OK, just one more thing.” Dieter tapped the keyboard. An image appeared on his screen, a close-up view of a visor. “We need to make sure it is secure. You and Tessa, can you both hold it and pull a little bit?”
“Do we need to do that?” I asked.
“I need to be certain the centrifuge will not affect it when we restart the spin.”
I nodded. “OK, go ahead.”
A second visor appeared in the image. “You heard the man, Tessa. Get a hold there and we’ll give it a good pull on three. One...two...”
A jolt shuddered through the ship.
“What was that?”
Dieter’s fingers flew over the keyboard. “I do not know. Domingo, Tessa, hold on. I think it is some kind of misfire.
I ran up a 3D image of the Terra Nova on my own screen and began a check. A part of the ship’s virtual anatomy flashed red. “What on earth?” I said. “Spin jets are firing at full power.” I glanced the joystick. The firing button was off. “We have to shut them down.”
“Scheisse. I know. I try to shut them,” said Dieter. “Domingo, Tessa, what is your status?”
“We’re holding on to the bloody camera frame. What the hell’s happening?”
“The spin jets are firing. Keep holding on. We will shut them down.”
The 3D image of the ship began to rotate, slowly at first then gradually picking up speed. I felt a slight sense of weight bearing me down into my chair. “Dieter, try the override command.”
“It does not work.”
“Then shut down all systems and reboot from scratch.”
“It is frozen. Look.”
I tapped in an instruction. Nothing happened. We were locked out of the ship’s computer.
“Dieter, we’re beginning to feel the weight here. Shut the jets off now.”
I shook my head in desperation. “We have to kill the power to the computer and restart manually.
“I must get under the console for that.”
“Dammit, do it! If we don’t stop the jets the whole ship will come apart.”
Dieter unbuckled his seat straps. “Must get tools. Talk to them.” He twisted out of his seat and made for the galley, where a tool chest was kept.
“Domingo. We’re going to shut down the system and do a reboot. Keep holding on.”
“Hurry up. Suit’s getting heavy.”
At that moment Cloe appeared beside me. “What is going on?”
“Spin jets are stuck on full throttle. I can’t access the system. Domingo and Tessa are hanging onto the forward camera. Dieter’s getting the tools to cut the system power.”
Cloe leaned over the mike. “Let go.”
Domingo replied, his voice strained. “What?”
“Let go. When we shut the jets we come for you.”
“No.” It was Dieter back with a small tool chest. “We do not know how long before we make the ship operational. They will be too far. I cut the power in a few seconds.” He leaned over the mike. “Hold on. I will be quick.”
“Hurry.”
At lightning speed Dieter drew out a powered screwdriver and began to undo the panelling screws below his console. With the exception of the main drive chamber, everything on the Terra Nova was designed for easy access by the crew. After a few moments the panel was off and pushed aside. Twisting around Dieter inserted his head in the exposed space. “Power cable...there. Give me the small pliers.” I passed them over. “Gut, I cut them now.” I waited.
Nothing happened. The virtual Terra Nova continued to rotate on my monitor, gaining speed.
“Dieter, what the hell...”
“Ich verstehe nicht! I cut the leads. The power should be off.”
“There must be a backup cable somewhere. Find the bloody thing.”
Time passed. Dieter grunted and twisted, his head out of sight. I watched the ship’s spin. We were nearly at one gee. My weight was beginning to bother me.
A voice came over the intercom. “We can’t hold on...” There was a shriek. “Tessa!”
I seized hold of the mike. “Domingo! What happened?”
“We’re loose.”
“Use your suit jets to slow yourselves down as much as possible until they’re empty. Do it now. We’ll come and get you.”
“OK, Jason. Come on Tess. We’ll lock arms and do it together. Ready....go.”
I turned my attention back to Dieter. “Found it?”
“Nein. Not here.” He emerged. “Move, Jason. I need to look under your side.”
Another shudder shook the ship. Dieter glanced upwards then down at my screen. “This is insane. The spin jets have reversed direction.”
The ship’s rotation gradually slowed whilst Dieter removed the second panel. I leaned over the mike. “Domingo? How’re you doing?”
“OK.”
“We’re slowing the spin. Soon as we’ve figured out the problem we’ll come for you. Tess, how are you?”
“Everything normal except the oxygen. It’s way down.”
“OK, breathe slowly. Domingo?”
“Same thing. Less than half an hour.”
“Keep calm, people. You’ve plenty left. We’ll get to you in good time.”
I switched off the mike and glanced down at Dieter. “How’re you doing?”
“I see nothing here. Give me a flashlight. Danke....wait....there it is. It is makeshift. Who did this? Gut, give me the pliers.”
“Wait,” said Cloe.
I looked at her. “Why?”
“Let’s see what happens.”
Dieter’s head emerged. “We must get the ship under control.”
“I know, but wait.”
The seconds passed. The ship’s rotation slowed to a fraction of a gee, then....
“The jets are off,” I said.
Cloe slid into the seat and ran her fingers over the keyboard. “I can access the systems. I’ll take off the last of the spin and start up the engine.”
Dieter pulled himself upright. “We must reboot. Whatever made the spin jets to start up could make them start again.”
“Non. No time.”
Dieter slipped into my own seat. “Let me find what caused this.”
For the next minute there was silence. As weightlessness returned I gripped hold of Cloe’s seat and switched on the mike. “OK Domingo, we’ve got control of the ship again. The spin is off. We’re about to start the main engine. Shouldn’t be more than ten minutes before we reach you.
“Good news, Jason.”
“How’s the air?”
“Still going down fast. We must both have a leak. Dunno how.”
“How much left?”
“At this rate, fifteen minutes.”
“I have them on radar,” said Cloe. “Two kilometres away. I pull the damping rods now. Feed the hydrogen in twenty seconds. Brace yourself, Jason.”
“Was zum Teufel...?” said Dieter.
“What?” I asked.
He said nothing, but gave me a glance before returning his attention to the screen.
I pushed myself up to the ceiling and got a grip on two handholds. For a burn we should all have been in the PriFly deck, settled in our gee-couches. When the main engine fired, up and down were reversed: the ceiling became the floor, with a 1-G force. The roof of the Annex deck was as good a place as any to be during a burn but I didn’t want to fall on it. I waited for the sudden increase of weight when the spewing column of superheated hydrogen gave its kick to the ship. As Cloe’s thumb hit the fire button on the joystick I braced my body against the ceiling.
Nothing happened.
I looked down. Cloe pressed the button several more times then turned to Dieter. “It does not fire!”
Dieter stared at the screen before him, his fingers moving over the keys. “It is blocking the hydrogen feed sequence. It is a trojan.”
“A what?”
“Remote controlled virus.”
I swung myself down to the floor. “Can you stop it?”
Dieter did not reply. Cloe raised her hands to her forehead. “Cut the power cable.”
Dieter shook his head. “Too late for that. We cannot recalibrate the systems and start the motor in under half an hour.”
He glanced at her. “We have lost them.” He undid his straps and lifted himself from his seat.
“Where are you going?” I asked.
He didn’t look at me. “I must check something. You...speak to them now.” And with that he pushed himself off.
I took my place and strapped in. I did not know what to do.
“Jason?”
“I’m here, Domingo.”
“How’s it going?”
What does one say? “Not good.”
“What do you mean?”
“We can’t start the engine.”
“Nothing you can do?”
Silence, then: “No.”
A sharp intake of breath, then a sob, from Tessa this time. For several long minutes no-one spoke, then Domingo’s voice: “OK, I wish we’d had more time, but this is it. He comes when he wants to come and we gotta go. Come, baby, let’s get ready. It’s just a door, you know, it’s nothing more than that.”
“I’m so scared.”
“Yeah, so am I. But it’ll be over quick. Come.”
“Do what?”
“Pray with me. You know the prayer.” There was a pause, then Domingo’s voice, hesitantly joined after a few words by Tessa’s: “Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with you. Blessed are you among women, and blessed is the fruit of your womb, Jesus. Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now, and at the hour of our death. Amen.” There was a pause, in which I could hear slightly laboured breathing. Their oxygen was giving out. Then Domingo spoke again: “It’s OK baby, we’re in the right hands. We’re in the right hands. Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with you....” And on they prayed until their breathing became too laboured for speech. The seconds passed, the breathing became rasping, erratic, and finally ceased. The Annex speakers fell silent. They were dead.
I stared in front of me at nothing. I did not speak for what seemed an age, hardly aware of Cloe next to me. The shock and speed of what had happened had been too quick and I could not absorb it. Two of my crew were dead, thrown off by the ship as if it meant to kill them. I could barely grasp the fact that it had happened, must less wonder how.
“Jason.”
I said nothing.
“I think the hydrogen feed is working again.”
I turned slowly towards Cloe.
“We can get them,” she said.
“Sure....let’s get them.”
“Before you do that, I want to ask you something.” It was Dieter. I twisted my head around. In his hand he held my tablet. “Log into this.”
“Why?”
“I tracked the IP address of the remote controller working the trojan. It is your tablet.”
I stared at him. “That can’t be.”
“It can be. Log in and we will know for certain.”
I took the tablet from him, switched on the holographic keyboard and typed in a password.
The slate grey screen resolved itself into a collection of coloured icons. I passed through them with my thumb. “There’s nothing here.”
He took it from me. “Try the trash.” Using his thumbs he opened the trash icon and ran through the files it contained. “Nein...nien...hier ist es.” He opened a folder. In it was a strange collection of interconnected files. “If that is not it then I am not German. I send a copy back to Earth for verification, but now I am sure. You killed them.”
“Are you crazy? Why the hell would I kill my own crew?”
“Easy to see, né? Two mouths less to feed, nearly twice the time in space. Live on minimum rations and you can wait two more years without a magician to bring a supply ship. You talk and talk about the mission so we do not suspect you. Very clever, ja, but you should have hidden better the IP address of that trojan.”
I looked at him, then grabbed at my strap buckle. In an instant his hands were around my throat. “Do not move. You are under arrest.”
“You’re insane.”
“You say that? Cloe, bring me some flex cable, schnell.” She hesitated. He glanced at her, his hands still about my throat. “Noun n’avons aucun endroit pour l’enfermer. Nous devons le ligoter.”
She unbuckled herself and lifted herself from her seat, her eyes on me.
“Cloe, this is crazy. I couldn’t kill them, you know that.”
The fingers tightened. “Enough. We have the proof. Talk again and you get tape on your mouth.”
Ten minutes later I was strapped to my couch in the PriFly deck, my feet bound together and my hands tied behind my back. I was alone. Dieter and Cloe had left after making me secure, no doubt to discuss what to do with me out of my hearing.
I focussed on my situation. Whichever way I looked at it, it was bad. I tested the cords binding my wrists. No, impossible to loosen them. Dieter had done a thorough job. With my hands tied I could not reach the strap buckles and free myself. I had no option but to remain a passive spectator and hope for a chance later on. The more I thought about it though, the more hopeless things became. Dieter would take care not to give me any opportunity of freeing myself.
I fought down the tide of panic welling up within me and forced my mind to become analytical. Dieter was the one who had sabotaged the spin jets and main engine. A ‘day’ on the Terra Nova followed the timescale of a day on Earth, which meant that the crew ate, worked and slept at roughly the same time. During the sleeping period, it would have been possible for him to add that second power cable to the main computer to delay its shutdown. He also had ample opportunity to access my tablet without attracting attention. Security was not a major issue on the ship. My tablet password was almost a formality and he would have had no difficulty cracking it.
But why go to so much trouble to incriminate me? And why leave me alive? It did not take me long to work out the answer. Getting rid of two of his fellow crewmembers was an insurance. Earth might survive. He had to return innocent. More important, he had to convince Cloe of his innocence. If humanity was destroyed he would be the new Adam and she the new Eve. The shadow of Cain could not be allowed to fall between them. As I followed this train of thought I felt a conviction settle in the pit of my stomach: Dieter had let me live for the present, but sooner or later, in all likelihood sooner, he would kill me. I stared at the PriFly ceiling and did some mental calculations. We had eight months’ food for five people, six months’ worth in the Terra Nova and two months’ in the supply vessel sitting on the Martian surface. Delaying our return would add slightly more than two years to our time in space. That meant a total of twenty-six plus eight months, equalling thirty-four months. The crew compliment had gone down from five to three. Each crewmember would have to ration himself to slightly more than a third of his normal food allowance.
The average young male needs about 3000 calories and the young female 2700 calories a day if they are active, which was the case of each crewmember on the Terra Nova, more so now that the functioning complement had dropped from five to two. The minimum requirement of an active male is 1500 calories. Dieter’s share was going to be slightly over 1000 calories. Even allowing for Cloe’s lower metabolism and my state of inactivity, the maths still said the same thing. We would starve before we got back to Earth. That made me expendable.
My mind danced like a dervish. How could he kill me and still look blameless? After all, I was completely helpless. I couldn’t even commit suicide. But I had no doubt he had already worked it out. His intellect, driven by his unfettered survival instinct, would have found it an easy puzzle to solve. My only chance was Cloe. She was not his accomplice, of that I was certain. If she had been I would be dead by now. I had to get through to her.