APRIL 8, 2074
NYS VEGA,
ONE HUNDRED TWENTY THOUSAND KILOMETERS BEYOND LUNAR ORBIT
Vega hurtled almost one thousand kilometers per minute in the wrong direction and Kate needed to reverse course. Seconds after she’d buckled into Vega’s helm, a lone orange status bar inside her hud beeped. Her other bars were green. She dismissed the warning using her neuroface. An odd error, but her highest priority was returning to the colony.
Ahead, the bridge’s array of observation monitors painted a pink and violet star cloud, the Milky Way, as wide and tall as the room. Neptune, sea blue and to the right of the Milky Way, formed a line with Jupiter and then rust-red Mars, which was Vega’s current destination, although not for long. Wires inside the walls hummed with electricity surging to the fuel pumps, and the pipes beneath the floor clanged and knocked with rising pressure. Steam, maybe. There shouldn’t be fuel pipes near the bridge. The sounds of Vega readying to reverse course weren’t normal and made her nervous about another power outage.
“Gentle, big girl. This won’t hurt a bit,” Kate caught herself muttering.
The tablet in her lap connected to the armrest of her captain’s chair by a swivel joint. It showed three green bars for the electrical system. The AC system read 800 hertz and 396 volts, while the DC system read 123 volts. Nominal frequency, yet the voltages were a shade low.
Clicking through the engineering notes, she decided the low voltages were within the five percent operating band and normal for Vega. Healthy, even. It was one more piece of evidence that the crew caused the first outage with a hidden kill switch, to deactivate the locks and slink off the ship in darkness. There was no way to know until she returned Vega to the colony for inspection—if she could pilot Vega to the colony intact.
She swiped through the tablet to the navigation controls and broadcast the map to the top right corner of the bridge’s display. If Vega broke apart, the deep space directly ahead was her future. She’d see the Milky Way for a few hours, spinning and twirling through the void, until she suffocated. Then, her corpse would orbit the solar system as a comet, and maybe end up as an icy pink smear on the surface of a rocky asteroid. Or the moon.
The flight plan recommended by the nav computer required a whopping fifteen hundred kilometers per minute delta-V to reverse course and would take five hours. An average thrust of one hundred and twenty-five percent of Earth’s gravity. 1.25g. Normally a cakewalk. But a ship this size didn’t just jump a curb and oversteer into a U-turn. They’d be another twenty-five thousand kilometers from the moon before they slowed their forward momentum and turned back. Fuel was a problem. Nothing flew without fuel and nothing landed without fuel, and the tanks would be bone dry.
As much as she wanted to return quickly, she wasn’t sure how much stress Vega’s old bones could handle. A ship this size didn’t turn on a dime, and a ship this elderly was likely to crack its frame if she applied too much force. So she dialed down the acceleration to a nice, soft one-fifth-g burn that would minimize hull stress. The new trajectory would take them seventy thousand kilometers farther from the moon and require nine hours, including landing.
A long voyage home. Vega had endured much more thrust leaving high Earth orbit, but the crew was running from something much more dangerous than this ship. They had little to lose.
Aviate, Navigate, Communicate, in that order, the fundamental principle of piloting a starship. With the ship under control and the flight plan decided, it was time to make a reservation at the spaceport.
Kate tapped the tablet to open a channel to the Lunar Spaceport and then opened her visor to talk. When she did, she felt pinpricks at the base of her skull, which quickly vanished. The orange warning in her helmet blinked red. She ignored both.
“Lunar Spaceport. This is NYS Vega declaring an emergency. Crew abandoned ship. We are returning to port.”
“Affirmative NYS Vega. Are you declaring a mayday?” The voice was reassuringly calm and human.
Fuel was low, but she would either make it or she wouldn’t. The nav computer said they’d land with the tanks at five percent, but she’d smelled fuel in the passageways. She wouldn’t know until she had time to assess the full extent of leakages. She had very little margin for error. Making a U-turn in space and then landing on the moon would require Vega’s fuel pumps to scour almost every remaining molecule from the tanks.
A mayday call, though, meant her situation was immediately life-threatening, and she was hours from that.
She changed her mind, decreased the burn, lowering the return speed, but increasing her estimated arrival time. Atmospheric drag wasn’t a problem in space, so once she hit cruising speed, the thrusters would cut off until landing. On the large navigation map in front of her, Vega’s trajectory to the moon arced across space as a thin, looped line, her current position at one end and the moon at the other. As she dialed down the speed, it stretched like a rubber band. She dialed the return speed down until she had a comfortable margin for error. Now she’d land with the tanks fifteen percent full. The resulting flight time was eleven hours and forty-five minutes.
Spaceport control repeated, “NYS Vega, are you declaring a mayday?”
“Negative, Lunar Spaceport. Not at this time. Request priority clearance straight through to landing. We are bingo fuel.”
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She rechecked the flight plan and her seat buckles, and then locked both. Her limbs floated off the chair, weightless. That would change when Vega spun and accelerated.
“Roger, bingo fuel, NYS Vega. How many souls aboard?”
“Four souls aboard. But this number is not confirmed.” Four that she was sure about. Lebofield, his two parents, and her. But there were five hundred and sixty-eight containers to search before she had to strap in for landing.
“Roger, four souls. Will you be needing fire and medical?”
Fire and medical. What could they do? This would not be the biggest ship she’d crashed. But Vega had no ejection seats and no escape pods remaining. She would either land safely, walking across the skybridge into the lunar colony, or shatter somewhere like a red space popsicle. There was no middle ground. Fire and medical could do nothing but watch. Rae always said she had a nice ass. Maybe EMS would get lucky and she’d be a comet with a long tail and give a spectacular wiggle as she burned up.
“Sure. Tell them to bring lawn chairs and a keg. Sunscreen, sunglasses, and a holographic camera with a good telephoto lens.”
“Say again, NYS Vega? Are you requesting lawn chairs and sunscreen?”
“Let’s start with fire and medical.”
“Roger, NYS Vega. Emergency services will be on stand by. Can you make it to pad delta?”
If she could make it to any landing pad, it would be a miracle. “Pad delta is fine, Lunar Spaceport.”
“Roger, NYS Vega. You are cleared straight through to landing pad delta. Keep this channel open for updates.”
“Roger, proceeding to pad delta.” She updated the flight plan and swiveled the pad to the side. “Leyna, copy?”
“Standing by,” came Leyna’s voice inside her helmet. “I am in the office with Vega’s nav display mirrored on the monitor. Twelve hours?”
“As much as Lebofield deserves a rough ride back there, I don’t know what Vega can handle. And we are low fuel. We are taking it slow and steady.”
“He needs something to shut him up. I muted him when he started droning about Aitken basin. Some kind of government conspiracy about the moon’s mass concentrations. His verbal diarrhea is giving me actual diarrhea.”
“He’s wrong. The real secret stuff is on the other side of the moon, near the North pole.”
“What secret stuff? That’s where Jin is headed.”
If Leyna knew what was at the bottom of a Pennsylvania limestone mine alongside Kate’s medals, she might not have taken the job. But what happened in Space Force Operator Club stayed locked and buried in that limestone mine.
She grinned. “I am kidding. I’m sure Jin will steer clear of the super secret alien base.”
“There is an alien base?” Kate could hear Leyna’s gulp across one hundred thirty thousand kilometers.
“Sure, Russia has one. China has one. South Korea—”
“Not funny. I still haven’t heard from him.”
The surface of the moon was the perfect place to meditate. It was a desolate grayscape of endless gravel and rocks. No traffic, no buildings, no noise, and no storms to worry about. For thousands of kilometers. It had a magnificent and sleep-inducing view of the stars. A great time to listen to a podcast, read a book, or nap. A nap sounded great right now.
“It’s only been a few hours since he left the hangar. I told you, coverage is sparse. I’m sure he’s fine. His blip is moving at eight hundred kilometers an hour. He probably put the rover on autopilot and took a nap. You’ve been oversexing him.”
“I haven’t been oversexing him. We barely do it once a day.”
Once a day. Barely. It had been a week for her and Rae because of their work schedules, and this trip was adding another twelve hours. She was sorry she brought it up. “I need you to scan my pressure suit. The electronic warfare system raised an alert. It registered a cyberattack on my neuroface.”
“Looks like Vega is trying to connect to your neuroface. It thinks Vega is a hacker.”
“That’s odd. Check it out.”
“Why is that odd?”
“I can think of a lot of reasons. Vega is old, built before neurofaces were elective surgery. Yet, nothing looks retrofit on this pile of junk. Why would a ship this old have a neuroface controller? And why would a supply ship need a neuroface controller to begin with? If the owner upgraded anything, they’d replace the main computer, install an AI pilot, and fire the crew. No need for humans except in extreme circumstances.”
“Like now.”
“No one’s invested a dollar to upgrade this ship except the fresh paint on the hull to hide its identity.”
“Smuggler ships need humans, humans like neurofaces.”
“Smugglers don’t like to leave a trail. Neurofaces leave an electronic trail. I doubt it has a neuroface connect. We missed something.”
“Could be your suit is glitchy. Military contractors are not famous for their quality control.”
“That’s one explanation. This ship is so old, my cybersecurity system might be misreading Vega’s signals.”
“Or could be malware that mimics a neuroface connection.” Leyna sounded almost gleeful. “Before he left, Jin said he’d seen a few notices pop up. Something new going around the mining outfits. This could be our chance to identify and remove it.”
“Going around the mining outfits?”
“That’s what he said.”
She didn’t want to ask the next question aloud, because it would worry Leyna. Jin told her before he left, we could be dealing with malware. Was that why he was in a hurry to get to the mining claim? Leyna was gleeful because she and Jin were cyberathletes. They entered contests and games and had a shelf of big, nerdy trophies. The most prized were the most elusive: trophies to analysts who were the first to crush a computer virus. The dead miners weren’t getting any deader. There was no need for him to rush off. She hoped Jin wasn’t traveling halfway across the moon and back to chase some cybernerd trophy.
A wave of irritation ran down her spine. The surface was calm and relaxing, but also ruthless and deadly. Dashing off for a trophy was foolish. No cybernerd trophy was worth risking his life. If she ended up having to rescue him, she’d kill him.
“If this ship has malware, Leyna, let’s not bring it back,” Kate said. “Scan everything until we get to the bottom of it.”
“Done and done.”
“And if you hear from him, tell him to make a U-turn. I don’t want him off chasing malware alone. Those dead miners aren’t going anywhere.”
Shit. She shouldn’t have said anything. Leyna was silent for a beat. Kate could hear her wheels turning from a hundred and thirty-five thousand kilometers away. He didn’t tell me that’s what he was going for. Why didn’t he take me? He’s trying to get the trophy all for himself. Cyberathletes were cybercompetitive.
Finally, Leyna said somberly, “What about the crew of Vega? That’s not on your flight plan anymore?”
“We’ll send Tesseract after they’ve realized the hopelessness of their dumb decision to abandon ship. Once those oxygen warnings start going off, they will be motivated to hop aboard any life raft we toss them.”
“That will save us a lot of paperwork.”
“I have a soft spot for saving paperwork.“
“When I’m Sheriff, I want to be as kind to paperwork as you. Do you want to wait while I scan?”
“We need to get this ship back now. Soon, we won’t have enough fuel to get back. Start your scans. I am turning around.”
Kate closed the connection and looked at the helm’s tablet, which she’d pushed to the side. Lebofield couldn’t escape his container while the ship had power. The question: whether she should let Lebofield know about the impending maneuver, or not. He’d figure it out. But did she want to give him a chance to buckle up first, or give him a rough ride?