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  Within a few minutes, however, everyone was sitting down in the much smaller, more intimate conference room than the one they’d used before. The desk was a large square, and the crew sat around three sides of it. Captain Weber and Bob McFadden were in the center of the U-shaped group, facing towards the wall opposite. John and Nandi sat on the side to their left.

  “Well, guys, I’m going to shut up this time,” Bob said. “I’m just sitting in, so over to you, Hans.”

  Captain Weber nodded. “Thanks Bob. In addition to the twin milestones of welcoming John Rees onto the crew roster and this being our last meeting before the start of the mission, we are of course going to see what news Andromeda brought back. Like you, I’m extremely anxious to see what awaits us at Epsilon.”

  With that, the wall opposite John and Nandi lit up with data. This included a map of the world, a 3D globe, and a countdown timer. It currently showed fifty-nine seconds remaining.

  Nandi crossed the first two fingers of her delicate right hand. John had his hands on his lap, his right leg jiggling with anticipation. His forehead had a slight sheen of perspiration. He put his elbows on the desk, clasped his hands together, and rested his chin on his knuckles. His eyes narrowed as he focused on the screen.

  Thirty,

  Twenty-nine,

  Twenty-eight…

  “What are we going to see first? Pictures?” Nikolai Cronin asked.

  “An overview of all the files she’s carrying,” Michael replied. “A folder, basically, with subfolders for comms from the crew, telemetry, photos of the landing site from orbiting telescopes, weather observations, logs of all radio noise on any frequency. The whole nine yards.”

  Nikolai nodded.

  Eight,

  Seven,

  Six…

  John shifted position again, putting his hands flat on the desk this time. He desperately wanted to hold Nandi’s hand, but knew that however much comfort this would bring, this was definitely not the time or place. He was glad she was there, though. One thing he had done, however, was to place Misti on the desk in front of him. She wore an enigmatic smile, reminiscent of the Mona Lisa, blinking her eyes and moving her head slightly every so often. She was indistinguishable from an image of a real person.

  Two,

  One,

  Zero.

  The room held its collective breath. Andromeda’s presence, detected by radar, and the start of the download of her massive payload of data should have happened simultaneously.

  One,

  Two,

  Three…

  The seconds ticked past. Nobody dared say a word.

  Thirty-one,

  Thirty-two,

  Thirty-three…

  Then a minute had passed. “I hope to God she makes it back,” Captain Weber said, breaking the tense silence.

  Then the screen came to life. PRESENCE CONFIRMED appeared at the top of the screen in large red letters. To the left, a graphic of the wedge-shaped probe appeared, about two Earth diameters above the planet. No orbital track was yet shown, as she was just beginning her long fall. Then her trajectory—shown as a line projected on a map of Earth—began to lengthen slowly, as she fired her engines in order to miss the planet and enter an elliptical path around it.

  The right side of the screen lit up, as promised, with a large picture of a folder, similar to a Windows directory. Under it were labels for all the different types of data. “Woohoo!” “Thank you, Jesus,” people in the room hollered.

  “Okay,” Bob said. “Now, we wait, as those in Mission Control start dissecting it all. In fact, let’s get on the conference line so we can hear them.”

  A few seconds later, at the command of Bob’s brain, deep voices—those of older men—filled the room.

  “That sounds like Hank Miller,” Bob said, his eyes narrowed with concentration.

  “Now, let’s see, what do we got here?” Hank said. “She brought back a huge data payload, as expected. Her memory’s got several petabytes of stuff, so it’s gonna be a little while.”

  “Yeah, even at this data rate it’ll take a couple of hours. Let’s prioritize the streams. Any messages from the colonists, followed by a picture of the landing site,” somebody else said.

  “On it,” said yet another, younger-sounding man.

  “The press is clamoring for answers,” came the easily recognizable tone of Johanna Locke.

  “Well, they’re gonna have to wait. We may not have a conclusive answer for hours. We have to be as sure as we can be before talking to anyone outside,” Hank said.

  “Yup.”

  John looked at Bob, then Nandi, then around at the others. Their searching, fearful eyes said it all.

  The data on the screen changed with each passing second, different diagrams, readouts, and charts flashing past as various teams within the IDSA interpreted each stream.

  At last, one verdict came in: “There are no messages or communications of any kind from the crew.” John’s heart sank as a pall was cast over the gathering.

  “Fuck,” Bob mouthed silently. Other lips in the room moved with silent prayers.

  “Okay,” Locke said, her own voice laden with disappointment. “How are we looking on orbital images?”

  “Going through them now,” an Indian woman’s voice answered. “There are thousands. The bad news is it was cloudy there most of the time that Andromeda was on site. The resolution is fine; we just can’t see anything. I’ve got dozens of people sifting through them now. We’ll let you know the minute we see Serenity Bay.”

  “Okay, Madhavi. Godspeed.”

  Next, a German voice spoke up. “We have found some anomalous radio transmissions in the millimeter range. It doesn’t match the frequency or signature of any type of equipment we have near Epsilon. However, it is also not cosmic in nature as far as we can tell. Dex is running it now to try and make sense of it.”

  “Interesting,” Hank said. “Keep us posted.”

  “That’s more than a little worrying,” Bob said.

  “Damn right,” Hans Weber said. They kept watching and listening.

  “We now have a clear image of the landing site, taken two weeks ago, the day before Andromeda set off back home,” Madhavi said, excitement evident in her voice. “We’re interpreting it now…”

  The tension in the conference room could have been cut with a knife. Seconds dragged by, agonizingly slow. John closed his eyes, and drew in a long, deliberate breath to center himself.

  At last, the answer came. “Hercules is there, looking intact. But, there’s nobody around. The rovers are still parked in their docks. Nothing’s has been disturbed at all.”

  “So nothing’s moved at all since they got there?” Locke said, incredulous.

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Captain Weber exhaled slowly, as he scanned the faces in the room. All eyes were on him. “This doesn’t look good at all,” he said. “Hercules landed months ago, and with no signs of human presence. It all comes down to us, ladies and gentlemen. All of humanity is counting on us to find out what happened and bring them home.”

  Part II: Hunted

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Captain Hans Weber and his three main flight crew sat four abreast in the cockpit of the spaceship Atlas. Behind them were rows of seats, seven wide, for the other crew. Only the first two rows were occupied—Atlas, built for a crew of 100, carried only fourteen other people. John Rees sat two rows behind the flight crew, Nandi Xie next to him.

  “This is it, then,” John said.

  “Yep,” Nandi replied. “Never thought my first interstellar mission would be under these circumstances.”

  “Too right.”

  “One minute,” Jake announced. Previously, only the four in the cockpit had been able to see outside. Then, the floor, walls, and ceiling of the entire passenger compartment dissolved away, giving the illusion that all the seats and their occupants were floating in midair. The crew in their white flight suits looked around at the vast
circular launch pad on which Atlas sat. Below the ship were large rectangles cut out of the concrete, leading to flame trenches which would channel away the blast from her exhaust. Roughly 210 meters long and eighty meters wide, Atlas’ underside was mostly covered with engine nozzles, each as large as a van. There were no other humans within miles, but billions watched mankind’s second interstellar launch on TV.

  Those seated immediately behind the pilots had midair displays in front of them. These virtual surfaces, about the size of a coffee table, glowed with myriad readouts. “Ready to commence final launch checklist,” Bob McFadden, Flight Director, said over the radio from Mission Control in Germany.

  “Roger that,” Jake replied.

  “Warp turbines?” another remote voice said.

  “Sixty thousand RPM,” Oliver Soto said. “Full field attenuation checks passed at 100%.”

  “ECLSS?”

  “All main and sub-diagnostics look good. Recycling systems are at peak efficiency,” Michael Van Buren said.

  “How’s your power generation looking?” said another indistinguishable voice in Mission Control.

  “The zero-point harvesting is at 100%. Ducts are at full preheat and ready for power.”

  “Thirty seconds,” Jake announced.

  “How are you all feeling?” McFadden asked.

  “Good,” Captain Weber replied. “At least I think I speak for all of us…” He turned around and surveyed the others’ faces. Smiles and thumbs-ups greeted him.

  “Twenty seconds,” Jake said.

  A light flurry of snow began to dust the launch pad with white. The crew in the back row stared out at this eerily peaceful sight, as those in front focused intently on their displays, time stretched out like matter at the lip of a black hole.

  “Five, four, three…” Jake counted. Atlas began to vibrate as white hot plasma formed into shock diamonds beneath her. Fire belched from ports on either side of the pad as the engines came up to full thrust.

  “Two, one, zero.” Roaring plasma beat down onto the pad, thrusting thousands of tons of ungainly spaceship into the sky. She glowed like a thermonuclear fireball as she ascended, slowly at first, then gathering speed, up into the leaden gray winter sky. The roar from of ZPR engines shook and echoed across the rocky uplands of northern Sweden, scattering herds of deer, elk, and caribou as Atlas disappeared into the clouds.

  As things slowly returned to normal on the ground, Atlas’ crew was suddenly bathed in blinding sunlight as they broke through the dense cloud cover. John smiled at Nandi, and she smiled back. This is what heaven is made of, John thought. After all the pain and hassle of the last two months, and laboring to launch a mission that he would never fly on, here he was soaring through the sky as one of the very small elite crew of the Atlas. The light from above, in a sky that was already darkening, summed up his ecstasy. The thrum of the ship beneath him dissipated his physical tension—a fifty billion dollar massage chair. Atlas, like all ZPR-driven ships, had so much power to spare that there was no need to rush into space as fast as possible as with the rockets of old. Her angular design wasn’t particularly aerodynamic either, so flying on a Hercules class ship was more like taking an elevator ride into the heavens than being strapped to a giant firework.

  John had spent a lot of time in space, of course. But, never like this, on a mission to a star twenty-two light years from Earth. His desperate, all-consuming desire to fly to the Constantine system had dictated his every waking moment for the last fifteen years. Until the previous day, it looked like it had all been for naught. But another man’s loss was John’s gain. And now everything he wanted was encapsulated in this moment: the pain of his life on Earth was receding quickly into the distance, Constantine lay before him, and Nandi, the woman he had already allowed too far under his skin, was beside him.

  * * * *

  John looked around at the orbital dockyard that now enclosed Atlas on all sides. This part of the Near Earth Station—an orbital base for the International Deep Space Alliance—existed to service large scientific exploration ships. The station itself was reminiscent of an Earth dry dock for marine vessels, even being about the same size and shape. However, this one had no floor. Hundreds of meters of latticework structure made up the back, sides, and front; these supported pressurized workspaces. Mounted to the inward, ship-facing sides were retracted gantries and long multi-jointed manipulator arms, that when extended facilitated working on ships like the Atlas.

  The ship had just docked, nose first, at the forward end of the enclosure. Henry Olson had supervised the hookup of the umbilical that would refill Atlas’ propulsion tanks with water, and hundreds of thousands of gallons would flow in over the next few hours. The next fill up would be on the planet Epsilon, using purified ocean water.

  All of the crew were now gathered in the lower passenger compartment. At the front of this area was the docking tunnel that led out into the Near Earth Station.

  “Pressures equalized; seal is good,” Captain Weber said. The walls of the passenger compartment went from being virtual glass back to their usual sterile white, handrails at the ready for weightless maneuvering. The two meter-wide silver hatch at the front swung slowly inward, revealing a circular tunnel around ten meters long. John smiled as he heard the clapping and cheering from beyond. Dozens of the NES’ resident crew had gathered to welcome them. Captain Weber pushed himself off the headrest of a seat in the front row, and floated slowly towards the noisy crowd, followed by the officers and the chief engineers and medics. While rank wasn’t supposed to matter on scientific ships such as Atlas, it still did; most of the higher-ups didn’t flaunt it too badly, but the order of rank was still observed when exiting the ship, and when meeting dignitaries, accepting awards, or other occasions of equal import. Michael Van Buren, Head of Engineering and John’s boss, was more fond than most of letting his underlings know he was in charge.

  * * * *

  “Welcome, crew of the Atlas!” Commander Gordon Sudbury, master of the Near Earth Station, crowed as Captain Weber reached the end of the docking tunnel, entering an airlock the size of a large living room. The many personnel gathered there backed up to make way for him.

  “Lemme give you a hand there, just in case zero-G’s too much for you,” somebody who was obviously an old friend of Weber’s joked.

  “I’ll let you know if it’s too much when I get back from Constantine,” the smiling captain shot back. “Meanwhile, keep making those circles around the Earth!” With NES never more than 400 kilometers from Earth, the joke was old hat from deep spacers passing through. The back-slapping and handshakes continued, as Atlas’ crew filed into the station.

  “Mike, good to see you,” one prominent engineer, Scott Riley, said as Michael passed through the crowd. Then he looked John’s way. “I see you lucked out there, my man. Heard about your last minute call to fly.”

  “Yeah, I sure did,” John said, the joy on his face impossible to hide.

  “He’s the best replacement we could get on short notice,” Michael Van Buren said. John did a double take. The tone wasn’t friendly. A dig at his expense? Or was it? Was he being paranoid? John looked around for Nandi to see if she had heard the remark and get her take on it, and then remembered she entered ahead of him.

  Once through the crowd—he didn’t particularly care for such situations, too much of an introvert—he sought out an unoccupied corner of the station. Not that difficult, given how big NES was. What he found was a large greenhouse, on the sun facing side. Once John was sure no one could hear him, he took Misti out of his pocket. She’d been switched on the whole time. “Misti, did you hear Michael Van Buren’s remark about me?”

  “Yes. I thought it was a bit rude, actually.”

  “So I’m not being over sensitive?”

  “No. I believe the tone was meant to convey a jab at you. From what I’ve seen and heard, he doesn’t seem to like you.”

  John sighed. How was he going to get through an entire mission
with this guy, now he knew how Van Buren felt about him? Oh well. He’d deal with Michael as best he could. Still, this situation was nothing compared to what the crew of the Hercules could be going through—assuming they were even still alive.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Several Weeks Earlier

  “How in the heck is it changing its orbit?” Captain Craig Martelle asked, referring to the unwelcome unidentified object they had spotted less than two hours ago on de-warping high above the surface of Epsilon. The huge body of the spaceship Hercules shimmered nearby, heat haze still steaming from the concrete landing pad. Constantine shone warm rays down, and the deep blue ocean glittered some distance away.

  “I have no idea, Sir,” Dexter Ward replied.

  “How much is it changing?”

  “It’s gone from circular at around 8,000 kilometers to elliptical with a perigee of around 4,000. That number is still dropping.”

  “Good grief. Alright, I need the officers, flight crew, and chief engineers. We need to figure out if it’s going to pose any danger.”

  “With all respect, Sir, we can’t leave immediately even if it does. The tanks are under twenty percent.”

  “I know that,” snapped Martelle. “I need to assess the danger. We need theories about what that thing is.”

  “It’s clearly a ship of some sort. Metallic objects don’t just appear, in an almost perfectly circular orbit, and then start changing that orbit.”

  Martelle sighed. “I did not want to think that, because we may well have to abort the mission. Well, we know we’re not alone in the universe then. Right. All hands to the pump. Literally. Get the water purification plant running and refill our tanks now.”

  “Yes Sir. We’ll get down there now,” Roxanne Charles, Serenity Bay’s Works Manager, said. “Dave, come with me, in case we have problems.”

  “Cheng, take charge of the refilling,” Martelle instructed.

  “Yes Sir.” Maxwell Cheng turned to Dexter. “What’s the minimum level needed to take off and head back to Earth?”