Andrew Morgan: Vessel

First, there was nothing.

Then, a single stellar body flickered in the night sky, and the nothingness ceased to be nothing.

It had arrived, silent and undetected.

It would change everything.

‘Hello TsUP, this is RS0ISS. Reporting unidentified vessel in our region, holding orbit approximately two hundred metres aft of our location. Please confirm.’

The heavy Russian accent, laden with radio static, fell silent. Sitting at his desk — row three of five in the cavernous cylindrical room — Mission Control Capsule Communicator Aleksandar Dezhurov touched his lips against the stiff microphone of his headset and considered his response.

‘Moscow TsUP, hello. Negative copy on your last transmission, please repeat.’

He gazed through the three gigantic screens at the front of the room, scratching his head through his greying hair as he waited for the reply. A slow stream of letters and numbers rolled down a smaller screen at his desk, disappearing at the bottom as if being swept along by a digital tide.

The static hissed in his ear.

‘TsUP, there is an unidentified vessel approximately two hundred metres aft of our orbit. It is maintaining distance. There are no obvious markings and the shape is unfamiliar to me. Can you verify?’

Aleks frowned. He was not aware of any other operations in the local vicinity of the International Space Station, national or otherwise, and the large screens confirmed this. He adjusted the headset as he always did when he became re-aware of its presence, picked up his pen and jotted a note down on his desk pad as he spoke.

‘Copy RS0ISS. Will confirm and verify unidentified vessel.’ His emotionless tone broke as worry panged in his throat. ‘Let me know if the situation changes, even slightly, okay, Mikhail?’

The nib of the pen paused while his eyes searched their sockets, waiting for the cosmonaut’s response.

‘Copy, Aleks. Don’t you worry about us, we can handle ourselves. Out.’

Aleks nodded, as if to reassure himself. He’d hoped it was going to be a quiet morning. Apparently not.

Within a few hours, the NASA operatives working in tandem with the Russian Federal Space Agency had confirmed that they were unaware of any American orbital vehicles operating in close proximity to the International Space Station. After half a day, NASA’s Washington headquarters clarified this statement, adding that there had been no request for permission to use that orbit by any private aerospace or military programs. They further added that there had been no reported incidents occurring between any of the thousands of satellites they currently monitored orbiting the Earth. The following day, the European Space Agency, Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency and Chinese National Space Administration denied involvement. As the days trailed on, the Indian Space Research Organisation and a number of other smaller agencies also denied knowledge of the unidentified vessel. It was a mystery to them all.

The cylindrical room, operated by a small crew a week ago, was now murmuring with the presence of over forty staff in its dimly-lit, theatre-like space, filling every desk with at least one — but in most cases two — people. The NASA presence had become twofold, and the hot twang of American accents punctured the languid hum emitted by its Russian hosts. The air conditioning worked hard, soaking away the heat from the additional bodies — and the screens they watched so intently — yet despite the startling increase in both active personnel and technology in the room, not a single screen, print-out or reading displayed any trace of the as-yet unidentified craft.

‘RS0ISS, hello RS0ISS, TsUP,’ Aleks called, adjusting his radio headset.

‘Hello Moscow, how are you doing?’ came Mikhail’s cheerful, slightly distorted reply. Mikhail’s words were also being emitted through a speaker on Aleks’ desk for the benefit of the Flight Director and NASA’s representative Flight Coordinator, who both sat in silence next to him with their brows furrowed in concentration.

The unexpected arrival of the vessel had done nothing to dampen the moods of the two cosmonauts and their astronaut guest for whom the ISS was currently home. Even without the Surgeon’s report — compiled from the constant stream of health data being broadcast from the station by each of its inhabitants — it was easy to tell that the crew were in good spirits. They were professionals, the best of the best, and they were behaving like it.

‘We’re good, thank you,’ said Aleks, smiling, and he glanced across his shoulder to the Flight Director, who nodded to him. ‘Down to business,’ he continued. ‘We have a no go on ground visibility of the unidentified vessel, require uplink to PC One for visual. Can you get a camera pointed at that thing for us?’

A few seconds passed while the signal shot at the speed of light some two hundred and forty miles upwards to the waiting crew of the ISS. Normally the wait barely registered in Aleks’ mind, but recently it seemed like minutes.

‘Standby TsUP. Preparing uplink to PC One, copy. No visuals from the ground? Interference?’

‘Something like that. Our telescopes won’t produce an image at the azimuth of the unidentified vessel, only static. We’re trying to figure it out.’

The faint hiss from the earpiece and speaker changed so imperceptibly that the Flight Director and his NASA minder didn’t seem to notice. Aleks’ ears pricked up, however, and he looked to his screen in anticipation. It blinked and flickered, and the list of numbers vanished. A saturated glow appeared and settled into a view of a white panel criss-crossed with cables and set with rows of buttons. The clean white lab-like scene drifted by, rolling away and down across the monitor in a lazy arc.

‘Can we get this on the big screen?’ asked the NASA operative in a gruff, business-like voice, and Aleks prodded a button on his desk, which did exactly that. Others in the room looked up from their screens for a moment, before looking back and resuming their work.

The view on screen swayed, guided from behind by an unseen force that steered it away from the wall and pointed it down a long, white tunnel that was punctuated by the occasional narrowing along its length. The camera re-focused and the detail became sharp.

‘TsUP, I’m moving through the Lab to the aft of the ISS,’ came Mikhail’s disembodied voice, distant and hollow, as his hand reached forward into view and gripped a rail with the tips of his fingers. Giving himself a gentle tug, he projected weightlessly forward along the module, gliding past the racks of scientific equipment in the walls and ceiling.

Rolling the camera to the right as he reached for another handrail, Mikhail’s broadcast glimpsed the rigid humanoid stature of the experimental R2 GM robotic astronaut, capturing for a second the svelte bronze head mounted to the folded white legless body.

‘Passing through into Node One.’

The tension in Mission Control was building. The cursory glances at the big screen from the other operators became hard, unblinking stares, all waiting for their first visual of the mysterious object.

As Mikhail dived through the square hatch that separated the US LAB from the Node One module, the light dimmed up ahead, and he pushed upwards to squeeze into the mouth of the Pressure Mating Adaptor between the US modules and the Russian ones. PMA One was unlit, and its narrowing walls — which formed a cone towards the tight exit at the end of its short length — were completely ringed with soft white cargo transfer bags, held down with stretched bungee cords. A black-and-yellow sign above the entrance jokingly warned of a 17,500mph speed limit.