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A cold wind swirled into the open cranial structure of the vast dark beast.

Jason turned, but his vantage point had narrowed.

The pickaxe in his hand looked magnified.

He dropped the ax and staggered forward, his mind reeling from the physiological change that had been thrust upon it.

Thoughts he’d had just moments before were lost to him. There was something he needed to remember, but he couldn’t grasp what had seemed so important just seconds before. A few, brief flashes of memory lit his mind, that of a woman dying in his arms, and an old man with a mutilated hand, but beyond that his mind was blank.

Jason’s clothes were too big and baggy. He reached out a tiny hand. steadying himself against a bank of flashing lights, looking out into the darkness.

Clouds raced by.

The alien creature banked to one side.

Wind howled beyond the cockpit.

Dawn broke in the distance. The sun peeked over the horizon as the massive craft crashed into the sea, sending up a wall of spray.

Cold sea water flooded into the fractured cavern, washing over Jason and causing him to choke. He spluttered, struggling to swim against the inflow of water flooding the vessel. Frantically, he kicked with his legs, freeing himself from his oversized, baggy clothing and pushing toward the surface.

The craft slipped quietly beneath the waves.

Jason swallowed sea water. Struggling and coughing, he fought to stay afloat, but he was sinking beneath the waves. Suddenly, a hand grabbed him, hauling him up into a rough wooden boat and he turned, seeing a familiar, friendly face, a face he’d seen thousands of times before.

Jason smiled at the aging North Korean fisherman.

He’d escaped, yet again.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

The lights in the airlock dimmed as the pressure dropped, slowly forming a vacuum in the chamber. Jae-Sun could feel his spacesuit flex slightly. The pressure within his suit hadn’t changed, but the dropping pressure around him forced the material to take shape, swelling slightly.

The interior of the airlock was white. Various touch panels indicated readings from inside and outside the lock. A green light came on, signaling that a vacuum had been established, matching that outside the vast exploration craft. The lighting inside the lock remained dim, ensuring the astronaut’s eyes remained accustomed to the low light outside the spaceship.

The iris on the outside of the airlock opened, beginning as a tiny dot and spreading to more than twenty feet in diameter, which was more than enough given that there were only two astronauts preparing to exit. Normally, this lock handled up to fifteen astronauts at a time, including construction equipment.

“You are clear for EVA,” a disembodied voice said over the radio com link.

“Roger that,” Commander Lassiter replied from opposite Jae-Sun.

The young man grinned from behind his glass faceplate, smiling at Jae-Sun. Such excitement was contagious. For a moment, Jae-Sun could almost pretend he was a young man, but four hundred and eighty seven years were taking their toll on his aging frame.

Even with gene therapy and rejuvenation sleeps, there was only so much the cells of his body could endure. He wanted to make five hundred, and why not? It was more than just an arbitrary number, it was his life. Jae-Sun was a bio-geneticist before switching to complete a double PhD in physics. He was one of the first to undergo live gene reconstruction in the twenty-first century. There was no known upper limit to the therapy, but his body still aged, just far more slowly. By the twenty-fifth century, he had the appearance of a sixty year old under natural aging.

Lassiter gestured to the old man, signaling for him to leave the airlock first.

Jae-Sun stretched the fingers on his right hand and his spacesuit responded effortlessly, following his every impulse. He twisted his hand slightly, adjusting his orientation and rotated to one side relative to Lassiter. A jet-propelled equipment case mimicked the motion of his suit, staying several feet behind him and off to one side.

Jae-Sun lined himself up with what he thought of as vertical on the distant asteroid. The equipment case aligned itself with Jae-Sun so that it remained behind him to his left, exactly as it had been in the airlock. The white cube was a meter square, but Jae-Sun, even after all these years still thought in imperial measurements. To him, it was three feet square, and some. The dials and gauges covering its six faces were overly large, having been designed to be easy to operate with thick gloves, but this was no ordinary instrument array.

Lassiter followed him out of the airlock.

“Keep the Excelsior on station in this orbital path,” Jae-Sun said over his radio.

“Yes sir,” came the distant reply.

“Under no circumstances is the Excelsior to approach OA-5772, is that understood?”

“Yes sir.”

“Regardless of what happens to me, you are to maintain the isolation of the asteroid and report into sector command.”

“Understood, sir.”

“Commander,” Jae-Sun said, turning toward the young man. “You have command of the EVA helm.”

“Roger that,” Lassiter replied, tapping on his wrist computer.

Jae-Sun never tired of the majesty of seeing a man or woman in a spacesuit, defying the cold, harsh vacuum of deep space. Over the centuries, the suits had changed from the bulky EVA packs he’d once used on the International Space Station. They were still white, as that was universally recognized as the most distinct color in space. There had been some experimentation with other colors like fluorescent green and DayGlo-orange. Both of these worked from a practical perspective, but they weren’t aesthetically pleasing, and in the harsh, hard life of an astronaut, even small concessions were highly significant. White had prevailed. White seemed to link the astronauts of today with those silver suits of the Mercury program, the emergence of EVA suits with Gemini, and the moonwalks of Apollo. White linked far-flung astronauts with a planet few would ever see again. White was important, and Jae-Sun understood that, having participated in space travel ever since the exploration of Mars.

“Setting way-points,” Lassiter said. “On your command.”

Jae-Sun turned to face the distant asteroid and said, “Go.”

Lassiter eased them forward, accelerating slowly. He was more considerate than most of the pilots Jae-Sun had worked with over the centuries, which was the reason Jae-Sun had requested him for this mission.

They pulled away from the Excelsior , leaving the three quarter mile long exploration vessel behind them. Within fifteen seconds, the two astronauts had passed the spinning centrifugal cabin used to maintain artificial gravity in deep space. The instrumentation cube followed faithfully behind them. Faces peered out from portholes swinging briskly by. They were better off watching on a vid-monitor, Jae-Sun thought.

Lassiter continued to accelerate, taking them up to a sustained one gravity, allowing them to cross the four hundred miles to the tiny, distant asteroid in less than seven minutes. Jae-Sun’s suit was in buddy-mode, matching the flight commands issued by Lassiter.

Jae-Sun felt some grit in the corner of his eyes. He should have cleared it out before the space walk. He closed his eyes for a moment, pinching his eyelids tight and then slowly releasing. While his eyes were closed, flashes of blue and white sparkled on the inside of his eyelids, appearing fleetingly, shining briefly like diamonds. It was Cherenkov radiation, the effect of cosmic rays passing clear through his skull and exiting out through his eyeballs. Astronauts had seen this phenomena for hundreds of years, ever since the first Apollo missions. Nothing short of the shielding on the Excelsior could prevent it. He opened his eyes, and for a second, it looked as though there were blue flashes in the distance.