Steven McDonald - Steven E. McDonald

She stood up, walked past Justin, following the sound. The examination tables were covered in plastic sheeting, never having been readied for use.

The plastic around the last table was moving, something writhing beneath it. Not certain why she was doing so, she reached out and grasped the edge of the plastic cover, pulling it back, needing to know what was under there, what was calling her.…

Denny.

She gasped, suddenly weak, nerveless. The scalpel slipped from her fingers, struck the deck, bounced with a tinny noise.

Denny. He looked up at her from the table, his waist and legs still beneath the plastic, looked up at her and giggled in that way that he had,,amused at a world that insisted on being silly to his perspective.

He reached up to her, and she remembered the vid she had been watching on the Lewis and Clark. She should pick him up, she thought, that’s what Mom does, playing horsey.

“Mommy…” Denny said, and he giggled again, as though this was just the best game in the world. His eyes shone, and she spilled over with love for him..

She started to pull the plastic further back, knowing she had to get him out from under there and that they could figure out the explanations later.

Then she saw what she had missed before. Where Denny’s atrophied legs should have been, beneath the plastic, something was squirming frantically, like a bag of angry snakes, the plastic pulsing up and down.

Horrified, she dropped the plastic sheet, backing away. This could not have been Denny. Her son was on Earth, with his father.

“Peters?”

She turned too fast, almost losing her balance. DJ was standing in the hatchway, holding a collection of blood sample containers in rubber-gloved hands. His usual mask had slipped a little, revealing concern.

She turned back toward Denny.

The table was empty. Her son, or whatever was masquerading as her son, was gone. She looked back at DJ again.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, putting the blood samples aside.

“I…” Peters started. She hesitated, trying to clear her mind. The images were trying to fade, becoming elusive. She squeezed her eyes shut, shuddering.

“I’m very tired, that’s all. It’s nothing.”

She made her way back to the workstation, trying to focus on her work.

It’s nothing.

Right now EVA was not precisely the thing Cooper wanted to do, despite his earlier eagerness. If anything, he would have preferred being in a Gravity Couch, totally out of it and well on the way back to Earth aboard the Lewis and Clark. This mission was totally, crazily, out of hand.

The one positive thing here was the size of the Event Horizon. That meant more airlock bays, which got around having the umbilicus in the way.

The inner airlock door hissed open and Smith stepped into the bay, undogging his helmet and pulling it off. His hair was matted down, slick with sweat.

“You been out there a long time,” Cooper said, looking him over. “Trying to break my record?”

Smith sat down heavily on a bench, getting his gloves off. “I’d rather spend the next twelve hours outside than another five minutes in this can.”

Cooper made a moue of disgust. “You don’t need to tell me that. I pulled a lot of ops in my time, seen decompression, radiation… but what I saw today…”

Cooper trailed off, unable to say any more. He could not push the images out of his mind, no matter how he tried.

“How is Justin?” Smith asked, interrupting the silence.

Cooper shook his head, “Same.”

Smith opened his suit, then reached down to get his boots off. An EVA suit keeps you alive but makes you smell very, very bad in the process.

Suddenly, Smith said, “When I was a kid, my mother used to tell me I was gonna go to a bad place. And she was right.” Smith’s eyes were filled with a fervor that Cooper found more than a little spooky. “This ship, it’s crazy, you know. I mean, trying to go faster than light, that’s like the Tower of Babel. You know what God did to the Tower of Babel, don’t you? He cast it down.”

Cooper sighed, shaking his head. “Smith, we got enough shit going on without you going biblical on me.”

Cooper picked up his helmet, put it on, and sealed it, hearing the hiss.

Without waiting for Smith to check him over, he walked over to the airlock, hit the door control, and ducked through.

All of a sudden, being outside had become very, very attractive.

Miller, DJ, and Weir had gathered behind Peters as she recalled the last entry in the Event Horizon log. She had found nothing useful so far.

“This is the final entry in the ship’s log,” she said, and pressed the play control.

The video display cleared. Captain Kilpack appeared on the screen, sitting in the center seat. He looked excited, as well he should; this was the main event in the Event Horizon’s maiden voyage. His crew, all eighteen of them, were gathered behind him. A few solemn faces, many smiles.

Kilpack said, “I want to say how proud I am of my crew. I’d like to name my station heads Chris Chambers, Janice Rubin, Dick Smith, Tom Fender, and Stacie Collins. We have reached safe distance and are preparing to engage the gravity drive and open the gateway to Proxima Centauri.”

“I wonder if they made it?” Miller said, quietly.

On the screen, Kilpack raised a hand in salute and said, “Ave atque vale.

Hail and farewell.”

Little did they know, Miller thought.

There was a burst of static across the screen. At first Miller thought the log disc had simply run its course, but then realized that it would then have simply stopped playing, shutting off the system. There was something else on the disc.

A terrible sound came pouring from the speakers, shrieking and inhuman, something out the depths of their nightmares. Peters yelped and reached for the gain slider, cutting the racket down.

To Miller, there was more than static on the screen. There was something moving inside the image. He reached out, tapping the pause control. He squinted at the screen, trying to resolve the image in the frozen frame. There was definitely something there, but he could not make it out at all now.

Peters was squinting at the frame too.

“What is that?” he asked her.

Peters shook her head. “I can run the image through a series of filters, try to clean it up.”

There was a chance that they might learn something useful from the scrambled section of the disc. Miller nodded. “Proceed.”

Without warning, the lights faded out slowly. Emergency lighting came on, illuminating them with a dim, reddish wash.

“A power drain,” DJ said. Miller had to agree—something had been activated. He had a terrible suspicion about the reason for the drain.

“The Core!” Weir snapped, turning to Miller.

“Go!” Miller said.

Weir ran for the door.

“The rest of you stay here,” Miller said, before DJ could head for the door. “I don’t want anyone else going near that thing.”

Miller took off after Weir.

He caught up with the scientist halfway down the main corridor, surprised at how fast Weir was able to move. They ran together through the First Containment and down the tunnel into the Second Containment, not waiting for the main door to open fully, squeezing by as soon as they could, not an easy trick for a man as tall and broad-shouldered as Miller.

“What’s causing the drain?” Miller asked, as Weir went over to the main console.

“The magnetic fields are holding,” Weir said, examining the readouts. He shook his head, looking baffled. “Maybe a short in the fail-safe circuit. I’ll check it out.”