Майкл Крайтон - The Andromeda Evolution

The cosmonaut Yury Komarov, stocky and bearded, was positioned across the module near a partially disassembled wall panel. He had spent the last few hours trying to piece together a functioning radio from parts scavenged from ancillary systems, without much success.

As a precautionary measure, both astronauts had changed into their pre-EVA uniforms. It had been decided between the two of them that nothing was off the table in terms of safety. A hasty retreat into the Soyuz spacecraft and an emergency descent were likely, though the risk of sabotage was high.

Surviving this situation was far from guaranteed.

This was the reason that Komarov had turned on his personal GoPro camera. He had set it to record and let it float ignored through the module. The hope was that, in the worst-case scenario, a record of what happened would at least exist.

Click-click-click. Click, click, click. Click-click-click.

“Call it a day with that, why don’t you?” asked Komarov over his shoulder. He winced at each click of the laser pointer button. “They know we are in distress. Look how far from home we are.”

Hamanaka seemed not to have heard him.

Thirty seconds passed, punctuated by the repetitive clicking of the laser. Komarov looked up in annoyance. He had just opened his mouth to speak again when an impact violently jarred the module. The entire ISS infrastructure shook along its main trusswork, the solar panels flapping like great wings.

Komarov’s mouth snapped shut in alarm.

Grabbing the tiny camera, he pushed himself toward Hamanaka. “What was that? What is happening?”

Hamanaka turned to him from the window, her face pale and lips trembling. She placed a hand over her mouth.

“Jin?” asked Komarov.

Her eyes turned to the window. Moving her gently out of the way, Komarov pressed his face to the glass.

“What is that cloud?” he is heard asking. “Why is it . . . it’s growing darker. It is—ah, gospodi! ”

Komarov turned to Hamanaka, his jaw working. The Japanese astronaut had quickly composed herself. Her brow was furrowed as she began to work through the implications of what they’d seen.

“It is a debris plume,” said Hamanaka in a quiet voice. “Forward deckside. The Wildfire module is breached.”

Komarov found a different vantage point through a nearby nine-inch portal. He watched the rupture in disbelief.

“There is something else,” added Hamanaka. “On the side of the module. Some kind of new growth is spreading. Dark purple.”

The Russian astronaut shook his head. His toes were lightly curled under a bar on the forward wall of the module, not straining, placed perfectly to maintain position without expending too much energy. Komarov was on his third visit to the station, a veteran, and until Kline’s coup he had been commander of this mission.

“This is too much!” he exclaimed, breath misting the inch-thick, quadruple-paned circle of glass. Komarov had forgotten to aim his camera outside, and it was now trained on the side of his concerned face. The following data was reconstructed through footage collected by an external camera mounted to the truss segment.

A glittering debris cloud still lingered near the Wildfire module. Komarov could be heard repeating the word no , again and again, as he watched the hole opening wider. The breach was ejecting a steady plume of wreckage. Reduced to shocked silence, Komarov watched as the dull golden face of the Robonaut R3A4 emerged from the jagged hole.

It looked around slowly, as if in wonder.

The Robonaut R3A4 was leaving the confines of the BSL-5 protected Wildfire module in which it had been built. The humanoid robot carefully squeezed its bulky body through the ragged breach and into the vacuum.

Turning, it reached back into the hole.

The robot teased out the ribbon filament. In the harshly lit images, the ribbon was tattooed with an alien sheen of hexagons, like dull dragon scales. The length of it spilled from the breach like a lolling tongue.

Even from a distance, and even at this early juncture, it was clear that the ribbon was still growing rapidly. The white-hot front edge glowed like smoldering coals. Anchored within the module, the ribbon now trailed after the ISS like a fishing line cast into a current.

Its surface was sparkling, presumably as it absorbed stray molecules of debris and atmosphere.

This frightening sight was visible to the ISS crew but too distant to be observed by the hundreds of astronomers watching from around Earth’s equator, both professional and amateur. NASA itself had “requested a look” from several orbital security assets of the US military. They saw a metallic ribbon, razor-thin and glinting in the sunlight, stretching away from the space station toward Earth. After a day of constant acceleration, it was plain to see that the ISS had progressed to a distance of nearly twenty thousand miles—toward geosynchronous orbit.

What remained unseen was even more concerning.

Imagery recovered after the fact revealed a luminous patch of violet on the Wildfire module. The encrustation had been expanding steadily, not in hexagons but in pulsing, serpentine tendrils. Now the size of a dinner plate, it flashed green and then purple as it spread across the hull in a starburst pattern.

Distinct from AS-3, it was the birth of a new evolution.

Day 5Ascent

Of all the ways you can limit yourself, your own self-definition is the most powerful.

—MICHAEL CRICHTON

A New Paradigm

ENVELOPED IN A SHROUD OF DARKNESS DEEP BENEATH the anomaly, the remaining survivors of the Wildfire field team would have found themselves exhausted and without hope. They had just witnessed the deaths of two team members. Their supplies had been lost, including Stone’s backpack. The final canary lay still, out of batteries. Shivering and wet, Stone and Vedala sat back-to-back, leaning against each other with Tupa curled on Stone’s lap. Their body heat had slowly begun to dry them.

In the dark unknown, the touch of other people must have been reassuring.

Based on postincident interviews, the team could discern only that the floor beneath them was flat and hard—made of the same material as the rest of the structure. Their fingers could make out the faint traces of hexagons etched in its surface. And though they couldn’t see the space around them, it was full of echoes. An eerie whistling sound came and went, almost like melancholy singing, emanating from someplace high.

The team was too fatigued to explore further.

This expedition had gone utterly wrong. Death was now the most likely outcome. The only question was how quickly the end would come. Leaning his back against Vedala’s, Stone kept one arm wrapped around the boy’s bony shoulders. Despite their worries, they all three succumbed to a deep and dreamless sleep.

It was daylight that woke them.

“James,” whispered Vedala. “Look.”

Blinking his eyes open, Stone realized he could now see the room around him. A shaft of blazing morning light was falling from a hexagonal opening high in the ceiling. The light was faint by any normal standards, but having been in the dark for so long, Stone found it nearly unbearable to look at. Tupa had crawled off his lap and was yawning and staring at the room in surprise.

“A hole in the ceiling? How?” asked Stone. “We’re under a lake!”

“I have no idea,” said Vedala. “Look at this place, it’s so strange.”

Shading his eyes, Stone lowered his gaze. Like the rest of the anomaly, every surface he saw was made of the dark gray-green AS-3 substance. The room was six-sided, with a hexagonal pillar rising from the dead center, right through the open shaft in the ceiling. Some kind of platform, made of human materials like steel and glass, had been built around the central pillar.