Year's Best Scifi 5 Part 11

One, two, one.

"Reggie? Level one diagnostic, report," said Nick.

One, one, two.

"Maybe we can get a coherent diagnostic out of one of the other expert systems," Margot suggested.

Reggie wasn't a single processor. It was a web-work of six interconnected expert systems, each withtheir own area of concentration, just like the members of the crew. Terminals in different modules of the s.h.i.+p gave default access to differing expert systems.

"Maybe," said Nick. "Tom can try to track down the fault from here. You and Jean see if you can get an answer out of si...the power plant." Margot was quietly grateful he remembered what else was in sick bay before she had to remind him.

One, one, one.

Jean and Margot pulled themselves down the connector to the engineering compartment. As Jean had reported, all the indicators that had remained functional after they'd lost the sail reported green and go.

"At least it's a different crisis," Jean muttered as she brought up Reggie's terminal, the one she and Ed had spent hours behind when the mag sail went out.

"Remind me to tell you about my grandmother's stint on the old Mir sometime," said Margot. "Now there was an adventure."

Jean actually smiled and Margot felt a wash of grat.i.tude. Someone in here was still who she thought they were.

Jean spoke to the terminal. "Reggie, we've got a ma.s.sive fault in the exterior communications system.

Can you a.n.a.lyze from this system?" As she spoke, Margot hit the intercom b.u.t.ton on the wall to carry the answer to the command center.

"Ma.s.sive disruption and multiple error processing," said Reggie, sounding even more mechanical than usual. "I will attempt to establish interface."

"Nick, you hear that?" Margot said to the intercom grill. She could just hear the static pulses coming from the command center as whispering echoes against the walls of the connector.

"Roger," came back Nick's voice.

"I am...getting reports of an external signal," said Reggie. "It is...there is...internal fault, internal fault, internal fault."

Jean shut the terminal's voice down. "What the h.e.l.l?" she demanded of Margot. Margot just shook her head.

"External signal? How is that possible? This can't be a comm burst from Houston."

Margot's gaze drifted to the black triangle of the window. The echoes whispered in ones and twos.

"What's a language with only two components?" Margot asked.

Jean stared at her. "Binary."

"What do we, in essence, transmit from here when we do our comm bursts? What might somebody who didn't know any better try to send back to us?"

Jean's face went nearly as white as Tom's. "Margot, you're crazy."

Margot didn't bother to reply. She just pushed herself back up the connector to the bridge.

"Tom? Did you hear that?"

Tom didn't look up. He had a clip board and pen in his hands. As the static bursts rang out, he scribbled down a 1 for each single burst and a 0 for each pair. He hung the board in mid-air, as if not caring where it went and his hands flew across the keyboard. "Oh yeah, I heard it."

Nick was back at his station, typing at his own keyboard. "The engineering ex-systems seem to be intact. Maybe we can get an a.n.a.lysis..." He hit a new series of keys. Around them, the static bursts continued. Margot's temples started to throb in time with the insistent pulses.

"There's something," Tom murmured to the terminal. His voice was tight, and there was an undercurrent in it Margot couldn't identify. "It'll take awhile to find out exactly what's happened. I've got Reggie recording," he looked straight at Nick. "As long as it doesn't crash all the way..."

Margot and Jean also turned to Nick. Margot thought she saw relief s.h.i.+ning behind his eyes. At least now he won't have to find us make-work to do.

"All right," said Nick. "Tom, you keep working on the a.n.a.lysis of this...whatever it is. Jean, we need you to do a breakdown on Reggie. What's clean and what's contaminated?" He turned his dark, relieved eyes to Margot. "I'll take care of Paul. Margot..."

"I'll make sure all the peripherals are at the ready," said Margot. "We don't know what's happeningnext."

Nick nodded. Margot extracted herself from her station and followed Nick down the connector. She tried not to look as he worked the wheel on the sick bay hatch. She just let herself float past and made her way down to the cargo bay.

The cargo bay was actually a combination cargo hold and staging area. Here was where they stored the carefully locked-down canisters holding the ore samples. But here was also where they suited up for all their extra-vehicular activities. Just outside the airlock, the explorer boats waited, clamped tightly to the hull. They were small, light s.h.i.+ps that looked like ungainly box kites stripped of their fabric. The explorers were barely more than frames with straps to hang sample containers, or sample gatherers, or astronauts from. They'd been designed for asteroid rendezvous and landing. Margot remembered the sensation of childlike glee when she got to take them in. She loved her work, her mission, her life, but that had been sheer fun.

For a brief moment there, they thought they might be able to use the explorers to tow the Forty-Niner into an orbit that would allow one of the Martian stations to mount a rescue, but Reggie's models had showed it to be impossible. The delta-vee just wasn't there. So the explorers sat out there, and she sat in here, along with the core samplers, the drillers, the explosive charges, doing nothing much but waiting to find out what happened next.

Hang on, Margot. Stay alive one minute longer, and one minute after that. That's the game now isn't it? Forget how to play and you'll be following Paul, Ed and Tracy.

She touched the intercom b.u.t.ton so she could hear the static bursts and Tom's soft murmuring. It reminded her that something really was happening. A little warmth crept into her heart. A little light stirred in her mind. It was something, Tom had said so. It might just be help. Any kind of help.

Small tasks had kept her busy during the two weeks since they lost the sail, and small tasks kept her busy now. She made sure the seals on the ore carriers maintained their integrity. She ran computer checks on the explorers and made sure the fuel cells on the rovers were all at full capacity, that their tanks were charged and the seals were tight. Given the state Reggie was in, she was tempted to put on one of the bright yellow hard-suits and go out to do a manual check. She squashed the idea. She might be needed for something in here.

She counted all the air bottles for the suits and checked their pressure. You never knew. With Reggie acting up, they might have to do an EVA to point the antenna back toward Earth. If this last, strange hope proved to be false, she still hadn't said good-bye to her fiance Jordan, and she wanted to. She didn't want to just leave him in silence.

Reggie's voice, coming from the intercom, startled her out of her thoughts. "Help," said Reggie. "Me.

Help. Me. We. Thee. Help."

Margot flew up the connector. She was the last to reach the command module. She hung in the threshold, listening to Reggie blurt out words one at a time.

"There. Is. Help," said Reggie, clipped and harsh. The words picked up pace. "There is help.

Comet. Pull. Tow. Yourself. There is a comet approaching within reach. You can tow yourself toward your worlds using this comet. It is possible. There is help."

Margot felt her jaw drop open.

Tom looked down at his clipboard. "What Reggie says, what we've got here is a binary transmission from an unknown source. Taking the single pulses as ones and the double pulses as zeroes gave us gibberish, but taking the single pulses as zero and the double pulses as one gave us some version of machine language. The engineering expert sub-system was able to decode it."

He gripped his pen tightly, obviously resisting the urge to throw it in frustration. "This is impossible, this can't be happening."

Margot shrugged. "Well, it is."

"It can't be," growled Tom. "Aliens who can create a machine language Reggie can read inside of four hours? It couldn't happen."

"Unless they've been listening in on us for awhile," Jean pointed out.

Tom tapped the pen against the clipboard. One, two, one. "But how..."Margot cut him off. She didn't want to hear it anymore. This was help, this was the possibility of life.

Why was he trying to screw it up? "We've been beaming all kinds of junk out into s.p.a.ce for over a hundred years. Maybe they've been listening that long." She felt his doubt his dribbling into the corners of her mind. She shut it out by sheer force of will.

Jean folded her arms tightly across her torso. "At this point, I wouldn't care if it was demons from the seventh circle of h.e.l.l, just so long as it's out here."

"Jesus," breathed Nick softly. Then, in a more normal voice he said, "OK, Margot, you and Jean are going to have to do an EVA to turn the antenna around so we can send a burst to Houston."

"We can't tell Houston about this," said Jean sharply.

"What?" demanded Tom.

Jean hugged herself even tighter. "They'd think we'd all gone crazy up here."

"What's it matter what they think?" Nick spread his hands. "It's not like they can do anything about it."

"They can tell our families we've all taken the mental crash," said Jean flatly. "I, for one, do not want to make this any worse on my parents."

Nick nodded slowly. "OK," he said. "We keep this our little secret. But if we do make it back, mission control is going to have a cow."

Tom looked from Nick to Jean and Margot saw something hard and strange behind his eyes. He faced Margot. "This thing with the comet, could we really do something like this?"

Margot's mouth opened and closed. A short-period comet, swinging around the sun. If they caught it on its way back in...if they could attach a line (hundreds of kilometers of unused cable coiled on its drum against the hull of the s.h.i.+p)...theoretically, theoretically, it could pull them into a tighter orbit. The stresses would be incredible. Several gs worth. Would they be too much? How to make the attachment? Couldn't land on a comet, even if the explorers had the delta-vee. Comets were surrounded by dust and debris, they ejected gas jets, ice and rock. Asteroids were one thing. Asteroids were driftwood bobbing along through the void. Comets were alive and kicking.

But maybe...maybe...

"We'd need to find the thing," she said finally. "We'd need course, distance, speed. We'd need to know if we can use the RCM to push us near enough to take a shot at it. We'd probably need the explorers to do the actual work of attaching the Forty-Niner to the comet..."

"We could use the mag sail," said Jean. She gnawed slowly on her thumbnail. "All that cable, we could use it as a tow rope. But we'd need a harpoon, or something..."

"A harpoon?" said Tom incredulously.

Jean just nodded. "To attach the tether to the comet. Maybe we could use some of the explosives..."

Nick smiled, just a little. For the first time in days, Margot saw the muscles of his face relax. "Jean, let's get down to engineering and see what we can work up. Tom, you and Margot find our comet." His smile broadened. "And keep an ear out in case the neighbors have more to say."

"No problem," said Margot. She raised her arm and whistled. "Taxi!"

Jean, an old New Yorker, actually laughed at that, and Margot grinned at her. Nick and Jean pulled themselves down the connector. Margot planted her feet on the velcro patch next to Tom.

"Let's see if we can still get to the database," she said, as she reached over his shoulder for the keys.

"We should be able to narrow down..."

Tom did not lift his gaze from the screen. "It's a fake, Margot," he whispered.

Margot's hand froze halfway to the keyboard. "What?"

"Little green men my a.s.s," he spat toward the console. "It's a fake. It's Nick. He's doing this to try to keep us going."

Margot felt the blood drain from her cheeks, and the hope from her heart. "How do you know?"

"I know." For the first time Tom looked at her. "He'd do anything right now to keep us in line, to keep giving orders, just so it doesn't look like he's out of options like the rest of us mere mortals."

Margot looked at his wide, angry blue eyes and saw the man she'd served with swallowed up byanother stranger. "You got proof?"

Tom shook his head, but the certainty on his face did not waver. "I checked the logs for gaps, suspicious entries, virus tracks, extra encryptions. Nothing. n.o.body on this s.h.i.+p could have made an invisible insertion, except me, or Nick."

"Unless it's not an insertion," said Margot. "Unless it's really a signal."

Tom snorted and contempt filled his soft words. "Now you're talking like Jean. She hasn't been with it since Ed went. Be real, Margot. If E.T.'s out there, why isn't he knocking on the door? Why's he sending cryptic messages about comets instead of offering us a lift?"

"It's aliens, I don't know," Margot spread her hands. "Maybe they're methane breathers. Maybe they're too far away. s.p.a.ce is big. Maybe they want to see if we can figure it out for ourselves to see if we're worthy for members.h.i.+p in the Galactic Federation."

Tom's face twitched and Margot got the feeling he was suppressing a sneer. "OK, if it's aliens, how come I was able to figure out what they were saying so fast? They have a NASA Machine Language for Dummies book with them?"

Margot threw up her hands. "If Nick was faking this, why would he insist on a comm burst to mission control?"

Tom's jaw worked back and forth. "Because it'd look funny if he didn't and he knew Jean'd object and give him an out. She might even be in on it with him."

Margot clenched her fists. "It's a chance, Tom. It's even a decent chance, if we work the simulations right. It doesn't matter where the idea came from..."

"It does matter!" he whispered hoa.r.s.ely. "It matters that we're being used. It matters that he doesn't trust us to hear him out so he's got to invent alien overlords."

"So, report him when we get home," said Margot, exasperation filling her breathy exclamation.

"We're not going to get home," Tom slammed his fist against the console. "We're going to die. This is all a stupid game to keep us from killing ourselves too soon. He's determined we are not going to die until he's good and ready."

Margot leaned in close, until she could see every pore in Tom's bloodless white cheeks.

"You listen to me," she breathed. "You want to kill yourself? Hit the sick bay. I'm sure Paul left behind something you can O.D. on. Maybe you're right, maybe how we go out is the only choice left. But I think we can use the deltavee from the comet to tow us into a tighter orbit. I'm going to try, and I may die trying, but that's my choice. What are you going to do? Which part of that stubborn idiot head are you going to listen to? Huh?" She grabbed his collar. "If it is Nick doing this, I agree, it's a stupid ploy.

But so what? It's the first good idea we've had in over a month. Are you going to let your pride kill you?"

Tom swatted her hand away. "I am not going to let him treat me like a fool or a child."

Tom lifted up first one foot then the other. He twisted in the air and swam toward the connector.

Margot hung her head and let him go.

Give him some time to stew and then go after him. She planted herself squarely in front of his station. "Reggie?"

"Functioning," replied the AI.

"We need to do some speculation here," she rubbed her forehead. "I need you to pull up any databases we've got on comets. Specifically I need any that are pa.s.sing within a thousand kilometers of the Forty-Niner's projected position anytime within the next several months."

A static burst sounded from the speaker as if Reggie were coughing. "Several is not specific."

"Six months then. Add in the possibility of a full or partial RCM burn for course correction to bring us within the cometary path. Can you do that?"