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Chapter 138 – Mission FailureAlex was really hoping the FBI could stop the Orphans and their creepy ‘killer maker’ prion stuff before Terawatt had to go do anything. Jack was calling it the ‘hate plague’ even if Alex had no idea where he got the term. Sometimes Jack’s brain went into really wacky places.
Like calling Victor Cready ‘Flamey the Wonder Ouchy’. Honestly. Sometimes Alex thought Shar was more mature than Jack. Or at least Jack tried to act less mature than Shar. Alex was sure Willow was really good for Jack in that way.
When Jo drove up for the martial arts lessons, they deliberately didn’t talk about the prion stuff. It was just too ooky to talk about around Shar, anyway.
Alex was really hoping the Orphans would have to hide out for a while, since everyone in the whole world was concentrating on Orphans who might be doing bad stuff. Maybe they’d have to hide out for months, and Alex could have a nice, normal, quiet spring term.
* * *
Sam Carter woke up. She had a miserable headache, and her mouth felt like a fraternity had washed their socks using her tongue. If she’d been drinking, she’d guess it was a hangover. But there was no alcohol of any kind on the shuttle. If she had been exposed to diseases recently, she’d guess she was coming down with something infectious. But she hadn’t been exposed to anyone new for a looooooong time. Not that she couldn’t use someone new to talk to or even put up with, because she was getting tired of Keith and Don and Eli’s little eccentricities. She would be so glad to land and be able to be around some other people for a change.
Okay, what could be the problem? If it wasn’t the impossible, it could be a failure in the environmental systems. She could fix that, but the env systems were really Don’s assignment, since he was the co-pilot and the official environmental specialist, and Keith was a massive pain about ‘chain of command’ and ‘official assignments’ even though there were only four people in the entire shuttle. If organic molecules were being spewed out by the env systems along with the oxygenated air, that could be a critical problem. She needed to be in a sealed suit right away, and get Don in one so he could fix the air.
She glanced at the electronic clock. It said 0326. That was impossible. They were operating on Houston time just for convenience, and the computer should have sounded her wake-up alarm at 1600. Not to mention there was no way Captain Keith ‘I am in command here’ Baker would let anyone else slide on their duty shifts for even a minute. And there was no way her body would let her sleep an extra eleven and a half hours. That was nineteen and a half hours of sleep! She normally woke up after only six and a half or seven hours of sleep anyway.
None of the guys were practical jokers, and resetting that clock would require resetting the entire computer time array, or else it would get reset in a matter of seconds.
She raised her voice. “Don? Don!”
No answer. That was ridiculous. The Atlantis was too small not to hear everyone all the time. Even when it was Eli doing that really annoying throat-clearing noise he did. It wasn’t as if he could even have a cold after their time in quarantine and then up here, or as if he could be exposed to anything he could be allergic to.
“Keith? Eli? Guys!”
This was getting ridiculous. She pulled herself out of her bunk. She was in her ‘suit’ already, since it was less of a problem to wear it all the time and sleep in it than to change into something a lot less appropriate given she was in tight confines with three guys who hadn’t had any sex in a long time. The ‘suit’ was basically like high-tech long johns, molding tightly to her skin with enough elastic force that she could do a space walk in nothing but the suit, the matching boots and gloves, and the helmet-backpack system. And she was wearing the gloves and boots, too. They all did, except when they needed to take the gloves off for detail work. In case of a Type I emergency where they were losing air pressure, she could slap on one of the helmets, engage the seal, and have breathable air in under ten seconds. In theory.
She floated across the narrow passageway and pulled out a backpack system. It was one small tank of pressurized air in between two small env systems shaped like long, thin boxes. The NASA engineers called the env systems ‘air scrubbers’, but that was inaccurate, and made it sound like the air was dirty and just needed to be washed. No, these were sealed systems with a simple activated charcoal filter and a platinum-based catalyst that under the proper electrostatic charge would break down CO2 into oxygen and some carbon that would get harmlessly deposited on the charcoal of the filter. Still, air eventually leaked out of the system at key sealing junctions, so the system needed extra air now and then from the tank. So, as long as the batteries lasted and the air tank lasted, the system would supply air. In theory, a fully charged pack like the one in her hands should last for up to twenty hours, at which point she’d need to slap on a new backpack system or else have the shuttle’s env systems repaired by then.
She strapped the backpack on, tugged her headgear and helmet in place, and hooked it up. The faint ozone scent told her the system was working properly.
She pulled herself expertly to the control cabin. There was no one there. No one! Keith wouldn’t dream of leaving the controls unattended. She was trained so she could serve as a third pilot, if needed, just as she was the astrophysics mission specialist and the primary flight engineer and the secondary co-pilot. And Keith liked having her watching the controls just in case, when he was on other tasks and Don was on sleep cycle.
She pulled herself back through the ‘living space’ where they had the bunks configured, along with the bathroom and the kitchen and the food stores. No one. She moved back into the payload area, which was at the back of the living space. Still no one.
Oh, shit, the specimen containers were all open. There was no way Professor Eli Colby would let that happen unless something really, really drastic had occurred.
“KEITH! DON! ELI!”
Maybe she was dreaming. She pulled off her gloves and pinched the back of her other hand. Ouch! Okay, not dreaming. That left hallucinations, insanity, or … something a lot worse than having your flight engineer go nuts.
She checked the entire shuttle. The space-walk suits were still secured, but the computer said one had been taken out and checked back in after only thirty minutes. She checked the computer’s logs. Something weird was there instead of some proper listings, so she went straight to the backup files at the flight engineer’s panels. Don had opened the airlock, and then opened it again from the outside after only seventeen minutes. And two hours later, Keith had tried to erase the log entries. Fortunately, Keith’s strong point was not computers, and he hadn’t cleared the backup drive she had set up using a redundant hard drive.
All three of the guys’ ‘suits’ were stuffed in one of the other bunks. She quickly checked that the alternate suits were all still in the laundry cabinet. Okay, so where were three naked astronauts who had done something so she’d sleep an extra 11.5 hours?
She hopped into the pilot’s seat and checked the astrogation. Okay, still on target for Earth. Fuel? Still at nominal. She checked the outside cameras and cringed.
Half a dozen of the crucial thermo-protective tiles were drifting away from the shuttle, and who knew how many others were completely lost to sight. She couldn’t land the shuttle without every tile perfectly in place and secured. The heat of the landing trajectory would melt a hole in the shuttle and destroy it in mid-air. The only way she could think of such a thing happening would be … if someone performed a spacewalk and tore the tiles off. It would only take, say, seventeen minutes to exit through the hatch, move around to the underbelly of the shuttle, tear a slew of tiles loose and hurl them off into space, then return.
Why would Don do such a thing? It made no sense. Why would Keith let him? Why would Keith aid and abet such an action and try to cover it up? And where were they? And why would they take off their skinsuits? And where was Eli? Still, she knew one thing. This needed to be reported immediately.
She went straight for the communications system. “This is Captain Sam Carter, mission specialist on Atlantis, calling NASA Mission Control. Come in please. Carter to NASA, come in please. We have a crisis. My entire crew is missing, repeat, missing, and the sample containers have been opened. We have a possible contamination threat, and there are now an unknown number of tiles from the underside of the shuttle floating away from me and irretrievable. I need assistance to dock at the ISS instead of attempting re-entry which would, under current conditions, result in burn-up.”
“…–tain Carter! This is Mission Control. We are receiving your message. Give us a couple seconds to hear all of it.”
She waited impatiently. Even at the speed the massive booster rockets on the sides of the shuttle permitted, she was still almost a week away from Earth. There were long seconds of lag in the communications. She pulled up the computer logs and matched them against her backups. All right, only the one spacewalk. There was only room for one person in the hatch, and it had been opened once from inside, then once from outside, and after that Don’s EVA suit had been checked back into its locker. There was no way there shouldn’t be three other people in the shuttle with her.
She considered whether it was conceivable that Don could have taken off the EVA suit and his skinsuit while in hard vacuum, stuffed them into the hatch, and then shut the outer door from the outside so Keith could put everything away. You didn’t just ‘explode’ in hard vacuum, nor did the other ridiculous myths from bad sci-fi really happen. If he expelled all the air from his lungs and yanked the helmet off, he’d have probably fifteen seconds before he passed out, and a couple minutes to live. But there was no way he could get out of his EVA suit in fifteen seconds, and there was no way he could take it off without removing the helmet for at least a minute or two. Okay, he must have come back into the shuttle. So she had to account for three missing bodies instead of just two.
“Captain Carter, this is Mission Control. We’ve been worried down here, because Atlantis has been silent for fourteen hours, and Captain Baker missed three check-ins. Can you repeat and validate your message? You have three missing crewmen?”
She sighed. This was going to be impossible to explain. The most logical choice was that she killed them and dumped their bodies, and then feigned ignorance of the truth. She was never going to be able to convince anyone of an alternative unless she worked it out herself and came up with solid evidence for it.
“Captain Carter to Mission Control. I have three missing crewmen. Something must have happened during my last sleep cycle, because I only woke up minutes ago, instead of twelve hours ago. I need to check everything in the computer logs. I need to check the env systems. Astrogation looks fine and fuel is nominal, but the shuttle has lost a minimum of six of the tiles off the underside. I can see them floating away in the external cameras. And I have to conclude that it was sabotage. Give me a few seconds to get one of the interior cameras mobile, and I’ll walk you through the entire interior so you can see I’m telling the truth.”
While she got the best camera ready, the voice came back. “Understood. Please continue.”
She sent a copy of the computer logs off to NASA. Then she started filming at the cabin, and she narrated as she worked her way through the craft. “Controls. Still on auto, still on course. Living areas. All bunks empty since I’m out of mine. All other suits shoved in here. All backup suits still in the laundry cabinet here. No one in the bathroom, the pantry shelves, the kitchen components, the astrophysics lab area, or the bio lab area. Note that someone opened all the bio sample containers. No one hiding in the EVA suits or lurking in the EVA hatch. No one anywhere all the way back to the engine control access panels. No one in the hydroponic oxygen-exchange system …”
She opened the panels to access the hydroponic ‘garden’ that was their primary CO2-to-O2 conversion system for the mission. It wasn’t harvestable, like a real hydroponic garden, so they were eating out of tubes and boxes, like usual. But it worked well.
Up until now.
Holy Hannah, there was a grayish-green, slimy, fungus-like mess that had taken over the entire hydroponic tank system and all the space around it.
The green mess began extruding some sort of thick tentacle toward her.
She slammed the access panels shut and pushed herself back until she bumped into the opposite side of the shuttle. “Houston? We have a problem.”
* * *
Jack grabbed his cellphone when it started playing ‘Girls Just Wanna Have Fun’. Smart fiancées? Awesome. Smart fiancées who were also phreakers you couldn’t keep out of your phone? Not quite as awesome. At least he was already awake and about to go out for his morning run. It wasn’t even 0600 his time, so he had no idea why Willow was even awake.
He snapped open the phone and checked, “What’s wrong?”
Willow whimpered, “Jack? I don’t know if this is an SRI problem, but if we don’t take it, someone creepy like the NID might!”
He said, “Take a deep breath and let it out slowly. Then define ‘it’ for me, because you left that part out.”
She took a deep breath. “Okay, you know how Tera and I have been keeping track of other-you’s 2IC?”
Jack rolled his eyes. “You can call her ‘Samantha’, you know. Or Carter.”
She stressed, “Well, the space shuttle Atlantis went silent hours and hours ago, and they missed three check-ins, which is totally of the bad, and so I sort of invaded NASA’s computer systems so I could keep an eye on things, and my system just woke me up and I caught her broadcast back to Houston, and she’s the only astronaut left alive, and there’s a huge fungus blob-thing in her shuttle with her, and they’ve lost a bunch of the heat tiles off the bottom so she can’t even land!”
Jack tried to sound reassuring. “Honey, I know this is bad, but an alien lifeform or a shuttle disaster is not in the SRI’s scope of work. I’m not sure whose purview it is, it should be NASA’s or Strategic Command’s, but it’s not ours, and we’re already in a bit of trouble for pushing our role way too far on some of these ops. Somebody decided that even though we saved the whole planet, the silicate and tarantula and mega-dino ops were not ‘superpowers’ issues and we were naughty children who should have gotten a timeout.”
Willow protested, “Well, that’s stupid, because you’re what’s saved the world like two dozen times in less than three years, going all the way back to that Siberian forest thing I’m not supposed to know about.”
Jack gave in. “Okay, I’m going to call Big Cheese’s office and try to make a case for us to stick our noses in. We both know Tera’s going to want to rescue this Sam if she can.”
Willow stared at the screen in utter horror as she watched the recording.
“Houston, this is Sam Carter. I am still on original flightpath, but I have no guarantee I won’t be consumed by this thing well before I approach re-entry. So I am requesting a flightpath that will take me as far from Earth as possible with a minimal-time trajectory into the sun.”
“Captain Carter, we would prefer if you didn’t go to the most drastic solution first.”
“Houston, I have no intention of doing that unless necessary. But I am eventually going to have to sleep. I would like to have the shuttle astrogation programmed this way every time I go on sleep cycle, as a precautionary measure. Based on what I can guess about the hours while I was unconscious, each of the other astronauts was consumed in turn. If I get … assimilated, I don’t want the shuttle crashing into the ISS or diving into Earth’s gravity well and possibly disseminating this threat while the shuttle burns up on re-entry.”
“Very well, we’ll get on that stat.”
* * *
Alex woke up. But it wasn’t her alarm.
Shar was shaking her arm with one hand and holding Piki in the crook of her other arm, while pushing the tPhone at her. “Alex! Wake up! Auntie Willow’s gonna call right now!”
“Huh? How do you know?”
Shar sort of rolled her eyes in an Uncle George way. “I dunno! I just felt her gettin’ really upset, and she was … sorta … thinking about you. And the phone. I think.”
The tPhone rang, only it was the music from ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Alex automatically knew what Willow would be worrying about, with that music playing.
And when was Willow going to stop messing with her ringtones, anyway?
She grabbed the phone and said, “Tera here. Is it a crisis with the space shuttle?”
“I knew you’d get it, even if it’s super-early but I’ve been up for hours worrying,” Willow babbled. “I mean, this is so uber-bad! NASA hasn’t released the video, but I just emailed you a clip, and the stuff they got from the comet that looked like organic molecules? It’s organic molecules. And I’m pretty sure it ate all of Sam’s crew and it may eat her before she gets anywhere near anyone who can help her, and she’s really worried, and she wants a total quarantine for her shuttle on the ISS or else she wants to do a dive into the sun to kill this stuff!”
Oh, crud. Alex was going to ask what Willow thought they could do to help, but sort of got run over.
“And I already talked to Pinkie Pie and he says it’s not even an SRI tasking and there’s nothing we can do and it’s not like NASA has spare shuttles lying around to shoot strange spec ops guys up to the space station, and nobody in the SRI has ‘space warfare’ training if there even is such a thing, and anyway, it turns out there are three agencies who actually have this tasking, so we have no shot of getting involved, and I don’t know what we can do to help!”
Alex carefully asked, “Umm, who does have this kind of thing as a tasking?”
Willow whimpered, “Well, NASA, of course, and the United States Strategic Command has a space warfare group that used to be called the United States Space Command, and we’ve got a treaty so the President could call on the Russian Space Force, and … the NID, at least what’s left of it, because the President and Congress pretty much stepped on those guys’ faces, but Jack says he’s sure they haven’t been totally dismantled because that prick Colonel Maybourne and his ex-Shop sidekick haven’t landed on some kind of ‘available officers’ list he won’t tell me about because he doesn’t want me to snoop in it. And it could’ve been worse, because if it hadn’t been for Pyre and you and the SRI, The Shop would have probably gotten a call on this one, because alien lifeforms? Totally in their purview.”
“Eww and double eww.” Then she remembered something even ickier. “Uh-oh. The U.S. Strategic Command? General Kremer runs that, and he’s pretty cheesed off at me, and especially at you.”
Willow whimpered. “Ugh, and Pinkie Pie will be totally of the snarky about that, because he keeps telling me I’m doing too much hacking without doing all the clearance-y things first and he wants me to work more with Big Cheese and Top Banana so the stuff I do is all of the legit.”
Alex admitted, “I think it’s really totally awesome what you do, but doing it the legal way if you can? That would be good.”
“Mega-good?” Willow teased.
“Uber-ly of the good,” she teased back.
But as soon as Willow hung up, Alex pulled up Willow’s email on the tablet and watched the attachment. Oh, crud. She couldn’t imagine how freaked she would be if she woke up and everyone else on her shuttle had just vanished, and then she found a tentacle monster. In the spot she couldn’t attack, because it was her source of oxygen.
And there was absolutely nothing Alex could do to save Sam.
Sometimes, being a superhero was way beyond cruddy.
* * *
Sam Carter checked her oxygen levels again.
She was still in her skinsuit and still using O2 out of a backpack. She had thoroughly inspected all six of the backpack systems, and they were all clean, so she was going to stay on emergency air all the time. She was just going to switch backpack systems every fifteen hours and get the most-recently used one recharged. In case of extreme emergency, she would then be prepared to live on the six backpack systems for up to one hundred or one hundred twenty hours before she asphyxiated, depending on the number of fully-charged systems and the amount of exertion she had to go through.
She had given NASA a complete report on the shuttle’s env systems. There were definitely some low-molecular-weight organics being released into the shuttle air because of the lifeform’s effects on the hydroponics. She didn’t think that any of them could fully account for the way she had overslept, and the ‘hangover’ she woke up with.
She had also tampered with the env system as much as she dared so she could expose the lifeform to changing levels of CO2 and O2 and N2 and the other gases she could adjust. She had been hoping that she could find a combination that it didn’t like, or it couldn’t tolerate. No such luck. It liked CO2, and it didn’t seem to care about other gases. It obviously couldn’t be killed by subjecting it to vacuum, because it had lived in vacuum on that comet for millennia. Millennia? It had probably lived on that comet through entire geological eras.
She had even taken a sample of the lifeform and hit it with everything in Eli’s little bio lab. Unsurprisingly, its microscopic structure didn’t hold up to anything with a pH well over 12 or a pH well under 2, but not a lot could. So if she had ten thousand gallons of pure hydrochloric acid, she could kill it. Or most of it. Even though ten thousand gallons of pure HCl would kill her and eat virtually everything in the shuttle as well.
She was feeling extremely frustrated, too. Eli Colby had been using mass spectrometry to analyze the molecules, and she vividly remembered that he had been complaining about needing to recalibrate constantly, and about not getting enough ionization, which he had been blaming on something Sam had done to his equipment. Now she knew just how stupid that was. He hadn’t been seeing enough ionization because the molecular structure of the lifeform let it directly absorb a pretty wide spectrum of electromagnetic radiation and convert it directly to something it could live on. So he had been feeding it the entire time. No wonder he had needed to continually recalibrate his system. The thing had been growing inside the ionization chamber, probably until it was large enough to develop some mobility and surprise him. It had also eaten away some of the gaskets inside the mass spectrometer, so nothing she had was secure against the stuff. It liked CO2, and it liked hydrocarbons. It would love Earth. It would be a bigger threat than that blob monster in Pennsylvania.
It would be a bigger threat than the asteroid that wiped out most of the dinosaurs sixty-five million years ago.
She had really wanted a chance after NASA to maybe work with whichever part of the DHS handled Terawatt and other super-powered individuals. The physics of superpowers would be fascinating. It was a shame she was pretty unlikely to ever get back to Earth, unless it was as absorbed and reconstructed molecules inside this lifeform.
But she was currently studying the mass spec output. Eli acted as if no one but a biochemist could possibly use one or understand the output, but it was really just pattern recognition. Large parts of the molecular structures were clearly analogues of DNA, which meant that the gene sequencer Eli had refused to get out of its carrying case was really what she needed to try next.
She took the sample out of the mass spectrometer and prepared slides to go in the gene sequencer. Then she was going to transmit the data to NASA as soon as she had it. Maybe some extremely-bright geneticist would be able to identify some weaknesses inherent in the lifeform’s nucleic acids.
* * *
Harry Maybourne reacted at the burner cellphone’s first ring. He quickly answered, “Colonel Maybourne here. Today’s passcode is ‘alpha seventeen’.”
“Today’s response code is ‘Meryl Streep’. Please hold for your contact.”
He instinctively sat up straight. After only a few seconds, he heard the voice of his handler. Now that the NID had been officially dismantled, he was running one of a number of active cells. He had no idea who was actually behind his handler, although he had several guesses. He was working under the assumption that if he ever guessed right and did so publicly, he would have a fatal accident within twenty-four hours.
“Colonel Maybourne, NASA has a problem we need to handle. The Atlantis has lost three of its four crew, and the fourth, Samantha Carter, is going to dock at the ISS instead of landing, because of contamination concerns. It’s a primitive alien lifeform. Get some samples and make sure they get delivered to Base Delta. If Carter or any of the ISS personnel get in your way, you know what to do.”
“Yes, sir.”
“For purposes of this op, you have need-to-know. We have an agent already onboard the ISS. The agent’s cover is less important than this mission.”
He listened carefully and memorized the agent’s name, codename, and passcodes.
* * *
“Commander Elliot? It’s NASA. They’ve got General Peterson calling for you.”
“Thanks, Miku.” He pushed off and floated over to the central core of the International Space Station. He was a captain in the U.S.A.F. so he wasn’t really Miku’s commander. She was part of the Japanese space program, and was their primary communications officer. But she preferred using his formal title whenever one of the major space agencies called him.
In private, everyone on the ISS just called him Vince. Well, in private their medical officer called him something entirely different, but that wasn’t anyone else’s business.
He floated out of the central core and into the command module from where they ran everything. “Captain Vincent Elliot speaking, sir.”
“At ease, captain. We have a crisis with the shuttle Atlantis. They picked up some exobiology they were studying.”
He nodded, while he held onto a grip. You had to watch your every movement when you were in micro-gravity. “Yes, sir. We watched some of Captain Carter’s reports.”
He didn’t mention that he really didn’t like Samantha Carter. They had been in the same year at the Air Force Academy, and she had beaten him out for first in class. Guys still gave him shit about that. Carter was the only girl who had pulled a first in Academy history, and she had done it despite his best efforts. It wasn’t his fault that she was the biggest brain to hit the Academy in decades, or that she had outstanding PT scores for a girl. He hadn’t been able to beat her out, and it had been a pretty nasty battle. She was also incredibly hot, and she had never once given him the time of day. And the word was that she was probably going to get promoted to major as soon as she wrapped up with NASA. He didn’t want to deal with Sam Carter.
“The exobiology turned out to be more than some organic molecules. It ate three of the crew, and has taken over the hydroponics section of the shuttle. Carter is fending it off and trying to analyze it for weaknesses, but it’s a maximal quarantine situation. Can you provide an isolation module where the Atlantis can dock?”
He clenched his teeth. He didn’t like Carter, but he really didn’t want to think about what things might be like for her if she was trapped in a tiny shuttle with an alien lifeform that had already taken down Keith Baker. Vince knew Keith well enough to have a few brews with him, and Keith was one tough, by-the-book officer. He said, “Sir, I need to confer with my medical officer, my researchers, and my flight engineers before I can give you an answer.”
“That’s what I expected, captain. Peterson out.”
Miku looked over at him from her chair. “An alien lifeform?”
He ran a hand through his blond buzzcut. “An alien lifeform that ‘ate’ three of the crew of the Atlantis and is probably looking at Sam Carter for dessert. Could you call an all-hands? We’ll make it short, so we can do it in here.”
Miku quickly called the entire crew of the ISS, and people started drifting into the command module.
Viktor was first in, as usual. Viktor was part of the Russian Space Administration, and they didn’t talk about it, but Vince knew Viktor had space warfare training as part of the Russian Space Force. Vince had asked Viktor to be his second in command, and Vince knew that if things ever went to hell, he’d be damn glad he had a 2IC with space warfare training, instead of a 2IC who was really good with, say, electronics. You could always order the technician to do what was needed. Knowing what orders to give was the hard part.
Lisa was second. She was a gorgeous redheaded Italian woman who was way too good for him, but luckily liked him anyway. She was part of the ESA group, along with Hans. As the station’s med officer she was also in charge of the environmental systems, although the mechanical side, like repairs, was Michael’s forte.
Michael drifted in next. He was part of the Canadian space program, and the station’s primary flight engineer, although he spent most of his time working as Hans’ and Jun’s and Al’s assistant in the research labs. He said, “Hey, Vince, Jun and Al are on sleep cycle. Can they just catch up later?”
“Sure,” he nodded.
And Hans came in last. That was partly because he was the oldest person on the ISS, and partly because he spent all his uptime in his lab. At least he had stopped asking Michael to call him ‘Dr. Halvorsen’ all the time in the lab. Michael had his own Ph.D., so it was sort of annoying.
Vince explained the situation, and asked for input. He might be the commander of the ISS while he was up here, but that didn’t mean this was an American military command.
Hans instantly said, “We should try. This is absolutely fascinating! A non-terrestrial lifeform. We could learn so much from its biochemistry, its functional form, its —”
Viktor interrupted, “Its way of eating every astronaut it can get its tentacles on. This is not a good idea.”
Lisa agreed, “It could be very dangerous. We can’t maintain perfect isolation with a hundred percent certainty.”
Michael contributed, “We have worked out how to separate a module from the station. It would have to be on its own environmental system, but we could set it up with a power cable and a transport tube and maybe three tether cables.”
Hans suggested, “At least three. Michael and I have tried this in computer simulations, and the problem will be the docking maneuver.”
Vince said, “We could use module four. It has bio lab equipment, a short-term environmental system of its own, a docking system, and an EVA hatch. But the environmental system won’t hold up on its own for more than a couple of weeks.”
Lisa shrugged. “With only one person, and access to the environmental system in the shuttle, we ought to be able to extend that to several months if we absolutely have to.”
Hans said, “And we can move in some of the spare physics lab equipment for Captain Carter to work with, before we disconnect it.”
Miku said, “We can put some remotely controlled jet systems on it so we can keep it stable after the shuttle docks.”
Viktor nodded. “Good idea. It should be workable. Michael and Jun and I should be able to rig it and detach it in under …” He looked at the clock on the wall and thought it over. “… twelve hours if Al and Miku can rig up the jet systems for us first.”
“Yes, we can do that,” Miku said.
Michael leaned over. “So, Hans, you ready to test out our remote sampling and analysis system? I think it ought to go into the module.”
Vince said, “Thanks, everyone. I’ll contact NASA and give them the news. Then we just have to prepare for a carnivorous alien lifeform we know nothing about.”
* * *
Sam Carter studied the data on the engine test burn. The astrogation data were conclusive. There was only enough lost mass to account for seven or eight of the ceramic tiles. The mass of her fellow astronauts was still on board.
That meant that all the living semi-solid mass packed in around the hydroponic oxygen exchange system had to be made of the mass of her three fellow astronauts. So it was only a matter of time before she fell asleep and got eaten. Or absorbed. Or adsorbed. Or digested. Or transformed. Or …
She studied the readouts from the env systems and properly recalibrated them. It liked CO2. If it ate her, it would lose its CO2 generator. She had no way of telling if it was smart enough to understand that. It didn’t possess chlorophyll, but it had chlorophyll-like organic molecules for conversion of CO2 and energy into O2 and food. And the env systems showed something in the filters that under a microscope looked like … spores.
Spores? Oh, hell.
If this thing escaped isolation and got loose on Earth, it would be a disaster. Now … how was she going to sleep without risking being eaten, or even worse, assimilated? Wait, how did she know she wasn’t already assimilated?
She took samples of her mucus and her blood and a scraping off her skin and checked under the microscope and in the biochem lab. Oh, holy Hannah, she was already a carrier. If she couldn’t figure out how to eradicate this from her system, she couldn’t ever go home. Don must have known, and had enough control before he mutated to go sabotage the shuttle so all the exo would burn up. Only that would not guarantee a one hundred percent success. Keith must have known, and had tried to cover it up from her. They must have known she was contaminated, too, and didn’t trust her.
Or else Don was ‘possessed’ by the thing and sabotaged the shuttle to get as much of the lifeform spread as widely as possible when the shuttle came apart on re-entry. Then Keith was ‘possessed’ as the thing grew inside him, and tried to cover up for Don. In that case, it was only a matter of time before the lifeform possessed her, and she did something Samantha Carter would hate.
She had to report this to NASA at once.