WHALE
A forgotten astronaut looks for a way back home
Before they found her, Galina Agafonov was an astronaut. She had overseen changing the trajectory of the Pallas at the last minute, diverting the starship toward a backup dash through the planets, a desperate bid to slingshot around Jupiter and back to Earth. It was an unlikely scenario, but one she had rehearsed a thousand times in the simulators, and a thousand times more in her head before strapping in. Even for someone with her job, her peers would describe her as needlessly conscientious.
The mission had fallen into chaos. System failure after system failure had meant they missed a critical transport window. They were forced to take the unlikely backup plan. The crew sent their messages back to Earth. The androids on board stood emotionless. Galina told her son she loved him. The signal was sent back to Earth. They initiated the plan.
The plan failed. Earth lost all contact with the Pallas during the manoeuvre, and by the time the ship was due to reappear from around the back of Jupiter, she was gone. There was no way to hunt for her, only wild speculation and telescopes and mechanical ears turned to the stars.
Conspiracy theorists proposed alien abductions, a secret interstellar war, a zombie apocalypse on board. The wilder theories included the Pallas smashing headfirst into a great barrier, that Earth was part of an intergalactic zoo.
These ideas were ridiculous. The ground crew guessed privately that the Pallas crew were long dead by now, having obliterated themselves in Jupiter’s atmosphere. It was a simple, uncomfortable truth. But the world held onto hope for a few more months.
Before they found her, Galina Agafonov was long dead. She was a flattened corpse dredged from interstellar space, a fossil of dust and micrometeorites. One of her legs was missing, and something very fast and very small had made a crater of one side of her skull. What remained of her ancient brain was frozen in place mid-flight. It was a fulgurite-shaped stalactite of blood and viscera waiting to be smashed open by alien instruments. Galina was a glistening mound of red and black and white. Of metal and flesh and bone, pulverised by time and by extreme conditions.
She was unrecognisable, but her suit computer survived. Her last moments were recorded, entombed on a crystal chip no larger than a fingernail. It waited half way up the spine of her suit, embedded in the crushed vertebrae and torn metal.
Galina’s body made its slow ascent into the hold of the ship. The machine was a mess of salvaged parts, engines and airlocks and tubing and cockpits jutting out in every direction. It looked as if it had been hastily welded together, as if with each journey the ship acquired a new wing or deck.
The trader checked the xenoarchaeological records on the ship’s computer, hoping this fossil would be worth something.
The characters on the suit were Earthic Russian. He knew that much. Pacing the room with flabby hands and feet, the trader hummed an old human song he had once heard and thought about his record collection. The handheld beeped and he flinched, catching it in mid-air.
Earthic synthetic fabrics. Early twenty-third century. The trader croaked happily. With this information the list of possible androids and humans was narrowed down to a few thousand, each accessible from the scattered records left behind in human settlements.
The trader frowned at the charred fossil in the cargo hold, estimating its value. He scratched his amphibian head and pouted, itching the orange flesh around his earholes. If this was a real human and not one of their millions of androids, this fossil alone could buy him an entire fleet of trading ships. Better yet, he could grab himself one of the talking ones, or a nice home on a planet-ring city. Or a sub-light drive. Or a… He was getting carried away with himself. Images of blue and grey, black and red, yellow and pink spaceships zipped through his mind, almost making him forget about the fossil. He was drooling. He shook his head and returned to reality.
He lacked the instruments to test the fossil further.
Solemnly the amphibian paced the boardwalk in the cargo hold, dragging fat webbed fingers along the safety rails and pondering. He could take the fossil to the black market, where its value could be inflated, but he would be at risk. If the thing was worth trillions, he would no doubt be spotted and killed off by some roving warlord who saw no benefit in honouring the transaction. They might even pay him, then bounce the money back after putting a hole through his head. No, that route was too risky.
But he couldn’t go the official route either. The official route meant getting ripped off too, having the artefact claimed by some agency, never seeing any money. He was in an owned quadrant anyway. Anything that was drifting here for the last few thousand years wasn’t his to take. If the scan was correct, this human was much, much older, meaning it pre-existed the ownership of this quadrant. But it wasn’t worth the risk. Any smart agency would argue their rights to the thing. Any really smart agency would find some way of impounding his trading vessel and accusing him of tampering with items of historical importance.
He looked again at the lettering on the burnt scrap of spacesuit, at the crushed human skull and the brain explosion frozen in time. The ship had enclosed it all in a protective field, but through the glistening opaque surface he could still see it, as if looking at a single frame of a movie. He squinted at the skull as if he might have a hope of telling if it was human or android. If it was human, then the thing was the single most valuable find in his fifteen-decade career.
He asked around. The trade vessel had nobody on board that could read the letters. One young Kh knew it was Russian, but only from studying the general shape and comparing to her knowledge of the ship’s database. The Kh, the trader thought, were generally useless when it came to anything beyond general knowledge. Most of them knew a bit of something about everything, but almost none of them knew anything about anything specific. They also slept too much, and their fur got on everything, and they had a proclivity toward casual violence that was unbecoming in a civilised trading/pirating vessel such as this, but that was another issue for another time.
The trader returned glumly to the cargo hold and reached a decision. He would take the fossil to a museum planet, where even if it would be undervalued, it would at least be properly examined. If it was really what he thought it was, the curators would be glad it was transferred straight to their careful hands, rather than through the endless clumsy bureaucracy of galactic government.
He made a coffee, using a human recipe, and spat the first mouthful out over the cargo hold floor. Somehow one of the Kh had got their fur in the coffee maker. The trader was just about losing his mind. At least the coffee was good.
The trading vessel zipped through spacetime, flitting effortlessly from one place to the next. If Galina had been alive to watch, it would have looked like the single orange star outside had burst, and the planets had smeared into greasy stains on the inside of a giant chrome tube. Ahead of them was an impenetrable blackness. The universe bent and buckled around the trading ship, turning into a funnel between location and destination.
Their solar system had eleven central planets. Each of these planets had evolved life independently. To them, systems like Earth’s, where only a handful of planets and moons had managed to create life, were practically barren.
The trading vessel popped into existence on the fringe of the system. The trader looked inward, marvelling at the sheer scale of their operations. They had developed a culture of conservationists over each planet, protecting life from catastrophe. Everything from wildfires to asteroid impacts were moderated or prevented. The natural existential threats and filters that a biosphere might go through were removed here. This made Them different to their idols, the Tessun Rel. They were interventionists.
The trader sipped the last of his coffee and walked proudly through the messy crew quarters, admiring his rag-tag team of ex pirates, miners, lawyers, and mercenaries. He smiled, imagining the riches he was about to bestow upon them. They could each have their own starship, perhaps even a small fleet of shining new vessels. Or better yet, they could expand upon this one. Yes, that was a perfect idea. More engines. More crew quarters. Maybe a few asteroid blasters on the sides, and a swimming pool above the refinery, with a glass floor so he could watch the ores being processed. His webbed fingers itched with anticipation. Naturally he would oversee the building himself. He would have one of those intelligent captain’s chairs, the ones with robot souls built in. It would be perfect.
END (of part one)
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