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Story Excerpt

A Long Journey into Light
by Deborah L. Davitt

Twenty years had passed since Ae‘ahauka‘e, the Wanderer, had first entered the Solar System from the top down, passing through the plane of the ecliptic near Uranus. Twenty years since Dominic Vadas, then the furthest human from the rest of humanity, had boarded the extrasolar object, finding that it was not, in fact, a rogue asteroid or chunk of space rock, but some form of alien space craft.

A nervous Earth had watched its silent progress through the outer planets for two decades, wondering if the device was some form of weapon. UNSCA, the U.N. Space Control Agency, had advised caution. “The microbes taken from storage on Ae‘ahauka‘e were all demonstrated to thrive in an anaerobic environment,” scientists asserted repeatedly. “The chances that they would be useful to any civilization on a planet like Earth is extraordinarily unlikely.”

Peter Brakenridge, grandson of Dominic Vadas, had grown up sending video letters to the far edge of the solar system to his famous hermit grandfather. He knew that the old man had always believed that Ae‘ahauka‘e was a terraforming vessel of some sort. Now a cantankerous seventy-two, Vadas maintained his hermit lifestyle at the far edge of the Solar System, still sought-after for interviews on the subject of the Wanderer . . . particularly as it slipped through Earth’s orbit.

After all, Vadas had been the only person to set foot on Ae‘ahauka‘e in all the time it had been transiting the Solar System. Oh, the Wanderer had come close enough to Saturn and Jupiter that the tiny enclaves of humanity based on Enceladus and Callisto could have reached out and boarded the vessel, the way Vadas had done, but UNSCA had advised caution, caution, and more caution, the closer Ae‘ahauka‘e came to Earth. “Observe, but do not provoke,” had been the watchword of the day.

There were, however, private companies run by billionaires that had attained spaceflight decades ago. And Peter Brakenridge had been hired by one of them as a pilot and mission commander after his stint in the U.S. Space Force. His job today wasn’t cleaning up orbital debris or repair work on satellites, no—today, he and his crew were going to approach the Wanderer as it settled into orbit. Not around Earth, but near Venus.

Of course, his ship, the Magellan, wasn’t the only spaceship that had made the trek out into the void to observe Ae‘ahauka‘e. Space exploration had become a race once again, as nations and corporations sought to colonize Luna, Mars, and the many moons of Jupiter and Saturn.

Hanging off the port side of the Magellan was the Chinese ship, Tànxiaˇn Jia¯. To the starboard hung the UNSCA ship Resolution, named after his grandfather’s ship—and for one of the ships of the famed explorer James Cook. All three hung near the Venus-Sun Lagrange 1 point, the projected parking spot that the Wanderer would take, after its long voyage from the dim depths of the outer Solar System to the brilliant light of the inner.

Peter felt the presence of the two other ships like millstones around his neck. Grandpa Dominic didn’t have all these people around, he thought glumly. It was just him and his AI and the Wanderer. Oh, he likes to complain about eight billion people breathing down his neck by radio, but that’s just his gift for exaggeration talking. Earth is all around me, right now.

“Control, the target seems to have finished aerobraking maneuvers,” Peter said into his radio, while the rest of the four-person crew worked the radar array and the video cameras, or otherwise hung staring out the windows. “But the solar sails have redeployed, and it’s heading toward us.”

As if for luck, he reached out and touched the picture of his wife, Meghan, and daughter, Teagan, taped as it was to an empty panel in the cockpit controls. Then he unbuckled himself from his deceleration couch and pushed off back “down” into the main cabin area where the rest of his crew worked. While he waited the three minutes to hear back from Control in Brownsville, Texas, Peter wondered idly what the chatter in the other ships was like. If they were as quiet as his own, or if the others were voluble, excited.

“Target now approaching L1,” Desiree Thomas said now, her tone clipped. “It’s still really moving. I wonder how it’s planning to brake.” She was the flight engineer for the mission, and worked hand-in-hand with him as the pilot. He watched over her shoulder as the video feed from the cameras outside the ship revealed Ae‘ahauka‘e in all its silvery glory. “I swear, the solar sails are changing shape.”

After a couple of confounded moments, Dr. Kjell Nilsen, the mission specialist who’d spent his entire academic career studying the Wanderer, spoke up. “Confirmed. The booms holding the sails are extending several meters a minute, and the sails appear to be extending with them.” He removed his glasses and buffed them momentarily, as if that would help him to see better. Or to see different results.

They all looked at one another in consternation. “How?” asked Dr. Alvarez, their flight surgeon. She folded her arms across her chest. “It can’t just be manufacturing new sails and booms out of nothing.”

“We have no idea what was inside the sealed compartments of Ae‘ahauka‘e that Vadas wasn’t able to enter,” Nilsen replied, lifting his hands with a bit of a sidelong glance at Peter.

Peter grimaced. His relationship to his famous grandfather was supposed to have been a secret, but the news media had blown that open the moment the crew manifest for the flight of the Magellan had been made public. For the twelve months of their flight to Venus, he’d endured sidelong glances, questions, and amiable jokes about nepotism, most of which he’d done his best to ignore. “I’m less interested in how it’s extending the sails, than in why,” Peter said now, redirecting the conversation. “If it’s final goal is the Lagrange 1 point, then it should be pulling those sails in now, shouldn’t it?”

After a moment, it was Nilsen again that spoke. “It’s turning into a solar shade.” A pause. “I would bet money on it. Just look at the shape!”

“It’s going to try to cool down Venus?” Peter replied, feeling awed. “That’ll take thousands of years.”

“Whoever built the Wanderer clearly didn’t think of time on the scale that we mere humans do,” Dr. Alvarez put in, her tone dry. “If this came from the group of halo stars that scientists think that it did, it’s been roaming the Universe for millions of years already. What’s a few thousand here and there in the grand scale of things?”

Control suddenly replied in their ears to something they’d said three minutes before: “Flight, we confirm Lagrange 1 destination.” A pause. “UNSCA has asked us to keep an eye on the Chinese ship.”

Peter blinked. Part of him wanted to say, repeat that, Control, but looking at the expressions on the others’ faces, he knew he’d heard correctly. You want us to do what now? Avoid an international incident? Create one? Instead he asked, “Could you be more specific, Control?” while he gestured for Desiree to re-task one of the external cameras to focus on the Chinese ship.

Sure enough the Tànxiaˇn Jia¯ had engaged its propellant engines and was edging closer to the Wanderer, which was, indeed, braking. Somehow. Without propellant or visible drive debris.

That was a mystery that would have to wait for them to investigate, however.

Peter closed off his radio signal to demand, out loud, “What the fuck are they doing?” and pushed off a wall to soar up to the pilot’s seat. Staring out the window at the sight of the Tànxiaˇn Jia¯ creeping closer to Ae‘ahauka‘e, he flipped the radio toggles, maintaining the long-range radio lock on Earth, while opening a short-range communication channel, aiming the array at the Chinese ship. “Tànxiaˇn Jia¯, you’re about to break several international treaties brokered by the U.N.,” he warned, knowing that at the same moment, the Resolution’s captain had to be making the same transmission. “Ae‘ahauka‘e has been declared a no-landing site—”

“Incoming transmission,” Desiree suddenly said. “Control is sending us something from the surface—from China. It’s raw, untranslated.”

She pulled it up on speakers, but while Peter had studied and was fluent in Russian thanks to past joint space missions, he didn’t speak Mandarin or Cantonese. He invoked his AI, a clone of his grandfather’s, Enara, and set her to work on the broadcast. It was faster than waiting for translators on Earth and finding another broadcast.

“. . . our national interest,” Enara began in mid-sentence, “not to mention the interest of humanity in general, has been overlooked by the U.N. for decades. If the so-called Wanderer is capable of terraforming Venus, what could it do to Earth? Could it not wipe out humanity and supplant us with life-forms of its own choosing?”

“It’s focused on Venus,” Peter tried not to shout, keeping his tone flat and angry instead. “It completely ignored Earth on the way past. If we don’t get its attention, it’ll probably keep right on ignoring us!”

He knew he wouldn’t convince the captain of the Tànxiaˇn Jia¯ to alter course. The captain of that vessel was following orders, and those orders came from a place three light-minutes away. Until this moment, that hadn’t seemed like a vast distance. The two hours it took for messages to reach Uranus, for example, was a gap he bridged daily in calls to his grandfather. A three-minute gap had hardly seemed anything until now.

Now it felt like just enough time for a war to begin.

“Control, what do you want us to do?” Peter asked into his headpiece, flicking the radio back over to long-range transmission.

Just as he did so, another message came through, out of joint. Not a reply to his last message, but one sent in the interim. “Get between the Tànxiaˇn Jia¯āand the Wanderer,” Control said firmly. “Don’t engage with them. Just be in the way.”

Peter opened his mouth to point out that doing even that much could be a provocative, escalatory move, when something bright seared his vision in the cockpit window, and he flinched away.

Ae‘ahauka‘e appears to have just . . . fired a warning shot at the Chinese ship,” Nilsen said, his voice shocked.

“There’s a transmission coming through,” Desiree cut in, her voice just as shocked as Nilsen’s, but more determined. “It’s in Chinese.”

“Enara, start translation.” Peter wished they had gravity or some sort of spin on the vehicle, so that he could feel some sort of orientation at the moment. His head was whirling. The warning shot had been a bright line of light, and parts of his vision were still purple from it. Some kind of collimated light, like a laser, but far more effective than Earth-bound ones?

Enara started translating, got a couple words in, and hesitated. “What’s wrong?” Peter asked the AI, not leaving the cockpit, where he was running a quick simulation of trying to move between the Wanderer and the Chinese ship. Though now, even more than before, he thought this a very bad idea, indeed.

“It’s a warning,” Enara replied, sounding about as shocked as an AI could.

“Well, that’s not unexpected—”

“It’s not from the Chinese ship,” Enara went on, overriding him. “It’s from Ae‘ahauka‘e. And it’s following up with its own translation in English. Here, listen.”

The voice of the Wanderer was obviously synthetic, an emulation of human tones. The Wanderer had chosen, for whatever reason, a voice between alto and tenor, neither male nor female, and had selected a British accent. Someone should tell them that only geniuses and supervillains get British accents in film, Peter thought inconsequentially, but then focused on the message: “We have permitted a member of your species to board in peace before, it is true, but we reserve the right of self-defense. We have detected heavy fissionable materials aboard the Tànxiaˇn Jia¯—” and here, Peter was surprised on several levels. Not that the synthetic voice said the name of the ship correctly, but that the voice knew that the name of the ship was a name—that it wasn’t translated to “explorer” in English, the way the rest of the text clearly had been. That suggested a nuanced mind, far beyond the best AIs Earth had yet to offer.

But the message hadn’t paused. “—heavy materials that are clearly bombs, and not part of the engine section. We will not permit these to be used on our vessel, which you call Ae‘ahauka‘e. We will defend ourselves. Stand down, Tànxiaˇn Jia¯.

“Well, they got the honor of the first message from the Wanderer being broadcast in Mandarin,” Nilson said after a shocked moment. The words hung limply in the air.

“Actually,” Enara chirped from Peter’s wrist, “the Wanderer used Cantonese. I think it was some variety of mild insult to the Chinese government to do so? I can’t, of course, be sure of that. Human nuance is so dreadfully beyond me sometimes.”

That last, in a tone of mild insult, herself.

Unlike others of her kind, this Enara was an actual clone of his grandfather’s AI, sent to him as a gift from the old man. She had all the memories of Vadas’ Enara, whereas other Enaras were merely the original factory stock. This made her an invaluable resource on a mission like this one . . . but also ensured that she had a certain attitude, developed over long, long years of association with humans.

“All right,” Peter said as the crew stirred around him. “Desiree, I’m going to move us between the two of them, as Control ordered—before the Chinese get any new orders from the surface, themselves. I’d like to broadcast at Ae‘ahauka‘e and the Chinese vessel as we start moving. Can I assume that the short-range radio array is still pointing right at them both?”

“Confirmed,” Desiree replied. Her tone sounded tight. “Sure you know what you’re doing, boss?”

Not a clue, Peter thought, but didn’t find it politic to say out loud. He gently urged the Magellan toward the two vessels, while saying into the radio, “This is Peter Brakenridge. I’m the grandson of Dominic Vadas, who boarded Ae‘ahauka‘e twenty years ago.” That, for whatever good it might do with the . . . intelligence . . . aboard the Wanderer. “I’d like to prevent any further hostilities, and I offer my services as an intermediary.”

He could only imagine the scene on the Chinese vessel’s bridge. Shock, consternation, fear, and anger at the warning shot. Dread of what their government might order them to do next. Frustration at this American vessel plotting and executing an intercept course. . . . “Message coming through,” Desiree said, her tone tight and short. “In English. It’s the captain of the Tànxiaˇn Jia¯.

“Captain Brakenridge,” came the smooth, cultured, lightly, accented voice across the void, “do not continue on your current course, or we may be forced to fire on you.”

Careful, careful words. May be forced. A structured threat, one that suggested that outside forces would compel their hands. Their government, or, perhaps the foolhardy actions of Captain Brakenridge himself.

Control’s voice came through now, three minutes too late, “Belay our last. Don’t make any moves toward them. Let them sort it out between themselves. Ae‘ahauka‘e is clearly capable of defending itself.”

Peter cut the jets and fired the retros, bringing the Magellan to a halt right in the middle of the Lagrange point. Sweat trickled down his temples. His grandfather might have endured massive g-forces in his turns around Uranus, but he wondered how the old man would have done with the raw social pressures currently bearing down on him, on this place, in this time. “Control, we were already en route. We’re currently hanging off the starboard bow of the Tànxiaˇn Jia¯. In the absence of anything else constructive we can do, we’re going to try dialogue.”

He shut down the mic, risked a glance back at his crew, and said, “Is there anything else we could do, besides opening the docking hatch and throwing our trash at the Chinese ship?”

Nilsen spread his hands. “We have a lot of propellant. Methane, oxygen, hydrogen, and ammonium perchlorate.”

Dr. Alvarez folded her arms. “I only speak Spanish and English, Nilsen. You’re going to have to speak one or the other for me to understand you.”

Desiree flapped a hand. “No, I got it. We could turn and cook off one of the engines right at the Chinese ship. It would melt their exterior, punching open holes to raw vacuum. We might catch Ae‘ahauka‘e at the edges, though. And I hate to be the ship that starts a war.”

Heavy silence fell on the bridge area, while Peter once again flicked the radio to life. “Tànxiaˇn Jia¯,” he began, searching a crew manifest quickly. “Captain Zhou.” A name, to personalize things more firmly. “We’re not here to attack you or your ship. We’re here to ensure that,” sweat trickling down his spine now, cold and damp, as he wondered, frantically, what to say, “Earth is represented as a whole today. Again, I am offering my services as an intermediary. I realize that your people back home are—” calling the shots? No, that’s too much like rolling over; what’s something else that’s truthful? “—probably in dialog with other governments right now,” there we go, “so my aim here is to prevent precipitate actions on any side.”

Ae‘ahauka‘e loomed, silent and enigmatic, not responding. He hadn’t really thought it would respond to his voice. It had said what it was going to say.

Unfortunately, for a long moment, he thought that Captain Zhou would remain as silent and unresponsive as the alien ship.

“Brakenridge,” a voice finally came through. Zhou, once more. “There is no need for an intermediary. My government will send its orders, and I will carry them out. I personally recommend that you move several hundred meters away from us.” His voice didn’t quaver. Zhou was too professional for that. But the word personally got Brakenridge’s attention. It was a careful pivot away from the party line. Either he thinks he’s going to be ordered to fire on us if we don’t move, or that the backwash from his bombs will catch us—holy shit, if that’s the case, he’s been sent on a suicide mission, and he knows it—

Peter touched the controls, and began to ease away from the Chinese ship. Meter by scant meter. Which was when a different voice clicked onto the radio. The neutral, emotionless, synthetic tones of Ae‘ahauka‘e itself. “Captain Brakenridge. We invite you to enter our ship. You may review our preparations for transforming the planet known in your nomenclature as Venus. You may attest to your world that we have no interest in your planet.”

Peter swallowed, his throat dry. There was something awe-inspiring about being addressed personally by the intelligence behind the great vessel. Behind and beside him, Kjell Nilsen was doing a little frustrated dance in the air—not that he could blame the older scientist. Nilsen had spent the past twenty years studying every frame of video that Vadas had sent back from Ae‘ahauka‘e in the first place, and now, to be denied entry? “Ae‘ahauka‘e,” Peter demurred on the radio, “I might not be the best person to do so. I am the only person who can fly my ship. Would you accept Dr. Kjell Nilsen in my place?”

There was a long pause—almost thirty seconds, during which Nilsen sent Peter a grateful look. “Negative,” Ae‘ahauka‘e’s governing intelligence responded, the word flat and cold. “You have artificial intelligences capable of piloting your vessels. Do not be disingenuous with us. That is not a way to build trust.”

“Sorry, man, I tried,” Peter told Kjell, his stomach somewhere down in his own boots. How the hell did Ae‘ahauka‘e know the word disingenuous, anyway? Peter felt like he needed a dictionary just to keep up with the Wanderer at this point. Back on the radio, he replied, “I will need permission from my people to board.”

“What will they do?” the Wanderer replied after a long pause. Its tone remained chill and distant. “Fire you?”

Everyone on the bridge stopped moving. Dominic Vadas’ famously acerbic words to UNSCA Control from twenty years ago hung repeated in the air. Peter sat back from the controls and darted a look at Kjell Nilsen. “It’s been aware the entire time it’s been in our Solar System,” Nilsen finally said out loud. “It’s been in receipt of every broadcast from the surface. That’s how it knows our languages.”

“And if it’s half as smart as it seems, it’s probably come to some opinions about all of us,” Dr. Alvarez said, her voice tight. “I know I would have, in twenty years of listening in on all of us.”

Control then, bursting in with a rattle of static. “You’re not cleared to move yet, Brakenridge. This is going to require some negotiation at the U.N. We might be a private corporation, but we don’t want to be the ones to start a war.”

Peter exhaled, looking at the ceiling. There was no “up” in space, but it felt heavenward to him. “Understood, Control. We’re not going anywhere.”

It took almost twelve hours before they were cleared to move between the Chinese ship and the Wanderer.

“Settle the Magellan down in the same landing area used by Vadas, and prepare to go EVA,” Control finally ordered.

In spite of everything, Captain Zhou on the Tànxiaˇn Jia¯ issued another warning as Magellan moved past his ship, his formerly smooth voice now harried. “Magellan—Brakenridge—stay back.”

“The eyes of the world are upon us right now, Captain Zhou,” Brakenridge shot back over the radio. “I am engaging in diplomacy with Ae‘ahauka‘e directly. You and your government have some decisions to make.”

Read the exciting conclusion in this month’s issue on sale now!

Copyright © 2024. A Long Journey into Light by Deborah L. Davitt

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