The Flight of the Aphrodite

by S.J. Morden

Genres: Space Exploration; Alien Contact

Synopsis

A thrilling standalone science fiction space adventure from Philip K. Dick award-winning author S.J. Morden

Strange radio signals are coming from Jupiter's largest moons.

A natural phenomenon, or something else?

Commander Mariucci and his hand-picked research team know they will have to muster all of their expertise, creativity and teamwork to survive the very harshest of conditions in orbit around the king of planets. But when they intercept a peculiar radio transmission, they have to investigate. Nothing should work in these impossible conditions, so what is sending the signal . . . and why?

With a degrading ship and crew at breaking point, there's every chance they will tear themselves apart before they ever find the answer to the ultimate question - are we alone in the universe?

And more importantly - what do we do if we aren't?

Release date: March 17, 2022

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 400

Sample

1

The lights of the holographic display showed the supply ship as it ought to be, not as it was: the wire frame model was whole and complete, but the object outside was far from that.

The external cameras showed it to be diseased and partial, bruised yellow and blown ragged by strange winds. The solar panels were filigree, which would explain why it was here, running on the last of its batteries, in an uncontrolled tumble, gradually falling towards the king of planets.

Mariucci looked through the hologram at the hunched shoulders of his pilot, at her leaning into Colvin’s screen to check that the distances and the rate of rotation were the same on her display. ‘Theresa?’ was all he said, and she shrugged her name off.

‘I can get this.’ Blasco spoke into her screen. ‘Just let me watch it a little longer. I’ve got the feel of it now.’

At the next console, Borner was trying yet again to access the supply ship’s systems, but whatever functionality was left, she was still unable to make the critical connection to the thrusters. Something in the ship’s vaulted brain had become unstuck in the two Earth years it had been orbiting Jupiter. All that way, all that time, and now, at the moment they needed the food, the water, the fuel and the spares that it contained? They couldn’t dock with it.

Borner was deep in the guts of the programming, feeding in raw bytes of data in an effort to reroute what little power there was to the systems she needed. Her concentration was total, only her lips and fingers moving as she recited hexadecimal spells.

The Aphrodite had matched course with the Nimbus-class supply ship a day ago. The rest of the time had been spent crawling closer and closer. It was now just off the Aphrodite’s bow, a hundred metres distant, but its motion couldn’t be corrected, and for that reason it might as well have been lost to the roiling cloudscape below.

Mariucci glanced behind him, at the segment of Jupiter the external cameras could fit onto the display. Distinct and drawn white-and-ochre bands precessed across the luminous pixels, washing their colours into the subdued lighting of Command. The slow swirls were beguiling, the temptation to watch them wind and unwind was strong, especially at perijove when they made their closest approaches.

Now was not the time to become lost in the fractal detail of their patterns. He needed to call it. There was no chance the hundred-plus metres of Aphrodite could manoeuvre precisely enough to dock with the Nimbus. But if they could, then it would be a huge boon.

‘Deirdre, when’s the next possible encounter with a Nimbus?’

Colvin rattled her keyboard, and shook the answer out. ‘We can match with Nimbus-eight on perijove seven.’

Three more orbits. Six weeks. He needed to talk to Hellsten, to see if that was going to put stress on the stores they had on the Aphrodite. Hellsten had been not quite himself recently, though, and Mariucci hadn’t been having conversations with him about that, which was something he now instantly regretted and felt shame over.

A captain’s duty wasn’t just to the mission, or the people who’d sent him and expected – if not spectacular discoveries – sufficient new insights to justify the cost of gaining them. A captain’s duty was also to his crew, all of them. A year was already a long time to spend in space. Especially with the knowledge of another two ahead of them.

Blasco gave a grunt and pushed back in her seat. Her hair drifted with the circulating air. ‘We’re almost out of shampoo.’

‘I cannot endanger the ship for that,’ said Mariucci, knowing he was right, and yet also accepting that while it wasn’t a problem for him, it was a problem for her. He briefly slid his hand over his shiny scalp, then brought his arm down in case she took the gesture as unwanted levity. They were all not quite themselves, and he didn’t know how to fix it. ‘Will this particular Nimbus survive another orbit?’

Colvin clacked her keyboard again. ‘Yes, within the margin of error. Ship systems will degrade further, and the beacon may not be functioning at that point. It’ll survive, but it’ll be worse than now, and we may not be able to find it again.’

Borner clicked her tongue, distracting Mariucci for a moment.

‘Yasmin?’

‘I thought I had it for a moment. Slipped away. Give me five minutes.’

Blasco touched the release mechanism on her chair, allowing her to swivel and face the pit. ‘We can afford to wait five minutes, Luca.’

‘If we wanted to make the next rendezvous, when would we need to start the burn?’

Colvin had already run those calculations, because she answered instantly. ‘T plus five hours ten minutes.’

‘Well, then: we can afford to wait five hours. If Yasmin can get the thrusters working, and we can get the tumble stabilised, we can attempt a docking manoeuvre. Otherwise, we initiate the burn and find another Nimbus. Agreed?’

They had one docking ring. If they damaged it – if they damaged it and couldn’t repair it – then they’d be in serious trouble. Not today, not next week or next month, but later on than that. It would be about more than shampoo by then.

Blasco nodded, Colvin looked at Blasco before assenting, and Borner didn’t so much as acknowledge the question. She just tightened her expression by another millimetre and let the data wash against her face.

‘Call me if you make progress.’ Mariucci punched his seat buckle and nudged down with his elbows against the arm rests.

He remembered briefly and vividly the violence of their orbital insertion, how they’d positioned themselves so precisely in the path of Jupiter that they had been swept up in its influence. They had almost skimmed the cloud tops to do it. So close: he’d felt he could have reached out and trailed his fingertips in them, sent eddies of smoke spinning around the planet. Strapped in his chair, listening to the tidal strains as vast forces gripped the Aphrodite and bent its orbit into new, tighter ellipses.

He’d been frightened, but he’d not shown it. It wasn’t in his job description to mirror the fear of his crew, of his scientists; rather to soak it up, absorb it, hold it in, and radiate calm assurance. All would be well.

He caught hold of one of the grab rails and pulled, his feet clearing his console and straightening out behind him. Pilot, navigator and comms were busy. Mariucci knew there was no point in interrupting their work: they were the best in their professions. They knew the limits of their choices and that they needed further permission to exceed them. He had captained sufficiently, but not excessively.

He aimed for the axis, and palmed off the bulkhead frame to reorient himself. The axis tube didn’t present a straight path all the way to the drive section at the far end – it kinked just over half way along, at the probe storage bay, to accommodate the four machines, two offset each side. But he could see as far as scientist country, the workshops and laboratories, where Forsyth had them crunching numbers and running models. They could have just as easily done that in the gravity section, but Forsyth wanted to keep them together, encouraging each other, competing against each other, driving each other, for as long as he could. For him, it was all about the science, and a moment spent doing anything else was an opportunity wasted.

It was a pattern that had slowly emerged after perijove one, but was now set. Mariucci thought it was too much: he knew that at some point he’d have a delegation of disgruntled scientists pleading exhaustion, and he’d be forced into a confrontation with Forsyth to try and fix the problem. He needed to pre-empt that moment without upsetting him. Forsyth, his superiors in Darmstadt had stressed, was the golden egg in his clutch.

Mariucci knew he had to line up his arguments first. Logic, not emotion, was the only way to convince Forsyth. Kattenbeck would have to help explain. Even though she was designated as science, he knew she didn’t take Forsyth’s, or anyone’s, side on this.

And there he was, coming up the axis towards him, his spindly limbs making him look disturbingly spiderlike as he bounced off the curved walls. Pale hands and pale face and a shock of black hair set against the off-white panels and his royal blue flight suit: Mariucci couldn’t envisage him ever complaining about the lack of shampoo, or anything so mundane as a physical need.

Forsyth stopped on the stern side of the gravity section’s rotating hub, with Mariucci on the Command side. The openings to the four hollow spokes spun gracefully and silently around between them.

‘There’s a delay,’ said Forsyth. ‘Why?’

Mariucci calibrated his response. It wasn’t personal. The scientist was like this with everyone.

‘The supply ship is tumbling, preventing us from docking.’ He kept to the facts. ‘Yasmin’s attempting to establish contact with the ship systems, but there’s a severe loss of function.’

‘The Europa probe is scheduled for this perijove.’

‘Yes. I’ve instructed the crew to keep trying up until the last moment they can, before it becomes necessary to—’

‘Any delay is intolerable.’

‘Necessary to the safety of the ship and its whole crew to alter our course for another Nimbus,’ finished Mariucci, ignoring the interruption. He’d found the constant talking-over difficult at first: Mariucci knew he’d come over as hesitant, which meant that Forsyth had doubled-down on his rhetorical trademark. But it had only taken a little while to find the tactic of simply remembering where he’d been before the interruption, and now he just carried on as if Forsyth had never spoken.

Except he was starting to struggle again, and he had to consciously make the effort to recall his last few words and his train of thought.

‘This is a scientific expedition,’ said Forsyth. ‘We have a mission profile that we have to follow in order to maximise our data collection.’

‘This is a human expedition,’ countered Mariucci. ‘We need the supplies in order to carry out the valuable investigations done by your team. Without them, our abilities are degraded, and the data we collect will suffer.’

‘The data will be just fine.’

‘I’m sure it will. However, people who are tired and hungry and worried won’t function at their best. Both Stan and Petra will tell you as much.’ That was also data. A human being wasn’t a machine.

Forsyth, frustrated that a mind inexplicably also needed a body, turned his head while he considered this. Then he looked back. He had no fear of intimate eye contact, just a fear of actual intimacy.

‘Your crew need to do better,’ he said. ‘Their lack is affecting my work.’

‘We can’t change the laws of physics, Rory,’ said Mariucci mildly. ‘As much as we’d like to. The space outside here is … savage.’

‘Then they should have built the Nimbus ships better.’

‘I’ll pass that on. They’ve been out here for far longer than was intended. They’ve withstood all manner of storms and fluxes. Sometimes I think it’s a miracle they’ve kept going this long.’ But he’d used the wrong word. Nothing was a miracle in Forsyth’s universe. Everything was always explicable.

‘Better,’ repeated Forsyth. The food he might eat or the air he might breathe was spinning uncontrollably outside the hull: it was neither his fault nor his business. He just wanted it done – completed or abandoned, he didn’t care which – so that the science schedule wasn’t compromised. Blaming the engineers back on Earth was simply a proxy for blaming Mariucci’s crew.

The senior scientific officer had made his point. Without another word, he spidered his way back down the axis, and vanished from view, heading into one of the workshops. Not for the first time, Mariucci was left wondering how someone like Forsyth could have got through the selection procedure for a long-duration mission. The engineering team had done far better in terms of robust design than the human factors group had. But Forsyth was a brilliant, if late, entrant, on a crew of mere experts. He supposed that allowances had been made. Compromises, even.

Mariucci drifted for a moment, letting the air currents push him away from Command and into the rotating hub. An access tunnel to the wheel passed him every five seconds. The magnetic bearings were perfectly quiet, but the quality of the ambient sound changed each time the hollow pipe swung by his ears. A profound, distant silence was replaced by a close, swaddling one, and back, and forward.

Then he stopped himself, and reached out for one of the grab rails on the rotating section and waited for his body to get up to speed. He lowered himself into the tube, and placed his hands either side of the ladder.

Illuminated pictograms warned him he was entering an artificial gravity environment. The fall, top to bottom, wouldn’t kill him, but it would hurt and it might injure him. Kattenbeck was a good doctor, very experienced, but that wasn’t the point. An avoidable accident was just that: avoidable. He needed to follow procedure and set an example.

The stripes on the tunnel wall tightened as he descended, to make him think he was going faster than he really was. An optical illusion, but a useful one, nudging him to stay safe. He closed his fists on the ladder, brought himself to an almost dead-stop, and consciously climbed down the rest of the way to the wheel.

One-fifth gravity at the bottom. Enough to keep water in his glass, food on his plate, and calcium in his bones. Not so much as to make him, or the rest of the crew, actively avoid the gravity section, not enough to associate it with tiredness, with exercise, with it being a chore. It was where they were supposed to sleep, socialise, eat, wash, and just be. It looked like a hotel, comfy curves and soft, noise-absorbing furnishings, carpet, fabric. There were archipelagoes of low couches, embayed coffee tables, and the kitchen area was open. Enclosed bedrooms intruded into the floor space like headlands.

It was designed to be welcoming, and easy, and normal, to draw the eye away from the arc of the floor that rose up either side of the viewer, to obfuscate that this was the inside surface of a spinning wheel on a spaceship that was itself a billion kilometres from home.

Mariucci’s gaze went past Kattenbeck, who was sitting at the long kitchen table, head bowed, concentrating on the words on her tablet, to follow the curve of the floor as it rose up around the rim of the wheel. It slid down again to her back as she moved, her finger grazing the screen before her hand returned to her lap.

‘Petra?’

‘Luca. Come on over.’ She read another few lines, then darkened the screen. She was assiduous with patient confidentiality. ‘Sit with me.’

He poured himself a glass of water, learned that she didn’t want one by his slight gesture and her equally minimal response, and he sat beside her, dropping gently into the chair. The water in his glass rolled as he put it down, moving as slowly as oil.

He didn’t ask her what she was reading, as the question was redundant. He had to trust that she’d tell him of anything that might affect the ship. Technically, he could raid all her files. Diplomatically, he never would. Instead, he swirled the water and looked at the reflections in it before drinking it down in three gulps.

‘I’ve seen you happier,’ she said. ‘You’re still worried?’

‘Yes.’

‘Your short-term memory is, if not perfect, well within bounds. Both verbal and visual. I can continue to test you every week against your baseline, but you haven’t varied more than a few points up or down. Clinically,’ she stressed the word, ‘you’re fine.’

‘You want me to talk to Stan.’

‘That’s my recommendation. I’m the bone and blood. Not the …’ She twirled her finger next to her head. ‘He’s the grey matter.’

Mariucci put the glass down and nudged it away. ‘But otherwise?’

‘This, this ship, this journey, is unique. Never have so few people spent so long together, so far away from land. Even in the Age of Sail. Everything that happens here is normal, Luca, even though it’s happening for the first time. We’re putting down the markers that everyone who follows will judge themselves against.’

‘We’re making history.’

‘This is our Apollo moment. We’re the vanguard, Luca, the pioneers. The very best of who we are travelling in the very best of what we can make. It’s our duty to record everything faithfully.’ She tapped the side of her tablet. ‘I make notes. But those notes are only as reliable as I make them.’

‘And if I don’t tell Stan about my memory loss—’

‘You don’t have memory loss. You’re concerned that you’re losing your ability to recall short-term memories, even though you’re not. It’s not real. It’s not measurable. All you have is the fear. What am I supposed to say to that, apart from “Go and talk to the psychologist”?’

Mariucci rephrased. ‘If I don’t tell Stan about my concerns …’

‘Then his notes will be incomplete. Inaccurate.’ She raised her eyebrows as she smiled. ‘You owe it to the future, Luca.’

‘Captain to Command,’ said Colvin over the tannoy.

He was out of his seat before the C of Command. The chair legs – magnetic – slid back rather than flew.

‘I’ll wash your glass,’ said Kattenbeck. ‘Go. Raus.’

‘I still need to talk to you about the—’ He gestured to the stern of the ship.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘It can wait until you deal with whatever.’

Mariucci climbed back up to the axis and pushed himself into Command. Aasen was there now too, the first time he’d seen her today. Perhaps it was two days? She was arm-deep in one of the floor panels, a tablet with schematics tethered to her other wrist.

‘Okay, Hanne?’

‘Circuit’s showing an intermittent fault.’

‘If you pull it now, will it affect any of the systems here?’

‘There’ll be a short outage, yes, before it reroutes.’

At that, Borner jerked round. ‘It needs to wait.’

‘I’ve a list of faults here, and they’re not fixing themselves.’

‘Hanne,’ said Mariucci. ‘It can wait. Yasmin – do we have control?’

‘Yes. The power I can shunt to the servos is minimal, and possibly temporary. But it should be enough.’

‘Port it to Theresa.’ He realised the engineer was still reaching under the floor. ‘Hanne. That’s an order.’

Blasco folded out the twin joysticks and fixed her chair in the upright position.

‘This is the delta-v,’ said Colvin, and Blasco nodded curtly. She’d barely looked, but she understood she probably only had one chance at this.

Mariucci wanted to watch the external cameras, but Aasen was persisting. He pulled himself over the consoles and planted himself next to her. What had got into her? Any interruption, any delay here could mean losing the Nimbus.

‘Hanne. Whatever it is, please. It must wait.’

It was the please that stopped her. She seemed to soften, then relent, pulling her arm free with her hand empty.

Mariucci took a moment to look at her properly. Her skin had a greasy sheen to it, and her hair – what he could see of it escaping from her bandana – was slick.

‘When was the last time you took a break?’ he asked her. ‘Rested? Slept? Had something to eat?’

She shrugged rather than answer. She looked down at the open floor panel, and then at the diagram on her tablet, and he could see her jaw twitch.

‘Go. I’ll look after things here.’ He knew Kattenbeck would still be in the kitchen area, and she’d see what he’d seen. How long had this been going on? Why hadn’t he spotted it sooner? It was his job, after all. Or had he seen it, and ignored it, because repairs were still being made and nothing had gone wrong?

Aasen unclipped herself from the floor and drifted up to the handholds. She glanced at the floor once more, and Mariucci flipped the panel with his foot, clicking it shut with his toe. He needed a tool to fix it in place – Aasen had that hanging off her belt, alongside all the others – but they weren’t doing any high-g vectoring anytime soon.

She almost smiled at him, just a brief flash with one corner of her mouth, then she headed for the axis. Mariucci scanned the screens for progress, but he only needed to see the look of quiet satisfaction on Blasco’s face to know that whatever she’d done, she was happy with it.

‘Update me,’ he said. ‘How did it go?’

‘Permission to dock, Captain,’ she said.

The Nimbus was rock steady on the display. Not a hint of either the spin or the tumble. It hung in space, pinned against the black.

‘Permission granted.’

Colvin tabbed her headset. ‘Acceleration, acceleration.’

Mariucci swung himself towards his chair, and strapped himself in. Borner, to his left, pressed her fingers into her temples, blinking and gasping, like a diver coming up for air.

‘Good work, Yasmin,’ he said. ‘Very well done.’

‘You’re … welcome,’ she replied.

The acceleration, when it came, was so gentle, it was barely a flutter in his inner ear.