Silent Sun: Hard Science Fiction Read online

  Silent Sun

  Hard Science Fiction

  Brandon Q. Morris

  Contents

  Silent Sun

  Author's Note

  Also by Brandon Q. Morris

  The Sun—A Guided Tour

  Glossary of Acronyms

  Metric to English Conversions

  Excerpt: The Rift

  Silent Sun

  October 15, 2071, 1866 Sisyphus

  “Stop squirming around!”

  Sobachka hung her head in acknowledgment of the reproach. Finally her muscles relaxed, allowing him to slide the suit over her front paws. It was a familiar procedure, yet the anticipation of an upcoming excursion inevitably got the better of her.

  “Good girl!” said Artem encouragingly, stroking her head softly. The suit’s soft material hardly restricted her movements. Just the diaper at her rear end bulged outward. He wore one, too. The excursion would only last a short time, but in space one never knew, and as always, ‘better safe than sorry.’

  “Hold still, now!” Here was the tricky part. Sobachka never liked him closing her helmet. She couldn’t understand, of course, that vacuum was lethal.

  He would probably react the same if someone was to interfere with his primary senses in the same way. With the helmet closed, the dog could only smell herself. He stabilized the back of her head with his right hand and shoved the helmet over her head with his left, until the helmet snapped into place at the middle of her neck. Then Artem activated the comms. “Great job!” he told her.

  Sobachka shook her head and tried to lick his hand, but the helmet cut the effort short. She yapped in a sound kind of like growling and howling all mixed up.

  “Sure, sure. I don’t like that myself.” Artem had tried to leave her on board during a spacewalk but the dog liked that even less. Besides, he needed her to do her thing later on.

  He put on his own helmet, leaving the visor open.

  He queried the helmet radio: “Current position?”

  A small, transparent heads-up panel moved before his left eye. He focused on it and recognized their destination: Asteroid 1866 Sisyphus. Stats on the side indicated 1,500 meters distance from his ship. The object, the term ‘egg-shaped’ probably coming closest to an accurate description, wasn’t more than a grain of sand in the sea of the universe. From this close, however, its eight-kilometer length was pretty impressive.

  “Exit in ten minutes,” the system intoned in a monotone voice. He had intentionally opted out of an AI-sounding voice. While he considered the decision somewhat silly, he hadn’t wanted the ship to sound more intelligent than himself. After all, he had Sobachka, who was brushing around his legs right now, for company during the months of solitude in space. Sometimes he couldn’t help thinking she’d have preferred to be a cat. The dog, a mongrel, had gotten used to space nearly as quickly as a cat, and to the lack of up and down in space, too.

  “Come along then,” he said. Artem opened the inside hatch of the airlock. Sobachka knew what he expected and followed by his side as he entered the chamber. He broke a smile despite himself as he saw her giving just the tiniest push with her rear paws to sail in alongside.

  He closed the inside hatch and locked it with the rotary wheel.

  “Hatch closed,” he said aloud. Then he flipped his helmet shut. Beside the hatch there was a panel with several buttons. He pressed the blue one.

  The system confirmed: “Evacuating airlock.” It was heavenly. A lovely silence built during the evacuation. He lifted his feet to cut that last path of transmission and relished the brief moment of complete silence.

  “Three minutes.”

  Things were getting serious. Artem checked whether Sobachka was breathing regularly. He bent down, made eye contact, and stroked her back. She was doing well. She had been a professional cosmonaut for a long time now.

  “Shall we, Sobachka?”

  She tried to bark upon hearing her name, which didn’t work well inside her helmet. Artem held her with one arm and attached the short lifeline between his spacesuit and the hook at the back of her suit. Then he clipped his own lifeline to the hook next to the outside hatch. This line was quite long, being his means of returning to the ship with Sobachka. His right hand grabbed the rotary wheel and he opened the hatch.

  The moment had come. He couldn’t help his heart beating faster just before launching himself downward. He pressed the hatch out, aided by the last remnants of air.

  Far below he saw brightly-lit rocks with hard-cut edges and deep black shadows. Now that he viewed the asteroid first-hand, rather than on a display, it felt like the gateway to hell—and fearfully far at the same time.

  But the display claimed only 300 meters to go. Artem jumped with the dog in his arms. A brief moment of panic, then experience kicked in and let him reorient his senses. The destination was ahead, not below. With his ship in orbit, he slowly drifted toward the asteroid. Every meter yielded more detail.

  A tourist would not notice, but the expert quickly noted that Sisyphus had been being mined for a long time already. The visible lines were too straight to be natural. And the residual waste filling craters was out of place, too. But that was what Artem was here for. His money came from being quicker than the rightful owner. Others would call him a thief.

  Early on he had aspired higher, maybe a kind of Robin Hood, but more recently he had admitted to himself that it was all about the money. Sisyphus was going to reach its closest orbital point from Earth in about a month, the perfect opportunity for its owner, the Russian conglomerate, RB, to send specialized transport ships to pick up the results of two-and-a-half years of mining.

  He was going to be quicker. He didn’t need special transport since he was only here for the rare earths that the machines of the RB Group had extracted from the rock of the asteroid. A ton and a half of his bounty would pay for the next three years—plus add a sweet little sum to his bank account. The risk was minimal, the core operation was would take about half an hour, and his small ship could accelerate faster than those plump transporters.

  Only 50 meters to go. The distance indicator started blinking on the display. He needed to concentrate. The asteroid rotated by in slow motion. At the moment, the dome where the two guards spent their time was passing under him. They posed no threat since their pay was terrible. The RB Group only employed them to meet legal requirements to keep the mining license on Sisyphus. At one point, trade unions had been able to ban staff-free mining. Even if these guys tried to interfere, he’d have his weapon to keep them in check. And before that, one of them would have to look up into the sky and notice his ship. Normally they would rely on their radar to detect visitors more reliably than any video cam. But his ship was protected against radar by expensive meta-materials. So far he’d had eight successful raids and everything had gone well.

  At ten meters he ignited the braking jets. There was a big rock between himself and the dome so that his activity would go unnoticed. The dome was of no interest to him. It housed the guards and he’d avoid them anyway. The resources he was after were stocked about 500 meters away from the dome.

  Artem checked directions on the eye display and carefully released Sobachka. The dog noticed at once that she was free. At first she struggled with her legs, but then she remembered how things worked in space. Her suit had its own jets that she controlled by pressing her front paws to her body. The harder she pressed, the more she would accelerate. Sobachka was perfectly in control. She showed him artistic pirouettes. Artem smiled and was deeply pleased to see her enjoying the performance. He’d have loved to be able to sit on a rock and keep watching, but they had work to do.

  He pointed in the direction
of the stockpile with his right arm, and the dog followed along obediently. Halfway there the sun rose; a cold, white fireball. It appeared over the near horizon, with the rapid rotation of the asteroid speeding the process along. Rocks glistened where they were flooded with light while hard-edged, pitch-black shadows spread behind objects. Then the stockpile came into sight. It was easy to spot by the rectangular shapes of the containers. They stood out like paper cutouts.

  He had worked on an asteroid as a contractor before going independent, so he knew the processes here quite well. The containers were hard steel all around. Opening them in space was not part of the procedure. To fill them, they had docking ports on all sides for tubes with a diameter of half a meter. Flat robots that looked like many-legged cockroaches transported the resources that had been previously mined and separated into specific raw materials. Extending the length of the tubes was all that was required as the mining process moved along.

  To avoid inefficiencies due to long distances, the guards had to add a new ‘roach’ to the system every three or four weeks. That was where the maintenance hatches in the tubing came in. Artem was heading there.

  “Come!” he called out to Sobachka. The dog responded immediately. Ahead of them a tube snaked across the scraggy surface. Artem pointed forward with his headlamp. He only needed to move ten meters toward the container to find an entry. He was able to remove the cover, secured by eight large screws, with the toolkit he had brought. He set the screws aside. He’d put them back in place later. The guards wouldn’t even guess that he’d moved through. Later, back on Earth, some manager would notice an unusually low yield of rare earths.

  Now it was his companion’s turn. He knelt before the dark opening, stroked her, and removed the safety line. Sobachka didn’t flinch. She knew what he expected of her. On his first trip he had tried a drone but it proved impossible to maneuver through the dark tubes. Artem lit up the helmet lamp for the dog, put his hand in the tube, and knocked on the floor there. That was her signal. The dog had an infallible instinct for her surroundings. He wouldn’t need to guide her around obstacles. If he spotted anything on her camera he’d let her know via helmet radio.

  “Search!” he commanded. Sobachka turned toward him for a last look and disappeared into the dark. Artem followed her progress on the display. Where each raw material was stored was different from asteroid to asteroid. The dog entered the first container. It was nearly full, so it couldn’t be anything valuable. Artem activated the gamma spectrometer on Sobachka’s back anyway. It detected some iron mineral, complete junk. No need to say anything, the dog was already looking for the next tube onward. The containers were interconnected so the roaches could store any raw material as needed.

  Half an hour later they finally came across something. The gamma spectrometer indicated the stuff he was looking for, starting phase two. He encouraged Sobachka via radio, prompting her to remember the container. Then he called her back. He was glad to see her crawl out of the hole after another five minutes. Unimaginable, if something were to happen to her!

  He loaded her with a bundle weighing about a kilogram on Earth. Training her with this pack bag had been the most difficult part. Sobachka carried the bundle straight to the right container, unrolled it, and spread it roughly over the desired material. Then Artem activated the fibers at the edge of the textile. They dug into the pile and enclosed part of it in the pack bag. That was the first load of bounty. He praised the dog again, and she started the return journey carrying the full but nearly weightless bag. Artem checked the clock: 47 minutes for the first bag.

  To meet his expenses, Sobachka needed to fill eight bags. His goal was twenty. Thirty would be a personal record. The longer they took, the higher the risk that one of the guards would see the bright speck that didn’t belong up there in the sky, and wasn’t detected by radar.

  He heard a noise on the helmet radio. That can only be Sobachka, he thought. Artem quickly knelt before the tube entrance. But the camera in her suit showed no image. Had something happened to her? His heart raced. He tried to peer into the tube in the direction from which she would be coming. Right then something knocked into his visor. She was back. Phew, first transport done. Artem stood up. Even as he rose he noticed a shadow next to him that hadn’t been there before. He pulled the weapon from his suit pocket, blinked while working out where the origin of the shadow would be, and shot. The recoil made him feel the projectile leaving the barrel, vacuum preventing the sound from reaching his ears. There was a dull groan on the helmet radio. Hit! Artem lifted his head and saw a person holding the side of his spacesuit.

  “He hit me! Shit, shit!” came through the radio in Russian, a male voice. That had to be one of the guards. How had they noticed him?

  “Your own bloody fault, idiot, I told you not to approach from that side,” said a second voice. Was that the other guard? Wouldn’t he run to help his colleague? The first man would die otherwise, no doubt, Artem thought.

  But the second guard wasn’t so stupid. He probably figured out he would be shot then, too. Or not? Indeed, there was a second person showing up next to the shot guard. Artem was lifting his arm to take aim when he got a hard kick against his elbow. He managed not to drop the weapon. At the same time somebody grabbed him around the neck. Couldn’t be the kicker, so I must be up against four. Has RB been ramping up security? And I haven’t noticed anything?

  “My partner is aiming at your head,” said a new voice. It didn’t sound like a bluff, but he wasn’t intimidated and kept aiming at the second man. His suit ramped up the ventilation as he was sweating profusely now. His mind raced. What are my options? Should I give up? I don’t think they’ll let me live. Shouldn’t I at least take one of them along with me?

  “Don’t you dare,” said the last voice, “or we’ll take the helmet off your little pet here.”

  A man in a brand-new RB spacesuit stepped into his view and brushed Artem’s weapon hand aside in a careless move. He had Sobachka stuck under his arm.

  “Should I? She would probably look real sweet yapping for air.”

  Artem released the weapon. It sailed away in slow motion.

  “I give up!” he yelled.

  “That’s very wise. Maybe we let your dog live that way. However,” the guard said in an ominous tone, “the Chinese cook on board has asked us for fresh meat so many times now…”

  “You son of a bitch! You thug!” burst out of Artem.

  “Hey, take it easy, Artjom. The villain here is you.”

  “Artem, you Russian asshole, it’s Artem. I am Ukrainian.”

  “Isn’t that the same, Artjom? I’ll call you what I choose. Be glad I don’t call you a piece of shit—I am well educated after all.”

  Artem tried to twist out of the grip of the man who was holding him from behind, but with no luck. The other guy, who still was holding Sobachka and seemed to be the boss here, kept coming closer and closer until their helmets met. He had blue eyes, a receding forehead, and the oft-broken nose of a boxer.

  “Nobody steals from RB. That should be clear to you!” he hissed over the radio.

  Suddenly an incredible pain seared through him. Sobachka was his last thought as he lost consciousness.

  October 16, 2071, SS Lenin

  “For the last time, who have you been working with?” The blue-eyed guy waved pliers in front of Artem’s face without getting any reaction.

  “I asked you something!” The man opened the pliers and adjusted them to Artem’s little finger. Then he started to squeeze. Artem tried to pull his hand away, his muscles twitching, but he was strapped down.

  “Alone. I am alone,” burst out of him. He tried not to show it, but the pain was so excruciating tears were running down his face.

  “Indeed you are, Artjom, but that doesn’t answer my question.” The pliers moved to his ring finger. He saw in slow motion how its jaws closed. Then, after a brief delay, pain flashed. The room on board the Russian ship with the outdated name began to wave
r. Maybe he’d be lucky and lose consciousness. Then somebody poured cold water over him from behind, and that hope vanished. The torture was set to continue.

  “You know, Artjom,” the boxer-guy said in a pretentiously jovial manner, “you must think I am a sadist. But torture is as strenuous for me as it is for you. Really. Can’t we meet halfway? You tell me who buys your wares and I… I let your dog live.”

  Sobachka—they haven’t killed her. The first good news since waking up only to be tortured by this sadist. Warm feelings welled up as he thought about Sobachka. Suddenly the deal didn’t sound bad. He’d give the name of the Chinese trader to whom he sold the rare earths, and Sobachka could join him. The trader wouldn’t be in immediate danger since Russia couldn’t afford trouble with China.

  Artem gave the name.

  “That’s the way!” said the man who was torturing him. He came closer and stroked Artem’s forehead. “You are a good boy, after all, Artjom.”

  “I want a real trial.”

  The man stepped back and looked at him with genuine surprise. “You want to be shot? After all, you killed an innocent man.”

  “I want a fair trial,” said Artem.

  “But we have a far better offer for you. You really impressed the big boss, Artjom. He digs creative work. We need people like you. You work for us in the future. We pay quite well, right guys?”

  The two men left and right of him nodded in unison.

  “And Sobachka?”

  “You can keep the bitch. Where else do you have that option, pets on spacecraft? Only with us.”

  “And if I refuse?”

  “Then you get the trial that you wish for so much. I can assure you that you will end up with a bullet in the head. Our unbribable courts show no mercy for villains of your kind.”