Behind the Night Sky

A Story by Zugzwang

Behind the Night Sky

When the sky refused to open up for him, Zane cried like a child. Tears sprung from his eyes into spinning globules, and floated off onto his helmet visor. He’d had ten runs already, ten runs at a portal that was closed to him. The loss he felt was acute, but he was low on fuel. He turned the scout ship about and gunned the throttle, feeling the thrust drive him deep into his seat, before cutting the engines and coasting back towards the mothership. The silence of space was absolute, surrounding him like a cocoon. Even the radio remained mute. He was grateful and, lulled by the quiet beauty of the stars, his mind drifted to the beginning.

He was an engineer on the Andreus, a mining ship on a three-year trip, scouring the solar system for rare metals; rare on Earth, but abundant on asteroids �" if you could find them. He was squeezed into an air-con duct swearing at an abraded O-ring in one of the CO2 scrubbers when he heard the news.

“Zane, we’ve got a problem.” It was Sandy, the systems tech, all elbows and overalls.

“No s**t, Sandy �" this whole unit needs to come out.”

“No, Roxanna’s ship dropped off the radar hours ago. The Captain wants eyeballs out there, and that means you.”

Roxanna. All-American, Ivy-League. She could have gone anywhere, but she chose this rinky-dink outfit because she got to play cowboy, hammering her tiny scout ship in amongst the asteroids like it was a toy. The crew loved her swagger, but she drove the poor captain frantic, so they loved her all the more.

Zane blinked and scooted backwards out of the duct. Sandy handed him a jumpsuit.

“Good luck,” she said. Zane gave her a tight grin, and handed her his spanner.

“Enjoy.”

Down in the hangar bay, the ship’s battered, ancient shuttle stood fuelled and ready to go. Settling into the pilot’s seat, the familiar musty old spacecraft smell enveloped him. He finessed the thrusters to nose the cumbersome craft gently out of the hangar bay before easing on the throttle and heading out to join the search party. By the time he reached them, they’d already started to sweep the search area, but after a solid ten hours they had found nothing. They came back every day after that, but after five days, morale was shot: everyone knew that Roxanne’s oxygen would be exhausted. At the end of day six, the captain called off the search. The pilots turned about and headed home in silence.

When the party drew close to the Andreus, the swifter scouts darted into the hangar bay first, leaving Zane’s shuttle to follow behind. A voice erupted from his headset:

“Zane, Roxanna’s back! Right where we lost her.” Zane pulled up and started a slow turn.

“On my way,” he said.

Roxanna’s small vessel hung suspended in space as if it had never left. Zane hailed it, but there was no response. Was it empty? Or some kind of trap? His curiosity got the better of him, and he decided to board it and take a look. After docking, he negotiated his way through the narrow hatch. Poking his head inside, he saw scrawls covering the entire interior: prose, diagrams and equations. Something was not right here. Peering further inside, he spotted her, sitting bolt upright in the pilot’s seat. He moved forward and got alongside her. She was staring off into space.

“Hi, Roxanne,” he ventured “are you ok?” She turned her head and looked at him with a face devoid of expression.

“Yes,” she said. He nodded slowly.

“Where have you been?”

“The gods came to barter. They gave me sight.” Zane’s thoughts raced. Had she lost her mind? He chewed at his lower lip.

“What sight?”

“Of things unseen.” He paused for a moment.

“And what did they want?”

“A keepsake.”

“A keepsake of what?”

“Of me.” Zane stared at her for a long time. Then, he reached out and touched her elbow.

“Let’s go home,” he said.

Back aboard the Andreus, the ship’s doctor was waiting for them. She gave Zane a nod and collected Roxanne, ushering towards the sick bay. Zane paused a moment, then walked to the quarterdeck and approached the captain.

“Sir, I’d like to retrieve the scout ship tomorrow. I’d like to take a look at some diagrams written on it.” Stared at him for a second, then shrugged and looked away.

“Be my guest.”

The next day Zane cadged a lift with one of the scouts to Roxanne’s ship. Going inside, he turned on the lights and examined the crabbed script carefully. He couldn’t make much sense of the prose, but it was disturbing enough to unsettle him. He turned his attention to the mathematics. Roxanne was smart, but she was a pilot, not a mathematician. But that just didn’t fit with what he saw�"this was advanced physics: entropy, gravity, and space-time. He was an engineer, and he wasn’t sure he understood it. Whatever else had happened to Roxanne, she’d become a prodigy. He had to know more.

Zane jumped into the pilot’s seat and started the engine. Somehow, Roxanna had stumbled onto something big. Perhaps if he retraced her steps, he could stumble back across. He set the autopilot to follow its last course, took a deep breath, and hit the switch.

Much later, after he’d made his unsuccessful passes and shed his tears, he noticed his reflection in the viewport. He had new eyes. Perfect platinum orbs, they sat in his head like gravity wells, absorbing everything. And they whispered to him of things unseen, behind the night sky.

© 2016 Zugzwang

My Review

Would you like to review this Story?
Login | Register

Featured Review

Gaia Octavia

First off, your character description of Sandy as "all elbows and overalls" is absolute magic! I just had to get that out there right away. I enjoyed this short story. I admire those who can write futuristic sci-fi stories that actually seem real and believable as your small world did. I came across the same thing with writing for school in that sometimes the story you have to tell could catastrophically soar over the word limit. I would love for you to be able to revisit this if you like it enough and flesh it out some more because it really has great potential for expansion. But, big surprise, I liked it. It's getting rather tiring complimenting you. Oh but one more thing: I LOVED how you portrayed Roxanna's Americanism in a subtle but unmistakable way. Nice one! Hope to see more work when you're not so busy adulting ;-D