Promise the Girl

by Aidan Bruce Alberts

Part 1 appears in this issue.

conclusion

Hymn felt herself lift off the ground, feeling enormously heavy from the intense g-forces. Thousands of feet separated her from the ground as her ship ripped through the atmosphere. Shifting her vision towards her side window, she saw the tan and green flyover states. It was a strange awareness to know that instant death could happen at any moment. The booster rockets peeled off from the probe's body like wax wings.

Then something terrible happened. Contingency gears began to activate, and the sounds of stuttering replaced the roar of the engine as power started to decline. Hymn sensed that the ambitions of the team of scientists back at mission control might have been an overreach.

As the impaired probe pushed past the border between Earth's atmosphere and outer space, automatic backup power reserves flared with green lights. Recalculations of all previous plans and destinations were underway. Hymn watched her monitor as Chant organized and diagrammed the options into a grid of information squares. In his state of tired pragmatism, he offered Hymn his findings.

“The probe lost sixty-five percent of its reserve fuel reaching exit velocity as a result of the booster rocket failure. Exploration capabilities are now restricted to a fraction of their original value.”

She knew what this jargon meant. No chance of making interplanetary stops. No sample collection of the icy water from Saturn's moons Enceladus and Titan. Looking at the monitor, she saw the information square containing the goal of traveling out into the Oort cloud beyond the Solar System had a large red “X” crossing it out. All these planned monumental feats were canceled.

What about my return home?

“Listen ... Chant ... we will make it home after we have completed the mission, right?”

The artificial consciousness of Chant coursed through the golden veins of the probe. A low hum droned in Hymn's ears. Chant was communicating with the spacecraft's computer intelligence. Comparatively, Hymn was in a cell of solitary confinement and feeling like a death row prisoner.

“We wait for commands from mission control.”

Before Hymn could question the validity of that response, Chant said something unexpected.

“Leave behind any idea of glory or accomplishment.”

* * *

Somewhere between Earth and Venus, the probe was assumed to be out of control and a lost cause. Meanwhile, Chant charted the probe's course in a new direction. Hymn was rocked back into her seat headrest when the accelerating boost of the probe's propulsion system kicked in. After a moment, the probe's inner gravity system stabilized. She undid her straps and got out of her seat.

Hymn paced the inner perimeter of the bridge that connected the pilot compartment to the observation room. She glided in the microgravity past white spaceship sensors, black electrical cords, circular air pressure dials and protruding adjustment knobs.

Hymn noticed for the first time that all the components on the six walls interlocked in a geometric pattern resembling an Escher print. This room of bizarre optical illusions, flickering lights and diverse texture overloaded her senses. She needed to be somewhere less overwhelming.

Grabbing bright yellow safety handles, she pulled herself into the separate observational cupola of the probe. She hoped to find some clarity looking out into the abyss.

She made her way into the cupola composed of symmetrical silicate glass panes, forged aluminum alloy, and steel plates. This compartment's main purpose was to serve as the landing craft at planets the probe would visit. Floating in front of a porthole, she saw the wake of the ship with its blazing aquamarine tail streaking for as far as she could see. In the far-off distance, Hymn saw through the onboard telescope a shadow covering half of the Earth as she pressed her hand against the tempered glass.

The terrible irony of this turn of events came to her. She pivoted back towards the pilot compartment. Using the navigating safety handles, she scrambled to the flight controls. Her monitor outlined a peculiar, red-lined route produced by the navigation system. She saw that the computer predicted a half-elliptical orbit into the innermost part of the Solar System. Something had to be wrong. Sending the probe to a celestial body was not feasible with the probe's remaining fuel stores. It would be a one-way ticket to...

Then the awful truth dawned on her. The orbit led them right into the Sun.

Hymn leaned forward and steepled her fingers. At the probe’s current speed, the Earth had shrunk into a shining pinhole among a backdrop of brilliance.

“Why the hell did you plot our course for the Sun?”

Chant said nothing.

Hymn swung in anger at the motionless hologram and her arm passed through to no effect. “You need to answer me now.”

Chant didn't have time to respond. The black sky of space was slashed by flames. A planet-sized whip of a solar flare scored the abyss. It was a tornado of hellfire with plasma and sparks exploding against the carbon-reinforced heat shield. The frame of the ship shuddered and seized.

Hymn staggered under the force of the lash. She grabbed onto a handle and pulled herself back to the cupola landing craft. The tempered glass was scarred by the heat. She could barely make out the thousand-kilometer corridors of fire because of the charred window. Screw this. She banged her fists on the controls and began bypassing Chant's authority. She overrode the safety protocols by pressing a series of buttons. Emergency doors slammed shut. The connection between the escaping cupola and the careening probe was now severed.

The cupola detached, rotating and spinning away from the probe like a whirlwind. She injected herself with a healthy dose of sedatives from the medical kit and peeked out of the porthole for one last glimpse of the Sun. This might be the last thing I ever see.

Her gaze lasted longer than she thought it would. She saw the hot, prismatic sphere in its full terrible luminosity. The Sun rotated on its axis, and on its surface molten hydrogen spiraled in golden tentacles. Within these tentacles, huge cells of plasma appeared mirror-like to her gaze. Visions came to her: she saw the origins and the ends of all things celestial; a meshing and rushing of a million waterfalls; dancing cave paintings of aurochs and mammoths stampeding to the beat of fire; an ancient ochre handprint and the engraved vulva of a hunter-gatherer; the observable universe from the unobserved region; living things in the Centauri star system; horses with fiery manes on the shore of a cyan sea at sunset; a supermassive black hole shaped convex and concave at the same time; an Aztec god throwing himself into the fire; the splintered bones and memories of seven astronauts; the Sun born and dying. A final image came to her of a man with cancer in his lungs whom Hymn would never forget. She felt terror, for her eyes had seen the death of her world.

Silence ensued as her vision was enveloped in bright turquoise light coming from the flaring up of the cupola's engines. Hymn felt the tug of displaced microgravity after a slight propulsion. She checked her miniature navigation tablet and looked in the opposite direction of the separated main probe heading towards the Sun. There in the expanse of the void, the tiny but growing speck of Earth shone increasingly brighter. Slumped against the wall, there was only one thing that she wanted.

She wished her dad was there to tell her that it was all going to be okay.

* * *

Before the cupola landing craft made it back to Earth, Hymn's father died.

It was now ten years ago to the day when an unidentified object had gently descended by parachute into the Pacific Ocean. Unknown to Hymn, an unusual magnetic storm emanating from the Sun had simultaneously washed over the Earth, cloaking her return.

Daytime transitioned to night on a remote tropical island in the middle of the Pacific. Hymn's one-year-old son sat on her lap, and they witnessed the fiery sunset come to an end. The jagged mountains gently sliced off the deep orange light illuminating the towering clouds. The reds and golds melted away and the overhead clouds were drained of their sunset color, leaving only the soft blowing wind. A warm sensation flowed through their bodies.

Lying next to her in the soft sand, still warm from the midday Sun, was her husband Kalani. She was thankful that her escape pod's reentry into Earth's atmosphere had seemed to be forgotten by the monitors of Requiem.

Now in the dark night sky, Venus became clear, and she observed her father's favorite constellation. Tracing the stars she could imagine the bow-wielding centaur frozen in time with an arrow drawn. Her dad would point to the constellation and entertain her with a story of the centaur's hunt in the sky. Then his arm would swing to another section of the cosmos showing her the menacing scorpion that had killed the centaur's friend.

Scorpius would always scare her because of its sharp pincers and its orange heart star. The first time she had heard the story she had to take a small step back and cling to her father. “Now for eternity, the archer has to pull back his arrow without ever releasing it on his enemy.” Her curiosity overwhelming, she asked him why he couldn't just let the arrow go. Shifting uncomfortably, he had said, “Because he has no control in making that choice.”

Hymn inhaled deeply as she pulled her son closer. Gazing upward, they saw a shooting turquoise star cross the night sky from the centaur to the scorpion as they both drifted into a comfortable sleep.

Proceed to Challenge 998...