The Gravity of the Moment

by C. H. Russellson

Table of Contents

Table of Contents,
parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6

conclusion

Grayson must not have trusted me not to chicken out. We had both crowded into the tiny airlock meant for one. He sent me on ahead to negotiate my way through the hold to Cronus’s door, which gave me another wave of disorientation. I scrambled inside and held onto the grips tightly while Grayson squeezed behind me to the pilot’s position. This time he had closed the door himself, no longer interested in watching my discomfort.

We were powered up and disconnected from the Pearson clamps within minutes and soon Cronus was oriented with the engine bell pointed for descent. Grayson was determined to land as soon as possible, even if it meant landing in potential darkness, because the terminator was coming up fast. I performed my one co-pilot role as I verified Grayson unfolded the landing gear. From then on, I was a mere passenger again.

Grayson selected the stored landing routine and, when prompted, entered an altitude. I thought he would consult the radar, but that would take some time and, well you know, we had to get this show on the road. I had to assume he knew what he was doing.

I held on tight as the thrust provided the first hint of real gravity we had experienced in months. I sagged a little but was thankful for the exercise I had managed to perform since leaving Saturn. The ride down to the surface seemed routine enough. The surface below was a patchwork of light and dark, not in between, since there was no atmosphere to diffuse the light.

I thought we were headed for a raised area, a plateau of sorts completely bathed in the diminished rays from the distant Sun. But we overshot that area and entered a region where light and dark struggled for dominance at the slowly shifting terminator. We descended farther in silence and, suddenly, the cold barren surface appeared near and rose up, unforgiving, to meet us.

* * *

We had lost the crapshoot, hoping to land in sunlight; instead, we came crashing into darkness. I didn’t think I was dead, because I was still breathing and not frozen solid. A quick glance to my left summoned the status display with suit pressure. It wasn’t dropping, and no supply was being added from the tanks. That was comforting to a degree; I could have been lying on torn fabric, sealing it with just my body weight, even in the scant gravity.

With my whole body hurting like it was, I didn’t have any plans to move until it became necessary. The temperature was okay and steady, and I could hear the whirrs and clicks of a normally functioning excursion suit. I had about six hours of oxygen left.

“Grayson, are you there? This is Brock.” Who else would it be? I tried it two more times. No answer. I listened carefully but couldn’t even hear him breathing or any suit noise. Comm status verified his mike was open, as we had agreed to. I set the volume to maximum. It was dead silent. Perhaps a bad choice of words.

I took a deep breath of precious warm air. I had to relax somehow. After a sip of water, I sank back into the suit padding and took in the view. Blackness, brilliant stars and one very bright crescent. It was one of the other moons but, at that point, I didn’t know or care which one it might be. I took a couple more deep breaths.

Something resembling a snowflake appeared in my field of view and floated down upon my visor. The light coming from inside my helmet gave the flake a pinkish hue. Another flake drifted by. One of the spare oxygen tanks on the lander must have ruptured, but then I remembered Grayson had decided we wouldn’t need it and chose not to bring the extra weight. I finally concluded it was the lander’s supply of propellant venting and freezing into flakes. Not a good thought, since Grayson had planned the landing and ascent maneuvers as economically as possible with little margin.

I soon decided I was wasting time and needed to find Grayson and the lander. I was able to raise my head up high enough in my helmet to look side to side and toward my feet. Nothing but a frozen, bleak and rock-strewn moonscape as far as I could see. I didn’t feel ready to raise up on one elbow and look behind me, but the lander had to be in that direction.

Haste makes waste. It seemed Franklinesque as I played it over in my mind, but the phrase was probably much older. I could imagine my grandmother Galena Brock using such an antiquated expression although I had never met her in person. Why had my brain dredged up such a random idiom while I lay there on a foreign shore in such dire straits? It occurred to me after an oddly philosophical moment of clarity that there was nothing random about it.

I gathered the courage to raise up on my right elbow, trying to locate Grayson and the lander. Not that it really mattered; things were looking bleak, but knowing the fate of the shattered lander and Grayson’s broken body might lend some finality to my last hours. Or minutes. I hadn’t decided if ending it all by opening my helmet was better than a slow, suffocating demise.

I could make out the silhouette of the mangled Cronus backlit surreally by a sunlit patch a hundred meters or so beyond. Somehow one of the floodlights atop the makeshift cabin had survived the impact and cast an eerie glow onto the ruptured shell. I thought I saw a torso and arm protruding but convinced myself it was a trick of light and shadow.

My entire body tensed up as a wave of pain shot through me. I returned to lying on my back, tried to keep my breathing steady and allowed my head to sink again into the padding of my helmet. Just then, a bright object appeared in my field of view. Vagabond, so close but so useless and lost to me, had made its first orbit around Oberon and streaked onward and out of sight.

To keep my mind occupied, I glanced at the chronometer so I could keep up with Cronus’s circuits overhead. I guessed twenty-five minutes, but that was off the top of my head. It appeared again after only what seemed two or three minutes. The clock verified that. I blinked my eyes, thinking it was an illusion, but it stayed and was somewhat brighter than before. I feared I was slipping into some sort of delirium or shock. I had never faced death before. The suit readings said there was nothing wrong, but the med panel painted another picture entirely: I was in distress.

The phantom light disappeared, going the way of the first sighting. The framed starfield above me began to fade, occulted by a film of dust that I tried to brush away from the visor with my gloved hands. The particles proved to be charged and difficult to remove. I raised my head and found the entire area filled with a cloud of dust mixed with tiny ice crystals flying about, some bouncing off my suit and helmet visor. From above, blazing beacons descended and stopped a few meters above the trembling ground.

* * *

There was stillness for a time and silence. One of the beacons moved like a searching eye and settled upon me. I had the presence of mind to use the ion blaster on the back of my right glove to clear my visor. The dust had settled somewhat.

“Lander crew, can you hear me? Repeat, lander crew, are you receiving?”

“Yes, yes!” I croaked, coughing to clear my dry throat. “I’m here!” I waved my arms toward the light.

“Yes, we see you. Why are you using this non-standard frequency? Never mind, not important now. Are you Grayson or Brock?” The disembodied voice asked with what sounded like a Galilean accent. Were we interplanetary celebrities or persons of interest?

“I’m Brock. Ian Brock. I think Neal is at the lander.”

“Hello, Ian. Sorry, but I don’t think your friend made it. We are picking up extremely low temp readings from his suit. We are prepared to rescue you and recover your friend’s body.” He kept calling Grayson my friend. I would need to set the record straight. “But there’s something I need you to do first, Ian.”

“What? What do you need?” I asked, perplexed.

“I need you to stand. I need you to stand and walk toward our lander. Are you injured?”

“I don’t think so. I feel like crap, though. Give me a minute.” I was mighty sore and weak but able to sit up. I managed to stand shakily on the uneven regolith. I walked slowly several steps toward the light but clumsily stumbled on a rock and went down on my left knee.

“It’s okay, Ian. We’ve got you from here.” A minute later, two suited figures arrived; they lifted me upright and walked me toward the lander. Once we were out of the glaring light, I saw that their vessel was huge, it seemed almost as big as the orbiting Vagabond. I remember a ladder leading upward but don’t remember climbing it.

* * *

I awoke to a glowing blonde halo that moved away and left me blinking in the harsh light. I heard muffled words: He’s awake now, sir. The halo returned, and the angelic face moved close and smiled. “Good morning, sleepy.” I felt my lips crack as I tried to smile back. The angel rubbed something soothing on them. “There, just relax.”

“Ah, this must be Mr. Brock,” a baritone voice said. My bed was adjusted more upright, and my webbing loosened a little. “That’s better now, I hope.” A face swam into view. An older face, perhaps sixties or early seventies, kind but serious, graying hair. “Welcome aboard Wayfarer. I’m Jean-Marc Leneveu. We spoke earlier. I guess you could say I’m the leader of this intrepid band of explorers.

“This is Kandace Kaine, one of the best engineers in the Galileans, but she’s acting as your nurse temporarily. I’m having to pay her a bonus now, thanks to you. We make up two-fifths of Wayfarer’s crew. Uh, not counting you.”

“Where are we?” I asked, hoping he would say Titan orbit.

“Oh, we’re still in Oberon orbit. We’ve been asked by the SEA to perform a forensic investigation of this debacle. Your friend Gray—”

“He’s not my friend!” I croaked and lapsed into a fit of coughing. Kandace produced a waterbulb.

“You okay now?” Jean-Marc asked. “Anyway, we’re allotted only a limited time here at Uranus. We’re having to waste some of that time looking into this foolhardy attempt by Grayson to beat us to Uranus. If you’d left a week earlier, it might’ve worked. Oh, he didn’t tell you about that, did he?” Jean-Marc asked having seen the look on my face.

“You sound like you knew him,” I said, raspy.

He smiled. “Yeah. Yeah, you could say that.” He paused as if framing his thoughts. “Look, Ian, you don’t have to thank me for saving your bony ass. You are welcome to hitch a ride, not that I have a choice. You will earn your keep on the way and then for a while after we return to Ganymede. Understand? Your life on Titan is over. You will also have to sign a non-disclosure agreement about what I’m about to tell you before you can leave Wayfarer just like everyone else who works for me. Should I continue?”

I nodded.

“Okay, for starters, and I think you’ve come to realize this, your friend, your acquaintance Neal Grayson is — or was — a manipulating con artist. Now this is going back a while, late 80’s, I was putting together a team to help me secure the funding for the Proxima run. I had lots of money, but I didn’t want to go broke getting there, even if I never got to return. We were going great guns; everything was falling into place with the tech, propulsion systems, and hibernation. We were going to Proxima! We even toyed with the idea of going straight to Alpha Centauri A or B.

“But I got distracted and, before I knew it, the whole thing started falling apart. Three of them teamed up to sue me, and that was the end of the dream. They got a big chunk of change and rights to some of the tech like pulse units and hibernation regimens. Any of that sound familiar?

“Then, somehow, word got out that I was planning this mission to Uranus.” He glanced over at Kandace, who shrugged her shoulders: It wasn’t me. “Grayson and the others just couldn’t let that happen. They had to beat me here. So, I bet that minx Cherie is with Blaine Vanderver now. Am I right?”

“Yes, they did seem to act like a couple,” I said, noting the distress on Leneveu’s face. I was wondering if Cherie had been the distraction he had mentioned that made everything go off the rails. She would’ve been young back then, incredibly young. Hmm. “She was with Grayson back then.” And then you got involved somehow, Jean-Marc.

“So, Grayson suffered a catastrophic suit failure, but you were thrown clear,” He brightened as he changed the subject, not seeming to feel any remorse for Grayson’s demise. “Congratulations, you’re the first human to have walked on a moon of Uranus. Hurray! Your name will surely go down in the Solar Annals. It’s a shame Grayson’s not here to see my defeat.

“Cronus, huh? I think he was the mythological guy who castrated his father, Uranus. That’s supposed to be me. Not to worry, I’m not mad. We’re leaving soon for Titania, and I’m going to be the first to walk on that one.

“Okay, that’s the spiel. You’ll recover in a few days from the flush that removed the somnolent formula from your system. You would have suffered kidney failure on your way back to Saturn, but Grayson was willing to risk your life.

“Oh, from what we can tell, Cronus crashed because the pilot was using a landing routine meant for Rhea, but Oberon has a slightly higher gravity. That, combined with a potentially errant starting altitude, was a recipe for disaster. It doesn’t even look like he had turned on the radar. You’re lucky to be alive.”

Kandace brought me lunch soon after and continued to fuss over me. I got the feeling that the downhill ride to Jupiter might be a pleasant one. But I hadn’t yet met the rest of the crew. I wanted to make sure there weren’t any romantic connections lingering; the thought of a love triangle had lost its appeal somehow.

I was getting a little intrigued by the prospect of beginning a new chapter in the Sims-Brock family legacy on Ganymede, and I looked forward to looking up family members among the Galilean worlds. I had a clean slate and, hopefully, the whole Oberon affair would be pushed off rightfully onto Neal Grayson. I had the backing of one Jean-Marc Leneveu, for what that was worth. The one thing I would need to work on was whom I chose for my friends.