Earthblood

Steve Romero heard the ball lobbing over into his section of the court. “Meaning it’s me that’s rucked up, Jed?”

“No. Just looks—”

“Heard you say it was communications.”

“Yeah.”

“So that’s me, right?”

Jim Hilton cut off the squabble before it deteriorated any further. “Enough, guys. Plenty of time to sort this out after reentry. Could be that you’re both right. Debriefing’ll show us what went wrong, and when.”

“My intercom isn’t working properly, Jim,” called Jeff Thomas.

“You hear me at all?” Jim asked, channeling him through Steve so he could be patched in with the others.

“That’s better. There’s a lot of breakup. And the servo on my chair isn’t functioning, either.”

“Same with mine,” added Carrie Princip. “The dupe board on the nav console is showing false data for our approach trajectory.”

Ryan O’Keefe coughed apologetically. “Sorry to add my mite to the problems, but I couldn’t open my personal locker when we got woken. The security device on it seemed to have jammed.”

“All right, all right.” Jim Hilton couldn’t hide how angry he was. “Have to be breakdowns along the line. We’ve got a whole day to sort these things out with mission control before hot-zone time. Steve?”

“Yo, Captain.”

“Let’s get in touch, shall we? Establish what might have happened.”

“Sure thing.” He pressed and turned dials. “Aquila calling mission control. Come in, Stevenson. Do you read?”

Everyone on the vessel could hear the faint atmospheric hissing.

And nothing else.

Chapter Four

“Twenty-seven hours and nine minutes to the commencement of final reentry procedures… procedures.” Mom lapsed into silence for thirty heartbeats. “Thirty-one hours and eight minutes to preset landing time at mission base.”

The last burst of information came out at a babbling, hysteric speed, as though Mom had been secretly sniffing helium, but nobody on the crew was paying the comp voice much attention.

They’d moved back out of the control section of the Aquila, going through into their rest quarters. The ship had originally been designed for the crew to be split up into shifts, so that no more than three-quarters would be awake at any one time. Now, with everyone there except for Steve Romero, it was uncomfortably crowded.

The radio operator was still at his post, leaning forward, trying every channel, his voice growing hoarse with the repeated, futile efforts to raise some kind of response from Earth.

“Come in, please. This is the USSV Aquila broadcasting an international Mayday call. Please respond to this wavelength. Come in for the Aquila, homeward bound from deep space.”

As they spiraled closer to Earth, Steve tried again and again. Mission control wasn’t responding from Nevada. The Thatcher Memorial Research Base in Surrey was silent, and so was the Yeltsin Space Center, near what had once been called Volgograd, in the wastes of ancient Kazakhstan.

Bases in India and Australia and South America and the Arctic and Antarctic were dead and still as a nameless tomb in a desert of permafrost.

Jim had called up the ship’s manuals onto the screens while all of the experts concentrated on their own areas of specialty. Section by section, everything was rapidly checked. Aerials and the outside linking receivers were all examined with the tiny mobile vid cameras.

Nobody could find anything wrong.

Steve Romero’s voice flooded into the room where everyone else was huddled. “Come in, please. This is the Aquila, flying on down.”

Jim Hilton clapped his hands. “All right, everyone. Let’s just look at this one together. Anyone got any ideas?”

Nobody spoke.

“Aquila calling Earth. This is the USSV Aquila calling fucking anyone!”

Jim Hilton sighed. “So nobody’s got any bright ideas?”

“Got to be something down between Earth and us,” said Marcey Cortling. “Major fault that means we’ve totally lost all contact.”

Henderson McGill shook his head. “Real brilliant, Marcey. Tell us something we don’t know.”

“What we don’t know is everything.” Michael Man was perched uncomfortably on the edge of one of the bunks.

“Sounds pretty zen,” Carrie said with a smile, but it was a thin, frightened smile.

Mom’s voice came through the speakers, unexpectedly loud. “We shall be commencing our descent through the atmosphere at noon on the twenty-fifth day of September. Thank you for flying Aquila Airlines.”

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