PROLOGUE
Tuesday, 13th October 2291:
Dear Diary,
It has been crazy-busy, so I have not had time to make an entry to this diary for a few days. This will probably be a long one, and I’m not sure where to begin. I’m on a spare at school right now, so maybe that’s where I’ll start.
In light of recent events, my schoolteacher decided to devote some class time to the study of dinosaurs. We are looking at the dinosaurs of the late Triassic period. Of course, I was a little ahead of everyone else because my dad and my brother and I had already looked up some Triassic dinosaurs in the library after my mom encountered some while exploring down on the surface of the planet we are orbiting.
About this planet, they say it is a copy of Earth as it was during that period of its history. Much different, apparently, from the version our ship originally came from. And much different again from the one where I was born.
I don’t really understand how there can be three different versions, but we are told that we passed through some kind of gateway in space to get from one to another. The question they don’t seem to be able to answer, and one that has always been on everyone’s minds is, can we get back? But right now, there are more immediate issues to deal with.
When my mom came back from the surface, she was taken to the med center immediately. She had sprained her right foot badly and banged her head when she fell off a rock. They kept her in there for a few days, monitoring her for concussion, but she’s been released now.
She’ll be fine, but she looks like hell. She’s got two shiners and a big bandage covering the cut on her forehead, which, by the way, required a few stitches. She’ll probably have a scar. She has to keep off her feet, so she’s staying in bed most of the time and using a wheelchair when she has to get up and go anywhere. Dad and Jessie and I moved some furniture in our place to make it easier for her to get around.
That’s what I meant when I said it’s been crazy-busy. We’ve all been helping her, and she’s a pretty demanding patient. Limiting her physical activity doesn’t come easy for her. She wants to be in the lab, analyzing the samples they took from the surface, helping to write the reports. She’s constantly sending us on errands and the clutter of papers and electronic devices on and around her bed is making it difficult to maneuver in there. She is connected to the lab via her dat-com, but it’s not the same as being there in person.
It’s actually a nice break for me when I go to school. A brief return to my regular routine. Jessie said the same about his shifts on the bridge. Of course, we’d never say that in front of mom. Then again, knowing her, she probably enjoys it when there aren’t as many of us around, pampering her. She knows we’re only trying to help, but sometimes it’s like we’re just getting in her way. Hopefully she’ll be back on her feet soon and our lives will get back to normal—as “normal” as our lives can be at this time.
I say that because the main reason they recalled mom and her crew from the surface earlier than planned is that some other ship had been spotted, and it was on track to rendezvous with ours. It seems to have followed the same course we took to get here from the gateway. They think it might belong to the same people—or whatever life forms they might be—that made the gateway and the thing they call the Sphere that captured our ship many years ago.
That’s because it looks similar to the original Sphere. It is spherical itself, only quite a bit smaller. Even so, it’s easily big enough for our ship to fit inside. And once it caught up with us it pulled us inside it with some kind of energy force, just like the original did. There was nothing we could do to escape it.
Once inside, our ship was guided to some kind of docking structure and then machinery moved around outside, attaching pipes and cables and other things the purpose of which we can only guess. So far, we’ve seen no life forms, nor have we been contacted.
My brother Jessie brings us updates when he gets off his shifts. He told us that none of the airlocks on our ship will open, so we can’t get out to explore. It’s as though they don’t want us to leave our ship. We’ve been broadcasting on every frequency in an attempt to establish contact, but there has been no response.
Because our ship is inside this Sphere, we cannot see outside of it and have no way of knowing whether we are in the same location as we were when it pulled us in, or if it is moving, taking us somewhere else. Jessie says that Commander Lucassen concluded there is little we can do but sit and wait. He and Mr. Curran, the Chief Engineer, are certain that whoever or whatever is running this Sphere will make contact eventually, whenever they’re ready.
My grandmother Maddie isn’t so sure. She was there during the encounter with the first Sphere and reminds us that they only found an artificial intelligence in it. No living beings. And they were free to move about inside that Sphere, not sealed up inside the ship like we seem to be now.
I hope Mr. Curran is right, that whoever is in control of this Sphere is friendly. I guess we’ll find out, once they decide to take the next step.
Meanwhile my mom is a bit of a celebrity now, having been the lead scientist on the away team that went down to the planet’s surface and found dinosaurs. And because of that, I am getting more than my share of attention at school. All the other kids keep asking me questions, as if I know more than what was in the away team’s interim reports. Things like, “was she scared?” and, “did she see a T-Rex?”
Of course, the T-Rex was from another era, not the Triassic. It came millions of years later, as they are now learning in class. And as for my mom being scared, I can tell them with certainty, absolutely not! At least not during the first encounter. The first species they found was plateosaurus, a herbivore. She was already safely aboard the Aurora lander when a ticinosuchus attacked and killed the last crew member remaining on the ground during the evacuation.
I would love to see real, live dinosaurs myself, but I doubt I’ll have the opportunity now. That is not to say that I was under any illusions that I would have had an opportunity. I am closer to the bottom of the pecking order of people who would have gone down to the surface than I am to the top. But now that we’ve been captured by this spherical alien ship, I don’t think anyone will be visiting the surface of the planet any time soon—if ever. Like I said, we don’t even know if we’re still in orbit around that planet.
Like Mr. Curran, my dad says he believes that all will be revealed in time. They both think that we will find the answers to all of our questions, either here inside this Sphere, or wherever it takes us. We do have a lot of questions, some of which date back to even before my dad’s time. Not everyone is taking this calmly, but one thing is certain: when the time comes, it should be one heck of a revelation!
- April Davis
Chapter One
Apart from the faint hiss of the air gently flowing from the HVAC vent on the wall near the ceiling, it was dead quiet. The only illumination in the small room was the dim glow from the digital clock on the night table beside the bed. Even though her eyes were closed, Madison Davis was aware of the light. She had lost track of how long she’d been trying to get to sleep, but she didn’t want to open her eyes to look at the clock. That wouldn’t help.
Try as she may to push the events of the last few days out of her mind, they kept playing over and over, like a looping video she could not turn off. And it wasn’t just the events of the last few days. Memories from many years ago were intermixed—an almost identical situation she had experienced. Almost.
This is different, she told herself, silently. She couldn’t shake a deep foreboding that something bad was going to happen. The Commander and Engineer were putting on brave faces, trying to keep the crew from panicking. That’s their job. In what they were saying was no hint of a lie. So far, there had been no hostile activity by their captors, other than the act of capturing the Hyperion in the first place. In fact, their captors had yet to even reveal themselves. There could be a benevolent motive for that initial act, but no theories came to Maddie’s mind.
The AI in the Sphere they had encountered all those years ago had explained that the reason they’d been captured was actually to save them from a perilous situation. It did not explain exactly what that danger was. That Sphere eventually released them and sent them on their way back home. Except it didn’t turn out to be home. The solar system they returned to appeared to be devoid of human life, and upon arrival, they found the Earth in the grip of an ice age.
Maddie and a small number of others ended up staying on that frozen world for over three decades before they were finally able to get back to the ship and embark on the next phase of their journey—a 15-year voyage that took them to the gateway, through which they wound up here, yet another very different version of Earth. Still not home.
Maddie’s thoughts wandered back to those early years of the Hyperion’s adventures, or misadventures, depending upon your outlook. It was on this ship that she met Matthew Davis, who she eventually married, and with whom she raised their only child, a son, Tyler. Matt was the Hyperion’s First Officer, and the leader of their primitive settlement on the hostile Earth.
Oh, how I miss Matt, she thought. No matter how much we went through, it only made our love stronger.
Maddie and Matt had planned to ease into a comfortable, semi-retired life once they had returned to Earth and Maddie could publish her book about the Hyperion’s ill-fated original mission. But that was not to be. Instead, they found themselves stranded on that very different version of Earth for more than 30 years. And their story did not end there.
Matt never saw the gateway. He suffered a massive heart attack and passed away long before the Hyperion reached it. Over the years they’d been together, Matt and Maddie had become close friends with Dakota Shevlin, the Hyperion’s original First Mate and general handyman in the ice-age Earth settlement. Dakota remained Maddie’s closest friend.
Dear old Dakota, Maddie said to herself, how would I have managed all these years without Matt were it not for you?
She gave up on trying to get to sleep. She opened her eyes and stared at the digital clock. It read 02:28. Her thoughts were still wandering between events of the past and the more recent, so it did not immediately register that she’d been lying there for almost three hours. But now she became aware of a more pressing issue. She had to pee. For a person her age, this was a regular occurrence, and it happened more than once, most nights. The old plumbing didn’t work like it used to.
She threw back the duvet and slowly eased her legs over the side of the bed and sat up. She gave it a few moments before attempting to stand up. The arthritic joints in her arms and legs weren’t as reliable as they used to be. To get around the ship she and Dakota used what were usually called wheelchairs but were actually motorized devices, a hybrid of a wheelchair and a scooter. In their respective quarters, they were able to walk the short distance to the bathroom with the aid of strategically placed grab handles and assist bars. She wore an emergency call button on a lanyard around her neck at all times. If she ever found herself in trouble, help was never far away.
Dakota was never far away either. His quarters were right beside hers, and they were rarely seen apart elsewhere in the ship. The main exception was when Maddie visited Tyler and her daughter-in-law Eileen, and her grandchildren Jessie and April. Even then, Dakota was often a dinner guest.
After relieving herself, Maddie stood at the sink and washed her hands. Water flowed like it did from a terrestrial faucet, gravity being supplied artificially by the rotation of the habitat rings of the ship. Maddie was glad that had not been terminated when the Hyperion was captured and brought inside the Sphere. Although weightlessness offered some advantages in terms of mobility, it would put a psychological exclamation mark on the situation. The artificial gravity was at least a continuity of sorts.
While drying her hands with the towel, Maddie glanced at her reflection in the mirror above the sink. The face that stared back at her was not as wrinkled and leathery as, when she was much younger, she had expected it to be by this age. Her shoulder-length hair was tinged with grey, but it was still mostly red. She could hardly believe that she would soon turn 80. Traveling between the stars took such a long time, even with FTL.
In a lower corner of the mirror’s reflection she saw the display on the digital clock in the room behind her. Even though it was inverted, she could easily see that it read 02:36. It made her think about the antique portable alarm clock she used to use, before it stopped working. It had been in the family for generations. Maddie had received it as a high school graduation gift from her mother, and it had originally been owned by her great, great grandmother.
It was in a red clamshell case small enough to cup in the palm of one hand, hinged at the back of its upper and lower halves. The timepiece was attached to the upper half by a hinge at the forward side. When the case was opened, the clock would swing down and double as a prop to keep the case open.
The face of the timepiece was white with elegant gold hands and hour numbers. There was a little dot by each of the numbers and slivers in the hands made of a phosphorescent material that was “charged” by exposure to light. The absorbed energy was slowly released in the form of light. The result was “glow-in-the-dark” hands and hour markers that functioned without a power source. The clock used a wind-up mechanism. A butterfly wing key on the back was rotated to wind it up, tightening a spring inside, and it would keep time for a couple of days before needing to be wound again. Unfortunately, it stopped working a few years ago. Maddie was winding it up and she heard something snap inside. When it happened, the time was 2:36, and it had remained frozen at that time to this day.
I must get Curran to see if he can fix it, she thought. I promised I would hand it down to Eileen, but I want it to be in working order when I give it to her.
She went back to the bed and sat down, propping her back against the headboard with pillows. She reached for her dat-com and opened the book she was currently reading. But after a while, she realized she had been advancing through the text on the screen without actually absorbing a single word. Instead, she had visions of being held prisoner inside an alien building, without windows or doors, and with no hope of regaining freedom.
She wanted to call Dakota, but he was the type who could sleep though almost anything and she was sure she’d be waking him. No use both of them suffering.
Her dat-com had been set up so she could tap into camera feeds that monitored the bridge, the communications room, engineering and various other internal and external views. She decided to see if there was anything new happening on the bridge.
She saw the skeleton crew of the overnight shift manning a few of the stations. It didn’t look like they were involved with anything unusual. The senior staff would have been summoned had there been any important developments.
Over in the coms area she saw a solitary figure hunched over a console. It wasn’t very brightly illuminated, and the camera showed a wide-angle view, but she was pretty sure it was Nate Ellis sitting there. If she recalled correctly, he was presently assigned to the night shift. Eva and Devin wouldn’t be on duty for a few more hours.
Maddie switched to an external view. It could just as easily have been a still photograph rather than a video feed. There was no visible motion. The view she was looking at was from a forward-facing camera located near the front doors of the starboard lander bay. She could see a bit of the nose of the ship and some fat cables or tubes that hung down from the underside and disappeared from view. A bit beyond the nose was a wall lined with all kinds of pipes and box-shaped objects. Everything was the same dull grey color and it was hard to judge sizes and distances without more points of reference.
There was a protuberance that spanned the entire horizontal range of the section of wall within her view. It looked like a ledge, but again, she could not determine its depth. Although not very bright, there was illumination, unlike when the Hyperion was captured by that first Sphere a generation ago.
She thought back to that time. That Sphere was ten times as large as this one, and it had been totally dark inside. Rather than being moored to the inner wall, the Hyperion had come to rest close to the center of the interior space, and they’d sent out drones to map the interior surface. Maddie had been one of the five-person away team that went out in a lander to explore the city-like landscape of the inner walls. She shuddered at the memory.
The others on that away team had been Matt, Dakota, Alexi Mikhailov, and the pilot, Trevor Hayes. She smiled now, as she remembered how Alexi’s sense of humor helped her control her fear. She had tagged along to video record the recon expedition. She was the media representative aboard the Hyperion.
This felt different. It wasn’t just that this Sphere was smaller, or that there was light inside. It was the suspicion that this Sphere has living beings aboard, and those beings may be responsible for everything that had happened since that first encounter began. Moreover, they were in control of what happens next.
Maddie switched the dat-com off and closed her eyes again. Instead of replaying events from the distant and not-so-distant past in her mind, this time she found herself imagining different scenarios for what is to come. Luckily, it didn’t last too long, and she finally drifted off to sleep.
She would not have the luxury of making up for lost time by sleeping in.