The Auriga Project Read online

  A pockmarked floor of gray dust stretched out in all directions. Right on target. He cast about for Eliana.

  She was nowhere in sight. He stopped breathing.

  “Where’s the rover?” someone asked.

  The voice came in through the comms unit in his helmet from one of three engineers standing in front of him. He couldn’t tell which one spoke, but he knew they had come from the Lunar Base in the primary biodome, and that they were expecting the lunar rover.

  He did not possess the will to respond. He sank in low-gravity slow motion to the floor, causing a cloud of eons-old dust to billow up around his knees.

  After the engineers picked him up, he pushed them away and paced angrily in the lower gravity, clenching his gloved fists and cussing at himself while he waited for Reuben to bring him home. The characteristic high-pitched noise the arch made only sounded Earth-side, so Amon had to ask over the radio whether Reuben had booted the Translocator up again or not. Reuben responded in the affirmative, but he seemed distracted by the chaos of the event.

  Amon refused to let his fear for Eliana overwhelm him. He treated it like any problem at the company or with his engineering projects: he pinned it down with a fierce conviction and attacked it.

  Trouble was, he didn’t know what to attack. He smacked his helmet with a fist. Think, dammit!

  First of all, he had to believe Eliana was alive. He categorically refused to accept the worst-case scenario. But his wife was nowhere in sight, and only time in his lab spent analyzing the faulty translocation would yield any clues to her whereabouts or…anything else.

  He walked in circles, ignoring sidelong glances from the surface team while he considered the possibilities and variables in play.

  It could have been anything. A loose screw, a bad fitting. The smallest error in a complicated machine had the potential to set off a fatal chain reaction. Picture the faulty o-ring that doomed the space shuttle Challenger to explode shortly after takeoff. With a machine as complex as the Hopper, it could take weeks to deconstruct the problem and come to any real conclusions—or solutions.

  He already felt the relentless pressure of the ticking clock, so he listed off possibilities. The culprit could be improperly calculated destination coordinates, an erratic spike in energy from the particle accelerator, a flaw in the stabilizing arch, a chink in the alloy spheres.

  But that didn’t make sense. The blasted thing had sparked like a Tesla coil when Eliana turned it on. Yet it had made a smooth run immediately before and after—one for the rover and one to send Amon himself to the lunar surface.

  Those runs went fine. So what had gone wrong with Eliana’s? His memory wound back to the moment she had touched the screen, turning at just the right angle to smile at the camera, her fingerprints flattened against the glass. Before the diagnostics started careening off course, her fingers had been zapped by an electric shock—she told him that.

  But then everything had happened so fast. He dropped his head, crushed. He paced to keep a surge of rage from building up.

  Could it have been the ring, the black diamond known as a carbonado? He dismissed the idea immediately. Diamonds are extremely efficient thermal conductors, but they’re electrical insulators—meaning they dampen electrical energy, not enhance it. In other words, a diamond couldn’t have caused the excess energy Amon saw leaping from nodes on the arch.

  He slammed his fist into his helmet on the other side. He needed to see the diagnostics before he could jump to any conclusions. And to do that, he needed to be back on Earth.

  “What the hell is taking so long?” he yelled into his helmet. No one responded. “I’ve been up here for fucking ages!”

  “Sorry, just a minute,” Reuben said. “There’s a bit of a scene down here.”

  “Bring me back.”

  “Uhh…”

  “Do it!”

  The Hopper could only be activated from one end. No magnificent arch or high-tech displays needed to be constructed on the lunar surface. Only a blue-green platform mounted in the ground, recognizable because it was marked with a Fisk Industries sigil, which projected a magnetic field and transmitted coordinates to the machine on Earth.

  Looking down at the bold sans-serif FI engraved in the alloy, Amon thought how arrogant it had been to put his name on the moon like that. It had seemed like a declaration of something important when he’d sent the design to the Lunar Station to have them 3-D print and set it. Now, the dust-blown letters silently mocked his folly.

  The platform’s material glowed softly.

  “Finally,” Amon said. He walked onto the platform without preamble. His stomach lurched at the familiar disorientation, and he found himself back on Earth.

  Pulling off his helmet, he stepped from the sphere into a buzzing throng of reporters.

  Lost in his thoughts, they took him by surprise—the camera lenses, the digital recorders, the handheld devices and booms and mics, all shoved into his face, sucking away the very air. The cold ball of iron in his gut shot off, tearing the tenuous walls of self-control he had established with his logical analysis mere moments before.

  “Mr. Fisk, what went wrong tonight?”

  “Is your wife alive?” Pops, flashes, microphones shoved in his face.

  “Is molecular reassembly truly a safe technology after what we just witnessed?”

  “I…” Amon said. “Um.”

  Amon stammered for a moment, acutely aware of the cameras, before Lucas swooped in to replace him with Fisk Industries’ media liaison, a tall, confident brunette with thick-rimmed glasses.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, “Mr. Fisk won’t be taking any questions at this time. Thank you for coming. We’ll release a statement first thing tomorrow.”

  Grateful he didn’t have to tell the lies himself, Amon let Reuben and Lucas place their arms over his shoulders and lead him inside.

  In the vast underground lab beneath the campus’s quad where the Hopper was kept, Reuben helped Amon out of the bulky spacesuit while the rest of the project team lowered the massive machine down into the lab and began to run diagnostic tests.

  Lucas took phone calls from the internal teleconference line wired into one of the lab’s computers for a while, reassuring the board of directors, various departments within the company, and the heads of several government agencies that everything was under control. But he kept bumping into people while they were trying to work, and eventually he pulled out his cell phone and went upstairs where the signal was stronger.

  “The director of the FBI is calling already? Christ!” Lucas said into the phone as he left the lab. “Fine, fine, put him through.”

  Reuben barked one-word orders at the project team, a selection of the brightest engineering and scientific minds of a generation: four biologists, two biochemists, six astrophysicists, eight engineers, and Reuben, plus Amon himself. Amon dabbled in a little bit of everything, but he knew the depth of experience that came from his team, and he trusted them to do their work faster and better than he could on his own. Reuben, the gruff old sergeant, knew their strengths and weaknesses, how to be demanding and forgiving at all the right times in order to bring out the best in them.

  Someone brought Amon a cup of tea. He sat in his wrinkled tux with the shirt untucked as the mug grew cold in his hands. When the reports had been generated, they laid out the data in rows on the tables, which doubled as digital surfaces, and in navigable gesture-controlled arrays on screens embedded into two walls of the room.

  His team pored over them, comparing notes and rehashing every moment of each translocation earlier that evening. They regrouped to discuss the occasional clarifying question: How did everyone interpret this energy spike here? Could it have occurred at the moment Eliana’s finger came into contact with the display screen? Could her high adrenaline level have had an effect on the disassembly process? They prowled the territory in crisscrossing patterns, scouring it for a clue that would point them in the right direction.

 
When they’d circled around it enough, and Amon finally came to accept that they might as well be tracking down a needle in a haystack—or rather, a single needle in a whole field of haystacks—he called a pause to the hunt.

  “Go home to your families,” he said. “Rest. We’ll regroup in the morning.”

  “It’s 5:30 a.m.,” Reuben said.

  “Is it?”

  The scientists left one by one, patting him on the shoulder. Jeanine, a biochemist, gave him a hug.

  “I’ll be back in two hours,” said Walter, an astrophysicist. “We’ll find her, boss.”

  Amon nodded and forced a smile. When everyone but Reuben was gone, he ran to the nearest trashcan and dry heaved into it. When that passed, he sank against the wall and closed his throbbing eyes.

  The search continued nonstop for two weeks while Lucas desperately maneuvered to keep the media and the government agencies at bay. In the end, the exact destination of Eliana’s reassembly remained unclear. In layman’s terms, the angle and direction of her translocation was obvious, but she’d somehow overshot the mark. They couldn’t make heads or tails of where she ended up, at least not to an exact degree because of the enormous distance she seemed to have covered. They did manage to narrow down her vector to a small patch of sky, a tiny sampling of space that contained millions of stars. But this area hadn’t been extensively mapped by the Kepler Observatory, and to gather that data would take time.

  “Where is she, Reuben?” Amon asked one night when they were the only two left in the lab.

  “Somewhere in that section of sky.”

  “That could be fucking anywhere. How are we supposed to find her?”

  Reuben pursed his lips but remained silent.

  “And that’s assuming she even reassembled at all,” Amon went on, breathing heavy. “What if she’s just dust motes floating through space forever? What if she materialized in the middle of nowhere and froze to death?”

  Reuben’s frown deepened. “Don’t say that.”

  “You and I both know that’s the far more likely scenario. She either exploded in the vacuum, her blood boiling and freezing at the same time—”

  “Stop,” Reuben said between his teeth.

  “—or she never reassembled at all.”

  “Amon…”

  Amon lumbered to his feet as he raised his voice. “Her body was torn into a million little pieces and is doomed to wander the vast nothingness—”

  Amon’s face exploded in pain as Reuben’s fist sailed into his jaw. Amon stared at his friend, stunned.

  “I didn’t want to do that,” Reuben said, “but you need to keep your head on straight.”

  Seething, Amon swallowed blood from a cut on his tongue.

  “It’s the beginning of the end when you start talking like that.” Reuben turned away, shaking his hand out.

  It had been a trying two weeks for everyone, but it occurred to Amon that Reuben wasn’t necessarily talking about Eliana, at least not entirely, and his anger fizzled out. Reuben didn’t like to speak of it, but Amon knew he had put his partner of thirty years in a nursing home last year.

  “Early onset Alzheimer’s,” Reuben had said simply after closing the door to Amon’s office and sitting on the edge of a chair one day.

  ”I’m so sorry,” Amon had said, and meant it. “Anything you need.”

  That had been the end of the conversation, but Amon saw how Reuben spent more time at the lab in recent months, how the skin under his eyes bruised from lack of sleep, and how he kept checking his phone at work. If anyone knew what Amon was going through right now, what it meant to lose a life partner, it was Reuben.

  “I’m sorry,” Amon said, rubbing his jaw. “Damn, you throw a mean right hook.”

  Reuben smirked. “And you thought I was an old putz.”

  “Never.”

  A moment of silence passed.

  “Don’t you want to go home?” Amon asked.

  “I’d rather not.”

  “Me either.”

  Reuben slept on the couch in the lounge beside the kitchenette. Amon gave up trying. Instead, he quieted his mind by keeping his hands busy and tinkered with one of two mobile transponder prototypes he and Reuben had begun testing immediately after the accident.

  Amon would need to carry the transponder with him when he went through after Eliana, since wherever she ended up didn’t have a transponder embedded in the ground like they had at the Lunar Station. The prototype they had thrown together was clunky, the size of an old TV remote, and not even close to functional. Nonetheless, the motions of taking it apart, systematically lining all the pieces up, and then putting it back together again calmed him. It wasn’t sleep, but it worked as a kind of meditation.

  When Reuben woke, he suggested some vitamin D therapy, so they made their way above ground to the café on campus. They sat watching the sun rise through a cool dawn while they ate freshly toasted bagels and sipped hot coffee.

  The campus began to teem with FI employees arriving for work. Instead of returning to the laboratory with Reuben, Amon walked across the quad. Those he passed avoided meeting his eyes. By now, they all knew the story, and his insane hours were often discussed. Those who had been paying attention to murmurings among the executive team also knew that the board of directors had called an all-hands meeting for this morning, and Amon had no choice but to attend.

  5

  Healer, Shaman, Chief

  Abrief flash of light startled Eliana awake. She panicked, casting about for something to grab onto. She came up with handfuls of dried grass, her fingernails scraping stone beneath her.

  The light expanded then shrank back to a sliver, disappearing as a heavy door inched shut. She tried to sit up, but the knotted muscles in her neck prevented her from rising.

  A woman kneeled by her side, the same short, shapely woman she’d approached on the beach. It was difficult to make out her features in the dim light, but Eliana recognized the turquoise-and-seashell necklace and the polished ovals of her jade earrings.

  She struggled to lift herself to her elbows, but the woman put one hand on her chest and pressed her back down, holding a clay mug filled with a warm liquid to Eliana’s lips.

  The acrid concoction gave off a bitter licorice smell with faint undertones of citrus. Eliana struggled, wrinkling her nose and turning away, her cramped neck muscles twitching. But the woman held the back of Eliana’s head with the other hand and forced her to drink. Much of the liquid dribbled down her chin, but some made it into her mouth, quenching her thirst and soothing her raw throat.

  The woman placed the empty cup on the floor and built a small fire with the dry grass while Eliana caught her breath.

  Eliana watched with fascination, wiping the sweat from her feverish brow, as the old lady fed handfuls of something from a dried gourd—likely incense and herbs, Eliana guessed—into the flames.

  As she watched, her eyelids began to droop of their own accord. Whether she was exhausted from the journey to this strange planet, or there had been a sedative mixed into the bitter drink the medicine woman had force fed her, Eliana didn’t know. But the woman didn’t seem to wish her harm.

  She turned her neck straight to ease the pain from her cramped muscles. While the room filled with smoke, she fell back into unconsciousness.

  She dreamed that she had found her way back to the pristine white beach somehow. Amon’s name had been washed out by the waves, and she recognized her location only by the two sticks standing several feet apart like a gateway to nowhere.

  Looking through the gateway, a path opened up into the jungle, a wide road leading into the trees, paved with white stones.

  Curious, Eliana followed it. After she’d gone a few yards, the paving stones began to crack and crumble. They soon gave way to a dirt trail, and when she looked back, the trees had closed in over top of the trail as if it had never existed.

  When she looked forward again, the dirt trail was gone, too. The forest had crowded in around
her so that she was wading through a sea of dense green-and-purple foliage with bright orange-and-blue flowers.

  The sun winked out like God had flipped a switch controlling the heavens. A low growl rumbled from somewhere beneath the impenetrable surface of leaves that coated the jungle floor and buried Eliana to mid-thigh, and two discs opened in the dark sky, bathing the sea of flora in silvery moonlight—the two moons hidden behind the canopy.

  A pair of red glowing eyes dodged around a tree at the edge of the clearing and bobbed through the brush, headed straight for her.

  She booked it in the other direction, arms pumping, back the way she’d come through thick brush, branches smacking her in the face and leaving long scratches.

  The creature yowled into the night as it stalked her. Eliana knew she was not faster than a jungle cat, but she seemed to be staying ahead of it nonetheless, as if the creature maintained that distance for the fun of the chase. Frightened, Eliana ran on.

  Without warning, the tree line ended, and the ground dropped out beneath her. Eliana pulled up, falling to the ground and skidding, her feet extending over the edge of a sheer cliff. Sharp breakers jutted out from the cliff wall into a violently crashing indigo ocean hundreds of feet below. Birds circled beneath her.

  Two moons hung in the sky above the sparkling sea. The bigger of the two was missing a significant portion of the upper right quadrant, as if it had been bitten off by a giant set of gnashers. Its jagged edge dripped. It was bleeding.

  Eliana spun, staring into the red gemstone eyes of an oversized jaguar. Her hands scrabbled back over the edge of the cliff, desperately seeking purchase but finding only air.

  The jaguar licked its lips.

  Eliana jumped up, panting, and retreated into a cold corner. She shivered and wrapped her thin body in her gooseflesh-covered arms.

  As her breathing returned to normal and the terror that crossed the bridge of consciousness from her dream subsided, Eliana inspected the room she occupied. Instead of the thick foliage of a dense jungle, four bare limestone walls surrounded her, and a wooden slat door barred the only exit. Eliana put a finger into the pile of cold ashes where the woman had burned the incense. She had no concept how long ago she had last awoken, but the air had cleared. The clay mug sat on the floor where it had been left.