Star Rider

Nobody can hear a scream in the vacuum of space, or so they say.

Maybe that’s why I didn’t hear myself scream when I saw the first missiles fly across the lower atmosphere of the Earth.

By Earth time, it’s been more than a year since that happened. I haven’t kept track of exactly how long. But the few of us on this ship measure time by the distance passed, and we have since put the asteroid belt behind us. The storms of Jupiter rage closer and closer in front of us every day.

By our Earthly timeline that would be more than a year. At least as much as I can remember.

“You know,” Commander Ranjan once told me. “I always thought it was strange that they didn’t launch the missiles until we were doing our second passage over Earth.”

She and I were sitting near the botany wing, me her erstwhile assistant helping her to trim the juniper leaves she was trying to grow in the ship’s artificial atmosphere.

“Maybe they wanted to put on a show for us,” I say. I expected a harsh rebuke from her. Commander Chameli Ranjan had many qualities, but black humor was not one of them.

But, instead, she looked up with a soft, distant expression on her face. “I mean, you were the only one watching.”

I think of a snarky reply but say nothing. I sensed she had more to say.

“But,” she continues. “I’ve had some time to think about it. I wonder if they weren’t trying to put on a show for us, but were instead waiting for us to appear to them.”

She snips a leaf without looking at it. I scratched my head. “What do you mean?”

“Well, think about it, Reg,” she says. “They had our communications. They knew we were making our second pass on Earth. Maybe they wanted to make sure that there was still going to be something left of humanity beyond the stars. Something that would carry on. Just enough satisfaction for them to pull the trigger on themselves.”

She snipped another leaf. “So to speak.”

In the Earth months that followed that conversation, I’ve thought about it every day cycle.

Not that I’m sleeping much these days.

In front of me, the lights on the ship begin to brighten in a soft, orange-colored tone. This signifies the coming of “dawn,” insofar as the ship was programmed to match the 24-hour time cycle of Earth. For the past several months all members of the crew have more or less fallen into a predictable daily rhythm. Julia, Jingjing, and Nikolai will be in their sleeping quarters trying to fight for as much additional sleep as they can. Shmuley will be in the dining capsule to get first dibs on the coffee rations before heading off the to communication panels in another attempt to find any contact with Earth. Hans is something of a wildcard, though he would most likely be in the virtual reality deck going through some esoteric holographic program. Or, perhaps in the storage unit that he had since converted into a makeshift chapel where he silently worships whatever god he has created out of the vacuum of space.

And then there Chameli, the mission commander, and me, the humble technician, sitting up as we do most nights in the botany wing, watching the vast red and brown and beige atmosphere of Jupiter growing with each “morning” cycle.

“Three days until Europa is at perihelion,” she says.

“I know,” I say. This ritual plays out between us almost every morning.

“That means seven days until we reach its orbit,” she says.

I rub my eyes. “That was a week on Earth, right?”

She sends me a side glance with an expression that I don’t try to read. “You need to be reminded?”

“Well,” I continue. “Once we land we’ll need to come up with a whole new time cycle. Not only that, a new calendar, new seasons, new everything.”

“I know,” she says.

In this brief dialog is the entire world as it now exists.

•

The day the missiles flew was June 19th on Earth. I do remember that distinctly. It was nine months since we first left Earth for Europa. Our course would first take us in the direction of the Sun. Our ship, small at first, was meant to fall into the Sun’s gravitational field. Then, as we neared the orbit of Mercury, we would unfurl the ship’s vast solar sails, our massive shimmering wings that exceeded the total surface volume of the rest of the ship by nearly a hundredfold. These sails caught the furious current of photos shooting from the surface of the Sun, converting their momentum into velocity, and carrying our ship outwards into the farther reaches of the solar system at incalculable speeds, carried by the solar winds like driftwood carried by a tidal wave.

And before we got to Europa, this course would carry us past Earth once more. Mission control had arranged it so that the ship would be caught in the gravitational pull of the Earth, which it would then use to slingshot its way towards Jupiter. This slingshot gave us a little over two Earth days in which we fell into Earth’s orbit, closer than the moon, in proximity to the layer of satellites encircling the Earth’s surface.

Chameli, as mission commander, had planned an entire event with the authorities back on Earth. We were meant to join in on conference calls with school children all across the world. We were meant to talk with heads of state, Nobel Peace Prize winners, billionaires, and celebrities. Our message to Earth would be broadcast in over a hundred languages. According to Julia, some pop star who had risen to fame after we had departed had even written a chart-topping hit about us, which would be performed live at 7 PM Greenwich Mean Time. As cheesy as the whole thing was, I would be lying if I said we weren’t all looking forward to it, especially since it would be our last significant taste of life on Earth before spending eleven months floating through space towards the moons of Jupiter. And then another three years before we would return to our native planet.

Or so we thought.

As it so happened, the day we were meant to encircle the Earth in geosynchronous orbit, one of the solar panels on the exterior of the ship sustained minor damage from a collision with an out-of-commission telecom satellite. This was not a critical problem, but Chameli didn’t want to sit too long on it. And so, on the day when the entire crew was supposed to endure 24 hours of celebration from the entire human population on Earth, I was sent out on a space walk to repair the panel. In my dimmest memories, I remember floating there through space, stuck in my bulky space suit, tethered to the lifelines back to the ship. I listened for Julia’s voice through my headset as she gave me updates on what was going on during the Earthly celebrations.

And I remember, despite all my professionalism and sense of duty, the dark vein of resentment that I could bury deep in my consciousness, but not ignore.

So there I floated, watching the nuclear white of the Earth’s surface as it reflected the sunlight that pushed my ship forward. Half-paying attention to my repairs of the solar panel while I listened to Julia’s updates in my ear.

“So, we’re having some technical difficulties, it seems, over,” she said. Her soft, posh British accent seemed to convey both annoyance and ruthless etiquette. I rolled my eyes.

“If you don’t distract me, I might be done in time to catch India, over,” I said.

“It’s strange,” Julia continued. She didn’t seem to be paying attention to me. “We’re supposed to be patched in with NASA, but we’re just getting an error pattern. Like the system’s gone dead.”

“NASA must have pissed off their IT department, the nerds,” I said. But something in Julia’s voice left an unspecified feeling of ill foreboding descending through my chest.

“Wait,” she said. In the background, I heard Chameli’s voice cut into the feed. I couldn’t make out her words, but her tone sounded urgent. “Wait a minute.”

“What is it?” I asked.

“Hold on, over.” Then the line went dead.

In my sudden isolation in the abyss of space, I considered making a wisecrack to myself and the billions of people below me. Instead, I blinked.

And that’s when I saw the first missile fly.

It ascended through the clouds like a liquid flame, carrying a burning trail of smoke and condensation clouds behind it. Soon dozens more joined it. Then hundreds. All erupting from different points on the globe, ascending in a flat arc above the clouds, into the stratosphere, reaching for the boundaries of space where they could break against the gravitational pull of their planet and join us, harmless, in the freedom of space.

One who still prayed may have asked for that.

But each remembered their place and began the second half of their arcs as they descended back to the surface of the Earth, reaching to make their impact at their predetermined location.

And so I watched the first warheads go off, one by one, across my home planet, the millions and millions of megatons of nuclear force bursting in a millisecond, dwarfing the fires of the sun and sending rings of shockwaves expanding across the Earth’s surface like ripples expanding from a stone thrown in still water.

And my only thought was that I had never seen anything more beautiful.

•

Within the hour Julia joined Chameli and me in the botany wing.

“Commander Ranjan,” she said. “Reg.”

Chameli and I both nodded in response without saying anything.

“Just wanted to let you know that Shmuley was unable to make any contact with Earth over the communication lines.”

This line had become part of our morning ritual as well. Shmuley, our communications officer, had not been able to get any word from Earth since the missiles first flew all those months ago.

“I see,” Chameli said. “Anything else?”

Julia bit her lip. “I just thought I would say…”

She trailed off. I glanced up and saw a pensive expression creep across her face.

“Yes?” Chameli asked. She kept her gaze directed at her plants.

“Well, Commander, I wanted to ask…we are going to be approaching Europa within seven Earth days, correct?”

Chameli picked a wayward flower from one of her lilac plants. “Based on the current navigational estimates, yes.”

Julia nodded. I sensed something clawing at the back of her mouth, trying to get out into the open. “Commander, may I request to speak freely?”

“You always can,” Chameli said. Her voice bore no hint of emotion, good or bad.

“Very well,” Julia said. She hesitated, sending a glance in my direction. Though what help she thought I could offer her…

“It’s been almost one Earth year since we left Earth’s orbit, correct?”

“Yes,” Chameli said.

“And during that time, we have not had any kind of significant discussion of what we’re going to do.”

Chameli gently placed her lone lilac flow on the metal floor of the ship and finally looked up to meet Julia’s gaze. “We’re going to do what our mission requires us to do,” she said. “We are going to land on Europa and engage in a scientific search for extraterrestrial life.”

Julia scowled. “That’s not what I meant…”

She trailed off again. Chameli stood up. “Well, what did you mean.”

Anger began to creep into Julia’s expression. “How can you not know what I mean?” she said. Her voice was louder. “I know denial is tempting, given the situation, but you have to know…”

“I am the Mission Commander,” Chameli cut in. “I know everything that I have to know.”

Julia’s lips curled. “So you know that there’s a very solid likelihood that we’re the last humans left alive in the universe?”

Chameli said nothing. I wanted to leave, but going anywhere else on the ship would likely involve running into Hans or the others, and that seemed like an even worse prospect.

“We don’t know that,” Chameli said at last.

“You saw the missiles flying!” she cried. It took me a few seconds to realize she was talking to me.

“Well,” I began.

“We all know what we saw,” Chameli interrupted. I was eternally grateful, though I figured the respite would be temporary. “We have had no direct information from Earth one way or another.”

“Why the hell would we get direct communication if everyone on Earth is dead in a nuclear holocaust?” Julia shouted.

Chameli’s lip curled towards her nose, but her tone remained calm and controlled. “We will wait for Shmuley to continue his attempts at communication. At the moment we do not know…”

“Are we going to try and return to Earth in the dim hopes it’s not a post-apocalyptic wasteland?!” Julia shouted. “Are we going to stay on Europa and try to restart human civilization?”

Chameli dropped her clippers in the artificial soil on the ground and turned her face away from Julia, towards the digital rendering of the view from the exterior of the ship that was displayed on the wall in front of us. I had known Chameli for almost five years, Earth time. Even before we launched, the entire crew had spent three years together in mission preparation. During that time, I had come to learn the various nuances of her facial expressions, and the stoic exterior that she maintained in both calm and stormy weather.

And I knew the first signs of cracks appearing in her poker face.

The tremble of the veins above her right eye. The involuntary snarl of her lip. The widening of her nostrils as she sucked more and more of our artificial air into her aggrieved lungs.

Still, her voice remained composed. “At the moment we have all information we need to fulfill our mission obligations to land on Europa. Once we have achieved our initial objectives, we will be able to assess our situation further and make further plans at that time.”

“Assess our situation?” Julia barked. “We’ve had a good year to assess the fact that our species decided that our absence from Earth was the best time to launch a nuclear war, and now…”

“As I said,” Chameli interrupted. Her voice was of a louder volume. “We have all information…”

“What is there to assess…”

I took that as good an excuse as any to creep out of the botany wing and into the (hopefully) empty corridors elsewhere in the ship.

•

When I was a child, my mother would sometimes sing me a song before I went to bed. She had a few she like to sing, mostly older folk songs or chart-toppers from when she was young herself. But one song in particular always stood out. I never saw or heard it anywhere else. And before she died I never thought to ask her where she had gotten it from. If it was some hidden family secret or something entirely of her creation. The mysterious origins of the song went to the grave with her. But ever since we left earth and its ascending mushroom clouds, the song, filtered through my mother’s soft, slightly off-key voice, has been drifting through my thoughts more and more.

Star rider

Shine down on me.

Bring me jewels of moonlight,

From the lunar sea.

I’ll leave my window open

And you can take my hand

And we’ll ride the stars together

Away from weeping lands,

Star rider…

That song played in my head as I enter the ship’s dining hall.

Nikolai and Jingjing were already there, sitting in the narrow, sterile metal booths and sucking up freeze-dried breakfast of some form or another. I gave a brief nod to both before slithering over to the coffee tube in the dim hope that any was left.

“Heard Commander and Julia arguing about something,” Nikolai said. Though English was the official language of the mission, Nikolai’s thick Russian accent hadn’t improved much over the year and a half we’ve been on the ship.

“It’s nothing,” I said. Given the efficiency of space on the ship, there were few places where anyone can speak without risking others’ hearing. Let alone argue.

Across the table, Jingjing looked up from her breakfast capsule. “Did you talk to Julia?” she asked.

“Talked?” I said. There was no coffee left, as I had feared. “Not really, why?”

“Hans wanted to see her.”

I swallowed as best I could in the artificial gravity. “Did Hans even come out of his little church yet?”

Jingjing flashed an ominous expression towards Nikolai, who dropped his eyes down to his food. “I ran into him last night, in the medical unit.”

“The medical unit?” I asked. “Did he injure himself?”

“Not that I could tell,” Jingjing said. Her voice held a slight reserve to it, as though she was trying to convey something for me to pick up without having to say it out loud. “He just wanted to see if I knew where Julia was.”

“And he came to the medical unit for that?” I asked. In lieu of any coffee, I grabbed one of the remaining breakfast capsules without bothering to check what was in it and sat down at the table. “It’s not a very big ship, and there aren’t exactly many other places to go.”

“No,” Jingjing said. Nikolai brought his eyes back up to hers with a crude Russian glare. “He asked you something else, no?”

Jingjing’s face dropped. “I mean…”

“He wanted to know what we should do if a crew member has a ‘psychotic break,’ is that not what you told me?”

“No,” Jingjing said with a bit more force than usual. “I mean, not exactly that.”

“Is what you told me,” Nikolai said in a mute, stoic tone.

I glanced over. “He was the one asking about psychotic breaks? Like, with us?”

“No, no,” Jingjing attempted. “Not in those words…”

Nikolai snorted. “Did you ask him about that church he build out of cargo? Maybe we should be asking about him.”

Jingjing shot Nikolai as piercing glare as her calm physician’s exterior would allow. “No one is having a psychotic break, ok? He simply wanted to learn the details of the mission’s protocols for the psychological health of the crew. That’s all.”

“Duct tape!” Nikolai said abruptly.

“What?”

“We bind them with duct tape. When one of us have a ‘psychotic break.’ We bind them with duct tape and lock them in one of the cargo holds until they come to their senses.”

Jingjing shook her head. “That’s not the protocol…”

Nikolai slurped the rest of his breakfast capsule. “And what do you know? You are a surgeon. Not a head doctor. You know nothing of the human mind.”

Jingjing clutched the table in a failing attempt to keep her cool. “I had extensive training in psychiatry before we departed Earth, you know that…”

“Ah, they teach you how to use duct tape, then?” Nikolai snorted.

“No!”

“Can we all just stop fighting?” The voice cut in from the outside corridor. I turned and saw Julia enter with a forlorn expression. Her hair was unkempt and her cheeks looked wet with tears, though she kept her British stiff upper lip intact.

“Morning,” Nikolai said. His voice allowed no acknowledgment of any social unpleasantness.

“Can we stop calling it morning, at the very least?” she sighed.

“We were chatting about duct tape,” Nikolai said. Jingjing rubbed her eyes.

“Great subject,” Julia said. “Anyway, I was just having a lovely chat with Commander Ranjan about our plans when we arrive on Europa. I’m sure all of you heard.”

“No,” Jingjing said.

“Yes,” Nikolai said.

I said nothing.

“Anyway,” Julia continued. “After my nice little chat with Commander Ranjan, she and I agree that…”

Her voice trailed off in a sudden, wayward breath.

“Yes,” I began. Then I caught sight of her eyes. She was looking up across the dining unit, towards the passageway leading to the other corridor.

There, bracing himself on the support handles in the ship’s inconsistent artificial gravity, was Hans. His small face, perched in a balding, round head, scanned the room, seeming to capture his human crewmates with as much attention as he gave the inanimate objects.

“Hello,” Julia managed.

Hans nodded without looking at her. “Dr. Winnfield.”

Hans Reichert was the ship’s engineering specialist. When I first met him back on Earth, he was a studious, unflappable, impossibly logical electrical engineer who served as the European Space Agency’s lone contribution to the crew of the Europa mission. With his polished German accent and the chronic humorless tone in his voice, he, of all of us, seemed to be the most professional, the least flappable, and, above all, the one who would remain the calmest and most efficient under pressure.

So it figures that he’d be the first one to crack.

Not that anyone had yet had cause to say that out loud. At least not yet. But ever since the nuclear war broke out on Earth, his behavior had become concerning enough to warrant a few passing whispers between the rest of the crew on the “Hans situation.” When he began to spend more and more time by himself in the virtual reality simulator, none of us paid much mind. God knows we had more than enough to worry about on our own. We could always assume that each of us had our ways of coping with the situation, and, so long as he wasn’t a harm to himself, to others, or the mission as a whole, we were more than happy to let him has as much time as he wanted in artificial reality.

But then came the strange pronouncements. The vaguely religious prophecies. The bizarre musing on hearing “the voice of God” in the radio waves beaming through space and captured in the ship’s virtual reality program. And when he began to build his “church” in the cargo hold, Chameli had cause to ask Jingjing for a review of the mission’s psychiatric protocols.

“I was looking for you, Dr. Winnfield,” Hans said. “I don’t know if Dr. Fan had told you.”

Jingjing dropped her eyes nervously. Julia rubbed the back of her head.

“Well, I’m here, if you want to chat,” she said.

Hans turned his gaze to me. “I had wanted to see you as well Dr. Elias.”

“Reg, please,” I sputtered. “I’m not a doctor.”

“I think we’re all doctors at this point,” Hans said. “We might as well assume that authority for ourselves, no? You of all the billions of humans there once were had the best view of humanity’s climax and dénouement, so to speak.”

I felt something tightening in my throat. “I wouldn’t put it like that…”

“What did you want?” Julia said.

“I had a vision,” Hans said. By his tone, he could have been telling us that he found an extra bit of chocolate in his desert ration.

“A vision,” Julia said. Jingjing looked around nervously, while Nikolai made no noticeable expression.

Hans nodded. “In the virtual reality simulator. I would once more recommend it to all of you. The things I’ve seen there.”

Julia cast a glance at the remaining three of us in the room. I dropped my eyes down to the floor.

“I’ve been in there plenty of time,” Julia began. “It’s very nice, of course. But I have work to do out here…”

“I saw an angel,” Hans interjected.

“…er, pardon?” Julia said.

Hans smiled. With his thin lips and too-small face, the smile jutted out of his head at an almost cruel angle, like a splinter.

“An angel. It appeared to me. It wielded a great sword, forged from starlight and ice. It comes to draw us home.”

Julia frowned. “That’s very nice, and all. But, you said you wanted to speak with me. And, if I may be frank, I am not much interested in angels, or any such…”

“Everyone!” Chameli’s voice radiated above everything else and echoed off the metal walls of the dining unit. We all turned our heads at once, save for Hans who remained smiling with his too-small smile into the empty center of the room.

Chameli stood in the doorway. Her expression was calm and professional, though tinges of something deeper seemed to seep from the depths of her eyes. She held a neat bunch of lilac flowers in her hand. In the artificial gravity, they seemed to sway as if in a breeze.

“What?” Julia asked.

Without words, Chameli walked over to the control panels on the left-most wall of the dining unit. The command center opened to the display page. Within a few seconds, the entire wall lit up with the image from the hi-res camera at the front of the ship. The vast, twirling bands of Jupiter encompassed the entire wall, so vast it seemed as if the planet’s bulk would burst through the ship’s outer structure and suck us into the vacuum of space.

“So?” Nikolai said. “Is Jupiter. We’ve seen it.”

“No, look,” Jingjing said.

Across the vast, twisting storms of Jupiter’s gaseous mass was the empty blackness of space. Then, in an instant, the yellow form of Saturn rose from the outer edge of its sibling’s curvature. Saturn caught the sunshine and sent a blinding flare of irradiating light firing in all directions. My eyes instinctively squinted. But, through my pained eyelids, I could still see enough to notice the single, black dot appearing as it was caught in the reflected sunlight. A small, circular moon, dwarfed by the vast gas giant it orbited, but suddenly the only solid object anywhere around us for millions of miles. It hung on the sunlight as if it flew across the very engines of dawn on wings lighter than the vacuum of space itself.

So caught up was I in the image, I didn’t notice Hans move next to me until I heard him speak.

“There it is,” he said. Without looking at him I could tell that his splinter-smile had only grown larger. “Our angel.”

In front of us, the circle hovered so close I felt I could reach through the impossible distances that still separated us and pluck it from the air, hold on to its gravity, and fly away into the sunlight and the endless universe beyond.

“Europa,” I said.