The Green Planet

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

I did.

Over the hiss of the airlock breaching.

Over the claxons sounding at every station.

Over the beating of my fists on that hatch, howling at that round glass window... and watching Reggie get pulled at incredible speed into the cold emptiness of this green planet’s insane gravity well.

He was gone in a flash, like he was yanked from our ship on purpose. And I know it’s impossible, but I heard him scream as he went.

Then it was quiet. Deathly quiet. I couldn’t hear the alarms. I couldn’t hear the computer. And I damn sure couldn’t hear the blood dripping from my hands as it hit the plate metal deck of our ship. For a long time afterwards, I was encased in silence and tears and blurry, flashing red and yellow lights.

I still hear that scream, sometimes. It comes unannounced and freezes me solid, just like Reggie. I feel myself in his place, filled with the quick blooming of unimaginably cold pain, every tiny nerve raging for a split-second while I scream and I scream with everything I’ve got, and I near-instantly solidify into a body-shaped block of ice… and only then the sound of it stops.

I watch as I burn when the atmosphere incinerates me. Or sometimes I keep falling, frozen in place with one hand outstretched, falling through those ugly green clouds of the exosphere. Falling until my body smashes into a million pieces on impact with its unknown surface.

I hate this place.

A month has passed since that scream. I’ve ignored every communications ping from the Company, every incoming transmission the computer goads me to watch. They take 3 weeks at the speed of light to get here, as if that makes them somehow important, but I don’t care; I have a job to do.

I’m gonna find out what happened.

I begin with a full inspection of the Santiago, all systems hard and soft. After bandaging my torn-up fingers, I spend a week pulling this old dinghy apart trying to figure out how any malfunction could have managed the impossible; putting Reggie, dressed in his old-fashioned blue jeans and a grey-striped T-shirt, into the airlock and expelling him into space.

It wasn’t the ship.

This makes me really mad, furious in fact. I literally see red as the realization sweeps over me; if it wasn’t a malfunction, then it’s gotta be the Company.

Reggie must’ve discovered something… or maybe he fell out with that fish-eyed mannequin, Draper, our primary interface to corporate. Hell, it could be simple espionage, or we got bought out without me knowing. Captain’s prerogative and all that… and we’re just the fallout. Cost of doing business.

I want to smash every COMM panel onboard, destroying everything in my path, but I manage to calm myself, just enough, by walking it off. I pace our three decks for hours with one thought rolling over and over in my mind, ‘I’m gonna figure this out and get those bastards.’

So, I carefully work my way through every single entry in the entire ship’s systems, even from before we took control of it. Day after artificial day I scrape every log, every mission communication the computer has stored up in memory, every sensor ping this bucket ever took, and nothing.

My anger goes flat, and I grimly execute a long, full sweep looking for any external telemetry, any possible kind of remote-control or top-secret signal buried in our communications net… and more nothing.

I eat and I sleep, and I sit in the med bay and think.

It’s sad, but finally I have to consider that maybe, just maybe, he did it on purpose. Like, no way was it an accident, and as much as I hate them now, this wasn’t the Company’s doing either.

I don't know, maybe I always hated them. But Reggie was my Captain and I was his Tech. And I know I idealized him. Hell, we’d been together for almost ten years: since he was a midshipman and me an apprentice. We’d always been friendly, so I followed him up the ladder and finally, onto this two-man secret mission to the edge of nowhere. But as infallible as he seemed, he was a human being just like the rest of us.

The Santiago is an older, smallish cargo vessel, fitted out as a kind of deep-space research/recon platform, and Reggie was the only other soul on board. His tiny cabin smells stale, and I'm an interloper somehow disturbing it's dignity. Quietly, I go through all his personal effects, even his mail.

It takes a full day and a half, and by the end I feel like part of his family. I cry for a bit, he seemed so happy and he had it all. This was his third full command, one of the youngest captains in the fleet. He had his whole career ahead of him. And his kid just had a birthday. I watched that video a dozen times hoping it held a clue, maybe something in his wife’s eyes or the tone of her voice.

Still, nothing.

Now, with no other options left, I’m EVA on the far side of the ship’s hull, just aft of engineering, making my way carefully to the place where it happened. I had to use the tiny emergency airlock, and only one thing kept me from completely losing it when I climbed in and shut that door behind me: the fact that I’m running out of time.

It won’t take long for the Company to consider us both KIA and send another ship to clean up our mess. And when they find me out here alone, you can bet your ass it’s gonna be mine that pays the price.

Slowly, I snap my next lanyard to the stanchion before me, and only after testing it twice do I release the one I was attached to before. I take a breath, smelling my own sweat layered on a hundred layers of older sweat, all mixed up with the stale scent of Reggie. My jaw clenches a little, and I think, ‘This might take an hour, but I’m getting there.’

I look up at this enigma we’re orbiting.

It’s an ugly green swirl of impenetrable quiet, just sitting there 3,000 kilometers below me, like it’s mocking me. Readings show something massively dense at its core, denser than anything physical ever encountered. They have no idea what it is, or what it’s made of, but it’s so heavy and so compact its pulling at me and the tiny Santiago with the force of a star.

That’s why we’re going so fast, and why this little ship is half engine and minimal crew.

‘Screw you’ I mutter and look back down.

We’re rotating to maintain gravity inside the ship, and that makes an EVA a dangerous and gut-churning experience. Because of our rotation, the planet looks like it’s actually circling us, not the other way around. So, I keep my eyes on the hull and hold down the urge to retch in my suit. All the training in the universe can’t stop this feeling, or the buttery taste that appears on the back of my tongue; it’s biology.

‘Human biology,’ I remind myself.

Another slow breath, a few slow steps, and I let out the line hand over hand as I go.

No wonder the Company is so interested in getting its hands on whatever’s down there. It’s gonna take military-grade mining gear, like the drones stashed in our cargo bay, to even try to get a sample… which is why we’re here in the first place, of course.

Then they would be the only ones to have it. No telling what they could use it for, and no one can ever know where it came from.

Companies live and die by such secrets, and so do crews.

I remember the day Draper brought us into a soundproof, electronically shielded conference room and made us sign 30-page non-disclosures, and then lied to our families about our destination. Obviously we knew it was dangerous, and the hazard pay was the highest I ever heard of. But Reggie just heard the word danger and signed right up, like without a second thought.

Me? I go where the Captain goes, that’s all I ever cared about, anyway. And this, this… this THING – whatever it’s worth or whatever kind of weapon they think they can make from it – well, it just took everything away from me.

One hand over the other, each foot magnetically adhering to the hull with every slow step I take, I make my way past the lateral sensor array and finally, I’m there.

Here.

I reach out in slow motion, like time itself has dilated, and take the airlock handles, one in each hand. I step to my right, first one foot, and then the other.

I breathe.

I plant my feet on the hull, and the brief thrum in my lower legs lets me know I'm clamped on tight. I feel the planet looking over my shoulder as I grip my hands tighter, and I raise my eyes.

Nothing.

Not. A. Thing. The airlock itself looks fine, there’s just no outer doorway. It’s just gone, like it was never there at all. And there’s no scratches, no debris, and no sign of a blowout. Even the emergency casing is sitting there, defiantly bright red, like it’s ready when I’ll need it.

Slowly I do a clockwise visual, then an even slower counter. I feel a coldness settle into my gut and a low ringing in my ears. Breath fogs the bottom of my faceplate a little, messing with my HUD. I look inside and pull myself forward.

The planet is beginning to wane but still watching carefully as I enter the empty airlock bay.

More nothing.

In fact, every light on every panel in this little square hatch is ‘Green for Go’ across the board.

I spin around, looking everywhere, looking for anything… and start to panic. And I’m panicking because I’m a pretty logical person; I know this leaves only two possibilities, two possible explanations.

One is that I did it. I killed Reggie and just don’t remember. A fight over the money? Ridiculous. If it was disease, why am I fine? Was it self-defense? Space madness or something else entirely? I don’t know, maybe there are clues back onboard.

But of course, then there’s the other possibility. The one where Reggie doesn’t exist… That I’m out here all alone, bouncing around in a tin can reading my own emails and watching videos from my own wife and kid. Living a premonition of something I might do to myself. Investigating a crime of my own mind.

And the only way to find out for sure is to talk to the Company.

I think about that for a moment, imagining dead-eyed Draper looking at me, chuckling with his dry cough, knowing I’m a madman either way… possibly a dead man. Murder On Board. Of a Captain, no less. Class A Felony with only one outcome. I shake my head; I know I’m lost.

I hear the scream.

It’s hard and it’s primal and it rips right through me, twisting as it goes, from the bottom up, consuming me, freezing me, releasing me.

But this time, I swear there’s a hint of a laugh in it. It’s quiet and it’s evil, but it’s in there and I heard it.

I look up… I mean down…

I stop and take a long, slow breath. My heart is hammering, my chest is wrapped in a band of iron. I look at that ugly green planet, knowing two things True as True deep in my bones.

I hate this place.

And there’s another possibility.