17 March 2171 AD

Desolate, distant space. Distant from Earth, relatively speaking. But now, Proxima Centauri was local space, and Earth had become the distant body.

The Daedalus floated silently through the void at forty thousand miles per hour against the beautiful backdrop of the Large Magellanic Cloud, the immense galactic cluster that looked – to the naked eye - just the same in Proxima as it did on Earth. All functions on board the ship were on standby, using up as little power as possible without compromising mission parameters.

The internal computers had been waiting for one hundred and fifteen years. Nearly six generations spent ticking over on a regenerating power supply, counting up to one single moment.

All this time, the Daedalus had been a cocoon. A hibernation capsule that protected the people within from the hostile space outside.

A time capsule.

A precarious existence.

Aboard the Daedalus a computerised timer loop reached a numerical value and an internal circuit triggered a program to load. At that moment, the entire mission hinged on whether that timer worked. Had the trigger not kicked in, Frank’s fears at the start of the mission would have been realised. But of course he would never know it. The entire crew of the Daedalus would have remained in cryogenic sleep forever, the origin of the signal from Proxima would never have been known, and they would float endlessly into the distant reaches of space.

The program loaded, and a monitor came on in the cryogenics module. If anyone had been there to see the screen, they would have read the words:

ISOE LOG ITEM 17154A: 217103170001

CRYO-SUBJECT GUNTHER: THAW INITIALISED

But at the moment, everyone was asleep.

The Daedalus’s onboard computer had kicked into life, and was now beginning to increase the temperature in the habitable areas of the ship to twenty degrees centigrade. A hissing sound was barely audible over the hum of the Daedalus’s machinery as the vents pumped oxygen into the accommodation and cryogenic modules. Once the oxygen reached a breathable level, a secondary routine triggered the mechanism on Harold Gunther’s cryogenic pod door. It slid open and to the side. Within four hours, the science officer would wake up.

25 April 2171 AD

Pulled back from the icy precipice. The first thing Frank could feel was the cold. The temperature suit, which was designed to alter and monitor his heat levels during cryogenic sleep, was warming slowly, steadily increasing his body’s overall temperature until he could feel the heated blood coursing through his veins.

Behind his closed eyelids, he could see coloured flashes of light. This time they were in his head, and his eyes were slowly becoming accustomed to light filtering through his eyelids.

He could hear the crashing sound of his blood pumping through his inner ear. His heart rate was still very low, and he felt weak.

He tried to move his right hand, it was incredibly stiff, but after a few moments of effort he felt his fingers curling inward.

Thoughts began to form in his head. A dim realisation of where he was, and disjointed ideas of why he was so cold.

He fought to open his eyes. Slowly he pulled them apart, sticky from a century’s worth of sleep, even though the pod’s hygiene jets had cleaned them regularly.

Objects tried to swim into focus through the tiny slits of his eyes. All that greeted him was a foggy view of the inside of his

cryogenics pod. Beyond it, the flashing lights on the monitors on the other side of the room, but nothing more coherent than that was being processed by his brain.

He had no strength. He knew it would come back to him eventually, but at the moment, all he could manage were very basic movements, which required all of his concentration.

His first big breath tasted strange, the slightly medicinal air caught the back of his throat and he coughed and wretched. Then he took a second breath, which went down much better.

Frank was able to consider the irony. His body had been ticking over unconsciously for the last hundred and fifteen years, but as soon as his conscious mind took over the reigns, he fell at the first hurdle, unable to process the air that he had been breathing slowly for so long.

He tried harder to regulate his breathing, and after a couple of minutes, he felt much better. He turned his attention onto the task of getting himself out of the cryogenics pod.

As soon as this thought occurred to him, he heard faint beep off to the left and the frosted glass front of the pod began to slide

outwards and to the side to reveal Dr James Clarke standing over him.

James Clarke was the first medical officer aboard the Daedalus. Born in London, England in 2023, he was now at the ripe old age of one hundred and sixty-one, though he looked no more than forty.

‘Commander Chambers’, whispered Dr Clarke.

Frank fluttered his eyelids a little to blink away excess water.

‘Good Morning sir, welcome to Proxima Centauri,’ said James.

It took a few moments for realisation to dawn on Frank. He rubbed his eyes and stared intently at James.

‘We made it.’

‘Yes sir, we’ve made it, and you look like you need a haircut. I’m afraid I also have some very sad news.’

‘What news, Dr Clarke’ said Frank in a half whisper.

‘It’s Harold sir. I’m afraid he’s dead.’

Janice Taylor couldn’t sleep. For some reason, tonight of all nights, her first night out of the pod, she found herself thinking about Mike.

She climbed out of bed and moved over to the small cupboard near the door. Opening it, she took out Mike’s wedding ring.

The officials had removed it from his body after they had cut him out of the wreckage.

Why had he been so stupid?

Her husband had been dismissed from the Space Foundation for releasing sensitive data to the media about the signal. An inquest had later heard that, according to the data transfer logs, unsolicited information had been transmitted from Mike’s comms unit at the Outpost on a number of occasions.

The transfers had been tracked to the Bradley Robertson Media Company in Sydney, Australia.

It became evident that the two gentlemen had had a long standing ‘arrangement’ whereby sensitive data would be sent down from the moon by Mike in order to give Bradley Robertson a head start on any Space Foundation stories that came to light. In return, Mike would get a head start on the ladder to win a place on the Europa seismic mission. Ironically, the mission had been cancelled anyway.

Bradley Robertson was fined seventeen billion dollars for professional misconduct, and Mike Taylor was jailed for three years.

A couple of weeks after he was released, Mike’s car was found at the bottom of a ravine in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. He had plummeted four hundred metres off the cliff after his brakes had failed.

The circumstances, it was concluded, were not suspect.

But Janice was convinced that Bradley Robertson was behind Mike’s death. She had campaigned for several months to try and incriminate the trillionaire, but her voice was too small against the clout of the world’s biggest media empire.

Once the Daedalus project had got underway, and she had applied to be on the spacecraft crew, she knew she had to stop making noises about Mike’s death and the Taylor Inquest. She was ruffling too many feathers and making a bad name for herself, and that had to change if she was to stand any change of being accepted onto the team.

She had ultimately won a place on the mission. But she knew deep down that part of her successful application to be on the Daedalus was because she was female, and she fitted nicely into the balanced gender criteria that the Space Foundation were adhering to.

Still, with the circumstances of her acceptance aside, she was in a unique position, serving her country and her species. But, more importantly to her, she was serving her late husband, whom she still loved with all of her heavy heart. She was now on the team that was investigating the signal that her husband found. She was - in a strange, convoluted way - trying to make some sense of his untimely

death.

She had brought a lot of his belongs with her. In the realm of astronautics she knew she was lucky. Because of the design process of the Daedalus – with most of it built in space - she and her crewmates had been allowed to bring a lot of personal items with them onto the ship. It had to be this way of course. The Space Foundation couldn’t pack up a bunch of people and haul them to the other side of the solar system (and beyond) without allowing them to take a fair sized cache of personal belongings with them.

So Janice felt that Mike was with her now. Joining her on the investigation of a lifetime - or two lifetimes, for their journey was so long. Travelling to see what it was that started all of this.

6 May 2171 AD

Each member of the crew was required to perform two hours a day in the gymnasium on the bicycle ergometer and the treadmill to build up muscle tissue. Although the Daedalus accommodation module rotated to simulate gravity for the occupants, the rest of the ship was non-rotational. In an ideal situation, the entire Daedalus would spin, bringing gravity to all areas. However, downlinks to Earth through an antenna that would only point home for a small period of time each rotation would not be feasible, and it was hard enough for a crew to maintain perception of an ‘up’ or ‘down’ in space, without the situation constantly changing to confuse things.

Mankind’s need for an ‘up’ and a ‘down’ was one legacy of evolution on Earth that had yet to be discarded in space.

A lot of the crew’s work time therefore was spent in a weightless environment. On a spacecraft where centrifugal cabin space was at a premium, it could be hard for an astronaut to get the right amount of exercise to prevent muscle degradation, so use of the gym was an essential part of life on the Daedalus.

During cryogenic sleep, Frank’s body (along with all the other members of the crew) had been pumped intravenously with a

muscle-preserving vitamin every 5 months to maintain tissue. Use of the vitamin meant that the time spent in the gym after waking was considerably reduced. However, the vitamin would never completely eradicate the post-cryogenic need for exercise, so the crew was required to spend extra time over the first month after waking, in the gym building up muscle tissue. To this end, a member of the crew had been woken weekly, so that the exercise machines could be used in rotation.

Frank had been the last to wake.

‘Jake,’ said Frank as he pedalled the bicycle slowly on the lowest setting, ‘I’d like you to fill me in on the events leading up to

Harold’s death.’

Jake was a short man for his age, and was prematurely balding. The hair he did have was light brown, and he possessed a pair of radiant blue eyes that captivated all who looked at them, as though he were wearing blue contact lenses. His eyes betrayed his Nordic ancestry. He was sitting on the edge of the crate that housed the dumbbells. In his hand was a pinch-force dynamometer, used for testing finger strength. He toyed with the device as he spoke.

Jake was young for an astronaut, aged thirty-one, give or take a hundred and fifteen years. Frank was always slightly dubious about having younger astronauts on his crews. But Jake’s medical adeptness was hard to beat, and he provided a certain youthful flair that was lacking in some of the older, more experienced crewmembers.

When Jake spoke, his voice quivered slightly, and Frank considered that maybe this investigation was happening too soon.

‘Harold had been running some chemical analysis tests. It all seems like such a haze now. You see, he was trying to ascertain the density of the hydrogen particles in the solar wind.’ he paused.

‘Go on’

Looking down at his hands, Jake continued. ‘He was carrying a tray of test tubes and slides and other stuff, I don’t know what was in them, I was only following him around to try and learn something. I had nothing else to do. We climbed through the axis corridor into Service Tunnel A and we were making our way down the ladder.’

Jake met Frank's eyes as a tear rolled down his cheek, ‘Harold was in front. He was below me. Then there was a massive jolt. The whole of the Daedalus lurched. I think something must have hit us. It must have been a small meteorite perhaps. Or possibly the termination shock.’

‘No,’ Frank interrupted, correcting him, ‘it wouldn’t have been the termination shock. Proxima’s solar winds would have hit us years ago. It probably was a meteorite. Go on.’

Jake looked up at Frank. More tears had welled up in his eyes. ‘Well, Harold lost his footing. He was only holding on with one hand. He slipped and fell all the way to the bottom of the tunnel. Okay, it’s a reduced gravity but it’s still a long way to fall and he hit his head on the patch unit down in the rim corridor.’

‘Did you make any attempts at the time to find out what hit the Daedalus?’

‘No. I thought of using the EVA unit, but I’ve never operated it so I couldn’t take it out and search for a dent in the hull. Perhaps I

should have been cross-trained on it after all. It would have been a big risk for me to try to use it. I figured there had to be another person inside here for that to work. Besides, I had to look after Harold.’

‘Yes, of course. Let’s go back to Harold. Did he die straight away?’

‘No. He’d sustained a massive head injury and there was no doubt the prognosis was bad. He actually died of acute subdural haematoma three days later. I made it as comfortable for him as I could. But once haematoma sets in it’s pretty much time to wave goodbye.’

‘What is subdural haematoma.’ Frank asked.

‘It can develop as a complication after a head injury. The blood veins that are located between the membranes covering the brain start to leak. It causes intracranial pressure, pressure inside the head from cerebral edema - swelled brain tissue.’

Frank tried to imagine what that would feel like, and realised that he was frowning deeply at the thought of the pain that Harold must have gone through, ‘Why didn’t you wake any of us up?’

‘What good would that have done? I’m the second medical officer. Only James outranks me in that department.’

‘So why didn’t you wake James?’

Jake became agitated, ‘I didn’t think it was necessary. I had the diagnosis in the bag. I gave Harold the best care that I could. Don’t you understand that? There’s nothing James could have done. It would have messed up the ISOE if I woke him early.’

Frank nodded calmly, ‘I understand. It must have been very traumatic.’

‘After he died I moved his body back to his cryogenics pod and put him on ice. It was the only thing I could think to do.’

‘Okay. You’re probably aware that Mission Control will want a full statement from you. I will send a preliminary message tomorrow and then you can follow up with your statement. I’ll help you write it if you want.’

‘Thank you Frank,’ said Jake, wiping some of the tears from his face. ‘If I’m excused. I have some post-cryo tests to run on the rest of the crew.

Frank smiled reassuringly, ‘Yes Jake, of course, and well done. You’ve coped very well under the circumstances.’

*

Ian Byrne and Frank Chambers sat in the observation suite. With the internal lights switched off, Frank felt like he was floating in space without a suit.

Before them, through the curved viewing window, lay the vast expanse of the universe, populated not only by millions of tiny points of starlight, but the vivid colours of galactic clusters. Gas plumes of giant and distant nebulae. A rich tapestry of pink, orange, blue and red. A swathe of beautiful three-dimensional structures that conveyed so incredibly the size of the universe that enveloped them. The constellations - Orion’s Belt, the Plough, the Bear - all still recognisable from here, so far away from home.

In the observation suite it was very easy for Ian to force the sounds of the ship’s machinery out of his head, and become caught up in the beauty of creation.

‘This reminds me,’ said Frank, ‘of the times I used to spend on the beach up at Big Sur. When I was a student at Berkley we used to meet in a burrito bar on Telegraph Road and head on out to the beach. We’d camp out there the whole weekend. We’d have parties and beach fires. And the starry panoramas were so incredible. Okay, maybe we wouldn’t see as much celestial stuff as through a telescope….’

‘Or here,’ Ian interrupted.

‘Or here. But at least it had a context. A situation. A moment in time that you would remember forever. Like a young love or a piece of music. The context is so important, don’t you think?’

‘I know exactly what you mean,’ replied Ian.

‘What do you miss most from home?’ Frank asked.

‘More than anything, It would have to be the rain, and the smell of forest dew in late May. I miss the beautiful romance of sharing an umbrella with a loved one." Ian laughed at his own words, ‘I know it sounds stupid, but I miss splashing around in puddles. Dashing in and out of doorways to avoid getting wet. Standing at the window and watching a fierce downpour from the warmth of my living room.’

‘Hmm, way out here. So far away from home, it’s hard to imagine rain, and sun, and wind. All the things we take for granted. All those wonderful things.’

‘There’s nothing like a bit of interplanetary space travel to put things in perspective, huh?’ Ian laughed.

‘How little we know. Sometimes I’d be walking down a street somewhere and I’d look at all the people rushing around. And I’d look at all the buildings and cars and I’d think; we humans live in a little pocket of air on the outside of a little rock which we call Earth. And we busy ourselves by messing around. Messing around with what we find and make. That’s all we really do. It’s all we’ve ever done. And we’ve spent so much time messing around, that we’ve lost our purpose – in a way. It’s not until you’re lifted into space, and look back at that little rock, that you realise how much time we waste. Not just within our individual lives, but as a species. I wonder if all that’s about to change. I wonder if what we find - in Proxima - will be the thing that changes the way we look at ourselves, the way mankind looks at itself.’

There was a knock on Frank’s cabin door. It was James.

‘Sir, do you have a minute? There’s something I would like to discuss with you, about Harold’s death.’

James looked somewhat apprehensive, and Frank began to feel a little edgy.

‘Come in. Have a seat.’

James walked over to a chair near the view-port and sat down. He looked nervously back at the door, seemingly to make sure it had closed behind him.

Frank leaned forward on his desk and clasped his hands together, ‘What’s on your mind?’

James avoided his gaze, running his hands through his floppy black hair, he said, ‘It’s Jake.’

‘What about him?’

‘Well sir. There’s something confusing me, and I want your opinion on how I should proceed. You see, Jake said that Harold died of acute subdural haematoma.’

‘Is there something wrong with that?’

‘There might be. You see. Subdural haematoma, while it’s extremely serious, would never kill somebody in three days.’

‘Are you sure? Doesn’t it depend on the seriousness of the head trauma?’

‘Well, yes. But subdural haematoma is more of a side effect than a full-blown cause of death. Now if it were concussion it would make sense, but to say that Harold died of subdural haematoma…’ he trailed off, ‘No, there’s something about Jake’s diagnosis that doesn’t sit right. And I can’t put my finger on it.’

‘What are you saying?’ Frank asked.

‘What I’m saying is. Well, what I’m asking is. I would like your permission to perform my own post-mortem to establish cause of death.’

Deep down Frank knew this was coming. He sat silent for a moment before speaking.

‘This is a serious accusation against Jake’s diagnosis. Why would he lie about the cause of death. It’s not as though he has anything to gain from it. We’re all working to the same common goal here.’

‘Yes I understand that sir.’

‘I realise that Jake ranks lower than you, but he is a competent medical officer and I defend his position. You and I both know that we could undermine his valuable trust by performing a post-mortem. In a confined crew environment that could be potentially destructive to his personal well-being. He could retreat from the group and -’

‘Then don’t tell him, sir. Jake and I perform opposite shifts. Let me perform the post-mortem while he is asleep. He need never know.’

‘Why are you so keen to do this James?’

‘Sir, as chief medical officer I deserve the right to a final say in matters of crew health and safety. And I believe that there is a

fair enough sized discrepancy to warrant a second opinion.’

‘But Harold’s dead. It’s too late for that. Surely second opinions are for less extreme situations.’

‘Sir, I think the crew deserves to know. What if Jake is lying?’ James said quietly.

Frank sat again in silent contemplation, almost unable to believe the scenario that was unfolding before him. He spoke softly.

‘James, do you believe that a post-mortem performed by you would add anything to Jake’s account of his death. So much so, that you’re asking me to spare you from other, more pressing duties so that you can perform it?’

‘Yes sir, I do.’

‘Very well then. As you outrank Jake, I grant you permission. But you are to perform it tomorrow night when Jake is asleep in his quarters. And you are to speak of it to no one. Understood?’

‘Yes sir. Thank you.’

‘Tomorrow morning I’m holding a meeting in the Rec room at 07:00. Can you make sure everyone knows?’

‘Yes sir, I’ll do that.’

After James had left Frank’s cabin, Frank undressed, put on his gown and made his way through the rim corridor to the low-gravity shower unit. He did a lot of thinking in the shower, and he always relished the luxury of having such a sophisticated unit in space. On his previous missions, the hygiene facilities were, quite literally, antiquated.

He pondered the day’s events. Not long ago he had woken up from an extraordinary sleep that had lasted over a hundred years. Then, upon waking, he had been presented with the sad news of Harold’s death. Today had been an emotional journey. In the extreme circumstances of the Daedalus mission, he found himself torn between the more pressing aspects of the mission, and grief for his friend Harold. He wished he could lay the matter to rest, put the grieving behind him, and turn his efforts to the mission. But part of him wanted to grieve. Part of him knew it was necessary to spend some time saying goodbye. However, he knew that a half-hearted order or an error of judgement could cost the lives of the rest of the crew. He knew he needed to keep things in perspective.

There was something about James’s request that unnerved Frank. As far as Frank was concerned, Jake’s story seemed perfectly feasible. However, Frank was not a trained doctor and would not necessarily detect any minor discrepancies in the medical aspects of Jake’s story. And suddenly it had become a story. It was no longer the truth any more, merely a version of the truth which was open to interpretation. James had changed Frank’s perspective on the matter.

Frank switched off the shower and stepped out of the unit. As he did so he noticed that his feet were covered with clumps of hair.

He looked back into the unit. He noticed more hair had collected on the floor near the water suction pipe. He reached his hand to his head. The hair was his colour, but it didn’t feel like he’d lost any. He switched the shower back on and washed the hair into the suction pipe.

Back in his cabin, Frank looked in the mirror. He seemed to have a full head of hair, but then there wasn’t that much in the shower unit, maybe he’d lost a little from all over. He began to worry. Maybe he had had an adverse reaction to the intravenous drugs he had received during cryogenic sleep.

Or perhaps he had suffered mild radiation exposure.

He made a mental note to discuss it with James after the meeting.

7 May 2171 AD

‘Good morning, and can I be the first to offer my congratulations to all of you. You are now officially the farthest travelling humans mankind has ever known, and also the oldest.’

Franks opening words elicited some laughs from the other five members of the crew.

‘As you all know, in the last hundred and fifteen years we have travelled over two-hundred and fifty thousand astronomical units. That’s a quarter of a million times further than the distance from the Earth to the Sun. Remember, we left the solar system after only ninety astronomical units. Anyway, this communication from Earth,’ Frank held up a palm computer, ‘was sent nearly five years ago by someone old enough to be my great-grandchild.’

More laughter from the crew. At least the cryo sleep hasn’t destroyed everyone’s sense of humour, Frank thought.

‘It’s somewhat ironic that this pioneering mission is being undertaken in a spaceship which is now an antique! And that most of the technology on this ship will have been superseded back on Earth several times by now. We are, for all intents and purposes, a time capsule, a little piece of history floating through space. I hope these facts are putting things into perspective for you, and not making you feel too old.’ He continued.

‘Before I read this message and go on to talk about the mission, I would like to say a few words about the sad loss of our crewmate and friend, Harold.’

‘No doubt you’re all by now aware of the circumstances surrounding Harold’s death. It seems as though an external force believed to be a meteorite hit the Daedalus. The timing was such that Harold sustained an injury from which he never recovered. We may never know the real cause of the jolt we encountered because, through no fault of his own, Jake had not been sufficiently cross-trained to respond to such an emergency and track the location of the object that hit us. I can only conclude that this is a hazardous mission, and we all knew the risks when we started. Harold knew those risks also, though I feel that it’s important we complete this mission successfully in his honour.’

Frank caught James’s eye, a knowing glance. Then he continued.

‘Jake did his very best to make Harold’s last days comfortable and we should all be thankful that he was on hand to administer the correct level of treatment at such an early stage. Jake, I commend your actions and would like to thank you on behalf of the crew.

‘We will be preparing a statement for downlink to Earth tomorrow. Which brings me on to our message.’

‘Mission Control has sent us a greeting. It’s over 50 pages long and it contains a substantial amount of information about what has been happening at home over the last hundred and fifteen years.

‘I will circulate this to all of you in due course, but if I may, I would like to outline the main points now.’

‘Our new boss - the seventh female President of the United States - named Tamara Hayward, is in her fifth presidential year, and she’s doing really rather well in the opinion polls at the moment. I guess there’s less scandal when a woman runs the show.’

More titters of laughter from the others.

Frank suddenly had a flashback of the day he performed best-man duties for a friend of his back in New Jersey. Twenty months before the launch, it was a very hot June day, and he was delivering a speech to the intoxicated and expectant crowd. Hoping to God that he would be funny. And for a moment the sights and smells of that wonderful occasion flooded back to him as though he had showered in the very essence of it. He had to stop speaking for a moment while it passed, until the smell of cherry blossom was gone, and the sun no longer glistened on that nearby lake.

He was suddenly catapulted back to reality. Into the Daedalus, where the birdsong was replaced by the machinery hum, so far away from home, spiralling through the cold icy void of space.

His speech that day had been well prepared. His delivery now was very much in the improvisation style, but he thought the style befitted him quite well.

He took a deep breath and carried on.

‘President Hayward has prepared a message for us, which reads… “Greetings to the crew of the Daedalus on this, the most brave and courageous mission ever undertaken by mankind. In the time that you have been gone from here, so many things have changed. Things that even I cannot tell you about, as they precede my lifetime and many lifetimes that have gone before me. You will be somewhat relieved to learn that the signal that you have been sent to intercept is still beaming to the Lincoln Outpost, just as it has for the last hundred years. All our thoughts are with you, as we honour the sacrifices you have made for the advancement of your race, and I’m sure I speak for all the citizens of the Earth when I wish you, the ambassadors of our species, a safe and prosperous trip into the pioneering depths of space.” It’s just a big slice of Mom’s Home Made Apple Pie if you ask me.’

‘It then goes on to talk about power sources. I’ll just read this bit. “Oil and Gas now provides less than two percent of the Earth’s power supply, the majority now being taken up by solar, wave and wind technology. Vast solar sails of highly reflective aluminium compounds are now tethered in space above the polar ice caps to channel solar wind energy into vast processing stations at ground level. The advancement of this technology was pioneered after the rainforest amnesty of 2082, which became the catalyst of change from an energy point of view. The Green Revolutionist Army had developed a latent chemical with high toxicity to humans and zero toxicity to plants, which they deposited over thousands of square miles of rainforest in South America using crop spraying planes. The chemical,’ (unnamed by the way), ‘was absorbed harmlessly into the tree bark and released when the inner rings were exposed. In other words, anyone attempting to fell a tree in that area would be exposed to traces of the lethal chemical. Many say the Army’s move was brutal, but they stood by their policy that if they needed to kill a man to save the planet, then so be it.”’ His voice trailed off.

Frank then felt the colour drain out of his face. He could feel the prickles of sweat on his face. ‘This is strange. Get a load of this. Attempts to land the first men on Jupiter’s moon Europa back in 2099 proved unsuccessful, even disastrous. A manned descent capsule named Horizon was dropped from an orbiting habitation module. All eight members of the descent team and the orbiter crew were lost in “an unprecedented and catastrophic accident”. Whilst the Horizon descent capsule was making its final drop to the moon’s surface, the Orbiter circled to the other side. The two spacecraft were out of radio contact for three hours and twenty minutes, during which time the Orbiter had a disastrous accident. It was not known what exactly happened for over a year, until a salvage vessel was despatched to retrieve the wreckage and bodies. What they found was somewhat unbelievable, yet categorically true. The NASA Pioneer space probe had crashed into the Orbiter, causing an immense explosion and killing the entire crew. The ground team, clearly reliant on the Orbiter for their return trip to Earth, perished on the surface of the moon. Not a single astronaut survived the incident, and no further missions to Europa have been launched since. It is still not known how the Pioneer space probe, last seen on an outbound journey for the stars, managed to turn up around Jupiter in 2099 and cause such an accident. Clearly it doesn’t make any sense.’

Frank scanned the document some more, ‘What else. Ah, Cryo Dude 142 has just hit theatres across the mid-west. Only kidding.’

‘I think we’re the cryo dudes now, sir’ said Ian.

Everyone burst into laughter.

‘Okay, I don’t want to spoil all the surprises, so I’ll leave the rest of this for your private reading later. Loretta, can you copy this

to everyone’s message box?’

Loretta Pearce, the systems engineer - nodded back at Frank.

‘On to our mission related agenda for today. Firstly, you can pat yourselves on the back for making it this far. You are all heroes in my eyes. But don’t go writing your acceptance speeches just yet, we have only accomplished the easy part, getting here. And we did that part with our eyes closed. Now, we’re headed straight for Proxima’s star, we have a lot of tough objectives ahead of us, and I’m going to need a hundred per cent from all of you. The photovoltaic scoop project has never been accomplished in this way before, so the majority of the task is theoretical.’

‘Let’s start with Loretta. How are the systems shaping up…?’

*

James pressed the button that released the catch on Harold Gunther’s cryogenic pod door. As the front of the pod slid to one side, the smell of the decaying body hit him.

As a doctor James was very used to the smell of dead bodies, and the cool temperature inside the pod prevented the stench from becoming too strong. But it was still unpleasant, especially after smelling the clean regenerated air in the Daedalus for the last few weeks.

He hooked the straps of the overhead pulley system around Harold’s waist, ankles and upper body, before activating the joystick, which enabled him to manoeuvre Harold over to a worktop and lower him onto it.

Using the pulley system was not really necessary in a weightless environment, as Harold’s body would have been relatively easy to move without any help. But the scene would have been a little undignified.

James climbed over to the worktop and detached the straps from Harold. Then he re-attached them to the metal hooks on the underside of the table.

Once Harold’s body was held in position, James moved the Freefall Doctor unit into position, and pushed the activation switch. A tinny, metallic voice emanated from the electronic sphere.

‘Online… Hello James, do you have some work for me?’

‘Hello FD. Yes, we are going to perform an autopsy on Harold Gunther.’

The Freefall Doctor was a more advanced weightless medical assistant than anything previously designed for the Space Foundation. Essentially it was a sphere that was slightly larger than a basketball, and all around it’s surface we’re sliding compartments marked with holographic labels indicating what was held inside. The design was simple but perfect. It could hang motionless in the air directly above the patient and enable the medical officer to access the basic tools he required to administer a wound or perform any other type of surgery. Using pressure jets it could rotate like a planet on any axis to enable easy access to its compartments, and could move out of the way if necessary. There was also a ‘dirty’ compartment into which used needles and other surgical tools could be deposited for sterilisation prior to automatic re-routing to their relevant compartments for further use. James found it ironic that this fantastic – and award winning - invention of Jake’s was being used in an examination that could disprove Jake’s own testimony of Harold’s death.

‘James, please calibrate my camera to the orientation of the subject.’

‘Okay.’ James tapped in a command on the remote keypad. The pressure jets on the FD unit fired and the camera moved down to point at Harold.

‘Performing initial scan, x-ray and infra-red scan complete. Cranial impact point detected. Would you like me to remove the hair around the wound?’

‘Yes please.’

A small razor slid out of the side of the Freefall Doctor, and the unit moved itself closer to the wound.

‘Please wait while I scan the contours of the work area.’

The FD unit emitted a high pitch beep, rotated itself slightly, and then extended the razor to Harold’s head.

8 May 2171 AD

Ian floated up to the command module where Loretta sat alone in the half-light tapping commands into her unit. She had some music playing. It was Dido and Anaeus played by the Tokyo Philharmonic Orchestra. Outside the window, the star field hung motionless in the distant void amidst scattered nebula and swathes of galactic clusters. Here more than anytime during his Earth orbit missions, he could see the depth in that star field.

‘Are you all right up here on your own. I noticed you missed dinner.’

‘I wasn’t hungry. I needed to get these diagnostics finished.’

‘I didn’t know you liked Purcell.’

She smiled, ‘I like to keep it secret.’

Ian laughed, ‘What checks are you running?’

‘Oh just boring old gyro stuff. I seem to spend more time checking things than anything else nowadays.’

‘Have you managed to find out if PMC-04-A is still beaming the signal?’

She looked up at him, and when their eyes met Ian wondered if there wasn’t something in that look. He became more than a little lost in it. ‘There’s no point,’ she said.

‘What? No point in what?’ Ian snapped back to reality.

‘There’s no point in trying to find out. We have no way of knowing if the signal’s beaming from where we are at the moment. You see, the signal was broadcast to the Lincoln Outpost on a very narrow band. We could only pick it up if we were directly in the line of the transmission. But, because of the orbital paths of the planets, the journey we have taken has not caused us to cross the signal’s path.’

‘How come?’

‘Well, Pluto’s orbital ellipse is angulated seventeen degrees above the remaining planets in the solar system. Our gravity assist threw us onto an upward climb to meet with Pluto’s orbital path. Ever since then we’ve been nowhere near the line of the signal. Everything else has been happening on the flat elliptic below us. We probably won’t be able to pick up the signal until we get to PMC-04-A.’, she looked out of the view-port, ‘Provided it’s still being transmitted when we get there.’

Ian smiled, and fixed Loretta with a steady stare, ‘You know, you’re very attractive when you get scientific.’

James stepped into Franks cabin and pulled up a chair. Frank poured a couple of glasses of water, and sat down across from him.

‘You performed the autopsy?’ asked Frank.

‘Yes sir.’

‘And what’s your verdict?’

James was silent for a moment before speaking, as though he was carefully considering the implications of his words. He had a good head, and was often able to assess a situation with a single glance of his quick dark eyes. He resembled one of those old Hollywood brat-pack kids from the mid 1980’s.

‘Sir, I am of the opinion that Jake has not told us the truth about Harold’s death. I have a number of findings that back this up.’

‘Like what, exactly?’

‘Well sir, the injury to Harold’s head was much more severe than Jake indicated. I don’t think he would have survived for as long as three days, probably not even three hours.’

‘So why do you think Jake lied about that?’

‘Well, I was getting to that. You see, the point of impact was, or rather is, should I say, a point of multiple impacts.’

‘I’m not following you.’

‘According to Jake’s story, Harold fell down the service tunnel and hit his head. But the markings on his head show multiple impact points. He died of several blows to the skull.’

Frank looked at him sternly, ‘James, are you sure about this. I have to stress again that the implications of…’

‘Sir, please. I’ve thought about this long and hard. I couldn’t sleep last night for all the thinking I was doing, but I can’t shake it.

Jake simply has to be lying.’

Frank sat quietly. James spoke again.

‘Sir, do you think we should detain him?’

Frank examined his hands thoughtfully, ‘No, it would undermine the trust of the rest of the crew. I want to keep an eye on him. I’ll notify Ian. But we’ll keep this between the three of us. We’ll watch Jake and see how he behaves.’

‘Okay sir.’

‘I don’t doubt your findings James, but I’m not ready to believe that Jake killed Harold. This mission is unique, vital and precarious, and an incorrect command decision could mess up everything.’

‘I understand. I’ll help you monitor him, sir.’ James stood and walked to the cabin door.

‘James, one other thing.’

‘Yes sir.’

‘While I was in the shower last night I noticed that some of my hair might have fallen out.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes, it was quite alarming. I thought that maybe I had suffered mild radiation exposure, perhaps while I was sleeping. Are there any tests you can run?’

‘Why didn’t you tell me before?’

‘James, there’s been so many other things going on.’

‘You have to promise you won’t leave anything this long again. I really need to be notified straight away if anyone thinks they may have an illness.’

‘Okay okay, point taken James, I won’t do it again.’

Ian placed the photograph of his late wife back on the table beside his bed. If she had still been alive, he would never have applied to join this mission. They would have continued their peaceful life in Alloa in Falkirk, on the banks of the river Forth, and the Daedalus mission would have passed him by. He would probably still be with the football team. Out drinking with the boys on a Saturday night in the bars on Clackmannan Road, just like the old days.

Maybe he’d even have had kids.

In the hundred years that had passed since he left, so much would have happened. It was likely than none of those things existed anymore. No football, no bars. He had sacrificed so much to be here, but never doubted that the Daedalus mission would be his way of getting into the history books.

He knew it was the right decision.

So strange how one event causes another to happen. Sometimes, when he really thought about it, it was hard to imagine how he had gotten from there, to here. The sequence of events and twists of fate that had caused him to be so many millions of miles from Earth, floating in an antique tin can.

Space did funny things to people, he thought. It redefines one’s social role. For example, on Earth, day after day, humans perform thousands of different roles. One minute you would be husband to a wife, or a father to a son. Then you would play the role of a customer in a shop, an agony uncle to a friend in distress. A teacher, a pupil, an employee or employer. Those situations enable the development of one’s identity, because each one requires a certain type of behaviour, even a certain type of vocabulary.

In space, those roles just didn’t exist. At least, not in the same way. Everything in space just is. All you did was sit on your branch of the hierarchical tree, performing the tasks you were there to do, perhaps with a little bit of crossover, but certainly nothing involving radical social and professional dynamics.

Without those roles, the reserves of experience from which to draw become smaller, and it ultimately affects one’s ability to balance ideas in a decision making process, and evaluate one’s progress alongside others. Everything had a knock on effect.

He was no longer a husband. Now he was just Ian, the astronaut.

He looked at his watch. It was time for dinner, and he made his way out of the cabin and along the rim corridor to the Rec room, where Janice was serving up a wonderful potato bake.

At least the food in a CELSS is good, Ian thought. They say an army marches on its stomach.

Mealtimes were an important event in the social calendar of the Daedalus. It enabled the necessary winding down associated with stress depletion in the confines of the ship. Isolation and confinement could often lead to loss of motivation, and there really couldn’t be any allowance for that on a space mission, so the meals were made into a bigger deal than perhaps was necessary. And often, when there was little else to do, mealtimes became a highly anticipated milestone in the crew’s recreation time.

It was good to punctuate the perpetual night with events to look forward to.

‘Did you know,’ Janice said to Ian after they had all sat down, ‘that the Daedalus tracked a second comet while everyone was asleep?’

Ian blinked with surprise, ‘Really, after Hyakutake? Was it a new one, or one the Foundation has already catalogued.’

‘Oh it’s one we’ve seen before,’ added Jake, ‘418-Minos, named after the Greek king. Three hundred kilometres at its widest point.’

‘It’s somewhat ironic,’ said Ian, ‘that a spacecraft named after Daedalus, aid to King Minos, builder of the labyrinth to contain the Minatour on the island of Crete, should – some five thousand years later – fly past and catalogue a comet named Minos. Don’t you think?’

‘How can you place a date on a mythical legend.’ said Jake laughing.

‘Wow, Ian you really know your Greek mythology.’ said Janice.

‘Daedalus and Minos meet once again.’ whispered James.

‘What goes around, comes around.’ added Ian in his most mystical of voices.

The others laughed, and carried on with their meal.

‘Sir, I’m going to pull out a couple of your hairs for analysis,’ said James

‘Good, as long as you don’t stick any needles in me.’

‘I didn’t know you were scared of needles.’

Frank laughed, ‘Can you believe it? Me. A member of the Space Foundation Astronaut Team. I became a damn pincushion during training. I hated every minute of it.’

James tugged at Frank’s hair, pulling out a couple of strands and placing them on a slide. Then he put the slide under the microscope.

‘Well, there’s no sign of any cell damage. Certainly no sign of any radiation exposure. Did you retrieve any hair from the shower unit?’

‘No, I didn’t. Stupid of me. I should have got some, but I guess I wasn’t thinking.’

‘Well, it was only yesterday that you took the shower, the CELSS dumps won’t have churned it up yet will they?’

‘No I think it takes about a week, but you don’t really want to climb around in the dump unit looking for bits of hair. It’s pretty foul.

The toilet sewage goes in there also. And what’s to say that the hair you find will be right stuff. I mean, everyone uses that shower.’

‘Which actually means that the hair might not be yours mightn’t it?’ James added.

‘That’s a good point.’

‘It backs up what I was about to say anyway. Judging by this sample, you’re in the clear. But someone on this crew, with brown hair like yours, could be suffering from the results of mild exposure to radiation.’

‘Brown hair. It could only really be Jake.’ Frank said.

‘Then we’ll need to get a sample from him. There’s no point in me testing the medical store sample. It was taken back at the Rig long before any of us would have been exposed.’

Ian had been doing some hard time in the gymnasium. He spent most of him time working on his upper body, which is where most of the strenuous work was done now. In the weightless environment, he had to use his hands to pull himself around the ship, pulling on grab bars, and attaching velcro strips, and also use them stop himself from crashing into walls. He also found that his fingers ached a lot from all the extra work they had been doing. But he was used to it now, especially after the amount of space flights he had performed to date.

Sometimes, after a stint in the gym, he liked to go up to the acrobatics facility.

He loved being weightless. It was an entertaining novelty that never really wore off. Many astronaut crews had petitioned the Space Foundation in an effort to get the company to include an acrobatics room purely for fun.

The Daedalus was the first ship to get one. A five metre by five metre padded room with nothing in it but a door and a small view-port. It was housed in a small room at the back of the cryogenic module near the observation suite.

As Ian lifted himself into the room, he grabbed the door handle behind him and swung it closed with ease.

He was alone. He floated up to the ceiling, flung her body round and pushed against it with her feet. He darted around the room, spinning round at the last minute and kicking off the opposite wall before he hit it.

Then he stopped his motion, and moved along the wall. Pushing himself away he put his arms out, spinning slowly in the air, and as he drew them in, his spin rate increased like a ballerina, until his hands were down by his sides and he spun at an incredible rate. By raising his arms again, his rate of spin declined.

He was killing time until his next shift. For once, taking his mind off the pressing aspects of the mission.

Where were they going? What was the meaning of the signal? Would they survive this unprecedented situation? What will PMC-04-A look like up close? A whole new world of wondrous things.

Of aliens perhaps.

These things could not be ruled out. The stuff of science fiction was now the stuff of fact.

The door opened beneath him, and Loretta floated up into the room.

‘Thought I might find you here.’ she smiled.

‘Am I that predictable?’ Ian asked in a joking manner.

She reached a hand to his and he took it, helping her up through the door and into the room.

‘Don’t worry, Ian. I’m not stalking you.’

He smiled, ‘I wouldn’t mind it if you were.’

‘If I didn’t know better I’d say you were flirting with me.’

‘Really? Well I’ll be damned.’

He moved closer to her. In the weightlessness, they pulled each other into a deep kiss. It was a wonderful moment for him. He could feel within him a release of so many tired emotions that he longed to be free of. He only half realised how much he had longed for her kiss.

Now, after all this time and all this distance, he finally felt as though he had found a home inside himself.