Little Noises

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99% of my time working with NASA is spent bitching that I know more than they do. The other 1% of my time is spent trembling, pissing myself, realizing I might actually be right. Now is one of those latter times. Houston should know everything wrong with my beacon, especially the fact that it is no longer doing the beacon-like things beacons are built for.

Instead, I’ve got someone sipping tepid coffee down in the land of women and pizza checking his readouts and telling me there’s nothing amiss. When I goddamn know something is amiss. The GWB was cool to the touch. And the alarms are going off again.

I type another quick text. The QT works with entangled particles, and they’re destroyed as they’re used, but I don’t care about budgets right now so much as not wasting time with whatever dweeb can’t do his job. I also very purposefully employ the caps button, because they can, in this way, hear us scream in space:

Get on the job, Houston.

I try to imagine people down on Earth stiffening at their consoles, rubbing the sleep from their eyes, and fixing all of this for me remotely, but I know there’s not even enough time for another reboot, not before the transit. Not sure why, but I launch back down the barrel to the GWB. Maybe just to watch, to hope nothing happens, to see the complete lack of wake as a ship passes by at twenty times the speed of light.

The GWB is still lifeless and cold when I arrive, the alarms still flashing and blaring. I turn to the porthole facing the asteroid belt—and a new star blooms into a brief and ugly existence. A blinding flash of light. Streaks of molten metal like meteors. An expanding cloud of titanium tinsel. Asteroids crashing and tumbling and knocking into one another, cleaving into smaller hunks of rock. An immense amount of destruction, all without making a sound, a macabre ballet and light show.

A large chunk of the cargo vessel flips end over end, twisted like taffy, great black gouges down the side, and everywhere are the scraps of bright red and blue and gray containers, all their contents spilling into the vacuum of space, much of it pulverized beyond recognition.

It all happens in an instant. None of the destruction is there one moment—just quietude and the mingling of hippo-like rocks—and then chaos and burning and death and space litter. This is what it looks like when a billion-ton spacecraft goes from FTL to slamming into a rock the size of a small county. When the beacon’s GWB went out, it was like the street sign before a sharp curve had been removed, the one that warns of the approaching cliff. I think of the eight crewmembers dead. Eight is the number of men in a special battalions squad. We don’t normally lose them quite this fast. Oftentimes, one will crawl away and die a slow and lonely death on the edge of space. But no one is crawling away from the disaster beyond my porthole. And five thousand more lives are inbound at twenty times the speed of light.