A Robinson Tale

Part V

Paradox

Chapter 1

A tower of black wreckage blocked the chariot's path.

Maureen pulled their vehicle to a stop and craned her neck toward the windshield to observe the wall of rubble. Sometime in the near future, her husband would come here and trigger the three burst signal that would travel through space and time to reach both their Jupiter and the Fortuna.

But would he now? The question rattled in her mind since she'd lost com with the ship, causing an elusive wave of uneasiness to build inside her.

"You coming?"

She caught Grant's interrogative glance as he opened his door.

"You guys go ahead. I'll join you in a minute," she replied, shifting back in the driver's seat.

"Take your time," he replied, joining Cynthia outside. "We're just going to look around."

Maureen gave him an absent nod.

While their boots creaked on the rocky ground, she turned the screen on the bird's eye view and zoomed out as much as she could. A field of ships in a horseshoe shape appeared with the chariot at its center. Something wasn't making any sense. Now that the Jupiter was next to the trench, why would John come all this way to signal his position? He couldn't have travelled faster than them and be here already, which made her doubt.

What if John wasn't the one to emit the signal in the first place? What if their assumption was wrong? What if they were caught in a series of events they had no power to override whatsoever? And If John wasn't on his way here, where was he?

The same old fear that gripped her in its icy hand each time her husband had to leave for a mission tightened her chest. The difference was that on Earth, he'd always managed to give her a heads-up, a call, a message, a text. Even when their relation had turned sour, he'd called home regularly, at the beginning at least. That hadn't happened yesterday. Yesterday was the first time he'd disappeared without a word. Maybe his wrist-computer was damaged or he found Harris's trail and went dark while following her and the robot. He must have a good reason to scare her like that, especially after their last talk. How could he leave her without a word after telling him that his best friend had committed suicide and admit that himself had been burnt out for years?

Maureen slid her hand in her jacket pocket and took out the worn, wallet-size family picture taken at Lake Tahoe for Will's seventh birthday, a month before Jackson's death. They had more recent family pictures, but he'd kept this one.

Her heart ached as she remembered how the photo had come into her possession six weeks ago in the airlock. Judy was intubating him and she was struggling to take him out of his EV suit. The picture had dropped to the deck as she'd removed his left glove and wrist-computer.

After subsisting on memories for two years, she'd taken the photo and for some reason had forgotten to give it back to John. And now he was alone, lost somewhere in that jungle, and he didn't have it with him. Did he miss it?

Maureen paused at the thought.

Aside from his grandmother's old tartan rug, that Penny loved to wrap herself in when she was a toddler, John had never been the sentimental type. Now, that rug was in Penny's closet because, like her sensitive daughter said, no matter how ragged it was, it had that comforting warmth and softness only time and love could confer to an object. John had admitted that the rug had been in his cribb and it was the only sentimental weakness he'd ever displayed. The photo in her hands was the second.

The corners were torn, the gloss was gone, the colors had washed out, but still they were gleaming with happiness.

Maureen shook her head, more puzzled than upset now about those three years he'd spent away from them. Because she hadn't asked him to stay, hiding her pain and disappointment at seeing him leave so soon after coming home for Christmas, because she had accepted that his job came first, all he'd gotten from her message of unconditional support, respect, and love was that she didn't care about him.

Footsteps crunching on the dirt ground broke the spell. Cynthia was striding back toward her, alone. Maureen promptly put the snapshot of their past life back into her jacket pocket, grabbed her backpack behind the driver's seat, and hopped out of the chariot.

"Did you guys find anything?" Maureen asked, marching up to her.

"The signal is coming from inside a ship down there but it's totally dark in there."

"I have two flashlights in my backpack and I can use my wrist-computer."

"Perfect. Let's go looting an alien ship then."

Cynthia's energetic character made Maureen smile slightly. She used to be that way. Where had she lost herself?

A gust of wind lifted fine dust in the air as they joined Grant in front of a wide crack in the black fuselage. The smell of ionized, metallic particles invading her nostrils, she handed them the flashlights, switched the one on her wrist-computer on, and sneaked in the wreckage.

"As far as I can judge from here, the structure looks stable," she said, lighting up a surprisingly intact ten-foot wide worm-like corridor.

"I remember a brilliant student sitting at the back of the auditorium. She had her head in her notes, only raised her eyes for brief glances, trying her best to avoid being noticed."

Maureen smiled sadly at Grant's words. "I'm not her anymore."

"I know."

Their steps softly squeaked on the perfectly smooth deck as they ventured deeper into the alien ship.

"There's no apparent seam anywhere," Cynthia said, her voice echoing between the bare walls. "It's almost like this ship has been grown instead of built."

Maureen shuddered at the idea but it made sense. "I think it's some kind of a metal-polymer nanocomposite material."

"No decoration, no windows," Cynthia added.

"Nothing much to see in space," Grant replied.

"They don't need windows. They have some kind of interactive holographic system in their control room. It should be down that corridor." Maureen paused to check their position in relation to the signal when she heard a nail-against-blackboard creaking. She turned back and saw Cynthia scratching the bulkhead with her pocket knife and pressing her bandana against the scratched surface. Oh, good thinking. Many times she'd wished she had taken a sample the time she'd entered Will's robot's ship.

"There's a breach here leading to a bigger chamber," Grant called from a dozen feet down the corridor.

Maureen joined him and crossed over the broken wall. Her shoulders brushed against the torn cables that ran inside the bulkhead. Until now, she'd thought those cables were just electric wires, but with Cynthia's earlier observation of the ship being grown, a totally different picture appeared in her mind, one of a living ship with a vascular network; an organism that produced an acoustic wave when it was awake, like a space whale with a pilot fish. A space killer whale, she corrected as their flashlights lit up the command center. "Wow…"

A second alien ship had cut right through the flying deck.

Maureen checked the tablet again. "The signal is coming from inside this one."

"We are in a giant Russian doll," Cynthia mused as they spread themselves along the rubble at the bottom of the second hull to find an opening.

"Only less colorful," Maureen replied.

"Why would John come all the way down here?"

Maureen stiffened. Grant had asked the question she was thinking.

"Maybe he was hiding from something," Cynthia said as Maureen's flashlight revealed a partially buried piece of the helm arch. A clawed-hand was still clinging to it.

Maureen knelt next to the robot and cleared its head from the rumble; the rest of the body was buried too deep. Why would both ships crash at the same location if not because of the signal? She raised her eyes and scanned the fuselage anew. There. Five feet up. There was a breach in the second ship. She climbed up the debris toward the hole.

"Who else could send the message?" Cynthia asked.

"We could."

Grant's reply as she leaned inside the crack and lit up another worm-like corridor made her freeze for a second. Indeed. This possibility, a self-fulfilling prophecy, had crossed her mind too.

Maureen swallowed a lump.

The inner wall had partially collapsed. Poles barred the corridor and cables dangled in the way. How many ships had stacked themselves in this exact location? She checked the tablet again. Eight meters. She couldn't see that far.

"Hey, Maureen? Where are you going?" Grant called as she crawled into the shipwreck.

While the others joined her, she slowly moved forward into the collapsed corridor, her small, flexible frame allowing her to maneuver in the maze of rubbles while she kept an eye on the distance to the signal's location.

Six meters reduced to four, then to one.

Maureen came to a halt and stared all around her. There was nothing there that resembled a long range communication device.

The beam of her flashlight hit a mirror-like surface in front of her feet.

Maureen crouched and pushed aside the cables on the ground.

Like a canary in a mine, a titanium fuselage reflected her light and her worst nightmare flared up to life.

"Is this...?" Cynthia's voice trailed off as she removed more cables. They'd been walking on a Jupiter's roof.

Tears prickled in Maureen's eyes.

From the moment they'd cleared the signal and pinpointed its location, she'd been afraid that for some twisted effect in space and time, their ship would be the source.

But this wasn't her Jupiter. Because her ship was next to the trench. Her children were safe. This was their Jupiter in the future that had crashed into their past. It seemed so simple and so impossible...

Moving like an automaton, she cleared the way until she found the rooftop hatch. With shaking fingers, she entered her code, almost hoping that it wouldn't work. But the light turned green and the seam opened.

"Maureen," Grant said as she turned around to face the ladder, "You don't have to go in there."

A foot already on a ring, she looked at him and shook her head, her throat too tight to reassure Grant that whatever was down there, she could face it. She had to.

Nevertheless a minute later, her self-assurance vanished as she stood in front of the cockpit's closed blast doors.

Limits are not an illusion. They're not endless either. Let them be physical or social or intellectual, everybody had limits. And if John had never made a fuss about his injuries, as if not talking about them would make them go away, yesterday evening was the first time he'd admitted hitting an emotional one.

Now, behind that door, there was something she feared no amount of compartmentalization or rationalization would never be enough to help her cope with what she might discover in the cockpit. What if they were all strapped in the chairs? John, Judy, Penny, Will, and her? Grant was right. She shouldn't go in there. And yet...

Grant squeezed her shoulder, yanking her back to the present. "Maureen, why don't you go back to the chariot? Cynthia and I can disable the communication console completely on our own. You don't need to be there."

"Tell me, Grant. What has made us think that the future without the signal would be better or safer than the one with it? How can we make a logical choice without knowing anything about why the robots are here? Why did they attack the Fortuna and the Resolute?"

"We can't."

His admission gave her the strength she needed to gather herself.

"We need to retrieve the flight and voice recorders," she said as she dislodged the panel protecting the door's electronic circuitry. "Hold the light for me, please."

Grant complied. Her eyes fixed on the wires, she created a short-circuit. The door slid open with a nail-on-blackboard creaking, then jammed.

Maureen directed her flashlight toward the opening. It was wide enough for her to sneak through. She was stepping toward it when Grant pushed the doors to open wider and moved in first. A stale, musty air escaped the cockpit.

"Let me in, Grant," she said. It was not a request.

"Alright."

As he moved away from the door, Maureen entered the Jupiter's flight deck and trained her flashlight. The whole space had been invaded by alien cables and poles. Her beam slid down a pole from the ceiling toward the center and hit Grant's head. Maureen frowned. He was standing between her and the pilot's seat. She shuffled down the ramp and felt her heart stall.

A man of John's build in an EVA suit was strapped in the seat. A pole had pierced through his helmet, another through his chest.

"I'm sorry, Maureen," Grant said.

As he was inching toward her, she raised her hand to stop him. "No, it's okay. I mean… I expected someone to be at the helm."

Someone... Despite her words, she felt an oppressive wave of sorrow rising in her. If it was really John, she needed to know.

While Cynthia worked on retrieving the black boxes, Maureen hunched beneath the pole and moved to the pilot's left side.

"What are you doing?" Grant asked as she leaned toward the arm and, averting her eyes away from the body, slid her fingers under the wrist-computer and touched a glossy surface. Her mouth twitched and her legs began shaking as she retrieved the wallet-sized picture and held it to Grant without looking at it. Feeling on the verge of shattering in pieces, she leaned a hand on the console, lowered herself to the deck, propped her elbow on her knee to support her heavy head.

Grant sat down next to her and wrapped his arm around her shoulder.

"You've made it to the colony, Maureen. All of you. John, the kids, and you, safe and sound," he said, giving her back the picture.

After a moment of hesitation, she took it and stared at it under the light of his flashlight. A happy family portrait at sunset in front of the Jupiter. Will was as tall as her. There was a mountain with a snowy top in the background.

She flipped the picture: First day on Proxima B, July, 23rd, 2065.

"It's John's handwriting. It's John," she said, running a hand through her hair as spasms suddenly shook her body.

Maureen hunched forward and crossed her arms tight against her aching belly as tears flowed out of her eyes.

This wasn't real... This future couldn't be their future...

Grant helped her remove her backpack, opened it and handed her a water bottle.

The freshness of the water had a calming effect and after a couple of minutes, she gave another look at the photo. Two years from now, they'd finally reach their destination, all together. This was great, right? This was miraculous. But now she needed to focus to understand why John had come back here. And find a way that he never would have to come here to die alone on this world. Not if she had something to say about it. They could still avoid this future.

What had happened to this Jupiter was critical intel. Retrieving the recorders would get her the last two hours of flight, hardly the whole picture.

Maureen put the photo with the other in her jacket internal pocket and turned to grab her backpack.

"What are you doing?" Grant asked as she retrieved her tablet.

"I'm going to download the ship's logs," she said, standing up with a grunt.

Glad to have her back to John's body, she set up her tablet to search for the Jupiter's system before attempting to switch on the main terminal in recovery mode, hoping that there was just enough juice left to allow the download. But unfortunately, there wasn't.

She would have to physically remove the computer's memory core and plug it in her Jupiter like she'd done with the Fortuna's communication system.

While Grant had moved back to help Cynthia pull out the first heavy recorder out of its box, Maureen took out her pocket multi-tool knife and lay on her side at the bottom of the console, trying her best not to touch John's legs.

She was removing the last screws when the flight deck suddenly lit up like a Christmas tree.

Three loud bursts of static blasted through the cockpit.