Height: 5'7”
Hair: Blonde
Eyes: Light blue
Features: Faint scar on right cheek, brown moth tattoo on left shoulder blade
Build: Athletic
Bust: 34DD
IQ: 178
Nicknames: Evi, Zhenya, Dragonfly
Notes: Elite Explorer of the Federation of Pilots
[etc., etc.]
+++
The dream of finding the fabled Spanish Silver Train sunken beneath the clear blue waves of the Caribbean, or the miraculous Fountain of Youth in the balmy mangroves of Yucatán, or the lost City of Gold gleaming amongst the dust and prickly cactuses of Mexico, had once inspired explorers to flock through the so-called New World of ancient Earth, conquering and discovering – and dieing – as they went. Like those ancient pioneers, the intrepid spaceship commanders of the year AD 3303 sometimes went out into uncharted territories looking for something other than simple profit, sights to see, freedom, or for scientific research. Sometimes something more eccentric and mysterious drew them out into the endless unknown of the ink.
In that sense, Commander Asimova was no different to any other pilot of her generation.
But her myth was her own.
There was something out there. She was just following hints, of course. But her father had found something, she could tell that much. His notebooks were arcane, difficult even for her – after years of reading and re-reading them – to understand. But there was something out there, she was sure, something unprecedented. Her father had found something, and built some kind of secret storage base, far away from The Bubble; a base so secret that he had never mentioned it to Evgeniya or to her sister Lilianna.
There were clues, diagrams, drawings of planets and systems, things she thought she half understood. What seemed to be a stupendously ringed planet or sun. Nothing exact. There was a storage base, and also the hint of some other mystery, something that had disturbed her father or perhaps intrigued him. It may have just been a dream, or some kind of vision he had had. She did not know. But she wanted to get to the bottom of it.
She hypothesised that the base was in a system that was somewhere at the bottom end of the Orion Spur, in the constellation of Taurus. That did not narrow it done much, of course, nor was it an area that was much travelled to. But that could work to her advantage, as any news from this area was more likely to stand out in the overwhelming welter of information that was always percolating in from around the galaxy.
“Cosmic dust-devils! What happened to the poor son of a bitch?”
“Didn't make it back,” the mechanic said with a shrug.
“Must've been some kind of disease. It is him, though.” The face was the only part left unmutilated. Evgeniya was not religious, but she crossed herself. The mechanic did not recognise the gesture. He just shrugged again.
Through her contacts she had managed to get closer to solving her puzzle. It was a stroke a luck really. She heard about a escape pod pulled from space in the Djaracates system. It belonged to a ship registered with an old acquaintance of her father's, a commander called Maxim Vizinczey. The Djaracates system was rarely visited by outsiders, as the only starport was too long a journey from jump-in point to make it worthwhile. But Evgeniya had made allies there, helping out with medical supply shipments during an outbreak of Valley Fever.
“We'll get rid of the body and the pod. You can take the data-canister. How much did we agree for the salvage?”
“1.2 million.”
“Okay, commander, make the payment, and I'll get the canister put in your ship. Which one's yours?”
She pointed across the terminal toward one of the landing pads. “EV-08A, Diamond Light. The red and black Asp over there.”
She was glad to get out of Tisserand Santuary.
She took the canister back to Can Qing to find out what was on it. As it turned out, this was the 'treasure map' – as it were – that Evgeniya needed, the key to the mystery.
+++
Several weeks later and 900-odd light year nearer to the edge of the galaxy, we find Evgeniya in a system that was not registered in any way other than by its name on the famous GalMap. It was called HIP 257** (it is probably better if I do not tell you its full name). She was currently 191,000 light-seconds from the primary star of that far-flung system, travelling toward a gas giant which was the furthest-most planet in the system's secondary formation. It was a long way to go on a whim growing from a flimsy kernel of curiosity, but she rationalised that to herself, believing the pay-off would be worth it. She needed to know.
She slowed her ship down as she approached. It had the cold purity of a crystal and the slight elegance of a frozen ice-skater. It was huge. It had been a long time since she had seen anything so impressive; probably since the huge white suns of the NGC 7822 nebula. But there was something special about the pale and austere rings of this gas giant which immediately spoke to her soul, and so she pulled to a stop for a moment and simply looked. She was 40 light-seconds away from it, but the large outer ring filled the view through her canopy. It was like a huge ghost in space. It was beautiful, and it gave her the willies. She sat and watched while her scanners performed their tasks, still unsure if she would be able to proceed. She could be disappointed, or perhaps she would find what she sought; she was unsure which outcome she would prefer. Once the data had scanned onto her digital orrery, she read the output from the holographic screen on her dashboard: it was a band of ice several million kilometres in diameter. Just as she had been led to expect. The figures seemed to match up. The kernel of curiosity grew.
The thrusters kicked in, and she went onward toward the planet, which was a dull mud-coloured ball of swirling hydrogen and helium, and had four moons orbiting in the large space between its rings. The local constellations winked through its cold disc, and the purple and brown streams of the distant galactic core were visible. She was both excited and a little anxious. The place was completely isolated, and that is how she felt too as she approached.
She flew up passed the gas giant's dark side, through the thicker inner ring, which glowed like purest diamond as the sun light passed through it.
That was when she picked up the signal.
It must be here that Commander Vizinczey had ejected from his ship. Banking her craft, she followed the signal to its source, curving around the gas giant. She found the remains of a ship, floating just above the atmosphere of the planet. She went closer; the shape of some of the torched plates suggested a Diamondback, which was the type of ship that poor Vizinczey's escape pod had belonged to. She looped around the wreckage, examining it with her pale eyes. There was no obvious reason for the craft's demise. Vizinczey could have run out of fuel and been forced to self-destruct.
She turned her ship so that her canopy was facing the darkly streaked surface of the gas giant. Her deep sensors picked up another strange signal source below, somewhere beneath the atmosphere of the planet, but she could see nothing unusual. What could it be? She ejected a probe, which flew off out of sight beneath her. The lights on her dashboard flickered, a strange magnetic energy was pulsing up at her from the storms of the gas giant. The scanner in front of her showed impossible movements, as if there were ships beneath the volatile surface of the planet, ghost ships that winked and disappeared. She assumed there was a fault, so she re-set the sensor, but when it came back on it still it showed bizarre readings.
She decided to keep moving. The probe would take an hour or so to return, and she decided to investigate the vicinity while she waited. Look for some clues. She flew back out, away from the gas giant, and scanned all its fleet-footed moons, which orbited it daily. Finally, she landed on the largest of the moons. This moon had its own miniature ice ring, and was white as arsenic, with several shallow scars across its otherwise pristine surface. A good place for a storage base? It was possible. She landed in one of the valleys and took a sample of the faded soil. Her scanners detected several deep caverns beneath the ice, but there was no obvious sign of a base or any kind of human settlement.
She took off and flew out into the vast ring of the gas giant. It was a barren field of slow dancing glacial asteroids, a frigid primeval pavane. She could see the pink glow of the Witch Head Nebula above her. Its aspect, seen from this spot, matched with a drawing from her father's logbook. It looked like an angry fish with a fierce orange mane. The light shining from the asteroids was ethereal and cold. They were translucent blue and white, solid looking, and the sunlight glinted off them as the turned. Most of them were several times larger than her ship.
She weaved her way through the icebergs, and back out into the darkness of space. She turned back toward the gas giant.
A look of disbelief, of horror, came onto Evgeniya's face as she looked at the readings that the probe had begun to return to her. They were erratic – impossible. The numbers were wrong, the visual obscure, and the audio was full of weird static like a radio being tuned. She thought she heard a voice speaking a horrid language beyond comprehension – there was sudden high-pitched electronic squeal. Then silence. She flicked through the readings, trying to make sense of them, pressed buttons on her dashboard, tapped her fingers on the side of her face.
The probe had been destroyed.
She had seen enough. She turned away from the ice field and accelerated. She charged her drive and jumped out of the system.
But she would be back.
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[More pictures here: Evi's gallery]