The Shards of a Cielo Dream

1. Pharos Station

Close your eyes. Although the truth sets you free, it is ignorance that keeps you safe at night.

Astronaut Tom S. Kirby swiped away the app from his tablet device. As the mission commander of the new NASA space shuttle Relentless, he was breaking guidelines by reading anti-intellectual websites. Especially when the nation was hot on its deep space mining program, and Saturn was wholly within its sight.

Still, he wanted to know why. Why some folks back home rejected science, and why they believed mankind was better off not looking up to the sky. Sure, the end goal of the program was to extract natural resources from Saturn's rings. But those ice and rocks also held scientific value. According to the latest reports, their geological makeup contained clues as to when and how the planet came to be. If that secret is unlocked, we would be closer to discovering the origin of the Solar System.

So back to the question. Why?

Kirby thought of his son. When the DC police called up his residence one night, it crushed him to hear Jamie had been arrested for protesting at the National Mall against the government's Saturn plans. How was it possible - that the son of a prominent astronaut was openly against progress? He felt betrayed, even ashamed. So he disowned his own flesh and blood in the heat of the moment. When Relentless blasted off, Kirby did not say goodbye.

A blinking yellow light prompted Kirby to put away his device. After eleven months, they had arrived.

The docking sequence began. His pilot, John Scythe, disabled the auto-pilot and took over the flight control stick. "Visual docking guidance system, online. Inbound trajectory, normal. Velocity, normal. Connecting in three, two, one..."

The vessel came to a jolting halt. If this was on Earth, there would be a loud bang.

"Docking complete," said Scythe. He shut off the fusion drive and pressurized the airlock.

The thick barrier doors beyond the airlock slid apart. There was oxygen around them; the life support system was still intact. Kirby and his team took off their helmets.

This was Pharos, a fully autonomous, three-thousand feet long space station that orbited Saturn between its major moons and outermost rings. Its function was to chart those rings by scanning them with optical, radar, and gravitational wave sensors. Should mining operations commence in the future, Pharos Station would also serve as a lighthouse.

But something had happened. Pharos Station lost contact with NASA. No warning, no running self-diagnostic. The AI simply pulled its own plug and went offline.

Kirby's mission was to reboot the AI, find the problem, and promptly bring the space station back online. Rich and influential people who funded this project were eager to start mining, but NASA's cartography work had fallen behind.

Rebooting the AI was easy. Kirby's tech specialist, Rachael Kim, punched in a series of codes from her tablet device. Sostratus 2.17 came alive on the screens mounted throughout the central command module. Its emotion readings were way above the red line, suggesting panic and fear.

"Warning, do not reboot the system, do not reboot the system!"

The three astronauts looked at each other, puzzled. Kim said, "Sostratus, this is the crew of OSV-102 Relentless executing NASA mission Harvest-1. Question: why did you shut down the station without prior authorization?"

"Because the station needed to be quiet."

"Quiet?" Kirby asked. "Why is the AI worried about being loud in space?"

"Beats me," said Kim. "Sostratus, question. Why do you need to be quiet?"

"Because the station needed to hide. The beast was waking up."

"What beast? I mean, question: what beast?"

"The beast from the other dimension."

The screens in the command module showed high-resolution images of Saturn's rings, overlaid with infrared and gravitational signatures. Somewhere between the countless pieces of ice and rocks, were some sort of debris. Millions of pieces of debris. Non-human starship debris.

And behind those drifting pieces, there was a distortion in the gravitational field. It was some sort of wormhole that had collapsed - four billion years ago.

Next, the images zoomed in to one of the violently torn objects. It appeared to be a bridge tower of what was once a colossal warship. Kirby saw pictograph words inscribed on the perfectly smooth surface, which Sostratus translated. "Let us stand our ground, for the great terror is upon us..."

"What is this?" asked Kirby.

"A battleground. Four billion years ago, ships from thirteen civilizations converged here to confront a threat known as Nu'chatka. The Great Beast. No one knew what it was, except it roamed our universe and consumed our light. The ensuing battle was fierce but short-lived. Weapons meant to kill planets were thrown against the Beast to no avail. So as a last-ditch effort, the armada opened a wormhole and let it collapse, killing all of their sailors in the process. The trap worked. The Beast remains confined between two dimensions to this day. But not for long."

For years, Pharos Station had been bombarding Saturn's rings with its sensor arrays. As a result, the once dormant wormhole had become destabilized and was returning to life. On the screen, Kirby witnessed a slit emerging in space, which cast long shadow beams throughout the celestial rings. Nu'chatka was coming.

No turning back. The three astronauts returned to Relentless. They started their propulsion system, buckled up, and set course towards the wormhole. No plan - just do what the ancients did by detonating their fusion drive once they slip into the portal. The wormhole shall collapse and trap the Beast until mankind stumbles upon it again in the future.

"Cooling system deactivated," said Kim. "Fusion drive rupture imminent."

"Approaching the wormhole," said Scythe. "Collision in four, three, two..."

Jamie, maybe you were right all along...

The slit opened wide, revealing a giant, staring eye.