Never Again Read online

  Chapter Six

  As he lurched into a sitting position, Yoshi’s heart thudded heavily in his chest. He blinked the sleep out of his eyes and felt the ship shake as the navigation thrusters engaged, placing them behind the orbit of Titan, Saturn’s largest moon. The unusual maneuvers had become a frequent event as sporadic asteroid showers flew past, devastating Titan’s surface and causing flashes of brilliant light when they struck Saturn’s surface.

  However, the ship’s vibrations hadn’t been what woke him. Yoshi cringed as the hidden implant in his head sent uncomfortable jolts through his nervous system, alerting him that he was about to receive a message from the Brotherhood.

  Yoshi stared out the viewport just above his bunk, and despite having been stationed in the Matsushita Science Station for nearly six months, he was in awe every time he saw Saturn, the yellow-orange gas giant with its telltale ring looming large in the background.

  Since having left Earth, Yoshi had not received a single communiqué from the Brotherhood, nor had he expected any. There’d be no reason to send a signal hundreds of millions of miles out in space just so he could hear it. But that tingling was a sign that he was mistaken.

  Swinging his legs off the side of the bed, Yoshi silently prayed for no more than half a minute when a voice only he could hear echoed loudly in his head.

  “Brother Watanabe, the time has come.

  “The End Times are here, but remember, in the wake of the darkness comes a great light. There will be those who are scared of what’s to come, but the faithful will see the glory of the Lord as the darkness approaches.

  “Brother, you have been blessed beyond comprehension. We have signs showing that our faith is being tested. By allowing God’s test to proceed unhindered, by exhibiting the faith that we know you possess, the Almighty will make his presence known to you.

  “His test comes in the form of the void. An utter blackness that, for those without faith, spells their doom. Yet for the faithful, it is a time of awakening. An opportunity for the unworthy to be saved, and for the faithful to become a First Witnesses to God’s glorious presence amongst us.”

  Yoshi’s heart raced; the thrill of what was to come felt almost overwhelming. To be a Witness was what all of the Brotherhood had been promised since time immemorial.

  “Brother Watanabe, be warned. If you don’t show faith in our Lord, if you shy away from His test, then He will know that you’ve forsaken His trust. And in so doing, the darkness of the void will leach through your soul and forever remove it from the Tree of Life. God will turn his back on you if you don’t show faith. Don’t allow others to doom your immortal soul. If there are believers with you, you may share the joyous news, but for the heathens, there can only be one fate.

  “Earn the title of First Witness, and let your soul sing forevermore.

  “You know what to do.”

  The tingling of the implant faded, but the words of the Brotherhood had not. With a surge of righteous energy flowing through him, Yoshi retrieved the knife he kept hidden in his dresser drawer.

  He gently kissed the blade and smiled as he stared at the Japanese symbols his father had carved into it. It was a single word: Righteous.

  With a practiced flip of the knife, Yoshi clenched it in his fist.

  Having spent six months with these people, he knew none of them were believers. They wouldn’t be able to stomach being a Witness. They’d try to save themselves from the darkness, and in so doing, risk God’s wrath.

  He knew what he had to do.

  ###

  Staring in awe through the portal above the administrator’s workstation, Yoshi felt an exhilarating tingle as the wake of some unseen power gripped the space station tightly.

  It had been two days since he’d received the Brotherhood’s message. Dozens of audio messages had been broadcasting through the space station from JAXA, the Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency. And when no responses were received, they kept trying to remotely recall the ship, which Yoshi repeatedly overrode.

  Suddenly, the administrator’s computer console let out an alarm. Yoshi glanced at the screen and scraped away the dried splatters of blood that blocked his view of the incoming message.

  *** NASA EMERGENCY ALERT ***

  All space exploration stations and personnel are recalled.

  Immediately return to Earth orbit under Emergency Protocol X-55. All other priorities are vacated.

  Confirm receipt.

  With a feeling of disgust, Yoshi shook his head at the message and lectured the unhearing computer. “I’ll never forsake my Lord. It’s only through our faith that he will walk amongst us again. Anything else is utter damnation.”

  Glancing over his shoulder, Yoshi spotted the crumpled body of one of the space engineers.

  “Blasphemy against our Lord cannot be tolerated.”

  ###

  Having strapped himself into the administrator’s chair, Yoshi held strong in his faith, even though the space station seemed to be shaking to pieces. Sparks flew throughout the cabin, and the near-deafening sound of metal shrieking was nothing compared to what Yoshi saw through the portal.

  Titan, the moon that the space station had been orbiting, had for some reason separated from Saturn’s orbit. The moon, with the space station in tow, was now racing into the emptiness of space.

  Yoshi stared in awe. “It’s as if the finger of God is nudging me along a preordained path. I go where You lead.”

  No more than several hundred miles away, Saturn’s former moon was being ripped apart.

  The mountain-sized pieces of Titan swirled around a void in space. There were no stars, just blackness. Yet the space station rushed ever faster around this void, almost like water swirling around a bathtub’s drain.

  Praying for a sign, Yoshi watched as Titan ripped into ever-smaller chunks.

  The space station approached ever closer. The groaning deepened as one of its arms sheared off with an explosive force, and all the lights blinked off.

  The shuddering vibration became stronger as Yoshi experienced a sensation that was almost like going down a steep rollercoaster, while the station became part of the swirling vortex.

  Just as another arm of the space station ripped from the main body, Yoshi gasped, and a sense of euphoria flushed through him.

  As the station swirled rapidly around the mysterious void, the darkness began to shine.

  Flares of scintillating light formed a coruscating shimmer across the center of the swirling maelstrom.

  The g-forces were too great for Yoshi to pull in a breath, but inside him, his mind sang loudly as he watched the darkness bloom into a beautiful rainbow of colors.

  Over the deafening sound of the chaos all around him, Yoshi yelled with his last breath, “I believe!”

  Just then, the station ruptured and fell into the gaping maw of the black hole.

  Chapter Seven

  Dave hopped over a small crevice on the lunar surface as other workers laid out the last of the solar panels for the Alpine Valley solar farm. It was the largest solar grid they’d ever installed on the Moon and it promised to yield tens of gigawatts of power.

  “Carter,” the Mining Director’s voice echoed loudly in Dave’s space helmet. “Schedule says we’re due to connect Alpine Valley to the dielectric heaters tomorrow. How’s it looking?”

  He panned his gaze across the field of panels, and they all looked uniformly seated. Not more than fifty feet from the solar farm was a foot-thick power cable that hadn’t yet been connected to the panels.

  “It looks like we’ll be done today. Just a few dozen more panels to install and then we’ll connect the power cable—”

  Suddenly, a flash of brilliant white light erupted on the lunar surface several hundred yards away, followed almost immediately by a half-dozen more near-blinding flares. Dave nearly lost his balance as the ground vibrated heavily and the speaker in his helmet crackled to life. “What the
hell? A moonquake?”

  With Dave’s heart racing, he motioned to the other workers to stay behind as he hopped toward the nearest impact site. “We just received a series of meteor strikes!”

  Racing toward the impact site, Dave slowed as ejecta ranging from fist-sized rocks to pebbles began to fall all around him.

  “Shit, is everyone okay? Any damage?”

  He switched his comms unit to the engineering team on the lunar surface and asked, “You guys okay?”

  “Roger, no injuries. But Carter, if you’re talking to the Director, tell him we’ve got a butt-load of work to do. We’ve got debris all over the solar farm and need to clean it off. Also, it looks like we might have some damaged panels, and we need to run diagnostics on them. This’ll push our schedule out at least twelve hours.”

  “Understood,” Dave switched his comms unit back to the Moon base frequency as he stared at a forty-foot-wide depression in the lunar surface. Tiny rocks dribbled down the sides of the impact crater. “Everyone’s fine,” Dave announced, trying to keep the worry from his voice. “There was only minor damage, and it shouldn’t impact our overall schedule by more than a single work shift.”

  Drenched with nervous sweat, he backed away from the crater and turned his gaze toward space. The impacts were almost certainly not a coincidence. It was the first in what he knew would likely be a hailstorm of impacts in the coming months.

  ###

  Images of a catastrophic explosion sent Dave lurching up into a sitting position, and he barely suppressed a terrified yell as the dream left his heart racing. Blinking sleep from his eyes, Dave mentally grasped for the details of his nightmare, but the memories vanished like a wisp of smoke from a candle’s extinguished flame. As his heart thudded heavily, Dave suddenly remembered that he’d forgotten to get himself assigned to tonight’s drilling crew. He knew himself well enough to know that he was too much of a control freak to let them connect the thermal transfer pipes to the Alpine Valley solar farm without him.

  Leaning back on his elbows, Dave yawned and glanced at the clock on his nightstand. From his bed, he stared out the six-inch-thick window and saw the familiar image of Earth sitting just above the horizon, a blue gem in the dark backdrop of space. As he stared at his birthplace, breathless anxiety washed over him. Dave’s chest tightened, and he suddenly felt like a drowning victim, desperately searching for that last breath that would never come. Gripping the bed sheets, he began struggling to breathe and began feeling light-headed. Dave closed his eyes and willed himself to relax, knowing that there was only so much he could do. Feeling the muscles around his chest slowly loosen, he sucked in a breath of sweet, sterile air and wished it could all somehow be different.

  Dave had known about the pending disaster for almost a decade. What had transpired since then had aged him more than he’d have liked to admit. He ran his hand through his tightly cropped Afro, knowing there weren’t any grays up there yet; but he felt every one of his twenty-nine years. Deep down, Dave wasn’t sure if he’d live long enough for his first gray hair. He’d done everything he could, but he wasn’t sure that it would be enough.

  Back when he’d lived on Earth, he’d become the youngest head of the International Science Foundation. It was the same year he’d been awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics at the “ripe old age” of nineteen, and that was only one year after having earned his second PhD from Caltech. Back then, the science journals had predicted he’d surpass the accomplishments of Einstein.

  Nobody thought that anymore. He’d been disgraced and shut out of the ISF, likely forgotten by the vast majority of people who’d ever heard of him, and that was actually okay with him. He’d never sought fame—quite the opposite. Dave had tried saving the world and failed miserably.

  It was now April 5th, 2066, the fourth-year anniversary of his arrival at Moon Base Crockett and the restart of his life.

  The recurring nightmares about explosions reinforced Dave’s nagging worry that the roughnecks might screw something up when attaching the dielectric heaters to the solar panels. He sighed and swung his legs out of bed.

  With fatigue wearing on him, he knew he needed sleep, but he couldn’t risk having his last chance for survival being messed up by other people’s carelessness. None of the miners in the space colony knew about the approaching danger.

  His thoughts drifted to the mining operation as he dressed, and Dave’s mind raced through all of the possible ways the miners could screw something up catastrophically.

  He shuddered as he whispered to himself, “The thermal energy couplers—if they don’t connect them properly ...”

  ###

  Walking underneath a newly-constructed, fifteen-hundred-foot-wide geodesic dome, Dave squinted through the clouds of dust floating in the low-gravity environment and heard the grunting of the roughnecks before he actually saw them.

  As he approached the far end of the enclosure, some of the dust thinned, and he saw two teams working at once. One was busy drilling a new hole into the lunar surface, while the other team was in the process of slowly lowering an ever-lengthening metal pipe into a pre-drilled hole. The pipe was a dielectric heater whose sole purpose was to generate heat from electricity.

  The foreman, one of the most senior members of the roughneck crew, glanced in his direction, wiped his sweaty, dirt-streaked face with his arm, and yelled, “Carter, what the hell you doing here? Your shift ain’t starting for another three or four hours, so unless you’re going to get your ass to work, get the hell out of our work space!”

  Dave held his hands up and took a step forward. “I’ll help out, where do you want me?”

  With an amused shrug, the foreman pointed at a large pile of pipes and yelled, “Relieve Doran and help with the pipes.”

  Grabbing a six-foot-long section of twelve-inch metal pipe from the pile, Dave grunted as he lifted it up and threaded the end onto the portion of pipe sticking out of the hole. With a large metal wrench, another burly worker twisted clockwise on the upper-half of the pipe, connecting the two pieces and yelled, “Goop it!”

  One of the crew slathered the pipe with a thick gray paste that was used as a thermal conductor, while another grunted as he pulled a three-foot-wide transparent sheet of graphene from a giant spool and wrapped it around the pipe.

  The foreman yelled, “Make sure you get a good even seal with that graphene or I’ll pound you something awful. That shit’s supposed to help heat the underground rock to well over 1,000 degrees, and I don’t want to see what’ll happen if the boss man says the thermal transfer isn’t working right.”

  As the pipe slowly turned and was lowered deeper into the hole by a hydraulic winch, one of the men slathered more goop on the pipe as the graphene rolled off the spool. Dave grabbed another pipe, heaved it up onto the top of the protruding pipe and the process repeated itself.

  After only a few minutes, he was soaked with sweat from the backbreaking work, but he found peace in the monotonous but satisfying progress. He’d been doing this type of thing, side-by-side with many of these men for nearly four years. Little did the rest of the workers know that he, in fact, had invented the process for trapping excess solar energy and storing it as heat, deep within the Moon.

  To them, he was just an anonymous mineral miner who mostly kept to himself, but on occasion got assigned to work as a roughneck by the Mining Director. As far as Dave knew, none of them realized or cared that he’d always managed to get himself assigned to the roughneck crew just as they were about to connect one of the thermal pipes to one of the multi-acre-sized solar panel farms splayed on the lunar surface.

  The pile of pipes eventually dwindled, and just as the last one was lowered into the hole, the foreman waved his right arm and yelled, “Clamp her shut! We’re at the bottom. Get the power cable ready, and the rest of you, stand back.”

  Dave, along with two others, began heaving on a thick power cable that was attached to the nearby acres of solar panels lai
d on the lunar surface. Even though the gravity was only one-sixth that of Earth, the cable was over a thousand pounds. He’d lost count of how many muscles he’d strained in the past, dragging a similarly cumbersome bundles of wires across the lunar surface.

  Having placed himself at the front of the cable, Dave and the others worked smoothly as a team. They began lifting the end of the foot-thick power cable, and Dave steered their movement carefully as the cable reached a level height with the top of the dielectric heating pipe.

  The foreman yelled out a warning: “Make sure you align that cable properly, or I’ll fire each and every one of your asses that isn’t burnt to a crisp.”

  With a grim smile, Dave grunted, “Okay, guys, just a little closer...”

  Suddenly, the cable slammed into the heating pipe with a loud metallic thunk as the electromagnetic field around the end of the cable automatically sealed the connection.

  Dave heard the familiar humming sound as tens of gigawatts of power began flowing into the eight-mile-long pipe. He breathed a sigh of relief.

  The foreman yelled, “Jenkins and Stevens, you two seal the top of the hole. The rest of you clean up, and job well done. That’ll be it for this shift, but we’ve got lots more drilling to do before this contract’s over. Carter, you’ve still got a shift to pull in a couple hours, and I’m expecting you to be there.”

  Wiping the sweat off his face with his sleeve, Dave waved at the foreman and nodded.

  “Sir,” one of the men who’d been wrapping the graphene around the heater glanced worriedly at the near-empty spool. “We just received a huge shipment of the heater pipe, but we’re running low on this graphene.”

  “I noticed that yesterday,” Dave yelled. “I’ll be talking to Hostetler later about that.”

  The foreman pointed at Dave with a serious expression. “Carter, you better make sure the Director understands, or I’ll take it out of your hide. The last thing we need is a delay that screws up our drilling schedule.”