Authors: Allen Steele
Angel of Europa
“An author with the potential to revitalize the Heinlein tradition.” —
Booklist
“The best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade.” —John Varley, author of
Slow Apocalypse
“One of the hottest new writers of hard SF on the scene today.” —
Asimov’s Science Fiction
“No question, Steele can tell a story.” —
OtherRealms
Winner of the Locus Award for Best First Novel
“Stunning.” —Chicago Sun-Times
“[Steele is] the master of science-fiction intrigue.” —
The Washington Post
“Brings the thrill back to realistic space exploration. It reads like a mainstream novel written in 2016 A.D.” —
The New York Review of Science Fiction
“A damned good book; lightning on the high frontier. I got a sense throughout that this was how it would really be.” —Jack McDevitt, author of
Cauldron
“An ambitious science fiction thriller . . . skillfully plotted and written with gusto.” —
Publishers Weekly
“A splendidly executed novel of working-class stiffs in space.” —
Locus
“Reads like golden-age Heinlein.” —Gregory Benford, author of
Beyond Infinity
“Readers won’t be disappointed. This is the kind of hard, gritty SF they haven’t been getting enough of.” —
Rave Reviews
“A high-tech thriller set against the backdrop of an alternative space program. Allen Steele has created a novel that is at once action-packed, poignant, and thought provoking. His best novel to date.” —Kevin J. Anderson, bestselling author of the Jedi Academy Trilogy
“Science fiction with its rivets showing as only Steele can deliver it. This one is another winner.” —Jack McDevitt, author of
The Engines of God
“With
The Tranquility Alternative,
Allen Steele warns us of the bitter harvest reaped by intolerance, and of the losses incurred by us all when the humanity of colleagues and friends is willfully ignored.” —Nicola Griffith, author of
Ammonite
“Unanswered questions, high-tech, hard-science SF adventure, and action—how can you fail to enjoy this one?” —
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
“Allen Steele is the best hard SF writer to come along in the last decade. In
The Jericho Iteration
he comes down to a near-future Earth and proves he can handle a darker, scarier setting as well as his delightful planetary adventures. I couldn’t put it down.” —John Varley, author of
Slow Apocalypse
“A portrait of a writer who lives and breathes the dreams of science fiction.” —
Analog Science Fiction and Fact
Allen M. Steele
I
T
HE TRANSITION FROM
life to death to life again was almost instantaneous.
First there was the decompression alarm, a loud and repetitive gong like a brass cymbal being struck again and again. Then a gust of wind, almost as if he was on a beach and feeling an ocean breeze coming in over the seawall. Then the breeze became a gale, and he turned away from the hardsuit he’d been inspecting just in time to see the outer airlock hatch open, a tiger-striped portal to an airless and star-flecked darkness.
Danzig grabbed the door rung of the open suit locker and yelled for help even though he knew there was no one on the other side of the closed inner hatch; he’d been alone on Hub Deck 2 when he entered the airlock. The roar of escaping air drowned out his voice, and his ears propped painfully when he yelled again. His feet tore loose from the deck; when he looked down at them, he saw that one of his sneakers had been ripped from his left foot.
He was cold, colder than he’d ever been before, and although he clutched the door rung as hard as he could, his hands were becoming numb. He tried to take a deep breath, but couldn’t fill his lungs. Blood spurted from his nostrils as a viscous red stream that was caught by the escaping air and sucked toward the open hatch. Pressure pounded against his temples and the sockets of his eyes; the very pores of his skin felt as if they’re on fire. His fingers loosened from the rung, and then he was lying in an infirmary bed, gazing up at Dr. Philips.
“Hello, Otto.” In keeping with expedition protocol, she spoke to him in English rather than his native German. Her voice was quiet, her eyes searching. “How are we feeling?”
Somewhere above his head was the staccato beep of the bed’s sensors, registering his cardiac rhythm and respiration. The bed sheets were cool and crisp, the pillow soft against the back of his head. His body was utterly weak, his muscles drained of all energy. It was all he could do just to keep his eyes open.
“Like … hell.” His throat was a dry tunnel behind a parched mouth. “Water.”
Dr. Phillips — he’d always had trouble thinking of her as Martha, her first name — favored him with worried smile. “You shouldn’t be dehydrated,” she said, glancing up at the IV drip bag suspended above the left side of his bed; its narrow plastic tube carried a glucose solution to the stent inserted in the crook of his left elbow. “I’ll get you something to drink in a moment.” She looked down at him again. “Do you know where you are?”
“Here,” he managed to croak.
“Think you can be a little more exact?”
“Ship …
Zeus
…
Explorer
.”
“Yes. Very good.” A satisfied nod. “And your name is …?”
“Otto … Danzig.” Irritation accompanied thirst. “Water … please.”
“Of course.” Phillips strolled over to a water dispenser, filled a paper cup, inserted a straw. Returning to the bed, she pushed a button on its right side. The bed purred softly as it raised halfway to a sitting position. “Just a little,” she said, bending the straw and fitting it between his lips. “Don’t gulp or you’ll get sick.”
The water was as lukewarm and flat as only the recycled urine of twenty men and women can be; just then, though, it was as sweet as wine. Ignoring the warning, Danzig sipped greedily at the straw, savoring the water as it rolled down the desert cave of his mouth and throat. He wanted to take the cup away from her, but his hands only twitched a little when he tried to raise them.
“That’s enough,” Phillips said, even though he’d barely slaked his thirst, and gently pulled the straw from his mouth before he was through. “Now … do you remember what happened?”
“I was … I was … in … the airlock. Outer door … opened and …” He struggled to remember, but the only image that came back to him were his feet, one of his sneakers missing, dangling a couple of meters from the open hatch. “That’s all.”
“Shock. Don’t worry, it’ll come back to you.” Philips took the cup over to a recycling tube and poured the remaining water into it. “You’re fortunate to be alive,” she continued as she crumpled the cup and shoved it into a disposal chute. “They managed to shut the hatch before you were blown outside, but you were dead when they pulled you out of there.”
Danzig stared at her. “Dead?”
“Uh-huh.” Philips turned to a nearby counter, started to do something Danzig couldn’t see. “Severe pulmonary barotrauma, coupled with acute ischemia. You’re just lucky you didn’t have an embolism … I’m not sure I could’ve saved you then. Otherwise, everything that could happen to someone who’s been in a blowout, happened to you.”
“How did … how did …?”
“They got you out of there in time. Once I managed to resuscitate you, I put you on life support, pumped you full of medical nanos, and programmed them to repair your organs and blood vessels. Then I stuck you in the emergency hibernation tank to heal.”
Philips turned away from the counter. She held a syringe gun, its barrel half-filled with a milky fluid. “Now that we don’t need them anymore, it’s time to kill the little demons.” She placed the gun’s tip against the side of his neck and squeezed the trigger. Danzig felt a wasp sting. “There. That should do it.”
Danzig knew that he should be grateful to the doctor for saving his life, but he could barely stay awake. “
Danke
,” he whispered, then remembered expedition protocol. “Thanks,” he added, using English instead. Another question occurred to him. “How … long?”
“About six and a half months.” Philips reached up to the monitor and tapped a finger against its screen. “To be exact,” she added, studying the readout, “six months, one week, six days, seven hours and thirty-six minutes. Today is September 19, 2112. And before you ask …”
She walked across the compartment to a large square porthole. Its outer shutters were closed; Philips touched a wall button and the shutters rolled up like Venetian blinds. Beyond the window lay darkness, jet black and fathomless. Then a grey orb slowly glided into view, as densely cratered as the Moon but much larger. Looming behind it was an immense sphere, yellow and orange bands slowly moving across its width, a large red ellipse swirling just south of its equator.
Callisto, with Jupiter in the background.
Danzig stared at them. When he’d entered the airlock, the
Zeus Explorer
had just crossed Mars orbit. If he’d been in hibernation for as long as Philips said, then the expedition must have reached Jupiter and its moons several months ago.
“We … made it.” Danzig forced a smile. “Thanks for … waking me up.”
“Yeah, well …” The doctor absently brushed back her blonde hair; she was kind of pretty, Danzig sleepily decided, in a stern sort of way. “If it was up to me, I would’ve let you sleep all the way back to Earth. You’re not fully healed yet. But the captain insisted that we wake you up.”
“Why did …?”
His eyes closed. He was unconscious before she had a chance to reply.
D
ANZIG SPENT THE NEXT
two days slipping in and out of sleep. Dr. Philips was there each time he woke up, ready to feed him or give him a bedpan. He was her only patient, so he had her undivided attention, and before long he felt comfortable enough with her to start calling her Martha. He gradually regained enough strength to stay awake and by the end of the second day all he wanted to do was get out of bed, although Martha warned him that he’d probably have to use a cane to get around. Six months of hibernation had atrophied his muscles; it would be awhile before his legs were strong enough to support him again.
It was not until then that the captain paid him a visit. He was sitting up in bed, reading a thriller on his pad — Martha had fetched it from his quarters, three levels down on Arm A from the infirmary, along with his clothes — when Consuela Diaz gently knocked on the recovery room’s half-open pocket door.
“Hello? Otto? Are you awake?”
“Yes, I am.” Danzig bookmarked his place and put down the pad. “Hello, Captain. Come to see if I’m still among the living?”
“That I knew already.” Captain Diaz slid the door shut behind her. “Dr. Phillips told me after the accident that you’d probably make it through, provided that you remained in hibernation long enough for the nanos to do their stuff.” A tentative smile on her nut-brown face. “I’m sure she’s told you that she was reluctant to wake you up. I figured, though, you’d be disappointed if you got all the way back to Earth only to find out that you’d missed your chance to see Jupiter.”
Danzig shrugged. Compared to what he’d been through, whether or not he was an active participant in the International Jupiter Expedition was the least of his concerns. In fact, he’d asked Martha to keep the shutters closed; the sight of Callisto spinning past the porthole every few minutes gave him vertigo, even if it was only caused by the habitat arms rotating clockwise around the
Explorer’s
hub.
“Is that why you had her wake me up?” he asked.
“No … no, I’m afraid it isn’t.” The smile faded as Diaz sat down on a vacant bed. “Something’s come up that … well, we need your particular skills.”