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To Violet Sue, born on New Year’s Eve

PROLOGUE
JULY 1, 2016

Valeri Fedorov had grown up with his eyes on the stars.

As a boy he had studied the history of space exploration while his friends were playing hockey and soccer. As a young man he had studied engineering and joined the Russian Air Force, distinguishing himself as a pilot and studying at night to prepare himself for applying to become a cosmonaut. His hero was Yuri Gagarin, and when he had felt the crush of liftoff for the first time in 2011, he felt like he was fulfilling Gagarin’s dreams, as well as his own.

Now, five years later, he was on Rhea, one of Saturn’s moons, and as far from Earth as any human being had ever been… but instead of flying, he was trudging across the moon’s hostile surface toward an electrical substation, trying to figure out why the power in the command center kept going out.

As he walked, Valeri surveyed the landscape, looking for any sign of something that might have caused the outage. There were no recent meteor impacts. The base was built along the lip of a giant crater, and the crater walls showed no sign of recent slides or collapses. At first they had suspected damage to some of the equipment from a micrometeorite, but unless it was really very small it would have registered on the base seismometers. Thus he would have to abandon that theory and inspect the equipment to see what it might tell him.

They had emergency power from shielded generators, but that wasn’t enough to keep all the lights on, and it sure as hell wasn’t enough to keep the Rhea station warm. So Valeri and his crew, another dozen cosmonauts with bruised dreams and bruised knuckles just like him, were out in the near vacuum of Rhea’s surface, freezing their asses off and trying to get the lights back on.

There had been several strange power surges of unknown origin over the past few days, perhaps related to Saturn’s electromagnetic sheath, or maybe a passing wave of particles from the sun. Valeri didn’t know. It wasn’t his job to know. He wasn’t a scientist. He was a trained pilot and engineer, a cosmonaut, reminded that most of space exploration was far from glorious. It was hard work, turning wrenches and fixing machines constantly under assault from the extremes of vacuum and cold.

Despite all that, Valeri loved it.

He had a girlfriend back on Earth, and someday he would settle down with her, but today he was building humankind’s dream of space… and keeping the human race safe from a repeat of what had happened in 1996.

Valeri had been just a boy then, still spending all his time playing hockey and fishing, and then at night looking up at the stars. The aliens had destroyed Moscow, Kiev, and St. Petersburg, but they had not reached Petropavlovsk when their mother ship was destroyed. Because of that, Valeri was alive to go to space and curse the balky machinery here on Rhea.

The power surges were making his life hell and slowing down the construction of the Earth Space Defense base they were supposed to be building.

“You on vacation out there?” one of the techs radioed from inside.

“Shut up,” Valeri said. He didn’t have much patience for people sitting inside where there were air and survivable temperatures, complaining about the pace of work on the moon’s surface. At least Valeri and his team didn’t have it as hard as the construction crew working on the base itself. The cranes and arc welders had their own fuel cells, so power interruptions didn’t give them any time off. The welders sparked now as a crew member held a ten-meter-long steel beam in place, extending the base’s frame toward what would be its final shape.

The armaments were still in transit from Earth. When the base was complete, the Earth Space Defense force would reach to Saturn. Heavy gun turrets engineered from alien technology would ring the base, making Saturn the outermost point in the defense architecture. Other bases were under construction on Mars and on one of Jupiter’s moons. Valeri couldn’t remember which one. Jupiter had too many damn moons.

Rhea’s minimal gravity made it easy to move once you had the hang of how to jump and control your landings without losing your balance. Valeri had figured it out during his first posting off Earth, back on the Moon. Rhea’s gravity was so light you could practically throw a rock over its horizon. He’d had to adopt a sort of slow-motion walk, not trying to jump, because each normal step would launch your body into a slow arc that could cover tens of meters.

He reached the substation and opened an electrical panel. He saw a lot of black streaks and knew immediately what the issue was.

“I found the problem,” he said. “The power surges blew out most of the fuses.” The substations were supposed to be shielded, but apparently their protection wasn’t as good as the thirty centimeters of lead that sheathed the emergency generators.

“Get the heat back on before we freeze to death,” the tech responded. “This is worse than Siberia.”

Siberia was nice in the summer, Valeri thought. He had gone fishing there a few times before joining the cosmonaut corps. Maybe when he rotated back to Earth, he would take a trip there again. The lakes, the endless forests… a marked contrast from what he was looking at out here.

He had to take off the whole panel to replace the fuses. Where was his wrench? He’d had it a minute ago. Ah. There it was, on the ground.

Must have dropped it
, he thought. As he picked it up, though, Valeri noticed a strange phenomenon. Tiny particles of ice floated up from the surface, drifting higher. Like a slow motion reverse snowstorm.

It wasn’t unusual for small vibrations to kick up little mini-storms like this. A passing vehicle or a launch shook up the surface for a radius of several kilometers—but there was nothing like that going on at the moment. Feeling a strange sensation, Valeri turned in a slow circle to make sure. The only thing he saw was the welding crew, levering another beam into place. That shouldn’t have caused this, and it certainly shouldn’t have caused what he was feeling—it was as if gravity was starting to disappear around him.

A pang of fear went through Valeri at the thought of floating away from Rhea. He had done space walks before, but he didn’t have the gear for one now, and—

Stop it
, he told himself.
There’s nothing wrong with gravity. What could affect it, after all?

He looked up then and saw a glowing, pulsating mass in space between Rhea and Saturn. The disturbance was… difficult to describe. It was circular, or perhaps spherical. The boundary between it and normal space was hard to determine because it rippled and pulsed, like a convection current in water, but with color.

What could cause something like that?
Valeri was a trained engineer, and had learned quite a bit of physics and astronomy during his years in space. None of his education had prepared him for this sight.

“Command, are you seeing this?” he radioed.

There was no answer. Valeri looked over toward the base and saw that the lights inside were flickering. Another power surge? Was it from the ripple in space? Valeri had never seen anything like it. The energies coming from the ripple had to be intense to affect the power supply even through the heavy shielding.

A thought occurred to him. If the power supply was being affected, what were those mysterious energies doing to his body through the minimal protection of his space suit?

Valeri decided the substation repairs could wait. He looked around and saw the other members of the crew reaching the same conclusion. They dropped their tools and started back for the relative safety of the base. The construction cranes and tractors powered down as their operators broke off work. All around them hung fine particles of ice, drifting slowly and incredibly upward.

Valeri followed, stepping carefully because he was still seeing the ice particles lifting around him, and he was suddenly and irrationally afraid that if he tried to move too fast, he would float away with them.

* * *

Commander Piotr Belyaev stomped into the command center as the lights flickered again. The area was still under construction. It was airtight and heated—at least theoretically—but the computer systems weren’t fully installed yet, and the furnishings were still minimal. The temperature, he guessed, was somewhere around minus twenty Celsius. He wore a parka and extra socks under his ESD-issue boots.

“What is it now?” he demanded as he entered. The power problems were slowing construction, and that in turn was slowing preparations for the installation of the gun turrets. They were on their way from Earth, and Belyaev was going to catch hell if the gun emplacements weren’t finished by the time they arrived.

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