Beasts in the Garden will only be available via Kickstarter until mid-2025. The Kickstarter for its sequel, Intelligent Design, is set to begin January 2025. Enjoy this extended excerpt!
Chapter 1: John
“Her coffin is empty.”
Kim’s words, piped into my suit, cut through the fugue of my respirator, pumping in oxygen, and sucking out carbon dioxide.
Shhhhhhh … Whoosh.
The Dreamer’s “coffins,” the dark spacer nickname for cryo-chambers, were out of place in the station’s communal living area. But their ship had been damaged during landing, and the vital life support equipment they were supposed to port over was, too. The station at least had adequate radiation shielding. Porting the cryo-chambers over, and sleeping until our rescue mission arrived, was the Dreamer’s crew’s last hope of survival.
Hana’s was the only chamber of twelve that was dark.
I hadn’t expected her to be in it. Hana wouldn’t have gone quietly into the good night. She’d have struggled until her last breath to find a way to survive. She wouldn’t be able to help herself. Give Hana a mental puzzle, and every neuron in her brain fired like Chicago fireworks on the Fourth of July—unscheduled and everywhere, non-stop and brilliant, until she’d figured it out.
I hadn’t expected how much gazing down at her empty coffin would affect me. The “coffin” had been designed for her and her alone. The muscle saving, body encapsulating gel retained the imprint of her body, slight and slim. If I gazed too hard at the indentation left by her slender fingers, I might have lost it.
So I didn’t. I kept the light on my helmet aimed at the level of where her heart would be, where the monitors were warped and misshapen, and the cracks of the coffin’s damaged Plexiplate spiraled out like a spider web. And I focused on my breathing, unnaturally loud inside my helmet.
Shhhhhhh … Whoosh.
Shhhhhhh … Whoosh.
A light bobbed. Dr. Vishnar’s voice cracked through the speaker in my helmet. “She may have walked out the airlock.”
“No,” I said.
Vish turned to Kim. “Could you blame her?”
I wondered if my speaker was off.
But Kim’s eyes met mine from across the coffin, and I realized Vish was ignoring me.
I raised my eyebrows and looked heavenward, the closest I could get to a shrug in my suit.
Kim’s brow furrowed, and I recognized righteous anger on my behalf. He was a good guy, Kim.
Vish said, “We should deploy a drone.”
“We should check the place out first,” I said, not because he’d listen, but because I wanted it on record that I said the responsible thing.
Vish tapped the side of his helmet. “I’ll have Lo get the drone ready—”
Normally, Vish’s unwavering commitment to pretending I didn’t exist made me chuckle. I wasn’t in that kind of mood. Kim snapped with the frustration I felt. “Let’s check the place out first.”
“All right,” said Vish.
Unlike me, Kim had an M.D. and a Ph.D. after his name.
We passed the other coffins of Hana’s crew. Winking green lights let us know all was well with them, and Kim confirmed the readouts didn’t lie. They slept peacefully. The electricity in the station was out, but their coffins had shifted fine to backup power.
We hadn’t expected the electricity to be out. I expected a doozy of a short was the cause.
After being cooped up on a ship, the living area felt immense, even if it was only the size of an ordinary living room. It had head room. Built in an array of interlocking titanium domes by robotic pioneers before Hana and her crew arrived, the ceiling was nearly two stories high at the apex.
Vish halted just before the airlock to the next dome. His head lamp illuminated crew snapshots pinned to the wall. “Dr. Morgenstern wasn’t just a Nobel recipient—she was beautiful.” His voice was wistful.
Dr. Morgenstern.
Hana.
She was in almost all the photos. But one drew me in. Hana was at the edge of the frame, and you could see her clearly. She was a little skinnier than my taste, not particularly well endowed in the T and A department, and she wasn’t wearing a lick of makeup. She’d pulled back her thick, curly, dark brown hair in a ponytail. Her narrow eyes revealed her Japanese ancestry. It was hard to say if her slightly aquiline nose hailed from her Japanese side or her Ashkenazi side. Her full lips were unsmiling.
It was not an open or expressive face.
She wasn’t really my type.
“Yes, she’s beautiful,” I said. My gaze fell on her left hand. She was wearing a cheap little snow globe bracelet, the kind with a stretchy, plastic spiral cord that slips around your wrist. You can pick them up at most cheap souvenir shops the world over. She used her precious personal space and weight allowance on that kitschy piece of plastic crap?
My throat got tight.
I focused on breathing.
Shhhhhhh … Whoosh.
Shhhhhhh … Whoosh.
I barely heard Vish say, “I got to meet her in person. At the Inter-time Symposium.” He huffed out an awed laugh. “Did you hear they nominated her for another Nobel in medicine?”
Kim raised an eyebrow. “She worked on the Near-Light Project at the University of Chicago. John did, too.” He was trying to get Vish to acknowledge the “uneducated” backwoods blue-collar type. It wouldn’t work. In Vish’s mind, I was only there because Vlks, the founder of Near Light and a co-sponsor of this mission, was “eccentric.”
He was right. Vlks was eccentric, and the only reason I was there. Vlks believed diverse crews were more able to deal with crises.
“Did you know her, John?” Kim asked.
The scar that covered more than half my back prickled.
It was an honest, reasonable question.
It was not the time for it.
“I ran into her a few times,” I said. Noncommittal. Cool.
Vish frowned, his thick brows coming together like dark wings. Gesturing at the door to the next dome, he said, “The electricity’s out. You have a crowbar for that?”
I hefted one of my two toolboxes. Planet-side, there was real gravity, and after gravity faked by acceleration for months on end, there was a comforting rightness about the way the tools rattled and shifted inside. “Sure do.”
* * *
It was true. I bumped into Dr. Hana Morgenstern, Nobel Prize recipient in physics and nominee in Medicine at the University of Chicago a few times.
The first time was completely by accident. I didn’t recognize her in front of me at the campus coffee shop. All I could see was her thick black hair, pulled back into a ponytail, and that she wasn’t wearing a coat, even though it was January.
The coffee shop was unusually quiet, and I was looking around, trying to figure out why.
And then those narrow shoulders in front of me crumpled. Hana turned around, but I still didn’t recognize her. Wiping her eyes, she murmured, “Excuse me,” and ran out the door. A blast of frigid air followed in her wake.
The coffee shop went from hushed to dead silent.
A barista, holding two steaming cups, looked at me with wide eyes. “I just finished her order.”
The whispers started, but nobody did anything, as though they were afraid. I felt like I was in a holo-fantasy, and a dark and powerful wizard had just left the premises.
Seeing my name scrawled on one cup, I said to the barista, “I’ll take hers to her.”
She seemed relieved to hand it over.
A few minutes later, I found Hana standing on the lawn. In the frigid air, her breath curled around her face. Seemingly oblivious to the cold, she clutched her hands behind her back and stared at the dead winter grass as though she’d lost something.
I don’t remember what I said to her. Probably, “You forgot your coffee.” Human memory isn’t perfect. But then she looked up, and I do remember her eyes. The weak winter sun was shining directly on her face, and her irises glowed the same color as cherry wood, the outer ring around them very dark. The effect was striking.
A second later, I recognized her. Her picture was all over campus. She was a physics superstar even then, and besides doing research, she consulted on the Near-Light Project—the first mission to take spaceships near the speed of light. The project had me, a former Navy nuclear submarine engineer, working at a university that was harder to get into than the big-name Ivies. Hana hadn’t won her Nobel then, but even I had heard the rumors that she was on the short list, and that it was only a matter of time.
“Thank you,” she said, wrapping her hands around the cup. And then she blurted, “My brother died. I just haven’t figured out how to compartmentalize it yet.”
I wasn’t sure if she was talking to me, or herself, but my heart went out to her. For Nobel Prize winners and Navy engineers, a beloved brother was the same. “It never works like that,” I replied. “Not for me.”
She looked up at me as though I might have the answers to the deepest questions in the universe. The scar on my back prickled again.
“What do you do?” she asked.
I’m not so big in the head that I think I know the answer for everyone. But I said what was true for me then, “Let it in … everything.” I’d still say the same thing. Psychologists—and I’ve had to speak to quite a few after the sub accident and before taking this job—will talk about “working through trauma,” but I don’t believe trauma was something you work through. It is not a dark tunnel with a light at the other end. There was no other side of the mountain. The mountain stays with you. You integrate the pieces of the mountain within yourself. It is not a process that ends. But it gets easier, or you get more used to carrying the weight. It starts with admitting the weight exists.
She bowed her head and sobbed.
Accepting grief might be the first step, but no man wants to make a woman cry. I reached out, almost touched her, then thought better of it. “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to make it worse.”
Pulling a tissue out of her pocket, she said, “It is just that’s exactly something my brother would have said.”
She blew her nose.
I wasn’t sure what to do.
“I’ll be all right,” she assured me.
“I know you will,” I said with forced cheer.
She didn’t move.
I extended my hand, because that was what you do when you meet someone. And sometimes normal niceties help in difficult circumstances. “John Miller.”
She took it. Her fingers were cold and damp with tears and snot. I shook them enthusiastically to show how little I cared.
“Hana Morgenstern.” She sniffed.
There was a banner hanging from a light pole right next to us with her name and picture on it. I couldn’t help chuckling. “I feel like I’ve seen you before …”
“No.” Pulling her hand away, she practically fled.
I felt bad for her. I knew the journey she was on and didn’t envy her. And she seemed very alone. No one had jumped to help her at the coffee shop. I hadn’t considered before then how isolating fame could be.
I didn’t expect to bump into her again.
* * *
We didn’t find Hana’s body in the engineering lab, the last place we looked.
Vish and Kim were surprised. I wasn’t.
But the huge, blackened circle in the middle of the floor had me perplexed. I scanned the ceiling. There were smoke stains there, too, but not as much. There was some wiring dangling from above, cooked and curled into fantastic shapes by heat. I scanned the rest of the dome. My heart rate picked up. I had half expected Hana to make her own near-light vessel and send herself home. Hana had to build a lot of her own equipment throughout her career, and she had the robots that built the station to help, a thorium-pill reactor to power them, and materials for planned additions to the station. If she could have engineered herself a smaller CO2 scrubber from the remnants of the main one … But that was an asinine hope. If she could have created a scrubber, she would have stayed here. She wasn’t one for unnecessary physical risks.
I turned around in a slow circle. Let it in. Let it all in. Later.
Shhhhhhh … Whoosh.
Shhhhhhh … Whoosh.
My suit had its own self-contained CO2 scrubber. It was state of the art. We’d picked it up at Moon Station after taking on this mission, years after the Dreamer left Earth. If the suits on the Dreamer had had the tech allowing me to breathe, Hana might have survived. My heart pounded in my ears.
Vish saved me by asking, “Did something happen to the extra plating during the landing?”
“What?” Kim said.
Vish’s headlamp bounced around the dome. “There should be more titanium plating here for additional domes.”
My gaze fell on the materials salvaged from Hana’s ill-fated ship, the Dreamer. Next to those were stacks of titanium and insulated sheeting brought by the first unmanned vessel, each sheet stamped with a small emblem of Earth’s moon. Moon Station was where their ore had been mined and they’d been manufactured, and where the money and resources for these interstellar missions came from. Cut into the shapes needed for dome construction, there were circular top caps, flat bottom sheets, and interchangeable wedges in three widths to accommodate domes of various heights.
The piles of spare sheeting only went as high as my knees.
“I think you’re right.” My headlamp bobbed back to the scorched center of the floor, and my mind went to the snow globe on Hana’s wrist. My heart leaped in a tangled beat of hope and fury. I wanted to scream, “Don’t make me hope like this, Hana!”
Kim wandered to the center of the dome and stared down at the floor. “What—?”
“She tried to go home,” I said.
Kim turned to me, his headlamp flashing in my eyes.
Vish said, “She stepped out the airlock. Cryo sickness was probably responsible. They shouldn’t have required them to be in a deep sleep for so long.” He took a deep breath. “Such a shame.” He turned toward the door. “Kim, you’ll help me move the cryo chambers into the ship.” Tapping his helmet, he said, “Lo, fire up the drones and imprint them with Dr. Morgenstern’s description—no, ignore that last order, just have them look for a body—send them out for a scan of the surroundings.”
Heading to the airlock, Vish said, “John, see to fixing the power and get the CO2 scrubbers online. Then haul the damaged ARV over here.”
Kim hung back, headlamp still shining in my eyes.
I knew that later I’d be answering questions.
But I needed to get the power online and get the station’s main CO2 scrubber fixed. I’d need both if … I growled to myself. It was stupid to get my hopes up. If she’d tried what I thought she’d tried, success would be a miracle.
Still, I arrived at the station on a spaceship that was traveling near light-speed. That was, in part, a Hana-made miracle.
Maybe she’d pulled one more off.
****
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