Icarus 9
They Died in Silence—But the Stars Remembered.
Icarus 9
Through the great and empty non-light it coasted. To call it flight would be a misnomer—flight is movement through air, against the force of gravity. Space has neither.
For ages it had traveled, steered by servos and circuits, skirting the occasional asteroid and comet, yet shooting unheeded through scouring clouds of meteoric dust. Battered and tarnished, homing in on coordinates that carried no relevance to the soulless computer that now held the helm, Icarus 9 moved on.
The radio had moldered away. Not rust, but raw plasmatic energy had eaten it from the antenna's tip to the microphone's cold coil. It made little difference. While the radio had once been the vital umbilical cord connecting the crew to Mother Earth, it had been severed long ago. None that lived knew, or cared, if the chariot of their great-grandfathers still rode through the vast heavens. Men had abandoned space and its harsh environment, largely because of the fate that befell the 9 and the rest of its fleet.
The Icarus fleet—Designed to sail the far heavens, to break the surly bonds and scour the Solar system, and beyond. The identical five-man ships were outfitted with a revolutionary propulsion system that, in theory, could make interplanetary travel a journey measured in weeks rather than years. There had been nine, launched week after flag-waving week, as the world watched the news broadcasts for daily reports. For a time the fleet sailed safely, each aimed toward its own destination; yet the good fortune that had smiled on each launch soon gave way to disaster.
The flagship Icarus 1, first launched and first lost, decompressed violently in Saturn's orbit. Icarus 3 suffered partial engine failure while approaching Mars and made a controlled crash on the dark side of Phobos; the heroically successful rescue, carried out by Icarus 5, briefly renewed the world's spirit. But hopes were dashed again when news came that Icarus 2, destined for Pluto, had shattered on Charon's frozen surface.
Icarus 4, the least ambitious of the fleet, safely traveled to Saturn and back, but morale plummeted when the photographic data they collected was lost on reentry. Icarus 6 made it to Mercury but never returned; a heat-shield malfunction, minor elsewhere in the system, roasted the crew in a microsecond. Icarus 7 and Icarus 8 shot beyond the Sun's reach and for years sent back images of darkness and void to Earth, until their signals became too weak to decipher. Their final messages were garbled farewells as both ships blasted off farther into the universe. It's possible both crews still lived, aging disproportionately as their craft approached light speed.
But Icarus 9, the last child of the ill-fated fleet, still lingered. Though the ages had rolled on and the mission was barely a memory, the 9 still hummed and, beyond all reason, moved. For into each of the Icarus fleet was programmed an unchangeable line of code: if possible, no matter the cost, the ship must return home.
No human heart yearning for lost love, or soul aching from memories past, haunted the 9. More than a century had passed since the cockpit was shorn open by collision with a jagged hunk of ice spun off a comet's tail. Only the life support was damaged, but that damage was critical—there wasn't even time to send a distress call.
Yet the mortal crew still held the floor. Space asks little of its dead and lets them keep what they will. Freed from the destructive nature of oxygen, lifeless bodies may linger forever. Lacking air, they perished but were better preserved than Tutankhamun in all his splendor. The sub-zero chill of space kept even their eyelashes from singeing as Icarus 9 skirted red-hot rocks and supercharged ion fields.
Strapped to their seats, the five-man crew stared unseeing at the blue-green planet that grew ever larger before them. Like an arrow from some long-withered bow they sped, faster than the dead have ever traveled. Icarus 9 shifted and shook as it grazed the moon's gravity field, then picked up additional speed as it shot toward Earth.
Gravity's increasing pull added to the speed of descent. The tip of Icarus 9 shone cherry red as its nose broke the atmosphere. Its heat shields, rotted like the radio by energy discharge, did nothing to protect the ship's metal alloy walls as it strong-armed through the thick air. Like an egg dragged over concrete, it bounced and skipped, stress fractures glowing red as the intense heat melted through what ages in space could not. The crew glowed crimson, then dull gray, in the split second before they were shuddered into a spinning cloud of ash.
Twisting and turning, rolling as it split apart, Icarus 9 shot across the sky, lighting the Pacific for a brief moment in a reddish hue; then all was dark.
The wind blew on and carried with it a strange gray tinge of dust, sprinkling it gently to the water. And as the breeze blew, that dust—which had seen the end of the galaxy and beyond—flew through the air.
Icarus 9 was home.