The Last Spell 49

The two-foot gash in Sentinel 1’s solar paneling was no more. Dante maneuvered the robotic arm away from the array of panels, examining the result of his work. He’d seen this before— the array had gotten redeployed in the last few weeks, and the retraction had been rough on the panels. It had been a good few decades since he’d had to make this kind of repair, and it was not without the risk of electrical shock, but he’d completed the operation in a little under six hours of work.

“Slow down,” Ross cut in through his headset. “You’re operating the arm past its recommended speed. That is a safety hazard.”

Dante rolled over to float horizontally, switching his grip on the robot. “Today is my five-hundredth spacewalk, and you don’t think I know how to move this old thing around?”

“It’d be a shame for you to fly loose into the void of space and become irrecoverable.” Ross’s tone suggested he would not mind that at all.

“Only because Sterling can’t get anyone else to run this coffin.” Dante shot a dirty look back to the planet, stomaching the dizziness the sight gave him. Not much land was visible. Sentinel 1 was passing above the Kejvan Ocean, leaving Mission Control in Starlight City just out of sight over the curve of the planet, but he pretended anyway.

Ross was new. He wouldn’t see it that way, of course, but his two years on communications was barely a sliver of time on Dante’s mission. He’d been unpleasant from day one, and Dante suspected he’d gotten placed on this job as punishment for something. He much preferred the person before him. Weber had been professional— somewhat boring in character, but she trusted Dante to know what he was doing, and there had been a few golden times when he’d gotten her to share some details of life on the surface. They were both from Amber City, and Weber had mentioned the city was severely changed after the Tremor earthquake years ago. How changed, Dante didn’t yet know. But he swore it looked different from up here.

“Slow it down, Weylin.” He could imagine Ross glaring at his monitor screen.

Face impassive, Dante instead sped up the arm— although it was hardly by anything, because the mechanism was only moving at a couple miles per hour— to hop back over to the airlock.

He was half-expecting the electric shock his suit gave him. It hurt, and it briefly seized him up, but Dante allowed himself no more reaction than a scowl as he pressed the button for the airlock to open. It wasn’t rare someone decided to zap him, but usually when they did, they were slightly less petty in their reason for it. Still, he knew they could do much worse.

“You could’ve damaged it,” Ross snapped. “General Sterling won’t be happy.”

“It’s all going down in t-minus eighty-two days, Ross. Sterling won’t give a shit.” Dante floated inside, closing the airlock behind him. After the hatch sealed, the small chamber would have to repressurize to equalize with the space station, so he was stuck with Ross for a few minutes longer.

“Any chance you’ll still be in there once it crashes?” Ross asked innocently.

“This universe isn’t that kind.” Dante could feel slight pain in his ears as the airlock recompressed.

Ross chuckled. “I was about to tell you not to celebrate your return so much, but you understand already. There’s nothing to get your hopes up for, Monarch. Your service is far from over.”

~ ~ ~

A short while later, Dante had changed out of his pressure suit and floated over to Sentinel 1’s primary module. He paused in front of the observation window, through which Renvara had just become visible. It was early morning in parts of the western hemisphere, and he could see the hazy line of the terminator cutting its way across the mountains. He turned away before very long. There was still something sickening about it centuries later.

“How’s it been, Spark?” he asked, settling in at the command center.

A blue light on the display turned on, signaling that the station’s interactive computer assistant was listening to him now.

“Welcome back, Dante,” Spark greeted. “Congratulations on your five-hundredth spacewalk. You have now spent two-thousand, three-hundred sixty-four hours and nineteen minutes on extravehicular activities.”

“And they still won’t put me in a book of records.” Dante hummed. “Did I miss anything in here?”

“I’ve installed the update for the analytics on the main telescope,” she said. “It should be ready to use.”

“I forgot about that.” Dante honestly had, even though he'd oddly been looking forward to it when it had been announced at the start of the week. It wasn't like there was much else to get excited for. “Let’s give that a try. Can you direct it to the Serpentine Galaxy?”

“Coming right up.”

Dante waited patiently for the telescope to rotate into position. He’d worked on customizing Spark over the years, with varying success. The first thing he’d done had been to get her to call him by his first name, after feeling like he was going insane from only hearing Weylin— or that stupid callsign of Monarch— from everyone he spoke to. He’d tried to make her voice sound more like Mireya’s, and he’d gotten most of the way there, but he’d never been able to program the way she spoke Aphiran with the ghost of a Ren accent— faint and subtle, but noticeable enough that its absence felt wrong. And he’d given up entirely on programming sarcasm. Nothing he’d tried had measured up to Mireya’s style.

The screen in front of him turned on, revealing the image of a twisting spiral galaxy behind the speckled band of an asteroid belt.

“There appears to be elevated activity in the belt in that direction,” Spark said. “Would you like me to magnify it?”

“That’d be great,” Dante said. “Set the observation spectrum to infrared light and open the log for documentation too, please.”

The image zoomed in on the belt. Dante rested his chin on his palm as he examined the event Spark was referring to: a luminous cluster of asteroids on the exterior of the ring. Thanks to the update, the readings popped up on the side a little faster than what he was used to.

“We’re looking at M-type asteroids, likely composed of nickel and iron, with a geometric albedo of... about point two, which makes sense for metal bodies,” Dante said, squinting at the screen. “They’re in motion, but at relatively low speeds. We’re going to want their size, so we’ll take them one by one. It appears the magnitude of the right-most rock is…”

Bright. Far too bright.

Time seemed to slow as he shrank back slightly, staring in disbelief. He turned his head slightly, reading the number listed on the right of his screen: five. The lower the magnitude, the brighter the object, and he'd never seen a value below ten for any new asteroid. He could brush it off as the update being faulty, make a call back to Mission Control and suffer through another conversation with Ross. But a glance back at the telescope image confirmed the fault didn't lie in the data. The blurs of searing white on the screen said it all.

He should’ve noticed that something was off right away.

“Spark, run the math on the diameter of that asteroid,” Dante said carefully, hoping he was wrong. He was no human calculator, but he’d done this math often enough to make a ballpark estimation, and he didn’t like his answer at all. “Make zero point two the input for albedo and five the input for magnitude. Apparent magnitude, not absolute.”

“The calculated diameter would be one hundred eighty-four point sixty-eight miles,” Spark responded pleasantly.

Dante massaged his face. Alright. This was gearing up to be a bigger headache than Ross.

“Are these asteroids already registered in our database?” Dante asked, though he thought he knew the answer already.

“They do not match the characteristics of any other cluster recorded by astronomers,” Spark answered. “If they did, they would be minor planets.”

“There is— there is no way two dozen asteroids that massive have just been living in that belt under our noses.” Dante shook his head incredulously. “A magnitude of five? Asteroids aren’t that bright. They just aren’t. They can’t reflect enough light for that, even if they were made of pure ice, unless their surface area is huge.”

“A brighter magnitude and a smaller geometric albedo predicts a larger asteroid,” Spark said. “While it’s an implausible observation for the location, it’s what the math suggests.”

“But that can’t be.” Dante took a deep breath. “Either we’ve got a migratory cluster on its way from a more distant belt we’ve not observed before, which I don’t think possible, or it’s…”

Or it’s got light of its own.

Dante pushed away from the command center, closing his eyes as he floated onto his back and held his head in his hands. Saints above. Saints above.

“I… I need to tell someone about this,” he muttered.

“Would you like me to call Sterling?” Spark asked.

“No. No, don’t call Sterling. Don’t tell him anything yet. I need—” Dante sighed, forcing himself to think. It was still working hours in the East, was it not? “I need Gwen Hawking.”

“Patching you over to her office right now.”

Gwen was the only person still on the planet Dante gave a damn about. He’d seen dozens of House leaders rise, reign and retire over the centuries. Many of them had wanted something from him, mostly as their spy on communications, baiting him with two or three years subtracted from his mission. Out of all of them, Gwen had been the only one to contact him out of concern, soon after her rise to leadership and learning of the Dynastics. As if her public policies weren’t shaking up the Houses enough already, she’d pulled the strings necessary to get him to deorbit by the end of the calendar year, despite Sterling’s immense frustration and displeasure.

Not only that, but she was essentially his only glimpse into life on the surface. Gwen seemed to notice the attention Dante paid to details she mentioned of everyday living, and she took the time to talk about her life whenever they spoke. She’d shared about her son’s high school graduation and college acceptances last season, the latest bill she’d sponsored, the pleasant trip she and her husband had taken to Storm City recently, and more. Gwen was kind, in a way he’d never seen anyone from the Houses demonstrate before, and he respected her. She gave him a bit of hope that life back home wasn’t completely doomed.

“Dante! What a pleasure.” Gwen’s warm voice filled the module. “You caught me at just the right time— I’m between meetings. What can I do for you?”

“How much stock do you place in the Ren theories of how magic arrived to the world?” Dante’s words tumbled out hurriedly. He knew a proper greeting was in order, but he couldn’t bring himself to string one together right now.

“I…” Gwen paused thoughtfully. “I think they’re the most likely explanation, and they wouldn’t be a controversial school of thought if Aphiran scientists hadn’t disregarded them for centuries before doing their own research. Why do you ask?”

Dante swallowed, gaze fixed on the screen, where the too-bright dots continued to move through space. “I may have just found some pretty damning evidence flying our way.”

Gwen went silent for a moment. “Tell me.”

“There’s an asteroid cluster in motion on the edge of the belt that makes, quite honestly, no fucking sense.” Dante knew by now Gwen didn’t object to the language— possibly because she’d just raised a teenager. “All of them are very bright, comparatively speaking. Normally, for that level of brightness, they’d be among the largest dwarf planets in the region, and we’d have them well documented. But we don’t have any celestial bodies in the region of that expected size.”

“So, if they’re small, in order for them to be that bright…”

“They’d have to be glowing.”

Gwen took a deep breath. “If they do have magic on them… at minimum, that’ll be on the front page of every science journal. But that’s not why you’re calling, are you?”

“They’re moving inward,” Dante said carefully. Even though the movement on the screen was barely visible, he found himself afraid to blink. “That’s not unusual, since asteroids get pulled in by the sun’s gravity fairly often. But we’re the largest planet nearby, and they could be drawn towards us for impact. It’s too early to say, but if there’s even the slightest chance…”

“The arrival of new magic could shake things up in ways neither of us can predict right now,” Gwen finished for him. “But it’s quite possible it’d be for the worse.”

“Right. No one needs an arms race.” Dante gestured helplessly, even though she couldn’t see him. “But I— I’m supposed to deorbit by the end of the season. We’re already making plans for a landing zone. I need to research this, but we’re running out of time.”

“Dante, it’s okay. We’ll figure this out.” Gwen’s voice was calm and soothing; he guessed it made her quite the leader back on the surface. “Do you know what kind of help you’ll need, if any?”

“If you know any trusted experts…” Dante paused, frowning in thought. “I could use an astrophysicist, a historian, and anyone who understands celestial mechanics.”

“I can get you the first two,” Gwen said. “But honestly, you’re who I’d pick for the last one.”

Dante let out a weak chuckle that betrayed his nerves. “What? No, I’m— I’m just the guy who floats around up here. I didn’t go to university for this stuff.” Saints, he hadn’t even attended high school. Mireya had been the one to teach him to read and write, and he’d learned math the hard way right here.

“That may be,” Gwen said. “But you’ve also been doing that work for centuries. You’ve got ten times more field experience than a professor at the peak of their career. The research you’ve done anonymously is valued highly among scientists down here. You may not see yourself as an expert, Dante, but you’ve earned the title. If there’s anyone who can figure this out, it’s you.”

Dante took a deep breath. Eighty-two days. Eighty-two days until he would be out of this hell and into a new one. Eighty-two days to determine if the world he was returning to would be forever changed in a few years from now.

“Okay,” he said at last. “I’ll work on it. And I’m sorry for this, but I have to ask you a favor.”

“What is it?”

“I need you to keep this a secret from Sterling.”

Immediately, Dante feared he’d asked for too much. He didn’t know how to interpret Gwen’s silence.

“A secret from General Sterling,” Gwen echoed. “Why?”

Dante pursed his lips. “You know what he’d do.”

For such a powerful mage as himself, Sterling sure had a way of hating magic. Or rather, he hated what he couldn’t control, which also included Dante. If he heard the delicate stalemate between his Dynastics and the anarchists could get upended by uncontrolled access to magic quite literally raining from the skies, Dante knew the man would go rabid. The Houses would cave to whatever he demanded. There’d be battlemages in the streets before Dante could even complete his current orbit.

He didn’t revere the Saints. Having one for a friend had taken all the mystery out of them. But he found himself praying without words that Gwen Hawking would understand. She had to.

Finally, he heard Gwen breathe deeply.

“True secrecy is a myth in my position,” she said. “If I’m told anything in confidence, I have to add it to my personal records for my successor to see one day— that would be my brother— so that it doesn’t die with me. But what I can promise you is this: as long as I’m alive, Sterling won’t know a word of this from me.”

The relief spreading through him was so strong it was almost dizzying. Dante closed his eyes. “Thank you,” he breathed.

“I’ll get you in touch with those you asked for,” Gwen said. “In the meantime, will you be alright up there?”

“Yeah. I’ll live.” He had no other option, of course. “I owe you one.”

“No, you don’t.” There was a slight smile to her words. “I’ve got to go to my next meeting, but I’m proud of you. Space couldn’t be in better hands.”

Proud? Proud? Dante’s thoughts fizzled out uselessly. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been told that. Maybe it’d been so long that he’d actually lost the memory.

“I’ll see you on the surface soon,” he promised.

“That you will.” Gwen chuckled. “Goodbye, Dante.”

“Goodbye.”

Proud.

The call went silent. Spark’s blue light had automatically turned off, after several minutes of inactivity. It was just him and the inky void of space now.

Dante floated over to the outward window, facing the same direction he’d pointed the telescope in. To his eyes, the asteroid belt was invisible, too dim against the backdrop of stars he knew better than himself at this point. But there was a chance, he knew, that one day, they could be bright enough that even someone bathing in city lights would see them slash across the sky.

He really did think space could be in better hands. Hands with less blood on them, certainly.

But if the stars did fall to him, there just might be a chance he could make an old friend proud.