Free The Orthogonal Galaxy by Michael L. Lewis Page B

of various volumes. Physon
quickly muted all of the alarm sounds and reached for his two-way
radio.
    “ Stan, do you copy?”
Physon voiced eagerly into the radio.
    “ Yeah, Physon. What’s
up?”
    “ Where are you at? I need
you to come quickly.”
    “ I’m on my way back right
now. I just stopped at the break room for a cup of coffee. What’s
wrong, buddy?”
    “ We have a massive
communication failure with Camp Mars right now. I’ve never seen a
comm interruption of this caliber.”
    “ Be right there.” Physon’s
voice and sprinting footsteps echoed with anticipation, as he
returned his radio to his holster and raced back to the control
room. Within moments, he threw open the door and found Staneck
quickly pacing the length of the control panel to assess the
situation.
    “ What have we got, Stan?”
Physon asked eagerly for a briefing of the situation.
    “ Three satellite failure
alarms, and a complete link loss to the surface array.”
    “ So, we are still
receiving signals from one of the satellites?” queried Physon as he
rubbed his forehead with his hand.
    “ Yeah. Sat Four is still
online, but we’re only receiving heartbeats, since it’s not in
range of the camp.”
    “ What’s its orbital ETA to
line of sight?”
    Physon raced to the other
end of the panel, assessed the current orbit of Satellite Four,
looked at his watch for the current time, punched a few numbers
into the computer, and returned the results. “Sixteen hours,
thirty-three minutes.” Physon looked up at his colleague with
concern.
    Stan sighed deeply and
shook his head yet maintained a calm voice. “You mean the only
satellite we got yapping right now is on the opposite side of the
planet?”
    “ Pretty much,” confessed
Physon bleakly.
    Stan ran to the control
panel, quickly scanned the situation and immediately picked up a
phone and dialed a four-digit extension.
    “ Vurim, Edwards here. We
have a serious communication failure. You better get in here
ASAP.”
    Staneck hung up the phone
and looked up at Physon, who appeared sullen. With eyes wide open
and perspiration forming around his temples, he raised his eyebrows
at his colleague questioningly.
    “ I know, buddy,” Physon’s
voice trailed off with a hint of concern. “You know, these things
rarely implicate something catastrophic, but darn it all, if it
doesn’t get your heart racing, and turn your hair gray…”
    Physon was distracted as
his eyes scanned the control room panels. “Stan, come take a look
at this.”
    Stan started when he
turned his head and saw Physon grow pale, a horror-stricken stare
flaring from his wide-open eyes. Stan was at Physon’s side in just
a couple of steps and looked at the panel that Physon had motioned
towards—the panel labeled O’Ryan.
    “ Had you noticed O’Ryan’s
vitals just before the comm failure?” Physon asked his
partner.
    “ No, I… I hadn’t,” he
confessed. “It shows that his heart and breathing rates increased
rather abruptly about… oh… 30 seconds before the comm failure. But
there’s nothing unusual about Boronov’s vitals.”
    “ Look closely,” Physon
rebutted, pointing to the ECG waveforms. “Right here, it looks like
Boronov skipped a beat. No racing like O’Ryan, but it looks like
there is a synchronized event… perhaps something that startled the
pair.”
    “ What do you make of it?”
asked the junior engineer.
    Physon could do little
more than shake his head slowly and shrug his shoulders in
dismay.
    After a brief pause, Stan
asked his more experienced partner, “Weren’t you in the control
room when mission 79 had to be aborted?”
    “ Yeah,” said Physon
breaking into a forced smile. “That was a grueling three-day event
that taught me to keep a level head and a stock of Tums on
hand.”
    “ But those guys were only
a hundred thousand miles from Earth?” pointed out Stan. Our boys
are millions of miles away right now, cut off from all
communication, perhaps for quite a few