Chapter One: Black Box

“People don’t go to the night-side for a reason…”

The engines of the Vertical-Lander whined and fell; the wings shook and pitched, spiraling out of control, falling out of the sky. Jakob helplessly gripped the armrests of his seat, and watched his equally helpless friends, clutching each other. But instead of his whole life flashing before his eyes, it was mostly the words of his primary school teacher. “People don’t go to the night-side for a reason,” he had said.

As a child, Jakob had loved to explore. He loved maps. Most of all he loved the blank spaces on them. The mysterious voids between roads, cities and familiar landmarks cried out to him of forgotten or undiscovered spaces. He stared endlessly at maps of abandoned places. Whole cities, he knew, were carved out of the rock underground. Not just in the twilight rim, where people lived now, but all over their world. Beneath the sun-blistered rock of the continent called Icarus, on the sun-side of Twilight, and under the cold stone of the night-side islands, lay dozens of the early colonies. There were even some ruins on his home island of Amsterdam. The underground structures that weren’t used by industry or for storage were carefully sealed off, of course, but there were plenty of terraforming structures above ground. The crumbled concrete and carbon fiber buildings were a maze of ceiling-less passages, and mysterious spaces all overgrown by grass, vines and trees.

And Jakob wondered about those places on the night-side too. The night-side, the site of the first landing on Twilight, where the oldest ruins on Twilight lay, and where you could look up and see the stars from which their ancestors came. So he’d ask about it in school whenever he got the chance. “It’s not just the cold,” his teacher had said. “The average temperature is actually only a little below what we might consider comfortable. It’s the volatile and unpredictable weather.” He aimed his ever-roving laser pointer at the globe to indicate the night-side pole of their tidally locked planet. The holograph spun about and with a blink of the teacher’s eye highlighted the splatter of islands and ice, swept by storms. “Tidal forces actually deepen the seas at the night-side pole, just as they do on the sun-side. But the downdraft of warm air cycling from the other side of the planet meets the cold water and ice, causing a great deal of evaporation, producing major storms, including a lot of hail. Add to that the effects of ocean currents, the effects of thermal activity, the drastic changes in tide caused by Caliban… ”

Jakob really couldn’t remember the rest of that lecture. Those first words just echoed in his mind over and over again. “People don't go to night-side for a reason.” He had reminded his friend Gordon about all that when they planned their trip around the world. But strapped helplessly into his seat, with fingers dug into the arm rests while the V-lander lurched and spiraled out of control in the storm, he wasn't angry about it. Maybe just a little. Or maybe it was just that he wished Jenny would stop screaming. It certainly wasn't helping anything. Snow and ice blasted the windows. It sounded like sand. He just barely heard Felix, Gordon and Sheila yelling over the noise, voices desperate, trying to regain control of the aircraft, but it seemed hopeless.

They had even planned for this; crashing into the icy whey of the arctic sea, or on some snow swept tundra. They had life craft, shelters, and survival gear in the V-lander, and more in the silver airship that drifted thousands of meters overhead. Enough food, water and supplements to last two months. More if they could glean anything from the environment. But the precautions had seemed more like planning for a campout, and Jakob feebly wondered if dying in the crash wouldn't be better.

Gordon had talked Jakob and the others into it back in grad school. It seemed like a million years ago. He had this crazy idea bout taking an airship around the world on the circadian axis. He could have suggested flying a starship into the corona of the sun, or into the lower atmosphere of Caliban, the gas giant of their solar system, and it would have sounded nearly as outrageous. Over bottles of wine, maps and computer models, and glossy pictures of airships and jets and the latest high-tech equipment, it seemed like nothing more that an expensive dream.

But Gordon wasn’t just a rich kid with adventure lust. He was an heir to one of the biggest aeronautics companies on the planet. Jacob was used to ostentatious displays from people like Gordon, but the silver airship that loomed over them in that hangar left him dumbstruck. And when he invited them all to look inside at the custom equipment and the pair of V-Lander jets that attached to it’s belly; all for their so-far very hypothetical journey, Jakob knew he was serious.

“The greatest adventure on this planet in hundreds of years!” he’d said. A flight around the world, the way no one else really saw it. The people of Twilight lived in a narrow band of perpetual twilight, just below the horizon line of the giant red sun. They were shielded by the curve of the planet from the bulk of solar radiation, but still close enough to feel the warmth of it's glow, always on the horizon, where the arcs of solar flares danced above the treetops.

Gordon’s friends also knew that it was a thinly disguised business trip. Gordon wanted to make a name for himself, instead of just having his place in daddy’s company handed to him. So he came up with a scheme to develop a new kind of airship-cruise. Day and Night. Something no other travel company in their tidally locked world could boast. Experience life like Ancient Earth, tour the ruins of the terra-forming colonial era now almost half a millennium old, and see the light of the gas-giant Caliban amongst a brilliant canopy of stars in a dark sky.

Gordon’s friendships were as carefully groomed as his business ideas. As a colonial historian, Jakob could find their way around the terra-forming ruins. Jenny had studied engineering and architecture, so she could address the integrity of the ruins, and select locations for way stations and lodges. Tanner was a meteorologist with some background in geology as well. Felix, and Gordon’s own girlfriend Sheila were both pilots and aeronautical engineers. It would have been distasteful but for the fact that somehow, Gordon managed to have genuine affection for them all. He would show up with an armful of beer and sausage with the blueprints of some ancient spaceport and have them all talking. The engineers, the pilots, the historian and the businessman; the unlikeliest of friends. It was easy to joke about it then. “We’ll probably get ourselves killed,” Jakob had joked.

The V-Lander began to shake violently. Jakob’s muscles ached from bracing himself. He heard yelling over the noise, “Pull up! Pull UP! HANG ON!” The earth-shattering, mind-numbing impact yanked him against the restraints like a rag doll. A confusion of pain and violence followed. There was wind and cold and what felt like a shower of sand, and then a kind of blackness.

The sound seemed to die away, too distant to hear. He became acutely aware of his right hand, gripping the armrest of his seat. He would be OK if he could just hang on to that one place. He crawled into those fingers and existed only there, split into those five fingers, barely held together by a thin, stretched palm. He was still there when the broken craft came to rest in the cold. The muted roar of chaos still overwhelmed him like too much breath in his ears.

Slowly at first, the beeping of alarms called him out of the fog. His eyes began to focus again, but he still didn’t understand what he was looking at. His neck hurt. His whole body hurt. The lights were flickering, and there were sparks. The cabin was littered with snow. It was gritty on his face. It wasn’t just snow. Chalky rock. There was a smell of sulfur mixed with the smell of burning plastic.

Then he could hear his companions; groaning, struggling. Felix was extracting himself from the cockpit. His face was ruined with pain. The scene was all wrong. He squinted at it, confused, as he struggled to free himself from his own restraints. The control panel was too close to the hatch. The windscreen was smashed in, and the cockpit was littered with snow and more of that strange white rock, mixed with blood. Felix was pulling himself from behind the pilot’s seat. He staggered out and braced himself on a seat, clutching his arm to his side. Jakob stood up, and fell over. He was dizzy and the V-Lander sat at a horrible angle.

“OK?, Oh-Kay?” Felix panted, looking confused.

“Felix?” Jenny’s voice wavered.

“’M’ OK.” Tanner stammered. “Your arm?”

“Broken, I think,” Felix grimaced.

Jakob had recovered himself, “Gordon and Sheila?” he asked, glancing at the cockpit. Felix shook his head, his lips tight, his chin falling slightly. Jenny let a low wail escape. Jakob looked into the cockpit, not wanting to believe. There, in the confusion, he managed to pick out their hands. Gordon’s lay half buried in the snow on the control panel, awkwardly bent. Sheila’s hung over the armrest of the pilot’s seat, strangely perfect and unharmed. He thought about them. He thought about how he had walked in on them fucking in the shower that morning. They had just laughed and kept going. He picked up his toothbrush, and smiled at them as he walked out the door. Jakob stood there, staring at the cockpit, staring at their hands, and remembering them in the shower that morning, trapped between those moments; trapped between their lives and their deaths.