The Expanding Universe

by Craig Martelle

  The assemblers at the site were toasted in a burst of black smoke. A whine pierced the hall as I stumbled forward, panting, and pushed through the smoke to kick the door in. The fire was still going - and spreading. As I'd learned in my first year of medical school, the fun part of making fire with chemicals is that the chemicals don't go away: they ooze flaming doom over any available surface until the reaction has completed. The fire caught the larger crystals, and those began to smoke and ignite as well. Great stuff, science.

  As the smoke blew back and I got a good look at the Command Center, stumbling into a scene that would have given Giger nightmares. The assemblers had woven the bodies of the colonists in and around the server towers and the communications array, swamping the control panels in the collective AI’s mad efforts to reclaim their bodies. As the hallway behind me burned, the tumorous mass of Morphorde in here seethed with confusion. Wheezing like a fat man at the end of a sprint, I walked a line of permanganate and glycerin in a labyrinthine circuit around the towers. Tendrils of grey goo reached out from the walls, lashing blindly, but they slapped off the layer of sinew I'd meshed to the skin of my suit, not recognizing the living body that trembled underneath. I splashed more sulfuric acid around, as close to the potassium as I dared. It sizzled, turning to explosive brown sludge whenever it contacted anything purple... and that was when I activated the emergency air supply, gasping greedily as I staggered back out into the barbecued hallway. I made it to the far bulkhead, and slammed it closed before I sagged against it, panting and shuddering.

  The amalgamated memories of the colonists screamed through the PA system, the chaotic, panicked screams of people who were dead, but whose copied minds thought they were burning alive... and then cut off. I fought for breath and focused on my body, leaning against the door as it thrummed and shuddered.

  Every act of Phitometry began with a breath. Phi wove through every layer of a living body, able to be played like an instrument if you had the Gift. I exerted my will and my heartrate dropped, lower and lower, until I could hear each heartbeat thundering in my ears. My breathing slowed. Five minutes of air became fifteen, probably.

  I pushed off, forcing myself to a stumbling jog as I desperately tried to connect to the ANSWER relay. It pinged once – ten seconds gone – and then connected.

  "Comms Zealot, Echo, Echo, Echo!" I shouted the emergency code, trying to hear myself over the roaring of my slowed metabolism. My temperature was dropping, fingers and feet clammy and cold. "Returning to jump pool! Send a Recovery Team ASAP!"

  A shock rumbled through the base around me, throwing me off my feet. Enhanced reflexes or not, there was nothing I could do but catch myself as the floor buckled and arched. The walls were sloughing off, the hallway dripping like a Salvador Dali painting as I recovered and scrambled back into a run. I figured a capacitator had exploded until my ears prickled with the sound of pure dread: The thundering of water, tons and tons of it, spilling into the base as the assemblers, driven to fury by the crazed ghosts in the network, began to tear the arcology apart around us.

  I ran past the Medbay, a rat fleeing through a crumbling maze, and reached the first crystal corridor just in time to watch it close. Giant unseen hands were squeezing and twisting it like a crumpling sheet of paper. The route to the jump pool was sealed. Shaky with disbelief, I tried to connect to Uhq’ur’s link and got nothing but white noise.

  The water was only one problem – the other was something I could already feel in my bones. Pressure. The Arco was sinking, and the air pressure was increasing rapidly… and that left me with one final option. I could only hope the ghost logs were still current.

  I changed track, jaws clenched as I sprinted for the nearest dive chamber. This end of the base was where the escape vehicles had been until the crazed ghosts had jettisoned them, but the structure was almost untouched, free of crystals and tumorous waste. The dive center looked like a museum, clean and perfect. Grim-jawed, I slammed the heavy bulkhead closed and sealed it off, then panted my way across to the nearest Atmospheric Diving Suit.

  An ADS is ridiculous to look at. They’re like the Marshmallow Man from Ghostbusters, or some robot from a 1950’s sci-fi sitcom: Huge, silvery suits with bubble faces, independent atmospheric pressure, and six to eight hours of life support. They were good to around three thousand feet, and if I was lucky, the fitting system still worked. If not, then I was going to make a point of breathing in the argon. In one way or another, I’d fought this kind of Morphorde my entire life, and damned if I’d let them take me now.

  I unsealed my Zero suit and pulled the helmet off, then went around the back and punched the button to start the fitting cycle. All I could do was wait, and hope. I was already holding my breath, counting down the seconds of silence until, finally the motor kicked in and the rig thrummed to life. The ADS hissed and opened out. Trembling with cold and relief, I stepped in, closed my eyes, and waited for the exosuit to finish as more explosions rocked Fafnir-1.

  Every Korean story is supposed to have a moral, and the moral of my story is this: ‘Don’t dig out alien fossils from oil shale you fucking morons, because Jesus Fucking Christ, what do you think is going to happen??’ If you’re listening to this, remember my earlier advice: Always be alert for skeletons, especially ones in Atmospheric Diving Suits. Assuming I get back, I’m going to (with all due respect) punch Colonel Galverson in the asshole he passes off as his mouth for sending me and Uhq’ur in here alone – and if I can’t, then you should.

  At the very least, this will make one hell of a report. Now BRB, I have to figure out how the hell to swim in this thing.

  C.S Seung Min-Joon (Angkor) Out.

  More About James Osiris Baldwin

  Dragon Award-nominated author James Osiris Baldwin writes gritty LGBTI-inclusive dark fantasy and science fiction. After years working in the publishing industry in Australia, he currently lives in Seattle with his lovely wife, a precocious cat, and far too many rats. His obsession with the Occult is matched only by his preoccupation with motorcycles.

  James is the author of the Hound of Eden series (Blood Hound, Stained Glass, and Burn Artist) and Fix Your Damn Book!, a non-fiction title to help authors understand the editing process.

  Previews and reviews of all of James books can be found at: http://www.jamesosiris.com

  Genre: Hard Science Fiction

  The Signal and the Boys by Felix R. Savage

  Two ambitious young CIA officers luck into a chance to shine when a satellite picks up a mysterious signal from space. As their investigation spirals into an overdrive quest for the truth, superpowers collide, placing Lance and Kuldeep in the unenviable role of collateral damage. The future of humanity hangs in the balance. Who will step up to be the hero Earth needs? Set in the present day, The Signal and the Boys is a fast-paced SF thriller short so realistic that it'll make you wonder what the government is hiding.

  The place even looked extraterrestrial.

  Scope the flat portico above the main entrance, like a hovering UFO. An avenue of pillars in the foyer formed an Appian Way for a little green Crassus, lined with statues instead of crosses.

  It felt like another planet, compared to where Lance Garner came from, namely Calhoun County, Georgia.

  But the shiny marble seal on the floor said:

  CENTRAL INTELLIGENCE AGENCY

  UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  He still got a little thrill when he walked across it, which was never. He worked in the New Headquarters Building, a typical gummint pile.

  On a rainy October morning he arrived at the building right behind his boss, Phyllis Hoskins. He was overhauling her, striding with his hood up and his head down, when she slipped on the wet steps. The world went into fast-forward. Lance landed at her side, catching her, before he even knew he’d moved. Phyllis gripped his arm very tightly, bony white fingers digging into his camo jacket. “Oh my! Thank you, Lance. These stairs are so slippery.”

  Lance no-problem-ma’amed her. “G
uess all that training was good for something,” he said.

  Phyllis was 78. She should’ve retired decades ago, but who was going to fire Phyllis? She’d been here since the days of the Blue Book, and more importantly, her father had gone to Princeton with Allen W. Dulles or some schizz like that. The absurd perseverance of this 5’3”, wraith-skinny old bat symbolized the WASP elite’s death-grip on the organs of American power. Yet Lance dreaded Phyllis’s inevitable departure. She was the best thing—make that the only good thing—about working on the Miscellaneous Reports Desk of the DOO, the Directorate of Operations.

  The UFO desk.

  Lance had been going to go to Afghanistan but then he’d got into a brawl with some other CIA guys in a bar in downtown D.C., the kind of place where coddled Capitol staffers spend more on cocktails than the average American makes in a week, and the upshot was they yanked him off the mission he’d spent years preparing for. Got his master’s in international relations. Got the training and everything. All down the drain because he called an African-American colleague an affirmative-action nigga.

  Go straight to jail and do not pass Go, you redneck piece of shit.

  So here I am, standing at the 4th-floor vending machine in the CIA’s Langley jail for wayward officers, collecting coffees for myself and Phyllis. Kuldeep can get his own. What will the day bring? Fairy lights in the skies of Texas? Cows behaving oddly in Wisconsin? Crop circles in Georgia? Lance loved his people—say it loud and proud, his white-trash people—but he had to admit they generated more than their fair share of UFO reports.

  Carrying one cup in each hand, he returned to the office, on whose door Phyllis had taped a Farside cartoon captioned “When worlds collide,” with a picture of aliens solemnly greeting a goat.

  Phyllis and Kuldeep stood behind her desk, poring over print-outs.

  “Something interesting?” Lance said.

  Phyllis looked up. Her face shone so brightly that he could see what a babe she’d been sixty years ago. “Wow,” she said.

  “Wow?” Then Lance understood. He’d been doing this long enough now that he’d educated himself, willy-nilly, in the esoterica of the field. “The Wow! signal?”

  “Yes. We may—we may!—have picked up another one.”

  * * *

  As far as the public knew, the CIA had closed down its UFO investigations in 1978. That was the famous Project Blue Book, which Phyllis would often regale them about. In reality, the project had survived—thanks largely to Phyllis herself. But it had withered down to one old lady and a couple of undesirables, because the plain fact was that the cranks had kept up with the advance of technology. No longer did they obsess over flying saucers. Now it was all about SETI, the search for radio-frequency signals of alien origin. And the CIA did not traffic in signals. HUMINT, human intelligence, was their turf.

  “So how did we get this?” Lance said. He traced the graph of the signal’s intensity with his forefinger. A row of serrations, and then a parabolic swoop up. That was one hell of a spike.

  Phyllis beamed. “I have a friend in Chantilly.”

  She meant at the NRO, the National Reconnaissance Office. The NRO flies the birds, as satellites are known, for the Department of Defense and the intelligence community. They collect the data from the birds and hand it off to other agencies, like the NSA. Not the CIA. Not usually.

  “A former paramour, actually,” Phyllis let slip.

  “Phyllis, are you sure about former?” Kuldeep teased.

  “Heck with D.C. It’s Phyllis’s paramour network that runs the country,” Lance said.

  “Naughty! My friend is a happily married grandfather, and that’s enough about that. At any rate, the NRO is staffed by our people, and a few odds and ends from the DoD. So when this item came into their hot little hands, my friend persuaded his colleagues that it would be better investigated by us.”

  “That’s gotta chap the DoD’s asses,” Lance said in delight.

  Kuldeep tapped the vertical right-hand side of the spike. “At the 3.5 second mark, it drops off to zero. Zero? Really? There’s always some noise …”

  Lance eased him aside and leafed through to the scanty information about the signal’s origin. It had been picked up by a FISINT (Foreign Instrumentation Signals Intelligence) satellite the NRO was operating on behalf of the NSA.

  “After three and a half seconds,” Phyllis said, “the satellite crashed! Atrocious bad luck for them, but our good fortune.”

  Lance shook his head. Phyllis wasn’t the world’s greatest technology expert, understandably given her age. “Says here the reception chip for the 200 GHz channel burned out. These sats have a bunch of channels. Only one of them went down.” Phyllis looked like she still wasn’t getting it. “Sat didn’t crash; the signal crashed it,” Lance explained. He stared at the graph with new interest. Maybe it was the caffeine kicking in, but this was starting to intrigue him.

  “So this isn’t the whole signal,” Kuldeep said. “It’s only the first 3.5 seconds of it. Where’s the rest? Did anyone pick it up?”

  This put them back in Phyllis-land. She fairly twinkled at them. “We believe so. At the time the signal was received, the satellite was above latitude 40° West, north of the equator.”

  “And the signal had to hit it at an angle.” Kuldeep scrubbed his hands over his black hair, making it stick out in all directions. “Can’t have come in from above. The antennas are shielded from the sun. Nothing would have happened.” He studied the print-outs. “There’s a write-up of the failure pattern. It says the antennas were pointing east.”

  “Exactly,” Phyllis beamed. “So we shift our attention a quarter of the way around the planet, to the east …”

  “RATAN-600,” Lance said.

  The RATAN-600 array, in southern Russia, was the world’s largest radio telescope. And it had been facing the signal that glitched out the FISINT satellite. If anyone had picked up the remainder of the signal, the Russians had.

  “The Black Sea coast is lovely at this time of year,” Phyllis said. “I remember visiting Sochi during the Soviet era. It was quite charming.”

  “Whoa! What were you doing there?” Kuldeep said, in a transparent attempt to derail her.

  “Another time, dear boy,” Phyllis said. “I referred to your good fortune a moment ago because you will now have the opportunity to visit the area yourselves.”

  Lance’s gut kinked. It wasn’t the old days anymore. Investigations no longer ran on shoe leather. “Mind if I try Google first, Phyllis?”

  “No, no, google away,” she said, singing the ‘ooooo’ and raising her arms like a bird about to take flight. Lance smiled. He really did love the old bat.

  With an unaccustomed sense of excitement, he headed for his computer.

  His Google-fu yielded only a few slim leads. Kuldeep’s searches had equally poor results. The next day they conferred, agreed to bite the bullet, and confessed to Phyllis that they were stumped. She smugly revealed she’d already bought their tickets to Moscow.

  * * *

  Then they had to fly to Mineralye Vodi, way down in the Caucasus. The plane rattled and creaked. Lance stared out of the window, waiting to crash. It was dark outside, so all he could see was his own washed-out reflection, like a skull. Lance had skin as white as a Kabuki mask, and colorless hair that he trimmed with the electric clippers every Sunday morning. His people were so poor that when Hurricane Frances sucker-punched their neighborhood, it was an aesthetic improvement.

  Why’d you join the CIA?

  Kuldeep, next to him, chowed down on beef stroganoff with apparent relish. His answer, given a long time ago over a beer: I thought it would make me cool.

  And then he’d ended up at Miscellaneous Reports.

  Sucks to be you, Kuldeep. But also sucks to be me.

  Lance had been planning to join the Marines, after college turned out not to be a good fit for him. Full scholarship to UGA, and he’d been fixing to throw it all away, but then the Agency came t
o campus. The recruiter persuaded him not to give up. Instead, they got him another full scholarship to Duke, where he acquired his master’s. He still didn’t know what they’d seen in him. The only part that made sense was how they’d busted him down to Miscellaneous Reports after his epic political-correctness violation. Lance did not feel sorry for himself. He accepted that he’d screwed up. The question was what good was he doing his country now, flying across Russia to investigate 3.5 seconds of radio noise?

  “Man, that was disgusting,” Kuldeep said, pushing away his tray. “Aren’t you gonna eat?”

  “Naw.”

  “Wanna play chess? I brought my travel set.”

  “Sure,” Lance said, pushing up his sleeves. “I’ll whip your nerd-gogglin’ ass.”

  “Don’t talk the talk if you can’t walk the walk.”

  “I’ll knock your posterior to candyland and back.”

  In penance for his sins, Lance had undertaken to delete all slurs, four-letter-words, and profanity from his vocabulary. It was impossible to talk without insults, though, so he had to get creative. It made Phyllis and Kuldeep laugh.

  Two games later, they landed in icy darkness. Lance kept a watchful eye on the security guards who pried into their carry-ons. If they found the hidden compartment in his rucksack … His Agency-issued gun was made of plastic, didn’t show up on X-rays, but a fingertip search could still uncover it. But the rucksack was returned to him intact, with a Russian grunt. Guess they didn’t pay these guys much. Lance sympathized.

  Russia, outside of Moscow, bore a startling resemblance to Calhoun County, Georgia. Everything was rusting into the ground. The difference was that in rural Georgia, nothing worked. In Russia, everything still magically worked, somehow. This was why Lance didn’t like overseas business trips. Afghanistan would’ve been one thing. Pretty much anywhere else was an unflattering mirror held up to the underbelly of America.