“To what end?”
“He’s trying to help me, prep me for the hearing, give me a chance to get my ducks in order.” James laughs and shakes his head. “I can’t believe it, but me and Larson are actually on the same side of something. He wants us to go back.”
“Have I ever mentioned how confusing people can be?” After a moment she adds, “What ducks do we need, so to speak?”
James bobs his head. “We’re going to need a security specialist, for starters. If we don’t pick one, they will. Will’s got some contacts.” He tugs at his ear. “If you were going to search for a first contact expert, where would you look?”
“That’s easy,” Ananke says. “You want the one person who’s already made contact with alien life. You want Dr. Ava Kelly.”
3
The Blue Room
From an altitude of two kilometers, Grand Cayman is a moss-green shoe lying on its side in azure waters with Owens Roberts International airport near the island’s heel. James announces final approach from the Sandpiper’s cockpit and descends, tires screeching as he touches down. When he steps outside his aircraft, the heat hits him like a jet blast. He takes off his jacket and slings it over his shoulder, Ananke affixed to his belt clip.
He orders a car and picks it up at the stand. As it drives to the marina, he takes in the sights of island life, the bustle of people milling about in colorful clothes untouched by time. It reminds him of photos he’s seen from the twentieth century.
When they arrive, their hydrofoil is waiting, sleek, white, and curved. The passenger cabin is plush, but he bypasses it and heads to the bridge.
“Good morning, Mr. Hayden,” the bridge console says. “Where would you like to go today?”
James looks around. The helm controls are directly in front of him, with a throttle lever to his right. He unhooks Ananke and attaches her to the dash. A grin pulls across his face.
“I know that look,” she says. “Do you even know how to drive a hydrofoil?”
He sets his hand on the throttle. “Boat go fast, boat go slow. Got it. Console, manual mode.”
“Manual mode engaged. Thank you for booking Cayman Tours.”
“Okay, here we go.” He edges the throttle forward and the boat pushes through the water. Ahead lies an aquamarine ocean and desaturated sky decorated with a few wispy cirrus clouds. Once they’re clear of the no-wake zone, he opens the throttle and the craft lifts above the waves. “Oh yeah,” he says, “I like it.”
“You know, I’ve never been sailing before,” Ananke says.
It jogs his memory and he scrunches his eyebrows. The smell of the ocean spray, the splashes of the waves. Just like that he’s nineteen, lying on a yacht deck beside Kate in the Whitsunday Islands. The night is crisp and full of bright constellations with Centaurus directly overhead. Kate slips her hand into his.
“Look,” Kate says, pointing with her other hand. “Alpha Centauri, on the centaur’s foot.”
“You wanna go?” he asks.
“I wouldn’t be surprised if you had a ship waiting on shore for us.”
James chuckles. “Who needs shores, when you have horizons.”
“Is that what you want to do, set sail and never turn back?”
“There’s so much to see.” He rubs her hand. “Don’t you want it all?”
Ananke’s voice jars him back to the present. “James, is everything alright?”
He blinks. “Yeah, I’m fine.”
“Worried about the mission?”
“No, just thinking about a time I went sailing, long ago.”
She hesitates. Ananke’s better at reading people than most humans. “Is it something you want to talk about?”
He shakes his head and taps the navigation display. “Visual on the platform.”
The Cayman Rise Oceanography Center is a floating town in a water world, tiered, with structures, cranes, docks, and communications arrays. A tethered fleet of submersibles bob like boats in a marina. The upper-bridge level is a three-sixty paneled glass array with a growth of antenna. Red beacons pulse from high points.
James slows the hydrofoil and coasts it into the south dock. Mechanized moors secure it, then he attaches Ananke to his belt clip and steps up. As he steadies himself, a woman emerges from the door at the dock’s end. She’s in her late thirties with chestnut hair tied back into a bun. She walks briskly to meet James and extends her hand.
“Mr. Hayden, Ananke. I’m Ava Kelly. Welcome.”
James shakes her hand. “It’s a pleasure.”
She lingers in the handshake a moment, smiling. “You’re taller in real life.”
James grins. “It’s just that I’m tiny on people’s watches.” He notices movement in the tower windows. A small group of people peer back down.
Ava follows his gaze over her shoulder and releases his hand. She chuckles. “Don’t mind them, they’re just a little star-struck.”
James waves up at the group, and one of them tentatively waves back.
“Were your travels okay?” Ava asks.
“My first time in a boat,” Ananke says. “It was…interesting. There’s a certain cadence, I imagine similar to riding a horse, that you don’t get with cars and planes.”
Ava smiles. “The pulse of the sea.”
“Yes, and the boat itself, which has its own rhythm.”
“I think, then, you’ll enjoy the hydropolis. If you’ll follow me.” She turns and leads them to the door. The interior is a cluttered mud room leading to a short hallway with a cylindrical lift in its center. They shuffle inside. When the doors open, they are in a scallop-shaped room fanned by wall-sized plexiglass. Azure water swirls on the other side as tropical fish skitter past in hypnotic patterns.
“Can I get you anything?” Ava asks. “The Blue Room here is a favorite amongst the staff for recreation.”
“No, thanks,” James says. “This is the hydropolis?”
“One of its rooms. All of the undersea rooms comprise it.”
Ananke says, “This station is designed for research of the Cayman Trough?”
“That’s right,” Ava says. “Oceanography with a primary focus on the ecologies of deep-sea hydrothermal vents. We run submersibles five kilometers down to the Mid-Cayman Rise, deploy crawlers to explore the vents, and catalog new species.”
Ananke’s screen undulates green. “Have you found many new species?”
“Oh, we have. Even after sixty years of exploring the Rise, there are constant surprises. On the microbe level, in particular, there’s evolution and adaption, so there’s no end to the diversity.” She shifts to the couch and sits. James takes a seat across from her. “But I suspect you’re not here to discuss the Rise.”
“There’s another water world we had in mind,” James says.
Ava smiles. “Enceladus. The saltwater world wrapped in a shell of ice. Not that different, in many ways, from the Rise.”
“Are you still doing work with the life on Enceladus?” Ananke says.
“Yes, I split my time between Providence Station and here. Would you like to see it?”
Ananke’s screen pulses orange. “Very much so.”
Ava taps her bracelet and the hydropolis windows darken to a star field. Saturn is a floor-to-ceiling banded disc with tilted rings, motionless, as the camera zooms in on its wispy E-ring, diving until a white speck is visible, then slowing as the speck becomes an icy white sphere. Enceladus is a cracked puzzle of geometric white ice shelves infused with soft blue veins. Providence Station coasts by. The view skims the moon’s surface, and, for the briefest moment, it could be Earth’s arctic, then it plummets through kilometers of ice to emerge in dark ocean. A depth indicator spins down—ten, twenty kilometers—and finally reaches the murk of the ocean’s floor. Twin lights flick on from the virtual camera, casting cones and spotlights in the darkness. Lumpy stone columns rise like stalagmites with the haze of scalding water shimmering around them. At first it’s like a trick-of-the-eye, a blurring alon
g the stalagmite’s surface, but then the motion resolves itself into thousands—no, tens of thousands—translucent domes with trailing tendrils. Flashes like firefly signals start near the base of the colony, appear at the opposite end, and sweep across in a pulse which meets in the middle. The domes burst into motion and scatter away from the camera, sporadic flashes fading to black.
“Beautiful, aren’t they? Of the five-thousand species we’ve catalogued on Enceladus, I find them the most interesting.”
“Those flashes were communication?” Ananke says.
“Bioluminescence has evolved at least forty times on Earth, so this part wasn’t too surprising. It’s this.” She touches her bracelet and the screen focuses on one of the creatures. Its flashes are like an electrical short. When Ava slides her finger back over her bracelet, the video rewinds and proceeds in slow motion. The flash is a series of flickers, like morse code, and the hue of the light changes with each beat. “Pulse modulation. Each bit of data has three axis - frequency, amplitude, and duration. It’s complex. We’re recorded common patterns, like words, and phrases which the group as a whole recites. What’s really interesting is that each individual contributes a word to the group’s phrase. It’s like they’re playing the game where a group tells a story with each new person adding a word.”
Ananke considers her comments. “I’ve read all of your papers on your approaches to communicate. Have you been successful yet?”
“Ah,” Ava starts, “when we reproduced their light patterns precisely, they ignored us. We’re not sure, but the light may be a by-product of the communication. Perhaps they’re tasting the chemicals used for the luminescence. If that’s the case, learning to communicate by tastes will be much more challenging. Currently we doubt they even have visual receptors.”
“I’m curious,” begins Ananke, “why they would evolve bioluminescence without the ability to see?”
“Perhaps earlier in the evolutionary tree they could see, or there is some symbiotic advantage to it. Here on Earth, vibrio fischeri is a bioluminescent bacteria which lives in the Hawaiian bobtail squid. The squid feeds it, and in turn it modulates its light to match the surface lux, in effect creating a biotech cloaking device for the squid. It’s remarkable.”
James leans in. “When you do crack the code, how will you know what to say?”
Ava shifts forward. “We’ve put a lot of thought into that. We’re not even sure what their intelligence level is, so we’ve written stepping stones—protocols for baby steps—and a decision tree for what to say based on their intelligence and response.” She pauses. “What to say quickly gets difficult the more intelligent they are. If they are sentient, nearly anything we say can profoundly affect their culture, so we need to tread carefully.” She crosses her legs and sets one hand on her knee, the other arm resting on the sofa edge. “I saw your footage of the alien probe on Janus. What did you try and say to it?”
James quirks his head. “You know, I was so focused on getting to it that once I got there I realized my plan amounted to ‘see what happens next’. It didn’t seem to be aware of me until my suit lights hit it, then things happened fast.” A laugh and a shake of his head. “I admit, pretty much the only thing I could come up with was ‘we come in peace.’”
Ava arches her eyebrow. “Not a bad start.”
“It was either that or ‘take me to your leader.’”
She smiles and clasps her hands. “Is this what you wanted to talk to me about? You want consultation on the first contact protocols for the alien probe?”
James nods slowly. “Yes, but there’s a twist. We don’t want you to consult, we want you to be there if it happens.”
There’s a long silence as Ava processes that. She pulls back, composes herself, and smiles. “Be there? Be where?”
“We’re planning a return mission to Janus. I’m putting together a crew, and I want you to be part of it.”
Ava blinks. “When?”
“If we get authorization, in two weeks. Trip duration is twenty-one days.”
A slow nod. “On your light-speed ship?”
“Gossamer Goose, and it can only do ninety-nine point nine percent light speed.” He smiles. “Light speed’s impossible. For now.”
“You want me to go to the edge of the Oort Cloud on your near-lightspeed ship to possibly make first contact with an extrasolar intelligence?”
“Yup, that’s pretty much it.”
She blinks. “That’s unbelievable.”
James musters his best smile. “So, wanna do it?”
Ava stands, smoothing her clothes. “Oh, hell yes.”
4
Down the Rabbit Hole
Hayden-Pratt’s Space Operations Center is a campus of glistening glass and steel sitting adjacent to six criss-crossed runways. The noon sun casts sharp reflections on the Pacific as the Sandpiper banks for its final turn. Ava peers out the starboard window as James talks on the headset. The runway numbers rush up to meet them as they glide to a smooth landing.
“We’ve got a room prepped on the West Campus for you,” James says, grabbing her luggage. “Get you settled in, grab some lunch, then do some introductions.”
Ava steps out of the plane, the summer heat washing over her. She squints. “I feel a little like Alice, following the white rabbit.”
James smiles. “Welcome to Wonderland.”
He leads the way off the tarmac through reception and the high-ceilinged lobby. Suspended from the ceiling is the first Hayden Aeronautics production model, a supersonic four-seater which looks like something out of a history book. James follows her gaze. “First plane my father built,” he says, “back when Hayden-Pratt was just Hayden, and only made aircraft.”
“You inherited the family business, built it into all of this?”
They reach the omnilift and step inside. When the doors close, James says. “West Campus.” The elevator accelerates laterally. “Eventually. You know, had a head full of adventure in my twenties. Spent some time in the Air Force. Didn’t see myself wearing a suit and sitting at a desk.”
The lift slows and the doors open. The West Campus resembles an ivy-league dormitory. They stroll down the hall together. “I suspect that’s still true,” Ava says.
James quirks his head. “What’s that?”
“Head full of adventure, don’t want to sit at a desk.”
“That’s why me and Will Pratt work so well together. He’s got the mind for business. Loves it. Met him in the Air Force. Wouldn’t be Hayden-Pratt without him.”
They stop at her room and the door slides open. Work area, rec room, bedroom, seaside view. She smiles as he sets her luggage inside the doorway.
“Console will order anything you want to eat,” James says. “Feel free to explore. I’ll meet you back here at thirteen-thirty for introductions, then the rest of the afternoon we’ll prep you for Friday.”
Ana tilts her head. “What happens on Friday?”
“I’m going back before the Senate Space Sub-Committee, and I want you to come with me.”
The Space Command Center is adjacent to the West Campus, a cinema filled with workstations. Earth dominates the room’s screen, blinding blue with the sun glaring off the Arabian Sea. Gossamer Goose is in full sunlight, its white hull nestled by the arcs of the MEO2’s shipyard frame. Two tugs arrive towing a seventy-meter ringed scaffolding. Parallel rails run along the scaffolding’s inner circumference — tracks for the robotic manipulators and welders — the entire structure a miniature version of the MEO ring. The tugs slow to a crawl and slip the ring around Gossamer Goose.
James motions towards the screen. “How’s Goose looking?”
Hitoshi points at the ring. The tugs are securing connections to the ship’s starboard and port wings. “Kind of like an old sci-fi book cover to me. So cool. Love it.” He taps an icon on the console and a schematic appears of the cargo layout. Most of it is filled with repair parts for Bernard’s and expedition supplies. “Still have capacity
. You want extra fuel?”
“There’s an old aviation saying that the only time you can have too much fuel is when you’re on fire.”
“Yeah, let’s hope that doesn’t happen this time. Speaking of bursting into flames, here’s Beckman’s requisition list.” He hands James a slate.
James squints. “What do you think of him?”
“A little odd. When I asked him if I could call him Guthrie, he said, ‘It’s Beckman. No mister, just plain old Beckman.”
James shrugs. “Will thinks the world of him.” His eyebrows raise as he progresses through the list. “I’ll talk to him about this.”
Hitoshi adds, “You know, although I think some of the stuff on the list is overkill, it’s still not a bad idea to have some weapons. I mean, you ever read sci-fi? It’s all well-and-good until the death rays and the brain melting begin.”
James smiles and pats him on the shoulder.
At first, Guthrie Beckman is a bit hard to locate. He’s not in his quarters, the cafeteria, or any of the campus rooms, and when James calls him, Guthrie’s watch indicates that he’s not wearing it. James stands with his hands on his hips staring out across the campus lobby. He glances at his watch. Ava’s finishing dinner now and he needs to get back shortly to continue prepping her for tomorrow. That’s when he sees a forty-something man jogging on the perimeter track. He smiles.
James needs to sprint to catch up with him, but he matches his pace and falls into cadence. It’s a beautiful day with crystal blue skies and a low gold sun.
Beckman keeps his eyes forward, stride unchanged. “Mr. Hayden. I think you’d be more comfortable in running shorts.”
“Saw you running and thought I’d catch you before I got pulled into something else.”
“Suit yourself. You’re here about the req?”
The track curves ahead with a few leafy trees and a park bench. “I am. What type of trouble are you expecting on Janus?”
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