by Diane Carey
As they approached the object, and it got bigger and bigger, Corgan was feeling smaller and smaller. What had he gotten himself into? Nate had probably been right, Corgan thought. I’m definitely in over my head.
His feeling of insignificance was replaced by awe, as they approached the steel egg’s hull, and it developed a horizon, a fulsome gray-metal vastness—it was bigger than some asteroids he’d walked on. It was the biggest spacecraft he’d ever seen, a small world to itself. And he assumed it was only a minor sample of the technology that had created it.
“You picking up any kind of signals?” Corgan called to Beresford, as they slowed even more, then began accelerating to skate just ten meters over its surface, the landers heading side by side toward the “navel” in the hull up ahead.
Beresford, hunched over a scanbox aft, growled, “No, not a damn thing. I’m sending the standard greetings package, like you ordered. No response. Not even a scan signal. If they’re looking at us they’re doing it with a frequency we don’t pick up.”
“What is this greetings package?” Reynolds asked.
“Oh,” Ashley said, seeing that Corgan was too caught up in staring at the alien craft to respond, “it’s something UNIC put together in case we run into extraterrestrials. All the ships carry the package—no one’s had to use it till now.”
Corgan couldn’t see Reynolds from where he sat but he could imagine the sour expression of outrage on his face as Reynolds said, “And why wasn’t I briefed on this? I’m the exobiologist, that would be my purview!”
“It’s not very ‘biological,’” Ashley said, distractedly, as she made tiny adjustments in the joystick. “It’s… cultural. In a lame kind of way. It sends out signals in mathematical formulae, in the form of bleeps, images showing what we think is friendly behavor—trading and so on, that sort of thing…”
“Like that musical message in Close Encounters,” Beresford said.
“In what?”
“Never mind, it’s an old movie.”
“Well there’s nothing musical in it. I’ve never understood why you’d watch one of those old movies—they’re two-dimensional. You can watch a holo in perfect 3-D.”
“Ah, you’re a philistine. You wouldn’t understand about the art of cinematic photography.”
“Whatever. Captain, we’re as close as it looks safe to get. Permission to set ’er down.”
“Permission granted,” Corgan said, barely audible. He was staring into the “navel” now, and feeling dizzy as he looked into it.
A few moments later they set down, with a clank that resonated through the lander, and they were pulling on their gloves, which automatically sealed themselves to the sleeves of the spacesuit, and clicking their helmets in place over their heads. They ran through their routines, confirming pressurization and compressed air, rebreather status, and suit’s store of electricity, then headed for the lander’s small airlock—the four of them barely fit into it.
The lander drew the air out of the airlock—thriftily sucking it into the lander for later use—and the hatch slid open. Corgan led the way down the ladder, stepping carefully on the hull of the alien craft…
… And falling anyway, tripping on the strange surface. He found himself sitting on a ridge of metal, a kind of endless rail, about forty centimeters high, eight wide, a third-meter to the next one, each of them identical, at least here. Rising from the skin of the steel egg to make the strange patterns that marked its surface, they were bigger than they’d seemed.
“You okay, Captain?” Ashley asked, offering him a hand, her voice coming statically in his helmet receiver.
He ignored her hand, getting up easily in the low gravity— in fact, floating a short distance over the surface with the motion. He had to take her hand, after all, to pull himself down. “Yeah, I’m fine, I just wasn’t expecting these things to be quite so obtrusive…”
The others clambered down more carefully, Ashley and Corgan helping them, and they moved in single file, Ashley and Beresford behind Corgan, along with the four crew members from Lander Two, toward the “navel,” their boots’ impact on the unknown metal of the hull clanking with each step as they walked between the raised rail-shapes.
“Look at Saturn from here,” Ashley said, her voice, even through the crackle, hushed with awe.
They all looked up—and there was the gas giant: huge, pale-golden, its rings silver-blue, filling most of the Bible-black sky like a god staring down at them. Terrifically intimidating.
Looking hastily back down at the hull, Corgan was not much more reassured by the “navel” on the alien craft—the spiral of hull lines descended at a mild slope that got more pitched as it went. It was like descending into a frozen whirlpool. Could this be the result of a particularly violent impact? But the more he looked at the smooth sides of the “whirlpool,” the more it looked engineered-in, a planned part of the whole design.
“It’s all too inviting,” came Beresford’s deep voice through the static. “You ever see a roach motel?”
“Do roach motels have steps?” Ashley asked, pointing.
“You sure those are steps?” Corgan asked. It was difficult to be sure. Where the rail-like lines ended, partway to the bottom of the whirlpool-shaped dip in the metal hull, there were half-disk shapes projecting out at odd, descending intervals, in tandem arrangement, first on the left, then on the right, down and down into the shadows, a chain of them going steadily down. “If they are, these aliens have a weird gait.”
“Of course they have a weird gait,” Beresford said. “They’re aliens.”
“Nonsense,” Reynolds sniffed. “Their gait will be efficient and smooth, like any other creature’s. Unless possibly they are winged beings, or otherwise capable of flying. Then these steps might be something like roosts. But they don’t seem far enough apart for that… I’ll need more data…” As Reynolds’s voice trailed off, an odd tremolo in it, Corgan realized the exobiologist was brimming with suppressed excitement. This would make his career, after all.
Corgan paused right before the top step, peering down. He thought he could see a platform, a place where the whirlpool-shape bottomed out, but it was shadowy down there, hard to be sure. “Anybody doesn’t want to go any farther, they can go back up to the landers. It’d be wise, in fact.”
“Uh—I’m rezzed with that,” O’Neil said. “I’m… I just think someone ought to stay with the, uh… you know, with the landers…” O’Neil was a big, strong, noticeably buff guy but he’d always been very careful about his personal safety, usually trying to avoid extravehicular work crews— especially after, on his first out-system trip, he’d seen a man hit by a small meteor that punched right through his spacesuit. Watching a fellow crewman’s guts getting sucked out through a little hole into space could make you nervous about spending time in a spacesuit.
“Sure, go ahead, that’d be good, Jim!” Corgan called. “The rest of you… if you’re coming with me, be careful, these little steps are kind of small…”
Corgan led the way, turning toward the hull as if going down a ladder, and they began to descend the steps, if that’s what they were. It was fairly hard going though their spacesuits were far more advanced than the sort that’d been common in the early twenty-first century. The gloves were more prehensile, smaller, the suit more flexible. But it was still more cumbersome than ordinary clothing.
Another ten meters down they entered deep shadow, and Corgan had to switch on his helmet light and the small lights on the tips of his boots before he could place his booted feet.
Down and down, and then—he stepped out onto the platform at the bottom. On the other side of the platform was a portal in a metal wall; at least, he assumed it was a portal. It was shaped like a tetrahedron, about two and a half meters high. He waited for the others, wondering if he should have brought some kind of weapon. There were automatic rifles in the ship, in case the armistice with CANC fell apart, but they weren’t designed to fire in a vacuum. Still—there coul
d well be atmosphere inside the alien ship.
Nate was right—he had been in too much of a hurry.
The others were gathered around him, looking at him and at the door. It was up to him now. And he knew he would go on. He felt compelled by some deep, almost primordial instinct. Something more than mere curiosity, something from the cave-dwelling hunter still hidden in his genes said, Explore it! A great prize awaits!
But how to continue the exploration? He couldn’t see a handle on the door and it was certainly sealed. Cruz had a high-intensity cutting torch with him. No telling if it’d burn through this alien alloy.
Corgan took a deep breath, and approached the doorway…
When he’d gotten within reach of it, he felt a tingling, starting at his head and moving in a ripple down his whole body. “I think I…” He looked around and, on the walls of the door alcove, to either side, he saw a triangular crystalline shape, set flush with the wall, but moving within it, now from floor to ceiling… and the tingle was moving with it, back up to his head. “I think I’m being scanned. Look there, on the wall…”
Reynolds stepped up beside him and watched the little crystalline glassy outline moving through the metal of the wall. He reached out and touched the wall around the moving node.
“Solid. But… it’s as if the metal is liquid for the scanner, like it can move in it freely…”
“But how do we—”
He broke off as the door slid open, and his voice trailed off:
“… get in?”
The others laughed nervously. But Corgan was staring through the doorway. It looked like a pretty standard airlock in there. A few cryptic markings on the walls.
“It scanned you and determined you were carrying no weapons,” Reynolds said, just as if he weren’t engaging in pure speculation. “And then it simply let you in.”
He was probably right. But Corgan was remembering Beresford’s roach motel remark as he took a deep breath and walked through the door. The other six followed, and the door slid shut behind them. The light seemed to emanate diffusely from the walls themselves, rather than from any one source. The farther door was transparent—a door-window, still shut. Corgan stepped up to the transparent door and beyond it saw a platform opening out onto a big chamber, surprisingly big—he had assumed that, as on an Earthly vehicle, even a big one, most of the inner structure would be a maze of small rooms and corridors. But this room was at least as big as a cathedral. The inner walls were lined with glassy panels, flickering dimly, and honeycomblike sections, with occasional stations, mostly high up, that extended from the walls, much like Earthly workstations—each one had recognizable chairs, and diamond-shaped flat-panel monitors. “It does look like they might have to fly, to get up to those workstations, if that’s what they are,” Corgan murmured. There was another entrance at the other end of the big chamber, to another gigantic room—you could see the farther door was transparent, also. “Unless there are elevators somewhere—” He broke off, staring as jets of a visible blue-gray gas spewed from the honeycombs, filling the room with a mist.
“Oh jeez, it is a bug killer,” Beresford says. “That stuff’ll be some kind of poison gas to kill us!”
“But they’d expect us to be wearing spacesuits,” Cruz said.
“It could be an acid or something, that’ll burn into your suit…”
“Rubbish,” said Reynolds shrewishly. “The inner door would be open if they wanted to gas us.”
Corgan was trying to contact the Hornblower, but the reception was poor. “Nate? You picking up?”
“I’m… getting… bad connect… interference… everybody okay?” came the crackling response in Corgan’s helmet radio.
“All okay. Entered anomaly airlock. No sign of life. Launch those EMP decoys when ready. Do you read?”
“Read enough. Already… prepared. Ready to…”
“Repeat, launch at will…”
“… Copy. Good lu…”
Reynolds spun to Corgan in excitement. “Look! They’re pressurizing the room! The process was begun when we entered the hatch! You see? The fog is settling down. It may well be that the atmosphere is breathable for us… the scan would have told them we were biologically close enough to the builders of this craft…”
And as if to confirm him, the glass door abruptly slid open. Corgan gulped but made himself step through into the huge chamber. A four-story building could have fit into the room easily. The light was a kind of brittle blue-white, seeming to have more ultraviolet than they were used to. Corgan activated the digital recorder on the collar of his spacesuit—it’d take in everything he turned toward. Doubtful its transmission to the ship would get through… but it would record it for later uploading.
“Horus,” Corgan prompted, “can you do an analysis of the atmosphere? Pressure and chemistry.”
“I’m already on it,” Horus said, peering at the small screen of a hand-held instrument he’d taken from his belt. “Yeah uh… wow. Almost Earth normal on both counts. Should be safe to breathe. Unless…”
“Unless there are organisms—bacteria, viruses,” Corgan said, finishing Horus’s thought.
“Right. Only… I’m not picking any up. As far as I can tell it’s pretty much sterile here.”
“That’s good enough for me!” Reynolds said eagerly.
And Corgan was surprised when the normally fastidious Reynolds tapped the code on his wrist that sent the signal to his helmet, unlocking it. He pressed the collar studs, and the helmet hissed open. He pulled it off before Corgan could do more than open his mouth to object.
Reynolds took a deep breath of the alien air. “Ah! Stale, lifeless… but life-giving! I feel perfectly well!”
Corgan looked coldly at him. “Reynolds—you’re a civilian but you’re under my orders! That’s in your contract and it’s the law! From now on you don’t do anything outside procedure without consulting me!”
Reynolds gave him a brittle smile. “Just as you say.”
But twenty minutes later, as they were roaming the far edges of the room, under the elevated workstations, they all had taken their helmets off—the temporarily collapsed helmets clipped, flattened, to their belts—and were breathing the stale, alien air, with no ill effects. No ill effects so far. The alien ship seemed almost welcoming. It had given them entry and it had given them air. But Corgan remembered being a young soldier on leave, lured into an alley by a pretty girl in Baghdad—where it was hard to meet available girls, without getting shot for it—and being set upon by the three thugs waiting there, while she watched, and smiled…
3
Dix was waiting for Bayfield at the stern launchtube, squinting through the heavy glass of the tube’s observation window. The small metal-and-plastic rocket shapes of the decoys were laid out in the array Nate had prescribed— should be random enough, once they depressurized the chamber, sucked the little goodies out into space. He could hear Nate talking to that big galumphing wimp O’Neil who was getting nervous alone in the lander on the alien craft’s hull. Wanting to come back up to the ship. Nate saying no, both landers would be needed, he didn’t trust autopilot to return the craft to that strange hull safely, O’Neil was just going to have to sit there and benervous.
Bayfield came whistling up behind—Bayfield, damn him, was a whistler. Always whistling some damn thing. You couldn’t hardly make out what he was whistling, either. You could ask him and he’d tell you the name of a song you knew and it didn’t sound like that at all. Typical tone-deaf cracker.
Dix turned to see Bayfield, a weak-chinned, slope-shouldered man with long stringy hair and a whimsical expression, wearing the gray maintenance coveralls, tools clanking on his belt. He could have brought along the tools on a hover, like you did with the wifi workstations, but he liked the belt. “Always makes me feel like I’m being followed,” he’d say, about the hovers. “Which I am.”
Dix noticed that Bayfield was walking crookedly down the corridor, and whistling even louder than usu
al. “Stop that fucking whistling, Bayfield. Goddamnit, you’re drunk again. How’d you do it this time?”
“Got a new pruno cooking…”
“You are gonna end up with your pay docked, you dumbass. Get over to the other switch, we got to do a dual launch here…hurry up, we gotta get those fucking things out there…”
“We got orders to launch?”
“You didn’t hear it on your shadio?” Shoulder radio: shadio. “You got it turned off? Dumbass, turn it on!”
Bayfield fumbled with the switch on his epaulette, as he shuffled over to the launchtube controls. He flipped the cover, and waited for Dix’s signal. “Go!” Dix said, and together they hit the buttons. The launchtube’s out-hatch dilated, and the atmosphere in the chamber—all waste gases from the engine—shooshed out into space, carrying the little decoys with it. They were gone from sight in seconds, whirling rapidly into space. “Launched decoys!” Dix said, into his shadio.
“Copy,” came Nate’s voice, almost as if Nate was standing just behind him, and not on the bridge. “I’m activating their thrust…”
Somewhere out there, the decoys would be firing their small rockets, shooting in various directions, and almost immediately activating their electromagnetic pulses, creating a series of interlocking, chaotic fields that should confuse the oncoming CANC probe.
In the bridge, seated at the bank of monitors, enjoying sitting in the captain’s seat in Corgan’s absence, Nate watched the pulse-sources spreading out over space between the anomaly and CANC’s robotic craft. He touched the out-team radio controls. “Captain, successful launch. How you doing out there?”
He waited. He listened to space crackling to him. He listened to Saturn seething.
And he heard nothing else at all.
* * *