In Between the Stars

by A. A. Ripley

  The blast doors to engineering were already sealed. Hijinks stood there, wrestling with the manual override.

  ‘Help!’ called Hijinks.

  ‘What is going on? Hijinks, what happened?’

  ‘Conduit ruptured,’ replied Hijinks without looking at them.

  ‘You can’t go in, Hijinks,’ said Alan. ‘You’ll burn to a crisp!’

  ‘What about automatic suppression systems?’ asked Inan. ‘We have those, right?’

  ‘Defunct,’ said Hijinks. ‘Must go in and turn it on.’

  Inan had no answer for this. To go inside like this was mad, but the fire would not burn itself out. Fuelled by the plasma coils it would travel up the conduits, breaking the backwash fail-safes one by one. Finally, reaching the fuel tanks, it would transform them into a brief star of antimatter explosion.

  ‘Let me go in,’ said a voice behind them. Ure stood with his back to the cargo bay, his face as calm as it would be if he was talking about going into a placid pond.

  ‘But you’ll die if you go in there.’

  ‘My current body is more resistant than you think. As long as my core is intact I think I can stand losing some of my nano-units, see?’ He plunged a fist inside his chest and the metallic body parted like a thick gel, revealing a green-shimmering oblong.‘I have another in my head, but I’m not showing you that one,’ he smirked.

  ‘Are you sure?’ said Inan.

  ‘Just hold the door for a few seconds,’ he said, joining Hijinks at the manual override.

  Hijinks looked at them, leaving a question unvoiced. Inan looked at Alan and he returned the stare.

  ‘Let him in, Hijinks,’ they said simultaneously.

  Hijinks grunted in agreement and let Ure manipulate the lever.

  ‘Better step aside,’ said Ure. ‘Just in case.’

  The doors creaked and a gap appeared, just wide enough for him to slip in. Inside, a small inferno raged. Inan caught a glimpse of fire sprays and a blast of hot air that smelled like burnt insulation and acrid smoke. The doors slammed shut again.

  For a few breathless seconds nothing happened. The alarm still went on, the red warning lights continued to blink. Inan thought that Ure was wrong, that there was nothing left of him but the charred remains of the nano-machines.

  Then it all stopped and silence broke in.

  The engineering doors sighed and stood open. Milky clouds of CO2 vapour from the fire suppression systems tumbled out. Finally, a blackened silhouette appeared in the doorway. Ure’s skin was covered in soot, the charred outer layer just starting to peel.

  ‘See?’ said Ure. ‘One patched-up conduit, one put-out fire and one crispy xenoarcheologist as promised.’

  He started to wipe the destroyed nano-units off his body and they came off as easily as moulted skin, revealing clean, silver surface underneath.

  ‘Are you really unharmed?’ asked Inan, looking at Ure with a mixture of concern and awe. A person who dives head first into scorching waves of fire deserves nothing less than the utmost respect.

  ‘Perfectly,’ he said. ‘Though I wouldn’t scoff at a good clean-up.’

  Inan thought that this should resolve Alan’s and Hijink’s doubts about that human. He might not be a galactic hero, but he had saved them all, hadn’t he? But neither Alan nor Hijinks agreed to relax the safety measures around Ure.

  *

  ‘There is nothing here,’ said Inan, looking out through the main screen. They had been in this system for two days now. The system itself was the least spectacular Inan had seen thus far. There was this small star, a red dwarf, that was well on its way to becoming a brown dwarf. This ancient sun was devoid of any planets and its loneliness was only mitigated by a few belts of asteroids and a few meagre planetoids.

  ‘These are the coordinates that were left by the expedition,’ said Ure. ‘They’re bound to turn up sooner or later.’

  Inan looked away from the main screen. On a secondary display the search pulse was spreading lazily over the system’s coordinates, looking for communication networks. There had been no response for over a day now, not even an automated beacon responding to their hails. Nothing but a few empty rocks were accompanying the Yi-yik-ke.

  Maybe they never got here. Maybe something happened on the way. Inan knew that spaceships do get lost or disappear without a trace. No one wanted to think about it, but it could happen nonetheless.

  A “tink” from a console interrupted Inan’s thoughts. Alan sat up from his repose and turned his attention to it.

  ‘We have a link,’ he said. ‘Alright.’

  ‘Is that the expedition? Can we talk to them?’ said Inan, trying to read the display over Alan’s shoulder.

  ‘No such luck, just an automated beacon,’ said Alan. ‘I think it was set up to guide a potential supply ship in.’

  ‘So now we know their location,’ said Ure. ‘We’ll soon be able to talk to Linai-Linai herself. If you could only interrupt the deluge of words from both of her mouths, that is.’

  With Hijinks behind the controls their little ship moved deeper into the gravitational well of the system, guided by the beacon. The signal-patch brought them over the surface of a planetoid. The planetoid was small, smaller than the average moon. But instead of the rocks and dust of a lifeless surface, the main screen was filled with something completely different. There was a shaggy mass of dark, purple jungle, dotted by reddish buttes and mesas stretching all over the planetoid. The sides of the flat-topped hills harboured craggy shadows and streams barely glinting in the weak light of the old sun. The view was partially obscured by a shroud of woollen clouds travelling across the face of the planetoid, suggesting an atmosphere rich in moisture.

  It struck Inan that this landscape should not exist at all. The planetoid was way too small to hold an atmosphere like that. And no atmosphere meant no vegetation or water. The mesas below them were formed by erosion, which would be impossible without water or wind or both.

  ‘Not possible,’ said Hijinks, mirroring Inan’s thoughts.

  ‘Impossible,’ said Ure, ‘is exactly what we were looking for.’

  *

  They landed on the top of a mesa, just as the red dwarf began to set, leaving the horizon streaked with fiery clouds dipped in the inky shade of the approaching night.

  The base was gathered around some boulders, many of which littered the brown mesa. The buildings were just the standard, pre-fabricated containers which were so popular among the surveying expeditions and early colonies. The dull, steely walls stood in contrast with the darkening sky and soon the automatic lights went online. Now the camp stood in an enclosure of stalwartly-glowing lamps, separating the expedition grounds from the rest of the planetoid. From their landing site Inan could hear the buzzing of generators, but no other sound came to her from the makeshift buildings.

  ‘Anybody home?’ asked Hijinks.

  ‘They should have heard us landing, shouldn’t they?’ said Inan, still looking towards the camp.

  ‘They went to sleep early?’

  ‘Sunrise in three hours,’ said Hijinks. ‘Short day-night cycle.’

  ‘That is not a welcome I expected either,’ said Ure. ‘Let’s go in and introduce ourselves.’

  They went into the circle of light and among the buildings. There was no sound except for the gravel under their feet. Inan opened the nearest door and peeked inside. There was no one there. Nobody in the second building, or the third or the fourth. Living quarters, storage, labs, even a small garage for the all-terrain vehicle – all empty. There was no trace of the famous Linai-Linai or any member of her expedition.

  ‘Where did they all go?’ said Inan.

  ‘Maybe they are working on a discovery somewhere,’ said Alan. ‘Or whatever your kind does in such places.’

  Ure shook his head. ‘Highly unlikely that they wouldn�
�t leave anyone behind to keep an eye on things. This isn’t someone’s back yard. It is an alien place, a strange one too.’

  ‘Keep looking around,’ said Hijinks.

  *

  The members of the expedition were not the only ones missing. The supply storage was empty too, no food or spare parts. There was nothing in the crates that would normally house found artefacts or specimens. There were no clothes in the lockers in the sleeping quarters, no personal items or tools in the labs. The metal floors rang hollowly as they walked the empty buildings, trying to make any sense out of this strange absence.

  Of all the equipment in there only a few computers seemed to be working. Ure and Alan sat down at them, fiddling with the systems, hoping to dig out something from their databases. Ure was helping him.

  ‘They weren’t digging out anything on that mesa, so the primary site has to be somewhere else,’ he said, sifting through the digital debris that littered the memory banks of the computers.

  The blue light from the displays slunk around the abandoned laboratory and flickered in the glass of testing kits that had already started to gather dust. It almost seemed as if the two humans were a part of some strange, half-forgotten museum display, sitting slouched in front of the consoles. They even tried to call up the people of the expedition, using the small communication network that was set up for the expedition members to be in contact with each other, but the only response that they got was silence.

  Soon the extremely short night came to an end and the tired, red sun came up slowly over the horizon. The automated lights died, giving way to daylight.

  Finally, their effort was rewarded with a location. Something, that was not a natural formation, was located at the foot of the mesa. Whatever fate met the xenoarcheological expedition it had to have something to do with whatever was buried there.

  *

  They walked down the winding, well-worked path, with the track marks of the all-terrain vehicle still visible in the reddish dirt. They passed a creek running across the path, its current scurrying like swift-tailed lizards. As they came closer and closer to the canopies of the purple-leafed trees, the sounds of the jungle started to float towards them. The calling of the still unseen throats and the rustle between the branches served as evidence of the rich animal life concealed between the darkly-stained leaves.

  ‘Path ends,’ said Hijinks, and she was right. The path, furrowed with the wheels of the expedition’s vehicle, gave way to a large clearing, with only bare-rooted trees growing at the sides of it. The ground was covered with a sinewy mesh, snaking and twisting in places like cables, plaid like wire in others. Thin spikes rose from the mesh, as thin as a thread but so close together they made sheer curtains standing between the trees and climbing up until they reached the treetops, slowly swaying high above their heads. Other spikes attached themselves to trunks and branches, taking over the bark of the trees and leaving them enclosed in dark nets. The strands were cold to the touch and hard. Not like stone, not like metal or plastic either; the surface felt a bit spongy under Inan’s talon and resisted her attempts to scratch it.

  ‘Do you always touch the remains of unknown alien civilisations?’ said Ure. Suddenly Inan wished that the jungle around them was green rather than purple. Then she wouldn’t stand out so much with her skin flushed with embarrassed green.

  ‘The expedition worked here so it can’t be that dangerous,’ said Alan, and earned himself Inan’s instant gratitude.

  ‘Yes, they did,’ replied Ure. ‘And now they are nowhere to be found, so be careful. Extremely so.’

  Inan noticed something metallic standing among the trees and the strands. When they approached it became clear that they had stumbled upon a day-camp, a small portable shelter housing everything an archaeological expedition could need during a busy day at the excavation site. There were portable comm-pads, light computers with uplinks to the machines at the base, digging tools, temporary storage crates. Various highly-specialised measuring and scanning equipment was scattered next to ordinary-looking brushes and trowels.

  A few metres away from the shelter there was an opening in the ground. Its dark interior emitted cold air and Inan could swear that she could feel a cool gaze settling on her when she turned her back to it.

  Hijinks took a couple of torches from the crate in the day-camp. She pointed one towards the dark opening and switched it on. The white beam flickered a couple of times and then stabilised, sending a cone of light into the darkness.

  ‘Take one too,’ said Hijinks to Inan and Alan, handing them a torch each.

  ‘It goes deep underground,’ said Alan. He shone the light into the opening and the alien mesh shone back at him with a dulled sheen. ‘There is a chamber of some sort down here.’

  The chamber was low and long but wide. The mesh was hanging down from the ceiling and split the beams from their torches into millions of thin shadows. In places the thin curtains twisted around themselves, creating grooved pillars. It smelled dank and dusty with a twinge of alien plants decomposing in the darkness.

  Suddenly, the light caught an alien, lumbering shape, standing silently in the corner of the chamber.

  ‘Excavator,’ said Hijinks. The expedition must have used it to drill down under the mesh above, creating a sloping opening for easy access.

  ‘Can you start it up, Hijinks?’ said Alan. ‘Its computer could still have some information intact.’

  ‘Can do,’ said Hijinks, and climbed inside.Inan hung herself from the access steps and peeked inside. To her, the inside of the excavator looked like a mixture of bizarrely-shaped buttons and access points interrupted only by the smooth surfaces where the electronic readouts would wake to life when the excavator was powered up. But Hijinks knew exactly what she was doing. She gripped the control panel in both hands, scouring the edges for fastening bolts. The panel popped open, revealing the emergency controls, still protected by a vacuum-sealed protective casing. The casing fell off with a click and Hijinks started to manipulate the controls. Hijinks twisted a small dial and a countdown beep marked the emergency starting procedure. The engine howled. The excavator lurched forward like a terrified beast. Inan fell off her perch and jumped back, avoiding the giant wheel.

  Terrified, she watched as the excavator hurtled forward, the engine at full throttle, the front beams up like eyes open with terror. It carried on down the chamber, carrying Hijinks fighting for control in the driver’s seat. Alan went after it, dropping his light.The excavator tore into one of the columns, stopping abruptly. Its wheels were still spinning, pushing the digging gear deep into the wiry strands.

  Before Inan could get to it, the excavator stopped completely, its engine idling now with a sound of a contented feline.

  ‘Got it now,’ said Hijinks, sticking her head out of the driver’s cabin.

  ‘Reverse! Reverse it!’ yelled Alan, looking somewhere high up.

  Inan cast the light up and saw the column begin to bend, swaying like a many-fingered black hand, reaching lower and lower towards the excavator.

  The engine came back to full power as Hijinks thrust it into reverse.

  ‘No!’ called Inan. ‘Hijinks, get out!’ But it was too late. The column stopped swaying and the strands lost their structure. They began to flake so quickly a dark rain of fibres began to rain from the ceiling. The column bent and twisted then, to Inan’s surprise, it started to flake and peel from the top down. But the disintegration didn’t stop there. A crack appeared on the floor under the mesh and started to grow. The floor crumbled, and the thin strands surrounding it soon followed, sliding into the hole like streams of clinging vines. For a moment Inan thought that the expanding hole would consume the excavator, but the erosion stopped short of its front wheels.

  ‘Looks like it is going even deeper,’ said Inan, approaching the hole that had grown where the column used to be. She bent over it, trying to see if there
was something warm down there.

  There was no feeling of movement, no memory of flight down the dark hole. She didn’t even have time to be scared. One moment she was peering down through the filaments into the opening below. The next, she was looking up towards the ceiling and the hole that was letting in the dusty grey shadow of daylight, and listening to the panicked voices of Alan and Hijinks calling to her.

  ‘I’m alright,’ she called back. ‘It’s not that deep.’ She groped around her. There was a pile of broken-up strands that created the small mound which Inan was sitting on, but nothing else as far as she could reach.

  ‘Sit tight, we’ll come down to you as soon as we can,’ Alan called to her from above.

  With nothing better to do she turned around, trying to pinpoint any possible sources of heat, not really believing she would find any. Then suddenly she saw a shower of heat spectrum moving over the filaments on the wall, sliding down in the shape of pinned-up fabric. The blue and green hues were slowly transforming into warmer yellows and oranges as the strands heated up and then reversing the colourful dance as they cooled rapidly. She looked fascinated at the coloured dancing in the darkness, changing to the unheard rhythm, driven by an unknown process.

  A blast of light shone down from the opening above.

  ‘We’re coming down, hang on,’ called Alan. Inan looked again at the wall, but her heat vision had become disturbed with the light source and the wall looked the same as the others; the heat dance had vanished.

  Alan and Hijinks climbed down from above, bringing two lights with them.

  ‘Where is Ure? Isn’t he coming down?’ said Inan, noting the absence of the xenoarcheologist.

  ‘He said that he will “hold the fort” for us.’

  Inan started wondering where Ure could find an alien defensive structure between the trees, but Alan interrupted her train of thought.

  ‘Look what we got. I took it from the small camp,’ said Alan, showing her a small device with multiple telescopic lenses on flexible arms. ‘Whatever is down here we can record it, in three dimensions if needed.’