Eclipse

by K. A. Bedford

  Then the bots reported their major finding: the ­tunnels of the reticula were full of a gelatinous black material which is what was producing the gas we detected. I heard Blackmore gasp, “My God…” as she heard this detail. We retrieved a sample of the material and scanned it for biological activity, microbes, tiny forms of life, and found nothing but cold, dead organic detritus.

  Over the next two days the swarms of explorer bots churned through this slime, working their way through the reticula, which ran for a combined total of more than two hundred kilometers. The scientists worked their monitors in shifts, shunting results into their headware. Sometimes they’d go off for private cloud conferences that lasted hours, during which they floated in the dome, curled up in loose balls, eyes closed. Ferguson scowled when they did this, and muttered darkly under his breath.

  He got me to scrub things a lot, and prepare meals, and run maintenance checks on the enlisted men, making sure they were all okay inside their eggs, maintaining peak form, getting their exercise and nutrition. I had to monitor their waste processing lines, brain activity, and all the rest. These disposables lived in a cloud of their own, where they spent their time on training missions, exercises and weapons ­proficiency drills. To them it was indistinguishable from real life. And when we needed them, they would be ready for action at a moment’s notice, rested, refreshed, and well-fed.

  And they would carry out their orders without question, a key selling point the companies that produced disposables liked to emphasize at the military trade shows. I imagined these trade shows must be very strange events.

  “What do you make of these cavities?” Grantleigh asked one day as I was passing by on my way to scrub something in the crew quarters. I figured he was talking to anybody but me, so I kept going.

  “Mr. Dunne?”

  I managed a guided turn in mid-air, and didn’t damage anything. “Sir?”

  “Yes, Mr. Dunne. I asked you a question.”

  “Of course, sir. One moment.” I pulled myself over to where he had attached himself to an anchor-point on the side of the workdome. He had a sheet of Active Paper covered in overlapping playback windows, most of which I recognized as relating to the internal structure of the alien ship. Grantleigh looked at me with a smile and said, “Mr. Ferguson says you’re a quick study, so I wondered what you might think of these structures…”

  While I tried to fathom Ferguson’s subtle game, Grantleigh worked his fingers over the page, manipulating windows and images, tweaking false-color renderings and resolutions. At length he showed me an image of a section of hull material that appeared to contain a series of hollow chambers, each of which contained some kind of large lump that almost filled each chamber.

  I frowned, staring at the false-color display in which solid regions of hull material were black and the cavities were white, with other colors showing other materials. “What is the actual size here?” I asked, and Grantleigh indicated the scale. By this measurement, the cavities were around three meters long by about one and a half in ­diameter. I said jokingly, “Kind of like crypts, eh sir?”

  Grantleigh scowled at me, nodding. “That was my ­thinking, too, son. Good work. Here, look at this sonic scan…” He brought up another window, this time rendering the sonic transparency of everything in false color. Here it was obvious that the lumps inside the cavities were made of very different substances from the material in the ­inner and outer hull and general structure of the ship. In this rendering, the hardest materials were black, leaving the lumps themselves to shine in blues, greens, and even shades of red. Grantleigh pointed to the red regions deep inside the lumps, “I think these might be organs of some kind.”

  That did it for me. Suddenly these things weren’t just piles of matter less dense than the hull material. While the possibility of finding aliens here had always been there, the data so far had suggested this craft was nothing more than a flying abandoned ant-nest. But where were the ants? I looked again at the images on Grantleigh’s page. “Is there anything else they could be, sir?”

  He rubbed his chin, looking thoughtful. “It’s hard to say, Mr. Dunne. They could be nodules of organic materials. They could be giant potatoes. We’ll have to open up some of these cavities and have a look.”

  This filled me with dread. “Mr. Ferguson won’t like that.”

  Grantleigh nodded. “I’ll handle Mr. Ferguson.”

  We had to bore out some tunnels after all. Not surprisingly I was chosen to go with a squad of armed enlisted men into the ship, climbing through the black goop in my all-too-thin suit. The scientists had cooked up a supply of an organic solvent designed to turn the jelly into a liquid, so we could move. That helped, but not enough. In actual practice, the rate at which the solvent acted was never fast enough. I was always climbing back up the tunnels to the workdome, desperate for a new air supply. Ferguson was having the shipboard fab whip up an airhose, but that would take time. Meanwhile, when I was in the alien ship, unable to see except by sonar and radar, the complete darkness did strange things to my mind. I saw things moving in the jelly, swimming around, giant blind predators, white and grisly, glowing like the creatures found in the cold dark oceans beneath Europa’s ice sheets. I imagined feeling things brush against my body, or nibbling at my feet, or wrapping themselves around my legs with icy tentacles. And against that blank void I found myself remembering things from my life, and being jolted out of these reveries by one of these phantom sensations of something touching me. I never got used to it. Especially when the memories were of my first year at the Academy.

  Ferguson would call to me over the cloud, “Why are you screaming, boy?”

  It took time, but we managed to find and open several of the crypt-like cavities. The cavities did indeed contain creatures, strange coiled groups of them, all apparently dead. My team of enlisted men helped me bring back a couple of these clumps for the scientists to study in the dome, surrounded by biohazard fields. We kept looking.

  The creatures had wound themselves around each other, like clumps of centipedes, only larger. As Grantleigh and Blackmore wrestled with these clumps in the dome, trying to pry the individuals out of this clench of death, the rest of us watched via the cloud. Thus we found out that these creatures did resemble a kind of evolved super-centipede, with a segmented, ridged, flexible, chitinous body, and with five sets of muscular, jointed legs. Two sets of these legs ended in structures suspiciously resembling three-pronged jointed grippers. I remember the sight of Blackmore, her face screwed up with tension, as she tried to unclench one of these hands, and how the appendage had snapped and shattered rather than unfold for her.

  Working with these dead specimens, Grantleigh surmised, “They probably have the ship filled with this jelly substance to provide a buffer against high acceleration, and it also provides their nutritional needs during the long flight.” The two scientists then suggested we open six crypts to start with. In the sixth cavity we found the first survivor.

  The only reason we located a survivor was because the creature’s faint respiratory and pulmonary activity caused it to move slightly in a way that didn’t fit the profile of the other lumps we had scanned. At first I thought it might just be jiggling a bit because of vibrations stemming from the tunnel-boring activities going on nearby, but the scientists urged me to have a look. In this cavity, as was proving usual, we found a clump of ten creatures; what was unusual was that only nine of them were dead. The survivor was somehow drawing sustenance from the husks of its clump-mates as well as the jelly medium. And when I say it was a survivor, I don’t mean it was thriving; the same state of life in a human would have made some call for Last Rites.

  Grantleigh and Blackmore, frustrated by their encounters with dead creatures, seized with astounded excitement on the prospect of contact with a living member of this race. Ferguson was less thrilled with the prospect. “I’m not sure I can authorize you to
bring that thing aboard Eclipse.”

  The scientists conferred with Ferguson and Rudyard over the cloud. Rudyard, in turn, launched messages back to the Community, in stripped-down, high-acceleration botships designed to seek out and enter hypertubes on their own. Depending on the tube weather situation, Service headquarters would be receiving Rudyard’s reports within the next few days. He said to Ferguson, “Locate any other survivors you can.”

  It took two more weeks, but we found three more, all in about the same state of health. We also began to find spherical objects, fifty centimeters in diameter, made from a clear glass-like material. Detailed inspection showed a sophisticated photonic information processing system embedded in these things, with monofilament-like connections leading to hundreds of indentations studded around the surface of the objects. Blackmore inferred that the creatures might use such a device as an interface to control the ship, because the indentations seemed designed to fit the creatures’ grippers.

  By this time Rudyard had heard back from Service HQ, which announced that it wanted all living specimens, artifacts, and the ship itself brought back to human space for study by Community scientists.

  Ferguson was visibly annoyed by this development, but he was a loyal Service man and made the arrangements, muttering when he thought nobody could hear, “Five bloody kilometers long! Millions of bloody tons!”

  We put the four live creatures in a purpose-fabbed containment unit filled with about two tonnes of the noxious jelly medium. We sealed the entrance tunnel we had dug in the hull of the ship and headed back to Eclipse. As we were returning, another ship’s boat launched with a crew of engineers whose job was to fathom the alien vessel’s mass-conversion drive. I wondered if Sorcha was in on this mission, and sent her a note. She wrote back saying she wasn’t that lucky, but she had been attached to the team converting a vacant meeting room aboard Eclipse for use as an isolation Infirmary for these aliens.

  “A word, Mr. Dunne?” It was Grantleigh again, he had cornered me in the cramped white galley of the boat while the others were busy cleaning equipment and doing routine maintenance. He said, “So, Mr. Dunne, how does it feel to confront the Great Other?”

  “Pardon me, sir?” I was trying to get the fab system to process the remains of the night’s meals, but it kept giving me annoying system errors. The boat was too small to have a decent disposable-based interface, so I had to do what I could through a terrible voice interface. I wasn’t in a mood to discuss anything with Grantleigh.

  The old man looked at me with his piercing eyes; he was close enough that I could smell the fabbed meat from tonight’s stew on his breath. “The Great Other, Dunne: The unknown, the essence of mystery, the thing we can never know.”

  I shifted about in the zero-G, trying to find a firm grip on something. Grantleigh’s breath was a little strong in these tight spaces. “I haven’t really had time to think about it, sir. Too much to do,” I hinted, gesturing at the fab, which was asking me to please explain the command “go screw yourself.”

  He smiled, recognizing that he was being a bit annoying. “And it must be observed that you’re doing a damned good job, too, son, under quite trying circumstances.”

  “Thank you, sir, I appreciate that. Did Mr. Ferguson send you to see me?” I could imagine Ferguson doing that, just for harassment’s sake. I couldn’t suppress the urge to glance around the walls of the galley for surveillance spray; I didn’t see any.

  “So what do you think of our aliens, son?” he persisted, ignoring my question.

  I assumed he was pestering me since I was the junior officer, the one who had lucked into a historic discovery on his first space rotation. In a distant part of my mind, it occurred to me there would be huge media interest in the discovery. But right now, all I wanted to do was get the stupid fab to work. I put that aside and thought about Grantleigh’s question for a moment. “To be honest, sir, they don’t seem all that alien. If you know what I mean.”

  He arched a thick white eyebrow at me. “Would you like to explain that remark, Mr. Dunne?”

  I stared at the complaining fab unit, frowning. “It’s just that they seem not very…” I paused, trying to think of the right word.

  Grantleigh suggested, “Exotic, perhaps? Is that it?”

  I bobbed my head a little. “Yes, sir. Not as exotic as I thought aliens might be. These things, these creatures, they don’t look much more exotic than large beetles or insects.”

  “So you’re saying they are insufficiently alien for your taste.”

  I scratched my head. “No, not that, it’s just—”

  “You were expecting something more fanciful, less quotidian?”

  “Well, yes. Yes, sir. I sort of figured the first aliens we met would be, well, I don’t know, inconceivable.”

  “Perhaps, Mr. Dunne, there is more to alienness than meets the eye. What do you think?”

  “I wouldn’t know, sir. I’m just a helm officer.” The question nagged at me later, though, during quiet times, ­often when I was trying to sleep. I never reached straightforward conclusions, but it did occur to me that even some people could seem utterly alien in their inexplicable behaviour and thinking.

  The old scientist leaned away from me, arms folded, still obviously studying me. Studying me the way he had studied those creatures, that’s how it felt. What was he up to?

  He went on, “You have family back home, son?”

  I glanced at him, wondering where he was going with this. I also explained my request again to the fab, and waited while it got going, hummed and died again. “My dad’s a systems guy on the new Tradewinds hab orbiting Europa. Keeps him busy. My older sister works as a media consultant on Mars.” Which was already more than I wanted to discuss.

  Grantleigh nodded, stroking his chin, as if all this meant a great deal to him. And as if he didn’t already know all this from my file, which he would have online in his head. He said, “I lost my parents a long time ago, Mr. Dunne. Drive accident on a first-generation tube freighter to Sirius. All hands lost.”

  I frowned. “I’m very sorry for your loss, sir. That must have been hard.”

  He managed, despite the cramped conditions, to shrug: “These things happen. Star travel was not so safe in those days.”

  “That’s true, sir.” I explained again to the fab that I wanted it to recycle the dishes, but it said it needed more information. I felt hotly embarrassed, going through this in front of Grantleigh. “I’ll be glad to see a decent human interface again, sir.”

  He chuckled politely. “Why do you think these chaps, these aliens, took to the stars like this?”

  “Couldn’t say, sir. Not my place to speculate.” The fab made a loud hissing noise, then sounded a warning tone.

  Grantleigh went on, “We think they might be from about three hundred light-years away. Staggering distance.”

  I hesitated before trying the diagnostics on the fab again. Something about what he said bothered me. “That seems odd, sir.”

  “Mr. Dunne?”

  I said, “Excuse me for saying so, but what about our sky surveys? They would have detected the gamma-bursts from this vessel’s drive system if they came from somewhere so relatively close, sir. The various other emissions, too, you’d expect from a mass-conversion drive system.”

  “Son?”

  “Even three hundred years ago, sir, we had comprehensive galaxy-scanning listening systems set up on Earth’s moon, and they were deliberately checking for EM stuff, comm traffic of any kind, and drive emissions. And we didn’t find any, or at least, none that was ever recognized and made public.”

  Grantleigh flashed a thoughtful smile, looking at me closely. “Well, that would be true if these chaps were ­travelling at lightspeed, Mr. Dunne, but as far as we can determine, this vessel could only make about one-fifth of lightspeed, and that with a
good tailwind, as it were. And it’s since slowed down to its present velocity. Our ­engineers have located a huge structural failure inside the power plant system on that ship. Other damage, too.”

  I thought about this, multiplying three hundred by five, and came up with a figure so long ago that the creatures could have pushed their rock up to .2 c, long before we could have picked up the gamma-radiation bursts resulting from the conversion of matter into energy. “But what did they do to decelerate down to this drifting?” I wondered out loud, then stopped, a little embarrassed, and added, “Sir!” I smiled hastily.

  He looked exhausted. “Perhaps we can ask them.”

  “Ask them, sir?”

  “It seems likely they are intelligent, Mr. Dunne.”

  “I suppose so, sir.”

  “Had you not wondered how they came to have this peculiar warren of a vessel, with no straight lines or other traces of Euclidean geometry to be seen anywhere, except in that huge stardrive unit on the back?”

  I took a risk, voicing an idea that had occurred to me earlier. “I had wondered if the drive unit might be an artifact of a different culture, sir. It’s as if another race gave it to them. But that’s just me guessing.” I shrugged. The fab unit was saying it needed a service technician urgently.

  Grantleigh went on, “You think some other chaps might have given these chaps the stardrive technology? Is that it, Mr. Dunne?”

  “I was just thinking, sir, looking at the whole ship, how it‘s not like the product of a single designer.”